As many of you know, the 2008 Republican National Convention was held from September 1st to September 4th in St. Paul, Minnesota.  The minute the location was announced, activist groups around the region (not just the Twin Cities -- a large part of the Upper Midwest jumped in on this) started to organize their protests.  There were a large range of activities in planning, everything from student walk-outs and concerts to marches and demonstrations to disrupting traffic and blocking off roads.

Note: This is going to be a brief entry because I have a lot going on at the moment and haven't really had time to process today's events.

The quick of it is, there is a very large anti-abortion demonstration being held in front of the Coffman Student Union at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and the pro-choice groups WSAC and the UPCC need people to protest with us. We'll be starting at 8am tomorrow (the anti-choicers are returning at 6am) and going all day, no matter what the weather, until the anti-choicers leave. As a reward for our hard work afterwards, we'll all be heading to MPIRG's Take Back the Night rally (6pm, Loring Park).

You can read a more detailed description of the day's events and tomorrow's plans after the break.

Yes, you two. I'm the one who argued with you about the bias of the information in some of your pamphlets. I'm calling you out.

First of all, I was right. There is no connection between abortion and breast cancer. It was disproven a few years ago. Interestingly enough, your pamphlet hasn't been revised since the middle of 2005, around the time when the connection was debunked. Don't you think that a pamphlet on such a controversial topic would be updated to reflect such an important revelation? Most of the quotes in there were from the late 1980s and mid 1990s, when a number of inconclusive studies were published. That's right: inconclusive, and there are a number of papers that explain this.

Last Wednesday I was approached by a friend and fellow WSAC member about how to set up a new Web site for the project that she is working on. Since neither of us had any idea how long it would take for Technology Services to set up a folder on the school’s server, and the site needed to be up and running within a week, I just bought a domain name and set the site up on an independent server.

When I went to the conference in DC, I had two ideas in mind for my Blueprints. The first was a river-bank clean-up. The Green Team at my former uni has one every semester; they're tons of fun and it's always exciting to see what people can find. Plus you're allowed to keep whatever you find, and there's a contest for the most interesting garbage. The first semester I participated, I found a roll of film and got it developed. I've also excavated a submerged couch, carried a living room back up a cliff, and rolled a 60-pound semi tire several hundred feet up a steep hill.

Six UMN-TC student groups held a war protest in front of the student union today. At noon, almost two hundred students gathered in the grass and waved posters. A representative from each of the student groups spoke about why their group was involved. And then, they marched: through the campus's main quad, around the auditorium and down major roads until they reached the alumni center. The protesters were flanked by an impressive police escort -- over ten bike-police and two more on horseback, plus a squad car following everything and every intersection blocked off by police controlled by an officer.

Note: If the tense of this entry seems odd, it's because it was written live during the forum. Also, sorry for messing up the views count, it increments whenever I edit.

The Student Forum on Global warming is being held at the University of St Thomas on March 03, 2008. UST president Father Dease introduced MN Governor Tim Pawlenty and UST alumnus and world-renowned arctic explorer Will Steger.

On the wall above Will Steger is a graph of "Global CO2 Concentration over the Last 40,000 Years". When the ppm drops below 200, we hit an ice age. Above 300? Warming. Currently the concentration is 385 parts per million. This increase began at the beginning of the industrial revolution.

I'd like to preface everything by declaring that I am ridiculously inconsistent when it comes to journaling. My schedule is erratic at best and nonexistent at worst. Also, when I haven't written in a while I tend to ramble, but I promise there's a point buried somewhere. So, in the case that this "blog" isn't touched for several weeks after this entry, it doesn't mean that I'm not doing anything. Far from it, I find myself more regularly (ha!) active than ever before.