Today for White Male Appreciation Week we celebrate wheat.
Well, white men didn't invent wheat, but one of them DID invest a strain of wheat resistant to disease and yeast which did more to end hunger than all of the celebrity aid to Africa.
You too can celebrate White Male Appreciation Week by posting achievements and contributions to society by various white males!
7 comments:
I love being white.
I got my last job by writing 'I am a white male, I won't get pregnant or steal' on a blank page calling it a resume and handing it in.
I just walked in there with it, asked for the manager, shook his land and asked him for a job, all while looking him in the eye.
#whitepriviledge
#gotfiredforstealing
hey cap!
how about this guy?!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Hilleman
"Instead, like all the world's earlier explosions of invention, it, in the words of one of the phenomenon's most acute observers, "fizzled out." One unique characteristic of the eighteenth-century miracle was that it was the first that didn't.
The other one, the real reason that the threads leading from Rocket [the first steam locomotive] form such a challenging knot, is that the miracle was, overwhelmingly, produced by English-speaking people. Rocket incorporates hundreds of invention, small and large --safety valves, feedback controls, return flues, condensers -- to say nothing of the iron foundries and coal mines that supplied its raw materials. If one could magically edit out those steam engines invented in Italy, or Sweden, or --more important -- France, or China, Rocket would still run. If the same magic were applied to those invented in England, Scotland, Wales, and America, the platform in the Science Museum would be empty.
That is a puzzle for which there is no shortage of proposed solutions (see Industrial Revolution, Theories of, above). The one propose by the book you hold in your hands can be boiled down to this: The best explanation for the preeminence of English speakers in lifting humanity out of its ten-thousand-year-long Malthusian trap is that the Anglophone world democratized the nature of invention.
Even simpler: Before the eighteenth century, inventions were either created by those wealthy enough to do so as a leisure activity (or to patronize artisans to do so on their behalf), or they were kept secret for as long as possible. In England, a unique combination of law and circumstance gave artisans the incentive to invent, and in return obliged them to share the knowledge of their inventions. ... Human character (or at least behavior) was changed, and changed forever, by seventeenth-century Britain's insistence that the ideas were a kind of property. This notion is as consequential as any idea in history."
-- Rosen, Willam, 'The Most Powerful Idea in the World'
Here's a great post extolling the virtues of white males.
http://goldengeesenews.blogspot.com/2013/10/white-privilege-we-earned-it-but-anyone.html
Thanks for the link Cappy. I have a degree in the same field as Borlaug & heard him talk a few times in grad school. But I did not know he was a hall of fame wrestler!
Here's a link to a Fred Reed classic on white males:
http://www.fredoneverything.net/WhiteMales.shtml
Enjoy!
On the subject of wheat, white men developed the quick-ripening strain which made the Canadian Prairies massively productive, despite the short growing period of about 180 days.
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