Tag: Americana

Happy Thanksgiving

New York, 3 October 1789
By the President of the United States of America

A Proclamation.

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor—and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me “to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.”

Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be—That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks—for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation—for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his Providence which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war—for the great degree of tranquillity, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed—for the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted—for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed; and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions—to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually—to render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed—to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shewn kindness unto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord—To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the encrease of science among them and us—and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.

Given under my hand at the City of New-York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.

Go: Washington

DISCUSS ON SG

The Paper is Not Magic

And, as Liberia has proven, it doesn’t make the dirt magic either.

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. It is therefore futile and foolish to make appeals to Constitutional arguments in an immoral and atheistic society. Our enemies have disregarded what the Constitution says for half a century. It is a mistake continuing to play by a set of rules that our enemies no longer obey. Worse yet, turning a piece of paper into an idol and elevating it to some pseudo “holy” status in our minds.

Andrew Torba is correct. The power is not in the paper, the power is in the ideas and those ideas have been adulterated and perverted wherever they haven’t been abandoned. Neither the words nor the ideas have ever applied in any way to newcomers, immigrants, citizens, illegals, invaders, foreigners, or the children of those diverse peoples, they only ever applied to the Posterity of the Founders, the direct genetic blood descendants of the men who fought the American Revolution against their British brethren for independence from the King of England.

The Constitution was written to safeguard the liberties of the sons and daughters of the American Revolution and no one else. That’s what the Preamble to it says and that’s literally what Posterity meant. And that’s what it still means today, the legalistic fantasies of the would-be inclusive midwits who overrate the importance of their credentials and their own cognitive capabilities notwithstanding.

The words of the U.S. Constitution have never applied in any way to most of the “Americans” who are reading this now. So to fetishize it, to place any trust whatsoever in it, is to fundamentally fail to understand what it is, why it was written, and why it is no longer even remotely applicable to the United States of America in the Year of Our Lord 2024.

No damage therefore, that men in the state of nature suffer from one another, can give a conqueror power to dispossess the posterity of the vanquished, and turn them out of that inheritance, which ought to be the possession of them and their descendants to all generations. The conqueror indeed will be apt to think himself master: and it is the very condition of the subdued not to be able to dispute their right. But if that be all, it gives no other title than what bare force gives to the stronger over the weaker: and, by this reason, he that is strongest will have a right to whatever he pleases to seize on.
– John Locke, Of Conquest, Second Treatise on Civil Government, 1690

DISCUSS ON SG

Peak America

We had no idea how good we had it as children, but we can hardly be blamed for that since we never knew anything else. But if you’re a member of Generation X, it is very important that you write your autobiography in order to leave behind some written record of what Peak America was actually like. Because what we regarded – what we still regard – as normal no longer exists. And its the micro accounts of daily life that are actually the most informative about a historical society, not the usual historian’s focus on politics, wars, and other macro-level events.

Save your elementary school class pictures. Describe what life was like in an ethnically homogenous European society. Give future generations a vision of what is possible for their children and grandchildren if they set their minds to it.

DISCUSS ON SG

Creepy Creeps Creeping Creepily

AC analyzes a video of two of the murdered Idaho girls recorded the night of their demise, and concludes that they may have been under surveillance prior to their murders. Which tends to look more than a little suspicious in light of what subsequently happened.

What I describe here may not be surveillance. Surveillance is designed to look normal. The things I see could be normal motions and body postures. But they exhibit many mannerisms common to foot surveillance, so we will use them here as examples of what foot surveillance looks like.

The following is a four hour video shot by a food service truck working in Moscow, Idaho, on the night of the Idaho murders. Kaylee Goncalves, and Madison Mogen, two of the students murdered, visited this truck to pick up some food, and were captured on its internet livestream later in the night. It would be significant if these girls were under domestic surveillance coverage before they were murdered, of course.

It’s really rather startling to see the images through the lens of the commentary. Because, while at first it all appears to be innocent and coincidental enough, as the encounter proceeds, it becomes practically undeniable that, at the very least, the various individuals involved a) are acquainted and b) are up to no good.

I would hope the police have already been examining this video closely as well.

DISCUSS ON SG

All ur patriotism is belong to us

Of course the national symbols belong to the Right. The Left not only supports invasion, occupation, and rule by foreigners, but increasingly consists of actual foreigners.

The New York Times appears to have ceded one of the most conspicuous signs of patriotism – the flying of the US flag – to Republicans, saying it may no longer unite people because it’s seen as a symbol of conservatism.

“Today, flying the flag from the back of a pickup truck or over a lawn is increasingly seen as a clue, albeit an imperfect one, to a person’s political affiliation in a deeply divided nation,” the Times said in an article on Saturday, the eve of the US Independence Day holiday.

The article went on to say the flag has become “alienating to some,” after it was embraced by supporters of former President Donald Trump. “And it has made the celebration of the Fourth of July, of patriotic bunting and cakes with blueberries and strawberries arranged into Old Glory, into another cleft in a country that seems no longer quite so indivisible, under a flag threatening to fray.”

Conservatives pounced on the article as an admission that their side now owns American patriotism. “Agreed,” self-described Christian traditionalist Theophilus Chilton told the Times on Twitter. “If you love your country, you’re probably on the right.”

It’s all-too-characteristic of the few actual Americans on the Left to claim that they can be a) patriotic, b) anti-nationalist, and c) favor subjugation to foreigners, but that’s because they are literally insane and are unable to see the contradictions inherent in the narrative-recitations that pass for their “thinking”. 

The real problem is less the anti-Americanism of the Left, but rather the false patriotism of the conservatives, who mindlessly repeat the foreign propaganda that “America is an idea”. Of course, all the ignoramuses who insist that “posterity means anyone living in a geographical location” or “nationality is paperwork” should seriously consider rethinking their false and stupid position given that it it is shared with a dementia-addled Leftist.

I’ve often said that America is the only nation in the world founded on an idea. Every other nation in the world is founded on the basis of either that — geography or ethnicity or religion. You can define every — almost everyone else based on those characteristics, but you can’t define America. I defy you to tell me what constitutes an American. You can’t do it. We’re an incredibly diverse democracy.

– Joe Biden, July 3, 2021

Challenge accepted: An American is a descendant of the mostly British men who settled the Thirteen Colonies and fought the War for Independence that is celebrated today. Americans are the Posterity of the Preamble, whose rights are articulated in the United States Constitution, whose “British brethren” were described in the Declaration of Independence, and whose forefathers declared Independence from the King of England. No one else is an American, regardless of what ideas they claim to believe, where they reside, or what paperwork they carry.

Anything else is not only a lie, but a lie that has been weaponized for over a century to weaken and destroy the American nation.

In the event you don’t understand the importance of the distinction between American Posterity and not-Americans, I suggest reading the Posterity debate between a civic nationalist lawyer who was attempting to defend the “America as Idea” proposition and a humble game designer who happens to read a little history now and then.

1950s America survives… in Japan

A fascinating phenomenon that William Gibson first noted in his “cool hunter” novels some years ago turns out to not only be real, but a viable business in Japan:

Takashi Tateno keeps an office in a simple studio above his wife’s hairdressing salon on the outskirts of Okayama, a medium-sized city in central Japan. In fashion circles, Okayama is famous for one thing: making the world’s best denim, using looms that date back to the 1950s. But Tateno isn’t a denim head. His brand, called Workers, adapts all sorts of American work wear from the 1900s to the ’60s—railroad jackets, canvas dusters, flannel shirts, double-kneed pants. Moreover, he’s obsessed by the American workers who manufactured these garments in their heyday, and the skills, techniques and tools used to produce such high-quality clothing on an industrial scale.

Before he hatched the idea of his own collection, Tateno spent years making clothes himself and working in a factory. At the same time, he launched a Japanese-language website that was absolutely alone in its single-minded pursuit of knowledge about the plans, patterns and procedures that old American work-wear manufacturers used to make their garments under such labels as Crown, W.M. Finck & Co. and Can’t Bust ’Em. Tateno journeyed to the United States multiple times to sift through archives and contact heirs to now-defunct clothing manufacturers to see if they had information about their ancestors’ businesses, and to buy up examples of the old clothes he loved so he could dissect their construction.

Tateno ushers me into his upstairs space. One room is filled with all kinds of clothing, everything from the work wear he collects to contemporary Italian jackets by Boglioli. There is also machinery, including an ancient riveting machine, plus old sewing-machine accessories that Tateno purchases so the factories he hires to produce his collection can make things to the exact specifications of, say, 1924 or 1942, with the same tools in use back then.

“When I learned to sew and tried to make these garments myself, I began to realize just how intricate the work was, what kind of tremendous skill level was required to turn out such huge quantities of high-quality garments,” Tateno says. “These were produced at a time when American workers were the most knowledgeable and skilled in the world.”

Though the kind of skilled manufacturing he admired in these garments had largely disappeared in the United States—a consequence of apparel production moving abroad and garment workers no longer finding work—he saw older Japanese people around him in Okayama with high-level sewing skills. And so he realized that if he could unearth the manufacturing secrets behind these old garments, he could make them in Okayama—and perhaps make them even better than the originals.

The cult of the artisan is ensconced in contemporary urban American culture. This is the ideal of a person who can handcraft a pair of jeans or a necktie, conscious of the most minute details of fabric, workmanship and authenticity. The era Tateno’s clothing harks back to is not the age of the lone artisan laboring over a single creation, though; it’s the era of packed factories in Pennsylvania, Virginia and California churning out thousands and thousands of high-quality garments at a reasonable price, all because of the workers’ skill. The irony is that this ideal of the American worker, which sounds like something lifted from old-school union advertising copy, can be hard to find in America today.

If I had nine lives, I like to think that one of them would have been involved staying in Japan and getting fluent in the language. As Spacebunny says, 95 percent of the weirdness in the world comes out of Japan. It’s the one place in the world where the present is as fascinating as the past.

Unimpressed

Dear humans,

That’s a cute little light show you’ve got there. Check this out.

Love,
Nature

Meanwhile, on the place where brain cells go to die, another futile sally into the Vast Chasm of Clueless Midwittery.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
SJWs go to one extreme, sacrificing the organization’s interests to their ideals. Too many on the Right go to the other extreme. Mistake.

Rudolf Mikler‏ @shoaahh
Horseshoe theory amrite lolololol  look at me so edgy.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
No. Horseshoe means the two extremes come together. In this case, the two extremes behave in an opposite manner.

Is America still a nation?

Pat Buchanan asks the $18 trillion question:

In the first line of the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, Thomas Jefferson speaks of “one people.” The Constitution, agreed upon by the Founding Fathers in Philadelphia in 1789, begins, “We the people …”

And who were these “people”?

In Federalist No. 2, John Jay writes of them as “one united people … descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs. …”

If such are the elements of nationhood and peoplehood, can we still speak of Americans as one nation and one people?

What do YOU think? Do we have more or less freedom now that Trump is in office? Sound off in the WND Poll!

We no longer have the same ancestors. They are of every color and from every country. We do not speak one language, but rather English, Spanish and a host of others. We long ago ceased to profess the same religion. We are evangelical Christians, mainstream Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists, agnostics and atheists.

Federalist No. 2 celebrated our unity. Today’s elites proclaim that our diversity is our strength. But is this true, or a tenet of trendy ideology?

All of which invites the question: Are we still a nation? And what is a nation? French writer Ernest Renan gave us the answer in the 19th century:

“A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things … constitute this soul, this spiritual principle. One is the past, the other is the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present consent, the desire to live together, the desire to continue to invest in the heritage that we have jointly received.

“Of all cults, that of the ancestors is the most legitimate: our ancestors have made us what we are. A heroic past with great men and glory … is the social capital upon which the national idea rests. These are the essential conditions of being a people: having common glories in the past and a will to continue them in the present; having made great things together and wishing to make them again.”

Does this sound at all like us today?

The USA is not a nation. It is a multinational empire. America is a nation occupied and oppressed, the Posterity of We the People, a nation invaded and robbed of its intellectual and geographical birthright, a nation betrayed by its leaders past and present.

The self-serving 20th century lie of the Jewish, Irish, and Italian immigrants to the USA is being applied to Europe today; the Africans invading the nations of Europe en masse are no more Italians, Germans, or Swedes than the 19th and 20th century European immigrants were ever Americans.

As Christians, we are taught to judge the truth of a concept by its consequences. And the consequences of the Melting Pot, the Nation of Immigrants, and the Proposition Nation are evil indeed.

A message to antifa

From Iron Mike, a US infantryman:

Alright fucksticks, this circus has gone on long enough and the audience has gotten tired of the clowns doing the same act for months on end. Your special snowflake brand of socialist revolution (black masks and tipped over trash cans) is sputtering out from underneath you. You’re not any more dedicated and disciplined at seeing this through than you were moving out of your parents’ guest bedroom after your “one semester off” 4 years ago. It’s time to take off the Doc Martins, wash your dreadlocks, remove the 9 facial piercings, and go get a job. You are not a revolutionary. You’re not changing the world. You WILL NOT win. All of your goals are stupid and you should do what you do best…quit. Until at least January 20th, 2020 Donald Trump is still going to be President; America is going to have a Capitalist, Market Economy; and working-class people are not going to fall in line with a bunch of spoiled middle-class college pussies LARP-ing as communist insurgents. 

And that’s just the beginning. It’s an impressive rant. Let’s just say that when the choice comes down to antifa or Alt-Right, America is going to side with the latter.