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On this date in 1794, Congress authorized the creation of a permanent United States Navy and the construction of six frigates. The US Navy today is the most powerful on the planet, deploying almost 300 ships, including 10 aircraft carriers, around the world.

Wednesday, March 26, 2014 The Shape of a Post-American World Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog The post-American world will be many things, but multilateral isn't one of them. There will be no world government and international organizations will be good for little except sucking up the last drops of wealth and prestige of the United States. It will be a chaotic place with everyone out for themselves. The Cold War map of the world divided into two camps was simple and clear. The post-American world will be a much more ambiguous place. Instead of two global...

A number of years ago I came across a good image of the above Slave's Friend abolitionist pamphlet.   It was published sometime between 1836 and 1860, most likely in the earlier years.    Freeper Ruy Dias de Bivar was kind enough to send me the image above, which is from MAN AT ARMS, published by the NRA, August, 1997, page 12. I intend to make this pamphlet easily available on the Internets, but I need a better image than the one above.   I know at least one better one exists, because I saw it in a reference book on weapons...

YouTube:1954 Commercial for the UNIVAC Computer This 1954 commercial for the Univac Computer is hilariously anachronistic. It is the first electronic computing system to be proven by widespread use. Because of its exclusive self-checking features, Univac can not make a mistake. They said the same thing about the HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

 Forgive them for thinking they HAD ALREADY joined an anti-Russian alliance upon entering NATO...  While Poland may be a formal and full member of both NATO and the European Union, they have all but given up on any timely, effective support from these 'allies' in the wake of shocking weakness displayed by the West throughout the recent Crimean land-grab. With Obama a disinterested putz and the EU heavily dependent on Russian gas/oil, the Poles have clearly been shocked by events in Ukraine, and can see that they might be on their own should Putin decide to turn their way. With good reason: the Russians have taken their...

I remember the story of the Uruguayan air force flight 571 that crashed in the Andes in 1972 with 45 people on board and the 16 survivors who cannibalized the snow-preserved dead in order to survive. Humanity recoiled in horror. During the 1932-1933 Russian engineered famine called Holomodor (extermination by hunger) in Ukraine, millions of Ukrainians died of starvation while some relatives, friends, and neighbors engaged in cannibalism to survive. Survivor Olena Goncharuk felt the terror: “We were afraid to go out in the village, because people were starving and they hunted children. My neighbor had a daughter, who disappeared....

Since the sensationalized reports in American mass media of the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting, the earlier movie theater killing in Aurora, Colorado and the rampage at the Navy Yard in Washington D.C., there has been a renewed focus on passing new legislation making acquiring a firearm more difficult and building a bureaucratic paper trail on citizens purchasing them. So far none of it has gotten any traction, but we're only another sensationalized event away from a new salvo against gun owners. The rationale for the proposed hindrances of average citizens and their lawful rights to own firearms is that some...

It’s another one of those articles that slipped by. The liberal media acts a lot like termites, destroying the integrity of a structure in ways you often can’t see until there’s a big problem. They’re constantly firing little shots to damage republicans, and those little points add up with the masses they’re trying to control. Hear More in this ZoNation. - See more at: http://alfonzorachel.com/1930/zonation-media-drive-jindal#sthash.IH79hsJw.dpuf

The Middle East is falling apart. The United States have ceased even to resemble a world power and force for good. Domestically, the United States are torn apart. It's time for President Obama to divide his remaining time in office between golfing and sleeping.Here's a link to a recent analysis of U.S. contributions to increasing instability in the Middle East. Even principals in the Obama Administration disagree substantively. Martin Indyk, special U.S. envoy for the Israeli - Palestinian "peace process" talks, was present at an Arab League summit in Kuwait to oppose passage of an extremely hard line Arab position on the peace talks -- which the Obama Administration has managed to...

On Sept. 18, 1980, at about 6:30 in the evening, Senior Airman David F. Powell and Airman Jeffrey L. Plumb walked into the silo at Launch Complex 374-7, a few miles north of Damascus, Arkansas. They were planning to do a routine maintenance procedure on a Titan II missile. They’d spent countless hours underground at complexes like this one. But no matter how many times they entered the silo, the Titan II always looked impressive. It was the largest intercontinental ballistic missile ever built by the United States: Ten feet in diameter and 103 feet tall, roughly the height of...

Monday, March 24, 2014 A Tale of Two Centuries Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog It's unfair to expect Obama to do anything about Ukraine when his biggest priority is convincing twenty-somethings to buy worthless health insurance policies by appearing on online comedy shows and deploying his March Madness bracket. The Obama Twitter feeds are filled with desperate pleas to buy ObamaCare; harnessing every memeworthy bit of internet detritus from cat pictures to twerking in the hopes of convincing  healthy young people who don't want health insurance to buy it anyway. On March 17th, Obama's Twitter linked...

In 1998, British Doctor Andrew Wakefield published research findings in Britain's famed medical journal The Lancet linking autism to a children’s vaccine (MMR) for measles, mumps and rubella. The doctor’s claims resulted in a panic as they “…triggered a slump in immunization levels, outbreaks of infectious disease and worldwide public worry.” In 2004, London Sunday Times reporter Brian Deer revealed that Dr. Wakefield had literally MADE UP the research which showed autism resulting in a matter of days after children had been vaccinated. Deer found that a group of attorneys was paying Wakefield large sums to discredit the MMR vaccine....

Leadership comes in many forms and with many levels of risk, but history gives us a few moments when leaders stood alone and were proven right. [...] In late June 1948 the Soviets cut all road, rail and water access to Berlin, a city controlled by the Western Allies yet surrounded by Soviet-controlled territories. The Soviet’s goal: take Berlin from the Allies by forcing the US-UK-French alliance into one of two options: try to protect a city of 2.1 million starving Germans, or war. The Soviets expected the West to surrender the city quickly. [...] The US was in the...

Sunday, March 23, 2014 The End of Science Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog The reemergence of Cosmos could not have come at a better time, not because it has something to teach us about science, but because are living in Sagan's world where real science is harder than ever to come by. Carl Sagan was the country's leading practitioner of the mythologization of science, transforming a process into a philosophy, substituting political agendas for inquiry and arrogance for research. Sagan was often wrong, but it didn't matter because his errors were scientific, rather than ideological or...

March 22, 2014, 2014 WELL, THAT MAKES SENSE: Nancy Pelosi to Accept Award Named After KKK Advocate and Race Eugenicist Doug Ross Just when you think the Democrat Party has hit rock bottom, they break out the jackhammer and start digging a new sub-basement: Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PP) announced that House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, an alleged Roman Catholic, will be given “the Margaret Sanger Award, the organization’s highest honor, in recognition of her leadership, excellence, and outstanding contributions to the reproductive health and rights movement over the course of her career,” according to a Planned Parenthood website...

On this day in 1775 at Saint John's Church in Richmond, Virginia, Patrick Henry made his speech before the House of Burgesses pressing for the need to mobilize to respond to the British. The end of Henry's speech is popularly known as: "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!" No one is exactly sure what Henry said that day, as the speech was written decades...

Maria Corina Machado, a not-yet-arrested Venezuelan opposition leader, is well spoken, understands how to respond effectively to question and knows what she, the people -- and the opposition in general -- want.[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9Qgnu-e76c?feature=player_detailpage] Video linkPlease watch the entire twenty-five minute video -- her English is as excellent. Is it too much to hope for that some of our own opposition "leaders" will watch and learn from her? Many of them could profit from doing so; if they do, the rest of us would too. I have often written about the worsening mess in Venezuela here, here, here, here and elsewhere over the...

Participants, spectators and critics produced scores of historical documents during the French Revolution.   These items are now available in the French Revolution Digital Archive, a digital collection recently released by Stanford Libraries.   FRDA brings together two foundational sources for French Revolution research: the Archives parlementaires, a day-to-day record of parliamentary debates and discussions held between 1789 and 1794, and Images de la Révolution française, a vast visual corpus from the collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.  The archive was a multiyear endeavor and was developed in response to expressed need by scholars for improved access to their sources, according to...

Friday, March 21, 2014 Friday Afternoon Roundup - The Voices They Hear Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Progressives Summarized SUPERSTAR There is no Obama administration. There is an Obama campaign. And that campaign is part of an organization built around a single figure; Obama Inc. Obama Inc. has more in common with the type of organization built around a celebrity like Beyonce than a conventional political organization. It can handle everything from fundraising, branding to viral marketing, but like the inner circles of top celebrities, the most influential person in the organization is the one who...