Have you had enough?
Monday, August 15, 2005
 
WAR OR PEACE - YOUR CHOICE

Seldom do I find an article expressing my views clearly and concisely.
The same thoughts expressed by me come across in a more emotional
manner and have an urgency about them suggested by my advanced age and
having experienced the events described personally.Please read this
article and compare its contents to the hundreds of pages written by me
on the same subject since 9/11. It is worth 5 minutes of your lifetime. It may impact upon the rest of your life.



"Sixty-three years ago, Nazi Germany had overrun almost all of Europe and hammered England to the verge of bankruptcy and defeat, and had sunk more than four hundred British ships in their convoys between England and America for food and war materials.

Bushido Japan had overrun most of Asia, beginning in 1928, killing
millions of civilians throughout China, and impressing millions more as slave labor.

The United States was in an isolationist and pacifist mood, and most
Americans and Congress wanted nothing to do with the European war, or the Asian war.

Then along came Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and in outrage Congress unanimously declared war on Japan, and the following day on Germany, which had not attacked us. It was a dicey thing. We had few allies.

France was not an ally, for the Vichy government of France aligned with its German occupiers. Germany was not an ally, for it was an enemy, and Hitler intended to set up a Thousand Year Reich in Europe. Japan was not an ally, for it was intent on owning and controlling all of Asia. Japan and Germany had long-term ideas of invading Canada and Mexico, and then the United States over the north and south borders, after they had
settled control of Asia and Europe.

America's allies then were England, Ireland, Scotland, Canada,
Australia, and Russia, and that was about it. There were no other countries of any size or military significance with the will and ability to contribute much of anything to the effort to defeat Hitler's Germany and Japan, and prevent the global dominance of Nazism. And we had to send millions of tons of arms, munitions, and war supplies to Russia, England, and the Canadians, Aussies, Irish, and Scots, because none of them could produce all they needed for themselves.

All of Europe, from Norway to Italy, except Russia in the east, was
already under the Nazi heel.

America was not prepared for war. America had stood down most of its military after World War I and throughout the depression. At the
outbreak of World War II there were army soldiers training with
broomsticks over their shoulders because they didn't have guns, and using cars with ''tank'' painted on the doors because they didn't have tanks. And a big chunk of our navy had just been sunk and damaged at Pearl Harbor.

Britain had already gone bankrupt, saved only by the donation of $600m given by Belgium to England to carry on the war when Belgium was overrun by Hitler. Actually, Belgium surrendered one day, because it was unable to oppose the German invasion, and the Germans bombed Brussels into rubble the next day anyway, just to prove they could. Britain had been holding out for two years already in the face of staggering shipping loses and the near-decimation of its air force in the Battle of Britain, and was saved from being overrun by Germany only because Hitler made the mistake of thinking the Brits were a relatively minor threat that could be dealt with later and turning his attention to Russia, at a time when England was on the verge of collapse in the late summer of 1940.

Russia saved America's rear by putting up a desperate fight for two
years until the United States got geared up to begin hammering away at Germany. Russia lost something like 24 million people in the sieges of Stalingrad and Moscow, 90% of them from cold and starvation, mostly civilians, but also more than a million soldiers. More than a million! Had Russia surrendered, then, Hitler would have been able to focus his entire
campaign against the Brits, then America, and the Nazis would have won that war. Had Hitler not made that mistake and invaded England in 1940 or 1941, instead, there would have been no England for the United States and the Brits to use as a staging ground to prepare an assault on Nazi Europe. England would not have been able to run its North African campaign to help take a little pressure off Russia while America geared up for battle, and today Europe would very probably be run by the Nazis, the Third Reich, and, isolated and without any allies (not even the Brits). The United States would very likely have had to cede Asia to the Japanese, who were basically Nazis by another name then, and the world we live in today would be very different and much worse.

I say this to illustrate that turning points in history are often dicey
things. And we are now at another one.

There is a very dangerous minority in Islam that either has or wants to have, and may soon have the ability to deliver small nuclear,
biological, or chemical weapons, almost anywhere in the world, unless it is prevented from doing so.

France, Germany, and Russia, have been selling these Islamic nations weapons technology at least as recently as 2002, as have North Korea, Syria, and Pakistan, paid for with billions of dollars that Saddam Hussein skimmed from the "Oil For Food" program administered by the United Nations with the complicity of Kofi Annan and his son.

The Jihadis, or the militant Muslims, are basically Nazis in Kaffiyahs.
They believe that Islam, a radically conservative (definitely not
liberal) form of Wahhabi Islam, should own and control the Middle East first, then Europe and then the world. All who do not bow to Allah should be killed, enslaved, or subjugated. They want to finish the Holocaust, destroy Israel, and purge the world of Jews. This is what they say.

There is also a civil war raging in the Middle East for the most part
not a hot war, but a war of ideas. Islam is having its Inquisition and its Reformation today, but it is not yet known which will win the
Inquisition, or the Reformation.

If the Inquisition wins, then the Wahhabis, or the Jihadis, will control
the Middle East, and the OPEC oil, and the United States, European, and Asian economies the techno-industrial economies will be at the mercy of OPEC. This is not an OPEC dominated by the well educated and rational Saudis of today, but an OPEC dominated by the Jihadis.

You want gas in your car? You want heating oil next winter? You want jobs? You want the dollar to be worth anything? You better hope the Jihad, the Muslim Inquisition, loses, and the Islamic Reformation wins.

If the Reformation movement wins, that is the moderate Muslims who
believe that Islam can respect and tolerate other religions and live in
peace with the rest of the world, move out of the 10th Century into the 21st Century. Then the troubles in the Middle East will eventually fade away, and a moderate and prosperous Middle East will emerge. We have to help the Reformation win, and to do that we have to fight the
Inquisition, i.e., the Wahhabi movement, the Jihad, Al Qaeda, the
Islamic terrorist movements.

We have to do it somewhere, we cannot do it just anywhere and we cannot do it everywhere at once.

We have created a focal point for the battle now at the time and place of our choosing, in Iraq. Not in New York, not in London, or Paris, or Berlin, but in Iraq, where we did and are doing two very important things:

(1) We deposed Saddam Hussein and whether Saddam Hussein was directly involved in 9/11 or not the issue. It is undisputed that Saddam has been actively supporting the terrorist movement for decades, Saddam is a terrorist. Saddam is, or was, a weapon of mass destruction, who is responsible for the deaths of probably more than a million Iraqis and two million Iranians.

(2) We created a battle, a confrontation, a flash point, with Islamic
terrorism in Iraq and we have focused the battle. We are killing bad
guys there, and the ones we get there we won't have to get here, or
anywhere else. We also have a good shot at creating a democratic,
peaceful Iraq, which will be a catalyst for democratic change in the
rest of the Middle East, and an outpost for a stabilizing American military presence in the Middle East for as long as it is needed.

The Euros could have done this, but they didn't, and they won't. We now know that rather than opposing the rise of the Jihad, the French, Germans, and Russians were selling them arms. We have found more than a million tons of weapons and munitions in Iraq. If Iraq was not a threat to anyone, why did Saddam need a million tons of weapons?

Additionally, Iraq was paying for French, German, and Russian arms with money skimmed from the United Nations Oil for Food Program (supervised by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and his son) that was supposed to pay for food, medicine, and education, for Iraqi children.

World War II, the war with the German and Japanese Nazis, really began with a ''whimper'' in 1928. It did not begin with Pearl Harbor. It began with the Japanese invasion of China. It was at war for fourteen years before America joined in it. It officially ended in 1945 a 17 year war and was followed by another decade of United States occupation in Germany and Japan to get those countries reconstructed and running on their own again a 27 year war. World War II cost the United States an amount equal to approximately a full year's GNP adjusted for inflation, equal to about $12 trillion dollars. World War II cost America more than 400,000 killed in action, and nearly 100,000 are still missing in action.

The Iraq war has so far cost the United States about $120 billion, which is roughly what 9/11 cost New York. It has also cost about 1,900 American lives, which is roughly 2/3 of the 3,000 lives that the Jihad snuffed on 9/11.

But the cost of not fighting and winning World War II would have been unimaginably greater, a world that would now be dominated by German and Japanese Nazism.

Americans have a short attention span, now, conditioned I suppose by 30 minute television shows and 2 hour movies in which everything comes out okay. The real world is not like that. It is messy, uncertain, and sometimes bloody and ugly. It always has been, and probably always will be.

If we do this thing in Iraq successfully, it is probable that the
Reformation will ultimately prevail. Many Muslims in the Middle East
hope it will. We will be there to support it. It has begun in some
countries, Libya, for instance also Dubai and Saudi Arabia. If we fail,
the Inquisition will probably prevail, and terrorism from Islam will be
with us for all the foreseeable future, because the people of the
Inquisition, or Jihad, believe that they are called by Allah to kill all
the Infidels, and that death in Jihad is glorious.

The bottom line here is that we will have to deal with Islamic terrorism until we defeat it, whenever that is. It will not go away on its own. It will not go away if we ignore it.

If the United States can create a reasonably democratic and stable Iraq, then we have an ''England'' in the Middle East, a platform from which we can work to help modernize and moderate the Middle East. The history of the world is the clash between the forces of relative civility and civilization, and the barbarians clamoring at the gates. The Iraq war is merely another battle in this ancient and never-ending war. And now, for the first time ever, the barbarians are about to get nuclear weapons unless we or somebody does prevent them.

The Iraq war is expensive, and uncertain, yes. But the consequences of not fighting it and winning it will be horrifically greater. We have four options:

1. We can defeat the Jihad now, before it gets nuclear weapons.

2. We can fight the Jihad later, after it gets nuclear weapons (which
may be as early as next year, if Iran's progress on nuclear weapons is what Iran claims it is).

3. We can surrender to the Jihad and accept its dominance in the Middle East, now, in Europe in the next few years or decades, and ultimately in America.

4. Or we can stand down now, and pick up the fight later when the Jihad is more widespread and better armed, perhaps after the Jihad has dominated France and Germany and maybe most of the rest of Europe. It will be more dangerous, more expensive, and much bloodier then.

Yes, the Jihadis say that they look forward to an Islamic America. If
you oppose this war, I hope you like the idea that your children, or
grandchildren, may live in an Islamic America under the Mullahs and the Sharia, an America that resembles Iran today.

We can be defeatist, as many Democrats and liberals, peace activists, and anti-war types seem to be, and concede or surrender to the Jihad or we can do whatever it takes to win this war against them.

The history of the world is the history of civil clashes, or cultural
clashes. All wars are about ideas, ideas about what society and
civilization should be like and the most determined always win. Those who are willing to be the most ruthless always win. The pacifists always lose, because the anti-pacifists kill them.

In the 20th Century it was western democracy vs. communism, and before that western democracy vs. Nazism, and before that Western democracy vs. German imperialism. Western democracy won, three times, but it wasn't cheap, fun, nice, easy, or quick. Indeed, the wars against German Imperialism (World War I), Nazi Imperialism (World War II), and communist imperialism (the 40-year Cold War that included the Vietnam Battle, commonly called the Vietnam War, but itself a major battle in a larger war) covered almost the entire century.

The first major war of the 21st Century is the war between Western
Judeo/Christian Civilization and Wahhabi Islam. It may last a few more years, or most of this century. It will last until the Wahhabi branch of Islam fades away, or gives up its ambitions for regional and global dominance and Jihad, or until Western Civilization gives in to the Jihad.

Remember, perspective is everything, and America's schools teach too little history. The Cold War lasted from about 1947 to 1989 at least until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Forty-two years. Europe spent the first half of the 19th century fighting Napoleon, and from 1870 to 1945 fighting Germany. World War II began in 1928, lasted 17 years, plus a ten year occupation and the United States still has troops in Germany and Japan. World War II resulted in the death of more than 50 million people, maybe more than 100 million people, depending on which estimates you accept. The United States has taken a little more than 1,900 Killed-in-Action (KIA) in Iraq. The United States took more than 4,000 KIA on the morning of June 6, 1944, the first day of the Normandy Invasion to rid Europe of Nazi Imperialism. In World War II the United States averaged 2,000 KIA a week for four years. Most of the individual battles of World War II lost more Americans than the entire Iraq war has done so far.

But the stakes are at least as high: a world dominated by representative governments with civil rights, human rights, and personal freedoms--or a world dominated by a radical Islamic Wahhabi movement, and by the Jihad, under the Mullahs and the Sharia.

I do not understand why many Americans do not grasp this. Too much television I guess.

Many Americans profess to be in favor of human rights, civil rights,
liberty, freedom, and all that. But not for Iraqis, I guess. In America,
but nowhere else. The 300,000 Iraqi bodies in mass graves in Iraq, not our problem. The United States population is about twelve times that of Iraq, so let's multiply 300,000 by twelve. What would you think if there were 3,600,000 American bodies in mass graves in America because of our president?

Would you not want another country to help liberate America? Would we see peace activists demonstrating in Iran, Syria, Iraq, Sudan, and North Korea; in the places in the world that really need peace activism the most?

Are we not supposed to be in favor of human rights, civil rights,
democracy, multiculturalism, diversity, etc? Well, if the Jihad wins an wherever the Jihad wins, it is the end of civil rights, human rights,
democracy, multiculturalism, diversity, etc. Americans who oppose the liberation of Iraq are coming down on the side of their own worst enemy. If the Jihad wins, it is the death of ALL OTHER "ISM'S!" Too many Americans JUST DON'T GET IT!

About the Writer: Raymond Kraft is a lawyer and writer living and
working in Northern California. Raymond receives e-mail at rskraft@vfr.n
 
Friday, August 12, 2005
 
The following is quoted from my book published in 2002
THE DUAL 1991-2002 PALINDROME
available at www.booksurge.com or at amazon.com

ISLAM vs. THE WEST -
THE MILLENIUM OF WARS PREDICTED BY THE PALINDROME HISTORY OF THE LAST THOUSAND YEARS

CAN HUMANS LIVE IN TWO PALINDROME YEARS IN ONE LIFETIME?
IT HAPPENED ONE THOUSAND YEARS AGO IN 999 AND 1001
AND IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN IN ANOTHER ONE THOUSAND YEARS IN 2992 AND 3003.

WITHIN A PERIOD OF TWO THOUSAND YEARS, YOU ARE MEMBER OF THE ONLY HUMAN GENERATION
THAT HAS LIVED THROUGH TWO PALINDROME YEARS: 1991 AND 2002. WHAT IS THE SIGNIFICANCE? WHAT CAN WE
LEARN FROM THE LAST 10 PALINDROME YEARS? YOU WILL FIND OUT ON THESE PAGES THE HISTORICAL EXPLANATION OF THE COMING MILLENIUM OF WARS BETWEEN ISLAM AND THE WEST.

The past can not be changed. Yet nothing changes more
constantly than our understanding of the past. For the past, that
influences our lives, does not consist of what actually happened,
but how we now perceive what has happened. Just as pictures
drawn by children reflect their limited knowledge of facts, an
adult who ignores the past will always remain a child.
We are sometimes shocked by the rapid change that is brought
upon us by events such as the tragedy of 9/11. The knowledge of
history cushions this shock because historical facts provide an
early warning system that gets us ready for the future. And it is in
the future where we’ll spend the rest of our life.
How far can you look into the future? Not too far. Perhaps
days, months or rarely years. Our view of the past, however, is
unlimited. While we can not change the past, we can better
understand it; so that we can better understand the future and
change it.

THE HISTORY OF PALINDROME YEARS predicts that the continued confrontation between
the Muslim World and the West will escalate into a major war
starting in the Palindrome year of 1991 and expand in magnitude in the Palindrome year of 2002 with consequences dominating the next millennium.

An attempt will be made, by declaring a “Jihad”, to recreate the
Ottoman Empire and to unite Muslims against the infidel. The
conflict between “modernization” and “westernization” of Islam
will be eventually resolved by reformation of the Muslim religion,
similar to the Reformation of Christianity. The age of the Muslim
religion and it’s intolerance of other religions reflects the
conditions of the Christian religion of the Dark Ages. This is the
Dark Age period of the Muslim religion both numerically and developmentally. Reformation will eventually lead to liberation of the women of Islam and peace between the religions.

Compared to the tragically slow reformation period of Christianity, the reform movement of Islam will be more speedy and effective due to the advances in communication technology. The advances in technology, however, will make the Islamic reformation period more dangerous because religious fanatics wil have access to weapons of mass destruction imperiling the civilized world.

JIHAD
The Islamic idea of “jihad” has a wide range of meanings,
from an inward spiritual struggle to attain perfect faith, to a war
of conquest or conversion against all unbelievers. Interpretation of
the word also changed throughout the existence if Islam. Starting
in the middle ages “jihad” generally referred to a divinely
sanctioned struggle to establish Muslim rule over non-Muslims f o r
the propagation of the Islamic faith.

Today Islam has three interpretations for the word. The
Muslim Apologists believe that “jihad” is resistance to persecution
of Muslims only. The Muslim Modernists believe that it means
resistance to aggression when Islam is attacked in war.
The third group, the Muslim Revivalists claim that “jihad”
means the struggle to expand Islam throughout the entire world.
Even this group does not intend to coerce people to accept Islam as
their religion. Its primary goal is to overthrow regimes ruling
Muslim countries that are secular and not governing according to
the laws of Islam. This has created major confrontations between
the governments of Islamic countries and the religious minority in
those countries.

Major segments of this Revivalist group are followers of
Osama bin Laden whose intentions were declared on February 23,
1998 in a statement issued by the World Islamic Front. It is a
religious ruling (fatwa) requiring the killing of Americans, both
civilian and military. This document links the bin Laden network to
many terrorist attacks, including the September 11, 2001 attacks
on New York and Washington. This group of fanatics is more
effective than the hundreds of similar groups preceding it, because
it is willing to utilize modern technology in its attacks while still
adhering to fundamental religious practices. It’s ideas are of
historic importance for us to understand. Here is the text of the
document issued by it’s leaders:

Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders
World Islamic Front Statement
23 February 1998
Shaykh Usamah Bin-Muhammad Bin-Ladin, Ayman a l -
Zawahiri, amir of the Jihad Group in Egypt, Abu-Yasir Rifa'i Ahmad
Taha, Egyptian Islamic Group, Shaykh Mir Hamzah, secretary of the
Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Pakistan, Fazlur Rahman, amir of the Jihad
Movement in Bangladesh
Praise be to Allah, who revealed the Book, controls the
clouds, defeats factionalism, and says in His Book: "But when the
forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever
ye find them, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them i n
every stratagem (of war)". Peace be upon our Prophet, Muhammad
Bin-'Abdallah, who said: I have been sent with the sword between my
hands to ensure that no one but Allah is worshipped. Allah who put
my livelihood under the shadow of my spear and who inflicts
humiliation and scorn on those who disobey my orders.
No one argues today about three facts that are known to
everyone; we will list them, in order to remind everyone:
First, for over seven years the United States has been
occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian
Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating
its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the
Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring
Muslim peoples.
The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing
aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging
post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being
used to that end, but they are helpless.
Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi
people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge
number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million... despite all
this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific
massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted
blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and
devastation.
Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious
and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and
divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of
Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy
Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to
fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia,
Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and
weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the
brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.
All these crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear decla
On that basis, and in compliance with Allah's order, we issue
the following fatwa to all Muslims:
The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians
and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it
in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate
the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip,
and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam,
defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance
with the words of Almighty Allah, "and fight the pagans all
together as they fight you all together," and "fight them until there
is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith
in Allah."
We -- with Allah's help -- call on every Muslim who
believes in Allah and wishes to be rewarded to comply with Allah's
order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and
whenever they find it. We also call on Muslim ulema, leaders,
youths, and soldiers to launch the raid on Satan's U.S. troops and
the devil's supporters allying with them, and to displace those who
are behind them so that they may learn a lesson.
Almighty Allah also says: "O ye who believe, what is the matter with you
this life, as compared with the hereafter: So lose no heart, nor fall
into despair. For ye must gain mastery if ye are true in faith."

Osama bin Laden sent a coded message in his video recording
shown throughout the world following the terrorist attack on the
World Trade Center in New York in 2001. When he referred to the
suffering by Muslims during the last 80 years he referred to the
Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire 80 years ago. His call to
remember the Ottoman Empire can be compared to similar
exhortations referring to events in US history. “Remember the
Alamo”. “Remember Pearl Harbor” “Remember the Main” etc.

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
The Ottoman Empire lasted for seven centuries from the 13th
century until the 20th century. Thirty-six consecutive rulers all
belonged to the same family. They defeated the Byzantine Empire
and conquered the capital of Constantinople. Under Mehmed the
Conqueror, the Ottomans rebuilt the devastated city into the
fabulously wealthy capital they renamed Istanbul, with large
warehouses, the Covered Bazaar, Topkapi Palace, and several
mosque complexes. The Ottomans are one of the greatest and most
powerful civilizations of the modern period.

It was Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent who brought the
Ottoman Empire to its zenith. During his reign, from 1520 until
1566, he presided over the most powerful state in the world. A
remarkable military strategist, he more than doubled the Ottoman
land holdings he inherited from his father. The Ottoman Turks have
conquered and maintain effective control over diverse peoples in a
vast empire stretching from Persia almost to the gates of Vienna
and along the north coast of Africa to Algiers. He also brought a
profusion of elegant mosques, baths, schools, fountains, and
gardens to Istanbul. Much of the original splendor created by the
Ottomans can still be seen in Istanbul.

While intellectual progress in the rest of Europe was
suppressed during the Middle Ages by the influence of the Church, a
virtual renaissance occurred in the Ottoman Empire in literature,
the arts, the sciences, and Suleyman set a new standard of
jurisprudence. Their moment of glory in the sixteenth century
represents one of the heights of human creativity, optimism, and
artistry. The empire they built was the largest and most influential
of the Muslim empires of the modern period, and their culture and
military expansion crossed over into Europe. The Ottomans
established an empire over European territory and established
Islamic traditions and culture that last to the current day. The
Muslims in Bosnia are the last descendants of the Ottoman
presence in Europe.

Upon Suleyman’s demise, the gradual decline of the Ottoman
Empire began. While historians like to talk about empires in terms
of growth and decline, the Ottomans were a powerful force
militarily and culturally, right up until the break-up of the empire
in the first decades of the 20th century. The Empire finally ended
after three hundred years in 1924 when Kemal Ataturk abolished
the Muslim caliphate and founded the Republic of Turkey.
Secularization represents the real break with the Ottoman
tradition and heritage. The return to a theocracy ruled by Mulahs is
the goal of the current JIHAD advocated by extreme elements of the
Muslim world.
 
Sunday, August 07, 2005
 
ARE WE SO DIFFERENT FROM 15TH CENTURY ISLAM?

This is Islam’s 1426th year. I have already discussed the similarity of behavior of the 15th Century Church and the current fanatical Islam. Not surprisingly large areas of the world dominated by Islam are still primitive compared to the 21st Century.

Here is, however, a reminder of the primitive conditions in the 15th and 16th Century as reflected by sayings still used 500 years later.

“Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May and still smelled pretty good by June. However, they were starting to smell, so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor.

Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children - last of all the babies.
By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it-hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water."

Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw, piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the dogs cats and other small animals, mice, rats, and bugs lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof-hence the saying "It’s raining cats and dogs."

The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt, hence the saying "dirt poor." The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh on the floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they kept adding more thresh until when you opened the door it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entryway-hence, a "threshold."

Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man "could bring home the bacon." They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and "chew the fat."

Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or "upper crust."

Lead cups were used to drink ale or whiskey. The combination would sometimes knock them out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up-hence the custom of holding a "wake."

England is old and small and they started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a” bone-house" and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, one out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they thought they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the "graveyard shift") to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be "saved by the bell".
 
The insane are running the asylum. Examples permeating American society today. Scams, fraud, perjury, uncivilized behavior and other signs heralding the fall of the USA, unless you had enough.

ARCHIVES
09/01/2003 - 10/01/2003 / 10/01/2003 - 11/01/2003 / 05/01/2005 - 06/01/2005 / 06/01/2005 - 07/01/2005 / 07/01/2005 - 08/01/2005 / 08/01/2005 - 09/01/2005 / 09/01/2005 - 10/01/2005 / 10/01/2005 - 11/01/2005 / 11/01/2005 - 12/01/2005 / 12/01/2005 - 01/01/2006 / 05/01/2006 - 06/01/2006 / 11/01/2006 - 12/01/2006 / 12/01/2006 - 01/01/2007 / 04/01/2007 - 05/01/2007 / 07/01/2007 - 08/01/2007 / 06/01/2008 - 07/01/2008 / 09/01/2008 - 10/01/2008 / 01/01/2009 - 02/01/2009 / 04/01/2009 - 05/01/2009 / 07/01/2009 - 08/01/2009 / 10/01/2009 - 11/01/2009 / 06/01/2010 - 07/01/2010 / 09/01/2010 - 10/01/2010 /


Powered by Blogger