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.

Should I keep going after Alexander Clapp? Or just accept his Waste Wars surrender? Nameless, Faceless Buyers to Him are My Peeps.

Nobody at last week's E-Waste World Conference in Frankfurt, Germany, mentioned Alexander Clapp or his "Waste Wars" book.

Jim Puckett was there, refused to speak about it.

Clapp cites me in 2006 as a source, but won't take my Linkedin invite, let alone speak about what I learned in the 19 years since (20 actually, since my 2006 quote was already dated).

I've got a lot of interesting new stuff to talk about. It's interesting how non-interested Alexander is, both in the sense of his lack of interest in the truth and African and Asians lack of interest in his racial profiling of their Tech Sectors.

Hopefully one of Alex's family members who wrote reviews of his book on Amazon (and transparently didn't hide their family relation) read this, by searching for him.

He's a total fraud. But probably unintentionally... probably meant well, probably yearns, as I do, to be an environmentalist.  But he didn't interview any buyers... they - the market - is nameless, faceless. But I really wish he had the guts to talk to me, like Oli and Adam and even Kevin McElvaney did. Clapp is the biggest intellectual coward of any person I've tried to confront. Sad. 


A Modest Hypothesis: Did Guiyu and Agbogbloshie Make the River Cleaner?



A professor visiting China emailed me this morning and jokingly asked what he should look for in Guiyu or Wuhan in his spare time.

Sometimes a pithy email response makes the best blog fodder. My response:

You don't need to really go to Guiyu or Agbogbloshie if you have Google maps. Just find press coverage of Basel Action Network or Blacksmith Institute's toxic River sample. Then identify the river and find a site a few kilometers upstream and then Google search for contaminated water samples upstream.  

Based on that evidence, Guiyu and Agbogbloshie are making the river cleaner (though of course that is because the samples upstream were taken years earlier when it was even worse).

Science!!!

I'm referring of course to the Guiyu river samples from the largest textile factory hub on earth, upstream from Guiyu, whose water samples are nearly identical to the Bangladesh Lourajong River samples downstream from the Bangladesh second-largest textile manufacturing hub on earth.  Surprise, Guiyu's samples look the same as the river samples of the textile effluent samples upstream from Guiyu.  

My Four Principles: Recycling Is My Karma Yoga

This is not a religious blog by any means. But my recycling career choice has an origin story. 

When my mother, Janeth Ingenthron (1942-2025), was pursuing a Ph.D degree at the University of Arkansas in World Literature, during my teenage years, she would finish an assigned reading and then knock on my bedroom door, throw it on my bed, and tell me briefly about why it was important.

Tao Tse Ching.

Plato's Republic. 

Steppenwolf, Siddhartha...

Bhagavad Gita...

Some combination of smoking pot and feeling guilty about it and being surrounded by Ozark Mountain Pentecostal relatives grew inside me... And I also read my pocket Gideon's Bible New Testament, and talked to Mom about Matthew, Mark, Luke and John... same story but different perspectives and lessons.

In a nutshell, cutting to the chase, I decided that becoming a hermit monk philosopher would keep my conscience nice and shiny, but that generations who would look back on us, the way I was looking back on these historical philophers, would care about what we consumed and polluted, and what we left for them.

That's why Recycling became my choice. It was a religious, philosophical choice. If I live on this planet, I will consume finite resources, and the best way short of asceticism was to justify my existence by saving waste. Recycling was my karma yoga.