#Black Lung

[jenarosscity]

Yeah Sadie stop being so insensitive

😠

[thedooristhebluecushion]

If you haven’t watched the music video for Tyler Childers’ In Your Love please do. It’s a beautiful snapshot of Appalachian queer love through the heartbreaking lens that is selling your body to the coal mines.

Childers continues to make excellent music while being intentional about what his art says. In this video he is making a statement about the beautiful diversity of every corner of our world, AND about how there are hundreds of industries beyond sex work that we sell our bodies to.

(They also hired Colton Haynes & James Scully to play the couple, which just makes my heart so happy.)

If you can, go download & view & get him to the top of the charts instead of some other tacky ass fake country man child who will remain nameless.

[microwave-core]

Something I love about the Zelda series is how Link and Zelda's relationship can change drastically in between games. Like, in Twilight Princess, the two don't really interact much outside of their first meeting. They have a mutual friend in Midna and that's it. There's not much there platonically, much less romantically. At most it's a "this is my girlfriend Midna and this is Midna's girlfriend Zelda" type of situation.

Then you have the next major release, Skyward Sword, where the two are most definitely in love with each other. They're so super into each other and almost everyone knows that. Unless I'm forgetting an entry, it's the closest zelink has come to being canon without them explicitly stating it's canon. And this dynamic comes after the game where they barely know each other. Love that for them.

[0cto-4v3ry]

I Ł0ve m¥ c4t <3

[uboat53]

How anti-worker are Congressional Republicans? Well, they're trying to repeal a policy that would protect mine workers even when the INDUSTRY HAS NOT EVEN ASKED THEM TO DO SO!

[girderednerve]

The proposed crackdown on silica follows a fraught history of the mine safety agency's decades of failure to protect miners from the toxic dust. The proposal also overlooks a history of overexposure at coal mines.

Again, this downplays the need and justification for action.

The rule notes that 93% of silica dust samples have been in compliance with existing silica dust limits since 2016. But the remaining 7% of samples amount to 5,300 instances of excessive exposure to the dust based on the newly proposed limit, according to MSHA data analyzed by Louisville Public Media and Public Health Watch.

In the 30 years leading up to 2016, agency data analyzed by NPR and Frontline found 21,000 excessive silica dust samples based on the existing limit. More than twice that many dust samples — 52,000 — exceeded the newly proposed limit.

This means that coal miners worked amid dangerous levels of silica dust — which is easily inhaled, easily lodges in lungs and can lead to severe disease and death — tens of thousands of times in 30 years.

During those three decades, the risk of silica dust exposure increased, as mining consumed the thickest coal seams, leaving thinner seams embedded in rock. Cutting those thinner seams generated more fine silica particles.

Also, during that period, the agency did not respond effectively to the threat.

[goosewizard]

ive seen so many “things that would kill a Victorian child” lists and they’re always like. a baja blast. youtube.

WHAT ABOUT THE HORRORS

[gwydionmisha]

Regulations are written in blood.

[davekatzdefensesquad]

- gay couple ✅

- history ✅

- sadness ✅

- country song that doesn’t degrade anyone ✅

[curiousorigins]

This is important stuff to know.

It's a foot note, but they just cut a ton of money to the few government related offices and departments that are supposed to protect our workers.

[cha-mij]

I've loved reading this fic and listening to the wonderful soundtrack that is scattered in the notes throughout. @princip1914 has done a wonderful job capturing a coal mining town so I thought I'd add to the soundtrack.

I was raised on these songs that tell of the strife so many toiled under (and still do). My maternal great grandfather was a collier and my paternal grandparents came to England for a better life, but worked in the cotton mills. Both my great grandfather and my grandmother died young (black lung and cancer respectively)

Max Boyce is normally a comedic folk musician but he grew up in the Welsh valleys and started off in the mines. He worked in a valley close to Aberfan and tried to reach it after the disaster to join in the rescue effort, but the roads were blocked by other miners all trying the same thing.

Rhondda Grey is about the colour of the skin minors and ex minors had when their lungs started to give out.

Duw it's Hard is about the closing of the mines.

Kate Rusby is a wonderful English folk singer and this one by her is of a woman lamenting her husband having Black Lung.

"The Welsh song “Myfanwy” (written by Joseph Parry from nearby Merthyr Tydfil) was sung by the soldiers who dug for victims. “Myfanwy” was also the first piece performed by the local Ynysowen Male Choir, formed after the tragedy, and from which the community sought to find some solace."

Like Max Boyce, Mike Harding is usually a comedic folk musician but has written some very hard hitting serious songs. Unlike Boyce he grew up in Lancashire where cotton mills dominated. Just like the mines they were incredibly dangerous, low paying, and ruined your lungs.

Finally, Belfast Mill by the Fureys tells of a town where most of the men worked at the local mill. When the mill shut down they had nowhere to go. Finbar Furey is one of Ireland's leading folk musicians. He learned banjo in the Appalachian style.

"I'm too old to work and I'm too young to die. Tell me where will I go now, my family and I?"

Growing up in the shadow of West Virginia’s Eden Mountain, Aziraphale Wright always expected to work for the family coal mining company. Anthony Crowley, the son of a down-and-out miner, was going to become a pilot and leave town forever. Now, thirty years later, neither of their lives have gone as planned, and an unexpected inheritance brings them back into one another’s orbit. Aziraphale hopes that they can move beyond their shared past, and a high school arrangement that ended in disaster, but he has secrets of his own that threaten their fragile reconnection…


Read it here on AO3! 


Complete as of July 2021!

[archaalen]

US miners' union head calls House Republican effort to block silica dust rule an 'attack' on workers | AP News

[pawpawholler]

[radiophd]

black lung -- the disinformation plague

[girderednerve]

This is a recording of Appalachian historian Barbara Ellen Smith's 1981 article, "Black Lung: The Social Production of Disease." It describes the history of black lung as a medical diagnosis and an occupational disease, and places decades of medical denial and dismissal of black lung in the context of the labor and class relations of twentieth-century West Virginian coal camps. Smith's account ends with the successful worker-led effort to create a federal black lung benefits program, and contends that these efforts hinged in part on a radical redefinition of the disease itself. Read the full article online (jstor; drive).

Although it seems difficult to imagine now, for decades, coal miners who complained of respiratory problems after years of unsafe exposure to coal and rock dust were diagnosed with 'fear of the mines' or accused of malingering. Black lung was comparatively difficult to diagnose from an X-ray, and nearly all medical care available in the coalfields was provided by company doctors, who were incentivized to ignore or downplay the clear hazards of the mines. Only aggressive labor action, including a period of repeated UMW strikes during World War II, ended this approach to coal-related dust disease. The black lung movement offers valuable insight into how workers have responded to insidious workplace safety issues, a topic with obvious present force.