Got about 2 feet of snow last night. About time.

Chat... I think we're back.

If you're cold, they're cold...

Only a bit snowy over in L'Anse.

Poor Camp has lost power. Grab your blankets!

He's keepin' watch while we're off the grid.

Thousands?! I didn't know that many lived here.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Snowed in today, so we doin' some reading.

Skimming before doing a more thorough reading.... The section on le Civil War has a lot of good stuff. Very excited to read it.

Jefferson Davis' great quote: "Our enemies are a traditionless and homeless race. From the time of Cromwell to the present moment they have been disturbers of the peace of the world. Gathered together by Cromwell from the bogs and fens of the north of Ireland and England, they commenced by disturbing the peace of their own country"

Mentions of Lord Fitzhugh.... Much excitement to be found.

We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.

—Herman Melville, White-Jacket

Behold the "New England Hive"—an infection that cannot enter a space without immediately attempting to conquer it:

In the eighteenth century the heirs of the Puritans played a key role in the American Revolution. “Puritanism,” notes the religious historian Mark Noll, “is the only colonial religious system that modern historians take seriously as a major religious influence on the Revolution.” In the generations following the Revolution, Congregationalists and Presbyterians from New England carried their campaigns of evangelical Calvinism into the upper Midwest and other areas of the Puritan diaspora, and by the 1830s their voluntary organizations of evangelization and moral reform had combined budgets larger than that of the federal government. They brought with them their distinctive brand of “moralistically inflected republicanism.” “Wherever you go, you will be a polis”: the watchword of the ancient Greek city-states as they created new colonies could also apply to the Puritan polis, whose people brought with them their own matter-of-fact assumptions of moral rectitude and cultural superiority. A writer in the proslavery United States Democratic Review in 1855 paid rueful tribute to the Puritans in language that almost mirrored the motto of the ancient Greeks. Referring to what he called “the New-England hive” established by the Puritans, he wrote, “No class of people are so prone to emigration. … But wherever they go they are sure to combine together, and act in concert for the furtherance of their own peculiar opinions and interests.” Harriet Beecher Stowe said the same thing but more admiringly: “New England has been to these United States what the Dorian hive was to Greece. It has always been a capital country to emigrate from, and North, South, East, and West have been populated largely from New England, so that the seed-bed of New England was the seed-bed of this great American Republic, and of all that is likely to come of it.” Despite sometimes fierce resistance from Catholics and midwesterners, by the outset of the Civil War “the Puritanization of the United States” had become a fact of life throughout most of the North, and the war itself marked the beginning of its century-long march into the heart of the South.

We find below the theological ancestor of the modern elite’s immunity—the realization that if one is destined for the "Right Side of History," the bourgeois laws of the common man no longer apply:

[They placed] emphasis on human passivity, a passivity that hardly seems compatible with an ethical community. If humans are utterly passive in receiving God's grace, then outward behavior ("works") has nothing to do with salvation. But what is ethics if not outward behavior? And how can a political community function without ethics? There is a disturbing note of fatalism here. If I have been selected from eternity for heaven, and if my conversion comes to me via God's "free grace" without the least effort on my part, why should I worry excessively about how I act toward my neighbor? No doubt I should be as pleasant as possible, but there does not seem to be any categorical imperative to behave well if my behavior is not causally linked to the fate of my soul. Emery Battis, the author of the standard work on the antinomian controversy, notes the popularity of spiritism with the better-off elements of Boston society. He suggests that one reason for it was that many of the wealthy Boston merchants engaged in sharp practices—buying cheap and selling dear—at variance with well-understood community norms. Free grace seemed to give them a free ride.