MountGinkgo

[MountGinkgo @MountGinkgo]

@JeffNadu @Sitdowncrimepod Not bad, but Lorenzo Anello should be higher. Wasn’t a huge role, but it was powerful as all hell

[Hollywood Gump @FirstNameJ0hn]

The time Kevin Nash showed up on WCW Monday Nitro as Scott Hall’s “Big Surprise.” (6 days before the nWo was formed)

The next step in changing the course of professional wrestling forever

WCW Monday Nitro
June 10, 1996

[MountGinkgo @MountGinkgo]

@OleTimeHardball Bobby Abreu

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

Was Stonewall Jackson actually that good? Let me end this debate.

In the spring of 1862, the Confederacy was losing. McClellan was marching 100,000 men up the Virginia Peninsula toward Richmond. The capital was about to fall. The war was about to end.

Then a weird, lemon-sucking, ex-VMI physics professor changed everything.

Thomas J. Jackson had 17,000 men in the Shenandoah Valley. The Union had three separate armies under Banks, Frémont, and Shields totaling over 60,000, all converging to crush him, then reinforce the assault on Richmond.

What Jackson did next is still taught at West Point, Sandhurst, and the Israeli Defense Forces' command college.

In 48 days, his "foot cavalry" marched 646 miles through the Blue Ridge. He fought five battles, McDowell, Front Royal, Winchester, Cross Keys, Port Republic, and won every single one. He used interior lines to appear in three places at once. He marched his men until their shoes fell off, then marched them more. He told no one his plans, not even his generals. When asked where he was going, he'd say "to do my duty."

He didn't just defeat three armies. He paralyzed them. Lincoln personally diverted 40,000 reinforcements away from Richmond to chase a ghost. McClellan's offensive collapsed. Richmond was saved.

He had done it with a third of the men.

Then came Chancellorsville, May 1863. Lee was outnumbered 130,000 to 60,000 by Hooker's army. Most generals would've retreated. Lee split his army. Then Jackson split it AGAIN, taking 28,000 men on a 12-mile flank march directly across the front of a numerically superior enemy, a maneuver textbooks call suicidal.

At dusk, his men exploded out of the woods into the unsuspecting Union right flank. The XI Corps disintegrated. It is, to this day, one of the most audacious tactical movements in the history of warfare.

Hours later, riding ahead in the dark to plan a night attack, his own men shot him by mistake. His arm was amputated. He died of pneumonia eight days later.

Lee, on hearing it: "He has lost his left arm, but I have lost my right."

Patton studied him. Rommel studied him. Moshe Dayan reportedly modeled parts of the Six-Day War on his Valley Campaign. MacArthur called him the greatest natural military genius America ever produced.

He was 39 years old.

You can hate the cause. But pretending Jackson wasn't one of the most lethal field commanders in military history is just bad history.

The man was a problem.

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

163 years ago today, Stonewall Jackson died at 3:15 PM on a Sunday afternoon in a small farm office in Guinea Station, Virginia.

He had told his wife that morning, “It is the Lord’s Day. I have always desired to die on a Sunday.”

He got his wish.

Eight days earlier at Chancellorsville, Jackson had pulled off what military historians still consider one of the most audacious flanking maneuvers in American history. Lee had split his outnumbered army in the face of a force more than twice its size, and sent Jackson on a 12-mile march around Hooker’s right flank.

At dusk on May 2nd, Jackson’s men came screaming out of the woods and rolled up the entire Union XI Corps. It was the high-water mark of the Confederacy.

Then, in the darkness, he rode forward to scout for a night attack.

The 18th North Carolina Infantry saw riders approaching through the trees and opened fire. Three bullets hit Jackson, one shattering his left arm. His own men.

The bullet they later recovered was .67 caliber. Confederate issue. Union troops in the area used .58.

His arm was amputated the next morning. When Lee got the news, he wrote: “Could I have directed events, I would have chosen for the good of the country to be disabled in your stead.”

Days later, when told Jackson had lost his arm, Lee said: “He has lost his left arm, but I have lost my right.”

For a week he seemed to recover. Then pneumonia set in. Modern doctors now suspect it was actually a pulmonary embolism from the amputation, undiagnosable in 1863.

On the morning of May 10th, his wife Anna told him he would not live through the day. Jackson asked his doctor to confirm it. When McGuire said there was nothing more they could do, Jackson paused and said:

“Very good, very good. It is all right.”

He drifted in and out. At one point in his delirium he was back on the battlefield, shouting orders: “Order A.P. Hill to prepare for action! Pass the infantry to the front rapidly! Tell Major Hawks…”

Then he stopped mid-sentence.

A smile spread across his face, and he said quietly:

“Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.”

Those were the last words of the most feared tactician in the Confederate army.

Lee never found a replacement. Two months later, at a small Pennsylvania town called Gettysburg, the absence of Jackson on the second day, when Ewell hesitated to take Cemetery Hill, would haunt the Confederacy for the rest of the war.

Chancellorsville was Lee’s masterpiece. It was also the last decisive victory the Army of Northern Virginia would ever win.

Jackson was 39 years old.

[Spinnin Backfist @SpinninBackfist]

JIM MILLER GETS THE GILLY WIN
#UFC328

[MountGinkgo @MountGinkgo]

@FadeAwayMedia Wow that’s a horrific list

[Super 70s Sports @Super70sSports]

Bob Seger is better than Bruce Springsteen. I don’t know how many of you are joining me on this island but I feel like it will be 50% geniuses and 50% guys who make women instinctively lock their car doors.

[Coach Vint @coachvint]

Don’t forget that Alvin Mack started college as a walk-on receiver at Texas State before entering the portal and transferring to ESU where he became an all-American linebacker.

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

He won the Civil War, broke the Klan, went bankrupt at 62, got terminal throat cancer, and wrote one of the greatest books in American literature in the final year of his life. He finished it 5 days before he died.

Ulysses S. Grant was born 204 years ago today.

His name wasn't even Ulysses S. Grant. He was born Hiram Ulysses Grant in Point Pleasant, Ohio on April 27, 1822. The congressman who nominated him to West Point wrote down the wrong name. Grant kept it. The "S." stands for nothing.

He hated his father's tannery and loved horses. Graduated 21st of 39 at West Point. Fought in the Mexican-American War, then came home convinced it was an unjust war designed to expand slavery. He later said he believed the Civil War was divine punishment for it.

He married Julia Dent in 1848, into a slave-owning Missouri family. His abolitionist father refused to attend the wedding. In 1859, broke and desperate, Grant freed the one enslaved man he'd briefly owned instead of selling him. He could have gotten a year's wages.

In the Civil War he became what no other Union general was: relentless. Vicksburg (July 4, 1863) split the Confederacy in half. Lincoln then gave him every Union army. His Appomattox surrender terms: officers kept sidearms, men kept horses for spring planting, no one prosecuted.

As president (1869 to 1877) he did something no president would do again until LBJ: used federal troops to crush the Ku Klux Klan. He suspended habeas corpus in 9 South Carolina counties, prosecuted Klansmen before predominantly Black juries, and broke the first Klan.

His presidency was also rocked by scandal: Black Friday 1869. Crédit Mobilier. The Whiskey Ring. Belknap. Grant himself never took a dime. He was just disastrously loyal to corrupt friends. The pattern damaged his reputation for a century.

After the White House, he toured the world for 2 years. Dined with Queen Victoria. Met the emperor of Japan. Then in 1884, a Wall Street partner named Ferdinand Ward ran what we'd now call a Ponzi scheme. Grant was wiped out. 62 years old. Penniless.

Weeks later he was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer. Mark Twain offered to publish his memoirs. Grant wrote in agony, sometimes 50 pages a day, racing the disease to leave Julia an inheritance. He finished the manuscript July 18, 1885. He died July 23.

The book made Julia $450,000, about $14M today. It's now considered one of the finest memoirs in the English language. For decades historians ranked Grant a failure. Since 2000 he's jumped 13 spots in the C-SPAN survey, the biggest rise of any president.

Happy birthday, General 🇺🇸

[MountGinkgo @MountGinkgo]

@edbassmaster

[MountGinkgo @MountGinkgo]

@VinnysCorner1

[MountGinkgo @MountGinkgo]

@MLFootball Jonny 🏈

[MountGinkgo @MountGinkgo]

@KyleBrandt Where is Paul Blake the 40 year old qb who’s the arm of the armadillos?

Cmon…..

[MountGinkgo @MountGinkgo]

@NFL_DovKleiman Legarrette Blount

[MountGinkgo @MountGinkgo]

@FBGreatMoments Dumbest clip ever - he was in pass coverage. Are you serious ?

[Lloyd Legalist @LloydLegalist]

The longer he’s gone the more I miss Norm Macdonald. Enjoy his famous moth joke.

[MountGinkgo @MountGinkgo]

@edbassmaster Good move - on the strengfth

[Jumbo Elliott @JumboElliott76]

This flag football. SMH. If you enjoy it, terrific. Have fun w it. It's the way nfl is slowly creeping towards anyway.
But it's not football.