Posted on 06/14/2006 5:58:12 PM PDT by Oshkalaboomboom
Confederate flags flown aboard the international space station and seemingly signed by a NASA astronaut showed up last week on the online auction site eBay.
The original eBay listing indicated that the 4-by-6-inch flags were brought aboard the space station by Russian cosmonaut Salizhan Sharipov in 2004, and an accompanying photo showed a sample flag that seemed to bear Sharipovs signature as well as that of Leroy Chiao, his NASA colleague on the station. Yet another photo showed several of the rebel flags floating in a space station module.
The item was pulled from the auction on Monday by the seller, Alex Panchenko of USSR-Russian Air-Space Collectibles Inc. in Los Angeles and on Tuesday, Panchenko told MSNBC.com that he removed the items from sale because he had concluded the flag and the authentication documents were forgeries.
However, Robert Pearlman, editor and founder of CollectSpace, said he believes the flags are authentic.
The picture taken of the flags aboard the station says a lot, he said. It would be difficult to fake, given the style and I couldn't see the motivation to do so. The onboard-the-ISS stamp, added Pearlman, is not known to have been counterfeited anywhere."
The disappearance of the flags followed a round of criticism over the weekend from former space scientist Keith Cowing, publisher of NASA Watch, an independent Web log. He cited the Confederate flags as an example of bad judgment on the ISS.
You'd think that someone on the U.S. side of the ISS program would have expressed some concern about flying a symbol on the ISS that many Americans associate with slavery, Cowing wrote.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Fort Sumter wasn't theirs to give up. It was Federal property. If California decided to seccede today, should the USAF abandon Vandenberg? If Florida secceded, should NASA walk away from Cape Canaveral? If your state secceded and decided to union with mexico, should *you* abandon your home?
> And I've been at work for two hours now.
Wow. Who knew that there were Web terminals in "Sonic" restaurants?
:P
You do understand of course that for the Democrats the confederate flag make the prefect tar baby for all those voters they lost in the south.
That all you "real" sons of the south can be so easily misled only fuels the claims that the south is inbred.
On the contrary, many, perhaps most slaves never saw the inside of a cotton gin. They worked as domestics or laborers in southern homes. Thomas Jackson, for example, was not a plantation owner, he was a teacher. Yet he owned as many as 10 slaves at one point in his life. Slavery was very much a middle-class institution with most slave owners owning fewer than 5 slaves.
that they paid for with the tariffs from the South.
Utter nonsense.
Can't blame his army for not trying, just lack of opportunity. During both campaigns in the North the Army of Northern Virginia lived off the land, taking food and livestock from local farms, and engaging in sporadic looting. And they also found time to grab any free blacks they found floating around and send them back south to slavery.
During the 1930's there was a WPA program to collect the interview living former slaves and record their memories of life under slavery. There are over 300 of them, most are available on the web, and I've read most of them at one time or another. In the vast majority of the cases the former slave didn't report any sort of abuse. Many of them even had fond memories of their former owners and weren't shy about saying so. Some said they were treated like family. All reported that life after slavery had been pretty hard, in many cases harder than life under slavery. But in all the inverviews I've read I cannot remember a single interviewee every saying that they wished they were still a slave. Doesn't that say something about the institution and it's effect on the slaves themselves?
Then why did none of the compromise solutions floated by southern leaders mention tariffs? They all dealth with only slavery. Why is slavery by far the single most often mentioned reason for secession in the 4 Declarations of the Causes of Secession? Why, if tariffs were such a bone of contention, was one of the first actions of the confederate congress to implement a tariff? One which, by the way, protected some southern industries and was theoretically unconstitutional?
Pure southron myth. Sunday schools for blacks were not uncommon in the south. Most southern churches felt it their duty to bring Christianity to the slaves. Jackson's Sunday school was far from the first and he didn't build it, it had been established at that church years prior to Jackson's joining. And you have to remember that some of the slaves at that school belonged to Jackson himself.
Name one.
You're mistaking me for someone else. I haven't mention the Alabama.
Sumter didn't belong to them in the first place.
As for the PC aspects, the 'ultimate liberal victimhood' has so damaged the heritage and history of this nation, it will be a miracle if history does not repeat itself. Just one more proof Ann Coulter is right.
Chains alone do not make a slave a slave. Only the lack of freedom, whether from confinement, servitude, or being browbeaten into submission can create that.
What greater tyranny than that which would suppress a heritage and the history that goes with it rather than learn about it, warts and all, and discuss it?
Instead, the PC march toward dhimmitude continues.
BTTT!
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