Monday, December 27, 2010
Liberty Is Dead. Long Live Liberty!
"Those of us who love freedom as though it were a living, breathing being must remember that human liberty was not born in the United States........
........what is happening in America is nothing new; the rise and fall of Empire has happened through history. The American instance will not bring down freedom any more than the fall of the Roman or British Empires killed human liberty. Indeed, a case could be made that when a government embarks on Empire, as America did in the Spanish American War (1898), then its ultimate fall is a necessary requisite to restoring liberty........
........Just as they cry out at the death of a monarch 'The King is dead. Long live the King!' I look at the death of American Empire and say "Liberty is dead. Long live Liberty!"
Via Western Rifle Shooters Association
Historical And Military Illiteracy
Mr. Moon,
"After reaction to your recent column advocating, among other unconstitutional things, government permission to purchase ammunition by way of an ID requirement, you made this ridiculous statement."
Walter Place, Holly Springs Mississippi
3 Buildings * Approx. 14,773 Square Feet Total * 12 Bedrooms * 12 Bathrooms * 15 Acres * Pond * Waterfalls
Via Mary Carol, Belle Grove
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You’ll not visit another home like Walter Place. It is unique. Walter Place took the large columns and broad pediment style of Greek Revival houses being built across the South in the 1850s and elevated it to a grander scale
An Old-Timey Southern Breakfast
For those who haven’t eaten enough of the good stuff over the Christmas holiday, here is a reminder of how real people start the day.
Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
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A Little Southern Breakfast:
“Let us not overlook the old-timey Southern breakfast. It is an institution – perhaps the best loved meal of the region – at any rate, for people who have gone to bed early and hungry, slept the sleep of the just and risen “early on a frosty morning.”
For this breakfast there are no fripperies and no preliminaries – no juice or melon or cereal. You plunge directly “in medias res” which being translated means old country ham, chicken, bacon and sausages, salt herring roes, rolls, toast, biscuits, waffles, coffee and – never to be forgotten – buckwheat cakes. These buckwheat cakes are not the “plate o’ w’eats” of the North shored up with puny sausage links. They are not the product of the ready-made “mix” which comes from a paste-board box with indecent haste and moves without meditation or art from carton to griddle.
This rare species requires long training – such as [our colored cook] Violet has had – with nothing to disturb the equanimity of the artist, and careful preparation then night before when the ingredients (“magruduses” to Violet), including ‘east cake, potato water, white flour and dark, water-ground buckwheat flour, are beaten up and left behind the stove in a gray earthen crock.
Next morning, milk, black molasses, baking powder, soda and a “fraction” of salt are added. Indeed all the “magruduses” are measured in “fraction.” Nobody knows what a “fraction” is. This art is not for the books.
But when the cakes come off the griddle they are too good to have their taste adulterated by any sort of syrup. Serve a stack topped by a stick of butter and accompanied by a few slices of strong, old country ham, or equally strong salt herring roe mashed up in butter, and you have a dish which will make lunch, or even dinner, a work of supererogation. There is something gargantuan about Southern cooking. Tom Wolfe got it right in Look Homeward, Angel when he wrote of his own family:
“They fed stupendously. Eugene began to observe the food and the seasons. In the autumn they barreled huge, frosty apples in the cellar. Gant bought whole hogs from the butcher, returning home early to salt them, wearing a long work-apron and rolling his sleeves half up his lean, hairy arms. Smoked bacons hung in the pantry, the great bins were full of flour, the dark recessed shelves groaned with preserved cherries, peaches, plums, quinces, apples, pears…
“In the morning they rose in a house pungent with breakfast cookery and they sat at a smoking table loaded with brains and eggs, ham, hot biscuits, fried apples seething in their gummed syrups, honey, golden butter, fried steaks, scalding coffee. Or there were stacked butter-cakes, rum-colored molasses, fragrant brown sausages, a bowl of wet cherries, plums, fat, juicy bacon, jam.
At the midday meal they ate heavily: a huge, hot roast of beef, fat, buttered lima beans, tender corn smoking on the cob, thick red slabs of sliced tomatoes, rough savory spinach, hot yellow corn bread, flaky biscuits, deep-dished peach and apple cobbler spiced with cinnamon, tender cabbage, deep glass dishes piled with preserved fruits – cherries, pears, peaches.
At night they might eat fried steak, hot squares of grits fried in egg and butter, pork chops, fish, young fried chicken.”
(A Little Breakfast, Southern Accent, From Uncle Remus to Oak Ridge, William T. Polk, William Morrow and Company, 1953, pp. 132-133)
========
An Old-Timey Southern Breakfast
Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
========
A Little Southern Breakfast:
“Let us not overlook the old-timey Southern breakfast. It is an institution – perhaps the best loved meal of the region – at any rate, for people who have gone to bed early and hungry, slept the sleep of the just and risen “early on a frosty morning.”
For this breakfast there are no fripperies and no preliminaries – no juice or melon or cereal. You plunge directly “in medias res” which being translated means old country ham, chicken, bacon and sausages, salt herring roes, rolls, toast, biscuits, waffles, coffee and – never to be forgotten – buckwheat cakes. These buckwheat cakes are not the “plate o’ w’eats” of the North shored up with puny sausage links. They are not the product of the ready-made “mix” which comes from a paste-board box with indecent haste and moves without meditation or art from carton to griddle.
This rare species requires long training – such as [our colored cook] Violet has had – with nothing to disturb the equanimity of the artist, and careful preparation then night before when the ingredients (“magruduses” to Violet), including ‘east cake, potato water, white flour and dark, water-ground buckwheat flour, are beaten up and left behind the stove in a gray earthen crock.
Next morning, milk, black molasses, baking powder, soda and a “fraction” of salt are added. Indeed all the “magruduses” are measured in “fraction.” Nobody knows what a “fraction” is. This art is not for the books.
But when the cakes come off the griddle they are too good to have their taste adulterated by any sort of syrup. Serve a stack topped by a stick of butter and accompanied by a few slices of strong, old country ham, or equally strong salt herring roe mashed up in butter, and you have a dish which will make lunch, or even dinner, a work of supererogation. There is something gargantuan about Southern cooking. Tom Wolfe got it right in Look Homeward, Angel when he wrote of his own family:
“They fed stupendously. Eugene began to observe the food and the seasons. In the autumn they barreled huge, frosty apples in the cellar. Gant bought whole hogs from the butcher, returning home early to salt them, wearing a long work-apron and rolling his sleeves half up his lean, hairy arms. Smoked bacons hung in the pantry, the great bins were full of flour, the dark recessed shelves groaned with preserved cherries, peaches, plums, quinces, apples, pears…
“In the morning they rose in a house pungent with breakfast cookery and they sat at a smoking table loaded with brains and eggs, ham, hot biscuits, fried apples seething in their gummed syrups, honey, golden butter, fried steaks, scalding coffee. Or there were stacked butter-cakes, rum-colored molasses, fragrant brown sausages, a bowl of wet cherries, plums, fat, juicy bacon, jam.
At the midday meal they ate heavily: a huge, hot roast of beef, fat, buttered lima beans, tender corn smoking on the cob, thick red slabs of sliced tomatoes, rough savory spinach, hot yellow corn bread, flaky biscuits, deep-dished peach and apple cobbler spiced with cinnamon, tender cabbage, deep glass dishes piled with preserved fruits – cherries, pears, peaches.
At night they might eat fried steak, hot squares of grits fried in egg and butter, pork chops, fish, young fried chicken.”
(A Little Breakfast, Southern Accent, From Uncle Remus to Oak Ridge, William T. Polk, William Morrow and Company, 1953, pp. 132-133)
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An Old-Timey Southern Breakfast
Beware Claims Of (US - Korea) 'Free Trade'
"When Fieldcrest executives first announced the closing in 2003, workers gathered at the plant for weeks afterward during lunch breaks and days off to hold prayer vigils. When the plant closed, 4,300 workers lost their jobs, the largest single layoff in North Carolina history. The Kannapolis area still has not recovered. While the state unemployment rate just increased to 9.7 percent, Kannapolis struggles with a rate of 12.3 percent."
Sunday, December 26, 2010
The Daily Bell Interviews Fitzroy McLean
Fitzroy McLean is a West Point graduate and former Army Ranger and Special Operations Officer who served throughout Europe, Africa, and the Middle East – until he was struck with an epiphany: he didn't believe in government at all, at least not the intrusive form of government that is commonplace throughout the western world.A few excerpts below from the main article HERE.
"After the Berlin Wall fell, America stepped up its long march towards being just another nation state. America was an idea and sadly I feel that America is no more. Now there is just The United States which is sadly just another government monstrosity plodding towards irrelevance. History shows that the death rattle of a nation state can be very painful for the citizenry. It pains me that there is no place left for those who truly want to be free.
I also went to graduate school at Oxford and although I didn't learn much of practical use it did open some doors and put me in touch with some great people whom I still work with on a regular basis. An MBA taught me that formal business education was a total waste of time and was designed to perpetuate conventional mediocrity. It also heightened my distain for conventional wisdom. I was fortunate to go there once I was already financially independent so I could pick fights with the faculty.
The EU is a political entity not an economic zone. Its predecessor, the EC, was a brilliant idea because it only dealt with the movement of people, goods and services. The EU is a bureaucracy run by socially pleasant but economically ignorant technocrats. The EU was doomed from day one and will soon collapse. The Euro will not survive.
These are entitlement riots. The participants are indignant that they may not be able to count on the largess of others to subsidize their lifestyle. The entitlement system is so deeply ingrained in the European psyche that many cannot contemplate a life of self-reliance. The system is doomed to destruction and it can't come soon enough. We are already scouting investment opportunities for after the collapse.
Take a look at the recent list of Nobel Piece Prize winners and ask yourself if you would let any of them watch your dog for the weekend.
Daily Bell: We think we will see a new currency emerging in the wake of a global meltdown. Agree?
Fitzroy McLean: Absolutely. I'm not sure what it will look like but eventually it will have to be tied to precious metals or a basket of commodities. I suspect we will see a series of forcibly enforced failed currencies before we get to that stage.
Freedom is at the heart of everything I do. I am a freedom zealot. I would rather be destitute and free than comfortable and constrained. It is quite possibly a genetic defect. Sometimes I wish I could think otherwise. Life would be simpler and I would not drive my friends and family crazy with my rants about how the US government ignored thousands of years of common law and contract law in the way they handled the Chrysler bankruptcy and why it was a moral outrage. Freedom is sacrosanct.Daily Bell: Is what is happening in the world today somehow planned to build a new world order?
Fitzroy McLean: Not at all. This situation is where the laws of unintended consequences meet the laws of large numbers. This doesn't mean there are not people looking for a NWO but if working for the CIA and other clandestine outfits taught me anything it is that no group comprised of type A personalities can keep a secret. What we have are skilled opportunists maneuvering to maximize their benefit from a system in flux. You don't have to believe in an organized conspiracy to believe that there will be a collapse. My experience with so-called elites is that they couldn't organize anything more difficult than a scotch and soda without the help of a professional party planner. They could never pull the strings necessary to organize this mess. See American Idol for a more likely cause of our woes.
Money spent on increasing your self-reliance and your analytical capabilities are the best use of funds today. So many of the so-called educated class are mere sheeple and they will not be able to cope with what is in store for them if it gets ugly. I wonder how that sociology degree will help when the home invasions start. I hope I am wrong but I don't think I am.Daily Bell: The West turning increasingly authoritarian? Where should people go?
Fitzroy McLean: That is a personal decision based on cultural affinity and ones own skill set. Uruguay is a very European place where my family and I can blend in comfortably. If you went to a restaurant where we were dining you would not be able to pick us out as foreigners unless you heard my heavily accented Spanish. Small countries with limited resources are the best because very few other nations care about them. "
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