Purifying Water With Plastic Bottles and Table Salt–Low Tech Solutions to Weighty Water Treatment Problems

by Pure Water Annie

 

When a city water plant sets about to make water potable–safe to drink–the first step is always to get rid of “turbidity,” or cloudiness.  This is often done by adding alum, to cause small particles to clump together, then filtering the water slowly through sand or another suitable particle-removal medium.

Clarifying the water is a necessary first step because particles in the water become hiding places for bacteria, and whether the purifying agent is a chemical (like chlorine or chloramine) or ultraviolet light, anything that offers a hiding place for microbes is undesirable.

It is fairly easy  to purify clear water. The solar water disinfection method, called SODIS, calls for leaving a transparent plastic bottle of clear water out in the sun for six hours. That allows heat and ultraviolet radiation to wipe out most pathogens that cause diarrhea.  Diarrhea kills 4,000 children a day in Africa.

The SODIS method, however, does not work if the water isn’t clear.   The microorganisms hide under the dirt or clay in the water and avoid the UV rays from the sunlight.

According to Science News, researchers at Queen’s University in Ontario have discovered a simple, easy, and inexpensive way to clarify muddy water.  Rather than alum, the chemical used by water suppliers, the simple method devised by the university researchers uses sodium chloride,  plain table salt.

The salt promotes flocculation,  causing the particles to clump together and settle out of the water.

“Salt is inexpensive and available almost everywhere. And it doesn’t take very much to make muddy water clear again.”

Although adding salt to the water isn’t ideal because the salt itself may influence its taste, the water, one researcher said, “has a lower sodium concentration than Gatorade.”

This would still be “too much salt to pass muster as American tap water, but American tap water is not the alternative.”

If the choice is diarrhea or slightly salty water, the choice is easy.

More information on this subject can be found in Science Daily.

Using Water from Wells Leads to Sea Level Rise

Science Daily reports that as people pump groundwater for irrigation, drinking water, and industrial uses, the water doesn’t just seep back into the ground — it also evaporates into the atmosphere, or runs off into rivers and canals, eventually emptying into the world’s oceans. This water adds up, and a new study calculates that by 2050, groundwater pumping will cause a global sea level rise of about 0.8 millimeters per year.

“Other than ice on land, the excessive groundwater extractions are fast becoming the most important terrestrial water contribution to sea level rise,” said Yoshihide Wada, with Utrecht University in the Netherlands and lead author of the study. In the coming decades, he noted, groundwater contributions to sea level rise are expected to become as significant as those of melting glaciers and ice caps outside of Greenland and the Antarctic.

 

Read the rest of the story.

Coal Sucks Water

If you’ve wondered why environmentalist are so opposed to coal as an energy source, this excellent short article should give you a hint. –Hardly Waite.

The United States produces 1 billion tons of coal a year, most of it burned in the nation’s 600 coal-fired utilities. In the competition between energy and water, coal is in a league by itself. Roughly half of the 410 billion gallons of water withdrawn every day from the nation’s rivers, lakes, and aquifers is used to mine coal, and cool electric power generating stations, most of which burn coal.

The Department of Energy forecasts that energy demand in the U.S. will grow 40 percent in the next four decades, and much of that growth will occur in the fast-growing southwest, Rocky Mountain region, and southeast, where climate change is reducing rainfall and snowmelt. Where coal falls in the nation’s energy picture will be decided, in large part, by the industry’s access to fresh water.

Coal, though, also is the largest source of climate-changing emissions of any industrial sector, as well as a significant source of water pollution. Evidence of the unholy water and coal alliance is visible along Virginia’s Clinch River and one of its tributaries, Dumps Creek. In the last half-century, three toxic spills have contaminated the Clinch. But it’s not unusual for state regulatory agencies to turn a blind eye when coal companies violate the Clean Water Act. In 2009, a New York Times investigation found that state agencies nationwide have taken action against fewer than three percent of Clean Water Act violators.

The excerpt above is from the excellent “Circle of Blue” website—a treasure of information about world water issues. To read more.

‘Brutality Smeared in Peanut Butter’ : Why America Must Stop the War Now

by Arundhati Roy

So now we know. Pigs are horses. Girls are boys. War is peace.

As darkness deepened over Afghanistan on Sunday October 7, 2001,  the US government, backed by the International Coalition Against Terror (the new, amenable surrogate for the United Nations), launched air strikes against Afghanistan. TV channels lingered on computer-animated images of cruise missiles, stealth bombers, tomahawks, “bunker-busting” missiles and Mark 82 high drag bombs. All over the world, little boys watched goggle-eyed and stopped clamoring for new video games.

The UN, reduced now to an ineffective acronym, wasn’t even asked to mandate the air strikes. (As Madeleine Albright once said, “We will behave multilaterally when we can, and unilaterally when we must.”) The “evidence” against the terrorists was shared amongst friends in the “coalition”.

After conferring, they announced that it didn’t matter whether or not the “evidence” would stand up in a court of law. Thus, in an instant, were centuries of jurisprudence carelessly trashed.

Nothing can excuse or justify an act of terrorism, whether it is committed by religious fundamentalists, private militia, people’s resistance movements – or whether it’s dressed up as a war of retribution by a recognized government. The bombing of Afghanistan is not revenge for New York and Washington. It is yet another act of terror against the people of the world.

Each innocent person that is killed must be added to, not set off against, the grisly toll of civilians who died in New York and Washington.

People rarely win wars, governments rarely lose them. People get killed.
Governments molt and regroup, hydra-headed. They use flags first to shrink-wrap people’s minds and smother thought, and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury their willing dead. On both sides, in Afghanistan as well as America, civilians are now hostage to the actions of their own governments.

Unknowingly, ordinary people in both countries share a common bond – they have to live with the phenomenon of blind, unpredictable terror. Each batch of bombs that is dropped on Afghanistan is matched by a corresponding escalation of mass hysteria in America about anthrax, more hijackings and other terrorist acts.

There is no easy way out of the spiraling morass of terror and brutality that confronts the world today. It is time now for the human race to hold still, to delve into its wells of collective wisdom, both ancient and modern. What happened on September 11 changed the world forever.

Freedom, progress, wealth, technology, war – these words have taken on new meaning.

Governments have to acknowledge this transformation, and approach their new tasks with a modicum of honesty and humility. Unfortunately, up to now, there has been no sign of any introspection from the leaders of the International Coalition. Or the Taliban.

When he announced the air strikes, President George Bush said: “We’re a peaceful nation.” America’s favorite ambassador, Tony Blair, (who also holds the portfolio of prime minister of the UK), echoed him: “We’re a peaceful people.”

So now we know. Pigs are horses. Girls are boys. War is peace.

Speaking at the FBI headquarters a few days later, President Bush said: “This is our calling. This is the calling of the United States of America. The most free nation in the world. A nation built on fundamental values that reject hate, reject violence, rejects murderers and rejects evil. We will not tire.”

Here is a list of the countries that America has been at war with – and bombed – since the second world war: China (1945-46, 1950-53), Korea (1950-53), Guatemala (1954, 1967-69), Indonesia (1958), Cuba (1959-60), the Belgian Congo (1964), Peru (1965), Laos (1964-73), Vietnam (1961-73), Cambodia (1969-70), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), El Salvador (1980s), Nicaragua (1980s), Panama (1989), Iraq (1991-99), Bosnia (1995), Sudan (1998), Yugoslavia (1999). And now Afghanistan.

Certainly it does not tire – this, the most free nation in the world.

What freedoms does it uphold? Within its borders, the freedoms of speech, religion, thought; of artistic expression, food habits, sexual preferences (well, to some extent) and many other exemplary, wonderful things.

Outside its borders, the freedom to dominate, humiliate and subjugate , usually in the service of America’s real religion, the “free market”. So when the US government christens a war “Operation Infinite Justice”, or “Operation Enduring Freedom”, we in the third world feel more than a tremor of fear.

Because we know that Infinite Justice for some means Infinite Injustice for others. And Enduring Freedom for some means Enduring Subjugation for others.

The International Coalition Against Terror is a largely cabal of the richest countries in the world. Between them, they manufacture and sell almost all of the world’s weapons, they possess the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction – chemical, biological and nuclear. They have fought the most wars, account for most of the genocide, subjection, ethnic cleansing and human rights violations in modern history, and have sponsored, armed and financed untold numbers of dictators and despots. Between them, they have worshipped, almost deified, the cult of violence and war. For all its appalling sins, the Taliban just isn’t in the same league.

The Taliban was compounded in the crumbling crucible of rubble, heroin and landmines in the backwash of the cold war. Its oldest leaders are in their early 40s. Many of them are disfigured and handicapped, missing an eye, an arm or a leg. They grew up in a society scarred and devastated by war.

Between the Soviet Union and America, over 20 years, about $45bn, 30bn) worth of arms and ammunition was poured into Afghanistan. The latest weaponry was the only shard of modernity to intrude upon a thoroughly medieval society.

Young boys,  many of them orphans – who grew up in those times, had guns for toys, never knew the security and comfort of family life, never experienced the company of women. Now, as adults and rulers, the Taliban beat, stone, rape and brutalize women, they don’t seem to know what else to do with them.

Years of war has stripped them of gentleness, inured them to kindness and human compassion. Now they’ve turned their monstrosity on their own people.

They dance to the percussive rhythms of bombs raining down around them.

With all due respect to President Bush, the people of the world do not have to choose between the Taliban and the US government. All the beauty of human civilization – our art, our music, our literature – lies beyond these two fundamentalist, ideological poles. There is as little chance that the people of the world can all become middle-class consumers as there is that they will all embrace any one particular religion. The issue is not about good v evil or Islam v Christianity as much as it is about space. About how to accommodate diversity, how to contain the impulse towards hegemony,  every kind of hegemony, economic, military, linguistic, religious and cultural.

Any ecologist will tell you how dangerous and fragile a monoculture is. A hegemonic world is like having a government without a healthy opposition. It becomes a kind of dictatorship. It’s like putting a plastic bag over the world, and preventing it from breathing. Eventually, it will be torn open.

One and a half million Afghan people lost their lives in the 20 years of conflict that preceded this new war. Afghanistan was reduced to rubble, and now, the rubble is being pounded into finer dust. By the second day of the air strikes, US pilots were returning to their bases without dropping their assigned payload of bombs. As one pilot put it, Afghanistan is “not a target-rich environment”. At a press briefing at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld, the US defense secretary, was asked if America had run out of targets.

“First we’re going to re-hit targets,” he said, “and second, we’re not running out of targets, Afghanistan is …” This was greeted with gales of laughter in the briefing room.

By the third day of the strikes, the US defense department boasted that it had “achieved air supremacy over Afghanistan” (Did they mean that they had destroyed both, or maybe all 16, of Afghanistan’s planes?)

On the ground in Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance – the Taliban’s old enemy, and therefore the international coalition’s newest friend – is making headway in its push to capture Kabul. (For the archives, let it be said that the Northern Alliance’s track record is not very different from the Taliban’s. But for now, because it’s inconvenient, that little detail is being glossed over.) The visible, moderate, “acceptable” leader of the alliance, Ahmed Shah Masud, was killed in a suicide-bomb attack early in September. The rest of the Northern Alliance is a brittle confederation of brutal warlords, ex-communists and unbending clerics. It is a disparate group divided along ethnic lines, some of whom have tasted power in Afghanistan in the past.

Until the US air strikes, the Northern Alliance controlled about 5% of the geographical area of Afghanistan. Now, with the coalition’s help and “air cover”, it is poised to topple the Taliban. Meanwhile, Taliban soldiers, sensing imminent defeat, have begun to defect to the alliance. So the fighting forces are busy switching sides and changing uniforms. But in an enterprise as cynical as this one, it seems to matter hardly at all.

Love is hate, north is south, peace is war.

Among the global powers, there is talk of “putting in a representative government”. Or, on the other hand, of “restoring” the kingdom to Afghanistan’s 89-year old former king Zahir Shah, who has lived in exile in Rome since 1973. That’s the way the game goes – support Saddam Hussein, then “take him out”; finance the mojahedin, then bomb them to smithereens; put in Zahir Shah and see if he’s going to be a good boy. (Is it possible to “put in” a representative government? Can you place an order for democracy – with extra cheese and jalapeno peppers?)

Reports have begun to trickle in about civilian casualties, about cities emptying out as Afghan civilians flock to the borders which have been closed. Main arterial roads have been blown up or sealed off. Those who have experience of working in Afghanistan say that by early November, food convoys will not be able to reach the millions of Afghans (7.5m, according to the UN) who run the very real risk of starving to death during the course of this winter. They say that in the days that are left before winter sets in, there can either be a war, or an attempt to reach food to the hungry. Not both.

As a gesture of humanitarian support, the US government air-dropped 37,000 packets of emergency rations into Afghanistan. It says it plans to drop a total of 500,000 packets. That will still only add up to a single meal for half a million people out of the several million in dire need of food.

Aid workers have condemned it as a cynical, dangerous, public-relations exercise. They say that air-dropping food packets is worse than futile.

First, because the food will never get to those who really need it. More dangerously, those who run out to retrieve the packets risk being blown up by landmines. A tragic alms race.

Nevertheless, the food packets had a photo-op all to themselves. Their contents were listed in major newspapers. They were vegetarian, we’re told, as per Muslim dietary law (!) Each yellow packet, decorated with the American flag, contained: rice, peanut butter, bean salad, strawberry jam, crackers, raisins, flat bread, an apple fruit bar, seasoning, matches, a set of plastic cutlery, a serviette and illustrated user instructions.

After three years of unremitting drought, an air-dropped airline meal in Jalalabad! The level of cultural ineptitude, the failure to understand what months of relentless hunger and grinding poverty really mean, the US government’s attempt to use even this abject misery to boost its self-image, beggars description.

Reverse the scenario for a moment. Imagine if the Taliban government was to bomb New York City, saying all the while that its real target was the US government and its policies. And suppose, during breaks between the bombing, the Taliban dropped a few thousand packets containing nan and kebabs impaled on an Afghan flag. Would the good people of New York ever find it in themselves to forgive the Afghan government? Even if they were hungry, even if they needed the food, even if they ate it, how would they ever forget the insult, the condescension? Rudi Guiliani, Mayor of New York City, returned a gift of $10m from a Saudi prince because it came with a few words of friendly advice about American policy in the Middle East. Is pride a luxury that only the rich are entitled to?

Far from stamping it out, igniting this kind of rage is what creates terrorism. Hate and retribution don’t go back into the box once you’ve let them out. For every “terrorist” or his “supporter” that is killed, hundreds of innocent people are being killed too. And for every hundred innocent people killed, there is a good chance that several future terrorists will be created.

Where will it all lead?

Setting aside the rhetoric for a moment, consider the fact that the world has not yet found an acceptable definition of what “terrorism” is. One country’s terrorist is too often another’s freedom fighter. At the heart of the matter lies the world’s deep-seated ambivalence towards violence.

Once violence is accepted as a legitimate political instrument, then the morality and political acceptability of terrorists (insurgents or freedom fighters) becomes contentious, bumpy terrain. The US government itself has funded, armed and sheltered plenty of rebels and insurgents around the world.

The CIA and Pakistan’s ISI trained and armed the mojahedin who, in the 80s, were seen as terrorists by the government in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Today, Pakistan – America’s ally in this new war – sponsors insurgents who cross the border into Kashmir in India. Pakistan lauds them as “freedom-fighters”, India calls them “terrorists”. India, for its part, denounces countries who sponsor and abet terrorism, but the Indian army has, in the past, trained separatist Tamil rebels asking for a homeland in Sri Lanka – the LTTE, responsible for countless acts of bloody terrorism.

(Just as the CIA abandoned the mujahideen after they had served its purpose, India abruptly turned its back on the LTTE for a host of political reasons. It was an enraged LTTE suicide bomber who assassinated former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1989.)

It is important for governments and politicians to understand that manipulating these huge, raging human feelings for their own narrow purposes may yield instant results, but eventually and inexorably, they have disastrous consequences. Igniting and exploiting religious sentiments for reasons of political expediency is the most dangerous legacy that governments or politicians can bequeath to any people – including their own.

People who live in societies ravaged by religious or communal bigotry know that every religious text – from the Bible to the Bhagwad Gita – can be mined and misinterpreted to justify anything, from nuclear war to genocide to corporate globalization.

This is not to suggest that the terrorists who perpetrated the outrage on September 11 should not be hunted down and brought to book. They must be.

But is war the best way to track them down? Will burning the haystack find you the needle? Or will it escalate the anger and make the world a living hell for all of us?

At the end of the day, how many people can you spy on, how many bank accounts can you freeze, how many conversations can you eavesdrop on, how many emails can you intercept, how many letters can you open, how many phones can you tap? Even before September 11, the CIA had accumulated more information than is humanly possible to process. (Sometimes, too much data can actually hinder intelligence – small wonder the US spy satellites completely missed the preparation that preceded India’s nuclear tests in 1998.)

The sheer scale of the surveillance will become a logistical, ethical and civil rights nightmare. It will drive everybody clean crazy. And freedom – that precious, precious thing – will be the first casualty. It’s already hurt and hemorrhaging dangerously.

Governments across the world are cynically using the prevailing paranoia to promote their own interests. All kinds of unpredictable political forces are being unleashed. In India, for instance, members of the All India People’s Resistance Forum, who were distributing anti-war and anti-US pamphlets in Delhi, have been jailed. Even the printer of the leaflets was arrested.

The right-wing government (while it shelters Hindu extremists groups such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal) has banned the Islamic Students Movement of India and is trying to revive an anti- terrorist Act which had been withdrawn after the Human Rights Commission reported that it had been more abused than used. Millions of Indian citizens are Muslim. Can anything be gained by alienating them?

Every day that the war goes on, raging emotions are being let loose into the world. The international press has little or no independent access to the war zone. In any case, mainstream media, particularly in the US, have more or less rolled over, allowing themselves to be tickled on the stomach with press handouts from military men and government officials. Afghan radio stations have been destroyed by the bombing. The Taliban has always been deeply suspicious of the press. In the propaganda war, there is no accurate estimate of how many people have been killed, or how much destruction has taken place. In the absence of reliable information, wild rumors spread.

Put your ear to the ground in this part of the world, and you can hear the thrumming, the deadly drumbeat of burgeoning anger. Please. Please, stop the war now. Enough people have died. The smart missiles are just not smart enough. They’re blowing up whole warehouses of suppressed fury.

President George Bush recently boasted, “When I take action, I’m not going to fire a $2m missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It’s going to be decisive.” President Bush should know that there are no targets in Afghanistan that will give his missiles their money’s worth.

Perhaps, if only to balance his books, he should develop some cheaper missiles to use on cheaper targets and cheaper lives in the poor countries of the world. But then, that may not make good business sense to the coalition’s weapons manufacturers. It wouldn’t make any sense at all, for example, to the Carlyle Group – described by the Industry Standard as “the world’s largest private equity firm”, with $13bn under management.

Carlyle invests in the defense sector and makes its money from military conflicts and weapons spending.

Carlyle is run by men with impeccable credentials. Former US defense secretary Frank Carlucci is Carlyle’s chairman and managing director (he was a college roommate of Donald Rumsfeld’s). Carlyle’s other partners include former US secretary of state James A Baker III, George Soros and Fred Malek (George Bush Sr’s campaign manager). An American paper– the Baltimore Chronicle and Sentinel – says that former president George Bush Sr is reported to be seeking investments for the Carlyle Group from Asian markets.

He is reportedly paid not inconsiderable sums of money to make “presentations” to potential government-clients.

Ho hum. As the tired saying goes, it’s all in the family.

Then there’s that other branch of traditional family business – oil. Remember, President George Bush (Jr) and Vice-President Dick Cheney both made their fortunes working in the US oil industry.

Turkmenistan, which borders the north-west of Afghanistan, holds the world’s third largest gas reserves and an estimated six billion barrels of oil reserves. Enough, experts say, to meet American energy needs for the next 30 years (or a developing country’s energy requirements for a couple of centuries.) America has always viewed oil as a security consideration, and protected it by any means it deems necessary. Few of us doubt that its military presence in the Gulf has little to do with its concern for human rights and almost entirely to do with its strategic interest in oil.

Oil and gas from the Caspian region currently moves northward to European markets. Geographically and politically, Iran and Russia are major impediments to American interests. In 1998, Dick Cheney – then CEO of Halliburton, a major player in the oil industry – said, “I can’t think of a time when we’ve had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian. It’s almost as if the opportunities have arisen overnight.” True enough.

For some years now, an American oil giant called Unocal has been negotiating with the Taliban for permission to construct an oil pipeline through Afghanistan to Pakistan and out to the Arabian sea. From here, Unocal hopes to access the lucrative “emerging markets” in south and south-east Asia. In December 1997, a delegation of Taliban mullahs traveled to America and even met US state department officials and Unocal executives in Houston. At that time the Taliban’s taste for public executions and its treatment of Afghan women were not made out to be the crimes against humanity that they are now.

Over the next six months, pressure from hundreds of outraged American feminist groups was brought to bear on the Clinton administration.

Fortunately, they managed to scuttle the deal. And now comes the US oil industry’s big chance.

In America, the arms industry, the oil industry, the major media networks, and, indeed, US foreign policy, are all controlled by the same business combines. Therefore, it would be foolish to expect this talk of guns and oil and defense deals to get any real play in the media. In any case, to a distraught, confused people whose pride has just been wounded, whose loved ones have been tragically killed, whose anger is fresh and sharp, the inanities about the “clash of civilizations” and the “good v evil” discourse home in unerringly. They are cynically doled out by government spokesmen like a daily dose of vitamins or anti-depressants. Regular medication ensures that mainland America continues to remain the enigma it has always been – a curiously insular people, administered by a pathologically meddlesome, promiscuous government.

And what of the rest of us, the numb recipients of this onslaught of what we know to be preposterous propaganda? The daily consumers of the lies and brutality smeared in peanut butter and strawberry jam being air-dropped into our minds just like those yellow food packets. Shall we look away and eat because we’re hungry, or shall we stare unblinking at the grim theater unfolding in Afghanistan until we retch collectively and say, in one voice, that we have had enough?

As the first year of the new millennium rushes to a close, one wonders – have we forfeited our right to dream? Will we ever be able to re-imagine beauty?

Will it be possible ever again to watch the slow, amazed blink of a newborn gecko in the sun, or whisper back to the marmot who has just whispered in your ear – without thinking of the World Trade Center and Afghanistan?

Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy, forty-one, is the author of The God of Small Things (Random House, 1997), which won the Booker Prize, sold six million copies, and has been translated into forty languages. Here is link to an interview with Arundhati in the April 2001 issue of The Progressive Magazine: 

 

Fair Use

 Typical Rejection Characteristics of Thin Film Composite (TFC) Reverse Osmosis Membranes

Below are the typical rejection (removal) percentages of a standard thin film (TFC) reverse osmosis membrane. These are averages based on experience and are generally accepted within the industry. They are not a guarantee of performance. Actual rejection can vary according to the chemistry of the water, temperature, pressure, pH and other factors.

We should point out that the listing below is of items that are treated by the RO membrane alone. Home RO units, which consist of carbon filters as well as a membrane, can remove innumerable chemical contaminants that are not listed on this chart. Here’s an article that explains what carbon filtration adds to the total removal capability of home RO units.

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Estimated Reverse Osmosis Rejection Percentages

The reverse osmosis process uses a semi-permeable membrane to reject a wide variety of impurities. Here is a partial list.

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Aluminum	97-98%	Nickel	97-99%
Ammonium	85-95%	Nitrate	93-96%
Arsenic	94-96%	Phosphate	99+%
Bacteria	99+%	Polyphosphate	98-99%
Bicarbonate	95-96%	Potassium	92%
Boron	50-70%	Pyrogen	99+%
Bromide	93-96%	Radioactivity	95-98%
Cadmium	96-98%	Radium	97%
Calcium	96-98%	Selenium	97%
Chloride	94-95%	Silica	85-90%
Chromate	90-98%	Silicate	95-97%
Chromium	96-98%	Silver	95-97%
Copper	97-99%	Sodium	92-98%
Cyanide	90-95%	Sulphate	99+%
Ferrocyanide	98-99%	Sulphite	96-98%
Fluoride	94-96%	Zinc	98-99%
Iron	98-99%
Lead	96-98%	Insecticides	97%
Magnesium	96-98%	Detergents	97%
Manganese	96-98%	Herbicides	97%
Mercury	96-98%	Virus	99+%
TDS (Total Dissolved Solids)	95-99%	Hardness	93-97%

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Horse Swims Three Miles Out To Sea off the Santa Barbara Coast

 

A 6-year-old Arabian horse named William, valued at  $150,000, bolted during a beach photo shoot and swam more than  two miles out to sea. After an ordeal that lasted almost 3 hours, the horse was rescued.  He was  exhausted and had some water in its lungs but is doing fine.

 

More Details.

Hawaiian Bottled Water Company Fined $2 Million for Selling Unfiltered Water

 

Kona USA, a company that sells filtered ocean water from a deep-sea source off Kona,  has agreed to pay the state department of health $2 million as part of a settlement in an enforcement case.

The state said Koyo USA diverted concentrated ocean water that had been rejected by its reverse osmosis system into its finished product.  

No health issue was involved.   Koyo USA was initially fined more than $5 million, but a $2 million settlement was reached.

The gruesome details.

Improved Cooling Tower Design Could Save Billions of Gallons of Water Per Year

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that commercial, residential and industrial buildings use approximately 47 billion gallons of water each day. And the EPA found that a typical office building uses more than 25 percent of its water supply for cooling towers.

In most large commercial and industrial buildings, tens of thousands of gallons of water flow through a big apparatus called a cooling tower (about the size of a two-car garage, they’re usually on the roof), where it evaporates out the top.

AT&T, whose facilities used 3.5 billion gallons of water in 2010, calculates that improving operations in the cooling towers at its largest facilities could save millions of gallons of water per year. Adopted on a broad scale, these solutions could save billions of gallons of water annually.

Read full details.

Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates

By Arundhati Roy

On the steel torsos of their missiles, adolescent American soldiers scrawl colourful messages in childish handwriting: For Saddam, from the Fat Boy Posse. A building goes down. A marketplace. A home. A girl who loves a boy. A child who only ever wanted to play with his older brother’s marbles.

On March 21, the day after American and British troops began their illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, an “embedded” CNN correspondent interviewed an American soldier. “I wanna get in there and get my nose dirty,” Private AJ said. “I wanna take revenge for 9/11.”

To be fair to the correspondent, even though he was “embedded” he did sort of weakly suggest that so far there was no real evidence that linked the Iraqi government to the September 11 attacks. Private AJ
stuck his teenage tongue out all the way down to the end of his chin. “Yeah, well that stuff’s way over my head,” he said.

According to a New York Times/CBS News survey, 42 per cent of the American public believes that Saddam Hussein is directly responsible for the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. And an ABC news poll says that 55 per cent of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein directly supports al-Qaida. What percentage of America’s armed forces believe these fabrications is anybody’s guess.

It is unlikely that British and American troops fighting in Iraq are aware that their governments supported Saddam Hussein both politically and financially through his worst excesses.

But why should poor AJ and his fellow soldiers be burdened with these details? It does not matter any more, does it?  Hundreds of thousands of men, tanks, ships, choppers, bombs, ammunition, gas masks, high-protein food, whole aircrafts ferrying toilet paper, insect repellent, vitamins and bottled mineral water, are on the move. The phenomenal logistics of Operation Iraqi Freedom make it a universe unto itself. It doesn’t need to justify its existence any more. It exists. It is.

President George W Bush, commander in chief of the US army, navy, airforce and marines has issued clear instructions: “Iraq. Will. Be. Liberated.” (Perhaps he means that even if Iraqi people’s bodies are killed, their souls will be liberated.) American and British citizens owe it to the supreme commander to forsake thought and rally behind their troops. Their countries are at war. And what a war it is.

After using the “good offices” of UN diplomacy (economic sanctions and weapons inspections) to ensure that Iraq was brought to its knees, its people starved, half a million of its children killed, its infrastructure severely damaged, after making sure that most of its weapons have been destroyed, in an act of cowardice that must surely be unrivalled in history, the “Allies”/”Coalition of the Willing “(better known as the Coalition of the Bullied and Bought) – sent in an invading army!

Operation Iraqi Freedom? I don’t think so. It’s more like Operation Let’s Run a Race, but First Let Me Break Your Knees.

So far the Iraqi army, with its hungry, ill-equipped soldiers, its old guns and ageing tanks, has somehow managed to temporarily confound and occasionally even outmanoeuvre the “Allies”. Faced with the richest,best-equipped, most powerful armed forces the world has ever seen, Iraq has shown spectacular courage and has even managed to put up what actually amounts to a defence. A defence which the Bush/Blair Pair have immediately denounced as deceitful and cowardly. (But then deceit is an old tradition with us natives. When we are invaded/ colonised/occupied and stripped of all dignity, we turn to guile and opportunism.)

Even allowing for the fact that Iraq and the “Allies” are at war, the extent to which the “Allies” and their media cohorts are prepared to go is astounding to the point of being counterproductive to their ownobjectives.

When Saddam Hussein appeared on national TV to address the Iraqi people after the failure of the most elaborate assassination attempt in history – “Operation Decapitation” – we had Geoff Hoon, the British defence secretary, deriding him for not having the courage to stand up and be killed, calling him a coward who hides in trenches. We then had a flurry of Coalition speculation – Was it really Saddam, was it his double? Or was it Osama with a shave? Was it pre-recorded? Was it a speech? Was it black magic? Will it turn into a pumpkin if we really, really want it to?

After dropping not hundreds, but thousands of bombs on Baghdad, when a marketplace was mistakenly blown up and civilians killed – a US army spokesman implied that the Iraqis were blowing themselves up! “They’re using very old stock. Their missiles go up and come down.”

If so, may we ask how this squares with the accusation that the Iraqi regime is a paid-up member of the Axis of Evil and a threat to world peace?

When the Arab TV station al-Jazeera shows civilian casualties it’s denounced as “emotive” Arab propaganda aimed at orchestrating hostility towards the “Allies”, as though Iraqis are dying only in order to make the “Allies” look bad. Even French television has come in for some stick for similar reasons. But the awed, breathless footage of aircraft carriers, stealth bombers and cruise missiles arcing across the desert sky on American and British TV is described as the “terrible beauty” of war.

When invading American soldiers (from the army “that’s only here to help”) are taken prisoner and shown on Iraqi TV, George Bush says it violates the Geneva convention and “exposes the evil at the heart of the regime”. But it is entirely acceptable for US television stations to show the hundreds of prisoners being held by the US government in Guantanamo Bay, kneeling on the ground with their hands tied behind their backs, blinded with opaque goggles and with earphones clamped on their ears, to ensure complete visual and aural deprivation. When questioned about the treatment of these prisoners, US Government
officials don’t deny that they’re being being ill-treated. They deny that they’re “prisoners of war”! They call them “unlawful combatants”, implying that their ill-treatment is legitimate! (So what’s the party line on the massacre of prisoners in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan? Forgive and forget? And what of the prisoner tortured to death by the special forces at the Bagram airforce base? Doctors have formally called it homicide.)

When the “Allies” bombed the Iraqi television station (also, incidentally, a contravention of the Geneva convention), there was vulgar jubilation in the American media. In fact Fox TV had been lobbying for the attack for a while. It was seen as a righteous blow against Arab propaganda. But mainstream American and British TV continue to advertise themselves as “balanced” when their propaganda has achieved hallucinatory levels.

Why should propaganda be the exclusive preserve of the western media? Just because they do it better? Western journalists “embedded” with troops are given the status of heroes reporting from the frontlines of war. Non-“embedded” journalists (such as the BBC’s Rageh Omaar, reporting from besieged and bombed Baghdad, witnessing, and clearly affected by the sight of bodies of burned children and wounded people)
are undermined even before they begin their reportage: “We have to tell you that he is being monitored by the Iraqi authorities.”

Increasingly, on British and American TV, Iraqi soldiers are being referred to as “militia” (ie: rabble). One BBC correspondent portentously referred to them as “quasi-terrorists”. Iraqi defence is “resistance” or worse still, “pockets of resistance”, Iraqi military strategy is deceit. (The US government bugging the phone lines of UN security council delegates, reported by the Observer, is hard-headed pragmatism.) Clearly for the “Allies”, the only morally acceptable strategy the Iraqi army can pursue is to march out into the desert and be bombed by B-52s or be mowed down by machine-gun fire. Anything short of that is cheating.

And now we have the siege of Basra. About a million and a half people, 40 per cent of them children. Without clean water, and with very little food. We’re still waiting for the legendary Shia “uprising”, for the happy hordes to stream out of the city and rain roses and hosannahs on the “liberating” army. Where are the hordes? Don’t they know that television productions work to tight schedules? (It may well be that if Saddam’s regime falls there will be dancing on the streets of Basra. But then, if the Bush regime were to fall, there would be dancing on the streets the world over.)

After days of enforcing hunger and thirst on the citizens of Basra, the “Allies” have brought in a few trucks of food and water and positioned them tantalisingly on the outskirts of the city. Desperate people flock to the trucks and fight each other for food. (The water we hear, is being sold. To revitalise the dying economy, you understand.) On top of the trucks, desperate photographers fought each other to get pictures of desperate people fighting each other for food. Those pictures will go out through photo agencies to newspapers and glossy magazines that pay extremely well. Their message: The messiahs are at hand, distributing fishes and loaves.

As of July last year the delivery of $5.4bn worth of supplies to Iraq was blocked by the Bush/Blair Pair. It didn’t really make the news. But now under the loving caress of live TV, 450 tonnes of humanitarian aid -a minuscule fraction of what’s actually needed (call it a script prop) – arrived on a British ship, the “Sir Galahad”. Its arrival in the port of Umm Qasr merited a whole day of live TV broadcasts. Barf bag, anyone?

Nick Guttmann, head of emergencies for Christian Aid, writing for the Independent on Sunday said that it would take 32 Sir Galahad’s a day to match the amount of food Iraq was receiving before the bombing began.

We oughtn’t to be surprised though. It’s old tactics. They’ve been at it for years. Consider this moderate proposal by John McNaughton from the Pentagon Papers, published during the Vietnam war: “Strikes at population targets (per se) are likely not only to create a counterproductive wave of revulsion abroad and at home, but greatly to increase the risk of enlarging the war with China or the Soviet Union. Destruction of locks and dams, however – if handled right – might … offer promise. It should be studied. Such destruction does not kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after time to widespread starvation (more than a million?) unless food is provided – which we could offer to do ‘at the conference table’.”

Times haven’t changed very much. The technique has evolved into a doctrine. It’s called “Winning Hearts and Minds”.

So, here’s the moral maths as it stands: 200,000 Iraqis estimated to have been killed in the first Gulf war. Hundreds of thousands dead because of the economic sanctions. (At least that lot has been saved from Saddam Hussein.) More being killed every day. Tens of thousands of US soldiers who fought the 1991 war officially declared “disabled” by a disease called the Gulf war syndrome, believed in part to be caused by exposure to depleted uranium. It hasn’t stopped the “Allies” from continuing to use depleted uranium.

And now this talk of bringing the UN back into the picture. But that old UN girl – it turns out that she just ain’t what she was cracked up to be. She’s been demoted (although she retains her high salary). Now she’s the world’s janitor. She’s the Philippino cleaning lady, the Indian jamadarni, the postal bride from Thailand, the Mexican household help, the Jamaican au pair. She’s employed to clean other peoples’ shit. She’s used and abused at will.

Despite Blair’s earnest submissions, and all his fawning, Bush has made it clear that the UN will play no independent part in the administration of postwar Iraq. The US will decide who gets those juicy “reconstruction” contracts. But Bush has appealed to the international community not to “politicise” the issue of humanitarian aid. On the March 28, after Bush called for the immediate resumption of the UN’s oil for food programme, the UN security council voted unanimously for the resolution. This means that everybody agrees that Iraqi money (from the sale of Iraqi oil) should be used to feed Iraqi people who are starving because of US led sanctions and the illegal US-led war.

Contracts for the “reconstruction” of Iraq we’re told, in discussions on the business news, could jump-start the world economy. It’s funny how the interests of American corporations are so often, so successfully and so deliberately confused with the interests of the world economy. While the American people will end up paying for the war, oil companies, weapons manufacturers, arms dealers, and corporations involved in “reconstruction” work will make direct gains from the war. Many of them are old friends and former employers of the Bush/ Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice cabal. Bush has already asked Congress for $75bn. Contracts for “re-construction” are already being negotiated. The news doesn’t hit the stands because much of the US corporate media is owned and managed by the same interests.

Operation Iraqi Freedom, Tony Blair assures us is about returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people. That is, returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people via corporate multinationals. Like Shell, like Chevron, like Halliburton. Or are we missing the plot here? Perhaps Halliburton is actually an Iraqi company? Perhaps US vice-president Dick Cheney (who is a former director of Halliburton) is a closet Iraqi?

As the rift between Europe and America deepens, there are signs that the world could be entering a new era of economic boycotts. CNN reported that Americans are emptying French wine into gutters, chanting, “We don’t want your stinking wine.” We’ve heard about the re-baptism of French fries. Freedom fries they’re called now. There’s news trickling in about Americans boycotting German goods. The thing is that if the fallout of the war takes this turn, it is the US who will suffer the most. Its homeland may be defended by border patrols and nuclear weapons, but its economy is strung out across the globe. Its economic
outposts are exposed and vulnerable to attack in every direction. Already the internet is buzzing with elaborate lists of American and British government products and companies that should be boycotted.

Apart from the usual targets, Coke, Pepsi and McDonald’s – government agencies such as USAID, the British department for international development, British and American banks, Arthur Anderson, Merrill Lynch, American Express, corporations such as Bechtel, General Electric, and companies such as Reebok, Nike and Gap – could find themselves under siege. These lists are being honed and re fined by activists across the world. They could become a practical guide that directs and channels the amorphous, but growing fury in the world. Suddenly, the “inevitability” of the project of corporate globalisation is beginning to seem more than a little evitable.

It’s become clear that the war against terror is not really about terror, and the war on Iraq not only about oil. It’s about a superpower’s self-destructive impulse towards supremacy, stranglehold, global hegemony. The argument is being made that the people of Argentina and Iraq have both been decimated by the same process. Only the weapons used against them differ: In one case it’s an IMF chequebook. In the
other, cruise missiles.

Finally, there’s the matter of Saddam’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. (Oops, nearly forgot about those!)

In the fog of war – one thing’s for sure – if Saddam ‘s regime indeed has weapons of mass destruction, it is showing an astonishing degree of responsibility and restraint in the teeth of extreme provocation. Under similar circumstances, (say if Iraqi troops were bombing New York and laying siege to Washington DC) could we expect the same of the Bush regime? Would it keep its thousands of nuclear warheads in their wrapping paper? What about its chemical and biological weapons? Its stocks of anthrax, smallpox and nerve gas?  Would it?

Excuse me while I laugh.

In the fog of war we’re forced to speculate: Either Saddam is an extremely responsible tyrant. Or – he simply does not possess weapons of mass destruction. Either way, regardless of what happens next, Iraq comes out of the argument smelling sweeter than the US government.

So here’s Iraq – rogue state, grave threat to world peace, paid-up member of the Axis of Evil. Here’s Iraq, invaded, bombed, besieged, bullied, its sovereignty shat upon, its children killed by cancers, its people blown up on the streets. And here’s all of us watching. CNN-BBC, BBC-CNN late into the night. Here’s all of us, enduring the horror of the war, enduring the horror of the propaganda and enduring the slaughter of language as we know and understand it. Freedom now means mass murder (or, in the US, fried potatoes). When someone says “humanitarian aid” we automatically go looking for induced starvation.

“Embedded” I have to admit, is a great find. It’s what it sounds like. And what about “arsenal of tactics?” Nice!

In most parts of the world, the invasion of Iraq is being seen as a racist war. The real danger of a racist war unleashed by racist regimes is that it engenders racism in everybody – perpetrators, victims, spectators. It sets the parameters for the debate, it lays out a grid for a particular way of thinking. There is a tidal wave of hatred for the US rising from the ancient heart of the world. In Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, Australia. I encounter it every day. Sometimes it comes from the most unlikely sources. Bankers, businessmen, yuppie students, and they bring to it all the crassness of their conservative, illiberal politics. That absurd inability to separate governments from people: America is a nation of morons, a nation of murderers, they say, (with the same carelessness with which they say, “All Muslims are terrorists”). Even in the grotesque universe of racist insult, the British make their entry as add-ons. Arse-lickers, they’re called.

Suddenly, I, who have been vilified for being “anti-American” and “anti-west”, find myself in the extraordinary position of defending the people of America. And Britain.

Those who descend so easily into the pit of racist abuse would do well to remember the hundreds of thousands of American and British citizens who protested against their country’s stockpile of nuclear weapons. And the thousands of American war resisters who forced their government to withdraw from Vietnam. They should know that the most scholarly, scathing, hilarious critiques of the US government and the “American way of life” comes from American citizens. And that the funniest, most bitter condemnation of their prime minister comes from the British media. Finally they should remember that right now, hundreds of thousands of British and American citizens are on the streets protesting the war. The Coalition of the Bullied and Bought consists of governments, not people. More than one third of America’s citizens have survived the relentless propaganda they’ve been subjected to, and many thousands are actively fighting their own government. In the ultra-patriotic climate that prevails in the US, that’s as brave as any Iraqi fighting for his or her homeland.

While the “Allies” wait in the desert for an uprising of Shia Muslims on the streets of Basra, the real uprising is taking place in hundreds of cities across the world. It has been the most spectacular display of public morality ever seen.

Most courageous of all, are the hundreds of thousands of American people on the streets of America’s great cities – Washington, New York, Chicago, San Francisco. The fact is that the only institution in the world today that is more powerful than the American government, is American civil society. American citizens have a huge responsibility riding on their shoulders. How can we not salute and support those who not only acknowledge but act upon that responsibility? They are our allies, our friends.

At the end of it all, it remains to be said that dictators like Saddam Hussein, and all the other despots in the Middle East, in the central Asian republics, in Africa and Latin America, many of them installed, supported and financed by the US government, are a menace to their own people. Other than strengthening the hand of civil society (instead of weakening it as has been done in the case of Iraq), there is no easy, pristine way of dealing with them. (It’s odd how those who dismiss the peace movement as utopian, don’t hesitate to proffer the most absurdly dreamy reasons for going to war: to stamp out terrorism, install democracy, eliminate fascism, and most entertainingly, to “rid the world of evil-doers”.)

Regardless of what the propaganda machine tells us, these tin-pot dictators are not the greatest threat to the world. The real and pressing danger, the greatest threat of all is the locomotive force that drives the political and economic engine of the US government, currently piloted by George Bush. Bush-bashing is fun, because he makes such an easy, sumptuous target. It’s true that he is a dangerous, almost suicidal pilot, but the machine he handles is far more dangerous than the man himself.

Despite the pall of gloom that hangs over us today, I’d like to file a cautious plea for hope: in times of war, one wants one’s weakest enemy at the helm of his forces. And President George W Bush is certainly that. Any other even averagely intelligent US president would have probably done the very same things, but would have managed to smoke-up the glass and confuse the opposition. Perhaps even carry the UN with him. Bush’s tactless imprudence and his brazen belief that he can run the world with his riot squad, has done the opposite. He has achieved what writers, activists and scholars have striven to achieve for decades. He has exposed the ducts. He has placed on full public view the working parts, the nuts and bolts of the apocalyptic apparatus of the American empire.

Now that the blueprint (The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire) has been put into mass circulation, it could be disabled quicker than the pundits predicted.

Bring on the spanners.

 

Fair Use

Coastal Basements and Underground Utilities Will Be At Risk as Global Warming Advances

Basements of some coastal area buildings and underground utilities may be at risk of being inundated by rising groundwater by the end of the 21^st century due to projected rates of sea level rise for the area, according to a preliminary study by the U. S. Geological Survey and Yale University.

“An underappreciated aspect of climate change is going to be the rising toll on property owners in the coastal zone from effects such as the one identified in this report: rising ground water that produces water damage in basements that for decades and possibly a century were dry,” said USGS Director Marcia McNutt. “Utility bills will also rise to re-engineer utilities that were not designed to be installed completely above ground, as in the case in more temperate climates farther south.”

More Details.