Friday, August 19, 2011

Some Random Quick Takes

We are busy packing up my home office and the dining room in preparation for some major home repairs and we have to get it done before we head to New England for a week. So I want to just pass on some posts I found interesting

Ta-Nehsi Coates at The Atlantic has been tearing apart the meme that the Civil War was avoidable tragedy that could've been avoided by compromise and the buyout of slave-holders:
Gradual compensated emancipation would, presumably, have been the better option. It would have saved the lives of soldiers, while leaving my grandmother's grandmother as property. This would, presumably, have been "untragic" or "less tragic." At any rate, Delaware -- a state where there were more free blacks than slaves -- rejected this option, preferring to grapple to the last. Compensated emancipation isn't a hypothetical. It was attempted. It failed for actual reasons.
I decline all offers to mourn the second American Revolution. No one mourns the first.
Have to agree with much of what Nashville Fan at Daily Kos recently wrote:
The problem is not WHAT you believe, the problem is the arrogant, dismissive, and hateful way in which you express those beliefs.
 I take what he calls white progressives are what working class Dems in Mass for many years simply called stuck-up assholes from Cambridge, in other words the people who lost Kennedy's seat through sheer arrogance.

Now onto the weather, here is the GISTEMP temperature map for July, click for the larger image.

In sports, I simply can't watch ESPN's morning shows anymore. It has become basically a celebrity channel, everything is about coaches, free-agents,  LeBron and Tiger Woods. How about some actual sports?

Finally:
"The Soviet Union? I thought you guys broke up."
"YES, that's what we wanted you to think!"

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