Uncle Ben's Rice...

[BoSoxGal]

As I believe Sue has posted before in 2nd Amendment threads, even with all the guns in private hands in this country, I doubt very much that the citizens could successfully repel a concerted effort by military and law enforcement to stage a military coup using the weaponry available to them.

Especially not if the majority of citizens were brainwashed into cooperation by a carefully implemented propaganda campaign prior, as occurred in Germany. Certainly not a minority of the population being singled out by the military with the support of the majority.

If more Jews in Germany and elsewhere in Reich-controlled countries had had guns, more Jews would have died on their own doorsteps than in concentration/labor camps.

[MajGenl.Meade]

That would have been an improvement. Clearly there's a lot of mistaken understanding of the communists in Weimar and the struggle against the infant Nazi party.

[dales]

Yeah and Hitler was a Catholic, right rube?

LMAO!

Only an idiot does not know that.

yrs,
rubato

[Sue U]

That would have been an improvement. Clearly there's a lot of mistaken understanding of the communists in Weimar and the struggle against the infant Nazi party.

So gang warfare and political assassination in the streets would have been the "proper" solution?

[Lord Jim]

All of the crusades began with the extermination of Jews in a European city.

Only an idiot does not know that.

yrs,
rubato

Which of course the Catholic Church condemned:

The massacre of the Rhineland Jews by the People's Crusade, and other associated persecutions, were condemned by the leaders and officials of the Catholic Church.[27] The bishops of Mainz, Speyer, and Worms had attempted to protect the Jews of those towns within the walls of their own palaces, but the People's Crusade broke in to slaughter them. Fifty years later when St. Bernard of Clairvaux was urging recruitment for the Second Crusade, he specifically criticized the attacks on Jews which occurred in the First Crusade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhineland_massacres

Yet another example of rube's penchant for attempting to deliberately mislead by leaving out key facts...It's a technique frequently employed by bigots of his type ...

Yeah and Hitler was a Catholic, right rube?

LMAO!

Only an idiot does not know that.

yrs,
rubato

Yeah, so was Joseph Stalin...

were less affected by Catholic Anti-semitism.

Was Catholicism responsible for your anti-semitism rube? Or is there some other cause for it?

[MajGenl.Meade]

That would have been an improvement. Clearly there's a lot of mistaken understanding of the communists in Weimar and the struggle against the infant Nazi party.

So gang warfare and political assassination in the streets would have been the "proper" solution?

So letting the Nazi party form and take over the country was the "proper" solution?

[MajGenl.Meade]

All of the crusades began with the extermination of Jews in a European city

Really? All of them? Details please

Rgds
Idiot

[Econoline]

Again: it was the anti-Semitism, not the lack of guns, that made the difference. Yes, there were a few instances of "Righteous Gentiles" in Germany and Poland who attempted to protect their Jewish neighbors...but by and large the Catholic and Protestant churches and the vast majority of Christians did nothing to interfere.

In the United States, with our rampant gun culture, gun owners rarely--I really want to say never, but I'll leave that open--have defended oppressed minorities (blacks, gays, religious minorities) from persecution and violence. Indeed, to the extent that a hated minority is seen as "armed and dangerous", that only serves to increase the level of prejudice; I can easily imagine how German Jews (and gypsies, homosexuals, etc.) being armed would have made it easier for them to be portrayed as dangerous enemies of the state.



P.S. Oh, and if the Church was steadfast against the persecution of the Jews prior to and during the Crusades, just where did all those devoutly religious Crusaders get the idea that the Jews were fair game? (Perhaps there were Islamic militant traitors in their ranks?)

P.P.S. And *WHO* first enunciated the command later paraphrased as “Kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out.”???

[MajGenl.Meade]

P.S. Oh, and if the Church was steadfast against the persecution of the Jews prior to and during the Crusades

Plural crusades again? LJ mentioned only one. And I'm waiting for the details on each and every other crusade than the first beginning with persecution of Jews. They may have done. But I'm an idiot so need rubato's help.

[Econoline]

Let me be clear: I'm not trying to defend rubato's statements; he can do that himself, if he wants to. I'm merely noting that the time of the Crusades (yes, plural) was a time of increasing hatred, persecution and slaughter of Jews by Christians, and that--whatever social forces they set in motion--the Crusades were in fact initiated by the Roman Catholic Church and carried out by its followers.

By the middle of the 11th century, Christianity had formally split between the Roman Catholic Church and the Byzantine Empire: The Emperor/Bishop of Constantinople and the Bishop of Rome had mutually excommunicated each other. In 1071, the Turks defeated the latter at the Battle of Manzikert. This left Constantinople exposed to attack from Muslims. Meanwhile, Christians were being ambushed during their pilgrimages to Jerusalem.

Emperor Alexius asked Pope Urban II for assistance. On 1095-NOV-27, the Pope called on Europeans to go on a crusade to liberate Jerusalem from its Muslim rulers. "The first and second wave of Crusaders murdered, raped and plundered their way up the Rhine and down the Danube as they headed for Jerusalem." The "army" was primarily composed of untrained peasants with their families, with a core of trained soldiers. On the way to the Middle East, they decided that only one of their goals was to wrest control of Jerusalem from the Muslims. A secondary task was to rid the world of as many non-Christians as possible - both Muslims and Jews. The Crusaders gave the Jews two choices in their slogan: "Christ-killers, embrace the Cross or die!" 12,000 Jews in the Rhine Valley alone were killed as the first Crusade passed through. Some Jewish writers refer to these events as the "first holocaust." Once the army reached Jerusalem and broke through the city walls, they slaughtered all the inhabitants that they could find (men, women, children, newborns). After locating about 6,000 Jews holed up in the synagogue, they set the building on fire; the Jews were burned alive. The Crusaders found that about 30,000 Muslims had fled to the al Aqsa Mosque. The Muslim were also slaughtered without mercy.

The Roman Catholic church taught that going to war against the "Infidels" was an act of Christian penance. If a believer was killed during a crusade, he would bypass purgatory, and be taken directly to heaven. By eliminating what might be many millennia of torture in Purgatory, many Christians were strongly motivated to volunteer for the crusades. "After pronouncing a solemn vow, each warrior received a cross from the hands of the pope or his legates, and was thenceforth considered a soldier of the Church."

These mass killings were repeated during each of the 8 additional crusades until the final, 9th, crusade in 1272 CE. Both Christians and Muslims believed that they were fighting on God's side against Satan; they believed that if they died on the battlefield they would be given preferential treatment in the Christian Heaven or the Muslim Paradise. Battles were fought with a terrible fierceness and a massive loss of life. Over a 200 year period, perhaps 200,000 people were killed. The Muslim warrior Salah a-Din subsequently recaptured Jerusalem from the Christians.

By the end of the crusades, most European Christians believed the unfounded blood-libel myths -- the rumor that Jews engaged in human sacrifice of Christian children. A long series of Christian persecutions of the Jews continued in Europe and Russia into the 20th century. They laid the foundation for the Nazi Holocaust.

The result of centuries of conflict among followers of the three main Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) was a "deep mutual hatred" and mistrust among the three faiths. Memories of these genocides still influence relationships among Jews, Christians and Muslims to the present time.

Among many Jews and Muslims, the term crusade evokes visions of genocide, mass murder, and mass extermination of innocent people. However, among many Christians it has become a positive term, frequently used to refer to mass rallies and campaigns to win converts - as in the Billy Graham Crusades. Out of respect for the victims of the "first holocaust," we recommend that the term be only used to refer to the wars of the Middle Ages.

(Source) BTW, at the Catholic high school I went to, the football and basketball teams were (and still are) named the Crusaders.

[Sue U]

That would have been an improvement. Clearly there's a lot of mistaken understanding of the communists in Weimar and the struggle against the infant Nazi party.

So gang warfare and political assassination in the streets would have been the "proper" solution?

So letting the Nazi party form and take over the country was the "proper" solution?

How would that have worked, exactly, prior to say 1933? What would prevent the Nazi party from forming? Jews and/or Communists get to shoot Nazis (they weren't even Nazis yet, just assholes) simply because they have a repugnant ideology? And remember, a lot more of them were elected to the Reichstag than were Communists.

[Econoline]

Back to Ben Carson and His Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat.

Here's a looong article by a retired U.S. Army officer, explaining Carson's lies about West Point and why they matter. It's pretty long (go to the link for the whole thing), but here is the concluding part of it:

These are the facts:

• 1. Carson was a senior in the 1968-1969 school year. That year he was promoted in the Junior ROTC program to Cadet Colonel and made the "Executive Officer" (in military parlance this is "XO," in other words the second highest ranked person in an organization).
  
  2. He applied to attend Yale that Fall of 1968. And only Yale, because he said that was all he could afford. (Remembering, USMA costs nothing to apply to, and even as a Junior, especially in JROTC, he would have had access to that information in his cadet detachment.)
  
  3. There was a banquet that he may have attended and where he could have met General Westmoreland, a four-star general and at the time America's most famous military commander. That was in February 1969. Carson's supporters, and then his campaign, and now Carson himself, say that it was probably actually at this point that Carson met Westmoreland.
  
  4. Carson said, in 1990 and numerous points in-between, that it was after the Memorial Day Parade in Detroit in May of 1969, that he met General Westmoreland. He was wrong. Westmoreland was not there.

This is what we know from Carson himself and his staff. Now, superimpose over this the official West Point timeline for application for today, as well as that pointed out in the 1966 Ebony magazine article supplied by the Carson campaign.

• A. Cadets should start the application in the Spring of their Junior year of High School. For Carson that was the Spring of 1968.
  
  B. In Spring of 1968 Westmoreland was still finishing off the Tet Offensive in Vietnam and its aftermath as the Commander, Military Assistance Command–Vietnam. He was not in Detroit at all.
  
  C. In the Spring of 1968 Carson was not a "Field Grade" cadet. He was still working his way up.
  
  D. The West Point deadline, in the late 1960s, was no later than eight months prior to when a prospective cadet would have to arrive at the Academy the following year.
  
  E. Cadets show up for "Beast Barracks" in late June, or by the first day or two of July, so the drop-dead date to complete both a nomination process getting a political nomination, and the Academy application would be late November of the prior year. In Carson's case that would be November 1968.

Now, some reasonable assumptions and additional facts.

• I. No "West Point officers" would initiate an application process after the drop-dead deadline for completion had already passed.
  
  II. Military officers in the field cannot offer appointments, then or now. That rests with a centralized board. Not even the Chief of Staff of the Army can do that. And none would because that would undercut Congress and civilian control of the military, since the nomination must come first.
  
  III. Appointments are made only after a political nomination has been made, usually by a Congressman/Senator, but sometimes using the slots reserved for the President (which he delegates). (Civilians rule the process, remember.)
  
  IV. No military officer at all would make an offer, by any definition of the word, to attend West Point in 1969 in February of that year. Nor would any make any suggestion that such an appointment was even possible. This would be "obligating the government" falsely and could end a career.
  
  V. No military officer would risk his career to make such a statement to a 17-year-old he had never met.
  
  VI. Presenting information to a person, and encouraging them to apply, is not the same as "offering a scholarship." When one attends a college fair and picks up information brochures from 17 tables they do not go home and say, "Mom, I got offers from 17 colleges!"
  
  V. Any officer talking to Ben Carson in 1969 would have, at best, suggested he apply for a position in the summer of 1970.
  
  VI. It does not cost anything to apply to West Point. (Though the costs of completing all travel and associated exams associated with the application process may cost.)
  
  VII. There was no formal recruiting (ie. Going out and finding prospects and then making them offers) operating out of West Point for anything but athletes in 1969.
  
  VIII. "Recruiting" for most of West Point, and all the rest of the Army, consists of spreading information. There were no teams of USMA officers meeting promising students in the Spring of their senior year, trying to entice them to attend West Point in a few weeks' time.

***

Got all that? Now, apply reason. This is what falls out.

Ben Carson did not receive any offer of a scholarship, or an appointment, or whatever you might want to call it. Not spoken or even implied. When he says that he did (and he has not backed off of this part of the story) he is not telling the truth. There is another word for that. It is apparent from everything listed above that he was not assured of acceptance, or anything like it, by any military officer. When he makes assertions to the contrary he is pitting his solitary word against the multi-century tradition of military subordination to civil authority and the honor of 240 years of oaths from the entire officer corps of the United States Army. Not to mention the legal proscriptions of the Acts of Congress dating all the way back to March 1, 1843.

In effect he was making up a story deliberately designed to show that not only could Ben Carson cut it in Detroit Junior ROTC as a military member; he could have been at West Point (a national institution) if he felt like it. This has become part and parcel of his personal myth as evidenced by the multiple times the story has been repeated by him over the years (and especially in the past few months). It steals from the honor of those who actually get in to West Point, let alone those who graduate, to make up such a story. Right now the ghosts of more than two hundred years of USMA graduates should be rising from their graves and shaking in rage that someone would tell a story about how he could have been one of them if only he had wanted to, just to advance himself personally.

Ben Carson did not tell the truth about meeting General Westmoreland on Memorial Day. Perhaps he was confused. Today he is claiming that all of this was so long ago. Who can remember such details?

Are you kidding? Ben Carson wrote the book that started all of this in 1989 (it was published in 1990), just 20 years later. Carson could not remember where/when he met the most famous American general, the Chief of Staff of the entire US Army, just 20 years later? It appears unlikely in the extreme.

Because Carson welded the first and the second together when he wrote about it back in the '80s, he gave the impression that they were related. Was that intentional? I leave that for you to decide.

Does any of this matter? Yes. Actually, it does.

As I said, we often deal with issues of Stolen Valor such as Ben Carson perpetrated, but usually the stories are larger and more outrageous. Most of those stories, however, occur in bars and are merely designed to puff up the thief's reputation to the others drinking beside him, most of whom know nothing of the military and therefore can't check his story. Other times, Stolen Valor perps get caught because they screw up and go out, boasting of their actions in public, and get caught by those who know what they are hearing is bullshit.

This is one of those times. But this time a lot more than a little ego is on the line.

Carson did not use his story to cage a beer or sweet-talk a lady. No, he has used it to help launch his "brand" and then elevate that brand on to ever higher heights.

Remember that very first non-Carson retelling of the tale to a broad political audience, the one in National Review, the one which essentially helped launch him as a potential candidate? "Five Things You Didn't Know About Ben Carson," and that was number four, in February 2013. Since then he has repeated it again and again and again.

Ben Carson did, in fact, fabricate this story.

[wesw]

a thief doesn t come to the strong man s house and bullies don t like getting punched in the nose, they pick on the weak.

which is why sue wants to disarm us. she knows best. do not resist. do not resist.....

,...then when "resistance is futile" , then comes..., Exterminate! Exterminate!!!!!

good luck. guns are flying off the shelves BECAUSE of people like sue. period.

between the limiting of speech and the attempts to infringe on the rights of good citizens to bear arms, the far left is becoming the enemy of our constitution and our republic. period.

[wesw]

god forbid that we actually fight the criminals. it s sooooo insensitive. puke.

[wesw]

just so you know. we aren t a bunch of urban gang members who couldn t hit the broadside of a barn with a shotgun.

we are country folk. we are able to take the eye out of a rabbit at 50 yrds with a good bb gun.

ethan allen and the green mountain boys redux.....

[Joe Guy]

a thief doesn t come to the strong man s house and bullies don t like getting punched in the nose, they pick on the weak.

A skilled thief goes to an empty house and a good bully doesn't get punched.

guns are flying off the shelves BECAUSE of people like sue. period.

Guns are flying off the shelves BECAUSE of people like Wayne Lapierre. exclamation point.

between the limiting of speech and the attempts to infringe on the rights of good citizens to bear arms, the far left is becoming the enemy of our constitution and our republic. period.

That may be true but the far right are armed paranoid gay-bashing woman-beating immigrant-hating confederate flag-waving prejudiced self-proclaimed 'Real Americans' who can't see past the barrel of a gun. two exclamation points.

[Sue U]

a thief doesn t come to the strong man s house and bullies don t like getting punched in the nose, they pick on the weak.

which is why sue wants to disarm us. she knows best. do not resist. do not resist.....

,...then when "resistance is futile" , then comes..., Exterminate! Exterminate!!!!!

good luck. guns are flying off the shelves BECAUSE of people like sue. period.

between the limiting of speech and the attempts to infringe on the rights of good citizens to bear arms, the far left is becoming the enemy of our constitution and our republic. period.

That is either the lamest attempt to bait me ever made, or you truly are A Idiot. Take your pick.

[Guinevere]

Hon, you are not a fish.

[wesw]

at least you admit to being an enemy of our constitution and republic. you are honest about it. I admire that.

[Sue U]

Hon, you are not a fish.

But I will drink like one.