Wednesday, February 13, 2019
10 Black-and-White Shots of Saigon in 1967
Lush bunches of fresh bananas at a market, a street-side merchant selling embroidered artworks to tourists, and Buddhist worshipers praying at a local temple — these Saigon scenes are rather mundane by today’s standards. However, at the time these photos were taken, these were remarkable visual pieces of proof to western audiences that Vietnam had a dynamic side apart from war and poverty.
Vietnamese photographer Nguyen Thanh Tai, the author of this set of images, used to work for US-based news agency United Press International (UPI). Tai’s black-and-white photos of an idyllic Saigon in 1967 is a change from his better-known works during the American War.
More @ Saigoneer
NC: PERMITLESS CONCEALED CARRY RETURNS
Last year, Republican leadership in the NC Senate failed to move HB 746 (Permitless Concealed Carry and more), but a new year brings hope...
It's true, Republican inaction on conservative legislation demotivated their base, and Republicans payed for this at the polls last November. That's the old news.
Looking Ahead to HB 61
The past is the past, but it's 2019 and with a new year comes good news! A new bill, HB 61, nearly identical to HB 746, has been introduced in the NC House. As you might have guessed,the new bill was introduced by Rep. Larry Pittman (Cabarrus, Rowan), GRNC 4-star and perennial gun rights stalwart.
We are Serious about Gun Rights
GRNC is tenacious, and we will not stop fighting, along with our allies in the NC legislature, for permitless concealed carry. We will continue to assist solid gun rights legislators while encouraging those distracted by other issues. Although pro-gun legislation is often promised on the campaign trail, it is not always delivered easily. No matter. We're not giving up, and we will ultimately win. But to win, we need your help...
Contact Your Representatives
One remedy to the reluctant or distracted politician is to keep their base voters constantly in their view. To encourage NC House Republicans to move on HB 61, please contact them using the information provided below. With your help, we can make this happen
Dallas City Council votes to remove Confederate monument from cemetery
Via Susan Lee
Members voted 11-4 in favor of a resolution that would declare the monument to Confederate soldiers inside Pioneer Park "a noncontributing structure for the historic overlay district."
Staff told council members the monument would have to be sawed into pieces in order to remove and store it.
Members voted 11-4 in favor of a resolution that would declare the monument to Confederate soldiers inside Pioneer Park "a noncontributing structure for the historic overlay district."
Staff told council members the monument would have to be sawed into pieces in order to remove and store it.
More @ Fox
Mel Bradford warned against the "idea of equality." We are living in the logical outcome
Yet, the real problem is that American history, that is, American history that is not completely warped by a predetermined progressivist ideology, hardly exists today as a subject taught in most US colleges and universities. And on the high school level, one is fortunate these days to find a teacher who is not convinced that “race” and “sex” are the only factors that actually shaped our nation, or who is not so cowed by political correctness that he or she doesn’t fear to deviate from the new ironclad template.
This disastrous situation in education should be self-evident to most observers of academia, but it is not…and apparently not for many conservatives and Republicans.
More @ The Abbeville Institute
Poll: Media’s All-Out Assault on Trump Only Hurts Trust in Journalists
Polling proves that public trust in the establishment media has collapsed in every imaginable way during Trump’s presidency.
There is no doubt anymore that corporate media’s ongoing assault against President Trump has backfired in a way that journalists will never recover from.
An IBD/TIPP poll asked about “the public’s perception of the mainstream news media” and found that “fully half the country says its trust in the media decreased over the past two years,” while only eight percent say they have more trust in the media.
More @ Breitbart
NEW SOCIALISTS: The Green Red Deal
Via David
Watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside.
Leftist environmentalists hate that. And yet, they do little to eschew the label. Quite the contrary, they earn it in spades.
They have from the outset. Whether sheer coincidence or because the Devil has a sense of humor, Earth Day always marks Vladimir Lenin’s birthday. The first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, just happened to be the centennial of Lenin’s birth.
Given that interesting confluence of dates, it seems more than ironic that so many former communists, when the Cold War ended, ran for the woods. It was the ideal ideological refuge. Rocks and frogs cannot tell the commie “environmentalist” to go jump in a lake. They can’t tell the central planners to take a hike back to their air-conditioned offices in Manhattan or coffee shops in Berkeley. Thus, for socialists, here’s the perfect constituency to wield government power and manage people and property.
Watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside.
Leftist environmentalists hate that. And yet, they do little to eschew the label. Quite the contrary, they earn it in spades.
They have from the outset. Whether sheer coincidence or because the Devil has a sense of humor, Earth Day always marks Vladimir Lenin’s birthday. The first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, just happened to be the centennial of Lenin’s birth.
Given that interesting confluence of dates, it seems more than ironic that so many former communists, when the Cold War ended, ran for the woods. It was the ideal ideological refuge. Rocks and frogs cannot tell the commie “environmentalist” to go jump in a lake. They can’t tell the central planners to take a hike back to their air-conditioned offices in Manhattan or coffee shops in Berkeley. Thus, for socialists, here’s the perfect constituency to wield government power and manage people and property.
More @ The American Spectator
WaPo Actually Fact Checks Kamala Harris’ Tax Refund Lie
In reality, the size of a tax refund reflects nothing about the size of a tax cut or tax increase — and at least in 2018, the vast majority of middle-class Americans can expect to pay less in taxes as a result of the Trump tax law,” Kessler concluded.
Fact checkers have been notoriously left-leaning in their insistence on nitpicking things Republicans say while ignoring major lies told by Democrats.
For example, on Monday, The Washington Post’s fact checker refused to give Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez any Pinocchios for her blatantly false claims about her Green New Deal FAQ. Instead, the checker went after President Donald Trump.
But also on Monday, the Post decided to actually fact check leading 2020 presidential nominee Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) over a tweet claiming that Trump’s tax cuts were actually tax hikes on the middle class.
More @ The Daily Wire
FEC Still Refuses To Investigate Alleged $84 Million Clinton Campaign Money Laundering
Via Billy
‘It’s outrageous that the FEC has sat around and done nothing—especially with such a detailed, comprehensive paper trail handed to them,’ lawyer Dan Backer told The Federalist.
Tuesday evening the Committee to Defend the President (CDP) filed a motion in a D.C. federal court seeking to supplement the complaint it had filed against the Federal Election Committee (FEC) in April 2018. In its original complaint, the CDP alleged that the agency responsible for enforcing campaign-finance law failed to act on an administrative complaint the CDP had filed with the FEC. That complaint charged that, during the 2016 presidential election, Democrats illegally funneled approximately $84 million through the Hillary Victory Fund to the Democratic National Committee (DNC), which then illegally coordinated with the Hillary Clinton campaign.
To understand the alleged scheme requires familiarity with controlling campaign-finance law and campaign contribution limits. As I explained at the time CDP sued the FEC last April:
‘It’s outrageous that the FEC has sat around and done nothing—especially with such a detailed, comprehensive paper trail handed to them,’ lawyer Dan Backer told The Federalist.
Tuesday evening the Committee to Defend the President (CDP) filed a motion in a D.C. federal court seeking to supplement the complaint it had filed against the Federal Election Committee (FEC) in April 2018. In its original complaint, the CDP alleged that the agency responsible for enforcing campaign-finance law failed to act on an administrative complaint the CDP had filed with the FEC. That complaint charged that, during the 2016 presidential election, Democrats illegally funneled approximately $84 million through the Hillary Victory Fund to the Democratic National Committee (DNC), which then illegally coordinated with the Hillary Clinton campaign.
To understand the alleged scheme requires familiarity with controlling campaign-finance law and campaign contribution limits. As I explained at the time CDP sued the FEC last April:
More @ The Federalist
Ted Cruz pushes for El Chapo to pay for the wall after drug lord's conviction
Sen. Ted Cruz is proposing a new source of funding for a border wall: recently convicted drug kingpin El Chapo.
Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman was found guilty Tuesday of 10 counts, including engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise.
The leader of the violent Sinaloa drug cartel faces a mandatory life sentence. Federal prosecutors also plan to seek a forfeiture judgment for the property Guzman gained from drug trafficking. The value of that property is believed to be as high as $14 billion.
More @ CNN
British Slaves, Serfs and Human Loot
The slaves of Middle Ages Britain were not African, nor were the slaves of the Church in Europe. In Anglo-Saxon England the slaves and peasants lived in great squalor, in small windowless thatched-roof huts with refuse dump-floors. An open-hearth fire vented to a hole in the roof. Most English slaves were reduced to that state as punishment for crimes, failure to pay fines or for being in debt. Also, children born of slaves of any origin were declared to be slaves as well. What is described below was medieval England, not the American South of 1860.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org The Great American Political Divide
British Slaves, Serfs and Human Loot
“There were true slaves in the Middle Ages, of course, men who worked like domestic animals, doing whatever kind of labor the lord demanded, and for whatever length of time he ordered. Many had begun their slavery as captives of war. After the Anglo-Saxons invaded England in the fifth century A.D., the word for the person without freedom was “Welshman” – the name of the native Britons that they enslaved.
“Welsh” eventually came to mean slave. (It was what would happen later when the word for “slave” itself was taken from Slav – the name of the Slavic peoples captured and sold into slavery in great numbers).
Until the Normans conquered the country in 1066, many Englishmen were sold abroad in the slavemarkets of Europe and the East. William the Conqueror permitted domestic slavery to continue, but he banned the sale of English slaves overseas.
The slaves who remained at home often saw their children and grandchildren melt into the condition of serfdom. The serfs worked the lord’s lands, but were left time enough to cultivate their own plots, out of which they paid dues and taxes, in money or in goods. They were obliged to be on call with their labor to build castles, bridges and roads. And in some times and places, they were liable for arbitrary taxes, imposed by the lord whenever “necessary.” Unfree to one degree or another, such a peasant was called “serf,” a name taken from the old Roman word for slave – servus.
For many centuries, popes and bishops, churches and monasteries owned slaves. Pope Gregory I (590-814) used hundreds of slaves on the papal estates. Early in the eighth century, the Abbey of St. Germain des Pres near Paris had 8,000 slaves and St. Martin of Tours had 20,000.
It was just before 800 [A.D.] that the Vikings began to raid the coasts of the British Isles. The natives they captured were of little use in their own service, so they traded most of them to Constantinople (the Byzantium of earlier days and now Istanbul) or Islamic Spain. In those markets the human loot was converted into gold, silks, wine and weapons.
A glimpse into an English slave’s life is given in the writings of Bishop Aelfric of the late tenth century. A plowman in one of his works says:
“I go out at dawn driving the oxen to the field and yoke them to the plough. It is never so harsh a winter that I dare lurk at home for fear of my master, but when the oxen have been yoked and the ploughshare and coulter fastened to the plough, I must plough each day a full acre or more . . . I must fill the oxen’s manger with hay, and water them, and clear out the dung . . . It is heavy work, because I am not free.”
(The Medieval Slave; Slavery: A World History, Milton Meltzer, Da Capo Press, 1993, excerpts pp. 209-211; 213)