Sunday, July 14, 2019

German Combat Pistols – Did the Guys Who Brought Us the Tiger Tank Really Think This was Enough Gun?

Via Jeffery

 
The Mauser HSc
The exposed hammer was only barely thus and remained both easily accessed and snag-free. The slide locked to the rear on the last round fired but closed automatically when a fresh magazine was rammed home. Literally, nothing is faster even today. The magazine release was located on the heel after the European fashion, and there was a manual safety on the left rear aspect of the slide that did not drop the hammer.
World War 2 was the world’s bloodiest, most expansive conflict. For the first time in human history, man’s quarrels with his fellow man were settled via warfare around the globe fought on an industrial scale. Never before or since has there been such killing.

Today’s generation seems awash in a lamentable soul-drenching ambiguity. The good guys are never fully good, the bad guys are never fully bad, and classical mores once held sacrosanct are now open for moral dissection. Where previously our enemies were vilified on grounds that were cultural, spiritual, and anthropomorphic, nowadays such stuff smacks of racism and is pitilessly suppressed. The moral challenges for American youth are implicit and insidious. When playing cowboys and Indians, for instance, for whom should one root?

More @ Guns America

The Opening Wedge of Revolution

 Image result for (In The Great Maelstrom: Conservatives in Post-Civil War South Carolina, Charles J. Holden

Feeling that the South had been “engulfed by the great maelstrom of bourgeois liberalism and capitalism, Frederick A. Porcher (1809-1888) and other Charlestonian began rebuilding their sense of community and political order.  An 1828 Yale graduate, he was a prewar planter who failed in that business and went to teaching at the College of Charleston. He served several terms in the South Carolina Legislature and counted among his many friends author William Gilmore Simms.
www.Circa1865.org  The Great American Political Divide

The Opening Wedge of Revolution

“Following the Civil War, Frederick Porcher continued to teach in Charleston, where it seemed that the Old South, his world, was unmistakably gone . . . “To the old Carolinian, everything was strange — he looked bewildered around him and about him, he felt he had become a stranger, that he had no home.”

Porcher’s fellow conservatives countered nascent black political organization with meetings and announcements of their own. A November 1867 convention of conservatives in Charleston outlined the postwar conservative beliefs. Local rule through States’ rights . . . and the fear of democracy all survived the war. The convention also gave hints of a developing industrial-age conservatism cherishing property rights and accepting as inevitable the labor/capital antagonism of a capitalist economy.

In its postwar defense of the States’ rights philosophy, the conservative convention granted that the emergency of war necessitated that the federal government reign “supreme.” But, as the Charleston Daily Courier reported, “Is this law, or is this usurpation? Is this good government, or is it revolution?”

A strong central government during a crisis of war was one thing. Conservatives asked if South Carolinians were now willing to endorse “so monstrous a proposition into our government polity.” Calhoun could not have stated any clearer the States’ rights view that conservative South Carolinians still held in 1867: To admit as a fact, as has been assumed to be the result of the war, that the Government of the United States is supreme, and that the States have no rights; or, if they have rights, that they are subordinate to the will of a majority having control of the Government, is to admit the abrogation of the Constitution, and to ignore the facts of history.”

Centralization of political power at the national level, especially with the inclusion of black voters, was the opening wedge leading to other revolutions. The Reconstruction Acts, conservatives argued, placed the power to tax “in the hands of those who own no property,” while it took power away from “those who hold the property and must pay the taxes.” To them, this was not just a bad idea, but a dangerous one.

Porcher used his history lectures to address the new political power of the black community. “A great experiment,” Porcher observed, “is now making in this country to commit the highest responsibilities of civilization to a race which in its native soil has never shown any capacity for improvement. You who hear me will be able to witness the result.”

[He] guided his young students with the strong suggestion that it too, would fail: “Civilization is an Innate Faculty, not an acquired Habit. It is a gift of God, not the result of human teaching.”

(In The Great Maelstrom: Conservatives in Post-Civil War South Carolina, Charles J. Holden, University of South Carolina Press, 2002, excerpts pp. 30-37)

A Great Consolidation of Government

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 1997 Pulitzer Prize for history.

The Constitution’s ratification is said to be the result of a series of illegal acts, with some revolutionary in character. And it is difficult to imagine exactly who would have pressed charges against the framers for subverting the Articles of Confederation while circumventing their own State legislatures in the process.

The Federalists, who favored increased centralization of power, were well-aware of their inability to defend the abandonment of the Confederation legally – though James Madison weakly observed in Federalist 40 that “in all great changes in established governments, forms ought to give way to substance.”
www.Circa1865.org   The Great American Political Divide

A Great Consolidation of Government

“After June 25, 1788, three States remained outside the new Union: New York, whose convention came to order in Poughkeepsie on June 17; North Carolina, whose delegates would meet in late July; and Rhode Island, to whose fate most Federalists were indifferent.

[New York anti-Federalists searched] for a formula for conditional ratification that would keep the State in the Union while preserving the right to withdraw subsequently should its amendments not be adopted. So opposed were Federalists to any form of conditional ratification that [Alexander] Hamilton even wondered whether they should agree that New York could reserve a right to “recede” from the Union should its desired amendments not be adopted . . .

Anti-Federalists insisted that North Carolina was not rejecting the Constitution outright, and they further intimated that the State would somehow remain in the Union – if not its new government – because the compact of the [Articles of] Confederation could be dissolved only with the consent of ALL its parties. Remarkably, Anti-Federalists even challenged the right of the convention to abandon the Confederation, or to substitute “We the people” as the source of federal legitimacy for “we the States.”

[James Madison’s Federalist 39 described the Constitution]: “In its foundation it is federal, not national; in the sources from which the ordinary powers of government are drawn, it is party federal and partly national; in the operation of these powers, it is national, not federal; in the extent of them, again, it is federal, not national; and finally, in the authoritative mode of introducing amendments, it is neither wholly federal nor wholly national.”

Such distinctions hardly assured the anti-Federalists who knew that the Constitution would form the States into a new Leviathan. “We may be amused if we please, by a treatise of political anatomy,” Patrick Henry warned the Virginia ratifiers, rebutting a speech in which Madison restated this argument. “In the brain it is national: the stamina are federal – some limbs are federal – others are national.”

“But what signifies it to me, that you have the most curious anatomical description of it in its creation?” Henry asked. “To all the common purposes of Legislation it is a great consolidation of Government.”

(Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution, Jack N. Rakove, Alfred A. Knopf, 1997, excerpts pp. 125-126; 161-162)

Devin Nunes Recommends Jail Time for DoJ Officials Behind Trump-Russia ‘Hoax’ in order to keep the country from fracturing.

Via Billy

Rep. Devin Nunes chairs a Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence hearing on China’s Worldwide Military Expansion at U.S. Congress in Washington on May 17, 2018. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) said that Department of Justice officials involved in the sketchy Trump-Russia investigation should face consequences including jail time in order to keep the country from fracturing.

The situation that unfolded—a years-long investigation of President Donald Trump for alleged ties to Russia—ended up being an “obstruction of justice trap” that started without evidence, Nunes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, told the right-leaning Fox News.

The issue can only be fixed by putting the people who “perpetuated this hoax” in prison, the lawmaker said.

NYT: Feds Must Force Middle-Class Americans To Sacrifice Suburbs for Immigrant Housing

Via Billy
Image result for NYT: Feds Must Force Middle-Class Americans To Sacrifice Suburbs for Immigrant Housing

The New York Times has officially gone off the deep-end. And these days, that’s saying something.
On Sunday, the 167-year-old organization announced through its editorial board that it supports the federal government sacrificing the value of millions of suburban houses by injecting poor immigrants into middle-class neighborhoods.

Instead of wanting the government to find an immigration solution that doesn’t put the property of American citizens in jeopardy, The Times said that everyone should stoop to the lowest common denominator.

More @ WJ

Armed 'anarchist and anti-fascist' (ANTIFA) attempted to firebomb ICE facility in Tacoma, killed in confrontation with police

Via Martin 


MSM no mention of connection with Antifa

 A hashtag on Twitter is filled with praise for the "martyr." 

On Saturday, a man armed with a rifle and Molotov cocktails or flares, according to reports, and angered by "factually inaccurate portrayal" of the facility, according to the company operating the facility, attempted to set fire to an ICE detention center in Tacoma, Washington. 

In a subsequent confrontation with police, the Antifa activist was killed. And some of his fellow activists called him a martyr for it.

More @ The Blaze