UK: Bring Back Bottle Deposits To Stop Plastic Pollution In Our Oceans [Petition]

Image via 38degrees.org

The following is an email I've recently received from the peeps at 38Degrees.org... It's about an interesting idea on how to reduce the marine plastic pollution. Worth a read (even if you don't live in the UK). 

Those of you who live in the UK are (obviously) very welcome to read that email and sign the petition. Thanks in advance :-)

Stay safe!

Loup Dargent


The Email:
"Dear Loup,

Plastic bottles are littering our high streets, parks and beaches. They don’t rot, so they end up clogging up landfill sites and the sea. [1]

Right now, the government is drawing up a plan to tackle litter in Britain. [2] And there’s a simple solution. They’re considering starting a bottle deposit scheme: 10p is added to the price of a drink and if you return the bottle you get the money back. It would mean that millions of bottles would get recycled.

But they haven’t made up their mind yet, and sugary drinks company lobbyists are pushing hard to get them to drop the idea. [3] A huge petition would prove to the government the public supports it, and could convince them to introduce the scheme.

‘Surfers Against Sewage ’ are an environmental charity - and they’ve started a petition on the 38 Degrees website. [4] Can you add your name now? It takes less than a minute:

SIGN THE PETITION

Plastic pollution is a huge problem, and a bottle exchange might feel like a small step. But from the 5p plastic bag charge to persuading supermarkets to switch to paper cotton buds, these little changes are adding up. It means we’re turning the tide on plastic litter and pollution. [5]

Other countries are already using bottle deposits to tackle plastic pollution. In Norway, 96% of bottles are returned by people for recycling. [5] We can clean up Britain’s towns, cities and beaches too. But first, we need to show the government that thousands of us want a bottle deposit scheme. 

Can you add your name to the petition now? 

SIGN THE PETITION

Thanks for all you do

Lorna, Trish, Robin and the 38 Degrees team"

NOTES:

[1] BBC: Plastic bottle litter on beaches up 43%, conservationists say:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-35878760

[2] The Telegraph:Plastic bottle 'tax' could be introduced to tackle waste:

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/20/plastic-bottle-tax-could-introduced-tackle-waste/

[3] You can read the Greenpeace investigation here:

energydesk.greenpeace.org/2017/01/25/investigation-coca-cola-fight-back-plans-tackle-plastic-waste/

[4] You can find about more about Surfers Against Sewage here:

www.sas.org.uk/

[5] The Guardian: England plastic bag usage drops 85% since 5p charge introduced:

www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/30/england-plastic-bag-usage-drops-85-per-cent-since-5p-charged-introduced

The Guardian: Tesco and Sainsbury’s ban plastic cotton buds:

www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/30/tesco-and-sainsburys-ban-plastic-cotton-buds-to-cut-waste

[6] Sky News: Sky Ocean Rescue: How bottle deposit scheme boosts recycling:

news.sky.com/story/sky-ocean-rescue-calls-for-uk-plastic-bottle-deposit-scheme-10741655 

Stop the Dakota Access Pipeline! [Petition]

The following is an email I've received earlier from Change.org, regarding Trump's executive action advancing the Dakota Access Pipeline... Feel free to read it (or/and watch the video) and act accordingly.

Stay safe!

Loup Dargent

Image via rezpectourwater.com

The Email:
"Loup – There's a new petition taking off on Change.org, and we think you might be interested in signing it.

Petitioning U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Stop the Dakota Access Pipeline Petition by Anna Lee, Bobbi Jean & the Oceti Sakowin Youth Fort Yates, North Dakota Sign the petition I’m 13 years-old and as an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, I’ve lived my whole life by the Missouri River. It runs by my home in Fort Yates North Dakota and my great grandparents original home was along the Missouri River in Cannon Ball. The river is a crucial part of our lives here on the Standing Rock Reservation. But now a private oil company wants to build a pipeline that would cross the Missouri River less than a mile away from the Standing Rock Reservation and if we don’t stop it, it will poison our river and threaten the health of my community when it leaks. My friends and I have played in the river since we were little; my great grandparents raised chickens and horses along it. When the pipeline leaks, it will wipe out plants and animals, ruin our drinking water, and poison the center of community life for the Standing Rock Sioux. In Dakota/Lakota we say “mni Wiconi.” Water is life. Native American people know that water is the first medicine not just for us, but for all human beings living on this earth. The proposed Dakota Access Pipeline would transport 570,000 barrels of crude oil per day, across four states. Oil companies keep telling us that this is perfectly safe, but we’ve learned that that’s a lie: from 2012-2013 alone, there were 300 oil pipeline breaks in the state of North Dakota. With such a high chance that this pipeline will leak, I can only guess that the oil industry keeps pushing for it because they don’t care about our health and safety. It’s like they think our lives are more expendable than others’. So we, the Standing Rock Youth, are taking a stand to be the voice for our community, for our great grandparents, and for Mother Earth. Join us, and sign to ask the Army Corps of Engineers to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Sincerely, Anna and the Standing Rock Youth Learn more about our campaign at rezpectourwater.com." Sign the petition

The Video:




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2017 Isn't '1984' – It's Stranger Than Orwell Imagined

REUTERS/Toby Melville

By John Broich, Case Western Reserve University

A week after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, George Orwell’s “1984” is the best-selling book on Amazon.com.

The hearts of a thousand English teachers must be warmed as people flock to a novel published in 1949 for ways to think about their present moment.

Orwell set his story in Oceania, one of three blocs or mega-states fighting over the globe in 1984. There has been a nuclear exchange, and the blocs seem to have agreed to perpetual conventional war, probably because constant warfare serves their shared interests in domestic control.

Oceania demands total subservience. It is a police state, with helicopters monitoring people’s activities, even watching through their windows. But Orwell emphasizes it is the “ThinkPol,” the Thought Police, who really monitor the “Proles,” the lowest 85 percent of the population outside the party elite. The ThinkPol move invisibly among society seeking out, even encouraging, thoughtcrimes so they can make the perpetrators disappear for reprogramming.

The other main way the party elite, symbolized in the mustached figurehead Big Brother, encourage and police correct thought is through the technology of the Telescreen. These “metal plaques” transmit things like frightening video of enemy armies and of course the wisdom of Big Brother. But the Telescreen can see you, too. During mandatory morning exercise, the Telescreen not only shows a young, wiry trainer leading cardio, it can see if you are keeping up. Telescreens are everywhere: They are in every room of people’s homes. At the office, people use them to do their jobs.

The story revolves around Winston Smith and Julia, who try to resist their government’s overwhelming control over facts. Their act of rebellion? Trying to discover “unofficial” truth about the past, and recording unauthorized information in a diary. Winston works at the colossal Ministry of Truth, on which is emblazoned IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. His job is to erase politically inconvenient data from the public record. A party member falls out of favor? She never existed. Big Brother made a promise he could not fulfill? It never happened.

Because his job calls on him to research old newspapers and other records for the facts he has to “unfact,” Winston is especially adept at “doublethink.” Winston calls it being “conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies… consciously to induce unconsciousness.”

Oceania: The product of Orwell’s experience

A wall painting in Dusseldorf, Germany, on Jan. 4, 1984. AP

Orwell’s setting in “1984” is inspired by the way he foresaw the Cold War – a phrase he coined in 1945 – playing out. He wrote it just a few years after watching Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin carve up the world at the Tehran and Yalta conferences. The book is remarkably prescient about aspects of the Stalinist Soviet Union, East Germany and Maoist China.

Orwell was a socialist. “1984” in part describes his fear that the democratic socialism in which he believed would be hijacked by authoritarian Stalinism. The novel grew out of his sharp observations of his world and the fact that Stalinists tried to kill him.

In 1936, a fascist-supported military coup threatened the democratically elected socialist majority in Spain. Orwell and other committed socialists from around the world, including Ernest Hemingway, volunteered to fight against the rightist rebels. Meanwhile, Hitler lent the rightists his air power while Stalin tried to take over the leftist Republican resistance. When Orwell and other volunteers defied these Stalinists, they moved to crush the opposition. Hunted, Orwell and his wife had to flee for their lives from Spain in 1937.

George Orwell at the BBC.

Back in London during World War II, Orwell saw for himself how a liberal democracy and individuals committed to freedom could find themselves on a path toward Big Brother. He worked for the BBC writing what can only be described as “propaganda” aimed at an Indian audience. What he wrote was not exactly doublethink, but it was news and commentary with a slant to serve a political purpose. Orwell sought to convince Indians that their sons and resources were serving the greater good in the war. Having written things he believed were untrue, he quit the job after two years, disgusted with himself.

Imperialism itself disgusted him. As a young man in the 1920s, Orwell had served as a colonial police officer in Burma. In a distant foreshadowing of Big Brother’s world, Orwell reviled the arbitrary and brutish role he took on in a colonial system. “I hated it bitterly,” he wrote. “In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the gray, cowed faces of the long-term convicts…”

Oceania was a prescient product of a particular biography and particular moment when the Cold War was beginning. Naturally, then, today’s world of “alternative facts” is quite different in ways that Orwell could not have imagined.

Big Brother not required
Orwell described a single-party system in which a tiny core of oligarchs, Oceania’s “inner party,” control all information. This is their chief means of controlling power. In the U.S. today, information is wide open to those who can access the internet, at least 84 percent of Americans. And while the U.S. arguably might be an oligarchy, power exists somewhere in a scrum including the electorate, constitution, the courts, bureaucracies and, inevitably, money. In other words, unlike in Oceania, both information and power are diffuse in 2017 America.

Those who study the decline in standards of evidence and reasoning in the U.S. electorate chiefly blame politicians’ concerted efforts from the 1970s to discredit expertise, degrade trust in Congress and its members, even question the legitimacy of government itself. With those leaders, institutions and expertise delegitimized, the strategy has been to replace them with alternative authorities and realities.

In 2004, a senior White House adviser suggested a reporter belonged to the “reality-based community,” a sort of quaint minority of people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.… That’s not the way the world really works anymore.”

Orwell could not have imagined the internet and its role in distributing alternative facts, nor that people would carry around Telescreens in their pockets in the form of smartphones. There is no Ministry of Truth distributing and policing information, and in a way everyone is Big Brother.

It seems less a situation that people are incapable of seeing through Big Brother’s big lies, than they embrace “alternative facts.” Some researchers have found that when some people begin with a certain worldview – for example, that scientific experts and public officials are untrustworthy – they believe their misperceptions more strongly when given accurate conflicting information. In other words, arguing with facts can backfire. Having already decided what is more essentially true than the facts reported by experts or journalists, they seek confirmation in alternative facts and distribute them themselves via Facebook, no Big Brother required.

In Orwell’s Oceania, there is no freedom to speak facts except those that are official. In 2017 America, at least among many of the powerful minority who selected its president, the more official the fact, the more dubious. For Winston, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” For this powerful minority, freedom is the freedom to say two plus two make five.


About Today's Contributor:
John Broich, Associate Professor, Case Western Reserve University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. 

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How Coldplay Blew The Crowd Away With One Trick

It was the adventure of a music-lovers’ dream at the latest Coldplay concert as the band’s sound swelled over “Yellow” and fans raised hands that glowed in joyful celebration of the band’s intended musical unity.

Coldplay concert-goers flipped the switch on the usual live concert show experience with a twist of the wrist using the innovative Xylobands LED Wristbands.

Beat by beat, the Xylobands LED Wristbands follow the flow of the music onstage. Coldplay’s fans raise their hands in unity and dance to the beats of the Xylobands as they pulse in unison with Chris Martin’s voice and Jonny Buckland’s strumming. The wearer syncs in with their fellow music lovers with each turn of their wrist, making the live concert onstage an intimate dance party in the seats. The multiple, flash pattern light show with RGB LED’s has the capacity to change colors along with the music, whether yellow, blue or gold. There are more colors than you can truly know inside this bit of wrist flicking magic.

And the band loves it.
Up and up went the energy as concert goers bonded over the experience of glowing wristbands that moved to the music at a recent concert. Joining wrist bands that vibrated with color, Coldplay admirers fell in love with Xylobands as the bracelet of color changed with each sway to the unique tunes onstage. Thousands of music lovers every night clipped on the slick Xylobands in anticipation. And they were not disappointed. Fans with the Xylobands were in for a treat each night. With the bands happily encircled around their wrists, fans received a profound, beautiful and bonding live music experience with the internationally-known band that loves a good tech twist. The band responds to the flashing Xylobands, amping up the energy of the live concert.

Coldplay has continued to use the stunning Xylobands that create a fabulous light show during live shows, much to their fans’ delight.

The colorful flashing bands were introduced at Coldplay’s American Express Unstaged concert in Madrid in October 2011. Since then, Coldplay fans have made it a joyful thing, with the band giving a shout out to the playful patterns of light that Xylobands brings to each and every concert.

The one-centimeter wide, radio-activated LED-equipped glow wristbands continually get the crowd to join together in an unusual way at Coldplay concerts.

With the playful wrist art of the slick Xylobands, Coldplay interacts with the crowd, having them join in with the band in a more intimate way with each song. The communally shared Xylobands bring each concert-goer further into the splendid live music of Coldplay. Concert-goers feel ignited in their passion for the music with each pulse of the glowing Xlyobands. The colorful, flashing bands are a rainbow of moving energy between users.

The latest tune-tastic accessory, Xylobands, will only cost you on average about $7. That's much less than a T-shirt or bumper sticker bought at a major venue. Coldplay’s sound comes alive in the hands of music lovers around the world with Xylobands.

The rainbow is overdue, and Xylobands LED Wristbands bring it closer to you, the music lovers.

The Xylobands USA technology team come from 35 years of experience and are simply the best.  From TLC Creative, their expertise will not only provide you with exceptional ideas for how to make your event stunning and memorable, but they will take the stress out, knowing that their experience, reliability and dedication will kick in to be sure everything goes off as you envision.

Statement by Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, in Response to President Trump's Executive Orders on Immigration

Rev. Samuel Rodriguez

Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC), the world's largest Hispanic Christian organization, which serves as a representative voice for the more than 100 million Hispanic Evangelicals assembled in over 40,000 U.S. churches, made the following statement regarding President Donald J. Trump's executive orders pertaining to immigration and the building of a wall:

"While I have had differences of opinion with the Trump Administration on how exactly to achieve our shared goal of securing our national borders, we at the NHCLC have made ourselves available to the Trump Administration throughout this process and have made our position clear.

First, when President Trump builds his wall, he must also - and as passionately - build bridges with the Latino community. Secondly, we have made it clear that we will vigorously oppose any action that would forcibly remove the 11 million undocumented people living, working and raising their families in the United States with the exception of criminals, drug dealers and others who bring shame and pain on our community.

I am grateful that our concerns have been met with both an open mind and a willingness to work together. In fact, after a call with the Trump transition team in December—a call organized by the NHCLC and which included other Hispanic heads of major denominations and networks—then President-elect Trump made it clear that he would not oppose DACA but would find a way to assist our young people.

I agree with President Trump that securing our borders is critically important to ensuring the safety of all Americans. I also agree with the administration that the American people have a right to determine who comes into our country, and to demand that our laws are respected in the process. However, our goal and our continued focus at the NHCLC will be to ensure these policies are always balanced by a respect for the sanctity of all life and the well-being of the immigrant."

NHCLC/CONEL is the world's largest Hispanic Christian organization, which serves as a representative voice for the more than 100 million Hispanic Evangelicals assembled in over 40,000 U.S. churches and hundreds of thousands of additional congregations spread worldwide throughout the Spanish-speaking diaspora. 

SOURCE: National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference

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