The Death Watch: NamSouth Repost from 2007

One more scene I can remember. Kind friends, you that know nothing of a soldier's life. I ask you in all candor not to doubt the following lines in this sketch. You have no doubt read of the old Roman soldier found amid the ruins of Pompeii, who had stood there for sixteen hundred years, and when he was excavated was found at his post with his sword clasped in his skeleton hands. You believe this because it is written in history.

I have heard, politicians tell it. I have heard it told from the sacred desk. It is true; no one doubts it. Now, were I to tell something that happened in this nineteenth century exactly similar, you would hardly believe it. But whether you believe it or not, it is for you to say. At a little village called Hampshire Crossing, our regiment was ordered to go to a little stream called St. John's Run, to relieve the 14th Georgia Regiment and the 3rd Arkansas. I cannot tell the facts as I desire to.

In fact, my hand trembles so, and my feelings are so overcome, that it is hard for me to write at all. But we went to the place that we were ordered to go to, and when we arrived there we found the guard sure enough. If I remember correctly, there were just eleven of them. Some were sitting down and some were laying down; but each and every one was as cold and as hard frozen as the icicles that hung from their hands and faces and clothing-dead!

They had died at their post of duty. Two of them, a little in advance of the others, were standing with their guns in their hands, as cold and as hard frozen as a monument of marble-standing sentinel with loaded guns in their frozen hands! The tale is told. Were they true men? Does He who noteth the sparrow's fall, and numbers the hairs of our heads, have any interest in one like ourselves? Yes He doeth all things well. Not a sparrow falls to the ground without His consent.

From the book Co. Aytch, A Confederate Memoir of the Civil War by Sam R. Watkins, page 38- Copyright 1962 by MacMillan Publishing Company Copyright renewed in 1990 by Simon &Schuster Inc. Sam began to write of his experiences in 1881 as a series for his hometown newspaper, the Columbia, Tennessee, Herald.
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The Death Watch

The Atomic Bomb that is About to Explode at the Federal Reserve

Via Survival

I have consistently contended that Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is something akin to a mad scientist who, in his development of new "tools" to manage monetary policy, is probably unaware of all the nuances and ramifications of the new tools he is developing. Indeed, one problem with one of his new tools may be about to blow up in his face.

It turns out that Bernanke's decision to pay interest on reserves held at the Fed by member banks has some twists to it that make what he is doing likely illegal. The blog Uneasy Money points this out in a post titled, Is the Federal Reserve Breaking the Law:

In a comment earlier today to this post, David Pearson shocked me by quoting the following passage from the Financial Services Regulatory Relief Act of 2006:

Balances maintained at a Federal Reserve bank by or on behalf of a depository institution may receive earnings to be paid by the Federal Reserve bank at least once each calendar quarter, at a rate or rates not to exceed the general level of short-term interest rates.

As I said to David Pearson in my reply to his comment, I am flabbergasted by this. The Fed is now paying 0.25% interest on reserve balances while and the interest rate on 3-month T-bills is now 0.01%. Yet the statute states in black letters that the rate that the Fed may pay on reserves is “not to exceed the general level of short-term interest rates.” In fact, as can be easily seen on the Treasury’s Daily Yield Curve webpage, only on rare occasions was the 3-month T-bill rate as high as 0.25% in 2009 and it has been consistently less than 0.20% for most of 2009 and all of 2010 and 2011.

Got that? The Fed, as I have pointed out a number of times, is paying interest to bankers many times what is available in the marketplace and this turns out to be illegal.

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My 15 year old daughter

Godfather Politics
VERBATIM POST
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I had a talk to my 15-year old daughter today. She is taking an online business class, and I noticed something in her economics textbook that I didn’t like. It was the definition of inflation: “The increase in the price of a commodity or service, or groups of commodities and services.” Since the class is at a Christian online school, I expected the teachers to have at least a conservative worldview, and define the concepts from a good old Christian conservative position. I asked her if her teacher believed that inflation was the same as “price increase.” She said yes, that’s what he was teaching them.

So we had to spend some time for her to understand that price increase is not necessarily inflation. When the price of of a seasonal fruit – grapefruits or watermelons, for example – goes down, this is not deflation. And when it goes up because they are out of season, this is not inflation. Inflation properly is defined as “an artificial increase in the money supply and the available credit leading to decrease of the currency’s value and therefore to general increase of all prices.”

My daughter is a smart girl – I know, I know, she must have gotten it from her mother – so she immediately asked the question: “If it is inevitable that the prices will rise with the inflation of the money supply, why do they keep printing more money?” Smart question.

Well, my reply was, do the prices rise right away? No, she said after some thinking, not before the new money reaches the market in the form of effective demand. Exactly. So whoever has the new money – and that means the government or the agents of the government or the favorites of the government (think Wall Street and the welfare recipients) – goes to the market and starts buying with the new money but at the old prices. The increased demand makes the sellers uneasy and give it some more time, they start raising their prices to accommodate to the new level of demand.

Now, tell me, I asked, who profits from this?

My daughter was quick: Whoever has the new money and buys at the old prices. Exactly.

It didn’t take her long to think of the next logical step: So if the government keeps printing money and keeps using them to buy commodities and services, or its favorites keep buying commodities and services, they will always be ahead of the market and always profit at the expense of everyone else who adjusts their prices later. I nodded. Then, she said, by constantly inflating the government always makes us get less for whatever we offer because we are always a step behind. This sounds like a hidden tax to me.

A smart daughter I have. Yes, I replied.

She continued: Then, inflation is an attack against liberty, since our Founding Fathers rose against taxes to defend their liberty.

I said, yes. And that is the history of the Federal Reserve. You know how much liberty we have been deprived of by looking at how much the dollar has been reduced in value for the last 98 years.

My 15-year-old daughter got it.

Millions of Republican voters don’t get it. They talk about “liberty,” they talk about America as it is supposed to be, they talk about the Founding Fathers, they talk about “conservatism” and “what it used to be in the past.” And very few understand that more taxes mean less liberty. Even fewer grasp the simple fact that inflation is a hidden tax. And only a portion among those are able to come to the logical conclusion that the Federal Reserve, the institution responsible for the demise of the US Dollar, is incompatible with our liberty. That it must go, and the control over the money supply must be taken out of the hands of politicians and bankers and returned back to the market. That our families, our property, and our churches are not protected unless our savings are protected. And our savings are not protected as long as politicians and central bankers can play with the value of the dollar by inflating it.

That the Republican debate is not revolving around this issue is a clear sign that America hasn’t awaken yet – not enough to deserve her liberty and be worthy of her Founding Fathers.

A Second Term for Obama Would Make the United States Go as California Has Gone

Via Western Rifle Shooters Association

Congressman Tom McClintock delivered the following speech to the Council for National Policy:

I want to welcome this groundbreaking scientific expedition to the savage lands of the Left Coast. You are here in California to answer an important theoretical question and now you have your answer.

Yes, this is what Barack Obama’s second term would look like.

Study it. Fear it. And then go home and make sure that it never happens to the rest of the country.

Of course, in spite of all of its problems, California is still one of the best places in the country to build a successful small business. All you have to do is start with a successful large business.

Laugh if you will, but as you whistle past this cemetery, do heed the medieval epitaph: “Remember man as you walk by, as you are now so once was I; as I am now so you will be.”

Mark that well, because if we lose this struggle for the future of our country, you too someday will live in a California – only without the nice climate.

Bad policies. Bad process. Bad politics. Those are the three acts in a Greek tragedy that tell the tale of how, in the span of a single generation, the most prosperous and golden state in the nation became an economic basket case.

When my parents came to California in the 1960’s looking for a better future, they found it here. The state government consumed about half of what it does today after adjusting for both inflation and population. HALF. We had the finest highway system in the world and the finest public school system in the country. California offered a FREE university education to every Californian who wanted one. We produced water and electricity so cheaply that some communities didn’t bother to meter the stuff. Our unemployment rate consistently ran well below the national rate and our diversified economy was nearly recession-proof.

One thing – and one thing only – changed in those years: public policy. The political Left gradually gained dominance over California’s government and has imposed a disastrous agenda of radical and retrograde policies that have destroyed the quality of life that Californians once took for granted.

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Foreigners Dump $74 Billion In Treasurys In 6 Consecutive Weeks: Biggest Sequential Outflow In History

Via Western Rifle Shooters Association

Over the weekend, we observed the perplexing sell off of $56 billion in US Treasurys courtesy of weekly disclosure in the Fed's custodial account (source: H.4.1) and speculated if this may be due to an asset rotation, under duress or otherwise, out of bonds and into stocks, to prevent the collapse of the global ponzi (because when the BRICs tell the IMF to boost its bailout capacity you know it is global).

We also proposed a far simpler theory: "the dreaded D-day in which foreign official and private investors finally start offloading their $2.7 trillion in Treasurys with impunity (although not with the element of surprise - China has made it abundantly clear it will sell its Treasury holdings, the only question is when), has finally arrived."

In hindsight the Occam's Razor should have been applied. Little did we know 5 short days ago just how violent the reaction by China would be (both post and pre-facto) to the Senate decision to propose a law for all out trade warfare with China. Now we know - in the week ended October 12, a further $17.7 billion was "removed" from the Fed's custodial Treasury account, meaning that someone, somewhere is very displeased with US paper, and, far more importantly, what it represents, and wants to make their displeasure heard loud and clear.

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White Supremacist Northerners, Reformers and Collectivists

The Northern worker as well as European immigrant wanted no emancipation of African slaves as they feared a flood of cheap labor coming into the North and the territories. Included in the 1854 and 1860 Republican party platforms were white supremacy planks that restricted the black man to the South while holding the western territories for white settlers. And ironically, while the abolitionists saw only evil in the South, many overlooked the plight of children and women enslaved in Northern factories, with many of the latter forced into prostitution.

Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
www.ncwbts150.com
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
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“When abolitionists attempted to induce empathy with the Negro in Northern whites who opposed slavery only passively, they were consciously trying to meet the greatest challenge to their cause, the widespread fear that emancipation would bring social equality in its wake. According to one student of Northern opinion, “the key to the explanation of anti-abolition is race prejudice.”

Most Northerners, he explains, were opposed at the same time to slavery and to race equality and therefore supported the American Colonization Society. Abolitionists, realizing this, always saw their struggle to discredit colonization as part of their fight against racism. In fact, their slogan of immediate and unconditional emancipation ought itself to be understood as, among other things, an assertion of the equality of the races.

White supremacist Northerners at the time understood this better than modern historians who have assumed that the slogan represented a naïve call for a revolutionary transformation they thought could come in the near future.

The [Northern] labor reformers stressed interest where the abolitionists stressed principle, talked of classes where the abolitionists talked of individuals, urged reform in institutions where abolitionists preached repudiation of sin. It is this conflict in philosophy…that explains why the two movements were not allied. Some abolitionists did in fact sympathize with underpaid American workers, starving Irish peasants, and disenfranchised English factory operatives.

George Henry Evans, editor of Young America…in an editorial [stated]: “If it be true, as I most firmly believe it is, that wages slavery, in its legitimate results of crowded cities, debasing servitude, rent exactions, disease, crime, and prostitution, as they now appear in England and our Northern Eastern States, are even more destructive of life, health and happiness than chattel slavery, as it exists in our Southern States, then the efforts of those who are endeavoring to substitute wages for chattel slavery are greatly misdirected…”

Evans was seconded by another National Reformer, William West, of Boston…[who stated that] the progress of slavery can never be arrested and reversed until monopoly of the soil was abolished. Abolitionists must therefore unite with the National Reformers to limit the amount of land an individual might own…[and] Slaveowners would have to free their slaves because enormous plantations would disappear.

The following March [1846], [William Lloyd] Garrison, back from Europe [said] “The evil in society…is not that labor receives wages, but that the wages given are not generally in proportion to the value of the labor performed.” A few months later it was Wendell Phillips turn. “A wiser use of public lands, a better system of taxation, disuse of war and military preparation, and more than all, the recognition of the rights of woman…will help the classes much.”

(Means and Ends in American Abolition, Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834-1850, Aileen S. Kraditor, Pantheon Books, 1969, pp.242-250)
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White Supremacist Northerners, Reformers and Collectivists

‘They Don’t Love This Country’: Congresswoman Linda Sanchez Says Tea Party and Republicans Are Unpatriotic, Hate America and Are Screwing the Working

This is from racist Sanchez. Remember her comments about Vietnamese and Republicans in the last election? She showed up in Little Saigon once in a Vietnamese Ao Dai and looked like a pig.
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a

Defund the UN Population Fund

There’s never been a better opportunity to defund a department of the United Nations than right now. Fresh out of the House Foreign Relations Committee is H.R. 2059, a remarkably short bill that would prohibit funding of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). The proposal has 83 cosponsors and quite a lot of momentum, and could save the American taxpayers $400 million in one decade, and probably many babies’ lives. In addition, it would bring the White House’s current policy back in line with American law that prohibits funding for any agency that supports or participates in programs of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization. (Think China.)

The propaganda from the UNFPA (known as the United Nations Fund for Population Activities from 1969 to 1987) indicates that its programs do nothing more than “reduce poverty and ensure that every pregnancy is wanted, every birth safe, every young person is free of HIV/AIDS, and every girl and woman is treated with dignity and respect.” And how does the UNFPA accomplish such lofty-sounding goals? By promoting “family planning,” access to abortions, and instituting sex-ed programs, especially for youth.

Although the UNFPA denies promoting or supporting abortion on its website, under the umbrella of “reproductive health” the international organization provides legitimacy for accessing abortion as a human right. As recently as July, the youth program of UNFPA, Y-PEER, released a statement calling for the realization of global youths’ sexual and reproductive health and rights. The statement even went so far as to encourage young people to “experience and celebrate their sexuality,” and emphasized the “right to choose” along with universal access to safe abortion and comprehensive sexuality education for those as young as ten years.

So, instead of promoting policies that would delay marriage and childbearing for the poverty-stricken of many countries, the UNFPA encourages promiscuity. Instead of abstinence training, a sexual revolution is advanced. And, instead of telling teens the truth about free sex, they hype the glories of condom use that afford little or no protection from sexually transmitted diseases rampant in many third world countries. Shockingly, the UN’s answer to gender discrimination and sex selection brought about by the one-child policy is “safe” abortions.

UNFPA was caught in 2001 praising China’s brutally enforced one-child policy, but denies that its programs in China supported coercive abortions. However, in 2002, the U.S. State Department, while concluding that UNFPA didn’t “knowingly” support or participate in forced abortions or sterilization, found that UNFPA had indeed provided computers and data-processing equipment that facilitated the implementation of China’s coercive policy, and even shared office space. This knowledge prompted then-Secretary of State Colin Powell to call for an end of U.S. funding for UNFPA. Furthermore John Negroponte, Deputy Secretary of State concurred in 2008 saying, “all UNFPA programming related to contraception and reproductive health incorporates, and defers to Chinese law and regulation.”

In 2005 and in 2006, UNFPA and International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) jointly advanced a framework that included “sexual and reproductive health and rights,” including “safe abortion.” In 2007, the goal was to introduce MVA techniques -- vacuum aspiration for early term abortions -- across the African continent. The IPPF at that time spent $100,000 on a special session for African health ministers to implement the UNFPA/IPPF plan of action.

In 2010, UNFPA’s contribution to IPPF was $1.6 million. UN Women contributed over $330,000. UNAIDS gave IPPF over $1 million. And the World Bank, WHO, and UNAIDS collectively donated $400,000 to IPPF.

Although House appropriators included a UNFPA funding ban in their version of the fiscal 2012 State Department spending bill, their Senate counterparts included $40 million for the UNFPA in their version, while President Obama has requested $47.5 million.

The moral of this story is that eventually, money given to UNFPA ends up in the pockets of those whose goal it is to increase abortions and destroy the morality and values of the people in many geographic locations; there’s little evidence that poverty is eliminated, or that women and children are any healthier.

Contact your congressmen now and insist they vote to defund UNFPA by passing H.R. 2059. Anything less would not be representational of the wishes of the American people who reject abortion and the use of their hard-earned tax dollars to pay for it.

Thanks,

Your friends at The John Birch Society

Tea Party Launches Attacks on 'Occupy Wall Street'

Tea party activists have gone on the offensive against anti-Wall Street demonstrators just a day before the New York protest threatens to come to a head.

The Republican party-within-a-party is taking pains to point out the differences between its genteel grass-roots movement and the disparate groups camping out under tarps pushing a range of left-wing causes.

And their point is likely to be driven home on Friday when a major confrontation between police and the Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York is predicted.

“The motivation between Occupy Wall Street and the motivation from the tea party are completely different,” Bryan Shroyer of theteaparty.net tells Newsmax.

“From their signs, speeches, and websites, they want to continue this push of America down this road of increased government involvement and increased socialism. The tea party is simply a collection of patriots from across the nation who want to get our country back to its capitalist roots.”

Shroyer pointed to a video from the demonstration in Los Angeles in which one leader was cheered when he called for violent revolution. “That’s very telling in terms of what this group is looking for,” Shroyer said .

Sal Russo, co-founder of Tea Party Express, also called out the advocacy for violence. “If any nut said something like that at a tea party rally, can you imagine the outcry?” he asked Newsmax.

“I am not worried about the Occupy groups; they are out of touch with the American people and have no coherent ideas of how to right the American ship of state.

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Charlie Daniels: Friends 10/13/11

LINK

Friends

This is the hardest soapbox I've ever written.

This morning about 4:15am I got the news that I had lost one of my oldest and dearest friends, Taz DiGregorio. He was killed in a one-car accident on I-40, East of Nashville when he was driving to catch our tour bus to go on the road.

As I write this, I am still somewhat in shock and have not fully accepted that there will be an empty spot on stage right where Taz's keyboards set for over forty years.

I honestly don't know what it's going to feel like when I walk back on stage for the first time without him, but one thing I do know, the music will go on, but it will never be quite the same.

Taz's wailing organ and rowdy piano were a mainstay in The CDB style since our very first records in the early 70's.

His tender piano intro to "Carolina I Remember You", his jazzy organ solo on "Birmingham Blues" and the signature riff he wrote for "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" were as much a part of The CDB sound as the songs themselves.

I traveled a good part of the world with Taz. We've been broke down on the roadsides of America, stranded by an air traffic controller's strike in Paris, stood together at the Berlin Wall and the 38th Parallel, walked the streets of Hong Kong, London, Amsterdam, Dublin, Juarez, Sydney, and a thousand little towns you've probably never even heard of.

We've stormed the Big Apple, the Big Easy, the Rockies, the Smokies, Clamtown, Beantown, the Midlands and the Maritimes and lit up the Daddy of 'Em All in Cheyenne Wyoming.

We've been in jail in Louisiana, rained on in Raleigh, shot at in Baghdad and left behind a trail that stretches millions of miles, thousands of shows and zillions of memories.

Taz was there through some of the toughest stretches of my life, when my dad died suddenly, through my battles with cancer and stroke and during the years it took me to pay off massive debts from a bad business arrangement.

Conversely, he shared some of the highest moments of my life, when my son was born, when we had our first gold record, when I was inducted into the Musician's Hall of Fame and when I became a member of the Grand Ole Opry.

At this early stage of the game, it's hard for me to think about what the future will be like without Taz in it, but I know one thing…

There is an empty place in my life today that nobody else will ever fill.

I will miss you my friend.

Love never dies.

William Joel DiGregorio
Born January 8, 1944
Southbridge, Massachusetts

What do you think?

Pray for our troops, and for our country.

God Bless America

Charlie Daniels