Comment on: Holiday Thoughts - Guest Post

LANGUAGE!

From the comments

Man am I glad there are still guys in your great country that think like that!
I am from New Zealand and visited the US to drive route 66 and also visit the states of Colorado, Oregon, Idaho and Washington. I was blown away by the hospitality and the patriotism of the rural states, especially Oklahoma and Texas.

The people we met stood for all that makes America great; Pride, independence and an admirable love for your great country and the way it should be. I must admit that I fear for your welfare as a nation until you stop making a shit job of picking leaders! Americans need to stop voting for the 'salesman' who offers to pay them more of other peoples money.

You are falling into the same trap as New Zealand is in. You are absolutely right, some people don't deserve my money as of right!

Fuck Obama (am I allowed to say that as a non-American?) and keep up the good work!

Mike

She would not be my daughter anymore and that's being polite

Via Survival

KSL
Verbatim Post

In a closet inside Gary Turley's West Bountiful home, an empty spot now shows where his most valued material possession used to sit. It was a safe, containing nearly $200,000 in cash — he thought was safer there than in a bank.

"It was my life savings," Turley said. "I had stuff from my grandpa, who's dead now: his pocket watch, stuff like that. My Social Security cards, Visas, passports, birth certificates, checking — everything to do with my checking (was in the safe)."

How it disappeared is almost worse that losing it in the first place.

Back in August, Turley was celebrating his daughter's wedding. He didn't know his new son-in-law well, nor did he know about the plot the couple had hatched to clean him out — planning to steal the safe containing money he scrimped and saved 20 years for.

Police say a couple of days after the wedding, Turley's daughter and new son-in-law got cold feet.

"I think they realized the error of their ways. It was just a bad idea," said West Bountiful Police Chief Todd Hixson.

But the groom's brother, cousin, and friends were still up for it.

"It would be a horrible feeling just to have your home broken into, but to know that it was that close to home would be devastating," Hixson said.

Police say the four men — Wayne Clark, Steven Hogge, Anthony Welch and Joshua Watts — distributed the money four ways. They and their girlfriends and wives blew through almost all of it in a couple of days. Now, nine people have been charged in connection with the crime.

"I love her, and I don't understand why she would do this to a parent," Turley said. "I don't understand how another person can turn on you, against the whole family that loves you."

Turley had a gut feeling the couple were involved and called police. As far as getting any of the money back, police did recover about $30,000 that one of the suspects buried in his backyard, but the rest is probably gone for good.

"When you're a victim of a crime, it cuts you deep," Hixon said, "and it's something that everybody has to think about."

Police say even though Turley has lost all of his savings, he still went to the police department and pulled all of the Sub for Santa lists for needy children off of their tree and spent his Christmas money fulfilling their needs.

Turley also goes to court every week for the criminal proceedings against each suspect in the case.

For those who wish to contribute to Turley's cause, a donation account has been set up at Zions Bank. Anyone wishing to contribute may do so at any Zions Branch by asking for the Gary Turley Donation Account.*

FireStash Keychain Lighter $9.99

Via Survival

HERE

Minting It (Amazing!)

Via Survival

German Herald
Verbatim Post

A museum cleaner is minting it after she found a lost multi-million GBP fortune in ancient coins stashed in an old jewellery box.

Curious Tanja Hols had walked past the untouched box in the storeroom at the Passau State Library in Germany thousands of times on her rounds and finally couldn't resist opening it.

Inside she found a hoard of gold and silver coins from ancient Greece, Rome and the Byzantine empire, that had simply been stored 200 years ago and never properly recorded.

Museum antiquities expert Dr Markus Wennerhold explained: "We looked for similar coins online, and found that some which were the same but in much worse condition had been sold for millions of Euros. Then there are coins that seem to be so rare they are not recorded elsewhere."

Now museum bosses are working out how to reward Tanja for her find.

"She was very honest, a brilliant historian and a great detective. We are certainly going to promote her to the curating side of the museum and we're discussing a suitable reward for her," said a spokesman.

We need middle-class misdemeanors to pay for the felonies of the underclass.

Via Survival

A few goodies.

........frightening are the thousands in our society — journalists, politicians, academics, activists — who get up each morning more concerned about the fleeing driver who destroys power and vines than the victims who pay for the carnage.

Governor Brown wants to raise income taxes on the top two brackets by 1 to 2 percentage points, making them over 11 and 12 percent respectively. That our schools are near dead last in test scores, that many of our main freeways are potholed relics from the 1960s, that we just passed the DREAM Act to extend state financial support for college-age illegal aliens, and that the overtaxed are fleeing the state do not register. Again, those who in theory can pay, should — and should keep quiet about why they must suddenly pay a 12 percent income tax that was not needed, say, in 1991, 1971, or 1961, when test scores were higher, roads better, and communities far safer. There is, of course, a vague code of silence about who is doing the stealing, although occasionally the most flagrant offenders are caught either by sheriffs or on tape; or, in my typical case, run off only to return successfully at night. In the vast majority of cases, rural central California is being vandalized by gangs of young Mexican nationals or Mexican-Americans........

The influx of over 11 million illegal aliens has had a sort of ripple effect that is rarely calibrated. Sixty percent of Hispanic males in California are not graduating from high school. Unemployment in rural California runs about 20 percent. There is less fear now of arrest and incarceration, given the bankruptcy of the state, which, of course, is rarely officially connected even in small part to illegal immigration. Perhaps because illegal immigration poses so many mind-boggling challenges (e.g., probably over $20 billion lost to the state in remittances, the undermining of federal law, the prejudice shown against legal immigration applicants, ethnic favoritism as the engine of amnesty, subterfuge on the part of Mexico, vast costs in entitlements and subsidies), talking about it is futile. So most don’t, in fear of accusations of “racism.”

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A Northern Traveler in the South, 1859

Cheap and replaceable German or Irish laborers were commonly found at Southern wharves in the antebellum years, and more expensive black labor maintained at the cotton plantations. New England mills, dependent on their wage-slaves working 14-16 hour days, drove the cotton plantation economy into high profitability and expansion. New England mill owners and Manhattan bank owners who provided high-interest credit to the plantation owners could have easily ended African slavery had they so wished.

Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
www.ncwbts150.com
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"

A Northern Traveler in the South, 1859:

Diary of John S. C. Abbott, of Brunswick, Maine.

“Dec. 11. – This – Sunday – is the greatest market day of the French Quarter in New Orleans. The whole scene is most decidedly French. Nothing has surprised me more in New Orleans than the small number of the colored population. When the Desoto was made fast to the levee, the wide and extended plateau was thronged with laborers, but they were nearly all Germans or Irish. It was the same in the streets as we drove through them.

Upon speaking of this to a very intelligent gentleman, he observed that the slaves were becoming so exceedingly profitable upon the plantations, that large numbers had been sold from the city for that purpose.

I am struck with the kindness with which the white population address the negroes, and the manifest friendly relations which generally exist between the two classes. The negrophobia at the North is unknown at the South.

Dec. 12. -- I met a Northern gentleman this morning, and almost his first words were: “As to this peculiar institution, I was always in favor of slavery when in the North, and I am still more so now that I have come South. The slaves are much better off than the laboring classes at the North.” Noticing, perhaps, my look of surprise, he added: “The poor laboring classes I mean, the poor ones.”

The condition of the slave, under a humane master, is undoubtedly preferable to that of the prostitutes, vagabonds, and thieves of the Five Points in New York. If this be the eulogy slavery demands, let it not be withheld.

Dec. 15. – At eleven o’clock yesterday I reached Mobile. Here, as in New Orleans, I was surprised to see how effectually free labor seems to have driven slave labor from the wharves and the streets. The Irish and the Germans seem to do nearly all the work of the streets. White girls are being also more and more employed in domestic service; and I think that but a few years will pass ere nearly all the colored population will be removed from the cities of the South. Indeed, now, New Orleans and Mobile seem but little more like slave cities than do Philadelphia and New York.”

(A Mirror for Americans, Life and Manners in the United States 1790-1870, Warren S. Tryon, editor, University of Chicago Press, pp. 405-409)

A Northern Traveler in the South, 1859

The ‘Horrific’ Details Behind Republicans’ Caving

Godfather Politics

Verbatim Post

Most media outlets are not telling the whole story behind the payroll tax-cut extension: most have highlighted the tax cut itself, how House Republicans were blocking the extension, and how they recently caved under pressure, handing Obama a major political victory.

Democrats are celebrating the Republicans’ caving for good reason, because there’s way more to the story than just Republicans blocking tax cuts. The Wall Street Journal reports,

Rank-and-file frustration has existed all year, and never really left even when Boehner tried to accommodate the concerns of his restive freshmen. The payroll-tax cut battle put a fine point on the caucus’s broader concerns about government spending and budget gimmicks, in part because the $33 billion, two-month package is set to be paid for with fees charged by mortgage financiers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over 10 years.

“The policy is horrific,” said Rep. Mo Brooks (R., Ala.) He said that “increasing the costs of mortgages hurts homeowners of all incomes,” adding “it’s hard to figure out how the senators could have done worse–all for two months.”

Meanwhile, Boehner’s procedural tactics are just as suspect:

House speaker agreed to pass the two-month extension on Friday morning by unanimous consent, a fast-track procedural maneuver that guarantees passage unless lawmakers book plane tickets and fly back to Washington in time to object.

“Given the late hour of notification, there’s no way I can make it,” said Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R., Kansas). “I’m disappointed. That’s not the process by which I thought we would consider things like this,” he said, adding “this is the kind of stuff that people hate about Washington.”

In other words, Republicans have “caved” by agreeing to increase mortgage fees for 10 years in order to fund a mere two months worth of tiny tax cuts. Instead of taxes being raised January 1, they go up March 1 instead, while the higher mortgage fees endure for a decade. Brilliant. And to score this great political achievement, the House speaker is willing to use Pelosi- and Reid-style procedural tricks to exclude the toughest opposition from the vote. Epic.

And this is why the move is indeed a major political victory for the radical Left: because the Republicans are acting just like them.

“Let it be that I am a Traitor........

........ The word has no terrors for me…I have been born of traitors, but, thank God, they have been Traitors in the great cause of liberty, fighting against tyranny and oppression. Such treason will ever be mine whilst true to my lineage.”
-- Robert Barnwell Rhett

Christmas gift suggestion

Via Don

Battle Hymn Of The Republic — Mark Twain Version

Re-post spurred by his War Prayer sent by Wes.

Battle Hymn Of The Republic — Mark Twain Version

Mine eyes have seen the orgy of the Launching of the Sword
He is searching out the hoardings where the stranger’s wealth is stored;
He hath loosed his fateful lightnings and with woe and death has scored;
His lust is marching on.

I have seen him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps;
They have builded him an altar in the Eastern dews and damps;
I have read his doomful mission by the dim and flaring lamps;
His night is marching on! I have read his bandit gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my pretensions, so with you my wrath shall deal; Let the faithless son of Freedom crush the patriot with his heel;
Lo, Greed is marching on!”

We have legalized the strumpet and are guarding her retreat;
Greed is seeking out commercial souls before his judgement seat;
O, be swift, ye clods, to answer him! Be jubilant my feet!
Our god is marching on.

In a sordid slime harmonious Greed was born in yonder ditch,
With a longing in his bosom — and for others’ goods an itch.
As Christ died to make men holy, let men die to make us rich –Our god is marching on.”

On Government

"Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please."
--Mark Twain
========
"I can now think of a certain government that follows this."
--Dixie Linh Townsend

Tigers in the Mud: The Combat Career of German Panzer Commander Otto Carius

Via Tom

Wikipedia

Lieutenant Otto Carius (born May 27, 1922 in Zweibrücken, Rheinland-Pfalz in Southwest Germany) was a German Heer tank commander during World War II and is credited with destroying more than 150 tanks.^[1] He is also a recipient of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves (German: Ritterkreuz des Eisernen Kreuzes mit Eichenlaub). The Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross and its higher grade Oak Leaves was awarded to recognise extreme battlefield bravery or successful military leadership.

Carius had been drafted twice before, but sent home as "Not fit for service at present underweight!". But in May 1940, Carius was finally drafted into the 104th Infantry Replacement Battalion. Following training, he volunteered for the Panzer Corps. Carius learned the fundamentals of tank warfare at Putlos in Holstein as a member of the 7th Panzer Replacement Battalion.

His unit was integrated into the newly formed 21st Panzer Regiment and June 1941, was sent to East Prussia. He experienced his first battle as a gunner in a Panzer 38(t) during Operation Barbarossa in late June 1941. It was during this operation that Carius suffered wounds from a round that struck his tank.

In 1943, Carius transferred to the schwere Panzer-Abteilung 502 (502 heavy tank battalion). This unit fought at the Leningrad front and then in the area of Narva, Estonia (Battle of Narva). Carius was severely wounded on July 24, 1944 while reconnoitering a village on a motorcycle ahead of his tanks. Until that day, he was unofficially running the 2nd company of 502nd, however, he officially became the commander of 2nd company on the same day he was shot through the leg, arm, 4 bullets in the back and one through the neck. He subsequently became the commander of a Jagdtiger company of the 512th Heavy Antitank Battalion (schwere Panzerjägerabteilung) in the West at the beginning of 1945. On 8 March 1945, without finishing its training, 2nd company was directed to the front-line near Siegburg. It then took part in the defense of the River Rhine and eventually surrendered to the US Army on 15 April 1945.

After the war he started a pharmacy shop called Tiger Apotheke in Herschweiler-Pettersheim, Rhineland-Palatinate, named after the Tiger tank, and still works there to this day. He also wrote a book about his own experience in the war, titled Tigers in the Mud.

Free Kindle

The English language foreword is a must read.

The American Revolutionary Era Origin of the Second Amendment's Clauses

Via Don

David E. Young

The 5/4 split decision in the Supreme Court’s District of Columbia vs Heller case demonstrated a continuing dichotomy in Second Amendment history between relevant period sources, which were largely relied on in the Courts’ decision, and the views of modern historians that backed up the dissent in that case. Justice Breyer’s statement that most of the historians supported the Heller dissent was correct, but that is exactly the problem. The historians’ brief contained numerous errors of fact and failed to present the essential bill of rights related developmental history of the Second Amendment’s clauses. This article contains extensive and essential relevant information that directly conflicts with, or is entirely missing from, the historians’ brief to the Supreme Court.

David E. Young is a Second Amendment scholar, editor of the ratification era document collection, THE ORIGIN OF THE SECOND AMENDMENT, and author of a recent definitive history, THE FOUNDERS’ VIEW OF THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS. Mr. Young’s historical research was extensively cited in the 2008 Heller case, as well as the 2001 Emerson decision from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

I. THE SOURCE OF SECOND AMENDMENT CLAUSES

The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states:

I-V

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VI. CONCLUSION

The concept that governments should possess a monopoly of force was not the viewpoint of Americans during the Founding Era. Our states and nation came into being because Americans decided to end British attempts to place the military in control of the civil population of Massachusetts. Americans replaced British military tyranny with civil governments dependent upon and supported by the inherent power of the people themselves. They assured that nothing like a government of force, the opposite of a free government, could ever again be set up in the United States. This was accomplished by simply protecting the right of the people to keep and bear arms, thus assuring their ability to self-embody for effective organized defense.

All eight Revolutionary Era Second Amendment predecessors, as well as the three Ratification Era two-clause proposals copied from them, were leading parts of complete Mason Triads. This context indicates the intention of both Second Amendment clauses was to assure the armed civil population’s control over government raised military force for the purpose of preventing oppression and tyranny. The First Congress, by protecting the right of the people to keep and bear arms, assured the people of being in a position to self-embody as an effective militia. Indeed, this was the very foundation of the Federalists’ polity as often expressed in their arms related mantra during the ratification struggle. A free state was ensured by such an armed populace because the people were inherently able to prevent the forceful implementation of acts that violated their rights and the Constitution. In the unlikely event such situations of force should ever arise, the people by merely defending themselves would be enforcing the supreme law of the land, and those attempting to use force against the people would be in direct violation of that supreme law, which the people had authorized.

Today, to the extent that the Second Amendment’s language is considered confusing or unclear, one thing is certain. Those applying such descriptions are unfamiliar with or ignoring the Second Amendment’s extensively documented American bill of rights history and period usage of its terms. Our history conclusively demonstrates both Second Amendment clauses are part and parcel of the individual rights protections that constitute the first eight amendments of the U.S. Bill of Rights. All of these provisions resulted from state ratifying convention desires that protections of the existing state bill of rights be added to the U.S. Constitution in a Federal Bill of Rights.⁷⁴ The relevant historical documents indicate that the Second Amendment’s clauses, just like their state bill of rights predecessors, were intended to protect individual rights against misconstruction and abuse of government powers.

Three Years Under Obama

Via The Battle of Atlanta

Mark Steyn: Ron Paul’s Support of Constitution is “Stunted Parochialism”

Via III Percent Patriots

Info Wars
Verbatim Post

Mark Steyn, the Canadian columnist who writes about American politics and is a close friend of the convicted criminal Conrad Black, has labeled Ron Paul’s political views “sheer stupid half-witted parochialism” in The Daily Caller.

“So we’re getting here into what is the problem with Ron Paul, which is the sheer stupid half-witted parochialism of his view of what’s going on out on the planet,” Steyn said on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show on Thursday. “And that’s why this is — this is a kind of utopian isolationism that fantasists on the right have embraced and at its darkest side, it meets the left coming around the other way in 9/11 truther conspiracy theories.”

Ron Paul has never declared 9/11 to be an inside job. Steyn’s attempt to portray him as a “truther” is more evidence that the neocon faction of the ruling elite is running scared as they confront the prospect of Paul winning the Iowa caucus.

Like his neocon fellow travelers, Steyn has a few fantasist dreams of his own – for instance, that Muslims will convert Europe into “Eurabia” (sic). In Steyn’s world, a 4 percent European Muslim population will dominate the continent by 2020, a statistical impossibility. But then statistics and factuality have nothing to do with it. The neocons are notorious fabricators and outright liars, as Steyn’s comment about Paul being a “truther” reveals. Neocon lies about Iraq resulted in the murder of 1.5 million Iraqis. Steyn enthusiastically supported the illegal and unconstitutional invasion.

More than one critic has accused the Canadian of anti-Muslim hysteria, which seems to be a disagreeable personality trait shared by many neocons. Northeastern University journalism professor Dan Kennedy has described Steyn as “the most toxic right-wing pundit you’ve never heard of” and alleges that Steyn writes with “a shrill, mocking tone of moral certainty that consigns those who disagree with him to the status of appeasers or even terrorists; and a willingness to distort, misrepresent, and omit facts in order to advance his argument.”

In fact, Mr. Steyn and the neocons did not emerge from the so-called “right.” Neoconservatism is a political philosophy that incubated on the so-called left. It was spawned by Trotskyites. That’s why former Marxists like David Horowitz have naturally migrated toward the movement.

As Thomas DiLorenzo has noted, the neocons are at war with the Constitution. It stands in the way of waging total war on the Muslims. “War is the enemy of constitutional liberty and also of prosperity. It is impossible to support the American regime’s unconstitutional and aggressive wars and be devoted to the Constitution at the same time,” DiLorenzo writes.

Ron Paul is devoted to the Constitution and that’s why Steyn and the neocons detest him.

Video in link.

The New Professionalism

Via Don

The Agitator
Verbatim Post

Maybe there’s a legitimate law enforcement reason to strip a man naked, strap him to a chair, tie a “spit hood” around his mouth, put a hood over his head (see video at the link), and douse him with pepper spray until he dies. That’s what sheriff’s deputies in Lee County, Florida did to 62-year-old Nick Christie two-and-a-half years ago.

I certainly can’t think of any such legitimate reason. But Lee County State’s Attorney Stephen Russell apparently can. Because he cleared the deputies involved of any wrongdoing.

Christie’s family just filed a lawsuit.

The cruelty of affirmative action

Vox Popoli
Verbatim Post

Jeff Jacoby spells out the obvious consequences of affirmative action in education:

The inability of racial preferences to vault more minority students into high scholastic achievement shouldn’t come as a surprise. When an elite institution relaxes its usual standards to admit more blacks and Hispanics, it all but guarantees that those academically weaker students will have trouble keeping up with their better-prepared white and Asian classmates. Minorities who might have flourished in a science or engineering program at a middle-tier state college are apt to find themselves overwhelmed by the pace at which genetics or computer architecture is taught in the Ivy League. Many decide to switch to an easier major. Others drop out altogether.

This is the cruelty of affirmative-action “mismatch’’ — the steering of minorities to schools where they are less likely to succeed.

I saw this happening to quite a few black students at my university. Because I was a 100m sprinter, I was in the track team's sprinter/jumper/hurdler group, which did all of its training and ate most of its evening meals together. It was probably the most racially mixed group in a predominantly white university. And it was really disturbing to see what a difficult time many of my black teammates had with collegiate academics, despite the fact that they were very diligent and hit the books extremely hard.

This wasn't true of all the blacks on campus. One of my friends from the soccer team was also black, but he was a very smart guy, a doctor's son who had attended an elite prep school. He was not the beneficiary of affirmative action, had no academic trouble, and went on to graduate from med school and become a doctor.

Affirmative action is disastrous because it doesn't help people, but rather, sets them up to fail.

Bill Clinton: "There is too much information on the internet!

Via Rebellion

Now wouldn't that be convenient for your little Collectivist friends.

"We need to go back to the Big 3 networks."

Dominant Social Theme: Too much information is bad for society.

Free-Market Analysis: Bill Clinton (left) wants to return to the days when three big television networks explained the Way the World Worked.

According to "Dilence Sogwood," a financial-industry DB feedbacker, Clinton spoke at a luncheon he attended and made these and other provocative points. What Clinton is revealing in these speeches he is giving around the world is that there is a historic struggle going on between free-market thinkers and those, like Clinton himself, who are attempting to maintain and justify the status quo.

We have no direct or corroborating evidence that Dilence Sogwood's statements are accurate; however, we have a history of his feedback going back nearly a year. In that time, we have never had a sense that he was anything other than a feedbacker who wished to share information about freedom, investing and elite social themes.

For purposes of this article, we will treat them as legitimate "sourced" statements. His feedback on Clinton's luncheon talk is important in our view because it provides a window into how Clinton and others who work for the Anglosphere elites are grappling with what we call the Internet Reformation.

The statement mentioned in Sogwood's feedback (above) is especially startling because in making it, Clinton reveals himself as pure utilitarian. He also reveals inadvertently the pervasiveness of the Anglosphere power elite control in the US.

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‘Santa’ Saves Man from Burning Pickup — But That’s Not the Whole Story…

Via Don

An amazing story

Incredible video caught one good Samaritan this past Tuesday pulling North Texas man out from his crashed pickup truck just before it was consumed by flames. After the rescue, the good Samaritan directed traffic around the accident until help came. What makes the rescue even more astounding is that the good Samaritan, Brad Luddeke, did it all this while wearing a Santa Claus costume on his way to deliver gifts to needy children. If that wasn’t incredible enough, WFAA reports on the heart warming coincidence, that some may call a sign of faith, behind the amazing video:

As WFAA reports, the rescuer Brad Luddeke, had lost his son Jordan in a car crash seven years earlier. The man he saved, Michael Walker, is father to Amber Walker who had been a close friend to Jordan.

“It was unbelievable. It was unreal. I think my son had a hand in it,” Luddeke told WFAA.

“Any time you think of him, you just want to smile, because he was genuinely an awesome person,” Amber said of Jordan.

“Honestly, it makes me feel like he’s still here… like he’s not gone,” Amber aid.

A Southern New Year's Day supper, black-eyed peas

With New Year’s Day only two weeks away, a new discussion has raised its head. Traditionally throughout the South, a dish of black-eyed peas (with or without rice) is served on New Year’s Day; it’s thought to ensure prosperity and good luck to the family for the coming year.

Recently one of those internet bits of legend or lore has raced across the web purporting to explain the “true story” behind the black-eyed peas tradition.

According to the typical unnamed source, it all goes back to Union General William Tecumseh Sherman and his march to the sea in late 1864. His stated purpose was to destroy the South, burning what he could, stealing crops, cows, food stuffs of all types, so that “a crow flying across the land could not find provenance” as he put it.

All that is true, but the story continues that the only thing left to the starving people of the South were the black-eyed peas still in the fields, since the less savvy Union troops did not realize they were edible.

Figuring that livestock was the only thing that would eat the peas (hence the alternate name of “cow peas”) and since they had stolen all the livestock, there was no use for the peas.

And thus since New Year’s Day 1866, the South has clung to the tradition of eating black-eyed peas on that first day of the year. Or so goes the lore.

Interestingly enough, one can find a dozen sites on the web which say basically the same thing, making one confident that most entries were written by those of the Northern persuasion, bless their hearts, who just didn’t know any better.

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A Southern New Year's Day supper, black-eyed peas

Make Congress Vote on War on Iran

Returning from Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta dropped some jolting news.

Asked by CBS's Scott Pelley if Iran could have a nuclear weapon in 2012, Panetta replied: "It would probably be about a year before they could do it. Perhaps a little less. But one proviso, Scott, is that if they have a hidden facility somewhere in Iran that may be enriching fuel."

Panetta was saying the mullahs are a year or less away from an atom bomb, and if they have a hidden site for enriching uranium to weapons grade, they may be even closer.

"That is a red line for us," Panetta added. "If we get intelligence they are proceeding with developing a nuclear weapon, then we will take whatever steps necessary to deal with it."

Panetta is raising the specter of pre-emptive war.

When Pelley's report hit, however, the Pentagon immediately began to walk the cat back.

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Election fraud? Sorry, vote's over Court rules inauguration cancels 'standing' in Obama case

Just amazing.

The judges on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals have ruled that election fraud suspected in the 2008 presidential campaign essentially was canceled by the inauguration of Barack Obama.

The ruling comes in a lawsuit that was filed on the same day Obama was inaugurated in Washington by a team of taxpayers, voters, presidential candidates, members of the military and others who alleged Obama failed to meet the Constitution's requirements for the presidency.

The case represents the work of two groups of plaintiffs, one led by lawyer Orly Taitz and the other by attorney Gary Kreep of the United States Justice Foundation.

Taitz said her plaintiffs definitely will pursue further action, probably a request for rehearing at two levels of federal court, while Kreep told WND he was working with his clients on the results, and they soon would make a decision regarding an appeal.

The issue was the "standing" of the groups bringing the complaint against Obama. The district court essentially said nobody had standing to bring a complaint, but the appellate judges said the individuals who were politically connected to the race should hold an interest in a fair outcome – including whether there was an ineligible candidate aboard the ticket.

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Classic Arms: We Are Celebrating A Birthday

The Birthday of a Saviour, Christ The Lord

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Massive 1,100+ year old Maya site discovered in Georgia's mountains

Via Cousin Bill

Archaeological zone 9UN367 at Track Rock Gap, near Georgia’s highest mountain, Brasstown Bald, is a half mile (800 m) square and rises 700 feet (213 m) in elevation up a steep mountainside. Visible are at least 154 stone masonry walls for agricultural terraces, plus evidence of a sophisticated irrigation system and ruins of several other stone structures. Much more may be hidden underground. It is possibly the site of the fabled city of Yupaha, which Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto failed to find in 1540, and certainly one of the most important archaeological discoveries in recent times.

BLAIRSVILLE, GA (December 21, 2011) -- Around the year 800 AD the flourishing Maya civilization of Central America suddenly began a rapid collapse. A series of catastrophic volcanic eruptions were followed by two long periods of extreme drought conditions and unending wars between city states.

Cities and agricultural villages in the fertile, abundantly watered, Maya Highlands were the first to be abandoned. Here, for 16 centuries, Itza Maya farmers produced an abundance of food on mountainside terraces. Their agricultural surpluses made possible the rise of great cities in the Maya Lowlands and Yucatan Peninsula. When the combination of volcanic eruptions, wars and drought erased the abundance of food, famines struck the densely populated Maya Lowlands. Within a century, most of the cities were abandoned. However, some of the cities in the far north were taken over by the Itza Maya and thrived for two more centuries.

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UPDATE

By Maggie Koerth-Baker

I hate to lend any dignity to this story by commenting on it, but it's making the rounds, so here goes. Two things:

1. Nobody found Mayan ruins in the U.S. state of Georgia. An article posted on The Examiner claimed this was the case. That article is full of it. So full of it that even the scientist cited in the article is (in a more polite way) publicly calling out The Examiner for being full of it. Mark Williams of the University of Georgia does do research on North American archaeology. He has spent 20 years excavating sites in Georgia's Oconee River valley. But these sites are not Mayan. Instead, they're part of what are broadly known as "Mississippian cultures," a conglomeration of ancient North American peoples who built a lot of earth mound structures and whose cultures are distinct from those of the Mayans and other Central Americans.

2. Do not automatically trust anything you read on The Examiner website. The Examiner is a content farm that allows anybody to write whatever they want about anything with absolutely zero oversight or fact-checking. The guy who wrote the bogus story on Mayan artifacts in Georgia appears to have just made up the entire Mississippian/Mayan connection out of his own imagination. As archaeologist Mark Williams told ArtInfo, "No archaeologist would defend this flight of fancy." (Again, this is polite scientist speak for, "Oh, my god. That guy is full of it.") While you're at it, apply the same level of skepticism to anything that comes from Hubpages, which has a similar model to The Examiner and was the source of that bogus "There's a secret cure for cancer!" story earlier this year. In general, remember that just because it's formatted like a newspaper story, with a dateline at the beginning, does not mean it has been written according to any kind of standard of quality. Check the sources of the article. Check what you read against what Wikipedia and other people have written on the same subject.

Thanks to John Hoopes for bringing this foolishness to my attention.