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Bottled Water Wars

The Mayor of Seattle has signed an executive order banning the city's purchase of bottled water, just as San Francisco did last year. TreeHugger has the story and some relevant links.

As for me, I think I've got the bottled water problem licked, so to speak, at least for a while. I've been using New Wave Enviro's Better Water Filter with Corn-Based Bottle. The bottle is made from a corn-based polymer, so it won't leach phthalates, and the filter allows 90 refills of municipal tap water as it removes chlorine and 60 other contaminants. I have to say the bottle takes some getting used to (you have to suck and squeeze the water through the filter), but even plain tap water tastes good with this system. When you're done, the bottle is biodegradable and compostable. I get mine at Your Guide to Green.

The Lie, and How We Know It

It may well be true that Eliot Spitzer was brought down by the Mossad, Israel's national intelligence agency, but it was the lie that ended his governorship of New York. It was also the lie that ended careers for Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, Lewis Libby, and Richard Nixon. Some go to jail (Leona Helmsley, Marion Jones, Martha Stewart), but the list of cheaters is really long. And we can expect this list to get longer, even if the people there don't go on to achieve any kind of fame.

This past week, as I handed back mid-term exams, one of my students, who received an 88 on her exam, engaged me in this conversation:

As we enter the sixth year of the Cheney-Bush administration's $3 trillion folly in Iraq, we find that with so many other things to occupy the American public's attention, they don't have a clue as to what's happening to our troops in the Middle East. And if they keep this up, we will find ourselves with a rewritten history of the war, as British teachers discovered recently, although it gets harder to find out what is true or not. Even the events themselves seem to stymie us. Witness, for example, this weird observation from an expert:

And yet it could be so easy just to speak the truth. Mark Twain said, "If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything." Now that the Busheviks have created their own alternative universe—a bizzaro world in which the war in Iraq, itself a model of success, really has nothing whatsoever to do with the sinking US economy—it will take at least a generation to untangle the mess of lies that cloud the minds of distracted Americans. That is, if the US isn't already sold off by then.