Blue Mango, Ebola Gorilla, Jeb History

joebageant
c/o smirkingchimp

It was not inevitable that we would arrive at such a point. It took a helluva lot of public greed and capitalist sucker-bait to make us the very spoiled and dangerous porcine folk we have become, people whose lives under the Empire constitute the most extreme material luxury and wealth the world has ever known, and the most oppressive and nihilistic one from a global standpoint.

Still, it's not easy being an upscale suburban white middle class American. There is a certain amount of guilt involved. (Cut to forty million black Americans laughing hysterically.) Waking up to suburban life's true global cost is like finding out that you have a hundred slaves in some unseen place on the other side of the world making your clothing, working in your mines and harvesting your Gevelia coffee. It's more than a conundrum. It's a moral confrontation with real justice and values. Jefferson had the same conflict about his slave ownership. He never came to grips with it either. Old Tom never freed that piece of side action, Sally Hemmings. Nor are we about to demand freedom for the sweatshop slaves who turn endangered nyatoh rainforest trees into Sears "classic and timeless patio furniture."

[I had carelessly forgotten Joe Bageant]

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joebageant

On my first day back at work I proudly showed the pictures of my new Belizian family to a co-worker, pictures of the children playing under the blue mango tree, Marzy with the baby of the family, Little Luke, on her hip by the tiny cottage in the sand. The co-worker looked at them carefully, then looked up at me and said, "I just don't see how people can live like that!"
Perhaps one day, if she is very lucky, God will pry her eye open "wid his own finger."

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physics

.. the unexpected erosion of the steel found in this beam warranted a study of microstructural changes that occurred in this steel..
ANALYSIS Rapid deterioration of the steel was a result of heating with oxidation in combination with intergranular melting due to the presence of sulfur. The formation of the eutectic mixture of iron oxide and iron sulfide lowers the temperature at which liquid can form in this steel. This strongly suggests that the temperatures in this region of the steel beam approached ~1000°C by a process similar to making a “blacksmith’s weld” in a hand forge.

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my Email to Joe Bageant at joebageant@joebageant.com

Hi Joe,
I enjoyed reading "Under the Blue Mango"
I have a small house in "Phase9" Bagong Silang outside Manila, sadly not on the ocean.
It cast about the same $5K. Only after it was largely completed did I find the blackmarket in power tools that oddly exists in downtown Manila. Around $40 for a new Bosch drill and angle grinder. I arranged for the tools to be used by my brothers-in-law ("hipag" brothers)
Up till now they have been sawing rebar using a hacksaw blade - I got the impression that an actual hacksaw was too rich, the blade was cutting it. This year all the users in the family
have spontaneously quit shabu (crystal meth). This is good news, since I never had the moral authority to convince them to quit. They now have the privilege of looking down on me as I drink my $1 Tanduay rum - actually a good spirit, but serious drinkers in Phase9 drink local gin, which is grim. My efforts to add calamansi ( a small lime) were regarded as effete foreigner behaviour. As to retirement, the tiny patch of banana trees that we "own" wont feed half the family, even if the neighbours dont pinch half. So my paradise isnt so well planned as yours. As to ownership, there dont appear to be any title deeds, or any plans. Ownership seems to be based on oral agreement. I dont have a clear idea about retiring there. I am legally married to a woman there, who has abandoned all ideas of coming to live in Australia. Chiefly because she hates the Australian Embassy, where insults are applied as a goad to ensure that potential immigrants loose patience. She also has rather vague ideas about wealth and earning, she prefers me to live there, God knows how this will end, but the place feels oddly safe, one can despatch a small child up the lane at 10pm to fetch some cola.
some photos of the neighbourhood:
flickr
flickr
flickr
cheers
Giordano Bruno

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While I wasnt watching, Ebola & bushmeat have been killing gorillas
- I had had a hopelessly hopeful view on lowland gorilla survival.
Seems I was wrong.
Extinction disasters are approaching, believe me, Climate Chaos is bringing on a great simplification, a great extinction. Of all these extinctions, I mourn, in advance, the loss of our cousins, the great apes. Because they are cousins, because they are great. Because they might have taught us volumes about ourselves. Because they are so great to have around.
johnhawks

A 2004 outbreak of the virus, which also kills people, killed 97 percent of gorillas who lived in groups and 77 percent of solitary males, Damien Caillaud and colleagues from the University of Montpellier and the University of Rennes in France reported.
Overall, it wiped out 95 percent of the gorilla population within a year, they reported in the journal Current Biology.

nationalgeographic [this is old news!]

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workingforchange (c/o smirkingchimp)
..as part of an education bill signed into law by Gov. Jeb Bush, Florida has declared that “American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed.” That factual history, the law states, shall be viewed as “knowable, teachable and testable.”
Florida's lawmakers are not only prescribing a specific view of U.S. history that must be taught (my favorite among the specific commands in the law is the one about instructing students on “the nature and importance of free enterprise to the United States economy”),

Blue Mango Ebola Gorilla Jeb History