Update and Random Thoughts

[chris_gerrib]

Update

Yesterday I made a one-day business trip to eastern Tennessee. It involved an oh-dark-thirty wake up call to catch the dawn patrol flight to Nashville, an hour's drive, and a late evening return to Chicago. I seriously considered flying in the night before, but that would have meant a night in a chain motel and a dinner at a chain restaurant. In short, six of one or a half dozen of the other. In any event, I'm back in the saddle.

Random Thoughts

1) Via various news sources (use your own Google) former general and Secretary of State Colin Powell is quoted has having said in email that the Benghazi affair was a witch hunt. He was also quoted (a sentiment I agree with) as saying the problem was our Ambassador thought the Libyan people loved him (which they may have) and thus he was safe (obviously not).

2) Again via various sources comes news that the Trump charitable "foundation" was yet another scam. Trump collected other people's money, used same to write checks to other charities while siphoning off as much as possible to pay family and buy junk for himself. The technical term for such conduct is "felony fraud" and usually earns one an orange jumpsuit.

3) Over at Wright's House of Wrong, the proprietor quotes Chesterton on the loss of honor due to the South's defeat in the Civil War. I am gobsmacked to note that the entire just under 2000 word article has not one mention of "slavery" in it.

Comments

Re: Gobsmacked

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

has not one mention of "slavery" in it

Sure it does - the very fourth fifth sentence in!

I mean, you do know that the entire war was fought only and entirely to free blacks so they could vote Democrat, yes?  You did attend public grade school after 1965, right…?


        WHO CONTROLS THE PRESENT CONTROLS THE PAST
        WHO CONTROLS THE PAST CONTROLS THE FUTURE

Re: Gobsmacked

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

No, the war was fought so the South could expand slavery to the North, West, South (Cuba) and anywhere else.

“O Captain! my Captain!”

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

He died before it happened; and it happened because he died.

What Chesterton says about Reconstruction's bitterly vicious reign of terror is true, tho' today's “Correct” history stands mute on the subject.  What I found fascinating was something else that he says.  I will quote M Crichton's The Andromeda Strain:


        For years it was stated that men had forty-eight chromosomes in their
        cells; there were pictures to prove it, and any number of careful studies.
        In 1953, a group of American researchers announced to the world that the
        human chromosome number was forty-six. Once more, there were pictures to
        prove it, and studies to confirm it. But these researchers also went back
        to reexamine the old pictures, and the old studies - and found only forty-
        six chromosomes, not forty-eight.


People see what they expect to see.  Only when they get new ideas, do they see new patterns.

Everybody “knows” that John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald both acted alone, they were nuts, nothing to see here, move along…  In the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, when it became just wincingly obvious that whatever the truth, that wasn't it, a group of researchers in the 1970s dug into the subject and started pulling up evidence that had been there all along, but no one had seen it: 


        But Northern fanatics finished the work of the Southern fanatic; many of
        them as mad as he and more wicked than he. Mr. Bowers gives a vivid account
        of the reign of terror that Stevens and Sumner and the rest let loose on
        the defeated rebels a pestilence of oppression from which the full promise
        of America has never recovered… - Chesterton


- and it was those “Northern fanatics,” in government circles and in the US Army, who arranged the removal of that obstruction to their vengeance.  They conspired to murder the President of the United States - and part of their shield was the utter disbelief that anyone could do such a thing.  Not merely unproven, it was literally unthinkable.

A more cynical age finds it very thinkable.

Now, the evidence was of necessity circumstantial, and no iron-clad proof that would (legitimately) re-write history texts has yet discovered, but it's fascinating to see how “thinking outside the box” can allow the same data to be re-interpreted in a totally different manner.



[Unthinkable:  We really winced and waffled before deciding to specifically, actually target and kill one man (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Vengeance) in WWII.  It's just not done.  Which is why no one in the British government tried to take out Hitler.  “The Battle of France is over; the Battle of Britain is - oh.  Ah, never mind.”]

Re: “O Captain! my Captain!”

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

And the Ku Klux Klan were merely a social club. /sarcasm/

No, the South fought a guerrilla war against the North with the view to re-enslaving the Blacks. Unfortunately, they won that war.

Re: “O, Captain?”

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

This reply makes no sense in context or in itself.

I'm just sayin'.

Re: “O, Captain?”

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

when you complain about "Reconstruction's bitterly vicious reign of terror" I note that the terror came from the South - the KKK, fighting an Iraqi-style insurgency against the North and their former slaves.

I'm ignoring your conspiracy theory about the North and/or the Army assassinating Lincoln. They had neither motive nor opportunity.

Re: “O, Captain?”

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

Um…  I'll let this go because it's completely pointless, but, oww…

“Rockets cannot work in space because
the exhaust has nothing to push against!”

… Yeah.