Category: History

An Interesting Take on Mali

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It turns out that north Mali has something in common with the antebellum South, a pervasive and systematic system of slavery:

The insurgents who have fled from invading French troops in Mali have been taking with them some of their most important possessions — slaves.

The Tuareg tribes that overran Mali’s military with the help of Arab extremist groups aligned with al-Qaeda have long held slaves and many of the captives are from families that have been enslaved for generations.

“It’s no way to live, without your freedom,” said Mohammed Yattara, a former slave who ran away from his Tuareg masters years ago.

“You depend on them for everything. If they tell you to do something, you have to do it, or they will beat you,” he said as he sat with the chief of the village of Toya and among men and women who were descendants of slaves or former slaves.

One of the artifacts of slavery is that its abolition has the effect of destroying a lot of wealth held by the elites, and the elites tend not to view this favorably.

For some historical perspective, note that the first war in North America over the issue of slavery was the War of Texas Independence, and the slave holders won.  (Yes, this was the primary causus belli was slavery, so the Mexicans were the good guys, but they lost, so the Texans wrote the history.)

H/t DownWithTyranny.

More on the 2nd Amendment and Its Relationship to Slavery

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I will direct you to The Hidden History of the Second Amendment, a 102 page article published in the U.C. Davis Law Review in 1998.  (Link is to the abstract, you can download the PDF from there)

This is a (obviously) a much longer, and much more extensively annotated, piece than either Thom Hartmann’s pro 2nd amendment/slavery patrol link article or Paul Finkleman’s argument against this.

I’ve read the full article, though it was a quick read, and while it clearly does not go as far as Hartmann, author Carl T. Bogus merely addresses the adoption of the 2nd amendment, rather than the whole Constitution as Hartmann does, but he does make a compelling case that the 2nd amendment was specifically a collective right granted to the states, and that the support for this amendment was driven by the fears of slave owners about an uprising, particularly in Virginia.

Bogus (I love that name) does admit that he no evidence that Madison, who wrote the Bill of Rights to preserve slavery, he does show that Madison’s compatriots and constituents in Virginia found the possibility that Congress would disarm the state slave patrols to be a concern of paramount importance.

In either case, it does make a slam dunk case for the 2nd amendment as a collective right assigned to the states, and not a personal right, which makes the so-called “strict constructionists” who voted for a personal right to firearms in District of Columbia v. Heller to be hypocrites and hacks.

Another Position on the 2nd Amendment

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Paul Finkleman makes the obvious point that the 2nd amendment was passed after the Constitution was approved, as evidenced by the fact that it’s an amendment, making Thom Hartmann’s argument that the it was about slave patrols moot.

The Bill of Rights was passed about two years after the Constitution was ratified, though some states had not ratified the Constitution, by the time that the Bill of Rights was proposed.

The actual line may be somewhere in the middle. You see, one of the factors in the ratification of the Constitution, was the Massachusetts Compromise, which involved a commitment to amending the Constitution, including the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which includes militia rights.

Considering that it was Mason and Madison, both of whom were slave holders, who were instrumental in the development and ratification of the Bill of Rights, it’s still a matter of some dispute.

My inclination is to lean a little bit on the side of Thom Hartmann, particularly given the history, which clearly shows that slavery was arguably the most contentious issue at the constitutional amendment.

In any case, it is more ambiguous than I originally suggested.

H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Interesting History on the 2nd Amendment

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I’ve made the comment that the current gun regulation regime is driven by issues of race.

Specifically, once the Black Panthers (the real ones, not the current wannabees) started carrying weapons openly, and then went to the California legislator while packing heat, it led to the passing of what was then the strictest gun control laws in the nation, signed into law by Ronald Reagan, because, “Oh Noes, Blax with Gunz“, and this panic about “black militancy” also led to the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968.

Once this law was, passed, gun organizations, most notably the NRA started freaking out, because, Oh Noes, I Needs Gunz to Protekt me from Blax!

So we saw the development of the modern paranoiac gun “rights” movement.

Well, it turns out that race has had a major role in using and owning firearms in the United States goes back far further.

Historical documents show the 2nd amendment was put in the constitution to sanction paramilitary militias used to keep slaves from revolting or escaping:

The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says “State” instead of “Country” (the Framers knew the difference – see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia’s vote. Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that . . . and we all should be too.

 In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South, they were also called the “slave patrols,” and they were regulated by the states.

In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, laws were passed in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their male white employees to be members of the Georgia Militia, and for those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state. The law defined which counties had which armed militias and even required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who may be planning uprisings.

As Dr. Carl T. Bogus wrote for the University of California Law Review in 1998, “The Georgia statutes required patrols, under the direction of commissioned militia officers, to examine every plantation each month and authorized them to search ‘all Negro Houses for offensive Weapons and Ammunition’ and to apprehend and give twenty lashes to any slave found outside plantation grounds.”

 It’s the answer to the question raised by the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained when he asks, “Why don’t they just rise up and kill the whites?” If the movie were real, it would have been a purely rhetorical question, because every southerner of the era knew the simple answer: Well regulated militias kept the slaves in chains.

 Sally E. Haden, in her book Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas, notes that, “Although eligibility for the Militia seemed all-encompassing, not every middle-aged white male Virginian or Carolinian became a slave patroller.” There were exemptions so “men in critical professions” like judges, legislators and students could stay at their work. Generally, though, she documents how most southern men between ages 18 and 45 – including physicians and ministers – had to serve on slave patrol in the militia at one time or another in their lives.

 And slave rebellions were keeping the slave patrols busy.

The 2nd amendment was not about allowing citizens to resist tyranny, it was about allowing states to enforce the tyranny required to keep slaves in chains.

Live and learn.

H/t Cthulhu at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Belated 100th Birthday, Mr. President

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Richard Milhaus Nixon was born on January 9, 1913.

I’m not a deep student of history, but I do believe that he was the worst president from the period 1933 through 1973 1974, and that he was the best president from the period of 1969 through 2013. (Would you like that with extrajudicial drone killings, sir?)

We are led by increasingly small and petty men.

Just Go Read Matt Taibbi

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He is on fire when writing about the nature of the bank bailouts:

………

Through behavior like this, the government has turned the entire financial system into a kind of vast confidence game – a Ponzi-like scam in which the value of just about everything in the system is inflated because of the widespread belief that the government will step in to prevent losses. Clearly, a government that’s already in debt over its eyes for the next million years does not have enough capital on hand to rescue every Citigroup or Regions Bank in the land should they all go bust tomorrow. But the market is behaving as if Daddy will step in to once again pay the rent the next time any or all of these kids sets the couch on fire and skips out on his security deposit. Just like an actual Ponzi scheme, it works only as long as they don’t have to make good on all the promises they’ve made. They’re building an economy based not on real accounting and real numbers, but on belief. And while the signs of growth and recovery in this new faith-based economy may be fake, one aspect of the bailout has been consistently concrete: the broken promises over executive pay.

………

The implications here go far beyond the question of whether Dimon and Co. committed insider trading by buying and selling stock while they had access to material nonpublic information about the bailouts. The broader and more pressing concern is the clear implication that by failing to act, federal regulators­ have tacitly approved the nondisclosure. Instead of trusting the markets to do the right thing when provided with accurate information, the government has instead channeled Jack Nicholson – and decided that the public just can’t handle the truth.

………

So what exactly did the bailout accomplish? It built a banking system that discriminates against community banks, makes Too Big to Fail banks even Too Bigger to Failier, increases risk, discourages sound business lending and punishes savings by making it even easier and more profitable to chase high-yield investments than to compete for small depositors. The bailout has also made lying on behalf of our biggest and most corrupt banks the official policy of the United States government. And if any one of those banks fails, it will cause another financial crisis, meaning we’re essentially wedded to that policy for the rest of eternity – or at least until the markets call our bluff, which could happen any minute now.

Other than that, the bailout was a smashing success.

Seriously, just go read, and then scream at your congresscritters.

Turtle Power!

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They beat us to the moon:

You might say the answer is Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and that other guy Michael Collins, the crew of Apollo 11. Or you could represent for the crew of Apollo 10, which reached the moon in May 1969 and then headed back to Earth without landing.

But there is a much stranger answer to this question, depending on how much you care about humans and what your definition of reaching the moon might be. Before any people arrived at the moon, other animals got there first. And unlike the dogs and monkeys that were made famous in early space shots and Earth orbits, the first vertebrates to reach the moon were a pair of steppe tortoises, Discovery’s Amy Shira Teitel reminds us.

The Soviet Zond 5 sent the animals around the moon — although not into lunar orbit — during a mission in the middle of September, 1968. The unmanned craft then returned to Earth and splashed down in the Indian Ocean, after which the Russians recovered the craft.

A month later, Soviet scentists revealed that the Zond had been a tiny ark, carrying the tortoises, “wine flies, meal worms, plants, seeds, bacteria, and other living matter.” A small dummy packed with radiation sensors flew, too.

Later, the turtles took to living in sewers, fighting with Japanese weapons, and eating pizza.

And Republican Wankertude Reaches New Heights

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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell just filibustered his own bill:

My admiration for the Senate’s minority leader, the Hon. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, is limited. But his latest move took even me by surprise.

 In a tactic he thought would put the Obama Administration in an uncomfortable position, yesterday McConnell proposed a measure that would give the president, rather than the Congress, the responsibility for raising the federal debt ceiling.

 Then, when Democrats surprised him by being willing to bring it up for a vote, McConnell reacted in the way that comes most naturally to him: by threatening a filibuster. Attentive readers will recall that over the past six years, McConnell has been responsible for most of the filibusters in America’s 225-year Constitutional history. ………

If anyone wonders if the casual use of the filibuster has not gone over the edge, they need to understand this: The Senate Minority Leader filibustered his own bill.

I understand that their are people who legitimately believe that the filibuster, as well as other traditions make the Senate the “World’s greatest deliberative body,” but I think the fact that that proves that it is nothing more than, “A petri dish for narcissistic sociopaths,” because The Senate Minority Leader filibustered his own bill.

What part of, “The Senate Minority Leader filibustered his own bill,” don’t you understand?

I Haz a Sad

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The Big E has finished its last tour, and it will be decommissioned and scrapped:

ABOARD THE USS ENTERPRISE – The world’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier ended its remarkable career at sea on Sunday when it pulled into its home port for the final time after participating in every major conflict since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

The USS Enterprise began shutting down its eight nuclear reactors almost as soon as it arrived at its pier at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia, where thousands of cheering family members and friends welcomed the ship home from its 25th and final deployment after nearly eight months at sea. The ship will never move on its own power again and will eventually be scrapped in Washington state.

………

The Navy will officially deactivate the Enterprise on Dec. 1, but it will take several more years for it to be decommissioned as its reactors are taken out. About 15,000 people are expected to attend the deactivation ceremony, which will be its last public ceremony after several days of tours for former crew members.

Nice Catch

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Lindsay Beyerstein has a very interesting analysis of Henry Wiencek’s essay The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson in Smithsonian magazine.

Some of the facts I knew, like the fact that George Washington made far more diligent efforts to free his slaves after his death than Thomas Jefferson ever did.

What I didn’t know, and now do know, is that he kept detailed records of slave beatings, and that Monticello’s primary cash crop was slaves:

The most disturbing revelation in this story is that Jefferson didn’t just keep slaves to work on his farm. He wrote that his real business model was “the increase” of his female slaves. He was raising human beings to be auctioned off like livestock. Jefferson calculated that the children of his slaves brought in a reliable 4% return per annum. It was a great business, he recommended it to everyone.

In the movies, we know someone’s a benevolent slave-holder if they “don’t break up families.” Well, those are the movies.

The revisionist fiction is that slavery was an unprofitable institution by Jefferson’s time. Wiencek explains how Jefferson breathed new economic life into bonded servitude by devising profitable models for slave labor in factories and wheat fields as tobacco farming was being phased out.

Jefferson spurned a golden opportunity to walk away from the slave trade. An old revolutionary comrade willed Jefferson a small fortune to pay for his slaves’ release and education, but Jefferson refused, even though he was the executor of the will.

George Washington freed his slaves upon his death, but Jefferson didn’t even go that far.

Some defenders will say that it’s unfair to judge Jefferson by the standards of our day, but the fact is, Jefferson fell short of the standards of his own time. He knew it was wrong to own slaves. In fact, his writings helped to set the standards of his day.

This explains much about the political culture of Virginia.

I had always wondered how the progressive (for his day) politics of Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia became the reactionary bigotry one sees leading up to (and during, and a long time after) the Civil War.

It now appears that the Jefferson’s progressive positions, at least insofar as slavery was concerned, was nothing more than a mirage, which means that the change in Virginia’s political culture was far less extreme than one is commonly led to believe.

I Have a New Favorite Abraham Lincoln Quote

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And it is from the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

Stephen Douglas was arguing for “Popular Sovereignty”, where he argued that the new territories could ignore the Dredd Scott case, because they would be acting as independently of the Federal Government.

To say that Lincoln thought that this was weak tea is an understatement, because of the sweeping nature of the Supreme Court decision:

Has it not got down as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death?

Heh.

Imagine that. People were making fun of homeopathy 170 years ago.

It’s Beginning toBlook Like the Last Days of the USSR Here

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Much like the USSR life expectancies are falling at the end of empire:

For generations of Americans, it was a given that children would live longer than their parents. But there is now mounting evidence that this enduring trend has reversed itself for the country’s least-educated whites, an increasingly troubled group whose life expectancy has fallen by four years since 1990.

 Researchers have long documented that the most educated Americans were making the biggest gains in life expectancy, but now they say mortality data show that life spans for some of the least educated Americans are actually contracting. Four studies in recent years identified modest declines, but a new one that looks separately at Americans lacking a high school diploma found disturbingly sharp drops in life expectancy for whites in this group. Experts not involved in the new research said its findings were persuasive.

 The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered possible explanations, including a spike in prescription drug overdoses among young whites, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, rising obesity, and a steady increase in the number of the least educated Americans who lack health insurance.

 The steepest declines were for white women without a high school diploma, who lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008, said S. Jay Olshansky, a public health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the lead investigator on the study, published last month in Health Affairs. By 2008, life expectancy for black women without a high school diploma had surpassed that of white women of the same education level, the study found.

 White men lacking a high school diploma lost three years of life. Life expectancy for both blacks and Hispanics of the same education level rose, the data showed. But blacks over all do not live as long as whites, while Hispanics live longer than both whites and blacks.

 “We’re used to looking at groups and complaining that their mortality rates haven’t improved fast enough, but to actually go backward is deeply troubling,” said John G. Haaga, head of the Population and Social Processes Branch of the National Institute on Aging, who was not involved in the new study.

In the last two decades of its existence, life expectancies fell in the USSR, because it was carving the heart out of its economy with a bloated and over-sized military.

Luckily, we’re nothing like that.

Just how many primary care physicians would one carrier battle group buy?

This is Cool

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An Ancient Roman mosaic was found beneath a farmer’s field in Turkey:

A giant poolside mosaic featuring intricate geometric patterns has been unearthed in southern Turkey, revealing the far-reaching influence of the Roman Empire at its peak.

 The mosaic, which once decorated the floor of a bath complex, abuts a 25-foot (7-meter)-long pool, which would have been open to the air, said Michael Hoff, a University of Nebraska, Lincoln art historian and director of the mosaic excavation. The find likely dates to the third or fourth century, Hoff said. The mosaic itself is an astonishing 1,600 square feet (149 square meters) — the size of a modest family home.

Best Trial By Fire Performance Ever

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On Saturday, I competed in Trial By Fire, which is a cooking competition, where you compete to cook authentic medieval dishes (650-1650 CE in this case)in 4 categories (Meat, Grain, Vegetable, Dessert) in 4 hours in camping conditions (no electricity, but bottled gas/coleman is OK).

I competed with two dishes, Toad in the Hole (Yorkshire Pudding with sausage in it), and Fried Kubba Kari (rice dumplings stuffed with the same), and I also made a thoroughly not-in-the-historical-period sausage gravy, because I had just cooked 2 lbs of lamb sausage, and because I had always wanted to make some.

Both the Toad in the Hole and the sausage gravy turned out well, though the dumplings did not.  They were made with broken rice, which was thoroughly cooked, but we could not get it to stick together, so it ended up fried rice with sausage.

Note on Recipes:
The following recipes are airy free.  I will replaced milk with almond milk, and butter with rendered chicken fat (schmaltz) so that they were kosher (fleishig) dishes.

Additionally, because of poor planning on my part, I picked up flour in the last minute, and could not find white flour without malted barley flour (Sharon* is allergic to malt and barley), so I used “white wheat” flour, which is not as suitable.

Recipes:

Toad in the Hole:

  • Roll Sausage in olive small balls, and brown in a skillet.
  • Mix with Yorkshire Pudding batter (see below).
  • Place cast iron dutch oven in a fire pit with the lid off. (I used the bottom of my charcoal smoker)
  • Place Dutch oven lid in fire as well.
  • Add ¼ cup of fat. (Drippings from a roast is traditional, you can also use olive oil, I used Schmaltz)
  • When the oil is just screaming hot (shimmering) pour the batter and sausage mixture in the dutch oven, and place the lid on, and pile coals on the lid. (See pic) This serves to create an oven effect on top of a fire.
  • Cook 20-30 minutes until puffy and brown on top.

Yorkshire Pudding Batter

Ingredients:

  • 6 large eggs
  • 1¼ Cup of Milk (I am using Almond Milk)
  • 1¼ Cup of flour
  • Pinch of salt
  • 3 tbsp of sweet butter (I am using Schmaltz)

Preparation:

  • Beat eggs and milk and melted schmaltz together until foamy.
  • Place the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl and make a well in and add the wet ingredients.
  • Beat until completely smooth (it should have the consistency of heavy cream).
  • Let the batter rest for 30-60 minutes before putting in pan for cooking.

Sausage Gravy

Ingredients:

  • 3 tablespoons butter (I am using chicken fat, not butter)
  • ¼ cup all-purpose flour
  • 3 cups whole milk (will be using almond milk)
  • salt and pepper to taste

Preparation:

  • Place sausage in a large, deep skillet.
  • Cook over medium-high heat until evenly brown.
  • Remove sausage with a slotted spoon, leaving the drippings in the pan.
  • Add butter, and stir until melted.
  • Add flour, turn heat to medium and stir until smooth and slightly brown.
  • Add milk slowly, stirring constantly.
  • Add back the crumbled sausage remaining after stuffing the Kubba Kari continuing to stir.
  • When the mixture has thickened, salt and pepper to taste.
  • If gravy becomes too thick, stir in a little more milk.

The sausage recipe I posted on the blog in 2007.

I did not win anything, but this is the first time that I’ve had a recipe actually go from the page to the table as intended at Trial by Fire. 

I have had things which became successful additions to my culinary repertoire, like my Indian spice rub, but this is the first time that my recipe turned out as initially intended.

There were no fire management issues, the batter came together well.

Considering the fact that I came up with the recipes about a week ahead of time, I got to cooking an hour late, that I didn’t do a trial run, and that this was my first time working with a roux (the sausage gravy), I am pleased with my results.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.