#DistractionFromExtraction 2: It's The Extraction. Period.

We should be judged by future generations.

And we will be. I live in a kind of skin and mentality that puts me in front of those to-be great-great-grandchildren, who will read about us, watch documentaries about us, and talk about what we did here on earth, during our lives.

Let us not be bad ancestors 

A super intelligence knows that every page and word in a book exists at once. The current page, occupied by the Anthropocenes (A. Minter, 2016, "How We Think About Recycling Is In Need of Repair"), is behaving as if future generations won't matter, that pages of extinction, ocean pollution, warming will be somehow made up for by the relative increase in wealth in emerging markets (#Gapminder). That has merits, but only if everybody learns to respect science, and learns to care.

Relative intelligence unites conservatives and liberals, and puts conservation back into "Conserve"-ative, and non-cancelling liberal thought back into "Liberal". Example - https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-fascinating-second-lives-of-stuff/

Tralfamadore

White Liberal Checks Privileges by Bicycle

Two friends shared a link to a blog by Michigan preacher and blogger JDowsett, who hit the Facebook lottery with a blog last week, "What My Bike Has Taught Me about White Privilege".   It is well written.

Liberal white privilege college students 1981

It has been one of those months when a lot of social and racial soul-searching is going on in the USA.  The mysterious shooting of Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri...  Without going into a lot about that case here, I'll just put this link to Cracked.com "7 Important Details that No One Mentions about Ferguson" (my Facebook status for much of the week).  The language is salty, but I think Cracked has definitely evolved from a Mad Magazine rip-off in the 1970s to some of the best editorial writing on the web today.  Here's a shot of my status, including a snippet of the article.

Robin Ingenthron via Cracked.com

August 29 at 9:22pm ·

Dudes... Cracked.com has grown into something, like... way different from "Mimic MAD". I've actually considered quitting to go work for Cracked, it's today's editorial.

Robin Ingenthron BTW It's a longer article than usual in Cracked and the language is quite quite salty. But there are some great points made, e.g.: "Aside from protesters throwing rocks and things at police, you've probably heard reports that LOOTERS and RIOTERS were at the protests, and that is true, .... There were people at these protests who got out of hand (some from out of town, some not), and the community paid for it. But small groups of drunken youths do not a riot make, especially when it's surrounded by much larger groups of completely peaceful protesters. Most of them are just like any average citizen in America. If you have to, just imagine that all of these protesters also happen to be white. Hope that helps."

August 30 at 10:39am · 

Note the distinction the author Cody Johnston makes about how a mass protest gets labelled as a "riot" less easily in our minds if we "just imagine that all these protesters also happen to be white".   It's much the same point I make ad nauseum about TV repair... people perceive an African TV repairman as a little more dangerous, a little more criminal.  #HurricaneJoeBenson did not get six bullets like Mike Brown, but the time they took to defame him and prosecute him was a slow motion train wreck.

Hey Yah...Teach me lies...

Even as UN reports surfaced showing 91% reuse, and the original source of the "ewaste hoax" statistic ("80% dumping?") mumbled away a denial of ever having stated otherwise, the prosecution of Joseph Benson and BJ Electronics plodded away, taking a note of none of it.  It's harder to assess, perhaps, a mistaken snap judgement made by a Ferguson MO policeman in seconds.  And Trayvon Martin's killer was acquitted based on the quickness of the killing (and prosecuted in the press for the number of minutes he spent stalking trouble).  Benson was FRAMED over a course of years, and apparently no one ever thought he was worth the time to check that Greenpeace and Basel Action Network were full of @#$*.

Yep, the biggest thorn in Jim's side is indeed a liberal environmentalist, a college chum of Puckett's chums.

Yearbook got us liberal Minnesota PIRGs (leaning left) mixed up with sparse Black Christians in Asia?  

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"....