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POPSLegalize Hemp! If it was good enough for revolutionary farmers, it's good enough for us. When I was in elementary school, one of my teachers brought in an old newspaper, pre-Civil War. The paper was printed on hemp and in perfect condition because, as my teacher pointed out, hemp is naturally acid-free. The ex-tobacco farmers in my community would love to grow hemp as an easy, low-maintenance and reliable cash crop. "Although products made with hemp -- everything from foods to fabrics to paper to auto body panels -- are legal in the US, under the DEA's strained interpretation of the Controlled Substances Act, hemp is considered indistinguishable from marijuana and cannot be planted in the US. According to the hemp industry, it is currently importing about $360 million worth of hemp products each year from countries where hemp production is legal, including Canada, China, and several European nations."
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POPSPuerto Rico Unions Protest Job Cuts From the article: Several protesters, holding signs demanding work, directed their criticism at Gov. Luis G. Fortuño. He was elected to his first term last year as a Republican, promising to jumpstart the economy, but so far, job losses and negative growth have continued, punishing the island with its fourth year of recession. Governor Fortuño has said repeatedly that he did not want layoffs, but had no choice. In interviews on radio and television on Thursday, he said that it was the only way to avoid a government shutdown because of the territory’s $3.2 billion deficit. “There was no alternative,” Mr. Fortuño said. “And there is no turning back.” ----- Which I can tell you is an total lie.
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POPSFarmers Arrested Planting Hemp on DEA Headquarters Lawn Hemp is not a drug and has no capacity to get someone stoned. Currently eight states -- Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Montana, North Dakota, Vermont, and West Virginia -- allow industrial hemp production or research, but federal law, which requires nearly-impossible-to-obtain-permits to grow hemp, trumps those state laws. A bill introduced by Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) would allow states to craft their own policies. Some facts from North American Industrial Hemp Council: Hemp has been grown for at least the last 12,000 years for fiber (textiles and paper) and food. Hemp oil once greased machines. Most paints, resins, shellacs, and varnishes used to be made out of linseed (from flax) and hemp oils. Rudolph Diesel designed his engine to run on hemp oil The products that can be made from hemp number over 25,000.
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POPSThe Thoreau Reader Can Something "Wrong," Really Be Something "Right?" - Rebecca Anne Kroll - "Thoreau's act of Civil Disobedience did not clog any government wheels.... Instead it echoed throughout the world as a way for people to affect change in something that they did not think was right.
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POPSGoodness! Evolution and the War between Fundamentalist Atheism and Religion
This will settle nothing, but it is a good read. The clip is a 'taster'' of an article focused on debates around evoulution and moral motivation. It ends: <<< Of course, religion doesn’t have a monopoly on awe and inspiration. The story that science tells, the story of nature, is awesome, and some people get plenty of inspiration from it, without needing the religious kind. What’s more, science has its own role to play in knitting the world together. The scientific enterprise has long been on the frontiers of international community, fostering an inclusive, cosmopolitan ethic — the kind of ethic that any religion worthy of this moment in history must also foster. William James said that religious belief is “the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.” Science has its own version of the unseen order, the laws of nature. In principle, the two kinds of order can themselves be put into harmony ...(more follows)
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POPSVoight: Is Obama creating a civil war in America? ""Do not let the Obama administration fool you with all their cunning Alinsky methods. And if you don't know what that method is, I implore you to get the book 'Rules for Radicals,' by Saul Alinsky. Mr. Obama is very well trained in these methods," he continues, citing a television campaign critical of the Republican Party and contentious town-hall meetings about health care reform. "The real truth is that the Obama administration is professional at bullying, as we have witnessed with ACORN at work during the presidential campaign. It seems to me they are sending down their bullies to create fist fights among average American citizens who don't want a government-run health care plan forced upon them," Mr. Voight says. "So I ask again. Is President Obama creating a civil war in our own country?""
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POPSProtesters Descend on Chevron for Climate Justice
“Chevron has the opportunity to do the right thing,” said Mayor of Richmond, Gayle McLaughlin. “They just need to agree to capping the crude at the level they currently refine. We want them to put Richmond’s residents to work modernizing and replacing the 80 year old boilers, which sadly they chose to remove from the project several months ago. ” “We want Chevron to build a cleaner and safer refinery,” said Ana Orozco of Communities for A Better Environment. ”We want the union jobs to continue to build a refinery that is cleaner and safer for our community. Our community has been put at risk for too long.” Of course Chevron would greet the peaceful protesters with a heavy police presence. Chevron has the mindset that they have the power to do anything they want without regard to how they poison people and the environment. They are championed by governments around the world who value money over the conditions of people’s lives. Chevron: agent of Corprafascism.
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POPSHamid Dabashi on Iran: this isn't class or sectarian conflict -- it's something new Hamid Dabashi is a Columbia University professor. He views the current situation in Iran as something fundamentally non-ideological. He compares it to the U.S. civil rights movement and predicts that a nonviolent resistance will continue for some time. I like the final line: "We need to sit back, hope for the best and let this inspirational movement of a whole new generation of hope teach us courage and humility."
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POPSWong Chin Huat arrested for sedition Academician, journalist and activist arrested on Tuesday, May 5th 2009 on charges of sedition, by the police, acting on a report made. Police, however, have declined to elaborate who filed the report. Welcome to 1Malaysia...
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POPSWARNING: Abortion is an act of violence that kills a baby. WARNING: Abortion is an act of violence that kills a baby. This site graphically depicts that reality. Go to: http://abortionno.org/AbortionNO/main_fl.html Murder is not pretty - it's very graphic but it's happening and being sanctioned by the government. How anyone who is Pro-Choice can view these pictures and video and come away feeling alright with themselves is unblieveable and disgusting.
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POPSHis Path "The idea of allowing drunk, smelly or snoring people to stretch out in the pews offended some churchgoers, who found it disrespectful. But that didn't stop Vitale. The protest has no visible effect on the military's activities at the fort, but Vitale says results are not the point. "Effectiveness is not what we're after," he says. "We are doing what's right before God. That's what we are called to do, and what happens happens."
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POPSSaving the World From Death by Coal I know this is a bit dated, but it bears repeating for those who missed it. A group of over 2,500 people from all across the country marched on the coal fired power plant in our nation's capitol which for over 100 years has supplied heat and electricity to Congress by burning coal. More actions in the form of civil disobedience directed against coal power plants are planned in the near future. As the world prepares for the UN COP15 Conference in Copenhagen this December, it is a critical year for, as Bill McKibben said, "creating a political space for a climate treaty to be finalized." Time's up.
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POPSCalls Mount for Obama to Fire NASA Climate Chief “As long as a public official is on the public payroll, his first loyalty is to his constituency, not to some outside pressure group calling on people to break the law,” Miller said. Hansen and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) he heads have been accused on several occasions of falsifying data to make global warming appear to be a crisis. In November 2008, Hansen claimed October 2008 was the warmest October on record. In fact, October temperatures were at the long-term average. Hansen’s techniques were recently exposed on the Web site of meteorologist Anthony Watts (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/12/08/how-not-to-measure-temperature-part-79-would-you-could-you-with-a-boat/) for adjusting raw temperature data to make a long-term cooling trend recorded by a climate monitoring station in New Mexico look like a warming trend.
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