Settlements and Statements

From Time:

"When he built his house in the early 1980s, Kennedy says, his water request was denied. He can't even remember the number of times he asked the city's service director for help, only to have nothing happen. Then a house went up next door. A white family moved in, and one day Kennedy saw his new neighbors watering their lawn. "They'd be out there with a hot tub out on the porch," he says, "and I was still going down the road [to the local water treatment plant] with a pickup truck every day."

Basically, for those of you who are TL;DR for the full article, a black community in a white part of the state of Ohio just got awarded 10 million for the fact that, I don't know, they were denied running water for fifty years, despite being only a few hundred feet from a water main servicing white communities. And yes - if you read the article, it's pretty blatant that it solely has to do with the race of the community, and that this is not just tort-mongering.

I'm glad I saw this; I have to work really quite hard to keep myself from falling into that "systemic racism" trap, whereby only a few idiotic white racists exist, and the real problems are all of the "invisible knapsack" variety. Nope. Plenty of good ol' white folks who just don't give a good goddamn about minorities pretty blatantly, if not abusively. And if you're of the Ron Paul mindset - explain to me where we'd be on civil rights if not for the Federal Government? I mean, this is Ohio we're talking about here - one of those places that has a Union memorial practically in every town center.

On a happier note - a list of 50 favorite words, from the Beeb. Personally, I'd like to add a few of mine: 

Ultracrepidarian - someone who talks on subjects of which they have no knowledge;

Lethelogia - to forget a single word; 

Rhinotillexis - to pick one's nose.

That Is All For Now.