On November 26, the New York Times published an article by Felicia R. Lee called "The Anger and Shock of a City's Slave Past." It is about the exhibition, now running at the New York Historical Society, called "Slavery in New York."

The article was filled with all kinds of quotes from seemingly horrified and now enlightened White Americans, surprisingly mostly middle-aged, saying things like, "It's striking for any of us who are New Yorkers to realize that the ground we touch, every institution, is affected by slavery," or that it makes "A difference when you look at a black person on a subway train, or you're working next to a black person, that you have a little more empathy and understanding and also praising for how far so many people came," or that "It's terrible to know that the city that I love was part of the slave trade." Best of all is the "elderly white woman who said she had two college degrees" who said, "I never knew until I walked in here about slavery in New York...It just breaks my heart."

With all due respect to Ms. Lee and the excellent exhibit, I really don't understand the choice of focusing on comments such as these. It seems to me like it is New York Times liberalism -- and I certainly do not use that word in the contemptuous Bill O'Reilly sense -- run amok. I do not ever recall in any history class in my life being told that the North did not engage in the slave trade, and that there were not slaves in Northern cities. I don't think most intelligent people would be truly shocked -- shocked! -- to find that there were, once upon a time, slaves in New York.

There is even a quote from a professor at GW University who says: "Back in the 90's, when Bill Clinton asked for a national conversation about race, most people didn't have the context in which to have the conversation." You mean...most people didn't know that once upon a time there were slaves in America, and that that, in fact, is the reason why most African-Americans are here? Or that now a disproportionate number of those Americans live in poverty or are in prison? That racism is a fact of daily life for many people? No one had that context, and now this exhibition has set us free!

Well blessed be, I am so glad the New York Times and the New York Historical Society have seen to it that the truth has finally come to light. So when do I get my reparations check?

An internationally made, web-enabled prediction:

PS3 will eat the XBox360's lunch. The predictions that are being made regarding the availability of games are bupkis. Go down to any retail video store and you'll see the number of referbushed PSP's available from those that have been sold back -- despite increasingly available PSP software. This thing came out a year ago! There is just that much turnover in the market right now, and the game stores make it a heck of a lot easier to sell things back. While there are some duds in the PSP's inaugural software class, I think EA's NFL Street is one of the best games ever made, and Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories should win some kind of software award for 2005.

XBox360 will sell maybe 2-3 million units between now and early March. Yawn. By the beginning of next summer, you won't be able to swing a dead cat without hitting a used XBox360, the one the real gamer traded in to get a PS3. Or, better yet, because of the amont of time between the releases and the eventual ensuing price war, the PS3 will be cheap enough for a lot of people that didn't wait to see which was better to actually purchase both. Either way, the PS3 will absolutely shine.

I read this interesting article by Bob Herbert in the New York Times (I hate that lousy TimesSelect, and predict it will be gone by New Year's Day).

What was so interesting about it was the speech it references, given by Lawerence Wilkerson at the New America Foundation. Colonel Wilkerson is a big fan of Bush I, but has some not so flattering things to say about W. I like his suggestion -- borrowed from George Packer's Assassins' Gate -- that Bush essentially ginned up the war "on the fly."

Wilkerson shows an extraordinary understanding of systems analysis and the kind of thinking that is paralyzing the current Administration. Whatever your belief about W, his Cronies, or Gulf War 2 (GW2), Colonel Wilkerson says quite a few things worth thinking about.

Feeling it might be equally useful, here are some (quickly found) references to some of the things mentioned in the speech:
PDD-56
James Vincent Forrestal
NY Times' review of The Assassins' Gate
Salon's Review of The Assassins' Gate
The Malmedy Massacre
Yoshiyama Awards
Colin Powell's Speech to the UN
Moorer-Radford Affair