Where are the protesters?

The protest in the trees seems to be losing its effectiveness. Not only is there giant opposition forming both in the form of faculty and students, but the protest has not stopped the ground breaking ceremony for calREN. Clearly the protesters are missing the forest for the trees. The biomedical building, which may have nefarious ties to private industry, is not slated to break ground for five plus years. While the students(?) ineffectively sit in trees, ground breaking is occurring at 9am on Thursday January 24th, beginning in the Alumni Room at UCSC. CalREN has ties to privatized industry which one would think would create a giant buzz. But it doesn't. Why? If the protest is about stopping expansion, wouldn't this be the greatest blow to the LRDP? To actually stop a ground breaking? A note about calREN: For the past ten years, California has had two Internets. The first is the commercial Internet that everyone is familiar with and uses everyday, the Internet that has proven such an enormous boon to the state's economy. The second is somewhat different. Reserved for the exclusive use of the state's K-20 research and education community, it is a private high-performance fiber-optic based network connecting all of California's K-20 public education - and a significant number of private and independent institutions - via one of the most advanced, cutting-edge Internet-based networks in the world. That network is the California Research & Education Network (CalREN), and the company that created and now operates and maintains that network is CENIC, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California.