"The agony of seven days without spending"

It's a new week... Germany is slipping into recession, Japan is sliding
into recession and the Eurozone is there, too. Let's take a look at
our stock market's opening bell: down 172
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Here is an interesting experiment, try not to spend any money for seven days.
It might go something like this: "To stage a tour de force, a morality play in seven daily acts!"
Steve Almond, the article is here
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Somebody STOP "them"!

While we weren't paying attention:
"Late on election day, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management announced a Dec. 19 auction of more than 50,000 acres of oil and gas parcels alongside or within view of Arches National Park and two other redrock national parks in Utah: Dinosaur and Canyonlands."

"This is the fire sale, the Bush administration's last great gift to the oil and gas industry," said Stephen Bloch, a staff attorney for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

read the article
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Something buried in the news:
"I think the breakdown of the talks between Beijing and the Dalai Lama is a major disaster, and it has now created a no-win situation for the Tibetans and China," said Tsering Shakya, a Tibetan historian at the University of British Columbia.