'Taken' and global sex traffic

"In his recent Fox thriller, 'Taken,' actor Liam Neeson tackles the inevitable result of that change, for sexual predators are the natural pedigree of sexually libertine societies. Neeson plays a divorced father who slashes through Europe, guns blazing, to rescue his young daughter. Kidnapped and drugged, she is auctioned off by aristocratic French sex slavers to wealthy Arab buyers during her Paris college vacation.

"'Taken' is brutally honest about the 'high end' of the growing global sex slave traffic. The girl's naïveté and her capture are wholly plausible and follow thousands of years of similar history when good men allow bad men to attain power. Only the happily ever-after rescue by 'dad with the "mad skills" of a super spy' is implausible."

Believe it or Not: Black Slaveowners

"When Carter G. Woodson declared that 'the majority of Negro owners of slaves were such from the point of view of philanthropy,' he failed to consider that there were so-called benevolent masters who freed one slave and sold another slave for profit. Woodson's perceptions of free black slaveholding were partially correct; however, when the totality of the institution is examined, his assumptions are revealed to be erroneous. . . .

"Many black masters were firmly committed to chattel slavery and saw no reasons for manumitting their slaves. To those colored masters, slaves were merely property to be purchased, sold or exchanged. Their economic self-interest overrode whatever moral concerns or guilt they may have harbored about slavery. Since the black masters benefited from slavery, they rationalized that because the institution was profitable, they could not relinquish their valuable property without being reimbursed. So black masters continued to own slaves even when the Union army was preparing to invade South Carolina in 1864. . . ."

How China has created a new slave empire in Africa

"Now the leader of the Patriotic Front, with a respectable chance of winning a presidential election set for the end of October, Sata says: 'The Chinese are not here as investors, they are here as invaders.

''They bring Chinese to come and push wheelbarrows, they bring Chinese bricklayers, they bring Chinese carpenters, Chinese plumbers. We have plenty of those in Zambia.'

"This is true. In Lusaka and in the Copper Belt, poor and lowly Chinese workers, in broad-brimmed straw hats from another era, are a common sight at mines and on building sites, as are better-dressed Chinese supervisors and technicians."