The Last Mountain

Appalachia: hillbilly country, coal country, mountaintop removal country. Massey vs. The People of Appalachia replaces the mythic antagonisms of Hatfields and McCoys. i can't review this film because i haven't seen it, but based on these clips and the extensive, informative interview with Robert Kennedy, Jr. and The Last Mountain film director Bill Haney, my instinctive critical eye tells me it's a film worth watching. A close friend and eco-warrior comrade of mine has been in and out of jail/court for a few years now for getting in the way of Massey Energy, and i know that promoting this film is right now the best thing i can do to support those efforts.

NB: West Virginia is hardly the only place in the world where mountaintop removal is being executed. Gold mining companies are engaging in this on many islands and most continents; it's also become de rigueur for other precious metal ventures. While distinguishable from open pit (UK: open cast) mines only in that some of the mountain is left behind to serve as walls for the massive, contaminated water-filled pits left behind, as far as i'm aware, there is little difference in the final devastation, i.e. long-term environmental impact. Coal Country has a list of documentaries which address mountaintop removal and mining, generally; this report by Oxfam and Earthworks looks primarily at the impacts of gold mining - it's disturbingly global in its scope. If you're thinking about what you can do to challenge these megaprofiteering monster companies, No Dirty Gold offers some ideas.

Jadugoda: The disgusting underbelly of India's nuclear industry

Paid a visit yesterday to our planetary caretaker friends over at Intercontinental Cry and have since spent every possible online moment educating myself about India’s uranium and nuclear power industries. Crazed and wanton don’t even begin to cover it. Uranium mining is consistently written off as a necessary evil by nuclear energy advocates, including some among the ‘Stop Climate Change’ crowd, who are evidently willing to sacrifice anything in the interests of clean air and predictable weather patterns. Don’t get me wrong, i care about air quality, extreme weather, desertification, etc. as much as any environmentalist, but i don’t believe nuclear power is the solution, in large part because of the actual power source, which is not some monolithic, theoretically earthquake-proof reactor, but uranium ore, mined on a massive scale, generating a lethal legacy to which ‘long-term’ doesn’t do justice.

Jadugoda has been referred to as ‘India’s Navajo Nation’, which under any other circumstances would be considered a great compliment, given the incredible beauty of Navajo lands. Located in the eastern state of Jharkhand, it has a 40+ year history of uranium mining and levels of contamination and negative health effects that reflect this. While it may be true that Jharkhand is an ‘environmentally friendly state [that] has lots of tourism potential. Whether you like pristine nature or the thrill of adventure, whether you are on a religious introspection, or health rejuvenation, Jharkhand can enchant your senses,’ with an estimated 48,000 tonnes of uranium ore in its bedrock, it seems fair to say that enchantment will require some strategic touring, a lengthy list of areas to avoid.

The problems at Jadugoda detailed in a 2010 WISE-Uranium report include displaced persons, political repression of displaced persons, a long, on-going history of labor union strikes, repeated pipeline bursts and tailings spills, health crises and lack of responsible government oversight. Given that the Uranium Corporation of India Ltd. (UCIL) is a public sector holding of India’s Department of Atomic Energy (DEA), the level of government complicity in ignoring and/or denying the problems at all of the country’s uranium mines is hardly a shock. It’s important to note that UCIL not only operates 6 mines in Jharkhand, but also has ore processing plants there to leach the ore and then mill the uranium for use in nuclear reactors. A public hearing is being held today to discuss UCIL's plans to extend the life of the Jadugoda mine, and while one wants to hope said extension will be denied, the overall picture of India’s nuclear ambitions leads this writer to expect otherwise.

The Jharkhandi Organization Against Radiation (JOAR) has been staging protests locally and at UCIL hearings for many years now, in addition to conducting their own environmental and health monitoring activities. The film Buddha weeps in Jadugoda offers an in-depth look at what they have been faced with and is full of personal testimonies that certainly rival the horrific experiences of those still suffering from the Bhopal catastrophe. . In one segment of the film, a Deputy Manager of a mill is speaking to a group of local villagers and, after explaining how there will be little uranium left in the waste stream, he has the audacity to make the situation sound almost poetic:

yes, the harmful dust may fly over you

but it is as safe as the sand in the river

but do not worry

we are here to protect you

the energy rays that come out will not reach your homes

it will become gas and go up

without harming you in any way

i'm convinced people gets these kinds of managerial jobs not because they're good managers or engineers, but because they get high marks when it comes to treating others with arrogance, hubris and outright idiocy. Here is part 4 of the film, focusing on the health problems people have been facing. Indian Doctors For Peace And Development published a study in 2007, Black Magic of Uranium at Jadugoda, which documents these at several villages near mining sites. They found that 4.5% mothers reported congenital birth defects, while nearly 10% report death of infants due to congenital defects. Higher rates of sterility and cancers affect the indigenous people disproportionately.

Reading about situations like this always leads me to ask about motivation; in this case, what is driving India to produce so much uranium. i found a very informative slide show put together by UCIL, reflecting such bold ambitions for India’s nuclear power program that one can’t help but wonder if these folks have been drinking the contaminated village water. The country has a 3 stage nuke power program that includes Pressurized Heavy Water Reactors, Boiling Water Reactors, Faster Breeder Reactors and Thorium-based reactors; they are also planning to construct 2 VVERs (Russian designed). The projected power potentials (in megawatts) go from 10,000 MWe in Stage One (PHWRs), to 530,000 MWe in Stage Two (Fast Breeder Reactors), to POWER POTENTIAL IS VERY LARGE in Stage Three (Thorium Based Reactors). Surely and under the circumstances, ‘very large’ is an inadequate, fantasy caliber assessment for long-term energy output. If AREVA or TEPCO came out with that, you know the stockholders would just laugh them out of the boardroom. At any rate, India’s DEA has big plans for a so-called clean energy future, but like all grande national plans, ironies abound.

In addition to the irony of devastating environment and health with more and bigger uranium mines in order to ‘go clean’, the country will still need to import uranium and this they are having trouble doing because of their refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT). In 2008, Kevin Rudd got the Australian government to veto selling uranium to India until it signed the NPT, and since then, other countries have joined the ban against uranium sales to New Delhi. According to The Australian, ‘Depletion of its uranium reserves caused India's production of nuclear power to fall last decade. Its 19 nuclear plants produce only 4 per cent of its electricity, but that level is expected to doubled over the next 25 years as new plants are commissioned.’ The irony, of course, is that the purpose of the NPT was to promote ‘peaceful’ i.e. energy, applications of nuclear materials, yet even though India needs the energy more than it needs a few hundred nuclear warheads, they are sacrificing the former out of principle (i suppose) to possess the latter. Never fear, a solution is at hand. Bloomberg reported earlier this month that Nuclear Power Corp. of India is considering a venture with state-run UCIL to start buying mines overseas. Maybe they’ll move into Navajo country, wouldn’t that be ironic to the extreme?

There are few issues as pressing as energy in this century, because its ripple effects are so strong. JOAR and its peer organizations at uranium mines around the world may not have all the answers, though my guess is that they are probably more concerned than the rest of us when it comes to finding a way forward for energy and climate that incorporates values of environmental justice and sustainability into the broader equation. Uranium mining runs counter to those values, and no matter how clean and advantageous the nuclear power lobby makes those reactors look, there is no escaping what lies underneath them, no way around the damage inflicted by uranium mining. I, for one, do not want to see a group of congenitally damaged descendants who live atop tailing sites left carrying the ball after the last reactor is shut down, cracked apart or washed away in a tsunami.

Circling in on the Arctic Circle

Denmark is laying claim to the North Pole. i asked myself why a country would do that and what ownership of the pole would mean - for Denmark and the rest of the world. One can't imagine that this is somehow related to cornering the seasonal market on elves and reindeer. Nor does it seem that the costs of administering new territory of such strategic importance would be offset by pocketing fees from the annual North Pole Marathon. The magnetic dip pole is moving about 40 miles/year towards Russia, which, among other things, is causing enormous problems for the aviation infrastructure; surely Denmark does not want to have to subsidize yet more renovations at Heathrow, et al. or suddenly find a fleet of Russia submarines calling Danish territory 'home'. Obviously, the Danes' motivation must lay elsewhere.

An article at European Geostrategy last week states that of the five High Arctic States (Russia, United States, Canada, Norway and Denmark/Greenland), 'All but Denmark have... explicitly identified the Arctic as a key part of their national energy security policies. ' This same piece cites a USGS study that 'suggests that thirty percent of the estimated ninety billion barrels of oil and twenty-eight percent of the 1667 trillion cubic meters of gas fall into zones (beyond the continental shelf of a given state) that are... currently contested.' Of course. Arctic oil and gas - i should have known that immediately. Evidently though, the geostrategists spoke too soon, because Denmark is now incorporating annexation of the North Pole territory into its official Danish-Greenlandic-Faroese policy objectives for the coming decade.

It's plausible that Denmark's policy might be coming from a desire to support the Greenlanders' development strategies, rather than risk Greenland becoming fully independent and thereby no longer giving Denmark preferential access to its energy resources or military bases. Well, there i've gone and contradicted my own supposition: no altruism here. Backing the policies of Greenland's current administration must certainly contravene an array of Danish environmental and wildlife protection policies; at the very least, extracting more fossil fuels does not fit with its ambitious 2020 goals for greenhouse gas reduction. Contravention, however, is what right wing governments generally do best.

The Nuuk Declaration, just signed on 12 May 2011 by 10 participating states of the Arctic Council (the aforementioned five, plus Finland, Sweden, the Faroe Islands and Iceland), reads very nicely from environmental, indigenous rights and food security standpoints, but intent and action are forever at odds in such international memoranda. It's hard to envision how more oil and gas exploration are compatible with 'developing best practices in the prevention of marine oil pollution', just as it is unclear how indigenous rights are to be secured when no indigenous nations were included in the council's negotiations. Greenland is giving Cairn Energy - or perhaps Capricon, its 'nonlisted subsidiary' (whatever that means) - licenses for exploratory drilling over 102,000 square kilometers off Greenland's coast. The company posted $1.6 billion in revenues for last year and has major operations in India, Albania and Spain. As of yet, there don't appear to have been any mishaps in their Arctic operations, but the Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico hadn't had a troublesome history either, until it exploded. If the terms of the declaration are ever realized, then at least whichever country is responsible for the next big Arctic oil slick won't be alone in trying to (unsuccessfully) make it go away.

Back to the North Pole. Claims are apparently to be presented to the UN for a June 2014 decision, so if this matter is of interest/concern to anyone, you've got time to try and influence the outcome. The best place to start, i would think, is finding out what the policy of your own government is on the issue of releasing international territories into the exclusive hands of a single nation. The NOAA has a webcam on the true pole, so if you're ever curious about what's going on up there, this link should give you a direct line to the march of penguins, slaughter of seals, planting of national flags or whatever else happens to be in temporal focus. The cloud from Iceland's latest volcanic eruption seems to be moving in the opposite direction, so if you can't sleep and want a taste of White Night, now's your chance - before Denmark pulls the plug.

Good luck with that

Obama has 'demanded' that Israel pull back to its 1967 borders. How bold and innovative the president has become since catching the US' archenemy last month. Bravo! Predictably, Netanyahu's first response is that 'Israel could never withdraw to borders that were "indefensible"'. Given Israeli activity on its borders last week, in which none of its own citizens were injured but plenty of others were, it's hard to grasp how much more defensibility they need. This may be especially true on the Syrian border, where they could just pull their units back from Golan and set them up on lawn chairs to watch Galilee sunsets with one eye and Syria with the other.

At any rate, i do wish Obama the best of luck negotiating with a state which, aside from setting terms of weapons sales agreements, has historically rejected the entire concept of negotiations. As long as the dollars keep pouring in, why should they do otherwise? The EU has embraced the same type of relationship with Israel, 'demanding' it end the occupation of Palestine (that would mean retreating to the same borders Obama cited), while concurrently pursuing further integration of Israel into the EU's economy and vice versa. The BDS movement on both sides of the Atlantic will hardly make a dent in these massive coffers, though i wouldn't say that makes it a wasted, pointless effort. The problem remains that in spite of all the international rhetoric inicating otherwise, Israel always gets what it wants and does what it wants, the intransigent state extraordinaire with a tightly knit entourage of G20 enablers.

Well, that was prescient

The Project for Excellence in Journalism at the Pew Research Center released a report last week that looks at how people in the United States access and use internet news sites. An overview of the results is here, with links to detailed analyses by topic. Among these – here’s where my own little blog turns out to be prescient: ‘Drudge Report: Small Operation, Large Influence’.

As Jim Carr of the NY Times writes: ‘Yes, Mr. Drudge is a conservative ideologue whose site also serves as a crib sheet for the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity… [The Drudge Report] is, in its own way, a kind of utility, with stable traffic of about 12 million to 14 million unique visitors every month no matter what kind of news is breaking. Everyone goes there because, well, everyone else goes there. ‘ Considering there are over 300 million people in the US, there is relief in knowing that only 5% use Drudge as a guide to what they read; what did surprise me is that the sites most Drudge users are driven to are Yahoo News, MSNBC and CNN, respectively. i suppose i expected more reactionary linkages, but that probably just reflects my own view of those sites as bland, part of the general cerebral meltdown. They should all just follow The Onion's lead and say outright, "Telling you what we want you to know."

Honestly, i’m not on a mission to keep people away from The Drudge Report. It is what it is. The links there statistically come quite close to what people are driven to from Facebook – as least in the US. i think what this shows overall is that when people want to read and recommend news, they shoot from the hip. We all want exposure to lots of stuff without knowing a great deal about any of it - the nature of the information overload beast. A couple of decades ago, i killed my television. By contrast, i treat my laptop as something close to holy… yet we must remain ever vigilant. At the risk of ending up in Lars von Triers 2^nd class coach to purgatory, i’m reminded of Adolf Hitler’s remark that ‘all propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach.' The issue isn’t so much the propaganda as it is the quality of the audience.

Where's my weekly dose of soma?

Yesterday i was woken by a phone call - way too early for a Sunday morning, might add - one of my students, screaming into my ear, 'We won! We won!' What the f*ck?? 'Eurovision! Azerbaijan won!!!' i'm thinking to myself, 'ask me now if i care,' yet ever the polite foreign guest, i did my best to feign interest - even enthusiasm - understanding immediately why the city's noise level was totally off the charts (yes, pun intended) last night, cringing at the realization that the coming week is going to meet all my criteria for cultural hell.

i do love thinking about ministers arguing over dismantling Schengen while the rest of Europe and its wannabe masses are fussing over dance costumes. Something of a Huxleyian brilliance in that, no? Out and about in the afternoon, i noticed that the urban wildlife was also frantically running around like - well, like rats, which is what they were. A second poignant vision, almost too much metaphor for someone who didn't get enough sleep.

Anticipating that Eurovision will be THE number one topic in all my classes this week, i dutifully checked out the Guardian UK's contest blog and then immediately wished i hadn't.

Our hosts for the evening are Anka, who is wearing a red dress like a 70s shagpile rug and a over-tight ponytail; Judith, who is wearing Bacofoil and doing the French bits, and a man called Stefan who is the actual Swedish Chef off the Muppets. He is talking about TV vankings. I hope these are rankings.

Ah, there's nothing like a bit of set-piece intro comedy, is there? Lena can't perform last year's winning song, Satellite, because she is also competing this evening, so Stefan and Anke are performing a rockabilly version.

Imagine how bad that could possibly be, and then multiply it by about 7 MILLION.

They have no been joined by 43 Lena lookalikes waving the flags of Europe. And now the actual Lena, doing the final chorus. And a full swing band. And many, many, fireworks.

My head hurts.

i stopped there cuz my head hurt, too. This is just NOT something i'm ever going to care about. Over on facebook, i'm inundated with Nakhba news and Israel's IDF shooting at people on all their borders. You want bright lights and meaningful crooning? Here's my eurovision antidote.

Drudging up the Drudge

Blogspot went down and my two most recent posts have returned to draft status = the graphics ‎remain but all the text has vanished. Bummer. Evidently they are still restoring files, so maybe my ‎work will magically reappear... lesson learned: do the writing elsewhere, so it can be saved on the hard ‎drive. Duh. It is very difficult to rewrite something that's already been edited and then tweaked per ‎literary light bulb. Norman Mailer said that writing 2 good pages a day was an admirable achievement ‎and i'm fairly certain that by 'good', he didn't mean 'easily regurgitated'. True, i'm a far, far cry from ‎Mailer, but that only makes it harder to put the words together again.‎

i guess cuz i was angry about the blog and needed to redirect, or maybe because the atmosphere at my workplace has been rapidly degenerating as closing of the school draws near - for whatever reason, i wandered over to Drudge Report... some things don't ever change... he's still putting out some bizarre, disturbing stuff. Instantly reminded why i've avoided the site for so long, i.e. since about 9/12/2001. Checking it today – well, at least he’s consistent. "Boy rides out storm in dryer" relates the true story of a kid's survival during recent Oklahoma tornado. News of the weird, fair enough. "Mitch would pick Condi as VP" turns out to be totally misleading, since the entire 3 page article is about Mitch Daniel's wife and their rocky marriage; Condi Rice is mentioned only once, in the very last line. i'm sure Matt Drudge would love to see her stalking liberal scum in the White House corridors again, but as far as headlines go, this is pure political trash. Shall i continue? Ok, one more. Walt Disney MegaCorp has trademarked the Seal Team 6 of capture-the-bad-guy fame and is planning to come out with ‘clothing, footwear, headwear, toys, games and “entertainment and education services,” among other things.’ Great. i hope they trademark Mossad next, big profits in Beirut for sure. Thanks Mr. Drudge for keeping us abreast of Disney’s latest money hungry effrontery.

Granted, Drudge is basically a clipping service for people who want to overdigest their slovenly portions of sensationalist ‘news’, so it may be unfair to lash out criticism – they’re just linking to stuff other news agencies are publishing. Nonetheless, i won’t be going there again for another decade, at least. It did take my mind off the blogspot problem,though, which is ultimately the higher purpose being served.

BTW, i was surprised to see that Facebook went ahead on their/its own accord and set up a page for this blog on Networked Blogs. If you happen to read this via FB, please consider adding yourself as a follower. If you're reading directly from blogspot, you could still list yourself. i'm all alone here, it would make me feel better, inspired to keep at it... i know lurking is usually more fun and all, but i'm asking nicely, so do it! :-)

Sorry, it's $27 million

Thought i was being too cynical yesterday? i think this goes to show that i have not lost my capitalist instincts.

We're all powerless here, except for the prez

The first time it happened was about a week after i'd moved into my flat, about 2-1/2 weeks after arriving in Baku. A not too terribly cold night, i'd taken a rambling, roundabout route home, soaking up the sights, sounds and odors of residential night life. When i got to my own street, i suddenly realized it was VERY dark; not dark as in there's no moonlight, but rather urban darkness, as in there's no electricity. My local butcher was conducting business by candlelight, other shops were using kerosene lanterns... clearly, this was not an unusual occurrence. Up four slights of stairs in total darkness - spooky but adrenalizing - when i entered the flat and looked out the balcony window, all i could do was laugh. Business owners and bars on my little side street were depending on paraffin stocks, but in the zone of City Hall, no voltage is spared to maintain Baku's image as a beacon of light shining on the shores of the Caspian's fossil fuel fortune.

i can't say that i hadn't been warned Azerbaijan has 'utility issues' and for the next few weeks, Wednesdays were my neighborhood power outage day. Other people i know here have either much less regularity or normalized daily shutdowns (no water from 9:00-17:00 every day of the week), so i was actually feeling somewhat blessed by the predictability of what was, overall, a relatively benign situation. However, i also realized on that first evening that loss of power means loss of water, because the water pumps installed to solve the low water pressure problem in apartment buildings here run on electricity. Without the pump, not a drop to drink. While that first night was kind of third world romantic-like, with the candles, 3 layers of clothing and Book I of The Iliad ('He sat himself down away from the ships with a face as dark as night, and his silver bow rang death as he shot his arrow in the midst of them'), being able to turn on the gas stove to make coffee is a moot amenity when there's no water to fill the pot. By the time i'd gotten it together to go out and buy some bottled water, the power had been restored.

The other day, i came home in the afternoon to have a job interview on skype and of course, even though it was Thursday, there wasn't any electricity. Total karmic no go zone. This time it was because Baku Electric had turned the switch off - that's what i get for trusting a new and now ex office manager with both my money and functionality. No warning notice - i guess they figure that people already know they haven't paid, so why bother to waste paper reminding them? Two days without water and electric, working 12-hour stints, is not really conducive to achieving my low stress objectives. My school was on the second day of phone lines being down, hence no internet access... i've omitted here my mid-winter crisis of going 10 days without water when the electrical workers refitting my building cut the line to my pump, but you get the general picture. The concept of having control over one's basic needs gets rather abstract; people have private cisterns and tanks, keep lots of batteries and candles on hand, but there are neither sympathetic comraderies nor complaints. This is just how life is, we are all at the mercy of inept, faceless forces and errant urban planning.

On the bright side, last month i found this notice stuck in the door, loosely translated for me as the president of the republic has decided to be gracious and relieve everyone from having to pay the water bill for a month. If an azeri speaker happens to read this post and is willing to give a more exact translation, have at it. i've always assumed there had to be some benefit(s) to living in a benevolent big D, and i guess this is one of them. An omnipotent leader can mimic the IMF and just make all our debts go away. Wow! When has a US prez ever done that for the working man? Not in my lifetime. It's comforting to know that at least one person is in control of the utility situation, with no Enron equivalents to muck things up. Maybe next month, we'll get free wifi? With all the moaning going on over royalty these days, i think people are missing the bigger picture. There's something to be said for having a national sugar daddy, someone with the means to just wash all our power struggles away.

So who gets the $25 million reward?

Breaking news. Ding dong, the sheikh is dead. i just love it when they get the bad guy. i'm listening to MSN's live feed and Dick Gregory has Richard Engel on the line to tell us that this means the war on terror is over, democracies can now blossom freely throughout the Middle East and we can all feel safe once again. What a relief! i know that i am definitely going to sleep better tonight and i'm sure the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan feel the same.

Of course, they could never have brought him in alive - that was probably a standing mandate from the W Dick administration, intent on covering their own tracks (background sounds of champagne corks popping and ribs sizzling in Crawford). It does look like we'll get a public viewing of the corpse, which is bound to incite an endless stream of fascinating conspiracy rants from Alex Jones proving that the same people who dressed up "Osama's" body for the cameras faked the moon landing back in 1969. Maybe he'll go on display at the WTC memorial site? That would be a sure way to shut the Obama-is-a-compulsive-liar birthers up.

Don't get me wrong, i'm not shedding any tears for this guy. Generally speaking, i don't have any positive things to say about men like bin Laden. That's exactly why i'm still asking why Cheney, Rumsfield, Wolfowitz and Bush are still at large. If they're going to hunt down war criminals, shouldn't they go for the whole gang?

Time for a musical interlude

Health, Beauty and further proof that wearing a watch is a bad idea

Nothing quite so profoundly reminds me what it means to be American like getting sick. Last week i got the flu and all my cultural conditioning immediately kicked in: calling in sick is a sign of weakness and indicates lack of commitment to one's job, going to a doctor is only necessary as a last resort, the need to rest is a euphemism for the desire to be lazy. Logically, i know none of these attitudes can survive much scrutiny; however, cultural responses to unexpected situations - i was going to say 'stressful situations', but only an American would classify illness as a form of stress - are not based on logic, but rather on normative behavior.

In the US - especially for those without health insurance - the norm is to work until you drop and as soon as you can stand up again, get back to work. It's no small coincidence that Americans are so inclined to try self-help remedies, women moreso than men. The principle difference between us and Europeans is that much of the alternative/complimentary medicine in Europe is practiced by doctors, whereas in America, we have learned to avoid doctor visits as much as possible and do our best treating ourselves. Over a decade ago, i contracted lyme disease and believe me when i say that i did a lot more work than any of the doctors i went to in figuring out how to recover and then manage this disease. 'It takes a lot of work to get well' fits very nicely with the entire cultural ethos (physical therapy is obviously an exception).

At any rate, while i was being a lazy bum, staying out of the rain and (intense Caspian) wind, drinking a catatonia-inducing quantity of Theraflu or whatever its Russian equivalents are called, i did manage to save myself the expense of going back to a hair salon by covering up those gray roots in the comfort of my own home. This is not to say that i regret having experienced the pleasures of an Azeri salon - au contraire! To spend an afternoon in the midst of so many black-haired beauties carrying out their feminine mandates was precisely the sort of perspicuous adventure any armchair anthropologist would crave.

It's probably safe to say that in a place where the bars and tea houses are predominantly exclusive to males, upscale beauty salons become a sort of female clubhouse. There seemed to be a number of women there just to gossip, drink tea and compare accessories. Smokers came and went through the back door. The only way to distinguish workers from customers was in the footwear, with employees sporting every color of plastic slipper or epsadrillo knock-off imaginable. Instead of music, a muted tv screen was set to a Turkish music video channel: sexy girls in sexy clothes, being drooled over by sexy, lustful men. The whole atmosphere felt almost conspiratorial.

While i was in 'the chair', a would-be Avon lady stood in front of me and methodically went through her entire bag of cheap, glitzy hair pins and jewelry. It didn't seem to matter to her that i wasn't going to buy anything; in a country of high underemployment, not making a sale here was just as good a way to spend the day as not making a sale somewhere else. Anyway, each hair stylist has 3-4 assistants who do lots of mindless tasks, such as taking the place of hair clips, (used in western salons) by holding the sections of hair that aren't being cut or colored, so there was a little mob around me who were happy to ooh and ahh over the contents of her various satchels.

Being a non-Azeri client, i was an item of obvious interest and practically everyone who worked there had to come over and get the low down on what exactly was being done to my voluminous locks. Cups of tea came, cooled and were replaced by new, hot ones. There were several discussions about ideal cuts and styles, followed by repeated disbelief that i only wanted a trim, as if i was insulting their sense of feminine propriety. My hair was dried simultaneously by three different girls while their mentor looked on, giving tips on pulling and fluffing. Far too much fussing for me, but i had to assure them all over and over that yes, the color was good and yes, the cut was what i wanted and yes, i would come back again. When i was finally finished and waiting to pay, in came a woman with a crate of kiwis to sell, which seemed like the perfect finale for this little afternoon comedy. Surprisingly, tips are not de rigueur here, which was fine since i was already paying way more than i'd expected. But no complaints. They gave me the full treatment, as it were, and it was definitely worth the experience.

Clearly, health and beauty are complex cultural realms, especially across national divides. Nonetheless, it was beyond shocking to read that wearing a watch - which has always seemed to me such an internationally accepted form of accessorizing that it doesn't even count as noteworthy - was responsible for no small number of men being renditioned to Guantanamo. Evidently someone(s) at al-Qaeda decided Casios were the perfect gift for their recruits; hardly as classy as a Rolex, but Casios do come with all the practical features a materially deprived, mountain-based terrorist needs: shock resistance, altimeter, solar power and a multi-functional alarm (one imagines that working for Sheikh bin Laden, effective management of alarms would be high on the list of priority skills). The lesson here is that sometimes it might make sense to look a gift horse in the mouth and just depend on the sun and stars to set up your attack plan, as warriors did in the time of Xerxes. Undone by a watch? Well, for a religious fundamentalist it's probably more palatable than being undone by a beautiful woman. But let's not tell the ladies here that, we wouldn't want to spoil whatever romantic fantasies may lurk in the minds of those yearning for eternal beauty, however contrived.

Gratulálok Magyarország! Hála istennek!

Catching up with Spiegel Online this evening, i scrolled past all the radioactive wastelands articles to learn that the Hungarian parliament, under Viktor Orbán's inspired tutelage, has finally voted on a new constitution. On Kossuth tér these days, it is 2011 going on 1935. The Germans and various EU others are not very pleased. Spiegel quotes Süddeutsche Zeitung:

"The constitution enshrines a spirit of ideological, ethnic intolerance, both externally and domestically. Some are being reminded of the fascist rhetoric in Europe between the world wars. Neighboring countries are getting unpleasant memories of the cultural arrogance and power of the Hungary of old, whose Magyarization programs they were subjected to. The new constitution claims that the state of Hungary represents all other Magyars, meaning the three million living in neighboring countries."

Orbán's spokesmen responded to the barrage of criticism coming from Germany with true freedom fighter spirit. "Hungary had to tolerate being instructed what to do or what to include in its constitution from the capitals of other countries for long decades. That era is now over." We have to give the Hungarian political establishment high marks when it comes to never learning from their own history. The purgers later become the purged. This new constitution is so heavily laden with nationalist rhetoric that one can't help but wonder if the motivation is not so much to pat themselves on the back for being Europe's most outstanding race as it is to convince themselves they didn't need papal payouts to set themselves up as an independent kingdom in the first place. Hungarians, in my experience, are even more schizophrenic than Americans when it comes to their identity.

The Fidesz party constitution takes a deep bow towards hefty domestic breeding and enshrines marriage as a solely heterosexual union, which inevitably means the Budapest police can stop whining about traffic obstruction and just ban the annual gay pride march on the grounds that it is unconstitutional. Yet the principle points of contention that have got the Hungarian left-center oppostion and all the centrist EU politicos up in arms involve the extent to which the ruling party will be allowed to cement their economic, judicial and social policies for years to come by making it virtually impossible to change them, even if Fidesz falls out of polling favor in the next elections (2014?). Thankfully, the media law enacted earlier this year should go a long way in ensuring that radical, aka 'anti-Hungarian', opinions are kept out of the public sphere, at least for as long as Fidesz remains in power.

i'm sure i'm not alone in thinking there is serious irony here, considering the circumstances at the root of King Viktor's re-ascension to power. i've been saving this video link for just the right moment... The names of liars in residence may have changed some, but the perversion of truth remains ever constant. Spoken word by Henry Rollins.

Is that all there is?

i'm fully aware how immature and catty this is going to sound, but this is my blog, not Glenn Mr. Maturity Beck's. One of the things i have enjoyed about living in Baku is that whenever i come across a swarthy Texan clad in layers of NorthFace garments, i ask if he works in the oil industry and the response i get is always as follows: he will hang his head, penitently nod and then look me shamefully n the eyes and say, "Yes, I work for BP... but I'm an engineer". The professional qualifier is evidently supposed to induce some level of sympathy, help me understand that not being here to drain the Caspian's reserves (adding billions to BP's coffers) would be a waste of his education and brilliant mind, or render him and his family destitute or victims of some other Ayn Rand nightmare. The main thing is that these guys are all clearly ashamed of BP which - especially after the Horizon disaster last year - they should be. For the first time in my life, oil men are not admonishing me for being uninformed and reactionary; i could get used to that.

Now to get catty and rancorous. This morning i received an email from the Gulf Restoration Network that may place me on the wrong side of this equation, drinking beer with the BP engineers - or karmically worse. Here's what they have to say to me on the anniversary of the Horizon explosion:

You don't have to go to great lengths to play an important role in reminding the nation that a year after the BP deepwater drilling disaster, the Gulf still needs the nation's support. I was out in the wetlands yesterday with an out-of-work oyster fishermen, and I can tell you the oil is still here. Unfortunately, Congress hasn't passed a single bill to restore or protect the Gulf after BP dumped over 200 million gallons of oil into our nation's energy sacrifice zone.

You want to do something though, don't you? Here are two simple things you can do for the Gulf right now—without even leaving your desktop.

1) Update your status on Facebook and Twitter to voice the call for Gulf recovery. Sample text: 1 year ago the worst oil disaster in U.S. history began. BP’s oil is still here! Help restore the Gulf at http://bpdrillingdisaster.org.

Make sure to link to http://bpdrillingdisaster.org.

2) Change your Facebook and Twitter image to the PeliCAN design on the right to draw attention to BP's on-going disaster in the Gulf. Just save the image to your computer and upload it to your social media profiles.

Having vowed to not use facebook this week and still sparing myself the hashtag inundations of twitter, you can immediately see the oil and water quandry GRN has placed me in. I cannot change my profile picture to a pelican. i cannot update my status to admonishing the US Congress. i cannot flood my friends' walls with horrific pictures of dead dolphins, blackened beaches, and stories of out-of-work Gulf fisherman. In short, not using facebook today puts me squarely in the ranks of the apathetic, the inactive, the oil industry doormats.

Am i wrong to feel sickened by this? If not sickened, then disheartened? i get that an augmentation of collective rage can be societally powerful, though i'm not sure if rage can exist in any real sense when manifest in the form of bytes and pixels. Call me naive, call me arrogant, call me a techno neophyte, i really don't care. It's not so much the use of these mediums that disturbs me but the fact that activism is now so focused on them. i'm definitely yearning for those old school, cut & paste flyers, surround the offices of Chevron days. But hey, whatever makes the Gulf activists feel better is ok, they're the ones living directly in the aftermath. i just hope for their sakes that facebook and twitter are not all there is.

Anyone who claims to be surprised by this must not know the history of US military intervention and the drug trade. The triad of military action, paramilitary/insurrectionist drug runners and subsistence farmers has long been characteristic of US foreign invasions, as well as more surreptitious CIA operations from Asia to Latin America. We knew from the onset that Afghanistan would be no different, and Patrick Cockburn likewise reported in 2007 that Iraq's opium fields have been brought back to life as a direct outcome of circumstances created by the US invasion there: conditions of primal anarchy are ideal for criminal gangs and drug smugglers and producers.

Afghanistan is an incredibly poor country. According to the Asian Development Bank, "Despite significant development gains since the 2001 ouster of the former Taliban regime, the people of Afghanistan continue to suffer widespread and growing insecurity; weak governance; inadequate health care, education, and other public services; and gender inequality. Lack of employment opportunities and endemic poverty continue among a large segment of the population, with two thirds of the population living below or just above the country’s official poverty line." That the US/UN lackeys currently trying to run the country publicly posit Afghan farmers would choose wheat over opium at current prices is more of the same dog and pony show we have seen for decades. The whole region is awash in heroin now, and i'm guessing that as the number of disenfranchised, disillusioned youth whose families, et al. have already been shattered by violence and despair increases, the inclination to escape reality by chasing the proverbial dragon will grow proportionately.

Escape From Facebook

It's Digital Detox Week, a great idea for people like myself whose worst nightmare has become the death, destruction or disappearance of my laptop. i'm not joking about this; just last week i dreamt that i got hit by a van (highly realistic Baku scenario) and instinctively used my computer case to buffer the impact. Laying on the ground in pain, all i could think about was that my computer was wreaked, which felt more devastating than any damage which might have befallen my own, corporeal being. i've no doubt that i'm one of millions in the world today who have developed a serious, insidious fear of losing net access, webcams, or worst of all, having their facebook accounts deleted. Not absolutely sure, but i'm guessing this is a contemporary manifestation of barophobia.

Complete detox from the digital world is definitely not in the cards during a regular work week. On top of having to use a computer to do what i'm paid to do, i've got an international job search going on, this blog, an unrelenting backlog of personal correspondence... what i can do, and have decided to do, is stay off facebook for a week, starting today. Oh, but wait! Shouldn't i post the link to this blogpost first? If i don't explain to everyone what i'm doing, does what i'm doing even matter? How can i network about not networking if i cease to use my networks? This conundrum has endless loops, but i won't falter. No facebook for a full 7 days will be good for me, a sort of digital world ramadan, testing my self-discipline for some higher spiritual Good.

Apparently unlike the vast majority of users, i do actually know 90% of the people in my facebook world, which means i'm well below the 8 new 'friends' per day par. The remaining 10% are folks i have shared political or artistic interests with, similar to the peripheral acquaintances one has in real social settings: the people you enjoy dancing with at parties but never quite manage to share a meal or go to a movie with. Some of my closest friends are not on facebook but i'm proud to say this has not resulted in them falling under my radar. i don't use facebook to chat for the sake of chatting (actually, i keep myself invisible to specifically avoid this), yet as most of my friends are involved in environmental/political/human rights work, i do use it as a source of recommended news and a place to discuss the events of the day. i like to think that the discussions i engage in are meaningful and relevant, and since my friends are all over the planet, it's great for being exposed to art, humor and various forms of weirdness that pop up around the globe.

There have, however, been downsides to the whole facebook experience. Posting something or making a brief 'status' statement that receives no comments feels akin to saying something to a room full of people and being completely ignored. When i first set up my account, i felt it was rude to not acknowledge everything my friends were posting, but keeping up with that became way too time consuming and since nobody else was doing it... Intellectually, given the medium, i have learned to adjust to this dynamic, but i can't help feeling that on some level it's not very healthy, psychologically. Why would you want to be 'friends' with someone you then repeatedly choose not to interact with? For people who derive social identity on the basic of their facebook activity, this could be damaging in subtle or even non-subtle ways.

Then there's the abbreviated opinions phenomenon, since short comment windows mandate short comments and people seem increasingly disinclined or unable to express themselves in more than 3 lines of text, anyway. Alternately, if you write more than 2 complete sentences or say something the least bit contentious, it's end of discussion (if one can even use the word 'discussion' for what is going on) or worse: you can be dealt that 'fuck you if you're too stupid to not agree with me' blow. i encounter this a lot, especially with friends of friends involved in cross-pollinated comment threads. Facebook has generated a new kind of phrasal speak, characterized by incomplete thoughts = weak thinking and rapid dismissal of alternative views. It would be easy to say that one reason i let this blog sit dormant for so long was because facebook distracted me, but the truth is that too much time on the site eroded my ability to write a full paragraph - to think through something long enough to have a full paragraph's worth of words to say about it. It might be positive - exciting, even - to regularly exchange information and ideas with so many diverse personalities, but when the end result is an intellectual meltdown, i'm not convinced that i wasn't better off just sticking to email.

While writing this, i've been listening to archives of an old friend's weekly music broadcast on Area 24 Radio, which i think is located somewhere in Westchester County, New York. This is someone i haven't seen for probably 20 years, yet thanks to facebook, i now have an outlet for random music requests and get to listen to T rifle through his eclectic music vault for two hours every week. So again, not everything about my Facebook experience has been negative, but taking a break is good, too. i listen to my students talk about how they use the site, see what gets posted on the pages of my Azeri acquaintances and realize that just as in the real world of social interaction, i am definitely on the edge of the social gaussian curve. i need to get off facebook for a week; some of them should consider getting off it for life.

You Need To Get Off Facebook from Świat Social Media on Vimeo.