You don't have to be a religious person to have heard the song "Kumbaya" sung. The song has become so interwoven into the fabric of America that there's even the colloquial term, "Kumbaya moment," that people use to convey a sense of togetherness and getting along. The word has been a part of the American lexicon for decades and the song has been a part of the culture for even longer. But the soothing melody isn't supposed to be sung in a slow melodic tone with everyone singing together in unison. Kumbaya is actually a Gullah Geechee phrase that literally translates to "come by here." If you're unfamiliar with the Gullah Geechee people, they're descendants of enslaved Africans that were brought to coastal plantations in North and South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. The enslaved people were from West and Central Africa encompassing multiple African cultures and ethnicities which created a unique amalgamation of language and culture. "The Gullah Geechee language began as a simplified form of communication among people who spoke many different languages including European slave traders, slave owners and diverse, African ethnic groups. The vocabulary and grammatical roots come from African and European languages," the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor website shares. guitar singing GIF by Cartoon Hangover Giphy This African creole is still spoken today, having influence in African American Vernacular English (AAVE), and "kumbaya" is a Gullah phrase that was turned into a hymn sung by the Gullah people during slavery. But the version most Americans grew up singing isn't the way it was originally sung, nor is it the way Gullah people sing it today. The truth is that the average person isn't aware of the roots of the song because by the time it reached summer camps and church groups, it had been stripped of it's cultural origin.Pamela Bailey, creator of the Antebellum Diaspora Project that focuses on reuniting families separated by chattel slavery recently uploaded a video to social media explaining how "Kumbaya" is supposed to sound. @antediaproject Kumbaya was a “call and response” song that that was sung with great passion! It was a call to action, not the more understated version most known by the masses today. #greenscreen #ancestors #history #research #genealogy #musician #SC #family #preservation #humanity #antebellumdiasporaproject ♬ original sound - ThePamela Bailey "It has occurred to me that many of the people who know and love this song still don't know how the song would have sounded being sung in the Gullah community. First of all, the song would've never been sung in unison in the way that you hear it sung today. It was actually a call and response," Bailey shares before singing an example. The song is not only sung as a call and response but the tempo is much faster and involves quick rhythmic clapping and stomping. One clear example of this can be seen in a recording uploaded to YouTube where a Gullah Geechee church in South Carolina is honoring one of it's members that has passed away. Instead of "kumbaya," the church sings the phrase in standard English as "come by here," but the tempo is much more upbeat and the calls more like painful cry.People in the comments of Bailey's video are excited to learn about the way the song originally sounded, while some grew up hearing it the same traditional way with one writing, "'was never that mellow' is an understatement. i remember my grandaddy singing this in church in SC. it was a true cry for help."Another person writes, "It’s so much more dynamic. Thanks for the education."Someone else says, "That makes more sense. When you sang it that way it sounded closer to how I imagined it."One teacher writes, "Thank you!! As a music teacher, I’m always trying to learn more authentic versions of musics."While many people may not have known where the beloved "Kumbaya" originated, it's not too late to spread the word. Did you know where the song came from and how it was supposed to sound?

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The unoriginal classic. The post “Actually a nick”: The Beatles song George Harrison thought they stole first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

Donald Trump won the election. The House and Senate are in Republican hands. That means the GOP now owns the debt and its consequences. This responsibility, while too much for past politicians, presents the opportunity of a lifetime: namely, to be the ones who put the government back on fiscal track and, among other things, save entitlement programs from long-term disaster. As a reminder, our debt is huge. It’s the size of the annual economy and is set to reach at least 166 percent of GDP in 30 years. Interest rates are high and have driven interest payments on that debt to levels not seen in a long time. These payments will eat up 20 percent of government revenue next year. If we exclude revenue earmarked for Social Security and, hence, already committed, that number is over 27 percent. It grows going forward and may even explode if interest rates end up higher than projected. This isn’t just a government problem; it’s a you-and-me problem. A large body of literature shows that rising debt leads to higher interest rates and slows economic growth. The indebtedness crowds out private investment, reduces the ability of businesses to expand, innovate and hire, and ultimately harms the very people policymakers aim to protect. No matter how enticing the reason, when Uncle Sam takes larger slices of the economic pie, the portion left for productive private enterprises shrinks, resulting in a smaller, less dynamic economy and fewer opportunities. Then there is the very real risk that our creditors demand higher interest rates in exchange for buying more treasuries, making the problem bigger. They might also worry that the Federal Reserve will devalue our debt with inflation. As the Washington Post editorial board rightfully warned incoming Republicans, large unfunded tax cuts could “cause exactly the kind of inflation that doomed Democrats in this election cycle. Worse, [Trump] runs the risk that the bond market will finally say ‘enough’ and start demanding even higher interest rates to offset the risks of buying into America’s ballooning debt.” It’s a sound warning considering the first Trump term wasn’t fiscally responsible. Republicans on the campaign trail reminded everyone how great the Trump economy was, and how low inflation and interest rates were. But this same booming economy made the deficit and debt growth all the more unnecessary. Even before the pandemic spending explosion, the budget deficit was approaching $1 trillion. Perhaps the second administration, with a fresh mandate, will show the discipline and leadership needed to change our fiscal trajectory. The allure of quick fixes and big spending programs is strong. The popular, yet misguided, pitfall of the moment — expanding the federal government’s role by dumping money into pet projects and subsidizing manufacturing and new family entitlements — all but ignores costs. Extending the Trump tax cuts and adding provisions such as no taxes on tips or overtime pay (without any offsets) will also be tempting. As will be denying that reforming Social Security and Medicare are fiscal imperatives. Instead, Republicans should focus on slowing the growth of debt-to-GDP. Economic growth is an important factor to achieve this goal, and the Trump agenda includes some such policies. Reducing excessive red tape that stifles businesses and hampers productivity, as well as more capital-friendly tax policies, would boost economic efficiency and give companies more freedom to allocate resources effectively, boosting tax revenue. Such regulatory and fiscal relief is especially important in the manufacturing sector. Yet economic growth alone won’t pay off the debt. It played a role in helping the country shed some of its debt after the Second World War, from a 103 percent debt-to-GDP ratio in 1945 down to 25 percent by 1973. However, a recent paper showed that it is only a piece of the puzzle. The main factor in those decades’ declining debt ratio was the austerity that followed the war, which produced primary surpluses (revenue minus spending, excluding interest payments on the debt). This decline was essential and relevant to our current situation. While the inflation that plagued the United States in the 1970s and ’80s was painful, it would have been much worse had the public debt-to-GDP not been relatively low. Today, with the debt at 100 percent, we aren’t so lucky. The road ahead will be difficult, and the choices won’t be popular. But if Trump wants to be remembered as the president who helped restore America’s economic health, he must shy away from debt-fueled government expansion and embrace fiscal discipline and renewed trust in the power of the market. Veronique de Rugy is the George Gibbs Chair in Political Economy and a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. To find out more about Veronique de Rugy and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM READ MORE: Which Nations Are the Freest, and Why Should We Care? Will Trump or Harris Drain the Swamp, or Invite You In? The post The GOP’s Gigantic Opportunity appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

President-elect Donald Trump is moving at record speed to nominate Cabinet officials and select White House staffers, especially in the area of national security policy. The world is watching and waiting, especially our allies and adversaries in the Indo-Pacific. The China hawks are back, and that most likely means that the United States will actually (instead of rhetorically) “pivot” to the Indo-Pacific. The Cold War with China is about to intensify. Let’s begin with Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth, currently a Fox News analyst and a decorated combat veteran of the Afghan and Iraq wars. Hegseth has stated that China is building an army that is specifically dedicated to defeating the U.S. Hegseth believes that America’s armed forces need to be more lethal, less concerned with “diversity, equity and inclusion,” and focused on winning wars. China, he believes, wants to take over Taiwan and gain control over its semiconductor industry. China’s leaders, he recently remarked, “have a full-spectrum long-term view of not just regional but global domination.” Hegseth will likely advocate for shifting resources from the Ukraine war to bolstering our ability to deter and if necessary defeat China in the western Pacific.  Trump’s pick for national security adviser, Florida Rep. Mike Waltz, also a retired army combat veteran, says that China is an “existential threat,” and has called for the U.S. to arm Taiwan “now before its too late.” Like Trump, Waltz has also urged Taiwan’s leaders to provide more for their own defense. Waltz values America’s alliances with Japan and South Korea, and sees India as a potential valuable ally against China. Waltz compares our current struggle with China to the 20th-century Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union. He is more supportive of Ukraine than Hegseth, but has also urged our European allies to provide more help in a war that affects them more than it does the United States. Perhaps the biggest China hawk on Trump’s new team is Secretary of State nominee Sen. Marco Rubio. Rubio has warned that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan may happen in the next few years. “We must do all we can to deter an attack on Taiwan,” Rubio said in 2022, “or we risk losing the Indo-Pacific region to the Chinese Communist Party.” Rubio is probably more interventionist than Trump or some of his other advisers, but on China he is in lockstep with other Trump national security picks.  Meanwhile, Trump has nominated New York Rep. Elise Stefanik to be America’s UN ambassador. Stefanik has been an outspoken critic of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its influence operations within the United States. Last year, Stefanik traveled to the Indo-Pacific region to meet with allied leaders in Japan, Singapore, and Thailand, where she pledged to “continue to strengthen key alliances and partnerships in the region” in the face of what she called China’s encroachment in the Indo-Pacific. Trump’s pick of Tulsi Gabbard, another army veteran, for director of national intelligence (DNI), is not so much a China hawk as a Ukraine war skeptic, who like Trump was highly critical of the interventionist policies of Bush 43, Obama, and Biden. She previously opposed Trump’s trade war with China, but also warned that Biden’s policies were pushing China and Russia closer together. For CIA director, Trump has selected former DNI Director John Ratcliffe, described as a “hardliner against China.” Ratcliffe was quoted as saying that “Beijing intends to dominate the U.S. and the rest of the planet economically, militarily, and technologically.”  Trump’s picks should come as no surprise, and it is likely that sub-cabinet positions and other national security and military positions will complement those at the top. Toward the end of Trump’s first term as president, the China “superhawks” (to borrow Josh Rogin’s term in Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the 21st Century) were ascendant. Rogin noted that after two years of infighting, the “hardliners in the Trump administration ultimately succeeded in moving the government closer to a competitive stance vis-à-vis China than any administration that had come before.” This was no small feat given the consensus behind engagement with China that dominated post-Cold War thinking since the early 1990s. Trump started to reverse that in his first term, but the Biden administration shifted back to “competitive engagement,” a policy that emboldened the CCP to place even more pressure on Taiwan. Moreover, Biden’s support for a Ukrainian victory in its war with Russia moved Russia closer to China.  Trump’s picks thus far demonstrate a consensus on a much firmer China policy — a recognition that post-Cold War engagement was a strategic failure that facilitated the rise of a new peer competitor to the United States. Trump and these advisers surely don’t want war with China, but they understand that the best way to avoid war is to prepare for it in such a way that the adversary is deterred. That will be the most important mission of Trump’s new China hawks. READ MORE: The Growing Irrelevance of the Mainstream Media Trump’s Well-Chosen Promises Would Bush’s Endorsement Help Harris? The post With Trump’s Presidency, the China Hawks Are Back appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

John Bolton just said Matt Gaetz is the "worst nomination for a cabinet position in American history." This confirms that Gaetz is indeed the best and most qualified person to lead the DOJ. President Trump made a revolutionary pick. Inverse Bolton. pic.twitter.com/MfLipxw92I — George (@BehizyTweets) November 14, 2024

by Rhoda Wilson, Expose News: A recently published paper in the European Economic Review estimated the impact of covid “vaccines” on care home mortality using double-debiased machine learning for the first time.  It found that a high covid “vaccine” booster take-up in elderly care homes did not reduce the covid deaths of residents.  In fact, the study […]