Some Things You Might Not Have Seen - Island Boys And The N-Word

Here are a couple of things I thought others might find worth reading.  The first challenges the narrative of the Lord of the Flies with an account of a real group of boys who were stranded on a desert island for over a year.  The second one is Leonard Pitts calling out Senato McConnell on his rebuke of President Obama.


The Real Lord of The Flies Cooperated With Each Other

"Then, on the eighth day, they spied a miracle on the horizon. A small island, to be precise. Not a tropical paradise with waving palm trees and sandy beaches, but a hulking mass of rock, jutting up more than a thousand feet out of the ocean. These days, ‘Ata is considered uninhabitable. But “by the time we arrived,” Captain Warner wrote in his memoirs, “the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.” While the boys in Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire, those in this real-life version tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year."

After Senator McConnell said, "“I think President Obama should have kept his mouth shut,” Leonard Pitts calls on McConnell to just say it.

"It’s not like the rest of us don’t hear it already in your contemptuous tone. If one didn’t know better, one might think you were addressing a not-so-bright junior staffer who spoke out of turn in a meeting, not a president of the United States. Former GOP Chairman Michael Steele certainly caught your meaning, retorting on Twitter, “I’m sure Mitch is aware that a grown-ass black man who happens to be a former president has agency to speak his mind on how his successor is managing this crisis, especially since his successor has yet to ‘keep his mouth shut’ about him.”

I also had a link here to a Twitter thread that gave a great detailed explanation of different kinds of ventilators, but when I checked the link before posting it was no longer there.