Someone Had Way Too Much Fun Writing This Label

Reparations

6/29/26 Tilting at Windmills discusses the current demands by Africa for slave reparations from Europe and America. The transatlantic slave trade is "the greatest crime against humanity" unlike the longer and larger transondian slave trade.

As most of you know, slaves were usually sold by Africans to Arabs and Europeans. This had severe bad effects on Africa. Largely agricultural societies were militarized to take prisoners of war for sale.  Much of this wealth was spent on repeating the process and buying alcohol, tools, and cloth. At the end, African slave traders exported several generations of workers in prime working years and failed to sensibly invest the capital. 

In England, some of the wealth from the slave trade was sensibly invested. Thomas Sowell says the role this had in capitalizing the Indistrial Revolution had been greatly exaggerated.  Over the years, I have seen many docum5 about Georgian building by slave owners that absurd vanity project:  capital wasted. It made England no better off.

In America, much of the wealth was sensibly invested. Lots of that invested capital was destroyed during the Civil War. Is that unfortunate? Yes but that wealth that Africa wants is just as gone as that which the slave traders wasted.

Stop whining and ask why a continent awash in natural resources remains poor today.

I Promise to Get Back to Current Events and History Soon (Fireflies As Light Pollution)

This relocation is just burning up all my time and energy. We have an offer on the house in Idaho. While not as much as we had originally hoped, it is sufficient to pay for the Tennessee house, the staircase rebuilds, adding a small staircase for the dogs from back porch to back yard, and a split A/C for the shop.

We drove up there last night about 11 PM to do s sky survey. Adding to the difficulty was a Full Moon and some high cirrys clouds. While not as dark as the house we had in Horseshoe Bend, it is better than what i have now. Beta and Gamma Lyrae, both magnitude 3 5 stars, were easy to see and Delta Lyrae, magnitude 4, was visible with averted vision. Polsris, magnitude 2, of course was plainly visible. I expect without the planet's most annoying nightlight I will see magnitude 4 and 5 stars easily. 

There are streetlights in the area but they are at least 100 feet below us and hidden by our front forest. The biggest light pollution problem seems to be fireflies. This is somewhat magical to us, still.