the guy by the door …

Today at First Church Unitarian, Harvard Square.

Banners:

One Day of the Iraq War = 720 Million Dollars: How Would You Spend It?
One Day of the Iraq War = 423,529 Children with Health Care.
One Day of the Iraq War = 1,274,336 Homes with Renewable Electricity
One Day of the Iraq War = 6, 482 Families with Homes.
One Day of the Iraq War = 1,153,846 Free School Lunches.
One Day of the Iraq War = 34,904 Four Year Scholarships for University Students

Viewing the webcast from Silver Springs, Md in the Parlor.

Live from Silver Spring Maryland, a reprise of the 1971 Winter Soldier Investigation¹. Also available on cable and satellite through Free Speech TV. This evening, tomorrow and Sunday March 16.

Corporal Gilligan has challenged the accuracy of my report. Corrections to appear. 3-28-08

Former Marine Corporal James Gilligan, gunner on humvee, tearfully reported an incident where he was pressed into service as a forward artillery observer despite not being “authorized to direct fire”. He was the only one in his unit who had seen the flash. He reported that they had taken fire. HQ asked him for the azimuth where the fire had originated. His GPS was too slow so he pulled out his compass. He now realizes that his M240 almost certainly disturbed the compass. After three morter barrages he reported seeing no hits on the target. A fourth barrage – nothing. He reported the target out of range, and told his driver to pull out, but heard fifth and sixth barrages go off. A few moments later, his humvee turned and he saw an Afghani village in flames.

¹Transcript.

Not a big deal, but noticable. I was asked about it by coworkers. One wanted to know about the lens I was using. I showed it to him. The other wanted to know why I was taking pictures of it. I don’t quite see why I would have to justify those pictures any more than any other. I was told that the Islamic students were asked to leave the Widener steps, but I was assured that on a previous occasion a Christian Fundamentalist preacher received a similar “request”. I was also told that there was discussion about whether the sound of the adhan constituted an imposition of belief on others. Analogy to blowing of the shofar was presented. However, the same source tells me that the same argument was used by denizens of Canaday to protest the ringing of the Memorial Church Bells. I’m told that these discussions were civil but animated.

[Photo: Democracy Now!]

That would be the latest accounting of the cost of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Professor Linda Bilmes¹ of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz appeared on the Friday broadcast of Democracy Now! If you missed it on satellite, cable TV, and radio, you can download it from the web and play it on your computer.

¹In an earlier edition, I mispeled ‘Bilmes’. I apologize. As for the marginal impertinence of the title, I’m sticking with the ‘competing with Drudge’ defense.

Last Wednesday on Democracy Now!

… to “the guy who makes windows” wherein I will continue to recount tales of Sidney. You might say, “it’s been a while now,” to which I say:

rembrance is for the rememberers. the rememberee is otherwise occupied.

  -William F. Buckley, Jr.

Bill got one thing right in his life.

-the guy by the door.

It is, i am told, the Islamic Call to Prayer.

¹

¹

¹

Do I get what wearing the hijab is about? Egyptian Eyes told me, in somewhat legalistic terms, and I’m not sure I got it. But I did notice my attention being relentlessly drawn to her eyes. I was afraid to tell her how beautiful she is. I was afraid of causing friction between her and Allah. But she was disappointed with a picture another photographer had taken of her. She’s devout, not blind. If the eyes are the window to the soul, does the hijab focus attention on the profound?

Part of Islam Awareness Week sponsored by the Harvard Islamic Society.

¹Well, Joe it sure ain’t easy, especially trying to learn it as an old guy. I had ISO set all the way up from the night before. Hence much of the noise. More serious, I didn’t know what I had until later. I could not have gotten a close-up of the young man. I tried, but he had finished the adhan. But, as you can see I was near the women. A moment’s thought and I would have had something more than spectacular. But then perhaps it was not meant to be.

12:06 AM

…might explain some things.

Then again maybe not.

Harvard Masters of Business Administration 1975. [Photo: Wikimedia Foundation]

I have to go see Leo Godwin of the United States Internal Revenue Service in a bit. After seven years, he noticed that I sold $250,000 worth of stock. But what he did notice is that some of it was bought on margin. Which means, I didn’t have the money. And I sold it within a few minutes at essentially the same price because it was either moving the wrong way or was moving the right way and turned around. Most of the stock, I never owned, I borrowed it from the broker, sold it, and a few minutes later, bought stock to give back to the broker. This is called “selling short”. Some people make money doing this stuff, but I don’t have the constitution for it. It is a roller coaster ride powered by the conflict between fear and greed. I did it because I was pretty sure Harvard would succeed in outsourcing me and I needed to find some way to make money. That was not it.

Anyway, if you make money doing this stuff, it is taxed as income.¹ But Leo wants half of the $250,000, most of which I never had. Leo knows that there’s nowhere near that much in the account now. If Leo really wanted to be helpful, he would ask the broker if I every withdrew anything ‘cuz I didn’t. But Leo didn’t do that. Leo came to my apartment. Actually he met me on the porch, where I explained all this to him. He wanted me to fill out some forms and produce some records. I invited him in to show him why that was an unreasonable expectation. He refused. There’s a lot more to this story. Stay tuned. I do feel I owe an apology to that portion of the left that didn’t refuse to help me keep my job at Harvard, but not to the Gummint. Given that SCOTUS broke the court system in 2000 and the Executive … well… I’ll try the Legislative.

¹If you hold the stock for some period of months, it is then called “capital gains” and is taxed at a lower rate. The down side of that approach is that you actually have to have the money to buy the stock.

On Friday Feb. 15, 2008 Judge Jeffrey S. White of the U. S. District Court, Northern District of California, ordered Dynadot LLC, the Domain Name Registrar for Wikileaks.org, to “immediately disable the wikileaks.org domain name and account to prevent access to and any changes from being made to the domain name and account information.”1 Wikileaks is the anonymized network that, among other things, released the Operations Manual for Camp Delta, Guantánamo.

A post in the wee hours of Saturday morning on Freedom4um noted the WikiLeaks either had Domain Name Service problems or was under a Temporary Restraining Order. Subsequent posters later in the morning confirmed that WikiLeaks was not accessible through its domain name wikileaks.org, but was accessible through some but not all of its Public Cover Names. Wired reported the story on Presidents Day [Monday Feb. 18, 2008].

I found out about this, NOT because Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society was practicing eternal vigilance. No, it was Havard’s Philosophy Librarian who still reads slashdot regularly who – in reporting on Google Knol – linked to slashdot. I followed the wrong link, scrolled to find Jason’s target, found this which points to an article by Apple employee #10 Robert X. Cringely.²

I do, at some point, want to get back to Jason’s Google Knol post, but the whole search business is such a can of worms. For example, what people with inside knowledge of Harvard’s deal with Google, went long on Google stock and shorted competitors? Does such conduct, if it occurred, “…conduce to the education of the English and Indian youth of this country, in knowledge and godliness…”? Maybe the answer will appear on WikiLeaks.

¹This purported copy of the court order is being served up by WikiLeakS Christmas Island server. I suppose I could figure out how to confirm it’s authenticity, but the claim is there’s some law talent in the Berkman Center. Maybe they could do it more easily?
²He, among others, points out that the IP address [88.80.13.160] of the main U.S. site still works.

Mexican President Felipe Calderón visited his alma mater, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Some folks were not happy to see him:

Some believe he stole the election:

[Click no to fraud] With Nobel Laureates Robert Solow and Joseph Stiglitz^[1] on the board^[2], The Center for Economic And Policy Research is hardly a radical think tank. They found evidence of voting irregularities.^[3]

Two of the poorest of the Mexican states were represented. From Chiapas:

Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN
or to us gringoes, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. They’re opposed to neo-liberal globalization. Probably don’t like the late Larry Summers either.

Representing Oaxaca, APPO Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca). They were formed in response to repression of labor organizing. Mumia Abu-Jamal writes.

I’m guessing at this point Calderon is being escorted out of the building.

The anarcho-syndicalists as well as the APPO are showing their flags. I have no idea what’s up with the Betsy Ross flag.

Caldergóne.

I have no idea what was said inside. I gave up trying to get into those things after the entire Kennedy School bought David Kaye’s Escherichia coli about Iraqi WMD, “We were all fooled.” All except the guy by the door. The proof is in the vault of the Clerk of the City of Cambridge.

Just prior to Calderón’s visit, Larry Cox of Amnesty International USA issued an open letter urging him to “…commit during your visit to ending serious human rights violations in Mexico…” Calderón is a KSG alum. Thanks to STOP TORTURE, we know about Alberto Gonzales. Today’s revelation is about Antonin Scalia HLS ’80. What are we teaching these people?

A better world IS possible – precisely BECAUSE it is NOT INEVITABLE. What we do matters. All of us. Running around with flags in the cold, cold, dark is not nothing, but it is not a plan. What constitutes a vision seems to be in the mind of the beholder.^[4] The idea of a direction, allows for the possibility that folks might agree on something more than running around in the dark with flags. Unfortunately, at the moment, it’s not looking too good for the Education Establishment as a vector for the urgently necessary progressive change.

^[1]In Globalization and Its Discontents, Stiglitz criticizes the methods of globalization used by the late Larry Summers during the “transition” of the Russian economy and later while Treasury Secretary.

²Note that Harvard Labor Economist Richard Freeman is also on the board. Most labor economists are paid by management to figure out how to “contain labor costs” i.e. increase profits at the expense of a lower standard of living for labor. Freeman seems to care about labor, but since Marty Feldstein is the President of the National Bureau of Economic Research and still has significant sway in Harvard Economics, it’s a tough row to hoe.

³In an earlier edition, I said they had found “voting regularities.” This was not a conscious snipe at the legitamacy of all electoral processes. However, my subconscious, if it exists, I cannot vouch for. A further apology: the post got too long to see the footnotes and get back easily. I’ve added bi-directional links to the superscripts. Hope that helps. I cribbed the basic hack from historian Roy Rosenzwieg and his bunch at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. But from the ‘no good deed goes unpunished’ file, I had to ‘title’ some links and play with the typography especially when a superscript is attached to something already carrying a link. Mousing over the links will usually tell you something about the link that does not appear in the status bar. In some other cases I’m just being ‘high spirited’.

⁴I stole that from Noam. It started out, with respect to Iranian nuclear intentions, “Intention is in the eye of the beholder’. Vision is slipperier. For example, the Project for the New American Century is some people’s idea of a vision. The medium is not the same as the message. Content matters.

Eva Perón inscribed a “child’s text” about labor now on display.

My first choice of course was Elizabeth Kucinich. Dennis probably would be the best in the history of First Spice.

I’ve seen more Obama energy in and near Harvard Yard than any other candidate. Not a lot, but more than anyone else. If it comes down to it, I’ll gladly spend the hour it will take to vote for Obama. Hopefully, it will be an Obama-Edwards ticket. But the candidates “left standing” are all waffling on the Regional War in the Middle East. What’s wrong with America being number one in sustainable economic development? Or are we dedicated to My Lai on a regional scale? We have to destroy the region to save it?

We have a Supreme Court, largely Harvard trained, who clearly violated the legislative intent of the Constitution in 2000 and will be in place for another generation. A Congress unable to stop funding escalation in the region despite the Tide of ’06 and a President who “signs away” a restriction on building a permanent presence and proposes to put more weapons in the region.

If we wait a year for change, it will be impossible. We need to be moving now, by every means possible.

Assembly at Noon

He wasn’t in uniform. I thought his boots meant construction, but he said, “destruction.” He’s a United States Marine on leave from Iraq for a month. He’s going back for 9 more. I made no attempt talk him into resisting. Nor could I, like Radar O’Reilly, say, “Stay low, fella.” Improvised Explosive Devices, you see, are usually on or in the ground. All I could say was, “Watch yourself.”

“Will do.”

We can’t wait for an election which will give us a choice of people who will ‘manage’ a situation that the Neo-Cons, even as you read, are wiring to last a long, long time.

If we cannot reach them¹, we must impeach them.

Time for the Harvard Cambridge peace walk².

Update: The National Defense Authorization Act excludes use of funds for permanent military bases in Iraq. George W. Bush released a signing statement that he intends to ignore that provision. Joseph A. Palermo finds this to be yet another reason to impeach and Gary Hart calls this lastest move in the NeoCon plan what it is: the Burden of Empire.

¹The ship has pretty much sailed on that one.

²Noon every Wednesday. Meet at the John Harvard Statue i.e. The Statue of At Least Three Lies. The Berkman server clock is wrong by an hour.

But the sky is gay.

I’ve been for a walk on a winter’s day.

Mark works on the trees,

While the students are away.

——————–

I have no idea how the Reverand Gomes feels about the cold,

but I’m told he’s a hell of a preacher, if you’ll pardon my french.

Updated, January 25

They came to deliver food and medical supplies for an international relief convoy to Gaza this Saturday January 26:

Gaza has other problems:

Clean the Water, Turn on the Lights,
Stop the War on Human Rights.

The demonstrators view the Israeli blockade in response to Hamas rockets as:

Collective Punishment

They wanted to speak with the Israeli Consul and ask him to let the convoy through:

But they were turned away:

There were some goyim¹ and the Boston Coalition for Palestinian Rights might include some Palestinians, but mostly the were Jews – Jews for Human Rights in Gaza and Jewish Voices for Peace – and the Israeli Consul would not see them.

Saturday, January 26, Local: Campaign to Break the Siege of Gaza, 12noon-1pm, Harvard Sq., Cambridge (in front of Au Bon Pain) On that day that Israeli peace groups will attempt to enter the Gaza Strip with a convoy of essential supplies and medicines. Gaza no longer has sufficient fuel to keep its power station running. Hospitals and homes are dark and cold, remaining food stocks are being spoiled, the water and sewage infrastructure is breaking down. We American taxpayers — who make this collective punishment possible — must raise our voices. Boston Coalition for Palestinian Rights

¹Reverand Ralph, though sporting an Anglican collar, is Unitarian. Ah, those Unitarians, such an unruly bunch. God love ’em. And as I’ve mentioned before, I am Pennsylvania Dutch.

Gotta get on the Red Line. More latta…

Jewish Voice For Peace Boston, and Boston Coalition for Palestinian Rights have announced:

Protest at the Israeli Consulate Boston to demand Israel stop the Blockade of Gaza, which is leading to malnutrition, raw sewage in the streets, no electricity ect. In solidarity with the international relief convey.

Similar demonstration July 2006.

Time: NOON to 1pm this Thursday January 24th

Place: Israeli Consulate Boston, located in the Park Plaza Hotel

Directions: Park Plaza hotel is located near the Boston Public Gardens (Arlington St. stop) We’re meeting at noon right across the street from the Park Plaza Hotel, the entrance closest to the Common (Arlington St. stop).

Action: WE are one of hundreds of protest world wide to demand that the international relief convey be let thought on Saturday January 26th SEE (http://zope.gush-shalom.org/index_en.html)

We will attempt to bring food to the Israeli Consulate and demand they end the siege of GAZA. Bring one food item to give…..

We will have leaflets, signs, speaker, music, and a few cartons of medical and food aid to carry in to the consulate – we’re going to try asking the consul to deliver it to Gaza, and to forward to his government our demand that they let the Israeli relief convoy through the Erez checkpoint this Saturday.

—–

Is collective punishment ever justified?

Brothers consulting on their computing environment.

While not ready for Vista, we were ready for a new scanner/ copier/ printer.

Coco and Jo at Pine St somewhere in the South.

Jo was our mother. She took me to see “Gone with the Wind.” I don’t remember how many times.¹ My mother went into reveries about men with gleaming sabres on horseback². She remembers how handsome Billy Westmoreland looked in his uniform when he came to church³. I suspect “The Wind Done Gone⁴” is more my style.

¹Frankly Scarlettⁱ, I don’t give a damn.

²She was, however, partial to gray uniforms.

³I guess West Point Gray was close enought for herⁱⁱ. She could have held out for Annapolis Blue, but she married a Pennsylvania Dutch school teacher. Go figure.

⁴Make-believe, it would seem, in the Mind of the Law is real enough to merit the attention of the Eleventh Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals. Was this case really about the money or was it about who owns history?

^IJo was a redhead too, but I was more circumspect with her.

^IIShe thought Billy got a raw deal about that “Viet Nam businessⁱ.”

ⁱShe was aware of the cautionary departing address of President/General of the Army Dwight David Eisenhower, for whom she and Guy both voted, but it seems to have had little or no effect on either of them.

[A picture of Gustavo which is in my other pants at the moment. Stay tuned.]

Actually, 9/11 truth has been in Harvard Square and Boston for quite a while, but this Saturday and Sunday folks from around the country will be gathering here to continue the investigation of the role that the Bush administration may have had in the events of September 11, 2001. Was it misfeasance or malfeasance aforethought? Former owner of Camp Casey¹, Cindy Sheehan, and former CIA agent Ray McGovern will be here.²

*If you don’t know this you’re even more nerdulent than I am. It’s Jack Nicholson, playing Colonel Nathan R. Jessup in “A Few Good Men.” If you haven’t seen it Tom and Demi are both very hot in uniforms.

¹Peace and People with Disabilities activist Bree Walker bought it from Cindy.

²Ray is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. Ray has supervised the preparation of PDB‘s. [I can’t go. I have to guard the liberry. You can blog it!]

The wires are glad to tell you what they think it says, but won’t give you a link. I respect my readers¹ more than that. It is not that long. First of all, only the summary – i.e. the conclusions – is declassified. The “evidence” is all carefully sequestered within the cone of silence.

• p1. Full color title with the seal of the Director of National Intelligence – wherein the eagle soars on gold wings while wearing a stars and stripes breast plate.
• p2. Dramatis personae.
• p3. The NIE Process.

These things don’t usually change from one NIE to another.

• p4. Scope Note – They tell us what they’re going to tell us. Unique to the NIE
• p5. Explanation of Estimative Language – boilerplate glossary of the official terms of obfuscation.²
• p6-8.Key Judgments. Hooray! They tell us.
• p9. Key differences … They tell us what they told us.

This NIE raises as many questions as it answers.³ I’d like to go into them with y’all¹, but I have to go do some life support activity. Y’all¹ come back now, hear?

¹ I’m assuming there’s someone besides Tim Gray who reads “the guy by the door.” Wait, someone besides Tim and Joe Wrinn 🙂 . Actually Joe has person who reads it. I read her blog too.

²They attempt to define a seven category scale of likehood and a three category scale of confidence. The categories necessarily have some width. There is also fuzziness about the boundaries. The serious question – does the fog of the language explaning the fuzziness of the boundaries clarify anything? Maybe it’s a good thing Noam reads these things. Confidence is about the quality of the sources used in the estimate all of which are carefully sequestered in the cone of silence. Hey trust us! Been there! Done that!

³It’s OK. I didn’t take expos at Harvard.

* It would be more in keeping with the spirit of the N.I.E.’s explanation of estimative language to say:

We estimate with a moderate to high level of confidence that we may have made, with a significant probability, a misapprehension of the Iranian situation vis. a vis. nuclear weapons, but it was with a very high probability an honest misapprehension which we can with the highest of confidence assert that it is exceedingly unlikely that we have done it this time.

Work with me people. I’m up against Drudge!