The sad truth is that the conquest and capture of Africans and their sale to Europeans was one of the main sources of foreign exchange for several African kingdoms for a very long time. Slaves were the main export of the kingdom of Kongo; the Asante Empire in Ghana exported slaves and used the profits to import gold. Queen Njinga, the brilliant 17th-century monarch of the Mbundu, waged wars of resistance against the Portuguese but also conquered polities as far as 500 miles inland and sold her captives to the Portuguese. When Njinga converted to Christianity, she sold African traditional religious leaders into slavery, claiming they had violated her new Christian precepts. —“Ending the Slavery Blame-Game,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr., New York Times
China will never let your bottom save the world;
watch as video kills the radio star;
puerile pointy-heads and their prurient pornography pastimes
Still smarting from the 1975 “Pepsi Challenge” taste-test battle, Coca-Cola Co. launches “Project Kansas,” a top-secret mission to reformulate Coke. President-Chief Operating Officer Robert Goizueta appoints Coca-Cola USA head Brian Dyson, who taps marketing chief Sergio Zyman to head the endeavor. Mr. Zyman and company test a new, sweeter version of the flagship cola with 190,000 nationwide taste tests at a cost of $4 million. At a bottlers’ meeting in Atlanta back on April 22, 1985, Mr. Zyman announced from the stage that Coke was changing its taste. The next day Coca-Cola revealed the new, sweeter taste to financial analysts and the media. But word of the new product finally leaks out and Pepsi dispatches its own press assault on the same day claiming victory. “The other guy blinked,” Pepsi says in ads saying Coke reformulated its brand to taste “more like” Pepsi. —“New Coke: One of Marketing’s Biggest Blunders Turns 25,” Abbey Klaassen, Advertising Age
Lessons in axiomatic falsehoods: the thinking man’s Lady Gaga;
a charismatic vegetarian will save Newark
(related: America has always been a bad place to live);
social media saves the world!
Though it may seem paradoxical, the “gay agenda” today is fundamentally conservative. Neither gay activists nor mainstream conservatives will be happy to admit this, of course. Those in the conservative movement resistant to making peace with the main criteria of this program—the extension of civil marriage rights, the right to serve openly in the military, the right to adopt children, and the acceptance of homosexuality itself as a benign, naturally occurring feature of humanity—continue to think of the gay rights movement as it was in its heyday of the immediate post-Stonewall era. They see gay people as threats to the traditional American family structure and social order, which, to be fair, most of the prominent gay activists at the time were….Today, there are no calls for free love or the sanctifying of bathhouses as battlegrounds for civil rights. The young gay activists protesting today do so in order to get married. They want to join a bedrock institution, not tear it apart. —“A Conservative Conundrum,” James Kirchick, The Advocate
Ride the white lightning: death by banana gin;
and thus turns the course of history: Alice Waters told Bill Clinton to eat a peach;
do the opposite: amorous advice from the inappropriately pierced
