2021 Pandemic Response - Seeking One True Size To Fit All

Here on a foggy mountaintop in Marshall, Arkansas (population 1300 and change), I'm preparing my family's bags to return to our disparate homes - Vermont, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Brooklyn and London. The kids are adults with careers and degree studies in Europe, my partner has a continued sabbatical in Spain. I should have more time to blog when I'm on my own again, though re-making this thing over and pruning back to the best branches seems daunting.

So let's try this. I can explain and represent the views of my conservative red-hat Trump was robbed family members to my more educated, more erudite liberal relatives. First, let me explain something to blog readers - the reddest of states has both.

Here is a conservative in my family who I wuld not want to become sick. He's 89. He loves oysters. He lives in the South of France, where vaccine hesitancy is highest. Today's blog will use CV-19 policy and opinion variance to illustrate how there is not "one correct answer". 

(Publishing prematureley as a place holder, last post of 2021 Coming back to edit, time to pack the car).

Recent E-Waste News Predicted by Good Point Ideas Blog

News headlines travel faster these days through my @WR3A Twitter account and LinkedIn. As compared to the blog, those social media venues compete better for shorter attention spans (including yours truly).

The beat goes on.

That said, it's worth it to link today's news to the paradigms long established in the blog.

For example, former E-Stewards Executive Director has retired rather fitfully, and gone on record that both the R2 and E-Stewards Certifications are flawed... flawed in a way that this blog described a decade ago as follows - They don't know what they are talking about and are making it up as they go along.

Akers told me he was somewhat censored by Resource Recycling editors who are trained to flinch by angry outbursts from Jim "A Place Called Away" Puckett. He filled some gems in by email, but the Op-Ed itself is damning enough.

In My Opinion: Does today’s industry need e-Stewards or R2?

I’ve looked at the IRS 990 filings for both Basel Action Network (BAN), the owner of the e-Stewards standard, and Sustainable Electronics Recycling International (SERI), the owner of R2. The most recent filings publicly available online for both organizations cover 2019.

BAN’s filing shows gross revenue of $838,358 with total expenses of $817,088 for a net gain of $21,270 (the year prior, BAN had a net loss of $77,785). The organization reported only $83,351 in grant revenue, meaning the bulk of the revenue is from e-Stewards. The executive director was paid $133,741. Spending on travel totaled $39,234 and spending for advertising was $7,514. Another $314,701 was spent on other salaries.

The SERI filing shows gross revenue at $1,746,118, salaries of $508,775 and a net revenue of $742,097. The executive director was paid $159,650. Certification fees brought in $1,689,774 in revenue.

Both filings raise some questions. For BAN: Is this program sustainable? What happens to my e-Stewards certification if BAN folds? BAN is mostly a one-man show. What happens if that individual retires or becomes ill? Is there a business-continuation plan to protect my investment in an e-Stewards certification? Was any money spent on advertising to help drive business to e-Stewards or just to recruit more companies into the certification pipeline?

For SERI, the main question is: Is any of its revenue spent to help drive business to R2 recyclers?...

The main question really is: How much of those membership fees are being spent to aid the certified recyclers in the marketplace?

From looking at the 990 filings, the answer is not much.

Pouty Puckett has yet to respond in public to Akers cards on the table, though SERI's Corey Dehmey tried to direct us away from the man behind the curtain, and back to the Wizard of Obfuscation with his response last week.

#PhotoJournalism and the Tire Fire Mirror: The Vampire Class Can't Find Its Own Footprints

#PhotoJournalism and the Tire Fire Mirror:  The Vampire Class Can't Find Its Own Footprints

Poverty Porn photographers claiming to "hold up a mirror" to society fail to document the true value of reuse and maintenance is in saving the environmental expense of virgin material extraction and production. The vampires can't see themselves because they are holding the mirror facing forward, where goods go to be reused, instead of at our own extractive environmental footprint.

The perfect example? The tire fire. A fresh one appears today in the respected Council on Foreign Relations... even they use the African Tire Fire to lead their story.

Council on Foreign Relations Gets Into the Act.

(This blog is summarized on my Twitter feed in 5 tweets plus 2 postscript, copied at bottom)

ENVIRONMENTALISM cannot be scatalogical. While waste analysis is as vital to earth environmental policy as a pap smear, urine sample, or colonoscopy sample, it isn't the cure for obesity, heart disease, disease exposure, or stupid behavior... all of which are bigger predictors of death than excrement.

PHOTOJOURNALISM likes to tell us (or themselves) that they make complicated science more understandable and relatable. Photos definitely stir a human empathy (nurture) or anger/fear reaction.

For years this blog has drummed about the danger of simple looking solutions which are in fact comically fictitious if the photo is given a time lapse treatment. In today's twitter feed, I use tires as an example of photojournalist "whistle blowing" to well-meaning environmentalists - triggering collateral damage via subconscious racial profiling.

To get your attention, I'll start with the guilty western pleasure of whacking off to an African burning a pile of tires.

Long term followers will recognize this 30 year old man as Awal Muhammed of Savelugu, used here to solicit hand-wringers to view "Welcome to Sodom", the most recent "documentary" to add to the pile of lies about Agbogbloshie, the auto scrapyard in central capital of Accra, Ghana. Here's another shot of Awal, from #SashaRainbow's glam-rock-band Placebo music video of the same vein of lies about Africa's waste being not African, but recently illegally imported externalized waste from OECD evil recyclers who refused to boycott Africa's Tech Sector entrepreneurs.

I don't credit the photographer, sorry. But the photographer didn't credit, or describe, Awal Muhamed, so call it even. In any case, after one more guilty pleasure shot of Awal's accelerant dowsed tire fire performance art, I will share an actual diagram of the life cycle of automobile tires, from rubber plant production to crumb rubber or cement kiln fate in the USA or Europe.

The entry point here is Sasha Rainbow and whatshisnameWelcometoSodom and Kevin McElvaney's re-treaded claim that they are not exploiting men like Awal, that their photo-economy is necessary to HOLD UP A MIRROR to wealthy societies who, they claim, are unaware that their OECD recyclers are faking it and dumping your electronics (as evidenced by tires) on Africa.

Universal Waste and the Fallacy of Failure

 Had a long and frustrating conversation with a pal of mine who is presenting to a council on CERCLA - the law enacted to clean up pollution disasters. CERCLA, or Superfund, is backward looking. It is not a seat belt or an air bag, it's a law to clean up the highway accidents by assigning cleanup costs to those who drove the car or fueled the tank.

First, here is the photojournalist take of a large failed warehouse.

Landlord warehouse in Columbus OH, courtesy of Resource Recycling magazine.

The pal called to present his recent takeaway from Closed Loop Refining and Recovery failure, an abandonment of CRTs and CRT glass at facilities CLRR rented in Arizona and Ohio. That highway accident was perhaps the biggest blemish on Electronics Recycling Programs across the country. Or perhaps, it's not. But owing to the landlord's use of CERCLA (Superfund Law) language to go after clients of the CRT Recycling company, CLRR certainly made the news, and elevated what was not the largest of CRT glass markets to become emblematic of the CRT recycling industry.

Cars driving the speed limit on the highway don't make the news. CRT recyclers who continually processed CRT glass, under the conditions of the EPA CRT Rule, were able to move far more material than CLRR - because they were moving it.

CLRR was driving twice the speed limit day after day by the end of the third quarter 2013. And by speed limit, I'm referring to limits on the conditional exemption to hazardous waste law - rules against speculative accumulation, and processing deadlines to produce "furnace ready cullet".

The consulting pal said that the root cause of the failures was the EPA CRT Rule - which I helped write in 1999. He said that had the EPA instead classified the CRTs as "Universal (Hazardous) Waste", that CLRR would not have happened.

This thinking is typical of CERCLA, which only focuses on disasters. People can make up whatever they want about coulda-shoulda-woulda, and the disaster appears to be the evidence that if "mistakes were made", that the wording of the laws in place that didn't prevent this accident must be to blame.

This is like a call to lower the highway speed limit from 70 to 50 MPH, when CLRR was driving 140. The fact is that if any regulator, certifying body, landlord doubling rented space, or supplier doing normal due diligence on CLRR had examined the requirements of the existing CRT Rule, and mass balance records from CLRR, they could only draw one conclusion by the end of 2013. I know, because I did the diligence, and cut off shipments to CLRR in 2013 until and unless the company corrected the expired and exceeded requirements of my diligence.  And I cut them off despite them lowering their fees to my company, and despite it being the beginning of the worst year in the history of my company - the Vermont Opt Out Plan settlement of 2014.

Michael Shellenberger's Mad at Solar Panels. Too Cute Substack Fallacy.

SEE VIDEO: WHY DECOMMISSIONED SOLAR PANELS ARE NOT DEAD YET.  

Like flip phones, CRT monitors, hotel TVs, ex-boyfriends, and used cars, your decision to electively upgrade to a newer solar panel does not mean the ex-panel's life won't go on.

I was coached that people don't have time to read everything, so here's the jist... Shellenberger's thesis is that solar panels are being upgraded far sooner than their 30 year warranty or 40 year estimated lifespan would have buyers assume. That's true, I just gave a presentation on that at NERC.org.  But the reason for the upgrades is not that the used panels are failing or are waste... It's because 

• the price and efficiency are falling, 
• the number of roofs is finite, 
• the cost of siting big solar fields near populated areas is skyrocketing
• early adapters like to upgrade to something new
• AND by 2028, virtually every older working will panel be cost-driven to replace

I have a whole presentation explaining this (Start at 2h 30min, NERC.org recorded session). Like desktop CRTs and Pentium 4 laptops, the solar panels are all going to get electively upgraded.

BUT  like those other items, the secondhand market is gobbling up replaced solar panels. And here's where the circular economy doesn't revolve around you, Michael Shellenberger - a 50% efficient panel replaced by a 100% efficient panel in Vermont GENERATES MORE KW IN AFRICA THAN THE NEW ONE DOES IN VERMONT.

Check out @AdamMinter's Twitter reply string to @ShellenbergerMD (he's not an MD, btw, he uses his first and middle initial).

MORE >

Robin Ingenthron's "Pecha Kucha" presentation (2018)

 

For me, the rules of Pecha Kucha are a bit like Fight Club... I was so nervous after this 2018 presentation in Burlington, Vermont, that I have never told anyone about it, or mentioned that it's recorded online. I went home and resolved never to watch it.

But I just did... and really, it's not that bad.  *continued

Building A Solar Power Economy in Africa via Fair Trade Recycling and Secondhand markets: BossBaby Part 1

Building A Solar Power Economy in Africa via Fair Trade Recycling and Secondhand markets: BossBaby Part 1

There is a huge amount of solar panel recycling news occuring in 2021.  It has been challenging for me to blog any updates, it is such a moving target.

Today however I have to post a response to Uganda's President Yoweri K. Museveni's Wall Street Journal Op-Ed criticizing Solar and Wind power assistance.  I know the Editors write the headline, so they need to be called out for allowing him to bury the lead. 

Nowhere in the article does Museveni present any evidence of "backlash". He's asking for a handout. If we offer solar panels for free, but are silent to your request for a free coal fired utility, that's kind of a "Boss Baby" African Privileged Sector response.

BossBaby Museveni is demanding handouts for coal. Not to put too fine a point on my response - 

Go pound sand.


OPINION
COMMENTARY

Solar and Wind Force Poverty on Africa
Letting us use reliable energy doesn’t mean a climate disaster.

By Yoweri K. Museveni Oct. 24, 2021 2:13 pm ET

@KagutaMuseveni twitter feed promoting his op-ed supports my suspicion that he had some help writing this... it has the fingerprints of Petrochemical Industry lobby seeding doubts about solar.

*linked to my comment at WSJ Comments section... but don't dive too deep, WSJ commenters are notoriously sharp elbows.

Property Value vs. Junkyards: The Privileged Viewpoints

September 2021 lone blog (forgot to publish)

Long running theme - how I learned as an Environmental Protection Regulator that Enforcement does NOT correspond so much with toxicity as it does with land value.

Dollars spent on pollution abatement and policing come from property taxes. Environmental Justice advocates are correct in this sense - that in "melting pot" societies like the USA, lower incomes correlate with lower property value. 

There's a natural free market "valuation" in play. Junkyards are better for future generations than hard rock mining. We applaud reuse and recycling rates, as we know that the carbon and habitat and water use from recycling is less than we spend mining raw material out of the earth.

But as much as a real estate agent will avoid property next to a Superfund CERCLA copper mine, they don't much want to represent property next to a junkyard, either.

Bats. Elephants. Gorillas. Whales. Extinction.

What I care about most are children who will be born centuries from now. People I will never meet, or see.

What they will learn about is the mass extinction underway.

They will see how human society of today was motivated by money.  Even when problems like climate change and extinction and deforestation were well understood, the solutions posed were to throw money at it. People whose opinions about the topic were politically correct would get nice jobs to phone in their outrage.

Fair Trade Recycling Offsets in West Africa - Phase 1

 Less Blogging. Less Tweeting. Less Opining. More Doing.

World Reuse, Repair and Recycling Association - dba "Fair Trade Recycling" doesn't do much fundraising. But I'm extremely proud of our contributions.

We have launched the next phase of the Fair Trade Recycling "Offset". My company has exported approximately 100 sea containers of working and repairable electronics to Africa since 2001. At approximately 15 tons per containerload, that leaves 1,500 tons of waste generated in African cities like Douala, Limbe, Accra, Lagos, Dakar, Kinshasa, Nairobi to now fund with the profits that both Africa's Tech Sector and OECD Reuse companies made through trade.

The Tech Sector in Africa is not "primitive", and I've long bristled at the fake claims that 80% of what they buy was not reused, but dumped. The photos NGOs used to promote that belief CLEARLY show electronic imported 30 years earlier, collected by the scrap sector from African consumers after decades of repair and maintenance.

That said, Africa has a problem with LITTER COLLECTION. WR3A has funded this study to see how many tons of ocean-bound plastic can be diverted from gutters before rainy season comes. Very proud of our collaboration with Dr. Asi Quiggle Atud - who was 4 years old when I said goodbye to him in Ngaoundal, Cameroon, in 1986.

Reviewing the report this weekend. Thanks Maia Nilsson and Sean Plasse and Laura Dubester for contributing to last year's GoFundMe campaign - and thanks to American Retroworks Inc and other WR3A members for raising the balance.

In phase 2, we'll pit Dr. Q's team of researchers against city scrappers in a contest of who can divert the most litter from city gutters and canals, before the monsoons come. My hope is that Plastic Manufacturing companies will then pitch in, and help "Offset" the packaging Africans rely on for food and drink in Emerging Markets.

#circulareconomy #fairtraderecycling

If Recyclers like my company commit to helping valedictorians lead efforts to collect and offset one ton of litter for every ton we have exported for reuse, we can establish a model for the Petrochemical and Plastics Trade Associations to follow.

"Might as well be me."

Thanks to the three or four people who contributed to our GoFundMe campaign. I matched the gifts 30 fold, personally, because I believe we have to do something.  I'm not a good fundraiser. But I have this unique perspective that Africa City Dumps aren't full of just coconut shells and banana peels, and that the Techs of Color who created the #criticalmassofusers that led to Mass Communications (my Dad was professor of that at U of Arkansas and Fresno State, a graduate of University of Missouri Journalism school).

Let's want to offset 1500 tons in 5 years. 

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Less blogging. Less tweeting. More doing.<br><br>Fair Trade Recycling Offset entering phase 2. Impressive report by Doctor Q - Asi Quiggle Atud of University of Cameroon.<br><br>I&#39;m committed to offsetting 1,500 tons of waste from African cities.<a href="https://t.co/RBE7kjd5p2">https://t.co/RBE7kjd5p2</a> <a href="https://t.co/EW4u01BMwN">pic.twitter.com/EW4u01BMwN</a></p>&mdash; Robin I (@WR3A) <a href="https://twitter.com/WR3A/status/1444319882837995520?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 2, 2021</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Don't Let #CircularEconomy Mean #PropertyColonialism

 The previous blog opened with a some photojournalism chestnuts from a decade ago - when Greenpeace slipped reporters a mickey, and showed journalists a sea container full of identical CRT TVs from a hotel upgrade shipped to Tema, Ghana - and then a 70 year old black and white Magnavox kitchen table TV housing in Agbogbloshie. What should have been proof that Agbogbloshie was an #ewastehoax was passed around as evidence of #environmentalinjustice.

There IS environmental injustice on display - it's when Western NGOs conflate the recent importer, the valedictorians in the Tech Sector, the "Geeks of Color", with wire-burning "primitive" recyclers from the slums who eventually gather used imports after DECADES of reuse in the #goodenoughmarket.

This week, we see evidence of the same tactic, via another NGO.  "How Romania Turned Into an Illegal Dumping Ground for EU Waste".

Check out these photos from the article, which claims that "rusting" metal farm equipment is "burned" in Romania landfils. Shocking, but not in the way the writer intended.

The claim that the "rusty" meatals are "burned in landfills" after being purchased in Western Europe is bigoted, stupid, and every bit as stupid as the 2010 claims that Joe Benson was importing the 1970 kitchen Magnaox watched by Prince Nico Mbarga.

Environmentalists Must Learn From Misdiagnoses: How CRT TCLP Would Affect Asbestos, Solar

First, by request, here are the photos the blog "Halloween Images of Scary Black People" pointed out a decade ago.  The blog was about language used to flog normal activities, rendering them repulsive - or heroicizing the same image (using Wordsworth's "The Village Blacksmith" to describe metal recycling compared to the way BAN.org described metal recycling at Agbogbloshie).

The BAN NGO was so proud of one photograph - of a man carrying copper and aluminum wiring (from scrap automobile harnesses inside a 1970s Magnavox kitchen tabletop TV case) - that they use it on their website masthead, and in annual fundraisers for "Giving Tuesday".  BAN offers readers who feel sorry for the "primitive" man the chance to donate $25-1000 to their NGO.  How the young man will benefit from your donation isn't exactly clear.

But as we pointed out in 2012, that self-same Magnavox kitchen-table CRT television was very, very, very unlikely to have arrived - as BAN repeatedly claims - "days earlier", or as a result of environmental externalization. Even back in 2012, that 1970s TV was an ebay collector's item selling for over $100. It bore no earthly relation to the TVs BAN or Greenpeace filmed unloaded at African port of Tema in 2009, or Jim Puckett's infamous updated photo of Africa's "primitive" Tech Sector.

Here is a picture of the top selling album in Nigeria in 1978 - by Africa's "Elton John" of the 1970s, the artist crowned as "Prince Nico Mbarga" (whose lilting song "Sweet Mother" from the same album remains Africa's chart-topper to this day).

Soooo, there's no evidence at all that the man in BAN's photo is carrying a TV imported used in 2012, vs. imported new or used in 1977. But BAN's practice of pushing the plastic casing as evidence of environmental injustice is ironically quite bigoted. BAN's unspoken assumption is that if-not-but-for villains like Joe "Hurricane" Benson, Agbogbloshie would be full of swimming and fishing young Michael Ananes, littered only with banana peels and coconut shells.

INTERPOL's (Higgins and Lindemulder) "Project Eden" was cruelly naive about African city waste. 

WasteDive Asks: Are Solar Panels the Next CRT Recycling Problem?

 Our small Vermont company gets 2 big stories in July.

First, Recycling International is publishing a 2 page interview with Yours Truly, whose small Vermont Recycling Company has catapulted to #36 on the Magazine's list of Notable Recyclers worldwide (and that's not just "e-waste").

Do we belong on a list that includes Robin Weiner of ISRI at #15, or author Adam Minter at #6?

My only explanation is ironic - compared to similar lists a decade ago, Recycling International now realizes there are hundreds of well-managed recycling companies in places like Ghana, India, China, Pakistan, Indonesia, Singapore.  After reading their interview of me, I realized the irony that a) thanks to us (and this blog), the list is much harder for a white American to get onto, and b) we are deliciously placed several rows above Basel Action Network (screenshot below), which tried to get me labelled as a pariah after being called out for profiling Joe "Hurricane" Benson as a "primitive recycler" (rather than a 25 year expert at reuse export) based on his nationality.

But before I "bury" the lead about solar panel recycling ---  it's been my honor to put together an esteemed panel on how Solar Panel Reuse in Emerging Markets may offer the same solutions as it offered SVGA computer monitors 20 years ago... Register at NERC.org for a front row on Zoom, as I participate with Emmanual Nyalete of Ghana, Lennart Banaszak of Germany, and Good Point Recycling's very own Solar Nerd Trevor de Young (who's trailer home is almost completely "off grid" with salvaged solar panels - including some deliberately smashed by the solar de-installers in an botched "end of life" crime).

(see hammer marks, which rendered this panel 50% efficient. If it is relocated to Ghana, the 50% efficient panel will produce more KWH - due to abundant sunlight - than it produced in Vermont before it was "sabotaged" to prevent reuse).

Katie Pyzyk's interview in WasteDive explores our pilot program for solar panel reuse... and finds parallels to the CRT Reuse concerns that resulted in California SB20 and piles of shredded leaded CRT cullet across the West.

Is the UNU E-waste Research Program Ever Going to Learn?

 I'm a little behind in editing and posting a number of draft blogs, but just sent this email to a university professor who shared a Grist article with me.

The Grist article is not that bad. But listen as I go on a tear of the UNU program (source of data in the Grist article). I used to have a friendly relationship with the UNU e-waste program. But they are fricking racists, and it's time to drop the mic on uncle bubba.

When I meet with the UNU boys (who are convincingly nice) I can smell the ruffled feathers. But they doubled down specifically on Joseph "Hurricane" Benson, and when proven completely wrong, hid their BS 80% press release statistic (switching from "primitively managed" to "undocumented" means "we didn't know what we were talking about when we said primitively managed but we don't want to retract our 80% BS statements in the past used to sentence the guy we applauded the arrest and sentencing of, so we use "informal sector" to imply that black techs are to be mistrusted")

Now that I have our attention, I share what I really think via the email below. Wake up, UNU. Every Univesity researcher who read you study has discredited it as Criminal Negligence. The fact that it's still being cited by environmental publications like Grist just show you to be the Thomas Midgely of surplus electronics management.

Robin Ingenthron Academia.Edu - Two decades of building a case in favor of Trade between Global Geeks

The blog has almost as many unfinished and unpublished posts in 2021 than posts that made it online. Twitter and Facebook and Linkedin force me to make the points more succinctly, and that can be good if the subject is retreading of past fair trade recycling posts. 

Given no word limit, I find myself tiptoeing up to the edge of obfuscation. But at the same time, there are a few people out there still who appreciate the intellectual bedrock of Right To Repair, Right to Own, Right to Recycle, and the tactics of Action Networks and Big Corporations.

 To make sure everyone can find copies of articles I've published, or authors and researchers who've done research on projects of mine at Fair Trade Recycling - Here are some of the highlights of 20+ years of research, and the untangling of a charitable industrial complex that doled out heaps of collateral damage on the E-Waste Hoax. 

 https://independent.academia.edu/RobinIngenthron 

Note that the oldest one is a paper I had to hand-write on completion of my 1983 semester at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland (couldn't fit a typewriter in my backpack). I'd gone to research the Infant Formula controversy and the USA's refusal to participate in a motion by the UN General Assembly to restrict the trade of infant formula to developing nations (LDCs). 

At Carleton College I worked to re-instate the Nestle Boycott by circulating petitions, and was pretty confident that I'd discover the US was wrong. But after deep interviews with Americans at World Health Organization, the leaders of the INFACT* 'Infant Formula Action" group, and Geoffrey Fookes (VP of Nestle) I got a taste of the "career path" of activism. I could not see any way the boycott could have traction without targeting Nestle, the most wealthy and conservative and best-practices-oriented manufacturer. And I didn't see how the NGO could grow and build on a micro-issue.

"WHO's in charge?" was a pretty decent pun summing up the problems I saw with UN and World Health Organization acting as pharmacists to police sales of baby food.  The real solution was right under my nose 2 years later, when I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Cameroun, Africa.

(*or was it INFORM? One was the USA counterpart)

Frederick Douglass 1881 Speech about Abolitionist John Brown

 Finished reading, then watching "The Good Lord Bird" yesterday. 

From the National Park Service museum page for Harper's Ferry... this tribute to John Brown by Frederick Douglass serves as a reminder not to dismiss those who go down fighting for a just cause.

On May 30, 1881, Frederick Douglass delivered a memorable oration on the subject of John Brown at the Fourteenth Anniversary of Storer College. Especially notable was the presence among the platform guests of Andrew Hunter, the District Attorney of Charles Town who had prosecuted Brown and secured his conviction. In his oration, Douglass extolled Brown as a martyr to the cause of liberty, and concluded with the following passages:

Frederick Douglass

"But the question is, Did John Brown fail? He certainly did fail to get out of Harpers Ferry before being beaten down by United States soldiers; he did fail to save his own life, and to lead a liberating army into the mountains of Virginia. But he did not go to Harpers Ferry to save his life.

"The true question is, Did John Brown draw his sword against slavery and thereby lose his life in vain? And to this I answer ten thousand times, No! No man fails, or can fail, who so grandly gives himself and all he has to a righteous cause. No man, who in his hour of extremest need, when on his way to meet an ignominious death, could so forget himself as to stop and kiss a little child, one of the hated race for whom he was about to die, could by any possibility fail.

"Did John Brown fail? Ask Henry A. Wise in whose house less than two years after, a school for the emancipated slaves was taught.

Plastic Waste Is A Biproduct - of Growing World Consumer Affluence (and Petrol Refinement)

Based on Twitter, Quora, Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as a growing number of press releases issued by Basel Action Network (the worst run NGO on the planet, manufacturing disinformation and reckless ad hominem and warrantless accusations and collateral damage for 2 decades), the plastic straw in the turtle's nose continues to churn affluent (#wguilt) attention.

This National Geographic Ocean Plastic Graphic is the best graphic presentation of an environmental problem since EWaste Republic.

The problem of ocean plastics is real.  It is so serious that we cannot afford to waste time on false causalities.  There is a cognitive dissonance growing in the environmentally activist community.  We don't want our heart surgeons to be displaying emotional breakdowns. Virtually ZERO of the Ocean Plastics Waste can be attributed to Western recycling programs, and virtually NOTHING can be accomplished by ceasing production of plastic at the source.

1) Plastic is itself, by and large, a recycled byproduct of gasoline refining.  When petroleum is pumped from the ground and refined to produce diesel or petrol or kerosene, a fatty polymer rich byproduct is produced. Plastic was a great invention to reduce the need to burn or dump that byproduct.

2) If Plastic was eliminated, it might give us a warm feeling that won't last long (like peeing our own pants). The energy needed to transport waste from food spoilage or metals and glass manufactured to replace it, and the weight of the new packaging, would create greater demand for fuel derived from petroleum.  The more cheese you make, the more whey you produce, the more milk you make, the more butter fat you produce, the more gasoline you make, the more polymers you produce. Banning whey won't spare any heifers. 

3) Ocean Plastic waste is, according to the very interesting internet presentation by National Geographic, produced by nations which are growing the most quickly in per capita income. As Africans and Asians have eliminated starvation, disease, and poverty over the past 50 years, they can afford the same stuff (gasoline engines and packaged water and packaged food) that "wealthy" countries have been buying.

BusinessInsider: New Zealand Company Extracts Gold from PC Boards Using Microbes (and...)

This Business Insider video on gold recycling just came out on Youtube.

I haven't even finished watching it yet, because the opening minute uses footage of African city junkyards to repeat perposterous claims that African are using a toxic leachate chemical process to extract gold from circuit boards.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yGPm1U7U6s

Look, if you are claiming to make a engineering or scientific breakthrough, don't start with a blatantly false and discredited claim.  I've been visiting African scrapyards for years.

The gold bearing printed-circuit boards that come from hand-demanufacture and disassembly (an honorable process, superior to Western "Big Shred" machines designed to avoid labor) are sorted by type and either a) reused in ubiquitous repair shops in Africa, or b) sold to Chinese buyers who harvest integrated chips from the boards for remanufacturing (e.g. into lower scale toys and appliances).

The whole "acid bath" claim was bogus since Guiyu reporting in 2002.  The claims made about Agbogbloshie and other African dumps (that they import EU and USA electronics for scrap, rather than collect from generators in African cities after decades of re-use) were disproven by multiple research papers over the past 10 years.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4yGPm1U7U6s" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

@BusinessInsider is ordinarily a great journalism organization, and the rest of the story may be quite interesting aside from the postulation that white people have better processes. 

E-Stewards Webinar on SEERA #ewaste legislation today. 8 Questions for 3 Privileged Boomers

Three experts - Jim Puckett, Bob Houghton, and Niel Peters-Michaud are three Boomer White Guy Experts who will tell us all why people should be arrested if they sell used electronics to a willing buyer from Emerging Markets in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. 

Most of those people who sell there are part of the diaspora - expatriate Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans (like Joseph "Hurricane" Benson). Nobody like that is represented on this panel of experts.

Here are some questions in advance:

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1) What is the average years of use of new devices sold to ("rich nation") OECD?

2) What is the average years of use of new devices sold to ("poor nation") non-OECD?

3) What is the average years of use of used devices in OECD?

4) What is the average years of use of used devices in the non-OECD?

In the not-so distant past, Jim Puckett and Bob Houghton both claimed that 80% of exports of used devices (#4) to Emerging Markets was waste.  After every single study showed 1) that's not economically even possible, and 2) no sample comes remotely similar to Jim's claim, and 3) Jim's source for Agbogbloshie (Mike "Fishing as a Boy" Anane) was making everything up or citing Jim.

Confronted in 2013 with the Big Lie about 80% of E-Waste, Jim changed his answer to "no one knows, but it is illegal".

So a few more questions:

Patent Law Gambits For Simpletons: Patent Exhaustion Remedies

* Note - this turned out not to be as simple as I imagined at 4 AM this morning.  But I'll revisit to plug in stick figure cartoons to make the wire analogy easier to follow.

Metal Wire manufacturing was patented in England in 1565, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

It marks one of the very first uses of patents, as understood by the founding fathers of the United States. This 1909 historical text explaining the history of the 1565 patent is past its copyright and may be freely copied and pasted.  By contrast, for some reason the image of the painting of Queen Elizabeth is listed as a modern copyright on Wikipedia... that's obviously an erroneous claim, you cannot take a photo of a portrait long past copyright and claim that anyone using the image of Queen Elizabeth is infringing on your photo copyright.  But I digress.

What's useful to understand about the difference in copyright and patent law is how much of the precedent involves the science and applied engineering of metal refining. Mining metal ores, and refining them in furnaces, was long established (think of the Iron Age and Bronze Age), and no one could successfully patent the extraction of ore and manufacture of metal. 

They could, however, patent unique methods and improvements in furnaces... one of which resulted in the 16th century in making metal so refined that it remained useful even when it was made very, very thin. Wire was very high tech, back in Queen 'Liz's period. The Tech Sector of the middle ages - that era's valedictorians - were adept at making metal into weapons and useful items in commerce. It also establishes an interesting string to follow for electric appliances, electronics, internet cable, etc. But I digress into the present.

Author: Viscount James Bryce
Author: Frederic William Maitland

Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, by various authors, compiled and edited by a committee of the Association of American Law Schools, in three volumes (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1909). Vol. 3.

Nos. XIII, XIV. 1565. Sept. 17. Two licenses to Wm. Humfry and Christopher Shutz to dig (1) for the Lapis Calaminaris, the manufacture of brass and iron wire and battery wares, (2) for tin, lead, and other ores. These grants covered geographically those parts of England not included in Houghstetter’s patents and the Alum patent of De Vos. Calamine or zinc carbonate is an essential in the manufacture of latten or brass, which it was proposed to use in casting ordnance (S. P. Dom. Eliz. vol. 8, No. 14). The mineral was discovered in Somersetshire in 1566, and the first true brass made by the new process was exhibited in 1568. The patentees also erected at Tintern the first mill for drawing wire for use in wool-carding. In 1568 the Company was incorporated by Charter as the ‘Company of the Mineral and Battery Works,’ and remained under practically the same management as that of the Society of the Mines Royal (Stringer, Opera Mineralia Explicata). In 1574, and again in 1581, the assignees of the patent obtained an injunction against several owners of lead mines in Derbyshire for using certain methods of roasting lead ores in a furnace worked by the foot blast and other instruments invented by Humphrey after the date of his patent. The Court of Exchequer ordered models to be made, and after repeated adjournments a Commission was appointed to investigate ‘the using of furnaces and syves for the getting, cleansing, and melting of leade Ower at Mendype, and the usage and manner of the syve’ (Exchequer Decrees and Orders). The depositions in this case are still preserved, but it is impossible to trace the history of the case to its completion. Coke informs us that as regards the use of the sieve, the patent was not upheld on the ground of prior user at Mendip. It is a peculiarity of the grant that it covered all subsequent inventions of the patentees in this particular branch of metallurgy. The hearth was invented after the date of the patent, and one of the questions to be decided was whether a subsequent invention could be covered by letters patent or no. See also Hyde Price, pp. 55-60.

Recycling Vocabulary: Environmental Fetishism vs. Informal Markets

Recycling Vocabulary: Environmental #fetishism is a term to describe a structural bias of high-liability laws in OECD nations. Our well-off sensitivity has a perverse effect. Rich nations demand to KNOW FOR CERTAIN a surplus iphone was shredded rather than accept a probable - but undocumented - reuse fate in emerging marketplaces. Tech Sector in Africa and Asia is obviously buying for so-called "informal" (not recorded) reuse.

Environmental laws are enforced to protect real estate value. This was observed as "environmental injustice" three decades ago - but that term has been misapplied to denigrate scrap reuse and recycling (which moves to poor neighborhoods with lower labor costs and higher repair skills) in urban areas, at the expense of virgin mining and extraction in even lower-land-value forests and deserts.

The legal liability created by RCRA is all downstream, no upstream. You can buy packaging made of baby seal pelts, but cannot export highly recyclable PETE plastic to some overseas markets.

It made no sense that Joseph "Hurricane" Benson would pay for hotel CRTs during a flat panel display upgrade, and rather than dispose of bad ones for free in the UK EPR marketplace, pay an additional $10,000 to export them to Ghana and Nigeria, to be busted apart for $2,000 worth of copper. No matter how lax the environmental laws, there is no incentive, which is why academics discovered that it never happened. Raphael Rowe of BBC Panorama served a decade in prison for the same false accusation as he made against Joe Benson.... All that is now exposed. But the EU Charitable-Industrial Complex has now moved the goalposts.

Some never even bothered to show a single piece of e-waste in their "expose"

It's not that Benson's market was dumping 80% of anything. It is the fact it was unknown, "informal", undocumented, which creates a sense of wealthy liability.

What is the purpose of "informal market" vocabulary?

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?