"Gone for the Day!" A Primer on Staying Close to Your Beloved Esposa!

Reading the Epoch Times is always an adventure. I come across many excellent articles and often clip them to send to family members. This morning the article that caught my eye was advice to parents of children not to let their family responsibilities prevent working on their couple relationship. I sent it to a granddaughter who is expecting her second little one. They are in the busy-busy days of married life.

She and her husband are blessed to live near both of their families and there are abundant baby sitters who would love cuddling the little ones. I never had that. Both sets of parents were too far away to be very helpful. We were pretty much on our own and since I was raised in a frequently moving Navy family I had no local support group. We gradually developed one through Christian Family Movement and church, but that's not the same as family.

Are Your Sources Trustworthy? Remember, The Winners Write History...

...at least in the short term. Things generally begin to be sorted out looking backwards several generations later. 

That is certainly the case with the Lincoln cult, i.e. the "church of Lincoln." He was a great man in many ways. He was also a self-serving pragmatist, the highest paid lawyer in the country who argued for "Massah" in his one and only case involving slavery. Thomas DiLorenzo has several books showing the other side of Lincoln which is not a pretty picture.

I was a Lincoln worshiper as a teenager and still have the report I did in high school. But I no longer look at him as a secular saint who "ended slavery" with his Emancipation Proclamation. He did no such thing. The only slaves freed by that document were those in the South, slaves over which Lincoln had no control. He simply, in pragmatic fashion, hoped to stir up a slave insurrection. In view of the bloody revolts in Haiti and Ned Turner's Rebellion, where entire families were wiped out like the genocide in Rwanda, Lincoln apparently had no concern about the possibility he would stir up genocide against southern families. 

The Civil War is Coming, Folks. Put on Your Seatbelt and Pray Your Rosary!

 The other day I posted about the Texas lawsuit asking, "Is this what the new Civil War will look like?" I'm convinced now that the answer is a resounding, "YES!" There are millions of "deplorables" in the red states who are fed up to the teeth with immorality and political correctness being stuffed down their throats. This latest initiative demonstrates it!

18 States Join Texas Lawsuit Urging SCOTUS to Review Texas Bid to Challenge Election in Battleground States 

The Media's False Narrative Will Start a Civil War

JP Sears sets the record straight 

"The media doesn't have ANY authority to determine who the winner of the election is. Actually ZERO. That's the exact amount of authority they have. Determining the winner of an election is actually the legal responsibility of the 1) Electoral College 2) Senate 3) House of Representatives 4) National Archives. Not the media. This is something other countries see very clearly while our media seems to be clouding our vision."

Does the media want more rioting? A civil war? Of course they do. They want their orchestrated civil war because it will fit their narrative of destroying our country so that the Great Reset can begin but President Trump and 75 million Deplorables are in their way. In this satirical video JP Sears actually gives a very clear analysis of what the media is doing.

 

Millennials...sigh

The Millennial Song by Micah Tyler

Millennials cannot answer a simple question: 
Who Won the Civil War?

Economic Rape of the South Led to Secession

When Union troops tried to resupply Fort Sumter, South
Carolina fired on the fort. The only casualty was a donkey,
but it gave Lincoln an excuse to call up 75,000 troops to stop
secession and force Southern states to remain in the Union.
Some critics believe he deliberately provoked the battle to
justify the war against the Southern states.

It's important to understand the major role economic issues played in the South's decision to secede. The states of the South represented about one fifth of the U.S. population, but they were paying over 80% of the tariffs levied by a Congress controlled by the Northern states. The actual amount involved according to Charles Adams writing in his book When in the Course of Human Events was about $107.5 million being charged at federal ports on goods coming into the country. The South, more dependent on imports than the mercantile North ended up paying about $90 million of this total compared to $17.5 million from the Northern states. That was a disparity of 83% of tariff taxation being picked up by the South and only about 17% from the North.

Civil War Causes - Follow the Money: The Tariff Battles

The battle over tariffs played a major role in
regional antagonism culminating in the Civil War, 

Everyone has heard the old adage, “Follow the money,” which recognizes the major impact economic issues play in any dispute.  And the Bible itself warns that “Love of money is the root of all evils.” It also played a large role in the Civil War. Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin made slavery more economically desirable for the cotton planters because cotton could be processed more easily and required many pickers to feed the gin. And cotton was indeed “king” economically accounting for more than 50% of U.S. exports at the time. Since  importing slaves was banned by federal law in 1808, one result of the cotton gin was the transfer of slaves from the northern Dixie states to plantations in the deep South. 

Do You Want to Understand the Past? Examine the Witnesses!

Investigators know that if they interview ten witnesses to an event they are likely to get ten different reports. Figuring out what really happened requires sifting through the data and finding the agreements, determining who are the most credible witnesses, etc. To arrive at an accurate picture of an event is not so easy as evaluating one testimony or one photograph and extrapolating from that to the big picture. That's how dishonest historians evaluate the past. Honest historians study the big picture.

And that's how it is with understanding the Civil War, or as one book is titled, The War Between the States: America's Uncivil War by John J. Dwyer and other contributors. A broad and deep study is necessary. I've just begun the book, but I'm already impressed by the author's approach and common sense. He speaks of the war as a "Fifty Years' War" that involved numerous factors: economic, religious, regional. Slavery was one issue among many, a factor yes, but not necessarily the most fundamental.

I found this in the introduction particularly interesting:

Pat Buchanan on "Dishonoring Confederate War Dead"

Editor's note: Will the iconoclasts demand the removal of Washington and Jefferson from Mt. Rushmore next? When will this lunacy end? 

DISHONORING CONFEDERATE WAR DEAD

by Patrick Buchanan

On Sept. 1, 1864, Union forces under Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, victorious at Jonesborough, burned Atlanta and began the March to the Sea where Sherman's troops looted and pillaged farms and towns all along the 300-mile road to Savannah.

Captured in the Confederate defeat at Jonesborough was William Martin Buchanan of Okolona, Mississippi, who was transferred by rail to the Union POW stockade at Camp Douglas, Illinois.

For a century, Americans lived comfortably with the honoring, North and South, of the men who fought on both sides.

By the standards of modernity, my great-grandfather, fighting to prevent the torching of Georgia's capital, was engaged in a criminal and immoral cause. And "Uncle Billy" Sherman was a liberator.

Under President Grant, Sherman took command of the Union army and ordered Gen. Philip Sheridan, who had burned the Shenandoah Valley to starve Virginia into submission, to corral the Plains Indians on reservations.

It is in dispute as to whether Sheridan said, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." There is no dispute as to the contempt Sheridan had for the Indians, killing their buffalo to deprive them of food.

Today, great statues stand in the nation's capital, along with a Sherman and a Sheridan circle, to honor these most ruthless of generals in that bloodiest of wars that cost 620,000 American lives. 

Read more....

Biking the Gettysburg Battlefield Reflecting on Choice

Larry and I spent the weekend in Gettysburg square dancing with our camping club. We never have much time on these weekends to see the sights so we stayed an extra day. This morning we biked the battlefield. As I rode around examining the monuments and reading the historical markers I thought of choice. The Kansas-Nebraska Act signed in 1854 was all about choice. Western territories had the "freedom to choose" by popular vote whether to be slave or free. In other words, Kansas-Nebraska, like Roe v. Wade was "pro-choice." Of course, Kansas Nebraska was passed by the Congress and Roe was imposed by the Supreme Court, but both sanctified the notion of the freedom to choose.

On Slavery and the War between the States

I'm reading an interesting book on Stonewall Jackson's Valley Campaign. Since moving to the Valley in 2002, I'm fascinated by its history which attracted me to Stonewall in the Valley by Robert Tanner when I was browsing the shelves of our little independent library in Woodstock. Initially I just planned to look up all the entries on Woodstock, but when I read the first chapter I was hooked.

One paragraph that leaped out at me referred tangentially to slavery. It described Jedekiah Hotchkiss, the famous mapmaker of the Confederacy. If you've ever seen samples of his maps you were no doubt impressed by their accuracy. A satellite map can hardly compare. The man had a great gift for "seeing" the lay of the land. A few years ago, Larry and I saw a display of his work at Winchester's Museum of the Shenandoah Valley. Wow! How could anyone on horseback with little opportunity for a bird's eye view make maps so detailed and so accurate? And to think it was a hobby. At any rate, Hotchkiss's profession was education and he began a number of schools in the Valley, the New Yorker's adopted home.

Here's the paragraph that impressed me: