The Often Misleading State of Electronic Waste Recycling

PBS Frontline featured a disturbing piece recently concerning the processing of electronic waste. With an undercover investigation, Frontline revealed how Americans and Europeans are assured they are "recycling" electronic waste safely and locally. Instead it is all loaded onto containers that are shipped to Ghana or the southern Chinese city of Guiyu where people work in extremely dangerous conditions burning plastics, and poisoning themselves with heavy metals to extract trace amounts of precious metals. The waste is transported under the guise of "donations." While Africa particularly needs electronics if they have any hope of ever developing, Westerners should be made aware of the environmental and human dangers of e-waste "recycling," and law enforcement agencies ought to investigate fraud and environmental destruction in this regard. Hearing that one is "recycling" tends to eliminate a feeling of guilt for many Westerners, but the reality in this case is far from that.

The Wire

Available on any major torrent tracker, the HBO's 5-season television series The Wire is one of the best shows ever made. The Wire focuses on organized crime, drug abuse, poverty, social services, law enforcement, and politics in the city of Baltimore, Maryland. The Baltimore inner city, like so many inner cities in America, has gone from a once developing industrialised center to a third world backwards wasteland of despair and violence. The fuel for this downward spiral is not surprisingly the war on drugs and its selective or sporadic enforcement and large profit potentials for dealers and suppliers. In contrast to "the game" of drug dealing and related crime, there exist precious few realistically attainable economic alternatives than a life of crime and violence for those born into it. The series addresses all of these issues directly, deeply, and poignantly. The show proves its social value by making it clear that the most effective way to address the disastrous economic situation of the inner-city is to decriminalise all forms of drug sale and use whilst allowing a protected environment for various charitable and social services to administer care to those in need unhindered. Besides its value for the exploration of American inner city life, corruption, and social ills, The Wire entertains and captivates with well-developed, interesting characters at all levels of position and power. Watch consecutively and in order.

9.7 IMDB rating.

The creators of the Wire have a new mini-series, Generation Kill, on HBO.

Impeach Bush, Impeach Cheney

I am watching live Dennis Kucinich calling for the Impeachment of the President and Vice President on the floor of the House. Rep. Kucinich is one of only a small handful of honest politicians in Washington. You can look for this speech on cspan.org or youtube. This post by Brad DeLong outlines some of the impeachable offenses:

David Kurtz writes:

Talking Points Memo | Phase II: Here are the key points from the reports, according to a press release from Sen. Jay Rockefeller's office:

• Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa'ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa'ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.
• Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.
• Statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of the political, security, and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.
• Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq's chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community's uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.
• The Secretary of Defense's statement that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground and deeply buried was not substantiated by available intelligence information.
• The Intelligence Community did not confirm that Muhammad Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 as the Vice President repeatedly claimed.

These gross violations by Richard Cheney and George W. Bush to take care that the laws be faithfully executed are High Crimes, demanding immediate impeachment and removal from office.

Death in Iraq

The 20th Century saw unprecedented violence, crimes of war, and deliberate genocide on a scale never before seen. Thanks to George Bush and all those who supported his invasion of Iraq, it seems the 21st Century is starting out in the same tradition. Last year the Lancet published this article from researchers at the John's Hopkins School of Public Health with the following findings:

...data from 1849 households that contained 12 801 individuals in 47 clusters was gathered. 1474 births and 629 deaths were reported during the observation period. Pre-invasion mortality rates were 5·5 per 1000 people per year (95% CI 4·3–7·1), compared with 13·3 per 1000 people per year (10·9–16·1) in the 40 months post-invasion. We estimate that as of July, 2006, there have been 654 965 (392 979–942 636) excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war, which corresponds to 2·5% of the population in the study area. Of post-invasion deaths, 601 027 (426 369–793 663) were due to violence, the most common cause being gunfire.

Forgetting that many American soldiers jingoistically volunteered to fight in Iraq, American propaganda outlets regularly report on the number of US soldiers that have been killed in the invasion of Iraq while rarely reporting on cumulative death tolls among Iraqi civilians. Meanwhile, the United States accepts less than 100 (figure awaiting confirmation) Iraqi or Afghan refugees every year. The mass genocide and crimes against humanity that have been caused directly or indirectly by the US Government with popular support need to be acknowledged, taught, and remembered alongside the numerous atrocities of the previous century. The politicians complicit in an immoral, illegal, and unjustified invasion including Senators and members of Congress should be tried before an International War Crimes body. The removal of a single tyrranical ruler and his imaginary war machine could have occurred with a single bullet or missile. The neoconservative experiment to impose a peaceful democratic system of government on an unwilling people by force and at great expense in money and lives has failed utterly as any informed and thinking person could have predicted. Never again.

N-tuplets

Humanity has long been plagued with the very difficult task of bearing and birthing children. It is one of the most dangerous periods of life for both mother and child. Complications from this ordeal more often than not resulted in mortality. Today, modern medical science has drastically reduced the probability of death from such complications and has even given fertility hope to many couples who would have been doomed by their own biology never to produce viable offspring. Unfortunately, the innate drive to reproduce has caused many couples to push their own biology to the limit of medical science in trying to produce offspring. Once impregnated through a cocktail of drugs, hormones and possibly invasive procedures sometimes involving third parties as donors or hosts, couples will then decide to try to simultaneously bring multiple babies to term even as many as 7 at a time. If this is not a crime against those children and a crime against nature then I do not know what is. The children tend to be born prematurely and are at extreme risk through their entire development process. The most bizarre part is that these couples will not terminate some of the pregnancies for the good of the rest because of their religious hang-ups. I can appreciate an anti-abortionist position, but for a woman to undergo such unnatural and dangerous procedures and then claim a profound respect for the dignity of human life is well beyond my comprehension.

When technology is sufficiently advanced, one can more seriously consider a Brave New World in which children are grown by the hundreds in artificial wombs. In such a scenario, there would presumably be little danger to the child's safety or development. A person could then spawn as many genetically similar children as they had desire and means to support.

Here on early 21st Century Earth, upright, large brained humans cannot reproduce in litters. Reproductive technologies are very fresh and need not be used lightly to satisfy some perverted fantasy or primitive impulse. There are literally millions of unwanted or orphaned children around the world. Infertile parents should consider adoption. I propose that carrying greater than 3 unnaturally conceived children simultaneously to term should be criminally prosecuted or prohibitively taxed. Society might also consider removing the children from those households since clearly such parents are unfit.

Quantifiable Advantages of a Large City

An article in Scientific American pointed me to an interesting article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. From SciAm:

"This is a fascinating paper that quantitatively explores the complex interactions between urbanization, sustainability and social innovation...Insights, such as those presented in this paper, will help guide our collective choices as the pace of socioecological change accelerates."

-Thomas Parris

Holding Government to Account

Very often, there is a vacuum of accountability at the upper echelons of Political and Fiscal power. This WSJ Opinion piece correctly argues for the SEC to hold San Diego city council members criminally responsible for their actions in defrauding and underfunding the city pension fund. Government fiscal irresponsibility should be considered tantamount to corporate accounting fraud.