“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.” –J. Robert Oppenheimer
“Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD, the people He has chosen as His own inheritance.” Psalm 33:12
This Superlative Sanctuary Sunday Open Thread, with full respect to those who worship God on the Sabbath, is a place to reaffirm our worship of our Creator, our Father, our King Eternal.
It is also a place to read, post and discuss news that is worth knowing and sharing. Please post links to any news stories that you use as sources or quote from.
In the QTree, we’re a friendly and civil lot. We encourage free speech and the open exchange and civil discussion of different ideas. Topics aren’t constrained, and sound logic is highly encouraged, all built on a solid foundation of truth and established facts.
We have a policy of mutual respect, shown by civility. Civility encourages discussions, promotes objectivity and rational thought in discourse, and camaraderie in the participants – characteristics we strive toward in our Q Tree community.
Please show respect and consideration for your fellow QTreepers. Before hitting the “post” button, please proofread your post and make sure you’re addressing the issue only, and not trying to confront the poster. Keep to the topic – avoid “you” and “your”. Here in The Q Tree, personal attacks, name calling, ridicule, insults, baiting and other conduct for which a penalty flag would be thrown are VERBOTEN.
In The Q Tree, we’re compatriots, sitting around the campfire, roasting hot dogs, making s’mores and discussing, agreeing, and disagreeing about whatever interests us. This board will remain a home for those who seek respectful conversations.
Let’s not give the Internet Censors a reason to shut down this intellectual haven that Wolf has created for us.
The Storm is upon us. Please remember to Pray for our President.
AND WHAT TIME IS IT? TIME TO DRAIN THE SWAMP!!!
It’s time to replace a failed and CORRUPT political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American People. ~ Candidate Donald J. Trump
Also remember Wheatie’s Rules:
No food fights.
No running with scissors.
If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
And,
On this day and every day –
God is in Control . . . and His Grace is Sufficient, so . . . Keep Looking Up
Hopefully, every Sunday, you can find something here that will build you up a little . . . give you a smile . . . and add some joy or peace, very much needed in all our lives.
“This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn nor weep.” . . . “Go your way, eat the fat, drink the sweet, and send portions to those for whom nothing is prepared; for this day is holy to our Lord. Do not sorrow, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”
10 The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; He makes the plans of the peoples of no effect. 11 The counsel of the Lord stands forever, The plans of His heart to all generations. 12 Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, The people He has chosen as His own inheritance.
13 The Lord looks from heaven; He sees all the sons of men. 14 From the place of His dwelling He looks On all the inhabitants of the earth; 15 He fashions their hearts individually; He considers all their works.
16 No king is saved by the multitude of an army; A mighty man is not delivered by great strength. 17 A horse is a vain hope for safety; Neither shall it deliver any by its great strength.
18 Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him, On those who hope in His mercy, 19 To deliver their soul from death, And to keep them alive in famine.
20 Our soul waits for the Lord; He is our help and our shield. 21 For our heart shall rejoice in Him, Because we have trusted in His holy name. 22 Let Your mercy, O Lord, be upon us, Just as we hope in You.
“Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD, the people He has chosen as His own inheritance.” Psalm 33:12
America is a Christian nation. We are one nation under God. Our Founding Fathers and others in American history endorsed God in government. Historically, our congress recommended Bibles for America and funded Christian missionaries. Our national motto is “In God we trust.”
Christians uniting in Christ is our nation’s source of unity.
We are now in the midst of a national uprising of Leftists, who are testing whether America can survive under its present form of God-given rights, constitutional government and practices, and its present overriding principles of Liberty and Justice.
The farthest thing from these Leftists’ minds is whether or not their actions bring credit to and are being done for the glory of God. They are godless and anti-Christian to their core.
Let’s remember, from history, the integral relationship of God with the founding and development of America.
“It is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor.” – George Washington
“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable.” – George Washington
We have this day [Fourth of July] restored the Sovereign to whom all men ought to be obedient. He reigns in Heaven, and from the rising to the setting of the sun, let His Kingdom come. – Samuel Adams
The name of the Lord (says the Scripture) is a strong tower; thither the righteous flee and are safe (Proverbs 18:10). Let us secure His favor and He will lead us through the journey of this life and at length receive us to a better. – Samuel Adams
The rights of the colonists as Christians…may be best understood by reading and carefully studying the institutes of the Great Law Giver and Head of the Christian Church, which are to be found clearly written and promulgated in the New Testament. – Samuel Adams
By Law the United States Congress adds to US coinage: “In God We Trust” – United States Congress 1864
The Declaration of Independence laid the cornerstone of human government upon the first precepts of Christianity. – John Adams
The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were the general principles of Christianity. I will avow that I then believed, and now believe, that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God. – John Adams
The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: it connected, in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity. – John Adams
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. – John Adams
[The Fourth of July] ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. – John Adams
As the safety and prosperity of nations ultimately and essentially depend on the protection and the blessing of Almighty God, and the national acknowledgment of this truth is not only an indispensable duty which the people owe to Him. – John Adams
God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever. – Thomas Jefferson
Education is useless without the Bible. The Bible was America’s basic text book in all fields. God’s Word, contained in the Bible, has furnished all necessary rules to direct our conduct. – Noah Webster
In my view, the Christian religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government ought to be instructed … No truth is more evident to my mind than that the Christian religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people. – Noah Webster, Preface Noah Webster Dictionary, 1828
“I verily believe Christianity necessary to the support of civil society. One of the beautiful boasts of our municipal jurisprudence is that Christianity is a part of the Common Law … There never has been a period in which the Common Law did not recognize Christianity as lying its foundations.” – Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story
“[The Bible] is the rock on which our Republic rests.” – Andrew Jackson
In regards to this great Book [the Bible], I have but to say it is the best gift God has given to man. All the good the Savior gave to the world was communicated through this Book. But for it we could not know right from wrong. All things most desirable for man’s welfare, here and hereafter, are found portrayed in it. – Abraham Lincoln
And whereas it is the duty of nations as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God … and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord. – Abraham Lincoln
Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh. (Matthew 18:7) – Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln Memorial
We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution. – Abraham Lincoln
“Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land, are still competent to adjust in the best way all our present difficulties.” – Abraham Lincoln
“We have staked the whole future of our new nation, not upon the power of government; far from it. We have staked the future of all our political constitutions upon the capacity of each of ourselves to govern ourselves according to the moral principles of the Ten Commandments.” – James Madison
“Religion [is] the basis and foundation of Government” – James Madison
“Cursed be all that learning that is contrary to the cross of Christ.” – James Madison
“The foundations of our society and our government rest so much on the teachings of the Bible that it would be difficult to support them if faith in these teachings would cease to be practically universal in our country.” – Calvin Coolidge
“The fundamental basis of this Nation’s law was given to Moses on the Mount. The fundamental basis of our Bill of Rights comes from the teachings which we get from Exodus and St. Matthew, from Isaiah and St. Paul.” – Harry S. Truman
“This Nation was established by men who believed in God. … You will see the evidence of this deep religious faith on every hand.’ – Harry S. Truman
“Without God there could be no American form of government, nor an American way of life. Recognition of the Supreme Being is the first, the most basic, expression of Americanism. Thus, the founding fathers of America saw it, and thus with God’s help, it will continue to be.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
“I believe that the next half century will determine if we will advance the cause of Christian civilization or revert to the horrors of brutal paganism.” – Theodore Roosevelt
“This is a Christian nation.” – Harry Truman
“[The United States is] founded on the principles of Christianity” – Franklin D. Roosevelt
Of the many influences that have shaped the United States into a distinctive nation and people, none may be said to be more fundamental and enduring than the Bible. – Ronald Reagan
Deep religious beliefs stemming from the Old and New Testaments of the Bible inspired many of the early settlers of our country, providing them with the strength, character, convictions, and faith necessary to withstand great hardship and danger in this new and rugged land. These shared beliefs helped forge a sense of common purpose among the widely dispersed colonies — a sense of community which laid the foundation for the spirit of nationhood that was to develop in later decades. – Ronald Reagan
The Bible and its teachings helped form the basis for the Founding Fathers’ abiding belief in the inalienable rights of the individual, rights which they found implicit in the Bible’s teachings of the inherent worth and dignity of each individual. This same sense of man patterned the convictions of those who framed the English system of law inherited by our own Nation, as well as the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. – Ronald Reagan
For centuries the Bible’s emphasis on compassion and love for our neighbor has inspired institutional and governmental expressions of benevolent outreach such as private charity, the establishment of schools and hospitals, and the abolition of slavery. – Ronald Reagan
Inside the Bible’s pages lie the answers to all the problems that mankind has ever known. I hope Americans will read and study the Bible. – Ronald Reagan
Our founders invoked our Creator four times in the Declaration of Independence. Our currency declares “IN GOD WE TRUST.” And we place our hands on our hearts as we recite the Pledge of Allegiance and proclaim that we are “One Nation Under God.” – Donald Trump
May we never forget that prayer guides and empowers our Nation and that all things are possible with God. In times of prosperity, strife, peace, and war, Americans lean on His infinite love, grace, and understanding. – Donald Trump
There is hope for us yet, as Christians across the USA declare: The Lord is the God of the USA and we are His people,
This battle is the Lord’s and through it God’s purpose and perfect plan will be accomplished.
God has mightily blessed America. May He continue to do so.
As of this writing, on Friday, September 11, at about 1:30 in the afternoon Central Daylight Time, the finer details of President Donald Trump’s scheduled rally in Reno, Nevada, are not known, other than there is going to be one. Time and location are not available, so this is going to pop up in the morning and we can all meet here when it really happens.
Ever wonder how close this is to the truth?
So how did this desert gambling oasis pop up? A little history from wiki:
Archaeological finds place the eastern border for the prehistoric Martis people in the Reno area.[7] As early as the mid 1850s, a few pioneers settled in the Truckee Meadows, a relatively fertile valley through which the Truckee River made its way from Lake Tahoe to Pyramid Lake. In addition to subsistence farming, these early residents could pick up business from travelers along the California Trail, which followed the Truckee westward, before branching off towards Donner Lake, where the formidable obstacle of the Sierra Nevada began.
Gold was discovered in the vicinity of Virginia City in 1850, and a modest mining community developed, but the discovery of silver in 1859 at the Comstock Lode led to a mining rush, and thousands of emigrants left their homes, bound for the West, hoping to find a fortune.
To provide the necessary connection between Virginia City and the California Trail, Charles W. Fuller built a log toll bridge across the Truckee River in 1859. A small community that served travelers soon grew near the bridge. After two years, Fuller sold the bridge to Myron C. Lake, who continued to develop the community by adding a grist mill, kiln, and livery stable to the hotel and eating house. He renamed it “Lake’s Crossing”. Most of what is present-day western Nevada was formed as the Nevada Territory from part of Utah Territory in 1861.
By January 1863, the Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR) had begun laying tracks east from Sacramento, California, eventually connecting with the Union Pacific Railroad at Promontory, Utah, to form the First Transcontinental Railroad. Lake deeded land to the CPRR in exchange for its promise to build a depot at Lake’s Crossing. In 1864, Washoe County was consolidated with Roop County, and Lake’s Crossing became the county’s largest town. Lake had earned himself the title “founder of Reno”.[8] Once the railroad station was established, the town of Reno officially came into being on May 9, 1868.[9] CPRR construction superintendent Charles Crocker named the community after Major General Jesse Lee Reno, a Union officer killed in the Civil War at the Battle of South Mountain.
In 1871, Reno became the county seat of the newly expanded Washoe County, replacing the county seat in Washoe City. However, political power in Nevada remained with the mining communities, first Virginia City and later Tonopah and Goldfield.[2][10]
The extension of the Virginia and Truckee Railroad to Reno in 1872 provided a boost to the new city’s economy. In the following decades, Reno continued to grow and prosper as a business and agricultural center and became the principal settlement on the transcontinental railroad between Sacramento and Salt Lake City.[11] As the mining boom waned early in the 20th century, Nevada’s centers of political and business activity shifted to the nonmining communities, especially Reno and Las Vegas, and today, the former mining metropoles stand as little more than ghost towns. Despite this, Nevada is still the third-largest gold producer in the world, after South Africa and Australia; the state yielded 6.9% of the world’s supply in 2005 world gold production.[12]
Gold, huh. No wonder the Democrats are hanging on to Nevada for dear life.
Reno took a leap when the state of Nevada legalized open gambling on March 19, 1931, along with the passage of even more liberal divorce laws than places such as Hot Springs, Arkansas, offered. No other state offered what Nevada had in the 1930s, and casinos such as the Bank Club and Palace were popular.[citation needed] The new Nevada divorce laws, passed around 1927, allowed people to divorce after six weeks of residency instead of six months. People wishing to divorce stayed in hotels, houses, and/or dude ranches. Most divorcees left Nevada when their divorces were finalized, while some stayed.[14]
Within a few years, the Bank Club, owned by George Wingfield, Bill Graham, and Jim McKay, was the state’s largest employer and the largest casino in the world. Wingfield owned most of the buildings in town that housed gaming and took a percentage of the profits, along with his rent.[15]
Ernie Pyle once wrote in one of his columns, “All the people you saw on the streets in Reno were obviously there to get divorces.” In Ayn Rand‘s novel The Fountainhead, published in 1943, the New York-based female protagonist tells a friend, “I am going to Reno,” which is taken as a different way of saying “I am going to divorce my husband.” Among others, Belgian-French writer Georges Simenon, at the time living in the U.S., came to Reno in 1950 to divorce his first wife.[16]
Truthfully, the closest this writer has ever been to Reno is probably Tahoe/State Line, Nevada, which was also the last and only casino she ever patronized. The place gave me a headache.
UPDATE: The rally will be at Minden-Tahoe Airport, about 40 miles away from Reno. So, here’s some Tahoe info:
The lake was formed about two million years ago as part of the Lake Tahoe Basin, with the modern extent being shaped during the ice ages. It is known for the clarity of its water and the panorama of surrounding mountains on all sides.[5] The area surrounding the lake is also referred to as Lake Tahoe, or simply Tahoe. More than 75% of the lake’s watershed is national forest land, being the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit of the United States Forest Service.
Lake Tahoe is a major tourist attraction in both Nevada and California. It is home to winter sports, summer outdoor recreation, and scenery enjoyed throughout the year. Snow and ski resorts are a significant part of the area’s economy and reputation.[6][7] The Nevada side also offers several lakeside casino resorts, with highways providing year-round access to the entire area.
Note: There’s a fairly lengthy bit below regarding gold / silver standards, thinly disguised as a coin essay. (Or maybe it’s the other way around.)
The Eight Weeks
The famous eight weeks are now at an end…and it seems like little has changed. I can only hope that things have been going on behind the scenes, and it’s just running a couple of weeks late.
I continue to maintain that something has to happen before the elections, particularly with regards to the protesting rioting. Enough people are being harmed by this that some might begin to wonder why President Trump doesn’t do something and then blame him for not doing something. Public perception now is that it’s a Democrat Caused Thing, but quite possibly, that could turn on a dime to a perception of them being a Republican Enabled Thing since little visible has been done by Republicans to stop them. (Note that word “visible,” it’s a key word.)
Yet another component of the Big Issue.
A Reminder Of Today’s Big Issue.
Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American People...Our campaign represents a true existential threat, like they’ve never seen before.
Then-Candidate Donald J. Trump
Needs to happen, soon.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
Please note that our menu has changed, please listen to all of the options.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Political correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. The first rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government take your guns. 5. The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Be sure of your target and what is behind it. 9. Social Justice Warriors, ANTIFA pukes, BLM hypocrites, and other assorted varieties of Marxists can go copulate with themselves, or if insufficiently limber, may substitute a rusty wire brush suitable for cleaning the bore of a twelve or ten gauge.
(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)
Coin of The Day
1792. 1834. 1853. And 1896.
What do those years have in common?
They’re big dates in American monetary history, and they all have to do with the relative values of certain commodities. In particular, gold and silver.
As conservatives, we are usually people who want us to go back on the gold standard, so the Federal Reserve will have to stop inflating our money. We’ve been using a dollar that is essentially backed by nothing since 1933.
To be sure foreign governments could exchange their dollars for gold at $35/troy ounce until the 1970s, but we could not. If we could have, we’d have cleaned out Fort Knox trading dollars for gold that was in fact worth far more than those days’ $35. Which is actually an illustration of the point I am about to make.
1792
The first US Congress under our shiny new Constitution met in 1789, and had a lot on its plate, of course, trying to institute and organize a whole new structure. One of the issues it was discussing was establishing US coinage…which in those days meant the entire monetary system, as no one was going to trust paper money any more after the sad experience with “Continental Currency.” (“Not worth a Continental” came from the Revolutionary War era.) It was common around the world for a piece of paper denominated in some money (for example, dollars or rubles) to be worth less than the physical metal money, so it might take thirty paper (Continental) dollars to buy one dollar in actual silver. Dollar meant two different things, and over in Russia, ruble did too, at the same time.
What were we using at the time? A mish-mosh of coins–English money (pounds, shillings and pence) and Spanish money (sixteen reales to the escudo) too. In fact Spanish money was more common here, because England usually specifically forbade the export of their money to the colonies! (The idea was for us to send money to them, not the other way around.) So we used Spanish silver, weighed it, and figured its value in pounds, shillings, and pence in some colonies, and other colonies just directly called the “piece of eight” a “dollar” and did things in dollars. (In Mexico the same coin was called a peso.)
So in April of 1792, we passed our first mint act, and officially adopted the dollar. Except we decided to divide it into a hundred parts, not eight. And that act specified how much silver was to be in an American dollar. 371 4/16ths grains (the same grain you use at the reloading bench, the same grain used to measure bullets) of silver, combined with enough copper to bring the total weight to 416 grains was by definition a dollar. A quarter dollar would be 92 13/16ths grains of pure silver in a 104 grain coin, a dime (spelled “disme” back then) would be 37 2/16ths grains of pure silver in a 41 2/5ths grain coin.
(Side note: Notice all the fractions, not decimals. They worked in fractions in those days, and the fractions were all expressed as 16ths in this case, because the arithmetic (all done longhand) was easier that way, though they haven’t taught arithmetic that way in a very long time. “New Math” is not a new thing. For example, to figure out the quarter, start with 371 4/16ths. Divide by four: break it down into 368 + 3 + 4/16ths, all of which are easier to divide by four. 368/4 = 92. 3/4 = 12/16ths, 4/16 divided by four is 1/16th, add (easy to do) and get 92 13/16. Similarly for the dime start with 371 4/16ths, break it up into 370 + 1 4/16ths, the first part is easy (37), the second part is equivalent to 20/16ths which readily divides by 10 to give 2/16ths, the time was 37 2/16ths ounces of pure silver. A little forethought made things easy, rather than just plug-and-chucking long division. The arithmetic worked similarly in Russia, which had, if anything even more complicated coinage standards back then.)
(End of side note.) Now this is an awfully peculiar amount. Why not 371? Or 372? Or 370? Well, they had actually assayed a bunch of Spanish coins to figure out what the typical Spanish piece of eight weighed and how pure it was.
Oh, and that purity was 371 4/16 divided by 416…easier expressed as a fraction by multiplying numerator and denominator by 4 to yield 1485/1664ths, or in modern terms 0.892427885… (a decimal which will eventually get around to repeating) fine. (Now you may be able to see why they worked in fractions!)
So we had our dollar. But the act of April 4, 1792 also authorized gold coinage. In this case, at least, we went with 22 karat gold, a nice clean 22/24ths or 11/12ths pure. We didn’t have a gold coin worth a dollar (not until 1849!) but we invented a denomination called the “eagle” equal to ten dollars. And we did start making eagles, 247 4/8 grains pure, add copper to get it to 270 grains. (And you can check to see that 247 4/8ths equals 11/12ths of 270, if you are so inclined. I did, using old methods, and it works.)
How much gold, then, in a gold dollar, if we had decided to make one? Dividing (I won’t show my work this time) you get 24 6/8ths grains of pure gold.
So by law 371 4/16ths grains of silver equaled 24 6/8ths grains of gold.
This implies a legal value ratio between gold and silver. And it turns out that 24 6/8 is 1/15th of 371 4/16. So gold and silver were defined by law to be in a 15:1 ratio, value wise. Fifteen ounces of silver had equal value to one ounce of gold.
People were allowed to bring their gold and silver to the mint, where it would be assayed, melted down, impurities removed and then alloyed to the proper fineness, and minted into coins, which would then be returned to the depositor. The government did this as a public service. (If you wanted your coins immediately, you had to pay a small fee, because you were then being given someone else’s silver from last week.) In fact the very first silver coins struck after the act was passed were, for a long time, believed to be made from Martha Washington’s silverware. It turns out it was most likely made from seventy dollars’ worth of silver Thomas Jefferson withdrew from a bank, for which he received, a few days later, 1400 half dimes. But it’s possible a second batch of half dimes came from Washington’s forks and spoons.
[No matter whose silver it was, I want one of those coins (just think, Washington or Jefferson spent that coin) and yes, they do turn up on the market occasionally–but still far more often than lottery prizes happen to me.]
Anyhow, back on the main train of thought:
Things were reasonably tidy, and would stay that way as long as the market value of gold and silver remained in a 15:1 ratio. I could bring in an ounce of gold or fifteen ounces of silver, and what came out would be of equal value either way…and they would be labeled as being of equal value. (Welllllll, they often didn’t put denomination inscriptions on the coins back then…people just knew what they were based on size and whether it was gold or silver. But hopefully you get my point.)
But gold had been slowly getting more valuable relative to silver. Around about 1700 the market value ratio was 14:1. Then it was 14.5:1. Now it was 15:1…and the trend continued!
By the 1830s, ten silver dollars could still buy a gold eagle, at places that had to conform to the 15:1 ratio…but the gold in that gold eagle was worth more than the ten silver dollars were worth. And the dollar was mostly thought of in silver terms then, so, in essence a ten dollar coin was worth more than ten dollars.
You can guess what happened: A number of people bought those gold eagles and melted them because they were worth more melted into bars than they were as coins. This is why early US gold is so dang expensive in the collector’s market now: It’s rare. Only in a few cases is a date common, generally representing “hoards” that escaped the melt down. Someone in 1813, for example, had some half eagles made and put them away. Those are now on the market so 1813 half eagles (95,428 made total) are considerably cheaper than 1829 half eagles (263,806 made), and even more so with other dates, some of which there are literally 3 or 4 surviving pieces. An 1822 half eagle (one of three survivors known out of 17,796 produced) sold for over six hundred thousand dollars in 1982 and the best guess is it would fetch around eight million dollars today.
The gold disappeared from circulation, in many cases going into a melting pot. And certainly no one was going to take their freshly-mined gold and devalue it by having eagles made from it.
The shift had happened fairly quickly. In fact, in 1799 the market ratio had already slipped to 15 3/4 to 1.
1834
Something had to be done, and something was done. By the act of June 28, 1834:
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, that the gold coins of the United States shall contain the following quantities of metal that is to say; each eagle shall contain two hundred and thirty two grains of pure gold, and two hundred and fifty eight grains of standard gold;…
Act of June 28, 1834
232/258 = 0.89224806… fine.
The change, midway through the year, was marked by a change in the design of the gold coins, so if you saw an 1834 “capped head” gold piece, you knew it was an old (overloaded) one, if you saw the “classic head,” it had the right amount of gold in it; also the E PLURIBUS UNUM motto was omitted to make the difference even more obvious. (These are the modern collector’s names for the designs.)
and AFTER (Classic Head, 1834-1839). This is a proof specimen which is why the fields look black, the light is off center or it would otherwise glare off the mirrored surfaces.
(And if you do see an 1834 capped head half eagle (no full eagles had been made since 1804) it’s worth over 50 thousand dollars in “About Uncirculated-55” grade. An 1834 classic head, on the other hand, is worth $1,750 in the same grade. When you consider it has roughly $500 worth of gold in it and is therefore worth that much even if you beat it to death with a hammer, that’s not ridiculously expensive for a high-grade collectible.)
This works out, by the way, to being almost exactly a 16:1 ratio between silver and gold; 23.2 is 1/16th of 371 1/5th, which is almost the same (off by 1/20) as 371 4/16ths.
Also according to the act, the old coins could be weighed and treated as equaling 94 8/10 cents per pennyweight (24 grains). That, at least, stopped people melting them down. In essence a completely unworn old eagle weighing 5 5/32 pennyweights was now worth (5 5/32 x 98 4/5) = 508 7/16ths cents, so basically it was worth almost two percent over its face value.
Apparently this was appropriate, because gold began to circulate alongside silver once again. And effectively, we were now on the gold standard at this point, from now on, we didn’t think of the gold price going up, but rather of the silver price going down, which had been the historical trend.
You could still bring your gold or silver to the US mint and have it made into money, as much as you wanted to.Well, it would be made into coins. Gold and silver were money, whether or not it was in coin form. Since the coins were worth what the metal in them was worth, it had no inflationary effect.
A very slight adjustment was made in 1837, keeping the coin the same total weight but making it .900 fine, so now there were 232.2 grains of gold in an eagle. It was far easier for the mint workers to deal with 9/10ths than it was to deal with 232/258ths when mixing a batch of standard gold. (Similarly the notional dollar had copper removed from it, retaining the same amount of pure silver but being .900 fine, resulting in 412.5 grains total weight, with all the other denominations adjusted in line with this. This would end up having an unintended effect down the road.)
16 gold dollars now had 371.52 grains of pure gold in them compared to 371.25 grains of pure silver in one silver dollar, so we were still very close to a 16:1 ratio. Close enough it wasn’t worth melting the coins.
Anyhow, let me just stop right here to make my point:
Trying to tie two different commodities together and fix their value relative to each other creates a mess. It creates a royal mess when you’re trying to use those commodities as the basis for your money.
Let me repeat that:
Trying to tie two different commodities together and fix their value relative to each other creates a mess. It creates a royal mess when you’re trying to use those commodities as the basis for your money.
But this is precisely what we were doing, by defining a certain amount of silver to be a dollar, and a certain amount of gold to be a dollar, and insisting that those two dollars were equivalent by law.
If all of this detail has given you a headache, then you should agree with this point. This is precisely the sort of detail we had to deal with, when our money was based on something “hard” like metal. You had money that wasn’t worth the same as the same amount of money in a different form, all over the place, and worse: coins were often weighed and discounted if they were worn.
To give you a man-on-the-street example of what was going on, a storekeeper could agree to sell you that suit for twenty dollars–and give you a discount if you paid in gold instead of silver, or charge you extra if you used paper money issued by some bank, the more disreputable, the higher the nominal price. That was daily life in America before 1853, and in many respects continued like that until 1876. But the US government could not play those games, not without changing the law. Gold eagles were to be treated as equal to ten silver dollars, period.
It’s worth the effort to have “hard money,” but it has to be done right…or you get a mess and even more headaches. And “right” means not having two different commodities tied together by law.
1853
Anyhow, 16:1 seemed pretty stable. Well, until something unexpected happened.
We conquered Mexico.
But rather than keeping the whole thing, we settled for half, and paid them for it.
Part of that half of Mexico was California.
The war ended on February 2, 1848, with the signing of a treaty.
Nine days before this, on January 24, 1848, gold was found at Sutter’s Mill in California.
A lot of gold. A shitload of gold, as it would turn out.
We had struck gold in the mountains of Georgia and North Carolina previously, and had even created branch mints in Charlotte NC, and Dahlonega, GA in the 1830s to handle this gold. But, though it was nice to have domestic sources rather than relying on foreign payments made in gold, there wasn’t enough gold there to make much of a dent in the market.
But the amount of gold coming out of what is today properly known as the People’s Respublik of Kalifornia was enormous.
(Mexico has been mad ever since about having to give up that territory. Since it turned out to be so dang valuable just at the time they signed it over.)
The mint adapted by introducing $20 gold pieces, double eagles. As gold coins go, these pieces are gigantic. And as I highlighted recently, we also had $1 pieces. These were introduced in 1850 and 1849 respectively. The gold had to get from California to the Philadelphia mint, and that was either overland (very hazardous and expensive) or by ship (also hazardous). A mint was established in San Francisco fairly quickly, but even then, the coins were often shipped east by boat, all the way around the tip of South America. Some of those ships sank, in fact one particularly famous example is the SS Central America, which went down in deep water in September 1857 thanks to a hurricane. On board were 30,000 pounds of gold. Since by this time gold = money, the literal loss of this much money contributed to a financial panic, somewhat (but only somewhat) like 2008.
Much of this gold has been retrieved, and as it happens 1857-S double eagles are far and away the cheapest double eagles from that time, because so many of them went down with that boat and were preserved.
But I have gotten ahead of myself by four years. I am supposed to be talking about 1853.
Refer to basic economics: what happens when there’s suddenly more of something? Its price will go down because the demand won’t otherwise balance supply. There was more gold. But gold was money, so if there’s more of it, and by definition it’s the yardstick of price…well, it looked like everything else went up.
Yes, you can have inflation on a gold standard. But at least governments just can’t stoke it for deficit spending. It’s an “act of God” not a human-caused thing.
One of the things that went up was silver. Yep, for once the gold:silver ratio was decreasing. And doing so fairly quickly, too.
So in the late 1840s and early 1850s, the silver in our silver coins was suddenly worth more than the value stamped on the coins.
You can guess what happened. The silver coins disappeared, they mostly got sent to Europe where they could laugh at our silly laws that said that quarter could only be worth 1/16th of its weight in gold. And to this day silver coins from before 1853 are generally more expensive than ones after 1853.
What did we do? Congress passed the Act of February 21, 1853. This drastically cut the weight of the half dollar, quarter, dime, and half dime, and made a smaller adjustment to the short-lived three cent silver piece (tiny!), but left the silver dollar alone. A dollar’s worth of these coins now contained 384 grams of metal, 90 percent pure, so 345.6 grains. Compare to the previous 371 4/16ths grains; it’s a seven percent reduction!
BEFORE. 1853 quarter dollar without arrows and rays. I wanted a half dollar from 1853, and couldn’t find an image to save my life. It turns out they were only produced in New Orleans that year without arrows and only four of them are known to exist. So I had to settle for this quarter dollar, but it looks substantially the same, just smaller and with QUAR. instead of HALF.
And AFTER–note the arrowheads on either side of the data (retained through 1855) and the rays around the eagle (dropped after 1853)
(And just incidentally, 384 grains is 8/10ths of a troy ounce, which made mint accounting very easy from that point forward; 16,000 ounces of .900 fine silver, for instance, became $20,000 in silver coins; I’ve even seen a copy of a receipt showing that is exactly what happened on April 1, 1871. Or…if you have two silver half dollars, 1964 or earlier, together they weigh 0.8 troy ounces, and since they are .900 fine, they contain .72 troy ounces of silver.)
[Edit to add. No, not quite. There was a minor adjustment in 1873 to make the coins come out to round weights in metric. Those two half dollars weighed 25 grams, total, and contained 20 grams of pure silver. It was a small adjustment but nevertheless it’s just a bit off from what I said.]
The silver coins (other than the dollar) were now worth less than their face value. This was deliberate. Congress was officially done dicking around with bi-metallic coinage standards trying to make them anything other than dysfunctional.
In order to mark the new coins, arrowheads were placed either side of the date in 1853, 1854, and 1855. On the quarter and half dollar, in 1853 only, a sunburst of rays was added to the background on the reverse.
Gold was left alone. You could still bring gold to the mint and have it made into coins. You could not do so with silver, not any more. Instead the government would buy the raw silver from you at market value, and then mint a strictly limited amount of silver coins. By artificially constraining the supply, they wouldn’t glut the market relative to gold. They could promise to always trade twenty silver half dollars (with less than 20 dollars worth of silver in them) for a twenty dollar gold piece, because the supply was strictly controlled. If too many people made that trade, they knew they had to make fewer silver coins to tighten the supply again.
When silver coinage is done like this, it’s described as subsidiary. It’s partially a token, not backed by the silver in the coin, but by gold somewhere else. So yes, now our silver coins were backed by gold.
But now silver miners were at the mercy of market forces. After this spike due to the gold rush, silver resumed its downward trend. And the government would only pay the market price so it could produce money for its own account (and literally make a profit, this is known as seignorage).
For reasons I’m not going to go into here, we briefly produced a heavy, 420 grain silver dollar in the 1870s and 1880s for trade with China–in essence our 412.5 grain silver dollar was too lightweight for the Chinese to appreciate. When we stopped producing those coins, we demonetized them, declaring they were no longer legal money. By then the silver to gold ratio had slipped so far that the silver in the coins was worth less than fifty cents. Their value dropped. Collectors a hundred years ago could actually buy these dollars for less than a dollar, because they could not be traded for dollars any more. (This is no longer true; of course!) They were eventually made legal tender again, but you’d be a sucker to spend one today.
1896
Many people didn’t like this change, especially (as I alluded to) silver miners. They would receive less and less money for their product as time went on. This became a big issue, one wrangled over as much as abortion and gun control are argued over today. There were constant attempts (some successful) to pass legislation requiring the government to produce more silver coinage. Which, to repeat myself, was supposed to be backed by something else, but could not be if it were produced in such quantities.
There was a financial “panic” in 1893, a severe one, and many became convinced that returning to “free coinage of silver” (i.e., the way it was in the old days, where the mint would just turn your silver into coins, gratis) and going back to bimetallism, would solve the issue.
They were wrong.
They were led by William Jennings Bryan (D), at 36 years of age the nominee for President and embarking on a long career of being dead wrong about everything. In 1896 the market gold/silver ratio was something like 30:1 (I’m looking at a very low-res graph). If people were allowed to bring as much silver to the mint as they wanted, to be coined into more face value in coins than it was worth, that would have been inflationary. On the other hand, maybe he anticipated John Maynard Keynes’ theories of fiscal “stimulus.” Maybe the stimulus would have pulled us out, but it would have caused more problems further down the road. So, he was still, basically, dead wrong.
Jennings lost the election. A very good thing, IMHO.
But Woodrow Wilson (also D), gave us the Federal Reserve, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (also D) devalued the dollar relative to gold (and confiscated the gold). Silver was safe, it was worth less than the value stamped on it, quite a bit less. In 1930 the gold silver ratio was eighty to one. Inflation was allowed to take place, and the ratio went back to being (typically) forty to one, so eventually we couldn’t sustain making silver coins, and in 1965, we got our new clad quarter and dime. (The half dollar had a reduced amount of silver in it until 1970, when it too went clad crap.) This happened under Johnson (also D…hmm, there seems to be a pattern here). Finally Nixon (R but RINO when it came to fiscal policy) closed the gold window that sold gold for $35 per ounce, and since then our money has been backed by nothing, other than the fact that the government will let you pay your taxes with it.
Why I Went On This Rant
I saw a well-intentioned post on yesterday’s open thread, suggesting that our dollar henceforth be backed by both gold (yellow) and oil (black gold). There would be gold certificates and oil certificates, backed by yellow and black gold, respectively. (I guess it could be called the bumblebee gold standard?)
This simply can’t work, at least not as the poster probably imagines. The old silver and gold certificates entitled you to exchange those certificates for a certain specified amount of silver or gold. The silver, of course was subsidiary, worth less than face value, but since it was in coin form (until very late) it was legally exchangeable for gold at par.
Would these proposed certificates also correspond to fixed amounts of yellow and black gold? OK…if so, how much? Let’s say the yellow gold dollar certificate entitled you to 1/2000th of an ounce of gold (that’s close to the market price) [Actually they probably wouldn’t issue gold certificates in that small a denomination; even in the old days I think ten dollars or about half an ounce of gold was the lower limit.] Oil is about $37.50 a barrel right now (which is 3/8ths of a hundred bucks), so a black gold certificate should get you (very roughly) a bit more than a gallon of crude oil. (42 gallons to the oil barrel.) So that gallon+ of crude and the speck of gold weighing 1/2000 of an ounce are equivalent.
Today.
But we have seen the price of oil whipsaw a lot. It even went negative for a while this year! Gold has jumped around too, but not as much–though it has often jumped in the opposite direction!
What would a graph of the yellow:black gold price ratio look like? Why, after reviewing all that history up above, would anyone even think of tying the two together?
We would instantly have to talk about black dollars and yellow dollars, and be spending our time monitoring the ratio between the two. Have black dollars in your wallet, but the price of crude just took a major dump? Suddenly that cheeseburger sold by the guy who prefers yellow dollars has jumped up in price for you, because he wants however many of those black dollars make up his price in yellow dollars. Yet they’d both be called “dollars” and our government would presumably have to treat them the same.
(And lets not even go into the fact that oil comes in all sorts of different compositions and qualities; a barrel of light sweet crude is worth more than a barrel of oil so thick it verges on being tar, by a ratio that itself varies depending on which users are looking to buy right now and what kind of goop they want to extract from it–whereas at least all gold is the same once you account for its purity.)
Nope, the only way to make this work is to allow the yellow and the black gold dollars to float relative to each other. And allow the government to recognize this. But at that point you might as well stop calling them both “dollars” since at that point absolutely no one is pretending they are the same thing.
If you don’t insist on having them be separate but tied together, though, you have another option: Combine them. Create a bumblebee gold certificate, which entitles you to 1/4000 th of an ounce of gold AND a bit more than half a gallon of crude oil. Total value at today’s prices, about a dollar. It might even be a bit more stable than a yellow gold or black gold certificate would be, depending; I don’t know how often yellow gold and black gold move in the same direction vs different directions, if the latter is common, it would tend to damp out commodity price fluctuations.
I still like (yellow) gold as a monetary standard, over (black) oil. Gold is not something that gets consumed (at least not much), most that is used industrially ultimately gets recycled, so the available supply isn’t at the mercy of people literally burning it like with oil. If gold production drops (and it is dropping), we still have all the above-ground gold, a cube 60 feet or so on a side in total mined over all of human history. If oil production stops…we will soon have no oil to back our money with since it will have gone out peoples’ tailpipes or been turned into milk jugs and saran wrap.
Trump’s Plans
There are rumors (and that’s all they are, no matter how much a certain few vloggers flog them) that Trump is planning to return us to some sort of gold (presumably the yellow kind) standard. Knowing something about the history of such things, I’d love to know the details…and I also know we won’t be made privy to them in advance.
But we must get our fiscal house in order. We have a crushing federal debt. Even if that went *poof!* and disappeared (which apparently some people imagine to be the case), we’re spending much more than we take in, and that can’t entirely be blamed on the ChiComCrud, so we’d just have a big debt again a few years down the road.
A true gold standard (or silver standard, or oil standard or mango standard) would force discipline on our government. Discipline it simply won’t tolerate. Trump is just as much a part of the forces driving deficit spending as any other person in DC. Which is why I can’t believe he’s willing to do this, unless he’s willing to go cold turkey on finances. No more new spending, no more bigass tax cuts. Money becomes a real, scarce thing and you can no longer just fire up the printing presses to cover deficit spending.
Standard Disclaimer: No coin, paper money, postage stamp, dust bunnies, dust rhinoceros or anything else other than bearded dragons, that I show here at Q Tree is one I own. I may own something similar, I may not.
Another Standard Disclaimer: Prospective burglars will be interested to know that gold and silver are not the only heavy metals I own, and that I keep some of those other heavy metals a lot closer to me than the gold and silver.
Obligatory PSA/Reminder
Just one more thing, my standard Public Service Announcement. We don’t want to forget this!!!
Remember Hong Kong!!! And remember the tens of millions who died under the “Great Helmsman” Chairman Mao.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=L3tnH4FGbd0%3F
I hope this guy isn’t rotting in the laogai somewhere!
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
For my money the Great Helmsman is Hikaru Sulu (even if the actor is a dingbat).
Trump is scheduled to speak at 7 p.m. from Avflight Saginaw, an aviation company located at the MBS International Airport in Freeland. Thursday’s event is the president’s first campaign rally in the state this year, coming while polls show the race tightening in Michigan.
So, just where is Freeland? If Michigan is a mitten, it’s between the thumb and index finger on the fleshy part.
The place was home to Native Americans long before the arrival of settlers of European ancestry. In the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw, in which the Chippewa, Ottawa, and Pottawatomi ceded a large portion of land including Saginaw County to the United States federal government. In that treaty, within the ceded territory, several tracts were reserved for specific groups of Chippewa. One such tract, Black Bird’s Village, consisted of 6,000 acres (24 km2) on the Tittabawassee (named as the Tetabawasink river in the text of the treaty), very near to the present location of Freeland.[5] [6] [7]
In the 1850s, lumbering outposts developed in the area, one of which was called “Loretta”, which was given a post office named “Jay” in April 1856. The office was named for the first postmaster, Jefferson Jaqruth. This outpost was very nearly at the geographical center of Tittawabasse Township. Another settlement was placed just a little to the north. in 1867, one resident of the second locale, George Truesdale, instigated moving the post office from Loretta to his settlement, which retained the name of Jay for several years afterwards.
The name of Freeland comes from “Mammy Freeland” who operated a popular tavern on the river, frequented by lumbermen and rivermen, who came to refer to the entire settlement as Freeland. The name of the post office was changed to Freeland in January 1879. It was also a station on the Pere Marquette Railroad. By another account (Moore), the Freeland family name was prominent in business and politics of the area.
During World War II, the airport was used to hold German prisoners of war.
That last bit could be useful at some trivia night.
No mention of hockey, though. Shows who is updating the wiki pages. I mean, this description screams “WORKING CLASS SMALL TOWN” in the most basic and stark of terms. This is about the most picturesque photo I can find of the place in the midst of old houses and McMansions for sale. Talk about being unpretentious.
From Freeland earlier:
I’ll add live links to this post during the late afternoon as they become available.
Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin. – Romans 3:19-20
When we read this terrible description of the human race as God sees it, it is almost impossible for us to believe that God is not going to say, Enough! Wipe them out! If all he sees is wretchedness, misery, evil, deceit, hypocrisy, vulgarity, profanity, slander, and all these evil things that are in every heart — every one without exception — our natural instinct is to say, “Then God doesn’t want us”.
The amazing thing is that in addition to this verse, God says that He “so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” God did not send the Law to destroy us (and this is very important); he sent the Law to keep us from false hope.
The worst thing that can happen is to be going down a road to an important destination and think we are on the right track and spend all the time necessary to get there only to discover that the road peters out into nothingness. We find we have been on the wrong track and it is too late to go back. That was what was happening. So God, in his loving kindness, has given us the Law to keep us from taking a false path. Though the Law condemns us, it is that very condemnation that makes us willing to listen, so that we find the right path.
Paul says the Law does three things to us: First, it stops our mouth: We have nothing to say. We can always tell someone is close to becoming a Christian when they shut up and stop arguing back. Self-righteous people are always saying, “But — but this — but I — yes, but I do this — and I do that”. They are always arguing. But when they see the true meaning of the Law, their mouth is shut.
Second, Paul says, the whole world is held accountable to God. That makes us realize there is no easy way, no way by which death suddenly is going to dissolve all things into everlasting darkness, forever forgotten. The whole world has to stand before God. Hebrews puts it so starkly, It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment (Hebrews 9:27 KJV).
Finally, the Law reveals very clearly what sin is. What does the Law want of us? Jesus said that all the Law is summed up in one word: Love. All the Law asks us to do is to act in love. All these things the Law states are simply loving ways of acting. When we face ourselves before the Law, we have to confess that many, many times we fail in love. That is what the Law wants us to see, because, then, when all else fails, we are ready to listen to what follows.
God loved us enough to shut up all other ways — to block them out and tell us they are wrong and they do not lead anywhere — so that we give up trying to make ourselves good enough to belong to Him. He gave us the only way that has ever been provided, a righteousness that is given to us, that we never earned, but which is ours because we believe and trust in the Lord Jesus.
Winston-Salem is called the “Twin City” for its dual heritage. “Camel City” is a reference to the city’s historic involvement in the tobacco industry related to locally based R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company’s Camel cigarettes. Many locals refer to the city as “Winston” in informal speech. Winston-Salem is also home to many colleges and institutions, most notably Wake Forest University and Winston-Salem State University.
Camels a day early, let’s see….
The last time I saw somebody with a pack of these, I was in Italy.
Just like so many places in the historic south, the housing was built high to avoid the fumes from the horse droppings.
Salem The origin of the town of Salem dates to January 1753, when Bishop August Gottlieb Spangenberg, on behalf of the Moravian Church, selected a settlement site in the three forks of Muddy Creek. He called this area “die Wachau” (Latin form: Wachovia) named after the ancestral estate of Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf. The land, just short of 99,000 acres (400 km2), was subsequently purchased from John Carteret, 2nd Earl Granville.
On November 17, 1753, the first settlers arrived at what would later become the town of Bethabara. This town, despite its rapid growth, was not designed to be the primary settlement on the tract. Some residents expanded to a nearby settlement called Bethania in 1759. Finally, lots were drawn to select among suitable sites for the location of a new town.
The town established on the chosen site was given the name of Salem (from “Shalom” meaning “Peace”, after the Canaanite city mentioned in the Book of Genesis) chosen for it by the Moravians’ late patron, Count Zinzendorf. On January 6, 1766, the first tree was felled for the building of Salem. Salem was a typical Moravian settlement congregation with the public buildings of the congregation grouped around a central square, today Salem Square. These included the church, a Brethren’s House and a Sisters’ House for the unmarried members of the Congregation, which owned all the property in town. For many years only members of the Moravian Church were permitted to live in the settlement. This practice had ended by the American Civil War. Many of the original buildings in the settlement have been restored or rebuilt and are now part of Old Salem Museums & Gardens.[8]
Salem was incorporated as a town in December 1856.[9] Salem Square and “God’s Acre”, the Moravian Graveyard, since 1772 are the site each Easter morning of the world-famous Moravian sunrise service. This service, sponsored by all the Moravian church parishes in the city, attracts thousands of worshipers each year.[10]
Winston In 1849, the Salem congregation sold land north of Salem to the newly formed Forsyth County for a county seat. The new town was called “the county town” or Salem until 1851 when it was renamed Winston for a local hero of the Revolutionary War, Joseph Winston.[11] For its first two decades, Winston was a sleepy county town. In 1868, work began by Salem and Winston business leaders to connect the town to the North Carolina Railroad.[12] That same year, Thomas Jethro Brown of Davie County rented a former livery stable and established the first tobacco warehouse in Winston. That same year, Pleasant Henderson Hanes, also of Davie, built his first tobacco factory a few feet from Brown’s warehouse. In 1875, Richard Joshua Reynolds, of Patrick County, Virginia, built his first tobacco factory a few hundred feet from Hanes’s factory. By the 1880s, there were almost 40 tobacco factories in the town of Winston. Hanes and Reynolds would compete fiercely for the next 25 years, each absorbing a number of the smaller manufacturers, until Hanes sold out to Reynolds in 1900 to begin a second career in textiles.
So, Winston-Salem actually started life as two different cities and was combined by the post office, actually, in 1880
In the 1880s, the US Post Office began referring to the two towns as Winston-Salem. In 1899, after nearly a decade of contention, the United States Post Office Department established the Winston-Salem post office in Winston, with the former Salem office serving as a branch. After a referendum the towns were officially incorporated as “Winston-Salem” in 1913.
The Reynolds family, namesake of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, played a large role in the history and public life of Winston-Salem. By the 1940s, 60% of Winston-Salem workers worked either for Reynolds or in the Hanes textile factories.[13] The Reynolds company imported so much French cigarette paper and Turkish tobacco for Camel cigarettes that Winston-Salem was designated by the United States federal government as an official port of entry for the United States, despite the city being 200 miles (320 km) inland.[13] Winston-Salem was the eighth-largest port of entry in the United States by 1916.[13]
In 1917, the Reynolds company bought 84 acres (340,000 m2) of property in Winston-Salem and built 180 houses that it sold at cost to workers, to form a development called “Reynoldstown.”[13] By the time R.J. Reynolds died in 1918, his company owned 121 buildings in Winston-Salem.[13]
I’ll add live links to this post during the late afternoon as they become available.
This Labor Day Stormwatch Monday Open Thread is VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KMAG/KAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Yes, it’s Monday…again.
But it’s okay! It’s a Holiday!
You can go back to bed:
Or have a nap:
Free Speech is practiced here at the Q Tree. But please keep it civil. Discussion of Q is not only allowed but encouraged. Imagine that! We can talk about Q here and not get banned.
Please also consider the Important Guidelines, outlined here. Let’s not give the odious Internet Censors a reason to shut down this precious haven that Wolf has created for us.
Our President is fighting for us night and day…please pray for him.
Wheatie’s Rules:
No food fights.
No running with scissors.
If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
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For your listening enjoyment, I offer this composition from Elephant Music, titled ‘Starlings’:
This year, Labor Day is at a time when our country is trying to get back to work.
America wants to work. And we don’t want to have to wear a mask to do it.
Let’s get back to when it was No Mask Required!
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Wheatie’s Word of the Day:
Facinorous
‘Facinorous’ is an adjective which means…atrociously wicked, vile or sinister.
Used in a sentence:
The child trafficking rings are finally being busted and taken down…along with the facinorous pedophiles who have been doing unspeakable things to our children.
6 When Jonah’s warning reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off his royal robes, covered himself with sackcloth and sat down in the dust. 7 This is the proclamation he issued in Nineveh:
“By the decree of the king and his nobles: Do not let people or animals, herds or flocks, taste anything; do not let them eat or drink. 8 But let people and animals be covered with sackcloth. Let everyone call urgently on God. Let them give up their evil ways and their violence. 9 Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish.”
10 When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened.
This Superlative Sanctuary Sunday Open Thread, with full respect to those who worship God on the Sabbath, is a place to reaffirm our worship of our Creator, our Father, our King Eternal.
It is also a place to read, post and discuss news that is worth knowing and sharing. Please post links to any news stories that you use as sources or quote from.
In the QTree, we’re a friendly and civil lot. We encourage free speech and the open exchange and civil discussion of different ideas. Topics aren’t constrained, and sound logic is highly encouraged, all built on a solid foundation of truth and established facts.
We have a policy of mutual respect, shown by civility. Civility encourages discussions, promotes objectivity and rational thought in discourse, and camaraderie in the participants – characteristics we strive toward in our Q Tree community.
Please show respect and consideration for your fellow QTreepers. Before hitting the “post” button, please proofread your post and make sure you’re addressing the issue only, and not trying to confront the poster. Keep to the topic – avoid “you” and “your”. Here in The Q Tree, personal attacks, name calling, ridicule, insults, baiting and other conduct for which a penalty flag would be thrown are VERBOTEN.
In The Q Tree, we’re compatriots, sitting around the campfire, roasting hot dogs, making s’mores and discussing, agreeing, and disagreeing about whatever interests us. This board will remain a home for those who seek respectful conversations.
Let’s not give the Internet Censors a reason to shut down this intellectual haven that Wolf has created for us.
The Storm is upon us. Please remember to Pray for our President.
AND WHAT TIME IS IT? TIME TO DRAIN THE SWAMP!!!
It’s time to replace a failed and CORRUPT political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American People. ~ Candidate Donald J. Trump
Also remember Wheatie’s Rules:
No food fights.
No running with scissors.
If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
And,
On this day and every day –
God is in Control . . . and His Grace is Sufficient, so . . . Keep Looking Up
Hopefully, every Sunday, you can find something here that will build you up a little . . . give you a smile . . . and add some joy or peace, very much needed in all our lives.
“This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn nor weep.” . . . “Go your way, eat the fat, drink the sweet, and send portions to those for whom nothing is prepared; for this day is holy to our Lord. Do not sorrow, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”
Awakening or Cleansing?
wheatietoo September 4, 2020 at 00:53
“20/20 vision” has long been used to refer to ‘perfect vision’…right? What better time to have the Great Awakening than in the year 2020.
I don’t know if Wheatie was referring to a spiritual Great Awakening or also included an awakening of the general populace to the depths of corruption in our nation’s and world’s governments. (or verse vica)
Be that as it may, her post got me thinking about how beneficial a spiritual great awakening would be to us today.
In many ways, before the Great Awakening, Christian worship had become more formal and less personal, relying on a minister and church rites and formalities for their worship. Christians were feeling complacent with their methods of worship. Many began to crave a return to religious piety.
The Great Awakening reinvigorated Christian worship in America at a time when it was steadily declining. Ordinary people were encouraged to make a personal connection with God.
Although the details of the Great Awakenings are varied (most say two Awakenings, some say three), their messages served the same purpose: to awaken and reenergize the waning Christian faith and return to worship practices that directly involved the people of the day.
At the present, I don’t know of any general worship movement away from the personal and toward the formal, but for years there has been a general movement away from God, and toward “other gospels”, more secular emphasis, social wokeness influence and even involvement with spirits, witchcraft and devil worship.
Yes, we could benefit greatly from a revival now. The time is certainly ripe for that.
“If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”
And then Wheatie’s road made me think of “From Here to Eternity”, not James Jones’ fictional novel (although there are definite parallels there), but an allegory to reality, with our present broad, evident road dwindling in the future to a pinpoint, leading to the Narrow Gate into eternity.
The road we see at the present is broad, encompassing all the paths available to us these days, both beneficial and harmful, that we may willingly or become enticed to travel down.
As the road advances into the future, we see human refuse off to the side . . . those who have chosen not to travel The Way, until it ultimately reaches the Narrow Gate.
Dora, not to be outdone by Wheatie, adds that the Lord “will clear his threshing floor and gather His wheat into His barn, but the chaff He will burn with unquenchable fire” (Mt. 3:12). This sorting-out process has been taking place, to one extent or another, throughout the Church’s history, but now it seems to be intensifying or approaching a climax. Not only do the tragic and degrading trends within our society and the larger world suggest that things cannot continue as they are for much longer; the various difficulties and divisions with the Church—most especially those involving the sexual abuse scandal—strongly suggest that a painful but necessary purification process is underway.”
All of this is true, and whether by Revival or Cleansing (or both), we now find ourselves at what I believe will prove to be a momentous crossroads in history.
Wheatie, obviously working overtime, adds “In this world you shall have tribulation. But have confidence, for I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33)
As we look around our country and the world, we should not fear that the widespread corruption will engulf us to our destruction. We are not of this world. The godless world has and will be judged to its own destruction. The war has already been won and the victory is ours.
“Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many dwellings; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also. And where I go you know, and the way you know.”
Thomas said to Him, “Lord, we do not know where You are going, and how can we know the way?”
Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.
Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American People...Our campaign represents a true existential threat, like they’ve never seen before.
Then-Candidate Donald J. Trump
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)
The Mandatory Coin
Thought of something in the nick of time. (This will probably post a few minutes late.)
One of the products of the California Gold Rush was the twenty dollar gold piece. I’ve talked about those a few times. But there was another, lesser known item, the one dollar gold piece.
These were tiny! Imagine that a 20 dollar gold piece was somewhat smaller than a silver dollar (but much heavier). A twentieth of that…well, that would have to be less than half the size of a dime! And indeed it was. (Now, it wasn’t less than half the width of a dime, but rather, less than half the volume of a dime. If the proportions were the same, it would have to be less than 4/5ths the diameter and less than 4/5th of the thickness to be less than half the volume of a dime. But even that looks tiny.)
There were three major varieties of these coins. From 1849-1849 was what we call today Type I.
Type I $1 gold piece. In 1849 there were three different variations, open and close wreath (this looks open to me) and somewhere on some of the close wreath coins James Longacre’s initial L appears very small, This was continued into 1854.
Type I was 13 millimeters across, making it barely half the width of a quarter.
My apologies for how wretched and worn that coin looks, but it seems to be rather difficult to find a picture with both sides of the coin in it and I’m pressed for time!
Type II is by far the hardest and most expensive to collect, it ran from 1854-1856, and is also known as the Indian Princess. They made the coin thinner so they could make it wider, it’s now 15mm across.
I said it was called the Indian Princess…but no Indian Princess ever wore an ostrich feather headdress. (Yes, those are ostrich feathers.)
This final coin is of course the easiest to locate, and there’s only about $100 worth of gold in it, so most here can probably manage to find one.
These were very popular as Christmas gifts. When it was discontinued in 1889, that job fell to the quarter eagle (i.e., the $2 1/2 gold piece).
During this entire period of time the US was also issuing silver dollars or trade dollars (special heavier dollars made for trade with China). In 1873, in fact, all three types of coins were minted as that was the year the Liberty Seated dollar was dropped and the Trade Dollar begun, also for a while in the late 1870s and early 1880s both Trade and Morgan silver dollars were being made.
So yet another way to have a dollar in your pocket that maybe some of you were unaware of!
Important Reminder
To conclude: My standard Public Service Announcement. We don’t want to forget this!!!
Remember Hong Kong!!!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=L3tnH4FGbd0%3F
I hope this guy isn’t rotting in the laogai somewhere!
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
For his second rally of the 2020 Presidential Campaign re-start, President Donald J. Trump and his team have chosen to stick to small town America, and have chosen…Latrobe, Pennsylvania?
Uhh, where is this place? (Thanks to an anon @Jack’s place, we have a map.)
More to the point, tonight’s rally is in a swing state where the officials have been known to play the precinct waiting game on election night.
Looks like the savvy 4D chess player is going to try to head that off at the pass.
Main Street, Latrobe, Pennsylvania
So, aside from being in what appears to be the fabled steel country of western Pennsylvania, what info is there out there on Latrobe? From wiki:
In 1852, Oliver Barnes (a civil engineer for the Pennsylvania Railroad) laid out the plans for the community that was incorporated in 1854 as the Borough of Latrobe. Barnes named the town for his best friend and college classmate, Benjamin Latrobe, who was a civil engineer for the B&O Railroad. (His father, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, was the architect who rebuilt the United States Capitol in Washington, DC, after the War of 1812.)
Its location along the route of the Pennsylvania Railroad helped Latrobe develop into a significant industrial hub. Latrobe was also served by the Ligonier Valley Railroad from 1877 to 1952.
In 1904, the banana split was invented in Latrobe by David Evans Strickler at the pharmacy that later became named Strickler’s Drug Store.[4]
Two interurban (long-distance trolley) lines served Latrobe:
The Westmoreland County Railway Company connected Latrobe to Derry and operated from 1904 to 1932.[5] The Latrobe Street Railway Company connected Latrobe to Kingston and began operations in 1900.[6] This line was purchased by West Penn Railways, which eventually linked it with its network running through Youngstown, Pleasant Unity, and eventually to Greensburg and Uniontown. Service ceased in 1952.[6] Latrobe has two sites on the National Register of Historic Places within its city boundaries:
Pennsylvania Railroad Station at Latrobe (325 McKinley Avenue): This station was built by the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1903.[7] Citizens National Bank of Latrobe (816 Ligonier Street, at Main Street): This was previously known as the Mellon Bank Building. This six-story, 1926 structure was designed by the Greensburg firm of Batholomew and Smith.[8] The former Fort Sloan, a small fortress established by the British settlers in the 1700s, is now a private residence, situated on the corner of Cedar St. and Raymond Ave.
So, it’s a rail town. Got it.
And has become standard operating procedure with these rallies, the crowds started turning up early.
“I’m not kidding, I truly believe that Donald Trump was sent by God." Supporters of President Trump were seen camping out at Arnold Palmer Regional Airport ahead of his rally tonight in Latrobe. https://t.co/TaZiKB2jNBpic.twitter.com/0XeHD2eDfd
Edward Young drove six hours, 340 miles from Brick New Jersey to Latrobe to attend the President's rally Thursday evening as @KatelynsWTAE reports #WTAEhttps://t.co/2LWqUGyMXl
