My current contract runs out on April 29 and the follow-on won't be a ready for a while after that, so I'll be fully retired for a spell. As I've been working full time to allow wife kitteh to do as she pleases and she has taken several solo trips during this time, she's encouraging me to go on vacation.
I've pondered three different trips.
- Coastal Carolinas. I love the inland waterways and used to say I wanted to retire in Elizabeth City, NC. This would be a chance to cruise the coast and chat with tobacco farmers to get some tips for the next time I try.
- Alabama exploration. I thought the northern hills were beautiful and down on the Gulf, Fairhope is fabulous. A week spent really getting to know the state would be a lot of fun.
- Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana. This one just popped into my head recently. We were driving around and somehow, the topic of Arkansas arose. It's as poor as can be, but so what? The Ouachita and Ozark regions are gorgeous. I've never spent any time there, so that's as good a reason to go as any.
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I have wanted to visit Vicksburg just to see what it's like and taking tours of catfish and crawfish farms in Mississippi and Louisiana would be cool. Maybe I could find an old cotton gin at an antique store.
Right now, the Arkansas option is winning out. I'm leaning towards flying into DFW and flying out of IAH as I want to see the USS Texas which is in the Houston area. I had thought I'd do a driving sweep through the area, staying at a different location every night, but the hotels aren't very attractive. If I can find a VRBO place to rent in striking distance of my destinations, I'd rather do that instead.
Addendum: The USS Texas is closed for repairs, so that's right out of the question. Sad.
The long drive would be into the bayous on the Gulf in Louisiana, but as I'd be alone, the only person I'd irritate in the car would be me. If I got sufficiently grumpy on the day trip, I could cut it short and do something else.
Stormfront and BLM Merge
Once you turn off the noise machine that is the news media and the pundits, it's easy to see how this happened.
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| Jamaal is a member in good standing of the Congressional Black Caucus. Here, he is arguing that blacks are different in kind and incapable of learning. This exact same cartoon could be used to make the exact same point by a white supremacist. |
On Twitter, lots of people made the connection and rushed about, pointing and howling, but when you step back and think about it, this was inevitable. BLM and Stormfront are solving the exact same equation with the exact same boundary conditions. That they used different methods to reach their answers doesn't change the fact that they came to the same conclusion.
The crucial governing principle is that race is the dominant feature in a person's life. Once you latch on to that and discard the notion that each person is an individual with moral agency over their lives, there's only one destination. And here we are.
Hooray for unity!
The driving sounds like a wonderful way to look around those states. Makes me jealous. Maybe you should consider two different VRBO’s, so you’d have two travel centroids to set to get a bit less driving and still be able to avoid the hotels. In any case we want pictures. Lots and lots of green and water pictures.
ReplyDeleteThe thing that has always jumped out at me for that cartoon is that it's only "unfair" if that isn't reflective of the job.
ReplyDeleteWhich the cartoon totally ignores as a consideration.
"That they used different methods to reach their answers doesn't change the fact that they came to the same conclusion."
ReplyDelete... starting from the same premises.
That does sound like a relaxing vacation prospect.
ReplyDeleteJamaal is a member in good standing of the Congressional Black Caucus. Here, he is arguing that blacks are different in kind and incapable of learning. This exact same cartoon could be used to make the exact same point by a white supremacist.
This tweet is not currently in his twitter feed. Are you sure it's real?
Assuming it is real, why do you think he was referring to black people, specifically? There are many theories of multiple types of intelligence; they have nothing to do with the level of melanin in your skin.
One difference between BLM and Stormfront is that the former sees the prevalence of race-based interactions as a social issue, and the latter as a biological issue.
Wherever you decide to go, have a good trip. And if you went ahead and bought that macro lens, don't forget to photograph some tiny stuff!
ReplyDeleteAs for that cartoon, the first time I saw it I didn't see it as saying anything about racism, so much as the big problem with standardized testing - standardized tests assume that there is basically one job that everybody needs to be trained to do, and that no other jobs that have different requirements matter. And so anybody who isn't temperamentally suited to be, say, an engineer does poorly on the test and is considered a failure. Even though engineering is a job that probably less than 1% of the population ends up doing.
... Except that standardized testing is not aimed at producing engineers, but rather giving children a necessary incentive (*) to acquire the minimally basic knowledge and skills they will need to be functional-and-contributing members of our society.
ReplyDelete*That* is what the leftists' attacks on standardized testing is about: they *need* as many people as possible to reach adulthood still unprepared to fully participate in our society.
(*) The time-frame reference of most children does not allow them to see all the way to the end of the school year from the start, much less to their future adulthood. But, most of them can see as far as the unpleasant consequences of getting a low grade on tomorrow's test.
if you're hitting up the Carolinas and looking for something different, try a fossil hunt in either state-they're both loaded.
ReplyDeletea few nitrate mines in NC hold day long fossil hunts. Just have to buy a pass, bring a helmet and your own tools. Lotsa big shark teeth there. Was looking into a trip last spring but China had other plans.
Ilíon said...
ReplyDelete*That* is what the leftists' attacks on standardized testing is about: they *need* as many people as possible to reach adulthood still unprepared to fully participate in our society.
Considering the deep and growing anti-science elements on the right, this gave me a pretty good chuckle.
Oddly enough, "rightists" don't have invent lies to have something to laugh at.
ReplyDeleteAs for the cartoon, yeah, it was on the guy's feed. He's a seriously committed racialist, so there's no doubt about the meaning. It's all part and parcel of the attempts to do away with standardized tests in the name of equity.
ReplyDeleteAs for the tests themselves, when I look at the results, it makes me say, "学习英语很容易!"
Und das bedeutet?
ReplyDeleteI'll just put this here
ReplyDeletehttps://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/070/585/131/original/c6b68959e36f5441.png
LOL, Ilion. That goes with the whole idea of characterizing people by skin color instead of behavior.
ReplyDeleteAs for the cartoon, I saw where there was a bill introduced in Colorado to eliminate the arrest of kids in schools when they're accused of violence and theft. It's all part and parcel of the racist notion that certain groups people aren't capable of behaving or learning.
Old Jeff Davis is smiling, watching Lincoln get canceled and the Confederacy's views on race come back in vogue.
Somehow, I doubt that Old Jeff Davis was half the RAYCISSSSSSSSSS that today's "liberals" (i.e. soft/squishy leftists) are.
ReplyDeleteI don't recall whether I have given you this link already: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDyCK-HRoSqUsowdKzOVHZA/videos
ReplyDeleteI love It's A Southern Thing!
ReplyDelete