Is Bernie’s Brain Bigger Than Bernie’s Socialist Mouth? Impossible!!

WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A BRONTOSAURUS AND BERNIE SANDERS?

by John Hinderaker  at PowerLine:

Brontosauruses are renowned for their small brains, but let’s be fair: at least they weren’t socialists. They may have become extinct, but unlike Sanders and many of his fellow Democrats they didn’t subscribe (as far as we know) to an extinct ideology.

Michael Ramirez imagines what really killed off the dinosaurs. The cartoon also features an ancient fossil. Click to enlarge:

I don’t suppose socialism actually killed the dinosaurs, but it surely will destroy us, as it destroyed Soviet Russia, Albania, North Korea, East Germany, Cuba, Venezuela, and every other country that has been foolish enough to adopt it, if Bernie Sanders and his Democratic Party get their way.

 

What’s the Difference Between a Brontosaurus and Bernie Sanders?

Americans all should know that  before that deluge from outer space around 65,000,000 years ago somewhere off the shores of Mexico which obliterated 80% or so of Earth’s animal world of that time, North Dakota housed not only Brontosauruses by countless other “saurs” of the day.

Our today’s lefty fascistic and fascist American  Democrats, especially those of the feminazi type, are not very learned human tribes.   Accumulating knowledge they need when problem solving too  often interferes with their inherent animalistic  emotions they learn to stir in today’s colleges and universities.

The World War of My Childhood Began 80 Years Ago!

Victor Davis Hanson: Lies, betrayal and incredible surprises marked start of World War II 80 years ago

by Victor Davis Hanson  at  Fox news:

Some 80 years ago, on Aug. 23, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, formally known as the “Treaty of non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”

The world was shocked — and terrified — by the agreement. Western democracies of the 1930s had counted on the huge resources of Communist Russia, and its hostility to the Nazis, to serve as a brake on Adolf Hitler’s Western ambitions. Great Britain and the other Western European democracies had assumed that the Nazis would never invade them as long as a hostile Soviet Union threatened the German rear.

The incompatibility between communism and Nazism was considered by all to be existential — and permanent. That mutual hatred explained why dictators Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin both despised and feared each other.

Yet all at once, such illusions vanished with signing of the pact. Just seven days later, on Sept. 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. World War II had begun.

After quickly absorbing most of Eastern Europe by either coercion or alliance, Hitler was convinced that he now had a safe rear. So he turned west in spring 1940 to overrun Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, France and the Netherlands.

Hitler accomplished all that relatively easily, failing only to conquer Great Britain with an exhaustive bombing campaigning.

 

During all these Nazi conquests, a compliant Stalin shipped huge supplies of food and fuel for the German war effort against the West. Stalin cynically had hoped that Germany and the Western democracies would wear themselves out in a wasting war — similar to the four horrific years in the trenches of the Western Front during World War I.

Communism then easily would spread to the Atlantic amid the ruins of European capitalism. Unlike Czarist Russia in 1914, this time around the Soviets wanted to stay out of a German war. Instead, Stalin rearmed during the non-aggression pact with Hitler.

Stalin, of course, had no idea he had created a Nazi monster that would quickly devour all of Continental Europe — and turn to its rear to eye a now-isolated Soviet Union. Much less did Stalin realize that the battle-hardened German war machine would soon overrun his country in a surprise attack beginning on June 22, 1941, a little less than two years after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

The non-aggression pact in a way had also ensured that a European war would soon turn into a global massacre that left roughly 65 million dead. At the time of deal, imperial Japan was fighting the Soviet Union on the Manchurian-Mongolian border. The Japanese were de facto allies of Nazi Germany. They had assumed that Stalin’s fear of an aggressive Germany meant the Soviet Union would have to worry about a two-front war against both Germany and Japan.

But now, the surprise agreement stunned the Japanese, who saw it as a German betrayal. It left them alone against the superior forces of Russia’s eastern armies.

Japan quickly withdrew from its losing Russian war. In time it signed its own non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, in April 1941 — ironically, just months before Hitler’s “Operation Barbarossa,” the massive invasion of Russia.

Japan correctly concluded by the betrayal that Hitler’s Germany could not be trusted and deserved tit-for-tat duplicity. So Japan never joined Hitler’s surprise invasion of Russia. Instead, the Japanese turned their attention to the Pacific and especially the vulnerable British and American bases in Singapore, Burma, the Philippines — and Pearl Harbor.

In sum, the August 1939 non-aggression pact ensured the German attack against Great Britain and Western Europe. It also convinced Hitler that Russia was vulnerable, gullible and appeasing, and could be overrun in weeks following an invasion.

Finally, the deal ended all Japanese ideas of fighting the Soviet Union on the ground from the East in partnership with Nazi Germany invading from the West. Instead, Japan turned toward the vulnerable British and American eastern forces.

In sophisticated times, we sometimes forget that time-honored concepts like the balance of power and military deterrence — not good intentions and international peace organizations — alone keep the peace. When the pact destroyed fragile alliances and encouraged German adventurism, war was certain.

The final ironies? The Soviet double-cross of the Western democracies eventually ended up almost destroying Russia, which bore the brunt of an empowered Germany.

The redirection of Japanese war strategy to target America finally brought the United States into World War II, which ensured the destruction of Japan and Germany.

Add this all up, and in some sense World War II really started on Aug. 23, 1939, 80 years ago this summer.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/victor-davis-hanson-world-war-ii

Note from ghr:   I was 5  when the European part of  World War II broke out in 1939.

I became acutely aware of it by  the  Spring of 1942 when I began able to read the cutlines of the war photos of the  Sunday Pioneer Press rotogravure picture section of its Sunday newspapers, and  the newspaper’s  headlines  of the Pacific front that Spring.   “Battle at Midway”,  was my entry to become part of the war effort ,  playing serious war games with my neighborhood buddies thereafter until August, 1945 when it all finally came to an end.

I couldn’t read story books, both then and now, but, even then,  I could read a lot about real wars, draw maps,  read cutlines to pictures available anywhere between the 16th century Spanish invasion of Aztec Mexico  to  the Korean War.    I began collecting American state  road maps in 1942….and have about 200 of them still stashed away somewhere.

My dad was 41 years old in 1942…..too old to go overseas.   He became one of the local air raid wardens here in St. Paul….and with special helmet and vest practiced safety from air assaults twice a week from April  to September that year.   Our neighborhood house lights had to be out beginning from  dusk on to dark for an hour or two.

We also began our Victory Garden in two empty lots across the alley behind our garage.   My dad had agreed with the city to commit our family to be responsible for this national urban effort to support the war effort by providing food for  neighbors on our block.

The city would plow the fields for us….My dad signed a contract.   We were going to help the war effort.   I had two step cousins, sons of my German step grandmother, age 16 and 18 who had joined the navy shortly after Pearl Harbor, and were sent to the Pacific front.

As life moved on that April, after Mom, Dad, and I had done all of the plantings, from radishes to sweet corn, potatoes to peas and even egg plant and  okra, lettuce, and tomato plants to  kholrabi,  you name it,  we must have planted it.   They treated me as if I were an adult.

Honestly, I loved every minute of it.   I loved the exploring, the planting, the learning from and  with both my parents.   Dad, however, had to work six days a week,  pharmacist and manager of a downtown St. Paul Liggett Drug Company store.  Mom picked up a terrible  rash, so was confined to canning and the cooking world throughout the war.

I became king of the Victory Garden roost…..and in full truth, then and now, loved every moment of it.  I weeded, mulched, fertilized, watered, planted, harvested, often thinking I was helping  our war effort in a dreamy way.   (I’d dive bomb the Colorado potato beetles eating potato foliage with my right hand “Lockheed Lightening”  and bury these enemies  into dad’s last year’s grease collection from his car….which was by then stored away in the garage until the war was over.

That war made me become a high school teacher of Social Studies, History, and Russian…..until the schools began to collapse as teaching  knowledge  institutions in the 1970s.     I have worked in the plant world ever since….including this very day,  next week, next month, and next Spring, Godwilling,  at 85 years old!

Please, Fellow Americans, Be Aware of the Fascistic Google War Against Our American Prager U!

I missed the following note from PragerU world regarding Google’s fascistic War against conservative communications in today’s leftist “Democrat” America.   This past  Tuesday, August 27,  we 85 year olds, graduates of 1952’s St. Paul Central High Schools, met for our 14th class reunion.

In our today’s  profoundly  problematic 21st century America, one couldn’t find a more civil, civilized, well educated, polite, JudeoChristian group of  Americans to be with, even in our 82nd year of life.

That is what in our generation we were trained, programmed, educated to be, by school,  Church and Synagogue, by newsprint and radio,  by mother, barber, and baker!

Real mothers existed then.   Adults were Bible aware.   Learning goodness was vital. Movies were civil.   Actors and actresses spoke beautiful American English, governed, trained, accomplished by radio and teachers.  Despite the Depression and the War,  honesty was vital to ones soul. Truth was sought, nearly all collectively examined and taught by old maid school marms, the very, very well educated ones like the ones we had who taught us  at 1948-1952 St. Paul Central High School.  How lucky we were.

Today, fascistic Google exists selling, controlling  its pompous devotion to  leftism and arrogance.   Google is NOT alone!   It’s a virus.

To Dennis……I hate to say this,  Dennis.   I don’t think you would have had much of a need for your wonderful schooling at PragerU in 1948-1952.    You probably would have been selling knowledge at a true American University instead….

But,  our Dennis  had to go to Court last Tuesday……Please read his message below:

“Dear Friend,

PragerU will head to court tomorrow morning to fight for freedom of speech in America.

PragerU has a court date in our lawsuit against Google/YouTube scheduled for tomorrow August 27th in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The outcome of this case is critical, and it will determine whether Americans can continue to express their views freely online.

We will be sharing a live stream of the hearing on PragerU’s social media channels starting at 9:00 am PT/12:00 pm ET.  Make sure to tune in!

There is no doubt about it: Conservative values are under attack.

We are seeing an outright assault against conservatives by Big Tech. Not only are these companies using their algorithms to suppress accounts and content that present a conservative point of view, but they are also preventing millions of Americans from even seeing videos from PragerU.

Currently, over 200 of our videos are restricted by YouTube, and many others are demonetized on its platform. Even 5 of our videos on the 10 Commandments have been restricted!

Last month, Dennis Prager testified before the U.S. Senate on how Big Tech censorship is the greatest threat against free speech today. The hearing revealed how Big Tech companies have a long-running pattern of targeting conservatives.

This is why our lawsuit is so important. We are taking on the world’s two largest search engines: YouTube and Google. These two platforms control the content that billions of people see worldwide, and with that power, Google is using its platform to ban ideas and perpetuate the misinformation of the Left. We cannot — and will not — let that happen on our watch.

Can we count on your support today to help us continue to spread public awareness on this important issue? A majority of the public still trusts Google/YouTube, and with your help, we can break that trust. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation today.

Freedom of speech is one of the most fundamental human rights protected by our Constitution. If conservatives are banned from having a voice online, it is only a matter of time until the freedom of speech is eliminated entirely.

We are determined to fight for as long as needed to secure this right for all. Please make a generous donation now to help PragerU fight Big Tech bias. August is our fundraising month, and we depend on support from people like you.

Won’t you stand with PragerU today and donate to help us fight Big Tech bias?

We appreciate your support,

The PragerU Team”

THANK GOD FOR GLOBAL WARMING!!!

by Glenn H. Ray:

The first university learning degree I received was in 1956 with a major in Geography and minor in Russian.    I was exploring.   Grades had meaning then.   I wanted to study the world and learn a foreign language.   Russian was an easy choice for me….nothing to do with ancestry.  It had to do with my and my country’s  future.  The fascist, terrifying USSR was then the powerful enemy of our American way.

My instructors, solid professors, were all male and all phD’s….NO funky graduate students who could barely speak English, and no easy gradings for leftists as in our ‘modern’ era.    Tuition cost me only $30 per quarter.

We undergraduates were often told at the beginning of each  class instruction to look to the front, to the back and to both sides and then yourself because in two years three of you today’s  students will no longer be at the University of Minnesota’s College of Liberal Arts.   They told the Truth as it turned out.

To get this first college degree I had to study climatology,  geology,  geomorphology,  astronomy, as well as geography of the world’s continents and their countries which truly fascinated me.

No longer did I have to cheat about reading novels in those English classes.   I suffer a dyslexia, (not yet ‘invented’ then, so I had no clue)…. I couldn’t, can’t,  make anything out of  reading real novels.    I have those  remarkable visual skills I was born with, instead.

It was the content of novels.    I’d buy the classic comics such as Dicken’s Tale of Two Cities, zip through them, enjoy them enough to search out and then read accurately  in the actual novel the most exciting sections of the novel.    Anything by William Thackeray, and such, was  too dull, to distant visually from the mind or whatever,  to remember or  grasp anything.  Mentally, I couldn’t connect  every time I’d try to read a novel.

I have a personal library in my old age of a couple thousand books, mostly  texts,  histories,  biographies,  “1984”, reality stuff including nineteenth century readings like McGuffey readers.   Here, my memory was solid.   I loved sharing these  learnings, so my first career became teaching high schoolers…….

I learned something about the disappearance of the dinosaurs those 65 million years ago…..you remember, those huge creatures running around America’s Dakota’s, eating those fern trees and the tonnage of the Brontosaurs, the ones especially  tasty to Tyrannosaurus Rex…..

……and the more recent stuff including  the glacial periods of tens of thousands of years ago…..like the last one  in northern Minnesota around Duluth before Lake Superior was born with the melting of thousands of feet of glacial ice!!!

THANK GOD FOR THAT GLOBAL WARMING OR WE HUMANS WOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN ABLE TO LIVE HERE….but our today’s lefty Democrat Party doesn’t give a damn about TRUTH!.   They don’t seem to be interested in knowledge either.

Neither were the Soviets, folks.

Please continue reading below regarding Truth instead of today’s Politics regarding “Global Warming”:

No U.S. Warming Since 2005

Another Chernobyl at Russia’s Sarov?

Russia’s New Chernobyl?

by Ed Morrissey   at HotAir:  

It’s been almost three weeks since a nuclear accident took place near the secret military city of Sarov, and Russia has only now begun to acknowledge it. Yesterday, the country’s weather service reported the elevated presence of four isotopes in the environment while still claiming that no particular danger exists:

Russia’s state weather and environment monitoring agency on Monday released new details about a brief spike in radioactivity following a mysterious explosion at the navy’s testing range that has been surrounded by secrecy and fueled fears of increased radiation levels.

The Aug. 8 incident at the Russian navy’s range in Nyonoksa on the White Sea killed two servicemen and five nuclear engineers and injured six others. The authorities reported a rise in radiation levels in nearby Severodvinsk, but insisted it didn’t pose any danger.

Russia’s state weather and environmental monitoring agency Rosgidromet said Monday the brief rise in radiation levels was caused by a cloud of radioactive gases containing isotopes of barium, strontium and lanthanum that drifted across the area. The agency said its monitoring has found no trace of radiation in air or ground samples since Aug. 8.

Russia has finally — if indirectly — acknowledged that the accident involved their new nuclear-powered cruise missile, which NATO calls Skyfall:

Russian officials have not conceded that the explosion involved the missile called the Skyfall. But on Monday, a Russian diplomat for the first time spoke of the accident in terms of the purpose for such a missile.

The diplomat, Aleksei Karpov, Russia’s envoy to international organizations in Vienna, blamed the United States for setting Russia on the path to developing a new device by withdrawing from an antiballistic missile treaty over 15 years ago.

Just how bad was this explosion? The types of isotopes in the leading edge of the cloud makes it clear that this was a reactor explosion, as was Chernobyl in 1986, if not on the same scale. It also leads observers to conclude that the radiation risk is likely worse in the region than Russia’s weather service admits:

“These are fission products,” Joshua Pollack, a leading expert on nuclear and missile proliferation, told Insider. “If anyone still doubts that a nuclear reactor was involved in this incident, this report should go a long way toward resolving that.”

Alexander Uvarov, the editor of the independent news site AtomInfo.ru, told the news agency RIA Novosti that these isotopes were products of nuclear fission involving uranium, Agence France-Presse reported Monday. This collection of radioisotopes could be released by a reaction involving uranium-235.

Nils Bohmer, a Norwegian nuclear-safety expert, told The Barents Observer that “the presence of decay products like barium and strontium is coming from a nuclear chain reaction,” adding that it was evidence that it “was a nuclear reactor that exploded.”

The Russians have acted as though the danger was higher than they were willing to admit on camera. In their zeal to protect themselves from criticism over the accident, Russian authorities left residents in the dark about the risks, including the first responders:

The Defense Ministry denied any radiation leak even as the local administration in Severodvinsk reported a hike in radiation levels and told residents to stay indoors — a move that prompted frightened residents to buy iodine, which can help reduce risks from exposure to radiation.

Russian media reported that the victims of the explosion received high doses of radiation. They said that medical workers at the Arkhangelsk city hospital that treated three of those injured said they hadn’t been warned that they would treat people exposed to radiation and lacked elementary protective gear.

The Moscow Times on Monday cited Igor Semin, a cardiovascular surgeon at the hospital, who scathingly criticized the authorities in a social network post for failing to warn the hospital workers about the deadly risks. “They were abandoned and left to fend for themselves,” the newspaper quoted Semin as saying.

Anyone who has studied the Chernobyl accident will find frightening parallels in this new accident. For years, the Soviets denied the true scope of the accident, and in the first few hours denied an accident had taken place at all. When Western nations began detecting high levels of radiation on the winds, the Soviets admitted that an accident had taken place but denied the scope of the problem. They delayed evacuations so as not to embarrass the political leadership, lied to the first responders, and only admitted to the true nature of the accident after the Soviet system had collapsed — bad engineering combined with incompetent operation.

This accident may not be anywhere near as bad as Chernobyl, but given the Russian government’s desire to follow the Chernobyl playbook, it must be pretty bad on its own. They’re only admitting to what cannot be denied — the dispersal of radioactive elements — while still denying any other implications of what seems clearly to be a reactor explosion, which would be a highly contaminative event. The need for secrecy suggests something closer to the worst-case scenario rather than the best-case scenario.

Perhaps this will convince Russia and others to dispense with the idea of nuclear propulsion on missiles. Don’t count on that, though; Chernobyl should have forced the Soviets to shut down all of its RBMK-type reactors, but they continued to operate — and in fact ten still operate in Russia. Some lessons never quite get learned when accountability is non-existent.

Russia’s new Chernobyl?

TAGS:CHERNOBYLNUCLEAR ACCIDENTRUSSIASKYFALL

(Note:   In 1990 I had traveled to the USSR, fascist Soviet Russia,  with an Anoka, Minnesota group of Christians who had gathered thousands of dollars to donate personally to Russian hospitals serving the countless thousands of victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.   I was fluent in speaking Russian at the time and was glad to be of service.

I had been teaching Russian in my ‘earlier’ life, and had spent a month in the USSR in 1966, practicing the language when it was still a first class nasty  fascist government.

Our current Dems in Congress today  seem to be have become purveyors of a Soviet type fascist  state.   Countless Americans don’t seem to care.   Most are Democrats!)  ghr

Our St. Paul Central’s Gathering for a 67th Year Class Reunion!

Student leaders of my graduation class from high school organized a reunion celebration which I shall, God willing, be attending this coming Tuesday.   We survivors  had all graduated from St. Paul Central High School, June, 1952.   So many of us have been dying recently those leaders must have decided to speed up our showings before we all disappear.

High schools “taught”  ninth grade then.  No one normal would have been stupid enough to detach puberty developing human animals from seniors in high school “to kin”  with  seventh  graders in junior high….except for typical College of Education majors of any day.  Unlike our today, teachers actually taught knowledge in public school.  They themselves, as it turned out,  were well educated, civil and JudeoChristian….especially the Christian part.

The more  knowledge I could amass, “the closer to God I would become”  was the mantra I had heard again and again the ideal why I was in school.   I was also expected to seek and discover a career for my future.

The only thing then I knew about the University of Minnesota is that it beat Nebraska 61-7 in the fall of 1945, the same autumn we began to get GIs; as teachers in 7th and 8th grades to replace the retiring demanding, encyclopedic, well educated  old maids.

I had a reading problem.  School mate, Brian Humphrey did too.  We couldn’t read novels.  My best friend, Jim Meeker could.  He was a well disciplined, A-plus, super study, rather quiet guy and good student and reader.  He could read nearly a novel per day!

I was reduced to Classic Comics….and loved the entanglements of their stories!!

A Mrs. Dagmar McClement was our basic 8th grade teacher at St. Paul’s Horace Mann Elementary School, K through 8th grade.   A  buxom bossy gal, intelligent, but NOT of the old maid well educated “religious and well learned”  old  guard type.  It was, after all, only eighth grade and consuming knowledge hadn’t arrived yet!

I had seen the  movie, “The Yearling” which was based on very popular novel of that day.  Some time well after Christmas Mrs. McClement announced  we would be having our annual  “Weekly Reader” test from the folks who publish the “Weekly Reader” an up-to-day learning weekly news piece about general knowledge the publishers and educators of the day thought necessary to read and follow beyond the school curriculum….pictures of stuff, articles of animals, maps, paragraphs of historic events, 100 items for the eye to conquer for the mind.

I had no trouble reading paragraphs, even pages, books  of history, especially where maps might be involved or newspaper articles.   But, I could, can, never read or follow a novel.

Jim Meeker and I were the best of friends from first grade on.   We played all sorts of games scholastically  oriented at his house, just the two of us…..for years!  He had a college-educated brother twelve  years older than we were, who had lots of stuff available we could work with.    I was certain he was my only real competitor.

Day of the annual Weekly Reader class test…..100 items, all short answer or multiple choice.   I had left only one question blank, and was certain I had finished the rest of the items correctly.   Jim told me he  had  left two blanks.   It turned out no one was close to us.

One of the question items was a picture of a dromedary we had to identify in writing.   Jim couldn’t name the creature so left the item blank.

I wrote in “DROMEDOR”. The answer should have been “DROMEDARY”.

Mrs. McClement didn’t like me.  I knew that.   She told the class I had misspelled the name of the animal, and therefore the answer was just as incorrect as Jim’s no answer at all.   She reminded me and the class that Jim was a better all around student and therefore had earned the book!

I was “mature” enough NOT in any way to blame Jim.   But, Dagmar was evil in my mind for the rest of the school year both in her classes and others.   I had ‘hired’ an anger about school I had NEVER before experienced, which carried me to my first class in high school,  English with Mabel Wicker the very next year.

There she was, that September….68 years old, her last year of teaching English.   Four feet ten,  90 pounds, a confident but  shadow of a woman, one wearing a red wig.

First hour, first day in her class we were to buy a pamphlet of Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice”.  We had to buy all of our school books in those public school days.   I looked at its first pages.  I smelled trouble.    I knew immediately Shakespeare English might as well be Chinese.  I had, have, never been able to read a novel, even to this day…end of story!

The very next school day Miss Wicker began her Shakespeare menus….She began reading with “Enter Antonio”, who says,  “In sooth.  I know not why I am so sad:  It wearies me; you say it wearies you;  But how I caught it, found it, or came by it, What stuff  ’tis made of, whereof it is born, I am to learn;  …….and such a want-wit sadness makes of me, That I have much ado to know myself.”

Salarino responds;  “Your mind is tossing on the ocean;   There, where your argosies with  portly sail.  Like signiors and rich burghers on the flood, Or as it were, the pageants of the sea, Do overpeer the petty traffickers,   That curtsy to them, do them reverence,  As they fly by them with their woven wings……..”

I was warned studying in high school would be a challenge.   Unbeknownst  to me,  the fact she had already read the play  to me as a member of the class made it possible for me  to understand the core of the drama itself.     I felt I was reading almost like anyone else.  I so wanted to read properly!

There were forty kids in the class….mostly boys….which I didn’t recognize until two years later when my college prep teacher at Central, Grace Cochran, cornered me regarding my bad reading ability.    “Who was your Freshman English teacher”, she asked.   She told me Miss Wicker  was the English teacher responsible for weeding  poor readers out of  the college prep line sending them to machine shop.    I admitted I hated Wm. Thackeray stuff, and by Nature couldn’t read “Vanity Fair” anyway.

She soothed me by mentioning a lot of boys were poor novel readers…..She told me to stay with my Classic Comics habit….at least I would know the Classics’  basic plots.

Miss Wicker failed me the first marking period.   She called each of  her  forty students as they were seated,  by alphabetical order to come quickly to her desk…..I, being Ray, was toward the end of the list, meaning I had to sweat  longer.   She called each of us  by her  same tone and volume.   When needed she spoke loudly so  every student in the room knew who isn’t working up to ‘snuff’.

I was quite nervous waiting for my turn.   I wasn’t used to doing homework.   “Mr. Ray!”

On her desk there sat a black ink well and a red ink well.    Each grading card was a small stiff card with the titles of  classes on the left,  with six or eight grading periods awaiting marks toward the right.   One’s grades were open for the world to see.

Our meeting was brief.   She  admired my improvements on her test scores concerning Shakespeare….However, she showed me the total absence of any and all homework I was supposed to do….

Her pen reached to the RED ink well.  Miss Wicker made as big a red “F” as she could in the space fit for the grade…..THE VERY FIRST CLASS MARKING ON MY REPORT CARD FOR THE REST OF THE YEAR for all to see!!!   My first grade at Central!

 

 

Today in American History

Where Lincoln Stood on Slavery

by Carl M. Cannon at realclearpolitics:

August 22, 2019

Seven years ago today, as the presidential election contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney entered the home stretch, Vice President Joe Biden spoke at three events in Detroit. Biden was in the news that week because of an intemperate assertion that Republicans desired to put African Americans “back in chains.”

Such rhetorical excess is a hallmark of our time, especially when Democrats discuss race, but Biden’s infelicity put me in mind of a time a century and a half earlier when a Republican president was publicly challenged within his own party to do more to free human beings who were literally in chains.

The unsolicited advice to Abraham Lincoln came in the form of an open letter in a newspaper published by Horace Greeley. Although remembered today mostly for a phrase he didn’t utter (“Go west, young man”), in his own time Greeley was known as an ardent social reformer, journalist, and politician. He came relatively late to the cause of abolition, but once he did, Greeley was all-in. Even as Lincoln pushed reluctant Union Gen. George B. McClellan to press the fight against the Confederates, Lincoln was hearing it from his other flank. Greeley’s New York Tribune published an editorial headlined “Prayer of Twenty Millions,” in which Lincoln was told that many of those who had voted for him in the 1860 election were now “sorely disappointed and deeply pained” by the president’s presumed moderation toward the Southern states then in rebellion.

Three days later, on this date in 1862, Lincoln gave his answer.

 * * *

Unbeknownst to Horace Greeley, Lincoln had been considering decisive action on the question of Southern slavery in the summer of 1862. The president had discussed it with his Cabinet and drafted a version of a sweeping executive order. But Lincoln believed it was best delivered from a position of strength. In the commander-in-chief’s mind, this meant issuing it after a military victory by Union troops. For this reason, Lincoln didn’t want to tip his hand entirely; neither did he want the Tribune’s editorial sitting out there unanswered. And on Aug. 22, 1862 — 157 years ago today — he formulated his reply.

“If I could save the Union without freeing any slave,” Lincoln wrote to Greeley, “I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”

This statement has been used by 20^th century revisionists of various stripes to assert that Lincoln wasn’t all that committed to the cause of ending slavery. This criticism is not only wrong, it’s wrong in every respect. Abraham Lincoln had made his name in politics by speaking against slavery; the nascent political party he had joined was created to end it. Even as he wrote to Greeley, he was commanding a huge military force suffering frightful losses, a force called “Mr. Lincoln’s Army,” whose infantrymen marched off to war singing “John Brown’s Body,” later to be known as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

In fact, Lincoln tipped his hand even in the Greeley letter, with his concluding statement: “I intend no modification,” he wrote, “of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.”

The “oft-expressed” observation was no exaggeration. Lincoln had forcefully denounced slavery before the Civil War and continued to do so throughout its duration. And he did so in ways that helped Americans see the cosmic issue at stake, which was whether all the Founders’ talk about freedom really meant anything at all.

In an Oct. 4, 1854 speech in Springfield, Ill., Lincoln had expressed it this way: “We were proclaiming ourselves political hypocrites before the world, by fostering human slavery and proclaiming ourselves at the same time, the sole friends of human freedom.”

In an 1855 letter to his friend Joshua Speed, Lincoln amplified on this theme in more caustic language. “Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid,” he wrote. “As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal except Negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.’ When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”

Three years later, Lincoln gave his famous “house divided” speech at the Illinois state Republican convention that nominated him for a Senate campaign.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Lincoln said. on that occasion. “I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or the other.”

In his December 1862 State of the Union message to Congress, President Lincoln portrayed the intertwined goals of ending slavery and preserving the Union as one and the same. “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free,” he asserted. “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of Earth.”

At Gettysburg, Lincoln referred to the “unfinished work” of the Union dead as “a new birth of freedom” that validated not just the hopes of enslaved Americans, but the soaring principles of America’s founding.

In an 1864 letter to a friend from Kentucky, a newspaperman named Albert G. Hodges, Lincoln wrote, “I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.” A month before he died, in a speech to the 140^th Indiana Regiment, Lincoln said simply, “Whenever [I] hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”

Lincoln’s actions, of course, spoke loudest of all. The military success he was awaiting on this date in 1862 came three weeks later at Antietam Creek. The cost was frightful: 2,100 Union soldiers killed, and another 9,500 wounded. The result was really a military stalemate, not a Union victory. But the Confederate losses were nearly as high, and the Battle of Antietam drove Robert E. Lee out of Maryland and back to Virginia. Less than two weeks later, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

 

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/08/22/where_lincoln_stood_on_slavery_141074.html

When American Women Were Real Mothers

I was seven years old when Pearl Harbor was bombed bringing our USA into World War II.   I was a child of the Great Depression up to that point.   American men  worked.   American women were homemaking Mothers.   Motherhood was highly honored in American society looking back where I lived.   Women as a class were highly regarded in the culture where I lived,  very, very Christian raising children at home and married!  Family incomes were the fathers’ responsibilities.  In my relatively newish urban neighborhood they took in about $5,000 or slightly less annually.    We moved into our newly built “five room bungalow” in 1936 about the time our neighborhood grade school was built.   Television didn’t arrive until 1947.   Of the 16 homes on both sides of our block, all but  two families had one or two kids.   The Jahnke’s across the street had three girls in their older teens who  baby sat at ten cents an hour when needed.

Nearly all, if not all, of the kids under age twelve were dressed with family hand-me-downs as all of my clothes were.    Mother made most of my sister’s dresses.

On good weather days, spring through September, washable clothes or curtains and such would be drying out on clothes’ lines hooked to garage and a clothes pole.  Moms also gardened both flower and food plants near the alleys by the backyard.

During the War nearly every house hold had tomato plants growing among the  flower gardens.   Boys learned to play kick ball or kick the can in the street.   Girls were all tied up playing dolls or paper dolls or jump rope in someone’s back yard, which gave Mothers  time to gather, chat, chuckle,  share Victory Garden produce, and often  butter or milk,  salt or sugar they had fallen short of.

My dad was head pharmacist and  manager at a Liggett Drugstore downtown St. Paul on Seventh and Robert.      Although gasoline was rationed during the War, most dad’s like mine,  stored their autos in their garages until the War was over.   Most guys too old to join the military during the War worked at least 48 hours a week always  away from home.

All of us kids had real Mothers all day long  Summers, weekends,  and vacations usually Saturday’s as well governing family children and the home nearly the entire week.    Such women had a right to claim Motherhood.

Today’s Mother is overwhelmingly  an entirely different animal.   With the exception of several religious groups, most American females who enter Motherhood are mothers for only  a week or two past delivery of any child.  She may prefer her career.    She might not be married.   She may  dump her offspring upon her jobless Mother or Grandmother.   There may be no Father.

Well, there’s always Saturday and Sunday for child rearing  Lefties might say.  But most leftist  feminazis usually ignore motherhood.  They prefer to teach at universities these days.

The vast majority of today’s American  family women are something other than Mothers these days….at best, only on weekends or during summer vacation.

No wonder our current Americana under age 30 have become so interested in our today’s Democrat Party fascism they absorb in school and at university!!

There’s no real Mother around.   Fatherhood majority disappeared decades ago!

Radio’s Golden Days…..Remembering the Lone Ranger and Glen Campbell

Starring Glen Campbell:

You may never have seen Glen play like this before. This is world-class guitar playing and Campbell makes it look easy.

The sounds of Glen Campbell on guitar and the symphony orchestra playing Rossini’s“William Tell Overture”  will take you
back to those golden days of yesteryear, when the strains of Rossini’s masterpiece coming over the TV meant the Lone Ranger show was about to begin.

Remember?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/GUBhE00h9U0?feature=player_detailpage

(Sent by Mark Waldeland.)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEAR DENNIS!

How blessed all of us  Americans are that our once Beautiful Godfearing America is at last becoming reacquainted with a Great Preacher for our Times…………

…….not a President, not a General, not a Pope, not a Stalinist, but a radio Preacher…..

OUR DENNIS PRAGER!

“I first met this Dennis via radio, late October, 2004, when civil and decent,  but boring and limited President, George W. Bush was struggling to retain his being in the nation’s White House.   He was trailing noted phony Vietnam crone, liar, foul fool from Massachusetts.   Then, as now, television news was already lefty news…..one and all.

Radio had been abandoned of matters of import.   Best friend of mine, intelligent thinker, skilled artist, politically astute and articulate called…….”You’ve got to turn on the radio!!”

“Why?”    Radio for me in those days was classical music and bouncy polkas….and I loved both….

“There’s a radio  guy, Dennis Prager, ….a conservative really upset and angry  about the possibility of   Kerry making it to the White House!  You’ve got to listen to him….He’s Great!”

I fumbled around searching for the station I had never heard of before.

John F. Kerry was a classic phony, a sleaze, a make-believe.   He had concocted a fairy tale of himself in Vietnam being shot at, with movie and all……starring himself as a hero dodging danger…..A liar….it was all a set up, but it made him a hero who wound up in every lefty communication’s industry and newspaper around.   He was phonier than Hillary by far.

This Dennis was in command of Truth with emotion……I caught him building  his  emotion filled with Truth, building, building……only Truth intended!!

In late August for years Dennis used to preach politics honestly, persuasively at the Minnesota State Fair.     I had never met a conservative as religious in his delivery as he.   I attended the fair every year he was there, every year a Star.

God Bless him……He’s the best American I have ever met.   I am proud and honored to help his conservative cause in any way I can.  Look what he has been able to achieve thus far!!!    God bless him and his cause”………Glenn H. Ray