Libby MT

I was glad to hear about this on the radio this morning:

" W. R. Grace & Company, a worldwide chemical company driven into bankruptcy by hundreds of millions of dollars in asbestos poisoning claims, has agreed to pay the federal government $250 million for environmental cleanup around its mining operations in Libby, Mont. ....

The settlement announced on Tuesday takes account of that payment and directs that future payments be directed to a special E.P.A. account to be used to clean schools, homes and businesses in Libby that are contaminated with carcinogenic asbestos dust.

The material came from a vermiculite mine and processing plant the company operated in and near Libby from 1963 to 1990. The vermiculite, which is used in insulation and other building materials, was contaminated with high levels of asbestos.

Asbestos is known to cause lung cancer and mesothelioma, a fatal tumor of the lining of the chest and abdomen. Exposure to asbestos also causes scarring of lung tissue."

There is still a criminal case pending... I saw a documentary about this case awhile ago. Its probably on Netflix now. As much as I am for environmentalism and health, I also have a fondness for small-town Montana and Montanans because my sister was born there and we lived there a little while when I was a young child.

School Girl Crushes

Ditto what this post says about Obama- Not a crush exactly -- great admiration.... although I did have that one dream a couple of years ago and made the mistake of telling C about it and now everytime we're watching TV together and Senator Obama comes on, he says "there's your man" ;~)

And then yesterday I read about another HUGE crush almost endorsing him:

"In the current presidential race, "there are two really good Democratic candidates for president. I admire and respect them both enough to wait and see what happens." But while he won't endorse Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama yet, he specifically praises the latter, who cited Springsteen as the person he would most like to meet in a recent interview with People. ( I KNEW IT - HE HAS GREAT TASTE!! -we have so much in common ;~)

"I always look at my work as trying to measure the distance between American promise and American reality," Springsteen says. "And I think (Obama's) inspired a lot of people with that idea: How do you make that distance shorter? How do we create a more humane society? We've lived through such ugly times that people want to have a romance with the idea of America again, and I think they need to.

"The hard realities and how things get done are important, too, but if you can effectively convince people that it's possible to make things better, they get excited."

Just as an aside... Speaking of crushes... Here's my current movie star crush ... James McAvoy. I just saw Atonement and loved it... I just wanted the whole movie to be about him. (I still love the book WAY more than the movie, even though they did a pretty good job translating it to film). That said, the Library scene was absolutely fantastic!!

I highly recommend "Last King of Scotland" -great performances and Mr. McAvoy's was outstanding- the character. I've also seen him in the "Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe", but I want to see more. He's got a shoot-'em-up movie with Angelina Jolie coming out soon. I hope it doesn't ruin him for me. I'll probably see it anyway. ALso there was an article by Maureen Ryan in the Trib about a UK TV series that he was in, "State of Play" so I'm going to see if that's on Netflix.

(pic by Lee Bromfield from here)

History & Totalitarianism

Very interesting article in WIRED (h/t Instapundit) about a project to find out what was written on all the East German Stasi reports on their people- alot of them were ripped up or shredded and now they are trying to piece them all back together with technology. This caught my attention for 2 reasons. (1) I finished reading "1984" by George Orwell a couple of weeks ago. It was certainly THE most depressing book I've ever read - (... well, OK "Sophie's Choice" is a close second). But I'm really glad I read it because its so relevant to our times,... issues about privacy, terrorism, torture, PRESERVING HISTORY. I'm still absorbing it. It certainly inspires me to NOT take any government actions for granted, benign or otherwise. (2) I loved the movie referenced, "The Lives of Others"! Its a foreign film I rented on Netflix last summer and its one of those that also really sticks with you long after you watch it, Highly Recommended!

" Requests dipped in the late 1990s, but the Oscar-winning 2006 film The Lives of Others, about a Stasi agent who monitors a dissident playwright, seems to have prompted a surge of new applications; 2007 marked a five-year high. "Every month, 6,000 to 8,000 people decide to read their files for the first time," Bormann says. These days, the Stasi Records Office spends $175 million a year and employs 2,000 people.

This being Germany, there's even a special word for it: Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or "coming to terms with the past." It's not self-evident — you could imagine a country deciding, communally, to recover from a totalitarian past by simply gathering all the documents and destroying them. In fact, in 1990 the German press and citizen committees were wracked by debate over whether to do just that. Many people, however, suspected that former Stasi agents and ex-informants were behind the push to forgive and forget.

By preserving and reconstructing the Stasi archives, BStU staffers say they hope to keep history from repeating itself. In November, the first children born after the fall of the wall turned 18. Evidence suggests many of them have serious gaps in their knowledge of the past. In a survey of Berlin high school students, only half agreed that the GDR was a dictatorship. Two-thirds didn't know who built the Berlin Wall."

Christmas Materialism

I totally feel this way too... there are so many people I could send it to - including my very own beloved and somewhat spoiled (compared to me of course! ;~) daughter - its a constant struggle! I miss not being able buy what I want to buy as gifts,.... but then I don't want them sitting in a corner, never used, either. I just do not "feel the love" with Gift Cards. Receiving is OK depending on how "close" I am to that person, but I don't feel as good giving them either. I love love love Cary Tenis - a philosophic advice columnist I've been reading for years on Salon.com . He puts in a very good word for the kids' POV:

Where, I ask you, are they supposed to find the values that you are talking about? Sure, parents can try to teach them these things. But kids look at their parents, and then they look at the world, and they go, What the fuck? They see the toys spewing out of the world's vast maws of plastic-mold technology, they see the microchips doubling in speed and know that in a year they will be faster and faster still, and tinier and tinier still, and more feature-rich too. They see the new dresses and the new videos, and they know they'll be changing faster than they can change their own clothes. And then they look at their parents, who seem to be moving in black-and-white slo-mo. How can they feel anything but pity and scorn? How can they have any confidence that their parents will even survive the acceleration? In fact it must frighten them that their parents seem so ill-adapted to the world that parents themselves have created.

And then we come along and we say, "I'm knitting you a sweater and I want you to be grateful for it." And they think, Are you out of your head? Are you nuts? Do you have any idea what's going on in the world?
This sentence is particularly funny because I actually DID crochet C. a black scarf several years ago. It was crazy lopsided, completely uneven. It was made from 100% Alpaca yarn though ( from my friends Lisa & Miguel's company) and it was made with LOVE. I don't think he wears it though. When he wore it working outside he would have a black ring of fibers around his neck if it was wet or cold outside. Truly- its the thought that counted in this particular case! ;~)

on this topic... This article was in the Trib today too. "What would Jesus Buy?" The movie is coming out this week. (From the same guy who made "Super Size me").
Among some regular retail outlets and online ( I'll have to do something for J and my neices & nephew) - these are two places I'll also be shopping this year:
Heifer and Project Peanut Butter