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Canada, America’s largest trading partner and largest foreign supplier of oil, has been amazingly patient over Obama’s clearly insincere dithering over approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. Back when I was still in Washington at AEI, Ken Green and I would occasionally put together panel discussions that included Keystone issues, and not only would the Canadian embassy decline to send anyone to participate, they didn’t even want to register for the event, so sensitive were they to mot wanting to be seen to intrude on domestic American politics. (Someone usually turned up from the embassy, but made no comments during discussion.)

That’s what makes notable the news stories yesterday that included public remarks of frustration from the Canadian ambassador to the U.S., Gary Doer. Doer made public a letter complaining about a new EPA analysis meant to undermine the Keystone pipeline—an analysis plainly intended to give Obama cover to block it since the State Department, no doubt against intense political pressure from John Kerry, looks to be playing the matter straight and issuing a favorable final ruling on Keystone.

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Well, that certainly accounts for some of the positions pushed by tReason magazine.

But ‘studies’ are behind Global Warming and the warnings against cholesterol, too, and we know how those worked out.

On the other hand, I’m prepared to believe this one, based on (granted, limited) anecdotal evidence.

James Taranto turns over a rock.

If the law is on your side, the juridical adage goes, argue the law. If the facts are on your side, argue the facts. If neither the law nor the facts are on your side, pound the table.

Supporters of ObamaCare have reached the stage of pounding their heads on the table.

Perhaps it will wake their brains up, assuming that they have any.

At any rate, political promises do not have the force of law unless they are enacted into law. Congress didn’t sign a contract with HCA; it passed a statute. If the statute doesn’t live up to the promise, HCA is SOL.

You’d certainly think that.

“Greenhouse fails even to mention the government’s stronger, though ultimately unpersuasive, argument that the statute is ambiguous,” lawyer Howard Slugh, whose firm has filed a brief in King v. Burwell, notes in an entertaining rejoinder at National Review Online. “Instead, she insists that the plaintiffs’ reading of the statute is utterly frivolous.” She claims that the justices “all agree on how to interpret statutory text”—and that they all agree with her.

She ends by instructing the justices (her emphasis): “Read the briefs. If you do, and you proceed to destroy [sic] the Affordable Care Act nonetheless, you will have a great deal of explaining to do—not to me, but to history.” As Slugh understates: “It takes a lot of chutzpah to admonish the Supreme Court in such fashion.”

Linda Greenhouse, for all that she has a prestige gig at Yale Law School and the New York Times, far too often makes mistakes for which any first-year law student would be spanked.

NRO’s legal blogger, Ed Whelan, makes one obvious point: “It’s difficult not to conclude that Greenhouse thinks, rightly or wrongly, that the Left’s efforts to intimidate Chief Justice Roberts in the first Obamacare case worked and are worth repeating.”

Favorite tactic of ‘progressives’ everywhere.

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An official US government report just has recommended that further research should be carried out into various methods of “geoengineering” the climate so as to combat global warming. But one of its authors disagrees with himself, saying that giving such technology to the current US leadership would be “like giving a loaded gun to a child”.

The report in question – actually two reports issued together – is from the hefty US National Academy of Sciences.

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According to the regulatory review, there are no legal barriers to testing autonomous vehicles on the U.K.’s public roads today, as long as a driver is present and taking responsibility, and the vehicle complies with road traffic laws. Those doing the testing don’t need to get any certificates or permits.

You first.

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For some time, an argument has been made that the liberal left, in refusing to examine the problems of Islam, has betrayed its Enlightenment roots. That is, while secular, feminist, and protective of free speech in dealing with its Western peers, the liberal left has been accused of abandoning its heritage in its quest for political correctness regarding Muslims.

In truth, however, the left has a distinguished background of courting Islam as a weapon against Western capitalism. Its most representative figures from the past did so frankly, as the following rehearsal of their statements demonstrates.

Joel Kotkin lays out some inconvenient truth.

It is unlikely that the American economy can sustain a healthy rate of growth without the kind of production-based strength that has powered Texas, as well as Ohio, North Dakota and Louisiana. De-industrializing states like California or New York may enjoy asset bubbles that benefit the wealthy and generate “knowledge workers” jobs for the well-educated (nationwide, professional and business services employment rose by 196,000 from October 2007 through October 2014), but they cannot do much to provide opportunities for the majority of the population.

By their nature, industries like manufacturing, energy, and housing have been primary creators of opportunities for the middle and working classes. Up until now, energy  has been a consistent job-gainer since the recession, adding  199,000 positions from October 2007 through October 2014, says Dan Hamilton, an economist at California Lutheran University. Manufacturing has not recovered all the jobs lost in the recession, but last year it added 170,000 new positions through October. Construction, another sector that was hard-hit in the recession, grew by 213,000 jobs last year through October. The recovery of these industries has been critical to reducing unemployment and bringing the first glimmer of hope to many, particularly in the long suffering Great Lakes.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, answers some frequently asked questions.

Someone—I think it was the late Larry Auster—said that there is no such thing as a right. There is a left, and it’s been pretty consistently the same across time and space, in all countries and at all times, at any rate since the French Revolution.

There is nothing that solid and consistent on the other side, only an anti-left with many factions, some of them wildly different from each other: libertarians, traditionalists, nationalists, Randian atheists, evangelical Christians …

My vague feeling is: sell libertarianism, buy nationalism. I’m not much of a stock-picker, though.

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The number of Americans choosing to give up their passports hit a record 3,415 last year, up 14% from 2013, and 15 times more than in 2008, when only 231 people renounced their citizenship.

Experts say the recent surge is coming from expats who no longer want to deal with complicated tax paperwork, a burden that has only gotten worse in recent years.

Unlike most countries, the U.S. taxes all citizens on income, no matter where it is earned or where they live. The mountain of paperwork can be so complicated that expats are often forced to fork over high fees to hire an accountant — some say they pay as much as $1,000.

Matt Welch connects the dots:

The main driver chasing our citizens away is the authoritarianly named Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), a gruesome bit of government money-grubbing of which Reason has written about plenty over the years. If you have more than $10,000 parked overseas, you have to disclose each and every account to the IRS, including the maximum value it had in the previous year, or face ruinous fines and even jail time. Foreign financial institutions, meanwhile, are deputized by FATCA to work as IRS tax collectors, which they obviously would rather not do, so many banks simply put up a “do not serve Americans” sign, which is a major pain in the ass for the 7 million or so Yanks living abroad. As Shikha Dalmia observed this week, the Obama administration’s approach toward runaway Americans (individual and corporate) is to further tighten the noose, which will only increase the number of defections.

Why would politicians knowingly harm their fellow Americans for what amounts to a trivial payoff in collections? Same reason a dog licks its naughty bits. Expats wield no political power, and all things being equal, the government prefers destroying financial privacy. The Republican National Committee one year ago approved a Sen. Rand Paul-led resolution to repeal FATCA; one of many indicators of whether the party will ever be worth a tinker’s damn will be if it plops a FATCA repeal onto President Barack Obama’s desk.

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The real cause of Robertson’s plight is more straightforward: The government does a terrible job of getting federal transit dollars to those who need them most, while at the same time constraining private initiatives that could make Detroit far more commutable without costing taxpayers a dime.

Robertson used to own a car, but after it broke down he didn’t replace it primarily because he couldn’t afford insurance. That’s no surprise, given that Detroit’s car insurance premiums are 165 percent the U.S. average, or the highest in the nation.

Why is basic liability coverage so costly? Michigan is the only state that doesn’t cap personal injury claims related to car accidents, and its no-fault insurance law means that drivers are responsible for their passengers’ medical costs whether they’re to blame for an accident or not.

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Guess the USPS is coughing up blood in the alley….

It remains impossible, as it was in the Eighteenth Century, to separate the democratic idea from the theory that there is a mystical merit, an esoteric and ineradicable rectitude, in the man at the bottom of the scale–that inferiority, by some strange magic, becomes a sort of superiority–nay, the superiority of superiorities. Everywhere on earth, save where the enlightenment of the modern age is confessedly in transient eclipse, the movement is toward the completer and even more enamored enfranchisement of the lower orders. Down there, one hears, lies a deep, illimitable reservoir of righteousness and wisdom, unpolluted by the corruption of privilege. What baffles statesmen is to be solved by the people instantly and by a sort of seraphic intuition. Their yearnings are pure; they alone are capable of a perfect patriotism; in them is the only hope of peace and happiness on this lugubrious ball. The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy!

— H. L. Mencken

Read it.

You’d be amazed.

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The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA or “the T” for short) has a problem. It has a $3 billion maintenance backlog, and must spend $470 million a year just to keep that backlog from growing. It has all kinds of wonderful plans to close that backlog, but those plans are all in the future. In the meantime, its latest budget proposal spares less than $100 million for maintenance.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Of course, the extension wasn’t supposed to cost $2 billion or increase ridership by just 0.5 percent. Back in 2005, the major investment study for the project estimated it would cost just $390 million (see page 5-55). That’s in 2005 dollars, but adjusting for inflation to today’s dollars increases it to about $450 million, less than a quarter of the actual cost. Projected annual operating costs have also nearly quadrupled from $9.9 million in 2005 to $36.9 million today. The 2005 study also predicted the line would increase increase daily ridership by more than 14,000 trips, or 1 percent, not just 0.5 percent (same page).

That’s because (a) public works projects always cost multiples of their original estimates, because people think of taxpayer funds as ‘free money’ and wet their beaks at every opportunity, and (b) public transport always goes from where you aren’t to where you don’t want to be, so very few people ride it. Reality is a stone bitch about that sort of thing.

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It appears that Islam Web, a popular website owned by Qatar’s Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs, may have been responsible for the rationale used by the Islamic State to burn alive a Jordanian pilot captive.

On February 7, 2006, the widely accessed Arabic website issued Fatwa No. 71480, titled “The Burning of Ias bin Abdul Yalil by Abu Bakr.” The fatwa, or Islamic decree, concluded that burning people as a form of punishment is permissible.

Ironically, hours after the Islamic State burned the pilot alive, Fatwa No. 71480 was removed from Islam Web.

Oops.

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But less in the spirit of the Old West. Does tradition count for nothing these days?

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Oh, noes! They might become disillusioned with the way governmen runs other aspects of life too! The horror!

Sarah Hoyt turns over a rock.

I’m doing this in my PJs, in a comfy heated office (filled with cardboard boxes) sitting at the black glass desk of Evil command. I’m drinking a beverage grown on another continent and transported by tech and human power across the world, so I can enjoy it.

I’m privileged. We are privileged beyond the dreams of kings and queens of past centuries.

Unfortunately when they tell you to “check your privilege” that’s not what they mean.

This is a phrase increasingly deployed by people (usually women – rolls eyes) with an academic background and its meaning is … liberal squid ink. If you’re telling them that Welfare was a disaster for black families (it was) and that affirmative action not only has been a disaster for many organizations, but corrodes the soul (you never know why you were hired. I have friends in that position) and institutes birth-privilege based on who your ancestors were (aka nobility) they will say “check your privilege.” This really doesn’t mean a heck of a lot. It can’t, because they have no idea who you are, or indeed if you have ever received any privilege growing up.

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Geez,  you’d think he was a Republican or something.

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After years of telling Americans that high-cholesterol foods would kill them, the federal government may ease up on warnings about this much-maligned nutrient. The U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee will no longer list cholesterol among its “nutrients of concern,” according to The Washington Post.

…

The move reflects updated scientific thinking on cholesterol. While high cholesterol levels in the blood can still be a bad health indicator, scientists no longer view high blood cholesterol as a direct result of eating a cholesterol-rich diet, at least not for most people. Genetics may make some individuals more vulnerable to cholesterol in food, but scientists estimate this group only includes about 25 percent of the population.

Well, if there’s one thing you can depend on, it’s a scientific consensus. Oh, wait….

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The one glaring fact concerning the persecution of approximately 100 million Christians around the world today is that the overwhelming majority of it is being committed by Muslims of all races, nationalities, languages, and socio-political circumstances: Muslims from among America’s allies (Saudi Arabia) and from its enemies (Iran); Muslims from economically rich nations (Qatar) and from poor nations (Somalia and Yemen); Muslims from “Islamic republic” nations (Afghanistan) and from “moderate” nations (Malaysia and Indonesia); Muslims from nations rescued by America (Kuwait) and Muslims from nations claiming “grievances” against the U.S. (fill in the blank __).

This fact is underscored in Open Doors’ recent 2015 World Watch List—a report that highlights and ranks the 50 worst nations persecuting Christians. It finds that “Islamic extremism” is the main source of persecution in 40 of the top 50 countries—that is, 80 percent of the nations where Christians are persecuted are Muslim. As for the top ten worst countries persecuting Christians, nine of them are Muslim-majority—that is, 90 percent of nations where Christians experience “extreme persecution” are Muslim.

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My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

I’ll bet he lies about being a Christian, too. Just sayin’.

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Hey, it was in a newspaper, so it has to be true, right?

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It’s widely understood that human genetics can influence culture, but increasingly, the idea that culture can also affect genetics is gaining ground. The theory of gene-culture coevolution suggests that “the cultural practices we adopt change the costs and benefits of having certain genes,” explains Catharine Cross, a researcher at the University of St Andrews. “A gene that is advantageous under one cultural practice is not necessarily advantageous under another.”

For example, yam cultivation in West Africa led to deforestation and an increase in standing water, which creates a breeding ground for mosquitoes and malaria. This meant that yam farmers with a particular genetic resistance to malaria were more likely to survive than farmers with susceptibility to malaria. Yam farmers in the region have been found to have a higher incidence of this genetic trait than nearby groups—even speakers of the same language—who farm other crops.

Oops, sorry, I forgot that the Equality Mandate means that genes don’t count because everybody is just the same. Forget I even mentioned it.

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Most Americans are happy with their commutes and would be willing to trade off even longer commutes in order to live in more desirable housing, according to a survey by YouGov. Moreover, the detailed results indicate that these preferences are almost as strong among 18-29 year olds as among older age classes. YouGov describes itself as a “market research and data company.”

…

The numbers suggest that anecdotes indicating that large numbers of Millennials want to use transit and live close to jobs aren’t supported by the facts. Among other things, the survey found that differences in commuting and other preferences between Democrats and Republicans are greater than between people in their 20s and people in their 50s.

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Two weeks ago, under the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”, I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.

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Think of it as evolution in action.

You might be a blueneck.

The new ephemera-based economy thrills those who celebrate a brave new world led by intrepid tech oligarchs and Wall Street money-men. The oligarchs in these industries have gotten much, much richer during the current recovery, not only through stocks and IPOs, but also from ultra-inflated real estate in select regional areas, particularly New York City and coastal California. As economist George Stiglitz has noted, such inflation on land costs has been as pervasive an effect of Fed policy as anything else.

Even in Houston, some academics hail the impending “collapse of the oil industrial economy,” even as they urge city leaders to compete with places like San Francisco for the much ballyhooed “creative class.” Yet University of Houston economist Bill Gilmer notes that low energy prices are driving tens of billions of new investment at the port and on the industrial east side of the city. This growth, he suggests, may help offset some of the inevitable losses in the more white collar side of the energy complex.

The emergence of a new ephemera-led economy bodes very poorly for most Americans, and not just Texans or residents of North Dakota. The deindustrialized ephemera-dominated economy of Brooklyn, for example, has made some rich, but overall incomes have dropped over the last decade; roughly one in four Brooklynites, overwhelmingly black and Hispanic, lives in poverty. Similar patterns of increased racial segregation and middle class flight can be found in other post-industrial cities, including one-time powerhouse Chicago, where areas of  concentrated poverty have expanded in recent years.

Nowhere is this clearer than in ephemera central: California. Once a manufacturing juggernaut and a beacon of middle class opportunity, the Golden States now suffers the worst level of poverty in the country. While Silicon Valley and its urban annex, San Francisco, have flourished, most of the state—from Los Angeles to the Inland regions—have done poorly, with unemployment rates 25 percent or higher than the national average. The ultra-“progressive” city now suffers the most accelerated increase in inequality in the country.

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The signal flaw of this thumbsucker is stated in the subhead:

The children of the rich and powerful are increasingly well suited to earning wealth and power themselves. That’s a problem.

Why? It’s never explained, just assumed.

For sure, America has always had rich and powerful families, from the floor of the Senate to the boardrooms of the steel industry. But it has also held more fervently than any other country the belief that all comers can penetrate that elite as long as they have talent, perseverance and gumption.

Unfotunately, there is increasing evidence that ‘talent, perseverence, and gumption’ are in large part hereditary and fostered by a good family life. This gives ‘progressives’ hives, because their whole worldview is founded on the nonsensical notion that every person is just the same as every other person, so any difference in outcome must be due to some evil circumstance, probably caused by some Rich White Person.

Today’s elite is a long way from the rotten lot of West Egg. Compared to those of days past it is by and large more talented, better schooled, harder working (and more fabulously remunerated) and more diligent in its parental duties. It is not a place where one easily gets by on birth or connections alone. At the same time it is widely seen as increasingly hard to get into.

That’s because talent is hereditary and not available to everybody without exception, schooling and hard work depend on individual effort that goes against the grain of the natural indolence of human nature, and diligence in parental duties is a product of a culture that most ‘underprivileged’ refuse to adopt.

More than 50 years ago Michael Young warned that the incipient meritocracy to which he had given a name could be as narrow and pernicious, in its way, as aristocracies of old.

Which is, of course, only a problem if you are predisposed to assume that all inequality is somehow bad.

Once progressives saw academic testing as a way of breaking down old structures of privilege; there is now a growing sense that it simply serves to advantage those who have been schooled to excel in such situations.

In other words, the system works, and they don’t like it, because it points out that their core assumptions are bullshit; they react as they always have, by blaming the facts for showing up their premises rather than re-evaluate their premises in light of the facts.

Read it.

A recent study of the wrists of modern birds finds that a bone lost from dinosaurs for tens of millions of years reappeared when dinosaurs evolved into birds and took flight.

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What did President Obama say? “No God condones terror.” Obviously he never read the Koran in its original Arabic version, and thus failed to grasp the fundamental fact that Allah the God of Islam is a God of terrorism “par excellence”, and He clearly instructs Muslims in the following verse to embrace terrorism as a religious duty:

Read it.

More than 60 years ago, Idaho Fish and Game dropped beavers out of a plane and parachuted them into the state’s backcountry. This little-known piece of Idaho history stars a crafty Fish and Game officer and a plucky male beaver named Geronimo.

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As it turns out, tools were sometimes attached to manuscripts, such as a disk, dial or knob, or even a complete scientific instrument. Such ‘add-ons’ were usually mounted onto the page, extending the book’s primary function as an object that one reads, turning it into a piece of hardware.

Thomas at Politics & Prosperity has an excellent fisking of Bryan Caplan on the subect.

Read it.

But there is a second way by which technology can suppress wages – when technology can guide and track workers the output of different workers becomes more uniform and thus more fungible. Before the era of ubiquitous cheap information technology, training and tracking the performance of mid and low skill workers was more expensive. Workers varied significantly in quality and ability and it made sense to pay workers with experience more so they would not have to be replaced by new workers who would be expensive to train. The extreme example of the fungible worker is the Amazon warehouse worker.

…

Before these technological advancements, workers enjoyed mini-monopolies. The warehouse worker couldn’t be easily replaced because their replacement might be way less efficient as they learned the layout of their workplace. As technology more directly guides low and mid skill workers in their jobs the workers are losing their mini-monopolies. Workers don’t need job specific experience to be hired so the supply of workers available to every technology guided job has increased. A higher supply leads to a lower price (the price of a worker is their wage). After full employment is reached the general wage level may increase for low skilled workers, but for now the impact of the Great Factor Price Equalization and the More Fungible Worker are suppressing the wages of middle and lower class developed world workers.

Yet another nail in the coffin of the Minimum Wage: If the choice is between hiring the Fungible Worker in a country that mandates a minimum wage and the Fungible Worker in a country that doesn’t, who get the job? Hint: It isn’t one of Barack Obama’s bought votes.

Theodore Dalrymple turns over a rock.

One little phrase in Le Monde’s report of an incident in Nice—in which a man aged 30 called Moussa Coulibaly attacked with a knife three soldiers guarding a Jewish community center—caught my attention: rien de bien méchant, nothing very bad.

It was used in describing his prior record: Coulibaly had been found guilty six times between 2003 and 2012 by French courts of “theft, use of drugs, insulting policemen,” and had received either fines or suspended prison sentences for his rien de bien méchant. Given the percentage of offenses that are actually elucidated in France (as elsewhere), the chances are that he had committed at least ten times as much as he had ever been charged with, and it is also very likely that some of what he had done was a good deal more serious than anything that has come to light. At the very least delinquency was his way of life; and the total amount of harm he did, the misery caused to or inflicted on others, considerable. Rien de bien méchant doesn’t quite capture it, and could only have been written by someone inhabiting so utterly different a social world that he has no idea of the nature of Coulibaly’s.

The Other McCain carefully refrains from saying I Told You So.

Notice that this is O’Donnell’s second lesbian wife. Her first marriage to longtime girlfriend Kelli Carpenter ended in 2007. Carpenter now has her own second wife, and the four O’Donnell-Carpenter children seem closer to Kelli than to Rosie. Nobody in the world of media is allowed to say a word about the unnatural weirdness of all this — two boys and three girls without fathers, one of them (Kelli’s youngest) conceived by artificial insemination — because equality!

Read it.

I have a little list….

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A new look at the human Y chromosome has overturned longstanding ideas about its evolutionary history. Far from being in a state of decay, the Y chromosome is the fastest-changing part of the human genome and is constantly renewing itself.

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This year’s version of the budget included a number of provisions targeting retirement accounts. That was no surprise, as provisions aimed at retirement accounts have been a regular feature in budgets in recent years. What was a surprise, however, is how many proposals were targeting retirement accounts, and how many new proposals there were. All told, this year’s budget featured over a dozen provisions that, if they were to become law, could directly impact your retirement savings.

Retirement accounts are one of the last great pools of money that the government hasn’t yet drained. Obviously, leeches like Obama want to sink their teeth into them.

Read it.

Here are the ones that aren’t:

Alaska- Bill Walker (I)
California- Jerry Brown (D)
Connecticut- Dan Malloy (D)
Hawaii- David Ige (D)
Kentucky- Steve Beshear (D)
Minnesota- Mark Dayton (D)
Missouri- Jay Nixon (D)
Montana- Steve Bullock (D)
New York- Andrew Cuomo (D)
Oregon- John Kitzhaber (D)
Pennsylvania- Tom Wolf (D)
Rhode Island- Gina Raimondo (D)
Utah- Gary Herbert (R)
Virginia- Terry McAuliffe (D)
Washington- Jay Inslee (D)

Utah is the real surprise.

Read it.

Speaking of public figures who lie….

Holder’s hiring practices have also been marred pure politics, especially within the Civil Rights Division. The Department of Justice’s own Inspector General found that one office in that division “passed over candidates who had stellar academic credentials with some of the best law firms in the country” in order to hire others they preferred, a majority of whom came from just five advocacy organizations that are political allies of the Obama administration.

All too often, moreover, the positions taken in court by Holder’s DOJ have been so devoid of legal merit that they can only be understood politically and/or ideologically….

Slate is not afraid to ask the ‘progressive’ questions.

Maybe because they’re criminals? That’s just a guess, you understand.

How to Build a Cannon That Shoots Wiffle Balls at 50MPH.

Key Chain Pry Tool.

Luna smart bed cover.

MiniDrain clip on urinal. I am not making this up.

Ceramic escape knife. One of these babies could save your life.

Shadow portable panic button.

Comfort U Body Support Pillow.

Read it.

Really. Just … read it.

“I sometimes think Obama thinks he’s in an episode of The West Wing or some other Aaron Sorkin version of reality where the facts always line up to preconceived liberal narratives. … It’s amazing to me how much Obama’s speeches depend on, and benefit from, the same things. The solipsism of the liberal egghead press is partly to blame. Obama goes out there and literally persuades no one about anything, but since he says exactly what a liberal president is supposed to say, they think it’s all brilliant soaring oratory and bold statesmanship.”

— Jonah Goldberg

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It took place near the city of Basra, located in present-day southern Iraq, over a period of fifteen years (AD 869–883). The insurrection is believed to have involved enslaved Bantus (Zanj) that had originally been captured from the African Great Lakes region and areas further south in East Africa.

Next time you see a black Muslim, remind him that Muslims have been enslaving black Africans for, oh, 1200 years now. And mention that if it hadn’t been for pressure by European nations, slavery would still be official in many Muslim countries (where it continues unofficially).

Feel free to savor the irony.