Posts Tagged ‘datechguy's magnificent seven’

By:  Pat Austin

SHREVEPORT – There has been a bit of a buzz in my neck of the woods this week about a “scorching” letter written by an Alabama tourist to Mayor Cantrell of New Orleans. This visitor took issue with the homelessness, blight, and open drug use in the city and implored the mayor to “be a leader” and clean up her city.

I can’t speak about NOLA, but I can’t argue with what this guy probably saw because I see the same thing here in Shreveport, and I suspect this is the case in many cities across the nation. In Shreveport, for example, the homeless population downtown can be seen everywhere; on every bench, in doorways of every abandoned building, and posted up in front of the public library. Some ask for money, most stare sullenly into space and avoid eye contact. It is sad to me, and I know that a wide variety of circumstances have brought them here. Some of this may be of their own doing, but not always.

Does this deter tourists? Probably, some.

More puzzling to me is that I don’t see this everywhere. I don’t travel widely, but I do travel. We recently returned from a trip to the Midwest to visit my husband’s family. As is our custom, we spent a day in Des Moines, exploring the vibrant downtown and then attending an iCubs baseball game. Shreveport doesn’t have minor league baseball, so we grab it when we can.

In Des Moines we did not see blight, homelessness, drug use, abandonment; I’m sure some of that is there, we just didn’t see it downtown. We walked blocks, inside the skywalks and outside on the street. Granted, a lot of the shops in the skywalks that we had seen before are gone. A lot of people are still working from home. But the majority of businesses there are booming and there are people living, working, and playing downtown.

It makes coming home to a dirty, crumbling city somewhat depressing.

I am not sure what the answer is. My husband would say it is the Democrats we seem to put into office. “Look at every city that ever had a Democrat mayor!” he screams. “It goes to hell!”

He’s not wrong.

Except the mayor of Des Moines is a Democrat.

Obviously, the blight and decay of our cities is the result of a combination of factors. For example, Louisiana only has two Fortune 500 companies, the highest of which ranks only 143 (CenturyLink). We are not a business friendly state with a rank of 49 on that list. I love my state for its natural beauty, but we have a lot of problems.

At the very least, we have got to get people back to work across this country. Everywhere we went on our travels we saw help wanted signs and places understaffed. Product shortages are evident. From the lowest to the highest, we have got to get this economy going and these jobs filled. The unemployment subsidies need to stop. ANYone who wants a job should be able to find one right now.

And while the tourist who wrote the letter to Mayor Cantrell will likely find his pleas falling of deaf ears in the mayor’s office, I hope he knows that a lot of other people see and agree with his words. We need to elect leaders who will step up and lead, who will do the right thing and not necessarily the popular thing, and who will get this country back on its feet.

It is overdue.

Pat Austin blogs at And So it Goes in Shreveport and at Medium; she is the author of Cane River Bohemia: Cammie Henry and her Circle at Melrose Plantation. Follow her on Instagram @patbecker25 and Twitter @paustin110.

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.

For many decades those on the political left have been pushing the deeply untruthful idea that the United States was, is now, and will always be a deeply racist nation with no redeeming qualities at all.  They are doing this by focusing exclusively on our nation’s two biggest sins, slavery and segregation, while ignoring all of the tremendous good the United States has always done and always has stood for.  Leftists are doing this because they want to replace the Constitution, our founding principles of liberty and individual rights, and our free market economy with collectivism and socialism.  They very mistakenly believe that collectivism and socialism would bring about a perfect society rather than the absolute hell they always bring about.

Critical Race Theory is the latest attempt by the political left to  re-brand the United States as a deeply racist nation in the minds of school and college students, along with those who are gullible and misinformed.  CRT is the latest of many attempts, however, it is the most successful because it is being crammed down our throats by two of the most powerful allies of the political left in their attempts to destroy the United States, teachers unions and major corporations.

This Breitbart article Pollak: Critical Race Theory, Explained contains the best definition of Critical Race Theory that I have found after a lot of research.

Critical Race Theory claims that all of our institutions — our government, our economy, our culture — are based on racial hierarchy, with whites on top and blacks at the bottom. Even things that look race-neutral are, on closer inspection, racist.

The author of the article goes on to document the history of Critical Race Theory.  It pleases me greatly to see that Andrew Breitbart was one of the earliest critics of CRT,

It was the invention of a group of radical left-wing intellectuals known as the Frankfurt School, who developed it to achieve through cultural change what Marxism could not achieve politically.

Breitbart wrote: “It was, quite literally, a theory of criticizing everyone and everything everywhere. It was an attempt to tear down the social fabric by using all the social sciences … it was an infinite and unending criticism of the status quo, adolescent rebellion against all established rules and norms. … Critical theory does not create, it only destroys.”

Critical Theory spawned various offshoots. One of them was Critical Legal Theory, which said that the Constitution, our judicial system, and our laws could never be neutral or objective because they existed to protect those who created them.

This Breitbart News article Pollak: Eight Years Later, Andrew Breitbart Vindicated on Critical Race Theory sheds more light on the history of CRT.

The Critical Race Theory training was exposed by Christopher Rufo, a contributing editor for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.

Yet the first to sound the alarm was Andrew Breitbart.

In a story that was only published after his death in March 2012, video that Breitbart had teased at the Conservative Political Action Conference just weeks before was finally released. It showed a young Barack Obama speaking at a protest at Harvard Law School in favor of Professor Derrick Bell, who had clashed with the university over the issue of faculty diversity.

More than that, Bell was the founder of the doctrine of Critical Race Theory.

Critical Race Theory holds that the United States is racist by design, because its Constitution and all of its other institutions emerged in a context where slavery was legal. According to the theory, the very institution of private property in the U.S. is corrupt because it was enshrined in a system that saw black people as chattels.

This American Thinker article What is Critical Race Theory? documents the Marxist roots of Critical Race Theory.

Instead of abandoning Marxist ideas to the dustbin of history, along with the notion of a flat earth, alchemy, and phrenology, American academics have simply substituted “race” for “class” and relabeled Marxism as Critical Race Theory.  The “capitalists” have been replaced with “whiteness,” and the oppressed are everyone else.

Like a bacterium that is resistant to antibiotics, Critical Race Theory is even more difficult to confront than Marxism, because those who oppose Marxism can only be slandered as “greedy capitalists,” while those who oppose CRT can be defamed as “racist.”  Even more ingenious is the substitution of Western civilization (i.e., the ideas of science and reason that began with the ancient Greeks, was adopted by the Romans, and thus spread throughout Europe) for “white supremacy.”  Thus, one cannot use reasoned arguments to refute CRT because rational thought is now considered a product of “white supremacy.”  (This is also how math can now be considered “racist.”)

Teachers Unions are at the forefront of making sure all school and college students in the United States are brainwashed with this hideous garbage, as you can see from this article Parents Don’t Want Critical Race Theory, So Of Course The Nation’s Largest Teachers Union Just Decided To Push It Harder

The nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, was one of the most notable organizations to embrace boosting racist teacher training and curriculum across the country. In addition to voting to dig up dirt on organizations that oppose the implementation educating children to view the world through the lens of race and oppression during the virtual conference last week, the Democrat donor group also passed a leftist-driven resolution committing its more than 3 million members to a “study that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.”

In the past few weeks nine states have outlawed the teaching of Critical Race Theory.  As you can see from the title of this article Teachers Unions Urge Educators to Defy State Laws to Push Critical Race Theory teachers unions will not stop at anything in their quest to brainwash generations of school children into hating this great nation.

Teachers unions are not alone because A disturbing look at corporate Critical Race Theory brainwashing.

It is absolutely essential the all of us who truly believe in the principles of individual liberty, individual rights, the Constitution, and free market capitalism stand up to the left and make sure no more school children are brainwashed with this Marxist garbage

Every time I post quotes by Thomas Jefferson on social media, something I do quite often because he has always been the founding father I most closely identify with, my Progressive friends trot out their customary talking points with maximum smugness.  I’m absolutely sure you know which ones I’m talking about.  The ones condemning Thomas Jefferson for owning slaves, which he inherited and tried desperately to free but could not because of Virginia law. and being a white supremacist.  Jefferson very hard to free all slaves on several occasions but failed. He was no white supremacist either. Neither charges are valid and are discussed in these two books: Jefferson Lies and The Real Thomas Jefferson. Both are extremely well documented and chock full of quotes.

As Independence Day rolls around every year liberal news agencies bash Thomas Jefferson for hypocrisy because they claim he only included white people when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, that he did not touch on slavery at all. They are dead wrong on this.   The original and complete text of Declaration of Independence, as originally written by Thomas Jefferson, is proof of hollowness if these charges. 

The truth of the matter is that the original complete text of the Declaration of Independence is proof that Thomas Jefferson was actually a failed abolitionist.  When he wrote the Declaration of Independence he included a clause condemning the King of England for England’s role in slavery. That criticism of slavery in our most seminal document would have ended slavery in the this newborn nation.  The clause was eliminated by the members of the Continental Congress who were from colonies that supported slavery.  Here is the deleted clause.

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.  This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain.  Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.  And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.