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Monday, July 31, 2017

Ford Cobra Kit Car

(For politics, please scroll down)

Posted by Warren

This is a replica (kit car) of the original Shelby Ford Cobra, a show car. It belongs to a friend of mine and I did the body work and painted it for him.





That means that you get the unfinished body, with some parts for the exterior, sent to you and you provide everything else including all the labor involved in the process. It took the owner twelve years to complete only working on it as time allowed.





I finished the rough body, removed and repaired the imperfections and fitted the doors, bonnet and boot lid. I also prepped and painted the car.

More pictures and commentary below the fold.


Paul Harvey's 1964 Prophecy

Worth the less-than-three minutes needed to watch this video (homily published in 1964 and broadcast on ABC Radio on April 3, 1965):


The YouTube blurb for the above:
Published on Mar 22, 2012

Dear American Citizen: Most would agree the reach of the Federal Government is simply too big, and has lacked true accountability by the press - Yet now the mainstream media (seemingly) is beginning to show signs of investigative journalism. And they should! Admittedly, the IRS has been targeting "Pro-America, Patriot, less Government, more God" non-profit groups. Using Paul Harvey's words and images from our current culture, this video has a message that clearly speaks into the souls of American citizens.

America is not lazy. America is not apathetic. America is not complacent. Yes, some American's are lazy, complacent and apathetic. Some choose laziness and complacency over hard work and creativity. Some stumble through this life completely dependent upon the government, faith based organizations, and the kindness of neighbors...and as American's we support them, not because we have to - but because we want to. We want to help our fellow countryman. But their comes a point where a line must be drawn. There comes a time when we say, "We will go this far, but no further." We cannot carry you forever. You must "want it" yourself. You must begin to walk...and run - on your own. And in time, you will see, that you must begin to help others as well.

And the hard workers? Yes, we dream. We work. We keep the country rolling. We give financially to our churches. We help our neighbors. We pay our taxes. Not out of any sense of shame or compulsion but because we WANT to...

Between the two Paul Harvey Videos I have made they have been viewed over 2,000,000 times. Not bad for a video I put together for our student ministry...but future America needs your help today in spreading the message of this video.

Please share, post, embed, re-post, email and get this message into the hands of Americans. This is not about an election. This is about fighting for the Heart of America...Freedom. You would be surprised who may watch this video and begin to reject complacency and dependency upon the government...together we can slowly rise to rebuild America.
Paul Harvey lived from September 4, 1918-February 28, 2009. He received the Medal of Freedom in 2005.

Go to Paul Harvey ~ The Rest of the Story to listen to more of Paul Harvey's homilies.

Saturday, July 29, 2017

Break From Politics

(If you must have politics, please scroll down)

I'll never again complain about the price of bananas!


Since his stroke of September 15, 2009, Mr. AOW is required by the doctor to eat at least one banana a day. Here's why:

Friday, July 28, 2017

Video: Ball of Confusion

Kid recently stated at Z's blog (emphasis mine):
Yes, a lot of people would love to be poor in America. Many have poured across the border now for decades, and if we didn’t have oceans separating us from the rest....

Still Democrats do maintain the lower standard of living areas in America.

From 1971. You’d think it was today.
Then Kid quoted the lyrics from the Temptations' tune "Ball of Confusion (That's What the World Is Today)."

Here is the "Ball of Confusion," with lyrics (apologies to FreeThinke, who will, no doubt, wish to silence the sound track):


Truly...
There is no new thing under the sun. — Ecclesiastes 1:9b (KJV)

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Recommended Reading

In at least this specific case, there appears to be a connection between illegal immigration (human trafficking) and drug cartels. One also wonders if some of these immigrants are drug mules or other gang operatives. See People close to notorious Zetas cartel helped immigrants found in truck in Walmart parking lot cross the Rio Grande, according to survivor.

Excerpt:
Survivors of Texas migrant truck have told of how they came to be locked inside

One said smugglers connected to Zetas cartel charged $700 to take them across the Rio Grande, before they were locked inside the tractor-trailer

Group of up to 200 people sat in there from Saturday morning until 9pm when they set out for San Antonio where they were later discovered, source said

Driver James Bradley Jr has been charged with transporting migrants illegally
About Los Zetas:
The Zetas gang, also known as Los Zetas, was originally part of the Gulf cartel, one of Mexico's largest and deadliest criminal organizations which was established in the mid 1980s.

Zetas was formed in 1997 by a group of Special Forces defectors which served the larger cartel and acted as enforcers for them. They were hired, predominantly, as bodyguards and assassins and there were 31 of them in total to begin with.

Their name translates to 'The Zs' and is derived from the code names given to their leaders - all of which start with the letter Z.

Because of its members advanced military training, they brought a new level of sophistication to the underworld and created fresh challenges for US law enforcement agencies trying to crack down on the Mexico's drug gangs.

In 2002, they struck out on their own.

Unlike other gangs which navigated large parts of the underworld through making deals with violence a collateral side effect, the Zetas MO is torture and terror.

They are responsible for the 2010 massacre of 72 illegal migrants whose bodies were found dumped in a mass grave in San Fernando.

Images of the victims, who were from other Central and South American countries, shocked the world and illustrated the brutality of the Mexican cartel world.

They were savagely killed after refusing to work for Los Zetas or give them money to be released.

Frank G. Fuentes
Related Washington Post sob story: He was brought to Virginia as a toddler, deported at 19. He died in an overheated tractor-trailer trying to return.

Note that this young man had both a criminal record and a deportation record — never mind that he was a fine-looking young man and educated in the United States, at the expense of the Fairfax County taxpayers.

Certainly some illegal immigrants are good people. But the fact remains that some are not, and this ugly reality applies to some protected by DACA, established by the Obama administration in 2012.

Close our porous southern border!

Find and vet the illegal aliens in our midst!

Tuesday, July 25, 2017

About 21st Century Sweatshops

As I was catching up on emails, I found this article in my inbox: Smug College Kid Shut Down After Professor Hits Him With a Truth Cruise Missile. A portion of the video below was embedded in the article. Please watch and, if you can recover from noting the cocky attitude of the students (Exeter University), offer your thoughts about what Yaron Brook said:

Sunday, July 23, 2017

Open Thread: Help Me Out Here


So, what's been happening while I was on blog break during Warren's visit to the AOW household and the D.C. area? All of us were having too much fun to be much concerned about politics!

Please bring me up to date about what happened from July 14 through July 22.

When commenting, please observe the guidelines below:

We welcome civil dialogue at Always on Watch. We will delete comments that include any of the following:
1. Any use of profanity or abusive language
2. Off topic comments and spam
3. Use of personal invective
4. We do not respond to anonymous comments

Saturday, July 15, 2017

Blog Break


Comment moderation intermittently enabled.

Real life, this time, pleasurable real life, supersedes virtual life!

Warren is coming for a visit — his first visit to Washington, D.C.!

There's too much going on here to work on publishing blog posts. Former blogger TMW and I are readying the house, and Mr. AOW is tidying up his man cave.

Then, once Warren arrives, we're off to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the National Air and Space Museum, the National Museum of Natural History, and whatever other attractions we can manage to squeeze into our schedule.

During this blog's hiatus, enjoy Preludes For Piano Book One by Claude Debussy (1862-1918):


List of preludes:

1) Danseuses de Delphes (Dancers of Delphi)
2) Voiles (Veils or Sails) 3:46
3) Le vent dans la plaine (The wind in the plain) 7:47
4) Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir (The sounds and fragrances swirl through the evening air) 9:48
5) Les collines d'Anacapri (The hills of Anacapri) 14:26
6) Des pas sur la neige (Footsteps in the snow) 17:44
7) Ce qu'a vu le vent d'Ouest (What the west wind has seen) 23:10
8) La fille aux cheveux de lin (The girl with the flaxen hair) 26:17
9) La sérénade interrompue (The interrupted serenade) 28:57
10) La Cathédrale engloutie (The engulfed cathedral) 31:23
11) La danse de Puck (Puck's dance) 37:39
12) Minstrels 40:36


For detailed information about Debussy and these preludes, go to Musical Musings.

Friday, July 14, 2017

Summertime In Washington

Today, here in the Washington, D.C., area, we should all be singing the praises of American capitalism!

One of my Facebook finds:


Read more about Willis Carrier HERE.

Willis Carrier didn't change the weather, but he gave us the means to cope with these hot-as-Hades days.  Long live American ingenuity!

Quotation from 1921 Ford calendar card from the Dave Thomson collection

Once again...Long live American ingenuity!

And long live American capitalism!

Thursday, July 13, 2017

On Days Like This...

...I'm glad that I am not, and never have been, a member of the GOP.

I'm referring to my disgust with the GOP's failure to keep their long-standing promise to repeal (and replace?) ObamaCare — not to Donald J. Trump, Jr.'s emails and his meeting with the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.

Note: please read the second link above, GOP cave on Obamacare repeal is the biggest broken promise in political history, before commenting on the topic.

Monday, July 10, 2017

R.I.P. CNN

They did it to themselves. For example (click directly on the graphic to enlarge it):



CNN has gone from the most trusted name in news to fake news. Therefore:



[hat tip to Infidel Bloggers Alliance for the first graphic in this blog post]

Friday, July 7, 2017

North Korea: Charles Krauthammer's 1994 Predictions

These are the cities Kim Jong-un CAN destroy with nuclear weapons

From O’ say can you see, North Korea’s highest, longest ICBM test yet? (dated July 5, 2017):
While Americans shot off Roman candles for July 4th, North Korea launched an ICBM higher and farther than any of its other 10 missile tests this year.

[...]

...North Korea is also developing a submarine-launched missile, which would not need the range to cross the Pacific.
FLASHBACK TO 1994...

Thursday, July 6, 2017

"The West will never ever be broken"

Image credit

I caught the last ten minutes or so of President Trump's speech today at Krasiński Square, the site of a monument commemorating the 1944 Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis in Warsaw, Poland.

WOWZER!

What a statement of the importance of national borders and of limited government!

But it was the words I cited in the title of this blog post that jumped out at me:

"The West will never ever be broken."

We no longer have an apologist POTUS. Instead, we have a POTUS who stands strong for the West — and without any mealy-mouthed whimpering about colonialism-based guilt (Zinnism).

Below, I have, more or less, cued up the portion of the speech that made me want to stand up and cheer. Worth your time.


Yes, President Trump uttered the words "radical Islamic terrorism."

Note: the full transcript of the speech is HERE.

Wednesday, July 5, 2017

Improving Graduation Rates


From Prince George's County, Maryland, comes this story of "earning" a high school diploma the wrong way – that is, making sure that student achievement looks good on paper but without improving the quality of education:

...One [teacher] said he did everything he could this year to help a senior headed toward failure — contacting parents, alerting a counselor and an administrator and referring him to a school intervention team. But little changed, so the teenager got an E — a failing grade — in an English course required for graduation.

A couple weeks later, he said, he spotted the student in a cap and gown, collecting a diploma. How that happened remains a mystery, he said. “It solidified what I’d heard about grades being changed and that administrators will do whatever it takes to make sure they meet their graduation rates,” he said.

At another school, a teacher said two of her seniors this year missed weeks of school, did not do assignments or make up work, and failed her course. But the principal encouraged students and their families to appeal, she said, and their course grades were revised to a C and a D. She was told both graduated.

[...]

At a third high school, an employee with firsthand knowledge said grade-change forms are often signed by the principal but not by teachers. The employee said the forms are often attached to academic “packets” designed to compensate for missed or failed work, but many of the packets are only partly complete.

“I think it’s all a numbers game,” the employee said, alleging that more than 100 students at the school graduated with the help of such changes during the past four years.

Four-year graduation rates in Prince George’s have jumped from 74.1 percent in 2013 to 81.4 percent in 2016...the largest gain for that period of any school system in Maryland....
Read the rest of Some employees in a large Maryland school system see signs of grade tampering, if the Washington Post's subscriber wall will allow you to do so.

By tampering with grades which are supposed to reflect students' achievement, the Prince George's County Public Schools System has denigrated and devalued the high school diplomas for all the students enrolled in the school system!

Of course, educational malpractice is not unique to the Prince George's County Public School system. See Dozens of Atlanta educators falsified tests, state report confirms (2011) and Public school employees who falsify student data are making a mockery of reform efforts (2012) and When Teachers, Not Students, Do The Cheating (2014) – to cite just three articles on the topic.

Lest we think that only public schools engage in such unethical behaviors, I am here to tell you that private schools sometimes cheat.

In fact, at the last private school in which I taught, administrators often overrode teachers' submitted grades so as to put higher grades on the report cards.  The administration's philosophy at the time was that parents shouldn't see C's on their children's report cards because, after all, the parents were paying hefty tuition rates. As a result of this grade cheating on the part of the administration, several other teachers and I resigned at the end of the school term.

There were plenty of applicants to fill the vacancies we created. Mammon triumphs, after all.

Sadly, for especially the last five years, I've been something similar occurring in the homeschooling movement. Most parents now are looking for good grades for their children so that their children look good on paper – never mind the erosion of learning itself.

Is it any wonder that we are seeing a decline in actual education (student learning), particularly in high school and beyond?  Even worse, is it any wonder that we are seeing an overall  decline in student interest in acquiring knowledge?

The state of education in a nutshell (click directly on the graphic to enlarge it):

Sunday, July 2, 2017

Happy Birthday, Land That I Love!


I am posting a few days early for Independence Day 2017 so that readers of this blog will have enough time to enjoy the soaring music of Symphony No. 9 In E Minor (aka "From The New World") by Antonín Dvořák (1841 –1904) and the accompanying images:



For detailed information about the composer and the above piece, please see THIS POSTING at Musical Musings. Those of you familiar with the song "Goin' Home" you may be surprised to learn the following:
[Dvořák] composed the Symphony No. 9 in 1893, and while American music inspired him, he did not use any American melodies in the work. He wrote in the American style of pentatonic scale use and did it so well that for a long time many put the cart before the horse, especially in regards to the melody from the 2nd movement. A song named "Goin' Home" takes its melody from the symphony, not the other way around. The words were not set to the melody until many years after the symphony had been written.
A detailed discussion of the origins of "Goin' Home," is found HERE.


HAPPY BIRTHDAY, USA!



AND HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY 2017 TO ALL WHO STOP BY ALWAYS ON WATCH!


Never forget why we celebrate this day:


The Declaration of Independence was a statement adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, which announced that the thirteen American colonies, then at war with Great Britain, regarded themselves as independent states, and no longer a part of the British Empire. John Adams put forth a resolution earlier in the year which made a formal declaration inevitable. A committee was assembled to draft the formal declaration, to be ready when congress voted on independence. Adams persuaded the committee to select Thomas Jefferson to compose the original draft of the document, which congress would edit to produce the final version. The Declaration was ultimately a formal explanation of why Congress had voted on July 2 to declare independence from Great Britain, more than a year after the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War. The Independence Day of the United States of America is celebrated on July 4, the day Congress approved the wording of the Declaration.

Quotes from signers:

"Believe me, dear Sir: there is not in the British empire a man who more cordially loves a union with Great Britain than I do. But, by the God that made me, I will cease to exist before I yield to a connection on such terms as the British Parliament propose; and in this, I think I speak the sentiments of America."
Thomas Jefferson

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Benjamin Franklin

"I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth."
John Adams

"There, I guess King George will be able to read that."
John Hancock

"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right...and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers."
John Adam

"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."
Thomas Jefferson

"I am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure it will cost us to maintain this declaration, and support and defend these states. Yet through all the gloom I see the rays of ravishing light and glory. I can see that the end is worth all the means. This is our day of deliverance."
John Adams

"Equal and exact justice to all men...freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus; and trial by juries impartially selected,these principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us."
Thomas Jefferson

"We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."
Benjamin Franklin
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