There Goes Our President, Re-writing History Again...

Remember "Bush-isms"? It was when George The Great Satan Junior would say something and then we'd get to watch it played over and over again at nauseau and get to hear about how not smart he is be. Well, this morning, I have the pleasure of sharing an "Obama-ism" with you:

"Long before America was even an idea, this land of plenty was home to many peoples. The British and French, the Dutch and Spanish, to Mexicans, to countless Indian tribes. We all shared the same land," President Obama told the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

Mexico declared its independence on September 16, 1810. It was recognized on September 27, 1821.

The United States of America declared its independence in 1776.

Granted, The Master and Commander was in a room full of Mexicans, so you can expect him to do some pandering - after all, even Barbara Boxer might be on the chopping block this November, so there's some real fear goin' on out there - but, to throw them into the list of people that were here before America is a prime example of this President's view that the hard-working, law-abiding, American taxpayer should always come second to whatever group he is pandering to at the time.

Now, let me add some further items to the conversation that I think of when I hear this quote. The British? Yes, they were here. Technically, that was us before the revolution, there chief, though obviously you do not consider yourself to be among the "descendants" of those British subjects that attained their independence in the Revolution, even when, really, regardless of when you got here, if you are a citizen, in a way, you are. Another prime example of the logic this President shows time and time again where he is much more concerned about being a citizen of the world than of this country. By the way, have you apologized to the Queen for the Revolution yet? Clearly, America was just as much at fault there as we were for winning World War II.

Also, if the Mexicans were Mexicans before Mexico even existed, isn't that some racial profiling right there? Anyone who is of Hispanic descent that was born in North America is a "Mexican" right, regardless of when the nation of Mexico came into existence and regardless of whether or not people were actually living within the borders of a country called Mexico? Is that why you think that every person who was born in Mexico also has a right to U.S. citizenship, regardless of whether or not they respect our laws and want to be a part of this nation, not just a foreign national living and working in America, but whose loyalty ultimately remains to their home country?

And lastly, "We all shared the same land." Yes, that is your vision, isn't it? Where we all share everything and nobody owns anything and everybody owns everything. So, in your fantasy land, did the British and the Indians share the land? Did America and the Indians share the land? Are we still sharing it with them today? What about the wars that we fought with Spain and Mexico? Were we sharing the land with them during the wars? Would you have not fought those wars and simply explained how we should share the land and not fight over it?

Yes, my brown little minions, go forth and tell the people in the barrio that the Democrats will share their land and its opportunities with you, regardless of whether or not you came her legally, for you see, it is all our land together, a shared land with free healthcare, education and a whole bunch of things that were once considered opportunities you worked for, yet today are somehow magically entitled civil rights. Citizen and non-citizen, taxpayer and non-taxpayer, all living together in harmony, everyone with an equal share, regardless of what laws you break, regardless of how much more you take out of America than put back in...

Hitler's Ho 229 Could Have Had Us All Speaking German By 1950...

I have always said that you go through school, and they teach you some of the facts, but they certainly do not teach you the whole story. When they taught us that we were the first to land on the moon, they definitely did not tell us that it was thanks to the Nazi V-2 rocket program and a team of SS scientists that we pardoned and gave asylum to after World War II. Here is another piece of technology that the mythical "they" never want us to know about. It is the precursor to our own Stealth Bomber, Stealth Fighter, and even Cold War-era flying wing experimental aircraft. It is the Nazi Ho 229 bomber. The following is from an email that has been circulating on the internet, sent to me by my good friend Captain Hooker:

"Keep in mind, this aircraft was built in the 1940's. It resembles our Stealth bombers of today. Had Hitler got these into production sooner, the world wouldn't be what it is today.



With its smooth and elegant lines, this could be a prototype for some future successor to the stealth bomber. But this flying wing was actually designed by the Nazis 30 years before the Americans successfully developed radar-invisible technology. Now an engineering team has reconstructed the Horten Ho 229 from blueprints, with startling results.



Blast from the past: The full-scale replica of the Ho 229 bomber was made with materials available in the 40s.



Futuristic: The stealth plane design was years ahead of its time. It was faster and more efficient than any other plane of the period and its stealth powers did work against radar. Experts are now convinced that given a little bit more time, the mass deployment of this aircraft could have changed the course of the war.



The plane could have helped Adolf Hitler win the war. First built and tested in the air in March 1944, it was designed with a greater range and speed than any plane previously built and was the first aircraft to use the stealth technology now deployed by the U.S. in its B-2 bombers. Thankfully Hitler's engineers only made three prototypes, tested by being dragged behind a glider, and were not able to build them on an industrial scale before the Allied forces invaded.

From Panzer tanks through to the V-2 rocket, it has long been recognized that Germany's technological expertise during the war was years ahead of the Allies.
But by 1943, Nazi high command feared that the war was beginning to turn against them, and were desperate to develop new weapons to help turn the tide.
Nazi bombers were suffering badly when faced with the speed and maneuverability of the Spitfire and other Allied fighters. Hitler was also desperate to develop a bomber with the range and capacity to reach the United States .

In 1943 Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering demanded that designers come up with a bomber that would meet his requirements, one that could carry 1,000 kg over 1,000km flying at 1,000km/h.

A full scale replica of the Ho 229 bomber made with materials available in the 1940s at preflight.



A wing section of the stealth bomber. The jet intakes were years ahead of their time. Two pilot brothers in their thirties, Reimar and Walter Horten, suggested a flying wing design they had been working on for years. They were convinced that with its drag and lack of wind resistance such a plane would meet Goering's requirements.

Construction on a prototype was begun in Goettingen in Germany in 1944.

The center pod was made from a welded steel tube, and was designed to be powered by a BMW 003 engine. The most important innovation was Reimar Horten's idea to coat it in a mix of charcoal dust and wood glue.



Vengeful: Inventors Reimar and Walter Horten were inspired to build the Ho 229 by the deaths of thousands of Luftwaffe pilots in the Battle of Britain.

The 142-foot wingspan bomber was submitted for approval in 1944, and it would have been able to fly from Berlin to NYC and back without refueling, thanks to the same blended wing design and six BMW 003A or eight Junker Jumo 004B turbojets. They thought the electromagnetic waves of radar would be absorbed, and in conjunction with the aircraft's sculpted surfaces the craft would be rendered almost invisible to radar detectors. The plane was covered in radar absorbent paint with a high graphite content, which has a similar chemical make-up to charcoal. This was the same method eventually used by the U.S. in its first stealth aircraft in the early 1980s, the F-117A Nighthawk.

After the war the Americans captured the prototype Ho 229s along with the blueprints and used some of their technological advances to aid their own designs. But experts always doubted claims that the Horten could actually function as a stealth aircraft.

Now using the blueprints and the only remaining prototype craft, Northrop-Grumman (the defense firm behind the B-2) built a full-size replica of a Horten Ho 229.



Luckily for Britain, the Horten flying wing fighter-bomber never got much further than the blueprint stage above.



Thanks to the use of wood and carbon, jet engines integrated into the fuselage, and its blended surfaces, the plane could have been in London eight minutes after the radar system detected it. It took them 2,500 man-hours and $250,000 to construct, and although their replica cannot fly, it was radar-tested by placing it on a 50 ft articulating pole and exposing it to electromagnetic waves. The team demonstrated that although the aircraft is not completely invisible to the type of radar used in the war, it would have been stealthy enough and fast enough to ensure that it could reach London before Spitfires could be scrambled to intercept it.

If the Germans had had time to develop this aircraft, it could well have had an impact, says Peter Murton, aviation expert from the Imperial War Museum at Duxford, in Cambridgeshire.

In theory the flying wing was a very efficient aircraft design, which minimized drag. It is one of the reasons that it could reach very high speeds in dive and glide modes and had such an incredibly long range.

The research was filmed for a forthcoming documentary on the National Geographic Channel."

Amazing Ship Find

A 22-gun British warship that sank during the American Revolution and has long been regarded as one of the “Holy Grail” shipwrecks in the Great Lakes has been discovered at the bottom of Lake Ontario, astonishingly well-preserved in the cold, deep water.

Shipwreck enthusiasts Jim Kennard and Dan Scoville used side-scanning sonar and an unmanned submersible to locate the HMS Ontario, which was lost with barely a trace and as many as 130 people aboard during a gale in 1780.

The 80-foot sloop of war is the oldest shipwreck and the only fully intact British warship ever found in the Great Lakes.

“To have a Revolutionary War vessel that’s practically intact is unbelievable. It’s an archaeological miracle,” said Canadian author Arthur Britton Smith, who chronicled the history of the HMS Ontario in a 1997 book, “The Legend of the Lake.”

The finders of the wreck said they regard it as a war grave and have no plans to raise it or remove any of its artifacts. They said the ship is still considered the property of the British Admiralty. Although the vessel sits in an area where the water is up to 500 feet deep and cannot be reached by anyone but the most experienced divers, Kennard and Scoville declined to give its exact location, saying only that it was found off the southern shore.

The sloop was discovered resting partially on its side, with two masts extending more than 70 feet above the lake bottom. “Usually when ships go down in big storms, they get beat up quite a bit. They don’t sink nice and square. This went down in a huge storm, and it still managed to stay intact,” Scoville said. “There are even two windows that aren’t broken. Just going down, the pressure difference, can break the windows. It’s a beautiful ship.”

Smith, who was shown underwater video of the find, said: “If it wasn’t for the zebra mussels, she looks like she only sunk last week.” The dark, cold freshwater acts as a perfect preservative, Smith said.

At that depth, there is no light and no oxygen to hasten decomposition, and little marine life to feed on the wood. The Ontario went down on Oct. 31, 1780, with a garrison of 60 British soldiers, a crew of about 40, mostly Canadians, and possibly about 30 American war prisoners.

The warship had been launched only five months earlier and was used to ferry troops and supplies along upstate New York’s frontier. Although it was the biggest British ship on the Great Lakes at the time, it never saw battle, Smith said.

Some Word Origins...

Geek: In the circus, a performer who sank sufficiently low would do horrible things (like biting the heads off live chickens) for booze money. The poor soul was called a geek. How it later came to describe smart people is unknown, but I am sure 80’s movies helped it along.

Two Cent’s Worth: During the Civil War, the cheapest cigar you could buy cost two pennies. “Two-center” cigars became synonymous with cheapness, and by the late 1800’s, people who wanted to project fauxhumility would offer their two cent’s worth.

Shoddy: A scandal erupted during the Civil War when some textilers sold the army uniforms made out of the scraps left over from their wool-making process. This cheap fabric was called shoddy. In no time, the noun turned into an adjective.

White Paper: In Victorian England, policy and legislation were delivered to Parliament in gigantic books with blue covers called Blue Papers. Lesser, shorter government business was delivered in smaller books with white covers, called White Papers.

Pundits: Brits who traveled to India met Hindi scholars who taught religion and law. They were knows as pandits. Soon enough, scholarly Londoners were known as pundits.

Kiosks: In Turkey, outdoor pavilions used for public meetings were called kiushks.

Haywire: In the 1800’s, New England loggers took bales of hay into the forest with them to feed their horses. These bales were bound with thin wire that was also used to make small repairs on the loggers’ equipment. The more that stuff broke, the more wire the loggers needed. Logging companies and groups of loggers that ended up using a lot of hay wire on their equipment, they were called haywire outfits. Slowly the term began to describe the actual process of the equipment breaking down and not working properly.

“Send In The Squirrels!"

“No, I had not heard about this, but it does not surprise me, foreign countries are always meddling in Iran,” said Hassan Mohmmadi, an Iranian fastfood vendor.

This was Mohmmadi’s response when he was told that the Islamic Republic News Agency was reporting that 14 squirrels had been captured by Iranian police near the Iranian border because they were found to have been equipped with eavesdropping devices.

Has the West finally run so far down on our list of options in dealing with a potential threat from the Iranian government that we have deployed our highly-skilled, agile, and possibly deadly squirrel special agents?

Do you think they won’t fall for that type of propaganda on the streets of Tehran? When asked where he thought the squirrels had come from, Hassan Mohmmadi didn’t miss a beat in replying, “I bet they were British squirrels, they are the most cunning.”

Maybe the reports are not that far off base. We used pigeons to carry intelligence out of Nazi-occupied France during World War II. We currently have chickens deployed in Kuwait to give us an early warning of chemical attacks. And, of course, we are using well-trained dolphins to help us locate underwater mines.

Don’t tell me that you cannot picture the scene in the melodramatic Tom Clancy knock-off movie where the CIA Director pounds his fist on his desk and exclaims, “Send in the squirrels!"

The Leap Days

Today, we worry about millisecond and nanosecond inaccuracies in times, but in the past, there have been discrepancies the length of days.

When Julius Caesar invented the Julian calendar, it was off by 11.5 minutes each year. Over the centuries, that small error added up so that by 1582, the Julian calendar being used by the Western Roman World was 10 days behind.

To fix the discrepancy in the Julian calendar, Pope Gregory XIII gave us leap days. However, before the Gregorian calendar could be put into place, the extra 10 days given to mankind by the Julian calendar had to be done away with.

Pope Gregory XIII then declared that the day after October 4, 1582 would be October 15, 1582. In Rome, all the days in-between never existed. There was wide-spread rioting in Rome because many Christians alive at the time felt that if their date of birth and date of death had been pre-ordained, the Pope had just shortened their lives by 10 days.

In defiance of Rome, England did not adopt the Gregorian calendar, so for nearly two hundred years it was always ten days later in Rome that it was in London.

Finally, in 1752 when England adopted the Gregorian calendar to sync itself up with the rest of the Western World, the day after September 2, 1752 was September 14, 1752, 11 days having never existed in London.

The problem this time, however, was not that people felt their lives were being shortened, but people actually were incensed to riot because they paid rent by the month and only got 19 days for their monthly rent that September. Naturally, landlords refused to make exceptions and expected October’s rent right on the first of the month.

The $10 Bill....

In 1861, the first $10 bill was issued near the outset of the Civil War.

It featured a portrait of Lincoln and is the only time a sitting president appeared on U.S. currency.

In 1861, a $10 bill could have bought you an entire barrel of flour, a month’s stay in a New York City tenement, or a ride on the Great Eastern steamship from Manhattan to Cape May, New Jersey.

In 1901, the $10 bill depicted explorers Lewis & Clark on the edges with a large American bison in the middle, and bought you ten private ballroom-dancing classes, a housepainter’s labor for eight days or a full eye exam and 10 pairs of glasses.

In 1929, all U.S. currency was changed to its standard size of today. Despite the popular belief, the car on your 1929 standardized $10 bill is not a Model T Ford, but a composite of cars from the day. In 1929, your $10 bill got you a year’s worth of accident and sickness insurance, a waffle iron, or a one-minute phone call from New York City to London.

In 1942, just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, special $10 bills were printed for Hawaii with the state’s name printed on the front and back and the serial numbers printed in brown ink instead of red. This was done so that if the Japanese invaded Hawaii, the U.S. Treasury would declare these $10 bills worthless.

Keep an eye out for the new $10 bill coming early in 2006. Its design is still mostly green, but now features shades of orange, yellow and red and has renderings of the Statue of Liberty torch and the words, "We The People..."

Why Is Ben On The C-Note?

Have you ever wondered why Benjamin Franklin is the only person featured on American paper currency who is not a former President of the United States? To find the answer, we must travel back to Ben Franklin’s day, but make a quick stop in an America on the brink of civil war.

When Abraham Lincoln took over the presidency, despite nearly one hundred years of existence, our fine country still did not have a federal, nation-wide currency. Realizing that war was eminent, and that a federal currency would be needed to fund and control war-time spending in the North, Mr. Lincoln ordered the first printing of the US federal dollar.

So, what did America do for money for the first hundred years? Would you believe that local banks printed currency notes themselves? You went to your bank, withdrew a note for a pre-designated amount and traded it with a store owner for goods on the pretense that the store owner could go to your bank and draw on the bank’s funds or have money put in his account to cover the amount of your purchase.

Bank notes back then worked much like a check works today. One of the main problems with this bank note system was that at any given time in pre-Lincoln America, up to 2/3 of the bank notes being passed around were counterfeit. In fact, one of the major British war efforts in the 1770s was to flood the American colonies with fake bank notes to destabilize our new, independent economy.

Some of the bank notes were easily forged by the monarchy, while others were very difficult to copy. And whose were the most difficult to copy? Why, the ones designed and printed by Mr. Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia, or course. Hence, the well-deserved honor of gracing the $100 bill.

The Interesting Journey Of The Body Of The Father Of Many Of Our Fonts

John Baskerville lived an interesting life, but the after-life of his “earthly” remains is a Gothic tale of Poe-tic proportions.

Baskerville had a lifelong passion for beautiful lettering and books. Around 1726, Baskerville moved to Birmingham, England and in 1738, he began experimenting with different types of papermaking, ink manufacturing, typefounding and printing. Baskerville invented his first of many typefaces in 1754 and most “serif” style fonts, even Times New Roman which was developed for the London Times newspaper, have been adaptations of Baskerville fonts. 

Baskerville would later go on to be the printer for the Cambridge University Press, and ironically for an atheist, is best known for his Cambridge University printing of the Bible. Baskerville even became a close friend of Benjamin Franklin while working with Cambridge University.

Baskerville died in 1775 after a long, interesting life, but he could not have even imagined the journey his body was about to take. Baskerville’s will decreed that he did not care in which manner he was buried, but only that he not be buried on consecrated ground, so he was placed in a lead coffin and buried on the grounds of his home.

In 1791, the Baskerville home was destroyed in the Birmingham riots and the land was sold to John Ryland who left it to his son Samuel, who sold it to Thomas Gibson who cut a canal through the grounds to create wharf land.

In 1821, workers came across Baskerville’s coffin and though Baskerville’s descendants didn’t want it, Gibson did not want to bury it in consecrated ground per Baskerville’s original wishes, so he placed it in his warehouse, where after eight years it was placed in John Marston’s plumbing shop. Baskerville's coffin was placed in a corner and sometimes even used as a workbench.

After eight years in the plumbing shop, Martson’s curiosity got the best of him and he opened the coffin only to make on-lookers ill at the sight. Once having opened it, Marston didn’t want the coffin around anymore, so he applied to have it buried in his family’s vault at St. Philip’s Church, but permission was refused.

A bookseller by the name of Nott who knew and appreciated Baskerville’s work agreed to bury the coffin in the Nott family vault, so Marston put it in a wheel barrow, wheeled it across town and left it on the floor of the Nott vault at Christ Church.

In 1892, Baskerville’s coffin was finally encased in cement, of course after being opened by the curious again, and placed properly in the Nott vault. Then, in 1899, after only seven years of proper burial, nearly 125 years after his death, the Christ Church was demolished to make way for a shopping district and Baskerville’s remains, along with the remains of 600 others were finally laid to rest permanently at the Warstone Lane catacombs, although still against his wishes, in consecrated ground.

His body’s legacy and journey lasted much longer than Baskerville’s actual life.