Two days ago I finally sent in my powerbook to get repaired, because the optical drive is completely broken. It's putting a damper on a lot of things to not have my computer. But in the past Apple has always been good about pretty quickly getting repairs done fast. And it's as easy as it can be - they send a box next day air via DHL, you put it in the box, call DHL for a pickup, it gets to them next day, they usually fix it in a day, and they send it back next day. So it's like 4 days usually.

Well, for some inexplicable reason DHL is taking 3 business days instead of 1 to get it to Apple. Plus there's a weekend in between. basically it was supposed to get to Apple yesterday and it won't get there till monday now. And DHL can't explain why. They just can't. It's just sitting at their sorting facility. Fucking bullshit. Apple, maybe you should think about switching to FedEx or UPS.

I recently read 2 very interesting articles about Venezuela by Christian Guerrero which look at the Chavez Bolivarian Revolution from a critical perspective I have not seen before. Christian is an activist Ecuadorian-American who lives here in Tucson and works with the Earth First Journal (which is based here).

One article is called "What's So Revolutionary About Venezuelan Coal?." The other is called "The War of 100 Years."

They're really worth looking at.

They remind me of an Eduardo Galeano essay, one of my favorite things he's written, called "Ser Como Ellos," ("To Be Like Them"), because they bring up a fundamental question in the ongoing global struggle of the rich against the poor, the rich countries against the poor countries: (To put it really simply) In this fight, is it the aim of the conquored simply to become like the conquerors? Or is there another way? A "third path?"