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[Rheo]

 

News, post snippets, video's, what you heard on tv or at the grocery store...or what Obama didn't know and the lies he spreads when his mouth is moving.

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[Cyber_Liberty]

New thread. Smells like carpet glue.

[SrWoodchuck]

WORLD EXCLUSIVE: Jack the Ripper unmasked: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2746321/Jack-Ripper-unmasked-How-amateur-sleuth-used-DNA-breakthrough-identify-Britains-notorious-criminal-126-years-string-terrible-murders.html

 

How amateur sleuth used DNA breakthrough to identify Britain's most notorious

criminal 126 years after string of terrible murders. DNA evidence on a shawl found at Ripper murder scene nails killer. By testing descendants of victim and suspect, identifications were made.

 

Jack the Ripper has been identified as Polish-born Aaron Kosminski. Kosminski was a suspect when the Ripper murders took place in 1888. Hairdresser Kosminski lived in Whitechapel and was later put in an asylum.

When my involvement in the 126-year-old case began, I was just another armchair detective, interested enough to conduct my own extensive research after watching the Johnny Depp film From Hell in 2001. It piqued my curiosity about the 1888 killings when five – possibly more – prostitutes were butchered in London’s East End.

 

Despite massive efforts by the police, the perpetrator evaded capture, spawning the mystery which has fuelled countless books, films, TV programmes and tours of Whitechapel. Theories about his identity have been virtually limitless, with everyone from Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence, to Lewis Carroll being named as possible suspects. As time has passed, the name Jack the Ripper has become synonymous with the devil himself; his crimes setting the gruesome standard against which other horrific murders are judged.

 

I joined the armies of those fascinated by the mystery and researching the Ripper became a hobby. I visited the National Archives in Kew to view as much of the original paperwork as still exists, noting how many of the authors of books speculating about the Ripper had not bothered to do this. I was convinced that there must be something, somewhere that had been missed.

 

By 2007, I felt I had exhausted all avenues until I read a newspaper article about the sale of a shawl connected to the Ripper case. Its owner, David Melville-Hayes, believed it had been in his family’s possession since the murder of Catherine Eddowes, when his ancestor, Acting Sergeant Amos Simpson, asked his superiors if he could take it home to give to his wife, a dressmaker.

 

Incredibly, it was stowed without ever being washed, and was handed down from David’s great-grandmother, Mary Simpson, to his grandmother, Eliza Smith, and then his mother, Eliza Mills, later Hayes.

 

In 1991, David gave it to Scotland Yard’s Crime Museum, where it was placed in storage rather than on display because of the lack of proof of its provenance. In 2001, David reclaimed it, and it was exhibited at the annual Jack the Ripper conference. One forensic test was carried out on it for a Channel 5 documentary in 2006, using a simple cotton swab from a randomly chosen part of the shawl, but it was inconclusive.

 

Most Ripper experts dismissed it when it came up for auction, but I believed I had hit on something no one else had noticed which linked it to the Ripper. The shawl is patterned with Michaelmas daisies. Today the Christian feast of Michaelmas is archaic, but in Victorian times it was familiar as a quarter day, when rents and debts were due.

 

I discovered there were two dates for it: one, September 29, in the Western Christian church and the other, November 8, in the Eastern Orthodox church. With a jolt, I realised the two dates coincided precisely with the nights of the last two murder dates. September 29 was the night on which Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes were killed, and November 8 was the night of the final, most horrific of the murders, that of Mary Jane Kelly.

 

DailyMail via WeaselZippers

[SrWoodchuck]

Huge Cyber Attack On U.S. From China, Watch Live Now

 

http://map.ipviking.com

 

Via WeaselZippers here: http://weaselzippers.us/198823-huge-cyber-attack-on-u-s-from-china-watch-live-now/

[SrWoodchuck]

[SrWoodchuck]

 

Via TheoSpark

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Bruce Levenson will sell Atlanta Hawks after releasing racist e-mail

[Geee]

 

 

 

At Last, someone skips the PC crap!!!

[Rheo]

Isn't she incredible, I cheered at the end.

[Valin]

Bruce Levenson will sell Atlanta Hawks after releasing racist e-mail

I've got $10.00.

[SrWoodchuck]

 

 

 

At Last, someone skips the PC crap!!!

 

I have a lot of respect for everyone on that panel. Brigitte Gabriel has lived the life of Muslim jihad & terror. Claire Lopez is one of the most respected ex-CIA, Mid-east experts & Frank Gaffney has the knowledge & the right delivery.

[Rheo]

[SrWoodchuck]

 

Via BonedJello

[Valin]

http://youtu.be/h5fBBTYm2IA

[Valin]

 

 

That's because Nixon was an evil ultra radical hate filled hating rightwing Tea Partier....And Obama is the New Hottness, and like Way Cool!

[Valin]

 

 

That's because Nixon was an evil ultra radical hate filled hating rightwing Tea Partier....And Obama is the New Hottness, and like Way Cool!

 

 

Can any reasonably intelligent person see Obama writing books on the level of Seize the Moment: America's Challenge in a One-Superpower World. In the Arena: A Memoir of Victory, Defeat, and Renewal or Beyond Peace?

[Geee]

 

 

 

That's because Nixon was an evil ultra radical hate filled hating rightwing Tea Partier....And Obama is the New Hottness, and like Way Cool!

 

 

Can any reasonably intelligent person see Obama writing books on the level of Seize the Moment: America's Challenge in a One-Superpower World. In the Arena: A Memoir of Victory, Defeat, and Renewal or Beyond Peace?

 

 

Depends on what Bill Ayers is up to nowadays and if their still buds.

[Valin]

@Geee

 

I said reasonably intelligent, not slimy hypocritical pencilnecked twerp. In a better world Billy boy would be sitting in an 8 x 12 cell outside beautiful scenic Florence Co.

[RandyM]

Ray Rice has been suspended indefinitely by the NFL. Big deal.

 

But did you notice that his GIRLFRIEND at the time he beat the crap out of her is now his WIFE? She needs her head examined as much as he does.

[SrWoodchuck]

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

[SrWoodchuck]

The Crusades: Before They Were Run Through The PC Machine

You Thought the Crusades Were Evil… Until You Read This

http://pneymatiko.wordpress.com/2014/05/21/you-thought-the-crusades-were-evil-until-you-read-this/

 

By Paul F. Crawford

This article appears in the Spring 2011 edition of the Intercollegiate Review. See the issue’s Table of Contents here.

In 2001, former president Bill Clinton delivered a speech at Georgetown University in which he discussed the West’s response to the recent terrorist attacks of September 11. The speech contained a short but significant reference to the crusades. Mr. Clinton observed that “when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem [in 1099], they . . . proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim on the Temple Mount.” He cited the “contemporaneous descriptions of the event” as describing “soldiers walking on the Temple Mount . . . with blood running up to their knees.” This story, Mr. Clinton said emphatically, was “still being told today in the Middle East and we are still paying for it.”

This view of the crusades is not unusual. It pervades textbooks as well as popular literature. One otherwise generally reliable Western civilization textbook claims that “the Crusades fused three characteristic medieval impulses: piety, pugnacity, and greed. All three were essential.”

 

1 The film Kingdom of Heaven (2005) depicts crusaders as boorish bigots, the best of whom were torn between remorse for their excesses and lust to continue them. Even the historical supplements for role-playing games—drawing on supposedly more reliable sources—contain statements such as “The soldiers of the First Crusade appeared basically without warning, storming into the Holy Land with the avowed—literally—task of slaughtering unbelievers”;2 “The Crusades were an early sort of imperialism”;3 and “Confrontation with Islam gave birth to a period of religious fanaticism that spawned the terrible Inquisition and the religious wars that ravaged Europe during the Elizabethan era.”4 The most famous semi popular historian of the crusades, Sir Steven Runciman, ended his three volumes of magnificent prose with the judgment that the crusades were “nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost.”5

The verdict seems unanimous. From presidential speeches to role-playing games, the crusades are depicted as a deplorably violent episode in which thuggish Westerners trundled off, unprovoked, to murder and pillage peace-loving, sophisticated Muslims, laying down patterns of outrageous oppression that would be repeated throughout subsequent history. In many corners of the Western world today, this view is too commonplace and apparently obvious even to be challenged.

But unanimity is not a guarantee of accuracy. What everyone “knows” about the crusades may not, in fact, be true. From the many popular notions about the crusades, let us pick four and see if they bear close examination.

 

Myth #1: The crusades represented an unprovoked attack by Western Christians on the Muslim world.

 

Nothing could be further from the truth, and even a cursory chronological review makes that clear. In a.d. 632, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, North Africa, Spain, France, Italy, and the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica were all Christian territories. Inside the boundaries of the Roman Empire, which was still fully functional in the eastern Mediterranean, orthodox Christianity was the official, and overwhelmingly majority, religion. Outside those boundaries were other large Christian communities—not necessarily orthodox and Catholic, but still Christian. Most of the Christian population of Persia, for example, was Nestorian. Certainly there were many Christian communities in Arabia.

By a.d. 732, a century later, Christians had lost Egypt, Palestine, Syria, North Africa, Spain, most of Asia Minor, and southern France. Italy and her associated islands were under threat, and the islands would come under Muslim rule in the next century. The Christian communities of Arabia were entirely destroyed in or shortly after 633, when Jews and Christians alike were expelled from the peninsula.6 Those in Persia were under severe pressure. Two-thirds of the formerly Roman Christian world was now ruled by Muslims.

What had happened? Most people actually know the answer, if pressed—though for some reason they do not usually connect the answer with the crusades. The answer is the rise of Islam. Every one of the listed regions was taken, within the space of a hundred years, from Christian control by violence, in the course of military campaigns deliberately designed to expand Muslim territory at the expense of Islam’s neighbors. Nor did this conclude Islam’s program of conquest. The attacks continued, punctuated from time to time by Christian attempts to push back. Charlemagne blocked the Muslim advance in far western Europe in about a.d. 800, but Islamic forces simply shifted their focus and began to island-hop across from North Africa toward Italy and the French coast, attacking the Italian mainland by 837. A confused struggle for control of southern and central Italy continued for the rest of the ninth century and into the tenth. In the hundred years between 850 and 950, Benedictine monks were driven out of ancient monasteries, the Papal States were overrun, and Muslim pirate bases were established along the coast of northern Italy and southern France, from which attacks on the deep inland were launched. Desperate to protect victimized Christians, popes became involved in the tenth and early eleventh centuries in directing the defense of the territory around them.

The surviving central secular authority in the Christian world at this time was the East Roman, or Byzantine, Empire. Having lost so much territory in the seventh and eighth centuries to sudden amputation by the Muslims, the Byzantines took a long time to gain the strength to fight back. By the mid-ninth century, they mounted a counterattack on Egypt, the first time since 645 that they had dared to come so far south. Between the 940s and the 970s, the Byzantines made great progress in recovering lost territories. Emperor John Tzimiskes retook much of Syria and part of Palestine, getting as far as Nazareth, but his armies became overextended and he had to end his campaigns by 975 without managing to retake Jerusalem itself. Sharp Muslim counterattacks followed, and the Byzantines barely managed to retain Aleppo and Antioch.

 

The struggle continued unabated into the eleventh century. In 1009, a mentally deranged Muslim ruler destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and mounted major persecutions of Christians and Jews. He was soon deposed, and by 1038 the Byzantines had negotiated the right to try to rebuild the structure, but other events were also making life difficult for Christians in the area, especially the displacement of Arab Muslim rulers by Seljuk Turks, who from 1055 on began to take control in the Middle East. This destabilized the territory and introduced new rulers (the Turks) who were not familiar even with the patchwork modus vivendi that had existed between most Arab Muslim rulers and their Christian subjects. Pilgrimages became increasingly difficult and dangerous, and western pilgrims began banding together and carrying weapons to protect themselves as they tried to make their way to Christianity’s holiest sites in Palestine: notable armed pilgrimages occurred in 1064–65 and 1087–91.

Far from being unprovoked, then, the crusades actually represent the first great western Christian counterattack against Muslim attacks which had taken place continually from the inception of Islam until the eleventh century, and which continued on thereafter, mostly unabated. Three of Christianity’s five primary episcopal sees (Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria) had been captured in the seventh century; both of the others (Rome and Constantinople) had been attacked in the centuries before the crusades. The latter would be captured in 1453, leaving only one of the five (Rome) in Christian hands by 1500. Rome was again threatened in the sixteenth century. This is not the absence of provocation; rather, it is a deadly and persistent threat, and one which had to be answered by forceful defense if Christendom were to survive. The crusades were simply one tool in the defensive options exercised by Christians.

To put the question in perspective, one need only consider how many times Christian forces have attacked either Mecca or Medina. The answer, of course, is never.

Myth #2: Western Christians went on crusade because their greed led them to plunder Muslims in order to get rich.

Again, not true.

 

Via iOTW

[SrWoodchuck]

FIND THE SNIPER: http://www.wired.com/2014/03/hidden-snipers/#slide-id-151701:full

 

Wired via iOTW

[mozartlover]

TwitchyTeam ‏@TwitchyTeam · 31m
'Come on'! Howard Kurtz asks if Jay Carney can be 'independent voice' at CNN http://bit.ly/ZgRX5Z

 

 

[SrWoodchuck]

Almost Mid-Term Time!

 

Don't get run down by the stampede of LO-FO-MO-FO'S........

 

 

Via Wirecutter