Johnny Foreigner

Or as you could also term it, the memoirs of Jefferson Davis. And it’s tedious, no doubt about it. With occasional little nuggets. He’s adamant that secession was the right of any and every state, obviously. And one can see interesting little parallels as to how Brussels would react if an EU member decided in 2080 or so that they think they’d really rather like to leave.

However, the one that got me was an odd fact. I think I had known, maybe, that the US banned slave importation in 1808 or thereabouts. There was smuggling but not all that much. And that some 450k Africans were imported. Which, by the time of the civil war, had led to a population of 4 million or so slaves (to which, presumably, one should add whatever number of free blacks there were). And that’s without any further importation (or immigration, obviously) after 1808.

And here’s what surprised me. Davis talks about the massive increase in the slave population, showing that said chattel slavery was very much milder than than that of other forms of it that history records elsewhere. And looking it up there seems to have been a 30% increase per decade in that slave population. Which for a pre-modern population is something of a population boom, isn’t it? Certainly in 18th century Britain urban populations didn’t even reproduce themselves, not sure if that was also true of the first half of the 19th.

So slaves were very definitely at well above subsistence level.

While Davis obviously thinks this worth mentioning as an apologia of sorts, no, I do not think that getting that second bowl of gruel a day is worth the horrors of chattel slavery. But there obviously was something different about American slavery: the African population of the British Caribbean islands nowhere near managed to replace itself while still in slavery, let alone show those sorts of growth rates (no, not even on Barbuda, essentially a stud farm run by the Codringtons).

Anyone got any references to more on this? Because it wouldn’t (probably because I don’t know all that much about the subject) surprise me, given that expansion, to find that this increase was larger than that of the white population at the time: sans immigration, of course.

How much are Egyptians Arabs?

Not for any particular reason but just pondering. In the same sense that we English are a mixture, Celt, Anglo Saxon, Jute, Viking, Norman and so on. But there’s a very great chunk of it that is still Celt. The rulers may have come in but the population (perhaps, at times, only the female) endured.

And with Egypt. How much are they Arabs, from the conquest, and how much Egyptians from before?

And, actually, I could imagine that the Circassian and Alan genetic influence is greater than the Arab. Imagine that is, not prove. For the Mamluk armies etc were all recruited, first generation, from the steppes as slaves. And children of them could not join the army at all, or administration, so must have gone off into the general population. So I could imagine that that influence was greater than the Arab.

Anyone know?

The adverts for Protein World slimming products featuring a bikini-clad model were widely criticised in the UK for objectifying women.
….
It is beginning to prove as contentious in America as it did in Britain and an online petition has already been set up calling for the ads to be taken down.

A few thousand on some posters for the subway and millions in sales as the Twitterati do the advertising in their outrage.

How long before said outraged realise they’re being played?

The civil rights activist who was “outed” as white after years of presenting herself professionally and socially as a black woman has called into question her parentage, saying she has no proof that her white mother and father are her biological parents.

Is this just blowin’ smoke and desperately inventing whatever? Or an actual delusion?

The aim is to learn more about “the intensity of the Scandinavian colonisation” in the 9th and 10th centuries in the Cotentin Peninsula, said Richard Jones, a senior history lecturer at the University of Leicester.

That includes trying to find out whether the colonisers kept to themselves or married amongst the locals, he added.

The French volunteers have been chosen because they have surnames that are of Scandinavian origin or that have been present in France since at least the 11th century. They also qualify if all four of their grandparents lived within a 50-kilometre radius of their current home.

French data protection authorities gave their green light to the study, which will be published in 2016, but the DNA testing has raised eyebrows in some quarters.

“We’re worried this will build on the idea that there are real Normans and fake Normans,” said Jacques Declosmenil, head of the local wing of the Movement Against Racism (MRAP) group.

“In the current context of xenophobia, it’s very dangerous. Racists could use this to say: ‘I’ve got proof that I haven’t got any Arab blood,’ for instance.”

Jeebus.

It’s really only looking at which flavour of Germanic overlies the original Celt after all. The Franks, like the Scandis, were all of that Germanic grouping that came in from the east anyway.

We are definitely seeing more diversity today, in television and in movies. Probably more than we ever have. There are certainly more Asians, more South Asians, more people from the Middle East, portrayed on television today, as compared to when I started out.

But in Hollywood, Caucasian is still the norm. Your heroes are still Caucasian. So that is somewhere we need more diversity, in terms of who’s creating the stories, who’s starring in the stories, who the stories are about. You can have a lot of brown people, but if the story’s really about white people, then it’s diversity, but not the kind we need.

Aasif Mandvi

Given that, you know, Indians are caucasians….

So, Rachel Dolezal’s “crime”, according to the SJW’s at Salon, is:

It’s about, apparently, flat out deception. It’s about how one person chose to obtain a college education and jobs and credibility in her community.

Gonna put that bird who lied about being Cherokee in order to gain tenure at Harvard in a pickle, isn’t it?

What’s that? She’s a Progressive? A Senator?

Ah, right, yes, forget I said that.

Meet Rachel Dolezal. You might have something in common.

An anti-corruption watchdog has found proof that a British company searching for oil in Africa’s oldest national park paid thousands of dollars to a Congolese military officer whose soldiers have been accused of bribing, intimidating and even killing the company’s opponents.
The watchdog, Global Witness, has obtained cheques and receipts for $42,250 (£27,475) that the company, Soco, paid the officer, Major Burimba Feruzi, over a fortnight in the spring of 2014. Opponents of drilling in Virunga national park, a Unesco World Heritage site in the Democratic Republic of Congo, were being violently silenced at that time.

Corrupt practices happen in corrupt parts of the world.

I am shocked, shocked. Of course, you never know whether it’s a shakedown (not exactly unknown among men with guns) or not.

But actually I am shocked. Who the hell pays a bribe with a cheque? That’s incompetent.

Snigger:

Belgium on Monday began minting €2.50 coins marking the 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s defeat of at the Battle of Waterloo, after France forced it to scrap a two-euro coin made for the same purpose.
Paris objected to the new Belgian coin, commemorating the French emperor’s defeat by British and Prussian forces, earlier this year, saying it would create tensions at a time when Europe’s unity is under threat.
Belgium was forced to get scrap about 180,000 two-euro coins that had already been minted after Paris sent a letter saying they could cause an “unfavourable reaction in France”.
But Belgium has managed to skirt the French protests using a rule that allows eurozone countries to unilaterally issue coins if they are in an irregular denomination – in this case, €2.50.

And causing an unfavourable reaction in France. Is this a problem or the point?

Father suggests an addition to our vocabulary, spurtle:

The spurtle (or “spirtle”) is a Scots kitchen tool, dating from at least the fifteenth century. It was originally a flat, wooden, spatula-like utensil, used for flipping oatcakes on a hot girdle the Scottish equivalent to a griddle.

Over time, the original implement changed shape and began being used specifically for stirring oatmeal and soups. The rod-like shape is designed for constant stirring which prevents the porridge from congealing and so becoming lumpy and unappealing.[1] It looks like a fat wooden dowel, often with a contoured end to give the user a better grip.

Spurtle Sturgeon and the Demented Porridge Wogs.

We might well adopt that….

the nine Azore Islands located off the coast of Portugal.

Umm, no, not really.

16 incredible European destinations

Well, no.

The Azores (UK /əˈzɔrz/ ə-ZORZ, US /ˈeɪzɔrz/ AY-zorz; Portuguese: Açores, [ɐˈsoɾɨʃ]), officially the Autonomous Region of the Azores (Região Autónoma dos Açores), is one of the two autonomous regions of Portugal, composed of nine volcanic islands situated in the North Atlantic Ocean about 1,360 km (850 mi) west of continental Portugal, about 880 km (550 mi) northwest of Madeira, about 1,925 km (1,196 mi) southeast of Newfoundland, and about 6,392 km (3,972 mi) northeast of Brazil.

Not really Europe, is it?

The British left must learn to speak a new language – Spanish

So says Owen Jones.

So I offer that title as a first language lesson for said British left. Admittedly, there’s a couple of ways one could interpret that, one using Polla to mean Polly Toynbee, which presumably isn’t what Owen is referring to as that would be the old British left, the one that must be left behind.

The other, more colloquial, meaning, well, more sui8table really as these people are willing to say or do prety much anything for power, aren’t they?

French company EDF has announced it will stop offering its 30,000 employees 10 weeks of holiday a year – a working condition that is envied around the world.

Blimey.

And that’s before bank holidays etc…..

Think that could be true.

Russian officials have launched an investigation into one of Russia’s most important spaceship builders amid a multi-million pound corruption scandal engulfing the country’s troubled space industry.

The arrest of Dmitry Dyakonov, the director of a firm that provides legal services to the company that builds Russia’s famous Proton and Angara space rockets, followed accusations of misappropriation and embezzlement across the industry that could run into billions of pounds.

My dealings with them were a long time ago and fairly minor but you could see the way the system was moving. Bits and pieces of work were outsourced specifically so as to create the opportunity for a margin to be built in. For a time we organised the import of the rad hard processors they needed for rockets. Lost that to people who were willing to pad for that margin….

It began in September last year, when the New South Wales branch of the RSPCA received a tip-off about the alleged mistreatment of sheep, including verbal abuse, that were being shorn at Boorungie Station, 130 kilometres from Broken Hill.

The complaint was lodged by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which had apparently obtained footage and testimony from an undercover operative working at the station.

Jeebus. Shearing time, bludger swears at sheep, this is abuse of animal rights.

Forgive me but there’s two Sheilahs who might benefit from a slight change of lifestyle I feel:

But Nicolah Donovan, president of Lawyers for Animals, said animals did understand.

“I think it is conceivable that verbal abuse of an extreme nature against an animal, whether it be human, sheep or otherwise, could constitute an act of violence,” she said.

“We have accepted that domestic violence can certainly be constituted by acts of extreme verbal abuse, particularly when the victim of the abuse is especially vulnerable – if they have a low fear threshold or they lack understanding that the verbal abuse isn’t going to proceed to a physical threat against them.

“This might be the case with children or farm animals, and the level of abuse needn’t be that extreme to cause that kind of fear in an animal.”

Lynda Stoner, CEO at Animal Liberation NSW, agreed.

She said animals did not need to understand language in order to comprehend that a human speaker was frustrated or angry.

“I’m not sure all animals can understand different dialects,” she said.

“I don’t think they’re getting the nuances someone is using.

“What they will be getting though is the threat inherent in the way that voice is used.

“I believe they can absolutely comprehend emotion.

“We all know that animals feel pain and suffering, we know animals remember what’s been done to them, and we know they can anticipate brutality if it’s come before.

“I don’t think that’s placing human emotions on animals. It’s simply that all animals, all species, are capable of feeling pleasure, pain, suffering and all those feelings we feel.”

Jesus honeys, get laid, have a drink or two. That someone said fuck in front of a sheep, even to one, just isn’t a big problem. At least this isn’t Wales where they do that, not say it, to the sheep.

Anyone else think we’re reaching the limits of first world problems?

There’s a reason for the convention that a man undoes his jacket buttons when he sits down.

Jus’ Sayin’….

If even Michelle Obama can’t speak about race without being told to ‘quit whining’ then who can?

A rich woman, one of the 1% at least, soon to be one of the 0.1% as a result of her husband’s retirement career, in one of the richest countries on the planet. Someone who is, by any global or historical standard horrifyingly well off. And she’s complaining?

Yeah, she’s whining.

Britain is operating a secret listening station at its embassy in Vienna, Austria’s ORF public broadcaster has claimed.

The broadcaster has released pictures of a small shed-like structure on the roof of the Vienna embassy, which it says conceals sophisticated antennas.

The site is used by GCHQ to monitor Austrian mobile phone networks and other communications, according to the ORF.

What does anyone think happens?

Well, yes?