WSJ Documentary On Wagner Group: Mining the Absence of Environmental Leadership

WSJ Documentary On Wagner Group: Mining the Absence of Environmental Leadership

The new 2023 Wall Street Journal Documentary on Russia's Wagner Group - Shadow Men: Inside Wagner, Russia's Secret War Company - deserves a Pulitzer Prize.  I try to embed it below, but follow the link above if that does not work.

It's a story linking the exploitation of extracted natural resources to war crimes. First in Syria - which offered Wagner Group 25% of the money at oil fields they protected - to become a "lilly pad" expansion to Libya, Central African Republic, and other weak states.  The gold mine they took over in Central African Republic is now a major source of funding for Wagner Group and Russia's war on Ukraine.

What I will add here for commentary is that the colonial forced extraction of virgin raw materials, in unregulated and poverty stricken lands, demands we re-read Heart of Darkness. But my liberal and environmentalist colleagues largely draw the absolutely wrong lesson from that. The mostly well intentioned left tries, through Basel Convention Amendments and R2 and E-Steward Certifications - to label suspect, racially profile, and boycott trade in everything that is NOT virgin material extraction.

The "cultural lobotomy" of denying Africa's Tech Sector to come test and buy used equipment comes out of a fear of exploitation. We want to keep our consciences shiny, and good enough on you for that. But watch the documentary below. Wagner understands what immense power a hundred dollar bill has to an African or a Russian prisoner.  They pay people to be brutal, they recruit sharp-elbowed youth, and they succeed in taking over governments precisely because people in those places are so inexpensive.

Why environmentalists what to deny those people good jobs in repair and recycling is not so much unfathomable as it is a symptom of tragic misunderstanding. Hanlon's Razor. I get frustrated at groups like Basel Action Network and SERI at times, but don't want to overstep and mistake ignorance or stupidity for malelovence. But when we don't allow the Youth in Emerging Markets to create valuable recycling and repair jobs - like our litter collection offset project underway in Cameroon - it just leaves a vacuum which allows exploitation of  hopelessness by filthy new Belgian Leopolds (the king who did not annex Congo, but made the Congolese people his personal property) like Yevgeny Prigozhin become the de facto job market for high school graduates.   

Boycotting or shaming trade as "exploitation" is, de facto, removing your privileged ass from environmental leadership. Contract managers, certification bodies, regulators, and activists who would prevent me from employing geeks of color in these same emerging markets are helping to supply the labor Wagner relies on to brutalize freedom seekers. 

Watch.

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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.

Apple of California or Taipei iPod Contractors? "Birth of iPhone" is "Game of Thrones" Saga

In the Game of Thrones (which am watching for the first time, binging Seasons 1, 2, and 3 during an Xfinity free-access trial).  It's about the rightful sons and daughters, or "bastard" sons of Kings, and their rights and claims to Kingdoms and Thrones.

In our world, the Patent or Copyright or Claim of invention is the coveted throne of the modern "Rightful Heir".  And the stakes - for Titans like Apple, Samsung, Sony, or Foxconn - represent a far more wealth than the "Iron Throne" at King's Landing.

Game of Thrones keeps our interest, in part, by slowly revealing more dimension in characters introduced in a previous season (before killing them off and replacing them, perhaps with a new actor less willing to negotiate better salary.. another contract manufacturing angle).  For those of us who study planned obsolescence and contract manufacturing, the history of Android (especially Samsung) vs. Apple smartphones is just as fascinating.  (There's even a 'bit player' I know personally, a kind of Hong Kong Tyrion, that I know pesonally.  Proview's Rowell Yang of the four fingers received a check from Apple for $60M five years ago. He had trademarked the name "iPhone" while I was a consulting with Proview).

In last weekend's WSJ.com, there's a fascinating chapter to the claims that Steve Jobs is the rightful King. father of the smartphone.

Africa's Tech Sector Becoming Africa's Banking Sector

WSJ Reports

"Sub-Saharan Africa accounted for more than half of the 255 live mobile money services across the globe in 2014, with monthly mobile money transactions in the region topping $10 billion in late 2014, according to GSMA."

Startup Fuels Africa’s Mobile-Payment Boom

MFS Africa’s mobile-payment platform is used by 55 million people in 17 African countries

Full article here (may be paywalled).  But check out the numbers.  This network is built on the refurbished cell phones and phone towers set up by Geeks of Color a decade ago.  This is incredible, and helps explain why it makes me furious that Basel Action Network, Greenpeace and PureEarth are making money by hustling and over-producing films depicting Africans as "primitive".





The Geeks of Color are going to inherit the continent, and people are fools to boycott America's access to the ground floor.  More Africans are going to college in China today than are going to college in the USA.

#freejoebenson

#thanksobama

Are Warnings about Saturated Fat Full of Baloney?

From today's Wall Street Journal, a history of how we all got duped by bad science.  If you can convince people that something normal - like eating bacon and eggs for breakfast - is an important (cognitive) risk, you can launch a multi-billion dollar industry to replace it.  NYT also reports that the fat is not in the fat.

WSJ:  "Butter and lard had long been staples of the American pantry until Crisco, introduced in 1911, became the first vegetable-based fat to win wide acceptance in U.S. kitchens. Then came margarines made from vegetable oil and then just plain vegetable oil in bottles.... All of these got a boost from the American Heart Association—which Procter & Gamble, the maker of Crisco oil, coincidentally helped launch as a national organization."

NYT:  “My take on this would be that it’s not saturated fat that we should worry about” in our diets, said Dr. Rajiv Chowdhury, the lead author of the new study and a cardiovascular epidemiologist in the department of public health and primary care at Cambridge University..

The economical leveraging of our concerns about human health should not make us cynical about "accepted science".   In comments to the WSJ article, there are people griping about climate change reporting.   It would be too easy to jump to the cynical conclusion that doing whatever we want will turn out for the best.

However, the resulting cynicism also shows the cruel danger of supporting a marketing hoax.  It can create collateral damage to agents of conscience in other fields.  If the American Heart Association is full of baloney, people may shrug off exercise and calorie counting, which are still shown to be very important to our health.  

My conclusion:  Do No Harm.   Apply scientific method.  What the "e-waste" hoax has done to repair and reuse is nothing new...  Big Corn or Big Shred or Big Brother are willing to dish out baloney.  Watch what you consume.

The history shows a firm link between human cognitive risk assessment and industry marketing thereto.  - Robin Ingenthron

BREAKING NEWS: Mexican Immigration Solved

From the Wall Street Journal:

"Net migration from Mexico has plummeted to zero thanks to changing demographic and economic conditions on both sides of the border, a new study shows, even as political battles over illegal immigration heat up and the issue heads to the U.S. Supreme Court.".. 

"The net migration flow from Mexico to the United States has stopped and may have reversed," says the report, which is based on analysis of U.S. and Mexican government data by the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center.

The standstill, according to the report, results from declining immigration from Mexico paired with a rising number of people returning south from the U.S. Those trends recently converged, and between 2005 and 2010 about as many Mexicans left the U.S. as flocked here. 

People aren't dying to cross our borders anymore.

People aren't trying to take our jobs away.

They don't really need our e-scrap, either.  They have enough "e-waste" of their own.

 It's ridiculous, people flying around, dodging Mercedes Benz's, trying to get a rare shot of the endangered, exotic, scrap merchant.

Going to a landfill and photographing junk TVs, and we ASSUME they must have been just imported.  AFRICANS don't have TVs!  They MUST have been imported!!

Guess what?  They are selling milk in plastic bottles now!!  And the Berlin Wall is down!