I think we can argue about whether or not a cross as a war memorial on public land is appropriate or constitutional – an issue which the Supreme Court is wrestling with right now. But I don’t see how anyone except for individuals or groups with an active hatred of Christianity can object to this one that is causing a dispute in a different part of California.

Before Monterey replaces the Portol -Crespi cross on Del Monte Beach, it wants to raise a war chest to defend the city's action against possible lawsuits — a move an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer calls "a very bizarre decision."

After holding a public hearing on the cross issue Tuesday night, the council came out of closed session saying its members were unanimous in wanting the cross replaced. The council said it marks the historic site where explorer Don Gaspar de Portol and Father Juan Crespi raised a wooden cross in December 1769 as a signal to the supply ship San Jose, expected to arrive from Mexico.

The newer cross, erected on the dunes between Roberts Lake and the beach in December 1969, was set there to mark the bicentennial of that event. Sometime during the night of Sept. 18, vandals sawed the cross off at its base and left it lying in the sand.

The council motion seems to hedge the city's bets in restoring it. It states: "The City Council does not condone vandalism. Because of the historical significance of the cross, it is the City Council's desire to restore the cross. To that end, once a legal defense fund is established by the community and $50,000 is raised, we will proceed with the restoration of the cross."

Got that, folks? This cross was placed on the site for one very simple reason – to the early exploration of the area by Spanish explorers who erected a cross on the site. This would seem to be, from a First Amendment perspective, a no-brainer. There is nothing religious about this cross – it is unquestionably the recreation of a historical event, which makes its erection a bona fide secular act.

But that isn’t good enough for the ACLU cretins who want to keep the cross from going back up. Seems to me that they simply wish to expunge the symbol from public land even when it serves a valid secular purpose – and that they probably won’t be happy until they have banned the letter “t” and the plus sign from all public facilities.

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One of the most troubling questions arising from the Holocaust is that of why the Jews did not resist more. That is not intended as an attempt to blame the victim, but more a desire to understand how so many people could fail to act in an effort to save their own lives and those of their children in the face of so great an evil.

But it is to be eternally remembered that some Jews did stand and fight – in particular the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto. And last week the world lost the last surviving leader of that heroic uprising against the murderous Nazi thugs.

Marek Edelman, who died on October 2, probably aged 90, was the last surviving leader of the armed Jewish revolt against the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto; having commanded the heroic but doomed struggle in April 1943 he was one of a tiny number of fighters to escape with his life, eventually taking part in the equally ill-fated citywide Uprising the following year.

Edelman was just 20 when the Nazis invaded Warsaw. By November 1940 the invading army had cut off his district from the rest of the city with walls and wire. As the anti-Semitic directives of the occupation were put into force, hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews were forced into the ghetto, inflating its population to almost half a million.

Conditions became intolerable and in the course of 1941 the ghetto population was decimated by disease and malnutrition. Early the following year however, with Hitler's decision to implement the Endlösung, or final solution to "the Jewish question", plans were put in place to liquidate the ghetto and its remaining occupants entirely.

From July 1942, Jews were herded through the ghetto to an umschlagplatz (or departure point), a square at its southern end, and on to trains 6,000 at a time. From there, the destinations were death camps. Two months after the ghetto clearance had begun, more than 300,000 Jews had been transported to the gas chambers. But even as Jews were encouraged on to the trains to Treblinka with promises of better conditions at their destination, Edelman and a small band of others were laying down plans for armed resistance.

And resist they did, fighting for three heroic weeks in 1943 against the Nazis who came to exterminate them Some escaped, while those who remained behind died in a last ditch resistance against the great evil of the age.

And Edelman provided a perspective on the question raised at the beginning of the post that to me is quite profound.

After the war, the 20 days of fighting in the ghetto were sometimes described as a rare example of violent Jewish resistance to the horrors inflicted on them by the Nazis. But Edelman always refused to make any distinction of character between those in the ghetto who fought and those who boarded the trains to the camps. Both groups, he said, were simply dealing with an inevitable death in the best way they could.

"We knew perfectly well that we had no chance of winning," he recalled. "We fought simply not to allow the Germans alone to pick the time and place of our deaths. We knew we were going to die. Just like all the others who were sent to Treblinka." Indeed, Edelman added, far from going passively, those who went steadfastly to Treblinika had shown the ultimate courage. "Their death was far more heroic. We didn't know when we would take a bullet. They had to deal with certain death, stripped naked in a gas chamber or standing at the edge of a mass grave waiting for a bullet in the back of the head. It is an awesome thing, when one is going so quietly to one's death. It was easier to die fighting than in a gas chamber."

It is a perspective that I had never considered before reading this brave man’s obituary. I do not know that I agree with it. Still, I honor it as I honor the man who so many years ago led the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – and I am sure that his entry into the presence of God was one which saw him greatly honored as well.

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Once again, we have an amazing anthropological find out of Ethiopia that sheds light – and raises questions – about the evolution of our species and our primate cousins.

After 15 years of rumors, researchers in the U.S. and Ethiopia on Thursday made public fossils from a 4.4-million-year-old human forebearer they say reveals that our earliest ancestors were more modern than scholars assumed and deepens the evolutionary gulf separating humankind from today's apes and chimpanzees.
The highlight of the extensive fossil trove is a female skeleton a million years older than the iconic bones of Lucy, the primitive female figure that has long symbolized humankind's beginnings.
After 15 years of rumors, researchers in the U.S. and Ethiopia on Thursday made public fossils from a 4.4-million-year-old human forebearer they say reveals that our earliest ancestors were more modern than scholars assumed and deepens the evolutionary gulf separating humankind from today's apes and chimpanzees.
The highlight of the extensive fossil trove is a female skeleton a million years older than the iconic bones of Lucy, the primitive female figure that has long symbolized humankind's beginnings.

The potentially earthshaking aspect of this discovery is that anthropologists may have had it all wrong in thinking that humans evolved away from our earliest prehuman ancestors while chimps, monkeys and apes remain closer to our common ancestors. It appears that we may be more faithful to that common ancestor and the primates are the ones that spun of on an evolutionary tangent. I can’t wait to learn more – because I’ll be teaching this in my classes in the future.

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The Egg, from the musical 1776.

Enjoy this Fourth of July.

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As the greatest generation continues its march to eternity.

A Navajo Code Talker who was part of the original group recruited to develop what became an unbreakable code that confounded the Japanese during World War II has died.

John Brown Jr. died early Wednesday morning at his home in Crystal, N.M., according to his son, Frank Brown. He was 88.

Several hundred Navajos served as Code Talkers during the war, but a group of 29 that included Brown developed the code based on their native language. Their role in the war wasn't declassified until 1968.

Brown received the Congressional Gold Medal in 2001 along with other members of the original Code Talkers. Less than a handful are still alive.

In an acceptance speech on behalf of the Code Talkers, Brown said he was proud that the Navajo language bestowed on them as a Holy People was used to save American lives and help defeat U.S. enemies.

As Code Talkers and Marines, he said they did their part to protect freedom and Democracy for the American people.

"It is my hope that our young people will carry on this honorable tradition as long as the grass shall grow and the rivers flow," Brown said, according to a CNN transcript.

On December 7, 1941 Brown was playing basketball when he heard word of Pearl harbor. He quickly signed up after being approached by a Marine recruiter. What happened next is nothing less than amazing.

Brown signed up and was sent to Camp Pendleton, intent on defending the United States against the Japanese. After he arrived for training, his all-Navajo platoon was told they were there for a special mission — to devise a secret code in their native language.

Navajo Code Talkers used their language to transmit military messages on enemy tactics, Japanese troop movements and other battlefield information in a code the Japanese never broke. Code Talkers took part in every assault the Marines conducted in the Pacific from 1942 to 1945, according to the Naval Historical Center in Washington.

After the war, the Code Talkers were told to keep their work a secret.

And they did – so secret that it was the late 1960s before their story was told to the public.

The Navajo nation has ordered its flags to be flown at half-staff in honor of John Brown, Jr. It is a fitting tribute. He was a man who showed that great things can be accomplished by ordinary men doing what is needed when confronted by extraordinary challenges. May he rest now, after what was a lifetime of service to this country and to his people, gone from among us but honored still.

And let us never forget what he and his fellow Code Talkers did.

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Could be – if this theory is true.

n Van Gogh's Ear: Paul Gauguin and the Pact of Silence, Hans Kaufmann and Rita Wildegans claim it was the sword attack, not Van Gogh's madness, that led him to commit suicide two years later.
The prevailing theory is that the Dutchman, who painted Sunflowers and the Potato Eaters, almost bled to death after slashing his own ear with a razor in a fit of lunacy on the night of December 23, 1888.
He is said to have wrapped it in cloth and handed it to a prostitute in a nearby brothel.
However, the new work from experts in Hamburg offers a very different version.
Gauguin, an excellent fencer, was planning to leave Van Gogh's "Yellow House" in Arles, southwestern France, after an unhappy stay.
He had walked out of the house with his baggage and his trusty épée in hand, but was followed by the troubled Van Gogh, who had earlier thrown a glass at him.
As the pair approached a bordello, their row intensified, and Gauguin cut off Van Gogh's left earlobe with his sword – either in anger or self-defence.
He then threw the weapon in the Rhône. Van Gogh delivered the ear to the prostitute and staggered home, where police discovered him the following day, the new account claims.

Of course, the only thing lacking with this theory is something called “evidence” – aside from a couple of obscure references to silence and the timing of the ear being cut off, there is nothing there. But it does go to show how some academics can make a career out of the most absurd of claims – and get published, too!

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That is the latest word from Egypt.

Cleopatra and Mark Antony were immortalised as two of historyÂ’s greatest lovers, but their final resting place has always been a mystery. Now archaeologists in Egypt are about to start excavating a site that they believe could conceal their tombs.
Zahi Hawass, director of EgyptÂ’s Superior Council for Antiquities, said yesterday that there was evidence to suggest that Cleopatra and Mark Antony were buried together in the complex tunnel system underlying the Tabusiris Magna temple, 17 miles from the city of Alexandria.
The dig, which begins next week, could reveal answers to the many myths surrounding the pair — including speculation about the Queen’s reputed beauty and the couple’s suicide. Teams from Egypt and the Dominican Republic will begin excavating three sites along the tunnels in the hope that one of the deep shafts will lead to a burial chamber. The sites were identified by a radar scan.

Now let’s acknowledge something here – Hawass is certainly a sensationalist who is great at promoting wild flights of fancy along with legitimate Egyptology. But the reality is that such announcements have accompanied many significant discoveries. Let’s wait and see if the coming weeks and months bring another announcement – this one telling us that the tomb of two of the world’s most famous lovers has been found.

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The Knights Templar have always been a fascinating subject for me. Among the reasons for that fascination has been the speculation that the Shroud of Turin – believed by many to be the burial shroud of Christ – was once in their possession, and may even have been the idol that the Knights were accused of venerating when the order was suppressed. I don’t know whether or not that story is true, but we now know that the Shroud was once in the possession of the Templars.

Medieval knights hid and secretly venerated The Holy Shroud of Turin for more than 100 years after the Crusades, the Vatican said yesterday in an announcement that appeared to solve the mystery of the relicÂ’s missing years.
The Knights Templar, an order which was suppressed and disbanded for alleged heresy, took care of the linen cloth, which bears the image of a man with a beard, long hair and the wounds of crucifixion, according to Vatican researchers.
The Shroud, which is kept in the royal chapel of Turin Cathedral, has long been revered as the shroud in which Jesus was buried, although the image only appeared clearly in 1898 when a photographer developed a negative.
Barbara Frale, a researcher in the Vatican Secret Archives, said the Shroud had disappeared in the sack of Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, and did not surface again until the middle of the fourteenth century. Writing in L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, Dr Frale said its fate in those years had always puzzled historians.
However her study of the trial of the Knights Templar had brought to light a document in which Arnaut Sabbatier, a young Frenchman who entered the order in 1287, testified that as part of his initiation he was taken to “a secret place to which only the brothers of the Temple had access”. There he was shown “a long linen cloth on which was impressed the figure of a man” and instructed to venerate the image by kissing its feet three times.

We now can date the Shroud back to the 1200s, significantly before the date that radiocarbon testing had placed it. And we now know that some of what the Templars were accused of was clearly unjust. So what we have here is a mystery and a history that trumps any novel – take that, Dan Brown!

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It is hard to decide which is the case with JapanÂ’s Tsutomu Yamaguchi. After all, there canÂ’t be many folks who can claim to have survived not just one of the worldÂ’s two uses of an atomic bomb on a populated area, but both of them.

A 93-year-old Japanese man has become the first person certified as a survivor of both U.S. atomic bombings at the end of World War II, officials said Tuesday.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi had already been a certified "hibakusha," or radiation survivor, of the Aug. 9, 1945, atomic bombing in Nagasaki, but has now been confirmed as surviving the attack on Hiroshima three days earlier as well, city officials said.

Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip on Aug. 6, 1945, when a U.S. B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on the city. He suffered serious burns to his upper body and spent the night in the city. He then returned to his hometown of Nagasaki just in time for the second attack, city officials said.

Like I ask above, is Yamaguchi a guy who can claim to have been doubly lucky in having survived both bombs? Or is he doubly unlucky for having been at the site of both? It is one of those questions to ponder. WouldnÂ’t it be fascinating, though, to be able to meet him and talk to him about those experiences?

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IÂ’m not one for re-writing history. There is, however, a question of how to appropriately present history in the context of a display about an event or time period. Decisions must be made about what to include. Sometimes, that means excluding things that may offend unless they can be further explained or contextualized. Such is the case here.

A VA hospital director who upset veterans by removing a framed newspaper with the headline "Japs Surrender" said last week that he had permanently replaced it with the next dayÂ’s edition bearing the headline "Peace!"

The The Indianapolis TimesÂ’ Aug. 14, 1945, front page has been replaced with the next day's edition featuring the "Peace!" headline because it better reflects what soldiers who served in World War II were fighting for, said Tom Mattice, director of Roudebush Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

He said the new display was also not offensive to any particular group of veterans.

"What we really want to do is honor all of the veterans who come through our medical center to make sure that they feel respected and to make sure that their service is just as honored as everybody else who has served this country," Mattice said.

He said he consulted the VA's National Center for Ethics for advice and he said they supported his decision to permanently remove the initial newspaper display.

Mattice removed the "Japs Surrender" headline earlier this year after receiving a complaint from an employee offended by the term "Japs," a common slur during World War II.

If this were a larger display on WWII, I’d disagree with the decision to remove the newspaper. After all, terms like “Jap” and “Kraut” were a part of the ethos that pervaded the US as we fought in that war. The demonization of our enemies should and ought to be dealt with in such a display. But here it appears to be a display of newspapers, plucked free of that greater context. As such, the choice of the “Peace!” headline over the one with an ethnic slur is preferable.

At the same time, I don’t condemn the vets who wanted the other headline to remain. They want to make sure that our nation’s history is not whitewashed. That isn’t an evil motive – it is an expression of a legitimate desire to remember that earlier era and the sacrifices that began at Pearl Harbor and continued throughout the War in the Pacific. But in this situation, they are fighting a battle that they ought to lose, because a newspaper hung in a hallway does not a museum exhibit make. And ultimately, the peace that comes with victory was exactly what the heroes who fought in that war – and in every war – sought with every ounce of their strength.

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Looks like there's been another large tomb discovered at the necropolis of Saqqara.

A storehouse of 30 Egyptians mummies has been unearthed inside a 2,600-year-old tomb, in a new round of excavations at the vast necropolis of Saqqara outside Cairo, archeologists said Monday.

The tomb was located at the bottom of a 36 foot (11-meter) deep shaft, announced Egypt's top archaeologist Zahi Hawass and eight of the mummies were in sarcophagi, while the rest had been placed in niches along the wall.

Hawass described the discovery as a "storeroom for mummies," dating to 640 B.C. and the 26th Dynasty, which was Egypt's last independent kingdom before it were overthrown by a succession of foreign conquerors beginning with the Persians.

The tomb was discovered at an even more ancient site dating back to 4,300-year-old 6th Dynasty.

Most of the mummies are poorly preserved and archeologists have yet to determine their identity or why so many are in a single room. One of the sarcophagi is made of wood and bears the name Badi N Huri, but no title.

"This one might have been an important figure, but I can't tell because there was no title," Hawass' assistant Abdel Hakim Karar told The Associated Press.

He added that the rest of the sarcophagi — including four which are tightly sealed — have yet to be opened yet.

This find is unusual, given that the use of such rocky niches were common in much earlier periods, rather than in late periods like the 26th Dynasty. It is unclear which sarcophagus is pictured above.

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AinÂ’t it great what computer technology can do?

Using age progression software to regress a portrait of our nationÂ’s first First Lady, historians have come up with a very different image of the dowdy old matron we see depicted in the history books.

Examination of records from her lifetime reveal an intelligent, competent, and passionate woman who would certainly have been a proper match for the studly young man we know George Washington to have been. It certainly makes one wonder if there was the sort of lively intellectual repartee between these two that we know existed between John and Abigail Adams – a couple who we also know had a smoldering passion for each other as well.

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Everybody knows that John Wilkes Booth murdered Abraham Lincoln. But studies of an old letter have now shown that his father, well-known Shakespearean actor Junius Brutus Booth, had written a letter threatening to assassinate President Andrew Jackson years before!

Dismissed for 175 years as a fake, a letter threatening the assassination of President Andrew Jackson has been found to be authentic. And, says the director of the Andrew Jackson Papers Project at the University of Tennessee, the writer was none other than Junius Brutus Booth, father of Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth.

Dan Feller and his staff solved the mystery of the July 4, 1835, letter to Jackson. The story of their investigation will be featured this summer on PBS' "History Detectives."

The letter, which addressed Old Hickory as "You damn'd old Scoundrel," demanded that Jackson pardon two prisoners named De Ruiz and De Soto who had been sentenced to death for piracy in a high-profile trial of the day.

Interestingly enough, no one has ever taken the letter seriously. Even Jackson's staff filed the letter as an anonymous threat, assuming that such a well-known figure as the elder Booth would not have written it. That shows you how differently matters of presidential security were taken in the early days of the republic.

Given that Jackson had chased down and subdued a would-be assassin earlier that year, I'd argue that an attempt to slit his throat in his sleep would not have been a wise move from the standpoint of personal safety. But the letter does go to show that the instability of the son may well have been a hereditary family trait.

H/T Protein Wisdom

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Yeah, the Pyramid isnÂ’t in great shape, the tomb was looted and the mummy damanged. But still, a neat bit of Egyptology in my book.

Egyptologists have discovered the remains of a mummy thought to belong to a queen who ruled 4,300 years ago, Egypt's antiquities chief has said.

The body of Queen Seshestet was found in a recently-discovered pyramid in Saqqara, Zahi Hawass announced.

She was mother of King Teti, founder of the Sixth Dynasty of pharaonic Egypt. Her name was not found but "all the signs indicate that she is Seshestet".

Such old royal mummies are rare. Most date from dynasties after 1800 BC.
Historians believe Queen Seshestet ruled Egypt for 11 years - making her one a small number of women pharaohs.

Let’s be honest – usually the only female pharaoh we hear about is Hatshepsut. That there were actually eleven of them is news to me – and the fact that one was so early is even more surprising. Indeed, a little research showed ruling queens as early as the First Dynasty.

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Here’s a neat discovery for fans of the movie Gladiator – the tomb of the man whose life partially inspired the main character of the movie.

The 1,800-year-old stone mausoleum on the banks of the River Tiber was hailed by experts as an "extraordinary discovery" and one of the most important Roman finds for decades.

It was built to contain the remains of Marcus Nonius Macrinus, a proconsul and a favourite of Marcus Aurelius, who ruled as emperor from 161 AD to his death in 180 AD.

Macrinus was born in Brescia, in northern Italy, and won victories leading Roman legions into battle.

He became a confidant of Emperor Aurelius, being appointed a proconsul in Asia Minor and describing himself as "chosen out of the closest friends".

Elements of his life were incorporated into Maximus Decimus Meridius, the fictional character for which Crowe won an Oscar in the 2000 film Gladiator, directed by Ridley Scott.

In other words, Macrinus was a rather extraordinary man who ascended to the very heights of Roman government. As such, his tomb is rather extraordinary.

The intricately carved marble tomb, complete with a stone inscription identifying it as that of Macrinus, was found near the Via Flaminia, one of the arterial roads which led in and out of ancient Rome.

The jumble of broken columns, friezes and stone blocks was discovered during the demolition of a warehouse, along with remarkably intact parts of the original Roman road.

* * *

Over the centuries parts of the tomb crumbled into the Tiber but enough has been recovered during months of painstaking excavation work that experts are discussing the possibility of reconstructing it as the focus of an archeological park.

I’ve always wanted to visit the Eternal City – and if I ever do, this sounds like one more site to add to my itinerary.

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I remember being eleven-years-old when the news broke that the Russians had expelled a dissident writer from their country. I didn't understand the importance of this man at the time, but I later recognized his greatness -- and the importance of his shedding light on the evil of Communism.

Today that man, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, has departed this earthly life.

The Soviet dissident writer and Nobel literature prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn has died aged 89, according to the Interfax news agency.

The agency said he died of a stroke, although his son Stepan Solzhenitsyn said his father died of heart failure. The author had suffered from ill heath, including high blood pressure, in recent years.

Solzhenitsyn served with the Red Army in the Second World War but became one of the most prominent dissidents of the Soviet era, enduring labour camps, cancer and persecution under the Soviet regime.

His experience of the network of labour camps was vividly described in his work One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

His key works, including "The First Circle" and "Cancer Ward" brought him world admiration and the 1970 Nobel Literature prize.

He was stripped of his citizenship and sent into exile in 1974 after the publication of "The Gulag Archipelago", his monumental history of the Soviet police state. Solzhenitsyn then moved to the United States, returning to post-Soviet Russia as a hero in 1994.

His diagnosis for the root cause of the evil that afflicted his homeland was clear and unapologetic.

"If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible that main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men had forgotten God; that is why all this has happened.'"

My words are not sufficient to praise one whose words and message were so important to the eventual downfall of communism, and whose suffering for speaking out against evil was a source of inspiration to millions. Let it suffice to say that he was among the giants of the twentieth century.

May Alexander Solzhenitsyn find himself this night in the arms of the Savior who he served faithfully -- and may his loved ones be comforted with the knowledge that this is so.

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I remember sitting and watching this as it happened, live.

(H/T Ace)

Hard to believe it has been thirty-nine years -- and that it has been three-and-a-half decades since man last walked on the moon.

And that our space program has been such a mess in the decades since that I'll be approaching sixty before Americans again set foot on Earth's closest neighbor. I doubt I'm alone in considering that to be shameful.

On the other hand, I am blessed to have a number of friends -- honest-to-God rocket scientists -- who work over at Johnson Space Center. Among other things, one of them is working on Project Constellation, hoping to see Americans back on the moon before his daughters finish college. It is history in the making, made by ordinary men and women doing extraordinary things.

And I'm also blessed to be friends with a number of old NASA hands who tell some of the funniest "inside stories" about the glory days. One couple that I love dearly told me stories about a group of NASA wives making dinners for the families of the Apollo crews during the missions -- and how thirty-nine years ago their kids made a killing selling lemonade to the reporters covering the Armstrong home just around the corner, since it was a typical sweltering July here in Houston. It's the sort of stuff that doesn't make it into the history books.

So take a moment to remember that moment when mankind accomplished one of the greatest achievements of the twentieth century.

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Now I have mixed emotions about this investigation -- and let me explain why.

There is, of course, an outside chance that someone involved in committing this heinous at is still alive -- though at the very least, said individual would have to be in his/her late 70s. More than likely, none of the perpetrators are alive -- making continued investigation by law enforcement a futile gesture.

On the other hand, it is important from a historical standpoint to learn, if we can, who perpetrated this grievous act of hatred and violence at Moore's Ford Bridge.

State and federal investigators said Tuesday that they spent the past two days gathering evidence in the last documented mass lynching in the United States: a grisly slaying of four people that has remained unsolved for more than six decades.

In a written statement, the FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said they collected several items on a property in rural Walton County, Georgia, that were taken in for further investigation.

On July 25, 1946, two black sharecropper couples were shot hundreds of times and the unborn baby of one of the women cut out with a knife at the Moore's Ford Bridge. One of the men had been accused of stabbing a white man 11 days earlier and was bailed out of jail by a former Ku Klux Klan member and known bootlegger who drove him, his wife, her brother and his wife to the bridge.

The FBI statement said investigators were following up on information recently received in the case, one of several the agency has revived in an effort to close decades-old cases from the civil rights era and before.

"The FBI and GBI had gotten some information that we couldn't ignore with respect to this case," GBI spokesman John Bankhead said.

Let me say it rather bluntly -- unless there is credible evidence that one or more of the evil bastards that committed this crime is still walking the earth, this is a matter for historians and not the FBI. Yet reading between the lines, I can only assume that there must be some living individual who the authorities view as culpable for this heinous act -- or at least I hope there is, for otherwise we are witnessing a waste of law enforcement resources.

Also of note in the article is Rep. John Lewis' effort to create an FBI "Cold Case" division. That might not be a bad idea -- provided it is intended to look at cases in which there is a realistic chance of prosecution, not merely to investigate historical incidents in which the criminals have long since been dealt with by the judge of a higher court than any constituted under the US Constitution.

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Once upon a time, military tribunals were considered acceptable for some crimes.

On this day in 1865, a military tribunal convicted seven men and a woman involved in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Four of the eight were later hanged by the U.S. Army at the Washington Navy Yard.

On the other hand, today they are not considered to be good enough for jihadis captured in the field while violating the Geneva Convention's rules for combatants.

And remember -- these folks were all US citizens apprehended, held, tried and executed withing the continental United States.

Thanks for the reminder, Michael -- and I loved your book.

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I was blessed to come of age during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, one of the greatest men to occupy that Oval Office -- indeed, the greatest to occupy it during my lifetime.

Twenty-one years ago today, President Reagan gave one of the great speeches against tyranny and oppression. In it, he offered one of the great calls for freedom -- "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

I'd thought to post the speech in its entirety -- but as a student and teacher of history, this video so moved me that I decided to share it instead.

Two-and-a-half years later, the gates were open and the wall began to fall.

Let freedom ring.

More at Grand Old Partisan, Soccer Dad

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If this can be corroborated, it takes us all the way back to the first century, and therefore to those who were contemporaries of Peter and Paul.

Archaeologists in Jordan have discovered a cave underneath one of the world's oldest churches and say it may have been an even more ancient site of Christian worship. But outside experts expressed caution about the claim.

Archaeologist Abdel-Qader al-Housan, head of the Rihab Center for Archaeological Studies, said this week that the cave was unearthed in the northern Jordanian city of Rihab after three months of excavation and shows evidence of early Christian rituals.

The cave is under St. George's Church, which some believe was built in the year 230, though the date is widely disputed. That would make it one of the oldest churches in the world, along with one unearthed in the Jordanian southern port of Aqaba in 1998 and another in Israel discovered in 2005.

Al-Housan said there was evidence that the underground cave was used as a church by 70 disciples of Jesus in the first century after Christ's death, which would make it the oldest Christian site of worship in the world.

He described a circular worship area with stone seats separated from a living area that had a long tunnel leading to a source of water. He said the early Christians hid there from persecution.

A mosaic inscription on the floor of the later church of St. George above refers to "the 70 beloved by God and the divine" who founded the worship there.

There are those who doubt this find -- and I am not ready to support the claim myself. It is virtually inconceivable that the mosaics would date to the first century (the 70 likely would have been a group fleeing from either the persecution of early Christians described in Acts or the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD -- not individuals with the wealth and/or skills to create the mosaics), and so it is more likely that the inscription refers to a legend in the community about the historical use of the cave. Absent some more solid archaeological evidence, I think it is impossible to sustain the claim it makes as fact.

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Today, sixty-four years later, our troops are again in the field in another Great Crusade against another unholy enemy, an enemy no less opposed to the freedom that marks our nation and our civilization out from theirs than were the forces of totalitarianism which bathed Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific in blood. American troops again come not as conquerors, but seekers of liberty for the oppressed and security for a free world. May they be inspired by the example of the men who braved the fire in landing craft as they stormed the beaches of Normandy, and by those who parachuted behind enemy lines. And may the American people recover that sense of purpose that led our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents on the home front to support the efforts of those troops with prayer and sacrifice.

Other Remembrances At Done With Mirrors, Flopping Aces, Dave in Texas, Hot Air, Michelle Malkin

OPEN TRACKBACKING AT Outside the Beltway, A NEWT ONE- NATIONAL EMERGENCY, The Virtuous Republic, Rosemary's Thoughts, Shadowscope, Leaning Straight Up, Cao's Blog, Big Dog's Weblog, The Amboy Times, Democrat=Socialist, Conservative Cat, Allie is Wired, Nuke Gingrich, Woman Honor Thyself, McCain Blogs, The World According to Carl, Pirate's Cove, The Pink Flamingo, Gulf Coast Hurricane Tracker, , and Gone Hollywood, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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Forty years ago today, triumph was cut short by a bullet.

Bobby Kennedy, perhaps the most accomplished and competent of the Kennedy brothers, was laid down by a man who today can only be described as a Palestinian terrorist.

Let us not forget the day.

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This one is important to note -- especially in light of the upcoming Beijing Olympics. On this day in 1989, the oppressors of the people of the People's Republic of China crushed the voice of the people when they called for democratic reform in Red China.

Some still suffer for their heroism.

China is still holding about 130 activists from the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations, Human Rights Watch said, calling on the government to free them on the 19th anniversary of the crackdown that falls today.

China should honor its pledge to improve human rights by releasing the prisoners before the Beijing Olympics in August when the square will be used for functions, the New York-based group said.

China tightened security at Tiananmen Square, authorizing police to randomly search visitors, state-run Xinhua News Agency reported last month. ``Security around Tiananmen is very important and has great international influence,'' it cited Zhang Peili, an official at the municipal government law office, as saying at the time.

Chinese soldiers, backed by tanks, killed an estimated 2,000 pro-democracy activists in and around Tiananmen Square and in other Chinese cities on June 3-4, according to Human Rights Watch. The death toll included Chinese citizens who massed in Beijing streets to stop the army reaching the square, it said.

We must never forget the sacrifices of these heroic young people who stood up against one of the most oppressive regime of our times.

Soccer Dad supplies this video that documents the evil committed by the Red Chinese dictators in Tiananmen Square nineteen years ago.

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Congressman Alcee Hastings, whose major distinction is being one of only seven federal judges in the entire history of the United States to be impeached and removed from office for committing high crimes and misdemeanors, is boycotting the Democrat Convention over the decision of the DNC to give the delegates of Florida and Michigan only half a vote each, made this historically inaccurate statement.

At the beginning of our great countryÂ’s history my ancestors were counted as only 2/3 of a person....

Well, not exactly -- in reality it was 3/5 of a person, and only for purposes of representation in Congress.

Interestingly enough, I wrote about this very topic earlier this evening in response to one of my students in my college-level American Government class.

There is this popular notion that the Three-Fifths Compromise means that blacks were three-fifths of a human being. However, if you go back and read it in the Constitution, it deals with a very different issue -- should property be counted for purposes of representation and taxation.

The Northern delegates argued no -- that if slaves were chattel, then they should no more be counted for purposes of representation that cows, pigs, or chickens were. Their goal was to see to it that slave-owners, who acted in violation of the principles of liberty and equality by holding slaves, did not also do violence to the principle of self-government by gaining extra representation by counting those who would not EVER have a voice in government. In short, they were
operating on the principle that those who were entitled to neither liberty, equality, nor self-government under the laws of those states that recognized slavery (northern and southern -- slavery was legal in at least 10 of the 13 states at this time, though more prevalent in the South) should not be included in the total inhabitants of the state who would be represented in Congress.

The Southern delegates, on the other hand, took a pointedly different tack -- they were more than willing to count slaves as their equal in terms of being numerically represented in Congress, even as they denied them liberty, equality, and self-government.

It is really easy (and popular) to condemn the Three-Fifths Compromise today, with the benefit of 221 years of hindsight. After all, that extra representation that the slave-holding aristocracy of the South gained enabled the region's "peculiar institution" to continue for at least three decades beyond what it would have if the Northern delegates had prevailed -- and during that time the forces of slavocracy were able to foist the Missouri Compromise on the nation, along with the Kansas-Nebraska Act and various Fugitive Slave Laws, not to mention the infamous Gag Rule that for a decade forbade Congress to even consider the issues of abolition and emancipation by consigning citizen petitions on those subjects to oblivion without hearing in violation of the First Amendment right of the people to petition their government for a redress of grievances.

However, you got to the meat of the issue in your last sentence -- a majority of those who met in Philadelphia in 1787 recognized that the nation needed to replace the Articles of Confederation with something that created a more functional national government. And so they compromised on the issue, leaving it to future generations to deal with a question they could not.

Consider this, my friends -- without the Three-Fifths Compromise, there would have likely been no Constitution. Not only that, but very possibly the government of the Articles of Confederation would have collapsed within a few years, and with it the fledgling United States of America. for all that it was a compromise with evil (one for which this nation has paid dearly in every generation), are not we and the world better off for it having been made in order to preserve America as one nation?

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But is that all it was? And why did it become the astrological/astronomical observatory that it undeniably is? This discovery doesn't answer those questions.

New radiocarbon dates from human cremation burials among and around the brooding stones on Salisbury Plain in England indicate that the site was used as a cemetery from 3000 B.C. until after the monuments were erected around 2500 B.C., British archaeologists reported Thursday.

What appeared to be the head of a stone mace, a symbol of authority, was found in one grave, the archaeologists said, indicating that this was probably a cemetery for the ruling dynasty responsible for erecting Stonehenge.

“It’s now clear that burials were a major component of Stonehenge in all its main stages,” said Mike Parker Pearson, an archaeologist at the University of Sheffield in England.

In other words, we still have some serious questions that need to be answered -- but it is exciting to have one more bit of history to add into the mix.

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I'm not a fan of Pat Buchanan. I flip the channel or change the station when I hear his voice or see his face. And I certainly don't read his column unless someone directs me to it because of specific content.

This is one of those cases -- and ought to be sufficient grounds for my fellow conservatives to excommunicate him from the movement.

"As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared, 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement. ..."

Again, Bush has made a hash of history.

Appeasement is the name given to what Neville Chamberlain did at Munich in September 1938. Rather than fight Germany in another great war -- to keep 3.5 million Germans under a Czech rule they despised -- he agreed to their peaceful transfer to German rule. With these Germans went the lands their ancestors had lived upon for centuries, German Bohemia, or the Sudetenland.

Chamberlain's negotiated deal with Hitler averted a European war -- at the expense of the Czech nation. That was appeasement.

German tanks, however, did not roll into Poland until a year later, Sept. 1, 1939. Why did the tanks roll? Because Poland refused to negotiate over Danzig, a Baltic port of 350,000 that was 95 percent German and had been taken from Germany at the Paris peace conference of 1919, in violation of Wilson's 14 Points and his principle of self-determination.

Hitler had not wanted war with Poland. He had wanted an alliance with Poland in his anti-Comintern pact against Joseph Stalin.

But the Poles refused to negotiate. Why? Because they were a proud, defiant, heroic people and because Neville Chamberlain had insanely given an unsolicited war guarantee to Poland. If Hitler invaded, Chamberlain told the Poles, Britain would declare war on Germany.

From March to August 1939, Hitler tried to negotiate Danzig. But the Poles, confident in their British war guarantee, refused. So, Hitler cut his deal with Stalin, and the two invaded and divided Poland.

The cost of the war that came of a refusal to negotiate Danzig was millions of Polish dead, the Katyn massacre, Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz, the annihilation of the Home Army in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, and 50 years of Nazi and Stalinist occupation, barbarism and terror.

Pat Buchanan is clearly more than an idiot in this column -- he is one who is deluded in his thinking. It is quite clear from Mein Kampf and Nazi campaign rhetoric that Hitler had a plan for expansion that went well-beyond the "recovery" of land that was inhabited by ethnic Germans. It was undeniable that the evils of the Final Solution have their roots not in the intransigence of Poland in the face of militaristic threats by Germany, but in a deeper seated hatred of the Jews. After all, the Nuremberg laws and other restrictions of Jews predated the invasion of Poland by years, and are clearly presaged in Hitler's earlier writing. For that matter, the spring of 1939 had seen the blitzkrieg into parts of Czechoslovakia which Hitler had promised to leave unmolested only a few months before. One has to at a minimum be ignorant of the historical record to make the claims that Buchanan does in his column.

But we all know that Buchanan is not ignorant of History.

No, for Buchanan to praise the appeasement of Hitler and condemn those who stood up to him is clearly based in something else -- either an antipathy to the Jews (a charge we've heard against him before) or an anti-Communism run so deep that even Hitler can be rehabilitated in the name of that cause. Indeed, i find myself looking for a proposal that the British and French would have done better to ally with Hitler to attack Stalin in 1938 & 1939, despite the fact that the most acute threat to European security was the Nazi regime and not the Red Menace.

So let me make it clear -- Pat Buchanan has clearly moved beyond the pale of conservatism, into that shadowy realm of right-wing authoritarianism which circles around to meet its left-wing siblings of socialism, communism, and fascism. He has therefore earned a place of shame with Bruce Ramsey of the Seattle Times

H/T Gateway Pundit, One Jerusalem, Below the Beltway, Soccer Dad

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The Seattle Times should have fired Bruce Ramsey on Friday for whitewashing Hitler's evil in order to attack our president and give support to Barack Obama. But now his stunning dishonesty is exposed for the world to see, and that should be grounds for his dismissal.

Here's what appeared on Friday.

What Hitler was demanding was not unreasonable. He wanted the German-speaking areas of Europe under German authority. He had just annexed Austria, which was German-speaking, without bloodshed. There were two more small pieces of Germanic territory: the free city of Danzig and the Sudetenland, a border area of what is now the Czech Republic.

We live in an era when you do not change national borders for these sorts of reasons. But in 1938 it was different. Germany’s eastern and western borders had been redrawn 19 years before—and not to its benefit. In the democracies there was some sense of guilt with how Germany had been treated after World War I. Certainly there was a memory of the “Great War.” In 2008, we have entirely forgotten World War I, and how utterly unlike any conception of “The Good War” it was. When the British let Hitler have a slice of Czechoslovakia, they were following their historical wisdom: avoid war. War produces results far more horrible than you expected. War is a bad investment. It is not glorious. Don’t give anyone an excuse to start one.

In a few months, in early 1939, Hitler ordered the invasion of what is now the Czech Republic—that is, territory that was not German. Then it was obvious that a deal with him was worthless. And so when Bush recalls the unnamed senator who, in September 1939, lamented that he had not been able to talk to Hitler, he hits an easy target. But the moment of September 1939 is nothing like today.

And here's what appears today in the same space.

The narrative we're given about Munich is entirely in hindsight. We know what kind of man Hitler was, and that he started World War II in Europe. But in 1938 people knew a lot less. What Hitler was demanding at Munich was not unreasonable as a national claim (though he was making it in a last-minute, unreasonable way.) Germany's claim was that the areas of Europe that spoke German and thought of themselves as German be under German authority. In September 1938 the principal remaining area was the Sudetenland.

So the British and French let him have it. Their thought was: "Now you have your Greater Germany." They didn't want a war. They were not superpowers like the United States is now. They remembered the 1914-1918 war and how they almost lost it.

In a few months, in early 1939, Hitler ordered the invasion of what is now the Czech Republic—that is, territory that was not German. Then it was obvious that a deal with him was worthless--and the British and French did not appease Hitler any more. Thus the lesson of Munich: don't appease Hitlers.

But who else is a Hitler? If you paste that label on somebody it means they are cast out. You can't talk to them any more. And it has gotten pasted on quite a few national leaders over the years: Milosevic, Hussein, Ahmadinejad, et. al. In particular, to apply that label to the elected leaders of the Palestinians is to say that you aren't going to listen to their claims to a homeland. I think they do have a claim. So do the Israelis. In order to get anywhere, each side has to listen to the other. To continually bring up Hitler, the Nazis, the Munich Conference and “appeasement,” is to try to prolong the stalemate.

Notice -- a total re-write of what was there. A total whitewashing of his defense of Hitler and his praise of appeasement. The changes made are not minor editorial fixes like spelling, grammar and coherence -- they are a wholesale effort to obscure the defense of evil and the praise for its accommodation that had appeared in that space only a short time before.

Sorry, Mr. Ramsey -- this isn't 1984 and you don't get to send such stuff down the memory hole. You were caught -- and your response was to cover it up. And as you folks in the press like to remind us, the cover-up is worse than the initial offense.

H/T Ace, STACLU

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It dates to 46 BC, making it the oldest depiction of the Roman Consul that we have.

The life-sized bust showing the Roman ruler with wrinkles and hollows in his face is tentatively dated to 46 B.C. Divers uncovered the Caesar bust and a collection of other finds in the Rhone near the town of Arles — founded by Caesar.

Among other items in the treasure trove of ancient objects is a 5.9 foot marble statue of Neptune, dated to the first decade of the third century after Christ.

Two smaller statues, both in bronze and measuring 27.5 inches each also were found, one of them, a satyr with his hands tied behind his back, "doubtless" originated in Hellenic Greece, the ministry said.

"Some (of the discoveries) are unique in Europe," Culture Minister Christine Albanel said. The bust of Caesar is in a class by itself.

"This marble bust of the founder of the Roman city of Arles constitutes the most ancient representation known today of Caesar," the ministry statement said, adding that it "undoubtedly" dates to the creation of Arles in 46 B.C.

No other depiction of the Roman leader is known to date from his lifetime -- making this potentially the only depiction of him w have made by someone who actually saw him in life. That means that this face is potentially the most accurate view of how he actually appeared -- allowing us to put a face with the name we have heard since our childhood.

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The entire Russian Imperial family was murdered in 1918 at the order of Lenin -- and the remains of the "missing Romanovs" have now been positively identified.

For nine decades after Bolshevik executioners shot Czar Nicholas II and his family, there were no traces of the remains of Crown Prince Aleksei, the hemophiliac heir to RussiaÂ’s throne.

Some said the prince, a delicate 13-year-old, had somehow survived and escaped; others believed he was buried in secret as the country lurched into civil war.

Now an official says DNA tests have solved the mystery by identifying bone shards found in a forest as those of Aleksei and his sister Grand Duchess Maria.

The remains of their parents, Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra, and three siblings, including the czarÂ’s youngest daughter, Anastasia, were unearthed in 1991 and reburied in the imperial resting place in St. Petersburg. The Russian Orthodox Church made all seven of them saints in 2000.

The murder of the family was simply one of the many atrocities committed in the name of Communism over the course of many decades, and the family are only a few of the millions of victims of that Satanic ideology. May the closing of the book on this historical question serve as one more pointed reminder of the malignant nature of Communism and the fact that it is antithetical to any valid notion of human rights.

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History records that nearly a century and a half ago the sixteenth president of the United States was murdered by a treasonous actor (they had them back then, too) who was killed some days later in a Virginia barn.

But is history wrong? Did Abraham LincolnÂ’s killer escape justice? Did Union troops kill an innocent man in a tragic case of mistaken identity? Those questions are periodically raised by assassination buffs and conspiracy theorists alike. And now it may be possible to lay the question to rest once and for all.

Sometime after 2 a.m. on a cool, cloudy Wednesday, a group of detectives and blue-clad troopers cornered a murderous fugitive in a tobacco barn on the Garrett family farm near Port Royal, Va.

"Draw up your men before the door and I'll come out and fight the whole command," called a voice from the barn. "Well, my brave boys, prepare a stretcher for me!"

A soldier lit a tuft of hay, threw it inside and spied the silhouette of a man on crutches, a carbine on his hip.

Pop! A shot was fired and, 143 years ago today, John Wilkes Booth - assassin of Abraham Lincoln - collapsed to the ground, mortally wounded in the neck.
That's what history says.

But two local Booth family descendants - Joanne Hulme of Philadelphia's Kensington section, and her sister, Virginia Kline of Warminster - aren't convinced.

They think that another man was killed and that Booth, who they believe was the president's assassin, lived to a ripe old age.

Aided by Booth historians, researchers and scientists, the sisters may now be on the threshold of proving their theory through DNA tests.

Results of the tests will be revealed on television this fall.

Personally, I place myself among the traditionalists. That said, I am open to evidence that I am wrong to accept the official story. And given that there have been multiple individuals who claimed to be John Wilkes Booth years after he was supposedly killed at Port Royal, perhaps the evidence from these tests will substantiate or refute those claim as well.

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Their love story is one of the most intriguing of the ancient world, and has been chronicled again and again -- even by the likes of Shakespeare himself.

But the tomb of Egyptian Queen Cleopatra and her lover, the Roman Consul Mark Antony, has never been examined by modern archaeologists -- because its location was lost in the mists of time.

Modern research seems to have found it -- and the site has now been made accessible. Archaeological work will start soon.

Archaeologists have revealed plans to uncover the 2000 year-old tomb of ancient Egypt's most famous lovers, Cleopatra and the Roman general Mark Antony later this year.

Zahi Hawass, prominent archaeologist and director of Egypt's superior council for antiquities announced a proposal to test the theory that the couple were buried together.

He discussed the project in Cairo at a media conference about the ancient pharaohs.

Hawass said that the remains of the legendary Egyptian queen and her Roman lover, Mark Antony, were inside a temple called Tabusiris Magna, 30 kilometres from the port city of Alexandria in northern Egypt.

Until recently access to the tomb has been hindered because it is under water, but archaeologists plan to drain the site so they can begin excavation in November.

Among the clues to suggest that the temple may contain Cleopatra's remains is the discovery of numerous coins with the face of the queen.

According to Hawas, Egyptologists have also uncovered a 120-metre-long underground tunnel with many rooms, some of which could contain more details about Cleopatra.

Given that the tomb has spent centuries under water, the question of whether or not the remains of the queen and the general survive is an important one. I am unsure as to whether Cleopatra was mummified, or whether Antony was cremated as was Roman custom at the time. And what treasures are there, given the great quantity of treasure taken back to Rome in triumph by Octavian (soon to be Caesar Augustus)?

Still, there s potential to illuminate the end of Ptolomaic Egypt, and with it one of the most storied women of the ancient world.

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On this day in history, the GOP-controlled Congress and a Republican President of the United States acted to end the threat to civil rights posed by the paramilitary terrorist wing of the Democrat Party.

On this day in 1871, the Republican-controlled 42nd Congress passed and the Republican President, Ulysses Grant, signed into law the Ku Klux Klan Act. The law banned the KKK and other Democrat terrorist organizations. President Grant then deployed federal troops to crush a Klan uprising in South Carolina.

Let me remind my readers that every major piece of federal legislation protecting the civil rights of Americans has been passed with the overwhelming support of Republicans. Every effort to ban lynching introduced by Republicans was thwarted by Democrats. The only member of the KKK to serve on the Supreme Court was appointed by and confirmed by Democrats, despite their full knowledge of his involvement in that organization.

And today, the only living member of the US Senate to have been a member of Klan is labeled as the "conscience of the Senate" by his fellow Democrats -- and sits three heartbeats from the Oval Office because his fellow Democrats made him president pro tempore of the Senate.

H/T Grand Old Partisan

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Posted by: Greg at 03:26 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Or at least that is the latest theory.

Researchers have discovered that the builder of the Titanic struggled for years to obtain enough good rivets and riveters and ultimately settled on faulty materials that doomed the ship, which sank 96 years ago Tuesday.

The builder’s own archives, two scientists say, harbor evidence of a deadly mix of low quality rivets and lofty ambition as the builder labored to construct the three biggest ships in the world at once — the Titanic and two sisters, the Olympic and the Britannic.

For a decade, the scientists have argued that the storied liner went down fast after hitting an iceberg because the shipÂ’s builder used substandard rivets that popped their heads and let tons of icy seawater rush in. More than 1,500 people died.

When the safety of the rivets was first questioned 10 years ago, the builder ignored the accusation and said it did not have an archivist who could address the issue.

Now, historians say new evidence uncovered in the archive of the builder, Harland and Wolff, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, settles the argument and finally solves the riddle of one of the most famous sinkings of all time. The company says the findings are deeply flawed.

The interesting bit of information from my point of view was that the builder had begun to switch to steel rivets, which are stronger. They used them on the central part of the hull, but not at the bow or stern, because they expected the most stress to be in that central zone. Unfortunately, a close encounter with an iceberg resulted in stress in the area with the sub-standard iron rivets, and it seems that they gave way and led to a catastrophic incident that would not have otherwise occurred.

And the rest is history.

Posted by: Greg at 09:36 PM | Comments (34) | Add Comment
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It is all well and good to try to undo historical wrongs. However, doing so can have unintended consequences if one is not careful.

In this case, it could upset the entire line of succession to the British throne, and even lead to the replacement of Elizabeth II by an extremely distant German cousin.

Gordon Brown is considering repealing the 1701 Act of Settlement as a way of healing a historic injustice by ending the prohibition against Catholics taking the throne.

But doing so would have the unforeseen consequence of making a 74-year-old German aristocrat the new King of England and Scotland.

Without the Act, Franz Herzog von Bayern, the current Duke of Bavaria, would be the rightful heir to the British Crown under the Stuart line.

The bachelor, who lives alone in the vast Nymphenberg Palace in Munich, is the blood descendant of the 17th-century King Charles I.

"If it [the Act] goes then the whole Catholic line is reinstated," said Prof Daniel Szechi, a lecturer in early modern history at the University of Manchester.

"Franz becomes the rightful claimant to the throne. We would just exchange one German family for another one."

The law in question dates back to the era following the Glorious Revolution, when efforts to keep the Catholic descendants of the deposed King James II from regaining the throne resulted in the selection of the House of Hanover to replace the House of Stuart. Could a change in the law result in a restoration of the claims of the Stuart Clan?

Indeed, the Act of Succession ought to be amended to remove the bar on Catholics from the line of succession or the throne. However, a better vehicle than that currently under consideration obviously needs to be found.

Posted by: Greg at 10:21 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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And we have this fossil record because, dare I say it, sh!t happened.

The discovery was one for the pages of an archaeology classic, something with a title like “Gods, Graves and Scat.”

Some people, coming into new country long ago, stopped at a cave for years perhaps, or only a day’s rest. Time enough, in any event, for them to relieve themselves — you know, answer nature’s call, if they bothered with euphemism. The cave was their in-house outhouse.

Exploring Paisley Caves in the Cascade Range of Oregon, archaeologists have found a scattering of human coprolites, or fossil feces. The specimens preserved 14,000-year-old human protein and DNA, which the discoverers said was the strongest evidence yet of the earliest people living in North America.

Other archaeologists agreed that the findings established more firmly than before the presence of people on the continent at least 1,000 years before the well-known Clovis people, previously thought to be the first Americans. Recent research at sites in Florida and Wisconsin also appears to support the earlier arrivals, and a campsite in Chile indicates migration deep into South America by 14,600 years ago.

The find was published online Thursday by the journal Science, www.sciencexpress.org.

That serves as a reminder that not every piece of the fossil record is something glamorous, and not every aspect of the anthropologists work involves findings of something glorious.

A bunch of humans stopped in a cave and set up a privy. Now, thousands of years later, that privy is the most significant piece of evidence we have for their existence, a millennium before any other humans came to the Americas.

Amazing, isn't it, what becomes scientifically significant?

Posted by: Greg at 10:09 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Rather than trying to refute the arguments of Kenzaburo Oe, the 1994 Nobel laureate in literature, a 91-year-old war criminal veteran of the Imperial Japanese Army tried to use the courts to force him to retract and apologize for information about the connection between the Japanese military and suicides by civilians during the fall of Okinawa.

In a closely watched ruling, the Osaka District Court threw out a $200,000 damage suit that was filed by a 91-year-old war veteran and another veteranÂ’s surviving relatives, who said there was no evidence of the militaryÂ’s involvement in the suicides.

The plaintiffs had also sought to block further printing of Mr. Oe’s 1970 book of essays, “Okinawa Notes,” in which he wrote that Japanese soldiers had told Okinawans they would be raped, tortured and murdered by the advancing American troops and coerced them into killing themselves instead of surrendering.

“The military was deeply involved in the mass suicides,” Judge Toshimasa Fukami said in the ruling. Judge Fukami cited the testimony of survivors that soldiers had handed out grenades to civilians to use for committing suicide, and the fact that mass suicides had occurred only in villages where Japanese troops had been stationed.

One more confirmation that the Japanese militarists who plunged Asia (and America) into war in the 1930s and 1940s were engaged in acts of unspeakable brutality and inhumanity. And also proof that there remains to this day an element of the Japanese population that does not want to deal with those historical truths.

Posted by: Greg at 12:00 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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"You mean witches? We have 'em too. We just pronounce it differently." -- Brigadoon

I think we'll all concede that there are no witches, at least not in the traditional sense of the malignant figures used to scare children.

And I think we'll all concede that there were massive wrongs done in witch hunts centuries ago, with men and women unjustly condemned for witchcraft.

But do we really need a legislative acknowledgment of centuries-old wrongs against accused and convicted witches?

Three years ago, Debra Avery and her family were shocked to learn they were direct descendants of Mary Sanford, a wife and mother of five who was hanged in Connecticut in 1692 after being convicted of witchcraft.

On Thursday, they trekked to the state Capitol, in the same city where Sanford and several other convicted witches were executed, to ask state lawmakers to restore their relative's good name. Legislators are considering a resolution that states that those convicted and their descendants should be freed from the stigma of the witchcraft accusations.

Avery, a New Preston resident and an eighth-generation great-granddaughter of Mary Sanford, said it has become a personal mission.

"We talk an awful lot about Mary being with us. We talk about whether we are Mary exonerating ourselves," she said. "But Mary has become a big part of our life. We talk about her a lot. I think it's in the DNA."

According to legislative research, it is believed that nine women and two men were convicted and hanged in the mid-1600s in Connecticut for witchcraft. Others were banished, indicted or fled the colony.

Two women were dropped into water to see if they possessed evil spirits. If they sank, they were innocent. But if they floated, they were guilty because the pure water cast out their evil spirit. One was acquitted while the other was given a reprieve by the General Assembly.

Others were also acquitted of the alleged crimes.

"Freed of the stigma"? Come on -- how much of a stigma is there, really, in 2008 over witchcraft charges in the seventeenth century? Do we really need legislation to acknowledge what everyone today admits -- that those accused were innocent of any wrongdoing? What next? Reparations for the descendants of those accused?

Sometimes we just have to recognize that great wrongs were done in the past, and that nothing we do or say today can undo them. All we can do is learn from them and move forward -- and that is not accomplished by breast-beating over the ancient wrongs.

Posted by: Greg at 09:10 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Imagine if this solution to the issue of slavery and Civil War had been tried. How different would our history have been?

Barely a year into the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln suggested buying slaves for $400 apiece under a "gradual emancipation" plan that would bring peace at less cost than several months of hostilities.

The proposal was outlined in one of 72 letters penned by Lincoln that ended up in the University of Rochester's archives, which are now online.

In a letter to Illinois Sen. James McDougall dated March 14, 1862, Lincoln laid out the cost to the nation's coffers of his "emancipation with compensation" proposal.

Paying slaveholders $400 for each of the 1,798 slaves in Delaware listed in the 1860 Census, he wrote, would come to $719,200 at a time when the war was soaking up $2 million a day. Buying the freedom of an estimated 432,622 slaves in Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri and Washington, D.C., would cost $173,048,800 — nearly equal to the estimated $174 million needed to wage war for 87 days, he added.

The idea never took root. Six months later, Lincoln issued the first of two executive orders known as the Emancipation Proclamation that declared an end to slavery.

This would have eliminated the need to pass the Thirteenth Amendment -- slavery would have been at an end in the territory controlled by the United States. Would the Confederacy have responded positively to this development and perhaps considered peace and a return to the Union? Or would the war have continued on?

Of course, it is important to note that none of what Lincoln proposed would have ended the peculiar institution for those enslaved in the bulk of the South. It would not have ended the Civil War. And instead of dollars, America paid a high price in blood to end an evil that had been allowed to infect the nation for too long.

Posted by: Greg at 11:16 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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When I was a little kid, I liked the Carpenters. Indeed, I even owned their Now and Then album (on vinyl!), which featured their home on the cover. The group is a bit of nostalgia for me.

But their home is NOT a significant historical structure -- no matter what some fans think.

Owners of The Carpenters' former home aren't feeling on top of the world about the legions of fans who keep stopping by to pay tribute.

The five-bedroom tract house, where siblings Karen and Richard Carpenter lived and penned some of their greatest hits, was featured on the cover of their 1973 hit album "Now & Then." It was also where an anorexic Karen Carpenter collapsed in 1983 before dying.

Owners Manuel and Blanca Melendez Parra have apparently grown weary of the parade of fans paying homage.

The couple have submitted plans to officials in Downey, a city about 15 miles south of downtown Los Angeles, to raze the 39-year-old main house, the Los Angeles Times reported Saturday. The Parras have already torn down an adjoining house and have begun construction on a larger home.

The proposal to level the rest of the residence has angered fans.

"This house is our version of Graceland," said Carpenters aficionado Jon Konjoyan. "When they photographed the 'Now & Then' cover here in 1973, the house was instantly immortalized."

The 57-year-old musician and promoter is heading a campaign to save the original home from the wrecker's ball. Some fans have proposed that Downey officials declare the house a historic landmark.

Good grief! The Carpenters, while good, must be retrospectively viewed as nothing more than the purveyors of cloyingly sweet pop music. They certainly have not left a legacy significant enough to necessitate the preservation of this home -- and in the process strip the owners of their property rights without compensation.

Jon Konjoyan wants the home preserved -- either through government action, purchase of the home, or requiring it to be moved.

I want Jon Konjoyan to mind his own business and quit trying to interfere with the property rights of the Parra family, who bought the home when nobody considered it significant enough to purchase.

Posted by: Greg at 03:10 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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