h/t to Redstate.com

Famous Figures of Ancient Times
by Cathy Diez-Luckie

Yes, these action figures really move! All you need is this book, a hole punch, and easy-to-use fasteners for assembly. Move their arms and legs, use their swords and shields and act out the real stories of history or make up your own and travel through time with moving figures!Famous Figures of Ancient Times includes a short biography of each historic figure, from Narmer, who united Upper and Lower Egypt, to Augustine, a leader of the Church at the fall of the Ancient Roman Empire.

• Narmer
• Khufu
• Sargon
• Hammurabi
• Moses
• King David
• Ashurbanipal
• Nebuchadnezzar II
• Cyrus the Great
• A Greek Hoplite
• Qin Shi Huangdi
• Aristotle
• Alexander the Great
• Hannibal
• Hannibal’s Elephant
• Julius Caesar
• Caesar Augustus
• Jesus
• Constantine
• Augustine

Ancient Rome
Eyewitness Expert

The DK Eyewitness series have set new standards for reference books for children & young adults. Each is conceived and laid out as if it were a museum exhibition. The most significant and most well known artifacts in each category are beautifully photographed and displayed with lengthy explanatory captions. The format of all 136 books is identical: hardback, 64 pages, glossy paperstock, four color photography on each of the 25+ two-page spreads.

The Eyewitness Expert series takes this concept several steps further. Along with the Eyewitness reference book (in paperback), the large slipcase includes:

• a wall chart / poster
• profile flashcards
• a clip-art CD to use in computer illustration programs
• a separate “Expert Files” paperback (64 pages) which is a hands-on guide to Ancient Rome, as explained by professional archeologists in the field
• a large folded map of the Roman World
• a paper model of the Colosseum printed in color on card stock to be punched out and assembled.

The title of an entry by Amelia McDonell-Parry at thefrisky.com

H/T to Glen Reynolds, aka Instapundit

“There’s a small number of popular things.”

“57% of everything Amazon sells is not available ANYWHERE except online.”

- Jesse Schell, online game guru, disney designer, prof at Carnegie-Mellon

What this means is Amazon (and other online vendors) are serving a huge amount of consumer demand & hunger for specialized products that was previously unmet. And this the future.

I’d actually expand on that a bit. I would say, “You do not know who you are until you know who your great-grandparents were.”

I’ve spent some time off and on over the past ten years doing some genealogical research on my ancestors. It’s been fun and has helped to personalize history. I enjoy telling the stories to my kids. Among other things, I’ve discovered that we’re descended from two of the Mayflower passengers (John Howland & Elizabeth Tilley), as well as from Robert the Bruce and Edward I.

I’ve had the benefit of an active set of Clarkson relatives who’ve done lots of research on the Clarkson clan in SC – Georgetown, Charleston, & Columbia. One of my great-grandfathers has held special interest for me – Henry Mazyck Clarkson. Born in 1835, a med school graduate, he served in the CSA from Dec 1860 through the end of the war – most notably as a surgeon at the battle of Gettysburg. After the war, he practiced medicine, wrote poetry, and was, for a time, superintendent of schools in Prince William Co., VA.

Today, I discovered that another of my great-grandfathers was also an officer in the CSA during the civil war and was a veteran of many of the important battles of 1861 & 1862. I found this out sorting through some of my mother’s genealogical notes. At one point, she had transcribed the grave markers in West View Cemetery in Atlanta GA. I knew the birth & death dates for my great-grandfather, but I was startled to see, in my mothers handwriting, a third line from the tombstone:

Robert H. Atkinson
Oct 16, 1838 – July 17, 1886
Capt. Co. C First Ga. Regulars CSA

I spent some time online researching the First Ga. Regulars and my great-grandfather. Turns out, he was a graduate of the Georgia Military Academy of Marietta, GA in 1862. I’ve written off for his CSA service records, but Co. C was organized in April of 1861. They fought in the Seven Days Battles in Virginia in 1862 (including at Malvern Hill), and then at 2nd Bull Run, Antietam, and Fredericksburg.

After Fredericksburg, it seems they were sent home on leave, to recoup, refit, and recruit replacements back in Georgia. In 1863, my great-grandfather married a young lady from Charleston, SC named Cordelia Dessau. He was 25 and she was 20. Of great interest to me is the fact that her family were German Jews. Her father, Abraham Dessau, born in 1802, had emigrated from Hamburg, Germany some time before 1843. I have remembered seeing a faded picture of a couple being married under a Jewish canopy, and I feel sure this must have been Robert Holt Atkinson and Cordelia Dessau – married in the middle of the Civil War.

My other two great-grandfathers (everybody has four!) were too young to have fought. Malcolm Graham Waitt (1854-1932) was only seven when the war broke out. William Hardin Watts (1861-1940) was born just a month before Fort Sumter.

My great-grandfathers:

Henry Mazyck Clarkson (1835-1915) <- Surgeon with the Army of No. VA, CSA
William Hardin Watts (1861-1940)
Malcolm Graham Waitt (1854-1932)
Robert Holt Atkinson (1838-1886) <- Captain, Co. C First Ga Regulars, CSA

“If you can’t budget, you can’t govern.” – Rep. Spratt (D-SC)

Haley, Scott win SC runoff for GOP nominations

By LIZ SIDOTI and JIM DAVENPORT (AP) – 11 hours ago

COLUMBIA, S.C. — In a break from the state’s racist legacy, South Carolina Republicans overwhelmingly chose Nikki Haley, an Indian-American woman, to run for governor and easily nominated Tim Scott, in line to become the former Confederate stronghold’s first black GOP congressman in more than a century.

wow.

Amazing.

In line with their yankee arrogance and infantile liberal bias, Liz Sidoti and Jim Davenport managed to work both “racist legacy” and “former Confederate stronghold” into the first sentence of this morning’s AP report on the South Carolina elections.

really?

This is not going to help the AP’s image.

Well, perhaps the rest of the country will lap it up, but trust me, in the South, we are tired of being denounced as racists just because we won’t give our political support to the Democrat Party.

“Andrew Jackson mobilized the federal government behind the expropriation and expulsion of a racial minority whom he considered an impediment to national integrity and economic growth. Before the end of his two terms, about forty-six thousand Native Americans had been dispossessed and a like number slated for dispossession under his chosen successor [Martin Van Buren].”

[. . .]

“Of course, the blame for the dispossession and expulsion of the tribes must be widely shared among the white public, and even a sympathetic administration found it difficult to protect Indian rights, as John Quincy Adams’ experience proved. But Jackson’s policies encouraged white greed and made a bad situation worse.”

from What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, by Daniel Walker Howe

What is the Jones Act?

The Jones Act (aka the Merchant Marine Act of 1920) forbids foreign vessels from operating in US territorial waters. The provisions of the Jones Act may be waived by the Secretary of Homeland Security on her own initiative, at the request of the Secretary of Defense, or by direction of the President.

President Bush did it on Day Three after Hurricane Katrina in September of 2005. And again, less than a month later after the landfall of Hurricane Rita. See here for a recap by Keith Hennesy, the Bush Administration official who coordinated the Jones Act waivers in 2005.

Day 59. Still no waiver from President Obama.

All of which got me to musing this morning over coffee with Cyndy about Tom Wolfe and his wonderful essay “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,” which was published in 1970. Dating myself, I know, but Wolfe remains arguably the best writer on the curiosities of American culture from the 1960s through the 1990s.

“Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” is an incomprehensible  title these days. What the heck is meant by  “Mau-Mau?” It seems to be a verb form of a noun, but what’s a “Mau Mau?” “Mau-Mau” is a reference to the rebellion of the Kikuyu tribe in Kenya against British colonial rule from 1952-1960. The British referred to it as the “Mau Mau uprising” or the “Mau Mau rebellion.” Nobody is quite sure of the etymology of the term. The rebellion is little known now, but it dominated the news out of Africa during the 1950s. There were atrocities on both sides – and the Mau Mau rebels acquired a reputation for being fierce, militant, and brutal. Mau Mau entered the popular vocabulary as a synonym for violent, militant, black nationalism.

“Flak-catcher” is a neologism coined by Wolfe – he also gave us such phrases as “radical chic,” “the Me decade,” “the right stuff,” and “good ol’ boy.” I’m not kidding you – the phrase “good ol’ boy” was coined by Wolfe in a 1964 essay for Esquire about stock car racer Junior Johnson.

Back to “flak-catcher.” According to Wolfe, the flak-catcher is the No. 2 or the No. 3 guy in any organization (or any assistant to the top guy) who is assigned the onerous task of handling complaints – especially complaints delivered in person by a group of angry people. Here’s a relevant passage describing an underling fielding questions from an angry mob of militants, “And then it dawns on you… This man is the flak catcher. His job is to catch the flak for the No. 1 man.”

Mau-mauing then, as described by Wolfe, is the kabuki theater in which members of an ethnic group stage a confrontation with authorities in order to extract money, grants, jobs, and other concessions. Wolfe spent some time observing how these performances were choreographed in San Francisco as various ethnic groups assembled at social service offices and demanded redress for their grievances.

“Mau-mauing the flak catcher” is the art of assembling a group, demanding a public meeting, presenting your demands, doing one’s best to appear threatening and scary, and then grudgingly accepting the money and other compensation proffered by the flak catcher.

Here’s how Wolfe describes it:

Going downtown to mau-mau the bureaucrats got to be the routine practice in San Francisco. The poverty program encouraged you to go in for mau-mauing. They wouldn’t have known what to do without it. The bureaucrats at City Hall and in the Office of Economic Opportunity talked “ghetto” all the time, but they didn’t know any more about what was going on in the Western Addition, Hunters Point, Potrero Hill, the Mission, Chinatown, or south of Market Street than they did about Zanzibar. They didn’t know where to look. They didn’t even know who to ask. So what could they do? Well … they used the Ethnic Catering Service … right … They sat back and waited for you to come rolling in with your certified angry militants, your guaranteed frustrated ghetto youth, looking like a bunch of wild men. Then you had your test confrontation. If you were outrageous enough, if you could shake up the bureaucrats so bad that their eyes froze into iceballs and their mouths twisted up into smiles of sheer physical panic, into shit-eating grins, so to speak–then they knew you were the real goods. They knew you were the right studs to give the poverty grants and community organizing jobs to. Otherwise they wouldn’t know.

The art of mau-mauing is still going on. . .

And our new kitten (whom I have tenderly nicknamed “psycho-kitty”) is the master of mau-mauing. She glares and threatens mayhem until you give in to her demands.

* flak, by the way, is a German abbreviation from WW2 which has found it’s way into English. When allied pilots encountered heavy anti-aircraft barrages during bombing runs over Germany, they referred to it as heavy “flak.” FLAK itself is the acronym for a Flieger-Abwehr-Kanone, or Flyer-Defense-Cannon – except that Germans don’t use hyphens in compound nouns, so they spell it Fliegerabwehrkanone. Aren’t you glad you asked?