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Today is the 4th of July and I sent a memo I posted on the 4th and decided to let that suffice.
This memo, however, expands upon my feelings about the symbolic meaning of the 4th of July. It is an expanded version of what I think.
I cannot say every day I awake, I thank God I was born in this blessed country. I can say that I love my country and that means I used to think that I would be brave enough to die for everyone who was an American citizen, whether I knew them or not. I no longer feel that way for those American citizens that hate this country enough to want to destroy it or radically change it because of their hatred.
As I stated earlier, we have our faults because nations are a composite of humans and humans are flawed beings. That said, America has proven, time and again, it can change and correct it's previous errors. This is no reason to hate America. It is every reason to stand in awe of America, the wisdom of our founding fathers and the collective decency of our citizenry.
If you hate this country then do everyone a favor and go where you will find the peace you are seeking. I daresay you have the guts to do so nor will you find such a place. Consequently, you will remain a wandering miserable human for the rest of your life and cause equal misery wherever you go.
Harsh sentiments but I have concluded your kind is unworthy of my life and the lives of those who love this land.
You have every right to be unhappy with certain matters about America. We are not perfect and our leadership, from time to time, varies from great to terrible. That is another issue. Hating America, as far as I am concerned, is off the plate.
I can only hope we are going through a rough time and will come out stronger and better for the circumstances.
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Subject: Planned Chaos
Pretty obvious. Don't know why more people don't see this
If you leave the gate open, the cow will wander off. So if you intentionally leave the gate open, you want the cow to wander off. You can't blame stupidity or laziness. It was intentional.
If you cut police budgets, you will get more crime on the streets. So if you intentionally cut police budgets, you wanted more crime on the streets.
If you cut back the supply of oil, gas prices will go up. So if you intentionally cut back the supply of oil, you wanted gas prices to go up.
If you print trillions of dollars without increasing the supply of goods, inflation will hit hard. So if you intentionally print trillions of dollars without more goods you wanted inflation to hit hard.
If you leave the southern border wide open, you get more drug trafficking and human trafficking. So if you intentionally leave the border wide open, you wanted more drug trafficking and human trafficking.
If you shut down 40% of the supply of baby formula in February, you'll get a huge shortage. When you KNOW a huge baby formula shortage is coming because of the FDA's actions, and you purposefully do nothing to prevent it, month after month, until the crisis finally hits hard, you INTENDED this crisis.
It is time to recognize the evil people behind that old man. They want crisis. They want chaos. They want riots. They want conflicts in your town. Their stated purpose years ago with Obama was to "take the US down a few notches on the world stage." You can feel the quality of your life going down with the country. These are not foolish or misguided people. They are headed somewhere you don't want to go...
Forward this if you can understand this is happening.
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From FAIR;
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Frederick Douglass didn't hate America, and neither should you
By Angel Eduardo
If anyone had a right to hate America, it was Frederick Douglass. Born into slavery and witnessing its horrors first hand, Douglass could lay claim to resentment against our country in a way that only he and his enslaved brethren ever could. He also possessed a unique ability to articulate those feelings—and in his famous 1852 “What, to a Slave, is the Fourth of July?” speech, he showed just how powerful a skill that was.
Every year on Independence Day, advocates and activists across the political spectrum share that speech on social media, and every year I fear too few of them truly grasp its content. Some focus only on the beginning, where Douglass calls the Founding Fathers “brave…[and] great men too—great enough to give fame to a great age.” They revel in Douglass’ acknowledgement of these “statesmen, patriots and heroes,” and that “for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, [he] will unite with [us] to honor their memory.”
Others skip to the middle, once Douglass notes that, for all the aforementioned praise of the Founders, he is “not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary.” Readers of a certain ideological bent will delight in the fact that Douglass didn’t take the stage to join in the jubilation, but rather to “call in question and to denounce…everything that serves to perpetuate slavery—the great sin and shame of America,” and to bring into stark relief the “revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy,” for which “America reigns without a rival.”
Indeed, the majority of Douglass’ time is dedicated to enumerating and elucidating America’s inhumanity and moral contradictions, and those who quote him to paint a purely flattering image of our country often elide the speech’s substance. Douglass himself pre-empts this by noting Sydney Smith’s dictum that “men seldom eulogize the wisdom and virtues of their fathers, but to excuse some folly or wickedness of their own.”
I would argue, however, that those who are hyper-focused on Douglass’ invective—those who use it to argue that America is irredeemably corrupt, or that descendants of slaves shouldn’t celebrate July 4th, are also missing something crucial: Namely, the reason Douglass was compelled to speak at all.
For all the venom in his Fourth of July speech, Frederick Douglass didn’t hate America. He believed in it—so much so that he fought his whole life for his rightful place in it, on the basis of its founding principles.
Douglass recognized America as an ideal. He saw in those founding documents not just hypocrisy, but also a boundless and unfulfilled potential. In what he called the Declaration’s “saving principles,” he saw a hope he considered “much needed, under the dark clouds which lower above the horizon.” Douglass spoke to his audience of their America, and the ways in which it failed to be his America. He bravely and rightfully held a mirror up to our country, and demanded that it work to live up to its promise, because he wanted that promise to be fulfilled.
And that’s what too many seem to miss. Despite having every right to be, Douglass’ criticisms weren’t cynical, or merely angry and spiteful. Anyone who reads the speech in full, rather than pulling convenient bits and pieces to serve their ideological ends, will see that Douglass not only “[does] not despair of this country,” but chooses to end his address “where [he] began, with hope.”
That hope is present throughout even the most vicious of his criticisms. In fact, hope is what fuels them. Without it, I imagine Douglass wouldn’t have bothered to criticize America at all. What would have been the point?
There’s a heartbreaking bleakness to the idea, communicated by some, that progress is impossible. I believe this is a mistake—not simply for the fact that despite our myriad problems, all around us is evidence to the contrary. It’s also mistaken because without hope there is no real reason to fight. Douglass knew that. We should too.
The United States was only seventy-six years old on the day Douglass addressed that audience on the Fourth of July. He noted that the country was “only in the beginning of [its] national career, still lingering in the period of childhood.” As we approach our two hundred and forty-sixth year, perhaps the beginning of our national adolescence, we still have plenty of work to do to live up to our founding principles. That work will likely never be finished. But if we wish to get somewhere, we must first acknowledge not just where we’ve been, but also where we are and how far we’ve come.
And:
Bob Woodson: If Not For 1776, There Would Be No Juneteenth
Bob Woodson on 'The Ingraham Angle' reacted to a video of a person saying that they celebrate Juneteenth not 4th of July:
"Well, this devastating is for more populations like the black community, Progressives are pushing this anti-American agenda and using slavery as a bludgeon against the country. One person saying that as you shown she celebrating Juneteenth but not 1776. She does not understand that if it was not for 1776, there would be no Juneteenth. Black Americans have sacrificed and demonstrated their commitment to these values and ideals of ours by the shedding of their blood. Blacks fought in every war that this country has had. Not a single black was ever convicted of treason. We have a Harlem hell fighters. The Tuskegee airmen. All of these. So America, people of color are risking their lives to come here and enjoy the freedoms that we enjoy. So we should celebrate and we will celebrate."
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US: Bullet too damaged to prove who shot Al Jazeera journalist
US releases results of examination of bullet which killed Shireen Abu Aqleh, IDF says no soldier deliberately shot her.
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WAPO should change it's own name to WHACKO!
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Cancel Culture Goes to Washington
George Washington University must change its name, says an article in, yes, the Washington Post.
By Allen C. Guelzo
George Washington is a problem for George Washington University, according to the Washington Post. For years, the university in the nation’s capital has struggled with the shadow cast by President Washington’s ownership of slaves. In 2020 university officials began investigating the school’s sports teams’ name, the Colonials, because of the “ways colonists ravaged communities of color.” Last month “Colonials” disappeared. This spring, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Caleb Francois, a senior at the school, insisting that the university deal with “systemic racism, institutional inequality and white supremacy” by dropping the Washington name completely and renaming the university for Frederick Douglass.
George Washington certainly did own slaves. In addition to the 10 he inherited from his father, he accumulated another 65 through outright purchase over the years. When he married Martha Dandridge Custis in 1759, she brought another 84 slaves to the household at Mount Vernon. By 1786 the slaves numbered 216. In 1799, the last year of his life, Washington owned 317 men, women and children. Even in the years Washington served as the first president, he kept at least eight slaves in his home in the first capitals, New York and Philadelphia.
Nor was Washington necessarily an easy master. He punished four slaves for their “pranks” by selling them to the hell-on-water of the West Indies, and he approved the whipping by his overseers of the “very impudent.” When Ona Judge, one of the dower slaves Martha Washington brought with her to Philadelphia, bolted for freedom, Washington tried (in vain) to re-capture her. As a cure for his endless dental problems, he yielded to the persuasions of a French dentist in 1784 and paid his slaves for nine teeth to be extracted from their mouths and implanted in his.
Yet Washington’s time was also the Age of Enlightenment, when the classical hierarchies of the physical and political worlds were overthrown, to be replaced by the natural laws of gravity and the natural rights of “Nature and Nature’s God,” as the Declaration of Independence put it. Labor ceased to be a badge of subservience, and commerce became admirable. As commerce and labor gave people a greater sense of control over their lives for the first time in human history, slavery came to be seen as repugnant and immoral.
Washington was an emblem of this transition. The Continental Army, over which he assumed control in 1775, barred the enlistment of “any stroller, negro, or vagabond.” But by the end of the Revolution, there were as many as 5,000 black soldiers under his command. Ten percent of the troops who shivered through the Valley Forge winter with him were black. By the 1780s he began to speak of desiring the adoption of “some plan . . . for the abolition of slavery,” and he described slavery as his “unavoidable subject of regret.” In his will, Washington did what no other Founder did, emancipating all the slaves he owned in his own name and provided for the education of their children. He “religiously” forbade the surreptitious sale “of any Slave I may die possessed of, under any pretence whatsoever.”
So, yes, George Washington owned slaves, and his turn against slavery happened slowly. But this isn’t the only matter to enter into the historical calculus of blame or fame. Washington was fumbling toward the elimination of slavery in an America that was only just emerging from centuries of deeming slavery normal. He was also the indispensable man of a rebellion that began the movement toward ending slavery. Once that government was established, he frankly told Edmund Randolph that if the slaveholding states of the South persisted in wrecking the new republic, “he had made up his mind to remove and be of the Northern” states. Frederick Douglass, in his most famous speech, praised Washington as the man who “could not die till he had broken the chains of his slaves.”
Let his onetime opponent, King George III, have the last word. In 1797, the expatriate painter Benjamin West dined with Rufus King, the American diplomatic envoy to Great Britain. West astounded King with a comment George III made when he learned that Washington had voluntarily surrendered his commission as general-in-chief of the Continental Army at the close of the Revolution, a voluntary submission of military power to civilian rule. “That act,” said the king, placed Washington “in a light the most distinguished of any man living, and that he thought him the greatest character of the age.”
If only on that point, George III got Washington right. And so, I suspect, did the ones who named George Washington University.
Mr. Guelzo is director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship in Princeton University’s James Madison Program.
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I am not Catholic but I will volunteer not sure he has been the best representative:
Pope Francis Denies He’s Resigning
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Full disclosure best medicine:
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The Hard Truths of American History
Teaching all aspects of the U.S.’s story will help de-politicize education and foster democracy.
By William J. Bennett
July 4 is the most sacred date on the American civic calendar. This year marks the 246th time Americans have celebrated the monumental achievement of founding a nation that, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, was “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
But the celebration comes with hard truths of history. The Fourth reminds us of Americans’ struggle, as the Constitution puts it, to “form a more perfect union.” The stain of human bondage sparked the Civil War. The suffragettes of the 19th and early 20th centuries fought for the right to vote. Japanese-Americans during World War II were forced into internment camps. And men such as Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr. paid with their lives to attain equality long denied to African-Americans. When we consider our past, sober reflection should accompany joyful celebration.
Crucially, such reflection must happen in our public schools. Liberals and conservatives alike have been guilty of playing down aspects of the American story in the classroom. Some on the left wrongly attempt to reduce our history to an ugly saga of patriarchy and racism. Others explain our country through an ideologically driven framework that sees America as permanently tainted by the original sin of slavery. Some conservatives have minimized how slavery, racism and discrimination have inflicted scars on our nation.
The vast majority of Americans—left, right and center—are united against indoctrination but supportive of candid instruction and thoughtful debate. Here’s a challenge for educators and all citizens: Let children examine our history with eyes wide open. Families don’t want their children caught up in political games. If we help them, our children can be stronger and more capable of discerning fact from opinion, discussion from indoctrination, than we give them credit for.
All Americans should be concerned about any indoctrination of children. But content addressing America’s difficult history of race relations, including today’s challenges, isn’t necessarily evidence of that. Achievements in the realm of civil rights have happened through an imperfect process spanning more than two centuries. The struggles of Americans like King and Frederick Douglass are lessons in striving toward the “more perfect union” of the Founders’ imagination. And they are worth teaching.
The American public-school system must teach both the galling and glorious aspects of U.S. history. As Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin has said, “We can teach all of our history, the good, the bad, and Virginia’s children will be better for it.” While it isn’t always a comfortable process, teaching children America’s complete history in an age-appropriate way, with parental awareness, is necessary for their own sake and for our country’s.
Doing so will help take politics out of education. It will prepare kids for the real world, where preventing hurt feelings doesn’t take precedence over facing uncomfortable facts. And it will instill in our children the ability to entertain ideas they may disagree with—an essential condition for a functioning democracy.
American exceptionalism is real, but fragile. Teaching the full story of American history will encourage the next generations of Americans in their own progress toward a more perfect union. America is still, as Lincoln said, “the last best hope of Earth.” If we tell the full story of the American past, it will help write a bright story of the American future.
Mr. Bennett served as U.S. education secretary, 1985-88.
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Israel continues to perfect technology:
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Shooters Become Targets: New Israeli System Detects Gunfire
IAI’s Othello-P system turns shooters into targets.
By Yaakov Lappin, JNS
A new gunfire-detection system unveiled earlier this month by Israel Aerospace Industries is attracting worldwide attention from potential clients, and company officials say its ability to turn shooters’ locations into precise target data means that “the imagination is the limit” in terms of usage and impact on future battlefields.
The system can detect anything from machine-gun fire, handguns, RPGs, 30-millimeter cannons and other types of threats. The system can detect hostile fire at lengthy ranges, including 2 kilometers for RPG attacks and more than 400 meters for AK-47 fire. Sniper positions can also be detected from hundreds of meters away.
IAI officially unveiled its Othello-P system—featuring an advanced camera, an acoustic sensor and artificial intelligence—on June 9.
According to the company, the system can be used in both stationary and on-the-move configurations, on vehicles, armored platforms, tanks and autonomous unmanned systems, as well as vehicles that transport VIPs and paramilitary vehicles. A version also exists for infantry and special force units.
Described as lightweight, Othello speeds up the time it takes for forces to locate enemy positions and turn that information into targeting data for return fire in a process known as the sensor-to-shooter loop.
Engineers at IAI’s Innovation Center who previously served in the Israel Defense Forces began developing a new acoustic sensor to identify and class hostile targets, using new kinds of technology, according to IAI.
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Situation Awareness
Eytan Eshel, IAI’s chief technology officer, said “the unique nature of IAI’s Innovation Center is based on accelerator format, operating as a startup, allowing the company’s engineers a path to develop advanced technologies and reach MVP [minimum viable product] or POC [proof of concept] within 13 weeks.”
Asher Abish, director of marketing at IAI-ELTA’s Land Division, said Othello-P was developed using a combination of innovation and developing existing systems. “One of the biggest problems that we have is getting situational awareness. This comes into our minds as cameras around us, letting us see our surroundings. But it’s actually much, much more than that,” said Abish.
Situation awareness means knowing where friendly and hostile forces are, the location of vehicles and where firing positions inside buildings are—and then turning that information into targeting coordinates that can be placed on a map.
“Othello P is a unique approach, a system that detects the source of the fire. If someone is shooting at me, I can identify where the fire coming from, what the location of the shooter is,” he added.
The camera (electro-optical) sensor identifies the flash of hostile fire that emanates from a barrel. The acoustic sensor identifies the blast, as well as shockwaves that are generated by bullets passing nearby. “We can integrate all three—or even just two of these—to get a location,” said Abish.
“If I’m in a protected vehicle and someone is shooting at me, the first thing I want to know is where it’s coming from. If I know the location, I can eliminate the threat. This is critical,” he stated.
This type of situational awareness is sorely lacking on a battlefield, such as Ukraine today, said the officials, where many tanks have been hit by RPGs and personnel struck by sniper fire without the forces knowing where to return fire.
‘Small Sensor Opens Up a Big Window of Opportunity’
Othello-P can operate day or night and in all weather conditions, stated IAI representatives. “We are able to operate in an urban area. This is very unique because the current traditional systems have a problem operating in an urban area,” said Abish.
“Urban areas are noisy environments. We integrated optical sensors for detecting flashes and an acoustic listening sensor for measuring and classifying fire sources, enabling us to operate in much more robust conditions than in the past,” he added.
The sensor can also be mounted on a tripod for VIP protection, such as on the balcony of a president.
In military settings, the target data that the system generates can be sent up to the level of the headquarters, which can then dispatch support to the unit under fire, such as through artillery return fire, or sending more forces to the relevant sector.
“Knowing lots of fire is coming from certain locations will help the headquarters to even divert transports away from there. This small sensor opens up a big window of opportunity when you look at a battlefield,” argued Abish.
Othello-P is made up of two parts, with each providing 180 degrees of coverage, amounting to 360-degree coverage per system. The two parts are integrated into a single control box.
The system can also detect the sources of fire directed against neighboring friendly sources.
According to Eshel, potential clients from around the world have expressed interest in the technology with demonstration requests lining up, and startup companies could become part of the project as well.
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THE OTHER SIDE. THERE IS ONE,YOU KNOW.
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