Just Like the Ones We Used to Know?

My ambition is to reach the heart of the average American, not the highbrow nor the lowbrow but that vast intermediate crew which is the real soul of the country. The highbrow is likely to be superficial, overtrained, supersensitive. The lowbrow is warped, subnormal. My public is the real people.
— Irving Berlin
“White Christmas” is the most popular Christmas song ever written. Irving Berlin originally wrote it for another musical. He wrote it 1938, but put it on hold until the Bing Crosby-Fred Astaire film “Holiday Inn” came along in 1942.

We – most of us – feel a nostalgia for days we never even knew. Those who were alive in 1942, like my mother agreed yes, that’s the way everyone felt. But it’s a song being sung in 1942 (written in 1938) expressing nostalgia for ever older olden times. We’re nostalgic, let’s face it, for World War II-era America (without the world war).

But what were the people of 1942 nostalgic for? Nostalgia is more understandable on the part of people living in 1942. They’d experience one world war, which came with a sequel, and in between a brief period of economic prosperity followed by a longer and devastating economic depression, and then the sequel to World War I.

No wonder older people of 1942 looked back in fondness to days of horse-drawn sleighs. They thought they had lost something in the intervening years. We think we’ve lost something that they had in 1942. But what? What had they lost? What had Irving Berlin been thinking of when he wrote the song?

He couldn’t have been thinking of his early childhood back in Siberia. His only memory was lying on the side of a dirt road watching his home being burnt down by the Imperial troops. Mom remembers being a girl in the Great Depression and being so hungry that she chewed on her leather shoes. Dad was only able to get a college education because the City College of New York offered free education to the poor (CCNY, where, he said, Marxism in American education got its start).

Irving Berlin produced over 1,000 songs over a century. If he didn’t have a wonderful life, he certainly had an amazing life. Trying figure out his inspiration for the sentimental “White Christmas,” this is what his biographers reveal:

From irvingberlin.com’s Concise Biography:

Irving Berlin was born Israel Beilin on May 11, 1888. One of eight children, his exact place of birth is unknown, although his family had been living in Tolochin, Byelorussia, when they immigrated to New York in 1893. When his father died, Berlin, just turned 13, took to the streets in various odd jobs, working as a busker (Sheet music companies hired “buskers” or “song pluggers” to travel the city and perform new songs in saloons, vaudeville theaters, and on street corners. By introducing a song to the public in this way, the companies hoped to stimulate sheet music sales.) singing for pennies, then as a singing waiter in a Chinatown Cafe. In 1907 he published his first song, “Marie from Sunny Italy,” and by 1911 he had his first major international hit “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”

An intuitive business man, Irving Berlin was a co-founder of ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers), founder of his own music publishing company, and with producer Sam Harris, builder of his own Broadway theatre, The Music Box. An unabashed patriot, his love for – and generosity to – his country is legendary, exemplified by his establishing The God Bless America Fund, which receives all income from his patriotic songs and distributes it to the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts.

Wikipedia tells us: Berlin arrived in the United States at the age of five. He published his first song, “Marie from Sunny Italy,” in 1907, [at the age of 19] receiving 33 cents for the publishing rights, and had his first major international hit, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” in 1911. He also was an owner of the Music Box Theater on Broadway on Broadway. It is commonly believed that Berlin could not read sheet music and was such a limited piano player that he could only play in the key of F-sharp unless using his custom piano equipped with a transposing lever. [That’s the common knowledge amongst musicians.]

Berlin was born on May 11, 1888, in the Russian Empire. His exact birthplace is unknown. Although Berlin’s family came from the shtetel of Tolochin (in latter-day Belarus), he may have been born in Tyumen, Siberia. He was one of eight children of Moses (1848–1901) and Lena Lipkin Beilin (1850–1922). His father, a cantor in a synagogue, uprooted the family to America, as did many other Jewish families in the late 19th Century. On September 14, 1893, the family arrived in New York City. Upon their arrival at Ellis Island, the name ‘Beilin’ was changed to “Baline.” According to biographer Laurence Bergreen, as an adult Berlin admitted to no memories of his first five years in Russia except for one: “he was lying on a blanket by the side of a road, watching his house burn to the ground. By daylight the house was in ashes.” As an adult, Berlin said he was unaware of being raised in abject poverty since he knew no other life.

Tsar Alexander III of Russia and then Tsar Nicholas II, his son, had revived with utmost brutality the anti-Jewish pogroms, which created the spontaneous mass exodus to America. The pogroms were to continue until 1906, with thousands of other Jewish families also needing to escape, including those of George and Ira Gershwin, Al Jolson, Sophie Tucker, Louis B. Mayer (of MGM), and the Warner brothers. It has been suspected that the Beilin family also fled due to these pogroms, though there is no evidence to indicate that there were pogroms in Tolochin or Tyumen when the Beilins left for America.

After their arrival in New York City, the Baline family lived briefly in a basement flat on Monroe Street, and then moved to a three-room tenement at 330 Cherry Street. His father, unable to find comparable work as a cantor in New York, took a job at a kosher meat market and gave Hebrew lessons on the side, to support his family. He died a few years later when Irving was 13 years old.

Now, with only a few years of schooling, eight-year-old Irving began helping to support his family. He became a newspaper boy, hawking The Evening Journal. One day while delivering newspapers, according to Berlin’s biographer and friend, Alexander Woollcott, he stopped to look at a ship departing for China and became so entranced that he didn’t see a swinging crane, which knocked him into the river. When he was fished out after going down for the third time, he was still holding in his clenched fist the five pennies he earned that day.

Music historian Philip Furia writes that when “Izzy” began to sell newspapers in the Bowery, he was exposed to the music and sounds coming from saloons and restaurants that lined the crowded streets. Young Berlin sang some of the songs he heard while selling papers, and people would toss him some coins. He confessed to his mother one evening that his newest ambition in life was to become a singing waiter in a saloon.

However, before Berlin was fourteen his meager income was still adding less than his sisters’ to the family’s budget, which made him feel worthless. He then decided to leave home and join the city’s ragged army of other young immigrants. He lived in the Bowery, taking up residence in one of the lodging houses that sheltered the thousands of other homeless boys on the Lower East Side. Bergreen describes them as being uncharitable living quarters, “Dickensian in their meanness, filth, and insensitivity to ordinary human beings.”

Those were the days…

With few survival skills having left school around the age of thirteen, he realized that formal employment was out of the question. His only ability was acquired from his father’s vocation as a singer, and he joined with a few other youngsters who went to saloons on the Bowery and sang to customers. Itinerant young singers like them were common on the Lower East Side. Berlin would sing a few of the popular ballads he heard on the street, hoping people would pitch him a few pennies. From these seamy surroundings he became street-wise, with a real and lasting education. Music was his only source of income and he picked up the language and culture of the ghetto lifestyle.

Berlin learned what kind of songs appealed to audiences, writes Begreen: “well-known tunes expressing simple sentiments were the most reliable.” He soon began plugging songs at Tony Pastor’s Music Hall in Union Square [the same Tony Pastor’s that the cast of “Hello, Dolly!” sings about] and in 1906, when he was 18, got a job as a singing waiter at the Pelham Cafe in Chinatown. Besides serving drinks, he sang made-up “blue” parodies of hit songs to the delight of customers.

Biographer Charles Hamm writes that in Berlin’s free time after hours, he taught himself to play the piano. Never having had lessons, after the bar closed for the night, young Berlin would sit at a piano in the back and begin improvising tunes. His first attempt at actual songwriting was “Marie From Sunny Italy,” written in collaboration with the Pelham’s resident pianist, Mike Nicholson, from which he earned 37 cents in royalties. A spelling error on the sheet music to the published song included the spelling of his name as “I. Berlin.”

Berlin continued writing and playing music at Pelham Cafe and developing an early style. He liked the words to other people’s songs but sometimes the rhythms were “kind of boggy,” and he would change them. One night he delivered some hits composed by his friend, George M. Cohan, another kid who was getting known on Broadway with his own songs. When Berlin ended with Cohan’s “Yankee Doodle Boy,” notes Whitcomb, “everybody in the joint applauded the feisty little fellow.”

Nobel Prize-winning author Rudyard Kipling, living up the coast during that period, said he “was shocked and intrigued by the screeching squalor he found in the dirty gray tenement canyons of immigrant New York.”
He described it as worse than the slums of Bombay, but was nonetheless “impressed and moved by how the songs by the little immigrant boys…saluted the Stars and Stripes,” Kipling wrote. Kipling’s comments, today, have to be edited a bit, but he gave those little Jewish immigrant boys credit for guts and determination.

Some of the songs Berlin created came out of his own sadness. For instance, in 1912 he married Dorothy Goets, the sister of songwriter E. Ray Goeta. She died six months later of typhoid fever contracted during their honeymoon in Havana. The song he wrote to express his grief, “When I Lost You,” was his first ballad. It was an immediate popular hit and sold more than a million copies.

In 1917, Berlin was drafted into the Army, and the news of his induction became headline news, with one paper headline reading, “Army Takes Berlin!” But the Army wanted Berlin, now aged 30, to do what he knew best: write songs. While stationed with the 152nd Depot Brigade at Camp Upton, on Long Island, he then composed an all-soldier musical revue titled, “Yip Yap Yaphank” written to be patriotic tribute to the United States Army. By the following summer, the show was taken to Broadway where it also included a number of hits, including “Mandy” and “Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,” which he performed himself.

The shows earned $150,000 for a camp service center. One song he wrote for the show but decided not to use, he would introduce 20 years later: “God Bless America.”

By 1918 he had written hundreds of songs, mostly topical, which enjoyed brief popularity. Many of the songs were for the new dances then appearing, such as the “Grizzly Bear,” “Chicken Walk,” and the “Fox Trot.” After a Hawaiian dance craze began, he wrote “That Hula-Hula,” and then did a string of southern songs, such as “When the Midnight Choo-Choo Leaves for Alabam’.” During this period, he was creating a few new songs every week, including songs aimed at the various immigrant cultures arriving from Europe. On one occasion, Berlin, whose face was still not known, was on a train trip and decided to entertain the fellow passengers with some music. They asked him how he knew so many hit songs, and Berlin modestly replied, “I wrote them.”

Berlin wrote “God Bless America” in 1918 but filed it away until 1938 when singer Kate Smith needed a patriotic song to mark the 20th anniversary of Armistice Day, celebrating the end of World War I. Its release near the end of the Great Depression, which had by then gone on for nine years enshrined a “strain of official patriotism intertwined with a religious faith that runs deep in the American psyche,” stated the New York Times.

Berlin’s daughter, Mary Ellin Barrett, states that the song was actually “very personal” for her father, and was intended as an expression of his deep gratitude to the nation for merely “allowing” him, an immigrant raised in poverty, to become a successful songwriter.

“To me,” said Berlin, “’God Bless America’ was not just a song but an expression of my feeling toward the country to which I owe what I have and what I am.”

Hear that, Caravan Invaders?

It quickly became a second National Anthem after America entered World War II a few years later. Over the decades it has earned millions for the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, to whom Berlin assigned all royalties. In 1954, Berlin received a special Congressional Gold Medal from President Dwight D. Eisenhower for contributing the song.

When the United States joined World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Berlin immediately began composing a number of patriotic songs. His most notable and valuable contribution to the war effort was a stage show he wrote called “This is the Army.” It was taken to Broadway and then on to Washington, D.C. (where President Franklin D. Roosevelt attended). It was eventually shown at military bases throughout the world, including London, North Africa, Italy, Middle East, and Pacific countries, sometimes in close proximity to battle zones. Berlin wrote nearly three dozen songs for the show which contained a cast of 300 men. He supervised the production and traveled with it, always singing “Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning” himself. The show kept him away from his family for three and a half years, during which time he took neither salary nor expenses, and turned over all profits to the Army Emergency Relief Fund.

Finally, we come to one of the most famous Christmas songs of all time, “White Christmas.”

The 1942 film Holiday Inn introduced “White Christmas,” one of the most recorded songs in history. First sung in the film by Bing Crosby (along with Marjorie Reynolds, whose voice was dubbed by Martha Mears), it has sold over 50 million records and stayed no. 1 on the pop and R&B charts for 10 weeks. Crosby’s version is the best-selling single of all time. Music critic Stephen Holden credits this partly to the fact that “the song also evokes a primal nostalgia—a pure child-like longing for roots, home and childhood—that goes way beyond the greeting imagery.”

Richard Corliss also notes that the song was even more significant having been released soon after America entered World War II: [it] “connected with… GIs in their first winter away from home. To them it voiced the ache of separation and the wistfulness they felt for the girl back home, for the innocence of youth….” Poet Carl Sandburg wrote, “We have learned to be a little sad and a little lonesome without being sickly about it. This feeling is caught in the song of a thousand jukeboxes and tune whistled in streets and homes: ‘I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas.’ When we sing that we don’t hate anybody. And there are things we love that we’re going to have sometimes if the breaks are not too bad against us. Way down under this latest hit of his, Irving Berlin catches us where we love peace.”

Ehh…we still went to war. Word War II wasn’t about hate; it was about not wanting the world to fall under a handful of dictators. Never did like Sandburg.

“White Christmas” won Berlin the Academy Award for Best Music in an Original Song, one of seven Oscar nominations he received during his career. In subsequent years, it was re-recorded and became a top-10 seller for numerous artists.

Berlin is the only Academy Award presenter and Academy Award winner to open the “envelope” and read his or her own name (for “White Christmas”). This result was so awkward for Berlin (since he had to present the Oscar to himself) that the Academy changed the rules of protocol the following year to prevent this situation from arising again.

Talking about “White Christmas,” composer–lyricist Garrison Hintz stated that although songwriting can be a complicated process, its final result should sound simplistic. Considering the fact that “White Christmas” has only eight sentences [54 words] in the entire song, lyrically Mr. Berlin achieved all that was necessary to eventually sell over 100 million copies and capture the hearts of the American public at the same time

Accounts vary as to when and where Berlin wrote the song. One story is that he wrote it in 1940, in warm La Quinta, Calif., while staying at the La Quinta Hotel, a frequent Hollywood retreat also favored by writer-director-producer Frank Capra, although the Arizona Biltmore also claims the song was written there. He often stayed up all night writing—he told his secretary, “Grab your pen and take down this song. I just wrote the best song I’ve ever written—heck, I just wrote the best song that anybody’s ever written!” However, since music historians say that he actually wrote it in 1938, he must have been somewhere else when he wrote it.

But the opening words to the song (songs used to have opening lines that explained the song itself) indicate he was in Beverly Hills, Calif.

The sun is shining, the grass is green,
The orange and palm trees sway.
There’s never been such a day
in Beverly Hills, L.A.
But it’s December the twenty-fourth,—
And I am longing to be up North—[23]

However, according to Jody Rosen, author of White Christmas: The Story of an American Song, the song may have been drafted in or near Los Angeles, but it was undoubtedly finished in New York or at the Berlin family’s weekend house in the Catskills. Like writers of all types, Berlin had a habit of writing something and putting it away if he wasn’t satisfied. He called these his “trunk songs.”

“The first time the song was introduced to his staff was on January 8, 1940. On that day, Berlin appeared in his business office to meet with Helmy Kresa, the fellow who scored his music. Berlin would sing the song and work carefully with Kresa, until the melody Kresa wrote sounded just as Berlin heard it in his head.

“When Berlin came in, he announced that he wrote the song “over the weekend.” The Berlin family was in New York through the holidays that year, so he must have written or at least polished it there.

“White Christmas was also originally written as a satire. As Berlin envisioned it, the song would be part of a musical revue. It would be performed tongue-in-cheek by sophisticates, drinks in hand, standing around a Hollywood pool surrounded by palm trees.

“That spring (1940), Berlin signed to do a musical for Paramount. The plot Berlin had in mind featured a vaudeville performer retiring to run a country inn. The gimmick was that it was a “holiday inn,” open for overnight guests only on holidays. Berlin would provide a holiday-themed score that would take viewers through the year of holidays.

“Casting for the film and early rehearsals for Holiday Inn began in the autumn of 1941. Irving Berlin knew his recently finished song, White Christmas, was a good one. The deal he made with Paramount was that White Christmas would be part of the film only if Paramount managed to sign Bing Crosby (1903-1977). Crosby was already a big star.

“In the midst of planning for Holiday Inn, Berlin, Crosby, and all Americans were rocked by national tragedy.

“On December 7, 1941, a surprise attack by the Japanese did unfathomable damage and caused great loss of life at the American port at Pearl Harbor. President Franklin Roosevelt summoned his military leaders to the White House and ordered a bombing raid on Japan. The country was at war.

“Just a few days after this—December 24, 1941—Bing Crosby introduced White Christmas, perhaps as a note of hope, on his highly successful radio broadcast, Kraft Music Hall.

“By late December of 1941, Americans were enlisting in the military in record numbers as America mobilized for war. They heard White Christmas not as a spoof but as a longing for days “just like the ones I used to know.” The lyrics took on a whole new meaning for soldiers on their way overseas.

And so that is how the song “White Christmas” came to be written – from a holiday trip, probably in the Catskill Mountains of New York, where it definitely snows, developed in Beverly Hills as a joke, introduced (with a hoodwink to the National Academy of Motion Pictures who would later have Berlin present himself an Oscar for writing it – although technically it was against the rules to award an Oscar to a song that had been previously recorded; apparently merely singing it on the radio didn’t count) just after the attack on Pearl Harbor and finally making it to the silver screen in 1942.

Now we know where Berlin saw those “treetops” glistening and heard “sleigh bells in the snow.” Because while it could have been in Imperial Russia, the Jewish Berlin family wouldn’t have been celebrating Christmas (although they might have heard sleigh bells; sleighs were the electric cars of their day – you wouldn’t hear them coming, otherwise), and he certainly didn’t see any glistening treetops in the Bowery or Los Angeles.

We’re a long way from that Christmas card scene, with our giant SUVs, 50-inch televisions, and ubiquitous Smartphones.

Still, it’s nice to think of a snowy Christmas world where the only vehicles are horse-drawn sleighs and cozy firesides, where the children hang their stockings, snap and crackle and pop in peace.

Hoodies in the Neighborhood

My childhood neighborhood wasn’t exactly the Bedford Falls of “It’s A Wonderful Life”.  It was more like the Indiana neighborhood of “A Christmas Story.”  We had neighborhood bullies who seemed to take particular interest in our family.  That same group of bullies tended to steal bicycles and other unguarded property.  They’d come here from Hell’s Kitchen in New York City, so no one was surprised.  We think they may also have been members of The Alliance, a white supremacist group.

 

Still, you could walk your dog at night.  Being a sprawling development, you didn’t walk to the corner store at night because a) it was too far and b) in those days, the local grocery store closed at 8 o’clock.  The bullies are long gone now.  Mostly, retired people live here now.  Retired people with enough money to play landscapers to rake their leaves and give their properties that “estate” look.

 

My own neighborhood has been dangerous for at least decade and in the last year, has become even more dangerous.  The downtown areas have been dangerous at night since the late Eighties or Nineties when the first illegal immigrants from Mexico arrived.

 

But you’ve got to know things are really bad when an adult can’t walk their dog at night.  Last evening, at dusk, I took my dog for a walk down Mom’s road.  Up ahead was a potential undesirable in a hoodie, carrying the tell-tale triangular backpack (drug dealer).  He knew I was there and although he was ahead of me, slowed down.  He began wandering from one side of the street to the other, looking into car windows.  Maybe he was hoping I’d catch up to him, even though I have a dog (who’d never let someone touch me; she’s a good dog).  I stopped at the nearest streetlight and watched him continue his survey of neighborhood cars.  Then I turned around and went back to my mother’s house.

 

Neighborhood bullies notwithstanding, it’s a fine state of affairs when you can’t walk my mother’s road in safety in the evening.

 

One of the (many) reasons my late companion and I were going to marry was, not only could I not afford to live on my own any longer, but I was also becoming afraid of this area.  Once I’d convinced him that I wasn’t going to turn into one of those gold-digging second wives who gets the older husband to sign over all his property to her, he agreed.  In fact, he’d been paying my bills for a couple of years and I felt that it just wasn’t fair to keep spending his money like that.  Two can live more cheaply than one ad all that.  He finally agreed.  My brother and his future wife began early plans for a quiet, low-key wedding at their large house up-county later in the Spring.

 

And then my companion died.  I got his dog, which is the best bequest I could have ever received.  But even his neighborhood wasn’t safe.  In fact, according to his neighbors, they’d been experiencing break-ins and even push-ins.  His neighborhood was upper middle class; my mother’s neighborhood has been undergoing a transformation.  It was, initially, lower middle-class or working class.  Today, the residents clearly have more money.

 

And more interested parties.

 

The redistribution of wealth is a high Democrat priority.  One way to do that is to unleash criminals on affluent neighborhoods and then let them go.  The police often don’t make robberies a major priority anymore.  Law enforcement no longer considers “non-violent” crimes a priority.  Like drug use and dealing.

 

Unsafe neighborhoods also open up the real estate market to developers who want to build rental units.  Welfare guarantees a rental income to the landlord.  No matter that the residents immediately strip the building of its copper plumbing.  The taxpayers just provide more copper.

 

The Democrats know now that they outnumber us and are supporting the Latin American caravans, injuring border guard agents.  Eventually, they hope to surge over the border and overturn the United States of America.  Since so many illegal aliens are already here, and illegally overturned some key Congressional districts, there’s not much to stop them.  The Millennials brains are sufficiently soaked in marijuana to be of no concern, and even support, to the Democrat Marxists.  The old-school Conservatives are dying out and the new Conservatives aren’t having enough children to make up the difference.

 

But we do have President Donald J. Trump.  He’s vowing to keep his promise to deny citizenship to the caravans.  Yesterday, Department of Homeland Security issued the following statement regarding the crisis on the southern border:

 

“Given the activities of the last 24 hours at the San Ysidro Port of Entry, I want to provide an update on what occurred and attempt to dispel many of the rumors and much of the misinformation circulating.

 

“First, the violence we saw at the border was entirely predictable. This caravan, unlike previous caravans, had already entered #Mexico violently and attacked border police in two other countries. I refuse to believe that anyone honestly maintains that attacking law enforcement with rocks and projectiles is acceptable. It is shocking that I have to explain this, but officers can be seriously or fatally injured in such attacks. Self-defense isn’t debatable for most law-abiding Americans.

 

“Second, the caravan is far larger and more organized than previous ones. There are 8,500 caravan members in Tijuana and Mexicali. There are reports of additional caravans on their way.

 

“Third, the overwhelming majority of these individuals are not eligible for asylum in the United States under our laws. Historically, less than 10% of those who claim asylum from #Guatemala, #Honduras, and #ElSalvador are found eligible by a federal judge. 90% are not eligible. Most of these migrants are seeking jobs or to join family who are already in the U.S. They have all refused multiple opportunities to seek protection in Mexico or with the UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. Seeking employment or family reunification are not grounds for asylum under our laws, or any international obligation. There are, however, legal ways to seek a job or to be reunited in the U.S.

 

“Fourth, the caravan members are predominately male. It appears in some cases that the limited number of women and children in the caravan are being used by the organizers as “human shields” when they confront law enforcement. They are being put at risk by the caravan organizers as we saw at the Mexico-Guatemala border. This is putting vulnerable people in harm’s way.

 

“Fifth, we cannot confirm the backgrounds and identities of all caravan members which possess a national security and public safety risk to our country. However, at this point we have confirmed that there are over 600 convicted criminals traveling with the caravan flow. This includes individuals known to law enforcement for assault, battery, drug crimes, burglary, rape, child abuse and more. This is serious. Additionally, Mexico has already arrested 100 caravan members for criminal violations in Mexico.

 

“Sixth, our Border Patrol agents and officers responded admirably and responsibly to the events on Sunday. It is a testament to their training and professionalism that no one was injured. The accepted use of nonlethal force (also used by the Obama Administration in 2013) prevented further injury to agents and a mass illegal rush across the border. We will not shy away from protecting our people. I ask parents to avoid violent caravan groups and refrain from attempts to illegally enter our country – these acts will put your children in danger.

 

“Seventh, I want to thank President Donald J. Trump again for the decision to send @DeptofDefense to the border to bolster our ports of entry and provide force protection for Customs and Border Protection. This decision likely prevented injuries to personnel and migrants or additional damage to property. Instead of “a political stunt,” as suggested by some, this was in fact the act of a leader concerned about the rule of law.

 

“Eighth, this Administration has been working nonstop to fix our immigration system to address the crisis at the border. We have proposed legislation and asked Congress to pass it. The President has repeatedly made clear what is needed to secure our border and negotiated in good faith. It is time for Congress to do its job. Absent Congressional action courts have misinterpreted existing laws and have made the job of law enforcement far more difficult. But the men and women of DHS will continue to do all we can to enforce the law and DHS and U.S. Department of State will continue negotiations with Mexico and our other partners in the region. We are optimistic that cross border collaboration will make America, indeed the entire region, more secure.

 

“Finally, this Administration warned about the danger of the caravan. We predicted the violence we saw on Sunday. We prepared to address it with additional personnel and DOD deployments. We will continue to prepare for the next assault while looking for lasting solutions with Congress and our Mexican partners. As always, I want to thank those officers and agents in San Ysidro who, under tremendous strain, used professionalism and restraint to ensure that no one was injured as they were attacked themselves. I also thank DOD and our state & local law enforcement who were on scene to support our people.”

 

Can we stem the tide?  Can we reverse it?  Time will only tell.  In the meantime, put secure locks on your homes, keep your vehicles locked, put any valuables in the truck, and secure your belongings.  Because the Legions are not only coming; they’re here and the government is protecting them, not you.

 

New Jersey has fallen.

 

 

North America Versus South America

As of 2014, the continent of North America had a total population of 474,013,267.  South, or Latin, America had a population double that of North America:  611,121,722.  If you subtract the population of Mexico and add it to the South American, mostly Spanish-speaking population, that’s 731,408, 377 (as of 2014) people versus 353,726,584, a little over half the “Latin” American population.  Both continents are roughly the same size, although a large portion of North America is in the frozen wilds of Canada.

 

Ruling an entire continent – with only one language (so much for diversity) – is not enough for the Latin American Marxists; they want to rule a second continent, North America, as well.  Illegal immigrants have been invading the United States since at least the 1990s.  Earlier, if you count Lyndon Johnson’s and Ted Kennedy’s Chain Migration legislation.

 

Angry Americans, casting their eyes towards the social and economic wreckage that is South (Latin) America, objected.  They were scolded into diversity and inclusion seminars at work, at college, right down to pre-school.  Even though there’s nothing diverse about South America, we’ve been told that we’re “racist,” “white supremacists” if we objected to this cultural invasion.  We were obviously bigots determined to discriminate against people with brown skin.

 

LaRaza has bragged that by 2050, the United States will be a majority Spanish-speaking nation.  Maybe even by 2030, if their invasion of our southern border is successful.  The mostly-male “asylum-seekers” have been throwing rocks (and probably other objects as well) at our border agents.  In response, the agents used tear T on the violent mobs (who pushed women and children to the front of the line for optimum optics about the “racism” of the United States).

 

Predictably, the Media, led by CNN, was outraged.

 

If the Latin American way is so great, why are these people leaving it?  We Americans, of course, know the answer to that.  They’re not seeking “asylum;” they’re seeking to overthrow the United States of America, with the help of the traitorous Democrats, going all the way back to the Sixties, when Chain Migration began.

 

The caravan mobs are fleeing oppression; they’re bringing it with them.  We’re well on our way to becoming that Third World country.  We enjoyed two years of prosperity and freedom with President Trump and a Republican (albeit an unreliable Republican) Congress.  Comes January, we’ll be back to business as usual.

 

The Millennial Snowflakes have hard heads.  It’s difficult to get through to them just what is wrong with Socialism.  Apparently, they’ve never been to Venezuela or Ecuador.  And Ecuador is one of the more classically liberal countries, at least compared to Venezuela.  Brazil’s hosting of Olympics was a disaster.  Their water system was so polluted, some swim teams refused to compete there.

 

You’d think the Nephew, living near some Latin Americans (who are very Conservative), would get the message.  You would have thought living in San Francisco would have showed him what a terrible system it is.  Even he and his ex-wife finally had to move, the city was so dangerous.  Middle Class friends of my younger brother got out of Ecuador because the Middle Class was being robbed by the Socialists.  The Nephew’s own ex-wife came from Communist China – and she hated it there.  She told him about the Cultural Revolution.   Didn’t any of it sink in?!

 

I have plenty of books I’d be happy to lend him, describing the nightmare of Socialism and Communism.  But then, he doesn’t work.  Thirty years old and he seems to figure his father (my hard-working) older brother is just going to leave everything to him – his house, his money, even his car.  He has no siblings he has to share his inheritance with.

 

He’d better wake up, because he has a nasty surprise coming.  I’ll leave it to my brother to tell him the bad news (hint:  none of us are getting that house).  He spent two years or more not talking to his father; we took notice.  To my BB:  quit fiddling around and get on with it already!

 

My mother was disappointed that she only got one grandchild.  I’m sorry for her sake, but I’m glad I didn’t bring any children into this miserable society.  On Thanksgiving Day, I was watching WNBC-TV New York for their Thanksgiving Day coverage.  Being New York City, they bring out the actors and actresses on Broadway to perform before the actual parade begins.

 

This year, they held a tribute to the transgender movement.  Little children were in that crowd, waiting for Santa Claus, not Sin the Clown.  Millions more children were watching on television.  They must have done this before and I just hadn’t tuned in because a Facebook friend had posted that they saw it last year, turned it off, and refused to watch it again.

 

No wonder.  What in the name of God were they thinking?!  If I’d been married and had children, my grandchildren might have been watching that filth (and as a grandparent, I’d have had nothing to say about, although their parents would have heard from me, anyway).  Tolerance is one thing; celebrating it is another, and teaching young children to celebrate it, that it’s “okay” is not okay in my book or my household.

 

But I don’t have a household and now I’m glad.  Expose my children to drugs, boozing, hook-up sex, sexual perversity?  Send them to college to learn to punch out anyone who speaks in favor of common-sense morality (I’m no angel), freedom, working for a living, and speaking English – the language of Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, and Charlotte Bronte?  Send my kids to college to apologize for being Anglo-Saxon, German, Italian (and if it had been possible, Dutch or English) white?

 

Teach that it’s okay to grow up without a father (I wouldn’t have done it, even if it had been possible economically) – their father?  Teach my daughters to take advantage of men, to berate them, criticize them and effeminize them?

 

Worst of all, teach them that there’s no God?  That there are no consequences for actions?  Teach them that there is no one in the universe who will always care about and whom they can always trust, more than any mere human being, and certainly more than any government entity?  Teach them that there is forgiveness without repentance?

 

I refused to bring children into a world that would lie to them about God, that would lure them away from His teachings, His word, His Name (Jehovah) and His rainbow.  God put that rainbow in the sky because He regretted destroying the world on account of sinful Man.  Jesus is our Second Chance.  But we’re blowing it big time.

 

We’re heading headlong the other way.  Some of us look back nostalgically to the film “It’s A Wonderful Life.”  We TCM Facebook followers were discussing the movie.  One of the administrators, for personal reasons, found the movie “sappy.”

 

George Bailey is by all means a flawed character, a bully even.  The film is filled with violence, beginning with the druggist who slaps and beats young George for failing to deliver a bottle of poisoned pills.  Young George is anxious to become an explorer.  Instead, Fate, in the form of his father’s death, leaves him literally minding the store, the Bailey Building & Loan which his father and uncle created 25 years earlier) while his younger brother Harry goes to college, then marries the daughter of the president of the company for which he works, and then goes off to become a war hero.

 

“A bitter and frustrated young man,” as Henry Potter, the richest (and most evil) man in town mocks him, George finds himself short of accounts and facing prison and disgrace when Uncle Billy misplaces a large sum of money, and contemplates suicide on Christmas Eve.

 

In the interim, in his frustration, he kicks his car door, chews out his youngest daughter’s schoolteacher, dares her husband to a fistfight (as a young man, he also invites a well-meaning neighbor to an altercation of sorts), overturns the table in the living room, shouts at his other daughter for playing the piano, yells at the oldest kid, asks his wife, Mary, “why did we have to have so many kids,” punches the cop, and shakes down his poor old Uncle Billy in a rage that leaves the poor, addled old man sobbing.  Among other things.

 

Did someone say “sappy?”

 

The 1930s and 40s weren’t an idyllic time.  We’re talking about the aftermath of World War I, a lethal flu epidemic, a brief period of economic prosperity followed by a devastating economic depression followed by another World War (which some say was just a continuation of the first war).  People had nothing.  They lost their jobs, their homes, their families.  People were living on the streets, in their cars (if they ever had one), in cardboard shanties in the cities.

 

Yet one thing they hadn’t lost was their belief in God.  There were people who didn’t care about right and wrong, certainly.  But most people did.  Ladies and gentlemen existed in those days.  Ladies wore hats and gloves.  Men wore hats, too (they looked SO handsome) and held doors open for ladies.  The men didn’t use bad language in front of ladies and ladies didn’t use bad language at all.  Prostitutes in those days looked pretty much like most young women today, which is a sorry commentary on modern women.

 

Oh, but we mustn’t judge!  Mustn’t we?  Maybe we should because one day we will be judged by someone we can’t simply brush off with a rude comment or a shrug of our shoulders.  If only we knew how we really looked – and cared about it.  The Muslims know.  They go to far extremes to avoid looking (and sounding) like us.

 

The residents of Bedford Falls (excluding Violet Bick) not only trusted God, but they feared Him.  George Bailey didn’t seem to be worried about God.  Hot-headed and at the end of the rope, only when he really loses everything and is himself punched in the jaw, does he break down and say a prayer to God (one of the most moving movie scenes ever).

 

God sends him just the sort of angel a skeptical man deserves.

 

What sort of angel would God send one of us – or all of us – to get us to wake up and get the message?  Or are we already out of time?  Will the next visitor be a kindly old clockmaker dressed in his wife’s nightgown.  Or will he be straight out of Revelations?

 

“The locusts looked like horses prepared for battle.  On their heads they wore something like crowns of gold and their faces resembled human faces.  Their hair was like women’s hair and their teeth were like lions’ teeth.”  Rev. 9:7-9

 

“The rest of mankind who were not killed by these plagues still did not repent of the work of their hands; they did not stop worshipping demons, and idols of gold, silver, bronze, stone and wood – idols that cannot see or hear or walk.  Nor did they repent of their murders, their magic arts, their sexual immorality, or their thefts.”  Rev. 9:20-21

 

“Then I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven.  He was robed in a cloud, with a rainbow above his head; his face was like the sun, and his legs were like fiery pillars.  He was holding a little scroll, which lay open in his hand.  He planted his right foot on the sea and his left foot on the land, and he gave a loud shout like the roar of a lion.  When he shouted, the voices of the seven thunders spoke.”  Rev. 10:1-3

 

“Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy and blessed are those who hear it and take it to hear what is written in it, because the time is near.”  Rev. 1:3

 

After watching NBC’s Macy’s 2018 Thanksgiving Day Parade and seeing the devils on the southern border, the time must be very near, indeed.

 

 

 

 

 

Thanksgiving 2018

At this time of year, Americans pause to reflect on what they are most thankful for during the past year. It’s the time to give thanks – to God, not Mother Nature, Father Time or Big Brother – for whatever good there is in our lives.

Personally, I’m thankful for having been born in 1959. I wish it could have been 1949, but ’59 will do. I’m thankful that I’m not a Millennial Snowflake.

I’m thankful for being an American. I’m grateful to my parents for teaching me how important freedom is and what a special country the United States of America is. I’m grateful for the appreciation they gave me for the sacrifices others made so that we could all enjoy this freedom.

I’m grateful to them for educating me about the enemies of freedom and what would happen if they were to prevail. Alas that some of their predictions have already come true. In the [former] Soviet Union, the Communist Party convinced women that they were wasting their “talents” washing dishes, cooking dinners, and changing diapers. Women in the Soviet Union were coaxed into placing their young children in government daycare, where the Party could begin indoctrination earlier.

In other countries, they said, you had to show legal papers to have the right to go from one part of the country to another. People who were accused of crimes were not entitled to legal representation, to call witnesses in their favor, or be tried by a jury of their peers. Instead, a panel of judges decided their fate, judges often under patronage to wealthy landowners.

The Soviet Union and China did not allow their citizens to “save” their own earnings. They weren’t allowed to own their own homes or cars and could only rent their living space. They could not travel outside of the country without special permission. Both countries often suffered from unnecessary food shortages, while elite members of the Party had their own stores, communities, and private cars.

You could not criticize your government in those countries. If you did, you’d be executed or sent to prison. Building manager were always party members and could report anything you said with the four walls of your own apartment or report any visitors you had or anything you brought home with you.

As people became more educated, they said, monarchies were becoming outmoded and replaced with parliaments, keeping their beloved royalty who had no official authority over the government. The United States of America was not only a one-of-a-kind nation in 1776, but the only one of its kind.

The Founding Fathers were very brave men who put their lives on the line to make America independent from Great Britain. The King of England had put them under penalty of death for creating a revolution. Still, they persisted. After failing to retake Philadelphia, then the capital city of the nascent country, George Washington led his 12,000-man army into winter quarters at Valley Forge, located approximately 18 miles northwest of Philadelphia. They remained there for six months, from December 19, 1777 to June 19, 1778. At Valley Forge, the Continentals struggled to manage a disastrous supply crisis while retraining and reorganizing their units. About 1,700 to 2,000 soldiers died due to disease, possibly exacerbated by malnutrition. Even in the darkest hour, at Valley Forge in the Winter of 1777-78, as soldiers’ feet turned blue and had to be amputated, the Colonial Army never gave up.

As the British enforced a naval blockade on the city of Boston in April 1775, and came ashore to find out where the Colonial Army had hidden its munitions, Paul Revere rode out with William Dawes across the Massachusetts countryside to warn of the approach of the British Regulars (“Regulars, not “Redcoats” or “British” – and the riders did not shout as secrecy was paramount and many residents were loyal to England).

But, of course, the most important story on this day we call Thanksgiving is the story of the Pilgrims.

The Pilgrims or Pilgrim Fathers were the first English settlers of the Plymouth Colony in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Their leadership came from the religious congregations of Brownist Puritans group of English dissenters or early Separatists from the Church of England. They were named after Robert Browne, who was born in Rutland, England in the 1550s. Browne was an advocate for congregational autonomy, in which the only authority they recognized was the New Testament. A majority of the Separatists aboard the Mayflower in 1620 were Brownists, and indeed the Pilgrims were known for 200 years as the Brownist Emigration, which had fled the volatile political environment in England for the relative calm and tolerance of 17th-century Holland in the Netherlands.

They held Puritan Calvinist religious beliefs but, unlike other Puritans, they maintained that their congregations needed to be separated from the English state church. They were also concerned that they might lose their cultural identity if they remained in the Netherlands (where Browne had fled in 1551), so they arranged with investors to establish a new colony in America. The colony was established in 1620 and became the second successful English settlement in America, following the founding of Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. The Pilgrims’ story became a central theme in the history and culture of the United States.

The Pilgrims are not to be confused with the Puritans, who maintained their allegiance to the Church of England.

The core of the group that came to be known as the Pilgrims were brought together between 1586 and 1605 by shared theological beliefs, as expressed by Richard Clyfton, a Brownist parson at All Saints’ Parish Church in Babworth, Nottinghamshire. This congregation held Puritan beliefs comparable to other non-conforming movements. As Separatists, they also held that their differences with the Church of England were irreconcilable and that their worship should be independent of the trappings, traditions, and organization of a central church—unlike those Puritans who maintained their allegiance to the Church of England.

The Puritan Separatists had long been controversial. Under the Act of Uniformity of 1559, it was illegal not to attend official Church of England services, with a fine of one shilling (£0.05; about £17 today) for each missed Sunday and holy day. The penalties included imprisonment and larger fines for conducting unofficial services. Under this policy, Robert Browne and his followers (the Brownists) were repeatedly imprisoned in Southwark and the City of London during the 1580s, and Barrowe, Greenwood, and Perry were executed for sedition in 1593. Penry urged the Separatists to emigrate in order to escape persecution; some went to Holland and some to Newfoundland, but those in Nottinghamshire remained.

Many Puritans had hoped that a reconciliation would be possible when James came to power which would allow them independence, but the Hampton Court Conference of 1604 denied substantially all the concessions which they had requested—except for an English translation of the Bible. Following the Conference in 1605, Clyfton was declared a non-conformist and stripped of his position at Babworth. Brewster invited him to live at his home.

Archbishop Hutton died in 1606 and Tobias Matthew was appointed as his replacement. He was one of James’s chief supporters at the 1604 conference, and he promptly began a campaign to purge the archdiocese of non-conforming influences, both Puritans and those wishing to return to the Catholic faith. Disobedient clergy were replaced, and prominent Separatists were confronted, fined, and imprisoned. He is credited with driving people out of the country who refused to attend Anglican services.

William Brewster was a former diplomatic assistant to the Netherlands. He was living in the Scrooby (England) manor house while serving as postmaster for the village and bailiff to the Archbishop of York. He had been impressed by Clyfton’s services and had begun participating in services led by John Smyth in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire. After a time, he arranged for a congregation to meet privately at the Scrooby manor house. Services were held beginning in 1606 with Clyfton as pastor, John Robinson as teacher, and Brewster as the presiding elder. Shortly after, Smyth and members of the Gainsborough group moved on to Amsterdam. Brewster is known to have been fined £20 (about £3.96 thousand today) in absentia for his non-compliance with the church. This followed his September 1607 resignation from the postmaster position, about the time that the congregation had decided to follow the Smyth party to Amsterdam.

Scrooby member William Bradford of Austerfield kept a journal of the congregation’s events which was eventually published as Of Plymouth Plantation.

He wrote concerning this time period:

But after these things they could not long continue in any peaceable condition, but were hunted & persecuted on every side, so as their former afflictions were but as flea-bitings in comparison of these which now came upon them. For some were taken & clapt up in prison, others had their houses besett & watcht night and day, & hardly escaped their hands; and the most were faine to flie & leave their howses & habitations, and the means of their livelehood.

The Pilgrims moved to the Netherlands around 1607. They lived in Leiden, Holland, a city of 100,000 inhabitants, residing in small houses behind the “Kloksteeg””opposite the Pieterskerk. a late-Gothic dedicated to Saint Peter. Leiden was a thriving industrial center, and many members were able to support themselves working at Leiden University or in the textile, printing, and brewing trades. Others were less able to bring in sufficient income, hampered by their rural backgrounds and the language barrier; for those, accommodations were made on an estate bought by Robinson and three partners. Bradford wrote of their years in Leiden:

For these & other reasons they removed to Leyden, a fair & bewtifull citie, and of a sweete situation, but made more famous by ye universitie wherwith it is adorned, in which of late had been so many learned men. But wanting that traffike by sea which Amsterdam injoyes, it was not so beneficiall for their outward means of living & estats. But being now hear pitchet they fell to such trads & imployments as they best could; valewing peace & their spirituall comforte above any other riches whatsoever. And at length they came to raise a competente & comforteable living, but with hard and continuall labor.

William Brewster had been teaching English at the university, and Robinson enrolled in 1615 to pursue his doctorate. There he participated in a series of debates, particularly regarding the contentious issue of Calvinism versus Arminianism (two theologians who debated about reformation and separation from the Catholic Church). Brewster acquired typesetting equipment about 1616 in a venture financed by Thomas Brewer, and began publishing the debates through a local press.
The Netherlands, however, was a land whose culture and language were strange and difficult for the English congregation to understand or learn. They found the Dutch morals much too libertine, and their children were becoming more and more Dutch as the years passed. The congregation came to believe that they faced eventual extinction if they remained there.

By 1617, the congregation was stable and relatively secure, but there were ongoing issues which needed to be resolved. Bradford noted that many members of the congregation were showing signs of early aging, compounding the difficulties which some had in supporting themselves. A few had spent their savings and so gave up and returned to England, and the leaders feared that more would follow and that the congregation would become unsustainable. The employment issues made it unattractive for others to come to Leiden, and younger members had begun leaving to find employment and adventure elsewhere. Also compelling was the possibility of missionary work in some distant land, an opportunity that rarely arose in a Protestant stronghold.

Bradford lists some of the reasons which the Puritans had to leave, including the discouragements that they faced in the Netherlands and the hope of attracting others by finding “a better, and easier place of living,” the children of the group being “drawn away by evil examples into extravagance and dangerous courses,” and the “great hope, for the propagating and advancing the gospel of the kingdom of Christ in those remote parts of the world.” Edward Winslow’s ‘s list was similar. In addition to the economic worries and missionary possibilities, he stressed that it was important for the people to retain their English identity, culture, and language. They also believed that the English Church in Leiden could do little to benefit the larger community there.

At the same time, there were many uncertainties about moving to such a place as America, as stories had come back about failed colonies. There were fears that the native people would be violent, that there would be no source of food or water, that they might be exposed to unknown diseases, and that travel by sea was always hazardous. Balancing all this was a local political situation which was in danger of becoming unstable. The truce was faltering in the Eighty Years’ War, and there was fear over what the attitudes of Spain might be toward them.

Possible destinations included Guiana on the northeast coast of South America where the Dutch had established the Essequibo Colony, or another site near the Virginia settlements. Virginia was an attractive destination because the presence of the older colony might offer better security and trade opportunities; however, they also felt that they should not settle too near, since that might inadvertently duplicate the political environment back in England. The London Company administered a territory of considerable size in the region, and the intended settlement location was at the mouth of the Hudson River (which instead became the Dutch colony of New Netherland). This plan allayed their concerns of social, political, and religious conflicts, but still promised the military and economic benefits of being close to an established colony.

Robert Cushman and John Carver were sent to England to solicit a land patent. Their negotiations were delayed because of conflicts internal to the London Company, but ultimately a patent was secured in the name of John Wincob on June 9 (Old Style)/June 19 (New Style), 1619. The charter was granted with the king’s condition that the Leiden group’s religion would not receive official recognition.

Preparations then stalled because of the continued problems within the London Company and competing Dutch companies approached the congregation with the possibility of settling in the Hudson River area. David Baeckelandt suggests that the Leiden group was approached by Englishman Matthew Slade, son-in-law of Petrus Placius, a cartographer for the Dutch East India Company. Slade was also a spy for the English Ambassador, and the Puritans’ plans were therefore known both at court and among influential investors in the Virginia Company’s colony at Jamestown. Negotiations were broken off with the Dutch, however, at the encouragement of English merchant Thomas Weston, who assured them that he could resolve the London Company delays. The London Company intended to claim the area explored by Hudson before the Dutch could become fully established, and the first Dutch settlers did not arrive in the area until 1624.

Weston did come with a substantial change, telling the Leiden group that parties in England had obtained a land grant north of the existing Virginia territory to be called “New England.” This was only partially true; the new grant did come to pass, but not until late in 1620 when the Plymouth Council for New England received its charter. It was expected that this area could be fished profitably, and it was not under the control of the existing Virginia government.

A second change was known only to parties in England who did not to inform the larger group. New investors had been brought into the venture who wanted the terms altered so that, at the end of the seven-year contract, half of the settled land and property would revert to the investors. Also, there had been a provision which allowed each settler to have two days per week to work on personal business, but this provision had been dropped from the agreement without the knowledge of the Puritans.

Amid these negotiations, William Brewster found himself involved with religious unrest emerging in Scotland. In 1618, King James had promulgated the Five Articles of Perth which were seen in Scotland as an attempt to encroach on their Presbyterian tradition. Brewster published several pamphlets that were critical of this law, and they were smuggled into Scotland by April 1619. These pamphlets were traced back to Leiden, and the English authorities unsuccessfully attempted to arrest Brewster. English ambassador Dudley Carleton became aware of the situation and began pressuring the Dutch government to extradite Brewster, and the Dutch responded by arresting Thomas Brewer, the financier, in September. Brewster’s whereabouts remain unknown between then and the colonists’ departure, but the Dutch authorities did seize the typesetting materials which he had used to print his pamphlets. Meanwhile, Brewer was sent to England for questioning, where he stonewalled government officials until well into 1620. He was ultimately convicted in England for his continued religious publication activities and sentenced in 1626 to a 14-year prison term.

Not all of the congregation were able to depart on the first trip. Many members were not able to settle their affairs within the time constraints, and the budget was limited for travel and supplies, and the group decided that the initial settlement should be undertaken primarily by younger and stronger members. The remainder agreed to follow if and when they could. Robinson would remain in Leiden with the larger portion of the congregation, and Brewster was to lead the American congregation. The church in America would be run independently, but it was agreed that membership would automatically be granted in either congregation to members who moved between the continents.

With personal and business matters agreed upon, the Puritans procured supplies and a small ship. The Speedwell was to bring some passengers from the Netherlands to England, then on to America where it would be kept for the fishing business, with a crew hired for support services during the first year. The larger ship, The Mayflower, was leased for transport and exploration services.

The Speedwell was originally named The Swiftsure. It was built in 1577 at sixty tons, and was part of the English fleet that defeated the Spanish Armada. It departed Delfshaven in July 1620 with the Leiden colonists, after a canal ride from Leyden of about seven hours. It reached Southampton and met with the Mayflower and the additional colonists hired by the investors. With final arrangements made, the two vessels set out on August 5 (Old Style)/August 15 (New Style).

Soon thereafter, the Speedwell crew reported that their ship was taking in water, so both were diverted to Dartmouth. There, it was inspected for leaks and sealed, but a second attempt to depart also failed, bringing them only as far as Plymouth, England. It was decided that Speedwell was untrustworthy, and it was sold; the ship’s master and some of the crew transferred to the Mayflower for the trip. William Bradford observed that the Speedwell seemed “overmasted”, thus putting a strain on the hull, and he attributed her leaking to crew members who had deliberately caused it, allowing them to abandon their year-long commitments. Passenger Robert Cushman wrote that the leaking was caused by a loose board.

Of the 120 combined passengers, 102 were chosen to travel on the Mayflower with the supplies consolidated. Of these, about half had come by way of Leiden, and about 28 of the adults were members of the congregation. The reduced party finally sailed successfully on September 6 (Old Style))/September 16 (New Style), 1620.

Initially the trip went smoothly, but under way they were met with strong winds and storms. One of these caused a main beam to crack, and the possibility was considered of turning back, even though they were more than halfway to their destination. However, they repaired the ship sufficiently to continue using a “great iron screw” brought along by the colonists (probably a jack to be used for either house construction or a cider press). Passenger John Howland was washed overboard in the storm but caught a top-sail halyard trailing in the water and was pulled back on board.

One crew member and one passenger died before they reached land. A child was born at sea and named Oceanus.

Land was sighted on November 9, 1620. The passengers had endured miserable conditions for about 65 days, and they were led by William Brewster in Psalm 100 as a prayer of thanksgiving. It was confirmed that the area was Cape Cod within the New England territory recommended by Weston. An attempt was made to sail the ship around the cape towards the North (Hudson) River, also within the New England grant area, but they encountered shoals and difficult currents around Cape Malabar (the old French name for Monomoy Island). They decided to turn around, and the ship was anchored in Provincetown Harbor by by November 11/12.

The charter was incomplete for the Plymouth Council for New England when the colonists departed England (it was granted while they were in transit on November 3/13). They arrived without a patent; the older Wincob patent was from their abandoned dealings with the London Company. Some of the passengers, aware of the situation, suggested that they were free to do as they chose upon landing, without a patent in place, and to ignore the contract with the investors.

A brief contract was drafted to address this issue, later known as the Mayflower Compact, promising cooperation among the settlers “for the general good of the Colony unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.” It organized them into what was called a “civill body politick,” in which issues would be decided by voting, the key ingredient of democracy. It was ratified by majority rule, with 41 adult male Pilgrims signing for the 102 passengers (73 males and 29 females). Included in the company were 19 male servants and three female servants, along with some sailors and craftsmen hired for short-term service to the colony. At this time, John Carver was chosen as the colony’s first governor. It was Carver who had chartered the Mayflower and his is the first signature on the Mayflower Compact, being the most respected and affluent member of the group. The Mayflower Compact was the seed of American democracy and has been called the world’s first written constitution.

A thorough exploration of the area was delayed for more than two weeks because the shallop or pinnace (a smaller sailing vessel) which they brought had been partially dismantled to fit aboard the Mayflower and was further damaged in transit. Small parties, however, waded to the beach to fetch firewood and attend to long-deferred personal hygiene.

Exploratory parties were undertaken while awaiting the shallop, led by Myles Standish (an English soldier whom the colonists had met while in Leiden) and Christopher Jones. They encountered an old European-built house and iron kettle, left behind by some ship’s crew, and a few recently-cultivated fields, showing corn stubble.

They came upon an artificial mound near the dunes which they partially uncovered and found to be an Indian grave. Farther along, a similar mound was found, more recently made, and they discovered that some of the burial mounds also contained corn. The colonists took some of the corn, intending to use it as seed for planting, while they reburied the rest. William Bradford later recorded in his book, Of Plymouth Plantation that, after the shallop had been repaired,

They also found two of the Indian houses covered with mats, and some of their implements in them; but the people had run away and could not be seen. Without permission, they took more corn, and beans of various colors. These they brought away, intending to give them full satisfaction (payment) when they should meet with any of them, – as about six months afterwards they did.

And it is to be noted as a special providence of God, and a great mercy to this poor people, that they thus got seed to plant corn the next year, or they might have starved; for they had none, nor any likelihood of getting any, till too late for the planting season.

By December, most of the passengers and crew had become ill, coughing violently. Many were also suffering from the effects of scurvy. There had already been ice and snowfall, hampering exploration efforts; half of them died during the first winter.[

Explorations resumed on December 6/16. The shallop party headed south along the cape, consisting of seven colonists from Leiden, three from London, and seven crew. They chose to land at the area inhabited by the Nausset people, where they saw some people on the shore who fled when they approached. Inland they found more mounds, one containing acorns, which they exhumed and left, and more graves, which they decided not to dig.

They remained ashore overnight and heard cries near the encampment. The following morning, they were attacked by Indians who shot at them with arrows. The colonists retrieved their firearms and shot back, then chased them into the woods but did not find them. There was no more contact with Indians for several months.

The local Indians were already familiar with the English, who had intermittently visited the area for fishing and trade before the Mayflower arrived. In the Cape Cod area, relations were poor following a visit several years earlier by Thomas Hunt. Hunt kidnapped 20 people from Patuxent (the site of Plymouth Colony) and another seven from Naussett, and he attempted to sell them as slaves in Europe. One of the Patuxent abductees was Squanto, who became an ally of the Plymouth Colony.

The Pokanokets also lived nearby and had developed a particular dislike for the English after one group came in, captured numerous people, and shot them aboard their ship. By this time, there had already been reciprocal killings at Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod. But during one of the captures by the English, Squanto escaped to England and there became a Christian. When he came back, he found that most of his tribe had died from the plague.

Continuing westward, the shallop’s mast and rudder were broken by storms and the sail was lost. They rowed for safety, encountering the harbor formed by Duxbury and Plymouth barrier beaches and stumbling on land in the darkness. They remained at this spot for two days to recuperate and repair equipment. They named it Clark’s Island for a Mayflower mate who first set foot on it.

They resumed exploration on Monday, December 11/21 when the party crossed over to the mainland and surveyed the area that ultimately became the settlement. The anniversary of this survey is observed in Massachusetts as Forefather’s Day and is traditionally associated with the Plymouth Rock landing tradition. This land was especially suited to winter building because it had already been cleared, and the tall hills provided a good defensive position.

The cleared village was known as Patuxent to the Wampanoag people and was abandoned about three years earlier following a plague that killed all of its residents. The “Indian fever” involved hemorrhaging and is assumed to have been fulminating smallpox. The outbreak had been severe enough that the colonists discovered unburied skeletons in the dwellings.

The exploratory party returned to the Mayflower, anchored twenty-five miles away, having been brought to the harbor on December 16/26. Only nearby sites were evaluated, with a hill in Plymouth (so named on earlier charts) chosen on December 19/29.

Construction commenced immediately, with the first common house nearly completed by January 9/19, 20 feet square and built for general use. At this point, each single man was ordered to join himself to one of the 19 families in order to eliminate the need to build any more houses than absolutely necessary. Each extended family was assigned a plot one-half rod wide and three rods long for each household member, then each family built its own dwelling. Supplies were brought ashore, and the settlement was mostly complete by early February.

When the first house was finished, it immediately became a hospital for the ill Pilgrims. Thirty-one of the company were dead by the end of February, with deaths still rising. Coles Hill became the first cemetery, on a prominence above the beach, and the graves were allowed to overgrow with grass for fear that the Indians would discover how weakened the settlement had actually become.

Between the landing and March, only 47 colonists had survived the diseases that they contracted on the ship. During the worst of the sickness, only six or seven of the group were able to feed and care for the rest. In this time, half the Mayflower crew also died.

William Bradford became governor in 1621 upon the death of John Carver. On March 22, 1621, the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony signed a peace treaty with Massasoit of the Wampanoags. The patent of Plymouth Colony was surrendered by Bradford to the freemen (a male, non-slave) in 1640, minus a small reserve of three tracts of land. Bradford served for 11 consecutive years, and was elected to various other terms until his death in 1657.

The colony contained Bristol County, Plymouth County, and Barnstable County, Massachusetts. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was reorganized and issued a new charter as the Province of Massachusetts Bay in 1691, and Plymouth ended its history as a separate colony.

The first use of the word “pilgrims” for the Mayflower passengers appeared in Of Plymouth Plantation. As William Bradford finished recounting his group’s July 1620 departure from Leiden, he used the imagery of Hebrews 11:13-16 about Old Testament “strangers and pilgrims” who had the opportunity to return to their old country but instead longed for a better, heavenly country.

So they lefte [that] goodly & pleasante citie, which had been ther resting place, nere 12 years; but they knew they were pilgrimes, & looked not much on these things; but lift up their eyes to ye heavens, their dearest cuntrie, and quieted their spirits.

There is no record of the term Pilgrims being used to describe Plymouth’s founders for 150 years after Bradford wrote this passage, except when quoting him. The Mayflower’s story was retold by historians Nathaniel Morton (in 1669) and Cotton Mather (in 1702), and both paraphrased Bradford’s passage and used his word pilgrims. At Plymouth’s Forefather’s Day observance in 1793, Rev. Chandler Robbins recited this passage.

The name Pilgrims was probably not in popular use before about 1798, even though Plymouth used a variety of terms to honor Plymouth’s founders. Pilgrims was not mentioned, other than in Robbins’ 1793 recitation. The first documented use that was not simply quoting Bradford was at a December 22, 1798 celebration of Forefathers’ Day in Boston. A song composed for the occasion used the word Pilgrims, and the participants drank a toast to “The Pilgrims of Leyden.”  The term was used prominently during Plymouth’s next Forefathers’ Day celebration in 1800, and was used in Forefathers’ Day observances thereafter.

The event that Americans commonly call the “First Thanksgiving” was celebrated by the Pilgrims after their first harvest in the New World in October 1621. This feast lasted three days, and—as accounted by attendee Edward Winslow – it was attended by 90 Indians and 53 Pilgrims. The New England colonists were accustomed to regularly celebrating “thanksgivings” days of prayers, or “feasts,” – as well as “fasts” in times of trouble – thanking God for blessings such as military victory or the end of a drought.

Are Americans as thankful as they ought to be. Christian Americans are. As for the rest of the rabble, they only seem to be thankful for the chance to get bargains on Black Friday, which has extended backwards into Thanksgiving Day itself. Most Americans are thankful for President Trump. Our economy is booming, people are working, other nations have stopped trying to take advantage of us, and America is becoming great again – or at least it was until the Mid-Terms. Someone – probably George Soros – infused the Stock Market with a flush of cash the day after the Election to make it seem like the Market was happy. But that economic joy was short-lived and deceiving.

If our economy plunges again under a Democrat House – the House legislates the taxes, people – will be as willing to fast as we are to feast in order to regain God’s blessings?

Enjoy your Thanksgiving Day. Be safe, stay warm if you’re in the Northeast, and stay home with your family on Thanksgiving Day. That 60-inch television will still be there on Friday.

Why Companies Cancel Conservative Advertising

When Glenn Beck was still on Fox News, Democrat operatives launched a campaign against Fox News’ advertisers in order to convince the network to cancel his show.  They did such a good job of demonizing Beck that even he began to believe that he was a bad guy.

 

It’s not just that there are a small coteries Demoncrat hackers who terrorize companies that advertise on conservative networks; they have their counterparts in company public marketing and advertising departments who advise executives to cancel their conservative advertising for fear of alienating phantom customers.

 

In 2011, Fox News finally cancelled Beck’s television segment on the network.  He tried going independent for awhile, but the Demoncrats followed him onto the live-feed satellite network and once again, his television program failed.  Now, he relies on his radio program and podcast subscriptions.

 

My former company was one of the advertisers to drop advertising on his Fox show.  While the then-CEO was a Conservative-to-Moderate, his advertising and marketing people were moderates and liberals, some of them with ties to La Raza, an organization he had officially banned.

 

That’s what Conservative broadcasters on radio, television – cable really; there are no conservative television networks and never have been – are facing.

 

Rush Limbaugh, on the air since the 1980s, has long been a target of the Demoncrats.  But his contract with Premiere Radio Networks gave him some coverage.  Liberal hackers still targeted his advertisers.  His brand, held, though.  The recent smearing of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh inspired him to write in his monthly newsletter, “The Limbaugh Letter” about his own battle with these hackers.

 

In the article, “Smear Merchants:  I’ve Been Smeared by the Left, I Know Who They Are,” in the November 2018 issue, Limbaugh writes:  “Through intelligence guided by experience, I have absolutely no doubt about who and what we’re confronted with in the radical left.  I know because I’ve seen it, up close and personal, over and over again.  The Left has smeared me, and not just once.  I’ve been subjected to their lies and attacks more times than I can count.  I know how they strategize.   I know their techniques better than they do.”

 

A cartoonist by the name of Chris Britt smeared Brett Kavanaugh.  Britt similarly smeared Rush Limbaugh in 1995 after the Oklahoma City bombing.  He made a cartoon of a heart-breaking photo of a fireman carrying the body of a baby killed in the explosion, with the balloon reading, “Damn right-wing radio.”

 

“But the actual fireman,” Limbaugh writes, “was thinking nothing of the sort.  He went on record to explain that he and his whole firehouse were avid listeners of my radio program.”

 

“This is an important window into the Leftist’s sick worldview,” he continues.  “It’s vile.  It’s depraved. There is no truth; only malice.  You can see why I have concluded that we’re dealing with people who, at some point in their lives, suffered some kind of trauma that has led to deep psychological disorders.  Their inner disintegration drew them to the Left, and now they find themselves in the mainstream of the Democrat Party.”

 

In 2009, the Liberals were at it again, accusing Limbaugh of racist comments on his program, when he became “a minority participant in an ownership group to buy the St. Louis Rams.”

 

“Bryan Burwell of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,” he says, “wrote a column claiming I had said that slavery ‘had its merits,’ and that I was advocating for its return because blacks were ‘better off in those days.’  A total hoax.

 

“I knew I had never said anything remotely like that, because I don’t think it.  We went back and searched the record, everything we have.  There is not even an inkling that any words in the quote were accurate.  Nobody heard me say it because it was never said.  Period.  Yet not a single reporter ever called to ask me, ‘Is it true?  Did you say this?’

 

“In the uproar that followed, the Post-Dispatch walked back the quote, saying it could not be verified “and its use did not meet the Post-Dispatch’s standards for sourcing,’ as reported by NBC Sports.  The newspaper pointed to a scurrilous 2006 book by Jack Huberman, 101 People Who Are Really Screwing America, as their source.  Huberman, of course, could not provide the origin of the quote, because it never happened.  The book was published by the far-left Nation Books, which explains everything right there.  But their lie had its intended effect:  it ended by Rams venture.”

 

Limbaugh notes that the Left will use any means to end Conservatism in America.

 

“Whoever stands in their way, whoever is effective, whoever defies them, must be discredited, shamed, shunned, and leveled,” he writes.

 

You don’t even have to be a Conservative.  Glenn Beck is a Libertarian.

 

“This is a power struggle over the future of America,” Limbaugh continues.  “The Left despises the country as founded, and will do anything to silence those who guard our Constitutional liberties.  It is just a fact that Conservatives pose the biggest threat to the Left today, so we are their biggest targets.  It is true that their media stranglehold has been irreparably harmed by me and others who have followed me.  I’ve ruined their monopoly.  They ought to treat me as an enemy, because I am; I want them totally defeated.

 

“It’s war,” he declares.  “Bring it.”

 

Personal smears in Conservative media are becoming less effective because Conservatives are pushing back.

 

“So, the Left attempts to deploy massive attacks on advertisers,” Limbaugh writes.  “They flood businesses with messages from bots [autonomous programs on a network (especially the Internet) that can interact with computer systems or users, especially ones designed to respond or behave like a player in an adventure game] claiming to be customers from all over the country, who declare they are never going to purchase another product until the company stops advertising on [fill-in-the-blank] programs.

 

“When they tried it against me in 2012 with their ‘Stop Rush’ campaign, we launched an EIB [Excellence in Broadcasting] investigation.  We were able to hunt down and expose the activists who have long operated anonymously and in secret.  There were ten people involved in the ‘Stop Rush’ effort.  Our investigation also uncovered e-mails rife with lies and smears sent out by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee encouraging recipients to boycott my program [or threaten to drop Limbaugh’s advertisers].

 

“On our website, we ID’d the ten people who had been tweeting, Facebooking, and e-mailing businesses with harassing and bullying messages over and over to them to surrender.  One of the culprits was a then-tenured professor at Kent State University [well that figures] using her official account to badger advertisers.  Custom-automated tweeting software – in violation of Twitter rules – allowed them to harass small businesses in an attempt to interfere with their operations.  They barraged companies with thousands of messages via this software, bullying and harassing advertisers until they cancelled.

 

“It wasn’t just activism;” Limbaugh writes, “it was blackmail.

 

“’Stop Rush’ claimed to be a ‘grassroots’ group of ordinary consumers unhappy with me.  But there were no potential customers, just a small number of hard-core political activists founded by Media Matters’ Angelo Carusone.”

 

“I know who these people are, inside and out,” he concludes.  I want to make sure you do, too, so you can join me in refusing to cave, ever.  Take heart.  We have truth on our side, which is impossible to defeat.  Do not doubt me.”

 

Since not everyone subscribes to The Limbaugh Letter, I thought I would share this with my readers.  I’ve known since first going on the Internet when I was dealing with what I called “hackers” and when I was dealing with actual human beings.  I called the hackers out in AOL’s War on Terror Chatroom, stating that they were a group of about ten people sitting in a room full of computers at some Democrat Party office, copying their vitriol from pre-written Democrat talking points.

 

They vanished from the chatroom, strangely enough, and I was left with only a few Conservative people who congratulated me.  I was surprised that they caved so easily.  I expected them to put up more of a fight.

 

The Democrats are what one of our band people used to call the tone-deaf kid who grabbed the microphone at a concert.  They exaggerate their numbers the way certain Communist countries exaggerate disaster casualties in order to glean more humanitarian aid from the United Nations.

 

When my company first opened its Facebook site, I warned the administrators that they were likely to discover that “complaints” were actually being registered by competitors.  I was gratified to read Rush Limbaugh’s article verifying my suspicions.  I’m glad he had the guts and the wherewithal to hunt these liars down.

 

If we just show that kind of courage in the face of the enemy, instead of shrinking down and slinking away, there wouldn’t be a Democrat left in Congress.  That’s the goal for which we should be fighting and we can start by yanking these computer ghosts out of their closets and exposing them the way Rush Limbaugh.

 

Bravo, Rush Limbaugh!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New Jersey Drivers: The Very Devil in a Snowstorm

When it snows in Alaska, Alaskans shrug. When it didn’t snow in Alaska for a long period in the 1990s, they were incredibly upset to hear that New Jersey had a blizzard. “Twenty-four inches?!” an Alaskan cried over the phone. “You call THAT a blizzard?! It’s not fair. We haven’t had snow here in a couple of years, but you people in New Jersey get two feet and you think it’s a blizzard?!”

When it snows – just a few inches will do – or worse, they have an ice storm, anywhere in the South, states go into total shutdown. Neither the states, the local governments or the drivers are prepared for it. You can understand.

When it snows in New England, it’s just weather as usual. They got a lot of snow up there. The Midwest – the same. They get huge snows. But they’re big, sparsely-populated states and can deal with it. Pennsylvania is fairly hilly and gets plenty of snow. But their main highways are in dreadful condition, which is why you hear so many dreadful accident stories, especially involving tractor-trailer trucks. Still, except for its main cities – Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Harrisburg – Pennsylvania is still pretty rural.

Then there’s New Jersey. Too many people – and too many people arriving all the time, being squeezed into “Affordable” Housing (what a joke!) – too many cars, and not enough roads. Every snowstorm here is a disaster. That’s why commuters forget the last Snowmaggedon as soon as the snow melts and when it happens again, they go into crisis mode.

New Jersey drivers only know one speed – fast. Doesn’t matter what’s on the road; to them, every day is the Fourth of July. They’ll roar down the highway at 75 miles per hour when the sun’s out, when the sun’s not out, when it’s dark, when it’s rainy, when it’s foggy, when it’s sleeting or it’s snowing. Doesn’t matter.

The Department of Transportation doesn’t stand a chance against these drivers. The snowplows must travel in packs, taking up every lane, with the truck in the fast lane farthest ahead, cheek by jowl with the next truck so the cars can’t cut them off. It’s the only way they can plow New Jersey roads.

If the snow is heavy enough, the governor has been known to close down the major highways: Route 80, Route 287, Route 280, Route 78, the New Jersey Turnpike, the Garden State Parkway, in addition to the local state highways. But it’s not enough to hinder the indefatigable Jersey Devils. If they can’t speed along the highways, they’ll take to the local secondary roads to race on home.

No one is more eager to get home than the New Jersey driver and they’ll do anything to get there, even if they have to walk, as some stranded commuters did this past Thursday. They’d raced ahead of the snow plows. So the roads were unnavigable, even for the vaunted SUVs and no one went anywhere -for up to 12 hours, according to some legends.

Our governator-in-chief immediately blamed the weather forecasters for not accurately forecasting that the storm, a Nor’easter, was going to dump more snow on New Jersey than had been predicted earlier in the day. I only bother to listen to one television weather forecast, because they’re the only ones who ever get it right, and that’s NJ12 News.

If you want New Jersey weather, it only makes sense to tune in to a New Jersey station, although we only have one. They have this one forecaster, DiGregorio, who always seems to get it right when everyone else gets it wrong. I don’t know if I was the only viewer listening to his forecast, but he said, “The storm is slowing down…and I’m going to have to revise my forecast to higher amounts of snow in the north.”

Pretty sure that’s what he said – with a grimace. As in, “Yikes!” What part of “The storm IS SLOWING DOWN!!!” didn’t our genius governor hear or comprehend?! That meant we were going to get more snow. What channel were Phoney Phil and his people watching? Comedy Central? That’s where all dimwit Democrats seem to get their news.

Not to sound like a commercial for NJ12. I hate their politics. But their weather forecasts are pretty darned accurate. I lost my job ages ago. I get paid to look after Mom. Big Brother wanted me to cancel Cablevision (it is way too expensive). But here in the hill country of New Jersey, where are hills are low but steep and we have more cars per square mile than any other state, NJ12’s weather and traffic forecasts are invaluable. I told my brother I refused to give it up.

This guy DiGregorio, when some hurricane or other was due to slam our state, when the other forecasters said it would go off the coast, he said, no it was going to come more or less straight up the middle of the state, he was right and they were wrong. Then, in another rain storm, the forecasters were predicting disaster. This guy said he didn’t go out on a limb and be wrong and wind up putting people in harm’s way, but the way he saw it, it just wasn’t going to happen. Fortunately, he was right. The other forecasters were wrong and, predictably, New Jerseyans were furious that the forecasters got them in an uproar for nothing.

This is Storm No. 3 for this fellow, and I haven’t really been keeping track. If I were NJ12’s internal public relations department, I’d have writers falling over themselves to do his story.

The State could try closing down the main arteries ahead of the snowfall. But they’d also have to shut down the secondary roads because New Jersey drivers just won’t stop. There’s a video of one New Jersey Devil barreling full-speed right through a long-red red light (in clear weather) on State Route 23 North in West Milford and into a SUV trying to cross the highway and then taking the traffic light down). Workers (especially mothers) could try staying home when a snowstorm is forecast. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could get their priorities straight?

Companies could do their workers a favor and let their workers go early, as soon as the snow starts falling, not when four inches of snow are already on the ground (that four-inch amount is pretty much the standard for accidents). But that’ll never happen, anymore than New Jersey drivers will slow down when the weather is bad. Workers were full of woeful stories of not getting home until 1 a.m., of taking up to five hours to travel two miles on a major highway, and school buses in central Jersey returning students to their schools because the buses just couldn’t get through. Some very tiny tikes were stuck at their nursery schools all night (What the bleep is the matter with those mothers?! STAY HOME WITH YOUR KIDS!!).

New Jersey drivers are a pain in the neck. They drive too fast, too far, and too furiously. Let’s face it: they’ll never learn. This storm was a little early. We rarely get this kind of snow before Thanksgiving. For eastern New Jersey, eight inches is a lot of snow, considering the number of cars on the road. It’s not the amount snow; it’s the congestion. But winter will be here officially in another month. The snow will fall, the Jersey Devil drivers will once again zoom ahead of the snow plows, and then have a fit of road rage when they get stuck in a snowdrift or do a tailspin into a barrier.

That’s a forecast upon which you can utterly depend.

Amazon Needed Tax Bribe to Locate in New York City

Amazon HQ2B has chosen Long Island City, in Queens, New York City, for one of its two East Coast headquarters (the other will be somewhere in Virginia). The headquarters will be just across the East River from Midtown Manhattan, accessible by the Queensboro Bridge and the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, in addition to various bus and subway lines. The company will bring 25,000 jobs to the City.

Newly-minted Socialist Communist-woman-to-be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is already up in arms because New York Governor Andrew Cuomo had to offer the mega-company a juicy $2 billion tax break in order to establish its headquarters in a city known for its onerous corporate taxes that have driven hundreds, maybe thousands, of businesses and workers to more business-friendly climes.

Some climate-change environmentalists are trying to discourage the company by pointing out that the location is in a flood plain. Yes, the headquarters will be on the East River, but the flood plain is actually further to the south, along the Atlantic shoreline. Now if these Amazon workers choose to live along Long Island’s southern Gold Coast, then they should check their maps. The building itself shouldn’t be in any grave danger of flooding.

Some pundits are boasting that Amazon has chosen New York for its “talent pool.” Talent? Like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

Consider, for example, how she responded this week when she was asked on “The Daily Show” to explain how she intends to pay for her Democratic Socialism-friendly policies, including her Medicare for All agenda.

No less than the Washington Post’s Official Fact Checker, Glenn Kessler, had to school Ocasio-Cortez.

“If people pay their fair share,” Ocasio-Cortez said, “if corporations paid — if we reverse the tax bill, raised our corporate tax rate to 28 percent … if we do those two things and also close some of those loopholes, that’s $2 trillion right there. That’s $2 trillion in ten years.”

“Unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs. Unemployment is low because people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their family.”
.@Ocasio2018 on Nancy Pelosi: “I think absolutely right now..she is the leader of..no no, um, she is speaker..or rather leader Pelosi..hopefully we’ll see..she’s ah..she’s the current leader of the party and..the party absolutely does have its leadership in the House and Senate”
pic.twitter.com/6FUTWpgS98

“In an appearance on CNN on Aug. 8, when challenged on the costs of government-financed health care, she answered: ‘Why aren’t we incorporating the cost of all the funeral expenses of those who died because they can’t afford access to health care? That is part of the cost of our system.’”

“ICE is the only criminal investigative agency, the only enforcement agency in the United States, that has a bed quota. So ICE is required to fill 34,000 beds with detainees every single night and that number has only been increasing since 2009.”
— in an interview with the Intercepted podcast, May 30

“As our friends at PolitiFact documented, this is an urban legend. There is language in the 2016 appropriations bill that requires ICE to have 34,000 beds available — ICE ‘shall maintain a level of not less than 34,000 detention beds through September 30, 2016’ — but it is not required to fill them. The main point of such language, a version of which dated to 2009, is to make sure the money is not spent on something else.”

“They [national Democrats] were campaigning most when we had more of an American middle class. This upper-middle class is probably more moderate but that upper-middle class does not exist anymore in America.”
—interview on “Pod Save America,” Aug. 7

“Here’s some more sweeping rhetoric. In knocking the current leaders of the Democrats, stuck in ‘ ’90s politics,’ Ocasio-Cortez said the ‘upper-middle class does not exist anymore.’”

“But the data show that while the middle class overall may have shrunk a bit, the upper-middle class has actually grown. In a 2016 paper published by the Urban Institute, Stephen J. Rose documented that the upper-middle class has grown substantially, from 12.9 percent of the population in 1979 to 29.4 percent in 2014. His analysis showed that there was a massive shift in the center of gravity of the economy, with an increasing share of income going to the upper-middle class and rich.

“In a Koch brothers-funded study — if any study’s going to try to be a little bit slanted, it would be one funded by the Koch brothers — it shows that Medicare for all is actually much more, is actually much cheaper than the current system that we pay right now.”
— interview on CNN’s “Cuomo Prime Time,” Aug. 8

“The reason that the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act is because they ruled that each of these monthly payments that everyday Americans make is a tax,” she announced.

“This appears to be an example of not understanding policy nuances. In the 5-4 opinion written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., the Affordable Care Act was deemed to be an appropriate exercise of the government’s taxing power. But Roberts was not referring to the monthly premium payments, as Ocasio-Cortez claims. Instead, Roberts was referring to the individual mandate to buy insurance — and the requirement to pay an annual penalty when filing a tax return if one did not buy health insurance.”

Fox News noted about Ocasio-Cortez:

“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is being roundly criticized for flubbing a question in which she criticized Israel’s ‘occupation’ of the Palestinian territories.

“Ocasio-Cortez, who surprisingly won a New York Democratic primary on a socialist platform, made the remark during an interview on PBS’s ‘Firing Line’ on Friday.

“When host Margaret Hoover asked her to clarify what she meant, the 28-year-old political newcomer fumbled over her words and acknowledged that she is ‘not the expert at geopolitics on this issue.’

“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is being roundly criticized for flubbing a question in which she criticized Israel’s “occupation” of the Palestinian territories.

“Her admission led to intense criticism on Twitter…

“’I am a firm believer in finding a two-state solution on this issue, and I’m happy to sit down with leaders on both of these. For me, I just look at things through a human rights lens, and I may not use the right words. I know this is a very intense issue,’ Ocasio-Cortez said.

“’She looks like us, she talks like us and she represents the values that we have,’ said Rigoberto Marquez, an Oakland resident whose parents immigrated to the U.S., to the San Francisco Chronicle. ‘You don’t see many people like that who are authentic like she is.’

“Ocasio-Cortez calls herself a democratic socialist —” wrote the San Francisco Chronicle, “as does another hero of the Left, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders — but she didn’t bring it up Tuesday. She didn’t really have to. Plenty of speakers who preceded her on the stage Tuesday did, in part because the event was co-sponsored by the San Francisco Progressive Alliance, a coalition that includes the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.

“Tagging someone as a socialist just doesn’t mean as much to anyone who remembers when the Berlin Wall was standing.”

“’We’ve got to let go of these Soviet-era images,’ Marquez said.”

According to an article in Esquire, Ocasio-Cortez attended a rally for a progressive candidate in St. Louis.

“They [the Republicans] say things -” she said, “I mean, they talk about things that everybody wants, especially like if you are a parent. They talk about education for your kids, healthcare for your kids. The things that you want. And if you’re not really paying attention to how they’re going to pay for it or the rest of that, it’s easy to fall into that trap and say, my kids deserve this.”

The Republicans don’t talk about universal healthcare precisely because they know the only way to pay for it is to take it away from the earners and give it to the takers. Redistribution of wealth isn’t part of their platform. But it is part of the Socialist-Democrat platform.

Does Ocasio-Cortez really think that believing your kids deserve a good education is a “trap?”

Clearly, Ocasio-Cortez’s education was so spectacularly dreadful that she has no acquaintance with concepts like “facts” and “truth.” Nor does she seem to care. She just shrugs and says she’s not perfect. When a company arrives that can employ thousands of New Yorkers, she starts a protest because the governor of the state gave the company a tax break, one it will more than make up in increased income tax revenue, sales tax revenue and all the other bonuses that come with the blessings of Capitalism.

Talent was clearly not on Amazon’s mind when they chose New York. They hesitated long enough before finally signing on for a headquarters building in Long Island City. It’s a good thing that New York City has one of the best public transportation systems in the country, and two airports, one within shouting distance (La Guardia) of the building (it’s so close that you could almost walk that if it weren’t for the heavy traffic). JFK is not much further off.

It’s a good thing Gov. Cuomo dangled that $2 billion tax incentive in front of Amazon’s decision-makers, who had their eye on the subways, buses, and airports.

Because if Amazon was looking for an educated East Coast workforce, and they used Ocasio-Cortez as an example of a New York City education, they’d have chosen Boston, instead.

 

 

 

 

 

Judicial Watch Legal Team Monitoring Election Recount in South Florida

Judicial Watch has a legal and investigative team closely monitoring the machine mid-term election recount in South Florida.  Almost 20 years ago, they conducted a thorough recount, with the help of a “highly reputable auditing firm,” in Florida during the heated 2000 presidential contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore.

Their website indicates that the machine recount “could be followed by a manual recount that could drag the spectacle out into the weekend. Florida law requires a machine recount when the vote margin in a race is less than 0.5 percent and that occurred in three key statewide races—for U.S. Senate, governor and agriculture secretary. If results from the machine recount show a 0.25 percent margin or less, a hand recount will ensue for undervotes and overvotes. An undervote occurs when no candidate is marked in a race. An overvote marks more than one candidate on the same ballot in the same race.”

“In the current debacle, all 67 counties are supposed to complete the machine recount by 3 p.m. on Thursday, a deadline set by the Florida Department of State. However, Palm Beach County Election Supervisor Susan Bucher said earlier in the week that would not be possible and a Tallahassee judge ordered the recount in Palm Beach County extended five additional days to November 20.

“Counties that don’t meet the recount deadline are supposed to keep the originally reported results on file. In the current recount, high-speed tabulating machines recheck all ballots against the original tallies. Many counties have completed the process. Palm Beach County, Florida’s third largest, has about 600,000 ballots to count and Bucher says outdated machines aren’t up to the task to meet the deadline even with staff working around the clock.”

“In other counties, things are going pretty smoothly, including in the state’s largest, Miami-Dade, and results are expected to trickle in on time. The epicenter of the action is Broward County, led by a famously incompetent election supervisor long under fire. Her name is Brenda Snipes and former Governor Jeb Bush appointed her in 2003 after getting rid of her equally inept predecessor, Miriam Oliphant, for severe mismanagement. In 2002 Judicial Watch investigated Oliphant for the botched Florida primaries in which her office lost hundreds of absentee ballots that were later found in a filing cabinet. The Florida Elections Commission fined Oliphant $10,000 for willfully neglecting her duties and causing dozens of polls to open late and close early during the 2002 gubernatorial primaries.

“Snipes has proven to be just as bad, though voters have reelected her despite her well-documented transgressions in several lower-profile elections. In an editorial this week, Broward County’s largest newspaper calls for Snipes’ ouster, calling her incompetent and questioning why despite her record of poor performance she keeps getting reelected. Bush took to social media to blast the election supervisor he appointed, writing: ‘There is no question that Broward County Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes failed to comply with Florida law on multiple counts, undermining Floridians’ confidence in our electoral process. Supervisor Snipes should be removed from her office following the recounts.’”

“Back in 2000 Judicial Watch, with the help of a highly reputable auditing firm, executed complete recounts in the disputed counties of Collier, Hillsborough, Indian River, Miami-Dade, Pinellas and Sarasota as well as the highly contested counties of Broward and Palm Beach. It was a tight presidential race between George W. Bush and Al Gore and Judicial Watch’s recount proved that Bush clearly won Florida and thus the presidency. Judicial Watch has since launched a national Election Integrity Project to clean up voter rolls. Robert Popper, a former Justice Department deputy chief of the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division, is the program’s director and his team is on the ground in south Florida.”

Sometimes you need to go directly to the best source to find out what’s happening and Judicial Watch is the best at keeping their legal-eagle eyes open for corruption and fraud.

Having Judicial Watch on the job is an incredible relief to the many Conservative voters who have felt themselves disenfranchised in this election.  They’re wondering, with good reason, how the Democrats can simply get away with “discovering” votes days after the polls have closed, hidden away in trucks and warehouses, to be trotted out when a Democrat win seems in doubt.

If the Democrats can lie, cheat and steal their way into office, if Big Donors can buy the votes of elected officials, what will happen to our federated republic and the rule of law.  If a former president’s judicial minions on appellate courts can overturn every appeal to real justice, how will freedom survive?  Who will speak for real Americans?

Judicial Watch has the legal strength and the legal minds to help protect the rule of law.  If you can, go to their website and give them your support.

We need them, more than ever.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stop Mass Hysteria: A Book Review

Last month, I was sick for two weeks with what turned out to be the adenovirus. I live right down the road from the Wanaque Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation, where some 20 young patients have been stricken. It’s actually a long-term, once-you-check-in-you-don’t-check-out facility. In addition to patients with life-long debilitating illnesses that require 24-hour respiratory care and accident victims, the facility also hosts AIDS patients, although with the advances in treatment there probably aren’t as many.

Local residents were upset when this facility first opened alongside Lower Twin Lake (before Route 287 roared through) in Wanaque, right on the border of Pompton Lakes. People weren’t so much worried about escapees as personnel who might not observe proper hygiene and then visit the local Stop & Shop just up the street.

I get an annual Fall cold, but not usually like this one. Being that sick meant two weeks off from tending to my 94 year-old mother. I didn’t want to go near her with this thing. So I had two weeks to rest and read. I had five or six books: the two Deep State books, Glenn Beck’s “Addicted to Outrage,” “The Coddling of the American Mind,” and finally, Michael Savage’s newest book, “Stop Mass Hysteria: America’s Insanity from the Salem Witch Trials to the Trump Witch Hunt.”

Preventing mass hysteria is what local health officials tried to do in the case of the adenovirus. They haven’t reported anyone getting sick from the adenovirus outside of the facility. It’s not fatal for otherwise healthy people; but you know it when you have it. There’s no mistaking it.

Savage’s book, “Stop Mass Hysteria: America’s Insanity from the Salem Witch Trials to the Trump Witch Hunts,” 2018: Center Street/Hachette Book Group, New York, doesn’t mention Typhoid Mary. But the book was released last month just in time for the Kavanaugh Witch Trials.

“Hatred is in the air,” Savage begins. “We are living in an age of hate, in which mental pollution is worse than air pollution. The most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents, hatred is spreading like a virus into all-too-willing hosts. It unifies knee-jerk liberals, no matter what their differences. Hatred of conservatives, Trump, and his voters is just one of many cases of hysteria infecting American society today, but it is likely the most destructive.”

He cites three symptoms of the illnesses: the publishing by Anti-FA of the home addresses of
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents; the suggestion by actor Peter Fonda President Trump’s son Barron be locked in room full of pedophiles; and Congresswoman Maxine Waters charge that all Democrat activists harass Trump administration officials and other Republicans in public venues.

Savage takes an historical perspective of hysteria through America’s history, from Columbus to the Salem Witch Trials, to the present.

“Whether you know it or not, you’re living through a mass hysteria primarily of the left,” he says, “but not solely of the left. How absurd they have become in their hatred of Donald Trump and those who voted for him. Their hatred has reached a fever pitch comparable to mass movements in totalitarian states.”

Savage had no idea how prescient his theory was; the Kavanaugh hysteria occurred after the book was published. If the publishers had waited six months, they could have added photos.

“The bases for fomenting and maintaining hysteria have been in place long before there was an America. Only the goals and slogans have changed. That is why I have chosen to write about history. It is scary to see how little we have changed over time, and I hope – with your help – we can start to change that.”

Savage uses the gun control issue and school shootings as an example of how the left manipulates mass hysteria.

“Gun control is an area where mass hysteria has trumped sound regulation. The left exploits horrors like school shootings – a mental illness and pharmaceutical issue, not a gun issue – as opportunities to repeal the Second Amendment,” Savage writes.

“This is using mass hysteria, trying to implement regulation based on emotional reactions to traumatic events” rather than scientific facts and reason.

He writes that up to the dawn of the Bronze Age, no one had any reason to revolt. There was no call for anarchy.

“In fact, there wasn’t even a word for the concept until the ancient Greeks coined anarchia and anarchos to describe the absence of rulers. Historians agree,” Savage writes, “the concept was first used in a political sense in the play Seven Against Thebes (467 B.C.) by Aeschylus. In that drama, the character Antigone refuses to obey a political order not to bury her apparently traitorous brother Polynices…Antigone acted with dignity and nobility; as the children of Oedipus, she and Polynices had learned to stand up for what was moral. However, acting in the name of honor and ethics is rarely the case with anarchist.

Savage cites Guy Fawkes, the British Catholic who helped mount the Gunpower Plot in England in 1605.

“The plan was to blow up Parliament and assassinate the Protestant king, James I, a scholar for whom the King James Bible was named. When the Catholic Lord Monteagle was advised to stay home that day, he became suspicious and alerted the monarch. King James had the cellars searched. The gunpowder was found [according to legend, as the fuse was burning] and the conspirators tracked down. Fawkes confessed under torture and was executed.”

But he got his own holiday, all the same (November 5 – actually, a thanksgiving day for the plot’s failure).

“Mass hysteria,” Savage instructs us, “- or mass hypnosis – falls into two categories. The first is ‘positive hallucinations or hysteria,’ when you believe something is real, absent evidence, just because someone says so or it fits your preconceived notions. The second is ‘negative hallucinations or hysteria’ when you deny the existence of something real, despite overwhelming evidence that it exists. The media and [Democrats] exploits both – for example, selling the absurd notion that Russia cost Hillary Clinton the election or denying [that] France and England are crumbling under the weight of Muslim immigration. One is demonstrably untrue, the other demonstrably true. Yet those in denial refuse to accept reality in either case.”

Another example of mass hysteria that Savage uses is the “War of the Worlds” broadcast in 1938, in which Orson Welles, using the H.G. Wells novel as a source, convinced the nation that Martians had landed in New Jersey.

“Panic ensued,” Savage says, “because many listeners believed these stories that were early examples of fake news. But it came from a reliable medium in a familiar format, spoken by familiar trusted voices.” In the same way, Walter Cronkite convinced Americans that the United States had lost the Vietnam War after the TET Offensive, when it had actually defeated the Viet Cong.

“..[T]he panic was caused by otherwise rational people allowing their emotions to overcome their reasons,” he writes.

Historically, the Boston Massacre was another mass hysteria event – caused not by the British, as John Adams proved when he defended the British soldiers, but by the colonists who struck first.

“Adams refused…to destroy the concept of justice, even if it meant defending King George’s soldiers, whose presence in Boston he otherwise objected to,” Savage writes.

“How does mass hysteria begin?

“It begins with the likes of Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google, who create algorithms that redirect young people to sites Google thinks they should see. Progressive sites that advance their agenda. The company that fired engineer James Damore for citing evidence that men and women have different aptitudes – a controversial, not a hateful, idea – will obviously not be promoting balanced viewpoints.”

Savage gives many history lessons, but we’ll examine two in this blog post.

The first involves Christopher Columbus.

“In the Eleventh Century,” Savage says, “more than half of Spain, the southern portion, was under Muslim rule and known as the Caliphate of Cordoba. Spain’s national hero, Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar – popularly known as El Cid, ‘the Lord’ – participated in the Reconquista, the military retaking of those regions under Muslim rule. The task took more than four hundred years but was completed at last in January 1492. Spain was once again a Catholic nation, both wholly and holy.

“In March 1492, six months before Columbus reached the New World, an event took place that was seemingly unrelated to the seaman but was clearly an offshoot of efforts to solidify the Reconquista. Spain’s King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella decreed that within four months, all Jews had to leave Spain. Those had converted to Catholicism, the Converso, could stay. The eight hundred thousand Jews who had not were out. Of course, an unknown number of the Conversos were attending mass but still secretly practicing Judaism. These people, these human beings, were known as Marranos – swine.

“There is good evidence that Columbus, whose Spanish name was Cristobal Colon, was Jewish [at least on his mother’s side], possibly a Marrano. The evidence is found in the will he signed on March 19, 1506. In it, he honored the Jewish custom of leaving a portion of his wealth to the needy. He specifically named a Lisbon Jew as the beneficiary of a portion of his estate. Columbus also earmarked part of his estate to go to a group that was charged with retaking Jerusalem from its Muslim occupiers. And finally, he signed the document with a triangle of marks that appeared on Jewish headstones. Those dots and characters were intended to represent the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the deceased.”

Savage goes on to cite Columbus’ considerable scholarship in astronomy and navigation (he went to sea at the age of 10). The author is concerned with the modern-day hysteria over the celebration of Columbus Day and Columbus’ discovery of America in spite of the presence of aborigines.

“Whatever else may be said of him,” Savage argues, “Columbus had courage, sailing three tiny vessels west into waters that were uncharted and said to be populated by sea monsters, on a world that many uneducated souls still thought was flat. That alone should be celebrated. In his own way, he set a standard for the ideal of American exceptionalism in which I wholeheartedly believe.

“Without ignoring the historic truth of the diseases his crew and those that followed introduced to the defenseless native population – and also, of course, the horrors of slavery, Columbus’s enterprise failed in its original goal yet succeeded on a scale he could never have imagined. Columbus’s search for a trade route triggered the Sixteenth Century colonization of the continent to the north of Hispaniola in the Caribbean, where he landed.

Context matters, Savage tells us.

In this context: “The anti-Israeli rhetoric and passions of Barack Obama – a Muslim by virtue of his paternal descent and tradition – helped to fire new waves of anti-Semitism, the most open and vitriolic since the days of Goebbels and Hitler. Neither he nor the critics of Israel have a sense of history. They claim Jews have squatted on Palestinian land that was, in fact, Hebrew land since before the days of Moses. I mention this,” Savage says, “because the Jews of Spain today are faced with a situation almost identical to that faced by Columbus and the Jews of the Fifteenth Century. In August 2017, just days after a terror attack killed fourteen and injured more than a hundred others, the chief rabbi of that city gave an interview in which he warned that Spain had become a nexus for Islamic terror.”

The other example of hysteria involved the Pilgrims – and the Puritans.

“Contrary to popular believe,” Savage writes, “the Pilgrims did not leave England [merely] because they sought religious freedom: They came to the New World to establish an order under their own terms [one could call that ‘religious freedom’].”

The Pilgrims were refugees from the Anglican Church who felt the Anglican church had gotten too caught up idolatry.

Under the Pilgrim’s terms, Savage writes, “anyone who didn’t fit in, who defied their Calvinistic mores and morality, could be cast out – or worse. The foundation of their creed – the Bible – gave these fanatics all the guidance they needed to govern. They arrived with what was ultimately to be one of those most insidious ideas to take hold in the New World – that the Bible does not mention juries, and a truly divine society does not need them. Instead, with a scripture as guide, the Pilgrims were free to serve as judges and executioners. Men like William Bradford, a Mayflower passenger and Massachusetts governor, were among those who dispensed ‘justice.’”

One of the first instances of mass hysteria revolved around a village misfit named George Spencer. “…stooped, balding, with only one eye…he was an easy target for malicious taunting. But the real root of the problem lay in the fact that he refused to attend church or read the Bible, “unless compelled to do so.” According to their legal document, the Mayflower Compact, refusing to go to church or read the Bible was a crime.

“Spencer is said to have lived in or around Boston,” Savage relates, “where he had once been punished with a public flogging for being a thief. He thereafter moved to the Connecticut colony of New Haven. It was during his time as a servant to Henry Browning that a panic arose, fueled by those who were inclined to mistrust or simply dislike Spencer because of his appearance. Browning sold a sow to John Wakeman, a farmer. The sow gave birth to a litter of piglets, one of which was misshapen and had large patches of soft, hairless skin. Most damning of all, the piglet was blind in one eye – and the blind eye was gray and clouded, much like the marble Spencer had placed in the socket of his own missing eye.

“That was all the evidence a society preprogrammed to hate Spencer needed to become hysterical and bring charges of bestiality against him…with accompanying punishment being clearly laid out in Leviticus 20:15: ‘And if a man lie with a beast, he shall surely be put to death: and ye shall slay the beast.’

“Spencer was arrested, placed in prison, and told that if he confessed his sins his punishment would be tempered with mercy. This was a lie, of course, but the forty-two year-old prisoner was no fool. He wanted to live. So he confessed to the charges, though he later denied the confession under oath at his trail, saying he had made it only to appease the magistrate.”

However, under the puritanical legal code, a capital offense – one that could lead to a death sentence – required two witnesses.

“The accusers had none,” Savage writes, the alleged crimes having been committed outside of anyone’s view. But the Puritans were not ones to let their own restrictions come in the way of a pre-ordained conviction, and the horrified and brainwashed public was not about to stand in their way. The Puritans decided that Spencer’s own confession, though recanted under oath, made him the first witness. For the second witness, they presented the mute piglet itself, in all its hairless, misshapen, one-eyed misery.”

Things did not end well, as you might imagine, for Spencer, the poor little piglet, or its mother, the sow.

Savage tells us that the foundations for the Salem Witch Hunts actually began some years earlier when Alse Young, a 47-year old woman, was hung as a witch in Hartford, Conn. Absent a male child, she would have inherited her husband’s property. This horrified the other landowners, possibly even her own husband, Savage notes.

“That winter and spring, New England in general and the Connecticut town of Windsor specifically suffered through a severe bout of influenza. All that had to happen was for a rumor to be spread that Alse was a witch and responsible for the disease that killed a high percentage of children, and mass hysteria took root.”

In 1647, Alse Young was hanged as the first witch to be charged and executed in the New World. Between 1647 and 1662, another ten women were executed for witchcraft.

The Salem Witch Trials began with a woman arguing with a 13 year-old over doing the laundry, Savage tells us. It’s always the teenagers, it seems.

Ann Glover came to Boston 1680 with her daughter. In 1688, she had an argument with Martha Goodwin, the thirteen year-old daughter of “well-to-do John Goodwin. Glover had worked for Goodwin as a washerwoman, and had a reputation for being confrontational with the family. After the dispute, Martha and several other of John Goodwin’s six children began exhibiting a variety of unexplainable symptoms, including random pains in the necks and backs, distended tongues, spontaneous vocal outbursts, and occasional loss of control over their bodies. A physician was called in to cure the children. When he failed to do so, he pronounced the condition beyond his superb medical care, said he, because they were ‘bewitched.’”

“Ann Glover became the scapegoat. She was charged with witchcraft and Boston went made with hate for her – if not because she was a witch then because she was the next-best thing: a transplanted Catholic from Ireland whose husband had been executed for not renouncing his faith while the couple had been living on a sugar plantation in Barbados.”

“Ann was of lowly birth,” Savage writes, “and lacked any sort of education. Those citizens would come to be known as the “blue-noses” of Boston (apparently named for a kind of potato) needed no more than to spread hate about Ann through the community. Before long, everyone knew she was guilty. During trial, Ann’s lack of anything beyond basic English skills, compounded by her panic at being arrested, caused her to answer questions with a frenzied gibberish – which was later determined to be her native Irish.

“By the time prosecutors realized their mistake and found a translator, mass hysteria had done its work,” Savage continues. “She had already developed an irreversible reputation for speaking in a ‘demonic’ language. But that was outside the courtroom. Inside, the poor woman’s inability to communicate with accusers at her trial was a form of self-incrimination. At one point, prosecutors asked her to recite the Lord’s Prayer, which she did – in Latin from the masses of her youth, as well as in Irish. But not in English. No one understood her. Or if they did, they failed to come forward.

“Then the big blow was struck. The infamous Cotton Mather, a minister at Boston’s North Church, visited Ann during the trail and observed her chanting. When he asked her what she was doing, she responded in her broken English that she was speaking to ‘spirits,’ which Mather interpreted, and later disseminated, as a confession that she was communicating with the Devil. What Glover was actually doing, no doubt, was praying to the Catholic saints she remembered from her childhood. Praying for them to help her, since no one else would help her.”

The horrible story continues.

“There was more such ‘evidence,’ of course. Two men who claimed to speak Irish said Ann had confessed in her native tongue, and their testimony was never challenged. A search of her residence turned up a collection of dolls – which would have been appropriate for a mother who had a daughter around the ages of the children of her employer. Obviously, she had used those to cast some voodoo-style enchantment over the Goodwin children.”

Ann Glover was found guilty of witchcraft and hanged on November 16, 1688.

Cotton Mather went on to use to evidence in Ann Glover’s case in his book Memorable Providences Related to Witchcraft and Possessions in 1689. He codified the guidelines that would lead to the accusations of witchcraft four years later in Salem, Mass., as well as additional accusations in the interim.

Near the end of his book, Savage concludes, “Mass hysteria in America has had a long, destructive journey. There is something almost biblical about its immoral nature and its ability to take many guises – now a serpent in Eden, encouraging the rejection of authority. Now a frenzy at the foot of Mount Sinai, as monotheism is repudiated for a traditional Golden Calf. Now a crowd calling for the life of the thief of Barabbas over that of Jesus, driven to hysteria by the whispers of pro-Roman voices. And it’s not yet through.

“Like an infectious disease, hysteria continues to morph. It can be big and global or it can be scalpel-precise. Today, uniquely, it can be both. Whereas it took some effort for Cotton Mather or Carrie Nation to get into a position where people noticed, while the Communists in czarist Russia had to print handbills on concealed presses and clandestinely pass them out – all it takes now to start a social fire is a blog, a tweet, or a hashtag.”

Savage says that “When the left has removed all the statues of Columbus, all the Confederate flags, all the monuments to our Founding Fathers, when books like this have been burned and removed from libraries, when we have allowed hysterical cries to terminate or terrorize rational discourse, we will all have become Cotton Mather and Hassan-i-Sabbah and those who erected testaments to their own infamy with the bones of others.”

That seems to be a jumbled prediction. We won’t become Cotton Mathers; we’ll become Ann Glovers praying in an outlawed language (England outlawed the speaking of Irish and Scottish, or Gaelic) to an outlawed God and martyred for our beliefs by a calculating, collective mob.

Middlesex County – New Jersey’s Premier Sanctuary County

An illegal alien accused of killing three people was previously detained on domestic violence charges in New Jersey before officials released him, immigration authorities reported.

Breitbart.com and TheBlaze.com (Fox News dropped the story) report that:

Luis Rodrigo Perez, 23, a Mexican national, faces multiple murder charges for fatally shooting two men and wounding two other people on November 1, and then fatally shooting a woman the following day, NJ.com (The N.J. Star-Ledger) reported last Friday.

Perez had been arrested on domestic violence charges and was taken to Middlesex County Jail in New Jersey in December 2017, but jail officials released him in February of this year.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Acting Executive Associate Director Corey Price said Friday that federal immigration officials placed a detainer on Perez while in the New Jersey jail, but jail officials did not honor the request and did not let ICE know when he was released.

“Yet again, an ICE detainer was ignored and a dangerous criminal alien was released to the streets and is now charged with killing three people,” Price said in a statement. “Had ICE’s detainer request in December 2017 been honored by Middlesex County Jail, Luis Rodrigo Perez would have been placed in deportation proceedings and likely sent home to his country – and three innocent people might be alive today.”

“It is past time that localities realize the perils of dangerous sanctuary policies and resume their primary goal of protecting their residents,” Price added.

Showing no shame, Middlesex County officials say its ICE’s fault the detainer was not honored because the agency’s request did not meet specific criteria.

“This order would have authorized Middlesex County to turn over custody of Mr. Perez prior to, or upon completion of his sentence,” county officials told the [reliably Marxist] Associated Press.

“Instead ICE officials chose to do nothing, which places all responsibility of Mr. Perez’s actions squarely upon ICE.”

County officials also claimed that ICE never requested to deport Perez while he was in jail.

Middlesex County said began honoring ICE detainer requests last year if inmates had been convicted of first or second-degree offenses or ordered by a federal judge to be deported.  Evidently, Perez’s domestic violence charge did not meet Middlesex County’s “criteria.”  In other words, he would have had to murder someone here in New Jersey.

ICE had slammed Middlesex County in the past for their “sanctuary” policies, especially after the federal immigration agency arrested 37 criminal illegal aliens in the area in July.

When ICE officials conducted the five-day sweep of the area, they found 16 of the criminal illegal aliens they arrested had been released from the Middlesex County Jail.

Perez was in Middlesex County Jail in December 2017 on domestic violence charges. Middlesex County is a sanctuary county, so the jail did not notify ICE when Perez was being released at the conclusion of his criminal proceedings. Perez moved to Missouri once he was released, and the triple murder occurred in Springfield.

Brutal murders: According to police documents, Perez shot and killed roommates Steven Marler and Aaron Hampton at their home on Nov. 1, and wounded two other people. The next day, Perez allegedly fatally shot Sabrina

 According to police documents, Perez shot and killed roommates Steven Marler and Aaron Hampton at their home on Nov. 1, and wounded two other people. The next day, Perez allegedly fatally shot Sabrina Starr, who had accompanied Perez to his home when the first two murders occurred.

Aaron Anderson was also with Starr and Perez on Nov. 1, allegedly waiting outside in an SUV with Starr while Perez killed his roommates. He was also with Perez when they went to Starr’s home and Perez allegedly shot and killed her. Anderson has been charged as an accomplice with two counts of first-degree murder.

Lessons learned? “Perez had a violent history, but despite that, the detainer was not honored,” Tsourkaris said. “We hope that this tragic turn of events forces Middlesex to reconsider its policy and that the local elected officials stop protecting criminal aliens.”

Fat chance of that happening.

Middlesex County had 496,533 registered voters as of November 2017.  180,239 voters, or 36 percent of voters participated in the 2017 elections and has the highest number of voting districts in the state.  1,019 ballots were rejected.  This year, 246,904 registered voters participated.  With two Congressional districts representing the county (Pallone-6^th Distr., D and Watson-Coleman-12^th Distr., D).  Another 200,000-plus registered voters didn’t go to the polls.

Why?  Did the other half of the county just figure the Democrats had it in the bag, so they didn’t have to bother?  Are things that bad in Middlesex County?  Judging by its status as a “Sanctuary County,” they must be.

New Brunswick (home to Rutgers University), Piscataway, and Woodbridge are lost causes, of course.  Most of the towns voted in Democrat mayors.  They weren’t all one-candidate races.  Some towns had their “choice” of Democrats.

Middlesex County proper is largely an urban county.  Its population estimate, as of 2017, was 842,798, an increase of 4.1 percent from the 2010 U.S. Census.  21.1 percent were of Asian descent.  Middlesex County, as of the Census, was only 58 percent white and it’s undoubtedly gone down since then.  Only 34.4 percent of the county has families with underage children.  Thirty-four percent 55.9 percent were married couples with no children, and only 93.5 percent of the residents are male.

Morris County, part of the 11^th District, voted for President Trump in 2016 and actually voted for Bob Hugin (53.48 percent) in this year’s mid-terms.  The county has 364,147 registered voters and 216,555 votes were cast.  Why, if Morris County voted for Hugin, didn’t it vote for Jay Webber?

Webber lost Pequannock Township by a huge margin, which he should have won.  However, thanks to all those wealthy residents of Cedar Crest Retirement Community (and I mean so rich that they pay upwards of $75 a ticket for Shakespeare Night in their very own sizeable auditorium), as well as the general upscale tone of the town as a whole (My late companion had lived there since he was about four.  But because he was a lowly – but excellent – auto mechanic and overall repairman, a blue-collar worker, the people in the town looked down on him).

Pompton Plains has become so wealthy that it now prides itself on throwing away its money.

Webber also lost across the center of Morris County, from Randolph, through Morristown, out the other side to Chatham, which used to be Republican.  As bad as the outbreak of townhousitis is in Passaic County, it’s far worse along the Route 10 corridor than it is along the Route 23 corridor.

Lincoln Park was divided.  Suburban homeowners overwhelmingly voted for Webber.  The illegal aliens living in the apartment complexes along Beaver Brook Road voted for Montclair Mikie.  I personally urged the Lincoln Park Town Council not to fall for the Affordable Housing sale.  So far as I know, they listened.

Randolph has quickly become the land of CEOs and Asian-Americans.  This was another former Republican stronghold.  Still, Randolph voted for a Republican town council, so it’s hard to understand why they wouldn’t vote for a Republican Congressman.  Randolph had a 59.47 percent voter turn-out, which is huge for a mid-term election.   Would a bigger Republican turn-out in Randolph helped sway the election?  We know Denville, that other town, is filled with degenerate voters.  Even my Democrat friends refuse to live there.

New Jersey, it seems, has the third lowest divorce rate in the nation:  12.7 per 1,000 people, or about 9 percent.  We have a 52 percent marriage rate.  Thirty four percent of New Jerseyans have never married.  Singlehood, especially young singles living in Democrat havens like Montclair (Clifton is catching up with Montclair), accounts for some of the loss.  No homes, no married spouses, no homes, no property, no strings – all fodder for Democrats to lure young idiots into voting for them.  Throw in the prevalence of drugs (drug manufacturing and sales are probably New Jersey’s leading industry) and they’ve got their voting.

All the Democrats needed were the illegal alien voters and the sanctuary cities to harbor them and they were able flip New Jersey.  New Jersey has sucked for at least ten years now and is getting worse.

But if you want to know the Number One reason why Republicans lost New Jersey:  New Yorkers.  Transplanted, unabashedly Democrat voters from Long Island and the City.

Those suburban women are really formerly Long Island Princesses.  There’s nothing suburban about New Jersey’s suburbs anymore.  The Democrats have spent the last decade, since Obama took office in 2008 making sure of it – and making a mint of money from selling New Jersey out.

Reason Number Two:  No jobs for middle-class, working people.  A Democrat project in place even longer than Obama’s project.

Reason Number Three:  Illegal aliens.

Reason Number Four:  Drugs, drugs, drugs.  From opioids to pot, drugs make mush of people’s brains, especially young people.  Ask any of the many towns in Bergen County why they’re outlawing pot in their municipalities.

The mistake pundits and analysts have made is in assuming these women are “suburban” women.  They are not.  They came from the City (New York City) and brought the City with them.

The residents of Bloomingdale at the time our development was built, c. 1960, had the same complaint about us.  They said they used to come up here for picnics.  However, the developer was environmentally conscious and did not clear-cut the lots.  Wild animals still abound on our hill:  deer, raccoons, rabbits, chipmunks, bears, coyotes…I just saw one coming up here this morning.  Yikes.  Even golden eagles.

There’s still Norvin Green Forest to the north (which comprises most of the acreage of Bloomingdale) in which to hike.  It’s just a shame about Federal Hill.  I’d take a coyote over an urban woman any day of the week.

We New Jerseyans have a new motto for the Garden State:  we’re now The Garbage State.