Blood Elf Mortar and Pestle Draw This Again Meme Fail

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

In explanation of my title, I fear I'll have to go on a scrap of a digression. Allow me tell three stories, nearly people in three different parts of our amazing planet.

STORY THE FIRST: In my early thirties, virtually forty years ago at present, through a serial of misunderstandings and coincidences I spent some time as the offset mate on a sailboat in the Philippines. At i signal nosotros spent a couple months anchored up offshore from the Manila Yacht Society while we were getting some boat repairs done. As befits a young man with more testosterone than sagacity, I spent the evenings in the dives and nightclubs in the local cerise-light district. Not paying for the favors of the ladies of the evening, you lot understand, that always seemed creepy to me. Only drinking and having a good fourth dimension. One of the confined had a pianoforte. It also had what they euphemistically chosen "hostesses", who I was told could be very welcoming and most hospitable in one of the upstairs rooms for a small donation to a good crusade …

It became my addiction that each evening afterwards work, I would become ashore. I'd walk the six blocks or and so over to the bar and play the piano for a few hours, and talk to the "hostesses" and the bartender, and spotter the evening go by. Later a while, I was just some other fixture in the bar, I was the piano human being. People coming in thought I was but part of the floor show, and I was. The management liked having me play, so they paid me … in free drinks and bar food, which was more than welcome.

I got to exist friends with the bartenders, and with the "hostesses", and they would tell me their stories. 1 of the women working in that location was a "hostess" named Helena. She and I got to be proficient friends. We were never lovers, although I wouldn't have minded one chip. We just hung out together and had a good time in the bar, singing songs, telling stories. Sometimes on the weekends we would see and wander effectually the city and she would explicate to me the local community, tell me what was going on. She taught me just enough Tagalog to get in trouble. It was great.

Effigy 1. Slums in Manila

During this time, Helena kept telling me that I was rich. I always laughed and said no, no, in America I was a very poor homo. And that was true—I was an itinerant crewman and fisherman and a boat bum. She just laughed back at me. But she never asked me for anything, not for one penny, non for i gift. Well, that's not quite true. She asked me for cigarettes for her father. So I kept her sometime man in smokes. I figured information technology was the to the lowest degree I could do. She had her pride.

One other affair she wouldn't exercise. I kept request her to invite me over to the place where she lived. Simply she always refused. I wouldn't like it, she said with her impish crooked smiling. So ane afternoon I decided I'd just go over there on my own. I got her address from 1 of the bartenders. He advised me against visiting at that place, maxim it was in a bad department of town. I said okay. I was immature. I was foolish. What did I know?

When I told the taxi commuter where I was going, he turned around in his seat and looked at me. "Are you certain y'all desire to get there", he asked? "Yeah I'm sure", I said with more than certainty than I felt. "OK", he said, "but y'all gotta pay me the money now, I'm not waiting around once we get in that location" … I gave him the money and off we went.

Helena'due south place turned out to be located in a shantytown covering an entire city block. The buildings had been demolished at some point in the by and then abandoned. An entire community had sprung up there over the years. Every bit soon as I got out of the taxi, the driver sped away. I turned around and was confronted by the most astounding warren of structures that I had ever seen.

Every possible building cloth was on display. Concrete blocks, short sticks of forest, old highway signs, flattened out tin cans, cardboard of every color and description, motorcar doors and windows, random bits of drinking glass, hunks of corrugated fe, shipping pallets, foam from apparatus boxes. And this potpourri of materials was all strapped and held and cajoled into staying together by a motley assortment of rusty nails, bits of wire, condom straps, pieces of leather, sections of vine, lengths of duct record, strips of cloth, the variety of fasteners was countless. There were buildings on meridian of buildings added onto buildings congenital underneath buildings.

I asked the first person I came to where Helena lived. He gave me a series of instructions that, equally nigh as I could understand, included obscure directives like "go over that direction except stay this side" and "don't get under the third walkway, go where the man is selling balut" and "be careful to avert the other opening". All of these directions were delivered in what to a coincidental passerby would take passed for English, just on closer examination appeared to accept been assembled from random phrases culled from instruction manuals.

I thanked the man and wandered off in the general management he had indicated. I stopped at intervals to get new sets of partially intelligible instructions from random strangers. These led me through and over and into more of the 3-D maze. The way to her house went by means of a bizarre collection of passageways that were neither streets nor alleys. I could not tell public from private areas. Eyes looked out of every opening. I knew that I could not find my manner back out without a guide.The passageway wandered over and around structures, at points seemingly going through people'southward back yards with life in full swing. At other points, the fashion passed along a ditch running foul sewage, complete with a strange array of floating objects that did non comport close inspection. Later on accidentally looking at one item piece of flotsam, I repented and quickly switched to advisedly looking at the other side of the path, and I eschewed farther reckless eyeballing until I left that ditch far behind.

Now, people mistake the Philippines for a nation. In reality, it is much more similar a really big family with a bunch of kinda foreign relatives. Not bad, just foreign. And of course, on this city block of houses-in-wonderland, everybody knew everybody. The nature of communications in the area was such that by the time that the kindness of strangers had brought me to where Helena lived, she had heard the news already and had gotten spruced up and was prepared to run across me at the door. She invited me into what she explained was her aunt'south firm. She had a room in the back. She offered to testify it to me.

We stepped inside her room. Of course, nosotros could not close the door, that was not proper … nor all that applied given the miniature size of the room. But it wouldn't have made much deviation, there was no privacy. You could hear everything everywhere, the walls were cardboard. And I suppose that shouldn't have been surprising, because one wall was actually made of paper, merely I was surprised by that detail even so. I noted in passing that the newspaper wall was fabricated up of pasted together advertising posters for Hindi Bollywood movies, lending a pleasant, well-nigh carnival atmosphere to the identify.

Her room was tiny. A pocket-size sleeping pallet took up near all of the available floor infinite. Inside the room were all of Helena's worldly property. They consisted of a small wooden box which contained a few dresses and blouses and undergarments, and another smaller wooden box which contained a few items of makeup, a mirror, and some little trinkets and costume jewelry that obviously were precious to her. Other than that, there was one pair of shoes, and a cross and a picture of Jesus on the wall. Oh, there was the cloth pallet on which she slept, but that scrap of sewn-together rags likely belonged to her auntie. And that was the sum full of her possessions, all contained in a minuscule room with ane wall fabricated of paper …

That was it … that was all that she owned. A few dresses and a moving-picture show of Jesus. Now I understood why she thought I was rich. Because by her terms, I most convincingly was rich. I was incredibly wealthy in her world.

I talked with her a while in that location in the business firm, and with her aunt. Her uncle was out working. Her aunt had a small sewing business in her house. Life was not bad, life was non good, life was just life. She didn't like her work, only that was the only task she could observe, she had no education and no skills. And it paid the bills. Helena translated, her aunt spoke simply Tagalog. We laughed some. They had a roof over their heads, albeit one of flattened tin can cans laid as shingles. They had each other. We watched the well-nigh-liquid warmth of the Manila gloaming slowly pouring over the metropolis, and we soaked in the terminal rays of the mean solar day.

After while, Helena showed me how to get dorsum to the street, and found me a taxi. I wouldn't have been able to notice the street without her, and no taxi would accept stopped for me there at dusk, just they knew Helena. She left me there, she had to go back and get changed and get to work. I said I was going back to the ship, I'd see her later that evening, play some pianoforte.

In the taxi, on my way dorsum to the ship, I reflected on how incredibly wealthy I actually was. I finally realized, with some embarrassment, why she had laughed so heartily when I was then foolish and naive every bit to merits that I was poor. The only remaining mystery to me was how her laughter at my blindness had been so free of even the slightest hint of reproach for my colossal bumbling ignorance.

STORY THE 2d: Fast forward five years. I'1000 working in sub-Saharan Africa, in Senegal. My workmate and I are in some godforsaken village out near the Kaolack common salt flats. A 3-D relief map of the turf would look similar a flat canvass of paper—it's the land god stepped on. Nosotros become invited to dinner past some farmer, and by custom, we cannot refuse. He lives in the proverbial mud hut, with his wife, a scad of kids, a wooden planting stick, a wooden mortar and pestle for grinding grain, a three-rock firepit out back for cooking, a leaky roof, and not much else.

Having grown up on a ranch, I automatically note when we go in that location that he has two scrawny chickens wandering the yard. When we go into the house, he confers for a moment with his wife. She disappears. I hear squawking. I realize the man now has one scrawny chicken wandering the yard. The farmer and my associate and I drink sickly sweet tea andtalk about the doings in the area. After a while, his wife brings in the chicken cooked up all nice, and offers it to united states of america, the honored guests. The kids sentinel from the corners of the room.

Just I can't swallow that damned bird. I tin can't do it. I can't bear the eyes of the kids. Don't misunderstand me. It'south non like they are watching me with reproach in their optics or annihilation, that wasn't the problem at all. The affair I can't conduct is that the kids can't take their eyes off of the chicken. Their optics caress it. They watch that bird "as one who hath been stunned and is of sense forlorn" equally the poet had it, they are bullheaded to everything else. I can't take it.

Plus I am shamed past the easy generosity of the human being and his wife. They have nothing, and yet he offers us half of what they accept without missing a beat out. I am reminded of Rabelais' will: "I take nada, I owe a slap-up bargain, and the rest I leave to the poor" . The farmer'south wife has cooked and served the chicken, both of them temporarily appropriating the easy air of people who accept hundreds of chickens, people who have chicken for dinner every night. My center hangs, suspended. I hear the lone remaining chicken complaining exterior.

So I trot out my old threadbare excuse from Mexico, and I blame my much-maligned liver. In Mexico, they blame their liver for everything. I have institute it's quite a useful excuse—over the years my liver has cheerfully soaked upward the blame for a host of my idiosyncrasies. So I take i minor bite for form's sake, and and then (in French, information technology being Senegal) I compliment the woman and the man on the chicken. I tell them the doctor has said that chicken is bad for my liver,le médecin has said that le poulet is downright mauvais for my greatly-abused erstwhilefoie, so every bit much every bit I liked the delicious flavor, and as much as I was deeply grateful for the accolade they were offering me, I say I'thousand terribly sorry but I tin can't mayhap consume whatsoever more, they'll but have to end it off for me. And I tuck into the residual of the meal, the office that my liver doesn't heed, to prove my bonafides.

They make the appropriate noises of disappointment that I'grand not eating, and they take the grace not to await overjoyed. The children's optics are full of expectation. They expect at that poor scrawny niggling representative of the great avian nation with unconcealed longing. The married woman takes the plate into the dorsum. In dissimilarity to their before raucous play, the children vanish soundlessly on bare feet along with her. It seems that none of them dare to make a sound in case the mirage all disappears, like Cinderella afterwards midnight. Not the time to go mom mad …

I avert my eyes from the disappearing craven and the children. I look at the man and my workmate. We lapse into small-talk with no reference at all to poultry, or to children, chatting light-heartedly as though nothing meaningful had just occurred.

Thinking on it now, I consider how many times I've bought some random craven in the supermarket on a whim, and how footling it represents to me. I could buy fifty chickens if I chose, v hundred if need be. And I think nearly what that 1 scrawny chicken meant to that family.

STORY THE Third: Fast forward another 5 years, to when I lived in the Solomon Islands, in the South Pacific. Because I ran a shipyard, I met lots of yachties who were on boats sailing through the Solomons. Often they would complain to me about the high prices beingness asked by the islanders for their cute wood carvings. Afterward the first few complaints, I developed the post-obit analogy which I used over and over.

I told the yachties, imagine that 1 day an conflicting spaceship lands in your front end yard. It is made out of solid gold, and information technology is encrusted with rubies, diamonds, sapphires, and emeralds. The alien steps out of the spaceship. He is dressed in cloth picked out in gold and silver threads, and his shoes accept platinum buckles and diamonds everywhere, including on the soles … he comes upwardly to y'all, and through his universal vocoder he says, "I say, old fellow, I rather fancy that old pickup truck of yours. How much money would it take to convince you lot to role with information technology?".

Now, you know the old truck is worth maybe a hundred dollars, and that's on a skillful twenty-four hour period with a post-obit wind. And one can't predict the future, but y'all are kinda certain that this opportunity will never come again … which ways the real question is, would you tell the diamond-studded alien "Oh, I could be persuaded to let it go for million dollars, it's kinda precious to me", or would you only say "a hundred thousand dollars"?

Seriously, I'd tell the yachties, you get a ane-time run a risk like that, you accept to take your shot. You have to enquire for the moon. Might not get it, merely why non ask?

Next, consider the boilerplate Solomon Islander, I would tell the yachties. The average guy in some outer island village might only see a hundred Solomon dollars in greenbacks all twelvemonth, that's thirty bucks Us. I said to the yachtie, your watch is worth 30 dollars United states. Your yachting shorts set you lot back forty-five, the cool sunglasses were seventy-v dollars, the Izod polo shirt was fifty-five, the chugalug was thirty bucks. Your stylish yachting cap was sixty bucks. The nice Sperry Topsider boat shoes were seventy-5 dollars. Not counting your socks or your skivvies or your jewelry,  what you are wearing is worth most what greenbacks the average outer islander might come across in ten or twelve years. Information technology'due south worth a decade of his labor, and that's only what yous are wearing every bit you pass through his world.  That doesn't count the greenbacks in your pocket, or the credit cards in your pocket. It doesn't count the value of the residual of your wardrobe. And we haven't even gotten to the money you might take in the depository financial institution or your other avails …

And then yeah, when you sail up to the village in a yacht and enquire how much something costs, they will ask a hundred dollars Solomon, or three hundred dollars, who knows? Because to them, you lot're an alien wearing gold material, with diamonds on the soles of your shoes. They'd be mad not to inquire height dollar for their carvings.

And I told the yachties, you know what? Given both that huge disparity in net worth between you lot and the woodcarver, and the world-class quality of the woodcarving in the Solomons, y'all'd exist mad non to pay elevation dollar for whatever carvings catch your fancy.

============ END OF THE Iii STORIES =============

Now, I have told these iii tales in guild to provide a context for a couple of quotes. The context that I am providing is that at that place is an near inconceivable distance from the top of the heap to the bottom of the heap. The top of the heap is the 1%, not of the Usa, only of the global population. That i% is made up of the people like y'all and me and the folks who read this, folks who live in the western world, the meridian few percent of the global population who relish the total benefits of development, the winners on the planet. It's a long, long fashion from where we stand up down to the bottom of the heap, that night and somewhat mysterious place we don't like to think virtually where far too many of the planet's people eke out a living on a dollar or three a day, and we wonder how on globe they can do then. To them, nosotros are as unknown and distant as aliens in golden jeweled spaceships with diamonds on the soles of our shoes. I offer the stories to give you some idea of the constraints on those people's lives, and the contrasts between their lives and ours.

Those people have no slack. They have no actress room in their budgets. They have no ability to absorb increases in their price of living, peculiarly their energy spending. They accept no credit cards, no credit, and almost no assets. They have no health insurance. They are not prepared for emergencies. They have no money in the banking concern. They accept no reserve, no cushion, no extra habiliment, no stored food in the basement, no basement for that matter, no fatty around their waist, no backups, no extras of whatsoever description. They are not ready for a hike in the price of free energy or annihilation else. They take damn well nada—a wooden digging stick, a spare dress, a picture of Jesus, a paper wall, a scrawny chicken, a bowl of millet.

It is in that context, the context that acknowledges that about half the world, iii billion people, live on less than three dollars a day (2005 PPP),  that I bring up the following two quotes:

 "Somehow nosotros take to effigy out how to heave the [US] toll of gasoline to the levels in Europe"

and

"Under my plan of a cap-and-merchandise system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket."

Here's my problem with these brilliant plans. Regardless of any hypothetical possible future do good they might or might not bring in fifty years, right hither and now in the present they are absolutely devastating to the poor.

The United states of america Secretarial assistant of Free energy Stephen Chu, the author of the start quote, wouldn't have his commute to piece of work imperiled if US gasoline prices were to rise to $eight/gallon and thus reach the levels in Europe. He can buy all the gasoline he wants for any purpose. But if you are a poor single mom with a couple of kids and a clapped-out auto that gets you to work and back and drinks gasoline faster than your good-for-cipher ex-husband drank whiskey before he left, for you a doubling of the gas prices means the kids eat less or something else goes past the board, because you have to get to piece of work. It's non optional.

And if the cost of electricity for the US and the White Firm "skyrockets", Obama won't be sleeping common cold in the winter. Nor will I, for that matter. That would exist the poor renter in upstate New York who can't beget to plow on the electric heater.

The departure between rich and poor, between developed and developing, is the availability of inexpensive free energy. A kilowatt-hour of electricity is the same corporeality of energy as a hard 24-hour interval's labor by an adult. We can buy that for 15 cents. Nosotros're rich because we have (or at least had) admission to the hardworking servants of cheap energy. We have inexpensive electrical and mechanical slaves to practise our work for us.

This is particularly important for the poor. The poorer you are, the larger a percentage of your upkeep goes to energy-intensive things like transportation and oestrus and electricity. If you double the price of energy, everyone is poorer, only the poor take it the hardest. Causing an increase in energy prices for any reason is the most regressive tax imaginable. At the bottom of the pile people make a buck a day and pay fifty cents a kilowatt-60 minutes for electricity … at that place's no give down there at the lesser of the heap, no room for doubling the price of gasoline to European levels, no space for electric prices to skyrocket.

And then I find it both reprehensible and incomprehensible when those of us who are in the ane% of the global one%, similar President Obama and Secretary Chu, blithely talk of doubling the price of gasoline and sending the cost of electricity skyrocketing as though there were no negative results from that, as though information technology wouldn't crusade widespread suffering, as though inexpensive energy weren't the best friend of the poor. What Chu and Obama propose are crazy plans, they are ivory-belfry schemes of people who are totally out of touch with the realities faced by the poor of the globe, whether inside the US or out. Now please, I'm non making this political. There are people on both sides of the aisle who accept signed on to the crazy thought that nosotros should raise energy prices.

When I was a kid, everyone was quite clear that inexpensive energy was the key to a fairly boundless future. Our schoolbooks told of the Tennessee Valley project, and how it lit up the whole region, to everyone'due south benefit. In particular, electricity was seen, and rightly so, as the savior of the rural poor. How did nosotros lose that? Just how and when did deliberately making energy more than and more expensive become a good thing?

I don't buy that line of talk, non for ane minute. Expensive energy is not a good thing for anyone, wealthy or poor. And in particular, more than expensive energy condemns the poor to lives of increased misery and privation.

Equally far every bit I know, other than the completely overblown "tiptop oil" fears, near the simply argument raised against the manifold benefits of cheap energy is the claim that increasing CO2 will atomic number 82 to some fancied hereafter Thermageddon™ l years from at present. I accept seen no bodily evidence that such might exist the example, just shonky figurer model results. And even if CO2 were to lead to a temperature ascent, nosotros have no prove that it will be harmful overall. According to the Berkeley Earth data, nosotros've seen a 2°C land temperature rise in the last two centuries with absolutely no major temperature-related ill effects that I am aware of, and in fact, generally beneficial outcomes. Longer growing seasons. More ice-free days in the northern ports. I don't see any catastrophes in that historical warming. Despite the historical warming, there is no sign of any historical increase in weather extremes of any kind. Given 2 degrees C of historical warming with no increment in extreme events or catastrophes, why should I look such an increment in some hypothetical futurity warming?

And so I'm pitiful, but I am totally unwilling to trade inexpensive free energy today, which is the existent actual salvation of the poor today, for some imagined possible slight reduction in the temperature fifty years from now. That is one of the worst trades that I can imagine, exchanging current suffering for a promise of a slight reduction in temperatures in the year 2050.

Finally, for those who think that these quotes and ideas of Chu and Obama only bear upon the US, nothing could be farther from the truth. Sadly, the policies are beingness exported and imposed, both by force and by persuasion, on the poorer countries of the world. To accept but one example, pressureon the World Depository financial institution from the western countries and NGOs is denying financing to coal-fired plants in countries similar Bharat with coal resources. And so the poor of Republic of india are denied cheap coal-fired electricity, they end upward paying the toll for the western one-percenters' guilt and fear ridden fantasies about what might happen 50 years in the misty future.

Heck, fifty-fifty if the dreaded carbon menace were real, raising the price on fossil fuels would be the last way on world I'd cull to fight it. Like I said … large electric current hurting for small time to come maybes, that's a lousy trade. Now, I don't think CO2 is worth fighting. But if you do, I implore you, offset practice no harm—any rise in free energy prices harms the poor. If you want to fight CO2, there are other means.

due west.

[UPDATE: a reader has pointed out that I am not describing the poorest of the poor, and he is quite correct. Helena had her chore. The African farmer had a house and land, and not to mention originally two, merely lately but i, craven. The people in the Solomons had their bush gardens and the bountiful ocean.

The poorest of the poor accept none of these things. They are a whole level below the people I talk well-nigh. You don't desire to consider where they sleep or what they eat. And yes, they are hit past rise energy prices like everyone else. -w.]

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Source: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/13/we-have-met-the-1-and-he-is-us/

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