Reparations

Justa thought (courtesy of The Cave of Adullum): during the 16th/17th century slave trade, somewhere around 600,000 to 650,000* African slaves were transported to what is now the United States (although some were transported to French and Spanish territory, now U.S.).  During that same time, Muslims captured and took to Africa as slaves, between 1,000,000 and 1,250,000 Europeans.

I’m sure that had some kind of deleterious effect upon my European ancestors.  I want reparations. The Saudis have deep pockets. Let’s all sue them.

*note: yeh, there were 10,000,000 or more African slaves taken/transported during the same time frame, but most went elsewhere, not to what turned out to be the territory of the U.S. Brazil? Jamaica and Haiti and Cuba, ya think? Tons. Etc.

Dog Bites Man Redux

Sadly, very sadly, this is not shocking.

If the story (documentation at The Smoking Gun linked above and here) shocks you, you just haven’t been paying attention to this space’s occasional warnings that stupid people (school administrators-duh) are running public schools.

Oh, a preview of the link? How about:

“…Columbus, Ohio public school officials–found only that Wedgewood Middle School educators drank booze during the school day, got kinky with each other in the boiler room bathroom, and spoke about where to score cocaine….”


The ringleader of this lil coven of kink? The principal, of course. A principal who reportedly once told a teacher at the school, “she smoked pot daily en route to school because ‘I can’t stand those kids.’ ”

Yeh, well, that’s probably why she was a crappy teacher before she became a crappy administrator. (It’s natural selection, you know: those who can’t teach become school administrators so they can obstruct the efforts of teachers who can teach and children who want to learn.)

h.t. NIF

Another lil experiment

This is another, different hosting service that’s in alpha right now. I have NO idea what’s gonna happen when I blog this mp3 file…

Powered by Castpost

Hmmm… I think I like this better than the embedding process I had to go through with putfile.com, even though I had to come back and manually edit to add a title for the post.

Those of y’all who are regulars will recognize this file as one I posted earlier. Had it handy. Arr copyrighted 2003 DWN–if you hunt down my post listing and find it below, I think I posted a link (somewhere) to the words. 19th century gospel tune. Actually, this was kinda fun to do. I was on a music e-list where someone requested a copy of the sheet music cos an older saint in their church had asked them to find/sing it for her. Found the sheet music (tune/lyrics) and thought, hmmm… I think I’ve heard some of the old folks around here mention this tune. Sure enough, I had. So, wrote out/recorded this lil thing for them (and for the person who’d requested the sheet music) and that’s making a short story long.

🙂

A quick question: those of y’all using Internet Exploder (The World’s Crappiest Browser, as the title bar in myversions read :-), tell me, please, does this load without problems for you or not? One comment I’ve recieved resulted in my experimental loading of Internet Exploder (the World’s Crappiest Browser) to test it, and I had a very unsatisfactory experience with it. Just wanna know how it works/doesn’t work for you.

a lil experiment

hosted at putfile.com

Now, I’m gonna see if this file will play for a few days or if putfile will delete it for not being accessed the way putfile wants.

Stop the ACLU! Petition!

Were you aware that your tax dollars are going to help the ACLU tear down American society?

Take just a moment and CLICK on through to the petition linked below. Check out some of my past posts (or those you may find in the Stop the ACLU blogroll) that catalog the ACLU’s support of homosexuals who rape young boys or its attacks on moral or religious expression in the public arena.

It’s your money that supports a lot of this obscene behavior.

SIGN THE PETITION TO GET THE ACLU OFF THE TAXPAYER’S DOLE

This was a production of Stop The ACLU blogburst. If you would like to join our efforts to fight the ACLU, it’s very simple. Just register at our portal. We will add you to our mailing list, and send you the info you will need. Over 100 blogs already on board. Join us!

Chinese Surpass America in Political Snark!

Well, I’ve been meaning to post on this for a couple of days. Dr. Phat Tony beat me to it yesterday with what I thought was a bang on (heh–it’ll be clear in a sec) post on the topic. Today, over at Woody’s News and Views I saw something that made me kinda glad I had held off posting. Cos this is priceless.

Unintentional (?) political snark by Chinese. And they owe so much to the Clinton “legacy”…

For “the rest of the story” see this.

Pork, pork, pork, pork, porkety-pork…

Sing the Monty Python Spam Song tune to this one…

Re: the myth about Louisiana not getting enough funds to shore up the levees. Here but one of many gotchas that topple that myth… plus a lil more thought candy to boot.  From John Stossel:

“It turns out Louisiana got lots of money for Corps of Engineers projects — hundreds of millions of dollars more than any other state. Congress just spent it on pork projects instead of on the levees.

I confronted Breaux about his own state’s pork, such as subsidies for ship builders and the sugar industry.

‘I object to you using words like squander and pork,’ he said. ‘What is pork in one part of the country is an essential project in another part.’

It’s a reason Americans shouldn’t filter so much money through Washington. Louisianans don’t need Iowa rain forests, and Iowans don’t need levees in Louisiana. Maybe the people who want to live in New Orleans should have to pay (through private enterprise or local taxes) the special costs of its exposed location — or live elsewhere. If all local projects, essential and whimsical, were paid for with local taxes, competition among states and cities would force them to become more efficient.”

Go, read the whole thing. The levee thing’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Equinox

First day of Fall.  

And for a wonder, it’s actually cooler today. Decided to get some early a.m. walk time in. Cool.  Really. Warmer now, but I’ll put some more real miles on the virtual pedometer this afternoon on my way to “adjudicating” an “honors choir” tryout session.  (heh, as if the director didn’t already have her picks set in stone.)