Re Unions & how the dog returns to his vomit. A couple of quite a few webplaces which discuss this event.The Hamlet, N.C., Fire
When I was growing up, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire was still vivid in people’s memories. () I often heard my mother, a garment worker and an ardent trade unionist, talk about how 150 workers, most of them young women, were killed in that fire. Many of them died struggling to escape through exit doors that were locked from the outside because the factory owners were afraid of workers’ stealing the garments. Others were killed as they jumped from windows to get away from the flames. That fire was 80 years ago, and most people thought nothing like it could ever happen again. It was part of a bygone era before there were unions and health and safety laws to protect workers and inspectors to enforce the laws. But we were wrong -- as we found out with the Imperial Food Products fire in Hamlet, N.C.
Last September 3, a fire broke out near the deep-fat fryer in Imperial’s chicken-processing plant and spread quickly through the one-story building. The plant had no windows and no sprinkler or fire alarm system. And workers who got to the unmarked fire exits found some of them locked from the outside. Imperial’s management was using the same "loss control" technique as the bosses at Triangle Shirt Waist -- and with the same result. Twenty-five of the 90-odd employees working at the time were killed, suffocated by the black smoke that filled the plant, and 55 more were injured.
A more recent follow-up, sad & sometimes shocking, with a description of the orginal Imperial Foods fire Still Burning(by Wil Haygood
Washington Post , Sun, Nov 10, 2002)Another educational link
Even more recent examples of a continuing problem are noted here, e.g. Suit Alleges Wal-Mart Locked in Janitors (Associated Press, Tuesday, February 3, 2004 ) and OSHA Cites Mobile Supermarket for Blocking Emergency Exits (Region 4 News Release No: 04-1708-ATL (195) Sept. 1, 2004)From a speech by Gary Goff in Brooklyn, New York on March 23, 2002.
“An injury to one is an injury to all” – it’s as true now as when the Wobblies first said it nearly a century ago.
A final reason why organized labor has to be here today is globalization. The system that creates the conditions in third world countries that drive millions to leave their homelands is the same system that oppresses them when they join the American working class. The system that condones the assassination of labor activists in Colombia is the same system that allowed my brothers and sisters at the Imperial Chicken plant down in Hamlet, N.C. to be burned alive when the boss locked the fire exits to prevent theft. The same system that sustains sweatshops throughout the third world maintains sweatshops right here in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
This is the system that says I’m supposed to feel I have more in common with the bosses because they look like me than I have with workers who don’t look like me. Well, this is a good time and a good place to say I’m not buying that lie – working people are not buying that lie – organized labor is not buying that lie.
Industrial Fires
The Human Face of Sustainable Agriculture:
Adding People to the Environmental Agenda
by Patricia Allen
Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems
University of California, Santa Cruz
Issue Paper #4, November 1994
Much of the work in the food and agriculture industry is in factories rather than on farms. Working conditions in food processing vary, but workers in produce and meat processing industries are often poorly paid, seasonally terminated, have no benefits, and work under miserable conditions. In the 1980s, Iowa meat packing industry wages decreased regularly and in 1989 49% of Iowa meat packing workers suffered work-related injuries or illnesses.(52) At a North Carolina chicken plant 25 workers were killed when they could not escape a fire because fire exits were locked to prevent workers from stealing chicken. A U.S. congressman summed up the situation, saying that this was an industry that decided to subsidize its profits "with the broken lives, limbs, lacerations, and decapitations of their workers."(53)
... speaking of New Overlords, as noted on Making Light, "Habemus Papam" - Benedict XVI
everyone knows that something that does not exist at all cannot carry meaning,"
Hmm ... "existence" in this sense including "believed in"? (Oh dear, this one goes back to the tree falling in the forest discussion). Because there may be very many things factually/actually, objectively, as far as we can currently define by scientific methods (and here we also touch upon the difficulty of measuring integration, intelligence, & good function mentioned in Neurological Update, from Making Light) there are an awful lot of things which could be said not to exist, but which have a lot of meaning to a lot of people.
One of the more famous odd things dreamt up by the Brits in WWII was the exploding rat . Here are a few links to the now-notorious SOE ( bbc.net.uk/history/war/wwtwo/soe_gallery.shtml ). Those of you in, near, or heading for Hampshire (UK) might be lucky enough to go along to the "Secret Army" exhibition , on now.
http://clutch.open.ac.uk/schools/emerson00/soe_title_page.html
The Special Operations Executive was created by Winston Churchill in July, 1940, to organise and carry out acts of sabotage in occupied Europe.
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/486391.stm
Documents just released [In 1999] by the Public Records Office detail the secret weapons which inspired those produced by Q, James Bond's weapon-master.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/hampshire/4349121.stm
Wartime school for spies revealed
Tuesday, 15 March, 2005, 11:07 GMT
An exploding rat from a wartime finishing school for secret agents will be one of the many devices on display at an exhibition opening on Tuesday, 15th March 2005. The Secret Army exhibition at Beaulieu in Hampshire focuses on the members of the Special Operations Executive...
Darn! Can't see any caltrops in the possibilities. Will have to engage in Discussion of Reasonableness.
I haven't been able to find a remark, made somewhere during the earlier days of the Abu Ghraib realisation period, that tnh had been firmly, yet lovingly - as is her way - applying the 4 x 2 of Correction at another site. Not sure if I had the phrase correct. Should it be enshrined as a unique descriptor?
Slightly cheery news for the spam-haters, and those dreading its infestation of mobile (cell) phones. From the Sydney Morning Herald: SMS campaign backfires as car firm is fined for sending spam
By Kirsty Needham, Consumer Reporter
April 6, 2005
A car company that sent text messages to people after copying their mobile phone numbers from classified advertisements has been fined under the Spam Act.
It is the first time that text message advertising has been caught under the new law, which came into effect last year and is designed to cut the torrent of junk email.
Carsales.com.au was fined $6600 after members of the public complained to the Australian Communications Authority about the unwanted marketing messages.
The chief executive of the automotive website, Greg Roebuck, said his staff sent out several hundred of the text messages each week because he believed it was "less intrusive" than calling.
But the authority ruled that the recipients of the messages had no relationship with the car website and did not give their consent to receiving the text messages ... href="http://www.smh.com.au/news/Technology/Car-firm-fined-for-sending-spam/2005/04/05/1112489491022.html">(more)
That's not just "a fatty lump of skin" or "piece of flesh", that's an important gland, that is!
Tho' I don't ever remember hearing it called a Pope's Nose, only ever a Parson's. Probably not related to the curate's egg.
It's being reported here that JP2 is insisting he will stay in the Papal Apartments instead of going to hospital again. Some are interpreting this as indicating he doesn't want the "extraordinary measures" of advanced medicine taken to keep him alive.
Quick Query
I note that publishing isn't in the list of Industries in Q 5. I'm in the computering (IT, database, etc) part of a publishing firm/ information supplier.
Quite a number of the people here would also work in publishing, would you put Other, then publishing, or Media, or some other available selection?
Oh wow! Plastination in a town near you! I've been longing for it to come to Australia - would even have gone to the Singapore show if I'd found out about it before it closed.
(For some reason they didn't mention it in their email newsletter (I'm sure Google translation would have noticed "Singapore") Grr.)
Definitely part of The Wonder of the Natural World.
This building scandal is yet another "We told you so" incident coming along in Australia, related to the kind of consequences warned about developments in the USA and UK as well.
Every Coalition MP is guilty if no heads roll over Rau
A few other links about the Cornelia Rau story:
Odyssey of a lost soul and its associated issues
Vanstone in new mental health row
Out of mind
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2005/02/13/1108229859314.html
Just dropping a fast comment on the flyby that I hope people will explicate for themselves.
Things like Scottish Play v Real Macbeth, and Richard III's stage & historical records connects up with things like Teresa's comments at Common fraud (December 03, 2004) and various discussions here and over there about how just ignoring facts & truth, and repeating what you want people to believe will often eventually pound itself into the local unconscious as 'common sense' or accepted, unquestioned belief.
Also connects with the technique of The Big Lie, and what I'm coming to believe is a defining part of humanity; what I think is called story or narrative or plot. Just throw random images down, and people will start to make up connexions & stories. (Possibly something to do with our development of a sense of time, causality, logic & so forth in pre-human days.)
Is another reason for disliking many attitudes seen in books, films, computer games, and the assumptions they make, which are starting to bleed into people's real decision making. Also connects to feminist attempts to push such unstated assumptions in language out into the light, and sometimes out of it altogether.
"If they're so good at coping with catastrophic environmental disruption, then why are they vanishing?"
I think the idea is that "primitive" peoples have retained the skills to survive in a "primitive" environment - the sort of things that survivalists may train in, like tanning skins, hunting without guns, making your own weapons or clothes or building shelters with minimal tools & no manufactured materials, first aid with natural materials & so forth.
A less extreme version is often found in places like Iraq or Cuba under sanctions, or poor parts of other countries, where people develop skills in making higher-tech things from improvised materials, or repairing & maintaining them - e.g. the high level of ingenuity in the mechanical tradesmen of Baghdad & beyond.
They may not be useful skills when it comes to surviving against bulldozers, measles & massed rifles, but if the bottom drops out of a high-tech culture they might prove useful again. Some of them may also may demonstrate ways to survive long-term in an environment without destroying it.
I, for instance, have a high medical dependency on certain technologies & products which would be very difficult to obtain without high technology, would suffer quite a lot, and probably die from infections reasonably rapidly without very intensive nursing, which in a 'collapse' would be unlikely now my partner's dead & without relatives. Diabetics, paraplegics of most types & a whole slew of others would probably go the same way.
There was a book of collected sf stories about a fictional planet called "Murasaki" which posited one possible way of approaching this problem. It involved a high degree of genetic manipulation to set up self-maintaining ecosystems which provided for the civilization. They also developed an interesting technology that enabled them to go back to a nomadic lifestyle without sacrificing all "high" culture.
Alas, you'd probably need some serious mental reworking to get humans to live that way without dropping back into the type of "strongman" culture we've supposedly spent the last thousand years trying to get away from. Well, some of us have. Others just seem to like being "top dog".
With scanners & colour laser printers, it's not as hard as it was :)
Hence our groovy plastic notes with the clear plastic watermark bits & front/back pattern matching & micro-printed bits. I think they tried out those groovy rainbow holograms (man) on earlier models, but they flaked off too easily.
At least the old 'putting my money through the laundry in my pockets' trick isn't so disastrous these days.
Avedon (January 20, 2004, 06:57 PM) And here I thought lock-ups had been illegal since the Triangle fire. Silly me
Try putting "Hamlet fire deaths Carolina" into a search engine. You'll find various versions of the story of the fire at the Imperial Food Products chicken processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina on the early morning of September 3, 1991
Example www.organicanews.com/news/article.cfm?story_id=103 This story is about people making a film about the fire, its causes & consequences. It's from 1995, but I don't know what has happened since. They mention the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire (March 25, 1911) too. I wonder how many others happened between or since? Certainly several in non-USA manufactories.
"The doors (at the Imperial Food chicken processing plant) were kept locked, and the plant had boarded-up windows so we couldn't steal the chicken," adds another worker, Conessta Williams. "They never put up a fence or hired a security guard. But (no one) would want to steal that chicken,"
Elizabeth: Eventually - not using the page's own 'search', but by probing sideways through an outside search engine into several websites set up by the Dean campaign, I was able to find what I think you were describing at this address:
www.deanforamerica.com/site/cg/index.html?type=page&pagename=democracy
I can't find a way to get there using the links within the site, but maybe that's just me. Thanks for the pointer, I'm always on the lookout for access to such material.
There is a similar disgust & impatience with the standardized usual way of doing things politically among many here in Oz, with more & more people voting for non-mainstream parties (in other places this might lead you to just not bother voting, here we legally have to attend a polling place & put a ballot into a ballotbox - it's up to you what you put on the paper & some just write rude words), and others actually going & working for the non-mainstream groups.
BTW, since there is a preferential count (what totalizators were invented for originally in Australia - see members.ozemail.com.au/~bconlon/) you can vote first for a minor party, then second for your most-preferred larger party so that those votes aren't "wasted", and the person who wins a seat usually does get a majority. In a "first past the post" system you can get, say a 25%, 35%, 40% split and the person who 60% of the voters were against actually winning. If the preferences are distributed with the lowest candidate's voters splitting between the other two, you can get a better representation of what the voters would prefer.
Could be interesting in William Gibson-style cyberspace display. Especially with realtime updating of money-flows, connexions formed to other groups, etc ...
Mike D. (January 4, 2004 08:15 PM):
you really must drop everything and dig upon Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination ...
BTW I believe that was its UK & Australian (Canadian?) title, but for the USA it was called Tyger! Tyger! (note Blakean [Blakite? Blakese?] spelling). It really knocked me over some twenty-odd years back when I read it at a reasonably impressionable age. Was it Brian Aldiss in Billion Year Spree who called that style "Wide Screen Baroque"? Some of that type pall very quickly, but this one does seem to stand up over time.
There is a bit of a fashion near here for reviving the old Maori facial tattooing - mostly in a less-than-permanent form, and whenever I glimpse one unexpectedly I get a flash memory of that.
Also, I enjoyed Heinlein's Young Adult stories in early/mid High School, but gradually got a very bad taste in my mouth from his more didactic preaching works. Then while reading a fairly early (?) book, The Puppet Masters one little bit really shook me. I've never worked out if it's serious (surely not?) or meant to show the flawed character of the narrator. Don't have a copy to check, it's something like "I felt good, like I'd just had a woman or killed a man".
The humanity of Terry Pratchett's attitudes (and his humour) is, even if falsely comforting, at least some comfort in difficult times (like Teresa's teddy).
Speaking of pre-internet web predictions, has anyone read "Michaelmas?"
www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/boxing.asp Deals well with the much-disputed origin of the name "Boxing Day"
It even got into Parliamentary debate in Australia:
www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/Prod/Parlment/HansTrans.nsf/ all/CA256D110020B6CD4A2564350022CDCE
Mr ZAMMIT (Strathfield) [3.53]: The Minister for State Development, and Minister for Arts spoke about Australia and New South Wales being part of a global economy. Nothing brought that home to me as much as when I visited China about 10 months ago with the former Premier. When we visited a very large factory the first question I was going to ask the factory manager was what he paid his staff, but instead I asked him , "Do you give your staff holidays?" He replied, "Holidays, yes, every Sunday." ...
[Page 5689]
... I have a definition by Rabbi Brasch of how Boxing Day began. He says:
The custom originated with the Romans and their feast of Saturn, during which they gave each other presents as an expression of the merry spirit of the celebration of the winter solstice.
[This I see more as one of the existing customs Christmas is based on. Remember, Christmas is not Jesus' birthday, it's the celebration of the birth. This was more familiar to Europeans in older times, when people had name-days rather than birthdays. I have an adopted friend whose parents picked a day for his birthday, not knowing the actual one, in a similar way.]
... The definition of Boxing Day in The All-Australian Calendar Book says:
Boxing Day probably takes its name from the fact that on the day after Christmas in Britain, the alms boxes which had been placed in the churches over the Christmas period were opened. The contents were distributed to the poor. On the same day, apprentices and servants broke open small earthenware boxes in which their masters had deposited small sums of money. In large households, the family may have used this day to distribute Christmas boxes to their staff.
[Strange that we can pinpoint the exact day Jesus was crucified, yet commemmorate it on a different day each year, but even the year of his birth is debated (tho' if the shepherds bit is true, it's obviously not midwinter) yet we have an exact repeated anniversary for it.]
St Stephen was the first Christian martyr, stoned to death by jews as a heretic (not unlike all the later Christians killed by other Christians for being heretics). Maybe that's why his feast is straight after Christmas.
Ever read "Hogfather" by Terry Pratchett? (www.dymocks.com.au/ContentDynamic/Full_Details.asp?ISBN=0552145424) and probably somewhere on Breastless or your online book catalogue of choice.
A good story, but it still doesn't help solve our problem of whether we should institute our own Antipodean, Southern Hemisphere midwinter festival of some sort, or adapt Yule/Christmas/Saturnalia/&c to a midsummer version.
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