What was important about this network of hitchhiking support was that it allowed thousands of people to move from city to city, protest to protest, with very little money. The mobilization effort to stop the war including having very flexible humans willing to dedicate themselves to the effort for long periods of time with little or no money.

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I will keep picking up hitchhikers, especially now that I heard that last week a young woman hitchhiking from the Redwoods was murdered near Brookings, Oregon. I will develop my knowing of when I am safe and keep picking up people on the roadside. And, I will find something I have in common with every person I meet. I will start from that point. And finally, I will talk about the war on Iraq and nature and I will listen. I don't have the answer for the way out of this war on the world, we all have it. And, we need to start listening to each other.

In a labor battle with roots dating back 100 years, independent truckers and Starbucks employees are now joining the wild and contentious Wobblies

On a fog-soaked December morning, near an Interstate 5 offramp on the outskirts of Stockton, about a dozen men huddled in a loose circle. Some wore the traditional long beards and Sikh turbans of their native India. The younger men were mostly clean-shaven and sported brand-name windbreakers. To the north was a truck dealership. To the south, shrouded in the fog, was a dog-food factory.

"...Most kids [...] could not tell you what the relationship between an Easter bunny and Easter is, would be my guess. Much less how the male bunny goes with a basket of eggs or how eggs fit into it all."

"In the first phase of the crime spree, children were beaten for speaking
their own languages, for having their own culture, all in the name of the
assimilation policy of the government. Innocent little kids were
terrorized by the men and women of God. Some were left to the nonexistent
mercy of pedophiles who found a  comfortable, and easy place among them.
The children were of a certain race, and to remove that race from the
child, the government went to extreme lengths."

Let's begin with this: 77% of Venezuela's farmland is owned by 3% of the population, the 'hacendados.'
I met one of these farmlords in Caracas at an anti-Chavez protest march. Oddest demonstration I've ever seen: frosted blondes in high heels clutching designer bags, screeching, "Chavez - dic-ta-dor!" The plantation owner griped about the "socialismo" of Chavez, then jumped into his Jaguar convertible.

Well you know the good ship of state in Alberta is teetering towards toppling and leaking like a sieve when its main propagandist gives it a good backhand slap.

Edmonton Sun columnist Neil Waugh the apologist for all things Klein and Tory has thrown up his hands in disgust over the cover up by the government of the fleecing it got from Enron when it deregulated the energy market.

"A parliamentary committee is expected today to cite unauthorized native fishing and federal mismanagement as two key reasons for the disappearance of up to 1.6 million sockeye salmon from the Fraser River last year.

A draft copy of the House of Commons fisheries committee report, obtained Monday by The Vancouver Sun, rejects the original assertion of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) that unusually warm water temperatures on the Fraser were the likely cause of what the committee calls a 'major ecological disaster.'"

MAALE ADUMIM, West Bank - "Israel has publicly confirmed plans to build 3,500 new housing units in the largest Jewish settlement in the West Bank, Maale Adumim, and Palestinians angrily responded that such an action would violate the Middle East peace plan and would be a major obstacle to resolving bitter disputes over nearby Jerusalem."

"Within a couple of hours last week, crude oil prices hit a
record $56 a barrel, President Bush fretted publicly over world oil
shortages and the Senate voted to open an Alaskan wildlife refuge to
drilling.

The converging events drew attention to what administration officials call a
temporary global energy crunch. But bigger worries also are bubbling to the
surface - fears of a day of reckoning over world oil reserves."

"(Northern Ireland's) Catholics and Protestants both celebrated the 1998 Good Friday (Peace) Agreement....With over thirty years of brutal violence during 'the Troubles' behind them, Catholics and Protestants both were eager to grasp any sign of peace. The Agreement, along with its accompanying ceasefire between pro-British (Loyalist or Unionist) and Republican forces, was to formally end sectarian violence, and provide a way to relax Britain's rule with a Northern Ireland Assembly. It was also supposed to end the racist laws used by the British government to persecute Catholics and deny them political and civil rights, supposedly on behalf of the Protestant majority....It proved to be an empty promise."

"The following is an inexorable truth: the U.S. government does not know what to do with the Bolivarian government of President Chavez. Our revolution is too democratic, too humanistic, too profound and too transcendent; and is therefore beyond traditional capitalist analysis and beyond the comprehension of a government of a country where values revolve around individualism."

"When you go through life abiding by all the rules and conforming to all the regulations of society, and one day you look out your car window and there stands a slew of cops barking orders and pointing guns at you and your girlfriend's head, your immediate feeling is that you are part of some elaborate prank. I waited for my friends to emerge from a bush, laughing hysterically, but they never appeared....Instead, more cop cars pulled up, their lights and sirens blazing frantically. The officer yelled at us to spread our arms wider and lie face down on the cold, oil-covered concrete."

QUEEN CHARLOTTE CITY - "Two groups of protesters, one in Queen
Charlotte City and one an hour north in Port Clements, blockaded roads
to Weyerhaeuser's two main log-sorting facilities on the Queen
Charlotte Islands Tuesday to draw attention to what the Haida say is
an ongoing violation of their rights.

At issue is the planned transfer of a Weyerhaeuser tree farm licence
to Brascan as part of an impending sale. The Haida say they aren't
being properly consulted about the transfer, in spite of a recent
Supreme Court of Canada decision requiring such consultation."

URGENT: Bill C-263 will go to a vote in the House of Commons on April 7, 2005

"Though egomania and naivete may well lead him to believe that he can coerce (Paul) Wolfowitz to implement more humanitarian policies, Bono's de facto endorsement of this explicit advocate of imperialism is way beyond the pale. And it marked the culmination of my disillusionment with the politics of the man whose lyrics are permanently embedded in the heads of people my age, if not of people of all ages, so long has been their hold on the title of world's No.1 band."