Playing Catch Up - Mega Post!
I meant to blog, but it just isn't happening...
Here are some of the links I've found interesting in the past few weeks:
CIA to Reveal Decades of Misdeeds [Source: BBC World News]
The BBC writes:
The US Central Intelligence Agency is to declassify hundreds of documents detailing some of the agency's worst illegal abuses from the 1950s to 1970s.
The papers, to be released next week, will detail assassination plots, domestic spying and wiretapping, kidnapping and human experiments.
Many of the incidents are already known, but the documents are expected to give more comprehensive accounts.
To savvy readers, this should be nothing new. I am waiting for this to be made available through FOIA. Check out what will be included:
Among the incidents that were said to "present legal questions" were:
* the confinement of a Soviet defector in the mid-1960s
* assassination plots of foreign leaders, including Cuba's Fidel Castro
* wiretapping and surveillance of journalists
* behaviour modification experiments on "unwitting" US citizens
* surveillance of dissident groups between 1967 and 1971
* opening from 1953 to 1973 of letters to and from the Soviet Union; from 1969 to 1972 of mail to and from China
So there we have it - the government admits wrongdoing. What never ceases to amaze me is exactly how many Americans still refuse to believe documented truth.
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Australian Pub Bars Heterosexuals [Source: BBC World News]
A gay pub in the city of Melbourne has won the right to ban heterosexuals - the first time such a decision has been made in Australia.
[...]
The pub's management said the move would stop groups of heterosexual men and women abusing gay people.
Civil liberties groups have supported the decision.
Now, this seems like a very strange approach for a club to take. Banning heterosexuals outright? How do you propose to identify a hetero? Do we walk around with ID cards? Does this mean I can't party with my gay friends down under?
However, the reason for this ruling becomes glaringly apparent a little further down in the article:
The tribunal's president said groups of straight women found homosexual men entertaining but that such attention was dehumanising, the BBC's Phil Mercer in Sydney says.
Managers complained raucous hen nights and stag parties created a poisonous atmosphere for its gay clientele, our correspondent says.
"If I can limit the number of heterosexuals entering the Peel, then that helps me keep the safe balance," the hotel's manager, Tom McFeely, told Australian radio, according to the Reuters news agency.
He said while Melbourne had 2,000 venues catering for heterosexuals, his was the only bar aimed exclusively at gay men.
Only one gay bar in all of Melbourne? Daaaamn. There is more to gay life than clubbing, but it must be rough to be same gender loving in Australia.
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Message In a Bottle [Source: Fast Company]
This article should be subtitled "the dark side of bottled water" because it completely changed how I think about the water I drink. Ironically, as I was reading this article about the costs of bottled water I happened to look at my desk. No less than three different brands of bottled water [Aqua Panna, Eternal, Whole Foods] were sitting on my desk.
Some highlights from the article:
Bottled water has become the indispensable prop in our lives and our culture. It starts the day in lunch boxes; it goes to every meeting, lecture hall, and soccer match; it's in our cubicles at work; in the cup holder of the treadmill at the gym; and it's rattling around half-finished on the floor of every minivan in America. Fiji Water shows up on the ABC show Brothers & Sisters; Poland Spring cameos routinely on NBC's The Office. Every hotel room offers bottled water for sale, alongside the increasingly ignored ice bucket and drinking glasses. At Whole Foods (NASDAQ:WFMI), the upscale emporium of the organic and exotic, bottled water is the number-one item by units sold.
Thirty years ago, bottled water barely existed as a business in the United States. Last year, we spent more on Poland Spring, Fiji Water, Evian, Aquafina, and Dasani than we spent on iPods or movie tickets--$15 billion. It will be $16 billion this year.
[...]
Bottled water is often simply an indulgence, and despite the stories we tell ourselves, it is not a benign indulgence. We're moving 1 billion bottles of water around a week in ships, trains, and trucks in the United States alone. That's a weekly convoy equivalent to 37,800 18-wheelers delivering water. (Water weighs 81/3 pounds a gallon. It's so heavy you can't fill an 18-wheeler with bottled water--you have to leave empty space.)
Meanwhile, one out of six people in the world has no dependable, safe drinking water. The global economy has contrived to deny the most fundamental element of life to 1 billion people, while delivering to us an array of water "varieties" from around the globe, not one of which we actually need. That tension is only complicated by the fact that if we suddenly decided not to purchase the lake of Poland Spring water in Hollis, Maine, none of that water would find its way to people who really are thirsty.
Read the whole article - it is completely worth it.
As for me, I don't think I'll stop buying bottled water, but I will cut down on my intake. (I agree that most places in the US have clean water...so why do I work in an old government building that has "DO NOT DRINK" signs above all facets, spigots, and out of commission water fountains? Weird...)
Labels: australia, bbc, bottled water, CIA, fast company, homosexual
posted by Latoya Peterson at 7:00 PM
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