Buchanan documents, as have others before him, that both the First and Second World Wars are primarily the product of wretchedly incompetent management of international relations on the part of Britain, France, Germany, and others. //

Most readers, myself included, will not buy all of Buchanan's arguments. Regarding the fecklessness of European diplomacy, and the causes of the First World War, I think that Buchanan is on solid ground. Other researchers before Buchanan have found the First World War to have been an avoidable tragedy that the European states should have been able to avoid. Buchanan's Second World War arguments are somewhat more problematic. //

Buchanan makes a pretty good case that Hitler was an opportunist, and that he was not without justification in seeking return of the Sudetenland and of Bohemia. Had he stopped there, and negotiated return of Danzig without war (which Buchanan says would have happened absent the British guaranty) we might be living in a very different world. Who can say?

Personally, I still think that Hitler was determined to fight a bloody war against Russia and persecute the Jews and other nationalities and ethnicities that he hated. Ultimately, it seems that Hitler was bound to fight such a war, but Buchanan makes some case that the world might have been better had Germany and Russia fought their war without the Western Allies being involved. Each reader must decide for him or her self. I don't accept this thesis. //

Mr. Buchanan's most insightful analysis is at the very end of this piece. He argues, as discussed above, that inept European diplomacy in which Great Powers went to war for non-vital reasons, was the cause of the World Wars. He then contrasts this with US diplomacy from World War I to the end of the Cold War. During this time American leaders refused to be easily drawn into conflicts and joined the World Wars only in their latter stages (particularly the First) thereby avoiding in significant degree, the horrendous casualties that many others suffered. Even more significantly, once America became the leading world power, American diplomacy repeatedly avoided war-starting confrontations by refusing, not without anguish, to fight wars for non-vital interests to America. Hence America's refusal to fight wars over Soviet interventions in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, or even the Cuban Missile Crisis. The contrast between the success of America in winning the Cold War without a World War (albeit with some sizable errors such as Vietnam) and European fecklessness in managing to start two world wars in 25 years, is stark. This is a truly fascinating insight which in my opinion is the major contribution of this book.

Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer took a trip down memory lane this week by building a functioning PDP-11 minicomputer from parts found in a tub of hardware.

It's a fun watch, especially for anyone charged with maintaining these devices during their heyday. Unfortunately, Plummer did not place his creation in a period-appropriate case, and one might argue he cheated a bit by using a board containing a Linux computer to present boot devices.

https://youtu.be/GJfeli6H_dc

Plummer's build started with a backplane containing slots for a CPU card, a pair of 512 KB RAM cards, and the Linux card – a QBone by the look of it. Also connected to the backplane were power, along with some halt and run switches.

The QBone is an interesting card and serves as an example of extending the original hardware rather than fully relying on emulation. ... In Plummer's case, he used it to provide a boot device for his bits-from-a-box PDP-11.

Once connected and with a boot device mounted, Plummer was able to fire up the computer with its mighty megabyte of memory and interact with it as if back in the previous century.

The TMS9900 could have powered the PC revolution. Here’s why it didn’t. //

The utter dominance of these Intel microprocessors goes back to 1978, when IBM chose the 8088 for its first personal computer. Yet that choice was far from obvious. Indeed, some who know the history assert that the Intel 8088 was the worst among several possible 16-bit microprocessors of the day.

It was not. There was a serious alternative that was worse. //

So why aren’t we all using 68K-based computers today?

The answer comes back to being first to market. Intel’s 8088 may have been imperfect but at least it was ready, whereas the Motorola 68K was not. And IBM’s thorough component qualification process required that a manufacturer offer up thousands of “production released” samples of any new part so that IBM could perform life tests and other characterizations. IBM had hundreds of engineers doing quality assurance, but component qualifications take time. In the first half of 1978, Intel already had production-released samples of the 8088. By the end of 1978, Motorola’s 68K was still not quite ready for production release.

And unfortunately for Motorola, the Boca Raton group wanted to bring its new IBM PC to market as quickly as possible. So they had only two fully qualified 16-bit microprocessors to choose from. In a competition between two imperfect chips, Intel’s chip was less imperfect than TI’s.

Einstein dedicated his time between 1905-1915 to develop general relativity (GR). It seems strange to me that no other physicists attempted to tackle this problem in this ten-year period. After all, developing a relativistic theory of gravity superseding Newton's should have been the holy grail of physics at that period. How come none gave it a shot?

I have this romantic idea about the lost writings of Epicurus that perhaps somewhere at the bottom of the Aegean Sea there still lies a ship sunken in Ancient Greek times with copies of the philosopher's writings stored in some waterproof amphorae (or something like that). Maybe one day they will resurface as was the case with the Antikythera wreck and mechanism, or maybe they won't and the ship and its remaining contents will just dissolve into enlarging entropy. Personally, I would certainly welcome their discovery most dearly ...

Now my question is along similar lines but more concrete in terms of known history: What were important instances of historic documents (or other artifacts) that were thought lost (e.g. with the library of Alexandria) or that were inaccessible at the time (e.g. in Soviet Russian archives) and that led to significant new historic understanding when new developments occurred and copies became available (perhaps surprisingly)?

I recently heard a story about John Wesley giving way to a stubborn man while on a narrow bridge: in short, Wesley was riding his horse on a bridge, while a man who was known to be a critic of Wesley was riding the other way. The bridge was too narrow for both, so the man said, "I never make way for a fool!" Wesley responded, "I do", and backed his horse out so the man can cross.

This was interesting, so I decided to look it up.

William Sheridan Allen

Use of arsenic sulfides for yellow, orange/red hues adds to artist's known pigment palette. //

Since 2019, researchers have been analyzing the chemical composition of the materials used to create Rembrandt's masterpiece, The Night Watch, as part of the Rijksmuseum's ongoing Operation Night Watch, devoted to its long-term preservation. Chemists at the Rijksmuseum and the University of Amsterdam have now detected unusual arsenic-based yellow and orange/red pigments used to paint the duff coat of one of the central figures in the painting, according to a recent paper in the journal Heritage Science. It's a new addition to Rembrandt's known pigment palette that further adds to our growing body of knowledge about the materials he used.

As previously reported, past analyses of Rembrandt's paintings identified many pigments the Dutch master used in his work, including lead white, multiple ochres, bone black, vermilion, madder lake, azurite, ultramarine, yellow lake, and lead-tin yellow, among others. The artist rarely used pure blue or green pigments, with Belshazzar's Feast being a notable exception. (The Rembrandt Database is the best resource for a comprehensive chronicling of the many different investigative reports.)

Shortly after 7 a.m. on Aug. 7, 1974, French performance artist Philippe Petit stepped out from the roof of the World Trade Center’s South Tower and onto a one-inch thick cable, stretching 140 feet across to the North Tower.

With no safety net or harness, all he had was a balancing pole for company – and a drop of 1,360-feet and certain death below him should he make one wrong step.

Philippe Petit, a young Frenchman artist tight rope walker, gave the most spectacular high-wire performance of all time.
6
Petit performed the act shortly after 7 a.m. on Aug. 7, 1974.
Polaris

“I was a little anxious on that first crossing because we never checked how strong the anchor point was on the other side,” Petit tells The Post. “It wasn’t great, to be honest, but it was good enough.”

Audacious, dangerous and entirely illegal, Petit’s wire walk was called the ‘artistic crime of the century’ and was years in the planning. Using covert surveillance and endless subterfuge, Petit managed to smuggle a huge amount of equipment up the 110 floors of the South Tower before his friend and collaborator, Jean-Louis Blondeau, fired a cable across to the North Tower using a bow and arrow.

He even chartered a helicopter so he could take aerial photographs of the rooftops of the Twin Towers.

He was released without charge on the condition he perform a free show for children in Central Park. //

He also found himself in the Guinness Book of World Records, much to his annoyance.

“My art cannot be defined by numbers or records but the irony is I unwittingly found myself in it whether I liked it or not,” he said. “I never I wanted to be in it alongside people who can eat 10 pizzas in a minute.” //

“Here in America I am called a daredevil or a stuntman, like I’m Evel Knievel on a motorbike or Harry Houdini, but nothing could be further from the truth. My art is not death-defying, it is life-affirming.

“I want to inspire people and to believe they can move mountains. I want them to look up without fear.

“I am a poet in the sky.”

Of Captain Teach Alias Blackbeard

Edward Teach was a Bristol man born, but had sailed some time out of Jamaica in privateers, in the late French war; yet though he had often distinguished himself for his uncommon boldness and personal courage, he was never raised to any command, till he went a-pirating, which I think was at the latter end of the year 1716, ... //

Being asked the meaning of this, he only answered, by damning them, that if he did not now and then kill one of them, they would forget who he was.

Josh Brooks @F530Josh
·
Big Army deciding their Soldiers from 130 years ago don't deserve the MOH because history is inconvenient and doesn't work with the modern narrative is a pretty good look.

10:58 AM · Jul 25, 2024 //

Congress started down this road by apologizing in 1990. The 2023 National Defense Authorization Act required the Department of Defense to examine the medals. //

No matter what this Potemkin board organized by Austin finds, the facts remain that the 7th Cavalry was operating under legal orders, and the men awarded the Medal of Honor met the criteria of the time. There is no wrong to be righted here. This is simply a political act by the losers to count coup on the winners. Austin's order to “consider the context of the overall engagement" is just a way to open the door to relitigating the Indian Wars by the "stolen land" nutters.

Don't think this is the end of it. //

DaleS 2 hours ago

Wikipedia has a list of the 20 medal winners for Wounded Knee, though they claim the award to Marvin Hillock was for fighting at White Clay Creek, and he was listed for Wounded Knee "due to a later error in War Department lists."

I believe that the battle at Wounded Knee was certainly mishandled and probably avoidable. I'm sympathetic in general to the U.S. Army during the western Indian Wars; they were forced to do a difficult job (often made much worse by the behavior of local settlers and government bureacrats), and most of the time I think they did a pretty good job. But this wasn't one of those times. I care nothing for Austin's conclusions, but Miles at the time was appalled by the battle, and he was actually the superior to the commander at the battle (Forsyth) and relieved him of command. He was in a better position to make that judgment than anyone in the DoD today, and certainly had more experience in Indian fighting than the folks in Washington who reinstated Forsyth. Miles was a fine general, but hard-hearted enough to exile his own apache scouts after Geromino's capture, so for him to call for compensation to Wounded Knee survivors demonstrated that this wasn't the usual brand of Indian fighting. It was a battle, but also ended up as a massacre. I'm willing to trust Miles' assessment of the battle.

With that said, even if what we would now consider war crimes happened at Wounded Knee, this wasn't an unprovoked slaughter like Sand Creek. There was actual combat and likely actual heroism. To take an example from the list:

"Musician John Clancy, artillery, twice voluntarily rescued wounded comrades under fire of the enemy."

I don't know what the late-19th century criteria for assigning Medal of Honor was, but that sounds pretty darn heroic to me, and has nothing to do with killing Sioux, justly or not. After all these years, how could you possibly determine that John Clancy not only didn't deserve his medal, but that he and his fellow honorees should be singled out for "cruelty".

It seems to me if you want to virtue signal by dishonoring the dead, the place to start should be with Forsyth, who was the responsible for the force there. It was his job to see his soldiers acted properly, and to take measures against any of his soldiers who targetted non-combatants. //

Sojourner 2 hours ago edited

The Medal of Honor, at that time, was the only decoration for valor, and the criteria were very different from those today.

^^^This^^^

The whole Wounded Knee episode was a mess. Mistakes committed by both sides. A messy almost-ending to the Indian Wars. But make no mistake, it was a war.

These social justice warriors are wrong here, just as they are wrong in opposing dropping the A-bombs on Japan in August 1945 or, as Streiff notes, our recent base renaming and statue removal mania. They are sermonizing with the luxury of hindsight in a way that is wrong in terms of historiography/hermeneutics.

Just as in mid-July 1945 (when it was clear Japan was going to fight until no one was left alive on the Home Islands; a view, btw, which the Japanese didn't change until AFTER the second bomb dropped), at the time of the Ghost Dance no one knew what was going to happen. But there were enough Indians who felt the pull to cause the Army to be legitimately concerned. On one hand, sorry for the dead Indians. On the other, they paid (perhaps unjustly) the price for the style of warfare their tribe and other tribes had historically waged. Whatever the injustices of Wounded Knee might there have been, it clearly signaled the end of our first War on Terror (which we won, unlike Round 2). The question no one on the social justice side of things wants to answer (b/c they can't) is to name a better outcome (and path to that outcome) than what happened. I'll repeat what I've written here before: the tribes were lucky how the Indian Wars ended. It could have been much worse.

Full disclosure, I was previously more inclined to review the actions at Wounded Knee. But we no longer live in that better universe. Streiff is 100% correct: this isn't going to be a review conducted in good conscience. Instead, it's 100% political warfare waged by those who hate America on those of us who love America. It's yet another play in a series of plays to destroy the fabric of our military and of our country under the guise of "righting wrongs." Base renamings, land acknowledgments, etc. IT'S ALL BS. And it's also utterly ironic; they're doing to us what they criticize America for doing to the Indians. They believe we should have left the Indians alone to live in peace, so to make their point they won't let us live in peace.

Want to be even more revolted, see this:
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2022/07/20/medals-of-honor-for-soldiers-who-perpetrated-wounded-knee-massacre-may-be-rescinded/

This is what we're up against. When even our supposed allies in the press lead off their articles with titles like this.

One lesson we need to take out of this is we should never allow any presidency to again take on a myth of Camelot. People attracted to power are some of the most selfish, venal, and narcissistic human beings. Callahan’s book moves us further toward acknowledging that ugly reality.

Without a civic life shaped by Christianity, there can be no American republic. //

Some will acknowledge the Christian inheritance of America but insist that it’s a point of departure, that once the American experiment was launched, it could be safely separated from the religion that launched it. They think it’s possible to take the “best” parts of the Christian faith without the need to continually affirm Christ. “Christless Christianity,” you might call it.

But it doesn’t work like that. A few months ago the famous atheist Richard Dawkins wondered aloud in an interview why his own country, England, could not just go on having “cultural Christianity” without actual, believing Christians. He said he liked the cathedrals and the Christmas carols, and would like to enjoy them without the bother of actual Christianity. He wants fewer believing Christians and more cultural Christians.

It never occurred to Dawkins that you don’t get to keep the culture without the cult. The sad spectacle of modern England should suffice to prove the point. If there is no one to worship in the cathedrals, they will become concert halls or, in England’s case, mosques. If no one really believes what the Christmas carols proclaim, eventually people will stop singing them.

The same goes for us here in America. The American proposition that all men are created equal is a religious claim, specifically a Christian one. Not to belabor the point, but the American founders only ever believed that all men are created equal because they believed that we are God’s children, created in His image. Our entire system of government flows from that belief; without it the whole system collapses. //

America is supposedly a secular country, with separation of church and state, free exercise of religion, and so on. Yet we find ourselves in the middle of what amounts to a religious war. How could this be?

Because America, like all nations, is founded on religious claims, and relies on those claims for its coherence. We’ve long been accustomed to talking about America as a “propositional nation,” a phrase taken from Abraham Lincoln’s famous line in the Gettysburg Address that America was “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

The idea is that America is fundamentally different from the ethnic nation-states of Europe, which were based on blood and soil and religion. America supposedly transcended all that. It was based instead on an idea — a proposition. Anyone could become an American if he agreed to the proposition.

And this is true. But nearly everyone who says America is a propositional nation is wrong about what the proposition is. America is not a collection of Enlightenment tropes at the intersection of Locke and Rousseau, a grab bag of philosophical sentiments about the rights of man. America is the creation of Christian civilization.

The proposition at the heart of America, undergirding our nation’s existence, is not just “all men are created,” but Christianity and all that comes with it. Without Christianity, you don’t get free speech, liberty, equality, freedom of conscience. All of it relies on the claims of the Christian faith, none of it stands on its own. //

To be clear, the contest is not between secularism or “wokeism” and Christianity. If we reject Christianity, the future of America will not be a secular liberal utopia, where we go on living off the capital of our Christian inheritance without replenishing it. It’s going to be a new version of paganism, and you’re not going to like it. //

The American founding is therefore not comprehensible in strictly secular, rationalist terms. Our nation begins with a proposition about the nature of God and man. If that proposition is discarded or denied, whatever comes after that isn’t America. It might call itself America, it might even deploy the familiar vocabulary of rights and liberties, but it is not America. //

To fight this new paganism, Christians in America will have to shed the false notion that their religion is a purely private matter, that there must be a “wall of separation” between our religion and our politics. We have to argue, without apology, that public life in this country should be shaped by Christian morality and ordered by its dictates, as it was for most of our civilization’s history.

Most of all, we have to accept that our American culture of self-government and liberty under law cannot long survive cut off from its source, which is and always was the Christian faith.

Without that faith, alive and active among the people, there can be no American republic. If we want to save the republic, we’ll have to become a Christian people once again. And that means we’ll have to fight — and win — a religious war for America. //

We see now that there is more than one way for a nation to fall. There is the Roman way: a centuries-long decline eventually succumbing to wave upon wave of invaders. There is the British way: a dwindling to irrelevance and impotence, passive in the face of an assertive Muslim immigrant population.

And then there is the American way: not to decline and fall, not to dwindle into irrelevance, but to become evil.

The Power of One Vote
The Power of One Vote, Your Vote. Use It.
By the Smallest of Margins…

In 1800 – Thomas Jefferson was elected President by one vote in the House of Representatives after a tie in the Electoral College.

In 1824 – Andrew Jackson won the presidential popular vote but lost by one vote in the House of Representatives to John Quincy Adams after an Electoral College dead-lock.

In 1845 – The U.S. Senate passed the convention annexing Texas by two votes (27/25).

In 1846 – President Polk’s request for a Declaration of War against Mexico passed by one vote.

In 1867 – The Alaska purchase was ratified in the Senate by two votes: 37-2, paving the way for future statehood.

In 1868 – President Andrew Johnson was Impeached but not convicted because the Senate was one vote shy of the necessary two thirds required.

In 1876 – Samuel Tilden won the presidential popular vote but came up one electoral vote shy and lost to Rutherford B. Hayes.

In 1941 – Congress amended the active-service component of the Selective Service Act from one year to two-and-a-half years by one vote, 203 to 202.

In 1948 – A Texas Convention voted for Lyndon B. Johnson over ex-Governor Coke Steven in a contested Senatorial election.

In 1962 – Governors of Maine, Rhode Island and North Dakota were elected by an average of one vote per precinct.

In 1977 – Vermont State representative Sydney Nixon was seated as an apparent one vote winner, 570 to 569. Mr. Nixon resigned when the State House determined, after a recount, that he had actually lost to his opponent Robert Emond 572 to 571.

In 1989 – A Lansing, Michigan School District millage proposition failed when the final recount produced a tie vote 5,147 for, and 5,147 against. On the original vote count, votes against the proposition were ten more than those in favor. The result meant that the school district had to reduce its budget by $2.5 million.

In 1994 – 1.1 votes per precinct in Alaska elected Tony Knowles as Governor and Fran Ulmer as Lieutenant Governor out of 216,668 votes cast in the General Election.

In 1994 – Republican Randall Luthi and Independent Larry Call tied for a seat in the Wyoming House of Representatives from the Jackson Hole area with 1,941 votes each. A recount produced the same result. Mr. Luthi was finally declared the winner when, in a drawing before the State Canvassing Board, a ping pong ball bearing his name was pulled from the cowboy hat of Democratic Governor Mike Sullivan.

Just One Vote
An Election Challenge
Author
Paul Harvey
One voter in each precinct of the United States will determine the next president of the United States. One vote. Thats a big weapon you have there, Mister. In 1948, just one additional vote in each precinct would have elected Dewey. In 1960, one vote in each precinct in Illinois would have elected Nixon. One vote.

One morning in 1844, a grain miller from DeKalb County, Indiana, was walking toward his mill. It was Election Day, but he had work to do and did not intend to vote. Before he reached the mill, however, he was stopped by friends who persuaded him to go to the polls. As it happened, the candidate for whom he voted won a seat in the state legislature"by a margin of one vote.

Now, when the Indiana Legislature convened, the man elected from DeKalb cast the deciding vote that sent Edward Allen Hennegan to the United States Senate. Then, in the Senate, when the question of statehood for Texas came up, there was a tie vote. But who do you suppose was presiding as president pro tempore? Hennegan. He cast the deciding vote from the chair. So, Texas was admitted to the union because a miller in DeKalb County, Indiana, went 10 minutes out of his way to cast...one vote.

More? Thomas Jefferson was elected president by one vote in the Electoral College. So was John Quincy Adams. One vote gave statehood to California, Idaho, Oregon, Texas and Washington. The Draft Act of World War II passed the House by one vote.

Over 200 million Americans are eligible to vote this year. Less than half will. Plato said it: The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men. So your vote is important. Historically, you use it...or you lose it. If you're not sure for whom you should vote, turn to a newspaper you can trust. Because everything we've won in 10 wars at the point of a gun can be taken away one vote at a time. Edmund Burke said it another way: All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in this world is for enough good men to do nothing.

video

Clyde S. Kilby joined the faculty of Wheaton College in 1935 at the age of 33 as an assistant professor of English and dean of men.

In 1943 Kilby read a new book published by C. S. Lewis, entitled The Case for Christianity, which changed the course of his life. It was based on two series of broadcast talks Lewis had given for the BBC and was later published as the first two sections of Mere Christianity. “I . . . read it right through feeling almost from the first sentence that something profound had touched my mind and heart.” It was like discovering “something bottomless,” and he was captivated by “the depth and freshness of his observations and the permanency of his expression.”

William Burr and Leopoldo Nuti examine the Kennedy Administration's efforts to remove Jupiter missiles from Turkey and Italy, part of a secret deal with Nikita Khrushchev to end the Cuban missile crisis. //

Jupiter Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile (IRBM) at Cigli air base in Turkey, 1963. There a squadron of 15 Jupiters was deployed becoming operational in March 1962. //

Kissinger’s finding that “almost everyone” among senior Italian government officials suspected a US-Soviet “agreement” on the Jupiters was not the only time such suspicions surfaced. In the days and weeks after the crisis began to dissipate, mid-level State Department officials discussed rumors that President Kennedy had favored a deal and had a “keen interest” in getting the Jupiters out. In the months after the crisis, McNamara and Rusk tried to batten down suspicions of a deal, testifying before Congress that there had been no such thing. But doubts persisted. Senator John Stennis (D-Ms), among other Senators, was convinced there had been a trade.[v]

It was essential for the Kennedy administration to implement the secret deal and make good on a commitment to the Soviet leadership, but executing it had its complexities. While Khrushchev focused mainly on the Jupiters in Turkey, withdrawing the IRBMs from Italy was also a US goal. Under a coherent policy, the US could not leave Jupiters anywhere on NATO territory, although this made the diplomacy more complicated. And the withdrawal of the Jupiters could not be completely secret, because it had to be carefully and delicately coordinated with Italy and Turkey, whose governments had signed agreements accepting the missiles. Both were NATO allies, and Washington could not ride roughshod over them.

To minimize suspicions of a US-Soviet deal, the reasoning for the Jupiter withdrawals would be carefully explained to Italian, Turkish, and other NATO interlocuters.

Washington, D.C., October 30, 2019 – The current crisis with Turkey over Syria has raised questions, yet to be resolved, about the security of 50 U.S. nuclear weapons stored at Incirlik Air Base. These questions have been posed before, going back almost to the start of nuclear deployments in Turkey in 1959.  How the United States responds carries implications for the region, for U.S.-Turkey relations, and for NATO. //

Members of Congress Worried in 1960 That Leaders of a Coup “Might Seize Control” of Weapons

Other U.S. Officials Feared Risks of Accidental War or Overreaction to Local Crises

During Mid-1960s Turkish Officials Were Interested in Producing an “Atomic Bomb” //

Document 13

Memorandum of Conversation, 14 December 1962, Top Secret
Dec 14, 1962
Source
RG 59, Records of the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Politico-Military Affairs, Subject Files, 1961-1963. Box 2. Memoranda (5 of 5)

The Jupiter missile deployments in Turkey (and to some degree Italy) were central to the Cuban Missile Crisis, both to instigating it–Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’ saw them as a “bone” in his throat–and to the secret Kennedy-Khrushchev agreement that resolved the crisis. While President Kennedy provided secret assurances to Khrushchev that the U.S. would remove the Jupiters, only a handful of people knew about the secret deal, and the NATO countries, included Turkey, learned nothing of it at the time.

Speaking with Turkish Defense Minister Ilhami Sancar, McNamara misled him by saying that the U.S. had refused to discuss with the Soviets the “comparability” of the Jupiters with the missiles in Cuba. He further argued that the U.S. was doing Turkey a favor by removing the dangerous and obsolete weapons and replacing them with Polaris missiles that would be deployed in the Mediterranean.

As John Dickinson later noted, “the insanity of Parliament has operated like inspiration in America. The Colonists now know what is designed against them.”

And suddenly, the phrase “the common cause” began appearing in pamphlets up and down the East Coast. The “common cause” was a call to all colonists to stand with their oppressed brethren in Boston against tyrannical overreach by the government.

To be clear, the Southern colonies had little in common with their Northern counterparts. For example, their economies were vastly different and dependent on different goods. Georgians could have ignored the plight of their fellow colonists in Massachusetts, but they knew should the same fate befall them, they too would have to face it alone. And so, the colonists moved forward under a united front.

“The die is now cast, the [American] colonies must now either submit or triumph,” King George III infamously said in Sept. 1774.

Colonists owed no obedience to unjust laws. There would be no such submission. They would take death or liberty.

Their sacrifices, willpower, and commitment to the “common cause” is why we celebrate the Fourth of July, Independence Day.

But it is a lack of that “common cause” that has put us in the position we are in today. Government has become too big, and Americans are — just as our forefathers — treated as piggy banks for bureaucrats who spend uncontrollably to finance their partisan agenda. There can be no better tomorrow under these circumstances, but who would know? We’re all too busy endlessly scrolling on social media to realize what’s happening around us. We’re willingly distracted.

America is in need of a “common cause” now more than ever. Too much is at stake.