Toronto renames Yonge-Dundas Square in honor of slave-dealing African tribe

Yonge-Dundas Square is the wannabe Times Square of Toronto. Alas, the Wokies discovered some alleged links between the slave trade and Henry Dundas, the Square's namesake. Sankofa Square is the new name for Yonge-Dundas Square. “Sankofa” is allegedly a reference to the folk wisdom of the Akan people in what is now Ghana, and means, according to the experts behind this decision, learning from history to facilitate a better future. From the Wikipedia entry for the Akan people: “The Akan waged war on neighboring states in their geographic area to capture people and sell them as slaves to Europeans…” Eat your heart out, Henry Dundas! But hey, they were Black slavers, so I guess it’s OK!

Forty acres and a mule: the remix

Hey Dad, I was just kidding... really! What do me and the Farm Manager want with a place that has five effing bathrooms?... not to mention that the Farm Manager claims everyone of them is in need of an update.

Not that I would have noticed.

But seriously... five bathrooms? We're at a place where we're looking to scale back, not scale up. The last "Junior" is filling out his on-line university applications as I write these words. A year from now every dog and cat at Falling Downs will have a room of her own. (And they are all "hers" now that I think of it.)

No, we're kinda keen on a one bed one bath deal. Otherwise we'd be getting dangerously close to that ordeal I was once forced to endure when the mother of a couple of those "Juniors" hired in a cleaning lady. This was concurrent with her demand that I take time off from running my imaginary real-estate empire to "help out" at home after the arrival of our second child.

That imaginary empire was hemoraging ten thousand all-too-real dollars a month at the time, but I was supposed to sit on the couch and watch a baby sleep. I felt rather strongly that this was not a positive use of my time, given that things were rapidly careening towards bankruptcy court, but WTF, in this corner you've got reality, and in that corner you've got a nagging wife... and in the middle I'm sitting on the fucking sofa and lifting up my feet so the cleaning lady can vacuum?

But I digress.

Forty acres and a mule. Apparently I appropriated that meme inappropriately the other day, according to folks who have spent too much time in the too-bright sunshine of Political Correctitude.

Sorry. Didn't intend that. I didn't even realize the extent to which "forty acres and a mule" had morphed from broken promise to "meme" over the last 150 years. Hell, I'm not even sure what a meme is...

So, duly chastised, I read around a bit. I think I basically got it right. Wave that meme around and you're talking about broken promises.

Found out some interesting facts.

Did you know that in 1910 African-Americans owned 15 million acres of farmland in the US? Not from some government program, but from buying it on the open market.

And did you know that today African-Americans own half that amount, even though there are four times as many African-Americans today as there were in 1910?

And did you know that after all that big talk during the Civil War years about African-Americans getting the land they'd worked as slaves, in the end, virtually all of it was handed back to the white plantation owners by the victorious Union side?

Yup... that fight to end slavery didn't really end all that well for the former slaves.

The lucky ones became "wage labour."

Which brings me back to that cleaning lady. She was "wage labour" too. And by employing her, that made me what?...

I'm not sure, but as a general rule, I like to think I can clean up after myself.

On the other hand, in the early years after my folks got off the boat at Pier 21, my dear mother worked as a cleaning lady. They were getting a start in the new world, and they needed the money.

Thank God for the toffs and wankers too precious to clean up after themselves!

Urban Outfitters offers employees opportunity to work for free!

Hey, you don't get a chance to do that everyday!

Well, actually lots of folks do. The publishing industry and the advertising biz are chock full of unpaid interns. Then there's the 70% of university faculty known as "adjunct professors" who are working for something right next to free.

So I guess Urban Outfitters isn't exactly tilling virgin soil here.

But, I suspect it's gonna work out swell for them. Lots of employees will be keen to show their commitment to the organization. After all, who can be against "team building?"

Only somebody just begging to be "outsourced," that's who...

This is more or less the other bookend for those folks who proclaim that raising the minimum wage would hurt poor people.

Be a team-builder; work for free!

Those black folks on the plantations weren't slaves; they were team-builders!

The trouble with efficiency

I don't know the man. He could be a decent tax-paying God-fearing regular guy, for all I know.

But Ed Burkhardt has grown rich by riding our "efficiency" craze to absurd  extremes.

There's 60 cars in a train and a crew of 5?

Let's go for a couple more cars and a couple fewer crew.

That's more efficient.

The shareholders and the business press applaud.

Hey, wouldn't it be more efficient if we sacked another worker and added another few cars to the train?

Oh ya! Now we're talking EFFICIENCY!!!

The shareholders augment their positions and the business press wet their pants.

Next thing you know, there's one tired guy at the end of a shift responsible for an 80 car train of highly volatile cargo.

That's absurd!

You know how it ends.

If Frederick got two beatings a day, how many beatings did he get in a week?

A schoolteacher in the American South lost his job this week for posing this question in a math assignment.

America lives in a state of constant denial.

Slavery? What slavery?

Slaves were never mistreated, especially since there were never any slaves to begin with.

All those black folks who came over from Africa in leg-irons were just the illegal immigrants of the day.

America bent over backwards to make them feel welcome. All that civil rights stuff in the '60's? Liberal propaganda!

Every patriotic American knows that the black folks who came over here to pick cotton had a way higher standard of living than the black folks who stayed in Africa.

It is indeed a sign of how far the communist teachers' unions have subverted the curriculum that such anti-American filth would find its way into a homework assignment.

The slaves got beatings? I say that commie teacher should get a good beating.

Such a slander on America can never be tolerated in the education of our children.