How do civil wars happen?

Via comment by Badger on Media war on Trump continues around the clock, and...

53rd North Carolina, Fort Mahone/ "Fort Damnation" Petersburg, Virginia

 Requiem Aeternam - Eternal Rest Grant unto Them

 My great grandfather and great uncle know all the men in the "Civil War Requiem" video as they were part of the 53rd NC which was the sole unit defending Fort Mahone.

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

 Two or more sides disagree on who runs the country. And they can’t settle the question through elections because they don’t even agree that elections are how you decide who’s in charge.

That’s the basic issue here. Who decides who runs the country? When you hate each other but accept the election results, you have a country. When you stop accepting election results, you have a countdown to a civil war.

The Mueller investigation is about removing President Trump from office and overturning the results of an election. We all know that.

More @ Tumblr

Judicial Watch: Documents Reveal Obama State Department Provided Classified Records to Sen. Ben Cardin to Undermine President Trump

 

‘The Obama administration was attempting to disseminate that material widely across the government in order to aid in future investigations’ – The Baltimore Sun 

Judicial Watch today released 42 pages of heavily redacted State Department documents containing classified information that was provided to Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD), top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and outspoken critic of President Donald Trump. The documents show Russian political interference in elections and politics in countries across Europe.

According to a March 2017 report in the Baltimore Sun: “Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin received classified information about Russia’s involvement in elections when the Obama administration was attempting to disseminate that material widely across the government in order to aid in future investigations, according to a report Wednesday … Obama officials were concerned, according to the report [in The New York Times, below], that the Trump administration would cover up intelligence once power changed hands.”

More @ Judicial Watch

CDC, in Surveys It Never Bothered Making Public, Provides More Evidence that Plenty of Americans Innocently Defend Themselves with Guns

Via John

CDC surveys in the 1990s, never publicly reported, indicate nearly 2.5 million defensive uses of guns a year. That matches the results of Gary Kleck's controversial surveys, and it indicates more defensive than offensive uses of guns.

Many people who support gun control are angry that the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) are not legally allowed to use money from Congress to do research whose purpose is "to advocate or promote gun control." (This is not the same as doing no research into gun violence, though it seems to discourage many potential recipients of CDC money.)

But in the 1990s, the CDC itself did look into one of the more controversial questions in gun social science: How often do innocent Americans use guns in self-defense, and how does that compare to the harms guns can cause in the hands of violent criminals?

More @ Reason

Kanye West Praises Conservative Firebrand Candace Owens

Via David

Hip-hop megastar and fashion mogul Kanye West took to Twitter on Saturday and declared his “love” for conservative YouTube star turned grassroots activist Candace Owens.

“I love the way Candace Owens thinks,” West wrote in a rare message to his 11 million-plus Twitter followers.

More @ Breitbart

Back Into The Backyard Workshop.

Via Joe

Some three decades ago I was finishing up a ten year stint at a large valve manufacturer and my employer made a gift to me of a surplus 8" x 16" sch. 80 pipe reducer along with an 8" sch. 80 pipe end cap. My intent at the time was to weld them together and make a large bell. This was something I had done a few times before on a smaller scale.


This 4" x 8" sch. 80 bell presently hangs on the side of my work shop. It is in need of some sanding and a new coat of paint but that will have to wait until other things are finished.

I also did a larger 6" x 12" sch. 40 that was donated to the church I was attending at the time and is used as the call to service bell. But as the old saying goes, life is what happens when you're planning to do other things and these parts languished in my storage building until last year when this project finally began.

More @ Joe Martin's Ghost

Neo-Confederates Plan to Organize in Chicago this Weekend. Protesters Plan to Meet Them.

 

"My Son’s and I will be there tomorrow."Your Northern Copperhead friend. Greg  

 Deep inside Oak Woods Cemetery in Chicago’s predominantly African-American Grand Crossing neighborhood, a 40 foot–tall monument looms over a grave of Southern rebels. The bronze likeness of a nameless soldier marks Confederate Mound, the South Side resting place of more than 6,000 Confederate fighters who died at Camp Douglas, a Civil War military prison that stood in present-day Bronzeville.

More @ Chicago Mag

Happy Birthday William Gilmore Simms

 

“To write from a people is to write a people—to make them live—to endow them with a life and a name—to preserve them with a history forever.”
–W.G. Simms

The great Southern writer William Gilmore Simms was born on this day in 1806. Unlike the more famous Southern writer, the short-lived Edgar Allen Poe, Simms wrote voluminously and in every literary form: short story, novel, poetry, criticism, essay, history, and biography. Though his work has sometimes been considered uneven in quality, he often wrote superbly. Poe said that Simms was one of the best American writers of the time and that if he had had the self-promotion machinery of the New England literati his name would be a household word. Although he was widely read and admired in his time in Europe and the North, Simms was for a long time after the War between the States dismissed as a mere Southern and second-rate writer; he remains today unrepresented in “mainstream” anthologies of the best American literature. Interestingly, in his own time the Northeastern critics who have dominated American literary discussion considered Simms to be distastefully racy and realistic. Later, when “realism” became the fashion, they labeled him as too romantic and “genteel.” In recent years, a handful of devoted and talented scholars have been forcing out a more just recognition of Simms’s stature and achievements. The ignoring and downplaying of Simms’s stature in American literature has been referred to as “intellectual murder.”

More @ The Abbeville Institute

Lincoln's New Frame of Mind

 

Allan Ramsey was a court painter to George III as well as a published political theorist, who argued, regarding the American revolutionists, that “should the people remain obstinate, their scorched and impoverished land could be occupied by loyal immigrants.” As he saw the inhabitants of British America as bidding defiance to the Crown and in a state of war with the King’s forces, they should expect no mercy and the hard hand of total war.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org   The Great American Political Divide

Lincoln’s New Frame of Mind

“We have here the germ of the twentieth-century rationale for total war: war aimed at the people of a nation, scorched-earth strategy, the bombing of civilian populations, massive deportations of people, and the enslavement of the vanquished. Total war is not unique to the twentieth century, nor is it due to “technology,” which has merely made its implementation more practicable and terrible.

Modern total war is possible only among “civilized” nations. It is shaped and legitimated by an act of reflection, a way of thinking about the world whereby an entire people become the enemy. This requires a prior act of total criticism, which is the characteristic mark of the philosophical act.

The concept of civilized warfare is unique to Europe and lasted about two centuries, roughly from the beginning of the eighteenth century until World War I. Civilized war was to be between combatants only and could not be directed against civilians as part of a strategy for victory.

The most important part of this system consisted of the rules for ending a war and establishing and equitable peace. The vanquished were to be treated with respect. Compensation to the victor was not to be conceived as punishment but as the cost of defeat in an honorable contest of arms. The idea of demanding unconditional surrender was out of the question. Such a demand denies the nation the right to exist and so would destroy the principle of the comity of nations.

The distinguished military historian B.H. Liddell Hart judged that the first break in the system came not from Europe but from America, when Lincoln shocked European opinion by directing war against the civilian population of the eleven American States that in State conventions (the same legal instrument that had authorized the State’s entrance into the union) had voted to withdraw from the federation and form a union of their own.

Lincoln’s scorched-earth policy and demand for unconditional surrender exhibited a new frame of mind that only eighty years later would reveal itself in the terror-bombing of Dresden and Hiroshima . . . it has been estimated that more than 135,000 perished in the British and American bombing of Dresden, carried out within three months of the end of the war, when the defeat of Germany was certain.

Dresden was a city of no military value and known to be packed with refugees, mostly women and children fleeing from the Soviet armies in the east.

[America entered World War I in 1917] and rather than [seek] a negotiated settlement . . . Social progressives now spiritualized the war into a holy crusade to restructure all of Europe, to abolish autocracy, and to establish universal democracy. The war was transformed by the language of totality. It was now the war to make the world safe for democracy, and the war to end all wars. The concept of the final war, the philosophically reflexive war, is perhaps the ultimate in the barbarism of refinement.”

(Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium, Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy, Donald W. Livingston, University of Chicago Press, 1998, excerpts pp. 297-299)

CNN Reporter Calls North Korea Announcement a ‘Huge Win For President Trump’

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s surprising Friday announcement that his country will suspend nuclear and missile tests stunned at least one CNN reporter enough to give President Trump some serious credit.

“The nuclear test and the intercontinental ballistic missile test will be discontinued,” reported the Korean Central News Agency on Friday. “North Korea’s nuclear test center will be discarded in order to ensure the transparency of the suspension of the nuclear test.”

CNN’s Will Ripley told host Wolf Blitzer via phone that the development was “frankly a huge win for President Trump.”

More @ The Daily Caller

The DoJ 'probes James Comey for leaking classified information' in memos about Trump - and the President hints he will use the investigation to FIRE Robert Mueller

 

The Department of Justice's internal watchdog is investigating James Comey for leaking classified information by sharing memos about his meetings with Trump with a friend, it has been reported. 

On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the infamous memos and how the ousted FBI director leaked them were part of an ongoing probe by the inspector general. 

Comey's treatment of them, including him giving them to the media, is part of the investigation,  it was reported. 

The revelation prompted a tweet from the president, who previously dubbed Comey a 'leaker and a liar'.  

More @ Mail