20SEP1780: How Long Does the Fox Stay in the Swamp?

In my last post about the adventures of Francis Marion and a small remnant (about 60 men) of his men who in two weeks had cause a large part of the British forces, both Tory militia and British regulars numbering about 1500, to try to hunt him down, Marion’s men had reached the safety of Great White Swamp just 30 miles over the border in North Carolina.

I also shared that British office Wemyss was terrorizing the areas of South Carolina that supported Marion and in a letter to Cornwallis, Wemyss shared his frustrations:

In a letter to Cornwallis on September 20 the thirty-two-year-old Wemyss wrote that he had done everything in his power to nab Marion and Colonel Hugh Giles but lamented that “I never could come up with them.” Nonetheless he boasted that he had broken up their band and forced their retreat into North Carolina. The rest of his report was, in Cornwallis’s view, “not so agreeable.” Wemyss had discovered that every inhabitant in that part of the country was deeply caught up in the rebel spirit, whereas the Tories were dispirited and apathetic. “It is impossible for me to give your Lordship an idea of the disaffection of this country,”

Oller, John. The Swamp Fox: How Francis Marion Saved the American Revolution (Kindle Locations 1106-1111). Da Capo Press. Kindle Edition.

Part of Wemyss’ frustration was also on how Capt. James and a few of the Kingstree militia, maybe no more than 20 in number, that had stayed behind in South Carolina to harass the British as they targeted the innocent people and homes. On 15SEP1780 at McGill’s Plantation, Capt. John James, Jr. fires on Maj. James Wemyss and his 63rd Regiment of Foot (200 British Regulars) as well as another 100 men from South Carolina and North Carolina Loyalist militia units.

It would take more than a week for this news to finally reach Marion and it turned into a great excuse to leave their swamp existence as outlined again in John Oller’s book:

… Back at Great White Marsh, camp life had turned grim for Marion’s men. Food was scarce, mosquitoes prevalent, the mood downcast. Among those present was young William Dobein James, whose father and brother were still in Williamsburg Township assessing the situation there…

While there is safety in the swamps, the long hot summer and all the mosquitoes made for almost a more dangerous environment.

… Among those felled by the fever were young William James and Peter Horry. The others were starting to complain and become restless …

These men suspected that in their absence there was nothing good to come from the British having free rein of South Carolina, especially the areas known to support the rebels:

It was Major James who brought word that Wemyss had torched the major’s house as well as the Indiantown Presbyterian Church, where James was an elder and many of Marion’s men regularly worshiped. Other churches were either burned or turned into British army depots, and those that were not were closed by their congregations, as the people felt it was unsafe to gather in public. The men of Williamsburg, aroused as never before, were anxious to take the field again.

Oller, John. The Swamp Fox: How Francis Marion Saved the American Revolution. Da Capo Press. Kindle Edition.

So from a two week whirlwind of victories against the British and Tory forces, to a two week respite in the swamps of North Carolina, how did this leader impress the men in their first month together?

Gravity—seriousness of purpose—was what gave Marion the intangible, almost mystical power he held over his men. Although he lacked physical presence or a magnetic personality, they regarded him with awe. Part of their reverence was due to his success, which naturally bred respect. But it was his steady, equable character that most caused them to follow where he led. … “He yielded to few excitements, was seldom elevated by successes to imprudence—as seldom depressed by disappointments to despondency.”

Oller, John. The Swamp Fox: How Francis Marion Saved the American Revolution (Kindle Locations 1145-1151). Da Capo Press. Kindle Edition.

Seldom depressed by the vary real circumstances that were totally out of his control, and yet he was able to stay the course. That quiet, resolute character strength was just what the militia needed as they lamented their family and friends lot back home.

It is this steadfastness of character that caused many after the war to pay high respects to this man who humbly led men, whether 20 or 200, in a variety of engagements towards stalling the British in South Carolina and keeping focused on the cause, freedom from tyranny!

Before the end of the war, Marion himself would be very aware that this “tyranny” would not evaporate once the conflict was over. George Mason from Virginia would say in 1782:

“posterity will reflect with indignation that this fatal lust of sovereignty, which lost Great Britain her western world, which covered our country with desolation and blood, should even during the contest against it, be revived among ourselves, and fostered by the very men who were appointed to oppose it!”

Sick, isn’t it? To go through a revolution and end up with practically the same thing? So basically, freedom and liberty in this world is an everyday battle for every generation to embark on. One of my goals is to give insights for the next generations to consider. Passing on not only knowledge, but wisdom if I can.

-SF1

The Historical Path of Freedom – Weaves Through the Reformation Period (1500s)

Free thinkers has always been a problem for those in authority. Back when the thought existed that the King was divine or the closest to it, any contrary thought was typically squashed. In time when the free thinkers did get traction, they too would tend to quash any public rebellion to tyrannical leadership, whether religious, state or both.

Bionic Mosquito has had a series of posts on a book by Gerard Casey called ‘Freedom’s Progress?: A History of Political Thought‘ and shares clips from it in his post on “The Reformation”. Here are some quotes to consider:

It is better that all of the peasants should be killed rather than that the sovereign and magistrates should be destroyed, because the peasants take up the sword without God’s authorisation. – Martin Luther

So the leader of the 1517 movement toward reforming the church was still resolute in thinking that the common man needed a ruler and needed to be restrained. Even free thinkers prior to this like John Wycliff focused his message of freedom towards the church itself but not the state in the 1370s.  His recommendation that pope and the church were second in authority to Scripture earned him an early death. Wycliff also questioned indulgences and confessions at that time BUT it was out of the box thinking that common man could even own their own property according to Wycliff.

Basically, Bionic points out that where people start from usually restrains them in their own revolutionary thinking:

As you will note from the opening quote from Luther, Augustine’s unfortunate interpretation of Romans 13 was influential; Luther, after all, began his religious life as an Augustinian.

“As Ellen Meiksins Wood puts it, ‘there hardly exists in the Western canon a more uncompromising case for strict obedience to secular authority; and this…belongs to the essence of Lutheran doctrine.’”

John Calvin too started out as a lawyer, so there is no doubt there are limits to where freedom SHOULD* be limited in his mind to as we will see in his role in governance over Geneva, Switzerland.

[NOTE: SHOULD is a word I try to avoid, I recommend that friends not SHOULD on their friends .. to honor them as unique individuals created in God’s image, COULD is a better suggestion ]

This is an important rabbit trail for me as I was raised in a religious environment, that while it had plenty of good in it, it also had plenty of guilt trip traps along the way. I find this with any controlling authority whether it be religious or the state. Try taking a knee these days and you will find out, blind obedience is mandatory at some points, you can’t make it look like authority does not have total control of you “in public” (or now with the NSA, in private either)

I like how Wayne Jacobson lays it out in this article at Lifestream where the difference between religion and relationship is revealed:

There’s nothing about real love that can be made into a weapon. But that doesn’t keep people from trying, especially scared parents and religious people.

They turn their twisted view of love into a weapon. When you’ve done enough, especially the things they think you should do, they will love you. When you don’t, they will not only withhold affection from you, they’ll resort to whatever means they have at their disposal to get you to change. They’ll give you the cold shoulder or disapproving glance. They will gossip about you with other family members. That will rant and rave until you conform to their desires. They will should all over you thinking that increasing levels of obnoxiousness will endear you to their point of view.

This is where the early reformation leaders went, they did not like attributes of the Catholic church they were rebelling against and yet they could not release the “control” of common people to their exercise of natural rights. Religion at some point demands obligation and obedience.

As Bionic shares again from Gerard Casey’s work:

“It is worth noting the prevalence of a popular but mistaken belief that the Protestant Reformers, in contrast to the repressive Catholic Church, were the apostles of liberty.”

“The Reformation was many things but by no stretch of the imagination was it the result of a clamour for religious liberty or, indeed, for liberty more broadly construed.”

In fact, it ushered in perhaps the most intolerant period in Christian history.

If anyone has the interest and the time, there is a lot of information on the Reformation period that proves that freedom did not always advance. Like I mentioned before about John Calvin and his actions in Geneva where he and four other pastors and 12 lay elders ruled the city. While his written works ( ‘Institutes of the Christian Religion‘ ) contained great thoughts on how the Catholic church focused on things wrongly, his actions to me speak louder than words. At the end of the day, I am not a fan of John Calvin.

Not all what happened during the Reformation is gloomy, there were bright spots as well in those that followed Luther and Calvin and even those in Scotland as they would give future generations hope in what real freedom and liberty is all about:

Eventually, the idea of private resistance to the prince would gain some traction, more by those who followed Luther and Calvin than in the two leaders themselves – driven by the fact that the secular leader was removing privileges previously granted to the Protestant communities. Where the secular leaders were unsympathetic to Protestant views, private resistance was seen more favorably – and Biblical interpretation would therefore evolve according to this necessity.

Further, in Calvinist communities of Scotland, for example, the idea of private resistance had traction almost from the beginning. Hey, they are Protestants…to each his own! But without the medieval Church and its recognized authority to sanction the prince, such resistance had little power or authority behind it.

Out of this period came other free thinkers that gave the Dutch Republic, a confederation of seven provinces from 1581 – 1795, ..

Dutch Republic

.. as well as the American confederation of thirteen colonies from 1776 – 1787 (under the Articles of Confederation)

John Paul Jones flag 1779

… a fair amount of written works on liberty and freedom.

We too, stand on the shoulders of all those who went before us, in terms of seeking freedom and liberty from any external controlling human force whether it be religion or statism. It is imperative that each person research as they are convinced toward, and be convicted of their own thoughts and principles in their own mind.

“… one person thinks that some days should be set aside as holy and another thinks that each day is pretty much like any other. There are good reasons either way. So, each person is free to follow the convictions of conscience ..” Romans 14:5 in the paraphrase The Message

I leave you with this inspiring song based on German 13th century written works of  Walther von der Vogelweide on the freedom of one’s thoughts and later in the 1780s became five stanzas in distributed leaflets and later put to music called “Die Gedanken Sind Frei”

Enjoy the rest of your Sunday y’all!

-SF1

Distorted Financial Indicators Lead to Squandered Opportunities and Lost Wealth

Y’all remember not that long ago when there was bragging going on about how the US was transforming itself into an oil exporter (and therefore self-sufficient so we would never again feel the effects of an oil embargo like OPEC did in October 1973)? Well, who told you that “fact”? What if I told you it was “Fake News”?

I guess it is one thing to get shale oil refined to the degree where the US would be secure in its oil production, but to do so in a way that was financially irresponsible is another. As Bill Bonner pointed out in this article, the recent peak of domestic oil production at the right was only one piece of the picture:

… The shale oil boom was even credited with having scuttled the oil market, which dropped from a high of around $130 a barrel in mid-2008 to under $30 in late 2016, thanks to so much new supply.

But guess what? The whole boom was fake. It didn’t add to wealth; it subtracted from it. Accumulated losses over the last five years tote to more than $200 billion, with $36 billion lost in the Bakken shale fields in North Dakota alone…

Not fake in that there was not oil produced, but that it was produced irresponsibly, but not just poor management or poor corporate decision-making but it was the Federal Reserve’s twisting of economic reality that fed this huge financial mistake:

Had credit been priced properly, it never would have happened. From The New York Times:

“The 60 biggest exploration and production firms are not generating enough cash from their operations to cover their operating and capital expenses. In aggregate, from mid-2012 to mid-2017, they had negative free cash flow of $9 billion per quarter.

While this effect that the FED has on corporations across this land with cheap credit (ZIRP) is not limited to the shale oil industry, Bill goes on to list a few more entities that will no longer be sustainable in their current form:

Of course, the same thing could be said of the trillion-dollar companies, Amazon and Apple, whose market capitalizations are largely the result of cheap credit.

And it could be said of the whole tech sector – with its outrageous inputs of capital into companies that have never made a dime.

Or it could be said of emerging markets, which have managed to suck up the loose change spilling out of the financial industry. They promised slightly higher yields, and now, they owe far more than they can pay…

.. “When the wind blows hard enough,” say the old-timers, “even turkeys fly.”

The wind never blew as hard as it did from 2009 to 2018. And overhead now are so many plump, money-losing birds that we suggest you take cover.

From the taxpayer bailouts ten years ago to today, we have quite a “bubble-rich” environment. Printing even more money is probably the only option left for the FED, we will see how far down the road they are able to kick this can. Rough sledding ahead .. prepare well and hang on!

-SF1

When You Hear Major Media Echo the US Government – Be Suspicious

Suspicious could be the first thing on your mind when you hear the media repeat verbatim what the government states as if it is truth. I have always doubted government statistics due to the spin that can be applied to “snow” the average American who understands very little about economics.

So when I saw the Burning Platform article and the quote below, I knew I had to dig deeper:

As you can see, the “civilian labor force”declined by 469,000 people in August from July. The number of “employed” dropped 423,000. The “not in labor force” increased by nearly 700,000. With these facts in mind (“facts” at least as far as the BLS numbers contain any shards of credibility), how can the Government claim that 201,000 “jobs were created” in August? How can CNBC say the “economy created more jobs than expected?” Based on the numbers in the details of the BLS report, it looks like, between the decline in the number of people employed and the decline in those not counted as part of the labor force, the economy shed over 1 million jobs.

PFM* is what the government uses to come up with these numbers. To really understand, one has to read AROUND the headline and dig for the truth.

[ * PFM is a nautical term we used in the US Navy ]

You can look at the monthly government stats, but know that “unemployment” is only when one has ACTIVELY searched for a job in the last 4 WEEKS! Do know that the US Bureau of Labor Statistics has a second measure of unemployment that includes workers who have been discouraged and out of the labor force for less than one year (below):

While the US government no longer tracks unemployment among discouraged workers who have been out of the work force for more than one year, John Williams of http://shadowstats.com continues to estimate this rate and places it at about 20%:

Courtesy of ShadowStats.com

I highly recommend this site as an excellent antidote to government statistics to get a more accurate view into the US economic environment whether it be unemployment, money supply or other critical statistics that show the true health of the US economy!

The bottom line is, how many people over 16 in this country have the opportunity to create value which generates wealth that sustains families and communities domestically (for this measure) for the health of all who call the US home? The US Government has a statistic that shows this, but these days they don’t publish it on the front page of major media outlets:

Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate 1980-2018

THIS is not good, too many people have given up on creating wealth for them, their kids and grandkids ..

… OR they have gone “underground” in their “business” of choice

… OR if they have chosen to leave the workforce behind, then that is fine. Maybe people have downsized, simplified and live a more self-sustaining lifestyle outside of the “rat-race”, well that is fine too.

Just please do your own research and be suspicious when the government / major media reports something .. anything!

-SF1

King George Would be Proud of These Redcoats!

Hundreds of years after the American Colonies united in a stand against tyranny, we have yet again experienced tyranny in this land first hand. This trend should be of no surprise as ever since the mid 1780s this nation’s government has gotten increasingly intrusive and abusive of the people.

This week, in the House of Representatives voting almost unanamously along party lines (with all but 4 GOP house members in favor) passed a bill [Community Safety and Security Act of 2018, H.R. 6691] that as Reason reports in this article:

… the bill “would label seemingly nonviolent offenses such as burglary of an unoccupied home and fleeing as violent offenses.”

“The bill would also label as violent conspiracy to commit any of the listed offenses, even when no violent acts have occurred,”

Yes, the government loves to ratchet up the number of people that could come under their NET of “violent offenders”. This is especially helpful when the FEMA buses (i.e. Redcoats – just doing their jobs) show up in your neighborhood and people flee .. yes, THOSE people can then be shot on sight because they committed a VIOLENT act of running away.

You can’t make this up!

The bill passed 247 to 152 … WITH 4 Republicans and 148 Democrats voting Nay.

The timing of this with almost total GOP approval along with the FEMA comms test to the nation coming up later this month is indeed interesting:

This is an awesome “opportunity” for the police state, prison revenue and overall tyranny taken to the next level. This administration is not about wanting to diffuse the power struggles in our culture but almost desires to ratchet it up a notch to see if it can get something started under “their” watch.

Now don’t be surprised that the Democrats did not vote FOR this .. they only didn’t because the other “flavor” sponsored the bill .. if their president had been behind this you can believe they would have loved this too. More power to the government, what can go wrong with that?

Just remember, the annual renewal of the NDAA means that anyone “seen” as having terrorist ties can be taken far from society with no judicial recourse. This bill is just another way to open up the net even wider, especially when communities protest EVEN PEACEFULLY, that those what flee will be consider violent and will now be treated as such.

Holly Harris, the executive director of the U.S. Justice Action Network, said in a statement to Reason. “At a time when we have bipartisan support for criminal justice reforms that will safely reduce incarceration and better prioritize public safety, passing a bill that does just the opposite makes no sense at all.”

Yes it does make sense Holly. What politicians SAY they are doing is rarely correlated to WHAT they are doing. Know that police, FBI, ATF, FEMA, the Prison-Industrial-Complex and all their cousins will use this bill to their advantage.

#Redcoats

-SF1