My Freshman Job Interview at SAGA Food Service - my first week at Carleton College 1980: Part One

My father and my mother were the first people in their high schools (graduated 7 years apart, my dad was older) in Taney County, Missouri. 

My father was raised in a very self-educated household. William E. Freeland, his grandfather, and wife Minnie Freeland (Pawpaw and Mawmaw) whom I lived with for a few months every year, as a child, had hundreds of books he purchased on a government salary stationed in Four Corners - Shiprock, NM, today - before it was the USA state, with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Where there wasn't anyplace to spend your federal paycheck, and nothing to do, so he and Minnie his wife (another family icon) spent their time reading and learning. 

* Pawpaw and Mawmaw Freeland were lifelong letter writers and retired with their friend John G. Neihardt in Branson, Missouri.  Black Elk Speaks was a seminal book I read and re-read in high school and afterwards, only later learning I'd sat on Neihardt's lap as a child... my Dad asked me what I was reading and I assumed he didn't know anything about Black Elk and was surprised when he pointed to the sofa where he and Pawpaw used to talk.


Pawpaw thought welfare and charity were corrupt and corrupting, and in the end thought BIA did more harm than good, "turning a culture morally opposed to hand-outs and charity upon its head".

My mom was raised on a subsistence farm in Taney County - Ridgedale, half a mile from the Arkansas border (she was born in Harrison). Outhouses using Sears Roebuck catalog pages for toilet paper. 

Premise: I was raised by people who didn't beg, borrow, or take family debt. And when I was admitted to Carleton College, the 1980s were when the colleges were absolutely soaking up debt like today's federal deficit. 

The financial aid officer at Carleton told me (and thousands of others) that there is "good debt" and "bad debt" and that a college education was the former.

Not convincing, as I was raised. I asked where the most work was on campus, and was told food service - SAGA. It didn't stand for anything - it was Saga Food Services, a chain providing college and institutional "turn key" cafeteria management.

In Part Two, I'll connect these dots.


3 Minute Middlebury College Blog

Yesterday we presented - in Espanol (I'm enrolled in a 7 week Escuela de Espanol) at Middlebury College.

There were four of us. Me, Kennii from Nigeria (and Stanford University), Bob from Brazil, and Jo - all Spanish 1.5 students presenting on environmental subjects to the students of Middlbury's prestigious summer language college (my wife is Director of the School of French).

Here is a link to my 5 minute presentation on "fotos falsas" and collateral damage.  I was joined by Technico Rudy of Queztatenaga Guatemala.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1drREMgKyYxSNks2prc0SutacLbUAAF5l/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=108266863784829595501&rtpof=true&sd=true

It went over very well. 

People can tell the difference between photos taken in professional refurbishing and recycling factories, and poverty porn pictures of random children placed atop of home-generated junk.

Kehinde “Kennii” Ekundayo has become a friend in the class.  Her presentation was about use of art to draw attention to global warming etc.  Bob and Jo also spoke about warming.  

I spoke about NGOs creating an atmosphere to arrest smart technicians in poor countries doing what my grandfather taught me about - fixing a rich person's broken thing.

80% Ewaste Hoax is dead.

https://www.sdsu.edu/news/2024/05/sdsu-international-student-secures-coveted-spot-in-stanfords-art-history-doctoral-program





DNA Immigration

Most "Illegal" Immigrants to the USA have 40-60% Native American, Indigenous, DNA.

Most legal Immigrants to America have 5%-15% (or lower) genetic North American DNA.

Quantitative Estimation Group
Est. % Native American Ancestry (average)
Unauthorized immigrants (mostly Central America, Mexico) ~40–60%
Legal immigrants (global distribution) ~5–15% or lower

Humans whose ancestors lived in North America are being told to obey migration rules invented in Europe. Lines drawn on maps by white people are somehow sacrosanct. But a DNA map shows that native north Americans are given less access to North America.
In my opinion, what is going on with xenophobia right now started with California's first marijuana legalization for medical purposes. It created a wink-wink economy for pot without a legal source to grow it. Arizona wound up a transport hub, and narcotics followed.

Leftist activists who organized "caravans" under Obama created a wave of immigrants educated (marketed) on how to overwhelm the USA's asylum law system. The current Trump efforts are anti-marketing. Sure, there are real differences of opinion, in between. But the anti marketing made sense and is working, and the "overwhelm the system" marketers have some blame.



Robin's 35 Wedding Anniversary: A Memorable Insight (Holy Ghost Blog)

1. Will your unbaptised child burn in hell?

2. Will your uncertified laptop burn in Agbogbloshie?

The authorities certified my wedlock, and the authorities certify my reuse sales. Massive edifices of cathedrals were built on money from the paid certification of cemetaries, births, baptisms and marriages. 

Thirty five years is most of my adult life.  My partner is a Ph.D in francophone literature and director of the USA's most prestigious language institute. She also set up the Middlebury College language program semester in Yaounde, Cameroon (where I did my Peace Corps service from 6/1984-12/1986).  I'm enrolled in the Middlebury College Escuela de Espanol ahora mismo.  It's a small world.


When we were married in July 1990 in Toulouges, France (her parents Catalan hometown, outside of Perpignan) it was a long haul for a lot of Americans who attended, including my parents and my grandparents - Clarence and Lauradean Fisher of Ridgedale, Missouri.  Clarence is the inspiration for the chapter of Adam Minter's Secondhand - "A Rich Persons Broken Thing" - about the value repair can add. It was the thesis of  my international career, that knowledge to repair what someone else doesn't know how to repair is an honest economic tool, and the nations which exited poverty most quickly despite the "Resource Curse" were countries that repaired and refurbished and remanufactured at a mass scale.

But today's memorable insight from the wedding was another visitor from Columbia, Missouri, where I grew up until age of 5 (as my dad got his Ph.D in Mass Communications and Journalism).  I didn't know Pamela in Columbia, but met her in 1984 when we were both assigned to TEFL posts in the north of Cameroon (she was in the far north, Maroua, I was in the close north, Ngaoundal - 3 hours south of Ngaoundere by train. 

Pamela was my "best man".

So the anecdote from the wedding was about Pamela, an African American woman from Missouri, and her meeting my Mom, daughter of Clarence and Lauradean, who were all from Taney County Missouri.  And how much Pam and my Mom had in common from attending a Midwest/Southern American church.  Black church in the USA and Pentecostal Church from rural USA had a LOT in common.  Fire and brimstone, emphatic preachers, songs and clapping, interruptions of Hallelujah. From Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn we have a snapshot of the roots of these Churches....

"He was the innocentest, best old soul I ever see. But it warn’t surprising; because he warn’t only just a farmer, he was a preacher, too, and had a little one-horse log church down back of the plantation, which he built it himself at his own expense, for a church and schoolhouse, and never charged nothing for his preaching, and it was worth it, too. There was plenty other farmer-preachers like that, and done the same way, down South."

In particular, I remember my Mom and Pam both laughing about their earliest doubts about the church their parents were so intent on baptizing them into. In particular, the common practice of the "Holy Ghost" or "Holy Spirit" to inhabit the soul of a churchgoer who would rise, possessed, and speaking in tongues.


Mom and Pam both laughed about the same moments they asked themselves... "Of all the people in our congregation, why does God and the Holy Ghost always choose Mrs. Anderson to possess?  And why doesn't it ever 'possess; me or my parents??"

This was not a mustard seed of faith, this was the mustard seed of logic and reasonable doubt... and helps to explain why neither Pam (who also married a French citizen, Laurent, who also continued working in Africa for decades after they met during our PC service in Cameroun) nor my mother raised their own kids in a fire-and-brimstone church.

There's a pattern here, and it has a lot to do with E-Stewards and R2 Certification and the Charitable Industrial Complex - which this blog has always associated with temple of authority.

Unobtainium Critique of Renewable Energy by Black Hooded Mark Mills

"Life Impact of Renewables" by Manhattan Institute's Mark Mills is still being widely shared in the MAGA universe. It was forwarded to me a month ago It might be a good thought experiment to question what is the half-life of a half-truth in half of a polarized society? But let's stick to math and science.

Does X - any object or technology - have environmental cost inputs? Certainly. A gold ring or smartphone has more costly inputs than a plastic ring or a corded dial up phone. Solar panels and wind turbines are not immune.  Everything has a break-even point to pay off the cost of the inputs. It's a time and math equation.


https://youtu.be/JNRNK3ULLK8

https://youtu.be/JNRNK3ULLK8


ARS TECHNICA's Science author John Timmer already rebutted this insidious critique of investment in renewable energy in 2021.  So if you watch the cringy attack by Mark Mills on renewable energy investments, read Ars Technica next. But I have a few things to add third.