Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum not only wants to criminalize absolutely all abortion in the United States, without exception, he also is rabidly against all forms of birth control. Here is a terrifying and bizarre excerpt from the Rachel Maddow Show of former Pennsylvania Senator Santorum spreading his frothy views on the “dangers of contraception“:

 ”…I think the dangers of contraception in this country, and the whole sexual libertine idea — many of the Christian faith have said, well that’s okay, I mean y’know, contraception is okay. It is not okay.”

Every Sperm is Sacred

Sexual libertines, really? In the year 2012? Is that what all of my fellow fornicators and I now are? Will all non-procreative sex outside of Christian heterosexual marriage be banned as well?

Some people may not know that in 1965 the Supreme Court finally made it illegal for states to ban birth control. Prior to that ruling in the Griswold v. Connecticut decision, which struck down a Connecticut law prohibiting the use of contraceptives as a right to privacy violation, many regions forbid not only access to abortion, but all contraception was banned as well.

This is the glorious repressive misogynist world that Santorum envisions for the United States. How does his Handmaid’s Tale vision sound to you?

We have already learned that the United States has killed its own citizens with secret military drones, but many people are unaware of just how prevalent these robot assassins have now become around the globe. In the three years since President Obama took office, more than five hundred civilians have been murdered by U.S. military drones in Pakistan alone, including scores of young children.

A new report by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism has documented that the CIA is using clandestine drone strikes to murder innocent people, including civilians who have tried to rescue injured victims, as well as slaughtering grieving mourners attending funerals.

Chris Woods, award-winning reporter with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, spoke with Amy Goodman about these atrocities:

“We noted that there were repeated reports at the time, contemporaneous reports in publications like New York Times, news agencies like Reuters, like CNN, that there were these strikes on rescuers, that there were reports of an initial strike and then some minutes later, as people had come forward to pull out the dead and injured that drones had returned to the scene and attacked rescues. We have been able to name just over 50 civilians that we understand have been killed in those attacks. In total, we think that more than 75 civilians have been killed specifically in these attacks on rescuers and on mourners, on funeral-goers.” 

Although he remains locked away in a tiny prison cell, Private First Class Bradley Manning has just been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Manning is alleged to have released many documents to the international whistleblower site Wikileaks, including the horrific “Collateral Murder” video. The military footage depicts United States soldiers in a helicopter callously and gleefully killing a group of unarmed Iraqi civilians and Reuters journalists.

The 23 year-old U.S. Army soldier has been accused of leaking classified information, and Bradley Manning has been imprisoned since May of 2010 without yet being brought to trial.

Members of Iceland’s Movement of the Icelandic Parliament group explained that they were compelled to put forth Manning for the prize because it is vital to recognize how the courageous efforts this individual made have positively impacted the peace process in our world.

Here is the Icelandic group’s letter to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee:

We have the great honor of nominating Private First Class Bradley Manning for the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize. Manning is a soldier in the United States army who stands accused of releasing hundreds of thousands of documents to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks. The leaked documents pointed to a long history of corruption, war crimes, and imperialism by the United States government in international dealings. These revelations have fueled democratic uprising around the world, including a democratic revolution in Tunisia.

According to journalists, his alleged actions helped motivate the democratic Arab Spring movements, shed light on secret corporate influence on our foreign policies, and most recently contributed to the Obama Administration agreeing to withdraw all U.S.troops from the occupation in Iraq. 

Bradley Manning has been incarcerated for well over a year by the U.S. government without a trial. He spent over ten months of that time period in solitary confinement, conditions which experts worldwide have criticized as torturous. Juan Mendez, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Torture and Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment, has repeatedly requested and been denied a private meeting with Manning to assess his conditions. 

The documents made public by WikiLeaks should never have been kept from public scrutiny. The revelations – including video documentation of an incident in which American soldiers gunned down Reuters journalists in Iraq – have helped to fuel a worldwide discussion about America’s overseas engagements, civilian casualties of war, imperialistic manipulations, and rules of engagement.

Citizens worldwide owe a great debt to the WikiLeaks whistleblower for shedding light on these issues, and so I urge the Committee to award this prestigious prize to accused whistleblower Bradley Manning.

Sincerely,

Birgitta Jónsdóttir

Margrét Tryggvadóttir

Þór Saari

Members of the Icelandic Parliament for The Movement

The San Onofre nuclear power plant was shut down again this week, due to another radiation leak in one of its reactor’s steam generators. The amount of radioactive water that was released is said to be minimal, but specific details have not yet been released. Over 7 million people live within a hundred miles of the crumbling energy facility.

The owners of the aging plant continue to insist that the nuclear generators are perfectly safe, but many activists claim that these continued mishaps are indications of larger problems. The Los Angeles Times reported that relatively new parts of the reactors are inexplicably showing excessive wear and corrosive damage, and many people are demanding that the facility be closed:

“The situation is ‘further evidence that California should move beyond nuclear power. California should plan for the orderly phase out of … aging nuclear power plants, including San Onofre, and shift to clean-energy alternatives like energy efficiency and renewable power,’ Bernadette Del Chiaro, director of clean-energy programs for the advocacy group Environment California, said in a statement.

 Nuclear regulation officials said Thursday that extensive wear had been found on tubes inside a unit at the San Onofre nuclear plant. Another unit at the plant was taken off-line after a small radiation leak earlier this week.

 Dozens of relatively new tubes that carry radioactive water in a steam generator showed ‘many, many years’ worth of wear, even though the tubing is 22 months old, said Victor Dricks, a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.”

San Onofre’s Unit 1 reactor is no longer functional, and is now the repository for tons of dangerous radioactive nuclear waste. The aging facility is over four decades old, and is only constructed to withstand a 7.0 earthquake. A Fukushima size earthquake and/or tsunami would quickly turn the entire region into a nuclear wasteland.

The morally dubious Bechtel Corporation designed and built the nuclear plant many years ago, and may not have done the most thorough construction job. In the July 12, 1982 edition of Time, the magazine reported that when the massive corporation was building the San Onofre facility:

“The firm Bechtel was further embarrassed in 1977, when it installed a 420-ton nuclear-reactor vessel backwards.”

A few months ago we were staying in southern California when the San Onofre plant went offline and helped create a massive international power blackout that impacted millions of people and lasted for days. These aging nuclear sites are not safe, sustainable or reliable, they have not been designed to withstand major earthquakes, and they should be shuttered immediately.

Even though the official Bank Transfer Day was back in November, millions more citizens are still continuing to move their money out of huge corporate banks into smaller and more accountable credit unions and local community financial institutions. The excessive fees and cruel indifferent arrogance of many large banks has definitely helped to fuel this decentralized grassroots activism. It seems that increasing amounts of people are finally getting the message that it really does make a difference where you keep your money.

A new study by Javelin Strategy & Research now estimates that 5.6 million former corporate bank customers have switched banks in just the last three months alone. The research site offers this insight into the growing shift of monetary resources:

“Bank Transfer Day and the Occupy Movement have received tremendous attention, and for the first time we have market research data to measure the impact on the financial services industry. Javelin’s research estimates that 5.6 million U.S. adults with a banking relationship changed providers in the past 90 days. Of those switchers, 610,000 US adults (or 11% of the 5.6 million) cited Bank Transfer Day as their reason and actually moved their accounts from a large to a small institution.

With a Google search of ‘bank transfer day’ returning fully 22,000,000 responses we’re not surprised that these angry bank-switchers represent nearly a three-time increase over the amount of people who took their funds out of large banks for highly-similar reasons during the previous 90-day period in 2011.”

If you have not already done so, please consider moving your money out of corporate banks and instead invest in your own neighborhood; open an account at an independent regional credit union or local community financial institution. You will certainly be glad that you did. If we join together, it is indeed possible to create sustainable change.

Last week I came across these beautiful posters from Occupy Wall Street West while walking down 24th street in San Francisco’s Mission District. Well done graphic design can often convey the conceptual details of a political message much more clearly than just words alone. Considering corporations people is utter madness.

I was sorry to have missed the recent demonstration in the Financial District, but it definitely seems that the Occupy Wall Street movement is continuing to gain momentum, despite many local camps being evicted across the country. It is not possible to evict an idea whose time has come.

For doubters, this compost is a safe and nutrient-rich soil amendment that greens up gardens. Professional composting “upcycles dog waste” into a useful product while diverting this nuisance material from walkways and landscape, landfills and streams.

How to pick up and transport the stuff is a vital question on the matter of pet waste. Many people simply use non-biodegradable plastic bags. EnviroWagg, on the other hand, sells compostable bags for this purpose. But finding such a product was not easy. Seemann says she has done research on the subject, and writes:

We searched for a dog waste bag formulated to meet ASTM D6400 standards for compostability that would be suitable for the parks and facilities contributing dog waste for our park compost programs. We looked for a U.S. manufacturer who would produce bags made from American-grown plant based material. These bags would ideally be petrochemical/polyethylene-free, non-GMO, affordable, and leave no harmful residues when they degrade.

EnviroWagg found compostable bags that met most of these requirements. Unfortunately, the bags were pricey. None were affordable enough for high-quantity park usage. Manufacturers promise that when demand increases – most likely due to plastic bag bans – the cost will come down.

According to Seemann, most community organic recycling programs don’t accept pet waste. Nor do community dog parks have systems that are compatible with compostable bags. Tying waste up in a bag doesn’t get very far, either.

“If you are trashing dog waste, tying it in a compostable bag does not give it a degrading advantage over plastic bags. Organics entombed in landfills are preserved, not degraded.”

Seemann says dog bags with a starch substrate are helpful to EnviroWagg’s large-scale commercial composting because it helps us break apart the film so that the waste is exposed to biological activity. But not plastic bags. The company has to screen out the plastic fragments before the product is ready for use.

EnviroWagg twist-top compostable bags appear to be a good solution. They degrade in the soil and leave no harmful residues.

Seemann is active right now with Denver Sustainability Park and the Colorado Renewable Energy Society is attempting to demonstrate something like the Park Spark Project in Cambridge, MA, where energy in the form of methane gas was used to burn a night lantern. More will be reported on this promising area of waste-to-energy as funding advances are made to launch a demonstration.

In the meantime, EnviroWagg’s compost is  great addition to any person’s garden soil.

According to the Grange website, the company in 2009 with the name, Brooklyn Grange, LLC because the founders – all of them residing in Brooklyn – thought they had a site in Brooklyn locked down. But in spring of 2010 the company relocated to its current location on Northern Blvd. in Queens.

At that point, however, we had already established an LLC under the name “Brooklyn Grange,” had begun using the name in public at our fundraisers and events in the winter and didn’t want to confuse the folks who had been following our progress and supporting our efforts. We’ve kept our name as Brooklyn Grange, but we are thrilled with our new home in LIC, Queens and have really enjoyed meeting the community there.

This one-acre (40,000 square foot) farm in Queens is made up of roughly 1.2 million lbs of soil and over 20,000 linear feet of green roofing material. That may hold a lot of weight, but Grange managers say that’s not a problem:

Our farm was designed and installed with the support of engineers and architects who assessed and approved the site. The building was constructed in 1919 and is built like a rock. The roof is made of a thick reinforced concrete slab, which is approved for loads far in excess of the 30 lbs. per square foot of materials that we have installed.

Now that winter is here, the Brooklyn Grange will open a second rooftop farm at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, writes Chase Emmons, director of marketing. Now that the Grange is also back in Brooklyn, this summer should provide the Big Apple’s urban farming enthusiasts with a harvest of good green news and plenty to eat.

Do you believe that utilizing more bicycles for everyday transportation will help create a more sustainable world? Would you like to learn how to build and easily maintain your own bike? If the answer to these questions is yes, please come visit Biketopia and find out how you can construct your very own own bicycle utopia.

Biketopia is a new cooperative bike shop that opened this month in Berkeley, at 1752 Alcatraz Street, just around the corner from the Ashby BART station. In addition to fixing your bicycle, the shop  also functions as a community bicycle education and youth services nonprofit. Biketopia provides bicycle education and full repair services, while also offering both employment and recreational opportunities for local youth.

Last week I took the train to the East Bay to visit the shop and meet with Zach Cohen, Biketopia’s founder. We discussed everything from the inevitable rise of alternative economic systems, such as collectives and cooperatives, sharing and the possibility of non-monetary structures, to more sustainable localized production and Charles Eisenstein’s seminal new book, “Sacred Economics: Money, Gift & Society in the Age of Transition“.

Zach told me that he had never ridden a bicycle regularly before moving from Florida to the Bay Area a few years ago. He explained that the bike shop cooperative model allowed him to merge many of his varied passions for sustainability issues, direct action and transitional economics all together:

“I believe the most important form of activism is the creation of alternatives to the failing establishment. Biketopia’s goal is to address diverse social problems with one comprehensive model that builds community while implementing solutions to youth homelessness, climate change, interest based money, and public health.”

Even though the bike cooperative has been open less than a month, the tiny shop is already beginning to thrive. They have received a great deal of support and help from the community, and are making many strong connections with local businesses. Zach shared some of the details of what the cooperative is working on, as well as their most recent generous gift:

“We just got a massive donation of large quantities of every single necessary bicycle component. It was from the estate of a recently deceased bike collector, and we inventoried the parts at $7,500. It was a pretty random stroke of luck, the beneficiary of the estate just happened to see our name on craigslist and gave us a call asking if we wanted it.

We’re also now working with new contacts at the Berkeley Police Department and the city office of economic development to scale up our programs and are applying for our first grant of $45,000.”

Time Bank Currency

In addition to finding good uses for recycled bike parts, and helping people learn how to properly maintain their own bicycle, Biketopia also encourages alternative economic models and time share currency. Locals can participate in work/trade exchanges or volunteer; the shop has also been approved as a member of the BACE Timebank, and has been working with NOBAWC (pronounced No Boss), the Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives.

The new Berkeley bike cooperative offers mechanics classes every month from 12:00p-2:00p Saturday and Sunday, before regular business hours. Biketopia is committed to educating and empowering local residents to build, maintain, and ride bicycles, as well as also helping to teach useful life skills and vocational training to young people in need.

The cooperative welcomes your bicycle repair business, as well as donations of tools, money, bikes and other needed resources.

Biketopia Hours for Repairs:

Mon, Tues, Thurs: 6:00pm – 8:30pm

Sat, Sun: 2:00pm-6:00pm

For more information please email: 

zach.cohen@biketopiaworkshop.org

In order to know which plastics may be recycled, it is important to understand how to tell which type of plastic you have. Many types of plastic can not be mixed together, and some recycling centers and plants only accept certian types of plastic.

Why is There a Number on My Plastic?

Have you always wondered what the numbers found on your plastic containers mean? In 1988 the Society of the Plastics Industry created the resin identification coding system or “RIC”. The RIC is the funny number and bundle of letters you often see inside of a triangle somewhere on your plastic item. These numbers and letters refer to type of plastic used to create your product, and how/if it can be recycled.

The following is a list of the RIC numbers, their corresponding abbreviation, the plastic they represent, and what that plastic is commonly used for:

#1 PETE or PET: Polyethylene terephthalate
PETE is commonly used in Polyester fibers in clothing,Plastic strapping, and soft drink bottles

#2 HDPE: High-density polyethylene
HDPE is most recognized as the flexible plastic used in milk jugs and playground equipment. A versatile plastic it is also used in various agricultural products and food containers.

#3 PVC: Polyvinyl chloride
PVC is the ubiquitous piping material seen on downspouts and hobby projects alike. A common and tough plastic it is also seen in many other structural uses like fences and plastic chairs.

#4 LDPE: Low density polyethylene
LDPE is infamously known as the material of 6 pack rings, causing marine animals to become trapped and die. Other common uses are as laboratory equipment and medicine containers.

#5 PP: Polypropylene
PP is known by sports enthusiasts as a major constituent of high performance wicking clothing. A particuraly tough plastic it is also used in auto parts and industrial fibers.

#6 PS: Polystyrene
PS is another of the more infamous plastics. Responsible for Styrofoam, it is particularly difficult to recycle. It is also used to make more rigid products like cafeteria trays and video cassettes and cases.

#7 OTHER or O: Other plastics
Other is self describing as the moniker for other types of plastic. Acrylic, fiberglass, nylon, polycarbonate, others are all contained under this symbol. Nalgene bottles are made of polycarbonate and were at the source of the recent BPA scares.

The most commonly recycled plastics among these are numbers 1-3. Always check with your local recycling center or pick-up service to determine which RIC plastics they accept.

Interested in hearing more about a particular type of plastic, or do you have other questions? Please leave a comment below for more information.