Some Notes on Slavery

It's hard for us looking back to understand how complicated people found the issue of slavery. Even many that conceded the evil of the institution didn't think that an immediate across the board emancipation was going to work. 

Many were convinced that the freed slaves would have to be "expatriated" somewhere. 

Abraham Lincoln proposed shipping the ex-slaves to Central America, the Caribbean or Africa. On August 14, 1862, Lincoln met at the White House delegation of black leaders and proposed voluntary emigration of African Americans to countries outside the U.S. “Your race suffer from living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.” 

Stephen Douglas essentially told him he was nuts but Lincoln tried to establish a colony on the island of Île à Vache in Haiti anyway. 

It was an unmitigated disaster and Lincoln accepted that the freed slaves would have to be assimilated into white society.

When Was America Great?

I'm no fan of Trump and his followers. People have taken to asking his MAGA supporters, since they want to make America great AGAIN, when they think America was great?

I'd like to answer that question.

America was great when we looked to the future rather than living in the past. Slavery is over and 600,000 men paid in blood before it ended. 

 Jim Crow is over. Enough people put their heads together and did something about it. 

The past is the past. How about we recognize the problems of the present and try to address them? How about we worry about the drugs and the crime and the unwed mothers and the lack of affordable healthcare and the absent fathers and that children can't read and that people can't live on their salaries?

How are those for facts? 

I heard a black woman on the radio recently refer to the five little girls killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963. Yes, that was a tragedy but what about the 1,300 teens and 276 children killed last year? 

We can't do anything about the past but we can do something about the current problems and the future. 

I'm 75 years old and I'm going to tell you that I've never seen a bigger group of fools than exists today. Every day I watch the rich and the media drive wedges between people to insure that we can't get together and make things better.

Iran Launches Strikes Against Israel

In retaliation for an Israeli air strike on Iran's consular offices in Syria Iran has launched 100-200 missile and drones at Israel.

Iran telegraphed the attack and launched mostly slow moving assets. Virtually all of the missiles and drones appear to have been shot down by Israeli, US and Jordanian forces.

The question is what happens next?

There are reports that an Iranian spokesman has said the the "matter can be considered concluded" unless there is more violence.

So far Iranian proxies such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and militias in the West Bank don't appear to have participated in the attack. Hamas, in Gaza, is pretty much in tatters already.

The ball may be in Israel's court. Hopefully they'll let the matter drop but I somehow doubt it.

What is a Woman?

The question "what is a woman" is tossed around by mostly right wing pundits as a sort of gotcha question.

The question "what is a woman" looks for a simple answer to what can be a complex situation. 

Let's start by asking if someone is talking about sex or gender when they ask the question? Sex and gender, despite many people using the terms interchangeably, are actually two different things. Sex is based upon physical characteristics such as chromosomes and genitalia. Gender defines the behavior and attitudes that society associates with a given sex.

The thing with gender is that it can vary from society to society and over time in any given society. Neither my mother nor my mother-in-law ever learned how to drive because that wasn't something that women did in their generation.

When people deviate from gender expectations we call that "gender non-conformity." Gender is something of a spectrum with man on one end, woman on the other end, and varying degrees of gender non-conformity in between. I suppose a "woman" on the gender spectrum would be someone who mostly exhibits behaviors and attitudes that society associates with the female sex.

A good example would be the fictional character Albert Goldman played by Nathan Hale in the movie "The Birdcage." Albert is a physical male but acts like the caricature of a female.

If the question refers to sex and not gender then I would say that it perhaps should be phrased as "what is a female" instead but let's go with "what is a woman" in reference to sex.

I can give an example. My wife is a woman but not every woman is my wife. I could say that a woman is someone with no Y chromosome but then where do people with Swyer Syndrome fit in?

Someone with Swyer syndrome has XY chromosomes but underdeveloped female sex organs. They don't produce ova but, if the uterus is reasonably developed, some can become pregnant with a donated egg or embryo and give birth.

I could say that a woman is someone with female genitalia but there are females with ambiguous or abnormal genitalia but they're still women. Some can even possibly become pregnant and give birth with donated eggs or embryos like those with Swyer Syndrome can.

You can't say that a woman is someone who can get pregnant and give birth because many women, due to age or physical issues, can't do that.

The problem really becomes that for any definition exceptions can be found. So the question doesn't have a simple answer.

Lung Issues - April 10, 2024

I had a collapsed lung in November of 2021 which stubbornly wouldn't reinflate. So they called in a thoracic surgeon to repair the lung. He saw a spot on the lung which he didn't like and took it out while he was in there.

The spot turned out to be cancerous and I've been going for regular CT Scans to monitor the situation. Yesterday I went to hear the surgeon's latest interpretation of the scan.

He's not happy with how one nodule, right near the one he removed two years ago, is acting and is sending me for a biopsy.

I have to get blood drawn tomorrow and then go for the biopsy on the 23rd. I see the surgeon again on the 30th to get the results.

It sounds like this biopsy is a bit of a big deal. I need to be at the brand new Valley Hospital at 8 AM. The instructions say they will give me a local anesthetic and then use a CT Scanner to stick a needle into the area of my lung in question. That should be fun.

The thing that really concerns me is they say there is a reasonable chance that the lung could collapse slightly, or not so slightly, and I really don't need to go through that again. Then I get monitored for a couple of hours I suppose just in case the lung collapses.

I'm not allowed to drive afterwards and I wonder why that's the case? So my wife has to go with me. I suppose we shall see what we shall see.

The War in Gaza

The war in Gaza continues and casualties are mounting especially among the Palestinian civilian population.

The Gaza Health Ministry claims 30,000 Palestinians have been killed but doesn't differentiate between combatants and civilians. Hamas admits to 6,000 fighters killed while the IDF claims 12,000. Either way, assuming the Health Ministry numbers are correct, which is a big if, then something like 18,000-24,000 civilians have died. The media always adds "mostly women and children." Given normal demographics I would it's mostly children. Funny how feminism isn't a thing when it comes to war.

War sucks and urban warfare really sucks when one side is embedded in buildings without any regard for possible civilian casualties. The strategy here is clear. Hamas crosses the border, commits a bunch of atrocities and then cries when the Israelis respond. Hamas are terrorists, murderers and rapists and the Palestinians in Gaza have been supporting them for 20 years.

Which is not to say they deserve what's going on. No one deserves this kind of stuff. Unfortunately it happens in a war. That's why war is to be avoided.

A lot of people are calling for a ceasefire including the UN Security Council. But they're not asking for the return of the remaining hostages at the same time. I suspect that's a non-starter. How many hostages are still alive? I've seen an estimate of about 100 but who knows? About 100 were returned during a previous ceasefire and I believe 30 or so have been declared as killed.

It's unclear to me what the Israeli end game is here beyond the return of the remaining hostages. I'm not sure they have one and that could be a real problem.

Bill Mahar on Slavery

Bill Mahar went on a bit of a rant about slavery that some "progressive" sites have labeled as horrendous. I watched the clip and I didn't see anything horrendous about it beyond some truths that some folks don't want to acknowledge.

The whole point Maher is making is that slavery was a common horror all over the word and that's true. Modern "progressives" seem to think that slavery was unique to North America. OK, when he started talking about "you have to cancel Jesus" because he never spoke out against it, that was a little weird I'll give you that. 

He then went on to complain about people wanting to cancel historical figures because they owned slaves. Yes, people have demanded that statues of Washington, Jefferson and even Ulysses S. Grant, because he had a slave that he freed, be torn down because they owned slaves in an era where lots of people, including black people in the US, owned slaves. Can you spell "presentism?" 

The authors of the Constitution mistakenly thought that slavery was on the way out and would disappear within the next ten or twenty years. Even the slaveholding states thought that this was the case which is why they didn't get too upset over Article 1, Section 9 which allowed Congress to make the importation of slaves illegal in 20 years. That's exactly what happened on January 1, 1808 based upon an 1807 bill signed into law by Thomas Jefferson. 

In the meantime slavery was either abolished or being phased out in all of the northern states by 1808.

Unfortunately, the gods laugh at the foolishness of mortals and the invention of the Cotton Gin in 1793 suddenly made an institution of questionable economic value into one that appeared to be enormously profitable. Cotton production exploded from 700 hectares in 1790 to 17,000 hectares in 1800 and then to over a million hectares in 1861. 

The ironic thing was that slavery was still a millstone around the southern economy. It made a handful of people rich but generally kept the entire area as something of an economic backwater. Free labor would have been much more productive and improved things for everyone including the plantation owners.

Was Social Security Racist?

I ran into a claim today that the original Social Security bill was racist because it excluded agricultural and domestic workers most of whom were black.

A little background investigation led me to understand that this claim was accurate but misleading. It was accurate that agricultural and domestic workers were originally not eligible but NOT because they were specifically excluded but because they were outside of the groups that were included.

The Social Security Act of 1935 was a complicated bill that contained 11 Titles and authorized 7 distinct programs. Only Title II was what we now know as Social Security. It was the only one of the 7 programs that was solely a federal program. The rest were federal and state supported (think today's Medicaid). 

All of the racism claims, even those by well known historians, confuse the racial motives associated with programs other than Title II with Title II. Title II did not exclude blacks, nor did it exclude agricultural and domestic workers, rather it only included those workers regularly employed in commerce and industry. 

This left out a whole slew of occupations in addition to agricultural and domestic workers (which usually drives the racism claim) including the self employed, merchant seamen and members of congress. Of the 20 million workers excluded 15 million were white.

So this is a highly dubious claim based upon manipulating the truth to make it say what you want it to say even though it's bullshit.