Chapters

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Nathan Crowe, who insisted we call him "Nate", is a freight driver with the Denver Woodwork Company. We hadn't scheduled a meeting with him but we struck up a conversation at a fuel station in the outskirts of Chicago and he had plenty of interesting things to tell us about life in the Federation of Free States.

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If I believed in biblical things, I would say that this is the time of Job in my life, but on a much-smaller scale. Maybe I am operating under the principle of Murphy’s Law, which states that, “Everything that can go wrong will go wrong.” I’ve decided to take a cautiously optimistic approach to life and my spell of minor troubles and believe that if the universe is indeed dishing me a few too many sides of bad luck, I’m going to take it as a semi-positive sign and believe that at least I am somewhat important- being totally ignored by the Fates would be worse, wouldn’t it?


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Sub-titled "And Never Feel Powerless Again," this book takes a "command and conquer" approach to life.  The more I read, the more I realized that… I don't really have a need to learn how to get anyone to do anything.  I'm not a sales person, and I no longer work in a corporate environment where winning arguments and driving the conversation is important.  Lucky me!

I checked this book out for a laff, expecting to find a lot of cheesy salesman style Jedi mind trick advice.  My biggest surprise was that most of the book was actually fairly reasonable.  


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Naomi Campbell

As the Guardian points out HERE, sometimes murder and mutilation are too little to garner international interest and attention; the testimony of a fashion model is the missing answer for the War Times Tribunal to focus attention on the trial against former Liberian President Charles Taylor. If you note that the irony in this is tinged with bitterness, that is the intent.

Charles Taylor is being tried on 11 different war crimes including murder, rape, and sexual slavery. His trade of “blood diamonds” was used to fund the rebels from Sierra Leone.


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 David Icke is a fascinating figure.  He began his career as a sports commentator for the BBC, and a Green Party spokesman.  Then after a fateful encounter with a psychic, Icke had a spiritual awakening.

In an interview that was ostensibly to be about something sports-related, Icke announced to the world that "he was the son of God, and predicted that the world would soon be devastated by tidal waves and earthquakes.  From this rapid turnabout, David Icke became one of the most prolific and disturbing futurists in the movement which he dubbed "New Age conspiracism."


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Yesterday, in New York, a city planning commission voted unanimously to remove the last legal obstacle to the construction of a mosque and Islamic center, two blocks from 9-11 ground zero, the site of the World Trade Center. The Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, responded to the activists, commentators and politicians, whom have dug deep into the tool box of destructive bigotry, and have used every instrument they could find, (fear, hate, threats of violence) to try to block the construction. In remarks delivered on Governor's Island, the mayor reminded the critics of the mosque, exactly what 9-11 was about, and what the United States of America is about, and what the loss of the lives of the three thousand plus was about.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg

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WikiLeaks is at http://wikileaks.org/ - Have you heard of it? It’s pretty much what you would expect- a wiki-style sharing of political leaks. Documents you aren’t supposed to be able to see that you get to see. And there have been some serious, big-time stories coming out of the site. Time magazine said that they could become as important a journalistic tool as the Freedom of Information Act, which is high praise- but is TIME magazine in a good place to comment on journalism? Just kidding. I’m a blogger, afterall.

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The Interweb is the dawn of a new era- and just after dawn, I believe, it has discovered politics. If you read me, you know that for me that means money, and this is no exception. But it’s more than that as well, as there are plenty of social issue still working themselves out on the Internet’s pages. Here are a few of the more recent, and I think interesting, examples:

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Duct Tape Prom Dress and Tux- The Winners!Duckie from “Pretty in Pink” would have been proud; recently, a young, inventive couple from Arizona won a design competition by creating  a tux and a prom dress completely out of duct tape. Of the 240 entrants from across North America, Ray Banna and Yancy Esquivel received the highest number of Facebook votes for their entry in the DUCK tape brand competition.


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