recycling PET bottles

PET means polyethylene terephthalate, and it's just referred to as PET in Japan.

Apparently, you're supposed to remove the cap when you recycle a PET bottle. I only fully realized that today. Oops. Of course, that means that the lovely plastic cap does not get recycled, which is a bad thing.

Like we need more plastic which degrades very verrry slowly (slower than George Bush's brain, can you imagine that?) cluttering up the world. At least the aluminum bottles get completely recycled (I think). I will have to stop using PET bottles.

Turtles Can Fly

There's a really interesting review by the Japan Times about a Kurdish movie called Turtles can Fly.

Kaori Shoji:

war, by its nature, cannot be a cause for hope

north korea and bush

Kim Il Sung: "Give us a nuclear reactor, you heathens!"

Bush: "As if! Do we look stupid?"

Kim Il Sung: "Yes!"


I wonder if I'm getting a little too twisted.

Inspired by the news that North Korea is demanding a nuclear reactor from the U.S.

politics

I am becoming far too polemic about American politics. Yet it is very hard to be dispassionate about people dying.

on a more positive note

Al Gore is cool.

Bush made FEMA ineffective

From an essay on Privatizing FEMA (the organization responsible for handling disasters like Hurricane Katrina)

FEMA did not set a self-directed course towards disaster. A career professional who made it a model agency was replaced with a political crony who rendered it a useless mess. Now conservatives are crying out that Katrina has proved the public sector inefficient, and we should give the same leader who weakened FEMA the opportunity to award private contracts for future disaster-relief. We should trade political patronage for crony capitalism.

Bush's decisions transformed a remarkably efficient government agency into a fatally incompetent one, so conservatives want to let him do it a second time. It's completely insane. This isn't a private vs. public debate -- contrast Clinton's FEMA with Bush's version to see that. But the right would much prefer that it was. Democrats should make sure voters understand that Bush took a superb organization and destroyed it by handing control to a politically-connected incompetent. Republicans who demand we let him do it a second time in a less reversible manner should be laughed out of the room.

The Naval Medical Center in San Diego's Balboa Park was shut down to accommodate a visit by President George W. Bush Aug. 30, RAW STORY has learned, forcing patients to cancel chemotherapy treatments and hundreds of scheduled patient visits.

"I'm sorry ma'am, the President is coming for a photo op so we can't give you chemotherapy today."

And then he cancelled his photo op. So all these people were inconvenienced for nothing!

In other news, Barbara Bush says Things Working Out 'Very Well' for Poor Evacuees from New Orleans.

In fact, Bush thinks he was extraordinary with Katrina, while his wife thinks it's Hurricane Corrina.

Delusional family.

Actual reporting appears in New Orleans?

In the face of an obvious national failure, perhaps actual investigative reporting has returned to existence?

Journalists question official response to the catastrophe.

On "Meet the Press," Tim Russert cited President Bush's comment that no one anticipated the breaching of the New Orleans levees, saying: "How could the president be so wrong, so misinformed?" Russert also loudly lectured Chertoff on the dispatching of evacuees to the city's convention center: "There was no water, no food, no beds, no authority there. There was no planning."

The first to blow the whistle on the initially color-blind coverage was Slate media columnist Jack Shafer, who wrote Wednesday: "Race remains largely untouchable for TV because broadcasters sense that they can't make an error without destroying careers. That's a true pity. If the subject were a little less taboo, one of [the] anchors could have asked a reporter, 'Can you explain to our viewers, who by now have surely noticed, why 99 percent of the New Orleans evacuees we're seeing are African-American?' "

Third World scenes in New Orleans

An interesting article on poverty: The Daily Crush Of Poverty, Strong As Any Storm