eddessaknight's Blog

The British Cunard ocean liner RMS Queen Mary on the high seas

1936 

England's Pride, the Royal Mail Ship Queen Mary begins her successful maiden voyage from from Southampton,England across the wide Atlantic Ocean to New York City  :-)

 

Wayfair WWII Photo Of RMS Queen Mary Arriving In New York Harbor By John Parrot - Photograph Print On Canvas & Fabric In Black/White EBHR3919_32118937 EBHR3919_32118937

Nota Bene

Not only a luxury sea liner breaking travel speed records, The Queen her duty during WW11 by becoming an active troop carrier across the oceans  :-)

Entry #1,611

WW11 major 'Malmedy Massacre' of 84 POW American troops during Battle of the Bulge, Belgium

December 17, 1944

According to various verified accounts, the Germans opened deadly fire on the unarmed prisoners in a field, a barbarous retaliation killing of more than 84 in what came to be known as the Malmedy Massacre, which was outside of the International  Geneva accords

This  Malmedy massacre was a German war crime committed by soldiers of the Waffen-SS on 17 December 1944, at the Baugnez crossroads near the city of Malmedy, Belgium, during the Battle of the Bulge. Soldiers of Kampfgruppe Peiper summarily killed eighty-four U.S. Army prisoners of war who had surrendered after a brief battle. The Waffen-SS soldiers had grouped the  U.S. POWs in a farmer's field, where they used machine guns to shoot and kill the grouped POWs; the prisoners of war who survived the g

....... :-(

 

Requiem en pace +

Thinking of...

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Entry #1,610

Heroin Saint Joan of Arc betrayed by French BURGUNDIANS

1430 

Heroin miraculous Victor over English occupied Orleans,young  St Joan of Arc is captured by by French Burundians, who allied with England,treacherously sold $$$ her out to English forces  :-(

 

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Joan of Arc is considered a heroine of France for her role in the siege of Orléans and the coronation of Charles VII of France during the Hundred Years' War

Entry #1,607

Clara Barton angelically founded th American Red Cross + :-)

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Heroin ,Clarissa Harlowe Barton was an American nurse who founded the American Red Cross. She was a hospital nurse in the American Civil War, a teacher, and a patent clerk. Since nursing education was not then very formalized and she did not attend nursing school, she provided self-taught nursing care. Barton is noteworthy for doing humanitarian work and civil rights advocacy at a time before women had the right to vote. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1973.

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Entry #1,606

Another Aviator, Emila Earhart takes to wings on Lucky Lindy Day

Heroin 'Mily' took off from Newfoundland  to become first brave lady to fly solo Across the great Atlantic waves ~~~~. Unfortunately,because of weather and equipment problems, Earhart set down in Northern Ireland instead of her intended France about 15 hours after takeoff.

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"Women, like men should try to do the impossible and when they fail, it should be a challenge to others."

~EH

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Entry #1,605

The Glorious Winged SPIRIT OF SAINT LOUIS

Classical  Iconic Icarus

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Charles Lindbergh American Aviator Hero
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Charles Lindbergh American Aviator Hero
Charles Augustus Lindbergh was an American aviator, military officer, author, inventor, and activist. At the age of 25, he achieved instantaneous world fame by making the first non stop flight from Roosevelt Field Long Island New York to Paris aboard 
"The Spirit Of St Louis' The Eagle of the USA on the historic non stop solo flight to France - BRAVO Party
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Entry #1,604

CIVIL WAR Tragedy ALAMAC; Wasted Siege & Battle of Vicksburg 1863 :-(

Image result for battle of vicksburg 1863. Size: 224 x 160. Source: fineartamerica.com
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Image result for battle of vicksburg 1863. Size: 215 x 160. Source: www.historyonthenet.com
Image result for battle of vicksburg 1863. Size: 226 x 160. Source: fineartamerica.com
The siege of Vicksburg (May 18 – July 4, 1863) was the final major military action in the Vicksburg campaign of the American Civil War. In a series of maneuvers, Union Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and his Army of the Tennessee crossed the Mississippi River and drove the Confederate Army of Mississippi , led by Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton , into the defensive lines surrounding the fortress city of Vicksburg, Mississippi .
Date:  May 18 – July 4, 1863
Entry #1,602

Americans are now entering uncharted, revolutionary territory :-(

Commentary

Americans are now entering uncharted, revolutionary territory. They may witness things over the next five months that once would have seemed unimaginable.

Until the Ukrainian conflict, we had never witnessed a major land war inside Europe directly involving a nuclear power.

In desperation, Russia’s impaired and unhinged leader, Russian President Vladimir Putin, now talks trash about the likelihood of nuclear war. A 79-year-old U.S. President Joe Biden bellows back that his war-losing nuclear adversary is a murderer, a war criminal, and a butcher who should be removed from power.

After a year of politicizing the U.S. military and its self-induced catastrophe in Afghanistan, America has lost deterrence abroad. China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia are conniving on how best to exploit this rare window of global military opportunity.

The traditional bedrocks of the American system—a stable economy, energy independence, vast surpluses of food, hallowed universities, a professional judiciary, law enforcement, and a credible criminal justice system—are dissolving.

Gas and diesel prices are hitting historic levels. Inflation is at a 40-year high. New cars and homes are unaffordable. The necessary remedy of high interest and tight money will be almost as bad as the disease of hyperinflation.

There is no southern border.

Expect more than 1 million foreign nationals to swarm into the United States this summer without audit, COVID testing, or vaccination. None will have any worry of consequences for breaking U.S. immigration law.

Police are underfunded and increasingly defunded. District attorneys deliberately release violent criminals without charges. (Literally 10,000 people witnessed a deranged man with a knife attack comedian Dave Chappelle onstage at the Hollywood Bowl last week, and the Los Angeles County DA refused to press felony charges.) Murder and assault are spiraling. Carjackings and smash-and-grab thefts are now normal big-city events.

Crime is now mostly a political matter. Ideology, race, and politics determine whether the law is even applied.

Supermarket shelves are thinning, and meats are now beyond the budgets of millions of Americans. An American president—in a first—casually warns of food shortages. Baby formula has disappeared from many shelves.

Politics are resembling the violent last days of the Roman Republic. An illegal leak of a possible impending Supreme Court reversal of Roe v. Wade that would allow state voters to set their own abortion laws has created national hysteria.

Never has a White House tacitly approved mobs of protesters showing up at Supreme Court justices’ homes to rant and bully them into altering their votes.

There is no free speech anymore on campuses.

Merit is disappearing. Admissions, hiring, promotion, retention, grading, and advancement are predicated increasingly on mouthing the right orthodoxies or belonging to the proper racial, gender, or ethnic category.

When the new campus commissariat finally finishes absorbing the last redoubts in science, math, engineering, medical, and professional schools, America will slide into permanent mediocrity and irreversible declining standards of living.

What happened?

Remember, all these catastrophes are self-induced. They are choices, not fate. The United States has the largest combined gas, coal, and oil deposits in the world. It possesses the know-how to build the safest pipelines and ensure the cleanest energy development on the planet.

Inflation was a deliberate Biden choice. For short-term political advantage, he kept printing trillions of dollars, incentivizing labor nonparticipation, and keeping interest rates at historical lows—at a time of pent-up global demand.

The administration wanted no border. Only that way can politicized, impoverished immigrants repay left-wing undermining of the entire legal immigration system with their fealty at the ballot box.

Once esoteric, crack-pot academic theories—“modern monetary theory,” critical legal theory, critical race theory—now dominate policymaking in the Biden administration.

The common denominator in all of this is ideology overruling empiricism, common sense, and pragmatism. Ruling elites would rather be politically correct failures and unpopular than politically incorrect, successful, and popular.

Is this not the tired story of left-wing revolutionaries from 18th-century France to early 20th-century Russia to the contemporary disasters in Cuba and Venezuela?

The American people reject the calamitous policies of 2021–2022. Yet the radical cadres surrounding a cognitively inert Biden still push them through by executive orders, bureaucratic directives, and deliberate cabinet nonperformance.

Why? The left has no confidence either in constitutional government or common sense.

So as the public pushes back, expect at the ground level more doxxing, cancel culture, deplatforming, ministries of disinformation, swarming the private homes of officials they target for bullying, and likely violent demonstrations in our streets this summer.

Meanwhile, left-wing elites will do their best to ignore Supreme Court decisions, illegally cancel student debts, and likely by this fall issue more COVID lockdowns. They will still dream of packing the Court, ending the filibuster, scrapping the Electoral College, adding more states, and flooding the November balloting with hundreds of millions more dollars of dark money from Silicon Valley.

When revolutionaries undermine the system, earn the antipathy of the people, and face looming disaster at the polls, it is then that they prove the most dangerous—as we shall see over the next few months.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Entry #1,601

Heroes Lewis and Clark Pacific Norhtwest Expedition >>

May 25th 1804

The transcontinental Lewis and Clark Expedition to explore the newly purchased Louisiana Territory as well as the still unknown vast Northwest bravely left camp near present day Hartford, Illinois,Hartford >>>>>>

Entry #1,599

Home plate ...

WORTHWHILE excellent article to read from beginning to end.

Twenty years ago, in Nashville , Tennessee , during the first week of January, 1996, more than 4,000 baseball coaches descended upon the Opryland Hotel for the 52nd annual ABCA's convention.

They waited in line to register with the hotel staff, there was more veteran coaches rumbling about the lineup of speakers scheduled to present during the weekend. One name, in particular, kept resurfacing, always with the same sentiment — “John Scolinos is here? Oh, man, worth every penny of my airfare.”

Who is John Scolinos?

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In 1996, Coach Scolinos was 78 years old and five years retired from a college coaching career that began in 1948. He shuffled to the stage to an impressive standing ovation, wearing dark polyester pants, a light blue shirt, and a string around his neck from which home plate hung — a full-sized, stark-white home plate.

Seriously, who is this guy?

After speaking for twenty-five minutes, not once mentioning the prop hanging around his neck, Coach Scolinos appeared to notice the snickering among some of the coaches. Even those who knew Coach Scolinos had to wonder exactly where he was going with this, or if he had simply forgotten about home plate since he’d gotten on stage. Then, finally …

“You’re probably all wondering why I’m wearing home plate around my neck,” he said, his voice growing irascible. I laughed along with the others, acknowledging the possibility. “I may be old, but I’m not crazy. The reason I stand before you today is to share with you baseball people what I’ve learned in my life, what I’ve learned about home plate in my 78 years.”

Several hands went up when Scolinos asked how many Little League coaches were in the room. “Do you know how wide home plate is in Little League?”

After a pause, someone offered, “Seventeen inches?”, more of a question than answer.

“That’s right,” he said. “How about in Babe Ruth’s day? Any Babe Ruth coaches in the house?” Another long pause.

“Seventeen inches?” a guess from another reluctant coach.

“That’s right,” said Scolinos. “Now, how many high school coaches do we have in the room?” Hundreds of hands shot up, as the pattern began to appear. “How wide is home plate in high school baseball?”

“Seventeen inches,” they said, sounding more confident.

“You’re right!” Scolinos barked. “And you college coaches, how wide is home plate in college?”

“Seventeen inches!” we said, in unison.

“Any Minor League coaches here? How wide is home plate in pro ball?”............“Seventeen inches!”

“RIGHT! And in the Major Leagues, how wide home plate is in the Major Leagues?

“Seventeen inches!”

“SEV-EN-TEEN INCHES!” he confirmed, his voice bellowing off the walls. “And what do they do with a Big League pitcher who can’t throw the ball over seventeen inches?” Pause. “They send him to Pocatello !” he hollered, drawing raucous laughter. “What they don’t do is this: they don’t say, ‘Ah, that’s okay, Jimmy. If you can’t hit a seventeen-inch target? We’ll make it eighteen inches or nineteen inches. We’ll make it twenty inches so you have a better chance of hitting it. If you can’t hit that, let us know so we can make it wider still, say twenty-five inches.'”

Pause. “Coaches… what do we do when your best player shows up late to practice? or when our team rules forbid facial hair and a guy shows up unshaven? What if he gets caught drinking? Do we hold him accountable? Or do we change the rules to fit him? Do we widen home plate? "

The chuckles gradually faded as four thousand coaches grew quiet, the fog lifting as the old coach’s message began to unfold. He turned the plate toward himself and, using a Sharpie, began to draw something. When he turned it toward the crowd, point up, a house was revealed, complete with a freshly drawn door and two windows. “This is the problem in our homes today. With our marriages, with the way we parent our kids. With our discipline.

We don’t teach accountability to our kids, and there is no consequence for failing to meet standards. We just widen the plate!”

Pause. Then, to the point at the top of the house he added a small American flag. “This is the problem in our schools today. The quality of our education is going downhill fast and teachers have been stripped of the tools they need to be successful, and to educate and discipline our young people. We are allowing others to widen home plate! Where is that getting us?”

Silence. He replaced the flag with a Cross. “And this is the problem in the Church, where powerful people in positions of authority have taken advantage of young children, only to have such an atrocity swept under the rug for years. Our church leaders are widening home plate for themselves! And we allow it.”

“And the same is true with our government. Our so called representatives make rules for us that don’t apply to themselves. They take bribes from lobbyists and foreign countries. They no longer serve us. And we allow them to widen home plate! We see our country falling into a dark abyss while we just watch.”

I was amazed. At a baseball convention where I expected to learn something about curve balls and bunting and how to run better practices, I had learned something far more valuable.

From an old man with home plate strung around his neck, I had learned something about life, about myself, about my own weaknesses and about my responsibilities as a leader. I had to hold myself and others accountable to that which I knew to be right, lest our families, our faith, and our society continue down an undesirable path.

“If I am lucky,” Coach Scolinos concluded, “you will remember one thing from this old coach today. It is this: "If we fail to hold ourselves to a higher standard, a standard of what we know to be right; if we fail to hold our spouses and our children to the same standards, if we are unwilling or unable to provide a consequence when they do not meet the standard; and if our schools & churches & our government fail to hold themselves accountable to those they serve, there is but one thing to look forward to …”

With that, he held home plate in front of his chest, turned it around, and revealed its dark black backside, “…We have dark days ahead!.”

Note: Coach Scolinos died in 2009 at the age of 91, but not before touching the lives of hundreds of players and coaches,including mine. Meeting him at my first ABCA convention kept me returning year after year, looking for similar wisdom and inspiration from other coaches. He is the best clinic speaker the ABCA has ever known because he was so much more than a baseball coach. His message was clear: “Coaches, keep your players—no matter how good they are—your own children, your churches, your government, and most of all, keep yourself at seventeen inches."

And this my friends is what our country has become and what is wrong with it today, and now go out there and fix it!

Entry #1,596