Posts Tagged ‘civil war’

Our trip to Georgia, or where Floridians spend their summer vacations

Posted: July 18, 2021 by John Ruberry in baseball, business, economy, News/opinion, politics, Sports
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Blogger at the summit of Black Rock Mountain

By John Ruberry

As you may have noticed I haven’t posted here for a couple of weeks. Mrs. Marathon Pundit were on vacation. And we traveled to, at least if you live in the Chicago area, to an unlikely place, Georgia. 

After MLB’s spineless commissioner, Rob Manfred, pulled the annual All-Star Game out of Atlanta over Georgia’s voting integrity bill, my wife and I decided to “buy-in” to Georgia. 

MLB moved the Midsummer Classic to Denver, the capital of Colorado, even though that state has more more restrictive voting laws than Georgia. The switch cost Atlanta-area businesses millions. Don’t forget Atlanta is a majority-black city–Denver is majority-white. Of the Georgia election bill, Joe Biden said, “This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle.” 

If that comment makes sense to you, or if Manfred’s panicky substitution swap does, then you need to switch off CNN and MSNBC.

Georgia’s new election laws, by the way, are less restrictive than those in Biden’s home state of Delaware.

So on Independence Day Mrs. Marathon Pundit drove south to the Peach State to make up, in a very small way, for the tens-of-millions of dollars shipped off by Manfred to Colorado. There were some diversions. We spent the night of July 4th in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which is just north of the Georgia state line. We did some sighteeing there the next day, including time on Lookout Mountain, where a pivotal battle of the Civil War Siege of Chattanooga occurred in late 1863. But the lion’s share of that day was spent on the site of the Battle of Chickamauga a few miles south in Georgia. The two battles are often presented as one, or part of a campaign, which is why the these two locations comprise the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park.

Of our Civil War battles only Gettysburg, fought two months earlier in Pennsylvania, had more casualties than Chickamauga. Unlike Gettysburg, Chickamauga was a Confederate victory. After being routed in Georgia the Union army retreated to Chattanooga. The northern commanding general, William Rosecrans, was relieved of his duties and replaced by Ulysses S. Grant. His breaking of the siege set the stage for the army led by his close friend, General William Tecumseh Sherman, to capture the strategic city of Atlanta the next year. Sherman’s March to the Sea, where Union forces split the Confederacy a second time, ended with the capture of Savannah late in 1864. 

We eventually made it to Savannah too. 

Mrs. Marathon Pundit was stupefied by the sprawling expanse of the Chickamauga Battlefield and the hundreds of monuments there. Her hometown of Sece, Latvia, was the site of a World War I battle. With the exception of a German military cemetery, there are no commemorations of that battle there. C’mon Sece, at least erect an historical marker in town about the battle.

We wandered for the next two days in the luscious Blue Ridge Mountains, mostly hiking, in these state parks: Fort Mountain, Black Rock Mountain, Smithgall Woods, Unicoi, and Tallulah Gorge. The latter is where much of the classic but disturbing film Deliverance was filmed. Around the time that movie was shot Karl Wallenda crossed the gorge on a high-wire. In fact, the Great Wallenda accomplished that feat 51 years ago today. Our first night in the mountains we spent in Helen, Georgia. Its buildings are in a Bavarian style and it’s filled with German restaurants. While it only has about 500 residents, Helen is Georgia’s third-most visited town. And I encountered mobs of Floridians there.  

People often wonder where Florida residents go on vacation–after all the Sunshine State is of course one of America’s most popular vacation destinations. In the summer many Floridians head to the slightly cooler climes of Georgia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Yes, Tropical Storm Elsa, which passed through coastal Georgia after pummelling Florida during our trip, might have chased some people up north, but not all of them. 

I almost forgot–we hiked the Applachian Trail too.

After a couple of days in South Carolina–at Abbeville, Beaufort, and Hunting Island State Park, with a quick return to Georgia for a walking tour of Augusta and lunch with a high school friend in nearby Evans, we spent our last two days in Georgia in historic Savannah, an even better walking city than Augusta. Our own March to the Sea was over. Then it was time to drive home. 

On our way back, the day of the Home Run Derby of the MLB All-Star Game, we planned to visit Stone Mountain Park, site of “the Mount Rushmore of the South,” the largest bas-relief in the world, which is comprised of carvings of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson. But the weather that day was horrible–heavy rain–so we kept driving, straight through, back to Illinois. Stacey Abrams, the defeated Democratic candidate for Georgia governor in 2018, favors removal of the mountain carvings.

Stone Mountain Park is the most-visited attraction in the Peach State.

Abrams gave tacit support to a boycott of Georgia because of the voting reform bills, but she stealthily edited her USA Today op-ed call for one, but her disingenous act was later exposed. 

Abrams all but said to stay away from Georgia. 

So we visited. And and Mrs. Marathon Pundit and I had a wonderful time.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

DaTechGuy off DaRadio Livestream Spontaneous Podcast the Civil War you don’t want and Cui Bono

Posted: April 28, 2021 by datechguy in blogs, business, crime, culture, DaTechGuy's Quick Thoughts, economy, News/opinion, podcast, trade
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Today I have some free time so it’s time for another spontaneous livestream

You can watch here

Topics will include

  1. The Civil war that you don’t want (or why people don’t understand why this is a bad thing.
  2. The Cold Civil war and what it means
  3. Cui Bono from the Biden Administration
  4. Stalling stalling stalling
  5. Reaping meeting sowing on police protection for Democrat cities

It will all start around 9:40 AM EST hope to see you here

“General Bragg, We can get all the supplies our Army needs in Chattanooga”

Posted: December 9, 2020 by datechguy in elections, politics
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One of the battle cries I have heard over and over again from people I respect such as Kurt Schlichter and the president himself has been the need to turn out and vote in the GA Senate runoffs since failure to win at least one of them would give the Democrats a majority in the upper chamber and free reign to wreak havoc on America.

This despite the fact that said election would be using the same machines that are in question and be run by the same people in the cities who stole the last one on the presumption that GOP poll watchers will be less willing to leave the room when they’re told this time and that the same party with the audacity to openly steal a national election won’t be daring enough to steal two senate races in Georgia.

While there is some merit to this argument as holding the senate is a worthy goal there is something I want to remind everyone.

One of the victims of the steal of the election of 2020 (I use this term not conceding that it has yet been successful) was the GOP candidate for the US Senate in Michigan.

And while John James has conceded if the steal in Michigan is reversed is it very possible, nay even probable that the Senate result in Michigan would also be reversed, after all the Senate Race in NH is the reason why alone among swing states in 2016 Democrats confident of victory in the national election took the time to steal it (Ed Naile has done yeoman work on the subject over the years here). This would provide the 51st vote regardless of the results in Georgia.

The majority of GOP state officials and legislature members who are either running away from exposing this fraud in an Election where their party made incredible gains in both the house and in state legislatures is reminiscent of Braxton Bragg insisting that after his victory at Chattanooga “any immediate pursuit by out infantry and artillery would have been fruitless.”

When Nathan Bedford Forrest who had been harassing the Union Army in full panicked retreat came back to protest the waste of their huge victory cost at a large price of blood Bragg told him he couldn’t move far from the railroad due to a lack of supplies. When he made the point that is the title of this post and was rejected he stormed away doubtless thinking of the thousands of causalities that their victory cost them said: “What does he fight battles for?”

I would ask the same basic question: What is the point of voting for members of the GOP to protect our interests if in the case where our national interests and indeed the republic are at stake they choose to get along to go along?

Is there any reason to believe that the Democrats backed by the social media and tech giants reinforced by a Obama Justice Department an Obama FBI and a Obama CIA in an Obama Administration (let’s stop pretending that this will be a Biden Administration rather than an Obama one) will not be able to protect and foil all efforts to stop a steal in 2024 nor that the Democrats having four years rather than four hours to create the ballots margins and programs needed will be ready to act on a scale that will boggle the mind? Particularly when they will have the full help and corporation of their good friends in China?

We have the power to stop this steal, we have the power to expose this corruption and crush it, now while it’s still weak and tentative (if it wasn’t weak and they weren’t afraid of exposure you wouldn’t see such efforts to hide the facts from the general public nor would grand statements not withstanding Democrat courts dismiss cases on technical grounds rather than based on the facts of the cases.

Those on the right who suggest we don’t push forward and simply wait things out till 2024 are analogous to Bragg’s decision to let Rosecrans get to Chattanooga unmolested. And while I don’t doubt that if the President’s attempts to stop this crime fails that he will be as energetic as ever to counter the left I fear that we of the right are likely to come to the same end that Bragg did, even if the left doesn’t come up with a Grant to lead them.

The Clock is running Out for The Left/Media’s Albert Sydney Johnston’s strategy

Posted: October 7, 2020 by datechguy in elections, politics
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As the Civil War began the most prominent general on the Confederate side was Albert Sydney Johnston formally of the 2nd US Calvary. Johnston was put in command of Confederate forces in the western theater which meant from the Mississippi river to the Appalachian mountains. His primary job was to stem any Union advance into Tennessee while keeping the Mississippi open to allow men & supplies from the far west (the Transmississippi) to continue to flow to the east.

Johnston was an able general with a well earned reputation as an excellent fighting officer, but realized rather quickly that he neither had the men or the supplies necessary to hold this line against the Union forces that were being arrayed against him. His concluded his best chance on stopping any Union advance was via bluff, namely making said union forces believe that HE was planning a major advance with an army much larger than he actually had.

So all over the press stories were planted doubling and tripling the size of his forces while reporting that he was preparing to advance on a half dozen different cities along a nearly 1000 mile front. At the same time as this was being reported Johnson was sending private requests to Jefferson Davis for reinforcement and resupply.

For a time this was wildly successful. defenses were prepared to stop the expected rebel advances. Governors balked at sending troops to the Army of the Potomac when they would be needed to fend off Johnson’s supposed hoards. In fact it was so successful that it fooled some confederate leaders. When PGT Beauregard was transferred west to serve under Johnson he was shocked to discover the actual strength of the force he was joining.

Eventually the Union forces did advance. US Grant took forts Henry and Donaldson and Union forces poured into Tennessee and Johnston would retreat into Mississippi. Johnston would eventually attack at Shiloh hoping to destroy the divided Union forces and be killed during the 1st day of the battle on April 6th 1862.

I tell this story because as I see stories like this.

Come On, Man: CNN Poll Puts Biden Up — By Sixteen Points?

and tweets like this.

It occurs to me that these modern Democrats who previously were using the same language as slavery supporting confederates from 1860 are using the same election battle plan as their Civil War Counterparts as well.

Having failed to remove the president via the Mueller investigation and Impeachment and having the Corona and Riot Brier Patches bite primarily on Democrat cities and office holders the primary tool of the Democrat left seems to be going all in on a media propaganda effort that the polling (done by absolutely TOP people from absolutely TOP organizations with absolutely TOP standards) indicates that the Trump campaign is on the road for a defeat of biblical proportions.

The purpose of this is to keep the faithful in the bubble fighting and to keep the morale up of an industry that has shrunk it’s customer base to the point where those who remain can’t abide any statement contrary to the narrative that they have been advancing.

Unfortunately for the media they have one disadvantage that General Johnston did not. There is an actual drop dead date for this tactic, namely election day, although in fairness the attempt to push the idea that mail in ballots will be enough to change a Trump election night victory to a defeat will likely continue until it’s clear that there simply aren’t enough votes to steal in enough states to reverse the result.

Perhaps we will see the “faithless electors” card played again and perhaps the left will run to the courts but in the end the clock will run out on the tactic of bluff and bluster and the media and their allies will have to deal with the reality of a defeat.

I suspect that there are more than a few who have already guessed what’s coming but for those who have not it will be quite a shock that I suspect will be featured in youtube videos for years to come.

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