Alexander Zaitchik

These are Ashaninka Indians from the remote village of Tenkarini in the Peruvian Amazon Basin, roughly midway between the eastern ridge of the Andes and Brazil. The woman on the left is Noemi, the village shamen, who led an Ayahuasca ceremony in which I participated and wrote about for Killing the Buddha. My New Republic piece about the local threat posed by illegal loggers and, increasingly, oil and gas development, can be found here. Many thanks to the Cool Earth Foundation and Tropicana for sponsoring my trip.

I was recently on Grit TV with Laura Flanders discussing the Tea Party I attended in Morristown, New Jersey, as well as the Alternet article I wrote with my old Moscow colleagues Mark Ames and Yasha Levine. There was another Tea Party later that night in downtown Manhattan, but I didn’t have it in me to attend another one of these things, which are part GOP convention floor, part Minutemen rally.

I have a new piece up at The Nation concerning a land-use conflict in remote northwest Ireland. Royal Dutch Shell wants to build a raw-gas pipeline and refinery. The small coastal community effected wants Shell to process the gas offshore. The elements and dynamics of the story are familiar enough, but the tenacity with which the locals have been fighting this one for a decade is truly inspiring. The activists have suffered prison, police beatings, and constant electronic surveillance since they began their resistance in 2000. They are some of the toughest bastards you will ever meet, and that’s a compliment.

Photo by Andrew Beardsworth.

My Alternet essay on Twitter has been reprinted as a cover story in the Sacramento News & Review and the Santa Cruz Good Times. You can click here to see me discuss the article and roundhouse kick three Twitter defenders on French TV. If for some reason you want to read two huffy-puffy critical responses to the article, you can click here and here.

I have a new piece up at Alternet that looks at the likelihood of defense contracting reform under the Obama administration. A lot of people are cautiously optimistic, but as one of my sources says: “Efforts to fix this flawed, complex system go back four decades with very little success. I wouldn’t get too excited.”

I have a short piece up at Alternet today that looks at growing interest in group-living among recently bust baby boomers. From taking in roommates to buying houses with friends to full-on hippie farm villages, alternatives to maintaining big empty suburban homes are looking better than ever to those nearing retirement. These homes were never all that good an idea in the first place, but now they are just not tenable for millions who have lost most of their wealth in the last year.

Last week I was awarded the Marty Biegel Civil Rights Award by the Union of Medical Marijuana Patients, for a series of articles on drug policy published in High Times and at Alternet.org. It was an honor that I was very happy to see become somewhat obsolete a few days later, when U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced that he would no longer allow federal agents to raid state-approved medical marijuana facilities, a long-standing practice that was a focus of the stories.

I just returned from my first Carnival, in Trinidad & Tobago. The trip was sponsored by the Trinidad Development Corporation and the Hyatt in Port of Spain. I will never have a bad thing to say about either entity. My short preview of Carnival season ran at ForbesTraveler.com; a more in-depth piece about Trinidad is forthcoming. The above photo is from the Kiddie Carnival, which takes place downtown a day before hell breaks loose.