Evolution, Wealth, Marxism, Slaves, Slavery
On The Genesis And Significance Of Furkan Aldemir
Michael Baumann | Liberty Ballers | 26th October 2015
Do not ignore this piece through lack of interest in basketball. "Love is an evolutionary tool in service of human survival. Furkan Aldemir is not". He "showed up in the NBA and immediately denied his evolutionary programming. He looked at the thing that gets you money and headlines and women, and told it, without a second thought, to go fuck itself". Now he's off the team. "There is no evolutionary advantage to the soul" (1,000 words)
Inside The Secretive World Of Tax-Avoidance Experts
Brooke Harrington | Atlantic | 26th October 2015
A sociologist who trained as a wealth manager in order to study them. "The secret point of money...is [not] the things that money can buy...but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy." "Money itself does not make this freedom attainable, but the application of financial-legal expertise does." Wealth managers not only do "classic" tax avoidance but also with related issues such as divorces and nationality-swaps (3,370 words)
Visitors To Marx’s Grave Balk At Fee
Alistair Macdonald & Ese Erheriene | Wall Street Journal | 25th October 2015
So many great lines. "Marx believed that labor should be rewarded, he didn’t believe that you could achieve a classless society simply by refusing to pay for things ... He wasn’t a hippie, let’s put it like that." A marxist refuses the WSJ's invitation to visit with them, "saying that a trip to Marx’s grave by a Marxist and The Wall Street Journal wasn’t an obvious pairing and that money would still need to be paid" (1,110 words)
An African Muslim Enslaved In Brazil
Steven J. Niven | The Root | 26th October 2015
Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua was a Muslim from Benin, who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Brazil. He wrote the only surviving autobiography by an African slave in Brazil. It tells of an incredible life story: despite a devout upbringing, he became a wayward, hard-drinking bodyguard, was enslaved, escaped twice and became free. He spent time in Haiti, upstate New York, Canada and England, always trying to return to Africa (1,370 words)
How Many Slaves Landed In The US?
Henry Louis Gates Jr. | The Root | 15th October 2012
Americans tend to think of the “slave experience primarily in terms of…the United States”. But a comprehensive database of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade shows that of 12.5m Africans shipped to the New World only 388,000 landed in the US. The vast majority “were shipped directly to the Caribbean and South America; Brazil received 4.86m Africans alone”. Today’s 42m African-Americans are descended from fewer than 0.5m Africans (430 words)
Video of the day: Wage Islands
What to expect: Physical mapping of New York City wages (1'31")
Thought for the day
Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggy" until you can find a rock
Will Rogers