1619 Is a Prime Number

Dubas has a ridiculous number of draft picks for the Penguins to work with over the next three years (18 in the first three rounds, including four first-rounders). He’ll also have an enormous amount of cap space (just over $26 million) to work with for next season. the problem will be, like the Pirates, the quality of the people working with those advantages.

***

A Falcon 9 launched two distinct NASA science missions March 11, SPHEREx and PUNCH. One will explore the infrared universe and one will study the solar wind.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 11:10 p.m. Eastern. It placed into sun-synchronous orbits the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) spacecraft and the four satellites of the Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission. All five spacecraft were in contact with controllers and functioning as expected after launch, the agency stated.

NASA elected to launch SPHEREx and PUNCH together, using the excess capacity in the Falcon 9 originally procured for SPHEREx since both missions were going to similar orbits. It is part of an approach by NASA to take advantage of rideshare launch opportunities.

“This is a real change in how we do business,” Mark Clampin, acting deputy associate administrator for science at NASA, said at a March 7 prelaunch briefing. “We can maximize the efficiency of launches by two payloads at once.”

***

Harvard Astrophysicist Willie Soon argues that solar variation, rather than human activity, is the primary driver of global warming. In an interview recently he said that modern physics has revealed physical laws too precise to be random.

***

So now there is a Ukraine ceasefire. Doesn't this now require the goodwill of Putin, who in any other civilized world would be held responsible for the war and should be considered a war criminal?

***

1619 Is a Prime Number

One of the appalling creations of the current race/propaganda/marketing gene splicing to crawl out of the Left's thought problem laboratory is the mind-numbing 1619 proposition floated by the formerly revered NYT. What is revelatory is how cynically commercial it is.

Here is a portion of a take on it from the New Criterion:

"It was to console its core readership that The New York Times undertook The 1619 Project in a special flood-the-zone issue of its Sunday magazine in August and then in a snazzy, graphics-heavy series of features on its website. For two years, the Times had invested heavily in the vaudeville entertainment called “Trump–Russia.” The spectacular failure of its leading man, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, to deliver a happy ending to that fiasco underscored the essential futility of the entire enterprise.

This was something that Dean Baquet, Executive Editor of the Times, grasped instantly. Last summer, he huddled with his staff in a town-hall-style meeting—the proceedings of which were promptly leaked—and acknowledged a sad truth: “We built our newsroom to cover one story” (the now-debunked story that Donald Trump had “colluded” with Russia to steal the 2016 election). The story didn’t pan out. “Now we have to regroup,” Baquet told the assembled troops, “and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story.” What story? Henceforth, or at least “for the next two years”—the remainder of Trump’s first term—the Times was going all in on “race, and other divisions.” Robert Mueller couldn’t get Trump. Maybe the Times could by writing about race in a “thoughtful,” i.e., obsessive and one-sided, way—“something,” Baquet added “we haven’t done in a large way in a long time.”

So there you have it. “That, to me,” Baquet concluded, “is the vision for coverage. You all are going to have to help us shape that vision. But I think that’s what we’re going to have to do for the rest of the next two years.” 

Et voilà, The 1619 Project, which the paper described in a preface as a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.

What followed was a stupefying race-based fantasy about the origins of the United States. The lead essay, by the black journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the “architect” of The 1619 Project, set the tone. “[O]ne of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain,” she wrote, “was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” So, everything you learned about the American Revolution is wrong, or at least wrongheaded. Forget about the Stamp Act, the Boston Tea Party, the Intolerable Acts, “No taxation without representation,” etc. All that, utterly unmentioned by Ms. Hannah-Jones, was mere window dressing. The American colonists might talk about liberty. What they really cared about, according to this malignant fairy tale, was preserving and extending the institution of slavery. “[S]ome might argue,” as Hannah-Jones coyly puts it, “that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy.” Gosh. Of course, “some might argue” any number of incredible things: that the earth is flat, that the moon is made of green cheese, that The New York Times is still a responsible source of news and even-handed commentary. The fact that “some might argue” X does not mean that X is credible.

So it is with the preposterous idea that America was founded as a “slavocracy.” Hannah-Jones asserts that “anti-black racism runs in the very dna of this country.” The claim is obviously metaphorical; countries do not possess dna. But if one were to take the metaphor seriously, as tantamount to asserting that anti-black racism is an essential and therefore unalterable characteristic of America, then the whole 1619 Project would be pointless from the get-go. It would be like complaining about the roundness of a circle or the wetness of water.

Presumably, however, neither Hannah-Jones nor the Times intends for us to take the metaphor quite so seriously. For Hannah-Jones, what is wanted is an expression that simultaneously justifies the endless whining of black radicals about how victimized they are because of things that happened a few centuries ago while also stressing the perpetually renewable guilt (like the liver of Prometheus) of whites, all whites, those living today even more than those actually involved in the African slave trade in the seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries. For the Times, it fits in with what Power Line’s Paul Mirengoff called its “irresistible urge to delegitimize America.” That is the ultimate aim of The 1619 Project: to deliver another blow in the campaign to besmirch and diminish the political and moral achievement that is the United States of America. It is as despicable as it is mendacious.

You might say, Who cares about insane rantings in The New York Times? It is increasingly a niche publication for the credentialed, politically correct nomenklatura, totally out of touch with the main current of America and held afloat only by its unremitting attacks on anything to do with Donald Trump.

This is true. Nevertheless, the paper is not entirely without influence, even today. Indeed, various public school districts, including some in Chicago, have announced that they will supplement their curricula by distributing copies of The 1619 Project to students, thereby promulgating the racialist worldview expounded by that “major” “reframing” of our history. And though the copies will be paid for by the Times and donors, taxpayers will still be indirectly funding a version of history that is politically tendentious and wildly at odds with the facts. The Pulitzer Center (not affiliated with the famed prizes) has announced that it “is proud to be the education partner for The 1619 Project.” As we write, the Center’s website is full of little valentines to Hannah-Jones and her racialist, ahistorical fantasy about the founding of the United States.
We said that The 1619 Project was stupefying. What we meant was that the claims it makes are so outlandish, at once so ostentatiously at odds with historical reality while also being carefully framed in a corset of politically correct verbiage, that any critical response is at first stunned. Someone tells you that the Apollo 11 moon landing was a carefully staged hoax perpetrated by nasa or the Trilateral Commission or whatever. Your first response is a spluttering incredulity.

It is the same with the contention that 1619, the year that the first African slaves were brought to America, marked “the beginning of the system of slavery on which the country was built.” But there were already slaves and various other forms of indentured labor in the Americas as there were all over the world. To say that there were slaves in America is not to say that “the country was built” on slavery. Moreover, the African slaves were not “kidnapped” by American or British slavers, as Hannah-Jones asserts, but were sold by other black Africans who were happy to profit by selling people they had enslaved to the colonists.

Fortunately, a rational, historically informed response to The 1619 Project has been building. The National Association of Scholars has inaugurated the “1620 Project,” not just to commemorate the signing of the Mayflower Compact—a much more significant event in the history of the United States—but also to provide an occasion for thoughtful responses to some of the more outlandish claims made by Hannah-Jones and the other writers involved in the Times’s latest campaign of disinformation. (Among our favorites, the contention that double-entry bookkeeping was an innovation “whose roots twist back to slave-labor camps.”)

The distinguished historian Allen C. Guelzo, writing in City Journal, notes that 'The 1619 Project is not history: it is polemic, born in the imaginations of those whose primary target is capitalism itself and who hope to tarnish capitalism by associating it with slavery.' The great irony, Guelzo writes, is that 'The 1619 Project dispenses this malediction from the chair of ultimate cultural privilege in America,' The New York Times, 'because in no human society has an enslaved people suddenly found itself vaulted into positions of such privilege, and with the consent—even the approbation—of those who were once the enslavers.'”

(A prime number is distinct, whose only function is 1 and itself, that is it is not the product of any two numbers other than one and itself. It is a happy curiosity. In this instance, it is meant to be isolated, autogenerated, and alone. But it may not be a terrific metaphor for a calculated, propagandist lie intended to influence public opinion and education. That kind of act is neither quirky nor interesting. Beneath such mendacity is a malignant evil and its target is the very foundation of the nation, a foundation that allows the NYT to exist. Any notion intended to hobble the value and free nature of man should never be passively tolerated.)

Jefferson and Slavery

The conflicts among Americans now is not over who is right or wrong but who is evil.

                              Jefferson and Slavery

From  Kallmes:

When Thomas Jefferson included a passage attacking slavery in his draft of the Declaration of Independence it initiated the most intense debate among the delegates gathered at Philadelphia in the spring and early summer of 1776.  Jefferson’s passage on slavery was the most important section removed from the final document.  It was replaced with a more ambiguous passage about King George’s incitement of “domestic insurrections among us.”  Decades later Jefferson blamed the removal of the passage on delegates from South Carolina and Georgia and Northern delegates who represented merchants who were at the time actively involved in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.  Jefferson’s original passage on slavery appears below.

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.  This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain.  Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.  And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

The removal of the anti-slavery clause of the declaration was not the only time Jefferson’s efforts might have led to the premature end of the “peculiar institution.” Economist and cultural historian Thomas Sowell notes that Jefferson’s 1784 anti-slavery bill, which had the votes to pass but did not because of a single ill legislator’s absence from the floor, would have ended the expansion of slavery to any newly admitted states to the Union years before the Constitution’s infamous three-fifths compromise.

The Great Production of Slavery

                       The Great Production of Slavery


From McCloskey on the revolting 1619 Lie:

Both Senator [Tom] Cotton [R-AR] and the 1619 Project have the economic history wrong.
If it were true, the numerous slave societies of olden times, such as Rome in 30 BCE or Norway in 700 CE, would have long ago experienced the Great Enrichment, of 3,000 percent per person for the poorest in Britain and Japan and many other non-slave places 1800 to the present. Likewise, by now Canada, say, with no slaves or much of any connection with slavery, would have remained very poor. Switzerland. New Zealand. Botswana.


What “built”” the US and every other country now prosperous was not stealing from poor people, or for that matter piling up routine investment, but massive innovation—cheap steel, electricity, vaccines, the modern university, mobility of labor and capital, the internal combustion engine, sewage treatment, artificial fertilizer, radio, radar, free trade, jet planes, the green revolution, containerization, computers, and above all the shamefully delayed but in the end thoroughly achieved liberation of slaves, poor men, women, colonial peoples, immigrants, free Blacks, gays. Under what Adam Smith called “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty”—in a word, liberalism– -people were permitted for the first time to have a go. It was their new liberty to innovate, not slavery or forced investment, that made billions rich, and will make the entire world rich. Or it will do so unless the 1619 Project and Senator Cotton, populists of left or right, with their Just-So understandings of history, kill it.

Wrong Questions

To be able to recover his honor, a slave must necessarily adopt the rules and standards of the society that surrounds him, and this means that, in practice at least, he cannot absolutely reject the institutions that de­prived him of his honor in the first place."---Olaudah Equiano

Amazing game last night that somehow Washington won.


Relativity Space, a venture-backed rocket company, just raised $140 million to fund its plan to 3D print its rockets.

The problem with price controls is simple when we think in terms of opportunity cost. If prices are fixed by law, they cannot tell us anything about the true opportunity cost of goods and services. Nevertheless, the logic of opportunity costs still applies to producers, including landlords, and consumers, including tenants.--Quiggin

This weird thing that slavery is the child of Capitalism and that America hinged on slavery really surprised me --until I read this: "Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry…cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations." This is a quote from Marx. So the sacred prophet must be taken seriously, regardless of how unserious the observation.

The Vaping deaths are mostly in THC use. But.....

“Scientist predicts a new ice age by 21st century” (The Boston Globe, April 16, 1970). “U.S. Scientist Sees New Ice Age Coming” (The Washington Post, July 9, 1971). “Space satellites show new Ice Age coming fast” (The Guardian, January 29, 1974). “The Cooling” (New York Times Book Review, July 18, 1976). “Acid Rain Kills Life in Lakes” (Noblesville Ledger, April 9, 1980). “Acid rain no environmental crisis, study concludes” (Associated Press, September 6, 1990). “Rising seas to obliterate nations by 2000” (Associated Press, June 30, 1989). “New York City’s West Side Highway under water by 2019” (Salon.com, October 23, 2001). “Gore: ‘Entire north polar ice cap will be gone in 5 years’” (WUWT, December 14, 2008). 
“Just 96 months to save world from catastrophe, says Prince Charles” (The Independent, July 9, 2009). “Gordon Brown: We have fewer than fifty days to save our planet from catastrophe” (The Independent, October 20, 2009). “French Foreign Minister: ‘500 Days to Avoid Climate Chaos’” (Washington Examiner, May 14, 2014). “Planet Still Standing 500 Days After French Foreign Minister Warned of ‘Climate Chaos’” (Washington Examiner, September 29, 2015).--from CEI

Controlling for academic traits and much else, being Asian American predicts a substantially lower probability of Harvard admission… And being female predicts a substantially higher probability of admission.--recent paper


Thirty-one-year-old British Major John Andre was hanged as a spy by U.S. military forces in Tappan, New York, on October 2, 1780



                              Wrong Questions


We have a history of asking the wrong questions. There is a clarity in the great teachers, an insightful way of thinking that explodes the prevailing error. Not only do they think deeper, they think more simply.

This is Sowell on poverty: "It’s not the origins of poverty that need to be explained. What requires explaining are the things that created and sustained higher standards of living. There’s no explanation needed for poverty. The species began in poverty. So what you really need to know is what are the things that enable some countries, and some groups within countries, to become prosperous.”
This is the question that Deidre McCloskey has asked in her trilogy.

This is Sowell on slavery: "Everyone hated the idea of being a slave but few had any qualms about enslaving others. Slavery was just not an issue, not even among intellectuals, much less among political leaders, until the 18th century – and then it was an issue only in Western civilization. Among those who turned against slavery in the 18th century were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry and other American leaders. You could research all of the 18th century Africa or Asia or the Middle East without finding any comparable rejection of slavery there. But who is singled out for scathing criticism today? American leaders of the 18th century.

Deciding that slavery was wrong was much easier than deciding what to do with millions of people from another continent, of another race, and without any historical preparation for living as free citizens in a society like that of the United States, where they were 20 percent of the population.

It is clear from the private correspondence of Washington, Jefferson, and many others that their moral rejection of slavery was unambiguous, but the practical question of what to do now had them baffled. That would remain so for more than half a century."

Slavery and Capitalism

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.--C.S. Lewis


Mom had a girls night out at the movies.
Mike Lange on the Pirate broadcast  didn't look like he would survive the night.

In the US, an annual income of only $5,300 makes you richer than 75% of the world’s population by income, $16,5000 per year makes you richer than 90% of the world’s population, $53,000 makes you richer than 99% of the world’s population and $100,000 puts you in the top richest 0.1% of the world’s population.

Asia's 20 wealthiest families are now worth more than $450 billion combined, a testament to how the world’s economic growth engine is minting fortunes at an unprecedented level. Topping the list with a $50 billion fortune is India's Ambani family.

A poll conducted with professional philosophers a few years ago asked them to name the philosopher, no longer living, with whom they most identify. Hume won, by a clear margin. In Julian Baggini’s estimation, contemporary ‘scientists, who often have little time for philosophy, often make an exception for Hume’. 

Amazon intentionally posts low profits because it takes the vast majority of the money it earns and invests it right back into the company so that it will profit all the more in the future. Its business model, once reviled on Wall Street, has spurred numerous other companies like Uber and WeWork to emulate Amazon and forgo profits for the sake of growth — though many of these companies haven’t really proved that they could ever be profitable.


Both "Lynch" and "Dewitt" mean "To kill by mob violence."  While the word lynch is coined after a perpetrator of such killing (Captain William Lynch), the word dewitt is coined after people who were the object of such violence, after the brothers Johan and Cornelius De Witt, Dutch statesmen, who were killed by a mob on Aug 20, 1672. This was a horrific event, the end of the Dutch Republican merchant class leadership as William ascended first to Dutch leadership and eventually to the throne of England. Early experiments against monarchies did not go well. It was the opening of Dumas' Black Tulip.

On August 23, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact, stunning the world, given their diametrically opposed ideologies. Apparently some people believed that public ideologies rather than the drive for power motivated people.

                    Slavery and Capitalism

The anti-capitalists are busy bees. If they weren't so malicious they would be funny. One of the new themes is this: Capitalism came from slavery and therefor capitalism is bad. There is some sort of transgenerational immoral contagion at work. Remember, the sins of the father are visited upon the sons. The Left is sometimes very biblical.

A new multipart feature series in the New York Times advances this thesis, depicting modern free market capitalism as an inherently “racist” institution and a direct lineal descendant of plantation slavery, still exhibiting the brutality of that system. This characterization draws heavily from the so-called “New History of Capitalism” (NHC) — a genre of historical writing that swept through the academy in the last decade and that aggressively promotes the thesis that free market capitalism and slavery are inextricably linked.

NHC contains historically implausible arguments, such as the notion that modern double-entry accounting emerged from plantation ledger books (the practice actually traces to the banking economies of Renaissance Italy), or that its use by slave owners is distinctively capitalistic (even the Soviets employed modern accounting practices, despite attempting to centrally plan their entire economy). Indeed, it was NHC historian Ed Baptist who produced an unambiguously false statistic purporting to show that cotton production accounted for a full half of the antebellum American economy (it actually comprised about 5 percent of GDP).

Magness has an interesting article on this deceptive frenzy where he resurrects 
George Fitzhugh’s Sociology for the South, first published in 1854. He quotes the opening lines:
"Political economy is the science of free society. Its theory and its history alike establish this position. Its fundamental maxim Laissez-faire and "Pas trop gouverner," are at war with all kinds of slavery, for they in fact assert that individuals and peoples prosper most when governed least."

This is not a pro-capitalist, pro-freedom tract. This guy is a slaver and a proponent of controlled economy and society. Fitzhugh was a leading slavery apologist who tried to make an elaborate ideological case for slave labor and indeed all aspects of social ordering. Such a system, he announced, would resolve the posited state of perpetual conflict between labor and the owners of capital by supplanting it with the paternalistic hierarchy of slavery. Fitzhugh was also an avowed anti-capitalist. Slavery’s greatest threat came from the free market economic doctrines of Europe, which were “tainted with abolition, and at war with our institutions.” To survive, he declared, the South must “throw Adam Smith, Say, Ricardo & Co., in the fire.”
By 1861, he had added his voice to the cause of southern secession and began mapping out an elaborate slave-based industrialization policy for the Confederacy’s wartime economy.

Fitzhugh had effectively worked out the Marxian theory of “surplus value” over a decade before the publication of Marx’s own Capital (1867), and derived it from the same sweeping indictment of the free-labor capitalism.
These similarities between Fitzhugh and socialism, and indeed the aggressive anti-capitalist rhetoric of proslavery ideology, are seldom examined in the NHC literature. But never mind.

Buzz, buzz. These controlling statists never sleep.
(a lot from Magness)

reparation

"Oberlin’s president defiantly says “none of this will sway us from our core values.” Those values — moral arrogance, ideology-induced prejudgments, indifference to evidence — are, to continue using the progressive patois, the root causes of Oberlin’s descent beyond caricature and into disgrace." Will on Oberlin's disastrous calumny and mendacity in their libeling a local merchant.

Mom had dinner at Superior Motors with her high school class.
I really hurt yesterday and last night after what is laughingly call my "Physical Therapy."

For the second week in a row, a small Florida city has agreed to pay cyber criminals hundreds of thousands of dollars after a ransomware attack crippled city systems.

A factory storekeeper in the Nzara township of Sudan became ill on this day in 1976. Five days later, he died, and the world’s first recorded Ebola virus epidemic begins making its way through the area. By the time the epidemic was over, 284 cases were reported, with about half of the victims dying from the disease. Symptoms of Ebola hemorrhagic fever generally begin about four to 15 days after a person is infected with the virus. 

                                                     Reparations

Definition of reparation. 1a : a repairing or keeping in repair. b reparations plural : repairs. 2a : the act of making amends, offering expiation, or giving satisfaction for a wrong or injury. b : something done or given as amends or satisfaction.

So such an act requires someone who has damaged someone and that person who has been damaged by him.
Slavery in the Nineteenth Century was a way of life throughout the world. It still is in some places --but not here. No one in the U.S. is responsible for anyone's slavery in the Nineteenth Century. Some may have had slave owning ancestors, but few. Far more had ancestors who went to war and freed the slaves. (People strangely rarely talked about.)

Ex post facto is most typically used to refer to a criminal statute that punishes actions retroactively, thereby criminalizing conduct that was legal when originally performed. Two clauses in the United States Constitution prohibit ex post facto laws: 1. Art 1, § 9 1. This prohibits Congress from passing any laws which apply ex post facto. 2. Art. 1 § 10. 1. This prohibits the states from passing any laws which apply ex post facto.
"It is settled, by decisions of this Court so well known that their citation may be dispensed with, that any statute which punishes as a crime an act previously committed, which was innocent when done, which makes more burdensome the punishment for a crime, after its commission, or which deprives one charged with crime of any defense available according to law at the time when the act was committed, is prohibited as ex post facto."-- Beazell v. Ohio, 269 U.S. 167 (1925)

So criminalizing slavery now in a period when it was legal is ex post facto. It doesn't matter what you think of it now, it matters completely how it was assessed then. If you change the speed limit today from 65 to 55, you can not arrest a guy for driving 60 yesterday.

Reparations are often used in reference to payments made by a defeated enemy, which in this case might make some sense.

Reparations for slavery are like so many of the whims of the far Left. They are so illogical, so unreasonable, so unjust and so far from the experience of most people that they are hard to grapple with. But that doesn't make them any more logical, just or reasonable. There is a word for holding total strangers guilty for events no one remembers: Vendetta.

Sometimes being cruel to be kind is just being crazy.

American Independence and The Art of the Plausible‏

In the academic world one needs an area of expertise. It is even better if one can stake a claim to a new, unexplored area. One may not necessarily be correct in the new thesis; the creative and unclaimed nature of the notion is often enough. One comes up with an idea--the more provocative the better--develops a thesis to accompany it and then develop and nurture it as your own franchise. Interviews and tenure may follow. This is The Art of the Plausible.
It is the essence of revisionism. One takes a well established historic event and recast it with as little Procrustean effort as possible into a new, fresh concept. Eskimos, because they survived, are a culture superior to the Ancient Greeks, because they did not. Shakespeare was a Catholic. But any innovation will do. The Freudian franchise. The various takes on the Kennedy Assassination. The Nazca Lines of Peru are proof of extraterrestrials. Crucial is the ability to take such ideas and elevate them from simple interesting coffee house banter to a marketable academic--or simply popular--franchise.
One of the more startling such concepts popped up on C-Span recently, the novel idea that the United States rebellion against the British was not rooted in a desire for independence but just the opposite: It was an effort to protect the Colonies from the rising British abolitionist movement. (Irony is a great assent in The Art of the Plausible.)
The first European nation to engage in the Transatlantic Slave Trade was Portugal in the mid to late 1400's. Captain John Hawkins made the first known English slaving voyage to Africa, in 1562, in the reign of Elizabeth 1. Hawkins made three such journeys over a period of six years. He captured over 1200 Africans and sold them as goods in the Spanish colonies in the Americas. 
To start with, British traders supplied slaves for the Spanish and Portuguese colonists in America. However, as British settlements in the Caribbean and North America grew, often through wars with European countries such as Holland, Spain and France, British slave traders increasingly supplied British colonies.
The exact number of British ships that took part in the Slave Trade will probably never be known but, in the 245 years between Hawkins first voyage and the abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807, merchants in Britain dispatched about 10,000 voyages to Africa for slaves, with merchants in other parts of the British Empire perhaps fitting out a further 1,150 voyages.
Historian Professor David Richardson, has calculated that British ships carried 3.4 million or more enslaved Africans to the Americas. Only the Portuguese, who carried on the trade for almost 50 years after Britain had abolished its Slave Trade, carried more enslaved Africans to the Americas than the British (the most recent estimate suggests just over 5 million people).
Nestled into these centuries of abuse are a number of legal debates that peppered the British courts. Where did the Magna Carta place slaves? Did a slave converted from paganism have a different status? In 1772, Somerset vs. Stewart debated the movement of an escaped slave in Britain and the legality of his resale per Common Law.
Looking over the timeline of the world's evolving opinion on slavery one can see a remarkable development, almost a "contagion of conscience,"  as small cities and city-states gradually outlawed slavery and the flow moved from Europe--where there were few slaves and the consequence of the decision was less--to North America, then South America, then Asia and finally the Middle East where the illegality of slavery is relatively quite modern--within the last several generations. (ISIS excepted.)
(Note to self: "Contagion of Conscience" possibly a Plausible notion?)

Slavery as Stockholm Syndrome

slavery

 "is an institution according to the law of nations whereby one person falls under the property rights of another, contrary to nature."

This definition of slavery is, surprisingly, from first century Roman law, recognizing the unnatural quality of slavery in the eyes of the Roman Empire, one of history's great slavers. It is placed by David Graeber in his book "Debt" in opposition to the opinion of Olaudah Equiano, an African sold into slavery as a child, who bought his freedom, became a success­ful merchant, a best-selling author, an Arctic explorer, and eventually, one of the leading voices of English Abolitionism. His life story played a significant part in the movement that led to the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807 (as they freed up their ships for the opium trade.) Yet for most of his early life, Equiano was not opposed to the institu­tion of slavery. The conundrum appeared to be that slavery essentially deprives the slave of honor. "To be able to recover his honor, a slave must necessarily adopt the rules and standards of the society that surrounds him, and this means that, in practice at least, he cannot absolutely reject the institutions that de­prived him of his honor in the first place."