I was on vacation for the last two weeks of December, and off the grid for most of that time. Upon my return, I found I'd missed a bunch of dumb stories, along with some real news that will ultimately prove fairly unimportant in the grand scheme of things. The final Obamacare delays of 2013, along with the December enrollment figures, are at home in the latter category. The revelation that my friend Matt Yglesias invented a fake baby to get Amazon's Mom discount was more typical of the former.

There's actually wide agreement among my peers who cover national politics that the last half of December was a news dead zone, which journalists endured by building totems out of trivia, and compiling top 10 lists.

I mostly agree with this assessment, but part ways with those who dismiss the importance of the "Duck Dynasty" dust-up.

How grateful I am this holiday season that I was mostly on vacation during the Duck Dynasty debate. Indeed, I am richly blessed.

- McKay Coppins (@mckaycoppins) December 28, 2013

On the contrary, if there's one story I wish I'd been on hand to watch unfold in real time, it's the "Duck Dynasty" debate. If you write about politics for a living, and you were bored by the "Duck Dynasty" story, or wrote it off like you might write off a gaffe or some other creation of the outrage industry, you're in the wrong line of work. Phil Robertson's comments about gay and black people and social welfare - and the way they pierced public consciousness - explain more about our country's political culture than almost anything else that happened all year.

An 11-year-old girl was arrested early Saturday morning after allegedly stabbing her mother 9 times at an apartment complex. Although the police have not specified the relationship between the girl and the victim, family friends told News 8 that the victim, Toshia Edmonson, was in fact, the girl's mother. The girl's identity was not released because she is a minor.

According to the police report, the girl was dropped off at an apartment Friday, just before midnight. She was reportedly upset that she had to be home. Police say the girl told them her mother said she was going to give her way and then shoved her into a couch. The report states the girl waited for her mother to fall asleep, retrieved a knife from the kitchen, and entered her bedroom where she stabbed her 9 times in the head, neck and shoulder. The girl's younger brother, according to the report, heard his mother wake up screaming for his sister to stop and calling out her name. Edmonson eventually was able to grab the knife and fell on top of the girl, stopping the attack.

In the late 1970s, a handful of feminist scholars did some groundbreaking research and delivered some distressing news: one in three American women and one in ten American men, they reported, had been victims of childhood sexual abuse.

Their studies proved that incest wasn't the rare anomaly it was long believed to be. Incest happened often. It happened in normal families - in the house down the street, in the bedroom down the hall.

A psychological phenomenon called repressed memory had allowed this outrage to go unacknowledged, even unknown. As Freud had first asserted a century earlier, the impact of child sexual abuse on young psyches was so profound that victims often lost their memories for years or decades. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were walking around with the time bomb of untreated childhood sexual abuse ticking inside them.

For better and for worse, these findings transformed incest from a dirty little secret of American family life into an American obsession. During the 1980s and early 1990s, several cultural icons, including Susanne Somers, former Miss America Marilyn Van Derbur, Roseanne Barr, and Oprah Winfrey, went public as incest survivors. Incest memoirs hit best-seller lists. "The Color Purple," whose protagonist had borne two of her father's babies, won the Pulitzer Prize. Sympathetic and sensational incest stories proliferated on TV news shows and after-school specials and in newspapers and magazines.

Reported cases of child abuse and neglect surged from 669,000 in 1976 to 2.9 million in 1993. During those years, according to "Victims of Memory" author Mark Pendergrast, up to one million families were torn apart by false accusations of sexual abuse.

Mine was one of them.

The 2005 tragedy haunted him when he returned to his home in Savannah, Ga. At night, a tall, shadowy figure crept into his room. Sometimes the Black Thing would threaten to kill him; other times it would choke his dead best friend.

The dark figure, a "Destroyer demon," punished him, he said, "for killing and for living."

Without answers - his PTSD diagnosis offered little explanation - he went to the one person he felt could save him: a minister who offered $199 exorcisms out of his trailer.

Daniels, profiled in the book "Demon Camp" by first-time author Jennifer Percy, is just one of many deeply troubled soldiers suffering from the after-effects of war who are so desperate for respite they undergo exorcisms at a fringe Pentecostal retreat.

Bear Creek Ranch, in Portal, Ga., is ministered by Tim and Katie Mather, a husband-and-wife team that has conducted over 5,000 exorcisms, some of them on veterans.

This is perhaps not surprising given the numbers of the afflicted.

Half of convicted sex attackers, violent criminals and burglars are avoiding prison despite government pledges to end "soft" sentences, official figures have revealed.

More than 65,000 serious criminals walked free despite being convicted of a range of offences including rape, sexual assault, manslaughter, grievous bodily harm and robbery.

Just 53 per cent of convicted paedophiles who abused children under the age of 13 were jailed in 2012, while half of drug dealers also escaped jail. Overall, just one in four criminals were sent to prison when lesser sentences were taken into account.

The figures are likely to embarrass the Conservatives. Chris Grayling, the justice secretary who has positioned himself as a Tory traditionalist on law and order in contrast to Ken Clarke, his more liberal predecessor.

A family were given a scary start to 2014 when they found a snake hiding inside their toilet.


The reptile had managed to slither into the Exwick home before being discovered tucked-away under the rim by a woman on New Year's Day.

Police were shocked to see the animal inside the lavatory when they responded to an "urban myth" report of a snake in a toilet.

Officers managed to extract the reptile before taking it away to a "place of safety".

Samantha Edworthy of Tiny Boas in Heavitree, said husband Jason was "surprised" to receive a call from Devon and Cornwall Police about the creature on January 1.

"Why the snake was in the toilet, I'll never know," she said. "The police ring us frequently about snakes they've found in garden sheds or elsewhere, but it's the first time we've ever heard of one in a toilet."

It is understood the woman who reported finding the snake was initially not believed by the rest of her family.

They reportedly called the police as a "last resort" after being refused help by the RSPCA.

The Gipper's warm "morning in America" worldview was directly shaped by his reading of occult thinker Manly P. Hall

Ronald Reagan often spoke of America's divine purpose and of a mysterious plan behind the nation's founding. "You can call it mysticism if you want to," he told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 1974, "but I have always believed that there was some divine plan that placed this great continent between two oceans to be sought out by those who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom and a special kind of courage." These were remarks to which Reagan often returned. He repeated them almost verbatim as president before a television audience of millions for the Statue of Liberty centenary on July 4, 1986.

When touching on such themes, Reagan echoed the work, and sometimes the phrasing, of occult scholar Manly P. Hall.

From the dawn of Hall's career in the early 1920s until his death in 1990, the Los Angeles teacher wrote about America's "secret destiny." The United States, in Hall's view, was a society that had been planned and founded by secret esoteric orders to spread enlightenment and liberty to the world.

In 1928, Hall attained underground fame when, at the remarkably young age of twenty-seven, he published "The Secret Teachings of All Ages," a massive codex to the mystical and esoteric philosophies of antiquity. Exploring subjects from Native American mythology to Pythagorean mathematics to the geometry of ancient Egypt, this encyclopedia arcana remains the unparalleled guidebook to ancient symbols and esoteric thought. "The Secret Teachings" won the admiration of figures ranging from General John Pershing to Elvis Presley. Novelist Dan Brown cites it as a key source.

After publishing his "Great Book," Hall spent the rest of his life lecturing and writing within the walls of his Egypto-art deco campus, the Philosophical Research Society, in L.A.'s Griffith Park neighborhood. Hall called the place a "mystery school" in the mold of Pythagoras's ancient academy.

George W. Bush
George W. Bush Presidential Center
PO Box 560887
Dallas, Texas, 57356

Dear Mr. Bush:

A few days ago I received a personalized letter from your Presidential Center which included a solicitation card for donations that actually provided words for my reply. They included "I'm honored to help tell the story of the Bush Presidency" and "I'm thrilled that the Bush Institute is advancing timeless principles and practical solutions to the challenges facing our world." (Below were categories of "tax-deductible contributions" starting with $25 and going upward.)

Did you mean the "timeless principles" that drove you and Mr. Cheney to invade the country of Iraq which, contrary to your fabrications, deceptions and cover-ups, never threatened the United States? Nor could Iraq [under its dictator and his dilapidated military] threaten its far more powerful neighbors, even if the Iraqi regime wanted to do so.

Today, Iraq remains a country (roughly the size and population of Texas) you destroyed, a country where over a million Iraqis, including many children and infants (remember Fallujah?) lost their lives, millions more were sickened or injured, and millions more were forced to become refugees, including most of the Iraqi Christians. Iraq is a country rife with sectarian strife that your prolonged invasion provoked into what is now open warfare. Iraq is a country where al-Qaeda is spreading with explosions taking 20, 30, 40, 50 or 60 lives per day. Just this week, it was reported that the U.S. has sent Hellfire air-to-ground missiles to Iraq's air force to be used against encampments of "the country's branch of al-Qaeda." There was no al-Qaeda in Iraq before your invasion. Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were mortal enemies.

Translated by SOTT.net

An investigation will be opened by Florent Boura, the local state prosecutor who has seen the video footage of the offending scene. Jean-Pierre Door, the local mayor, hopes for strict sanctions

Jean-Pierre Door, the (UMP party) deputy mayor of Montargis in the Loiret department in north-central France, discovered a horrific video of youths committing a 'quenelle' * in front of his town hall yesterday morning. He was absolutely disgusted.

Posted on Youtube on December 29th, it depicts nine youths openly, on the steps of the city hall, before showing their support for the humorist Dieudonné, making the gesture of 'la quenelle' repeatedly, while their spokesman violently attacks the great President of the Republic. All the while, in the background, "Le Chant des Partisans" plays.

A fine of 45,000 euros for insulting the President of the Republic

Jean-Pierre Door sent the video to the police so that they can begin their investigations. An investigation will also be opened by Florent Boura, the state prosecutor of Montargis. He believes that the video contains objectionable features, including an insult to the President of the Republic. The penalty is a fine of € 45,000. The prosecutor also mentioned incitement to racial hatred: "The fact that this crime was performed in the city of Montargis is not an aggravating factor but for a different analysis."

Hundreds of armed vigilantes stormed a Mexican town and arrested federal police in the latest bloody battle between residents, criminal gangs, and the police locals say are in league with the gang members.

Around 600 members of local 'autodefensas', or self-defence groups, stormed Paracuaro in the troubled Michoacan state yesterday in an attempt to seize control of the town back from the feared Caballeros Templarios (Knights Templar) drug cartel.

The battle was the latest in a long-running war between the drugs gang in Mexico's south-west and local residents who say state and federal police are not protecting them.