A man is lying in bed in a Catholic hospital with an oxygen mask over his mouth. A young auxiliary nurse appears to sponge
his face and hands.
"Nurse," he mumbles from behind the mask, "Are my testicles black?"
Embarrassed, the young nurse replies, "I don't know, I'm only here to wash your face and hands."
He struggles again to ask, "Nurse, Are my testicles black?" Again the nurse replies, "I can't tell. I'm only here to wash
your face and hands."
The ward sister was passing and saw the man getting a little distraught so marched over to inquire what was wrong.
"Sister," he mumbled, "Are my testicles black?"
Being a nurse of longstanding, the sister was undaunted. She whipped back the bedclothes, pulled down his pajama trousers,
moved his penis out of the way, had a right good look, pulled up the pyjamas, replaced the bedclothes and announced,
"Nothing wrong with them!"
At this the man pulled off his oxygen mask and asked again, "Are my test results back?"
*.*
25 Smart Synonyms You Should Be Using
The word thesaurus literally means "repository" or "storehouse," and it ultimately comes from the same root as the word
treasure. There's certainly some treasure to be unearthed in one, so in honor of Thesaurus Day, here are 25 smart-sounding
synonyms to reboot your vocabulary.
1. INSTEAD OF "PAUNCHY," TRY USING "ABDOMINOUS."
Derived from the same root as abdomen, if you're abdominous then you have a paunchy stomach, or a large, protruding belly.
2. INSTEAD OF "BAD LANGUAGE," TRY USING "BILLINGSGATE."
Billingsgate was a famous fish market in central London. Thanks to the foul language of the people who worked there, the
name eventually became synonymous with all coarse or abusive language.
3. INSTEAD OF "BAD IDEA," TRY USING "CACOETHES."
Derived from the Greek "bad character," a cacoethes (that's "ka-ko-EE-theez”) is an insatiable desire to do something
inadvisable.
4. INSTEAD OF "SKILLFUL," TRY USING "DAEDAL."
Daedalus was the architect who built the Labyrinth in the ancient myth of the Minotaur, and, derived from his name,
someone who is daedal is especially skilled or artful.
5. INSTEAD OF "CONFUSE," TRY USING "EMBRANGLE."
A brangle is a squabble or a noisy argument, while to embrangle someone is to throw them into a quandary or to utterly
perplex them. An embranglement, likewise, is a tricky, confusing situation.
6. INSTEAD OF "FEVERISH," TRY USING "FEBRILE."
If you've come down with the flu you might be feeling febrile, or feverish. It might only be a febricula (that's a light
or passing fever), but nevertheless, you might need a febrifuge (a drug that lowers your temperature).
7. INSTEAD OF "SLIPPERY," TRY USING "GLIDDERY."
If something glidders, it freezes over, which makes something gliddery very slippery, as if covered in ice.
8. INSTEAD OF "GOOSE BUMPS," TRY USING "HORRIPILATION."
That's the medical name for this curious phenomenon, which is also called gooseflesh, henflesh, or goose-pimpling.
9. INSTEAD OF "APPROPRIATE," TRY USING "IDONEOUS."
It's a little on the old-fashioned side, but idoneous, derived from the Latin word idoneus, makes a perfectly, well,
appropriate replacement for words like proper, fit, and suitable.
10. INSTEAD OF "BOASTING," TRY USING "JACTANCE."
Derived from a Latin word meaning "to boast" or "speak out," jactance or jactancy is vainglorious boasting.
11. INSTEAD OF "RECOGNIZABLE," TRY USING "KENSPECKLE."
A word from Scots dialect but with its roots in Scandinavia, kenspeck or kenspeckle means "easily recognizable" or
"conspicuous."
12. INSTEAD OF "INDIFFERENT," TRY USING "LAODICEAN."
Laodicea was a city in ancient Asia Minor. According to the biblical Book of Revelation, the people of Laodicea were known
for their religious apathy, their fair-weather faith, and their lukewarm interest in the church—all of which prompted a
pretty stern letter from St. John. As a result, a Laodicean is an apathetic, indifferent, or unconcerned person when it
comes to religion.
13. INSTEAD OF "SMELLY," TRY USING "MEPHITIC."
A mephitis is a noxious, foul-smelling fume emanating from inside the earth, and anything that smells as bad as that is
mephitic. Case in point, skunks were known as "mephitic weasels" is the 19th century.
14. INSTEAD OF "MISER," TRY USING "NIPCHEESE."
As well as being another name for a ship's purser (the steward in charge of the ship's accounts), a nipcheese is a mean,
penny-pinching person. Feel free to also call your most miserly friend a nip-farthing, a shut-purse, a pinch-plum, or a
sharp-nose.
15. INSTEAD OF "BEND," TRY USING "OBLIQUATE."
Derived from the same root as the word oblique, if something obliquates then it turns or bends to one side.
16. INSTEAD OF "CONCISE," TRY USING "PAUCILOQUENT."
Ironically, the thesaurus is full of weird and wonderful words for people who don't say very much. As well as
pauciloquent, people who like to keep things brief can be laconic, synoptic, or breviloquent.
17. INSTEAD OF "QUINTESSENCE," TRY USING "QUIDDITY."
Quintessence is already a fairly smart-sounding word, but you can up the stakes with quiddity: Derived from a Latin word
meaning "who," the quiddity of something is the very essence or nature of something, or a distinctive feature or
characteristic.
18. INSTEAD OF "CHEERFUL," TRY USING "RIANT."
Derived via French from the Latin word for "laugh," if you're riant then you're cheerful or mirthful. A riant landscape or
image, likewise, is one that makes you happy or is pleasurable to look at.
19. INSTEAD OF "TWITCHY," TRY USING "SACCADIC."
A saccade is an involuntary twitch or movement of the eye—and, figuratively, that makes someone who is saccadic
characteristically fidgety, twitchy, or restless.
20. INSTEAD OF "EQUIVOCATE," TRY USING "TERGIVERSATE."
To tergiversate literally means "to turn your back on" something, but more loosely, it means to dodge a question or issue,
or to avoid a straightforward explanation.
21. INSTEAD OF "HOWL," TRY USING "ULULATE."
Probably originally meant to be onomatopoeic, ululation is a howling sound like that made by wolves. More figuratively, to
ululate can be used to mean "to bewail" or "lament."
22. INSTEAD OF "PREDICT," TRY USING "VATICINATE."
Derived from the Latin word for a soothsayer or seer, to vaticinate is to prophesize or predict something.
23. INSTEAD OF "UNLUCKY," TRY USING "WANCHANCY."
Wanchance is an old Scots dialect word for misfortune. Derived from that, the adjective wanchancy has fallen into more
widespread use to mean "unlucky," "ill-fated," or in some contexts, "uncanny" or "eerily coincidental."
24. INSTEAD OF "LAST NIGHT," TRY USING "YESTERNIGHT."
There are more yester– words in the dictionary than just yesterday. As well as yesternight, there's yesterweek, yestereve,
and yestermorn.
25. INSTEAD OF "CRITICISM," TRY USING "ZOILISM."
Zoilus was one of the harshest critics of the ancient Greek writer Homer, and he was known for his scathing, nit-picking
attacks on Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Derived from him, a zoilist is an overbearingly harsh critic, while unduly harsh
criticism is zoilism.
*.*
Living on the moon would be fun.
But it would sure suck having to walk a mile every time you missed a Frisbee.
*.*
THE PENTAGON — Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has vowed to kill the next person who refers to him by the nickname of “Mad Dog,” sources confirmed today.
After the secretary’s press officer briefed him on the latest news outlet to refer to him by the nickname — which he claims a reporter just made up years ago — he asked for the name of the next “son of a bitch” who utters it so that he can be disemboweled with his favorite E-tool, defense officials said.
“Mad Dog? I hate that name. I hate it. You hear?” Mattis said, according to a source briefed on the conversation. “Nobody calls me ‘Mad Dog,’ especially not some duded-up, egg-suckin’ gutter trash.”
A senior defense official told reporters that Mattis should be referred to as Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, or by his radio callsign “Chaos,” an acronym that was bestowed on him by his fellow officers in the 7th Marine Regiment that means “Colonel Has Another Outstanding Solution.”
The official added that Mattis could also be referred to as The Death Star.
*.*
Who says building a border wall won't work?
The Chinese built one over 2,000 years ago and they still don't have any Mexicans.
Issue of the Times;
What I Learned at “Racial Justice” Re-indoctrination Camp by Thomas DiLorenzo
Several months ago the president of Loyola University Maryland, Brian Linnane, announced to the faculty that he had been thinking a lot about the Baltimore riots that took place two years earlier. (The riots, you may recall, were a response to the death of a local black drug gangster while in a police van after he had been arrested. All of the police involved, most of whom were black, were eventually acquitted at trial. The rioters looted the CVS pharmacies in town, emptying them of oxycodone and other painkillers, then burned them to the ground along with police cars, private homes, and public buildings. The former mayor of Baltimore publicly referred to the rioters as “our children” and instructed the police to stand down and “give them their space” to loot, vandalize, and burn down parts of her city).
In response to all of this the college president decided that what is needed to reduce the likelihood of such events in the future is to put the affluent, mostly white, Loyola University Maryland faculty through a round of cultural Marxist “racial justice” training. Such language reminded me of Chinese and Vietnamese communist “re-indoctrination camps” where attendees were pressured/coerced into becoming good little obedient communists. So, naturally, I had to attend to see what it was all about.
What I learned is that all the problems of the 65 percent black population in Baltimore city (one of the highest murder rates in the world, poverty, horrible government schools, criminal gangs randomly attacking tourists at the Inner Harbor, street crime run amok, “no-go zones” where even the police won’t go for fear of being shot at, etc.) are caused by “white privilege.” The lowliest, indigent, white redneck who lives in a rusted-out old school bus down by the river in Tennessee is “privileged,” by definition, whereas the children of multimillionaire Barack Obama or multimillionaire Tiger Woods are not privileged. In fact, since they are black they are, by definition, “oppressed” by the white redneck who lives in the rusted-out old school bus down by the river.
A close second in terms of the causes of Baltimore’s problems, I learned, was the bigotry of white men who died fifty years ago or longer. We were shown parts of a video documentary about “the history of racism” up to the 1950s and were told that little or no progress has been made in Baltimore’s black community because of this permanently-debilitating history. This is why “things never seem to change in the city,” I was told by one of the presenters. No mention was made of the fact that, just a few miles down the road in Columbia, Maryland one will find some of the most affluent black professionals in the world who share this same history. What they don’t share is being ruled by the extreme leftist Baltimore city government for the past half century with their corrupt police and courts that refuse to imprison violent criminals, their extortionate taxes, lavish welfare handouts, and a completely dysfunctional school system ruined by teachers’ unions.
I also learned that only white people can be racists or commit racist acts. This is because the cultural Marxists have redefined racism to mean an act of discrimination plus “power,” and only white heterosexual males can wield this “power.” Several of my faculty colleagues sheepishly questioned this obviously bogus idea, based on their life experiences, but got no response from the presenters.
I asked the presenters the following hypothetical: If the Congressional Black Caucus got a law passed that funded “minority scholarships” for black students and advertised that white people need not apply (we do have such programs), would that be discriminatory? I did not get a yes or no answer, but another mini lecture about white privilege.
Of course, only a moron would believe that only white people can be racists. All the “racial justice” presenters would have to do to learn this would be to listen to some of the harsh racist language on several of the black-owned radio stations in Maryland. That does not fit with the virtual reality they have invented for themselves, so there is no chance of that happening.
Although the supposed purpose of all of this was to address the root causes of the problems of crime, poverty, and lack of education that plague Baltimore, the work ethic-destroying and family-destroying effects of the welfare state were studiously ignored and not mentioned at all as possible problems. Nor was the awful, corrupt, teachers’ union-controlled government school monopoly, the extortionate property taxes that have driven tens of thousands from the city, the squalor and crime in the government housing projects, all the crime caused by the government’s war on drugs, and myriad other government policies and interventions that have been shown by social scientists for decades to be the real causes of “urban decay” (See Losing Ground by Charles Murray).
In fact, the seminar ended with a power point presentation that recommended that what “people of color” really need is “more resources,” which is the usual leftist code language for more welfare, more money down the rat hole of the government school monopoly, more taxes, and more bureaucracy. This is always espoused as though it is a brand new idea that has never been tried before. This of course is the point of white privilege seminars – to censor out all discussion of how “the legacy of liberalism and interventionism” is the real problem with cities like Baltimore, not the legacy of slavery and discrimination.
On the same day as the racial justice seminar the front page of the Baltimore Sun and the chatter on local talk radio included a discussion of how, on Halloween night, a gang of inner-city “youth” armed with baseball bats and wooden planks went around the city bludgeoning people and stealing their wallets and cellphones. This was two weeks after a family of ten tourists from New Jersey was attacked at the Inner Harbor by a gang of “youths” who punched every one of them in the face, including the 80-year-old grandmother, knocked them to the ground, kicked them, robbed them, and then disappeared. Now that I have been re-educated I understand that this was merely the latest manifestation of white privilege in Baltimore.
Quote of the Times;
Boredom is where all evils enter the world. And when a person is bored, he is bored with himself. Interesting people, in their daily lives, are never bored as they find everything interesting.
Link of the Times;
https://www.dangerous.com/40315/iphone-heath-app-showed-strenuous-activity-migrant-raped-murdered-german-girl/
Learned?
Until?
There once was a religious young woman who went to confession. Upon entering the confessional, she said, "Forgive me,
Father, for I have sinned."
The priest said, "Confess your sins and be forgiven."
The young woman said, "Last night my boyfriend made mad passionate love to me seven times."
The priest thought long and hard and then said, "Squeeze seven lemons into a glass and then drink the juice."
The young woman asked, "Will this cleanse me of my sins?"
The priest said, “No, but it will wipe that smile off of your face."
*.*
I asked a Chinese girl for her number.
She said, "Sex! Sex! Sex! Free sex tonight!"
I said, "Wow!"
Then her friend said, "She means 666-3629."
*.*
Recently, a large corporation hired several cannibals to increase their diversity. "You are all part of our team now,"
said the Human Resources rep during the welcoming briefing. "You get all the usual benefits and you can go to the
cafeteria for something to eat, but please don't eat any employees." The cannibals promised they would not. Four weeks
later their boss remarked, "You're all working very hard and I'm satisfied with your work. We have noticed a marked
increase in the whole company's performance. However, one of our secretaries has disappeared. Do any of you know what
happened to her?" The cannibals all shook their heads, "No." After the boss had left, the leader of the cannibals said to
the others, "Which one of you idiots ate the secretary?" A hand rose hesitantly. "You fool!" the leader continued, "For
four weeks we've been eating managers and no one noticed anything. But no, you had to go and eat someone who actually does
something."
*.*
A Mexican magician says he will disappear on the count of three.
He says, 'uno, dos...' and poof.
He disappears without a tres."
*.*
What's red and bad for your teeth?
A brick.
Issue of the Times;
Progressive Will Not Stop Until Civilization is Completely Destroyed by Louis Stuart
A great deal of people have often commented here asking: “Where does it stop?” In everything from the efforts to stigmatize normal flirting (while ignoring rape from “migrants”) to criminalizing the failure to celebrate transgenderism, so many people wonder where does it end. When will this insanity finally run its course? The answer is…
Never.
Modern “progressives,” as the way they style themselves suggests, are obsessed with everything they see as being “new.” As Thomas Sowell said over 20 years ago, it’s vital to their self-image that they differentiate themselves from the rest of the public, which they view as being hopelessly backward and morally inferior to themselves. Yet, it’s actually in this instinct that they reveal themselves as not being “new” at all. The “social justice” peacock of today is nothing more than the latest version of an old zealot that stretches back to Ancient Egypt. This zealot is the revolutionary in the service of the “Year Zero” cause.
What is Year Zero?
The term itself originates from Pol Pot. He borrowed it from the French, who in their revolution declared that the execution of Louis XVI was the event that began Year One on the new, revolutionary calendar. All events prior to that date were irrelevant, not worth preserving, and were to be erased from memory, along with everyone who defended them, or who were merely insufficiently enthusiastic for the new era.
The remains of dead royals were destroyed, the churches were closed and desecrated (which included throwing what was said to be the Crown of Thorns into the gutter), and any defenders of the old order (or simply those suspected of it or connected to it in passing) were sent to the guillotine.
The impetus of a Year Zero revolution is to raze the existing culture to the ground and build a new one from scratch. Any connection to the past, whether in the form of art, law, or people, needs to be erased. Pol Pot was perhaps the most extreme in this. Seemingly anyone at any time was prone to being killed. Even those who wore glasses were in danger of being seen as intellectuals and thus an obstacle to the implementation of Pol Pot’s agrarian socialist paradise. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge killed more people in their country per capita than anyone else.
A Year Zero regime is the fullest measure of totalitarianism. Not even language itself is immune. The use of Orwellian terms has often been mocked, but the art form goes way back. The pioneer of Newspeak was the Pharaoh Akhenaten, who sought to overthrow the ancient religious order in Egypt and replace the familiar gods with his one god, the Aten. Akhenaten closed down the temples and prohibited the worship of the old gods, but this was only the start. Akhenaten of course erased the names of the old gods, but he even went so far as to cross out the plural “gods” on inscriptions all over Egypt. Prominent people would change their own names, usually to reflect solar deities (say, from something like “Wenamon” to “Wenare”) to either incur his favor or avoid his displeasure.
Not even the age-old beliefs in the afterlife were immune from the revolution, as the famous death prayers were no longer addressed to lord of the dead, Osiris, but to Akhenaten. A depiction has even been found of the Aten defeating the gods of the underworld. This would have been a stunning and dismaying piece of propaganda for an ancient Egyptian, who would have always been concerned about his eternal life. This was a culture that, more than any other, created entire industries to ensure that people would be able to have a comfortable afterlife.
It’s often been said that Communist propaganda was designed to be as demoralizing as possible. The architecture in Soviet-occupied Europe, for example, was stunningly ugly. This is certainly a tendency that’s been carried over into our own time, from the celebration of vulgar art, to the celebration of fatness, to the mandated use of “proper pronouns.” Yet, as we’ve seen, none of this is new. It’s an age-old technique to enforce submission to the revolution through compulsory amnesia. Nothing about the past can be looked on fondly or even spoken of at all.
And it’s certainly no coincidence that both ISIS and the “social justice” peacocks have a penchant for toppling statues. Both are driven by the same instinct in service of whatever their conception of utopia is.
What happens after the revolution?
Unfortunately for the Year Zero zealots, things never go the way they expect. They’re usually too busy accusing each other of anti-revolutionary sentiment in a bid for power, or focusing on nonsense. Prioritizing the personal behavior of the population and the imposition of a manufactured (and therefore ugly) culture makes for bad government.
People can only pay attention to one thing at a time, and failure to control your attention will lead you to make the wrong decisions in life. Akhenaten focused so greatly on his revolution that the Hittites sponsored the conquest of Egypt’s Asiatic vassals under his watch. The French Directorate was too busy replacing the calendar and accusing each other that they neglected to manage the wars that country got into as a result of the Revolution.
Into this vacuum of chaos usually steps some kind of strongman to lead the reaction against the revolutionaries and restore order. After the chaos of Akhenaten’s regime, a general named Horemheb eventually took control of the country, putting down the domestic disorder the revolution caused and restoring order, which included an ironic turn of the tables – he began the erasure of Akhenaten, his heirs, and his regime from memory.
This example would repeat throughout the centuries. Into the disorder after Oliver Cromwell died stepped General George Monck and a restored monarchy in Charles II, who purged Cromwell’s cronies and destroyed radical factions like the Fifth Monarchists. Theaters were reopened and other excesses of Cromwell’s regime reversed. The populace was overjoyed.
140 years later, Napoleon would lead an armed coup, overthrow the Directory, and end the reign of the Year Zero revolutionaries in France. Though he was no conservative by the standards of his time, Napoleon would go on to restore law and order, the church, the calendar, and other institutions the revolutionaries had sought to overthrow, becoming immensely popular.
These are only a few examples. Because the Year Zero revolutionaries bring such chaos and disorder, they demoralize and anger the population, and because they’re extremely violent, little options remain for the disaffected population but to rally to the support of these strongmen. They restore the old order, but certain liberties are often lost in the process. As leftists in our own culture grow more violent and brazen, we would be well served by remembering this pattern.
If the “social justice” peacocks think Donald Trump is some kind of strongman, they might surprise themselves at what comes next, should they continue to act so insufferably – and all evidence says they will.
Quote of the Times;
When starting a new hobby, activity, or even job, search “things I wish I knew before I started [x].” This can get you a ton helpful tips to boost you when starting off
Link of the Times;
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2018/01/canada-muslim-leader-bracing-for-the-hate-she-thinks-will-come-because-islamophobic-hate-crime-exposed-as-hoax
Father, for I have sinned."
The priest said, "Confess your sins and be forgiven."
The young woman said, "Last night my boyfriend made mad passionate love to me seven times."
The priest thought long and hard and then said, "Squeeze seven lemons into a glass and then drink the juice."
The young woman asked, "Will this cleanse me of my sins?"
The priest said, “No, but it will wipe that smile off of your face."
*.*
I asked a Chinese girl for her number.
She said, "Sex! Sex! Sex! Free sex tonight!"
I said, "Wow!"
Then her friend said, "She means 666-3629."
*.*
Recently, a large corporation hired several cannibals to increase their diversity. "You are all part of our team now,"
said the Human Resources rep during the welcoming briefing. "You get all the usual benefits and you can go to the
cafeteria for something to eat, but please don't eat any employees." The cannibals promised they would not. Four weeks
later their boss remarked, "You're all working very hard and I'm satisfied with your work. We have noticed a marked
increase in the whole company's performance. However, one of our secretaries has disappeared. Do any of you know what
happened to her?" The cannibals all shook their heads, "No." After the boss had left, the leader of the cannibals said to
the others, "Which one of you idiots ate the secretary?" A hand rose hesitantly. "You fool!" the leader continued, "For
four weeks we've been eating managers and no one noticed anything. But no, you had to go and eat someone who actually does
something."
*.*
A Mexican magician says he will disappear on the count of three.
He says, 'uno, dos...' and poof.
He disappears without a tres."
*.*
What's red and bad for your teeth?
A brick.
Issue of the Times;
Progressive Will Not Stop Until Civilization is Completely Destroyed by Louis Stuart
A great deal of people have often commented here asking: “Where does it stop?” In everything from the efforts to stigmatize normal flirting (while ignoring rape from “migrants”) to criminalizing the failure to celebrate transgenderism, so many people wonder where does it end. When will this insanity finally run its course? The answer is…
Never.
Modern “progressives,” as the way they style themselves suggests, are obsessed with everything they see as being “new.” As Thomas Sowell said over 20 years ago, it’s vital to their self-image that they differentiate themselves from the rest of the public, which they view as being hopelessly backward and morally inferior to themselves. Yet, it’s actually in this instinct that they reveal themselves as not being “new” at all. The “social justice” peacock of today is nothing more than the latest version of an old zealot that stretches back to Ancient Egypt. This zealot is the revolutionary in the service of the “Year Zero” cause.
What is Year Zero?
The term itself originates from Pol Pot. He borrowed it from the French, who in their revolution declared that the execution of Louis XVI was the event that began Year One on the new, revolutionary calendar. All events prior to that date were irrelevant, not worth preserving, and were to be erased from memory, along with everyone who defended them, or who were merely insufficiently enthusiastic for the new era.
The remains of dead royals were destroyed, the churches were closed and desecrated (which included throwing what was said to be the Crown of Thorns into the gutter), and any defenders of the old order (or simply those suspected of it or connected to it in passing) were sent to the guillotine.
The impetus of a Year Zero revolution is to raze the existing culture to the ground and build a new one from scratch. Any connection to the past, whether in the form of art, law, or people, needs to be erased. Pol Pot was perhaps the most extreme in this. Seemingly anyone at any time was prone to being killed. Even those who wore glasses were in danger of being seen as intellectuals and thus an obstacle to the implementation of Pol Pot’s agrarian socialist paradise. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge killed more people in their country per capita than anyone else.
A Year Zero regime is the fullest measure of totalitarianism. Not even language itself is immune. The use of Orwellian terms has often been mocked, but the art form goes way back. The pioneer of Newspeak was the Pharaoh Akhenaten, who sought to overthrow the ancient religious order in Egypt and replace the familiar gods with his one god, the Aten. Akhenaten closed down the temples and prohibited the worship of the old gods, but this was only the start. Akhenaten of course erased the names of the old gods, but he even went so far as to cross out the plural “gods” on inscriptions all over Egypt. Prominent people would change their own names, usually to reflect solar deities (say, from something like “Wenamon” to “Wenare”) to either incur his favor or avoid his displeasure.
Not even the age-old beliefs in the afterlife were immune from the revolution, as the famous death prayers were no longer addressed to lord of the dead, Osiris, but to Akhenaten. A depiction has even been found of the Aten defeating the gods of the underworld. This would have been a stunning and dismaying piece of propaganda for an ancient Egyptian, who would have always been concerned about his eternal life. This was a culture that, more than any other, created entire industries to ensure that people would be able to have a comfortable afterlife.
It’s often been said that Communist propaganda was designed to be as demoralizing as possible. The architecture in Soviet-occupied Europe, for example, was stunningly ugly. This is certainly a tendency that’s been carried over into our own time, from the celebration of vulgar art, to the celebration of fatness, to the mandated use of “proper pronouns.” Yet, as we’ve seen, none of this is new. It’s an age-old technique to enforce submission to the revolution through compulsory amnesia. Nothing about the past can be looked on fondly or even spoken of at all.
And it’s certainly no coincidence that both ISIS and the “social justice” peacocks have a penchant for toppling statues. Both are driven by the same instinct in service of whatever their conception of utopia is.
What happens after the revolution?
Unfortunately for the Year Zero zealots, things never go the way they expect. They’re usually too busy accusing each other of anti-revolutionary sentiment in a bid for power, or focusing on nonsense. Prioritizing the personal behavior of the population and the imposition of a manufactured (and therefore ugly) culture makes for bad government.
People can only pay attention to one thing at a time, and failure to control your attention will lead you to make the wrong decisions in life. Akhenaten focused so greatly on his revolution that the Hittites sponsored the conquest of Egypt’s Asiatic vassals under his watch. The French Directorate was too busy replacing the calendar and accusing each other that they neglected to manage the wars that country got into as a result of the Revolution.
Into this vacuum of chaos usually steps some kind of strongman to lead the reaction against the revolutionaries and restore order. After the chaos of Akhenaten’s regime, a general named Horemheb eventually took control of the country, putting down the domestic disorder the revolution caused and restoring order, which included an ironic turn of the tables – he began the erasure of Akhenaten, his heirs, and his regime from memory.
This example would repeat throughout the centuries. Into the disorder after Oliver Cromwell died stepped General George Monck and a restored monarchy in Charles II, who purged Cromwell’s cronies and destroyed radical factions like the Fifth Monarchists. Theaters were reopened and other excesses of Cromwell’s regime reversed. The populace was overjoyed.
140 years later, Napoleon would lead an armed coup, overthrow the Directory, and end the reign of the Year Zero revolutionaries in France. Though he was no conservative by the standards of his time, Napoleon would go on to restore law and order, the church, the calendar, and other institutions the revolutionaries had sought to overthrow, becoming immensely popular.
These are only a few examples. Because the Year Zero revolutionaries bring such chaos and disorder, they demoralize and anger the population, and because they’re extremely violent, little options remain for the disaffected population but to rally to the support of these strongmen. They restore the old order, but certain liberties are often lost in the process. As leftists in our own culture grow more violent and brazen, we would be well served by remembering this pattern.
If the “social justice” peacocks think Donald Trump is some kind of strongman, they might surprise themselves at what comes next, should they continue to act so insufferably – and all evidence says they will.
Quote of the Times;
When starting a new hobby, activity, or even job, search “things I wish I knew before I started [x].” This can get you a ton helpful tips to boost you when starting off
Link of the Times;
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2018/01/canada-muslim-leader-bracing-for-the-hate-she-thinks-will-come-because-islamophobic-hate-crime-exposed-as-hoax
Jedi?
My nine-year-old granddaughter addressed a letter to: God c/o Pearly Gates, Heaven.
It was returned.
Someone at the postal service had written across the envelope:
"Nobody at the post office is headed that way. Sorry!"
*.*
I think complete lack of patience should be a covered disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Then people like me wouldn't have to sit through all those annoying red traffic lights.
*.*
Q: What's the difference between a nine-month pregnant woman and a super-model?
A: Nothing (if the pregnant woman's husband knows what's good for him).
*.*
The dean and the coach struck a simple deal. Despite his abysmal grades, the all-star tackle could play in the big game if and only if he could learn and remember the formula for water before then. The coach and the chemistry teacher both worked with the gridiron star and were confident that he'd come through with flying colors.
On the morning of the game the dean came down to the locker where the tackle was suiting up. "Well?" said the dean. "What is the formula for water?"
Grinning broadly, and drawing confidence from the presence of his proud coach, the player said, "H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O."
*.*
I was reading an article the other day about how "political correctness" has infected the manufacturers of school text books in the United States. These publishers have to scrub their text so as to not offend anyone.
I'm not making this up.
For instance, these publishers can't even print the legendary "The Old Man and the Sea" by Ernest Hemingway.
"Old" is ageist.
"Man" is sexist.
"Sea" can't be used in case a student lives inland and doesn't grasp the concept of a large body of water.
Issue of the Times;
'Star Wars: The Last Jedi': The 5 Biggest Complaints From Fans by James Barrett
“Star Wars: The Last Jedi” has owned the box office in its first ten days in theaters, but it has already fallen far behind “The Force Awakens” in total revenues. While it has a surprisingly good 92% among critics on the Tomatometer, it’s getting bad reviews from fans, currently at just 52% on Rotten Tomatoes. I’ve seen the film twice. The first time with great anticipation; the second time with the faint hope that I’d be able to appreciate the movie more after having accepted its various shortcomings. Unfortunately, the second time I saw it, I felt even worse about it. When I went back and watched “Force Awakens,” the frustration with its sequel intensified. I’ve since gone on to read a bunch of fan reviews and found a lot of similar responses. Below's a discussion of what I found to be the five most consistent and significant complaints from fans about director Rian Johnson’s epic misfire.
1. Burns It All Down
As Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro highlights, it becomes clear by the end of “The Last Jedi” that Kylo Ren’s call to kill the past is actually the theme of the Disney sequels. Not only does the film literally endorse book-burning—the destruction of the collective wisdom of our forebears—it also methodically tears down and then needlessly murders the characters “Star Wars” fans love.
Han’s murder at the hands of his own son in “Force Awakens” is a meaningless sacrifice, serving no purpose in helping the Resistance and having no positive impact on his son, whom Solo clearly did a terrible job raising. Like Han, Luke has retreated from the world, allowing the boy he badly trained run rampant murdering millions while he sulks in self-pity and deconstructs the “hope” his character once embodied. His bizarre life on the island with the fish-nuns and the alien sea cows comes off as pathetic and cowardly, not the austere life of a monk trying to attain further spiritual enlightenment. In fact, Luke has gone apostate, so what exactly is he doing hanging around the books he eventually tries to burn, other than being a coward? When he fights Rey, he loses to a novice in a way that diminishes him.
Luke's final confrontation with Kylo Ren at first appears like true heroism, but Johnson burns that down too. We learn at the end of the showdown that Luke isn’t even there, only astrally projecting himself, thus facing no actual physical threat. Sure, Luke fades away at the end with a beautiful parallel to the powerful moment on Tatooine from Episode IV (still the best moment in the franchise), but that feels more like his fated time coming than having bravely sacrificed himself. Like Han, Luke’s portrayal (which Mark Hamill hated, by the way) feels mean-spirited, as if Disney wants to show its audience that these old, classic embodiments of heroism need to go the way of Old Ben.
2. Diminishes Old and New Characters
Not only are the old characters diminished—except perhaps for Leia (though her constant call for retreat isn't exactly inspiring)—the new additions are less likable by the end of “The Last Jedi.” Poe gets abused the worst in this film. For some reason, Johnson decided to portray Poe as an even more two-dimensional version of Maverick who’s every action in the film until the final retreat proves to be rash and counter-productive. Johnson also seems to go out of his way to repeatedly emasculate Poe: he gets slapped by Leia, looks physically and intellectually small next to Laura Dern’s Vice Admiral Holdo, and then gets knocked unconscious by the "woke" general after his pointless mutiny.
Finn is a flawed character from the start. We’re told that for most of his life he was trained to be a soldier, yet he is always in a state of panic in battle and seems to know surprisingly little about being a soldier. He delivers one of the worst lines in the new film when he declares that it was “worth it” to make the rich people feel some pain when he and Rose free the horse-like alien creatures. No, it isn’t “worth it.” The #Resistance might be destroyed, and Rey with it, if he and Rose don’t succeed. Petty schadenfreude has no place in Star Wars.
Despite attempting to build Snoke up as the unbeatable bad guy, the all-digital villain is killed off rather easily and before the audience is given any background whatsoever on him. His treatment in “Force Awakens” suggests he will be the Emperor that haunted all six of the first films, but with a simple click of a light saber, he’s out of the series.
Kylo Ren is the most interesting new character, but both “Force Awakens” and “The Last Jedi” do grave damage to him as the bad guy. In the first film, he’s bested by someone who’s never picked up a light saber before. It’s a terrific fight scene, for sure, but it undermines his threat. In the second film, he easily falls for Luke's delay tactic and thus is defeated again. The only time we see Darth Vader defeated in battle is in “Return of the Jedi”—and Luke has to nearly embrace the Dark Side to do it. Kylo Ren’s temper tantrums are also getting ridiculous. He can’t keep breaking his toys every time something goes wrong and still be respected by the audience.
Like Leia, Rey comes out of the second film okay. She is earnest, brave, and contains the “ray of hope” that her name is supposed to invoke. Building up to the revelation about her parents, however, feels like a cheap trick—though thematically it does work well with the democratization of the Force theme.
3. Breaks Cardinal Rule In Cinema
Director Rian Johnson breaks the most important rule in film: Never waste the viewers’ time. The unspoken agreement between an audience and a filmmaker is that every second of the film is there for a reason. “The Last Jedi” breaks this rule repeatedly by taking us on a number of missions that do not further the plot, and in so doing, undermine the sense of purpose in the plot and the audience’s trust in the lead characters’ judgment. Finn and Rose’s trip to the casino world (which is prequel-level silly) to get the “master code breaker”—whom they didn’t find, but did find sort of(?)—and their harrowing mission onto the command ship all ends up being pointless. So does Poe’s utterly unnecessary takeover of the Resistance ship. After being once again smacked down by Leia, Poe wakes up to learn in about 10 seconds what he should’ve been told by Holdo before the waste-of-time mutiny. The dominant motif of the film is "delay and retreat"; in many ways, the entire film feels like one big delay tactic.
4. Gets Political
This film feels political in a way that previous Star Wars films wisely avoid—and many fans have commented on this as one of the key distractions of the film. Many critics, on the other hand, clearly loved this aspect of it. The #Resistance is led entirely by women, who make a point of putting men in their place. Rey even bullies her elder and would-be father figure Luke, while he proves that he indeed is not a worthy mentor—except, in the film's worldview, that he’s willing to burn down the past, just like Kylo Ren. The burning down of the past, particularly ancient spiritual texts, feels a whole lot like a direct slap in the face of religious viewers. The pointless sequence on the silly Casino planet could’ve been written by someone from the Occupy movement, particularly the gross schadenfreude moment from Finn and Rose. Rey, who is the most likable of the new characters, is set up by the end of the second film to be the perfect millennial social justice warrior, who we’re told doesn’t need to learn anything from her elders or any old ancient books because she knows it all already.
5. Doesn't Understand Star Wars Humor
The opening sequence in which the daring and increasingly stupid Poe says he’ll “hold” for Commander Hux (played by chronic overactor Domhnal Gleeson) was jarring. I saw this movie twice with two totally different audiences, and each time there were uneasy laughs from fans. The reason is that the humor is simply not Star Wars humor, a comment that many fans made in their complaints. Same thing goes for Luke flippantly tossing the light saber over his shoulder, his "that is nowhere" line, and the insane sea cow scene where Luke glowers at Rey as he drinks his fresh-squeezed alien milk. Then there’s the fish-nuns, which were supposed to be comic relief at one point, but ended up spoiling the whole isolation feel of Luke’s monkish existence. Neither heavy sarcasm nor outright silliness work in this universe.
The Good
The movie is certainly not all bad. It is beautifully filmed. The action sequences are mostly terrific (except for the "gravity in space" bomb-dropping nonsense). The fight between the imperial guard and Rey and Kylo Ren is awesome. The connection between the two is also intriguing, and both actors probably have the capacity to carry the series. The balance of nostalgia and newness is difficult to manage. So far Disney has failed on the character and theme level, but has largely succeeded in the look and feel of the Star Wars universe, as well as the overall tone and pacing of the series. Has Disney left enough of the original spark to keep fans coming back? We'll see, but a lot of longtime fans, including this one, suspect that the studio has fully embraced Kylo Ren's mission to snuff it out.
Related:
'Star Wars: The Last Jedi': The Full Shapiro Review:
On Saturday night, I went with my wife and dad to see the new Star Wars film. I’ll save my general rating for the end of this review, but it’s very difficult to put an overall grade on such a chaotic film. There are great parts, there are terrible parts, and there’s a lot in between. The best way to break this thing down is to bifurcate between the good stuff and the bad stuff. So that’s what we’ll do.
1. The Force Awakens Apparently Never Happened. At the end of the last movie, you’ll recall, the Rebel Alliance blew up the Starkiller Base, devastating the First Order’s capacity to make war. Or not. It turns out that they’ve still got heavy advantages in weaponry, which they make obvious from the outset. It’s somewhat weird that the Republic was re-established and fell in less than 40 years thanks to weapons inferiority. I’m fine with pretending The Force Awakens didn’t happen — it essentially ruined my childhood by turning Han Solo into a loser absentee father — but it’s tough to dismiss the ending and just start as though the Rebel Alliance didn’t do a whit of damage to the First Order.
2. There Is No Gravity In Space. The opening sequence features bombers dropping explosives on a First Order dreadnought. It’s a cool scene. But the bombers literally drop explosives in space. That’s not a thing, guys.
3. Snoke Is A Throwaway. In the last film, JJ Abrams made a big deal out of this Snoke guy. Now, I’m not a fellow who spends a lot of time googling whether Snoke is actually Darth Plagueis or whether he’s Mace Windu. But if you’re going to build up a big baddie who has the power to seduce Kylo Ren to the Dark Side, completely override Rey’s force abilities, and threaten Luke, you’ve got to tell us who the heck he is. And then he’s dispatched in particularly easy fashion by Kylo Ren. It’s satisfying to see him go, but he can’t be that scary if Kylo Ren can take him out by activating a light saber.
4. Kylo Ren Isn’t Intimidating. This is the biggest problem. In TFA, JJ Abrams did Kylo Ren a tremendous injustice by making him a petulant man-child who is stymied by a Mary Sue. Remember, Darth Vader literally doesn’t lose a battle until Return of the Jedi — and even that’s after Luke nearly turns to the Dark Side. By castrating Kylo Ren in TFA, it makes it difficult to think of him as the ultimate bad guy in the universe. Snoke was supposed to fill that gap. Now Snoke is dead. Why, exactly, should the Rebel Alliance be worried? Rey has bested Kylo several times already, plus Leia apparently has Force abilities, plus General Hux isn’t exactly terrifying.
5. Rey’s Backstory Sucks. After the last film, there was an insane amount of buzz about who Rey was. Who were her parents? Was she Obi-Wan’s granddaughter? Did Luke have a kid he didn’t know about? Was she Han’s bastard? Then it turns out that she’s just a nobody. Now, some of this is George Lucas’ fault for his midi-chlorians nonsense in the prequels, which made coordination with the Force a sort of genetic inheritance. The series wanted to reset so that anybody could have abilities with the Force — a laudable goal. But by sucking Rey out of the family drama, we’re no longer dealing with the central storyline — a point Kylo Ren makes to Rey openly. I guess the idea is that we’re supposed to now think that small street urchins without any sort of bloodline can become incredible Jedi. That’s democratic, but it’s not true to the storyline, and it doesn’t provide any drama.
6. Luke’s Weird Farmer Life Is Weird. Did we really need a whole day of Luke going around milking an alien seacow and drinking it?
7. Luke Is A Bad Teacher. Luke says that he’s going to provide Rey three lessons. The lessons consist of him (1) telling her what the Force is (okay, we already knew that); (2) having her touch a rock and see the Dark Side (she’s drawn in by it but not seduced). There is no third lesson — that’s a lesson for Luke from Yoda, who makes an odd cameo to tell Luke that the Force doesn’t need old texts, so let’s burn us some antique books. Rey literally learns zero practical things from Luke. This isn’t Yoda teaching Luke on Dagoba. It’s just Luke moping.
8. Celebrity Cameos Make No Sense. Laura Dern with purple hair? Benicio Del Toro stuttering? What are these people doing here?
9. Poe Dameron’s Story Arc Is Foolish. Poe is supposed to be newfangled Han Solo. Fail. First off, there is no new Han Solo. Second, Poe is a dolt. And Admiral Laura Dern, working with Leia, has a plan they could easily just tell Poe and solve half the conflict of the plot. Why keep it secret from Poe? We never find out. Instead, Poe runs around like a moron, making stupid plans with Finn that have no actual effect on the plotline.
10. Finn’s Storyline Is Useless. Finn should have died at the end of TFA. He should have died at the end of The Last Jedi. Instead, he goes on a random jaunt to Monte Carlo with aliens, and then rides a bunch of camel/horse/kangeroos to freedom while street urchins cheer. It’s godawful. Then, finally, when he’s about to do something useful, Rose stops him from doing it. Why is he here again, except to have awkward hugs with Rey?
11. Rose Is Useless. Rose is added to the plot to give Finn someone to travel with and develop awkward romance with. But her presence is simply not useful. She doesn’t do anything particularly special. She does give Finn a lecture about income inequality, though. So I guess that’s something.
12. Social Justice Warrioring On Interplanetary Monte Carlo Is Awful. Awful. In this little jaunt, we learn that income inequality is bad (see, street urchins are riding the magic horsecamels, and that’s terrible!), that animal abuse is bad (see, the ugly alien is abusing the magic horsecamels and that’s terrible!), and that weapons dealing is bad (yeah, talk to the Rebel Alliance using all those X-Wings). This whole sequence never should have happened.
13. Captain Phasma Is A Nothing. She’s apparently a white woman who wears a cool suit, and then Finn — a dude who five seconds ago was a janitor — beats her. Welp.
14. Luke Shouldn’t Have Been A Hologram. Turning Luke into Obi-Wan Kenobe for purposes of the reset makes some sense. But his death made none. Why is it cool for Luke to survive a barrage from AT-ATs if he’s not even there? Why is it cool for Luke to best Kylo Ren in a light saber battle if (1) Rey has already done so, and (2) Luke isn’t even there? They easily could have brought Luke there, and had him do exactly the same thing, but sacrifice himself — or perhaps just fade away in front of Kylo Ren.
15. The Powers Of The Force Aren’t Magic. We learn that through the Force, you can now hologram yourself places, and that you can also survive being thrown into space (Leia). Wut?
16. Light Speed Can't Be Used As A Weapon. You can't destroy ships by flying at them at light speed. If you could, the entire first scene would have been unnecessary (forget the bombers, just shoot an X-wing through that dreadnought), and the Rebel Alliance could have taken down every Death Star ever in the same way.
17. Why Would Luke Try To Kill Kylo? He tried to save Vader after Vader destroyed a planet and cut off his hand. He sensed good in him. He senses evil in Kylo and for a moment wants to kill him? That seems like a mild stretch at best.
18. There Are No Interesting Characters Left Except For Kylo Ren. So, now everybody’s dead. Han’s dead. Luke is dead. Leia was never that interesting, but Carrie Fisher died, so Leia can’t stick around for long. That means we’re left with the new characters — which is the point, since Star Wars can’t survive on nostalgia forever. But Rey isn’t particularly interesting — they just gave her a crappy backstory — and Poe is apparently stupid. Finn is a nonentity and nobody cares about Rose. This leaves Kylo Ren as the only interesting character in the Star Wars universe, and unlike Vader, who was wildly intimidating because of his mystery, it’s incredibly unclear that Kylo Ren can carry this series on his shoulders. It’s also unclear why Kylo Ren would want to rule the galaxy at this point. Everybody’s dead, he’s gotten his revenge on everybody except Leia (who he didn’t want to kill), and he seems to have little idea how to govern except for Hulk Smash.
19. Kylo Should Have Sided With Rey. This is the biggest problem of all. Once Kylo and Rey team up, they should stay teamed up. Rey is a far cooler character as a moderating influence on Kylo than on her own. And Kylo is far more interesting as a character trying to hold his darkness in check than as a guy who gives into it. There’s also no hint that Kylo has some desperate need to rule the universe, so it’s odd that he gives up the possibilities of a joint rule with Rey in order to destroy the transports. Why wouldn’t he just call off the attack on the transports and then work with Rey? That would be a radically different direction for the franchise. As it is, we’re back to Luke vs. Darth, that binary fight that was only interesting the first time around.
Okay, that’s a lot of criticism. But it’s not all bad.
Here’s what’s right with the film:
1. The Kylo/Rey Connection Works. The entire film is built on this relationship. It’s the only interesting thing remaining in this universe. The scenes in which Kylo is being called to the Light Side by Rey absolutely work. They’re great. The truth is that Star Wars was always built on relationships, and this is the only remaining interesting one. You believe it when Kylo turns against Snoke. That’s what makes for one of the best scenes in the Star Wars canon.
2. The Light Saber Battle. The killing of Snoke works emotionally, although as noted before, it makes little sense to kill Snoke before we learn anything about him. But the Rey/Kylo team-up is awesome — it brought open cheers in the theater. The choreography works, it’s emotionally resonant. It was a mistake to immediately jettison that for a forced conflict between Kylo and Rey.
3. Luke’s Final Scene. The mirror image of Luke looking off into the distance at the two suns of Tattooine is his death scene. It works, and it’s heartbreaking. If you grew up with Mark Hamill at 26 and now you’re watching him fade out at age 66, that’s pretty moving stuff. That’s why he should have gone out in a blaze of glory rather than with a cheap apparition trick.
Those big things that are right with the film are more important, in many ways, than the things that are wrong with the film. Rian Johnson, the director, didn’t play it safe, and that’s great. But he did play it safe by having Kylo return to the Dark Side and turning Rey into an avatar of populism. Those are mistakes that will haunt the franchise. And without Luke and Han and the nostalgia factor, can Star Wars carry forward with the same legacy, without just turning into another Avengers series — a fun watch that has no real emotional resonance?
Overall, better than The Force Awakens, which doesn’t hold up on repeat, and planted seeds that poisoned The Last Jedi, particularly with regard to Kylo Ren. Not as good as Rogue One, and below Return of the Jedi. It’s difficult to imagine how Episode IX can remain interesting with a universe this narrowed and a set of compelling characters reduced to a grand total of two: Kylo and Rey.
Quote of the Times;
Start leaving what you want to leave. Your future is waiting.
Link of the Times;
http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/06/13/tucker-carlson-jeff-sessions-hearing-donald-trump-russia-leaks-perverting-government
It was returned.
Someone at the postal service had written across the envelope:
"Nobody at the post office is headed that way. Sorry!"
*.*
I think complete lack of patience should be a covered disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Then people like me wouldn't have to sit through all those annoying red traffic lights.
*.*
Q: What's the difference between a nine-month pregnant woman and a super-model?
A: Nothing (if the pregnant woman's husband knows what's good for him).
*.*
The dean and the coach struck a simple deal. Despite his abysmal grades, the all-star tackle could play in the big game if and only if he could learn and remember the formula for water before then. The coach and the chemistry teacher both worked with the gridiron star and were confident that he'd come through with flying colors.
On the morning of the game the dean came down to the locker where the tackle was suiting up. "Well?" said the dean. "What is the formula for water?"
Grinning broadly, and drawing confidence from the presence of his proud coach, the player said, "H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O."
*.*
I was reading an article the other day about how "political correctness" has infected the manufacturers of school text books in the United States. These publishers have to scrub their text so as to not offend anyone.
I'm not making this up.
For instance, these publishers can't even print the legendary "The Old Man and the Sea" by Ernest Hemingway.
"Old" is ageist.
"Man" is sexist.
"Sea" can't be used in case a student lives inland and doesn't grasp the concept of a large body of water.
Issue of the Times;
'Star Wars: The Last Jedi': The 5 Biggest Complaints From Fans by James Barrett
“Star Wars: The Last Jedi” has owned the box office in its first ten days in theaters, but it has already fallen far behind “The Force Awakens” in total revenues. While it has a surprisingly good 92% among critics on the Tomatometer, it’s getting bad reviews from fans, currently at just 52% on Rotten Tomatoes. I’ve seen the film twice. The first time with great anticipation; the second time with the faint hope that I’d be able to appreciate the movie more after having accepted its various shortcomings. Unfortunately, the second time I saw it, I felt even worse about it. When I went back and watched “Force Awakens,” the frustration with its sequel intensified. I’ve since gone on to read a bunch of fan reviews and found a lot of similar responses. Below's a discussion of what I found to be the five most consistent and significant complaints from fans about director Rian Johnson’s epic misfire.
1. Burns It All Down
As Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro highlights, it becomes clear by the end of “The Last Jedi” that Kylo Ren’s call to kill the past is actually the theme of the Disney sequels. Not only does the film literally endorse book-burning—the destruction of the collective wisdom of our forebears—it also methodically tears down and then needlessly murders the characters “Star Wars” fans love.
Han’s murder at the hands of his own son in “Force Awakens” is a meaningless sacrifice, serving no purpose in helping the Resistance and having no positive impact on his son, whom Solo clearly did a terrible job raising. Like Han, Luke has retreated from the world, allowing the boy he badly trained run rampant murdering millions while he sulks in self-pity and deconstructs the “hope” his character once embodied. His bizarre life on the island with the fish-nuns and the alien sea cows comes off as pathetic and cowardly, not the austere life of a monk trying to attain further spiritual enlightenment. In fact, Luke has gone apostate, so what exactly is he doing hanging around the books he eventually tries to burn, other than being a coward? When he fights Rey, he loses to a novice in a way that diminishes him.
Luke's final confrontation with Kylo Ren at first appears like true heroism, but Johnson burns that down too. We learn at the end of the showdown that Luke isn’t even there, only astrally projecting himself, thus facing no actual physical threat. Sure, Luke fades away at the end with a beautiful parallel to the powerful moment on Tatooine from Episode IV (still the best moment in the franchise), but that feels more like his fated time coming than having bravely sacrificed himself. Like Han, Luke’s portrayal (which Mark Hamill hated, by the way) feels mean-spirited, as if Disney wants to show its audience that these old, classic embodiments of heroism need to go the way of Old Ben.
2. Diminishes Old and New Characters
Not only are the old characters diminished—except perhaps for Leia (though her constant call for retreat isn't exactly inspiring)—the new additions are less likable by the end of “The Last Jedi.” Poe gets abused the worst in this film. For some reason, Johnson decided to portray Poe as an even more two-dimensional version of Maverick who’s every action in the film until the final retreat proves to be rash and counter-productive. Johnson also seems to go out of his way to repeatedly emasculate Poe: he gets slapped by Leia, looks physically and intellectually small next to Laura Dern’s Vice Admiral Holdo, and then gets knocked unconscious by the "woke" general after his pointless mutiny.
Finn is a flawed character from the start. We’re told that for most of his life he was trained to be a soldier, yet he is always in a state of panic in battle and seems to know surprisingly little about being a soldier. He delivers one of the worst lines in the new film when he declares that it was “worth it” to make the rich people feel some pain when he and Rose free the horse-like alien creatures. No, it isn’t “worth it.” The #Resistance might be destroyed, and Rey with it, if he and Rose don’t succeed. Petty schadenfreude has no place in Star Wars.
Despite attempting to build Snoke up as the unbeatable bad guy, the all-digital villain is killed off rather easily and before the audience is given any background whatsoever on him. His treatment in “Force Awakens” suggests he will be the Emperor that haunted all six of the first films, but with a simple click of a light saber, he’s out of the series.
Kylo Ren is the most interesting new character, but both “Force Awakens” and “The Last Jedi” do grave damage to him as the bad guy. In the first film, he’s bested by someone who’s never picked up a light saber before. It’s a terrific fight scene, for sure, but it undermines his threat. In the second film, he easily falls for Luke's delay tactic and thus is defeated again. The only time we see Darth Vader defeated in battle is in “Return of the Jedi”—and Luke has to nearly embrace the Dark Side to do it. Kylo Ren’s temper tantrums are also getting ridiculous. He can’t keep breaking his toys every time something goes wrong and still be respected by the audience.
Like Leia, Rey comes out of the second film okay. She is earnest, brave, and contains the “ray of hope” that her name is supposed to invoke. Building up to the revelation about her parents, however, feels like a cheap trick—though thematically it does work well with the democratization of the Force theme.
3. Breaks Cardinal Rule In Cinema
Director Rian Johnson breaks the most important rule in film: Never waste the viewers’ time. The unspoken agreement between an audience and a filmmaker is that every second of the film is there for a reason. “The Last Jedi” breaks this rule repeatedly by taking us on a number of missions that do not further the plot, and in so doing, undermine the sense of purpose in the plot and the audience’s trust in the lead characters’ judgment. Finn and Rose’s trip to the casino world (which is prequel-level silly) to get the “master code breaker”—whom they didn’t find, but did find sort of(?)—and their harrowing mission onto the command ship all ends up being pointless. So does Poe’s utterly unnecessary takeover of the Resistance ship. After being once again smacked down by Leia, Poe wakes up to learn in about 10 seconds what he should’ve been told by Holdo before the waste-of-time mutiny. The dominant motif of the film is "delay and retreat"; in many ways, the entire film feels like one big delay tactic.
4. Gets Political
This film feels political in a way that previous Star Wars films wisely avoid—and many fans have commented on this as one of the key distractions of the film. Many critics, on the other hand, clearly loved this aspect of it. The #Resistance is led entirely by women, who make a point of putting men in their place. Rey even bullies her elder and would-be father figure Luke, while he proves that he indeed is not a worthy mentor—except, in the film's worldview, that he’s willing to burn down the past, just like Kylo Ren. The burning down of the past, particularly ancient spiritual texts, feels a whole lot like a direct slap in the face of religious viewers. The pointless sequence on the silly Casino planet could’ve been written by someone from the Occupy movement, particularly the gross schadenfreude moment from Finn and Rose. Rey, who is the most likable of the new characters, is set up by the end of the second film to be the perfect millennial social justice warrior, who we’re told doesn’t need to learn anything from her elders or any old ancient books because she knows it all already.
5. Doesn't Understand Star Wars Humor
The opening sequence in which the daring and increasingly stupid Poe says he’ll “hold” for Commander Hux (played by chronic overactor Domhnal Gleeson) was jarring. I saw this movie twice with two totally different audiences, and each time there were uneasy laughs from fans. The reason is that the humor is simply not Star Wars humor, a comment that many fans made in their complaints. Same thing goes for Luke flippantly tossing the light saber over his shoulder, his "that is nowhere" line, and the insane sea cow scene where Luke glowers at Rey as he drinks his fresh-squeezed alien milk. Then there’s the fish-nuns, which were supposed to be comic relief at one point, but ended up spoiling the whole isolation feel of Luke’s monkish existence. Neither heavy sarcasm nor outright silliness work in this universe.
The Good
The movie is certainly not all bad. It is beautifully filmed. The action sequences are mostly terrific (except for the "gravity in space" bomb-dropping nonsense). The fight between the imperial guard and Rey and Kylo Ren is awesome. The connection between the two is also intriguing, and both actors probably have the capacity to carry the series. The balance of nostalgia and newness is difficult to manage. So far Disney has failed on the character and theme level, but has largely succeeded in the look and feel of the Star Wars universe, as well as the overall tone and pacing of the series. Has Disney left enough of the original spark to keep fans coming back? We'll see, but a lot of longtime fans, including this one, suspect that the studio has fully embraced Kylo Ren's mission to snuff it out.
Related:
'Star Wars: The Last Jedi': The Full Shapiro Review:
On Saturday night, I went with my wife and dad to see the new Star Wars film. I’ll save my general rating for the end of this review, but it’s very difficult to put an overall grade on such a chaotic film. There are great parts, there are terrible parts, and there’s a lot in between. The best way to break this thing down is to bifurcate between the good stuff and the bad stuff. So that’s what we’ll do.
1. The Force Awakens Apparently Never Happened. At the end of the last movie, you’ll recall, the Rebel Alliance blew up the Starkiller Base, devastating the First Order’s capacity to make war. Or not. It turns out that they’ve still got heavy advantages in weaponry, which they make obvious from the outset. It’s somewhat weird that the Republic was re-established and fell in less than 40 years thanks to weapons inferiority. I’m fine with pretending The Force Awakens didn’t happen — it essentially ruined my childhood by turning Han Solo into a loser absentee father — but it’s tough to dismiss the ending and just start as though the Rebel Alliance didn’t do a whit of damage to the First Order.
2. There Is No Gravity In Space. The opening sequence features bombers dropping explosives on a First Order dreadnought. It’s a cool scene. But the bombers literally drop explosives in space. That’s not a thing, guys.
3. Snoke Is A Throwaway. In the last film, JJ Abrams made a big deal out of this Snoke guy. Now, I’m not a fellow who spends a lot of time googling whether Snoke is actually Darth Plagueis or whether he’s Mace Windu. But if you’re going to build up a big baddie who has the power to seduce Kylo Ren to the Dark Side, completely override Rey’s force abilities, and threaten Luke, you’ve got to tell us who the heck he is. And then he’s dispatched in particularly easy fashion by Kylo Ren. It’s satisfying to see him go, but he can’t be that scary if Kylo Ren can take him out by activating a light saber.
4. Kylo Ren Isn’t Intimidating. This is the biggest problem. In TFA, JJ Abrams did Kylo Ren a tremendous injustice by making him a petulant man-child who is stymied by a Mary Sue. Remember, Darth Vader literally doesn’t lose a battle until Return of the Jedi — and even that’s after Luke nearly turns to the Dark Side. By castrating Kylo Ren in TFA, it makes it difficult to think of him as the ultimate bad guy in the universe. Snoke was supposed to fill that gap. Now Snoke is dead. Why, exactly, should the Rebel Alliance be worried? Rey has bested Kylo several times already, plus Leia apparently has Force abilities, plus General Hux isn’t exactly terrifying.
5. Rey’s Backstory Sucks. After the last film, there was an insane amount of buzz about who Rey was. Who were her parents? Was she Obi-Wan’s granddaughter? Did Luke have a kid he didn’t know about? Was she Han’s bastard? Then it turns out that she’s just a nobody. Now, some of this is George Lucas’ fault for his midi-chlorians nonsense in the prequels, which made coordination with the Force a sort of genetic inheritance. The series wanted to reset so that anybody could have abilities with the Force — a laudable goal. But by sucking Rey out of the family drama, we’re no longer dealing with the central storyline — a point Kylo Ren makes to Rey openly. I guess the idea is that we’re supposed to now think that small street urchins without any sort of bloodline can become incredible Jedi. That’s democratic, but it’s not true to the storyline, and it doesn’t provide any drama.
6. Luke’s Weird Farmer Life Is Weird. Did we really need a whole day of Luke going around milking an alien seacow and drinking it?
7. Luke Is A Bad Teacher. Luke says that he’s going to provide Rey three lessons. The lessons consist of him (1) telling her what the Force is (okay, we already knew that); (2) having her touch a rock and see the Dark Side (she’s drawn in by it but not seduced). There is no third lesson — that’s a lesson for Luke from Yoda, who makes an odd cameo to tell Luke that the Force doesn’t need old texts, so let’s burn us some antique books. Rey literally learns zero practical things from Luke. This isn’t Yoda teaching Luke on Dagoba. It’s just Luke moping.
8. Celebrity Cameos Make No Sense. Laura Dern with purple hair? Benicio Del Toro stuttering? What are these people doing here?
9. Poe Dameron’s Story Arc Is Foolish. Poe is supposed to be newfangled Han Solo. Fail. First off, there is no new Han Solo. Second, Poe is a dolt. And Admiral Laura Dern, working with Leia, has a plan they could easily just tell Poe and solve half the conflict of the plot. Why keep it secret from Poe? We never find out. Instead, Poe runs around like a moron, making stupid plans with Finn that have no actual effect on the plotline.
10. Finn’s Storyline Is Useless. Finn should have died at the end of TFA. He should have died at the end of The Last Jedi. Instead, he goes on a random jaunt to Monte Carlo with aliens, and then rides a bunch of camel/horse/kangeroos to freedom while street urchins cheer. It’s godawful. Then, finally, when he’s about to do something useful, Rose stops him from doing it. Why is he here again, except to have awkward hugs with Rey?
11. Rose Is Useless. Rose is added to the plot to give Finn someone to travel with and develop awkward romance with. But her presence is simply not useful. She doesn’t do anything particularly special. She does give Finn a lecture about income inequality, though. So I guess that’s something.
12. Social Justice Warrioring On Interplanetary Monte Carlo Is Awful. Awful. In this little jaunt, we learn that income inequality is bad (see, street urchins are riding the magic horsecamels, and that’s terrible!), that animal abuse is bad (see, the ugly alien is abusing the magic horsecamels and that’s terrible!), and that weapons dealing is bad (yeah, talk to the Rebel Alliance using all those X-Wings). This whole sequence never should have happened.
13. Captain Phasma Is A Nothing. She’s apparently a white woman who wears a cool suit, and then Finn — a dude who five seconds ago was a janitor — beats her. Welp.
14. Luke Shouldn’t Have Been A Hologram. Turning Luke into Obi-Wan Kenobe for purposes of the reset makes some sense. But his death made none. Why is it cool for Luke to survive a barrage from AT-ATs if he’s not even there? Why is it cool for Luke to best Kylo Ren in a light saber battle if (1) Rey has already done so, and (2) Luke isn’t even there? They easily could have brought Luke there, and had him do exactly the same thing, but sacrifice himself — or perhaps just fade away in front of Kylo Ren.
15. The Powers Of The Force Aren’t Magic. We learn that through the Force, you can now hologram yourself places, and that you can also survive being thrown into space (Leia). Wut?
16. Light Speed Can't Be Used As A Weapon. You can't destroy ships by flying at them at light speed. If you could, the entire first scene would have been unnecessary (forget the bombers, just shoot an X-wing through that dreadnought), and the Rebel Alliance could have taken down every Death Star ever in the same way.
17. Why Would Luke Try To Kill Kylo? He tried to save Vader after Vader destroyed a planet and cut off his hand. He sensed good in him. He senses evil in Kylo and for a moment wants to kill him? That seems like a mild stretch at best.
18. There Are No Interesting Characters Left Except For Kylo Ren. So, now everybody’s dead. Han’s dead. Luke is dead. Leia was never that interesting, but Carrie Fisher died, so Leia can’t stick around for long. That means we’re left with the new characters — which is the point, since Star Wars can’t survive on nostalgia forever. But Rey isn’t particularly interesting — they just gave her a crappy backstory — and Poe is apparently stupid. Finn is a nonentity and nobody cares about Rose. This leaves Kylo Ren as the only interesting character in the Star Wars universe, and unlike Vader, who was wildly intimidating because of his mystery, it’s incredibly unclear that Kylo Ren can carry this series on his shoulders. It’s also unclear why Kylo Ren would want to rule the galaxy at this point. Everybody’s dead, he’s gotten his revenge on everybody except Leia (who he didn’t want to kill), and he seems to have little idea how to govern except for Hulk Smash.
19. Kylo Should Have Sided With Rey. This is the biggest problem of all. Once Kylo and Rey team up, they should stay teamed up. Rey is a far cooler character as a moderating influence on Kylo than on her own. And Kylo is far more interesting as a character trying to hold his darkness in check than as a guy who gives into it. There’s also no hint that Kylo has some desperate need to rule the universe, so it’s odd that he gives up the possibilities of a joint rule with Rey in order to destroy the transports. Why wouldn’t he just call off the attack on the transports and then work with Rey? That would be a radically different direction for the franchise. As it is, we’re back to Luke vs. Darth, that binary fight that was only interesting the first time around.
Okay, that’s a lot of criticism. But it’s not all bad.
Here’s what’s right with the film:
1. The Kylo/Rey Connection Works. The entire film is built on this relationship. It’s the only interesting thing remaining in this universe. The scenes in which Kylo is being called to the Light Side by Rey absolutely work. They’re great. The truth is that Star Wars was always built on relationships, and this is the only remaining interesting one. You believe it when Kylo turns against Snoke. That’s what makes for one of the best scenes in the Star Wars canon.
2. The Light Saber Battle. The killing of Snoke works emotionally, although as noted before, it makes little sense to kill Snoke before we learn anything about him. But the Rey/Kylo team-up is awesome — it brought open cheers in the theater. The choreography works, it’s emotionally resonant. It was a mistake to immediately jettison that for a forced conflict between Kylo and Rey.
3. Luke’s Final Scene. The mirror image of Luke looking off into the distance at the two suns of Tattooine is his death scene. It works, and it’s heartbreaking. If you grew up with Mark Hamill at 26 and now you’re watching him fade out at age 66, that’s pretty moving stuff. That’s why he should have gone out in a blaze of glory rather than with a cheap apparition trick.
Those big things that are right with the film are more important, in many ways, than the things that are wrong with the film. Rian Johnson, the director, didn’t play it safe, and that’s great. But he did play it safe by having Kylo return to the Dark Side and turning Rey into an avatar of populism. Those are mistakes that will haunt the franchise. And without Luke and Han and the nostalgia factor, can Star Wars carry forward with the same legacy, without just turning into another Avengers series — a fun watch that has no real emotional resonance?
Overall, better than The Force Awakens, which doesn’t hold up on repeat, and planted seeds that poisoned The Last Jedi, particularly with regard to Kylo Ren. Not as good as Rogue One, and below Return of the Jedi. It’s difficult to imagine how Episode IX can remain interesting with a universe this narrowed and a set of compelling characters reduced to a grand total of two: Kylo and Rey.
Quote of the Times;
Start leaving what you want to leave. Your future is waiting.
Link of the Times;
http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/06/13/tucker-carlson-jeff-sessions-hearing-donald-trump-russia-leaks-perverting-government
Hire?
A Jehovah’s Witness knocked on my door yesterday, so I answered it and asked if he wanted to come in. He said, “Yeah, okay.”
I said “I’m just making a cup of tea, do you want one?”
He said, “Yeah, sure.”
I said, “I’ve just made some toast do you want a slice?
He said, “Yeah, why not.”
We sat down and I asked him, “So what now?
He said, “I don’t know, I’ve never got this far before!”
*.*
Fed Up With Oppressive Capitalism, Bernie Sanders Retires To Socialist Paradise Venezuela
LAKE CHAMPLAIN, VT—After years of suffering oppression at the hands of the capitalist system in America, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders announced he would be quitting politics and retiring to the socialist paradise of Venezuela.
Senator Sanders held a press conference at his summer vacation home on Lake Champlain to announce the move.
“I simply have had enough of being exploited by billionaires and evil corporations,” the democratic socialist who owns three homes said. “I will be retiring from my Senate seat and its problematic $200,000 annual salary and going to live in the idyllic land of Venezuela.”
“Here in America, we have great wealth inequality, whereas in the utopia of Venezuela, everyone has the same amount of money,” he added.
Sanders announced he would be driving his luxury SUV as far as he could before catching a ferry to the socialist wonderland, where he’d live in peace, comfort, and security for the rest of his days, “just like all the other lucky citizens of Venezuela.”
*.*
I finally realized why I dislike The Phantom Menace.
The acting? No.
Podracing? Nope.
The awkwardness of a 9 year old hitting on a 14 year old? Not even close.
Jar-Jar Binks? Na.
The E.T. cameo? Nadda.
The dialogue? Nein.
The whole Midichlorians causing the force? Nope.
Baby Greedo? Not even close.
My issue is this: they cast Liam friggin' Neeson, widely typecast as Mr. Punchy, and Samuel L. Jackson, widely typecast as Mr. Yelly-And-Cursey. And what happened?
There was no Liam Neeson punching faces and no Samuel Jackson yelling at people.
Sad.
*.*
I pulled into a crowded parking lot and rolled down the car windows to make sure my Labrador Retriever had fresh air. She was stretched out on the back seat, and I wanted to impress upon her that she must remain there.
I walked to the curb backward, pointing my finger at the car and saying emphatically, "Now you stay. Do you hear me? Stay! Stay!"
The driver of a nearby car, perhaps noting that I'm a blonde, gave me a strange look and then said, "You should just put it in park."
*.*
I'm currently dating an Avon lady.
We fight a lot, but it's worth it.
The makeup sex is incredible.
Issue of the Times;
Why Hire Women? by Stuart Schneiderman
You knew this was coming, because I have said that it was coming. The #MeToo movement will make life more difficult for women in the workplace. It feels like a revolutionary action to overthrow the patriarchy, and it is certainly destroying the careers of more than a few men, especially in the media and entertainment, but living your life within a grand historical drama is always a bad idea. This time, the ultimate victims will be women.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings.
Obviously, businessmen cannot speak out about the issue. But, what they are telling each other deserves a hearing, even if the author of the current piece speaks anonymously.
He mentions first that in a climate where accusations count as incontrovertible truths, our grand American tradition of justice has been largely discarded. Remember when Benjamin Franklin said that it is better for ten guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to be convicted. Well, you can forget about that, along with due process.
Anonymous quotes Emily Linden, a columnist for Teen Vogue, who declares that she does not care if some innocent man’s reputation is ruined as long as she can avenge herself against the patriarchy and can foment revolution. Naturally, Linden, a fanatic masquerading as a serious writer, has forgotten about due process and does not care either about what happens to the innocent man’s wife and children. Nice way to show us how sensitive you are, Em.
Anonymous offers his analysis from within the business world:
There are however two big problems with the whole situation:
1. Accusations alone kill careers and businesses just through the media attention and absence from any investigation or evidence.
2. The narrative of the whole debate is that every claim must be believed regardless how ridiculous the claim itself is and that any questioning of this or that people want an investigation is automatically anti female.
These two social justice paradigms have made it impossible to defend anybody against accusations regardless how suspicious or shallow the claims were and it still continues so we can assume this will stay for way longer than just the next week.
He is not alone in pointing out that in the ambient mania the meaning of sexual harassment has been bloated almost beyond recognition:
Another problem is that the meaning of sexual harassment was widened to include what most of us would consider normal behavior among adults. This includes but is not limited to: getting invited for a drink, making somebody a compliment or standing in the same room.
This paints almost any interaction at a workplace in a sexualized context which in turn makes it almost impossible to be comfortable with each other. This has a major chilling effect on teamwork, arbitration and general communication.
Worse yet, women are shouting that they are weak and ineffectual, that they are so sensitive that they are rendered ill by someone who makes them feel “uncomfortable.” So much for the myth of strong, empowered women.
Now as a business owner myself and somebody who is in voluntary leadership positions I can tell you one thing:
It´s impossible to accomplish anything if you are not willing to make someone “uncomfortable”! Especially if you take on a mentor role!
And also:
When James Damore was asked for feedback from his supervisor and internally circulated his google memo, it got leaked, he got fired and women stayed at home the next Day because “for emotional reasons”
A ten page summary of data and analysis from Damore was enough to “emotional distress” the women at the company.
I’m not arguing here about the validity of the memo we can talk about that on a separate occasion my point here is that a ten-page document with written words that suggested possible gender differences cost multiple sick days!
Anonymous tries to put it in context:
What the media doesn’t see are … very important facts:
Most businesses still care more about profit than gender distribution
Most businesses don’t share the blatant disregard for men
Most businesses are still created, maintained and lead by men so you can’t put men out of the equation
Now, male executives will react to the #MeToo movement by hiring fewer women and by practicing gender segregation. Anonymous quotes some of his male executive friends:
“We will probably not hire women if they have to work together with men” (paraphrased)
“We have to consider gender segregation at the workplace as a next step so we hire women only for positions where we can make a team out of them and where we have to hire a spot in the male-dominated parts we hire additional men” (paraphrased)
One of my colleagues from a US Tech company gave me even a (for me) more horrific answer when I asked him about this notion:
“We are considering to drop our female staffers in the non-support teams, this way we can eliminate the risk and from the outside, it looks like we just have a 90/10 split which is low but not unreasonable for a tech company” (paraphrased)
Many men are saying that hiring women is simply not worth the risk:
Even an unproven or false allegation can cost a company a significant sum of money!
For some businesses it could even mean bankruptcy because clients could drop them, they can’t bear the expensive legal fees or the media outrage kills their reputation.
And I don’t know anyone who is willing to take that kind of risk.
And then there are other unspeakable risk factors in hiring women. As he says, no one will say this out loud, because such speech is strictly forbidden:
Adding to that the risk of possible pregnancy, that some call for sick leave when they have their period and the whole depiction of women in the mainstream media and you have the perfect mix for “high risk, high cost, low reward” (actual quote)
“Officially, we will of course never ‘promote’ this if somebody asks about stuff like that we will just say the teams can work better this way… but we don’t risk our core team that makes money just to fulfill a quota. Google & Co can do that and cripple themselves in legal affairs” (paraphrased).
Anonymous concludes:
Well, it hurts me to say but maybe we shouldn’t if this is how women behave in today’s world! It just doesn’t make a lot of sense to hire somebody that can potentially cost you more time and money to the addition that you have to create special rules for all other employees.
Quote of the Times;
Wisdom comes alone through suffering. – Aeschylus
Link of the Times;
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2017/11/sweden-nobody-helped-woman-raped-by-20-muslim-migrants-neighbors-have-learned-not-to-see-or-hear-too-much
I said “I’m just making a cup of tea, do you want one?”
He said, “Yeah, sure.”
I said, “I’ve just made some toast do you want a slice?
He said, “Yeah, why not.”
We sat down and I asked him, “So what now?
He said, “I don’t know, I’ve never got this far before!”
*.*
Fed Up With Oppressive Capitalism, Bernie Sanders Retires To Socialist Paradise Venezuela
LAKE CHAMPLAIN, VT—After years of suffering oppression at the hands of the capitalist system in America, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders announced he would be quitting politics and retiring to the socialist paradise of Venezuela.
Senator Sanders held a press conference at his summer vacation home on Lake Champlain to announce the move.
“I simply have had enough of being exploited by billionaires and evil corporations,” the democratic socialist who owns three homes said. “I will be retiring from my Senate seat and its problematic $200,000 annual salary and going to live in the idyllic land of Venezuela.”
“Here in America, we have great wealth inequality, whereas in the utopia of Venezuela, everyone has the same amount of money,” he added.
Sanders announced he would be driving his luxury SUV as far as he could before catching a ferry to the socialist wonderland, where he’d live in peace, comfort, and security for the rest of his days, “just like all the other lucky citizens of Venezuela.”
*.*
I finally realized why I dislike The Phantom Menace.
The acting? No.
Podracing? Nope.
The awkwardness of a 9 year old hitting on a 14 year old? Not even close.
Jar-Jar Binks? Na.
The E.T. cameo? Nadda.
The dialogue? Nein.
The whole Midichlorians causing the force? Nope.
Baby Greedo? Not even close.
My issue is this: they cast Liam friggin' Neeson, widely typecast as Mr. Punchy, and Samuel L. Jackson, widely typecast as Mr. Yelly-And-Cursey. And what happened?
There was no Liam Neeson punching faces and no Samuel Jackson yelling at people.
Sad.
*.*
I pulled into a crowded parking lot and rolled down the car windows to make sure my Labrador Retriever had fresh air. She was stretched out on the back seat, and I wanted to impress upon her that she must remain there.
I walked to the curb backward, pointing my finger at the car and saying emphatically, "Now you stay. Do you hear me? Stay! Stay!"
The driver of a nearby car, perhaps noting that I'm a blonde, gave me a strange look and then said, "You should just put it in park."
*.*
I'm currently dating an Avon lady.
We fight a lot, but it's worth it.
The makeup sex is incredible.
Issue of the Times;
Why Hire Women? by Stuart Schneiderman
You knew this was coming, because I have said that it was coming. The #MeToo movement will make life more difficult for women in the workplace. It feels like a revolutionary action to overthrow the patriarchy, and it is certainly destroying the careers of more than a few men, especially in the media and entertainment, but living your life within a grand historical drama is always a bad idea. This time, the ultimate victims will be women.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings.
Obviously, businessmen cannot speak out about the issue. But, what they are telling each other deserves a hearing, even if the author of the current piece speaks anonymously.
He mentions first that in a climate where accusations count as incontrovertible truths, our grand American tradition of justice has been largely discarded. Remember when Benjamin Franklin said that it is better for ten guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to be convicted. Well, you can forget about that, along with due process.
Anonymous quotes Emily Linden, a columnist for Teen Vogue, who declares that she does not care if some innocent man’s reputation is ruined as long as she can avenge herself against the patriarchy and can foment revolution. Naturally, Linden, a fanatic masquerading as a serious writer, has forgotten about due process and does not care either about what happens to the innocent man’s wife and children. Nice way to show us how sensitive you are, Em.
Anonymous offers his analysis from within the business world:
There are however two big problems with the whole situation:
1. Accusations alone kill careers and businesses just through the media attention and absence from any investigation or evidence.
2. The narrative of the whole debate is that every claim must be believed regardless how ridiculous the claim itself is and that any questioning of this or that people want an investigation is automatically anti female.
These two social justice paradigms have made it impossible to defend anybody against accusations regardless how suspicious or shallow the claims were and it still continues so we can assume this will stay for way longer than just the next week.
He is not alone in pointing out that in the ambient mania the meaning of sexual harassment has been bloated almost beyond recognition:
Another problem is that the meaning of sexual harassment was widened to include what most of us would consider normal behavior among adults. This includes but is not limited to: getting invited for a drink, making somebody a compliment or standing in the same room.
This paints almost any interaction at a workplace in a sexualized context which in turn makes it almost impossible to be comfortable with each other. This has a major chilling effect on teamwork, arbitration and general communication.
Worse yet, women are shouting that they are weak and ineffectual, that they are so sensitive that they are rendered ill by someone who makes them feel “uncomfortable.” So much for the myth of strong, empowered women.
Now as a business owner myself and somebody who is in voluntary leadership positions I can tell you one thing:
It´s impossible to accomplish anything if you are not willing to make someone “uncomfortable”! Especially if you take on a mentor role!
And also:
When James Damore was asked for feedback from his supervisor and internally circulated his google memo, it got leaked, he got fired and women stayed at home the next Day because “for emotional reasons”
A ten page summary of data and analysis from Damore was enough to “emotional distress” the women at the company.
I’m not arguing here about the validity of the memo we can talk about that on a separate occasion my point here is that a ten-page document with written words that suggested possible gender differences cost multiple sick days!
Anonymous tries to put it in context:
What the media doesn’t see are … very important facts:
Most businesses still care more about profit than gender distribution
Most businesses don’t share the blatant disregard for men
Most businesses are still created, maintained and lead by men so you can’t put men out of the equation
Now, male executives will react to the #MeToo movement by hiring fewer women and by practicing gender segregation. Anonymous quotes some of his male executive friends:
“We will probably not hire women if they have to work together with men” (paraphrased)
“We have to consider gender segregation at the workplace as a next step so we hire women only for positions where we can make a team out of them and where we have to hire a spot in the male-dominated parts we hire additional men” (paraphrased)
One of my colleagues from a US Tech company gave me even a (for me) more horrific answer when I asked him about this notion:
“We are considering to drop our female staffers in the non-support teams, this way we can eliminate the risk and from the outside, it looks like we just have a 90/10 split which is low but not unreasonable for a tech company” (paraphrased)
Many men are saying that hiring women is simply not worth the risk:
Even an unproven or false allegation can cost a company a significant sum of money!
For some businesses it could even mean bankruptcy because clients could drop them, they can’t bear the expensive legal fees or the media outrage kills their reputation.
And I don’t know anyone who is willing to take that kind of risk.
And then there are other unspeakable risk factors in hiring women. As he says, no one will say this out loud, because such speech is strictly forbidden:
Adding to that the risk of possible pregnancy, that some call for sick leave when they have their period and the whole depiction of women in the mainstream media and you have the perfect mix for “high risk, high cost, low reward” (actual quote)
“Officially, we will of course never ‘promote’ this if somebody asks about stuff like that we will just say the teams can work better this way… but we don’t risk our core team that makes money just to fulfill a quota. Google & Co can do that and cripple themselves in legal affairs” (paraphrased).
Anonymous concludes:
Well, it hurts me to say but maybe we shouldn’t if this is how women behave in today’s world! It just doesn’t make a lot of sense to hire somebody that can potentially cost you more time and money to the addition that you have to create special rules for all other employees.
Quote of the Times;
Wisdom comes alone through suffering. – Aeschylus
Link of the Times;
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2017/11/sweden-nobody-helped-woman-raped-by-20-muslim-migrants-neighbors-have-learned-not-to-see-or-hear-too-much
Whitewashed?
Apple announced today that it has developed a computer chip that can store and play high fidelity music in women's breast implants.
The iBoob will cost between $799 and $999, depending on the speaker size.
This is considered to be a major breakthrough as women have always complained about men staring at their breasts and not listening to them.
*.*
A wife complains, "Our wall clock almost killed my mother today. It fell only seconds after she got up from the couch."
The husband mumbles, "Damn clock always was slow."
*.*
Japanese Emperor Admits Pearl Harbor ‘Kind of a Dick Move’
CHIYODA, Japan — In remembrance of Pearl Harbor, Emperor Akihito admitted in a public comment that the Japanese sneak attack that brought the United States into World War Two was “kind of a dick move.”
“We are taking the time to express Our regret for a wrong committed over 70 years ago,” the Emperor began. “This week, after seeing a news report about a Pearl Harbor veteran ceremony, We thought to ourself, ‘Man, that was kind of a dick move, We should probably make an expression that acknowledges that.'”
The emperor said he used the American slang to make his message more heartfelt and appealing to his US audience, according to a Japanese political analyst.
“Really, what the hell were we thinking? That was a really weird time for us,” Akihito added.
Akihito made the stunning remarks during a speech at the Yasukuni Shrine, a controversial Shinto site which commemorates the names of Japanese soldiers killed in service to the Empire. Among the names are those of war criminals hanged by international tribunal.
“We would also like to note that that this announcement has absolutely nothing to do with an upcoming $10 billion arms deal with the United States for new Aegis guided missile destroyers,” Akihito added at the end of his remarks.
The announcement stunned onlookers and infuriated governments across the region, especially China, whose people suffered some of the worst atrocities at the hands of the Japanese Empire during the war, including the infamous Rape of Nanking, where over 100,000 women were forced into sex slavery for Japanese soldiers and an estimated 300,000 citizens were killed.
Although Akihito apologized for the Nanking incident in 1995, he refused to issue a written statement. Many Japanese history books still refer to that conflict as the War of Western Aggression.
While US officials praised the announcement, many on social media have criticized the emperor for not going further and condemning his country’s role in the creation and distribution of Hello Kitty, Pokemon, tentacle porn, and ridiculous game shows.
At press time analysts noted that throughout the entire speech Akihito didn’t ever actually use the words “sorry,” “apologize” or even “our bad,” for the 1941 attack.
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Little Johnny says, "Mom, when I was on the bus with Daddy this morning, he told me to give up my seat to a lady."
"Well, you've done the right thing," says Mommy.
"But Mommy, I was sitting on daddy's lap."
*.*
When life has got me down and I'm ready to give up, I try to remind myself:
I'm the one in control here.
I have the gun and the hostages.
So back off!
Issue of the Times;
The Whitewashed Tyranny of Abraham Lincoln by Tara Dodrill
Abraham Lincoln was the best U.S. President, motivated by a patriotic and Christian desire to preserve the union of states and free the slaves. At least that is what modern textbooks suggest. There is a bigger story to the 16th President of the United States than the Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation. A whitewashed version of the man is all that we learned about him in school. It is what our children and grandchildren are still being taught. Public school districts and universities have been dutifully parroting that the Southern states of Lincoln’s era had a perverse culture, while Northern society was superior. This became the politically-correct mantra when ‘teaching’ about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War for generations after the Civil Rights Movement. The identity politics is only getting worse, and more blatant.
The narrative is not only infused heavily with a liberal bias, but moreover, it is entirely wrong. Far too many Americans, both current students and adults, believe that the Civil War was a war about slavery. This liberalized version of history does not chronicle the political shenanigans that were undertaken by groups to harden theircentralized (federal) grasp on power, as is still the case today. Most Americans do not believe that this issue was at play during Lincoln’s era, but they are so very wrong. The current political atmosphere in America is a testament to how ignorance of history forces a people to repeat it.
President Abraham Lincoln should not be revered as a hallowed figure. “Honest Abe” was a mere man; one who made mistakes and decisions based on his own self-interest. Some of his choices did benefit America, but the benefits were often a positive byproduct of his political self-interest, not benevolence.
Abraham Lincoln’s Flopping Stance on Slavery
The liberal Republicans of the time, who eventually touted Lincoln as a champion of freedom, steadfastly demanded the media and citizens not “paint him with an Abolitionist brush,” during his first inaugural address. Abraham Lincoln did not wish to be known as anti-slavery after putting his hand on the Bible and taking the oath of office. Also, during his first inaugural address, President Lincoln declared that he had absolutely no legal authority to interfere with the practice of slavery in states where it already existed. He then went on to boldly say that he would be enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act. The federal law mandated the return of runaway slaves who had fled slave states to seek safety and freedom in the North.
Although the history textbooks tend to gloss over such facts, slavery did once exist in the North. The practice of owning human beings had ended throughout the Northern states by 1804. Even after slavery was abolished in the North, racial discrimination still heavily existed in workplaces, schools, and communities. The idea of a little white girl sitting next to a little black girl, or a black man and a white woman courting was still not accepted by the ‘tolerant’ North or ‘freedom-loving’ elites, who were hurling hateful rhetoric toward the South. Meanwhile, indentured servitude in the North, which was a big step but not a leap up from slavery, remained legal. Equally legal was the use of children as the North’s virtual slave labor inside its factories. Many of whom were worked to death, and usually had a poorer quality of life than the average Southern slave.
Politics, money, and power were just as intrinsically woven during the 1860’s as they are today. Some of the most fervent and vocal anti-slavery Northerners, who pushed for an end to slavery, were not doing it entirely from a human rights sentiment. Many wealthy businessmen in the North were pressuring politicians to force the South into submission over slavery, because they felt that it created unfair competition in the marketplace. With slavery existing in the Southern states, Northern businessmen were being forced to compete against free labor. Even child laborers had to be paid something, after all.
Congress was fiercely divided over the issue of slavery during the months prior to the election of Abraham Lincoln. Heated arguments over the Thirteenth Amendment occurred on a daily basis in the House of Representatives and the Senate. The furious debates continued during the early stages of Lincoln’s presidency.
The Thirteenth Amendment that most Americans associate with Abraham Lincoln was passed at the end of the Civil War, in 1865. However, there was a previous version of the Thirteenth Amendment that had a polar-opposite intent. Lincoln publicly supported the former version during his swearing-in ceremony. This original version of the Thirteenth Amendment was meant to enshrine the practice of slavery as immutable. It would have amended the Constitution to pro-actively prevent any future legislature from ever attempting to outlaw the ownership of human beings. This version of what would have become the Thirteenth Amendment, if it had passed, is now often referred to as the Corwin Amendment. Thomas Corwin, an Ohio Republican Representative and a Lincoln supporter, sponsored the bill.
“I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable,” Lincoln said when referencing Corwin’s proposal, according to a report by Constitution Daily.
The Political Landscape Before Lincoln’s Election
To truly understand what actually caused the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln’s massive flip-flop on slavery, we must understand what happened during the 10 years that led up to his election, and the split in the Democrat Party, which occurred at its convention to select a presidential candidate to oppose the Republicans.
In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed. This law permitted each new state coming into the United States to decide for itself whether or not slavery would be legal inside its borders. It was sponsored by the wing of Republicans to which Lincoln belonged. The legislation overturned the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had banned slavery north of Maryland’s northern border. This delineation is commonly known as the Mason-Dixon line.
For decades before Lincoln’s election, the Southern states had been responsible for most of the federal government’s revenue. The South had stringent tariffs forced upon it by Northern lawmakers, who in-turn gave about 80 percent of the funds to enhance public works in their states and bolster the struggling economy of the North. There was no income tax in the United States at that time, nor had there ever been an income tax, as it is forbidden by the U.S. Constitution. About 85 percent of the revenue that the federal government had at its disposal came in the form of tariffs that were levied on goods and services from the South. The high taxes that Southerners paid helped to build railroads, roads, manufacturing complexes, and canals in the North.
Before 1812, the tariffs levied were between 15 and 20 percent. The funds garnered by these tariffs were enough to keep the federal government fully functional, without placing an excessive burden on any specific region of the country. When the War of 1812 broke out, the tariffs upon Southern businesses were increased up to 26 percent by Congress, with the net profits being funneled to aid manufacturers in the North. With a new tariff in 1828, the economy of South Carolina took the biggest hit and lost 25 percent of its export business in just 24 months. In the Southern newspapers, the tariff was nicknamed “Tariff of Abominations”. The U.S. Congress was dominated by Whig Party members from the North, who had passed the tariff, increasing the amount that the South had to pay on exported goods up to 50 percent.
In 1832, South Carolina officials called for a state convention to nullify both the tariff of 1828 and another tariff that had been enacted earlier that same year, by arguing that the tariffs were unconstitutional. Unfair taxation was one of the premises that had sparked America’s War of Independence against England, and it seemed as if the same issue was going to prompt a Civil War in the still-young nation.
In early 1860, the Morrill Tariff was passed. Even though the tariffs being collected from the South now totaled about 87 percent of the federal government’s revenue. The bill was named after Northern steel manufacturer and Republican Congressman, Justin Morrill. The legislation levied up to a 47 percent tariff increase on exported goods over the course of three years. The burden of this new tariff fell squarely on the shoulders of the South. The industrial businesses of the North were largely domestic sellers. The Morrill Tariff decreased the trade value of agricultural exports overseas, causing a gigantic blow to the Southern economy. Abraham Lincoln campaigned as a supporter of the tariff. Thaddeus Stevens, a Lincoln supporter and Republican Congressman, co-authored the Morrill Tariff.
During the campaign season, the iron manufacturer from Pennsylvania said that the two most important issues of the 1860 election were increasing tariffs and putting an end to slavery. Stevens also told a New York crowd that the new tariff would financially cripple the South and the West, but it would enrich the North. He claimed that it would increase the wages of Northern industrial workers and help America achieve greatness.
Henry Clay, who was the leader of the Whig Party, which held the majority in Congress, was able to implement an export tariff of 36 percent, in 1861. The economy of the North began to boom, because the bulk of its industrial goods were sold domestically. The Southern economy began a downward spiral, as the vast majority of its revenue was based upon the exportation of cotton and tobacco to Europe.
Former President and South Carolina Senator, John C. Calhoun, was able to negotiate a compromise that would roll back the tariffs to their former 15 percent range over the course of several years. Henry Clay (a man whom Lincoln greatly admired) and his Whig party were infuriated at being forced into a compromise with the South. It meant the loss of money that was to be ultimately funneled, at least in part, to their campaign supporters.
If Southern officials had tried to resist the tariffs, they would have been herded up and hanged as enemies of the state. Thaddeus Stevens was a powerful leader within the Republican party, and by some accounts, he ran the nation after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. His open hostility toward the South and vindictiveness explains the North’s punitive tone during the Reconstruction Era.
The 1860 Presidential Election
Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election, but the why and how have been left out of most history books, and this is causing the mis-education of millions of Americans.
The Democrat Party split along geographical lines during its presidential convention. A northern faction and a southern faction emerged. The convention ended without the nomination of a candidate to run on the ticket. When the Democrats met in Charleston, South Carolina to hold their convention in April, tensions swirled and boiled over rather quickly. Northern party leaders felt that Stephen Douglas was their best chance to defeat the “Black Republicans” seeking to end or limit slavery. Southern Democrats largely deemed Douglas to be unfit, because he believed that the federal government had no right to determine the legality of slavery. Douglas maintained that the issue should remain a state decision. Six weeks after the Southern Democrats walked out of the convention without a vote being held, Stephen Douglas was nominated during a second convention that was held in the North. Southern Democrats also held a second convention and nominated the sitting Vice President, John Breckenridge, to lead the ticket.
With the Democrat Party split in half and in chaos, Republicans felt that they would have an edge in the presidential race during their convention, which they held in Chicago the following month. Republicans needed a candidate who would garner the Electoral College votes of the North. Such a scenario would require carrying Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Illinois, and Indiana.
After intense debate over a slew of possible candidates, Abraham Lincoln, after three votes were taken, received the nomination. During his one term in the Senate, the press had cast Lincoln as a strong all-American man, with an inspiring pull-yourself-up by the bootstraps story. He had become the darling of the Northern press during his bitter debates with Stephen Douglas earlier the same year. News coverage of the debates was spread nationwide at a time when the telegraph was still in its infancy.
When a 3-way race for the presidency turned into a 4-man contest, Abraham Lincoln’s party felt that their candidate would be a shoe-in, if given the right press coverage. John Bell, a wealthy Tennessee plantation owner, was nominated as the candidate for the newly-created Constitutional Union Party. The political group was largely composed of community pillars and former politicians. They described themselves as moderates. They believed that the best way to calm the nation and win the election was to avoid the issue of slavery altogether.
As a presidential candidate, Lincoln supported the deportation of all Negroes to an unpopulated zone outside of America. This was euphemistically described as a policy of “colonization”. As late as December of 1862, Lincoln was continuing to promote his idea of ridding the U.S. mainland of all Negroes, even as the Civil War raged on. This stance, which was one that was taken by some of the most conservative members of his political party, did not endear him to either abolitionists or Southern voters.
When Lincoln ran for the highest office in the land in 1860, it was the first time that “sectional” (regional) parties were involved in a presidential race. It was also the first time that the South was not represented on either the top or the bottom of a winning presidential ticket. Abraham Lincoln did not win a single Electoral College vote from either a Southern or a border state. In fact, he won the election with only 39 percent of the popular vote. The message was clear to Southerners: the North, and only the North, would determine the president.
“I will say then, that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of making voters of the Negroes, or jurors, or qualifying them to hold office, of having them to marry with white people. I will say in addition, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races, which I suppose, will forever forbid the two races living together upon terms of social and political equality, and inasmuch, as they cannot so live, that while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior and inferior, that I as much as any other man am in favor of the superior position being assigned to the white man.” — Abraham Lincoln, 1858, Lincoln-Douglas Debate
Abraham Lincoln’s Early Months in the Presidency
Southerners perceived the election of Abraham Lincoln as the solidification of Northern dominance over nearly every aspect of their lives. It took only a day for Americans in South Carolina and multiple Gulf Coast states to call for secession.
Despite the mounting tensions between the North and South, Lincoln did not have a single man who lived below the Mason-Dixon line on his cabinet as an adviser, nor did he take a meeting with any Southern lawmakers from the time that he was elected up through the beginning of the Civil War.
If the preservation of the Union was a top priority for Lincoln, he should have attempted to prevent the mounting hostilities, addressed the concerns that the South had been battling against for more than a decade, and tried to prevent the fever pitch from growing louder. But he did not. Lincoln ignored the South’s economic and states’ rights worries repeatedly, so their distrust of the new president increased dramatically.
Instead of attempting to meet with Southerners to calm their fears over continued tariff increases, or working toward eventually ending slavery peaceably, Lincoln signed the Morrill Tariff into law. Taking his power a step further, the new president vowed that he would ensure enforcement of the high tariff on Southern states that seceded from the Unites States. It signaled to the Southern states that they were trapped in a position of perpetual servitude to produce federal revenue.
President Lincoln was essentially calling the South out, but Southerners were not bluffing. They had lost patience in having taxation without representation for the sole benefit of the North, and so they seceded, with South Carolina being the first state to exit the Union. Northern members of Congress began preparing for a military campaign, as their Southern peers were packing up their Washington, D.C. offices for train rides home.
James Buchanan alongside other current and former politicians of the time reached out to the South, as well as the incoming administration to engage in a constitutional convention that was to be followed by a direct-vote national vote on the divisive issues threatening to tear apart the country. It was a Kansas Senator, John Crittenden, not Abraham Lincoln, who took bold steps to preserve the Union and prevent a Civil War that would ultimately take more than 650,000 American lives. Modern history books ignore the Kansas Senator’s noble efforts, as well as the decision by Lincoln and his party to embrace bloodshed.
The Crittenden Compromise called for immediate legislation to create a far more permanent solution, by way of constitutional amendments, for the issues dividing the nation. The compromise called for extending the slavery boundaries established by the 1820 Missouri Compromise, which had been terminated by the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act. This was the North’s proverbial fig leaf, which was being offered to appease Southerners, in the hope that friendly relations could be renewed. The act, which did get some support from powerful Senators in the North, was sent to a special committee. However, it died when some of Lincoln’s most staunch supporters quickly rejected the Crittenden Compromise. “History is to record us,” the Kansas Senator cautioned Congress when presenting his bill. “Is it to record that when the destruction of the Union was imminent, we stood quarreling?”
When elected officials from Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida received no communication from President Lincoln to assure them that the fiscal attacks on the South would come to an end, they also voted to secede. North Carolina was the last to leave, and it ultimately lost the most men to the war.
President Lincoln’s War
Every newspaper in the country ran headlines about the South’s secession. Neither the press nor the Northeastern public disputed the right of the states to legally and peaceably withdraw from the United States, at least not initially. When a member of Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet suggested that they just let the South leave peaceably, the president has been quoted as replying, “Let the South go? Where, then, would we get our revenue!” Respect for the South’s right to secede soon vanished, not because of a more in-depth look at our Constitution, but because wealthy Northern business leaders suddenly realized that they would soon be competing in a truly free market (sans high tariffs) against the South. This fact, on top of worries about the massive loss of annual revenues resulting from lost tariffs, soon caused saber rattling of epic proportions.
President Lincoln finally took a meeting, a covert one, with a Southerner. He met with Virginia Secession Convention delegate Colonel John Baldwin. The colonel, like many of his peers, preferred for his state to remain a part of the United States if a compromise could be reached. During the April 4th, 1861 meeting, Colonel Baldwin learned that the president was already plotting a military assault against the South at Fort Sumter. The Virginia delegate tried to convince Lincoln that any such action would force the Southern states into an all-out war with the North. The colonel also told the president that if the South were permitted to leave the Union peaceably, economic and historical ties would ultimately bring the two geographical factions back together again.
Another point of fact that modern history textbooks omit is why Fort Sumter was the place that Lincoln chose to make a stand. It was not merely a military fort. Fort Sumter was a tariff collection facility. The president’s attempt to terrorize the South through Fort Sumter was an epic failure.
Colonel Baldwin responded to a letter that was sent by a Northern politician asking what would become of Union men in Virginia after the battle of Fort Sumter. “There are now no Union men in Virginia. But those who were Union men will stand to their arms, and make a fight which shall go down in history as an illustration of what a brave people can do in defense of their liberties, after having exhausted every means of pacification.”
After losing the early battles of the Civil War, Lincoln and his supporters, both in industry and the Senate, began to anguish over the possibility that England and European nations would send military support to the South, since his administration was viewed throughout the world as a despotic regime. There was concern that the Republican leadership would be tried like war criminals. Threats and a naval blockade ensued to preemptively thwart interventions by other nations. Lincoln even threatened war against any nation that sought to provide humanitarian aid.
Author Charles Dickens penned a now obscure but relevant opinion piece about the Civil War in a London newspaper during the final weeks of 1861. “The Northern onslaught upon slavery is no more than a piece of specious humbug disguised to conceal its desire for economic control of the United States.”
Infamous socialist Karl Marx also saw the Civil War for exactly what it was. He wrote, “The war between the North and South is a tariff war. The war, is further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery, and in fact turns on the Northern lust for power.”
During his first four months as President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln trampled the U.S. Constitution to create the military dictatorship that was necessary to wage and win a war against his own people.
Abraham Lincoln’s Unconstitutional Acts and High Crimes
Lincoln circumvented Congress when calling up the United States Army — 75,000 men initially.
He refused to call Congress back into session after ordering military action at Fort Sumter.
Ordered the Navy to blockade Southern ports, a direct act of war. Such an act could only be undertaken by an order of Congress. It was a diabolical tactic to prevent food imports, in order to starve the Southern states.
In an escalation of Lincoln’s starvation strategy, he ordered General Sherman to begin a military campaign against civilians, cities, and hospitals. Women and children were not spared. General Sherman was nicknamed “Burning Sherman”, because he randomly burned entire cities, even in the middle of winter. Lincoln ordered Sherman to terrorize the South by pillaging and plundering at a level that surpassed even the ancient Roman armies. As America’s first war criminal, General Sherman is one of the main reasons why disease and starvation killed significantly more people in the Civil War than combat.
Suspended the writ of habeas corpus, yet another act that is a function of Congress. The suspension of habeas corpus gave Lincoln the power to arrest Americans without filing a criminal charge and permitted him to have them held indefinitely without either a charge or a trial.
Lincoln violated the Constitution once again when he refused to comply with a Supreme Court order to immediately restore the right of habeas corpus. Our Founding Fathers added the habeas corpus protection into the Constitution specifically so tyranny would never again reign in America, as it had in Europe and when the “New World” was under British control.
Lincoln had the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court arrested after receiving a court order to restore habeas corpus protections. Upon receiving the ruling by the high court, the president sent a federal marshal to arrest the Chief Justice.
There has never been a more substantial threat to a free press in the history of our country than the 16th President of the United States. Lincoln sent soldiers to destroy printing presses and related newspaper publishing tools at outlets which did not support his handling of the Southern secession. In response to negative editorials about the military invasion of the South and his overall war policy, Lincoln also commandeered, and then closed 300 Northern newspapers.
President Lincoln did not stop at just destroying private property and commandeering newspapers, he also arrested and imprisoned many of the editors and publishers of those same press outlets.
Before the end of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln had ordered the arrest of approximately 20,000 Americans without charging them with a crime or permitting them to have their day in court. The citizens who were unconstitutionally detained had spoken out against Lincoln personally, the Civil War, or were merely suspected of harboring anti-war sentiments.
The 16th President illegally took it upon himself to create a new state. West Virginia quickly came into existence after Lincoln declared war on the South, as a North-friendly region within the South.
Lincoln arrested and imprisoned the entire Maryland state legislature to prevent them from holding a debate and taking a vote on secession. The elected officials were never charged with a crime, or granted a trial.
Concluding the War of Northern Aggression
What occurred in 1861 still festers to this day, and almost all of it has been cloaked in politically-expedient lies. A tyrannical, centralized government that was hell-bent on dominating the Southern states was coalesced by the election of Abraham Lincoln. What was known as the War of Northern Aggression throughout the world gave birth to an overbearing federal government that is answerable to no one, a false supremacy of the federal government over the states, a government that cannot control its own growth or spending, the principle that agents of the federal government are above the law, a government that does not obey its own Constitution, and it spawned a perpetual cycle of servitude for all Americans in the form of income tax. That national tax system requires the tracking of everything that every American does. They did it for the money and it was only the money.
The Northern troops were enraged and their army began experiencing increased desertions when, in the middle of the war, the Northern politicians reinvented the war as a crusade against slavery, for political capital, and as a means to further punish the South. Northern soldiers were deeply disturbed by this new narrative, which stated that they were expected to continue killing their own countrymen for the sole benefit of the Negroes. It was not what they had enlisted for. Meanwhile, many (if not most) of the freed slaves had to be driven from their plantations by Northern soldiers, for they were afraid to leave the only places that they knew to be their homes. Most of the slaves had come to consider their owners as family and this feeling was often mutual. Allowing the slaves to voluntarily remain looked terrible politically and the press would have had a heyday if the overwhelming majority had remained. So, slaves were driven into the wilderness with very few options for their survival, other than crime. In response to the rampant crime by former slaves (who sadly had no other way to survive) the Ku Klux Klan was formed as a vigilante organization, but it quickly spiraled out of control with the growing racial tensions. At no point in this catastrophe was genuinely helping the “colored” a goal of the North’s war machine.
America’s Founding Fathers labored over what might be the most important document that will ever be written by man, only to be gutted less than 100 years later, by a president who is falsely revered. Lincoln may have taken actions that ultimately brought the broken Union back together, but the aftermath of his role as a despot and military dictator marks him as the worst enemy that the United States has ever known. Lincoln came closer to completely destroying the United States than anyone else. The institution of slavery would have ended soon, with or without a war. If Lincoln had chosen the without option, or if the South had been allowed to participate in the presidential election, then America would not have had its cultural and economic base obliterated. The U.S. would have advanced centuries beyond where it is now, and race relations would be good. Instead, most of America was sent back to the Stone Age, and the flames of racial hatred were fanned in a way that may never be truly quenched. Lincoln never expressed remorse for any of it. He was, by every definition, a sociopath. He would be at home in today’s liberal politics.
Lessons to Be Learned
The history of the American Civil War ought to provide us with some important lessons, and it is easy to understand why the lessons are avoided by today’s leftist educators. The American Civil War was a dire warning about the destiny of any welfare state. In the early stages of the disease, the U.S. political system was brought to its knees by class warfare.
Eventually, as the class system ever polarized, one group became entirely responsible for financially supporting another. America became the first welfare state, with the South providing the welfare benefits to the North. The North was the South’s ungrateful and jealous welfare child. Eventually, the North shifted from simple ingratitude to full-fledged resentment against the hand that fed it. This irrational resentment is the eventual consequence of all welfare systems, whenever they are continued for long enough. The solution to the North’s jealousy and resentment was violence, which it justified through rationalizations of injustices by the very people whom it had developed a parasitic relationship with. Everything collapsed once the North ran out of other peoples’ money. It had behaved as if there had been no need for thriftiness, since more money could always be taken, but there isn’t always more.
Compare this to the politics of today. Very little has actually changed. Between all the political correctness, socialist movement, race baiting, and identity politics of liberalism today, we still find that we destroy the character and spirit of a people whenever we are too generous. Through our excessive generosity, we encourage the beneficiaries of our philanthropy to develop a sense of entitlement and a belief in the righteousness of theft.
Quote of the Times;
“The intention is everything; the act nothing.”
Link of the Times;
https://www.dailywire.com/news/25183/12-major-stories-2017-media-buried-forgot-or-ryan-saavedra?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_content=062316-news&utm_campaign=benshapiro
The iBoob will cost between $799 and $999, depending on the speaker size.
This is considered to be a major breakthrough as women have always complained about men staring at their breasts and not listening to them.
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A wife complains, "Our wall clock almost killed my mother today. It fell only seconds after she got up from the couch."
The husband mumbles, "Damn clock always was slow."
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Japanese Emperor Admits Pearl Harbor ‘Kind of a Dick Move’
CHIYODA, Japan — In remembrance of Pearl Harbor, Emperor Akihito admitted in a public comment that the Japanese sneak attack that brought the United States into World War Two was “kind of a dick move.”
“We are taking the time to express Our regret for a wrong committed over 70 years ago,” the Emperor began. “This week, after seeing a news report about a Pearl Harbor veteran ceremony, We thought to ourself, ‘Man, that was kind of a dick move, We should probably make an expression that acknowledges that.'”
The emperor said he used the American slang to make his message more heartfelt and appealing to his US audience, according to a Japanese political analyst.
“Really, what the hell were we thinking? That was a really weird time for us,” Akihito added.
Akihito made the stunning remarks during a speech at the Yasukuni Shrine, a controversial Shinto site which commemorates the names of Japanese soldiers killed in service to the Empire. Among the names are those of war criminals hanged by international tribunal.
“We would also like to note that that this announcement has absolutely nothing to do with an upcoming $10 billion arms deal with the United States for new Aegis guided missile destroyers,” Akihito added at the end of his remarks.
The announcement stunned onlookers and infuriated governments across the region, especially China, whose people suffered some of the worst atrocities at the hands of the Japanese Empire during the war, including the infamous Rape of Nanking, where over 100,000 women were forced into sex slavery for Japanese soldiers and an estimated 300,000 citizens were killed.
Although Akihito apologized for the Nanking incident in 1995, he refused to issue a written statement. Many Japanese history books still refer to that conflict as the War of Western Aggression.
While US officials praised the announcement, many on social media have criticized the emperor for not going further and condemning his country’s role in the creation and distribution of Hello Kitty, Pokemon, tentacle porn, and ridiculous game shows.
At press time analysts noted that throughout the entire speech Akihito didn’t ever actually use the words “sorry,” “apologize” or even “our bad,” for the 1941 attack.
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Little Johnny says, "Mom, when I was on the bus with Daddy this morning, he told me to give up my seat to a lady."
"Well, you've done the right thing," says Mommy.
"But Mommy, I was sitting on daddy's lap."
*.*
When life has got me down and I'm ready to give up, I try to remind myself:
I'm the one in control here.
I have the gun and the hostages.
So back off!
Issue of the Times;
The Whitewashed Tyranny of Abraham Lincoln by Tara Dodrill
Abraham Lincoln was the best U.S. President, motivated by a patriotic and Christian desire to preserve the union of states and free the slaves. At least that is what modern textbooks suggest. There is a bigger story to the 16th President of the United States than the Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation. A whitewashed version of the man is all that we learned about him in school. It is what our children and grandchildren are still being taught. Public school districts and universities have been dutifully parroting that the Southern states of Lincoln’s era had a perverse culture, while Northern society was superior. This became the politically-correct mantra when ‘teaching’ about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War for generations after the Civil Rights Movement. The identity politics is only getting worse, and more blatant.
The narrative is not only infused heavily with a liberal bias, but moreover, it is entirely wrong. Far too many Americans, both current students and adults, believe that the Civil War was a war about slavery. This liberalized version of history does not chronicle the political shenanigans that were undertaken by groups to harden theircentralized (federal) grasp on power, as is still the case today. Most Americans do not believe that this issue was at play during Lincoln’s era, but they are so very wrong. The current political atmosphere in America is a testament to how ignorance of history forces a people to repeat it.
President Abraham Lincoln should not be revered as a hallowed figure. “Honest Abe” was a mere man; one who made mistakes and decisions based on his own self-interest. Some of his choices did benefit America, but the benefits were often a positive byproduct of his political self-interest, not benevolence.
Abraham Lincoln’s Flopping Stance on Slavery
The liberal Republicans of the time, who eventually touted Lincoln as a champion of freedom, steadfastly demanded the media and citizens not “paint him with an Abolitionist brush,” during his first inaugural address. Abraham Lincoln did not wish to be known as anti-slavery after putting his hand on the Bible and taking the oath of office. Also, during his first inaugural address, President Lincoln declared that he had absolutely no legal authority to interfere with the practice of slavery in states where it already existed. He then went on to boldly say that he would be enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act. The federal law mandated the return of runaway slaves who had fled slave states to seek safety and freedom in the North.
Although the history textbooks tend to gloss over such facts, slavery did once exist in the North. The practice of owning human beings had ended throughout the Northern states by 1804. Even after slavery was abolished in the North, racial discrimination still heavily existed in workplaces, schools, and communities. The idea of a little white girl sitting next to a little black girl, or a black man and a white woman courting was still not accepted by the ‘tolerant’ North or ‘freedom-loving’ elites, who were hurling hateful rhetoric toward the South. Meanwhile, indentured servitude in the North, which was a big step but not a leap up from slavery, remained legal. Equally legal was the use of children as the North’s virtual slave labor inside its factories. Many of whom were worked to death, and usually had a poorer quality of life than the average Southern slave.
Politics, money, and power were just as intrinsically woven during the 1860’s as they are today. Some of the most fervent and vocal anti-slavery Northerners, who pushed for an end to slavery, were not doing it entirely from a human rights sentiment. Many wealthy businessmen in the North were pressuring politicians to force the South into submission over slavery, because they felt that it created unfair competition in the marketplace. With slavery existing in the Southern states, Northern businessmen were being forced to compete against free labor. Even child laborers had to be paid something, after all.
Congress was fiercely divided over the issue of slavery during the months prior to the election of Abraham Lincoln. Heated arguments over the Thirteenth Amendment occurred on a daily basis in the House of Representatives and the Senate. The furious debates continued during the early stages of Lincoln’s presidency.
The Thirteenth Amendment that most Americans associate with Abraham Lincoln was passed at the end of the Civil War, in 1865. However, there was a previous version of the Thirteenth Amendment that had a polar-opposite intent. Lincoln publicly supported the former version during his swearing-in ceremony. This original version of the Thirteenth Amendment was meant to enshrine the practice of slavery as immutable. It would have amended the Constitution to pro-actively prevent any future legislature from ever attempting to outlaw the ownership of human beings. This version of what would have become the Thirteenth Amendment, if it had passed, is now often referred to as the Corwin Amendment. Thomas Corwin, an Ohio Republican Representative and a Lincoln supporter, sponsored the bill.
“I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable,” Lincoln said when referencing Corwin’s proposal, according to a report by Constitution Daily.
The Political Landscape Before Lincoln’s Election
To truly understand what actually caused the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln’s massive flip-flop on slavery, we must understand what happened during the 10 years that led up to his election, and the split in the Democrat Party, which occurred at its convention to select a presidential candidate to oppose the Republicans.
In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed. This law permitted each new state coming into the United States to decide for itself whether or not slavery would be legal inside its borders. It was sponsored by the wing of Republicans to which Lincoln belonged. The legislation overturned the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had banned slavery north of Maryland’s northern border. This delineation is commonly known as the Mason-Dixon line.
For decades before Lincoln’s election, the Southern states had been responsible for most of the federal government’s revenue. The South had stringent tariffs forced upon it by Northern lawmakers, who in-turn gave about 80 percent of the funds to enhance public works in their states and bolster the struggling economy of the North. There was no income tax in the United States at that time, nor had there ever been an income tax, as it is forbidden by the U.S. Constitution. About 85 percent of the revenue that the federal government had at its disposal came in the form of tariffs that were levied on goods and services from the South. The high taxes that Southerners paid helped to build railroads, roads, manufacturing complexes, and canals in the North.
Before 1812, the tariffs levied were between 15 and 20 percent. The funds garnered by these tariffs were enough to keep the federal government fully functional, without placing an excessive burden on any specific region of the country. When the War of 1812 broke out, the tariffs upon Southern businesses were increased up to 26 percent by Congress, with the net profits being funneled to aid manufacturers in the North. With a new tariff in 1828, the economy of South Carolina took the biggest hit and lost 25 percent of its export business in just 24 months. In the Southern newspapers, the tariff was nicknamed “Tariff of Abominations”. The U.S. Congress was dominated by Whig Party members from the North, who had passed the tariff, increasing the amount that the South had to pay on exported goods up to 50 percent.
In 1832, South Carolina officials called for a state convention to nullify both the tariff of 1828 and another tariff that had been enacted earlier that same year, by arguing that the tariffs were unconstitutional. Unfair taxation was one of the premises that had sparked America’s War of Independence against England, and it seemed as if the same issue was going to prompt a Civil War in the still-young nation.
In early 1860, the Morrill Tariff was passed. Even though the tariffs being collected from the South now totaled about 87 percent of the federal government’s revenue. The bill was named after Northern steel manufacturer and Republican Congressman, Justin Morrill. The legislation levied up to a 47 percent tariff increase on exported goods over the course of three years. The burden of this new tariff fell squarely on the shoulders of the South. The industrial businesses of the North were largely domestic sellers. The Morrill Tariff decreased the trade value of agricultural exports overseas, causing a gigantic blow to the Southern economy. Abraham Lincoln campaigned as a supporter of the tariff. Thaddeus Stevens, a Lincoln supporter and Republican Congressman, co-authored the Morrill Tariff.
During the campaign season, the iron manufacturer from Pennsylvania said that the two most important issues of the 1860 election were increasing tariffs and putting an end to slavery. Stevens also told a New York crowd that the new tariff would financially cripple the South and the West, but it would enrich the North. He claimed that it would increase the wages of Northern industrial workers and help America achieve greatness.
Henry Clay, who was the leader of the Whig Party, which held the majority in Congress, was able to implement an export tariff of 36 percent, in 1861. The economy of the North began to boom, because the bulk of its industrial goods were sold domestically. The Southern economy began a downward spiral, as the vast majority of its revenue was based upon the exportation of cotton and tobacco to Europe.
Former President and South Carolina Senator, John C. Calhoun, was able to negotiate a compromise that would roll back the tariffs to their former 15 percent range over the course of several years. Henry Clay (a man whom Lincoln greatly admired) and his Whig party were infuriated at being forced into a compromise with the South. It meant the loss of money that was to be ultimately funneled, at least in part, to their campaign supporters.
If Southern officials had tried to resist the tariffs, they would have been herded up and hanged as enemies of the state. Thaddeus Stevens was a powerful leader within the Republican party, and by some accounts, he ran the nation after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. His open hostility toward the South and vindictiveness explains the North’s punitive tone during the Reconstruction Era.
The 1860 Presidential Election
Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election, but the why and how have been left out of most history books, and this is causing the mis-education of millions of Americans.
The Democrat Party split along geographical lines during its presidential convention. A northern faction and a southern faction emerged. The convention ended without the nomination of a candidate to run on the ticket. When the Democrats met in Charleston, South Carolina to hold their convention in April, tensions swirled and boiled over rather quickly. Northern party leaders felt that Stephen Douglas was their best chance to defeat the “Black Republicans” seeking to end or limit slavery. Southern Democrats largely deemed Douglas to be unfit, because he believed that the federal government had no right to determine the legality of slavery. Douglas maintained that the issue should remain a state decision. Six weeks after the Southern Democrats walked out of the convention without a vote being held, Stephen Douglas was nominated during a second convention that was held in the North. Southern Democrats also held a second convention and nominated the sitting Vice President, John Breckenridge, to lead the ticket.
With the Democrat Party split in half and in chaos, Republicans felt that they would have an edge in the presidential race during their convention, which they held in Chicago the following month. Republicans needed a candidate who would garner the Electoral College votes of the North. Such a scenario would require carrying Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Illinois, and Indiana.
After intense debate over a slew of possible candidates, Abraham Lincoln, after three votes were taken, received the nomination. During his one term in the Senate, the press had cast Lincoln as a strong all-American man, with an inspiring pull-yourself-up by the bootstraps story. He had become the darling of the Northern press during his bitter debates with Stephen Douglas earlier the same year. News coverage of the debates was spread nationwide at a time when the telegraph was still in its infancy.
When a 3-way race for the presidency turned into a 4-man contest, Abraham Lincoln’s party felt that their candidate would be a shoe-in, if given the right press coverage. John Bell, a wealthy Tennessee plantation owner, was nominated as the candidate for the newly-created Constitutional Union Party. The political group was largely composed of community pillars and former politicians. They described themselves as moderates. They believed that the best way to calm the nation and win the election was to avoid the issue of slavery altogether.
As a presidential candidate, Lincoln supported the deportation of all Negroes to an unpopulated zone outside of America. This was euphemistically described as a policy of “colonization”. As late as December of 1862, Lincoln was continuing to promote his idea of ridding the U.S. mainland of all Negroes, even as the Civil War raged on. This stance, which was one that was taken by some of the most conservative members of his political party, did not endear him to either abolitionists or Southern voters.
When Lincoln ran for the highest office in the land in 1860, it was the first time that “sectional” (regional) parties were involved in a presidential race. It was also the first time that the South was not represented on either the top or the bottom of a winning presidential ticket. Abraham Lincoln did not win a single Electoral College vote from either a Southern or a border state. In fact, he won the election with only 39 percent of the popular vote. The message was clear to Southerners: the North, and only the North, would determine the president.
“I will say then, that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of making voters of the Negroes, or jurors, or qualifying them to hold office, of having them to marry with white people. I will say in addition, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races, which I suppose, will forever forbid the two races living together upon terms of social and political equality, and inasmuch, as they cannot so live, that while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior and inferior, that I as much as any other man am in favor of the superior position being assigned to the white man.” — Abraham Lincoln, 1858, Lincoln-Douglas Debate
Abraham Lincoln’s Early Months in the Presidency
Southerners perceived the election of Abraham Lincoln as the solidification of Northern dominance over nearly every aspect of their lives. It took only a day for Americans in South Carolina and multiple Gulf Coast states to call for secession.
Despite the mounting tensions between the North and South, Lincoln did not have a single man who lived below the Mason-Dixon line on his cabinet as an adviser, nor did he take a meeting with any Southern lawmakers from the time that he was elected up through the beginning of the Civil War.
If the preservation of the Union was a top priority for Lincoln, he should have attempted to prevent the mounting hostilities, addressed the concerns that the South had been battling against for more than a decade, and tried to prevent the fever pitch from growing louder. But he did not. Lincoln ignored the South’s economic and states’ rights worries repeatedly, so their distrust of the new president increased dramatically.
Instead of attempting to meet with Southerners to calm their fears over continued tariff increases, or working toward eventually ending slavery peaceably, Lincoln signed the Morrill Tariff into law. Taking his power a step further, the new president vowed that he would ensure enforcement of the high tariff on Southern states that seceded from the Unites States. It signaled to the Southern states that they were trapped in a position of perpetual servitude to produce federal revenue.
President Lincoln was essentially calling the South out, but Southerners were not bluffing. They had lost patience in having taxation without representation for the sole benefit of the North, and so they seceded, with South Carolina being the first state to exit the Union. Northern members of Congress began preparing for a military campaign, as their Southern peers were packing up their Washington, D.C. offices for train rides home.
James Buchanan alongside other current and former politicians of the time reached out to the South, as well as the incoming administration to engage in a constitutional convention that was to be followed by a direct-vote national vote on the divisive issues threatening to tear apart the country. It was a Kansas Senator, John Crittenden, not Abraham Lincoln, who took bold steps to preserve the Union and prevent a Civil War that would ultimately take more than 650,000 American lives. Modern history books ignore the Kansas Senator’s noble efforts, as well as the decision by Lincoln and his party to embrace bloodshed.
The Crittenden Compromise called for immediate legislation to create a far more permanent solution, by way of constitutional amendments, for the issues dividing the nation. The compromise called for extending the slavery boundaries established by the 1820 Missouri Compromise, which had been terminated by the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act. This was the North’s proverbial fig leaf, which was being offered to appease Southerners, in the hope that friendly relations could be renewed. The act, which did get some support from powerful Senators in the North, was sent to a special committee. However, it died when some of Lincoln’s most staunch supporters quickly rejected the Crittenden Compromise. “History is to record us,” the Kansas Senator cautioned Congress when presenting his bill. “Is it to record that when the destruction of the Union was imminent, we stood quarreling?”
When elected officials from Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida received no communication from President Lincoln to assure them that the fiscal attacks on the South would come to an end, they also voted to secede. North Carolina was the last to leave, and it ultimately lost the most men to the war.
President Lincoln’s War
Every newspaper in the country ran headlines about the South’s secession. Neither the press nor the Northeastern public disputed the right of the states to legally and peaceably withdraw from the United States, at least not initially. When a member of Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet suggested that they just let the South leave peaceably, the president has been quoted as replying, “Let the South go? Where, then, would we get our revenue!” Respect for the South’s right to secede soon vanished, not because of a more in-depth look at our Constitution, but because wealthy Northern business leaders suddenly realized that they would soon be competing in a truly free market (sans high tariffs) against the South. This fact, on top of worries about the massive loss of annual revenues resulting from lost tariffs, soon caused saber rattling of epic proportions.
President Lincoln finally took a meeting, a covert one, with a Southerner. He met with Virginia Secession Convention delegate Colonel John Baldwin. The colonel, like many of his peers, preferred for his state to remain a part of the United States if a compromise could be reached. During the April 4th, 1861 meeting, Colonel Baldwin learned that the president was already plotting a military assault against the South at Fort Sumter. The Virginia delegate tried to convince Lincoln that any such action would force the Southern states into an all-out war with the North. The colonel also told the president that if the South were permitted to leave the Union peaceably, economic and historical ties would ultimately bring the two geographical factions back together again.
Another point of fact that modern history textbooks omit is why Fort Sumter was the place that Lincoln chose to make a stand. It was not merely a military fort. Fort Sumter was a tariff collection facility. The president’s attempt to terrorize the South through Fort Sumter was an epic failure.
Colonel Baldwin responded to a letter that was sent by a Northern politician asking what would become of Union men in Virginia after the battle of Fort Sumter. “There are now no Union men in Virginia. But those who were Union men will stand to their arms, and make a fight which shall go down in history as an illustration of what a brave people can do in defense of their liberties, after having exhausted every means of pacification.”
After losing the early battles of the Civil War, Lincoln and his supporters, both in industry and the Senate, began to anguish over the possibility that England and European nations would send military support to the South, since his administration was viewed throughout the world as a despotic regime. There was concern that the Republican leadership would be tried like war criminals. Threats and a naval blockade ensued to preemptively thwart interventions by other nations. Lincoln even threatened war against any nation that sought to provide humanitarian aid.
Author Charles Dickens penned a now obscure but relevant opinion piece about the Civil War in a London newspaper during the final weeks of 1861. “The Northern onslaught upon slavery is no more than a piece of specious humbug disguised to conceal its desire for economic control of the United States.”
Infamous socialist Karl Marx also saw the Civil War for exactly what it was. He wrote, “The war between the North and South is a tariff war. The war, is further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery, and in fact turns on the Northern lust for power.”
During his first four months as President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln trampled the U.S. Constitution to create the military dictatorship that was necessary to wage and win a war against his own people.
Abraham Lincoln’s Unconstitutional Acts and High Crimes
Lincoln circumvented Congress when calling up the United States Army — 75,000 men initially.
He refused to call Congress back into session after ordering military action at Fort Sumter.
Ordered the Navy to blockade Southern ports, a direct act of war. Such an act could only be undertaken by an order of Congress. It was a diabolical tactic to prevent food imports, in order to starve the Southern states.
In an escalation of Lincoln’s starvation strategy, he ordered General Sherman to begin a military campaign against civilians, cities, and hospitals. Women and children were not spared. General Sherman was nicknamed “Burning Sherman”, because he randomly burned entire cities, even in the middle of winter. Lincoln ordered Sherman to terrorize the South by pillaging and plundering at a level that surpassed even the ancient Roman armies. As America’s first war criminal, General Sherman is one of the main reasons why disease and starvation killed significantly more people in the Civil War than combat.
Suspended the writ of habeas corpus, yet another act that is a function of Congress. The suspension of habeas corpus gave Lincoln the power to arrest Americans without filing a criminal charge and permitted him to have them held indefinitely without either a charge or a trial.
Lincoln violated the Constitution once again when he refused to comply with a Supreme Court order to immediately restore the right of habeas corpus. Our Founding Fathers added the habeas corpus protection into the Constitution specifically so tyranny would never again reign in America, as it had in Europe and when the “New World” was under British control.
Lincoln had the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court arrested after receiving a court order to restore habeas corpus protections. Upon receiving the ruling by the high court, the president sent a federal marshal to arrest the Chief Justice.
There has never been a more substantial threat to a free press in the history of our country than the 16th President of the United States. Lincoln sent soldiers to destroy printing presses and related newspaper publishing tools at outlets which did not support his handling of the Southern secession. In response to negative editorials about the military invasion of the South and his overall war policy, Lincoln also commandeered, and then closed 300 Northern newspapers.
President Lincoln did not stop at just destroying private property and commandeering newspapers, he also arrested and imprisoned many of the editors and publishers of those same press outlets.
Before the end of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln had ordered the arrest of approximately 20,000 Americans without charging them with a crime or permitting them to have their day in court. The citizens who were unconstitutionally detained had spoken out against Lincoln personally, the Civil War, or were merely suspected of harboring anti-war sentiments.
The 16th President illegally took it upon himself to create a new state. West Virginia quickly came into existence after Lincoln declared war on the South, as a North-friendly region within the South.
Lincoln arrested and imprisoned the entire Maryland state legislature to prevent them from holding a debate and taking a vote on secession. The elected officials were never charged with a crime, or granted a trial.
Concluding the War of Northern Aggression
What occurred in 1861 still festers to this day, and almost all of it has been cloaked in politically-expedient lies. A tyrannical, centralized government that was hell-bent on dominating the Southern states was coalesced by the election of Abraham Lincoln. What was known as the War of Northern Aggression throughout the world gave birth to an overbearing federal government that is answerable to no one, a false supremacy of the federal government over the states, a government that cannot control its own growth or spending, the principle that agents of the federal government are above the law, a government that does not obey its own Constitution, and it spawned a perpetual cycle of servitude for all Americans in the form of income tax. That national tax system requires the tracking of everything that every American does. They did it for the money and it was only the money.
The Northern troops were enraged and their army began experiencing increased desertions when, in the middle of the war, the Northern politicians reinvented the war as a crusade against slavery, for political capital, and as a means to further punish the South. Northern soldiers were deeply disturbed by this new narrative, which stated that they were expected to continue killing their own countrymen for the sole benefit of the Negroes. It was not what they had enlisted for. Meanwhile, many (if not most) of the freed slaves had to be driven from their plantations by Northern soldiers, for they were afraid to leave the only places that they knew to be their homes. Most of the slaves had come to consider their owners as family and this feeling was often mutual. Allowing the slaves to voluntarily remain looked terrible politically and the press would have had a heyday if the overwhelming majority had remained. So, slaves were driven into the wilderness with very few options for their survival, other than crime. In response to the rampant crime by former slaves (who sadly had no other way to survive) the Ku Klux Klan was formed as a vigilante organization, but it quickly spiraled out of control with the growing racial tensions. At no point in this catastrophe was genuinely helping the “colored” a goal of the North’s war machine.
America’s Founding Fathers labored over what might be the most important document that will ever be written by man, only to be gutted less than 100 years later, by a president who is falsely revered. Lincoln may have taken actions that ultimately brought the broken Union back together, but the aftermath of his role as a despot and military dictator marks him as the worst enemy that the United States has ever known. Lincoln came closer to completely destroying the United States than anyone else. The institution of slavery would have ended soon, with or without a war. If Lincoln had chosen the without option, or if the South had been allowed to participate in the presidential election, then America would not have had its cultural and economic base obliterated. The U.S. would have advanced centuries beyond where it is now, and race relations would be good. Instead, most of America was sent back to the Stone Age, and the flames of racial hatred were fanned in a way that may never be truly quenched. Lincoln never expressed remorse for any of it. He was, by every definition, a sociopath. He would be at home in today’s liberal politics.
Lessons to Be Learned
The history of the American Civil War ought to provide us with some important lessons, and it is easy to understand why the lessons are avoided by today’s leftist educators. The American Civil War was a dire warning about the destiny of any welfare state. In the early stages of the disease, the U.S. political system was brought to its knees by class warfare.
Eventually, as the class system ever polarized, one group became entirely responsible for financially supporting another. America became the first welfare state, with the South providing the welfare benefits to the North. The North was the South’s ungrateful and jealous welfare child. Eventually, the North shifted from simple ingratitude to full-fledged resentment against the hand that fed it. This irrational resentment is the eventual consequence of all welfare systems, whenever they are continued for long enough. The solution to the North’s jealousy and resentment was violence, which it justified through rationalizations of injustices by the very people whom it had developed a parasitic relationship with. Everything collapsed once the North ran out of other peoples’ money. It had behaved as if there had been no need for thriftiness, since more money could always be taken, but there isn’t always more.
Compare this to the politics of today. Very little has actually changed. Between all the political correctness, socialist movement, race baiting, and identity politics of liberalism today, we still find that we destroy the character and spirit of a people whenever we are too generous. Through our excessive generosity, we encourage the beneficiaries of our philanthropy to develop a sense of entitlement and a belief in the righteousness of theft.
Quote of the Times;
“The intention is everything; the act nothing.”
Link of the Times;
https://www.dailywire.com/news/25183/12-major-stories-2017-media-buried-forgot-or-ryan-saavedra?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_content=062316-news&utm_campaign=benshapiro
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No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.