Author: haroldblackphd

January 29, 2024

My youngest granddaughter is named Haley. Her mother was in Tennessee’s MBA program and went with me to visit Alex Haley – a fellow University of Tennessee faculty member – at his farm in Norris, Tennessee. She had read Roots and meeting Alex had such an impression on her that she named her daughter “Haley”.  Roots was a sensation and spawned a TV mini series in 1977. To recap, Roots told the story of Kunta Kinte an African youth sold into slavery and his descendants leading to Haley himself. The actor Levar Burton played Kinte. I loved Alex but found it hard to believe that he had found his African roots.

For several years I served on the board of the East Tennessee Historical Society. I enjoyed my being on the board despite being the only one not from Tennessee or East Tennessee in particular. I love the rich history of the region learning about the contributions of blacks to country music, the mystery of the Melungeons and in particular the strong alliance to the Union during the Civil War. One of my dearest friends is kin to the famous Carter family and told me how Lesley Riddle traveled with A.P. Carter around the region composing songs and teaching Maybelle his fingerpicking guitar style. There were other influential but soon to be forgotten blacks such as Gus Cannon and Rufus Payne. In more modern times, singers like the Carolina Chocolate Drops have carried on the tradition of black country music.

However, I still felt like an outsider especially when the Society launched its First Families of Tennessee initiative which records the descendants of the first white families that came across the mountains from North Carolina to settle in the region. Still it is a fascinating history of strength and perseverance. I recommend highly Drury and Clavin’s Blood and Treasure, a wonderful book about Daniel Boone. Members of the Society’s board of directors then traced back to their immigrant ancestor, the first in their family to step foot in America. I am not envious of other people except in this one instance. One of my best friend’s ancestors immigrated from Sweden. He and his family every so often would visit his Swedish relatives and showed me a picture of the family cemetery where is buried the great great grandfather with the same name. I knew that the likelihood of my finding my ancestral African forebearers was almost zero. Slaves did not have last names. There was no records of births and parentage. So despite my love for Alex Haley, I looked upon Roots and entertainment rather than historical fact.

In the television series “Finding Your Roots” hosted by the esteemed historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr., LeVar Burton (Haley’s Kunte Kinte) is shocked when Gates reveals that Burton’s great great grandfather was a Confederate soldier. Personally, I was surprised that he was surprised. We black folk did not get this color by accident. I would guess that the majority of black Americans have white ancestors and many of them are descendants of Confederates.

The Society also has the Civil War Families of Tennessee which includes the descendants of Civil War soldiers, both north and south. Obviously, being from Georgia, I am excluded from this group but I am, like LeVar Burton, a direct descendant of a Civil War soldier – no not one of the 200,000 blacks who wore blue, but a confederate sergeant who served in the 6^th Georgia.

My maternal great grandfather Seth Towles was a sergeant in the 6th Georgia. Ironically, he never owned slaves but his sister was married to a Jarrell and lived on the Jarrell Plantation in Jones County, GA where Seth had a son Milous Towles with one of the cooks. My mother told me that Seth never disowned his black son and visited him every other Sunday for dinner at (Pop) Milous’ home. Mom said that he would load his black grandchildren in a wagon and take them to town in Macon to buy them things. All this while having a white family (he married after Milous was born). Because of this I don’t harbor any ill will toward my great great grandfather Seth. 

Seth is buried in a Confederate cemetery in Atlanta, less than a mile from my parents’ house at the site of the Battle of Ezra Church. Seth fought in that battle and wanted to be buried with his buddies who were killed and interred there. My son and nephew paid Seth a visit to update him on the progress made by his black descendants.

Because of Seth I was able to trace back to my immigrant ancestor Henry Towles born in Liverpool, England in 1651 who died in Accomack County VA in 1721. I discovered that I also have a Towles who fought in the Revolutionary War and one who served in the War of 1812. I guess I qualify to be a member of the National Sons of the American Revolution. I also qualify to join the Sons of the Confederate Veterans – but I’ll pass.

Knoxville Focus

Knoxfocus.com

January 29, 2024

I am a deer hunter and since 1971 I have not eaten any red meat except venison. I have no explanation except that since I can hunt and take enough game to last from the end of deer season to the beginning of the next, I see no need to eat beef or pork. I do eat fish, chicken and turkey and also am a turkey hunter. I have a fairly healthy diet and cannot recall the last time I have eaten fast food – although I have stopped for an early morning biscuit on the way to a hunt. I eat very little processed foods. All this is to say is that I do not understand fake meat. What’s the point of consuming a food like substance that is processed to imitate meat with its texture and smell? Wouldn’t it make more sense just to consume the plant and not all the other stuff that is added to it? Consider that one of the products imitating meat contains 22 ingredients. I would not feed it to my dog – and I bet my dog wouldn’t eat it. My dog is fed raw venison at each meal and venison has no added ingredients.

I presume that the fake meat industry arose from a combination of climate change and PETA activists who seek to decrease the consumption of meat. The PETA folks have been protesting meat consumption for years and just been silly in their protestations. The climate alarmists want to decrease meat consumption because they note that cows farts are a major source of methane in the atmosphere. Scientists report that methane has a warming potential more than 28 times that of carbon dioxide meaning that cows may pose a bigger threat to the environment than internal combustion engines. Who knew? The anti-cow lobby got a boost from the recent UN climate change conference in Dubai (of all places) where the delegates arrived in private jets, ate expensive cuts of beef and recommended that we, the great unwashed, go green and eat green.

A country that has taken seriously the threat to cows destroying the planet is Denmark with its large agriculture footprint and dairy farms. There it is estimated that “total methane emissions from Denmark’s approximately 570,000 dairy cows today amount to 2.3 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalents annually. Likewise, the total pig production results in methane emissions equal to 1.45 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalents per year.” A tonne is 1,000 kilograms. The Danes are experimenting adding algae to animal feed to reduce methane claiming that the algae are not harmful for human consumption. However, the Danish government has other ideas showing that governments think alike regardless of location. It is proposing a farming emissions tax on cows to force farmers to decrease the size of their herds and substitute non-animal products. The politicians in Denmark have obviously ignored the reaction of the farmers who are loudly protesting the proposed tax. In the Netherlands and New Zealand where similar taxes were proposed farmers staged protests that often turned violent. In the Netherlands, several political parties united to fight the government edicts and its prime minister declared a political crisis. The end result was a collapse of the government and the election of a conservative leader that shook the left wing media and entrenched European politicians.

The question is whether America will reach that point with some governments which seems intent on banning all internal combustion engines (ICE). Their war on stuff is getting absurd with some states proposing fines and jail time for operating gas powered lawn movers and weed eaters. The banning of ICEs comes at a cost. “Renewable” energy is highly inefficient and more costly than fossil fuels. The demands on the electric grid will cause brown outs and black outs. Energy will be more costly reducing consumers’ real incomes and having an adverse effect on the poor. What is particularly vexing is that the banning of ICEs has been shown to have a negligible impact on total CO2 emissions. When Americans come to realize that the climate change efforts costing over $1 trillion is either to make the left feel good and to transfer public funds to the green industry and their friends, perhaps they will follow the lead of the Netherlands in voting for a regime change.

Knoxville Focus

knoxfocus.com

January 15, 2024

It’s Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday as well as my son’s. So Happy Birthday MLK and Happy Birthday Morgan!

CNN ran a story that harkened back to the good old days. It was about Navy Federal Credit Union’s rejecting over half of its mortgage applications from blacks while accepting more that 75% of applications for the same type of mortgage from whites. It was the type of story that was published in big city newspapers during the 1970s and was similar to the ones in Nashville newspapers in the 1990s. These stories looked at the differential between black and white acceptance rates. The earlier studies charged that the differentials were proof that blacks were being discriminated against in the mortgage lending decision. The CNN article states explicitly that Navy Federal may not be discriminating against blacks but the disparity raises that possibility. The earlier studies simply looked at the final accept/reject disparities. The CNN study uses the data mandated by the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. These data are publicly available and include applicant’s race, gender, applicant’s income, debt-to-income ratio, the loan amount, the property value and the neighborhood’s socioeconomic makeup. However, the data do not include credit worthiness which is proprietary and why CNN cannot positively assert discrimination although they strongly imply it. CNN states that black applicants were more than twice as likely to be denied as white applicants and “Latino applicants were roughly 85% more likely to be denied than White applicants.”

I must admit some personal responsibility in the analysis of lending discrimination. My study of discrimination in mortgage lending while at the Comptroller of the Currency in the early 1970s was the first econometric studied that modeled the lending decision and used a unique statistical procedure to test for discrimination. That study led in part to the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and to the Community Reinvest Act (CRA). The early newspaper articles alleging lending discrimination prompted the Comptroller of the Currency to ask me to determine if the allegations were true for national banks which were regulated by the agency. The problem was that in those days there were no data.  Therefore, we went to interview major bank lenders. We asked what were the important variables in the lending decision and constructed a mortgage lending application form that contained those variables. We did not put race on the application because we felt that a minority borrower would be reluctant to indicate race if it were felt that the lender might discriminate. So we put the demographic variables on a separate tear off form with a number linking it to the application. The borrower was to fill out the information, put it in an envelope addressed to the FDIC which did the data compilation. The FDIC forwarded the data to me at the Comptroller’s office. We then analyzed the data and later published the results in the American Economic Review (May 1978). The results showed weak statistical evidence of discrimination by race but stronger evidence of redlining which is discrimination against the property. That is, if a white applicant applied for a mortgage in a certain geographic area, it had a higher likelihood of being rejected.

Motivated in part by our results, the Congress passed HMDA so that the regulators would have relevant data and passed the Community Reinvestment Act which was targeted at redlining requiring lenders to make loans in underserved neighborhoods. The regulators would be privy to the creditworthiness data and could use it to make a determination as to whether the lending practices were in fact discriminatory.

When we first started the analysis our priors were that discrimination was possible in markets characterized by little competition among lenders. In those days most of the mortgages loans were made by savings and loans and not by banks. Credit unions could not make mortgages. In fact, this was the case and several lenders were punished by the regulators for discriminatory practices. Economics tells us that if there is excess demand for mortgages and few lenders, then the lenders can reject loans that would be profitable because of the limited supply of funds available. However, this is not the case today. Now banks, savings and loans, credit unions and online lenders can originate mortgages. Thus, rejection of profitable loans would be irrational on the part of the lenders. In many institutions the mortgage loan officer is compensated by the mortgages underwritten. It would then be irrational for a loan officer to reject a qualified applicant if it lowered the officer’s compensation. Also, the regulators who examine the lender’s decisions are junk yard dogs looking for discrimination. As a consequence, a lender who discriminates in today’s environment is not only irrational but is also foolish. It would be akin to speeding at 100 MPH with a state trooper at every mile marker. Lastly, Navy Federal should know that its lending disparity is out of line and would warrant more detail examination from the Federal authorities. Other institutions have gamed the system by increasing the acceptances of marginal minority applicants to lessen the disparity. One wonders why Navy Federal did not do the same.

January 10, 2024

Anyone who talks about white privilege has obviously never been to Appalachia.

I’ve always thought it was somewhat ironic that kids in the state with the lowest reading proficiency have to spell Mississippi while kids in the state with the highest reading proficiency only have to spell Utah.

I would hate to be a white kid in a school that teaches Critical Race Theory.

A teacher in a large city in a mixed race school said that CRT provides an excuse for poor black performance but what is he supposed to tell his white students that are struggling? 

Did you read where the climate terrorists in England have taken to deflating tires (tyres if you are a Brit) to protest the use of internal combustion engines? In particular they hate SUVs. Well now they have started deflating the tires of EVs. Reports state that the group called the Tyre Extinguishers said: “Hybrids and electric cars are fair game. “We cannot electrify our way out of the climate crisis – there are not enough rare earth metals to replace everyone’s car and the mining of these metals causes suffering.” Well they do have a point (no pun intended). I guess you can spot them because they must be either on bicycles or skateboards.

I don’t understand how the deflating of tires, the blocking of streets, the gluing of oneself to the pavement, the mutilating of art works and the defacing of property are intended to win converts to the greenie weenie crusade.

When Hamas attacked Israel and slaughtered 1,400 Jews, I stated that the Israelis in their efforts to eradicate Hamas should ignore the reaction from the left wing media and the progressives worldwide who would criticize their response. Predictably, there has been sharp criticism of Israel with the media reporting the civilian casualty figures given by Hamas. I have yet to figure out – much like the climate terrorists – how protests on college campuses and in our cities will have any impact on Israeli resolve. I guess the pro-Hamas crowd thinks that they can pressure their governments to lean on Israel to give up and have a cease fire. However, that will still leave the threat of Hamas on Israel’s doorstep with the intent to kill Jews and eradicate Israel itself. I doubt that there is enough outside pressure for Israel to capitulate to the demands of those who can sleep soundly and safely at night.

It should be obvious by now that I am not a fan of EVs. They are expensive to buy, expensive to maintain and expensive to repair. The production of EVs pollutes worse than ICEs and the rare earth minerals are mined in near slave conditions and are environmentally destructive. That world governments are trying to force them down our throats is a testament to governments’ desires to take away freedoms and impose upon their citizens. But mind you, I am not opposed to EVs if they were just another product produced to satisfy market demand. EVs make ok commuting vehicles and second (or third) family cars. In America, most EVs are owned by people who could charge them at their residences, meaning that thousands of chargers outside the residence are not needed. However, since governments want to ban gas powered vehicles, chargers outside the residence are needed in the towns and on the highways. This is to combat range anxiety allowing people to travel in their EVs. But more chargers are a great idea if the chargers work and if there are not long lines to use them. Regardless, a trip in an EV that requires charging along the way is going to take much more time because even “fast” charging is slow compared to filling up at the pump. I can’t imagine most Americans having the patience to stop every few hundred miles and waiting an hour to get back on the road. On one trip the reported said “Google maps said it would take 13 hours and 20 minutes for our trip. The Tesla map, factoring in charging, said it would be 16 hours. It ended up at almost 17. Tesla’s software does a great job of routing you to superchargers, which are the fastest way to charge but may not be the fastest way to get where you’re going.” If you want to put up with this more power to you. But I bet the vast majority of use wouldn’t unless forced to do so.

Look for EV chargers to be mandated for all new residential construction.

January 5, 2024

Nikki Haley is trying to beat Kamala Harris in becoming the first Asian-American president. She had better hope that Biden lives out his term.

“Elite” college campuses are not the only places inhibited by the pro-Hamas crowd. It seems that the “progressives” in Washington government jobs have been infected as well. Did you see where 17 Biden campaign staffers anonymously wrote a letter opposing his stand on the Israeli-Hamas war? The staffers called for an immediate ceasefire and an end to military aid to Israel. Obviously this is a bunch of cowards or else they would have penned their names to the letter and they should resign or be fired. The chief of staff to the controller at the Pentagon also called for a cease fire. The Wall Street Journal reports that 500 appointees and staff from 40 agencies, including the National Security Council and the Justice Department, have sent Biden a letter demanding for a cease-fire and “de-escalation” between Israel and Hamas. Also more than 1,000 employees at the U.S. Agency for International Development have signed a similar letter. Members of the State Department also objected to the administration’s policies. Then there were the gutless congressional staffers on the Capitol steps wearing masks to express their displeasure. One minor official in the Department of Education did resign over the administration’s stance in the war as did one in the Department of Education. All the rest should do the same.

Is it just me? I am tired of every article on race, DEI, and Critical Race Theory saying “after the killing of George Floyd”. I bet if young people were asked who is the most prominent black person in American history, they would answer George Floyd.

This year’s college football payoffs featured two teams from the Big Ten (Michigan and Washington) and two from the SEC (Alabama and Texas). I have no doubt that Washington and Oregon will continue to thrive in the Big “10” but have my doubts about USC and UCLA. But it will be interesting to see how Texas and Oklahoma will fare with an SEC schedule.

Claudine Gay, forced out as Harvard’s president, says that her ouster was due to racism and was an attack on the “pillars of American society”. She refuses to acknowledge the obvious – that her elevation to Harvard’s presidency was due to her race, gender and progressivism. A white male with the same resume would never even gotten an interview. As to the attack on the “pillars of American society” she is referring to the education establishment. Yet given the rot at the core of American education as evidenced by the student pro-Hamas protests, abuse of DEI, Critical Race Theory and LGBTQ indoctrination, it needs to be attacked. She obviously is not going quietly and her whining is tiresome.

When did we get the mandate not to call illegal immigrants illegal? Now they are just “migrants”.

Post George Floyd, the Oracle Who Names Stuff dictated that we now capitalize “black” but not “white”. The rebels out there responded by starting to capitalize “white”. Obviously a bunch of racists. Me? I refuse to capitalize either, unless its my name.

A climate scientist (Willie Soon) has confirmed what I have been saying for years that climate change is due to the sun’s axil tilt and not from carbon dioxide. We got global warming when the ice age ended and there were no automobiles or weed eaters then.

I’ve also said that if the fossil fuel energy companies had put the first wind turbines the greenie weenies would have wanted them banned given how many migratory birds were being killed.  Now the wind farm contractors are admitting that the sea based turbines are killing all the whales and dolphins that are dying in their vicinity. Yet not a peep from the green crusaders.

If systemic racism is due to the government I might be in favor of reparations. More on that later.

January 3, 2024

It was only a matter time until Claudine Gay yelled “racism!” regarding her resignation from the presidency of Harvard. I wonder if she knows that one of her harshest critics, Carol Swain is black? Also, the president of Stanford resigned due to charges of plagiarism and he is white with an impressive resume that dwarfs Gay’s meager one. Penn’s president resigned earlier and she is white. I think that Gay’s holding out was because she is black. If she were white she would have been long gone. It not surprising that Gay’s defenders – who should know better – are also screaming racism. And it is certainly no surprise that Al Sharpton has taken up her cause. 

By the way, what do Claudine Gay, Kamala Harris and Ketanji Brown Jackson have in come (other than they are all “progressives”)? They are all married to white men. I have said for a number of years that because among blacks, wormen earn 64% of the undergraduate degrees, 72 percent of masters and 66 percent of the doctorates that they would start to look elsewhere for a husband. While men more typically will marry a woman with less education, that is seldom true for women.

In one of the weekly food specials I get is a buy one get one for vegan burgers. You can save $1019! Huh? Ten dollars for vegan patties that approximate a food like substance? I am not a red meat buyer. I eat venison because I am a deer hunter and have not consumed any other red meat since 1971. But I never understood the fake meat thing and tried it only once to see what the shouting was about. It was awful, a ghastly experience not to be repeated.  Its not cheap ($10.19) and it is not particularly healthy. Just look at the ingredients and ask yourself if you really want to ingest that stuff. Real meat is healthier (and apparently cheaper). I wonder when the ersatz concoction will disappear from the grocers’ shelves. More than likely, they are there only so the grocer can virtue signal to the greenie weenies. A Beyond Meat “burger” has 22 ingredients:

• Water
• Pea protein isolate
• Expeller-pressed canola oil
• Refined coconut oil
• Cellulose from bamboo
• Methylcellulose
• Potato starch
• Natural flavor
• Maltodextrin
• Yeast extract
• Salt
• Sunflower oil
• Vegetable glycerin
• Dried yeast
• Gum arabic
• Citrus extract (to protect quality)
• Ascorbic acid (to maintain color)
• Beet juice extract (for color)
• Acetic acid
• Succinic acid
• Modified food starch
• Annatto (for color)

I don’t know about you but I wouldn’t feed this to my dog. She eats venison which contains no additives and no artificial colors.

When fake meat was introduced and the companies went public, their stock prices in the IPOs were high. Beyond Meat was trading at $238 a share. Now its around $10 a share. Pity the fools who bought the IPO. Hell of a virtue signal if you ask me. Then reality set in. All the fake meat companies are struggling and some have shut their doors in the face of tepid consumer demand. It is though people bought the stuff and discovered how awful it was. Given that the climate zealots want to ban cows I am not surprised that the Biden crowd didn’t try to mandate fake meat to force it down our throats – much like they are doing for EVs.

Do you sleep with your socks on? I sometimes do in the winter when my feet are cold under the covers. Invariably I find myself shedding them sometime in the night because I’ve gotten too toasty (there’s a pun in there somewhere). I thought I was one of the few until I read a Wall Street article on January 2^nd ‘If You Sleep in Socks You’re a Psychopath.’ Health Tip Kicks Up Controversy”. Well I am certainly not a psychopath and found that “one small survey suggested 63% of us don’t sleep with socks on, 25% sometimes do, and nearly 12% regularly do.” I am in the 25% but in the winter its 50-50. The journal also noted some benefits to sock wearing to bed: “A study published in the Journal of Physiological Anthropology found that young men fell asleep 7.5 minutes faster, slept 32 minutes longer and woke up 7.5 times less often than those not wearing socks.” Who knew? I am no longer a young man but as an old man I am going to wear my socks (clean ones not the ones I wore all day) to bed more often to see if I get to sleep faster, sleep longer and wake up less often. Starting tonight!

This is the beginning of the worse time for sports. College football is over except for the National Championship game. I hate Michigan. I am not a pro football fan and watch it if I don’t have anything else to do. Then I only watch the highlights on the NFL network rather than an entire game. I don’t care for basketball be it mens, womens or NBA. Spring Training begins on February 24 and I am counting down the days. The Braves added Chris Sale (a k a the Blade because he is so skinny). A great addition to the starting rotation provided he can stay healthy. Last season was one of the most fun I have had as a Braves’ fan. My youngest granddaughter just graduated from Georgia and her first job is at MLB headquarters in New York! I am trying to get her to go into Rob Manfred’s office and suggest two things. First, that no team gets a bye. None of the best teams made it to the World Series because they got rusty sitting and waiting. Second, that instead of Jackie Robinson Day where all players wear 42,  only let the Dodgers wear 42 and all the other teams wear the number of their first black player.

January 3, 2023

Harvard’s president Claudine Gay has finally resigned. The Babylon Bee (which everyone should read) says satirically that her speech was plagarized from the Gettysburg Address. She returns to the faculty. I wonder if she keeps her $1 million per year salary. The question is will Harvard hire someone equally mediocre going forward. Prof. Carol Swain whose work was plagiarized by Gay wrote the most devastating critique of a fellow academic that I have ever read. It appeared in the Wall Street Journal on December 17 as “Claudine Gay and my scholarship.” I recommend it to you. Here is an excerpt. 

“Even aside from the documented instances of plagiarism, Ms. Gay’s work wouldn’t normally have earned tenure in the Ivy League. Tenure at a top-tier institution normally demands ground-breaking originality; her work displays none. In a world where the privilege of diversity is king, Ms. Gay was able to parlay mediocre research into tenure and administrative advancement at what was once considered a world-class university. 

Harvard can’t condemn Ms. Gay because she is the product of an elite system that holds minorities of high pedigree to a lower standard.”

Ouch!

It was interesting that at first Harvard’s Board stood by Gay and defended her testimony before Congress on the student pro-Hamas demonstrations and the antisemitic harassment of Jews on campus. Then came the charges of plagiarism. Again the Harvard Board stood by Gay despite the fact that plagiarism is perhaps the most egregious crime that a scholar can make in academe. (A personal note: I forced a PhD student to leave the program when I realized that he had plagiarized a critique of an academic article written by another student from my seminar a few years before. He had thought that I would not remember the report. But I did). Some Harvard students actually turned against Gay noting that the punishment for student plagiarism was severe while that accorded Gay was merely a slap on the wrist. The charges of plagiarism were not on a one off incident. Rather more than 50 instances of plagiarism were found in her “scholarly” work. Even so, her academic resume was painfully thin for one in such an exalted position. Interestingly, many on the Harvard faculty stood by her. More than 700 had signed a letter of support of her testimony – which leads me to wonder what the Jewish students would feel about these professors. When she resigned there were quotes from Harvard faculty who continued to support her even in the face of plagiarism. One wonders about their scholarship integrity as well.

January 1, 2024

January 1st is the 161st anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Although universally acknowledged as an important historical document, the reasons for its importance are not at all clear. I remember being taught in high school that Lincoln freed the slaves and immediately getting into an argument (which I lost) with the teacher. I contended that Lincoln could not have freed the slaves since the slaves were freed by the 13th amendment which was ratified after Lincoln’s death. She, of course, was referring to the Emancipation Proclamation as the document which freed the slaves. However, I remember a conversation I had with my great grandmother (Ma Mat) who said she was in December 1864 picking cotton on Bonner’s Hill in Clinton, Ga “when Sherman marched up the hill”. She also said that when she heard of the Emancipation the previous year, the slaves all of a sudden did not starting running around shouting “Lawdy we is free”. Rather it was business – or servitude – as normal. Even after “Sherman” had left Clinton headed to Savannah, the slaves remained in bondage. Although later I learned that it was not Sherman but rather Oliver O. Howard’s (Howard University) wing that marched up Bonner’s Hill, it still did not detract from Ma Mat’s powerful imagery. So armed with that information from my great grandmother I confronted my high school history teacher. Later at home I went to the Encyclopedia Britannica to actually read the Emancipation Proclamation and sure enough it stated that “all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.” Since those states had declared their independence, the Proclamation did not have any force of law. Indeed, so as not to offend the neutral states and territories that allowed slavery (Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri and the western counties of Virginia) Lincoln had carefully crafted his words. However, there was one very important provision of the proclamation, that was to have the Federal forces to “recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.” This was of extreme importance since in earlier years or the war, runaway slaves were often not aided by the federals and were sometimes returned back to the confederate lines. Also after the proclamation, the federals started wholesale enlistments of black troops. Although the vast majority were freemen, many were runaways. In the end, more than 200,000 blacks wore union blue and historians find that the superiority of manpower of the federals enhanced by the blacks in blue, hastened the end of the war. Finally, did my history teacher concede? No. She simply stated that Lincoln through the emancipation laid the foundation for freedom and had motivated the 13th amendment which was passed in the Senate before Lincoln’s assassination. 

Lincoln was emboldened by the Union victory at Antietam in September 1863 which lifted northern spirits after a series of defeats by Lee’s army. It prompted him to issue the Proclamation in hopes of dissuading the anti-slavery governments of Britain and France from recognizing the legitimacy of the confederate government. It also allowed him to allow the enlistment of black troops. However, the Proclamation was not met with universal favor in the north, leading to riots in some cities. So should January 1st be “Emancipation Day?” Texas, and many blacks, have long celebrated Juneteenth day as Emancipation Day. Juneteenth (June 19, 1865) marked the end of slavery in Texas and is now a federal holiday. Fittingly, Texas first enshrined the date as a state holiday in 1980. By 2019, Juneteenth was recognized by 47 states and the District of Columbia.  Thus, whether accurately or not, Juneteenth rather than January 1^st is Emancipation Day.

December 25, 2023

Knoxville Focus

knoxfocus.com

This Christmas, like all the ones before, I am grateful to have been blessed with great parents who had struggled to get an education and who made it easy for me and my brother to go to school. Dad’s parents did not finish college and his mother was a domestic. His father drove a coal truck. His mother would not let her three girls do any housework saying that she was not training the next generation of maids. Instead they all went to HBCUs and became school teachers. Dad and his three brothers all graduated from college and the older children helped finance the education of their younger siblings. Mother’s father was a farmer but her mother had a high school degree and was the one room school marm for black kids in Jones County, GA. Mother received the first four year degree from Fort Valley State University (GA) and is considered the mother of that university. Both of my parents had masters’ degrees and both my brother and I have Ph.Ds. 

My parents spent much of their lives trying to help educate black children in the Atlanta public schools. I am bitter about very few things. However, I am bitterly disappointed in the black intelligentsia and their opposition to improving the education of poor children. When I was growing up in Atlanta during the Civil Rights movement, blacks made up over 50 percent of the school age population but only had 6 of the 20 or so high schools in Atlanta. So our schools were big. We had horrible facilities, used textbooks with white school’s names on them and had no scientific equipment in our labs. However, we had terrific teachers. Back in those days, teaching was a well paying job for a black college graduate and we had tons of male teachers too. I got a great public school education. Now our public school teachers use teaching methods that do not work and make excuses for their failure. I thought that once blacks got the vote, we would elect city officials and school boards who cared about educating our children. I thought that the reason why black kids got shafted was because white officials who got elected by running on a racist platform were actively discriminating against blacks. Well it was true. So we got the vote, the whites fled the city, we voted the bums out and put in place black mayors, city councils and school boards. And what happened? Educational achievement went down. Why? First better jobs opened up for black college graduates. Teacher’s standards eroded as well as accountability. My beloved mother who taught second grade for 40 years complained about the deteriorating quality of the teachers – saying that they were unprofessional in their dress and behavior. Second, the teacher’s unions became a political force and were more interested in “social justices” than in academic achievement and third, the black politicians began to be manipulated and bribed. 

What was ironic is that the only politicians who seemed to care were the Republicans who pushed for vouchers and charter schools – both of which demonstrated higher achievements among black urban kids than the public schools. Of course both have been derided and panned by liberal democrats and their black sycophants. Well vouchers work. Charter schools work. What we need is a market solution to the problem of low achievements in education. The market would not tolerate a system that is so bankrupt, so corrupt and so poor that damages and destroys our children. Most urban parents are not equipped to home school their kids so that is not an option. However, many charter schools and private Catholic schools show a startling juxtaposition of the same kids from the same environment having radically different academic results. It is a national shame that we have allowed our education system to become so woeful. In a market system, poorly performing schools would have been put out of business and their teachers and administrators fired. Instead, they have been rewarded with ever increasing salaries, benefits, pensions and tenure. So when I once wrote “Why do democrats hate black kids?” I meant every word. I also include among that number the black leaders of the teacher’s unions and every so-called black leader and civil rights organization that remain silent rather than making this the number one issue in black America.

December 25, 2023

Merry Christmas

I love science fiction

I love science fiction growing up in its golden age. Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. LeGuin, Samuel Delany, Roger Zelazny, Frank Herbert, Arthur C. Clarke, Aldous Huxley, Philip K. Dick, Larry Nevin, Poul Anderson, and my favorite Robert Heinlein were in their glory. Today not so much. When you look at lists for the best Sci Fi of 2022 or 2023, most of the books are from women writers of fantasy not science fiction. Today’s science fiction/fantasy is mostly anticapitalism with the wealthy subjugating and exploiting the poor. If big government is the tyrant, it is usually because it is doing the work of the uber rich. There is precious little hard science fiction with the wonderful books by Andy Weir being the exception. Saxon Andrew is as prolific as Edgar Rice Burroughs but his novels get tiresome quickly with humans of psychic power dominating his universes. I have tried Arkady Martine, Ann Leckie, Martha Wells and Cory Doctorow. I like Octavia Butler and occasionally John Scalzi and have yet to figure out what all the shouting is about for Neal Stephenson and Neil Galman. Frustrated with today’s woke authors, I find myself rereading the books of my youth. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers and Methuselah’s Children are all favorites but any of his novels are worth the read. He had the ability to weave his political thinking into his works without belaboring them but make no mistake he was no “progressive” democrat. 

Here are a few of his quotes.

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as “bad luck.

[T]here seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously-after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year, he knows he is important … so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth.

You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.

Political tags – such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth – are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.

Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anything. You can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.

I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group. A racial group. Or a religion. Or a language. Anything, as long as it isn’t the whole population.

Democracy can survive anything except Democrats

Patriotism is not ‘my country right or wrong’; patriotism means loving the ideals for which America stands and having the courage to speak up when these ideals are distorted for personal or political gain. The American government was instituted to be the servant of the people, not our master.

Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.

A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.

I think perhaps of all the things a police state can do to its citizens, distorting history is possibly the most pernicious.

Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.

There are two ways of forming an opinion. One is the scientific method; the other, the scholastic. To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all-important, and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything, and facts are junked when they do not fit theory.

The lessons of history teach us – if the lessons of history teach us anything – that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.

There is an old song which asserts ‘the best things in life are free.’ Not true! Utterly false! This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted…and get it without toil, without sweat, without tears. Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain.

Anyone who clings to the historically untrue-and thoroughly immoral-doctrine that, ‘violence never settles anything’ I would advise to conjure the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedom.

An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.