Your Sunday Morning Prop Noise

A gaggle of Spitfires:

Aux barricades, mes amis !

Today is Bastille Day, the French National Day.

A version that is more familiar to American audiences:

Allons enfants de la Patrie
Le jour de gloire est arrivé !
Contre nous de la tyrannie
L'étendard sanglant est levé
Entendez-vous dans nos campagnes
Mugir ces féroces soldats ?
Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras.
Égorger vos fils, vos compagnes !

Aux armes citoyens
Formez vos bataillons
Marchons, marchons
Qu'un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons

(Full translation, which makes The Star-Spangled Banner look pacifistic.)

The Bastille was torn down very soon afterwards. Very little of it survives. The key to the fortress was given by Marquis de Lafayette to President Washington. It is on display at Mount Vernon.

And next year, we may have to do this for reals.

Happy Gettysburg Day

The Battle of Gettysburgh ended on this day in 1863. It was the high-water mark of the Rebellion of the Slavers.

163 years later, a Southern sympathizer who would have surrendered to the South inhabits the White House. No doubt he regards the Union victory as a tragedy. Fuck that guy.

The following day, Vicksburgh surrendered. The Englishmen pressuring their government to support the Confederacy gave up. Four months later, President Lincoln gave what may be the greatest speech goiven by an American president.

Hurrah for the Union!

And fuck this guy, his co-defendants, those who sent him there and those who support what they did.

161 Years

The last flag of the Confederacy was flown by the Army of Northern Virginia, 161 years ago today:

The loser was one of the most overrated generals in American history.

The lies of the "lost cause" fools that the war wasn't about owning people continue to this day.

Sixty Years Ago, the Right Did the Same Thing

Sixty years ago, the Klan murdered a white woman who was helping civil rights marchers. And the FBI worked to smear her.

CBS- Whitewashing History

CBS News(max) ran a story about the reintroduction about the reintroduction of bison in Illinois and whitewashed the cause of them being extirpated two centuries ago.

That's pretty fucking weak tea.

Truth

Marisa Kabas:

Trump did January 6th. Republicans did january 6th. Violent traitors did january 6th. They stormed the capitol, destroyed the building and threatened to kill members of Congress. Ashli Babbitt was a violent insurrectionist. The Capitol Police protected people.

These are truths we need to repeat.

It was treason.

And even they seem to know it.

But, of course, the Orange Insurrectionist is publishing wholescale lies.

Veterans' Day

For all veterans.

I remember an old man who lived one block down when I was a kid. He was a veteran of the Spanish-American War. World War I veterans and their wives were senior administrators and teachers and factory managers. WWII veterans and women war workers were raising families (a WASP lived two doors down). Older kids were sweating being drafted for Vietnam.

This blog was active while there were still a few Great War veterans alive. The veterans from World War II are almost gone. The Vietnam War vets are in their seventies and older. The Korean War vets are in their nineties.

This is a day to honor all veterals, living and passed. Sadly, we keep making and needing more of them. And then disregarding their needs after their service is over.

Racist as Fuck: Heritage Foundation

The Heritage Foundation had two memorial panels removed from a military cemetery in Holland. Because those panels described the work of, as the Dutch see it, Black Liberators.

The Dutch are not amused. Nor should they be. they were occupied by Nazi Germany and the Heritage Foundation, as recent events has shown, is Nazi-infused.

I haven't been blogging about the Nazi/groyper fighting going on there. Maybe I'll write up a quck sketch of it. For it seems that the Right can go from Conservative to Nazi in no time flat.

And Then There Were None

The last American WW2 ace has died. Donald McPherson was 103.

Because It's Friday

One hundred years ago, celebrating the first hundred years of railroading.

About Locomotion No.1.

Not With a Whimper, But With a Bang

Eighty years ago today, a B-29 bomber named "Enola Gay" dropped "Little Boy", a uranium-fueled atomic bomb, on the city of Hiroshima. The bomb was not as destructive as the firebombing of Tokyo, a few month before, but it was a hell of a lot faster and had a lot more lingering effects.

Don't count me amongst the brigade of hand-wringers over the use of the bombs. I am here, my siblings, nieces, nephews and cousins are here because of the use of atomic bombs. My father was in the Army in the Pacific; he had been trained to defuse Japanese ordnance. One of my uncles was in the Pacific, a two-invasion Marine. Another uncle was in the ETO. a fourth was coming up on draft eligibility. All would have been sucked into the greedy maw of the meatgrinder that would have been Operation Downfall.

It would have been a series of very bloody battles, as, unlike the fighting in Europe, the fighting in the Pacific was largely a no-quarter contest. Likely a million or more Allied servicemen would have been killed, with Japanese casualties of ten to fifty times as high, including a good percentage of the civilian population. A goodly part of Japan would have been turned into ruins.

Our Thin-Skinned Toddler-in-Chief

The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History removed references to President Donald Trump's two impeachment proceedings from an exhibit on the "Limits of Presidential Power," a Smithsonian spokesperson confirmed to ABC News. The spokesperson said a future exhibit will include all presidential impeachments.

The museum decided to "restore" the section of a permanent exhibition to its "2008 appearance" because various topics had not been updated since that year and therefore they removed references to Trump, the Smithsonian spokesperson told ABC News on Thursday.

Anyone who says that the Smithsonian didn't remove the references to Trump because he pitched a fit is full of shit. The word on the street is that the Smithsonian was threatened with both a loss of funing and closure of the Museum of American History if they didn't remove the references to Trump being impeached.

What a narcissistic, whiny, petulant, overly-made-up, childish, demented and fat old fuck.

Who is still in the Epstein files.

Some have harsh words for this man of renown, But some think our attitude should be one of gratitude, Like the widows and cripples in Old London Town, Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.

Tom Lehrer has died.

If you don't know his work, get thy ass to YouTube and catch both his songs and his work for the kiddie show The Electric Company. Seventy years since he started doing his songs and about sixty since he stopped performing his comedic songs, his work is still timely.

Aux barricades, mes amis !

Today is Bastille Day, the French National Day.

A version that is more familiar to American audiences:

Allons enfants de la Patrie
Le jour de gloire est arrivé !
Contre nous de la tyrannie
L'étendard sanglant est levé
Entendez-vous dans nos campagnes
Mugir ces féroces soldats ?
Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras.
Égorger vos fils, vos compagnes !

Aux armes citoyens
Formez vos bataillons
Marchons, marchons
Qu'un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons

(Full translation, which makes The Star-Spangled Banner look pacifistic.)

The Bastille was torn down very soon afterwards. Very little of it survives. The key to the fortress was given by Marquis de Lafayette to President Washington. It is on display at Mount Vernon.

And next year, we may have to do this for reals.

249 Years Ago

In March of 1776, the Continental Army, under the command of Gen. Washington, fortified Dorchester Heights (now part of Boston) with cannon brought overland from Fort Ticonderoga. The British Army almost immediately realized that they could not hold on in Boston, and so they evacuated the city. This was the first major victory of the war. Thomas Jefferson and the Second Continental Congress got to work to declare independence.

Read aloud by the staff at NPR, many years ago.

IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Juneteeth Should Be National Fuck Texas Day

Juneteeth celebrates the day that the slaveowners in Texas were forced, at bayonet point, to recognize that the Civil War was over and that their slaves were free. They knew the war was over, of course, but they hung onto their slaves until they couldn't.

That's one thing.

The other thing is the big lie over Texas's war of independence. For it seems that it was yet another war fought over the desire of rich white southerners to own slaves, as Mexico had abolished slavery and the rich white Texans wanted to own them. So when you see or read crap about "Remember the Alamo", keep in mind that it was a fight by slavers over abolitionists. Which is why the Mexicans let the two Black men who survived the fight 9one a slave, the other free) leave unmolested.

Happy Antifa Day

That trip was necessary.

Unfortunately, the threat now comes from within. It comes from billionaires, who want the government to benefit them alone. It comes from a political party that has taken up the flag of the Klan with its "southern strategy" of hate-based politics. It comes from voters who have been suckered into letting the billionaires pick their pockets, rob them of health care and steal their retirement funds so long as they think that some other group has it worse than they do.

The FLOSS Fucks Up V-E Day

President Donald Trump has issued a proclamation designating Thursday as a day for the United States to celebrate victory in World War II as countries in Europe already do.
...
“Many of our allies and friends are celebrating May 8th as Victory Day, but we did more than any other Country, by far, in producing a victorious result on World War II. I am hereby renaming May 8th as Victory Day for World War II and November 11th as Victory Day for World War I,” he said last week on social media. “We won both Wars, nobody was close to us in terms of strength, bravery, or military brilliance, but we never celebrate anything — That’s because we don’t have leaders anymore, that know how to do so! We are going to start celebrating our victories again!”

He can't open his mouth without revealing his deep ignorance and shallow understanding of anything whatsoever. Let's detail a few, shall we?

• Fighting was going on in the Pacific and would until the Japanese surrendered in August.
• The Soviet Union had a small campaign going on against the Germans, in which they suffered something like sixty times the casualties of the United States.
• When the Allies named a supreme military commander in World War I, it was French Army General Ferdinand Foch. American troops didn't show up on the battlefield until the spring of 1918. More damning, American commanders adopted the "hey, diddle, diddle, straight up the middle" frontal assault tactics that the more-seasoned commanders in other armies, by that time in the war, knew were ineffective and which did little except produce high casulaties. American troops did supply the edge in both fresh units and morale that helped defeat the Germans, but the bulk of the fighting and the commanding was done by the British and the French.

Trump knows as much about history, or anything for that matter, as the average housepet. If he had gone on the show "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader", he would have been flayed.

And this, of course:

Trump is on the side of fascism, as was his party in the 1930s. It's kind of bitterly amusing that he is so keen on taking credit for what people in his party originially called "Mister Roosevelt's War" and who did everything they could to defund both the American military and deny aid to the Allies, whether out of naïve isolationism or a desire to see fascism win is still debatable.

With his affinity for Hitler and Nazi Germany, it's a safe bet that Trump believes that we fought on the wrong side of the war.

Your Sunday Morning Prop Noise

In memory of Group Captain John Hemingway, who flew Hurricanes in the Battle of Britain,