Day By Day by The Great Chris Muir

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

New Book Release - AZTEC MIDNIGHT by M.C. Tuggle

From the dedicated and unwavering Old Rebel comes the release of his new novella. Long considered a daily must read around these parts, I highly recommend a yarn from a authentic southern thinker and writer. Here is a sample of what to expect from this new work Aztec Midnight:


Charlotte, NC­­--December 26, 2014. “They’re coming,” says A.J. Louderback, sheriff of Jackson County, Texas. And he’s not the only public official warning of the growing threat of Mexican drug cartels.  Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama and Representative Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee have publicly expressed their concerns about these cartels expanding their reach into the U.S.

Set against this modern-day background of the growing power and brazenness of these cartels, the just-released novella Aztec Midnight explores the explosive combination of Mexican economic woes and American complicity in a gripping tale Kirkus Reviews says “zips right along from twist to twist, eventually arriving at a bloody finale.” Foreward Reviews writes that Aztec Midnight is “a suspenseful, driving thriller” that “amps up the suspense with well-crafted dialogue and a Mexican drug cartel subplot.”

North Carolina writer M.C. Tuggle based his story on his travels to Mexico, his encounter with the Mexican military, and interviews with the inhabitants of the Mexican village where he researched his story. Aztec Midnight is the fast-paced tale of Jonathan Barrrett, an American expert in pre-Columbian weapons, who journeys to Cuernavaca with his wife Susanna at the request of Eric Winwood, a high-ranking State Department official. Barrett’s mission is to find and rescue the sacred knife of Aztec emperor Ahuitzotl before the cartels can claim it. Locating the knife proves more challenging and dangerous than Dr. Barrett anticipated, and he and Susanna soon find themselves at the center of the cartels’ search. For Dr. Barrett and his wife to survive, he will be forced to apply his knowledge of ancient weapons in the face of an ancient power he never imagined.

Tito Perdue, the acclaimed author of Lee and Fields of Asphodel, calls Tuggle an “author who knows something about drug cartels, about the lure of artifacts (magic ones especially), and about the derring-do of academical people when pushed to the wall.  Who knows how to write clearly and design a suspenseful plot.”

Aztec Midnight is published by The Novel Fox, and is available at Amazon, Apple iTunes, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Google Books.

ISBN 978-1-68042-002-9
The Novel Fox
P.O. Box 310458, Miami, Florida 33231
http://www.thenovelfox.com/aztec-midnight

About The Author:

M.C. Tuggle’s fantasy, science fiction, and literary stories have been featured in Kzine, Bewildering Stories, Mystic Signals, Fabula Argentea, and Fiction 365. In addition to fantasy, science fiction, and crime novels, he enjoys reading history, with an emphasis on military history, and has given presentations on Stonewall Jackson's Valley Campaign to several historical societies. An avid weightlifter, tennis player, collector of American Indian relics, and student of martial arts.

Please check out his new work and help support a True Brother Of Liberty.

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

What Really Happened to Emmett Till

I have always wondered what the full details of this incident were.

Killer's Confession from Look Magazine

The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi
By William Bradford Huie
Editors Note: In the long history of man's inhumanity to man, racial conflict has produced some of the most horrible examples of brutality. The recent slaying of Emmett Till in Mississippi is a case in point. The editors of Look are convinced that they are presenting here, for the first time, the real story of that killing -- the story no jury heard and no newspaper reader saw.

Disclosed here is the true account of the slaying in Mississippi of a Negro youth named Emmett Till.
Last September in Sumner, Miss., a petit jury found the youth's admitted abductors not guilty of murder. In November, in Greenwood, a grand jury declined to indict them for kidnapping.

Of the murder trial, the Memphis Commercial Appeal said: "Evidence necessary for convicting on a murder charge was lacking." But with truth absent, hypocrisy and myth have flourished. Now, hypocrisy can be exposed; myth dispelled. Here are the facts.
Carolyn Holloway Bryant is 21, five feet tall, weighs 103 pounds. An Irish girl, with black hair and black eyes, she is a small farmer's daughter who, at 17, quit high school at Indianola, Miss., to marry a soldier, Roy Bryant, then 20, now 24. The couple have two boys, three and two; and they operate a store at a dusty crossroads called Money: post office, filling station and three stores clustered around a school and a gin, and set in the vast, lonely cotton patch that is the Mississippi Delta.

Carolyn and Roy Bryant are poor: no car, no TV. They live in the back of the store which Roy's brothers helped set up when he got out of the 82nd Airborne in 1953. They sell "snuff-and-fatback" to Negro field hands on credit: and they earn little because, for one reason, the government has been giving the Negroes food they formerly bought.
Carolyn and Roy Bryant's social life is visits to their families, to the Baptist church, and, whenever they can borrow a car, to a drive-in, with the kids sleeping in the back seat. They call Shane the best picture they ever saw.

For extra money, Carolyn tends store when Roy works outside -- like truck driving for a brother. And he has many brothers. His mother had two husbands, 11 children. The first five -- all boys -- were "Milam children"; the next six -- three boys, three girls -- were "Bryant children."
This is a lusty and devoted clan. They work, fight, vote and play as a family. The "half" in their fraternity is forgotten. For years, they have operated a chain of cottonfield stores, as well as trucks and mechanical cotton pickers. In relation to the Negroes, they are somewhat like white traders in portions of Africa today; and they are determined to resist the revolt of colored men against white rule.

On Wednesday evening, August 24, 1955, Roy was in Texas, on a brother's truck. He had carted shrimp from New Orleans to San Antonio, proceeded to Brownsville. Carolyn was alone in the store. But back in the living quarters was her sister-in-law Juanita Milam, 27, with her two small sons and Carolyn's two. The store was kept open till 9 on week nights, 11 on Saturday.
When her husband was away, Carolyn Bryant never slept in the store, never stayed there alone after dark. Moreover, in the Delta, no white woman ever travels country roads after dark unattended by a man.

This meant that during Roy's absences -- particularly since he had no car -- there was family inconvenience. Each afternoon, a sister-in-law arrived to stay with Carolyn until closing time. Then, the two women, with their children, waited for a brother-in-law to convoy them to his home. Next morning, the sister-in-law drove Carolyn back.

Juanita Milam had driven from her home in Glendora. She had parked in front of the store to the left; and under the front seat of this car was Roy Bryant's pistol, a .38 Colt automatic. Carolyn knew it was there. After 9, Juanita's husband, J. W. Milam, would arrive in his pickup to shepherd them to his home for the night.

About 7:30 pm, eight young Negroes -- seven boys and a girl -- in a '46 Ford had stopped outside. They included sons, grandsons and a nephew of Moses (Preacher) Wright, 64, a 'cropper. They were between 13 and 19 years old. Four were natives of the Delta and others, including the nephew, Emmett (Bobo) Till, were visiting from the Chicago area.

Bobo Till was 14 years old: born on July 25, 1941. He was stocky, muscular, weighing about 160, five feet four or five. Preacher later testified: "He looked like a man."
Bobo's party joined a dozen other young Negroes, including two other girls, in front of the store. Bryant had built checkerboards there. Some were playing checkers, others were wrestling and "kiddin' about girls."

Bobo bragged about his white girl. He showed the boys a picture of a white girl in his wallet; and to their jeers of disbelief, he boasted of success with her.
"You talkin' mighty big, Bo," one youth said. "There's a pretty little white woman in the store. Since you know how to handle white girls, let's see you go in and get a date with her?"
"You ain't chicken, are yuh, Bo?" another youth taunted him.
Bobo had to fire or fall back. He entered the store, alone, stopped at the candy case. Carolyn was behind the counter; Bobo in front. He asked for two cents' worth of bubble gum. She handed it to him. He squeezed her hand and said: "How about a date, baby?"
She jerked away and started for Juanita Milam. At the break between counters, Bobo jumped in front of her, perhaps caught her at the waist, and said: "You needn't be afraid o' me, Baby. I been with white girls before."

[ED NOTE: The phrase "I been with white girls before" might have been possibly "I f**ked white girls before." or something similar. Court records show Carolyn Bryant testified that Till used an "unprintable word":

Carolyn Bryant described the August 24 incident at Bryant's Grocery & Meat Market.  Bryant said that "just after dark" with her alone in the store, Till strongly gripped her hand as she held in out on the candy counter to collect money.  She said she jerked her hand loose "with much difficulty" as Till asked her, "How about a date, baby?"  When she tried to walk away, she stated, Till grabbed her by the waist and said, "You needn't be afraid of me.  I've"--and here Bryant said Till used an "unprintable word"--"white women before."  Bryant testified, "I was just scared to death." 

I looked at Wikipedia to see what it had in reference to this. Wikipedia's account suggests something different, as if some random curse word was just thrown out. ]

[Also, from a comment found, edited for vulgarity:

"Now, I'm going to stop right there. Close your eyes. Imagine it is 2013. You have a 100-pound wife. A 14-year-old, 150-lb white kid grabs her and says, "Don't be afraid; I've f**ked married women before." What are you going to do to that kid? Now imagine it's 1955, and a white kid did that to your wife. The truth has very little to do with the fact that Till was black. It has everything to do with the fact that Till acted like (trashy, verbal/sexual assaulter).....

When Till's friends saw what he was doing, they grabbed him and quickly hustled him out of the store. Carolyn Bryant stopped, ran out the front door behind them to her brother-in-law's car, and grabbed a pistol from under the seat. She was terrified. I don't have to explain to any of you why. "]

At this point, a cousin ran in, grabbed Bobo and began pulling him out of the store. Carolyn now ran, not for Juanita, but out the front, and got the pistol from the Milam car.
Outside, with Bobo being ushered off by his cousins, and with Carolyn getting the gun, Bobo executed the "wolf whistle" which gave the case its name:
THE WOLF-WHISTLE MURDER: A NEGRO "CHILD" OR "BOY" WHISTLED AT HER AND THEY KILLED HIM.
That was the sum of the facts on which most newspaper readers based an opinion.
The Negroes drove away; and Carolyn, shaken, told Juanita. The two women determined to keep the incident from their "Men-folks." They didn't tell J. W. Milam when he came to escort them home.

By Thursday afternoon, Carolyn Bryant could see the story was getting around. She spent Thursday night at the Milams, where at 4 a.m. (Friday) Roy got back from Texas. Since he had slept little for five nights, he went to bed at the Milams' while Carolyn returned to the store.

During Friday afternoon, Roy reached the store, and shortly thereafter a Negro told him what "the talk" was, and told him that the "Chicago boy" was "visitin' Preacher." Carolyn then told Roy what had happened.

Once Roy Bryant knew, in his environment, in the opinion of most white people around him, for him to have done nothing would have marked him for a coward and a fool.
On Friday night, he couldn't do anything. He and Carolyn were alone, and he had no car. Saturday was collection day, their busy day in the store. About 10:30 Saturday night, J. W. Milam drove by. Roy took him aside.

"I want you to come over early in the morning," he said. "I need a little transportation."
J.W. protested: "Sunday's the only morning I can sleep. Can't we make it around noon?"
Roy then told him.
"I'll be there," he said. "Early."
J. W. drove to another brother's store at Minter City, where he was working. He closed that store about 12:30 a.m., drove home to Glendora. Juanita was away, visiting her folks at Greenville. J. W. had been thinking. He decided not to go to bed. He pumped the pickup -- a half-ton '55 Chevrolet -- full of gas and headed for Money.

J. W. "Big Milam" is 36: six feet two, 235 pounds; an extrovert. Short boots accentuate his height; khaki trousers; red sports shirt; sun helmet. Dark-visaged; his lower lip curls when he chuckles; and though bald, his remaining hair is jet-black.
He is slavery's plantation overseer. Today, he rents Negro-driven mechanical cotton pickers to plantation owners. Those who know him say that he can handle Negroes better than anybody in the country.

Big Milam soldiered in the Patton manner. With a ninth-grade education, he was commissioned in battle by the 75th Division. He was an expert platoon leader, expert street fighter, expert in night patrol, expert with the "grease gun," with every device for close range killing. A German bullet tore clear through his chest; his body bears "multiple shrapnel wounds." Of his medals, he cherishes one: combat infantryman's badge.

Big Milam, like many soldiers, brought home his favorite gun: the .45 Colt automatic pistol.
"Best weapon the Army's got," he says. "Either for shootin' or sluggin'."
Two hours after Big Milam got the word -- the instant minute he could close the store -- he was looking for the Chicago Negro.

Big Milam reached Money a few minutes shy of 2 a.m., Sunday, August 28. The Bryants were asleep; the store was dark but for the all-night light. He rapped at the back door, and when Roy came, he said: "Let's go. Let's make that trip now."

Roy dressed, brought a gun: this one was a .45 Colt. Both men were and remained -- cold sober. Big Milam had drunk a beer at Minter City around 9; Roy had had nothing.
There was no moon as they drove to Preacher's house: 2.8 miles east of Money.
Preacher's house stands 50 feet right of the gravel road, with cedar and persimmon trees in the yard. Big Milam drove the pickup in under the trees. He was bareheaded, carrying a five-cell flashlight in his left hand, the .45 in the right.

Roy Bryant pounded on the door.
Preacher: "Who's that?"
Bryant: "Mr. Bryant from Money, Preacher."
Preacher: "All right, sir. Just a minute."
Preacher came out of the screened-in porch.
Bryant: "Preacher, you got a boy from Chicago here?"
Preacher: "Yessir."
Bryant: "I want to talk to him."
Preacher: "Yessir. I'll get him."

Preacher led them to a back bedroom where four youths were sleeping in two beds. In one was Bobo Till and Simeon Wright, Preacher's youngest son. Bryant had told Preacher to turn on the lights; Preacher had said they were out of order. So only the flashlight was used.

The visit was not a complete surprise. Preacher testified that he had heard of the "trouble," that he "sho' had" talked to his nephew about it. Bobo himself had been afraid; he had wanted to go home the day after the incident. The Negro girl in the party urged that he leave. "They'll kill him," she had warned. But Preacher's wife, Elizabeth Wright, had decided that the danger was being magnified; she had urged Bobo to "finish yo' visit."

"I thought they might say something to him, but I didn't think they'd kill a boy," Preacher said.
Big Milam shined the light in Bobo's face, said: "You the nigger who did the talking?"
"Yeah," Bobo replied.
Milam: "Don't say, 'Yeah' to me: I'll blow your head off. Get your clothes on."
Bobo had been sleeping in his shorts. He pulled on a shirt and trousers, then reached for his socks.
"Just the shoes," Milam hurried him.
"I don't wear shoes without socks," Bobo said: and he kept the gun-bearers waiting while he put on his socks, then a pair of canvas shoes with thick crepe soles.
Preacher and his wife tried two arguments in the boy's behalf.
"He ain't got good sense," Preacher begged. "He didn't know what he was doing. Don't take him."
"I'll pay you gentlemen for the damages," Elizabeth Wright said.
"You niggers go back to sleep," Milam replied.
They marched him into the yard, told him to get in the back of the pickup and lie down. He obeyed. They drove toward Money.

Elizabeth Wright rushed to the home of a white neighbor, who got up, looked around, but decided he could do nothing. Then, she and Preacher drove to the home of her brother, Crosby Smith, at Sumner; and Crosby Smith, on Sunday morning, went to the sheriff's office at Greenwood.
The other young Negroes stayed at Preacher's house until daylight, when Wheeler Parker telephoned his mother in Chicago, who in turn notified Bobo's mother, Mamie Bradley, 33, 6427 S. St. Lawrence.

Had there been any doubt as to the identity of the "Chicago boy who done the talking," Milam and Bryant would have stopped at the store for Carolyn to identify him. But there had been no denial. So they didn't stop at the store. At Money, they crossed the Tallahatchie River and drove west.
Their intention was to "just whip him... and scare some sense into him." And for this chore, Big Milam knew "the scariest place in the Delta." He had come upon it last year hunting wild geese. Over close to Rosedale, the Big River bends around under a bluff. "Brother, she's a 100-foot sheer drop, and she's a 100 feet deep after you hit."

Big Milam's idea was to stand him up there on that bluff, "whip" him with the .45, and then shine the light on down there toward that water and make him think you're gonna knock him in.
"Brother, if that won't scare the Chicago -------, hell won't."
Searching for this bluff, they drove close to 75 miles. Through Shellmound, Schlater, Doddsville, Ruleville, Cleveland to the intersection south of Rosedale. There they turned south on Mississippi No. 1, toward the entrance to Beulah Lake. They tried several dirt and gravel roads, drove along the levee. Finally, they gave up: in the darkness, Big Milam couldn't find his bluff.
They drove back to Milam's house at Glendora, and by now it was 5 a.m.. They had been driving nearly three hours, with Milam and Bryant in the cab and Bobo lying in the back.
At some point when the truck slowed down, why hadn't Bobo jumped and run? He wasn't tied; nobody was holding him. A partial answer is that those Chevrolet pickups have a wraparound rear window the size of a windshield. Bryant could watch him. But the real answer is the remarkable part of the story.

Bobo wasn't afraid of them! He was tough as they were. He didn't think they had the guts to kill him.
Milam: "We were never able to scare him. They had just filled him so full of that poison that he was hopeless."
Back of Milam's home is a tool house, with two rooms each about 12 feet square. They took him in there and began "whipping" him, first Milam then Bryant smashing him across the head with those .45's. Pistol-whipping: a court-martial offense in the Army... but MP's have been known to do it.... And Milam got information out of German prisoners this way.
But under these blows Bobo never hollered -- and he kept making the perfect speeches to insure martyrdom.
Bobo: "You bastards, I'm not afraid of you. I'm as good as you are. I've 'had' white women. My grandmother was a white woman."

Milam: "Well, what else could we do? He was hopeless. I'm no bully; I never hurt a nigger in my life. I like niggers -- in their place -- I know how to work 'em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are gonna stay in their place. Niggers ain't gonna vote where I live. If they did, they'd control the government. They ain't gonna go to school with my kids. And when a nigger gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he's tired o' livin'. I'm likely to kill him. Me and my folks fought for this country, and we got some rights. I stood there in that shed and listened to that nigger throw that poison at me, and I just made up my mind. 'Chicago boy,' I said, 'I'm tired of 'em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. Goddam you, I'm going to make an example of you -- just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.'"

So Big Milam decided to act. He needed a weight. He tried to think of where he could get an anvil. Then he remembered a gin which had installed new equipment. He had seen two men lifting a discarded fan, a metal fan three feet high and circular, used in ginning cotton.
Bobo wasn't bleeding much. Pistol-whipping bruises more than it cuts. They ordered him back in the truck and headed west again. They passed through Doddsville, went into the Progressive Ginning Company. This gin is 3.4 miles east of Boyle: Boyle is two miles south of Cleveland. The road to this gin turns left off U.S. 61, after you cross the bayou bridge south of Boyle.
Milam: "When we got to that gin, it was daylight, and I was worried for the first time. Somebody might see us and accuse us of stealing the fan."
Bryant and Big Milam stood aside while Bobo loaded the fan. Weight: 74 pounds. The youth still thought they were bluffing.

They drove back to Glendora, then north toward Swan Lake and crossed the "new bridge" over the Tallahatchie. At the east end of this bridge, they turned right, along a dirt road which parallels the river. After about two miles, they crossed the property of L.W. Boyce, passing near his house.
About 1.5 miles southeast of the Boyce home is a lonely spot where Big Milam has hunted squirrels. The river bank is steep. The truck stopped 30 yards from the water.

Big Milam ordered Bobo to pick up the fan.
He staggered under its weight... carried it to the river bank. They stood silently... just hating one another.
Milam: "Take off your clothes."
Slowly, Bobo pulled off his shoes, his socks. He stood up, unbuttoned his shirt, dropped his pants, his shorts.
He stood there naked.
It was Sunday morning, a little before 7.
Milam: "You still as good as I am?"
Bobo: "Yeah."
Milam: "You still 'had' white women?"
Bobo: "Yeah."
That big .45 jumped in Big Milam's hand. The youth turned to catch that big, expanding bullet at his right ear. He dropped.
They barb-wired the gin fan to his neck, rolled him into 20 feet of water.
For three hours that morning, there was a fire in Big Milam's back yard: Bobo's crepe soled shoes were hard to burn.
Seventy-two hours later -- eight miles downstream -- boys were fishing. They saw feet sticking out of the water. Bobo.

The majority -- by no means all, but the majority -- of the white people in Mississippi 1) either approve Big Milam's action or else 2) they don't disapprove enough to risk giving their "enemies" the satisfaction of a conviction.

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Geroge Mason, Patrick Henry, and Nationalism contra Federalism


Was Nationalism Sold To the Country As Federalism?by Al Benson Jr.



It seems that, under the Articles of Confederation, there were states rights, as each state was considered sovereign and independent. However, with the ratification of the new constitution, that seems to have disappeared. Historian Clarence Carson has noted that, regarding the Articles of Confederation: “This bent, or tradition can be traced to many sources. Americans were, above all, a people of the book–the written word–the Bible. There was the Puritan idea, too, of the Covenant, an agreement between man and man and between man and God…Colonists had drawn their own political agreements, such as the Mayflower Compact and the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut…Once the colonies had broken away from England, the only historical allegiances that remained were to the states and localities…At any rate, there should be no doubt that the government of the United States under the Articles of Confederation was brought into being by the states.”
Some delegates saw the new Constitution as potentially tyrannical and refused to sign it. It seems that statesmen in those days had a far clearer view of things than do our present politicians, who I will not dignify by calling them statesmen.
George Mason of Virginia was unwilling to sign. The major objection was that the new document did not contain a bill of rights and there were objections in several state conventions to ratification being enacted too hastily without such being made part of the document. Patrick Henry argued, and rightfully so, in the light of history, that a specific bill of rights was essential. He observed that governments regularly and automatically assumed powers that were not prohibited to them. Can anyone in our day deny this truth? We have a Commander-in-Chief that regularly rules the country by executive fiat when he can’t get a usually-willing Congress to go along with something he has been instructed to ram through. And Congress never seems to complain. They sit back and let him do it. In our day the Executive Branch of government regularly usurps powers denied to it and the courts ignore the whole situation, giving the Executive and Legislative branches a wink and a nod as our rights are stolen. So much for checks and balances–another bill of goods we have been sold.
Added to all this was the continuing problem of differing views of the Constitution, which seems to have been a major problem back before the War of Northern Aggression.
In his book The Confederate Constitution of 1861 Marshall DeRosa noted that: “Within the context of American federalism does sovereignty reside in the people in their national or state capacities? To be more precise, does the U.S. Constitution establish an association of sovereign individuals within their respective states or a national community of sovereign individuals the states notwithstanding?” It seems that within the ‘more perfect Union” there has always been this tension. DeRosa noted that by 1861 this tension had become a major cleavage so that the Constitution “rather served as a vehicle for dissension and separation.”
DeRosa observed that: “This was most certainly the case by 1861, as Northerners insisted on a model of federalism consisting of a national community of individuals, with sovereignty being a national phenomenon–that is, nationalism–whereas Southerners adhered to a model consisting of a community of states.”
John C. Calhoun, while he was still alive, (he died in March, 1850) noticed that a transition was taking place wherein the old Federal Republic was being transformed into a consolidated democracy, which placed sovereign authority at the national level while taking power away from the states. That trend continued, with William Henry Seward claiming that the Constitution had established a national community of individuals and not a community of states. Seward was from New York.
And this thought has occurred to me–is it just possible that what Calhoun observed as a transformation was, in fact, actually there in seed form at the very beginning?
According to DeRosa, Seward claimed that: “the States are not parties to the Constitution as States; it is the Constitution of the people of the United States. But even if the States continue as States, they have surrendered their equality as States, and submitted themselves to the sway of the numerical majority…” There is no way I can agree with Seward’s blatant nationalism, but, what if that was really the intent from the beginning? What if nationalism was sold to the Southern states surreptitiously as federalism and, outside of a few men like Patrick Henry, hardly any grasped that? While that may sound far out to some, is it any further out than the idea of a group of men eagerly signing up for a “Union” they could not secede from only 13 years after they had experienced the same situation with Great Britain?
You have to wonder what would make men yoke themselves and their states again to a bondage they had only recently fought a war of independence to get away from. You have to wonder if some of these delegates had in mind something other than the freedom and liberty for both states and individuals that Patrick Henry envisioned.
An educated pastor once said to me “You have to wonder if there were some anti-Christs in that (constitutional) convention.” At the time, I did not grasp the enormity of his assertion. Now I have begun to.


Where Mason Left Us by Vito Mussomeli

This essay is in honor of George Mason’s death, October 7, 1792.
He wrote the foundational words for America. If we listen, he taught us the dream that the import of America is greater, more important than any government of any United States.
He continues today as he was in his time, a pulsating presence of cogency, learning and disregard for political prominence. An unsplintered force, he is our unbreakable vision of limited government grounded in the local people. Like Taylor of Caroline and Macon of North Carolina, he was a true, tempered and tried ‘Roman’ Republican. He built for the ages. He loved for and lived between our eternities of Life and Liberty.
His “Virginia Declaration of Rights” is our touchstone expression of the essential American understanding of a people, any people and their government. He did not abbreviate our world into “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. He was far more clear: “… all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety”.
Again, “… all power is vested in, and consequently derived from, the people; that magistrates are their trustees and servants and at all times amenable to them.”
And, again, “… when any government shall be found inadequate or contrary to … (the security, protection and common benefit of the people) … a majority of the community has an indubitable, inalienable, and indefeasible right to reform, alter, or abolish it in such manner as shall be judged most conducive to the public weal.” (Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, from Sec. 1, 2 and 3)
In 1787 he led the fight to end the Slave Trade only to have that quintessential understanding of liberty set adrift in the slave-ship harbors of New England on the demand of South Carolina’s early gift to Nationalism, General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. In turn, Pinckney threw away the South’s defense against New England’s commercialism voting to allow a simple majority in the national legislature for commercial statutes. Infuriated, Mason claimed the South was there “delivered” into the hands of the Northern business interests. He recognized the igniting spark of future war.
Unlike Patrick Henry relying on the Amendment Clause to sign approval for the Constitution, or Edmund Randolph who did an about-face from Philadelphia so strange as to withhold a letter from New York during the Virginia ratification convention which, if known to the delegates, may have tipped Virginia to Mason’s side, Mason held firm and refused. In so doing he declined the shards of political compromise to retain political stature. It was then he rose to become an historical beacon of a person’s self-worth.
He understood that the threat to a person’s liberty is so great as the distance between your government and your person. Humanity’s personal liberty requires greater vigilance than its property. Principles of government that will be continuously construed to protect our liberty can only be retained when closely borne. While Wilson, Hamilton and Ellsworth plotted for a national judiciary which they knew would stitch together national power over the States, Mason agreed the courts would grow far afield from the States. He proposed that any national judiciary be limited to admiralty and maritime cases. Like Jefferson who called courts “sappers”, Mason knew no government function breathes air so distant from local people as a national-appointed judiciary.
When he passed from this world on October 7, 1792, he left a record of sterling brilliance and unparalleled character, of self-denial service to more than the people of Virginia. He is our Untarnished Founder, a man whose intellect, character and vision equaled or surpassed any in this world’s political history – for he served the world as well as his country, Virginia. He and Jefferson would say good-bye at Gunston Hall for the last time on September 30, 1792, and the Federalist Republican mantle drew closer and far heavier onto Jefferson’s shoulders.

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Vox Day - William S. Lind's "ON WAR" and "What Cultural Marxism Is and Isn't"

What "Cultural Marxism" is and isn't
This is very relevant today, since it is not only an excerpt from William S. Lind's ON WAR, which is being officially released later today by Castalia House, but a topic that has been the subject of some debate among GamerGaters opposed to the pinkshirts' attempts to transform the game industry in a conventionally cultural marxist manner.

Most people wrongly understand cultural Marxism to mean: "cultural efforts to establish an actual global Marxist system". This is not correct. Marxism is a political and economic system that has been repeatedly refined since Karl Marx laid down his pen. It might be a little less confusing to describe it as "cultural Marxianism", but that's being excessively pedantic. The matter is readily clarified by the essay entitled "What is Political Correctness", as the father of 4th Generation War theory explains the historical roots of political correctness in cultural Marxism:
Political Correctness is cultural Marxism, Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. Its history goes back not to the 1960s but to World War I. Before 1914, Marxist theory said that if a major war broke out in Europe, the workers of every country would join together in a revolution to overthrow capitalism and replace it with international socialism. But when war came, that did not happen. What had gone wrong?

Two Marxist theorists, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary, independently came up with the same answer. They said that Western culture and the Christian religion had so blinded the working class to its true Marxian class interests that Communism was impossible in the West until traditional culture and Christianity were destroyed. When Lukacs became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bela Kun Bolshevik government in Hungary in 1919, one of his first acts was introducing sex education into the Hungarian schools. He knew that destroying traditional sexual morals would be a major step toward destroying Western culture itself.

Lukacs became a major influence on a Marxist think tank established in 1923 at Frankfurt University in Germany, the Institute for Social Research, commonly known as the Frankfurt School. When Max Horkheimer took over as director of the Frankfurt School in 1930, he set about in earnest to do Lukacs’ bidding by translating Marxism from economic into cultural terms. Other Frankfurt School members devoted to this intellectually difficult task were Theodor Adorno, Eric Fromm, Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse. Theirs was not the Marxism of the Soviet Union—Moscow considered them heretics—but it was Marxism nonetheless.

The Frankfurt School’s key to success was crossing Marx with Freud. They argued that just as under capitalism everyone lived in a state of economic oppression, so under Western culture people lived under psychological repression. From psychology they also drew the technique of psychological conditioning. Want to “normalize” homosexuality? Just show television program after television program where the only normal-seeming white male is homosexual.

In 1933 the Frankfurt School moved from Germany to New York City. There, its products included “critical theory,” which demands constant, destructive criticism of every traditional social institution, starting with the family. It also created a series of “studies in prejudice,” culminating in Adorno’s immensely influential book, The Authoritarian Personality, which argued that anyone who defends traditional culture is a “fascist” and also mentally ill. That is why anyone who now dares defy PC gets sent to sensitivity training, which is psychological conditioning designed to produce submission.
In other words, it is not a tool used to establish Marxism, but rather a perversion of Marxism aimed at the culture rather than the political economy. Anyone attempting to understand the pinkshirts of #GamerHate must first understand that cultural Marxism is real and that it is the underlying basis for the SJWs' current attack on the game industry. And it is worth pointing out that any #GamerGaters attempting to defeat them would do very well to understand that they are presently engaging in a 4GW struggle, and that in that struggle, they are the insurgents.

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

The Economic Causes of the War Between the States by Dr. Donald W. Miller, Jr.

via Free North Carolina and Rebellion Blog

 

North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial

The Economic Causes of the War Between the States



The following essay is an excellent encapsulation and explanation of the economic causes of the
War Between the States published in September 2001 by Dr. Donald W. Miller, Jr.  Editor
The Economic Roots of the Civil War

“Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions
to the North. The love of money is the root of this, as of many evils. The quarrel between the North and the
South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel.” Charles Dickens

In the schoolbook account of the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln rose to the presidency and
took the steps needed to end slavery. He led the country in a great Civil War against the slaveholding
States that seceded, restored these states to the Union, and ended slavery. Accordingly, historians rate
Abraham Lincoln as one of our greatest presidents.

Capt Louis Thomas Hicks

People in the South, like my great-great-grandfather Louis Thomas Hicks, had a different view of the war.
Louis Hicks fought in the Battle of Gettysburg in the Army of Northern Virginia, commanding the
20th North Carolina Regiment (in Iverson's Brigade of Rodes Division in Ewell's Second Corps).
He led his regiment into action on the first day of the battle and was forced to surrender after losing
eighty percent of his men (238 out of 300) in two-and-a-half hours of fighting. In his personal account
of the battle, he wrote, "[As a prisoner] I lied awake, thinking of my comrades and the great cause for
which we were willing to shed our last drop of blood."


His daughter, Mary Lyde Williams, echoed similar sentiments in her Presentation Address given
at the Unveiling of the North Carolina Memorial on the Battlefield of Gettysburg on July 3, 1929.
She began her address with the words, "They wrote a constitution in which each State should be free."
Four children, including her granddaughter, my mother, who was then 10 years old,
removed the veil that covered the statue.

Today’s Standard View of the War
Today American children are taught in the nation's schools, both in the North and South,
that it was wrong for people to support the Confederacy and to fight and die for it.

Well-intentioned, "right thinking" people equate anyone today who thinks that the South did the
right thing by seceding from the Union as secretly approving of slavery. Indeed, such thinking has
now reached the point where groups from both sides of the political spectrum, notably the NAACP
and Southern Poverty Law Center on the left and the Cato Institute on the right, want to have the
Confederate Battle Flag eradicated from public spaces. These people argue that the Confederate
flag is offensive to African-Americans because it commemorates slavery.

In the standard account, the Civil War was an outcome of our Founding Fathers failure to address
the institution of slavery in a republic that proclaimed in its Declaration of Independence that
"all men are created equal." But was it really necessary to wage a four-year war to abolish
slavery in the United States, one that ravaged half of the country and destroyed a generation
of American men? Only the United States and Haiti freed their slaves by war.


America Not Alone in Slaveholding
Every other country in the New World that had slaves, such as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia,
Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela, freed them in the 19th century peacefully.

The war did enable Lincoln to "save" the Union, but only in a geographic sense. The country ceased
being a Union, as it was originally conceived, of separate and sovereign States. Instead,
America became a "nation" with a powerful federal government. Although the war freed four million
slaves into poverty, it did not bring about a new birth of freedom, as Lincoln and historians such as
James McPherson and Henry Jaffa say.

For the nation as a whole the war did just the opposite: It initiated a process of centralization of government
that has substantially restricted liberty and freedom in America, as historians Charles Adams and Jeffrey Rogers
Hummel have argued – Adams in his book, When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for
Southern Secession (published in 2000); and Hummel in his book, Emancipating Slaves,
Enslaving Free Men (1996).

Not a “Civil War”
The term Civil War is a misnomer. The South did not instigate a rebellion. Thirteen Southern States in
1860-61 simply chose to secede from the Union and go their own way, like the thirteen colonies did
when they seceded from Britain. A more accurate name for themwar that took place between the northern
and Southern American States is the War for Southern Independence. Mainstream historiography
presents the victors' view, an account that focuses on the issue of slavery
and downplays other considerations.

Up until the 19th century slavery in human societies was considered to be a normal state of affairs.
The Old Testament of the Bible affirms that slaves are a form of property and that the
children of a slave couple are the property of the slaves' owner (Exodus 21:4). Abraham and Jacob
kept slaves, and the New Testament says nothing against slavery.

Slaves built the pyramids of Egypt, the Acropolis of Athens, and the coliseums in the Roman Empire.
Africans exported 11,000,000 black slaves to the New World – 4,000,000 to Brazil, 3,600,000 to
the British and French West Indies, and 2,500,000 to Spanish possessions in Central and South America.
About 500,000 slaves, 5 per cent of the total number shipped to the New World, came to America.
Today slavery still exists in some parts of Africa, notably in Sudan and Mauritania.

Britain Sets the Peaceful Abolition Example
Britain heralded the end of slavery, in the Western world at least, with its Bill of Abolition, passed in 1807.
This Bill made the African slave trade (but not slaveholding) illegal. Later that year the United States
adopted a similar bill, called the Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves, which prohibited bringing
slaves into any port in the country, including into the southern slaveholding States.

Congress strengthened this prohibition in 1819 when it decreed the slave trade to be a form of piracy,
punishable by death. In 1833, Britain enacted an Emancipation Law, ending slavery throughout the
British Empire, and Parliament allocated twenty million pounds to buy slaves' freedom from their owners.
The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer rightly described this action as one of the greatest
acts of collective compassion in the history of humankind.
This happened peacefully and without any serious slave uprisings or attacks on their former owners,
even in Jamaica where a population of 30,000 whites owned 250,000 slaves.

Confederate Constitution Forbids Slave Trade
The Constitution of the Confederate States of America prohibited the importation of slaves (Article I, Section 9).
With no fugitive slave laws in neighboring states that would return fugitive slaves to their owners, the value of
slaves as property drops owing to increased costs incurred to guard against their escape. With slaves having
a place to escape to in the North and with the supply of new slaves restricted by its Constitution, slavery
in the Confederate States would have ended without war.
A slave's decreasing property value, alone, would have soon made the institution unsustainable, irrespective
of more moral and humanitarian considerations.  The rallying call in the North at the beginning of the war
was "preserve the Union," not "free the slaves." Although certainly a contentious political issue and
detested by abolitionists, in 1861 slavery nevertheless was not a major public issue. Protestant Americans
in the North were more concerned about the growing number of Catholic immigrants than they were
about slavery. In his First Inaugural Address, given five weeks before the war began, Lincoln
reassured slaveholders that he would continue to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act.


Lincoln’s War Goes Badly
After 17 months of war things were not going well for the North, especially in its closely watched Eastern Theater.
In the five great battles fought there from July 1861 through September 17, 1862, the changing cast of Union
generals failed to win a single victory. The Confederate army won three: First Bull Run (or First Manassas)
on July 21,1861; Seven Days – six major battles fought from June 25-July 1, 1862 during the Union army's
Peninsular Campaign that, in sum, amounted to a strategic Confederate victory when McClellan withdrew his
army from the peninsula; and Second Bull Run (or Second Manassas) on August 29-30, 1862.

Two battles were indecisive: Seven Pines (or Fair Oaks) on May 31-June 1, 1862, and Antietam (or Sharpsburg)
on September 17, 1862. In the West, Grant took Fort Donelson on February 14, 1862 and captured 14,000
Confederate soldiers. But then he was caught by surprise in the battle of Shiloh (or Pittsburg Landing)
on April 6-7, 1862 and lost 13,000 out of a total of 51,000 men that fought in this two-day battle.

Sickened by the carnage, people in the North did not appreciate at the time that this battle was a strategic
victory for the North. Then came Antietam on September 17, the bloodiest day in the entire war; the Union
army lost more than 12,000 of its 60,000 troops engaged in the battle.

Did saving the Union justify the slaughter of such a large number of young men? The Confederates posed
no military threat to the North. Perhaps it would be better to let the Southern States go, along with their
4 million slaves. If it was going to win, the North needed a more compelling reason to continue the war than
to preserve the Union. The North needed a cause for continuing the war, as Lincoln put the matter
in his Second Inaugural Address, that was willed by God, where "the judgments of the Lord" determined
the losses sustained and its outcome.

Lincoln: “Remain in the Union and Keep Your Slaves”
Five days after the Battle of Antietam, on September 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation.
The Emancipation Proclamation was a "war measure," as Lincoln put it. Foreign correspondents covering the
war recognized it as a brilliant propaganda coup. Emancipation would take place only in rebel States not
under Union control, their State sovereignty in the matter of slavery arguably forfeited as a result of their
having seceded from the Union. The president could not abolish slavery; if not done at the State level,
abolition would require a constitutional amendment.

Slaveholders and their slaves in Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, Tennessee, and parts of Virginia
and Louisiana occupied by Union troops were exempt from the edict. Slaves in the Confederacy would be
"forever free" on January 1, 1863 – one hundred days after the Proclamation was issued – but only if
a State remained in "rebellion" after that date. Rebel States that rejoined the Union and sent elected
representatives to Congress before January 1, 1863 could keep their slaves. Such States would no
longer be considered in rebellion and so their sovereignty regarding the peculiar institution would be restored.
As the London Spectator put it, in its October 11, 1862 issue: "The principle [of the Proclamation] is not that
a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States."

Lincoln: Emancipation and Deportation
Regarding slaves in States loyal to the government or occupied by Union troops, Lincoln proposed three
constitutional amendments in his December 1862 State of the Union message to Congress. The first was that
slaves not freed by the Emancipation Proclamation be freed gradually over a 37-year period, to be completed
by January 1, 1900. The second provided compensation to owners for the loss of their slave property.

The third was that the government transport freed Blacks, at government expense, out of the country and
relocate them in Latin America and Africa. Lincoln wrote that freed blacks need "new homes [to] be found for
them, in congenial climes, and with people of their own blood and race." For Lincoln, emancipation and
deportation were inseparably connected. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Wells wrote in his diary that
Lincoln "thought it essential to provide an asylum for a race which he had emancipated, but which
could never be recognized or admitted to be our equals."

As historian Leone Bennett Jr. puts it in his book Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream (2000),
"It was an article of faith to him [Lincoln] that emancipation and deportation went together like firecrackers
and July Fourth, and that you couldn't have one without the other."

Congress refused to consider Lincoln's proposals, which Horace Greeley in the New York Tribune labeled
whales' tubs of "gradualism, compensation, [and] exportation." None of the Confederate States took the
opportunity to rejoin the Union in the 100-day window offered and the war continued for another two years
and four months. Eight months later the 13th Amendment was ratified, and slavery ended everywhere in the
United States (without gradualism, compensation, or exportation).

Africans Unwanted in the North
Black and White Americans sustained racial and political wounds from the war and the subsequent Reconstruction
that proved deep and long lasting. Northern abolitionists wanted Southern black slaves to be freed, but certainly
did not want them to move north and live alongside them. Indiana and Illinois, in particular, had laws that barred
African-Americans from settling. The military occupation and "Reconstruction" the South was forced to endure after
the war also slowed healing of the wounds.


At a gathering of ex-Confederate soldiers shortly before he died in 1870, Robert E. Lee said,
If I had foreseen the use those people [Yankees] designed to make of their victory, there would have been no
surrender at Appomattox Courthouse; no sir, not by me. Had I foreseen these results of subjugation, I would
have preferred to die at Appomattox with my brave men, my sword in my right hand.”

The North’s Tariff War
Why were business and political leaders in the North so intent on keeping the Southern States in the Union?
It was, to paraphrase Charles Dickens, solely a fiscal matter. The principal source of tax revenue for the federal
government before the Civil War was a tariff on imports. There was no income tax, except for one declared
unconstitutional after its enactment during the Civil War. Tariffs imposed by the federal government not only
accounted for most of the federal budget, they also raised the price of imported goods to a level where the
less-efficient manufacturers of the northeast could be competitive.


The former Vice-President John C. Calhoun put it this way:
"The North had adopted a system of revenue and disbursements in which an undue proportion of the burden
of taxation has been imposed upon the South, and an undue proportion of its proceeds appropriated to the North…
the South, as the great exporting portion of the Union, has in reality paid vastly more than
her due proportion of the revenue."

In March 1861, the New York Evening Post editorialized on this point:
“That either the revenue from duties must be collected in the ports of the rebel States, or the port must be closed
to importations from abroad, is generally admitted. If neither of these things be done, our revenue laws are
substantially repealed; the sources which supply our treasury will be dried up; we shall have no money to
carry on the government; the nation will become bankrupt before the next crop of corn is ripe. There will
be nothing to furnish means of subsistence to the army; nothing to keep our navy afloat; nothing to
pay the salaries of public officers; the present order of things must come to a dead stop.”

Given the serious financial difficulties the Union would face if the Southern States were a separate republic
on its border engaging in duty-free trade with Britain, the Post urged the Union to hold on to its custom
houses in the Southern ports and have them continue to collect duty. The Post goes on to say that incoming
ships to the "rebel States" that try to evade the North's custom houses should be considered as carrying
contraband and be intercepted.
Observers in Britain looked beyond the rhetoric of "preserve the Union" and saw what was
really at stake.Charles Dickens views on the subject were typical:

“Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions
to the North. The love of money is the root of this, as of many other evils. The quarrel between the North
and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel.”

The London press made this argument:
“The war between the North and the South is a tariff war. The war is further, not for any principle, does not
touch the question of slavery, and in fact turns on the Northern lust for sovereignty.”


The South fought the war for essentially the same reason that the American colonies fought the
Revolutionary War. The central grievance of the American colonies in the 18th century was the taxes
imposed on them by Britain. Colonists particularly objected to the Stamp Act, which required them to
purchase an official British stamp and place it on all documents in order for them to be valid. The colonists
also objected to the import tariff that Britain placed on sugar and other goods (the Sugar Act).

After the enactment of what was called the "Tariff of Abomination" in 1828, promoted by Henry Clay, the tax
on imports ranged between 20-30%. It rose further in March 1861 when Lincoln, at the start of his presidency,
signed the Morrill Tariff into law. This tax was far more onerous than the one forced on the American
colonies by Britain in the 18th century.


Usurping Congressional Authority
Lincoln coerced the South to fire the first shots when, against the initial advice of most of his cabinet,
he dispatched ships carrying troops and munitions to resupply Fort Sumter, site of the customs house
at Charleston. Charleston militia took the bait and bombarded the fort on April 12, 1861. After those first
shots were fired the pro-Union press branded Southern secession an "armed rebellion" and called
for Lincoln to suppress it.  Congress was adjourned at the time and for the next three months, ignoring
his constitutional duty to call this legislative branch of government back in session during a time
of emergency, Lincoln assumed dictatorial powers and did things, like raise an army,
that only Congress is supposed to do.

He shut down newspapers that disagreed with his war policy, more than 300 of them. He ordered his
military officers to lock up political opponents, thousands of them. Although the exact number is not known,
Lincoln may well have arrested and imprisoned more than 20,000 political opponents, southern sympathizers,
and people suspected of being disloyal to the Union, creating what one researcher has termed a 19th century
"American gulag," a forerunner of the 20th century's political prison and labor camps in the former Soviet Union.
Lincoln denied these nonviolent dissenters their right of free speech and suspended the privilege
of Habeas Corpus, something only Congress in a time of war has the power to do.

Lincoln's soldiers arrested civilians, often arbitrarily, without any charges being filed; and, if held at all,
military commissions conducted trials. He permitted Union troops to arrest the Mayor of Baltimore (then
the third largest city in the Union), its Chief of Police and a Maryland congressman, along with 31 State
legislators. When Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote an opinion that said these actions were
unlawful and violated the Constitution, Lincoln ignored the ruling.

Error of Judgment
Lincoln called up an army of 75,000 men to invade the seven Southern States that had seceded and force
them back into the Union. By unilaterally recruiting troops to invade these States, without first calling
Congress into session to consider the matter and give its consent, Lincoln made an error in judgment that
cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans.

At the time, only seven States had seceded. But when Lincoln announced his intention to bring these
States back into the Union by force, four additional States – Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and
Arkansas – seceded and joined the Confederacy.

Slavery was not the issue. The issue was the very nature of the American union. If the President of the
United States intended to hold the Union together by force, they wanted out. When these four States
seceded and joined the Confederacy rather than send troops to support Lincoln's unconstitutional actions,
the Confederacy became much more viable and the war much more horrible.

Lincoln Continues Whig Policies
From the time Lincoln entered politics as a candidate for State legislature in 1832, he championed a
political agenda known as the "American System." First advocated by his idol and mentor, Henry Clay,
it was a three-part program of protective tariffs, internal improvements, and centralized banking.
This program "tied economic development to strong centralized national authority," as Robert Johannsen
puts it in Lincoln, the South, And Slavery. Lincoln believed that import tariffs were necessary,
at the expense of consumers. He believed that American industries needed to be shielded
from foreign competition and cheap imported goods. The "internal improvements" he advocated were
simply subsidies for industry, i.e., corporate welfare. Abraham Lincoln was the first president
to give us centralized banking, with paper money not backed by gold.

A More Perfect Union Created by the South
The Constitution of the Confederate States of America forbid protectionist tariffs, outlawed government
subsidies to private businesses, and made congressional appropriations subject to approval by a
two-thirds majority vote. It enjoined Congress from initiating constitutional amendments, leaving
that power to the constituent states; and limited its president to a single six-year term. When the South lost,
instead of a Jeffersonian republic of free trade and limited constitutional government, the stage was set
for the United States to become an American Empire ruled by a central authority. In starting his war
against the Confederate States, Lincoln was not seeking the "preservation of the Union" in its
traditional sense. He sought the preservation of the Northern economy by means of
transforming the federal government into a centralized welfare-warfare-police state.

Paroled from the prison camp at Johnson's Island, Ohio shortly before the end of the war, my grandparent
Louis Hicks walked, barefoot, back to North Carolina to his home named "Liberty Hall" in the town of Faison.
But instead of enjoying a new birth of freedom, he and his family, along with other people in the South,
had to endure a twelve-year military occupation and an oppressive Reconstruction
instituted by radical Republicans.

Reflecting on the War for Southern Independence let us hope that the Confederate Battle Flag that
Louis Thomas Hicks' North Carolina regiment carried with it into battle at Gettysburg, with the cross
of Scotland's patron saint emblazoned on it, will come to be viewed in the 21st century, not as an badge
of slavery, which it is not, but as a symbol of opposition to centralized government power and tyranny.”
End


Notes
The Confederate Battle Flag has 13 white stars superimposed on a blue Cross of St. Andrew, centered
on a red backdrop. Each star represents a State that seceded from the Union, which includes Kentucky
and Missouri, the last two states to be admitted into the Confederacy in late 1861. Throughout the war,
however, they remained largely under Union control. St. Andrew was the younger brother of St. Peter
and is the patron saint of Scotland.

The population of the United States in 1860 was 31,101,000, of which 21,244,000 lived in the North
and 10,957,000 in the Confederacy. In the Confederate States 5,447,000 of these people were white,
133,000 free black, and 3,951,000 were slaves. There were 320,000 deaths in Union forces,
3.2 percent of the total male population; and 300,000 deaths in the Confederate forces, 9.7 percent
of the (white) male population. This death rate, with the current population of the United States 284,050,000,
would be equivalent to 6.5 million men being killed today. Most of those killed were teenagers and men in their 20s.

In his First Inaugural Address, for United States Lincoln uses the term Union. In his Gettysburg Address,
however, instead of Union he uses the word nation, which implies a closer association of States under
centralized control, as opposed to a looser association connoted by the word Union, of separate and
sovereign States. Likewise, in his Second Inaugural Address Lincoln only uses the word Union when
referring to the country as it was when he gave his First Inaugural Address four years earlier, before
the war began; he uses the word nation for the country

it had become in 1865. In these two later speeches he says that the war was fought to preserve the
"nation," that the "nation" shall have a new birth of freedom, and that we must bind up the "nation's wounds."

In a civil war the warring sides battle for control of the central government. The term "civil war" was
coined in England in the 17th century to identify the war fought between supporters of Charles I and the
Parliamentarians led by Oliver Cromwell for control of the government. The South had no designs on the
federal government of the North, headquartered in Washington, D. C. It did not want to run that government.
The breakaway Southern States asserted their independence, like the American colonies did from Britain
eighty-five years before, formed their own Confederate States of America and placed their
seat of government in Richmond, Virginia.

The American Republic was founded on the concept that all men are created equal, with inalienable
rights to life, liberty and property. Black slaves, being sentient human beings, should therefore be as
equally free and independent, with equality under the law, as White human beings; but, as slaves, they
were also someone's property and subject to the due process of law in that regard. Federalist Paper
No. 54 addresses the problem of counting slaves in the population with regard to legislative
representation, concluding that slaves are divested as "two-fifths of the MAN"
and three-fifths as capital, or property.

After the war Robert E. Lee also wrote, "The best men in the South have long desired to do away
with the institution [of slavery], and were quite willing to see it abolished. But with them in relation to
this subject is a serious question today. Unless some humane course, based on wisdom and Christian
principles, is adopted, you do them great injustice in setting them free." (Thomas Nelson Page,
Robert E. Lee: Man and Soldier [New York, 1911], page 38.) Lee did not own slaves (he freed his
in the 1850s), nor did a number of his most trusted lieutenants, including generals A. P. Hill,
Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, J. E. Johnston, and J. E. B. Stuart.

The source references for these quotes can be found in Charles Adams' book When in the Course
of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession.

Colonists also objected to the search and seizure of their property without a specific warrant,
and to being denied the right of trial by jury, which the British instituted to help them more easily
catch and imprison smugglers who avoided paying taxes on imported goods.

Friday, September 26, 2014

r/K Selection Theory by Anonymous Conservative



From Anonymous Conservative:

Biologists have long noted that species will tend to evolve behaviors which best aid them to effectively exploit their environment. Among these behavioral life history traits are reproductive strategies. Reproductive strategies are, as the name implies, the strategies individuals will use to reproduce. Here we will focus upon the two strategies demonstrated in r/K Selection Theory in Evolutionary Biology.

The science behind r/K Selection theory was hashed out decades ago. It emerged as biologists pondered why some species reproduced slowly using monogamy and high-investment parenting, while other species reproduced explosively, using promiscuity and single parenting. At the time this science was developed, the researchers were wholly unaware of its relevance to our modern ideological battles in the world of politics. The terms r and K came from variables in equations which described how populations would change over time. r represented the maximal reproductive rate of an individual, while K represented the carrying capacity of an environment.

r/K selection theory describes two environmental extremes, and the strategies a population will produce to exploit each extreme. As a result of these strategies, each of these two environments will produce a very particular psychology in the individuals exposed to them.

The first environment an organism may face is the presence of freely available resources, which is referred to as an r-selective environment. This most often occurs when a predator keeps a population consistently lower than the carrying capacity of its environment. Just as rabbits do not strip their grassy fields bare due to the predation they endure, the r-strategy is designed to exploit an environment where resources are freely available, everywhere.

In r-selection, those individuals who waste time fighting for food will be out-reproduced by pacifists, who simply focus upon eating, and reproducing. Fighting also entails risks of injury or death – risks which are pointless given the free availability of resources everywhere. Hence this environment will favor a tendency towards conflict avoidance, and tend to cull the aggressive and competitive. It will also evolve tendencies towards mating as early as possible, as often as possible, with as many mates as possible, while investing as little effort as possible rearing offspring. Here, there are unlimited resources just waiting to be utilized, and even the most unfit can acquire them. As a result, it is more advantageous to produce as many offspring as possible, as quickly as possible, regardless of fitness, so as to out-reproduce those who either waste time producing quality offspring or waste time competing with each other.

Since group competition will not arise in the r-selected environment, r-type organisms will not exhibit loyalty to fellow members of their species, or a drive to sacrifice on their behalf. Indeed, the very notion of in-group will be foreign, and the concept of personal sacrifice for other in-group members will be wholly alien. This is why rabbits, mice, antelope, and other r-selected species, although pleasant, will tend to not exhibit any loyalty or emotional attachment to peers. When resources are freely available, group competition is a risk one need not engage in to acquire resources, so this loyalty to in-group and emotional attachment to peers is not favored.

Here in the r-strategy, we see the origins of the Liberal’s tendencies towards conflict avoidance, from oppositions to free-market capitalism, to pacifism, to demands that all citizens disarm so as to avoid any chance of conflict and competition. Even the newer tendencies to support the ”everyone gets a trophy” movement are outgrowths of this competition-averse urge, and desire for free resource availability. Similarly, Liberals are supportive of promiscuity, supportive of efforts to expose children to ever earlier sexual education, and, as the debate over Murphy Brown showed, Liberals are supportive of low-investment, single parenting. Finally, as John Jost has shown, Liberals show diminished loyalty to in-group, similar to how r-selected organisms do not fully understand the reason for even perceiving an in-group in nature.

In the other environment, a population exists at the carrying capacity of its environment. Since there is not enough food to go around, and someone must die from starvation, this will evolve a specific psychology within such a species.

Termed a K-type psychology, or K-Selected Reproductive Strategy, this psychology will embrace competitions between individuals and accept disparities in competitive outcomes as an innate part of the world, that is not to be challenged. Since individuals who do not fight for some portion of the limited resources will starve, this environment will favor an innately competitive, conflict-prone psychology. Study shows, such a psychology will also tend to embrace monogamy, embrace chastity until monogamous adulthood, and favor high-investment, two-parent parenting, with an emphasis upon rearing as successful an offspring as possible. This sexual selectiveness, mate monopolization, and high-investment rearing is all a form of competing to produce fitter offspring than peers. This evolves, because if one’s offspring are fitter than the offspring of peers, they will be likely to acquire resources themselves, and reproduce successfully.

Although total numbers of offspring will be diminished with this high-investment rearing strategy, the offspring’s success in competition is what is most important in a K-selective environment. Here, wasting time producing numerous offspring that are not as fit as possible will doom one to Darwinian failure. As time goes on, and K-selection continues, forming into competitive groups will often emerge as a strategy to acquire resources. This will add add loyalty to in-group to the suite of K-type psychological characteristics. This is why when we look at K-selected species in nature, we see packs of wolves, herds of elephants, prides of lions, and pods of dolphins, and each individual is loyal to their group and its competitive success. Since the only way to survive will be to acquire one’s resources by out-competing peers, this invariably produces tremendously fast rates of evolutionary advancement. For this reason, K-selected organisms are usually more evolutionarily advanced than their r-selected counterparts, and will exhibit more complex adaptations, from increased intelligence and sentience, to increased physical capabilities, to loyalty and prosociality, in species where group competition occurs.

Clearly, this mirrors the Conservative’s embrace of competitions, such as war, capitalism, and even the bearing of arms in self-defense against criminals. It also mirrors the Conservatives tendency to favor family values, such as abstinence until monogamy and two-parent parenting. It even explains why Conservatives feel driven to see their nation succeed as greatly as possible, regardless of the effects this has upon other nations or just members of their out-group.

To my eye, it is inherently clear that this r/K divergence is the origin of our political divide. Indeed, while policy proposals from Conservatives are predicated upon the premise that resources are inherently limited, and individuals should have to work and demonstrate merit to acquire them, Liberals advocate on behalf of policy proposals which seem to be predicated upon an assumption that there are always more than sufficient resources to let everyone live lives of equal leisure. To a Liberal, any scarcity must clearly arise due to some individual’s personal greed and evil altering a natural state of perpetual plenty.

Here, we see how these two deeply imbued psychologies generate grossly different perceptual frameworks within those who are imbued with them. Just as a Liberal will never grasp why a Conservative will look down upon frequent promiscuity and single parenting, the Conservative will never grasp why the Liberal will be so firmly opposed to free market Capitalism, or the right to self defense when threatened. Each sees an inherently different world, and is programmed to desire an inherently different environment.

In nature, since it is the individuals who best exemplify this r-selected psychological standard who will reproduce under conditions of resource abundance, their offspring will carry these traits. As time goes on, the population will gradually develop ever more extreme presentations of these traits. As we show, there is copious evidence that a genetic allele, which diminishes dopamine signaling, is associated with every facet of the r-strategy’s psychology, as well as a predisposition towards political Liberalism.

In addition, the r-strategy may have evolved to be engendered within individuals by environmental stimuli as well, through a desensitization to the neurotransmitter dopamine. This effect arises from its copious release in such an environment down-regulating receptor expression and consequently reducing receptor densities in nervous tissue. We also maintain that a lack of adversity in the environment will fail to develop a drive or ability to confront adversity, through a failure to develop a brain structure called the amygdala. In summary, an organism placed in an environment devoid of adversity, and filled with pleasure, may find itself more demanding of pleasure and less tolerant of adversity, than an organism which is enured to a less hospitable environment.

Within r/K selection theory, all populations will contain some differing degrees of r and K selected psychologies. As an environment shifts to one extreme or the other, a population will adopt a more r or K-selected psychology, but this will only last as long as the environmental conditions which produced the shift continue. Under conditions of reduced mortality, and copious resource availability, both r and K-selected psychologies will be present. This will continue until such time as resources become limited, and a competitive, K-selected pressure takes hold, or predation begins to cull both sides evenly, and the K-selected individuals, being slower reproducers are relatively culled back.

Interestingly, r/K Theory not only explains a means by which our political ideologies are adaptive to a specific environment. Many have noted an increasingly masculine quality to the women in our culture, as well as a corresponding effeminate nature to our men. Rush Limbaugh will often refer to them as the Feminazis, and the Castrati. In nature, a K-selected model of rearing involves a feminine mother, who nurtures offspring and guides them away from danger, combined with a more masculine male who will aggressively confront dangers, so as to protect his family.

However, when a population becomes increasingly r-selected, the nature of the sexual dimorphism and these sex-specific rearing behaviors will change. As you see a more r-strategy emerge, females of the species will need to become increasingly aggressive and masculine, since due to paternal abandonment, they must provision and protect their offspring alone. Since r-selected males are solely concerned with mating (before abandoning their mate), and fleeing from conflict, they become more diminutive, and more cowardly. The end result is the r-strategy has, inherent within it, a model of aggressive, manly females who raise children alone, and diminutive, effete males who are solely concerned with superficial, mate-attracting flash, and conflict avoidance.

Even more interestingly, as we point out in this blog post, as well as this blog post, there is evidence indicating that this phenomenon, accidentally over-expressed, may be responsible for producing males who are so effeminate that they are actually homosexual, and females who are so manly, they cross the boundary into lesbianism. Not only do the rearing behaviors and sexual characteristics change, but the males become attracted to more manly characteristics (which are now exhibited by the most adaptive females), and the females become more attracted to effeminate characteristics (which are now exhibited by the most adaptive males).

Some will ask, why would we have evolved both of these psychologies, within our species, instead of trending totally r or K. This can occur for a number of reasons. Obviously an organism which inhabits an environment where resources surge in availability, and then become scarce can see its r-types surge in number during times of plenty, only to die back once resources become scarce. Indeed, such a population may eventually see its individuals adapt to change their strategy with the availability of resources. Or, as time goes on, the r-types may evolve strategies designed to see a few members persist during times of scarcity, so they may explode again once resources become plentiful.

But in humans, the mechanism was probably a little more complex. When we first evolved, a critical adaptation was our loss of body hair. It allowed us to move about in the heat of an African day, when all other furred prey needed to bed down. To acquire meat, all we needed to do was roust a bedded down antelope, make it run a short distance, and it would rapidly collapse of heat stroke, so we could then acquire its meat. There are tribes in Africa who still hunt using this method.

This allowed us to explode in numbers, but as in all ecosystems, we eventually found there were not enough resources to support the population. It was at this time that our population divided.

At this point, the competition was fierce. One group adopted the K-selected psychology, stayed put, and slugged it out for resources, in free, merit based competition. They formed into groups, battled for territory and resources, and adopted a competitive, K-selected reproductive strategy. They became the K-type cohort of our population, embracing freedom and self-determination, free competition, monogamy, strong family values, loyalty to in-group, and sexual chastity in the youth.

As the battles began to rage, another cohort, more cowardly and weak, fled. Those who fled the fastest and the farthest, found themselves in a new, untapped territory, with free resource availability yet again. Those among them who did the best from Darwin’s perspective, were those who adopted the most r-type strategy of free promiscuity, single parenting, and early age at first intercourse. They had no need for loyalty to in-group, and indeed, would have adopted a more selfish and cowardly psychology, to better disperse their genes, and serve their own self interests. They became our population’s r-type cohort, and even today, the gene which is associated with Liberalism is found in large numbers in migratory populations, even as social psychologists note that Liberals score highly in novelty seeking, such as preferring new and novel environments, or unusual foods.

As time went on, Homo sapiens likely spread across the globe in this manner. r-types fled as the territory behind them became K-selective and competitive. As time went on, this constant selective pressure favoring fleeing gradually made the r-type more prone to flee competitions and adhere to an r-type mating strategy, and less able to even comprehend why K-types would ever seek monogamy or aggression when threatened, or innately perceive an in-group in need of defense.

In between where the r-types fled to, and where the K-types were battling it out, there was likely a sort of geographical spectrum. At one end were the extreme r-types on the frontier, and at the other were the extreme K-types, battling with neighbors. But in the middle, were areas where some r-types were mingling with some K-types. It is likely that there, these two strategies were evolving psychological traits which would allow them to persist in a mixed population. K-types tried to purge the disloyalty, selfishness, and promiscuity of the r-types, while r-types tried to use deception, as well as the rule-breaking and lack of loyalty identified by Jost (himself a Liberal), as an advantage. It would not surprise me if our political animus was evolved.

It is also interesting to note, even today, as r-types gain hold in a civilization, they seek to provide the unproductive and uncompetitive with the free resource availability of the r-selected environment. As in nature, as this goes on, the r-type cohort grows in the population, until the entire financial ecosystem collapses, the government dissolves, and the civilization becomes ruthlessly competitive. As in nature, free resource availability cannot go on forever.

To be clear, individuals are complex. Just as it is difficult to characterize a single individual organism’s exact reproductive strategy in nature, it is difficult to characterize a single human’s political strategy. However, just as the quantum mechanical world yields the chaos of its uncertainty to the order and formality of Newtonian physics when viewed from a distance, as we zoom out from our society we will find two primary ideologies within it. Just as in nature, these two ideologies match exactly the two psychologies of the r and K-type psychology.

Before closing, I would like to note that the primary environmental condition favoring an r-strategy is free resource availability. Too often the r-strategy is portrayed as a defensive adaptation designed solely to overcome the mortality of predation, or other forms of environmental harshness, through increased reproductive rates. The r-strategy however, is just as much an offensive adaptation designed to exploit free resource availability, and the absence of competitive selections for survival and reproduction.

In the book, we describe how this may be seen most clearly in the world of microbiology. There, complex, highly-adapted microbes are often drawn from a harsh, highly selective environment, and transferred to an unselective environment of ideal conditions and free resource availability (such as a petri dish of nutrient media housed in an incubator). There, they initially grow slowly, as each parent cell carefully produces colonies full of highly adapted daughter cells.

Some parent cells however, make mistakes, and produce less complex offspring, who reproduce more rapidly, as they devote less energy to their parent cell’s complex adaptations. As time goes on a highly evolved isolate can quickly shed its adaptations and devolve into a strain of simpler, less complex cells which grow colonies astonishingly quickly on agar. Over time, if given only free resource availability, the cells of the simpler dysgenic strain will numerically dominate any peers which retain their complexity and adaptation. In this environment, due to the absence of competitive selections favoring fitness or complexity, the sole determinate of survival becomes sheer numerical advantage. As a result, it is this standard which the organism will evolve towards, and one will increasingly find a less complex, less evolved organism devoted solely to mating and reproduction. Free resource availability, and an absence of competitive selection pressure, by itself, is all that is necessary to fuel a rapid growth in the r-strategist cohort within a population.

In closing, it is impossible to deny that every aspect of political ideology revolves around the same fundamental issues of behavior that r/K selection theory revolves around. Although our species’ embrace of group competition has further molded these urges, this is the evolutionary foundation of ideology. It is where political ideology began. For that reason, no individual can ever fully understand political ideology or the forces which motivate it, absent a grasp of r/K Selection Theory.