On the other hand, fortunately for the makers of horror films, Friday is the most likely day for the 13th of a month to fall on.

In his book, Douglass describes his incredible personal experience of slavery.  For instance, like other slaves he was expected to sleep on the floor of the shack in which he lived with only a blanket.  In the winter, his feet became cracked from frostbite.  In the countryside, like other slaves, he was kept in a state of perpetual hunger.  Like other slaves, he was given one set of crude clothing a year and no shoes as he was a child.  If that clothing wore out, he had to go naked until the next year.  He was regularly beaten, often arbitrarily.  He saw a slave brother killed, shot in the head, with no repercussions for the murderer.  For a slave, the South was a huge prison.  If a white man passed a black man on the road, the common greeting was for the white man to say: ” Well, boy, whom do you belong to?” While it is powerful to hear this conditions described in the third person, it is doubly so to hear them described by Douglass himself.

Douglass makes several unexpected points in the book.  First, he repeatedly emphasizes that the more religious a slave holder was, the worse he treated his slaves.  The religious slave owners noted that slavery exists in the bible, and in one of Douglass’ anecdotes, even quoted the holy book as they were beating their slaves. A second unexpected point was the extent that slave holders went to deny their slaves education.  Douglass, who surreptitiously taught himself to read while in Baltimore, was rarely left alone for fear that he would be leafing through a newspaper or book.  His owners thought that education made slaves unruly.  In his master’s words: “Learning would spoil the best n***** in the world.” Several times Douglass started popular Sunday schools to teach his slave brothers to read, and each time the schools were quickly broken up by his owners.

Two passages were particularly powerful to me.  In one passage, Douglass describes his life as a teenager in Baltimore.  He had learned the trade of caulking, and he was allowed to work at a ship yard.  At the end of each week, Douglass had to report to his master and give him his entire weekly wages–around six dollars.  His master would then give him  a few cents to encourage him.  The second passage was that in which his master died, and Douglass was required to go back to Maryland to be valued.  All the slaves were lined up next to livestock, and a auditor roughly examined the slaves to estimate how much they were worth.  This passage reminded me of reading about Michelle Obama’s great-great-great-grandmother Melvina Shields, who was a slave valued at $475 when her master died.

Douglass’ 1845 narrative is only one hundred pages long.  It is usually bundled with long introductions and prefaces to make the book look thicker.  These should be skipped.  Douglass’ biting narrative doesn’t need any introduction.  One hundred and seventy years after it was first published,  it is the most powerful condemnation of slavery I have ever read.

Some of my young idealistic friends like to talk about figuring out what they could do to most help the world, and might go to Burma to see how the really poor live.  I tell them one has to learn lots of details about a place to figure out how to improve it, and they’d do better to try this on a part of the world they understand better.  But that doesn’t sound nearly as fun as saving the whole world all at once.

…

The obvious way to help poor folk far away without relying on your poor understanding of their world is to rely on the one thing you know best about their world: it is poor.  Invite them to move to your rich world, to share in its riches.  If your neighbors hinder you, use what you know about them to change that.

Dean tried to avoid talking about health care as much as possible.   Towards the end of the debate, he asked the moderators if they had any questions that were not about health care.  He kept dropping the name “Barack” and telling the audience how “your generation” has to stay active in politics and be bipartisan.  Many of his comments ended in exhortations with fist shaking and a raised voice.  As to his remarks on health care, he mostly spoke of the outrages of “predatory  insurance companies”, and repeatedly brought up “a student in the audience” whose mother was denied coverage for some disease or other.

Rove, on the other hand, focussed exclusively on health care.  He might have been more persuasive if it wasn’t for the ridiculous statistics he kept quoting–and everything he said was laced with statistics.  For example, he said that 45% of physicians in the United States would quit if the senate health care bill passes.   He said that medicare rejects claims at a rate twice as high as private insurance companies.  The audience broke into laughter when Rove said that America has the best health care system in the world.

Several times during the debate, the moderators lost control as Dean and Rove yelled over and at each other.  One such dialogue is contained in the Centre Times article about the debate.  While it was fun to see a couple of grown men strutting and pretending to have hurt pride, by the end of the hour-long debate I kept checking my watch. You see, there is better entertainment on Hulu, and more information about health care reform on Wikipedia.

Imagine that every one of these people was killed in the blast, and each person’s two parents, two children and spouse were also maimed.  That is about how many casualties there were in Baghdad today.

Bombing is a terrible tactic.

Edit: Today the New York Times reports that there were an additional thirty children killed in the playground of the Ministry of Justice.  There are exactly thirty kids in this picture:

Here is the closing paragraph of the New York Times article:

And some participants have found that the slaughter is, well, less than life affirming. Jake Lahne, a graduate student in Food Science and Human Nutrition at the University of Illinois, recently enrolled in a meat-production course at school to achieve “a real understanding of where meat comes from,” he wrote on a blog, the Ethicurean.

He got it. “Animals do not want to die,” he wrote. “They can feel pain and fear, and, just like us, will struggle to breathe for even one single more second. If you’re about to run 250 volts through a pig, do not look it in the eyes. It is not going to absolve you.”

“I truly believe that humane slaughter is important and possible,” he added, “but, as I have been learning, here’s the truth about any slaughter: it is both morally difficult and really gross.”

Edit: Success!

As long as I am writing:

Russian reverse psychology via Tyler Cowen

I comment on Petek’s post

If you haven’t been following, crazy real escape story

List of unusual deaths