Archive for the 'America' Category

I know my readers.  And I know why you come to TCJ.  You come here because this is the only place you can find the kind of scholarship you seek.  Here you can get everything from epistemology and ethics, to sectional density and ballistic coefficient.  If I can’t give it to you all the time, the commenters will. Give yourself and me a pat on the back.

It’s in that spirit that I offer up this worthy viewing for the day.  Language warning.

GAO:

The 20 federal law enforcement agencies in GAO’s review reported spending at least $38.8 million on firearms, $325.9 million on ammunition, and $1.14 billion on tactical equipment—at least $1.5 billion in total—from fiscal years 2010 through 2017, based on data agencies provided to GAO.

And Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution comes to mind.

Calvin Coolidge:

No one can examine this record and escape the conclusion that in the great outline of its principles the Declaration was the result of the religious teachings of the preceding period. The profound philosophy which Jonathan Edwards applied to theology, the popular preaching of George Whitefield, had aroused the thought and stirred the people of the Colonies in preparation for this great event. No doubt the speculations which had been going on in England, and especially on the Continent, lent their influence to the general sentiment of the times. Of course, the world is always influenced by all the experience and all the thought of the past. But when we come to a contemplation of the immediate conception of the principles of human relationship which went into the Declaration of Independence we are not required to extend our search beyond our own shores. They are found in the texts, the sermons, and the writings of the early colonial clergy who were earnestly undertaking to instruct their congregations in the great mystery of how to live. They preached equality because they believed in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. They justified freedom by the text that we are all created in the divine image, all partakers of the divine spirit.

Jonathan Edwards is rightly called the greatest philosopher America ever produced, and Whitefield perhaps the greatest preacher – both Calvinists.

The roots of the American revolution go to continental Calvinism and the doctrine of covenant, just as we have discussed before.

We haven’t had a president like Coolidge since him, and we’re likely never to have another one.

Happy independence day.

Enjoy it with family and friends.  And remember.  King George was just a man.  There have been many other such men throughout history, are many such now, and will be many in the future, who would “erect a multitude of New Offices,” and send “hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.”

All usurpation of God’s authority and governance over mankind is wickedness.  Always and forever.

Via WRSA, Chateau Heartiste:

A few years ago, I struck up a conversation with a white guy from Zimbabwe — in the Wal Mart checkout line, of all places. Fair number of blacks around, but the guy was totally relaxed. It was a comparative matter, you see. Back home, he explained, there was just just no way his car would still be in the lot when he exited the store, since in the present case he had left no one armed to watch it. Just having that luxury — not leaving an armed person and believing his car would be present —   was like heaven.

And Americans may look back on years gone by as like heaven compared to what’s coming.  What’s coming won’t exempt military or LEOs because they carry guns or a badge.  Everyone will get swept up in it.

As for Christians in California, let’s take a look at where they are right now.

According to its website, Summit Ministries, an organization devoted to advising Christian youths on how to live out a Christian worldview, has canceled its scheduled appearances at Biola University in Los Angeles “due to concerns that California will forbid some of what it teaches.”

Summit’s concern is real.

The fact is that California is about to make into law A.B. 2943, a bill recently passed by the state Assembly and probably soon to be ratified by the state Senate.  The proposed law seeks to punish by fines and penalties any goods and services and services “offering to engage in or engaging in sexual orientation change efforts with an individual,” claiming that such efforts constitute deceptive business practices.

[ … ]

The reluctance to fight is in some ways understandable because of the high-profile examples of the Christians whose businesses and lives have been destroyed by radicals of the LGBT movement.  Even big fish like Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A have been threatened because their managers have dared to stand up for the Christian view of marriage.

Moreover, many times, fellow Christians do not come to the support of other Christians who are attacked.

Well, they’re too busy watching football and worrying over racial reparations while they’re at worship.  It only goes downhill from here.  Diversity means submission, Sharia law means for your women too, and MS-13 had better be appeased or they’ll hack you to pieces with machetes.  They clearly want to do something like that to Mr. Trump.

In the mean time, you’d better purchase some good firearms and ammunition and learn to fight if you haven’t already done that.  Make sure not to forget PT.  It means everything.  Without PT you will be too winded and weak to defend yourselves or your families.

Citylab:

This month, the South Carolina House of Representatives made it clear that they don’t want anyone’s hands on their guns—not national leaders, and certainly not local ones. To keep Washington’s interference at bay, representatives introduced a bill that would let the state consider seceding from the country if the federal government were to start confiscating legally purchased firearms. But they also launched an inward-facing attack, introducing a “Second Amendment Protection Act” that would enforce extra punishments on cities that act to “restrict [gun] access beyond that which is provided by state law.”

South Carolina already has harsh state preemption policies that weaken localities’ ability to pass their own gun regulations, as do 42 other states. So why is it passing a new one?

The answer may lie in a bold piece of legislation passed this December by the city of Columbia, in what has become the most recent manifestation of a city-state battle over guns—waged while the federal government sits most of it out.

[ … ]

To challenge these sweeping allowances, some cities are quietly—and elsewhere, loudly—pushing their own gun reform agendas. In March, Lincoln, Nebraska, followed Columbia to become the second city to ban bump stocks. (City council members called the ban a largely symbolic move, but one that brings them closer to becoming a safer “city of law and order.”) And on April 3, Deerfield, Illinois passed a bill prohibiting the possession, sale, or manufacturing of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines—to the dismay of the NRA. Gun owners in the city have until June 13 to get rid of their assault rifles, or face steep fines.

Columbia Mayor Steve Benjamin will take the helm of the U.S. Council of Mayors as president in May, and has already expressed a commitment to making city-level gun control a priority. He’s been strategizing with mayors from Little Rock, Arkansas; Chattanooga, Tennessee; and Orlando, Florida, which just voted to join the lawsuit against Governor Rick Scott over preemption. “I think you’re going to see an interesting, thoughtful wave of policy-making [next year],” said Benjamin. “Creative policy-making, and litigation strategies that will allow us to do our jobs.”

Hey, it’s almost as if there is no more South and the culture has gone.  And the American culture has completed fractured into a million pieces.  And families are far-flung, and there is no national recognition of liberty and rights, much less state or even city, with whomever wants doing whatever is right in his own eyes.

And its almost as if America is a disaggregated collection of disparate, unconnected and unrelated self-serving entities vying for position and power, as if the only thing left is family (if we can bring them back together), community and tribe.

I wonder just how that happened?

David Codrea:

“The Alt-left does not even hide their violent threats against conservatives,” Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit noted Thursday. “Of course, you will never see this reported by the #FakeNews media.”

“The patriot prayer rally is a nazi white supremacist event,” so-called alt-left “leader” Jordan Towers threatened. “I’ll be their [sic] to crush some nazi [sic] skulls.”

Read the rest of it.  I disagree with one of the commenters who doesn’t believe there can be such a thing as civil war.  “I don’t believe we are headed toward civil war. The Leftists can’t be controlled by their leaders well enough to accomplish that,” he says.

This ignores the fact that America is already at civil war.  The controllers are people like George Soros, the Clintons, the two generals in the White House (Kelly, McMaster), and all of the three-letter agencies, or in other words, the deep state.  Senators, Congressmen, Antifa, BLM and the other participants (e.g., college professors and students everywhere) are doing exactly as they have been taught and told.

The control thus far is perfect, lacking nothing at all in intelligence, deep state operatives, logistics, money or any other resource.  It may not look like civil war to this commenter, but it is.  It’s 4th generation warfare, or some version of it, and it’s working so far.

Richmond-Times Dispatch:

In an interview, Crompton falsely said the Confederate states seceded because of heavy taxation and “tyranny” by the federal government, not slavery. “They were overtaxing the South and the South got fed up with it,” he said. “Slavery was not a factor.”

Let’s cover this one more time for good measure.  The thinking in the South was based on who did the thinking.  If you were among the more educated, such as preachers and pastors, you would have seen the war between the states as a theological conflict.  My former professor, Dr. C. Gregg Singer, stated that “The Southern Presbyterian Church saw the war as a humanistic revolt against Christianity and the world and life view of the Scriptures” (A Theological Interpretation of American History, 86-87).

R. J. Rushdoony, citing Benjamin Palmer, stated that “Indeed an important aspect of the Civil War was the Unitarian statist drive for an assault on its Calvinist enemy, the South…  The gathering conflict (South Carolina had moved as early as November 16, 1860) Palmer saw as forces of a false theology, of atheism and of the French Revolution, of the religion of humanity, in short, arrayed against a Christian people dedicated to faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and to Constitutional government.  These forces sought to frame “mischief by law” (The Nature of the American System, 58-59).

Men like they cite – Palmer, Plumer, Thornwell, Dabney – were in the pulpits or seminaries informing men how to think.  Being “churched” today may not be a thing like it was 150 years ago, but the place for philosophy was in the pulpit.  On the other hand, on a more pedestrian level, there was the burdensome taxation and tariffs set in place by the Congress.

In addition to generating revenue, a tariff hurts the ability of foreigners to sell in domestic markets. An affordable or high-quality foreign good is dangerous competition for an expensive or low-quality domestic one. But when a tariff bumps up the price of the foreign good, it gives the domestic one a price advantage. The rate of the tariff varies by industry.

If the tariff is high enough, even an inefficient domestic company can compete with a vastly superior foreign company. It is the industry’s consumers who ultimately pay this tax and the industry’s producers who benefit in profits.

As early as the Revolutionary War, the South primarily produced cotton, rice, sugar, indigo and tobacco. The North purchased these raw materials and turned them into manufactured goods. By 1828, foreign manufactured goods faced high import taxes. Foreign raw materials, however, were free of tariffs.

Thus the domestic manufacturing industries of the North benefited twice, once as the producers enjoying the protection of high manufacturing tariffs and once as consumers with a free raw materials market. The raw materials industries of the South were left to struggle against foreign competition.

Because manufactured goods were not produced in the South, they had to either be imported or shipped down from the North. Either way, a large expense, be it shipping fees or the federal tariff, was added to the price of manufactured goods only for Southerners. Because importation was often cheaper than shipping from the North, the South paid most of the federal tariffs.

Much of the tariff revenue collected from Southern consumers was used to build railroads and canals in the North. Between 1830 and 1850, 30,000 miles of track were laid. At their best, these tracks benefited the North. Many rail lines had no economic effect at all. Many of the schemes to lay track were simply a way to get government subsidies. Fraud and corruption were rampant.

These ideas don’t conflict.  In fact, they dovetail together as a real example of statism and its effects.  While the pastors were philosophically training the men who would ultimately decide on war, these same men were suffering under the yoke of financing an entire country due to protective tariffs.  You can believe they heard from their countrymen, their neighbors and their wives about the yoke of burden they felt.

War ensued.  If anyone tells you that the war was fought over slavery, he is lying to you.  That’s revisionist history, a version of events that has no basis in the primary source documents of the time (newspapers, sermons, etc.).  Idiot “journalists” today may not know history, but you need to be better than that.

UPDATE:  Frank Clarke sends the following note.

For those who say the Civil (sic) War was “all about slavery”, I like to point out that slaves in the South were “identified as free” by the Emancipation Proclamation — issued two years after a war that was “all about slavery” started — but weren’t actually free because there were no blue-clad troops to spring them.  Slaves in DC were freed by ordinance in 1864.  Slaves elsewhere had to wait until the 13th amendment in December 1865, 8 months after a war that was all about slavery ended.  It appears the DC politicians didn’t get the memo about the war being all about slavery, and Lincoln, himself, didn’t realize it for two whole years.

The Emancipation Proclamation, America’s first major PR effort, was (much more likely) a ploy to “make the war about slavery” which would operate to bring lots of Northern abolitionists down to the recruiting stations.  This, in turn, would beef up the ranks of the Union army which was then getting its clock cleaned.

Had Lincoln been keen to erase slavery, he could have done it far cheaper than ruining the South’s economy and threatening the North’s — at a cost of 620,000 dead — had he done it the way the Brits had 30 years prior; he certainly had to know about that.  The Brits outlawed slavery, then bought out all the slaveholders for cash.  It was a good deal for anyone who could see the onrushing Industrial Revolution, an event which would, in short order, make human chattel slavery an economic dead-end.

But Lincoln was not keen to empower the South with such a scheme.  Lincoln wanted to OWN the South.  The tariffs had done that.  If the South rendered itself immune to the tariffs, the Northern economy would crash.  This could not be allowed to happen.  It is related that one reporter asked Lincoln “Why not just let them depart?” and Lincoln’s answer was “Then who would pay for the government?”  That was Lincoln’s (and the North’s) motive.

Foreign newspapers of the day, Corriere della Sera, Le Monde, The Times of London, and others, universally saw the conflict as economic and not connected to slavery.  As disinterested spectators, their views are telling.

This is as good an afteraction report as you’ll find anywhere on what happened at Charlottesville, Virginia.  This is an afteraction report from Seattle, and this is a report from Durham.

DURHAM, N.C. (WNCN) – A crowd of protesters gathered outside the old Durham County courthouse on Main Street Monday evening in opposition to a Confederate monument in front of the government building.

Around 7:10 p.m. a woman using a ladder climbed the statue of a Confederate soldier and attached a rope around the statue.

Moments later, the crowd pulled on the rope and the statue fell.  One man quickly ran up and spat on the statue and several others began kicking it.

Durham police later said they monitored the protests to make sure they were “safe” but did not interfere with the statue toppling because it happened on county property.

“Because this incident occurred on county property, where county law enforcement officials were staffed, no arrests were made by DPD officers,” Durham Police spokesman Wil Glenn said in a statement.

Durham County Sheriff’s deputies videotaped the statue being brought down — but didn’t stop it from happening.

After toppling the statue, the protesters started marching. They blocked traffic with authorities trying to stay ahead of them. The protesters made their way down East Main Street to the site of the new Durham Police Department.

Watch the video.  I suspect that when all is said and done, it will be learned that fat girl and metrosexual boy were paid protesters funded by George Soros because they are too stupid to find work any other way.

We already know that many, if not most of the protesters at Charlottesville, were in the employ of Soros, and one was clearly a high level DNC operative.

Attempts to blame guns and open carry fell flat today given that there was no violence perpetrated by anyone except Antifa.  I said very little about what McAuliffe said about the event, except to quote him.

You saw the militia walking down the street, you would have thought they were an army,” he added. “I was just talking to the State Police upstairs; they had better equipment than our State Police had,” he said, referring to the militia members. “And yet not a shot was fired, zero property damage.”

To which I said, “Good for you.  Good job, boys.”  Read between the lines here.  McAuliffe is clearly a shill, and I’ve always thought of him as a rather dense one at that.  He wanted to blame the right, and wanted to blame guns more than anything else.

But he couldn’t, and he knew it.  He knew that as soon as he did so, he would be proven wrong by all of the video, afteraction reports and eyewitness accounts, some by the very police he told to stand down.  He couldn’t blame the militia and had to stipulate that there was no property damage.

People damage – well, that’s another story.  The various militia groups who marched that day did a great job showing restraint, and frankly I would have preferred to see more aggression.  I would have preferred to see at least the use of bear spray on the Antifa rioters.  So if each and every militia member wasn’t carrying and didn’t deploy bear spray on an Antifa rioter, I don’t understand why.

Furthermore, when someone like that attacks you, your life is in danger, regardless of the kinds of weapons employed.  Fists can kill.  Sooner or later, guns will have to be used in the defense of life and property.  As Matt Bracken says, there will be shooting.  Carbines, up until now unloaded and for show, will be aimed, and triggers will be pulled.  You know it’s going to happen sooner or later.

These are the beginning stages of the great American split, and let’s pray that it is only a split into multiple countries instead of a civil war.

I will detail my thoughts on Robert E. Lee later.  I am not as big of a fan of his leadership as many, and see him and his horrible tactical decisions at Gettysburg as one of the primary reasons for the loss of the South in the war between the states.  The point of all of this is not what I or you think about Lee, it’s what we think about the erasure of our heritage.

Twice now I have hiked the battlefield trail on King’s Mountain (as well as miles of other trails in that park) with my children, even though my children were grown when I did it.  It’s always educational to remember what once was and what used to be.  On Monday I hiked this trail with my beautiful daughter, Devon.

I have seen many homeschoolers on the trail with parents, reading literature and learning real American history, when men were free, rather than the fabricated crap and lies they learn in public schools that passes for history, taught by the collectivist lemmings.  I have never seen a public school class there.

One placard in particular has always caught my attention.

This distinguished race of men are more savage than the Indians, and possess every one of their vices, but not one of their virtues.  I have known … these fellows (to) travel 200 miles through the woods never keeping any road or path, guided by the sun by day, and the stars by night, to kill a particular person of the opposite party (George Hanger, British officer formerly attached to Ferguson’s provincial corps).

Would we win the war of independence today?  Do such men exist, who would travel 200 miles through woods, day and night, to engage fellow countrymen in a battle for freedom?