That's the word from The Dusty Attic's official calculating team of one.

I saw the panoramic photo of the Ellipse at the 24 September 'Mixed Nuts' Rally that LGF linked to here and lifted it to include below.


There's no time frame for the photo I spent about 10 minutes playing with the Google Maps, having to use the 'print screen' to capture the scale (std. print doesn't provide and that's why it took more than five minutes).

I outlined the limits of the area occupied by just about every Cindy, Chest, Jesse, Hazel, Ramsey, Pecan, Becker, Wal, Ralph, Brazil, Palestine, Pistashio Gloria, and Almond nuts both home and foreign grown, living and roasted. That's delineated by the 'Reds' line.

Using some very detailed measurements and my powerful Windows calculator I did the number crunching. I determined, to an accuracy of 'no chance in hell'* of being off by no more than 10%, that the number of nuts at the rally was 66,000. (Actually, the calculations resulted in 65,640, but I added 360 nuts on other's shoulder to round it off.)

That was using a ratio of one nut per 7.5 square feet. Without going into dissertation length explanation, the Park Service used to use 5 square feet as a rule of thumb to count nuts gathered in Occupied Territories such a Washington DC, but that is really packing them in the can. If you look at many of the photos of the rally that are on the web, these people were not interested in the idea of close proximity. And if you study where almost half the people were in the subject photo, these folks were not at the speech area but milling about on the street, another condition where close proximity is not the norm here. So this 7.5 sf ratio is an extremely accurate number to use for the whole area. Generous, in fact.

But wait. I decided take a second approach -- identifying the length of a protest march of 100,000 nuts. Taking a look at a couple of the surrounding streets, such as Constitution Ave, I see there are 6 traffic lanes. I've been to DC, a long time ago, but I do still have the impression the lanes are not spacious. I'll use 10 wide. I'll also say the sidewalks are 10 wide. That's an 80 foot width. If you do the calculation based on a per nut space occupation of 8 sf, a march of 100,000 nuts would need to be 10,000 feet long. I don't know what the route was so, I just made up a route on a map of the area that would keep them from getting tangled, showing a presumed start of the procession and where the front of the march have to be when the last nut left the starting point.

My guess is that the march never achieved the length I show but, of course, those that went to watch could verify whether it was, in fact, possible that the march was this long.

Anyway, by any stretch or spin, this was a pitifully dinky protest. These three days have been on the schedule for almost 6 months. While only two organizations were mostly mentioned in the news as being sponsors of this protest, these groups, together, are made up of just about every left group in the country. At ANSWER, the steering committee alone has a nut from 12 different radical left wing causes and boast of hundreds under their umbrella. Not to be outdone in the organization department, UFPJ's steering committee is populate with no less than 42 people from different organizations while their site boasts over 1,300 local and national groups in their coalition.

So, in sum:
Bad Intelligence,
No plan,
They didn't send enough protesters,
They lied about their reason for the rally,
Their actions are creating more neocons, and
They haven't made themselves safer.

They are in a protest quagmire and have no exit strategy! Who's to blame? Where's the failure?
Do you know how much gas a bus uses? Not to mention all the asbestos spewed along the highway to DC. We can't breathe all that additional pollution ... they're making hurricanes more severe ... defying Kyoto ... raising sea levels ....

No more protests for donations!

Oh yeah, by the way, it wasn't 100,000. It was 300,000! Where's Al Franken when you need him.