Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer
I’ve always had a natural affinity for recognizing patterns. I see this as a genetic trait that contributed to our survival- ‘let’s not camp near the volcano again’, has saved more lives than it’s alternative has cost. I don’t know when it first began, it was a confluence of events; my father and I watching the PBS series Civilization with Arthur C. Clark on Sunday evenings, being given the Time-Life book Early Man one Christmas, and the accidental find of an early archaic, corner-notched Kirk point fashioned from Macungie jasper in an empty potato field near my school.
By the time I was seven I could confidently find artifacts in most plowed fields around our home while everyone else walked past them without notice. If I was on a hilltop above water, if there were flakes of chert or flint scattered about, or small round river cobbles with one or more sides ground down from percussion flaking I knew with certainty that Indians had camped here, had sharpened their tools there, hunted game somewhere further off. I was fascinated by archaeology, ancient man, his tools and his history and I never lost my interest in the subject no matter what I did or where I lived.
The more I learned the more I noticed patterns, and on occasion I have been told that we see patterns because we look for them. I believe that we see them because they’re there. What we’d left behind told our story loud and clear, and over all that time nothing really changed if you knew how to recognize the pattern.
One night in the days after my accident I fell in and out of a troubled sleep, altering from disorientation at finding myself in a room other than my own, to the searing howl of grinding bone on bone every time I moved. The television was still on a Youtube station, the sound low and as I came out of my dream I discovered a British series called Time Team. The long running BBC program has enjoyed a twenty year effort at looking into the human history of the British Isles.
The pitch goes something like this- a group of half a dozen archaeologists, geophysicists, professors, illustrators and history nerds spend three days on an ever changing landscape of historic sites looking for evidence of past habitation and lifestyles in a series of trenches dug about the property. The cast is hosted by one of those typical Brits that would look comfortable climbing out of a trench at the Battle of the Marne, a bayonet tipped Enfield gripped tightly to his chest. He uses lots of layman’s terms to translate from the nerd-babble of the rest of the team and he does it with frequent quips and puns with an historic bent, deadpan through no fault of his own.
The huge Scottish paleo-archaeologist that would look comfortable wearing a horned helmet and battle ax is complimented by the wild-haired academic in Bill Cosby sweaters as they argue over the temper found in a fragment iron age pot shard. I became entranced by the program, as much for it’s repetitive structure and martial music theme- “We’ve got just three days!” Bum! Bum! Bum!- as it’s variety of sites and historic eras. They dug for evidence of Roman villas, cut through Celtic henge, unearthed Mottes and Baileys, sifted out skull fragments from disarticulated burials in the neolithic era and a scatter of first century Roman sestertius from the same test pit! They would unearth a massive cut rock and then argue over the likelihood of it being a Bronze Age dolmen or a Victorian-era equestrian plinth (I knew it was just the entrance stone to an Iron Age round house, I’d seen an episode with one earlier that day).
The more I watched the series- and thanks to Youtube in no particular order- the more I began to notice patterns in both their discoveries of ancient evidence, but their current preoccupation with modern sensibilities. For anyone who has yet to watch a single episode, let me explain one irrefutable truth; beneath virtually every archaeological site ever dug in any episode of that show there was one ubiquitous and ever present constant. Walls. Stone walls and rubble walls, Walls with ditches in front, walls with moats behind.
Tower walls and palisades walls, evidence of walls two feet wide and ten feet wide, some of them were twenty feet wide and half again as a deep. There were Roman walls and Beaker People walls, walls heaped up from soil and sand, tipped with sharpened tree trunks and walls made with cut blocks of limestone and Dorset flints. Some were for houses and shops, but most were for defenses. Castles and shell keeps, middens and overburdens. Everywhere, consuming uncountable expenditures of rock and earth, human sweat and human time is the evidence over spans of time that go back as far as we can imagine and there it is- the undeniable proof that if walls don’t work long term, mankind believes in them as much as anything else they have ever done.
The majority of the episodes follow a loose script that goes something like this- The team is invited to a piece of property where evidence suggests something might be found. On occasion they visit known historic sites; Westminster Abbey’s courtyard, Stonehenge, decrepit castles and barrows scattered across the countryside and at other times come to farms or even construction sites that have uncovered artifacts during plowing or construction. They discuss their approach and set about their business of stripping away the soil to uncover what lies beneath.
The variety of accents, the difference in their areas of expertise, their expectations are so often wildly different that it never gets tedious despite the academic slant the show takes. What is slowly uncovered over a hundred or more episodes is equally interesting to finally comprehend. Though it is firmly committed to a progressive agenda in terms of how they pout and frown when they mention past behaviors like slavery or women as chattel, they cannot conceal the weight of evidence that demonstrates just how predictable and unchanging human beings tend to be over long periods of time.
They reveal these bits of data, for example the fact that the single most common item found in a Saxon burial is an edged weapon, a knife, dagger or sword, and let it pass without commenting on why an entire culture felt that the world was so dangerous that even the dead need to be armed. It should be noted that this particular culture was very fond of living behind multiple layers of walls and trenched defenses, another indicator of their primary concerns- the unwelcome visitor into their lands. The waves of these human invasions is the very subtext of the entire series, each week skipping from one era to another, the neolithic to the Bronze Age and it’s transition to the Iron Age.
The Picts, the Celts, The Angles and Romans, the Saxon mercenaries, driven from their own overrun homeland who settle and remain until they were displaced with the Danes, then Vikings, each group over running the defenses of the native stock and installing their own stamp of ownership in terms of how they construct their new and improved walls and ditches to keep out the next wave.
The host and his cast reveal their own prejudices in terms of modern ideas of class, some of the most excited responses they voice are when the discover an artifact that is “posh” or gives evidence of being from a “high status” member of society. While they excavate plenty of sites that turn up beautiful artifacts of commoners, polished bone awls, a masterfully finished ground flint adz, hand decorated pottery four thousand years old, nothing gets them worked into a tizzy like a gold broach or a silver Roman spoon from someone “of some importance”.
What struck me as even more instructive, a confirmation of everything I discovered watching Time Team, was another odd little side trip I discovered by watching a series of shows about Customs, Border and Immigration workers. There was no one particular show- although the common thread between them all is that they are exclusively English speaking Western countries featured the various series; Canada, USA, England, New Zealand and Australia.
The shows features several rotating locations; airports and border crossings, points of entry and cruise ships from the POV of the inspectors and investigators that ostensibly control the defined borders and various laws that govern who and what may enter each one. These shows are a riddle to me. In the current era with the modern narrative it would seem to be a contradiction of everything we are told. If anyone who can make it across the border is an American, why is it so important to be on the lookout for insects and fruit?
The level of scrutiny that they display seems intense although by observing the never ending flow of humanity laden down with luggage that shuffles in the background of virtually every shot you know that the best they could hope to intercede would be in the low single digits of a percentage. While they spend a good ten minutes doing everything but administering an enema to an elderly man from Connecticut on his way back from a radiation treatment because of his rad level, a virtual expressway of angry looking bearded Muslims shuffle behind him and right out the front door of the airport.
An inordinate amount of time and money goes in to relieving travelers of their undeclared banana eaves, plastic shopping bags full of maggots and bloated ropes of blood sausages. I had no idea that behind every international baggage claim area that there was an industrial sized food grinder manned by a crew of women in East German style TSA uniforms and pale blue hairnets feeding it an endless supply of muktuk, bosingang, ant eggs and balut that the discombobulated arrivals failed to understand were “Food or perishable items” on their language specific customs claim form.
No problem beyond seizures, thank-you, the bamboozled humans wrapped in multiple layers of bed sheets and bandannas make their confused way right out into the midst of the Western World to seek their fortunes, sans huitlacoche. Much as it was in the series of police arrests I watched several weeks ago there is one common trait of all foreign travelers apprehended at our borders for smuggling- abject denial and utter bewilderment at how two pound of black tar heroin wound up in their panties.
Not my pants/I didn’t pack that/Where did you find that? are the hallmarks of an iguana smuggler. There’s an awful lot of complaining about racial profiling from the West African visitors- there must be flash cards out there somewhere- but it always amuses me when they pull it on a brown guy named Hernandez that barely speaks English himself. I watched with a certain amusement as one inspector demonstrated the system of precautions they were tasked to take when they discover a white power in plastic wrap.
He took it in the back, put on a dust mask most people use when they sand sheetrock and cut it open with his personal pocket knife. Glad it wasn’t ricin. The next inspector didn’t bother to use a mask or go in the back and opened it right up in the middle of the customs inspection, toddlers wandering around right next to the counter. “Take it in the back!” I found myself yelling at the television, “Wear a mask!” but it turned out it was just baby powder.
Dodged a bullet there. All I could think was to have some master criminal-or angry foreign entity- decide to paralyze our entire transportation system by sending actual toxin laced bags to multiple airports simultaneously for these congenitally lackadaisical inspectors to open in plain view.
What I began to understand from these programs is that the inspectors are all very experienced with accusations of racism, our borders don’t keep much out at all, the new arrivals laugh at our laws and disregard even the pretense of being gracious for being allowed in, rather they seem to enjoy flauting the regulations and rules and think that we are rather stupid for attempting to enforce them and demonstrate it with their behavior and comments.
Our borders are- with the exception of an elderly couple who may or may not have smoked a joint- wide open to all comers. Even the ones sent back when caught, and there were very few of those, were not given lifetime bans, even those with egregious violations. The one area that brought about some of the most harsh treatment were the smugglers of counterfeited consumer products.
As one border agent said in a moment of candor after seizing two suitcases full of bogus Givenchy and Gucci handbags and wallets, “Our reason for being here is to protect the intellectual property rights of companies even if they aren’t in our country.” I couldn’t help but notice that the inspectors knew the value of the items almost to the dollar of this “high status items” and “posh” artifacts of the modern era.
So there’s a pattern to discern in watching these two program types- that beneath the surface of all human history is walls and impediments designed to protect against the next invader and whatever he brings with him and that none of them are effective no matter how much time, effort and treasure is invested in the idea. High status goods and posh items attract and fascinate human beings and they will go to whatever lengths necessary to obtain them for themselves and that where ever these items and attraction are, others will go.
At certain times we take the matter very seriously and hold on to those lands and resources by constructing massive defenses and arming the population to defend against encroachment and these may last hundreds of years. And as the people become soft, as they bring in mercenaries to staff their armies or make pacts with foreigners to help expel other enemies, use servants from distant provinces and fail to maintain their own specific people and culture, opening the gates to invasion, they disappear and leave virtually nothing behind but graves full of bones, the ruins of once formidable walls and bits and pieces of their definitive cultural artifacts behind to remind us that nothing changes and nothing ever will. Walls work until they don’t and it is a people that makes a culture, not the land upon which they once stood.
ADMIN NOTE: Send get well cards, etc. to:
Marc Moran
Hopewell Farm
3 South Rd
Newbury, New Hampshire 03255
https://www.facebook.com/NewburyFarmer/
You should bust yourself up more often. We’d get quality writing and perspective like this more frequently.
As someone who is smarter than he appears once said – we don’t build walls because we hate the people on the outside but because we love the people on the inside.
It’s a good lesson and one that we forget at our own peril.
If you’re watching youtube and want a chuckle my daughter and I have been watching a bunch of Aussies dropping things from great heights to see what happens to them. Because you know – physics. My favorite is the giant dart.
https://www.youtube.com/user/whoisjimmy
Get well my friend.
I wonder what they’ll say when all they find are ten or more remote controls in each dwelling.
That it was a high status dwelling.
….maybe, IF they also find the corresponding 80″ curved LED screen teevee. Although the future programs will unfortunately be nothing more than, ‘Tune in for our commercial free broadcast of “Tivo – the lost power, what it as and why” or such’. We’ve left them so little.
Looks like our ancestors knew how to defend their families and culture from invasion . We are letting people who hate us ,our way of life and our founding documents right into our nation. It’s kind of depressing and their doesn’t seem to be anything we can do about it . Our own government will defend the Invaders .The level of lies and betrayal is hard to understand for someone like me. I will be 58 my next birthday. I will probably live to see our nation Completely destroyed. I don’t think we have another 20 years. Maybe not 10 . I’m so sick and tired of it.
Hardfarmer , watch your mail. I sent you a little something. Not much but it’s something. God bless.
Beebs, if anything, it shows that your ancestors (whoever they may have been; picts, celts, angles, romans or saxons, ) did not know how to defend their families. Did you not read that there were several invasions? In every instance, from the microbial level to the macrobiotic, when the defenses fail or fall, a new, stronger culture comes in and rapes the women. It is nature’s way of securing the survival of life.
[On a side note, it is the men that defend the culture and if that defense fails it’s probably due to some anti-masculine campaign organized by lesbians.]
The article points out that invasions, like shit, happen. Shit happens is a universal truth. Look back at history and you’ll see what I mean. Ancestors are, like Old Pangloss said about Herbie, dead. Your born, you build a wall, you complete your debt to nature, you croak.
It’s as if nature’s only purpose in supporting human life is to build walls. Maybe there is something that hates a wall but it ain’t nature. Nature seems to give little shit about humans. It readily erases all traces of man, takes the cannoli and leaves the walls.
” it’s probably due to some anti-masculine campaign organized by lesbians.”
or Gillette.
P&G
Kill yourself. Go be with Jesus.
Are you talking to HF or BB?
Gawd, I am loving me some Orange Man Trumpy just more n more Everyday!! To paraphrase the Leprechaun, whereas me Wall? Who’s got me Wall? I’m coming to get me Wall!!
I think there is a Civil War campsite on the on our property. Since the nearest battle site was/is a Union victory site, I assume it was a bunch of lowlife Johnny Rebs and there wouldn’t be a high status artifact in the pile.
I watched a couple of minutes and got a feel for the show. A different sort of excavation from a Civil War encampment, I see. Thanks for the Time Team tip.
Why Saxons are called Saxons:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seax
https://regia.org/research/warfare/seax.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seax_of_Beagnoth
We too have spent quite a few evenings watching hours of time team. The presenter, Tony Robinson, has a very large archive of historical shows and he has been knighted for his work over the years. He is not just reading his lines, and neither are the others in the show. Phil, Mick, and all the rest, take just three days because that is all they can give from their university positions.
If you would like to have a taste of what they do, and the personalities of those who do the work, you could do worse than this episode:
Baldrick?????
He must have a cunning plan for each dig.
I thought I had seen this host before. The Blackadder series are some of my favorite British comedies
I’ve watched some of these videos in the past without paying attention to the channel name. Not bad videos.
And it is not just the people who make the culture, it is the people who defend the culture. The walls are useless if there is no one left to man them.
As they prove one strata after another.
The way I see it, the fortifications are always at their peak at the overlaps of cultures and the during the height of cultural hegemony they always make the exact same mistake- open up the gates and flood the realm with a slave class from somewhere else to do the scut work, the fighting and dying until those people go “Hey what’s to stop us from taking it all?” and then BOOM! Next strata, brand new walls and ditches.
And if it didn’t come through I love the show, I’m just surprised by how much they don’t seem to see of the bigger picture.
“They always make the exact same mistake- open up the gates and flood the realm with a slave class from somewhere else to do the scut work, the fighting and dying until those people go “Hey what’s to stop us from taking it all?” and then BOOM! Next strata, brand new walls and ditches.”
I’m pretty sure that is not the history of empires. Alexander the Great did not come in to do scut work. Yours is a popular current theory that, like the domino theory, serves a political purpose but is not historically correct at all.
I hope you heal up soon before you end up thoroughly brainwashed by the telly. Really, you think the things you see on a program are accidental? I’ve got a 9/11 pancake theory to sell you.
I agree with EC. I think that HSF simplifies the change from civilization to civilization. When the Romans invaded Britain they were fairly successful until Boadicea damn near wiped them out. She surely defended her walls just fine. Unfortunately the Romans came back with a much bigger force and stamped her into the ground. The bigger picture is actually more like greater fire power and more men. It has absolutely nothing to do with slaves and scut work. At least not in England.
Thanks, HR. The barrage of historical revisionism can make a person lose his grip on high school history but for the parade of empires. With all the theories on the fall of the Roman empire, I can conclude that nobody really knows what happened. Diocletian split the empire and Constantine focused on the Byzantine portion of the empire. Maybe he felt that Constantinople was the logical focal point from which to rule the lands around the Mediterranean. The history books say the western portion fell because of poor leadership, the eastern portion survived because of great leaders. There is no mention of scut workers overthrowing anything.
If it is down to Leadership I cannot help but point to the obvious…
The West
It still exists..
The East
Not so much
Tony Robinson is also a comedian. If you want a very British take on British history – with a very British sense of humour – look up Blackadder, in which he played the character, ‘Baldrick’.
Though they ran out of steam by the last series -World war setting.
You first have to HAVE a wall to work before it doesn’t. Could we at least give it a fucking try?
Most of the walls in New England were to define property lines, had to clear the newly formed fields and do something with stones. This was mostly sheep country in the 17 and early 18 hundreds, mostly grown over now except for urban sprawl. I am totally in awe as I traverse the woods here at what took place here back in those early days just by observing the walls, rock piles, cellar holes. Those walls like today kept the sheep in or the sheep out – or not.
Same as it ever was:
You really summed up your points in the last two paragraphs. Well done.
These shows provide a current and view back of what happens when an invasion is taking place..
Sounds like a porno movie.
Did you see my question about the videos you posted?
No I didnt no one. Ask me again if that is okay as i cannot remember thread I put those vids in..
cheers
ps sorry that I havent been around much. Been on a timeout although this article has spurred an idea for a bit. Might give it a try..
No big deal… I dunno either. maybe it’ll come up one way or the other.
Been thinking a bit about it off and on over past couple of days. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of there… there. Still what did happen before, during and after event leaves open many questions. While I do think the tragedy took place, and many young innocent souls were lost, one thing is certain.
There were nefarious people working behind the scenes to exploit all this for their own devious ends. That is for certain. The fact that the fellow leading the charge, doing it all just for the kidz thru his HONR Network, was the one time owner of a teen porn site, is most certainly a red flag in my books….
I’d write moar but its off to work
You inspire us all to be better stewards of our time. Wonderful observations.
I spent a week one summer as a kid on an archaeological dig. Digging and sifting very carefully through layers of dense sediment and muck got to be pretty tedious. Of course, it wasn’t until after the week was nearly done that they explained to me what “the privy” was. Worthwhile experience – figured out I didn’t want to be an archaeologist.
Grand insight! Indeed the walls are great if the city or village is under attack, but if it bears no punishment once inside what would be the purpose. We have already destroyed their homes, and then invited them in.
The enemy is behind the wire. 90% of us are gone in 6 years according to DEAGEL There is no punishment for the usurpers, this wall only requires a tunnel or a breach to become a toll road. The FEMA camps are ready, it will be easy to gather up the foreigners in a strange land. Is Western civilization the gingerbread cottage?? Now all that is required is to make internal strife thin out a bunch so somebody can declare war on the remnant
That was magnificent, Hardscrabble. I love how you brought it all together at the end. You’re a great writer. I’m looking forward to your book. Isn’t history fascinating?
shouldn’t it be Observations FROM and Invalid???
You are correct but it looks wrong.
HF,
Great writing, even better reading. Do you have a patreon account? I think one beer or equivalent is warranted for support. Look forward to more.
Did you read the article? He put his address at the end of the article.
The reason they don’t walls is the enemy is here already and continue to arrive. Now in high levels of government. We have already been destroyed. It all over but crying.
Walls make sense. Even microorganisms and our own cells have walls. If not for that, our cytoplasm (or plant cell walls), mitochondria, ribosomes and nucleus with its little cell penis or vagina – those x and y chromosomes – would come spilling out.
However, walls are not always indicated. It depends on the problem. The problem now is that women are in revolt. They want men, especially white men because they are smart enough to recognize the bait and switch going on, to cast off their masculinity and start sucking dick. When you have a dick shoved into your mouth, you can’t very well say inconvenient stuff that contradicts what they want.
WM – we need jobs,
WW – that sounds like toxic masculinity
WM – you shipped our jobs overseas
WW – black males are also unemployed, are you spouting white privilege?
WM – we need white kids
WW – that sounds racist
WM – we need jobs and kids
WW – suck some dick, take opioids
WM – we’re being genocided
WW – we’ll build a wall, ok?
WM – ok, maybe put one around your cootch too.
WW – there you go again with the male superiority!
WM – sorry.
The sociopathic marxists in power in Washington KNOW that walls work, regardless of their talking points. The problem for them is that they do work, and they will impede the invasion of third world low IQ baby producers whose spawn will grow up to vote to keep the freebies coming and swell the ranks of the democratic party. That is why they don’t want the wall.
But the Rs don’t want the wall, either, because it cuts into their slave-wage profit model. See the Koch bros.
Sone R’s. Mcstain and Flake were always the holdouts and they’re history. The rest who agree? At least they’re not hypocrites ranting and raving about the wall being immoral.
Mostly people looking for work because they are dirt poor. Drug smugglers filling the desire for drugs.
Turn the country into fortress America for what? Just as the terrorist won on 911 for the damage it did to personal freedoms. I think work visas(passes) and telling people to show some common sense and personal responsibility about drug use is what is needed. Maybe some serious talk about the Mexican government is in order.
We generally deny things we are not privy to but HF says human nature does not change. Assuming that is true, I would say that before he became Augustus, Octavian tried to shake down Mark Antony. I am not going to kid myself that Augustus was some sort of saint when sainthood wasn’t even in fashion.
Augustus probably also grabbed his share of pussy. Due to the unchanging nature of humanity and world leaders, we can almost say Trump is no different than that early Roman emperor.
With the revelation in the trial of El Chapo, that he gave the former Mexican president (EPN) a $100M bribe, it’s possible then-candidate Trump went over there to shake him down. Despite how dumb Trump pretends to be – it was reported he didn’t even take briefings – he is always ahead of the curve when it comes to dirt on his enemies. How dumb is that?
It’s quite likely Trump knew about the payoff to EPN.(If you recall, Jesse Jackson tried to shake down Vicente Fox over some anti-black offense.) EPN looked pretty pissed off, like he just got hit up for the vig.
One of the most – if not the most- effective walls in all of history was Masada. There was only a one-person-width trail up the side into the fortress. Pictures really don’t do it justice, you have to see it and walk it to get the full effect. And the Romans took their time and simply built a ramp up the side until they could march over the edge. Took two years and who knows how many slaves.
The point is that the end result is all about who has the power, whether to defend the wall or overwhelm it. If the Jews had the wherewithal, they could’ve harassed or destroyed or slowed the assault until the Romans gave up. But they were alone, and could only watch and protect that one trail, until the final dawn came and Roman soldiers along with it. Then it was submit or die fighting or, as they chose, kill their people and the last few fall on their swords.
Do I think we should build the wall? Yes.
Not because I think it is more than a temporary panacea. The power has been thrown away to muster the necessary will to defend these borders for any significant stretch of time. It’s not a physical power we have lost at this point – we could smoke check Mexico in a day or so, if we really wanted to. It’s the loss of a national will. I believe it’s permanently lost.
The wall would be just one more instance of doing what we can to keep retreating as slow as possible, keep using every bit of breathing space to prepare. It most undoubtedly would stifle at least some illegal entry, and at a minimum push most toward the choke-points. Like I said, any effective results would be short-lived.
The preparation is the thing, and we should avail ourselves with as much opportunity as possible to keep that first gleam of the spearpoint coming over the wall away as long as possible.
This preparation is personal. Do you use the time to prepare spiritually for the last great cleansing, however you see that playing out? Or do you use it to keep digging that figurative foxhole where you’ll hunker until the dust settles and the next cycle starts the long grind back? Or maybe you’ve decided to, however that applies in your life, to fall on your sword, preferring that end to whatever would be forced upon you?
At the end of it all, we do what we do because of who we are. Protect, retreat, plan, plant that apple tree despite the evidence that you’ll never see it bear fruit. Not because of what might happen, but simply because it’s just who and what we are.
“Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” Martin Luther
The wall was a campaign promise that was not meant to be kept anymore than the Obama promise of immigration reform. They kept that shit going for 16 years and hoped to put Hillary over the top with the same bullshit.
It has to be a neat trick to convince people to hold two opposing thoughts at the same time. One idea is that we have a uni-party in the USA. The opposite idea is that there is disagreement over a wall. Disagreement would mean we have two parties. Yet they align so perfectly that the only discernible difference is over a wall. That sound suspicious. Suppose your wife and your best friend have similar tastes, preferences and hobbies; they are so much in agreement that they like to spend lots of time together. The only thing they don’t do is sleep together. They just have never been a able to agree on that point at all.
Trump would be a fool to deliver on a wall too early, he and the Repukes can milk this vote-getting issue for another two or four election cycles, maybe forever like LBJ’s welfare machine.
The muppets are salivating over a wall like Pavlovian dogs. Everywhere you look, whites keep talking of walls. What a concept! You don’t have to offer them a chicken in every pot, just offer them a wall somewhere. I wonder if the Russians ever got so jazzed about Stalin’s Iron Curtain? No doubt he sold it as a way to keep future Nazi invasions out.
EC – what you wrote is definitely NOT irrelevant, so don’t think I’m knocking it. However, it barely seems to have any relevance to what I wrote. I would’ve thought that it would’ve been more of a stand-alone comment, instead of a reply to my post.
I didn’t say I thought it would get built. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. I personally loathe both ‘parties’, and know that both are so beyond corrupt that I don’t see how their flesh doesn’t fall like confetti every time they move. The “Wall” as such and all the furor surrounding that topic, is barely of any significance, and of only very limited value. I was more interested in using it as an example to show my opinion about a mindset, and trying to connect with HSF’s views/comments about recognizing patterns and what to do with that recognition. Everything only has value as long as it -whether concept or material object – gets you closer to what you see as a positive, or necessary, goal. Notice I wrote things, not people.
You were waxing poetic about a wall. I thought you needed prodding to wake up from the dream. My goodness, when did a wall become the holy grail or semblance of heaven on earth?
Guess people just can’t make up their minds…
With all the despair about the illegals invasion – Obama was the deporter in chief at the same time he was ‘encouraging’ illegal immigration – a manufactured crisis was followed up with a manufactured solution.
I have watched this cartoon before; a salesman employs a mouse to invade a home so that he can sell the housewife a mousetrap.
The point will be lost on the Walleyes.
Certain people here, who cannot put 2 and 4 together will call me an open borders liberal for mentioning that just a few years ago, we were selling guns to the drug traffickers.
You made quite a few good points above but I think my basic premise was misunderstood- both the archaeologists and the customs people were focused on the little details; pottery shards, roasted beetles, etc. They both understood quite well where each of these pieces fit, they were specialists in each profession studying the clues until they picked up a pattern; this site is bronze age because of the kind of knife blade, those guys are smuggling because of their luggage. The bigger picture/pattern over longer periods that I noticed was that there are distinct separations between cultures(not civilizations) that can be identified by the construction of fortifications and that as soon as a culture became focused on “posh” items with “high status” dwellings and overly comfortable in their wealth and privilege, a hungrier, more aggressive culture displaced them. I didn’t claim that the fall of any particular culture was completely due to their importation of foreign labor-to do scut work, or to serve in their military/at the borders/manning the walls-only that once a culture reached that point it was past the point of no return. Arminius comes to mind.
And watching those poor customs workers looking for needles in a haystack, half of them foreign born, while rivers of humans from a hundred nations simply marched past them 24/7 kind of lets you know where we are today.
I’m not emotionally invested in historic trends. Every dog has it’s day and if our time is drawing to a close because we’ve lost the spark that made us great and now we just want to lay around enjoying shiny baubles while the rising tide of the Earth displace us with vigor, that’s just the way the world works. It’s nature.
I was going to do a third installment in this series but maybe this was enough. I’m not sure anyone wants to hear my take on 60 episodes of Love American Style.
Please do. It might flush out the clogged tubes of the old timers who still remember when members of opposite genders consorted in private moments with emotions now reserved for soy boys. Today, every move is recorded, Instagram-ed, graded and commented on in a furious flurry by a flock of fake friends
I would love to see what you have to say about “Love American Style.”
WALLS WORK>>
Hey, look who just woke up.
Love American Style?!Time to get off the computer/get your parchment/quill/ink and work on your book!I realize as a song writer one gets mental blocks but filling in down time with inane tv programs like LAS will not help!
I would say if the writing in a pause phase regarding book time to read up on a Hornady loading manual and figure out a optimum load for various rifles/situations ect.
Anyhow,how ever you spend your “down time”,heal well and hope you soon back to the normal routines/life.