The Canadian would-be buyer of a three-bedroom, two-bath house in Jasper County, South Carolina discovered the developers had neglected to inform her of one little detail.

(The local reporter has a few problems with the English language, but one gathers that:)

In 1998, the then-owner of the 1700-acre Delta Plantation, Henry E. Ingram Jr. (a man of decidedly Southern irredentist opinions) when he sold his acreage to Bluffton Home Builders, inserted a few small covenants in the deed.

Mr. Ingram’s covenants stipulated that the property, or subdivisions thereof, could not be sold or leased to:

1. Yankees.

2. Persons bearing the last name Sherman (vide: General William Tecumseh Sherman).

3. Persons bearing last names whose letters could possibly be rearranged to spell Sherman.

Ms. Legare, the would-be buyer (who, being Canadian, would not be personally impacted by Mr. Ingram’s covenants, but who obviously might like to be able resell her house some fine day) and Bluffton Home Builders are now working with Mr. Ingram’s son, Mr. Ashley Ingram, a local attorney (who probably has some personal interest in the matter) to get those covenants removed. But Henry Ingram, now a resident of Corpus Christi, Texas disagrees. The older Mr. Ingram wants his covenants defended and enforced, and is planning to move to Costa Rica, presumably to get further away from those damned Yankees.

———————–

FOLLOW-UP

Alfred L. Brophy tells us he covered the Ingram covenants back in 1998. (Did blogs exist in 1998?)

Mr. Brophy also provides addiional detail: Yankees are defined as people who’ve lived north of the Mason-Dixon line for more than a year or were born north of the Mason-Dixon line. But Ingram also included an exemption: if a Yankee takes a Southern loyalty oath and whistles Dixie as a sign of loyalty, then he is permitted to buy the property.

Paper by Messrs. Brophy & Ghosh on the Unconstitutionality of the Ingram Covenants offers excellent historical background and legal detail; but, alas! the authors do take an unsound view of the desirability of enforcing such covenants.

Dear old Yale was goofy enough to cooperate with a New York Times’ Sunday Mag feature all about how former Taliban roving ambassador Sayed Ramahtullah Hashemi was now studying at Yale, and wasn’t that so cool?

What with world events, the Taliban’s generally negative reputation, and the ready availability of some rather colorful interviews gven just a few years ago by Ramahtullah himself, poor Yale really got clobbered with the proverbial million dollars worth of bad publicity over all this. And it seems that those stout-hearted Yale administrators are getting tired of replying “No comment” to sarcastic questions from the Press.

The Yale Administration reflected long and hard, and came to the inevitable conclusion that fewer and better Ramahtullahs at Yale amounted to less grief for themselves, so (with the characteristic courage of their breed) they denied Ramahtullah’s application for admission as a degree candidate.

H/T to Michelle Malkin.

The Blogosphere was filled today with howls of savage satisfaction at the sudden death of Ken Lay.

How can I not respond?

My wife is persuaded of Lay’s villainy, having read two of the books produced by journalists in the aftermath of Enron’s demise.

I wouldn’t read those books, but I remember reading the attack story spread across the front page of the Wall Street Journal by members of its leftwing news side, and I remember being unpersuaded that pushing the edge of the accounting practices envelope was necessarily either illegitimate or criminal.

In America, when the hound pack of the Press chases a conspicuously wealthy defendant, the prosecutor/huntsman always wins. The readily-provoked envy of the masses invariably ensures a guilty verdict. And such was Ken Lay’s unhappy fate.

The honest WSJ editorial side was skeptical of the prosecution’s case as well:

There is no doubt that Mr. Lay is guilty of bad management. He admitted Thursday that his trust in Mr. Fastow was misplaced, and there must have been other missteps. But Mr. Fastow had plenty of help in covering his tracks, both within Enron and from its outside accountants. In a criminal trial, it is not enough to say that Mr. Lay should have known. No CEO can know all that is going on in a large corporation, and the fraud at Enron was so complex that it took prosecutors more than two years to unravel.

The government’s Exhibit A will presumably be a videotape of Mr. Lay’s now-famous pep talk to employees in August 2001, telling them Enron was still “doing extremely well” and encouraging them to hold on to their stock. Many followed his advice and ended up losing much of their life savings. That aroused an understandable anger with the CEO, who was paid salary and bonuses in the millions.

But Mr. Lay was also putting his money where his mouth was. During the long slide of Enron’s share price, he continued to keep the vast majority of his personal wealth in the stock and even bought more shares, selling only when forced by margin calls. This is not consistent with the theory that he knew the company’s true situation and was out to defraud shareholders.

Mr. Lay’s co-defendant, former CEO Jeffrey Skilling, claimed that he resigned from the company for personal reasons and allegedly made $89 million in profits from selling Enron stock. By all accounts Mr. Lay came back to the company to replace Mr. Skilling as CEO because of his personal connection to it. He then did what captains are supposed to do, which is go down with his ship.

I’m not sure I believe the heart attack story, but I see no reason to inquire. The young boy from Tyrone, Missouri who delivered newspapers and mowed lawns made good, made a lot of money, lived the good life, and like many a good man was brought low. If he escaped prison and degradation by his own hand, good for him.

Perhaps Ken Lay behaved in extremis as the ancient Romans did, when Fate turned on them. Thinking of Ken Lay today, I remembered the end of Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurian:

For there remained also, for the old earthy creature still within him, that great blessedness of physical slumber. To sleep, to lose one’s self in sleep–that, as he had always recognised, was a good thing. And it was after a space of deep sleep that he awoke amid the murmuring voices of the people who had kept and tended him so carefully through his sickness, now kneeling around his bed: and what he heard confirmed, in the then perfect clearness of his soul, the inevitable suggestion of his own bodily feelings. He had often dreamt he was condemned to die, that the hour, with wild thoughts of escape, was arrived; and waking, with the sun all around him, in complete liberty of life, had been full of gratitude for his place there, alive still, in the land of the living. He read surely, now, in the manner, the doings, of these people, some of whom were passing out through the doorway, where the heavy sunlight in very deed lay, that his last morning was come, and turned to think once more of the beloved. Often had he fancied of old that not to die on a dark or rainy day might itself have a little alleviating grace or favour about it. The people around his bed were praying fervently–Abi! Abi! Anima Christiana! [“Depart! Depart! Christian Soul!”] In the moments of his extreme helplessness their mystic bread had been placed, had descended like a snow-flake from the sky, between his lips. Gentle fingers had applied to hands and feet, to all those old passage-ways of the senses, through which the world had come and gone for him, now so dim and obstructed, a medicinable oil. It was the same people who, in the gray, austere evening of that day, took up his remains, and buried them secretly, with their accustomed prayers; but with joy also, holding his death, according to their generous view in this matter, to have been of the nature of martyrdom; and martyrdom, as the church had always said, a kind of sacrament with plenary grace.

A second Qassam missile launched by Hamas militia from Gaza struck the Israeli city of Ashkelon Wednesday night, one day after the first rocket to hit a city in Israel landed on a high school. Another missile exploded harmlessly south of the city. Depkafile reports:

Eight people in shock, four of them children. The missile exploded on residential Efraim Tsur Street.

Jerusalem Post

WorldNetDaily

The really intriguing question of whether the Palestinians will make good their threat of using WMDs remains to be seen.

The American Spectator has learned from Treasury and Justice Department officials more scarifying details about the US Government’s attempts to persuade both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times to refrain from publishing the SWIFT story.

According to Treasury and Justice Department officials familiar with the briefings their senior leadership undertook with editors and reporters from the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, the media outlets were told that their reports on the SWIFT financial tracking system presented risks for three ongoing terrorism financing investigations. Despite this information, both papers chose to move forward with their stories.

“We didn’t give them specifics, just general information about regions where the investigations were ongoing, terrorist organizations that we believed were being assisted. These were off the record meetings set up to dissuade them from reporting on SWIFT, and we thought the pressing nature of the investigations might sway them, but they didn’t,” says a Treasury official.

In fact, according to a Justice Department official, one of the reporters involved with the story was caught attempting to gain more details about one of the investigations through different sources. “We believe it was to include it in their story,” says the official….
“We thought that once the reporters and editors understood that one, these were not warrantless searches, and two, that this was a successful program that had netted real bad guys, and three, that it was a program that was helping us with current, ongoing cases, they would agree to hold off or just not do a story,” says the U.S. Treasury official. “But it became clear that nothing we said was going sway them. Whomever they were talking to, whoever was leaking the stuff, had them sold on this story.”

To that end, the Justice Department has quietly and unofficially begun looking into possible sources for the leak. “We don’t think it’s someone currently employed by the government or involved in law enforcement or the intelligence community,” says another Justice source. “That stuff about ‘current and former’ sources just doesn’t wash. No one currently working on terrorism investigations that use SWIFT data would want to leak this or see it leaked by others. We think we’re looking at fairly high-ranking, former officials who want to make life difficult for us and what we do for whatever reasons.”

The fact that this last especially outrageous violation of national security appears likely to motivate the Justice Department to get serious about catching the Pouting Spooks responsible, and bringing them to justice, sheds a single ray on sunshine on the appalling situation. The truth of the matter is, all they need to do is get one cowardly squealer to talk, and they can probably bag the whole lot. In that company, too, cowardly squealers are probably a dime a dozen.

For some inexplicable reason, this new advertisement by Sony announcing the availability of a white version of Sony’s Playstation Portable has provoked controversy.

This is the sort of thing which will one day amuse historians, who will chuckle over anecdotes demonstrating our era’s characteristic cringe over racial matters, in precisely the same way we are amused at the idea of prudish Victorians placing skirts on the legs of tables and pianos.

Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff, who for obvious reason signs her postings “Heart” and not “Head,” subscribes to the same school of paranoid Feminism as that ditzy chick teaching at USC.

Seelhoff quotes the Hadji Girl song, and (with typical Feminist logic) segues from a discussion of a humorous skit of a Marine turning the tables on insurgents who attack him, to the case of several soldiers from the 101th Airborne Division of the US Army, not Marines, who have been accused by Iraqis of participating in an incident of rape and murder in the Iraqi city of Mahmoudiya.

Today 15-year-old Abeer Qasim Hamza is dead, having been raped and burned by soldiers after her family had been shot by them.

According to this article the soldiers who murdered her had been sexually harrassing her (described as “making advances” towards her) every day as she passed through a checkpoint they manned. She was scared and had told her mother about it several times, and her mother had spoken with friends and even asked whether her daughter could stay with them.

It is so transparent. It is so obvious.

Abeer Qasim Hamza made the fatal errror of refusing the “advances” of Marines. She had to have known, said they, that she was hot. She had to have known, said they, what she was doing, sashaying through that checkpoint every day. And she turned them down. Ignored them. Rejected them. Acted like she was scared. Who the hell did she think she was? What. They were there all the way from the United States to defend her and her family, and she thought she could get away with that kind of bullshit?

After they raped her and killed her family, they blamed it on “insurgents.” And in their minds, that wasn’t really a lie. In fact, to men under male heterosupremacy, beautiful women who refuse their advances are always “insurgents.” They are deceivers, evil vixens, jezebels, dangerous, and deadly, decoys scheming to lure them into traps. They deserve to be raped. They deserve to die.

I’m not surprised by this; it makes perfect sense to me. It will make perfect sense to any honest and clear-thinking woman who has experienced this same murderous hatred at the hands of a man she has spurned or ignored (something most women have experienced sometime or other.) I don’t think any of the men who did this were personality-disordered. I think they were men under male heterosupremacy who had the opportunity of a lifetime: the opportunity to get away with raping and killing and getting revenge against a beautiful young girl who had rejected them.

What disturbs me, and scares me, are all the Americans, including women, who defended this song, defended this performance, and bought the public explanations — thousands and thousands of them. All the Americans who thought this song was funny.

Ms. Seelhoff not only doesn’t need the formality of a trial to convict the accused soldiers, only one of whom seems to have been been charged so far. Seelhoff knows exactly what the accused were thinking, which thoughts happen to have consisted of the perfect case stereotype projections of masculine malevolence from a feminist perspective.

The reality is, neither I nor Ms. Seelhoff were there. We don’t know the truth in the Mahmoudiya case. We certainly do know that Islamic enemies of the United States are very well acquainted with our cultural vulnerabilities to accusations of this kind, and are prone to try to arrange such propaganda victories. We owe members of the US Armed Forces who have served in a theatre of war, at the very least, the same presumption of innocence until prove guilty which American civilians enjoy.

Whatever happened or didn’t happen in Mahmoudiya hasn’t got a thing to do with the song.

And, until feminists like Ms. Seelhoff develop the capacity for logical thought, and grow a sense of humor, no sensible member of the patriarchy will ever take them seriously.

———————

Old joke:

Question: How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb.

Answer: That’s not funny!

Raphael, St. George Fighting the Dragon, 1505;
Oil on wood, 12 x 10 1/4 in (30 x 26 cm); Musée du Louvre, Paris

The Daily Mail reports that

His dragon-slaying heroics have kept his legend alive through the centuries.

But the Church of England is considering rejecting England’s patron saint St George on the grounds that his image is too warlike and may offend Muslims.

Clergy have started a campaign to replace George with St Alban, a Christian martyr in Roman Britain.

The scheme, to be considered by the Church’s parliament, the General Synod, has met a cautious but sympathetic response from senior bishops.

The Reformation-era practice of burning major English clerics at the stake for heresy was clearly allowed to go out of fashion much, much too soon.

————–

We Lithuanians liked St. George as well. When I was a boy I attended St. George Lithuanian Parish Elementary School, and served mass at St. George Lithuanian Roman Catholic Church in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. I would have used a picture of the statue of St. George from my boyhood church, but, alas! I couldn’t find a usable photo in the parish histories.

North Korea ignored the protestations of the United States and other countries, and went ahead and tested a long-range missile intended to be capable of striking the Wester Coast of the United States.

Their long range test failed 40 seconds into its flight this time.

It strike me that it’s exceedingly foolish to wait until outlaw regimes like North Korea and Iran perfect their capabilities, and proceed to use them or distribute them to other parties.

The Anchoress has some colorful experiences at her local Costco, leading to a bold new theory.

One Qassam rocket fired Tuesday evening by Hamas militia units struck a high school in the Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon, 6 miles (10 km) over the border from the Gaza strip. No one was injured, and the rocket apparently did not carry a chemical warhead. This rocket strike represented the deepest penetration into Israel by a Qassam rocket so far, and was described as “a major escalation” by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

Another Israel report says that an additional three Qasam rockets were fired Tuesday morning from Northern Gaza into Israel, all three landed in the Negev region and caused no injuries and no damages. One rocket landed near kibbutz Yad Mordechai and two other in open fields near kibbutz Nahal Oz.

The use of the Qassam rockets against Israel by Hamas militia units, though so far producing little in the way of results, is of international interest because al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades boasted in leaflets distributed in Gaza on June 25th of possessing both chemical and biological weapons capabilities.

Rabbi Aryeh Spero explains in Human Events:

Why does the Times do whatever it can to demoralize our troops, cast them as blood-thirsty, bring about humiliation of President Bush and America, and even offer its pages for op-eds by a known al Qaeda terrorist, romanticizing the jihadist cause? Why is it helping our enemies and imperiling our safety and the safety of our children?

It is because the New York Times is not some inanimate object but the propaganda organ of a particular crowd, real people on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, who wish to run the country and control our domestic and foreign policy even though they have not been elected to do so. Because this crowd sees itself as superior to the rest of us and our institutions, and smugly scorns that which was once termed “the American Way,” they have placed themselves in a battle mode hostile and counter to all we hold dear. Our defeat is their victory.

If they can bring down the military, they can force the United States to go the negotiation route where they, not the generals, hold sway. If they can demonize the soldier, they assume we will look to them for “working things out” with the outside forces. If America can be defeated, then “the American Way” of strength against our enemies will be discredited, thereby opening the way for them, the cosmopolitans and transnationalists, to determine within their international fraternity the destiny of America. Bottom line: they wish to control America’s destiny…

What type of person possesses such arrogance? Elitists, like the New York Times crowd who know they are superior. A crowd that does not accept you as an intellectual, social and political equal. They “care” for you only as their ward, with they above and you below — all in the name of compassion and equality.

This crowd points to America as the source of all trouble in the world, as do the Europeans, because they think like Europeans, not Americans. They admire Paris, not Peoria. They live here, get rich here and gain power here, but respect the “sophistication” of Stockholm more than the “plainness” of Missouri. They want to reshape America into a Europeanism. Michael Wolff of New York Magazine bragged: “I’m not an American. I’m a New Yorker.” In other words, they are cosmopolitans of the world, above the plebians in Witchita.

The liberalism of the New York Times is different, for example, than that of the millions of individual liberals across the country or even that of, say, the Washington Post. The New York Times expresses the views of a specific crowd that congregates in a physical location primarily in Manhattan’s Upper West Side and, now, upper east side. It is a crowd that has never been comfortable with mainstream America and Americanism. Thus its anti-Americanism comes naturally, and easily. The anti-Americanism that horrifies us is part of their decades-old mindset. It comes with that neighborhood.

Unlike the liberalism of ideology seen in other parts of America, the anti-American leftism of the Upper West Side/New York Times crowd is akin to a heritage, passed down from generation to generation within the families living there. Additionally, contra-Americanism is their identity, a raison d’etre of this particular community. With all its wealth, power and privilege, it still feels alien to historic America and hopes and works for historic America to be replaced by a different America.

For them, it is not a hobby or pastime but a mission. They will never stop nor be satisfied. As the country becomes more permissive, this crowd keeps redefining what it means to be moral and tolerant so as to continually remain “above” the rest of America. It is a one-upmanship. This has led, for example, to their silly new definition of torture: playing loud music in front of Islamic terrorists.

More than mere liberalism, unique to the Upper West Side crowd is a haughty anti-Americanism reinforced by members living in a cocooned, chosen ghetto apart from and disdainful of the American people and “the American way.” This crowd routinely snickers at regular Americans and views the military as unrefined, as red-neck types.

Its university-educated youth redrink what they already imbibed from mother’s milk, namely, that America is racist and imperialistic. It finds, therefore, common cause and political identity with any group — be it domestic or foreign — that condemns American society or the American people. For them, groups that are anti-American are comrades.

I think the rabbi’s indictment is pretty accurate, but I wouldn’t restrict its applicability to the Upper West Side of Manhattan.