All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
Back when we not only still made useful things but they even had style.
America was supposed to be Art Deco – a thread of 10 iconic Art Deco designs 🧵
1. "Mercury" – a streamliner passenger train which operated between 1936 and 1959 pic.twitter.com/teuTY82yuB
— Culture Critic (@Culture_Crit) August 26, 2023
Well, now that Juneteenth is an official holiday, July 4th is left for us bad thinkers who believe in equality but not equity. The Fourth of July can no longer be celebrated but instead remembered as something that was once glorious but is now lost. Maybe one day we’ll regain it.
But this remembrance day will still be a time to enjoy family and friends and reflect on the achievement of the Founding Fathers and their rebellion.
Here’s a little reminder.
In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United States of America,
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness of his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
New Hampshire: Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton
Massachusetts: Samuel Adams, John Adams, John Hancock, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry
Rhode Island: Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery
Connecticut: Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott
New York: William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris
New Jersey: Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark
Pennsylvania: Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross
Delaware: George Read, Caesar Rodney, Thomas McKean
Maryland: Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton
Virginia: George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton
North Carolina: William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn
South Carolina: Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton
Georgia: Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton
I didn’t celebrate Pride Month. I didn’t celebrate Juneteenth. I didn’t celebrate Black History Month or Women’s History Month or any other history month. I did celebrate Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween, Columbus Day, Washington’s Birthday and all the holidays we had back in the good old days. And I will be celebrating the Fourth of July.
The Fourth of July commemorates the War of Independence and the Founding Fathers’ courage and wisdom in creating a new nation and providing it with an enlightened Constitution that provided the framework for living a free life.
Nowadays those Founding Fathers and their Constitution are targets for hate and derision by the Left and anyone else who buys into their whole George Floyd/Black Lives Matter/anti-white campaign. To them the Fourth of July is just a reminder of all the injustice and racism they claim is inherent in America and its history.
Well. good. Let them disown the Fourth categorically and absolutely. Let them reject anyone who celebrates it as a deplorable enemy of all they stand for. That suits me right down to my toes. It makes my enjoyment of the fireworks and the barbecues and the parades that much the sweeter.
Tomorrow my grandchildren will be riding on wagon covered in July 4th posters and other artwork of their design in a parade. The wagon will be pulled by a tractor that their father and uncle will be driving. And when they get to the town common, they’ll listen to music, speeches, poems and other patriotic thoughts that were written centuries ago by Jefferson, Paine and Henry. And I’ll stand on the side of the street and wave to them and applaud their efforts and afterward we’ll celebrate with some more hot dogs and hamburgers and watermelon.
And tomorrow night we’ll watch the local fireworks displays. They won’t be anything too spectacular. They’re not a patch on the ones I used to watch in New York City when I was young. Those were spectacular. But these are just as important. Maybe more so. They represent the local enthusiasm and will to celebrate the things that we believe in. This is us saying we are the United States of America. Anyone who says that this is a racist and evil country is not an American.
He is a parasite growing at the expense of his host. Eventually he hopes to kill off his host and replace him. Right now, we haven’t managed to find the drug that will kill this parasite. So, we have to suffer the symptoms. But we definitely don’t have to pretend that this creature is part of the body. We don’t have to cooperate with its destructive activities or treat it as a friend. Its only goal is our destruction and our only goal is to cut off its blood supply and poison it.
Well, all that is not the result of eating some hamburgers and shooting off some fireworks. But those are the things that give children the message that this is a country worth defending from those who would take away our freedoms and prosperity and replace them with poverty and dependency. So that makes celebrating the Fourth of July a worthwhile and strengthening endeavor. And based on the current propaganda it is also transgressive and defiant. It’s a thumb in the eye of the Biden administration and its “new world order.” After all what do parades, fireworks and barbecues have in common? Well, they all add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Chew on that Dementia Joe.
I’m sure the mainstream media will celebrate Pearl Harbor Day with endless recriminations about Japanese Americans being interred in California. But I think it’s important for us in post-America to remember what a united nation can accomplish when its enemies give it no choice. We may have the courage to unite against the enemies within who are determined to destroy us and our way of life.
During the lifetime of the Greatest Generation the powers-that-be created a myth of what America was. FDR and Hollywood and everything under their control built up a story of who we are and what makes us special. And it was a beautiful story and it was poetry. And that myth was good enough to help them survive a Great Depression, win a World War and create everything from atom bombs to the internet. We were the good guys. We stood for truth, justice and the American Way. Sure, we had some ugliness and pain in our past and we hadn’t banished poverty and crime but we were working on it. We had a war on poverty and a war on drugs and we believed in color blind justice and we loved everyone.
But somewhere around 1960 a new generation of elites decided we needed a new myth. The grown-ups wouldn’t buy into it so they started selling it to the kids. And it was a depressing story and it wasn’t going to fuel a bigger and better tomorrow. In fact, it was a blueprint to demolish the American Way. It was about murdering America and creating a world that would feed on the carcass. And amazingly after sixty years of selling it this new myth is the reality. And if you think I’m exaggerating just look through the headlines of the last few years. The majority of young people believe that America is evil and the only way to fix things is to take away the freedoms and money of the people they don’t like and give it to the people they like. And it’s happening in real time before our eyes. I can’t imagine that we are going to convince these people that they’re wrong. They believe their myth. It’s what they grew up on and it’s very real for them. And they’re not going to convince us. So, we’re in a new world where two peoples are living together inside one political entity. Somehow, we’ll have to separate. That’s a long story and we’ve been talking endlessly how that will happen. But one thing that we need is a new myth.
We can’t keep the old one. They blew that one up. They polluted it and destroyed its basis. The people who defiled it are the descendants of the Pilgrims. They invalidated their own ancestors to destroy our myth. We have to write a new story. We will have to take our parts in the original story and write out the usurpers. We have to make their betrayal a central thread in this new tapestry. Overcoming their treason and building something new and better is the purpose of what needs to be achieved and that will be how we come up with a new myth. We need an inspirational story of who we are and what makes us special. And we’ll have to see who will be the heroes of this epic. We know that Donald Trump will be in it. He’ll be like one of the earliest chapters. He’ll be like Samuel Adams or Thomas Paine. Maybe Ron DeSantis will be there too. And Barack Obama and Joe Biden will be in the story too. They’ll play the part of Benedict Arnold or some other traitor. And since Google and Facebook and Twitter and the rest of the Silicon Valley boys are silencing voices on our side of the fence maybe our myth will be recorded on websites like this that haven’t been silenced by the powers-that-be.
A lot of people will say that myths aren’t a thing anymore. That people in the information age work with facts. A lot of people would be wrong. All we have are myths nowadays. Reality is manufactured in newsrooms, government agencies and corporate offices. The truth can be censored or photoshopped into anything or nothing. We need to create our own truth. It needs to be something that nourishes our souls. It needs to be what will help us survive Antifa, BLM, anti-white hate, equity, diversity, inclusion, LGBTQ nonsense, transgender madness and a hundred other things that the other myth is using to destroy us. So, with no disrespect to Thomas Paine, consider this to be my daily dose of “Common Sense.”
After discussing the Revolutionary War last time, the next major historical comparison I’d like to look at is the one comparing our situation to the mid-nineteenth century American Civil War. In this comparison the Left is equated with the historical “North” and the Right with the “South.”
We’ll start with things that do align in this comparison. The cultural and intellectual elites of the Abolitionist Movement do line up well with the modern Left. In fact, there is probably a decent number among today’s Woke Left that are direct descendants from the Abolitionists themselves. And certain historians believe that the culture of New England and its exports to areas like the Great Lakes area and the Pacific Coast states have preserved the viewpoint and authority of the nineteenth century elites from that region of the country. From that point of view there is a certain direct analogy between the Northern Abolitionist Leadership and the Modern Left.
But let’s look at some of the other factors. First of all, let’s look at the driving force of the cause. The Abolitionists wanted to end slavery. It’s hard to over stress just how popular this cause was. It was evident to even many Southerners that slavery was an evil that could not be justified by its benefits to the economy. For a country whose whole existence is expressed in the single word freedom, slavery is anathema. Therefore, the moral underpinnings of the Civil War were very powerful. Certainly, the Southern States were able to muster a justification for the practice of slavery but at no time did this justification convince anyone outside of the South and not even everyone inside. So, the abolition of slavery was a cause that resonated broadly around the United States outside of the Deep South.
But look at the current agenda of the Woke Left. It is a rag tag grab bag of radical ideas and identity politics grievances that isn’t even rationally self-consistent. Feminism and even lesbian feminism are at odds with transgender “rights.” And the BLM agenda of eliminating the police won’t stand scrutiny by other communities like Asians and Hispanics now that they see that it equates to wholesale criminal anarchy. It is far from certain that even in the “Blue States” that the whole agenda of the radical Left is entirely acceptable. This is a major difference between the Civil War situation. The Left’s agenda today is far less popular than the abolition of slavery was back then.
The next consideration is the location of each “side.” The Confederacy was never able to convince even some of the slave states to join in its revolt. The border states Kentucky, Missouri and Maryland never seceded. And even an area of Virginia refused to join and “seceded” from Virginia to become West Virginia and remain with the Union. Inside the free states there weren’t any large areas that would have joined the South or opposed the abolition of slavery for the most part.
But look at today. Instead, the Red and Blue States are only an indicator of the majority status of each side in a state. But geographically we can see that this is really a city versus countryside polarization. The cities in the Red States are full of Leftists for the most part and even deep Blue States like California and New York have rural areas that are completely red. This definitely helps our side. These concentrated populations of Leftists work well when you want to cheat during an election but it doesn’t help much when you are trying to control a population that is diffused over thousands of square miles in some cases. Controlling the back country especially when it is adjacent to a Red State may turn out to be an impossible job.
And finally in the 1860’s the slave states were so afraid of a Republican holding the White House that they seceded before Lincoln could even assemble his government. We’ve seen two truly woke administration already. Obama and now Biden. And Biden is using all the force of the federal government to destroy our way of life. But what it seems to show is that determined state leaders can use the state laws to combat these Woke orders and possibly nullify their effects without having to leave the Union. This is still a preliminary evaluation but I think it is worth seeing if the lessons learned from Sanctuary Cities can be applied to other issues like Second Amendment Rights and First Amendment Freedoms.
So, from the point of view comparison, it seems to me that our side is significantly better off in the present situation than the South was during the Civil War. And that is definitely a thing to be happy about.