Here’s a buttload of links of things I’ve been perusing this week, and haven’t bee able to actually post about.

First US Official Resigns Over Afghanistan – “Not worth the effort.”

Stephen Fry’s Twitter Spat is News?!? The world is a sad place.

Parliament to Host first Gay Wedding! Yay!

US Terrorizing Aid to Somalia – aaaah the War on Terror

Thank Bolivia for you Lithium Batteries -let’s hope they can manage the industry wisely

Random nature links on Seahorse Sex and Humpback Whale Fights (I attribute these links to a recent bout of insomnia. That’s when I gravitate towards nature videos.)

Children Who Get Life in Prison Without Parole – the sad sad state of the US correctional system.

Camorra Boss Arrested in Naples – for those who don’t know about the situation, read Roberto Saviano’s Gomorra (one of the best books of 2007) and then go see the Cannes Grand Prix winning film made from the book. (trailer)

Karzai’s Opponent drops out and Robert Fisk says what I was thinking (but so so much better than I could)

The Case For Modesty in an Age of Arrogance – if Barack is so humble, shouldn’t he have refused the Nobel Prize?

One Reason You Shouldn’t Go To Afghanistan With Beard – interesting quick read

Alrighty, to finish up the Rant, here’s the video I ran across a few days ago when I started this rant. It’s a documentary called Addicted to Plastic. I was especially interested to see it because the filmmakers actually go through the Pacific Garbage Patch. It’s a pretty good general overview of the plastic situation; history, problems, and people currently looking for solutions either by creatively reusing and reworking plastic products, or by creating new and eco-friendly materials to replace our current plastics.

Here’s the trailer:

It would have been nice to see the filmmakers press the people who make plastics a bit more – like the plastics industry rep they feature throughout the film – but on the whole, I think they were trying to be positive and spend more time on the people trying to find solutions.

And the solutions out there are truly amazing. What is sad is that there are so many really ingenious people coming up with creative, intelligent solutions and I’m sure they could use more government financing to get their projects going, but they seem to have to be doing it all on their own. It’s a shame, we should be supporting this innovation more.

Elsewhere on the subjects of the production process, disposability and waste, here’s two good vids I’ve posted before but it can’t hurt to do it again:

The Story of Stuff – amazing concise explanation of the problems with how we make things, socially, economically, ecologically and ethically.

And Waste = Food, about the phenomenal work of a chemist and an architect working together to create “cradle-to-cradle” systems of production which create no waste at all.

OK – so this Rant of The Week started last week, but I got side-tracked with Halloween this weekend and haven’t had blogging time.

So, in Rant part 1 about plastic I linked to an article, which at some point mentions the chemical bisphenol A. Shortly after reading that article, as I was browsing through the archives of Bill Moyers’ show, Journal, like a good PBS junkie, I came across this episode, produced in conjunction with Expose, on the chemicals in our food, and specifically bisphenol A.

What’s really interesting about this is not so much the scientific research showing that bisphenol A can be harmful in many lab animals (which is attention-grabbing enough to get me to stop buying plastic water bottles forever) but the institutional failures of the government administrations charged with protecting the consumer and regulating what can and cannot be used to produce and package food.

Also a great look at some crack investigative journalism by the team at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal. It shows why we still need newspapers with investigative teams, “new media” are not going to fill the need to have people working full time on long term projects.

article from bestlife magazine

A while ago I came across this article in a stack of materials a friend had left me to use for my advanced English classes. From Best Life magazine, it discusses plastic; it’s composition, it’s resistance to recycling, and especially, it’s accumulation in the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch – a swath of the Pacific ocean, twice the size of Texas – TWICE THE SIZE OF TEXAS – that has turned into a floating soup of garbage – mainly plastics, that is just swirling in a giant gyre.

After reading it, I couldn’t look at plastic in the same way. I started to notice every bit of excessive packaging (which has always annoyed me) and decided to try to cut out plastic as much as is possible.

I challenge you to do the same. Even just for a few days. No plastic. (Or as little as possible).

So what did that mean? Well, I wouldn’t get any plastic carrier bags at the store. I’d either use my backpack or take one that we already had at home. This was sometimes annoying if I wanted to make an impromptu shopping trip and did not have the bag on me. I had to learn to plan ahead, or carry a bunch of things precariously balanced in my arms.

Once in the store, the no plastics challenge changed what I bought. I only bought the eggs in the carton package, for example. And, well, that was almost the only thing I could buy in the typical grocery store that did not come with some form of plastic. (Ok, well, maybe garbanzo beans in a jar, but I can’t live on beans alone, my flatmates might rebel).

I also had a battle against those little bitty plastic bags supermarkets make you put your fruits and veggies in. I tried consolidating, and not putting big single items in bags at all. Sometimes it worked, sometimes the checkout ladies looked at me like I was a nut because I’d put the pricing sticker directly on my single mango. I pretended not to notice.

All of this meant I had to try to do a lot of my shopping elsewhere – mainly the big, beautiful, and yes, more expensive market down the street. They would wrap my fruit and veg in brown paper, and my cheese and meats in wax paper, and I would bring my own bag. I sacrificed quantity for quality as it was pricier so I had to buy less (and in a world of increasing obesity, is that really a downside?). And of course bread fresh from my local bakery came in paper, unlike the sliced stuff from the supermarket.

But there are still things that, try as I might, can not be found without plastic. Rice might come in paper bags sometimes, but pasta never does. And though I used to buy Granini juices only because they were the only ones on the market here that came in glass (which meant I drank less cuz it was expensive, but hey, less sugar right?) I was dismayed to find out over the summer that they’ve switched to plastic. Sigh. I drink more water now (from the tap and stored in my metal drinking bottle – which means it never has that nasty plastic taste).

And of course the things that absolutely, one hundred percent do not come in anything but plastic? Bath and beauty products (except for my tins of Nivea) and cleaning products are obvious, as well as any sort of office supplies and electronics parts which must come in impossible to open thick shrink wrapped layers of pure evil which only exist to accommodate the thin layer of marketing copy laminated between them.

My experiment in total plasticlessness was not long-lived (though some of the habits have stuck, like carrying my carrier bags with me most of the time, and trying to go to the market more often than the supermarket, and I’ve just automatically become more aware of what choices I can recycle and which I can’t). But more and more, I feel like plastic is a huuuuge problem, I feel like some weird paranoid, cuz now I notice it everywhere, and its increasingly noticeable presence is becoming increasingly irritating.

If I thought I was going to be in Spain long-term, I think I’d go out and start a big packaging-reduction campaign. It’ll have to wait til D.C. I guess.

Well that’s it for today. I guess I’ll just go hug a tree and go to bed now.

(via CrooksandLiars.com)

Dissent gets interesting!

From the Washington Post:

But last month, in a move that has sent ripples all the way to the White House, [former Marina Corps Captain Matthew]Hoh, 36, became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency.

“I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan,” he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter to the department’s head of personnel. “I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end.”

The reaction to Hoh’s letter was immediate. Senior U.S. officials, concerned that they would lose an outstanding officer and perhaps gain a prominent critic, appealed to him to stay….

…”I’m not some peacenik, pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in love,” Hoh said. Although he said his time in Zabul was the “second-best job I’ve ever had,” his dominant experience is from the Marines, where many of his closest friends still serve.

“There are plenty of dudes who need to be killed,” he said of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. “I was never more happy than when our Iraq team whacked a bunch of guys.”

But many Afghans, he wrote in his resignation letter, are fighting the United States largely because its troops are there — a growing military presence in villages and valleys where outsiders, including other Afghans, are not welcome and where the corrupt, U.S.-backed national government is rejected. While the Taliban is a malign presence, and Pakistan-based al-Qaeda needs to be confronted, he said, the United States is asking its troops to die in Afghanistan for what is essentially a far-off civil war.

When the guy who talks about how much he loves “whacking” “dudes” says we’re out of line, let’s hope people start listening.

Just for anyone who hasn’t seen it, this is Franken, tellin’ it like it is, about health care bankruptcies. I was well impressed with his supposedly funny book “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them” which was actually a hard hitting look at right wing pundits cleverly disguised as humor. So I had high hopes for him when I heard he was getting into politics, and so far, I am impressed.

Now that I know I’m going to leave, this is something that’s on my mind a lot. I’m going to make this post, and the “Things I Won’t Miss” post sort of rolling posts, I’ll repost them every time I update them with something new that’s popped into my head.

1. My neighborhood.

La Latina. It’s fabulous. For the last two years I sometimes feel like I’m living in a cheesy movie about living in Europe. During the day, I stand on my balcony and look out over the square and the people sitting at the sidewalk cafes, and the beautiful murals on the sides of buildings, and I listen to the street musicians serenade me (ok, some of them I hate, but in general its nice), and I pop down to the bakery that’s right next door, or to the stationary store or the video store or the incredible Mercado de la Cebada where they now know me, and I think, I’m never going to get this in the states, so I’d better enjoy it now.

And at night, it can be absurd, certainly not to just anyone’s tastes. It’s loud. I mean loud. So many people are out in the streets going from bar to bar (I’ve been here 2 years and haven’t been to half of them – though that’s mainly due to being too poor) that when you open the balcony doors in our living room on a summer night, the noise is deafening. I sometimes have to close them if I want to talk on the phone in here. And I can’t count the number of nights I have fallen asleep to the sounds of people in the plaza drunkenly playing, singing, clapping flamenco after the bars have closed. Seriously. It feels like a cheesy movie but that’s how it is.

My everyday view from the balcony of San Andres and Plaza Carros

View towards Cebada

Basilica San Francisco just down the street

Plaza Carros on a typical sunny Sunday

Mural on building near mine

Festive Plaza Puerta Cerrada with murals

Via onegoodmove.org, I ran across this blog post by Roger Ebert, who is apparently quite the award-winning blogger. I did not know. It’s all about his books; his many many, piled up to the ceiling, falling over one another, can’t possibly throw them away, treasures. I sense a kindred spirit. Says Ebert:

I cannot throw out these books. Some are protected because I have personally turned all their pages and read every word; they’re like little shrines to my past hours. Perhaps half were new when they came to my life, but most are used, and I remember where I found every one. The set of Kipling at the Book Nook on Green Street in Champaign. The scandalous The English Governess in a shady book store on the Left Bank in 1965 (Obilisk Press, $2, today $91). The Shaw plays from Cranford’s on Long Street in Cape Town, where Irving Freeman claimed he had a million books; it may not have been a figure of speech. Like an alcoholic trying to walk past a bar, you should see me trying to walk past a used book store.

I have always inspired hatred in those who helped me to move house because of the ridiculous number of books I have. Below is the current state of things, which for me, is drastically pared down, since I have changed flats about 8 times in the past 6 years,(and came to Spain with, I believe, 2 books) and I do sell a significant amount of my books back to the book shop – probably about 3 or 4 for every 1 I’ve kept over the years.

The overflow on my night table.

I totally know what Ebert is talking about. A lot of these books are stories in themselves for me. My dog-eared edition of Moby Dick, given me by a friend I haven’t seen in ages and which carried me through a dark time last year (I know, it doesn’t make sense that Moby Dick would do that, but I’m weird that way). I have a cute little volume of poetry that I stole from my high school library (me and my high school had a love hate relationship, so I felt fine about the theft at the time). Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is even more beautiful somehow now that it’s pages are all warped and stained because one year, when we were on vacation, the water tank burst, and I happened to have left it in the bathroom. (Yes, as toilet reading.) My dad’s copy of Beryl Markham’s West With the Night brings me a little bit of home and reminds me of him reading the stories to me as a child.

One of the thoughts currently panicking me is how I’m going to move all this when I go home to the States. I have 6 years of accumulated muck. Part of me wants to be all zen about it and toss away all my unnecessary possessions, so that I may feel some transcendent sense of lightness. But, on the other hand, They’re My BOOOKS!!! My babies!! Arrrrrgh. My brow furrows with worry.

Then there is another school of thought, which says that those of us with all these ridiculous tomes merely suffer from some egotistical obsession about asserting our personality through a wall of intellectual impressiveness. Quoth Seneca (my dude, btw, I recommend you all get to know him):

What is the point of having books and libraries beyond number if their owner can barely read through their titles in his lifetime? Such a vast collection does not instruct the learner but puts a burden on his back, and it is much better to give yourself up to a few authors than to wander through many.

He may go a little far in calling the lost library of Alexandria an example of “scholarly extravagance” but he is ever an advocate of moderation, summing it up with “you should procure as many books as are sufficient, but none merely for show.”

Ok, I can live with that, it leaves room for flexibility, my “sufficient” may be another person’s “absurd.”

…you can always count on me for suggestions. I have too much to read!

Latest link list I want to get through is Project Censored’s list of the 25 most censored news stories of the past year.  You can buy it in book form here. I actually came across it in a little anarchist-y newspaper here in Madrid called Diagonal. I have checked it out in previous years, and its always good for some eye-opening.

And here they are:

• 1. US Congress Sells Out to Wall Street
• 2. US Schools are More Segregated Today than in the 1950s
• 3. Toxic Waste Behind Somali Pirates
• 4. Nuclear Waste Pools in North Carolina
• 5. Europe Blocks US Toxic Products
• 6. Lobbyists Buy Congress
• 7. Obama’s Military Appointments Have Corrupt Past
• 8. Bailed out Banks and America’s Wealthiest Cheat IRS Out of Billions
• 9. US Arms Used for War Crimes in Gaza
• 10. Ecuador Declares Foreign Debt Illegitimate
• 11. Private Corporations Profit from the Occupation of Palestine
• 12. Mysterious Death of Mike Connell—Karl Rove’s Election Thief
• 13. Katrina’s Hidden Race War
• 14. Congress Invested in Defense Contracts
• 15. World Bank’s Carbon Trade Fiasco
• 16. US Repression of Haiti Continues
• 17. The ICC Facilitates US Covert War in Sudan
• 18. Ecuador’s Constitutional Rights of Nature
• 19. Bank Bailout Recipients Spent to Defeat Labor
• 20. Secret Control of the Presidential Debates
• 21. Recession Causes States to Cut Welfare
• 22. Obama’s Trilateral Commission Team
• 23. Activists Slam World Water Forum as a Corporate-Driven Fraud
• 24. Dollar Glut Finances US Military Expansion
• 25. Fast Track Oil Exploitation in Western Amazon

In case there’s anyone out there, here’s the nutshell explanation why nothing has appeared on this blog in aaaages.

I ended up in the hospital for gall stones. Got out of the habit of blogging what with the hospital stays, visiting mom,  preoccupations with losing work hours and lots of money, and then just decided to forget the blog for a while. I just didn’t want to think about it. It felt like this big guilt trip “I should be blogging this, I should be blogging this”. Bleh.  Had to sort out what was going to come next in life, since my papers had recently been denied, all my money was gone and I was not looking forward to teaching English (which I am doing once again).

So that’s that. Gonna try to ease back into this. Just posting whatever I come across, and talking about my plans – which are almost certainly to leave Spain in the fairly near future.

In the mean time, I want to encourage anyone who wants to to find me on facebook, where I tend to post a lot more links than I ever managed to put up here. Just include a message as to how you came to find me (ie- via the blog) so i know what list to add you to!

Thanks!