ProtestShooter.com - Berkeley Mulch Grove

These are from Monday, September 8th in Berkeley, CA.

If you haven't been following the Berkeley Oak Grove protest at UC Berkeley's Memorial Stadium you might want to read the events of the last couple of days. Basically the story is that there are still four tree sitters in one tree, but the rest of the grove has pretty much been converted to mulch. Note that you'll still see lots of trees - that's because the new sports facility isn't going to take up the whole space and most of the remaining trees are near the sidewalk.

I basically just dropped by to soak up a bit of local color - it's clear Cal's going to let the protesters stew for a while before doing anything dramatic. In the meantime the protesters are demanding oversight over Cal's land use and $6 million US. Seriously. Oh, and one of the stumps.

So that's what the stadium looks like.

Still lots of crap there. There were several sleeping folks.

There were seven or eight media vans. That's part of why I'm not too concerned about being there the moment the last sitters come down - the media will most likely catch it, and if anything unfortunate happens the supporters will have it on YouTube in milliseconds. But I do enjoy filling in the corners of a story like this...

That's Ayr (the head ground support guy) on the left in purple (which he's worn for days), and the gal on the right in the Aloha shirt is a code pink member (out of uniform obviously).

There were big cameras on tripods everywhere, the vultures.

Good luck with that.

ZZZZzzzzzz.....

The cleared area from the side. That's all fresh mulch in the foreground.

As usual there's lots of crap everywhere from the tree supporters. One of the major reasons why the students are becoming increasingly angry with the protest is they effectively have dozens of dirty, smelly, homeless-looking people camped out on the sidewalk and it's long since stopped being amusing.