Why Waylon Jennings Isn't Big In Myanmar
Sep. 30th, 2009 03:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraNIGHT JUMP: Cactus, TX --> Stinett, TX – City Ballfield, East 1st Street: 50 miles
Go out the way we came in... LEFT onto HWY 287 SOUTH to Dumas
At first traffic light, LEFT onto HWY 152 EAST to Stinnett... arrows to lot
***Stop in the parking lot tonight and go to sleep. Have your trucks running and ready to spot at 8am***
Shows tomorrow at 5pm/7:30pm
The biggest employer in the town of Cactus is the SwiftCo slaughterhouse. In the afternoons, when the winds rise, the abattoir stink rushes in, overwhelms you till you gag.
Do you remember Cactus Texas? sings Waylon Jennings.
Nothing but a wide place in the road...
Let’s go back to Cactus Texas
Maybe once we’re there, we’ll find out where we are...
I’m telling you this for your own good, Waylon: DON’T DO IT!
In 2006 the SwiftCo plant in Cactus was one of six raided by a thousand enforcement agents from Immigration and Customs. Thirteen hundred Mexicans in all were arrested and charged with identity theft. Most of the illegals were deported, three hundred of them former Cactus workers.
(SwiftCo preferred to hire illegal aliens because they got them for cheap, $12 an hour as opposed to $20 an hour for documented workers who are unionized.)
After the Mexican debacle, SwiftCo decided to look elsewhere for its help and started recruiting Burmese refugees, recent arrivals from gulags on the Thai border where they’d fled from the catastrophic cyclone that killed thousands in Myanmar last year.
Presumably their lack of language skills compensates for the fact that they’re legal – you ain’t gonna join no union if you can’t speak English. They too make $12 an hour.
Consequently Cactus, Texas is now a most interesting demographic mix of Asian and Latino’s with a few Somali Moslems thrown in for good measure. The Burmese men wear sarongs. The Somali women wear burkas.
The two factions hate each other. There’s a lot of violence.
“You do not want to spend the night here,” advised the police chief. “Leastways the city can’t be responsible for the damage if you do.”
He told us to lock up the cats and dogs. Was he implying the Burmese would eat them?
Whatever, Chance wasn’t going to risk it. We did a night jump into Stinnett.
On the road between Cactus and Walmart – oops! I mean Dumas – we passed acres and acres of feed pens, kind of like bovine Auschwitz’s. The cows are stuffed into cage-things till they can barely move. It was really depressing. I’d seriously reconsider eating beef except chickens have it even worse and I’d never survive as a vegetarian – I just don’t have the patience to track my protein intake. And anyway, the culprit isn’t eating meat, the culprit is this assembly line, deathcamp method of raising animals.
Go out the way we came in... LEFT onto HWY 287 SOUTH to Dumas
At first traffic light, LEFT onto HWY 152 EAST to Stinnett... arrows to lot
***Stop in the parking lot tonight and go to sleep. Have your trucks running and ready to spot at 8am***
Shows tomorrow at 5pm/7:30pm
The biggest employer in the town of Cactus is the SwiftCo slaughterhouse. In the afternoons, when the winds rise, the abattoir stink rushes in, overwhelms you till you gag.
Do you remember Cactus Texas? sings Waylon Jennings.
Nothing but a wide place in the road...
Let’s go back to Cactus Texas
Maybe once we’re there, we’ll find out where we are...
I’m telling you this for your own good, Waylon: DON’T DO IT!
In 2006 the SwiftCo plant in Cactus was one of six raided by a thousand enforcement agents from Immigration and Customs. Thirteen hundred Mexicans in all were arrested and charged with identity theft. Most of the illegals were deported, three hundred of them former Cactus workers.
(SwiftCo preferred to hire illegal aliens because they got them for cheap, $12 an hour as opposed to $20 an hour for documented workers who are unionized.)
After the Mexican debacle, SwiftCo decided to look elsewhere for its help and started recruiting Burmese refugees, recent arrivals from gulags on the Thai border where they’d fled from the catastrophic cyclone that killed thousands in Myanmar last year.
Presumably their lack of language skills compensates for the fact that they’re legal – you ain’t gonna join no union if you can’t speak English. They too make $12 an hour.
Consequently Cactus, Texas is now a most interesting demographic mix of Asian and Latino’s with a few Somali Moslems thrown in for good measure. The Burmese men wear sarongs. The Somali women wear burkas.
The two factions hate each other. There’s a lot of violence.
“You do not want to spend the night here,” advised the police chief. “Leastways the city can’t be responsible for the damage if you do.”
He told us to lock up the cats and dogs. Was he implying the Burmese would eat them?
Whatever, Chance wasn’t going to risk it. We did a night jump into Stinnett.
On the road between Cactus and Walmart – oops! I mean Dumas – we passed acres and acres of feed pens, kind of like bovine Auschwitz’s. The cows are stuffed into cage-things till they can barely move. It was really depressing. I’d seriously reconsider eating beef except chickens have it even worse and I’d never survive as a vegetarian – I just don’t have the patience to track my protein intake. And anyway, the culprit isn’t eating meat, the culprit is this assembly line, deathcamp method of raising animals.
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no subject
Date: 2009-10-01 01:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-01 12:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-01 01:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-01 01:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-01 01:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-03 03:06 pm (UTC)I will say it was disconcerting to see all those endless fields of corn and soybeans earlier this summer when I was traveling through Illinois and Iowa. Not so long ago agriculture there was diversified, they fed themselves. Now they sell crops to China. Is this an improvement for them? They have to use the money they make to buy what they used to produce, but maybe there's a net profit which allows them also to buy Chinese-made HD TV sets, so I just don't know.
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Date: 2009-10-05 04:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-05 05:06 pm (UTC)