Saturday Links for the Week – December 15, 2007

The Environmental Cause of Cancers: The World Cancer Research Fund has made the scientific link between toxins (and lack of micronutrients and diversity) in our food supply, and the prevalence of many cancers. A very early and tentative step towards showing that the world megapolluting corporations and governments are causing much, most of the disease that is killing and sickening billions. If the political and legal system will ever be of any value whatsoever (other than to the elite it slavishly serves), it will be in its eventual capacity to sue, dismantle and stop the people behind these mass murdering organizations. Thanks to Prad for the link.

Feminist Blogs: My favourite critic flickrdiner provides this excellent list of blogs by women who are, like me, angry and fed up with patriarchy:

• Ilyka Damen: Maybe I don’t really love women. Maybe I’m just concern-trolling.
• BrownFemiPower: We have the right to heal and to live. We owe ourselves life. We owe that to each other.
• Blackamazon: It is in the music.
• Sudy: “Perhaps it’s because marginalized individuals spend such an ungodly amount of their lives fighting to get their voice out that when the sound resonates, I’m less concerned about whether it’s pleasing, and more about my own ability to tell my truth.”
• Feministe: Minorities within minorities within minorities.
• Feministing: WAM.

More on Polyamorism: Another great resource explaining what poly is and what it isn’t, from Xeromag. Thanks to an anonymous reader.

A Blog on Love, Conversation and Community!: This is an incredible find. “If humanity is to thrive into the next millennium, it will be because we who live have found our own ways that work, not because some scientist(s) found the magic formula”. The author of this blog figured it all out way before I did. Sustainability. The different forms of love. Polyamorism. All thoughtfully considered. Brilliant. I’ve been soaking up every word.

Why We Mostly End Up Being ‘Everybody Else”: Reader/blogger Jeremy at 6th Density beat me to the punch with a review of Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article on IQ as a measure of modern social conditioning. Excerpt from Gladwell: “Two institutions at present control our children’Äôs lives: television and schooling, in that order. Both of these reduce the real world of wisdom, fortitude, temperance, and justice to a never-ending, nonstop abstraction. In centuries past, the time of childhood and adolescence would have been occupied in real work, real charity, real adventures, and the realistic search for mentors who might teach what you really wanted to learn. A great deal of time was spent in community pursuits, practicing affection, meeting and studying every level of the community, learning how to make a home, and dozens of other tasks necessary to becoming a whole man or woman.” The way we equate conformity to ‘modern’ cognition with intelligence is entirely consistent with how we equate obedience with intelligence in animals.

China’s Toxic Fish Products: Consistent with everything else they produce, fish and seafood from China is toxic poison, the inevitable product of a society that cannot afford to care a whit about human health, dignity, well-being or the environment, or anything beyond the grim and endless struggle just to stay alive at any cost.

Best Business Books of 2007: Not a bad list from S+B this year, except ignore the whole category of books on entrepreneurship, which are all crappy. Canadian Bill Buxton’s Sketching, which I reviewed recently, was justifiably best book on innovation.Next year’s best business book of the year will be mine, of course.