150 Year's ago today

"Economic and political prosperity are not the final measures of human progress. The Rome of Trajan was immeasurably more splendid than the Rome of the Scipios; yet the progress had been downwards nevertheless. If the object of our existence on this planet is the development of character, the culminating point in any nation's history is that at which it produces its noblest and bravest men."
-- James Anthony Froude, The English in the West Indies
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Henry Lawson Wyatt, NC State Capitol

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It's been a special year because this is the 150th anniversary of the War Between the States.

In April, they were at the reenactment of the Battle of Big Bethel in Newport News, Va., (that was actually fought in June). This is where Wyatt, 19, of Tarboro, was killed June 10, 1861 when his brain was pierced by a musket ball as he charged across an open field.

On their way back home, Pvt. Russ, Pvt. Evans and their 1st Sgt. Tom Oliver stopped at the Wyatt marker to place flowers and pay their respects. Wyatt was the first North Carolina soldier to die in the war.

It rained on Evans that day, and he learned, "Trust in God, but keep your powder dry."

“I learn something every time out,” he said.

These men are living history as they say. They have respect for the gray or blue uniform they wear. Some historians have said the Civil War is the single most important event in the United States’ history, probably even more than the American Revolution. I dunno.

North Carolina voted to join the Confederacy on May 20, 1861, "a reluctant partner to the cause" as The AP's Martha Waggoner wrote this week. The state had voted earlier that year not to call a secession convention, and it wasn’t until the firing on Fort Sumter on April 12 and President Lincoln’s call for troops that North Carolina and Tennessee became last two of the 11 Confederate states to join.

There's a symposium in Raleigh this weekend. One of the underlying themes will be why people care so much about the Civil War. Historian David Blight says it’s because the Civil War set into play the debates that still dominate our public discussions today.

“It’s about who we are as Americans; how we define ourselves; how equal we really want to be; how we define federalism from generation to generation; and what we believe government is,” said Blight, a Yale University history professor and keynote speaker at the symposium. “Big government, centralized government was invented in the Civil War by the Lincoln administration. When we debate Civil War memory, we are debating a lot of fundamentals about our social and political systems.”

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150 Year's ago today

It's a Two Way Street

Via Green Mountains Homesteading

Police Misconduct NewsFeed Weekend Recap 05-21-11 to 05-22-11

I’ve decided to post the weekend update early this weekend, don’t worry though, if any more reports come up I’ll add them as they come in. I might just make the weekend recaps live recaps from now on actually… we’ll see how it goes…

With that in mind, here are the 12 reports of police misconduct tracked in our National Police Misconduct News Feed so far for this weekend, May 21-22, 2011: HERE.

Informant in raw video gives Fox News explosive details about Gunwalker

Gun Rights Examiner has been so involved providing original investigative reporting on “Project Gunwalker”* developments that investigations conducted by others at times go unexplored. Such is the case with a raw video produced by Fox News on April 27, in which reporter William La Jeunesse interviewed an unidentified confidential informant.

Not that the reports go unnoticed behind the scenes. This correspondent has been in contact with La Jeunesse on Gunwalker developments for some months, and while not free to share his replies, this is what he was emailed following publication of his May 4 report:

Per your report:

“In a second, equally explosive disclosure, a law enforcement source tells Fox News, that ATF undercover agents were acting as the straw buyers and purchasing guns using government-issued false identifications and then providing those guns to cartel traffickers to gain credibility in their undercover roles. In that capacity, the ATF "provided 2, 50 cal. machine guns to traffickers that are loose in Mexico and unaccounted for," the source said.”

From...a[n]...expert on NFRTR:

“IF a dealer had M2s in stock, they could NOT have been legally transferred to a buyer without approval by ATF. Taking the report at face value, it would mean that (1) the straw buyer went through the NFA paperwork process to get the M2s, and (2) ATF knew about that by definition, and allowed the guns to walk anyway.

“I am suspicious of the reports, in the sense that the M2s in question originated from a dealer. Could be that they were M1s, and the straw buyer converted them into machine guns; which is quite a different thing?”

Thought I'd run that by you to make sure.

Pettigrew's Division

“When [Northern] artillery opened on Pettigrew’s division, the fire was so devastating that, as [General Isaac] Trimble observed, Pettigrew’s division “seemed to sink into the earth under the tempest of fire.” Responding lustily to the stirring command, “Three cheers for the Old North State,” Pettigrew’s North Carolinians halted, coolly returned the enemy’s fire, and then, giving a wild yell, dashed forward once again into the flame.

The North Carolinians sullenly withdrew from the field only after Pickett’s division was almost destroyed…The desperate onslaught of the North Carolinians in this battle is fully attested by their opponents, who by their own admission were on the verge of retreat; and the Confederate records attest the feats of valor under devastating fire of the five North Carolina regiments in Pettigrew’s division which lost nearly as many men in killed and wounded as the fifteen regiments in Pickett’s division.” MORE.

North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission

"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"

Why Affirmative Action Should Stop

2011, not 1970?

We have had about a half-century of racial preferences and often unspoken but real quotas for hiring and admission based on racial identity. If the original intent was to level the playing field for African-Americans and Latinos, who had been subject to systematic and often gratuitously mean discrimination throughout much of the American South and Southwest, nonetheless the current rationale for sustaining affirmative action has become a veritable nightmare of contradictions, biases, and incoherence that is now well beyond reform. Conservatives mostly believe this; an increasing number of liberals quietly think it.

Who Is What?

First, what exactly is race today in America in which intermarriage and immigration have increasingly made it — and its ugly twin racial purity — often irrelevant? We are no longer a country largely 85-90% “white” and 10-12% “black,” but something almost hard to categorize in racial terms. Do university admission officers adopt the 1/16, one-drop racial rule of the old Confederacy? Does being one fourth African-American qualify one for consideration; three-fourths Japanese; half Mexican-American? Does a simple surname add — and often by intent — authenticity and credulity? The son of Linda Hernandez and Jason Smith — a Bobby Smith — is not considered, without genealogical investigation, Hispanic, but the son of Linda Smith and Jason Hernandez — a Roberto Hernandez of equal 50/50 ancestry — is almost instantly? If so, is race a state of mind and personal choice more than circumstances of birth? What exactly is white and what a minority — a dark-skinned Armenian-American is the former, a light-skinned Colombian American is the latter? A dark Sicilian-American is white, Barack Obama is black?

We are reaching the point in a multiracial and intermarried America where admissions officers and employers simply would have to hire British genealogists to trace our bloodlines — and instead, in millions of cases, therefore resort ad hoc to what Americans profess or think they are.

Nothing Else But Murder

Elmira, The Death Camp Of The North (My Great Uncle)

Elmira POW Prison, NY ==============================

Both Edwin Stanton and US Grant were responsible for the deaths of thousands of Northern prisoners held in the South, as well as Southern prisoners maltreated in the North. Had the Lincoln administration made peace with those Americans seeking self-government, those prisons would have been empty.

Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
www.ncwbts150.com
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
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Nothing Else But Murder:

“The resources of the Confederacy in the last year of the war were totally inadequate to supply the 13,000 daily rations [at Salisbury prison]. On one occasion the post commissary secured some stores that were on the train en route to the Southern army. By a Federal order medicine had been pronounced “contraband” and the sufferings of the prisoner inmates in the hospitals increased accordingly.

For a long period Secretary Edwin M. Stanton refused to permit an exchange of prisoners between the North and the South, and this order was not modified until about the middle of February, 1865. Between October, 1864, and March, 1865, more than 500 prisoners made their escape.

One of them, Junius H. Brown, who wrote a book on the Salisbury [North Carolina] prison, said: “We particularly endeavored to learn who was responsible for the murder – for it was nothing else – of thousands of our brave soldiers; and we did learn. There was but one answer to all our questions, and that was, Edwin M. Stanton, secretary of war. Although he knew the exact condition of affairs in the rebel prison, he always insisted that we could not afford to exchange captives with the South; that it was not policy.”

(North Carolina, The Old North State and the New, Archibald Henderson, Vol. II, Lewis Publishing Company, 1941, page 277)
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Nothing Else But Murder

Ranger's name who ordered Ron Paul decal removed from car

Free Speech Violation: Park Ranger Orders Visitor to Leave National Military Park, Citing Objection to Ron Paul Decals on Car

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Adam Love said...

The ranger's name is Eugene Rife. He is named in Rutherford's letter to King's Mountain park, which you can read here.