SpaceKitty Wanderings

The first thing to know about traveling in Palestine is that it is as likely that you will not be able to get where you are going, and there is ~nothing~ you can do about that. There are over 200 checkpoints and roadblocks in the West Bank alone. Some of these are permanent, established checkpoints with strict rules about who passes and who doesn't, others are random roadblocks with concrete barriers, piles of dirt and stone, and still others are what they call flying checkpoints, where the Israeli army puts their jeeps in the middle of the road, and starts to check the Ids of everyone traveling.

The first checkpoint I went through was the Kalandia checkpoint. Everyone going into and out of Ramalla has to pass through it. Going into Ramalla, you simply get out of your taxi, pass through a very narrow turnstile, and get into a new taxi on the other side. At first it seemed like a small annoyance. But going out, people wait in lines of four hours or more to simply leave the city.

The second checkpoint that I didn't go through was the Huwara check point, leading into the city of Nablus. I am not allowed into Nablus, so a I took a taxi up a road which only allows settlers on it, sprinted up the side of a hill, and at the top another taxi picked me up and shuttled me over some mountains. This is how anyone who doesn't ~live~ in Nablus gets into the city.

Then there was the checkpoint getting out of Nablus where I saw a man who was blindfolded and standing in a toilet stall. He has been there for 7 hours.

I spoke with one man named Mohammed Ayesh, who was traveling from Nablus to Ramalla, which should take about an hour, I guess. On his trip, he was detained four seperate times. Once for four hours, once for three, once for one half an hour, and once for an hour.

And this has been the biggest lesson about the occupation, to me, so far. The occupation is absolutely people walking around with guns, people dying stupidly, for no reason, women giving birth and dying at checkpoints, and these sorts of high level crises. But the occupation is also about thousands of people waiting in line every day, to leave their houses, to get to work, to go to school, to return home in the evening. About stupid annoyances, harassment for no reason, senseless complications.

10:48:19 AM  comment []    

'Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink', Coleridge's 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner' declaims hoarsely. 

WC Fields would have approved as he claimed never to touch the stuff anyway, his excuse being that fish fornicate in it.

But the ancient mariner's modern day shipmates are likely to have holds full of one of the most ostentatiously useless consumer products of all: bottled water -- branded dihydrogen oxide.

Years ago, an entrepreneur tried to sell tins of fresh Scottish air to jaded Londoners. They were supposed to open it, sniff the fresh breeze that emanated and, if they followed the instructions, run twice around the block. 

They would feel better for it, the label said. Indeed. The enterprise eventually evaporated into thin air.

By contrast, bottled water is more of a commercial success, and increasing numbers of people are buying it in larger and larger quantities, even though benefits are equally illusory. 

All sorts of greenish individuals stock up on bottles of water rather than going to their kitchen sink and drinking the much cheaper generic alternative.

Do they ever stop to think of the damage they cause to the environment? 

For example, in New York supermarkets, apart from Perrier, you can get water from Scotland , Fiji and even Greenland , which is alleged to be melted glacier water. 

Think about it. Why should water that has been lying around since the last Ice Age, or maybe even the one before, collecting dioxins, lead, radioactive fallout, polar bear poop and, for all anyone knows, the occasional dead Inuit or Viking, set any acceptable standard for purity?

Then, to completely insult our intelligence, the water is bottled -- often in glass, no less, thus demanding huge energy expenditures to fuse the ingredients and smelt the bottle tops, or in plastic, demanding high hydrocarbon usage. 

Manufacturing either type of container emits huge amounts of greenhouse gases. 

During bottling, the water is often ozonated, introducing free radicals to kill the bacteria that would otherwise thrive on a long journey.

The bottles are then placed in shrink-wrapped non-biodegradable plastic units and stacked on disposable wooden palettes, deforesting whole regions, before being hauled by diesel-fueled trucks, which emit carbon particles and carbon dioxide, and loaded onto ships that burn the dirtiest of bunker fuels.

Finally, they arrive at your local store where you pay a $1 a bottle (or more) while cursing your city for charging the same amount for 500 gallons of some of the purest municipal water in the world.

Of course, not all bottled water travels such an environmentally deleterious voyage. No, sir. 

In New York, many of the firms selling bottled water to offices and homes take it straight from the city supply and put it in bottles. 

It is quite fitting, really, a bit like selling the Brooklyn Bridge on the installment plan.

Some bottles are then recycled, which means they are cleaned using water heated by burning fossil fuels, or melted at huge energy costs to make new glass. 

Alternatively, they're cast aside to clutter the beaches and landfills of the world. 

And then there are those ubiquitous plastic bottles that every health-conscious jogger -- indeed every pedestrian -- in Manhattan clutches talismanically in the summer heat. 

Never mind the way the discards clog the drains, ditches and beaches. 

Have they ever thought of the complex organic compounds that leach from the plastic into that 'pure spring water' they just bought at the neighborhood deli?

Unless of course they are drinking the allegedly naturally carbonated water that has been divested of bacteria with the introduction of carbon dioxide. 

They drink it, and then every burp helps melt a snowman somewhere in the world. Don[base ']t they feel the slightest twinge of guilt?

Green joggers should savor every last drop of that glacier melt bottled water. 

If they keep consuming a product that adds so much in greenhouse gases, soon there will be no icecaps left to bottle. 

And the sea levels will rise, forcing them to stock up on bottled water -- because although diluted with all that fresh water from the melted poles, the sea will be everywhere, and still too saline to drink.

Think before you drink! 

A trip to the kitchen to fill up on pure, cheap, low energy water will save the planet -- and your bank balance. 

Until of course, the IMF forces New York to privatize its water supply and you have to pay market prices for the stuff.

10:16:56 AM  comment []    

November 25, 2004
Guardsmen Say They're Facing Iraq Ill-Trained
* Troops from California describe a prison-like, demoralized camp in New Mexico that's short on gear and setting them up for high casualties.
By Scott Gold, Times Staff Writer

DOÑA ANA RANGE, N.M. [~] Members of a California Army National Guard battalion preparing for deployment to Iraq said this week that they were under strict lockdown and being treated like prisoners rather than soldiers by Army commanders at the remote desert camp where they are training.

More troubling, a number of the soldiers said, is that the training they have received is so poor and equipment shortages so prevalent that they fear their casualty rate will be needlessly high when they arrive in Iraq early next year. "We are going to pay for this in blood," one soldier said.

...

The fact that the National Guardsmen have undergone largely basic training suggests that Army commanders do not trust their skills as soldiers, said David Segal, director of the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland. That tension underscores a divide that has long existed between "citizen soldiers" and their active-duty counterparts, he said.

"These soldiers should be getting theater-specific training," Segal said. "This should not be an area where they are getting on-the-job training. The military is just making a bad situation worse."

The soldiers at Doña Ana emphasized their support for the war in Iraq. "In fact, a lot of us would rather go now rather than stay here," said one, a specialist and six-year National Guard veteran who works as a security guard in his civilian life in Southern California.

The soldiers also said they were risking courts-martial or other punishment by speaking publicly about their situation. But Staff Sgt. Lorenzo Dominguez, 45, one of the soldiers who allowed his identity to be revealed, said he feared that if nothing changed, men in his platoon would be killed in Iraq.

Dominguez is a father of two [~] including a 13-month-old son named Reagan, after the former president [~] and an employee of a mortgage bank in Alta Loma, Calif. A senior squad leader of his platoon, Dominguez said he had been in the National Guard for 20 years.

"Some of us are going to die there, and some of us are going to die unnecessarily because of the lack of training," he said. "So I don't care. Let them court-martial me. I want the American public to know what is going on. My men are guilty of one thing: volunteering to serve their country. And we are at the end of our rope."

9:21:48 AM  comment []