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Chris Knight's avatar

Something that’s been twirling around my gray matter since last night:

The coronavirus situation is bringing about the first real paradigm shift since the fall of communism thirty years ago.

We are not going to come out of this the same that we were before, just as life in the civilized world – or anywhere in the world for that matter – did not proceed as it had been before the Soviet Union lost control of its satellites before itself imploding.  That chain of events precipitated an entirely new sphere of being and now for these current generations, COVID-19 is doing much the same.  Albeit, on a vastly larger scale.  It’s one thing to watch the Berlin Wall coming down from thousands of miles away.  It’s something else entirely more drastic when it’s the President of the United States telling you… yes you… to wear a mask when going ...

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Some
of Google’s ”doodles” either fly over my head or make me cringe in
disbelief.  A lot of them are about historical events and people that at best are extremely obscure or else make me wonder “What the hell are they smoking over there?”

But the one they have for today is as good as it gets and I
recognized it immediately.  Give credit where credit is due: Google was really thoughtful about this one and how to convey it:

A depiction of the four North Carolina A&T students who sat down at the segregated lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in Greensboro (the big
city near where I’m from). That was sixty years ago today.

 This is how to SERIOUSLY
protest a wrong. Peacefully and respectfully. Nobody was hurt, nobody
was insulted, nobody was arrested because of violent behavior. These young men simply went in, sat at a whites-only ...

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Chris Knight's avatar
Just think: a few years later chunks of that wall were being sold at K-Mart. 

Friends, I have a secret to tell.  I’ve waited decades… decades… for the chance to use the word “perestroika” in a written piece.  Not even during college and my senior history thesis – about the Russian space program and how it had tracked with that country’s politics since Nicholas II’s reign – did “perestroika” get to be employed.

I guess “perestroika” on some weird level is for me, what “smock” was to Hobbes:
Credit: the peculiar genius of Bill Watterson
Anyway, the considerate curators of conservative-ish contemplation at American Thinker have published a second article from me in as many days, and I am extremely thankful for that.  “The Fall of the Deep State and 1989’s Fall of Communism” relates some parallels between the events that transpired across Eastern Europe thirty years ago
...
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Despite now being a few years and several hundred miles away from my spawning grounds in Reidsville, I still tend to keep an eye on goings-on in north-central North Carolina.  Part and parcel to that is every so often visiting the website of Greensboro’s News & Record… even though it’s been years since that newspaper bore any semblance of objective reporting.  The decline has notably accelerated lately, along with most other “mainstream” journalism.

I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me when I saw the headline of today’s News & Record web edition, given the “historicity” of the anniversary.
Number-one rule of healing: you don’t rip the Band-Aids off the wound.  And throughout all of recent memory the News & Record has not only yanked away the bandages, it does its damndest to keep the sore nice and festered.
It’s not the best source to cite but Wikipedia has a
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“Good luck, Mister Gorsky!”

Okay, there was never a “Mister Gorsky” and Armstrong never said that.  But everyone else is posting “One small step for man…” and I just had to be the oddball tonight.
Happy Fiftieth Anniversary to Apollo 11’s touchdown in Mare Tranquilitatis!
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“Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!  You are about to embark upon a great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months.  The eyes of the world are upon you.  The hopes and prayers of liberty loving people everywhere march with you.  In company with our brave Allies and brothers in arms on other fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.


“Your task will not be an easy one.  Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle hardened.  He will fight savagely.

“But this is the year 1944!  Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41.  The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man to man.  Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength
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1968 was perhaps the most turbulent year of the most turbulent decade of modern history.  Assassinations, wars, upheaval – sometimes peaceful and sometimes not – and the looming threat of global annhiliation… it seemed that the whole world had gone mad.

So maybe it took three men a distance of more than two hundred thousand miles from that same world to put things into humbling perspective for the rest of us.
It was fifty years ago tonight, on Christmas Eve in 1968, that the crew of Apollo 8 ended one of the most-watched television broadcasts in history with a special message.  William Anders, James Lovell, and Frank Borman took turns reading from the first chapter of the Book of Genesis.  Half a century later, their glad tidings from orbit above the Moon has lost none of its magnificent potency.
Here it is:
A short while earlier, the crew had become
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Well, that’s a pretty bold assessment to make considering that 2018 has been a year that I haven’t seen many movies during initial release in a cinema.  And where something like Solo: A Star Wars Story and Avengers: Infinity War are usually films that I’d see multiple times during their theatrical run, I only caught those once each.  And lately my schedule has become packed with a lot of activity: various projects and whatnot.

That being said, two months ago the sense hit that They Shall Not Grow Old was going to be an experience unlike any other in recent memory.  And that sense was proven just.  Only two movies before had ever left me feeling so impacted and affected as the credits rolled: 1993’s Schindler’s List and then The Passion Of The Christ eleven years later.
But as emotionally overwhelming as those two films are, neither can boast a
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Law, we are told even in fifth grade, is something that applies to all without respect to wealth or status.  And then a few years later the same notion gets drilled into our mushy skulls during civics class as high school freshmen.  It’s a noble ideal, and we like to think that the world follows America’s example as a model of how under the rule of law, there are none deemed greater than others.  Rich or poor, celebrity or obscure, politically affluent or peanut gallery… it doesn’t matter.  Here we are all equally accounted and equally accountable.

And it is all a damnable fantasy and we all know it.  Even if we don’t talk about it.
I suppose the current situation with Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is in my mind tonight.  As of this writing some former classmate during the early Eighties is alleging that Kavanaugh did something, or
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