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White House spokesman Robert Gibbs was ordered by the Obama apparatchiks to express displeasure at the decision by Israel to build houses in the East Jerusalem suburb of Gilo. But Gibbs failed to disclose that the land on which Gilo was built, as with other suburbs in "disputed" parts of East Jerusalem, was home to many Jews who were driven out in 1948 by the British officered Arab Legion of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. It was not liberated by Israel, and the land restored, until the June, 1967 Six Day War, nineteen years later. King Hussein of Jordan had...

AMATEUR archaeologists have uncovered evidence of Scotland's oldest human settlement, dating back 14,000 years. The team dug up tools that have been shown to date from the end of the last Ice Age. It is the first time there has been proof that humans lived in Scotland during the upper paleolithic period.

Scotland already has more identified Roman camps than any other European country -- reflecting Rome's repeated attempts to stamp its rule on the troublesome north. Now the number is set to increase. The first comprehensive survey of Roman remains for 30 years will boost the total of officially recognised sites and give them greater legal protection, officials said yesterday. Traces of at least 225 Roman military camps dot the Scottish countryside from the Borders to Aberdeenshire... They can be spotted today mostly from the air, where the distinctive bank and ditch defences thrown up by the legionaries still mark the...

See link below. Article has a doozy of a comment by a poly sci professor at SMU and many comments to article

Clocks are clocks are clocks – or so you may think. However, some clocks are astronomical both literally and metaphorically. Here is a great selection of astronomical clocks of Europe.

**And now a word from my inner swaggerer... Europe is a chick's name. That's right, you heard me. The word Europa from which Europe is derived is of feminine gender in origin. In Greek mythology Europa was a Phoenician princess abducted by Zeus. Zeus disguised himself as a bull to pull off the caper. So, what do we have? Let's review: Europe is a defenseless but pretty chick fooled by a bunch of bull and ravaged by a God. Yep. Sounds about right. Now what about America? How chikified is our name? Well, not much. As it happens America is...

Prince Charles was at odds with ministers today over plans to abolish history and geography lessons in schools. The Prince of Wales is said to be 'passionate' about protecting traditional lessons in British history and English literature in the classroom. Bernice McCabe, a leading headteacher and one of the Prince's closest advisers, has criticised education reforms which she says will leave schools as 'globalised theme

Mark HoffmanSurrounded by white corn drying the traditional way, manager Jeff Metoxen talks about the benefits of white corn to a group of visitors from Germany last month at the Tsyunhehkwa Agricultural Center in Oneida. Oneida embrace planting, harvesting of white corn as a staple of diet, culture Mark HoffmanWhite corn has far fewer rows of kernels than its sweet corn cousin. Oneida - George Washington's troops at Valley Forge may have starved to death without the white corn an Oneida Indian chief gave them in the winter of 1777 during the Revolutionary War. Now, the Oneida, like other...

Special Dispatch - Egypt August 22, 2003 No. 556 (Translated from Arabic Language Sources) Egyptian Jurists to Sue 'The Jews' for Compensation for 'Trillions' of Tons of Gold Allegedly Stolen During Exodus from Egypt The August 9, 2003 edition of the Egyptian weekly Al-Ahram Al-Arabi featured an interview with Dr. Nabil Hilmi, Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Al-Zaqaziq who, together with a group of Egyptian expatriates in Switzerland, is preparing an enormous lawsuit against "all the Jews of the world." The following are excerpts from the interview: (1) Dr. Hilmi: "... Since the Jews...

MEMRI: Palestinian Historian Dr. Ibrahim Al-Sinwar: Ancient Egyptians Had the Right to Force the Jews to Work Building Pithom and Raamses; Benjamin Franklin Warned against the Jews MEMRI No. 2260| November 16, 2009 Palestinian Historian Dr. Ibrahim Al-Sinwar: Ancient Egyptians Had the Right to Force the Jews to Work Building Pithom and Raamses; Benjamin Franklin Warned against the Jews Following are excerpts from an interview with Dr. Ibrahim Al-Sinwar, a lecturer on Islamic history at the Islamic University of Gaza. The interview aired on Al-Aqsa TV on July 31, 2009. To view this clip, visit http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/2260.htm Dr. Ibrahim Al-Sinwar: The...

Scientists have uncovered heart disease in 3,500-year-old Egyptian mummies, suggesting the risk factors behind it are not just modern in nature. Heart disease is often ascribed to modern risk factors, such as smoking, unhealthy diets rich in saturated fats, salt and processed sugars, or sedentary lifestyles. But then cardiologists touring the Egyptian National Museum of Antiquities in Cairo during a medical conference last year noticed the nameplate of the pharoah Merenptah, who ruled from 1213 B.C. to 1203 B.C. It read that when Merenptah died at roughly age 60, he was afflicted with atherosclerosis, or thickening of the arteries due...

Those of you who still believe that freedom is an American (and human) value will appreciate the significance of this day. Twenty years ago today communism fell in Czechoslovakia with considerably little blood spilt. ... The protest began as a legal rally to commemorate the death of Jan Opletal, but turned instead into a demonstration demanding democratic reforms. Riot police stopped the students (who were making their way from the Czech National Cemetery at Vyšehrad to Wenceslas Square) halfway in their march, in Národní třída. After a stand-off in which the students offered flowers to the riot police and showed...

On December 24, 1971, the New York Times ran one of the first of many articles on a new holiday designed to foster unity among African Americans. The holiday, called Kwanzaa, was applauded by a certain sixteen-year-old minister who explained that the feast would perform the valuable service of "de-whitizing" Christmas. The minister was a nobody at the time but he would later go on to become perhaps the premier race-baiter of the twentieth century. His name was Al Sharpton .... With money also comes forgetfulness. As those warm Kwanzaa feelings are generated in a spirit of holiday cheer, those...

This is the final installment my three part report on the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s one day conference on The Roots of American Order. So here is part two of mine titled Lift a Glass to the Past: America Rooted in Tradition or a New Covenant? (Click for parts one and two) After a break for lunch, Mark C. Henrie took up America's Britishness. Henrie wrote the ISI's A Student's Guide to the Core Curriculum that explains the value of a traditional core of studies in Western civilization and his session reflected that study. Capitalizing on Birzer's citation of Edmund Burke...

This is part two of my three part report on the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s one day conference on The Roots of American Order. So here is part two of mine titled Lift a Glass to the Past: America Rooted in Tradition or a New Covenant? (Part one can be seen here) The second speaker of the day was Brad Birzer who regaled us on America's Judeo-Christian History. Bizer began his session by noting that historian Donald Lutz discovered that the founders used Christian references in their pre-war writing far more than any other source. St. Paul was the most referenced...

Is the United States a grand experiment, a new covenant invented out of whole cloth by the fertile minds of the founders from never before seen ideas or is it a nation spawned from deeply rooted traditions of western thought? This was the question posited in a one-day-long conference on classicism in America's founding sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) and held in Skokie, Illinois, a near northern suburb of Chicago. The short answer is that the liberal mindset that holds that we should invent the USA anew with each succeeding generation is an erroneous conception of what the...

In the United States, in the autumn of 2008, the Presidential election was decided on the hoopla of hope and change drenched in hyperbolic rhetoric which effectively drowned journalistic decorum to maintain any pretence at integrity. It put the Oval Office decisively lurching into a monopoly of power without any effective constraints in place. In short, the seeds of tyranny were safely and decisively planted. The jury is still out whether or not the 1986 Philippine Spring succeeded in vanquishing tyranny to nurture expanding liberty. The leading indicators point to a political governance being still in the clutches of a...

Okay you red-blooded Americans...let's see how you do on this test... 24 out of 30 is considered a passing grade. Supposedly 96% of all high school Seniors FAILED this test. AND if that's not bad enough, 50% + of all individuals over 50 did too!! Take the test and be surprised at what we don't know. http://games.toast.net/independence I found a fun QUIZ on introductory level United States History. Don't take it too seriously. It contains 30 multiple choice questions with 4 choices for each one. If you are as old as I am (Born in 1948)or older , went to...

Former President George W. Bush selects Miller Center’s Presidential Oral History Program to record presidency Scholars at the Miller Center of Public Affairs’ Presidential Oral History Program will soon begin to conduct audio interviews with members of former President George W. Bush’s administration, as well as foreign public officials. The 43rd president selected the Miller Center to document the official oral history of his two terms. As part of the project, University faculty and staff will conduct interviews with members of the former White House Cabinet, representatives of Congress, independent political advisers and foreign leaders — particularly those affected by...

Barack Obama’s deep bow to the emperor of Japan and earlier bow to the Saudi Arabian king is so deeply offensive to America’s history and traditions that it cannot and most not be explained away in any fashion. The framers of the U.S. Constitution were particularly sensitive to the conditions under which a President could serve or any hint that a privileged, monarchal class might emerge. “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States. And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of Congress, accept any present, Emolument, Office...

California experienced centuries-long droughts in the past 20,000 years that coincided with the thawing of ice caps in the Arctic, according to a new study by UC Davis doctoral student Jessica Oster and geology professor Isabel Montañez. The finding, which comes from analyzing stalagmites from Moaning Cavern in the central Sierra Nevada, was published online Nov. 5 in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters. The sometimes spectacular mineral formations in caves such as Moaning Cavern and Black Chasm build up over centuries as water drips from the cave roof. Those drops of water pick up trace chemicals in...

During the Constitutional Convention, from May to September 1787, delegates from the colonies were to gather together for the express purpose of amending the Articles of Confederation to form a “more perfect union” (NOT a completely different union!). The men that met in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, were under direct and limited orders from their states to attend the Federal Convention explicitly to preserve the federation and State rights and to correct the errors of the existing federal government for the limited purposes of handling foreign affairs, commerce among the states and common defense. Yet, during that private and secret convention, there...

Rehnquist’s Portrait Allie Winegar Duzett, November 12, 2009 William Rehnquist was by all accounts a fascinating man. His work in the judiciary was unparalleled: he served on the Supreme Court as a justice for over three decades, and led the court as Chief Justice for nineteen years. He was a justice voting on the controversial Roe v. Wade case (Rehnquist wrote the dissent), the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton, and for the dispute over 2000 presidential election. As a justice for the Supreme Court, Rehnquist lived his life under public scrutiny—but only a very few got to know the man...

2,500 years ago, an army of 50,000 men left an oasis in western Egypt and were never heard from again. Now, archaeologists think they may have uncovered the missing troops, who were probably killed in a sandstorm. ...the team decided to investigate Bedouin stories about thousands of white bones that would have emerged decades ago during particular wind conditions in a nearby area. Indeed, they found a mass grave with hundreds of bleached bones and skulls. "We learned that the remains had been exposed by tomb robbers and that a beautiful sword which was found among the bones was sold...

ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. — Sister Catherine Bitzer slowly opened a file box and carefully removed a brittle page, scarred by years of neglectful storage, mold and insects. At 415 years old, the marriage record written by a Roman Catholic priest is still readable and is one of the oldest known European records from the United States.It's among thousands of artifacts detailing the lives of the Spanish soldiers, missionaries and merchants who settled St. Augustine, the nation's oldest permanent city. The church kept the only official records, a role that today is filled by government.After being scattered from Florida and surviving...

The remains of a Minoan-style wall painting, recognizable by a blue background, the first of its kind to be found in Israel, was discovered in the course of the recent excavation season at Tel Kabri. This fresco joins others of Aegean style that have been uncovered during earlier seasons at the Canaanite palace in Kabri. "It was, without doubt, a conscious decision made by the city's rulers who wished to associate with Mediterranean culture and not adopt Syrian and Mesopotamian styles of art like other cities in Canaan did. The Canaanites were living in the Levant and wanted to feel...

(Nov. 11) -- At first, it seemed like a sick joke or, worse, some sort of scam. The caller from North Carolina was telling John Lenox that the wreckage of his father's plane had been located. Staff Sgt. Alvin Lenox had been dead for two weeks longer than his 66-year-old son, John, had been alive. The Army Air Force radio operator crashed with four others in a cargo plane flying a supply mission from Yantai, China, to Joraht, India, in August 1943. They went down in a treacherous mountain region known as The Hump, which swallowed about 600 U.S. planes...

JERUSALEM – Israel displayed for the first time Wednesday a collection of rare coins charred and burned from the Roman destruction of the Jewish Temple nearly 2,000 years ago. About 70 coins were found in an excavation at the foot of a key Jerusalem holy site. They give a rare glimpse into the period of the Jewish revolt that eventually led to the destruction of the Second Jewish Temple in A.D. 70, said Hava Katz, curator of the exhibition. The Jews rebelled against the Roman Empire and took over Jerusalem in A.D. 66. After laying siege to Jerusalem, the Romans...

The Mithraic Mysteries was a mystery religion that became popular among the military in the Roman Empire, from the 1st to 4th centuries AD. Information on the cult is based mainly on interpretations of monuments, which depict Mithras as born from a rock and sacrificing a bull. His worshippers had a complex system of seven grades of initiation, with ritual meals and they met in underground temples. Little else is known for certain.

In the current issue of Books & Culture, Professor Paul Harvey (not to be confused with the late radio icon) takes aim at my “imagined” (read: invented) tradition of classical liberalism on race. You can read his full review here. Harvey concedes that Race and Liberty in America rediscovers “understudied authors.” Then he quickly moves on to the usual academic dismissal of any classical liberal “tradition” on race (academics love scare quotes to let the reader know that there really is no such thing). Since the 1950s, if not earlier, left-liberal academics have argued that classical liberalism ended in the...

Four thousand years ago, a government bureaucrat in Mesopotamia jotted down a tally of slave laborers on a clay tablet. The bureaucrat left behind the count in wedge-shaped symbols that proved hard to fully decipher with the naked eye. Until now. Researchers at the University of Southern California's West Semitic Research Project have helped uncover its hidden narrative with the aid of lighting and imaging techniques that are credited with revolutionizing the study of ancient texts. Over the last three decades, the USC project has produced thousands of crisp images of inscriptions and other artifacts from biblical Israel and other...

Austrian archaeologists have found a Babylonian seal in Egypt that confirms contact between the Babylonians and the Hyksos during the second millennium B.C. Irene Forstner-Müller, the head of the Austrian Archaeological Institute's (ÖAI) branch office in Cairo, said today (Thurs) the find had occurred at the site of the ancient town of Avaris near what is today the city of Tell el-Dab'a in the eastern Nile delta. The Hyksos conquered Egypt and reigned there from 1640 to 1530 B.C. She said a recently-discovered cuneiform tablet had led archaeologists to suspect there had been contact between the Babylonians and the Hyksos....

Kristallnacht also known as Night of Broken Glass was an anti-Jewish pogrom in Nazi Germany on November 9th-10th 1938. Kristallnacht was the day Hitler's final solution "came out of the closet" It is viewed by many historians as the beginning of the final solution, leading towards the genocide of the Holocaust In a coordinated attack on Jewish people and their property, 99 Jews were murdered and 25,000 to 30,000 were arrested and placed in concentration camps. 267 synagogues were destroyed and thousands of homes and businesses were ransacked. This was done by the Hitler Youth, Gestapo,and the SS. Kristallnacht also...

Herodotus wrote of a 50,000-man strong army that set out on foot into the Egyptian desert in 525 B.C. and was never heard from again ... until today.A pair of Italian archaeologists have uncovered bronze weapons, a silver bracelet, an earring and hundreds of human bones in the vast desolate wilderness of the Sahara desert. Twin brothers Angelo and Alfredo Castiglioni are hopeful that they've finally found the lost army of Persian King Cambyses II. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Cambyses II and his armied were buried by a cataclysmic sandstorm in 525 B.C. He wrote, "a wind...

>Nouri Obeyd Kathem (left), an archaeologist with the Iraqi Ministry of Antiquities and Tourism, explains the Sobbar Abu Habba site to Maj. Charles Morrison (center) and Capt. Ross Boyce with the 120th Combined Arms Battalion, Nov. 4. Photo by Sgt. Jon Soles, Multi-National Division – Baghdad. BAGHDAD — What may look like large, weathered mounds of dirt on rural farmland near Mahmudiyah are actually artifact-filled ruins of an ancient civilization. Soldiers of the North Carolina National Guard's 120th Combined Arms Battalion, 30th Heavy Brigade Combat Team here surveyed the sites recently with officials from the Government of Iraq's Ministry of...

Nancy Pelosi's Democrats operated under a moral and ideological compul sion to pass ObamaCare -- consequences be damned. The late conservative columnist Robert Novak liked to say that God had put Republicans on the Earth to cut taxes. Democrats believe they were put on Earth to nationalize health care. It doesn't matter if the legislation to do so is unpopular; if it is fiscally unsustainable and will increase insurance premiums; if it can only pass on a party-line vote, in contrast to other major pieces of social legislation like Social Security and Medicare.

Finally, Gen. Casimir Pulaski became an American, 230 years after the Polish nobleman died in Georgia fighting for what became the United States. President Barack Obama signed a joint resolution today of the Senate and the House of Representatives that made Pulaski an honorary citizen. Pulaski's contribution to the Americans' effort to leave the British Empire began with a flourish. He wrote a letter to Gen. George Washington, the Revolution's leader, with the declaration: "I came here, where freedom is being defended, to serve it, and to live or die for it." Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich, whose home city of...

There were, once upon a time, usury laws that generally held any interest rate greater than 10% was illegal. The Federal Reserve under Paul Volcker believed that interest rates needed to be raised to insane levels to stop the runaway inflation, which was the first stone that hit the water sending the shock waves that we are having to pay for today. Once the usury laws were altered so the Fed could fight inflation, it set in motion the doubling of household debt, not to mention the national debt. At 8%, the principle is doubled through interest in less than...

The children of the Nazi party began as a shining hope for the future, but by the end of the war they became reserve soldiers as the Germans faced military defeat. That descent from twisted idealism to cynicism and eventually disillusionment is traced in “Tempted, Misled, Slaughtered: The Short Life of Hitler Youth Paul B.,” an exhibit at the American Jewish Museum of the Jewish Community Center in Squirrel Hill. The exhibit, on display in the Kaufmann Building through Dec. 31, is presented with the Holocaust Center of the United Jewish Federation of Pittsburgh — part of a busy schedule...

Oct. 25, 2009 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: In 1942, it came down to one Marine It's hard to envision -- or, for the dwindling few, to remember -- what the world looked like on Oct. 26, 1942, when a few thousand U.S. Marines stood essentially stranded on the God-forsaken jungle island of Guadalcanal, placed like a speed bump at the end of the long blue-water slot between New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago, the most likely route for the Japanese Navy to take if they hoped to reach Australia.On Guadalcanal, the Marines struggled to complete an airfield....

McNoughton's response to liberal criticisms of "One Nation Under God." Incredible painting. As you move your cursor over the various images, a brief description is revealed on the side panel.

... The Great Depression was caused by misguided government policies adopted to avoid the "unsatisfactory conditions" signaled by the crash. The run-of-the-mill recession that ought to have followed the crash was magnified by the policies of the federal government during the administration of Herbert Hoover. In a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research published last August, Lee E. Ohanian examines a continuing mistake during the Hoover administration that helped transform difficulty into calamity. An economics professor at UCLA, Ohanian has written numerous papers on the Depression. In one earlier paper, he pinned the persistence of high unemployment on...

GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) – Scuba divers are exploring the depths of a volcanic lake in Guatemala to find clues about an ancient sacred island where Mayan pilgrims flocked to worship before it was submerged by rising waters. Samabaj, the first underwater archaeological ruins excavated in Guatemala, were discovered accidentally 12 years ago by a diver exploring picturesque Lake Atitlan, ringed by Mayan villages and popular with foreign tourists. "No one believed me, even when I told them all about it. They just said 'he's mad'," said Roberto Samayoa, a businessman and recreational diver who grew up near the lake where...

Gen. Stanley McChrystal will soon hear word on 40,000 reinforcements for Afghanistan...how have his predecessors fared? When they've asked for more troops, have they gotten them?...has fulfilling their requests made a difference? A look back: Revolutionary War Washington called on the Continental Congress to beef up his army. But it had to rely on the states, which raised far fewer than the 88 battalions promised. War of 1812 Generals were hesitant to attack the British in Canada without an influx of troops. More were OK'd, but logistics prevented ambitious operations, leading to a draw. Mexican-American War Gen. Zachary Taylor had...

Credit: Froese et al. 2009. The Klondike region of the Canadian Arctic isn't often thought of as an oasis for life. Today, the area is best known for its vast frozen wilderness, its goldfields, and as the namesake of a popular chocolate-coated ice cream treat. However, new research shows that the Klondike goldfields of Canada's Yukon Territory hold key records of a past environment that was much different than the harsh climate experienced by today's explorers, ice truckers and miners. The Klondike is part of a wider geographic area dubbed "Beringia," which includes parts of Siberia, Alaska and the Canadian...

Ok this was just funny enough to pass along. The Source of STFU. Southern Tenant Farmers Union. No seriously! In 1934 the biracial organization started up in response to the New Deal and the farm subsidies that had the effect of encouraging medium and large land owners to take a good bit of their land out of farming to get the subsidy. That had the effect of throwing about 200,000 black families off the land who were tenants and sharecroppers. It forced thousands of Black share Croppers and white small holders to drift to the cities. The STFU, was not...

General McChrystal has staked his entire reputation, not to mention the lives of our men and women in the field, on a counter insurgency strategy that almost exclusively focuses on population protection. His statement that 'success would be defined by the Afghans' harkens back to the Malayan Emergency and General Templer's contention that 'the answer lies not in pouring more troops into the jungle, but in the hearts and minds of the people'. The problem is, the insurgents in Malaya were different than the Afghan insurgency. Theirs was a political ideology. The 'insurgents' in Afghanistan are hardly an alienated element...

Nothing on the copyrighted website can be clipped to display here. It came to me not as an advertisement, but as an uplifting message. It makes a valid statement about our history and society.

The original makers of Côtes-du-Rhône are said to have descended from Greek explorers who settled in southern France about 2500 years ago... The study, by Prof Paul Cartledge, suggested the world's biggest wine industry might never have developed had it not been for a "band of pioneering Greek explorers" who settled in southern France around 600 BC. His study appears to dispel the theory that it was the Romans who were responsible for bringing viticulture to France. The study found that the Greeks founded Massalia, now known as Marseilles, which they then turned into a bustling trading site, where local...

Modern man and Neanderthals had sex across the species barrier, according to leading geneticist Professor Svante Paabo.Professor Paabo, who is director of genetics at the renowned Max Planck Institution for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, made the claim at a conference in the Cold Springs Laboratory in New York. But Prof Paabo said he was unclear if the couplings had led to children, of if they were capable of producing offspring. "What I'm really interested in is, did we have children back then and did those children contribute to our variation today?" he said in an article in The Sunday Times....