It’s Sister Jenny’s Turn to Throw the Bomb

View 695 Wednesday, October 05, 2011

Today’s Headline:

Labor Unions Join Wall Street "Occupiers" for Mass Rally

The cavalry has arrived in Lower Manhattan. Representatives from no fewer than 15 of the country’s largest labor unions will join the Occupy Wall Street protesters for a mass rally and march today in New York City.

The AFL-CIO, United Auto Workers, and Transit Workers’ Union are among the groups expected to stand in solidarity with the hundreds of mostly young men and women who have spent the better part of three weeks sleeping, eating, and organizing from Zuccotti Square.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/labor-unions-join-occupy-wall-street-york-rally/story?id=14673346

The revolution enters the next phase. It could be serious, but it can also be farce: it’s not at all clear which of the conflicting demands coming from the Occupy Wall Street protestors the unions support. It is doubtful that real auto workers are in favor of the tax raises that would be required to forgive student debts, but that hardly matters. The entire “American Autumn” is a community organizer event intended to draw attention away from the Tea Party; something for the media to play with. The Arab Spring events are serious but disorganized. These “American Autumn” events are actually fairly well organized even if they appear to be something else. No one took them very seriously. They certainly weren’t demanding the overthrow of Obama. They weren’t demanding a military coup. Mostly it was farce.

Some of it was a bit amusing, even appealing. After all, the IWW, the International Workers of the World, have endorsed Occupy Wall Street. All 12,000 of them, among them the folk singer Leslie Fish, who will emotionally and rather appealingly tell you that the Wobblies are still around. You can hear her here. (It might take a bit of time to download; be patient. And you may find some other songs at that site, such as Let us Go A-rambling…) After all, it’s time to throw the bomb…

But it is farce no longer. The entry of organized labor, which claims to speak for more than 10% of the US population and which has a highly favored place in Federal law and regulation, makes this a more serious matter.

It is also a sign of desperation. And maybe, just maybe, those who pay their union dues will stop to consider that this may be a more serious matter than they supposed. It’s one thing to pay dues and watch money go to liberal causes. It’s quite another to identify oneself with rebels. Next it may be your turn to throw the bomb.

No news on the CERN faster than light neutrinos. Without that observation all the speculations about relativity are fairly idle talk: as Russell Seitz reminds me, most physics professors have a peach crate full of well reasoned refutations of Einstein’s theory of relativity sent by smart people, and there’s not a lot of point in reading them because there’s no need for a new theory: what we have works to cover the data we have. Beckmann’s Einstein Plus Two is interesting if the FTL particles are “real” (repeatable observations by different teams with different equipment, etc.) because we need a new theory because if FTL happens then light speed really isn’t invariable; but without that observational data, it’s just another book in the peach crate. That’s still the way to bet, of course. But I sure could use faster than light for my stories….