The world is rightfully pissed off at British Petroleum, but what does the world expect when we rely upon a disgusting energy source that we have to buy from countries that dislike the cultures that the filthy sludge engenders?

Greenpeace–haha, yeah, they’re still around–has a great campaign to rebrand the oil giant that swims in money while we swim in carbons.  The problem with the campaign is not its brilliance, but that it’s not Creative Commons.

I more and more have trouble understanding the “All Rights Reserved” mentality in situations like this.  Why launch an effort to re-brand a company with copyright protected submissions that are meant to go viral?  What’s the point?

Regardless, here are my favorites:

Go find yours on Flickr and blog it, damn the copyright.

I make no money from my Creative Commons photography, but the payoffs come in ways that aren’t financial.  One is that with every person I photograph, I’m in a situation where I have the opportunity to say something to that person.

I almost never take advantage of this.  It’s somewhat unprofessional: these people are there to have their pictures taken, and I’m there to take them.  Neither of us is there to discuss whatever.  Idle chatter does not go down well with photographers because it hamstrings our ability to shoot photographs.

Besides, what to say when one has perhaps 20 seconds for an interaction?

When I photographed David Bowie, my all-time favorite musician and someone whose work impacted my life a good deal, I said nothing to him.

“I really love your music” wouldn’t have cut it in the moments we had, and who knows if his reaction to such a cliche would have hurt my own cherished, personal “David Bowie”.

But with Elizabeth Warren it was different.

Amongst the 100 Most Influential People in the World, she was the only person to whom I had something to say because I love Elizabeth Warren.

I love the person I see in the media; I love that she does so much good; I love the voice and tone that she uses to say the things that she does; and I love how gently matter-of-fact she is about it all.

I went to law school, but I also love that I would only need a high school education to understand the arguments that she makes on behalf of mainstream Americans (and against the shenanigans of Wall Street).

If you ever have said to yourself, “You know, I really should bone up on what needs to be done to fix the whole Wall Street mess” then Google Elizabeth Warren and look for her television appearances.  She’s speaking for you, she’s speaking for me, and even though they may not know it yet, she is speaking for Wall Street.

Our financial sector, the entire global economy, only functions with trust and faith; damage it, and nobody trusts that the things you sell may be okay to buy.

Think Chinese toothpaste and toys; American financial products are in danger of the same reputation if we don’t clean up how they are made.

So what did I say to Elizabeth Warren when I had the opportunity?  “Elizabeth!  Thank you!  You do such good work!  Thank you!“  And then I took the portrait that you see above.

Learn why I love her–and why you should too–by watching this clip from the May 3rd Stephen Colbert (whom I photographed in 2007, but to whom I also said nothing):

Click here to see my Time 100 Creative Commons portraits at Flickr.

Follow Shankbone updates on Twitter.

The conservative philosophy has done a lot to make America great (as has the liberal philosophy); but something is incredibly wrong with the country when one or the other does not mind simply lying to advance its goals.

If you can’t beat ideas with the truth, then maybe your own ideas are pretty bad.

The thing is, most Americans don’t like to feel stupid, and whenever people willingly believe lies and deception, it makes them the very definition of ignorant (actually, willfully ignorant). That might be fine for the 25% of America that is the Republican hardcore base–whatever happened to Christian values?–but most Americans eventually turn their back on the people who don’t tell them the truth. Voters don’t like that.

Editorial: Greed is not good
The Philadelphia Inquirer

Defeating any initiative of President Obama’s is the GOP’s preferred course these days. And so Republican senators are decrying more bailouts for big, bad banks while meeting behind closed doors with Wall Street executives and pocketing all the campaign contributions they can grab from banks.

Opposing Obama in this case would give Republican lawmakers a twofer by thwarting proposed regulation of an industry that historically has been friendly to their candidates. Since 1990, 60 percent of the bankers’ campaign donations have gone to the GOP. Small wonder that McConnell’s recent private meeting with Wall Street moguls included Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, the Senate Republicans’ campaign chairman for this year’s elections.

Fake populists in the GOP take us all for suckers
Jay Bookman, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A while back, I wondered how the Republicans were going to both defend their buddies on Wall Street while simultaneously placating their Tea Party constituents to whom helping Wall Street is anathema. How could they manage both?

I should have known the answer: Lie. Lie often, lie repeatedly, lie shamelessly.

It’s now clear that Wall Street bitterly opposes the financial reform bill proposed by congressional Democrats. After meeting with Wall Street leaders, Republicans such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have made it equally clear that they too will oppose the financial reform bill.

So how do the Republicans plan to sell that approach to Americans sickened by Wall Street’s arrogance and selfishness?

By claiming that it’s the Democrats who are siding with Wall Street. While they do the Street’s bidding and collect the Street’s campaign money, the Republicans intend to cast themselves as the populists who side with Main Street over Wall Street.

Obama: McConnell’s Arguments on Financial Regulation ‘Cynical and Deceptive’
Jake Trapper, ABC News

“The leader of the Senate Republicans and the chair of the Republican Senate Campaign Committee met with two dozen top Wall Street executives to talk about how to block progress on this issue,” Obama said. “Lo and behold, when he returned to Washington, the Senate Republican leader came out against the common-sense reforms we’ve proposed. In doing so, he made the cynical and deceptive assertion that reform would somehow enable future bailouts – when he knows that it would do just the opposite.” [....]

Today, Obama countered, “We’re going to put in place new rules so that big banks and financial institutions will pay for the bad decisions they make – not taxpayers. Simply put, this means no more taxpayer bailouts.”

Borderline-Useless Senate Democrat Suddenly Interested in Regulating Wall Street
Alex Pareene, Gawker

We know that the GOP has already begun to engage in attacks so ridiculous that it will make “death panels” look like responsible policy debate. And we know that when Mitch McConnell says something that is literally the precise opposite of the truth, it will lead to a lot of people debating whether or not his blatant lie was “fair” or not, and responsible, respectable outlets will say “most experts dispute McConnell’s characterization of the financial regulation bill currently under consideration” instead of saying “Mitch McConnell is a shameless liar.” [...]

Hah, and there was word earlier today Republican Susan Collins, formerly of the “one of the good ones” caucus, had not signed on to the letter from Mitch McConnell about how all the Republicans hate the financial regulation bill because it is “permanent bailouts,” that talking point we mentioned earlier that is actually literally the exact precise opposite of the truth, but it looks like she’s signed on! They’re all fucking idiots. Once again, the political calculations trump everything else. America’s Senate still proudly broken!

In their “World in 2010″ annual almanac of predictions, the Economist looks at whether this will be a year of social unrest, and included is the map below as a helpful guide to countries at the greatest risk:

I highly recommend you purchase this almanac for a good overview of where the world is more-or-less heading.  In the accompanying article on this particular topic, Laza Kekic of the Economist Intelligence Unit writes the following:

[A] congruence of calamities could prove politically tempestuous: a sharp rise in unemployment, increased poverty and inequality, weakened middle classes and high food prices in many countries. Austerity is also on the agenda in 2010 following the extreme fiscal relaxation of 2009.

Historically, political reactions to economic distress have tended to come with a lag. The same is true of labour-market developments: even once the recession ends, unemployment continues to rise. According to Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) estimates, in 2010 there will be 60m more unemployed worldwide than in 2008. The International Labour Organisation reckons some 200m workers are at risk of joining the ranks of people living on less than $2 a day.

Declines in incomes are not always followed by political instability. Vulnerability to unrest depends on a host of factors. These include the degree of income inequality, the state of governance, levels of social provision, ethnic tensions, public trust in institutions, the history of unrest and the type of political system (“intermediate” regimes that are neither consolidated democracies nor autocracies seem the most vulnerable).

Something to watch.

Brazil’s position in the low combustibility category mirrors the magazine’s recent profile of the continuing boom of the country:

Latin America’s largest economy is enjoying its best moment for a long time. One of the last countries to enter the global downturn started by the financial sector in 2007, Brazil was also one of the first to come out of it. For the first time in its history it has found a combination of economic growth, low inflation and full democracy—and the good fortune looks set to continue.

The story reminded me of a 2007 article I read in the New York Times about Brazilian immigrants to the U.S. who were emigrating back to Brazil:

That decision — to give up on life in the United States — is being made by more and more Brazilians across the country, according to consular officials, travel agencies swamped by one-way ticket bookings, and community leaders in the neighborhoods that Brazilian immigrants have transformed, from Boston to Pompano Beach, Fla.

No one can say how many are leaving. But in the last half year, the reverse migration has become unmistakable among Brazilians in the United States, a population estimated at 1.1 million by Brazil’s government — four to five times the official census figures.

To explain an often wrenching decision to pull up stakes, homeward-bound Brazilians point to a rising fear of deportation and a slumping American economy. Many cite the expiration of driver’s licenses that can no longer be renewed under tougher rules, coupled with the steep drop in the value of the dollar against the currency of Brazil, where the economy has improved.

Brazil’s ascendency is nothing but good news for the Western Hemisphere.

I’m an avid reader of The Economist, and in this week’s edition the article that jumped out at me was “A needier era“, which details how some–including me–think the new global economic realities are going to re-shape our politics:

THE 1990s was “the age of abundance”, argued Brink Lindsey in a book of that title. Round the world, incomes were rising; capital markets were processing endless flows of money and investment; technological gains meant that ever more information was available ever more cheaply. And politics in the age of abundance, Mr Lindsey claimed, was all about values. In America this was the period of the “culture wars” over abortion and gun ownership; internationally, there was a huge expansion in concern over human rights.

One of the biggest problems America faces is that many of its citizens, both liberal and conservative, are stuck on culture wars that feed their anger, instead of focusing on the reality that our current economic system is unsustainable.  Our focus on voting for people for their views about abortion, gun rights and gay marriage has given us a crop of leaders who are ill-prepared to take on the real challenges that we face.

The 2010s, it is sometimes said, will be an age of scarcity. The warning signs of change are said to be the food-price spike of 2007-08, the bid by China and others to grab access to oil, iron ore and farmland and the global recession. The main problems of scarcity are water and food shortages, demographic change and state failure.

One of the challenges America faces as a country is how we choose to inform ourselves, which is mostly by the cable news channels.  Fox News and MSNBC (as well as the rest of them) are corrosive influences on all of us.  For those like myself, who don’t watch them, we still have to deal with the foolish liberals and conservatives who do and form their opinions based upon cable news demagoguery.

[Authors of a report at the Center on International Cooperation] claim that the current global system is ill-designed for such a world. It is not just that the foreign policies of big countries are in flux. Rather, the way states deal with new threats is, in the jargon, “stove-piped”.  As a UN panel said in 2004, “finance ministers tend to work only with the international financial institutions, development ministers only with development programmes.”

The authors say that what is needed is not merely institutional tinkering but a different frame of mind. Governments, they say, should think more in terms of reducing risk and increasing resilience to shocks than about boosting sovereign power. This is because they think power may not be the best way for states to defend themselves against a new kind of threat: the sort that comes not from other states but networks of states and non-state actors, or from the unintended consequences of global flows of finance, technology and so on.

What’s the first thing that you, as an individual, can do to start preparing for this new world?  Stop watching the cable news channels.  Stop listening to the Olbermanns and Hannitys, who do little else but incite your rage (and I have it too, but it has to be tempered).  Right now, we don’t need an angry populace.  We need a calm citizenry that takes time to learn about the economic issues that we face, rolls up its sleeves and gets to work fixing them.  You might not like abortion, and you may think gay marriage is all about equal rights, but if there is widespread economic collapse, these issues are going to be irrelevant to the world we face.

Do yourself and the rest of us a favor:  Stop watching cable news.

Please note: TaxFree Shopping, Ltd. is a valid business that has been victimized in this scam.

If it looks too good to be true…

Just after I wrote about Jeff Kreisler’s book Get Rich Cheating, I received a piece of air mail yesterday telling me I had won a bunch of money.  Supposedly it came from TaxFree Shopping, Ltd. based in Addison, Texas.  Everything about it screamed SCAM!

First, it told me that I had won $150,000 in a “Consumer Promotion Draw organized for all customers of the major stores in U.S.A., Canada and United Kingdom e.g.: Wal-Mart, Sears, Home Depot, Safeway, H.E.B., Sainsbury, Dell, HP, Dillard’s, Teco [probably meant Tesco as there is no store named Teco anywhere], Marriott and Recreational Equipment Inc.”

I knew it was a scam.  Everything about it said scam, except…it had what looked like a real live check drawn off a JPMorgan Chase Bank account.  The check, of course, was the scammiest part.  This is what it told me to do:

Enclosed is a check of $3800.00 USD which is for your tax payment of $2950.00 USD, for Non-Resident Government Tax, payable to the British tax officer as stated below:

Tax Officer:  Teresa Melvin
56 Oxford Street
WC 12 PD London
United Kingdom

Tax Amount:  $2950.00

Payment Methods:  Moneygram International or Western Union Money Transfer

Everything about the check seemed real.  It had perforations, was signed by hand, had watermarks and was drawn off a major bank.  TaxFree Shopping, Ltd. is a Better Business Bureau A+ accredited company.  The problem: the check was no good.

I went to a Chase bank this morning knowing full well what to expect: nothing.  I brought with it the letter and envelope.  At first, the teller was unhelpful when I asked.

“We can’t give out that information, sir,” she said.

“You can’t tell me if the check is good?  It’s drawn off your bank.”

“No, sir, we can’t give out that information.”

“Okay, then let me cash it.”

“It’s over the amount we are allowed to cash.”

“Please get your manager.  I’d rather you tell me that the check is not good then for me to try to cash it at my bank and get the bounced check fee.”

The bank manager was more helpful (why do these things always have to come down to ‘let me speak to your manager’…sigh)  The manager confirmed that the check was fake, and that they had seen this before.

How the scam works

Apparently, the scam works this way:  Doofus gets a check and instead of investigating it on their own, calls the numbers listed for TaxFree Shopping, Ltd. (on the letter it says to call Richard Patton “for advice on how to claim your winning” and gives the telephone numbers 1-866-213-8778 or 1-866-213-5993).  Doofus wires the $2950.00 and instead of being richer, now is out $2950.00 and additional bounced check fees.

It’s hard to imagine anyone falling for this because it is so easy to discover, but I guess there’s a sucker born every minute.  The seemingly live check signed by hand on a major bank was enough to have me take ten minutes out of my morning to investigate.

What perplexed me was my own thinking.  I had recently bought a 23 inch HP flat screen monitor, and wondered if I had filled out on-the-fly some sweepstakes (I don’t usually, but sometimes I do).  Regardless, my brain told me the $150,000.00 was a scam, but here I had a check in my hand for $3,800.  If the $3800 was valid, I might have followed-up about the $150K (which the letter, dated September 18th, had told me was not good after 20 days.  Somehow it took this letter 20 days to get to my mailbox).

Chase bank confiscated the phony check, and my slight notions of a possible Spanish vacation evaporated as I left the bank and thanked the manager for her help.

TaxFree Shopping, Ltd. is a victim

I spoke with Ben Petty, the managing partner of TFS, Ltd., and he confirmed that this has been going on for awhile.  Apparently some guy up in Massachusetts was taken for about $10,000.  The perpetrators are out of–surprise!–Nigeria and the Secret Service is not able to do anything about it.

They are actually using the real account information for this company, and it has caused havoc for its business.  The check that I received is the fourth generation of the scam.  The Nigerians are hiring people through Craigslist looking for “check processors”, and then they tell them to go to Office Depot and buy check-writing supplies and check-printing software.  Some people actually do it.

Mr. Petty has been fielding many phone calls from distraught and disappointed senior citizens.

Don’t work for this scam.  Don’t cash the check.  Don’t call the number.  Don’t send the money,  or you will end up a fool.

“You are poor. No matter what you do, where you live, whom you love, or even how much money you have, you are poor. Poor, poor, poor.” — Jeff Kreisler, Get Rich Cheating

How in the hell did America end up with an award-winning comedian with classic good looks tearing at society’s deceptions and the looting of the public’s coffers?

With his new book Get Rich Cheating, Jeff Kreisler–executive editor of My Wall Street Journal and syndicated columnist for TheStreet.com–is l’enfant terrible of finance.  As the recipient of the Bill Hicks Spirit Award for Thought Provoking Comedy and a writer for Comedy Central’s Indecision2008, he has a lot to get off his chest about the direction of American society.  Amongst other things, you will discover how to:

• Get huge government bailouts, blow them on private jets, and come back for more
• Exploit family, friends, employees, the desperate, the weak, and the dumb
• Take advantage of society’s indifference, ignorance, and celebrity bling worship

“I think it came from that old sense of  ‘if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry,’” the Princeton, Exeter, and Virginia Law-educated Kreisler told Boston Comedy about his motivation for the book.

It’s not just the financial corridors of power that Kreisler takes aim at: it’s the wider sense that in the United States the only way to get ahead is to game, cheat and pilfer the system.

“You’ve got Bernie Madoff, Rod Blagojevich, steroid scandals.  Everywhere you look, when there’s a fortune there’s cheating behind it.  Every time you open the paper there’s more news,” said Kreisler.

Below are my five questions for one of the good guns, a comedian who fights evil:

Kreisler's My Wall Street Journal, a parody of the paper, raised the hackles of News Corp. with its topless Ann Coulter (click photo)

What is one thing you think every American should know?

That listening to the ideas of others doesn’t make us weak. It actually makes us strong.

If you had the option to have been born another nationality than your current one, which nationality would you choose?

Australian. Nice weather, good arts, fun accent, big lobsters.

What is one misconception people have about you?

That I’m going to turn everything everyone says into a joke. I’m not. I like you, but I’m not using you for material.

Is there anyone’s death, either in your life or in popular culture, whose passing you were surprised by how profoundly it affected you?

Len Bias, a University of Maryland basketball star drafted by the Boston Celtics in 1986. I was a teenager, in the height of my sports-is-everything phase and, though wasn’t a Celtics fan, I lived in Massachusetts, so I was surrounded by ‘em. He died from a cocaine overdose, ending his journey right when a lifetime of hard work was about to pay off. While I’ve done my share of “experimenting,” I’ve never touched cocaine, and I’m pretty sure his death is the reason why. In a more positive way, I’ve also tried to appreciate every precious accomplishment knowing that it could be taken away in an instant. His death was one of the earliest of many events to teach me that lesson.

In life we often have goals that we feel as if would just die if we don’t reach them. Sometimes we reach them, sometimes we don’t. The question is, have you ever worked to fulfill a goal, only to find that once you achieved it, the experience was a let down? It meant something to you when you did not have it. Then you obtained it and, after the initial excitement, you thought to yourself, “Is that all there is?” Have you ever had an experience like that?

Ha. All the time. My career, my life, has been a series of projects – rather than one steady job, I’ve gone from opportunity to opportunity, throwing myself into it and hoping that it works out. From political comedy tours during elections, to an original live sitcom/sketch show for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, an off-Broadway show I worked on, to “Get Rich Cheating,” I’ve done some incredible things, and gotten some fantastic critical feedback… BUT, each time there’s a part of me that says “I want more. Yeah, it’s nice that this turned out great, but what’s next? Praise and a few sales are nice, but I want someone to give me a bigger, better, easier project. Now!” This is how things go for me: Hard work, expended energy, excitement, “success,” let down. I’m okay with it.

I’ve learned to temper the downs of the roller coaster ride by managing my expectations. I always tell myself, “Aim for the stars, but be happy with the moon.” It’s important to want to improve and do better, to strive for greatness, but it’s equally important to appreciate and enjoy each unique moment that I’ve been fortunate enough to create.

FIVE QUESTIONS – A SERIES

• Gerald Posner – Bane of Kennedy conspiracy theorists, white shoe lawyer, Chief Investigative Reporter for The Daily Beast…I have five questions for you.
• Bebe Buell – Artist, musician, scenester and lover; mother of Liv Tyler; embodiment of a rock era…I have five questions for you.
• Evan Wolfson – founder of the modern gay marriage movement…I have five questions for you.
• Jimmy Wales – Citizen of the world, sage to millions of editors of Wikipedia, which he founded…I have five questions for you.
• Billy Name – Famous Warhol live-in photographer; silverized the Factory; shot the cover of the Velvet Underground’s eponymous album; iconic portraits of Lou Reed and Edie Sedgwick…I have five questions for you.

Clinton in 1992, the year the right-wing attack machine made the President's wife a focus. "Murderer", "Lesbian" and "Communist" were standard fare for the right's labels.

The Republican victim machine has been in full-swing defending Sarah Palin, with Ross Douthat writing a misguided, tear-jerking obituary after Palin quit the Alaska governorship two-and-a-half years into her first term.  The conservative playbook on this is that the negative treatment Palin and her family received was “unprecedented” and unfair.

Have these people forgotten the treatment Hillary Clinton received in the 1990′s?  Frank Rich has not:

The Palinists’ bogus beefs about double standards reached farcical proportions at Fox News on the sleepy pre-Fourth Friday afternoon when word of her abdication hit the East. The fill-in anchor demanded that his token Democratic stooge name another female politician who had suffered such “disgraceful attacks” as Palin. When the obvious answer arrived — Hillary Clinton — the Fox host angrily protested that Clinton had never been attacked in “a sexual way” or “about her children.”

Americans have short memories, but it’s hardly ancient history that conservative magazines portrayed Hillary Clinton as both a dominatrix cracking a whip and a broomstick-riding witch. Or that Rush Limbaugh held up a picture of Chelsea Clinton on television to identify the “White House dog.” Or that Palin’s running mate, John McCain, told a sexual joke linking Hillary and Chelsea and Janet Reno. Yet the same conservative commentariat that vilified both Clintons 24/7 now whines that Palin is receiving “the kind of mauling” that the media “always reserve for conservative Republicans.” So said The Wall Street Journal editorial page last week. You’d never guess that The Journal had published six innuendo-laden books on real and imagined Clinton scandals, or that the Clintons had been a leading target of both Letterman and Leno monologues, not to mention many liberal editorial pages (including that of The Times), for much of a decade.

Let’s also not forget that Rush Limbaugh suggested that Clinton is a murderer and the National Review, one of the right’s mouthpieces, helped propagate the rumors that Hillary is a lesbian.

Palin doesn’t help matters when, in her first attempt to be a serious conservative voice by penning an Op-Ed in the elite media that is the Washington Post, she got a lot of things wrong.  Not only did she try to pin the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill on Barack Obama (he had little to do with it); she appeared to not understand what the bill is about.  What little analysis she undertakes is little more than “applause lines“.  Ostensibly, this is again the media’s fault.

2008 NYC protest outside the Mormon temple in Lincoln Center; part of a series taken for Wikipedia/Creative Commons

After Proposition 8 passed, many gay people were angered by the 70% African-American support rate for the anti-Gay California measure.  The  media outlets, particularly Fox News, were keen to take the focus away from the conservative Mormon church’s involvement in Prop. 8′s passage, which spurred large nationwide protests.

Fox News et al. created the appearance of a “war” between the reliably-Democratic voting blocks of blacks and gays.  Stephen Colbert ridiculed this in several segments (below is with Dan Savage, who is hysterical in the interview):

Nevertheless, there was a modicum of truth to it as the gay and black communities have had a long, complicated relationship.  Although civil rights icons like Coretta Scott King, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have endorsed social justice and marriage for gay people, their followers remain unconvinced.

Homophobia is rampant in the African-American community.  Andrew Sullivan writes that, “The black church is one of the most powerful forces fomenting homophobia in America, and has fostered attitudes that have literally killed countless gay black men.”   Dan Savage, who after seeing the Proposition 8 support broken-down by race, expressed his outrage:

I’m done pretending that the handful of racist gay white men out there—and they’re out there, and I think they’re scum—are a bigger problem for African Americans, gay and straight, than the huge numbers of homophobic African Americans are for gay Americans, whatever their color.

Porn king Michael Lucas has cited homophobia as the reason he can’t find more black models for his films.  Responding to a letter he received on his blog, Lucas wrote:

I would love to use more, but unfortunately, Black models are not that open to appearing in adult gay films. It of course has a lot to do with the rampant homophobia in the African-American community, and models are just scared of being in productions.

African-Americans ignore the homophobia in their community, but gays tend to ignore the racism in their own.  I have seen many gay men reveling in guilty giggles after they’ve shared a racist joke.

This racism has an impact.  According to a recent study by H. Fisher Raymond and Willi McFarland, from the San Francisco Department of Public Health, the social barriers black men face may be responsible for the raging AIDS epidemic in their community.  Other races find black men undesirable, limiting their diversity of sexual partners.

The perception is that black men are most likely to transmit HIV.  African Americans make up only 13 percent of the U.S. population, yet they account for 57 percent of new AIDS infections.  According to the study:

Black gay men are the least preferred of sexual partners by other races, according to the interview data. Black men also are perceived to be riskier to have sex with, which can lead to men of other races avoiding black men as sexual partners. They are also perceived as less welcome in the common social venues of gay men in San Francisco. As a result, black men are three times more likely to have sexual partners that are also black, than would be expected by chance alone.

In the study authors’ view, the combination of attitudes on the part of nonblack gay men, friendships and social networks that are less likely to include blacks, and the environments found in gay venues serve to separate black gay men from other groups. Consequently, the sexual networks of blacks are pushed to be more highly interconnected than other groups, with the potential for a more rapid spread of HIV and a higher sustained prevalence of infection among black gay men.

Homophobia and racism between blacks and gays are problems that have hit a brick wall, as neither community trusts nor desires to engage the other.  As the passage of Proposition 8 and the black AIDS epidemic show, both communities suffer for their mutual bigotry.

This is what your landfill looks like because you irrationally fear your tap water. Photo: Brett Weinstein

Three cheers for the residents of Bundanoon, Australia, who this week banned the sale of bottled water in their town.   This came just after New South Wales banned all state departments and agencies from purchasing bottled water because it is a waste of money and natural resources.

Buying water when you have perfectly good water on tap is an environmental menace.  Bottles clog landfills and waste giant amounts of energy to produce and transport.

According to Deborah Lapidus of Corporate Accountability International’s “Think Outside the Bottle” campaign, Bunadanoon’s ban is the first of its kind.  “I think what this town is doing is taking it one step further and recognizing that there’s safe drinking water coming out of our taps,” said Lapidus.

No,  your bottled water is not safer than your tap water, and even the General Accounting Office says so:

Bottom line: The Food and Drug Administration oversees bottled water, and U.S. EPA is in charge of tap water. FDA lacks the regulatory authority of EPA, John Stephenson of the Government Accountability Office told a House panel.

The Safe Drinking Water Act empowers EPA to require water testing by certified laboratories and that violations be reported within a specified time frame. Public water systems must also provide reports to customers about their water, noting its source, evidence of contaminants and compliance with regulations.

By comparison, GAO said, FDA regulates bottled water as a food and cannot require certified lab testing or violation reporting. Furthermore, FDA does not require bottled water companies to disclose to consumers where the water came from, how it has been treated or what contaminants it contains. In a survey of 188 brands of bottled water released yesterday, the nonprofit Environmental Working Group found only two providing such information about its product to consumers.

Stop buying bottled water unless there is no source of clean tap water nearby.  You are ruining the environment and wasting our natural resources when you do, all for a false sense that it’s healthier.  It’s not.  One of humanity’s dumbest trends ever.

According to Forbes magazine, these are the ten best municipal water systems in the United States:

10.  Tulsa, Oklahoma
9.  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
8.  Tampa, Florida
7.  Las Vegas, Nevada
6.  Boise City, Idaho
5.  Birmingham, Alabama
4.  Miami, Florida
3.  Sioux Falls, South Dakota
2.  Austin, Texas
1.  Des Moines, Iowa

Here’s a New York Times opinion piece on the supremacy of tap water.