Burn like a real American

[JezebelinHell]

I was watching some story on immigration in the U.S. on CNN last night when something suddenly came to me. The greatest, most awesomely brutal American dream that we ever admitted out loud as a country was the load of crap that was "Manifest Destiny." In light of this, I think we should support this year's theme by annexing nearby camps. Make sure you have flags to mark your territory, and don't forget a fence of some sort to keep the "illegals" out (even though it was their camp to begin with). Feel free to annex far away camps that have strategic importance as well. We all need a base next to an ice station, and anyone with an art car is fair game. Viva la revolution!

[gyre]

Come the revolution gonna be no more limousines
Gonna be no more peaches and cream

[Captain Goddammit]

Don't forget that territory is taken by force, not flags, and you'll need plenty of firepower to keep your head attached to your shoulders should you decide to start a war.

[gyre]

There is always a velvet revolution.

A few tips from our side.
http://community.e2conf.com/servlet/Jiv ... Manual.pdf
Simple sabotage is somewhat interesting.

[Ugly Dougly]

The wetbacks believe in their own version of Manifest Destiny. Viva la Raza and all that.

[ZaphodBurner]

Her love is red hot when she comes undone.
Never thought gettin' burned could be so much fun.
Always comin' up with something new,
Yeah, that woman taught me a thing or two.
She's on fire
My baby's on fire.
We go out drivin' in my 6.6, yeah.
Fly past the city, head straight for the sticks.
Shut off the lights, turn off the key
No sooner said, done, when she jumps on top of me
She's on fire
My baby's on fire.
Now let it burn
ooooh, yeah
I like it hot
She's on fire
My baby's on FIYEAAAAA.
No time for friends, no time for rest.
Straight home from school she starts to get undressed.
It's five below, but it's hot down here...Whoo
She gets so hot every time she comes near.
Turn on the love like it's the latest style.
I get response from just a look with a smile.
She's like a bomb that's about to explode.
Just one touch and she begins to unload
She's on fire
My baby's on FIYEAAAAAAYeah
She takes me higher
My baby's on fire
My baby's on FIYAAAAAAA
Yeah I like it hot..
Now let her burn
-- Sammy Hagar

[chiefdanfox]

Another side of Manifest Destiny: John Muir

[Teo del Fuego]

The wetbacks believe in their own version of Manifest Destiny. Viva la Raza and all that.

you politically incorrect bastard!

thanks for typing that

[gyre]

History is a wonderful thing.
If only it were true.

[JezebelinHell]

History bored the living shit out of me in school (American history did anyway). Imagine how much more dull it would be if they stuck to the truth...

Now the Europeans... they have some interesting history. If they're making shit up they're clearing much better at it than we are.

[gyre]

There is no excuse for any history being dull.
It's the way it is often taught.

[Ron]

History bored the hell out of me as well. Until my Jr. year in high school when I had Mr. Tom Baurbor as a teacher. The first day of class he didn't lecture at all. Instead he passed a hat around class. The hat was filled with little pieces of paper with a country and some dates on each one. "Panama 1912." "Ecuador 1911." And so on. Around 30 kids in the class, there were enough bits of paper for us all. After we'd each drawn a nation Baurbor said, "OK, now we're going to the library. In three days each of you will have to deliver a 2 minute oral report on the nation and time show on the slip you drew. " And so we did.

The first report went like this. "Nicaragua 1913, U.S. forces invaded at the request of U.S. fruit companies and set up a government friendly to U.S. interests." (I'm making the dates up at this point, but you get the idea.) The second report was just like it, as was the third, fourth, and so on. It blew me, and the class, away. Then Baurbor started to lecture.

"In every other history class you've had to date you've studied the flaccid details of the U.S. revolution, worked forward a few years after that, then gotten way behind and skipped to the 1960s as your class got close to it's end. Not here. We're going to start at 1900 and work forward and you're going to see that history is the story of what we crazy people actually have done and there's very little more interesting than that."

And so it was. Great teacher and class he turned me on to history in a way that lasted. I ended up minoring in U.S. History in college and am still an amateur student of history. Hat's off to, ya, Tom, I hope you're still kicking and teaching somewhere. :)

Ron

[mdmf007]

History is a wonderful thing.
If only it were true.

History is written by the victorious. Great story Ron - we need more teachers that inspire, and actually have some passion.

Watch Charelton Hestons speeches to the many Universities around our nation. He hits the nail on the head. Our higher institutions are turning out more flacid drones than ever before. INdependent thinking is the exception not the rule anymore. It used to be the other way around.

goto
nra.com
archives
Heston (not Heston tribute)
then click on the Harvard speech - he gave it at northwestern, georgetown, et.al.

theres no direct link.

[Timezone LaFontaine]

We all need a base next to an ice station

ROFL! That is so true. But you know, I think whoever controls the pathways leading to coffee is going to run the town during daylight hours.

[Simon of the Playa]

i wanted to form camp MICROSOFTIE, and go around confiscating peoples MACINTOSHS and smash them, and then replace with some dell crap or otherwise.

rename the center cafe Redstone, and charge 49.95$ for each coffee cup "patch" at the counter.


instead, i think camp ICAHN ICON would be better, where we'll just BUY first camp and kick larry right the fuck out.

[ygmir]

we'll take over your camp.
BY walking in backwards and telling you we're leaving..........

Ygmir

[Simon of the Playa]

i will NOT fall for that....


again.

[twinwitin]

History class is something my kids don't have to study if they don't want to, they are blessed and attend a Charter school. They follow the Sudbury model of democratic education, and are allowed to choose what they want to learn. It is the only publicly funded school of this philosophy in the nation. Of course now after 10 years the school board of our area, in their infinite wisdom. has decided to deny us our charter renewal due to the personal beliefs of some of the board members (it's a real small town, with a few small-minded people) Anyway, just a little plug for our school there, just be aware people, that in certain areas your children and you will be left out of how and where their education happens!
I had amazing teachers in school but alot of times they were required to teach something that they found as meaningless as we did.
Another plug for self education- from the local traditional highschool, the last 3 valedictorians and the last 2 high school representatives on the schoolboard have all been students of our school. Go figure!

[ZaphodBurner]

Not learning history is ridiculously dangerous to the future of society and humanity. It's why we still have jackasses running around believing the Holocaust was a hoax and Hitler a victim of propaganda.

A few years ago my wife and I went to the museum in a Mississippi ghost town doing some research for my book. I asked the black woman at the museum if there had been much of an underground railroad presence there. She--a black Mississippi woman at a pre-civil war museum--said "No, but, there was some train tracks to Port Gibson..."

Had she not heard of the term "underground railroad?" Harriet Tubman? Pegleg Joe? Follow the Drinking Gourd? (One of the -single most important songs- in American, let alone black American history because the lyrics literally gave slaves a roadmap to freedom.)

-c

[gyre]

It isn't an area I've studied, but there does seem to be a lot of mythology about slavery and the underground railroad.
Is there even a consensus yet on it's existence as an organized group versus an evocative description?
If so, it probably didn't exist this far south.
We have an underground railroad museum here.
People who have studied it and the information being distributed widely, have concluded the house may have been used for just about everything except that.
That hasn't slowed down the owner from creating her own history.

Hidden rooms were almost a standard in this part of the country and pretty much required in the years after the war with the number of northern raiders raping, killing and burning.
I've come to the conclusion that hidden rooms are the only sound response to current crime.

I think a lot of people still think the underground railroad is an actual rail system.
When a subject isn't studied, history is often taken from fiction rather than reality.

A recent archaeological dig on a plantation had results counter to what was expected, in terms of standard of living, apparent freedom and even independent businesses.
This seems to have upset a lot of people.
The university conducting it was unable to find many comparable digs in terms of thorough documentation.
But they were expecting different results, based on what anecdotal material they had.

I am certain there were slaves escaping from Mississippi.
But in Mississippi there may be no documentation of what little organized escape planning was done.
Understandable considering it would have been a secret event.

[theCryptofishist]

I remember reading about that slave graveyard in NYC. From the formation of the bones, they could tell that these people had worked hard, and from a young age. This was in the 90s, so I'd consider the ability to interpret the bones to be scientific and well documented.

[thirt33n]

.....so burn like a real american.

[gyre]

I would certainly expect any farmer's life of that period to be quite hard.
Many of my relatives were farmers and even in the last generation, starving to death on a farm was not unheard of.
When I visited, I was put to work with all the other children.
I have picked cotton and I can confirm that it is not nearly as much fun as it looks.

My oldest aunt recently died at 95.
She had been run down by a car years ago and had her hips broken.
Everyone expected her to die soon.
She was still driving a five speed truck to the last.
In our last conversation, she asked me if she should feel guilty that she wasn't getting much work done.
That is what real farm life is like.


I don't know when the one I am thinking of got started, but it must have been some years back.
It was a complete dig of a plantation and village that had been undisturbed since being wiped out.
They explored all the slave cabins and houses of those who lived in the area, including tools, trash piles (which tend to be static in that type of rural location) and anything that could be found.
I'm not suggesting any significance or morality in what they found.
It just did not match typical mythology and definitely not the premise they went in to confirm.
History is what it is.

I think the response they had to reporting what they found is of much more interest than what they found.

[thirt33n]

gosh. i know farming. they used to do this all by hand. nutz. we have swathers and v rakes and balers and loaders.....

slavery. a horrible thing.

i'm sure many many farmers worked side by side with their slaves. and in convenient ignorance loved them just like they loved their horses.

[gyre]

It is hard to get perspective on how harsh life really was.
Selling white children into slavery was common although they called it "apprenticeship".
We had a neighbor here who had been sold to a mill as a boy.
That would have been thirties or forties.
Kind of stunning.

I think the driving force against slavery in the north was from industrialists who realized it was cheaper to be able to pay less than it took to feed people.
And to lay them off at your convenience and not feed them at all.

I tend to think Twain's descriptions of slavery are more generally accurate than most, with plantations being the exception to small farms.
It matches the older land lines that I have looked at.
Interesting that his anti-slavery books met much protest from pro-slavery people and are now often banned by black "activists".

[gyre]

gosh. i know farming. they used to do this all by hand. nutz. we have swathers and v rakes and balers and loaders.....

slavery. a horrible thing.

i'm sure many many farmers worked side by side with their slaves. and in convenient ignorance loved them just like they loved their horses.

Animals had more legal protection than children of any race had.
The first child protection case was brought by an animal protection group.

[Ugly Dougly]

My, what a happy thread this is.
We're all serfs when you look at it. Whack! Back to work!

[theCryptofishist]

Yes, life was hard. For almost everyone. People lived in leaky lean-tos that couldn't actually keep out weather. And that's just for starters.
And not only were apprenticeships common and abusive, but there was a pattern of stepping up the hardships after the 6th year or so, so that the kid would run away and not have to be set up as a journeyman at his master's expense.
Nonetheless, I still find comments like these

I think the driving force against slavery in the north was from industrialists who realized it was cheaper to be able to pay less than it took to feed people.
And to lay them off at your convenience and not feed them at all.

to be problematic. I don't really think that industrialists thought that somehow slavery was going to become legal in the north and that they'd have to buy slave labor. I also don't think that there was much actual industrialization going on in the south that they felt would grow into competition. I mean, the economics of slavery had locked the southern elite into a way of life that depended on slave labor and not machinery. And to the extent that they depended on cotton for thier mills, they would have prefered not to have a four year interruption in supply. I think the northern indurstrialists would have been just as happy never to have that war, but there were people of consciousness who just wouldn't shut up and wouldn't stop agitating. Now, free labor felt threatened, but that' s different kettle of fish.

[gyre]

I was actually referring to when it was still practiced in the north and in the UK, as well.

I don't think the war was about slavery, although I grant many people did.
I think it had more to do with power and the proof of power, especially considering that there was general agreement that slavery was done as an economic force, even leaving aside moral grounds.
I think it was related to slavery in the way communism relates to the Vietnam War, and 9/11 (or was it wmds?) relates to the Bush War II in Iraq.

Enlightened self interest being what it is and powerful people concealing their motives at the best of times, it is probably impossible to know how many people could have cared less about slavery when acting to end it, but it is not a reach considering the expendable way labor was thought of..


The way labor was treated and killed off has been truly astounding in this country.

There is a Frontline documentary about a foundry run on the traditional principle that if you could make a profit at the expense of people's lives, that was good business.
A group split from it and started one based on the idea that you could make a profit without treating people as chattel.
They both continue this practice to the present and Frontline covered the routine and myriad deaths and accidents caused by the more cutthroat company, and the toothless protection that exists under present law.

Murder brings less penalty than an epa violation.
There is a followup to the first story covering the changes made since the story ran.

There is nothing to keep a company from behaving this way still.
I think the number of negligent deaths far exceeds those in war.
And some people still think tort law should be gutted.

The more benevolent company is now owned by the workers.
It has always turned a profit.

A Dangerous Business
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline ... workplace/

[ygmir]

I think a person would be hard pressed to find a group/race/religion, or however you want to put people together, that, at one time, have not been enslaved, or, held slaves.........

I don't know that looking backwards is helpful, if, we value people as such, it won't happen......

And, there's always the work for pay/slave to the company store dillemma..........

Ygmir