bart's journal

from Global Economics Blog:

As energy prices soar, Frustrated owners try to unload their guzzlers.

Americans are turning away from the boxy, four-wheel-drive vehicles that have for years dominated the nation's highways. Sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks - symbols of Americans' obsession with horsepower, size, and status - are falling out of favor as consumers rich and poor encounter sticker shock at the pump, paying upward of $80 to fill gas tanks.

(from the Washington Post)

MODBURY, England — Rebecca Hosking’s moment, when a happy English farm girl cried tears that changed her life, came on a speck of sugar-white beach in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

“All you could smell was death,” Hosking recalled, sitting snugly in a 600-year-old pub in her rainy home town, which has been transformed by her epiphany two years ago on Midway Atoll.

found this funny video via Stimulator's blog:

from the BBC:

It started life as the emblem of the British anti-nuclear movement but it has become an international sign for peace, and arguably the most widely used protest symbol in the world. It has also been adapted, attacked and commercialised. (see diamond-encristed

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Decoding the Symbol

from Boing Boing:

As reported in The Guardian: Gary Pugh, director of forensic sciences at Scotland Yard, says primary school children should be eligible for the DNA database if they exhibit behaviour indicating they may become criminals in later life. Civil liberty groups condemned his comments last night by likening them to an excerpt from a 'science fiction novel'. One teaching union warned that it was a step towards a 'police state'.

from The Sanctuary for Independent Media website

An art installation closed by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute last Thursday (March 5) was shut down by the City of Troy this morning (March 11), a day after it re-opened at The Sanctuary for Independent Media.

from indybay:

In a major step for the U.S. labor movement, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) has announced that it will shut down West Coast ports on May 1, to demand an immediate end to the war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Middle East. In a February 22 letter to AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, ILWU International president Robert McEllrath reported that at a recent coast-wide union meeting, “One of the resolutions adopted by caucus delegates called on longshore workers to stop work during the day shift on May 1, 2008 to express their opposition to the war in Iraq.”

I just came across an interesting interactive world map of US Foreign Policy on the site Historyisaweapon.com

Check it out, its very nicely done. Its an interactive history of US backed coups. Coups that toppled democratically elected goverments in favor of brutal dictators who in return backed US business interests.

interesting post on slashdot.org
about what Fascism actually looks like in America.

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