Liberal and Conservative Conservation

I've got some swell new posts in draft form, just need to do the customary cutting back (trimming some to make new topics, or "part IIs").

As it's Sunday, I have time for Facebook, we have Vermont friends coming over for a barbecue, and I have family calls to make.  Made air reservations for a liberal friend's funeral in California, made a lunch date for a conservative friend in Dallas two days later.  I'm getting the Facebook "like if (I) love Jesus" from friends in the midwest, and "like if I like George Carlin" from the Northeast.

I'll be thinking about how important it has been to get the older gals in Mexico (like Ms. Vicki above) drives to demanufacture, because our strategy of being the end market for TVs is getting hard on their backs.   Everybody, liberal and conservative, is alarmed about exporting hard drives with "information" on them to places like this, where elderly unemployed Mexicans without college degrees take them apart slowly by hand, keeping things like hard drive magnets with rare earth metals.  Texas, Vermont, and California are united... Ms. Vicki must be stopped, either because I'm exploiting her, or she's incapable, or polluting, or stealing sensitive hard drive information, or stealing American jobs.

We don't want her jumping the fence to take apart drives in the USA, and we don't want to ship the drives to Mexico.  So we put them through machines, destroying the reuse which the Thailand flood hard-drive shortage makes valuable, and destroying the rare earth metals in the magnets, which cling to the steel.

"Smiling and waving and looking so fine, I don't think you knew you were in this song"....



My geek friends in Cairo are displaced Palestinians, and sometimes I'm afraid to "google translate" their facebook posts.   My friends in China make valid points about Asia rising.  My friends in Latin America "like" the Cato Institute, or "like Che Guevara".   I see all kinds of "memes" of Ann Coulter or Jon Stewart...

People who travel tend to be more understanding of foreign views.  But liberals who travel only to liberal nations, and conservatives who only visit Christian missionary sites, tend to come back even more certain of themselves.

So Geography isn't, by itself, a moderating force, but geography combined with business is.

The movements have to be to protect diversity from extinction, and to make cut off the very worst ideas and policies.

It won't make much of a difference in the world if we sit down and tell our Vermont and California friends to "like" the end of dumb laws about marijuana, and in won't make a lot of difference to sit down with friends in Texas and Arkansas and "like" the end of dumb laws about regulating recycling.

It's time to select a few things we are very sure of, and sit down with people who "like" the people who oppose those things.  We have to stand up for things which take courage to stand up for, and stop being ditto-heads for people who preach half truths to their own choir.