I’m backpacking

I’ll be in the High Sierras backpacking Wednesday-Sunday at Kings Canyon-Sequoia National Park. The trailhead is at 9,000 feet and we’ll do a pass at 11,000,then go up to a plateau at 11,500 where there’s lots of lakes.

The Perseid meteor shower will peak Wednesday night, and is expected to be spectacular this year, and we’ll be far from city lights tonight and up high with no smog.

However, there will be no cell phones, Internet, or blogging. Gasp, can I survive 4 days off the grid?

Um, yes, I can. Quite happily too.

I can hardly wait to see what new madness the world has gotten itself into upon my return to civilization.

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Protest Bush in Santa Monica tomorrow

Bush will be at the airport for a fundraiser dinner. ANSWER volunteers who have been handing out flyers in Santa Monica say the response has been overwhemingly positive, so this street corner demo could easily draw several hundred people.

Thurs, Aug 12, 4 pm
Santa Monica Airport
Corner of 31st St. & Ocean Park Blvd.

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US HQ attacked in central Baghdad

Rocket-propelled grenades and mortars have hit the headquarters of US-led occupation forces in Baghdad.

Another bomb targeted a US convoy travelling in a street next to the Palestine and Sheraton hotels.

During the night on Monday, Iraqi resistance fighters fired a dozen mortars at central Baghdad’s Green Zone compound housing the interim Iraqi government and the US and British embassies.

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UfPJ abandons West Side Highway rally plan

From their listserv

WE ARE MARCHING! On August 29, United for Peace and Justice will hold a massive, impassioned, peaceful, and legal march past Madison Square Garden, the site of the Republican Convention, to protest the Bush Administration’s deceit and destruction.

But we will NOT be rallying afterwards on the West Side Highway. As we announced in a press conference today, exiling us to a remote stretch of sun-baked highway makes a mockery of our right to assembly: The deal is off.

Then why the hell did you originally agree to it? A chimpanzee with a hangover could have deduced an isolated section of freeway in August with no shade or water would be a terrible location for an antiwar rally.

Central Park is the only sensible place for us to rally. We filed a new permit application today with the NYC Parks Department to rally in Central Park on August 29, using the Great Lawn, North Meadow, and East Meadow.

Join the club, latecomer! ANSWER, NION and many others are applying for permits, and ANSWER is going to federal court “to support the right of assembly in the Great Lawn in Central Park for all those who are expressing political opposition” to Bush and the war machine.

That’s what UfPJ should have done several weeks ago when NYC rejected their permit for a Central Park rally on the laughable grounds that all those people might hurt the grass. (I am not making this up!) They should have gone to court then. But they didn’t, and instead meekly accepted the West Side Highway location. And they only bailed from that because of the pressure they were getting from activists.

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Crude oil jumps to record after Iraq cuts shipments to tankers

“There is no limit to how high crude oil can go,” said Carl Larry, an associate director of energy futures at Barclays Capital Inc. in New York. “There is too much demand and terrorism. There are problems in Iraq, Russia and Venezuela that threaten supply.”

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