Tracking the Ancestry of Corn Back 9,000 Years - The New York Times

For most of human history, our ancestors relied entirely on hunting animals and gathering seeds, fruits, nuts, tubers and other plant parts from the wild for food. It was only about 10,000 years ago that humans in many parts of the world began raising livestock and growing food through deliberate planting. These advances provided more reliable sources of food and allowed for larger, more permanent settlements. Native Americans alone domesticated nine of the most important food crops in the world, including corn, more properly called maize (Zea mays), which now provides about 21 percent of human nutrition across the globe.

But despite its abundance and importance, the biological origin of maize has been a long-running mystery. The bright yellow, mouth-watering treat we know so well does not grow in the wild anywhere on the planet, so its ancestry was not at all obvious. Recently, however, the combined detective work of botanists, geneticists and archeologists has been able to identify the wild ancestor of maize, to pinpoint where the plant originated, and to determine when early people were cultivating it and using it in their diets.
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Dr. Beadle’s results showed that maize and teosinte were without any doubt remarkably and closely related. But to pinpoint the geographic origins of maize, more definitive forensic techniques were needed. This was DNA typing, exactly the same technology used by the courts to determine paternity.

Tracking the Ancestry of Corn Back 9,000 Years - The New York Times

Decolonising the mind: The misunderstanding of traditional African beliefs - This Is Africa

To the modern African who distrusts these age-old traditions, indigenous faith systems can be nothing but evil. Proof of this is in the ritual killings that keep on happening in this modern age whether it is 100 graves dug up in Benin Republic or albinos being killed for their body parts in Tanzania. These rituals, otherwise called witchcraft, are said to exist due to the superstitious nature of Africans, which arises from traditional beliefs. It is believed that in rituals, people are regularly abducted and killed, their body parts used to create charms or “fetishes” that are said to bring riches to whoever bears them. These so-called ritual killings have attained the status of urban legends in countries like Nigeria where the 10% of Nigerians who adhere to traditional beliefs have to keep their faith secret or risk being labelled as enablers of human sacrifice. There is a great need to differentiate between legitimate spiritual systems and witchcraft, yet it is widely accepted that human sacrifices were part and parcel of pre-colonial faith systems.

That these rituals are done with the main aim of making money should hint at their true capitalist nature. In a world where everyone is looking to be rich and wealthy, indigenous African spiritualities are not exempt from being corrupted by those who would do anything to get rich. Discussions about the modern “innovations” in African cultures and religious practices are almost nonexistent, so most of us never consider that the growth of Pentecostal churches is encouraging witchcraft related fears or that market forces are central to today’s beliefs in witchcraft. A few months ago at a work meeting, the topic of ritual killings and idol worship came up and a colleague boldly objected to a idea that ritual killings had been traditionally done by Nigerians in pre-colonial times. She said she recalled when human sacrifices started in Nigeria  – at the time, she was a child growing up in the 1970s. Her opinion is backed by Chief Adelekan, a Yoruba diviner who at a talk in the Manchester Museum insisted that human sacrifices have nothing to do with his indigenous worship. But in people’s minds, this modern practice of ritual killings has been conflated with indigenous faith systems.

Decolonising the mind: The misunderstanding of traditional African beliefs - This Is Africa

How the Vatican investigates miracles | New York Post

In “The Vatican Prophecies: Investigating Supernatural Signs, Apparitions, and Miracles in the Modern Age” (Viking), John Thavis, former Rome bureau chief for the Catholic News Service, describes this 1982 secret exorcism.

The new book shares how the Vatican deals with supernatural — or supposedly supernatural — events, from holy relics to instances of possession.

Thavis makes it clear that events of this sort put the Vatican in a difficult spot. On one hand, they cannot reject such supernatural phenomena outright, as to do so would reject many elements of the religion’s history.

At the same time, every claim of a supernatural or otherworldly presence must be handled with extreme skepticism, to prevent the Church from being taken in by charlatans, any one of whom could deal a blow to the Church’s credibility.

[,,,]

The Church has dealt with fake relics since the Middle Ages, when the “brain of Saint Peter,” which had been “venerated for centuries in the cathedral of Geneva was investigated and found to be a pumice stone,” and the “arm of Saint Anthony,” long “kissed by the faithful on festive occasions, turned out to be part of a stag.”

These days, rather than spend time and money exposing forgeries, the Church sometimes turns a blind eye to relics whose authenticity is in question. In 2011, Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster angered many Catholics when he stated, “If that connection is made through an object which maybe forensically won’t stand up to the test, that’s of secondary importance to the spiritual and emotive power that the object can contain.”

How the Vatican investigates miracles | New York Post

Meet David Barton — the Evangelical Quack “Historian” Exposed as the Fake He Is

Although I have previously posted concerning Julie Ingersoll's book “Building God’s Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction”this excerpt provided by Frank Schaeffer is an eye opener.  Delving into the mind of Barton can be a dangerous thing, but Ingersoll does a wonderful job of explaining how and why Barton thinks the way he does.

My only caveat, while I appreciate the work of Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter, they are not the first, nor the only individuals responsible for exposing Barton for the liar he is.  In 2006 Chris Rodda published Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History, Vol. 1 followed by Debunking David Barton's Jefferson Lies: #2 - Jefferson Founded a Secular University in 2012 and Debunking David Barton's Jefferson Lies: #5 - Jefferson Advocated a Secular Public Square. During that time period, beginning in 2010, Chris also produced a series of videos that countered the crap Barton was spewing on Glen Beck.  Though a bit dated, the information is still relevant as Barton as still regurgitating the same lies. Chris is currently working on a fourth book addressing more of Barton's bullshit

There is perhaps no better example of Christian Reconstructionist influence on the broader culture than the work of Tea Party “historian” David Barton. Barton does not explicitly identify as a Christian Reconstructionist, and Christian Reconstructionists would not claim him as one of their own.Barton does have ties to several Reconstructionist groups, including the Providence Foundation; he occasionally cites the work of Rousas Rushdoony and promotes views on race and slavery that are rooted in Rushdoony. While Barton doesn’t use the language of theonomy or postmillennialism, as we will see, he speaks of dominion, biblical law, the necessity of bringing every area of life under the lordship of Christ, and sphere sovereignty of biblically ordained institutions. He embraces the whole range of political views advocated by Reconstructionists from the right-to-life and creationism to more narrowly held positions on issues such as the history of slavery and opposition to the Federal Reserve System. As we shall see, the approach to history that has made Barton famous is rooted in Rushdoony’s biblical philosophy of history.
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Barton’s work has been the subject of extensive critique by bloggers, reporters, and other critics, some of whom are scholars publishing peer-reviewed critiques, but, for the most part, scholars have not devoted a lot of attention to debunking his claims. Beginning in about 2011, two conservative Christian professors from Grove City College, Warren Throckmorton, professor of psychology, and Michael Coulter, professor of humanities and political science, published a critique of Barton’s The Jefferson Lies entitled Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims about Our Third President. The book was received well by scholars, and the authors’ credentials as conservative Christians undermined Barton’s defense that criticism of his work was ideological rather than factual. The Jefferson Lies was withdrawn by its publisher. One might expect under the weight of such resounding rejection, Barton would disappear into obscurity. Yet Barton’s supporters remain as devoted as before. Criticism from scholars (whether Christian or not) is dismissed as liberal, socialist, and even pagan. Discredited in the larger culture, Barton remains influential in the conservative Christian subculture.
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Many look at the US Constitution and see little mention of religion and wonder how conservative Christians can insist that it is a template for a Christian nation. But Barton is careful to speak, instead, of our “original national founding documents.” For Barton and his followers, the Declaration of Independence, though never ratified and carrying no legal authority, has the same status as the Constitution.   [<--a point I have a tendency to harp on]
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For him the Constitution represents a consensus—as though there is a singular view that can be attributed to “the founders.” Barton’s style of reading the Constitution is modeled on his style of reading the Bible, which he also treats as a coherent document that can be read from start to finish to yield a clear, undisputed, objective meaning, instead of a collection of fragmented texts written over a very long period of time in different cultures, assembled into larger texts, then chosen from an even larger collection of texts in a political process, translated from ancient languages, and finally interpreted in different ways by different communities. Every stage of that process continues to be profoundly disputed by scholars, and there is always an interpretative framework (albeit all too often an unrecognized one) underlying any reading of it. While the US Constitution is a newer document, and it is therefore somewhat less difficult to discern its meaning(s), the fact remains that it is the product of hard-fought compromise among leaders, bound in time and culture, who profoundly disagreed with each other. There is no reason to believe they thought they were writing a sacred text to which all subsequent generations of Americans were bound by a process that amounts to divining a singular “intent.”

Meet David Barton — the Evangelical Quack “Historian” Exposed as the Fake He Is

UPDATE::Nicholas Winton’s ‘Most Emotional Moment’ - The New York Times

It is with tremendous sadness that I post the following; humanity has lost a very humble man:

Nicholas Winton, who died Wednesday at 106, went 50 years without telling anyone about how he had rescued 669 children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.

Even after his anonymity ended in 1988, when his wife’s discovery of an old scrapbook in their attic set off a wave of public recognition, he never fully explained why he did it.

One especially poignant appearance came in 1988 on the BBC program “That’s Life,” when for the first time, dozens of people who owed their lives to him assembled to thank him. In the video, he dabs tears as a woman hugs him. Then he is surprised to learn that the dozens of people seated around him were also children he had saved.

Nicholas Winton’s ‘Most Emotional Moment’ - The New York Times

Guy Carawan Dies at 87; Taught a Generation to Overcome, in Song - NYTimes.com

On an April night in 1960, Guy Carawan stood before a group of black students in Raleigh, N.C., and sang a little-known folk song. With that single stroke, he created an anthem that would echo into history, sung at the Selma-to-Montgomery marches of 1965, in apartheid-era South Africa, in international demonstrations in support of the Tiananmen Square protesters, at the dismantled Berlin Wall and beyond.

The song was “We Shall Overcome.”

Mr. Carawan, a white folk singer and folklorist who died on Saturday at 87, did not write “We Shall Overcome,” nor did he claim to. The song, variously a religious piece, a labor anthem and a hymn of protest, had woven in and out of American oral tradition for centuries, embodying the country’s twinned history of faith and struggle. Over time, it was further polished by professional songwriters.

But in teaching it to hundreds of delegates at the inaugural meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee — held in Raleigh on April 15, 1960 — Mr. Carawan fathered the musical manifesto that, more than any other, became “the ‘Marseillaise’ of the integration movement,” as The New York Times described it in 1963.

Guy Carawan Dies at 87; Taught a Generation to Overcome, in Song - NYTimes.com

Why Native Americans Are Outraged Over the Vatican’s First Hispanic U.S. Saint

A "man of his time,"  what a freaking cop-out!!

The Virgen de Guadalupe is depicted with spikes around her, much like the Nahua serpent god Quetzalcoatl. Though her original purpose as a way to secretly practice the old religion has since been forgotten, the indigenous Mexican still exists in her DNA. It also exists in the stones of the basilica. It exists in the Mestizo.

Mexico is Catholic because of conquest. It is Catholic because many years ago the Spanish came and brought with them murder, disease, and Catholicism. The Indians were forced to accept a foreign faith, and if they refused, they were met with violence.

It is a violence that has shaped Latin America.

And now, Native American groups are furious that the Vatican is seeking to canonize as a saint a man who perpetuated that violence.

According to Latin Post, Pope Francis will canonize Junípero Serra, an 18^th century Hispanic friar in Baja California who was responsible for bringing Catholicism to much of California.

Why Native Americans Are Outraged Over the Vatican’s First Hispanic U.S. Saint

Show Notes:: History, it is important

The original post this is taken from.

But why is this important,,,

The notion that America was founded as a Christian nation is a central animating element of the ideology of the Christian Right. It touches every aspect of life and culture in this, one of the most successful and powerful political movements in American history. The idea that America's supposed Christian identity has somehow been wrongly taken, and must somehow be restored, permeates the psychology and vision of the entire movement. No understanding of the Christian Right is remotely adequate without this foundational concept.

But the Christian nationalist narrative has a fatal flaw: it is based on revisionist history that does not stand up under scrutiny. The bad news is that to true believers, it does not have to stand up to the facts of history to be a powerful and animating part of the once and future Christian nation. Indeed, through a growing cottage industry of Christian revisionist books and lectures now dominating the curricula of home schools and many private Christian academies, Christian nationalism becomes a central feature of the political identity of children growing up in the movement. The contest for control of the narrative of American history is well underway.

Other stuff to explore,,,

• Writings of William Bradford Guests examined the history of the early Colonial period through the life and writings of William Bradford. Bradford was governor of the Massachusetts Colony and the author of the Mayflower Compact and Of Plymouth Plantation. The guests and “Governor Bradford” responded to audience comments and questions. 
• Deconstructing History: Mayflower
• On This Day: Mayflower Compact

One final thought,,,

It is important, no critical, that every American understands that a theocracy is the greatest form of tyranny founded on destroying liberty, and for Americans it begins by suspending the Constitution and replacing it with religious edicts. One of the beautiful features of our Constitution was that it used to guarantee freedoms that all Americans were required to comply with, but over the years politicians granted religious groups power to  dictate to the nation which aspects of the Constitution they will comply with, and which parts of the Christian bible they will impose on the population. It is a harsh enough reality to learn the Constitution does not protect all Americans’ freedoms, and supremely disheartening that despite the Founding Fathers’ intent to protect the people from theocratic tyranny, evangelical Christians are imposing theocratic fascism on the people while “wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

The stubborn myth of the Christian country: Why the U.S. has always been “one nation, under gods” - Salon.com

Yes, another book to add to my list. What intrigues me is the overall premise behind the book, the "a city upon a hill" reference. Although I was aware of this metaphor, I never considered the ramifications in regards to the "Christian Nation" push by the Reich; especially in regards to their love of all things Puritan. It is definitely something to explore,,,

 See also: We are not a Christian nation: Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy and the eternal lie of the “city upon a hill” - An excerpt from "One Nation Under Gods: A New American History"

As Peter Manseau, author of “One Nation, Under Gods: A New American History,” would have it, nothing has done more damage to the ideal of American religious pluralism than the “stubborn persistence of words spoken more than a century before the United States was a nation at all.” Those words are “a city upon a hill,” preached by the Puritan John Winthrop to his fellow colonists as they prepared to leave their ship at Massachusetts Bay in 1630. Most strenuously invoked by Ronald Reagan, the city on the hill, according to Manseau, has for the past 50 years “dominated presidential rhetoric about the nation’s self-understanding, causing an image borrowed from the Gospels to become a tenet of faith in America’s civil religion.”

The incessant citation of Winthrop’s metaphor — which envisioned the fledgling colony as a shining example set up to inspire the world but also to invite its comprehensive moral scrutiny — keeps reinforcing the assumption that the United States is fundamentally Christian. There’s more behind that stubborn belief than just rhetoric, of course, but when even ostensibly pluralistic presidents like John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama conjure up Winthrop’s biblical metaphor, it starts to take on the aura of an unquestioned truth.

Well, Manseau certainly questions it with “One Nation, Under Gods,” an unusual work of history meant to revive the idea that the U.S. is a “land shaped and informed by internal religious diversity — some of it obvious, some of it hidden.” Most key points in our national narrative involve a non-Christian element if you look closely, he maintains. “One Nation, Under Gods” is less a continuous narrative itself than a series of isolated snapshots, each chapter telling the story of a person considered a heretic, blasphemer, atheist or heathen, who nevertheless helped in some way to shape the course of American history.

[,,,]
Some of the stories in “One Nation, Under Gods” are more surprising. “It is perhaps the greatest of forgotten influences on American life and culture,” Manseau writes, that some 20 percent or more of Africans living in America around the time of the Revolutionary War were Muslims, a quantity that “dwarfed the number of Roman Catholics or Jews.” The majority of enslaved Africans did practice such Western African religions as Yoruba and Obeah, all of which contributed to the distinctive customs of African-American Christianity. But we also have a handful of stories of African Muslims abducted to the U.S., where, as in the case of one Omar ibn Said, they astonished the natives by writing fluently in a strange alphabet (Arabic) and impressed, if also bewildered, everyone with their abstemious piety.

The stubborn myth of the Christian country: Why the U.S. has always been “one nation, under gods” - Salon.com

Dream Deferred | The Holocaust’s forgotten black victims – the ‘Rhineland Bastards’

Most people know about the Nazi Holocaust, the murder of 6 million Jews and 6 million others: Russians, Gypsies, Slavs, socialists, disabled people and LGBT people.

Alongside the big narrative of the Holocaust there are a myriad of small, individual stories and testimonies that help illustrate and shed light on the cruelty and barbarity of the Nazi regime.

One such account is the story of what happened to Germany’s tiny black population.

Primo Levi once wrote, “this is a story interwoven with freezing dawns”. Some may know their story, I certainly didn’t.

Tucked away inside Hitler’s anti-Semitic diatribe, Mein Kampf, there is the following passage:

It was, and is, the Jew who brought negroes to the Rhine, brought them with the same aim and with deliberate intent to destroy the white race he hates by persistent bastardisation, to hurl it from the cultural and political heights it has attained, and to ascend them as its masters.

[,,,]
An organisation named “Commission Number 3″ was created by the Nazis to deal with the so-called problem of the “Rhineland Bastards”. This was organised under Dr Eugen Fischer of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. It was decided that the African-German children would be sterilised under the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring.

The programme began in 1937, when local officials were asked to report on all “Rhineland Bastards” under their jurisdiction.

All together, some 400 children of mixed parentage were arrested and sterilised. The Nazis went to great lengths to conceal their sterilisation and abortion programme.

What happened to these Afro-Germans is very complex – their experiences were not uniform. Some of these children were subjected to medical experiments and others mysteriously “disappeared”.

Hans Hauck, a black Holocaust survivor and a victim of Hitler’s mandatory sterilisation programme, explained in the film Hitler’s Forgotten Victims that when he was forced to undergo sterilisation as a teenager, he was given no anaesthetic. Once he received his sterilisation certificate, he was “free to go”, so long as he agreed to have no sexual relations whatsoever with Germans.
_____
From the comments:

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the photograph taken in 1933 of a brown-skinned boy wearing a swastika in a schoolyard in Hamburg, Germany, does not begin to tell the story of the remarkable life of Hans J. Massaquoi. Mr. Massaquoi, former managing editor of Ebony magazine, has now told the story himself in his new book, Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany. http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0003/black_nazi.html



Dream Deferred | The Holocaust’s forgotten black victims – the ‘Rhineland Bastards’

Lillian Gobitas Klose, 90, Dies; Stood Against Mandatory Pledge - NYTimes.com

“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

__

Lillian Gobitas’s family belonged to the Jehovah’s Witnesses and heeded a leader’s call to refuse to recite the pledge in compliance with biblical commands against idolatry. On Oct. 22, 1935, Lillian’s brother William Gobitas, a fifth grader, refused to say the pledge at his public school in Minersville, Pa. The next day, Lillian did the same thing. The town school board responded by passing a resolution calling refusal to recite the pledge an act of insubordination. It then expelled the Gobitas children.

“They expelled us right then and there,” Mrs. Klose said in an interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2003. “They said, ‘Don’t come back.’ ”

For 12-year-old Lillian, the sting from her act of conscience — which she said was entirely the result of her own thinking, not her parents’ — was sharp. Children threw rocks at her, The Washington Post reported in 1988.

She overheard two girls talking. “We used to be friends with her,” one said. People jeered the family on the streets. William was beaten by schoolmates. Local churches led a boycott of the family’s grocery store.

“It got real ugly,” Mrs. Klose told The Morning Call, a daily newspaper published in Allentown, Pa., in 1988. “They thought we were Communists, Nazis. They felt real righteous about it.”

The controversy led to an eight-year legal battle. It pitted the virtues of a strong national government — unified by patriotic sentiment as the country was edging toward war — against the protection of individuals from being coerced by that government. The Supreme Court decided 8 to 1 in 1940 that compelling students to say the pledge was not a violation of religious freedom, with Justice Felix Frankfurter writing the majority opinion.

The ruling sparked attacks on 1,488 Witnesses in 44 states, the American Civil Liberties Union reported.

In West Virginia, Witnesses were forced to swallow large amounts of castor oil. In Wyoming, they were tarred and feathered; in Nebraska, they were castrated. In Maine, a mob of 2,500 burned down a local Witness place of worship, known as a Kingdom Hall.

On the other side, Eleanor Roosevelt and editorials in 170 newspapers strongly defended the Witnesses’ rights. The New Republic suggested that compelling the pledge created the risk of “adopting Hitler’s philosophy” of ultranationalism. The case would end in 1943 with the Supreme Court, with different membership, reversing the 1940 ruling by a 6-to-3 vote in a near-identical case — a startlingly rapid judicial about-face.

Lillian Gobitas Klose, 90, Dies; Stood Against Mandatory Pledge - NYTimes.com


See also:

Letter, Billy Gobitas to Minersville, Pennsylvania, school directors, explaining why the young Jehovah's Witness refused to salute the American flag,

SCOTUS ruling that public schools could compel students—in this case, Jehovah's Witnesses—to salute the American Flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance despite the students' religious objections to these practices.
 
The 1943 SCOTUS decision that overruled Minersville v Gobitas, stating that the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution protected students from being forced to salute the American flag and say the Pledge of Allegiance in school.

Knocking (2006) documentary that focuses on the civil liberties fought for by Jehovah's Witnesses:  Conscientious objection, and rejection of blood transfusions and saluting the flag (featuring Lillian Gobitas.)

Lawmaker to Push Bill Requiring Dinesh D'Souza's 'America' Be Shown in Schools

To call this movie a conservative point of view on American history is just wrong. It is an example of revisionist history and has been thoroughly panned by numerous critics. It is propaganda per and simple. That aside, it is not the movie per se that concerns me, as kids are not nearly as dumb as the Reich thinks they are, but the waste of time and money that will be spent in pushing this legislation forward.

A Florida state senator plans to introduce a bill that would make Dinesh D'Souza's docudrama, America, required viewing for most teenagers in the state, The Hollywood Reporter learned on Friday.

Republican Alan Hays said he’ll introduce in November his one-page bill that simply states that students in the 1,700 Florida public high schools and middle schools are to be shown the film unless their parents object.

[,,,]
America, the movie, espouses a conservative point of view toward telling history. D'Souza takes on leftist arguments that portray the U.S. in a negative light, and he specifically attacks Howard Zinn, author of the book A People’s History of the United States, often considered the most widely used history book in U.S. academia. The movie shows actors Matt Damon and Woody Harrelson praising the book.

Hays said the purpose of his proposal is to introduce more balance into Florida schools.

“I saw the movie and walked out of the theater and said, ‘Wow, our students need to see this.’ And it’s my plan to show it to my colleagues in the legislature, too, before they’re asked to vote on the bill,” Hays said.

[,,,]
“I’ve looked at history books and talked to history teachers and the message the students are getting is very different from what is in the movie,” Hays said. “It’s dishonest and insulting. The students need to see the truth without political favoritism.”

[,,,]
“The most dreaded disease in America today is political correctness. We need to inform our students of our whole history, and teach them how to think, not what to think,” Hays said. “Let them talk with their teachers, their peers and their parents, then draw their own conclusions. But they need both sides, and this movie shows a side they just aren’t seeing.”

Lawmaker to Push Bill Requiring Dinesh D'Souza's 'America' Be Shown in Schools

See also: 
Dinesh D'Souza Explains How Costco, Google And The New York Times Are Conspiring Against Him

Right-wing activist and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza is convinced that Costco, Google and the New York Times are working together to suppress his new book, “America: Imagine the World Without Her” and its companion movie of the same name, which liberals hate because they hate America .

D’Souza sat down with One American News Network’s Rick Amato on Wednesday to explain how liberal executives at the three companies are working to suppress his book: Costco by pulling his book from its shelves citing low ratings on the New York Times bestseller list, the New York Times by somehow doctoring its bestseller list to keep him off it, and Google for sending people who search for his movie “America” to listings for his previous movie “2016: Obama’s America” (obviously a liberal plot).

Congressman Vows to Investigate Google Searches of 'America' Movie (Exclusive)
(Bare in mind all this is being said whilst the title of the movie was "America")

Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, a frequent foe of Google, is demanding to know why the giant Internet company was fumbling the search results for Dinesh D'Souza's movie America for nearly three weeks.

Shortly after the movie opened wide on July 2, the filmmakers complained to Google that Internet users looking for showtimes and locations were sometimes misdirected to the wrong movie. On other occasions, an image of the film's poster was incorrect or a description of the movie was wrong.

Rohrabacher tells The Hollywood Reporter that he's so disturbed by Google's behavior he intends on discussing it Wednesday during the House Republican Conference, which is the party caucus for Republicans in the House of Representatives.

"This doesn't deserve to be ignored. We need to verify the statistics in some way, and I will be suggesting the appropriate committee or subcommittee have some kind of hearing on this," Rohrbacher said. "We know there were significant incidences, and that would suggest there was intent behind Google's nonperformance."

Obama Derangement Syndrome: How D'Souza thinks
For some very interesting background/insight on D'Souza's:

And if I were to try to understand his thinking using the same methods he uses to interpret Mr Obama, I might look to his Indian background, which is where he says he gained his insight into anti-colonialism. Mr D'Souza notes simply that he grew up in Mumbai, but a more complete accounting is that his parents were members of the Christian community in the state of Goa, which was colonised by Portugal. The last name "D'Souza" is a common family name in West Africa, where it indicates that the family is descended from the slave-trading coastal mixed-race elite. In India, however, it indicates that the family likely belongs to the Roman Catholic Brahmins, Hindu Brahmins who were converted by missionaries beginning in the 17th century. Interestingly, the Christian community in Goa retained a Hindu-style caste system, with Catholic Brahmins continuing to discriminate against Catholic dalit or "untouchables", whom they refer to as mahara or chamaar. Elite Catholic Brahmin households in Goa sent their children to Jesuit schools (like the one Mr D'Souza attended) and often spoke Portuguese at home, referring to the main local native language, Konkani, as the lingua des criados ("language of servants").

UPDATE::Man Who Saved 669 Kids From Nazis Turns 105, Gets Beautiful Birthday Honor

This is an update of sort to a story I posted in early February.

The story of Sir Nicholas Winton is one of the most profound tales of humanitarianism that you've probably never heard.

After saving 669 children, most of them Jewish, from likely death at Nazi concentration camps at the onset of World War II, it was announced Monday -- on Winton's 105th birthday -- that the heroic Englishman will be awarded the Order of the White Lion, the highest order in the Czech Republic, the Associated Press reported. In the official announcement, Czech President Milos Zeman noted Winton's example of humanity, selflessness, personal bravery and modesty as reasons for the prestigious honor. The award will be given to Winton this October.

Man Who Saved 669 Kids From Nazis Turns 105, Gets Beautiful Birthday Honor

Christian ‘historian’: Allowing women to vote ‘hurts the entire culture and society’

You would think that in the 4000+ years of human existence there would be some sort of precept against lying. Oh. wait there is!!

Beck U professor David "I create my own HIStory" Barton has once again managed to ignore genuine history. He recently opened his mouth and out tumbled misogynistic psycho-babble he calls history.

The family was the first and fundamental unit of all government. Actually, you have individual self government first, then you have family government second, you have civil government third, and have church government fourth. Those are the four levels of government in the order they are given in the Bible.

So family government precedes civil government and you watch that as colonists came to America, they voted by families. You look at the Pilgrims, when they finally moved away from socialism and moved toward the free enterprise system, they called the families together and gave families plots of land. Private property given to the families. And so that’s the way things work.

And you have to remember back then, husband and wife, I mean the two were considered one. That is the biblical precept. That is the way they looked at them in the civil community. That is a family that is voting and so the head of the family is traditionally considered to be the husband and even biblically still continues to be so …

Now, as we’ve moved away from the family unit – you need to be independent from the family, don’t be chained down and be a mother and don’t be chained down and be a father and don’t be chained down to your parents, you know, we’ve moved into more of a family anarchy kind of thing, the ‘Modern Family’ kind of portrayal – that understanding has gone away.

Clearly, what [the listener] has asked is a brilliant question because it does reveal that the bigotry we’re told they held back then, they didn’t hold and what they did was they put the family unit higher than the government unit and they tried to work hard to keep the family together. And, as we can show in two or three hundred studies since then, the more you weaken the family, the more it hurts the entire culture and society.

So they had a strong culture, a strong society and it was based on a strong family to preceded government and they crafted their policies to protect a strong family.

As much as I would like to dissect this garbage, there is only one name I will mention, Lydia Taft, who in 1756 became the first legal woman voter in colonial America. And yes there is more evidence of pre-Revolution women voters.

Barton's blatant Biblical patriarchy aside, there is a danger in what this man preaches and teaches, depriving one group the right to vote will never satisfy him or his ilk. (And if you have read my diatribes enough you know who the "ilk" are.)

“First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.” (Martin Niemoeller, 1892 - 1984)

If they're successful in depriving women of their right to vote, who then becomes their next target? Gays? Asians? Catholics? What about the 99 "percenters"? They will keep going until only those they deem "worthy" of the right to vote are able to vote.

This man is dangerous, and those who listen to and believe him, I have one question for you. Will you be deemed worthy?

Christian ‘historian’: Allowing women to vote ‘hurts the entire culture and society’

“The Last of the Unjust”: A new look at Eichmann, more evil than banal - Salon.com

Lanzmann found Murmelstein living in Rome in 1975, where he cuts the figure of a sprightly, dapper continental gentleman with an impeccable Italian wardrobe, a bountiful intellect and a sardonic wit. (Although this footage was shot nearly 40 years ago, he seems a strikingly contemporary figure.) He had stayed away from America and Israel, the focal points of postwar Jewish emigration, and for good reason. To many people in the Jewish world, his name became identified with the way some leaders of Europe’s Jewish community had capitulated to Nazi domination and collaborated with a campaign of mass extermination. Gershom Scholem, the German-born Jewish philosopher and historian, suggested at one point that Murmelstein should be hanged as a traitor.

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Murmelstein was a powerful and well-connected figure in the Jewish world; he could easily have emigrated to England as late as 1939. Indeed, he almost did: He accompanied a fellow rabbi to London shortly before the war started, and then returned to Vienna on a nearly empty commercial flight. He could have refused to work with Eichmann and other Nazi commanders, and accepted the alternative: a bullet in the back of the head, or a one-way rail journey to “the East.” (Murmelstein says, by the way, that he didn’t learn the precise nature of what happened to deported Jews in Eastern Europe until 1945, although he knew that none of them ever came back.) Instead, he stayed behind, risking his own life every day in tense diplomatic encounters with murderers and psychopaths. He admits that he relished power and followed a strong drive for self-preservation — largely so that someone would be alive to tell the story. Many people died in Theresienstadt, but nowhere near as many as did in Lodz or Warsaw or Vilnius or the other Jewish ghettoes wiped out by the Germans before the war’s end. They dithered over the place and then they left, and when the Red Army finally arrived in the spring of 1945, Murmelstein and most of the town’s Jewish residents were still there.

“The Last of the Unjust”: A new look at Eichmann, more evil than banal - Salon.com

A Man Discovers He’s Sitting With ‘Kids’ He Saved From Nazis (VIDEO) | LiberalAmerica.org

This piece comes courtesy of Tiffany Willis over at Liberal America. It is the story of Nicholas Winton and the Czech Kindertransport. A bit of history I knew nothing about,,,

In December 1938 — on the eve of World War II — a British stockbroker named Nicholas Winton was readying himself to leave for a skiing vacation when he was summoned unexpectedly by his friend.

Upon arrival in Prague, Czechoslovakia, Nicholas Winton found that he had traded his skiing vacation for working at a refugee camp for people who had been vacated from Western Czechoslovakia by Nazis after it was annexed by Germany.

Winton became very concerned about the people in the camp, particularly the children. Everyone was still saying “what war, we’re not going to war,” but he was convinced that German occupation would soon take over all of Czechoslovakia. Tales of the horrible Kristallnacht, a “night of broken glass” when Germans waged a violent attack against German and Austrian Jews, were fresh on his mind. He simply wasn’t having it. Not there, not those children.

A Man Discovers He’s Sitting With ‘Kids’ He Saved From Nazis (VIDEO) | LiberalAmerica.org

Legacy Of Forced March Still Haunts Navajo Nation : NPR

Musician Clarence Clearwater, like so many Navajos, has moved off the reservation for work. He performs on the Grand Canyon Railway, the lone Indian among dozens of cowboys and train robbers entertaining tourists.

"I always tell people I'm there to temper the cowboys," says Clearwater. "I'm there to give people the knowledge that there was more of the West than just cowboys."

About 50 years ago, Clearwater retraced his great-great-great-grandfather's footsteps along what Navajo and Mescalero Apache people call the Long Walk. In a series of marches starting in 1864, 9,500 Navajo and 500 Mescalero Apache were forced by the U.S. Army to walk 400 miles from their reservation in northeastern Arizona to the edge of the Pecos River in eastern New Mexico; like the forced march known as the Trail of Tears, thousands died.

Legacy Of Forced March Still Haunts Navajo Nation : NPR

How Elizabeth Blackwell became the first female doctor in the U.S. | PBS NewsHour

It was a cold, wintry day in upstate, western New York when a 28-year-old Elizabeth Blackwell received her diploma from the Geneva Medical College. As she accepted her sheepskin, Charles Lee, the medical school's dean, stood up from his chair and made a courtly bow in her direction.

Only two years earlier, in October of 1847, her medical future was not so certain. Already rejected at schools in Charleston, Philadelphia and New York, matriculating into Geneva represented her only chance of becoming a medical doctor.

Dean Lee and his all male faculty were more than hesitant to make such a bold move as accepting a woman student. Consequently, Dr. Lee decided to put the matter up to a vote among the 150 men who made up the medical school's student body. If one student voted "No," Lee explained, Miss Blackwell would be barred from admission.


How Elizabeth Blackwell became the first female doctor in the U.S. | PBS NewsHour

Is it 1914 all over again? We're in danger of repeating mistakes that started WWI - Independent.ie

History never repeats itself, but it sure does rhyme, it has been said.

Now an internationally respected historian is warning that today's world bears a number of striking similarities with the build-up to the First World War.

The newly mechanised armies of the early 20th century produced unprecedented slaughter on the battlefields of the "war to end all wars" after a spark lit in the Balkans with the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Empire's Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Professor Margaret MacMillan, of the University of Cambridge, argues that the Middle East could be viewed as the modern-day equivalent of this turbulent region.

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"While history does not repeat itself precisely, the Middle East today bears a worrying resemblance to the Balkans then," she says. "A similar mix of toxic nationalisms threatens to draw in outside powers as the US, Turkey, Russia, and Iran look to protect their interests and clients."

Professor MacMillan highlights a string of other parallels between today and a century ago. Modern-day Islamist terrorists mirror the revolutionary communists and anarchists who carried out a string of assassinations in the name of a philosophy that sanctioned murder to achieve their vision of a better world.



Is it 1914 all over again? We're in danger of repeating mistakes that started WWI - Independent.ie

Panama Canal . American Experience . WGBH | PBS

On August 15th, 1914, the Panama Canal opened, connecting the world’s two largest oceans and signaling America’s emergence as a global superpower. American ingenuity and innovation had succeeded where, fifteen years earlier, the French had failed disastrously. But the U.S. paid a price for victory: a decade of ceaseless, grinding toil, an outlay of more than 350 million dollars -- the largest single federal expenditure in history to that time -- and the loss of more than 5,000 lives. Along the way, Central America witnessed the brazen overthrow of a sovereign government, the influx of over 55,000 workers from around the globe, the removal of hundreds of millions of tons of earth, and engineering innovation on an unprecedented scale. The construction of the Canal was the epitome of man’s mastery over nature and signaled the beginning of America’s domination of world affairs.

The second half of the 19th century was a time of expansion and great technological advancement. Americans built the Brooklyn Bridge and completed the Transcontinental Railroad. The French had constructed the Suez Canal in Egypt in 1869 and set their sights on a canal through the Panamanian Isthmus. But after eight years of earthquakes, floods and disease-stunted progress, the French returned home bankrupt. The canal project would lay abandoned for nearly 15 years.

Panama Canal . American Experience . WGBH | PBS