Ethical Automobile Airbags - Sodium Azide. Carcinogen, Mutagen, Toxin saving lives at EOL

 Work up this morning wondering where automobile airbags wind up when used cars are sold for reuse in Africa. 

The automobile airbag, mandated after valiant effort to protect consumers by Ralph Nader's organization in the 1970s, is a wonderful invention.  Here's a video of one deploying.


Cool huh? But after your life is saved in the crash, what happens to the airbag? 

How it works (at least in older models of cars, most often exported to Africa) is that a highly toxic, known mutagen, suspected carcinogen, CDC advisory toxic chemical SODIUM AZIDE is triggered by an electrical charge.

Robin's Little Red Recycling Book - Thirteen Threads of Page One.

The evolution (or devolution) of blogging to 280 characters (Twitter Maximum) has had positive and negative impacts on wisdom.

It does create a mental talent for pruning excess verbiage, which was always my bane in high school and college. My dad, "Doctor I" had a habit of crossing out the word "that" in books and articles, as if to keep a trove of "that" pages he would have saved being printed, like trees saved by recycling tons.

It also gives wind to oversimplification, and "black and white" (almost literally, but not literally) opinions.

Intolerance is increasingly treated as a virtue, both on the "left" and on the "right".  I can tolerate intolerance for things that are truly black and white, like torture of children and extinction of species and destruction (e.g. via mining) of habitat. I cannot tolerate the idea of "endangered species platter" in restaurant tourism. But I have to consider the domestication of wild species (Tiger King is nearly intolerable, but might have preserved the very last tiger DNA in a future paradigm) as a possible "seed bank", and realize it's funded by Chinese restaurant tourism (watched "Wet Markets" documentary on VICE over the weekend).\




500 Year Young Unborn Superchild Salli

She's four years old, 15.4 kg (34 lbs), has dark brown hair, and dark olive green eyes. Her skin is mocha, the product generations of shuffled melatonin across generations of slapjack diaspora who spent generations falling from and rising to power over five centuries of globalism. Globalism is a word in history books - not that there are books - taken for granted by children of earth. The year is 2521.

 Let's call her Salli. 

Had Sally been conceived 504 years in the past, reaching this age in AD 1521, it's unlikely she'd have been aware of what we now call the Renaissance. The great artists, Raphael, da Vinci, and others would not have been recognized by the average European, let alone a child, or anyone in Asia, Africa, or the Americas. Even if she had the fortune to be born in a European city - Athens, Florence, Berlin, London, Paris, Barcelona, Copenhagen - she would statistically have been extremely poor. Over 12% of children born died in their first year. 


Five hundred years later, in present day 2021, it's easy for us to recall (or google, or Wikipedia) the great philosophers and artists of 500 years ago. The Renaissance or "Rebirth" period of history centers on humans who re-discovered ancient wisdom, re-appreciated Greek and Roman philosophy, and set the stage for founding fathers of democratic constitutions. Those constitutions eventually led to generations of oppressed, indentured, enslaved genders and races to aspire, and achieve promises of equality. Whether that equality status has been "achieved" as of today might be perilous to debate before the woke. But from the position of Salli in 2521 AD, a lot of progress was made by women and the colonized nations (absurdly referred to as "minorities" so often in western-centric writings) between 1521 and 2021.

The question today is what about her?

Vermont E-Waste Recycler Accused of Burying Hunter Biden Hard Drive in CEO's Front Yard

 [April 1, Middlebury, Vermont]


Early on April first, Drones from the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources - in constant surveillance of Good Point Recycling - provided shocking photos of the largest e-waste dump in the United States.

Focus material - data - was being landfilled, and on the CEO's own personal property.

"Honest, we just thought we were digging up collapsed orangeburg sewer pipe," said the Bristol Vermont excavating company owner, Steve.

But when the pipe was replaced, in a ten foot deep excavation, the excavator saw Ingenthron place a hard drive, floppy disk, zip drive, and a letter and post it note in the deepest part of the sewage-rinsed  yard hole.  They were placed carefully, with double zip-locked bags for protection.

"Dumping e-waste," said ANR staffer Karen Krabapple, who pilots the drones from her home during pandemic lockdown, "is a crime in Vermont."