The spirit of “local” is the attendant existence of an agrarian life.

 

“Guess the best thing dirt roads do…is they slow people down. The world’s too much in a hurry, and usually with no place to go. Everything flies by in a blur. And people get to where they don’t belong anywhere and ain’t from no place at all.”

If you travel I-20 east from Jackson, Mississippi, somewhere about 20 miles short of Meridian you’ll see a sign: Hickory Exit. This sign is one almost ad infinitum of green signs along a monster interstate that has sucked the life out of localism, particularly important throughout the South. But should you drive into downtown from old Highway 80, you’ll see a different sign: Welcome to Hickory, Miss. The Little Town with A Big heart. A bit more dash and devotion and emotion than: Hickory Exit.

Hickory lies in Newton County, an area rich in Southern history; much, which is not uncommon in the South, involves The War–no, not WWII. Newton County was the focal point for one of the John Wayne/John Ford often South-friendly movies about a true battle in 1863: The Battle of Newton Station. Results were heartbreaking for the Confederates but illustrated their courage and character.

More @ The Abbeville Institute

Staged but Funny

Via Billy

South Vietnam Before 1975

Le Cercle Sportif
Nicer pool that the  American Embassy

OICC office party: Her child finally gave in to my hand. :)

Helping Mr. Hoo

Just came in from the Cambodian border to this party and was drenched in sweat as my '52 Citroen had no A.C.

Winning: U.S. Steel to Call Back 500 Employees to Illinois Plant After Trump Announces Tariffs on Foreign Steel

 

 Breitbart

United States Steel announced Wednesday morning that it would call back 500 employees to work at its Granite City, Illinois, plant after President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. would impose tariffs on foreign steel.

“Our Granite City Works facility and employees, as well as the surrounding community, have suffered too long from the unending waves of unfairly traded steel products that have flooded U.S. markets,” U.S. Steel President and Chief Executive Officer David B. Burritt said in a statement released Wednesday.

The steel company announced that it would need the additional personnel to support increased demand for steel after President Trump announced last week that the U.S. would impose tariffs on aluminum and steel imports.

Company leaders praised President Trump for his decision to increase competition among different companies, adding that steel imports threaten this country’s economic and national security.
The Granite City plant idled its blast furnaces and its steel-making facilities in December 2015 and idled its hot strip mill in January 2016 because of a sluggish market.

The plant re-opened its steel-making facilities on the heels of Trump’s announcement, asking the 500 employees to work in the previously shuttered steel-making facilities as soon as this month. It could take up to four months before the company can restart the blast furnaces entirely.

This n' That

Sprucing up Dixieland.

Soros Chalks Up Another DA Win After Dropping Nearly $1 Million In Texas Race

 

The left-wing billionaire pumped almost $1 million into a Texas district attorney’s race against a Democratic DA who opposes sanctuary cities, according to campaign filings reviewed by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Soros’s preferred candidate, Joe Gonzales, upset incumbent Bexar County DA Nico LaHood in the Democratic primary Tuesday. LaHood conceded after Gonzales jumped up to a sizable lead as votes were counted.

More @ The Daily Caller

Founding Intentions

 

Would a return to the original intentions of the framers of the Constitution be impracticable? Not really. But I can hear the howls of protest by those who would say otherwise. “It can’t be done.” “It would result in chaos.” “The people would be hurt.” “We need a strong military establishment.” “What about Social Security, Education, Welfare?” The question is do we want freedom or not? 

A review of Original Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the United States Constitution by M.E. Bradford (Georgia, 1993).

Since the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution, numberless books re-examining the document and the convention that made it have issued forth from commercial publishing houses and university presses.

 While some of them are excellent and make important contributions in the field of constitutional history (Forrest McDonald’s Novus Ordo Seclorum, Framing and Ratification of the Constitution [1987]), the question of what the framers intended remains very much at issue. The late M. E. (Mel) Bradford, in what is one of the better studies to come out in recent years, addresses this central issue ably, forthrightly and provocatively. Hence the title of Original Intentions (a phrase that strikes fear in the minds of modern advocates of governmental intervention and intrusion).

More @ The Abbeville Institute

Ted Cruz: Voter turnout dispels media myth of a blue Texas

 

Sen. Ted Cruz said Tuesday night's primaries in his home state of Texas once again rejected the media storyline that Democrats are gaining strength there.

Cruz, who is up for Senate re-election, won the Republican Texas primary with over 1.3 million votes out of more than 1.5 million GOP votes cast. The Democratic front-runner, Rep. Beto O'Rourke, D-Texas, won his party’s primary with only 641,052 votes, out of just over 1 million votes cast for Democrats.

More @ Washington Examiner

Americans should applaud Trump for starting to end our nation's wholesale surrender on trade

Via Billy 

National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn (before his resignation in protest Tuesday) was marshalling Wall Street collaborators and global companies to attack the tariffs proposal, even though taken to their maximum extent the tariffs would mean a $9 billion cost spread through a $20 trillion economy.

President Trump is right to call for tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. Tariffs are often used as a last resort, but the domestic steel industry has reached that point. Rather than attacking the president for his proposal, all Americans should applaud him for beginning to end our nation’s wholesale surrender on trade.

The president’s action is already producing results, as U.S. Steel announced Wednesday that it will restart one of its idled blast furnaces in Granite City, Illinois and create approximately 500 jobs.

I have visited communities deeply affected by steel imports.

More @ Fox

Why I Couldn’t Agree With Bruce Catton

 

Over the years I have read a bit of “Civil War” history from a lot of authors with divergent opinions on many things. Somehow, though, Bruce Catton’s view of the War was just not one I could get comfortable with. It was sort of like James M. McPherson’s view of the War, and you all know who he was. If you ever read anything I wrote about the War you will recall I couldn’t get comfortable with McPherson’s worldview regarding the War and the reasons for it either. And while McPherson’s books have often been cited on the World Socialist Website in the past, I couldn’t find anything in that regard about Bruce Catton.

However, McPherson’s and Catton’s views appear quite similar when it comes to the notorious Forty-Eighters that Donnie Kennedy and I wrote about in Lincoln’s Marxists.

A friend in New Jersey recently sent me a paragraph out of Catton’s The Army of the Potomac: 

Glory Road, from page 172 of the book. This is one I had not read, and it probably explains why I am glad I did not make the effort. Even when you research history,  there are times when you can only stand so much propaganda and, though he probably did not intend to do it, that’s exactly what Mr. Catton gave us in this instance. I will comment here on some of what he said in this paragraph.

More @ Revised History

The Tyranny of the Perpetually Offended

 

Someone had commented how much this blog has changed over the years, for the worse, as he saw it. He's probably right. I used to write a lot about the Constitution, about the violations, specifically and line by line with supporting case law, etc.

The problem with that sort of thing is that we no longer live in a Constitutional republic. What is the point in going on and on about a document that means nothing, that is irrelevant and disregarded. One only need to read the headlines to understand that an entire presidential administration operated outside the law, with aid and support of the federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies to see what I mean. That is an impossibility in a government where there is the rule of law, that it is respected by the government as well as the people and that world just no longer exists.

More @ Christian Mercenary

Food stamp loopholes are rampant — here's how to fix them

 

There are currently more people on food stamps in the United States than the total population of Canada. This explosion in welfare dependency did not happen by accident, and despite current record-low unemployment and millions of open jobs, welfare enrollment remains at a near all-time high.

Even worse, much of the welfare expansion has been to able-bodied adults, many without kids. There are nearly 21 million able-bodied adults on food stamps, nearly four million of whom are younger than 50 and have no kids at home.

More @ Washington Examiner

Russia Blamed For Italian Election Outcome

Via Billy

If there is a European election, and the anti-establishment parties score a stunning victory (as just happened in Italy, and a few months prior, in Austria), who’re you gonna blame? Vladimir Putin (of course)!

That’s what Samantha Power, one of the top diplomats in the Obama administration, did when she shared an article by Spain’s El Pais newspaper about how Russia predetermined the outcome of Sunday’s election by spinning an immigration discourse in Italy: “Italy’s joins long list of elections influenced by Russia. Sputnik will do what Sputnik does. The question is: what are our democracies going to do about it? Will voters repudiate candidates who seek to benefit from Russian interference?”

 You see, it had nothing to do with the 38% youth unemployment, the stagnant economy, the record debt load, the record number of young people living with their parents, the meager opportunities for career advancement and the sense that everything is rigged. It was… Russia!

More @ LRC

How To Download Your Personal Data From Facebook

 

 NZ Herald

Facebook was the first of the big social media companies to give users the ability to download a file containing their personal history on the service. Google followed in 2011 and Twitter in 2012.

It's undeniably a good thing and means you can partake in ACCC chairman Rod Sim's game of comparing if the amount of personal data Facebook has on you is in line with your expectations.

To download it, click at the top right of any Facebook page and select Settings.

Click "Download a copy of your Facebook data" below your General Account Settings and then click the green button.

It takes about 10 minutes for Facebook to retrieve the file and you'll get an email and notification when it's ready to download.

Even if you don't use Facebook very much, you might be surprised by what you find.

I seldom use Facebook anymore and deleted the app on my phone some time ago. My profile is still up and running but even if I wanted to disconnect entirely, it feels like there's little escape from the clutches of Facebook at this point.

The Dishonest NY Times And Guns

Via Jonathan

This is the sort of article that should lead to a flat-out boycott and destruction of this "newspaper".

Specifically, they speak of Mexico, which has extremely stringent gun laws -- and only one legal gun store.  They make this out to be better than the United States, but intentionally fail to state the obvious: Their murder rate is 17.03 per 100,000 people (in 2016) or roughly three times that of the United States and roughly double the gun homicide rate even though the US has six times more guns per-person than Mexico does.

In other words the number of guns owned and the ease of acquiring them has nothing to do with the gun homicide rate nor with the murder rate overall.

What does?

Are you completely dense?

More @ Market Ticker

DOJ Announces Fast and Furious Documents Withheld by Eric Holder Will Be Released

 

The Department of Justice announced Wednesday additional documents related to the Operation Fast and Furious scandal during the Obama administration will be released to the House Oversight Committee. The documents were previously withheld by Attorney General Eric Holder, who was voted in civil and criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to turn them over.

“The Department of Justice under my watch is committed to transparency and the rule of law. This settlement agreement is an important step to make sure that the public finally receives all the facts related to Operation Fast and Furious,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions released in a statement.

The Department stated the document release is part of “the conditional settlement agreement, filed in federal court in Washington D.C.” and  “would end six years of litigation arising out of the previous administration’s refusal to produce documents requested by the Committee.”

More @ Townhall

Activists damage war monument where 58 dead NC soldiers were thrown into well

Via John

 

North Carolina Civil War monument at Maryland’s South Mountain State Battlefield was vandalized over the weekend. The Friends of South Mountain Battlefield posted images of the damage on Facebook early Tuesday and said several acts of vandalism were reported at the site over the past two weekends. South Mountain Battlefield is on the National Register of Historic Places and is infamous as the battle where 58 dead Confederates from North Carolina were dumped down a well after the fighting ended.

The site is about 15 miles southeast of Hagerstown, Maryland.

More @ The Charlotte Observer

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article203707029.html#storylink=cpy