SAYING HAPPY HOLIDAYS IS ANOTHER WAY OF SAYING MERRY CHRISTMAS

If you read the title, you read English. The concepts that words label don't change to suit the needs of anyone. However, when enough misuse a word over time, mistakenly, many believe that word has taken on new meaning. One of those words is holiday.

Adoration of the Shepherds by Gerard van Honthorst (1620)

Holiday is the Old English word haligdæg. To Old English speakers the word meant Christian holy day, consecrated day, religious anniversary; day of rest. To Old English speakers holiday had no other meaning.

When Old English speakers wanted to speak of other people and their religion, Old English speakers would say demonym adjectives prefacing the word holiday.

To English speakers, other people and their other religions do not have holidays. They have days of significance to their religion.

Americans came to say the phrase happy holidays as a Christmastime greeting, which the sellers of Camel cigarettes introduced in advertising to Americans in 1937.

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ALCOHOL, EVIL, LUCK, AND ENGLISH. WHY MOST SUFFER FROM FALSE BELIEFS AND WHY MOST LIVE LAME LIVES.

ME:

Can you imagine Muslim refugees drinking a few pints down at the local with the lads while watching the 2015 Rugby World Cup? I can't (see: ENGLAND, THE RUGBY WORLD CUP 2015 AND THE MUSLIM REFUGEES INVASION OF EUROPE).


CHARLIE:

Alcohol is evil... can so often lead to violence...

ME:

Alcohol is inert. It is not sentient. By your beliefs, fire is evil because fire destroys things through burning.

Rightly, many of mankind live by evil or live from evil. The man or woman who lives by alcoholism lives by evil. The alcohol itself isn't evil.

Evil is an Old English word meaning vicious, wicked, bad, ill. Ill is a word of Old Norse that entered English about 1200 meaning morally evil. Wicked is an English word also attested to about 1200 meaning bad, false.

Vicious is an Old French word spoken by the Anglo-Normans and first attested to the late 1300s meaning unwholesome, impure, of the nature of vice, wicked, corrupting, pernicious, harmful. In turn the word comes from the Latin vitiosus meaning faulty, full of faults, defective, corrupt; wicked, depraved.

All of these things — evil, vicious, wicked, ill, unwholesome, corrupting — are bad characters of individuals of mankind. Never are these are not qualities of things.

Because most know words and can pronounce words, most believe they know what they say. Yet, more often than not, they do not. That is why their beliefs are muddled and superstitious-driven.

Good luck!

CHARLIE:

LOL! I will need the luck today for sure.

ME:

Luck is merely having kept one's eyes open for opportunity and always having worked to better oneself so that one can leverage oneself to gain from the opportunity.

Opportunity offers itself in proportion to one's skills, one's will for action, and one's belief in attaining the outcome. Those who act in the face of opportunity and who come out ahead are lucky.

Opportunity comes from the Latin expression ob portum veniens meaning coming toward a port. When you come to port, you must ask those who are from there if they want what you offer. You must seek those who have what you want.

Hence, my cheers of good luck to one and all.

Those who are slothful, reliant upon others, those who can only imitate — these are the ones who fail to see opportunity and thus never experience luck.

Luck does not mean being handed something for nothing though fools believe that is the meaning of luck.

Luck entered into English late in the 1400s from the Middle Dutch meaning happiness (cf. Deutsch Glück). Happiness is an Old English word meaning the fullness of being happy. Happy is Middle English for one who takes on the haps (chances).

Happy does not mean temporal joy, temporal bliss or any such nonsense that almost all believe happiness means today.

Because most native English speakers are horrible with Latinate English — English words taken from Old French, Middle French, Norman French, Late Latin, Modern Latin — they grow up quite confused about the meaning of words of English, especially words of Old English derived from Old Saxon and Old Norse as well as of Middle English, you know, the rudiments of English.

Good luck!

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DO YOUR DUE DILIGENCE. UGH. YOU CAN'T DO DUE DILIGENCE, EVER.

All too often, I come across someone who says the rather stupid expression, "You gotta do your due diligence before you buy." Stupidly, many who say such, believe, wrongly of course, that doing your due diligence means researching an investment or speculation before buying.

You can't do your own due diligence. You can't owe yourself any legal requirement to consummate a deal.



Due diligence is what one party owes another party because of legality. Due means that which is owed. Diligence in the context of due diligence means a best effort of the facts presented so as not to commit fraud in a commercial deal.

Would-be sellers of things that have legal requirement of prospectus owe a best-effort to present the facts. Those offering stock for the first time, those offering realty and so on have requirement by law to disclose pertinent facts.

They owe (due) a best-effort (diligence) to give the facts to would-be sellers.

Legislators either have written law directly or have given authority to regulators who require legally-mandated documents, which disclose essential facts. Preparation of these documents must be done with earnest to present the facts so as not to commit fraud.

Many get confused because the words due and do are homophones. It's a linguistic error made by many that has arisen since the boom days of the Internet IPO by neophytes. The frequency of the error has risen quite a bit in the last ten years, especially in the latter days of the housing bubble.

Likely, wily advertisers have misled many into the idiotic belief that due diligence means comparison shopping. It doesn't. As well, it doesn't mean shop around nor compare prices, nor research before you buy.

Advertisers have done their best to wreck English. These days, it's common to hear or read in advertising the word ridiculous to mean amazing rather than what it means, that which is excites laughter from derision. It sure is ridiculous that too many say due diligence to mean comparison shopping.

If someone says to you, "You need to do your due diligence before you buy," run! Do not listen to them! They don't know what they're talking about.

Ordinary, average guys never make such mistakes. Instead, they hope their doo is hard.

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EBB AND FLOW. UGH! IT'S EBB AND FLOOD.

Almost everyday, whenever I read the news, I come across a story where thoughtlessly, the writer has parroted the error-filled phrase "ebb and flow."




Rightly, it is ebb and flood and not "ebb and flow". Even ebb and slack would be better. The flow is the ebb and flood.

A Google News search for the last 30 days shows many have written the mistaken ebb and flow. Such reveals the ease at which men will parrot the behavior of those before them without any thought.

An incoming tidal flow is known as a flood tide and also known as a flood current. An outgoing tidal flow is an ebb tide and also known as an ebb current. The period between flood and ebb tides, when there is little or no current, is called slack water or slack tide.

Men can attest the word tide to Old English tid meaning at a time ahead.  My Old English speaking ancestors living in Canterbury, Kent, said flod and ebba for the rise and fall as they did not say the word tid related to water. Not until the mid-1300s, did my Middle English speaking ancestors say tide to mean the rise and fall of the sea.

Slack is an Old English word. Men can attest the phrase slack water to 1769 meaning the time when tide is not flowing.

English speakers, even more so native speakers and those with ancestral English, ought to know words such as yuletide, Christmastide, tidings, riptide, betide.

It's cringeworthy (and yes, I coined that word) whenever hearing someone say or reading someone write, ebb and flow as noted marine biologist Rachel Carson (Silent Spring) did when she wrote, "To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides ...".

At least Longfellow, "The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide," and Yates, "Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, but joy is wisdom, time an endless song," had it right.

Enjoy Debby Harry with Blonde performing a cover of the 1967 John Holt song perhaps originally performed when Holt was a member of the Paragons. Holt did much to define the reggae sound of Jamaica.

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WHEN IRISH EYES ARE SELLING AND BUYING. WHY THE EURO AND NOT THE U.S. DOLLAR? AH THOSE BANKER'S BLUES.

So, Jeremy Warner of the UK's Telegraph caught a performance by the American financial TV broadcaster, CNBC's Joe Kernan (YouTube video) who seemed bemused upon learning the Irish banking system belongs to the Eurozone and not the British.

Warner claims it's "from an economic perspective, it's a very odd state of affairs which isn't obviously doing the country [the Irish] a great deal of good."

The Irish have had overlords since Henry II sent a force in 1171 to control his own Norman knights in their 1169 conquest of Ireland. The Irish overlords of today are German bankers mostly along with French and Italian bankers as well as their respective national politicians who get these bankers to buy sovereign bonds, thus enabling deficit spending and ever weakening the buying power of the Euro.

So why are the Irish beholden to their continental masters and not their former British masters? Here is what the numbers say.

It's true. The Irish import more goods from the Brits than from anyone else. In fact, 38.5% of all their goods come from the UK. The Irish import 1.5 times as much stuff from Brits as they do from their Eurozone friends.

However, the Irish export 2.7 times as much stuff to their Eurozone friends as they do to Brits. With their Eurozone friends, the Irish have a $37.5 billion trade surplus. With their not so beloved Brits, the Irish suffer a -$2.4 billion trade deficit.

Of their Eurozone friends, the Irish hold their best trade position with the Belgians and Luxembourgians. The Irish run a $16.5 billion trade surplus with with the two countries combined, which is 2.5 times better than their trade position with the French or the Germans, their next two biggest trading partners of the Eurozone.

In spite of their -$1.4 billion trade deficit with the Norwegians, mostly for oil, the Irish enjoy a $7.4 billion trade surplus with the banking independents, Swiss, Danish and Swedes, including the Norwegians.

Americans buy more stuff from the Irish than anyone. The Irish sell 21.6% of their goods to Americans. Americans buy 1.4 times as much stuff from the Irish as the Brits do. Americans buy from the Irish 1.5 times as much as Belgians and Luxembourgians combined, 2.4 times as much as the Germans and 3.0 times as much as the French.

The Brits with their Bank of England and British pound whom Kirnan believes should be the banking masters over Irish, engage is substantial trade with those of the Eurozone. A whopping 62.4% of Brit imports come from Eurozone countries while the Brits sell 57.4% of their exports to Eurozone countries.

Eurozone countries hold 77.5% of Brits's net trade position. The BRIC countries of China, India and Russia come in second with 44% of the British's net trade position.

As with the Irish, Americans buy more stuff from Brits than anyone else, although the Germans aren't far behind ($52.4 billion vs $47.5 billion). Brits sell three times as much stuff to the Eurozone players as they do to Americans and Canadians combined.

So, the bigger question becomes why aren't the Irish using the Federal Reserve banking system for theirs and thus the U.S. dollar for their cash? Likewise, why haven't the Brits long ago abandoned the British pound and the Bank of England in favor of the Federal Reserve and the the U.S. dollar or the European Central Bank and the Euro?

Unless the Irish have their own cash, never will the Irish be free. The Irish might as well celebrate the Henry the 8th Tudor re-conquest of Ireland of the 1530s.

Enjoy an little-known Irish export, a quality guitarist, Rory Gallagher.

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BRAVEHEARTS. SCOTS SERIOUSLY SEEK INDEPENDENCE FOR THE FIRST TIME IN AWHILE.

A poll for the Sunday Times declares that 51% of Scottish voters plan to vote for their independence from English dominance. This is the first time Yes voters have taken the lead since polling began. Sky News reports No voters lost a a 22-point lead within the past month.

Those seeking to maintain English sovereignty over the Scots desperately have taken to using ex-soccer players to pitch a no vote.

EU parliamentarians have tried to scare the Scots with the fear that a sovereign Scotland could get forced to wait five years before getting back into the EU. Scots should ignore that fear mongering and sign unilateral trade deals with the Norwegians, the Icelanders and yes, the English.

As I say always in such matters, it's not so much about territory. It's about people. The political establishment hates losing people because they hate losing the ability to control property of others and thus the ability to scoop up taxes, which are an unearned share of profits taken by force if necessary.

Englanders produce 85% of UK GDP. Scots produce 9%. No one has produced a study, much less a valid one, showing what part of England GDP arises from Scots and what part of Scotland GDP arises from the English.

The downside for Scots is a push by Scots to have a bigger, socialist state. Likely, the wrong Scotsmen would come to power and run into the ground an independent Scotland.

A recurrent theme expressed by likely YES voters in reporting is their anger of National Health Service (NHS) welfare spending cuts. Scots seem bent on more socialism and more political involvement in their lives and thus a weaker economy with less freedom for each man and each woman.

The Washington Post reports that if Britain were a U.S. state, it would be the second-poorest, behind Alabama and before Mississippi.  The Guardian reports that Scots GDP per head is $2,980 higher than British. Likely, the poorer Northern Irish, the Welsh, and every Englishman not living in London or South East are pulling down the British GDP per cap relative to Scots GDP per cap.

Should the Scots leave the UK, the EU overlords claim that action automatically kicks out the Scots from the EU. A Scots exit from the EU could mean a British exit from the EU. Together, both might be the tipping point for other exits.

Even if the Scots secede, the Scots, the English, the Welsh and Northern Irish have good reason to enter into a mutual defense union along with an open trade agreement as opposed to managed trade hiding under the rubric of "Free Trade Agreement". However, Scots would do better if they had their own banking system with their own cash.

Unfortunately, Scots have expressed the desire to remain in the British banking system with the British pound as their cash. Thus, Scots won't get the most important benefit from secession. In fact, without a standalone banking system, Scots won't gain true secession.

Perhaps, as an alternative to an independent Scotland, all Brits should gather around to hold a constitutional convention to instill liberty and hobble politicians, establishing a federal system for Brits along the lines of what Canadians have or Australians have.

Regardless of the outcome, Brits ought to exit the European Union. Instead, Brits ought to join the  European Economic Area (EEA) and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), gaining all of the benefits of harmonized trade with other Europeans without the loss of sovereignty.

And considering the relative per capita income of the British, perhaps Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland should dissolve the United Kingdom and become states of the United States.

Scots hold their independence referendum on Thursday, September 18, 2014.

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SUTTON WHO? ANGLES, SAXONS, AND JUTES OH MY. WHAT INVASION?

Bizarro Theater has been ongoing for much longer than the days of 20th century radio, TV and Internet media.



Back in 731 or so, a monk named Bede wrote Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (An Ecclesiastical History of the English People) in which he spun a tall tale of propaganda about the failings of Roman Christian Britons to convert Germanic immigrants to Catholicism. It is from Bede that modern era historians developed the myth of an invading horde of Angles, Saxons and Jutes sailing an armada across the English Channel coming to conquer and kill off Celto-Britains around 450 AD. After the invasion, myth tellers claim the locals slowly adopted the language, customs and beliefs of the Germanic Angles, Saxons and Jutes.

What invasion? Germanic people likely sailed with Romans in 43 AD and partook in the Roman invasion of Briton. As it were, likely most of the Roman troops of the 43 AD invasion came from Germanic imperial provinces.

Likelier still, Germanic Peregrini from Germania Inferior and Gallia Belgica populated Roman-Britain over the long span between 43 AD and 410 AD along with Roman citizen administrators and soldiers. Likely, these Germanic Peregrini outnumbered Romans emigrating to Britain by a big factor. Also likely, Germanic Peregrini were given enfranchisement maybe even by en bloc and likely had higher status than those of wealh pre-Gaulish origin Britons. As it is, all Germanic Peregrini were made citizen in 210 AD.

These Germanic Peregrini provided the backbone of Roman-standards work in Britain precisely because they had been doing so already in the imperial provinces on the mainland. These Germanic Peregrini likely were skilled craftsman and skilled farmers who were looking to move up to "new world" opportunities.

Perhaps those of the Ubii and Tongres comprised the first Germanic Peregrini who sailed with Roman citizens and soldiers from Lugdunum Batavorum (Katwijk) and Bononia (Boulogne). No doubt Germanic Peregrini of other clans and tribes traveled to the new world to advance themselves. Their population grew with their Britain-living descendants.

Since most administrators and soldiers of the 43 AD invasion came from Germanic imperial provinces, quite likely most of the administrators and higher-ranking soldiers were bi-lingual in government Latin and the prevailing Germanic tongue of their region. This is likely so because likely most were Germanic and not Romans from Rome.

The archaeological record fails to show a mass invasion and wipe out of Britons. It seems so unlikely that 5th century Germanic tribes from Germania Magna had the financial means much less the technological and organizational means to build a flotilla of ships in a World War 2 style mass invasion of Britain. That isn't to say enterprising Germanic mafioso from that region didn't show up in the power vacuum created by departing Roman administrators and soldier-police. According to those at 3D history, an Anglo-Saxon boat could carry around 40. That means an invasion of 100,000 would have needed a whopping 2,500 boats!


The Romans had the sophistication and means. The Romans carried on extensive trade from their provinces. The Romans would have been sailing ships likely on schedule from Lugdunum Batavorum (Katwijk) and Bononia (Boulogne), ships which would have transported new world opportunity seekers. The Romans had transport highways from these ports leading all the way back to Rome.

The linguistic record shows so few words of Celto-Britons in English. Yet more than a few Romano-Latin words in English supports Celto-Brits being sequestered from Romans and Germanic Peregrini.

So likely, the Old English period did not begin around 450 AD as far too many have supposed for far too long. Rather, Old English in Britain likely began 43 AD because people were already speaking a Germanic tongue, which became the basis of misnamed "Anglo-Saxon" by linguists.

That Celto-Britons get labeled as foreigners (wealh) reveals exclusion. The DNA record supports connection between contemporary Englishmen and contemporary North Sea Germanics of Belgium, Netherlands and northern Germany.

What happened in Britain from 43 AD might have looked quite a bit like what happened in Colonial America. Englishmen and Ulster Scots, the Romans and Germanics of later times, pushed out into the hinterlands the native North American "indians", the Celto-Britons of their time. The population of hunter-gatherers would remain small relative to the growing population of sophisticated farmer-traders.

Likely, the next big-scale invasion didn't come to the shores of Britain until 865 AD.

Recently, I came across this BBC doc from a few years ago hosted by Francis Pryor and based on his work Britain A.D. Pryor and I agree on the imaginary Angle, Saxon, Jute invasion. However, it should seem obvious to all that Germanics invaded in 43 A.D. and continued to migrate to Roman Britain for centuries.

Likely, these earlier migrants and their descendants spoke a Germanic tongue that gave rise to the English of the Old English era.





I'd bet the only Saxons to invade Britain were these guys who formed their invasion in Barnsley, South Yorkshire back in 1976.

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AMERICANS LIVING IN FOREIGN LANDS SHOULD TELL CONGRESS TO FACTA-OFF.

So today, Dylan Griffiths of Bloomberg reported  the number of Americans renouncing U.S. citizenship stayed near an all-time high in the first half of 2014 before FACTA rules came into force. Between January and June, 1,577 once U.S. citizens renounced their citizenship to U.S. embassy officials.



Since July 1, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act has been in full effect. The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act decrees that U.S. citizens who live outside the USA to report their financial accounts held outside the USA to the IRS on behalf of Congress. Bizarrely, the law also requires foreign financial institutions to report to the IRS about their customers who are U.S. citizens.

NO ONE who earns income outside the borders of the fifty states which comprise the USA should pay taxes to the U.S. Congress. No one.

Disgustingly, Congress believes they are owed an unearned share of profits of U.S. citizens living elsewhere in other countries like Canada and Australia. It's neither moral nor legally justifiable for Congress to demand taxes from anyone earning income outside the USA. Greedy Congress "men" yearn for this undeserved tax revenue so they can increase the balance owed on their giant-sized Congressional debt credit card, wrongly parroted by most as the "national debt" or "federal debt".

When the authors of the second constitution wrote rules giving Congress the capacity, authority and thus power to lay and collect taxes, those authors wrote their taxation design in Article 1, sections 2, 8 and 9. Enough of the delegates from the various states ratified the constitution enshrining that power into law.

In Article I, Section 2, the authors wrote,

"Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."

Specifically, Article 1, Section 8 states,

"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;"

In Article I, Section 9, the authors wrote,

"No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census of Enumeration herein before directed to be taken."

and

"No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State."

So the authors' made explicit their design:

1. Direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states.
2. The congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes.
3. Direct taxes shall be apportioned by the results of the census.
4. No export taxes of any kind.

By apportionment, the ratifiers agreed that Congress would be restricted to collecting direct taxes, such as an income tax, based on the percentage of each states' population to the total for the USA. So, if New Yorkers had 10% of the population of the USA, and if Congress levied an income tax, New Yorkers had to pay 10% of all income taxes laid by Congress.

In effect, apportionment acted as a block against Congresses from levying income taxes.  Later, after the 1895 U.S. Supreme Court declared a  federal income tax unconstitutional because it violated this rule of apportionment in Pollock v. Farmer’s Loan & Trust, another Congress decided that apportionment acted as shackles against them, so they passed the 16th Amendment, in which they wrote,

"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration."

Interestingly, before the 16th amendment, the Constitution had no mention of income.

Samuel Johnson, the devout Anglican lexicographer first published his A Dictionary of the English Language in 1755. Looking at the third edition, published in 1768 before the writing of the second constitution as well as the tenth edition published in 1792 soon after the writing of the second constitution, we can come to see how the founders thought of income.

Both th 1768 edition and the 1792 edition have revenue and income as synonyms, having an head entries for each word, revenue and income. Both words meant annual profits received from lands or other funds as well as the produce of anything.

Both th 1768 edition and the 1792 edition have revenue as a synonym for the head entry rent, specifcally defining the word rent as annual payment; the money paid for anything held of another.

Both th 1768 edition and the 1792 edition have definition for produce. Produce meant  product; that which yields or brings. The secondary definition for produce is amount; profit; gain; emergent sum or quantity.

Both the 1768 edition and the 1792 edition have definition for yield. Yield meant to produce; to give in return for cultivation or labor.

So those who drafted and ratified the second constitution had in mind earnings from land whether crop sales or rent, as well as interest from loans as the source of taxes. Never did the so-called founders or framers envision taxing anyone's labor income.

After 1895, Congress demonstrated by action they needed to define income as more than rent and interest, hence, this is why the 16th amendment includes the phrase "from whatever source." Further Congress demonstrated the need to rid itself of the pesky apportionment rule, hence the phrase, "without apportionment among the several States."

Yet, it is quite clear that in the second constitution, the ratifiers authorized taxation only with respect to the states and the Congress which drafted the 16th failed to expand taxation beyond states.

Thus, IRS rules regarding taxation of Americans as U.S. citizens living outside the USA and FACTA are quite unconstitutional. In short, Congress lacks authority to levy taxes upon anyone outside the territory of the USA and specifically the states.

If Congress had that authority, the Constitution would contain something along the lines of what would be construed as absurdity by everyone, e.g.,

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, without regard to any census or enumeration, without regard to citizenship or domicile, upon anyone living the earth over.

Congress needs a geography lesson. No one living in the 193 U.N. member countries, nor living in the 206 sovereign countries, nor those living in the U.S. possessions of American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico or the U.S. Virgin Islands, as well as the free association countries of the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and Palau owes Congress a penny, much less a dime.

There is no constitutional basis for Congress to claim the right of taxation neither on U.S. citizens living outside the USA nor upon foreigners wherever they live the earth over, except within the boundaries of the actual fifty states that constitute the USA.

That successive Congresses are so brazen to seek taxes from U.S. citizens earning income abroad and that many idiotic Americans support them in their Ahab quest shows the world how far Americans have fallen. Americans have wandered far from the path of the right way.

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YO QUIERO ENGLISH ONLY

Many years ago I stumbled upon this cartoon. My bellyached for hours reading this one. 

Colorado, California, Montana, Florida, Nevada, Los Angeles, tequila, margarita, avocado, burrito, chile, enchilada, salsa, taco, tortillas, frijoles, cilantro, pronto — many speak Spanish often and not even know they are.

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HAVE FEMINISTS WON? GRAMMAR FEMINISM SPOKEN BY OBAMA

"It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of their own," he told hundreds of Israeli students in a speech. "Palestinians have a right to be free people in their own land." ~ President Obama

On March 21st of this year, the USA Today published the foregoing quote from Obama of something he said during his trip to Israel.

Their is an Old Norse word, þierra, which entered into English about the year 1200. It is the possessive (genitive) form of the third person pronoun they. Their replaced the word hiera.

Their is the THIRD PERSON possessive determining adjective. Most often, a speaker says the word right before saying a noun. So you might hear, their houses or their dogs.

The right use of the word their relies upon a preceding third person subject noun or third person subject pronoun. English speakers ought to recognize the former because of the letter 's', which signals to listeners such. Likewise, English speakers ought to recognize the third person subject pronoun every time they hear it. It's the word they.

Obama should have said: It is not fair that Palestinian children can not grow up in a state of their own. Obama could have said: It is not fair that a Palestinian child can not grow up in a state of his own. 

When Obama said the phrase a Palestinian child, he spoke a singular noun of the subordinate clausethat Palestinian children can not grow up in a state of their own.

Various grammarians have different labels to name such clauses. Some name them as complements. Others say declarative content clauses.

However, the subject of what Obama said is the singular pronoun it. The main, independent clause Obama spoke is It is not fair.

For years, feminists have attacked English, wishing to rid it of good, useful words. They hate the word woman because they hear the word man. Yet, man is the English word for person. It does not mean male.

English speakers once had a word for male men. That word was wer. You recognize the word wer in the word werewolf.

What feminists fail to see is that with English, it is males who get shorted. English speakers have reverence for females. That is why they get their own pronouns — she, her, hers. English speakers care little to differentiate between males and sex-irrelevant things.

Obama, feminists and the great swath of middling intellect Americans reveal likely how languages change. Because such suffer from the equivalent of functional illiteracy in speech, they drive out good speech with their popular, bad forms.

You can think of it as Johnson's Grammar Law — bad language use drives out good, much like Gresham's Law — bad money drives out good — as coined by perhaps the greatest economist of all-time, Henry Dunning MacLeod. 

Interestingly, Obama gets it right when he says "their own land", tying that to Palestinians as shown in the second sentence of the quote. That Obama can get it wrong in one sentence and then get it right in a sentence right after reveals profound disorder in his mind and reveals the war that goes on in the minds of many during major upheavals in languages. You are witnessing the change of English in action.

On a side note, oddly, Obama seems to be hung up on trying to define fairness everywhere he goes, from taxes in America to territorial borders of Middle Eastern people.

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