“Normal rules” of American politics

Via WRSA

 

“…Given that the “normal rules” of American politics have delivered America into the hands of a permanent ruling class content to preside over a hyper-regulated, corrupt, cronyist, indebted borderless ruin mitigated according to taste by a deranged hyper-sexualized identity-politics totalitarianism hunting down homophobic bakers and Confederate-flag decals, I’m rather relaxed about that. Your mileage may vary. 

But the fact is that in a two-party system the Democratic Party is relatively effective at delivering to its voters the world they want to live in.

The Republican Party not so much…”

— Mark Steyn

Fear Porn

Via Doug S

On Wednesday I suggested that indeed there are things that “bother me” in the big picture. The biggest scare for someone like me is that we have morphed into a society where our entire lives rely on this thing called the Internet and the “grid”. ( the grid being the electrical distribution system)

I really cannot express how much this bothers me. I remember when I got my first digital camera and I was loading pictures onto my stone age computer. It was great! I could look at them, send them for free to family and friends. It was amazing. Then one day my hard drive crashed. All those memories were gone. People put on their high horse and said “Bob, didn’t you have a tape back up?!”  I didn’t even know what it was at the time, all I knew was that my photo’s were gone.

So now it’s all about backing up data in “the cloud”. Well that’s just fine and dandy folks. Now what happens when that cloud goes down? Again most people snicker as if having data centers that can’t go dark is impossible. Well I’m here to tell you they most certainly can.  Now, let’s pull it a little closer to home. If EITHER the Internet as a whole was to go down, or our Power Grid (which would be both actually) all life as we know it stops on that day.  No ATM’s, no credit card transactions, no banking, no food stores, no mass transit, no gas stations, no nothing.

That’s bad.

More @ Invest Yourself

Hilarious! Airlifted Whiskey at Gettysburg, 1938

 

Much of the credit for arranging the 1938 Gettysburg reunion of veterans was due to the intervention of Richmond Times-Dispatch editor Virginius Dabney, whose mother was descended from Thomas Jefferson and his grandfather a Confederate veteran. It was suggested that the final airlifted load of whiskey for the pint-flasks home was confiscated by the greatly outnumbered Rebel contingent.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com   The Great American Political Divide

Airlifted Whiskey at Gettysburg, 1938

“. . . One of the greatest stories of the era occurred in July, 1938, when some 1,800 surviving Northern and Southern veterans held a reunion at Gettysburg. But everyone who followed the copious preliminary press coverage knew that arranging this reunion was almost as perilous as the conflict that took place at Gettysburg in July 1863.

Plans for the reunion began as early as 1935, but some members of the Grand Army of the Republic said they would not foregather unless the Rebels left all their Confederate flags at home. And, indeed, earthier epithets were used for “Confederate flags.”

The Rebels not only insisted on bringing their “unsullied oriflammes.” Some of the more irascible stipulated: “There’ll be no damned reunion unless the Yankee government pays for some of the property their army destroyed, and just for the hell of destroying it.”

Many of the Yankees drew the line at “playing host for the damned Rebs,” and the Rebs, frequently in graphic language, told the Yankees where they “can put their invitations.” Finally, the idea, but not the practical vehicle, of a “joint reunion” was circumvented when the State of Pennsylvania asked both sides “to attend a gathering at Gettysburg.”

Most of the Confederates were escorted by boy scouts, and those who embarked from North Carolina to Gettysburg were cheered to the local train station by huge crowds and bands, wherever bands were available.

Amazingly, the non-reunion reunion of the old foes was as tranquil as the blue July clouds that hovered over the once-bloody fields of Gettysburg. There was only one formidable problem, and this, which gained national attention, was keeping the 1,800 nonagenarians supplied with drinking whiskey. As Virginius Dabney noted, “The Southern contingent was afflicted with a notable thirst, and principally because of this fact the original consignment of five cases of liquor was exhausted almost as soon as it was opened.”

The hosts had assumed that a small cup containing a couple teaspoons of whiskey would be an adequate drink for men pushing one hundred years. But the first time the whiskey ration was doled out, one 97-year-old Rebel snorted: “That ain’t even a good sniff, much less a drink.”

An airplane was sent for more booze, and it returned with twenty-two additional cases. When this was consumed, the same airplane brought fifteen more cases. While the extra fifteen cases managed to last-out the encampment, there was none left to “see the boys back home safely.” With the third supply, the last fifteen cases gone, the “airplane of mercy,” as some dispatches called it, “brought back enough whiskey for each of the Rebels to have a pint-flask for the trip home.”

By all accounts, the Rebels, even more outnumbered at Gettysburg than they had been seventy-three years before, won the battle of the bottle, walking sticks down. A wire service reported that one veteran, 104-years-old, but never designated as to side, was picked up suffering from acute alcoholism.

Many of the North Carolina chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy denounced the wire service “for printing vile slander,” but the clear implication of these frothy demurrers was that the unidentified 104-year-old alcoholic was a Yankee. As one local UDC regent reasoned, in a letter to several [daily newspapers], “If the poor man had been one of ours, you can bet your bottom dollar the Yankee reporters would have said so.”

(The Tar Heel Press, Thad Stem, Jr., NC Press Association, 1973, pp. 263-265)

Grant’s Royal Robes

Enlarged

 My great, great Grandfather,  Bartholomew Figures Moore, On Governor Holden

 "Holden's impeachment is demanded by a sense of public virtue and due regard to the honor of the state. He is an exceedingly corrupt man and ought to be placed before the people as a public example of a tyrant condemned and punished."

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

Imprisoned by scalawag Governor William Holden for alleged activities with North Carolina’s postwar Klan as it fought Holden’s Union League, Randolph A. Shotwell spent three hard years in an Albany, NY prison, which he termed the “Radical Bastille.” The prison staff was instructed to use any means to extract confessions of Klan outrages and lists of Klan members in North Carolina. Below, Shotwell criticizes the 1872 victory of Grant’s corrupt administration and the low quality of the Northern electorate.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com  The Great American Political Divide

Grant’s Royal Robes

“[Diary Entry] Nov. 6th. All is over! The Great Farce, (the Presidential Election) closed yesterday, as had been foreseen for the past month, with a complete triumph for the Bully Butcher, and National Gift Taker. Grant walked the track. Telegraphic reports from all quarters leave it doubtful whether [Horace] Greeley will get a single vote. Even New York – the Democratic Old Guard – surrenders to the tune of 3500 majority for the “Coming Man.”

Twenty-five other States are in the same column – marching the Despot gaily to his throne! Selah! It is absolutely amazing, the apathy, the blindness, the infatuation of the people!

Is there no longer an patriotism, any conservatism in the land? What do we see this day? A nation yielding its elective franchise to elect a worse than Napoleonic despot! I say the nation yields its franchises because no one believes that Grant is the choice of the people, that he is worthy of the high Authority which is now his for another term and doubtless for life.

Bu corruption, and greed, and avarice, and fear, and Prejudice, and Misrepresentation, every malignant passion, every illegal and dishonorable means have been made to bring about the stupendous result. And now, what next?

Historians tell us that every Republic that has fallen, to shake the faith of man in his own capacity for government, has been, preceding its final fall, the scene of just such transactions as these; sectional prejudices, the majority trampling on the minority, the courts corrupted and used for political ends, open corruption in office, bribery of voters, use of the military to intimidate the opposition, great monopolies supporting the most promising candidates, and finally much unanimity in favor of some popular leader, who quietly took the crown and Royal Robes when a suitable opportunity occurred.

This is the political panorama now unfolding, slowly but surely, in our own country. The end we may almost see. And then bloodshed, insurrections, turbulence and anarchy! I do not predict that all of this is to occur in a year or two; it may be postponed for a score of years. But one thing is certain it will not be half so long, nor a third of it, if the Government continues to usurp power, and hold it, as it has done during the last decade.”

(The Diary, 1871-1873, The Papers of R. A. Shotwell, Volume III, Jos. D.R. Hamilton, editor, NC Historical Commission, 1936, pp. 276-277)

When the Army went Mad Max: Vietnam gun trucks

Via Jeffery

 

A largely forgotten part of the war in South East Asia was the one fought by the U.S. Army’s gun trucks as part of convoy operations through the heart of enemy territory.

While Hollywood would tell you everything moved by chopper in Vietnam, the hard fact of life was that it was truck convoys that schlepped the bulk of the food, fuel and ammo to American and allied units stationed in the countryside. However, these predicable routes became target for enemy ambushes.

One of the worst supply runs was that along Route 19, some 150 miles of winding nowhere that became known as “Ambush Alley” for the motor transportation guys having to make the drive.

The response: hit the scrap piles and, using salvaged steel, sandbags and anything else they could find, up-armor Deuce and a Half and later 5 ton trucks then pile on whatever ordnance they could mount. In some instances, this ran all the way up to entire M113 armored personnel carrier bodies.

More @ Guns

Mi-28 crash at air show near Ryazan, one of the pilots killed

Via panzerbar

Navy denies reports that sailor will be charged for returning fire against Chattanooga gunman

Via Billy

The U.S. Navy is denying reports that it will file charges against a naval officer who used a weapon to return fire against Chattanooga gunman Muhammad Abdulazeez during last month's deadly attack.

On Saturday, conservative commentator Allen B. West wrote a blog post saying sources had told him the Navy would bring charges against Lt. Cmdr Timothy White for illegally discharging a firearm on federal property. White and a Marine are believed to have fired their personal weapons during the July 16 attacks that killed four Marines and one sailor.

More @ AL

To Change the History Just Lie About It

Via Billy

 

The actual history of the War of Northern aggression has always had its detractors who have wanted to make the historical record say what they wanted it to say. The manifestations of their  disease have been present in this country since Appomattox and they continue to this day.

Their solution to making the history say what they wish it said is, quite frankly, to lie about it. Just change a few words here and there, a phrase or two someplace else, and you can make the history say what you wish it said but doesn’t. Unfortunately, most folks won’t realize that it doesn’t and they end up buying the same historical swill that has made the Cultural Marxists ideologically sick.

More @ Revised History

A Jeffersonian Political Economy

 

Your other lecturers have pleasant and upbeat subjects to consider. I am stuck with economics, which is a notoriously dreary subject.   It is even more of a downer when we consider how far the U.S. is today from a Southern, Jeffersonian political economy which was once a powerful idea.

Economics as practiced today is a utilitarian and materialistic study. It is concerned with maximizing profit, with describing the actions of man as an economic being, and explaining the allegedly inevitable results of supposed economic laws.   Our Southern forebears did not practice economics. They practiced political economy—which is concerned with human well-being.   Those old-time Southerners did not assume that man is to be understood wholly or chiefly as an economic being. They did not believe that the economic conditions they faced were entirely determined by  abstract laws—but rather that they were the result of human decisions, some of them the product of corrupt politics.

More @ The Abbeville Institute

Robert E. Lee High School

 

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Tim Adams‎ Robert E.Lee ( Ex. Athletes) San Antonio Texas

My name is Michael Powells. I’m a 1988 graduate of Robert E. Lee High School in San Antonio, Texas. I’m making this statement in response to the current attempt to rename the school I have so many fond memories of and still love. I’m not an activist and I don’t consider myself a trailblazer - although I do now live in Oregon, but I’m still a Spurs fan!

For all four years that I was a student at Robert E. Lee High School, I was a member of the marching band. I wore the Confederate Battle Flag with silver/grey background on my chest, playing the saxophone. Before I graduated in 1988 I did some research and discovered that I was the first Black person to march for four years in the Robert E. Lee High School Band. I cannot tell you how proud that made me feel, but my pride in that accomplishment wasn’t rooted in feeling excluded or discriminated against.

I never felt that I was negativity affected by the name of Robert E. Lee High School since I lived in the Lee attendance area and that was my school. I’ve always been a self-aware Black American, but I never had negative feelings towards Robert E. Lee High School or the history of its namesake.

Back then, the NEISD didn’t have a School Choice Policy to allow students to attend any NEISD High School they wanted. I lived in the Robert E. Lee attendance area, so that’s where I went. In the era I attended Robert E. Lee High School, where you lived determined where you went to school. I realize there are many more options now in terms of school choice, private schools or home schooling, but I went to Robert E. Lee High School because that’s where I was supposed to be.

Twenty-Seven years later, I’ve come to some conclusions about my Alma Mater.
Robert E. Lee would have had schools named after him no matter what side he chose to fight on in the Civil War. He was a great man and that fact was celebrated on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line before, during and after the War. Abraham Lincoln offered Robert E. Lee the command of the Union Army, but when Virginia seceded, he chose to defend his home State of Virginia. His wife, Mary Custis, was George Washington’s granddaughter and his Arlington, Virginia Estate housed many of Washington’s artifacts. 

 

As with any great man of History, Robert E. Lee was a product of his times but also transcended those times. The years preceding the Civil War were complex and volatile. The choice Robert E. Lee made to defend Virginia is not one that we, 150 years later, can simply dismiss or judge.

As for now, I understand the reaction of many in our country to the church shooting in South Carolina, but not for the reaction to one picture of the alleged shooter with a Confederate flag.

Here in the Pacific Northwest there are people flying the same flag, which is their right, protected by Amendment 1 of The Bill of Rights, which guarantees freedom of speech – just as it gave that right to the NEISD Board in 1958 when they named the new high school at 1400 Jackson Keller after Robert E. Lee.

It’s been suggested by former San Antonio mayor Julian Castro that the name of Robert E. Lee High School has a negative impact on the African-American students who attend there today. But he doesn't speak for those of us of African descent who have already graduated from Robert E. Lee High School and he does not speak for all the Black students who are there today.

As the Bible says, “You see the speck in your brother’s eye, but you don’t notice the log in your own eye.” Mr. Castro should remember that the high school he graduated from, Thomas Jefferson, is named after a slave owner, while Robert E Lee never owned slaves and the slaves he did inherit through his marriage to Mary Custis were freed in 1862 – before the Emancipation Proclamation was ever signed. Thomas Jefferson had several other character flaws as well, including fathering at least 6 children with Sally Hemmings, a slave woman who lived on his Monticello Estate. But, Thomas Jefferson was still a great man, a Founding Father and almost as good a role model as Robert E. Lee.
History is there to learn from in both positive and negative ways. If we start ridding ourselves of this history, other historical perspectives are next and we will loose what it means to be American.

ROBERT E LEE throughout the years!

Mike Powells

Robert E. Lee Marching Band 1984-1988
Robert E. Lee High School Class of 1988

Loathsome, devious, despicable, treasonous, contemptible, sellout Republicans.

Via Michael

 

 Breitbart reports that the Republican congressional leadership would not lower themselves to respond to inquiries on whether they would

be willing to support any reduction at all in the record annual dispensation of new green cards and new foreign worker visas. 

* * * *

Not one Republican leadership office was willing to even reply to the question. Every GOP leader’s office refused to answer, to express any support for reduced future immigration, or to offer any thought at all on the subject. It appears that not one of these public servants was even willing to engage on the issue of historic immigration transforming the electorate, school systems, and labor markets.^[1]

The offices referred to are those of:

More @ Liberty's Torch