The Hay Pusher

Via Daily Timewaster

 I done, done that! :) We also had it bailed before we flicked them up on wagons which were pulled by Mules or  tractors, John Deere/Farmall.  Orchard Grass, we shocked and then flicked up.  Remember when a Copperhead went slithering across my shoes.

NC: Vietnam veteran comes home to rest after nearly 45 years

Via Michael

After almost 45 years, a Vietnam War veteran came home to rest.

Army Sergeant Bunyan Durant Price Jr. was declared "Missing In Action" in Cambodia in 1970, and remained that way since. His body was returned to his family in Gastonia Thursday.

It was a day of mixed emotions for relatives. Price's nephew told WBTV the family is feeling happiness and sadness. They're also relieved that the soldier will finally get a proper burial.

"Today was really sad," said Sgt. Price's sister, Brenda Harris, "But it brought closure for me."

Sgt. Price's two other sisters agreed. "There were times I thought he was alive, but there were also times I thought he was dead," said Arvonia England.

"He was our hero," said Wanda Hanley.

The fallen veteran's nephew, Harley Walker Jr. said, "My uncle was a real good person. He was caring, and he would do anything for you."

More @ WBTV

Ron Paul Groped by TSA

Via comment by Anonymous on Edward Snowden statue appears in Brooklyn overnigh...

Because, he looked so anti-American and dangerous..................

Tonight, while traveling home to Houston, TX, C4L Chairman Ron Paul was groped by TSA agents while passing through security. A long opponent of the TSA, Dr. Paul, voted against creating the massive department while in Congress.

More @ Campaign For Liberty

Generation Ice Flow: Combating Ageism

 

Some time ago I met an older woman – my guess, in her 60’s – who had just been let go from her position. She had a PhD in optics, and was clearly bright, capable, and able to work effectively. And she knew, the desperation in her eyes spoke clearly, that any job she could get would likely involved some version of “Do you want fries with that?”.

Last summer I had lunch with an older friend whom I’ve known for years. After mutually commiserating in our lack-of-work status, he referred to his age and said “I know I’ll never work again”. MIT-educated at both the Bachelors and Masters level, and bi-lingual in Spanish, you’d think he be in demand. Nope. Another lunch conversation with someone who has just hit “The Big Five-O” was similar. Intelligent, capable, and accomplished, he is doing everything right per the “job search experts” – volunteering, having a part-time job, networking, losing weight and exercising, and furthering his education… and while he gets the occasional interview, he gets no offers.

More @ Linked In

NC: Wilber’s Barbecue

Via Cousin John

Wilber Shirley is committed to the tradition of cooking whole hogs entirely over hardwood coals.

Wilber’s is one of the biggest names in barbecue in eastern North Carolina. Unlike a few other famous places in the Coastal Plain, this is a restaurant where the name above the door still means exactly what it did when Wilber Shirley bought the former Hill’s Barbecue and opened it under his own name in 1962.

Wilber’s is one of only a handful of remaining restaurants anywhere in the eastern part of the state where barbecue is cooked entirely over hardwood coals. Many other places still trade on the names and reputations of men who took the trouble to cook barbecue the old, slow way — the way it was meant to be cooked — but behind the scenes, their owners have quietly gotten rid of the wood, the pits, the smoke, the shovels, and the mess of pit cooking. Not Wilber. He points out that tradition comes with a hefty price tag, a fact he knows well, since his crew cuts and splits wood year-round.

But he says, “I think the finished product is worth the effort. I think that I’ve been successful with it, and I firmly believe that’s the way to cook it.”

More @ Scalawag Our State

AHMAD JIHAD--AMERICA'S ISIS PIN-UP BOY

Via Joe

Tweeting from his sister's basement in Dearborn, Michigan to the sands of Syria, Sunni Cleric Ahmad Jibril has become the world's most popular on-line preacher to Westerners fighting in Iraq and Syria. But back in the U.S.A, Jibril is having trouble explaining to a federal judge who, exactly, is paying for his underpants.

The Garden of Death: The Fallen Sparrows of Fort Mahone

 How fortunate that I have been able to contribute to another book. The first consisted of two volumes and is excellent. Blood and War at my Doorstep: North Carolina Civilians in the War between the States . Angela Smythe, the author of The Garden of Death: The Fallen Sparrows of *Fort Mahone , has done extensive research on John Wilkes Booth and believes she has found a picture him while in the Richmond Grays. John Wilkes Booth & The Richmond Grays .

My great grandfather and great uncle knew all the men in the "Civil War Requiem" video as they were part of the 53rd NC which was the sole unit defending *Fort Mahone. (Fort Mahone was named "Fort Damnation" by the Yankees)

**Handpicked men of the 53rd (My great grandfather was one of these) made the final, night assault at Petersburg in an attempt to break Grant's line. This was against Fort Stedman which was a few miles to the slight northeast. They initially succeeded, but reinforcements drove them back. This video is made from photographs which were taken the day after the 53rd evacuated the lines the night before to begin the retreat to Appomattox.

I have many more pictures taken by the same photographer, one of these shows a 14 year old boy and the other is the famous picture of the blond, handsome soldier with his musket.

**General Gordon promised the men a gold medal and 30 days leave if they accomplished their task and many years after the War my great grandfather wrote General Gordon, who was then governor of Georgia about this incident. They exchanged several letters which I have framed.  **The Attack On Fort Stedman

************************************* 

The Garden of Death: The Fallen Sparrows of Fort Mahone has been web released today on the sesquicentennial observance of the deaths of the men and boys seen in the heartbreaking photographs taken by Thomas Roche in the trenches of Petersburg, Virginia, on April 2nd, 1865. 

The article was web released at: "A Little Touch of History, An Awesometalks Program"

It is also hosted on my website: "AntebellumRichmond" under "Essays"

Direct link to the article itself: The Garden of Death: The Fallen Sparrows of Fort Mahone

I wish to thank each and every one of you for your invaluable assistance during the research that went into this article.  As I did not have affiliations for some of you, I have listed your individual names alphabetically under the article's concluding Contributors page.  Please let me know if there are any corrections desired.

I hope that this memorial to those who have none in stone, while but a wisp in the ether, may serve to remind people when looking at these photographs to "see" that "there is indeed a special providence in the fall of a sparrow."  This year, the sesquicentennial of Roche's photographs befittingly falls on Good Friday, April 3rd.  Sometimes history and serendipity walk hand in hand.  In this case I truly believe their footsteps were one and the same.

With my sincerest gratitude -

Angela Smythe

Why the Confederacy Lives

                       

The very existence of opposition gnaws at radical leftists. They particularly despise Southerners because the South’s resilient culture is a major impediment to their agenda. Culture is an organic and tireless organizing force, and therefore a threat to far-left schemes that would dismantle society and put the left in charge. Just look at how traditional culture overthrew the Soviet bloc in the 1990s, and how it’s challenging overgrown governments around the world today.

So it’s no surprise to see yet another slam against the South by the tag team of Euan Hague, Heidi Beirich, and Ed Sebesta. Their latest hit piece, entitled “Why the Confederacy Lives,” neatly and blindly dismisses Southern heritage, the rise of self-government, and growing distrust of social reengineering as — drum roll, please — racist.

What, again?

More @ Conservative Heritage Times

ISE SCV European Camp #1612 Newsletter

Via Nancy

 @ Cracker News

Appomattox Wasn't Really the End (Especially for the North)!

Via Billy

 

On April 6th I read an article by a thoroughly politically correct gentleman named Charles J. Dean on the website www.al.com dealing with the so-called "end" of the "Civil War." I don't know where Mr. Dean learned his history, but Lenin could not have taught him any better.

Mr. Dean noted in his article: "On April 9, 1865  General Robert E. Lee surrendered his sword and his Army of Northern Virginia to Gen. Ulysses Simpson Grant marking the end of the Civil War." Mr. Dean has swallowed the fiction most of us were programmed with in government schools--namely that Appomattox was the end of the War and that was it.

More @ PoP's Southern Thangs

NC:Act Now on Pending Gun Legislation

 

Below is a summary of pro and anti-gun bills which have been filed in the North Carolina General Assembly. Crossover deadline – the date by which they must pass at least one chamber or else be declared dead – looms in coming weeks, so your immediate action is required.

Pro Gun Bills

Senate:

SB 394, “Preemption Affirmation Act”: “It is declared by the General Assembly that the regulation of firearms is properly an issue of general, statewide concern, and that the entire field of regulation of firearms is preempted from regulation by local governments except as provided by this section.”

Since 1996, NC has had a statewide preemption law prohibiting local governments from passing gun laws more stringent than state law. Unfortunately, ideologically motivated local governments have ignored recent expansions of concealed carry into parks and elsewhere. To put “teeth” into preemption, SB 394 will add civil penalties and a private cause of action against local bureaucrats who willfully flout preemption. Full text of the bill is available here: http://www.ncleg.net/Sessions/2015/Bills/Senate/PDF/S394v0.pdf

SB 641, “Concealed Handgun Standardization Act”: “An act to standardize and ensure uniformity of concealed handgun permit applications.”

Four more pro and two anti @ GRNC

Right to Bear Arms? Gun grabbing sweeping the nation

Via Iver

Cherished family heirlooms were among the 21 firearms Michael Roberts surrendered to the Torrance Police Department in 2010, after his doctor filed a restraining order against him.

The court order was the result of a dispute Roberts had with a member of the doctor’s staff and, after Roberts pleaded no contest, the matter was resolved. Yet, even though he filed the proper Law Enforcement Gun Release paperwork on four separate occasions, obtained clearance from the California Department of Justice and had two court orders commanding the return of his guns, police refused to hand them over.

With the backing of the National Rifle Association and California Rifle and Pistol Association, Roberts filed a federal lawsuit in May 2014, over the $15,500 worth of firearms. In the end he got the money, but not the guns. The police had had them destroyed.

Second Amendment lawyers say his case is not rare.

More @ Fox

"What if Iran already has a bomb, or bombs?" Another Possibility

Via Jonathan

One of the oldest tricks in negotiating is to make the other side think that you regard some point as terribly important when in fact it is not, fight over it tooth and nail, give ground grudgingly, and by so doing win major concessions on points that are actually far more important. It appears that the Iranian negotiations have yielded an agreement that, if implemented and fully complied with by the Iranians, will essentially eviscerate their nuclear program.

Iran has cut its centrifuges by two-thirds, and the centrifuges it will use are legacy, several generations behind state of the art. It has agreed not to enrich uranium beyond 3.67 percent, far below the 90 percent necessary for a bomb. A heavy water reactor at Arak will be reconfigured so that it cannot produce plutonium (the Iranians have never had the capability to reprocess such plutonium into bomb cores). The once-secret Fordow uranium enrichment site will be converted into a research center. International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors will have virtually full-time, soup-to-nuts access, from uranium mining to all of Iran’s nuclear facilities, and will monitor imports into the country of materials and components that could have potential nuclear applications.

More @ Straight Line Logic

General Robert E. Lee's Return from the McLean House, April 9th 1865

 

Having surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia, General Lee rode back toward his headquarters tent through a cool and dark Palm Sunday evening. The sun behind the clouds had slanted near the horizon; sunset in Richmond that night came at 6:24. A chaplain present with the army described the weather: "The morning had been bright and fair. By noon dark and gloomy clouds had gathered over the whole face of the sky."

From a distance of a half-mile, General Edward Porter Alexander saw Lee coming out of the village on his familiar gray "Traveller" at about 4:30 p.m. Lieutenant Colonel Charles Marshall, Lee's reliable 34-year-old aide, rode beside his chief. "A strong desire seized me," Alexander wrote, "to have the men do something, to indicate to the general that our affection for him was even deeper than in the days of greatest victory and prosperity."

More @ FNC

The Passing of the Dead

Salute of Honor by Mort Kunstler

"On our part not a sound of trumpet more, nor roll of drum; not a cheer, nor word nor whisper of vain-glorying, nor motion of man standing again at the order, but an awed stillness rather, and breath-holding, as if it were the passing of the dead."

**************************

 They faced each other in two long straight lines - just as they had so many times before on so many bloody fields of fire.  This time was different.  Three days earlier, General Robert E. Lee had surrendered the skeletal remnants of his hard-fighting Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant in farmer Wilmer McLean's parlor.  Now it was time for the Sons of the South to lay down their bloodied battle flags.  As enemies, these men in blue and gray had faced each other at Petersburg and Cold Harbor, at Gettysburg and Chancellorsville, at Fredericksburg and Antietam, at Second Manassas and Malvern Hill.  Now they again stood in great ranks opposite each other - one now the victor, the other now the vanquished.

Placed in command of receiving the Southern surrender was Brigadier General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a Northern war hero who bore four battle wounds inflicted by these men in gray and butternut now assembled before him.  Absent in Chamberlain, however, was any animosity toward these former foes; present instead was a sense of respect for fellow countrymen who had given their all in the grip of war.

At Chamberlain's order, there was no jeering.  No beating of drums, no chorus of cheers nor other unseemly celebration in the face of the fallen foe.  "Before us in proud humiliation," Chamberlain would later recall, "stood the embodiment of manhood: men whom neither toils and sufferings, nor the fact of death, nor disaster, nor hopelessness could bend from their resolve; standing before us now, thin, worn, and famished, but erect, and with eyes looking level into ours, waking memories that bound us together as no other bond.  Was not such manhood to be welcomed back into a Union so tested and assured?"

At Chamberlain's command, the Northern troops receiving the surrender shifted their weapons to "carry arms" - a soldiers salute, delivered in respect to the defeated Southerners standing before them.  Confederate General John B. Gordon, immediately recognized this remarkable, generous gesture offered by fellow Americans - and responded with a like salute. Honor answering honor.  Then it was over.  And a new day had begun - built on this salute of honor at Appomattox.  Former foes both North and South - in mutual respect and mutual toleration - now faced the future together. 

 

Lee's Surrender, By My Great Grandfather, April 9, 1865, 150 Years Ago

Confederate Veteran May-June 1990

25th Anniversary of General Lee's Surrender April 9th, 1865

by John Pelopidas Leach, 1890

A quarter of a century has passed since General Lee surrendered the last hope of the Confederacy at Appomattox Court House.

For more than a year prior to that time, he had, with matchless skill, contended against vastly superior numbers and military resources, and successfully held at bay the grandest army ever marshaled on American soil. In the annals of American history, the name of this village will be preserved side-by-side with Yorktown, New Orleans and Mexico.

A private soldier, though a living witness, cannot describe a battle, much less a campaign. The field of observation to him is circumscribed and limited. But as I went with my companions to the last firing line, I have some vivid recollections of the event and I will relate my experiences and observations as a member of Company C, 53rd NC Regiment at Appomattox.

More @ FNC

The Calamity of Appomattox, by H.L. Mencken

 

Repost.

"No American historian, so far as I know, has ever tried to work out the probable consequences if Grant instead of Lee had been on the hot spot at Appomattox. How long would the victorious Confederacy have endured?

Could it have surmounted the difficulties inherent in the doctrine of States’ Rights, so often inconvenient and even paralyzing to it during the war? Could it have remedied its plain economic deficiencies, and become a self-sustaining nation?

How would it have protected itself against such war heroes as Beauregard and Longstreet, Joe Wheeler and Nathan D. Forrest? And what would have been its relations to the United States, socially, economically, spiritually and politically?

I am inclined, on all these counts, to be optimistic.

More @ FNC

The Calamity of Appomattox, by H.L. Mencken

After University Canceled ‘American Sniper’ Showing, Their New Football Coach Made This EPIC Announcement

Via Jeffery

Earlier today, Top Right News reported on how the University of Michigan shamefully kowtowed to a handful of radical Muslim students, by cancelling a planned showing of the film “American Sniper.” The film portrays the late hero Chris Kyle — whom the Muslims called a “racist” and “mass killer.”

Well late tonight, after Michigan’s new football coach Jim Harbaugh got wind of this disgrace to his school, he took to Twitter, to announce that his team will hold a screening of “American Sniper.”

His tweet was simply EPIC:

More @ Top Right News

7th NC Patcon: See you there.

Via Jeff

Gone, but hopefully not forgotten, I have taken a hiatus from posting largely because where I am there are not a lot of Internet connections, no phone service, no email etc. So, I would not be able to respond, or answer questions readily, something I think is important when disseminating information. I am largely out of touch with the politics of the day, but even if I were, has anything gotten better in the few months I have not posted? Anything? No, I don't consider the Republicans retaking the Senate to be better, not in any way.

More @ Christian Mercenary