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Early last year, after a series of frightening encounters with her former husband, Stephanie Holten went to court in Spokane, Wash., to obtain a temporary order for protection.
Her former husband, Corey Holten, threatened to put a gun in her mouth and pull the trigger, she wrote in her petition. He also said he would "put a cap" in her if her new boyfriend "gets near my kids." In neat block letters she wrote, "He owns guns, I am scared."
The judge's order prohibited Mr. Holten from going within two blocks of his former wife's home and imposed a number of other restrictions. What it did not require him to do was surrender his guns.
About 12 hours after he was served with the order, Mr. Holten was lying in wait when his former wife returned home from a date with their two children in tow. Armed with a small semiautomatic rifle bought several months before, he stepped out of his car and thrust the muzzle into her chest. He directed her inside the house, yelling that he was going to kill her.
"I remember thinking, 'Cops, I need the cops,' " she later wrote in a statement to the police. "He's going to kill me in my own house. I'm going to die!"
Ms. Holten, however, managed to dial 911 on her cellphone and slip it under a blanket on the couch. The dispatcher heard Ms. Holten begging for her life and quickly directed officers to the scene. As they mounted the stairs with their guns drawn, Mr. Holten surrendered. They found Ms. Holten cowering, hysterical, on the floor.
For all its rage and terror, the episode might well have been prevented. Had Mr. Holten lived in one of a handful of states, the protection order would have forced him to relinquish his firearms. But that is not the case in Washington and most of the country, in large part because of the influence of the National Rifle Association and its allies.
Advocates for domestic violence victims have long called for stricter laws governing firearms and protective orders. Their argument is rooted in a grim statistic: when women die at the hand of an intimate partner, that hand is more often than not holding a gun.
In these most volatile of human dramas, they contend, the right to bear arms must give ground to the need to protect a woman's life.
In statehouses across the country, though, the N.R.A. and other gun-rights groups have beaten back legislation mandating the surrender of firearms in domestic violence situations. They argue that gun ownership, as a fundamental constitutional right, should not be stripped away for anything less serious than a felony conviction — and certainly not, as an N.R.A. lobbyist in Washington State put it to legislators, for the "mere issuance of court orders."
That resistance is being tested anew in the wake of the massacre in Newtown, Conn., as proposals on the mandatory surrender of firearms are included in gun control legislation being debated in several states.
Among them is Washington, where current law gives judges issuing civil protection orders the discretion to require the surrender of firearms if, for example, they find a "serious and imminent threat" to public health. But records and interviews show that they rarely do so, making the state a useful laboratory for examining the consequences, as well as the politics, of this standoff over the limits of Second Amendment rights.
By analyzing a number of Washington databases, The New York Times identified scores of gun-related crimes committed by people subject to recently issued civil protection orders, including murder, attempted murder and kidnapping. In at least five instances over the last decade, women were shot to death less than a month after obtaining protection orders. In at least a half-dozen other killings, the victim was not the person being protected but someone else. There were dozens of gun-related assaults like the one Ms. Holten endured.
The analysis — which crosschecked protective orders against arrest and conviction data, along with fatality lists compiled by the Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence — represents at best a partial accounting of such situations because of limitations in the data. The databases were missing some orders that have expired or been terminated. They also did not flag the use of firearms in specific crimes, so identifying cases required combing through court records.
Washington's criminal statutes, however, contain a number of gun-specific charges, like unlawful possession of a firearm and aiming or discharging one, offering another window into the problem. Last year, The Times found, more than 50 people facing protection orders issued since 2011 were arrested on one of these gun charges.
In some instances, of course, laws mandating the surrender of firearms might have done nothing to prevent an attack. Sometimes the gun used was not the one cited in the petition. In other cases, no mention of guns was ever made. But in many cases, upon close scrutiny, stricter laws governing protective orders and firearms might very well have made a difference.
The Times also looked at several other states without surrender laws. In Minnesota, more than 30 people facing active protection orders were convicted of some type of assault with a dangerous weapon over the last three years, court records show.
And in Oklahoma, The Times found the case of Barbara Diane Dye.
Ms. Dye, 40, obtained an emergency order of protection in July 2010, on the same day she filed for divorce from her husband, Raymond Dye, a firefighter. Ms. Dye, who worked as a personal trainer at a gym the couple owned, explained in her petition that since telling her husband she wanted a divorce because of his infidelity, he had repeatedly threatened to kill her. She wrote that she feared he would "have a violent reaction when he receives divorce papers."
When asked if there were weapons on the premises, she wrote, "Yes." In fact, Mr. Dye possessed an arsenal of weapons, which Ms. Dye and her family would later beg the local police to help them deal with, to no avail.
After obtaining the court order, which was good until a hearing about a lengthier order three weeks later, Ms. Dye went into hiding in Texas but returned to Oklahoma to attend divorce proceedings. Two weeks after obtaining the initial order, she was in a bank parking lot in the city of Elgin when her husband pulled up in his truck, blocking her in.
Witnesses later told the police that Mr. Dye, 42, tried to drag her into his truck. When she fought back, Mr. Dye brandished a .357 revolver and shot her in the leg. She fell to the ground. Mr. Dye fired several more shots into her, saying, "I love you, I love you," according to the police report. He then shot himself in the chest with a different gun, a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol, and collapsed, dead, onto his wife.
"We kept telling them, 'He's got all of these weapons,' " said Ms. Dye's mother, Barbara Burk, a local official who has fought unsuccessfully in Oklahoma for a measure that would give judges issuing protective orders the power to order sheriffs to confiscate weapons and hold them for a "cooling off" period. "Is there nothing you can do?"
Legislative Landscape
Intimate partner homicides account for nearly half the women killed every year, according to federal statistics. More than half of these women are killed with a firearm. And a significant percentage were likely to have obtained protection orders against their eventual killers. (A 2001 study, published in Criminal Justice Review, of women slain by intimate partners in 10 cities put that number at one in five.)
It was in recognition of these converging realities that Congress included a provision in the 1994 crime bill, over the objections of the N.R.A., that barred most people subject to full protective orders filed by intimate partners from purchasing or possessing firearms. In a nod to the concerns of the gun lobby, the statute excluded most people under temporary orders, on the ground that they had not yet had the opportunity to contest the accusations in court.
The statute, though, is rarely enforced. In 2012, prosecutors nationwide filed fewer than 50 such cases, according to a Times analysis of records from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research center at Syracuse University that collects federal government data.
It has, therefore, largely fallen to a state-by-state patchwork of laws to regulate this issue — or not.
A handful of states have enacted laws requiring that judges order the surrender of firearms when issuing even temporary protection orders. The strictest states, like California, Hawaii and Massachusetts, make it mandatory for essentially all domestic violence orders; others, like New York and North Carolina, set out certain circumstances when surrender is required. In a few other states, like Maryland and Wisconsin, surrender is mandatory only with a full injunction, granted after the opposing party has had the opportunity to participate in a court hearing. Several other states, like Connecticut and Florida, do not have surrender laws but do prohibit gun possession by certain people subject to protective orders.
Although enforcement remains an issue, researchers say these laws have made a difference. One study, published in 2010 in the journal Injury Prevention, found a 19 percent reduction in intimate partner homicides.
Washington State has seen several efforts to enact firearm surrender laws. In 2004, Representative Ruth Kagi, a Democrat, introduced a bill mandating the surrender of firearms with temporary protective orders. But after strong opposition from the N.R.A., the bill failed to make it out of committee. The N.R.A.'s lobbyist in the state, Brian Judy, testified that the measure granted "extraordinarily broad authority to strip firearms rights."
Gun-rights groups stress that the subjects of temporary orders have not even had the chance to be heard in court, and that many temporary orders do not become full injunctions. Advocates for domestic violence victims counter that the most dangerous moment is when such orders are first issued, and that the surrender of weapons at this stage may be only temporary.
Nevertheless, in 2010, they decided to lower their ambitions and backed a proposal in the Washington Legislature requiring surrender only after a full protective order was issued, restraining threatening conduct against family members or children of family members. The measure also would have made it a felony to possess a firearm while subject to such an order.
Once again, the N.R.A. and its allies strenuously objected. The group sent out a legislative alert to its members, who besieged legislators. A veteran gun-rights lobbyist flew in from Florida to meet with Representative Roger Goodman, a Democrat who had introduced the measure.
Mr. Judy, the state N.R.A. lobbyist, wrote in an e-mail to Mr. Goodman that his organization considered the current Washington law "already bad on this subject." He added, "It is the N.R.A.'s position that any crime that is serious enough to cause an individual to lose a fundamental constitutional right should be classified as a felony."
Ultimately, lawmakers stripped the gun measure out of a broader package of domestic violence legislation.
Lessons of History
This year, the issue is pending once again in the Washington Legislature, part of a number of gun-related proposals introduced after the Newtown shooting. The proposed legislation, further narrowed in an attempt to placate the N.R.A., seeks to mirror the language of the federal prohibition, which bars most people under full protective orders from buying or owning weapons. But in an e-mail to House Judiciary Committee members considering the measure, Mr. Judy wrote that the federal law "does not provide adequate protection" and argued that individual firearm rights were more broadly protected in Washington's State Constitution than in the Second Amendment.
The bill seemed on the verge of being scuttled as the N.R.A. pushed to amend it in a way that supporters argued would render it meaningless, but House Democrats managed to close ranks and pass it. It faces a much steeper climb in the Republican-controlled State Senate, where the N.R.A. wields greater influence.
The issue has also gained traction in Colorado — a traditional power base for the gun lobby but also the state where 12 people were shot to death and 58 were wounded at a movie theater in July. A measure that would require the surrender of firearms in protection-order cases is part of a gun-control package passed by the State Senate last week, though not a single Republican voted for it.
And in Congress, Representative Lois Capps, Democrat of California, introduced a bill last week that would expand the federal prohibition to include temporary orders and current or former "dating partners."
Even so, across the country, any suggestion of a broad shift must be tempered by history.
In the mid-1990s, Wisconsin became one of the first states to require the surrender of firearms with full protective orders. But in 2010, seeking to strengthen enforcement, advocates for domestic violence victims pushed for the statewide adoption of procedures that had been successful in a few counties. Among a host of provisions, people subject to protective orders would have been required to list their firearms and surrender them to the county sheriff or a third party within 48 hours.
The N.R.A. mobilized, calling the measure "a blatant violation of Americans' Fifth Amendment rights" in an alert to its members. Jordan Austin, an N.R.A. lobbyist, expanded in his testimony on the bill before an Assembly committee: "Once a person has an injunction issued against him, he is already a prohibited person. He cannot, under the Fifth Amendment, be forced to disclose whether he is in possession of firearms, because that would be tantamount to forcing him to admit a crime."
The bill died in the State Senate.
In Virginia, the gun lobby has repeatedly stymied efforts to make it illegal for people subject to court injunctions to possess firearms. (Currently, they are barred only from buying and transporting firearms.)
"There's often recognition that firearms and domestic violence is a lethal combination, but it's followed quickly with concerns about taking away an individual's right to possess a firearm," said Kristine Hall, the policy director for the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance.
The lack of a state surrender law helps explain what happened when Deborah Wigg, a 39-year-old accountant in Virginia Beach, obtained a protective order in April 2011 against her husband, Robert Wigg, whom she was in the process of divorcing. In her petition, she described a violent encounter in which Mr. Wigg grabbed her by her hair, threw her down, ripped out a door and threw it at her. He was arrested and charged with assault. She also made clear in the petition that her husband owned a 9-millimeter semiautomatic handgun.
She eventually won a full protective order, but Mr. Wigg kept his gun, which he used in his business installing and servicing A.T.M.'s.
Ms. Wigg and her co-workers at an accounting firm openly fretted about the weapon. She agreed that every morning she would call Marty Ridout, a partner at the firm, so he could make sure she was safe.
On the morning of Nov. 8, 2011, Ms. Wigg left Mr. Ridout a voice mail message saying everything was fine.
Around 11 p.m. that night, however, Mr. Wigg, 43, showed up at his wife's home and began ringing the doorbell and pounding on the door. Ms. Wigg called her parents. Her mother, Adele Brown, told her to hang up and call 911.
But as Ms. Brown and her husband, who lived about a half-mile away, were heading over, Mr. Wigg smashed through the door and into the house. The Browns arrived to find a neighbor bent over their daughter's bleeding form, screaming, "Debbie, don't leave me!"
"When we got to her, those beautiful blue eyes were already set," Ms. Brown said.
Ms. Wigg died of a single shot to the head.
After shooting his wife, Mr. Wigg drove to the Browns', apparently to kill them as well. He killed himself in their front yard.
"It astounds me," Mr. Ridout said. "I cannot believe we have a society where a person has physically abused another person and been charged with assaulting her and that they don't automatically take away his weapon."
A System That's Working
One state with strict laws in this arena is California, where anyone served with a temporary protective order has 24 hours to turn over any weapons to local law enforcement or sell them to a licensed gun dealer.
Enforcement, however, has been inconsistent. So in 2006, the state set up pilot programs to increase enforcement in San Mateo County, just outside San Francisco, and Butte County, a largely rural area north of Sacramento. The programs' money dried up in 2010 with the state's fiscal woes, but San Mateo sought other financing because it believed that its program was saving lives.
"We have not had a firearm-related domestic violence homicide in the last three years," said Sgt. Linda Gibbons, who oversees the program as the head of the major crimes unit in the county sheriff's office.
Last year alone, the program took in 324 firearms through seizure or surrender from 81 people, out of more than 800 protective orders it reviewed.
Every morning, Detective John Kovach, who handles a range of domestic violence investigations, reviews a stack of protective orders filed the day before — generally 15 to 20 a day — looking for any mention of firearms.
Usually, a handful of orders a day will contain some reference to guns, which Detective Kovach follows up on. He sometimes contacts the person protected by the order to find out more. He also checks various law enforcement databases, including one available in California that tracks handgun purchases.
He goes out once or twice a week and serves the restraining orders himself. Usually, he says, he tries to collect firearms immediately, employing a well-honed sales pitch about helping the person comply with the law. If he believes beforehand that the person might not be cooperative, he will sometimes request a search warrant.
"My experience is the quicker you act, the more successful you're going to be," he said.
Notably, given the gun lobby's objections to seizing guns after just a temporary order, Detective Kovach said he had handled only one or two restraining orders involving firearms in the last year that were eventually dropped after the court hearing.
In a typical case, a 19-year-old woman from Redwood City filed for a restraining order against her husband in December, explaining that he had become increasingly abusive and that she had recently moved out. She checked off a box on the form saying he had used firearms to threaten her and, on a confidential "weapons possession data sheet" provided as a part of the San Mateo program, indicated that he owned an assault rifle and a handgun.
The detective picked up her order the following morning and, with a colleague, arranged to meet that day. She told them that after an argument a year earlier, her husband had threatened to kill himself, sending her in a text message a picture of himself holding an assault rifle to his head. More recently, he had warned that if she started dating, he would shoot the man, her and then himself.
Detective Kovach quickly secured a search warrant. He and several other detectives staked out the man's home and served him with the protective order while he was walking his dog. In their search, they turned up seven guns, including two AR-15 assault rifles.
"Every murder, when you look at it, there are always points where law enforcement could have made a difference," the detective said. "I don't ever want to be that guy who goes to sleep knowing he hasn't done everything to protect the public."
Deadly Consequences
In Washington State, The Times's analysis highlighted danger at play when there is no broad mandatory firearm surrender law.
Under current law, judges issuing protective orders are required to order the surrender of firearms only in very specific situations, like a determination by "clear and convincing evidence" that the person has used the weapon in a felony or has committed another offense that by law would disqualify him from having a firearm. Otherwise, judges have the discretion to issue a surrender order under a variety of circumstances, including a finding that there is a threat of "irreparable injury." (There is also a court form specifically requesting the surrender of firearms, but advocates say it is rarely used because few victims of domestic violence know about it.)
All five of the Washington cases identified by The Times in which the woman who obtained the protective order was later killed were murder-suicides. In three cases, the woman wrote in her petition that her husband or ex-boyfriend possessed firearms. In none of the cases did the judges issue surrender orders.
In fairness, it was not always clear that such an order would have prevented the deaths. Even so, those cases can show the existing system's weakness in the face of obvious peril.
Melissa Batten, a 36-year-old software developer for Xbox, secured a temporary protective order in July 2008, describing a series of episodes in which her estranged husband harassed her and also broke into her workplace in Redmond. She said he also pointed a loaded gun at her in an argument and then put it to his head, threatening to kill himself.
It fell to a mutual friend, however, not the courts or law enforcement, to deal with the gun. He persuaded the husband, Robert Batten, to sell his .22-caliber handgun back to the dealer, according to a police report. But Mr. Batten later bought two more guns, a .357 Smith & Wesson revolver and a 9-millimeter Taurus semiautomatic, according to the police. It is not clear exactly when he bought them, but the police found evidence that he went to a gun show a few days after being served with the protective order. (In some states, the existence of the order would have barred him from buying guns.)
Mr. Batten shot his wife eight times in the parking lot outside her home before shooting himself, killing them both.
Ms. Batten's case made headlines. Then there are the more routine episodes that unfold outside the public eye.
Julie Lohrengel obtained a temporary order for protection against her estranged husband, Shawn Lohrengel, in August 2010, detailing several encounters, including one in which he had shaken her and grabbed her by the throat. She checked off the box in the petition that indicated he possessed firearms.
The court commissioner did not order Mr. Lohrengel to surrender his guns. Several weeks later, Ms. Lohrengel and a friend, with Ms. Lohrengel's two children in the back seat, drove up to her home in Centralia but stopped when they saw Mr. Lohrengel's truck parked outside the garage. As they started backing out of the driveway, between five and eight gunshots rang out, but no one was wounded. When the police arrived, Mr. Lohrengel ran out onto the front porch with a rifle, as if looking for someone, the police report said. He eventually pleaded guilty to aiming and discharging a firearm and reckless endangerment.
Sometimes, the person who takes out a protective order is not the one ultimately victimized.
James Anthony Mills, 17, pleaded guilty last year to second-degree murder for firing two shots that killed Adrian Wilson, 16, at a birthday barbecue in Auburn, Wash. Less than a year before, an ex-girlfriend of Mr. Mills's had obtained an order for protection against him. She explained in her petition that Mr. Mills had threatened her with a gun during an argument. Nothing was done about the weapon.
Even in cases where there was evidence that someone subject to a civil order for protection possessed a gun in violation of state and federal law, no move was made to remove it.
Dennis Pirone was arrested in Seattle in July 2009 and charged with harassing his ex-girlfriend Jody Mayes. A criminal no-contact order was issued, requiring him to surrender his firearms. He filled out a form declaring that he had none. He was arrested again a few weeks later for violating the no-contact order. Once again, after being ordered to surrender firearms, he declared that he did not have any.
That December, Ms. Mayes sought a protective order, writing in her petition that Mr. Pirone had bought a gun even though "he is a convicted felon and is not supposed to have it in his own words."
Two months later, Mr. Pirone flew into a rage at another woman, a roommate, after she refused his sexual advances. He came back with a small silver handgun, told the woman, "I will kill you," and pointed the gun at her before firing a shot into an old sofa, according to a Seattle police report. The police later found two .22-caliber semiautomatic handguns in the house.
More than a year after her ordeal in Spokane, Stephanie Holten still cannot understand why the judge did nothing about her former husband's guns.
"I do believe in the Second Amendment," she said, "but at the same time, public safety has to be paramount."
Ms. Holten, 39, who is still seeing a counselor about the episode, said her mind relentlessly replays the scene of her on her knees, looking down the barrel of a loaded gun. In the recording of her 911 call, she can be heard sobbing and begging Mr. Holten to leave. He can be heard responding, between expletives, that she is going to die.
Mr. Holten — who later pleaded guilty to attempted first-degree assault and was sentenced to more than six years in prison — ordered her upstairs to her bedroom, forcing her to show him that she still had their wedding photos and other mementos. He then offered her a deal: he would put the gun down if she promised to drop the protection order, give him custody of their son and not call the police. When she tearfully assented, Mr. Holten placed his 9-millimeter carbine — the same weapon Ms. Holten believes she saw at his home a month earlier and cited in her court petition — in a hallway closet. That was when they both heard a male voice say "Police Department."
Her legs buckled, and she crumpled to the ground.
"I wish in my case he had to surrender everything," she said. "If the cops had been able to take the firearms out of that household when they served him, I think it would have averted the entire thing."


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No, I haven't suddenly turned into an economic optimist, but this week's new retail sales report is even better news than the media have noted. What's they've noted is that retail sales in July rose 0.8% relative to June, which was better than expected. They've also noted that retail sales fell 0.7% in June, which kind of cancels it out. But the bigger and better news, I think, is in the yearly change: retail sales rose 4.1% compared with July 2011, which is a pretty healthy rate of increase. And retail sales for the three-month period of May-July 2012 were 4.3% above the corresponding period for last year.
Two components that caught my eye:
- Sales of sporting goods, hobby, book, and music stores rose 10.6%. Perhaps not a very large part of GDP, but notable in that these goods tend not to be necessities. The surge in spending on these goods may point to growing consumer confidence that the consumer-confidence surveys (which tend to be focused on big-ticket purchases) do not pick up.
- Nonstore retailers' sales rose 11.8%. I assume this mostly means online sales from places like Amazon.com. Double-edged sword: good for consumers and those companies, probably bad for job creation as a whole, as I'd expect companies like Amazon.com to be a lot less labor-intensive than traditional brick-and-mortar stores. Which may have something to do with why the U.S. economy has been so crap at job creation over the past dozen years.
I should note that these numbers are not adjusted for inflation, but even after the adjustment they are still decent, especially considering that the Eurozone is basically in recession (0% growth in 1st quarter, 0.2% decline in 2nd quarter). The consumer price index rose just 1.4% y/y (July 2011 – July 2012) and not at all in July 2012, so this is a real improvement. Has the American consumer awakened?

subset: commoncrawl


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BERDYCHEV (Polish, BERDYCZEW):(Redirected from BERDYCZEW.)
A city in the government of Kiev, Russia; in historical and ethnographical relations part of Volhynia. It has one of the largest Jewish communities in Russia, and is often called the "Jerusalem of Volhynia." It is difficult to determine the time when Jews first settled there. From the sixteenth century till the end of the eighteenth, Berdychev was under the dominion of Poland; and the Polish family of Tishkewitz, the hereditary owners of that domain, ruled over it as they pleased. In 1593 it is stated that the owners of the "new town" of Berdychev farmed out to a certain Jew the mill-and bridge-taxes. In the eighteenth century the Jewish population increased considerably, and a Jewish "Ḳahal" (government of the community) was established, as in other large cities of Poland. A trade-union of Jewish tailors was formed in 1732 with the permission of the lady of the domain, Tereza (Theresa) Zawisha, who granted them autonomy and exemption from the rule of the Ḳahal. In 1794 Prince Radziwill permitted the Jews to elect their own civil judges in addition to the ecclesiastical court.
In 1765 King Stanislaus of Poland decreea that some great fairs be held during each year at Berdychev; and from that time the city became a commercial center, attracting the Jews from all parts ofthe country. At the government record office of Kiev some statistical data concerning the Jewish population of that period are preserved, according to which the numbers of Jews at Berdychev were: in 1765, 1,220; in 1784, 1,319; in 1787, 1,504; in 1789, 1,951. According to their occupations, 246 were liquor-dealers, 452 house-owners, 134 merchants, 188 artisans, and 150 clerks, together with 56 idlers. These figures may be considered too low; the taxes of the Polish government being heavy, as many persons as could possibly do so avoided being placed on the registers.
At the end of the eighteenth century, when the movement of the Ḥasidim among the Jews of Poland was at its height, Berdychev became the metropolis of the Ḥasidim of Volhynia, owing to the fact that about 1780 the celebrated "Ẓaddiḳ," Levi-Isaac, the author of "Ḳedushat Levi" (The Holiness of Levi), made it his headquarters. He created a great commotion by his teachings and by his quarrels with the "Mitnagdim." It is probable that the above-mentioned permission for the election of separate judges, given by Prince Radziwill in 1791, was secured by the Ḥasidim, who sought to emancipate themselves from the jurisdiction of the Ḳahal and the rabbis of the Mitnagdim. Great masses of people then flocked to Berdychev to see Levi-Isaac, who ruled there until 1810. At this period a printing-establishment for Hebrew books was in existence in the city.
In 1793, at the second division of Poland, Berdychev, with other cities of Volhynia, came under Russian domination. During the reign of Emperor Nicholas I., Berdychev was the largest commercial center in the Jewish pale. Afterward commerce diminished, and the poverty of the Jews there increased accordingly. Of all cities in the pale, Berdychev has the largest proportion of Jewish inhabitants. In 1899 there were 50,460 Jews in a total population of 62,283. There were seven synagogues and sixty-two houses of prayer.
- Regesty i Nadpisi, No. 694, St. Petersburg, 1899;
- Balinski i Lipinski, Starozytna Polska, ii. 632-635;
- Archiv Yugo-Zapadnoi Rossii, v. 55, 506, 608, Kiev, 1890;
- Bolshaya, Entziklopedia Pod Redaktziei Yuzhakova, iii. 74, St. Petersburg, 1901.


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NEW YORK (Reuters) - The benchmark Standard & Poor's 500 index ended at a five-year high on Friday, lifted by reports showing employers kept up a steady pace of hiring workers and the vast services sector expanded at a brisk rate.
The gains on the S&P 500 pushed the index to its highest close since December 2007 and its biggest weekly gain since December 2011.
Most of the gains came early in the holiday-shortened week, including the largest one-day rise for the index in more than a year on Wednesday after politicians struck a deal to avert the "fiscal cliff."
The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> gained 43.85 points, or 0.33 percent, to 13,435.21. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> rose 7.10 points, or 0.49 percent, to 1,466.47. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> edged up 1.09 points, or 0.04 percent, to 3,101.66.
For the week, the S&P gained 4.6 percent, the Dow rose 3.8 percent and the Nasdaq jumped 4.8 percent to post their largest weekly percentage gains in more than a year.
The CBOE Volatility index <.vix>, a measure of investor anxiety, dropped for a fourth straight session, giving the index a weekly decline of nearly 40 percent, its biggest weekly fall ever. The close of 13.83 on the VIX marks its lowest level since August.
In Friday's economic reports, the Labor Department said non-farm payrolls grew by 155,000 jobs last month, slightly below November's level. Gains were distributed broadly throughout the economy, from manufacturing and construction to healthcare.
Also serving to boost equities was data from the Institute for Supply Management showing U.S. service sector activity expanding the most in 10 months.
With the S&P 500 index at a five-year closing high, analysts said any gains above the index's intraday high near 1,475 in September may be harder to come by.
"We are getting to a point where we need a strong catalyst, which could be earnings, it could be three months of good economic data, it could be a variety of things," said Adam Thurgood, managing director at HighTower Advisors in Las Vegas, Nevada.
"What is going on right now is this conflicting view of fundamentals look pretty good and improving, and then you've got these negative tail risks that could blow everything up," Thurgood said.
He referred to "a fiscal superstorm brewing" of issues still left unresolved in Washington, including tough federal budget cuts and the need to raise the government's debt ceiling all within a couple of months.
The rise in payrolls shown by the jobs data did not make a dent in the U.S. unemployment rate still at 7.8 percent.
A Reuters poll on Friday of economists at Wall Street's top financial institutions showed that most expect the Fed in 2013 to end the program with which it bought Treasury debt in an effort to stimulate the economy.
A drop in Apple Inc shares of 2.6 percent to $528.36 kept pressure on the Nasdaq.
Adding to concerns about Apple's ability to produce more innovative products, rival Samsung Electronics Co Ltd is expected to widen its lead over Apple in global smartphone sales this year with growth of 35 percent. Market researcher Strategy Analytics said Samsung had a broad product lineup.
Eli Lilly and Co
Fellow drugmaker Johnson & Johnson
Shares of Mosaic Co
Volume was modest with about 6.07 billion shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange, NYSE MKT and Nasdaq, slightly below the 2012 daily average of 6.42 billion.
Advancing stocks outnumbered declining ones on the NYSE by 2,287 to 701, while on the Nasdaq, advancers beat decliners 1,599 to 866.
(Reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak; Editing by Nick Zieminski and Kenneth Barry)


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Star Wars fans had a lot of questions when it was first announced that Disney was set to purchase Lucasfilm – with the intention of producing an entirely new trilogy in a Galaxy Far, Far Away. However, one of the biggest questions surrounding the future of Star Wars is where the story would go in Episodes 7-9. Would the new films continue the narrative established in the original six installments and bring back fan-favorite actors (now 30 years older) to reprise their characters or would Lucasfilm clean the slate and center the trilogy around entirely new faces?
Now, we're getting unofficial word that Harrison Ford has signed-on to reprise his role as Han Solo in Star Wars: Episode 7 – lending credence to hopes that the film will directly continue storylines from the prior trilogy – while introducing new characters too. Of course, if the rumor turns out to be true, it would likely mean that other high-profile casting announcements are also in the pipeline.
Now that director J.J. Abrams is officially helming Episode 7, Star Wars-related rumors and reports are at an all-time high. Joining the chorus of unconfirmed reports on the production, Latino Review took to the Fox News Latino airwaves and announced that, according to their sources, Harrison Ford has officially signed-on for a "significant" appearance as Han Solo in Episode 7. Not entirely a big surprise, given that Ford has previously stated he'd be open to returning – if the story would allow for it. When pressed for further information, Latino Review admitted that there scoop was limited to the signing of Han Solo and anything beyond the casting itself would purely be speculation at this point. Latino Review has a relatively successful record with their scoops – so there's more than enough reason to believe that there's at least some truth to the report.
So what role will Han Solo play in Michael Arndt's upcoming Star Wars: Episode 7 story? Assuming that use of the word "significant" was deliberate (and accurate), it's safe to say that Harrison Ford won't just appear in a flashback or be viewable shooting a Rodian (first) in the background of a future cantina scene. Where Lucasfilm intends to take the character down the line (for Episodes 8 and 9) is still up in the air but, for Episode 7, it's pretty safe to say that Ford will have a central role – especially if the film deals in some way with Han Solo and Princess Leia's children (Jaina, Jacen, and Anakin Solo) as many have speculated.
A lot of fan-favorite Star Wars Extended Universe fiction centers around the Solo children and, even if Episode 7 doesn't directly follow any one specific storyline (i.e. possible female protagonist – aka Jaina), they could serve as a smart jumping off point for a new trilogy – not to mention provide an excuse for the return of other familiar faces: their mother, Leia (Carrie Fisher), Jedi Master Uncle Luke (Mark Hamill), and Wookie Uncle Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew).
Early reports of the Disney purchase indicated George Lucas sat down with Fisher and Hamill ahead of the final acquisition – mentioning the possibility of Episode 7, 8, and 9. This led many fans and industry insiders to speculate that he might have been putting out feelers to see if they'd be open to returning. As a result, the Han Solo rumor (and possible story implications) makes all the more sense.
Of course, this isn't the only Han Solo-related report that we've heard in the last few weeks. Disney has confirmed that in addition to the core trilogy event films, we'll also be seeing regular standalone movies set in the Star Wars universe – with spin-offs possibly involving Boba Fett, Yoda, and a Seven Samurai-like Jedi movie from Zack Snyder. A Han Solo standalone film (a prequel) was also mentioned and has quickly become the most talked about option among fans who are eager to see the smuggler's early days – or at the very least, see him make the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs.
Harrison Ford in Star Wars: Episode 7 is a strong probability but Lucasfilm has yet to officially announce the casting. So, as with all unconfirmed reports, take this news with grain of salt for now.
Ben Kendrick blogs at Screen Rant.


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Re: Scoping constructs Block, Module, ModuleBlock violate
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg111301] Re: Scoping constructs Block, Module, ModuleBlock violate
- From: John Fultz <jfultz at wolfram.com>
- Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2010 04:15:26 -0400 (EDT)
On Mon, 26 Jul 2010 11:06:56 -0700, Michael wrote: > On 7/22/2010 2:42 AM, John Fultz wrote: >> [...] >> I didn't look at your original code, but I think I probably know why >> your use of >> Block and Dynamic together failed. The principal point is that Block >> introduces >> an environment where variables can be temporarily redefined, but that >> environment evaporates the moment Block is finished evaluating. The >> contents of >> a Dynamic never even begin evaluating until well after the Shift-Enter >> evaluation is over. >> [...] >> > Hi again John, > > I'm seeing a similar thing happen when I use DynamicModule: > > xyz == "A"; > f[] :== DynamicModule[{tmp == "A"}, > CreateDialog[{ > PopupMenu[Dynamic[tmp], {"A", "B", "C", "D"}], > PopupMenu[Dynamic[xyz], {"A", "B", "C", "D"}] > }] > ]; > Button["Test", f[]] > > If I click on the "Test" button, I don't see the value of "tmp" being > changed when I pick different options from the pop up menu, but I *do* > see the value of "xyz" being changed when I pick different options from > its pop up menu. > > However, if I execute f[] directly, it works for both cases. Shouldn't > clicking the button produce identical results to calling whatever is > defined for its action? There seems to be something related to using a > dynamic module variable, perhaps it loses its definition during a Button > call or something. > >> Sincerely, >> >> John Fultz >> jfultz at wolfram.com >> User Interface Group >> Wolfram Research, Inc. >> > > Best Regards, > > Michael You need to read up on DynamicModule wormholes. In the help viewer, type: tutorial/AdvancedDynamicFunctionality and DynamicModule wormholes are the very last topic. However, they're also the very most advanced. You really should read the both the introductory tutorial here... tutorial/IntroductionToDynamic and the advanced tutorial, in their entirety, in sequence. Doing so will help you to understand both why the above failure happens and the best method for resolving it. Sincerely, John Fultz jfultz at wolfram.com User Interface Group Wolfram Research, Inc.


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Mac the Naw: Blue Ribbon Big Brown
Hello fellow anglers, a very happy Naw year to you all. I have been on, and am still on, winter vacation, but I wanted to give you a small update of what's going on in our local area. It's a good time to do some cold weather fishing. There are some hot, and some not so hot spots to go, and one of my favorites is just not accessible.LAKE TAHOE: I have to tell you. Gene St. Denis, captain and owner of Blue Ribbon Sport Fishing on Lake Tahoe, is on a hot streak. According to Nevada Department of Wildlife, Gene has on record the largest Mackinaw for the year at 28.9 pounds, the largest rainbow at 11.4 pounds and now the largest brown trout at 15.9 pounds. Mind you these are not lake records, just largest recorded fish brought in and weighed at NDOW. That is something to be proud of, and it's all from one boat named PT-109. This is the story in his exact words."A Day of Days… Yesterday on Lake Tahoe I hooked into a truly monstrous German brown weighing in at 15.9 pounds and 33 inches long. My son Eric St. Denis netted the magnificent Tahoe brown for me with one big swipe of the net at the back of the PT-109 in howling winds, blowing snow and 15-degree temperatures. We were trolling at 3 mph in 15 feet with a 5.5-inch trophy stick in Tui Chub covered in Pro-Cure Trophy Trout Gel. The big brown inhaled the lure. It's stomach Contents were full of mysis shrimp and baby crawdads. We recorded the catch at 1:30 p.m. on Dec. 29 at Elk Point just south of Zephyr Cove. Eric and I are still jazzed to say the least, as he fought like a freight train for 30 minutes. The current Lake Tahoe record brown trout is 15.14 pounds, we just missed it. My personal best Tahoe brown ever."INDIAN CREEK RES: The paved road from highway 89 is not advised and is unsafe due to excessive snow pack. The dirt road from Diamond Valley Road is slick and muddy, and by the time you read this, frozen and snow covered. Just like the lake itself, which has had 2 to 3 inches of ice on it and is very unstable. I have heard of only one angler crazy enough to attempt to ice fish it. Yes, he is still alive, but told me he crawled off of it like a baby and would never do that again.TOPAZ LAKE: Opening day was cold as usual. The fishing was good for average pan-sized trout. There were 13 tagged trout worth $100 each, and 12 trout more than 2 pounds brought in the first day. For the week, there was a total of 19 tagged trout brought to the Topaz General Store. The largest trout of the week in the Topaz Lodge derby was 4.6 pounds caught by Brett Kirby from Newman, Calif. In second place, was 4.3 caught by Aaron Wilson from Wellington, Nev. I was not able to make opening day this year, but I have spent some of my vacation time fishing the lake since then. I saw many small fish jumping on the north end. I got one bite. I could not really access the far east side through the park because I did not want to get stuck in the snow. But, I did see many does and a big buck enjoying the peace and quiet. I talked with Chuck Fields from Topaz Landing Marina. Chuck told me he heard many reports of slow fishing, most likely due to extremely cold weather, making the fish not very active yet. For those who are boat fishing, you need to use the Nevada park ramp. Due to unsafe conditions, Topaz Landing launch has not opened yet. Although, they are open for boat rentals. For more information on the Topaz Lodge derby. Go to topazlodge.com or call 775-266-3338. CAPLES LAKE: John Voss reported that many anglers are ice fishing at the dam or the spillway area. Anglers reported 6-to 12-inches of ice under a couple feet of snow. They are catching rainbow trout 10-to 15-inches. The Caples Lake General Store is closed for the season, but cabins and lodge rooms are available. For more information call 209-258-8888.RED LAKE: John Voss also reported 6-to 10-inches of ice on Red lake. A couple friends and I will be venturing up to see how much snow is on top of that this Saturday. Come join us. If you do not have an ice auger, I will loan you mine. There is no special pole or rigging needed. You can put everything you need in a ziplock bag, such as size 8 hooks, pinch weights, and a couple kastmasters or small spoons to jig with. I would advise wearing some good warm and dry winter clothing. Hope to see you there, and I'll have a full ice fishing report in the next article.Good luck on your next fishing adventure. If you get a photo of your catch send it to email@example.com. If you have any questions in our local fishing world call the Naw line at 775-267-9722. Good fishin' and tight lines.—Gene St. Denis (530-544-6552, http://www.blueribbonfishing.com) contributed to this report.
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RocketPlay Betting on Zynga to Bring Its Virtual Sports Casino to Facebook
RocketPlay has partnered with Zynga to bring its virtual sports betting game to Facebook.
The concept is similar to a sportsbook in Las Vegas, where fans drink beer, place bets and watch their favorite teams play on giant screens.
Now, instead of traveling all the way to Sin City, players can tune in to Facebook to check out the odds and place bets while watching the game from their living rooms. And, because sports betting is illegal in the U.S., the free-to-play game doesn't require players to spend a dime, making it a much more innocent form of entertainment.
The game, called Sports Casino, goes live today, just in time for the NFL's season opener tonight between the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Giants.
In the game, players place their bets based on RocketPlay's odds for a chance to beat the house. Initially, it will cover professional and college football, baseball and soccer games, with other sports, such as basketball, cricket and rugby, coming later.
RocketPlay, which has offices in both San Francisco and Tel Aviv, will be one of the first third-party developers to partner with Zynga. As part of that partnership, Zynga will publish the game on both the Facebook and Zynga.com platforms, and, in theory, direct thousands of players to use it. In return, RocketPlay will share the revenues with Zynga.
Matthew Cullen, president of RocketPlay, said the partnership with Zynga was attractive because of the 40 million users who play Zynga Poker every month, which makes it the second-most-popular game on the social network.
"Zynga Poker is an awesome game and it has a huge following — it hasn't lost speed for them at all," Cullen said. "We think sports betting is exactly the same thing, and that it's going to complement them really well. We had a number of options for distribution, and partnering with Zynga made too much sense not to do."
Third-party publishing is just one area where Zynga hopes to boost the company's growth. The second is in real-money gaming, making Sports Casino a good match on two fronts. Last week, AllThingsD reported that Zynga hired Maytal Ginzburg as the company's chief operating officer in charge of new markets, which includes gambling. Ginzburg was a high-level executive at 888 Holdings, which offers real-money games such as poker, bingo and sports betting online, where it is legal.
Cullen said RocketPlay was founded in 2008 as the developer behind Footbl.com, a social network for soccer fans, which managed real-money games based on fantasy teams. That is legal in the U.S. A little more than a year ago, it got serious about the opportunity on Facebook, given the popularity of virtual casino games, like slots, bingo and poker.
"We sat back and asked 'why the hell hasn't someone done sports betting?'" Cullen said, adding that sports betting is bigger than all the other kinds of gambling combined.
Cullen said that in addition to sports bets, Sports Casino will also incorporate other games you would normally find in a casino, like poker and slots, to keep people playing. Additionally, the Sports Casino offers "in-play betting," which means that people will be able to place bets after a game begins on all kinds of propositions, such as which team will be the next to score, or what are the odds of a turnover.
Next, he said, the company will be bringing the game to mobile, and down the road, it will investigate the opportunity for real-money gaming, especially in Europe, where Facebook is already conducting experiments.
The company, which has 21 employees, is backed by $10 million in funding from Pitango, an Israeli-backed venture capital firm.
Here's the press release:
RocketPlay Partners with Zynga to Bring Social Sports-Betting to Facebook and Zynga.com
Sports Casino Delivers Engaging Second-Screen Sports Experience with Live In-Game Betting
SAN FRANCISCO — Sept. 5, 2012 — RocketPlay, creators of groundbreaking social sports-betting games, today announced that it has launched Sports Casino, a social sports-betting title on Facebook and Zynga.com. Along with the game's release, RocketPlay also announced its partnership with Zynga (NASDAQ:ZNGA), the world's leading provider of social game services, to bring Sports Casino to the 306 million monthly active players on Zynga's network of games across Facebook and other platforms. Sports Casino is available to play at www.zynga.com and on Facebook at http://apps.facebook.com/sportscasino/.
"Sports Casino delivers an authentic virtual sports-betting experience to social gaming and sports fans," said Mani Honigstein, CEO, RocketPlay. "We're thrilled to launch with Zynga's support, a company that has set the social gaming benchmark and will help us bring a great game to a wide range of players."
Sports Casino players enjoy an authentic Las Vegas-style sportsbook experience, placing virtual bets on global sports with real-time odds, while enjoying integrated casino games such as video poker, slots, and blackjack. Players can enjoy in-game, real-time betting while competing with their friends – a perfect second-screen complement to watching live sports on television. Sports Casino arrives just in time for action-packed betting on professional and college football, baseball, and international soccer.
The game appeals to the highly sought-after male gamer demographic on Facebook, particularly as social betting games continue to grow in popularity. Though the game currently uses only virtual currency, RocketPlay has developed Sports Casino to take advantage of the rising importance of real-money gambling in the social space as opportunity arises and legal restrictions are eased.
The Zynga Platform is a social gaming platform designed to give players the most social and fun gaming experience wherever they play, while helping third-party developers of all sizes launch, promote, scale and grow their games and business.
Following the Sports Casino's release, RocketPlay will continue to update the game with new features and sports, including hockey, basketball, and more.
About RocketPlay
RocketPlay, formerly known as Gamingo, is a leading entertainment and gaming company, bringing sports and casino games to the Web, Facebook and Mobile. Developed by an experienced team comprised of social gaming and iGaming veterans from Betfair, Kabam, 888.com, and bwin.party, the company's flagship product, Sports Casino, is the first of its kind on Facebook. RocketPlay is funded by Pitango Venture Capital and has offices in London, San Francisco and Tel Aviv.


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As if all the other benefits of trees and hedging to the landscape aren't already enough, they're a godsend to horses, too! In amongst the hedgerows is also a good source of forage for them and can provide variety in their diet… but be careful what you plant as some can be harmful.
Posts Tagged 'quickthorn'
Perfect plants for paddocks and pastures: Horse-friendly hedging and Trees
Posted by Trees & Hedging Team on April 21st, 2015


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for better and for worse -- yet the automaker's selection of Mary Barra as chief executive is a big deal.
Barra will break ground as the American auto industry's first female CEO, but her appointment is about more than the breaking of another glass ceiling.
As the daughter of a die maker who worked 39 years at GM, she recognizes the importance of the company's workers on the factory floor. As a trained engineer, she understands the significance of first-rate design and precise production. As a career employee of GM, she has an allegiance to the company yet recognizes the need for additional changes in its culture.
And, yes, as a woman she is attuned to the product-based likes and dislikes of women, who purchase the majority of automobiles (in the United States, at least).
Yet the departing CEO, Daniel Akerson, has made clear that Barra's selection was not the result of an affirmative-action program or diversity initiative. "Mary was picked for her talent, not her gender," Akerson said Tuesday.
A new breed
For decades, GM was very focused on the gender of its executives: They were all men. What's more, as the quality of the company's products declined, it was clear that too little attention had been paid to talent.
But a new breed of designers, engineers, plant managers and executives -- including Barra, many other women and, of course, men -- helped GM emerge from bankruptcy in 2009 and manufacture substantially improved cars and trucks.
GM still has challenges in a global marketplace. It's share of domestic sales are stagnant, there are problems with European operations and the company must deliver on its promise that GM vehicles will maintain long-term quality.
But clearly the company's positioning is dramatically better than it was before bankruptcy and a $49.5 billion bailout by the U.S. government. The rescue was risky but it succeeded: GM has been profitable for 15 consecutive quarters; on Monday, the Treasury Department sold the last of the stock it received in exchange for the bailout.
The auto-industry press credited Barra for her contributions to GM's recovery and the release of new models that have been praised by consumer groups. Economic analysts at Barclays publicly expressed pleasure that an engineer with firsthand experience in product development will lead GM.
Judged by performance
Of course, once the news of the U.S. auto industry's first female CEO runs its cycle, Barra will be judged on the performance of the company she leads -- as she should be.
General Motors is no longer the behemoth that it once was, when the conventional wisdom was: What's good for GM is good for the country. But the multinational automaker remains an important cog in America's -- and the world's -- industrial machine. And when the chief executive of that company is both talented and a precedent-setting woman, that is good for the country.
Barra is good for GM
for better and for worse -- yet the automaker's selection of Mary Barra as chief executive is a big deal.


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Chair of Asian Art and James and Donna Reid Curator of Chinese Art
Clarissa von Spee brings more than a decade of museum experience to the CMA. From 2008 until 2016, von Spee served as curator of the Chinese and Central Asian Collections, Department of Asia, at the British Museum in London. She organized exhibitions including The Printed Image in China from the 8th to the 21st Centuries (2010); Modern Chinese Ink Paintings (2012); and Gems of Chinese Painting: A Voyage along the Yangzi River (2014).
In 2013, von Spee became a Fellow of the China Center of Visual Studies at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, China. Previously, she was assistant professor at the Institute for East Asian Art History, Heidelberg University, and curator at the Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst in Cologne.
Dr. von Spee received her PhD from Heidelberg University, having also studied in Taipei, Shanghai, and Paris. In 2016 she was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to conduct research on the art of the Jiangnan region of China.
Recent publications include Wu Hufan: A Twentieth-Century Art Connoisseur in Shanghai (2008); The Printed Image in China from the 8th to the 21st Centuries (2010); Der Perfekte Pinsel: Chinesische Malerei 1300–1900/The Perfect Brush: Chinese Painting 1300–1900 (2010); and Modern Chinese Ink Painting: A Century of New Directions (2012).
[1] https://www.clevelandart.org/art/collection/search?filter-department=Chinese%20Art


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Bradford 3-1 Aston Villa - The Bantams One Step Closer To Wembley
Bradford will take a two-goal lead into the second leg of their League Cup semi-final after beating Premier League opponents Aston Villa 3-1 at Valley Parade. Bradford started nervously as Villa pressed early on, with Christian Benteke testing keeper Matt Duke 13 minutes in, only to be denied by a smart save. The breakthrough moment came in the 19th minute, when Nakhi Wells capitalised on commotion in the Bradford penalty box to finish coolly and put the underdogs 1-0 up. Bradford continued to pile on the pressure in the second half, and while credit goes to Aston Villa for pulling a goal back through Andreas Weimann, it was Bradfords never say die spirit that won them this game in stylish fashion with two further goals from McArdle (77) and McHugh (88). The tie is fascinatingly poised, with the League Two side taking a two goal cushion with them to Villa Park, one would think they may be tempted into parking the bus and grinding out a passage to the final with a bore draw or taking their chances on a narrow defeat. Anyone making such an assumption clearly hasnt watched Bradford in this Capital One Cup campaign, where they have played adventurous and daring football to emphatically knock out high flying Arsenal on penalties. The chances are Bradford will fancy themselves away from home and will go out and attack their superior opposition, it is their way. Another twist to Bradfords startling cup run may come if they go through to the final and face Chelsea (who must defeat Swansea to get there themselves); then they will have a very strong chance of qualifying for the Europa League! It would be a thrilling turn of events, but for now all eyes are on the second leg of the semi-final which will be played on Tuesday the 22nd of January.
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A-level student in London, I write about football, Arsenal in particular. If you like what I write, follow me on twitter @Omar_A_MohamedSee more from Omar


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Obama and Military Tribunals
Yesterday, Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder, held a press conference and announced that Khalid Shaik Mohammed (KSM) would be prosecuted for war crimes before a military tribunal. It's probably fair to say, as some newspapers have noted, that the idea of bringing KSM to New York City to be tried in civilian court for the 9/11 atrocity was Holder's "signature" decision since becoming attorney general–and that that idea is now dead. However, Obama and Holder conceded a place for tribunals more than a year ago and they could never really offer a good explanation as to why some persons would go to civilian court and why others would go before tribunals. Like Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, Obama and his people would just sorta decide case‐by‐case.
Conservatives are chortling over Obama's apparent embrace of Bush policies, such as keeping Guantanamo open and reviving trials before tribunals. Like the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, however, Obama has not stumbled on to the correct path. He has instead shown exceptionally poor judgment yet again. Two questions are now looming on the horizon. First, prosecutors are anxious to have a lengthy 9/11 trial, but what if KSM calls the tribunal a farce and decides to skip the trial, plead guilty, and then demands to be executed so he can become a martyr? The tribunal might grant the wish, but the legitimacy of the military system may be called into question again–especially in the Muslim world. Second, the Pentagon has made it pretty clear that anyone acquitted by a tribunal will remain a prisoner at Guantanamo (pdf). There may be a legal rationale for that, but, again, how is that going to be perceived by the world? As a start, one might consider how we would react if an American were acquitted by a court abroad, but was nonetheless returned to his prison cell to be detained indefinitely.
There is no need to go there. Obama should close Gitmo and transfer the prisoners to Bagram and hold them there, but with full transparency. The Bush policies of secret prisons, secret interrogation methods, and secret trials before special military courts were wrongheaded and remain so.
For additional background, go here.


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It was a beautiful sunny day when I walked into work, but by noon I was drenched to the skin. Which was bad enough, but my desk drawer was a doll swimming pool and as for the computer, I was sure it was ruined. The entire office staff ended up outside in the sun wringing water out of our hair and suits. You'd think such a thing could only happen if a tornado came through, taking the roof off the building or shattering all the windows. Certainly none of us could have predicted such a heavy downpour on a day without so much as a wisp of cloud. It happened, though.
Take a Step Back
I should start at the beginning, I suppose. It wasn't really an ordinary day anyway. It was bring your child to work day, intended to interest kids in what their parents do for a living and give them career ideas. The noise level was much higher than usual when I came in, all the kids were chattering and being shown around the office. I went straight to my desk, not having a child of my own to bring in yet. Things settled down slowly as parents took their offspring back to desks and started explaining what they actually did all day. There were scattered complaints of boredom. The questions of how grown ups could stand to do this every day that triggered stifled snickers from the nonparents in the office. Looking back we should have been paying more attention to the bored kids.
How Does That Work?
Actually it was only one bored kid that caused the trouble. Eleven-year-old Tom, who was with his dad in the cubicle next to mine, was to the point of kicking his feet on the cubicle wall and asking about the fire extinguishers and the sprinklers in the ceiling. I took advantage of his trip to the bathroom to make a call without the background complaints. My phone call was interrupted by the shriek of the fire alarm. Startled I looked up to see Tom balancing carefully on the corner of an empty cubicle by the door. He was holding a wad of flaming toilet paper and towels from the bathroom right underneath an emergency sprinkler. I wasn't the only one to notice him right about then. I heard Tom's dad shout his name with all the force an angry parent can summon. Tom dropped the still flaming blob of burning tissue and lost his balance.
Not Part of Manufacturer Specifications
In his panic Tom grabbed for the nearest thing available to try and keep his balance. Unfortunately that happened to be the sprinkler hanging from the ceiling. Tom' s feet slid off the cubicle walls and he dangled for a few seconds before he came down. The sprinkler was still clutched in his hands. Water gushed from where the sprinkler had been. Apparently the system took that to mean that there was a true emergency and all the sprinklers in the building came on. Everyone grabbed for jackets or files to as a shield against the deluge, hitting the off switch on anything electrical before dashing for the exits. I helped Tom's dad carry him outside with the rest of the evacuation. His fall had snapped his ankle.
Roll Cameras
I don't know how the local news station heard about it but there was a shot that night of everyone out on the lawn looking like drowned kittens. The headline was Water Damage, Cincinnati Office Eye of the Storm. Both the company president and Tom's father refused interviews. It took several weeks to get the office dried out and back to normal. The next year the boss neglected to announce bring your child to work day. He banned Tom from the building for life, though. By Heidi Grover
Heidi Grover often writes about mishaps at work. She always gets nervous on bring your child to work day. She has sent recommendations to engineers about designing emergency sprinklers that will hold a person's weight. She also writes on behalf of clients like Water Damage, Cincinnati.


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I had decided to spend another night at Custer State Park and went into Rapid City to take care of some business - I needed a new camera! The one I had was putting a rather large grayish spot in the upper center of some pictures. Not all of them, usually those with a pretty blue sky. If you noticed, many of the shots taken in the Badlands and within the past few weeks were cropped to cut out some of the sky – that's why. Camera going bad. Not good. It also makes a bit of a grinding noise when the lens is extended when turning the camera on. Probably dirt or dust in the mechanism.
I had been looking around for the last couple of weeks but there wasn't a "big box" electronics store in the small towns I'd been through. Wally World had several nice cameras (Canon SX30 IS and a Nikon) on display but they were out of stock everywhere I stopped, including Rapid City. I ended up getting what was in stock and what met most of my criteria:
- A viewfinder (a must under bright light conditions as I often found that I couldn't see what I was taking a picture of!)
- Uses AA batteries (I severely dislike brands that use proprietary batteries and I love the convenience of "regular" batteries, especially rechargeable ones).
- More megapixels and greater zoom capabilities than the current camera.
I played with the idea of getting a digital SLR but I really like the convenience of a smaller camera. I hauled around bunches of lenses and camera bodies when in the Navy and for years afterward. Just didn't want to do that again.
I purchased a Fujifilm Finepix S2940 with 14 megapixels and an 18x zoom. The current camera was 12 megapixels and 12x zoom. Also would have liked a little bit more zoom capability but the 18x zoom is a nice compromise. It is about the maximum that I can effectively hand-hold and not get fuzzy photos! Anything longer would require use of a tripod, at least for me.
The first three photos were taken with the "old" camera (Canon SX120 IS) in the morning and the last three with the new Fujifilm camera in the afternoon. The image of Washington was cropped from a landscape photo only so much as to eliminate traces of the other fellows. The Lincoln image is not cropped at all.
There seems to be a bit of a "lag time" before the next picture can be taken, but overall I'm happy with the new camera and I'm loving the viewfinder! It also has a panorama setting that is pretty slick.
Update: After using it for five days, the Fujifilm camera went back to the store. The "lag time" between photos was unacceptable. It would take anywhere for 10 to 30 seconds between shooting one picture and being able to take the next one! If I'd had this camera in White River, I never would have been able to take those action photos of the rodeo. It didn't seem to matter whether the batteries were fully charged or partially used or nearly completely used. I really liked the camera but that "feature" made it difficult for me to continue to use it. The other thing that I didn't like was that it did not have an on/off button, rather it had a sliding switch that sometimes didn't turn the camera on when it was moved to the "on" position. I would NOT recommend this camera to anyone! So, I've reverted to using the "old" camera again for a while, until I can find what I want. I'm looking at the Canon SX30 IS and the Nikon P500. Although several "big box" stores have them on display they don't have them in stock, at least in the places I've stopped! Sigh....


text:
Click here to play "Dr. Michael Hill, 2004 Virginia LS State Meeting"
Dr. Michael Hill, September, 2004 Virginia League of the South State Meeting
The Patrick Henry Chapter
Virginia League of the South
[Transcribed by Tara Carreon, ABOL Librarian]
[Dr. Michael Hill] When God foiled the building of the Tower of Babel on the Plains of Shinar, he did so in order that the people might be scattered into separate nations, and no longer be one people with one language. That's Genesis 11, verses 1-9.
In the previous chapter of Genesis, we are told that the sons of Noah, Shem and Japheth. and their descendants would occupy specified parts of the earth. For example, we read in Genesis 10:5 regarding the sons of Japheth, "By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided into their lands, every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations." It's clear then that God intended man to live separately, with their own languages, kith and kin, and nations. Therefore nations, that is peoples, have a biblical mandate to exist, and thereby to protect their interest from those who would destroy them, either by war, genocide, or more subtle means.
Because of a resurgence of godless multiculturalism and universalism, which is the new Tower of Babel, white Western Christians are threatened with extinction as a separate and identifiable people, because of their own weakness and lack of Biblical understanding about the God-ordained principles of nationhood.
While all other nations, or peoples, groups based on race, ethnicity, and blood and soil, are encouraged today to preserve themselves and their cultures, white Christians in the West are told that we must give up everything we have in order to placate those who are different from ourselves, and who bear some alleged grievance toward us, whether it be slavery, racism, hatred, you name it.
And sadly, as has been alluded to earlier, it is often Christian ministers who lead the charge toward multiculturalism, pluralism and universalism in the name of God himself. But these are false teachers. You can see them as that way.
By the Grace of God -- I'll repeat that phrase -- by the Grace of God, the philosophies and institutions of Christian liberty, are the creation of Western European thoughts. In an age of rabid political correctness, this salient truth is buried beneath the monumental lie that all men, and hence all cultures and civilizations, are created equal.
You know, but the truth is a stubborn and resilient thing. And the truth is that at least for the past 400 years, Western Christian -- that is, European -- American civilization alone -- ALONE! -- has enjoyed the fruits of order, liberty and abundant material prosperity. Elsewhere in the world, despotism, sloth and poverty have been the order of the day.
However, let us not boast for the simple reason that God has ordained things thusly out of his eternal wisdom. The Western world's blessings of the gospel, liberty and prosperity are just that: a blessing.
In Acts 16, verses 6-9, Paul and Silas were headed to Asia to spread the gospel, but the holy spirit forbade them to go into that region. Instead, the spirit led them by means of Paul's dream westward, into Macedonia. Thus, the gospel was forbidden in Asia in that day. Conversely, it was God's will that they be spread into Europe. Of this we cannot boast. Rather, we can only thank God that in his providence he saw fit to bless our ancestors with his Word, and all that flows from obedience to it.
Our white, European, American ancestors had no trouble enunciating the obvious truth that Western Christian civilization was superior to all others. When I taught at the University of Alabama, and taught Western Civilization for almost 20 years, I wish I had a quarter for every time I got called to the Dean's office or the Department of Chair's office because of some irate, left-wing student who says, "Dr. Hill is saying that Western white civilization is superior to everything else, and we just don't like that." Well, the Dean and the Department Chair just finally got tired of it, and just left me alone.
But this is the truth. And I thought that that's what universities sought to give to their students, is truth.
Well, our ancestors in the South had no trouble understanding this truth. Moreover, they had no hesitation about defending it. Defending it as their God-given patrimony against those who would denigrate it or destroy it.
And just a century and a half ago, right before the war, our civilization was still distinguished by a robustness and self-confidence, born out of the realization of the natural superiority of the West and its ways. None but the most cracked-brain utopians believed in social, political, economic, and cultural equality. Nor did they believe in the equality of the races, in intellect and accomplishment.
Unfortunately, our present century, and the previous century, has witnessed this old order turned upside-down on its head. Today, the descendants of those European-Southern white folks who are our ancestors, today we their descendants behave as a shamed and defeated people.
Not only do we refuse to proclaim the God-ordained superiority of our own civilization, and its venerable institutions, we also refuse to defend the very ethnic and racial peculiarities that gave form and definition to our civilization. "White" has become a dirty word, and we have no one but ourselves to blame for letting it happen. Few whites today can even use the term without wincing and casting furtive glances to and fro. I mean, we're afraid to call ourselves what God created us. And to deny one's identity in such a manner is to dishonor the God who made us what we are, and who separated us apart from the other races and peoples for his own eternal purposes. While Blacks, Hispanics, Asians and other groups revel in their natural peculiarities, whites will not even dare admit that race is one of the primary factors that determines who we are, and what we create on this earth. This is a simple and fundamental fact of God's creation. We are who we are simply because he's commanded it.
Because Christian liberty has been the product of Western civilization, should the white European stock of America disappear, then both liberty and civilization as we have come to know them, will cease to exist for us.
As we have lost the will to defend our inheritance, there has been a corresponding increase in the willingness of others to destroy our civilizations. I don't have to tell you that when our enemies see and sense that we are weak, they will strike. Other people see today that Western white Christians, and their civilizations, will not defend themselves; therefore, they seek to replace it with their own vision of what they consider to be the good society. That vision -- or for us, nightmare -- will have no truck with the rule of law, equity or fairness. It will be predicated on what I like to call the intimidation factor, the employment of brute force of the strong against the weak. In short, it will be payback time for the alleged mistreatment that minorities -cum-majorities have suffered at the hands of what they so often now call the White Devils.
Why do we Southerners, in particular those of us who can trace our lineage back to the founding stock, lack the backbone to stand for the civilization that was given to us by our forbears? That's the question that we have to answer. Why will we not defend our patrimony? What is it that has paralyzed us to the point that we are about to commit suicide if we do not stand?
A major reason is a thing called "collective guilt." When the white man first came into contact with the darker races through the institution of slavery in the 17th century, slavery, and not man-stealing, was successfully defended from a Biblical standpoint through the war for Southern Independence and beyond. But after the South's defeat and subsequent reconstruction, the institution's legitimacy was systematically undermined in the name of equality, and misappropriated Christian ethics. By World War I, Communists in Europe and America seized on the issues of equality, racism, and white guilt, and began to use them as battering rams to knock down the gates of the old social, political, and economic order in the West.
Moreover, the bogus work of leftist intellectuals such as Franz Boas and Margaret Mead, told white Europeans and Americans that all cultures were basically equal, which has come to be known today as "cultural relativism." Slavery and racism, and as was pointed out earlier, the latter term -- I think Stan pointed it out -- was coined by the Communists. Because of these things, they become instruments wielded by the left to destroy the very civilization which allows them freedom and leisure to formulate and articulate their ideas in the first place.
This nihilistic predilection shared by all leftists, appears paradoxical at first glance. However, upon closer inspection, it reveals a deep-seated hatred of God-given order and rationality, hallmarks of the White western Christian world. The leftists' embrace of the antithesis of ordered Christian liberty manifested itself early on in a fascination with the primitiveness of non-white, non-Christian peoples and cultures. It was the enlightenment philosophers after all, in France, who first became enamoured with the idea of the noble savage: those who had not been corrupted by the vile civilization of the west. The leftists' success in introducing the concept of racism into the American social and political lexicon, has today led to increasingly shrill demands from Black leaders for reparations. This is clearly a policy of economic blackmail, and intended to transfer yet more wealth from whites to blacks. It is also, more importantly, another means of eliciting from whites an admission of guilt in order that their civilization might further be discredited.
But instead of whites owing blacks reparations for slavery, and its alleged attendant ills, blacks in reality owe White America, especially the South, a debt that will not be acknowledged and certainly not repaid. As Donny Kennedy said to me as we were discussing his new book on American slavery -- I think it's called "American Slavery" -- he said basically, the Blacks owe us for the boatride over here. And I tend to agree.
Now, let's see what they left here.
Sold into slavery by their own people, or by the Muslims who so many Blacks seem to hold in such high regard today, which I could never quite understand why, Africans were transported out of a heathen and idolatrous continent, and set down in the most Christian section of America. There they were instructed in the Christian religion of their masters, given cradle-to-grave security, and generally treated quite humanely. In short, they were given a chance to live in an advanced civilization.
And because of this, they have prospered mightily. All you have to do is contrast the lot of today's black Americans with that of his brethren back in Africa to see the truth of this assertion. Yet, you'll never get them to admit that that is where this has all led to. Why? Because it's too good of a weapon to use against us.
The South's military defeat in 1865 and the sudden, subsequent emancipation of 3-1/2 million slaves, was a disaster for whites and blacks alike. Former slaves who found themselves on top in many areas of the reconstruction of the South, generally proved unfit to hold positions of authority. Spurred on by the radical Republican leaders, these black legislators, and newly-enlisted soldiers, earned the enmity of disenfranchised whites who saw the destruction of their society at hand. Therefore, once the Union military occupation forces were withdrawn from the south in 1876, white southerners immediately began to reassert their authority over a war-ravaged society. During the period of reconstruction, 12 years, 1865-77, whites in the south had seen enough of negro rule to understand that their civilization would perish should blacks be given the vote and thus be permitted to control the political system.
Whereas whites and blacks in the antebellum south lived and worked in close proximity, once the situation changed at the end of the war, especially with the passage of the reconstruction amendments, some new arrangement became necessary if our white ancestors were to conserve the society that they had built. Few southerners of the late 19th century believed that whites and blacks could live together in a state of equality without serious consequences for both races. If you don't believe that, just go back and read what they had to say, all the way back to Jefferson. Therefore, postbellum Southern blacks were disenfranchised, and Jim Crow laws resulted in a segregated south. And I must admit that as much as I would like to claim authorship of this next clever term I'm about to use, I can't do that. I'm going to have to give credit where credit is due to John Vincent. Today, Jim Crow has been replaced by what might become "Jim Snow" policies that discriminate against whites. Thank you, John.
Through these measures, white southerners were able to exert some control over a still primitive and uneducated black population during the period of reconstruction. Nonetheless, the black community of the late 19th century, began to experience problems largely absent prior to 1865. I talked to Clyde Wilson who studied this, and he says it's almost impossible, it is impossible to find the levels of illegitimacy, poverty, family disintegration, crime among southern blacks before 1865. He said that about the 1890s, these problems -- black on black crime, illegitimacy, abject poverty, family disintegration, among others -- became an epidemic within the black community. And this was only one generation removed from emancipation.
Despite trillions of dollars spent on welfare and other programs in the past century, these problems, and many others, still plague the black community to the present day. Clearly there's an ever-present problem here, that emancipation and money did not solve and cannot be explained away by a white [inaudible].
Today it's fashionable for black leaders, hispanic leaders, and their white liberal allies, to blame slavery, racism, you name it, for the continuing ills that beset the black and other minority communities. These ills were not eradicated by the civil rights revolution, and now black and other minority failure must have a fresh excuse, and that excuse is institutional racism. To the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons of the world, the only remedy is the destruction of our civilization, white western European civilization, in which blacks and other minorities cannot compete. And this society, in their view, must be replaced with a society based on the principles and mores of dark-skinned people, usually some form of Marxism. This is why whites, beginning with southerners, the easiest targets, and their way of life, must be demonized and eradicated. Blacks and other minorities claim they simply cannot get a fair shake in a white man's world, therefore the white man must give up his world.
The cold facts of history give the lie to the claims of the afro-centrist, who says that we stole their civilization. You know, it started with the Greeks and it never stopped. We stole their civilization and made it our own. Well let me tell you this, having studied the European colonial history of the 19th century, I can say this: that the little light that did shine on what has been called "the dark continent," came only as a result of 19th century European colonialism. Once these colonial regimes were dismantled after World War II, Africa began a steady descent into decadence and barbarism. And all you need to do is look at the poster child, Robert Mugabe -- he's it.
You know, I will not call Rhodesia Zimbabwe. I just simply refuse to do it. To me it will always be Rhodesia. And Nelson Mandela's South Africa.
What you see here are the deleterious effects of white disestablishment and black rule. And anyone with half a brain and one eye can see that. That is simply the truth that can't be covered up. These were two prospering countries in Africa, and now they are no different from any other place in Africa.
Again, it is a cold and hard fact that if white Christian Americans should lose control over the North American continent to non-white, non-Christian minorities, then this will cease to be the civilized place we've known for the past several hundred years. And I do not want my children and grandchildren to live in such a place. I mean, we're talking about a matter of our own survival here, folks. That is what it is. And the time for mincing words and dancing around the subject is over. Because this is about our survival as a people.
As minorities have gained political control over towns and cities, the decline in the quality of life for whites has become precipitous. Whites have very quietly deserted the places their forefathers built, rather than stay and be subjected to the crime and disorder that frequently comes with minority rule. Especially intolerable is the never-reported epidemic of black on white violent crime. Whites then don't leave because they are "racists," whatever that means. But they leave because they fear for their lives and property in an unfamiliar and inhospitable environment. They become outsiders.
You know, I have two grown daughters, and I have one daughter who is 12, and I learn a good deal about current popular culture through them as sort of conduits. But I also learn a lot by simply observing things on the streets. And when I see a blonde-haired, blue-eyed boy walking around with his britches hanging down, and his underwear showing, and a backwards baseball cap on, listening to rap music, you know what the first thing I say is? We have failed. We have failed. There's a cultural vacuum that that kid's trying to fill. And we have failed to give him the true fundamentals of his own culture to fill it.
And the idea that, you know, you have this TV-Hollywood nexus today. It's the epitome of cool among young people, I don't care whether they're white or black or hispanic or whatever. To act in the manner that they see put forth on the television, and that's why as Franklin Sanders has said before, one of the three things that we all ought to do is kick out our television sets, because that has been the purveyor of this kind of sewage through our living rooms. And we're surprised that our children act like this when they watch four or five or six hours of TV in a day after being at government schools for the other 8 hours? And we're surprised that they act like this?
You know, why listen to Mozart when you can listen to rap? I mean, I know why, but you know a lot of young folks think rap is cool, and Mozart is just a old dead white European male. In fact, what we're seeing today is the descent of our culture to the lowest common denominator.
And stemming naturally from this very sad state of affairs is not a sense of cultural equality, but of cultural superiority. And if you want to see a representation of that, just look at how white men, particularly fathers, are portrayed on television programs and movies. The squarest, most unhip, uncool characters that you can imagine. And everybody else is portrayed as cool and hip and witted. So this is not about cultural equality, it's about cultural superiority. And it's not our culture that's elevated to the superior place.
Now, its I think a short series of steps from white guilt over slavery and racism, to equality, to multiculturalism, and diversity, to hate crimes, and hate speech, and then to the ultimate compromise of racial extinction through either genocide or miscegenation. At that point, our civilization won't be needed. For whatever reason, it will be gone. And our question again today that I'm putting to you is, "Are you willing to do and say and write what is necessary and true regarding the questions of our survival as a people?"
What will happen when America is no longer a predominately white Christian nation? Already we've seen that the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 60s, what I like to call "the second reconstruction," was more about special privileges for blacks and other minorities than about equality. Moreover, guilt-ridden whites have acquiesced to a campaign of silence about the epidemic of black on white violent crime. That's the biggest dirty little secret, that's the 2-ton elephant at the tea party that everybody plays like it's not there.
There are, however, some blacks who see the truth, and are willing to speak it. One is syndicated columnist and George Mason University economist Walter Williams [libertarian], who recently said that the antebellum south was absolutely right to defend its largely anglo-celtic civilization from the machinations of Yankee abolitionist meddlers.
Then there is Elizabeth Wright. Do any of you know who Elizabeth Wright is? Elizabeth Wright and her views undoubtedly shape the liberal egalitarians to their very core. Elizabeth Wright is a black woman, and she wrote this: "I'm not fooled by the diversity folk into believing that the institutions of this society will be preserved and honored by those who happen to share my gene pool. The multicultural ideologues make it clear that they view these institutions with contempt. They are working for nothing less than total control of the [inaudible]."
Well, Wright has indeed pegged the multicultural egalitarians correctly. Raw power is their one and only end, and they'll use any means necessary to obtain it. And when they do, we, as white European-Southerners, will be their first target. They've made that clear. Then we'll understand what "equality" really means. When they get in control, we'll understand. Wright believes, and I quote: "when these people -- meaning blacks and other minorities -- come to power, their major aim will be to institute their enlightenment policies in all quarters of society. I have heard them refer to liberties such as freedom of speech as no more than 'jive ass claptrap'." She continues: "I predict that, once in power, they will actually create laws to impose interracial unions, in order to finally bring about the 'raceless' dream society. He who insists on union with his own kind will be dubbed an intractable racist, and sent off for further re-education."
Now, it goes without saying -- but I'm going to say it anyway -- that few whites today would have the intestinal fortitude to say what Elizabeth Wright has said. And this is the problem. Even in the benighted and racist South, most whites will no longer speak and act in their own interests. However, the situation here, as bad as it is, particularly in the big cities, the yuppie suburbs, and the big wimpy churches, it's worse elsewhere. If a spirited defense of white, Western, Christian civilization is to be mounted on these shores, then it will be in the South among the remnant of proud Anglo-Celts who remember the glories of their past. As likely as not, the South will find it necessary to break away from a decrepit Union that has already succumbed to the poison of multiculturalism, and then form a new confederacy dominated by the mores and institutions of our own people and our civilization.
Once again, Elizabeth Wright -- and don't you feel ashamed that a black woman has to do our talking for us? -- here she says, she seems to understand the predicament better than we do. She sees, "no deep-seated, heartfelt opposition to this trend -- and it's multiculturalism -- except among white Southerons. Other types of conservatives talk tough," she says, "until an epithet is hurled their way. Then they fold." Undoubtedly she's talking here about the Republican Party.
Wright concludes her remarkable essay with a call to arms for white Southerners. And remember, it's the Wright woman. Man, we can't do our talking for ourselves! Quote: "Who is most likely to fight the hardest to maintain and conserve this extraordinary experiment in freedom? Who else but the actual descendants of those Founders, that's who. That means you, white Southerons. Once you lay down the sword, that will be the end of resistance. I view the battle," she writes, "as one that can be only accomplished by white southerners. I would think that most whites would want to be among the last who would destroy that which came out of the genius of their own ancestors." And she concludes, "So, if a white South would guarantee the preservation of those institutions, then let's have a White South."
Now, this is a refreshing column. But look, we can say, "Man, aint it great that the Elizabeth Wright woman is on our side?" Yeah, I'd rather have her as a friend as an enemy. But it is not her job to do this. Is it? It is our job to defend our heritage, our culture, as a thing bequeathed us by our ancestors. If we can't do it for ourselves, then it won't last.
Yeah, this is a refreshing column, but it is white southerners themselves who must muster the courage to act, and act very soon. Demographers predict that whites will be a minority in this country by 350?, and this is already true today -- a little bit ahead of schedule -- in California and Texas, and, I believe, Arizona and New Mexico. If we are not willing to fight to preserve the glorious heritage bequeathed us by men of honor, genius, and principle, then we truly deserve the disinheritance that's going to befall us for sure in the next half century. We are sowing the wind because of our inaction regarding immigration, in particular, and the spread of multiculturalism. We will likely reap the whirlwind.
I thank you for your attention. I thank Randy for inviting me to speak. And may God save the South!