Google Warning - retroworks.blogspot.com losing 592+ Posts

Well, it was a depressing email in my gmail box this morning.  Google will stop indexing a huge number of posts from this blogspot.

I've always been aware of my mortality, and of the mortality of my ethical recycling messages. I have books on my shelf which are long, long out of print, which are both central to my morality and my thesis, and which I know are unlikely to ever be read again, much less appreciated by mentorees.

But the first one I looked at in the Google Indexing purge kind of stung.

It was from autumn 2009, when I had been a background check source for CBS Sixty Minutes producer Solly Granatstein, about Scott Pelley's notorious "wasted" minutes flying around with BAN.org's Jim Puckett, who was describing huge imports of CRT desktop monitors (purchased for $10 apiece, bearing only $2 of scrap copper) as being "primitively" mismanaged in Guiyu.

http://retroworks.blogspot.com/2009/08/cbs-60-minutes-wasteland-unseen-footage.html

Solly and Michelle Rey had stopped responding to my emails asking them to run a follow up or correction to the story, which had shown no evidence of CRTs processed in Guiyu, despite the claim "we followed the trail".

So I checked that one, and because the film evidence of the factories that had actually purchased the monitors circled by helicopter were posted in picasaweb, a google product offered to bloggers like myself for photo uploads, and Google has since stopped supporting picasaweb, that the blog will no longer show up in searches.  So if you are a journalism student looking for CBS Wasteland's Polk Award on CRT disposal allegedly occuring in China in 2008, you won't find me.

A lot of people I met - "Swordfish" - in my career met me through the circulation of that specific blog. Author Adam Minter for example asked what to look for when he visited Guiyu (the three-story integrated IC chip market - Guiyu was a reuse-of-CPU and chips market, not a CRT monitor refurbisher. And what is upstream of the river where BAN's "samples" showed poisons more associated with textile manufacturing than e-waste). Adam later visited CRT remanufacturing factories. He's a journalist with actual knowledge of recycling. But the blog that connected us is now gone unless Google accepts my correction (now linked to photos.google not picasaweb).

But am I going to take the time to re-edit 520+ blogs? I had to find the one on CBS Wasted Leads via the Wayback Machine site to locate it and find the dated address to correct it on blogspot.

Wikipedia Talk: Solly Granatstein CBS 60 Minutes Meta Response

Thirteen years ago, this blog reported on CBS 60 Minutes sourcing of Jim Puckett for its George Polk awarded episode "The Wasteland".  

I traded emails with producer Solly Granatstein during the original November 2008 broadcast.  I had been background sourced prior to the episode and did not know what CBS was going to say or claim. For that reason, the year before after the original broadcast, I only blogged about the actual buyers of the CRT monitors CBS aired claims were dumped for primitive recycling.  But after being ghosted by Granstein for months, I published the blog above directly taking them on.

It is not too late to learn about the Charitable-Industrial Complex and Collateral Damage. 

Now the CRT reuse business is long expired.  CRT glass is found in pending superfund sites in Phoenix AZ and Columbus OH, not in Guiyu China.  And it has been a decade since BAN's Jim Puckett tried to deny his role in the E-Waste Hoax - evidence enough that Granastein's source needed to be cross-interviewed.

So I found a Wikipedia Bio on Solly Granatstein, and did not publicly alter it in any way, but left the comments below in the Editor Talk section.  It's a hail Mary pass.  Could Mr. Granatstein consider an Ira Glass turnaround (Mike Daisy episode) now that Spain has arrested 40+ African dyaspora workers in the Canary Islands, citing the false claims CBS first gave credence?

Here's my Wikipedia Editor Talk post below.  I will post now but update links later

5. How Too Quietly Big EWaste Lies Buried: Top Five E-Waste Lies Mapped

Let's ReMap the Five Biggest E-Waste Lies (before the April Fool's Blog traditionally comes out).  In Part Five, let's look at five geographic places the bodies of the truth were buried underneath a pile of false narratives and bogus "E-waste Export" claims. If you are doing a thesis or term paper on electronics recycling this semester, take the blue pill and see how normal ordinary places were sensationalized with poverty narratives despite prima facia evidence that the story was bogus.

We can forgive reporters and news producers like Solly Granatstein (CBS 60 Minutes) at the proximate time that they report. We can roll our eyes at well-meaning do-gooders who react to false claims with alarm, out of a sense of liability. 

But I question why so few reporters do as Ira Glass did following his sharing of Mike Daisy's Foxconn exaggerations and lies. This American Life is alone in re-tracing its steps, and learning that activists and environmentalists are not immune from biased reporting, sensationalism, and creating bricks that build the House of Big Lies.

The Big Lies are about PLACES visible on Google Earth. Please, I need some unprejudiced university student help to link and map these, and I can provide the photos.

1.Guiyu.

2. Foshan

3. Basel

4. Accra

5. Hong Kong

Punjab / Faisalabad is the Sixth Man... Penang, Malaysia gets honorary mention.

10 Years Of Good Point Recycling Blogs: What's Been Learned?

Ten years ago, most of the mainstream press in Europe and the USA had accepted the cartoon thesis that if electronic waste is expensive to recycle, that shipments of used electronics to Asia, Africa and South America were to avoid those expenses. At least, 80% of the time.

We took that on here, before anyone else would touch the controversy with a 10 meter pole. Here's a retrospective on what was, and still is, relevant in the Good Point Recycling Blog.

When poor people are paying for something (including transportation), it is not "because" the rich are willing to ship it.

We demonstrated that with the "Big Secret Factories" and 60 Wasted Minutes blogs. The sea containers of CRT monitors headed for Asia were never, ever full of large CRT televisions, even though large CRT TVs had more copper and costed more to recycle. In fact, the purchase orders did even accept Sony Trinitron 17" desktop monitors or screen-burned desktop CRTs or pre-VGA.  When someone is paying you $10 each for something specific, and refusing to accept other similar CRTs even if you pay them, it probably has nothing to do with (ahem) "rice paddies".

Brad Collis [CC BY 2.0]