You thought aloe was already about love.
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I’m typing this on the Earth Hour. Immediately after, actually. By the time we’d thought to look at the time, we’d missed the whole thing. Our usually regressive city council had registered Colorado Springs as an official participant, and we wondered if we’d watch the city lights go dark, on a Saturday night, when offices and stores are vacant anyway. Except for the clubs, which would surprise me if they even dimmed the music to mark the event.

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USHUAIA, ARGENTINA- Today I am in Ushuaia, on the island of Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost city in the world. Woot, woot! I took a leisurely boat ride through the Beagle Channel — so named for the ship in Charles Darwin’s famous journey — and learned about the Yamanas, the indigenous Fuegons as they like to be called. Right. More on the Yamanas later, but I think they will prove my theory about the body’s natural thermostat.

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Adbusters:
In the classic novel, Treasure Island, any pirate suspected of betrayal is handed a piece of paper with a black spot on it — a warning that the receiver has been marked for judgement. So dreaded is this mark that when the grizzled pirate Billy Bones has one slipped into his hand, he suffers a fear-induced stroke and dies.

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While negotiating the Suez Canal in Egypt, the ship GLOBAL PATRIOT fired on enterprising Egyptian merchants who’d approached too close, who did not know perhaps, despite its GWOT themed name, that the container ship was under contract with the US Navy. The Egyptian traders may not have predicted the ship was manned by gun totting mercenaries, operating under Iraq privateer rules of engagement, shouting and shooting out the porthole as if everyone outside was an unlucky Iraqi. It’s reported that one Egyptian was killed and others wounded. Global Container Lines explained their people were wary of a USS Cole type attack, the usual contractor justification for preemptively strafing civilians. But US private soldiers aren’t above the law in Egypt.

Want the quickest, healthiest breakfast? Try this: half a container of cottage cheese, half the blueberries, and a sprinkle of slivered almonds. These should be, respectively, without rBGH, organic, and raw* when possible. The second day this meal will be even more convenient, since the berries are already rinsed and you can combine everything in the dairy container without needing to dirty a bowl. Use a plastic spoon and you can take breakfast for the drive.

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Best sign of optimism I’ve seen ever.
 
resistance is fertile
from CrimethInc.
 
The greatest illusionist spectacle in the world no longer enchants us. We are certain that communities of joy will emerge from our struggle, here and now. And for the first time, life will triumph over death.

What do you suppose Bush’s wordsmiths had in mind to choose the arcane term “hectoring?” They’ve been quite astute at framing issues with novel usage like “surge” and other reinventions to frustrate our lexicography. (I’m having a flashback to another Jonathan Winters / Arsenic and Old Lace expropriation. I’ll think of it in a second.) We’re being led to infer that Bush knows his Homer, although we’re more likely to believe he saw the movie. Clearly he didn’t stay awake for long. Hector was the protector of Troy, and lent his name to the colloquialism for his constant criticism –in opposition to the war! Ultimately he died a valiant death, unlike a number of the warmongers.

The Independent is sponsoring a lecture by populist champion Jim Hightower of the HIGHTOWER LOWDOWN on
April 1st. No joke!
 
Gates Common Room, Palmer Hall, Colorado College, Tues. 4-5pm.
 
I confess for some reason I had ex-agricultural commissioner Hightower confused with Texan kill-joy Marvin Zindler of Chicken Ranch fame, but I loved him all the same.

There is such an assault on the idea that environmental toxins actually do cause disease these days, that this study linking Parkinson’s to pesticides is noteworthy. Pesticide Parkinson’s link strong Of course, poisons cause diseases like Cancer, Asthma, and Parkinson’s, etc. and not just genes and heredity, but the media generally keeps quite silent about that as a general rule. Don’t want anybody to seriously propose more government regulation, now do they? That would harm the ‘free market’ and be socialism, something that the corporate press is quite allergic to.

Makes you sick… capitalism as a means toward social organizing and a just prosperity. Tell me after reading this you’re still convinced that capitalist democracy is viable any longer… for us, the working poor, the working class, the middle classes? We’ve lost all our gains, if any were actually made, since the early 70s. All the surplus that is produced from our labor, whether service or manufacturing, has been stolen by the financial industries and corporate wall street barons. This is the National Dividend that Richard Cook talks about and urges we demand, to get back our gains from our productivity.

Such a repressive place, Cuba! Hateful and nasty communists run the island. They are hateful and nasty that is, unless you happen to be Gay! That’s right, Cuba is a gayer place today than it was yesterday.

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Thank God that we have a Department of Homeland Security that is protecting us all from body piercings in airports. See… TSA Forces Woman To Remove Nipple Rings For Flight In fact, it’s like we have The Three Stooges loose in the airports these days.

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Revealed: two more US contractors were killed in Iraq. Their bodies discovered after they had been captured last year. The FBI has asked the families not to comment publicly. Plus, this latest report came with more gruesome detail than Americans are accustomed. Something about severed fingers.

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In case you missed it, NMT is on location in Buenos Aires! Marie is in the thick of the protests, but without her laptop/Photoshop. She writes: Read more »

Superdelegates were conceived to avoid the problem which George McGovern presented as the popular democratic nominee for the 1972 election. Without political guidance, the hoi palloi delegates selected a candidate, the best ever really, who promptly lost to Richard Nixon in a landslide. Since then the party has appointed superdelegates to temper future wayward exuberance. Perhaps the Democrat heavyweights who threw some of their fund-raising clout around –to suggest that the 2008 nomination be left to the appropriate authorities– are worried that Obama looks to be a similarly naive choice.

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The US is now attacking the allies of Iran within the Iraqi Shia community, and this new battle in the US War to Re-Colonize the Middle East is now underway. It is an effort by the US to clean up behind the lines before it begins its bombardment of Iran.

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This year for the first time the Hands Off Venezuela campaign will be taking part in the Cairo Conference (International Campaign against US and Zionist Occupation, 6th Cairo Conference, 4th Cairo Forum, Press Syndicate, March 27-30, 2008). HOV will be holding a seminar on The Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela and the struggle for socialism.
 
On March 25, YOUNG LEFT in Sweden passed a motion in support for the HANDS OFF VENEZUELA campaign. Read more »

These bastards are brazen thieves and agents of disinformation. Has the entire fricking country gone stupid? We are witnessing the transfer of vast sums of our money… not theirs, ours… to them!! And a Fed who wants to get the SEC out of the way so they can do it! Paulson, Bernake, Greenspan, Volker, Rubin… all wall street thieves and crooks, liars and scum. This is the fascist business model in full head long dive to the bottom with the Fed cleaning up the mess and divvying up the bailout money to their wall street buddies. For the next 6 months.

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Poetry Slams have reduced our most elevated literary genre to the arena of Hallmark Cards. Can you imagine compelling Longfellow to extemporize on the spot, faced with one-upping a fast-rapping carnival barker? Perhaps Oscar Wilde could have risen to the challenge against a ghetto phoenix such as Eminem, but Eminem is not representative of the norm. We have to acknowledge the aberration of genius.

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I believe that we, as U.S. Americans, even though we have maps, should actually be able to read maps, so that we don´t, like people in Iraq and elsewhere, get lost every five minutes, even though we spend at least ten minutes looking at the maps, before we walk out the door.

I also personally believe, that we should forget about Home Economics, and should, instead, require Cartography as a, uh, requirement, before allowing our women to travel to large cities in foreign countries, where no one speaks a word of American, alone.

Is promoting the First Affirmative Financial Network actually promoting real ‘economic sustainability’? The reason I ask this, is that tonight the Justice and Peace group here in Colorado Springs is hosting the message of this FAFN group in the PPJPC offices downtown. The host (a paid PPJPC office staff member) is somebody that keeps pushing something he calls ’sustainability, but has never defined what he means by this.

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