Tag: American History

Two Hundred And Fifty Years Of History

We are about the experience a year long celebration of our history from the DoI to situations of today and as a political historian I think it is essential that we look at that history and see where stuff went wrong and how we could avoid any further degradation of the system we have working today.

WE will look at our history by decade….it will be quicker and more simply understood for those that have a hard time keeping up….

Dividing history into decades is an arbitrary but sometimes very useful way of trying to understand the arcs and significance of events. Trying to identify any single event as crucial to the understanding of a given decade may be even more arbitrary. It is certainly subjective. Nevertheless, that attempt can at the very least be a catalyst for discussion. What follows is an attempt to identify decade-defining moments in the history of the United States since the country’s inception.

1770s: Declaration of Independence (1776)

The centrality of the Declaration of Independence (1776) to the developments of the 1770s is self-evident. From the Boston Tea Party to the “shot heard round the world,” Washington’s crossing of the Delaware River, and the Valley Forge winter, the American Revolution’s pursuit of liberty was made meaningful by the founding document of the great American experiment in democracy.

1780s: Constitution of the United States of America (1787)

With the war won, independence secured, and the Articles of Confederation proving inadequate, the Founding Fathers laid down the law by which the new country would be governed in the elegantly crafted Constitution, which, depending on one’s perspective, was meant either to evolve to meet changing circumstances or to be strictly interpreted to adhere to the Founders’ “original intent.”

1790s: Whiskey Rebellion (1794)

As the new country began finding its feet, U.S. President George Washington sent troops to western Pennsylvania in 1794 to quell the Whiskey Rebellion, an uprising by citizens who refused to pay a liquor tax that had been imposed by Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton to raise money for the national debt and to assert the power of the national government. Federalists cheered the triumph of national authority, while members of Thomas Jefferson’s Republican (later Democratic-Republican) Party were appalled by what they saw as government overreach. More than two centuries later, the names and faces have changed, but the story is ongoing.

Learn on!

https://www.britannica.com/story/25-decade-defining-events-in-us-history

That should give readers a working knowledge of our history and the difficulties we faced by decade….

Be Smart!

Learn Stuff!

As we enter into the holiday weekend I hope everyone will rejoice with care and as always…..Be Well and Be Safe….

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Mississippi Reinvents Slavery

Another trip down memory lane, history to be exact, for my state of Mississippi.

A state that still tries to deny the effects of slavery.

There is a common myth that Mississippi fought in the Civil War over taxation…….but in their statement of session tells a different story (and the true reason why)….in their own words….

In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery– the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.

But do not take my word for it….read the actual document for yourself….

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_missec.asp

Here when I was in school you could not graduate if you had not taken Mississippi history….but that course left a whole lot out of the class….like the Republic of West Florida, Free State of Jones, and the ‘Black Codes’…..

“Black Codes?  Yep it was Mississippi’s way of trying to reinvent slavery….

On November 25, 1865, Mississippi created the first of the Black Codes. Designed to re-create slavery in all but name, this signified the white South’s massive resistance to the freeing of their labor force and the lengths to which it would go to tie workers to a place under white control.

Remember, the point of slavery was labor. If anything, we don’t talk about this enough. Yes of course it was racist, but the whole reason was to have a permanent labor force. Whites would do anything to create that labor force. And they did, engaging in crimes against humanity for hundreds of years. They had no intention of letting the end of technical slavery get in the way of labor control.

The impact of slavery’s end is hard to overestimate. But the Emancipation Proclamation did not free any slaves immediately, and the ratification of the 13th Amendment did not take place until well after the war’s end. The federal government was woefully unprepared, both in manpower and ideas, for ensuring that the rights of ex-slaves were respected after the war. Sure, slavery might be technically dead as of April 14, 1865, when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, but was the US military there to enforce freedom on the plantations? Largely, no.

…

The Black Codes thus intended to trap Black labor in place. The plantation elite’s top goal immediately upon emancipation was to corral Black labor, whose core goal was to avoid the plantation labor system, preferably replacing it with small farms they owned. The Black Codes intended to prevent this. Building upon the slave codes regulating Black behavior, and especially Black movement, before the war, the Black Codes were the South’s statement to the North that the end of the war did not mean the end of white supremacy. Black people would have to show a written contract of employment at the start of each year, ensuring they were laboring for a white employer. At the core of the Mississippi code and copied around the South was the vagrancy provision. “Vagrancy” was a term long used in the United States to crack down on workers not doing what employers or the police wanted them to do. In this case, it meant not working for a white person. Decades later, a vagrancy charge was a great way for authorities to imprison union organizers.

Mississippi did not allow Black people to rent land for themselves. Rather, all Black people in rural areas were required to labor for a white under one-year contracts. They did not have the option to quit working for that white person. If a Black person in the countryside was found not working for a white person, the state would contract that worker out to a private landowner and receive a portion of their wages. If a Black person could not pay high taxes levied on them by the state, they would be charged with vagrancy and the same process would result. As during slavery, any white person could legally arrest any Black person.

https://www.wonkette.com/p/that-time-mississippi-reinvented

You see the Emancipation Proclamation may have freed the slaves in word but not so much in deed.

Some of these ‘Black Codes’ hung around until the 1980s and there are still some that refuse to believe that slavery was all that bad to this day.

Few are taught these parts of the state’s history and that is truly sad.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

The ‘Exclusion’ Of Immigrants

This is right time for the Old Professor to drop a bit of history on you that tries to enlighten the reader to the history that is all too forgotten.

Little Donny is deporting people at an alarming right all in an effort to keep the loyal in line with his brand of ignorance…..so far this year…Within the span of 100 days, the results of this sweeping and sustained set of actions, touching nearly every corner of the U.S. immigration system, have yielded some quick results. U.S. Border Patrol encounters of irregularly arriving migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border plunged to 7,000 in March—the fewest since at least 2000, when the government started publishing monthly apprehension numbers—after the administration declared an “invasion,” sent 10,000 troops to the border, and effectively barred access to asylum there.

All these deportations is a first for a president, right?

Not even close.

Just another misguided attempt to appear as if he truly cares about this country.

Before I go on maybe it would be a good spot to drop some history about the ‘law’ that the Trumpites are using to justify these deportation….even though the justification for these deportations is the ancient act from the 18th century….about here would be a good time to explain the “Act” for the history impaired….

The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 is a wartime authority that allows the president to detain or deport the natives and citizens of an enemy nation. The law permits the president to target these immigrants without a hearing and based only on their country of birth or citizenship. Although the law was enacted to prevent foreign espionage and sabotage in wartime, it can be — and has been — wielded against immigrants who have done nothing wrong, have evinced no signs of disloyalty, and are lawfully present in the United States. It is an overbroad authority that may violate constitutional rights in wartime and is subject to abuse in peacetime.

… but the mass deportations occurred in the beginning of the middle 19th century and the Chinese immigrants.

The United States’ current deportation process traces its roots to the late 19th century as the nation moved to exercise federal control of immigration.

The impetus for this shift was anti-Chinese racism, which reached a fever pitch during this period, culminating in the passage of laws that restricted Chinese immigration.

The influx of Chinese immigrants to the West Coast during the mid-to-late 19th century, initially fueled by the California Gold Rush, spurred the rise of an influential nativist movement that accused Chinese immigrants of stealing jobs. It also claimed that they posed a cultural threat to American society due to their racial otherness.

The Geary Act of 1892 required Chinese living in the U.S to register with the federal government or face deportation.

The Supreme Court addressed the constitutionality of these statutes in 1893 in the case of Fong Yue Ting v. United States. Three plaintiffs claimed that anti-Chinese legislation was discriminatory, violated constitutional protections prohibiting unreasonable search and seizure, and contravened due process and equal protection guarantees.

The Supreme Court affirmed the Geary Act’s deportation procedures, formulating a novel legal precept known as the plenary power doctrine that remains a key tenet of U.S. immigration law today.

https://theconversation.com/from-the-chinese-exclusion-act-to-pro-palestinian-activists-the-evolution-of-politically-motivated-deportations-254683

Is Donny’s use of ‘Act’ legal by Executive Order?  Damn good question!

… no court has expressly interpreted “invasion” in the context of the AEA, the definition of “invasion” in the constitutional sense has received recent judicial and scholarly attention. Early last year, Texas tried to make the immigration-as-invasion argument in two cases, United States v. Texas and United States v. Abbott, the former of which dealt most directly with the claim. There, a district court—after providing one of the most comprehensive analyses of “invasion” in the State War Clause—enjoined the enforcement of Texas law that established state criminal liability for immigration law violations. Although the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ultimately stayed the injunction, it was “not persuaded” by Texas’s immigration-as-invasion argument. The case is still pending. In light of interpretative uncertainty, recourse might also be had to interpretations of the president’s unilateral authority to use force to repel attacks or invasions.

(there is more legal wrangling going on)

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/can-trump-invoke-the-alien-enemies-act

This will be a sticky situation for only recently a Trump appointed judge rules against Donny’s move on Venezuelans.

A federal judge on Thursday barred the Trump administration from deporting any Venezuelans from South Texas under an 18th-century wartime law and said President Trump’s invocation of it was “unlawful.” US District Court Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. is the first judge to rule that the Alien Enemies Act cannot be used against people the administration claims are gang members invading the United States, the AP reports.

  • “Neither the Court nor the parties question that the Executive Branch can direct the detention and removal of aliens who engage in criminal activity in the United States,” wrote Rodriguez, who was nominated by Trump in 2018. But, the judge said, “the President’s invocation of the AEA through the Proclamation … is contrary to the plain, ordinary meaning of the statute’s terms.”
  • Rodriguez’s ruling is significant because it is the first formal permanent injunction against the administration using the AEA and contends the president is misusing the law, the AP reports. “Congress never meant for this law to be used in this manner,” said Lee Gelernt, the ACLU lawyer who argued the case, in response to the ruling.
  • If the administration appeals, it would go first to the New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the nation’s most conservative appeals courts. The Supreme Court has already weighed in once on the issue of deportations under the AEA. The justices held that migrants alleged to be gang members must be given “reasonable time” to contest their removal from the country. The court has not specified the length of time

This whole debacle will be interesting to watch….and I will watch.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Not Much Change Since Jefferson

I have heard some call the election of 2024 a sea change in American history…..it was very interesting election but nothing was a sea change….not much was different than any other election in our history.

Let’s step back 200 years to the election of 1800….Jefferson vs Adams….

The most extreme accusations Democrats and Republicans hurl at one another today would be familiar to the Founding Fathers.

In fact, the election of 1800 alone featured almost everything that’s made Donald Trump’s three presidential contests a wild ride.

Accusations of foreign interference?

Check—John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the candidates in 1800, each thought the other was subservient to a foreign power.

The French Revolution divided Americans as bitterly as any foreign-policy crisis today.

Jefferson’s Republican Party, which is actually the ancestor of today’s Democratic Party, thought Adams and his Federalist Party were monarchists and traitors to the American Revolution because they were pro-British and anti-French.

The Federalists thought Jefferson’s pro-French party was as radical as France’s own revolutionaries: The phrase “godless communists” didn’t exist yet, but Federalists perceived Jeffersonians as atheists who would abolish private property if they got the chance.

Federalists were anti-democratic, said Republicans.

Republicans were against the Constitution, Federalists shot back.

Each side fervently believed the other was “illiberal” and in league with foreign regimes antithetical to America’s principles.

Immigration was a red-hot issue then as well and tied to fears of anti-American influences from abroad.

Under President Adams, Congress raised the number of years a foreigner would have to live in the United States before being naturalized as a citizen.

The Federalist-controlled Congress also gave the president broad powers to deport immigrants—or “aliens,” as they were then called.

How Politics Hasn’t Changed Since Jefferson

You see BS from both sides….same as today….

And the fact that the government is controlled by plutocrats has not change since day one of the republic.

Plutocracy?

Plutocracy is a government controlled exclusively by the wealthy, either directly or indirectly. A plutocracy effectively allows only the wealthy to rule. This can then result in policies exclusively designed to assist the wealthy.

Plutocracy doesn’t have to be a purposeful, overt format for government. Instead, it can be created through the allowance of access to certain programs and educational resources only to the wealthy, thereby making it so that the wealthy hold more sway. The concern of inadvertently creating a plutocracy is that the regulatory focus will be narrow and concentrated on the goals of the wealthy, creating even more income and asset-based inequality.

In a plutocracy, access to political power is limited and requires one either to possess wealth or to have the support of the wealthy by being willing to serve their interests. This may be a matter of official rules and restrictions that explicitly require that a person have some specified level of economic affluence in order to exercise political authority, such as voting or holding public office. However, plutocracy more often arises informally and is implicitly embodied in constitutional, legal, or regulatory measures that create barriers to participation in politics and political life that can be met only through the possession or expenditure of significant wealth.

And this incoming administration will be the most plutocratic of all….and that is saying something….considering all our presidents have had wealth on their side….

Somethings never change….history can teach us that.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Is US Running Out Of White People?

I recently read a fascinating article about the population changes coming….this story could send shivers up the spines of all those that hate diversity…..plus my favorite subject, a little history, thrown in….

Demographers project that whites will become a minority in the U.S. around 2045, dropping below 50% of the population. Between 2010 and 2018, the number of white children fell by 2.8 million, or 7.1%. In contrast, nonwhite children grew by 6.1%.

In 2018, the last year for which data are currently available, the proportion of people in the U.S. under 18 years of age was just barely more white than nonwhite. However, children under 11 were more nonwhite than white.

In almost one-third of U.S. states, nonwhite children outnumber all white children under 18 in 14 states — including Nevada, Hawaii, Georgia and Maryland — plus the District of Columbia. The link I tried to provide to document this led to factfinder.census.gov, which is currently unreachable. Is it too much of a conspiracy theory to think it’s among the thousands of government sites Elon Musk and DOGE don’t want you to see?

Not enough white people isn’t a new problem in America. When Europeans supposedly discovered America, there were already more people of color than Europeans. In 1526, a group of enslaved Black people escaped their Spanish captors during the San Miguel de Gualdape Slave Rebellion. They mixed with Native Americans in what is now South Carolina and Georgia. In 1565, Spaniards (not exactly white) brought slaves to Saint Augustine. In 1619, a British ship landed in Jamestown with enslaved people.

Though the indigenous population took a hit from the diseases carried by Europeans, including smallpox, they easily outnumbered white people when America was founded. The Black population drastically increased, not only from the Transatlantic Slave Trade but by a systemic pattern of forced breeding to meet the demand for labor. When the international slave trade was ended in 1808, it was because a sufficient number of Black babies were being born to meet the needs. The means to the end often involved rape and forced pairings. Thomas Jefferson didn’t need to explain that to George Washington when he wrote to tell him that if each enslaved woman had a child every two years, he would see profits increase by 4% annually.

By the time America achieved independence from the British in 1776, several areas including some states like South Carolina had a majority Black population, mainly enslaved people. Before there were police forces, there were slave patrols to capture runaways and protect plantation owners from revolts. There was a fear of rebellion throughout American history, before and after slavery. Jefferson talked about having a “wolf by the ears.” Lincoln wished to deport the freed slaves to Liberia and Central America. Heexperimented with deportation on Cow Island near Haiti, which had disastrous results.

https://www.levelman.com/america-is-running-out-of-white-people/

Is news like this driving the GOP and especially Little Donny in its push to re-write history?

I think diversity is what makes this country great, well great before the magic Sharpie.

Trying to change the outcome of history is a fool’s errand…..but look who we voted into office….one of America’s biggest fools.

Thoughts?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

More Assassination Files Released

Recently the government has released otherwise classified files about the death of JFK…so this controversy can continue (seems like a misdirection to me)….

Previously classified documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy were released Tuesday following an order by President Trump shortly after he took office. The 1,123 files were posted on the website of the US National Archives and Records Administration. The vast majority of the National Archives’ collection of over 6 million pages of records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings, and artifacts related to the assassination have previously been released, the AP reports.

  • Trump told reporters Monday that has administration will be releasing 80,000 files, though it’s not clear how many of those are among the millions of pages of records that have already been made public. “We have a tremendous amount of paper. You’ve got a lot of reading,” Trump said while visiting the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.
  • Researchers have estimated that 3,000 records or so hadn’t been released, either in whole or in part. And last month, the FBI said that it had discovered about 2,400 new records related to the assassination.
  • Many who have studied what’s been released so far by the government say the public shouldn’t anticipate any earth-shattering revelations from the newly released documents, but there is still intense interest in details related to the assassination and the events surrounding it.
  • Trump’s January order directed the national intelligence director and attorney general to develop a plan to release the records. A year after the Nov. 22, 1963 assassination, the Warren Commission, which President Lyndon B. Johnson established to investigate, concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and that there was no evidence of a conspiracy. But that didn’t quell a web of alternative theories over the decades.
  • In the early 1990s, the federal government mandated that all assassination-related documents be housed in a single collection in the National Archives and Records Administration. The collection was required to be opened by 2017, barring any exemptions designated by the president. Trump, who took office for his first term in 2017, had said that he would allow the release of all of the remaining records but ended up holding some back because of what he called the potential harm to national security.

This ought to keep the conspiracy theorists busy for awhile and not paying attention to the happening daily.

However I would like to add a little fire to this debate…..

If anything, the latest declassification of records in December 2022, coming after an inexplicable five-year delay, only sparked further debate. As one poll showed, over two-thirds of Americans were unhappy with Joe Biden for upholding the redaction of thousands of documents with the vague excuse of preventing ‘possible harm’.

The facts are these: on 22 November 1963, President John F. Kennedy was visiting Dallas, Texas, to shore up support in the south for his re-election. To connect with future voters, Kennedy sat in the back of a slow-moving limousine next to his glamorous wife, Jackie. As the motorcade turned onto Elm Street towards the Dealey Plaza, several shots were heard and Kennedy’s head jerked violently backwards. Abraham Zapruder, a spectator, captured the scene on his home-movie camera.

Within an hour of the president’s death, local police had arrested Lee Harvey Oswald, who worked at the Texas School Book Depository overlooking the parade route. The media soon circulated a picture of Oswald holding a Carcano bolt-action rifle resembling the one found on the sixth floor of the book depository. A former US Marine and self-declared Marxist, Oswald had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 and returned to the US with a Russian wife in 1962. He fitted the profile of a communist agent. His mysterious visits to the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico two months before the assassination only furthered suspicion.

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/what-killed-kennedy

Let the theories abound.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Trump And The Constitution

Yes my friends it is that time again….time for a short history lesson from our founding days.

Let’s go back to Trump’s speech on 04 March….

If there are any limits to a president’s power, it wasn’t evident from Donald Trump’s speech before a joint session of Congress on March 4, 2025.

In that speech, the first before lawmakers of Trump’s second term, the president declared vast accomplishments during the brief six weeks of his presidency. He claimed to have “brought back free speech” to the country. He declared that there were only two sexes, “male and female.” He reminded the audience that he had unilaterally renamed an international body of water as well as the country’s tallest mountain.

“Our country is on the verge of a comeback the likes of which the world has never witnessed, and perhaps will never witness again,” Trump asserted.

The extravagant claims appear to match Trump’s view of the presidency – one virtually kinglike in its unilateral power.

It’s true that the U.S. Constitution’s crucial section about the executive branch, Article 2, does not grant the president unlimited power. But it does make this figure the sole “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States.”

This monopoly on the use of force is one way Trump could support his 2019 claim that he can do “whatever I want as President.”

…

When the Constitution was written, many people – from those who drafted the document to those who read it – believed that endowing the president with such powers was dangerous.

Ratified after a lot of huffing and puffing, on May 29, 1790, by rather nervous citizens, the text of the Constitution had stirred many controversies.

It wasn’t just the oftentimes vague language, which includes head-scratchers such as the very preamble, “We the People of the United States.” Nor was the discomfort due solely to the document’s jarring brevity – at 4,543 words, the U.S. Constitution is the shortest written Constitution of any major nation in the world.

No, what made that document especially problematic, to borrow from John Adams, was that it provided for “a monarchical Republick, or if you will a limited Monarchy.”

Trump is the kinglike president many feared when arguing over the US Constitution in 1789 — and his address to Congress showed it

In essence the Constitution was put together to avoid the US from having to answer to yet another king….the actions of our dearly clueless leader is trying to circumvent the Constitutional powers that the office has and make it all about what he wants.

Sorry I do not see any constitutional priority that allows Donny these unlimited powers.

If he wants this to be the law of the land then maybe it is time for constitutional upgrade.

There are, of course, opportunities to amend the constitution without completely scrapping it. Article V states that Congress itself can propose an amendment “whenever two-thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary,” and once the amendment is “ratified by three-fourths of the several states” it becomes “Part of this Constitution.” This process (simpler than the other option, a convention of states) has been successfully used 27 previous times. The convention of states method, on the other hand, may not be restricted to a specific subject and could be used as a vehicle to overturn the entire Constitution.

This will not happen.

Today’s political climate makes it impossible to find an intellectual giant like the founders…there is no one to ‘lead’ the way to saving this country and its laws.

Any thoughts?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

 

This Is How We Erase History

The GOP is trying desperately to rewrite history and they put the best person to do that in the WH….

Remember those pricks on 6 January that tore up the Capital?

It appears that reference to them is being purged…..

Attorneys for a group of news organizations, including NPR, said in a legal filing on Tuesday that evidence used at the sentencing of a rioter charged in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol had “disappeared” from an online government platform.

In response to the press coalition’s legal motion, the chief judge for the District of the District of Columbia, James Boasberg, ordered the government to halt the removal of any video or court records related to Jan. 6 from its platform. Boasberg also ordered the government to identify any other videos removed from the database and provide an explanation for their removal by Feb. 26.

The missing evidence consists of nine video exhibits from the Justice Department’s case against Glen Simon, who pleaded guilty to a charge of “Disorderly and Disruptive Conduct in a Restricted Building or Grounds.” Simon said as part of his plea that he pushed against police officers with a metal bike rack, stormed the U.S. Capitol and recorded himself saying “this is what a revolution looks like,” and, “we gotta show these f****** we ain’t f****** around. It’s the only way to get it done. Fear!”

So far, the absence of video files appears to only have affected Simon’s case. It is unclear whether the Department of Justice intentionally removed the files. A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, which handled all of the Jan. 6 criminal cases, declined to comment citing the ongoing litigation.

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/11/nx-s1-5293447/jan-6-evidence-captiol-riot-donald-trump

And do not forgot the purging by NASA of women in leadership rolls.

The step to remove pronouns is the latest by the space agency to comply with the White House’s desire to restrict certain kinds of content within government systems. The outlet 404 media, an independent journalist-founded media website, has reported that NASA employees were required to “drop everything” and remove a list of words from public facing websites including “Indigenous people” and “Anything specifically targeting women (women in leadership, etc.).”

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/06/nx-s1-5289319/nasa-instructs-employees-to-remove-pronouns-from-all-work-communications

And the purge continues…..

References to transgender people were removed Thursday from a National Park Service website for the Stonewall National Monument, a park and visitor center in New York that commemorates a 1969 riot that became a pivotal moment for the LGBTQ+ rights movement. The changes were made in the wake of an executive order President Trump signed on his first day in office calling for the federal government to define sex as only male or female, the AP reports. The National Park Service told the Washington Post it was implementing the order.

Let the purge continue…..what more will be hit by the delete button?

Trying to keep any knowledge of what actually happened and why to a bare minimum.

Please take us back to the 1950s….I so miss those days of ignorance and prejudice.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Return Of The ‘Robber Barons’?

It pains me as someone who values knowledge that I probably have to explain the term ‘Robber Baron’.

What is a ‘Robber Baron’?

“Robber baron” is term used to describe America’s most successful industrialists. This derogative term was primarily used during the era of the late 19th century often known as the Gilded Age. 

The term robber baron is also sometimes used to describe any successful businessperson whose practices are considered unethical or unscrupulous. This behavior can include employee or environmental abuse, stock market manipulation, or deliberately restricting output to charge higher prices.

The original “robber barons” were feudal lords who robbed travelers and ships passing through their territory. During the 1800s, the term was applied to successful capitalists like Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John Rockefeller, who used monopolistic business practices to corner entire industries and extract great wealth from workers and consumers.

These ‘people’ were brought into line in this country by regulations that prevented them from raping the nation and its people.

I resurrect the term here because of something Elmo the Parasite stated recently….

Even before Donald Trump took office, his major bankroller Elon Musk was publicly pledging to use his new power in the federal government to gut its existing efforts to regulate private industry.

Weeks into the Trump administration, Musk has mostly made headlines for an assault on federal workers and payments. But regulation may not be far behind: during a late-night public chat this week, the world’s richest man said it’s time to get rid of all existing regulations.

“Regulations, basically, should be default gone,” the head of the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency said on the call, as spotted by HuffPost. “Not default there, default gone.”

“If it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in,” he suggested. “These regulations are added willy-nilly all the time. So we’ve just got to do a wholesale, spring cleaning of regulation and get the government off the backs of everyday Americans so people can get things done.”

It’s unclear what Musk thinks will happen if regulations are rolled back, especially considering the intensity of the shockwaves after all the drama at USAID and beyond. (Many acts of deregulation would also benefit him personally at his business ventures, ranging from Tesla to SpaceX.)

Regulations, after all, provide Americans with an incredible number of protections — from workplace safety to rules against companies polluting to making it so manufacturers can’t sell goods that are poisonous or dangerous.

Musk’s counterpoint: muh freedoms, essentially.

“If the government has millions of regulations holding everyone back, well, it’s not freedom,” Musk said during the call. “We’ve got to restore freedom.”

https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-eliminate-regulations

Apparently this beast longs for the days when the rich could do everything they want and have no control devices in place.

Elmo wants to stab the people of this country in back and make financial rape of their lives all the more easy.

The very people that fell for the lame promises are going to be the ones that are humped the hardest and watch their families suffer at the hands of these despicable pricks.

Your vote did this….enjoy!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

How Did It Come To This?

In recent years the question has been asked and there have been many answers….how did our two party system become so toxic?

I have said that I believe it became hard toxic with the election of Reagan and his policies of culture war top define politics and let the country go to crap in return.

But the truth of the matter is the party politics started way back with the 8th president, Martin Van Buren….(that is right time for a little history that few have the knowledge of in this day and time)

When Martin Van Buren arrived in Washington to be sworn in as a senator in 1821, he told a friend he planned to “build up a party” for himself. It was an odd time to be party-mongering, and Van Buren an unlikely party-monger. Republican James Monroe had run unopposed in the 1820 presidential election, and “every politician in Washington, with varying degrees of enthusiasm … was calling himself a Republican,” writes James M. Bradley in Martin Van Buren: America’s First Politician, a lively and illuminating new biography of our eighth president—the first to be born a U.S. citizen. Absent a strong opposition party, Van Buren lamented that politicians were appealing less to ideals and more to personalities, and wished, as he put it in an 1827 letter, to unite citizens through “party principle,” rather than “personal preference.”

Born in 1782 to a tavern-keeping family in Kinderhook, New York, Van Buren had little schooling but made himself a lawyer, rising to the heights of power despite his lack of military experience or strong family ties to ensure patronage. At 5-foot-6, he was considered notably short, and friends and foes called him the “little magician” for his outsize political talents. He proceeded swiftly from senator to secretary of state, vice president and president. And though he failed to win a second term, Bradley says, “He built and designed the party system that defined how politics was practiced and power wielded in the United States.” We are living in the world Van Buren created.

In the first decades of the Republic, leaders had generally called themselves Federalists or Republicans, but “few imagined that parties would be a permanent feature of the nation’s political life,” Bradley writes. “They expected parties to disband once the Republic was more secure and its great issues settled.” Van Buren plowed ahead, with the thoroughly modern view that parties were not a regrettable necessity but a revolutionary means of achieving and using power. With Andrew Jackson, he co-founded the Democratic Party in 1828, cannily banking on Jackson’s personal appeal to win that year’s election; Van Buren became Jackson’s vice president, and the Democrats dominated politics until 1860. “He didn’t think that politics should be a hobby for gentlemen to practice in their spare time,” Bradley says. “A party had to have an organization, a structure, a personality, and it should be run by professionals.”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/martin-van-buren-created-americas-partisan-political-system-were-still-recovering-180985643/

So you see this whole party politics is not some new concept but rather it has been building slowly and steady until we have the crappy system of today.

Just thought you might like to know

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