Aaron Swartz cofounder of Demand Progress [WikiMedia Foundation]

Bill S. 3804 currently in the Senate Judiciary Committee would require internet service providers to block a domain if the court determines that copyright infringing material is  “central to the activity of the Internet site”.  As of now,  a site like YouTube is in compliance with law if they remove infringing material when it is brought to their attention. Under they new law, they could be banned if a single copyright holder can convince the court that the total of all material of all copyright holders is “central to the activity of the Internet site”.

Havard Center for Ethics Fellow Aaron Swartz together with Democratic Rhode Island State Representative David Segal have founded Demand Progress which has taken on lobbying against S. 3804 as its first campaign. Their site has a petition against the bill. The site also has a petition urging President Obama to look for a substantial upgrade in replacing the Late Larry Summers.¹

The current director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics is Lawrence Lessig of Creative Commons fame.  Lessig is also part of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society^2,3, but to my knowledge, they have yet to weigh in on this bill.

¹To those of you new to the guy by the door, this nomenclature comes from asking the question, “Is there life after being the President of Harvard?”

²In the interest of full disclosure, the guy by the door is hosted by The Berkman Center.

³My apology to another member of the Berkman Center, Professor Charles Ogletree whom I heard testify at the commutation hearing for Arnie King.  Arnie is a great story, I need a bit more time to finish the piece.

Usumacinta Jack-up in the Gulf of Mexico on fire in 2007 [photo: oilrigdisasters.co.uk”]

The owner Mariner Energy,  denies that there was an explosion.  CNN report and early blog posts.

Thanks to Simon, there is a website of oil rig disasters, including Usumacinta Jack-up shown above.

An international day of action, with events listed [logo above] on four continents. Local Boston area activists listed on the United for Peace with Justice Website.

When: Saturday, June 5, 2010, 2:00 pm to 3:30 pm
Where: Park Street Station • Park and Tremont Streets • Boston

Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom:

and:

and:

are the sponsors. I’m going. Yes, I’m a dog.

Democracy Now! on Twitter announced:

Democracy Now! is heading to the Gulf this weekend. Send story ideas and guest suggestions on the oil spill to “stories@democracynow.org”

I don’t know exactly who’s going and who’s staying in New York to mind the studio, but there’s a good chance some of the folks will tweet over the weekend. They can only do a full broadcast on weekday mornings. They can post to their website at any time, but if they are on the move that’s hard. Twitter provides an immediacy and off-cycle capability.  If they do tweet from the Gulf it might inspire questions and story ideas. Reasonably thought out ideas longer than 140 characters probably should go to the stories address above.  If you’re following them on Twitter remember that the DN! account has 25,000 followers so replies that are too casual and numerous could flood them.

When they went to Haiti producer and on-air Sharif Kaddous on Twitter shared personal observations:

Surgical mask, bandana, T-shirt, cloth, hand, toothpaste or lemon rind on upper lip. These are all ways in Haiti to cover the smell of death
5:08 PM Jan 19th via Echofon

A week after earthquake, bodies are still being pulled from the rubble. This one lies across from the hospital http://twitpic.com/ytrdz
2:33 PM Jan 19th via Echofon

A river of waste and death streams out of the morgue as they sweep away the remains. http://twitpic.com/ytqqc
2:29 PM Jan 19th via Echofon

The morgue has been largely cleared of corpses. But one remains. Without effective aid, more will come.  http://twitpic.com/ytpji
2:20 PM Jan 19th via Echofon

[I’ve only smelled one decomposing human body. It didn’t smell particularly bad
… until I knew what it was. It was my neighbor Todd. Fifteen years later I can still smell it. The horror. I can only guess what it must have been like for Sharif.]

Producer and on-air Anjuli Kamat is on Twitter and  Havard Alumna and camera operator Nicole Salazar is on Twitter. Nicole ain’t said nothing yet, but I’ll let her know there’s somebody listening.

It has resurfaced as Budget Amendment #764.  The Mass Transgender Political Caucus is asking us to call our State Representatives today. Alice Wolf has been consistently strong in support of this measure. If you are in her district [as i am] a call/e-mail is not a waste of time. It will help her make the case if she can point to strong constituent support.

Forwarded by the Mass Transgender Political Caucus, a Boston Globe editorial:

No, it’s not a ‘bathroom bill’

I was afraid it had died, but it sounds to me like the opposition is afraid it isn’t. A good sign?

The Harvard Book Store¹ is hosting a talk by Professor Elaine Scarry Thursday April 8 at 7:00 PM.  From their website announcement:

Arguing that post-9/11 legislation and foreign policy severed the executive branch from the will of the people, Elaine Scarry in Rule of Law, Misrule of Men offers a fierce defense of the people\’s role as guarantor of our democracy.

Her interest is in a sense academic and in a sense not. At a faculty meeting [during the Summer’s Reign] on the subject of  free speech, she raised the issue of  Harvard’s response to the Patriot Act:

Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value Elaine Scarry asked how the University planned to address the USA Patriot Act. Part of the act requires extensive disclosure of information about foreign-born scholars, including their library and e-mail records.

“I would like to know what is being done about the consequences falling on some of our community members as a result of the Patriot Act,” Scarry said.

Scarry told the Crimson that the act also affected other members of the academic community, such as librarians, who might be forced to monitor their colleagues.

Did anyone record/video her speech at the walk-out protesting the beginning of the Iraq War?

the (dot) guy (dot) by (dot) the (dot) door (at) gmail (dot) com

There is a Wikipedia page for her, but it is so anemic that it’s not worth a link. If she’ll let me take her picture I’ll post it there.

One of my very best stories about my time at Harvard is about her.

¹The Harvard Book Store is the one remaining independent book store in Harvard Square. For this purpose ‘store’ means has a space near but not on the sidewalk. There are a couple of enterprises on the sidewalk from time to time. They are ‘book sellers’. All the other stores, are members of chains. This includes the Harvard Cooperative Society whose book operation is run by Barnes and Noble.

… Due to Measures Unimplemented  by …

…me.

I screwed up about Robert Rubin. It was Robert Reich at the Sackler. I’m told that it took half the talk for them to get a box high enough for him to be seen over the podium. I’m going to do the manly thing:

1)  I’ll take Full Responsibility for this not really all that significant mishap.

2) I’ll assassinate the character of my source in the most obscure possible way so it won’t look like that’s what I’m doing.

3) I’ll take Full Responsibility for this unfortunate but totally understandable misoccurance.

But first I’ll get something to eat.

The $10 Billion  Large Hadron Collider has recorded it’s first collisions at 7 Tev [3.5 Tev/beam]. The design capability of the machine is 9 Tev [4.5 Tev/beam]. The machine was turned on in late 2009 after a repair/recovery mission from a mishap in 2008, but the energy attained was only 2.36 Tev [1.18 Tev/beam]. That was just enough energy to beat the then record holding machine in Batavia Illinois, the Tevatron.  Today’s energy offers the possibility of seeing ‘significant new physics.’

LHC, located at the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire¹ [CERN] in Geneva, Switzerland,  a significant world wide web  presence. This is kind of a good thing, given that the World Wide Web emerged from the wilds of speculative research into a household convenience largely due to work by Sir Tim Berners-Lee that was done at and/or paid for by CERN.  But, LHC can claim to be the first major accelerator of the Twitter age. So if you want to follow the nitty gritty details you can. [CERN][USLHC] Look at the ‘following’ lists to get individual experiments. On the other hand, you might feel this is just too much information about the trees and totally lacking a view of the forest. Significant results will no doubt be ’emargoed’ i.e. withheld from the public until a prespecified release date and time. This strategy has two benefits:

1) It gives the collaborations² a chance to be sure of their interpretation of the results.

2)It gives a measure of fairness to theorists at institutions that are ‘less well connected’.³

So you probably won’t see tweets that preview significant findings. If you do, you can bet that PhD student will probably be in a lot of trouble. But you will see tweets that point you to press releases on the major lab sites. And if you want to know what it all means, look to Cosmic Variance.

I am, as I have been for some time now, on the cusp.  $10 Billion could house 25,000 homeless people even at Cambridge prices. It could probably feed millions for years in many parts of the world. There are much more pressing needs to be met. But LHC will help us know a little more about how the universe is made and how it got started. I want to know, even if I can’t be on the frontier myself. $10 Billion probably would not buy one Nimitz class aircraft carrier at today’s prices. We probably can afford to do big science, if we don’t do continuous cascading war. But would we? What new weapons will supersymmetry make possible? And will we build them?⁴ My problem you see, is that I have become stark raving sane.

¹I cut and pasted it. My multi-lingual abilities are limited to knowing when to believe Google translate and when not.

²These experiments are large collaborations. You can readily see from tweets by various member collaborations of LHC that it is in fact, a loose confederation of large collaborations. Perhaps it is time to look once again at a subject that has a significant history at Harvard. The growth of Big Science. Is Derek J.de Solla Price’s  Little Science, Big Science still true?

³I hope at some point to relate the a tale of collegiality vs. insider gossip HEP business. It was between a woman experimentalist protecting her working relationships and a male theorist trying to exploit an ‘insider tip’. Was gender important? I’ll have to let you decide, but Sidney was at his best in settling the disagreement.

⁴ Early in my first year of graduate school, when the Nixon cuts to research budgets had already set in, class discussion turned to the future. Pavao Senjanovic piped up, “If we have a war with Mars, high energy physicists will have jobs.” Thanks, Pavao. You spoke to me only once, but you were kind.

Before the Massachusetts Legistature now:

I’m trapped in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. I’ll try to smooth this out later. Tnx.

The lead story of this morning’s Democracy Now! was International Women’s Day. In Amy Goodman’s introduction, the first celebration was due to a ‘…group of women from seventeen countries gathered in Copenhagen…’ but her first guest, Kavita Ramdas, said:

…it actually started right here in New York City. It was a group of—prior to 1910, it was a group of activist women laborers in New York City who were challenging the fact that women in sweatshops used to be locked up in those sweatshops. And because the Socialist Movement made that workers’ struggle a banner and a cause, the United States essentially shut down any recognition of its own history…

The official International Women’s Day 2010 website attributes the first International Women’s Day to Clara Zetkin head of the Women’s Office of the Social Democratic Party in Germany. It was held on March 19 to commemorate the King of Prussia making concessions to the proletariat during the revolution of 1848. The website is registered in the .com top level domain and has sponsorship ads from the European Investment Bank and Thomson Reuters. Reuters got it’s start with men rowing out to incoming ships in New York harbor to get ‘advance news’ for select Wall Street patrons i.e. asymmetrizing information.¹ Reuters got it’s start as neither socialists nor free market capitalists.

The United Nations website mentions the first National Women’s Day occuring on February 23, 1909

In What were the Origins of International Women’s Day, 1886-1920?, by Kathryn Kish Sklar and Lauren Kryzak. (Binghamton, NY: State University of New York at Binghamton, 2000).

National Woman’s Day is Celebrated in the U.S. , 1909

In 1908 the Socialist Party of the U.S. established a Woman’s National Committee. One of the Committee’s first acts was to declare that the last Sunday in February should be recognized as National Woman’s Day. The first celebrations took place the following year, February 23, 1909. (See Document 9) In subsequent years National Woman’s Day was widely celebrated by socialists, working women, and middle-class reformers. (See Documents 6-15).

But farther down:

Women’s Day is Celebrated Internationally in Europe in 1911

The success of National Woman’s Day in the United States in 1910 probably influenced Clara Zetkin and other delegates in 1910 at the Second International Conference of Socialist Women in Copenhagen, who created a Women’s Day, “to aid in the attainment of women’s suffrage.”  … The first “International Woman’s Day” was held on the 19th of March, 1911, that day commemorating an 1848 uprising in Prussia. In 1913 International Women’s Day was celebrated on March 8, the date on which it is still celebrated today.

This publication is available to Harvard ID holders as an internet resource. The electronic redistributer Alexandra Street Press does have about a quarter of it’s catalog available for free. Unfortunately this isn’t one of them, but you can ask you librarian to request a free trial.

A significant confusion factor in this story is the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire which occurred just weeks after the first International Women’s Day.

The officer, apparently oblivious to the three dead young women at his feet is probably looking up at other young women trying to decide whether it’s better to jump to their death than be burned. [Photo: unknown]

¹For those of you who have forgotten or never taken Harvard’s Ec 10 asymmetric information is the bane of the ideal classical market in the form of the Welfare Theorem.

Photo: Wikimedia Foundation

Dear Amy,

Sorry I can’t come hear you. This is one of the rare occasions on which I could hear you for free and maybe even meet you, but I have to guard the library. Oh, well – a dream deferred. 🙁  But I do want to congratulate the Extension School for doing something clearly better than the muscle bound Faculty of Arts and Sciences. [Maintaining excellence, indeed!]

See you sometime,

-r

——-

Award-winning journalist Amy Goodman, host of the daily, grassroots, global, radio/TV news hour Democracy Now!, is on a national speaking tour to mark DN!’s 14th anniversary and launch her new book, Breaking the Sound Barrier.

The buskers are tuning up for ya.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Here they are, His Holiness¹ the Reverend Busker and Friends.

Valentine’s Day Show  ->  Friday Feb. 12, 2010

A  Benefit Concert for First Church Shelter  11 Garden St, Cambridge

8p   ->  11p    $10 [suggested donation]

¹He calls himself Reverand Busker. I gave him the promotion.

She’s twenty something and I’m sixty something, but I follow her. She knows I’m there. It doesn’t spook her. We’re on twitter. Sindi was bored, bored, bored. This video made her a little homesick for Vancouver.  Then:

You always think you have all the time in the world..then someone is ripped from your life. Rip doll 🙁9:20 PM Jan 30th from TweetDeck

Jenny was twenty something too. She didn’t want to wear a seat belt. Sindi tweets disbelief. Three hours later Sindi went from ‘super sad’  to  ‘super pissed off’ – a little Kübler-Ross thing going on. I didn’t mention it to Sindi at the time. Now I have – twofold. I like to tell people in grief about Kübler-Ross. It feels like helping. I don’t know if it is.

Sindi asked us all to please wear a seat belt. It won’t bring Jenny back, but it’ll make Sindi feel better. Be safe, if not for yourself, for Sindi and the Jenny that lingers within her.

my girl is still signed onto yahoo messenger… sent her a message, knowing I wont get a reply. Hoping it’s all just a bad dream..it’s not.7:51 AM Jan 31st from web

Sindi had a great deal of trouble sleeping.  She was awake well into the morning.

Laying in bed..crying…wishing I was holding into her. This is something I cannot shake.9:17 AM Jan 31st from TweetDeck

“…holding into her.”  Typo or intriguing variation. Freudian in a good way.

So..Um… I’m just supposed to go to bed? Put my ipod down and get on with my life? 🙁9:36 AM Jan 31st from TweetDeck

Eventually weariness prevailed to some extent. After fitful on-and-off sleep:

Shock is starting to fade. Reality is set in…my girl is gone 🙁 Keep going to my phone to look for texts from her…there is none.about 13 hours ago from web

Sindi is a digital native – a loved one dies and she suffers on the net. Netizens  do their best to console her. I’m a netizen, but an immigrant – a very experienced immigrant.  Part of my accent is to worry about her privacy. I’m so touched by her that I had to share it more widely. But I’ve been cryptic about some details and if she feels I’ve made her grief too public, i’ll remove or alter it. I do hope she feels good about it though, because this post will complement nicely my somewhat overdue post about recent BGLT activism in Massachusetts.

Jenny, I’m not a smart man, but I know what love is.     –Forrest Gump

I’m a very smart man, but I’m not sure I know what love is.     –the guy who makes windows

I believe Forrest and as much as he suffered for it, I believe his love for Jenny was worth it. I believe Sindi and as much as she suffers for it, I believe her love for Jenny was worth it.

At about 2  PM EST, producer and occasional ‘on-air’ Sharif Adbel Kaddous tweeted that they have landed safely in Port au Prince. He posted this picture on Twitpic¹:

Sharif on the left and Amy squinting² in the middle. I’m guessing that Nicole Salazar ’07³ is holding the camera.

Nicole, while at Harvard, co-authored a Crimson article about the war in Iraq, “What Have We Won?“.

Tune in tomorrow and see Amy squinting in the Haitian sun.

¹For the benefit of Dr. Urs Gasser, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Twitpic does not claim copyright ownership from its submitters. DN! gives it’s content away. They will accept donations 🙂

²It never ceased to amaze me – the things that make women beautiful.

³For my non-Harvard readers this is the somewhat self-centered way the Crimson refers to Harvard Alums. A year with no further qualification means Harvard College a.k.a Bachelors from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Without the resources of a major network, to get it’s own crews on scene in Port au Prince, Democracy Now! improvised. Emerging technology star Twitter was alive with tweets about Haiti. DN! invited journalist Kim Ives from the Brooklyn office of Haiti Liberté¹ to give on air commentary of the latest tweets from his contacts in Haiti. Democracy Now!, the little network that can, has done it, again. The dream of the internet bubble – Convergence.

Today is Sunday, Democracy Now! can’t call up the satellite companies and buy an extra block of time. All today the Democracy Now! blog has had posts from observers in Haiti:

“The Haitian People Have Mobilized, While Foreign Aid Efforts Continue to Stall”

“Bill Quigley: “Ten Things the U.S. Can and Should Do For Haiti”

“The Haitian People Have Mobilized, While Foreign Aid Efforts Continue to Stall”

What is NOT new, but a trademark of Democracy Now! since it’s inception is the historical background information including the involvement of the C.I.A. in the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Jean Bertrand Aristede.

¹My fellow gringoes might want the english version.

The UN Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen was due to end Friday. But rising pressure from ‘the developing world’ i.e. the 130 nations of the G77¹ and the leak of a confidential memo to the UN Secretariat admitting that the carbon emission targets so far are too high,  raised the question of whether world leaders will stay on. The Guardian’s Copenhagen Twitter channel reflected confusion about what press conferences would occur when. First the rumor was that Obama would give a press conference, but then it turned out he was only addressing the Whitehouse press corps. Then he left due to weather in Washington. The EU delayed it’s press conference for another round of talks. The ‘deal’ wasn’t actually ‘sealed’ until the wee hours of Saturday  morning, well after Ban Ki-moon had declared a highly qualified victory.  It was agreed by the Conference of Parties to ‘take note of‘ the agreement brokered by Obama, between the U.S., China, India, Brazil, and South Africa.

As of 11:00 AM EST² on 12/19/09, The Uptake . Org is webcasting the press conference of the Climate Action Network on its Copenhagen 1 channel.

Obama:  Nothing legally binding. Kyoto was legally binding but everybody fell short anyway.

Friday night, close to midnight Copenhagen time, The Uptake.Org interviewed Naomi Klein and Bill MkGibben. Naomi pointed out that of the big five agreed on the 3+ degree nonbinding agreement – U.S. , China, India, Brazil, and South Africa – that they would have probably agreed to a stronger carbon reduction budget if the U.S. had put it on the table.

One Climate interviewed Amy Goodman, “This is another olympic failure.”

¹There were 77 developing nations when the group was formed. It now has 130.

²I suspect it’s running on a loop.

Mohammed Nasheed, President of the Maldives

In my mind, a block of carbon-neutral developing nations could change the outcome of Copenhagen. At the moment, every country arrives at the negotiations seeking to keep their own emissions as high as possible and never to make commitments unless someone else does first. This is the logic of a madhouse – a recipe for collective suicide.

The Maldives is a nation of about 360,000 people living on about 200 of 1197 islands in the Indian Ocean. The average island is about a kilometer¹ in diameter.  The highest elevation is 7’1″ above sea level. 80% of the islands are only 3′ above sea level.  If we cause the ocean to rise, this nation will disappear beneath the waves.

Amy will be reporting from Copenhagen for the duration. Today’s news looks distressing, but I can’t watch it myself. I have to prepare my case for the Cambridge Housing Authority. Please watch it for me. Tnx.

And an apology to the Islamic students of Harvard and the world, I totally spaced out about Ramadan and so I am late in conveying to you the good wishes of President Nasheed – for a blessed Eid.²

¹Just google^A it.

²I have great respect for Karl Marx, especially the portion of his work that is critique of capitalism, but it seems to me that portions of his work are not economics, but eschatology. In that light, the ‘opiate of the people’ remark loses a little steam. But Tom Friedman is just a dork. The strife in the Middle East is not about the ‘desert religions’. It is mostly about land and oil. The extent to which it is about religion, it is not because they all originated in a place where it’s too hot to think. It is because they are genetically related. It is a family feud. And it has gone on far too long.

^AI realize that google hasn’t yet achieved a place in the language comparable to kleenex, but I like to look ahead. Otherwise, I might know what is gaining on me.

… or if you are the kind of person who believes that decisions are made at meetings¹, you can believe that the Governor’s people ‘found’ a previously missing pot of money and that activism had nothing to do with it. And you can believe that the Speak Out shown below had no effect.

¹One of the reasons I liked the West Wing is that Aaron Sorkin put those words into Josh Lyman’s mouth. Another was the mention of Peak Oil. Dr. M. King Hubbert when he discovered it, was a denizen of that hotbed of radicalism, the Shell Oil Company. He later retired to another hotbed of radicalism, the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey.

In response to $1 Million of budget cuts in programs for the homeless, Jim Stewart organized a Speak Out at the Massachusetts Statehouse. The gold dome caps a much larger building. It is easy get lost. Since the cuts were made by Governor Deval Patrick – while at the same time allocating $9 Million for a foot bridge for football fans – Stewart called the Speak Out in front of The Corner Office. Stewart, director of the First Church Shelter in Cambridge, has been there many times before – especially when Cantabrigian Bill Weld occupied the office.

The  ‘providers’ led off. Several spoke. I won’t show them all. Above, Paulette from Gateway Shelter in Somerville is in the center speaking. Immediately to the left is George Capinegro,  a former guest and former employee of First Church Shelter. To the right, Johanna and Joe, staff at First Church. The guy with the fisherman’s cap and glasses is Jim Stewart. There is a homeless person in the picture that I met at St. Francis House. You will never guess and I will never tell.

After the providers, Jim called on us, the homeless. I did not speak. I felt my colleagues were more eloquent. The Aviatrix did not speak. I suspect from past experience with her, she could not.

Aside from Johanna who is a Divinity student at Harvard, I only recognized one other face from Harvard – David Dance from Phillips Brooks House. I have not had a chance to ask him how the student run UniLu Shelter will fare if the budget cuts stick. Next to him is Phil Wright from Pine Street Inn in Boston. I’ve met more Harvard ‘low wage workers’ since becoming homeless than I did during the Mass Hall Sit-In of 2001. There may well have been some that I haven’t met at this rally.

The high point of the morning was the prayer offered by Reverand Molly Baskette from First Congregational Church of Somerville. She was ably assisted by her exuberant three year old ecclesiastical assistant. The State Police Officer guarding the Governor rose to his feet and bowed his head.

We had heard that the Gov was in Worcester.  His Dudes were stationed by the door. They were going to ‘report back.’  But he popped out of the elevator and into his office. A homeless woman from the Anchor Program on Long Island¹ asked, “Can the Governor come out and talk to us.”

“He has important business.”

“He has bridge plans to look at.” Jim Stewart².

A woman on community service sabbatical from Sovereign Bank asked Deval’s Dudes, “How come you guys aren’t taking notes? How are you going to give a faithful report to the Governor?” The thinker in front of her is Reverand Tom Feagley from Bread of Life in Malden.

Deval’s Dudes under questioning. I moved in close to make them feel exposed. Deer in the Headlights Dude, had asked Jim Stewart if he could address the crowd.

“Are you going to tell them the cuts are restored?”

“No.”

“Then you can’t address them.”

Anyone with a conscience would have been moved by the experience. He would have come out and said, “You’re right. I was wrong. We won’t cut funds for the homeless.”  Sadly, that is yet to come.

I hope to have “action items” for you soon. Stay tuned.

¹This program is not readily Googlable. I’ll have to ask Jim Stewart. But at least I’ve ‘advanced’ the American language with a new adjective or am i falsely flattering myself.

²Referring, of course, to the $9 Million footbridge mentioned earlier. If you got it yourself, I apologize. If not, I’m glad I bludgeoned you.

In Summer of  ’68 I went to Paris. I had missed the Days of Rage, but I was in la place de la Bastille¹ [Eng] on July 14. The CNRS was out in force.  Lacrymogène was in the air.

Yesterday was not a Day of Rage at Harvard, but last night was a Night of Concern.

Healthcare, especially the Stupak Amendment

I’m with Harvard’s own Dr. Steffi Woolhandler [on Democracy Now! a day or two ago.] The current bill is worse than nothing. Call your Senator. [More in a bit.]

Global Warming

The Leadership Campaign in Harvard Yard

The Leadership Campaign is a Project of Massachusetts Power Shift. Their goals are:

• Nothing less than 100% clean electricity
• Nothing more than 350 ppm carbon dioxide.

This latter goal will certainly require a national policy stronger than the Cap and Trade that Mass Power Shift was espousing when they met at the Onetarian church across from Charles Sumner. Cap and Trade, as David Harvey points out, rewards past polluters. I will make the argument in capitalist terms with all the externality/internality jargon. More importantly it will be slooooow. It is basically a delaying tactic by the power industry, which has representatives within Mass Powershift. The Leadership Campaign must lead Powershift away from being a captive of Big Power. I will explain, but …
Gentle reader, I have lot to say more to say about both issues. Please come back, tomorrow. I need to spend some time dealing with my own homelessness.

¹My command of French barely gets beyond, “Il mio conto per favore.”^A I thought I would link the French Wikipages for those who are more able. For those who are tediously monolingual like me, I will link the English pages with [Eng].

^AYes, I do jest. Hearing Andrea Bocelli sing “Con te partirò” [Eng] is such an expansive experience that I wondered how much more was in the lyrics. The translations leave me with the vague notion that I know what the song is ‘about’. If you understand the lingo, you might try to explain it to me. But you may find me challenged in my knowledge of love, Love, lLove, or some such thing.ⁱ

ⁱi’m a bit of nominalist, remember?

Rumors abound, but most are untrue.

Election Commissioners evaluating "Auxiliary Ballots"

There has not been a significant write-in campaign in a very long time and there has not been one since the computer system was purchased to “streamline” the tabulation of the Proportional Representation voting system that Cambridge alone of all U.S. cities uses. Voters express a list of preferences for City Council and School Committee. The software has to keep track of the preference list for each voter and transfer votes to the second choice if the first choice is elected and so on. This used to all be done by hand. It was quite a social event lasting four or more days. The computer changed all that. Until now. The ‘late campaign manager’ who missed the nomination paper deadline for Marj Decker, has unknowingly forced a partial return to the hand count system. Except that in this case, the Election Commission has to look at all the “Auxiliary Ballots” including write-ins that have no ambiguity at all.

The Election Commission released unofficial results last night. Normally, when there are 50 or 100 Auxiliary Ballots the Unofficial Results give a pretty good idea of what’s going on. But with over 3590 Auxiliary Ballots that is no longer true. Quota, the number of votes required to elect a City Councilor will be something under 1606. It would be possible for two people to be electd on Auxiliary Ballots alone. But it didn’t happen.

The Election Commission released the computer printout of the count of all the machine readable ballots including tranfers and a determination of elected vs. defeated. Above it, in small print, they placed suitable disclaimers. But, many people didn’t read them. They read the big print in the table including the words “Elected” and “Defeated’ which even 18 hours later are still not meaningful. But since you have been suitably warned, I can let you look at what the Election Commission posted.

There are remarks made within the “Cordon Zone” that get overheard and misinterpreted. Most of the write-ins are for Marj Decker. A single scanner was reprogrammed to count for Decker, ballots with her name in write-in position one.

At 4:30 P, Executive Director Marsha Weinerman announced that the count would go into Wednesday, but with 1000 of 3590 auxiliary ballots counted and the kinks worked out of the system, she is optimist that it won’t go into Thursday.

The Peabody about an hour to go.

The polls are closed now. The ballot collecting machines are all at the Senior. So too are the “Auxiliary Ballot Boxes.”

Ballot and Aux ballot boxes; Senior Center Nov. 3, 2009

My ballot which had two write-ins was rejected by the machine. It went into the Aux Box. In1999, there were so few write-ins, the Election Commission counted them on the spot. They ran the PR computer program. The results were announced at 10:00 P. This time there are too many. The Election Commission is going to start counting at 9:00 AM. Nothing will be known tonight.

Goodnight!

12:58P Give me a few minutes.

1:04P I’m thinking.

4:10P I had to go to a cosmology seminar to regain my composure – watching galaxy clusters collide. It’s peaceful in some ways. They mostly pass through each other, but the gas gets striped out of them. Black holes are very violent. They eat matter spiralling in to them and spit x-rays and radio waves out. Fortunately none of them are in our immediate neighborhood – the solar system. There’s a really big one at the center of the Milky Way, but it won’t eat us anytime soon. We have angular momentum. Nothing dissipates angular momentum in a serious way except gravitational radiation.¹

I don’t know if I can fully explain my title before the polls close. For now, let just indicate my choices for City Council:

1. Philip Fenstermacher

I will write myself in. No candidate has put forward a platform that seems to me truly progressive in terms of the cacophony of crises we face. I drew papers to get on the ballot, but got sick and had to go to the hospital. I was somewhat victimized by the false rumors about how a sticker campaign works, but if I had been serious I would have checked with the Election Commission. I have no campaign manager and no money. My platform most likely would have caused Glenn Koocher to brand me as unelectable – at best 🙂 I don’t think Cambridge has ever elected a homeless person. It would be an honor to be the first. It is unlikely. I will get at least one vote and surely less than 50 which, by the rules of proportional representation, means I personally will not pass to the second round as a candidate. If by some miracle, I make it into later rounds, I will be cut from the bottom. If you want a protest gesture that won’t cost you anything, sticker me in.

2. Lawrence Adkins

An eloquent plain speaking African-American man from Riverside. If elected, I think he would probably revive the spirit of Saundra Graham. But he won’t be. He got 15% of quota on the first round in ’97. He’ll survive into the second round. My vote will transfer to him. But he doesn’t have much money and his ’97 performance was far behind the incumbents. It’s doubtful he’ll be seated. So.

3. Minka van Beuzkom

A woman from Central Square who has been active in the area especially in the areas of public health and environment. I don’t know if she ever followed on her threat to bring some of the rats that are infesting parts of Cambridge into the Sullivan Chamber, but I like the spirit. She pulled of a Toomey with her nomination papers. She gathered a full 100 signatures over 4th of July weekend – the sign of an dedicated organized core of support. The bad news is that she has 1/3 the money of Davis and Decker. The good news is she has almost as much money as Seidel. She has a good chance – not a sure thing.

4. Marj Decker has been the most stridently antiwar counselor, but she hasn’t solved the problem that has plagued the peace movement for as long as there has been one. How do you answer these two questions at the same time.

I. Who really benefits from war?
II. What did my daughter die for?

Nobody else has. I have ideas, but …

Marj is good on the potpourri of progressive issues. I do wish though that she wouldn’t talk to me as if she didn’t put her pants on one leg at a time.

Anyway, despite the gaff with her election papers, she’s an incumbant with a strong base and more money than anybody else! The only real question mark is, will people not want to write her in? I’m not counting her out. Despite any rumors to the contrary, a sticker candidate is treated the same as any other. You can vote them at any preference. If you like Marj to any degree, sticker her in!

5:48P It’s getting late so I must get sketchy. Besides if my vote hasn’t stuck by this point, I can’t find someone to give it to who both needs it and has a chance of being elected. Anyway.

5. Silvia Glick

6. Tom Stohlman

7. Kathy Podgers

———

¹You may occasionally come across the phrase ‘gravity waves’. This is the name that physicists of the last century assigned to waves propagating on the surface of water. Gravity provides the restoring force.

I was in Roxbury visiting Project HipHop. Deputy Director D’Mon Bills took me to coffee at nearby Haley House. I kind of deserted my host to get a snap of Boston Mayor Menino. Unfortunately, the lovely Dottie Wells, his steadfast publicist, had her back to me. She claimed she remembered me from the Firefighters rally outside the State of the City at the Strand. She’s a publicist.

That’s all very nice, but I didn’t see them at the Rally and March for Jobs and A Real Economic Recovery.

Whereas:

Michael Flaherty @ Rally for Jobs Oct. 1, 2009

and the guy who’s always with the people:

Chuck Turner at rally for jobs Oct. 1, 2009