Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the UAW had refused a compromise offer by Ford of a 12.4 percent pay raise, equating to 15 cents per hour, to avoid a strike. The company had also sought a security package regarding strikes in violation of contract. The union demanded, as in the G.M. strike, a 30 percent wage increase. G.M. had offered a ten percent increase or 13.5 cents an hour, prior to the beginning of the strike on November 21.

The joint Congressional committee investigating Pearl Harbor received a statement from a Japanese naval officer, Commander Tomo Tachibana, that on December 6, 1941, the Japanese had intercepted American broadcast signals which enabled interpretation of the number of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers present in Pearl Harbor, as well which were out on training missions. They had also been able to deduce the time and zone of airplane patrols in the same manner. The commander further stated that he and other Japanese commanders had been told on November 9 to prepare for war with the U.S., Great Britain, and the Netherlands.

Admiral Theodore Wilkinson, having changed suddenly his newspaper name, no doubt for reasons of security, from "Thomas" of the day before, finished his testimony in which he stated that the warships in Pearl Harbor may have had an hour and a half to put to sea if a warning message had been sent from Washington at the time he had urged. He also stated that the Fleet would have been less insulated from attack on the West Coast or at Lahaina Roads, another anchorage in Hawaii.

Captain Charles McVay, skipper of the ill-fated Indianapolis, testified in his own defense at his court martial in Washington that there was no moon on the night of July 29-30 when the ship was struck and sunk, and that visibility was poor. That is why he did not order a zig-zag course to evade enemy submarines. He also stated that at the time of the explosions, he was asleep in his cabin. He awoke immediately and ordered a distress message communicated. He could not see the extent of damage from the bridge, but initially the ship was maintaining a fairly even keel. When told the ship was badly damaged, the captain stated that he nevertheless did not want the ship abandoned as he thought the damage could be controlled. But after another check, the executive officer told him the ship was doomed; in reliance on that assessment, he ordered the ship abandoned.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a resolution, already passed by the Senate, urging the Government to seek from Britain the free entry of Jews into Palestine. The full House would soon vote on the measure. In the Senate, only Senator Tom Connally of Texas cast a nay vote, giving as his reason that the President instead wanted to afford an Anglo-American committee time to investigate the matter and make recommendations.

Premier Stalin returned to Moscow after a 68-day vacation, ending rumors that he had been ill.

The foreign ministers conference in Moscow meanwhile entered its third day.

The FBI announced that nineteen persons had been arrested for theft of $125,000 worth of merchandise, either owned by the Government or moving in interstate commerce.

The 68-inch snowfall at Buffalo ended. Seven lives were lost in five days.

Sleet, snow, and rain fell in Georgia and Alabama, with snow in Louisiana, Nashville, Memphis, Atlanta, and Birmingham.

Freck Sproles reports on plans by the Salvation Army and other groups in the community to help provide Christmas to the needy of Charlotte. The Empty Stocking Fund had increased by $1,000 to $5,061.29, thanks to an $800 contribution by the Charlotte Wrestling and Boxing Commission, a perennial contributor to the fund.

On the editorial page, "Mr. Murray's About-Face" finds CIO head Philip Murray's acquiescence to higher prices being charged by the steel industry to accommodate increases in wages to be indicative of CIO's stand that wage increases could be passed on to the consumer. He assured that the union would not demand to look at the books of U. S. Steel, even though it had demanded to examine G.M.'s books. Such a stance might effect a resolution of the steel issue and the G.M. strike and Ford wage impasse. But it would be at the cost of a Government sell-out if consumer prices ultimately were raised to pay for it.

"Mink and Malnutrition" comments on the ad for Macy's running recently in New York newspapers in which it promoted $246 mink overcoats for dogs, under such sloganeering, "What a witch...since she got her Macy mink."

"Muttering from Below" finds several news items suggesting that the animal kingdom might be revolting upon the approach of winter. In Houston, a duck was killed by a man with a show gun in his back yard. When he sought to kill another duck, it pounced on his hand and caused the pistol to discharge into the man's leg.

In Holyoke, Colorado, a dog had jumped into a farmer's truck, placed his paw right on the trigger of a shotgun, discharging the weapon, killing the farmer instantly.

Near Hagerstown, Md., that buck had run away with the rifle the hunter had employed to wound it firmly attached to its antlers until it was found dead, still carrying the rifle proudly on its head.

The piece concludes that the animals had decided that Man had gone too far in his mastery of the earth and that they were plainly in rebellion in consequence of the inference. While the resistance was not yet organized, mutiny was clearly in the barnyard air.

And to their criticism that Man could not be trusted with the world's problems, he could only reply that he had learned how to split the atom before learning how to feed his children.

George Orwell's Animal Farm, just published in August in Britain, tells the rest of this true story, ugly though it is to realize. Whether it had been read by the editors and served as the inspiration for the piece, apart from, or a part meant to form, the actual occurrences lending it credence, we don't know. But since the book is not mentioned, likely it was mere coincidence.

But those Pigs, those Pigs, were the real instigators of the Rebellion, not the humble deer, dog, duck, merely pawns in their game. Yes, we must brand them for what they are, egging on the gentler creatures, who, under normal circumstance, would have had no part in such nefarious contra activities, against the hands which fed them. They had been urged by the Pigs to rebel, while the Pigs sat back and reaped the Farm gravy. It's always the way of it in these Revolutions. It's a dirty business, full of slop, wars and rumors of war.

Let slop the Hogs of war. Let slip the rack and reel.

"Liberals 'always connect the wrong dots and blame the same people when their idiotic ‘solutions’ don’t solve problems,' [Cleta] Mitchell [lawyer for the NRA] said," as quoted by The Washington Post, December 21, 2012.

Here we have another guy, another Fascist Pig with the Big Solution. You are a Killer, you self-righteous Pig. You are a disgrace to the legal profession, undoubtedly one of the well-paid Fascists of the bar, who have been recruited deliberately to people certain law schools and be groomed thereafter for judicial appointments by Fascist organizations in the last thirty years or so, who attack and seek to disbar other lawyers for merely exercising Freedom of Speech which articulately and resolutely, with appropriate legal analysis, shows you up for what you are, a bunch of cheap whores from hell. And the public wonders why no one much speaks out against these Whores. We are not afraid of you, Whore.

We say again, as we said a few days before the latest massacre, stimulated through time actively by members of the National Rifle Association, who cultivate killers so they can then blame the killing on the Government, as long as it is convenient, as long as there is a Democrat in the White House or a Democratically controlled Congressional chamber, all to achieve their Fascist goals of a Fascist society in their Nazi-visioned mold: Yes, we shall take it from your cold, dead hands.

At least you do, though unintentionally so, appear to subscribe to our argument that the only way to do away with mass killing by guns in the hands of the young is to excise from the Constitution the Grand Anachronism, the oft-quoted but as oft misunderstood and misinterpreted Second Amendment, and let the Congress and the states then have a free hand to legislate gun control as the people, all of the people, not just gun-wielding nuts, direct them to do.

You agree with us because no one but a complete lunatic would treat at all seriously your proposed solution; for taking police personnel off the streets in adequate numbers to guard each and every classroom in the country would not only break the country's Treasury, but would lead to such a corrupted and distracted learning environment, with an armed cop in the classroom, as to cause a drop-out rate as never before. And you do not seem to grasp the obvious: that these mass shootings previously have occurred in areas guarded by armed security, to no avail, because you do not seem to grasp that the Killer has a unique talent of being able to blend with the background and become so homogeneously ordinary as to be the very last person who would be the object of suspicion by police personnel trained to spot "suspicious" people, i.e., those who stand out from the crowd.

And all of this huge expense to society and enormous inconvenience and loss of freedom of movement, not to mention the violence, so that your precious hunting rights might be protected, your precious rights to defend yourself against attack with a gun, your precious rights to lord over the rest of us who choose not to have guns as little scared pansies, frightened in our little booty-wooties of our own shadows, a gun which has, in the end, much greater likelihood of being used on its owner or others, offensively or accidentally, than by its owner in self-defense, just as was the case in Connecticut.

A piece from the Washington Post, titled "George S. Patton, Romanticist", by correspondent John G. Norris, recently returned from a stint in the Navy, tells of a conversation had with General Patton five years earlier when he was a brigadier. He had confided to Mr. Norris that he was a collateral descendant of the family of George Washington. He rarely mentioned the fact, he said, because thus far, he had been unworthy of the claim; yet one day, lead he would, he predicted with assurance, an American Army to victory in a great battle. He had given the correspondent permission to disclose his relationship to General Washington only at that point.

Drew Pearson comments on the testimony of Private George L. Mark to the House Military Affairs Committee, letting the brass hats have it as about twenty brass hats sat listening in stunned silence. The Private was granted full immunity by the House and was about to be discharged from the Army anyway. He had called the brass "Pentagon boy scouts", "bemedaled four-flushers", and "aristocratic phonies". They were, he said, after a large Army to retain their ranks as generals.

Marquis Childs comments on the concerted efforts in London by American go-getters to locate the United Nations headquarters in the United States. Lord Halifax had refused to obey the Foreign Office directive to limit American visas based on limited hotel space in London. He understood the impact of denying such passage to mayors and other functionaries on a patriotic mission. Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, and Atlantic City, along with other smaller burgs, had each sent delegations.

Samuel Grafton finds, as had The News the previous week, the urging of the Home Builders Association that home buyers would not pay unreasonable prices negating the need for ceilings to enable pleasant views of the sky, to be founded on flawed logic. While truistic, if it had been so, there would never have been inflation in the history of the world.

Dorothy Thompson comments that if the atom bomb were to condemn the world to disintegration, it would be only in the aftermath of spiritual and intellectual disintegration.

Well, Mayans, today, December 21, 2012, we may or may not find out that Ms. Thompson's genuflecting prophecy of doom, in the wake of victory in World War II, finding it only a tomb, will come true.

Stay tuned. We have the distinct feeling, however, that we shall be back at the same old dull routine again tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, 'til the very crack of doom ends this petty pace upon the stage that is Man's lot in the curse of consciousness, knowledge of good and evil, above the Fauna and Flora, thus expelled from their Farm.

But there are those who claim the calendar of the Mayans has been miscalculated and the actual end date is still a few months hence. That is simply hedging the bet. You only get one shot, not two, to end the world. It was supposed to end years ago anyway. If you can't deliver the goods, then stop issuing these silly prophecies.

The sound of a train in the distance at dawn foretells the tale that, for now, all in Mudville is well, that the safes have not yet failed, though a day may come when the machine fumbles its sum and the sky, rife with portent nigh, turns ashen, mute, rolls dumbshow's fife and drum, Man's lease on earthly rest rent and run.

Two men write a letter in response to the caustic letter of December 15 written by a woman in response to a letter from two women workers seeking contributions for children of strikers at the Erwin Mills in three North Carolina towns—none of which had Airports. (Look under "gift" in the Bard's lexicon; you, you punk kid, you hung-dung, gun toting hick, cannot destroy "this", for this is this, and you're not, having shot down your own daddy's leg.) The gentlemen indicate that mill workers had always received low wages, that the woman correspondent appeared ignorant of the actual conditions in textile mills, though claiming to have worked in one. Wages were once averaging $10 to $12 per week before the fight by organized labor to get passed the minimum wage law establishing 40 cents per hour as the minimum, and 55 cents since that time.

They point out that the workers had managed to raise $3,000 for the children's Christmas party. They believed that, regardless of how one felt about their strike to avoid the stretch-out system, it would negate the Christmas spirit to deprive children of Christmas.

The lady who had written was simply an ignorant slime.

We might expect that the lady will respond, if permitted to object, outraged again over the fact of $3,000 having been raised in sin, remitted to afford a Christmas party for the children, seemingly a bit extravagant, by ordinary, for mill workers to throw in North Carolina's hog chaudron, when children of Europe starved this Christmas maudlin, a falling Winter in Satan's grip, as the world appeared ready in discontent to slip, no sooner than peace on earth had been declared at San Francisco in June, and immediate thereto, in the 44 days ensuing, which saw the advent of the atomic bomb brewing, at Trinity, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, winds blowing, Bikini to follow, skewering to the sticking post, stewing the witch's Sabbath, in 1946, the eyes' daggers' havoc, thus our breasts imbrued, with points sharp, true, to pluck the strings of harps and so to us a Good Night endue, into the Eternal endless Blue, becoming Black benighted, black by day to those without a Clue, arointed.

Remember that Jesus was but a Jew, an Ethiop, before the angel's Cue to Mary upon her shoulder alighted, to make her infant then appear, in virginal chaste, against desert sands, in that manger's peaceful place, waxed pure in shades whited.

Light a candle if you dare, than curse the pricks of holly on the door bedighted.