Author: Alpha Unit

“Oranges and Lemons,” by Alpha Unit

Humans are among the few mammal species unable to synthesize Vitamin C from glucose. All of our Vitamin C has to come from our diets. If you were somehow to end up with no Vitamin C in your diet whatsoever for a prolonged time – say, three or four months and counting, indefinitely – it is no exaggeration to say that the repercussions could be dire.

Without Vitamin C we can’t make collagen, and without collagen your body can’t repair your skin, bone, cartilage, ligaments and tendons, blood vessel walls, and teeth. You need fresh food in your diet, either from plant or animal sources, to get this done.

Wherever you find people going without fresh food for long periods, you’ll find Vitamin C deficiency, or scurvy.

Scurvy has been prevalent throughout much of human history. It likely began to occur in humans during the development of agriculture. According to biologist Thomas Jukes, once people in temperate zones adopted an agrarian lifestyle they were able to store grains for use during winter. They were also able to spread into other temperate regions previously uninhabitable due to the lack of food supply during winters.

But because stored grains are extremely low in Vitamin C, it is likely that these ancient peoples developed scurvy during the long winter months because grain dominated their diets.

During long journeys or overland campaigns, such as the Crusades, scurvy inevitably appeared.

The first written account of a disease likely to be scurvy comes from the Eber Papyrus of ancient Egypt, dated to 1550 BC. The Papyrus not only diagnosed scurvy but prescribed that its victims be given onions, which contain Vitamin C.

Throughout maritime history, people had to figure out not only how to transport themselves across seas and oceans but how to stay healthy along the way. They were clearly relatively successful at both. Millennia ago, Austronesians were the first humans to invent oceangoing vessels; they colonized a large part of the Indo-Pacific region. Early Polynesians were superb seafarers and traveled thousands of miles exploring and settling the region we know as the Polynesian Triangle (drawn by connecting the points of Hawaii, New Zealand, and Easter Island).

Somali seafarers developed extensive trade networks, and Somali merchants at one time led commerce between Asia and Africa. Chinese merchants sailed the Indian Ocean and traded throughout Southeast Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, and East Africa.

How did ancient seafaring peoples deal with scurvy?

Stefan Slater writes that Polynesian seafarers relied on freshly caught fish, crustaceans, and octopi, and would sometimes slaughter some of the animals they were transporting for breeding stock. Jin Ding, Chaojan Shi, and Adam Weintrit report that the diet on Chinese sailing ships included green tea, which contains more Vitamin C than black tea. They also say that Chinese ships began to carry gardens with them, growing soybean sprouts, which are high in Vitamin C.

So there is some evidence that ancient seafarers knew the importance of keeping fresh vegetables and meat in their diets on long voyages.

For Europeans, it wasn’t until the Age of Sail that the problem of scurvy truly came into focus. Wealth and national interest were at stake in ways they hadn’t been before.

Advances in naval technology and a rush for exploration and conquest brought Europeans the “plague of the sea.” Scurvy was the main occupational disease of what historians call the European Age of Exploration. More sailors died of scurvy than all other causes combined, including battles, storms, and other diseases.

Jason A. Mayberry makes the case that a unique confluence of conditions made scurvy and seafaring a deadly combination for Europeans. In his essay “Scurvy and Vitamin C,” he draws upon the work of Stephen Bown, author of Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail.

First, countries had difficulty maintaining sufficient crews for their naval vessels, so they relied on impressment: the taking of men into the military by compulsion, with or without notice. It had been legally sanctioned in Britain since the time of Edward I.

It was basically kidnapping. Gangs of men would go into port towns looking for “recruits.” They would club a man and drag him back to the ship. The man’s family might have no idea what happened to him, and many of the men never made it back home.

Some had experience at sea, some didn’t. Some were in poor health to begin with, being homeless, convicts, or elderly. On average a third of a ship’s crew was made up of impressed men.

Even the men who volunteered for naval service were often in poor health. Many would volunteer in order to secure a place to sleep and get regular meals. Sometimes boys who were orphans or runaways would join.

A second reason that Vitamin C deficiency was hastened during this period were the working conditions on ships. Discipline was harsh and included flogging, keelhauling, and starvation. The body needs more Vitamin C when it is under stress, and sailors had heightened stress in the form of physical exertion, exposure to the elements, fear of battle, and sleep deprivation.

The third and main factor in the development of scurvy was clearly the diet onboard ships. What mattered most for food supplies was that the food be storable for long periods without spoiling. The nutritional content of the food was of little concern for those in charge. What was most important to them was to maintain a suitable labor force at the least possible cost.

A typical weekly ration for a sailor, according to Bown:

  • 1 lb. hardtack (biscuit) daily
  • 2 lbs. salted beef twice weekly
  • 1 lb. salted pork twice weekly
  • 2 oz. salted fish 3 times weekly
  • 2 oz. butter 3 times weekly
  • 4 oz. cheese 3 times weekly
  • 8 oz. dried peas 4 times weekly
  • 1 gal. beer daily

Sometimes the rations included dried fruit or barley meal. But the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables left the diet almost completely devoid of Vitamin C.

Compounding this problem was that even the food sailors had access to wasn’t always fit to eat. Spoilage was a huge problem on ships. Ships were a dark, damp, and sometimes waterlogged environment for sailors and their food, and this led to moldy, worm-eaten bread, or other dried foods. Meat would begin spoiling almost as soon as it left port, no matter how salt-laden it was.

European navies did provide surgeons and surgeon’s mates on ships, but most of a surgeon’s time was spent caring for battle wounds instead of focusing on the treatment and prevention of disease.

All of these factors made scurvy the leading cause of death during the Age of Sail.

The onset of scurvy is a slow progression, Bown and others inform us, usually appearing after 60 to 90 days of a Vitamin C-deficient diet. This is when the body’s lingering stores of Vitamin C are depleted. The initial symptoms are fatigue and muscle aches. Upon waking, a scurvy victim’s joints will ache.

During the second stage, his gums begin to swell and will bleed with slight pressure. The teeth become loose at the roots. He also feels pain throughout his joints and muscles.

During the third stage, the gums begin to rot. They also bleed profusely. The victim’s flesh becomes gangrenous and will spontaneously hemorrhage. His skin, especially on the legs and feet, develop ulcers that turn gangrenous. As connective tissue fails, long-healed broken bones begin to refracture, and long-healed wounds begin to reopen. The legs cramp so severely that the person cannot walk.

At this point the person is in excruciating pain.

In the final stage of scurvy, the person gets a high fever. His skin develops black spots and he begins having tremors. He will drift in and out of consciousness for a while, and then he dies.

An estimated two million sailors died of scurvy between the 15th and 18th centuries. The science at the time was of very little use in treating them – even though various people throughout European history had made the connection between citrus fruits and the prevention of scurvy.

On July 8, 1497, Vasco da Gama set sail from Lisbon, Portugal, in search of a passage to India. On January 11, 1498, the fleet anchored off Mozambique. After five weeks at sea, the crew began showing the symptoms of scurvy.

Fortunately, some weeks later, they arrived at Mombasa, on the coast of Kenya, where they met local traders who traded them oranges. Within six days of eating them, the crew recovered. Da Gama left Africa and began his voyage across the Indian Ocean to Kozhikode (or Calicut to Westerners).

After staying in India for four months, da Gama left for a three-month journey at sea in which scurvy killed many of his sailors. On January 7, 1499, the ships anchored at Malindi, Kenya, where the sailors, remembering their previous cure in Mombasa, asked for oranges. Still, more sailors died of the disease “which started in the mouth.” Six months later the survivors made it back to Lisbon.

Did Vasco da Gama alert any ship owners or controlling authorities of what he had discovered about treating scurvy? No one knows.

Sir Richard Hawkins had discovered a cure for scurvy in 1593 when it appeared in his crew in southern Brazil. He reported that oranges and lemons had been a remedy for his men. To whom did he report this? What did they do with the information?

The Dutch had known about the value of citrus fruits since at least the late 16th century. According to J. Burnby and A. Bierman, who wrote “The Incidence of Scurvy at Sea and Its Treatment,” the Dutch East India Company bartered for lemons in Africa and also established vegetable gardens and orchards in their colonies to provide fresh citrus to their ships. How did the Dutch manage to keep this knowledge to themselves? Was that their intention?

Burnby and Bierman also write about an Elizabethan merchant, Sir Hugh Plat, who had an interest in botany and gave bottled lemon juice to the commander of the first fleet of the English East India Company. It was only the crew of the flagship, Red Dragon, which received a daily allowance of lemon juice. It was also the only crew that remained relatively free of scurvy. What did the English East India Company do with this information?

In the early 1600s John Woodall, a surgeon for the same East India Company, described the symptoms of scurvy and recommended that ships’ surgeons inform Governors of “all places they touch in the Indies” that the juices of oranges, lemons, limes, and tamarinds be used as medicine for scurvy.

The East India Company actually supplied “lemon water,” as it was called, for its ships until 1625, when the Company chose not to provide it because “the woman supplying it wanted 12d. a gallon above the usual price.” The return voyage of 1626 was badly afflicted with scurvy because they had bought tamarinds in the East Indies which they presumed to be as effective as lemons. All sour fruits and even acids such as vinegar were erroneously thought to be cures for scurvy.

J. F. Bachstrom, a Lutheran theologian and physician, wrote in 1734 that there was only one cause of scurvy – the absence of fresh fruits and vegetables for a long period. No drugs would help, nor would mineral acids. Were any companies or government entities aware of his findings? If so, did they take them seriously?

Europe was slowly making headway against this problem nevertheless. In 1739 James Lind, a former physician’s apprentice, volunteered for the Royal Navy and was designated a surgeon’s mate. After seven years in that position, he was promoted to surgeon on HMS Salisbury. It was on this ship that he performed his famous scurvy experiment.

Lind showed an insight ahead of his time by understanding that, to develop a cure, treatments must be compared simultaneously in similar patients. He had envisioned the concept of clinical trials, as rudimentary as his idea might have been.

After eight weeks at sea, and when scurvy was beginning to take its toll on the crew, Lind decided to test his idea that the putrefaction of the body caused by the disease could be prevented with acids. He divided 12 sick patients into six pairs, and provided each pair with a different supplement to their diet: cider, vitriolic acid (diluted sulfuric acid), vinegar, sea water, two oranges and one lemon, or a purgative mixture.

Only the pair who took the oranges and lemons improved.

You would think that Lind had established a clear connection between citrus and scurvy and that the Navy would have taken immediate action. But neither happened.

Lind continued to believe that there were multiple causes of scurvy. He also advocated a method of preserving the virtues of oranges and lemons that involved boiling the juices. Unbeknownst to Lind, boiling destroyed the active ingredient in citrus juices – Vitamin C. When the boiled juice was tried on ships as a preventative measure and found lacking, people began to dismiss the whole idea that citrus fruits were effective against scurvy!

In 1753 Lind published his Treatise on the Scurvy, considered a classic of medical science. But it took the Royal Navy over 40 years to adopt Lind’s recommendations. This happened under the direction of Sir Gilbert Blane, who had been appointed Physician to the Fleet.

Blane was familiar with Lind’s work and had the power and initiative to bring about change, Mayberry states. He organized an experiment on HMS Suffolk on a 23-week trip to India. The sailors were given a mixture of rum, water, sugar, and lemon juice. A few sailors developed a slight case of scurvy. They were given additional rations of lemon juice and the scurvy was quickly cured.

With the results from the HMS Suffolk and the power of his position, Blane was able to ensure that fresh citrus juice became a staple in the British Navy. For the British, scurvy had finally been conquered.

The question remains: why did it take so long, when so many had found the cure time and time again?

Burnby and Bierman note that there was the view among ship owners and government authorities that seamen were expendable. They also suggest that seamen themselves might have been reluctant to take part in experiments that might have settled the issue. But they mention other considerations, mainly the problem of “sheer impracticability.”

How does one store many thousands of oranges and lemons on an overcrowded man-of-war laden with guns, gunpowder, and shot? Using the juice of citrus fruits was certainly a space saver but it readily became moldy, especially under poor storage conditions, which were usually the case.

Speaking of practical considerations, how long can it be practical to treat your work force as if they are expendable? There were no sailors’ advocates at the time to make it impractical for businessmen and governments to do so. Nothing stopped or even slowed Europe’s exploration and colonization, so losing sailors to scurvy was just one of the costs of doing business.

“Judgement Day,” by Alpha Unit

The British cargo ship Norham Castle, built in Glasgow, was launched in 1869 as a tea clipper for the trade with China. Clipper ships, sleek and three-masted, were designed for speed. Their production took off in the 1840s because of a growing demand for faster delivery of tea from China.

The Norham Castle transported tea and eventually mixed cargoes to places including Australia and New Zealand. In 1883 she was sailing near the Sunda Strait, which is located between the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra. It just so happens that most of Indonesia’s more than 130 active volcanoes lie between Java and Sumatra, the most famous being the stratovolcano (the steepest and most deadly kind) known to Westerners as Krakatoa.

By the summer of 1883 seismic activity around Krakatoa had been intensifying for months, producing earthquakes, steam venting, and ash eruptions. The three peaks of Krakatoa served as an exit for a huge magma chamber beneath. There is some speculation that an earlier eruption had clogged the neck of one of the peaks, creating an incredible amount of pressure building up below the blockage. The volcano was overdue for a climax.

Around 1:00 p.m. on August 26, a volcanic eruption sent a cloud of gas and debris about 15 miles into the air. The eruption was continuous, with numerous explosions. Capt. W.J. Watson of the Irish merchant ship Charles Bal reported that the noise was like the continuous discharge of heavy artillery. The noise intensified and was accompanied by a hail of ash and pumice. Ash eventually blanketed everything within thousands of square miles, plunging the area into darkness that would last two and a half days.

Capt. Watson said that the intense blackness made it impossible to see to any distance. There was also a small tsunami on the shores of Java and Sumatra.

Early in the morning on August 27, a series of explosions began triggering more tsunamis. The third of these explosions was the most horrific, so violent that it was heard about 1,900 miles away in Western Australia – and about 3,000 miles away on the Indian Ocean island of Rodrigues. People there thought the blasts were cannon fire from a nearby ship.

The noise from this explosion is arguably the loudest sound ever recorded. The barometer at a gasworks in Batavia (now Jakarta), 100 miles from Krakatoa, registered a spike in pressure of over 2.5 inches of mercury, which converts to over 172 decibels, at 100 miles from the source. (For context, if you were operating a jackhammer you would be subject to 100 decibels.)

At above 194 decibels, sound waves stop traveling through the air and begin pushing the air along with them – and the resulting “wind,” or shock wave, can blow anything in its path to pieces. Closer to Krakatoa the sound was well over this limit.

The shock waves created by the Krakatoa eruption shattered windows and shook homes within a 100-mile radius of the volcano. The shock waves were so powerful that they were recorded by barometric stations around the globe.

The tsunamis created by the eruption proved most deadly. More than 36,000 people were swept out to sea in the series of tsunamis caused by the volcano’s collapse, which created a wall of water over 100 feet high that wiped out scores of coastal villages on Java and Sumatra. The tsunami carried the Dutch ship Berouw a mile inland, killing all 28 crew.

The eruptions also created pyroclastic flows – avalanches of lava, ash, and pumice. These flows scorched everything in their path, whether passing ships or coastal villages. Michael Bubb writes:

Of the 36,000 deaths, around 4,500 were attributed to the pyroclastic flows which would have arrived just after the tsunamis. Most likely the 4,500 who met their fate with the flows had reached higher ground or shelter to avoid the rushing water, only to be engulfed in fire and ash.

Unimaginable horror was unfolding on the Sunda islands.

This catastrophe marked a series of “firsts,” says geologist David Bressan. It was the first global catastrophe and the first news story to go around the world, thanks to modern communications.

As the Sunda Strait was and still is an important passage from the Indian Ocean to the Chinese Sea, news about the eruption and destruction of harbors and lighthouses in the area were of special interest to merchants, politicians, and the public in general…

Krakatoa was also the first scientifically well recorded and studied eruption of a volcano, from the very beginning to its disastrous ending.

The study of what was left of the former island of Krakatoa also spawned a new scientific discipline: disturbance ecology. Observations made at Krakatoa were valuable for understanding the colonization of devastated or newly formed terrain.

And what of the clipper Norham Castle? On Sunday, August 26, the vessel was at the eastern entrance of the Sunda Strait, along with another ship, the Sir Robert Sale. On Monday morning both vessels entered the Strait but because of blackened skies neither made much progress.

Capt. O. Sampson of the Norham Castle reported that Krakatoa “appeared to be alight with flickering flames rising behind a dense black cloud; at the same time balls of fire rested on the mastheads and extremities of the yardarms.”

In the wake of the devastating eruption, Capt. Sampson wrote in his official log:

I am writing this blind in pitch blackness. We are under a continual rain of pumice and dust. So violent are the explosions that the eardrums of over half my crew have been shattered. My last thoughts are with my dear wife. I am convinced the Day of Judgement has come.

By the morning of Tuesday, August 28, Krakatoa had gone silent. The volcanic island had almost entirely sunk, except for the southern third. The blackness of the sky was slowly beginning to lift. The Sir Robert Sale and the Norham Castle finally made it through the Strait.

“Bid Calling,” by Alpha Unit

You name it and it’s been sold at auction.

As long as humans have traded with one another, they have staged auctions. About 500 B.C. in Babylon, women were being auctioned off as wives. Ancient Greece and ancient Rome held auctions not just to sell people but to sell all kinds of assets, including war plunder and family estates. In seventh-century China, the personal items of deceased Buddhist monks were being sold at auction.

Auctions in the United States date all the way back to colonial times. Crops, livestock, tools, slaves, and sometimes entire farms were sold at auction. The National Auctioneers Association informs us that during the American Civil War only colonels could auction war plunder, which is why in honor of this history many auctioneers in America today carry the title “Colonel.”

In the early 1900s the first auctioneering schools opened in the United States. The Great Depression created great opportunity for auctioneers, whose services were needed to liquidate assets. Collectibles, antiques, used cars, heavy equipment, livestock, real estate, and all kinds of commodities are sold at auction in the US either by private parties or by government agencies.

No one knows exactly when rapid-paced “bid calling” became a feature of auctions in the US, but it is now the norm. Many of you are familiar with American-style auction calls, where an auctioneer delivers a rapid, almost hypnotic repetition of numbers and words to present items up for bid. Newcomers to auctions might find it indecipherable, but nothing could be farther from the truth!

An auctioneer’s entire job is to communicate clearly and effectively, and if you can’t understand him (or her), then he isn’t doing his job.

An auctioneer uses his chant to hold the audience’s attention and keep the auction moving along at a steady clip while he’s soliciting bids. He’s going fast because he’s responsible for selling all of the items within a relatively short time, and he’s got to create a sense of urgency among bidders. He must at the same time be very clear and specific with his language.

What the auctioneer is really doing is reciting numbers.

An auction chant consists basically of two numbers – the have (the current bid price) and the want (the higher bid being requested by the auctioneer). Between these two numbers are a variety of sounds and filler words to add rhythm to the chant and make the bidding more entertaining. To make it seem that he’s talking faster than he really is, the auctioneer will slur his words to shorten them.

An auctioneering student starts out learning a very basic auction chant, something like this:

One dollar bid, now 2,
now 2, will ya give me 2?

2 dollar bid, now 3,
now 3, will ya give me 3?

3 dollar bid, now 4,
now 4, will ya give me 4?

This hypothetical bidding would proceed in this fashion until the crowd stops bidding and the item is sold to the high bidder.

Filler words are rhythmic but they serve an important purpose: they provide a natural pause between the have and the want, giving the bidders a fraction of a second to make a decision.

Once the auctioneer’s want becomes the have, a new want is created. This number is called the next. A bid caller always has three numbers in mind – the have, the want, and the next.

Suppose you’re at an auction where a vehicle is up for bid. The auction chant might be something like this:

All right, folks, I have up for auction a 1994 Ford Mustang, cherry, lots of new parts, who’ll give me four large?

Four thousand, four, now who gimme four fiddy? Got four fiddy, got four fiddy from the man in the back, now who gonna go five?

Fi fiddy, fi fiddy bid, man in the back, now who gimme six? Fi fiddy bid, who gimme six?

Six thousand! Now who gimme seven? Seven on the board now, who gimme seven fiddy?

And on it goes.

Each auctioneer has his own style – his own favorite filler words, his own preferred speed, and his own cadence. Some auction chants are positively musical. The filler words are just carriers for the most important part of the chant: the numbers.

Keep in mind, though, that the auctioneer can only chant as fast as the bidders bid. So he designs his chant to create excitement and keep the auction moving along at a good pace. It truly is an art form.

There’s no telling where you might hear an auction call. Listen to Congressman Billy Long (R-MO) breaking into an auction chant to foil a protester during a hearing in Congress.

“What Should the Captain Do?” by Alpha Unit

 

Look, Cromie,  this isn’t a ship. You don’t have to go down with it!

  • from “Reilly: Ace of Spies”

In the popular imagination, there has been the idea that a captain is supposed to do everything in his power to save his passengers or die trying. But the answer to the question is “No.”  If a ship is sinking, and everything possible has been done to evacuate crew and passengers, the captain is under no obligation to remain at the helm and go to a watery grave. So where does this idea that a captain goes down with the ship come from?

Throughout history ships’ masters have shown this resolve to stay with sinking vessels, and it had less to do with lofty principle than with concerns over salvage rights. Under ancient maritime law, an abandoned ship could be salvaged by anyone able to put a line on it and bring it safely into port, according to Craig Allen, a Professor of Maritime Studies at the US Coast Guard and at Yale Law School.

The salvor may then be entitled to a substantial salvage award from the owners, based on the value of the abandoned ship and its cargo. So long as the captain or crew remained on the stricken vessel, however, the terms of any salvage arrangement can be negotiated, likely resulting in a lower salvage award.

So traditionally the captain stayed with a damaged ship to protect the ship owners’ interests. Even in the absence of potential salvors, with a captain on the ship it was easier for owners to arrange a towing contract to get the vessel back to port.

Maritime law holds that a captain is responsible for his or her vessel no matter what its condition. If his ship is in imminent peril, his responsibility includes executing the evacuation plan, which requires his presence for the duration. Out of a sense of duty, captains have believed that they must, if it can be managed, be the last person to get off the ship.

Although captains feel a moral duty to do so, it is usually not written that a captain must be the last person to leave the ship. The International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), adopted in response to the sinking of the Titanic, does not specify that the captain remain on the ship throughout the emergency.

In 1948 the United Nations created the International Maritime Organization (IMO). Its International Safety Code has been adopted by most maritime nations (including the US), but it doesn’t mandate that a captain be the last one off the ship.

Individual countries pass their own laws about the conduct of ships’ masters during catastrophes within their jurisdictions. “Abandonment” of a ship can be prosecuted in some jurisdictions; other countries have prosecuted captains for negligence, or if there are deaths, manslaughter.

Some captains have defended leaving their vessels during evacuation by pointing out that nothing required them to stay until the end. Unsurprisingly, this doesn’t help.

“LaborFest 2019,” by Alpha Unit

The annual celebration called LaborFest has been going on since July 2 in San Francisco. Various cities across the country have their own LaborFest celebrations, but in San Francisco it is a monthlong series of cultural and arts events, including a film festival, to educate the public about the history of organized labor in America.

LaborFest commemorates the 1934 San Francisco General Strike, a key episode in the rise of organized labor in the United States. It was the first time that a major US port city was completely shut down by a strike. The result of the strike was the unionization of all ports on the West Coast.

On May 9, 1934, roughly 10,000 longshoremen went on strike all along the West Coast, to protest below-subsistence wages and the humiliating daily hiring experience known as the “shapeup.” Writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, Fred Glass explains:

In this exercise in employer absolutism, workers gathered early in the morning on the foggy docks along the Embarcadero, competing with one another in a desperate race to the bottom of the Depression wage scale.  Once at work, the worker might remain there for 10, 12, 16 or more hours. Injuries accumulated faster than cargo on the dock because of the frantic pace of the work. And should they imagine complaining, there were always more workers waiting to take their place.

Among those who’d had enough was Australian immigrant seaman Harry Bridges, who had started working the San Francisco docks in 1921. Bridges reached out to other maritime unions – including sailors’ unions and Teamsters – in May 1934 and within weeks, the number of striking workers increased to 40,000. Almost every West Coast port was shut down.

Employers had the support of San Francisco government officials, the police, and the local press. Police and employers’ armed “thugs” sent hundreds of strikers and their sympathizers to hospital emergency rooms.

On July 5, known ever since as Bloody Thursday, police shot and killed two strikers near the longshoremen’s union hall – World War I veteran and longshoreman Howard Sperry and marine cook Nicholas Bordoise. After lying in state their bodies were moved to the front of an enormous, silent funeral parade, writes Fred Glass. The discipline of the marchers inspired solidarity among other groups of workers and an outpouring of sympathy from San Francisco’s middle class, “scaring the bejesus out of San Francisco’s ruling elite.” Glass continues:

The conflict escalated into a four-day mostly peaceful…citywide general strike. The work stoppage  brought virtually all industrial and commercial operations of San Francisco to a halt. Although the San Francisco Labor Council assumed leadership of the general strike, its heart was the maritime workers unions’ headquarters. After the display of determined collective power, the maritime workers gained union recognition, substantial increase in wages, and control over their hiring halls.

Every year on July 5 the International Longshore and Warehouse Union honors Bloody Thursday, as a memorial to the lives lost during the strike and as a celebration of what they achieved. For Harry Bridges, the real fruit of the General Strike wasn’t the winning of any particular demand, according to the ILWU website, but an ever-expanding union.

The longshoremen turned San Francisco into a union town and embarked on a warehouse organizing drive that didn’t stop until it reached Baltimore on the East Coast. The ILWU went on to organize the entire state of Hawaii and expanded into Alaska and western Canada.

Now consider the words of William H. Crocker, a prominent San Francisco banker during the time of the General Strike. Crocker had served as a leader and strategist for the employers.

This strike is the best thing that ever happened to San Francisco…Mark my words. When this nonsense is out of the way and the men have been driven back to their jobs, we won’t have to worry about them anymore. They’ll have learned their lesson. Not only do I believe we’ll never have another general strike, but I don’t think we’ll have a strike of any kind in San Francisco during this generation. Labor is licked.

Not yet.

 

 

"They’re Not Oysters," by Alpha Unit

Connecticut, West Virginia, Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, Idaho, Nebraska, and Alaska have at least one thing in common: each has a Panhandle (WV has two). The Nebraska Panhandle is the westernmost part of Nebraska, where the prairie turns into rocky mesas, buttes, and pillars, such as Chimney Rock. It’s where the Midwest becomes the West.

Cattle outnumber people by about three to one in Nebraska. While Eastern Nebraska has excellent cropland for corn, the rest of the state is abundant with grassland for cattle grazing. In the semi-arid Panhandle, cattle ranching dominates. That means Rocky Mountain Oysters are a celebrated delicacy.

This past April the Sidney Shooting Park held its 8th Annual Rocky Mountain Oyster Fry and Fundraiser at the Cheyenne County Fairgrounds west of Sidney, Nebraska. At the Silver Dollar Bar and Grill, also in Sidney, you can stop in for cold beer, onion rings, and Rocky Mountain Oysters – described by one satisfied customer as hot, fresh, and tender.

They might have been hot, fresh, and tender, but you and I know that there aren’t any oyster reefs in Nebraska. These Oysters are bull testicles – or, more accurately, calf testicles. In spring or early summer, ranchers dehorn and castrate bull calves that they won’t be using as breeding stock. They call these non-breeding stock steers. The males that keep their testicles and are later used as breeding stock they call bulls. The main purpose of castration is to calm their tempers, says Dr. Jake Geis, cattle rancher and veterinarian.

Simply put, bulls like to fight. They fight to establish dominance and even after they settle the hierarchy, they fight to re-assert dominance. Dr. Geis says that he’s worked on bulls that have been banged up fighting each other; sometimes the animal is so badly injured that a rancher has no choice but to put it down. Breeding bulls are essential so the problem can’t be entirely avoided, but castrating the non-breeding animals reduces the number of bulls from half the calf crop to three or four.

Also, bulls are more aggressive toward people than steers. Castrating bulls makes them mellower and safer to work with. A herdsman could be seriously injured or killed by a bull while loading or unloading them via trailers.

Another problem, says Dr. Geis, is that when bull calves reach puberty, they want to start breeding. Young females, or heifers, on the other hand, aren’t ready to breed. They can get pregnant but they can’t yet safely deliver and raise a calf. Castration eliminates this problem.

Arguably the most important reason for castrating bull calves is that Americans prefer the taste of steer meat to that of bull meat. The hormone profile of steers with their reduced testosterone changes the flavor of the meat. Dr. Geis says that not all cultures share this preference. He mentions that in Italian culture bull meat is preferred. This means they raise the bulls to harvest weight but have to manage all the problems with aggressiveness and fighting.

With a pair of organs coming off each calf, ranchers could easily end up with scores of them in a day’s work. The dogs get their share before the ranchers, herdsmen, and their families cook the rest just as they would any other part of the animal. The same as cattlemen have done for centuries all over the world.

When they’re not castrating bulls, beef cattle herdsmen are doing various other things with cattle such as feeding, giving vaccinations, tagging or branding, trimming hooves, assisting with births, performing artificial insemination, loading animals onto trailers, driving feed trucks, maintaining pastures, mending fences, and just about anything else that needs to be done on the ranch or feedlot.

"From the Mississippi Delta to South Australia," by Alpha Unit

Don Morrison salvages old galvanized sheet metal from sheds and farms throughout Australia. The older the metal, the better, he says; some of this reclaimed metal is over 100 years old. He takes it to his workshop in Summertown, South Australia, where he fashions it into metal-bodied acoustic guitars. Of his material he says:

Galvanised iron, or Galvo, is now an integral part of the Australian landscape and it seemed natural (to me at least!) to try it in a resonator guitar. The result is a truly awesome sound, very loud but with a surprisingly rounded tone. I should call it the Transcontinental guitar – genuine Aussie material, genuine Delta sound!

That “Delta sound” refers to Delta blues, one of the early forms of blues. This music arose in the Mississippi Delta, which, despite its name, is not a part of the actual delta of the Mississippi River. Rather, it is located in the northwestern part of Mississippi, bounded by the Mississippi River on the west and the Yazoo River on the east.

This alluvial floodplain is one of the most fertile agricultural regions in the world. It was here that Black field hands created the music we call blues, using chants, “field hollers,” and songs to make their work go faster. Ed Kopp writes:

While blues lyrics often deal with personal adversity, the music itself goes far beyond self-pity. The blues is also about overcoming hard luck, saying what you feel, ridding yourself of frustration, letting your hair down, and simply having fun.
The best blues is visceral, cathartic, and starkly emotional. From unbridled joy to deep sadness, no form of music communicates more genuine emotion.

Although the sound of a resonator guitar is iconic to blues, blues musicians didn’t start out playing the resonator. The earliest bluesmen played an instrument called the diddley bow.
The diddley bow has been called “the godfather of American roots instruments.” It is the simplest form of the guitar and is the first type of slide guitar used in America. It was very easy to make, consisting of a string of wire tensioned between two nails on a board. A bottle or can wedged under the wire would create tension for pitch. The player would pluck the string while sliding a piece of metal or glass on it to produce notes.

One-stringed bow instruments date back to antiquity and developed in various parts of East Asia and in the west coast and Congo regions of Africa. Rural Black Southerners crafted these instruments and taught their children to play them. They would sometimes build one-stringed zithers on a wall, “with a strand of baling wire, two thread spools for bridges, and a half-pint whiskey bottle for a slider,” as slide guitar player Big Joe Williams recalled to one researcher.

Boys who showed promise on the diddley bow could graduate to a guitar if they were lucky enough to get a hold of one. Musicians such as Lightnin’ Hopkins, Elmore James, and B. B. King all first learned to play on the diddley bow.

Once musicians could afford guitars they quickly abandoned the diddley bow. And when the resonator guitar came along, they had a way to present their music to even larger audiences. The resonator, with its crisp metallic ring, created the signature sound of Delta blues. When you listen to Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Son House, or Bukka White – among many others – you’re listening to Delta blues. Others, such as John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters, started out playing Delta blues.

This Delta sound is what craftsmen like Don Morrison aim to re-create. His resonators, like the very first of their kind, have built-in amplification – a feature that came about by demand.

Back in the early 1920s guitar players performing with dance orchestras couldn’t really stand out from the other players. Since there were no amplifiers, guitars were considered a part of the rhythm section instead of lead instruments. A vaudeville performer and promoter named George Beauchamp wanted an acoustic guitar that could play melodies over the orchestral instruments. He turned to John Dopyera, a violin repairman and luthier whose workshop was close to Beauchamp’s Los Angeles home.

John Dopyera and his brother Rudy experimented with various designs to achieve a smooth and balanced amplified sound and decided to mount cone-like aluminum resonators, similar to speaker cones, inside a metal guitar body. Dopyera found that using three smaller cones instead of one big cone gave the guitar the sound he’d been looking for. The tri-cone resonator guitar was born.

Beauchamp was impressed with the new design and proposed a business venture to Dopyera, who agreed. They created the National String Instrument Corporation in 1927. National guitars quickly became best sellers. The company soon created a wood-bodied model.

There were differences, though, between Beauchamp and Dopyera. Beauchamp preferred a single-cone resonator, not only because it was louder but because it was cheaper to make. For Dopyera, excellent sound and quality were top priorities. The two men finally went their separate ways when Dopyera found out that Beauchamp had claimed the patent for the single-cone resonator. In 1928 Dopyera quit National, with the intention of manufacturing his own single-cone resonator. John and his brother Emil formed the Dobro Manufacturing Company (named for the Dopyera Brothers).

Because National held the patent for his single-cone resonator, John Dopyera had to develop a new style of single-cone resonator. The single biggest change that he made was to the bridge of the guitar.

On a standard acoustic guitar, the bridge is glued directly to the top of the guitar. It has several functions: it holds the strings securely, sets the spacing of the strings, and acts as an external brace to the guitar body. Its other important job is transferring vibrations from the strings to the soundboard of the guitar. On a resonator guitar, the bridge is a part of the resonator cone.
For single-cone resonators, the cone has either a “biscuit” bridge or a “spider” bridge.
The National resonator used a biscuit cone, which is convex (pointing outward). Inside the tip of the cone sits a round wooden bridge (the biscuit), and set into the bridge is a small piece typically found on a guitar bridge – the saddle. The saddle keeps the strings elevated at the preferred height above the fretboard. The saddle transfers the string vibrations to the bridge and the bridge transfers them to the cone. The cone in turn vibrates, moving the air volume inside the guitar out through the sound holes.

For his Dobro resonator, John Dopyera decided to make his cone concave (pointing inward) and used an eight-legged “spider” bridge which straddled the cone. The vibrations from the strings travel from the saddle and down the spider “legs,” providing the cone with eight contact rods for vibration. The result is a loud, full-bodied tone.

Resonator guitars became popular in both blues and bluegrass. Dobro-style guitars, especially wood-bodied ones, were preferred by many bluegrass players. Blues players tended toward National-style tri-cone resonators. But plenty of guitarists break with tradition and use resonators in their own preferred ways.

Players liked resonators because, being louder than regular acoustic guitars, they could play for larger crowds in rural areas that didn’t have electricity for amplifiers. Street musicians, who had to set up without amplifiers, liked resonator guitars for the same reason.

Don Morrison makes both single-cone and tri-cone resonators. For his popular Rustbucket model, he says he flattens the corrugated steel sheets by walking on them so he can fit them through his ancient set of sheet metal rollers. Some of this old metal will still bear the makers’ stamps: Trademark Redcliffe, for example, or Lysaght Queen’s Head Australia or Emu Best. You’ll see these stamps on the backs of his guitars.

On some Rustbuckets he takes naturally weathered Galvo and adds an artificially rusted cone and sound holes, giving the guitar a distinctive, vintage look.

When he isn’t building resonators, Don Morrison is performing music, often Delta blues. During the ’90s his band, The Elmores, played blues classics by Elmore James and John Lee Hooker. He and his band Prawnhead are also a part of a “roots revolution” in popular music.

We honed our style on the streets and markets of Adelaide. We found the faster we played, the more money we made. We don’t play blues or folk, we don’t play country, we don’t play bluegrass, nor do we play rockabilly. But we play a mixture of all of those. We call it bluebilly.

Image courtesy of Slide Guitar for Beginners

"Fishing on the Big Black," by Alpha Unit

The Big Black River, flowing southwest across Mississippi, is the site of a pivotal battle during the Vicksburg Campaign of the Civil War. After a decisive loss at Champion Hill, the Confederates reached the Big Black River on the night of May 16, 1863, under the command of Lt. Gen. John Pemberton, commander of the Confederate Army of Mississippi.

The Confederates constructed earthworks on the river’s east bank and placed 18 guns behind the works. Large sections of Pemberton’s line were protected by a bayou of waist-deep water. A planked-over railroad bridge and another makeshift bridge provided access to additional artillery overlooking the river on its west bank.

Union forces led by Maj. Gen. John McClernand encountered the Confederates early on the morning of May 17. It just so happened that the men led by Brig. Gen. Michael Lawler actually got to the Rebels first, wading through the bayou to overrun the Confederates on the east bank of the river. Inspired by Lawler’s attack, other Union formations surged forward.

Overwhelmed, the Confederates broke for the makeshift bridges to get to the west bank. Most of Pemberton’s men made it across, but Pemberton’s chief engineer set fire to both bridges to cut off any Union pursuit. Many of the Confederates tried to swim across the river and drowned. About 1,700 Rebels were stranded on the east bank and subsequently captured. It was the final battle before the Siege of Vicksburg.

After floods you can still sometimes find artifacts from the gunboat battles that took place on the Big Black River during the War. But most people on the river nowadays aren’t really interested in Civil War artifacts. The big payoff during springtime on the Big Black are flathead catfish – also called tabby cats, shovelhead cats, yellow cats, flatties, and who knows how many other names. The Big Black River will overflow her banks that time of year. As Cliff Covington tells it:

Foraging catfish move into the flooded timber in large numbers. Catfish anglers take advantage of this feeding frenzy by setting multiple trotlines in likely spots along the main channel. Chicken livers, cut skipjack, live goldfish, and pond perch are the baits of choice when a boatload of catfish is the big objective.

Muddy and slow-flowing due to the large amount of sediment it carries, the Big Black River is renowned for yielding blue, channel, and flathead catfish of what Covington calls “mythical proportions.” It is one of the premier handgrabbing destinations in the South. A handgrabber catches fish by placing his hands directly into a catfish hole, and some anglers are very good at it. Covington refers to Woodie Reaves, who says there is no better place for handgrabbing catfish than the shallow waters of the Big Black.

While Reaves’ personal best is a 93-pound whale of a catfish that he wrestled from its underwater bed just a few years ago, his group routinely lands up to 25 big cats, averaging 50 pounds each, every time they venture out on this stream.

Sportsmen say that the Big Black River is also a good place for bowfishing. Bowfishers use highly specialized bows to catch fish, usually on a boat set up just for bowfishing. Hunting fish using a bow and arrow isn’t new at all and is a traditional way of fishing all over the world. Bert Turcotte of Vicksburg has been an avid bowfisher since high school and says that anyone with a regular bow can also fish this way. As he told Phillip Gentry:

All kinds of bows can be used for bowfishing. People who like traditional archery can easily equip a recurve bow for fishing. Any compound bow can also easily be set up, but the range of draw weight is the key. Forty pounds of draw weight or less will get the job done here in Mississippi.

Unlike hunting bows, fishing bows come with reels for retrieving your prey.

In Mississippi you can legally catch carp, buffalo, gar, shad, bowfin, and catfish with a bow. There are restrictions, however, on when and where you can catch catfish in this way.
Gentry says that nearly all bowfishing is done at night when carp, buffalo, and gar can be found hiding in extremely shallow water. Buffalo and carp feed on aquatic vegetation and are especially fond of newly planted areas that have recently flooded from spring rain. Gar are the most commonly sought daytime species, he says, and can be found “sunning” in shallow water or lurking near the surface in deeper water.

Sean Ford of Madison, Mississippi, uses a gas generator on his bowfishing boat to power either sodium or halogen lights for night fishing. He says:

The platform will allow two of us to fish at the same time from the front as we ease along in shallow water with the trolling motor, looking for fish to shoot.

An angler will use a trolling motor on his boat in order to move quietly through the water. You don’t want to spook the fish.

"Old-Fashioned Pig Farming," by Alpha Unit

Woodlands are a pig’s natural habitat. But pigs are adaptable to just about any environment. They live on every continent (except Antarctica).

In the forests and woodlands where wild pigs live, trees and vegetation provide them with shelter and their preferred foods. They like places where they’ll have year-round access to water and moist ground for wallowing, such as swamps and marshes.

In spring they graze on grasses and clover. Throughout the year they’ll forage for berries, nuts, acorns, mushrooms, insects, and sometimes small rodents. But one thing a pig was designed to do is root. A pig’s snout allows it to navigate and interact with its environment – sort of like a cat’s whiskers.

The nasal disc of a pig’s snout, while rigid enough to be used for digging, has numerous sensory receptors. In addition to being useful as a fine and powerful tool for manipulating objects, the extensive innervation in the snout provides pigs with an extremely well-developed sense of smell.

Pigs can smell roots and tubers that are deep underground and in the wild can spend up to 75 percent of their day rooting and foraging. Some homesteaders put pigs’ rooting instinct to work for them and use pigs to “till” garden plots.

Daniel MacPhee and his wife use Guinea Hog piglets on their New England farm, but unlike some farmers, they don’t plan to eat their pigs.

Instead, the piglets are meant as an environmentally- and -budget-friendly cleanup crew of sorts, rooting around to clean out tough, tangled roots after a small flock of sheep has grazed at the couple’s farm, Blackbird Rise in Palermo [Maine].
By having the animals do the work, “we’re not buying machinery and we’re not wasting fossil fuels,” said MacPhee, 35. “They’re eating the roots and vegetable matter, processing that and putting nutrients back in the soil through manure. They’re doing all the same things a tractor does but without the environmental impact.”

The Guinea Hogs on their farm are a “heritage breed,” the name given to any of the distinct breeds that can be traced back to the period before industrial farming. Generations ago, there were hundreds of pig breeds on homesteads in Europe and the United States. But a lot of the historic breeds fell out of favor as the pork industry moved toward leaner carcasses and began large-scale confinement operations. This was in part the result of corn production.

As the larger settled farms of the Midwest began to produce excess corn, the availability and low cost of this feed attracted pig production and processing to the region. By the mid-1800s the states that produced the most corn also produced the most pigs, and production declined in the East and New England. The industry was becoming geographically centralized as well and the number of breeds of pigs began to decline. Several breeds became extinct by the early 1900s.

Pigs are for the most part no longer produced and sold by independent producers on open markets. Since the late 20th century, pig production in the United States has come to be dominated by a few large, vertically-integrated corporations that control every step along the way from the selection of breeding stock to the retailing of pork. A lot of the farmers who are still in the business are contract growers for the corporations. But there are independent pig farmers who are dedicated to bringing back the old breeds and are raising them in the traditional way, on pasture and in woodlands.

Some heritage breeds are very rare and are listed as critically endangered by the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy. Among heritage breeds is the very popular Berkshire pig, a black pig designated “first class”. Farmers say that Berkshires have an excellent disposition and are very friendly and curious.

The Tamworth is a golden-red pig and a direct descendant of the wild boars that roamed the forests of Staffordshire. They are considered very outdoorsy and athletic. (They make the best bacon in the United States, according to some fans.)

The Large Black retains the traits of its ancestors that lived on the pastures and woods of England in the 16th and 17th centuries. They are hardy animals that can withstand cold and heat. They are well-known as docile hogs.

The Hereford is a medium-size pig that is unique to the United States. Its name is inspired by its striking color pattern of intense red with white trim, the same as that of Hereford cattle. These pigs also have a reputation for being easy-going.

The Red Wattle is especially in danger of extinction. It is a large red hog with a fleshy wattle attached to each side of the neck. These pigs are very hardy with an especially mild temperament.

There are other heritage breeds, some of which number as low as a few hundred worldwide. Heritage pig farmers want to increase demand for their breeds, because to eat them is to preserve them, they say. There is, in fact, a growing market for heritage pork, which is more tender and tastes much better than mass-produced pork. Just looking at a cut of heritage pork you see a striking difference. It’s typically darker than pork from industrial farms, some as red as beef.

Of course, there are heritage pig farmers like the MacPhees, who just like having pigs on the farm, performing those unique tasks that pigs do.

If you’ve got children, there are heritage pig breeds they would easily get along with. Brian Wright raises heritage pigs and says that some are considered docile while others are seen as “evil, killer hogs” – in other words, very aggressive. You’ve got to do your homework before picking a breed.

The Rossi Farm in Rhode Island began breeding Gloucestershire Old Spot pigs several years ago and the pigs have become a favorite. Nicknamed Orchard Hogs, these pigs originally foraged for windfall apples and are distinguished by the black spots on their white coats.
The Rossis say Gloucestershire Old Spots are extremely friendly and laid-back. When the pigs are in the pasture, the children are often out there with them. And the pigs love having their ears scratched by the kids.

"Black Women and Beauty," by Phil

This article shall partake in an investigation of “attractive traits” with females of West African extraction in terms of their effects with regard to appearance, along with a discussion of their development. Such an endeavor is undertaken due to Satoshi Kanazawa’s controversial work in analyzing differences in perceived beauty among races.
Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?
In my honest opinion, this was something that I had trouble going through when thinking of women. I mean sure, I could think of attractive black women but typically they were mixed noticeably.
However, it wasn’t until I read and saw pictures of Native African women that I noticed four appealing physical aspects of African women.
Traits:
1. Eye Shape – Defining eye shape of Blacks is sort of weird, for there are various caricatures. The type encompasses the big “wide eyes”, “sad eyes” (almost like triangles, giving a sad look to them), small slits, etc. The big eyes I find to be more common in deeper jungle Blacks, I believe, sad eyes and slits to those that came from the desert. Medium/almond eyes, that are sometimes considered “pseudo Asian” eyes on black women, were among the one I found rather appealing.
2. Lips – While “Big lips” are sometimes seen as unattractive as opposed to small or lips that are just full, depending on the actually shape of the lips themselves they look nice as well. The thing is though is that they are less of a sexual appeal of beauty and just more of a comely feature when they are big but well shaped.
3. Contrast of features against skin – In the case of having attractive features they become more pronounced. Not a huge necessity for standard beauty, but a nice trait at least – though its effect depends on the presence of pre-existing features. The trend was present, although further examining led me to conclude it wasn’t that uncommon.
4. The fourth one has at first a bit of a dubious nature to it. Basically it deals with cases where typically discouraged traits like prognathism and prominent cheek bones look good when coupled with a slimmer face, prominent chin, and not as exaggerated. Basically what this does is further draw attention to these features in an organized and pleasing composition. The issue is that I was unsure of how significantly “common” this trend was, though further examining led me to conclude it wasn’t that uncommon.
Here. This would be a decent example of what I’m talking about.
However, it’s time to get to cons.
1. Head shape – From what I read, at least for the average African American female, they tend to get a wider face. Personally, a face that’s more pointed or oval – that is, having a thinner lower face – is more attractive on women. In the case of Black women this is caused by the larger Jaws of Blacks generally, more prominent cheek bones, and emphasized with a narrower forehead amongst blacks. However, I believe this is more of a male trait than female.
2. Nose – Basically more angular noses are preferred but I think it is more of its relative size and how much the nostrils flare.
3. Body – Reading info from Steve Sailor, while Black men in America have narrower hips than Whites or Latinos, Black women have the widest waists of women and even wider waists than Black men.
This is basically due to a combination of earlier development of female fat distribution in females and Blacks being on average more impulsive, in this case particularly with food. In some African cultures it’s a sign of beauty. Often before marriage ceremonies the women go through a fattening period.
Examination:
While many are probably familiar with European-mix progression, examples of African progression can be seen here amongst these Igbo women, an ethnic group of various looks.
Igbo Women
The two on the right and the second from the left are overall better looking than the one in the middle or on the left end (though the one in the middle is of course notably older). The causes are more noticeable in the one second from the left and the one on the far right, having less prominent cheek bones, more expressive eyes, and smaller lower lips. The eye traits are present in the one second from the right, though she has prominent cheekbones. This trait is complimented with a wider forehead and what I believed to be a more prominent chin.
More African women.
Compared to the one on the far left, the other two look more appealing due to having smaller jaws. But overall none look hideous, just more “ethnic looking” in which they have the traits to a noticeable but not to an exaggerated degree. All three, however, show the cheekbone trait (which I may add looks actually nice when coupled with a smaller jaw) but they seem to have “better” facial proportions where their faces don’t look unpleasingly wide. Their eye shapes seem to vary, too.
Ibo women.
The one on the far left shows African achievement of a face highly reduced of maxillary prognathism, while the one on the right shows one that is only partially reduced but is at a point that displays that unique “attractive” jutting I mentioned earlier. The one second from the right when compared to the one second from the left has wider (more almond) eyes and less prominent cheekbones, appearing more attractive due to a slimmer looking face and more expressive eyes. The one in the very middle is blurry but appears to resemble the type on the far right.
Young Ibo Women of Ibuza
Each of these girls, in my opinion, deviate a fair amount from typical vices due to the lower jaws with smaller lips and noses, though the one on the left seems to have a lower forehead (a vice that I forgot to add as well as possessing more slit eyes. The one on the right is quite the opposite, having quite a wider and higher forehead with bigger eyes.)
Igbo Women
This is a favorite of mine in which it shows a very good example of African progression that I speak of, being prognathism that is subtle and pronounces the fullness of the lips, not extending further than nose length, an overall smaller nose, what appear to be almond eyes, cheek bones that are showing but not overly prominent, with a forehead that is round.
The only concerning “flaw” it the forehead’s height but it’s not that big of a deal.
Biafrans.
The one on the right has the smallest jaw, thinnest lower face, intermediate nose and eyes size, and least exaggerated cheekbones. Still, all are rather pretty in my opinion anyway.
Though we’ve seen many examples of well-formed faces, actual specimens of body shapes yield little variation (from what I could find) to offer in forms of images. Most were slim, lanky forms that, while not truly unpleasing in my opinion, I must admit I would be biased in saying that it wouldn’t have limited appeal. Among African-American women these forms seems occasional but not that common, at least to me. Thus, it is likely due to nutritional factors if not wholly due to admixture, for native Africans were often recorded to be vegetarians, meat being held more commonly as a luxury rather than a given.
However, I’m fortunately in possession of positive commentary of European comments on Gold Coast women of both the Fanti and Ashanti tribes.
“The women when young are ugly in face and beautiful in form, when old they are in both.” (This is likely due to R/K breeding, causing faster maturation and possible loss in the retaining of younger traits).
“In general appearance the Ashanti much resemble the Fanti though they are not perhaps so strongly built. They are however quite as good looking and according to Mr Bowdieh the women are handsomer than those of the Fanti.”
– The Uncivilized Races of Men in All Countries of the World Volume 1. by J. G. Wood
Discussion:
Now that we are familiar with the identification of African progression of attractive female traits, what possible mechanisms in Africa caused the common (without influence of modern opinions) stereotype type to prevail?
Well, Satoshi, after ruling out BMI and intellect differences, claims testosterone differences. The reasoning behind this is due to his findings that, net of intelligence, Black men were rated higher than men of other races. This led him to suggest that difference in testosterone, which produces masculine features and being recorded to being highest in blacks, resulted in Black males deemed more attractive and females not.
I’m unsure of this inference, but it does draw attention to the stronger association between “beauty” and intellect in Black males compared to females. The topic between his research of beauty and intellect can be accessed here for others to discuss in the comments, for now I’m going into some knowledge of why the results are the way they are.
Beautiful People Really Are More Intelligent
One possible reason for these results is social roles in regards to sexual selection. From reading Among the Ibos by George Thomas Basden:

“In the majority of cases young man makes his own choice. He happens to a girl who attracts his attention and he immediately inquiries as to her parents and whether she be engaged or not. If she is free he endeavors to through her friends information concerning her in cooking trading and other useful and profitable accomplishments. He also inquires about her whether she be of good temper quiet industrious and so forth. Should these investigations prove satisfactory he lays his case before his parents or his friend for he cannot make the first advances personally.”

According to this, while initial notice (likely attraction) starts courtship, it is actual character that causes union to follow. Some HBD’rs claim that populations in Eurasia had a more directed course of selection, often described as self-domestication. It’s possible that in cases like here with some African tribes different standards in selection caused for different measures of association of intellect – for example, a proxy of character – that caused the weaker association in black women. It is worth mentioning, however, that based on Satoshi’s research that the correlation between attractiveness and intellect is higher in men than women by about 2.4 IQ points. I believe the association becomes stronger as a society develops. The Ashanti have often been commented to have a higher culture than Fanti, and the women of the Ashanti were commented to be more beautiful as well, though the margin between men was regarded as relatively smaller, with the Fanti males having a better build but the Ashanti being superior in facial features.
Regardless, I’m an amateur at best with the topic and I urge anyone else knowledgeable on the topic to share in the comment section.

"Southern Sweet Potatoes," by Alpha Unit

Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard was a military officer who became the first brigadier general of the Confederate States Army. In 1987 at Louisiana State University Dr. Larry Rolston, an entomologist and Civil War enthusiast, came up with a high-yielding, disease-resistant strain of sweet potato that saved the sweet potato industry in Louisiana. He named his variety after General Beauregard, of St. Bernard Parish. It remains one of the most popular varieties.

Sweet potatoes, a type of morning glory, come in over 400 varieties grown around the world. Louisiana’s soil and climate are ideal for growing sweet potatoes. But Louisiana sweet potato growers have some great competition in Mississippi. The Mississippi Sweet Potato Council will tell you.

No other sweet potato can compare to the ones we grow in Mississippi. We produce premium Number One sweet potatoes bursting with flavor and freshness. The rich, fertile soils of North Mississippi make our sweet potatoes appealing both inside and out.

Last year Mississippi planted just over 23,000 acres of sweet potatoes. About 500 of those acres produced organic sweet potatoes, mostly for baby food. Ricky and Jamie Earp are second-generation sweet potato farmers who run the operation their father started in 1968 near Houlka in Chickasaw County. About 60 percent of their crop are Beauregards.

As with almost all other growers in the country, labor is of prime concern to the Earp brothers (pronounced ARP, as in “sharp”). But unlike so many other growers you talk to, the Earps say they have a reliable local labor supply made up of people who have worked with them consistently over the years. Jamie Earp says that his wife and Ricky’s wife also help in the business.

Sweet potato farming is not highly mechanized. About his labor force Jamie says:

For planting, we’ll need 20 to 22 workers for about two and a half weeks, and at harvest 30 workers for about eight weeks. We have three harvester machines, each requiring eight workers. Then there are those who run the tractors and forklifts and other operations. Some of those same people help out in packing and shipping throughout the year.

Danny Clark of Vardaman, Mississippi, is in the same business. He is a third-generation sweet potato farmer. He says that sweet potato production is very hands-on labor-intensive, and that a lot of growers in the area use H2A workers, who are mostly Hispanic and work seasonally. But like the Earps, he says that most of his labor is local, mostly women who have been with his operation for many years.

At harvest time he operates digging rigs that move through the field at less than 1 mph, scooping sweet potatoes onto conveyor belts on each side of a trailer, where an eight-person crew sorts them into bins according to grade. It’s still going to be a while, though, before the sweet potatoes are ready for market.

The thing about sweet potatoes is that you don’t want them “green.” If you eat a green sweet potato you might be convinced that you don’t like sweet potatoes. Between 15 and 20 percent of the sweet potato harvest in the US is washed, packed, and shipped immediately after harvesting. These freshly dug sweet potatoes aren’t very sweet or moist.

Unlike a lot of other freshly harvested produce, sweet potatoes have to “set up” to be really enjoyable. They are cured by storing them at 85-90 degrees F and about 90 percent humidity, for 5 to 10 days. This is when they start developing their sugar-creating enzymes. This process also heals any bruises or skinning that occurred during harvest and allows the sweet potatoes to be washed and packed with less outer damage.

Afterwards the sweet potatoes are stored at 55-60 degrees F for six to eight weeks. The sugars continue to come to life. In due time the harvest is ready for packing and shipping. When you get them home and put them in the oven, the sugars really kick in.

You can’t tell by looking at a sweet potato whether or not it’s been cured. But a lot of growers assure you that they only ship cured sweet potatoes – especially those sold from September to the end of the year, when they sell the most. Edmondson Farms of Vardaman says through their highly advanced storage method they can provide consistent and exceptional quality sweet potatoes year-round.

Edmondson grows mostly Beauregard sweet potatoes in northern Mississippi and in Oak Grove, Louisiana. They’ve clearly got the best of both worlds.

"Picking Blueberries Isn’t What It Used to Be," by Alpha Unit

People from Washington County, Maine, which borders the Canadian province of New Brunswick, will readily tell you about the natural beauty of the area – and about how friendly and hardworking the people are. But some of them will also tell you not to move there unless you don’t need to work.

Maine’s six “Rim Counties,” the rural counties just south of the Canadian border, are among the poorest counties in New England. Washington County has more unemployment and poverty than the rest. Paul Constant, who hails from Maine, says that the popular conception of Maine as nothing but lighthouses and lobsters is far from the truth. Once you get away from the relatively affluent parts of southern Maine, you see how tough it can really be to live there.

But Washington County, the poorest part of Maine, is special. It is the wild blueberry capital of the world.

Maine has 44,000 acres of wild blueberries that bring in about $250 million in annual revenue. Cultivated blueberries from other states dwarf the production of wild blueberries that grow on Washington County’s “barrens,” says Philip Conkling. These areas got their name because only blueberries and a few other plants could grow on the sandy soils left by the receding glacier. A spokeswoman for the Maine Wild Blueberry Commission told him that Maine grows a very special product but most people don’t know the difference between a wild blueberry and a cultivated one.

Philip Conkling offers a hint: the fat watery ones with less flavor are the cultivated ones.

In the summer of 1974 Conkling jumped at the chance to make some money raking blueberries at the Deblois barrens in Washington County, as part of a crew assembled by some neighbors who also owned blueberry land. He says that the wild blueberry harvest was the one time of year when just about anyone between six and 60 could earn a small pile of cash “to spend like a grasshopper or save for the coming winter.”

One week later I was in the back of Ralph Jr.’s two-ton, stake-body truck with a motley crew of neighbors, lurching off Highway 193 onto dirt roads that curved around endless vistas of blueberry fields on the barrens. When we stopped, Ralph handed me a bucket and a blueberry rake. He explained that when I had filled my bucket, I was to bring it over to a hand-cranked winnowing machine to separate the leaves and stems from the berries and then pour the berries carefully into wooden boxes. For this, I would make $2.50 a box. Seemed simple enough.

It turned out to be back-breaking work.

For generations most of the laborers in the blueberry fields were Native Americans, from the local Passamaquoddy tribe and Mi’kmaq from Canada. But with the expansion of the industry, blueberry farmers started hiring migrant workers to increase their labor force. Since the 1960s the harvest has been picked mainly by migrants, most of whom are Mexican, Mexican-American, Filipino-American, Jamaican, Haitian, Honduran, and Guatemalan. They work alongside Passamaquoddy and Mi’kmaq families.

Still, there are fewer migrant laborers in the barrens than there used to be. Since the 1990s growers have been using mechanical harvesters. Some blueberry operations are almost completely mechanized, and others are planning to make the transition. These machines can harvest about 10 times what a typical person can harvest with a hand-held blueberry rake.
Some analysts say that mechanization is the consequence of uncertainty over immigration reform. Without any long-term clarity on what the law will be, growers can’t easily plan for even five years ahead.

What about hiring native Mainers to replace migrant workers? Not really an option, according to some growers.

“There are people who say if we just paid more, Americans would do the work. But that’s a joke,” said Ed Flanagan, president of Jasper Wyman & Son Inc., Maine’s second-largest blueberry grower. Flanagan says hard-working pickers make as much as $20 an hour here, almost three times Maine’s minimum wage of $7.50.

Even though Washington County has high unemployment, the seasonal jobs in the blueberry fields find few takers among local residents.

Another grower works with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to make sure its seasonal staff are in the US legally, but a spokesman says every year it’s a gamble. “You never know if enough people are going to show up to get the job done,” he says.

“The Last Trip From Jacksonville to San Juan,” by Alpha Unit

A US Navy salvage unit is headed to the debris fields near the last known location of the SS El Faro, a US-flagged cargo ship that sank last week during Hurricane Joaquin. What they want to recover immediately is the voyage data recorder, which captured the ship’s course and speed as well as onboard audio from the bridge. Once submerged, the recorder would have begun pinging. It has a battery life of 30 days.

The El Faro is a “roll-on/roll-off” cargo vessel designed to carry vehicles that are driven on and off the ship. It left Jacksonville, Florida, last Tuesday on its weekly run from Jacksonville to San Juan, Puerto Rico. It held 294 cars, trucks, and trailers below deck and 391 containers topside carrying groceries and other retail products.

There were 33 crew members, including Captain Michael Davidson, a veteran mariner of over 25 years’ experience. Twenty-eight of the crew members were from the United States and five were from Poland.

TOTE Maritime Puerto Rico operated the El Faro and says the 40-year-old vessel was sound and well-maintained and that it had passed its annual Coast Guard inspection in March. The question that has been floating around for the past week is “Why did the captain set sail in the face of a hurricane?”

Experienced mariners say that it isn’t at all unusual for a captain to head out under those conditions. One Merchant Marine captain, Laurence Wade, told the Portland Press Herald that sailing in bad weather, even in hurricanes, is part of the way of life for mariners.

You do the best you can. You ride it out. If the [El Faro] hadn’t lost power it would have been in San Juan by Friday and back in Jacksonville today.

Others remind us that the decision to sail rests with the captain, not with the company, and that no captain would take a ship and its crew into harm’s way. Wade says that he never likes to see people questioning a captain’s decision, particularly those with no experience at sea.

A former merchant mariner and current maritime lawyer named Rod Sullivan told the South Florida Business Journal that the El Faro probably sailed due to routine.

People get wedded to their schedule. There are vendors, stevedores, truckers who are all expecting the ship to arrive. There’s pressure to keep on schedule.

That’s putting it charitably. Other mariners say that pressure from the shipping office is intense. On all kinds of forums where people are discussing this disaster, you’ll find sea veterans making comments like this:

To answer your question, the most likely reason that the El Faro sailed when and where she did was because she had a schedule to keep at San Juan’s container port, and that was paramount over the concern of risking the ship and the lives of those serving on her…

Some flunky at a desk in an office building somewhere scheduled a particular vessel to be at a certain place within a specified time window, and that’s pretty much it…details like war or weather or other such things are treated as just another thing that the crew is expected to “deal with.”

Executives at the parent company of TOTE Maritime acknowledged on Monday that the company could have vetoed the captain’s decision to set sail but say that Captain Davidson had a sound plan that would have enabled him to pass clearly ahead of the storm. Had the El Faro not lost propulsion, Davidson would most likely have succeeded.

Why the ship lost propulsion is still unknown. The ship left Jacksonville on Tuesday, September 29. At 7:15 AM on Thursday, October 1, the Coast Guard received distress alerts from the El Faro. Just before the alerts went out, Captain Davidson had notified TOTE Maritime that the ship had lost propulsion and was listing 15 degrees in the midst of Hurricane Joaquin. The captain also noted that the ship had taken on some flooding but that the crew had the situation under control. This was the last contact anyone had with the ship.

According to Rick Spilman of The Old Salt Blog, these vehicle carriers have an inherent weakness that might have doomed the El Faro.

Ro/ros have wide vehicle decks. They are essentially parking lots at sea. The wide and open decks are necessary for efficiently driving vehicles on and off ships. The problem is that even moderate flooding of the vehicle deck can dramatically destabilize a ro/ro. The sloshing of water on the vehicle deck, referred to as the “free surface effect,” can cause the ship to capsize rapidly and without warning.

In addition to the sloshing water in the vehicle deck, vehicles can become unsecured in heavy seas and slide to one side, causing a ship to list even more. That is what happened when the Korean ferry Sewol capsized in 2014.

The El Faro‘s emergency beacon sent out a signal briefly and then stopped. The beacon is designed to float away from the ship and continue sending a signal. If the El Faro capsized, the beacon could have been trapped underneath the ship, says Spilman.

In the estimation of Captain Joseph Murphy of the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, two essential things to the survival of the ship were its ability to maintain propulsion and its power. He explains:

Propulsion so they can maneuver it and power so they can maintain communication. The other one is watertight integrity so that the ship is able to float. By all reports, she had a 15-degree list, which would have made it difficult for them to launch lifeboats. And she had lost power and communication so my suspicion is that they did not have either propulsion or power.

My personal belief – and I don’t have anything to go on other than experience, years of going to sea – is that the ship actually did capsize and sank very, very quickly.

Most people don’t think that much about mariners or the vessels they work on until tragedies like these occur. The fact is, almost everything we use and consume every day arrives to us by ship. The goods flow day and night, but transporting them is a risky enterprise. In addition to the grueling work schedules and battles over pay, there is the fact that mariners work in a wilderness as deadly as any other on Earth.

“Mother Nature is merciless and more powerful than we give her credit,” says a former maritime instructor to those who wonder why this happened. In a discussion at the Service Academy Forums, he says there is an evolution you go through.

Stage 1 is, I’m a little scared, but I trust you guys. Stage 2 is, I’m strong, I’m invincible, I can handle anything, BRING IT. A lot of people stop there. A lot of people LIVE under the illusion that because they can turn up a thermostat, turn on a faucet, flip a switch and cook a meal, that they have bested nature. Technology only takes you so far.

Forty-foot seas, 140-knot winds, no port to enter, no way off the ship, no one to negotiate with, no alternatives. Human beings can adapt to and overcome a lot of things, but sometimes there is a confluence of nature that makes it NOT POSSIBLE. And those people get to Stage 3: I am strong, I am trained, I am clever, and I have my wits – but I am a speck of dust on a capricious planet, and I am at its mercy.

"The Last Trip From Jacksonville to San Juan," by Alpha Unit

A US Navy salvage unit is headed to the debris fields near the last known location of the SS El Faro, a US-flagged cargo ship that sank last week during Hurricane Joaquin. What they want to recover immediately is the voyage data recorder, which captured the ship’s course and speed as well as onboard audio from the bridge. Once submerged, the recorder would have begun pinging. It has a battery life of 30 days.
The El Faro is a “roll-on/roll-off” cargo vessel designed to carry vehicles that are driven on and off the ship. It left Jacksonville, Florida, last Tuesday on its weekly run from Jacksonville to San Juan, Puerto Rico. It held 294 cars, trucks, and trailers below deck and 391 containers topside carrying groceries and other retail products.
There were 33 crew members, including Captain Michael Davidson, a veteran mariner of over 25 years’ experience. Twenty-eight of the crew members were from the United States and five were from Poland.
TOTE Maritime Puerto Rico operated the El Faro and says the 40-year-old vessel was sound and well-maintained and that it had passed its annual Coast Guard inspection in March. The question that has been floating around for the past week is “Why did the captain set sail in the face of a hurricane?”
Experienced mariners say that it isn’t at all unusual for a captain to head out under those conditions. One Merchant Marine captain, Laurence Wade, told the Portland Press Herald that sailing in bad weather, even in hurricanes, is part of the way of life for mariners.

You do the best you can. You ride it out. If the [El Faro] hadn’t lost power it would have been in San Juan by Friday and back in Jacksonville today.

Others remind us that the decision to sail rests with the captain, not with the company, and that no captain would take a ship and its crew into harm’s way. Wade says that he never likes to see people questioning a captain’s decision, particularly those with no experience at sea.
A former merchant mariner and current maritime lawyer named Rod Sullivan told the South Florida Business Journal that the El Faro probably sailed due to routine.

People get wedded to their schedule. There are vendors, stevedores, truckers who are all expecting the ship to arrive. There’s pressure to keep on schedule.

That’s putting it charitably. Other mariners say that pressure from the shipping office is intense. On all kinds of forums where people are discussing this disaster, you’ll find sea veterans making comments like this:

To answer your question, the most likely reason that the El Faro sailed when and where she did was because she had a schedule to keep at San Juan’s container port, and that was paramount over the concern of risking the ship and the lives of those serving on her…
Some flunky at a desk in an office building somewhere scheduled a particular vessel to be at a certain place within a specified time window, and that’s pretty much it…details like war or weather or other such things are treated as just another thing that the crew is expected to “deal with.”

Executives at the parent company of TOTE Maritime acknowledged on Monday that the company could have vetoed the captain’s decision to set sail but say that Captain Davidson had a sound plan that would have enabled him to pass clearly ahead of the storm. Had the El Faro not lost propulsion, Davidson would most likely have succeeded.
Why the ship lost propulsion is still unknown. The ship left Jacksonville on Tuesday, September 29. At 7:15 AM on Thursday, October 1, the Coast Guard received distress alerts from the El Faro. Just before the alerts went out, Captain Davidson had notified TOTE Maritime that the ship had lost propulsion and was listing 15 degrees in the midst of Hurricane Joaquin. The captain also noted that the ship had taken on some flooding but that the crew had the situation under control. This was the last contact anyone had with the ship.
According to Rick Spilman of The Old Salt Blog, these vehicle carriers have an inherent weakness that might have doomed the El Faro.

Ro/ros have wide vehicle decks. They are essentially parking lots at sea. The wide and open decks are necessary for efficiently driving vehicles on and off ships. The problem is that even moderate flooding of the vehicle deck can dramatically destabilize a ro/ro. The sloshing of water on the vehicle deck, referred to as the “free surface effect,” can cause the ship to capsize rapidly and without warning.

In addition to the sloshing water in the vehicle deck, vehicles can become unsecured in heavy seas and slide to one side, causing a ship to list even more. That is what happened when the Korean ferry Sewol capsized in 2014.
The El Faro‘s emergency beacon sent out a signal briefly and then stopped. The beacon is designed to float away from the ship and continue sending a signal. If the El Faro capsized, the beacon could have been trapped underneath the ship, says Spilman.
In the estimation of Captain Joseph Murphy of the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, two essential things to the survival of the ship were its ability to maintain propulsion and its power. He explains:

Propulsion so they can maneuver it and power so they can maintain communication. The other one is watertight integrity so that the ship is able to float. By all reports, she had a 15-degree list, which would have made it difficult for them to launch lifeboats. And she had lost power and communication so my suspicion is that they did not have either propulsion or power.
My personal belief – and I don’t have anything to go on other than experience, years of going to sea – is that the ship actually did capsize and sank very, very quickly.

Most people don’t think that much about mariners or the vessels they work on until tragedies like these occur. The fact is, almost everything we use and consume every day arrives to us by ship. The goods flow day and night, but transporting them is a risky enterprise. In addition to the grueling work schedules and battles over pay, there is the fact that mariners work in a wilderness as deadly as any other on Earth.
“Mother Nature is merciless and more powerful than we give her credit,” says a former maritime instructor to those who wonder why this happened. In a discussion at the Service Academy Forums, he says there is an evolution you go through.

Stage 1 is, I’m a little scared, but I trust you guys. Stage 2 is, I’m strong, I’m invincible, I can handle anything, BRING IT. A lot of people stop there. A lot of people LIVE under the illusion that because they can turn up a thermostat, turn on a faucet, flip a switch and cook a meal, that they have bested nature. Technology only takes you so far.
Forty-foot seas, 140-knot winds, no port to enter, no way off the ship, no one to negotiate with, no alternatives. Human beings can adapt to and overcome a lot of things, but sometimes there is a confluence of nature that makes it NOT POSSIBLE. And those people get to Stage 3: I am strong, I am trained, I am clever, and I have my wits – but I am a speck of dust on a capricious planet, and I am at its mercy.

"Rodbusters," by Alpha Unit

For millenia humans have created structures out of concrete. The Romans preferred concrete to all other construction materials, and their unique formula is the reason so many of ancient Rome’s monuments are still standing. The concrete we use today, while different from Roman concrete, is an excellent building material but as strong as it is, it has almost no tensile strength: it can’t withstand much pulling or stretching. For that reason builders reinforce it with rebar.

These metal rods, which have spaced patterns of bumps or swirls to help the concrete grip them, allow concrete to bend and flex without cracking or breaking. Rodbusters, the ironworkers who install rebar, have one of the most physically demanding jobs in construction.

Rodbusters will tell you that their shoulders especially take a pounding. They do a lot of lifting, and routinely carry heavy rebar on their shoulders. During hot weather, shoulder burns from hoisting hot steel rods are common. Here’s how one rodbuster describes his work:

Your back is shot, shoulders are raped, you can’t walk from being in the SLDL position all day long, and you literally have no free time aside from our [mandated] breaks.

Another rodbuster has pretty much the same view:

It’s good clean work…but it’s hell on the body. Carrying 150-180 pounds of 30′ rods all day gives your lower back, shoulders, and legs a beating. Not to mention tying [rebar] all day long as well. Picture being in the SLDL start position for five minutes at a time.

SLDL stands for Stiff Legged Deadlift.

Once a rodbuster positions the rebar, he ties it together with wire. He has to wrap wire securely around any area with two or more rebar sections that intersect or overlap. Tied corners are weak, so he installs bent rebar at corners. A job might involve cutting or welding.

Tying rebar requires fast, repetitive hand and arm movements while applying a lot of force. When a rodbuster ties rebar at ground level, he typically works in a stooped position, with his body bent deeply forward. A rodbuster informs us:

For a career as a rodbuster, you’re always bunched forward. You can always tell a rodbuster by how he looks.

Ironworkers in the United States have been represented since 1896 by the International Association of Bridge, Structural, Ornamental, and Reinforcing Iron Workers. But throughout the country there are rodbusters working without a union contract.

Some non-union rodbusters have walked off the job to protest working conditions. They report making significantly less than the national average for reinforcing ironworkers. They say they can work 18-hour days sometimes, without warning. There are no health benefits, and if there is an accident, it might not get reported to OSHA. Such protests have taken place in Vancouver, Washington; in Houston, Texas; and in Manchester, Tennessee.

Union or non-union, if you can set and tie rebar, you have a skill that’s in demand. Some ironworkers say that in their line of work, the sooner you get in and get out, the better off you are. As one of them put it:

I was a rodbuster for over 30 years, and if you go that route you will find out GOD fucking hates you. The first two weeks every muscle in your body will fucking hate you. But remember this, you are not the only one that will do it or has been through it, and you will survive.

"Is a Meal Break This Big a Deal?" by Alpha Unit

The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was a landmark piece of legislation that changed life as working Americans knew it. Among the things it brought about are the 40-hour work week, the national minimum wage, guaranteed “time and a half” for overtime, and the end of what it called “oppressive child labor.”
But progressives in California were ahead of the federal government on worker protections. Twenty-five years before Congress passed the FLSA, California created the Industrial Welfare Commission to establish regular wages, hours, and working conditions in California. The state continues to enforce Wage Orders mandated by the IWC.
What most people would consider obvious requirements for workers has been the subject of intense litigation in California for years: providing meal periods and rest breaks. It’s common sense that people working all day need breaks. But workers and employers have been fighting it out in court over this issue regularly in California. Employers say that providing a meal break isn’t as straightforward as it sounds.
Under California law, workers are allowed:

  • a 30-minute meal period for every work period of more than 5 hours
  • two 30-minute meal periods for every work period of more than 10 hours
  • rest periods at the rate of 10 minutes per 4 hours worked, in the middle of the work period if possible
  • an additional hour of pay for each day that the employer fails to permit the meal period or rest break

Employers, however, find these rules cumbersome and vague, says Allen Matkins. The issues confronted by employers are:

  • What does it mean to “provide” a meal period?
  • Do meal periods have to be provided in rolling 5-hour increments?
  • Are early (or late) lunches allowed?
  • Must employers ensure that their employees actually take these mandated breaks?
  • Are meal and rest period claims suitable for class action adjudication?

According to the California Restaurant Association, these regulations can be a headache for supervisors, who feel they have to play lunchroom cop. Clocking in after a break even one minute early subjects restaurant operators to class action lawsuits. It also says these laws are inconvenient for employees.

  • Many table servers are forced onto mandatory breaks in the midst of the busiest times of day when many would prefer to delay or forego a break to collect more tips.
  • Others would prefer to work through their break to be able to leave 30 minutes early to go to school, pick up kids, and so forth.

But employees aren’t of one mind on how inconvenient these regulations are.
In 2004 five employees of Chili’s restaurant filed a case, Hohnbaum v. Brinker Restaurant Corporation, in which they claimed the restaurant illegally denied them meal and rest breaks. They said that the restaurant would have them take “early lunches” shortly after starting work and then work them another 5 to 10 hours without receiving another meal break.
They also said that they should have received a rest break before the first meal period and that they worked “off the clock” during meal periods.
Brinker argued that meal periods need only be “provided” as set forth in the Labor Code. Whether or not any particular manager discouraged or prohibited breaks should be decided on an individual basis and not as a class action.
The case was indeed certified as a class action involving more than 60,000 current and former employees. Brinker appealed this order and prevailed, with the Court of Appeal vacating each subclass. The California Supreme Court accepted review and agreed to settle the uncertainty over meal and rest breaks and the suitability of these claims for class action.
The California Supreme Court finally ruled in 2012, siding with Brinker. It stated:

  1. An employer’s obligation to “provide” a meal period is satisfied if the employee is relieved of all duty for an uninterrupted 30-minute period and is free to leave the work premises. The employee can use the meal period for whatever purpose he or she desires.
  2. An employer does not have to ensure that no work is done during a meal period. Nor is the employer liable for a meal period premium if the employee chooses to work (unless he or she is pressured to work).
  3. The first meal period must be provided after no more than 5 hours of work. The second meal period must be provided after no more than 10 hours of work.
  4. Rest breaks and meal periods do not need to be taken in a certain order.
  5. A 10-minute rest period is owed for every major portion of 4 hours after an employee works 3 and a half hours. Thus, an employee is entitled to 10 minutes rest for shifts from 3 and a half to 6 hours, 20 minutes for shifts of more than 6 hours up to 10 hours, and so on.
  6. Meal and rest period claims can be suitable for class action litigation if the employer has a uniform policy that conflicts with break requirements.

So you would think that the issue of meal and rest breaks in California was made simple by the Brinker case. But it wasn’t. Companies can claim that they are exempt altogether from complying with meal and break regulations. This was the issue in Dilts v. Penske Logistics.
Mickey Lee Dilts, Ray Rios, and Donny Dushaj worked for Penske Logistics and Penske Truck Leasing. At the time in question, Penske provided transportation and warehouse management services to Whirlpool Corporation in California. Employees inventoried appliances and loaded them onto trucks for delivery and installation.
Dilts was a “driver/installer.” Rios and Dushaj were “installers” whose job was to unload and install appliances at their destinations.
Penske had a systematic policy of automatically deducting 30 minutes of work time to account for daily meal periods. It didn’t ask whether workers actually had a 30-minute meal period. Furthermore, company policy didn’t permit the driver/installer to leave the truck unattended. Workers had cellphones for communicating with dispatchers, supervisors, and customers during the day but Penske didn’t allow workers to turn off the cellphones during breaks.
In spite of all this, the issue wasn’t simply whether Penske violated California law but whether those laws were preempted by the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act of 1994.
The FAAA Act declares that a state cannot enact or enforce any law involving prices, routes, or services of any motor carrier that transports property. Penske argued:

  • California’s law would force drivers to alter their routes. They would have to look for a place to exit the highway and locate stopping places that safely and lawfully accommodated their vehicles.
  • The law would require 1 or 2 fewer deliveries per day to schedule off-duty meal periods.
  • Off-duty meal periods and rest breaks would reduce driver flexibility and interfere with customer service.
  • The law would significantly impact prices. The company would incur the cost of additional drivers, helpers, trackers, and trailers to ensure off-duty breaks and maintain the same level of service.

The US District Court ruled for Penske in October 2011. But the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the ruling, saying that meal and rest break laws are not preempted because they are not the sorts of laws related to price, routes, or service that Congress intended to preempt. Instead they are normal background rules for all employers doing business in California.
The Obama administration had filed a brief supporting the workers in this case, saying that the FAAA Act did not preempt state break requirements because it is squarely within the states’ traditional power to regulate the employment relationship and to protect worker health and safety.
Penske appealed to the United States Supreme Court. Among those who filed in support of Penske were the American Trucking Associations and the United States Chamber of Commerce. But the Supreme Court denied the petition. Dilts, Rios, and Dushaj prevailed after 6 years.
Does this mean there won’t be any more litigation in California over meal and rest breaks for workers? If only it were that simple. Employers and workers have a hard time seeing eye-to-eye on when and how a worker should take a break.

"The Rise, Fall, and Reinvention of an American Company," by Alpha Unit

Overseas competition mortally wounded the Faribault Woolen Mill Company. It finally died in 2009 and joined the ranks of similarly disposed of American companies, all casualties of the ongoing quest for “cheaper” manufacturing.
At the time of its demise, the company was nearly 150 years old. It had been created in 1865 when a German immigrant, Carl Henry Klemer, entered the woolen mill business after arriving in the village of Faribault, Minnesota. Prior to the Civil War, most woolen goods in this country were imported. Says Peter J. de Carlo:

After the war, domestic wool manufacturing increased as the country became more industrialized. The growth of wool production was aided by the Tariff Acts of 1867. The acts provided protection for domestic wool makers and made them more competitive. In Minnesota, the 1860s saw the beginning of many woolen manufacturing companies.

In 1882 Klemer moved his business to a building on the Straight River, in Rice County, Minnesota. A succession of fires over the next ten years ultimately destroyed the facility. In 1892 Klemer bought property on the Cannon River, built a fireproof brick building, and replaced the wooden dam that powered the mill with one made of stone.
During this period, the Faribault mill picked up a military contract with West Point that allowed the business to expand.
The company grew slowly during the early 1900s but built on its success with the military after being awarded a contract with the US Army in 1917 for 100,000 blankets. It also manufactured blankets for the military during World War II. In the postwar years Faribault led its industry with new products like washable wool and moth-proofed wool, with its profits peaking during the 1970s.
Things began to change during the 1990s. A lot of woolen manufacturing had moved offshore, and high-tech synthetics were beginning to inundate the market. Faribault was struggling. In 1998 a majority of its stock was acquired by a businessman named Peter Lytle who was based in the Twin Cities. The company became a subsidiary of a new entity, North American Heritage Brands, which also bought a cotton mill as a hedge.
North American Heritage Brands wasn’t up to the task of saving Faribault. The entity went bankrupt, taking both mills down with it. The Faribault Woolen Mill Company was finished.
The owners shut the mill down abruptly. Employees were asked to leave their posts; blankets were still on the looms half-woven. Nearly everything, from office supplies to spinning machines, was left behind.
To make matters worse, the mill flooded in 2010. The entire lower level had been filled with unattended machinery. According to John Mooty, everything that was still working was tagged to be shipped to a manufacturer in Pakistan. The rest was to be liquidated, and the facility would finally be emptied.
What was left of the once-thriving company was the empty building and the rights to its name and brand. Someone came along and decided that these were worth holding onto. That was John Mooty’s uncle, Paul Mooty, and Paul’s cousin Chuck Mooty. After consulting with the mill’s former controller, the Mootys decided that reviving the mill would deliver a good return on investment. They reopened the mill in September of 2011 and brought back many of the employees who had been let go.
“In less than six months, we went from not having a single usable restroom to selling goods in 50 states,” says Paul Mooty.
The new owners had decided at the outset on a particular strategy, according to Adam Platt. They were going to get the acrylic out of their products, for starters. But more importantly, they saw no point in trying to compete with output from India and China. They were going to bring their products back as a brand.
A major selling point was that Faribault’s products were American-made. Paul Mooty says that a lot of people are seeing now that the country has paid a price for shipping so many jobs overseas. The Mootys see great value in reviving a historic Minnesota business that they don’t want to see tossed by the wayside. In addition, they believe the art of textile manufacturing should be kept alive in America.
The Faribault Woolen Mill Company creates its products from start to finish under one roof, making it one of the last fully vertically integrated manufacturers in the United States.
Some analysts, including the Mootys, say that small manufacturers are going to be the key to bringing back jobs to the United States that big businesses sent overseas. Says Chuck Mooty:

The Chinas of the world were wonderful places for people to get value, but the middle market players are frustrated with rising costs of labor, energy, and transporting products. This is the time for people to step up and take some risks and invest in ventures that produce and manufacture products domestically.

It’s true that manufacturing in America includes many small businesses. Will the “Made in America” movement be the job creator people expect it to be?

"Shipyard Workers in Demand," by Alpha Unit

Ships are crucial to the day-to-day living most of us take for granted. But for some, sailing is in the blood, as they put it. Ships and shipyards loom large in the life of Jimmy Buffett.
Jimmy Buffett’s grandfather ran away from home at the age of 13. In the liner notes to his album Far Side of the World, Buffett tells how his grandfather jumped out of a second story window of his family home in Sydney, Nova Scotia, never to return. Three years later James Delaney Buffett became a whaling-ship cabin boy and went looking for his older brother, who had supposedly been shipwrecked. He eventually became a sea captain.
During the course of his travels he ended up on the Gulf Coast of the United States, living in a boarding house for sailors in Pascagoula, Mississippi. He got married to a local girl and began to raise a family. Their oldest was Jimmy Buffett’s father, J.D. Buffett. After serving as a mechanic in the Army Air Corps in World War II, J.D. Buffett moved his family to Mobile, Alabama, where he worked as a naval architect for the Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Company.
J.D. Buffett had met his wife while both worked at another Gulf Coast shipbuilding company, Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula. Ship production had begun there in 1939, just in time for World War II, when the shipyard put commercial production on hold and started building military vessels.
Ingalls has built troopships, destroyers, tankers, submarines, and aircraft carriers for the Navy and cutters for the Coast Guard. The company has been saying for some time now that there is a need on the Gulf Coast and nationwide for first class level craftsmen, especially welders, pipe welders, pipefitters, and shipfitters.
Shipfitters make molds and patterns for construction, basing their designs on the blueprints and schematics produced by the ship’s architects and drafters. They then make walls and structural parts and brace them in position for welding or riveting. Essential skills, indeed.
Companies and the military are so eager to recruit shipyard workers that they are investing in apprenticeship programs to grow a workforce for the industry. They find that plenty of their applicants require remedial math and English classes along with their blueprint-reading classes.
Hiring managers say meeting short- and long-term hiring goals is a challenge. The vocational pipeline from high school to industry has narrowed over the years, mainly because of the emphasis placed on college degrees. It’s the same thing they’ve been saying in the skilled trades for years now.
The investment does pay off, though, with more awareness being raised about the shortage of skilled tradesmen all over the country – and awareness being raised about good shipbuilding jobs, in particular.

"Who Wants to Work in the Logging Business?" by Alpha Unit

The logging business in Arkansas has been down so long, says Jan Cottingham, that people are skeptical of any predictions of an upturn. And yet some observers are that confident. What they wonder is whether or not the workers will be there to meet the demand.
Labor concerns in Arkansas reflect what’s going on nationwide: the lumber industry workforce is reaching retirement age and employers don’t know if they’ll see new recruitment coming in. Even with some modest increases in the labor force, challenges remain in drawing young people to the industry.
Much like farming, the logging industry is often multi-generational and family-run, says Matt Jensen. He is the vice president of the Great Lakes Timber Professionals Association in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, and a third-generation logger. He says:

This is a business that is really hard to learn and it’s really a lifestyle. If you don’t teach your children the work ethic, they’re not going to continue.

One of the biggest challenges facing the forestry industry is the negative perception about wood usage, according to Scott Bowe of the University of Wisconsin. He thinks it’s hypocritical, because people use wood everyday. “We need fresh, young people to carry the business forward,” he says. “We consume more wood every year. The wood’s got to come from somewhere.”
The question is, who will replace the current generation of loggers?
Logging is capital-intensive, requiring an initial investment of roughly $1 million for heavy equipment like fellers, which cut the trees; skidders, which move the felled trees; processors, which de-limb the trees; and loaders, which lift the logs from piles to trucks. Lenders are reluctant to provide money for new logging businesses.
Whether the businesses are new or established, the amount of work you do depends on the weather. In Arkansas, logging time can be about 40 weeks out of the year. So you’re not going to make a lot of money working in this business. The appeal just isn’t there for a lot of young people.
Steve Richardson owns a logging business in Arkansas and says that every logger has either gotten more productive with fewer people or has gone out of business. Some timber companies are considering forming their own logging crews, a practice that largely disappeared when workers’ compensation insurance rates soared. Vertical integration, in which a company owns the supply chain for its products, used to be typical in the industry, but Richardson is skeptical of its reinstation, saying that those companies don’t know how to work this labor.

These folks that work for me are fiercely independent. They’re not college graduates. They want to make a living, they want to go hunting and fishing on the weekend, and some of them want to start getting drunk on Friday afternoon.

And that mindset doesn’t fit with most business plans, Cottingham says.
Marvin Larrabee of Elk Mound, Wisconsin, says that logging almost has to be passed down in the family. He has four sons assisting him in the business but knows how hard it would be for them to strike out on their own. The expensive equipment is just the start of it. Loggers also have high fuel costs and extremely high insurance premiums. The occupation is consistently ranked one of the most hazardous in the country.
Larry Altman of Vermont was a logger for 20 years. He has pins in his ankle from the time a tree fell on him. On another occasion, his arm was crushed between two logs, but luckily he was working that day with a friend who freed him 45 minutes later.
“You’ll get hurt bad at least one time logging,” he says.
Altman says he’d still do it if you could make money at it, but you can’t.

In this whole picture, there’s a ceiling, and that ceiling is the price paid at the mill. There’s very little wiggle room for the individual logger.

The roots of logging run deep in Vermont. Its first sawmill opened in 1739, and by the middle of the 19th century logging had become Vermont’s largest and most lucrative industry. But today, says Larry Altman, many people, especially in Burlington, have no idea that logging still goes on in Vermont.
Those that become aware of it lump the local timber industry in with large-scale, ecologically devastating logging operations in the Pacific Northwest, Canada, South America, and Asia. The fact is, the vast majority of local loggers are sole proprietors, working alone in the woods, usually equipped with little more than a chainsaw, skidder, bulldozer, and truck.
Some young people are drawn, nevertheless, to the logging business. Will Coleman, 26, and his brother Wesley, 24, started Coleman Brothers Logging LLC, in December 2012. They operate out of Richburg, South Carolina, harvesting pulpwood and saw timber.
The Coleman brothers were able to buy a used Tigercat skidder and feller/buncher with a loan from Natural Capital Investment Fund’s Logging Initiative. NCIF is a business loan fund that provides debt financing to small businesses in West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, south Georgia, and the Appalachian regions of Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio.
The Coleman brothers say they doubled their loads in the first week after running the equipment they purchased with their loan.
Out on the West Coast, Billy Zimmerman, 25, has launched his own company, Zimmerman Logging LLC, in Rainier, Oregon. Zimmerman was raised on a tree farm his great-grandfather bought in the 1920s, and discovered his love of tree farming at age 10, when his father let him set chokers – setting cables around logs so they can be hauled away – for the first time. He helped his father with farming before and after school and after football practice.
In December of last year he decided to go into business for himself. His father gave him a bulldozer, saving him the $160,000 he might have needed for a new one, and his parents gave him $3,000 in seed money. He was in business by March, with a company consisting of Zimmerman, his best friend, and his father Ron.
Zimmerman works 11-hour days and is willing to underbid others so he can build a client base and his reputation. And his specialty are small jobs. As he puts it:

There are a ton of little 5- and 10-acre jobs that the guys with big machines cannot justify bringing out there to work that job. But we can. We found our niche in smaller jobs, at least for now, and for what we have it’s been working well.

"Railroad Workers to Union Leaders: This Deal Is Unacceptable," by Alpha Unit

Back in 2008, there was a head-on collision between a Metrolink commuter train and a Union Pacific freight train near Chatsworth, California. Twenty-five people were killed, including an engineer, who was evidently texting at the time and may have missed a stop signal.
After this collision Congress mandated Positive Train Control. This system monitors trains by computer and satellite GPS. It will stop the train if the crew doesn’t brake or slow down correctly. Had it been in place in 2008, the commuter train would have stopped before crossing into the path of the freight train.
With this new collision-avoidance system, rail carriers have found yet another way to cut labor costs. They now want one-man crews on freight trains. Currently in the United States, trains operate with at least two crew members, one engineer and one conductor. Some trains are over 10,000 feet long and more than 15,000 tons. Engineers drive and take care of the engines but conductors do everything else.
Engineers and conductors are licensed by the Federal Railroad Administration and undergo continual re-training and testing. But many of them – and their families – oppose the idea of one-man crews. They consider it an unacceptable safety hazard, and one of the main factors in their opposition is the grueling fatigue that train crews have to deal with.
Train crews are usually on duty around the clock and may get only two or three hours’ notice to report for work, any time of day or night. They can be called to work again after only 10 hours off. Their shifts can be for up to 12 hours. Some of the duties of a conductor:

  • hopping off the train to throw the switch that moves the train to another track
  • adding or removing cars
  • updating the list of cars that carry hazardous materials – crucial for first responders in case of a wreck
  • problem solving if a mechanical problem stops the train
  • conferring with the engineer about hazards, speed reductions, or crossings coming up

Opponents of one-man crews cite the case of a disaster that occurred in July of 2013. An unattended crude oil train broke loose and rolled down a hill, derailing in the middle of Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, igniting fires and explosions that killed 47 people. A sole engineer had been in charge of the train.
Last month, thousands of railroad workers found out that their union officers had negotiated with one of the biggest freight carriers in the country to allow one-man crews. The union is SMART, the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers (formerly the United Transportation Union), which represents conductors. The rail carrier is Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway (BNSF).
Currently a SMART agreement requires a minimum of one conductor and one engineer in the cab on Class I railroads. But that agreement will soon expire. Conductors could lose jobs if railroads implement engineer-only operation.The deal struck by the General Committee of SMART would have a designated master conductor working either from a fixed or mobile location other than the train. It would be the first time that a conductor is in charge of train operation.
The deal would boost the pay of conductors and other ground service workers, such as brakemen, switchmen, helpers, and yardmen. All these workers are eligible for promotion to conductor.
The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, which represents engineers, has clashed with SMART over the years. Many engineers’ jobs were eliminated several years ago when railroads introduced Remote Control Operation technology for railyards. As J.P. Wright and Ed Michael explain, inbound train cars can come to the yard to be received, separated, and regrouped into tracks so that outbound trains are built with cars all going to the same destination. A yard crew used to consist of engineer, brakeman, and conductor.
Now yard crews have been reduced to a lone conductor with a remote control device strapped to his or her body. He operates the engine’s throttle and brakes to move cars, uncouples cars, and throws switches, talking by radio to the yardmaster and incoming engineers.
At first BLET and UTU (representing conductors at the time) stood united against remote control, but an attempt to merge the two unions failed. The UTU broke ranks and agreed to remote control, eliminating engineers’ jobs.
SMART is now trying to hold on to conductors’ jobs since this new industry move toward engineer-only crews.
Rank and file members of SMART have to approve of the new deal, and a campaign is underway to get them to vote no on one-man crews. Both SMART and BLET are officially against one-man crews, but each union is willing to cut whichever deal benefits its members.
Railroad Workers United was organized to bring all workers in the industry together to oppose one-man crews, regardless of their craft or union affiliation.
As for the federal government, the National Transportation Safety Board has no objection to eliminating conductors on PTC-run trains. Amtrak, commuter railroads, and some smaller freight carriers already operate with lone engineers in the cab and haven’t found any reduction in train safety.

"The Death of a Young Sailor," by Alpha Unit

Ashtabula, Ohio, is a major coal port on Lake Erie. The coal dock at Ashtabula Harbor is a transload point for coals destined for electricity-generating plants and cement producers in Canada and the Great Lakes area. Coals from Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia arrive at Ashtabula by train before being sent on their way. Other commodities coming through the port include iron ore, sand, gravel, and stone.

Among the ships you could see at Ashtabula Harbor was the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald, a lake freighter that carried iron ore from mines near Duluth, Minnesota, to iron works near cities like Detroit and Toledo. A young man named Karl Peckol, barely out of Ashtabula High School, signed on to work on the Edmund Fitzgerald. He became a watchman.

Most of the crew on the Fitzgerald were veteran seamen. But there were some novices, including Karl Peckol, who didn’t necessarily aspire to a life as a sailor. Stacy Millberg says that Peckol was working on going to college. He didn’t get to go to college. He died on November 10, 1975, when the Fitzgerald sank in a storm on Lake Superior. At 20 years old, he was the youngest man on board.

"Tugboat Workers and Corporate Angst," by Alpha Unit

Iron ore is critical for modern civilization – and critical for corporate profits.
Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake right now as mining companies, shipping companies, and employees stake out their positions in a bargaining dispute. At issue are pay and work hours for deckhands, masters, and engineers on tugboats at Port Hedland in the Pilbara district of Western Australia.
The tugboats guide iron ore ships in and out of the port, and if the workers strike it could cost companies $100 million a day in lost iron ore sales. The tugboat workers are employed by Teekay Shipping and represented by the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA).
This labor dispute involves the world’s largest mining company, BHP Billiton, which has a contract with Teekay for tug services. BHP is the Anglo-Australian multinational mining, metals, and petroleum company, with headquarters in Melbourne. BHP would be directly affected by a strike, as would Fortescue Metals Group, the third largest iron ore producer in Australia, after BHP and Rio Tinto.
Nev Power, the Chief Executive of Fortescue, was not in a mood to negotiate with the MUA when he released this statement:

There is something wrong with our industrial relations laws when a small group of 45 people who would like to only work 22 weeks a year and be paid a base rate about three times the base wage of a nurse…can hold to ransom an industry that generates more export earnings than any other.

Actually, no, says Will Tracey. He is the Western Australia branch secretary of the MUA, which is seeking a 12% pay increase over four years and wants working time to be cut to five months a year down from the current six. He stated:

Over the course of a year, tugboat workers work six swings of 28 days, at an average of 12 hours a day, and sometimes up to 20 hours a day, depending on the volume of iron ore going through the port.
Total number of hours worked by a tugboat deckhand in a year equates to almost 54 weeks of a standard 37.5-hour working week.

It turns out that the MUA has just agreed to suspend taking industrial action against Teekay Shipping for a 30-day period while negotiations continue. Port Hedland is the world’s biggest export terminal for iron ore, and there would be huge losses for BHP, which ships about a million tons of iron ore a day.
It isn’t just corporate profits that are at stake. Mining royalties and tax revenues are also at risk. Iron ore is a major Australian export and Hamersley Province in Western Australia is one of the world’s best sources. The ores from the major mines are hauled to screening and crushing plants via truck and then transported for further treatment to port sites by train. After arriving at Port Hedland much of the ore is shipped to the Chinese port of Tianjin and then delivered to steel mills in China.

"Made Mostly in America," by Alpha Unit

Waterford Precision Cycles manufactures custom, hand-built bicycles 30 miles from downtown Milwaukee. It was founded by Marc Muller and Richard Schwinn, both formerly of Schwinn Bicycle Company. Richard Schwinn is the great-grandson, in fact, of the founder of Schwinn.
Waterford, established in 1993, is one of the few bicycle manufacturers left in the United States. The vast majority of bikes sold here are made in Asia, including Schwinn bikes, which are fabricated entirely in China. In 2012 another bike manufacturer began operations in America, in midtown Detroit. That company is Shinola, which started out producing hand-crafted watches and leather goods.
The company makes 80 to 100 bikes each month on a three-person assembly line. Waterford Precision Cycles provides the frames and forks. The company reveals on its website that the wheels are assembled in California, the frame tubings are made in Mississippi, the spokes are from Colorado, and the brand decals are made in North Carolina.
Other small parts of their bicycles come from Asia and Europe. The company says that right now there isn’t any at-scale manufacturing in the United States for some of the components they need. But no matter where the parts come from, their bicycles are assembled completely in their Detroit factory.
Shinola, says John Arlidge, is the creation of Tom Kartsotis, who founded Fossil, a watches and accessories brand. He poured much of his fortune into his venture capital firm, Bedrock, which invests in US-based manufacturers. He got the idea to set up Shinola after one of Bedrock’s managers made the “You don’t know shit from Shinola” reference when kidding around with an office colleague.
Shinola was the name of a shoe polish sold in the United States until 1960. According to Arlidge:

The joke turned into a discussion about restoring the brand. Kartsotis bought the name from the defunct shoe polish company with the idea of using it as a catch-all brand for domestic cottage industries.

In June 2011 executives from Shinola were scouting out locations for factory space in Detroit to manufacture high-end watches, says J.D. Booth. They found 60,000 square feet of empty space at 485 West Milwaukee, in what was originally a research and design laboratory for General Motors. The building is on the National Register of Historic Sites.
Shinola parts are produced in Switzerland by Ronda AG, which manufactures watch movements for a number of famous brands. The final timepieces are assembled on the fifth floor of the Detroit building. Shinola brought in watchmaking experts from Switzerland to train their workers – none of whom had experience as watchmakers – and imported a manager from Ronda to run their production facility.
When Shinola decided to branch out into bikes they hired Sky Yaeger, who joined the company two years ago. She had spent 25 years designing bicycles for companies such as Bianchi, Swobo, and Spot. Shinola produces two lines – the Runwell and the Bixby. As R. J. King tells it:

Inspired by the French style of Porteur bicycles, as well as American models that slightly mimic motorcycles with a faux, elongated gas tank, the urban cruisers retail for $1,950 for a 3-speed version and $2,950 for an 11-speed model.

Who among us will buy them?
The number one “frequently asked question” for Shinola is, indeed, why its bikes cost so much more than a lot of other bikes. The company points to the quality of the components and the craftsmanship that goes into production. “The value they represent is absolutely worth the asking price,” they declare.
And another question they’ve been asked is “Why Detroit?” Their rejoinder:

Why not accept that manufacturing is gone from this country? Why not let the rust and weeds finish what they started? Why not just embrace the era of disposability? And why didn’t we buy a warmer coat before we moved here?

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"Online Thieves and Corporate Puppets," by Alpha Unit

A musician spends time and energy creating a work of music – time and energy he or she can never get back. What is his effort worth? How do you place a value on what a musician has created?
The argument over this question goes back for years – probably to the beginning of commercial music, actually. I’m sure plenty of you can remember the battles over file sharing with companies like Napster, Limewire, and Grokster that have lost court battles over copyright infringement. While musicians are serious about protecting their intellectual property, many of them point out that they have no beef with their fans. The fans aren’t the enemy. Corporate America is. As Ellen Seidler puts it:

Online piracy isn’t about altruism, it’s about income. Today’s technology allows web pirates to steal content and monetize that content with a click of a mouse. Meanwhile, “legit” companies encourage and facilitate this theft while also profiting from it (ad service providers, advertisers, and payment processors).

Ms. Seidler explains that companies like Sony, Radio Shack, Pixar, ATT, Chase, Auto-Zone, and Netflix are generating an enormous amount of income by placing advertising on websites featuring streams and links to pirated content.
Of course the ads also generate income for those operating the pirate websites. Says Ms. Seidler:

This dubious connection to piracy is not limited to the companies whose ads appear on various pirate sites. Even more problematic are those companies, like Google (via AdSense), that generate their own robust revenue stream by providing the interface for the pirate-site pop-up ads themselves. In this equation everyone except the actual content creator makes money from this theft.

According to The Trichordist, this piracy isn’t about fans sharing music. It’s about illegally operating businesses making millions of dollars a year from the exploitation of artists’ work and not sharing any of the revenue with artists.

To the uninitiated, it might seem odd that what seems like a simple question of right or wrong is even being debated, but these sites that exploit artists are supported and promoted by faux civil liberties groups opposed to protecting creators’ rights – and internet giants are happy to throw their support behind them.
Together they have crafted a narrative of creator rights as quaint and outdated, offering artists a brave new online world where they can throw off the shackles of labels (or publishers, or studios, etc.) and give away their work to find fame and fortune. However, after a decade of half-baked ideas, faulty business models, and outright lies, we know this is simply untrue.

The artists at The Trichordist say they might not always be a fan of record labels, but at least the labels negotiate contracts, pay advances, market and promote artists, and are contractually accountable for wrongdoing. A musician has no such enforceable rights in what they call the Exploitation Economy.
As for the view that the internet is a powerful tool for distributing music more cheaply, these guys are adamant that pirate sites have no place in this scheme. They say that nothing is stopping musicians from sharing or giving away their music through legitimate sites like SoundCloud and Bandcamp. As far as they’re concerned, there simply is no justification for the existence of pirate sites.
Major companies such as American Express, Citibank, Direct TV, Levi’s, Macy’s, Princess Cruises, Target, United Airlines, and dozens of others have been cited as placing ads on sites that are receiving notices for copyright infringement. David Newhoff points out that this is about large American corporations supporting and legitimizing the exploitation of American workers.

I’ll say it again without equivocation. These sites are in the business of exploiting workers. Period. Don’t let’s get distracted by the fact that copies of files don’t cost anything to produce or distribute or that you think WMG is evil or you don’t like the RIAA. That’s all that bullshit again, and it has nothing to do with the way in which these sites generate revenue. All that “free” media represents hours or years or even decades of labor, either by one person or by hundreds of people.

And the idea that by downloading files illegally you’re “sticking it to the Man”? The truth, he says, is that the ardent file sharer is a corporate puppet that has no idea which companies are pulling its strings.
If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site. – RL

"Auto Unions Moving Forward in Tennessee," by Alpha Unit

Industriegewerkschaft Metall was the largest labor union in Germany, and the largest union in any democratic country in the world, between 1950 and 2001. It represents workers in the motor vehicle industry. Half of the 20 seats on Volkswagen’s supervisory board are occupied by members of IG Metall.
Blue-collar and white-collar workers are represented in a works council. This is an integral part of Volkswagen’s corporate structure and gives workers a say in plant and company operations. This system of joint decision-making among employer, workers, and works council – known as Mitbestimmung – is accompanied by the usual negotiations between IG Metall and management over wages and benefits.
Berthold Huber, the former head of IG Metall, says Mitbestimmung keeps an eye on the system as a whole – the health of industrial employers as well as workers. “If you give people rights, they take on responsibility – that’s what Mitbestimmung has taught us,” he says.
IG Metall wants to establish a works council at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and has joined with the United Auto Workers to bring this about. The hurdle for the unions is that US labor law does not allow for company-sponsored unions. In order to have anything like a works council in the United States the company has to operate in conjunction with a labor union. Hence the push to organize workers at the plant in Chattanooga.
The UAW says that a majority of the workers at Chattanooga have signed cards supporting unionization. Some of the workers have said that the UAW and Volkswagen acted unlawfully in the solicitation and handling of authorization cards and filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB just determined, however, that neither organization violated US labor laws in their unionization push.
Volkswagen said in a statement that the decision by the NLRB confirms its legal position. It also stated:

Furthermore, we wish to reiterate that as a general principle, Volkswagen supports the right of employees to representation at all its plants and is in favor of good cooperation with the trade union or unions represented at its plants….For this reason, Volkswagen is currently working on an innovative model for the representation of employees’ interests which will be suitable for the USA. This model will be based on positive experience in Germany and other countries where the Volkswagen Group is active.

Naturally not everyone is happy with what’s going on in Chattanooga. Business interests, Republican politicians, and anti-union organizations have been doing everything they can to stop unionization at the plant. Politicians say that if the UAW prevails it would hurt the state’s business climate. They want Volkswagen to disregard the card signings and insist on a secret ballot election instead.
If the UAW is successful, it would be the union’s first victory at organizing a foreign-owned assembly plant in the South in 30 years of trying.
If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site. – RL

"He's Still a Mariner," by Alpha Unit

Richard Phillips is no hero. He himself said so. He was captain of the Maersk Alabama when it was seized by Somali pirates back in 2009 and says that the real heroes of the whole incident are the US Navy, the Navy SEALs, and the merchant mariners who sailed with him.
Some of the crew members who sailed with him swear he’s no hero. They’ve been telling the media that it was his recklessness that got the ship into the hands of the pirates in the first place. Nine of them have filed a lawsuit against the Waterman Steamship Corporation and Maersk Line Limited alleging that the companies willfully sent their employees into an area where pirates were attacking merchant vessels and showed a willful disregard for their safety – mostly for financial gain.
In their lawsuit they detail some of the physical injuries and mental anguish they’ve suffered as a result.
Captain Phillips admits that he ignored calls to stay at least 600 miles off the coast of Somalia, but he told ABC News that it didn’t matter. He had never been that far from Somalia before and ships are sometimes taken 1,000 miles out.
He also said that everyone in the Merchant Marine has to face pirates at some point, adding, “If you don’t want to deal with piracy, you need to get another job.”
Captain Phillips has the support of his union, the International Organization of Masters, Mates, and Pilots. Steve Werse, a union executive and a sea captain, told ABC that warnings of pirates off the Somali coast were so numerous in 2009 that if you listened to all of them you’d have never left port.
He also explained that the warnings were just advisories of suspected pirate activity and carried no legal weight or authority. There is nothing “magical” about sailing 600 miles off the coast, he said, because pirate attacks have occurred even beyond 1,000 miles off the coast.
The Masters, Mates, and Pilots union represents licensed deck officers, marine engineers, state pilots, unlicensed seafarers, and shore side clerical and service workers in the maritime industry. Captain Phillips and his union have taken advantage of the publicity surrounding the movie about his kidnapping to draw attention to the Maritime Security Program (MSP), which is run by the Department of Transportation.
The program keeps 60 ships ready to carry cargo for the US military at war, and it carried 95 percent of Defense Department cargo during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, from tanks to food. In return, the federal government provides the ship owners with an operating stipend to offset the increased costs of maintaining their ships under US registry. (It’s cheaper to register elsewhere, because of US labor and environmental regulations.)
Budget cuts due to sequestration were scheduled to reduce funding to MSP next year, which led the US Maritime Administration to warn ship owners that a third of the vessels in the fleet could be eliminated. But the fleet has been preserved now that President Obama has signed into law the bill to reopen the government. MSP funding is to remain at a level sufficient to maintain the entire 60-ship fleet. Congress has to approve funding every year.
The Maritime Security Program provides vital services to the military, but for mariners, it’s really about preserving jobs. He’s famous, but Captain Phillips remains a working seaman.

The White Hole, by Joseph Hirsch

A short story by Mr. Hirsch. This story deals explicitly with race. It was controversial at the time, but the editor liked it and I think it has held up well with time. It first appeared in 3 AM Magazine in 2007. – Robert Lindsay.

The White Hole

By Joseph Hirsch

Before his death, Anton Walters III had been one of the most powerful and influential voices in the White Power movement (though he would have preferred the term ‘Separatist’). In fact, Federal sources revealed that he had taken part in a telephone conference from within the confines of his compound in Spokane, Washington, concerning the Nazi Low Riders, a notorious prison gang, and whether or not they should allow members with Latin blood into their ranks.
His vote had been a predictable ‘Nay’, but it had fallen on deaf ears. The drug trade and changing times had drowned out his vote, and it was best he died when he did before having to witness any further decline within the movement he had helped build.
Walters had first made his presence felt in the mid-Eighties. Before that, his writings mostly concerned big game hunting and the best methods for defense against nuclear fallout. He printed his manuals at his own expense, though the costs must have been offset or eaten by his bread and butter enterprise, which was, conveniently, running a printing press.
His works frequently showed up at Gun Shows and Trade Expos, though they weren’t displayed prominently, and he didn’t begin to receive feedback until his thoughts, and his pen, turned to the question of Apartheid during the height of the tumult in South Africa. He gained his fair share of supporters, and a few critics, after calling for the assassination of Nelson Mandela.
But he continued on, undeterred, until he contracted throat cancer in 1986 after a lifetime of indulging in both smoking and chew tobacco. He underwent radiation therapy and beat the disease despite his advancing years. And maybe the brush with death could explain the shift from hard-line essays to the dreamy speculation of his fantasies, which would go on to arouse the minds of his extremist readership.
His flagship character made his first appearance in a book entitled, simply, The Norseman. The book concerns a put-upon farmer whose wife leaves him for a strapping young black man, taking both of their daughters with her in tow. The distraught farmer, after having lost everything, goes into his backyard, falls among the furrowed ranks of corn and beseeches Christ for mercy. The farmer’s crop turns fallow the next day, leaving him without a harvest.
Embittered now, and dark of mind, the farmer turns to the Old Gods, and he summons Odin, pleading not for mercy, but for revenge. Against all logic, and told in a prose that keeps it from becoming laughable, a galleon with twenty-four oarsman rows its way onto his farm, a Viking to match the greatest of black virility at its helm. Cloaked in the pelts of fierce beasts and wearing a horned helmet, the Norseman vows to succor the poor farmer’s hatred.
The Viking then goes on a tear across the plains, until he finds the wife and the ‘moor’, as the Viking refers to him. Happening upon the couple as they are in congress in a sleazy motel, the Viking proceeds to decapitate the black man and then orders the wife to fellate him, after which she joins her lover in a heap at the foot of the bed. The novel ends with the Norseman returning to the farm, the farmer’s children in tow, clinging to his strong body…
The Norseman became a runaway success and went through five printings before Walters realized he would need to find a legitimate publisher to handle the demand. The first installment was followed by five sequels, all of which were equally successful and relied heavily on the same formula of a white nuclear family disrupted by an outside influence, usually in the form of a black man.
All of the follow-up novels sold just as well, or close. Walters’ proudest hour came when the original installment appeared in a reversible omnibus with The Turner Diaries, the only other Separatist/ Supremacist tract to surpass his own books in sales.
The success of the series allowed him to move from his single-wide trailer to a log and cedar split-level situated on ten acres of verdant wilds, with enough room for a shooting range and a small tribe of deer, each of whom was assigned an appropriately Nordic name. His favorite, was, of course, Odin….
****
Walters had a younger brother, Edgar, who lived some few-hundred miles away in Missouri. Walters the Eldest had tried to impress upon his brother the perils white womanhood would face in the coming century, but Edgar was a happily married and well-adjusted state trooper with two sons of his own whose beliefs ended at the Methodist Church he and his family attended every Sunday. He regarded his brother with some fear, and couldn’t for the life of him understand where he had gotten his ideas, as their parents had been of tolerant stock, especially considering the time and place from whence they came.
Unfortunately, Edgar’s wife left him (though not for a black man, as he repeatedly assured his older brother), and he contracted the cancer which was a part of their shared heredity. When it spread to the lymph nodes, and it became clear that he wasn’t going to beat the disease as easily as his brother had, Edgar found himself with no choice but to remand his children over to his older brother’s care.
John and Eric Walters came to live with their uncle in the Spring of 1995. John had been twelve at the time, Eric eight. After showing each of the boys their rooms, and making them feel at home, Anton proceeded to indoctrinate the children in such a way that Edgar, if he could hear it from within the confines of his coffin, would have probably rolled over in his grave.
No one knows for certain what went on at Compound Walters, but if we were to speculate, certain shows of youthful normalcy such as hunting and sports were allowed. But the pickup basketball games and the laps swam around the lake were probably greeted with caveats from the sideline: “Good, grow strong for the white race.” And the outings with the shotgun might have been prefaced: “Pretend that deer’s a black man,” or something along those lines.
The boys were home-schooled. Most of the outside world was filtered out. The one exception may have been the satellite TV, which Anton couldn’t resist, with its constant stream of damnation that fed his mind whatever thoughts of impending apocalypse or greed it needed for confirmation of Society’s collapse, everything from the spinning Wheel of Fortune to the wild fires in Arizona, Armageddon spelled out on the big-screen with closed-captions to boot.
The extent of the abuse the children suffered, or even if there was abuse, is unknown. We can assume there was some form of abuse, else why would Anton Walters the Third’s body have been found tied to a chair in front of the television? As to how the children took their White Pride education, when Walters was found, dead and starved, attached to the chair in front of the TV, the screen was blaring BET, an assault of Rap Videos in surround sound, gloating in front of his incontinent body. No one could mistake this ironic finish for an accident. When you consider that the Satellite package included more than three-hundred channels, the erstwhile Walters brothers had obviously intended to send a message to whoever found the old man, his body lighter a few credit cards.
The trail of the aforementioned credit cards stopped somewhere in Seattle, and no one had seen or heard from the brothers for at least a year. If they were alive, or where they were…it was all an unknown….
….But that wasn’t the bank’s business. Their job was to foreclose on the house, and bury its history. After the injunction was waived, a crew was ordered to restore the inside, another crew to handle the grounds outside, before the log mansion was to be set on the auction block; for Walters, in the white-heat of his creativity, had neglected to give the federal government its due.
The under-the-table atmosphere of the conventions where his books were sold only encouraged his dodgy behavior, and it was only after the IRS discovered that he owed eight years of back taxes that the body had been discovered. God knows the state of decomposition it might have been found in had it taken longer to uncover his fraud.
As it stood, the body had been taken out of the house months ago. After they removed the SS regalia and everything else that flew in the face of the man’s repeated statements that he was merely a ‘Separatist’, the rest of the home’s contents were auctioned off. The final detail was the lawn, which still needed cutting.
The two foreman, both beefy white men, stood posted on the side of the pickup where they kept all the landscaping tools. Their six-man Salvadoran work crew had undone the flatbed, pulled out the mowers and weed whackers and had gone to work. The two men shouted over the sound of their crew. Grass as fine as dust blew out from under the rusty machines, groaning out a stream of fuel that mixed with the sun and spelled Spring.
“D’ ya hear they found the kid?”
“Who?” The other one asked, lighting a cigarette and wondering if it was a safe thing to do with all the fuel residue around here.
“The nephew. You know the story here right?” The boss looked irritated, quizzically staring his friend down and wondering if he was going to have to explain the whole fuggin’ thing again.
“Yeah, yeah. I know. Crazy-ass clansman.”
“No. Wasn’t no clansman. But close.”
“Yeah, so anyway. The nephew.” The second one said, prompting him again.
“Yeah, right.” The first one said, picking it back up. “They caught his ass in Arizona. Dumb fuck was using his uncle’s credit cards to buy himself lunch at a Burger King.”
“Huh.” The other one said, leaning his elbows against the side of the truck. He noted that only one of the Salvadoran crew was wearing a mask to protect himself from the fumes. Was he some sort of foreman among them? he wondered. The hierarchy for him ended right here. He didn’t know anything about them. The Salvadorans were Mexican to him. Among these musings, the light bulb went off.
“Wait.” The second one said.
“What?” His boss said. His friend’s voice sounded contradictory. He didn’t know they were having an argument here.
“I thought there was two of them.”
“Two what?”
“Nephews.” The second one, whose name was Chet, said.
His boss, Harmon, wanted to argue, but knew he was right. It was his turn to say it. “Huh.” He said.
Huh, it hung in the space between them. Which was alright, since it was too hot to speak anymore. The chips of grass flecked up and stung their faces, like thorns or mosquitoes, pesky inanimate insects unearthed as the ground was brought back to proper manicured form. It was too hot to even look at those Mexicans, Salvadorans, let alone do what they were doing, God bless them, working without a sound usually, except for the one now, coming toward them, the one wearing a mask.
He spoke in rapid-fire Spanish. They wouldn’t have understood him even without the mask, but that only made it worse. “Good God, man, what?”
The man overcame his panic enough to pull the mask from his face, let it slide down to his sweating neck. He pointed to a spot where his countrymen were gaggled together. “Aqui!” He shouted. The foreman and his underboss brought themselves up from their sticky idle alongside the pickup truck and headed over to the point where the men were gathered like mourners around their dead.
“Okay. What the fuck?” The first white man said.
“Aqui.”
“Yeah. A key. A key to what, man?”
A nuclear symbol, the black and yellow triangles, a yellow jacket warning harkening from the Cold War days, stood out on a metal bubble, protruding from the ground, a circle riveted with steel bolts, like a shield. Around the circumference of the steel bubble, were the words White Power, traced like the outlines of reflected smiles or the most primitive of fish.
Both of the men exchanged glances. What the hell? With the bank’s consent, and with two of its representatives present, a welder was called in, a friend of the foreman’s. All in attendance gave him and his torch a respectful berth, the Salvadorans marking the furthest reaches of the perimeter, the foremen a little closer, the two bank reps the closest, as this promised to be of the most relevance to them. Whatever it was, it would either raise or lower the value of the property as a whole. They wouldn’t know until the man with the torch, faceless beneath the mask, had burned a hole in the bubble.
The sparks reached their apex as it popped, then yielded. The welder gripped the manhole cover in his gloved hands and threw it to the side. He pulled the lid of his mask from his face, revealing sweaty eyes that could barely do more than squint.
“Who’s going in?”
No one had to. Someone was coming out, stooped, mistaken for a midget, since the gait was that of age, but it was the cramped space that had wizened the boy. They all stood and watched him. He visored his eyes with his hand, stared at the circle of people around him, and spun three-hundred and sixty-degrees. It overwhelmed him, and he fell in his dizzy spell onto the grass. Two of the Salvadorans ran to him. Another one went for the water in the trunk of the pickup. The boy’s chest was heaving. He was hyperventilating.
One of the bank reps, the woman in her mid-thirties, stepped around the boy and the group gathered around him, and she peered inside. It was cool, a dank cave, counterpoint to the heat outside; the cool, mixed with her own curiosity, beckoned her further, and she descended within.
A motion sensor triggered and brought her out of the dark. The subterranean eight by six world illuminated, and she saw what the boy had seen for…how long? The answer was there, above a shelf where a bible, a bottle of vitamins, and a 9mm Beretta semi-auto handgun were resting. Fortunately the gun (which looked loaded from here) seemed untouched. The teddy bear, on the other hand, appeared to have been snuggled until mangled, a source for the child’s fear that had endured until one of the black sequins that was its eye fell from the socket, under the wear of spit when it wasn’t wrapped around a sucked thumb. Better the teddy-bear than the gun, she thought, before marveling at the digital face which was precise down to the second….
13:10:05:23:09
Thirteen months, ten days, five hours, twenty three minutes and nine…no ten…now eleven seconds the boy had been down here, alone. With foodstuffs, a teddy bear, vitamins, and a handgun. A pulley hung from the ceiling. She clutched the base of the square knot, and walked from one end of the six by eight cell to the other. She immediately felt a breeze as slats yielded in the ceiling, revealing a most-primitive form of cross ventilation, which sent her to the other side of the room, and the child’s only other form of entertainment: a military-issue, World War One style gas mask.
Up above, the other man cradled the boy who had been forced to grow to pubescence in a space too small to even use the bathroom. The boy stared into his eyes, looking like he was about to die, more probably about to pass out. He mustered some words for the man, too faint to hear without reaching down.
“What, son?”
The boy repeated it. “Did the n—— take over?”
The man winced and drew back, maybe because he was black, and the boy had spoken in commiserate tones, as if they were on the same team. The man fought his repulsion, looked up to make sure no one else had heard, then leaned back in. The boy didn’t know what the word meant. Or, if he had at some point, he had somehow forgotten in the intervening year. The man cradled him and knew the words meant nothing, didn’t know whether the boy’s brother or the boy’s uncle had locked him down here. But he wanted to kill somebody.

The Last Slice of Pizza, by Joseph Hirsch (A Dystopian Science Fiction Novel)

Brief Synopsis:  Michael Fermi is what many people would uncharitably describe as a “loser.” He is in his mid-twenties, living at home with his mother and delivering pizzas for a living. His life is about to change, however, as he has been selected by an alien race which intends to install its parasitic spearhead in his body in order to use him for their own purposes. This unseen race, known as the Grand Arbiters, will use this method of bilocation to observe humanity through the eyes of the lowly pizza man, in order to determine whether or not Man should be eliminated, and his precious Earth destroyed alongside of him.

The Last Slice of Pizza

By Joseph Hirsch

What the Reader Doesn’t Want to Know

The President of the United States of America walks into the War Room, flanked by two four star generals and the Secretary of State. While there is an impressive, massive table dominating the room, this is not the War Room we have grown accustomed to from countless movies and TV shows. There is a stainless steel carafe of water on the table, centered on a tray with three drinking glass that have been left untouched. The White House Press Secretary and the Vice President of the United States are the only people in the room who are seated. Everyone else stands, either uneasily against the wall or off to the side of the President.
The Press Secretary says, “Mr. President, at three-forty five am this transmission was intercepted at Cape Canaveral along with a decryption cipher, which arrived via radio signal at ten second intervals over the course of the following forty-five minutes. At that time, all communications ceased.”
The president has his ring finger pressed against the side of his skull, the fingertip flush against his hair which became shot with gray roughly a year into his second term. His golden wedding band is dull from being rapped repeatedly against the surface of his desk in the Oval Office.
The message is then played: “Homo sapiens, you are being contacted because we wish to inform you that several tons of radioactive explosives have been placed in the molten core of your Earth. This bomb cannot be defused, and requires no secondary trigger mechanism. It has been activated by the positively charged ions, rotation, and convective motion of your Earth, which are responsible for producing your magnetic field. The bomb will detonate in twelve hours.”
A terrified murmur makes its way from one to the other of those assembled in the room. The most powerful man on Earth has been reduced inwardly to a whimpering child, though he is still man and leader enough to conceal his terror from those who look to him for guidance, and who still want to believe that he can get them through this.
“In order to dissuade you from your doubts, reticence, or your suspicion that this may be a hoax, we have decided to incinerate a star whose coordinates we have provided to your scientists at NASA. This incineration will take place roughly eleven hours before we destroy your Earth.”
The president has clasped his hands together, as if praying, though he is more likely deep in thought, as those close to him know the Ruler of the Free World to be a closet deist, a yuppie agnostic who attended church more to plug himself into the political pipeline when rallying for his senate run, than out of any sort of religious ardor.
“Each of you who have been made aware of this message is to meet at coordinates which have been provided in a document accompanying the cipher of this transmission. You three-thousand humans will be spared and taken aboard our ship. Your immediate families will also be spared. If, however, you inform anyone not included on the manifest of either what is to happen to the Earth o he manifest of either what is to happen to the Earth or of the coordinates where the airlift is to take place, you will be incinerated along with all of your unfortunate Homo sapiens friends. End…”
Static ripples, and the Vice President turns the volume down. The President looks over at the Press Secretary, who removes his bifocals and wipes the fogged glasses with the triangular end of his paisley tie. “Mr. President, a star was in fact incinerated a little bit more than two hours ago.”
“Which star?” The president is grim, but still not panicking.
The Press Secretary swivels in his seat, undoes the half-Windsor knot of his tie. “It was a star we hadn’t even located or named until its coordinates were provided in the encrypted signal.”
The president is deep in thought, pondering the greatest crisis his nation, his planet, has ever faced. The irrepressible conflict between the North and South which claimed more American lives than any other war, the Cuban Missile Crisis whereby mutual destruction may have just been narrowly averted, the banking meltdown in which economies from Reykjavik, Iceland to Manhattan Island almost collapsed due to bad credit default swaps-all of it pales in comparison to the calamity he now has to face.
Every one of the other people in the room is grateful that the decision rests with him. Never has the crown laid heavier upon the head, or the political chalice for which men competed seemed more poisonous a drink. The President of the United States of America thinks about his constituents, about his enemies, about the hardy souls who came out to shake his hand when he did his tours of the heartland damaged by tornadoes and floods. He thinks about his responsibility to them, and he is tempted to ask one of his generals if they might not be able to triangulate the source of that signal and perhaps fire upon the target. He knows that the languishing Star Wars program is a pipe dream, and that some Hail Mary fantasy of sending a nuclear payload aboard a satellite toward the hostile aliens would make a good yarn in a popcorn flick, but this is not a movie.
The President stops thinking about his voters, his friends and enemies in Washington, the sycophantic press corps. He shifts in his seat, and the Presidential seal stitched into the leather headrest frames his head for a moment like a halo. He thinks about his wife, his children, his shaggy spotted Cocker Spaniel, and the choice becomes obvious. He glances at everyone in the room, and finally lets his eyes settle on his shiny loafers, because he is too ashamed to meet any gaze right now.
“Have Air Force One readied, and give the pilot the coordinates listed in the cipher accompanying the signal from space.”
An audible sigh goes up from those assembled in the War Room. There is the sound of papers shuffling, and then they all disperse. No one makes cellphone calls or sends emails, since those can easily be intercepted thanks to programs the president himself has signed off on via executive fiat. His decision has alienated him from his liberal base, and garners him no credit from his enemies who see him as too dovish, but he has done what he thought was right for the American people. It was easy, he muses as he walks through the halls of the White House, past the presidential portraitures, to be a protestor when one didn’t receive the kinds of briefings he got daily. But to stand on that carpet and hear about the terror cells, the loose uranium, the new surface-to-air shoulder fired rockets, day in and day out, and to keep those secrets to oneself, that made the decisions that much harder. It was his second term anyway. Better to alienate the base in order to protect them.
All of it had been for nothing, though.
He runs out to his helicopter and salutes the marine as he boards, a boards, a final wash of guilt making its way over him before it is drowned out in the roar of propellers as he takes off into the sky.
The termites dance away. Another one of the little maggots makes communion with the others, sharing his secret with them, bearing tidings from aboard a vessel where the unseen until now Arbiters are assembled to speak. They wear the same metal shells as Mama, but Wichman, Mars, Kammisch and I can sense alien life pulsing beneath the scaled metal armor. One of them speaks, its voice oscillating through some kind of modulator:
“Mercury we need only for the mining of calcium and magnesium.”
This motion is seconded, and each of the steel-sheathed Arbiters vibrate as a harmonious accord flows across their ranks. A canister filled with the pseudocoelomate rotifer Nanobots recently jettisoned from Earth appears in their midst. One of the Arbiters cracks the glass case like a giant opening a walnut with his massive hands.
A scattering of thermal termites, like floating tinsel, shows the Arbiters a scene of destruction which excites them, makes their slimy, pestiferous bodies writhe inside of the steel shells that make them seem so much stronger and more o much stronger and more formidable than they actually are. The Earth explodes, and something like a gestalt orgasm makes all of the extraterrestrial trolls applaud.
The Earth is now a radiant sun, and through the observation window a fleet of ships drifts into view to form a colorless bulwark that blots out the stars. Their force fields deploy, tessellated striations of jagged lightning, a kinematic orchestration which pushes the Earth until it sits where the sun once was, shoving the sun into an adjacent galaxy. The ships groan and turn to face the other direction. Their ballistic waves of purple light press Mars until it moves where the Earth once was. The moon stays in place.
From within this vision which has been brought to us thanks to our shattering of the little bank teller’s tube, I can hear Wichman laughing. “Clever, evil bastards.”
“That was not Earth we just visited,” Mars says.
“Captain Obvious,” Wichman shoots back. Kammisch is silent, as am I. We watch the Arbiters, sated on that main course of destruction, now treated to a desert which consists of a sadistic show well beyond man’s conception.
The President has done as the Arbiters have commanded him. He has managed to beat Benjamin Franklin’s sage advice about men and secrets, and he has assembled an intergalactic Noah’s Ark, this collection of senators and their families, generals and aides-de-camp, speechwriters and their spouses. They wait patiently for their starship to come. It arrives, a facsimile of the drop ship where we now sit watching this scene unfold, only of course much larger. They board quietly, frightened, like obedient cattle, forming the shape of a new docile animal which is composed of all of their shuffling bodies, a pachyderm bound for God-knows-where.
Once aboard, their vessel launches into space, and as quickly as a rifle tracking skeet, the Arbiters watch them through the display window of their own ship and one of the aliens presses a button which sends a ray out to intercept and obliterate the vessel filled with the only Earthlings besides us four men watching in terror, as a satanic orange and red mushroom cloud consumes itself and then dissolves into shards, fanning out into the vacuum of space.
The Arbiters roil and slither inside their steel suits, pleased and hissing, tearing themselves into shapes which resemble uncoiling strands of especially pliant taffy or fiberglass insulation. They are not so much hideous as imbued with a primordial ugliness which should not know sentience. Each of us sees bits of them slithering around in their suits, thanks to the diligence of the thermal termites worming their way into cracks and joints, and though I haven’t spoken to the other men, I can feel their anger rising as just I can feel my own.
Things that look like these Arbiters, formless ooze, should not rule over us, should not control who lives or dies or the manner in which we perish. Those politicians who fed off the blood of the people deserved to be booted from office, sure, and one could maybe make a Guy Fawkes argument that they even deserved death for the betrayal of their constituents, but killing their families, their wives, and children is beyond the ken of even Old Testament Yahweh in all but his most vindictive mood.
I am, after all, something of an authority on God, as much as any man can be short of knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that He empirically exists. God did not, in that Gutenberg Bible I keep by my nightstand, tell the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah that they would live, only to kill them anyway. If Lot’s wife had not turned around and disobeyed him, if she had kept her eyes forward, then God would not have turned her into a pillar of salt merely to amuse himself.
I dig my fingernails into the lifelines of my palms until they begin to bleed, cursing the slime bags for their formlessness, which leaves them no necks to even wring. I want to throttle them, too, to strangle one, but I have to keep my anger in check, because the silkworms are still spinning their web, showing me that I am in fact wrong in my assumption that we four aboard this drop ship are the only human beings left alive. The Arbiters in fact decided to keep a certain number of human beings alive for their own purposes, which were cruel, but not without a cold logic that I find hard to refute.
Several hundred sport utility vehicles, like the ones I saw around the neighborhood where I had once lived with my mother by the lake, are arranged in a long line on the rusted tundra of the Martian basalt. “Stau,” Kammisch says.
“Ja,” I reply.
But how? How or why is there a traffic jam on the surface of Mars? One of the Nanobots, not hindered by atmospheric concerns, weaves its way across the rocks toward the line of SUVs. Each of the drivers, men and women shanghaied from Earth, marooned now on Mars, grip the steering wheel of their car. Each vehicle’s porous doors and sunroofs are sheathed in a cocooning membrane of elastomeric seals reinforced with a space age polymer, like the doors on our mother ship. Nothing can get in and nothing can get out, but these men and women who have been abducted from carpools or crosstown errands do not need more oxygen than they already have, because the thermal termites will provide that, just as they would continually rewire the digestive systems of the drivers so that hunger would never become a problem, either.
Gas would certainly not be an issue, as I already know from experience. The termites are rerouting all of the atoms and molecules into a feedback loop, whereby any gas that is burned will in turn create more gas in a cycle of perpetual motion better than any sort of zero point energy theorized by Barry Mars in his most outlandish mood. The people drive in circles for days that turn into months, which become years that in turn morph into generations. They beg for death, but the termites keep their hands sealed to the wheels. The red clay of Mars looks so much like the brimstone of Hell, but nothing from Dante or Sisyphus could rival the punishment these commuters are forced to endure, as the worms in the engine blocks pump more and more fossil fuel into the Martian atmosphere.
Co2 gases form a greenhouse shell over Mars, and the Arbiters observe and laugh, this multi-century project a diversion that lasts them in their infinite cruelty the equivalent of only a few hours. Their hideous voices, rasping and scarred, carry across the desolate Martian expanse. Over one-hundred Mbar of surface pressure is realized, the temperature rising degree by degree, until the Nanobots are forced to vacate and the drivers are finally released from their torment, melting to the liquefying hulls of their Denali and Expedition and Yukon utility vehicles.
From an astral perch the Nanobots watch, nesting like lapdogs on the contours of the metal suits that the Arbiters wear. After the cars melt, the rocks begin to undergo thermal decomposition, and hissing C02 and H20 make noises eerily similar to the laughter of the monstrous aliens, gases coming in wavering steamy fingers from the ground where it cracks with molten volcanic life.
Our hatred for the evil Gods melts in that moment. No matter how wicked we consider them to be, they are giving us something that had been the provenance of no man, no matter how holy and faithful to God he was, or devoted to science he might have been. We are seeing the beginnings of a new world, the new world in fact.
A tundra region opens above the regolith, and life as small as the Nanobots appears, little pioneer biota that appeal to the part of each man that he keeps hidden, the part that wants to pet butterflies but fears how that might appear to other men.
“Oh, shit,” I think I hear Wichman say, and he starts to cry. It is contagious. We hear each other’s voices, but see only the memories of the termites, each passing on a bit of knowledge to the next in case it prematurely senesces or is consumed in flames.
The little butterflies with their purple and blue patterns are resistant to the ultraviolet rays which lash the cragged surface of this new Earth, and they excrete acids that further dissolve the rocks and flatten the mountains into low naked hills, and banded marble cliffs which form a rim around the first ocean. We can taste the nitrogen and oxygen as they are introduced, across the chasm of centuries and despite the limited sensory perception of the little wormy hosts sending back data one broken image at a time.
The one ocean of New Earth breaks into two oceans, forming an aqua-frothed Pangaea wreathed in salt in the northern boreal area and a second sea in the southern hemispheric Hellas Planitia zone. Minor tweaking is performed by the bulwarked convoy of drifting sky fortresses, which casts a giant shadow over the Earth which has become the new sun, and Mars, which has become a home for the Arbiters. Giant louvered parasol sunshades emerge from the abysses inside of the great ships, and they adjust the orbital eccentricity of every planet until the Council of Arbiters achieves that revolting harmonious accord again. They writhe in their elemental suits, and rap their chainmail knuckles against the top of their table.
The millions of aliens who have moved into the Milky Way are happy with this new living arrangement. We four remaining humans above this drop ship are less so.

"How Happy Are Recent College Graduates?" by Alpha Unit

I remember reading an article roughly 25 years ago about recent college graduates who had jobs as bike messengers and coffee shop baristas. The author, the late William Henry, was asking if too many people were going to college.
People still want to know. Now questions about the employment prospects of recent college graduates are raised throughout the mainstream media continually, for good reason. There is a glut of college graduates but a shortage of jobs that college graduates want to take – or feel they deserve.
More and more of them are taking jobs that don’t require a college degree, which pushes people without degrees out of those jobs.
Alana Semuels, writing for the Los Angeles Times, compares past and present:

In 1970, only 2% of firefighters had college degrees; now 18% do, according to Richard Veddder, an economist at Ohio University. Fewer than 1% of taxi drivers had college degrees in 1970; now 15% do. About 25% of retail sales clerks have college degrees, Vedder said.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 48% of employed college graduates are in jobs that require less than a 4-year degree. For college graduates under 25, over half are in such jobs.
Not surprisingly, a third of 4-year college graduates don’t feel that college prepared them well for employment, as a report by McKinsey & Company found last year. Graduates who are most dissatisfied majored in visual and performing arts and liberal arts – although a third of science, business, finance, and economics graduates feel the same way.
McKinsey found that half of all graduates would choose either a different major or a different school if they had it to do all over again. Students most likely to wish they had majored in something else are those who studied visual and performing arts; language, literature, and social sciences; and accounting, economics, and finance.
Students who attended the nation’s top 100 schools fared somewhat better, but 4 in 10 settled for employment outside their intended area.
The group that fared worse than average in all measures were liberal arts graduates. They tend to be lower paid, deeper in debt, less happily employed, and slightly more likely to wish they’d done things differently.
In contrast, graduates from 4-year STEM programs were above average on most measures. They feel better prepared for employment, are more likely to be in a job that required their degree, are more likely to have an above-average income, and are more likely to choose the same major if they had it do over.
But Robert Charette warns against emphasizing STEM at the expense of other disciplines. He says that without a good grounding in the arts, literature, and history, STEM students narrow both their worldview and their career options. He cites a 2011 op-ed piece by Norman Augustine, the former chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin, who said:

In my position as CEO of a firm employing over 80,000 engineers, I can testify that most were excellent engineers. But the factors that most distinguished those who advanced in the organization was the ability to think broadly and read and write clearly.

Charette’s view is that everyone needs a solid grounding in science, engineering, and math. In that sense, he says, there is a STEM knowledge shortage. To fill that shortage you don’t necessarily need a college or university degree in a STEM discipline, but you do need to learn those subjects, from childhood until you head off to college or get a job.

"Heavy Construction," by Alpha Unit

The Dockbuilders of New York and New Jersey traces its beginnings to the late nineteenth century, when a group of men got together to form the Independent Dockbuilders Union. The union worked on the New York City waterfront, building docks and piers and driving piles for marine foundations and structures. They were granted a charter by the American Federation of Labor in 1907.
After a fire destroyed its records in 1910, the union reapplied for a charter. That was when the Dockbuilders Union became the object of a tug-of-war between two other unions, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and the Bridge and Structural Ironworkers Union. Both these unions claimed the dockbuilders as part of their jurisdiction.
The AFL didn’t agree with either of them. It saw dockbuilding as a specialty trade and reissued the charter. So two dockbuilder locals were formed – the Independent Dockbuilders Union and the Municipal Dock Workers. The Carpenters Union wasn’t about to give up on the dockbuilders, though, and by 1914 was pressuring the dockbuilders to affiliate with them.
The Independent Dockbuilders gave in to the pressure. The Municipal Dock Workers would not. Along came the Ironworkers Union, claiming Municipal as part of its jurisdiction.
The AFL ruled that there should only be one dockbuilders union in New York City. So Municipal joined the already affiliated Independent Dockworkers as part of Dockbuilders Local 1456.
Commercial divers who did welding and installed piling in and around New York City had formed the Marine Divers and Tenders Union in 1920. By 1973 the divers had affiliated with Dockbuilders Local 1456, too.
Jurisdictional claims such as those in New York City are why piledrivers locals across the country are a part of the Carpenters Union. Pile drivers are described, in fact, as the elite of the carpentry trade.
Pile drivers are the first work crew on a construction site. They’re the ones who do all the foundation work on piers, wharves, drydocks, bulkheads, bridges, highway overpasses, skyscrapers, and parking lots. Pile drivers install piling – structural columns of wood, steel, or concrete – on the ungraded site.
Specifically, a pile driver lays out from blueprints the exact location of the piling and positions them correctly, then drives them into place. He (or she) then caps the piling after it’s been driven and prepares it to receive the superstructure.
This type of work involves strenuous labor. There is a lot of lifting and rigging involved and a worker will at times have to climb a piledriving lead – the track upon which a driving hammer runs – to properly align a pile beneath the hammer. Some of the leads are well over 100 feet tall.
Pile drivers get their work done with various types of heavy equipment like excavators, drilling rigs, and diesel and hydraulic hammers. They build but they also perform demolition work. Some of them are commercial divers who work in marine construction installing piling for offshore oil rigs and other projects. The divers weld, perform inspections, and handle salvage operations.
As you can imagine, this is difficult, noisy, dangerous work.
It takes about four years to become a journeyman pile driver. Whether you work inland or offshore you can expect to spend considerable time away from home. In addition to your regular work hours you’re likely to have extended periods of overtime on some projects. A pile driver has to travel, too, sometimes long distances.
Pile drivers, or “pilebutts” as they sometimes call each other, take great pride in what they do. To them, the undeveloped earliest stage of construction is the hardest to work with. But it can be rewarding for anyone who’s good at it – and becoming really good at some aspects of this job can take years. An experienced union man’s kindly advice to brand new apprentices is Keep your mouth closed and your ears open. Go to work every day willing to learn and the senior guys will show you the ropes.

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