September 11, 2019 at 7:30 am (History Doesn't Lie - You Just Don't Understand It, Never Forget, Politics, The Long War, War on Terror)
The 11th of September. A beautiful fall day burned forever into our memories.
Some years, the words flow. This year, all I have is a dull ache, a gnawing grief that will not be soothed.
Remember the lost.
Remember the ones lost since due to sickness caused by exposure during the rescue/recovery.
Remember the ones suffering now, soon to be lost.
Last year’s post.
September 11, 2018 at 6:41 am (History Doesn't Lie - You Just Don't Understand It, Never Forget, War on Terror)
Imagine working beside someone who was ten years old on this fateful day in 2001. Someone who had only heard what teachers and yammering talking-heads have said throughout their school years. Not someone who lost someone that day. Or knew others who lost friends, spouses, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, co-workers, the cute girl at the coffee shop, or an entire firehouse of brave fireman.
America, America. My tears are for thee.
My day today is filled with senseless meetings. My phone will buzz with the annual reminders to reflect on our losses – of Flight 11 at 8:46, Flight 75 at 9:03, Flight 77 at 9:37, the South Tower collapse at 9:59, Flight 93 at 10:07, and the North Tower collapse at 10:28. I will be quiet and distracted. The meeting leaders will wonder what’s going on in my insignificant little life that my phone is suddenly rattling away.
From the 9/11/13 post:
Despite the sadness, and the blustery misdirection of politicos and media hounds, remember those who died this day at the hands of terrorist Islamists that our government now secretly embraces.
Georgia lost four sons that day:
- Claude Michael Gann of Roswell, whose tribute you can find here. Mike was recently remarried and attending a conference at Windows on the World.
- Major Stephen V. Long of Georgia, whose tributes you can find here and here. Already a war hero, he was at his post at the Pentagon when it was attacked.
- Maynard S. Spence Jr of Douglasville, whose tribute you can find here. He was on the 99th floor of the second tower.
- Harshad Sham Thatte of Norcross, whose Legacy page is here. He worked for the same company as Mr. Spence, Marsh & McLennan.
Teach your children and grandchildren what happened that day. Never, ever forget.
November 21, 2013 at 8:50 pm (History Doesn't Lie - You Just Don't Understand It)
Via The Daley Gator:
Vallely, formerly the deputy commanding general of Pacific Command, said the current crop of leaders must be forced to resign by the “demand resignation” process, which he explained requires massive grass-roots protests and social networking. As an example, he cited the public and media pressure that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.
Impeachment, Vallely said, is not a viable option because of “partisan politics.”
“Our federal government continues down the path of destroying America,” he said. “Americans must now stand up and put America back on the right track.”
Read the whole thing. I’ll wait.
With the (Un)ACA imploding, Democrats running for the hills, damaging lies being exposed every day, there might be a chance to salvage this country.
October 14, 2013 at 3:50 pm (History Doesn't Lie - You Just Don't Understand It, Politics, Stuff I'm tired of, Stupid Government Tricks)
Spengler has the right idea about all this posturing over the debt ceiling!
That is political overreaching of the worst kind. If Obama refuses to postpone the implementation of his health care plan in return for an extension of the debt ceiling, Republicans should stand their ground, and force the president to tear up the Constitution and assume dictatorial powers. Americans don’t like that, and they will dislike it doubly if Obama does so to protect a hated piece of legislation. It would clarify the choices before the electorate and give conservative Republicans something to run against. That isn’t enough: they have to present a credible program to restore economic growth and opportunity. But that will be then: this is now.
Read the whole thing to really understand what THAT is. I say CALL HIS BLUFF. Force a Constitutional crisis (hey – remember early on when he was touted as a Constitutional Scholar? Hahahaha) and make him show his true nature.
October 9, 2013 at 9:11 pm (History Doesn't Lie - You Just Don't Understand It, Obama Bad, Stupid Government Tricks)
The Weekly Standard calls a National Park Service goon a goon. Read the whole thing.
This is how deep the politicization of Barack Obama’s administration goes. The Park Service falls under the Department of the Interior, and its director is a political appointee. Historically, the directorship has been nonpartisan and the service has functioned as a civil, not a political, unit. Before the current director, Jonathan Jarvis, was nominated by President Obama, he’d spent 30 years as a civil servant. But he has taken to his political duties with all the fervor of a third-tier hack from the DNC, marrying the disinterested contempt of a meter maid with the zeal of an ambitious party apparatchik.
If you don’t think these shutdowns aren’t instigated out of pure spite, perhaps you’ll believe they are planned distractions to yet another Obama disaster.
Regardless, even the ‘low-information’ sorts are beginning to realize the President believes he’s a King.
[…]the federal government wasn’t so much regretfully informing the public that the money had run dry as it was attempting to remove its Royal blessing from a local Lord who does not rely on it. Nobody who genuinely recognizes government as the deferential servant of a naturally free people would view the state this way. Peeved Kings, convinced of their divine right and keen to demonstrate the folly of recalcitrant subjects, on the other hand, most certainly would. “It’s my party, and you’ll cry if I want you to,” our mandarins in D.C. appeared to say.
If you attended high school before 1976, you’ll know we fought a war to get rid of the last King. For those who didn’t, and therefore didn’t get their American history the way it should be taught, this link will get you started.
August 28, 2013 at 4:58 pm (History Doesn't Lie - You Just Don't Understand It, Libtards, Stop Obama)
Robert Fisk at the Independent (you can count on the over-the-pond media to report on issues the US media refuses to touch – look, kittens!) says what we know deep inside our red-blooded American hearts:
If Barack Obama decides to attack the Syrian regime, he has ensured – for the very first time in history – that the United States will be on the same side as al-Qa’ida.
Quite an alliance! Was it not the Three Musketeers who shouted “All for one and one for all” each time they sought combat? This really should be the new battle cry if – or when – the statesmen of the Western world go to war against Bashar al-Assad.
The men who destroyed so many thousands on 9/11 will then be fighting alongside the very nation whose innocents they so cruelly murdered almost exactly 12 years ago. Quite an achievement for Obama, Cameron, Hollande and the rest of the miniature warlords.
I have a very bad feeling about the next few days…
August 16, 2013 at 6:07 am (Faith, History Doesn't Lie - You Just Don't Understand It, Jedi Musings, Never Forget)
Calling all Bible scholars. Is the current meltdown in Egypt fulfillment of prophesy?
Besides viciously turning on themselves, the murderous Muslim horde Religion of Peace in Egypt have burned down scores of Christian churches and homes.
Remember this is the Long War of light against darkness.
The West’s war with Islam, a jihad begun and fought against us as a religious obligation, didn’t begin on September 11th, 2001, nor even in 1979, when Khomeini took over Iran. It’s been fought off and on for over 1,400 years, and now is in an active phase. The genius and determination of Leo III in desperate battle bought Western Europe the time it needed until it could stand on its own.
Read the whole thing. We need another clever leader, like Byzantine Emperor Leo III, now more than ever.
June 14, 2013 at 6:11 am (First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, History Doesn't Lie - You Just Don't Understand It, Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, Sic Semper Tyrannis)
Basically now we’re getting a scandal a day. When will America wake up to what is happening?
Daniel Henninger at the WSJ articulates my concern and disgust better than I can:
Cynics say presidents have always sicced the IRS on opponents. Perhaps. But those were simpler times. The IRS audit scandal and the NSA’s metadata surveillance may be apples and oranges, but for many the distinctions aren’t so obvious. We live today inside a constant torrent of big government and big data. No one should be surprised if a political backlash, however inarticulate, forms against both for inconsistent reasons.
Consider what people are asked to absorb in the news flow now—some of it political, some not. Beyond the IRS audits and NSA surveillance we have a Department of Justice penetrating press activity protected by the First Amendment, stories about Iran’s hackers accessing the control-room software of U.S. energy firms, China hacking into everything, reports last month of cyberthieves siphoning millions of dollars from ATMs, rivers of email spam that fill inboxes alongside constant warnings to protect yourself against phishing and malware by storing industrial-strength passwords on encrypted flash drives, stories in this newspaper about social-media apps that exist mainly to collect your personal data for sale to advertisers.
Books have been written about governments using Web technology to censor and control their populations. What’s good and evil, helpful and menacing, comes at us with equal force from the same technologies. “Dual-use” was formerly a phrase used mostly in the military. We’re all living in a dual-use world now.
Electronic sophisticates say it’s all good. Sun Microsystems’ former CEO Scott McNealy famously said: “You have zero privacy. Get over it.” That’s what he thinks. This is a sum-of-all-fears environment tailor-made for eventually producing a public backlash. It’s already in the water, with Sen. Rand Paul offering a Fourth Amendment Restoration Act, which he says would stop the NSA’s data-mining program. That would be the one protecting us all from homicidal Islamist bombers.
Without giving away the farm, I will admit my entire career has been IT, with many years in information security, so I understand all the ins and outs of these arguments. But there has to be a line drawn somewhere, and it shouldn’t be where Americans queue themselves up to live in a police state.
At the end of the day, Julian Assange had a point.
“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
February 4, 2013 at 6:03 pm (And now for something completely different, History Doesn't Lie - You Just Don't Understand It)
Or as they call them across the pond, “Car Parks.”
Archeologists were digging up just such a car park in Leicester, long believed to be site of the long lost Grey Friars church, when their excavations uncovered a human skeleton with curiously twisted spine.
The bones of Richard III (the last Plantagenet king of England) which were unearthed in that excavation a few months ago have been verified by DNA testing. Believe it or not, over 500 years later, a distant descendent was found in Canada and appropriately swabbed. Imagine HIS surprise at having English royalty in his family tree!
The king died a gruesome death. They didn’t have forensics back in 1485:
Richard died at Bosworth on 22 August 1485, the last English king to fall in battle, and the researchers revealed how for the first time. There was an audible intake of breath as a slide came up showing the base of his skull sliced off by one terrible blow, believed to be from a halberd, a fearsome medieval battle weapon with a razor-sharp iron axe blade weighing about two kilos, mounted on a wooden pole, which was swung at Richard at very close range. The blade probably penetrated several centimetres into his brain and, said the human bones expert Jo Appleby, he would have been unconscious at once and dead almost as soon.
The injury appears to confirm contemporary accounts that he died in close combat in the thick of the battle and unhorsed – as in the great despairing cry Shakespeare gives him: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”
Another sword slash, which also went through the bone and into the brain, would also have proved fatal. But many of the other injuries were after death, suggesting a gruesome ritual on the battlefield and as the king’s body was brought back to Leicester, as he was stripped, mocked and mutilated – which would have revealed for the first time to any but his closest intimates the twisted back, a condition from an unknown cause, which began to contort his body from the age of about 10. By the time he died he would have stood inches shorter than his true height of 5′ 8″, tall for a medieval man. The bones were those of an unusually slight, delicately built man – Appleby described him as having an “almost feminine” build – which also matches contemporary descriptions.
One terrible injury, a stab through the right buttock and into his pelvis, was certainly after death, and could not have happened when his lower body was protected by armour. It suggests the story that his naked corpse was brought back slung over the pommel of a horse, mocked and abused all the way, was true. Bob Savage, a medieval arms expert from the Royal Armouries who helped identify the wounds, said it was probably not a war weapon, but the sort of sharp knife or dagger any workman might have carried.
Ouch.
Plans are to rebury his remains at in a new tomb nearby Leicester Cathedral.
Now if they could only find the bones of those two little princes…
January 24, 2013 at 6:31 pm (America Lost, History Doesn't Lie - You Just Don't Understand It, Hope and Sadness, Stuff I'm tired of)
Well, the hubs is on his flight home. GradSchoolGirl is re-esconced in the frozen hinterlands of the north, in a new situation that has heat but no bugs or rats or noisy housemates. WeeHighlander is back at his school as well, with multiple promises to keep this coming semester substantially less festive than the last.
Monday was MLK day. This week I had the same discussion with my son and a co-worker (at different times) about how Dr. King would probably be ashamed of how his dream had been implemented over the last decade or so. How not only the country, but the states, the cities and towns, and even the workplace seems so polarized by race. Did Dr. King mean it when said that a person should be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin? He wanted, at least in my feeble understanding, for all to be equal and share the fruits of that equality. Now, it seems that anything but that.
Then Gerard said it better, as he always does:
Reflecting on The Day … I have to say that I’m sticking with that rueful but passing smirk as I consider the distance we’ve come since King’s speech at the Lincoln Memorial 50 years ago in 1963. Then we struggled, with men like King, to come together as a people, to move beyond our past, to be one nation. Now, under the cynical manipulation and malicious policies of one who would cast himself as the inheritor of the King mantle, we find the current occupant of the White House doing his best, day after day, to drive the races apart once again.
How strange that someone who has attained the presidency in this day and age should not only hate citizens because of the color of their skin and the cut of their bitter and clinging class, but be lauded for it. Stranger still that he should be half-black and be inaugurated on the day set aside to honor Martin Luther King. Once I would have remembered and honored this day and felt we were at last getting beyond race hate in America. When exactly that was I now forget. I guess we’ve still a reckoning ahead of us.
RIP Dr. King. I sincerely hope you’re not spinning in your grave.
November 14, 2012 at 9:17 am (America Lost, Election2012, Faith, History Doesn't Lie - You Just Don't Understand It, Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, Sic Semper Tyrannis)
I suppose, like a great part of this nation, I’ve been grieving and haven’t realized it. There the usual signs and stages: lack of sleep, lack of appetite, malaise, disinterest, dull and lingering pain, anger, shock, despair.
The scriptures about ‘rejoicing in trials’ keep running through my mind…
“Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, 3 because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. “ (James 1:2)
“There is cause for rejoicing here. You may for a time have to suffer the distress of many trials; but this is so that your faith, which is more precious than the passing splendor of fire-tried gold, may by its genuineness lead to praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ appears.” (1 Peter. 1:6-7)
Along with the ones about ‘gird yourself’…
Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. 11 Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. 12 For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. 13 Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. 14 Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, 15 and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. 16 In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. 17 Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. 18 And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints. 19 Pray also for me, that whenever I open my mouth, words may be given me so that I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel, 20 for which I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I may declare it fearlessly, as I should.” (Ephesians 6:10-20)
Get that… “fearlessly?” Fearlessly, Fear–less–ly. Behavior that is the exact opposite of what the newly re-elected regime expects of the populace.
Don’t be fooled – this current Bread and Circus hides hideous facts that the White House DOES NOT want the American people to hear.
What we’re seeing with the Petraeus sexcapades is a classic magician’s misdirection. Two months past the attack on Benghazi, which resulted in the death of an American Ambassador and three others — an attack we are told the White House watched while ordering no response; an attack the mainstream media helpfully blacked-out, at first, then allowed to be spun — we are now being served The Prestige, where all of reality is being turned on its head, and the audience isn’t even sure what it’s seeing, so it simply becomes giddy, and content to be led.
If the nation is content to forget the image of Ambassador Chris Stevens’ naked body being hauled away by a crowd “taking him to the hospital where he later died”; if the nation is completely fine with a truly heinous story of government malfeasance, depraved indifference to human life, political calculation and incompetence being turned into bread and circuses for the mobs, well, then shame on the nation, for choosing to be entertained, once again, by the people who know that all the mob really wants is a show, and is quite pleased to give it to them.
In the meantime, Dear Leader is no longer constrained with the pretense of caring what his constituents want. He’s following the playbook – almost to the letter.
[…]Paula Broadwell’s father asserted “this is about something else entirely, and the truth will come out. There is a lot more that is going to come out. You wait and see. There’s a lot more here than meets the eye.”
That something else has to be bigger than Petraeus; common to all the mysteries of this most impenetrable of presidencies. News under the Obama administration has become coded to a degree unknown outside the annals of Soviet Russia and Mao’s China. In those regimes people talked about numbers, flowers and calendars to indirectly reference what could only be spoken of openly in whispers.
Nothing was what it seemed.
The “The Three-Anti (1951) and Five-Anti campaigns (1952)” were “ostensibly aimed to root out corruption, embezzlement, waste, though they also served to purge opposition to the new Communist government.”
The “Hundred Flowers” (1957) campaign encouraged critics to speak up — so that they could be identified by the State Security apparatus.
The “Destruction of the Four Olds” (1966) is not, as one might think, a scrappage program involving cars made by a division of General Motors but “call to burn and destroy cultural artifacts, Chinese literature, paintings, and religious symbols and temples. People in possession of these goods were punished. Intellectuals were targeted as personifications of the Four Olds, resulting in their persecution.”
The 6521 project is the most recent, occurring only in 2009. It was a “nationwide operation … to ensure ‘social stability’ by suppressing potential dissidents during anniversaries of political significance. The campaign’s name refers to the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the 50th anniversary of the 1959 Tibetan uprising, the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, and the 10th anniversary of the persecution of Falun Gong. ” And there you have it: 6521.
There were wheels within wheels; layers beneath layers; matryoshka dolls within matryoshka dolls.
These innocuous sounding Chinese names were in fact shadow plays aimed at sending a fascist message couched the most innocuous sounding terms. The sheer vagueness of the campaigns lent an edge of terror to them. Nobody knew what they were about and that imbued them with a sinister and crepuscular menace.
Democracies are creatures of the open day. The procedural mechanism of constitutional republic exists to ensure that all the cards are dealt above the table. That the lights always shine. The sign democracy is working is that everybody basically understands what is going now; when things are really about what they say they are about.
By contrast autocracies are thronged with secrets, secret passages, star-chambers and cabals. The characteristic of a conspiratorial political system is that nobody knows who’s next.
Secrets within secrets, all conveniently swept under the rug until after the election.
Wow. So if Broadwell was right — and obviously, she was in a position to know — then either (a) the Obama administration was secretly violating its own announced policy [remember, the President Obama EO in 2009 banning secret CIA prisons?? – admin], or (b) some in the CIA had gone “rogue,” and the deliberate obfuscation of what happened in Benghazi was a cover-up of this secret violation of the president’s executive order.
If so, then it bears a resemblance to the Iran-Contra scandal, and if it turns out that things went wrong in Benghazi because the folks in charge were too busy chasing poontang to do their actual jobs, then this story is a long way from being over.
Trouble is on the way. America, at least the America that wants to live as free citizens, needs to prepare. Educate yourself, especially on things you’d never thought you’d need to know. Create a safe haven/safety net, if you don’t already have one. Have a plan. Have multiple plans. Connect with other like-minded patriots. Get ready, for the future will be here before you know it.
“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” (Philippians 4:13)
June 15, 2012 at 11:30 am (History Doesn't Lie - You Just Don't Understand It, Stupid is as stupid does)
On November 19, 1989, the people of Prague, in the former state of Czechoslovakia, gathered to commemorate a massacre of Czech students by Nazi Germany fifty years earlier. By the end of the day, the gathering turned into a demonstration against a ruling Communist government that had begun massacring Czechs and Slovaks from virtually the moment the Nazis were booted out. By December 29, 1989, without a shot fired, the protesters had driven out their Communist masters, electing poet, playwright, and political prisoner Vaclav Havel as interim President. This peaceful revolt by a peaceful people against their Stalinist puppet government became known as the “Velvet Revolution”.
Brett Kimberlin stole the name. Read the rest and spread the word.
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