5333 private links
Woodbutcher
3 hours ago
"From the beginning, you couldn’t own any weapon you wanted to own"
Well, yes, Joey boy, you could, in the beginning. Up to and including cannon and warships!
tonysc Woodbutcher
3 hours ago
GMTA, I'm not going to delete my comment but, canons were, indeed privately owned. At the time, I'm not sure what weapon was considered more war-like than a canon but I can't think of any.
Diamondback tonysc
3 hours ago
A fully-armed warship with two dozen of 'em on its gun deck would fit that description nicely, this was why privateers had to have a Letter of Marque and Reprisal before sailing.
The backbone of Revolutionary War naval efforts was actually our privateer fleet, ditto the War of 1812 and the Quasi-War with France.
Consider that the Man-o-War was the ICBM of the day...
tonysc
3 hours ago
From the beginning, you couldn't own any weapon you wanted to own.
That's weird, I seem to remember canons being privately owned back when that silly Constitution was written but maybe he was talking about weapons that hadn't been invented yet. //
Draconis tonysc
2 hours ago
...On the note of 'weapons that had not been invented yet' nothing shows the ignorance of the gun grabbers more than 'when the Constitution was written they couldn't imagine something like today's rapid fire weapons existing'....They have obviously never heard of the Girardoni Air Rifle....
...Developed by Bartolomeo Girardoni in 1779, used by the Austrian army from 1780 to 1815, it used compressed air to fire a projectile each time the trigger was pulled (similar to today's semi-automatic rifles) maintaining that rate of fire for 30 shots before it had to be 'reloaded' with compressed air.....Lewis and Clark even carried one on their expedition....in 1803....
...For those who are a bit vague on history, the Second Amendment was written in 1789 and ratified in 1791 ....TWELVE YEARS after this semi automatic rifle was developed...... //
johncv tonysc
3 hours ago
and warships too. IIRC John Hancock owned one. The Privateers also preyed upon British shipping.
The communists are showing the weakness of their programs - the apparatchik speech writers are as ignorant of history as the students they indoctrinate.
Coincidentally, today is Booker T. Washington’s 165th Birthday: he was born April 5, 1856. In a time when racial disparities and tension were the real deal, rather than so much of this manufactured nonsense, Washington made this controversial statement in his 1911 book, My Larger Education.
“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”
Washington described them as “problem profiteers”, and it is interesting that Booker and Barkley saw this so clearly. There are some people for whom it is more important to drive their agenda than it is to actually get things done and solve problems. If work is accomplished and problems are resolved, it means those profiteers can no longer earn their prestige or dollars. Both Booker T. Washington and Charles Barkley are the latter. Our political class and much of our legacy media are the former. //
It was at a second job in a local coalmine where he first heard two fellow works discuss the Hampton Institute, a school for formerly enslaved people in southeastern Virginia founded in 1868 by Brigadier General Samuel Chapman. Chapman had been a leader of Black troops for the Union during the Civil War and was dedicated to improving educational opportunities for African Americans.
Washington walked the 500 miles from Malden, Virginia to Southeastern Virginia to get to the Hampton Institute. //
Brigadier General Chapman was so impressed by Washington, that he was invited to return to Hampton as a teacher. Chapman then referred Washington for a role as principal of a new school for Blacks in Tuskegee, Alabama: The Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, now known as Tuskegee University. At age 25, Washington took on the task, and was there until his death in 1915.
Washington is too often seen as a supporter of segregationist views, and he and W.E.B. Du Bois famously battled in their writings over this. Washington encouraged Blacks to embrace skilled labor and the trades to build their own wealth as an avenue of integration, rather than Du Bois’s chosen method of pushing to change laws and forcefully integrate into what was at that time, white society.
In an 1895 speech which Du Bois dubbed, “The Atlanta Compromise,” Washington told a majority white audience in Atlanta that the way forward for Blacks was self-actualization to “dignify and glorify common labor.” Washington saw showing through actions and accomplishments that you are a valuable part of contributing society as a wiser path toward desegregation than some of the attempts being made by his contemporaries. Washington encouraged a measured approach, as opposed to blowing up the system:
“The wisest of my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than artificial forcing. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than to spend a dollar in an opera house.” //
So Barkley and Washington embody a powerful work ethic and an insatiable drive that sadly, is lacking in much of what is touted as “success” today. Instead of upping that quotient, some would rather blame a generation of Blacks’ lack of success on racism. //
Bottom line, both men encourage us to: Get our own. Then, OWN it. Then, BUILD wealth and legacy through it.
My people still have not exploited these lessons to their full extent. We’re still fighting the battles that W.E.B. Du Bois waged and that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and many others fought and won. Both should capture our attention, and where we have allowed that legacy of civil rights to erode, we need to shore it up. But what I most find is a fixation that no progress has been made. When someone like Barkley points out this is not the case and that certain actors are invested in ensuring we stay divided, his premise is questioned and marginalized, rather than examined for its veracity.
Washington had this to say in his autobiographical novel, Up From Slavery, page 103.
I said that the whole future of the Negro rested largely upon the question as to whether or not he should make himself, through his skill, intelligence, and character, of such undeniable value to the community in which he lived that the community could not dispense with his presence.
This is brilliant.
May 1981. President Ronald Reagan is giving a speech at an Air Force base in West Berlin when a balloon pops loudly. Only two months previously, the President had been shot in an attempt on his life, not long after beginning his first term.
Reagan's response:
"Missed me"
My story of growing up as a little black girl in an all-white region of Canada is wrought with racial abuse which often manifested as physical abuse. In fact, I fled Canada at 18-years-old because my Canadian life had been defined by racism and racist abuse up until that point. //
People who claim that the United States is the worst place on earth when it comes to racism are too privileged to know better. They have never made the effort to understand cultures outside their own, and in fact pride themselves on their ignorance. They are so immersed in American privilege that they assume everyone else on earth lives like we live and thinks like we think – the “we” being the intellectual Left, naturally.
The truth is, the United States is the most racist country on the planet, except for everyone else. Humans are tribal. No amount of shaming, canceling or legislation can thwart human nature, human sin. If you think America is the most racist place on earth I invite you to move anywhere else and begin telling the people of color who live there what a utopia they live in.
The Trump Campaign laid down a huge marker for the final 50 days leading up to Election Day — voters can embrace the patriotic history that focuses on 1776 and what came after, or 1619 and what the New York Times says should be important. //
Critical race theory, the 1619 Project, and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, an ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together. It will destroy our country.
American parents are not going to accept indoctrination in our schools, cancel culture at work or the repression of traditional faith, culture, and values in the public square,” Trump said.
Teaching this horrible doctrine to our children is a form of child abuse, the truest sense. For many years now, the radicals have mistaken Americans’ silence for weakness. They’re wrong. There is no more powerful force than a parent’s love for their children.
The left-wing Cultural Revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution … The Left has warped, distorted, and defiled the American story with deceptions, falsehoods, and lies.
Editor's note: Twelve Civil War historians and political scientists who research the Civil War composed a letter to The New York Times Magazine concerning 'The 1619 Project.' The NYTM editor, Jake Silverstein, responded but the NYTM declined to publish the letter and his response. The scholars created a reply and Silverstein had no objection to publishing the exchange in another venue. It is published below.
It’s attractive for politicians to keep taxes low and spending high. Each of our last four presidential administrations has benefited from this dynamic.
Wall Street and global business, which dominates Washington policymaking, have also benefited greatly. These corporate actors care about their next financial quarter a lot more than our country’s state of affairs 10 or more years down the road.
This period will be looked upon by historians as the saddest time in our history: a once great country behaving so selfishly and with such short-term interests that they sold their children’s futures away with barely any debate.
USS Michael Murphy strutted into San Diego Bay in style flying the biggest American Flag we have ever seen on a U.S. Navy surface combatant.
Tom Cotton Creates Inspiring Message Explaining Why the Flag Is Backward on Military Uniforms
By Brandon Morse | Feb 26, 2021 3:30 PM ET
AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, Pool
If you’ve ever wondered why the American flag patch is backward on military uniforms, then Sen. Tom Cotton has the explanation, and once you hear it, its symbolism will inspire you.
As Cotton explained during his CPAC speech, the reason the patch is backward has everything to do with what the flag looks like to our military while it’s charging forward.
“It goes back to the days of cavalry charges,” said Cotton. “When our soldiers would charge into battle the flag would fly in the wind and if you’re on the right side of the formation (and the flag is worn on the right shoulder) it would appear backwards.”
“So our soldiers wear that flag backwards on their uniform still today to remind everyone that our army always advances, it never retreats,” said Cotton.
”And I think that’s a pretty good lesson for us today,” said Cotton. “When America is under assault and conservatives are under attack we will never retreat. We will never surrender, and we will always defend and protect the United States of America.”
Around him were a couple hundred shoppers, some with only credit cards, trying to stock up during a statewide emergency. The power had been going on and off in this Austin suburb as cold weather overwhelmed the Texas grid. But no one told shoppers to put their items back if they couldn’t pay cash.
When Hennessy got to the cashier, he said, she just waved him on, thanked him and told him to drive home safely.
“And it hit us — like, wow, they’re just letting us walk out the door,” the 60-year-old man recounted. Ahead of him, shoppers were pushing carts piled high with diapers, milk, jumbo boxes of crackers — all free. He began to tear up.
The two men came from extremely modest means, one even more than the other. Primarily because each understood the rare power of self-education and the gift of books, both went on to have lives of remarkable celebrity, accomplishing extraordinary things for our nation.
One was born in a humble one-room cabin in Kentucky. The other was born into slavery in Maryland. In time, they became two of America’s greatest, most consequential leaders during our nation’s most trying time. //
As Douglass recounts in his final autobiography, “The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, From 1817 to 1882,” the pair met again at the White House a year later:
What he said on this day showed a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had even seen before in anything spoken or written by him. I listened with the deepest interest and profoundest satisfaction, and at his suggestion, agreed to undertake the organizing a band of scouts, composed of coloured men, whose business should be somewhat after the original plan of John Brown, to go into the rebel States, beyond the lines of our armies, and carry the news of emancipation, and urge the slaves to come within our boundaries.
This plan, Douglass explained, was finally unnecessary because of the ultimate emancipation of the slaves. But, he adds, “I refer to this conversation because I think it is evidence conclusive on Mr. Lincoln’s part that the proclamation, so far as least as he was concerned, was not effected merely as a ‘necessity’” but as a moral duty. //
In 1865, Douglass traveled to Washington D.C. to hear the president give his second inaugural address. He also accepted President Lincoln’s kind invitation to visit him and his family at the White House, //
Recognising me, even before I reached him, he exclaimed, so that all around could hear him, ‘Here comes my friend Douglass.’ Taking me by the hand, he said, ‘I am glad to see you. I saw you in the crowd to-day, listening to my inaugural address; how did you like it?’
I said, ‘Mr. Lincoln, I must not detain you with my poor opinion, when there are thousands waiting to shake hands with you.’
‘No, no,’ he said, ‘you must stop a little, Douglass; there is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours. I want to know what you think of it?’
I replied, ‘Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort.’
‘I am glad you liked it!’ he said, and I passed on, feeling that any man, however distinguished, might well regard himself honoured by such expressions, from such a man. //
Douglass wanted the Ages to know and remember that the Freedman’s Monument — funded primarily by the sweat of emancipated slaves — was a humble and essential gift to the memory of his friend lost to an assassin’s bullet. That “pure act of malice” had “done good after all.”
For that dark murder “filled the country with a deeper abhorrence of slavery and a deeper love for the great liberator.” As he closed, the ex-slave said, “No man who knew Abraham Lincoln could hate him.”
11th Hour
@11thHour
'America is back': Biden ends 'America first' Trump agenda.
Learn more: http://on.msnbc.com/39MVaBp
“We will repair our alliances and engage with the world once again, not to meet yesterday’s challenges, but today’s and tomorrow’s,” Biden said during an address at the State Department that attempted to turn the page on isolationism [America first] and restore diplomacy [globalism] as the tool of choice. [Wait — who’s the “tool”?]
“America is back. Diplomacy is back,” Biden said... //
New York Post
@nypost
Pompeo slams Biden over 'America is back' foreign policy shift https://trib.al/BndGb6r
During an appearance on “Fox New Primetime,” Pompeo shared those thoughts with host Trey Gowdy.
“Does he mean back to when ISIS controlled a caliphate in Syria that was the size of Britain? I hope not. President Trump and our team took that down.”
[Pompeo drops mic, walks off stage.] //
“When he says “back,” when America is back, does he mean back to letting China walk all over us, destroying millions of jobs in places like Kansas and South Carolina, that we know so well? I hope that’s not what he means by back.
“He talked about allies, when he said go back, does he mean back to dissing allies and friends like Israel and treating the terrorists in Iran like friends by giving them $150 billion in pallets of cash?
“I don’t think the American people can afford to go back to eight more years of Barack Obama’s foreign policy. I hope they’ll move forward with a foreign policy look much more like our ‘America First’ foreign policy.
A new CBS News poll reveals that a majority of Americans believe the biggest threat to the American way of life is other Americans. More than two-thirds of poll respondents said they believe democracy in the U.S. is “threatened,” and 54% said “other people in America” are the “biggest threat to the American way of life,” more so than economic factors, viruses, natural disasters, or foreign actors. //
What does this all add up to? Simple. We have two groups that hate America and Americans. These groups overlap a bit. They are the hardcore Leftists and the self-described, Elites. The Elites are comprised of garden variety Leftists, but also include RINO politicians and pundits. Think Hunger Games.
These two groups have grown so strong, they have made it virtually impossible to compromise with them. Meeting them in the middle has become akin to a situation where a mugger comes up, threatens to kill you, rape your wife, and take all your money. You hope that a compromise might be that he takes your money, kills you, and lets your wife go. Really?
There really are two Americas, three if you count the Elites and the Leftists as two groups. Make no mistake about it. The Elites and the Leftists do indeed pose a huge danger to America. And make no mistake about it. It’s not just President Trump they hate. They hate us. Mr. Utter has written an excellent article. Please take the time to look it over. The only beef I have is that we really don’t need a poll to realize at this point, We have met the enemy and he is us.
However, the answer to the “greatest threat” question has changed. No longer am I looking at maps or reading international news to determine the who’s who of international threats. Instead, I have been watching domestic news, following social media, and watching as the rights and privileges guaranteed by the Constitution are eroded by a much more dangerous group: Corporate Fascists.
Of course, Constitutional rights apply to the prohibition of the action of Government to curtail or eliminate those rights. Companies and corporations, essentially, are entitled to any and all prohibitions they so desire, including limitations on free speech, the prohibition of 2nd Amendment rights, and the unfettered ability to spy on your life absent your knowledge or any warrant. The information they gather about you and your life is for sale to the highest bidder, including foreign enemies. They can decide to have two competing standards for two groups of people, regardless of how discriminatory it may be.
If Democrats want to impeach someone for inciting insurrection, they could start with Harriet Tubman. She was one of the major planners of the attempt to take over and occupy the United States arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1859. Seventeen people were killed in that action. The leader, John Brown, was charged with treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, murder, and inciting insurrection. He and six others were convicted and executed for their roles in the attack. Had she not fallen ill shortly before the attack, Harriet Tubman might well have been among those captured and executed.
President Donald Trump’s advisory 1776 Commission on Monday released a public report, fulfilling its task to revisit the nation’s founding history in an effort to reunite the Americans around its founders’ principles.
Over two centuries ago, on June 18, 1812, Jefferson Democrats declared war on Great Britain. At that time, Jefferson Democrats controlled 107 of 143 congressional seats, 26 of 34 senate seats and Thomas Jefferson’s hand pick successor, James Madison, was president. Meanwhile in the city of Baltimore a Federalist publisher named Alexander Contee Hanson lived. Hanson owned one of the most powerful Federalist newspapers in the entire nation, the Federal Republican. //
During the war of 1812, Federalists opposed the war as they believe it was manufactured by the Jefferson Democrats to further that party’s political interests. As soon as war started, Alexander Hanson used the Federal Republican to denounce Madison and the war. Within days, a mob of Jefferson Democrats destroyed the newspaper’s office including the printing press. //
No sooner had the citizens of Baltimore heard of Hanson’s return than they planned a second mob attack. This time, though, Hanson was not going down without a fight— he brought over seventy men into his office to assist him. Among the men defending Hanson were revolutionary leaders Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee, father of Robert E. Lee, and General James M. Lingan. //
Lee and Madison were classmates at Princeton. They had a long-standing friendship. Since Lee was one of the nation’s foremost military experts, Madison may have asked Lee to come out of retirement to assist in the defense of his country. Lee had provided Madison advice on how to prepare the country’s defenses. Because the mob, in its frenzy, sought to silence Hanson and publish his supporters, it may have altered the course of the War of 1812. If, for example, Madison had the experience of Lee by his side, the British would never have captured and burned Washington, D.C.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo wrote on Twitter that in the upcoming days, he would give the complete account of their foreign policy as his New Year Resolution, adding that it could not be found anywhere else.
“America is a force for good—an exceptional nation like none other in history. First country ever to recognize that every human being has God-given rights. Truly a shining city on a hill,” Pompeo wrote.
Pompeo started the series of tweets by stating that now the country is a lot safer than before the current administration took office.
He also criticized the 1619 project—a New York Times narrative that claims that the basis of the United States’ founding was slavery, rather than the Declaration of Independence—as false and an attempt to smear the vision of a noble founding of America.
The world the pilgrims made is a testament to their resolve and daring, without which this country and the people we love so much would not exist.