Huff Puff Exodus

The purchase of the Huffington Post by AOL left many of the progressive writers and readers that made the site into a powerhouse looking for a new home."Socialite Arianna Huffington built a blog-empire on the backs of thousands of citizen journalists," a post at Adbusters begins. "She exploited our idealism and let us labor under the illusion that the Huffington Post was different, independent and leftist. Now she’s cashed in and three thousand indie bloggers find themselves working for a megacorp."

They continue that the Huffington Post is not Arianna’s to sell. It is theirs: the lefty writers and readers, environmentalism activists and anti-corporate organizers who flooded the site with 25 million visits a month. So they’re going to take it back.

"We are the ones who built the Huffington Post. And now we will be the ones who will huff & puff it down," Adbusters concluded.

They claim they’ll stop going to her site. And stop blogging for her too. Then they shall birth an alternative to AOL’s HuffPo by using the #huffpuff hash tag and ironically tell the world about their NEW favorite counter-culture websites and indie blogs. Kind of a counter-to the counter-culture corporate left tilted AOL owned left tilted website?

Damn that must be exhausting.

Look, it's a crap site full of pseudoscience and a large percentage of horse droppings. She sold it because she can. It's got her name on it, and she's going to make a fortune. But it's also AOL - and they have the anti-Midas touch. Like the Moldy touch. It seems that just about every venture that AOL has tackled has been put into the history books as "the worst business decision in history." Time Warner? Sending out CD's every week to everyone on the planet? Not considering DSL or Cable Modems as a serious threat to their business plan?

Surly, the death of the Huff-Puff is a foregone conclusion - and losing their fan base will only slightly accelerate its demise.

World Food Prices Hit Record

The U.N.’s food price index hit a record in January and recent catastrophic weather around the globe could put more pressure on the cost of food, an issue that has already helped spark protests across the Middle East.

Up for the seventh month in a row, the closely watched Food and Agriculture Organization Food Price Index on Thursday touched its highest since records began in 1990, and topped the peak of 224.1 in June 2008, during the food crisis of 2007/08.

“The new figures clearly show that the upward pressure on world food prices is not abating. These high prices are likely to persist in the months to come,” FAO economist and grains expert Abdolreza Abbassian said in a statement.

Surging food prices have come back into the spotlight after they helped fuel the discontent that toppled Tunisia’s president in January and have spilled over to Egypt and Jordan, raising expectations other countries in the region would secure grain stocks to reassure their populations.

World Bank President Robert Zoellick urged global leaders to “put food first” and wake up to the need to curb increased price volatility.

“We are going to be facing a broader trend of increasing commodity prices, including food commodity prices,” he told Reuters in an interview.

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Hey, Hey! This was Made in the USA!

Oh, that's tear gas, ain't it? Uh, well, would you be happier if it was Russian made tear gas? Israeli tear gas? And it's not like anyone is buying American cars... hell no. But you'll sure buy our weapons. Must be what the Egyptians were using that 1.5 Billion in aid for... for tear gas and American weapons?

I'm sure the brothers and sisters of the revolution won't hold that against us... right?