Here’s how Wall Street wants you to celebrate the holidays: spend, spend, spend. They want you to rush out and shop until your credit cards are smokin’ hot. They want the affection you feel for your loved ones to translate into stuff — more sweaters, more iGadgets, more games and toys. They want your money to trickle up, not only through your purchases, but also through the credit card interest you’ll be paying until the next holiday season. Who cares if you protest as long as you buy more shit?

Personhood USA, the Colorado Springs-based Christian group that wants to see fertilized eggs given personhood and full constitutional rights, was behind the experiment. Having twice failed by overwhelming margins to win voter approval for a “personhood” amendment in Colorado, the group set its sights on more fertile territory — Mississippi.

You’re sitting in a coffee shop. You notice that the adult sitting next to you is logged on to one of those torrent sites and is illegally downloading music, movies, books and games. Knowing that this person is breaking the law — and determined to teach him right from wrong — you get up, pull off your belt, and proceed to beat this person for the next six minutes, shouting and berating him for this blatant act of stealing.

The trouble with finding new sources of renewable energy is that the people who currently profit off our energy use want to continue profiting forever and ever. Our need as a human family to find new ways of staying warm, cooking our meals and making things go vroom is immaterial to people who will cease to be rich the moment we stop buying fossil fuels.

Law enforcement wants to put it down with mesh nets, pepper spray and nightsticks. Conservative news pundits want to minimize it by feeding sound bites designed to denigrate both the protesters and their cause to brain-dead audiences who’ve long since lost the capacity for independent thought. Corporate greedheads want to ignore it and distance themselves from it, as if it sprang from the minds of people who are off their meds and not from concrete recent events that exposed Wall Street as a den of well-dressed thieves.

Boulder County Parks and Open Space has decided to enforce dog rules up at Walker Ranch, issuing a “directed patrol” for the Meyers Homestead Trail. This means rangers will be patrolling the trail at all times of the day and will be issuing tickets on sight to people who let their dogs run off-leash.

If you haven’t watched the BBC series The Edwardian Farm, I highly recommend it. A series that ended this past January, the program features historian Ruth Goodman and archaeologists Alex Langlands and Peter Ginn, who attempt to show what daily life was like during the Edwardian period on a farm at Morwellham Quay, a historic quay in Devon in southwest England.

Colorado Court of Appeals has ruled that elected officials can vote by secret ballot on controversial issues, even during public meetings.

Some Colorado hospitals may not be up to the task of treating rape victims. That’s one possible conclusion after the recent release of the arrest affidavit in the rape case against Denver Bronco cornerback Perrish Cox.

I spent an afternoon some time ago with a master composter who, while helping me improve my composting game, offered this summation of our consumer-based economic system: “It’s all about making more people to sell more shit to.” He was making an argument for an economic system based not on consumption, but on self-sustainability.