A reCAPTCHA For Virginia

We have all been on websites with pictures asking you to select the boxes with buses or stoplights or cars in order to prove you are not a bot. It is a system called reCAPTCHA. It was meant as an improvement over an earlier system that presented you with fuzzy numbers and letters which you had to type in.

Someone decided to create a new picture just for Virginia politicians and gun control advocates.

Flatlanders like Gov. Ralph Northam (D-VA) just don’t get it.

As someone who has lived in the Appalachians for the majority of my life, I can tell him that folks from Tazewell or Grundy or Wytheville are different from the rest of Virginians. They didn’t descend from the planter class and their families won’t be found in a list of the First Families of Virginia. Instead they are descended from the heavily Scots-Irish migrants who ended up there because they just wanted to be left the hell alone. They didn’t take kindly to being told what to do and they still don’t.

People in the mountains are a tolerant people until they are not. This is something the Virginia Democrats bought and paid for by Michael Bloomberg should keep in mind. I hope and pray that they do. Because if they don’t, all hell is going to break loose. And it won’t be pretty.

Snake Handling

That snake handling scene in the preview of Justified reminds of an incident involving a snake handling preacher It happened soon after I first moved
to the mountains of North Carolina. He had a little Holiness
congregation over in Canton. His day job, I kid you not, was as a wholesale bait dealer .

Our sheriff at the
time who didn’t exactly have a sterling reputation went to break up one of his outdoor revivals on the grounds that
snake handling is illegal in North Carolina. One thing lead to another and the sheriff got bit by the rattler. The sheriff made it to the hospital in time and lived. However, he did retire soon thereafter.

I guess we can thank that rattle snake for helping clean up law enforcement in Haywood County.

Oh, and that snake handling preacher who got arrested? He got bit by a rattler at a service in Greene County, Tennessee later in the year, refused treatment, and died.