Saturday, June 29, 2019

Qanon - Warning Order Signal

 After over thirty days of complete silence,  we just got this drop that is a clear warning order preparatory to engagement.  Four signals issued that we do not understand but someone(s) has been waiting for.   Then we have a call to action.

This all folds in to a previous expectation of a pronouncement made by Trump on the 4th of July in particular, but again it may not be at all.

I will attempt to track this closely as i do think it matters in time and space. 

.

Q !!mG7VJxZNCI No.471 
Jun 27 2019 15:34:17 (EST)
FOR GOD AND COUNTRY.
PATRIOTS FIGHT.
Q



3351 Q !!mG7VJxZNCI No.470 
Jun 27 2019 15:28:37 (EST)
[Future Comms]
Pre_stage ele_y
Pre_stage sec_y
Pre_stage dir_y
Pre_stage cap_y
[OnReady]
Q



3350 Q !!mG7VJxZNCI No.469 
Jun 27 2019 15:23:57 (EST) Be ready.
Q

The Five Stirring Stanzas That Proved a Poem Can Help End a War




This is a bit of  history that is mostly a one off.  It gets forgotten far too easily.  All this helped support the rise of a new political dispensation.

The monarchy had fallen or was about to and the old regime was in disarray, not dissimilar to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This supported the transition by bringing out the full weight of the population on to the streets.

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The Five Stirring Stanzas That Proved a Poem Can Help End a War

In 1918, a few lines by a Hungarian desk clerk spurred a revolution that helped end the Great War. Her words still ring true today.


Stephanie Newman 


Illustrations by James Heimer

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-five-stirring-stanzas-that-proved-a-poem-can-help-end-a-war

“We need no two-headed eagle!” one protester shouted in Budapest on the evening of October 30, 1918. The eagle was the Austro-Hungarian coat of arms: a double-headed black bird clutching a sword and crown in its talons. It was the emblem of a monarchy that had controlled Hungary since 1867. Rioting men scurried up the facade of a nearby building and tore down the Empire’s ornament to a cheering crowd. Down the street, outside Gerbeaud, the city’s finest patisserie, the throngs were so thick that it was impossible to see over anyone’s head.


This was the Hungarian Revolution of 1918. Two days earlier, citizens had marched across the city demanding that the Archduke József appoint Mihaly Károlyi as their Prime Minister. The Central Powers were at the brink of defeat in World War I, and the people wanted to choose who would determine the future of their country. They despised the monarchy and pinned their hopes instead on Károlyi: a politician who championed Hungarian secession, universal suffrage, and peace. When Archduke József denied their request and had three protesters killed, the Hungarians steeled themselves for a fight.


Over the last two days of October, the streets of the Hungarian capital swarmed with all manner of civilians: factory workers, newspaper editors, intellectuals, servants. According to one participant who recorded his memories in “The Hungarian Revolution: An Eyewitness Account,” taxis stopped mid-street, surrounded by protesters on all sides. Passengers had to be pulled out, and then they also joined the ranks of demonstrators singing revolutionary tunes.


There were soldiers, too. The troops patrolling Budapest in the autumn of 1918 were known to be especially brutal – they were ruthless Bosnian mercenaries – and their order from the government was to quell any uprising. The monarchs knew World War I had been lost, and that instability was approaching. What they didn’t grasp was that after the carnage of the Great War, these fighters wanted nothing more than to go home, and the quickest route was through a regime change that would release them from their oaths. You can imagine their relief when pamphleteers started passing out revolutionary leaflets in their barracks, declaring, “Soldiers! The [revolutionary] National Council releases you from your old oath. From now on you owe your allegiance to the National Council.”


There was another flyer making the rounds, a reprint of a poem written in 1912. Its title was spelled out in large block letters: “To my soldier-son.” The five stanzas spoke directly to the army in the voice of a soldier’s mother begging her son not to suppress an upcoming workers’ demonstration. Each stanza ends with the same bold-face imperative: “Do not shoot, my son, for I too will be there!” And sure enough, when the people gathered outside Budapest’s Hotel Astoria that night, cheering on Mihály Károlyi as he spoke to them from the hotel balcony, hordes of soldiers joined them – not to shoot, but to protest by the people’s sides.





Zseni Várnai and her signature from a book published in 1942.


The woman who wrote the poem was 28-year-old Zseni Várnai, my grandmother’s aunt. A photograph of Várnai from 1918 shows her in a long, dark dress, with tiny buttons all the way up to her sternum. Her hair is loosely pulled back, her hands hidden out of sight behind her back. She was far too young to be the mother of a soldier, but she did have a toddler named Gabor, who clings to his father’s leg in the picture. Várnai’s expression seems too somber to belong to someone whose enthusiasm would pull thousands onto the streets of Budapest. And yet, according to the eventual Swedish ambassador Vilmos Böhm, “To my soldier-son” became the rallying cry of the revolution.



“In the afternoon, the posters [of Várnai’s poem] appeared on the streets,” he wrote. “The city’s image changed in one hour…. The whole city echoed with the words: ‘Do not shoot, my son, for I too will be there!’”


It was the perfect poem for the historic moment: anti-war, anti-violence, and written for the people. Its pacifism relies on the essential bodily connection between mother and child, and its imagery is as unsubtle as a revolution. “My precious heart, my handsome soldier son,” the first line begins, “I write this letter with my blood to you.”


As Várnai goes on to describe the physical bond between the maternal figure and her baby, she emphasizes the injustice of nurturing a child who eventually destroys you:



My soldier son, I carried you inside me,
I suckled you and cradled you to sleep,
I gave you day and night, my every moment,
now read these shaky lines and hear me weep;
flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, I ask you,
how could you fire when you hear the prayer
that I will scream and wail towards your army:
don’t shoot at us, my son, I will be there!


In the poem, the narrator’s love for her son expands into a tenderness that includes farm workers, slaves, and peasants. She warns the soldiers that the government will command them to attack their own families, and she compares their position to mistreated workers with too few rights. “The blood of slaves is raging in your veins,” she insists. Várnai appeals to the enslaved son inside each man, directing them not to murder the mothers who gave them life, but to refuse their commanders’ orders. No battle will lead these soldiers to true glory, Várnai’s poem emphasizes. Instead, a tide of common citizens will one day “conquer with an overwhelming force.” Várnai implies to both soldiers and peasants that their freedom relies on a peaceful mutiny.


Because “To my soldier-son” universalized the experience of government exploitation, the poem ended up appealing to masses of non-soldiers, too. When pamphleteers circulated the poem in coffee shops and bars to rally the civilians, people responded passionately. Mario D. Fenyo, in his 1987 volume “Literature and Political Change: Budapest, 1908-1918,” paints a vibrant scene: “Soldiers, workers, and others walked with leaflets on the streets, the whole city resounding with the poem’s rousing refrain… The demonstrators entered cafés and mounted a table or a chair to recite the poem; the guests would rise to their feet and join.”


As the rebels continued to gather, they became insurmountable. Finally, at around seven the following morning, October 31, the Archduke József called Károlyi to his palace. The King had authorized Károlyi to form a new government for the First Hungarian People’s Republic. Austria-Hungary was dead; the Central Powers were broken; the war would end less than two weeks later. Várnai’s poem had helped invoke an insurrection.


* * *


Despite the success of the 1918 revolution, Zseni Várnai’s legacy remains complicated. In the public imagination, she’s remembered as a one-dimensional poet concerned with motherhood, flowers, and peace. If you type Zseni Várnai’s name into Google, you’re likely to find her poems on Hungarian mothers’ blogs, written in cursive against pastel backgrounds. With her photo on cheerful Pinterest tableaus with captions like, “Zseni Várnai: Mama,” casual readers would hardly associate the poet with topics like war and mutiny. Rather than casting Várnai as a writer who used motherhood as a framework for making political statements, history has neutralized her poetry, rendering her as a woman who wrote about being a mom. The story of her legacy proves the fluidity between personal and political outlooks, and how easily one can eclipse the other – either to stoke the fires of a revolution, or to erase problematic political memories altogether.


When 18-year-old Várnai graduated from Budapest’s Academy of Performing Arts in 1908, the capital was flowering intellectually. It was the perfect place for an artistically inclined young woman like Várnai, who had trained as an actress. Known as the “Paris of the East,” the city teemed with artists, writers, scientists, and mathematicians, many of whom would go on to win Nobel Prizes. Scholars gathered in coffee shops along the Danube, most famously at the Art Nouveau styled Café Gresham. New literary magazines proliferated on newsstands. One in particular, called “Nyugat” (“The West”), came to be regarded as the gem of Hungarian intellectual life. Founded in 1908, it was a biweekly journal with colorful covers; some issues were pastel blue, while others had images of eye-catching red-and-black flowers. Its contributors became Hungarian literary legends: Endre Ady, Gyula Krúdy and Zsigmond Móricz. Many “Nyugat” writers had socialist sympathies, and their community became a political-intellectual force helmed by literati.





Zseni Várnai with her son, Gábor Peterdi, and husband, Andor Peterdi, in 1918. Photo courtesy of The Heritage Museum of Hungarian Speaking Jewry, Safed.


Várnai and her husband, Andor Peterdi, mingled with “Nyugat” writers. When war broke out, the couple took a hard stance against it – an unpopular opinion in a country that was eager to fight. This was not Várnai’s only radical opinion. A Social Democrat, she stood for universal suffrage, equality of the sexes, workers’ rights, and a government that ruled domestically, not from Vienna. Though a handful of her poems appeared in “Nyugat,” Várnai was a much more regular contributor to the Social Democratic daily paper “Népszava.” It was “Népszava” that originally printed “To my soldier-son” (“Katonafiamnak”) for the first time around 1913, and that published Várnai’s first volume of “proletarian” poetry under the same name the following year.


The “Katonafiamnak” collection placed Várnai into a central debate around the merit of political poetry. In a hotly contested “Nyugat” essay, social scientist Ervin Szabó argued that a poet motivated by policy was no poet at all. Real art must be able to outlive its political moment, and labeling Várnai’s work as “proletarian” was too limiting.


Szabó seemed to foreshadow Várnai’s constricting role in the Hungarian imagination. Perhaps “To my soldier-son” faded from consciousness because the poem didn’t outlive its moment after all – a moment that turned out to be shockingly fleeting. Even though the 1918 uprising was successful in installing a new government, the First Hungarian People’s Republic was chaotic and short-lived. The country was dissolved in March 1919, reinstated in August 1919, and dissolved again for good in March 1920. The independent nation stayed intact as the Kingdom of Hungary, but it was no longer a social democratic entity. A poem like “To my soldier-son,” written so clearly with a timely aim in mind, didn’t have much longevity.


As fascism swept through Europe in the 1930s, Várnai’s outspoken anti-fascist stance and socialist leanings turned her into a visible target. Soon enough, Várnai was no longer grappling with the political moment so much as it was grappling with her. As a Jew, she was under constant threat of deportation. Her work was outlawed as communist “propaganda.” When the Nazis invaded, Várnai formed a resistance group with Nobel-prizewinning biologist Albert Szent-Györgi, hiding other Jewish Hungarians in Szemlohegy-cave in Buda. The hideout was raided in 1944, though Várnai survived in various locations that included a church by day and a doctor’s office at night.





From the steps of the parliament building, the Hungarian communist politician Béla Kun announces that the proletariat has taken control of the government in 1919. Photo from “Cecile: An Outlaw’s Diary. Revolution,” 1923.


Still, the changing political climate can’t entirely explain how Várnai’s poetry came to be perceived as more feminine than political, especially because she continued publishing prolifically after the war and stayed involved with progressive political organizations in Budapest.


In 1956, she won one of Hungary’s most prestigious literary awards, the Attila József Prize, and by the time she passed away in 1980, she had written dozens of volumes of poetry and even some children’s literature. It’s true that Várnai was raising a son and a daughter, and that many of her volumes were built on maternal themes – their titles include “Mother of Gracchus” and “Song of the Mother” – but even those without such obvious names were billed as matriarchal. The cover of her 1940 collection “I never give up hope” contains both her portrait and the subtitle: “Verses from a Mother’s Heart.” The packaging of her texts made it glaringly clear that Várnai was a female poet, with the emphasis on female.


Some contemporary summaries of Várnai’s work have sexist undertones, as well. In the “Encyclopedia of Continental Women Writers,” the critic Peter I. Barta subtly insults Várnai’s intelligence. He writes that “her vision of the world is relatively simple,” crossing the line from commenting into an ad-hominem attack. When he does analyze her poetry, he centers his synthesis on Várnai’s pathos and plays into the stereotype that women are governed more by feelings than by logic: “Many of her conventional rhymed, rhythmic poems are expressive and are informed by strong emotions.” It’s not that Barta dismisses Várnai’s work on the grounds that she’s a woman, but that his critique shows how easily gender can color the elements we choose to notice in an author’s work.


Várnai seemed cognizant of the limitations imposed on her as a woman when she wrote “To my soldier-son.” The poem itself hinges on inverting gender roles and reclaiming a voice – the mother’s voice – that authorities don’t want to acknowledge. “To my soldier-son” suggests that by owning their maternal roles, moms can shift the power balance in a male-dominated society. The final lines of the poem gesture at the possibilities for a world in which mothers have

influence: 

Just think … if every mother sent a letter,
each to her son, to soldiers everywhere,
awakening, inflaming, agitating:
don’t shoot at us, my son, for I too will be there!


When Várnai wrote the piece, women were unable to exert their political will through voting or running for office. They could, however, make their wishes known to the men they had the most power over: their sons. Stepping into that power was a form of protest.


That said, even more scholars who recognize Várnai’s political sway seem hesitant to comment on the aesthetic merit of her writing.


“Some of her poems are quite beautiful,” said Ivan Sanders, adjunct professor of Hungarian literature at Columbia, when I asked him what he knew about Várnai. “But they’re a little too…” he trailed off. “They’re not difficult.”


I knew what he meant. Poems like Várnai’s have gone out of style for being too earnest, too straightforward. She freely uses exclamation points and rhymes, which can come across as trite. Sanders tipped his hat to Várnai for her unwavering pacifism during WWI, but, he adds in his 1985 essay “Hungarian Writers and Literature in World War I,” her warmongering peers “were incomparably greater artists.” Even the scholar Mario D. Fenyo, whose father founded “Nyugat,” admits in “Literature and Political Change: Budapest, 1908-1918” that “her poetry seldom hit the mark.” The critical opinion seems united: Várnai was second-rate.


Still, Várnai’s name remains recognizable among many Hungarians. During a visit to Budapest earlier this year, I sat down with gender studies scholar Andrea Pető. When I asked her about Várnai, she immediately knew whom I meant. “There are very few female poets, and she was pretty successful,” Pető told me. “Later on, she somehow very smoothly became part of the communist regime. But there is no biography of her.”


Várnai initially supported the Communist Party in 1945, though she withdrew her support before the Communist government started practicing torture, censorship, and, ironically, violence against anti-government protesters in the 1950s. Still, in light of communism’s current reputation in Hungary, perhaps it’s no coincidence that readers would rather not dwell on Várnai’s socialist leanings.


Given her present status as a poet-mother, it’s fitting that Várnai’s children have been among her most dedicated memory-bearers. Her daughter Mária Peterdi stayed in Europe after World War II and became an Egyptologist; eventually, she helped her mother write “Like a Storm, the Leaf,” one of Várnai’s several autobiographical works. Várnai’s son Gabor Peterdi became a widely successful graphic artist and painter, studying at the same studio as Picasso in Paris and eventually moving to New York City. Among his paintings is a portrait of his mother, sitting in a wine-red dress with a book in her lap. Mária and Gabor are some of the only documenters who depict Várnai as a multi-dimensional human, without the easy labels of “socialist” or “mother.”


Even if Várnai’s poems are destined to remain on parenting blogs as Mother’s Day tributes, her words are much more meaningful when they’re recontextualized in today’s political climate. In Hungary, the current government continues to come between mothers and their children, even when those children are still in their mother’s womb. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and right wing party, Fidesz, promote their version of traditional family values, which means undermining the country’s policy of legal abortion, and mandating that all babies be delivered in hospitals, regardless of the mother’s preference. Midwives who assist women with home births can be jailed.


Policies like these underline the inseparability of personal and political experiences, for moms and every infant they bring into the world. Várnai’s legacy shows that it’s futile to erase the influence of politics, and that even those writers that critics snub, whose Google searches yield very unliterary results, can start revolutions.



* * *
Full Poem:

From In Quest of the Miracle Stag: The Poetry of Hungary

Translated by Peter Zollman 

To my soldier-son (Katonafiamnak)
My precious heart, my handsome soldier son,
I write this letter with my blood to you.
Since you’ve had to take the Kaiser’s shilling
our world has turned red of a fiery hue.
The big decisive battle is approaching
and you will be our enemy, beware!
When they command you to attack your own blood:
don’t shoot at us, my son, I will be there!
The fertile womb of Mother Earth is stirring,
she eyes the armies of the worker-slaves
who’ll sow the seeds of life in virgin furrows,
she wants those vital reproductive waves.
Now soon we’ll test our formidable forces,
we’ll leave the cornfields mercilessly bare,
the living soil shall be our insurrection:
don’t shoot at us, my son, I will be there!
My soldier son, I carried you inside me,
I suckled you and cradled you to sleep,
I gave you day and night, my every moment,
now read these shaky lines and hear me weep;
flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, I ask you,
how could you fire when you hear the prayer
that I will scream and wail towards your army:
don’t shoot at us, my son, I will be there!
You are our hope, our life, you are our fullness,
Messiah, Christ, who gloriously reigns!
My son, you hold our fate within your power
the blood of slaves is raging in your veins;
the heady fever of the revolution
shall sweep you gloriously in the air,
and whip the oceans in a roaring tempest:
don’t shoot at us, my son, for I too will be there!
The seas run high now, bitter storms are raging,
the haughty ship is struggling on the course,
but think … the tides could breach the old defences,
and conquer with an overwhelming force!
Just think … if every mother sent a letter,
each to her son, to soldiers everywhere,
awakening, inflaming, agitating:
don’t shoot at us, my son, I will be there!”

Upright Canine Encounter - Hidden Valley Lake, Indiana




This is pretty straight forward and likely a much more common experience than the record indicates.  what is interesting here is that the walking gait is identifiable as human like.  This is also true for the Sasquatch.  For that reason i suspect that the morphological changes are all in the hips and that the remaining four legged morphology is intact allowing real four legged running as we have seen reported.

I suspect that two legged running is ill advised and we have yet to have that reported.  Two legged walking provides ample advantage for a natural stalker and the feet are also critical to grasping a tree limb.

Yet even this sighting was been dismissed as an unusual dog.  A little more distance and we would never have heard of it....




Upright Canine Encounter - Hidden Valley Lake, Indiana 


Friday, June 21, 2019 


https://www.phantomsandmonsters.com/2019/06/upright-canine-encounter-hidden-valley.html
I recently came across the following account:

This is basically a "Beast of Bray Road" type sighting, but it happened in southern Indiana, far from Bray Road. I'm wondering if anyone else has had (or heard of) sightings in the same area. For the record, this is NOT a werewolf story. What I saw was an animal, not a shapeshifter. I know "the beast" is often called a werewolf, but I don't buy that explanation.

My sighting happened between 1992-1995 because I only lived in the area during that time. My best guess is that it was 1992-1993 because I was coming home late at night (around 1-2am) without my then-fiance, and she would have been with me after 1993.

The sighting happened on State Line Road, just off Route 50 in southern Indiana/Ohio, right by Hidden Valley Lake. You can see on Google maps that the area is still pretty wooded, even 25 years later. The usual caveats apply: I had not been drinking and I wasn't on drugs.

I had just turned into State Line Road from Route 50 and I saw a large animal in the road. It looked like a huge dog hunched over roadkill. As I neared it, I began to suspect it was one of my neighbor's dogs -- he had two Irish wolfhounds. If you don't know, those are huge dogs that stand about three-foot at the shoulders. I assumed one of them had got out.

By this time I was slowing down because the animal didn't seem aware of my car and I was about 30 yards away. I was starting to plan how I was going to get a dog that big into my car so I could drive it home, and also wondering if wolfhounds were typically dangerous to approach. I was also trying to figure out if I should wake the neighbors up or just try and tie the dog up outside or something.

As my mind raced through these thoughts (this all happened in just a few seconds) the animal finally turned and looked at my car, so I stopped the car completely. Its face looked more like the shape of a police dog's than a wolfhound, and that threw me. I remember wondering why my neighbor's dog looked so strange. And then the animal simply stood up on two legs and calmly walked off to the west, into the tall grass off the road. My mind at this point was still trying to reconcile how this was my neighbor's wolfhound. I literally thought he had trained his dogs to walk on two legs and had never told us!

Then it started to sink in: The shape of the head was wrong, the build of the dog was too muscular, and it walked like a human not a circus dog. My mind looped back to that, of course: It had walked off like a human on two legs. And its gaze had lingered on me as if its attitude was telling me, "I didn't have to move, you know."

The fur was long and shaggy and gray, although in the darkness I could have misjudged the color and my mind filled it in with the color I was expecting to see on my neighbor's wolfhound. I watched it walk -- still casually -- until it was swallowed by the shadows and trees on the other side of the small field.

I was terrified to drive the rest of the way home. I never mentioned it to anyone, but in the morning I asked my mom if the neighbor's dogs had got out, and when she asked why I wanted to know, I just said I thought I'd seen one. But both dogs were accounted for and neither had got out. Then, about 10 years later, I heard Linda Godfrey on Coast to Coast talking about the Beast of Bray Road, and I was like, "That's exactly what I saw." It was even the same time period as the original Bray Road flap. With that confirmation, I finally started to tell people about it to see if anyone else had seen anything like it -- no one had, of course.

So that's my story. Are there historical sightings of "the beast" in the southern Indiana/Ohio state-line area? GL

Trump fears the reality of war



 

Trump understands clearly that real war destroys wealth and is unsustainable and also massively counter productive in terms of USA aims and in terms of real peace as well.
 
The problem has always been having someone who wants to start one.  That is best answered by a surgical attack that degrades the opponent's options.  Right now the USA is waging ECONOMIC WAR on Iran and it is not in the form of half measures at all.  

This is tilting the balance between the Mullahs and the Iranian people who know that the USA has their backs already.  A civil war would be between a revolutionary guard remnant and the Iranian military who could potentially massacre the whole class of Mullahs.  Those are pretty high stakes. 

Thus at this point, it is marching toward an internal crisis in which Trump can negotiate for saving the Mullahs lives and exile.  In the meantime he is able to effectively block all shipping in and out of Iran.
 
Understand also there is an end game.  Thus all former allies of Iran have no reason to get involved. .
 
 
 
Trump fears the reality of war
 
On Iran, the accidental president is accidentally presidential

Dominic Green

June 21, 2019

https://spectator.us/trump-fears-reality-war/

If truth is the first casualty of war, the second casualty of war is credibility. Last week, much of the American media chose not to believe Mike Pompeo when he presented a Central Command video which, he said, showed an Iranian crew tinkering with limpet mines and an oil tanker.‘Tankers Are Attacked in the Mideast, and US Says Video Shows Iran Was Involved,’ was the New York Times’s headline. An op-ed in the same issue pondered whether the administration’s ‘narrative’ of the tanker attacks was a Gulf of Tonkin-style fake.


Today, the Times is certain of its facts: ‘Trump Approves Strikes on Iran, but Then Abruptly Pulls Back.’ It has the ring of truth, which is always dangerous whether it is true or not. And we incline to believe it not so much because it reflects the hair-trigger nature of US-Iran tensions, or because the story is well-sourced — our DC editor, Curt Mills, heard the story on Tuesday night from three different sources — but because it seems to reflect one of the few commonly held ‘narratives’ in modern American life: the psychology of Donald Trump.


Trump is not a warmonger. He is a monger of the commodities whose value rises in times of peace and stability: golf courses, luxury apartments, university degrees, reality TV. He is, as he ceaselessly reminds us, the winner in the race of life. He received the presidency as a kind of gold watch, confirming decades of selfless service to himself.


Trump is, though, a patriot. His patriotism is part of his bottom-line realism: if you’ve invested in America, of course you should love it and seek to protect your investment. So far, this has served him and the American people better than the wisdom of the policy experts served all the other post-Cold War presidencies.


Looking back, every president since 1990 made serious errors in war. George H.W. Bush chose not to finish the job in Iraq. Bill Clinton antagonized Russia and China by bombing Serbia. Most disastrously, George W. Bush chose to finish the job in Iraq, and start a war in Afghanistan. Barack Obama casually destroyed Libya.

It is to Trump’s enormous credit that, though every problem looks like a nut to a man with a hammer, he has so far avoided using American military power as a substitute for thought and policy. It is now Trump’s dilemma that the nuts who run Iran are daring him to drop the hammer. As usual, this dilemma has arisen in part because of Trump’s own actions.


It was typical of Trump’s practical realism that he dismissed the JCPOA as a bad deal. It was typical of his hubris that he believed that he could convince the Iranian regime to accept a deal that was better for the United States, and hence worse for the Iranian regime — not by inducement but by ‘maximum pressure’ alone, by blustering and sending out the fleet, by walking loudly with a big stick, and leaving the carrot at home.


Trump has a realistic grasp of how most people will react to a high-pressure sales pitch, even though experience teaches that the seller cannot deliver on his most extravagant promises. On Tuesday, Trump launched his pitch to retain the White House in 2020. To preserve the pitch, he cannot let reality intrude too far in to his promises. He must, in other words, sustain the profitable illusions of peace.


The Iranian regime are not most people: they are pursuing their own high-pressure sales pitch for hegemony in the Middle East. At the UN, Iran’s ambassador Majid Takht Ravanchi has called the American use of a drone a ‘blatant violation of international law’, a ‘provocative act’ against the ‘territorial integrity’ of another member state. The Iranian regime is familiar with this chapter of international law. The reality is that a rich variety of Iranian drones, proxy militias and soldiery have violated the territorial integrity of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Israel, as part of Iran’s campaign to rule the Middle East.


Iran’s long game has repeatedly acted as a reality check on the United States, from Beirut in the early Eighties to Iraq and Syria. Trump seems to grasp that war’s realities are incontrovertible. Iranian retaliation, and the killing of American servicemen and women, cannot be smoothed over as a problem of optics. A president who won in 2016 by denouncing the imperial follies of previous presidencies could only risk a war that he knew he could win.


In 2013, when the Assad regime crossed Obama’s ‘red line’ by using chemical weapons, Barack Obama called off airstrikes against Syria at the last minute, apparently because he lacked European support. Obama’s sales pitch was the institutional realism of alliances and that chimera, the ‘international community’. He didn’t proceed because he recognized that reality would not support his ideals.


This week, if we can believe what the papers are saying, Trump didn’t proceed with strikes on Iran for similar reasons. The realty of war destroys civilian illusions as well as military lives. Trump has prospered, and the US economy has prospered under his presidency, from the recognition that people, as T.S. Eliot said, ‘cannot bear very much reality’, and would prefer to buy a dream instead.


Obama has said that the decision not to bomb Syria took ‘political courage’. He is right to say that. It was presidential of Trump to resist pressure from his advisors to drop the hammer on Iran. Was it political courage, or sensible fear? And who has the better grasp of reality, the recklessly courageous or the sensibly fearful?

Friday, June 28, 2019

“Social justice” homosexuals actively working to contaminate the blood donor supply





This is of course absurd.  Willfully supplying blood that is tainted  or even at high risk to been tainted is a prima facie criminal case, the same way in which i would face real consequences if i emptied an AK- 47 into the atmosphere over a city.
 
Do we need a victim and a full criminal investigation along with a life sentence to bring this fraud home?
 
You are absolutely not innocent if you engage in actions that destroys another life..
 
“Social justice” homosexuals actively working to contaminate the blood donor supply with blood-borne diseases, claiming safety is “discrimination”

Friday, June 21, 2019 by: Ethan Huff
 
Tags: AIDs, anal cancer, badhealth, badmedicine, blood, blood donors, donors, evil, gay men, gays, HIV, homosexuals, LGBT, love, LTBGQP, men's health, narcissism, narcissists, perverse, perversion, self-worship, sexually-transmitted diseases, social justice, sodomites, STDs, tainted blood, tolerance

https://www.naturalnews.com/2019-06-21-homosexuals-contaminate-blood-donor-supply.html


(Natural News) The me-centered mindset of LGBTQP cultists knows no bounds, as homosexual men in the United Kingdom are now knowingly contaminating the blood donor supply with their tainted blood in order to selfishly achieve what they perceive and demand as “equality” with non-LGBTQPs.


Even though U.K. law prohibits sodomites from donating blood if they’ve had sexual relations with other men in the past three months – the purpose of this being to protect vulnerable patients from contracting sexually-transmitted diseases (STDs) – some self-worshiping gays are reportedly lying on medical forms and donating their blood anyway – because “tolerance” and “love.”

These selfish individuals are intentionally polluting U.K. blood banks with dirty blood say that they’re doing so in order to fight “discrimination” and “homophobia.” Meanwhile, patients in need of clean blood are now being forcibly exposed to contaminants that could make them even more ill, or possibly kill them.
 

“When a gay man is giving blood, they have to tick a box to say that they have complied with these rules, but we have found that some are lying on that form,” warns Victoria Derbyshire, an investigative journalist who recently aired a segment on her morning news program about how LGBTQPs are putting the entire population at risk because of their extreme selfishness.
 

Fellow investigative journalist Ben Hunte reportedly interviewed six different homosexuals from across England, all of whom believe that they’re doing “good” by donating their possibly HIV-infected blood to blood banks in violation of the law. One of them apparently admitted that he became triggered when he first heard about the rules for donating blood, prompting him to rush out and donate his tainted blood for “social justice.”


“I grew up in a family who gave blood regularly and instilled in me that that was the right thing to do,” this anonymous individual, whom the media is referring to as “David,” told Hunte. “I did it before I started having sex with men, and I carried on doing it afterwards because, for me, that was the right thing to do.”


According to “David,” his homosexual lifestyle is “safer” than that of the heterosexual couples he knows, so in his own mind he’s fully justified in breaking the law by donating tainted blood to blood banks.


“I don’t see why I should be denied the right to help fellow people,” “David” told Hunte, whining about the “deep homophobia” that prevents promiscuous gays from forcing their questionable blood supply on people who do not pursue gay lifestyles.


Another homosexual interviewed as part of the investigation, whom reports have dubbed as “Ryan,” revealed that he’s been illegally donating his blood to blood banks for more than 10 years because it’s “not nice almost to be discriminated against.”


Just like “David,” “Ryan” has somehow justified his perverse behavior in his own mind by convincing himself that what he’s doing is “moral” because “you are helping somebody.”
 
It’s time to face the facts: Some homosexuals care only about themselves, even if they place others at risk of infections

What these full-fledged narcissists refuse to acknowledge, however, is the fact that the rules exist for a reason: to protect patients. But like most social justice warriors, when “David” and “Ryan” don’t get what they demand – even when there’s a very good medical reason behind the restrictions – they proceed to do what they want regardless in order to fight “discrimination” and “homophobia.”


“The main reason” why blood banks don’t accept homosexual blood, explains Su Brailesford from the National Health Service (NHS) Blood and Transplant department, is that “vulnerable patients” are the ones receiving it.
 

“The guidelines are there for a reason,” Brailesford stresses. “I would really encourage people to follow the guidelines, even if they don’t agree with them,” she adds, noting that sodomites are “disproportionately affected by HIV.”

 
“About 13,500 of them don’t know they have it and are at risk of passing on the virus,” she further warns about homosexual men, who continue to be “one of the highest risk groups” for HIV, AIDS, and other deadly STDs, as well as anal cancer.


Dr. Ben Carson: Yes, babies feel excruciating pain when they are being ripped apart during “barbaric” abortions



Infanticide is a thing that must be considered in specific cases.  Those cases are rare but also compelling.  I have dealt with teenage children whose mind never developed and never would and essentially lived the life of a lizard brain.  Infanticide in those situations is a blessing for the individual and the community.  Thus all natural communities living wild practiced infanticide, often just setting the child out for a carnivore to consume.  
 
Cutting a developed baby apart for parts without cutting off the brain is nonsense and why the abortion industry is now under a full press assault.
 
I have already posted that abortion for birth control needs to happen before the 45th day to get rid of the majority of spiritual issues that can arise.  From that date on it is bettetr to understand that we are dealing quite correctly with infanticide.
 
I have also posted that the central problem is motherhood support which has been long avoided and is central to our dropping birthrate to begin with. We have effective birth control and short term abortion should only augment that to handle normal exceptions.

What we desperately need to do is correctly reconstitute the natural community in such a way that it fully supports motherhood itself.  I talk about the natural community as central to ending poverty itself and to empower the global economy, but a natural corollary would be strongly supported motherhood.
 
..

Dr. Ben Carson: Yes, babies feel excruciating pain when they are being ripped apart during “barbaric” abortions

Friday, June 21, 2019 by: Ethan Huff

Tags: abortion, baby murder, badhealth, barbaric, ben carson, Child abuse, clump of cells, conception, cruelty, Dr. Ben Carson, Fetuses, infanticide, late-term, medical violence, miracle, pain, pregnancy, pro-life, violence, women's health

https://www.naturalnews.com/2019-06-21-dr-ben-carson-yes-babies-feel-excruciating-pain-barbaric-abortions.html


(Natural News) The apathetic denial of heartless Leftists who claim that unborn babies are just random “clumps of cells,” and that these “fetuses,” as they love to call them, somehow don’t feel pain when they’re aborted, will never stamp out the ugly but persistent truth that terminating unborn human life is completely inhumane and barbaric.


During a powerful speech he gave at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C., renowned pediatric neurosurgeon and former Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson spoke about the sanctity of unborn human life. He explained the fact that babies, no matter how small, most certainly do feel the excruciating pain associated with being ripped limb-from-limb out of their mothers’ wombs.

While it has sadly become politically incorrect to take this type of stand for unborn human life using actual science and common sense, Dr. Carson did just that by presenting before his audience a profound glimpse into the glorious mystery behind human conception – in the process revealing why it’s meritorious to continue the fight for unborn human life.

“God has orchestrated an incredible situation where the egg and the sperm come together, and within a matter of 10 to 12 weeks, you can see the little fingers and the little toes, and the little nose, and the face, the heart is starting to beat. It’s absolutely amazing,” Dr. Carson explained with true conviction.

“And then (the brain) goes on to develop very rapidly from there. Hundreds of thousands of neurons every single day. I’ve had the privilege of being able to operate on little babies that were 25, 26, 27, 28 weeks’ gestation. I can guarantee you, they can feel, they can react,” he added.

Just like they respond to comfort and warmth, unborn babies feel exactly what you would feel if you were being stabbed to death

After refreshing his audience about the miracle of conception and pregnancy, Dr. Carson got to the more uncomfortable part of his speech. He refused to beat around the bush in calling out the pro-death crowd for its willful ignorance and persistent denial about the horrors of abortion, a medical procedure that he described as “barbaric.”

Dr. Carson also unequivocally described abortion as what it actually is: murder.

“For somebody to say that [it’s] a meaningless bunch of cells, honestly is just totally ignorant,” Dr. Carson stated about those who contend that unborn babies aren’t human, and thus don’t have the same human rights as the rest of us.

“The level of barbarism that (late-term abortion) requires … I quite frankly don’t know how people can do it,” he added. “You have to give them anesthesia, if you’re going to cut them. Believe me,” he added, noting that this is clearly made evident by the fact that unborn babies “also respond to comfort and to warmth.”

Dr. Carson went on to recall one particular instance in which he was able to talk a 33-week pregnant woman out of aborting her unborn baby, which had a congenital abnormality. Because he genuinely values human life, knows what he’s talking about concerning the pain that unborn babies feel as they’re being aborted, and has true compassion for the lives of the unborn, Dr. Carson’s words resonated with the woman – which he counts as a true blessing.

“It’s going to be up to us people with morals and values to stand up to it because we cannot let this happen in our society,” Dr. Carson maintains about what needs to happen in order to stymie the trend towards legalized late-term abortion and infanticide.

For more news about Leftists and their push for unlimited baby murder, be sure to visit Evil.news.

How I Became ‘Rich’




 
This is a great reminder that being rich is first a mind set that we all should cultivate.   The truth is that we are all truly rich simply because we no longer have a master whose only real thought is to pick cotton or some version thereof.
 
Think on that. Outside of selling a few hours to provide coin we are free to imagine and even attempt a brilliant future however banal our physical circumstances.
 
And not much money can place us somewhere else where we can live rich, even if it is only on vacation.  That is the essence of a Cruise.
 
I grew up on a simple nineteenth century farm, but read my way into the Edwardian world of the upper class.  That instruction in human behavior carried me through a life of scholarship and financial dealings wherever i went.  That is ultimately how easy it is for both the truly wealthy and those far from it.  I never really understood what poor actually meant or felt like.  ..
 
How I Became ‘Rich’

During a rare opportunity to vacation in Hawai’i, Stacy Torres is forced to confront her status as better off than where she came from.

Illustration by Homestead

Stacy Torres
Longreads |
 June 2019 

https://longreads.com/2019/06/20/how-i-became-rich/

On my first two trips to Hawai‘i I photographed things people who live there might consider mundane: red dirt along a paved road, sunlit hibiscus draped over a parking lot wall, blue-faced Zebra Doves so calm I almost tripped over them because they didn’t skitter away like the nervous pigeons back home in New York City. The only palm trees I’d ever seen before appeared on postcards, television, and luau-themed party decorations. In Hawai‘i I wasted no time filling my camera with pictures of real ones: swaying palms against a light-filled morning sky, baby palms trees in the midday sun, and full-grown trees wrapped in twinkling lights under an aspirin moon.

The first trip, in 2009, happened by accident. At least it felt that way. My then-boyfriend wanted to go somewhere tropical. I wanted to go somewhere interesting, though I had no inkling of the plan he was hatching when I mentioned Hawai‘i. I figured this discussion was just another of the fantasy trips we often took in our heads after watching the Travel Channel. Neither of us had passports or much money. But my boyfriend’s job as a New York City public high school special education teacher had wrecked him. For the past few years, half the teachers at his school left by year’s end. C. stood on the verge of quitting too. Instead, he started drinking on the train ride to work in the mornings. Then he took his tax refund and booked us a trip to paradise.

At first he refused to tell me where we were going. “Block off a week,” C. said. I’m going to need you not to be interrupted.” I pressed for details. After about age 12, I’d stopped liking surprises. By then I’d learned they could herald sudden bad news, such as when I awoke to find my mother applying antiseptic to a knife slice on my father’s temple after he got mugged coming home from work. Worry grew about some emergency lurking behind his request, a not unreasonable idea given the last few rocky years. Only after several days of persistent badgering, he divulged, “We’re going somewhere.” I grew more fearful. Where were we going? Why?

We didn’t go places, except the occasional day-trip to Philadelphia on a $10 round-trip Chinatown bus ticket. Sometimes we hopped an Atlantic City casino bus out of Port Authority. We got most of the bus fare back in a cash voucher to be redeemed at Harrah’s, but we dumped that and a few more bucks into the penny and nickel slots. Lucky Lemmings was our machine of choice. We always fooled ourselves into believing riches lay just one more pull away, and cheered when we hit a bonus game. The cute animated lemmings delighted us when they dived from the cliff, or trampolined off a lavender walrus’s back into caves marked with different credit amounts. If we got really lucky, the machine rewarded us with a lemming stampede, and they continued jumping in and out of the caves, green bills swirling and swooshing in their tracks, and manic jangly beeping ramped up as we racked up more credits. We never knew when to stop and usually returned home losers.

When we landed in Honolulu, as I gazed at boughs of thick fog suspended from mountain peaks like leis I felt like Dorothy stepping into a Technicolor Oz. I’d grown up in the shadow of the Empire State building and never imagined I could ever feel at home among plumeria the way I did among concrete and glass. Hawai‘i proved me wrong. In Waikiki I let myself be a real tourist for the first time and snapped hundreds of pictures as though I’d touched down on another planet rather than the United States’ 50th state. I finally understood the awe people must feel when they first see Times Square and found myself falling hard for a place I never expected to like.

I had no inkling of the plan my boyfriend was hatching when I mentioned Hawai‘i. I figured this discussion was just another of the fantasy trips we often took in our heads after watching the Travel Channel.

As a born and raised New Yorker, I’m used to keeping my head down and walking fast, but in Hawai‘i I dawdled. It took a few days, but I fell into step with the Islands’ slower pace. My boyfriend waited patiently as I whipped out my camera every few steps. “Just one more,” I said after crouching beside a concrete planter filled with pink and cherry-red hibiscus made incandescent by the sun. My pictures could never do justice to what I’d seen, but I persisted in my frenzy, hoping to capture some of the wonder I experienced when I laid eyes on such startling beauty.

During one of those moments on our second trip, while my boyfriend and I rode past more pry-your-eyes-open beauty, I experienced another taste of just how far I’d come. The gregarious cabdriver reminded me of my father. He joked that he’d charge us double for listening to the CD of lilting ukulele music he played — a compilation that was a gift from his daughter, he added. I imagined that if my dad had been a Korean immigrant cab driver in Honolulu instead of a Chilean immigrant doorman in Manhattan, he’d have used the same spiel. When the driver rounded the final bend in the winding road to Diamond Head Crater, he pointed out Kahala below, an area filled with million-dollar homes and sparkling swimming pools. In the distance two small island humps rose from the ocean like a scene from South Pacific. The driver then interrupted the spell of my thoughts with unexpected commentary. “This is where the rich people live,” he said, “like you.”


Like me? I winced. I saved ketchup packets from McDonald’s. My kitchen cabinets overflowed with pilfered napkins and plastic utensils from skuzzy fast-food joints. My boyfriend was the son of a building superintendent and a school cafeteria worker on the Lower East Side. A few years before his family lost their home of four decades in an eviction, along with everything but some photos, a pile of old clothes, and a tin of loose change. “We’re not rich,” I said but let it drop as he pointed out other tourist attractions as I sunk further into my seat. He’d said it so matter of factly, how could I argue?

My dad would have run with this, unleashing a haughty laugh. “Yes, rich like me.” I could picture his smile of smug satisfaction. He loved people to think he had money he didn’t. Dad delighted in telling whoever would listen that he lived in Chelsea while omitting the details of how he managed to live in a Manhattan neighborhood now packed with art galleries, swanky restaurants, and million-dollar condominiums. Long story short: no one wanted to live there when he arrived on a bitter cold day in March 1975.

“This looks expensive,” Dad often said while modeling his latest clothing purchase from his favorite discount store in Elmhurst, Queens. It didn’t matter what the item in question cost, so long as he could pull off the illusion of having money. Doing it on the cheap was even better. After all, only he knew that he wore irregular Bloopers brand underwear beneath his expensive-looking clothes.

We had a game we played: “Guess how much this costs?” my father would ask. “I don’t know,” I said, feigning cluelessness. But when he revealed the price, the too-good-to-be-true low figure often amazed me. Whenever my father admired an item of clothing or piece of jewelry of mine, I shaved a few dollars off what I’d paid to maximize his approval and avoid any disappointed looks. My father was an expert bargainer, in part because he didn’t give a damn about walking away. I was only a middling haggler, emboldened to ask for a few dollars off when buying multiple things. Once I got over my attachment to an item, going low and threatening to walk, I found I lacked my father’s magic touch. No one came running after me; they let me walk.

I recognized the taxi driver as the same person who had taken us to the airport the year before, during our first trip to Hawai‘i, though I doubted he remembered us. I remembered the first cab ride well. He asked if we were on our honeymoon. “No,” I said, disappointing him. I was disappointed too, having lost faith my boyfriend and I would ever have enough financial stability to get married. After eight years together, I’d resigned myself to the burdens of a long relationship with few of the perks. The simple wooden cross that dangled from the cab’s rearview mirror comforted me as I prayed in earnest that the plane wouldn’t crash. I had been 29 on that first trip, and less than a week before I’d boarded a plane for the first time. The furthest I’d traveled before was Toledo, Ohio to visit my boyfriend’s sister — a cramped 14 hours by Greyhound bus.

Maybe the cab driver was right, I thought later as I clicked through the day’s photos. I wasn’t rich, but I’d now gone to Hawai‘i not once but twice. My father understood this fact in an uncomplicated way that I couldn’t: A daughter who vacationed in Hawai‘i conferred bragging rights. We were moving up in the world. He even told me to save the plastic bag from the store where I purchased souvenirs for his friends. “Why?” I asked. “I want to show them,” he said. Dad wanted to prove to them I’d really gone there; that this time he wasn’t telling another tall tale.

I’d collected my own physical evidence, but for different reasons. Guilt hovered over these trips. As I took in dazzling sights — 30-foot palm trees dancing in gentle trade winds and the lavender silhouette of Diamond Head Crater against a shimmering moonstone sky — I longed to share what I’d seen with those I left behind, like my sister who’d never traveled to more than three states. She spent her life shuttling other people’s children back and forth to school five stops on the subway and considered a trip to the Jersey Shore an extravagant journey. If I could get just one more picture, from just the right angle, maybe I could bring a piece of this home.

I thought too of my late mother on these trips, and played the what-would-she-think-if-she-were-alive game. But I already knew the answer. Mom would have been thrilled. She always wanted more for my sisters and me than she’d had, and I guessed she wouldn’t quite understand the sense of betrayal that sometimes welled in my chest whenever I caught myself enjoying the luxuries we could never afford while I was growing up, whether a hunk of Manchego cheese or a trip to Hawai‘i. Even my camera revealed changes in the way I took pictures from trip to trip. The first time we went I took pictures to prove to myself that I’d really gone there. At home I’d had trouble believing I’d spent a week in this breathtaking place, even when I appeared in the postcard-pretty photos. The second time I took pictures with confidence that I’d someday return; they would tide me through a cold New York City winter until I reunited with a place I’d come to love.


“Where are you from?” asked a woman with a thick mop of silky black hair a few days into our second trip, while serving me at the Poi Bowl, an unassuming Hawaiian food eatery in a mall on the edge of Waikiki. To stretch our food dollars, we’d hit Poi Bowl hard along with Zippy’s, a local chain, and the supermarket. She studied my face as she divvied a heaping portion of kalua pork and macaroni salad into the neat compartments of the Styrofoam takeaway tray. “New York,” I answered, without much thought. “Where are you from?” she tried again, unsatisfied. “Chelsea?” I said, grasping and unsure of how I had failed to give a satisfactory answer. “In Manhattan, I grew up there…” I continued in an effort to prop up the botched exchange with extra details. “Ah, ok,” she said shortly, as though she had given up on obtaining the desired information, and moved onto serving the next person in line.


I’ve attained some privilege. I don’t punch a clock like my dad; I work in my pajamas some days and get paid to read, write, think, and teach. I can afford a cappuccino once in a while.

At first, I thought perhaps she asked some version of this question of all tourists. But the crew didn’t seem like small-talk types, more focused on their assembly line serving during the lunchtime rush. Before I finished paying, I was tempted to return to the food counter and clarify what she wanted. How had I failed to furnish such essential information about myself? I didn’t know the answer; I didn’t even understand the question. Only when I set my tray on the table, it dawned on me she might have been curious about my ethnicity. I’d gotten some version of the “where are you from” question throughout my life, especially when someone saw my last name on a form or official document (Oh, where are you from?). But I didn’t really know. Where was I from, and where was I going?


On the way to the airport, we got the same cabdriver again. He remembered us. “You were here for a long time,” he said. My heart sank. I turned my head towards the window as we zipped past Honolulu one last time. My eyes rested on the driver’s tanned forearms, his leathery hands at ten and two on the steering wheel. Instead of praying for safe travel I thought about why what he’d said the other day made me sad and why I was so uncomfortable now. “Rich” implied a pulling away, a separation I didn’t like. He told me I wasn’t like him, wasn’t like my father, though I felt closer to him than the mansion-dwellers he thought I belonged with.

My boyfriend always over-tipped. He’d grown up with a broom in his hand, not so long ago. I don’t know how much he gave that day, but enough that the driver looked down with genuine surprise at the bills pressed into his palm. “Oh? Thank you,” he said with a wide smile. “See you next year,” my boyfriend said, with a confidence I couldn’t yet muster. I decided then that maybe being “rich” wasn’t such a bad thing after all.;

I thought going to Hawai‘i would mark the height of my travel, like my Mom’s story of her one faraway trip to Spain before she had us. But the trip turned out to be the beginning. I’ve not traveled nearly as much as my counterparts in the academic world I now inhabit. And these days I still struggle financially to pay down a mountain of student loan debt and make ends meet in a high-cost area. Other aspects of the middle-class world continue to perplex me, like dinner party etiquette and knowing when to keep my mouth shut. But I’ve attained some privilege. I don’t punch a clock like my dad; I work in my pajamas some days and get paid to read, write, think, and teach. I can afford a cappuccino once in a while. I’ve resigned myself to never getting ahead (welcome to the middle-class), but I always seem to land on my feet. I’m still finding my way but no longer suffer a poverty of imagination or ultra low horizons.

Though I may never feel “rich,” especially when I look at my bank account, I no longer wince at the word as though it was an accusation. But I hope one day to see our cabdriver again. He was right. I’d come a long way to see him.

Stacy Torres is an assistant professor of sociology in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco.

How Scotland’s 35-Year Kilt Ban Backfired in Spectacular Fashion


 
 Of course it was taken up by the military with a vengeance and highland regiments quickly became the backbone of the British army during the war with France right though the Napoleonic era all of which quickly followed upon the 1746 Battle of Culloden.

During that protracted struggle the highland regiments earned great distinction for their reliability which surely led to the reinstatement of the tartan once the risk had disappeared.

It only took two generations.

 
How Scotland’s 35-Year Kilt Ban Backfired in Spectacular Fashion

The English banned the kilt hoping to do away with a symbol of rebellion. Instead they created a symbol of Scottish identity.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-scotland-s-35-year-kilt-ban-backfired-in-spectacular-fashion

At the behest of England's national Anglican church, 1688's Glorious Revolution—also called the Bloodless Revolution—deposed the country's last Catholic king. It is widely considered Britain's first step toward parliamentary democracy. It is less known, however, for setting the table for a kingdom-wide kilt ban decades later.


That year, King James II (he was also James VII of Scotland) became the proud poppa of a baby boy—and England's parliament was not happy about it. James was Roman Catholic, a deeply unpopular religion, and the birth of his son secured a Catholic lineage that, in the opinion of England's Anglican parliament, guaranteed a future of religious tyranny. To stop this, the establishment pushed James off the throne and handed the seat to his Protestant daughter and son-in-law, Mary and William of Orange (who ruled jointly as William and Mary). Over the next 60 years, a series of bloody uprisings ensued as James's supporters, called Jacobites, attempted to restore their anointed Catholic king back to the big chair. Many of these supporters were Scottish.

Scottish Jacobite armies regularly went to battle wearing tartan kilts. A staple of Highland dress dating to the early 16th century, these outfits didn't resemble the skirt-like kilts we're familiar with today; rather, these kilts were 12-yard swaths of cloth that could be draped around the body. The garment, which could be looped and knotted to create different outfits to accommodate the fickle Highland weather, was part of a practical workman's wardrobe. As the politician Duncan Forbes wrote in 1746, "The garb is certainly very loose, and fits men inured to it to go through great fatigues, to make very quick marches, to bear out against the inclemency of the weather, to wade through rivers, and shelter in huts, woods, and rocks upon occasion; which men dressed in the low country garb could not possibly endure."

Because the kilt was widely used as a battle uniform, the garment soon acquired a new function—as a symbol of Scottish dissent. So shortly after the Jacobites lost their nearly 60-year-long rebellion at the decisive Battle of Culloden in 1746, England instituted an act that made tartan and kilts illegal.


"That from and after the first day of August, One thousand, seven hundred and forty-six, no man or boy within that part of Britain called Scotland, other than such as shall be employed as Officers and Soldiers in His Majesty's Forces, shall, on any pretext whatever, wear or put on the clothes commonly called Highland clothes (that is to say) the Plaid, Philabeg, or little Kilt, Trowse, Shoulder-belts, or any part whatever of what peculiarly belongs to the Highland Garb; and that no tartan or party-coloured plaid of stuff shall be used for Great Coats or upper coats."

Punishment was severe: For the first offense, a kilt-wearer could be imprisoned for six months without bail. On the second offense, he was "to be transported to any of His Majesty's plantations beyond the seas, there to remain for the spaces of seven years."

The law worked … mostly. The tartan faded from everyday use, but its significance as a symbol of Scottish identity increased. During the ban, it became fashionable for resistors to wear kilts in protest. As Colonel David Stewart recounted in his 1822 book, many of them worked around the law by wearing non-plaid kilts. Some found another loophole, noting that the law never "specified on what part of the body the breeches were to be worn" and "often suspended [kilts] over their shoulders upon their sticks." Others sewed the center of their kilt between their thighs, creating a baggy trouser that must have resembled an olde tyme predecessor to Hammer pants.

According to Sir John Scott Keltie's 1875 book A History of the Scottish Highlands, "Instead of eradicating their national spirit, and assimilating them in all respects with the Lowland population, it rather intensified that spirit and their determination to preserve themselves a separate and peculiar people, besides throwing in their way an additional and unnecessary temptation to break the laws."

By 1782, any fear of a Scottish uprising had fallen and the British government lifted the 35-year-old ban. Delivering a royal assent, a representative of parliament declared: "You are no longer bound down to the unmanly dress of the Lowlander."

But by that point, kilts and tartan were no longer staples of an ordinary Scottish laborer's wardrobe. In that sense, the law had done its job. But it also had an unintended consequence: It turned the tartan into a potent symbol of Scottish individuality and patriotism. So when the law was lifted, an embrace of kilts and tartan blossomed—not as everyday work clothes, but as the symbolic ceremonial dress that we know today. The law, which was intended to kill the kilt, very well might have helped saved it.