The story disingenuously ends with this statement: "The finders and the landowner have said that they want the hoard to go to the island and be put on display for the people of Jersey to enjoy." They sound oh-so philanthropic and egalitarian. What the article doesn't mention is that they don't have any choice. Under the modern UK law, buried precious metal treasure troves do not belong to landowners or the finders--they belong to the government.=========A massive hoard of Celtic coins worth millions of pounds has been found on the island of Jersey.
The hoard comprises 30,000 to 50,000 coins and is thought to have been buried to protect it from the advancing armies of Julius Caesar.
The coins were discovered in a farmer's field in the parish of Grouville in the east of the island by local metal detector enthusiasts Reg Mead and Richard Miles.
Mr Mead had been investigating the field for 30 years since he heard a report that coins scattered on the ground when a tree was uprooted.
The coins are thought to be worth between £100 and £200 each, giving a potential value of between £3 million and £10 million.
Jersey Heritage said the coins are in one solid mass weighing about three quarters of a tonne.
They are of Armorican origin (modern day Brittany and Normandy) from a tribe called the Coriosolitae, who were based around Rance in the area of modern-day St Malo and Dinan.
More @ The Independent
Friday, June 29, 2012
Massive Celtic coins hoard found on Jersey.
"Americans, you've been had"
Abolitionist Hands Drenched in Blood
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
www.ncwbts150.com
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Abolitionist Hands Drenched in Blood:
“In the job of molding public opinion, [William Lloyd] Garrison needed help. The need of a platform personality to carry the cause directly to the people was answered, unsolicited, by Wendell Phillips. At a meeting in 1837, young Phillips rose from the audience, denounced the murderers of Elijah Lovejoy, the antislavery editor, of Alton, Illinois…..A Bostonian once reported that during a Phillips speech he had heard a man in the audience applauding, stamping his feet, and exclaiming enthusiastically, “The damned old liar! The damned old liar!
Phillips strove to foster a public opinion hostile to slaveholding…..Phillips battleground was the Northern mind. His eye was on the North, though his shots appeared to be aimed at the South. To arouse Northern awareness of danger, Phillips emphasized the political threat of the South by pointing to its wealth and its continued success in Washington.
For all practical purposes, Phillips said, the slave power was the South; there could be no other South until the North created one. The image of the South which Phillips labored to evoke in the Northern mind embodied deformities that were designed to call up repugnance, anger and fear. It violated the cherished ideals of the North. He conjured up a land of whipping posts and auction blocks, a feudal society in which newspapermen, politicians, and clergymen were vassals. “The South is the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.”
Phillips….often spoke of the possibility of armed rebellion in the South. “I can imagine the scenes of blood through which a rebellious slave-population must march to their rights.”
The agitator must continually intensify his attack if he is to maintain the appearance of vitality. With the years, Phillips grew more vitriolic. In 1853, surveying the achievements of the abolition movement, he said: “To startle the South to madness, so that every step she takes in her blindness, is one more step toward ruin, is much. This we have done.”
Nothing shows more clearly that Phillips had become a victim of his own program. By this time he could summarize his view of the South in one image: the South was “one great brothel where half a million women are flogged to prostitution, or, worse still, are degraded to believe it honorable.”
By the time of the [John Brown] Harpers Ferry incident, Phillips was able to say that Brown had more right to hang [Virginia] Governor Wise than the Governor had to hang Brown. As Phillips grew more outspoken, some of his listeners became indignant, and the abolitionists were forced to form bodyguards.”
(The South in Northern Eyes, 1831 to 1861, Howard R. Floan, McGraw-Hill, 1958, pp. 11-14)
Abolitionist Hands Drenched in Blood
What Will They Do With All Those Pocket Constitutions?
Perhaps the biggest waste of Charles Koch's (and others') money by the beltwaytarians has been the Cato Institute's giving away of tens of thousands of little "pocket constitutions" over the past twenty years or so. Their strategy was apparently to get people to read them, and then somehow magically "force" the government to obey the document. Yesterday's majority opinion, written by the conniving little totalitarian left winger John Roberts, proves once again what I have been saying for years: Ever since 1865, Americans have lived under the "Hamiltonian constitution" whereby the document is used as a rubber stamp of approval for virtually anything the politicians in Washington can dream up. This is how government lawyers with lifetime tenure (our "black-robed deities") like John Roberts view their jobs. This was Alexander Hamilton's take on how the Constitution should be used. It eclipsed the Jeffersonian vision of a government "bound by the chains of the Constitution" many generations ago.
The beltwaytarians will never admit this, for to do so is to dispute the state's false version of the "Civil War" and its consequences, and they are far too politically correct to do so. It was Woodrow Wilson who, in his book, Constitutional Government in the United States (p. 178), celebrated the fact that the North's victory in the "Civil War" brought about the practice of the Supreme Court being the sole arbiter of the constitutionality of federal legislation. "The War between the States established . . . this principle, that the federal government is, through its courts, the final judge of its own powers," Wilson wrote.
The Jeffersonians never believed that a written constitution alone would be sufficient to restrain the tyrannical proclivities of the state. That's why Jefferson himself championed the rights of secession and nullification until his dying days. Read John C. Calhoun's Disquisition on Government if you are interested in an adult analysis of "constitutional government" and are not a cowardly beltway-area "libertarian" whose primary goal in life is to be "accepted" by the Washington establishment and the politically-correct totalitarian leftists in academe.
Insane killer whale story
What if that huge conservative doctrinal achievement was mere dicta?
I have expressed my frustration with those who see some salvation in the supposed advancement of constitutional federalism in the ruling by Chief Justice Roberts and the four conservative dissenters that the Commerce and Necessary and Proper Clauses did not justify forcing people into commerce.
Those rulings arguably were not essential to the decision. Once the Court (the Chief Justice and the four liberal Justices) found that the mandate was justified under the power of Congress to tax, the Court could have stopped right there, declined to address the Commerce and Necessary and Proper Clause arguments, and the result would have been the same. Indeed, the four liberal Justices in the majority on the tax issue were in the dissent on the other issues.
The Commerce and Necessary and Proper Clause holdings may be deemed limited by some future composition of the Court to the unique facts of the Obamacare mandate, or worse, considered mere dicta, meaning opining by the Court which while informative is not binding on inferior or future Courts because not essential to the ruling.
Ilya Somin makes this point as well:
More @ Legal Insurrection
Pittsboro, NC Wild Goose Festival 2012
About 2,200 people flocked to the rolling hills of Pittsboro, N.C., last week for second annual Wild Goose Festival, held outdoors at the Shakori Hills Community Arts Center from June 21-24.
Inspired by the Greenbelt Festival in the United Kingdom and rooted in the Christian tradition, the event brought together activists, artists and believers for four days of creativity, social justice and theological discussion.
The "Wild Goose" is a Celtic metaphor that signifies the Holy Spirit. See a slideshow of the festivities below.
Eyewitness to Miami Beach fatal shooting alleges police misconduct
Footage of a Miami Beach police shooting was preserved when a witness hid his phone's memory card in his mouth.
An eyewitness to a fatal police shooting in Miami Beach last week claims police officers attempted to confiscate the video he filmed of the incident, and even crushed his phone underfoot in an attempt to destroy the recording.
Narces Benoit says he just happened to be in the area driving with his girlfriend when police fatally shot an erratic driver early Memorial Day morning.
He said after the disturbance started, he pulled over his truck, and started recording with his cell phone camera capturing the shooting.
"When he noticed me recording, one of the officers jumped in the truck, put a pistol to my head," he said. "My phone was smashed - he stepped on it, handcuffed me."
Juan Sanchez a detective with Miami Beach Police Department said he could not comment on how officers that night handled eyewitnesses who may have filmed the incident, because the matter could become the subject of an internal investigation or a civil lawsuit.
But Sanchez added that after the shooting, the site was an active crime scene and the police were looking for additional suspects.
Benoit's girlfriend, Ericka Davis, was also in the truck at the time.
"They handled us like we were criminals," she said. "The officer came over to the driver's side, on my left, and just put the gun to my head."
"They took everyone's phones and smashed them," she said.
Benoit says the only reason he still has the footage is because it was saved on a tiny memory card, which he removed and hid from the officers, despite being told to hand over his video.
"I took the chip out and put it in my mouth," he said, and kept it there the whole time he was interviewed by police at a nearby mobile command post.
More @ CNN