Is Uber just a rehash of earlier lessons in economics? Some might say so (hat tip to Rohan Light) if they’re familiar with criticisms of the “putting out” economy in 19th Century industrialization.

Punch Magazine published an illustration of “cheap clothing” by John Leech in 1845.

Two years earlier in 1843 they had published the “Song of the Shirt” poem by Thomas Hood.

With fingers weary and worn,
   With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat in unwomanly rags,
   Plying her needle and thread—
      Stitch! stitch! stitch!
In poverty, hunger, and dirt,
   And still with a voice of dolorous pitch
She sang the "Song of the Shirt."

   "Work! work! work!
While the cock is crowing aloof!             
   And work—work—work,
Till the stars shine through the roof!
It's O! to be a slave
   Along with the barbarous Turk,
Where woman has never a soul to save,
   If this is Christian work!

   "Work—work—work,
Till the brain begins to swim;
   Work—work—work,
Till the eyes are heavy and dim!
Seam, and gusset, and band,                    
   Band, and gusset, and seam,
Till over the buttons I fall asleep,
   And sew them on in a dream!

   "O, men, with sisters dear!
   O, men, with mothers and wives!
It is not linen you're wearing out, 
   But human creatures' lives!
      Stitch—stitch—stitch,
   In poverty, hunger and dirt,      
Sewing at once, with a double thread,
   A Shroud as well as a Shirt.

   "But why do I talk of death?
   That phantom of grisly bone,
I hardly fear his terrible shape,
   It seems so like my own—
It seems so like my own, 
   Because of the fasts I keep;
Oh, God! that bread should be so dear.
   And flesh and blood so cheap!
              
   "Work—work—work!
   My labour never flags;
And what are its wages? A bed of straw,
   A crust of bread—and rags.
That shattered roof—this naked floor—
   A table—a broken chair—
And a wall so blank, my shadow I thank
   For sometimes falling there!

   "Work—work—work!
   From weary chime to chime,   
Work—work—work,
   As prisoners work for crime!
Band, and gusset, and seam,
   Seam, and gusset, and band,
Till the heart is sick, and the brain benumbed,
   As well as the weary hand.

   "Work—work—work,
In the dull December light,
   And work—work—work,
When the weather is warm and bright—         
While underneath the eaves
   The brooding swallows cling
As if to show me their sunny backs
   And twit me with the spring.

   "O! but to breathe the breath
Of the cowslip and primrose sweet—
   With the sky above my head,
And the grass beneath my feet;
For only one short hour
   To feel as I used to feel,            
Before I knew the woes of want
   And the walk that costs a meal!

   "O! but for one short hour!
   A respite however brief!
No blessed leisure for Love or hope,
   But only time for grief!
A little weeping would ease my heart,
   But in their briny bed
My tears must stop, for every drop
   Hinders needle and thread!"

With fingers weary and worn,
   With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat in unwomanly rags,
   Plying her needle and thread—
      Stitch! stitch! stitch!
   In poverty, hunger, and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch,—
Would that its tone could reach the Rich!—
   She sang this "Song of the Shirt!"

The post title comes from a 1946 “Paper Bullets” booklet that was “DEDICATED to the men and women of the Overseas Branch, United States Office of War Information… to serve their country as propagandists in time of war….”

…like mustard gas, which clings to the ground for months after battle, psychological warfare and its poison of hate and distrust linger on for years.

Fast forward to 2016 and American soldiers still suffer from mustard gas experimentation done on them. They were told by their government to never speak about it and were denied healthcare claims.

We girls could not use perfume, we could not use hairspray, anything in the house” because of his ailment.

Daughter Beverly Howe, a nurse trained in chemical, biological and radiological treatment from Thomasville, Ga., said she interviewed her father for a school paper in the early 1970s, and he disclosed the gassing reluctantly to her for the first time. As a nurse, she recognized the symptoms from her training. “He said it was secret and they weren’t supposed to talk about it,” she said. “If they did, they’d be in big trouble.”

Then, while visiting a Veterans Administration hospital in Columbia, Mo., in the late 1980s or early 1990s, a VA X-ray technician who had seen Arlie Harrell’s records asked if he had ever been exposed to mustard gas.

“I was mostly horrified when I saw the look of terror in my dad’s eyes,” said Ayers, who was with her father at that appointment. “The man told him it was OK, you can talk about it now. He said, ‘Yes,’ and that was about it.”

Put these two themes together and you get a story about lingering effects of mustard gas mixed with racism (hate and distrust).

Edwards was one of 60,000 enlisted men enrolled in a once-secret government program — formally declassified in 1993 — to test mustard gas and other chemical agents on American troops. But there was a specific reason he was chosen: Edwards is African-American.

“They said we were being tested to see what effect these gases would have on black skins,” Edwards says.

An NPR investigation has found evidence that Edwards’ experience was not unique. While the Pentagon admitted decades ago that it used American troops as test subjects in experiments with mustard gas, until now, officials have never spoken about the tests that grouped subjects by race.

[…]

All of the World War II experiments with mustard gas were done in secret and weren’t recorded on the subjects’ official military records. Most do not have proof of what they went through. They received no follow-up health care or monitoring of any kind. And they were sworn to secrecy about the tests under threat of dishonorable discharge and military prison time, leaving some unable to receive adequate medical treatment for their injuries, because they couldn’t tell doctors what happened to them.

The BBC has published a story of how Easter Island government officials invoked prohibition customs to control the pandemic in their country.

Thanks to both tapu and umanga, Easter Island has not only successfully warded off the coronavirus; it’s revived past practices in order to plot a more sustainable future.

Tapu is practiced in various forms across Polynesia, from New Zealand to Hawaii, and is believed to be the origin of the English word “taboo”, with British explorer James Cook first noting the concept on a visit to Tonga in 1777. While tapu is a divine mandate controlling a society’s access to certain people, places or things (with potentially dire consequences for those who transgressed in historical times), taboo is similarly used in English to describe practices that are either forbidden or restricted by social or religious customs.

The local description of the safety and security that can come from a taboo is very poetic.

What the pandemic did, [Mayor Pedro Edmunds Paoa] explained, was change the position of the mask from the eyes to the mouth.

“It shut our mouths, because we kept eating and consuming and searching for money and building and destroying the nature and our fragile culture, without seeing the jeopardy that we were putting ourselves in,” he said. “Now, our eyes are open, and we are more keen to promote sustainability in words, actions and plans than we ever were before.”

A common thread in education has been to point to Easter Island as a lesson in ecological collapse. If true, perhaps it would be wise to look towards them for insights in environmental and health policy.

However, history is not quite so obvious, and so it turns out there is an even better reason to learn from Easter Island. The latest research shows it was invasion by foreign threats that was the main calamity to their thriving civilization.

…disease and slavery, introduced by Europeans, are more to blame than ecocide and self-destruction.

One of the turning points in analysis, from internal collapse to external threats, was a realization that fragments of “weapons” were more like evidence of sophisticated peaceful agrarian tools.

“It’s assumed that [pieces of glass] are the WMDs that led to the collapse of people,” the study’s lead author, Carl Lipo, an anthropologist and director of Binghamton University’s environmental studies program, told the BBC. “And what we found was there was no evidence, in fact, to support that these were used in a systematic, lethal fashion, and that they’re best explained as cultivation tools and things used in daily household activities.”

The assumptions made by Europeans were ignorant, a bit like someone from Easter Island landing in France observing that everyone owns a shovel and assuming it means civil war.

Two parts of the big shift in analysis are related to some pretty simple, even common sense, threads.

First, the rounded and short glass tools called “mata’a” were nothing like the offensive long-pointy weapons found in other places around the world. Who innovates around a big spoon when they could have enhanced their knife designs?

Here’s the data:

Ok I said spoon for a very specific reason. And now I have to take a second to discuss how disappointing it was to read that “researchers call them the ‘swiss army knives’ of stone tools”. I mean these same researchers are claiming tools were NOT primarily military issue while trying to describe them as ancient Swiss army knives?

SWISS ARMY KNIVES are standardized, military issue and pointy… it’s like the researchers couldn’t have possibly used a worse phrase to make their point (pun intended).

Second, these islands lacked defensive evidence expected from innovation around fortresses and garrisons built for civil wars.

No strong offensive evidence, no real defensive evidence… the island populations were decimated by something else.

So while past lessons erroneously have suggested Easter Island is about environmental disaster from over-production, instead it serves as an example of collapse from disease-infested invasion.

It all registers as important food for thought about data integrity as they practice taboo to save their population from pandemic; show the world a “good model” of disease prevention as one of the most important forms of sustainability.

… why did the population shrink after the Europeans arrived in the eighteenth century? Lipo has a single, stark answer: “Disease that is introduced by Europeans after contact.” Smallpox and plague ripped through Easter Island, halving the population in a short time. […] The fate of the Rapa Nui on Easter Island is often used [falsely] to illustrate how humans destroy their communities with environmental destruction and warfare. But it might actually provide a good model for sustainable civilizations of the future.

Oh, and why did all the trees disappear? Rats, known also for spreading the plague, are blamed for Easter Island deforestation.

Almost all of the palm seed shells discovered on the island were found to have been gnawed by rats. Thousands of rat bones have been found, and crucially, much of the damage to forestry appears to have been done before evidence of fires on the island. […] Unchecked, a single mating pair can produce a population of nearly 17 million in just over three years…capable, on their own, of deforesting large lowland coastal areas in about 200 years or less. “In the absence of effective predators, rats alone could eventually result in deforestation.”

Once again, it seems prevention of invasive and uncontrolled threats is the Easter Island lesson for COVI19 and human sustainability.