Gravity http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/ http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping Mon, 07 Jul 2008 06:52:48 +0200 http://www.blog.ca en 1.0 http://www.blog.ca http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/ Ralph Nader Toys Built in China http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/12/23/ralph-nader-toys-built-in-china-19884449/ Tue, 23 Dec 2014 19:44:51 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan Here's a question to ponder this Holiday season -- what do toy brands like Barbie, Mickey Mouse and Thomas the Tank Engine have in common? What about the companies that produce these toys -- Mattel, Disney, Fisher Price and other major toy companies such as Crayola and Hasbro? Many parents might say that the shared commonality of these toys and their corporate manufacturers is their young children's affinity for them, especially around the holiday season when corporate advertising and marketing launches into overdrive. Many parents may be planning or have already purchased these and other toys as holiday gifts for their youngsters. Here's one common factor that many parents will likely not consider about the toys they purchase as gifts. According to a recently released 66-page report from the nonprofit organization China Labor Watch (CLW), these aforementioned popular toy brands and many others are manufactured in Chinese factories that have been found to have repeatedly committed a vast number of worker rights violations. This most recent CLW investigation was a follow-up to one conducted and reported on in 2007. Disturbingly, many of the same abuses reported then were discovered once more, seven years later. Despite efforts to bring attention to these harmful labor conditions, the conditions in Chinese factories persist, and Americans continue to buy up these products by the millions. As for the American companies that sell them, finding ways to shirk any responsibility for deplorable factory conditions is their primary public relations concern. The CLW report states: Many toy companies divide their toy orders among dozens or hundreds of factories in order to ensure that their orders in any given factory only consists of a small proportion of that factory's total orders usually no more than 20 percent. Toy companies will also use this as a basis for avoiding responsibility for poor labor conditions. For example, if CLW uncovers labor rights violations at a Disney supplier factory in China, Disney might respond that it only maintains a small number of orders in the plant and is unable to influence the factory's behavior. Parents should consider the following harsh realities uncovered by CLW: Workers who create these toy products often make just over a dollar an hour, nowhere near a living wage. Many live in cramped company dormitories with inadequate bathroom facilities for the number of people who occupy them. Many receive inadequate or no safety training. Many are forced to work excessive overtime hours in violation of Chinese labor laws. Many are provided inadequate safety equipment or work on poorly maintained and potentially dangerous equipment. None of the factories investigated by CLW conducted fire safety training, and one even locked emergency escape doors and had fire escape routes obstructed. Unfortunately, the grievance procedures for factory workers to file complaints or report incidents are ineffective or nonexistent. Here's one that might strike a chord with the smartphone generation -- a 2013 CLW report on Mattel factories reported that in one factory, "A worker who checks his cell phone will have that day's working hours reset to zero, effectively not paying the worker for the actual work that he did." These are only some of the numerous issues reported. Taken as a whole, the report describes a truly nightmarish and inhumane work environment that would appall many in the Western world. Behind the friendly plastic smiles of Mickey Mouse and Thomas the Tank engine lays immense human suffering and worker abuse. Eighty-five percent of all children's toys that are sold in the United States come from China. Furthermore, these toys often come with too many hazards -- burning, choking risks for small children, or toxics in or on the toys. It can be difficult for parents to know what toys are safe for their youngsters. Some are recalled by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. (See cpsc.gov for the latest recalls.) A few examples of recent recalls: A singing monkey toy, sold in Cracker Barrel restaurants, has a battery compartment that can overheat and cause burns. Another is a "Dream on Me" playhouse that reportedly can collapse and pose a strangulation risk to young children. Yet another is a "Hello Kitty" whistle, distributed by McDonald's, in which a small internal piece can come detached and be swallowed or choked on by young users. The proposed remedy from McDonald's: "Consumers should immediately take the whistle away from children and return it to any McDonald's for a free replacement toy and either a yogurt tube or a bag of apple slices." All of these dangerous products were manufactured in China. The Business Supply Chain Transparency on Trafficking and Slavery Act (H.R. 4842) was introduced earlier this year by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) It would require U.S. companies to disclose its contracting practices in annual reports that find instances of "child labor, forced labor, slavery, and human trafficking." It would also require the Secretary of Labor "to develop and publish annually on the Internet website of the Department of Labor a list of top 100 companies adhering to supply chain labor standards, as established under federal and international guidelines." This would be an important step in holding toy companies accountable for the inhumane conditions they permit by doing business with abusive factories in China. In the meantime, being a socially-conscious shopper is one way to let these corporations know that Americans do not approve of products built on the backs of Chinese serf-labor. One easy method is to check the country-of-origin label on products to see where they came from. Parents should know about the products their children request and not give into demands or nagging because the youngster wanted the products to fit in with their friends. These toy companies want their young consumers to be compliant, vulnerable and ever-hooked on fashionable fads. Is such crass commercialism worth the cost of human suffering? Follow Ralph Nader Feel free to ignore this blog! I am intending to use it as a repository of various writings: drafts, doodles, etc. If there ARE any articles here, they are posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan [ One of my intentions with this blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. Further, this ‘blog’ will contain various drafts of unknown writings just to be saved in the event they are needed by me, etc.– Louis Sheehan ] </p> 19884449 2014-12-23 19:44:51 2014-12-23 19:44:51 open open ralph-nader-toys-built-in-china-19884449 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan eb Bush Just Took a Big Step Toward Running for President. Here Are 23 Reasons He Should Reconsider. From questionable business dealings to allegations of philandering, the former Florida governor's past is an opposition researcher's dream. http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/12/23/eb-bush-just-took-a-big-step-toward-running-for-president-here-are-23-reasons-he-should-reconsider-from-questionable-business-dealings-to-allegat-19884430/ Tue, 23 Dec 2014 19:39:59 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan Jeb Bush Just Took a Big Step Toward Running for President. Here Are 23 Reasons He Should Reconsider. From questionable business dealings to allegations of philandering, the former Florida governor's past is an opposition researcher's dream. —By Stephanie Mencimer | Tue Sep. 9, 2014 6:30 AM EDT | Updated Tue Dec. 16, 2014 10:10 AM EDT On December 16, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush announced (via Facebook) that he plans to "actively explore the possibility of running" for president in 2016. It's the first step toward formally entering the race. But there are plenty of reasons why Bush should think long and hard before subjecting himself (and his family) to the ruthless scrutiny of a presidential campaign. His history is an opposition researcher's dream—clouded by embarrassing family episodes, allegations of philandering, offensive comments to black voters, and dubious business dealings. Many of these past deeds and misdeeds will no doubt be put under the microscope should Bush run in 2016. Here are 23 reasons why he might want to take a pass—and it's only a partial list: The shopaholic: Customs agents detained Bush's wife, Columba, in 1999 at the Atlanta airport and fined her $4,100 for failing to declare the more than $19,000 in clothes and jewelry she'd purchased in Paris. The addict: In 2002, Bush's daughter Noelle was arrested for trying to purchase Xanax with a bogus prescription. In rehab, she was caught with a "white rock like substance" thought to be crack cocaine. Between 1995 and 2002, she racked up seven speeding tickets, five other traffic violations, and was involved in three wrecks. jeb bush illustration Jeb Bush's Cyber Attack on Public Schools The stalker: In 1994, Bush's eldest son, George P., broke into his ex-girlfriend's house. After fleeing her father, George returned to the scene and drove his SUV into their front lawn. His ex told the police that young George had "been a problem" since the breakup. Her father declined to press charges. The other son: In 2000, cops discovered Bush's 16-year-old son "Jebby" boffing a 17-year-old girl in a car in a mall parking lot. The police reported the incident of sexual misconduct, but Jebby wasn't arrested. The black sheep brother: Volumes have been written about Jeb's siblings, especially former president George W. Bush. But his brother Neil, who helped bankrupt a savings and loan and once toured Asia with the late Rev. Sun Myung Moon while he was promoting the development of a 51-mile underwater highway between Russia and Alaska, will give reporters plenty to chew on. The fraudster: In 1986, Camilo Padreda, who had been a counterintelligence officer for Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in the 1950s, hired Bush to find tenants for office buildings financed with US Department of Housing and Urban Development-backed loans. Bush took the gig, despite the fact that four years earlier Padreda had been indicted for embezzling $500,000 from a Texas savings and loan. Those charges were dropped, but in 1989 Padreda pleaded guilty to defrauding HUD of millions. (Bush was not involved in that scam, and it's unclear whether he was aware of the savings and loan indictment when he teamed up with Padreda.) The international fugitive: In 1986, Miguel Recarey, who'd done 30 days in jail for income tax evasion in the 1970s, paid Bush $75,000 to help him find a new headquarters for his health care company. The company never moved, but while Bush's father was serving as vice president, Bush lobbied the US Department of Health and Human Services to help Recarey access millions in Medicare funds. Bush also helped arrange for Recarey's company to provide free medical care to the Nicaraguan contras. Recarey was later indicted for a massive Medicare fraud scheme but fled the country before trial. He is now an international fugitive. The bribery case: In 1988, Bush formed a company with GOP donor David Eller to market water pumps manufactured by Moving Water Industries, another Eller business, to foreign countries. The company used Bush's White House ties to drum up business. In 1992, at the behest of MWI, the Export-Import Bank approved $74 million in US-backed loans to Nigeria to buy water pumps from Eller's company. The Justice Department later alleged in a 2002 civil suit that about $28 million of those loans were used to bribe a Nigerian official. Bush was not implicated, but in November 2013, a jury found MWI guilty of making 58 false claims to the Export-Import Bank on its applications for the Nigerian loans. A federal judge fined the company $580,000. Bush escaped testifying after the judge determined his testimony wouldn't be relevant to the central issue in the case. The fortunate son: Cuban American real estate developer Armando Codina was the Florida chair of George H.W. Bush's unsuccessful 1980 bid for the GOP presidential nomination. He loved the Bush family so much that when Jeb first moved to Miami in the early 1980s, he made Bush a partner in his real estate company and gave him 40 percent of the profits—even though Jeb had no real estate experience or money to invest. In 1985, Bush and Codina bought an office building partially financed by a savings and loan that later failed. The $4.56 million loan went into default, but federal regulators gave Bush and his partner a pass. Instead of foreclosing, they merely asked them to repay $500,000 of the loan. Taxpayers picked up the rest. In 1991, Bush and Codina sold the building for $8 million. The shady company: In 2007, Bush joined the board of InnoVida, a building materials-manufacturing startup founded by a businessman whose previous company had gone bankrupt under suspicious circumstances. Bush and his fellow board members subsequently failed to notice that InnoVida officials had used forged documents to fake solvency, hidden the company's financial problems, and misappropriated $40 million. The company's Maserati-driving founder eventually went to jail for money laundering, and investors lost their shirts when the company went bankrupt in 2011. Last year, Bush agreed to repay the $270,000 he was paid by the company as a consultant to reimburse defrauded investors. The Big Finance fail: Bush signed on as a paid adviser to the financial giant Lehman Brothers in 2007, just as the firm was on the brink of collapse. The company hoped he would use his political ties to rescue it, but he couldn't even convince Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim to throw some money into that pit. The terrorist: In 1989, Bush successfully lobbied his father, who was then serving as president, for the release of Cuban terrorist Orlando Bosch, who allegedly orchestrated the bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people in 1976 and other terrorist attacks. Bosch, who was in a federal prison on an immigration violation and dubbed an "unrepentant terrorist" by then-Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, was a cause célèbre for Miami's influential Cuban population—a voting bloc that Jeb needed to launch his political career. The black vote: During his first failed campaign for governor in 1994, Bush was asked in a debate what he would do to help African Americans. "Probably nothing," he replied. In 2000, his administration purged 12,000 eligible voters from the rolls because they were incorrectly identified as convicted felons. More than 40 percent of them were African Americans. The welfare wife: During his 1994 campaign, Bush said that women on welfare "should be able to get their life together and find a husband." The Playboy bunny: In 1999, Bush appointed Cynthia Henderson as his secretary of business regulation. Bush later transferred Henderson, who had worked her way through law school as a bunny at the St. Petersburg Playboy club, to another job in his administration, after she got caught taking a trip to the Kentucky Derby on a corporate jet owned by a company she regulated and accepting lodging and tickets to the event from an association of race track regulators. (Henderson's boyfriend, a Florida real estate developer, eventually paid the cost of the trip.) Rumors that Henderson and Bush were having an affair forced him to publicly deny philandering. The socialist: While at the elite prep school Andover, Bush was briefly a member of the socialist club. He also smoked pot. Feel free to ignore this blog! I am intending to use it as a repository of various writings: drafts, doodles, etc. If there ARE any articles here, they are posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan The failed charter school: After wining just 4 percent of the black vote in his first failed run for governor, Bush teamed up with the Greater Miami Urban League to start Florida's first charter school. In 1999, the state implemented a school grading system at Bush's insistence. His own charter school received a D. By 2008, the school had earned a C- and was $1 million in debt; the state shut it down that year. The shady charter school operator: In 2010, Bush gave the commencement speech for the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, an Ohio online charter school owned by William Lager, a big GOP donor who has served on Bush's Digital Learning Council, which promotes for-profit online schools like ECOT. (Lager's companies have also sponsored conferences hosted by Bush's education foundation.) The school was far from a model for the future. At the time Bush gave his speech, ECOT's graduation rate had never exceeded 40 percent. A 2001 state audit found that though the state had paid the school tuition for more than 2,000 students one month, only seven students had logged on to ECOT's computer system. When state auditors couldn't find the rest of the school's alleged student body, ECOT was forced to repay Ohio $1.7 million. School founder William Lager's private companies have earned more than $100 million from online schools that perform worse than any of Ohio's worst brick-and-mortar public schools. The cheaters: In 2010, Bush and his education reform organization, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, created a group of school superintendents and other high-ranking officials called "Chiefs for Change" to advance the Florida model of education, which emphasizes accountability and emphasized giving schools letter grades based on performance, especially standardized test scores. One of the original eight chiefs was accused of inflating the grade of a lackluster charter school funded by a Republican donor. The office of another was caught manipulating test score data. The IRS complaint: In October, a New Mexico advocacy group filed a complaint with the IRS alleging that Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education failed to disclose thousands of dollars it paid to bring public school superintendents, education officials, and lawmakers to the group's events, where they had private "VIP" meetings with the foundation's for-profit ed-tech company sponsors. The complaint alleges that Bush's foundation disguised travel payments as "scholarships" to hide the fact that the nonprofit was facilitating lobbying between big corporations and public officials. The IRS has not commented on the complaint. Bush's foundation issued a statement dismissing the allegations as politically motivated. The immigration book: Last year, Bush published Immigration Wars, a book that took a hardline position against a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. After going on TV to push the book's anti-path-to-citizenship position—and being accused of having changed his position to avoid offending the tea party—he quickly reverted to his previous stance of supporting citizenship. The Reagan comment: In 2012, Bush said publicly that Ronald Reagan would have had trouble getting his party's presidential nomination today—meaning that the tea party had driven the GOP too far too the right. He told editors at Bloomberg, "Back to my dad's time and Ronald Reagan's time—they got a lot of stuff done with a lot of bipartisan support." Reagan "would be criticized for doing the things that he did." The mother: In April, former First Lady Barbara Bush appeared on the Today Show and said that her son would be "by far the best qualified man, but
we've had enough Bushes." [ One of my intentions with this blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. Further, this ‘blog’ will contain various drafts of unknown writings just to be saved in the event they are needed by me, etc.– Louis Sheehan ] </p> 19884430 2014-12-23 19:39:59 2014-12-23 19:39:59 open open eb-bush-just-took-a-big-step-toward-running-for-president-here-are-23-reasons-he-should-reconsider-from-questionable-business-dealings-to-allegat-19884430 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Israeli bank to pay $400 million to US in tax evasion case http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/12/23/israeli-bank-to-pay-400-million-to-us-in-tax-evasion-case-19884153/ Tue, 23 Dec 2014 18:30:29 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Israeli bank to pay $400 million to US in tax evasion case Bank Leumi admits to helping US taxpayers hide assets; will hand $270m to Justice Department, $130m to NY Department of Financial Services By AFP and Times of Israel staff December 23, 2014, 5:50 am 4 Feel free to ignore this blog! I am intending to use it as a repository of various writings: drafts, doodles, etc. If there ARE any articles here, they are posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan [ One of my intentions with this blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. Further, this ‘blog’ will contain various drafts of unknown writings just to be saved in the event they are needed by me, etc.– Louis Sheehan ] Israel’s Bank Leumi Group has agreed to pay a total of some $400 million to US and New York authorities to settle a criminal probe, after admitting to helping US taxpayers hide assets, the Department of Justice announced Monday. Get the Start-Up Israel's daily newsletter and never miss our top stories Free Sign up! The bank will also terminate the employment of senior staff as part of the settlement. Leumi agreed to pay $270 million to the US Department of Justice, $156 million of which is a fine for US taxpayer accounts held at the bank’s Swiss subsidiary, and $130 million to New York’s Department of Financial Services. From at least 2000 until early 2011, Leumi sent private bankers from Israel and elsewhere to meet with US taxpayers and help them conceal assets at Leumi locations in Israel, Switzerland and Luxembourg, documents revealed. Leumi, a unit of Bank Leumi le-Israel, also helped US taxpayers prepare and present false tax returns, prosecutors said. As part of a deferred prosecution agreement, Leumi agreed to supply information on more than 1,500 US account holders. “The Bank Leumi Group recognized that the writing is on the wall for offshore banking, and cooperating with the government’s investigation was the only way to proceed,” said Deputy Attorney General James Cole. The bank agreed to a deferred prosecution deal in which it admitted to wrongdoing without pleading guilty and avoiding prosecution. “This deferred prosecution agreement demonstrates both that the Justice Department will hold financial institutions accountable for their crimes, and that we will be fair in recognizing extraordinary cooperation,” said Cole The Justice Department said the case marks the first time an Israeli bank has admitted to such criminal conduct. According to a report in Forbes magazine, the statement of facts in the case included the following main accusations: “surreptitiously sending private bankers from Israel and elsewhere around the world to the United States to meet secretly with US clients at hotels, parks and coffee shops to discuss their offshore account activity; assisting US clients in using nominee corporate entities created in Belize and other foreign jurisdictions to hide their undeclared accounts by concealing the US client as the true beneficial owner of the account; using the Bank Leumi le-Israel Trust Company as a nominee account holder for US clients with accounts in Israel to conceal the US client as the true beneficial owner of the account;maintaining US clients’ undeclared offshore accounts under assumed names or numbered accounts to conceal the US client as the true beneficial owner of the account.” The report also said the bank was guilty of “providing hold mail services so that correspondence and other account information would not go directly to the US client to make it more difficult to connect the client to the secret offshore account; extending loans to US clients from Bank Leumi USA that were collateralized by the assets in those clients’ offshore accounts, so that the clients could leverage their offshore assets to obtain and use capital in the United States while keeping their foreign accounts secret and undetected from the US government; and after the department’s investigation into UBS and other Swiss banks’ criminal conduct in aiding US taxpayers to evade their taxes became public, the Bank Leumi Group opened and maintained accounts for US taxpayers who left UBS and other Swiss banks due to the investigation in an effort to continue to avoid detection by the US government.” </p> 19884153 2014-12-23 18:30:29 2014-12-23 18:30:29 open open israeli-bank-to-pay-400-million-to-us-in-tax-evasion-case-19884153 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan The FBI Is Very Excited About This Machine That Can Scan Your DNA in 90 Minutes http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/12/08/the-fbi-is-very-excited-about-this-machine-that-can-scan-your-dna-in-90-minutes-19817725/ Mon, 08 Dec 2014 01:03:20 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>The FBI Is Very Excited About This Machine That Can Scan Your DNA in 90 Minutes Rapid-DNA technology makes it easier than ever to grab and store your genetic profile. G-men, cops, and Homeland Security can't wait to see it everywhere. —By Shane Bauer | Thu Nov. 20, 2014 6:30 AM EST Email 191 [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan Illustration: Dan Bejar Robert Schueren shook my hand firmly, handed me his business card, and flipped it over, revealing a short list of letters and numbers. "Here is my DNA profile." He smiled. "I have nothing to hide." I had come to meet Schueren, the CEO of IntegenX, at his company's headquarters in Pleasanton, California, to see its signature product: a machine the size of a large desktop printer that can unravel your genetic code in the time it takes to watch a movie. Schueren grabbed a cotton swab and dropped it into a plastic cartridge. That's what, say, a police officer would use to wipe the inside of your cheek to collect a DNA sample after an arrest, he explained. Other bits of material with traces of DNA on them, like cigarette butts or fabric, could work too. He inserted the cartridge into the machine and pressed a green button on its touch screen: "It's that simple." Ninety minutes later, the RapidHIT 200 would generate a DNA profile, check it against a database, and report on whether it found a match. A scanner, quickly: The RapidHIT 200 can generate a DNA profile in about 90 minutes. IntegenX The RapidHIT represents a major technological leap—testing a DNA sample in a forensics lab normally takes at least two days. This has government agencies very excited. The Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and the Justice Department funded the initial research for "rapid DNA" technology, and after just a year on the market, the $250,000 RapidHIT is already being used in a few states, as well as China, Russia, Australia, and countries in Africa and Europe. "We're not always aware of how it's being used," Schueren said. "All we can say is that it's used to give an accurate identification of an individual." Civil liberties advocates worry that rapid DNA will spur new efforts by the FBI and police to collect ordinary citizens' genetic code. The US government will soon test the machine in refugee camps in Turkey and possibly Thailand on families seeking asylum in the United States, according to Chris Miles, manager of the Department of Homeland Security's biometrics program. "We have all these families that claim they are related, but we don't have any way to verify that," he says. Miles says that rapid DNA testing will be voluntary, though refusing a test could cause an asylum application to be rejected. "We're not always aware of how it's being used. All we can say is that it's used to give an accurate identification of an individual." Miles also says that federal immigration officials are interested in using rapid DNA to curb trafficking by ensuring that children entering the country are related to the adults with them. Jeff Heimburger, the vice president of marketing at IntegenX, says the government has also inquired about using rapid DNA to screen green-card applicants. (An Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman said he was not aware that the agency was pursuing the technology.) Meanwhile, police have started using rapid DNA in Arizona, Florida, and South Carolina. In August, sheriffs in Columbia, South Carolina, used a RapidHIT to nab an attempted murder suspect. The machine's speed provides a major "investigative lead," said Vince Figarelli, superintendent of the Arizona Department of Public Safety crime lab, which is using a RapidHIT to compare DNA evidence from property crimes against the state's database of 300,000 samples. Heimburger notes that the system can also prevent false arrests and wrongful convictions: "There is great value in finding out that somebody is not a suspect." But the technology is not a silver bullet for DNA evidence. The IntegenX executives brought up rape kits so often that it sounded like their product could make a serious dent in the backlog of half a million untested kits. Yet when I pressed Schueren on this, he conceded that the RapidHIT is not actually capable of processing rape kits since it can't discern individual DNA in commingled bodily fluids. Despite the new technology's crime-solving potential, privacy advocates are wary of its spread. If rapid-DNA machines can be used in a refugee camp, "they can certainly be used in the back of a squad car," says Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "I could see that happening in the future as the prices of these machines go down." Democratic members of Congress have urged the FBI to look into the "broad deployment" of rapid DNA in police stations. Lynch is particularly concerned that law enforcement agencies will use the devices to scoop up and store ever more DNA profiles. Every state already has a forensic DNA database, and while these systems were initially set up to track convicted violent offenders, their collection thresholds have steadily broadened. Today, at least 28 include data from anyone arrested for certain felonies, even if they are not convicted; some store the DNA of people who have committed misdemeanors as well. The FBI's National DNA Index System has more than 11 million profiles of offenders plus 2 million people who have been arrested but not necessarily convicted of a crime. For its part, Homeland Security will not hang onto refugees' DNA records, insists Miles. ("They aren't criminals," he pointed out.) However, undocumented immigrants in custody may be required to provide DNA samples, which are put in the FBI's database. DHS documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation say there may even be a legal case for "mandating collection of DNA" from anyone granted legal status under a future immigration amnesty. (The documents also state that intelligence agencies and the military are interested in using rapid DNA to identify sex, race, and other factors the machines currently do not reveal.) The FBI is the only federal agency allowed to keep a national DNA database. Currently, police must use a lab to upload genetic profiles to it. But that could change. The FBI's website says it is eager to see rapid DNA in wide use and that it supports the "legislative changes necessary" to make that happen. IntegenX's Heimburger says the FBI is almost finished working with members of Congress on a bill that would give "tens of thousands" of police stations rapid-DNA machines that could search the FBI's system and add arrestees' profiles to it. (The RapitHIT is already designed to do this.) IntegenX has spent $70,000 lobbying the FBI, DHS, and Congress over the last two years. The FBI declined to comment, and Heimburger wouldn't say which lawmakers might sponsor the bill. But some have already given rapid DNA their blessing. Rep. Eric Swalwell, a former prosecutor who represents the district where IntegenX is based, says he'd like to see the technology "put to use quickly to help law enforcement"—while protecting civil liberties. In March, he and seven other Democratic members of Congress, including progressive stalwart Rep. Barbara Lee of California, urged the FBI to assess rapid DNA's "viability for broad deployment" in police departments across the country. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter</p> 19817725 2014-12-08 01:03:20 2014-12-08 01:03:20 open open the-fbi-is-very-excited-about-this-machine-that-can-scan-your-dna-in-90-minutes-19817725 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan Raoul Villain http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/12/01/raoul-villain-19781460/ Mon, 01 Dec 2014 09:19:28 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Raoul Villain From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Raoul Villain (1885 – 1936) was a French nationalist. He is primarily remembered for his assassination of the French socialist leader Jean Jaurès on July 31, 1914, in Paris. Villain was acquitted by popular jury in 1919 and later fled to the Balearic island of Ibiza, where he was killed during the Spanish Civil War. Contents 1 Early life and background 2 Attack on Jaurès and result 3 After being acquitted 3.1 Death 4 Notes 5 Sources 6 External links Early life and background Villain was born in Reims, Marne, France on September 19, 1885. As a 29-year-old student in archeology at the École du Louvre, he was a member of the Ligue des jeunes amis de l'Alsace-Lorraine ("League of Young Friends of Alsace-Lorraine"), a nationalist student group.[1] After France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine were annexed by Germany. This was a source of anger and resentment in France, causing many to feel that a new war with Germany was in order to recover both territories and French pride. Therefore many like Villain were opposed to the pacifist policies of Jean Jaurès. Villain lived for some time in England, at Loughton, where he stayed with Mrs Annie Francis, who described him, according to The Observer on 6 June 1915, as "a gentle and very kind man". Attack on Jaurès and result The still existing Café du Croissant which was located next to Jaurès's newspaper L'Humanité (photo by Rémi Jouan) Villain focused on Jaurès, bought a revolver and began stalking him, scribbling incoherent notes about the socialist leader's habits into his pocket-book. At about 21:40 on Friday, July 31, 1914, Villain fired two bullets through a window embrasure into Jaurès' head while his victim was having supper with his contributors in Le Croissant at the corner of Rue Montmartre and Rue du Croissant.[2] The next day, posters went up all over France announcing the general mobilization, and war was declared three days after Jaurès's death. What would be World War I began. Incarcerated for the duration of the war, Villain was brought to trial in 1919. He was acquitted by a popular jury on March 29, 1919, and Anatole France wrote in L'Humanité: "Workers! A monstrous verdict brings in that assassinating Jaurès is not a crime...".[3] Jaurès's wife, plaintiff, was convicted in costs. After being acquitted After having briefly been arrested in 1920 in Paris after trying to pass some false currency, Villain fled to Cala de Sant Vicent,[4] Ibiza in the Balearic Islands off Spain. Receiving some money through a legacy, he fled France and arrived in Ibiza via Mexico.[5] Villain thought that, by hiding up in the remote northeastern corner of Ibiza, he could live anonymously and be forgotten. In 1933,[5] the Bay of Cala de San Vicent was a very quiet backwater with no development, there was not even a road into the valley. Villain decided to make his home there. Using local labour and help from Paul René Gauguin,[5] the grandson of Paul Gauguin, he built a house from concrete and had almost finished the building by August 1936. On September 13,[5] a small detachment of soldiers arrived on the beach of Cala de San Vicent by rowing boat. Eyewitness reported that they thought that they may have been anarchists of the FAI.[5] These soldiers were part of a larger detachment. The force had arrived on the island to re-secure the island following the mini-coup which had been orchestrated by the Nationalists under the command of Infantry Commander Juli Mestre.[5] Villain had been away visiting a French lady[5] in Santa Eulària des Riu when the soldiers arrived, but quickly returned home when he had heard of their arrival. Feeling vulnerable, he feared that the soldiers would steal his valuables, which he had stashed[5] in the unfinished house. Despite being repeatedly warned[5] by his neighbours not to go back down to the cove, he still went home. Death The House of Raoul Villains in Bay of Cala de San Vicent as it stands in 2013 The officer and troops who arrived on the beach that day seemed very suspicious of this Frenchman, who also antagonised the officer with his explanation of why he had set a crucifix[5] on the hill behind his house. Apart from this outward show of religious zeal, the officer was also suspicious of where Villain had been that day, and decided to confine him to his house.[5] He was considered to be a fascist and a spy and, as such, a threat to their plans to reoccupy the island. The details of what happened next are sketchy, but what is certain is that Villain ended the day with a bullet wound which eventually killed him. That afternoon, three bombers from the Italian air force had flown along the coast over Cala de Sant Vicent and bombed Ibiza town, which could be heard even this far up the coast.[5] It is thought that the troops, on hearing the attack, decided to return to the capital and tried to take Villain and his valuables with them. He reacted violently to this, and as a consequence was shot in the back, with the bullet exiting via his throat.[5] Unfortunately for Villain, he had only been wounded. The officer in charge warned the villagers that had come down to see what had happened, not to assist or disturb the mortally wounded man. Villain lay alone on the sand for two days[4] until he died. The locals then placed his body in a makeshift coffin, draped it in a French tricolour they found in his house, and buried him in the cemetery at nearby Sant Vicent de sa Cala.[5] Notes Vilain, Isabelle. Les Vilain célèbres: Raoul Villain, 3 January 2002. It seems the family name can be written either with one or two 'l'. In the center of Paris, not on the Butte Montmartre (Montmartre Mound) Vovelle, Michel. "1914: Jaurès est assassiné", L'Humanité (archived at waybackmachine.org), 24 April 2004. The White Island, The Colourful History of the Original Fantasy Island, Ibiza. Author: Stephen Armstrong. Published:Corgi. ISBN 0-552-77189-9 Title: The Road to San Vicente. Author: Leif Borthen. Published: Barbury Press. ISBN 9788461181193 [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19781460 2014-12-01 09:19:28 2014-12-01 09:19:28 open open raoul-villain-19781460 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan The Firing of Chuck Hagel Elizabeth Drew Kristoffer November 24, 2014 http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/11/28/the-firing-of-chuck-hagel-elizabeth-drew-kristoffer-november-24-19771035/ Fri, 28 Nov 2014 03:19:01 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>The Firing of Chuck Hagel Elizabeth Drew Kristoffer November 24, 2014 Earlier this year, I went to the Pentagon to have lunch with Chuck Hagel, whom I had known for many years. Because of his packed schedule the lunch was arranged for 11:30 AM, and was to last for forty-five minutes. As we got talking, he let the time slip for another ten minutes and then politely excused himself, explaining that he simply had to move on to the next appointment—a courtesy meeting with the Defense Minister of Peru. The Middle East was falling apart and countries where the US was supposed to be winding down its military commitments were looking anything but ready for stability. The Veterans Administration; sexual exploitation of women in the military; Russian adventurism in Crimea and other parts of Ukraine; decaying weapons; commanders at US nuclear facilities found to be not exactly alert on the job; missile tests by North Korea; mindless across-the-board budget cuts imposed by Congress; coups in Africa; endless demands and requests from legislators; congressional Republicans having their festival of Benghazi hearings–-and the secretary of defense had a scheduled courtesy meeting with the defense minister of Peru. Now, the US and Peru have enjoyed a close working relationsip and the minister was not to be offended; moreover during his previous tenure on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hagel had been visited by and took time for officials from all over the world and such courtesy continued to be expected. While I had come to admire Hagel as a thoughtful man, there’s a question of whether anyone can make the leap from a senator’s office—with an average staff size of 34 people, to the Pentagon, the world’s largest institution, which employs about 26,000 personnel on site, plus about a half million overseas, plus an active military of about 1.5 million men and women. In general, transitions from Capitol Hill to a cabinet office, in either party, haven’t been markedly successful. The Pentagon has been a sinkhole of failures. Irrespective of all that, there’ve been the dramatic changes from the job that Hagel came to do to and the one that it has become. He came to the office with the assignment of presiding over the ending of two wars, yet each has been expanded (Iraq) or extended (Afghanistan, after thirteen years). Onto which has been grafted the most elusive and formidable of tasks: defeating the hyper-terrorist group ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Even the administration figures who preside over it are aware that the effort in Syria might not succeed: the “moderate opposition” to the Assad regime has been weakened and infiltrated to the point where it barely exists as a force; the US has no real allies on the ground, other than some Kurd forces, who aren’t as strong there as they are in Iraq. It’s been a pipe dream to think that Turkey would want to get involved in any way that might help Bashir al-Assad. The White House is stuck in a policy that has very little chance of working, putting the president and his national security aides in real peril. And Chuck Hagel, who watched all this with dismay, became the odd man out. If its interests in an international situation aren’t great enough or worth the cost, the US can cut its losses and walk away. Or not even try. We’re not trying to fix failed African states—not Somalia (tried that, disastrously) or Congo. States, with their own long histories, have a way of being intractable to being fixed by outsiders—a lesson yet to be thoroughly absorbed by this administration. But even if the president wanted to disengage from Syria, says a senior adviser, “His hands are largely tied because of the brutal executions by ISIS.” It’s considered quite likely that ISIS will continue the beheadings; no one is sure whether the point is to provoke the US into a difficult war, but that’s the effect. A participant in the discussions of US policy in the Middle East says, “As long as ISIS is beheading Americans there’s no way the president can stand up and say that Syria isn’t our problem.” This is an assumption, not a fact. Hagel, who came from the now virtually defunct moderate wing of the Republican party, openly broke with his fellow party members and said he regretted his vote for the Iraq War, in 2002. In 2007 he voted with Senate Democrats to call for a withdrawal of American troops from Iraq within 120 days, and in 2011, after he left the Senate, he said it was time to find an exit from Afghanistan. Hagel’s mentality matches that of Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell: careful and loath to engage in military force; don’t venture where you don’t know what you’re getting into (which could largely characterize our ventures in the Middle East). This happened also to be the philosophy of Barack Obama. Hagel has a deliberative mind, one likely to take in more considerations than that of the typical pol. He’s been ambitious—he’d coveted a cabinet position from the outset of the Obama administration, having been selected by candidate Obama as one of two companions for his pre-election trip to Afghanistan and Iraq (the other was Jack Reed, and these choices spoke well of Obama). In the Senate, Hagel could wield a knife with the best of them—but he wasn’t a relentless type. He also wasn’t a fire-in-the-belly politician. Seriously considering running for the presidency in 2008, he called a press conference in which he announced, to a widespread thud, that he hadn’t yet made up his mind. Yet Hagel remained a respected figure in Washington and in foreign capitals. Though Hagel and Obama thought quite alike and respected each other, Hagel was probably not cut out for the Obama administration, or for what it’s evolved into. Though Hagel had, and used, a direct line to Obama—calling in frustration after a larger meeting where he felt he hadn’t been listened to, and over time largely wasn’t, Obama wasn’t as welcoming of diverse voices as he’d first indicated he would be. Hagel was never one to blend quietly into the tapestry. He prided himself in being his own man, and he liked to talk about his opinions—to the press and the public as well as on the Senate floor. Hagel wasn’t destined to be a docile member of an administration over which the White House exercises the tightest control in memory—especially one in which policy was made by a small group in the White House headed by a remote president who doesn’t care for turbulence and who is capable of changing policy on a dime. In particular, defense policy has time and again lurched head-snappingly from firm decision to its reverse. Bit by bit, Hagel saw policy in the Middle East move in the opposite direction of what he’d understood was his assignment and on which he and the president had once agreed. Hagel particularly chafed at the White House’s governing style on national security policy. He believed—and in this he was far from alone within and outside the administration—that national security adviser Susan Rice is in over her head. And Rice’s admittedly abrasive style put off a large number of people. But she’s been close to the president from the days of the 2008 campaign, and that appears to be what matters most to him. Initiatives, and not just in security policy, would get clogged up at the White House in task forces to study them. The NSC, which was originally a modest-sized organization set up to coordinate among the relevant cabinet departments, has metastasized into a staff of about four hundred people and under the Obama administration actually makes foreign and defense policy. A cabinet office has traditionally been an august position (if somewhat faded)—being called “Mr. Secretary” or “Madame Secretary” counts for a lot in Washington, and defense is one of the top ones. The Obama White House’s famous “micro-management” of the Departments—treating Cabinet officers as junior assistants, sometimes the last to know of a change in policy, would particularly trouble a person of pride, not to mention one who has held elective office. Hagel made no secret of his frustration. We’ve seen past administrations in big trouble throw overboard an inconvenient major figure. Whether it was the right one has always been a question. So was the matter of how much difference the move actually made in improving the fortunes of the said administration. Most of the time a White House staff hasn’t been as eager as this one to make it clear, right away, that the officer didn’t resign but was pushed out. This is not a good sign. All the talk coming out of the White House that Hagel’s confirmation performance is still a problem and other complaints are mainly padding on a ruthless if necessary decision—necessary in the eyes of the president and his very closest aides. But this won’t help them fix their terrible problems in Iraq and Syria and—as is increasingly clear—Afghanistan. The senior adviser said to me Monday evening: “If Hagel had agreed with the White House he wouldn’t have been fired.” November 25, 2014, noon [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19771035 2014-11-28 03:19:01 2014-11-28 03:19:01 open open the-firing-of-chuck-hagel-elizabeth-drew-kristoffer-november-24-19771035 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan Chaski http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/11/24/chaski-19751944/ Mon, 24 Nov 2014 06:42:03 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Forensic linguist studies syntax as a signature Carole Chaski uses writing to help police solve crimes By MOLLY MURRAY Sussex Bureau reporter 11/16/2002 . The News Journal/GARY EMEIGH Carole Chaski, an instructor at Delaware Technical & Community College, analyzes writing styles to identify people Every time someone writes a memo, a note or an e-mail, the person leaves behind something akin to a written fingerprint. It is not so much the words, the spelling errors or the grammatical mistakes that make writing unique, however. It is the way the words are strung together - the syntax - that give writing a signature almost as individual as DNA. Carole Chaski, a linguist and criminal justice instructor at Delaware Technical & Community College in Georgetown, is using writing samples to help link people to crimes. Her linguistic work is at the center of new forensic research being developed in a world that is increasingly paperless and devoid of handwriting because of the use of computers. Chaski has appeared on national television news shows in recent weeks, and an article in The Washington Post quoted the instructor's thoughts on the meaning of the Washington-area sniper's writings. An online Wall Street Journal column scoffed at her, using quotations marks to set off Georgetown, Del., to question her standing as an expert. In addition to being a Delaware Tech instructor, she runs a consulting business and has helped police agencies around the country with investigations. The flurry of sniper-related publicity, however, has been just part of what the forensic linguist does. For The Washington Post, Chaski said she simply did a quick read of some of the messages authorities said were left behind for police. But in a real investigation, Chaski takes sentences apart to see how individuals use nouns and verbs, adverbs and prepositions. In a very basic way, what Chaski does is somewhat similar to elementary school students standing at a blackboard and separating the parts of speech in a sentence. As teachers tell those students, every sentence has to have a subject or a noun, and a predicate or a verb. Even with simple sentences, there are a lot of ways to combine the words and say the same thing. Because most people don't write sentences that consist merely of a noun and a verb, Chaski's work is complex. She has developed a computer program to do most of the analysis of sentences. The program takes apart the sentence and finds each part of speech in relation to the rest of the words. Then she counts the patterns and uses a statistical analysis to determine whether someone wrote something. "I was trained as just a regular syntactical linguist," Chaski said. "I was just a regular linguistics professor at North Carolina State University." But her career changed when she was asked to help police on a perplexing case about North Carolina State student Michael Hunter, who died in April 1992 from an injection of lidocaine, Benadryl and Vistaril. One of his two roommates reported the death. All signs pointed to a suicide, but Raleigh, N.C., police Detective W. Allison Blackman wasn't so certain. There were suicide notes, written on a computer and printed out by Hunter's roommate, Joseph Mannino, authorities said. "I said there's got to be some way to figure out who wrote these notes," Blackman recalled. The notes had been printed out on a university computer from a disk. Blackman began contacting universities and eventually found Chaski. Chaski said she looked at the pattern and placement of words in the sentences and counted the patterns. "She was about 99.9 percent sure" that Hunter had not written the suicide notes, he said. Her work helped police identify Mannino as a suspect. Weeks away from becoming a doctor, he was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to seven years in prison. He claimed he had given Hunter antihistamines to treat a migraine. After working with Blackman, Chaski quickly realized that linguistics and word patterns could play a role in police investigations. She wondered whether a syntax review of writing would work every time. Then Chaski was called in on a case involving solicitation of murder, and the word patterns again pointed to a suspect. She applied for a fellowship at the National Institute of Justice, where she began a scientific study of written syntax and developed the computer software that she uses. To be accepted as evidence in a court case, a system such as Chaski's has to be based in science and must produce reliable results consistently. She started to pull together a database of writing samples. She asked four women for writing samples on 10 topics, then looked at the word patterns and punctuation. She then asked for a blind sample, and was quickly able to determine which of the women wrote it. Chaski said she thinks writing is an instinctive process, which is why it tends to be so individualized. "Isn't it amazing that that's how we work?" she said. "It's something about the way we process language, but it is the minor, tiny things that are different because we understand each other. ... Like DNA, we share 98 percent of our DNA patterns. Our differences are tiny and not something that is easy to find." Language has about seven basic units, and they are combined in predictable combinations, she said. The differences are what make each person's writing unique. "This really gave me something I could do with linguistics," she said. Nonetheless, Chaski said, her method is not perfect. It works only if there is a limited group of suspects. Since the Hunter case, Chaski has worked on civil patent cases, an attempted homicide in Florida and a rape case in Washington, D.C. "My method requires about 200 words, and it's much better if you can get more," she said. "I would like to eventually expand it to do voice. There are really no validation studies of individual voices. ... It's easier to disguise and it's less automatic than writing." Reach Molly Murray at 856-7372</p> 19751944 2014-11-24 06:42:03 2014-11-24 06:42:03 open open chaski-19751944 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan American Involvement in World War I http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/11/23/american-involvement-in-world-war-i-19749260/ Sun, 23 Nov 2014 07:11:16 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>American Involvement in World War I In 1912 Woodrow Wilson was elected President of the United States. Wilson successfully kept Americans troops out of World War I during his first term. However American involvement became inevitable later on in World War I. As the European powers squared off in 1914 in what was to be four years of mind-numbingly horrific war, America managed to somewhat nervously mind its own business. Wilson, in fact, won reelection in 1916 using the phrase “he kept us out of war.” As time passed, however, the country began to side more often with Britain, France, and other countries that were fighting Germany. The sinking of the British passenger ship, Lusitania, by a German submarine in 1915, which resulted in the deaths of 128 Americans, inflamed U.S. passions against “the Huns.” Propagandistic portrayals of German atrocities in the relatively new medium of motion pictures added to the heat. And finally, when it was revealed that German diplomats had approached Mexico about an alliance against the United States, Wilson felt compelled to ask Congress for a resolution of war against Germany. He got it on April 6, 1917. The U.S. military was ill-prepared for war on a massive scale. Only about 370,000 men were in the Army and National Guard combined. Through a draft and enlistments, however, that number swelled to 4.8 million in all the military branches by the end of World War I. At home, about half of the war’s eventual $33 billion price tag was met through taxes; the rest was funded through the issuance of war bonds. Organized labor, in return for concessions such as the right to collective bargaining, agreed to reduce the number of strikes. Labor shortages drove wages up, which in turn drove prices up. But demand for goods and services because of the war soared, and the economy hummed along, despite government efforts to “organize” it. In Europe, however, no one was humming. American troops, like their European counterparts before them, found that modern warfare was anything but inspiring. The first U.S. troops were fed into the lines as much to shore up the morale of the Allies as anything else. But by the time the Germans launched their last desperate offensive, in the spring of 1918, more than 300,000 American troops had landed in France. By the war’s end in November, the number of Yanks had swelled to 1.4 million. Led by Major General John “Black Jack” Pershing, a celebrated veteran of the Spanish-American and Philippines wars, the U.S. forces, known as the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) fought off efforts by Allied commanders to push the AEF into a subordinate role as replacement troops. Starting with the battles of Cantigny, Chateau-Thierry, and Belleau Wood in France, the AEF proved itself an able force. In September 1918, the Americans launched an attack on a German bulge in the lines near Verdun, France. U.S. and French troops captured more than 25,000 prisoners, and the German military’s back was all but broken. At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, Germany called it quits, and the fighting stopped. American losses — 48,000 killed in battle, 56,000 lost to disease — seemed trifling compared to the staggering costs paid by other countries. Germany lost 1.8 million people; Russia, 1.7 million; France, 1.4 million; Austria-Hungary, 1.2 million; and Britain, 950,000. “The War to End All Wars,” as it was called, turned out to be just another test of humans’ aptitude for killing other humans in large quantities. [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19749260 2014-11-23 07:11:16 2014-11-23 07:11:16 open open american-involvement-in-world-war-i-19749260 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan 9 astonishing deaths reported in Victorian newspapers http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/11/17/9-astonishing-deaths-reported-in-victorian-newspapers-19716889/ Mon, 17 Nov 2014 01:10:29 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan 9 astonishing deaths reported in Victorian newspapers The British Newspaper Archive is a treasure trove of forgotten history. Here, Jeremy Clay, author of The Burglar Caught by a Skeleton, unearths a series of extraordinary deaths from the Victorian press
Thursday 13th November 2014 Submitted by Emma McFarnon Magazine subscription - 5 issues for £5 Man visited by an apparition on his death bed (Hulton Archive/Getty Images) The corpse that stood up and danced Marion Hillitz’s dancing days were behind her. So too, alas, were her breathing ones. At least, that’s what the doctors believed. On a Saturday night in June 1878, in the Virginian hospital where she’d stayed for several months in the care of nuns, Mrs Hillitz died. She was a popular patient; wealthy too. But all that could have been done for her, had been done. And so, according to the customs of Richmond’s Hospital of the Little Sisters of the Poor, she was wrapped in a shroud, and laid out in the parlour. The good sisters, who had watched faithfully by the bedside, were gathered mournfully by her body when the clock struck midnight. Suddenly, her sunken eyes seemed to flash, and the blood rushed to her wan cheeks. “As though imbued with superhuman energy,” reported the Edinburgh Evening News, “the dead body rose up from its resting place, which was draped with a black pall, emblematic of mourning, and spoke to the affrighted watchers, saying, ‘I am not dead yet, but I will die soon’.” Cue consternation. Mrs Hillitz then reportedly danced around the room, singing and shouting as the thunderstruck nurses stared in disbelief. “As soon as the nurses recovered from their fright, they placed the old lady in bed, where she lingered until about nine o’clock, when she again apparently died,” said the Evening News. “The affair has created the most intense excitement, and thousands of persons visited the hospital.” An actor stabbed to death during a play It was the performance of a lifetime: a stage death that oozed realism. The crowd applauded, the curtain came down, the theatre cleared. But as they drifted away from London’s Novelty Theatre that August night in 1896, the audience wasn’t aware just how realistic the final act had actually been. “The exigencies of the play demanded that the chief villain should be stabbed,” reported The Yorkshire Evening Post, “and this operation was so realistically carried out that the instrument employed – unhappily an actual dagger of particularly sharp quality – penetrated the breast of the unfortunate gentleman.” The unfortunate gentleman was Temple E Crozier. His killer was his friend, a fellow member of the cast of Sins of the Night. “I did it,” Wilfred Franks told the police. “It was an accident. It is a terrible thing.” The play was a sensational melodrama of greed, murder and revenge. Crozier played the part of Ramez, a dastardly Spaniard who seduced and killed Abimahad, the sister of Franks’ character Pablo. In the final act, the plot called for Pablo to drive a knife into Ramez, exclaiming “now my sister is avenged”. Everything had been going just fine until that moment. Alive to the risks of wielding a blade, Franks had calculated exactly where he needed to stand for his dramatic lunge to be believable but safe, and hadn’t budged in the scene. But Crozier leaned in. Maybe that wouldn’t have mattered too much if Franks had used a harmless stage knife from the theatre's props department. Unfortunately he used his own – a sharp and slender stiletto with a jewelled handle. The actor stumbled, turned twice from the blow and fell on his back with the dagger sticking in his chest. “Don’t worry, I’m alright,” Crozier told his unwitting killer. Three surgeons were speedily on the scene, but to no avail. “Deceased moaned and expired,” concluded the Evening Post. A man choked by a billiard ball As stunts go, it left a little to be desired. But it was Walter Cowle’s party piece, and he was going to stick to it. The 24-year-old was in the pub with his pals in November 1893, when talk turned to the tricks they could perform. Eager to show off, Walter asked the landlord of the Carlisle Arms in Soho for a billiard ball, then placed it in his mouth with a flourish, and closed his mouth. Ta-da! Uh-oh. “He evinced signs of choking,” reported the Grantham Journal. “His back was slapped and his head held down, in the hope that the ball would fall forward and out of his mouth. It did not, however and Cowle was at once conveyed to Middlesex Hospital, where he was found to be dead. “It was only when the post-mortem examination was made by Dr Sidney Bulke, resident surgeon, that the ball could be extracted.” His friend told the inquest he’d seen him do the trick dozens of times before, without any mishap. The coroner, rather superfluously, pointed out that sticking a billiard ball in your mouth to impress your mates was “silly and dangerous.” Animal revenge In Jaws the Revenge, a Great White Shark hunts down the family of the man who killed its relative. Preposterous, you may think, and pretty much everyone who saw it would agree with you. But the plot, ludicrous as it may be, is not entirely without parallel in the animal world. In 1894, a stablehand in the Welsh village of Dyserth, near Rhyl, came to an unpleasant end when he was kicked to death by a horse. His employer, said The Citizen, “at once got rid of the brute”. Not just that, but as a display of goodwill, he hired the son of the dead man as a groom. “News has come to hand that the son has himself been kicked to death by the foal of the mare that kicked his father to death,” reported the paper in March the following year. The condemned man who bought more time Robert Blanks didn’t have long, the court had seen to that. It may have been little more than a legal lynching, but the verdict stood. Blanks would hang. It was a spring day in 1899 when he was led to the gallows in Maysville, Kentucky. But before he drew his final breath, Robert Blanks was determined to squeeze every last remaining second out of what was left of his life. First he made a speech from the scaffold. It lasted 40 filibustering minutes. Then he requested that all those present at his execution bid him a personal goodbye. Each and every one of them, in a crowd that numbered more than 1,000. When there were no more farewells to be made, he asked for a collection to be held on behalf of his poor family. “The sheriff then told him to get ready for death,” said the Sheffield Evening Telegraph, “but he begged fervently for still more time, which he occupied in praying on his knees, and afterwards singing hymns.” Tired of the shilly-shallying, the sheriff tried to place the black cap on Blanks’ head. He tore it off. Back on it went. Back off it came. Three more times they struggled with the cap before Blanks was finally pinned down. As the noose went round his neck and the trapdoor fell, reported the Evening Telegraph, Blanks yelled his frantic last words. “Wait a minute
” The father killed by joy It was the news he had been longing for; the words he’d prayed to read. His son was safe. There was the evidence, at last, in his hands: a letter with a Bloemfontein postmark, telling Peter Kitchen that his lad was alive and well. Some time before, his son – a member of Armley Ambulance Corps in Leeds – had signed up for service in South Africa with No 9 Field Hospital. The year was 1900. The second Boer War was in full swing. Nothing had been heard from Kitchen’s son for a long while. Like any parent, Mr Kitchen, who was in his 80s, was beside himself with worry – until that day. From then on in, he wouldn’t have a care in the world. “Mr Kitchen was so overcome with joy on at last receiving news of his son’s safety that he expired without warning,” reported The Edinburgh Evening News. The man murdered by a monkey It was the clown who found him. When Signor Rovelli missed his cue for the big finale in the show, the circus joker went to see what was up. What he discovered that night in Mexico was far too gruesome to be mollified with a comedy honk of the horn. Rovelli was seated in his chair, with his menagerie of performing dogs and monkeys around him. His throat had been cut from ear to ear. His dogs whined pitifully at his feet. In the corner, one monkey was brandishing a razor. “He had evidently fallen asleep,” said the Illustrated Police News in September 1876, “and while in an unconscious state, one of the monkeys had become possessed of his master’s razor, which [it] drew across the throat of the sleeping man. “It is said that the acrobat had been seen to behave very cruelly to his monkey on many occasions, as the latter, from some cause or other, would not do as his master wished, and at times, when Rovelli was shaving, he used to go up to the monkey, razor in hand, threateningly, and imitate the movement of cutting himself. This was a most imprudent thing to do.” As they say: monkey see, monkey do. The girl who worried herself to death Thirteen words. That’s all it took to kill Kate Weedon. Thirteen words strung together in a sinister rhyming couplet. Poor Kate was a worrywart. Like a moth drawn to a flame, the 10-year-old Londoner began reading the prophecies of 16th-century soothsayer Mother Shipton, and was quickly fixated on two apocalyptic lines: The world to an end shall come In eighteen hundred and eighty one It was already 1881 – the tail end of the year at that. And as the days passed, she became more and more anxious. One day in November, Kate returned home from school in floods of tears. “Her mother told her it was all nonsense,” reported the Taunton Courier, and Western Advertiser, “but this had not the least effect upon her, and when she went to bed at half-past 10 she was still crying and wringing her hands, saying she knew the end of the world would come in the night. “At about half-past three on the following morning the mother was awakened by hearing her cry, and on going to her bedroom found the child in a fit. A doctor was immediately sent for, but his services were of no avail, and the child died two hours later.” An inquest found death was due to convulsions and shock to the system, brought on by fright. An entirely needless dread, at that. Almost 10 years before, the author Charles Hindley had admitted to fabricating the prophecy – to liven up his 1862 book on Mother Shipton. The servant who died re-enacting the death she had just witnessed Some folks are wise, and some are otherwise, observed the author Tobias Smollett. Proof, if it was required, was to be found in Widnes in 1881. On an October evening that year, a wholesale draper named Birchall asked an employee called Hague to go to his lodgings and fetch his four-chambered revolver, which he intended to hand as a gift to a policeman who was leaving for Australia. When Hague got the house, he contrived to shoot himself through the mouth while examining the gun. When a neighbour hurried to the scene, a servant picked up the revolver to show what had happened. “The firearm again went off,” said the Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette, “and shot her through the mouth. Both are dead.” The Burglar Caught by a Skeleton, published in paperback by Icon Books, is now on sale. Find out more here. You can follow Jeremy Clay on Twitter @ludicrousscenes, and read more at www.ludicrousscenes.com</p> 19716889 2014-11-17 01:10:29 2014-11-17 01:10:29 open open 9-astonishing-deaths-reported-in-victorian-newspapers-19716889 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan The Virus That Could Be Making You Dumber By Carl Engelking | November 10, 2014 3:51 pm http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/11/15/the-virus-that-could-be-making-you-dumber-by-carl-engelking-november-10-2014-3-51-pm-19710675/ Sat, 15 Nov 2014 05:21:04 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>The Virus That Could Be Making You Dumber By Carl Engelking | November 10, 2014 3:51 pm Share on print Share on facebook Share on twitter Share on email More Sharing Services 817 [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan You may have heard the saying, “You can’t catch stupid” — meant to console you that idiocy is not contagious. But, as it turns out, in a small way it might be. Scientists have discovered that a foreign virus in some peoples’ throats parallels with those individuals’ poorer cognitive performance. And when mice are given this virus, previously thought to only infect algae, they were slower to learn a maze. Surprise Virus Scientists stumbled on their discovery while collecting throat swab samples from people to assemble a virome — a genetic profile of all the viruses circulating through our bodies. During the analysis, researchers were surprised to find DNA of chlorella virus ATCV-1, a virus common in aquatic environments but not thought to infect humans or animals. What’s more, the virus was common: It was detected in 40 out of the 92 participants. It didn’t appear that age, sex, race or any other external factors affected a person’s chance of harboring the virus. Dumbed Down Fortunately for researchers, their original experiment included standardized tests to measure participants’ visual processing and motor skills. So, with the new variable — ATCV-1 — in the forefront, scientists switched gears to examine whether the newly discovered virus affected cognitive performance. And they found it did: people infected with the virus performed significantly worse on cognitive tests than did their uninfected counterparts. That warranted further study, so esearchers then tested how the virus affected mice. They infected 30 mice with ATCV-1 and put them through a series of maze tests. These mice took much longer to explore a novel maze setup than mice in the control group, researchers reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Mind Control ATCV-1 is common in most inland waters such as those around Baltimore, where the study was conducted. Therefore, exposure to the virus is probably common, but why some people acquire infection while others don’t is still unknown. Answering this question, researchers say, will guide future studies on ATCV-1. In the meantime, it’s a fascinating and freaky example of how microbes can mess with our brains. Robert Yolken, the virologist who led the study, told The Independent,“This is a striking example showing that the ‘innocuous’ microorganisms we carry can affect behavior and cognition.” </p> 19710675 2014-11-15 05:21:04 2014-11-15 05:21:04 open open the-virus-that-could-be-making-you-dumber-by-carl-engelking-november-10-2014-3-51-pm-19710675 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan From Kevin Randell's Blog http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/11/08/from-kevin-randell-s-blog-19682759/ Sat, 08 Nov 2014 06:59:50 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>A document labeled with the Majestic tag has been found. It has a proper provenance, which means the origin of the document can be traced by anyone who wishes to do so and there is no doubt it is authentic. The first page, which was classified as Top Secret is entitled, “Report by the Joint Logistic Plans Committee the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Joint Logistic Plan for ‘Majestic.’” There are some interesting things on that page. It identifies the problem, saying, “1. Pursuant to the decision by the Joint Chiefs of Staff on J.C.S. 1844/126, to prepare the Joint Logistic Plan in support of MAJESTIC*.” The asterisk references the same document mentioned in the body of the text. It provides no more information about it, but it is interesting because it is a reference to another document which could be traced to provide additional authentication. It also suggests something about how these highly classified documents are created and how many of them are inter-related. The rest of the document is merely other paragraphs that tell us very little about what Majestic is and everything that it does say could, in fact, be considered as evidence of MJ-12. This is a document that deals with logistics, which can be simply defined as the support needed for military operations. It could be said that this is a document that relates to the movement of an alien craft, the wreckage or debris, and the bodies of the alien flight crew from one location to another. This would be the plan to explain the mode of transportation, how many soldiers would be needed, how they would be fed and housed, the fuel supplies, weapons and ammunition, route information and bases where additional support could be found and anything else rated to all of this. The second page is a list of those who will receive the information which is quite long. It is labeled, “Top Secret Security Information,” and is stamped, “Special Handling Required, Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals,” and for those keeping score at home is dated 25 September 1952. Please notice the dating format that is not 25 September, 1952. But here is where we run into the first problem with all of this. At the bottom it is noted, “Forward herewith is a copy of the Joint Outline Emergency War Plan for a War Beginning 1 July 1952 MAJESTIC. This plan supersedes Joint Outline Emergency War Plan MASTHEAD, which was forwarded by SM-1197-51, dated 14 May 1951, copies of it will be either returned or destroyed by burning.” This suggests that it has nothing to do with UFOs or the Majestic-12, but the argument could be made that this is “typical boilerplate,” meaning that the paragraph is sort of standard without a specific meaning other than instructions of removing the obsolete plan and replacing it with the new one. In today’s world it would be a “cut and paste” error. In 1952, such a thing is more difficult to explain. The third page makes it clear what is being discussed and what Majestic really is and ends all our speculation. Stamped with a date of 2 OCT 1952 (as opposed to 02 OCT, 1952) and with “Top Secret Security Information, the letter, in paragraph one said, “Enclosure (1), with attached copies of Joint Outline Emergency War Plan “MAJESTIC’, is forwarded.” This is a war plan and has nothing to do with UFOs. The markings on it, made in 1952, show what they should have been as opposed to what they are on the MJ-12 documents and the EBD. Yes, there might be variations depending on military service branch and the level of classification, but here is something that shows what was being used at the time, how it was used and what the specific wording was and should have been. This does not bode well for MJ-12, not to mention the duplication of code words. By duplication of code words, I mean that all code words for classified projects come from a master list so that there is no accidental duplication (Yes, the military sometimes uses civilian code words for projects, such as Project Saucer, but the real name was Project Sign). To use the same or similar code words would lead to compromise. Someone cleared to deal with the War Plan – Majestic - wouldn’t be cleared for the MJ-12 material, but the duplication of code words wouldn’t make that clear. This is the same argument made for Majic. During WW II there was a highly classified project known as Magic. This similarity could lead to compromise, if you had two projects with such similar names. The last page of the documents that I have makes it clear that there is no reason to assume this has anything to do with the investigation of alien craft, alien bodies or the recovery of an alien spacecraft. Paragraph 4 says, “The estimate of the Soviet Union’s capability to execute campaigns and her probable courses of action contained in the Enclosure does not take into consideration the effect of opposition by any forces now in position or operational, or of unfavorable weather or climate conditions.” This is also classified as “Top Secret Security Information,” and is dated 12 September 1952 (again is relevant because it puts it into the time frame of the EBD and it shows the dating format as it should have been written), is signed by W. G. Lalor, Rear Admiral, U.S. Navy (Ret.), and is also noted as “Reproduced at the National Archives.” This then, should be the absolute, final blow to the MJ-12 nonsense. There simply wouldn’t be two highly classified projects with the same code name operating at the same time and we have the documentation here to prove that Majestic existed but it wasn’t what we have been told. It should be noted that I was alerted to this by my colleague Tony Bragalia. He suggested that this might have inspired the name Majestic-12 because here was a real project with that name. If the documents were still classified, meaning they couldn’t be released into the public arena, and in the 1980s, the classification might have held it would have been an interesting bit of corroboration. Someone could have stumbled over the top secret project with the name being found but nothing to identify exactly what it was. This would have hinted at a provenance and a high classification. Without some of the follow up documents, there could be speculation about what it meant, but no one would know. It would have provided an interesting time
until all the documents were found. Too bad that those proponents of MJ-12 couldn’t have found some of this twenty years ago. Oh, we’d know now what it was all about, but it sure would have given them a fine run. And I have to wonder if Bill Cooper, in his claim to have seen documents labeled as Majestic might not have seen these documents. Given his claimed position in the Navy, he might have seen the cover sheets for this but had no chance to read the document to see what it was all about. Tony added a note about all this, and how he came to find the documents. He provided the link so that those who wished to see the provenance would know where to look. He wrote that, “The reference linked below is what got me going down this research avenue. The Emergency War Plan -codenamed MAJESTIC - is highlighted in yellow in the military history book seen here: http://books.google.com/books?id=SeeNAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA164&lpg=PA164&dq=%22plan+majestic%22+1952&source=bl&ots=jB7mbVYG8S&sig=GU5KwjiTYMHUIgPGzenVyGL00uI&hl=en&sa=X&ei=uWhbVMehBYKgyATchYDADw&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=%22plan%20majestic%22%201952&f=false Added to the failure of the El Indio - Guerrero UFO crash that is part of the EBD and for which there is no evidence of it other than Robert Willingham’s obviously bogus tale, this should end, for all time any doubt about the fraudulent nature of the original MJ-12 documents. And for those who would now retreat to the argument that “Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence,” I would say, until you find something tangible, “Absence of evidence is, in fact, evidence of absence.” I have looked, others have looked everywhere that something like this would be noted, and nothing has been found. This seems to be “Game Over.” Posted by KRandle at 3:07 PM Labels: Bill Cooper, Majestic, Majic, Masthead, MJ-12, Robert B. Willingham, Tony Bragalia [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19682759 2014-11-08 06:59:50 2014-11-08 06:59:50 open open from-kevin-randell-s-blog-19682759 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Anarchic Autism Genetics Gain a Touch of Clarity By Gary Stix | October 30, 2014 | http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/11/02/anarchic-autism-genetics-gain-a-touch-of-clarity-by-gary-stix-october-30-19654510/ Sun, 02 Nov 2014 18:35:17 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Anarchic Autism Genetics Gain a Touch of Clarity By Gary Stix | October 30, 2014 | The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American. [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan Two new studies demonstrate the promise and pitfalls of the industrial-scale gene-processing technologies that define the meaning of the much-ballyhooed Big Data. Bad news first. One of the two reports published in Nature provided a four-digit estimate of the number of genes involved with autism. [I’m obligated to break here to say that Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group.] My science skeptic friends would say that this is also the point that I should start trying to bash autism genetics. “A thousand genes?” “Think of the combinatorial mess.” “They’ll never make any progress.” But what the myriad research teams found was actually pretty cool. The two studies, published Oct. 29, pooled the labor of more than 50 laboratories across the globe. Their results tied more than 100 genes to autism, sixty of which met a “high-confidence” threshold—meaning that a particular gene has more than a 90 percent chance of increasing the risk of autism. Only 11 had met that mark before. One of the studies looked at 2,515 families from a database maintained by the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative. The families had only one child with autism, suggesting the involvement of a rare, spontaneously occurring—writ de novo—mutation. The researchers then looked for the mutated DNA by sequencing the full protein-coding portion of the affected child’s genes, known as an exome. They used their high-powered, next-generation sequencers to look at the exomes of both parents and, in many cases, at least one sibling—a mind-blowing endeavor for any geneticist who has 15 to 20 years on a CV and remembers when sequencing a single gene was a big deal. De novo mutations of various sorts are estimated to account for at least 30 percent of autism cases. Of course, the next question is what do you do with all of this information—and how does it lead to treatments? The idea of routinely administering drugs for autism the way physicians do for blood pressure is still quite a ways off. But pathways that get you from here to there might become a bit clearer from these types of studies. The genes found by the various research groups point to dysfunctions in the communication hubs, or synapses, that connect one neuron to another. Each brain cell typically synapses to thousands of others. Also involved was genetic material (transcription factors or chromatin) that regulates the activity of genes. “Having these genes that you can put in a stem cell or a mouse for research will be transformative in finding what causes autism,” says Stephan Sanders, assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco, and an author on both papers. In terms of focus, any biologist will tell you that that a list that includes synapses, transcription factors and chromatin still covers a lot of ground. But it does at least provide a starting point of sorts, furnishing a number of intriguing ways to categorize the disorder. “Higher IQ autism,” such as Asperger’s, which affects mostly boys, appears to have different genetics than the “lower IQ” form in which both boys and girls are affected. Autism is characterized by language deficits, social problems and repetitive gesturing. Nicholas Lange of Harvard, an author for Scientific American whose article on autism I edited last year, was enthusiastic after reading the two papers because some of the newly discovered genes are implicated in other disorders. That raises the possibility that research for, say, schizophrenia or epilepsy treatments might be of use for autism as well. He wrote me: “These findings, and many others like them recently, help us move forward from thinking of autism as a discrete multi-genic disorder toward viewing it more generally as a disability arising from factors shared by many other human impairments, some of whose biological underpinnings are already well known.” Besides the research that crunched the exome sequencing database, the other study, with contributions from dozens of institutions, came from the Autism Sequencing Consortium, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health as part of its efforts to support collaborations that would be too big for any one lab. These studies don’t represent a clarion call that marks the beginning of the war on autism—nor should they. War analogies and science don’t mix that well. Pace Richard Nixon. But they are a measure of progress, an acknowledgement that the field has moved light years beyond the days of Bettelheim’s “refrigerator mothers.” Image Source: National Library of Medicine About the Author: Gary Stix, a senior editor, commissions, writes, and edits features, news articles and Web blogs for SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. His area of coverage is neuroscience. He also has frequently been the issue or section editor for special issues or reports on topics ranging from nanotechnology to obesity. He has worked for more than 20 years at SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, following three years as a science journalist at IEEE Spectrum, the flagship publication for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He has an undergraduate degree in journalism from New York University. With his wife, Miriam Lacob, he wrote a general primer on technology called Who Gives a Gigabyte? Follow on Twitter @@gstix1. More » The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American. </p> 19654510 2014-11-02 18:35:17 2014-11-02 18:35:17 open open anarchic-autism-genetics-gain-a-touch-of-clarity-by-gary-stix-october-30-19654510 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan More Amgen lay offs http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/11/01/more-amgen-lay-offs-19648318/ Sat, 01 Nov 2014 00:33:54 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan By Dean Starkman , Andrew Khouri contact the reporters BusinessFinanceJob LayoffsUnemployment and LayoffsJobs and WorkplaceActivismArthritis Amgen's job cuts were part of maneuvers intended as a way to funnel money back to Wall Street investors Who should be driving strategic decisions — Amgen managers or owners? Amgen Inc., the Southern California biotech giant that has struggled to match the torrid growth of its pharmaceutical peers, finds itself in the crosshairs of a New York hedge fund manager, one of the new breed of activist investors, who is loudly calling for the company to split in two. Amgen is resisting a split, though by promising to shed thousands of jobs as part of a bid to boost its share price, it has been steadily giving in to Wall Street criticism of being bloated and inefficient. On Tuesday, it blinked again. In a surprise statement at an investment conference in New York, the Thousand Oaks firm said it would eliminate up to 1,100 jobs, boosting the total announced cuts this year to as many as 4,000, about 20% of its global workforce. Wall Street cheered, sending shares up 6% on the day to $157.19, a gain of $8.99. With four potential product launches in 2015 and a strong pipeline of innovative and biosimilar molecules, we are well positioned to deliver breakthrough medicines. - Robert A. Bradway, Amgen's chairman and chief executive The job cuts were part of a sweeping set of financial maneuvers the company intended as a way to funnel money back to Wall Street investors. The company also said it would buy back $2 billion in stock and increase its dividend 30%. It also made an ambitious promise of double-digit earnings growth for the next three years. The fight between management and activist investor Daniel Loeb is part of a broader argument over whether such high-stakes face-offs result in short-term benefits to shareholders at the expense of a company's ability to invest in its operations and thrive long term. Another big question: Who should be driving strategic decisions — managers or owners? Robert A. Bradway, Amgen’s chairman and chief executive, insisted that the company still had plenty of capital to invest in new products, including cutting-edge "biosimilars," which are less expensive versions of pricey biological drugs. lRelated Database shows $3.5 billion in industry ties to doctors, hospitals Business Database shows $3.5 billion in industry ties to doctors, hospitals See all related 8 "With four potential product launches in 2015 and a strong pipeline of innovative and biosimilar molecules, we are well positioned to deliver breakthrough medicines for patients and drive long-term growth," Bradway said. Bradway, himself a former investment banker, told investors and analysts Tuesday that a spinoff didn't make sense financially. "As we've looked at this, we've not seen a way through that we think unlocks significant value for our shareholders," Bradway said. "So what I'm not saying is, 'No, never,' but what I am saying is that right now, [we're] not convinced there's a way through that adds value for all of our shareholders." In a letter to its investors last week, Loeb's hedge fund, Third Point, suggested that Amgen could benefit by splitting into two companies: a mature brand that focuses on established drugs and a growth company that targets drugs in development. Related story: Hedge fund Third Point calls for splitting Amgen into two firms Related story: Hedge fund Third Point calls for splitting Amgen into two firms Stuart Pfeifer Amgen is one of a wave of public companies under pressure from activist investors, usually hedge funds, that buy large blocks of shares and use their clout to force financial or operational changes such as spinoffs, mergers, stock buybacks and new slates of directors. Hedge funds, which face fewer restrictions than other money managers on how and where they can invest, have thrived in the low-interest-rate environment. Investors scrambling for bigger yields have turned to such higher-risk, higher-reward operators. Overall, hedge funds have seen their money under management balloon to $2.8 trillion, including a 7% rise through the first nine months of this year, according to Hedge Fund Research Inc. Of that amount, activist hedge funds have grown the fastest, rising 20% to $113 billion this year. Activist hedge funds have grown so quickly mainly by outperforming the rest of the industry. cComments @Dougdingle Don't equate the big boys getting rich with people being poor. As it turns out, when they get rich, you get rich. I don't care if Joe CEO makes $500M a year and gets a $50M golden handshake - as long as he can raise the stock price of our (yours and my) investments. Brainwashed_in_Church at 7:19 AM October 30, 2014 Add a comment See all comments 19 Over the last three years, the group has posted annualized returns of 12.9% while hedge funds as a whole have generated returns of 6.5%. A mutual fund indexed to the Standard & Poor's 500 index would have garnered a 15.2% return, and at much lower risk. Once known as corporate raiders and pilloried by Hollywood in movies such as "Wall Street," these engaged, charismatic investors rebranded themselves as activists, arguing that they force efficiencies and other changes that complacent managements won't make. Among higher-profile campaigns recently were Bill Ackman's successful push for changes at Canadian Pacific Railway and a less successful push at retailer Target Corp. He also is part of a Canadian firm's effort to acquire Allergan Inc., the Irvine eye- and skin-care company. Nelson Peltz at Trian Fund Management has pushed for splits and spinoffs at Pepsico Inc. and DuPont. Old-guard activist Carl Icahn campaigned for Ebay Inc. to split off its PayPal unit and for Apple Inc. to use a portion of its cash horde to buy back some of its shares. Loeb's Third Point, meanwhile, has been among the most active in the business, notably with a successful and noisy campaign for management and strategic changes at Yahoo Inc. last year. Now, he's turned to Amgen. In a recent letter to investors, Loeb cited the company as an underperformer and argued that it has failed to realize its potential value despite producing both longtime, high-margin products such as anti-inflammatory Enbrel, and recently launched blockbusters such as Prolia and Xgeva, both for bone-related disorders. "Amgen has all the hallmarks of a hidden value situation, one of our favorite investment themes," Loeb wrote. "The company does not receive proper credit from investors for either the cash generative potential of its mature products or the coming financial impact of its growth assets." Founded in 1980, Amgen became the world's largest independent biotech company by developing drugs to treat anemia, arthritis, kidney disease and bone disease. It is one of the largest publicly traded companies in Southern California, with $18.7 billion in revenue last year and a market capitalization of nearly $110 billion. It reported $5 billion in profit last year. In recent years, the company has looked to expand into new sectors, including a wider variety of treatments for cancer. Last year, as Amgen struggled with slower sales growth, the company bought Onyx Pharmaceuticals Inc. for more than $10 billion. The deal gave Amgen control of a blood cancer drug, Kyprolis, which is expected to become highly popular in the next few years. With the latest round of layoffs disclosed, an Amgen employee described the mood in Thousand Oaks as "very dark" while workers wait to see who will be affected. Some left last week in the initial round of layoffs, the employee said, and it's grown difficult to work under the threat of constant downsizing. Workers wonder whether the consolidations are motivated by the desire to develop life-changing drugs, said the employee, who asked to remain anonymous given the sensitivity of the situation. "A lot of people are wondering if Bob [Bradway] appeased investors and Wall Street or appeased our patients and improving their lives." dean.starkman@latimes.com andrew.khouri@latimes.com Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times</p> 19648318 2014-11-01 00:33:54 2014-11-01 00:33:54 open open more-amgen-lay-offs-19648318 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan America's Civil War: Colonel Benjamin Grierson's Cavalry Raid in 1863 Originally published by Civil War Times magazine. Published Online: September 01, 2006 http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/10/11/america-s-civil-war-colonel-benjamin-grierson-s-cavalry-raid-in-1863-originally-published-by-civil-war-times-magazine-published-online-september--19540032/ Sat, 11 Oct 2014 06:21:00 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>America's Civil War: Colonel Benjamin Grierson's Cavalry Raid in 1863 Originally published by Civil War Times magazine. Published Online: September 01, 2006 [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan April 17, 1863, dawned with the promise of an almost perfect spring day. The Federal cavalry camp at La Grange, Tennessee, had been alive with activity since early morning. Anxious soldiers awaited the arrival by train of Colonel Benjamin H. Grierson, commander of the 1st Brigade of the Cavalry Division, XVI Corps, Army of Tennessee. Summoned back from a visit to his family, Grierson had spent the late evening hours conferring with his superiors in Memphis. When he arrived in camp, he brought welcome news: the long inactivity of winter would soon be relieved, and not merely by the tedium of scouting and reconnaissance. His orders included nothing less than an invasion of Mississippi–one of the most daring cavalry raids of the Civil War. Grierson's men were not the only ones preparing to march that day. Federal forces were in motion across the entire Western front from Memphis to Nashville. Major General Ulysses S. Grant planned to move his army across the Mississippi River from Louisiana to gain a better position from which to assault the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg, Mississippi. To mask this movement, he ordered infantry and artillery from Tennessee to push south into northwestern Mississippi along the Coldwater River. At the same time, Colonel Abel Streight and 1,000 mounted infantry were sent to disrupt Confederate communications in northern Alabama. While these maneuvers occupied Confederates, Grant proposed to send a strong mounted column into the heart of Mississippi to smash railroads and divert the attention of Confederate cavalry from his attempt to cross the river. To execute this thrust, Grant selected Grierson, a 36-year-old former music teacher and storekeeper from Jacksonville, Illinois. Grierson had proven himself a reliable and resourceful cavalry commander while fighting guerrillas in west Tennessee. Major General William T. Sherman had recommended him as 'the best cavalry commander I have yet had. Tall and lean, the bearded Grierson possessed an iron constitution and a modest and unassuming demeanor that earned him the respect of men under his command. That command consisted of 1,700 veterans from the 6th and 7th Illinois and the 2d Iowa Cavalry regiments. For speed and surprise, Grierson stripped his command down to essentials. The haversacks his men carried across their saddle pommels held five days' light rations of hardtack, coffee, sugar, and salt. He instructed company commanders to make those rations last at least 10 days. Each soldier also carried a carbine, saber, and 100 rounds of ammunition. The only carriages were those bearing the six two-pounder Woodruff guns of Captain Jason B. Smith's Battery K of the 1st Illinois Artillery. Grierson's chief concern was the broken-down condition of his horses. Some men in the 2d Iowa rode mules appropriated from the brigade's wagon train. The expedition would rely heavily on the Mississippi countryside for new mounts, as well as food and forage. Despite Grierson's worries, a lighthearted mood prevailed among his Yankee horsemen. The men seemed to feel highly elated, and, as they marched in columns of twos, some were singing, others speculating as to our destination, recalled Sergeant Richard Surby. They would have been surprised to learn their commander had only a vague notion of their goal. Grierson had orders only to disable the section of the Southern Railroad that ran east from Jackson to an intersection with the Mobile & Ohio Railroad at Meridian, just north of Enterprise. Beyond that, his movements had been left to his own discretion. He carried in his uniform pocket a small compass, a map of Mississippi, and a written description of the countryside. Success or failure would depend largely on his skill and ingenuity. The Federals crossed the Tallahatchie River on April 18 and pressed south through torrential rains the following day. They encountered almost no resistance at first, but news of the raid soon reached Confederates in the state. Lieutenant Colonel C.R. Barteau raced north along the Mobile & Ohio Railroad with the 2d Tennessee Battalion, Colonel J.F. Smith's militia regiment, and Major W.M. Inge's battalion. Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton, commanding the defense of Vicksburg, called on district commanders James R. Chalmers and Daniel Ruggles to mobilize Confederate cavalry in northern Mississippi. The Federals plodded southward on the 19th over roads that were fast becoming quagmires. That evening they reached Pontotoc, where they halted only long enough to destroy government property and sift through captured documents abandoned by a retreating militia company. They went into camp about five miles south of Pontotoc. Despite the deteriorating roads, the hard-riding horsemen were maintaining a brisk pace of 30 miles per day. To help keep up that pace, Grierson stripped his command of dead weight. In a midnight inspection he personally weeded out 175 of the least effective troopers. At 3:00 a.m. on April 20, Major Hiram Love of the 2d Iowa led this Quinine Brigade–along with prisoners, broken down horses, and a single artillery piece–out of the Federal camp toward La Grange. By moving in columns of fours under cover of darkness, Grierson hoped Love would deceive local residents into thinking the entire command had turned back. With Love on his way north, the main column resumed its march. The force encamped shortly after dark on the 20th. In four days the raiders had encountered only token resistance, but Barteau's Confederate cavalry was fast closing in. They had entered Pontotoc well behind the Federal force on the morning of the 20th, but closed the gap with hard riding that night. By daybreak on the 21st they were scant hours behind the Union horsemen. Grierson did not know how close his pursuers were, but he certainly expected pursuit. To obscure his trail, he detached Hatch's 500-man 2d Iowa–nearly a third of his command–and a gun from Smith's battery. Hatch, a bombastic 31-year-old former lumberman, left the main column with instructions to strike the Mobile & Ohio Railroad near West Point, destroying its tracks as far south as Macon, about halfway between West Point and Meridian. He was then to swing through Alabama, doing further damage to rail and telegraph lines during his return to La Grange. Before joining Hatch's detachment, Company E of his 2d Iowa and the two-pounder artillery piece followed the main column three or four miles toward Starkville. There the Iowans wheeled about and returned in columns of fours, obliterating hoofprints in the opposite direction. They turned the tiny cannon at four different spots in the road to leave distinct sets of wheel impressions, suggesting that four different cannon had turned. With a little luck, pursuing Confederates would pick up the freshest tracks in the thick mud and conclude that Grierson's entire force had turned east toward the Mobile & Ohio. Hatch's diversion worked flawlessly. Barteau, arriving at the junction shortly before noon, reported, My advance guard fired upon a party of 20 of the enemy, supposed to be the rear guard. This party fled and took the Starkville road. The enemy had divided, 200 going to Starkville and 700 continuing their march on the West Point road. Barteau turned eastward in pursuit. At 2:00 p.m. Barteau fell upon the Iowans' flanks and rear two miles northwest of Palo Alto. After a fierce skirmish, the Confederates withdrew. Their position, however, covered the road leading south to West Point and Macon, compelling Hatch to reevaluate his orders. He believed it was important to divert the enemy's cavalry from Colonel Grierson, so his Hawkeyes began a slow withdrawal northward, drawing the pursuing Rebels along with them. Barteau would finally break off contact on the 24th. Meanwhile, the 950 troopers of the 6th and 7th Illinois and Smith's four remaining guns raced southward. Shortly after noon on the 21st, a half-dozen horsemen at the head of the column shed their Union blue in favor of civilian garb. Each cradled a shotgun or long rifle. The brainchild of Lieutenant Colonel William D. Blackburn of the 7th and commanded by Quartermaster Sergeant Richard W. Surby, this unit of Butternut Guerrillas would serve as the eyes and ears of the Yankee raiders. The next day Grierson again focused his attention on the Mobile & Ohio Railroad that paralleled his line of march 25 miles to the east. Uncertain of Hatch's fate, he dispatched Captain Henry C. Forbes and 35 men of the 7th's Company B to disrupt the tracks at Macon. Forbes found both Macon and the tracks outside it too well guarded for his small band to approach. He turned back in search of Grierson's trail, leaving the railroad intact. Although his mission failed, it drew attention away from the main body of Federals and focused Rebel eyes on the railroad. During the night of April 22, 2,000 troops moved north by rail from Meridian to protect Macon from assault by a force estimated at 5,000 Union troops. While the Confederates rushed to protect Macon, Grierson passed swiftly south. News of the Yankee raid had not yet reached the region, and townspeople cheered the dust-covered horsemen who galloped through Louisville shortly after dark on the 22d, mistaking them for Confederate cavalry. Grierson was almost within striking distance of the Southern Railroad by the night of the 23d. After conferring with his field officers about 10:00 p.m., he sent Blackburn and about 200 officers and men to seize the depot at Newton Station, just south of Decatur, tear up the track and telegraph line, and inflict all the damage possible upon the enemy. The main column followed in Blackburn's trail within an hour. Blackburn's troopers approached Newton Station just as the first rays of sunlight spread across the eastern horizon on the morning of the 24th. Surby and two butternut-clad companions casually slipped into the outskirts of town, where they learned a train was expected soon. The shrieking whistle of a westbound freight train sent one of the scouts speeding back to alert Blackburn, who had barely concealed his men behind the depot buildings when the 25-car freight puffed laboriously into the station. As the locomotive drew abreast of the depot, blue-clad soldiers burst from the shadows and bounded into the cab. With pistols drawn, they ordered the startled engineer to stop the engine. No sooner had they diverted the train from the main track and scurried back into hiding than a second locomotive pulled slowly into the depot from the west. Using the same tactic, the raiders seized 13 cars crammed with weapons, ammunition, and supplies. A passenger car disgorged several distraught civilians fleeing from besieged Vicksburg with their furniture and other personal belongings. After removing the private property, Blackburn's jubilant soldiers sent flames dancing down the length of both strings of captured cars. Soon, the deep reverberations of shells erupting in the intense heat reached Grierson's ears five miles away and brought the main Federal column charging briskly to the rescue. Grierson was happy to find the noise was caused not by a pitched battle, but by the destruction of Rebel ammunition. He was less pleased to observe many of his troopers filling their canteens from a captured whiskey barrel. In addition to the 38 railroad cars and their contents, 500 stand of arms and a large quantity of clothing went up in flames at Newton Station. Explosions ruptured the captured locomotives, and fire consumed the depot. Amid the smoking ruins, Grierson paroled 75 prisoners. After spreading the false rumor that the raiders were headed for Enterprise on the Mobile & Ohio Railroad, Grierson was back in the saddle and southbound by 2:00 p.m. The riders would not reign up to sleep until near midnight, about 48 hours after their last bivouac. During the night, Grierson contemplated his next move. Aware that Rebel forces were converging to block his escape through northern Mississippi, he decided to feint westward and then proceed south slowly, resting his men and animals, collecting food, and gathering information. He would then make up his mind whether to return to La Grange by way of Alabama, or to drive south and try to join with Union forces on the Mississippi River. The band spent April 25 on the march, stopping near nightfall. Grierson learned from informants that a Rebel force was en route from Mobile to intercept the Yankee raiders. To verify the report and further confuse the enemy, Grierson sent Samuel Nelson, one of Surby's resourceful scouts, to cut telegraph wires near Forest Station on the Southern Railroad and perhaps destroy a railroad bridge or trestle. Slipping out of camp around midnight, Nelson approached within seven miles of the railroad, where he stumbled upon a regiment of Confederate horsemen on the trail of Grierson's column. With his benign disguise enhanced by a slight stutter, Nelson passed himself off as an unwilling guide for the Yankee cavalry. He told the Rebels they faced a unit that was 1,800 strong and headed east toward the Mobile & Ohio Railroad. Satisfied with Nelson's story, the Confederates released him and headed off in pursuit of the phantom force. In fact, Grierson had decided to continue southwest and strike the New Orleans, Jackson & Great Northern Railroad at Hazelhurst, disrupting the movement of troops and supplies between Vicksburg and Port Hudson. Following a good night's rest and with a full supply of forage and provisions, Grierson's raiders broke camp at 6:00 a.m. on April 26. At Raleigh, Surby's scouts surprised the sheriff and confiscated $3,000 in Confederate currency. After struggling through a torrential downpour in nearly impenetrable darkness, the sodden troopers halted on the banks of the Strong River outside Westville, 40 miles from their previous night's encampment. While the weary main column paused for a rest, Colonel Edward Prince and four companies of his 7th Illinois raced ahead to seize the Pearl River Ferry. Rested and fed, the main column broke camp about midnight. As the clatter of iron-soled hooves echoed across the wooden planks of the Strong River bridge, a wave of shouts and cheers rolled up from the tail of the long column. Grierson shifted in his saddle just as three beaming horsemen reined up sharply at his elbow. Captain Forbes presents his compliments, an excited trooper blurted out, and begs to be allowed to burn his bridges for himself. Astonished and amused, the smiling colonel posted a guard to meet the lost souls of Company B. Forbes had spent the previous five days engaged in a frantic attempt to overtake the main body of Federal cavalry. He had been misled by the false information planted at Newton Station and veered eastward. At Enterprise, on the Mobile & Ohio, Forbes bluffed his way out of a tight spot by demanding the surrender of the garrison in the name of Major General Grierson. Confederate reports of the number of the Federal cavalry raiders had varied widely; the presence of a major general would have meant it was quite a large force. As the Rebel commander weighed his options, the Yankee captain backed out of harm's way. Forbes later learned his gambit had drawn Major General W.W. Loring to Enterprise, pinning down three regiments of potential pursuers while Grierson escaped in the opposite direction. The unexpected presence of Confederates in Enterprise had alerted Forbes that Grierson had not taken that path. After a 34-hour ride through rain-shrouded forests, fording swollen streams and following a trail of fire-blackened bridges, Forbes miraculously found his way back to the column. While guards awaited his company at the Strong River crossing, the advance force under Prince approached the Pearl River at two o'clock that morning. Finding the ferry swinging from its mooring on the opposite shore, Prince summoned his best Southern accent and commandeered the flatboat. The last of Prince's horsemen clambered up the steep opposite bank of the river as day broke, and Colonel Grierson arrived at the landing with the rest of the Federal column. Learning that Prince had intercepted a courier bearing orders for the destruction of the ferry, Grierson hurried up the crossing by crowding men and mounts 24 at a time onto the flatboat. As soon as the first boatload touched the opposite shore, a detachment rushed several miles upstream to lie in ambush for an armored transport rumored to be anchored in the vicinity. The Rebel gunboat failed to appear and, with the arrival of Captain Forbes's errant company, the entire force was safely across the river by early afternoon. Suspecting that Confederate authorities in Jackson, barely 40 miles to the north, were aware of his presence, Grierson had started Prince's battalion toward Hazelhurst while he personally supervised the Pearl River crossing. Surby's scouts led the way and directed a steady stream of prisoners back to Prince's trailing column. Four miles outside Hazelhurst, Prince handed Surby a dispatch addressed to Pemberton, informing him that the Yankees had advanced to Pearl River and finding the ferry destroyed they could not cross and had left taking a northeasterly course. Minutes later, two butternut-clad strangers strode confidently into a circle of Rebel officers idling away time in the Hazelhurst depot. They calmly handed their message to the operator and watched as the misleading telegram raced across the wires to Confederate headquarters. The pair pressed their luck, though, when they decided to take a meal at the hotel. As they approached the square, a prisoner who had been captured and released by the raiders on the previous day suddenly appeared brandishing a sword and a pistol, and shouting for help in stopping them d—-d Yankees. With revolvers drawn, the unmasked scouts wheeled in their tracks and spurred their mounts into a blind dash out of town. Collecting the rest of Surby's Butternuts, they raced back through a torrential midday downpour to the Hazelhurst depot, only to discover its occupants had scattered, taking the telegraph key with them. In their haste, however, the Confederates had neglected to countermand the forged dispatch. Following closely behind Surby, Prince's vanguard thundered down the empty streets. In a familiar movement, the blue-coated troopers fanned out to seal escape routes. At that moment, the southbound Jackson train chugged slowly into the outskirts of Hazelhurst. The conductor sounded the alarm at his first glimpse of a blue-clad picket posted at the bridge north of town. Brakes screeched and the engineer brought the locomotive to an abrupt halt and reversed its course. Prince watched in agonized frustration as the train backed rapidly up the tracks, carrying its cargo to safety–a cargo that included seventeen commissioned officers and eight millions in Confederate money, which was en route to pay off troops in Louisiana and Texas. After discharging ineffectual shots at the fast-retreating train, Prince's men turned to matters close at hand. Gathering together commissary and quartermaster stores, along with four carloads of powder and ammunition, the Yankee raiders ran their captured booty a safe distance out of town and ignited it. Other squads of Federal soldiers raced north and south along the tracks tearing up rails, demolishing trestlework, and disrupting telegraph wires. The thud of captured artillery shells exploding in the bonfire startled Grierson as he approached Hazelhurst from the east. With orders to trot, gallop, march echoing down the column, the horsemen flew to the aid of their comrades, only to discover they had been sold again. Sharing a good laugh, Grierson's troopers broke ranks and retired to the hotel, where they partook of a banquet of captured food. With full bellies, they remounted and rode westward out of town, toward the river. All evening they fended off Rebel vedettes who harassed the front and flanks of their column. That night and the following morning, Confederate forces converged on the Yankee horsemen from the north and west. Learning of Grierson's appearance at Hazelhurst, Pemberton threw his forces into action. He most feared that the enemy would swing back to the northwest, cross the Big Black River, and strike again at the Southern Railroad, interrupting communications between Jackson and Vicksburg. Unable to second-guess the elusive Grierson, he restlessly maneuvered far-flung cavalry in a fruitless effort to defend all possible targets at once. He dispatched a battalion of cavalry under Captain W.W. Porter south from Jackson along the New Orleans, Jackson & Great Northern Railroad. He ordered Colonel Wirt Adams's cavalry at Grand Gulf to move eastward to cut the Federals off from Port Gibson. Until Adams arrived on the scene, Colonel R.V. Richardson, the unorthodox leader of the 1st Tennessee Partisan Rangers, would hold overall command of the operation. Another courier carried orders to Barteau at Prairie Mound to move without delay to Hazelhurst. With Confederates closing in, Grierson broke camp at 6:00 a.m. on the 28th. Dry, hard roadbeds were a welcome change from the muddy quagmires of the past several days. Near mid-morning, he sent Captain George W. Trafton and four companies of the 7th east to strike the railroad at Bahala. Trafton's detachment returned before dawn on April 29, bringing Grierson the dismaying news that he was poised in the jaws of a Rebel trap. Its mission of destruction at Bahala completed, the battalion was approaching the Federal camp at Union Church around 1:00 a.m. when Sergeant Surby and Private George Steadman stumbled upon Rebel pickets belonging to old Wirt Adams' cavalry. The soldiers revealed that when reinforcements arrived in the morning, Adams intended to give the 'Yanks' h—-l between Union Church and Fayette, a few miles to the west. Grierson summoned Colonel Prince, Lieutenant Colonels Blackburn and Reuben Loomis, and Adjutant Samuel Woodward to a council of war. Surby estimated Confederate forces in the vicinity at 400 cavalry, supported by a battery of artillery. Even as they conferred, Adams was passing around the Union flank to join with Captain S.B. Cleveland's 100-man cavalry force west of Union Church. The trap was closing, but Grierson and his officers had a daring response in mind. At 6:00 a.m. the Yankee troopers boldly rode into the teeth of the Rebel ambush. Then, a short distance outside Union Church, the main column veered sharply from its westward course toward the Mississippi River and headed southeast toward Brookhaven, leaving behind a small company to occupy the Rebels on the westward road. After waiting several hours, Adams realized his trap was sprung. The frustrated colonel informed Pemberton he was marching from Fayette with five additional companies to intercept the enemy's southward movement. While Adams stewed in his embarrassment, the Federal raiders followed a confused maze of back roads through piny woods. Considerable dodging was done the first three or four hours' march of this day, Surby recalled. I do not think we missed traveling toward any point of the compass. In the western distance, the Yankee soldiers could hear the leaden reverberations of Union Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter's gunboats bombarding Grand Gulf. With Adams's cavalry squarely between him and the river, however, Grierson could not join Porter. Instead the raiders pushed south and thundered down the dusty streets of Brookhaven, startling dazed residents. While the 7th rounded up prisoners, Loomis's 6th charged a conscript camp concealed in a grove of live oak a mile and a half south of town and found it vacant. The previous day, Pemberton had ordered Major M.R. Clark to evacuate the camp. As the 6th destroyed abandoned arms, ammunition, and stores, Captain John Lynch's two companies tore up track and trestlework. Loomis's troopers returned to Brookhaven just as flames enveloped the depot, a railroad bridge, and a dozen freight cars. An officer and 20 men armed with buckets prevented fires from spreading to civilian property. Some of the hardest work of the day fell to Lieutenants Samuel L. Woodward and George A. Root, the young adjutants of the 6th and 7th Illinois regiments. Civilian morale, never high in some of Mississippi's southern counties, bordered on open disloyalty. After paroling over 200 officers, soldiers, and able-bodied citizens, Woodward was astonished to see a flood of military-age men lining up to receive paroles: slips of paper that would exempt them from military service until exchanged. Many who had escaped [conscription] and were hiding out were brought in by their friends to obtain one of the valuable documents, Woodward recalled. The Yankee raiders had covered almost 40 miles since dawn and were happy to bed down outside town that night. The next morning, still uncertain about events along the river, Grierson decided to continue tearing up track along the New Orleans, Jackson & Great Northern. An easy two-mile ride brought him to Bogue Chitto, a forlorn cluster of perhaps a dozen buildings straddling the railroad. In short order, his raiders destroyed the depot and freight cars, ripped out rails and trestlework, demolished a bridge across Bogue Chitto Creek, and returned to the saddle to head south. From Bogue Chitto, Grierson pushed on toward Summit, some 20 miles south. To the raiders' surprise, that small community welcomed them with open arms. Surby judged Grierson's popularity at least equal to Pemberton's, and the colonel himself recalled a local woman who promised that if the north should win and I should ever run for president, that her husband should vote for me or she would certainly endeavor to get a divorce from him. The blue-coated soldiers lingered most of the afternoon among these congenial civilians. After the townspeople had helped themselves to government supplies, the troopers rolled 25 freight cars a safe distance out of town and put them to the torch. Noticing the depot's proximity to private residences, Grierson ordered the building spared. As at Brookhaven, the regimental adjutants handed out paroles to prisoners captured during the day and to civilians eligible for conscription into Confederate service. At this seemingly harmless village, Grierson confronted an enemy more dangerous
than Wirt Adams' Cavalry. Several enterprising troopers had uncovered a cache of Louisiana rum hidden in a swamp about a mile outside of town. Grierson dispatched an officer and a squad of men to investigate. They staved the heads of 30 or 40 barrels of the potent brew and watched the balm of a thousand flowers mingle with the Mississippi clay. Near sunset, the raiders filed out of Summit. Having learned nothing of Grant's army, Grierson had finally concluded to make for Baton Rouge. His men moved southwest, away from the broken railroad and toward Liberty. They bivouacked near midnight, 15 miles southwest of Summit. While the Federal troopers caught a few fitful hours of sleep, Confederate cavalry struggled desperately to overtake them. After an agonizing nine-hour delay in leaving Jackson, Richardson had finally locked onto Grierson's trail near Hazelhurst on the 29th. Following a path of burned depots and twisted rails, the Rebel colonel reached Summit at 3:00 a.m. on May 1, nine hours behind his prey. The Yankees had planted the suggestion there that they were headed for Magnolia and Osyka, the next stations on the railroad. Receiving that news, the eager Confederates pressed southward in the hope of falling upon the Union column's rear. Wirt Adams, meanwhile, had marched to Liberty after failing to trap the Yankees at Union Church. On the evening of April 30 his men were camped within five miles of Grierson. Like Richardson, he hoped to do battle with the Federals near Osyka. At the same time, other Confederate units were riding northeast from Port Hudson. Colonel W.R. Miles transferred his Louisiana Legion to Clinton on the 29th and set out for Osyka the next day. Lieutenant Colonel George Gantt's 9th Tennessee Cavalry Battalion had been ordered to the vicinity of Tangipahoa. For several days, Gantt responded to one contradictory report after another regarding the Yankees' position and destination before finally settling in near Osyka, covering the roads to Liberty and Clinton. In the midst of all this confusion, it would be easy to overlook a small detachment of Wingfield's Battalion of the 9th Louisiana Partisan Rangers–a mere 80 men under the command of Major James De Baun. On the 28th De Baun had moved to intercept the Union cavalrymen at Woodville. Two days later, he was ordered to reinforce either Miles or Gantt at Osyka. Augmenting his command with 35 men of Gantt's battalion, De Baun set out immediately and by 11:30 a.m. on May 1 was camped at the Wall's Bridge crossing of the Tickfaw River, eight miles west of Osyka. Only vaguely aware of the Rebel forces closing in on him, Grierson woke his men to a breathtaking dawn on May 1. As the first narrow slivers of sunlight sliced through the branches of towering pines, the Illinois troopers mounted their horses and resumed their march. The command felt inspired, Surby recalled, and various were the conjectures as to what point on the Mississippi we would make. Oblivious to the glories of nature, their commander concentrated on throwing his pursuers off the scent. He ordered an abrupt turn to the south, and his raiders disappeared into the dense woods. After an arduous ride, interrupted by frequent halts to lift the small cannon over fallen timbers, the bruised and scratched horses and men finally stumbled onto a little-used path and resumed their march at a brisk trot. Near midday, they emerged on the Clinton and Osyka road just west of the point where Wall's Bridge crossed the Tickfaw River. Fresh hoofprints indicated a large body of cavalry had passed east just a short time earlier. Dense underbrush, however, obscured the Tickfaw crossing a few miles distant, and the road itself disappeared from view beyond a sharp bend approaching the bridge. Suspecting an ambush, Grierson sent his Butternut Guerrillas to scout the bridge, while the main column remained concealed behind the tree-covered bend in the road. Surby learned from Confederate pickets that a cavalry force was bivouacked along the river bank. At that moment, a shot rang out behind him. Seizing the disconcerted Rebels, Surby rushed them to the rear, where he learned that the alarm had sounded during a chance encounter between Union and Confederate stragglers at a nearby plantation house. Undaunted by the close call, Surby's scouts returned to the place where they had stumbled upon the Rebel outpost. With similar luck, they captured Confederate Captain E.A. Scott and his orderly, who revealed that De Baun's 115-man battalion had reached the river crossing scarcely 15 minutes before the raiders' arrival. Alarmed by the same shot that had alerted Surby, De Baun had deployed his dismounted troopers in an ambush. Although aware of each other's presence, Grierson and De Baun both maneuvered blindly because of the sharp bend in the road. Grierson hoped to avoid an engagement; much of his success so far had been the result of surprise and subterfuge. Reluctant to waste precious time and lives, he planned to approach, show a bold front, feel out the enemy's strength, and then pass rapidly around his flank. He erred, however, in choosing Blackburn of the 7th to execute this delicate maneuver. Itching for a fight, the brash and excitable officer called to Surby: Bring along your scouts and follow me, and I'll see where those Rebels are. Spurring their horses, Surby and three Butternuts dashed off in pursuit. Dressed in full Federal uniform and rapidly outpacing his escort, the burly Blackburn seemed oblivious to the scattered gunfire his approach to the Tickfaw crossing summoned. The fire increased as the Federal horses pounded across the narrow plank bridge. Blackburn's mount, pierced by a dozen balls, collapsed, pinning its wounded rider to the ground. Close behind Blackburn, another horse reeled and fell, throwing a butternut-clad Yankee hard against the wooden planks. A ball burned across the neck of Surby's mount and buried itself in the sergeant's thigh. Clinging desperately to his reins, he wheeled around and retreated across the bullet-pocked bridge. In his dash to safety, Surby passed Lieutenant William H. Stiles racing forward with the 12-man vanguard of the Federal column. Charging blindly, the group made it to the opposite bank of the river before reeling under a deadly volley from unseen carbines. A second assault likewise withered under the galling enemy fire, and the battered Yankee troopers scrambled back across the river. Grierson soon arrived on the field, dismounted and deployed companies A and D of the 7th to the left and right of the bridge. While those men pinned down the Rebel marksmen, Smith's artillery began firing round shot and canister into the woods. When the replying volleys abated, Union skirmishers advanced across Wall's Bridge. The outnumbered Confederates had abandoned their position. The fierce skirmish had cost Grierson one dead and five wounded. Two of the latter, including the overzealous Blackburn, were mortally wounded. De Baun placed the Confederate loss at 1 captain, 1 lieutenant, and 6 privates, all captured by Surby's scouts. As a burial detail interred Private George Reinhold of the 7th regiment's Company G, soldiers carefully removed the wounded to the nearby Newman plantation. Surgeon Erastus D. Yule of the 2d Iowa helped Surby's comrades replace the injured sergeant's butternut garb with a proper Federal uniform, at least ensuring the clever scout would not be executed as a spy. By crossing the Tickfaw at Wall's Bridge and recrossing it again at a ford some six miles downstream, Grierson's men were able to cut diagonally across a westward bend in the river. After they made the second crossing and turned southeast, just two major obstacles stood between them and the Union lines at Baton Rouge: the rain-gorged Amite and Comite Rivers. The troopers reined up that evening a mile short of the Amite River bottom as two butternut-clad riders advanced toward them along the darkened road. A calm whisper identified the grime-covered scouts as Confederate couriers bearing dispatches for Port Hudson. In an instant, the pair of chagrined Rebels slipped silently and securely into Union hands. With a bright moon lighting the way, the Federal cavalrymen crossed the Amite River at the Williams Bridge. Grierson urged the column steadily forward while a company of the 6th filed off to disperse enemy cavalry camped nearby. An ear-shattering volley sent 75 partially clad Confederates scrambling for their lives. After collecting a handful of prisoners, the troopers raced to overtake the moving column. As they pushed on through the early morning darkness toward the Comite River, the jaded cavalrymen began to drift off to sleep. Men by the score, and I think by fifties, were riding sound asleep in their saddles, Captain Forbes recalled. The horses, excessively tired and hungry, would stray out of the road and thrust their noses to the earth in hopes of finding something to eat. A handful of officers and enlisted men passed up and down the flanks of the ragged column, riding herd on straying men and mounts. Daylight on May 2 found the Yankee raiders approaching Big Sandy Creek, seven miles east of the Comite River ford. As sleeping soldiers jerked stiffly upright in their saddles, the scouts spotted 150 tents dotting the opposite bank. A quick charge by two companies of the 6th secured the camp. Most of the men were off in Mississippi looking for Grierson's raiders; of the 40 who had remained to guard the crossing, all but one fell into Yankee hands. While the 6th stayed behind to destroy tents and equipment, Grierson pressed on with the 7th toward the Comite. Captured officers told Grierson of the Confederate guard at Roberts' Ford on the Comite. Yankee scouts confirmed the presence of an encampment amidst a cluster of trees on the river's eastern bank. The Rebels seemed oblivious to the approach of Yankee cavalry. On the morning of May 2, at about 9 a.m., I was surprised by a body of the enemy, under command of Colonel Grierson, numbering upward of 1,000 men, wrote Captain B.F. Bryan, the Confederate commander at Roberts' Ford. They made a dash and surrounded me on all sides before I was aware that they were other than our own troops, their advanced guard being dressed in citizens' garb. A dozen shots from Yankee carbines transformed the tranquil grove into a scene of chaos. In the confusion, Bryan escaped by hiding in the moss-draped branches of a nearby tree. Most of my men being on picket, and having only about 30 of them immediately in camp, he reported, there was no possible chance of my making a stand. Few of his soldiers escaped; he assessed his loss at 38 men, 38 horses, 2 mules, 37 pistols, 2,000 rounds of cartridges, and our cooking utensils. The Yankee raiders forded the swollen Comite half a mile upstream, and Grierson ordered them into bivouac four miles outside the Union lines at Baton Rouge. Sleep came easily to the exhausted troopers, but their commander, having come this far, felt he could hardly afford to relax his vigilance. After posting a guard, the former music teacher proceeded to a nearby house, where he astonished the occupants by sitting down and playing upon a piano which I found in the parlor, Grierson recalled. In that manner, I managed to stay awake, while my soldiers were enjoying themselves by relaxation, sleep, and quiet rest. A breathless orderly interrupted his recital with news of enemy skirmishers advancing from the direction of Baton Rouge. Confident that the enemy must be part of Major General Nathaniel Banks's Federal command in that city, Grierson rose from his piano stool and rode out to meet his visitors. Dismounting and pulling a handkerchief from his pocket, the mud-spattered Grierson hailed Captain J. Franklin Godfrey and two companies of the Federal 1st Louisiana Cavalry. The raiders had reached Union-controlled territory. At 3:00 p.m. on May 2, a cloud of dust rose over the Bayou Sara Road. Citizens and soldiers flocked to the streets of Baton Rouge, eager to catch the first view of the daring raiders. With sabers drawn, the dusty troopers of the 6th Illinois Cavalry rode four abreast through the crowd-lined avenues. Close behind, the four guns of Smith's battery wobbled ludicrously on makeshift wheels that had been improvised to replace those broken during the expedition. A hundred or more morose prisoners trudged in the wake of the swaying artillery pieces and, behind them, 500 former slaves in every conceivable style of plantation dress and undress, each one mounted, and leading from two to three other horses, and many of them armed with shotguns and hunting rifles. Behind the contrabands (slaves who had fled from their owners to Union lines) lumbered a ragtag assortment of wheeled vehicles. Aboard were the sick and wounded, most suffering from painfully swollen legs caused by extended riding. Colonel Prince's 7th Illinois, also in columns of fours and with drawn sabers, brought up the rear. With the cheers of the flag-waving crowd echoing off the cobblestones, Grierson's motley band circled the city square and proceeded to water their horses in the Mississippi. As the sun descended, the tired, dirty cavalrymen settled into camp in a fragrant blooming magnolia grove. Grierson slipped off to well-earned rest. In 16 days of nearly continuous riding, he had led his men on a 600-mile path down the length of Mississippi. They had disrupted between 50 and 60 miles of vital rail and telegraph lines leading from Confederate headquarters at Jackson east to Alabama and Georgia and south to the river strongholds of Port Hudson, Grand Gulf, and Port Gibson. Grierson estimated the cost to the enemy at 100 dead or wounded, 500 prisoners captured and paroled, 1,000 horses and mules confiscated, 3,000 stand of arms, and huge quantities of army stores and other government property seized and destroyed. Even the Federal raiders were astonished at the relative ease with which they had passed through what was presumed to be the armed heartland of the Confederacy. In spite of the enemy's superior numbers and intimate knowledge of roads and terrain, Grierson's cavalry had encountered only token resistance. The entire loss sustained by the two Illinois regiments amounted to three killed, seven wounded, and five left along the route. All the while, Grierson's mysterious movements had confounded Confederate commanders and diverted cavalry to the state's interior during the Union army's crucial movement across the Mississippi for the final assault on Vicksburg. Notified of Grierson's success through Southern newspapers, Grant pronounced the expedition one of the most brilliant cavalry exploits of the war and predicted that it will be handed down in history as an example to be imitated. Equally important was the effect of Grierson's raid on Confederate morale. The Federal invasion heightened popular distrust of military and civilian authority and threw Mississippians into a frenzy. Grierson has knocked the heart out of the State, an anonymous Unionist reported. To a Northern public weary of a long winter of inactivity, news of the brilliant cavalry feat came from the west like an invigorating breeze of spring air. You have only yet received the first installment of events that will electrify the world, announced the New Orleans correspondent of the New York Times. I should not be surprised if the Mississippi should prove, at last, the base of operations by which we can most instantaneously reach the innermost heart of the mighty rebellion. Fresh from a firsthand tour behind the Rebel lines, Grierson spoke directly to the earnest hopes of his fellow citizens when he informed a New England chaplain, The Confederacy is an empty shell. Two more years of bloody warfare lay ahead before the Union armies would finally pierce that shell, but Grierson's remarkable raid showed the way. This article was written by JBruce J. Dinges and originally published in the February 1996 issue of Civil War Times Magazine. For more great articles, be sure to subscribe to Civil War Times magazine today! </p> 19540032 2014-10-11 06:21:00 2014-10-11 06:21:00 open open america-s-civil-war-colonel-benjamin-grierson-s-cavalry-raid-in-1863-originally-published-by-civil-war-times-magazine-published-online-september--19540032 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan title-19447922 http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/09/22/tuesday-sep-16-2014-09-45-am-pdt-robert-reich-19447922/ Mon, 22 Sep 2014 07:14:38 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Tuesday, Sep 16, 2014 09:45 AM PDT Robert Reich: Harvard Business School is complicit in America’s widening inequality The former secretary of labor calls out the famed university for the way it's educating our country's future CEOs Robert Reich, http://www.salon.com/2014/09/16/robert_reich_harvard_business_school_is_ruining_america_partner/ Robert Reich: Harvard Business School is complicit in America's widening inequalityRobert Reich No institution is more responsible for educating the CEOs of American corporations than Harvard Business School – inculcating in them a set of ideas and principles that have resulted in a pay gap between CEOs and ordinary workers that’s gone from 20-to-1 fifty years ago to almost 300-to-1 today. A survey, released on September 6, of 1,947 Harvard Business School alumni showed them far more hopeful about the future competitiveness of American firms than about the future of American workers. As the authors of the survey conclude, such a divergence is unsustainable. Without a large and growing middle class, Americans won’t have the purchasing power to keep U.S. corporations profitable, and global demand won’t fill the gap. Moreover, the widening gap eventually will lead to political and social instability. As the authors put it, “any leader with a long view understands that business has a profound stake in the prosperity of the average American.” Unfortunately, the authors neglected to include a discussion about how Harvard Business School should change what it teaches future CEOs with regard to this “profound stake.” HBS has made some changes over the years in response to earlier crises, but has not gone nearly far enough with courses that critically examine the goals of the modern corporation and the role that top executives play in achieving them. A half-century ago, CEOs typically managed companies for the benefit of all their stakeholders – not just shareholders, but also their employees, communities, and the nation as a whole. “The job of management,” proclaimed Frank Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, in a 1951 address, “is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly affected interest groups
stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large. Business managers are gaining professional status partly because they see in their work the basic responsibilities [to the public] that other professional men have long recognized as theirs.” This view was a common view among chief executives of the time. Fortune magazine urged CEOs to become “industrial statesmen.” And to a large extent, that’s what they became. advertisement For thirty years after World War II, as American corporations prospered, so did the American middle class. Wages rose and benefits increased. American companies and American citizens achieved a virtuous cycle of higher profits accompanied by more and better jobs. But starting in the late 1970s, a new vision of the corporation and the role of CEOs emerged – prodded by corporate “raiders,” hostile takeovers, junk bonds, and leveraged buyouts. Shareholders began to predominate over other stakeholders. And CEOs began to view their primary role as driving up share prices. To do this, they had to cut costs – especially payrolls, which constituted their largest expense. Corporate statesmen were replaced by something more like corporate butchers, with their nearly exclusive focus being to “cut out the fat” and “cut to the bone.” In consequence, the compensation packages of CEOs and other top executives soared, as did share prices. But ordinary workers lost jobs and wages, and many communities were abandoned. Almost all the gains from growth went to the top. The results were touted as being “efficient,” because resources were theoretically shifted to “higher and better uses,” to use the dry language of economics. But the human costs of this transformation have been substantial, and the efficiency benefits have not been widely shared. Most workers today are no better off than they were thirty years ago, adjusted for inflation. Most are less economically secure. So it would seem worthwhile for the faculty and students of Harvard Business School, as well as those at every other major business school in America, to assess this transformation, and ask whether maximizing shareholder value – a convenient goal now that so many CEOs are paid with stock options – continues to be the proper goal for the modern corporation. Can an enterprise be truly successful in a society becoming ever more divided between a few highly successful people at the top and a far larger number who are not thriving? For years, some of the nation’s most talented young people have flocked to Harvard Business School and other elite graduate schools of business in order to take up positions at the top rungs of American corporations, or on Wall Street, or management consulting. Their educations represent a substantial social investment; and their intellectual and creative capacities, a precious national and global resource. But given that so few in our society – or even in other advanced nations – have shared in the benefits of what our largest corporations and Wall Street entities have achieved, it must be asked whether the social return on such an investment has been worth it, and whether these graduates are making the most of their capacities in terms of their potential for improving human well-being. These questions also merit careful examination at Harvard and other elite universities. If the answer is not a resounding yes, perhaps we should ask whether these investments and talents should be directed toward “higher and better” uses. Robert Reich, one of the nation’s leading experts on work and the economy, is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. Time Magazine has named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written 13 books, including his latest best-seller, “Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future;” “The Work of Nations,” which has been translated into 22 languages; and his newest, an e-book, “Beyond Outrage.” His syndicated columns, television appearances, and public radio commentaries reach millions of people each week. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, and Chairman of the citizen’s group Common Cause. His new movie "Inequality for All" is in Theaters. His widely-read blog can be found at www.robertreich.org. [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19447922 2014-09-22 07:14:38 2014-09-22 07:14:38 open open tuesday-sep-16-2014-09-45-am-pdt-robert-reich-19447922 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Your guide to Jack the Ripper http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/09/13/your-guide-to-jack-the-ripper-19395834/ Sat, 13 Sep 2014 19:22:26 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan Your guide to Jack the Ripper An 'armchair historian' claims to have identified Jack the Ripper as a 23-year-old Polish immigrant named Aaron Kosminski. Here, Clive Emsley and Alex Werner reveal the life and times of the Victorian murderer, and tell you everything you need to know about the yet unsolved murder cases. This article was first published in the May 2008 issue of BBC History Magazine Monday 8th September 2014 Submitted by Emma McFarnon - Jack the Ripper victim found - Illustrated Police News (Museum in Docklands) The murders Within just a few short weeks, the Ripper slashed and mutilated five prostitutes in London’s East End Shortly before 4am on 31 August 1888, a cart driver found the body of Mary Ann ‘Polly’ Nichols in Buck’s Row, close to Bethnal Green. She was on her back. Her skirt had been pulled up round her waist. Her throat had been slashed so deeply that she had nearly been decapitated, and there were deep cuts to her abdomen. This was the first of the Whitechapel Murders that are commonly attributed to Jack the Ripper. Just over a week later, at about 6am on 8 September, the body of Annie Chapman was discovered in a yard in Hanbury Street. Her injuries were similar to those of Polly Nichols, but some of her internal organs had also been cut away and removed; her small intestines lay by her right shoulder. On 30 September came ‘the double event’. Elizabeth ‘Long Liz’ Stride was found first, but her injuries were not as severe as those of the earlier victims; the assumption was that the killer had been disturbed during his butchery. And if that was the case he had quickly found a second victim. Catherine Eddowes was killed soon after, and not far from Stride. Her intestines had been ripped out and the killer had taken away her left kidney and uterus. "Central to the fascination that surrounds Jack is the fact he’s never been caught" Saturday 10 November was the day of the Lord Mayor’s Show in London. What should have been one of the highlights of the capital’s social calendar was marred by the revelations of a fifth, even more horrendous murder. Whereas the previous victims had been killed in the street, Mary Kelly’s body was found on a bed in a shabby lodging house in Miller’s Court. Indoors, the killer had been able to take his time. Kelly was savagely mutilated and body parts and internal organs were left on a table beside the bed. Other killings were linked with Jack the Ripper – both at the time and in later years – but these five murders are now generally acknowledged as the sum total of his grisly work. All of them took place in a confined area of London’s East End – much less than a square mile. All of the victims were poor women, and each one of them had worked, or was still working, as a prostitute. Jack the Ripper was not the first serial killer. He was not the first notorious sexual predator, nor was he the first killer or sexual assailant to cause a panic far beyond his area of activity. But Jack was never caught. And it is this that has probably been central to the fascination that continues to surround him. Contemporaries of the murders, and people ever since, have filled in the blanks to suit themselves. They’ve used the killings to develop theories about the state of society and the potential for male violence, and even to live out their own personal fantasies of Jack. The big question: who was Jack? The finger has been pointed at a succession of possible Jacks, including Joseph Barnett, a Billingsgate porter and former lover of Mary Kelly, and HRH the Duke of Clarence, Queen Victoria’s eldest grandson, who died young in 1892 following a life of sexual excess. The novelist Patricia Cornwell spent considerable sums trying to prove her theory that Jack was the artist Walter Sickert, basing her claims on his paintings of a nude woman and a man in a house in Camden. "Revd Osborne suggested 'female hands' were behind the murders" Other suspects have included school teacher Montague Druitt, whose body was fished from the Thames shortly after the last murder; Aaron Kosminski, a Polish hairdresser; and Michael Ostrog, a mad Russian doctor. Another doctor, Thomas Neill Cream, has also been accused. Cream committed seven murders on both sides of the Atlantic between 1877 and 1892 and his victims were often seeking abortions or were prostitutes. Cream was executed for murder in England but his instrument of choice was strychnine, not a knife. Could Jack have been Jill? Some contemporaries even suggested that the killer was a woman. Jill the Ripper seems unlikely given that such extreme violence has almost always been perpetrated by men. But only 15 years before the Whitechapel Murders, Mary Ann Cotton had been executed in Durham Gaol. She was convicted of poisoning her seven-year-old stepson, though another 20 family members, including her mother and three husbands, also appear to have been her victims. The Revd Lord Sidney Godolphin Osborne, an earnest, evangelical paternalist, wrote a series of letters to The Times during the period of the murders. He lamented the gulf between rich and poor, and equated Whitechapel with a huge cesspit. He also suggested that “female hands” might be behind the murders, since the unfortunates of the district were well known for their jealousy, their violence, and for possessing the strength necessary for such action. Was Jack a foreigner? Others suggested that Jack was a foreigner. They were convinced that no Englishman would do such things. The press conjured with images of Indian thugs (bandit worshippers of the goddess Kali, crushed by the British in the 1830s), of Malays running amok, of North American Pawnees “drunk with blood” and of atrocities from “the wilds of Hungary”. The recent influx of Jews to Britain, fleeing oppression in Eastern Europe, combined with the undercurrent of anti-Semitism in Britain to foster the belief among many that a Jew was the killer. The Star newspaper almost found itself defending a libel suit when it named John ‘leather apron’ Pizer, a Jewish boot maker, as the killer. The idea that Jack was Jewish received some support from a chalk inscription found on a wall close to part of Catherine Eddowes’s bloodstained apron. There were several versions of what the inscription said, the most syntactically correct being: “The Jews shall not be blamed for nothing”. Sir Charles Warren, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, ordered that it be washed off for fear that it might provoke anti-Semitic disorder. The murders echoed the false, but popular medieval fears that Jews ritually killed Gentile children. There were also wild stories of Jews who, after sex with Gentile women, needed to purge themselves with the blood of those women. Such stories sparked panics in other parts of Europe during the 19th century, many in the 1890s. The Berlin-based Association against anti-Semitism counted 79 between 1891 and 1900; about half were in the Austro-Hungarian empire and another fifth in imperial Germany. Among the best-known is the accusation of the murder of a five-year-old boy levelled at a Jewish butcher, Adolf Buschoff, in the Rhenish town of Xanten. There was little evidence, but the authorities found themselves forced to try him. Buschoff was acquitted but he, and most of the Jews in Xanten, thought it best to quit the town for good. Did life imitate art? The Whitechapel Murders came just two years after Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. A stage version, with Richard Mansfield in the roles of the physician and his monstrous alter ego, opened to packed audiences just a few weeks before the murders. To many, the killings suggested that fiction had become reality and this led to the play being taken off in October – and Mansfield himself has been identified as a possible Jack. Moreover, Stevenson’s book contributed to the idea that Jack was a toff in top hat and silk cape. Perhaps he too was a doctor – for some, the manner in which organs were removed from the victims suggested a knowledge of anatomy. The way in which he, or someone else, played with the police, sending them letters ‘From Hell’, also pointed to a man of ability. Did Jack write the letters ‘from Hell’? Hundreds of letters were sent to police and the press purporting to be written by the murderer. The two letters signed by Jack the Ripper are, like almost everything about the killer, shrouded in controversy. There is evidence to suggest that they were indeed written by Jack – one of them mentioned slicing off part of a future victim’s ear, something that was done to Catherine Eddowes after the letter was sent. Newspapers printed the letters and the police took them sufficiently seriously to post facsimiles of them in the metropolis. But some senior police officials later suggested that the letters were the work of a journalist keen to add yet more sensation to the story. After all, the killer may have cut off Eddowes’s ear after reading the facsimile letters. Was Jack an original? Jack the Ripper is among the most infamous murderers in criminal history. Yet he is far from unique, both as a savage attacker of women and a serial killer – as the following cases prove: The London monster "The wound that he made in this young lady’s hip, Was nine inches long, and near four inches deep; But before that this monster had made use of force, He insulted their ears with obscene discourse." From March 1788 to June 1790 a ‘Monster’ terrorised London. Some 50 women were abused, cut and stabbed in the street and young Welshman, Rhynwick Williams, an artificial flower maker, was eventually arrested and tried at the Old Bailey for the crimes. Following a legal dispute about what the offence actually entailed Williams was found guilty and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment – an exceptionally long sentence by the standards of the late 18th century. The Ratcliffe Highway murders On the night of 7 December 1811, Timothy Marr, a linen draper, was found battered to death in his shop on the Ratcliffe Highway in East London. Battered and stabbed close by were his wife, their four-month-old baby and the shop-boy. Two weeks later John Williamson, publican of the Kings Arms in New Gravel Lane just off the Ratcliffe Highway, was also murdered with his wife and maidservant. John Williams, a young seaman, was arrested on suspicion of the murders and allegedly committed suicide in Coldbath Fields Prison. Doubts about his guilt remain, but he was buried at a crossroads with a stake through his heart. In the 120 years since the Whitechapel Murders, the spectre of Jack the Ripper has returned to haunt the public’s imagination on numerous occasions. No more so than when a hoaxer sent police letters claiming to be the Yorkshire Ripper and calling himself ‘Jack.’ Two other cases from the 20th century are worth noting for their contrasts to the Jack the Ripper murders and for showing how quickly they can be forgotten: The Halifax slasher During the early part of the 20th century there were several instances of men creeping up behind girls and cutting off the long plaits that were the fashion of the day. Once or twice there were also much more serious slashings. The best known occurred in Halifax in 1926 and 1927, and again in 1938. On the latter occasion the local newspaper, the Courier, offered a £25 reward for the arrest of “The Halifax Slasher”. The community mobilised behind the police: women armed themselves with hat-pins and men with a variety of weapons. The panic was over in a matter of days, however, when several of the victims confessed to self-inflicted wounds. The blackout ripper In the second week of February 1942, four women were found strangled and savagely mutilated in their Soho flats. Later that week there were attacks on two other women, but the attacker ran off on the first occasion when he was disturbed and on the second because his victim fought back successfully. The attacker, Gordon Frederick Cummings, a cadet officer in the RAF, was easily and quickly identified. He was tried for murder at the Old Bailey the following April, found guilty and executed in June. Did the press sensationalise the murders? Lurid violence had long been popular with the media. Papers made much of ‘last dying speeches’ at public executions, which invariably came headed with a bloodthirsty image of the felon’s crime. When newspapers first became popular in England during the 18th century, editors quickly recognised the value of crime and violence to maintain or boost sales. Victorian papers had a range of titles devoted to sensational stories and ’orrible murders and, from the 1860s, increasingly used bold and eye-catching headlines. One of the leading practitioners of sensationalist journalism at the time of the murders was WT Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. In 1885 Stead’s reforming zeal, and desire to sell papers, led him to launch a campaign to combat child prostitution. It was a success, but it landed Stead in gaol. Interestingly, Stead refused to print all the gory details of the mutilations inflicted on the Ripper’s victims; instead he used the case to call for a ‘Court of Conscience’ among the media. But other journalists and newspaper editors took full advantage of the murders to shock and thrill their readers. While Stead urged restraint, they used the coroner’s inquests to push at the boundaries of what was considered decent in the descriptions of both the injuries and the women’s bodies. At the same time, the press speculated extensively on the identity of the killer and the nature of the city in which he operated. London was the centre of an empire; it was the capital of what the British still liked to think of as the workshop of the world, and of a nation with a legal and constitutional system that was a model for the world. The Whitechapel Murders encouraged Liberal elements in the press to probe the darker corners of this dazzling metropolis and to urge social reform. As explained above, it also encouraged nationalist elements to conclude that only a foreigner could commit such heinous crimes. It is worth emphasising here that the 19th‑century British press was not unique in the way that it revelled in violent crime. In 1894 a Madrid-based socialist newspaper protested at the way in which the press was less interested in education than in satisfying “gross appetites by providing
spiced up fare”. In France, popular papers such as Le Petit Parisien and Le Petit Journal filled their pages with grisly accounts of offenders like Jean-Baptiste Troppmann, who slaughtered the entire Kinck family of husband, pregnant wife and six children, and Albert Soleilland, who raped and murdered an 11-year old girl. Papers everywhere were illustrated with drawings of knives flashing, guns blazing and blood splashing. In fact, it wasn’t until the early 20th century that such graphic accounts began to disappear from European newspapers – either as a result of the carnage of the First World War, or the increasing use of photography. What was the East End like at the time of the Ripper? Drunkenness and prostitution were rife in an area characterised by abject poverty, says Alex Werner The East End was a vast, densely inhabited working-class district. At Aldgate, the eastern extremity of the City of London, the road forked into two highways: Whitechapel Road, dating to Roman times, linked London to Colchester; and the Commercial Road, built in the early 19th century, connected the docks at Blackwall and Poplar with the City. Off these two major London thoroughfares, in Whitechapel and Spitalfields, there existed a labyrinth of narrow courts and alleyways with many lodging houses and small workshops. Immigrants had settled here for centuries; in the 17th and 18th century, Huguenots, the Irish, Jews and Germans had all made the East End their home. During the late 1880s they were joined by thousands of Jews escaping oppression in Central and Eastern Europe, many of whom settled in the vicinity of Middlesex Street (Petticoat Lane) and Wentworth Street. Even before the brutal murders of 1888, a spotlight had been thrown on the abject poverty of east London. Journalists painted a lurid picture of the area, stressing its criminality and moral degradation. In such a world, drunkenness was common, offering some form of escape and, on the streets and behind doors, it often led to violence. Prostitution was also widespread, as poor women sold their bodies to pay for alcohol, tobacco or a bed for the night. Charities descended on the area and tried to help those most in need. Slums were cleared and artisans’ dwellings erected. As well as bringing ‘the word of God’, religious organisations like the Salvation Army took ‘practical Christianity’ to the East End. They built night shelters, ran dispensaries and soup kitchens, and visited slum-dwellers in their homes. Employment in the nearby docks and markets was often casual or seasonal in nature. Thousands of men, women and children toiled away for long hours and for little pay in the sweated trades, ruthlessly exploited by sub-contractors. In fact, the low pay and appalling conditions at Bryant & May’s match factory drove its matchgirls to strike in the summer of 1888. Meanwhile, periods of economic depression, such as in 1886 and 1887, resulted in mass unemployment and the threat of starvation. Some improvements to Whitechapel and Spitalfields followed Jack the Ripper’s crimes. Slums like Flower and Dean Street were cleared and replaced by model dwellings; common lodging houses declined and with them, prostitution and crime. In the 1890s London County Council began to replace slums with purpose-built council housing. However, poverty and overcrowding persisted, and in 1901 Dorset Street was still widely being described as “The Worst Street in London”, much to the fury of local inhabitants. Alex Werner is co-curator of the Museum in Docklands exhibition, Jack the Ripper and the East End Did the police investigate thoroughly? Sections of the press, particularly the papers linked to Liberal and Radical politics, were highly critical of the police and the “defective detectives” for failing to find Jack. Yet the police probably did all that was possible. Forensic science was still in its infancy, and it was to be over 10 years before fingerprints were used as evidence in court – always assuming that any fingerprints could have been found and identified at any of the murder scenes. The police presence was increased in the district where the murders occurred, and men in plain clothes circulated both in the hope of collecting information and preventing further attacks. The police were urged to use bloodhounds to track the killer, yet such experiments were not particularly successful. The advocates of the bloodhounds insisted that they were still the answer, and sections of the press found yet another stick with which to beat the police. Part of the problem was the reluctance of the police to give information to the media; it was to be another 40 years before a press bureau was established at Scotland Yard. And with no official intelligence to feed on, the press were drawn to the wilder and more sensational theories which, of course, helped to sell newspapers. General Sir Charles Warren, the relatively new commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, did not help matters. Much of the press condemned his decision to remove the graffiti from the wall near the site of Eddowes’s murder on the grounds that he had denied the investigation the only genuine clue left by the killer. Whether this was true, of course, remains an open question. "A tactless soldier like Warren was not the ideal man to be police commissioner" Warren had a distinguished military career both before and after his time as commissioner. He was also an archaeologist of some significance and, in his final years, he was an eager supporter of Baden Powell’s Boy Scout Movement. He had been appointed to the police in March 1887 to restore the force’s morale and public confidence in the aftermath of rioting in and around Trafalgar Square following a demonstration against unemployment. When trouble appeared likely again in Trafalgar Square in November 1887, Warren responded with ruthless efficiency deploying troops to back up his police in a violent confrontation that resulted in one fatality and many injured, and that became known as Bloody Sunday. Among Liberals and Radicals, his behaviour revived fears that the police were becoming militarised. He also clashed with the Home Office over the manner in which he should command his police. The final straw came just after the last of the Whitechapel Murders when Warren published an article outlining his ideas, condemning the press and criticising government action. The permanent under secretary at the Home Office declared him to be “in a state of complete insubordination” and Warren’s resignation followed soon after. Probably any commissioner would have had difficulty in dealing with the Ripper murders, but a tactless soldier like Warren was not the ideal man for the job. The continuing fascination The fascination with Jack and his killings spread far beyond Britain. The late 19th-century French press was obsessed with murders by human “monsters” and “ogres” and ‘Jack l’Eventreur’ remains a well-known figure in France. Lulu, the femme fatale of the German playwright Frank Wedekind’s Earth Spirit (1895) and Pandora’s Box (1904) – as well as of GW Pabst’s film Pandora’s Box and Alban Berg’s opera Lulu – is killed by Jack. George Grosz, the celebrated artist of the seamy and violent side of Weimar Germany, had himself photographed as Jack. And the notion of a stealthy, unknown killer with a knife, preying on the weak and vulnerable – especially young women – has been meat and drink to the cinema ever since it began. Jack the Ripper was the first celebrity serial killer who appeared to threaten people that were unknown to him. Had he been caught, his notoriety would probably never have been so great. It is the blank of who he really was that adds to the fascination and enables everyone, of every age, to remake him anew. [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19395834 2014-09-13 19:22:26 2014-09-13 19:22:26 open open your-guide-to-jack-the-ripper-19395834 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Failure in Gaza Assaf Sharon September 25, 2014 Issue http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/09/07/failure-in-gaza-assaf-sharon-september-25-2014-issue-19349161/ Sun, 07 Sep 2014 20:40:10 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan Failure in Gaza Assaf Sharon September 25, 2014 Issue The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long ago become a shouting match over moral superiority. With seventy Israelis and more than two thousand Palestinians, most of them civilians, dead, the latest round of violence in Gaza, too, is being analyzed and discussed mostly on ethical grounds. But as fighting goes on, moral condemnation will likely do little to prevent the next round. Understanding how we got to this point—and, more importantly, how we can move beyond it—calls for an examination of the political events that led up to the operation and the political context in which it took place. 1. In Israel, endless controversy over Gaza has overlooked one question: How did we get here in the first place? Why, after a considerable period of relative calm, did Hamas resume rocket fire into Israel? Benjamin Netanyahu; drawing by John Springs Before the current operation began, Hamas was at one of the lowest points in its history. Its alliance with Syria and Iran, its two main sources of support, had grown weak. Hamas’s ideological and political affinity with the Muslim Brotherhood turned from an asset into a burden, with the downfall of the Brotherhood in Egypt and the rise of its fierce opponent, General Abdel Fatah el-Sisi. Egypt’s closure of the Rafah crossing and the tunnels on its border with Gaza undermined Hamas’s economic infrastructure. In these circumstances, Hamas agreed last April to reconciliation with its political rival Fatah, based on Fatah’s terms. For example, the agreement called for a government of technocrats largely under the control of the Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas. But Benjamin Netanyahu viewed the reconciliation as a threat rather than an opportunity. While the separation of Gaza from the West Bank may not serve Israel’s interest (namely, effective government in the Palestinian Territories), it benefits Netanyahu’s policy of rejecting solutions that would lead to a separate Palestinian state. The reconciliation agreement robbed him of the claim that in the absence of effective rule over Gaza, there is no point in striking a deal with Abbas. Ironically, it was Netanyahu’s own choices that drove Abbas to reconciliation with Hamas. The impending failure of the Mideast peace negotiations led by US Secretary of State John Kerry in 2013 and early 2014 left Abbas with few political options. Talks faltered as Netanyahu allowed increased settlement activity on the West Bank and they finally collapsed when he reneged on his commitment to release Palestinian prisoners. Realizing that talks were doomed, Abbas signed fifteen international agreements as a head of a Palestinian state and struck his reconciliation deal with Hamas, as he said he would. Netanyahu, who never had any intention of making the necessary concessions, as his own statements would later reveal,1 was mainly playing the blame game. He saw the reconciliation with Hamas as an opportunity to criticize the Palestinian president and, according to one of the American diplomats involved in the peace talks, his aides said that “Abbas’s strategy showed that there was no difference between him and the terrorists.” As soon as the reconciliation was announced, Netanyahu launched a public offensive against Palestinian unity and demanded that the international community oppose it. His efforts did not succeed. Israel’s friends in Europe applauded the agreement between Hamas and Fatah. Even the United States announced its intention to cooperate with the unity government, much to Netanyahu’s chagrin. Netanyahu could have chosen a different path.2 He could have used the reconciliation to reinforce Abbas’s position and further destabilize Hamas. He could, in recognition of the agreement, have encouraged Egypt to open its border with Gaza in order to demonstrate to Gazans that the Palestinian Authority offered a better life than Hamas. Instead, Israel prevented the transfer of salaries to 43,000 Hamas officials in Gaza, sending a clear message that Israel would not treat Gaza any differently under the rule of moderate technocrats from the Palestinian Authority. The abduction of three Israeli youths in the West Bank on June 12 gave Netanyahu another opportunity to undermine the reconciliation. Or so he thought. Despite the statement by Khaled Mashal, the Hamas political bureau chief, that the Hamas political leadership did not know of the plans to carry out the abduction, Netanyahu was quick to lay the blame on Hamas, declaring that Israel had “unequivocal proof” that the organization was involved in the abduction. As yet, Israeli authorities have produced no such proof and the involvement of the Hamas leadership in the kidnapping remains unclear. While the individuals suspected of having carried out the kidnapping are associated with Hamas, some of the evidence suggests that they may have been acting on their own initiative and not under the direction of Hamas’s central leadership. Regardless of this, Netanyahu’s response, apparently driven by the ill-advised aim of undermining Palestinian reconciliation, was reckless.3 Determined to achieve by force what he failed to accomplish through diplomacy, Netanyahu not only blamed Hamas, but linked the abduction to Palestinian reconciliation, as if the two events were somehow causally related. “Sadly, this incident illustrates what we have been saying for months,” he stated, “that the alliance with Hamas has extremely grave consequences.” Israeli security forces were in possession of evidence strongly indicating the teens were dead, but withheld this information from the public until July 1, possibly in order to allow time to pursue the campaign against Hamas. On the prime minister’s orders, IDF forces raided Hamas’s civil and welfare offices throughout the West Bank and arrested hundreds of Hamas leaders and operatives. These arrests did not help to locate the abductors or their captives. Among the arrested were fifty-eight Palestinians previously released as part of the deal to return the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been a captive of Hamas since 2006. As part of this ill-conceived operation against Hamas, Israel also mounted air strikes on Hamas facilities in Gaza. Apparently, Hamas did not take an active part in firing rockets for more than two weeks, although it did not prevent other factions in Gaza from firing.4 Only on June 29 or 30 did Hamas restart the rocket bombardment of Israeli territory, which it had not engaged in since November 2012.5 Israel retaliated against Hamas in Gaza and a vicious cycle began. Netanyahu lost control over an escalation he had instigated. In his badly misjudged eagerness to blame Abbas and punish him for reconciling with Hamas, Netanyahu turned a vicious but local terrorist attack into a runaway crisis. 2. In the first week of July, rockets and mortar shells continued to be fired from Gaza into Israel. Hamas still denied any involvement in the abduction of the three Israeli youths and declared its commitment to the understandings reached in November 2012, following an eight-day Israeli operation in Gaza, according to which Hamas agreed to stop rocket fire into Israel in exchange for Israel reopening border crossings and allowing goods to be imported to Gaza. This time, after the initial operation against Hamas, Israel was clearly seeking a cease-fire, but refused the terms set by Hamas: releasing the rearrested Palestinians from the Shalit deal and easing the restrictions imposed on Gaza since 2007. Instead, Israel believed it could force Hamas to accept the Egyptian-brokered agreement for an immediate cease-fire on July 4. However, that assumption was based on an inaccurate evaluation of Hamas’s position, interests, and capacities, and the mutual fire continued. On July 8, Israel officially launched “Operation Protective Edge” with air strikes on Gaza. According to Israeli media, one participant in the security cabinet meeting at which the decision was made warned that “Hamas is trying to drag Israel into broader military action. It serves them. Hamas scores ‘points’ when it is hit.” This observation makes the question of the operation’s goals all the more pertinent: What is the purpose of striking an organization that benefits from being attacked? In 2009, as head of the opposition, Netanyahu attacked then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for his weakness and declared that as prime minister, he would bring down Hamas. Similar statements were frequently made by members of the coalition he later formed. The boasting, however, was not backed by Netanyahu’s policy during his five years in office: not only did he not bring down Hamas, he actually strengthened the organization considerably by releasing more than a thousand prisoners into its hands to free Shalit. At the same time, Netanyahu’s government did all it could to weaken Hamas’s political opponent—Fatah, led by Abbas. Even as the current operation began, bringing down Hamas was conspicuously not among its stated aims; instead, Netanyahu offered a vague promise to “restore calm” to southern Israel, while Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon stated that “the aim is zero rockets.” Later, Netanyahu talked of dealing “a tough blow to Hamas” to restore deterrence, while some of his ministers spoke of demilitarizing Gaza—a goal finally adopted by the prime minister three weeks into the operation. The Cabinet member Naftali Bennett, who opposes a Palestinian state, said that the goal should be to “forcefully root out Hamas’ faith in its ability to win.” His colleague in the Cabinet, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, said that the operation must “end
with the IDF controlling the Gaza strip.” No one mentioned the destruction of tunnels as a goal. On July 15 the Cabinet agreed to the cease-fire proposal formulated by Egypt, which was similar to what had been agreed to in the 2012 cease-fire. Hamas rejected the proposal, on the grounds that it did not meet its terms: mainly, “lifting the siege and opening the crossings.” Two days later, thirteen Hamas militants infiltrated Israel through a tunnel near Kibbutz Sufa. In a sudden about-face, the stated goal of the operation became the destruction of tunnels from Gaza into Israel. Since Israel’s statements about its goals were both vague and shifting, it is not surprising that three weeks into the operation, Israeli media reported that “officers on the ground feel that Netanyahu and Ya’alon don’t really know what their objective is.” Lacking clearly defined aims, Israel was repeatedly dragged into situations created by the other side. Having misread the situation, Israel failed to adequately prepare for Hamas’s response to the arrests and assaults on the organization’s institutions. Instead, the government dallied until it felt it was forced to respond with a broad aerial assault. Even then, it was clear that the government did not desire a ground invasion. That is why it agreed to a cease-fire without resolving the tunnel issue. It was only after Hamas rejected the proposal that Israel launched a ground invasion into the eastern parts of Gaza. Yet again, Netanyahu’s expectations would be frustrated. What was supposed to be a short, focused attack failed to achieve its goals: on July 20, Defense Minister Ya’alon said that it would take “two or three days” to destroy the tunnels. The job was said to be completed only two weeks later. sharon_2-092514.tif Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images Palestinians watching the removal of rubble after Israeli air strikes destroyed the building across the street, Gaza City, August 26, 2014 False assumptions, miscalculations, and obsolete conceptions robbed Israel of initiative. Lacking clear aims, Israel was dragged, by its own actions, into a confrontation it did not seek and did not control. Israel was merely stumbling along, with no strategy, chasing events instead of dictating them. What emerged as the operative aim was simply “to hit Hamas,” which for the troops translates as a license for extensive and unchecked use of force. Such aimless display of military power resulted in much unnecessary violence, though it was also true that Hamas rockets were often fired from civilian centers. Under pressure from politicians, the military was encouraged to carry out actions whose primary purpose was to satisfy a need for vengeance—a vengeance the very same Israeli politicians tried to arouse in the Israeli public. One example is the bombing of the residences of Hamas’s high-ranking officials—acts that security experts describe as completely ineffectual. Another example is the careless and possibly criminal bombing of UN schools on three separate occasions—schools in which there was apparently no evidence found of Hamas weapons. This strategic confusion led Yuval Diskin, the previous head of the Israel Security Agency, to say, three weeks into the operation, that “Israel is now an instrument in the hands of Hamas.” 3. On August 26 an Egyptian proposal for a “cease-fire
unlimited in time” was accepted by both sides. While the details are not yet public, it seems that any stable agreement will involve significant easing of the siege, as Hamas demanded from the beginning. Even President Obama, who supported Israel’s offensive throughout, now says the blockade must be lifted. The deal ultimately reached will probably not be very different from the one that could have been achieved from the start. What the government presents as its main accomplishment is the destruction of the offensive tunnels into Israel. These pose a genuine security threat, and eliminating them would certainly be a notable achievement. Yet it is clear that this was not the objective at the beginning of the operation, and the degree to which this goal has been achieved is doubtful. As the operation’s objective shifted to the tunnels following the infiltration of Palestinians through one of them on July 17, it seemed as if the threat of tunnels caught everyone by surprise. Only two days earlier, Israel had been willing to accept a cease-fire deal despite having done nothing about the tunnels. In fact, the security establishment was well aware of the tunnels and the threat they pose. Prior to Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, soldiers were killed in a number of attacks using tunnels in Gaza. In June 2006, Gilad Shalit was abducted by militants who entered Israel through just such a tunnel. In October 2013, a tunnel was found near Kibbut Ein Hashlosha, and in March of this year, another tunnel was discovered in Israeli territory, close to the border with Gaza. Defense officials cautioned many times in recent years that the danger of infiltration by tunnels was real, and one high-ranking officer explicitly stated that “the IDF knew of the existence of forty tunnels before the [current] operation began.” Yet the existence of tunnels was not seen as a reason for major operations. Ironically, the most serious threat to Israel’s security from Gaza (after the successful deployment of the electronic shield “Iron Dome”) was all but ignored until the July 17 infiltration. When ground forces entered Gaza, what they found was a Palestinian version of the tunnels used in Vietnam by the Viet Cong. Since Hamas was out-numbered and outgunned, its strategy, like that of other guerrilla forces before it, was to lure its enemy into subterranean warfare where its relative weakness was somewhat mitigated. This is why some military experts argue that the tunnels should have been addressed not by a large-scale ground invasion, which exposes troops to attack, but by surgical commando operations. Others argue that the tunnels could have been destroyed on the Israeli end, without needing to enter Gaza at all. A few even say that it was all an excuse—under pressure from the right, Netanyahu and Ya’alon seized on the tunnels as a justification for a limited ground operation that would allow them to save political face without too many complications. The battle over the tunnels was complicated, costly, and its results remain dubious. Though many tunnels have been destroyed, it now appears that some tunnels remain, and it is close to certain that new ones will soon be dug.6 A former commander of an elite IDF combat engineering company made this clear: “Hamas will resume tunneling as soon as we leave,” “they’ll go back to digging, no matter what.” Israel’s failure to stop the rockets and to prevent the construction of tunnels underlines the futility of the strict closure of all exits imposed on Gaza since June 2007. The closure had a devastating effect on Gaza’s civilian population, with unemployment now at 40 percent and 80 percent of the population dependent on international aid. Now it has become clear that the security benefits of the closure are strategically negligible. Although it is possible that Hamas would have amassed still more military power had the closure not been in place, its capacities would still be nowhere near those of the IDF. And yet the arms it managed to accumulate, the rockets it fired, and the tunnels it built under the tight restrictions of the closure were sufficient to create a crisis. Thus, while it is important to prevent the arming of Hamas, the closure is of limited strategic value. Empowering the Palestinian Authority to gradually take control over Gaza and involving international forces in that project is clearly a better strategy. Rebuilding Gaza’s economy could not only ease the humanitarian crisis there, but also benefit Israeli security—as defense officials have stated. Both have become more difficult following the violence of the last few weeks. 4. Operation Protective Edge has been a strategic failure. It gave Hamas a way out of isolation, providing the organization with an opportunity to show that it could inflict harm on Israeli cities, kill IDF soldiers, and briefly shut down Ben Gurion Airport. Reinstating Abbas in Gaza, as was possible and desirable last April, may now have become more difficult as a consequence of the operation. Despite the heavy toll in human life, the war accomplished no strategic goal. Yet this is not an accidental mistake. Israel’s conduct throughout the crisis has been based directly on Netanyahu’s philosophy of “conflict management,” whose underlying premise is that the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians cannot be solved, but can be effectively “managed” for a very long period of time. This feeble, not to mention defeatist, assumption is not only wrong but also dangerous, trapping Israel in an illusion that is shattered time and again. Yet “control” and “stability” only exist between each inevitable round of violence. In fact, recurring rounds of violence are inherent to this approach. “Conflict management” means continued Israeli control over the Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank, with the inevitable reality of organizations and factions struggling to overthrow that control. Under the illusion that the conflict is being managed, opportunities for change provided by calm periods are squandered. Thus, Israel under Netanyahu did not use the five years of relative calm following Operation Cast Lead—the Gaza war in December 2008 and January 2009—to take any useful action to improve its position with respect to Gaza. The government failed to take advantage of Hamas’s weakness in light of political developments in the region and willingness to make a deal with Abbas. In these circumstances, especially given the desperate conditions in Gaza, the inevitable consequence is periodic violence. Two alternative approaches exist. One, promoted by the Israeli extreme right, assumes that the conflict can be concluded by defeating the other side. Palestinian national aspirations can be controlled by force on one hand and benefits on the other. Proponents of this approach, spearheaded by ministers Bennett and Lieberman, have been calling for the occupation of Gaza. Undoubtedly, the IDF, if it undertakes a large-scale mobilization, has the military capacity to conquer Gaza and bring down Hamas rule there. However, this strategy will fail even if it seems to succeed temporarily. Conquering Hamas will not change the reality of Gaza and displays of military might will not crush legitimate Palestinian aspirations. Given the desperate conditions in Gaza, another Palestinian power would undoubtedly rise to take Hamas’s place—one that may very well be more extreme and dangerous than its predecessor. Moreover, effective control over the entire Gaza Strip, as Israel maintained until 1994, requires a heavy IDF presence deep within Gaza, regularly exposing Israeli soldiers to harm. Israeli control over Gaza will likely be similar to the conditions that prevailed in southern Lebanon before the IDF withdrawal: daily attacks and a steady stream of casualties. This is not a strategy for alleviating violence, but rather for exacerbating it. Ironically, right-wing demands for war ultimately mean making it easier for Hamas to harm Israeli soldiers. History has proven the futility of this strategy, whether in Vietnam, Lebanon, Afghanistan, or Iraq. That is why so few Israelis want the IDF to return to Lebanon or to Gaza. When the military presented the costs of a strategy of conquest, even Netanyahu’s hawkish government rejected it completely. The idea of “managing” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is illusory, and concluding it by force is a dangerous fantasy. The only reasonable strategy is resolution of the conflict. 5. So long as Hamas is willing to use terror against innocent Israeli civilians and so long as it refuses to recognize the State of Israel, it will not be a “partner” for peace. But it could be partner to interest-based agreements requiring it to modify its behavior, as many academic and security experts claim. In fact, despite Netanyahu’s being the most vocal opponent of dialogue with Gazan terror organizations, it was he who reached two agreements with Hamas: the 2011 Shalit deal and the 2012 agreement that ended Operation Pillar of Defense. The only question is whether the latest agreement between the two sides, reached on August 26, will be limited, fragile, and short-lived, or a stable arrangement that will improve Israel’s strategic standing for a considerable period of time. A long-term resolution with respect to Gaza requires changing its political predicament. The only sensible way of doing this is to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, a state whose existence would be negotiated with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) under Abbas’s leadership. As part of a comprehensive political agreement, Hamas is very likely to agree to a long-term truce, as its representatives have repeatedly said. In 1997, its founder and spiritual leader Ahmad Yassin suggested a thirty-year hudna (truce) with Israel. In 2006, one of its leaders, Mahmoud al-Zahar, proposed a “long-term hudna.” Earlier this year, Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a senior Hamas functionary in the West Bank, reiterated the organization’s willingness for a hudna and said the organization was willing to accept a peace agreement with Israel if a majority of Palestinians supported it. In 2010, in an interview with a Muslim Brotherhood daily circulated in Jordan, Hamas’s political leader Khaled Mashal expressed pragmatic views and willingness to reach an agreement with Israel. In late July, he told Charlie Rose, “We want peace without occupation, without settlements, without Judaization, without the siege.” All these proposals were contingent on ending the Israeli occupation and establishing a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders. They received no response from Israel. Although a Palestinian state contradicts Netanyahu’s ideological commitments and conflicts with his own political interests, a state is clearly in Israel’s interest. In fact, conditioning the establishment of a Palestinian state on attaining comprehensive peace may have been the greatest mistake by advocates of peace. The historic conflict with the Palestinians will not be settled by a single agreement. Reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians—overcoming decades of bloodshed and hatred—will require a long process of acceptance and forgiveness spanning years and probably decades. The armed conflict, however, can certainly be ended. Israel has already ended armed conflicts with several neighboring countries: with some, like Egypt and Jordan, it achieved comprehensive peace agreements; with others, it agreed to other kinds of accords. An agreement can be reached with the Palestinians, too: the terms are known and the price is fixed. Whether it is reached or not is a matter of political will on the part of Israeli and Palestinian leaders. Unfortunately, Israel’s current leadership will do anything to avoid this choice, to the detriment of both peoples. The war in Gaza is, fundamentally, not about tunnels and not against rockets. It is a war over the status quo. Netanyahu’s “conflict management” is a euphemism for maintaining a status quo of settlement and occupation, allowing no progress. The Israeli opposition must distance itself from this hopeless conception and other countries need to reject it. Both must be done forcefully and before violence erupts once more, and force becomes the only option—yet again. —August 28, 2014 1 See “Netanyahu: Gaza Conflict Proves Israel Can’t Relinquish Control of West Bank,” The Times of Israel, July 11, 2014. His press adviser told Yediot Ahronot that Netanyahu intentionally “led the talks nowhere.” ↩ 2 Lately, even some of Netanyahu’s closest associates have begun to realize that condemning the Palestinian unity government was a mistake. For example, on July 24, Minister of Communications Gilad Erdan said: “We thought the unity government was a very bad thing. Maybe today we should see it as the lesser of two evils—it is preferable that Abbas oversee the Rafah crossing under Egyptian protection.” ↩ 3 BBC journalist Jon Donnison quoted an Israeli police spokesperson as saying that the abduction was the act of a lone cell, operating independently of Hamas’s central directions. He added that “Israeli police spokes[person] Mickey Rosenfeld also said if kidnapping had been ordered by Hamas leadership, they’d have known about it in advance.” A similar report on Buzzfeed quoted an anonymous Israeli intelligence official as confirming that Hamas did not carry out the abduction, adding that “he felt the kidnapping had been used by politicians trying to promote their own agenda.” Rosenfeld later denied the statements attributed to him, but BBC ’s Donnison held firm to his version. The former head of Israel’s internal security service (Shabak or Shin Bet), Yuval Diskin, added his own estimation that Hamas was not behind the abduction: see Julia Amalia Heyer, “Ex-Israeli Security Chief Diskin: ‘All the Conditions Are There for an Explosion,’” Der Spiegel International, July 24, 2014. Israeli journalist and Hamas expert Shlomi Eldar had earlier surmised that the abduction was the work of the Hebron-based Qawasmeh family, which is affiliated with Hamas but operates independently: see “Accused Kidnappers Are Rogue Hamas Branch,” Al-Monitor, June 29, 2014. Recently even Israel Hayom (the daily newspaper closely associated with Netanyahu) reported that Hamas did not know about the abduction: see Yoav Limor, “Interim Report,” August 1, 2014. On August 20 a video was released allegedly showing a Hamas official, Saleh al-Arouri, attributing the kidnapping to the organization’s military wing. Whether it was ordered by Hamas leadership or not remains unclear. ↩ 4 According to some sources, until June 24, Hamas arrested terrorists from other factions responsible for rocket fire on Israel: see Avi Issacharoff, “Hamas Arrests Terror Cell Responsible for Rocket Fire on Israel,” The Times of Israel, June 25, 2014. ↩ 5 On June 29, the IAF attacked a rocket-launching cell associated, according to some sources, with Hamas: see Jeffrey Heller, “Netanyahu Accuses Hamas of Involvement in Gaza Rocket Fire,” Reuters, June 30, 2014. According to other sources, Hamas began shooting only on June 30, after one of its men was killed the day before: see Avi Issacharoff, “Hamas Fires Rockets for First Time Since 2012, Israel Officials Say,” The Times of Israel, June 30, 2014. ↩ 6 According to expert estimates, tunnels can be dug at six to twelve meters a day, an average tunnel taking three months to complete. A former commander of an elite IDF combat engineering company estimated that a five-hundred-meter-long tunnel would take a month and a half to dig, and a longer tunnel would take several months at most. ↩</p> 19349161 2014-09-07 20:40:10 2014-09-07 20:40:10 open open failure-in-gaza-assaf-sharon-september-25-2014-issue-19349161 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan Left and Right Agree -- Let Ex-Im Expire Nader http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/09/07/left-and-right-agree-let-ex-im-expire-nader-19349159/ Sun, 07 Sep 2014 20:38:02 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Left and Right Agree -- Let Ex-Im Expire Posted: 09/05/2014 12:01 pm EDT Updated: 09/05/2014 12:59 pm EDT [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan I have recently traveled from New York to California talking to audiences from the left, right and middle about my new book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State. The topic has been how activists from both the right and left side of the political spectrum can come together to bring about long-overdue changes in America. With the current "Do-Nothing" Congress halting progress on many important issues, there is much skepticism in America about political rivals coming together in support of common goals. But a major issue that could create unlikely allies is now coming to a head on Capitol Hill. As a September 30 deadline looms, Congress must decide on whether or not to reauthorize the controversial Export-Import Bank. Established in 1934 by an Executive Order from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Ex-Im bank provides credit to domestic exporters and foreign importers to the U.S. The Ex-Im bank has long been accused of being little more than a corporate welfare fund, mostly for Big Business, by outspoken progressives and conservatives. In short, the function of Ex-Im is to subsidize businesses that export American products. The major problem with this agency comes from the fact that a big bulk of Ex-Im funds go to huge, wealthy companies, such as the Ex-Im's largest beneficiary Boeing, which in 2013 received 30 percent of its loans and guarantees. Ex-Im defenders argue that the majority of its loans go to small businesses that cannot secure financing in the private market, conveniently ignoring the crucial fact that the majority of the money goes to big businesses such as the aforementioned Boeing, as well as other giant corporations like General Electric (10 percent of Ex-Im loans and guarantees in 2013) and Caterpillar (approximately 5 percent). Economist Dean Baker, a leading voice on the left against the reauthorization of the Export-Import, puts it best: "If the bank backs $80 billion in loans for Boeing, General Electric, or Enron (a favorite in past days), and $20 billion for small businesses, it doesn't matter that the $20 billion in small business loans accounted for the bulk of the transactions. Most of the money went to big businesses. That is what matters and everyone touting the share of small business loans knows it." It's also important to note that the Ex-Im Bank is involved in only 2 percent of U.S. exports -- the other 98 percent function just fine without its largesse. Thus the expiration of the Ex-Im would mainly affect the profit margins of a handful of big corporations. Robert Weissman of Public Citizen explained: "Ex-Im puts the federal government in a role which ought to be filled by private lenders and insurers. It forces taxpayers to bear the risk that should be absorbed by business." Eighty years after its creation, the Ex-Im Bank's stated mission of boosting American jobs is questionable, at best. And, the Ex-Im's general lack of transparency and a growing list of allegations of fraud and corruption (as in the recent headlines regarding four Ex-Im officials accepting kickbacks) are additional red flags. The Ex-Im reauthorization efforts have the predictable support of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and many prominent Democrats and Republicans -- some of whom have changed their tunes over the years. Dean Baker writes that the prospect of ending Ex-Im "prompted the most hysteria among the Washington elite since the financial crisis threatened to lay waste to Wall Street following the collapse of Lehman. As we know, when major companies have their profits on the line, the pundits get worried and truth goes flying out the window." Baker also criticizes GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, who recently claimed it was "just wrong" for him to have to arduously make a case for the reauthorization of the Ex-Im. Baker notes that Immelt, who makes $25 million a year, has advocated cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits. The elimination of the Ex-Im Bank was once a decidedly progressive cause. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was once extremely outspoken on Ex-Im -- in 2002 calling it "corporate welfare at its worst" and writing that, "American citizens have better things to do with their money than support an agency that provides welfare for corporations that could care less about American workers." Nowadays, Senator Sanders is strangely silent in public on the matter of reauthorization, although he remains opposed to it. This past July, 29 state governors sent a letter to Congressional leaders expressing their support for reauthorization -- 20 Democrats and 9 Republicans. Republican Texas Governor Rick Perry and Republican South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley also expressed their crony capitalistic support of reauthorizing the Ex-Im. From the Democratic quarters, former President Bill Clinton said during a recent panel at the U.S.-Africa Business Forum (alongside GE's Jeffrey Immelt) that attacks on the Ex-Im were "ridiculous." "Economics is not theology. If you're running a country, you've got to try to create an opportunity for all of your businesses to be competitive," Clinton said. Mr. Clinton declined to be more specific -- but some of the very profitable companies using Ex-Im, such as GE and Boeing, contribute to his foundation. During the 2008 election, then-Senator Barack Obama called the Export-Import bank, "Little more than a fund for corporate welfare." Today, President Obama tells a very different story. He revised his beliefs at a recent news conference: "For some reason, right now the House Republicans have decided that we shouldn't do this, [reauthorize the Ex-Im bank] which means that when American companies go overseas and they're trying to close a sale on selling Boeing planes, for example, or a GE turbine or some other American product that has all kinds of subcontractors behind it and is creating all kinds of jobs and all of sorts of small businesses depend on that sale...we may lose that sale." Convergence works both ways, unfortunately -- in this case, the political corporatists are aligning with Big Business interests. Dean Baker, a consistent voice of reason in a storm of hysteria, writes: "Just to remind everyone, the Export-Import Bank issues the overwhelming majority of its loans and guarantees to benefit a small number of huge corporations. It is a straightforward subsidy to these companies, giving them loans at below market interest rates." Moreover, many of these giant corporations, like General Electric and Boeing, pay little or no federal income tax on U.S.-based profits! (See Citizens for Tax Justice at ctj.org.) Keep that in mind when General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt complains about having to defend his company's lucrative corporate subsidy to its critics. In a role-reversal of sorts, it is now the Tea Partiers who have taken to the ramparts to condemn what they refer to as the Ex-Im's "crony capitalism." The Tea Party influence is having great effect -- the Ex-Im bank was last reauthorized in 2012 with the full support of then-Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Cantor was ousted from his seat earlier this year in a primary election by Tea Party candidate David Brat, who Cantor outspent 27 to one. Cantor's replacement, Congressman Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), has taken note of his predecessor's missteps. McCarthy, who voted for reauthorization in 2012, recently told Fox News: "One of the biggest problems with government is they go and take hard-earned money so others do things that the private sector can do. That's what the Ex-Im Bank does." Even Speaker John Boehner, who also previously voted for reauthorization, has backed off support. In light of this new found common ground between left and right, where are the congressional leaders on the left who once shared a similar viewpoint on corporate welfare? Their silence is deafening. Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) is one of few Democrats who are still outspokenly opposed -- even Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) have come out in support of the Ex-Im. The Ex-Im bank situation presents a unique opportunity later this month to do something (ironically, through doing nothing) by letting the Ex-Im Bank's charter expire for good. Leaders in Congress must get over the "yuck factor" of working with their colleagues across the aisle and come together when such concurring occasions present themselves. Signed copies of Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State are available to order from Politics and Prose. Follow Ralph Nader on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RalphNader More: Boeing Corporate Welfare General Electric Crony Capitalism Congress Ex Im Bank </p> 19349159 2014-09-07 20:38:02 2014-09-07 20:38:02 open open left-and-right-agree-let-ex-im-expire-nader-19349159 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan "activité, activité, vitesse, vitesse.” http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/09/01/activite-activite-vitesse-vitesse-19303015/ Mon, 01 Sep 2014 00:07:11 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Waterloo – An Utter Waste of Time Posted on August 31, 2014 by Harvey Mossman http://theboardgaminglife.com/2014/08/31/waterloo-an-utter-waste-of-time/ [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan by Paul Comben According to Helmuth von Moltke, no military plan ever survived first contact with the enemy. According to the Duke of Wellington, his plans were to be best thought of as tatty old bits of harness which could be knotted and pieced back together whenever anything snapped or fell off. For Napoleon, perhaps the single most important factor in a campaign’s success was to be found in one of his favourite maxims: “activité, activité, vitesse, vitesse.” This is best translated by recalling Stonewall’s words about surprising and mystifying your enemy – or in other words, acting quicker than they did and generally getting a move on. Returning to von Moltke, he was surely exaggerating to make a point. Plans certainly need wiggle room, but not all plans fall to pieces the moment the enemy bestirs himself. Just about every key facet of Case Yellow worked like a charm as the French and British armies, irrespective of what they were rubbing up against, witlessly obliged in executing their own downfall by doing pretty much what the likes on von Manstein believed they would do. Likewise, at Cannae, Hannibal annihilated a massive Roman army which again did almost exactly what the great general envisaged them doing. But never mind what the enemy is doing, what about the forces, or more particularly, the subordinate commanders, who are supposed to be carrying out the agreed strategy once the shooting has started? And what about those factors which do not appear in written plans and pre-battle orations – the weather, disease, good and bad omens and the like. It was certainly not part of the British plans at Mons, that, at some pre-arranged moment, everyone from King Arthur to the archangel Gabriel appeared in the sky and inspired the thin khaki line to hold off the grey hordes; but nevertheless many a Tommy claimed to have seen them. And whatever nasty surprises awaited Hitler as untold masses of tanks crawled out of the Russian forests, the real unraveling of Barbarossa had rather more to do with bad weather, useless and late arriving winter clothing, and Hitler himself falling ill at the end of the summer which left his generals free not so much to tinker but to revise wholesale what Hitler had wanted to do. Sir_Arthur_Wellesley,_1st_Duke_of_Wellington In short, all plans have a weak point, and the key then becomes to ensure that the enemy, neither by accident or design, ever gets near hitting the vulnerable spot. Wellington kept his vulnerable spots hidden in that tangle of make-do and mend, which meant that any given point was never the vulnerable point; but for Napoleon the weak point could often be Napoleon himself. Whilst Napoleon was still on top of his game, and consistently so, his risks, gambles, “catch me if you can” manoeuvres, and everything that went with them, could be counted on to win the day. But, even relatively early on, the fine workings of Napoleon’s very fine harness could be thrown into hazard. His plans for another Cannae at Eylau were thrown out by the blizzard his army fought in, which confused his army’s movements, delayed his reinforcements, afforded his artillery precious little it could see let alone fire at, and brought him a dubious victory at a very bloody cost. Painting : Napoleon at FontainbleauBut the campaign that really showed up the shortcomings of Napoleon’s military genius was the 1812 foray into Russia. There are many ways this massive ruin of a venture might be depicted, but it is tempting to portray it from Napoleon’s perspective as a highly experienced (but getting on a bit) team sports coach, who is trying to lead his boys through a season fought in everything from blazing heat to freezing cold, on fields which are rutted and worn, with facilities that are virtually non existent, and a sideline which is a hundred yards away from the action. And adding to the sense of frustration is the fact that the coach “Pop Bonaparte,” just played the game in his day at a level far higher than any of the players out there are capable of, and thus he is just dying to get out on the field, tell them what to do up close, and then, if they still cannot do it, hang out there and do it himself. In campaign after campaign prior to 1812, Napoleon’s grand scheme of things had been assisted by the fact that he was rarely more than a day’s ride away from any corps headquarters, and thus he could influence events and do the coaching knowing his influence would be felt and acted upon. But in Russia it was all so very different: envelopments were supposed to coordinated and carried out at distances far remote from the headquarters of the emperor; dispatches sent and dispatches received were badly out of date by the time they were written, let alone by the time they actually reached their intended recipient; and with those subordinates the emperor was grudgingly relying upon being comfortably away from any sight of the imperial clipboard being thrown down and the eruption that would go with it, things just never moved with the speed hoped for
and could not anyway, on the sand and mud bath the supposedly fleet formations of the Grande Armée were meant to do their stuff on in Tsarist Russia. Add to that the emperor’s own travails of weariness and disillusionment as his carefully planned campaign led to frustration after frustration, and add then the bad cold which led to bad tactics at Borodino, and you have the answer why this Russian nightmare just went from bad to worse. And then, after further frustrations and eventual defeat in the massive campaign of 1813 in Germany, it was very different in 1814. Napoleon’s situation was simplified by his having very little army left, and the front being reduced to comfortable distances. As a result he was once again capable of throwing his forces here, there and everywhere, moving faster with his far less cumbersome order of battle than he had for many a year. That he was again eventually militarily defeated was simply due to the enemy wisely opting to fight where he was not, and finally bringing their far superior numbers to bear. But if he had quit the inferno of Leipzig just a bit earlier, and had thus had a bit more army left to fight the following spring, it might have been a different story. And now to the events of 1815: Napoleon_2246460b It is hard to know, or rather even to guess, just how many accounts have been written of Waterloo and the campaign of The Hundred Days since those faraway hours of June 1815, but it is safe to assume that scores of different factors have featured in scores of different accounts as to what happened, especially through the 15th to the 18th June in southern and central Belgium. But whatever different accounts choose to highlight here and there with regard to the course of the campaign, there is little doubt in my mind that everything from Napoleon’s recurring lethargy to the erratic performance of subordinates can be encapsulated by the embracing factor of a total loss of time, both by the emperor and those he was chiefly relying on. This might not have been so much of an issue if either the French plan or the capability of the French army had been less susceptible to hiccups in the clockwork. But this was precisely where the plan was vulnerable, and the one man who could and should have foreseen this and acted with diligence to ensure the worst did not happen, was yet again off his game. There were actually two clocks running against Napoleon by the time he moved into Belgium. The first had started running the moment he was back in France after his exile on the island of Elba. This was the Coalition clock – the Coalition that had swiftly re-formed as news of his return reached their Vienna conclaves. The Russians and the Austrians were again readying their massive field armies; the British were moving their fleet, and their fleet was moving a new army to Belgium, where it joined another sizeable force of Prussians under Blücher. By common consensus, Napoleon could not sit idly by and let this huge assemblage of hostile contingents march on his borders; for it was only a matter of time, of waiting for the clock chimes, before those forces did exactly that. So, after some lackluster attempts at negotiating a peace utterly failed, Napoleon was committed to a pre-emptive strike. GeneralBlucher_small The second clock was the campaign clock, linked to his overall plan for a move into Belgium and the defeat in detail of the two Coalition armies deployed there. There were several reasons why Napoleon chose Belgium for this initial fight – it was close by and thus, whilst keeping him near France, offered the prospect of a quick series of fights leading to a quick and telling victory; it also would pitch him against the two smallest armies in the Coalition – Wellington’s force of British, Dutch-Belgian, and contingents from the German states numbered a shade under 100,00; Blucher’s Prussian army numbered about 115,000. Both were therefore a little smaller individually than Napoleon’s Armée du Nord, but were likely to prove too much if they were able to join. However, joining was not much of a priority for either Coalition commander in Belgium, with Wellington fretfully mindful of his communications back to Britain via the Channel ports, and Blücher equally mindful of his communications back across the Rhine. Thus the two armies were pulled apart by their competing priorities, and this invited Napoleon to exploit the situation by adopting a campaign plan of the central position, whereby his army would interpose itself like a wedge between its two foes, block one from assisting the other, and then employ the greater part of its strength to defeat whichever one of the Coalition forces offered battle first. And with that matter successfully concluded, the other Coalition force could be engaged whilst the defeated army was harried and ushered away from any prospect of intervention and/or recovery by a smaller pursuing force. This was the sort of plan one could readily envisage the Napoleon of 1805 or 1806 being able to push through to complete victory – but it was, perforce, a high energy beast of a plan, which had to be lashed along to ensure that two sizeable opposing forces were kept off balance, and that the initial move put the French army well and truly between Wellington and Blücher. Given the relatively short distances, this was almost certainly going to be a quick and intense campaign, and for Napoleon, alongside the other benefits of victory was the prospect of bringing the Belgians and the Dutch back into the fold – peoples who had fought alongside the French not so very long ago, and whose allegiance to the Coalition was thought to be seriously suspect. M-Davout So there was much to benefit the emperor by winning big in Belgium; but it was not 1805/6, it was 1815, and things were different. The plan was fine, but even before its first operational moment came, the emperor was eating away at its chances of success. To return to the earlier sporting analogy, Napoleon may well have been closer to the sidelines in 1815 than in 1812, but through his increasing want of tactical finesse he had taken half the plays out of the playbook, had compounded this by not putting his best team on the field, and seemed for prolonged periods totally reluctant to offer any direct guidance as to how anything should go. With a little coaxing, Murat would have been available to command the cavalry
but Napoleon did not summon him from Italy, and thus deprived himself of the best cavalry commander in Europe. Davout was also available, and was head and shoulders above anyone else Napoleon could have appointed to a wing or corps command, but Davout was kept in Paris as a reflection of the emperor’s insecurities about his volatile political situation, and so Napoleon’s army was also absent one of the best field commanders of the era. Michel Ney, Marshall of the French Empire So, having deliberately deprived himself of two commanders who knew how to move quickly and with telling effect, Napoleon made his advance into Belgium on June 15th 1815, accompanied by an army of relatively high but dangerously brittle morale, and caught up with at the last moment by the blustering Marshal Ney. Recent historical reports have very much suggested that Ney was a burnt-out and unstable force by 1815, having been psychologically wrecked by his experiences leading the rearguard in Russia in 1812. That Napoleon entrusted his left wing to him calls his judgment even further into question. Why did he do it? Was it that the ailing army coach saw the old veteran as he had once been in the glory days, and erroneously thought that all the old talent was still there? Perhaps. But Ney’s creative talents, the sort of talents this plan required, had always been suspect. Wellington had totally confounded him, and Ney had always tended to be the sort of eager subordinate one has to point at the right thing, whisper a few words of encouragement to, and then leave to take or to hold whatever needed to be taken or held onto. Interpreting a situation entirely on his own was not his strong suit, and with his temper lurching all over the place, he was never going to be the man to control and co-ordinate the subtle evolutions of a carefully arranged military plan. The campaign clock really started to run as L’Armée du Nord crossed into Belgium. Delay here would bring about several undesirable effects – the Coalition armies, now gathering intelligence as to what was transpiring, would attempt junction; the “bullseye” for Napoleon’s military wedge would grow smaller as the forces around it (the road junction of Quatre bras) grew larger; and such was the nature of Napoleon’s fine design as opposed to Nosey’s bit of harness, that once one part started to falter, the whole thing would start to fall out of synch. waterloo-ball The first potential speed bump was the crossing of the Sambre river. The border was close by, and the nearest town, Charleroi, was occupied by advanced Prussian forces belonging to one of the Army of the Rhine’s I Corps brigades. Nevertheless, the forward French forces successfully made the crossing of the river, and pushed the Prussians back on their main forces. By the morning of June 16th, the greater part of L’Armée du Nord was over the Sambre, and this with the Coalition forces still disjointed. Wellington had famously heard of Napoleon’s move whilst attending the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in Brussels, and whilst he made hurried arrangements to close the gap, that the key crossroads of Quatre Bras had anything present to defend it at all was largely due to the Belgian commander on the ground acting contrary to his orders. The crossroads was vital, as French occupation of it would effectively deny any move by Wellington’s army to support Blücher if ‘Old Forwards” really stuck his neck out by going for battle immediately. Furthermore, control of the crossroads would enable the French forces present there to move, at least in part, towards the Prussians’ largely unguarded west flank and turn any bad situation for them into a total catastrophe. And this was indeed was faced the Allies that morning and early afternoon. Blücher was shaping to offer battle around the village of Ligny, just a few miles to the east of Quatre Bras, and this with just three of his four army corps – the IV Corps, under Bülow, was too far away on the 16th to intervene. Meanwhile, barely a division’s strength of Belgian and Dutch troops were present at Quatre Bras, with potentially two entire corps of French (II corps immediately threatening, and I corps also available along with strong cavalry elements) ready to bear down on them. The situation could hardly have been better for Napoleon and his plan, but from then own, and for most of the ensuing days of fighting and marching, it all went awry. The first piece of misery leading to the first serious delay, was Ney’s prevarication in front of Quatre Bras. Later in this short campaign, at Waterloo itself, Ney would steam into anything without much more than a perfunctory look at what he was going at; but on the 16th, fearing a trap of Wellington’s fiendish design, he suspected the thin screen of Dutch and Belgian forces were a lure to something far nastier lurking behind, when it fact what he saw was all that was there. No other forces were concealed in the tall wheat or behind the hedges or beyond the gentle elevations; but by the time Ney had more or less convinced himself of that, Picton’s division was heading south on the Brussels road, with several thousand Brunswickers close behind them. They would be arriving at Quatre Bras even as Ney was moving the II corps to the attack in the later afternoon. LignyDeployment To the east, Napoleon’s main body, consisting of III and IV corps, the Imperial Guard and most of the reserve cavalry were moving through and around the town of Fleurus and deploying against Blücher’s rather spread out three Prussian corps. It was hardly the fastest approach to battle in Napoleon’s career – there may have been “activité” but the vitesse had largely gone off the boil. Further signaling this was the absence from the battle of the VI corps under Lobau. This was a relatively small corps, bereft of cavalry, but contained some high quality infantry regiments. It was not brought nearer the battle until the evening, by which time it really acted as nothing but a late spectator to events. Thus, both battles began tardily, which assisted Wellington at Quatre Bras by allowing his first reinforcements to reach the field ahead of the first crisis; and at Ligny, the late start meant that the French were trying to complete their hard won victory even as it was getting dark. maps_hmquatre_bras However, the greatest farce on the 16th lay in the performance of D’Erlon’s I Corps, who really proved to be the French equivalent of The Grand Old Duke of York. Ney wanted the corps at Quatre Bras to defeat the forces that would not have been there if he had attacked when he should have done. Napoleon wanted I Corps to perform at least a partial envelopment of the Prussians, and so degrade them past any prospect of military viability for the rest of the campaign. Of course, in an era of uncertain communications, Napoleon was assuming rather than knowing that Ney had done his job and was marching contingents to Napoleon’s assistance. What this resulted in was in both factions yanking at I Corps’ lead, with D’Erlon apparently lacking the drive to cut through the bluster and go somewhere, anywhere, of his on volition. Had D’Erlon resolved to make his own decision, and had thus intervened on either field, the result could have been decisive; but as it was, the entire corps turned this way and that, went about even as he was nearing the Ligny battlefield, and thus ended up doing nothing anywhere. And then it rained. Well, not exactly, not quite yet, at least not in the biblical amounts of a few hours later, but for all the positive action the French forces got up to immediately after the two battles of the 16th, it might have well rained all through that night and into the morning. Napoleon’s campaign plan really required the first defeated army to be ruthlessly chased and essentially bothered out of any lingering effectiveness by a rapid and close pursuit. But, after Ligny, no proper pursuit was organized until the following morning, and this only after the emperor had had a rest and toured the battlefield. And then, when the pursuit did begin, Marshal Grouchy, in command of 30,000 men, set off on the wrong road and spent several hours “chasing” after a phantom army of Prussian deserters fleeing to the east
whilst the Prussian army, albeit battered and bruised, was heading north towards Wavre. We may divert ourselves here by considering how the likes of Bobby Lee and Stonewall Jackson would have dealt with a battered enemy force in retreat. One can well imagine Lee suggesting to Stonewall that “it will be most beneficial to ourselves if those people are kept discomforted.” That would have surely sufficed to fill the pursued route with the further wreckage of utter defeat; but in the case of Grouchy, the trail of pursuit was not so much filled with the litter of defeat as with the discarded strawberry stalks of the Marshal’s impromptu snacking. 640px-De_prins_van_Oranje_aan_het_hoofd_van_het_vijfde_bataljon_Nationale_Militie_bij_Quatre_Bras%252C_16_juni_1815 But however we present it, the Prussians were left to recover, to the extent that the IV corps of their army was able to join with the other three. As for events at Quatre Bras, as far as Ney was concerned, there were not any events at Quatre Bras
leastways none he could see. In truth this was quite amazing, as large numbers of Wellington’s troops were presently clearing off to the north whilst the French were still at breakfast. Suddenly apprehensive as to why he was hearing nothing from Ney, Napoleon then finally bestirred himself and hastened over to Quatre Bras where breakfast was still going on. It is probably safe to say that the emperor did not help himself to a croissant, as he raged before Ney “On a perdu la France!” Indeed, the implications of Ney’s inactivity were rather obvious, and if Ney had possessed any sort of rudimentary notion or faculty to do more with the imperial plan than play finders keepers with the I Corps, he might have noticed that Wellington’s army was disappearing before his eyes, and that the imperative pursuit was far too late beginning. Had Davout been there, instead of being stuck in Paris “organizing things,” there would have been a very good chance that Wellington army would have been fixed in place by deliberate attacks that morning, leaving it in a desperately vulnerable position as the French forces from Ligny closed in. But, despite one moment of crisis at Genappe as Napoleon tried to get some sort of pursuit going, Wellington’s army was able to get back to the pre-selected position just south of Mont St Jean, helped by the massive and enduring downpour which then occurred. Of course, Napoleon’s plan could hardly have been predicated on “Well what do we do if it rains?” but the truth is there was plenty that could have been done before it got seriously wet – only next to nothing was done. When we turn to events on the 18th, the long enduring question has always been: “Could Napoleon have begun the battle of Waterloo earlier?” Despite what you may read somewhere, or seek to set up in a game, the simple truth is that very little could have been started at Waterloo before its historical start time of approaching noon. The French army was simply too strung out after trying to march through that appalling storm, and the ground was impossibly wet. Yes, Napoleon did therefore lose as much as five hours of battle time waiting for the ground to dry and his army to complete its deployment, but this would not have mattered nearly so much if Grouchy’s pursuit of the Prussians had been early and effective, and if Ney had done something other on the morning of the 17th save wait for his coffee to turn up. As it was, despite incorrectly assessing Wellington’s army as stronger than his, Napoleon that morning of the 18th put his chances as ninety in his favour to ten against, and curtly dismissed any notion that the Prussians might be able to assist Wellington by the convenience of considering them more damaged and demoralized than they actually were. One thing totally missing from his calculations in this regard was just how much hatred Blücher had for Napoleon, and thus while he still had an army of any description, the old Prussian was forever set to go after his despised enemy. So time went by again whilst the ground dried sufficiently for the French to move their cannon; and perhaps having some stabs of doubt as to what was happening to the east, Napoleon sent a message to Grouchy advising him of the rumours of the actual Prussian movements, together with a suggestion that Grouchy shift over to the west. Of course, by now Grouchy was miles away from the main Prussian force, and really needed a direct order telling him to move his army and his strawberries directly to the emperor’s assistance. Napoleon would eventually issue something like this order, but far too late in the day for it to have any effect – three Prussian corps were to arrive at Waterloo, leaving the III Corps to hold off Grouchy at Wavre when he eventually turned up. 640px-Battle_of_Waterloo_1815 What occurred at Waterloo rightly now belongs to the ages. It has been described countless times, and I will not seek to add a further account to the long list. Instead, for me the most significant aspect of that final battle is that it saw the Iron Duke at the peak of his powers, doing what English warlords have always tended to do best – make a stand on a hill and defy heaven and earth to move them off it. For Napoleon, for any one of a number of reasons, it was simply one battle too many. After Ligny, some generals had observed that the Napoleon they had known did not exist any more, and certainly there was nothing about his conduct at Waterloo which would have reminded one of the victor of Marengo, Austerlitz or Jena. It was as if at some fundamental level he just could not be bothered with all the taxing necessities of battle. He left much of the battle to Ney, and Ney made a complete mess of nearly everything. Apart from formulating the initial plan, Napoleon appears to have done precious little that day until near the very end. Then, with all his time close to being entirely used up, near his last action was to lie to his own men by telling them Grouchy was on the field, and then to lead the final attack of the Guard to within six hundred yards of Wellington’s line before pulling away and watching the subsequent calamity unfold. Napoleon is supposed to have once said “we only have a certain time for war.” By 1815, it is clear he was on borrowed time, and what was left to him in life and in fortune was of very poor quality. His 1815 plan needed the sort of qualities Lee and Jackson brought to Chancellorsville forty eight years later; in other words, not a mentally broken down subordinate acting haphazardly on the orders of a commander whose triumphs were now all in his mind. About the Author Paul Paul has been involved in the hobby since the early 1970s. Of largely Belgian ancestry on his father’s side, and English (Yorkshire) on his mother’s, after finishing his education he worked in tourism and student services, and also spent some time in the former West Germany. He met his wife Boo in 1990, and they married a couple of years later. Paul his from a long line of former servicemen – one grandfather was a sergeant in the BEF of 1914, whilst two of his great grandfathers were to killed whilst serving with the Royal Navy. His own father, who was born in Britain, served with the army in Malaya in the early 1950s. </p> 19303015 2014-09-01 00:07:11 2014-09-01 00:07:11 open open activite-activite-vitesse-vitesse-19303015 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan WATERLOO GAMES http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/09/01/waterloo-games-19303012/ Mon, 01 Sep 2014 00:03:31 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>← Waterloo – An Utter Waste of Time Several Ways with The Hundred Days Posted on August 31, 2014 by Harvey Mossman http://theboardgaminglife.com/2014/08/31/several-ways-with-the-hundred-days/ [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan By Paul Comben This is a simply a light look at all the Waterloo campaign games I have owned and played over the years. I have tried to include just about anything with at least some campaign element to it, but pure recreations of the climatic battle are not present – so no Wellington’s Victory or The Thin Red Line etc. Furthermore, I am not going into any deep detail as to how the qualifying games are played. What I am looking at (chattily) is how these games reflected (or failed to reflect) the issues in my Waterloo as an Utter Waste of Time article – that is, operational manoeuvre room, the issue of time, the weather, and command and control. Waterloo (Avalon Hill)Waterloo One of the oldest historical wargames, and just the third board wargame I ever owned. As a boy, I travelled into London’s West End all on my own at the very end of 1972, armed with some extra Christmas money. With it I bought Waterloo, got it home, got it open, got it punched, learnt
and then got disappointed. Perhaps I was not helped by the utterly rotten film on the television, but any sense of seeing something that played like something from the drama of June 1815 was pretty much absent. Looking back, I can affirm that the game had a map you could wander about on, but weather, command, and the time drag of military events happening or not happening was utterly absent. And with the map, no one I ever played it with ever moved their armies like Napoleonic armies, and thus you invariably ended up with a long line of blue units pushing against a long line of green and pinky/red units, with everyone knocking off for the day bang on five – that is when each day’s time track abruptly ended
in the month with the longest days in the year! But of course I played it, repeatedly and devotedly, because it was the only thing on the subject I had for several years. And so it got indulged until the counters faded and the black tape fell off (well ripped off) the back of the board. And if I see a copy now, all it does it make me feel old
and recall Roy Wood and Wizzard, Marc Bolan, and girls in hot pants. Napoleon’s Last Battles (SPI) Napoleons_Last_Battles_SPI_quadrigame_flatpack_box_front Christmas 1976 – the film Waterloo was making its British television debut on the evening of the 25th, and my family was having a mass festive knees-up at our London home. I wanted to watch the film, but downstairs the Comben residence was filled with everyone from near and distant family to neighbours from around the street
and Party Sevens and bowls of crisps and peanuts, and a great cloud of toxic cigarette smoke, and stacks of 45 singles ready to drop on the turntable, and turkey sandwiches, and sausage rolls, and great big shirt collars and hair styles for the younger blokes looking like variations on a samurai’s helmet. I kept upstairs the first part of the evening and watched the film in stunning low definition black and white. But my interest was kept seriously attuned to events by the presence beside me of one of my three Christmas wargames (if you know what the other two were, you must have been there), towit, Napoleon’s Last Battles. This could be played in its littler bits as, well
.Napoleon’s Last Battles. On the other hand, you could put the four maps together, sort out the OOB, and play a three day (actually two and a bit of a day) campaign game. Compared to Avalon Hill’s Waterloo, this was a serious move on – not that much more complicated, but possessing nearly all the right things. First of all, French army command had to be kick started each campaign morning after the 16th. Until Napoleon himself stirred, precious little else could get going. The indifferent qualities of Napoleon’s erring subordinate, Marshal Ney, were highlighted by gruff nuts’ inability to lead more than one formation at a time – he could something, but never everything. There was no actual loose cannon effect however. As to other issues, the rain certainly did arrive in this game, and from what I can remember, it slowed units and prevented artillery bombarding otherwise promising targets. But this was a game that was very much what I would call “the fight at the end of the funnel.” You began with everything set up for Ligny and Quatre Bras, so, by Jove, that was what you were going to have. And there was precious little territory west of Quatre Bras, and only two and a half days to win or lose everything. And with nothing west of the historic Waterloo position, in all probability, if things were not decided clearly on the 16th, it was Waterloo you were most likely to get, as there was nowhere else to go
and no time to get there anyway. 1815 (GDW) 1815 I was at University when I caught up with this one. I did try hard to like this it, with its shock-capable cavalry, blown cavalry markers, and its bombarding artillery set-ups, but it never worked for me – not even when, recently, Gilbert Collins did a video which pointed out all its best points. But it was another funnel game, and unlike NLB, it seemed to me stodgy and ill-paced. If I remember correctly, one little nuance it did have was randomizing what might be lurking at Quatre Bras at game start, thus giving Ney some genuine food for thought as he faced some inverted mystery counters. But you could never “Go West Rash Man” because there was nowhere to go, and this combined with those good ideas turning into dragging procedures just failed to work my dice. It also had some rather unappealing components, in my opinion, clear but utterly bland, so I must confess, in the end it was just left to gather dust. The Last Days of the Grand Armée (OSG)Last Days of the Grande Armee Now this game had near everything – command issues, scouting and screening cavalry, operational and tactical blends, weather, a decent timescale, something west of the Brussels /Charleroi road
and all of it presented on a wacky large hex map. Pushing forty when I nabbed this goody, I was coming back to the hobby after a period of absence lasting a fair whack of years. I more or less immediately recognized the similarities to NLB, but only rather later cottoned on to the two games both being designed by Kevin Zucker. Oh dear. Could I criticize it? I do not really want to because this was a clever piece of work that combined so much relevant colour with genuine ease of play. True, it needed a revised set of rules, but this was really the first time I felt like these were 1815 armies moving realistically on the operational level and fighting realistically on the tactical level. As such, the necessity of preventing the two Coalition armies joining was played out in a historically faithful manner. You even got a pontoon train! Looking back to my earlier article, time was certainly an issue in this game – and daringly and adeptly done. Turns were great chunks of daytime (morning, afternoon, evening – I think – and night.). Your big battles might therefore only last a couple of turns, or maybe three, but this worked alongside a very neat battle engagement system which made it very difficult to keep throwing the same units into the fray and expecting them to look interested. The one negative was the map – in my opinion. Big hexes are all very well, but to compensate parts of the map detail looked plain odd – bends in roads where there never bends in reality, but it was the only way to make the terrain stay more or less where it should. Perhaps areas would have been better, and I must admit to being one of those gamers who think areas should be employed in map design far more often. The Emperor Returns (Clash of Arms) The Emperor returns Another Kevin Zucker design, following in the operational tradition of Napoleon at Bay, 1809, Struggle of Nations, and others too numerous to mention. Two things really dominated the design mindset of this series – logistics and army command. You could not simply push all your pieces to wherever you wanted them to go – you had to issue orders from a Centre of Operations (best placed on the best bit of road you could find), or else rely on the subordinate commander’s initiative to move without directions coming from above. And every time something or someone moved, there was a danger that someone or some things would fall by the wayside as march attrition took its toll. Given the smaller distances and timespan of the 1815 campaign, this was not so much of an issue as in other campaigns, but then again, the game covered a far greater period of time, with the French army’s shift to the border catered for, and then potentially weeks of manoeuvres following after. You could play with fog of war, and this tied in with a map of nearly all of Belgium and a chunk of northern France, enabled the French to opt for a completely different approach to the historic one. L’Armée du Nord might make its main thrust further to the west, thus threatening immediately the Iron Duke’s communications with Britain; or, alternatively, you could find Boney moving further east, to imperil Blücher’s lines of communication with the Rhine. The choice was wide open, and so the battles on this 1815 rerun might well occur far away from Hougomont’s woods and Ligny brook. Inevitably though, in this system, which stressed that what went on pre battle was at least as important as battle itself, the battles you saw on your map were fought with a very broad brush – not without style or consideration of battle factors such as cavalry finishing a rout, or the French Grand Battery, but not ever a battle “in little” as other designs might seek to attempt. Weather? Well that was certainly present, but I felt it was not quite right. The game insisted, as I recall, that it was going to tip down on the 17th as it historically did. But, given how many other what-ifs you were working with, and how much Belgium you could be in, I always felt that this game needed to be less set about when the bad weather came, if at all, and where it fell
if it ever did. Oh, and where was I when I got this game? At home, waiting for the parcel to arrive. Battles of the Hundred DaysHundred Days This was essentially a Kevin Zucker operational model tied down to the actual Waterloo campaign territory. It came in a tiny box, with a tiny bland map, utterly unremarkable units and a totally unappealing rulebook. Nevertheless, all the orders and logistics/admin stuff was there, but sometimes you cannot overcome disappointing components and a sense that this is the wrong game in the wrong format, lingering away in the wrong box. I played it a few times at uni, and it then followed me home looking for love – but thirty years on, it still has not had any. L’Armée du NordArmee du Nord Just in terms of physical size, the biggest game on the 1815 campaign. It still pertains to the actual history, but the amount of room around the actual lines of advance and retreat opened up broader options. As I recall, I got this game in a London shop, where, having money to spend and wanting to spend it wisely, I spent ages in this large basement area (where the wargames were) prompting the owner to come down and make sure I had not collapsed or something. The game had weather, a sense of time and command, and a neat effect of distinguishing some casualties as men shook loose from units as stragglers or lightly wounded, from those who were clearly never going to prime a musket again. Perhaps the biggest issue with this game was its sheer physical size – you could play the whole campaign on three maps, or go for a specific day (guess what the choices were) where two of the three maps were in play. I never had room for three maps, and barely enough table space for two. As a Clash of Arms game it was attractive, but plain too big for me. Maybe others could cope, but I am tempted to say this was another game where working with a map divided into areas might have condensed things down whilst keeping options open. Waterloo Fate of FranceLDG_WaterlooFateofFrance My most recent campaign acquisition, and talking of areas, this is a game with an area divided campaign map. You move your forces on this, with a reasonable amount of room off the historic beaten track; but when it came to battle, you moved everything onto one of a number of battle mats, which contained, depending on the location, actual or representative terrain of the sort of area you were in. If you want to talk about time in this game, it is hard not to turn the issue of time into a look at the two speed nature of the design. This can be problem with games which seek to do things two different ways – sometimes the two levels marry well together
and sometimes they do not. Avalanche Press’ copious range of naval titles, for example, combine an operational level and a tactical battle system, which, despite its broad strokes, is still reasonably involved. The problem with Fate of France’s two tier system, at least for me, is that the battle tier has not got the scope it needed and can feel like a poor man’s simulation of anything that could or did occur. In plain terms, the battlefield maps are a tad too small, and, surprising for an L2 product, the battlefield graphics are utterly uninspiring. In a sense, it rather negates the ease of area movement at operations level to then have to nudge and squeeze the attractive units onto small unattractive maps. For me, bogging the game down with a fiddly, awkward battle provision was not the way to go. On the other hand, the rules are pretty straightforward, and many of the right elements are present
even if the box does not fit anywhere. Napoleon Napoleonnew-cover-400 This would have been my most recent 1815 purchase in its deluxe form, only I already had the game from some years back in an earlier Columbia version. Like The Emperor Returns, there are a great many options for the French advance as the map covered a good amount of Belgium – albeit, in its earlier form, on a map of such limited proportions it could have been mistaken in some countries for a stamp. Well, that is a bit of an exaggeration, but it was not a big map, so the new version was worth getting if only to put my broad sweeps on a broader operational canvas. Of course, from certain perspectives, this game could be ridiculed for its notable list of missing “essentials.” There is no weather; no real sense of command and control other than a basic limit to how many “group” moves the different armies can make in any given turn, and the battle system never seems to run out of Q&A prompts. But dammit, this is the game which did fog of war better than any other game in history – it helps that this is the “Campaign Daddy” of all campaigns, with tension and consequences abounding. Furthermore, whatever the quirks of the combat system (which now includes an abstracted provision of terrain) it does marry well with the operational pace of the broader gameplay, and was surely a better model for how things might have been done in Waterloo Fate of France. To put it plainly, this is still the best 1815 campaign simulation out there. I do not care what it does not have, because that is utterly secondary to the beautiful simplicity of a game that highlighted the essential campaign quandaries of all three armies. Conclusion Next year we will be at the bi-centennial of Waterloo, and naturally the mind turns to what 1815 offerings the hobby will delight us with in
2016
or 2017. There is surely plenty of scope for something really special: something that will marry time pressures to command limitations, and add weather, fog of war, drama and panoply. I just hope whatever arrives, whenever it arrives, is not too big, too complex, vexing, two paced,
the campaign, duly realized, will do enough of that in itself. About the Author Paul Paul has been involved in the hobby since the early 1970s. Of largely Belgian ancestry on his father’s side, and English (Yorkshire) on his mother’s, after finishing his education he worked in tourism and student services, and also spent some time in the former West Germany. He met his wife Boo in 1990, and they married a couple of years later. Paul his from a long line of former servicemen – one grandfather was a sergeant in the BEF of 1914, whilst two of his great grandfathers were to killed whilst serving with the Royal Navy. His own father, who was born in Britain, served with the army in Malaya in the early 1950s.</p> 19303012 2014-09-01 00:03:31 2014-09-01 00:03:31 open open waterloo-games-19303012 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Smokey the Bear http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/31/smokey-the-bear-19299794/ Sun, 31 Aug 2014 05:17:14 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Smokey the Bear Where There’s Smoke September 1, 2014 Issue Only You By Ian Frazier http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/01/only-you?utm_source=tny&utm_campaign=generalsocial&utm_medium=twitter&mbid=social_twitter Alley Pond Park, in Queens, sounds small, as if it could fit between a couple of high-rises. In fact, the park stretches for more than a mile and a half and covers six hundred and fifty-five acres that seem almost to be in another dimension, coexisting as they do with the Cross Island Parkway, Northern Boulevard, the Long Island Expressway, the Douglaston Parkway, Union Turnpike, and the Grand Central Parkway, all of which insinuate their multiple lanes through and along the park and curl their intricate cloverleafs over the green of its map like sprung violin strings. On the highways, you’re barely aware of the park, and in the park the highways are a distant noise. One of the park’s entrances winds among tall, shadowy, redwood-size columns of concrete that support an elevated section of road. Smokey the Bear was in the park the other day, walking around in an open, grassy area and having his picture taken with people. The occasion was his seventieth birthday; on August 9, 1944, the U.S. Forest Service and the Ad Council decided to use a fictional bear named Smokey as the mascot for their campaign to prevent forest fires. Later, a real bear who survived a New Mexico forest fire shared the name, but the classic Smokey remains the anthropomorphized bipedal bear in the poster, with the ranger hat and the shovel. As he strolled in a stately, slightly syncopated manner, well-wishers kept asking Smokey if he was hot in all that fur, but an occasional shrug was the only reply. He never once spoke. His eyes were set back under the brim of his hat and the overhang of his brow, and he made his point by silent moral authority. To look into his eyes was to hear the pulse of your own fire-using, match-tossing, corrupted human heart. Maybe there were a lot of Smokeys at large in American parks on that particular afternoon. This Smokey had the sponsorship of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, and its representatives had hung the pink crêpe-paper streamers in an oak tree, and set up the tables where kids could make birthday cards for Smokey, and provided the chocolate- or vanilla-frosted birthday cupcakes, and arranged for the various instructional booths—the N.Y.C. Fire Department’s Fire Safety Education, the D.E.C.’s Division of Lands and Forests, and the N.Y.C. Department of Sanitation’s Compost Project, among others. At the Fire Safety booth, the firefighters Lois Mungay and Stephen Comer were remembering some notable urban brush fires. “By Howard Beach, one time, the dry phragmites reeds were burning like crazy out beyond Cross Bay Boulevard, and we were hauling the hoses around back there in the brush,” Comer said. “We couldn’t even see where the fire was!” “Yeah—you just hear a crackling in the distance, like a fireplace,” said Mungay. “The chief was radioing us—‘It’s to your left! It’s to your right!’ ” Comer said. “Haulin’ those hoses everyplace in the reeds, finally I collapsed. They had to carry me out.” “Did you have to go in the hyperbaric chamber?” “No, it was just exhaustion. But, I’ll tell you, the experience gave me new respect for the guys fightin’ fires out West.” Just then, Smokey ambled by the booth, giving the thumbs-up sign. “Hey, Smokey! But where’s his little sidekick—what’s-his-name, Boo-Boo Bear?” Mungay asked. “That’s Yogi Bear’s little sidekick. In the cartoon. Not Smokey the Bear—different bear,” Comer said. A lot of other things were going on in this corner of the park. To one side of Smokey’s party, a group of about thirty mostly Asian young men and women were holding a get-acquainted picnic for the bridesmaids and groomsmen of a wedding planned for September. On the other side was a Spanish-speaking birthday party with a “Dora the Explorer” theme for a two-year-old girl. From a farther-off cookout, guys playing Frisbee and holding Solo cups in their free hands ran past Smokey without paying him much mind. Smokey stood bare-chested (aside from his fur) and unshod (ditto); his ranger hat and a pair of Wrangler bluejeans constituted his only clothing. His head fit onto his shoulders so well that the seam could hardly be seen. In true bear fashion, his full-length profile increased substantially at the middle. A man came up to him and asked, “Hey, Smokey—what size are your jeans?” Smokey fixed the man with a long, level, heart-stopping gaze. The man seemed to shrivel slightly. The bear crossed his forelegs across his chest twice, and then held them in a three-o’clock position: “X X L.” His expression didn’t change. ♦ [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19299794 2014-08-31 05:17:14 2014-08-31 05:17:14 open open smokey-the-bear-19299794 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Lt. Walter G. Haut Roswell base public information officer http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/31/lt-walter-g-haut-roswell-base-public-information-officer-19299768/ Sun, 31 Aug 2014 04:58:07 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan http://roswellproof.homestead.com/haut.html Lt. Walter G. Haut Roswell base public information officer "deathbed" affidavit to seeing spacecraft & bodies On UFO Updates on November 17, 2007, Kevin Randle also wrote that a man he interviewed in the mid-1990s, 1st Lt. Richard C. Harris, Jr., said that he met Haut near a base hangar and Haut told him at that time about seeing a dead alien body. Harris said Haut suggested he take a quick look, but Harris decided against this. (Harris, the base asst. financial officer, also said he helped cover up the paper trail of expenses involved in the recovery.) Tom Carey and Donald Schmitt also remark how Haut commonly dropped hints that he knew more than he was letting on to. Haut's common closing remarks in public appearances or in interviews was, "It wasn't any type of weather balloon. I believe it was a UFO! Just don't ask me why!" Haut started to become more publicly forthcoming in 2000. He gave a lengthy recorded oral history with researchers Wendy Connors and Dennis Balthauser, people he knew well and trusted. Haut stipulated the interview was not to be released until after his death. (Haut died in December 2005). In the interview (transcript) Haut first disclosed he saw the craft and small bodies in one of the hangars. He also disclosed that Gen. Roger Ramey, one of the architects of the weather balloon cover-up, had flown in for the staff morning meeting on July 8, and helped decide on how to deal with the situation. (Wendy Connors in private email, told me that Haut was already telling her privately about Ramey and knowing something about the bodies even before this interview.) In December 2002, Haut filled out a notarized affidavit (immediately below), that was sealed and again not to be publicly disclosed until after his death. A copy first appeared in the June 2007 book Witness to Roswell by Tom Carey and Don Schmitt, released with permission of Haut's surviving family. New Nov. 2008! Schmitt and Haut's daughter Julie Shuster afterwards revealed that the affidavit was drafted by Schmitt, with Haut's approval, after years of conversations with Haut. Haut then carefully reviewed Schmitt's emailed draft for accuracy, both privately and with Shuster present. He made no changes before signing in front of Shuster, a notary, and an outside witness. According to Schmitt, a doctor had just reviewed the status of Haut's health and judged him to be of sound mind. For Shuster's detailed comments in the September MUFON Journal about the process behind the affidavit, click here. In the affidavit, Haut again said that he had seen the crash object and bodies in a hangar (Hangar 84 or P-3). Col. Blanchard, a close friend his entire life, made a point of taking him out there. Haut also disclosed new information, such as personally handling the debris during the morning meeting, which he said was unlike anything he or anyone else there had ever seen before, going out to one of the crash sites (probably the large Foster Ranch debris field) and bringing debris back to his office. He also revealed that the second main crash site with the object and bodies was about 40 miles north of Roswell and had been found by civilians on July 7. He first became aware of both crash sites by the afternoon of Monday, July 7, after returning to duty from the 4th of July weekend. A key topic of discussion at the morning meeting was how to deal with the situation, since members of the press and public already knew something was going on. Haut gave insight into the reasoning behind Blanchard's perplexing flying disc press release which Haut delivered to the local Roswell media. Gen. Ramey wished to divert attention away from the more important craft/body site by acknowledging the remoter, less accessible debris site, but providing few details. Haut believed Ramey was acting under direction of his superiors at the Pentagon. It was discussed whether to tell the public the full truth, but this was decided against, and thus began a cover-up that continues to this day. Haut also mentioned being aware of teams sent out to both sites for months afterwards to search for any remaining evidence. This provided some corroboration for Bill Brazel's story (son of rancher Mack Brazel) of having debris samples confiscated from him by such a team a few months later. Haut is far from alone in his claims to seeing alien bodies, a spacecraft or strange debris. Click on the links at the top for other such accounts about non-human bodies or strange debris, such as Frederick Benthal and Eli Benjamin, two other military alien body eyewitnesses. The writeup on mortician Glenn Dennis has numerous other mostly second-hand accounts. A number of these center around base Hangar 84 or P-3 mentioned by Haut, where crash debris, craft, and bodies were taken for processing and shipment. The heavily guarded B-29 crate flight to Fort Worth on July 9, the day after Haut's viewing of the bodies/craft in the hangar, is strongly suspected of carrying bodies. See also my review of the Carey/Schmitt book for an overview of the accounts. According to Carey & Schmitt, Haut waited until the end of his life to reveal this information because he had promised Col. Blanchard to not disclose it while he was alive. Haut may have had another personal reason. He was well-aware how other major Roswell witnesses had been savaged by debunkers, a prime example being Jesse Marcel, the intelligence officer. By initially denying direct knowledge of the more controversial aspects about Roswell, Haut would be denying critics a convenient target. However, with Haut's now-public interview and affidavit confessing to being an eyewitness to the debris, spacecraft, and bodies, he will no doubt be attacked as a liar who changed his story, a senile old man, or even worse. Haut's "deathbed" affidavit is sure to stir up a huge heated controversy. Once a public figure like Haut states that there really was a flying saucer crash and alien bodies and he saw it with his own eyes, there is never any returning to the quiet life. Walter Haut was the public information officer at Roswell base during the Roswell incident of July 1947. In interviews dating back to the 1980s, he said he was mostly out-of-the-loop. His basic story was that on the morning of July 8, base commander Col. William Blanchard had dictated to him a press release that they had obtained a flying disc from a nearby ranch and were flying it on to "higher headquarters." He said he thought the original press release was the truth and he was convinced "the material recovered was some type of craft from outer space." (1993 affidavit) He was pretty sure Blanchard must have seen the debris before issuing the press release and said Blanchard would never make a mistake of confusing the recovered material with a weather balloon.. Haut, who lived in Roswell, became one of the most interviewed and public Roswell witnesses and key advocate of a saucer crash, yet continued to publicly disclaim personal knowledge of the debris or of the actual craft and recovered bodies as reported by other witnesses. However, Haut's on-the-record public statements differed from some of his private ones. E.g., Robert Shirkey Jr., son of Robert Shirkey, base assistant operations officer, disclosed on a recent Art Bell show that Haut told his father, a good friend, about seeing the bodies clear back in 1989. Shirkey Jr., said his father also told him this in 1989. (Art Bell show, June 30, 2007, 3rd hour) Shirkey Sr. in his 1991 affidavit also hinted at this when he stated "I learned later that... the bodies were laid out in Hanger 84." An excerpt of Shirkey Jr.'s comments about being told of the bodies are below, including statements about the character of the men involved, whom he knew personally, having grown up in Roswell. (See 2 minutes into clip for body comments.) Lt. Walter G. Haut Roswell base public information officer "deathbed" affidavit to seeing spacecraft & bodies On UFO Updates on November 17, 2007, Kevin Randle also wrote that a man he interviewed in the mid-1990s, 1st Lt. Richard C. Harris, Jr., said that he met Haut near a base hangar and Haut told him at that time about seeing a dead alien body. Harris said Haut suggested he take a quick look, but Harris decided against this. (Harris, the base asst. financial officer, also said he helped cover up the paper trail of expenses involved in the recovery.) Tom Carey and Donald Schmitt also remark how Haut commonly dropped hints that he knew more than he was letting on to. Haut's common closing remarks in public appearances or in interviews was, "It wasn't any type of weather balloon. I believe it was a UFO! Just don't ask me why!" Haut started to become more publicly forthcoming in 2000. He gave a lengthy recorded oral history with researchers Wendy Connors and Dennis Balthauser, people he knew well and trusted. Haut stipulated the interview was not to be released until after his death. (Haut died in December 2005). In the interview (transcript) Haut first disclosed he saw the craft and small bodies in one of the hangars. He also disclosed that Gen. Roger Ramey, one of the architects of the weather balloon cover-up, had flown in for the staff morning meeting on July 8, and helped decide on how to deal with the situation. (Wendy Connors in private email, told me that Haut was already telling her privately about Ramey and knowing something about the bodies even before this interview.) In December 2002, Haut filled out a notarized affidavit (immediately below), that was sealed and again not to be publicly disclosed until after his death. A copy first appeared in the June 2007 book Witness to Roswell by Tom Carey and Don Schmitt, released with permission of Haut's surviving family. New Nov. 2008! Schmitt and Haut's daughter Julie Shuster afterwards revealed that the affidavit was drafted by Schmitt, with Haut's approval, after years of conversations with Haut. Haut then carefully reviewed Schmitt's emailed draft for accuracy, both privately and with Shuster present. He made no changes before signing in front of Shuster, a notary, and an outside witness. According to Schmitt, a doctor had just reviewed the status of Haut's health and judged him to be of sound mind. For Shuster's detailed comments in the September MUFON Journal about the process behind the affidavit, click here. In the affidavit, Haut again said that he had seen the crash object and bodies in a hangar (Hangar 84 or P-3). Col. Blanchard, a close friend his entire life, made a point of taking him out there. Haut also disclosed new information, such as personally handling the debris during the morning meeting, which he said was unlike anything he or anyone else there had ever seen before, going out to one of the crash sites (probably the large Foster Ranch debris field) and bringing debris back to his office. He also revealed that the second main crash site with the object and bodies was about 40 miles north of Roswell and had been found by civilians on July 7. He first became aware of both crash sites by the afternoon of Monday, July 7, after returning to duty from the 4th of July weekend. A key topic of discussion at the morning meeting was how to deal with the situation, since members of the press and public already knew something was going on. Haut gave insight into the reasoning behind Blanchard's perplexing flying disc press release which Haut delivered to the local Roswell media. Gen. Ramey wished to divert attention away from the more important craft/body site by acknowledging the remoter, less accessible debris site, but providing few details. Haut believed Ramey was acting under direction of his superiors at the Pentagon. It was discussed whether to tell the public the full truth, but this was decided against, and thus began a cover-up that continues to this day. Haut also mentioned being aware of teams sent out to both sites for months afterwards to search for any remaining evidence. This provided some corroboration for Bill Brazel's story (son of rancher Mack Brazel) of having debris samples confiscated from him by such a team a few months later. Haut is far from alone in his claims to seeing alien bodies, a spacecraft or strange debris. Click on the links at the top for other such accounts about non-human bodies or strange debris, such as Frederick Benthal and Eli Benjamin, two other military alien body eyewitnesses. The writeup on mortician Glenn Dennis has numerous other mostly second-hand accounts. A number of these center around base Hangar 84 or P-3 mentioned by Haut, where crash debris, craft, and bodies were taken for processing and shipment. The heavily guarded B-29 crate flight to Fort Worth on July 9, the day after Haut's viewing of the bodies/craft in the hangar, is strongly suspected of carrying bodies. See also my review of the Carey/Schmitt book for an overview of the accounts. According to Carey & Schmitt, Haut waited until the end of his life to reveal this information because he had promised Col. Blanchard to not disclose it while he was alive. Haut may have had another personal reason. He was well-aware how other major Roswell witnesses had been savaged by debunkers, a prime example being Jesse Marcel, the intelligence officer. By initially denying direct knowledge of the more controversial aspects about Roswell, Haut would be denying critics a convenient target. However, with Haut's now-public interview and affidavit confessing to being an eyewitness to the debris, spacecraft, and bodies, he will no doubt be attacked as a liar who changed his story, a senile old man, or even worse. Haut's "deathbed" affidavit is sure to stir up a huge heated controversy. Once a public figure like Haut states that there really was a flying saucer crash and alien bodies and he saw it with his own eyes, there is never any returning to the quiet life. . 1993 AFFIDAVIT OF WALTER HAUT (1) My name is Walter Haut (2) My address is: XXXXXXXXXX (3) I am retired. (4) In July 1947, I was stationed at the Roswell Army Air base serving as the base Public Information Officer. At approximately 9:30 AM on July 8, I received a call from Col. William Blanchard, the base commander, who said he had in his possession a flying saucer or parts thereof. He said it came from a ranch northwest of Roswell, and that the base Intelligence Officer, Major Jesse Marcel, was going to fly the material to Fort Worth. (5) Col. Blanchard told me to write a news release about the operation and to deliver it to both newspapers and the two radio stations in Roswell. He felt that he wanted the local media to have the first opportunity at the story. I went first to KGFL, then to KSWS, then to the Daily Record and finally to the Morning Dispatch. (6) The next day, I read in the newspaper that General Roger Ramey in Fort Worth had said the object was a weather balloon. (7) I believe Col. Blanchard saw the material, because he sounded positive about what the material was. There is no chance that he would have mistaken it for a weather balloon. Neither is their any chance that Major Marcel would have been mistaken. (8) In 1980, Jesse Marcel told me that the material photographed in Gen. Ramey's office was not the material he had recovered. (9) I am convinced that the material recovered was some type of craft from outer space. (10) I have not been paid nor given anything of value to make this statement, and it is the truth to the best of my recollection. Signed: Walter G. Haut 5-14-93 Signature witnessed by: M. Littell (?) [Source: Karl Pflock, Roswell in Perspective, 1994] .NEW 2007! 2002 SEALED AFFIDAVIT OF WALTER G. HAUT DATE: December 26, 2002 WITNESS: Chris Xxxxxx NOTARY: Beverlee Morgan (1) My name is Walter G. Haut (2) I was born on June 2, 1922 (3) My address is 1405 W. 7th Street, Roswell, NM 88203 (4) I am retired. (5) In July, 1947, I was stationed at the Roswell Army Air Base in Roswell, New Mexico, serving as the base Public Information Officer. I had spent the 4th of July weekend (Saturday, the 5th, and Sunday, the 6th) at my private residence about 10 miles north of the base, which was located south of town. (6) I was aware that someone had reported the remains of a downed vehicle by midmorning after my return to duty at the base on Monday, July 7. I was aware that Major Jesse A. Marcel, head of intelligence, was sent by the base commander, Col. William Blanchard, to investigate. (7) By late in the afternoon that same day, I would learn that additional civilian reports came in regarding a second site just north of Roswell. I would spend the better part of the day attending to my regular duties hearing little if anything more. (8) On Tuesday morning, July 8, I would attend the regularly scheduled staff meeting at 7:30 a.m. Besides Blanchard, Marcel; CIC [Counterintelligence Corp] Capt. Sheridan Cavitt; Col. James I. Hopkins, the operations officer; Lt. Col. Ulysses S. Nero, the supply officer; and from Carswell AAF in Fort Worth, Texas, Blanchard's boss, Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey and his chief of staff, Col. Thomas J. Dubose were also in attendance. The main topic of discussion was reported by Marcel and Cavitt regarding an extensive debris field in Lincoln County approx. 75 miles NW of Roswell. A preliminary briefing was provided by Blanchard about the second site approx. 40 miles north of town. Samples of wreckage were passed around the table. It was unlike any material I had or have ever seen in my life. Pieces which resembled metal foil, paper thin yet extremely strong, and pieces with unusual markings along their length were handled from man to man, each voicing their opinion. No one was able to identify the crash debris. (9) One of the main concerns discussed at the meeting was whether we should go public or not with the discovery. Gen. Ramey proposed a plan, which I believe originated from his bosses at the Pentagon. Attention needed to be diverted from the more important site north of town by acknowledging the other location. Too many civilians were already involved and the press already was informed. I was not completely informed how this would be accomplished. (10) At approximately 9:30 a.m. Col. Blanchard phoned my office and dictated the press release of having in our possession a flying disc, coming from a ranch northwest of Roswell, and Marcel flying the material to higher headquarters. I was to deliver the news release to radio stations KGFL and KSWS, and newspapers the Daily Record and the Morning Dispatch. (11) By the time the news release hit the wire services, my office was inundated with phone calls from around the world. Messages stacked up on my desk, and rather than deal with the media concern, Col Blanchard suggested that I go home and "hide out." (12) Before leaving the base, Col. Blanchard took me personally to Building 84 [AKA Hangar P-3], a B-29 hangar located on the east side of the tarmac. Upon first approaching the building, I observed that it was under heavy guard both outside and inside. Once inside, I was permitted from a safe distance to first observe the object just recovered north of town. It was approx. 12 to 15 feet in length, not quite as wide, about 6 feet high, and more of an egg shape. Lighting was poor, but its surface did appear metallic. No windows, portholes, wings, tail section, or landing gear were visible. (13) Also from a distance, I was able to see a couple of bodies under a canvas tarpaulin. Only the heads extended beyond the covering, and I was not able to make out any features. The heads did appear larger than normal and the contour of the canvas suggested the size of a 10 year old child. At a later date in Blanchard's office, he would extend his arm about 4 feet above the floor to indicate the height. (14) I was informed of a temporary morgue set up to accommodate the recovered bodies. (15) I was informed that the wreckage was not "hot" (radioactive). (16) Upon his return from Fort Worth, Major Marcel described to me taking pieces of the wreckage to Gen. Ramey's office and after returning from a map room, finding the remains of a weather balloon and radar kite substituted while he was out of the room. Marcel was very upset over this situation. We would not discuss it again. (17) I would be allowed to make at least one visit to one of the recovery sites during the military cleanup. I would return to the base with some of the wreckage which I would display in my office. (18) I was aware two separate teams would return to each site months later for periodic searches for any remaining evidence. (19) I am convinced that what I personally observed was some type of craft and its crew from outer space. (20) I have not been paid nor given anything of value to make this statement, and it is the truth to the best of my recollection. Signed: Walter G. Haut December 26, 2002 Signature witnessed by: Chris Xxxxxxx [Source: Tom Carey & Donald Schmitt, Witness to Roswell, 2007] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19299768 2014-08-31 04:58:07 2014-08-31 04:58:07 open open lt-walter-g-haut-roswell-base-public-information-officer-19299768 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan In the Public Interest: The Crime of Overbilling Healthcare Ralph Nader http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/30/in-the-public-interest-the-crime-of-overbilling-healthcare-ralph-nader-19298450/ Sat, 30 Aug 2014 19:21:13 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan In the Public Interest: The Crime of Overbilling Healthcare Ralph Nader August 29, 2014 Over twenty years ago, Pat Palmer, in her own words, “stumbled upon a $400 overcharge in a bill my father received for a routine medical procedure.” That might have become the costliest “overcharge” the gouging, overbilling health care industry ever inflicted on itself. Because it led Ms. Palmer, whom Steve Brill (author of the Time Magazine cover story, “Why Medical Bills are Killing Us,” April 4, 2013) called “one of my earliest tutors as I tried to figure out the dysfunctional world of medical economics and billing,” to start a business investigating the overbilling of patients. Located in Roanoke, Virginia, Medical Billing Advocates of America (MBAA) (billadvocates.com) makes money by saving patients money. No savings, no charge. In twenty years, she has collected a multitude of cases of doctors, hospitals and insurance companies overcharging. This evidence reflects routine, everyday overbilling in the many billions of dollars a year. How extensive is this commercial crime wave? The nation’s expert on computerized billing fraud, Malcolm Sparrow, who is an applied mathematician at Harvard, estimates medical billing fraud adds up to a minimum sum of $270 billion a year or at least ten percent of all health care expenses. His classic book, License to Steal, showed that these ripoffs are not just clerical errors or computer malfunctions. The systemic fraud goes far beyond the organized criminal syndicates defrauding Medicare that the FBI raids once in a while. The frauds are designed with corporate interests in mind to filch your wallet directly or under the nose of unobservant insurers, from the very design of billing statements to the manipulation of codes. Pat Palmer is out with a paperback titled Surviving Your Medical Bills, which is self-published by her firm, MBAA. Ms. Palmer explained she almost gave up on “all the rules and regulations that no one is enforcing.” It’s a good thing she didn’t. Instead, Ms. Palmer decided to rile up the patients and their families directly with her book by describing how outrageously brazen billing practices are (not just an aberration) and showing how people can become common-sense investigators if they receive these shocking bills. Start with the fact that about eighty percent of all medical bills contain errors, with the average error being $1,300. Most of these overbillings favor, unsurprisingly, the sellers (euphemistically called “the providers”). Ms. Palmer says the situation has been getting worse. With the number of diagnostic codes growing from 17,000 to about 60,000 under Obamacare, to supposedly improve efficiency, the system has become even more complicated, with hospitals and few others knowing how to game or beat the system. She lists many of the ways that medical bills are hugely inflated, using the technique known as unbundling, when tests and procedures are broken down into their individual components, which allows for double or triple billing. Some hospitals also, by their own admission, incorporate their overhead in the itemized pricing of even simple items like $20 aspirins or $15 disposable razors. An example of double-billing technique is when a patient is charged thousands of dollars a day for being in an intensive care unit (ICU) and then also charged for the ventilator which is already factored into the cost of the ICU. Hospitals charge for their mistakes as in the radiology department. Another example is when they charge, say $12, for each time a nurse brings you an aspirin, even though you’re paying for these hospital services in your room rate. Transporting that aspirin is called an “oral administration fee.” Gobbleygook names are omnipresent in these bills. You can get these itemizations by refusing to accept a “summary bill,” and ask, as is your right under state law, to receive an itemized bill which sometimes will extend to pages of computer printout in inscrutable code that you can then demand an explanation in ordinary English. Hospital billings for similar services or items vary wildly and arbitrarily. Ms. Palmer found a hospital charging $444.78 for a 10-milligram vial of the neuromuscular blocking drug Norcuron. She then found another hospital “charging $17.90 for the very same 10-milligram vial.” In her book, she often refers to documented examples of massive overbilling on major surgeries, major medical equipment and lesser items. People have been charged for phantom procedures, nominal physician visits, for hospital employees transporting specimens down a few floors to the labs. Patients, are charged for omnibus services and products, then charged again and again for the pieces. Now obviously there are variations as well in levels of honesty and fraud between institutions and practices. But overall, what Palmer and Sparrow are writing about is, arguably, our country’s biggest commercial crime wave. However, strangely, prosecutors reserve their few grand jury indictments largely for the criminal underworld stealing from Medicare or other insurers. For the corporate establishment, there are always the easy ways out such as confessing error, but not intent, when caught or arguing reasonable industry practices. They quickly correct the specific bill of its offending bloat and satisfy the complaining patient, but nothing changes overall. Clearly the current criminal laws do not adequately prevent such computerized theft and need to be amended to account for this fraud. Furthermore, if our nation followed the example of other countries and transitioned to a universal full Medicare for-all-system, this would end fee for service and the Pat Palmers would be out of business (see singlepayeraction.org for more information). The main point of this book is that if enough outraged or concerned patients can follow Pat Palmer’s clear roadmap and challenge the bilkers, maybe the law enforcers will get the message and maybe the lawmakers will give these law enforcers the budgets to stop these widespread corporate crimes. follow on Twitter | friend on Facebook | forward to a friend Copyright © 2014 Nader.Org, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in at our website. Our mailing address is: Nader.Org P.O. Box 19367 Washington, DC 20036 [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19298450 2014-08-30 19:21:13 2014-08-30 19:21:13 open open in-the-public-interest-the-crime-of-overbilling-healthcare-ralph-nader-19298450 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Is There Such A Thing As A 'Good Psychopath'? byLinton Weeks http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/24/is-there-such-a-thing-as-a-good-psychopath-bylinton-weeks-19250783/ Sun, 24 Aug 2014 20:36:54 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Is There Such A Thing As A 'Good Psychopath'? by Linton Weeks August 21, 201411:11 AM ET Man in a white mask standing in the snow beside a gray river. kuzmafoto.com/iStockphoto Oxymoronic, isn't it, the idea of a "good psychopath"? But in their just published book, The Good Psychopath's Guide to Success, Andy McNab and Kevin Dutton argue that relying on some psychopathic traits can lead to a more successful life. Andy is a British Special Air Service veteran and novelist; Kevin is an Oxford University psychologist. Kevin . Andy says . Their checklist of psychopathic traits includes: charisma, charm, coolness under pressure, fearlessness, focus, impulsivity, lack of conscience, mental toughness, reduced empathy and ruthlessness. "None of these characteristics are inherently bad in themselves," Kevin says. "When they become dysfunctional is when they are deployed inflexibly in the wrong contexts." On the other hand, functional psychopaths — according to the book — are able to modulate their feelings to be more productive in business, in politics and in life. The Path To Psychopathy Don't we already have enough psychopaths in the world? we ask Kevin. By encouraging people to get in touch with their inner psychopath, aren't you removing guilt and shame and conscience from the equation? Won't that be deleterious to society? "I'm not saying that psychopaths per se are good for society," Kevin says. "A pure psychopath is going to ruin his or her life and also the lives of those who they come into contact with." But Kevin does believe that certain psychopathic characteristics, such as those listed above, "can — when dialed up at certain levels, in certain combinations and in certain contexts — predispose one to success." No Such Thing The whole idea of a "good psychopath" has succeeded in upsetting Lillian Glass, a who has written or co-written a raft of books including Toxic People: 10 Ways of Dealing with People Who Make Your Life Miserable and A Guide to Identifying Terrorists Through Body Language. "The words 'psychopath' and 'success' should never be in the same sentence," Lillian says. "Psychopaths are dangerous people, and to encourage someone to act like a psychopath is both irresponsible and dangerous." She does not subscribe to the notion that we all have some psychopath within us. "You either are one or you are not one," she says. "And if you are a psychopath, you don't dial up the levels of the traits. ... It can't be done. Psychopaths don't pick and choose how ruthless or nonempathetic they will be. They are these traits, and it is not by degree." Lillian says, "All of these characteristics are wrong when they hurt others. A lack of conscience is very wrong, and an absence of one can lead to committing criminal acts on others. Ruthlessness is not a good characteristic. It is a bad characteristic." So, we ask Oxonian Kevin Dutton, can you point to a successful psychopath who has made positive contributions to the world? "Psychopathy is on a spectrum," Kevin says. "It is neither all or nothing. Nor should 'successful psychopathy' be removed from context. But someone who was pretty high on the psychopathic spectrum was Winston Churchill." Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19250783 2014-08-24 20:36:54 2014-08-24 20:36:54 open open is-there-such-a-thing-as-a-good-psychopath-bylinton-weeks-19250783 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan ‘Dead zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico is the size of Connecticut http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/19/dead-zone-in-the-gulf-of-mexico-is-the-size-of-connecticut-19183344/ Tue, 19 Aug 2014 06:36:34 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>http://artbell.com/dead-zone-in-the-gulf-of-mexico-is-the-size-of-connecticut/ ‘Dead zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico is the size of Connecticut| 379 Views | Leave a response (Reuters) – Scientists say a man-made “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico is as big as the state of Connecticut. The zone, which at about 5,000 square miles (13,000 sq km) is the second largest in the world but still smaller than in previous years, is so named because it contains no oxygen, or too little, at the Gulf floor to support bottom-dwelling fish and shrimp. The primary cause of the annual phenomenon is excess nutrient runoff from farms along the Mississippi River, which empties into the Gulf, said Gene Turner, a researcher at Louisiana State University’s Coastal Ecology Institute. The nutrients feed algae growth, which consumes oxygen when it works its way to the Gulf bottom, he said. “It’s a poster child for how we are using and abusing our natural resources,” Turner said. More via Reuters. [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19183344 2014-08-19 06:36:34 2014-08-19 06:36:34 open open dead-zone-in-the-gulf-of-mexico-is-the-size-of-connecticut-19183344 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan NEWSWEEK Young Israeli Entrepreneurs Are Flocking to Germany By Elisabeth Braw / July 3, 2014 2:00 PM EDT http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/18/newsweek-young-israeli-entrepreneurs-are-flocking-to-germany-by-elisabeth-braw-july-3-2014-2-00-pm-edt-19167509/ Mon, 18 Aug 2014 06:52:11 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>NEWSWEEK Young Israeli Entrepreneurs Are Flocking to Germany By Elisabeth Braw / July 3, 2014 2:00 PM EDT [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. -- Louis Sheehan ] Posted but NOT written by Lou Sheehan Filed Under: World, Germany, Israel When Elad Leshem graduated with an MBA two years ago, he immediately started a company. So far, so conventional. But Leshem, an Israeli, launched his business career in Berlin. “In Berlin there are a lot of resources available, including grants, subsidies and incubators, and the city is still relatively cheap,” explains Tel Aviv-born Leshem. “That allows you to kick-start your business without a lot of capital. That’s not possible in Silicon Valley. And the city is groovy, with a lot of young people.” Leshem, 33, is not the only young Israeli who has discovered the joys of Berlin. “When I moved here to go to university, people at home said, ‘Why are you moving to Germany? I’m never going to visit you,’” recalls Asaf Moses, 31, a fashion technology entrepreneur from Ra’anana outside Tel Aviv. “But since then the number of Israelis has increased at an incredible rate. Today you can easily build a company here with just highly qualified Israelis. Berlin has become the international symbol of cool instead of a symbol of the Holocaust.” Try Newsweek Print + Digital for only $1.25 per week It’s no surprise that Israel, with its approximately 4,800 startups at any given time, is seeing some of its entrepreneurs try their luck elsewhere. As far as Leshem, Moses and their fellow entrepreneurs are concerned, choosing Berlin is simply a matter of business opportunities and the cost of living, just as it is for all budding entrepreneurs. Leading venture capital firms such as Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins have recently invested in Berlin startups, and SoundCloud, the popular music-sharing service founded by two Swedes, is also based here. Though there are no reports quantifying the number of Israeli-run startups, incubators and businesses, schools all report a growing Israeli presence in the German capital. Israeli commercial attaché Hemdat Sagi alone receives around 150 inquiries from Israeli entrepreneurs and companies each year. “Israeli companies understand the potential of operating in a market of 82 million consumers, and it’s only natural for them to try and penetrate this market, which is also not so far from Israel,” Sagi explains. “Israeli companies, not just startups, offer innovative solutions in various sectors, which are synergetic with the abilities of the German industry.” Yakov Hadas-Handelsman, Israel’s ambassador to Berlin, notes it takes less time to fly from Berlin to Tel Aviv than from New York to San Francisco. Among the Berlin-based creations are InFarm, which allows people to grow micro-vegetables indoors; Capsuling Me, which helps organizations target their marketing based on their users’ online profiles; and Screemo, which allows concert audiences to choose a band’s next song by voting with their mobile devices and seeing the result appear in real time on large screens. Berlin accelerators, including media conglomerate Axel Springer’s Plug and Play, and incubators now feature Israeli startups. “The [entrepreneurs] basically just have to step off the plane and everything is set up for them,” says Axel Menneking, international director at Deutsche Telekom’s incubator, hub:raum, which already has five Israeli firms on its books and is aiming for more. “Large German companies have started approaching budding Israeli entrepreneurs as well,” he adds. “It’s in their interest to support this trend.” Berlin’s grants and subsidies to entrepreneurs form part of a deliberate strategy to position the city as an attractive business alternative to other European capitals and indeed to Germany’s own business capital, Frankfurt. The effort makes sense for this relatively poor metropolis with a per capita gross domestic product of $40,000, compared with London’s $66,000, as startups require relatively little investment and Berlin already boasts a young workforce. Israel, for its part, keeps producing talented would-be entrepreneurs. “The Israelis learn very useful skills during their conscription in the armed forces, particularly those who serve in intelligence units, where they’re constantly exposed to problems that they know nothing about, and yet they have to come up with solutions,” observes Menneking. “That’s exactly what you have to do in a startup.” The German-Israeli Chamber of Commerce has spotted the trend, recently launching an initiative called BETATEC (Berlin Tel Aviv Technology and Entrepreneurship Committee). The program will help Israelis start companies in Berlin but also send German entrepreneurs to Israeli incubators, where they’ll receive mentoring. “The idea is that this will help the German economy, but indirectly it will help the Israeli economy as well,” says Mickey Steiner, BETATEC’s director and the former Israeli CEO of German software giant SAP. To further increase Berlin’s attractiveness, BETATEC will also help Israeli firms expand more easily in Germany and beyond. Still, Berlin isn’t an entirely obvious alternative to Silicon Valley or London for ambitious young entrepreneurs. “If an Israeli does business with a Brit or American, of course it’s good, but it’s just business,” observes Hadas-Handelsman. “This is much more. The destinies of Israelis and Germans are connected because of our past. That makes the startup trend important in itself, and it goes both ways, with Germans going to Israel.” Hadas-Handelsman hopes it will help increase trade between the two countries, one of which is the world’s fifth largest economy. He recognizes the unconventional nature of the trend, noting that “some people in Israel don’t view it favorably.” But, he adds, “we have nothing against it; on the contrary, it’s a win-win for Germany and Israel.” Entrepreneurs are not the only Israelis moving to Berlin: Artists and scientists are also putting down roots. The city now features Israeli restaurants and even a German-language Israeli online magazine. Daniel Barenboim, the pianist and conductor who was born in Argentina but who holds Israeli citizenship, is music director of the Berlin State Opera. According to one estimate, 40,000 Israelis live in the German capital today; in 1925, before the rise of Nazism, there were 160,000. According to Steiner, Israelis’ risk-taking nature contributes to their startup success. It is a quality that gives Israelis a competitive advantage in Berlin, says Leshem, who recently founded a second company following the demise of his first one. “Israelis are pushy and loud, while Germans are more conformist and quiet,” he elaborates. “Israelis have a ‘Let’s do it’ attitude and less fear of failure, like you see in the U.S. When an Israeli innovates, his attitude is ‘Let’s build a fucking great company that we can sell for 1 billion euros.’ Germans are more thorough and stable. But in a startup it’s more about fast and dirty than slow and clean.” There’s just one thing Leshem doesn’t like about doing business in Berlin: the need to speak German. “It’s really easy to start a company here, and it just costs you 200 to 300 euros [$270 to $400], but to get all those wonderful subsidies you have to fill out a lot of forms in German,” he says. “German authorities don’t care whether you’re Bill Gates. They want you to fill out the forms in German.” Other entrepreneurs point out that the city’s incubators aren’t (yet) at the same level as, for example, San Francisco-based Y Combinator, which spawned Airbnb. Moses, who speaks fluent German, calls German-language skills a prerequisite for startup success in Berlin. He knows what he’s talking about, having grown his fashion technology company, FitAnalytics, which he co-founded with a German friend four years ago, to 15 employees, who work in the trendy neighborhood of Kreuzberg. But Israeli engineers with no immediate plans to start their own companies need not bother learning the language. “There’s such a shortage of engineers here that you’ll get a job the day after you land,” Moses says. According to VDI, the Association of German Engineers, each unemployed software engineer in Germany has 3.7 jobs to choose from. On top of that are Berlin’s fast-rising costs, especially rents, which increased by 2.6 percent last year. Still, the average rent is less than $8 per square meter, a bargain compared with the current range of $60 to $120 per square meter in central London. Despite the language barriers, Leshem, a German citizen thanks to his German-born maternal grandparents, who fled to Palestine before the outbreak of World War II, has no plans to leave Berlin. He says he feels he’s taking revenge on the hateful political creed that was responsible for the death of so many, including several relatives. “Today’s multicultural Berlin is history’s joke on Hitler,” he says. “Berlin of 2014 is the happy opposite of the dark Berlin of 1934.”</p> 19167509 2014-08-18 06:52:11 2014-08-18 06:52:11 open open newsweek-young-israeli-entrepreneurs-are-flocking-to-germany-by-elisabeth-braw-july-3-2014-2-00-pm-edt-19167509 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan First World War slang words we still use today http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/16/first-world-war-slang-words-we-still-use-today-19158269/ Sat, 16 Aug 2014 22:43:24 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] http://www.historyextra.com/feature/first-world-war/10-first-world-war-slang-words-we-still-use-today?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=BBCHIS-150814-NL_BBC%20History_Newsletters First World War slang words we still use today Banter, camaraderie and a satirical sense of humour helped make life bearable for the everyday Tommy in the trenches during the First World War. But, as BBC Antiques Roadshow presenter Martin Pegler explains in his new book, we unknowingly continue to use much of that slang today Wednesday 13th August 2014 Submitted by Emma McFarnon In Soldiers’ Songs and Slang of the Great War, Pegler reveals how common words and phrases such as ‘bumf’ and ‘having a chat’ originated in the trenches. Drawing on his interviews with a number of First World War veterans conducted in the 1980s, he recalls how the men were overwhelmingly positive about their experiences – they made friends for life, and the camaraderie they shared was something that many never experienced again. Here, writing for History Extra, Pegler details 10 words and phrases circulated during the war that still remain in use today: The subject of the First World War evokes many images, many of which are used repeatedly nowadays in film and TV, but they tend to concentrate on the drama and the misery of war. The reality was that it didn’t rain every day, the trenches were not knee deep in mud all year round, and soldiers were not subjected to shelling and death every day of their lives. In fact, day-to-day life was, as one veteran told me, “90 per cent sheer boredom and 10 per cent fear, but when we were frightened, we were very frightened, though you tried not to show it”. Of course there was death and destruction – there always is in war – but these men were young, energetic and above all, optimistic. Few believed anything terrible would happen to them (it was always ‘the other bloke’), and they masked their nervousness by sharing their hardships and fears with close chums. Indeed, having interviewed many veterans over the years, the overwhelming impression was that they looked back on their service in the First World War with a mixture of nostalgia and affection, tinged with sadness at the loss of friends. Above all else, the one emotion that helped them keep their sense of perspective and enabled them to endure the bad times was their uniquely British sense of humour, which appeared in even the grimmest situations, and it was the funny stories that they most often regaled us with. Much of the humour was found in their widespread use of songs and slang. Within any profession there is a language that is largely incomprehensible to outsiders, and soldiers were little different. In 1914–18, however, for the first time in Britain’s history, huge numbers of men from every conceivable walk of life had been put together in a huge citizen army, and as a result they developed their own language. But whereas in the past this slang had mostly remained within the ranks of the armed forces, during the First World War much of it was transferred by the soldiers from the western front to the home front. The songs and slang used by these men became not only popular, but almost fashionable in wartime England, and much of this has remained with us to this day. Here are 10 examples that might surprise you. 1) ‘Having a chat’ A commonplace expression today that owes its origin to that most pernicious of insects, the louse. Body lice were endemic in the trenches, and they inhabited the seams and pleats of clothing where they bred in huge numbers, causing skin rashes and itching. The expression is often ascribed to the Hindi word for a parasite, ‘chatt’, but is more possibly from an earlier medieval English word for idle gossip, ‘chateren’. Soldiers in the Napoleonic Wars certainly referred to lice as ‘chats’. During the Great War it was common to see small groups sitting around and talking as they used their fingernails, or a candle, to kill the lice. Such groups were described as men who were ‘chatting’. 2) ‘Plonk’ The now almost universal word for a bottle of wine. The British soldier has traditionally failed since time immemorial to master the pronunciation of even the simplest foreign words, and it is merely a corruption of the French ‘vin blanc’. 3) ‘Pillbox’ Prior to the war some small defensive military fortifications had been constructed, generally referred to as blockhouses. Mostly these were made of heavy timber – many were constructed during the Boer War. However, the term was only widely adopted into English during the latter part of the Great War because of the huge numbers of concrete bunkers constructed by the Germans across the flooded Flanders battlefields. They were called pillboxes due to their similarity to the small receptacles used by civilians for carrying medication. 4) ‘Blighty’ The origin of this now very British word is shrouded in mystery. It may have come from the Arabic ‘beladi’, meaning ‘my own country’, or the Hindi word ‘bilaik’, referring to a foreign place or country. For the Tommies, it meant only one thing: home. The best possible way to get there was to sustain a wound serious enough to require hospitalisation in England, which was enviously termed ‘a Blighty one’. 5) ‘Third light’ A superstition that it was bad luck to light a third cigarette from the same match. This was actually based on sound experience: it took a German sniper about five seconds at night to see, aim and fire at a light source, and a flaring match was clearly visible on a dark night from well over 500 yards. Five seconds was also about the time it took for the third man to light up. 6) ‘Tank’ The first modern armoured fighting vehicles were produced in great secrecy by Fosters of Lincoln. To prevent any hint of their purpose being discovered by German spies, workers were told they were mobile water tanks. Some were even clearly marked in Cyrillic ‘Water tanks for Russia’. The ruse certainly worked, because their first use on the Somme on 15 September 1916 was a complete surprise to the Germans. 7) ‘Sniper’ Prior to the First World War, armies had employed specialist marksmen known as ‘sharpshooters’, but when war broke out the Germans fielded thousands of highly trained riflemen, usually equipped with telescopic-sighted rifles. British officers referred to them as ‘snipers’, which harked back to the army in India in the late 18th century when officers would go bird hunting in the hills – the tiny Snipe being one of the hardest of targets to hit. From 1914 the word was widely adopted by the British press, and it has since become universal. Sniping can now also refer to sharp or snide remarks made about another person. 8) ‘Over the top’ An example of an expression that has seen a resurgence, although now with a very different meaning. Originally it referred to the physical act of launching an attack by climbing over the sandbag parapet in front of a trench – literally by going over the top. It thus became synonymous with setting off on any highly dangerous venture, usually with a slim chance of survival. It mostly died out after the war but in recent years has been revived, albeit now meaning to embark on a course of action or to make a remark that is either excessive or unnecessary. 9) ‘Shrapnel’ Often used today as a reference to the annoying, and all-but-worthless small change that accumulates in one’s pockets or purse. It is possibly the most incorrectly used word from the war, as it is invariably misapplied to describe the lethal flying splinters from high-explosive shells. In fact, it refers to the lead balls launched from airburst shells (a little like airborne shotgun cartridges) invented by Lt Henry Shrapnel of the Royal Artillery in 1784. 10) ‘Bumf’ Printed paper that is produced in huge quantities for no discernable reason, and apparently has no information value. The junk mail we all receive on a daily basis is a prime example. It is derived from the army term ‘bum-fodder’ – paper that has only one possible practical use. It is originally from prewar schoolboy slang then appropriated by the soldiers to refer to excessive paperwork. It generally referred to the endless streams of army orders that were issued from headquarters. In the middle of one particularly savage attack on the Somme, a British orderly officer received a series of communiqués from HQ demanding to know how much tinned jam was held in stores and how many pairs of socks were required. Some things never change. Soldiers’ Songs and Slang of the Great War by Martin Pegler (Osprey Publishing) is now on sale. To find out more, click here. </p> 19158269 2014-08-16 22:43:24 2014-08-16 22:43:24 open open first-world-war-slang-words-we-still-use-today-19158269 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan title-19139811 http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/15/http-nga-gov-au-dix-my-intention-with-my-blog-19139811/ Fri, 15 Aug 2014 04:32:16 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>http://nga.gov.au/dix/ [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. -- Louis Sheehan ] The Art of War Otto Dix’s Der Krieg [War] cycle 1924 Introduction | Selected works | Slideshow | Checklist | Education (pdf) Otto Dix 'Nachtliche Begegnung mit einem Irrsinnigen [Night-time encounter with a madman]' 1924 etching, aquatint Collection of the National Gallery of Australia, The Poynton Bequest 2003 © Otto Dix, Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia click to enlarge Otto Dix was born in 1891 in Untermhaus, Thuringia, the son of an ironworker. He initially trained in Gera and at the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts as a painter of wall decorations and later taught himself how to paint on canvas. He volunteered as a machine-gunner during World War I and in the autumn of 1915 he was sent to the Western Front. He was at the Somme during the major allied offensive of 1916. After the war he studied at the academies of Dresden and Dusseldorf. Together with George Grosz, he was one of the leading exponents of the artistic movement Die Neue Sachlichkeit [New Objectivity], a form of social realist art which unsentimentally examined the decadence and underlying social inequality of post-war German society. With the rise of the National Socialists in 1933, Dix was dismissed from his teaching post at the Dresden Academy. He moved south to Lake Constance and was only allowed to continue practising as an artist after he agreed to relinquish overtly political subject matter in favour of landscape painting. Dix was conscripted into the army during World War II and in 1945 was captured and put into a prisoner of war camp. He returned to Dresden after the war where his paintings became more religiously reflective of his war-time experiences. He died in 1969.[1] Der Krieg [War] 1924 arose out of Dix’s own experiences of the horrors of war. As outlined above, he had volunteered for service in the army and fought as a machine-gunner on the Western Front. He was wounded a number of times, once almost fatally. War profoundly affected him as an individual and as an artist, and he took every opportunity, both during his active service and afterwards, to document his experiences. These experiences would become the subject matter of many of his later paintings and are central to the Der Krieg cycle. Der Krieg itself, as a cycle of prints (51 in total), is consciously modelled on Goya’s [1746–1828] equally famous and equally devastating Los Desastres de la Guerra [The disasters of war]. Los Desastres detailed Goya’s own account of the horrors of the Napoleonic invasion and the Spanish War of Independence from 1808 to 1814. Goya’s cycle of 82 etchings, which he worked on for a decade after the Spanish War of Independence were not, however, published until 1863, long after his death. Like Los Desastres, Der Krieg uses a variety of etching techniques and does so with an equally astonishing facility. Similarly, it exploits the cumulative possibilities of a long sequence of images and mirrors Goya’s unflinching, stark realism in terms of its fundamental presentation. GH Hamilton describes Dix’s cycle as ‘perhaps the most powerful as well as the most unpleasant anti-war statements in modern art
It was truly this quality of unmitigated truth, truth to the most commonplace and vulgar experiences, as well as the ugly realities of psychological experience, that gave his work a strength and consistency attained by no other contemporary artist, not even by [George] Grosz
’[2] It has become a commonplace to see this cycle as an admonition against the barbarity of war. And there is no doubt that as a human document it is a powerful cautionary work. At a psychological level, however, its truth goes deeper than this. Dix was both horrified and fascinated by the experience of war. Otto Dix 'Verwundeter (Herbst 1916, Bapaume) [Wounded soldier – Autumn 1916, Bapaume]' 1924 etching, aquatint, drypoint Collection of the National Gallery of Australia, The Poynton Bequest 2003 © Otto Dix, Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia click to enlarge In 1963, explaining why he volunteered for the army in the First World War he had this to say: I had to experience how someone beside me suddenly falls over and is dead and the bullet has hit him squarely. I had to experience that quite directly. I wanted it. I’m therefore not a pacifist at all – or am I? Perhaps I was an inquisitive person. I had to see all that myself. I’m such a realist, you know, that I have to see everything with my own eyes in order to confirm that it’s like that. I have to experience all the ghastly, bottomless depths of life for myself
[3] In the same interview, he also had this to say: As a young man you don’t notice at all that you were, after all, badly affected. For years afterwards, at least ten years, I kept getting these dreams, in which I had to crawl through ruined houses, along passages I could hardly get through
[4] This nightmarish, hallucinatory quality pervades all of the Der Krieg images. Paradoxically, there is also a quality of sensuousness, an almost perverse delight in the rendering of horrific detail, which indicates that there was perhaps, in Dix’s case, an almost addictive quality to the hyper-sensory input of war. In terms of the general corpus of Dix’s work, Der Krieg occupies a central place amongst the large number of paintings and works-on-paper devoted to the theme of war. The work is astonishingly powerful and, as stated above, it remains one of the most powerful indictments of war ever conceived. It is universally regarded as one of the great masterpieces of twentieth century. Dix’s oeuvre as a whole, and Der Krieg in particular, was hugely influential on a number of other twentieth century artist such as Ben Shahn, Pablo Picasso and Robert Motherwell. Otto Dix 'Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor [Stormtroops advancing under gas]' 1924 etching, aquatint, drypoint Collection of the National Gallery of Australia, The Poynton Bequest 2003 © Otto Dix, Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia click to enlarge The etchings were printed by Kupferdruckerei O. Felsing in Charlottenburg on BSB Maschinen Butten and Kupferdruck paper under Dix’s supervision. The portfolio was published by Karl Nierendorf, Berlin, as five separate folios each of 10 prints in an edition of 70 in 1924. The edition the National Gallery of Australia has acquired is numbered 58/70. The portfolio also includes the impression of Soldat und Nonne [Soldier and nun], depicting the rape of a nun by a soldier, which was suppressed in the published version of the suite. Otto Dix is one of the greatest artists of the first half of the 20th century and his visual legacy, including his Der Krieg cycle, with its still relevant contemporary echoes, is one of the most powerful documents of man’s inhumanity to man that we have available to us today. Its acquisition represents a major coup for the Gallery having been on the Department of International Prints desiderata list for years. Mark Henshaw Curator Department of International Prints, Drawings and Illustrated Books Notes [1] Biographical details sourced from Harold Osborne [ed], The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981 and Jane Turner [ed], The Dictionary of Art, London: Macmillan, New York; distributed by Grove Dictionaries, 1996 [2] Osborne [ed]. [3] interview with Maria Wetzel at www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk [4] Also quoted at www.historical.org </p> 19139811 2014-08-15 04:32:16 2014-08-15 04:32:16 open open http-nga-gov-au-dix-my-intention-with-my-blog-19139811 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan For sale at one euro: a house in an idyllic Sicilian village http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/15/for-sale-at-one-euro-a-house-in-an-idyllic-sicilian-village-19139758/ Fri, 15 Aug 2014 04:20:15 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. -- Louis Sheehan ] Council in Gangi selling off around 20 homes for the price of a cup of coffee in the hope of attracting new life to hilltop community The Telegraph Nick Squires in Rome 4:24PM BST 06 Aug 2014 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/11016777/For-sale-at-one-euro-a-house-in-an-idyllic-Sicilian-village.html It's yours for the price of a cup of coffee - a historic house in a terracotta-tiled hill town in Italy. In fact for the price of a full English breakfast, you could snap up half a dozen of them. The mountain town of Gangi on the Madonie mountains in the Province of Palermo (Alamy) A village in Sicily which has endured decades of population decline and neglect has come up with a novel, and seemingly too-good-to-refuse offer: it is selling off empty homes for just one euro each. That's 80p at today's exchange rate. Our village is for sale on eBay 11 Jul 2014 Gangi is a hill-top town set amid the rolling wheat fields and wooded valleys of central Sicily, about an hour's drive south of the picturesque holiday resort of Cefalu. Founded in the 12th century, it boasts a castle and access to hiking trails in the surrounding countryside. The local council wants to sell around 20 houses, many of them derelict, which were bequeathed by locals who had neither the money nor the will to renovate them. The bargain-basement prices come with a few conditions, none of which are very onerous or particularly costly. Gangi, with Mt Etna in the distance; the town is an hour's drive from Cefalu (Alamy) Buyers must pay a €5,000 (£3,970) guarantee to the local council to ensure that they renovate the properties, rather than just leave them empty. The money will be redeemed once the homes are restored. Owners have five years in which to bring the houses up to a habitable standard. Most of them are in a state of disrepair, if not derelict, with the cost of renovating them estimated at around €35,000 (£28,000). Buyers would have to pay the legal costs associated with the purchase - estimated at around €6,000 (£4,760) per property, depending on its taxable value. Gangi's council first launched the unusual initiative a couple of years ago, but with none of the councillors speaking English, it received barely any attention and achieved few results. Now the village of 7,000 people has turned to Marie Wester, an English-speaking, Swedish property consultant who lives in Sicily, to help market the deal. The Ventimiglia tower in the town of Gangi (Alamy) Through a newsletter she sends out to clients, she has already had interest from four British couples as well as Swedes, Americans and Russians. "The people of Gangi want to attract foreigners to the town because they want to bring in new life," Ms Wester told The Telegraph. "Since I got involved in the sale, there has been massive interest. I think it's a good deal." After living in Italy for seven years, Ms Wester has a shrewd idea of what local builders would charge to undertake the renovation of the properties, all of which are in the historic centre of Gangi. "The houses need new roofs and floors, you'd need to put in electricity, water and sewerage and re-plaster them at the end of it all. I reckon it would cost about €35,000 per property. "The only downside I can think of is that the village is not near the coast, but it a lovely medieval town, it's very clean and well-kept and the people are friendly." Two of the houses were bought last week by an expatriate Italian businessman and his Russian wife, who are based in Abu Dhabi. "They fell in love with our village, with the tranquillity and the clean air," said Giuseppe Ferrarello, the mayor. "We've received more than a hundred telephone calls from Italy and abroad. We are ready to welcome more people with traditional hospitality." Gangi may be in the same province as Corleone, the town made notorious for its Mafia links by The Godfather books and films, but foreign buyers need have no fear of Cosa Nostra. "The Mafia exists, of course, but they are operating at a different level - they are interested in multi-million euro construction projects, not restorations like this," said Ms Wester. "Some people think that if you come here you'll see them walking down the street with guns, but it's not like that." The one-euro-a-house offer comes a month after much of a village in the Italian Alps was put on sale on eBay for €245,000 (£195,000). Calsazio had a population of around 80 a few decades ago but emigration and the drift to the cities by young people has reduced the number of locals still living there to just eight. </p> 19139758 2014-08-15 04:20:15 2014-08-15 04:20:15 open open for-sale-at-one-euro-a-house-in-an-idyllic-sicilian-village-19139758 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Russia’s Manned Moon Mission to Cost $2.8 Billion Posted on August 6, 2014 in Science http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/13/russia-s-manned-moon-mission-to-cost-2-8-billion-posted-on-august-6-2014-in-science-19129436/ Wed, 13 Aug 2014 23:40:14 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Russia’s Manned Moon Mission to Cost $2.8 Billion Posted on August 6, 2014 in Science [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] MOSCOW, August 3 (RIA Novosti) – A manned mission to the Moon will cost Russia 100 billion rubles (about $2.8 billion), Igor Mitrofanov, laboratory director at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Space Research Institute said Sunday. “An estimated cost of one project aimed at the development of an automatic lunar station is 10 billion rubles (about $280 million). The project is to be completed in five or six years. The manned lunar mission will cost ten times more,” Mitrofanov told reporters during the COSPAR Scientific Assembly in Moscow. He elaborated that prior to the manned flight it is necessary to “learn to conduct the Moon landing all over again,” and automatic lunar stations are needed for this purpose. According to Mitrofanov, one of the Space Research Institute’s partners is currently developing three stations called Luna-25 (Luna-Glob project), Luna-26 and Luna-27 under the Luna-Resource project. He elaborated that Luna-25 and Luna-27 are landers aimed to run for one year, whereas Luna-26 is an orbiter, which will monitor the Moon for two years. Mitrofanov stressed that within the next ten years lunar bases will likely to be created. A mission to the Moon has become one of Russia’s top priorities in space. Russia plans to launch three lunar spacecraft — two to surface and one to the orbit — by the end of the decade. The first mission, the long-delayed Luna-25, is slated for launch in 2016 and land at the Moon’s South Pole. The next two missions will include an orbiter to monitor the Moon in 2018 and a lander with a drill to search for water ice in 2019. Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19129436 2014-08-13 23:40:14 2014-08-13 23:40:14 open open russia-s-manned-moon-mission-to-cost-2-8-billion-posted-on-august-6-2014-in-science-19129436 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan The Case for Helping the Kurds By Fred Kaplan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/13/the-case-for-helping-the-kurds-by-fred-kaplan-19128457/ Wed, 13 Aug 2014 20:50:00 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Slate.com http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2014/08/isis_and_kurdistan_the_future_of_iraq_depends_on_a_thriving_kurdish_population.html [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] The Case for Helping the Kurds A thriving Kurdistan is necessary for a democratic Iraq. By Fred Kaplan It’s clear for lots of reasons—political, economic, strategic, electoral, opportunistic, moral, and simply sensible, to name a few—that President Obama has no desire to get drawn back into the Iraq war. So why is he bombing Islamist insurgents in the Kurdish region of Iraq and saying he might keep doing so for months? Because what he’s doing has nothing to do with getting drawn back into the Iraq war. Fred Kaplan Fred Kaplan is the author of The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War and 1959: The Year Everything Changed. This seems a paradox, to say the least, but stick with me for a minute. We can all agree that “the Iraq war” refers to the period from 2003-11, when a U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq, ousted the central Baghdad government, and dismantled all bodies of authority, thus hurling most of the country into sectarian warfare, which American commanders tried to suppress, first through crude, brutal occupation, then (in 2007) through clever counterinsurgency techniques, which played the sectarian factions off one another, vastly reducing the violence and forging a provisional truce. However, even the advocates of this new strategy, such as Gen. David Petraeus, said all along that the benefits would be temporary at best; that all U.S. forces could do was provide “breathing space” for Iraq’s political factions to get their act together. After American troops came home (under the terms of a 2008 treaty signed by George W. Bush at the insistence of Iraq’s parliament), it soon became clear that Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki had no desire to get his act together and sustain the truce with his Sunni rivals; in fact, he stepped up his persecution against them—and sectarian war re-erupted. This is the Iraq war that neither President Obama nor any sentient American should want to re-enter. Obama’s airstrikes against the Islamists’ holdings in Kurdistan are something different. Note that three paragraphs ago, in my mini-summary of the Iraq war, I noted that the 2003 ouster of Saddam Hussein’s regime and the dismantlement of all his ministries hurled “most of the country into sectarian warfare.” (The emphasis, this time, is added.) The one area of Iraq that remained nearly immune from the chaos—the one area that U.S. authorities deemed “stable” through most of the occupation—was the northern area known as Kurdistan, home to roughly 6 million Kurds. This is true, despite Kurdistan’s multiethnic population (mainly Muslims but also Yazidis, the Yarsan, Christians, and Jews) and its various conflicts over the decades with Baghdad. The main reason for Kurdistan’s stability is that in 1970 the U.S. and Iraqi governments decreed it an autonomous area. More relevant still, after the 1991 Gulf War, the U.N. Security Council, in, Resolution 688, declared the area a “safe haven” to protect Kurds from Saddam Hussein’s wrath. (He had killed thousands of Kurds with chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.) And the United States agreed to enforce the resolution with a “no-fly zone.” (In other words, all Iraqi planes trying to fly over Kurdish territory would be shot down by U.S. air or naval power.) Under this protection, Kurdistan has thrived. Its per capita income exceeds the rest of Iraq’s by 50 percent, it has free-trade zones with Turkey and Iran (both of which were once rivals or enemies), and it has solid relations with many Western companies. The Kurds’ growing wealth has sired tensions too. As Sunni-Shiite violence has turned Iraq into a borderline “failed state,” the Kurds have started making their own deals with oil companies and made moves toward their centurylong aspirations of complete independence (which the French and British colonialists thwarted after World War I by divvying Kurdish territory among the peripheries of Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Iran). This would deny Baghdad and Iraq’s Sunni Arabs of much oil revenue. Still, it’s become very clear that, if Iraq—whether as a centralized state or a loose federation—has any hopes of ever becoming stable, much less democratic, a thriving Kurdistan must be part of it, even a model for it. When ISIS (now calling itself the Islamic State, or IS) crossed into Iraq in June, many in the West expressed worry but not enough to do a lot about it. First, ISIS seemed pretty small. Second, few realized that—under Maliki’s corrupt leadership—much of the Iraqi army had become a hollow shell of its former shelf. Third, ISIS was playing on the hostility of many Sunnis to Maliki’s Shiite government, so most Western leaders said the only way to solve the problem was for the Iraqis to form a new, more inclusive government; meanwhile, if we defended what was seen as an oppressive Shiite government, we would be viewed as “Maliki’s air force” and drive still more Sunnis into ISIS’s ranks. Finally, and most pertinent in this context, it was assumed—and, at the outset, affirmed—that the Kurdish peshmerga could defend itself if ISIS moved into Kurdistan. Top Comment If we're helping the Kurds we should give them independence and finally be done with this attitude that borders can't be changed. More... -JanDeDoot 75 Comments Join In President Obama’s Aug. 11 announcement of airstrikes over Kurdistan and increased military shipments followed the first signs that ISIS could challenge the peshmerga after all. In other words, Obama’s moves do not amount to a resumption of the Iraq war but rather a necessary response, not only to a humanitarian crisis but to a mortal danger facing a vital ally. Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan</p> 19128458 2014-08-13 20:50:00 2014-08-13 20:50:00 open open the-case-for-helping-the-kurds-by-fred-kaplan-19128457 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan Ralph Nader : What the Democratic Party Does Well: Doing Itself In http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/12/ralph-nader-what-the-democratic-party-does-well-doing-itself-in-19113031/ Tue, 12 Aug 2014 07:33:18 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] What the Democratic Party Does Well: Doing Itself In Ralph Nader August 8, 2014 Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the minority leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives, just had her political consultants send out a mass mailing to women asking for money and responses to an enclosed survey of their opinions. The mass mailing duly recites the truly horrible House Republican votes against a variety of women’s health, safety and family protections and seeks to survey women’s priorities for the Congressional Democrats’ legislative agenda. Under the category titled “Employment,” there is no mention of restoring the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour, which Rep. Pelosi supports. The closest option to check was “inadequate/or no salary increase.” The Pelosi mailing, uninspiring and defensive, is another product of the Party’s political consultants who have failed them again and again in winnable House and Senate races against the worst Republican Party record in history. These consultants, as former Clinton special assistant, Bill Curry, notes, make more money from their corporate clients than from political retainers. Slick, arrogant and ever reassuring, these firms are riddled with conflicts of interests and could just as well be “Trojan horses.” The full restoration of the federal minimum wage to make up for the ravages of inflation since 1968 would take it from the present, stagnant $7.25 per hour and beyond the proposed $10.10 to $10.90 per hour. Over thirty million American workers – two thirds of them women and two thirds of them employed by large low-wage companies like Walmart and McDonald’s – would benefit from this wage restoration, and in turn would be able to strengthen the economy by increasing their consumer expenditures. There are a lot of votes out there if the Democrats go beyond lip service and push for a major media and grassroots campaign against the Congressional Republicans who are blocking a vote on this minimum wage bill. Three of four Americans favor a restored minimum wage. Some cities and states have already taken their state minimum wage toward $9.00 per hour. They’re feeling pressure from distressed workers, from growing street demonstrations and from holding their fingers to the political winds. This is an issue whose time has come. A few months ago, even Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and other out of office Republicans who are not raising money from their corporate paymasters, declared their support for increasing the minimum wage. Bill Curry flatly says that the Democrats can retain control of the Senate and take back the House by making raising the federal minimum wage a top 2014 campaign issue. The many human interest stories about the plight of underpaid workers are compelling and would motivate more voters to turn out. After being too inactive in 2010 and 2012, the labor movement has touted a restored minimum wage, lobbied at some state legislatures for a raise, and organized demonstrations of workers, backed by SEIU, in front of fast food and other big box chains. AFL-CIO chief, Richard Trumka, has been at demonstrations and has put out materials demanding that Congress act on H.R.1010 to take the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. However, organized labor can do more with multi-million dollar organizing drives and ad buys (as they did in 1996). More demonstrations in more Congressional districts and more pressure on nervous Republican incumbents to sign the pending Discharge Petition to force Republican House Speaker, John Boehner, to let the House members vote on the bill could make a difference on this important fight. Boehner is on the wrong side of this politically popular issue, but up to now he hasn’t thought the Democrats can turn this into enough votes to discharge his speakership after November. At the very least, the AFL-CIO unions should prepare a big mass media buy soon, since there are less than 100 days to the elections. The key discharge petition in the House, to bring the modest $10.10 over three years to a vote, is assumed to have all 199 Democrats signed on. Only 19 Republicans need to sign it to get to the decisive 218 tally. Six Republican incumbents pushed for the last minimum wage raise in 2006 saying that “nobody working full time should have to live in poverty.” These six went on to vote for the raise in 2007. The trouble is that since the discharge petition was filed by Rep. Tim Bishop (D-NY) in February, there has been little publicity for it by either the Democratic House Leadership or the White House (see timeforaraise.org). And what of President Obama who is reportedly desperate to win back the House? On April 30th, he held an event with some minimum wage workers and criticized Republicans. On June 12th, he announced the details of the executive order to raise wages for federal contract workers. But he is not barnstorming on this BIG proposal that resonates with so many people in their hard-pressed daily life. He does, however, barnstorm around the country to attend exclusive high contributors’ fundraisers. How can he not understand that, with his “bully pulpit” and hard-working Americans by his side around the country, he could raise real political heat under the Republicans whose refusal to bend on this issue could result in their breaking? The mass media, after all, covers the news-making President everywhere. I’ve often said that the Democratic Party cannot even defend the country against the demonstrably cruel, anti-worker, anti-consumer, pro-big business/Wall Street over Main Street Republican Party. The voting evidence in Congress is fully accessible. The Democrats compiled, but did not adequately deploy a report on some sixty outrageous Republican Party House votes during the last Congress that, if really driven home to voters, would have resulted in a landslide Democratic win against the GOP. Instead, the Democrats allowed the GOP to cover its truly vicious tracks with flowery rhetoric that kept their day of reckoning from seeing sunlight (see for yourself). My message to Democrats is: Dump your corporate consultants. Just campaign for the necessities of the people. And publicize those Republican votes crisply, widely and repeatedly. follow on Twitter | friend on Facebook | forward to a friend Copyright © 2014 Nader.Org, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in at our website. Our mailing address is: Nader.Org P.O. Box 19367 Washington, DC 20036 </p> 19113031 2014-08-12 07:33:18 2014-08-12 07:33:18 open open ralph-nader-what-the-democratic-party-does-well-doing-itself-in-19113031 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ALIEN ABDUCTIONS? http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/08/whatever-happened-to-alien-abductions-19078872/ Fri, 08 Aug 2014 07:02:31 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] http://ufodigest.com/article/alien-abductions-0801 WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ALIEN ABDUCTIONS? Nick Pope's picture By Nick Pope - 6 days 11 hours ago In the late Eighties and throughout the Nineties, alien abductions were at the heart of ufology. How did what might be regarded as a subset of ufology become its central meme? Abductions (irrespective of whether one believes they take place in a literal sense) could arguably be regarded as an evolution of the contactee phenomenon, and for those who believe UFOs are extraterrestrial spacecraft, it’s only logical that one should look beyond the vehicles and focus on the nature and agenda of the occupants. John Keel’s 1967 article “Never Mind the Saucer! Did You See the Guys Who Were Driving?” articulates this point perfectly, but it wasn’t until the publication of “Missing Time” (1981), “Intruders” (1987) and “Communion” (1987) that Keel’s question became the question most asked in the UFO community. Click here to enlarge top photo. Of the three books mentioned, Whitley Strieber’s “Communion” did most to move alien abductions out of the ufological fringe and onto centre stage, and from there, into the mainstream public awareness. From there, things snowballed. Abduction plotlines were featured in “The X-Files” and a wide range of other TV shows and movies, while the image on the front cover of “Communion” became embedded in public consciousness, further boosted by the so-called alien autopsy film in 1995. In 2002 Steven Spielberg’s TV mini-series “Taken” illustrated that abductions were still big news and big business. All this time, abductions were the central focus for much of the UFO community, and the three charismatic figures of Budd Hopkins, David Jacobs and John Mack were at the heart of things. While the centre of gravity was America, interest was global. My own book on the alien abduction mystery, “The Uninvited”, got to number seven in the UK hardback non-fiction chart, while the US mass-market paperback edition, published by Dell, was also a best-seller, clearly showing not only that abductions were the dominant force in ufology, but also that the subject had broken out into mainstream media and public awareness. Now let’s fast forward to 2014. One hears comparatively little about alien abductions, even within the UFO community, where the main current areas of interest are government cover-ups, ‘Disclosure’, secret space program/‘breakaway civilization’, the Rendlesham Forest incident, and – perhaps most prominently of all – the resurgence of the ancient astronaut/ancient aliens hypothesis. What’s going on? There are a number of theories and it’s worth running through them. At the extreme end of the belief spectrum, for those who think abductions take place in a literal, physical way, as many abductees claim, there’s the suggestion that the alien agenda is coming to its climax. Such people regard abductions as an extraterrestrial project, usually characterized as a human/alien hybridization program. If abductions have declined, or stopped altogether, does this not suggest that the program is coming to an end, or has finished? If this is the case, what happens next? Is some dramatic development just around the corner? It’s certainly food for thought. There are, of course, some more prosaic possibilities. As a journalist and broadcaster, I know that interest in just about everything is cyclic. There comes a time when saturation point is reached and people lose interest, not least because pretty much everything there is to say has already been said. Whether this is reflected in, or driven by the media is open to debate, but editors and producers looking at abductions these days are inclined to say things like “that’s a bit passé”, or “this has all been done to death”. If this is the case, perhaps interest will return, just as interest in the ancient astronaut theory has returned. The TV show “Ancient Aliens” may have driven this resurgence, but it only worked because a new generation of people were genuinely interested in ideas that had been popularized back in the Seventies by authors such as Erich von Däniken. What other factors could explain the lack of coverage and (apparent) lack of interest in abductions? One cannot overstate the influence of individuals when it comes to driving the agenda in a subject, whether they do so deliberately or not. Simply put, Budd Hopkins, David Jacobs and John Mack played a huge role in putting abductions centre stage within ufology, and now that Hopkins and Mack are both dead, the greater part of that impetus is gone. This is in no way meant to disparage the work of other ufologists and abductees, or downplay the continuing influence of writers such as Whitley Strieber, but there’s no getting away from the fact that the deaths of Hopkins and Mack dealt a hefty blow to abduction research. There have been other assaults on the validity of abductions and the credibility of both abduction researchers and abductees. The debate over whether regression hypnosis can recover hidden memories, distort existing ones or even implant false ones was the first shot across the bows. Concerns about using regression hypnosis on abductees segued into wider concerns about the propriety of ufologists dealing with abductees. This was essentially a therapist/patient relationship in a situation where some of the people claiming abduction experiences (real or not) were extremely vulnerable. Were abduction researchers suitably qualified or otherwise equipped to deal with such people in a professional and ethical way? The allegations made by “Emma Woods” against David Jacobs brought that debate into focus, as did the criticisms made by filmmaker Carol Rainey regarding her former husband, Budd Hopkins. The recent arrest of self-described abductee Stan Romanek on charges of possessing and distributing child pornography may turn out to be the final nail in the coffin. Alien abduction may be down, but it isn’t altogether out. Travis Walton remains popular on the conference circuit and hopes to see a remake of “Fire in the Sky”. Researchers such as Yvonne Smith continue to fly the flag for the subject, while this month’s “Contact in the Desert” conference in Joshua Tree has a panel discussion on the “contact experience”. This latter point is particularly noteworthy, because it seems that we’ve gone from contactees to abductees and now back to contactees – the more neutral term “experiencers” is sometimes used, but that’s another story. In all of this, here’s the key question about the apparent rise and fall of alien abductions: does it tell us something about the true nature of the UFO phenomenon, or does it tell us just as much – and maybe even more – about ufology and ufologists? Nick Pope is a former employee of the UK Ministry of Defense. From 1991 to 1994 he ran the British Government's UFO project and has recently been involved in a five-year initiative to declassify and release the entire archive of these UFO files. Nick Pope held a number of other fascinating posts in the course of his 21-year government career, which culminated in his serving as an acting Deputy Director in the Directorate of Defense Security. He now works as a broadcaster and journalist, covering subjects including space, fringe science, defense and intelligence. Nick Pope’s latest book, Encounter in Rendlesham Forest, co-written with John Burroughs and Jim Penniston, was published by Thomas Dunne Books on 15th April and is available via Amazon and all good bookstores.</p> 19078872 2014-08-08 07:02:31 2014-08-08 07:02:31 open open whatever-happened-to-alien-abductions-19078872 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Kynisca http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/05/kynisca-19053982/ Tue, 05 Aug 2014 07:25:11 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Here I copied/lifted a part of a Wikipedia webpage
. Lou Sheehan Kynisca was born in 440 BC in the ancient Greek city of Sparta and was the daughter of the Eurypontid king of Sparta, Archidamus II, and Eupoleia. She was also the sister of the later king of Sparta, Agesilaus II. She is said to have been a tomboy, an excellent equestrian and very wealthy, the perfect qualifications for a successful trainer. She was exceedingly ambitious to succeed at the Olympic Games and the first woman to breed horses and win an Olympic victory, according to Pausanias. Her name means 'female puppy in Ancient Greek. Olympic Games While most women in the ancient Greek world were kept in seclusion and forbidden to learn any kind of skills in sports, riding or hunting, Spartan women by contrast were brought up from girlhood to excel at these things and to disdain household chores, by attending a boarding school similar to this that Spartan boys attended. The ancient Olympic Games were almost entirely male-only and women were forbidden even to attend the main stadium at Olympia, where running events and combat sports were held. Women were allowed to enter only the equestrian events, not by running but by owning and training the horses. Kynisca employed men and entered her team at the Olympics, where it won in the four-horse chariot racing (tethrippon Greek: τέθριππον) twice, in 396 BC and again in 392 BC. The irony is that she probably didn't see her victories. However, Kynisca was honored by having a bronze statue of a chariot and horses, a charioteer and a statue of herself in the Temple of Zeus in Olympia, by the side of the statue of Troilus, made by Apelles, and an inscription written declaring that she was the only female to win the wreath in the chariot events at the Olympic Games. The first person in the inscription indicates that Kynisca was willing to push herself forward. In addition to this, a hero-shrine of Kynisca was erected in Sparta at Plane-tree Grove,[8] where religious ceremonies were held. Only Spartan kings were graced in this way and Kynisca was the first woman to receive this honor. The inscription from Olympia (ca. 390-380 BC) reads[9]: English Kings of Sparta are my father and brothers Kyniska, victorious with a chariot of swift-footed horses, have erected this statue. I declare myself the only woman in all Hellas to have won this crown. Apelleas son of Kallikles made it. -- Louis Sheehan </p> 19053982 2014-08-05 07:25:11 2014-08-05 07:25:11 open open kynisca-19053982 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan ERIS http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/04/eris-19046130/ Mon, 04 Aug 2014 04:27:54 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/P/PlanetX.html A hypothetical tenth planet of the Solar System (the 'X' may be read as the Roman numeral 10 or the letter 'x' for unknown). What were thought to have been unexplained perturbations in the orbits of Neptune and Uranus, at the turn of the 20th century, led to the search for a trans-Neptunian planet. But upon the discovery of this planet, Pluto, the mystery only seemed to deepen. Pluto proved to have far too little mass to account for the wobbles thought to be present in the movements of Neptune and Uranus. Over the next few decades, speculation continued about the possible existence of "Planet X." However, today, it seems clear that the supposed perturbations were fictitious and, therefore, that these were not valid grounds upon which to suspect that a tenth planet was real. Many Kuiper Belt objects (KBO), however, do circle the Sun beyond Pluto and may reach diameters of more than 1,000 km. In July 2005, the discovery was announced of a KBO, now called Eris (formerly 2003 UB313), which is larger than Pluto and thus qualifies as the tenth planet of the Solar System. [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. -- Louis Sheehan ] Posted but NOT written by Lou Sheehan </p> 19046130 2014-08-04 04:27:54 2014-08-04 04:27:54 open open eris-19046130 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan The war and the panic Jul 25th 2014, 14:39 by The Economist http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/03/the-war-and-the-panic-jul-25th-2014-14-39-by-the-economist-19044621/ Sun, 03 Aug 2014 21:21:19 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>The war and the panic Jul 25th 2014, 14:39 by The Economist [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. -- Louis Sheehan ] On July 28th 1914 Austria-Hungary declared war against Serbia. As our article from August 1st 1914 feared, the war quickly escalated when on that same day Germany, which was allied with Austria-Hungary, declared war against Russia (which was allied with Serbia) and two days later against France. Britain entered the war against Germany on August 4th, after it received an "unsatisfactory reply" regarding Belgium's neutrality. ON SUNDAY—just four weeks after the murder by Servian assassins of the Austrian Heir-Apparent and his wife in Sarajevo—Europe was suddenly confronted with the fear of a great war on a scale of unprecedented magnitude, involving loss of life and a destruction of all that we associate with modern civilisation too vast to be counted or calculated, and portending horrors so appalling that the imagination shrinks from the task. Readers of The Economist are aware of the train of events which led up to the catastrophe. The quarrel between Austria and Servia may be said to date from the time when an Austro-Hungarian army conquered Bosnia and Herzegovina, and in rescuing it from the Turkish yoke encountered the bitter hatred of Servia. The story was begun in our columns last week by Dr Josef Redlich, and is completed in a second letter which we print on another page of The Economist. It is clear to the impartial observer that there have been faults on both sides. But no cool thinker will be disposed to deny that the atrocious murders of the Austrian Heir-Apparent and his wife, following upon Servia's successful war, in which Austria, after all, played a fair and moderate part, must have been an intolerable provocation to any "old and haughty nation proud in arms." The administration of Austria-Hungary in Bosnia has often been compared with that of Great Britain in India. In 35 years, law and order, and security and religious toleration, have been substituted for rapine, disorder, official tyranny, and religious persecution. Admirable roads and railways have been built, and industry has at last begun to reap its reward for the first time since the Roman Empire fell. It is fair, then, to ask, not only what Austria ought to have done, but what Great Britain would have done in a like case—if, for example, the Afghan Government had plotted to raise a rebellion in North-West India, and if, finally, Afghan assassins had murdered a Prince and Princess of Wales? Certainly the cry for vengeance would have been raised, and can we be sure that any measure milder than the Note sent from Vienna to Belgrade would have been despatched from London or Calcutta to Kandahar? It is only after saying this that we feel justified in stating that the terms of the Austrian Note and the action of the Austrian Government, when most of these terms have been conceded, appear too stiff, too rigid, too relentless. There should have been more solicitude for the peace of Europe, and a livelier perception of the fact that neighbourly conduct and good feeling cannot be inculcated by military measures. All the same, it is a fact that City men sympathise with Austria. And it is a fact that the provocation begun by Servia has been continued by Russia. If a great war begins Russian mobilisation will be the proximate cause. And we fear that the poisonous articles of the Times have encouraged the Czar's Government to hope for British support. Fortunately, the attitude of the Times is utterly opposed to the feelings of the business community, and to the instincts of the working classes. In maintaining strict neutrality Mr Asquith and Sir Edward Grey can count upon the support of the Cabinet, the House of Commons, and the nation. So far Great Britain has taken the lead in Europe on behalf of peace. The value of that effort is due to the honourable and straightforward conduct of Sir Edward Grey, which did so much to localise the Balkan wars and to prevent the mobilisation in Austria and Russia from terminating in an explosion. It is also due to the great efforts made in England and Germany during the last two or three years to re-establish the old friendship which ought never to have been disturbed. It is very noticeable that there were many cries of "Hoch England " as the crowds which demonstrated in Berlin on Sunday passed by the British Embassy. It is also noticeable, we think, that both in France and Italy public opinion supports British efforts on behalf of peace, and there is one moral, drawn, we are happy to observe, by a Jingo contemporary, that the influence of Great Britain at this crisis and her strength as a mediator are due to the fact that "she alone of the Great Powers is not bound by a definite alliance." It is deplorable that at such a moment Mr Churchill should have given sensational orders to the Fleet, as if, forsooth, whatever happened, any British Government was entitled to plunge this nation into the horrors of war, in a quarrel which is no more of our making and no more our concern than would be a quarrel between Argentina and Brazil or between China and Japan. The attempts of the yellow Press and of the Times to drive the Government into a European war are happily not seconded by the sober-minded part of the Unionist Press in the provinces and Scotland. And we are glad to note the pacific line of the Standard, which is in keeping with its old traditions as a moderate representative of business feeling. The commercial and working classes of this country are just as friendly to Germany as to France, and they will almost unanimously reject the idea of helping Russia to extend its empire in Europe and Asia. Moreover, by keeping clear of the war we shall be able to assist the small Powers and neutral countries—Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, to maintain their integrity, their neutrality, and their independence. Mr Asquith has said plainly that no British interest is directly involved, and we should hope that the Cabinet as a whole reflects the general feeling of the nation that we should observe strict neutrality and avoid even the appearance of taking sides in a quarrel which is not of our making. There is no sign that British interests will be attacked. Happily the principal organs of unofficial Liberal opinion have been speaking out clearly and boldly. Every British interest points irresistibly to the maintenance of strict neutrality. And, of course, by so doing we shall be in a far better position later on—if the worst comes to the worst—to mediate effectively between exhausted combatants. Posted but NOT written by Lou Sheehan </p> 19044621 2014-08-03 21:21:19 2014-08-03 21:21:19 open open the-war-and-the-panic-jul-25th-2014-14-39-by-the-economist-19044621 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan 'Octomom' sets egg-brooding record A deep-sea octopus is observed guarding the same clutch of eggs for nearly 4.5 years http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/02/octomom-sets-egg-brooding-record-a-deep-sea-octopus-is-observed-guarding-the-same-clutch-of-eggs-for-nearly-4-5-years-19030894/ Sat, 02 Aug 2014 05:04:18 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Posted but NOT written by Lou Sheehan SCIENCE NEWS The deep ocean has spawned a new record: the longest egg-brooding period. In April 2007, Bruce Robison of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, Calif., and colleagues sent a remote-operated vehicle down 1,397 meters (4,583 feet) into the Monterey Submarine Canyon. There they saw a deep-sea octopus (Graneledone boreopacifica) making its way toward a stony outcrop. One month later, the scientists spotted the same octopus, which they dubbed ‘Octomom,’ on the rock with a clutch of 155 to 165 eggs. The researchers returned to the site 18 times in total. Each time, there she was with her developing eggs. Most female octopuses lay only one clutch of eggs, staying with the eggs constantly and slowly starving to death while protecting them from predators and keeping them clean. When the eggs hatch, the female dies. The scientists report July 30 in PLOS ONE that the octopus was observed on her eggs for 53 months, until September 2011, the longest brooding period of any known animal.</p> 19030894 2014-08-02 05:04:18 2014-08-02 05:04:18 open open octomom-sets-egg-brooding-record-a-deep-sea-octopus-is-observed-guarding-the-same-clutch-of-eggs-for-nearly-4-5-years-19030894 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan Obama and the “Public Sentiment” Ralph Nader August 1, 2014 http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/02/obama-and-the-public-sentiment-ralph-nader-august-1-19030861/ Sat, 02 Aug 2014 04:59:58 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. -- Louis Sheehan ] Obama and the “Public Sentiment” Ralph Nader August 1, 2014 Dear President Obama: Abraham Lincoln once said that “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.” Presumably, he meant Presidential action on popular issues can and should overcome influential interests. At long last, the “public sentiment” seems to be aligning with some causes you are advancing. First, support is increasing for restoring the federal minimum wage to account for the inflation that, since 1968, has greatly diminished its purchasing power. The federal minimum wage is presently stagnant at $7.25 per hour. You are supporting the Harkin-Miller bill (H.R.1010 and S.2223), which would raise it to $10.10 per hour over three years. You have already issued an executive order to require federal government contractors to pay their employees no less than $10.10 per hour, effective in 2015 (see timeforaraise.org for more information). Restoring the purchasing power of the minimum wage has over 70% public support and would lift the wages of 30 million hard-pressed American workers. Had you pushed to raise the federal minimum wage in 2010 when the Democrats controlled Congress, the House of Representatives might not have been given over to the Republican Party in those November elections. In light of this missed opportunity, you can still pressure Speaker John Boehner and House Republicans to support raising the federal minimum wage by noting that Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and former Republican Governor of Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty, now support this effort. Affected workers need you to step up the pressure in the remaining months of this forlorn Congress and get an existing discharge petition to the House floor for a vote. Second, U.S.-chartered giant companies like Pfizer, Medtronic and, perhaps most foolishly, Walgreens— given its 8,000 protestable stores—are planning to move their headquarters to countries that lure them with lower tax rates, such as Ireland and Switzerland, abandon their U.S. “citizenship,” and re-incorporate in those jurisdictions. This is all for another tax escape to add to their existing ones, including large tax credits to Pfizer and Medtronic for research and development that corporatist lobbies have written into the U.S. tax code. “I don’t care if it’s legal, it’s wrong,” you have indignantly exclaimed in recent speeches. You are supporting legislative efforts by Democrats in Congress (H.R.4679 and S.2360, sponsored by Representative Sander Levin (D-MI) and Senator Carl Levin (D-MI)) to prohibit such drains on corporate taxes intended for the U.S. Treasury and make the ban retroactive to May 2014. Third, and perhaps most impressively, you are questioning the “economic patriotism” of many giant U.S. corporations who have received support (financial and otherwise) from U.S. workers, taxpayers and the public laws and benefitted from the infrastructure of our country. The mere implication that these companies are unpatriotically abandoning their native country has outraged the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (to which you paid a courtesy visit in 2011) along with the predictable Wall Street Journal editorial page. That highly vocal reaction means you touched on a vulnerability that has been on the minds of tens of millions of Americans. May you continue to promote the importance of insisting on the patriotic character of corporations, since the U.S. Supreme Court (5 to 4) keeps telling us that corporations are people. The public sentiment awaits your leadership on other positive redirections as well. Large majorities on both the left and the right: favor breaking up the “too big to fail” New York City banks; support cracking down on corporate crime and fraud (see the Hide No Harm Act of 2014); and, the more they know about its benefits and fairness, support a Wall Street speculation tax, a sales tax that could bring in about $300 billion a year, fund repairs of our public infrastructure, and dampen some of the reckless gambling with other peoples’ money, such as pension and mutual funds. The many rallies in New York City, in front of the White House and around the country— some of which have been led by the National Nurses United—are pressing Congress for such a transaction tax. Such activities have laid the groundwork for your exercise of the “Bully Pulpit.” Another easier initiative, pointed out in my new book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State, is to highlight, once again, the legislation that you as a Senator co-sponsored with Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) in 2006 to require that the full text of all federal government contracts above a minimum amount be available online. As I’ve written previously, putting the full text of these contracts online will: give taxpayers both savings and higher quality performances; let the media focus more incisively on this vast area of government disbursements to inform the wider public; encourage constructive comments and alarms from the citizenry; and stimulate legal and economic research by scholars interested in structural topics related to government procurement, transfers, subsidies and giveaways. There is already support by members of both Parties in the Congress for this measure. Online disclosure would provide for greater scrutiny of some $300 billion in annual contracts by the media, taxpayer groups, competitors and academic researchers. Yes, indeed, Mr. President, wondrous and beneficial changes can come to our country when you and Congress heed the long-standing “public sentiment,” more recently called the “voices of the people,” and translate that “public sentiment” into beneficial action by our government. Sincerely, Ralph Nader Posted but NOT written by Lou Sheehan </p> 19030861 2014-08-02 04:59:58 2014-08-02 04:59:58 open open obama-and-the-public-sentiment-ralph-nader-august-1-19030861 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan General Motors Is Broken -- Ralph Nader http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/07/31/general-motors-is-broken-ralph-nader-19002536/ Thu, 31 Jul 2014 09:07:37 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. -- Louis Sheehan ] General Motors Is Broken http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/07/general_motors_ignition_switch_defect_a_crisis_of_inattention.html The auto giant is suffering a crisis of inattention. Here’s how to fix it. By Ralph Nader he recent Senate committee hearing on how General Motors dealt with its deadly ignition switch defect provides the latest glimpse into the crisis of inattention, deferral of responsibility, and lack of accountability that permeate America’s largest automaker. GM acknowledges, so far, that 13 people were killed as a result of more than a decade of institutional cover-up and negligence brought on by an imperious corporate culture. Clarence Ditlow, head of the well-regarded Center for Auto Safety, has predicted that the death toll will go into the hundreds. In the hearing, GM’s general counsel, Michael P. Millikin, came under criticism for his failure to act and—in the words of subcommittee Chairwoman Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.)—for his “Whac-a-Mole” approach to ignition switch–related lawsuits, even though engineers at GM were aware of the defect. McCaskill twice questioned whether Millikin should still have his job and why CEO Mary Barra has not fired him. Barra defended Millikin, who himself testified, “We had lawyers at GM who didn’t do their jobs, didn’t do what was expected of them. Those lawyers are no longer with the company.” Once again, a GM executive passed the buck to midlevel employees while taking little of the blame himself. Another subcommittee member, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.)—a most penetrating questioner—asked Millikin whether GM would waive its (deceptively obtained) liability shield from lawsuits prior to its 2009 bankruptcy and taxpayer bailout, or whether it would make public documents related to the internal investigation of the defect. “We will not,” answered Millikin to both questions. “Lawyers typically are supposed to be the corporate conscience,” Blumenthal says. “They’re supposed to be the ones that make sure that corporations comply with the law in spirit and letter. Here, the lawyers for GM actually enabled cover-up, concealment, deceit, and even fraud.” Barra told the Senate committee that GM is taking steps to change the corporate culture that failed for 13 years to acknowledge the ignition switch defect. Barra spoke of firing 15 employees, “some for misconduct and incompetence, others because they didn’t take responsibility or act with a sense of urgency.” She talked of creating a Speak Up for Safety program meant “to encourage and recognize employees that bring potential safety issues forward quickly” as well as appointing a new global vice president of safety who would report to her. GM will also establish a fund to compensate people injured and the families of those killed because of the defective ignition switch. The devil is in the details. GM’s lawyer, Ken Feinberg of Feinberg Rozen LLP, detailed the prerequisites for the compensation program, noting that there is “no aggregate cap on the amount of compensation GM will make available to eligible claimants.” The key word is eligible—it happens to exclude all of the millions of recalled GM cars with faulty ignition switches except for the original 2.5 million recalled Cobalts and Saturns. “The fund failed to include other recalled vehicles and defects that resulted in deaths and injuries, and are barred by statutes of limitations or the GM bankruptcy,” Ditlow explains. “The least GM could do for taxpaying consumers who bailed them out is compensate them for their losses due to defects in GM vehicles. Even for ignition switch victims covered by the Fund, it will be difficult, if not impossible, for a consumer to prove that ignition switch failure caused a crash if all they have is their statement that the ignition switch cut off.” GM should introduce a monetary reward for safety reports by its engineers that could help prevent death and injuries. History has shown that GM executives are willing to talk about safety only when they get caught misbehaving. After all, this is the company that in the past has dragged its feet on safety standards for years, such as with shoulder belts and airbags. Since GM sales are rising, concerns about losing customers seem to have gone away. That may help explain why the auto giant refuses to produce more information about its negligent practices, refuses to support proposed corrective legislation, and seems increasingly comfortable that any Justice Department criminal inquiry will not reach the upper echelons of GM management and will only result in a fine that GM can easily absorb. What would it take to instill long-lasting change in a company that now has a storied history of selling unsafe automobiles? One very simple solution would be for Barra to establish an independent ombudsman office. GM’s proposed global vice president of safety—another bureaucratic link in the hierarchical GM chain of command—does not inspire much public confidence that safety defects will receive the immediate action they require. By contrast, an ombudsman would be authorized to receive, in complete confidence, the assertions of conscientious engineers and other internal whistleblowers and report them directly to GM’s CEO and president. This independent office could ensure that safety defects are taken seriously and that employees would be protected from retaliation or job loss. It would then become the CEO’s direct responsibility to follow up on the ombudsman’s report and decide whether it warrants triggering federal regulation on reporting the discovery to the Department of Transportation. GM could also introduce a monetary reward for safety reports by its engineers and other employees to the ombudsman that could help prevent death and injuries. There is a precedent for this: Many other companies here and abroad have long given assembly line workers rewards for proposing more efficient ways to manufacture products. If there is any benefit to the current firestorm over GM, it’s been to bring attention to the urgent need for stronger auto safety authority and enforcement budgets for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration—something that’s been long opposed by auto industry powers and their congressional allies such as Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.). Now is an ideal time to strengthen NHTSA. First and foremost, Congress must make it criminal for manufacturers and their officials to knowingly violate the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act. Citizens must be given the right to sue NHTSA when it fails to enforce the Safety Act, and all industry meetings with NHTSA officials should have detailed minutes that are placed in a public docket within 48 hours. The agency’s pathetic vehicle safety budget, now at $134 million, must be tripled, starting with funding a research lab like those at other regulatory agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration and Environmental Protection Agency. Today’s NHTSA rents lab space from Honda, a company that it regulates. The agency has no meaningful electronics and computer expertise, even though vehicles have become computers on wheels. NHTSA’s administrator admitted to Congress that the agency didn’t even know how the advanced airbags it mandated worked. An added incentive to stop corporate cover-ups comes from Sens. Blumenthal, Bob Casey (D-Pa.), and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who have just introduced the Hide No Harm Act of 2014 (S.2615), which would make it a criminal act—with punishment of up to five years in prison—for a corporate executive to cover up a harmful or deadly safety issue. Such action is long overdue. Only by holding top corporate executives’ feet to the fire can we avoid these deadly mishaps in the future. Ralph Nader’s most recent book is Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State. Follow him on Twitter. [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. -- Louis Sheehan ] </p> 19002536 2014-07-31 09:07:37 2014-07-31 09:07:37 open open general-motors-is-broken-ralph-nader-19002536 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan aretr / UFO http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/07/29/aretr-ufo-18988689/ Tue, 29 Jul 2014 00:04:23 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. -- Louis Sheehan ] Post by meldrew on Oct 21, 2010 at 12:55pm www.richplanet.net/detail.php?dbindex=61 President Jimmy Carter was the first President of the United States of America to have officially reported the UFO he saw to the authorities. He was also the President who said that if elected he would see that UFO-Alien Full Disclosure would take place. That the American public would be told the truth about everything was one of the campaign cries of Jimmy Carter. Carter made a promise he could not or would not be able to keep. After Carter won the White House, he paid a visit to the then-CIA Director, George Bush. Carter had an interest in UFOs ever since experiencing his first sighting sometime in 1969 while standing outside a Lion's Club in Georgia. His campaign speeches promising to unravel the government's long held cover-up was the ''Parting of the Red Sea'' for Ufologists not only in America but around the world. Here was the one guy who would open up the ''Promised Land'' and lead them into Full Disclosure. Carter wanted the U.S. Government's UFO secret documents declassified. George Bush more or less told Carter that the President of the United States did not have the need to know the information contained in those documents. Can you even begin to imagine that? What lends even more mind-blowing credibility to this alleged event between Carter and Bush is the credibility of the allegation maker: Daniel Sheehan. Daniel Sheehan was born in1946 and graduated from Harvard Law School. There, he was co-founder of the Harvard Civil Rights and Civil Liberty Law Review. He went on to work for the American Civil Liberties Union and became general counsel for a host of entities including The Disclosure Project-a group dedicated to getting the U.S. Government to allow full and unfettered access to what the Feds know about the UFO-Alien phenomenon. According to Sheehan, Bush Senior, who was the CIA Director, refused Carter's request for disclosure of the UFO documents, even to the President of the United States, because it was generally believed in the halls and corridors of the secret, black-ops government that Carter would then turn the truth over to the American people. Director of a California think tank, Sheehan's credentials are impeccable. Sheehan's career is a litany of high-profile cases like, ''legal counsel team for the New York Times' Pentagon Papers case, defense of the Berrigan brothers, going after the Kerr-McGee nuclear plant (Karen Silkwood), Three-Mile Island, Iran-Contra. At the Disclosure Conference, Sheehan says the Bush-Carter story was relayed to him in 1977 by Marcia Smith of the Congressional Research Service, part of the Library of Congress.'' Sheehan's interest in this phenomenon came about when Sheehan met Marcia Smith through a mutual acquaintance. Smith told Sheehan that she was involved in a research project for the Science and Technology Committee of the Library of Congress that would address the issues of the potential existence of extraterrestrial intelligence and make an evaluation of the data on the phenomena of UFOs. When Sheehan queried Smith as to who exactly wanted this study done, her answer was none other than Jimmy Carter. This all was with a view to investigate exactly what could or could not be turned over to the general public, according to Daniel Sheehan. Smith asked Sheehan if he could, since he was the then-General Counsel to United States Jesuit Headquarters at their National Office in Washington D.C., get access to the records on the UFO-Alien issue contained in the Vatican. Though Sheehan made repeated attempts to gain access to the Vatican's documents through official channels, he was refused each time. This makes one wonder just why, if all there is to this UFO-Alien issue is weather balloons, flocks of geese, and swamp gas, would the Vatican (or any government on the earth, for that matter) have top-secret, and highly unattainable records pertaining to a nonexistent issue? After telling Marcia Smith of his roadblock with the Vatican Library, she asked if he could help with a team that was lobbying Congressional leader to reinstate funds for the SETI (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program. Sheehan indicated to Smith that he was glad to help out. Smith also later asked him if he could help out with an investigation into ''the potential theological religious implications of potential contact with extraterrestrial civilizations.'' This again begs the question that if there's nothing at all to this phenomenon, then why this study? Sheehan agreed to Smith's request but insisted he have access to the documents pertaining to this issue that she had garnered for an investigation she did for the Science and Technology Committee in Congress. When asked what exactly Sheehan wanted to see, he indicated he wanted access to ''the classified sections of the Project Blue Book.'' Astoundingly, Daniel was granted access. He was not allowed to take notes, photos, or carry anything into the room containing the documents or out with him when he left the Library of Congress where the documents were stored. After proceeding through multiple layers of security, he was shown to the room with microfiche machines. Before entering, he was told he could not take his briefcase with him. Almost absent-mindedly, he had a yellow legal pad under his arm that wasn't confiscated before he entered the room. He proceeded through small canisters of film. It didn't take long to find proof. He discovered photos of what appeared to be a disc-shaped craft. It had crashed. ''It had hit into this field and had dug up, kind of plowed this kind of trough through this field. It was wedged into the side of this bank. There was snow all around the picture. The vehicle was wedged into the side of this mud-like embankment -- kind of up at an angle.'' The men taking photos were unmistakably, in Sheehan's mind, American Air Force personnel. As Sheehan continued to review the film, he discovered a close-up of the craft that revealed symbols or glyphs written on the craft. He thought it was an insignia. He wanted to record what he saw, but remembered he was not allowed to take notes. He knew it was likely his legal pad would be discovered when he left the room and the guards would examine it to see if he had taken notes. However, since he wanted those insignias, he had to find a way to record them. He decided to arrange the cardboard backing of his legal pad in such a way against the microfiche screen so he could trace the symbols. When he left the top-secret document room, he was searched. His pad was taken and flipped through for notes. Finding none, and not noticing the traced symbols on the cardboard backing of the yellow pad, it was returned to him by the guards and Sheehan left. Sheehan not only revealed to Marcia Smith what he had found but he also revealed the information to his boss at the Jesuit National Headquarters. Meetings and conventions were convened on the issue. Reports were written. President Carter saw at least one of the reports made by Marcia Smith, which included information from Daniel Sheehan's discoveries. Sheehan still has the yellow notepad with the symbols but says no analysis has been done on the symbols. Oh, are you wondering about the reports Marcia Smith finished after Daniel Sheehan's discovery and what they said? Well, Sheehan read them and according to Sheehan: ''The one report that Marcia showed me on extraterrestrial phenomena actually stated that it was the conclusion of the Library of Congress, Science and Technology Division, that from two to six, at least, other highly-intelligent, technologically-developed civilizations exist right within our own galaxy.'' [http://www.presidentialufo.com/marcia_smith_story.htm] ''The second report,'' says Sheehan, ''they had drawings of different shapes of UFOs that have been sighted,'' continued Sheehan. ''They didn't site any particular cases, but they said that they believed there was a significant number of instances where the official United States Air Force investigations were unable to discount the possibility that one or more of these vehicles was actually from one of these extraterrestrial civilizations. They put this together, and sent it over to the President. I ended up seeing a copy of it.'' The Carter Administration, though not bringing about Full Disclosure, had a very busy four years of UFO phenomena. I can't help but wonder if he had had another term in office, what could have come of all of this? Article : Doug Bower Post by meldrew on Oct 21, 2010 at 12:55pm www.richplanet.net/detail.php?dbindex=61 President Jimmy Carter was the first President of the United States of America to have officially reported the UFO he saw to the authorities. He was also the President who said that if elected he would see that UFO-Alien Full Disclosure would take place. That the American public would be told the truth about everything was one of the campaign cries of Jimmy Carter. Carter made a promise he could not or would not be able to keep. After Carter won the White House, he paid a visit to the then-CIA Director, George Bush. Carter had an interest in UFOs ever since experiencing his first sighting sometime in 1969 while standing outside a Lion's Club in Georgia. His campaign speeches promising to unravel the government's long held cover-up was the ''Parting of the Red Sea'' for Ufologists not only in America but around the world. Here was the one guy who would open up the ''Promised Land'' and lead them into Full Disclosure. Carter wanted the U.S. Government's UFO secret documents declassified. George Bush more or less told Carter that the President of the United States did not have the need to know the information contained in those documents. Can you even begin to imagine that? What lends even more mind-blowing credibility to this alleged event between Carter and Bush is the credibility of the allegation maker: Daniel Sheehan. Daniel Sheehan was born in1946 and graduated from Harvard Law School. There, he was co-founder of the Harvard Civil Rights and Civil Liberty Law Review. He went on to work for the American Civil Liberties Union and became general counsel for a host of entities including The Disclosure Project-a group dedicated to getting the U.S. Government to allow full and unfettered access to what the Feds know about the UFO-Alien phenomenon. According to Sheehan, Bush Senior, who was the CIA Director, refused Carter's request for disclosure of the UFO documents, even to the President of the United States, because it was generally believed in the halls and corridors of the secret, black-ops government that Carter would then turn the truth over to the American people. Director of a California think tank, Sheehan's credentials are impeccable. Sheehan's career is a litany of high-profile cases like, ''legal counsel team for the New York Times' Pentagon Papers case, defense of the Berrigan brothers, going after the Kerr-McGee nuclear plant (Karen Silkwood), Three-Mile Island, Iran-Contra. At the Disclosure Conference, Sheehan says the Bush-Carter story was relayed to him in 1977 by Marcia Smith of the Congressional Research Service, part of the Library of Congress.'' Sheehan's interest in this phenomenon came about when Sheehan met Marcia Smith through a mutual acquaintance. Smith told Sheehan that she was involved in a research project for the Science and Technology Committee of the Library of Congress that would address the issues of the potential existence of extraterrestrial intelligence and make an evaluation of the data on the phenomena of UFOs. When Sheehan queried Smith as to who exactly wanted this study done, her answer was none other than Jimmy Carter. This all was with a view to investigate exactly what could or could not be turned over to the general public, according to Daniel Sheehan. Smith asked Sheehan if he could, since he was the then-General Counsel to United States Jesuit Headquarters at their National Office in Washington D.C., get access to the records on the UFO-Alien issue contained in the Vatican. Though Sheehan made repeated attempts to gain access to the Vatican's documents through official channels, he was refused each time. This makes one wonder just why, if all there is to this UFO-Alien issue is weather balloons, flocks of geese, and swamp gas, would the Vatican (or any government on the earth, for that matter) have top-secret, and highly unattainable records pertaining to a nonexistent issue? After telling Marcia Smith of his roadblock with the Vatican Library, she asked if he could help with a team that was lobbying Congressional leader to reinstate funds for the SETI (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program. Sheehan indicated to Smith that he was glad to help out. Smith also later asked him if he could help out with an investigation into ''the potential theological religious implications of potential contact with extraterrestrial civilizations.'' This again begs the question that if there's nothing at all to this phenomenon, then why this study? Sheehan agreed to Smith's request but insisted he have access to the documents pertaining to this issue that she had garnered for an investigation she did for the Science and Technology Committee in Congress. When asked what exactly Sheehan wanted to see, he indicated he wanted access to ''the classified sections of the Project Blue Book.'' Astoundingly, Daniel was granted access. He was not allowed to take notes, photos, or carry anything into the room containing the documents or out with him when he left the Library of Congress where the documents were stored. After proceeding through multiple layers of security, he was shown to the room with microfiche machines. Before entering, he was told he could not take his briefcase with him. Almost absent-mindedly, he had a yellow legal pad under his arm that wasn't confiscated before he entered the room. He proceeded through small canisters of film. It didn't take long to find proof. He discovered photos of what appeared to be a disc-shaped craft. It had crashed. ''It had hit into this field and had dug up, kind of plowed this kind of trough through this field. It was wedged into the side of this bank. There was snow all around the picture. The vehicle was wedged into the side of this mud-like embankment -- kind of up at an angle.'' The men taking photos were unmistakably, in Sheehan's mind, American Air Force personnel. As Sheehan continued to review the film, he discovered a close-up of the craft that revealed symbols or glyphs written on the craft. He thought it was an insignia. He wanted to record what he saw, but remembered he was not allowed to take notes. He knew it was likely his legal pad would be discovered when he left the room and the guards would examine it to see if he had taken notes. However, since he wanted those insignias, he had to find a way to record them. He decided to arrange the cardboard backing of his legal pad in such a way against the microfiche screen so he could trace the symbols. When he left the top-secret document room, he was searched. His pad was taken and flipped through for notes. Finding none, and not noticing the traced symbols on the cardboard backing of the yellow pad, it was returned to him by the guards and Sheehan left. Sheehan not only revealed to Marcia Smith what he had found but he also revealed the information to his boss at the Jesuit National Headquarters. Meetings and conventions were convened on the issue. Reports were written. President Carter saw at least one of the reports made by Marcia Smith, which included information from Daniel Sheehan's discoveries. Sheehan still has the yellow notepad with the symbols but says no analysis has been done on the symbols. Oh, are you wondering about the reports Marcia Smith finished after Daniel Sheehan's discovery and what they said? Well, Sheehan read them and according to Sheehan: ''The one report that Marcia showed me on extraterrestrial phenomena actually stated that it was the conclusion of the Library of Congress, Science and Technology Division, that from two to six, at least, other highly-intelligent, technologically-developed civilizations exist right within our own galaxy.'' [http://www.presidentialufo.com/marcia_smith_story.htm] ''The second report,'' says Sheehan, ''they had drawings of different shapes of UFOs that have been sighted,'' continued Sheehan. ''They didn't site any particular cases, but they said that they believed there was a significant number of instances where the official United States Air Force investigations were unable to discount the possibility that one or more of these vehicles was actually from one of these extraterrestrial civilizations. They put this together, and sent it over to the President. I ended up seeing a copy of it.'' The Carter Administration, though not bringing about Full Disclosure, had a very busy four years of UFO phenomena. I can't help but wonder if he had had another term in office, what could have come of all of this? Article : Doug Bower Post by meldrew on Oct 21, 2010 at 12:55pm www.richplanet.net/detail.php?dbindex=61 President Jimmy Carter was the first President of the United States of America to have officially reported the UFO he saw to the authorities. He was also the President who said that if elected he would see that UFO-Alien Full Disclosure would take place. That the American public would be told the truth about everything was one of the campaign cries of Jimmy Carter. Carter made a promise he could not or would not be able to keep. After Carter won the White House, he paid a visit to the then-CIA Director, George Bush. Carter had an interest in UFOs ever since experiencing his first sighting sometime in 1969 while standing outside a Lion's Club in Georgia. His campaign speeches promising to unravel the government's long held cover-up was the ''Parting of the Red Sea'' for Ufologists not only in America but around the world. Here was the one guy who would open up the ''Promised Land'' and lead them into Full Disclosure. Carter wanted the U.S. Government's UFO secret documents declassified. George Bush more or less told Carter that the President of the United States did not have the need to know the information contained in those documents. Can you even begin to imagine that? What lends even more mind-blowing credibility to this alleged event between Carter and Bush is the credibility of the allegation maker: Daniel Sheehan. Daniel Sheehan was born in1946 and graduated from Harvard Law School. There, he was co-founder of the Harvard Civil Rights and Civil Liberty Law Review. He went on to work for the American Civil Liberties Union and became general counsel for a host of entities including The Disclosure Project-a group dedicated to getting the U.S. Government to allow full and unfettered access to what the Feds know about the UFO-Alien phenomenon. According to Sheehan, Bush Senior, who was the CIA Director, refused Carter's request for disclosure of the UFO documents, even to the President of the United States, because it was generally believed in the halls and corridors of the secret, black-ops government that Carter would then turn the truth over to the American people. Director of a California think tank, Sheehan's credentials are impeccable. Sheehan's career is a litany of high-profile cases like, ''legal counsel team for the New York Times' Pentagon Papers case, defense of the Berrigan brothers, going after the Kerr-McGee nuclear plant (Karen Silkwood), Three-Mile Island, Iran-Contra. At the Disclosure Conference, Sheehan says the Bush-Carter story was relayed to him in 1977 by Marcia Smith of the Congressional Research Service, part of the Library of Congress.'' Sheehan's interest in this phenomenon came about when Sheehan met Marcia Smith through a mutual acquaintance. Smith told Sheehan that she was involved in a research project for the Science and Technology Committee of the Library of Congress that would address the issues of the potential existence of extraterrestrial intelligence and make an evaluation of the data on the phenomena of UFOs. When Sheehan queried Smith as to who exactly wanted this study done, her answer was none other than Jimmy Carter. This all was with a view to investigate exactly what could or could not be turned over to the general public, according to Daniel Sheehan. Smith asked Sheehan if he could, since he was the then-General Counsel to United States Jesuit Headquarters at their National Office in Washington D.C., get access to the records on the UFO-Alien issue contained in the Vatican. Though Sheehan made repeated attempts to gain access to the Vatican's documents through official channels, he was refused each time. This makes one wonder just why, if all there is to this UFO-Alien issue is weather balloons, flocks of geese, and swamp gas, would the Vatican (or any government on the earth, for that matter) have top-secret, and highly unattainable records pertaining to a nonexistent issue? After telling Marcia Smith of his roadblock with the Vatican Library, she asked if he could help with a team that was lobbying Congressional leader to reinstate funds for the SETI (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program. Sheehan indicated to Smith that he was glad to help out. Smith also later asked him if he could help out with an investigation into ''the potential theological religious implications of potential contact with extraterrestrial civilizations.'' This again begs the question that if there's nothing at all to this phenomenon, then why this study? Sheehan agreed to Smith's request but insisted he have access to the documents pertaining to this issue that she had garnered for an investigation she did for the Science and Technology Committee in Congress. When asked what exactly Sheehan wanted to see, he indicated he wanted access to ''the classified sections of the Project Blue Book.'' Astoundingly, Daniel was granted access. He was not allowed to take notes, photos, or carry anything into the room containing the documents or out with him when he left the Library of Congress where the documents were stored. After proceeding through multiple layers of security, he was shown to the room with microfiche machines. Before entering, he was told he could not take his briefcase with him. Almost absent-mindedly, he had a yellow legal pad under his arm that wasn't confiscated before he entered the room. He proceeded through small canisters of film. It didn't take long to find proof. He discovered photos of what appeared to be a disc-shaped craft. It had crashed. ''It had hit into this field and had dug up, kind of plowed this kind of trough through this field. It was wedged into the side of this bank. There was snow all around the picture. The vehicle was wedged into the side of this mud-like embankment -- kind of up at an angle.'' The men taking photos were unmistakably, in Sheehan's mind, American Air Force personnel. As Sheehan continued to review the film, he discovered a close-up of the craft that revealed symbols or glyphs written on the craft. He thought it was an insignia. He wanted to record what he saw, but remembered he was not allowed to take notes. He knew it was likely his legal pad would be discovered when he left the room and the guards would examine it to see if he had taken notes. However, since he wanted those insignias, he had to find a way to record them. He decided to arrange the cardboard backing of his legal pad in such a way against the microfiche screen so he could trace the symbols. When he left the top-secret document room, he was searched. His pad was taken and flipped through for notes. Finding none, and not noticing the traced symbols on the cardboard backing of the yellow pad, it was returned to him by the guards and Sheehan left. Sheehan not only revealed to Marcia Smith what he had found but he also revealed the information to his boss at the Jesuit National Headquarters. Meetings and conventions were convened on the issue. Reports were written. President Carter saw at least one of the reports made by Marcia Smith, which included information from Daniel Sheehan's discoveries. Sheehan still has the yellow notepad with the symbols but says no analysis has been done on the symbols. Oh, are you wondering about the reports Marcia Smith finished after Daniel Sheehan's discovery and what they said? Well, Sheehan read them and according to Sheehan: ''The one report that Marcia showed me on extraterrestrial phenomena actually stated that it was the conclusion of the Library of Congress, Science and Technology Division, that from two to six, at least, other highly-intelligent, technologically-developed civilizations exist right within our own galaxy.'' [http://www.presidentialufo.com/marcia_smith_story.htm] ''The second report,'' says Sheehan, ''they had drawings of different shapes of UFOs that have been sighted,'' continued Sheehan. ''They didn't site any particular cases, but they said that they believed there was a significant number of instances where the official United States Air Force investigations were unable to discount the possibility that one or more of these vehicles was actually from one of these extraterrestrial civilizations. They put this together, and sent it over to the President. I ended up seeing a copy of it.'' The Carter Administration, though not bringing about Full Disclosure, had a very busy four years of UFO phenomena. I can't help but wonder if he had had another term in office, what could have come of all of this? Article : Doug Bower </p> 18988689 2014-07-29 00:04:23 2014-07-29 00:04:23 open open aretr-ufo-18988689 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan From The New Yorker Masland Carpet October 1, 2012 http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/07/20/from-the-new-yorker-masland-carpet-october-1-18923857/ Sun, 20 Jul 2014 06:26:07 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] A Reporter at Large Transaction Man Mormonism, private equity, and the making of a candidate. by Nicholas Lemann October 1, 2012 1.6K Print More Mitt Romney’s time at business school coincided with the waning of big corporations and the beginning of the rise of finance. I. CHURCH This summer, I spent most of an afternoon in Salt Lake City with Douglas Anderson, a friend of Mitt Romney’s. Anderson lives in a housing development in the foothills of the mountains that rise to the east of the city. We met in his living room, which leads to a patio with a view across the Great Basin—a view that isn’t so different from the one that the first Mormon settlers in Utah had as they crossed the mountains, except that what you see now is prosperous urban sprawl, not a desert. Anderson, a bald, amiable man in his early sixties, is a Democrat, but, like Romney, he is a Mormon, with deep roots in Utah; he is part of the business-school and management-consulting worlds; and his father always made it clear that holding a high political office would be the excellent culmination of a career. In Belmont, Massachusetts, where both men lived for years, Anderson was the Romney family’s “home teacher,” assigned by the Church to pay monthly visits to support the family and its religious life and to offer a little guidance. In 1989, Anderson and his family moved to Salt Lake City. On the coffee table in the living room was a large, leather-bound copy of the Book of Mormon. Above the desk in Anderson’s study was a picture of Jesus Christ standing on a high bluff and looking down into a valley, with the caption “Oh, Jerusalem! Oh, Jerusalem!” Anderson told me an almost surreal story about his first encounter with Romney, in 1968. Anderson was a freshman at Stanford. Romney had been a student there in 1965-66, before he left for France, to do the missionary work that young Mormons pursue. Anderson was walking across the campus one day when a student he hardly knew approached him. “Are you a Mormon?” the young man asked. Anderson said yes. “Do you know Mitt Romney?” No. “Mitt Romney is the finest person I have ever known!” Then he walked away. Another Mormon friend who shares Romney’s background (church, business school, long residence in Belmont, Massachusetts) is Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor and renowned management guru. He remembers first encountering Romney in an economics class at Brigham Young University, in 1970, just after Romney returned from his mission and married Ann Davies, his high-school sweetheart. “He was the big man on campus,” Christensen told me. He owned an A.M.C. Javelin, the hottest car made by the auto company that his father, George Romney, had run. “He had a beautiful wife. His father was famous, he was handsome. Everybody wanted to be what Mitt was.” Inside the world that Mitt Romney inhabits, he has always been a person of destiny. It isn’t just that he is the son of a corporate chief executive, governor, and Presidential candidate. He is the scion of one of the most prominent Mormon families, with a direct connection to the Church’s founding prophets, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. The Romneys converted in England and came to the United States in 1841. The first American member of the family, Miles Park Romney, was born in the short-lived paradise of Nauvoo, Illinois, over which Joseph Smith presided. After Smith’s martyrdom, the Romneys took part in the terrible forced exodus that ended in Utah. Mitt Romney was born in 1947, the year of the centennial of the Mormons’ arrival there. The youngest of four siblings by six years, he was born when his parents were middle-aged. Romney, with his square jaw and brilliantined hair and old-school cultural references, is a throwback to an earlier time. His father and mother were born in 1907 and 1908; his oldest sister was born before either of Barack Obama’s parents. from the issue buy as a print e-mail this Romney often comes across as not being able to relate to mainstream American life. In his astonishing performance before a group of rich donors in Boca Raton, Florida, in May, recently made public by Mother Jones, he said that the forty-seven per cent of Americans who pay no federal income taxes are never going to vote for him, because they think of themselves as “victims” and “believe that government has a responsibility to care for them.” That forty-seven per cent includes millions of people who do pay payroll taxes, and retirees, and people who are disabled and unemployed. You’d expect somebody who proposes to run the federal government to know that. One could see Romney simply as a rich person who thinks the way many rich people must think; one could see him as a super fund-raiser who is good at telling a certain kind of wealthy audience what he believes it wants to hear; or one could see him simply as somebody who can’t connect to outsiders in any natural way, who goes through life trying one somewhat forced and awkward technique after another, because he thinks he has to keep his real self private. It isn’t easy to comprehend what sort of heart and soul and mind produced those remarks. Romney is very deeply a product of a series of interconnected, tightly enclosed worlds, with their own rules: Mormonism, business school, management consulting, private equity. Understanding him requires understanding the subcultures that produced him. Romney, on his mission in France, lived a life oddly similar, in its daily texture, at least, to Obama’s as a community organizer in Chicago: long, penurious days spent knocking on strangers’ doors, “tracting” in the hope of finding someone who wanted to hear Joseph Smith’s miraculous story. But in 1968, toward the end of his mission, Romney had several unsettling experiences. He was in an auto accident in which a passenger in the car he was driving was killed. When the French student protests broke out, members of Romney’s mission (who were garbed, “Matrix”-like, in white shirts, black suits, and skinny ties) saw them as a terrifying example of the threat posed by the left. And Romney’s father, long considered the front-runner for the Republican Presidential nomination, was dropping out of the race, before the first primary. These days, people often describe Romney as an old-fashioned “Rockefeller Republican”—moderate on social issues, internationalist on foreign policy, and pro-Wall Street—who is pretending to be more conservative out of expediency. This is misleading on two counts. In the heyday of Rockefeller Republicanism, George Romney’s billboards in New Hampshire said, “The Way to Stop Crime Is to Stop Moral Decay.” And that campaign resulted in an enduring sense in the family of personal bitterness and betrayal toward Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York. Just after the 1966 midterm elections, Rockefeller summoned George Romney to one of the family’s properties, the Dorado Beach hotel, in Puerto Rico, and promised him full support in the 1968 Presidential primaries and election. This meant that Romney would begin the race with the delegations of Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania in his pocket (the governor of Pennsylvania had allied himself with Rockefeller), plus a panoply of Rockefeller connections, funding sources, and policy advisers, including Henry Kissinger. Yet he was not remotely an establishment figure. In “The Making of the President 1968,” Theodore H. White wrote, wonderingly, “Somewhere out beyond the Alleghenies the old culture of America still persists, people who think Boy Scouts are good, who believe that divorce is bad, who teach Bible classes on Sunday, enjoy church suppers, wash their children’s mouths with soap to purge dirty words, who regard homosexuals as wicked, whose throat chokes up when an American flag is marched by on the Fourth of July.” (All five of Mitt Romney’s sons were Boy Scouts and three became Eagle Scouts.) The Old Guard, White thought, would never put up with this sort of character: “There is a natural timberline in national politics beyond which certain kinds of men cannot thrive.” More specifically, Rockefeller, who could never completely give up the idea of himself as President, began to hint that he might get into the race after all. At a certain point, it was made clear to Romney that all those Rockefeller resources were not going to be available to him. Romney bowed out, feeling that he had been played for a fool; Rockefeller never entered the race. In March, 1968, Michael Bush, a member of Mitt Romney’s mission in France, wrote to his mother, “Mitt Romney is working in Bordeaux now. We were together a while this morning and of course we discussed politics. (Politics is often a missionary discussion topic.) It was interesting to hear about George Romney from the inside. It appears that Rockefeller gave Romney a dirty deal. In a letter Elder R. received just after his Dad’s withdrawal, Gov. Romney explained that the poor predictions for New Hampshire were not the reason he withdrew. It was because Rockefeller was stepping out of the non-candidacy ranks. Rockefeller had ardently promised his support, right down to the line—winner or loser, but when he said that he would accept a draft, Romney doubted his sincerity and told Rocky that he knew then that he had been a stalking horse.” Was that when the seed of Mitt Romney’s Presidential candidacy was planted? We’ll never know, because Romney and his friends are wedded, no doubt sincerely, to the standard Republican rhetoric about his political ambition as a matter of “being of service” and “giving back.” If the seed was planted back then, one of the lessons plainly was that you want to be the guy in the race who has the most money, not the guy who is dependent on the guy with the most money. Like most élites, the Mormon élite is a small world where everybody knows and has close ties to everybody else. One of the important Mormon families is the Eyrings. Henry Eyring, like George Romney, was born in Mexico in the first decade of the twentieth century. Mormons had established a colony there, so that they could continue to practice polygamy. In the nineteen-thirties and forties, Eyring was a distinguished chemistry professor at Princeton. His son Henry B. Eyring, who taught at Stanford Business School, is now the second-ranking official in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, with the title First Counsellor in the First Presidency. In 2006, Henry B.’s son, Henry J., gave up a career at the management-consulting firm Monitor, where Mitt Romney’s eldest son, Tagg, has worked. The Church assigned him to a team in charge of transforming a small two-year Mormon college in Rexburg, Idaho, into a major Mormon university, called B.Y.U.-Idaho. In 2005, Kim Clark, the dean of Harvard Business School, became president of B.Y.U.-Idaho; for many years in Belmont, Mitt Romney was home teacher for Clark’s seven children. When I visited Rexburg, Henry Eyring, a rail-thin, bald man in his late forties, gave me a tour of the campus, which consists of new brick and stone buildings separated by well-tended lawns and paths. A large temple stands next to the campus. Our tour ended in the main auditorium, which seats fifteen thousand, so that the entire student body can worship together. We sat down in the balcony and talked. “My great-great-grandmother was a Romney,” Eyring said. “That’s the family connection. In fact, my grandfather’s father was married to two Romney sisters. They were driven out of the United States, to Mexico. Then they were driven out of Mexico, by Pancho Villa and the Mexican Revolution. They lived in a stockyard in El Paso for a year, and then in Pima, Arizona. The middle of nowhere. But they got an education. There is within us, as a people, a drive to get all the education you can, to conquer the wilderness, if you will. We must become all we can be. We must master our circumstances—we as a family. Not for aggrandizement. For self-actualization, as Abraham Maslow would say. Let’s go to Zion.” The heads of B.Y.U.-Idaho and Brigham Young’s other sister school, in Hawaii, are former Harvard Business School professors. Three of Mitt Romney’s sons have Harvard M.B.A.s. I asked Eyring why so many prominent Mormons are attracted to business school. The educational ethic, he said, is “to be intellectually curious but to be practical. That will take a disproportionate portion of the population into commerce—schools of business. Make the desert blossom as the rose, in the words of Isaiah. The two most significant graduate schools in the Mormon educational system are business and law. There is a great interest in executive leadership. You’re talking to a J.D./M.B.A. Mitt is a J.D./M.B.A. When a Mormon goes to law school, he rarely thinks about law firms. It’s more about government and diplomacy.” Eyring noted that Joseph Smith’s expulsion from one state after another, and his murder in Illinois, impressed on Mormons the importance of being empowered participants in government. “We are interested in law because of governance, business because of building things. Mitt’s father moved back and forth across the line. You have to be a builder. You can build it in business, or you can build it in government. You are not going to be driven out of your home. You will not be persecuted. You will be safe. You will get an education. You can advance.” Some weeks later, in Boston, I asked Clayton Christensen the same question. “Let me give you a two-minute history of Christianity,” he said. “In 300 A.D., the leaders decided they had all the answers. God doesn’t give you a new answer until you ask a question. The leaders had the New Testament. It had all the answers. God had given them revelation. What’s unique about Mormonism is that, starting with Joseph Smith, we started asking questions of God that we didn’t have the answers to. The intellectual curiosity: we, or the Prophet, ask God.” He went on, “Most religions come to believe in the Zeus model of God. He was outside the universe and created everything. Latter-Day Saints believe that God is in the universe and his power comes from understanding the rules of the universe perfectly. Everything we learn makes us more like God. The impetus to learn is so strong because it helps us to become more like God.” There is a special intensity in the playing out of Mormon culture across American society, because it is an American religion, whose canonical events took place here, not all that long ago. Back in Rexburg, I asked Kim Clark what in Mormon culture generates such an intense preoccupation with business. Henry Eyring identified business with building and practicality; Clark identified business with personal leadership, which is also a preoccupation of Mitt Romney’s. “There are aspects of the doctrine, the practice, the experience that prepare people well for leadership,” he said. “My mother, every day, would look me in the eye and say to me, ‘You are a leader! Stand up for what you believe in. Don’t let people drag you around by the nose. You have a responsibility to your heavenly father. You have a responsibility to do your very best.’ And on my way out the door she’d add, ‘You remember who you are. People sacrificed for you. They died so you could have what you have.’ I’m sure I’m not the only L.D.S. child who heard that from his mom. That came out of the pioneer experience. It’s deeply ingrained. Being persecuted, driven across the country. I was five! And then the Church gives you those leadership opportunities. For little kids, three years old, there’s something called Primary. I gave my first talk to an organization when I was four or five years old. At twelve, they put you in a leadership position. At nineteen, you get sent on a mission. At twenty, you’re responsible for other missionaries, and it’s serious. It’s people’s lives. All through your experience, you’re trained to be a leader.” II. BUSINESS All of us see the course of our lives as particular, and Mitt and Ann Romney tell their story that way. But Romney’s life as a young man took a typical path for a devout Mormon: freshman year of college, then a mission abroad, then an early marriage and enrollment at Brigham Young (where it is not uncommon for more than half the class to be married when they graduate). Ann, also the child of a businessman, and brought up as a lightly affiliated Episcopalian, converted to Mormonism. The marriage took place twice, once in Michigan, so that her parents could attend, and then in the magnificent temple in Salt Lake City (which only Mormons with a “temple recommend” can enter). From Brigham Young, Romney went to Harvard, where, as a compromise with his father, he enrolled in both the law school (his father’s preference) and the business school. Romney was a golden boy there, as he had been at Stanford, on mission, and at Brigham Young. When Romney was at Harvard Business School, all second-year students were required to read Alfred P. Sloan’s “My Years with General Motors.” In the decades after the Second World War, G.M. was one of the most successful institutions in America, the sort of place where the brightest Harvard Business School graduates dreamed of working. The most influential figures in business were the chief executives of large corporations. Wall Street, in those days, was a sleepy backwater, and it was almost unimaginably less important to American economic life than it is now. In the nineteen-seventies, the balance of power began to shift from production to capital, and corporate America started to seem lumbering and inefficient. This shift was the business world’s version of the sixties—one (younger and impatient) group of politically conservative businesspeople challenging another (older and more traditional) group. The field of battle was not politics, culture, dress, or taste in music. It was the American corporation, and the consequences for the whole society were profound. The business sixties wound up rearranging most of the American economy. General Motors has fewer than half as many employees today as it did in 1955, and, among the American corporations that were great at mid-century, it’s hardly alone. George Romney was an organization man. Mitt Romney became a transaction man: someone who moves assets around with a speed and force that leaves many of the rest of us bewildered. The insurrection in business has profoundly affected the lives of most people who work, pay taxes, and get government benefits. It is the backdrop to this Presidential election. By the time Romney graduated, in 1975, the best students at Harvard Business School were dreaming not of rising through the management ranks at an industrial company but of working in the financial world or at strategic-consulting companies. The most prestigious of these was a relatively new boutique firm called Boston Consulting Group, and Mitt Romney got his first job after business school there. The mystique of B.C.G. and its founder, Bruce Henderson, couldn’t have been more different from that of Alfred Sloan and G.M. B.C.G. was small, and it didn’t run or make anything; it merely gave advice. Corporations with tens of thousands of career employees brought in teams of five or six people from B.C.G. to spend a few months studying their business and then tell them how to become more economically powerful, by making structural and strategic changes. The consultants interviewed employees and customers and suppliers, and got competitors’ public data filings. They analyzed the information using techniques that Henderson and his colleagues had developed, with names like the experience curve and the growth-share matrix. B.C.G., its older and bigger competitor McKinsey, and many imitators helped to break apart the corporate structures of postwar America and reconfigure them. Romney was an ideal consultant: polite, well trained in presentation skills, and, as the son of one corporate executive and the namesake of another (he is Willard Mitt Romney, after Willard Marriott, the leading Mormon business executive of the late nineteen-forties), comfortable in a boardroom. Kim Clark says that Romney was “very smart, but also great with senior executives, really capable of developing relationships with them. You have to be really good on your feet, good at understanding what people’s concerns are and how they think.” In 1973, Bruce Henderson’s second-in-command at B.C.G., Bill Bain, left to start his own strategic-consulting firm. Slight, neat, and quiet, Bain was a former fund-raiser for Vanderbilt University, with no formal training in business or economics. Bain & Company worked for only one company in an industry, under conditions of high secrecy. Its consultants were recruited with obsessive attention to brains, impeccable dress, manner, and credentials. Whether it was the atmospheric sizzle or the analytic steak, Bain & Company prospered. Often, the top few strategic-consulting firms were competing for the same work, so a slight edge in the youthful perfection of one’s M.B.A.s could tip the balance. In 1977, B.C.G. put Romney in charge of recruiting at Harvard Business School. Midway through the recruiting season, Bill Bain persuaded Romney to leave B.C.G. and become Bain’s chief recruiter at Harvard. “So the person who was saying, ‘Join B.C.G.,’ was now saying, ‘Join Bain,’ ” Clayton Christensen says. “Mitt is so persuasive. He could get rich selling used bubble gum. That gave Bain the critical mass to compete with B.C.G.” Sometimes large historical developments are obvious only in retrospect. In 1979, an obscure division of the U.S. Department of Labor in charge of regulating pension funds loosened something called the “prudent man rule,” enabling funds to invest more aggressively, for higher returns. Organizations like the California state employees’ pension fund and the teachers’ retirement system of Texas suddenly became power players in American capitalism. So did university and foundation endowments and, later, sovereign-wealth funds. The people running these large pools of capital invested to get the best returns, and so helped to drive the remaking of companies, the restructuring of the workforce, and globalization. When the country was dominated by large, established institutions, workers were, often implicitly, guaranteed job security and comfortable benefits. In the new economy, these arrangements were eroded, which put pressure on the political system to pick up the slack. Meanwhile, the hot shots at strategic-consulting firms were becoming frustrated. Sometimes their clients made a great deal of money thanks to their advice, while the firms got only a fraction of what they saw as the value of their work. Conversely, clients were free to ignore their advice, or to be slow about implementing it. In 1976, two members of the faculty at the University of Rochester’s business school, Michael Jensen and William Meckling, published an article in the obscure Journal of Financial Economics called “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure.” It provided the intellectual foundation for bringing together one set of ideas about how to change the ownership structure of a company with another set of ideas about how to change the way it operated. That consolidation led to the creation of Bain Capital, in 1984, and made Mitt Romney very rich. Jensen and Meckling argued that publicly held corporations were poorly managed, because their chief executives, with their generous salaries and high job security, had no real incentive to “maximize the value of the firm.” If a company could be restructured so that it was run by the owner, and if it could take on a lot of new debt that it had to pay down with cash, then it would maximize its value, rather than the comfort and prestige of its C.E.O. In the nineteen-eighties, Harvard Business School hired Michael Jensen as a faculty member, and the battles between him and the pro-corporate professors defined the intellectual life of the school just as much as the battles over critical legal studies defined Harvard Law School when Obama was a student there. Jensen argued in favor of junk bonds, hostile takeovers, leveraged buyouts, and stock options for chief executives. Mitt Romney and others, with these new techniques at their disposal, were able to raise pools of capital and use it to slice, dice, and rearrange the American economy. In a speech in 1993, Jensen announced that the country was experiencing a “third industrial revolution.” It was as economically consequential, he said, and likely to become as politically and culturally controversial, as the industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century. One day in the early eighties, a note appeared on the bulletin board at Bain & Company, saying that anyone interested in starting a new venture-capital fund should get in touch with Mitt Romney. Bain Capital was modest when it launched (the first investment pool was thirty-seven million dollars), and agnostic about whether it borrowed money to buy existing businesses or built new businesses with its own money. One of its first two ventures, a small airline that ran military shuttles between Tonopah, Nevada, and Las Vegas, was in the first category. The other, an eye-surgery business headquartered in Boston, was in the second. So was Staples, Romney’s favorite example of a Bain Capital investment. The consultants were going to bring their consulting skills to bear on the companies they owned, and, as owners, they could guarantee that their advice would be taken. (Bain & Company had unsuccessfully suggested the eye-surgery company, MediVision, to one of its clients, Bausch & Lomb.) But, within a few years, Bain Capital had become almost completely a buyout firm: it bought businesses, retooled them, and resold them. The returns were typically much higher than they were from investing in start-ups. Buying assets with borrowed money can be spectacularly profitable if the asset can be resold at a higher price. After Romney left Bain Capital, the head of the management committee was Bob Gay, whose father, a prominent Mormon and a friend of George Romney’s, ran Howard Hughes’s business empire. Gay was brought in because he was a Wall Street guy who knew the deal business. When a company is acquired by a private-equity firm, something dramatic is guaranteed to happen to it. The debt increases the cost of doing business, because of interest payments. The investors have to get their money back within ten years. And the deal has to generate income for the private-equity firm. Some moribund companies are turned around or fruitfully combined with a powerful new partner; some close plants and lay off workers; some take on debt just to pay fees to the investors; some are sold and then go bankrupt. Even as Bain Capital was making a lot of its money in buyouts, it still took pride in its consulting skills. Romney likes to say that he was a consultant or a venture capitalist, not that he was in private equity. Consultants think that people in private equity make most of their money from the way a deal is structured (Bain Capital aggressively pursued that aspect of its business), not from how well they analyze a company and its problems. Some Bainies liked to talk about “the nuclear reactor”: their all-powerful analytic methods, which the dummies on Wall Street didn’t have. They weren’t traders; they were efficiency experts. What they did wasn’t mere “financial engineering”; it was “operational engineering.” They replaced management, reorganized the supply chain, upgraded equipment, changed the accounting system. Romney loved to order up charts and graphs; in his personal pantheon of admirability “data” ranks right up there with “leadership.” During meetings, he still challenges the person making the PowerPoint presentation, poking holes in the argument, demanding different ways to solve the problem. In his own mind, he is a master chief executive who started a very successful business that brought a particular approach to problems—not a guy who used debt to buy and resell businesses. Bain Capital did many dozens of deals under Romney. One of them involved a carpet company in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, called Masland, which had been owned and operated by one family for four generations. It went public in the nineteen-sixties. In 1986, it was acquired in a hostile takeover by Burlington Industries. The next year, Burlington itself came under attack from a corporate raider, and it arranged a leveraged buyout with Morgan Stanley. Desperate for cash, it put Masland up for sale. Bain Capital bought the company, which by that time was largely selling interior components to the auto business. Before making the deal, Romney flew to Detroit with the C.E.O. of the company, Bill Branch, and met with Masland’s biggest customer, Ford, to make sure that it would stay on board after the deal. Then Romney helped the company acquire another interior-components supplier, in Wisconsin, which had General Motors as a customer. In 1993, only two and a half years after the acquisition by Bain, Masland went public. On the profits from that transaction, Bain made seven times its initial investment. In 1996, Masland was merged with an auto-parts company called Lear. In 2005, Lear formed a partnership with W. L. Ross & Company, a big New York private-equity firm. In 2008, the original Masland manufacturing plant, in Carlisle, which at its peak had employed a thousand workers, shut down. So goes the transactional society, as it plays out across the middle range of the economy and the middle of the country. Three years after Bain Capital was founded, Oliver Stone’s movie “Wall Street” came out. Gordon Gekko, its protagonist, expressed his greed by doing buyout deals. A few years later, in “Pretty Woman,” Richard Gere was a private-equity guy who redeemed himself by falling in love with Julia Roberts and cancelling his plans to buy a company and do all the things that private-equity firms do. In popular culture, private equity had become the most conveniently available symbol of everything that people didn’t like about the transactional economy. In 1994, when Romney ran for the U.S. Senate against Ted Kennedy, Kennedy’s campaign figured out (as President Obama’s campaign has this year) that an essential element of a race against Romney was to run against the private-equity business. Within private equity, people don’t talk about the questions that are on the mind of the public. One professor at a leading business school whose subject is private equity put it simply: “Can I change the free cash-flow equation of the company? If I do, I win. If I don’t, I lose. It’s not the job of private equity to create jobs. The job is to create value. That sometimes creates jobs, and sometimes not.” A comprehensive study of private equity published last year found that the industry has a negligible effect on employment. Private equity is business on steroids: seek efficiency and economic return, not large social goals (unless you think those are large social goals). Because Mitt Romney is incapable of explaining his career in a way that makes it sound admirable to people who aren’t in business, the country, for now, is directing at him its very mixed feelings about the financialization of the American economy. Everyone who knows Romney agrees that his father is unusually important to him. “His dad is his biggest hero,” says Ben Coes, who managed Romney’s successful 2002 campaign for governor of Massachusetts, seven years after George Romney’s death. “He thinks about him at least once an hour, if not more. He worships the guy.” In 1994, just after his unsuccessful Senate campaign, Romney called William Weld, then the governor of Massachusetts, to ask if he could stop by with his dad to talk about volunteerism. “Mitt and his father came in,” Weld remembers. “I got out from behind my desk. George talks for forty-five or sixty minutes, with one or two interjections by me. Mitt not only didn’t say a word; his eyes never left his father’s face. The expression in his eyes was hero worship. . . . And six months later his father was dead.” When Mitt Romney announced that he was going to run against Ted Kennedy, George Romney started making appearances at the Bain Capital office. He was delighted by Mitt’s decision, and evidently thought of politics as a higher calling than business. For Mitt, honoring and pleasing his father seems to have been the highest calling of all. Finally, in George Romney’s mind, his son’s real career had begun. III. POLITICS Just about the only thing in life that Mitt Romney is obviously not very good at is the public aspect of running for office. During his four campaigns for office—U.S. senator, in 1994; governor, in 2002; President, in 2008 and 2012—he must have undergone endless hours of training and practice, but the magic just isn’t there. In June, I spent a few days on the campaign trail with him, in Wisconsin and Iowa. Romney’s trip had several purposes. A film crew was gathering footage for campaign commercials to run in the fall; Romney stopped in Janesville, Wisconsin, talking privately and doing an event with Paul Ryan, soon to be his running mate; and it was another attempt, apparently fruitless, on the part of the campaign to demonstrate the candidate’s concern with ordinary people. This segment was officially called the “Every Town Counts” tour. Romney rode around in a sleek bus painted with all-American scenes of mountains, church steeples, and ships in harbors. Romney cannot light up a crowd. He dresses the way one is supposed to dress (checked shirt, no tie), he dutifully repeats his applause lines at every stop (“Last time there was hope and change—this time it’s ‘We hope to change the subject’ ”), he takes his body through motions and gestures meant to read as forceful and high-energy—and nothing happens. This summer, his audiences were strikingly small, and white, and middle-aged or older. One problem is that Romney’s voice lacks resonance and range. Another is that, even in brief appearances, he tends to offer up three- and five-point policy plans that bore the audience. He talks to voters businessman to businessman, on the assumption that everybody either runs a business or wants to start one. Romney believes that if you drop the name of someone who has built a very successful company—Sam Walton, of Wal-Mart, or Ray Kroc, of McDonald’s—it will have the same effect as mentioning a sports hero. And Romney’s political references (the Dodd-Frank financial-reform law, the organized-labor cause known as “card check,” Obama’s failure to negotiate new free-trade agreements) don’t register much with the people who turn up at rallies. He sounds like someone speaking at a Rotary Club luncheon in the nineteen-fifties. The weekend before the Republican Convention, I travelled to Powell, Ohio, a picture-postcard small town just outside Columbus, where there was a Romney rally early on a Saturday morning. Ryan spoke before Romney. He was loud and kinetic, and full of cultural references (football, deer hunting, Catholicism), which got far more applause than his comments on economics and policy. When Romney took the stage, he picked up on the distant shouts of a group of protesters who were outside the security perimeter of the rally, and began to riff. He referred to the protesters as a Greek chorus, went on to recall the grandiose Greek columns that stood behind Obama when he accepted the Democratic nomination in Denver, in 2008, and finally arrived at the Greek fiscal crisis and how the Obama Administration was leading America in that direction. His punch line was “Everything they do reminds us of Greece!” Then he predicted that although Obama would accept the nomination this year at the Bank of America Arena, in Charlotte, he would not call the arena by its name, because he would never acknowledge a bank. Then it was on to Chinese-currency policy. After the rally, I interviewed Romney. He was sitting at a folding Formica-topped table in a corner of the town’s city-council chamber, with his travelling press aide, Rick Gorka, at his side. Romney has done a lot of meeting and a lot of selling during his rise in business and politics, but mainly indoors, in small groups of peers. He’s as adept in that setting as he is unnatural talking to a big crowd. Unlike most candidates, he did not communicate a sense either of being too restless to give you his full attention or of having to establish that he is the alpha and you the beta. He was direct and pleasant and engaged. His voice sounded husky, rather than flat. His gestures seemed spontaneous, not staged. Because Romney’s answers to the standard political questions are usually scripted and unrevealing, I asked him about business. Why had General Motors, the economic titan of his youth, fallen so low? “My dad had a statement he would make that proved to be true in this industry, as in all others,” Romney said. “I remember, as a boy, saying to him, ‘Dad, we make the best cars, don’t we?’ And he said yes. And I said, ‘Then why don’t we sell the most cars?’ And he said, Well, someday we may. And he said, ‘Because, Mitt’—and this is a quote—‘there’s nothing as vulnerable as entrenched success.’ And the auto industry, in particular General Motors, was so successful for so long that it didn’t recognize the need to innovate, to become more productive, to become more efficient, or it would ultimately be vulnerable to foreign competition. So the industry itself, its managers, made some critical mistakes.” Romney ticked off the mistakes. “One, they agreed to union contracts that were uncompetitive with those of other companies around the world, and ultimately with the so-called transplants, foreign companies doing business in the U.S.,” he said. “By calculations that some consulting firms did, a U.S. car was two thousand dollars more expensive to build than a comparable foreign product.” He added, “The benefit packages, the work rules, the wages, and other decisions by the management were not consistent with the need to be more competitive.” I asked Romney how he would reconcile this account with the central theory of his first employer, the Boston Consulting Group, that experience gives a company a powerful economic advantage. Actually, he said, Bruce Henderson’s insight was tempered by the word “could.” A successful company could have low costs, it could make a better product, and it could have a highly profitable run. “But if companies become complacent,” he went on, “in my dad’s lexicon, they could become more vulnerable. And the history—I.B.M., Western Union, A.T. & T., the history of the great nations of the earth, the great empires of the earth—there’s nothing as vulnerable as entrenched success. “And there are some enterprises that have found that they can, despite their huge success, reinvigorate themselves, reinvent themselves, and maintain their lead. G.E. did that under Jack Welch,” he said. “Bruce Henderson’s vision was important because it said what’s important is not just how good you are as a company; it is how good you are relative to your competition. . . . And Bill Bain’s innovation was to go one step further, and to say, ‘We don’t just give the company a road map; we help them implement that road map.’ Because giving someone an answer without actually helping them implement it will often not yield a result. So both firms, Boston Consulting Group and Bain, and then ultimately McKinsey and others, all caught on to the same vision, which is: help American and foreign companies recognize that they must change to survive.” Romney clearly loved talking about this, and he was showing how he thinks about running things, including the federal government. The motif of understanding business and government in terms of a competition between entrenched, unproductive costs and efficient investments, which animates the video of the talk to donors in Boca Raton, ran through our conversation. He went on, “I’ve seen, for instance, in a company like Marriott International—you have Bill Marriott, who is the chief executive officer there, and there’s the Host Hotels, which was part of the company at one point. It’s now a separate company. It’s headed by another Marriott brother, Dick Marriott. Both of them have been highly successful over many decades . . . and their chief executives are constantly pushing the businesses to become more efficient, more customer-friendly, to expand into new markets.” He led into a discussion of politics by talking about the strategic myopia of many business executives. “They agree to actions which are good on a short-term basis but may be more hazardous long term. And so, for instance, if you’re the chief executive officer of General Motors back in the nineteen-seventies and a contract comes forward which has onerous legacy costs, why, you know that those costs are not going to be borne on your term, because it’s going to be done for future retirees. And so you might agree to something that is harmful to the company long term but, by the way, beneficial short term, because who wants to take a strike, to prevent a provision that’s going to hurt ten years or twenty years down the road? “This is particularly true, by the way, in politics,” he went on, “where politicians regularly agree to huge contracts with back-end-loaded benefits, and the day of reckoning finally comes, but they’re long gone.” He allowed a hint of sarcasm to creep into his voice. “While they were there, everything was great. But look at the contracts they entered into!” I asked whether it was possible to run the vast, diffuse American government the way you would run a business. “The private sector is less forgiving,” he said. “If you make serious mistakes in the private sector, you’ll lose your job, or, if you’re in a position of responsibility, you might lose other people’s jobs. In politics, politicians make mistakes all the time and blame their opposition, or borrow more money, or raise taxes to pay for their mistake. In the business world, the ability to speak fast and convincingly is of very little value. I remember the first time I met Jack Welch. I expected him to be a super-salesman. Instead, he spoke quietly, somewhat haltingly, but brilliantly. Stuff matters a lot more than fluff in the private sector.” It was clear where Romney placed himself. “I can’t imagine making politics my profession,” he said. “I can’t imagine having to think about winning elections through a lifetime, to be able to put food on the table and provide for my family.” Because his profession was in the private sector, “I don’t get wound up about winning an election. Instead, I think about what I want to do, hopefully communicate that as well as I can to people, and, if they vote for me, fine, and if they don’t they don’t. That’s their right.” He recalled watching his father on Election Night in 1964, when George was running for reëlection as governor of Michigan. Lyndon Johnson had won the Presidency by a landslide. “The numbers had come in, and in Michigan Johnson was way ahead of what our pollster, Walter DeVries, had estimated. And Walter DeVries came in. Our family was in a hotel room. He said, ‘George, you probably can’t win. Most likely you’ve lost tonight.’ And I, as a seventeen-year-old, was thinking about how embarrassing it would be to go to school and have your dad having lost as governor, and those kinds of personal things. My dad, I looked at him, he was not in the slightest affected.” George Romney told his son, “I’ve put out what I think I can do, and if they want someone else that’s their right.” Mitt Romney said, “He was not defined, in his own mind, by winning elections. He was defined by the things he believed. And if people wished to follow his lead that was up to them.” Romney went on to talk about the social-welfare functions of government. “Government, by and large, is less efficient than churches and private institutions and family members. A family member can say to someone, ‘I’m not going to give you another dollar until you clean up your act, son!’ A government can’t do that. A government has to say, ‘If you qualify, you get it.’ And, that being said, one has no choice but to have a safety net provided by government for housing needs, for food needs, for welfare to get people back on their feet. I recognize that, support that.” Between Presidential campaigns, Romney wrote a book, “No Apology,” without a ghostwriter. It reveals a man doing a slow burn as he watches the man who won the election take office and make the wrong decision on every major issue. So I asked him what he would have done differently in January, 2009. “Let’s start domestic,” he said. “The President failed to focus on the economy. He delegated to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid the stimulus. He did not personally guide the process with Republicans and Democrats, hearing the ideas of both, shaping a piece of legislation which he thought would be most effective. Instead, it was done by Congress. He instead devoted his time and his political capital to the Affordable Care Act, to cap and trade, to Dodd-Frank, and to other pieces of legislation that he thought were going to be historic in their scope. “No. 2, related to foreign affairs. We had men and women in harm’s way, particularly in Afghanistan,” he said. “We knew that there was a decision point about Afghanistan that would be coming forward. We had tens of thousands of men and women in conflict, but he spent almost no time meeting with the commanders and leaders of our military to understand the needs in Afghanistan, to understand what level of a surge, to understand what level of troops might be appropriate for that kind of action. And so when the decision point came he had to delay. I think that was a mistake. He concluded to put in thirty thousand troops instead of the forty thousand that the military had requested. That was a mistake.” On foreign policy, where he has no direct experience and no long-standing team of helpers, Romney consistently shows a moralistic streak; his critique of President Obama is partly managerial, and partly based on the idea that Obama’s foreign policy is all about “apologizing for America.” Regarding the nations of the Middle East, there needed to be a concerted effort to move them “toward a more representative form of government, particularly among our friends. And then when our enemies—when I say our enemies, I’m thinking of Iran, or Syria—we obviously would have very little influence of that nature with them, but when there were movements that began to spring forward seeing greater representation in those countries, we should have been all over that, encouraging it, standing with them, shouting from the mountaintops. Instead, the President, wanting to engage with Iran, was silent when the dissidents took to the streets.” He went on, “It was as if the President was trying to show our foes in the world that we are not biased, we’ll work with anyone. In my view, the right course for a President is to show our friends that we are linked arm in arm with them, and to show those that oppose our interests that we are happy to talk with them, to engage in diplomacy with them, but we will not give an inch to their agenda.” Romney also discussed Russia (whose support of Iran and Syria he strongly objects to) and China (which he feels is playing unfairly in trade with the United States). In both cases, he believes that by getting tougher he could get the other superpower to change. Then our conversation returned to businesses and countries that founder. “We’re all worried,” he said, “but the consequence of not recognizing problems when they’re small and dealing with them can be severe when the problems become large. And that’s frankly what’s happening with the country over all.” He went on, “The President said Medicare is going to be bankrupt in eight to nine years. And we have to fix it or reform it. And he’s made no proposal whatsoever to do so. I don’t know how you can be President of the United States and not say, Well, here’s something that will make Medicare work permanently. Or here’s something that’ll fix Social Security permanently. And here’s what we need to do to make our tax system fair, equitable, and one that encourages growth. And, by the way, trillion-dollar deficits? For four years?” Romney described this as “a very dangerous course, because, as you know, at some point the people who loan us all this money, if they get nervous that they’re going to get repaid in dollars that might not be worth too much, they are going to ask for higher interest rates, and if that happens our budget is going to get overwhelmed by high interest costs. And it can kill our economy. And, by the way, kill jobs. We see what’s happening in Europe.” Our time was up. We stood and shook hands. “I enjoy speaking about substance, as opposed to just the political process,” Romney said. IV. THE RESCUER Throughout his years at Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company, and Bain Capital, Romney was an active Latter-Day Saint. The Mormon Church does not have a professional clergy, so its members perform the clergy’s functions themselves, and they also tithe. The late-adolescent mission is, in a sense, meant to get Mormons accustomed to devoting a great deal of time to the Church. In Massachusetts, Romney became a bishop and then “stake president.” He played a role in building a temple in Belmont. There are many stories of his pastoral activities: the time he rushed over to Doug Anderson’s home to help after a fire, the time he deployed a group of Bain Capital employees to go to New York to find Bob Gay’s missing teen-age daughter, the time he straightened out a wayward son of Kim Clark’s. If elected, Romney would arguably be the most actively religious President in American history. Clayton Christensen told me about his days as a struggling young consultant. He is from a modest background in Utah, and had married and started a family while still a student, so when he bought his first house, in Belmont, he and his wife had to fix it up themselves, a process that took twelve years. One night, exhausted, he was on his hands and knees on the living-room floor applying polyurethane. There was a knock on the door; it was Mitt Romney, who explained that he had driven by just to check up earlier in the evening, and had seen Christensen through the living-room window. “There’s a better way to do it, Clay,” Romney said. “Here, let me show you.” He produced a tool that he had devised at home. As he was telling me this story, Christensen (who once or twice had to wipe tears from his eyes when he was speaking about Romney’s church activities) got out a sheet of paper and drew a diagram of Romney’s solution. Romney had laid three four-inch paint brushes side by side, then fixed them to each other with duct tape, then attached the brushes to a pole—“so rather than being on my hands and knees, I was standing up, and applying the polyurethane with a wide brush. I was done in half an hour.” Romney’s career in the years since Bain Capital has repeatedly followed the narrative of the rescuer, the person who combines moral passion and practical skill to fix seemingly insoluble situations. He referred to the first of these in our interview, the rescue of Bain & Company, saying that he had applied three simple rules: “Focus, focus, and focus.” According to colleagues of Romney’s, Bill Bain and his group of founders had created a financial structure that enabled them to take out bank loans on behalf of the firm in order to pay themselves the big lump sums that they felt they deserved but that the consulting business doesn’t ordinarily produce. Then the business took a dip, and the company began missing its payments on the loans. In 1990, Romney returned from Bain Capital to save Bain & Company. He worked long hours, studying the data and talking to all the parties. Within a couple of weeks, colleagues say, he was able to persuade Bain and the other founders to give up most of their overly generous payments, and to get the banks to forgive a portion of the loans. That removed enough immediate financial pressure to re-start the firm. When Romney ran for office for the first time, against Kennedy, in 1994, he felt called to clean up a moral cesspool. The Romneys were disgusted by the stories they were seeing on television about Kennedy’s carousing, especially during testimony at the Florida rape trial of Kennedy’s nephew William Kennedy Smith. There seems to be a connection in Romney’s mind between lack of personal discipline and, in government, a free-spending, fiscally irresponsible liberalism. As Clayton Christensen put it, “People who run against him are liberal in the sense that they vote for legislation that takes money out of one person’s pocket and puts it in another person’s pocket, and say they’re compassionate. They don’t get it. They don’t have any idea of what life is like at the bottom of the pyramid”—but Mormons, who work hands-on in an elaborate church welfare system, do. If Romney had won the Senate race, he would have instantly become a plausible Presidential candidate, especially since Massachusetts borders the key Presidential primary state, New Hampshire. Romney’s taking over of the 2002 Winter Olympics, in Salt Lake City, followed the same rescue narrative. Salt Lake City had been an unsuccessful bidder for the Winter Olympics three times. Not long after it finally succeeded in its bid, there were reports that members of the Salt Lake City Olympic Committee had given bribes to the International Olympic Committee. The mayor of Salt Lake City resigned and the lead Olympic organizers were indicted. In Romney’s version of the story, he selflessly answers a call to service, and moves to Utah to save the Olympics. Actually, he competed for the job (which another prominent Mormon scion turned politician, Jon Huntsman, also wanted), and he seems to have understood that it had the potential to launch him into public life. In Salt Lake City, he recruited one of the founding crew at Bain Capital, Fraser Bullock, to serve as his chief aide in running the Olympics. But, before he completed his assignment in Utah, he had an even closer Bain associate, Bob White, who was back in Boston, preparing for a race for governor in Massachusetts. The situation in Salt Lake City was not quite so dire as Romney has made it sound: the indicted officials were eventually acquitted, and there was always government funding for the Games. Still, by all accounts he did an excellent job. Massachusetts, to Romney’s way of thinking, also needed to be rescued. The state budget was in deficit, and the heavily Democratic state legislature didn’t have the discipline to fix the problem. The sitting Republican governor, Jane Swift, came to understand that she had to step aside so that Romney could run. The 2002 campaign had a much stronger flavor of the Bain Capital approach to life than the 1994 Senate campaign had, and this carried over into governing. “Mitt Romney believes in his competence as a manager,” Rob Gray, one of the people Romney hired to run his gubernatorial campaign, told me. “If he’s elected, he’ll do an adequate job of dealing with the issues of the day. He’s not a vision guy. He’s not policy-driven. He thinks he’ll do a good job.” Ben Coes, the campaign manager, who is in private equity, told me that he got the job because he had gone to Romney’s house and given a dazzling PowerPoint presentation. Then he implemented an elaborate system that used databases and poll results to divide the state into eleven cultural groups, identify the six most likely to vote for Romney, and find volunteers to establish personal contact with each identifiable member of those groups. These techniques, along with the money that Romney was able to spend, helped him win. In office, Romney was heavily involved both in management—he brought in another of the Bain Capital founders, Eric Kriss, as the state’s top administrator—and in the drama of reëstablishing morality in government. He pushed out the state’s head of patronage, the president of the state university, and the head of the Big Dig highway-construction project. He improved the state’s finances and passed health-care reform. Romney was harder-working and far more cautious as a policymaker than William Weld, the previous Presidentially ambitious Republican governor. He saw his major initiatives as exercises in problem-solving, not as expressions of lifelong convictions. Or one could say that the process itself—identify the problem, analyze the data, kick around solutions until the best one emerges, lead—is his conviction, not the principle involved. He took on health-care reform because rising medical costs were putting stress on the state budget. He endorsed an individual mandate to carry health insurance, which was a favored conservative idea at the time, and opposed a similar mandate for businesses, but when the state legislature made it clear that both mandates were going to have to be in any bill that passed Romney accepted that and signed with a smile on his face. Problem solved. He was always thinking ahead. Within just a few years of taking office, he was laying the groundwork for a Presidential campaign. After the 2008 campaign failed, the Romneys moved to San Diego, where their sons live. And he was soon at work on his book, “No Apology,” setting out his Presidential vision for 2012. This spring, after Rick Santorum dropped out of the race for the Republican Presidential nomination, Romney called Michael Leavitt, who, as governor of Utah, had supported the idea of bringing him in to run the Olympics and, as Secretary of Health and Human Services, had signed the waiver of federal rules he needed to launch the Massachusetts health-care plan. (Leavitt says that Romney was the only governor he dealt with who always came with a PowerPoint presentation, which he would deliver personally.) Romney asked Leavitt to set up a Presidential-transition office in Washington. He called it the Readiness Project. One day during the summer, I dropped by the Readiness Project office to talk to Leavitt. It is on the ninth floor of a brand-new, grade-A office building near Union Station and the Capitol. There was no sign on the door or listing in the building directory. The office was neat and hyper-organized, with no piece of paper visible on any desk. There were conference rooms with screens and whiteboards (all blank). On the walls were poster-size color photographs of the Grand Canyon, the Alamo, and the Golden Gate Bridge. At the exact time my meeting was supposed to begin, the receptionist came over and said that she was very sorry, but Governor Leavitt was running late. About two minutes afterward, he came in from the elevator lobby, and asked what conference room we had been assigned to. It was the Constitution Room; the receptionist walked us down a hallway and keyed in a security code that unlocked the door, and we sat down. Like everyone I met who’s close to Romney, Leavitt was clean-cut, friendly, and straightforward. He had a firm handshake and he looked me in the eye. Our conversation had a combination, which I had become accustomed to, of directness and opacity. He told me that when Romney called to offer him the job “he said that the point is not just to get the nomination, and not just to win, but to be prepared. So I want you to start thinking about this.” What would Romney do as President? “I believe Mitt truly believes the pattern he has followed in other turnarounds will provide benefit to the country,” Leavitt said. “Job one, it’s a disheartened country. Give people confidence again. Two, bring things into balance. Give the speech about sizing our response to our resources. Three, build a team that can execute the plan. He believes that formula is a sound one.” Romney is a creature of two realms that he evidently believes American society doesn’t understand, and that have been the frequent object of hostility: his church, and the corner of business where he has spent his career. He combines an utter confidence in his ability to fix anything with an utter lack of confidence in his ability to explain to people what he intends to do, which is why he appears so stiff and so unspecific in talking about his prospective Presidency. Even Romney’s friends and business associates find him guarded. He doesn’t give anybody, except his immediate family, access to his emotional life. He has the caution of a crown prince who has always been intensely aware of the demands imposed by his destiny. This election is activating large parts of the American psyche. After the 2008 financial crisis and the long, painful recession, people’s desire for a big fix, a new social compact, is palpable. The main project of the business careers of Romney and the other transaction men—to make American business competitive in the global economy—may have succeeded on its own terms, but most Americans haven’t shared in the benefits. Even Michael Jensen, the chief theorist of private equity, expressed some doubts to me about how the transaction economy has played out. Private-equity firms can be more attentive to their fees than to the value of the company, he said, and too inattentive to the overarching purpose of financial engineering. “Value, in the way I’ve defined it, is the score that shows up on the scoreboard,” he said. “It’s not the objective. It’s not the strategy. Your life can’t be just about you, or your life will be shit. You see that on Wall Street.” If Romney loses this election, he will be, to some extent, a victim of the widespread resentment of the new economy, and of the Obama campaign’s skill at directing that resentment toward him. But the story won’t have ended. It’s not clear what will reverse the rise in economic inequality and uncertainty. Government is unpopular, and the Democratic Party has its own ties to big money. The larger forces of global capitalism will continue to unfold. Perhaps a future Republican candidate can persuade the country to see the world as he sees it. Romney, it seems, can’t do that. Clayton Christensen told me that when Romney was made a bishop, in the early eighties, Christensen took him aside for a little talk about how he needed to open up more. “He never at church was able, in front of the whole congregation, to talk about himself,” Christensen said. “You have to push a neuron across the synapse. If you’ve never landed a neuron across that path . . . It’s as if Mitt has never had the thought of talking about himself.” Christensen decided to offer Romney a Biblical parable: the story of Moses, which, as he recounted the conversation to me, he delivered to Romney with a distinct M.B.A. flavor. “God spoke to the guy: ‘I want you to lead Israel out of Egypt.’ He tried over and over. Nothing worked. Finally, it worked. The Red Sea parted. Up to that point, you would have had a Plan B and a Plan C. Here there was no backup plan, ladies and gentlemen. Sure enough, God parted the Red Sea. “So then, on the other side, Moses had no experience in management. His father-in-law shows up, and says, ‘Moses, you’re a horrible manager. Ever heard the word “delegation”? Can you do this, Moses?’ And Moses had never been responsible for the supply chain in any industry, but now we have run out of water. So he banged the rock and out comes water. Then he goes to Mt. Sinai. He gets the instructions, he sees what the people are doing, and he’s so mad. They can’t handle anything beyond the elevator pitch for God. So then Moses told everything about himself. Mitt, look at the impact his openness had on Israel! Most of the other prophets, you had no idea what their life was like. All the other prophets aren’t in the psyche of Israel. Why?” I asked Christensen if the talk worked. He shrugged. “It had no effect whatsoever. The neuron can’t get across that synapse.” ♦ ILLUSTRATION: Barry Blitt </p> 18923857 2014-07-20 06:26:07 2014-07-20 06:26:07 open open from-the-new-yorker-masland-carpet-october-1-18923857 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan New Yorker Can linguists solve crimes that stump the police? by Jack Hitt July 23, 2012 http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/28/new-yorker-can-linguists-solve-crimes-that-stump-the-police-by-jack-hitt-july-23-18747758/ Sat, 28 Jun 2014 06:53:39 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Dept. of Linguistics Words on Trial Can linguists solve crimes that stump the police? by Jack Hitt July 23, 2012 [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Subscribers can read the full version of this story by logging into our digital archive. Not a subscriber? Get immediate access to this story, along with a one-month free trial, by subscribing now. Or find out about other ways to read The New Yorker digitally. July 23, 2012 Issue Related Links Audio: Jack Hitt on forensic linguistics. Keywords Forensic Linguistics; Robert Leonard; Roger Shuy; Unabomber; James Fitzgerald; Natalee Holloway; Ronald Butters DEPT. OF LINGUISTICS about forensic linguistics. These days, the word “forensic” conjures an image of a technician on a “C.S.I.” show who delicately retrieves a hair or a paint chip from a crime scene, surmises the unlikeliest facts, and presents them to the authorities as incontrovertible evidence. If “forensic linguist” brings to mind a verbal specialist who plucks slivers of meaning from old letters and stray audiotape before announcing that the perpetrator is, say, a middle-aged insurance salesman from Philadelphia, that’s not far from the truth. Tells about the testimony of forensic linguist Robert Leonard in the 2011 murder trial of Chris Coleman. Discusses the work of James Fitzgerald, a retired F.B.I. forensic linguist who brought the field to prominence in 1996 with his work in the case of the Unabomber. Fitzgerald had successfully urged the FBI to publish the Unabomber’s “manifesto.” Many people called in to say they recognized the writing style. By analyzing syntax and other linguistic patterns, Fitzgerald narrowed down the possible authors and finally linked the manifesto to the writings of Ted Kaczynski, a reclusive former mathematician. Fitzgerald went on to formalize some of the tools used in forensic linguistics, including starting the Communicated Threat Assessment Database. The CTAD is the most comprehensive collection of linguistic patterns in written threats, containing some four thousand “criminally oriented communications” and more than a million words. The pioneer of forensic linguistics is widely considered to be Roger Shuy, a Georgetown University professor and the author of such fundamental textbooks as “Language Crimes: The Use and Abuse of Language Evidence in the Courtroom.” The field’s more recent origins might be traced to an airplane flight in 1979, when Shuy found himself talking to the lawyer sitting next to him. By the end of the flight, Shuy had a recommendation as an expert witness in his first murder case. Since then, he’s been involved in numerous cases in which forensic analysis revealed how meaning had been distorted by the process of writing or recording. In recent years, following Shuy’s lead, a growing number of linguists have applied their techniques in regular criminal cases, such Chris Coleman’s, and even certain commercial lawsuits. Mentions a suit between Apple and Microsoft over the use of the phrase “app store.” Writer visits Robert Leonard at Hofstra University and describes some of his cases, including the investigation of the murder of Natalee Holloway in Aruba. Mentions Carole Chaski, the executive director of the Institute for Linguistic Evidence and the president of Alias Technology, which markets linguistic software. Chaski has been working to perfect a computer algorithm that identifies patterns hidden in syntax. read the full text... read the full text... Jack Hitt, Dept. of Linguistics, “Words on Trial,” The New Yorker, July 23, 2012, p. 24 </p> 18747758 2014-06-28 06:53:39 2014-06-28 06:53:39 open open new-yorker-can-linguists-solve-crimes-that-stump-the-police-by-jack-hitt-july-23-18747758 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan New Yorker: The F.B.I.’s criminal profilers try to think their way into the head of the offender. http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/28/new-yorker-the-f-b-i-s-criminal-profilers-try-to-think-their-way-into-the-head-of-the-offender-18747120/ Sat, 28 Jun 2014 03:23:09 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Dept. of Criminology Dangerous Minds Criminal profiling made easy. by Malcolm Gladwell November 12, 2007 The F.B.I.’s criminal profilers try to think their way into the head of the offender. [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] On November 16, 1940, workers at the Consolidated Edison building on West Sixty-fourth Street in Manhattan found a homemade pipe bomb on a windowsill. Attached was a note: “Con Edison crooks, this is for you.” In September of 1941, a second bomb was found, on Nineteenth Street, just a few blocks from Con Edison’s headquarters, near Union Square. It had been left in the street, wrapped in a sock. A few months later, the New York police received a letter promising to “bring the Con Edison to justice—they will pay for their dastardly deeds.” Sixteen other letters followed, between 1941 and 1946, all written in block letters, many repeating the phrase “dastardly deeds” and all signed with the initials “F.P.” In March of 1950, a third bomb—larger and more powerful than the others—was found on the lower level of Grand Central Terminal. The next was left in a phone booth at the New York Public Library. It exploded, as did one placed in a phone booth in Grand Central. In 1954, the Mad Bomber—as he came to be known—struck four times, once in Radio City Music Hall, sending shrapnel throughout the audience. In 1955, he struck six times. The city was in an uproar. The police were getting nowhere. Late in 1956, in desperation, Inspector Howard Finney, of the New York City Police Department’s crime laboratory, and two plainclothesmen paid a visit to a psychiatrist by the name of James Brussel. Brussel was a Freudian. He lived on Twelfth Street, in the West Village, and smoked a pipe. In Mexico, early in his career, he had done counter-espionage work for the F.B.I. He wrote many books, including “Instant Shrink: How to Become an Expert Psychiatrist in Ten Easy Lessons.” Finney put a stack of documents on Brussel’s desk: photographs of unexploded bombs, pictures of devastation, photostats of F.P.’s neatly lettered missives. “I didn’t miss the look in the two plainclothesmen’s eyes,” Brussel writes in his memoir, “Casebook of a Crime Psychiatrist.” “I’d seen that look before, most often in the Army, on the faces of hard, old-line, field-grade officers who were sure this newfangled psychiatry business was all nonsense.” He began to leaf through the case materials. For sixteen years, F.P. had been fixated on the notion that Con Ed had done him some terrible injustice. Clearly, he was clinically paranoid. But paranoia takes some time to develop. F.P. had been bombing since 1940, which suggested that he was now middle-aged. Brussel looked closely at the precise lettering of F.P.’s notes to the police. This was an orderly man. He would be cautious. His work record would be exemplary. Further, the language suggested some degree of education. But there was a stilted quality to the word choice and the phrasing. Con Edison was often referred to as “the Con Edison.” And who still used the expression “dastardly deeds”? F.P. seemed to be foreign-born. Brussel looked closer at the letters, and noticed that all the letters were perfect block capitals, except the “W”s. They were misshapen, like two “U”s. To Brussel’s eye, those “W”s looked like a pair of breasts. He flipped to the crime-scene descriptions. When F.P. planted his bombs in movie theatres, he would slit the underside of the seat with a knife and stuff his explosives into the upholstery. Didn’t that seem like a symbolic act of penetrating a woman, or castrating a man—or perhaps both? F.P. had probably never progressed beyond the Oedipal stage. He was unmarried, a loner. Living with a mother figure. Brussel made another leap. F.P. was a Slav. Just as the use of a garrote would have suggested someone of Mediterranean extraction, the bomb-knife combination struck him as Eastern European. Some of the letters had been posted from Westchester County, but F.P. wouldn’t have mailed the letters from his home town. Still, a number of cities in southeastern Connecticut had a large Slavic population. And didn’t you have to pass through Westchester to get to the city from Connecticut? from the issue buy as a print e-mail this Brussel waited a moment, and then, in a scene that has become legendary among criminal profilers, he made a prediction: “One more thing.” I closed my eyes because I didn’t want to see their reaction. I saw the Bomber: impeccably neat, absolutely proper. A man who would avoid the newer styles of clothing until long custom had made them conservative. I saw him clearly—much more clearly than the facts really warranted. I knew I was letting my imagination get the better of me, but I couldn’t help it. “One more thing,” I said, my eyes closed tight. “When you catch him—and I have no doubt you will—he’ll be wearing a double-breasted suit.” “Jesus!” one of the detectives whispered. “And it will be buttoned,” I said. I opened my eyes. Finney and his men were looking at each other. “A double-breasted suit,” said the Inspector. “Yes.” “Buttoned.” “Yes.” He nodded. Without another word, they left. A month later, George Metesky was arrested by police in connection with the New York City bombings. His name had been changed from Milauskas. He lived in Waterbury, Connecticut, with his two older sisters. He was unmarried. He was unfailingly neat. He attended Mass regularly. He had been employed by Con Edison from 1929 to 1931, and claimed to have been injured on the job. When he opened the door to the police officers, he said, “I know why you fellows are here. You think I’m the Mad Bomber.” It was midnight, and he was in his pajamas. The police asked that he get dressed. When he returned, his hair was combed into a pompadour and his shoes were newly shined. He was also wearing a double-breasted suit—buttoned. In a new book, “Inside the Mind of BTK,” the eminent F.B.I. criminal profiler John Douglas tells the story of a serial killer who stalked the streets of Wichita, Kansas, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. Douglas was the model for Agent Jack Crawford in “The Silence of the Lambs.” He was the protégé of the pioneering F.B.I. profiler Howard Teten, who helped establish the bureau’s Behavioral Science Unit, at Quantico, in 1972, and who was a protégé of Brussel—which, in the close-knit fraternity of profilers, is like being analyzed by the analyst who was analyzed by Freud. To Douglas, Brussel was the father of criminal profiling, and, in both style and logic, “Inside the Mind of BTK” pays homage to “Casebook of a Crime Psychiatrist” at every turn. “BTK” stood for “Bind, Torture, Kill”—the three words that the killer used to identify himself in his taunting notes to the Wichita police. He had struck first in January, 1974, when he killed thirty-eight-year-old Joseph Otero in his home, along with his wife, Julie, their son, Joey, and their eleven-year-old daughter, who was found hanging from a water pipe in the basement with semen on her leg. The following April, he stabbed a twenty-four-year-old woman. In March, 1977, he bound and strangled another young woman, and over the next few years he committed at least four more murders. The city of Wichita was in an uproar. The police were getting nowhere. In 1984, in desperation, two police detectives from Wichita paid a visit to Quantico. The meeting, Douglas writes, was held in a first-floor conference room of the F.B.I.’s forensic-science building. He was then nearly a decade into his career at the Behavioral Science Unit. His first two best-sellers, “Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit,” and “Obsession: The FBI’s Legendary Profiler Probes the Psyches of Killers, Rapists, and Stalkers and Their Victims and Tells How to Fight Back,” were still in the future. Working a hundred and fifty cases a year, he was on the road constantly, but BTK was never far from his thoughts. “Some nights I’d lie awake asking myself, ‘Who the hell is this BTK?’ ” he writes. “What makes a guy like this do what he does? What makes him tick?” Roy Hazelwood sat next to Douglas. A lean chain-smoker, Hazelwood specialized in sex crimes, and went on to write the best-sellers “Dark Dreams” and “The Evil That Men Do.” Beside Hazelwood was an ex-Air Force pilot named Ron Walker. Walker, Douglas writes, was “whip smart” and an “exceptionally quick study.” The three bureau men and the two detectives sat around a massive oak table. “The objective of our session was to keep moving forward until we ran out of juice,” Douglas writes. They would rely on the typology developed by their colleague Robert Ressler, himself the author of the true-crime best-sellers “Whoever Fights Monsters” and “I Have Lived in the Monster.” The goal was to paint a picture of the killer—of what sort of man BTK was, and what he did, and where he worked, and what he was like—and with that scene “Inside the Mind of BTK” begins. We are now so familiar with crime stories told through the eyes of the profiler that it is easy to lose sight of how audacious the genre is. The traditional detective story begins with the body and centers on the detective’s search for the culprit. Leads are pursued. A net is cast, widening to encompass a bewilderingly diverse pool of suspects: the butler, the spurned lover, the embittered nephew, the shadowy European. That’s a Whodunit. In the profiling genre, the net is narrowed. The crime scene doesn’t initiate our search for the killer. It defines the killer for us. The profiler sifts through the case materials, looks off into the distance, and knows. “Generally, a psychiatrist can study a man and make a few reasonable predictions about what the man may do in the future—how he will react to such-and-such a stimulus, how he will behave in such-and-such a situation,” Brussel writes. “What I have done is reverse the terms of the prophecy. By studying a man’s deeds, I have deduced what kind of man he might be.” Look for a middle-aged Slav in a double-breasted suit. Profiling stories aren’t Whodunits; they’re Hedunits. In the Hedunit, the profiler does not catch the criminal. That’s for local law enforcement. He takes the meeting. Often, he doesn’t write down his predictions. It’s up to the visiting police officers to take notes. He does not feel the need to involve himself in the subsequent investigation, or even, it turns out, to justify his predictions. Once, Douglas tells us, he drove down to the local police station and offered his services in the case of an elderly woman who had been savagely beaten and sexually assaulted. The detectives working the crime were regular cops, and Douglas was a bureau guy, so you can imagine him perched on the edge of a desk, the others pulling up chairs around him. “ ‘Okay,’ I said to the detectives. . . . ‘Here’s what I think,’ ” Douglas begins. “It’s a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old high school kid. . . . He’ll be disheveled-looking, he’ll have scruffy hair, generally poorly groomed.” He went on: a loner, kind of weird, no girlfriend, lots of bottled-up anger. He comes to the old lady’s house. He knows she’s alone. Maybe he’s done odd jobs for her in the past. Douglas continues: I pause in my narrative and tell them there’s someone who meets this description out there. If they can find him, they’ve got their offender. One detective looks at another. One of them starts to smile. “Are you a psychic, Douglas?” “No,” I say, “but my job would be a lot easier if I were.” “Because we had a psychic, Beverly Newton, in here a couple of weeks ago, and she said just about the same things.” You might think that Douglas would bridle at that comparison. He is, after all, an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who studied with Teten, who studied with Brussel. He is an ace profiler, part of a team that restored the F.B.I.’s reputation for crime-fighting, inspired countless movies, television shows, and best-selling thrillers, and brought the modern tools of psychology to bear on the savagery of the criminal mind—and some cop is calling him a psychic. But Douglas doesn’t object. Instead, he begins to muse on the ineffable origins of his insights, at which point the question arises of what exactly this mysterious art called profiling is, and whether it can be trusted. Douglas writes, What I try to do with a case is to take in all the evidence I have to work with . . . and then put myself mentally and emotionally in the head of the offender. I try to think as he does. Exactly how this happens, I’m not sure, any more than the novelists such as Tom Harris who’ve consulted me over the years can say exactly how their characters come to life. If there’s a psychic component to this, I won’t run from it. In the late nineteen-seventies, John Douglas and his F.B.I. colleague Robert Ressler set out to interview the most notorious serial killers in the country. They started in California, since, as Douglas says, “California has always had more than its share of weird and spectacular crimes.” On weekends and days off, over the next months, they stopped by one federal prison after another, until they had interviewed thirty-six murderers. Douglas and Ressler wanted to know whether there was a pattern that connected a killer’s life and personality with the nature of his crimes. They were looking for what psychologists would call a homology, an agreement between character and action, and, after comparing what they learned from the killers with what they already knew about the characteristics of their murders, they became convinced that they’d found one. Serial killers, they concluded, fall into one of two categories. Some crime scenes show evidence of logic and planning. The victim has been hunted and selected, in order to fulfill a specific fantasy. The recruitment of the victim might involve a ruse or a con. The perpetrator maintains control throughout the offense. He takes his time with the victim, carefully enacting his fantasies. He is adaptable and mobile. He almost never leaves a weapon behind. He meticulously conceals the body. Douglas and Ressler, in their respective books, call that kind of crime “organized.” In a “disorganized” crime, the victim isn’t chosen logically. She’s seemingly picked at random and “blitz-attacked,” not stalked and coerced. The killer might grab a steak knife from the kitchen and leave the knife behind. The crime is so sloppily executed that the victim often has a chance to fight back. The crime might take place in a high-risk environment. “Moreover, the disorganized killer has no idea of, or interest in, the personalities of his victims,” Ressler writes in “Whoever Fights Monsters.” “He does not want to know who they are, and many times takes steps to obliterate their personalities by quickly knocking them unconscious or covering their faces or otherwise disfiguring them.” Each of these styles, the argument goes, corresponds to a personality type. The organized killer is intelligent and articulate. He feels superior to those around him. The disorganized killer is unattractive and has a poor self-image. He often has some kind of disability. He’s too strange and withdrawn to be married or have a girlfriend. If he doesn’t live alone, he lives with his parents. He has pornography stashed in his closet. If he drives at all, his car is a wreck. “The crime scene is presumed to reflect the murderer’s behavior and personality in much the same way as furnishings reveal the homeowner’s character,” we’re told in a crime manual that Douglas and Ressler helped write. The more they learned, the more precise the associations became. If the victim was white, the killer would be white. If the victim was old, the killer would be sexually immature. “In our research, we discovered that . . . frequently serial offenders had failed in their efforts to join police departments and had taken jobs in related fields, such as security guard or night watchman,” Douglas writes. Given that organized rapists were preoccupied with control, it made sense that they would be fascinated by the social institution that symbolizes control. Out of that insight came another prediction: “One of the things we began saying in some of our profiles was that the UNSUB”—the unknown subject—“would drive a policelike vehicle, say a Ford Crown Victoria or Chevrolet Caprice.” On the surface, the F.B.I.’s system seems extraordinarily useful. Consider a case study widely used in the profiling literature. The body of a twenty-six-year-old special-education teacher was found on the roof of her Bronx apartment building. She was apparently abducted just after she left her house for work, at six-thirty in the morning. She had been beaten beyond recognition, and tied up with her stockings and belt. The killer had mutilated her sexual organs, chopped off her nipples, covered her body with bites, written obscenities across her abdomen, masturbated, and then defecated next to the body. Let’s pretend that we’re an F.B.I. profiler. First question: race. The victim is white, so let’s call the offender white. Let’s say he’s in his mid-twenties to early thirties, which is when the thirty-six men in the F.B.I.’s sample started killing. Is the crime organized or disorganized? Disorganized, clearly. It’s on a rooftop, in the Bronx, in broad daylight—high risk. So what is the killer doing in the building at six-thirty in the morning? He could be some kind of serviceman, or he could live in the neighborhood. Either way, he appears to be familiar with the building. He’s disorganized, though, so he’s not stable. If he is employed, it’s blue-collar work, at best. He probably has a prior offense, having to do with violence or sex. His relationships with women will be either nonexistent or deeply troubled. And the mutilation and the defecation are so strange that he’s probably mentally ill or has some kind of substance-abuse problem. How does that sound? As it turns out, it’s spot-on. The killer was Carmine Calabro, age thirty, a single, unemployed, deeply troubled actor who, when he was not in a mental institution, lived with his widowed father on the fourth floor of the building where the murder took place. But how useful is that profile, really? The police already had Calabro on their list of suspects: if you’re looking for the person who killed and mutilated someone on the roof, you don’t really need a profiler to tell you to check out the dishevelled, mentally ill guy living with his father on the fourth floor. That’s why the F.B.I.’s profilers have always tried to supplement the basic outlines of the organized/disorganized system with telling details—something that lets the police zero in on a suspect. In the early eighties, Douglas gave a presentation to a roomful of police officers and F.B.I. agents in Marin County about the Trailside Killer, who was murdering female hikers in the hills north of San Francisco. In Douglas’s view, the killer was a classic “disorganized” offender—a blitz attacker, white, early to mid-thirties, blue collar, probably with “a history of bed-wetting, fire-starting, and cruelty to animals.” Then he went back to how asocial the killer seemed. Why did all the killings take place in heavily wooded areas, miles from the road? Douglas reasoned that the killer required such seclusion because he had some condition that he was deeply self-conscious about. Was it something physical, like a missing limb? But then how could he hike miles into the woods and physically overpower his victims? Finally, it came to him: “ ‘Another thing,’ I added after a pregnant pause, ‘the killer will have a speech impediment.’ ” And so he did. Now, that’s a useful detail. Or is it? Douglas then tells us that he pegged the offender’s age as early thirties, and he turned out to be fifty. Detectives use profiles to narrow down the range of suspects. It doesn’t do any good to get a specific detail right if you get general details wrong. In the case of Derrick Todd Lee, the Baton Rouge serial killer, the F.B.I. profile described the offender as a white male blue-collar worker, between twenty-five and thirty-five years old, who “wants to be seen as someone who is attractive and appealing to women.” The profile went on, “However, his level of sophistication in interacting with women, especially women who are above him in the social strata, is low. Any contact he has had with women he has found attractive would be described by these women as ‘awkward.’ ” The F.B.I. was right about the killer being a blue-collar male between twenty-five and thirty-five. But Lee turned out to be charming and outgoing, the sort to put on a cowboy hat and snakeskin boots and head for the bars. He was an extrovert with a number of girlfriends and a reputation as a ladies’ man. And he wasn’t white. He was black. A profile isn’t a test, where you pass if you get most of the answers right. It’s a portrait, and all the details have to cohere in some way if the image is to be helpful. In the mid-nineties, the British Home Office analyzed a hundred and eighty-four crimes, to see how many times profiles led to the arrest of a criminal. The profile worked in five of those cases. That’s just 2.7 per cent, which makes sense if you consider the position of the detective on the receiving end of a profiler’s list of conjectures. Do you believe the stuttering part? Or do you believe the thirty-year-old part? Or do you throw up your hands in frustration? There is a deeper problem with F.B.I. profiling. Douglas and Ressler didn’t interview a representative sample of serial killers to come up with their typology. They talked to whoever happened to be in the neighborhood. Nor did they interview their subjects according to a standardized protocol. They just sat down and chatted, which isn’t a particularly firm foundation for a psychological system. So you might wonder whether serial killers can really be categorized by their level of organization. Not long ago, a group of psychologists at the University of Liverpool decided to test the F.B.I.’s assumptions. First, they made a list of crime-scene characteristics generally considered to show organization: perhaps the victim was alive during the sex acts, or the body was posed in a certain way, or the murder weapon was missing, or the body was concealed, or torture and restraints were involved. Then they made a list of characteristics showing disorganization: perhaps the victim was beaten, the body was left in an isolated spot, the victim’s belongings were scattered, or the murder weapon was improvised. If the F.B.I. was right, they reasoned, the crime-scene details on each of those two lists should “co-occur”—that is, if you see one or more organized traits in a crime, there should be a reasonably high probability of seeing other organized traits. When they looked at a sample of a hundred serial crimes, however, they couldn’t find any support for the F.B.I.’s distinction. Crimes don’t fall into one camp or the other. It turns out that they’re almost always a mixture of a few key organized traits and a random array of disorganized traits. Laurence Alison, one of the leaders of the Liverpool group and the author of “The Forensic Psychologist’s Casebook,” told me, “The whole business is a lot more complicated than the F.B.I. imagines.” Alison and another of his colleagues also looked at homology. If Douglas was right, then a certain kind of crime should correspond to a certain kind of criminal. So the Liverpool group selected a hundred stranger rapes in the United Kingdom, classifying them according to twenty-eight variables, such as whether a disguise was worn, whether compliments were given, whether there was binding, gagging, or blindfolding, whether there was apologizing or the theft of personal property, and so on. They then looked at whether the patterns in the crimes corresponded to attributes of the criminals—like age, type of employment, ethnicity, level of education, marital status, number of prior convictions, type of prior convictions, and drug use. Were rapists who bind, gag, and blindfold more like one another than they were like rapists who, say, compliment and apologize? The answer is no—not even slightly. “The fact is that different offenders can exhibit the same behaviors for completely different reasons,” Brent Turvey, a forensic scientist who has been highly critical of the F.B.I.’s approach, says. “You’ve got a rapist who attacks a woman in the park and pulls her shirt up over her face. Why? What does that mean? There are ten different things it could mean. It could mean he doesn’t want to see her. It could mean he doesn’t want her to see him. It could mean he wants to see her breasts, he wants to imagine someone else, he wants to incapacitate her arms—all of those are possibilities. You can’t just look at one behavior in isolation.” A few years ago, Alison went back to the case of the teacher who was murdered on the roof of her building in the Bronx. He wanted to know why, if the F.B.I.’s approach to criminal profiling was based on such simplistic psychology, it continues to have such a sterling reputation. The answer, he suspected, lay in the way the profiles were written, and, sure enough, when he broke down the rooftop-killer analysis, sentence by sentence, he found that it was so full of unverifiable and contradictory and ambiguous language that it could support virtually any interpretation. Astrologers and psychics have known these tricks for years. The magician Ian Rowland, in his classic “The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading,” itemizes them one by one, in what could easily serve as a manual for the beginner profiler. First is the Rainbow Ruse—the “statement which credits the client with both a personality trait and its opposite.” (“I would say that on the whole you can be rather a quiet, self effacing type, but when the circumstances are right, you can be quite the life and soul of the party if the mood strikes you.”) The Jacques Statement, named for the character in “As You Like It” who gives the Seven Ages of Man speech, tailors the prediction to the age of the subject. To someone in his late thirties or early forties, for example, the psychic says, “If you are honest about it, you often get to wondering what happened to all those dreams you had when you were younger.” There is the Barnum Statement, the assertion so general that anyone would agree, and the Fuzzy Fact, the seemingly factual statement couched in a way that “leaves plenty of scope to be developed into something more specific.” (“I can see a connection with Europe, possibly Britain, or it could be the warmer, Mediterranean part?”) And that’s only the start: there is the Greener Grass technique, the Diverted Question, the Russian Doll, Sugar Lumps, not to mention Forking and the Good Chance Guess—all of which, when put together in skillful combination, can convince even the most skeptical observer that he or she is in the presence of real insight. “Moving on to career matters, you don’t work with children, do you?” Rowland will ask his subjects, in an example of what he dubs the “Vanishing Negative.” No, I don’t. “No, I thought not. That’s not really your role.” Of course, if the subject answers differently, there’s another way to play the question: “Moving on to career matters, you don’t work with children, do you?” I do, actually, part time. “Yes, I thought so.” After Alison had analyzed the rooftop-killer profile, he decided to play a version of the cold-reading game. He gave the details of the crime, the profile prepared by the F.B.I., and a description of the offender to a group of senior police officers and forensic professionals in England. How did they find the profile? Highly accurate. Then Alison gave the same packet of case materials to another group of police officers, but this time he invented an imaginary offender, one who was altogether different from Calabro. The new killer was thirty-seven years old. He was an alcoholic. He had recently been laid off from his job with the water board, and had met the victim before on one of his rounds. What’s more, Alison claimed, he had a history of violent relationships with women, and prior convictions for assault and burglary. How accurate did a group of experienced police officers find the F.B.I.’s profile when it was matched with the phony offender? Every bit as accurate as when it was matched to the real offender. James Brussel didn’t really see the Mad Bomber in that pile of pictures and photostats, then. That was an illusion. As the literary scholar Donald Foster pointed out in his 2000 book “Author Unknown,” Brussel cleaned up his predictions for his memoirs. He actually told the police to look for the bomber in White Plains, sending the N.Y.P.D.’s bomb unit on a wild goose chase in Westchester County, sifting through local records. Brussel also told the police to look for a man with a facial scar, which Metesky didn’t have. He told them to look for a man with a night job, and Metesky had been largely unemployed since leaving Con Edison in 1931. He told them to look for someone between forty and fifty, and Metesky was over fifty. He told them to look for someone who was an “expert in civil or military ordnance” and the closest Metesky came to that was a brief stint in a machine shop. And Brussel, despite what he wrote in his memoir, never said that the Bomber would be a Slav. He actually told the police to look for a man “born and educated in Germany,” a prediction so far off the mark that the Mad Bomber himself was moved to object. At the height of the police investigation, when the New York Journal American offered to print any communications from the Mad Bomber, Metesky wrote in huffily to say that “the nearest to my being ‘Teutonic’ is that my father boarded a liner in Hamburg for passage to this country—about sixty-five years ago.” The true hero of the case wasn’t Brussel; it was a woman named Alice Kelly, who had been assigned to go through Con Edison’s personnel files. In January, 1957, she ran across an employee complaint from the early nineteen-thirties: a generator wiper at the Hell Gate plant had been knocked down by a backdraft of hot gases. The worker said that he was injured. The company said that he wasn’t. And in the flood of angry letters from the ex-employee Kelly spotted a threat—to “take justice in my own hands”—that had appeared in one of the Mad Bomber’s letters. The name on the file was George Metesky. Brussel did not really understand the mind of the Mad Bomber. He seems to have understood only that, if you make a great number of predictions, the ones that were wrong will soon be forgotten, and the ones that turn out to be true will make you famous. The Hedunit is not a triumph of forensic analysis. It’s a party trick. “Here’s where I’m at with this guy,” Douglas said, kicking off the profiling session with which “Inside the Mind of BTK” begins. It was 1984. The killer was still at large. Douglas, Hazelwood, and Walker and the two detectives from Wichita were all seated around the oak table. Douglas took off his suit jacket and draped it over his chair. “Back when he started in 1974, he was in his mid-to-late twenties,” Douglas began. “It’s now ten years later, so that would put him in his mid-to-late thirties.” It was Walker’s turn: BTK had never engaged in any sexual penetration. That suggested to him someone with an “inadequate, immature sexual history.” He would have a “lone-wolf type of personality. But he’s not alone because he’s shunned by others—it’s because he chooses to be alone. . . . He can function in social settings, but only on the surface. He may have women friends he can talk to, but he’d feel very inadequate with a peer-group female.” Hazelwood was next. BTK would be “heavily into masturbation.” He went on, “Women who have had sex with this guy would describe him as aloof, uninvolved, the type who is more interested in her servicing him than the other way around.” Douglas followed his lead. “The women he’s been with are either many years younger, very naïve, or much older and depend on him as their meal ticket,” he ventured. What’s more, the profilers determined, BTK would drive a “decent” automobile, but it would be “nondescript.” At this point, the insights began piling on. Douglas said he’d been thinking that BTK was married. But now maybe he was thinking he was divorced. He speculated that BTK was lower middle class, probably living in a rental. Walker felt BTK was in a “lower-paying white collar job, as opposed to blue collar.” Hazelwood saw him as “middle class” and “articulate.” The consensus was that his I.Q. was somewhere between 105 and 145. Douglas wondered whether he was connected with the military. Hazelwood called him a “now” person, who needed “instant gratification.” Walker said that those who knew him “might say they remember him, but didn’t really know much about him.” Douglas then had a flash—“It was a sense, almost a knowing”—and said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the job he’s in today, that he’s wearing some sort of uniform. . . . This guy isn’t mental. But he is crazy like a fox.” They had been at it for almost six hours. The best minds in the F.B.I. had given the Wichita detectives a blueprint for their investigation. Look for an American male with a possible connection to the military. His I.Q. will be above 105. He will like to masturbate, and will be aloof and selfish in bed. He will drive a decent car. He will be a “now” person. He won’t be comfortable with women. But he may have women friends. He will be a lone wolf. But he will be able to function in social settings. He won’t be unmemorable. But he will be unknowable. He will be either never married, divorced, or married, and if he was or is married his wife will be younger or older. He may or may not live in a rental, and might be lower class, upper lower class, lower middle class or middle class. And he will be crazy like a fox, as opposed to being mental. If you’re keeping score, that’s a Jacques Statement, two Barnum Statements, four Rainbow Ruses, a Good Chance Guess, two predictions that aren’t really predictions because they could never be verified—and nothing even close to the salient fact that BTK was a pillar of his community, the president of his church and the married father of two. “This thing is solvable,” Douglas told the detectives, as he stood up and put on his jacket. “Feel free to pick up the phone and call us if we can be of any further assistance.” You can imagine him taking the time for an encouraging smile and a slap on the back. “You’re gonna nail this guy.” ♦ ILLUSTRATION: GLEN BAXTER </p> 18747120 2014-06-28 03:23:09 2014-06-28 03:23:09 open open new-yorker-the-f-b-i-s-criminal-profilers-try-to-think-their-way-into-the-head-of-the-offender-18747120 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan New York Times http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/28/new-york-times-18747111/ Sat, 28 Jun 2014 03:20:37 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Ghost of the Confederacy ‘Clouds of Glory,’ Michael Korda’s Robert E. Lee Biography By FERGUS M. BORDEWICHJUNE 27, 2014 Photo Lee, photographed by Mathew Brady in Richmond, shortly after the surrender. Credit Photograph from Library of Congress Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Share This Page [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Robert E. Lee occupies a remarkable place in the pantheon of American history, combining in the minds of many, Michael Korda writes in this admiring and briskly written biography, “a strange combination of martyr, secular saint, Southern gentleman and perfect warrior.” Indeed, Korda aptly adds, “It is hard to think of any other general who had fought against his own country being so completely reintegrated into national life.” Lee has been a popular subject of biography virtually from his death in 1870, at the age of 63, through the four magisterial volumes of Douglas Southall Freeman in the 1930s to Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s intimate 2007 study of Lee and his letters, “Reading the Man.” Korda, the author of earlier biographies of Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower, aspires to pry the marble lid off the Lee legend to reveal the human being beneath. He draws a generally sympathetic portrait of a master strategist who was as physically fearless on the battlefield as he was reserved in personal relations. He was, Korda writes, “a perfectionist, obsessed by duty,” but also “charming, funny and flirtatious,” an animal lover, a talented cartographer and a devoted parent, as well as “a noble, tragic figure, indeed one whose bearing and dignity conferred nobility on the cause for which he fought and still does confer it in the minds of many people.” Graduating second in his class at West Point, Lee was commissioned into the engineers, then the most prestigious branch of the Army. He spent several unremarkable decades directing the construction of coastal fortifications, including Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, and somewhat more memorably, diverting the course of the Mississippi River at St. Louis. The Lee legend was born during the Mexican War, when he won the highest praise from the commander of the invading American army, Winfield Scott, for his bold reconnaissance behind enemy lines, during which he participated in three battles and crossed enemy territory three separate times in 36 hours — “the greatest feat of physical and moral courage” of the campaign, in Scott’s words. In 1859, when Scott was the overall commander of the United States Army, Lee was tapped to lead the company of Marines that captured John Brown at Harpers Ferry. Two years later, as state after state seceded from the Union, Lincoln offered Lee the command of the federal forces. He of course declined, and took his talents south. Korda portrays the Lee of 1861 as a man tragically torn between loyalty to his nation and his native state. That Lee agonized over his decision is certainly true. However, Korda does not consider the fact that Lee was also heir to an antifederalist tradition embedded deep in the political circuitry of the Virginia elite, and of his own family: 70 years earlier, in 1790, Robert’s father, the Revolutionary War hero Henry Lee, declared in response to what he considered a slighting of Southern interests, “I had rather myself submit to all the hazards of war and risk the loss of everything dear to me in life, than to live under the rule of a fixed insolent Northern majority.” Many other Southern-born officers remained unshaken in their loyalty to the Union. Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Korda provides crisp and concise, if conventional, accounts of Lee’s major engagements. We rarely hear from ordinary soldiers or feel the terror of battle amid the fog of war, but Korda is good at explaining Lee’s strategic thinking, the maneuvering of armies and the sometimes crippling limitations imposed by logistics, bad maps and worse roads. Lee was not infallible. Although Korda generally gives him the benefit of the doubt, he admits that Lee was “not always an effective commander,” too often leaving it to his subordinates to guess at what he intended. He is too generous in his assessment of Lee’s disastrous frontal attacks at the Battle of Malvern Hill that capped the Seven Days campaign, and his equally futile assault — now famous as Pickett’s Charge — on another impregnable federal position at Gettysburg, in 1863. To Lee’s credit, as Pickett’s shattered survivors straggled back to their lines, Lee leaned from his horse to shake their hands, telling them, “All this has been my fault.” Yet without Lee, the Army of Northern Virginia would most likely have been defeated long before Appomattox. Korda acknowledges that it is impossible to consider Lee without facing the problem of slavery. Lee owned slaves himself, and he arguably did more than any other man to try to create a country founded on slavery. Korda asserts that Lee was at least “moderate” on slavery, writing that he “was never, by any stretch of the imagination, an enthusiast for slavery.” That said, Lee did nothing to bring slavery to an end, and regarded abolitionists as troublemakers and revolutionaries. Korda quotes a revealing letter that Lee wrote to his wife, Mary, in which he described slavery as “a moral and political evil,” but went on to say, “I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race. . . . The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially and physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their instruction as a race.” How long their “subjugation” would be necessary, Lee complacently concluded, “is known and ordered by a wise and Merciful Providence.” As Allen Guelzo noted in “Gettysburg: The Last Invasion,” Lee’s army systematically kidnapped both former fugitive slaves and free blacks in Pennsylvania, dragging scores, perhaps hundreds, of them back to slavery in Virginia. Lee may not have approved of this atrocity, but he did little or nothing to stop it. “Clouds of Glory” is unfortunately marred by more than a few annoying errors of fact. Northern politicians with Southern leanings were called “doughfaces,” not “doughboys” — a 20th-century term for American soldiers in World War I. At the time of the Nat Turner rebellion in 1831, the enslaved population of the United States was about two million, not four million. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed in 1854, not 1845. More troubling is a footnote in which Korda likens the burning of Atlanta in “1865” (actually 1864) and William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea to the firebombing of Dresden in 1945. “Britain’s bomber command . . . simply had more sophisticated technology than Sherman did, but the intention was the same,” Korda writes. He uncritically asserts that “Sherman introduced what a later generation would call total war, involving the burning of cities, homes and farms on a wide scale.” Although Sherman’s march was destructive of property, it was far less extensive than Lost Cause mythology claims, and was carried out with remarkably little loss of life: Perhaps fewer than 2,500 Confederate soldiers were killed in open battle, and very few civilians died. The bombing of Dresden took tens of thousands of lives, virtually all civilians. The worst war crimes of the Civil War were perpetrated by Confederates, in the savage massacres of black federal soldiers at Fort Pillow, Tenn., and by Lee’s own troops at the Crater at Petersburg, in 1864. “Clouds of Glory” will satisfy readers who wish to be reassured that Lee was a splendid and courageous soldier, as well as the fine-mannered epitome of antebellum aristocracy. Those who might regard him as a reactionary who betrayed his country, and whose skillful generalship prolonged an unwinnable war on behalf of a cause that Grant called “one of the worst for which a people ever fought,” may find Korda’s enthusiasm less persuasive. CLOUDS OF GLORY The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee By Michael Korda Illustrated. 785 pp. Harper. $40. Fergus M. Bordewich’s most recent book is “America’s Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union.” A version of this review appears in print on June 29, 2014, on page BR11 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Ghost of the Confederacy. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe </p> 18747112 2014-06-28 03:20:37 2014-06-28 03:20:37 open open new-york-times-18747111 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Zimbabwe's Unfolding Humanitarian Disaster: We Visit the 18,000 People Forcibly Relocated to Ruling Party Farm Friday, 27 June 2014 09:06 By Davison Mudzingwa and Francis Hweshe, Inter Press Service http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/28/zimbabwe-s-unfolding-humanitarian-disaster-we-visit-the-18-000-people-forcibly-relocated-to-ruling-party-farm-friday-27-june-2014-09-06-by-daviso-18747104/ Sat, 28 Jun 2014 03:19:00 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Zimbabwe's Unfolding Humanitarian Disaster: We Visit the 18,000 People Forcibly Relocated to Ruling Party Farm Friday, 27 June 2014 09:06 By Davison Mudzingwa and Francis Hweshe, Inter Press Service [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Masvingo, Zimbabwe - As the villagers sit around the flickering fire on a pitch-black night lit only by the blurry moon, they speak, recounting how it all began. They take turns, sometimes talking over each other to have their own experiences heard. When the old man speaks, everyone listens. "It was my first time riding a helicopter," John Moyo* remembers. "The soldiers came, clutching guns, forcing everyone to move. I tried to resist, for my home was not affected but they wouldn't hear any of it." So started the long, painful and disorienting journey for the 70-year-old Moyo and almost 18,000 other people who had lived in the 50-kilometre radius of Chivi basin in Zimbabwe's Masvingo province. When heavy rains pounded the area in early January, the 1.8 billion cubic metre Tokwe-Mukosi dam's wall breached. Flooding followed, destroying homes and livestock. The government, with the help of non-governmental organisations, embarked on a rescue mission. And even unaffected homes in high-lying areas were evacuated by soldiers. According to Moyo, whose home was not affected, this was an opportunity for the government, which had been trying to relocate those living near Chivi basin for sometime. "They always said they wanted to establish an irrigation system and a game park in the area that covered our ancestral homes," he tells IPS. For Itai Mazanhi*, a 33-year-old father of three, the government had the best excuse to remove them from the land that he had known since birth. "The graves of my forefathers are in that place," he tells IPS. Mazanhi is from Gororo village. After being temporarily housed in the nearby safe areas of Gunikuni and Ngundu in Masvingo province, the over 18,000 people or 3,000 families were transferred to Nuanetsi Ranch in the Chingwizi area of Mwenezi district, about 150 kms from their former homes. Chingwizi is an arid terrain near Triangle Estates, an irrigation sugar plantation concern owned by sugar giant Tongaat Hulett. The land here is conspicuous for the mopane and giant baobab trees that are synonymous with hot, dry conditions. The crop and livestock farmers from Chivi basin have been forced to adjust in a land that lacks the natural fertility of their former land, water and adequate pastures for their livestock. The dust road to the Chingwizi camp is a laborious 40-minute drive littered with sharp bumps and lurking roadside trenches. From the top of an anthill, a vantage point at the entrance of this settlement reveals a rolling pattern of tents and zinc makeshift structures that stretch beyond the sight of the naked eye. At night, fires flicker faintly in the distance, and a cacophony of voices mix with the music from solar- and battery-powered radio sets. It's the image of a war refugee relief camp. A concern for the displaced families is the fact that they were settled in an area earmarked for a proposed biofuel project. The project is set to be driven by the Zimbabwe Bio-Energy company, a partnership between the Zimbabwe Development Trust and private investors. The state-owned Herald newspaper quoted the project director Charles Madonko saying resettled families could become sugarcane out-growers for the ethanol project. This plan was subject to scathing attack from rights watchdog Human Rights Watch. In a report released last month, the organisation viewed this as a cheap labour ploy. "The Zimbabwean army relocated 3,000 families from the flooded Tokwe-Mukorsi dam basin to a camp on a sugar cane farm and ethanol project jointly owned by the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front [ZANU-PF] and Billy Rautenbach, a businessman and party supporter," read part of the report. The sugarcane plantations will be irrigated by the water from the Tokwe-Mukosi dam. Upon completion, the dam is set to become Zimbabwe's largest inland dam, with a capacity to irrigate over 25,000 hectares. Community Tolerance Reconciliation and Development, COTRAD, a non-governmental organisation that operates in the Masvingo province sees the displacement of the 3,000 families as a brutal retrogression. The organisation says ordinary people are at the mercy of private companies and the government. "The people feel like outcasts, they no longer feel like Zimbabweans," Zivanai Muzorodzi, COTRAD programme manager, tells IPS. Muzorodzi, whose organisation has been monitoring the land tussle before the floods, says the land surrounding the Tokwe-Mukosi dam basin was bought by individuals, mostly from the ruling ZANU-PF party. "Villagers won't own the land or the means of production. Only ZANU-PF bigwigs will benefit," Muzorodzi says. The scale of the habitats has posed serious challenges for the cash-strapped government of Zimbabwe. Humanitarian organisations such as Oxfam International and Care International have injected basic services such clean water through water bowsers and makeshift toilets. "It's not safe at all, it's a disaster waiting to happen," a Zimbabwe Ministry of Local Government official stationed at the camp and who preferred anonymity tells IPS. "The latrines you see here are only one metre deep. An outbreak of a contagious disease would spread fast." Similar fears stalk Spiwe Chando*, a mother of four. The 23-year-old speaks as she sorts her belongings scattered in small blue tent in which an adult cannot sleep fully stretched out. "I fear for my child because another family lost a child due to diarrhoea last week. This can happen to anyone," she tells IPS, sweating from the heat inside the tent. "I hope we will move from this place soon and get proper land to restart our lives." This issue has posed tensions at this over-populated camp. Meetings, rumour and conjecture circulate each day. Across the camp, frustrations are progressively building up. As a result, a ministerial delegation got a hostile reception during a visit last month. The displaced farmers accuse the government of deception and reneging on its promises of land allocation and compensation. The government has promised to allocate one hectare of land per family, at a location about 17 kms from this transit camp. This falls far short of what these families own in Chivi basin. Some of them, like Mazanhi, owned about 10 hectares. The land was able to produce enough food for their sustenance and a surplus, which was sold to finance their children's education and healthcare. Mazanhi is one of the few people who has already received compensation from the government. Of the agreed compensation of 3,000 dollars, he has only received 900 dollars and is not certain if he will ever be paid the remainder of what he was promised. "There is a lot of corruption going on in that office," he tells IPS. COTRAD says the fact that ordinary villagers are secondary beneficiaries of the land and water that once belonged to them communally is an indication of a resource grabbing trend that further widens the gap of inequality. "People no longer have land, access to water, healthcare and children are learning under trees." For Moyo, daily realities at the transit camp and a hazy future is both a painful reminder of a life gone by and a sign of "the next generation of dispossession." However, he hopes for a better future. "We don't want this life of getting fed like birds," says Moyo. *Names altered for security reasons. </p> 18747104 2014-06-28 03:19:00 2014-06-28 03:19:00 open open zimbabwe-s-unfolding-humanitarian-disaster-we-visit-the-18-000-people-forcibly-relocated-to-ruling-party-farm-friday-27-june-2014-09-06-by-daviso-18747104 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan SCIENCE 3 Blackholes http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/28/science-3-blackholes-18747044/ Sat, 28 Jun 2014 03:02:34 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>3 Blackholes Collection of three supermassive black holes detected Posted on June 26, 2014 in Science [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] The galaxies we see in the present-day Universe were built through the merger of smaller ones. Almost all of the galaxies contain supermassive black holes at their cores. Basic logic would suggest that the mergers would also have placed supermassive black holes in close proximity at the cores of galaxies. What’s less certain is what happened to them once they were brought together. Ultimately, the fate of these black holes will be to merge. But if the process is slow enough, we should see a large number of binary supermassive black holes lingering in the cores of galaxies, producing gravity waves as they interact. We’d love to detect those gravity waves, but it’s hard to justify building the appropriate detector until we know they’re out there, which means we need to determine whether supermassive black hole binaries are common. Today, an international team of researchers is announcing that they’ve found a triple black hole system, with two of the objects forming a tight binary system. The good news for gravity waves is that they found this system in one of the first handful of systems they checked, and they suggest that the signs of these systems might be relatively easy to spot.</p> 18747044 2014-06-28 03:02:34 2014-06-28 03:02:34 open open science-3-blackholes-18747044 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Israel Claims $3B in Cyber Exports; 2nd Only to US http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/26/israel-claims-3b-in-cyber-exports-2nd-only-to-us-18735280/ Thu, 26 Jun 2014 05:11:35 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Israel Claims $3B in Cyber Exports; 2nd Only to US Netanyahu: 'We Have a Land Flowing With Milk and Cyber' Jun. 20, 2014 - 03:19PM [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] DEFENSE NEWS | By BARBARA OPALL-ROME ISRAEL-CYBER-SECURITY-NETANYAHU HERZLIYA, ISRAEL — Israeli exports of cyber-related products and services last year reached $3 billion, some 5 percent of the global market and more than all other nations combined apart from the United States, according to Israel’s National Cyber Bureau (NCB). Officials here say the latest data, cited last week at an international conference here and presented in detail at a closed briefing of the Israeli Cabinet in late February, clearly ranks Israel as the second leading cyber exporting nation. “As far as industry goes, Israel is a superpower indeed,” Tal Steinherz, NCB chief technology officer, told participants at a June 9 session of the annual Herzliya Conference here. “Our part of the international market equals the entire world apart from the United States... We’re talking 5 percent of all world exports,” he said. Itzik Ben-Israel, a retired major general who chaired a high-level task force that pushed to establish the NCB, said Israel aspires to 10 percent of the global market in less than five years. By then, MarketsandMarkets, a Dallas-based research and consulting firm, estimates the global market to grow beyond $150 billion. “We’re already at 5 percent. With the capabilities we have now and the programs and partnerships that are being planned, I see us realistically reaching that goal in the near term,” Ben-Israel told Defense News. In a briefing to Cabinet ministers, NCB Director Eviatar Matanya noted that Israel’s $3 billion in 2013 exports was three times that of the United Kingdom’s. Israeli firms last year raised $165 million in investment funding, a figure he said represents 11 percent of global capital invested in the field of cyber. According to NCB data, 14.5 percent of all the firms worldwide attracting cyber-related investment are Israeli-owned. Israel’s cyber industry, Matanya said, comprises 20 multinational corporate-funded research-and-development centers and 200 local start-up firms. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made it a personal and national goal to elevate Israel’s status as a global cyber power. Since he established the NCB in 2011 — an increasingly high-priority organization that reports directly to Netanyahu’s office — the government has augmented annual cyber defense spending by 30 percent, despite a budget crisis. In parallel, Israel is investing hundreds of millions of shekels each year on infrastructure to transform the southern desert city of Beersheba into what Netanyahu calls “a global cyber hub for innovation.” The effort involves relocation of national labs, military intelligence units and C4I organizations, a new National Cyber Command, a new industrial park co-located with Beersheba’s Ben Gurion University and a high-speed train connecting it all from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. “We established the National Cyber Bureau for the purpose of transforming the state of Israel into a cyber superpower,” Netanyahu told ministers after Matanya’s closed-door Cabinet session, a summary of which was provided to Defense News. Beyond the national security requirements driving Israel’s Cyber program, Netanyahu said the national effort would yield tremendous economic benefit. “I see [NCB] also as a huge economic force multiplier. There is tremendous international interest in our abilities,” he said. Netanyahu’s office has also directed the government’s chief scientist, the Ministry of Industry and Trade and other agencies to serve as “angels” and incubators to nurture and assist start-up firms. “I see the Prime Minister’s Office as a public relations agency for the cyber industry,” Raviv Raz, a young chief executive officer of an Israeli start-up firm called Hybrid Security, told the June 9 Herzliya Conference panel. Raz said his firm, which specializes in applying artificial intelligence for detection and identification of what he called “bad website users,” received generous funding assistance at multiple phases of the business process. “All entrepreneurs start with an idea, and for that, the chief scientist can help ... Then there are grants to see you through the prototype phase, and this is followed by the need to raise money, where it also assists,” Raz said. “Israel is becoming a mega power in cyber, and we are a good example of how this is happening,” he added. “The government gives, and takes no equity.” In a Cabinet meeting this month, just days before the Jewish holiday of Shavuot (Festival of Weeks) that commemorates, in part, the first fruits of the harvest, Netanyahu likened national cyber investments to modern-day “first fruits.” “We always knew that we have a land flowing with milk and cyber,” Netanyahu said. ■ Email: bopallrome@defensenews.com.</p> 18735280 2014-06-26 05:11:35 2014-06-26 05:11:35 open open israel-claims-3b-in-cyber-exports-2nd-only-to-us-18735280 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan Netanyahu: We struck Syrian army forcefully and will continue to hit those who harm us Jerusalem Post http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/26/netanyahu-we-struck-syrian-army-forcefully-and-will-continue-to-hit-those-who-harm-us-jerusalem-post-18735245/ Thu, 26 Jun 2014 04:38:42 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Netanyahu: We struck Syrian army forcefully and will continue to hit those who harm us By GIL HOFFMAN 06/23/2014 16:46 PM sends warning to Assad and vows to take further steps against Hamas, including house demolitions. Binyamin Netanyahu Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, June 15, 2014 Photo: AVI OHAYON - GPO Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu warned Israel's enemies throughout the Middle East on Monday that Israel would strike back if any of them attempt to harm the Jewish state. Speaking at a meeting of his Likud Beytenu faction in the Knesset, Netanyahu praised the Shin Bet security service, police, and IDF for identifying and apprehending the murderer of police deputy major general Baruch Mizrahi, whose arrest was revealed Monday. Related: Netanyahu: Israel will take all action necessary against 'scourge of terrorism' Netanyahu noted that he had ordered the demolition of the home of Mizrahi's killer, a Hamas operative released in the Gilad Schalit deal. He vowed to take more steps against Hamas, including more arrests and house demolitions. The prime minister told the faction that he had taken steps against terrorists in Israeli jails. He said their visiting hours were cut to the minimum required by international conventions. Responding to a question from Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon about Israeli prisons being "summer camps," Netanyahu said the terrorists' cell phone usage would be cut and they would not be permitted to watch the World Cup. He also reported to the faction about the IDF's airstrikes in Syria that came in retaliation for the deadly missile attack that killed teenager Muhammad Karaka. "We demonstrated strength overnight versus the Syrian army that took action against us and if there is a need, we will use more force. We will continue to take forceful action against anyone who harms us or attempts to harm us," Netanyahu said. He received support from the ministers in his cabinet, including those on the Left. Finance Minister Yair Lapid reminded his Yesh Atid faction of the revenge taken following the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre when he said “Even if it takes time, we will get to all the kidnappers.” Justice Minister Tzipi Livni did not show any impatience with the ongoing IDF action in Palestinian cities in the West Bank. She justified continued action against Hamas. “Our central goal remains returning the kidnapped and arresting the kidnappers,” she told her Hatnua faction. “We won't stop until we accomplish our goals. Meanwhile, the IDF is acting to weaken the infrastructure of Hamas, a terrorist group that does not recognize Israel's existence.” Livni said Israel must continue trying to reach an agreement with Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas for Israel's interest while taking action against Hamas and other terrorist groups. Economy and Trade Minister Naftali Bennett told his Bayit Yehudi faction that following the arrest of Mizrahi's killer, the era of releasing terrorists was over. “The concept of releasing terrorists has reached its end,” Bennett said. “It only leads to more deaths. They say it will bring peace or they get reformed. But we live in the Middle East and in the Middle East, a murderer remains a murder. The PA must be held accountable for funding killers and encouraging murder. Labor faction chairman Eitan Cabel said the opposition had lowered its profile to let the prime minister and defense minister do their work in bringing about the return of kidnapped teens Eyal Yifrah, Gil-Ad Shaer and Naftali Fraenkel. “Speaking for all of us, I hope that there will be good news,” he said. “We are hoping for a miracle.”</p> 18735245 2014-06-26 04:38:42 2014-06-26 04:38:42 open open netanyahu-we-struck-syrian-army-forcefully-and-will-continue-to-hit-those-who-harm-us-jerusalem-post-18735245 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan The Food Safety Movement Grows Tall Posted: 06/20/2014 2:18 pm Ralph Nader http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/22/the-food-safety-movement-grows-tall-posted-06-20-2014-2-18-pm-ralph-nader-18715442/ Sun, 22 Jun 2014 06:19:15 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] The Food Safety Movement Grows Tall Posted: 06/20/2014 2:18 pm By Ralph Nader Let us celebrate today the latest initiatives of our nation's growing food safety movement. Across the country, consumers are demanding the right to know what is in their food, and labeling of genetically engineered food. It's a vibrant and diverse coalition: mothers and grandmothers, health libertarians, progressives, foodies, environmentalists, main street conservatives and supporters of free-market economics. Last year, a New York Times poll found that a near-unanimous 93 percent of Americans support such labeling. This is no surprise. Genetically engineered food has yet to be proven safe. In 1998, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) admitted in court that it had reached "no dispositive scientific findings" about the risks of genetically engineered foods. There is no scientific consensus about the risks of eating genetically engineered food, according to a statement last year signed by nearly 300 scientists. The scientists agree that "Concerns about risks are well-founded" and that a "substantial number" of "animal feeding studies and reviews of such studies...found toxic effects and signs of toxicity" in animals fed genetically engineered food, compared with controls. "Some of the studies give serious cause for concern," the scientists write. For example, a review of nineteen studies on mammals, published in Environmental Sciences Europe, found that the "data appear to indicate liver and kidney problems" arising from diets of genetically engineered food. According to Consumers Union senior scientist Michael Hansen PhD, the ability of genetically engineered crops to induce allergic reactions is "a major food safety concern." When it comes to genetically engineered food, there are questions about risks, but no convincing answers. There is no mandatory pre-market safety testing for genetically engineered food. These questions of risks and safety have festered for years because the big agrichemical companies use their intellectual property rights to deny independent scientists the ability to test genetically engineered crops, or to report their results. Scientific American called these restrictions on free inquiry "dangerous." "In a number of cases," the magazine reports, "experiments that had the implicit go-ahead from the seed company were later blocked from publication because the results were not flattering." When scientists do publish studies adverse to the interests of the big agrichemical companies, they are met with vicious attacks on their credibility, their science and even in their personal lives. Sixty-four nations have already required labeling of genetically engineered food, including the members of the European Union, Australia, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa, even Russia and China. The food industry is feeling the pressure. Paul Bulcke, CEO of Nestle, the world's largest food and beverage company, said that: "It is not business as usual anymore. Pressure is mounting from all sides and angles." Despite the overwhelming popularity of labeling, Congress refused to act, so citizens took up the cause in their own states. Under heavy corporate lobbying and deceptive TV ads, ballot initiatives for labeling of genetically engineered food were narrowly defeated by 51 percent-49 percent in both California and Washington State. In May, legislation in the California Senate led 19-16, but failed without the 21 vote majority needed for passage. Finally, on May 8, in a major victory, Vermont approved the first unconditional statewide labeling law for genetically engineered food. "Vermonters take our food and how it is produced seriously, and we believe we have a right to know what's in the food we buy," said Gov. Peter Shumlin. Since then, the food and agrichemical industries have escalated to a full panic. On June 13, the Grocery Manufacturers Association and three other trade associations -- the heart of the junk food industry -- filed a lawsuit in federal court to block the new Vermont labeling law. The good news is that people are rushing to Vermont's defense, including Ben & Jerry's ice cream, which will re-name one of its flavors "Food Fight! Fudge Brownie" to help fund a vigorous legal defense of Vermont's new labeling law. Elsewhere, industry is spending lavishly against the food movement. In New York State, the Daily News reported that: "Trade organizations, farm groups and corporate giants such as Coca-Cola and Kraft have spent millions of dollars on lobbyists and campaign contributions to defeat" labeling of genetically engineered food. The food industry is quick to scare consumers with the canard that labeling of genetically engineered food will raise food prices. But manufacturers change their labels often, so their claim doesn't make sense. It has been debunked in an study by Joanna Shepherd Bailey, a professor at Emory University School of Law, who found that "consumers will likely see no increases in prices" as a result of labeling genetically engineered food. In Congress, U.S. Rep Mike Pompeo (R-KS) introduced a bill at the behest of the Grocery Manufacturers Association -- dubbed by its consumer opponents "the Deny Americans the Right-to-Know (DARK) Act" -- to block any federal or state action for labeling of genetically engineered food. Sometimes, politics is drearily predictable: Can you guess Rep. Pompeo's largest campaign contributor? You got it: Koch Industries. But the shame is fully bipartisan: sleazy Democratic lobbyists like former US Senator Blanche Lincoln and Steve Elmendorf are plying their trade for Monsanto and the Grocery Manufacturers Association to keep you from knowing what's in your food. Meanwhile, the food disclosure movement is going full speed ahead with ballot initiatives for GMO labeling in Oregon and Colorado, as well as legislative efforts in many other states. There's a great lesson in all this: when left and right join together, they can defeat big corporations and their subservient politicians. That's the theme of my new book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State. Food labeling is hardly a radical idea. Conservative economists are quick to point out that the free exchange of information about products is crucial to the proper functioning of a free market. Even Monsanto supported labeling of genetically engineered food in Britain. But it spends millions to oppose labeling here in America. Such is corporate patriotism in the 21st Century: St. Louis-based Monsanto believes the British deserve more consumer rights than Americans do. There are other reasons to be concerned about genetically engineered crops. Genetically engineered crops have led to increased use of pesticides. For example, a study by Professor Chuck Benbrook of Washington State University found that between 1996 and 2011, genetically engineered crops have brought an increased use of more than 400 million pounds of pesticides. Mutating weed resistance is requiring the Monsantos to sell even more powerful herbicides. More details on these backfiring GMO crop technologies are contained in the new book titled The GMO Deception edited by Professor Sheldon Krimsky and Jeremy Gruber. Perhaps most alarming is the corporate control of agriculture in the hands of the world's largest agrichemical companies -- Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Dow, Bayer and BASF. "The Big 6 chemical and seed companies are working diligently to monopolize the food system at the expense of consumers, farmers and smaller seed companies," said Philip H. Howard, an associate professor at Michigan State University. These companies may be meeting their match in the mothers and grandmothers who have powered the movement for labeling of genetically engineered food. Like Pamm Larry, the pioneering grandmother who came up with the spreading idea reflected by the California ballot initiative for labeling. Mothers know that food is love. Certainly, my mother did. She taught me early and often about how important it is to eat healthy food. She even wrote about these values in the book, It Happened in the Kitchen. I'd like to think that she'd feel right at home with the mothers and grandmothers of today's food movement. I sure do. In some ways, that's the point: a movement that makes you feel at home, no wonder it is so popular. Follow Ralph Nader on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RalphNader </p> 18715442 2014-06-22 06:19:15 2014-06-22 06:19:15 open open the-food-safety-movement-grows-tall-posted-06-20-2014-2-18-pm-ralph-nader-18715442 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Hillary’s Haughty Hyperbole! Ralph Nader June 18, 2014 http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/22/hillary-s-haughty-hyperbole-ralph-nader-june-18-18715419/ Sun, 22 Jun 2014 06:04:53 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Hillary’s Haughty Hyperbole! Ralph Nader June 18, 2014 Last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review section featured a one page interview with Hillary Clinton, author of the just released Hard Choices which brought her a $14 million advance from Viacom’s Simon and Schuster. My first reaction was “Can anybody believe this?” I’m referring to the replies by Mrs. Clinton to questions about her book reading habits which turn out to be prodigious. How can such a super-busy person have the time to absorb such a staggering load of diverse books? The Times sends questions in advance to the person that they are going to interview each week. This gives the person being interviewed enough time to think about their favorite books and be precise about titles. The titles Hillary said she is reading could have been poll-tested for the 2016 presidential race. First Hillary declared that she is absorbing three books at one time, which she explained are among the “pile of books stacked on my night stand that I’m reading.” They included Mom & Me & Mom by the late Maya Angelou. To the question, “What’s the last truly great book you read?” She listed not one, but four of them: The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal, The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert, Citizens of London by Lynne Olson and A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. Revving up, she took on with gusto the question “Who are your favorite contemporary writers,” including “any writers whose books you automatically read when they come out?” She replied that she “automatically” reads “anything by Laura Hillenbrand, Walter Isaacson, Barbara Kingsolver, John le Carré, John Grisham, Hilary Mantel, Toni Morrison, Anna Quindlen and Alice Walker,” plus “the latest installments from Alex Berenson, Linda Fairstein, Sue Grafton, Donna Leon, Katherine Hall Page, Louise Penny, Daniel Silva, Alexander McCall Smith, Charles Todd and Jacqueline Winspear.” Whew! That’s not all of her responses. I have read some of this popular New York Times column’s interviews over the years, many with professional authors, fiction and non-fiction, and not one replied with such an oceanic immersion, even though many of these authors regularly read many books for their craft. The former First Lady explained that she finds time to indulge in “guilty pleasures and useful time fillers,” by reading “cooking, decorating, diet/self-help and gardening books.” Time fillers? For one of the busiest people on Earth? Has Hillary discovered the 72 hour day? It gets better, when asked her opinion on the best books about Washington, DC to recommend, she chose Our Divided Political Heart by E.J. Dionne Jr., who “shows how most everybody has some conservative and liberal impulses, but just as individuals have to reconcile them within ourselves, so does our political system if we expect to function productively.” To the question “Is there one book you wish all students would read,” Hillary could not hold back providing three: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen, and Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally. As for the “one book that made you who you are today,” Hillary replied, as she does often, that it was the Bible, which she elaborates “was and remains the biggest influence on my thinking.” Which parts of the Bible remain unknown, but presumably she has read the wide range of choices including the parts about “an eye for an eye,” “turning the other cheek,” and “the golden rule.” More insights into her eclectic interests came from responses to the question “which books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?” “You might be surprised,” she admitted, “to see memoirs by Republicans such as Decision Points by President George W. Bush” (whose criminal Iraq War she voted for), “and Faith of my Fathers by Senator John McCain” chief sabre-rattler in the Senate. Perfecto! With this interview Hillary has used her literary interests to pander to homemakers, ethnic groups, poets, lovers of fiction, adversaries, hard-line Republican leaders in Congress, religious groups and the swooning credulous. Why is Hillary Clinton unable to resist straining our credulity? A few days earlier, Hillary told Diane Sawyer of ABC News that she and Bill left the White House “dead broke.” This comment prompted the press to report on their combined $23 million book contracts, ample Presidential pension, $200,000 a speech for Bill and other rewards provided to them by friends. Sure politicians are calculating, even cunning. Those are occupational traits. Maybe Hillary thinks she can push the envelope into prevarication and distortion with impunity. After all, as a Wall Street corporatist and a war-mongering militarist, she has gotten away with much worse. Rocky Anderson, the former twice-elected mayor of Salt Lake City, cited polls and examples in his presentation to the mass-media in which he both addressed Clinton’s “recognized reputation for lying, distorting and evading,” and suggested important questions that they may wish to ask Hillary on her North-American book tour. One such episode involved her trip to Bosnia as First Lady in 1996. By her account she landed under sniper fire and had to run “with our heads down to get into the vehicles.” This narrative was contradicted by the videos and the report from accompanying CBS reporter, Sharyl Attkisson. The video shows Clinton and daughter Chelsea, in Attkisson’s words “speaking with young people at the airport, taking their time and not rushing, heads down or otherwise, to any vehicles.” For the full list of Anderson’s basic questions, go to the Facebook group: Progressives Opposed to a Clinton Dynasty. On June 10, 2014 the lines of people seeking autographed copies of Hard Choices started lining up at 3am in front of the Barnes & Noble bookstore at Union Square in New York City, the launch of Hillary’s book tour. The New York Times reported that “dozens of Secret Service agents” were establishing orderly processions by the customers. Retired presidents and their families are given a permanent, small Secret Service detail. A private citizen doesn’t have “dozens of Secret Service agents” to help sell her books. The reporters didn’t push this subject. It is a small wonder that Hillary’s march to the White House is being described as “a coronation.” With so many curtseying instead of inquiring, how can her path by anything but Queenly? follow on Twitter | friend on Facebook | forward to a friend Copyright © 2014 Nader.Org, All rights reserved. </p> 18715419 2014-06-22 06:04:53 2014-06-22 06:04:53 open open hillary-s-haughty-hyperbole-ralph-nader-june-18-18715419 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan EGYPT – THE LOST CIVILISATION THEORY By Alan F. Alford http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/22/egypt-the-lost-civilisation-theory-by-alan-f-alford-18715406/ Sun, 22 Jun 2014 05:52:02 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] EGYPT – THE LOST CIVILISATION THEORY By Alan F. Alford The Panleonist Lost Civilisation Theory The panleonist theory proposes that a highly advanced civilisation existed on the Earth during during the precessional age of Leo (c. 10900-8700 BC), but was destroyed by a cataclysm circa 10500 BC and hence became a ‘lost civilisation’. The theory proposes that the lost civilisation encoded the date 10500 BC into their monuments (e.g. by astronomical alignments) so as to commemorate the date of the cataclysm. The panleonist theory is best known from the writings of Robert Bauval, Adrian Gilbert and Graham Hancock. But it has its roots in an assortment of different writings. Firstly, in Plato’s story of Atlantis, which recalled the destruction of an advanced civilisation nine thousand years before the time of Solon, i.e. c. 9600 BC. Secondly, in the prophecies of certain mystics, such as Edgar Cayce. And thirdly, in the writings of Zecharia Sitchin, who dated the beginning of history to the Great Flood in 11000 BC, at the beginning of the age of Leo. It is on the writings of Bauval, Hancock and Gilbert that I wish to comment here, in particular their claims that the Giza Pyramids and Sphinx were built to commemorate the date 10500 BC. The Orion Theory In ‘The Orion Mystery’ (1994), Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert made a very interesting discovery, namely that the three main pyramids at Giza (of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure) formed a pattern on the ground virtually identical to that of the three belt stars of the Orion constellation. This was a perfectly plausible hypothesis. However, Bauval and Gilbert then entered controversial territory. Using computer software, they wound back the Earth’s skies to ancient times, and witnessed a ‘locking-in’ of the mirror image between the pyramids and the stars at the same time as Orion reached a turning point at the bottom of its precessional shift up and down the meridian. This conjunction, they claimed, was exact, and it occurred precisely at the date 10450 BC. In ‘Keeper of Genesis’ (1996), Robert Bauval teamed up with Graham Hancock, and took the 10500 BC theory further, claiming corroborative evidence in the form of the Sphinx at Giza (see below). In ‘Heaven’s Mirror’ (1998), Graham Hancock tried to argue that the date 10500 BC was encoded also at the ancient Cambodian site of Angkor Wat (the temples, he alleged, were in the image of the constellation Draco at exactly 10500 BC). On 15th September 1998, I issued a detailed rebuttal of Hancock’s Angkor Wat theory, which I published on my website. I concluded that ‘Hancock’s case is extremely weak, and by pursuing it with such vigour (claiming ‘no doubt that a correlation exists’ p.126, and then winding back the skies to 10500 BC to claim a ‘precise’ match) he risks bringing this kind of research into disrepute. He certainly does Robert Bauval no favours, for many people will now highlight the poor quality of Hancock’s research to debunk the more plausible (though unproven) 10500 BC alignment at Giza.’ My comments were to prove farsighted. On 4th November 1999, BBC screened a Horizon documentary which raised serious questions about Bauval and Hancock’s panleonist theory. Hancock, in particular, was ridiculed for his theory of a 10500 BC alignment between Angkor Wat and the constellation of Draco (rightly so in my opinion). But Bauval too was criticised for being careless in his calculation of the 10500 BC alignment between the Giza Pyramids and the stars of Orion’s Belt. To the shock and horror of Bauval’s followers, the BBC claimed that the accurate 10500 BC ‘lock-in’ between the Giza pyramids and Orion’s Belt was not quite so accurate after all. Worse still, in the ensuing furore, Bauval and Hancock actually conceded the point and admitted that the alignment was not precise. Bauval and Hancock went on to accuse the BBC of bias, and their complaint was upheld in one respect (although not in the majority of respects) by an independent commission. Nevertheless, in the heat of the argument, the fact was obscured that (a) the alleged accuracy of the Pyramids/Orion’s Belt alignment had been absolutely central to Bauval and Hancock’s original argument of a lost civilisation of 10500 BC; and (b) the alleged accuracy of the Pyramids/Orion’s Belt alignment had been successfully rebutted by the BBC. The present situation is this. It is accepted that the alignment between the Giza pyramids and the stars of Orion’s Belt is not precise but approximate. Therefore, no firm conclusion can be drawn about any particular date which the monuments might have commemorated. Accordingly, the panleonist theory of Giza is entirely baseless (nevertheless, it remains an important discovery that the layout of the three Giza pyramids mirrors the shape of Orion’s Belt). The Sphinx Problem One of the foundation stones of the panleonist theory is the Great Sphinx of Egypt, which is presumed to have the body of a lion, thus evoking the precessional era of Leo (10900-8700 BC). In his follow-up work with co-author Graham Hancock, Robert Bauval wound back the skies to show that not only did the three Giza pyramids line up with the three stars of Orion’s Belt at 10500 BC, but also, at the same time, the constellation of Leo rose exactly due east of the Sphinx. This occurrence, they said, was unique to 10500 BC, and it was therefore beyond coincidence that the Sphinx had been carved in the form of a lion. According to Bauval and Hancock (and other researchers, such as John Anthony West) the weathering of the Sphinx by rainwater supports a date of construction c. 10500 BC, at the same time as the ground plan had been designed for the three Giza pyramids. I would like to make three critical observations on this theory. Firstly, the geological evidence for an older Sphinx, based on the work of the geologist Robert Schoch, is more in line with 5000-4000 BC than with the extreme date of 10500 BC. I know from personal discussion with Robert Schoch that he is quite unhappy with the way Bauval, Hancock and West have hijacked his evidence to fit their pet theory. Secondly, as I pointed out in chapter 1 (p. 24) of my book ‘The Phoenix Solution’ (1998), there is a much more plausible reason fot the importance of the age of Leo in ancient Egypt, namely that the Sun rose against the backdrop of Leo during the heliacal rising of the star Sirius at the summer solstice throughout most of Egyptian dynastic history. The leonine imagery of the Sphinx (if indeed it be a lion) points us not necessarily to the 11th millennium BC, but rather to the much more plausible era of the 4th millennium BC. Thirdly, I would question the assumption that the Sphinx has the body of a lion. In fact, as Robert Temple has pointed out, the Sphinx has ‘no mane, no tufted tail (and) no raised haunches’, which we would expect of a lion, and nor does it have a lion’s powerful shoulders. Furthermore, the lion was a dualistic concept in ancient Egyptian myth and architecture; lion sphinxes, for example, were generally built in pairs, protecting the entrances to temples. And yet the Sphinx of Giza is most certainly a solitary figure; there is no evidence whatsoever for a second Sphinx. On balance, it seems to me that, as Robert Temple has suggested, the Sphinx was built with the body of a dog, presumably to symbolise Anubis (with the cat’s tail representing a later modification). Anubis, it should be noted, was the god who guarded the Earth and the Underworld, and protected the body of Osiris. With the Pyramid representing Osiris (Pyramid Texts, Utterance 600), it would make sense that the Sphinx was originally an image of Anubis (its head was probably recarved from the head of a dog to the head of a king). The Anubis theory may, or may not, be correct, but its plausibility brings into question the widely-held assumption that the Sphinx has the body of a lion. Of course, if the Sphinx has the body of a dog, then astronomy is of no use whatsoever in dating it. All things considered, the Sphinx offers no evidence whatosever in support of the panleonist lost civilisation theory. It might well date to the pre-dynastic era (as I have indeed argued in ‘The Phoenix Solution’), but probably to no earlier than the 5th or 6th millennium BC. Summary Much credit is due to Bauval, Gilbert, Hancock and West for getting us all looking at Egypt again with a fresh perspective. But the debate must move on, and frankly I would like to see an end to this obsession with 10500 BC. At the present time, there is not one single piece of evidence anywhere in the world to justify the idea that 10500 BC was being commemorated by a lost civilisation. In my view, this obsession with 10500 BC has done great harm, and continues to do great harm, to the cause of those, such as myself, who would make a serious challenge to official dogma on the origin of the Giza pyramids and the history of civilisation. Yes, there is a mystery which requires an explanation. But what if the answer to the mystery lies not in 10500 BC but rather in the more plausible period of 6000-5000 BC? The worst thing we can do is investigate the past with a preconceived dogma to rival that of mainstream academia. Rather, it is time to take account of all the scientific evidence and draw our conclusions accordingly. Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 18715406 2014-06-22 05:52:02 2014-06-22 05:52:02 open open egypt-the-lost-civilisation-theory-by-alan-f-alford-18715406 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan Netanyahu ‘loathes’ Obama, Israel’s opposition leader charges http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/15/netanyahu-loathes-obama-israel-s-opposition-leader-charges-18669316/ Sun, 15 Jun 2014 03:15:31 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Netanyahu ‘loathes’ Obama, Israel’s opposition leader charges PM’s hostility to president is ‘endangering Israel’s security,’ claims Labor’s Isaac Herzog, in rare confirmation of long-rumored strained ties between ‘Bibi’ and ‘Barack’ By TIMES OF ISRAEL STAFF [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “loathes” Barack Obama, and his hostile attitude to the US president constitutes a danger to Israel’s well-being, the head of the Israeli opposition charged on Friday night, in a highly unusual acknowledgement of the long-rumored strained personal ties between the two leaders. minister, Labor party chairman Isaac Herzog slammed Netanyahu for failing to listen to the international community, failing to present peace proposals of his own for an accord with the Palestinians, and failing to work properly with Obama. It was “a tragedy” that Netanyahu had not presented a peace plan, and was instead “dragged” into responding to other proposals, said Herzog. “The second tragedy, that endangers the security of Israel, is his loathing and hostility for Barack Obama,” Herzog went on, describing this as “one of Netanyahu’s gravest failures. Herzog, who was minister of welfare under Netanyahu from 2009-2011, was speaking in an interview on Channel 2 news in the aftermath of this week’s formation of a new Hamas-backed Palestinian unity government. Netanyahu had called on the international community to stand up against what he described as a government backed by a terrorist organization, but instead the US led the world in making clear that it would work with the new Palestinian government, and the EU, the UN and much of the rest of the international community quickly followed suit. US President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu go informal at Ben Gurion Airport, March 22, 2013 (photo credit: Avi Ohayon/GPO/Flash90) Netanyahu and Obama have long been perceived as having a strained relationship, with policy differences emerging over how to stop Iran’s nuclear program, and the prime minister’s expansion of settlements, among other issues. Obama gave an interview which indicated criticism of some of Netanyahu’s key policies just as the prime minister was flying to meet him at the White House in March, and Netanyahu was seen by some in the US as having sought to bolster Mitt Romney’s prospects in the 2012 presidential elections. But formally Israeli and American leaders have generally insisted that the two work together professionally. Obama took pains to speak of “my friend Bibi,” using the prime minister’s nickname, when he visited Israel last year, and Netanyahu reciprocated by calling him “my friend Barack.” For a figure as prominent as Herzog to use Israel’s most-watched news program to declare that the prime minister loathes the US president was unprecedented. Sources close to Netanyahu have claimed that Secretary of State John Kerry had promised the prime minister that the US would not work with the new Palestinian government, and had thus breached understandings with Israel. Herzog charged that Netanyahu “does not listen” to the international community, and they don’t listen to him. Under Netanyahu, Israel was now “completely isolated,” he said. Opposition leader Isaac Herzog, left, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Photo credit: Kobi Gideon/Flash90) As opposition leader, Herzog receives regular briefings on diplomatic and security issues from Netanyahu and other leading figures. He has been urging relatively dovish members of the governing coalition — notably the Hatnua party led by Tzipi Livni and the centrist Yesh Atid of Yair Lapid — to leave the government and back him. Herzog said Israel needed to negotiate with the Palestinians on the principle of a two-state solution based on the pre-1967 lines, with land swaps and “arrangements” to resolve the contested fate of Jerusalem. When it was suggested to him that Netanyahu was prepared to go along with such ideas, Herzog retorted, “His mistake is that he’s not put a proposal on the table. In comments earlier in the week, Herzog had blamed the US and EU recognition of the Hamas-backed Palestinian unity government on the “complete collapse of Israeli foreign policy” under Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman. “Netanyahu and Liberman failed to understand the international arena,” he said. “Netanyahu speaks [but] the world doesn’t listen,” said Herzog Wednesday, adding that the prime minister’s failure to lead a diplomatic process “let Hamas into the West Bank through the front door.” Herzog warned that if Netanyahu did not act on the diplomatic front, “Israel will lose the support of the international community and the ability to preserve [Israel] as a Jewish and democratic state.” The opposition leader called on the prime minister to come up with a clear plan to avoid Israel becoming a binational state with a Jewish minority. “The man who describes himself as strong against Hamas is revealed as being strong at nothing but talking, Herzog wrote in a Facebook post. Israel has castigated the US over its position, arguing that by maintaining ties with a government supported by a terror group, the US was indicating to PA President Mahmoud Abbas that it was okay to “form a government with a terrorist group.” “I’m deeply troubled by the announcement that the United States will work with the Palestinian government backed by Hamas,” Netanyahu said Wednesday, noting that the Islamist group has murdered “countless innocent civilians.” “All those who genuinely seek peace must reject President Abbas’s embrace of Hamas, and most especially, I think the United States must make it absolutely clear to the Palestinian president that his pact with Hamas, a terrorist organization that seeks Israel’s liquidation, is simply unacceptable,” he said. Earlier Wednesday, Kerry defended a US decision to work with the new Palestinian unity government, despite Israeli criticism, emphasizing that the new Palestinian leadership did not include any Hamas ministers. Speaking to reporters in Beirut, Kerry said Abbas “made clear that this new technocratic government is committed to the principles of non violence, negotiations, recognizing the state of Israel, acceptance of the previous agreements and the Quartet principles.” “Based on what we know now about the composition of this technocratic government, which has no minister affiliated to Hamas and is committed to the principles that I describe, we will work with it as we need to, as appropriate.” While on an unscheduled visit to Beirut, Kerry said: “I want to make it very clear we are going to be watching it (the government) very closely, as we have said from day one, to absolutely ensure that it upholds each of those things it has talked about, that it doesn’t cross the line.” The new Palestinian cabinet was sworn in Monday, after a surprise reconciliation deal reached in April between Hamas and the PLO. Read more: Netanyahu 'loathes' Obama, Israel's opposition leader charges | The Times of Israel http://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahus-loathes-obama-israels-opposition-leader-charges/#ixzz341JqNttu </p> 18669316 2014-06-15 03:15:31 2014-06-15 03:15:31 open open netanyahu-loathes-obama-israel-s-opposition-leader-charges-18669316 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Can Progressives Learn from Eric Cantor’s Defeat? Ralph Nader June 13, 2014 http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/14/can-progressives-learn-from-eric-cantor-s-defeat-ralph-nader-june-13-18666081/ Sat, 14 Jun 2014 01:35:58 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Can Progressives Learn from Eric Cantor’s Defeat? Ralph Nader June 13, 2014 The stunning upset defeat of House Majority Leader, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) by Professor David Brat, an economist from Randolph-Macon College, in Tuesday’s Republican Primary has several takeaways for progressives besides envy and shame over why they do not directly take on the corporate Democrats. First, among all the reasons for Cantor’s fall, there were the ones encapsulated in the Nation’s John Nichols’ description of Brat as an “anti-corporate conservative.” Repeatedly, Brat said he was for “free enterprise” but against “crony capitalist programs that benefit the rich and powerful.” David Brat pointed out that Cantor and the Republican establishment have “been paying way too much attention to Wall Street and not enough to Main Street.” Brat supported “the end of bulk phone and email data collection by the NSA” and other government agencies on constitutional grounds. Professor Brat attacked the Wall Street investment bankers who nearly “broke the financial system,” adding the applause line: “these guys should have gone to jail. Instead of going to jail, where did they go? They went to Eric Cantor’s Rolodex.” An advocate of ethical capitalism, with religious-Christian overtones, Mr. Brat went after the deal-making in Washington, such as Cantor’s close relationships with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable. He especially berated Cantor for weakening the proposed bill to ban insider trading by members of Congress by exempting their family members and spouses. He chastised Cantor on immigration, taking advantage of the latter’s wavering appeal to voters who believe that large corporations, represented by Cantor, want a never-ending supply of cheap foreign labor to hold wages down. On the other hand, Brat opposes a minimum wage on libertarian grounds. In addition, David Brat, described as a “commanding orator who mixes fiery rhetoric with academic references and self-depreciating humor,” wants a balanced-budget amendment, a “fair or flat tax,” and is opposed to federal educational programs such as “No Child Left Behind.” Brat is a mixed bag for progressives. But in that mix is a clear populist challenge by Main Street against Wall Street and by ordinary people against the corporate government with subsidies and bailouts that the Left calls corporate welfare and the Right calls crony capitalism. Therein lies the potential for a winning majority alliance between Left and Right as my new book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State, relates in realistic detail. Second, Professor Brat spent about $230,000 to Eric Cantor’s $5.7 million. However, David Brat more than made up for the money deficit with energy, focused barbs and the shoe-leather of his committed followers. On election night, Brat made the point that progressives would do well to heed, as they obsess over big money in politics; “Dollars don’t vote,” he said, “people do.” Interestingly, Tea Party forces and donors claim they thought Cantor was so unbeatable that they didn’t even fund David Brat even though he had two national radio talk show hosts speaking well of him. Can’t progressives find that kind of energy with their many broader issues and larger support base? Can’t they find capable so-called “nobodies” with hidden talent to become publically heralded champions? There are fresh voices everywhere who can take on the corporate Democrats, like the Clintons, who work with Wall Streeters and espouse crony capitalism and with neocons to advance militarism abroad, along with corporate-managed, job destroying trade agreements and off-shore tax havens? Unfortunately the driving energy of progressives, including the dissipating Occupy Wall Street effort, is not showing up in the electoral arena. The political energy, the policy disputes and the competitive contests are among the Republicans, not the Democrats, observed the astute political commentator and former Clinton White House aide, Bill Curry. The third lesson from the decisive Cantor upset is not to embrace the political attitude that calls for settling, from the outset, for the least-of-the-worst choices. Progressives have expressed and harbored strong criticisms of the Democratic Party establishment and their adoption of corporatist policies, but election cycle after election cycle, fearful of the Republican bad guys, they signal to the Democrat incumbents that the least-of-the-worst is acceptable. Like the liberals they often consort with, progressives do not ask: “Why not the best?” with the plan that they will either win or at least pull their Party away from the relentless 24/7 grip of big-time corporatism. The final takeaway from this fascinating Virginian contest in the 7th Congressional District near Richmond was that Cantor’s tactics backfired. The more Cantor spent on TV, radio, billboard ads and mailings, the more David Brat became known and the more people were reminded that Washington and Wall Street really do not care about people on Main Street. That is truly the nub of a Left-Right alliance. In recent decades, pollsters would sometimes pose a variation of the question: “Do you believe that X candidate or Y party or Z in Washington cares about people like you?” The responses revealed a sizable majority of people, regardless of their ideological or political labels, said “no.” With the interest of the public, the community and the country in the forefront, those “nos” can become “yeses” for a long-overdue rejuvenated and just society driven by reality and edified by its ideals. </p> 18666081 2014-06-14 01:35:58 2014-06-14 01:35:58 open open can-progressives-learn-from-eric-cantor-s-defeat-ralph-nader-june-13-18666081 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan DISCOVER MAGAZINE FROM THE JUNE 2014 ISSUE http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/31/discover-magazine-from-the-june-2014-issue-18567724/ Sat, 31 May 2014 23:56:57 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] DISCOVER MAGAZINE FROM THE JUNE 2014 ISSUE 20 Things You Didn't Know About... Noise Did you know the Big Bang was noiseless? By Jonathon Keats|Friday, May 23, 2014 RELATED TAGS: SENSES Share on facebookShare on twitterShare on emailShare on printMore Sharing Services39 Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock 1. The Big Bang was noiseless. Everything in the universe expanded uniformly, so nothing came into contact with anything else. No contact, no sound waves. 2. Astronomer Fred Hoyle coined the term Big Bang in the ’50s, not because he thought it was noisy, but because he thought the theory was ridiculous. 3. For a really big bang, you should have heard Krakatoa in 1883. On Aug. 27, the volcanic island in Indonesia erupted with the explosive power of 200 megatons of TNT. The eruption could be heard nearly 3,000 miles away, making it the loudest noise in recorded history. 4. There are people who would outdo it if they could. They pack their cars with stereo amps to pump out 180-plus decibels (dB) of noise at so-called dB drag races. That’s how loud a jet engine would sound — if it were a foot away from your ear. 5. Jets get a bad rap. According to psychoacoustician Hugo Fastl, people perceive airplane noise as if it were 10 dB greater than the equivalent noise made by a train. 6. Since the decibel scale is logarithmic, growing exponentially, that means a jet sounds 10 times noisier than a train when the noise levels of both vehicles are objectively the same. 7. The only difference is that people find plane noises more annoying. The effects are dubbed the “railway bonus” and “aircraft malus.” 8. The first known noise ordinance was passed by the Greek province of Sybaris in the sixth century B.C. Tinsmiths and roosters were required to live outside the town limits. 9. Recognizing noise exposure as an occupational safety hazard took longer. The first scientific study was initiated in 1886 by Glasgow surgeon Thomas Barr. After he tested the hearing of 100 boilermakers, he determined that incessant pounding of hammers against metal boilers caused severe hearing loss. 10. One of Barr’s solutions to the problem of “boilermaker’s ear” was to suggest that clergymen shave their beards so that workmen could lip-read their sermons. 11. No wonder unprotected boilermaking was a problem: The human ear can perceive sound waves that move the eardrum less than the width of an atom. 12. You can fight noise with noise. The first patent on “active noise cancellation” dates to 1933, when German physicist Paul Lueg proposed to silence sound waves by simultaneously generating waves of the exact opposite orientation. The principle is now used in noise-canceling headsets. 13. Bring yours to the bar. Researchers at the Université de Bretagne-Sud have found that men imbibe more than 20 percent faster when ambient noise is cranked up from 72 to 88 dB. 14. And people are only getting louder. According to the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, the volume of an animated conversation between Americans increased by 10 dB during the ’90s. 15. Social and ambient noise causes hearing loss, often misdiagnosed as an effect of aging. Preventing it would require that cities become 10 dB quieter. 16. Deafness isn’t the only medical danger of noise exposure. The stress causes some 45,000 fatal heart attacks a year in the developing world, according to researcher Dieter Schwela of the Stockholm Environment Institute. 17. And then there’s the unintended assault on ocean dwellers by noisy navy sonar. The disorienting sound drives beaked whales to beach themselves, and it makes humpbacks extend the length of their songs by 29 percent. 18. To carry the same amount of information in a noisier environment, the whale songs have become more repetitive. Noise can be the nemesis of any signal. 19. Except when noise is the signal. Back in the ’60s, Bell Labs astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson kept picking up static with their radio telescope. They eventually realized that the noise was the sound of the universe itself, a remnant of a dense, hot plasma that pervaded the early cosmos. 20. Their discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation won them the Nobel Prize because the remnant heat showed that the universe must have begun with a violent explosion. Sorry, Fred Hoyle. The Big Bang is proven. </p> 18567724 2014-05-31 23:56:57 2014-05-31 23:56:57 open open discover-magazine-from-the-june-2014-issue-18567724 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS Pakistan: Worse Than We Knew Ahmed Rashid June 5, 2014 Issue The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001–2014 by Carlotta Gall http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/31/new-york-review-of-books-pakistan-worse-than-we-knew-ahmed-rashid-june-5-2014-issue-the-wrong-enemy-america-in-afghanistan-2001-2014-by-carlotta--18567698/ Sat, 31 May 2014 23:36:37 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS Pakistan: Worse Than We Knew Ahmed Rashid June 5, 2014 Issue The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001–2014 by Carlotta Gall Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 329 pp., $28.00 Alexandra Boulat/VII A pro-Taliban rally in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s Balochistan province, circa 2002 During the Afghan elections in early April I was traveling in Central Asia, mainly in Kyrgyzstan. I wanted to inquire into the fears of the governments there as a result of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. What did they think of the growth of Taliban and Islamic extremism in Afghanistan and Pakistan? Officials in each country cited two threats. First, the internal radicalizing of their young people by increasing numbers of preachers or proselytizing groups arriving from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Middle East. The second, more dangerous threat is external: they believe that extremist groups based in Pakistan and Afghanistan are trying to infiltrate Central Asia in order to launch terrorist attacks. Islamic extremism is infecting the entire region and this will ultimately become the legacy of the US occupation of Afghanistan, as the so-called jihad by the Taliban against the US comes to an end. Iran, a Shia state, fears that the Sunni extremist groups that have installed themselves in Pakistan’s Balochistan province on the Iranian border will step up their attacks inside Iran. In February Iran threatened to send troops into Balochistan unless Pakistan helped free five Iranian border guards who had been kidnapped by militants. (The Pakistanis freed four of the guards; one was killed.) Chinese officials say they are particularly concerned about terrorist groups coming out of Pakistan and Afghanistan that are undermining Chinese security. Although China is Pakistan’s closest ally, its officials have made it clear that they are closely monitoring the Uighur Muslims from Xinjiang province, who are training in Pakistan, fighting in Afghanistan, and have carried out several terrorist attacks in Xinjiang. Terrorist assaults from Pakistan into Indian Kashmir have declined sharply since 2003, but India has a perennial fear that Islamic militant groups based in Pakistan’s Punjab province may mount attacks in India. Many Punjabi fighters have joined the Taliban forces based in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, and they have attacked Indian targets in Afghanistan. India is also wary of another terrorist attack resembling the one that took place in Mumbai in 2008. For forty years Pakistan has been backing Islamic extremist groups as part of its expansionist foreign policy in Afghanistan and Central Asia and its efforts to maintain equilibrium with India, its much larger enemy. Now Pakistan is undergoing the worst terrorist backlash in the entire region. Some 50,000 people have died in three separate and continuing insurgencies: one by the Taliban in the northwest, the other in Balochistan by Baloch separatists, and the third in Karachi by several ethnic groups. That sectarian war, involving suicide bombers, massacres, and kidnappings, has gripped the country for a decade. Some five thousand Pakistani soldiers and policemen have been killed and some twenty thousand wounded, both as targets of terrorist attacks and during offensives against them. The economy has sharply declined, and there are widespread electricity shortages. The political elite is divided and at odds with the military over how to deal with terrorism, while many in the middle class are leaving the country. Two years ago all the states in the region would have publicly or privately accused Pakistan’s military and Interservices Intelligence (ISI) of supporting, protecting, or at least tolerating almost every terrorist group based in Pakistan. The ISI had links with all of them and often collaborated with them. Recently those relations have changed. Governments in the region now accept that Pakistan is in some ways trying to fight terrorism on its soil. But those governments are also concerned that the Pakistani military and political elite have lost control of large parts of the country and cannot maintain law and order. The US and Western countries fear that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons arsenal is vulnerable and that terrorists in Pakistan may be planning an attack comparable to that of September 11. There is still no overall political or military strategy to combat Islamic extremism. The Pakistani army tries to suppress some terrorist groups but not, for example, those that target India. Such a selective strategy cannot be maintained indefinitely and poses enormous risks to the entire world. Since the mid-1970s the ISI has supported extremist Islamic groups in Afghanistan including the Taliban, but that policy may now be changing. Contrary to many predictions, the situation in Afghanistan may be taking a turn for the better. Despite the threat of Taliban reprisals, seven million Afghans turned out on April 5 to vote in the first presidential election in which President Hamid Karzai was not a candidate. This was also the first genuine attempt in Afghan history to transfer power democratically. A remarkable 58 percent of the 12 million eligible voters turned out—35 percent of them women. Although the Taliban did not make a show of force to stop the vote, relatively few people voted in many Taliban-controlled areas in the south and east. Preliminary results released on April 26 show the Tajik leader Abdullah Abdullah in the lead with 45 percent of the vote and his Pashtun rival Ashraf Ghani trailing with 32 percent. Over three thousand cases of fraud still have to be investigated before the count is final. Since neither candidate had a majority of 50 percent, there will be a runoff election between the two by the end of May. A new government will not be in place before July, which means that a security agreement with the US, which all the candidates have agreed to, will be delayed. The US and NATO want a military force of some ten thousand to stay in the country in order to train the Afghan army and gather intelligence. Such an agreement will be necessary if the US Congress and Europe are to be persuaded to keep the Kabul government financially afloat. Afghanistan needs a minimum of $7 billion a year to pay for its budget and army. In January the US Congress cut by half the $2 billion earmarked for US aid to Afghanistan. To bring the civil war to an end the new president will try to open talks with the Pashtun Taliban in Afghanistan. Pakistan is now also keen on such talks because two thirds of Pashtuns live in Pakistan, including members of the Taliban, and there has been talk by Islamists of carving out a separate Pashtun state. Will the Pakistan military put pressure on the Afghan Taliban leaders who live in Pakistan to talk to the new government in Kabul while Pakistan deals with its own Pashtun problem? A lot will depend on whether a much weakened Pakistan still has the power to force the Afghan Taliban to engage in negotiations. All the recent books I have seen on the Afghan wars have recounted how the Pakistani military backed the Taliban when they first emerged in 1993, but lost its influence by 2000. Then, after a brief respite following September 11, 2001, Pakistan’s military helped to resurrect the Taliban resistance to fight the Americans. My own three books on Afghanistan describe the actions of the Pakistani military as one factor in keeping the civil war going and contributing to the American failure to win decisively in Afghanistan.* Now in The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001–2014, Carlotta Gall, the New York Times reporter in Afghanistan and Pakistan for more than a decade, has gone one step further. She places the entire onus of the West’s failure in Afghanistan and the Taliban’s successes on the Pakistani military and the Taliban groups associated with it. Her book has aroused considerable controversy, not least in Pakistan. Its thesis is quite simple: The [Afghan] war has been a tragedy costing untold thousands of lives and lasting far too long. The Afghans were never advocates of terrorism yet they bore the brunt of the punishment for 9/11. Pakistan, supposedly an ally, has proved to be perfidious, driving the violence in Afghanistan for its own cynical, hegemonic reasons. Pakistan’s generals and mullahs have done great harm to their own people as well as their Afghan neighbors and NATO allies. Pakistan, not Afghanistan, has been the true enemy. Dogged, curious, insistent on uncovering hidden facts, Gall’s reporting over the years has been a nightmare for the American, Pakistani, and other foreign powers involved in Afghanistan, while it has been welcomed by many Afghans. She quickly emerged as the leading Western reporter living in Kabul. She made her reputation by reporting on the terrible loss of innocent Afghan lives as American aircraft continued to bomb the Pashtun areas in southern Afghanistan even after the war of 2001 had ended. The bombing of civilians was said to be accidental, supposedly based on faulty intelligence; but it continued for years and helped the Taliban turn the population against the Americans. Before human rights groups or police arrived in remote, bombed villages, Gall was often there first. Thus in July 2002, she writes of driving “for three days over dusty and rutted roads” to reach a village in Uruzgan province that had been bombed during a wedding. Fifty-four wedding guests were killed, including thirteen children from one household, and over one hundred people were wounded. The survivors of this massacre “were collecting body parts in a bucket”—Gall’s quote of the provincial governor that haunted reporters and other observers in Kabul. She continued: Sahib Jan, a twenty-five-year-old neighbor, was one of the first to reach the groom’s house after the bombardment. Bodies were lying all over the two courtyards and in the adjoining orchard, some of them in pieces. Human flesh hung in the trees. A woman’s torso was lodged in an almond sapling
. Bodies lay in the dust and rubble of the rooms below. Some of those killed were friends of President Karzai and these bombings infuriated him and caused his relations with the US to deteriorate. As late as 2009 Gall was still covering such disasters, as when US planes bombed the village of Granai, killing 147 people—“the worst single incident of civilian casualties of the war.” Carlotta Gall was, in effect, a one-woman human rights agency. She spent much time and effort exposing the torture and killing of Afghans taken prisoner by the Americans. This was a highly sensitive issue—the American victors did not expect American media to expose their wrongdoings. But Gall went ahead. She told the heartbreaking story of Dilawar, a naive taxi driver who was wrongly arrested in Khost in eastern Afghanistan, incarcerated in an isolation ward at the US airbase at Bagram, and then beaten to death by his American jailors. She spent many weeks tracking down Dilawar’s family and obtained the death certificate issued by the US Army: I gasped as I read it. I had been looking to learn more about the Afghans being detained. I had not expected to find a homicide committed by American soldiers. Nobody was ever charged and the same US team of interrogators was deployed to Abu Ghraib in Iraq—the other site of grisly US treatment of prisoners. Gall’s modesty does not allow her to mention that it was this story that led to the making of the 2007 Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side. Robert Nickelsberg Prayer flags at a Taliban graveyard on the outskirts of Kandahar city, Afghanistan, February 2005; photograph by Robert Nickelsberg from his book Afghanistan: A Distant War, just published by Prestel All her skills were put to the test when she reported on the death of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad and tried to discover whether senior Pakistanis had been hiding him all along. Methodically adding one fact to another, she concludes not only that some were, which is convincing, but that all the top officials in the military and the ISI knew of his whereabouts, although the evidence she offers for such widespread knowledge is not wholly plausible; and her assertion that there was a specific “bin Laden desk” at the ISI appears, from my own inquiries, to be flimsy. For many Pakistanis the main failure of the government is that nobody has ever been punished or held responsible either for hiding bin Laden or not discovering him earlier. Gall surmises that the ISI had let it be known that bin Laden’s hideaway was an ISI safe house. That is why nobody ever knocked on the door—a reasonable assumption. However, the fiercest opposition to her views comes from American officials themselves. They insist, as they are obliged to do, that none of the top Pakistani leaders knew of bin Laden’s whereabouts. Gall’s conclusion that the Obama administration deliberately kept the ISI’s role in harboring bin Laden secret in order to save the US–Pakistan relationship is difficult to accept for two reasons. The first is simply the propensity of officials in Washington to leak to journalists. The second is that US–Pakistani relations would collapse a few months after the killing of bin Laden over different issues, notably Pakistan’s support of the Taliban. The US therefore would not have been so concerned to protect its relations with Pakistan. Most states today, including the US and NATO countries, believe that the Pakistani military is no longer in control of the Taliban in Afghanistan or capable of putting decisive pressure on them. The army leaders have too much of a problem at home with their own Pakistani Taliban. Their ability to persuade the Afghan Taliban to make peace with Kabul is very limited. Moreover, the Pakistani military has shown no willingness to kick the Afghan Taliban out of Pakistan and back to Afghanistan. The civilian government is trying to negotiate with the Pakistani Taliban but the military is against such talks and would rather use force, a major division in policymaking in Islamabad. There are enormous risks involved, such as the two Talibans merging to fight the Pakistani army. The Pakistani military belatedly understands that a Taliban conquest in Afghanistan would eventually ensure that Pakistan would find itself with a Taliban government in Islamabad. As Gall recounts, the Pakistani army has spent years propping up the Afghan Taliban, training their fighters, allowing them to import arms and money from the Arabian Gulf and to recruit among Pakistani youth. As Gall shows, the army even decided which tactics the Afghan Taliban should use. The army is now desperate to find a political solution that would send the Afghan Taliban home. Many army and police officers find themselves confused as they are ordered to protect some Taliban and other extremists and kill others. Pakistani officials are supposed to be loyal allies of the US and they take its money but they also are encouraged by powerful Pakistanis to promote anti-Americanism in society and the army. There has been no adequate explanation for these dual-track policies, which have ravaged state and society and undermined the army internally. Moreover the army is still not prepared to give up its militant stand against India. Gall writes that Pakistani soldiers “were fighting, and dying, in campaigns against Islamist militants, apparently at the request of America, but at the same time they were being fed a constant flow of anti-American and pro-Taliban propaganda.” Unfortunately she does not acknowledge that there have been shifts in the military’s thinking and that it faces the more open kind of confusion over its strategy and its loyalties that I have described. Her book starts and ends on the same note even though thirteen years have elapsed. Afghans have observed that the ISI has not interfered in the Afghan elections. Contrary to its policy since the 1970s, it has avoided favoring Pashtun candidates. It has also tried to improve relations with the former anti- Taliban Northern Alliance (NA) warlords it once opposed by meeting with the leaders of Tajik, Hazara, and Uzbek groups that were the major components of the alliance. Consequently all the Afghan presidential candidates have softened their comments on Pakistan, avoiding the harsh rhetoric of Hamid Karzai. Yet for the reasons described by Gall, the Pakistani military still does not comprehend how deeply Pakistan is hated by most Afghans. Even today the worst atrocities and suicide bombings causing civilian deaths are often blamed on the Taliban elements “trained by Pakistanis.” Hatred for Pakistan is possibly even stronger among the Afghan Pashtuns who have been Pakistan’s traditional allies. The Pakistani army must undergo deep self-examination and show considerable humility in dealing with the Afghans if it is to genuinely create an opportunity for peace. However there are large gaps in Gall’s analysis that cannot be ignored. Pakistan was not the only cause of the failure to control the Afghan Taliban; the failure in Afghanistan has been an American failure as well. The lack of a US political strategy stretched over four administrations. Two Presidents—Bush and Obama—were unable to make up their minds about what to do in Afghanistan or how many troops should carry out which tasks. The overwhelming militarization of US decision-making and the hubris of American generals undermined diplomacy and nation-building; the US failed to curb open production of opium and other drugs. There was constant infighting between the White House, Defense, and State Departments over policy. There was also widespread corruption and waste both in the private contracting system used by the US military and in some of the operations of the US Agency for International Development. The list of such American failures is indeed long, and assigning responsibility for the losses in Afghanistan will occupy US historians for decades. Gall’s second omission is not to recognize the negative effects caused by the neighboring countries, apart from Pakistan, and their constant interference in Afghanistan. She ignores the Afghan civil war after 1989 when all the Afghan warlords had international backers. She fails to mention that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia backed the Taliban while Russia, Iran, India, Turkey, and the Central Asian republics supported the Northern Alliance. More recently Iran has given sanctuary to the Taliban and al-Qaeda, India is funding the Baloch separatist insurgency in Pakistan, and Afghanistan has provided a refuge to the leader of the Pakistani Taliban. The US presence has failed to provide protection for people in the region. Most Afghans will tell you today that what they fear most about the Americans leaving is that intervention from all the country’s neighbors will start again. Gall doesn’t blame neighbors other than Pakistan. Why did Pakistan adopt policies of intervention in Afghanistan, especially after September 11, when it had essentially lost the game in Afghanistan? There has been a disastrous logic to the military’s policies—which more thoughtful Pakistanis have always resisted. Here some history is useful. The Pakistan military has used militant political groups as an arm of its foreign policy in India and Afghanistan since the 1970s. This was allowed by the West as part of the cold war. During the 1980s the CIA funded the Afghan Mujahideen and Islamic extremists from forty countries when they were fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. It was not until September 11 that Pakistan’s use of Islamic extremists as a tool of its foreign policy became unacceptable. After September 11 General Pervez Musharraf and the military regime believed that they could, for a time, appear to meet US demands by capturing al-Qaeda leaders while avoiding harm to the Afghan Taliban. Musharraf was always treated as a messiah by the Bush administration; but a year after September 11 well-informed Pakistanis knew that Musharraf had started playing a double game with the Americans by covertly supporting a Taliban resurgence. What was the Pakistan military’s logic in doing so? After the war to oust the Taliban was over in 2001 the military faced the defeat of its Taliban allies and had to suffer the Northern Alliance and its backers—including India and Iran—as victors in Kabul. Musharraf felt he had to preserve some self-respect; and Bush appeared to acknowledge this when he allowed ISI agents to be airlifted out of Kunduz before the city fell to the Northern Alliance and its backers—a series of events well described by Gall. Bush had also promised Musharraf that the NA would not enter Kabul before a neutral Afghan body under the UN took over the city. But as the Taliban fled, the NA walked into Kabul without a fight and took over the government. The Pakistani military was further angered at Bonn in December 2001, when the new Afghan government was unveiled and all the provincial security ministries were handed over to the Northern Alliance, with Pashtun representation at a minimum. This was the usual outcome by which the spoils of war went to the victors, but for Pakistan’s generals it was further humiliation that bred resentment and a desire for revenge. The military was equally perplexed about why the US did not commit more ground troops to hunt down al-Qaeda instead of leaving that task to Northern Alliance warlords. The military was convinced that the Americans would soon abandon Afghanistan for the war in Iraq and leave the NA, backed by India, in charge in Kabul. Bush’s refusal to commit even one thousand US troops to the mountains of Tora Bora where bin Laden was trapped sent a powerful message to Pakistan. By 2003 US forces in Afghanistan still amounted to only 11,500 men—insufficient to hold the country. Five years later in 2008 there were only 35,000 US troops in Afghanistan, compared to five times that number in Iraq. The Pakistani military’s insecurity about American intentions and the growing power of the NA, India, and Iran led to its fateful decision to rearm the Taliban. It believed that the Taliban would provide a form of protection for the Pakistani military against its enemies. Instead the revamped Afghan Taliban helped create the Pakistani Taliban and the worst blowback of terrorism in Pakistan’s history. It is the Taliban’s terrorism within Pakistan rather than US pressure that altered the military’s position from backing the Afghan Taliban to its now seeking a peaceful Afghanistan. Gall’s account of the rise of the Taliban is also open to question. She writes that three commanders in Kandahar and Kabul—two of them drug smugglers and one of them a landlord—initiated the Taliban movement. Between 1994 and 1998, in Kandahar and Kabul, I interviewed nearly all the students who were the founding members of the Taliban and the three men she names were never mentioned, except as intermittent financiers. The founders of the Taliban were pious, conservative, simple young villagers who had fought the Soviets as foot soldiers and were now deeply disillusioned with their former leaders for fighting a civil war. They came together to rid Kandahar of criminal gangs. They then traveled around the country asking warlords to help end the civil war and bring peace. When that failed they decided to launch their own movement. Contrary to Gall’s account that they wanted power over Afghanistan from the first, the Taliban founders initially had only three aims—to end the civil war, disarm the population, and introduce an Islamic system. Until they reached the gates of Kabul in late 1995, they had no intentions of ruling the country. Instead they were demanding a Loya Jirga, or meeting of tribal elders, to decide who should rule. Some, like Mullah Borjan, were actually royalists who wanted to call back the former King Zahir Shah from exile. Gall says Borjan was killed at the behest of the ISI in 1996, although it is widely accepted that he died a year earlier in the first attack on Kabul. All the founding members of the Taliban I interviewed gave a different account from Gall’s of the rise of their leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. They all had equal status, the requisite piety, and a strong record of fighting the Soviets. There was no natural commander among them. After much debate they picked Omar as the first among equals, the most pious and apparently the most humble. His status rose only after he insisted that his colleagues swear an oath of allegiance to him. He continues to be powerful. Too much of Gall’s information and analysis on the history of the Taliban seems to reflect the views of the Afghan intelligence service, whose own interpretation is flawed and one-sided. Today, with Pakistan torn apart by unprecedented violence and the situation in Afghanistan still precarious, the Pakistani military has strong reasons to change its past policies of sponsoring wars fought by nonstate organizations. Some changes are happening, but only at a glacial pace. Serious reform needs to start at the lowest level of the military, at the schools and colleges from which the army is drawn, where drastic curriculum changes are needed. The ISI needs to be brought under a code of conduct and accountability, particularly with respect to its dealings with violent organizations. Its personnel should be trained in political realism rather than in ideological prejudices. Unless changes in the army can be made more quickly, there is still the danger that this nuclear power could slip into chaos. </p> 18567698 2014-05-31 23:36:37 2014-05-31 23:36:37 open open new-york-review-of-books-pakistan-worse-than-we-knew-ahmed-rashid-june-5-2014-issue-the-wrong-enemy-america-in-afghanistan-2001-2014-by-carlotta--18567698 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Khety II (nomarch) http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/31/khety-ii-nomarch-18567671/ Sat, 31 May 2014 23:09:53 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Khety II (nomarch) [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Khety II Nomarch of the 13th nomos of Upper Egypt Predecessor Tefibi Dynasty 10th dynasty Pharaoh Merykare Father Tefibi Burial Asyut Khety II was an ancient Egyptian nomarch of the 13th nomos of Upper Egypt ("the Upper Sycamore") during the reign of pharaoh Merykare of the 10th dynasty (c. 21st century BCE, during the First Intermediate Period).[1] Biography He was one of the last of a long line of nomarchs in Asyut with strong bonds of loyalty and friendship towards the herakleopolite dynasty: his father was the nomarch Tefibi, himself son of the nomarch Khety I, and a herakleopolite pharaoh had joined the mourning for the latter's grandfather (i.e. Khety II's great-great-grandfather). After Tefibi's death, Khety II was installed as a nomarch by king Merykare himself, who sailed up the Nile with his court on a fleet. It is known that Khety II undertook some restoration works in the local temple of Wepwawet.[1] He was loyal to the 10th dynasty until the end, and probably died shortly before the fall of Asyut by the Theban pharaoh Mentuhotep II of the 11th dynasty, which preceded the final capitulation of Herakleopolis and thus the end of the civil war. Under the reign of Mentuhotep II, the old line of nomarchs represented by Khety II and his ancestors was replaced by a new, pro-Theban one.[1] His unfinished tomb at Asyut has been excavated several times since the late 19th century, most recently in 2003-2006.[2] References Hayes, op. cit., pp. 467–470. El Khadragu, Mahmoud, "New Discoveries in the Tomb of Khety II at Asyut", Bulletin of the Australian Centre for Egyptology 17, 2006. Bibliography William C. Hayes, in The Cambridge Ancient History, vol 1, part 2, 1971 (2008), Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-077915.</p> 18567671 2014-05-31 23:09:53 2014-05-31 23:09:53 open open khety-ii-nomarch-18567671 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan Was Flight MH370 Taken Out by a US Drone? http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/29/was-flight-mh370-taken-out-by-a-us-drone-18556904/ Thu, 29 May 2014 01:20:14 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Flight MH370: mystery cargo continues to raise questions www.theweek.co.uk http://www.nnrusa.com/ LAST UPDATED AT 13:12 ON Fri 23 May 2014 Flight MH370 conspiracy theories: what happened to the missing plane? The mystery of flight MH370: 7 other planes that vanished Questions continue to circle around a mystery shipment that was on board Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 when it disappeared more than two months ago. NNR Global Logistics, a Penang-based company that handled some of the cargo, has refused to reveal its contents. The company admitted that 200kg of lithium-ion batteries formed part of the shipment. But a senior official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Engineering and Technology (E&T) Magazine this formed only part of the consignment, which weighed a total 2,453kg. He said that NNR Global has been told by its solicitors not to disclose details of the cargo because of the ongoing investigations into the missing aircraft. E&T says that "what is even more surprising" is that the company that produced the batteries has also not been named. Neither NNR Global Logistics nor Malaysia Airlines have been willing to identify the manufacturer, saying that it was "highly confidential". When questioned, the airline said that the remaining weight was "radio accessories and charges" but this was not documented in the cargo manifest. The manifest stated only that NNR shipped 133 pieces of one item, weighing a total of 1990kg, and 67 pieces of another item, weighing a total of 463kg. There were also strict instructions on the manifest that the batteries should be handled with care and that there was a flammability hazard. However, several experts have ruled out the theory that the plane might have caught fire, as it would have struggled to fly on for several hours afterwards. According to Malaysian newspaper The Star, NNR Global's base is less than 100m from Penang International Airport. "The complex is guarded by the police and only those with passes are allowed entry," said the newspaper. The underwater hunt for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane has resumed and will complete a search in a targeted area of the Indian Ocean before handing over to private contractors within the next week. Flight MH370: book claims missing plane was shot down 20 May A new book claims that the missing Malaysian Airways flight MH370 may have been shot down accidentally by US-Thai joint strike fighters in a military exercise that went wrong in the South China Sea. The book also claims that search and rescue efforts were deliberately sent in the wrong direction as part of a cover-up, the Daily Mail reports. Flight MH370 – The Mystery, by British writer Nigel Cawthorne, bases its theory on the account of a New Zealand oil rig worker Mike McKay who says he saw a jet liner "burst into fire" on the evening the flight went missing. McKay said that he saw something "burning at high altitude" over the oil rig on which he works, the Songa Mercur located off Vung Tau, on the south east coast of Vietnam. Cawthorne suggests that such evidence indicates that there may have been a cover-up over the disappearance of the MH370. In the book's introduction, Cawthorne says that relatives of the plane's passengers will "almost certainly" never know the fate of those who went missing. The family of Rod Burrows, an Australian man who was aboard the flight, criticised the timing of the book's release, 71 days after the jet went missing. Irene Burrows, his mother, told the Melbourne Herald Sun that the publication of the book was premature. "Nobody knows what happened so why would anyone want to put out a book at this stage?" she said. "There's absolutely no answers. It's devastating for the families. It's ten weeks tomorrow and there's nothing," she said. In a blog post, Malaysia's former prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, wrote that he believes the US Central Intelligence Agency must know something about the plane's fate. "Airplanes don't just disappear," he wrote on his blog. "Certainly not these days with all the powerful communication systems, radio and satellite tracking and filmless cameras which operate almost indefinitely and possess huge storage capacities. "For some reason, the media will not print anything that involves Boeing or the CIA." In an effort to counter the increasing swirl of rumours, Malaysia said today that it would release data from the British satellite company Inmarsat which had been used to define the search area for the missing plane. "In moving forward it is imperative for us to provide helpful information to the next of kin and general public, which will include the data communication logs as well as relevant explanation to enable the reader to understand the data provided," the Malaysian government said in a statement. Relatives of those on board Flight MH370, who have been critical of Malaysia's response, have previously claimed that Inmarsat's data did not "support a definitive conclusion that no other flight path was possible," The Guardian reported. Read more: http://www.theweek.co.uk/world-news/flight-mh370/57641/flight-mh370-mystery-cargo-continues-to-raise-questions#ixzz32zWJh0jv Posted by: Louis Sheehan </p> 18556904 2014-05-29 01:20:14 2014-05-29 01:20:14 open open was-flight-mh370-taken-out-by-a-us-drone-18556904 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan EU Parliamentary election polls show England's far-right UKIP party and Le Pen's party in France leading in their respective countries; in Greece, the far-left sees gains. http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/27/eu-parliamentary-election-polls-show-england-s-far-right-ukip-party-and-le-pen-s-party-in-france-leading-in-their-respective-countries-in-greece--18549215/ Tue, 27 May 2014 03:57:58 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] The rise of far-right wing parties in Europe By REUTERS 05/26/2014 03:21 BRUSSELS - Eurosceptic nationalists scored stunning victories in European Parliament elections in France and Britain on Sunday as critics of the European Union more than doubled their seats in a continent-wide protest vote against austerity and unemployment. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls called the breakthrough by Marine Le Pen's anti-immigration, anti-euro National Front in one of the EU's founding nations a political "earthquake". Anti-establishment parties of the far right and hard left, their scores amplified by low turnout, made gains in many countries although in Germany, the EU's biggest member state with the largest number of seats, and Italy, the pro-European centre ground held firm. In a vote that raised more doubts about Britain's long-term future in the EU, Nigel Farage's UK Independence Party, which advocates immediate withdrawal, led the opposition Labour party and Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservatives comfortably with almost half the results declared. A jubilant Le Pen, whose party beat President Francois Hollande's ruling Socialists into third place, told supporters: "The people have spoken loud and clear ... they no longer want to be led by those outside our borders, by EU commissioners and technocrats who are unelected. "They want to be protected from globalisation and take back the reins of their destiny." With 80 percent of votes counted, the National Front had won 26 percent of the vote, comfortably ahead of the conservative opposition UMP on 20.6 percent, with the Socialists on 13.8, their second heavy defeat in two months after losing dozens of town halls in March. First official results from around the 28-nation bloc showed the pro-European centre-left and centre-right parties will keep control of the 751-seat EU legislature, but the number of Eurosceptic members will more than double. The centre-right European People's Party, led by former Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, was set to win 212 seats, preliminary results issued by the parliament showed. "As the EPP has a strong lead ... I am ready to accept the mandate of the European Commission president," Juncker told reporters in parliament. "We will have a clear pro-European majority in this house." The centre-left Socialists led by outgoing European Parliament President Martin Schulz of Germany were in second place with 186 seats followed by the centrist liberals on 70 and the Greens on 55. Eurosceptic groups were expected to win about 141 seats, according to a Reuters estimate, the far left 43 and conservatives 44. A glum looking Schulz would not concede defeat, telling reporters he would negotiate with other parties. "It is a bad day for the European Union when a party with such a racist, xenophobic and anti-Semite programme gets 24-25 percent of the vote in France," he said. "But these voters aren't extremists, they have lost trust, they have lost hope." UKIP MAKE BIG GAINS The political fallout may be felt more strongly in national politics than at EU level, pulling mainstream conservative parties further to the right and raising pressure to crack down on immigration. In Britain, where voting took place last Thursday, UKIP had 29 percent half way through the count, with Labour and the Conservatives neck-and-neck for second place with just under 24 percent each. That will pile pressure on Cameron, who has promised Britons an in/out referendum on EU membership in 2017 if he is re-elected next year, to take an even tougher line in Europe. His pro-European Liberal Democrat coalition partners were set to lose nearly all their seats. "The whole European project has been a lie," Farage said on a television link-up with Brussels. "I don't just want Britain to leave the European Union, I want Europe to leave the European Union." In Italy, pro-European Prime Minister Matteo Renzi's centre-left Democratic Party was on course for a triumph, building a strong lead over the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement of former comic Beppe Grillo, early projections showed. The anti-immigration far right People's Party topped the poll in Denmark and the extreme-right Jobbik, widely accused of racism and anti-Semitism, finished second in Hungary. In the Netherlands, the anti-Islam, Eurosceptic Dutch Freedom Party of Geert Wilders' - which plans an alliance with Le Pen - finished joint second in terms of seats behind a pro-European centrist opposition party. Although 388 million Europeans were eligible to vote, fewer than half cast ballots. The turnout was officially 43.1 percent, barely higher than the 2009 nadir of 43 percent, despite efforts to personalise the election with the main political families putting forward a leading candidate or "Spitzenkandidat". In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats secured 35.3 percent of the vote, down from a 23-year-high of 41.5 percent in last year's federal election but still a clear victory. The centre-left Social Democrats, her coalition partners, took 27.3 percent. The anti-euro Alternative for Germany won seats for the first time with 7 percent, the best result so far for a conservative party created only last year to oppose bailouts and call for weaker southern members to be ejected from the single currency area. GREEK FAR LEFT GAINS In Greece, epicentre of the euro zone's debt crisis, the radical left anti-austerity Syriza movement of Alexis Tsipras won the vote but failed to deliver a knockout blow to Prime Minister Antonis Samaras' government. An official projection gave Syriza 26.7 percent, ahead of Samaras' conservative New Democracy on 22.8 percent, reflecting popular anger at harsh spending cuts adopted in recent years to meet the terms of Athens' EU/IMF bailout programme. "Europeans are celebrating the defeat of the bailout and austerity in the country the European leadership turned into the guinea pig of the crisis," Tsipras said. The two parties in the coalition, New Democracy and PASOK, won a combined vote larger than that of Syriza, and political analyst Theodore Couloumbis said the government's survival was not at stake despite its narrow two-seat majority. Sunday was the fourth and final day of voting in elections to the European Parliament, which is an equal co-legislator with member states on most EU laws. Far-right and radical left groups will have roughly a quarter of the seats, enough to gain a much louder voice but probably not to block EU legislation. Officials said final results and seat allotments would likely not be finalised until later on Monday. The record low turnout was in Slovakia, with just 13 percent. The highest was 90 percent in Belgium, where voting is compulsory and there was a general election on the same day. Sweden appeared to have elected the only feminist party member of the EU assembly. Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 18549215 2014-05-27 03:57:58 2014-05-27 03:57:58 open open eu-parliamentary-election-polls-show-england-s-far-right-ukip-party-and-le-pen-s-party-in-france-leading-in-their-respective-countries-in-greece--18549215 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan David Lloyd George http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/23/david-lloyd-george-18527613/ Fri, 23 May 2014 23:23:03 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Lou Sheehan ] David Lloyd George, 1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor, OM PC (17 January 1863 – 26 March 1945) was a British Liberal politician and statesman. As Chancellor of the Exchequer (1908–1915), Lloyd George was a key figure in the introduction of many reforms which laid the foundations of the modern welfare state. His most important role came as the highly energetic Prime Minister of the Wartime Coalition Government (1916–22), during and immediately after the First World War. He was a major player at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 that reordered Europe after the defeat of Germany in the Great War. He arguably made a greater impact on British public life than any other 20th-century leader, thanks to his pre-war introduction of Britain's social welfare system, his leadership in winning the war, his post-war role in reshaping Europe and his partitioning Ireland (between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland which remained part of the UK). He was the last Liberal to serve as Prime Minister. Parliamentary support for the coalition premiership was mostly from Conservatives rather than his own Liberals. The Liberal split led to the permanent decline of that party as a serious political force. Although he became leader of the Liberal Party in the late 1920s, he was unable to regain power, and by the 1930s he was a marginalised and widely mistrusted figure. In the Second World War he was known for defeatism. Although many barristers have been Prime Minister, Lloyd George is to date the only solicitor to have held that office. He is also so far the only British Prime Minister to have been Welsh and to have spoken English as a second language.[4] He was voted the third greatest British prime minister of the 20th century in a poll of 139 academics organised by MORI, and in 2002 he was named among the 100 Greatest Britons following a UK-wide vote. Posted but not written by: Louis Sheehan</p> 18527613 2014-05-23 23:23:03 2014-05-23 23:23:03 open open david-lloyd-george-18527613 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan WATCH: New robotic system seeks to meet threats posed by landmines, explosives. Jerusalem Post. http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/18/watch-new-robotic-system-seeks-to-meet-threats-posed-by-landmines-explosives-jerusalem-post-18475450/ Sun, 18 May 2014 07:27:06 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Lou Sheehan ] By JPOST.COM STAFF LAST UPDATED: 05/14/2014 inShare New unmanned system could be applied to Israel's border patrol duties and forward combat engineering missions. Israel Aerospace Industries revealed on Tuesday the new Sahar robotic system intended to meet threats posed by explosives and mines. The project was developed jointly with Kinetic North America and Watairpoll LTD. The system prototype is being presented this week at the AUVSI exhibition in Orlando, Florida. Sahar is a completely autonomous system with the ability to tackle various operational activities such as detecting land mines, dealing with improvised explosive devices and various other threats, then removing them. A statement by IAI expressed that these and other similar tasks are currently undertaken by ground personnel or remote-controlled robots which require a great deal of skill and time from their handlers while the proximity necessary to deal with such threats poses a great danger to human personnel. The Sahar system was developed to overcome these challenges. IAI hopes to apply the new technology to Israel's border patrol missions and combat engineering's reconnaissance missions. Posted but not written by: Louis Sheehan</p> 18475450 2014-05-18 07:27:06 2014-05-18 07:27:06 open open watch-new-robotic-system-seeks-to-meet-threats-posed-by-landmines-explosives-jerusalem-post-18475450 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Did We Just Get One Step Closer To Finding The Zodiac Killer? Author’s New Book Points Finger at His Dad • By Justine Hofherr http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/17/did-we-just-get-one-step-closer-to-finding-the-zodiac-killer-author-s-new-book-points-finger-at-his-dad-by-justine-hofherr-18464759/ Sat, 17 May 2014 01:44:08 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Did We Just Get One Step Closer To Finding The Zodiac Killer? Author’s New Book Points Finger at His Dad • By Justine Hofherr • Boston.com Staff • May 14, 2014 3:44 PM Will a new book cause the case for the Zodiac killer to be reopened...or even solved? Maybe. Louisiana author Gary L. Stewart claims that the Zodiac killer, infamous for sending taunting letters and cryptograms to the Bay Area press, was his father, late rare book dealer Earl Van Best Jr. The serial Zodiac killer operated in northern California in the late 1960s and early 70s. In letters, he claimed to have killed 37 people, but only five have been confirmed as his victims. Though he was never identified, the horrifying story has fascinated people for decades. In 2007, the film “Zodiac,” based on the murders and starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey Jr., was released and grossed an estimated $65 million at the box office. Stewart, an electrical engineer, was abandoned by his birth parents early in life. According to The Washington Post: Adopted as an infant by a loving family, Stewart never knew the identity of his birth parents until his birth mother ? Judith Gilford ? reached out to him in 2002. He soon learned that she was 14 when she ran away from home with a 27-year-old rare book dealer named Earl Van Best Jr., later giving birth to his child in New Orleans in February 1963 when the two were on the run from the authorities searching for Gilford, a minor. Against the wishes of Gary?s frightened, confused teenage mom, Best abandoned their month-old son in a Baton Rouge apartment building. Armed with this new information, Stewart embarked on a mission to better understand his father. He sifted through government records, news reports, and tracked down numerous friends and relatives of his birth parents. As Stewart learned more about his father, he eventually became convinced that Earl Van Best Jr. was, in fact, the Zodiac killer. Stewart then teamed up with journalist Susan Mustafa to document his decade-long hunt for the truth about his father’s identity. His book describes Van Best as a “troubled boy with disturbing fixations,” “a frustrated intellectual with high culture pretensions,” and “a jilted lover” with an inability to quell his rage. HarperCollins told New York Magazine that Van Best, who had a criminal record in San Francisco involving forgeries and bad checks, had a mugshot that bore an uncanny resemblance to the police sketches of the Zodiac killer. The book, “The Most Dangerous Animal Of All,” hit bookstores in the U.S. on May 13. If you can’t get your hands on a copy, you can always rent the movie. You can reach me at justine.hofherr@globe.com. Follow me @Jhofherr29 Reposted by: Louis Sheehan </p> 18464759 2014-05-17 01:44:08 2014-05-17 01:44:08 open open did-we-just-get-one-step-closer-to-finding-the-zodiac-killer-author-s-new-book-points-finger-at-his-dad-by-justine-hofherr-18464759 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Reckless in Kiev: Neocons, Putin and Ukraine Al Jazeera Marwan Bishara http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/13/reckless-in-kiev-neocons-putin-and-ukraine-al-jazeera-marwan-bishara-18432047/ Tue, 13 May 2014 04:48:14 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Reckless in Kiev: Neocons, Putin and Ukraine Why Obama and Putin must desist from reckless military interventions in other countries' affairs. Last updated: 10 Mar 2014 15:55 Marwan Bishara Marwan Bishara is the senior political analyst at Al Jazeera. RSSBooks Moscow has largely failed to contain Western Ukrainian tendencies despite its sticks and carrots, writes Bishara [EPA] Like most of the people speaking about Ukraine,I am no expert. But I know one or two things about the history of the Cold War to recognise a polarising cliche when I hear one, or a demonising characterisation that leads to further escalation of a dangerous situation. Already, the ripples from Ukraine are having long terms strategic ramifications regardless whether a diplomatic solution is reached soon. Alas, much of that depends not on Ukrainians but rather on Moscow and Washington - my very focus here and in the next episode of EMPIRE . Both have cynically pulled and shoved this country in the name of freedom and security, euphemisms for imperial interests, and pretexts for intervention. Russian President Vladimir Putin has made bold moves and a few conciliatory statements since the crisis deteriorated, with lots of improvisation in between, in an attempt to achieve the twin goals of preserving Russia's interest in Ukraine and stemming the tide of Western expansion in Ukraine and former republics of the Soviet Union. And in the process reconstitute Moscow's area of influence His abrupt and repressive ways are questionable; indeed reprehensible. Counting the Cost - The price of military intervention How Washington reacts depends largely on its original motivations and goals for getting so deeply involved, and on whether the White House was privy to what US diplomats, notably Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and US ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt,, were cooking in Kiev. In other words, what did Obama know and when did he know it? Putin: Ukraine as a redline After so many east European nations and former republics of the Soviet Union deserted Moscow in favour of the West, Putin has made it clear over the last decade that Ukraine, like Georgia, is a Russian redline. And like all imposed lines, it's red on one side, green on the other, in this case, allowing Moscow to intervene while denying Washington the same power or privilege. This is of course a familiar notion in global power politics. (In Palestine, the green line is red to the Palestinians, green to Israelis.) But geopolitical familiarity shouldn't be confused with international legality. Ukraine, a country of 45 million, has been a major Russian economic and strategic partner, and is the last major buffer zone separating it from NATO. So it comes as no surprise that Moscow, the powerful former patron, subordinates Ukraine's sovereignty to its own national and strategic interests, two decades after it gained independence. Post-Cold War agreements, that granted Ukraine its independence and disarmed it of its nuclear weapons, allow Russia to maintain as many as 25,000 Russian troops in the Crimea region, the region with a Russian majority witnessing much of today's tension. Headed by a former KGB agent, Russia is most likely to be clandestinely and deeply involved in the internal affairs of its neighbour. Or as the Europeans have come to realise, Westerners come and go but Russian secret services have been at home in Ukraine. Headed by a former KGB agent, Russia is most likely to be clandestinely and deeply involved in the internal affairs of its neighbour. Or as the Europeans have come to realise, Westerners come and go but Russian secret services have been at home in Ukraine. Nonetheless, Moscow has largely failed to coopt or contain Western Ukrainian tendencies, despite its sticks and carrots including Putin's December offer of $15 bn in loans and discounted gas prices. Putin, who remained rather cool in response to Western meddling in Ukrainian affairs, has finally fired back rather aggressively after the removal and flight of President Viktor Yanukovich - referring to it as coup d'etat. Nuland: 'Yats is the guy' Victoria Nuland is the gal who made headlines after her infamous "F*** the EU" remark during a phone conversation with US ambassador to Ukraine Geofrey Pyatt. The exchange that appears to have been monitored and leaked by Russian intelligence - was posted on youtube under the Russian title - "Maidan Puppets". Although Nuland's profanity got all the attention, her arrogance during the conversation was far more telling and dangerous. Like an imperial commissaire from a past era, she assigned roles in the future government, and made it clear who would and who wouldn't join, dismissing Vitali Klitchko and anointing Arseniy Yasenyuk - who did become the present prime minister, all the while casually referring to them as "Klitsch" and "Yats". She insisted, "Yats is the guy" to lead. The same Yats who’s in Washington this week to discuss the future of Ukraine. If this sounds like a brazen old-fashion interference in another country's affairs, well, it is. It's also rash and counterproductive. When the foreign diplomats in question join demonstrations and give out cookies to protesters, as Nuland and others did, they're in effect saying; to hell with Russia. Judging by her record, Nuland is happy to provoke a crisis leading to a break up with Russia. But - at least - she and the State department, and yes, the CIA should have known that Russia wouldn't allow it. Or did they know it? Enter a major crisis that could escalate into a military confrontation. It's "deja vu all over again" - with the neocons providing the pretext to America's military interventionists to make the case for muscular intervention or even war, such as Nuland's former boss, Dick Cheney, the godfather of the 2003 war on Iraq. Cheney was quick to point out that Obama's weakness prompted Putin to act and that military rather than diplomatic moves are need to deter Putin. Cheney recommended at least three immediate military steps: Deploying missile systems in Poland, preparing for NATO military exercises close to the Russian borders, and arming and training Ukrainian forces. It's the closest thing to what American Russia expert Stephen Cohen called: "Two steps from a Cuban Missile Crisis and three steps from war with Russia for the first time." If it walks like a
A woman for all seasons when it comes to Washington politics, Nuland was at home in the Clinton and Bush administration as she is today at the Obama administration. She served as assistant Vice President Dick Cheney, ambassador to NATO, and an Obama State Department spokesperson before taking on her current position in September 2013. But there should be no mistaking her ideological leaning. Not only because she's the spouse of leading neoconservative, Robert Kagan. Or, that she's the sister-in-law of another prominent Neocon, Fredrick Kagan and wife Kimberly, both think-tank type military historians. Russia declares support for Crimea breakaway They all belong to a Washington clique of neoconservatives that continue to affect foreign policy who, like most of the other collaborators in the movement, haven't served in the military and are referred to by their detractors as "chicken-hawks". "F*** the EU" is the new improvised version of Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and the neocons' hostility towards "Old Europe". In his 2003 book, "Of Paradise and Power", Robert Kagan highlighted the difference and division between the US and Europe - Americans from Mars, Europeans from Venus. The Kagans reckon Europe should be marginalized because it's too soft, overly diplomatic. A charge the Europeans reject. Especially when it's the Polish, America's close friends in Europe, who have spearheaded EU diplomacy in Kiev before and after the crisis broke out in Ukraine. Another example of neocon-leaning activist, who has been playing an important role in Ukraine and paving the way for the anti Russian movement, is Carl Gersham, the head of the National Endowment for Democracy, NED.He served as head of the CIA associated Radio Free Europe at the height of the Cold War. Paradoxically, he's been at the helm of this democracy promoting organisation 30 years or longer than most of the world's autocracies. If you look up Ukraine at NED's website, you'll see the almost 70 programmes listed in 2012 that are financed by the organisation. That's not to say that Ukrainians have been merely instigated or that those who receive funds are suspect. Certainly not. They do have legitimate reasons to protest against corrupt leaders and in favor or better standard of living. But from Putin’s perspective, Gresham's activities constitute meddling in Ukraine’s affairs, plain and simple. For the record, I don't fault the neoconservatives for their idealism or declared position on the promotion of human rights, freedom and democracy. I am personally a staunch supporter of these principles in international relations. What I do question is their double standard - for example on Israel/Palestine - and methods - all too eager to use military force. The neocons are pretty messianic in the way they see the battle for universal freedom as integral to American power and the fulfillment of its destiny. Fortunately, President Obama has refrained from escalating militarily, preferring instead to remain diplomatically engaged. Unfortunately, however, the damage is already done. And it's doubtful the Russian Western relationship could get back on track any time soon. That's why Presidents Obama and Putin need to make it clear they regret their diplomats' political intrusion in Ukraine, and reject reckless foreign military interventions in other countries' affairs. And they must avoid war at any cost. A redline for both sides. Marwan Bishara is the senior political analyst at Al Jazeera. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy. Source: Al Jazeera Posted by: Louis Sheehan </p> 18432047 2014-05-13 04:48:14 2014-05-13 04:48:14 open open reckless-in-kiev-neocons-putin-and-ukraine-al-jazeera-marwan-bishara-18432047 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan Monica should apologize to Hillary May 11, 2014, 1:23 pm Read more: Monica should apologize to Hillary | Shmuley Boteach | Ops & Blogs | The Times of Israel http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/monica-should-apologize-to-hilary Shmuley Boteach http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/12/monica-should-apologize-to-hillary-may-11-2014-1-23-pm-read-more-monica-should-apologize-to-hillary-shmuley-boteach-ops-blogs-the-times-of-israel-18430804/ Mon, 12 May 2014 20:11:01 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Monica Lewinsky is back in the news after a decade hiatus. She returned to tell us, as the headline of The New York Post put it, that ‘her life sucks.’ Because of her notoriety she can’t find a job. Because of her infamy she finds it difficult to sustain a relationship. There is nothing particularly newsworthy in any of this. Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign up! But then she added she feels that Hillary was doing a disservice to women when she appeared to blame her own “emotional neglect” of her husband for driving him to Monica. Lewinsky is scandalized that Hillary is blaming herself rather than her husband, the perpetrator. Let’s be clear. The only thing that should bring Monica Lewinsky back into the public eye is repentance and a public apology to Hillary. It’s utterly crude to come back just to cause the woman more pain. I don’t care if people love Hillary Clinton as a public personality or hate her. This has nothing to do with the fact that in her husband’s affair she is the victim. Anyone who thinks otherwise has a broken moral compass. If our society is to retain any sense of values then it will declare the truth. Monica Lewinsky is a home wrecker. Pure and simple. She was an adult when she had an affair with a famously married man. This was deeply immoral and she owes the man’s wife an apology. What she further owes Hillary is just getting out of her face. She has to stop rubbing the offended party’s face in her own pain. Was Hillary responsible for Bill’s affair? Absolutely not. Not one bit. It was not her emotional neglect of her husband that led him to cheat. He always had the power to choose. There was nothing she did that removed from him his capacity for moral choice. If his wife was neglecting him emotionally then he could easily have gone to marriage counseling, talked to his wife about it, gotten a friend to talk to both of them about it, or, worst case scenario, seek a separation and divorce. All of these are moral choices. They may be painful, they may harm the family, but they are moral. But lying and cheating and deceiving is deeply immoral. And personal accountability dictates that we are responsible for the bad things we do and should never blame someone else. Do I believe for a moment that Hillary is right to blame herself for the affair, if that is indeed the truth? No. Absolutely not. But one thing I know for sure. The last person in the world who should be telling her this is Monica Lewinsky. It’s not for the woman who had the affair with her husband to stick her nose in it again. It’s for her to apologize and then stay clear of the couple. I have written an entire book on infidelity called Kosher Adultery. To write the book I interviewed countless couples where a partner was unfaithful. Discovering your spouse has lied to you and compromised the intimacy of the marriage is one of the most painful things in life you will ever discover. Those who are immoral enough to have relationships with married people deserve the same condemnation as the cheating partner themselves. And both need to repent. There are few things in life more cruel, heartless, and selfish than having an affair with a married man or woman. The harm it does to a family is incalculable. The pain it causes the victimized spouse is forever. When Moses encounters God for the very time he does so by seeing a manifestation of the divine in a burning bush. God orders him to remove his shoes, lest he tread on holy ground and desecrate it. Marriage is holy, marriage is special. It is that same holy ground. Outsiders dare not trample on it. The Clintons are fair game politically. If someone wants to dismiss them as political opportunists, that’s their prerogative. If you want to vote for their opponents, go ahead. If you want to assail their policies and positions, well, that’s what democracy is all about. But for those who want to delve deeply into their marriage – analyze it, hurt it, dissect it, make assumptions about it, intrude upon it –I’m sorry. That’s not their place. It’s wrong and it’s a violation. As a society we either believe in marriage or we don’t. It’s time for us to choose. Posted </p> 18430804 2014-05-12 20:11:01 2014-05-12 20:11:01 open open monica-should-apologize-to-hillary-may-11-2014-1-23-pm-read-more-monica-should-apologize-to-hillary-shmuley-boteach-ops-blogs-the-times-of-israel-18430804 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Ex-Mossad chief calls Newsweek spy story ‘delusional’ http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/12/ex-mossad-chief-calls-newsweek-spy-story-delusional-18427875/ Mon, 12 May 2014 07:00:15 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Danny Yatom says Israel has more advanced methods than crawling through hotel air vents to snoop on vice presidents By Spencer Ho and Times of Israel staff Posted by: Louis Sheehan A former head of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, on Sunday brushed off as “delusional” a Newsweek article alleging an Israeli spy hid in the vents of a Jerusalem hotel during a visit by then-US vice president Al Gore 16 years ago. Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign up! “We did not spy on [Gore] or any other American targets in Israel or abroad,” Danny Yatom, who was chief of the Mossad at the time, said in an interview on Army Radio. “I think that there are much more advanced methods that everybody who’s seen movies and read books on the subject knows to say to himself that these methods of agents crawling through the ventilation ducts to get to the room of the vice president of the United States — these descriptions are delusional.” According to a former senior US intelligence agent who spoke to Newsweek, when Al Gore was vice president, a surprise guest was hiding in an air duct in his hotel room during a trip to Israel 16 years ago — an alleged Israeli spy. The source detailed how after US Secret Service agents swept the room, clearing it, one of the men stayed behind to use the bathroom before Gore was to arrive, when he heard a sound. “So the room was all quiet, he was just meditating on his toes, and he hears a noise in the vent. And he sees the vent clips being moved from the inside. And then he sees a guy starting to exit the vent into the room,” the former operative told Newsweek, adding that the Secret Service agent did not scramble for his gun. “He kind of coughed and the guy went back into the vents.” Former US vice president Al Gore (Photo credit: CC BY 2.0, Erik Charlton from Menlo Park, USA/Wikimedia) Former US vice president Al Gore (Photo credit: CC BY 2.0, Erik Charlton from Menlo Park, USA/Wikimedia) On Thursday, Newsweek published a report quoting unnamed former US intelligence officials, alleging that Israel’s aggressive spying activities in the United States have been routinely hushed up because of the country’s powerful connections in Congress. Israel has emphatically denied the claims. Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz said Saturday that an impression was forming in Israel that “someone” was trying to harm the “excellent” intelligence cooperation between Israel and the United States. The Newsweek article came two days after a story published in the magazine cited US intelligence officials and congressional staffers who have been privy to information on Israeli spying activities, calling the extent of it “shocking,” “sobering” and far exceeding similar activities by any other close US allies. The issue of spying has come to the forefront in recent months as the possible release of Jonathan Pollard, a jailed American-Israeli spy, was brought up in connection with Israel-Palestinian peace talks. Pollard, a US-born navy intelligence analyst, is serving a life sentence in a North Carolina prison for spying for Israel. He was captured in 1985. The issue of Israel’s spying also became an issue in its bid to join the US visa waiver program. Reports have indicated that Israel’s covert activities were holding it back from achieving its goal of joining the program, which would allow Israeli citizens to travel to the US with much greater ease. A former aide told Newsweek that even if Israel takes the required steps to enter the program, there are reservations within the American security establishment about letting them in. “They’re incredibly aggressive. They’re aggressive in all aspects of their relationship with the United States,“ the aide said. “If we give them free rein to send people over here, how are we going to stop that? Read more: Ex-Mossad chief calls Newsweek spy story 'delusional' | The Times of Israel http://www.timesofisrael.com/ex-mossad-chief-calls-newsweek-spy-story-delusional/#ixzz31Twzt7N0 Follow us: @timesofisrael on Twitter | timesofisrael on Facebook </p> 18427875 2014-05-12 07:00:15 2014-05-12 07:00:15 open open ex-mossad-chief-calls-newsweek-spy-story-delusional-18427875 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan 5,000 years later, the wheel gets an Israeli update Read more: 5,000 years later, the wheel gets an Israeli update | The Times of Israel http://www.timesofisrael.com/5000-years-later-the-wheel-gets-an-israeli-update/#ixzz31S3QkrXj Follow us: @timesofisra http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/11/5-000-years-later-the-wheel-gets-an-israeli-update-read-more-5-000-years-later-the-wheel-gets-an-israeli-update-the-times-of-israel-http-www-time-18426266/ Sun, 11 May 2014 23:11:17 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>With a flexible shock absorption system built into the wheel itself, SoftWheel boosts stability without sacrificing speed — in wheelchairs, bikes, cars, even planes By David Shamah May 11, 2014, 4:24 pm Posted by: Louis Sheehan Read more: 5,000 years later, the wheel gets an Israeli update | The Times of Israel http://www.timesofisrael.com/5000-years-later-the-wheel-gets-an-israeli-update/#ixzz31S3X2lbX Follow us: @timesofisrael on Twitter | timesofisrael on Facebook SoftWheel, an Israeli company, is giving a high-tech update to the wheel, the ancient engine of civilization that enabled humans to explore their world. Its new technology, focused around a flexible shock absorption system built into the wheel itself, allows for better stability when needed without sacrificing speed. “With all due modesty, I say that what we have created is a game changer,” said Daniel Barel, CEO of SoftWheel. “Our wheel technology can be developed for and retrofitted to any vehicle,” notably including bikes, cars and jet planes. Read more: 5,000 years later, the wheel gets an Israeli update | The Times of Israel http://www.timesofisrael.com/5000-years-later-the-wheel-gets-an-israeli-update/#ixzz31S3IrWCl Follow us: @timesofisrael on Twitter | timesofisrael on Facebook Its new technology, focused around a flexible shock absorption system built into the wheel itself, allows for better stability when needed without sacrificing speed. “With all due modesty, I say that what we have created is a game changer,” said Daniel Barel, CEO of SoftWheel. “Our wheel technology can be developed for and retrofitted to any vehicle,” notably including bikes, cars and jet planes. The airline industry is already in touch with SoftWheel, and the company sees immense potential there. But planes and automobiles will have to wait a while, Barel said, as the Israeli firm is focused first on wheelchairs and bikes. “People in the airline industry heard about what we were doing, and asked us to develop landing gear incorporating our technology,” said Barel. “We weren’t sure it could be done at first, but, after doing some work on the project, we became convinced that it could be done, and could save airlines lots of money. We’re now developing the landing gear system, which will eliminate the need for the expensive hydraulics currently used to ensure that a plane lands properly. This technology has not been updated in sixty years.” Still, in planes and cars, “it takes years to make changes. They have to be approved and implemented, factories have to adopt new manufacturing techniques, and so on,” said Barel. Much better to start with the wheelchair and bicycle markets, which are easier to break into. “Most of the world’s wheelchairs are used in hospitals, but there is a large premium market for people who want to live active lives but are restricted to wheelchairs by their disabilities. These people want to be as mobile and self-reliant as possible, and our technology makes this possible,” said Barel. Barel sees bikers embracing the SoftWheel. “Our wheel will enable bikers to ride faster and more smoothly,” he said. “In standard wheels, about 30 percent of propulsion energy is reserved for suspension, even if that suspension isn’t necessary at a specific time. With our system, suspension can be turned on and off as needed, reserving more energy for speed.” Daniel Barel (Photo credit: Courtesy) Daniel Barel (Photo credit: Courtesy) The oldest wheels found are about 5,000 years old from Mesopotamia, and it’s on that basic technology that modern wheels roll. What Barel and a team of engineers from Ziv-Av, an Israeli engineering firm, are doing entails a reimagining of the wheel — with a system redesign that incorporates shock absorption that turns itself on when necessary. The system, called Symmetrical Selective In-Wheel Suspension, uses sensors and three compression spokes to hold the wheel in place. When it encounters an impact, the wheel’s hub shifts, with the shock absorption cushioning the impact. The threshold can be preset by the manufacturer or user. Once past the impact, the wheel returns to its previous rigid state, saving the energy normally reserved for impact absorption in standard wheels and enabling it to be used for propulsion instead. Generally, only very high-end wheelchairs have shock absorption built in, necessitating wheelchair-accessible entrances to buildings. “It’s difficult and painful to use a wheelchair to cross the street, with the chair’s rider feeling the strong impact of a chair going off the sidewalk and onto a curb,” said Barel. “With a SoftWheel-equipped chair, a wheelchair user can cross streets or go down steps without feeling the impact.” Bikes, both manual and electric, are another big market for SoftWheel, which employs six people and is located in the Haifa area . “With cities around the world implementing biking programs for commuter, there is a big market for more comfortable rides,” said Barel. “Our wheels can easily replace the standard ones used for bikes, and make bike commuting much more comfortable.” For wheelchairs and bicycles, adding SoftWheel suspension is all about increasing energy efficiency and making the ride much more comfortable. For the car and plane markets, the system will be able to save manufacturers a lot of money, Barel predicts. “The bigger the vehicle, the more suspension you need, and both cars and planes have elaborate suspension systems,” said Barel. “In order to make up for the energy expended on the suspension, engines have to be made to work harder, using more fuel and resources. With our sensor-based technology and the suspension system built into the wheels, you can save a lot of fuel.” Ditto for cars, said Barel, although implementing the SoftWheel system in planes and cars won’t happen overnight. “Plane designs have to be approved by the Federal Aviation Industry in the US, and implementing changes in the automobile industry takes time. But eventually, both industries are going to adopt our design. Until now you had to choose between comfort and efficiency in wheel design, and now, for the first time, you can have both.” If the SoftWheel catches on in the way Barel thinks it will, Israel will become a world center of wheel technology and production. “Nearly all the materials we use to produce our wheels are made in Israel, and we are currently building a large production facility in northern Israel to build SoftWheels,” said Barel. “This, like our product, is an innovation as well, because not too many industrial products are made in Israel. All around we are developing a new paradigm, one we believe the world will embrace.” Read more: 5,000 years later, the wheel gets an Israeli update | The Times of Israel http://www.timesofisrael.com/5000-years-later-the-wheel-gets-an-israeli-update/#ixzz31S3EMqYo Follow us: @timesofisrael on Twitter | timesofisrael on Facebook </p> 18426266 2014-05-11 23:11:17 2014-05-11 23:11:17 open open 5-000-years-later-the-wheel-gets-an-israeli-update-read-more-5-000-years-later-the-wheel-gets-an-israeli-update-the-times-of-israel-http-www-time-18426266 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan Sitting comfortably versus lying down: Is there really a difference in energy expenditure? J.L. Miles-Chanemail address , D. Sarafian , J.P. Montani , Y. Schutz , A.G. Dulloo http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/10/sitting-comfortably-versus-lying-down-is-there-really-a-difference-in-energy-expenditure-j-l-miles-chanemail-address-d-sarafian-j-p-montani-y-sch-18419315/ Sat, 10 May 2014 04:10:02 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Sitting comfortably versus lying down: Is there really a difference in energy expenditure? J.L. Miles-Chanemail address , D. Sarafian , J.P. Montani , Y. Schutz , A.G. Dullooemail address Received 27 September 2013; accepted 17 November 2013. published online 25 November 2013. Abstract Full Text PDF Images References Summary Background & aims Energy expenditure (EE) during sitting is widely assumed to be higher than that while lying down, but supporting evidence is equivocal. Despite this, resting EE in the sitting position is often used as a proxy for basal metabolic rate. Here we investigate whether EE differs in the comfortable seated position compared to supine (lying) position. Methods EE and respiratory quotient (RQ) were measured (by ventilated hood indirect calorimetry) in 19 healthy subjects (9 men, 10 women) after an overnight fast. Supine measurements were made using a comfortable clinical tilting table and sitting measurements made using an adjustable, ergonomic car seat adapted for the hood system. After about 30 min of rest in either position, metabolic monitoring was conducted until stabilization of EE for at least 15 min in each posture. Results EE in the sitting position was not significantly different compared to supine (</p> 18419315 2014-05-10 04:10:02 2014-05-10 04:10:02 open open sitting-comfortably-versus-lying-down-is-there-really-a-difference-in-energy-expenditure-j-l-miles-chanemail-address-d-sarafian-j-p-montani-y-sch-18419315 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan Deception: A Review and Critical Analysis of the book, Encounter In Rendlesham Forest By Peter Robbins, April - May 2014 http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/10/could-get-a-movie-deal-also-we-already-had-somebody-18419271/ Sat, 10 May 2014 03:54:46 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Deception: A Review and Critical Analysis of the book, Encounter In Rendlesham Forest By Peter Robbins, April - May 2014 Posted by: Louis Sheehan This paper is provided copyright free and the reader is welcome to post, print, distribute, copy or otherwise share it in total without prior written consent from either the author or original publisher. Requests for permission to use excerpts should be secured by contacting the author at probbinsny@yahoo.com . An earlier version of the review contained in this book appears in UFO Truth Magazine, issue number six. Table of Contents Introduction 2 The Review and Investigation 4 The Investigation Continues 46 Conclusions 58 “I am afraid there is little I can offer; the only official report we have is from Lt Col Charles Halt which you already have. As far as I am aware, this report was looked at when it was received, and it was subsequently concluded that the events described were of no defence significance. The Ministry of Defence re ceives many UFO reports each year, and while we believe that explanations could be found for most, we accept that some will remain unexplained. It would seem that the RAF Woodbridge sightings would fall into this category. ... Finally, I wish you the best of luck with your book.” Excerpt from a February 2 1993 letter sent to me from the Ministry of Defence in response to my letter of inquiry, signed N. Pope “True we can put a book out then go on a book tour its OK with Warren and company so that what we shou ld do. We will finish our research put it in a book so everybody can see it at once and then go around and talk about it. Everybody else does that why not us! Maybe we put the cart before the horse Jim! Travis (Walton), Warren, Robbins and (Robert) SALAS a ll wrote one why not us! Everybody loves there books while we’re at it lets see if we 2 could get a movie deal also. We already had somebody offer to write it for us today how hard was th could get a movie deal also. We already had somebody offer to write it for us today how hard was that. I think I hear my phone ringing gotta go!” John Burroughs, April 7, 2012 “We have never attacked another direct witness, nor will we. We have pointed out incorrect information, and corrected that information with others. I believe you might be one of the people who can very well not handle what is going to be released ab out RFI, or where our investigation that John and I started on December 26, 1980 is about to cumulate in the near future. We can’t wait for it all to be factually all put out to the public, for them to analyze and to debate.” Jim Penniston, March 10, 2012 “Buy putting it in a book we will be able to show everything we have done. ... This is the best way then we can take question afterwards we want to thank Peter, Larry and Robert for the suggestion.” John Burroughs, March 23, 2012 “There are moments that g o beyond each of our poor lives.” Charles de Gaulle Introduction Some months back, my friend and colleague Gary Hazeltine, who is also publisher of UFO Truth Magazine in beautiful in West Yorkshire , asked if I’d be willing to use one of my regular magazine columns to review a new book due for publication in late April 2014. Issue number six of UFO Truth would going out to subscribers in early May so it was imperative that I locate, read, then write my review a s soon as possible, then make my deadline, something I regularly excelled at failing to do. Knowing something of my uneven history with two of the authors, Gary just wanted to make sure I was up for the assignment; he knew I would write an objective, even - handed review. About a month before its release date I requested a review copy from the publisher through proper channels. Several weeks later it had yet to arrive. I was visiting New York City that week and as usual when in town, stopped by my favorite bookstore, The Strand on Broadway and 12 th . I quickly made my way down the stairs to the basement, then advanced on the UFO and 3 paranormal stacks where, specifically the shelves belonging to the “P” authors. There it was, two copies actually, weeks before publication date, and at half the list price. Thank you Strand. Once home I flipped through it, but it sat for about a week before I actually begin reading it and making notes. And so it happened that as I read and wrote, making my objections and rendering praise in review form, I began to notice something, subtle at first, then more apparent, then truly begin to emerge from just below the surface of the words. If my imagination wasn’t running away with me I could only characterize what I was observing as a pattern, but a pattern that seemed to have been deliberately undertaken, in an intentional manner, and calculated only to manifest negative intent. And the more I observed it come into play, the more uncomfortable it made me feel. This feeling was soon re placed by one of anger, and finally one of serious concern. More, it was something very few readers would ever pick up on or even look for. The reason for this was that each separate element in the overall pattern was a specific piece of information only a vailable or found in Left At East Gate . Each data point was presented respectfully, if incomplete or in reconfigured form, then through the use of seemingly ‘’objective commentary and a dose of good common sense, would conclude that the pattern - point’s ‘fi ndings’ (again) strongly suggested there was good cause to doubt Larry Warren’s credibility and motivations regarding his involvement and claims, something which only reflected poorly on my professionalism, research and investigation skills, and reputation . By this point I was fully engaged in writing the most comprehensive book review in history and as a result, late in meeting my deadline as usual. It was handed it in running hysterically long, though Gary agreed to print it in its final form, even if he did have to breakdown and redesign the immediate page layouts. But somewhere along in my reading and writing the review, I began to write a separate paper, the intention of which was to focus on, detail, document and explain my concerns in a more appropri ate form. It was not lost on me that if I failed to make a case for what I perceived to be a grave series of concerns, no one else ever would. And possibly, no one else could. Over the next weeks I put more and more time into the paper until, by no stretch of the imagination, could it be defined as a ‘paper’ any longer. It was about here that I realized I was writing a book. I also realized how crazy it would sound to tell friends and colleagues I was writing a book that I had decided would take no longer t han a month to research, investigate, write, fact - check, edit, review, finalize, and have in print in just under a month, start to finish – with an expanded version of the original book review 4 included. Just under sixty pages of fourteen point translates i nto almost ninety standard book pages, so a book it is, even if a small one. Let me just add the following. I took no pleasure and little satisfaction in writing any part of what you are about to read. At the same time I knew it was important for me to do so. I did look for some way out of this, or for some alternate set of reasons that might explain or justify why Encounter In Rendlesham Forest was written in the precise manner it was. But I haven’t been able to and must conclude that parts of this book w as written with conscious intent to deceive its readers, and in so doing, demean the value of an outstanding book I had put almost ten years of my life into, and to minimize the contributions of the man responsible for setting that incredible undertaking i nto motion. I appreciate that in publishing this book I must take responsibility for all of the opinions, views and alleged conclusions expressed herein and I do. And now, Deception, the only book ever written that begins with a book review, I think. Peter Robbins Brooklyn New York May 7, 2014 The Review John Burroughs and Jim Penniston’s book on the Rendlesham Forest UFO incident is finally out, as written by Nick Pope in collaboration with the two eyewitnesses involved on the first of three nights of UFO activity, now collectively known as the Rendlesham Forest UFO incident. As any author of a serious work of nonfiction can attest, the actual writing of such a book should not be an extremely challenging process and one not to be undertaken lightly. There is no question that doing the initial research is critically important, and, but the ability to bring it all together in a fully professional manner is something else again. Having devoted nine years of my life to coauthoring a work on the same subj ect I speak from experience. Jim and John’s choice of Nick Pope as the lead author seemed a logical one. Nick is an established writer in the UFO field and author of four previous books on the subject. He brings with him both name recognition and the 5 uni que caveat of having served in Her Majesty’s Ministry of Defence for more than twenty years, several of which were spent officially charged with looking into UK UFO reports, a credential unique to this author. But there are downsides to this collaboration. To begin with, Penniston and Burroughs long - awaited personal story is communicated to us almost entirely in the second person and suffers for it. Let me say at the outset that no one I know disputes the involvement of these two witnesses, or the fact t hat their encounter experiences and those they incurred at the hands of ‘debriefers’ in its aftermath resulted in ongoing personal suffering, serious physical ailments, and uncontested symptoms of Post - Traumatic Stress. Even so, John’s somewhat glib notion about the ease of writing such a book on their own (“how hard was that.”?) seems to have proven a task beyond the pair’s collective abilities. Then again, neither of them are trained writers, nor have they ever claimed to be. In 1999 or 2000 I reviewed Nick’s first of two works of fiction, Operation Thunder Child, for Vicki and Don Ecker’s then - outstanding publication, UFO Magazine . I gave it a rave and deservedly so. It was an outstanding piece of ‘what if’ fiction and earned a review that reflected not hing less. Writing this review for Nick’s first new book in fourteen years has been proven to be something else again. A rather minor criticism to start with. This book is repetitious at times, in cases restating the same information, and occasionally on the same page. A far more significant shortcoming encountered in Encounter In Rendlesham Forest is that the book is entirely devoid of footnoted annotations. This is certainly a much less time - consuming way to write an inve stigative work, but diminishes its value as a serious research tool immeasurably. The book I co - wrote on the Rendlesham incident, Left At East Gate, included hundreds of carefully researched annotations, and make no mistake about it, compiling, organizing, and proof - checking each one was a boring, repetitive, labor - intensive process, but one I undertook gladly as both Larry and I felt that doing so was essential to the value and integrity of what we had set out to do. The absence of same here left me with t he distinct impression that rushing this book into print was more important to the authors than doing the best and most thorough job they were capable of. This leaves the reader with only the limited appendices, the book’s index, and if you want to include it, the table of contents, as reference tools. The index is problematic in itself as it lacks a surprising number of significant inclusions. I know it is a challenge 6 to make sure that all of the subjects, locations and individuals you’ve written about are listed in a book’s index and that you’re always going to miss a few no matter what, but it’s the job of the authors, their editor, and their publisher to do their best to assure that this is accomplished as successfully as possible. Encounter In Rendles ham Forest opens with a succinct introduction to its protagonists while setting the scene and offering some necessary background. The first chapter launches directly into the events of the first night with attention given to the other personnel who were di rectly or indirectly involved. I was surprised though at how disappointing it was to finally read Penniston and Burroughs’ long - awaited account, this only because – with the exception of a number of quotations and statements from the experiencers, it is to ld entirely in the third person by Pope. Nick shares the pair’s story clearly enough, but it is devoid of any real feeling or vitality, and I think it’s a shame that the witnesses themselves decided against relating this all - important narrative in their ow n words. What such a telling might have suffered in terms of loss of the professional polish that Nick supplies would have been more than made up for in heart, tension, and the ‘in - the - moment’ quality that can make the act of reading a good work of nonfict ion work so exciting. Jim and John’s selected statements, while welcome, are not an acceptable replacement for this. The two write their own chapter at the end of the book so why not here? Nick Pope never experienced the stress, challenge, or fear associat ed with these events, and when compared to experiencer accounts such as Travis Walton’s in Fire In the Sky , Whitley Strieber’s in Communion, Jesse Marcel Jr’s. in The Roswell Legacy, and Debbie Jordan and Kathie Mitchell’s in Abducted!,” there really is no comparison. Whitley of course is an accomplished professional writer but none of these other authors were. Here I must include Larry Warren as well. The incredible job he did in painstakingly writing, recreating, and relating his personal experiences in L eft At East Gate, also someone with no previous writing experience, Is consistently ‘in - the - moment’ and spot - on throughout. Then again, I’m biased. Hard work, definitely, but what a gift to the reader! The failure to fully recreate the most shattering nigh t of the witnesses’ lives gives us a book that opens on something of a flat, disappointing note. But as I read Nick’s treatment of the pair’s experiences, I couldn’t help but think about parts of Larry’s account, and in the form of a number of haunting si milarities shared by all three men during their respective 7 encounters: the malfunctioning radios, the ferocious static electricity charge in the air, John and Jim’s description of walking into the area “as akin to wading through deep water.” Larry’s memory of his movements having “become very slow, as if I were in a vacuum.” As Penniston and Burroughs approached the small clearing “there was a silent explosion of light.” As Warren and the men with him looked up to regard the reddish sphere of light, it “exp loded in a blinding flash (and without a sound).” Penniston observed “that what had first appeared to be a sphere of light in front of him had dissipated and now had the appearance of a craft of some sort.” Warren recalled “The explosion (of light) produce d no noticeable heat. But now, right in front of me was a machine occupying the spot where the fog had been.” Absolutely fascinating stuff. But when we come to the point in the narrative where Penniston touches the craft, there is a complete absence of any mention of his now - famous and insistent claim that a long binary code message down - loaded into his head. His December 2010 announcement of this allegation set off a major and still ongoing controversy in ufology, so why not introduce this charged moment i n the context of where and when it was actually supposed to have occurred? I do not know why Nick made this decision, but as a writer myself, I know that I’ve withheld such key information from its proper chronological place as a narrative device to buil d the reader’s sense of anticipation or tension. To the informed reader though I fear that in this context it may only come off as a bit ‘stagy.’ It certainly led me to feel that a ‘big reveal’ would be coming later on in the book. Unfortunately when we fi nally do encounter the binary code in the second to last chapter in the book, it is more with a whimper than a bang. As we continue to follow the story, we are reminded of how the pair chose to play down their anomalous experiences from the get - go, neith er of them wanting to be fully forthcoming in their respective written statements or reports. Nor is there any mention of the forty - five minutes of missing time they’d experienced, and with good cause. The UFO ridicule factor was and remains very much aliv e and well, and likely on steroids in a 1980 military context. Ask yourself this question: if you were in John or Jim’s place, would you have wanted such information to become a part of your permanent military record? Me neither. It was Deputy Base Command er Halt – very much a fixture in the men’s lives at this time and for more than twenty - five years to come, who suggested they use the phrase “unexplained lights” instead of ‘UFO’ in relevant reports. We are also reminded that the 8 Law Enforcement security b lotters for that night were removed, then classified, never to be seen again. In chapter two, “The Next Morning,” we begin with some military UFO - related history, information on base procedural matters, and are introduced to more of the personnel who had roles in the events during and/or leading up to the event. Burroughs and Penniston retrace their steps and return to the clearing where they again see the indentations in the soil associated with the craft. The next morning three others return to the site with them. Measurements and photographs are taken while plaster casts of the indentations are made. One of the men, Sgt. Ray Gulyas, later returns on his own to take personal photographs and make his own plaster casts. In chapter three, “Into the Darkness, ” we jump directly to the particulars of Col. Halt’s third night’s encounter and those of the men who accompanied him into the forest on another now - famous part of the Rendlesham chronicles. Nick supplies much detail here and excerpted statements from some of the men involved. Chapter four picks up where “Into the Darkness” ends and culminates with the episode’s most dramatic aspect, that of the unknown coming in over the group’s heads and shining a pencil - thin beam of light into their immediate area. Cha pter five, “Charles Halt Over the Years,” runs five pages, ironically, the exact length I take to review it here. It is the first point in this book where I felt the writing specifically calculated to present the reader with a consciously limited and highl y controlled assessment of its subject, this by way of what it does not include rather than what it does. The treatment begins with what for me is a major inaccuracy: “Until John Burroughs and Jim Penniston decided to speak out, Charles Halt had probably b een the person most closely associated with the Rendlesham Forest incident.” No, he “probably” was not. Larry Warren “probably” was. And while the author and I can debate the semantics of the use of the word ‘probably’ here, it is Larry Warren’s name and p resence that have been front and center in this regard for more than thirty years now. The reason any of us even learned the names Charles Halt, John Burroughs and Jim Penniston was due only to Larry Warren’s having given them, as well other names of indiv iduals involved to Coventry Connecticut Police Lieutenant and UFO investigator Larry Fawcett, this back in 1982. True, Halt’s name was included in the original October 2, 1983 New of the World coverage of the incident while Warren’s was noted in the same a rticle under the pseudonym Fawcett had created for him, but the following year Warren came out under his own 9 name, and very publicly at that, and it is that name which has remained at the forefront of those associated with the Rendlesham Forest incident ev er since. It was years before the colonel publically began to speak out on his involvement, during which time Larry Warren was left to go it alone in the face of public speculation and accusations, this while Halt, Penniston and Burroughs (commendably) con tinued their hitches in the Air Force. Nick then cites a series of statements made by Halt underscoring his involvement. This is certainly fair and appropriate, but the first of them is dated November 2007, hardly making him a pioneer in getting the word out in terms of chronology. Halt’s pro - UFO and pro - UFO cover - up statements are worthy of our respect, especially in their having come from an honorably retired United States Air Force officer, and it is his opinion that the intelligences behind the RFI we re extraterrestrial in nature, the likelihood of which I agree. It is also in this chapter that Nick makes reference to a September 2012 clash between Halt and Colonel John Alexander, a retired Army officer who undertook his own unofficial investigation in to the possibility of a government UFO cover - up. When Alexander concludes there was no Rendlesham cover - up, Halt responds that he is naïve, something with which I concur. But again, far more important is what Nick has chosen to leave out of this chapter, a nd in the process creating the distinct and decidedly false impression that all is copasetic between the officer and the two former enlisted men. He does this by omitting a number of ‘facts in evidence,’ at least in this reviewer’s opinion. In his article, “Rendlesham Forest Thirty Three Years On,” which appeared in the October 2013 issue of UFO Truth Magazine , Mr. Halt makes clear at least some of the ‘missing in action’ information I refer to: “The individuals originally involved in the first night/sigh ting have changed their story numerous times, to the point that one wonders what’s going on. At least four individuals - the three that were involved in the initial sighting and a wannabee (Warren, in Halt’s incorrect opinion), according to them were brou ght to the Office of Special Investigation (OSI) and “debriefed” with injected drugs and hypnotized by Special Agents. They (Jim and John) did not make me aware of this until several years later. If I had known then I would have gotten involved. I am convi nced the purpose of the “debriefing” was to get the facts and to plant false memories. There’s no doubt the “debriefing” was a success. On one occasion, one of the individuals (Burroughs) has taken me to the wrong “landing site” and made claims that 10 were c learly wrong. (Italics Halt’s) For 20+ years I repeatedly saw a notebook from the incident that was supposedly made that night on scene. I never saw any binary codes in the book and there are several glaring errors with what’s now being shown as authentic. None of this means the event didn’t occur. I’m firmly convinced the individuals that are now making different or absurd claims were messed with, for the lack of a better term. It’s truly sad the way what’s happened has ruined the lives of several of t he participants. I have tried to help them on several occasions only to be re - buffed. I knew two of the original participants from the first encounter (Penniston and Burroughs) very well personally. One worked with me countless hours as a Police Liaison in the command post on exercises. He was earmarked for special promotion. As a result of the UFO incident this didn’t happen. Another, I rode with on patrol numerous times. Both had their careers derailed and their personal lives turned upside down. They wer e never the same after the incident and the “debriefing.” For me, Charles Halt long ago emerged as the most enigmatic player among the witnesses. He is in the unique position of being both witness/victim and manipulator, especially with regard to the infl uence he had over Jim and John for most of their adult lives – and in that respect he has successfully played the pair off against Warren for several decades now. It’s both interesting and depressing, and not without some irony, to observe that the kind of critical undermining which Halt has used against Warren for so long he now applies to undermine the credibility of Burroughs and Penniston. Oh what a tangled web we weave. There is no question that Larry Warren’s 1982 ‘outing’ of the colonel caused signif icant problems in both his professional and private life, this while he has always maintained it has nothing to do with his opinions about or attitude toward my coauthor. Halt’s treatment of Burroughs has been particularly shabby though, exemplified by his statement about John having taken him to the wrong landing site, and that Burroughs had “made claims that were clearly wrong.” How can Halt possibly know with certainty what the correct or incorrect first night landing site was? He was not there. John Bur roughs was. Given this fact, I found it interesting that throughout the book Penniston is particularly respectful and supportive in his references to Halt as exemplified here: “ Colonel Halt is an officer who truly believes you are only </p> 18419271 2014-05-10 03:54:46 2014-05-10 03:54:46 open open could-get-a-movie-deal-also-we-already-had-somebody-18419271 draft 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day, by David J. Hand by Gabriel Popkin http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/09/why-coincidences-miracles-and-rare-events-happen-every-day-by-david-j-hand-by-gabriel-popkin-18414242/ Fri, 09 May 2014 01:30:31 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day, by David J. Hand by Gabriel Popkin 9:00am, May 6, 2014 Magazine issue: May 17, 2014 Incredible things happen routinely. People win the lottery — twice. Golfers hit holes-in-one several days in a row. Basketball players appear to get a “hot hand” (SN: 2/12/11, p. 26; SN Online: 10/29/13). Do these chance events validate superstition or suggest a hidden influence in our world — a higher power, perhaps? Absolutely not, argues Imperial College London statistician David J. Hand. The laws of mathematics and physics suffice to explain a world of coincidences. Hand weaves his principle from several strands dubbed the “law of inevitability,” the “law of truly large numbers” and others. Essentially, he argues that because so many things happen, and because we are biased toward noticing unusual events, we should not be surprised when an occasional startling coincidence emerges from a sea of ordinariness. Instead, we should be surprised if one doesn’t. In making his case, Hand devotes much space to debunking fallacies such as ESP-proving experiments and Carl Jung’s “synchronicities.” He also really likes dice. But if you’re not a gambler and already assume a rational universe, you may wonder how the improbability principle might apply to more pressing societal problems. Here Hand offers a few tantalizing examples: a mother exonerated by statistics after being convicted of double infanticide; CEOs whose swiftly appreciating stock options were found to have been postdated to just before a dramatic price increase; the unsettling frequency of stock market crashes. But more would have been welcome. Hand also seems forever worried that his reader will forget the previous chapter’s exposition, leading to much repetition. Still, his informal style, wide-ranging curiosity and knack for elucidating complicated mathematics make the book an enjoyable — and mostly convincing — read. Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27 Posted by: Louis Sheehan</p> 18414242 2014-05-09 01:30:31 2014-05-09 01:30:31 open open why-coincidences-miracles-and-rare-events-happen-every-day-by-david-j-hand-by-gabriel-popkin-18414242 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan The world according to Putin [From the Economist] http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/08/the-world-according-to-putin-from-the-economist-18413403/ Thu, 08 May 2014 19:56:56 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Posted by: Louis Sheehan From the Economist The world according to Putin Why should the Russian president’s innovative attitude towards borders be restricted to eastern Europe? May 10th 2014 | From the print edition WHEN Vladimir Putin justified his annexation of Crimea on the ground that he owed protection to Russian speakers everywhere, this newspaper took a dim view of his line of argument, pointing out that since linguistic borders do not match those of states, it would lead to chaos. We now recognise that this approach to international relations betrayed a deplorable conservatism. Since we pride ourselves on pushing the boundaries in search of a way to clamber out of the box and reach the summit of blue-sky thinking, we reckoned we should grasp the nettle of radical Putinism and run with it. We have, therefore, redrawn the world’s boundaries according to Mr Putin’s principles. We think readers will agree that the resulting map has considerable appeal. Under Mr Putin’s dispensation, things look up for the old colonial powers. Portugal gets to reclaim Brazil, Spain most of the rest of Central and South America and France most of west Africa, which would probably be fine by the locals, since many of their current governments are not much cop. A mighty Scandinavian kingdom comes into being—including Finland, although Finnish is very different from the Scandinavian tongues. Since Swedish is Finland’s second language, the Vikings would have strong grounds for bringing about the sort of peaceful merger based on shared cultural values for which they are famous. In this section Exorbitant privilege The world according to Putin A unified Arabia would stretch from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. There might be the odd squabble between Sunnis, Shias, Christians and adherents of archaic notions of nation; but united by a common tongue, the Arabs would be sure to get along fine, especially if they teamed up to smite the Persian-speakers on the other side of the Gulf. The two Koreas would become one, which might be a good thing—or not, depending on which system prevailed. Since Hindi and Urdu are both a mutually intelligible mixture of Sanskrit and Persian, India could make a claim for Pakistan—and vice versa. The existence of nuclear weapons on either side would bring added spark to the debate over linguistic precedence. Best of all, Britain would regain its empire, including—since it spoke English first—the United States. It would, obviously, give Barack Obama a prestigious position—Keeper of the Woolsack, say—and a nice uniform. Britain might, however, have to surrender some of London’s oligarch-dominated streets, as well as Chelsea Football Club, to Russia. A sizeable minority of The Economist’s staff also speaks Russian and would like to claim Mr Putin’s protection in advance of the next pay negotiations. There is, however a hitch. Consolidation would be undermined by linguistic independence movements. Dozens of segments would peel away from Mandarin-speaking China. Mayaland would agitate for autonomy in Central America. Swahililand would demand independence in Africa. The world’s 7 billion people speak more than 7,000 languages; in Russia alone there are more than 100. Perhaps, on second thoughts, Mr Putin should quit while he is ahead. </p> 18413403 2014-05-08 19:56:56 2014-05-08 19:56:56 open open the-world-according-to-putin-from-the-economist-18413403 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Better Eating, Thanks to Bacteria By JEFF GORDINIER http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/07/better-eating-thanks-to-bacteria-by-jeff-gordinier-18401377/ Wed, 07 May 2014 04:45:21 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Originally published in the New York Times. Posted by Louis Sheehan. Better Eating, Thanks to Bacteria By JEFF GORDINIER SAY this about Sandor Ellix Katz: the man knows how to get you revved up to eat bacteria. “Oh, this is nice kimchi,” he said on a summer afternoon at Momofuku Noodle Bar, using chopsticks to pull crimson-coated knuckles of Napa cabbage from a jar. “I like the texture of the sauce. It’s kind of thick.” Kimchi, like sauerkraut, is one of the world’s great fermented foods, and Mr. Katz, a resident of Tennessee, was curious to see what David Chang’s team of cooks in the East Village would do with it. Lately Mr. Katz has become for fermentation what Timothy Leary was for psychedelic drugs: a charismatic, consciousness-raising thinker and advocate who wants people to see the world in a new way. A fermented food is one whose taste and texture have been transformed by the introduction of beneficial bacteria or fungi. And Mr. Katz, who turned 50 this year, considers it a big part of his mission to remind us that the tangy delights of that metamorphosis surround us — and always have, if you look back at the arc of human evolution. “I don’t believe there’s a restaurant in the world that doesn’t have products of fermentation on their menu,” Mr. Katz said. “If you have bread, you have fermented food. If you have cheese, you have fermented food. If you have salad dressing or anything with vinegar in it, you have fermented food. If you have alcoholic beverages, you have fermented food. I mean, you really can’t get through the day without eating something fermented.” Nevertheless Mr. Katz, whose latest book, “The Art of Fermentation” (Chelsea Green), recently went into its third printing, maintains a special fondness for the funkiest manifestations from around the world. “When I walk into a restaurant, I peruse the menu to see if they have any special ferments,” he said. He was in luck at Momofuku, where the crew, led by Mr. Chang, prides itself on exploring new microbial pathways. Tim Dailey, a sous-chef at the Noodle Bar, brought Mr. Katz a glass of an amber-hued German-style helles beer that he had brewed (and that is not regularly served at the restaurant). There were pickles, too, and an egg marinated in soy sauce; a summer-squash salad that had been laced with white kimchi (that is, a kimchi without the usual spicy creek of red chile pepper running through it); and an assortment of warm fungi arrayed upon a pool of black-garlic yogurt. “Oh wow, what’s that?” Mr. Katz asked when that last dish arrived. “It’s a mushroom salad,” Mr. Dailey said. To share a meal with Mr. Katz is to be reminded that you are sharing it with a vast army of invisible dining companions. As he dug into the mushrooms and yogurt, he talked about a recent study, the Human Microbiome Project, that has deepened the understanding of how our bodies are occupied by “trillions of bacteria,” most of which appear to be committed to the noble enterprise of keeping us healthy and functioning. Mr. Katz believes that fermented foods help replenish a diverse variety of probiotic bacteria in our guts, and his interest in the topic can be traced back to a health crisis of his own. In 1991, while working in New York City politics, he learned that he had contracted H.I.V. Suddenly unsure of how many healthy years he had left, but certain that he didn’t want to squander them trudging through stress-throttled 80-hour workweeks, he moved to a rural commune in Tennessee. “I didn’t have experience as a gardener, but that was something I was interested in pursuing when I got there,” he said. “I felt myself called by plants.” Blame bumper crops of cabbage for his fermentation fixation: Since he had to do something with the cabbage before it rotted, he soon found himself making sauerkraut, and learning more and more about its health benefits and the role that preserved vegetables had played in the course of civilization. “Agriculture doesn’t make sense without ways of storing the harvest,” he said. “Stuff happens when you try to store food, or inadvertently let food sit around. Just as our bodies are covered with microorganisms, everything we eat is covered with microorganisms.” (Still, Mr. Katz often stresses that fermented food hasn’t “cured” him of H.I.V., although he does think it’s possible that friendly bacteria have helped reduce some side effects of the medications he takes.) If, as books by other authors have argued, cod changed the world and the Irish saved civilization, Mr. Katz’s work often brushes up against the idea that the discovery of fermentation provided a crucial step in human evolution. We ate, we drank, we changed. “It seems likely that our primate ancestors were familiar with fermenting berries and were even familiar with the phenomenon of inebriation,” he said. Human beings “figured out how to liquefy the berries and make beverages,” spurring the development of both pottery and poetry. There’s no denying that fermentation has drastically expanded the spectrum of what’s available to the human palate. “Ferments are huge sources of flavor complexity,” Mr. Katz said. “That’s why people find cheese so compelling. That’s why soy sauce has become a universally loved condiment.” At home, Mr. Katz devotes much of his days to flavor experiments. “This woman in North Carolina taught me that Cherokee people used to take their excess corn and pickle it in a brine, and it’s incredibly delicious like that,” he said. “I’ve been doing a variation on that where I cut kernels off the corn and make like a fermented corn relish. I ferment it just for a few days in a jar and it gets this beautiful, sharp flavor.” Pungent tastes and aromas don’t dissuade him. A while back he tried his hand at making balao-balao, a Filipino specialty in which rice is fermented with shrimp. “I loved it, and as the days passed and the flavors got stronger, I liked it more and more,” he said. “I brought it to a potluck meal that some friends had organized. And as I reheated it, I noticed that it got really, really smelly. A year later my friends are still telling stories about that crazy smelly fish that I tried to serve them.” Naturally, a seeker like Sandor Katz couldn’t resist an invitation to visit Momofuku’s laboratory of fermentation, so after lunch he took a short stroll to an unmarked sliver of office space in the East Village, where he met Dan Felder, the 28-year-old head of R&D for Mr. Chang’s network of restaurants. There, in the Momofuku test kitchen, Mr. Felder gave Mr. Katz a glimpse of a brilliantly demented-fermented future: Erlenmeyer flasks full of new iterations of soy sauce, jars of vinegar conjured up from ingredients like strawberries and cherries, little mounds of paste that represented the next wave in miso. There were vials of explosively flavored tamari, a mere droplet of which might garnish an oyster. “It’s basically, ‘How do we make umami from scratch?’ ” Mr. Felder explained. As with molecular gastronomy and the farm-to-table movement in the past, a deep focus on fermentation can help a chef like David Chang (or René Redzepi at Noma in Copenhagen) stake out fresh territory for creative expression. Every time the Momofuku crew hatches a new flavor, Mr. Felder said, “the more expansive our repertoire can become.” To demonstrate this, he reached into a fridge and removed some laces of creamy fatback dusted with salt and a mold-colonized barley used to make products like soy sauce and miso. “Koji-cured lardo,” Mr. Felder said. “This is a new frontier.” Mr. Katz reacted to the lardo and everything else like a kid in a kimchi shop, even going into a brief reverie when a jar of Basmati koji was opened and his nasal passages got to bask in the fragrance. “Oh, my God, what a beautiful aroma,” he said. “It’s a gorgeous mold. I am so in love with koji.” Traditionally, miso has come from fusing that mold with rice or barley, then adding it to a base of soybeans. But Mr. Felder brought out several versions that had been made, instead, with ingredients like pistachios, pine nuts, lentils or mung beans. “I’m fascinated by this idea of nut-based misos,” Mr. Katz said. “I want to taste them all, really. The pine nut was amazing.” “That’s Chang’s favorite,” Mr. Felder said. “You get this incredibly creamy mouthful.” Mr. Katz swooned over the pistachio miso, too (“Oh, my God, this is so delicious”), and as he prepared to leave, his blue eyes were brightly shining. “It’s really exciting for me to see these crazy new applications,” he said. “I feel like this is going to influence my experimentation.” </p> 18401377 2014-05-07 04:45:21 2014-05-07 04:45:21 open open better-eating-thanks-to-bacteria-by-jeff-gordinier-18401377 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan
we've had enough Bushes." [ One of my intentions with this blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. Further, this ‘blog’ will contain various drafts of unknown writings just to be saved in the event they are needed by me, etc.– Louis Sheehan ] </p> 19884430 2014-12-23 19:39:59 2014-12-23 19:39:59 open open eb-bush-just-took-a-big-step-toward-running-for-president-here-are-23-reasons-he-should-reconsider-from-questionable-business-dealings-to-allegat-19884430 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Israeli bank to pay $400 million to US in tax evasion case http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/12/23/israeli-bank-to-pay-400-million-to-us-in-tax-evasion-case-19884153/ Tue, 23 Dec 2014 18:30:29 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Israeli bank to pay $400 million to US in tax evasion case Bank Leumi admits to helping US taxpayers hide assets; will hand $270m to Justice Department, $130m to NY Department of Financial Services By AFP and Times of Israel staff December 23, 2014, 5:50 am 4 Feel free to ignore this blog! I am intending to use it as a repository of various writings: drafts, doodles, etc. If there ARE any articles here, they are posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan [ One of my intentions with this blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. Further, this ‘blog’ will contain various drafts of unknown writings just to be saved in the event they are needed by me, etc.– Louis Sheehan ] Israel’s Bank Leumi Group has agreed to pay a total of some $400 million to US and New York authorities to settle a criminal probe, after admitting to helping US taxpayers hide assets, the Department of Justice announced Monday. Get the Start-Up Israel's daily newsletter and never miss our top stories Free Sign up! The bank will also terminate the employment of senior staff as part of the settlement. Leumi agreed to pay $270 million to the US Department of Justice, $156 million of which is a fine for US taxpayer accounts held at the bank’s Swiss subsidiary, and $130 million to New York’s Department of Financial Services. From at least 2000 until early 2011, Leumi sent private bankers from Israel and elsewhere to meet with US taxpayers and help them conceal assets at Leumi locations in Israel, Switzerland and Luxembourg, documents revealed. Leumi, a unit of Bank Leumi le-Israel, also helped US taxpayers prepare and present false tax returns, prosecutors said. As part of a deferred prosecution agreement, Leumi agreed to supply information on more than 1,500 US account holders. “The Bank Leumi Group recognized that the writing is on the wall for offshore banking, and cooperating with the government’s investigation was the only way to proceed,” said Deputy Attorney General James Cole. The bank agreed to a deferred prosecution deal in which it admitted to wrongdoing without pleading guilty and avoiding prosecution. “This deferred prosecution agreement demonstrates both that the Justice Department will hold financial institutions accountable for their crimes, and that we will be fair in recognizing extraordinary cooperation,” said Cole The Justice Department said the case marks the first time an Israeli bank has admitted to such criminal conduct. According to a report in Forbes magazine, the statement of facts in the case included the following main accusations: “surreptitiously sending private bankers from Israel and elsewhere around the world to the United States to meet secretly with US clients at hotels, parks and coffee shops to discuss their offshore account activity; assisting US clients in using nominee corporate entities created in Belize and other foreign jurisdictions to hide their undeclared accounts by concealing the US client as the true beneficial owner of the account; using the Bank Leumi le-Israel Trust Company as a nominee account holder for US clients with accounts in Israel to conceal the US client as the true beneficial owner of the account;maintaining US clients’ undeclared offshore accounts under assumed names or numbered accounts to conceal the US client as the true beneficial owner of the account.” The report also said the bank was guilty of “providing hold mail services so that correspondence and other account information would not go directly to the US client to make it more difficult to connect the client to the secret offshore account; extending loans to US clients from Bank Leumi USA that were collateralized by the assets in those clients’ offshore accounts, so that the clients could leverage their offshore assets to obtain and use capital in the United States while keeping their foreign accounts secret and undetected from the US government; and after the department’s investigation into UBS and other Swiss banks’ criminal conduct in aiding US taxpayers to evade their taxes became public, the Bank Leumi Group opened and maintained accounts for US taxpayers who left UBS and other Swiss banks due to the investigation in an effort to continue to avoid detection by the US government.” </p> 19884153 2014-12-23 18:30:29 2014-12-23 18:30:29 open open israeli-bank-to-pay-400-million-to-us-in-tax-evasion-case-19884153 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan The FBI Is Very Excited About This Machine That Can Scan Your DNA in 90 Minutes http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/12/08/the-fbi-is-very-excited-about-this-machine-that-can-scan-your-dna-in-90-minutes-19817725/ Mon, 08 Dec 2014 01:03:20 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>The FBI Is Very Excited About This Machine That Can Scan Your DNA in 90 Minutes Rapid-DNA technology makes it easier than ever to grab and store your genetic profile. G-men, cops, and Homeland Security can't wait to see it everywhere. —By Shane Bauer | Thu Nov. 20, 2014 6:30 AM EST Email 191 [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan Illustration: Dan Bejar Robert Schueren shook my hand firmly, handed me his business card, and flipped it over, revealing a short list of letters and numbers. "Here is my DNA profile." He smiled. "I have nothing to hide." I had come to meet Schueren, the CEO of IntegenX, at his company's headquarters in Pleasanton, California, to see its signature product: a machine the size of a large desktop printer that can unravel your genetic code in the time it takes to watch a movie. Schueren grabbed a cotton swab and dropped it into a plastic cartridge. That's what, say, a police officer would use to wipe the inside of your cheek to collect a DNA sample after an arrest, he explained. Other bits of material with traces of DNA on them, like cigarette butts or fabric, could work too. He inserted the cartridge into the machine and pressed a green button on its touch screen: "It's that simple." Ninety minutes later, the RapidHIT 200 would generate a DNA profile, check it against a database, and report on whether it found a match. A scanner, quickly: The RapidHIT 200 can generate a DNA profile in about 90 minutes. IntegenX The RapidHIT represents a major technological leap—testing a DNA sample in a forensics lab normally takes at least two days. This has government agencies very excited. The Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and the Justice Department funded the initial research for "rapid DNA" technology, and after just a year on the market, the $250,000 RapidHIT is already being used in a few states, as well as China, Russia, Australia, and countries in Africa and Europe. "We're not always aware of how it's being used," Schueren said. "All we can say is that it's used to give an accurate identification of an individual." Civil liberties advocates worry that rapid DNA will spur new efforts by the FBI and police to collect ordinary citizens' genetic code. The US government will soon test the machine in refugee camps in Turkey and possibly Thailand on families seeking asylum in the United States, according to Chris Miles, manager of the Department of Homeland Security's biometrics program. "We have all these families that claim they are related, but we don't have any way to verify that," he says. Miles says that rapid DNA testing will be voluntary, though refusing a test could cause an asylum application to be rejected. "We're not always aware of how it's being used. All we can say is that it's used to give an accurate identification of an individual." Miles also says that federal immigration officials are interested in using rapid DNA to curb trafficking by ensuring that children entering the country are related to the adults with them. Jeff Heimburger, the vice president of marketing at IntegenX, says the government has also inquired about using rapid DNA to screen green-card applicants. (An Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman said he was not aware that the agency was pursuing the technology.) Meanwhile, police have started using rapid DNA in Arizona, Florida, and South Carolina. In August, sheriffs in Columbia, South Carolina, used a RapidHIT to nab an attempted murder suspect. The machine's speed provides a major "investigative lead," said Vince Figarelli, superintendent of the Arizona Department of Public Safety crime lab, which is using a RapidHIT to compare DNA evidence from property crimes against the state's database of 300,000 samples. Heimburger notes that the system can also prevent false arrests and wrongful convictions: "There is great value in finding out that somebody is not a suspect." But the technology is not a silver bullet for DNA evidence. The IntegenX executives brought up rape kits so often that it sounded like their product could make a serious dent in the backlog of half a million untested kits. Yet when I pressed Schueren on this, he conceded that the RapidHIT is not actually capable of processing rape kits since it can't discern individual DNA in commingled bodily fluids. Despite the new technology's crime-solving potential, privacy advocates are wary of its spread. If rapid-DNA machines can be used in a refugee camp, "they can certainly be used in the back of a squad car," says Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "I could see that happening in the future as the prices of these machines go down." Democratic members of Congress have urged the FBI to look into the "broad deployment" of rapid DNA in police stations. Lynch is particularly concerned that law enforcement agencies will use the devices to scoop up and store ever more DNA profiles. Every state already has a forensic DNA database, and while these systems were initially set up to track convicted violent offenders, their collection thresholds have steadily broadened. Today, at least 28 include data from anyone arrested for certain felonies, even if they are not convicted; some store the DNA of people who have committed misdemeanors as well. The FBI's National DNA Index System has more than 11 million profiles of offenders plus 2 million people who have been arrested but not necessarily convicted of a crime. For its part, Homeland Security will not hang onto refugees' DNA records, insists Miles. ("They aren't criminals," he pointed out.) However, undocumented immigrants in custody may be required to provide DNA samples, which are put in the FBI's database. DHS documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation say there may even be a legal case for "mandating collection of DNA" from anyone granted legal status under a future immigration amnesty. (The documents also state that intelligence agencies and the military are interested in using rapid DNA to identify sex, race, and other factors the machines currently do not reveal.) The FBI is the only federal agency allowed to keep a national DNA database. Currently, police must use a lab to upload genetic profiles to it. But that could change. The FBI's website says it is eager to see rapid DNA in wide use and that it supports the "legislative changes necessary" to make that happen. IntegenX's Heimburger says the FBI is almost finished working with members of Congress on a bill that would give "tens of thousands" of police stations rapid-DNA machines that could search the FBI's system and add arrestees' profiles to it. (The RapitHIT is already designed to do this.) IntegenX has spent $70,000 lobbying the FBI, DHS, and Congress over the last two years. The FBI declined to comment, and Heimburger wouldn't say which lawmakers might sponsor the bill. But some have already given rapid DNA their blessing. Rep. Eric Swalwell, a former prosecutor who represents the district where IntegenX is based, says he'd like to see the technology "put to use quickly to help law enforcement"—while protecting civil liberties. In March, he and seven other Democratic members of Congress, including progressive stalwart Rep. Barbara Lee of California, urged the FBI to assess rapid DNA's "viability for broad deployment" in police departments across the country. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter</p> 19817725 2014-12-08 01:03:20 2014-12-08 01:03:20 open open the-fbi-is-very-excited-about-this-machine-that-can-scan-your-dna-in-90-minutes-19817725 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan Raoul Villain http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/12/01/raoul-villain-19781460/ Mon, 01 Dec 2014 09:19:28 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Raoul Villain From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Raoul Villain (1885 – 1936) was a French nationalist. He is primarily remembered for his assassination of the French socialist leader Jean Jaurès on July 31, 1914, in Paris. Villain was acquitted by popular jury in 1919 and later fled to the Balearic island of Ibiza, where he was killed during the Spanish Civil War. Contents 1 Early life and background 2 Attack on Jaurès and result 3 After being acquitted 3.1 Death 4 Notes 5 Sources 6 External links Early life and background Villain was born in Reims, Marne, France on September 19, 1885. As a 29-year-old student in archeology at the École du Louvre, he was a member of the Ligue des jeunes amis de l'Alsace-Lorraine ("League of Young Friends of Alsace-Lorraine"), a nationalist student group.[1] After France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine were annexed by Germany. This was a source of anger and resentment in France, causing many to feel that a new war with Germany was in order to recover both territories and French pride. Therefore many like Villain were opposed to the pacifist policies of Jean Jaurès. Villain lived for some time in England, at Loughton, where he stayed with Mrs Annie Francis, who described him, according to The Observer on 6 June 1915, as "a gentle and very kind man". Attack on Jaurès and result The still existing Café du Croissant which was located next to Jaurès's newspaper L'Humanité (photo by Rémi Jouan) Villain focused on Jaurès, bought a revolver and began stalking him, scribbling incoherent notes about the socialist leader's habits into his pocket-book. At about 21:40 on Friday, July 31, 1914, Villain fired two bullets through a window embrasure into Jaurès' head while his victim was having supper with his contributors in Le Croissant at the corner of Rue Montmartre and Rue du Croissant.[2] The next day, posters went up all over France announcing the general mobilization, and war was declared three days after Jaurès's death. What would be World War I began. Incarcerated for the duration of the war, Villain was brought to trial in 1919. He was acquitted by a popular jury on March 29, 1919, and Anatole France wrote in L'Humanité: "Workers! A monstrous verdict brings in that assassinating Jaurès is not a crime...".[3] Jaurès's wife, plaintiff, was convicted in costs. After being acquitted After having briefly been arrested in 1920 in Paris after trying to pass some false currency, Villain fled to Cala de Sant Vicent,[4] Ibiza in the Balearic Islands off Spain. Receiving some money through a legacy, he fled France and arrived in Ibiza via Mexico.[5] Villain thought that, by hiding up in the remote northeastern corner of Ibiza, he could live anonymously and be forgotten. In 1933,[5] the Bay of Cala de San Vicent was a very quiet backwater with no development, there was not even a road into the valley. Villain decided to make his home there. Using local labour and help from Paul René Gauguin,[5] the grandson of Paul Gauguin, he built a house from concrete and had almost finished the building by August 1936. On September 13,[5] a small detachment of soldiers arrived on the beach of Cala de San Vicent by rowing boat. Eyewitness reported that they thought that they may have been anarchists of the FAI.[5] These soldiers were part of a larger detachment. The force had arrived on the island to re-secure the island following the mini-coup which had been orchestrated by the Nationalists under the command of Infantry Commander Juli Mestre.[5] Villain had been away visiting a French lady[5] in Santa Eulària des Riu when the soldiers arrived, but quickly returned home when he had heard of their arrival. Feeling vulnerable, he feared that the soldiers would steal his valuables, which he had stashed[5] in the unfinished house. Despite being repeatedly warned[5] by his neighbours not to go back down to the cove, he still went home. Death The House of Raoul Villains in Bay of Cala de San Vicent as it stands in 2013 The officer and troops who arrived on the beach that day seemed very suspicious of this Frenchman, who also antagonised the officer with his explanation of why he had set a crucifix[5] on the hill behind his house. Apart from this outward show of religious zeal, the officer was also suspicious of where Villain had been that day, and decided to confine him to his house.[5] He was considered to be a fascist and a spy and, as such, a threat to their plans to reoccupy the island. The details of what happened next are sketchy, but what is certain is that Villain ended the day with a bullet wound which eventually killed him. That afternoon, three bombers from the Italian air force had flown along the coast over Cala de Sant Vicent and bombed Ibiza town, which could be heard even this far up the coast.[5] It is thought that the troops, on hearing the attack, decided to return to the capital and tried to take Villain and his valuables with them. He reacted violently to this, and as a consequence was shot in the back, with the bullet exiting via his throat.[5] Unfortunately for Villain, he had only been wounded. The officer in charge warned the villagers that had come down to see what had happened, not to assist or disturb the mortally wounded man. Villain lay alone on the sand for two days[4] until he died. The locals then placed his body in a makeshift coffin, draped it in a French tricolour they found in his house, and buried him in the cemetery at nearby Sant Vicent de sa Cala.[5] Notes Vilain, Isabelle. Les Vilain célèbres: Raoul Villain, 3 January 2002. It seems the family name can be written either with one or two 'l'. In the center of Paris, not on the Butte Montmartre (Montmartre Mound) Vovelle, Michel. "1914: Jaurès est assassiné", L'Humanité (archived at waybackmachine.org), 24 April 2004. The White Island, The Colourful History of the Original Fantasy Island, Ibiza. Author: Stephen Armstrong. Published:Corgi. ISBN 0-552-77189-9 Title: The Road to San Vicente. Author: Leif Borthen. Published: Barbury Press. ISBN 9788461181193 [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19781460 2014-12-01 09:19:28 2014-12-01 09:19:28 open open raoul-villain-19781460 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan The Firing of Chuck Hagel Elizabeth Drew Kristoffer November 24, 2014 http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/11/28/the-firing-of-chuck-hagel-elizabeth-drew-kristoffer-november-24-19771035/ Fri, 28 Nov 2014 03:19:01 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>The Firing of Chuck Hagel Elizabeth Drew Kristoffer November 24, 2014 Earlier this year, I went to the Pentagon to have lunch with Chuck Hagel, whom I had known for many years. Because of his packed schedule the lunch was arranged for 11:30 AM, and was to last for forty-five minutes. As we got talking, he let the time slip for another ten minutes and then politely excused himself, explaining that he simply had to move on to the next appointment—a courtesy meeting with the Defense Minister of Peru. The Middle East was falling apart and countries where the US was supposed to be winding down its military commitments were looking anything but ready for stability. The Veterans Administration; sexual exploitation of women in the military; Russian adventurism in Crimea and other parts of Ukraine; decaying weapons; commanders at US nuclear facilities found to be not exactly alert on the job; missile tests by North Korea; mindless across-the-board budget cuts imposed by Congress; coups in Africa; endless demands and requests from legislators; congressional Republicans having their festival of Benghazi hearings–-and the secretary of defense had a scheduled courtesy meeting with the defense minister of Peru. Now, the US and Peru have enjoyed a close working relationsip and the minister was not to be offended; moreover during his previous tenure on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hagel had been visited by and took time for officials from all over the world and such courtesy continued to be expected. While I had come to admire Hagel as a thoughtful man, there’s a question of whether anyone can make the leap from a senator’s office—with an average staff size of 34 people, to the Pentagon, the world’s largest institution, which employs about 26,000 personnel on site, plus about a half million overseas, plus an active military of about 1.5 million men and women. In general, transitions from Capitol Hill to a cabinet office, in either party, haven’t been markedly successful. The Pentagon has been a sinkhole of failures. Irrespective of all that, there’ve been the dramatic changes from the job that Hagel came to do to and the one that it has become. He came to the office with the assignment of presiding over the ending of two wars, yet each has been expanded (Iraq) or extended (Afghanistan, after thirteen years). Onto which has been grafted the most elusive and formidable of tasks: defeating the hyper-terrorist group ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Even the administration figures who preside over it are aware that the effort in Syria might not succeed: the “moderate opposition” to the Assad regime has been weakened and infiltrated to the point where it barely exists as a force; the US has no real allies on the ground, other than some Kurd forces, who aren’t as strong there as they are in Iraq. It’s been a pipe dream to think that Turkey would want to get involved in any way that might help Bashir al-Assad. The White House is stuck in a policy that has very little chance of working, putting the president and his national security aides in real peril. And Chuck Hagel, who watched all this with dismay, became the odd man out. If its interests in an international situation aren’t great enough or worth the cost, the US can cut its losses and walk away. Or not even try. We’re not trying to fix failed African states—not Somalia (tried that, disastrously) or Congo. States, with their own long histories, have a way of being intractable to being fixed by outsiders—a lesson yet to be thoroughly absorbed by this administration. But even if the president wanted to disengage from Syria, says a senior adviser, “His hands are largely tied because of the brutal executions by ISIS.” It’s considered quite likely that ISIS will continue the beheadings; no one is sure whether the point is to provoke the US into a difficult war, but that’s the effect. A participant in the discussions of US policy in the Middle East says, “As long as ISIS is beheading Americans there’s no way the president can stand up and say that Syria isn’t our problem.” This is an assumption, not a fact. Hagel, who came from the now virtually defunct moderate wing of the Republican party, openly broke with his fellow party members and said he regretted his vote for the Iraq War, in 2002. In 2007 he voted with Senate Democrats to call for a withdrawal of American troops from Iraq within 120 days, and in 2011, after he left the Senate, he said it was time to find an exit from Afghanistan. Hagel’s mentality matches that of Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell: careful and loath to engage in military force; don’t venture where you don’t know what you’re getting into (which could largely characterize our ventures in the Middle East). This happened also to be the philosophy of Barack Obama. Hagel has a deliberative mind, one likely to take in more considerations than that of the typical pol. He’s been ambitious—he’d coveted a cabinet position from the outset of the Obama administration, having been selected by candidate Obama as one of two companions for his pre-election trip to Afghanistan and Iraq (the other was Jack Reed, and these choices spoke well of Obama). In the Senate, Hagel could wield a knife with the best of them—but he wasn’t a relentless type. He also wasn’t a fire-in-the-belly politician. Seriously considering running for the presidency in 2008, he called a press conference in which he announced, to a widespread thud, that he hadn’t yet made up his mind. Yet Hagel remained a respected figure in Washington and in foreign capitals. Though Hagel and Obama thought quite alike and respected each other, Hagel was probably not cut out for the Obama administration, or for what it’s evolved into. Though Hagel had, and used, a direct line to Obama—calling in frustration after a larger meeting where he felt he hadn’t been listened to, and over time largely wasn’t, Obama wasn’t as welcoming of diverse voices as he’d first indicated he would be. Hagel was never one to blend quietly into the tapestry. He prided himself in being his own man, and he liked to talk about his opinions—to the press and the public as well as on the Senate floor. Hagel wasn’t destined to be a docile member of an administration over which the White House exercises the tightest control in memory—especially one in which policy was made by a small group in the White House headed by a remote president who doesn’t care for turbulence and who is capable of changing policy on a dime. In particular, defense policy has time and again lurched head-snappingly from firm decision to its reverse. Bit by bit, Hagel saw policy in the Middle East move in the opposite direction of what he’d understood was his assignment and on which he and the president had once agreed. Hagel particularly chafed at the White House’s governing style on national security policy. He believed—and in this he was far from alone within and outside the administration—that national security adviser Susan Rice is in over her head. And Rice’s admittedly abrasive style put off a large number of people. But she’s been close to the president from the days of the 2008 campaign, and that appears to be what matters most to him. Initiatives, and not just in security policy, would get clogged up at the White House in task forces to study them. The NSC, which was originally a modest-sized organization set up to coordinate among the relevant cabinet departments, has metastasized into a staff of about four hundred people and under the Obama administration actually makes foreign and defense policy. A cabinet office has traditionally been an august position (if somewhat faded)—being called “Mr. Secretary” or “Madame Secretary” counts for a lot in Washington, and defense is one of the top ones. The Obama White House’s famous “micro-management” of the Departments—treating Cabinet officers as junior assistants, sometimes the last to know of a change in policy, would particularly trouble a person of pride, not to mention one who has held elective office. Hagel made no secret of his frustration. We’ve seen past administrations in big trouble throw overboard an inconvenient major figure. Whether it was the right one has always been a question. So was the matter of how much difference the move actually made in improving the fortunes of the said administration. Most of the time a White House staff hasn’t been as eager as this one to make it clear, right away, that the officer didn’t resign but was pushed out. This is not a good sign. All the talk coming out of the White House that Hagel’s confirmation performance is still a problem and other complaints are mainly padding on a ruthless if necessary decision—necessary in the eyes of the president and his very closest aides. But this won’t help them fix their terrible problems in Iraq and Syria and—as is increasingly clear—Afghanistan. The senior adviser said to me Monday evening: “If Hagel had agreed with the White House he wouldn’t have been fired.” November 25, 2014, noon [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19771035 2014-11-28 03:19:01 2014-11-28 03:19:01 open open the-firing-of-chuck-hagel-elizabeth-drew-kristoffer-november-24-19771035 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan Chaski http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/11/24/chaski-19751944/ Mon, 24 Nov 2014 06:42:03 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Forensic linguist studies syntax as a signature Carole Chaski uses writing to help police solve crimes By MOLLY MURRAY Sussex Bureau reporter 11/16/2002 . The News Journal/GARY EMEIGH Carole Chaski, an instructor at Delaware Technical & Community College, analyzes writing styles to identify people Every time someone writes a memo, a note or an e-mail, the person leaves behind something akin to a written fingerprint. It is not so much the words, the spelling errors or the grammatical mistakes that make writing unique, however. It is the way the words are strung together - the syntax - that give writing a signature almost as individual as DNA. Carole Chaski, a linguist and criminal justice instructor at Delaware Technical & Community College in Georgetown, is using writing samples to help link people to crimes. Her linguistic work is at the center of new forensic research being developed in a world that is increasingly paperless and devoid of handwriting because of the use of computers. Chaski has appeared on national television news shows in recent weeks, and an article in The Washington Post quoted the instructor's thoughts on the meaning of the Washington-area sniper's writings. An online Wall Street Journal column scoffed at her, using quotations marks to set off Georgetown, Del., to question her standing as an expert. In addition to being a Delaware Tech instructor, she runs a consulting business and has helped police agencies around the country with investigations. The flurry of sniper-related publicity, however, has been just part of what the forensic linguist does. For The Washington Post, Chaski said she simply did a quick read of some of the messages authorities said were left behind for police. But in a real investigation, Chaski takes sentences apart to see how individuals use nouns and verbs, adverbs and prepositions. In a very basic way, what Chaski does is somewhat similar to elementary school students standing at a blackboard and separating the parts of speech in a sentence. As teachers tell those students, every sentence has to have a subject or a noun, and a predicate or a verb. Even with simple sentences, there are a lot of ways to combine the words and say the same thing. Because most people don't write sentences that consist merely of a noun and a verb, Chaski's work is complex. She has developed a computer program to do most of the analysis of sentences. The program takes apart the sentence and finds each part of speech in relation to the rest of the words. Then she counts the patterns and uses a statistical analysis to determine whether someone wrote something. "I was trained as just a regular syntactical linguist," Chaski said. "I was just a regular linguistics professor at North Carolina State University." But her career changed when she was asked to help police on a perplexing case about North Carolina State student Michael Hunter, who died in April 1992 from an injection of lidocaine, Benadryl and Vistaril. One of his two roommates reported the death. All signs pointed to a suicide, but Raleigh, N.C., police Detective W. Allison Blackman wasn't so certain. There were suicide notes, written on a computer and printed out by Hunter's roommate, Joseph Mannino, authorities said. "I said there's got to be some way to figure out who wrote these notes," Blackman recalled. The notes had been printed out on a university computer from a disk. Blackman began contacting universities and eventually found Chaski. Chaski said she looked at the pattern and placement of words in the sentences and counted the patterns. "She was about 99.9 percent sure" that Hunter had not written the suicide notes, he said. Her work helped police identify Mannino as a suspect. Weeks away from becoming a doctor, he was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to seven years in prison. He claimed he had given Hunter antihistamines to treat a migraine. After working with Blackman, Chaski quickly realized that linguistics and word patterns could play a role in police investigations. She wondered whether a syntax review of writing would work every time. Then Chaski was called in on a case involving solicitation of murder, and the word patterns again pointed to a suspect. She applied for a fellowship at the National Institute of Justice, where she began a scientific study of written syntax and developed the computer software that she uses. To be accepted as evidence in a court case, a system such as Chaski's has to be based in science and must produce reliable results consistently. She started to pull together a database of writing samples. She asked four women for writing samples on 10 topics, then looked at the word patterns and punctuation. She then asked for a blind sample, and was quickly able to determine which of the women wrote it. Chaski said she thinks writing is an instinctive process, which is why it tends to be so individualized. "Isn't it amazing that that's how we work?" she said. "It's something about the way we process language, but it is the minor, tiny things that are different because we understand each other. ... Like DNA, we share 98 percent of our DNA patterns. Our differences are tiny and not something that is easy to find." Language has about seven basic units, and they are combined in predictable combinations, she said. The differences are what make each person's writing unique. "This really gave me something I could do with linguistics," she said. Nonetheless, Chaski said, her method is not perfect. It works only if there is a limited group of suspects. Since the Hunter case, Chaski has worked on civil patent cases, an attempted homicide in Florida and a rape case in Washington, D.C. "My method requires about 200 words, and it's much better if you can get more," she said. "I would like to eventually expand it to do voice. There are really no validation studies of individual voices. ... It's easier to disguise and it's less automatic than writing." Reach Molly Murray at 856-7372</p> 19751944 2014-11-24 06:42:03 2014-11-24 06:42:03 open open chaski-19751944 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan American Involvement in World War I http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/11/23/american-involvement-in-world-war-i-19749260/ Sun, 23 Nov 2014 07:11:16 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>American Involvement in World War I In 1912 Woodrow Wilson was elected President of the United States. Wilson successfully kept Americans troops out of World War I during his first term. However American involvement became inevitable later on in World War I. As the European powers squared off in 1914 in what was to be four years of mind-numbingly horrific war, America managed to somewhat nervously mind its own business. Wilson, in fact, won reelection in 1916 using the phrase “he kept us out of war.” As time passed, however, the country began to side more often with Britain, France, and other countries that were fighting Germany. The sinking of the British passenger ship, Lusitania, by a German submarine in 1915, which resulted in the deaths of 128 Americans, inflamed U.S. passions against “the Huns.” Propagandistic portrayals of German atrocities in the relatively new medium of motion pictures added to the heat. And finally, when it was revealed that German diplomats had approached Mexico about an alliance against the United States, Wilson felt compelled to ask Congress for a resolution of war against Germany. He got it on April 6, 1917. The U.S. military was ill-prepared for war on a massive scale. Only about 370,000 men were in the Army and National Guard combined. Through a draft and enlistments, however, that number swelled to 4.8 million in all the military branches by the end of World War I. At home, about half of the war’s eventual $33 billion price tag was met through taxes; the rest was funded through the issuance of war bonds. Organized labor, in return for concessions such as the right to collective bargaining, agreed to reduce the number of strikes. Labor shortages drove wages up, which in turn drove prices up. But demand for goods and services because of the war soared, and the economy hummed along, despite government efforts to “organize” it. In Europe, however, no one was humming. American troops, like their European counterparts before them, found that modern warfare was anything but inspiring. The first U.S. troops were fed into the lines as much to shore up the morale of the Allies as anything else. But by the time the Germans launched their last desperate offensive, in the spring of 1918, more than 300,000 American troops had landed in France. By the war’s end in November, the number of Yanks had swelled to 1.4 million. Led by Major General John “Black Jack” Pershing, a celebrated veteran of the Spanish-American and Philippines wars, the U.S. forces, known as the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) fought off efforts by Allied commanders to push the AEF into a subordinate role as replacement troops. Starting with the battles of Cantigny, Chateau-Thierry, and Belleau Wood in France, the AEF proved itself an able force. In September 1918, the Americans launched an attack on a German bulge in the lines near Verdun, France. U.S. and French troops captured more than 25,000 prisoners, and the German military’s back was all but broken. At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, Germany called it quits, and the fighting stopped. American losses — 48,000 killed in battle, 56,000 lost to disease — seemed trifling compared to the staggering costs paid by other countries. Germany lost 1.8 million people; Russia, 1.7 million; France, 1.4 million; Austria-Hungary, 1.2 million; and Britain, 950,000. “The War to End All Wars,” as it was called, turned out to be just another test of humans’ aptitude for killing other humans in large quantities. [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19749260 2014-11-23 07:11:16 2014-11-23 07:11:16 open open american-involvement-in-world-war-i-19749260 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan 9 astonishing deaths reported in Victorian newspapers http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/11/17/9-astonishing-deaths-reported-in-victorian-newspapers-19716889/ Mon, 17 Nov 2014 01:10:29 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan 9 astonishing deaths reported in Victorian newspapers The British Newspaper Archive is a treasure trove of forgotten history. Here, Jeremy Clay, author of The Burglar Caught by a Skeleton, unearths a series of extraordinary deaths from the Victorian press
Thursday 13th November 2014 Submitted by Emma McFarnon Magazine subscription - 5 issues for £5 Man visited by an apparition on his death bed (Hulton Archive/Getty Images) The corpse that stood up and danced Marion Hillitz’s dancing days were behind her. So too, alas, were her breathing ones. At least, that’s what the doctors believed. On a Saturday night in June 1878, in the Virginian hospital where she’d stayed for several months in the care of nuns, Mrs Hillitz died. She was a popular patient; wealthy too. But all that could have been done for her, had been done. And so, according to the customs of Richmond’s Hospital of the Little Sisters of the Poor, she was wrapped in a shroud, and laid out in the parlour. The good sisters, who had watched faithfully by the bedside, were gathered mournfully by her body when the clock struck midnight. Suddenly, her sunken eyes seemed to flash, and the blood rushed to her wan cheeks. “As though imbued with superhuman energy,” reported the Edinburgh Evening News, “the dead body rose up from its resting place, which was draped with a black pall, emblematic of mourning, and spoke to the affrighted watchers, saying, ‘I am not dead yet, but I will die soon’.” Cue consternation. Mrs Hillitz then reportedly danced around the room, singing and shouting as the thunderstruck nurses stared in disbelief. “As soon as the nurses recovered from their fright, they placed the old lady in bed, where she lingered until about nine o’clock, when she again apparently died,” said the Evening News. “The affair has created the most intense excitement, and thousands of persons visited the hospital.” An actor stabbed to death during a play It was the performance of a lifetime: a stage death that oozed realism. The crowd applauded, the curtain came down, the theatre cleared. But as they drifted away from London’s Novelty Theatre that August night in 1896, the audience wasn’t aware just how realistic the final act had actually been. “The exigencies of the play demanded that the chief villain should be stabbed,” reported The Yorkshire Evening Post, “and this operation was so realistically carried out that the instrument employed – unhappily an actual dagger of particularly sharp quality – penetrated the breast of the unfortunate gentleman.” The unfortunate gentleman was Temple E Crozier. His killer was his friend, a fellow member of the cast of Sins of the Night. “I did it,” Wilfred Franks told the police. “It was an accident. It is a terrible thing.” The play was a sensational melodrama of greed, murder and revenge. Crozier played the part of Ramez, a dastardly Spaniard who seduced and killed Abimahad, the sister of Franks’ character Pablo. In the final act, the plot called for Pablo to drive a knife into Ramez, exclaiming “now my sister is avenged”. Everything had been going just fine until that moment. Alive to the risks of wielding a blade, Franks had calculated exactly where he needed to stand for his dramatic lunge to be believable but safe, and hadn’t budged in the scene. But Crozier leaned in. Maybe that wouldn’t have mattered too much if Franks had used a harmless stage knife from the theatre's props department. Unfortunately he used his own – a sharp and slender stiletto with a jewelled handle. The actor stumbled, turned twice from the blow and fell on his back with the dagger sticking in his chest. “Don’t worry, I’m alright,” Crozier told his unwitting killer. Three surgeons were speedily on the scene, but to no avail. “Deceased moaned and expired,” concluded the Evening Post. A man choked by a billiard ball As stunts go, it left a little to be desired. But it was Walter Cowle’s party piece, and he was going to stick to it. The 24-year-old was in the pub with his pals in November 1893, when talk turned to the tricks they could perform. Eager to show off, Walter asked the landlord of the Carlisle Arms in Soho for a billiard ball, then placed it in his mouth with a flourish, and closed his mouth. Ta-da! Uh-oh. “He evinced signs of choking,” reported the Grantham Journal. “His back was slapped and his head held down, in the hope that the ball would fall forward and out of his mouth. It did not, however and Cowle was at once conveyed to Middlesex Hospital, where he was found to be dead. “It was only when the post-mortem examination was made by Dr Sidney Bulke, resident surgeon, that the ball could be extracted.” His friend told the inquest he’d seen him do the trick dozens of times before, without any mishap. The coroner, rather superfluously, pointed out that sticking a billiard ball in your mouth to impress your mates was “silly and dangerous.” Animal revenge In Jaws the Revenge, a Great White Shark hunts down the family of the man who killed its relative. Preposterous, you may think, and pretty much everyone who saw it would agree with you. But the plot, ludicrous as it may be, is not entirely without parallel in the animal world. In 1894, a stablehand in the Welsh village of Dyserth, near Rhyl, came to an unpleasant end when he was kicked to death by a horse. His employer, said The Citizen, “at once got rid of the brute”. Not just that, but as a display of goodwill, he hired the son of the dead man as a groom. “News has come to hand that the son has himself been kicked to death by the foal of the mare that kicked his father to death,” reported the paper in March the following year. The condemned man who bought more time Robert Blanks didn’t have long, the court had seen to that. It may have been little more than a legal lynching, but the verdict stood. Blanks would hang. It was a spring day in 1899 when he was led to the gallows in Maysville, Kentucky. But before he drew his final breath, Robert Blanks was determined to squeeze every last remaining second out of what was left of his life. First he made a speech from the scaffold. It lasted 40 filibustering minutes. Then he requested that all those present at his execution bid him a personal goodbye. Each and every one of them, in a crowd that numbered more than 1,000. When there were no more farewells to be made, he asked for a collection to be held on behalf of his poor family. “The sheriff then told him to get ready for death,” said the Sheffield Evening Telegraph, “but he begged fervently for still more time, which he occupied in praying on his knees, and afterwards singing hymns.” Tired of the shilly-shallying, the sheriff tried to place the black cap on Blanks’ head. He tore it off. Back on it went. Back off it came. Three more times they struggled with the cap before Blanks was finally pinned down. As the noose went round his neck and the trapdoor fell, reported the Evening Telegraph, Blanks yelled his frantic last words. “Wait a minute
” The father killed by joy It was the news he had been longing for; the words he’d prayed to read. His son was safe. There was the evidence, at last, in his hands: a letter with a Bloemfontein postmark, telling Peter Kitchen that his lad was alive and well. Some time before, his son – a member of Armley Ambulance Corps in Leeds – had signed up for service in South Africa with No 9 Field Hospital. The year was 1900. The second Boer War was in full swing. Nothing had been heard from Kitchen’s son for a long while. Like any parent, Mr Kitchen, who was in his 80s, was beside himself with worry – until that day. From then on in, he wouldn’t have a care in the world. “Mr Kitchen was so overcome with joy on at last receiving news of his son’s safety that he expired without warning,” reported The Edinburgh Evening News. The man murdered by a monkey It was the clown who found him. When Signor Rovelli missed his cue for the big finale in the show, the circus joker went to see what was up. What he discovered that night in Mexico was far too gruesome to be mollified with a comedy honk of the horn. Rovelli was seated in his chair, with his menagerie of performing dogs and monkeys around him. His throat had been cut from ear to ear. His dogs whined pitifully at his feet. In the corner, one monkey was brandishing a razor. “He had evidently fallen asleep,” said the Illustrated Police News in September 1876, “and while in an unconscious state, one of the monkeys had become possessed of his master’s razor, which [it] drew across the throat of the sleeping man. “It is said that the acrobat had been seen to behave very cruelly to his monkey on many occasions, as the latter, from some cause or other, would not do as his master wished, and at times, when Rovelli was shaving, he used to go up to the monkey, razor in hand, threateningly, and imitate the movement of cutting himself. This was a most imprudent thing to do.” As they say: monkey see, monkey do. The girl who worried herself to death Thirteen words. That’s all it took to kill Kate Weedon. Thirteen words strung together in a sinister rhyming couplet. Poor Kate was a worrywart. Like a moth drawn to a flame, the 10-year-old Londoner began reading the prophecies of 16th-century soothsayer Mother Shipton, and was quickly fixated on two apocalyptic lines: The world to an end shall come In eighteen hundred and eighty one It was already 1881 – the tail end of the year at that. And as the days passed, she became more and more anxious. One day in November, Kate returned home from school in floods of tears. “Her mother told her it was all nonsense,” reported the Taunton Courier, and Western Advertiser, “but this had not the least effect upon her, and when she went to bed at half-past 10 she was still crying and wringing her hands, saying she knew the end of the world would come in the night. “At about half-past three on the following morning the mother was awakened by hearing her cry, and on going to her bedroom found the child in a fit. A doctor was immediately sent for, but his services were of no avail, and the child died two hours later.” An inquest found death was due to convulsions and shock to the system, brought on by fright. An entirely needless dread, at that. Almost 10 years before, the author Charles Hindley had admitted to fabricating the prophecy – to liven up his 1862 book on Mother Shipton. The servant who died re-enacting the death she had just witnessed Some folks are wise, and some are otherwise, observed the author Tobias Smollett. Proof, if it was required, was to be found in Widnes in 1881. On an October evening that year, a wholesale draper named Birchall asked an employee called Hague to go to his lodgings and fetch his four-chambered revolver, which he intended to hand as a gift to a policeman who was leaving for Australia. When Hague got the house, he contrived to shoot himself through the mouth while examining the gun. When a neighbour hurried to the scene, a servant picked up the revolver to show what had happened. “The firearm again went off,” said the Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette, “and shot her through the mouth. Both are dead.” The Burglar Caught by a Skeleton, published in paperback by Icon Books, is now on sale. Find out more here. You can follow Jeremy Clay on Twitter @ludicrousscenes, and read more at www.ludicrousscenes.com</p> 19716889 2014-11-17 01:10:29 2014-11-17 01:10:29 open open 9-astonishing-deaths-reported-in-victorian-newspapers-19716889 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan The Virus That Could Be Making You Dumber By Carl Engelking | November 10, 2014 3:51 pm http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/11/15/the-virus-that-could-be-making-you-dumber-by-carl-engelking-november-10-2014-3-51-pm-19710675/ Sat, 15 Nov 2014 05:21:04 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>The Virus That Could Be Making You Dumber By Carl Engelking | November 10, 2014 3:51 pm Share on print Share on facebook Share on twitter Share on email More Sharing Services 817 [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan You may have heard the saying, “You can’t catch stupid” — meant to console you that idiocy is not contagious. But, as it turns out, in a small way it might be. Scientists have discovered that a foreign virus in some peoples’ throats parallels with those individuals’ poorer cognitive performance. And when mice are given this virus, previously thought to only infect algae, they were slower to learn a maze. Surprise Virus Scientists stumbled on their discovery while collecting throat swab samples from people to assemble a virome — a genetic profile of all the viruses circulating through our bodies. During the analysis, researchers were surprised to find DNA of chlorella virus ATCV-1, a virus common in aquatic environments but not thought to infect humans or animals. What’s more, the virus was common: It was detected in 40 out of the 92 participants. It didn’t appear that age, sex, race or any other external factors affected a person’s chance of harboring the virus. Dumbed Down Fortunately for researchers, their original experiment included standardized tests to measure participants’ visual processing and motor skills. So, with the new variable — ATCV-1 — in the forefront, scientists switched gears to examine whether the newly discovered virus affected cognitive performance. And they found it did: people infected with the virus performed significantly worse on cognitive tests than did their uninfected counterparts. That warranted further study, so esearchers then tested how the virus affected mice. They infected 30 mice with ATCV-1 and put them through a series of maze tests. These mice took much longer to explore a novel maze setup than mice in the control group, researchers reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Mind Control ATCV-1 is common in most inland waters such as those around Baltimore, where the study was conducted. Therefore, exposure to the virus is probably common, but why some people acquire infection while others don’t is still unknown. Answering this question, researchers say, will guide future studies on ATCV-1. In the meantime, it’s a fascinating and freaky example of how microbes can mess with our brains. Robert Yolken, the virologist who led the study, told The Independent,“This is a striking example showing that the ‘innocuous’ microorganisms we carry can affect behavior and cognition.” </p> 19710675 2014-11-15 05:21:04 2014-11-15 05:21:04 open open the-virus-that-could-be-making-you-dumber-by-carl-engelking-november-10-2014-3-51-pm-19710675 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan From Kevin Randell's Blog http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/11/08/from-kevin-randell-s-blog-19682759/ Sat, 08 Nov 2014 06:59:50 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>A document labeled with the Majestic tag has been found. It has a proper provenance, which means the origin of the document can be traced by anyone who wishes to do so and there is no doubt it is authentic. The first page, which was classified as Top Secret is entitled, “Report by the Joint Logistic Plans Committee the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Joint Logistic Plan for ‘Majestic.’” There are some interesting things on that page. It identifies the problem, saying, “1. Pursuant to the decision by the Joint Chiefs of Staff on J.C.S. 1844/126, to prepare the Joint Logistic Plan in support of MAJESTIC*.” The asterisk references the same document mentioned in the body of the text. It provides no more information about it, but it is interesting because it is a reference to another document which could be traced to provide additional authentication. It also suggests something about how these highly classified documents are created and how many of them are inter-related. The rest of the document is merely other paragraphs that tell us very little about what Majestic is and everything that it does say could, in fact, be considered as evidence of MJ-12. This is a document that deals with logistics, which can be simply defined as the support needed for military operations. It could be said that this is a document that relates to the movement of an alien craft, the wreckage or debris, and the bodies of the alien flight crew from one location to another. This would be the plan to explain the mode of transportation, how many soldiers would be needed, how they would be fed and housed, the fuel supplies, weapons and ammunition, route information and bases where additional support could be found and anything else rated to all of this. The second page is a list of those who will receive the information which is quite long. It is labeled, “Top Secret Security Information,” and is stamped, “Special Handling Required, Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals,” and for those keeping score at home is dated 25 September 1952. Please notice the dating format that is not 25 September, 1952. But here is where we run into the first problem with all of this. At the bottom it is noted, “Forward herewith is a copy of the Joint Outline Emergency War Plan for a War Beginning 1 July 1952 MAJESTIC. This plan supersedes Joint Outline Emergency War Plan MASTHEAD, which was forwarded by SM-1197-51, dated 14 May 1951, copies of it will be either returned or destroyed by burning.” This suggests that it has nothing to do with UFOs or the Majestic-12, but the argument could be made that this is “typical boilerplate,” meaning that the paragraph is sort of standard without a specific meaning other than instructions of removing the obsolete plan and replacing it with the new one. In today’s world it would be a “cut and paste” error. In 1952, such a thing is more difficult to explain. The third page makes it clear what is being discussed and what Majestic really is and ends all our speculation. Stamped with a date of 2 OCT 1952 (as opposed to 02 OCT, 1952) and with “Top Secret Security Information, the letter, in paragraph one said, “Enclosure (1), with attached copies of Joint Outline Emergency War Plan “MAJESTIC’, is forwarded.” This is a war plan and has nothing to do with UFOs. The markings on it, made in 1952, show what they should have been as opposed to what they are on the MJ-12 documents and the EBD. Yes, there might be variations depending on military service branch and the level of classification, but here is something that shows what was being used at the time, how it was used and what the specific wording was and should have been. This does not bode well for MJ-12, not to mention the duplication of code words. By duplication of code words, I mean that all code words for classified projects come from a master list so that there is no accidental duplication (Yes, the military sometimes uses civilian code words for projects, such as Project Saucer, but the real name was Project Sign). To use the same or similar code words would lead to compromise. Someone cleared to deal with the War Plan – Majestic - wouldn’t be cleared for the MJ-12 material, but the duplication of code words wouldn’t make that clear. This is the same argument made for Majic. During WW II there was a highly classified project known as Magic. This similarity could lead to compromise, if you had two projects with such similar names. The last page of the documents that I have makes it clear that there is no reason to assume this has anything to do with the investigation of alien craft, alien bodies or the recovery of an alien spacecraft. Paragraph 4 says, “The estimate of the Soviet Union’s capability to execute campaigns and her probable courses of action contained in the Enclosure does not take into consideration the effect of opposition by any forces now in position or operational, or of unfavorable weather or climate conditions.” This is also classified as “Top Secret Security Information,” and is dated 12 September 1952 (again is relevant because it puts it into the time frame of the EBD and it shows the dating format as it should have been written), is signed by W. G. Lalor, Rear Admiral, U.S. Navy (Ret.), and is also noted as “Reproduced at the National Archives.” This then, should be the absolute, final blow to the MJ-12 nonsense. There simply wouldn’t be two highly classified projects with the same code name operating at the same time and we have the documentation here to prove that Majestic existed but it wasn’t what we have been told. It should be noted that I was alerted to this by my colleague Tony Bragalia. He suggested that this might have inspired the name Majestic-12 because here was a real project with that name. If the documents were still classified, meaning they couldn’t be released into the public arena, and in the 1980s, the classification might have held it would have been an interesting bit of corroboration. Someone could have stumbled over the top secret project with the name being found but nothing to identify exactly what it was. This would have hinted at a provenance and a high classification. Without some of the follow up documents, there could be speculation about what it meant, but no one would know. It would have provided an interesting time
until all the documents were found. Too bad that those proponents of MJ-12 couldn’t have found some of this twenty years ago. Oh, we’d know now what it was all about, but it sure would have given them a fine run. And I have to wonder if Bill Cooper, in his claim to have seen documents labeled as Majestic might not have seen these documents. Given his claimed position in the Navy, he might have seen the cover sheets for this but had no chance to read the document to see what it was all about. Tony added a note about all this, and how he came to find the documents. He provided the link so that those who wished to see the provenance would know where to look. He wrote that, “The reference linked below is what got me going down this research avenue. The Emergency War Plan -codenamed MAJESTIC - is highlighted in yellow in the military history book seen here: http://books.google.com/books?id=SeeNAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA164&lpg=PA164&dq=%22plan+majestic%22+1952&source=bl&ots=jB7mbVYG8S&sig=GU5KwjiTYMHUIgPGzenVyGL00uI&hl=en&sa=X&ei=uWhbVMehBYKgyATchYDADw&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=%22plan%20majestic%22%201952&f=false Added to the failure of the El Indio - Guerrero UFO crash that is part of the EBD and for which there is no evidence of it other than Robert Willingham’s obviously bogus tale, this should end, for all time any doubt about the fraudulent nature of the original MJ-12 documents. And for those who would now retreat to the argument that “Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence,” I would say, until you find something tangible, “Absence of evidence is, in fact, evidence of absence.” I have looked, others have looked everywhere that something like this would be noted, and nothing has been found. This seems to be “Game Over.” Posted by KRandle at 3:07 PM Labels: Bill Cooper, Majestic, Majic, Masthead, MJ-12, Robert B. Willingham, Tony Bragalia [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19682759 2014-11-08 06:59:50 2014-11-08 06:59:50 open open from-kevin-randell-s-blog-19682759 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Anarchic Autism Genetics Gain a Touch of Clarity By Gary Stix | October 30, 2014 | http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/11/02/anarchic-autism-genetics-gain-a-touch-of-clarity-by-gary-stix-october-30-19654510/ Sun, 02 Nov 2014 18:35:17 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Anarchic Autism Genetics Gain a Touch of Clarity By Gary Stix | October 30, 2014 | The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American. [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan Two new studies demonstrate the promise and pitfalls of the industrial-scale gene-processing technologies that define the meaning of the much-ballyhooed Big Data. Bad news first. One of the two reports published in Nature provided a four-digit estimate of the number of genes involved with autism. [I’m obligated to break here to say that Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group.] My science skeptic friends would say that this is also the point that I should start trying to bash autism genetics. “A thousand genes?” “Think of the combinatorial mess.” “They’ll never make any progress.” But what the myriad research teams found was actually pretty cool. The two studies, published Oct. 29, pooled the labor of more than 50 laboratories across the globe. Their results tied more than 100 genes to autism, sixty of which met a “high-confidence” threshold—meaning that a particular gene has more than a 90 percent chance of increasing the risk of autism. Only 11 had met that mark before. One of the studies looked at 2,515 families from a database maintained by the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative. The families had only one child with autism, suggesting the involvement of a rare, spontaneously occurring—writ de novo—mutation. The researchers then looked for the mutated DNA by sequencing the full protein-coding portion of the affected child’s genes, known as an exome. They used their high-powered, next-generation sequencers to look at the exomes of both parents and, in many cases, at least one sibling—a mind-blowing endeavor for any geneticist who has 15 to 20 years on a CV and remembers when sequencing a single gene was a big deal. De novo mutations of various sorts are estimated to account for at least 30 percent of autism cases. Of course, the next question is what do you do with all of this information—and how does it lead to treatments? The idea of routinely administering drugs for autism the way physicians do for blood pressure is still quite a ways off. But pathways that get you from here to there might become a bit clearer from these types of studies. The genes found by the various research groups point to dysfunctions in the communication hubs, or synapses, that connect one neuron to another. Each brain cell typically synapses to thousands of others. Also involved was genetic material (transcription factors or chromatin) that regulates the activity of genes. “Having these genes that you can put in a stem cell or a mouse for research will be transformative in finding what causes autism,” says Stephan Sanders, assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco, and an author on both papers. In terms of focus, any biologist will tell you that that a list that includes synapses, transcription factors and chromatin still covers a lot of ground. But it does at least provide a starting point of sorts, furnishing a number of intriguing ways to categorize the disorder. “Higher IQ autism,” such as Asperger’s, which affects mostly boys, appears to have different genetics than the “lower IQ” form in which both boys and girls are affected. Autism is characterized by language deficits, social problems and repetitive gesturing. Nicholas Lange of Harvard, an author for Scientific American whose article on autism I edited last year, was enthusiastic after reading the two papers because some of the newly discovered genes are implicated in other disorders. That raises the possibility that research for, say, schizophrenia or epilepsy treatments might be of use for autism as well. He wrote me: “These findings, and many others like them recently, help us move forward from thinking of autism as a discrete multi-genic disorder toward viewing it more generally as a disability arising from factors shared by many other human impairments, some of whose biological underpinnings are already well known.” Besides the research that crunched the exome sequencing database, the other study, with contributions from dozens of institutions, came from the Autism Sequencing Consortium, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health as part of its efforts to support collaborations that would be too big for any one lab. These studies don’t represent a clarion call that marks the beginning of the war on autism—nor should they. War analogies and science don’t mix that well. Pace Richard Nixon. But they are a measure of progress, an acknowledgement that the field has moved light years beyond the days of Bettelheim’s “refrigerator mothers.” Image Source: National Library of Medicine About the Author: Gary Stix, a senior editor, commissions, writes, and edits features, news articles and Web blogs for SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. His area of coverage is neuroscience. He also has frequently been the issue or section editor for special issues or reports on topics ranging from nanotechnology to obesity. He has worked for more than 20 years at SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, following three years as a science journalist at IEEE Spectrum, the flagship publication for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He has an undergraduate degree in journalism from New York University. With his wife, Miriam Lacob, he wrote a general primer on technology called Who Gives a Gigabyte? Follow on Twitter @@gstix1. More » The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American. </p> 19654510 2014-11-02 18:35:17 2014-11-02 18:35:17 open open anarchic-autism-genetics-gain-a-touch-of-clarity-by-gary-stix-october-30-19654510 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan More Amgen lay offs http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/11/01/more-amgen-lay-offs-19648318/ Sat, 01 Nov 2014 00:33:54 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan By Dean Starkman , Andrew Khouri contact the reporters BusinessFinanceJob LayoffsUnemployment and LayoffsJobs and WorkplaceActivismArthritis Amgen's job cuts were part of maneuvers intended as a way to funnel money back to Wall Street investors Who should be driving strategic decisions — Amgen managers or owners? Amgen Inc., the Southern California biotech giant that has struggled to match the torrid growth of its pharmaceutical peers, finds itself in the crosshairs of a New York hedge fund manager, one of the new breed of activist investors, who is loudly calling for the company to split in two. Amgen is resisting a split, though by promising to shed thousands of jobs as part of a bid to boost its share price, it has been steadily giving in to Wall Street criticism of being bloated and inefficient. On Tuesday, it blinked again. In a surprise statement at an investment conference in New York, the Thousand Oaks firm said it would eliminate up to 1,100 jobs, boosting the total announced cuts this year to as many as 4,000, about 20% of its global workforce. Wall Street cheered, sending shares up 6% on the day to $157.19, a gain of $8.99. With four potential product launches in 2015 and a strong pipeline of innovative and biosimilar molecules, we are well positioned to deliver breakthrough medicines. - Robert A. Bradway, Amgen's chairman and chief executive The job cuts were part of a sweeping set of financial maneuvers the company intended as a way to funnel money back to Wall Street investors. The company also said it would buy back $2 billion in stock and increase its dividend 30%. It also made an ambitious promise of double-digit earnings growth for the next three years. The fight between management and activist investor Daniel Loeb is part of a broader argument over whether such high-stakes face-offs result in short-term benefits to shareholders at the expense of a company's ability to invest in its operations and thrive long term. Another big question: Who should be driving strategic decisions — managers or owners? Robert A. Bradway, Amgen’s chairman and chief executive, insisted that the company still had plenty of capital to invest in new products, including cutting-edge "biosimilars," which are less expensive versions of pricey biological drugs. lRelated Database shows $3.5 billion in industry ties to doctors, hospitals Business Database shows $3.5 billion in industry ties to doctors, hospitals See all related 8 "With four potential product launches in 2015 and a strong pipeline of innovative and biosimilar molecules, we are well positioned to deliver breakthrough medicines for patients and drive long-term growth," Bradway said. Bradway, himself a former investment banker, told investors and analysts Tuesday that a spinoff didn't make sense financially. "As we've looked at this, we've not seen a way through that we think unlocks significant value for our shareholders," Bradway said. "So what I'm not saying is, 'No, never,' but what I am saying is that right now, [we're] not convinced there's a way through that adds value for all of our shareholders." In a letter to its investors last week, Loeb's hedge fund, Third Point, suggested that Amgen could benefit by splitting into two companies: a mature brand that focuses on established drugs and a growth company that targets drugs in development. Related story: Hedge fund Third Point calls for splitting Amgen into two firms Related story: Hedge fund Third Point calls for splitting Amgen into two firms Stuart Pfeifer Amgen is one of a wave of public companies under pressure from activist investors, usually hedge funds, that buy large blocks of shares and use their clout to force financial or operational changes such as spinoffs, mergers, stock buybacks and new slates of directors. Hedge funds, which face fewer restrictions than other money managers on how and where they can invest, have thrived in the low-interest-rate environment. Investors scrambling for bigger yields have turned to such higher-risk, higher-reward operators. Overall, hedge funds have seen their money under management balloon to $2.8 trillion, including a 7% rise through the first nine months of this year, according to Hedge Fund Research Inc. Of that amount, activist hedge funds have grown the fastest, rising 20% to $113 billion this year. Activist hedge funds have grown so quickly mainly by outperforming the rest of the industry. cComments @Dougdingle Don't equate the big boys getting rich with people being poor. As it turns out, when they get rich, you get rich. I don't care if Joe CEO makes $500M a year and gets a $50M golden handshake - as long as he can raise the stock price of our (yours and my) investments. Brainwashed_in_Church at 7:19 AM October 30, 2014 Add a comment See all comments 19 Over the last three years, the group has posted annualized returns of 12.9% while hedge funds as a whole have generated returns of 6.5%. A mutual fund indexed to the Standard & Poor's 500 index would have garnered a 15.2% return, and at much lower risk. Once known as corporate raiders and pilloried by Hollywood in movies such as "Wall Street," these engaged, charismatic investors rebranded themselves as activists, arguing that they force efficiencies and other changes that complacent managements won't make. Among higher-profile campaigns recently were Bill Ackman's successful push for changes at Canadian Pacific Railway and a less successful push at retailer Target Corp. He also is part of a Canadian firm's effort to acquire Allergan Inc., the Irvine eye- and skin-care company. Nelson Peltz at Trian Fund Management has pushed for splits and spinoffs at Pepsico Inc. and DuPont. Old-guard activist Carl Icahn campaigned for Ebay Inc. to split off its PayPal unit and for Apple Inc. to use a portion of its cash horde to buy back some of its shares. Loeb's Third Point, meanwhile, has been among the most active in the business, notably with a successful and noisy campaign for management and strategic changes at Yahoo Inc. last year. Now, he's turned to Amgen. In a recent letter to investors, Loeb cited the company as an underperformer and argued that it has failed to realize its potential value despite producing both longtime, high-margin products such as anti-inflammatory Enbrel, and recently launched blockbusters such as Prolia and Xgeva, both for bone-related disorders. "Amgen has all the hallmarks of a hidden value situation, one of our favorite investment themes," Loeb wrote. "The company does not receive proper credit from investors for either the cash generative potential of its mature products or the coming financial impact of its growth assets." Founded in 1980, Amgen became the world's largest independent biotech company by developing drugs to treat anemia, arthritis, kidney disease and bone disease. It is one of the largest publicly traded companies in Southern California, with $18.7 billion in revenue last year and a market capitalization of nearly $110 billion. It reported $5 billion in profit last year. In recent years, the company has looked to expand into new sectors, including a wider variety of treatments for cancer. Last year, as Amgen struggled with slower sales growth, the company bought Onyx Pharmaceuticals Inc. for more than $10 billion. The deal gave Amgen control of a blood cancer drug, Kyprolis, which is expected to become highly popular in the next few years. With the latest round of layoffs disclosed, an Amgen employee described the mood in Thousand Oaks as "very dark" while workers wait to see who will be affected. Some left last week in the initial round of layoffs, the employee said, and it's grown difficult to work under the threat of constant downsizing. Workers wonder whether the consolidations are motivated by the desire to develop life-changing drugs, said the employee, who asked to remain anonymous given the sensitivity of the situation. "A lot of people are wondering if Bob [Bradway] appeased investors and Wall Street or appeased our patients and improving their lives." dean.starkman@latimes.com andrew.khouri@latimes.com Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times</p> 19648318 2014-11-01 00:33:54 2014-11-01 00:33:54 open open more-amgen-lay-offs-19648318 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan America's Civil War: Colonel Benjamin Grierson's Cavalry Raid in 1863 Originally published by Civil War Times magazine. Published Online: September 01, 2006 http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/10/11/america-s-civil-war-colonel-benjamin-grierson-s-cavalry-raid-in-1863-originally-published-by-civil-war-times-magazine-published-online-september--19540032/ Sat, 11 Oct 2014 06:21:00 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>America's Civil War: Colonel Benjamin Grierson's Cavalry Raid in 1863 Originally published by Civil War Times magazine. Published Online: September 01, 2006 [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan April 17, 1863, dawned with the promise of an almost perfect spring day. The Federal cavalry camp at La Grange, Tennessee, had been alive with activity since early morning. Anxious soldiers awaited the arrival by train of Colonel Benjamin H. Grierson, commander of the 1st Brigade of the Cavalry Division, XVI Corps, Army of Tennessee. Summoned back from a visit to his family, Grierson had spent the late evening hours conferring with his superiors in Memphis. When he arrived in camp, he brought welcome news: the long inactivity of winter would soon be relieved, and not merely by the tedium of scouting and reconnaissance. His orders included nothing less than an invasion of Mississippi–one of the most daring cavalry raids of the Civil War. Grierson's men were not the only ones preparing to march that day. Federal forces were in motion across the entire Western front from Memphis to Nashville. Major General Ulysses S. Grant planned to move his army across the Mississippi River from Louisiana to gain a better position from which to assault the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg, Mississippi. To mask this movement, he ordered infantry and artillery from Tennessee to push south into northwestern Mississippi along the Coldwater River. At the same time, Colonel Abel Streight and 1,000 mounted infantry were sent to disrupt Confederate communications in northern Alabama. While these maneuvers occupied Confederates, Grant proposed to send a strong mounted column into the heart of Mississippi to smash railroads and divert the attention of Confederate cavalry from his attempt to cross the river. To execute this thrust, Grant selected Grierson, a 36-year-old former music teacher and storekeeper from Jacksonville, Illinois. Grierson had proven himself a reliable and resourceful cavalry commander while fighting guerrillas in west Tennessee. Major General William T. Sherman had recommended him as 'the best cavalry commander I have yet had. Tall and lean, the bearded Grierson possessed an iron constitution and a modest and unassuming demeanor that earned him the respect of men under his command. That command consisted of 1,700 veterans from the 6th and 7th Illinois and the 2d Iowa Cavalry regiments. For speed and surprise, Grierson stripped his command down to essentials. The haversacks his men carried across their saddle pommels held five days' light rations of hardtack, coffee, sugar, and salt. He instructed company commanders to make those rations last at least 10 days. Each soldier also carried a carbine, saber, and 100 rounds of ammunition. The only carriages were those bearing the six two-pounder Woodruff guns of Captain Jason B. Smith's Battery K of the 1st Illinois Artillery. Grierson's chief concern was the broken-down condition of his horses. Some men in the 2d Iowa rode mules appropriated from the brigade's wagon train. The expedition would rely heavily on the Mississippi countryside for new mounts, as well as food and forage. Despite Grierson's worries, a lighthearted mood prevailed among his Yankee horsemen. The men seemed to feel highly elated, and, as they marched in columns of twos, some were singing, others speculating as to our destination, recalled Sergeant Richard Surby. They would have been surprised to learn their commander had only a vague notion of their goal. Grierson had orders only to disable the section of the Southern Railroad that ran east from Jackson to an intersection with the Mobile & Ohio Railroad at Meridian, just north of Enterprise. Beyond that, his movements had been left to his own discretion. He carried in his uniform pocket a small compass, a map of Mississippi, and a written description of the countryside. Success or failure would depend largely on his skill and ingenuity. The Federals crossed the Tallahatchie River on April 18 and pressed south through torrential rains the following day. They encountered almost no resistance at first, but news of the raid soon reached Confederates in the state. Lieutenant Colonel C.R. Barteau raced north along the Mobile & Ohio Railroad with the 2d Tennessee Battalion, Colonel J.F. Smith's militia regiment, and Major W.M. Inge's battalion. Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton, commanding the defense of Vicksburg, called on district commanders James R. Chalmers and Daniel Ruggles to mobilize Confederate cavalry in northern Mississippi. The Federals plodded southward on the 19th over roads that were fast becoming quagmires. That evening they reached Pontotoc, where they halted only long enough to destroy government property and sift through captured documents abandoned by a retreating militia company. They went into camp about five miles south of Pontotoc. Despite the deteriorating roads, the hard-riding horsemen were maintaining a brisk pace of 30 miles per day. To help keep up that pace, Grierson stripped his command of dead weight. In a midnight inspection he personally weeded out 175 of the least effective troopers. At 3:00 a.m. on April 20, Major Hiram Love of the 2d Iowa led this Quinine Brigade–along with prisoners, broken down horses, and a single artillery piece–out of the Federal camp toward La Grange. By moving in columns of fours under cover of darkness, Grierson hoped Love would deceive local residents into thinking the entire command had turned back. With Love on his way north, the main column resumed its march. The force encamped shortly after dark on the 20th. In four days the raiders had encountered only token resistance, but Barteau's Confederate cavalry was fast closing in. They had entered Pontotoc well behind the Federal force on the morning of the 20th, but closed the gap with hard riding that night. By daybreak on the 21st they were scant hours behind the Union horsemen. Grierson did not know how close his pursuers were, but he certainly expected pursuit. To obscure his trail, he detached Hatch's 500-man 2d Iowa–nearly a third of his command–and a gun from Smith's battery. Hatch, a bombastic 31-year-old former lumberman, left the main column with instructions to strike the Mobile & Ohio Railroad near West Point, destroying its tracks as far south as Macon, about halfway between West Point and Meridian. He was then to swing through Alabama, doing further damage to rail and telegraph lines during his return to La Grange. Before joining Hatch's detachment, Company E of his 2d Iowa and the two-pounder artillery piece followed the main column three or four miles toward Starkville. There the Iowans wheeled about and returned in columns of fours, obliterating hoofprints in the opposite direction. They turned the tiny cannon at four different spots in the road to leave distinct sets of wheel impressions, suggesting that four different cannon had turned. With a little luck, pursuing Confederates would pick up the freshest tracks in the thick mud and conclude that Grierson's entire force had turned east toward the Mobile & Ohio. Hatch's diversion worked flawlessly. Barteau, arriving at the junction shortly before noon, reported, My advance guard fired upon a party of 20 of the enemy, supposed to be the rear guard. This party fled and took the Starkville road. The enemy had divided, 200 going to Starkville and 700 continuing their march on the West Point road. Barteau turned eastward in pursuit. At 2:00 p.m. Barteau fell upon the Iowans' flanks and rear two miles northwest of Palo Alto. After a fierce skirmish, the Confederates withdrew. Their position, however, covered the road leading south to West Point and Macon, compelling Hatch to reevaluate his orders. He believed it was important to divert the enemy's cavalry from Colonel Grierson, so his Hawkeyes began a slow withdrawal northward, drawing the pursuing Rebels along with them. Barteau would finally break off contact on the 24th. Meanwhile, the 950 troopers of the 6th and 7th Illinois and Smith's four remaining guns raced southward. Shortly after noon on the 21st, a half-dozen horsemen at the head of the column shed their Union blue in favor of civilian garb. Each cradled a shotgun or long rifle. The brainchild of Lieutenant Colonel William D. Blackburn of the 7th and commanded by Quartermaster Sergeant Richard W. Surby, this unit of Butternut Guerrillas would serve as the eyes and ears of the Yankee raiders. The next day Grierson again focused his attention on the Mobile & Ohio Railroad that paralleled his line of march 25 miles to the east. Uncertain of Hatch's fate, he dispatched Captain Henry C. Forbes and 35 men of the 7th's Company B to disrupt the tracks at Macon. Forbes found both Macon and the tracks outside it too well guarded for his small band to approach. He turned back in search of Grierson's trail, leaving the railroad intact. Although his mission failed, it drew attention away from the main body of Federals and focused Rebel eyes on the railroad. During the night of April 22, 2,000 troops moved north by rail from Meridian to protect Macon from assault by a force estimated at 5,000 Union troops. While the Confederates rushed to protect Macon, Grierson passed swiftly south. News of the Yankee raid had not yet reached the region, and townspeople cheered the dust-covered horsemen who galloped through Louisville shortly after dark on the 22d, mistaking them for Confederate cavalry. Grierson was almost within striking distance of the Southern Railroad by the night of the 23d. After conferring with his field officers about 10:00 p.m., he sent Blackburn and about 200 officers and men to seize the depot at Newton Station, just south of Decatur, tear up the track and telegraph line, and inflict all the damage possible upon the enemy. The main column followed in Blackburn's trail within an hour. Blackburn's troopers approached Newton Station just as the first rays of sunlight spread across the eastern horizon on the morning of the 24th. Surby and two butternut-clad companions casually slipped into the outskirts of town, where they learned a train was expected soon. The shrieking whistle of a westbound freight train sent one of the scouts speeding back to alert Blackburn, who had barely concealed his men behind the depot buildings when the 25-car freight puffed laboriously into the station. As the locomotive drew abreast of the depot, blue-clad soldiers burst from the shadows and bounded into the cab. With pistols drawn, they ordered the startled engineer to stop the engine. No sooner had they diverted the train from the main track and scurried back into hiding than a second locomotive pulled slowly into the depot from the west. Using the same tactic, the raiders seized 13 cars crammed with weapons, ammunition, and supplies. A passenger car disgorged several distraught civilians fleeing from besieged Vicksburg with their furniture and other personal belongings. After removing the private property, Blackburn's jubilant soldiers sent flames dancing down the length of both strings of captured cars. Soon, the deep reverberations of shells erupting in the intense heat reached Grierson's ears five miles away and brought the main Federal column charging briskly to the rescue. Grierson was happy to find the noise was caused not by a pitched battle, but by the destruction of Rebel ammunition. He was less pleased to observe many of his troopers filling their canteens from a captured whiskey barrel. In addition to the 38 railroad cars and their contents, 500 stand of arms and a large quantity of clothing went up in flames at Newton Station. Explosions ruptured the captured locomotives, and fire consumed the depot. Amid the smoking ruins, Grierson paroled 75 prisoners. After spreading the false rumor that the raiders were headed for Enterprise on the Mobile & Ohio Railroad, Grierson was back in the saddle and southbound by 2:00 p.m. The riders would not reign up to sleep until near midnight, about 48 hours after their last bivouac. During the night, Grierson contemplated his next move. Aware that Rebel forces were converging to block his escape through northern Mississippi, he decided to feint westward and then proceed south slowly, resting his men and animals, collecting food, and gathering information. He would then make up his mind whether to return to La Grange by way of Alabama, or to drive south and try to join with Union forces on the Mississippi River. The band spent April 25 on the march, stopping near nightfall. Grierson learned from informants that a Rebel force was en route from Mobile to intercept the Yankee raiders. To verify the report and further confuse the enemy, Grierson sent Samuel Nelson, one of Surby's resourceful scouts, to cut telegraph wires near Forest Station on the Southern Railroad and perhaps destroy a railroad bridge or trestle. Slipping out of camp around midnight, Nelson approached within seven miles of the railroad, where he stumbled upon a regiment of Confederate horsemen on the trail of Grierson's column. With his benign disguise enhanced by a slight stutter, Nelson passed himself off as an unwilling guide for the Yankee cavalry. He told the Rebels they faced a unit that was 1,800 strong and headed east toward the Mobile & Ohio Railroad. Satisfied with Nelson's story, the Confederates released him and headed off in pursuit of the phantom force. In fact, Grierson had decided to continue southwest and strike the New Orleans, Jackson & Great Northern Railroad at Hazelhurst, disrupting the movement of troops and supplies between Vicksburg and Port Hudson. Following a good night's rest and with a full supply of forage and provisions, Grierson's raiders broke camp at 6:00 a.m. on April 26. At Raleigh, Surby's scouts surprised the sheriff and confiscated $3,000 in Confederate currency. After struggling through a torrential downpour in nearly impenetrable darkness, the sodden troopers halted on the banks of the Strong River outside Westville, 40 miles from their previous night's encampment. While the weary main column paused for a rest, Colonel Edward Prince and four companies of his 7th Illinois raced ahead to seize the Pearl River Ferry. Rested and fed, the main column broke camp about midnight. As the clatter of iron-soled hooves echoed across the wooden planks of the Strong River bridge, a wave of shouts and cheers rolled up from the tail of the long column. Grierson shifted in his saddle just as three beaming horsemen reined up sharply at his elbow. Captain Forbes presents his compliments, an excited trooper blurted out, and begs to be allowed to burn his bridges for himself. Astonished and amused, the smiling colonel posted a guard to meet the lost souls of Company B. Forbes had spent the previous five days engaged in a frantic attempt to overtake the main body of Federal cavalry. He had been misled by the false information planted at Newton Station and veered eastward. At Enterprise, on the Mobile & Ohio, Forbes bluffed his way out of a tight spot by demanding the surrender of the garrison in the name of Major General Grierson. Confederate reports of the number of the Federal cavalry raiders had varied widely; the presence of a major general would have meant it was quite a large force. As the Rebel commander weighed his options, the Yankee captain backed out of harm's way. Forbes later learned his gambit had drawn Major General W.W. Loring to Enterprise, pinning down three regiments of potential pursuers while Grierson escaped in the opposite direction. The unexpected presence of Confederates in Enterprise had alerted Forbes that Grierson had not taken that path. After a 34-hour ride through rain-shrouded forests, fording swollen streams and following a trail of fire-blackened bridges, Forbes miraculously found his way back to the column. While guards awaited his company at the Strong River crossing, the advance force under Prince approached the Pearl River at two o'clock that morning. Finding the ferry swinging from its mooring on the opposite shore, Prince summoned his best Southern accent and commandeered the flatboat. The last of Prince's horsemen clambered up the steep opposite bank of the river as day broke, and Colonel Grierson arrived at the landing with the rest of the Federal column. Learning that Prince had intercepted a courier bearing orders for the destruction of the ferry, Grierson hurried up the crossing by crowding men and mounts 24 at a time onto the flatboat. As soon as the first boatload touched the opposite shore, a detachment rushed several miles upstream to lie in ambush for an armored transport rumored to be anchored in the vicinity. The Rebel gunboat failed to appear and, with the arrival of Captain Forbes's errant company, the entire force was safely across the river by early afternoon. Suspecting that Confederate authorities in Jackson, barely 40 miles to the north, were aware of his presence, Grierson had started Prince's battalion toward Hazelhurst while he personally supervised the Pearl River crossing. Surby's scouts led the way and directed a steady stream of prisoners back to Prince's trailing column. Four miles outside Hazelhurst, Prince handed Surby a dispatch addressed to Pemberton, informing him that the Yankees had advanced to Pearl River and finding the ferry destroyed they could not cross and had left taking a northeasterly course. Minutes later, two butternut-clad strangers strode confidently into a circle of Rebel officers idling away time in the Hazelhurst depot. They calmly handed their message to the operator and watched as the misleading telegram raced across the wires to Confederate headquarters. The pair pressed their luck, though, when they decided to take a meal at the hotel. As they approached the square, a prisoner who had been captured and released by the raiders on the previous day suddenly appeared brandishing a sword and a pistol, and shouting for help in stopping them d—-d Yankees. With revolvers drawn, the unmasked scouts wheeled in their tracks and spurred their mounts into a blind dash out of town. Collecting the rest of Surby's Butternuts, they raced back through a torrential midday downpour to the Hazelhurst depot, only to discover its occupants had scattered, taking the telegraph key with them. In their haste, however, the Confederates had neglected to countermand the forged dispatch. Following closely behind Surby, Prince's vanguard thundered down the empty streets. In a familiar movement, the blue-coated troopers fanned out to seal escape routes. At that moment, the southbound Jackson train chugged slowly into the outskirts of Hazelhurst. The conductor sounded the alarm at his first glimpse of a blue-clad picket posted at the bridge north of town. Brakes screeched and the engineer brought the locomotive to an abrupt halt and reversed its course. Prince watched in agonized frustration as the train backed rapidly up the tracks, carrying its cargo to safety–a cargo that included seventeen commissioned officers and eight millions in Confederate money, which was en route to pay off troops in Louisiana and Texas. After discharging ineffectual shots at the fast-retreating train, Prince's men turned to matters close at hand. Gathering together commissary and quartermaster stores, along with four carloads of powder and ammunition, the Yankee raiders ran their captured booty a safe distance out of town and ignited it. Other squads of Federal soldiers raced north and south along the tracks tearing up rails, demolishing trestlework, and disrupting telegraph wires. The thud of captured artillery shells exploding in the bonfire startled Grierson as he approached Hazelhurst from the east. With orders to trot, gallop, march echoing down the column, the horsemen flew to the aid of their comrades, only to discover they had been sold again. Sharing a good laugh, Grierson's troopers broke ranks and retired to the hotel, where they partook of a banquet of captured food. With full bellies, they remounted and rode westward out of town, toward the river. All evening they fended off Rebel vedettes who harassed the front and flanks of their column. That night and the following morning, Confederate forces converged on the Yankee horsemen from the north and west. Learning of Grierson's appearance at Hazelhurst, Pemberton threw his forces into action. He most feared that the enemy would swing back to the northwest, cross the Big Black River, and strike again at the Southern Railroad, interrupting communications between Jackson and Vicksburg. Unable to second-guess the elusive Grierson, he restlessly maneuvered far-flung cavalry in a fruitless effort to defend all possible targets at once. He dispatched a battalion of cavalry under Captain W.W. Porter south from Jackson along the New Orleans, Jackson & Great Northern Railroad. He ordered Colonel Wirt Adams's cavalry at Grand Gulf to move eastward to cut the Federals off from Port Gibson. Until Adams arrived on the scene, Colonel R.V. Richardson, the unorthodox leader of the 1st Tennessee Partisan Rangers, would hold overall command of the operation. Another courier carried orders to Barteau at Prairie Mound to move without delay to Hazelhurst. With Confederates closing in, Grierson broke camp at 6:00 a.m. on the 28th. Dry, hard roadbeds were a welcome change from the muddy quagmires of the past several days. Near mid-morning, he sent Captain George W. Trafton and four companies of the 7th east to strike the railroad at Bahala. Trafton's detachment returned before dawn on April 29, bringing Grierson the dismaying news that he was poised in the jaws of a Rebel trap. Its mission of destruction at Bahala completed, the battalion was approaching the Federal camp at Union Church around 1:00 a.m. when Sergeant Surby and Private George Steadman stumbled upon Rebel pickets belonging to old Wirt Adams' cavalry. The soldiers revealed that when reinforcements arrived in the morning, Adams intended to give the 'Yanks' h—-l between Union Church and Fayette, a few miles to the west. Grierson summoned Colonel Prince, Lieutenant Colonels Blackburn and Reuben Loomis, and Adjutant Samuel Woodward to a council of war. Surby estimated Confederate forces in the vicinity at 400 cavalry, supported by a battery of artillery. Even as they conferred, Adams was passing around the Union flank to join with Captain S.B. Cleveland's 100-man cavalry force west of Union Church. The trap was closing, but Grierson and his officers had a daring response in mind. At 6:00 a.m. the Yankee troopers boldly rode into the teeth of the Rebel ambush. Then, a short distance outside Union Church, the main column veered sharply from its westward course toward the Mississippi River and headed southeast toward Brookhaven, leaving behind a small company to occupy the Rebels on the westward road. After waiting several hours, Adams realized his trap was sprung. The frustrated colonel informed Pemberton he was marching from Fayette with five additional companies to intercept the enemy's southward movement. While Adams stewed in his embarrassment, the Federal raiders followed a confused maze of back roads through piny woods. Considerable dodging was done the first three or four hours' march of this day, Surby recalled. I do not think we missed traveling toward any point of the compass. In the western distance, the Yankee soldiers could hear the leaden reverberations of Union Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter's gunboats bombarding Grand Gulf. With Adams's cavalry squarely between him and the river, however, Grierson could not join Porter. Instead the raiders pushed south and thundered down the dusty streets of Brookhaven, startling dazed residents. While the 7th rounded up prisoners, Loomis's 6th charged a conscript camp concealed in a grove of live oak a mile and a half south of town and found it vacant. The previous day, Pemberton had ordered Major M.R. Clark to evacuate the camp. As the 6th destroyed abandoned arms, ammunition, and stores, Captain John Lynch's two companies tore up track and trestlework. Loomis's troopers returned to Brookhaven just as flames enveloped the depot, a railroad bridge, and a dozen freight cars. An officer and 20 men armed with buckets prevented fires from spreading to civilian property. Some of the hardest work of the day fell to Lieutenants Samuel L. Woodward and George A. Root, the young adjutants of the 6th and 7th Illinois regiments. Civilian morale, never high in some of Mississippi's southern counties, bordered on open disloyalty. After paroling over 200 officers, soldiers, and able-bodied citizens, Woodward was astonished to see a flood of military-age men lining up to receive paroles: slips of paper that would exempt them from military service until exchanged. Many who had escaped [conscription] and were hiding out were brought in by their friends to obtain one of the valuable documents, Woodward recalled. The Yankee raiders had covered almost 40 miles since dawn and were happy to bed down outside town that night. The next morning, still uncertain about events along the river, Grierson decided to continue tearing up track along the New Orleans, Jackson & Great Northern. An easy two-mile ride brought him to Bogue Chitto, a forlorn cluster of perhaps a dozen buildings straddling the railroad. In short order, his raiders destroyed the depot and freight cars, ripped out rails and trestlework, demolished a bridge across Bogue Chitto Creek, and returned to the saddle to head south. From Bogue Chitto, Grierson pushed on toward Summit, some 20 miles south. To the raiders' surprise, that small community welcomed them with open arms. Surby judged Grierson's popularity at least equal to Pemberton's, and the colonel himself recalled a local woman who promised that if the north should win and I should ever run for president, that her husband should vote for me or she would certainly endeavor to get a divorce from him. The blue-coated soldiers lingered most of the afternoon among these congenial civilians. After the townspeople had helped themselves to government supplies, the troopers rolled 25 freight cars a safe distance out of town and put them to the torch. Noticing the depot's proximity to private residences, Grierson ordered the building spared. As at Brookhaven, the regimental adjutants handed out paroles to prisoners captured during the day and to civilians eligible for conscription into Confederate service. At this seemingly harmless village, Grierson confronted an enemy more dangerous
than Wirt Adams' Cavalry. Several enterprising troopers had uncovered a cache of Louisiana rum hidden in a swamp about a mile outside of town. Grierson dispatched an officer and a squad of men to investigate. They staved the heads of 30 or 40 barrels of the potent brew and watched the balm of a thousand flowers mingle with the Mississippi clay. Near sunset, the raiders filed out of Summit. Having learned nothing of Grant's army, Grierson had finally concluded to make for Baton Rouge. His men moved southwest, away from the broken railroad and toward Liberty. They bivouacked near midnight, 15 miles southwest of Summit. While the Federal troopers caught a few fitful hours of sleep, Confederate cavalry struggled desperately to overtake them. After an agonizing nine-hour delay in leaving Jackson, Richardson had finally locked onto Grierson's trail near Hazelhurst on the 29th. Following a path of burned depots and twisted rails, the Rebel colonel reached Summit at 3:00 a.m. on May 1, nine hours behind his prey. The Yankees had planted the suggestion there that they were headed for Magnolia and Osyka, the next stations on the railroad. Receiving that news, the eager Confederates pressed southward in the hope of falling upon the Union column's rear. Wirt Adams, meanwhile, had marched to Liberty after failing to trap the Yankees at Union Church. On the evening of April 30 his men were camped within five miles of Grierson. Like Richardson, he hoped to do battle with the Federals near Osyka. At the same time, other Confederate units were riding northeast from Port Hudson. Colonel W.R. Miles transferred his Louisiana Legion to Clinton on the 29th and set out for Osyka the next day. Lieutenant Colonel George Gantt's 9th Tennessee Cavalry Battalion had been ordered to the vicinity of Tangipahoa. For several days, Gantt responded to one contradictory report after another regarding the Yankees' position and destination before finally settling in near Osyka, covering the roads to Liberty and Clinton. In the midst of all this confusion, it would be easy to overlook a small detachment of Wingfield's Battalion of the 9th Louisiana Partisan Rangers–a mere 80 men under the command of Major James De Baun. On the 28th De Baun had moved to intercept the Union cavalrymen at Woodville. Two days later, he was ordered to reinforce either Miles or Gantt at Osyka. Augmenting his command with 35 men of Gantt's battalion, De Baun set out immediately and by 11:30 a.m. on May 1 was camped at the Wall's Bridge crossing of the Tickfaw River, eight miles west of Osyka. Only vaguely aware of the Rebel forces closing in on him, Grierson woke his men to a breathtaking dawn on May 1. As the first narrow slivers of sunlight sliced through the branches of towering pines, the Illinois troopers mounted their horses and resumed their march. The command felt inspired, Surby recalled, and various were the conjectures as to what point on the Mississippi we would make. Oblivious to the glories of nature, their commander concentrated on throwing his pursuers off the scent. He ordered an abrupt turn to the south, and his raiders disappeared into the dense woods. After an arduous ride, interrupted by frequent halts to lift the small cannon over fallen timbers, the bruised and scratched horses and men finally stumbled onto a little-used path and resumed their march at a brisk trot. Near midday, they emerged on the Clinton and Osyka road just west of the point where Wall's Bridge crossed the Tickfaw River. Fresh hoofprints indicated a large body of cavalry had passed east just a short time earlier. Dense underbrush, however, obscured the Tickfaw crossing a few miles distant, and the road itself disappeared from view beyond a sharp bend approaching the bridge. Suspecting an ambush, Grierson sent his Butternut Guerrillas to scout the bridge, while the main column remained concealed behind the tree-covered bend in the road. Surby learned from Confederate pickets that a cavalry force was bivouacked along the river bank. At that moment, a shot rang out behind him. Seizing the disconcerted Rebels, Surby rushed them to the rear, where he learned that the alarm had sounded during a chance encounter between Union and Confederate stragglers at a nearby plantation house. Undaunted by the close call, Surby's scouts returned to the place where they had stumbled upon the Rebel outpost. With similar luck, they captured Confederate Captain E.A. Scott and his orderly, who revealed that De Baun's 115-man battalion had reached the river crossing scarcely 15 minutes before the raiders' arrival. Alarmed by the same shot that had alerted Surby, De Baun had deployed his dismounted troopers in an ambush. Although aware of each other's presence, Grierson and De Baun both maneuvered blindly because of the sharp bend in the road. Grierson hoped to avoid an engagement; much of his success so far had been the result of surprise and subterfuge. Reluctant to waste precious time and lives, he planned to approach, show a bold front, feel out the enemy's strength, and then pass rapidly around his flank. He erred, however, in choosing Blackburn of the 7th to execute this delicate maneuver. Itching for a fight, the brash and excitable officer called to Surby: Bring along your scouts and follow me, and I'll see where those Rebels are. Spurring their horses, Surby and three Butternuts dashed off in pursuit. Dressed in full Federal uniform and rapidly outpacing his escort, the burly Blackburn seemed oblivious to the scattered gunfire his approach to the Tickfaw crossing summoned. The fire increased as the Federal horses pounded across the narrow plank bridge. Blackburn's mount, pierced by a dozen balls, collapsed, pinning its wounded rider to the ground. Close behind Blackburn, another horse reeled and fell, throwing a butternut-clad Yankee hard against the wooden planks. A ball burned across the neck of Surby's mount and buried itself in the sergeant's thigh. Clinging desperately to his reins, he wheeled around and retreated across the bullet-pocked bridge. In his dash to safety, Surby passed Lieutenant William H. Stiles racing forward with the 12-man vanguard of the Federal column. Charging blindly, the group made it to the opposite bank of the river before reeling under a deadly volley from unseen carbines. A second assault likewise withered under the galling enemy fire, and the battered Yankee troopers scrambled back across the river. Grierson soon arrived on the field, dismounted and deployed companies A and D of the 7th to the left and right of the bridge. While those men pinned down the Rebel marksmen, Smith's artillery began firing round shot and canister into the woods. When the replying volleys abated, Union skirmishers advanced across Wall's Bridge. The outnumbered Confederates had abandoned their position. The fierce skirmish had cost Grierson one dead and five wounded. Two of the latter, including the overzealous Blackburn, were mortally wounded. De Baun placed the Confederate loss at 1 captain, 1 lieutenant, and 6 privates, all captured by Surby's scouts. As a burial detail interred Private George Reinhold of the 7th regiment's Company G, soldiers carefully removed the wounded to the nearby Newman plantation. Surgeon Erastus D. Yule of the 2d Iowa helped Surby's comrades replace the injured sergeant's butternut garb with a proper Federal uniform, at least ensuring the clever scout would not be executed as a spy. By crossing the Tickfaw at Wall's Bridge and recrossing it again at a ford some six miles downstream, Grierson's men were able to cut diagonally across a westward bend in the river. After they made the second crossing and turned southeast, just two major obstacles stood between them and the Union lines at Baton Rouge: the rain-gorged Amite and Comite Rivers. The troopers reined up that evening a mile short of the Amite River bottom as two butternut-clad riders advanced toward them along the darkened road. A calm whisper identified the grime-covered scouts as Confederate couriers bearing dispatches for Port Hudson. In an instant, the pair of chagrined Rebels slipped silently and securely into Union hands. With a bright moon lighting the way, the Federal cavalrymen crossed the Amite River at the Williams Bridge. Grierson urged the column steadily forward while a company of the 6th filed off to disperse enemy cavalry camped nearby. An ear-shattering volley sent 75 partially clad Confederates scrambling for their lives. After collecting a handful of prisoners, the troopers raced to overtake the moving column. As they pushed on through the early morning darkness toward the Comite River, the jaded cavalrymen began to drift off to sleep. Men by the score, and I think by fifties, were riding sound asleep in their saddles, Captain Forbes recalled. The horses, excessively tired and hungry, would stray out of the road and thrust their noses to the earth in hopes of finding something to eat. A handful of officers and enlisted men passed up and down the flanks of the ragged column, riding herd on straying men and mounts. Daylight on May 2 found the Yankee raiders approaching Big Sandy Creek, seven miles east of the Comite River ford. As sleeping soldiers jerked stiffly upright in their saddles, the scouts spotted 150 tents dotting the opposite bank. A quick charge by two companies of the 6th secured the camp. Most of the men were off in Mississippi looking for Grierson's raiders; of the 40 who had remained to guard the crossing, all but one fell into Yankee hands. While the 6th stayed behind to destroy tents and equipment, Grierson pressed on with the 7th toward the Comite. Captured officers told Grierson of the Confederate guard at Roberts' Ford on the Comite. Yankee scouts confirmed the presence of an encampment amidst a cluster of trees on the river's eastern bank. The Rebels seemed oblivious to the approach of Yankee cavalry. On the morning of May 2, at about 9 a.m., I was surprised by a body of the enemy, under command of Colonel Grierson, numbering upward of 1,000 men, wrote Captain B.F. Bryan, the Confederate commander at Roberts' Ford. They made a dash and surrounded me on all sides before I was aware that they were other than our own troops, their advanced guard being dressed in citizens' garb. A dozen shots from Yankee carbines transformed the tranquil grove into a scene of chaos. In the confusion, Bryan escaped by hiding in the moss-draped branches of a nearby tree. Most of my men being on picket, and having only about 30 of them immediately in camp, he reported, there was no possible chance of my making a stand. Few of his soldiers escaped; he assessed his loss at 38 men, 38 horses, 2 mules, 37 pistols, 2,000 rounds of cartridges, and our cooking utensils. The Yankee raiders forded the swollen Comite half a mile upstream, and Grierson ordered them into bivouac four miles outside the Union lines at Baton Rouge. Sleep came easily to the exhausted troopers, but their commander, having come this far, felt he could hardly afford to relax his vigilance. After posting a guard, the former music teacher proceeded to a nearby house, where he astonished the occupants by sitting down and playing upon a piano which I found in the parlor, Grierson recalled. In that manner, I managed to stay awake, while my soldiers were enjoying themselves by relaxation, sleep, and quiet rest. A breathless orderly interrupted his recital with news of enemy skirmishers advancing from the direction of Baton Rouge. Confident that the enemy must be part of Major General Nathaniel Banks's Federal command in that city, Grierson rose from his piano stool and rode out to meet his visitors. Dismounting and pulling a handkerchief from his pocket, the mud-spattered Grierson hailed Captain J. Franklin Godfrey and two companies of the Federal 1st Louisiana Cavalry. The raiders had reached Union-controlled territory. At 3:00 p.m. on May 2, a cloud of dust rose over the Bayou Sara Road. Citizens and soldiers flocked to the streets of Baton Rouge, eager to catch the first view of the daring raiders. With sabers drawn, the dusty troopers of the 6th Illinois Cavalry rode four abreast through the crowd-lined avenues. Close behind, the four guns of Smith's battery wobbled ludicrously on makeshift wheels that had been improvised to replace those broken during the expedition. A hundred or more morose prisoners trudged in the wake of the swaying artillery pieces and, behind them, 500 former slaves in every conceivable style of plantation dress and undress, each one mounted, and leading from two to three other horses, and many of them armed with shotguns and hunting rifles. Behind the contrabands (slaves who had fled from their owners to Union lines) lumbered a ragtag assortment of wheeled vehicles. Aboard were the sick and wounded, most suffering from painfully swollen legs caused by extended riding. Colonel Prince's 7th Illinois, also in columns of fours and with drawn sabers, brought up the rear. With the cheers of the flag-waving crowd echoing off the cobblestones, Grierson's motley band circled the city square and proceeded to water their horses in the Mississippi. As the sun descended, the tired, dirty cavalrymen settled into camp in a fragrant blooming magnolia grove. Grierson slipped off to well-earned rest. In 16 days of nearly continuous riding, he had led his men on a 600-mile path down the length of Mississippi. They had disrupted between 50 and 60 miles of vital rail and telegraph lines leading from Confederate headquarters at Jackson east to Alabama and Georgia and south to the river strongholds of Port Hudson, Grand Gulf, and Port Gibson. Grierson estimated the cost to the enemy at 100 dead or wounded, 500 prisoners captured and paroled, 1,000 horses and mules confiscated, 3,000 stand of arms, and huge quantities of army stores and other government property seized and destroyed. Even the Federal raiders were astonished at the relative ease with which they had passed through what was presumed to be the armed heartland of the Confederacy. In spite of the enemy's superior numbers and intimate knowledge of roads and terrain, Grierson's cavalry had encountered only token resistance. The entire loss sustained by the two Illinois regiments amounted to three killed, seven wounded, and five left along the route. All the while, Grierson's mysterious movements had confounded Confederate commanders and diverted cavalry to the state's interior during the Union army's crucial movement across the Mississippi for the final assault on Vicksburg. Notified of Grierson's success through Southern newspapers, Grant pronounced the expedition one of the most brilliant cavalry exploits of the war and predicted that it will be handed down in history as an example to be imitated. Equally important was the effect of Grierson's raid on Confederate morale. The Federal invasion heightened popular distrust of military and civilian authority and threw Mississippians into a frenzy. Grierson has knocked the heart out of the State, an anonymous Unionist reported. To a Northern public weary of a long winter of inactivity, news of the brilliant cavalry feat came from the west like an invigorating breeze of spring air. You have only yet received the first installment of events that will electrify the world, announced the New Orleans correspondent of the New York Times. I should not be surprised if the Mississippi should prove, at last, the base of operations by which we can most instantaneously reach the innermost heart of the mighty rebellion. Fresh from a firsthand tour behind the Rebel lines, Grierson spoke directly to the earnest hopes of his fellow citizens when he informed a New England chaplain, The Confederacy is an empty shell. Two more years of bloody warfare lay ahead before the Union armies would finally pierce that shell, but Grierson's remarkable raid showed the way. This article was written by JBruce J. Dinges and originally published in the February 1996 issue of Civil War Times Magazine. For more great articles, be sure to subscribe to Civil War Times magazine today! </p> 19540032 2014-10-11 06:21:00 2014-10-11 06:21:00 open open america-s-civil-war-colonel-benjamin-grierson-s-cavalry-raid-in-1863-originally-published-by-civil-war-times-magazine-published-online-september--19540032 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan title-19447922 http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/09/22/tuesday-sep-16-2014-09-45-am-pdt-robert-reich-19447922/ Mon, 22 Sep 2014 07:14:38 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Tuesday, Sep 16, 2014 09:45 AM PDT Robert Reich: Harvard Business School is complicit in America’s widening inequality The former secretary of labor calls out the famed university for the way it's educating our country's future CEOs Robert Reich, http://www.salon.com/2014/09/16/robert_reich_harvard_business_school_is_ruining_america_partner/ Robert Reich: Harvard Business School is complicit in America's widening inequalityRobert Reich No institution is more responsible for educating the CEOs of American corporations than Harvard Business School – inculcating in them a set of ideas and principles that have resulted in a pay gap between CEOs and ordinary workers that’s gone from 20-to-1 fifty years ago to almost 300-to-1 today. A survey, released on September 6, of 1,947 Harvard Business School alumni showed them far more hopeful about the future competitiveness of American firms than about the future of American workers. As the authors of the survey conclude, such a divergence is unsustainable. Without a large and growing middle class, Americans won’t have the purchasing power to keep U.S. corporations profitable, and global demand won’t fill the gap. Moreover, the widening gap eventually will lead to political and social instability. As the authors put it, “any leader with a long view understands that business has a profound stake in the prosperity of the average American.” Unfortunately, the authors neglected to include a discussion about how Harvard Business School should change what it teaches future CEOs with regard to this “profound stake.” HBS has made some changes over the years in response to earlier crises, but has not gone nearly far enough with courses that critically examine the goals of the modern corporation and the role that top executives play in achieving them. A half-century ago, CEOs typically managed companies for the benefit of all their stakeholders – not just shareholders, but also their employees, communities, and the nation as a whole. “The job of management,” proclaimed Frank Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, in a 1951 address, “is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly affected interest groups
stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large. Business managers are gaining professional status partly because they see in their work the basic responsibilities [to the public] that other professional men have long recognized as theirs.” This view was a common view among chief executives of the time. Fortune magazine urged CEOs to become “industrial statesmen.” And to a large extent, that’s what they became. advertisement For thirty years after World War II, as American corporations prospered, so did the American middle class. Wages rose and benefits increased. American companies and American citizens achieved a virtuous cycle of higher profits accompanied by more and better jobs. But starting in the late 1970s, a new vision of the corporation and the role of CEOs emerged – prodded by corporate “raiders,” hostile takeovers, junk bonds, and leveraged buyouts. Shareholders began to predominate over other stakeholders. And CEOs began to view their primary role as driving up share prices. To do this, they had to cut costs – especially payrolls, which constituted their largest expense. Corporate statesmen were replaced by something more like corporate butchers, with their nearly exclusive focus being to “cut out the fat” and “cut to the bone.” In consequence, the compensation packages of CEOs and other top executives soared, as did share prices. But ordinary workers lost jobs and wages, and many communities were abandoned. Almost all the gains from growth went to the top. The results were touted as being “efficient,” because resources were theoretically shifted to “higher and better uses,” to use the dry language of economics. But the human costs of this transformation have been substantial, and the efficiency benefits have not been widely shared. Most workers today are no better off than they were thirty years ago, adjusted for inflation. Most are less economically secure. So it would seem worthwhile for the faculty and students of Harvard Business School, as well as those at every other major business school in America, to assess this transformation, and ask whether maximizing shareholder value – a convenient goal now that so many CEOs are paid with stock options – continues to be the proper goal for the modern corporation. Can an enterprise be truly successful in a society becoming ever more divided between a few highly successful people at the top and a far larger number who are not thriving? For years, some of the nation’s most talented young people have flocked to Harvard Business School and other elite graduate schools of business in order to take up positions at the top rungs of American corporations, or on Wall Street, or management consulting. Their educations represent a substantial social investment; and their intellectual and creative capacities, a precious national and global resource. But given that so few in our society – or even in other advanced nations – have shared in the benefits of what our largest corporations and Wall Street entities have achieved, it must be asked whether the social return on such an investment has been worth it, and whether these graduates are making the most of their capacities in terms of their potential for improving human well-being. These questions also merit careful examination at Harvard and other elite universities. If the answer is not a resounding yes, perhaps we should ask whether these investments and talents should be directed toward “higher and better” uses. Robert Reich, one of the nation’s leading experts on work and the economy, is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. Time Magazine has named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written 13 books, including his latest best-seller, “Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future;” “The Work of Nations,” which has been translated into 22 languages; and his newest, an e-book, “Beyond Outrage.” His syndicated columns, television appearances, and public radio commentaries reach millions of people each week. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, and Chairman of the citizen’s group Common Cause. His new movie "Inequality for All" is in Theaters. His widely-read blog can be found at www.robertreich.org. [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19447922 2014-09-22 07:14:38 2014-09-22 07:14:38 open open tuesday-sep-16-2014-09-45-am-pdt-robert-reich-19447922 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Your guide to Jack the Ripper http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/09/13/your-guide-to-jack-the-ripper-19395834/ Sat, 13 Sep 2014 19:22:26 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan Your guide to Jack the Ripper An 'armchair historian' claims to have identified Jack the Ripper as a 23-year-old Polish immigrant named Aaron Kosminski. Here, Clive Emsley and Alex Werner reveal the life and times of the Victorian murderer, and tell you everything you need to know about the yet unsolved murder cases. This article was first published in the May 2008 issue of BBC History Magazine Monday 8th September 2014 Submitted by Emma McFarnon - Jack the Ripper victim found - Illustrated Police News (Museum in Docklands) The murders Within just a few short weeks, the Ripper slashed and mutilated five prostitutes in London’s East End Shortly before 4am on 31 August 1888, a cart driver found the body of Mary Ann ‘Polly’ Nichols in Buck’s Row, close to Bethnal Green. She was on her back. Her skirt had been pulled up round her waist. Her throat had been slashed so deeply that she had nearly been decapitated, and there were deep cuts to her abdomen. This was the first of the Whitechapel Murders that are commonly attributed to Jack the Ripper. Just over a week later, at about 6am on 8 September, the body of Annie Chapman was discovered in a yard in Hanbury Street. Her injuries were similar to those of Polly Nichols, but some of her internal organs had also been cut away and removed; her small intestines lay by her right shoulder. On 30 September came ‘the double event’. Elizabeth ‘Long Liz’ Stride was found first, but her injuries were not as severe as those of the earlier victims; the assumption was that the killer had been disturbed during his butchery. And if that was the case he had quickly found a second victim. Catherine Eddowes was killed soon after, and not far from Stride. Her intestines had been ripped out and the killer had taken away her left kidney and uterus. "Central to the fascination that surrounds Jack is the fact he’s never been caught" Saturday 10 November was the day of the Lord Mayor’s Show in London. What should have been one of the highlights of the capital’s social calendar was marred by the revelations of a fifth, even more horrendous murder. Whereas the previous victims had been killed in the street, Mary Kelly’s body was found on a bed in a shabby lodging house in Miller’s Court. Indoors, the killer had been able to take his time. Kelly was savagely mutilated and body parts and internal organs were left on a table beside the bed. Other killings were linked with Jack the Ripper – both at the time and in later years – but these five murders are now generally acknowledged as the sum total of his grisly work. All of them took place in a confined area of London’s East End – much less than a square mile. All of the victims were poor women, and each one of them had worked, or was still working, as a prostitute. Jack the Ripper was not the first serial killer. He was not the first notorious sexual predator, nor was he the first killer or sexual assailant to cause a panic far beyond his area of activity. But Jack was never caught. And it is this that has probably been central to the fascination that continues to surround him. Contemporaries of the murders, and people ever since, have filled in the blanks to suit themselves. They’ve used the killings to develop theories about the state of society and the potential for male violence, and even to live out their own personal fantasies of Jack. The big question: who was Jack? The finger has been pointed at a succession of possible Jacks, including Joseph Barnett, a Billingsgate porter and former lover of Mary Kelly, and HRH the Duke of Clarence, Queen Victoria’s eldest grandson, who died young in 1892 following a life of sexual excess. The novelist Patricia Cornwell spent considerable sums trying to prove her theory that Jack was the artist Walter Sickert, basing her claims on his paintings of a nude woman and a man in a house in Camden. "Revd Osborne suggested 'female hands' were behind the murders" Other suspects have included school teacher Montague Druitt, whose body was fished from the Thames shortly after the last murder; Aaron Kosminski, a Polish hairdresser; and Michael Ostrog, a mad Russian doctor. Another doctor, Thomas Neill Cream, has also been accused. Cream committed seven murders on both sides of the Atlantic between 1877 and 1892 and his victims were often seeking abortions or were prostitutes. Cream was executed for murder in England but his instrument of choice was strychnine, not a knife. Could Jack have been Jill? Some contemporaries even suggested that the killer was a woman. Jill the Ripper seems unlikely given that such extreme violence has almost always been perpetrated by men. But only 15 years before the Whitechapel Murders, Mary Ann Cotton had been executed in Durham Gaol. She was convicted of poisoning her seven-year-old stepson, though another 20 family members, including her mother and three husbands, also appear to have been her victims. The Revd Lord Sidney Godolphin Osborne, an earnest, evangelical paternalist, wrote a series of letters to The Times during the period of the murders. He lamented the gulf between rich and poor, and equated Whitechapel with a huge cesspit. He also suggested that “female hands” might be behind the murders, since the unfortunates of the district were well known for their jealousy, their violence, and for possessing the strength necessary for such action. Was Jack a foreigner? Others suggested that Jack was a foreigner. They were convinced that no Englishman would do such things. The press conjured with images of Indian thugs (bandit worshippers of the goddess Kali, crushed by the British in the 1830s), of Malays running amok, of North American Pawnees “drunk with blood” and of atrocities from “the wilds of Hungary”. The recent influx of Jews to Britain, fleeing oppression in Eastern Europe, combined with the undercurrent of anti-Semitism in Britain to foster the belief among many that a Jew was the killer. The Star newspaper almost found itself defending a libel suit when it named John ‘leather apron’ Pizer, a Jewish boot maker, as the killer. The idea that Jack was Jewish received some support from a chalk inscription found on a wall close to part of Catherine Eddowes’s bloodstained apron. There were several versions of what the inscription said, the most syntactically correct being: “The Jews shall not be blamed for nothing”. Sir Charles Warren, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, ordered that it be washed off for fear that it might provoke anti-Semitic disorder. The murders echoed the false, but popular medieval fears that Jews ritually killed Gentile children. There were also wild stories of Jews who, after sex with Gentile women, needed to purge themselves with the blood of those women. Such stories sparked panics in other parts of Europe during the 19th century, many in the 1890s. The Berlin-based Association against anti-Semitism counted 79 between 1891 and 1900; about half were in the Austro-Hungarian empire and another fifth in imperial Germany. Among the best-known is the accusation of the murder of a five-year-old boy levelled at a Jewish butcher, Adolf Buschoff, in the Rhenish town of Xanten. There was little evidence, but the authorities found themselves forced to try him. Buschoff was acquitted but he, and most of the Jews in Xanten, thought it best to quit the town for good. Did life imitate art? The Whitechapel Murders came just two years after Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. A stage version, with Richard Mansfield in the roles of the physician and his monstrous alter ego, opened to packed audiences just a few weeks before the murders. To many, the killings suggested that fiction had become reality and this led to the play being taken off in October – and Mansfield himself has been identified as a possible Jack. Moreover, Stevenson’s book contributed to the idea that Jack was a toff in top hat and silk cape. Perhaps he too was a doctor – for some, the manner in which organs were removed from the victims suggested a knowledge of anatomy. The way in which he, or someone else, played with the police, sending them letters ‘From Hell’, also pointed to a man of ability. Did Jack write the letters ‘from Hell’? Hundreds of letters were sent to police and the press purporting to be written by the murderer. The two letters signed by Jack the Ripper are, like almost everything about the killer, shrouded in controversy. There is evidence to suggest that they were indeed written by Jack – one of them mentioned slicing off part of a future victim’s ear, something that was done to Catherine Eddowes after the letter was sent. Newspapers printed the letters and the police took them sufficiently seriously to post facsimiles of them in the metropolis. But some senior police officials later suggested that the letters were the work of a journalist keen to add yet more sensation to the story. After all, the killer may have cut off Eddowes’s ear after reading the facsimile letters. Was Jack an original? Jack the Ripper is among the most infamous murderers in criminal history. Yet he is far from unique, both as a savage attacker of women and a serial killer – as the following cases prove: The London monster "The wound that he made in this young lady’s hip, Was nine inches long, and near four inches deep; But before that this monster had made use of force, He insulted their ears with obscene discourse." From March 1788 to June 1790 a ‘Monster’ terrorised London. Some 50 women were abused, cut and stabbed in the street and young Welshman, Rhynwick Williams, an artificial flower maker, was eventually arrested and tried at the Old Bailey for the crimes. Following a legal dispute about what the offence actually entailed Williams was found guilty and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment – an exceptionally long sentence by the standards of the late 18th century. The Ratcliffe Highway murders On the night of 7 December 1811, Timothy Marr, a linen draper, was found battered to death in his shop on the Ratcliffe Highway in East London. Battered and stabbed close by were his wife, their four-month-old baby and the shop-boy. Two weeks later John Williamson, publican of the Kings Arms in New Gravel Lane just off the Ratcliffe Highway, was also murdered with his wife and maidservant. John Williams, a young seaman, was arrested on suspicion of the murders and allegedly committed suicide in Coldbath Fields Prison. Doubts about his guilt remain, but he was buried at a crossroads with a stake through his heart. In the 120 years since the Whitechapel Murders, the spectre of Jack the Ripper has returned to haunt the public’s imagination on numerous occasions. No more so than when a hoaxer sent police letters claiming to be the Yorkshire Ripper and calling himself ‘Jack.’ Two other cases from the 20th century are worth noting for their contrasts to the Jack the Ripper murders and for showing how quickly they can be forgotten: The Halifax slasher During the early part of the 20th century there were several instances of men creeping up behind girls and cutting off the long plaits that were the fashion of the day. Once or twice there were also much more serious slashings. The best known occurred in Halifax in 1926 and 1927, and again in 1938. On the latter occasion the local newspaper, the Courier, offered a £25 reward for the arrest of “The Halifax Slasher”. The community mobilised behind the police: women armed themselves with hat-pins and men with a variety of weapons. The panic was over in a matter of days, however, when several of the victims confessed to self-inflicted wounds. The blackout ripper In the second week of February 1942, four women were found strangled and savagely mutilated in their Soho flats. Later that week there were attacks on two other women, but the attacker ran off on the first occasion when he was disturbed and on the second because his victim fought back successfully. The attacker, Gordon Frederick Cummings, a cadet officer in the RAF, was easily and quickly identified. He was tried for murder at the Old Bailey the following April, found guilty and executed in June. Did the press sensationalise the murders? Lurid violence had long been popular with the media. Papers made much of ‘last dying speeches’ at public executions, which invariably came headed with a bloodthirsty image of the felon’s crime. When newspapers first became popular in England during the 18th century, editors quickly recognised the value of crime and violence to maintain or boost sales. Victorian papers had a range of titles devoted to sensational stories and ’orrible murders and, from the 1860s, increasingly used bold and eye-catching headlines. One of the leading practitioners of sensationalist journalism at the time of the murders was WT Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. In 1885 Stead’s reforming zeal, and desire to sell papers, led him to launch a campaign to combat child prostitution. It was a success, but it landed Stead in gaol. Interestingly, Stead refused to print all the gory details of the mutilations inflicted on the Ripper’s victims; instead he used the case to call for a ‘Court of Conscience’ among the media. But other journalists and newspaper editors took full advantage of the murders to shock and thrill their readers. While Stead urged restraint, they used the coroner’s inquests to push at the boundaries of what was considered decent in the descriptions of both the injuries and the women’s bodies. At the same time, the press speculated extensively on the identity of the killer and the nature of the city in which he operated. London was the centre of an empire; it was the capital of what the British still liked to think of as the workshop of the world, and of a nation with a legal and constitutional system that was a model for the world. The Whitechapel Murders encouraged Liberal elements in the press to probe the darker corners of this dazzling metropolis and to urge social reform. As explained above, it also encouraged nationalist elements to conclude that only a foreigner could commit such heinous crimes. It is worth emphasising here that the 19th‑century British press was not unique in the way that it revelled in violent crime. In 1894 a Madrid-based socialist newspaper protested at the way in which the press was less interested in education than in satisfying “gross appetites by providing
spiced up fare”. In France, popular papers such as Le Petit Parisien and Le Petit Journal filled their pages with grisly accounts of offenders like Jean-Baptiste Troppmann, who slaughtered the entire Kinck family of husband, pregnant wife and six children, and Albert Soleilland, who raped and murdered an 11-year old girl. Papers everywhere were illustrated with drawings of knives flashing, guns blazing and blood splashing. In fact, it wasn’t until the early 20th century that such graphic accounts began to disappear from European newspapers – either as a result of the carnage of the First World War, or the increasing use of photography. What was the East End like at the time of the Ripper? Drunkenness and prostitution were rife in an area characterised by abject poverty, says Alex Werner The East End was a vast, densely inhabited working-class district. At Aldgate, the eastern extremity of the City of London, the road forked into two highways: Whitechapel Road, dating to Roman times, linked London to Colchester; and the Commercial Road, built in the early 19th century, connected the docks at Blackwall and Poplar with the City. Off these two major London thoroughfares, in Whitechapel and Spitalfields, there existed a labyrinth of narrow courts and alleyways with many lodging houses and small workshops. Immigrants had settled here for centuries; in the 17th and 18th century, Huguenots, the Irish, Jews and Germans had all made the East End their home. During the late 1880s they were joined by thousands of Jews escaping oppression in Central and Eastern Europe, many of whom settled in the vicinity of Middlesex Street (Petticoat Lane) and Wentworth Street. Even before the brutal murders of 1888, a spotlight had been thrown on the abject poverty of east London. Journalists painted a lurid picture of the area, stressing its criminality and moral degradation. In such a world, drunkenness was common, offering some form of escape and, on the streets and behind doors, it often led to violence. Prostitution was also widespread, as poor women sold their bodies to pay for alcohol, tobacco or a bed for the night. Charities descended on the area and tried to help those most in need. Slums were cleared and artisans’ dwellings erected. As well as bringing ‘the word of God’, religious organisations like the Salvation Army took ‘practical Christianity’ to the East End. They built night shelters, ran dispensaries and soup kitchens, and visited slum-dwellers in their homes. Employment in the nearby docks and markets was often casual or seasonal in nature. Thousands of men, women and children toiled away for long hours and for little pay in the sweated trades, ruthlessly exploited by sub-contractors. In fact, the low pay and appalling conditions at Bryant & May’s match factory drove its matchgirls to strike in the summer of 1888. Meanwhile, periods of economic depression, such as in 1886 and 1887, resulted in mass unemployment and the threat of starvation. Some improvements to Whitechapel and Spitalfields followed Jack the Ripper’s crimes. Slums like Flower and Dean Street were cleared and replaced by model dwellings; common lodging houses declined and with them, prostitution and crime. In the 1890s London County Council began to replace slums with purpose-built council housing. However, poverty and overcrowding persisted, and in 1901 Dorset Street was still widely being described as “The Worst Street in London”, much to the fury of local inhabitants. Alex Werner is co-curator of the Museum in Docklands exhibition, Jack the Ripper and the East End Did the police investigate thoroughly? Sections of the press, particularly the papers linked to Liberal and Radical politics, were highly critical of the police and the “defective detectives” for failing to find Jack. Yet the police probably did all that was possible. Forensic science was still in its infancy, and it was to be over 10 years before fingerprints were used as evidence in court – always assuming that any fingerprints could have been found and identified at any of the murder scenes. The police presence was increased in the district where the murders occurred, and men in plain clothes circulated both in the hope of collecting information and preventing further attacks. The police were urged to use bloodhounds to track the killer, yet such experiments were not particularly successful. The advocates of the bloodhounds insisted that they were still the answer, and sections of the press found yet another stick with which to beat the police. Part of the problem was the reluctance of the police to give information to the media; it was to be another 40 years before a press bureau was established at Scotland Yard. And with no official intelligence to feed on, the press were drawn to the wilder and more sensational theories which, of course, helped to sell newspapers. General Sir Charles Warren, the relatively new commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, did not help matters. Much of the press condemned his decision to remove the graffiti from the wall near the site of Eddowes’s murder on the grounds that he had denied the investigation the only genuine clue left by the killer. Whether this was true, of course, remains an open question. "A tactless soldier like Warren was not the ideal man to be police commissioner" Warren had a distinguished military career both before and after his time as commissioner. He was also an archaeologist of some significance and, in his final years, he was an eager supporter of Baden Powell’s Boy Scout Movement. He had been appointed to the police in March 1887 to restore the force’s morale and public confidence in the aftermath of rioting in and around Trafalgar Square following a demonstration against unemployment. When trouble appeared likely again in Trafalgar Square in November 1887, Warren responded with ruthless efficiency deploying troops to back up his police in a violent confrontation that resulted in one fatality and many injured, and that became known as Bloody Sunday. Among Liberals and Radicals, his behaviour revived fears that the police were becoming militarised. He also clashed with the Home Office over the manner in which he should command his police. The final straw came just after the last of the Whitechapel Murders when Warren published an article outlining his ideas, condemning the press and criticising government action. The permanent under secretary at the Home Office declared him to be “in a state of complete insubordination” and Warren’s resignation followed soon after. Probably any commissioner would have had difficulty in dealing with the Ripper murders, but a tactless soldier like Warren was not the ideal man for the job. The continuing fascination The fascination with Jack and his killings spread far beyond Britain. The late 19th-century French press was obsessed with murders by human “monsters” and “ogres” and ‘Jack l’Eventreur’ remains a well-known figure in France. Lulu, the femme fatale of the German playwright Frank Wedekind’s Earth Spirit (1895) and Pandora’s Box (1904) – as well as of GW Pabst’s film Pandora’s Box and Alban Berg’s opera Lulu – is killed by Jack. George Grosz, the celebrated artist of the seamy and violent side of Weimar Germany, had himself photographed as Jack. And the notion of a stealthy, unknown killer with a knife, preying on the weak and vulnerable – especially young women – has been meat and drink to the cinema ever since it began. Jack the Ripper was the first celebrity serial killer who appeared to threaten people that were unknown to him. Had he been caught, his notoriety would probably never have been so great. It is the blank of who he really was that adds to the fascination and enables everyone, of every age, to remake him anew. [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19395834 2014-09-13 19:22:26 2014-09-13 19:22:26 open open your-guide-to-jack-the-ripper-19395834 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Failure in Gaza Assaf Sharon September 25, 2014 Issue http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/09/07/failure-in-gaza-assaf-sharon-september-25-2014-issue-19349161/ Sun, 07 Sep 2014 20:40:10 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan Failure in Gaza Assaf Sharon September 25, 2014 Issue The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long ago become a shouting match over moral superiority. With seventy Israelis and more than two thousand Palestinians, most of them civilians, dead, the latest round of violence in Gaza, too, is being analyzed and discussed mostly on ethical grounds. But as fighting goes on, moral condemnation will likely do little to prevent the next round. Understanding how we got to this point—and, more importantly, how we can move beyond it—calls for an examination of the political events that led up to the operation and the political context in which it took place. 1. In Israel, endless controversy over Gaza has overlooked one question: How did we get here in the first place? Why, after a considerable period of relative calm, did Hamas resume rocket fire into Israel? Benjamin Netanyahu; drawing by John Springs Before the current operation began, Hamas was at one of the lowest points in its history. Its alliance with Syria and Iran, its two main sources of support, had grown weak. Hamas’s ideological and political affinity with the Muslim Brotherhood turned from an asset into a burden, with the downfall of the Brotherhood in Egypt and the rise of its fierce opponent, General Abdel Fatah el-Sisi. Egypt’s closure of the Rafah crossing and the tunnels on its border with Gaza undermined Hamas’s economic infrastructure. In these circumstances, Hamas agreed last April to reconciliation with its political rival Fatah, based on Fatah’s terms. For example, the agreement called for a government of technocrats largely under the control of the Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas. But Benjamin Netanyahu viewed the reconciliation as a threat rather than an opportunity. While the separation of Gaza from the West Bank may not serve Israel’s interest (namely, effective government in the Palestinian Territories), it benefits Netanyahu’s policy of rejecting solutions that would lead to a separate Palestinian state. The reconciliation agreement robbed him of the claim that in the absence of effective rule over Gaza, there is no point in striking a deal with Abbas. Ironically, it was Netanyahu’s own choices that drove Abbas to reconciliation with Hamas. The impending failure of the Mideast peace negotiations led by US Secretary of State John Kerry in 2013 and early 2014 left Abbas with few political options. Talks faltered as Netanyahu allowed increased settlement activity on the West Bank and they finally collapsed when he reneged on his commitment to release Palestinian prisoners. Realizing that talks were doomed, Abbas signed fifteen international agreements as a head of a Palestinian state and struck his reconciliation deal with Hamas, as he said he would. Netanyahu, who never had any intention of making the necessary concessions, as his own statements would later reveal,1 was mainly playing the blame game. He saw the reconciliation with Hamas as an opportunity to criticize the Palestinian president and, according to one of the American diplomats involved in the peace talks, his aides said that “Abbas’s strategy showed that there was no difference between him and the terrorists.” As soon as the reconciliation was announced, Netanyahu launched a public offensive against Palestinian unity and demanded that the international community oppose it. His efforts did not succeed. Israel’s friends in Europe applauded the agreement between Hamas and Fatah. Even the United States announced its intention to cooperate with the unity government, much to Netanyahu’s chagrin. Netanyahu could have chosen a different path.2 He could have used the reconciliation to reinforce Abbas’s position and further destabilize Hamas. He could, in recognition of the agreement, have encouraged Egypt to open its border with Gaza in order to demonstrate to Gazans that the Palestinian Authority offered a better life than Hamas. Instead, Israel prevented the transfer of salaries to 43,000 Hamas officials in Gaza, sending a clear message that Israel would not treat Gaza any differently under the rule of moderate technocrats from the Palestinian Authority. The abduction of three Israeli youths in the West Bank on June 12 gave Netanyahu another opportunity to undermine the reconciliation. Or so he thought. Despite the statement by Khaled Mashal, the Hamas political bureau chief, that the Hamas political leadership did not know of the plans to carry out the abduction, Netanyahu was quick to lay the blame on Hamas, declaring that Israel had “unequivocal proof” that the organization was involved in the abduction. As yet, Israeli authorities have produced no such proof and the involvement of the Hamas leadership in the kidnapping remains unclear. While the individuals suspected of having carried out the kidnapping are associated with Hamas, some of the evidence suggests that they may have been acting on their own initiative and not under the direction of Hamas’s central leadership. Regardless of this, Netanyahu’s response, apparently driven by the ill-advised aim of undermining Palestinian reconciliation, was reckless.3 Determined to achieve by force what he failed to accomplish through diplomacy, Netanyahu not only blamed Hamas, but linked the abduction to Palestinian reconciliation, as if the two events were somehow causally related. “Sadly, this incident illustrates what we have been saying for months,” he stated, “that the alliance with Hamas has extremely grave consequences.” Israeli security forces were in possession of evidence strongly indicating the teens were dead, but withheld this information from the public until July 1, possibly in order to allow time to pursue the campaign against Hamas. On the prime minister’s orders, IDF forces raided Hamas’s civil and welfare offices throughout the West Bank and arrested hundreds of Hamas leaders and operatives. These arrests did not help to locate the abductors or their captives. Among the arrested were fifty-eight Palestinians previously released as part of the deal to return the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been a captive of Hamas since 2006. As part of this ill-conceived operation against Hamas, Israel also mounted air strikes on Hamas facilities in Gaza. Apparently, Hamas did not take an active part in firing rockets for more than two weeks, although it did not prevent other factions in Gaza from firing.4 Only on June 29 or 30 did Hamas restart the rocket bombardment of Israeli territory, which it had not engaged in since November 2012.5 Israel retaliated against Hamas in Gaza and a vicious cycle began. Netanyahu lost control over an escalation he had instigated. In his badly misjudged eagerness to blame Abbas and punish him for reconciling with Hamas, Netanyahu turned a vicious but local terrorist attack into a runaway crisis. 2. In the first week of July, rockets and mortar shells continued to be fired from Gaza into Israel. Hamas still denied any involvement in the abduction of the three Israeli youths and declared its commitment to the understandings reached in November 2012, following an eight-day Israeli operation in Gaza, according to which Hamas agreed to stop rocket fire into Israel in exchange for Israel reopening border crossings and allowing goods to be imported to Gaza. This time, after the initial operation against Hamas, Israel was clearly seeking a cease-fire, but refused the terms set by Hamas: releasing the rearrested Palestinians from the Shalit deal and easing the restrictions imposed on Gaza since 2007. Instead, Israel believed it could force Hamas to accept the Egyptian-brokered agreement for an immediate cease-fire on July 4. However, that assumption was based on an inaccurate evaluation of Hamas’s position, interests, and capacities, and the mutual fire continued. On July 8, Israel officially launched “Operation Protective Edge” with air strikes on Gaza. According to Israeli media, one participant in the security cabinet meeting at which the decision was made warned that “Hamas is trying to drag Israel into broader military action. It serves them. Hamas scores ‘points’ when it is hit.” This observation makes the question of the operation’s goals all the more pertinent: What is the purpose of striking an organization that benefits from being attacked? In 2009, as head of the opposition, Netanyahu attacked then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for his weakness and declared that as prime minister, he would bring down Hamas. Similar statements were frequently made by members of the coalition he later formed. The boasting, however, was not backed by Netanyahu’s policy during his five years in office: not only did he not bring down Hamas, he actually strengthened the organization considerably by releasing more than a thousand prisoners into its hands to free Shalit. At the same time, Netanyahu’s government did all it could to weaken Hamas’s political opponent—Fatah, led by Abbas. Even as the current operation began, bringing down Hamas was conspicuously not among its stated aims; instead, Netanyahu offered a vague promise to “restore calm” to southern Israel, while Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon stated that “the aim is zero rockets.” Later, Netanyahu talked of dealing “a tough blow to Hamas” to restore deterrence, while some of his ministers spoke of demilitarizing Gaza—a goal finally adopted by the prime minister three weeks into the operation. The Cabinet member Naftali Bennett, who opposes a Palestinian state, said that the goal should be to “forcefully root out Hamas’ faith in its ability to win.” His colleague in the Cabinet, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, said that the operation must “end
with the IDF controlling the Gaza strip.” No one mentioned the destruction of tunnels as a goal. On July 15 the Cabinet agreed to the cease-fire proposal formulated by Egypt, which was similar to what had been agreed to in the 2012 cease-fire. Hamas rejected the proposal, on the grounds that it did not meet its terms: mainly, “lifting the siege and opening the crossings.” Two days later, thirteen Hamas militants infiltrated Israel through a tunnel near Kibbutz Sufa. In a sudden about-face, the stated goal of the operation became the destruction of tunnels from Gaza into Israel. Since Israel’s statements about its goals were both vague and shifting, it is not surprising that three weeks into the operation, Israeli media reported that “officers on the ground feel that Netanyahu and Ya’alon don’t really know what their objective is.” Lacking clearly defined aims, Israel was repeatedly dragged into situations created by the other side. Having misread the situation, Israel failed to adequately prepare for Hamas’s response to the arrests and assaults on the organization’s institutions. Instead, the government dallied until it felt it was forced to respond with a broad aerial assault. Even then, it was clear that the government did not desire a ground invasion. That is why it agreed to a cease-fire without resolving the tunnel issue. It was only after Hamas rejected the proposal that Israel launched a ground invasion into the eastern parts of Gaza. Yet again, Netanyahu’s expectations would be frustrated. What was supposed to be a short, focused attack failed to achieve its goals: on July 20, Defense Minister Ya’alon said that it would take “two or three days” to destroy the tunnels. The job was said to be completed only two weeks later. sharon_2-092514.tif Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images Palestinians watching the removal of rubble after Israeli air strikes destroyed the building across the street, Gaza City, August 26, 2014 False assumptions, miscalculations, and obsolete conceptions robbed Israel of initiative. Lacking clear aims, Israel was dragged, by its own actions, into a confrontation it did not seek and did not control. Israel was merely stumbling along, with no strategy, chasing events instead of dictating them. What emerged as the operative aim was simply “to hit Hamas,” which for the troops translates as a license for extensive and unchecked use of force. Such aimless display of military power resulted in much unnecessary violence, though it was also true that Hamas rockets were often fired from civilian centers. Under pressure from politicians, the military was encouraged to carry out actions whose primary purpose was to satisfy a need for vengeance—a vengeance the very same Israeli politicians tried to arouse in the Israeli public. One example is the bombing of the residences of Hamas’s high-ranking officials—acts that security experts describe as completely ineffectual. Another example is the careless and possibly criminal bombing of UN schools on three separate occasions—schools in which there was apparently no evidence found of Hamas weapons. This strategic confusion led Yuval Diskin, the previous head of the Israel Security Agency, to say, three weeks into the operation, that “Israel is now an instrument in the hands of Hamas.” 3. On August 26 an Egyptian proposal for a “cease-fire
unlimited in time” was accepted by both sides. While the details are not yet public, it seems that any stable agreement will involve significant easing of the siege, as Hamas demanded from the beginning. Even President Obama, who supported Israel’s offensive throughout, now says the blockade must be lifted. The deal ultimately reached will probably not be very different from the one that could have been achieved from the start. What the government presents as its main accomplishment is the destruction of the offensive tunnels into Israel. These pose a genuine security threat, and eliminating them would certainly be a notable achievement. Yet it is clear that this was not the objective at the beginning of the operation, and the degree to which this goal has been achieved is doubtful. As the operation’s objective shifted to the tunnels following the infiltration of Palestinians through one of them on July 17, it seemed as if the threat of tunnels caught everyone by surprise. Only two days earlier, Israel had been willing to accept a cease-fire deal despite having done nothing about the tunnels. In fact, the security establishment was well aware of the tunnels and the threat they pose. Prior to Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, soldiers were killed in a number of attacks using tunnels in Gaza. In June 2006, Gilad Shalit was abducted by militants who entered Israel through just such a tunnel. In October 2013, a tunnel was found near Kibbut Ein Hashlosha, and in March of this year, another tunnel was discovered in Israeli territory, close to the border with Gaza. Defense officials cautioned many times in recent years that the danger of infiltration by tunnels was real, and one high-ranking officer explicitly stated that “the IDF knew of the existence of forty tunnels before the [current] operation began.” Yet the existence of tunnels was not seen as a reason for major operations. Ironically, the most serious threat to Israel’s security from Gaza (after the successful deployment of the electronic shield “Iron Dome”) was all but ignored until the July 17 infiltration. When ground forces entered Gaza, what they found was a Palestinian version of the tunnels used in Vietnam by the Viet Cong. Since Hamas was out-numbered and outgunned, its strategy, like that of other guerrilla forces before it, was to lure its enemy into subterranean warfare where its relative weakness was somewhat mitigated. This is why some military experts argue that the tunnels should have been addressed not by a large-scale ground invasion, which exposes troops to attack, but by surgical commando operations. Others argue that the tunnels could have been destroyed on the Israeli end, without needing to enter Gaza at all. A few even say that it was all an excuse—under pressure from the right, Netanyahu and Ya’alon seized on the tunnels as a justification for a limited ground operation that would allow them to save political face without too many complications. The battle over the tunnels was complicated, costly, and its results remain dubious. Though many tunnels have been destroyed, it now appears that some tunnels remain, and it is close to certain that new ones will soon be dug.6 A former commander of an elite IDF combat engineering company made this clear: “Hamas will resume tunneling as soon as we leave,” “they’ll go back to digging, no matter what.” Israel’s failure to stop the rockets and to prevent the construction of tunnels underlines the futility of the strict closure of all exits imposed on Gaza since June 2007. The closure had a devastating effect on Gaza’s civilian population, with unemployment now at 40 percent and 80 percent of the population dependent on international aid. Now it has become clear that the security benefits of the closure are strategically negligible. Although it is possible that Hamas would have amassed still more military power had the closure not been in place, its capacities would still be nowhere near those of the IDF. And yet the arms it managed to accumulate, the rockets it fired, and the tunnels it built under the tight restrictions of the closure were sufficient to create a crisis. Thus, while it is important to prevent the arming of Hamas, the closure is of limited strategic value. Empowering the Palestinian Authority to gradually take control over Gaza and involving international forces in that project is clearly a better strategy. Rebuilding Gaza’s economy could not only ease the humanitarian crisis there, but also benefit Israeli security—as defense officials have stated. Both have become more difficult following the violence of the last few weeks. 4. Operation Protective Edge has been a strategic failure. It gave Hamas a way out of isolation, providing the organization with an opportunity to show that it could inflict harm on Israeli cities, kill IDF soldiers, and briefly shut down Ben Gurion Airport. Reinstating Abbas in Gaza, as was possible and desirable last April, may now have become more difficult as a consequence of the operation. Despite the heavy toll in human life, the war accomplished no strategic goal. Yet this is not an accidental mistake. Israel’s conduct throughout the crisis has been based directly on Netanyahu’s philosophy of “conflict management,” whose underlying premise is that the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians cannot be solved, but can be effectively “managed” for a very long period of time. This feeble, not to mention defeatist, assumption is not only wrong but also dangerous, trapping Israel in an illusion that is shattered time and again. Yet “control” and “stability” only exist between each inevitable round of violence. In fact, recurring rounds of violence are inherent to this approach. “Conflict management” means continued Israeli control over the Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank, with the inevitable reality of organizations and factions struggling to overthrow that control. Under the illusion that the conflict is being managed, opportunities for change provided by calm periods are squandered. Thus, Israel under Netanyahu did not use the five years of relative calm following Operation Cast Lead—the Gaza war in December 2008 and January 2009—to take any useful action to improve its position with respect to Gaza. The government failed to take advantage of Hamas’s weakness in light of political developments in the region and willingness to make a deal with Abbas. In these circumstances, especially given the desperate conditions in Gaza, the inevitable consequence is periodic violence. Two alternative approaches exist. One, promoted by the Israeli extreme right, assumes that the conflict can be concluded by defeating the other side. Palestinian national aspirations can be controlled by force on one hand and benefits on the other. Proponents of this approach, spearheaded by ministers Bennett and Lieberman, have been calling for the occupation of Gaza. Undoubtedly, the IDF, if it undertakes a large-scale mobilization, has the military capacity to conquer Gaza and bring down Hamas rule there. However, this strategy will fail even if it seems to succeed temporarily. Conquering Hamas will not change the reality of Gaza and displays of military might will not crush legitimate Palestinian aspirations. Given the desperate conditions in Gaza, another Palestinian power would undoubtedly rise to take Hamas’s place—one that may very well be more extreme and dangerous than its predecessor. Moreover, effective control over the entire Gaza Strip, as Israel maintained until 1994, requires a heavy IDF presence deep within Gaza, regularly exposing Israeli soldiers to harm. Israeli control over Gaza will likely be similar to the conditions that prevailed in southern Lebanon before the IDF withdrawal: daily attacks and a steady stream of casualties. This is not a strategy for alleviating violence, but rather for exacerbating it. Ironically, right-wing demands for war ultimately mean making it easier for Hamas to harm Israeli soldiers. History has proven the futility of this strategy, whether in Vietnam, Lebanon, Afghanistan, or Iraq. That is why so few Israelis want the IDF to return to Lebanon or to Gaza. When the military presented the costs of a strategy of conquest, even Netanyahu’s hawkish government rejected it completely. The idea of “managing” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is illusory, and concluding it by force is a dangerous fantasy. The only reasonable strategy is resolution of the conflict. 5. So long as Hamas is willing to use terror against innocent Israeli civilians and so long as it refuses to recognize the State of Israel, it will not be a “partner” for peace. But it could be partner to interest-based agreements requiring it to modify its behavior, as many academic and security experts claim. In fact, despite Netanyahu’s being the most vocal opponent of dialogue with Gazan terror organizations, it was he who reached two agreements with Hamas: the 2011 Shalit deal and the 2012 agreement that ended Operation Pillar of Defense. The only question is whether the latest agreement between the two sides, reached on August 26, will be limited, fragile, and short-lived, or a stable arrangement that will improve Israel’s strategic standing for a considerable period of time. A long-term resolution with respect to Gaza requires changing its political predicament. The only sensible way of doing this is to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, a state whose existence would be negotiated with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) under Abbas’s leadership. As part of a comprehensive political agreement, Hamas is very likely to agree to a long-term truce, as its representatives have repeatedly said. In 1997, its founder and spiritual leader Ahmad Yassin suggested a thirty-year hudna (truce) with Israel. In 2006, one of its leaders, Mahmoud al-Zahar, proposed a “long-term hudna.” Earlier this year, Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a senior Hamas functionary in the West Bank, reiterated the organization’s willingness for a hudna and said the organization was willing to accept a peace agreement with Israel if a majority of Palestinians supported it. In 2010, in an interview with a Muslim Brotherhood daily circulated in Jordan, Hamas’s political leader Khaled Mashal expressed pragmatic views and willingness to reach an agreement with Israel. In late July, he told Charlie Rose, “We want peace without occupation, without settlements, without Judaization, without the siege.” All these proposals were contingent on ending the Israeli occupation and establishing a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders. They received no response from Israel. Although a Palestinian state contradicts Netanyahu’s ideological commitments and conflicts with his own political interests, a state is clearly in Israel’s interest. In fact, conditioning the establishment of a Palestinian state on attaining comprehensive peace may have been the greatest mistake by advocates of peace. The historic conflict with the Palestinians will not be settled by a single agreement. Reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians—overcoming decades of bloodshed and hatred—will require a long process of acceptance and forgiveness spanning years and probably decades. The armed conflict, however, can certainly be ended. Israel has already ended armed conflicts with several neighboring countries: with some, like Egypt and Jordan, it achieved comprehensive peace agreements; with others, it agreed to other kinds of accords. An agreement can be reached with the Palestinians, too: the terms are known and the price is fixed. Whether it is reached or not is a matter of political will on the part of Israeli and Palestinian leaders. Unfortunately, Israel’s current leadership will do anything to avoid this choice, to the detriment of both peoples. The war in Gaza is, fundamentally, not about tunnels and not against rockets. It is a war over the status quo. Netanyahu’s “conflict management” is a euphemism for maintaining a status quo of settlement and occupation, allowing no progress. The Israeli opposition must distance itself from this hopeless conception and other countries need to reject it. Both must be done forcefully and before violence erupts once more, and force becomes the only option—yet again. —August 28, 2014 1 See “Netanyahu: Gaza Conflict Proves Israel Can’t Relinquish Control of West Bank,” The Times of Israel, July 11, 2014. His press adviser told Yediot Ahronot that Netanyahu intentionally “led the talks nowhere.” ↩ 2 Lately, even some of Netanyahu’s closest associates have begun to realize that condemning the Palestinian unity government was a mistake. For example, on July 24, Minister of Communications Gilad Erdan said: “We thought the unity government was a very bad thing. Maybe today we should see it as the lesser of two evils—it is preferable that Abbas oversee the Rafah crossing under Egyptian protection.” ↩ 3 BBC journalist Jon Donnison quoted an Israeli police spokesperson as saying that the abduction was the act of a lone cell, operating independently of Hamas’s central directions. He added that “Israeli police spokes[person] Mickey Rosenfeld also said if kidnapping had been ordered by Hamas leadership, they’d have known about it in advance.” A similar report on Buzzfeed quoted an anonymous Israeli intelligence official as confirming that Hamas did not carry out the abduction, adding that “he felt the kidnapping had been used by politicians trying to promote their own agenda.” Rosenfeld later denied the statements attributed to him, but BBC ’s Donnison held firm to his version. The former head of Israel’s internal security service (Shabak or Shin Bet), Yuval Diskin, added his own estimation that Hamas was not behind the abduction: see Julia Amalia Heyer, “Ex-Israeli Security Chief Diskin: ‘All the Conditions Are There for an Explosion,’” Der Spiegel International, July 24, 2014. Israeli journalist and Hamas expert Shlomi Eldar had earlier surmised that the abduction was the work of the Hebron-based Qawasmeh family, which is affiliated with Hamas but operates independently: see “Accused Kidnappers Are Rogue Hamas Branch,” Al-Monitor, June 29, 2014. Recently even Israel Hayom (the daily newspaper closely associated with Netanyahu) reported that Hamas did not know about the abduction: see Yoav Limor, “Interim Report,” August 1, 2014. On August 20 a video was released allegedly showing a Hamas official, Saleh al-Arouri, attributing the kidnapping to the organization’s military wing. Whether it was ordered by Hamas leadership or not remains unclear. ↩ 4 According to some sources, until June 24, Hamas arrested terrorists from other factions responsible for rocket fire on Israel: see Avi Issacharoff, “Hamas Arrests Terror Cell Responsible for Rocket Fire on Israel,” The Times of Israel, June 25, 2014. ↩ 5 On June 29, the IAF attacked a rocket-launching cell associated, according to some sources, with Hamas: see Jeffrey Heller, “Netanyahu Accuses Hamas of Involvement in Gaza Rocket Fire,” Reuters, June 30, 2014. According to other sources, Hamas began shooting only on June 30, after one of its men was killed the day before: see Avi Issacharoff, “Hamas Fires Rockets for First Time Since 2012, Israel Officials Say,” The Times of Israel, June 30, 2014. ↩ 6 According to expert estimates, tunnels can be dug at six to twelve meters a day, an average tunnel taking three months to complete. A former commander of an elite IDF combat engineering company estimated that a five-hundred-meter-long tunnel would take a month and a half to dig, and a longer tunnel would take several months at most. ↩</p> 19349161 2014-09-07 20:40:10 2014-09-07 20:40:10 open open failure-in-gaza-assaf-sharon-september-25-2014-issue-19349161 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan Left and Right Agree -- Let Ex-Im Expire Nader http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/09/07/left-and-right-agree-let-ex-im-expire-nader-19349159/ Sun, 07 Sep 2014 20:38:02 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Left and Right Agree -- Let Ex-Im Expire Posted: 09/05/2014 12:01 pm EDT Updated: 09/05/2014 12:59 pm EDT [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan I have recently traveled from New York to California talking to audiences from the left, right and middle about my new book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State. The topic has been how activists from both the right and left side of the political spectrum can come together to bring about long-overdue changes in America. With the current "Do-Nothing" Congress halting progress on many important issues, there is much skepticism in America about political rivals coming together in support of common goals. But a major issue that could create unlikely allies is now coming to a head on Capitol Hill. As a September 30 deadline looms, Congress must decide on whether or not to reauthorize the controversial Export-Import Bank. Established in 1934 by an Executive Order from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Ex-Im bank provides credit to domestic exporters and foreign importers to the U.S. The Ex-Im bank has long been accused of being little more than a corporate welfare fund, mostly for Big Business, by outspoken progressives and conservatives. In short, the function of Ex-Im is to subsidize businesses that export American products. The major problem with this agency comes from the fact that a big bulk of Ex-Im funds go to huge, wealthy companies, such as the Ex-Im's largest beneficiary Boeing, which in 2013 received 30 percent of its loans and guarantees. Ex-Im defenders argue that the majority of its loans go to small businesses that cannot secure financing in the private market, conveniently ignoring the crucial fact that the majority of the money goes to big businesses such as the aforementioned Boeing, as well as other giant corporations like General Electric (10 percent of Ex-Im loans and guarantees in 2013) and Caterpillar (approximately 5 percent). Economist Dean Baker, a leading voice on the left against the reauthorization of the Export-Import, puts it best: "If the bank backs $80 billion in loans for Boeing, General Electric, or Enron (a favorite in past days), and $20 billion for small businesses, it doesn't matter that the $20 billion in small business loans accounted for the bulk of the transactions. Most of the money went to big businesses. That is what matters and everyone touting the share of small business loans knows it." It's also important to note that the Ex-Im Bank is involved in only 2 percent of U.S. exports -- the other 98 percent function just fine without its largesse. Thus the expiration of the Ex-Im would mainly affect the profit margins of a handful of big corporations. Robert Weissman of Public Citizen explained: "Ex-Im puts the federal government in a role which ought to be filled by private lenders and insurers. It forces taxpayers to bear the risk that should be absorbed by business." Eighty years after its creation, the Ex-Im Bank's stated mission of boosting American jobs is questionable, at best. And, the Ex-Im's general lack of transparency and a growing list of allegations of fraud and corruption (as in the recent headlines regarding four Ex-Im officials accepting kickbacks) are additional red flags. The Ex-Im reauthorization efforts have the predictable support of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and many prominent Democrats and Republicans -- some of whom have changed their tunes over the years. Dean Baker writes that the prospect of ending Ex-Im "prompted the most hysteria among the Washington elite since the financial crisis threatened to lay waste to Wall Street following the collapse of Lehman. As we know, when major companies have their profits on the line, the pundits get worried and truth goes flying out the window." Baker also criticizes GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, who recently claimed it was "just wrong" for him to have to arduously make a case for the reauthorization of the Ex-Im. Baker notes that Immelt, who makes $25 million a year, has advocated cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits. The elimination of the Ex-Im Bank was once a decidedly progressive cause. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was once extremely outspoken on Ex-Im -- in 2002 calling it "corporate welfare at its worst" and writing that, "American citizens have better things to do with their money than support an agency that provides welfare for corporations that could care less about American workers." Nowadays, Senator Sanders is strangely silent in public on the matter of reauthorization, although he remains opposed to it. This past July, 29 state governors sent a letter to Congressional leaders expressing their support for reauthorization -- 20 Democrats and 9 Republicans. Republican Texas Governor Rick Perry and Republican South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley also expressed their crony capitalistic support of reauthorizing the Ex-Im. From the Democratic quarters, former President Bill Clinton said during a recent panel at the U.S.-Africa Business Forum (alongside GE's Jeffrey Immelt) that attacks on the Ex-Im were "ridiculous." "Economics is not theology. If you're running a country, you've got to try to create an opportunity for all of your businesses to be competitive," Clinton said. Mr. Clinton declined to be more specific -- but some of the very profitable companies using Ex-Im, such as GE and Boeing, contribute to his foundation. During the 2008 election, then-Senator Barack Obama called the Export-Import bank, "Little more than a fund for corporate welfare." Today, President Obama tells a very different story. He revised his beliefs at a recent news conference: "For some reason, right now the House Republicans have decided that we shouldn't do this, [reauthorize the Ex-Im bank] which means that when American companies go overseas and they're trying to close a sale on selling Boeing planes, for example, or a GE turbine or some other American product that has all kinds of subcontractors behind it and is creating all kinds of jobs and all of sorts of small businesses depend on that sale...we may lose that sale." Convergence works both ways, unfortunately -- in this case, the political corporatists are aligning with Big Business interests. Dean Baker, a consistent voice of reason in a storm of hysteria, writes: "Just to remind everyone, the Export-Import Bank issues the overwhelming majority of its loans and guarantees to benefit a small number of huge corporations. It is a straightforward subsidy to these companies, giving them loans at below market interest rates." Moreover, many of these giant corporations, like General Electric and Boeing, pay little or no federal income tax on U.S.-based profits! (See Citizens for Tax Justice at ctj.org.) Keep that in mind when General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt complains about having to defend his company's lucrative corporate subsidy to its critics. In a role-reversal of sorts, it is now the Tea Partiers who have taken to the ramparts to condemn what they refer to as the Ex-Im's "crony capitalism." The Tea Party influence is having great effect -- the Ex-Im bank was last reauthorized in 2012 with the full support of then-Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Cantor was ousted from his seat earlier this year in a primary election by Tea Party candidate David Brat, who Cantor outspent 27 to one. Cantor's replacement, Congressman Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), has taken note of his predecessor's missteps. McCarthy, who voted for reauthorization in 2012, recently told Fox News: "One of the biggest problems with government is they go and take hard-earned money so others do things that the private sector can do. That's what the Ex-Im Bank does." Even Speaker John Boehner, who also previously voted for reauthorization, has backed off support. In light of this new found common ground between left and right, where are the congressional leaders on the left who once shared a similar viewpoint on corporate welfare? Their silence is deafening. Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) is one of few Democrats who are still outspokenly opposed -- even Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) have come out in support of the Ex-Im. The Ex-Im bank situation presents a unique opportunity later this month to do something (ironically, through doing nothing) by letting the Ex-Im Bank's charter expire for good. Leaders in Congress must get over the "yuck factor" of working with their colleagues across the aisle and come together when such concurring occasions present themselves. Signed copies of Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State are available to order from Politics and Prose. Follow Ralph Nader on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RalphNader More: Boeing Corporate Welfare General Electric Crony Capitalism Congress Ex Im Bank </p> 19349159 2014-09-07 20:38:02 2014-09-07 20:38:02 open open left-and-right-agree-let-ex-im-expire-nader-19349159 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan "activité, activité, vitesse, vitesse.” http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/09/01/activite-activite-vitesse-vitesse-19303015/ Mon, 01 Sep 2014 00:07:11 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Waterloo – An Utter Waste of Time Posted on August 31, 2014 by Harvey Mossman http://theboardgaminglife.com/2014/08/31/waterloo-an-utter-waste-of-time/ [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan by Paul Comben According to Helmuth von Moltke, no military plan ever survived first contact with the enemy. According to the Duke of Wellington, his plans were to be best thought of as tatty old bits of harness which could be knotted and pieced back together whenever anything snapped or fell off. For Napoleon, perhaps the single most important factor in a campaign’s success was to be found in one of his favourite maxims: “activité, activité, vitesse, vitesse.” This is best translated by recalling Stonewall’s words about surprising and mystifying your enemy – or in other words, acting quicker than they did and generally getting a move on. Returning to von Moltke, he was surely exaggerating to make a point. Plans certainly need wiggle room, but not all plans fall to pieces the moment the enemy bestirs himself. Just about every key facet of Case Yellow worked like a charm as the French and British armies, irrespective of what they were rubbing up against, witlessly obliged in executing their own downfall by doing pretty much what the likes on von Manstein believed they would do. Likewise, at Cannae, Hannibal annihilated a massive Roman army which again did almost exactly what the great general envisaged them doing. But never mind what the enemy is doing, what about the forces, or more particularly, the subordinate commanders, who are supposed to be carrying out the agreed strategy once the shooting has started? And what about those factors which do not appear in written plans and pre-battle orations – the weather, disease, good and bad omens and the like. It was certainly not part of the British plans at Mons, that, at some pre-arranged moment, everyone from King Arthur to the archangel Gabriel appeared in the sky and inspired the thin khaki line to hold off the grey hordes; but nevertheless many a Tommy claimed to have seen them. And whatever nasty surprises awaited Hitler as untold masses of tanks crawled out of the Russian forests, the real unraveling of Barbarossa had rather more to do with bad weather, useless and late arriving winter clothing, and Hitler himself falling ill at the end of the summer which left his generals free not so much to tinker but to revise wholesale what Hitler had wanted to do. Sir_Arthur_Wellesley,_1st_Duke_of_Wellington In short, all plans have a weak point, and the key then becomes to ensure that the enemy, neither by accident or design, ever gets near hitting the vulnerable spot. Wellington kept his vulnerable spots hidden in that tangle of make-do and mend, which meant that any given point was never the vulnerable point; but for Napoleon the weak point could often be Napoleon himself. Whilst Napoleon was still on top of his game, and consistently so, his risks, gambles, “catch me if you can” manoeuvres, and everything that went with them, could be counted on to win the day. But, even relatively early on, the fine workings of Napoleon’s very fine harness could be thrown into hazard. His plans for another Cannae at Eylau were thrown out by the blizzard his army fought in, which confused his army’s movements, delayed his reinforcements, afforded his artillery precious little it could see let alone fire at, and brought him a dubious victory at a very bloody cost. Painting : Napoleon at FontainbleauBut the campaign that really showed up the shortcomings of Napoleon’s military genius was the 1812 foray into Russia. There are many ways this massive ruin of a venture might be depicted, but it is tempting to portray it from Napoleon’s perspective as a highly experienced (but getting on a bit) team sports coach, who is trying to lead his boys through a season fought in everything from blazing heat to freezing cold, on fields which are rutted and worn, with facilities that are virtually non existent, and a sideline which is a hundred yards away from the action. And adding to the sense of frustration is the fact that the coach “Pop Bonaparte,” just played the game in his day at a level far higher than any of the players out there are capable of, and thus he is just dying to get out on the field, tell them what to do up close, and then, if they still cannot do it, hang out there and do it himself. In campaign after campaign prior to 1812, Napoleon’s grand scheme of things had been assisted by the fact that he was rarely more than a day’s ride away from any corps headquarters, and thus he could influence events and do the coaching knowing his influence would be felt and acted upon. But in Russia it was all so very different: envelopments were supposed to coordinated and carried out at distances far remote from the headquarters of the emperor; dispatches sent and dispatches received were badly out of date by the time they were written, let alone by the time they actually reached their intended recipient; and with those subordinates the emperor was grudgingly relying upon being comfortably away from any sight of the imperial clipboard being thrown down and the eruption that would go with it, things just never moved with the speed hoped for
and could not anyway, on the sand and mud bath the supposedly fleet formations of the Grande Armée were meant to do their stuff on in Tsarist Russia. Add to that the emperor’s own travails of weariness and disillusionment as his carefully planned campaign led to frustration after frustration, and add then the bad cold which led to bad tactics at Borodino, and you have the answer why this Russian nightmare just went from bad to worse. And then, after further frustrations and eventual defeat in the massive campaign of 1813 in Germany, it was very different in 1814. Napoleon’s situation was simplified by his having very little army left, and the front being reduced to comfortable distances. As a result he was once again capable of throwing his forces here, there and everywhere, moving faster with his far less cumbersome order of battle than he had for many a year. That he was again eventually militarily defeated was simply due to the enemy wisely opting to fight where he was not, and finally bringing their far superior numbers to bear. But if he had quit the inferno of Leipzig just a bit earlier, and had thus had a bit more army left to fight the following spring, it might have been a different story. And now to the events of 1815: Napoleon_2246460b It is hard to know, or rather even to guess, just how many accounts have been written of Waterloo and the campaign of The Hundred Days since those faraway hours of June 1815, but it is safe to assume that scores of different factors have featured in scores of different accounts as to what happened, especially through the 15th to the 18th June in southern and central Belgium. But whatever different accounts choose to highlight here and there with regard to the course of the campaign, there is little doubt in my mind that everything from Napoleon’s recurring lethargy to the erratic performance of subordinates can be encapsulated by the embracing factor of a total loss of time, both by the emperor and those he was chiefly relying on. This might not have been so much of an issue if either the French plan or the capability of the French army had been less susceptible to hiccups in the clockwork. But this was precisely where the plan was vulnerable, and the one man who could and should have foreseen this and acted with diligence to ensure the worst did not happen, was yet again off his game. There were actually two clocks running against Napoleon by the time he moved into Belgium. The first had started running the moment he was back in France after his exile on the island of Elba. This was the Coalition clock – the Coalition that had swiftly re-formed as news of his return reached their Vienna conclaves. The Russians and the Austrians were again readying their massive field armies; the British were moving their fleet, and their fleet was moving a new army to Belgium, where it joined another sizeable force of Prussians under Blücher. By common consensus, Napoleon could not sit idly by and let this huge assemblage of hostile contingents march on his borders; for it was only a matter of time, of waiting for the clock chimes, before those forces did exactly that. So, after some lackluster attempts at negotiating a peace utterly failed, Napoleon was committed to a pre-emptive strike. GeneralBlucher_small The second clock was the campaign clock, linked to his overall plan for a move into Belgium and the defeat in detail of the two Coalition armies deployed there. There were several reasons why Napoleon chose Belgium for this initial fight – it was close by and thus, whilst keeping him near France, offered the prospect of a quick series of fights leading to a quick and telling victory; it also would pitch him against the two smallest armies in the Coalition – Wellington’s force of British, Dutch-Belgian, and contingents from the German states numbered a shade under 100,00; Blucher’s Prussian army numbered about 115,000. Both were therefore a little smaller individually than Napoleon’s Armée du Nord, but were likely to prove too much if they were able to join. However, joining was not much of a priority for either Coalition commander in Belgium, with Wellington fretfully mindful of his communications back to Britain via the Channel ports, and Blücher equally mindful of his communications back across the Rhine. Thus the two armies were pulled apart by their competing priorities, and this invited Napoleon to exploit the situation by adopting a campaign plan of the central position, whereby his army would interpose itself like a wedge between its two foes, block one from assisting the other, and then employ the greater part of its strength to defeat whichever one of the Coalition forces offered battle first. And with that matter successfully concluded, the other Coalition force could be engaged whilst the defeated army was harried and ushered away from any prospect of intervention and/or recovery by a smaller pursuing force. This was the sort of plan one could readily envisage the Napoleon of 1805 or 1806 being able to push through to complete victory – but it was, perforce, a high energy beast of a plan, which had to be lashed along to ensure that two sizeable opposing forces were kept off balance, and that the initial move put the French army well and truly between Wellington and Blücher. Given the relatively short distances, this was almost certainly going to be a quick and intense campaign, and for Napoleon, alongside the other benefits of victory was the prospect of bringing the Belgians and the Dutch back into the fold – peoples who had fought alongside the French not so very long ago, and whose allegiance to the Coalition was thought to be seriously suspect. M-Davout So there was much to benefit the emperor by winning big in Belgium; but it was not 1805/6, it was 1815, and things were different. The plan was fine, but even before its first operational moment came, the emperor was eating away at its chances of success. To return to the earlier sporting analogy, Napoleon may well have been closer to the sidelines in 1815 than in 1812, but through his increasing want of tactical finesse he had taken half the plays out of the playbook, had compounded this by not putting his best team on the field, and seemed for prolonged periods totally reluctant to offer any direct guidance as to how anything should go. With a little coaxing, Murat would have been available to command the cavalry
but Napoleon did not summon him from Italy, and thus deprived himself of the best cavalry commander in Europe. Davout was also available, and was head and shoulders above anyone else Napoleon could have appointed to a wing or corps command, but Davout was kept in Paris as a reflection of the emperor’s insecurities about his volatile political situation, and so Napoleon’s army was also absent one of the best field commanders of the era. Michel Ney, Marshall of the French Empire So, having deliberately deprived himself of two commanders who knew how to move quickly and with telling effect, Napoleon made his advance into Belgium on June 15th 1815, accompanied by an army of relatively high but dangerously brittle morale, and caught up with at the last moment by the blustering Marshal Ney. Recent historical reports have very much suggested that Ney was a burnt-out and unstable force by 1815, having been psychologically wrecked by his experiences leading the rearguard in Russia in 1812. That Napoleon entrusted his left wing to him calls his judgment even further into question. Why did he do it? Was it that the ailing army coach saw the old veteran as he had once been in the glory days, and erroneously thought that all the old talent was still there? Perhaps. But Ney’s creative talents, the sort of talents this plan required, had always been suspect. Wellington had totally confounded him, and Ney had always tended to be the sort of eager subordinate one has to point at the right thing, whisper a few words of encouragement to, and then leave to take or to hold whatever needed to be taken or held onto. Interpreting a situation entirely on his own was not his strong suit, and with his temper lurching all over the place, he was never going to be the man to control and co-ordinate the subtle evolutions of a carefully arranged military plan. The campaign clock really started to run as L’Armée du Nord crossed into Belgium. Delay here would bring about several undesirable effects – the Coalition armies, now gathering intelligence as to what was transpiring, would attempt junction; the “bullseye” for Napoleon’s military wedge would grow smaller as the forces around it (the road junction of Quatre bras) grew larger; and such was the nature of Napoleon’s fine design as opposed to Nosey’s bit of harness, that once one part started to falter, the whole thing would start to fall out of synch. waterloo-ball The first potential speed bump was the crossing of the Sambre river. The border was close by, and the nearest town, Charleroi, was occupied by advanced Prussian forces belonging to one of the Army of the Rhine’s I Corps brigades. Nevertheless, the forward French forces successfully made the crossing of the river, and pushed the Prussians back on their main forces. By the morning of June 16th, the greater part of L’Armée du Nord was over the Sambre, and this with the Coalition forces still disjointed. Wellington had famously heard of Napoleon’s move whilst attending the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in Brussels, and whilst he made hurried arrangements to close the gap, that the key crossroads of Quatre Bras had anything present to defend it at all was largely due to the Belgian commander on the ground acting contrary to his orders. The crossroads was vital, as French occupation of it would effectively deny any move by Wellington’s army to support Blücher if ‘Old Forwards” really stuck his neck out by going for battle immediately. Furthermore, control of the crossroads would enable the French forces present there to move, at least in part, towards the Prussians’ largely unguarded west flank and turn any bad situation for them into a total catastrophe. And this was indeed was faced the Allies that morning and early afternoon. Blücher was shaping to offer battle around the village of Ligny, just a few miles to the east of Quatre Bras, and this with just three of his four army corps – the IV Corps, under Bülow, was too far away on the 16th to intervene. Meanwhile, barely a division’s strength of Belgian and Dutch troops were present at Quatre Bras, with potentially two entire corps of French (II corps immediately threatening, and I corps also available along with strong cavalry elements) ready to bear down on them. The situation could hardly have been better for Napoleon and his plan, but from then own, and for most of the ensuing days of fighting and marching, it all went awry. The first piece of misery leading to the first serious delay, was Ney’s prevarication in front of Quatre Bras. Later in this short campaign, at Waterloo itself, Ney would steam into anything without much more than a perfunctory look at what he was going at; but on the 16th, fearing a trap of Wellington’s fiendish design, he suspected the thin screen of Dutch and Belgian forces were a lure to something far nastier lurking behind, when it fact what he saw was all that was there. No other forces were concealed in the tall wheat or behind the hedges or beyond the gentle elevations; but by the time Ney had more or less convinced himself of that, Picton’s division was heading south on the Brussels road, with several thousand Brunswickers close behind them. They would be arriving at Quatre Bras even as Ney was moving the II corps to the attack in the later afternoon. LignyDeployment To the east, Napoleon’s main body, consisting of III and IV corps, the Imperial Guard and most of the reserve cavalry were moving through and around the town of Fleurus and deploying against Blücher’s rather spread out three Prussian corps. It was hardly the fastest approach to battle in Napoleon’s career – there may have been “activité” but the vitesse had largely gone off the boil. Further signaling this was the absence from the battle of the VI corps under Lobau. This was a relatively small corps, bereft of cavalry, but contained some high quality infantry regiments. It was not brought nearer the battle until the evening, by which time it really acted as nothing but a late spectator to events. Thus, both battles began tardily, which assisted Wellington at Quatre Bras by allowing his first reinforcements to reach the field ahead of the first crisis; and at Ligny, the late start meant that the French were trying to complete their hard won victory even as it was getting dark. maps_hmquatre_bras However, the greatest farce on the 16th lay in the performance of D’Erlon’s I Corps, who really proved to be the French equivalent of The Grand Old Duke of York. Ney wanted the corps at Quatre Bras to defeat the forces that would not have been there if he had attacked when he should have done. Napoleon wanted I Corps to perform at least a partial envelopment of the Prussians, and so degrade them past any prospect of military viability for the rest of the campaign. Of course, in an era of uncertain communications, Napoleon was assuming rather than knowing that Ney had done his job and was marching contingents to Napoleon’s assistance. What this resulted in was in both factions yanking at I Corps’ lead, with D’Erlon apparently lacking the drive to cut through the bluster and go somewhere, anywhere, of his on volition. Had D’Erlon resolved to make his own decision, and had thus intervened on either field, the result could have been decisive; but as it was, the entire corps turned this way and that, went about even as he was nearing the Ligny battlefield, and thus ended up doing nothing anywhere. And then it rained. Well, not exactly, not quite yet, at least not in the biblical amounts of a few hours later, but for all the positive action the French forces got up to immediately after the two battles of the 16th, it might have well rained all through that night and into the morning. Napoleon’s campaign plan really required the first defeated army to be ruthlessly chased and essentially bothered out of any lingering effectiveness by a rapid and close pursuit. But, after Ligny, no proper pursuit was organized until the following morning, and this only after the emperor had had a rest and toured the battlefield. And then, when the pursuit did begin, Marshal Grouchy, in command of 30,000 men, set off on the wrong road and spent several hours “chasing” after a phantom army of Prussian deserters fleeing to the east
whilst the Prussian army, albeit battered and bruised, was heading north towards Wavre. We may divert ourselves here by considering how the likes of Bobby Lee and Stonewall Jackson would have dealt with a battered enemy force in retreat. One can well imagine Lee suggesting to Stonewall that “it will be most beneficial to ourselves if those people are kept discomforted.” That would have surely sufficed to fill the pursued route with the further wreckage of utter defeat; but in the case of Grouchy, the trail of pursuit was not so much filled with the litter of defeat as with the discarded strawberry stalks of the Marshal’s impromptu snacking. 640px-De_prins_van_Oranje_aan_het_hoofd_van_het_vijfde_bataljon_Nationale_Militie_bij_Quatre_Bras%252C_16_juni_1815 But however we present it, the Prussians were left to recover, to the extent that the IV corps of their army was able to join with the other three. As for events at Quatre Bras, as far as Ney was concerned, there were not any events at Quatre Bras
leastways none he could see. In truth this was quite amazing, as large numbers of Wellington’s troops were presently clearing off to the north whilst the French were still at breakfast. Suddenly apprehensive as to why he was hearing nothing from Ney, Napoleon then finally bestirred himself and hastened over to Quatre Bras where breakfast was still going on. It is probably safe to say that the emperor did not help himself to a croissant, as he raged before Ney “On a perdu la France!” Indeed, the implications of Ney’s inactivity were rather obvious, and if Ney had possessed any sort of rudimentary notion or faculty to do more with the imperial plan than play finders keepers with the I Corps, he might have noticed that Wellington’s army was disappearing before his eyes, and that the imperative pursuit was far too late beginning. Had Davout been there, instead of being stuck in Paris “organizing things,” there would have been a very good chance that Wellington army would have been fixed in place by deliberate attacks that morning, leaving it in a desperately vulnerable position as the French forces from Ligny closed in. But, despite one moment of crisis at Genappe as Napoleon tried to get some sort of pursuit going, Wellington’s army was able to get back to the pre-selected position just south of Mont St Jean, helped by the massive and enduring downpour which then occurred. Of course, Napoleon’s plan could hardly have been predicated on “Well what do we do if it rains?” but the truth is there was plenty that could have been done before it got seriously wet – only next to nothing was done. When we turn to events on the 18th, the long enduring question has always been: “Could Napoleon have begun the battle of Waterloo earlier?” Despite what you may read somewhere, or seek to set up in a game, the simple truth is that very little could have been started at Waterloo before its historical start time of approaching noon. The French army was simply too strung out after trying to march through that appalling storm, and the ground was impossibly wet. Yes, Napoleon did therefore lose as much as five hours of battle time waiting for the ground to dry and his army to complete its deployment, but this would not have mattered nearly so much if Grouchy’s pursuit of the Prussians had been early and effective, and if Ney had done something other on the morning of the 17th save wait for his coffee to turn up. As it was, despite incorrectly assessing Wellington’s army as stronger than his, Napoleon that morning of the 18th put his chances as ninety in his favour to ten against, and curtly dismissed any notion that the Prussians might be able to assist Wellington by the convenience of considering them more damaged and demoralized than they actually were. One thing totally missing from his calculations in this regard was just how much hatred Blücher had for Napoleon, and thus while he still had an army of any description, the old Prussian was forever set to go after his despised enemy. So time went by again whilst the ground dried sufficiently for the French to move their cannon; and perhaps having some stabs of doubt as to what was happening to the east, Napoleon sent a message to Grouchy advising him of the rumours of the actual Prussian movements, together with a suggestion that Grouchy shift over to the west. Of course, by now Grouchy was miles away from the main Prussian force, and really needed a direct order telling him to move his army and his strawberries directly to the emperor’s assistance. Napoleon would eventually issue something like this order, but far too late in the day for it to have any effect – three Prussian corps were to arrive at Waterloo, leaving the III Corps to hold off Grouchy at Wavre when he eventually turned up. 640px-Battle_of_Waterloo_1815 What occurred at Waterloo rightly now belongs to the ages. It has been described countless times, and I will not seek to add a further account to the long list. Instead, for me the most significant aspect of that final battle is that it saw the Iron Duke at the peak of his powers, doing what English warlords have always tended to do best – make a stand on a hill and defy heaven and earth to move them off it. For Napoleon, for any one of a number of reasons, it was simply one battle too many. After Ligny, some generals had observed that the Napoleon they had known did not exist any more, and certainly there was nothing about his conduct at Waterloo which would have reminded one of the victor of Marengo, Austerlitz or Jena. It was as if at some fundamental level he just could not be bothered with all the taxing necessities of battle. He left much of the battle to Ney, and Ney made a complete mess of nearly everything. Apart from formulating the initial plan, Napoleon appears to have done precious little that day until near the very end. Then, with all his time close to being entirely used up, near his last action was to lie to his own men by telling them Grouchy was on the field, and then to lead the final attack of the Guard to within six hundred yards of Wellington’s line before pulling away and watching the subsequent calamity unfold. Napoleon is supposed to have once said “we only have a certain time for war.” By 1815, it is clear he was on borrowed time, and what was left to him in life and in fortune was of very poor quality. His 1815 plan needed the sort of qualities Lee and Jackson brought to Chancellorsville forty eight years later; in other words, not a mentally broken down subordinate acting haphazardly on the orders of a commander whose triumphs were now all in his mind. About the Author Paul Paul has been involved in the hobby since the early 1970s. Of largely Belgian ancestry on his father’s side, and English (Yorkshire) on his mother’s, after finishing his education he worked in tourism and student services, and also spent some time in the former West Germany. He met his wife Boo in 1990, and they married a couple of years later. Paul his from a long line of former servicemen – one grandfather was a sergeant in the BEF of 1914, whilst two of his great grandfathers were to killed whilst serving with the Royal Navy. His own father, who was born in Britain, served with the army in Malaya in the early 1950s. </p> 19303015 2014-09-01 00:07:11 2014-09-01 00:07:11 open open activite-activite-vitesse-vitesse-19303015 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan WATERLOO GAMES http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/09/01/waterloo-games-19303012/ Mon, 01 Sep 2014 00:03:31 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>← Waterloo – An Utter Waste of Time Several Ways with The Hundred Days Posted on August 31, 2014 by Harvey Mossman http://theboardgaminglife.com/2014/08/31/several-ways-with-the-hundred-days/ [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan By Paul Comben This is a simply a light look at all the Waterloo campaign games I have owned and played over the years. I have tried to include just about anything with at least some campaign element to it, but pure recreations of the climatic battle are not present – so no Wellington’s Victory or The Thin Red Line etc. Furthermore, I am not going into any deep detail as to how the qualifying games are played. What I am looking at (chattily) is how these games reflected (or failed to reflect) the issues in my Waterloo as an Utter Waste of Time article – that is, operational manoeuvre room, the issue of time, the weather, and command and control. Waterloo (Avalon Hill)Waterloo One of the oldest historical wargames, and just the third board wargame I ever owned. As a boy, I travelled into London’s West End all on my own at the very end of 1972, armed with some extra Christmas money. With it I bought Waterloo, got it home, got it open, got it punched, learnt
and then got disappointed. Perhaps I was not helped by the utterly rotten film on the television, but any sense of seeing something that played like something from the drama of June 1815 was pretty much absent. Looking back, I can affirm that the game had a map you could wander about on, but weather, command, and the time drag of military events happening or not happening was utterly absent. And with the map, no one I ever played it with ever moved their armies like Napoleonic armies, and thus you invariably ended up with a long line of blue units pushing against a long line of green and pinky/red units, with everyone knocking off for the day bang on five – that is when each day’s time track abruptly ended
in the month with the longest days in the year! But of course I played it, repeatedly and devotedly, because it was the only thing on the subject I had for several years. And so it got indulged until the counters faded and the black tape fell off (well ripped off) the back of the board. And if I see a copy now, all it does it make me feel old
and recall Roy Wood and Wizzard, Marc Bolan, and girls in hot pants. Napoleon’s Last Battles (SPI) Napoleons_Last_Battles_SPI_quadrigame_flatpack_box_front Christmas 1976 – the film Waterloo was making its British television debut on the evening of the 25th, and my family was having a mass festive knees-up at our London home. I wanted to watch the film, but downstairs the Comben residence was filled with everyone from near and distant family to neighbours from around the street
and Party Sevens and bowls of crisps and peanuts, and a great cloud of toxic cigarette smoke, and stacks of 45 singles ready to drop on the turntable, and turkey sandwiches, and sausage rolls, and great big shirt collars and hair styles for the younger blokes looking like variations on a samurai’s helmet. I kept upstairs the first part of the evening and watched the film in stunning low definition black and white. But my interest was kept seriously attuned to events by the presence beside me of one of my three Christmas wargames (if you know what the other two were, you must have been there), towit, Napoleon’s Last Battles. This could be played in its littler bits as, well
.Napoleon’s Last Battles. On the other hand, you could put the four maps together, sort out the OOB, and play a three day (actually two and a bit of a day) campaign game. Compared to Avalon Hill’s Waterloo, this was a serious move on – not that much more complicated, but possessing nearly all the right things. First of all, French army command had to be kick started each campaign morning after the 16th. Until Napoleon himself stirred, precious little else could get going. The indifferent qualities of Napoleon’s erring subordinate, Marshal Ney, were highlighted by gruff nuts’ inability to lead more than one formation at a time – he could something, but never everything. There was no actual loose cannon effect however. As to other issues, the rain certainly did arrive in this game, and from what I can remember, it slowed units and prevented artillery bombarding otherwise promising targets. But this was a game that was very much what I would call “the fight at the end of the funnel.” You began with everything set up for Ligny and Quatre Bras, so, by Jove, that was what you were going to have. And there was precious little territory west of Quatre Bras, and only two and a half days to win or lose everything. And with nothing west of the historic Waterloo position, in all probability, if things were not decided clearly on the 16th, it was Waterloo you were most likely to get, as there was nowhere else to go
and no time to get there anyway. 1815 (GDW) 1815 I was at University when I caught up with this one. I did try hard to like this it, with its shock-capable cavalry, blown cavalry markers, and its bombarding artillery set-ups, but it never worked for me – not even when, recently, Gilbert Collins did a video which pointed out all its best points. But it was another funnel game, and unlike NLB, it seemed to me stodgy and ill-paced. If I remember correctly, one little nuance it did have was randomizing what might be lurking at Quatre Bras at game start, thus giving Ney some genuine food for thought as he faced some inverted mystery counters. But you could never “Go West Rash Man” because there was nowhere to go, and this combined with those good ideas turning into dragging procedures just failed to work my dice. It also had some rather unappealing components, in my opinion, clear but utterly bland, so I must confess, in the end it was just left to gather dust. The Last Days of the Grand Armée (OSG)Last Days of the Grande Armee Now this game had near everything – command issues, scouting and screening cavalry, operational and tactical blends, weather, a decent timescale, something west of the Brussels /Charleroi road
and all of it presented on a wacky large hex map. Pushing forty when I nabbed this goody, I was coming back to the hobby after a period of absence lasting a fair whack of years. I more or less immediately recognized the similarities to NLB, but only rather later cottoned on to the two games both being designed by Kevin Zucker. Oh dear. Could I criticize it? I do not really want to because this was a clever piece of work that combined so much relevant colour with genuine ease of play. True, it needed a revised set of rules, but this was really the first time I felt like these were 1815 armies moving realistically on the operational level and fighting realistically on the tactical level. As such, the necessity of preventing the two Coalition armies joining was played out in a historically faithful manner. You even got a pontoon train! Looking back to my earlier article, time was certainly an issue in this game – and daringly and adeptly done. Turns were great chunks of daytime (morning, afternoon, evening – I think – and night.). Your big battles might therefore only last a couple of turns, or maybe three, but this worked alongside a very neat battle engagement system which made it very difficult to keep throwing the same units into the fray and expecting them to look interested. The one negative was the map – in my opinion. Big hexes are all very well, but to compensate parts of the map detail looked plain odd – bends in roads where there never bends in reality, but it was the only way to make the terrain stay more or less where it should. Perhaps areas would have been better, and I must admit to being one of those gamers who think areas should be employed in map design far more often. The Emperor Returns (Clash of Arms) The Emperor returns Another Kevin Zucker design, following in the operational tradition of Napoleon at Bay, 1809, Struggle of Nations, and others too numerous to mention. Two things really dominated the design mindset of this series – logistics and army command. You could not simply push all your pieces to wherever you wanted them to go – you had to issue orders from a Centre of Operations (best placed on the best bit of road you could find), or else rely on the subordinate commander’s initiative to move without directions coming from above. And every time something or someone moved, there was a danger that someone or some things would fall by the wayside as march attrition took its toll. Given the smaller distances and timespan of the 1815 campaign, this was not so much of an issue as in other campaigns, but then again, the game covered a far greater period of time, with the French army’s shift to the border catered for, and then potentially weeks of manoeuvres following after. You could play with fog of war, and this tied in with a map of nearly all of Belgium and a chunk of northern France, enabled the French to opt for a completely different approach to the historic one. L’Armée du Nord might make its main thrust further to the west, thus threatening immediately the Iron Duke’s communications with Britain; or, alternatively, you could find Boney moving further east, to imperil Blücher’s lines of communication with the Rhine. The choice was wide open, and so the battles on this 1815 rerun might well occur far away from Hougomont’s woods and Ligny brook. Inevitably though, in this system, which stressed that what went on pre battle was at least as important as battle itself, the battles you saw on your map were fought with a very broad brush – not without style or consideration of battle factors such as cavalry finishing a rout, or the French Grand Battery, but not ever a battle “in little” as other designs might seek to attempt. Weather? Well that was certainly present, but I felt it was not quite right. The game insisted, as I recall, that it was going to tip down on the 17th as it historically did. But, given how many other what-ifs you were working with, and how much Belgium you could be in, I always felt that this game needed to be less set about when the bad weather came, if at all, and where it fell
if it ever did. Oh, and where was I when I got this game? At home, waiting for the parcel to arrive. Battles of the Hundred DaysHundred Days This was essentially a Kevin Zucker operational model tied down to the actual Waterloo campaign territory. It came in a tiny box, with a tiny bland map, utterly unremarkable units and a totally unappealing rulebook. Nevertheless, all the orders and logistics/admin stuff was there, but sometimes you cannot overcome disappointing components and a sense that this is the wrong game in the wrong format, lingering away in the wrong box. I played it a few times at uni, and it then followed me home looking for love – but thirty years on, it still has not had any. L’Armée du NordArmee du Nord Just in terms of physical size, the biggest game on the 1815 campaign. It still pertains to the actual history, but the amount of room around the actual lines of advance and retreat opened up broader options. As I recall, I got this game in a London shop, where, having money to spend and wanting to spend it wisely, I spent ages in this large basement area (where the wargames were) prompting the owner to come down and make sure I had not collapsed or something. The game had weather, a sense of time and command, and a neat effect of distinguishing some casualties as men shook loose from units as stragglers or lightly wounded, from those who were clearly never going to prime a musket again. Perhaps the biggest issue with this game was its sheer physical size – you could play the whole campaign on three maps, or go for a specific day (guess what the choices were) where two of the three maps were in play. I never had room for three maps, and barely enough table space for two. As a Clash of Arms game it was attractive, but plain too big for me. Maybe others could cope, but I am tempted to say this was another game where working with a map divided into areas might have condensed things down whilst keeping options open. Waterloo Fate of FranceLDG_WaterlooFateofFrance My most recent campaign acquisition, and talking of areas, this is a game with an area divided campaign map. You move your forces on this, with a reasonable amount of room off the historic beaten track; but when it came to battle, you moved everything onto one of a number of battle mats, which contained, depending on the location, actual or representative terrain of the sort of area you were in. If you want to talk about time in this game, it is hard not to turn the issue of time into a look at the two speed nature of the design. This can be problem with games which seek to do things two different ways – sometimes the two levels marry well together
and sometimes they do not. Avalanche Press’ copious range of naval titles, for example, combine an operational level and a tactical battle system, which, despite its broad strokes, is still reasonably involved. The problem with Fate of France’s two tier system, at least for me, is that the battle tier has not got the scope it needed and can feel like a poor man’s simulation of anything that could or did occur. In plain terms, the battlefield maps are a tad too small, and, surprising for an L2 product, the battlefield graphics are utterly uninspiring. In a sense, it rather negates the ease of area movement at operations level to then have to nudge and squeeze the attractive units onto small unattractive maps. For me, bogging the game down with a fiddly, awkward battle provision was not the way to go. On the other hand, the rules are pretty straightforward, and many of the right elements are present
even if the box does not fit anywhere. Napoleon Napoleonnew-cover-400 This would have been my most recent 1815 purchase in its deluxe form, only I already had the game from some years back in an earlier Columbia version. Like The Emperor Returns, there are a great many options for the French advance as the map covered a good amount of Belgium – albeit, in its earlier form, on a map of such limited proportions it could have been mistaken in some countries for a stamp. Well, that is a bit of an exaggeration, but it was not a big map, so the new version was worth getting if only to put my broad sweeps on a broader operational canvas. Of course, from certain perspectives, this game could be ridiculed for its notable list of missing “essentials.” There is no weather; no real sense of command and control other than a basic limit to how many “group” moves the different armies can make in any given turn, and the battle system never seems to run out of Q&A prompts. But dammit, this is the game which did fog of war better than any other game in history – it helps that this is the “Campaign Daddy” of all campaigns, with tension and consequences abounding. Furthermore, whatever the quirks of the combat system (which now includes an abstracted provision of terrain) it does marry well with the operational pace of the broader gameplay, and was surely a better model for how things might have been done in Waterloo Fate of France. To put it plainly, this is still the best 1815 campaign simulation out there. I do not care what it does not have, because that is utterly secondary to the beautiful simplicity of a game that highlighted the essential campaign quandaries of all three armies. Conclusion Next year we will be at the bi-centennial of Waterloo, and naturally the mind turns to what 1815 offerings the hobby will delight us with in
2016
or 2017. There is surely plenty of scope for something really special: something that will marry time pressures to command limitations, and add weather, fog of war, drama and panoply. I just hope whatever arrives, whenever it arrives, is not too big, too complex, vexing, two paced,
the campaign, duly realized, will do enough of that in itself. About the Author Paul Paul has been involved in the hobby since the early 1970s. Of largely Belgian ancestry on his father’s side, and English (Yorkshire) on his mother’s, after finishing his education he worked in tourism and student services, and also spent some time in the former West Germany. He met his wife Boo in 1990, and they married a couple of years later. Paul his from a long line of former servicemen – one grandfather was a sergeant in the BEF of 1914, whilst two of his great grandfathers were to killed whilst serving with the Royal Navy. His own father, who was born in Britain, served with the army in Malaya in the early 1950s.</p> 19303012 2014-09-01 00:03:31 2014-09-01 00:03:31 open open waterloo-games-19303012 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Smokey the Bear http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/31/smokey-the-bear-19299794/ Sun, 31 Aug 2014 05:17:14 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Smokey the Bear Where There’s Smoke September 1, 2014 Issue Only You By Ian Frazier http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/01/only-you?utm_source=tny&utm_campaign=generalsocial&utm_medium=twitter&mbid=social_twitter Alley Pond Park, in Queens, sounds small, as if it could fit between a couple of high-rises. In fact, the park stretches for more than a mile and a half and covers six hundred and fifty-five acres that seem almost to be in another dimension, coexisting as they do with the Cross Island Parkway, Northern Boulevard, the Long Island Expressway, the Douglaston Parkway, Union Turnpike, and the Grand Central Parkway, all of which insinuate their multiple lanes through and along the park and curl their intricate cloverleafs over the green of its map like sprung violin strings. On the highways, you’re barely aware of the park, and in the park the highways are a distant noise. One of the park’s entrances winds among tall, shadowy, redwood-size columns of concrete that support an elevated section of road. Smokey the Bear was in the park the other day, walking around in an open, grassy area and having his picture taken with people. The occasion was his seventieth birthday; on August 9, 1944, the U.S. Forest Service and the Ad Council decided to use a fictional bear named Smokey as the mascot for their campaign to prevent forest fires. Later, a real bear who survived a New Mexico forest fire shared the name, but the classic Smokey remains the anthropomorphized bipedal bear in the poster, with the ranger hat and the shovel. As he strolled in a stately, slightly syncopated manner, well-wishers kept asking Smokey if he was hot in all that fur, but an occasional shrug was the only reply. He never once spoke. His eyes were set back under the brim of his hat and the overhang of his brow, and he made his point by silent moral authority. To look into his eyes was to hear the pulse of your own fire-using, match-tossing, corrupted human heart. Maybe there were a lot of Smokeys at large in American parks on that particular afternoon. This Smokey had the sponsorship of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, and its representatives had hung the pink crêpe-paper streamers in an oak tree, and set up the tables where kids could make birthday cards for Smokey, and provided the chocolate- or vanilla-frosted birthday cupcakes, and arranged for the various instructional booths—the N.Y.C. Fire Department’s Fire Safety Education, the D.E.C.’s Division of Lands and Forests, and the N.Y.C. Department of Sanitation’s Compost Project, among others. At the Fire Safety booth, the firefighters Lois Mungay and Stephen Comer were remembering some notable urban brush fires. “By Howard Beach, one time, the dry phragmites reeds were burning like crazy out beyond Cross Bay Boulevard, and we were hauling the hoses around back there in the brush,” Comer said. “We couldn’t even see where the fire was!” “Yeah—you just hear a crackling in the distance, like a fireplace,” said Mungay. “The chief was radioing us—‘It’s to your left! It’s to your right!’ ” Comer said. “Haulin’ those hoses everyplace in the reeds, finally I collapsed. They had to carry me out.” “Did you have to go in the hyperbaric chamber?” “No, it was just exhaustion. But, I’ll tell you, the experience gave me new respect for the guys fightin’ fires out West.” Just then, Smokey ambled by the booth, giving the thumbs-up sign. “Hey, Smokey! But where’s his little sidekick—what’s-his-name, Boo-Boo Bear?” Mungay asked. “That’s Yogi Bear’s little sidekick. In the cartoon. Not Smokey the Bear—different bear,” Comer said. A lot of other things were going on in this corner of the park. To one side of Smokey’s party, a group of about thirty mostly Asian young men and women were holding a get-acquainted picnic for the bridesmaids and groomsmen of a wedding planned for September. On the other side was a Spanish-speaking birthday party with a “Dora the Explorer” theme for a two-year-old girl. From a farther-off cookout, guys playing Frisbee and holding Solo cups in their free hands ran past Smokey without paying him much mind. Smokey stood bare-chested (aside from his fur) and unshod (ditto); his ranger hat and a pair of Wrangler bluejeans constituted his only clothing. His head fit onto his shoulders so well that the seam could hardly be seen. In true bear fashion, his full-length profile increased substantially at the middle. A man came up to him and asked, “Hey, Smokey—what size are your jeans?” Smokey fixed the man with a long, level, heart-stopping gaze. The man seemed to shrivel slightly. The bear crossed his forelegs across his chest twice, and then held them in a three-o’clock position: “X X L.” His expression didn’t change. ♦ [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19299794 2014-08-31 05:17:14 2014-08-31 05:17:14 open open smokey-the-bear-19299794 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Lt. Walter G. Haut Roswell base public information officer http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/31/lt-walter-g-haut-roswell-base-public-information-officer-19299768/ Sun, 31 Aug 2014 04:58:07 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan http://roswellproof.homestead.com/haut.html Lt. Walter G. Haut Roswell base public information officer "deathbed" affidavit to seeing spacecraft & bodies On UFO Updates on November 17, 2007, Kevin Randle also wrote that a man he interviewed in the mid-1990s, 1st Lt. Richard C. Harris, Jr., said that he met Haut near a base hangar and Haut told him at that time about seeing a dead alien body. Harris said Haut suggested he take a quick look, but Harris decided against this. (Harris, the base asst. financial officer, also said he helped cover up the paper trail of expenses involved in the recovery.) Tom Carey and Donald Schmitt also remark how Haut commonly dropped hints that he knew more than he was letting on to. Haut's common closing remarks in public appearances or in interviews was, "It wasn't any type of weather balloon. I believe it was a UFO! Just don't ask me why!" Haut started to become more publicly forthcoming in 2000. He gave a lengthy recorded oral history with researchers Wendy Connors and Dennis Balthauser, people he knew well and trusted. Haut stipulated the interview was not to be released until after his death. (Haut died in December 2005). In the interview (transcript) Haut first disclosed he saw the craft and small bodies in one of the hangars. He also disclosed that Gen. Roger Ramey, one of the architects of the weather balloon cover-up, had flown in for the staff morning meeting on July 8, and helped decide on how to deal with the situation. (Wendy Connors in private email, told me that Haut was already telling her privately about Ramey and knowing something about the bodies even before this interview.) In December 2002, Haut filled out a notarized affidavit (immediately below), that was sealed and again not to be publicly disclosed until after his death. A copy first appeared in the June 2007 book Witness to Roswell by Tom Carey and Don Schmitt, released with permission of Haut's surviving family. New Nov. 2008! Schmitt and Haut's daughter Julie Shuster afterwards revealed that the affidavit was drafted by Schmitt, with Haut's approval, after years of conversations with Haut. Haut then carefully reviewed Schmitt's emailed draft for accuracy, both privately and with Shuster present. He made no changes before signing in front of Shuster, a notary, and an outside witness. According to Schmitt, a doctor had just reviewed the status of Haut's health and judged him to be of sound mind. For Shuster's detailed comments in the September MUFON Journal about the process behind the affidavit, click here. In the affidavit, Haut again said that he had seen the crash object and bodies in a hangar (Hangar 84 or P-3). Col. Blanchard, a close friend his entire life, made a point of taking him out there. Haut also disclosed new information, such as personally handling the debris during the morning meeting, which he said was unlike anything he or anyone else there had ever seen before, going out to one of the crash sites (probably the large Foster Ranch debris field) and bringing debris back to his office. He also revealed that the second main crash site with the object and bodies was about 40 miles north of Roswell and had been found by civilians on July 7. He first became aware of both crash sites by the afternoon of Monday, July 7, after returning to duty from the 4th of July weekend. A key topic of discussion at the morning meeting was how to deal with the situation, since members of the press and public already knew something was going on. Haut gave insight into the reasoning behind Blanchard's perplexing flying disc press release which Haut delivered to the local Roswell media. Gen. Ramey wished to divert attention away from the more important craft/body site by acknowledging the remoter, less accessible debris site, but providing few details. Haut believed Ramey was acting under direction of his superiors at the Pentagon. It was discussed whether to tell the public the full truth, but this was decided against, and thus began a cover-up that continues to this day. Haut also mentioned being aware of teams sent out to both sites for months afterwards to search for any remaining evidence. This provided some corroboration for Bill Brazel's story (son of rancher Mack Brazel) of having debris samples confiscated from him by such a team a few months later. Haut is far from alone in his claims to seeing alien bodies, a spacecraft or strange debris. Click on the links at the top for other such accounts about non-human bodies or strange debris, such as Frederick Benthal and Eli Benjamin, two other military alien body eyewitnesses. The writeup on mortician Glenn Dennis has numerous other mostly second-hand accounts. A number of these center around base Hangar 84 or P-3 mentioned by Haut, where crash debris, craft, and bodies were taken for processing and shipment. The heavily guarded B-29 crate flight to Fort Worth on July 9, the day after Haut's viewing of the bodies/craft in the hangar, is strongly suspected of carrying bodies. See also my review of the Carey/Schmitt book for an overview of the accounts. According to Carey & Schmitt, Haut waited until the end of his life to reveal this information because he had promised Col. Blanchard to not disclose it while he was alive. Haut may have had another personal reason. He was well-aware how other major Roswell witnesses had been savaged by debunkers, a prime example being Jesse Marcel, the intelligence officer. By initially denying direct knowledge of the more controversial aspects about Roswell, Haut would be denying critics a convenient target. However, with Haut's now-public interview and affidavit confessing to being an eyewitness to the debris, spacecraft, and bodies, he will no doubt be attacked as a liar who changed his story, a senile old man, or even worse. Haut's "deathbed" affidavit is sure to stir up a huge heated controversy. Once a public figure like Haut states that there really was a flying saucer crash and alien bodies and he saw it with his own eyes, there is never any returning to the quiet life. Walter Haut was the public information officer at Roswell base during the Roswell incident of July 1947. In interviews dating back to the 1980s, he said he was mostly out-of-the-loop. His basic story was that on the morning of July 8, base commander Col. William Blanchard had dictated to him a press release that they had obtained a flying disc from a nearby ranch and were flying it on to "higher headquarters." He said he thought the original press release was the truth and he was convinced "the material recovered was some type of craft from outer space." (1993 affidavit) He was pretty sure Blanchard must have seen the debris before issuing the press release and said Blanchard would never make a mistake of confusing the recovered material with a weather balloon.. Haut, who lived in Roswell, became one of the most interviewed and public Roswell witnesses and key advocate of a saucer crash, yet continued to publicly disclaim personal knowledge of the debris or of the actual craft and recovered bodies as reported by other witnesses. However, Haut's on-the-record public statements differed from some of his private ones. E.g., Robert Shirkey Jr., son of Robert Shirkey, base assistant operations officer, disclosed on a recent Art Bell show that Haut told his father, a good friend, about seeing the bodies clear back in 1989. Shirkey Jr., said his father also told him this in 1989. (Art Bell show, June 30, 2007, 3rd hour) Shirkey Sr. in his 1991 affidavit also hinted at this when he stated "I learned later that... the bodies were laid out in Hanger 84." An excerpt of Shirkey Jr.'s comments about being told of the bodies are below, including statements about the character of the men involved, whom he knew personally, having grown up in Roswell. (See 2 minutes into clip for body comments.) Lt. Walter G. Haut Roswell base public information officer "deathbed" affidavit to seeing spacecraft & bodies On UFO Updates on November 17, 2007, Kevin Randle also wrote that a man he interviewed in the mid-1990s, 1st Lt. Richard C. Harris, Jr., said that he met Haut near a base hangar and Haut told him at that time about seeing a dead alien body. Harris said Haut suggested he take a quick look, but Harris decided against this. (Harris, the base asst. financial officer, also said he helped cover up the paper trail of expenses involved in the recovery.) Tom Carey and Donald Schmitt also remark how Haut commonly dropped hints that he knew more than he was letting on to. Haut's common closing remarks in public appearances or in interviews was, "It wasn't any type of weather balloon. I believe it was a UFO! Just don't ask me why!" Haut started to become more publicly forthcoming in 2000. He gave a lengthy recorded oral history with researchers Wendy Connors and Dennis Balthauser, people he knew well and trusted. Haut stipulated the interview was not to be released until after his death. (Haut died in December 2005). In the interview (transcript) Haut first disclosed he saw the craft and small bodies in one of the hangars. He also disclosed that Gen. Roger Ramey, one of the architects of the weather balloon cover-up, had flown in for the staff morning meeting on July 8, and helped decide on how to deal with the situation. (Wendy Connors in private email, told me that Haut was already telling her privately about Ramey and knowing something about the bodies even before this interview.) In December 2002, Haut filled out a notarized affidavit (immediately below), that was sealed and again not to be publicly disclosed until after his death. A copy first appeared in the June 2007 book Witness to Roswell by Tom Carey and Don Schmitt, released with permission of Haut's surviving family. New Nov. 2008! Schmitt and Haut's daughter Julie Shuster afterwards revealed that the affidavit was drafted by Schmitt, with Haut's approval, after years of conversations with Haut. Haut then carefully reviewed Schmitt's emailed draft for accuracy, both privately and with Shuster present. He made no changes before signing in front of Shuster, a notary, and an outside witness. According to Schmitt, a doctor had just reviewed the status of Haut's health and judged him to be of sound mind. For Shuster's detailed comments in the September MUFON Journal about the process behind the affidavit, click here. In the affidavit, Haut again said that he had seen the crash object and bodies in a hangar (Hangar 84 or P-3). Col. Blanchard, a close friend his entire life, made a point of taking him out there. Haut also disclosed new information, such as personally handling the debris during the morning meeting, which he said was unlike anything he or anyone else there had ever seen before, going out to one of the crash sites (probably the large Foster Ranch debris field) and bringing debris back to his office. He also revealed that the second main crash site with the object and bodies was about 40 miles north of Roswell and had been found by civilians on July 7. He first became aware of both crash sites by the afternoon of Monday, July 7, after returning to duty from the 4th of July weekend. A key topic of discussion at the morning meeting was how to deal with the situation, since members of the press and public already knew something was going on. Haut gave insight into the reasoning behind Blanchard's perplexing flying disc press release which Haut delivered to the local Roswell media. Gen. Ramey wished to divert attention away from the more important craft/body site by acknowledging the remoter, less accessible debris site, but providing few details. Haut believed Ramey was acting under direction of his superiors at the Pentagon. It was discussed whether to tell the public the full truth, but this was decided against, and thus began a cover-up that continues to this day. Haut also mentioned being aware of teams sent out to both sites for months afterwards to search for any remaining evidence. This provided some corroboration for Bill Brazel's story (son of rancher Mack Brazel) of having debris samples confiscated from him by such a team a few months later. Haut is far from alone in his claims to seeing alien bodies, a spacecraft or strange debris. Click on the links at the top for other such accounts about non-human bodies or strange debris, such as Frederick Benthal and Eli Benjamin, two other military alien body eyewitnesses. The writeup on mortician Glenn Dennis has numerous other mostly second-hand accounts. A number of these center around base Hangar 84 or P-3 mentioned by Haut, where crash debris, craft, and bodies were taken for processing and shipment. The heavily guarded B-29 crate flight to Fort Worth on July 9, the day after Haut's viewing of the bodies/craft in the hangar, is strongly suspected of carrying bodies. See also my review of the Carey/Schmitt book for an overview of the accounts. According to Carey & Schmitt, Haut waited until the end of his life to reveal this information because he had promised Col. Blanchard to not disclose it while he was alive. Haut may have had another personal reason. He was well-aware how other major Roswell witnesses had been savaged by debunkers, a prime example being Jesse Marcel, the intelligence officer. By initially denying direct knowledge of the more controversial aspects about Roswell, Haut would be denying critics a convenient target. However, with Haut's now-public interview and affidavit confessing to being an eyewitness to the debris, spacecraft, and bodies, he will no doubt be attacked as a liar who changed his story, a senile old man, or even worse. Haut's "deathbed" affidavit is sure to stir up a huge heated controversy. Once a public figure like Haut states that there really was a flying saucer crash and alien bodies and he saw it with his own eyes, there is never any returning to the quiet life. . 1993 AFFIDAVIT OF WALTER HAUT (1) My name is Walter Haut (2) My address is: XXXXXXXXXX (3) I am retired. (4) In July 1947, I was stationed at the Roswell Army Air base serving as the base Public Information Officer. At approximately 9:30 AM on July 8, I received a call from Col. William Blanchard, the base commander, who said he had in his possession a flying saucer or parts thereof. He said it came from a ranch northwest of Roswell, and that the base Intelligence Officer, Major Jesse Marcel, was going to fly the material to Fort Worth. (5) Col. Blanchard told me to write a news release about the operation and to deliver it to both newspapers and the two radio stations in Roswell. He felt that he wanted the local media to have the first opportunity at the story. I went first to KGFL, then to KSWS, then to the Daily Record and finally to the Morning Dispatch. (6) The next day, I read in the newspaper that General Roger Ramey in Fort Worth had said the object was a weather balloon. (7) I believe Col. Blanchard saw the material, because he sounded positive about what the material was. There is no chance that he would have mistaken it for a weather balloon. Neither is their any chance that Major Marcel would have been mistaken. (8) In 1980, Jesse Marcel told me that the material photographed in Gen. Ramey's office was not the material he had recovered. (9) I am convinced that the material recovered was some type of craft from outer space. (10) I have not been paid nor given anything of value to make this statement, and it is the truth to the best of my recollection. Signed: Walter G. Haut 5-14-93 Signature witnessed by: M. Littell (?) [Source: Karl Pflock, Roswell in Perspective, 1994] .NEW 2007! 2002 SEALED AFFIDAVIT OF WALTER G. HAUT DATE: December 26, 2002 WITNESS: Chris Xxxxxx NOTARY: Beverlee Morgan (1) My name is Walter G. Haut (2) I was born on June 2, 1922 (3) My address is 1405 W. 7th Street, Roswell, NM 88203 (4) I am retired. (5) In July, 1947, I was stationed at the Roswell Army Air Base in Roswell, New Mexico, serving as the base Public Information Officer. I had spent the 4th of July weekend (Saturday, the 5th, and Sunday, the 6th) at my private residence about 10 miles north of the base, which was located south of town. (6) I was aware that someone had reported the remains of a downed vehicle by midmorning after my return to duty at the base on Monday, July 7. I was aware that Major Jesse A. Marcel, head of intelligence, was sent by the base commander, Col. William Blanchard, to investigate. (7) By late in the afternoon that same day, I would learn that additional civilian reports came in regarding a second site just north of Roswell. I would spend the better part of the day attending to my regular duties hearing little if anything more. (8) On Tuesday morning, July 8, I would attend the regularly scheduled staff meeting at 7:30 a.m. Besides Blanchard, Marcel; CIC [Counterintelligence Corp] Capt. Sheridan Cavitt; Col. James I. Hopkins, the operations officer; Lt. Col. Ulysses S. Nero, the supply officer; and from Carswell AAF in Fort Worth, Texas, Blanchard's boss, Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey and his chief of staff, Col. Thomas J. Dubose were also in attendance. The main topic of discussion was reported by Marcel and Cavitt regarding an extensive debris field in Lincoln County approx. 75 miles NW of Roswell. A preliminary briefing was provided by Blanchard about the second site approx. 40 miles north of town. Samples of wreckage were passed around the table. It was unlike any material I had or have ever seen in my life. Pieces which resembled metal foil, paper thin yet extremely strong, and pieces with unusual markings along their length were handled from man to man, each voicing their opinion. No one was able to identify the crash debris. (9) One of the main concerns discussed at the meeting was whether we should go public or not with the discovery. Gen. Ramey proposed a plan, which I believe originated from his bosses at the Pentagon. Attention needed to be diverted from the more important site north of town by acknowledging the other location. Too many civilians were already involved and the press already was informed. I was not completely informed how this would be accomplished. (10) At approximately 9:30 a.m. Col. Blanchard phoned my office and dictated the press release of having in our possession a flying disc, coming from a ranch northwest of Roswell, and Marcel flying the material to higher headquarters. I was to deliver the news release to radio stations KGFL and KSWS, and newspapers the Daily Record and the Morning Dispatch. (11) By the time the news release hit the wire services, my office was inundated with phone calls from around the world. Messages stacked up on my desk, and rather than deal with the media concern, Col Blanchard suggested that I go home and "hide out." (12) Before leaving the base, Col. Blanchard took me personally to Building 84 [AKA Hangar P-3], a B-29 hangar located on the east side of the tarmac. Upon first approaching the building, I observed that it was under heavy guard both outside and inside. Once inside, I was permitted from a safe distance to first observe the object just recovered north of town. It was approx. 12 to 15 feet in length, not quite as wide, about 6 feet high, and more of an egg shape. Lighting was poor, but its surface did appear metallic. No windows, portholes, wings, tail section, or landing gear were visible. (13) Also from a distance, I was able to see a couple of bodies under a canvas tarpaulin. Only the heads extended beyond the covering, and I was not able to make out any features. The heads did appear larger than normal and the contour of the canvas suggested the size of a 10 year old child. At a later date in Blanchard's office, he would extend his arm about 4 feet above the floor to indicate the height. (14) I was informed of a temporary morgue set up to accommodate the recovered bodies. (15) I was informed that the wreckage was not "hot" (radioactive). (16) Upon his return from Fort Worth, Major Marcel described to me taking pieces of the wreckage to Gen. Ramey's office and after returning from a map room, finding the remains of a weather balloon and radar kite substituted while he was out of the room. Marcel was very upset over this situation. We would not discuss it again. (17) I would be allowed to make at least one visit to one of the recovery sites during the military cleanup. I would return to the base with some of the wreckage which I would display in my office. (18) I was aware two separate teams would return to each site months later for periodic searches for any remaining evidence. (19) I am convinced that what I personally observed was some type of craft and its crew from outer space. (20) I have not been paid nor given anything of value to make this statement, and it is the truth to the best of my recollection. Signed: Walter G. Haut December 26, 2002 Signature witnessed by: Chris Xxxxxxx [Source: Tom Carey & Donald Schmitt, Witness to Roswell, 2007] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19299768 2014-08-31 04:58:07 2014-08-31 04:58:07 open open lt-walter-g-haut-roswell-base-public-information-officer-19299768 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan In the Public Interest: The Crime of Overbilling Healthcare Ralph Nader http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/30/in-the-public-interest-the-crime-of-overbilling-healthcare-ralph-nader-19298450/ Sat, 30 Aug 2014 19:21:13 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan In the Public Interest: The Crime of Overbilling Healthcare Ralph Nader August 29, 2014 Over twenty years ago, Pat Palmer, in her own words, “stumbled upon a $400 overcharge in a bill my father received for a routine medical procedure.” That might have become the costliest “overcharge” the gouging, overbilling health care industry ever inflicted on itself. Because it led Ms. Palmer, whom Steve Brill (author of the Time Magazine cover story, “Why Medical Bills are Killing Us,” April 4, 2013) called “one of my earliest tutors as I tried to figure out the dysfunctional world of medical economics and billing,” to start a business investigating the overbilling of patients. Located in Roanoke, Virginia, Medical Billing Advocates of America (MBAA) (billadvocates.com) makes money by saving patients money. No savings, no charge. In twenty years, she has collected a multitude of cases of doctors, hospitals and insurance companies overcharging. This evidence reflects routine, everyday overbilling in the many billions of dollars a year. How extensive is this commercial crime wave? The nation’s expert on computerized billing fraud, Malcolm Sparrow, who is an applied mathematician at Harvard, estimates medical billing fraud adds up to a minimum sum of $270 billion a year or at least ten percent of all health care expenses. His classic book, License to Steal, showed that these ripoffs are not just clerical errors or computer malfunctions. The systemic fraud goes far beyond the organized criminal syndicates defrauding Medicare that the FBI raids once in a while. The frauds are designed with corporate interests in mind to filch your wallet directly or under the nose of unobservant insurers, from the very design of billing statements to the manipulation of codes. Pat Palmer is out with a paperback titled Surviving Your Medical Bills, which is self-published by her firm, MBAA. Ms. Palmer explained she almost gave up on “all the rules and regulations that no one is enforcing.” It’s a good thing she didn’t. Instead, Ms. Palmer decided to rile up the patients and their families directly with her book by describing how outrageously brazen billing practices are (not just an aberration) and showing how people can become common-sense investigators if they receive these shocking bills. Start with the fact that about eighty percent of all medical bills contain errors, with the average error being $1,300. Most of these overbillings favor, unsurprisingly, the sellers (euphemistically called “the providers”). Ms. Palmer says the situation has been getting worse. With the number of diagnostic codes growing from 17,000 to about 60,000 under Obamacare, to supposedly improve efficiency, the system has become even more complicated, with hospitals and few others knowing how to game or beat the system. She lists many of the ways that medical bills are hugely inflated, using the technique known as unbundling, when tests and procedures are broken down into their individual components, which allows for double or triple billing. Some hospitals also, by their own admission, incorporate their overhead in the itemized pricing of even simple items like $20 aspirins or $15 disposable razors. An example of double-billing technique is when a patient is charged thousands of dollars a day for being in an intensive care unit (ICU) and then also charged for the ventilator which is already factored into the cost of the ICU. Hospitals charge for their mistakes as in the radiology department. Another example is when they charge, say $12, for each time a nurse brings you an aspirin, even though you’re paying for these hospital services in your room rate. Transporting that aspirin is called an “oral administration fee.” Gobbleygook names are omnipresent in these bills. You can get these itemizations by refusing to accept a “summary bill,” and ask, as is your right under state law, to receive an itemized bill which sometimes will extend to pages of computer printout in inscrutable code that you can then demand an explanation in ordinary English. Hospital billings for similar services or items vary wildly and arbitrarily. Ms. Palmer found a hospital charging $444.78 for a 10-milligram vial of the neuromuscular blocking drug Norcuron. She then found another hospital “charging $17.90 for the very same 10-milligram vial.” In her book, she often refers to documented examples of massive overbilling on major surgeries, major medical equipment and lesser items. People have been charged for phantom procedures, nominal physician visits, for hospital employees transporting specimens down a few floors to the labs. Patients, are charged for omnibus services and products, then charged again and again for the pieces. Now obviously there are variations as well in levels of honesty and fraud between institutions and practices. But overall, what Palmer and Sparrow are writing about is, arguably, our country’s biggest commercial crime wave. However, strangely, prosecutors reserve their few grand jury indictments largely for the criminal underworld stealing from Medicare or other insurers. For the corporate establishment, there are always the easy ways out such as confessing error, but not intent, when caught or arguing reasonable industry practices. They quickly correct the specific bill of its offending bloat and satisfy the complaining patient, but nothing changes overall. Clearly the current criminal laws do not adequately prevent such computerized theft and need to be amended to account for this fraud. Furthermore, if our nation followed the example of other countries and transitioned to a universal full Medicare for-all-system, this would end fee for service and the Pat Palmers would be out of business (see singlepayeraction.org for more information). The main point of this book is that if enough outraged or concerned patients can follow Pat Palmer’s clear roadmap and challenge the bilkers, maybe the law enforcers will get the message and maybe the lawmakers will give these law enforcers the budgets to stop these widespread corporate crimes. follow on Twitter | friend on Facebook | forward to a friend Copyright © 2014 Nader.Org, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in at our website. Our mailing address is: Nader.Org P.O. Box 19367 Washington, DC 20036 [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19298450 2014-08-30 19:21:13 2014-08-30 19:21:13 open open in-the-public-interest-the-crime-of-overbilling-healthcare-ralph-nader-19298450 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Is There Such A Thing As A 'Good Psychopath'? byLinton Weeks http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/24/is-there-such-a-thing-as-a-good-psychopath-bylinton-weeks-19250783/ Sun, 24 Aug 2014 20:36:54 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Is There Such A Thing As A 'Good Psychopath'? by Linton Weeks August 21, 201411:11 AM ET Man in a white mask standing in the snow beside a gray river. kuzmafoto.com/iStockphoto Oxymoronic, isn't it, the idea of a "good psychopath"? But in their just published book, The Good Psychopath's Guide to Success, Andy McNab and Kevin Dutton argue that relying on some psychopathic traits can lead to a more successful life. Andy is a British Special Air Service veteran and novelist; Kevin is an Oxford University psychologist. Kevin . Andy says . Their checklist of psychopathic traits includes: charisma, charm, coolness under pressure, fearlessness, focus, impulsivity, lack of conscience, mental toughness, reduced empathy and ruthlessness. "None of these characteristics are inherently bad in themselves," Kevin says. "When they become dysfunctional is when they are deployed inflexibly in the wrong contexts." On the other hand, functional psychopaths — according to the book — are able to modulate their feelings to be more productive in business, in politics and in life. The Path To Psychopathy Don't we already have enough psychopaths in the world? we ask Kevin. By encouraging people to get in touch with their inner psychopath, aren't you removing guilt and shame and conscience from the equation? Won't that be deleterious to society? "I'm not saying that psychopaths per se are good for society," Kevin says. "A pure psychopath is going to ruin his or her life and also the lives of those who they come into contact with." But Kevin does believe that certain psychopathic characteristics, such as those listed above, "can — when dialed up at certain levels, in certain combinations and in certain contexts — predispose one to success." No Such Thing The whole idea of a "good psychopath" has succeeded in upsetting Lillian Glass, a who has written or co-written a raft of books including Toxic People: 10 Ways of Dealing with People Who Make Your Life Miserable and A Guide to Identifying Terrorists Through Body Language. "The words 'psychopath' and 'success' should never be in the same sentence," Lillian says. "Psychopaths are dangerous people, and to encourage someone to act like a psychopath is both irresponsible and dangerous." She does not subscribe to the notion that we all have some psychopath within us. "You either are one or you are not one," she says. "And if you are a psychopath, you don't dial up the levels of the traits. ... It can't be done. Psychopaths don't pick and choose how ruthless or nonempathetic they will be. They are these traits, and it is not by degree." Lillian says, "All of these characteristics are wrong when they hurt others. A lack of conscience is very wrong, and an absence of one can lead to committing criminal acts on others. Ruthlessness is not a good characteristic. It is a bad characteristic." So, we ask Oxonian Kevin Dutton, can you point to a successful psychopath who has made positive contributions to the world? "Psychopathy is on a spectrum," Kevin says. "It is neither all or nothing. Nor should 'successful psychopathy' be removed from context. But someone who was pretty high on the psychopathic spectrum was Winston Churchill." Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19250783 2014-08-24 20:36:54 2014-08-24 20:36:54 open open is-there-such-a-thing-as-a-good-psychopath-bylinton-weeks-19250783 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan ‘Dead zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico is the size of Connecticut http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/19/dead-zone-in-the-gulf-of-mexico-is-the-size-of-connecticut-19183344/ Tue, 19 Aug 2014 06:36:34 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>http://artbell.com/dead-zone-in-the-gulf-of-mexico-is-the-size-of-connecticut/ ‘Dead zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico is the size of Connecticut| 379 Views | Leave a response (Reuters) – Scientists say a man-made “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico is as big as the state of Connecticut. The zone, which at about 5,000 square miles (13,000 sq km) is the second largest in the world but still smaller than in previous years, is so named because it contains no oxygen, or too little, at the Gulf floor to support bottom-dwelling fish and shrimp. The primary cause of the annual phenomenon is excess nutrient runoff from farms along the Mississippi River, which empties into the Gulf, said Gene Turner, a researcher at Louisiana State University’s Coastal Ecology Institute. The nutrients feed algae growth, which consumes oxygen when it works its way to the Gulf bottom, he said. “It’s a poster child for how we are using and abusing our natural resources,” Turner said. More via Reuters. [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19183344 2014-08-19 06:36:34 2014-08-19 06:36:34 open open dead-zone-in-the-gulf-of-mexico-is-the-size-of-connecticut-19183344 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan NEWSWEEK Young Israeli Entrepreneurs Are Flocking to Germany By Elisabeth Braw / July 3, 2014 2:00 PM EDT http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/18/newsweek-young-israeli-entrepreneurs-are-flocking-to-germany-by-elisabeth-braw-july-3-2014-2-00-pm-edt-19167509/ Mon, 18 Aug 2014 06:52:11 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>NEWSWEEK Young Israeli Entrepreneurs Are Flocking to Germany By Elisabeth Braw / July 3, 2014 2:00 PM EDT [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. -- Louis Sheehan ] Posted but NOT written by Lou Sheehan Filed Under: World, Germany, Israel When Elad Leshem graduated with an MBA two years ago, he immediately started a company. So far, so conventional. But Leshem, an Israeli, launched his business career in Berlin. “In Berlin there are a lot of resources available, including grants, subsidies and incubators, and the city is still relatively cheap,” explains Tel Aviv-born Leshem. “That allows you to kick-start your business without a lot of capital. That’s not possible in Silicon Valley. And the city is groovy, with a lot of young people.” Leshem, 33, is not the only young Israeli who has discovered the joys of Berlin. “When I moved here to go to university, people at home said, ‘Why are you moving to Germany? I’m never going to visit you,’” recalls Asaf Moses, 31, a fashion technology entrepreneur from Ra’anana outside Tel Aviv. “But since then the number of Israelis has increased at an incredible rate. Today you can easily build a company here with just highly qualified Israelis. Berlin has become the international symbol of cool instead of a symbol of the Holocaust.” Try Newsweek Print + Digital for only $1.25 per week It’s no surprise that Israel, with its approximately 4,800 startups at any given time, is seeing some of its entrepreneurs try their luck elsewhere. As far as Leshem, Moses and their fellow entrepreneurs are concerned, choosing Berlin is simply a matter of business opportunities and the cost of living, just as it is for all budding entrepreneurs. Leading venture capital firms such as Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins have recently invested in Berlin startups, and SoundCloud, the popular music-sharing service founded by two Swedes, is also based here. Though there are no reports quantifying the number of Israeli-run startups, incubators and businesses, schools all report a growing Israeli presence in the German capital. Israeli commercial attaché Hemdat Sagi alone receives around 150 inquiries from Israeli entrepreneurs and companies each year. “Israeli companies understand the potential of operating in a market of 82 million consumers, and it’s only natural for them to try and penetrate this market, which is also not so far from Israel,” Sagi explains. “Israeli companies, not just startups, offer innovative solutions in various sectors, which are synergetic with the abilities of the German industry.” Yakov Hadas-Handelsman, Israel’s ambassador to Berlin, notes it takes less time to fly from Berlin to Tel Aviv than from New York to San Francisco. Among the Berlin-based creations are InFarm, which allows people to grow micro-vegetables indoors; Capsuling Me, which helps organizations target their marketing based on their users’ online profiles; and Screemo, which allows concert audiences to choose a band’s next song by voting with their mobile devices and seeing the result appear in real time on large screens. Berlin accelerators, including media conglomerate Axel Springer’s Plug and Play, and incubators now feature Israeli startups. “The [entrepreneurs] basically just have to step off the plane and everything is set up for them,” says Axel Menneking, international director at Deutsche Telekom’s incubator, hub:raum, which already has five Israeli firms on its books and is aiming for more. “Large German companies have started approaching budding Israeli entrepreneurs as well,” he adds. “It’s in their interest to support this trend.” Berlin’s grants and subsidies to entrepreneurs form part of a deliberate strategy to position the city as an attractive business alternative to other European capitals and indeed to Germany’s own business capital, Frankfurt. The effort makes sense for this relatively poor metropolis with a per capita gross domestic product of $40,000, compared with London’s $66,000, as startups require relatively little investment and Berlin already boasts a young workforce. Israel, for its part, keeps producing talented would-be entrepreneurs. “The Israelis learn very useful skills during their conscription in the armed forces, particularly those who serve in intelligence units, where they’re constantly exposed to problems that they know nothing about, and yet they have to come up with solutions,” observes Menneking. “That’s exactly what you have to do in a startup.” The German-Israeli Chamber of Commerce has spotted the trend, recently launching an initiative called BETATEC (Berlin Tel Aviv Technology and Entrepreneurship Committee). The program will help Israelis start companies in Berlin but also send German entrepreneurs to Israeli incubators, where they’ll receive mentoring. “The idea is that this will help the German economy, but indirectly it will help the Israeli economy as well,” says Mickey Steiner, BETATEC’s director and the former Israeli CEO of German software giant SAP. To further increase Berlin’s attractiveness, BETATEC will also help Israeli firms expand more easily in Germany and beyond. Still, Berlin isn’t an entirely obvious alternative to Silicon Valley or London for ambitious young entrepreneurs. “If an Israeli does business with a Brit or American, of course it’s good, but it’s just business,” observes Hadas-Handelsman. “This is much more. The destinies of Israelis and Germans are connected because of our past. That makes the startup trend important in itself, and it goes both ways, with Germans going to Israel.” Hadas-Handelsman hopes it will help increase trade between the two countries, one of which is the world’s fifth largest economy. He recognizes the unconventional nature of the trend, noting that “some people in Israel don’t view it favorably.” But, he adds, “we have nothing against it; on the contrary, it’s a win-win for Germany and Israel.” Entrepreneurs are not the only Israelis moving to Berlin: Artists and scientists are also putting down roots. The city now features Israeli restaurants and even a German-language Israeli online magazine. Daniel Barenboim, the pianist and conductor who was born in Argentina but who holds Israeli citizenship, is music director of the Berlin State Opera. According to one estimate, 40,000 Israelis live in the German capital today; in 1925, before the rise of Nazism, there were 160,000. According to Steiner, Israelis’ risk-taking nature contributes to their startup success. It is a quality that gives Israelis a competitive advantage in Berlin, says Leshem, who recently founded a second company following the demise of his first one. “Israelis are pushy and loud, while Germans are more conformist and quiet,” he elaborates. “Israelis have a ‘Let’s do it’ attitude and less fear of failure, like you see in the U.S. When an Israeli innovates, his attitude is ‘Let’s build a fucking great company that we can sell for 1 billion euros.’ Germans are more thorough and stable. But in a startup it’s more about fast and dirty than slow and clean.” There’s just one thing Leshem doesn’t like about doing business in Berlin: the need to speak German. “It’s really easy to start a company here, and it just costs you 200 to 300 euros [$270 to $400], but to get all those wonderful subsidies you have to fill out a lot of forms in German,” he says. “German authorities don’t care whether you’re Bill Gates. They want you to fill out the forms in German.” Other entrepreneurs point out that the city’s incubators aren’t (yet) at the same level as, for example, San Francisco-based Y Combinator, which spawned Airbnb. Moses, who speaks fluent German, calls German-language skills a prerequisite for startup success in Berlin. He knows what he’s talking about, having grown his fashion technology company, FitAnalytics, which he co-founded with a German friend four years ago, to 15 employees, who work in the trendy neighborhood of Kreuzberg. But Israeli engineers with no immediate plans to start their own companies need not bother learning the language. “There’s such a shortage of engineers here that you’ll get a job the day after you land,” Moses says. According to VDI, the Association of German Engineers, each unemployed software engineer in Germany has 3.7 jobs to choose from. On top of that are Berlin’s fast-rising costs, especially rents, which increased by 2.6 percent last year. Still, the average rent is less than $8 per square meter, a bargain compared with the current range of $60 to $120 per square meter in central London. Despite the language barriers, Leshem, a German citizen thanks to his German-born maternal grandparents, who fled to Palestine before the outbreak of World War II, has no plans to leave Berlin. He says he feels he’s taking revenge on the hateful political creed that was responsible for the death of so many, including several relatives. “Today’s multicultural Berlin is history’s joke on Hitler,” he says. “Berlin of 2014 is the happy opposite of the dark Berlin of 1934.”</p> 19167509 2014-08-18 06:52:11 2014-08-18 06:52:11 open open newsweek-young-israeli-entrepreneurs-are-flocking-to-germany-by-elisabeth-braw-july-3-2014-2-00-pm-edt-19167509 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan First World War slang words we still use today http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/16/first-world-war-slang-words-we-still-use-today-19158269/ Sat, 16 Aug 2014 22:43:24 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] http://www.historyextra.com/feature/first-world-war/10-first-world-war-slang-words-we-still-use-today?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=BBCHIS-150814-NL_BBC%20History_Newsletters First World War slang words we still use today Banter, camaraderie and a satirical sense of humour helped make life bearable for the everyday Tommy in the trenches during the First World War. But, as BBC Antiques Roadshow presenter Martin Pegler explains in his new book, we unknowingly continue to use much of that slang today Wednesday 13th August 2014 Submitted by Emma McFarnon In Soldiers’ Songs and Slang of the Great War, Pegler reveals how common words and phrases such as ‘bumf’ and ‘having a chat’ originated in the trenches. Drawing on his interviews with a number of First World War veterans conducted in the 1980s, he recalls how the men were overwhelmingly positive about their experiences – they made friends for life, and the camaraderie they shared was something that many never experienced again. Here, writing for History Extra, Pegler details 10 words and phrases circulated during the war that still remain in use today: The subject of the First World War evokes many images, many of which are used repeatedly nowadays in film and TV, but they tend to concentrate on the drama and the misery of war. The reality was that it didn’t rain every day, the trenches were not knee deep in mud all year round, and soldiers were not subjected to shelling and death every day of their lives. In fact, day-to-day life was, as one veteran told me, “90 per cent sheer boredom and 10 per cent fear, but when we were frightened, we were very frightened, though you tried not to show it”. Of course there was death and destruction – there always is in war – but these men were young, energetic and above all, optimistic. Few believed anything terrible would happen to them (it was always ‘the other bloke’), and they masked their nervousness by sharing their hardships and fears with close chums. Indeed, having interviewed many veterans over the years, the overwhelming impression was that they looked back on their service in the First World War with a mixture of nostalgia and affection, tinged with sadness at the loss of friends. Above all else, the one emotion that helped them keep their sense of perspective and enabled them to endure the bad times was their uniquely British sense of humour, which appeared in even the grimmest situations, and it was the funny stories that they most often regaled us with. Much of the humour was found in their widespread use of songs and slang. Within any profession there is a language that is largely incomprehensible to outsiders, and soldiers were little different. In 1914–18, however, for the first time in Britain’s history, huge numbers of men from every conceivable walk of life had been put together in a huge citizen army, and as a result they developed their own language. But whereas in the past this slang had mostly remained within the ranks of the armed forces, during the First World War much of it was transferred by the soldiers from the western front to the home front. The songs and slang used by these men became not only popular, but almost fashionable in wartime England, and much of this has remained with us to this day. Here are 10 examples that might surprise you. 1) ‘Having a chat’ A commonplace expression today that owes its origin to that most pernicious of insects, the louse. Body lice were endemic in the trenches, and they inhabited the seams and pleats of clothing where they bred in huge numbers, causing skin rashes and itching. The expression is often ascribed to the Hindi word for a parasite, ‘chatt’, but is more possibly from an earlier medieval English word for idle gossip, ‘chateren’. Soldiers in the Napoleonic Wars certainly referred to lice as ‘chats’. During the Great War it was common to see small groups sitting around and talking as they used their fingernails, or a candle, to kill the lice. Such groups were described as men who were ‘chatting’. 2) ‘Plonk’ The now almost universal word for a bottle of wine. The British soldier has traditionally failed since time immemorial to master the pronunciation of even the simplest foreign words, and it is merely a corruption of the French ‘vin blanc’. 3) ‘Pillbox’ Prior to the war some small defensive military fortifications had been constructed, generally referred to as blockhouses. Mostly these were made of heavy timber – many were constructed during the Boer War. However, the term was only widely adopted into English during the latter part of the Great War because of the huge numbers of concrete bunkers constructed by the Germans across the flooded Flanders battlefields. They were called pillboxes due to their similarity to the small receptacles used by civilians for carrying medication. 4) ‘Blighty’ The origin of this now very British word is shrouded in mystery. It may have come from the Arabic ‘beladi’, meaning ‘my own country’, or the Hindi word ‘bilaik’, referring to a foreign place or country. For the Tommies, it meant only one thing: home. The best possible way to get there was to sustain a wound serious enough to require hospitalisation in England, which was enviously termed ‘a Blighty one’. 5) ‘Third light’ A superstition that it was bad luck to light a third cigarette from the same match. This was actually based on sound experience: it took a German sniper about five seconds at night to see, aim and fire at a light source, and a flaring match was clearly visible on a dark night from well over 500 yards. Five seconds was also about the time it took for the third man to light up. 6) ‘Tank’ The first modern armoured fighting vehicles were produced in great secrecy by Fosters of Lincoln. To prevent any hint of their purpose being discovered by German spies, workers were told they were mobile water tanks. Some were even clearly marked in Cyrillic ‘Water tanks for Russia’. The ruse certainly worked, because their first use on the Somme on 15 September 1916 was a complete surprise to the Germans. 7) ‘Sniper’ Prior to the First World War, armies had employed specialist marksmen known as ‘sharpshooters’, but when war broke out the Germans fielded thousands of highly trained riflemen, usually equipped with telescopic-sighted rifles. British officers referred to them as ‘snipers’, which harked back to the army in India in the late 18th century when officers would go bird hunting in the hills – the tiny Snipe being one of the hardest of targets to hit. From 1914 the word was widely adopted by the British press, and it has since become universal. Sniping can now also refer to sharp or snide remarks made about another person. 8) ‘Over the top’ An example of an expression that has seen a resurgence, although now with a very different meaning. Originally it referred to the physical act of launching an attack by climbing over the sandbag parapet in front of a trench – literally by going over the top. It thus became synonymous with setting off on any highly dangerous venture, usually with a slim chance of survival. It mostly died out after the war but in recent years has been revived, albeit now meaning to embark on a course of action or to make a remark that is either excessive or unnecessary. 9) ‘Shrapnel’ Often used today as a reference to the annoying, and all-but-worthless small change that accumulates in one’s pockets or purse. It is possibly the most incorrectly used word from the war, as it is invariably misapplied to describe the lethal flying splinters from high-explosive shells. In fact, it refers to the lead balls launched from airburst shells (a little like airborne shotgun cartridges) invented by Lt Henry Shrapnel of the Royal Artillery in 1784. 10) ‘Bumf’ Printed paper that is produced in huge quantities for no discernable reason, and apparently has no information value. The junk mail we all receive on a daily basis is a prime example. It is derived from the army term ‘bum-fodder’ – paper that has only one possible practical use. It is originally from prewar schoolboy slang then appropriated by the soldiers to refer to excessive paperwork. It generally referred to the endless streams of army orders that were issued from headquarters. In the middle of one particularly savage attack on the Somme, a British orderly officer received a series of communiqués from HQ demanding to know how much tinned jam was held in stores and how many pairs of socks were required. Some things never change. Soldiers’ Songs and Slang of the Great War by Martin Pegler (Osprey Publishing) is now on sale. To find out more, click here. </p> 19158269 2014-08-16 22:43:24 2014-08-16 22:43:24 open open first-world-war-slang-words-we-still-use-today-19158269 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan title-19139811 http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/15/http-nga-gov-au-dix-my-intention-with-my-blog-19139811/ Fri, 15 Aug 2014 04:32:16 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>http://nga.gov.au/dix/ [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. -- Louis Sheehan ] The Art of War Otto Dix’s Der Krieg [War] cycle 1924 Introduction | Selected works | Slideshow | Checklist | Education (pdf) Otto Dix 'Nachtliche Begegnung mit einem Irrsinnigen [Night-time encounter with a madman]' 1924 etching, aquatint Collection of the National Gallery of Australia, The Poynton Bequest 2003 © Otto Dix, Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia click to enlarge Otto Dix was born in 1891 in Untermhaus, Thuringia, the son of an ironworker. He initially trained in Gera and at the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts as a painter of wall decorations and later taught himself how to paint on canvas. He volunteered as a machine-gunner during World War I and in the autumn of 1915 he was sent to the Western Front. He was at the Somme during the major allied offensive of 1916. After the war he studied at the academies of Dresden and Dusseldorf. Together with George Grosz, he was one of the leading exponents of the artistic movement Die Neue Sachlichkeit [New Objectivity], a form of social realist art which unsentimentally examined the decadence and underlying social inequality of post-war German society. With the rise of the National Socialists in 1933, Dix was dismissed from his teaching post at the Dresden Academy. He moved south to Lake Constance and was only allowed to continue practising as an artist after he agreed to relinquish overtly political subject matter in favour of landscape painting. Dix was conscripted into the army during World War II and in 1945 was captured and put into a prisoner of war camp. He returned to Dresden after the war where his paintings became more religiously reflective of his war-time experiences. He died in 1969.[1] Der Krieg [War] 1924 arose out of Dix’s own experiences of the horrors of war. As outlined above, he had volunteered for service in the army and fought as a machine-gunner on the Western Front. He was wounded a number of times, once almost fatally. War profoundly affected him as an individual and as an artist, and he took every opportunity, both during his active service and afterwards, to document his experiences. These experiences would become the subject matter of many of his later paintings and are central to the Der Krieg cycle. Der Krieg itself, as a cycle of prints (51 in total), is consciously modelled on Goya’s [1746–1828] equally famous and equally devastating Los Desastres de la Guerra [The disasters of war]. Los Desastres detailed Goya’s own account of the horrors of the Napoleonic invasion and the Spanish War of Independence from 1808 to 1814. Goya’s cycle of 82 etchings, which he worked on for a decade after the Spanish War of Independence were not, however, published until 1863, long after his death. Like Los Desastres, Der Krieg uses a variety of etching techniques and does so with an equally astonishing facility. Similarly, it exploits the cumulative possibilities of a long sequence of images and mirrors Goya’s unflinching, stark realism in terms of its fundamental presentation. GH Hamilton describes Dix’s cycle as ‘perhaps the most powerful as well as the most unpleasant anti-war statements in modern art
It was truly this quality of unmitigated truth, truth to the most commonplace and vulgar experiences, as well as the ugly realities of psychological experience, that gave his work a strength and consistency attained by no other contemporary artist, not even by [George] Grosz
’[2] It has become a commonplace to see this cycle as an admonition against the barbarity of war. And there is no doubt that as a human document it is a powerful cautionary work. At a psychological level, however, its truth goes deeper than this. Dix was both horrified and fascinated by the experience of war. Otto Dix 'Verwundeter (Herbst 1916, Bapaume) [Wounded soldier – Autumn 1916, Bapaume]' 1924 etching, aquatint, drypoint Collection of the National Gallery of Australia, The Poynton Bequest 2003 © Otto Dix, Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia click to enlarge In 1963, explaining why he volunteered for the army in the First World War he had this to say: I had to experience how someone beside me suddenly falls over and is dead and the bullet has hit him squarely. I had to experience that quite directly. I wanted it. I’m therefore not a pacifist at all – or am I? Perhaps I was an inquisitive person. I had to see all that myself. I’m such a realist, you know, that I have to see everything with my own eyes in order to confirm that it’s like that. I have to experience all the ghastly, bottomless depths of life for myself
[3] In the same interview, he also had this to say: As a young man you don’t notice at all that you were, after all, badly affected. For years afterwards, at least ten years, I kept getting these dreams, in which I had to crawl through ruined houses, along passages I could hardly get through
[4] This nightmarish, hallucinatory quality pervades all of the Der Krieg images. Paradoxically, there is also a quality of sensuousness, an almost perverse delight in the rendering of horrific detail, which indicates that there was perhaps, in Dix’s case, an almost addictive quality to the hyper-sensory input of war. In terms of the general corpus of Dix’s work, Der Krieg occupies a central place amongst the large number of paintings and works-on-paper devoted to the theme of war. The work is astonishingly powerful and, as stated above, it remains one of the most powerful indictments of war ever conceived. It is universally regarded as one of the great masterpieces of twentieth century. Dix’s oeuvre as a whole, and Der Krieg in particular, was hugely influential on a number of other twentieth century artist such as Ben Shahn, Pablo Picasso and Robert Motherwell. Otto Dix 'Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor [Stormtroops advancing under gas]' 1924 etching, aquatint, drypoint Collection of the National Gallery of Australia, The Poynton Bequest 2003 © Otto Dix, Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia click to enlarge The etchings were printed by Kupferdruckerei O. Felsing in Charlottenburg on BSB Maschinen Butten and Kupferdruck paper under Dix’s supervision. The portfolio was published by Karl Nierendorf, Berlin, as five separate folios each of 10 prints in an edition of 70 in 1924. The edition the National Gallery of Australia has acquired is numbered 58/70. The portfolio also includes the impression of Soldat und Nonne [Soldier and nun], depicting the rape of a nun by a soldier, which was suppressed in the published version of the suite. Otto Dix is one of the greatest artists of the first half of the 20th century and his visual legacy, including his Der Krieg cycle, with its still relevant contemporary echoes, is one of the most powerful documents of man’s inhumanity to man that we have available to us today. Its acquisition represents a major coup for the Gallery having been on the Department of International Prints desiderata list for years. Mark Henshaw Curator Department of International Prints, Drawings and Illustrated Books Notes [1] Biographical details sourced from Harold Osborne [ed], The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981 and Jane Turner [ed], The Dictionary of Art, London: Macmillan, New York; distributed by Grove Dictionaries, 1996 [2] Osborne [ed]. [3] interview with Maria Wetzel at www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk [4] Also quoted at www.historical.org </p> 19139811 2014-08-15 04:32:16 2014-08-15 04:32:16 open open http-nga-gov-au-dix-my-intention-with-my-blog-19139811 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan For sale at one euro: a house in an idyllic Sicilian village http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/15/for-sale-at-one-euro-a-house-in-an-idyllic-sicilian-village-19139758/ Fri, 15 Aug 2014 04:20:15 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. -- Louis Sheehan ] Council in Gangi selling off around 20 homes for the price of a cup of coffee in the hope of attracting new life to hilltop community The Telegraph Nick Squires in Rome 4:24PM BST 06 Aug 2014 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/11016777/For-sale-at-one-euro-a-house-in-an-idyllic-Sicilian-village.html It's yours for the price of a cup of coffee - a historic house in a terracotta-tiled hill town in Italy. In fact for the price of a full English breakfast, you could snap up half a dozen of them. The mountain town of Gangi on the Madonie mountains in the Province of Palermo (Alamy) A village in Sicily which has endured decades of population decline and neglect has come up with a novel, and seemingly too-good-to-refuse offer: it is selling off empty homes for just one euro each. That's 80p at today's exchange rate. Our village is for sale on eBay 11 Jul 2014 Gangi is a hill-top town set amid the rolling wheat fields and wooded valleys of central Sicily, about an hour's drive south of the picturesque holiday resort of Cefalu. Founded in the 12th century, it boasts a castle and access to hiking trails in the surrounding countryside. The local council wants to sell around 20 houses, many of them derelict, which were bequeathed by locals who had neither the money nor the will to renovate them. The bargain-basement prices come with a few conditions, none of which are very onerous or particularly costly. Gangi, with Mt Etna in the distance; the town is an hour's drive from Cefalu (Alamy) Buyers must pay a €5,000 (£3,970) guarantee to the local council to ensure that they renovate the properties, rather than just leave them empty. The money will be redeemed once the homes are restored. Owners have five years in which to bring the houses up to a habitable standard. Most of them are in a state of disrepair, if not derelict, with the cost of renovating them estimated at around €35,000 (£28,000). Buyers would have to pay the legal costs associated with the purchase - estimated at around €6,000 (£4,760) per property, depending on its taxable value. Gangi's council first launched the unusual initiative a couple of years ago, but with none of the councillors speaking English, it received barely any attention and achieved few results. Now the village of 7,000 people has turned to Marie Wester, an English-speaking, Swedish property consultant who lives in Sicily, to help market the deal. The Ventimiglia tower in the town of Gangi (Alamy) Through a newsletter she sends out to clients, she has already had interest from four British couples as well as Swedes, Americans and Russians. "The people of Gangi want to attract foreigners to the town because they want to bring in new life," Ms Wester told The Telegraph. "Since I got involved in the sale, there has been massive interest. I think it's a good deal." After living in Italy for seven years, Ms Wester has a shrewd idea of what local builders would charge to undertake the renovation of the properties, all of which are in the historic centre of Gangi. "The houses need new roofs and floors, you'd need to put in electricity, water and sewerage and re-plaster them at the end of it all. I reckon it would cost about €35,000 per property. "The only downside I can think of is that the village is not near the coast, but it a lovely medieval town, it's very clean and well-kept and the people are friendly." Two of the houses were bought last week by an expatriate Italian businessman and his Russian wife, who are based in Abu Dhabi. "They fell in love with our village, with the tranquillity and the clean air," said Giuseppe Ferrarello, the mayor. "We've received more than a hundred telephone calls from Italy and abroad. We are ready to welcome more people with traditional hospitality." Gangi may be in the same province as Corleone, the town made notorious for its Mafia links by The Godfather books and films, but foreign buyers need have no fear of Cosa Nostra. "The Mafia exists, of course, but they are operating at a different level - they are interested in multi-million euro construction projects, not restorations like this," said Ms Wester. "Some people think that if you come here you'll see them walking down the street with guns, but it's not like that." The one-euro-a-house offer comes a month after much of a village in the Italian Alps was put on sale on eBay for €245,000 (£195,000). Calsazio had a population of around 80 a few decades ago but emigration and the drift to the cities by young people has reduced the number of locals still living there to just eight. </p> 19139758 2014-08-15 04:20:15 2014-08-15 04:20:15 open open for-sale-at-one-euro-a-house-in-an-idyllic-sicilian-village-19139758 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Russia’s Manned Moon Mission to Cost $2.8 Billion Posted on August 6, 2014 in Science http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/13/russia-s-manned-moon-mission-to-cost-2-8-billion-posted-on-august-6-2014-in-science-19129436/ Wed, 13 Aug 2014 23:40:14 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Russia’s Manned Moon Mission to Cost $2.8 Billion Posted on August 6, 2014 in Science [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] MOSCOW, August 3 (RIA Novosti) – A manned mission to the Moon will cost Russia 100 billion rubles (about $2.8 billion), Igor Mitrofanov, laboratory director at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Space Research Institute said Sunday. “An estimated cost of one project aimed at the development of an automatic lunar station is 10 billion rubles (about $280 million). The project is to be completed in five or six years. The manned lunar mission will cost ten times more,” Mitrofanov told reporters during the COSPAR Scientific Assembly in Moscow. He elaborated that prior to the manned flight it is necessary to “learn to conduct the Moon landing all over again,” and automatic lunar stations are needed for this purpose. According to Mitrofanov, one of the Space Research Institute’s partners is currently developing three stations called Luna-25 (Luna-Glob project), Luna-26 and Luna-27 under the Luna-Resource project. He elaborated that Luna-25 and Luna-27 are landers aimed to run for one year, whereas Luna-26 is an orbiter, which will monitor the Moon for two years. Mitrofanov stressed that within the next ten years lunar bases will likely to be created. A mission to the Moon has become one of Russia’s top priorities in space. Russia plans to launch three lunar spacecraft — two to surface and one to the orbit — by the end of the decade. The first mission, the long-delayed Luna-25, is slated for launch in 2016 and land at the Moon’s South Pole. The next two missions will include an orbiter to monitor the Moon in 2018 and a lander with a drill to search for water ice in 2019. Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19129436 2014-08-13 23:40:14 2014-08-13 23:40:14 open open russia-s-manned-moon-mission-to-cost-2-8-billion-posted-on-august-6-2014-in-science-19129436 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan The Case for Helping the Kurds By Fred Kaplan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/13/the-case-for-helping-the-kurds-by-fred-kaplan-19128457/ Wed, 13 Aug 2014 20:50:00 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Slate.com http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2014/08/isis_and_kurdistan_the_future_of_iraq_depends_on_a_thriving_kurdish_population.html [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] The Case for Helping the Kurds A thriving Kurdistan is necessary for a democratic Iraq. By Fred Kaplan It’s clear for lots of reasons—political, economic, strategic, electoral, opportunistic, moral, and simply sensible, to name a few—that President Obama has no desire to get drawn back into the Iraq war. So why is he bombing Islamist insurgents in the Kurdish region of Iraq and saying he might keep doing so for months? Because what he’s doing has nothing to do with getting drawn back into the Iraq war. Fred Kaplan Fred Kaplan is the author of The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War and 1959: The Year Everything Changed. This seems a paradox, to say the least, but stick with me for a minute. We can all agree that “the Iraq war” refers to the period from 2003-11, when a U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq, ousted the central Baghdad government, and dismantled all bodies of authority, thus hurling most of the country into sectarian warfare, which American commanders tried to suppress, first through crude, brutal occupation, then (in 2007) through clever counterinsurgency techniques, which played the sectarian factions off one another, vastly reducing the violence and forging a provisional truce. However, even the advocates of this new strategy, such as Gen. David Petraeus, said all along that the benefits would be temporary at best; that all U.S. forces could do was provide “breathing space” for Iraq’s political factions to get their act together. After American troops came home (under the terms of a 2008 treaty signed by George W. Bush at the insistence of Iraq’s parliament), it soon became clear that Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki had no desire to get his act together and sustain the truce with his Sunni rivals; in fact, he stepped up his persecution against them—and sectarian war re-erupted. This is the Iraq war that neither President Obama nor any sentient American should want to re-enter. Obama’s airstrikes against the Islamists’ holdings in Kurdistan are something different. Note that three paragraphs ago, in my mini-summary of the Iraq war, I noted that the 2003 ouster of Saddam Hussein’s regime and the dismantlement of all his ministries hurled “most of the country into sectarian warfare.” (The emphasis, this time, is added.) The one area of Iraq that remained nearly immune from the chaos—the one area that U.S. authorities deemed “stable” through most of the occupation—was the northern area known as Kurdistan, home to roughly 6 million Kurds. This is true, despite Kurdistan’s multiethnic population (mainly Muslims but also Yazidis, the Yarsan, Christians, and Jews) and its various conflicts over the decades with Baghdad. The main reason for Kurdistan’s stability is that in 1970 the U.S. and Iraqi governments decreed it an autonomous area. More relevant still, after the 1991 Gulf War, the U.N. Security Council, in, Resolution 688, declared the area a “safe haven” to protect Kurds from Saddam Hussein’s wrath. (He had killed thousands of Kurds with chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.) And the United States agreed to enforce the resolution with a “no-fly zone.” (In other words, all Iraqi planes trying to fly over Kurdish territory would be shot down by U.S. air or naval power.) Under this protection, Kurdistan has thrived. Its per capita income exceeds the rest of Iraq’s by 50 percent, it has free-trade zones with Turkey and Iran (both of which were once rivals or enemies), and it has solid relations with many Western companies. The Kurds’ growing wealth has sired tensions too. As Sunni-Shiite violence has turned Iraq into a borderline “failed state,” the Kurds have started making their own deals with oil companies and made moves toward their centurylong aspirations of complete independence (which the French and British colonialists thwarted after World War I by divvying Kurdish territory among the peripheries of Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Iran). This would deny Baghdad and Iraq’s Sunni Arabs of much oil revenue. Still, it’s become very clear that, if Iraq—whether as a centralized state or a loose federation—has any hopes of ever becoming stable, much less democratic, a thriving Kurdistan must be part of it, even a model for it. When ISIS (now calling itself the Islamic State, or IS) crossed into Iraq in June, many in the West expressed worry but not enough to do a lot about it. First, ISIS seemed pretty small. Second, few realized that—under Maliki’s corrupt leadership—much of the Iraqi army had become a hollow shell of its former shelf. Third, ISIS was playing on the hostility of many Sunnis to Maliki’s Shiite government, so most Western leaders said the only way to solve the problem was for the Iraqis to form a new, more inclusive government; meanwhile, if we defended what was seen as an oppressive Shiite government, we would be viewed as “Maliki’s air force” and drive still more Sunnis into ISIS’s ranks. Finally, and most pertinent in this context, it was assumed—and, at the outset, affirmed—that the Kurdish peshmerga could defend itself if ISIS moved into Kurdistan. Top Comment If we're helping the Kurds we should give them independence and finally be done with this attitude that borders can't be changed. More... -JanDeDoot 75 Comments Join In President Obama’s Aug. 11 announcement of airstrikes over Kurdistan and increased military shipments followed the first signs that ISIS could challenge the peshmerga after all. In other words, Obama’s moves do not amount to a resumption of the Iraq war but rather a necessary response, not only to a humanitarian crisis but to a mortal danger facing a vital ally. Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan</p> 19128458 2014-08-13 20:50:00 2014-08-13 20:50:00 open open the-case-for-helping-the-kurds-by-fred-kaplan-19128457 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan Ralph Nader : What the Democratic Party Does Well: Doing Itself In http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/12/ralph-nader-what-the-democratic-party-does-well-doing-itself-in-19113031/ Tue, 12 Aug 2014 07:33:18 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] What the Democratic Party Does Well: Doing Itself In Ralph Nader August 8, 2014 Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the minority leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives, just had her political consultants send out a mass mailing to women asking for money and responses to an enclosed survey of their opinions. The mass mailing duly recites the truly horrible House Republican votes against a variety of women’s health, safety and family protections and seeks to survey women’s priorities for the Congressional Democrats’ legislative agenda. Under the category titled “Employment,” there is no mention of restoring the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour, which Rep. Pelosi supports. The closest option to check was “inadequate/or no salary increase.” The Pelosi mailing, uninspiring and defensive, is another product of the Party’s political consultants who have failed them again and again in winnable House and Senate races against the worst Republican Party record in history. These consultants, as former Clinton special assistant, Bill Curry, notes, make more money from their corporate clients than from political retainers. Slick, arrogant and ever reassuring, these firms are riddled with conflicts of interests and could just as well be “Trojan horses.” The full restoration of the federal minimum wage to make up for the ravages of inflation since 1968 would take it from the present, stagnant $7.25 per hour and beyond the proposed $10.10 to $10.90 per hour. Over thirty million American workers – two thirds of them women and two thirds of them employed by large low-wage companies like Walmart and McDonald’s – would benefit from this wage restoration, and in turn would be able to strengthen the economy by increasing their consumer expenditures. There are a lot of votes out there if the Democrats go beyond lip service and push for a major media and grassroots campaign against the Congressional Republicans who are blocking a vote on this minimum wage bill. Three of four Americans favor a restored minimum wage. Some cities and states have already taken their state minimum wage toward $9.00 per hour. They’re feeling pressure from distressed workers, from growing street demonstrations and from holding their fingers to the political winds. This is an issue whose time has come. A few months ago, even Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and other out of office Republicans who are not raising money from their corporate paymasters, declared their support for increasing the minimum wage. Bill Curry flatly says that the Democrats can retain control of the Senate and take back the House by making raising the federal minimum wage a top 2014 campaign issue. The many human interest stories about the plight of underpaid workers are compelling and would motivate more voters to turn out. After being too inactive in 2010 and 2012, the labor movement has touted a restored minimum wage, lobbied at some state legislatures for a raise, and organized demonstrations of workers, backed by SEIU, in front of fast food and other big box chains. AFL-CIO chief, Richard Trumka, has been at demonstrations and has put out materials demanding that Congress act on H.R.1010 to take the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. However, organized labor can do more with multi-million dollar organizing drives and ad buys (as they did in 1996). More demonstrations in more Congressional districts and more pressure on nervous Republican incumbents to sign the pending Discharge Petition to force Republican House Speaker, John Boehner, to let the House members vote on the bill could make a difference on this important fight. Boehner is on the wrong side of this politically popular issue, but up to now he hasn’t thought the Democrats can turn this into enough votes to discharge his speakership after November. At the very least, the AFL-CIO unions should prepare a big mass media buy soon, since there are less than 100 days to the elections. The key discharge petition in the House, to bring the modest $10.10 over three years to a vote, is assumed to have all 199 Democrats signed on. Only 19 Republicans need to sign it to get to the decisive 218 tally. Six Republican incumbents pushed for the last minimum wage raise in 2006 saying that “nobody working full time should have to live in poverty.” These six went on to vote for the raise in 2007. The trouble is that since the discharge petition was filed by Rep. Tim Bishop (D-NY) in February, there has been little publicity for it by either the Democratic House Leadership or the White House (see timeforaraise.org). And what of President Obama who is reportedly desperate to win back the House? On April 30th, he held an event with some minimum wage workers and criticized Republicans. On June 12th, he announced the details of the executive order to raise wages for federal contract workers. But he is not barnstorming on this BIG proposal that resonates with so many people in their hard-pressed daily life. He does, however, barnstorm around the country to attend exclusive high contributors’ fundraisers. How can he not understand that, with his “bully pulpit” and hard-working Americans by his side around the country, he could raise real political heat under the Republicans whose refusal to bend on this issue could result in their breaking? The mass media, after all, covers the news-making President everywhere. I’ve often said that the Democratic Party cannot even defend the country against the demonstrably cruel, anti-worker, anti-consumer, pro-big business/Wall Street over Main Street Republican Party. The voting evidence in Congress is fully accessible. The Democrats compiled, but did not adequately deploy a report on some sixty outrageous Republican Party House votes during the last Congress that, if really driven home to voters, would have resulted in a landslide Democratic win against the GOP. Instead, the Democrats allowed the GOP to cover its truly vicious tracks with flowery rhetoric that kept their day of reckoning from seeing sunlight (see for yourself). My message to Democrats is: Dump your corporate consultants. Just campaign for the necessities of the people. And publicize those Republican votes crisply, widely and repeatedly. follow on Twitter | friend on Facebook | forward to a friend Copyright © 2014 Nader.Org, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in at our website. Our mailing address is: Nader.Org P.O. Box 19367 Washington, DC 20036 </p> 19113031 2014-08-12 07:33:18 2014-08-12 07:33:18 open open ralph-nader-what-the-democratic-party-does-well-doing-itself-in-19113031 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ALIEN ABDUCTIONS? http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/08/whatever-happened-to-alien-abductions-19078872/ Fri, 08 Aug 2014 07:02:31 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] http://ufodigest.com/article/alien-abductions-0801 WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ALIEN ABDUCTIONS? Nick Pope's picture By Nick Pope - 6 days 11 hours ago In the late Eighties and throughout the Nineties, alien abductions were at the heart of ufology. How did what might be regarded as a subset of ufology become its central meme? Abductions (irrespective of whether one believes they take place in a literal sense) could arguably be regarded as an evolution of the contactee phenomenon, and for those who believe UFOs are extraterrestrial spacecraft, it’s only logical that one should look beyond the vehicles and focus on the nature and agenda of the occupants. John Keel’s 1967 article “Never Mind the Saucer! Did You See the Guys Who Were Driving?” articulates this point perfectly, but it wasn’t until the publication of “Missing Time” (1981), “Intruders” (1987) and “Communion” (1987) that Keel’s question became the question most asked in the UFO community. Click here to enlarge top photo. Of the three books mentioned, Whitley Strieber’s “Communion” did most to move alien abductions out of the ufological fringe and onto centre stage, and from there, into the mainstream public awareness. From there, things snowballed. Abduction plotlines were featured in “The X-Files” and a wide range of other TV shows and movies, while the image on the front cover of “Communion” became embedded in public consciousness, further boosted by the so-called alien autopsy film in 1995. In 2002 Steven Spielberg’s TV mini-series “Taken” illustrated that abductions were still big news and big business. All this time, abductions were the central focus for much of the UFO community, and the three charismatic figures of Budd Hopkins, David Jacobs and John Mack were at the heart of things. While the centre of gravity was America, interest was global. My own book on the alien abduction mystery, “The Uninvited”, got to number seven in the UK hardback non-fiction chart, while the US mass-market paperback edition, published by Dell, was also a best-seller, clearly showing not only that abductions were the dominant force in ufology, but also that the subject had broken out into mainstream media and public awareness. Now let’s fast forward to 2014. One hears comparatively little about alien abductions, even within the UFO community, where the main current areas of interest are government cover-ups, ‘Disclosure’, secret space program/‘breakaway civilization’, the Rendlesham Forest incident, and – perhaps most prominently of all – the resurgence of the ancient astronaut/ancient aliens hypothesis. What’s going on? There are a number of theories and it’s worth running through them. At the extreme end of the belief spectrum, for those who think abductions take place in a literal, physical way, as many abductees claim, there’s the suggestion that the alien agenda is coming to its climax. Such people regard abductions as an extraterrestrial project, usually characterized as a human/alien hybridization program. If abductions have declined, or stopped altogether, does this not suggest that the program is coming to an end, or has finished? If this is the case, what happens next? Is some dramatic development just around the corner? It’s certainly food for thought. There are, of course, some more prosaic possibilities. As a journalist and broadcaster, I know that interest in just about everything is cyclic. There comes a time when saturation point is reached and people lose interest, not least because pretty much everything there is to say has already been said. Whether this is reflected in, or driven by the media is open to debate, but editors and producers looking at abductions these days are inclined to say things like “that’s a bit passé”, or “this has all been done to death”. If this is the case, perhaps interest will return, just as interest in the ancient astronaut theory has returned. The TV show “Ancient Aliens” may have driven this resurgence, but it only worked because a new generation of people were genuinely interested in ideas that had been popularized back in the Seventies by authors such as Erich von Däniken. What other factors could explain the lack of coverage and (apparent) lack of interest in abductions? One cannot overstate the influence of individuals when it comes to driving the agenda in a subject, whether they do so deliberately or not. Simply put, Budd Hopkins, David Jacobs and John Mack played a huge role in putting abductions centre stage within ufology, and now that Hopkins and Mack are both dead, the greater part of that impetus is gone. This is in no way meant to disparage the work of other ufologists and abductees, or downplay the continuing influence of writers such as Whitley Strieber, but there’s no getting away from the fact that the deaths of Hopkins and Mack dealt a hefty blow to abduction research. There have been other assaults on the validity of abductions and the credibility of both abduction researchers and abductees. The debate over whether regression hypnosis can recover hidden memories, distort existing ones or even implant false ones was the first shot across the bows. Concerns about using regression hypnosis on abductees segued into wider concerns about the propriety of ufologists dealing with abductees. This was essentially a therapist/patient relationship in a situation where some of the people claiming abduction experiences (real or not) were extremely vulnerable. Were abduction researchers suitably qualified or otherwise equipped to deal with such people in a professional and ethical way? The allegations made by “Emma Woods” against David Jacobs brought that debate into focus, as did the criticisms made by filmmaker Carol Rainey regarding her former husband, Budd Hopkins. The recent arrest of self-described abductee Stan Romanek on charges of possessing and distributing child pornography may turn out to be the final nail in the coffin. Alien abduction may be down, but it isn’t altogether out. Travis Walton remains popular on the conference circuit and hopes to see a remake of “Fire in the Sky”. Researchers such as Yvonne Smith continue to fly the flag for the subject, while this month’s “Contact in the Desert” conference in Joshua Tree has a panel discussion on the “contact experience”. This latter point is particularly noteworthy, because it seems that we’ve gone from contactees to abductees and now back to contactees – the more neutral term “experiencers” is sometimes used, but that’s another story. In all of this, here’s the key question about the apparent rise and fall of alien abductions: does it tell us something about the true nature of the UFO phenomenon, or does it tell us just as much – and maybe even more – about ufology and ufologists? Nick Pope is a former employee of the UK Ministry of Defense. From 1991 to 1994 he ran the British Government's UFO project and has recently been involved in a five-year initiative to declassify and release the entire archive of these UFO files. Nick Pope held a number of other fascinating posts in the course of his 21-year government career, which culminated in his serving as an acting Deputy Director in the Directorate of Defense Security. He now works as a broadcaster and journalist, covering subjects including space, fringe science, defense and intelligence. Nick Pope’s latest book, Encounter in Rendlesham Forest, co-written with John Burroughs and Jim Penniston, was published by Thomas Dunne Books on 15th April and is available via Amazon and all good bookstores.</p> 19078872 2014-08-08 07:02:31 2014-08-08 07:02:31 open open whatever-happened-to-alien-abductions-19078872 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Kynisca http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/05/kynisca-19053982/ Tue, 05 Aug 2014 07:25:11 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Here I copied/lifted a part of a Wikipedia webpage
. Lou Sheehan Kynisca was born in 440 BC in the ancient Greek city of Sparta and was the daughter of the Eurypontid king of Sparta, Archidamus II, and Eupoleia. She was also the sister of the later king of Sparta, Agesilaus II. She is said to have been a tomboy, an excellent equestrian and very wealthy, the perfect qualifications for a successful trainer. She was exceedingly ambitious to succeed at the Olympic Games and the first woman to breed horses and win an Olympic victory, according to Pausanias. Her name means 'female puppy in Ancient Greek. Olympic Games While most women in the ancient Greek world were kept in seclusion and forbidden to learn any kind of skills in sports, riding or hunting, Spartan women by contrast were brought up from girlhood to excel at these things and to disdain household chores, by attending a boarding school similar to this that Spartan boys attended. The ancient Olympic Games were almost entirely male-only and women were forbidden even to attend the main stadium at Olympia, where running events and combat sports were held. Women were allowed to enter only the equestrian events, not by running but by owning and training the horses. Kynisca employed men and entered her team at the Olympics, where it won in the four-horse chariot racing (tethrippon Greek: τέθριππον) twice, in 396 BC and again in 392 BC. The irony is that she probably didn't see her victories. However, Kynisca was honored by having a bronze statue of a chariot and horses, a charioteer and a statue of herself in the Temple of Zeus in Olympia, by the side of the statue of Troilus, made by Apelles, and an inscription written declaring that she was the only female to win the wreath in the chariot events at the Olympic Games. The first person in the inscription indicates that Kynisca was willing to push herself forward. In addition to this, a hero-shrine of Kynisca was erected in Sparta at Plane-tree Grove,[8] where religious ceremonies were held. Only Spartan kings were graced in this way and Kynisca was the first woman to receive this honor. The inscription from Olympia (ca. 390-380 BC) reads[9]: English Kings of Sparta are my father and brothers Kyniska, victorious with a chariot of swift-footed horses, have erected this statue. I declare myself the only woman in all Hellas to have won this crown. Apelleas son of Kallikles made it. -- Louis Sheehan </p> 19053982 2014-08-05 07:25:11 2014-08-05 07:25:11 open open kynisca-19053982 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan ERIS http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/04/eris-19046130/ Mon, 04 Aug 2014 04:27:54 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/P/PlanetX.html A hypothetical tenth planet of the Solar System (the 'X' may be read as the Roman numeral 10 or the letter 'x' for unknown). What were thought to have been unexplained perturbations in the orbits of Neptune and Uranus, at the turn of the 20th century, led to the search for a trans-Neptunian planet. But upon the discovery of this planet, Pluto, the mystery only seemed to deepen. Pluto proved to have far too little mass to account for the wobbles thought to be present in the movements of Neptune and Uranus. Over the next few decades, speculation continued about the possible existence of "Planet X." However, today, it seems clear that the supposed perturbations were fictitious and, therefore, that these were not valid grounds upon which to suspect that a tenth planet was real. Many Kuiper Belt objects (KBO), however, do circle the Sun beyond Pluto and may reach diameters of more than 1,000 km. In July 2005, the discovery was announced of a KBO, now called Eris (formerly 2003 UB313), which is larger than Pluto and thus qualifies as the tenth planet of the Solar System. [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. -- Louis Sheehan ] Posted but NOT written by Lou Sheehan </p> 19046130 2014-08-04 04:27:54 2014-08-04 04:27:54 open open eris-19046130 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan The war and the panic Jul 25th 2014, 14:39 by The Economist http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/03/the-war-and-the-panic-jul-25th-2014-14-39-by-the-economist-19044621/ Sun, 03 Aug 2014 21:21:19 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>The war and the panic Jul 25th 2014, 14:39 by The Economist [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. -- Louis Sheehan ] On July 28th 1914 Austria-Hungary declared war against Serbia. As our article from August 1st 1914 feared, the war quickly escalated when on that same day Germany, which was allied with Austria-Hungary, declared war against Russia (which was allied with Serbia) and two days later against France. Britain entered the war against Germany on August 4th, after it received an "unsatisfactory reply" regarding Belgium's neutrality. ON SUNDAY—just four weeks after the murder by Servian assassins of the Austrian Heir-Apparent and his wife in Sarajevo—Europe was suddenly confronted with the fear of a great war on a scale of unprecedented magnitude, involving loss of life and a destruction of all that we associate with modern civilisation too vast to be counted or calculated, and portending horrors so appalling that the imagination shrinks from the task. Readers of The Economist are aware of the train of events which led up to the catastrophe. The quarrel between Austria and Servia may be said to date from the time when an Austro-Hungarian army conquered Bosnia and Herzegovina, and in rescuing it from the Turkish yoke encountered the bitter hatred of Servia. The story was begun in our columns last week by Dr Josef Redlich, and is completed in a second letter which we print on another page of The Economist. It is clear to the impartial observer that there have been faults on both sides. But no cool thinker will be disposed to deny that the atrocious murders of the Austrian Heir-Apparent and his wife, following upon Servia's successful war, in which Austria, after all, played a fair and moderate part, must have been an intolerable provocation to any "old and haughty nation proud in arms." The administration of Austria-Hungary in Bosnia has often been compared with that of Great Britain in India. In 35 years, law and order, and security and religious toleration, have been substituted for rapine, disorder, official tyranny, and religious persecution. Admirable roads and railways have been built, and industry has at last begun to reap its reward for the first time since the Roman Empire fell. It is fair, then, to ask, not only what Austria ought to have done, but what Great Britain would have done in a like case—if, for example, the Afghan Government had plotted to raise a rebellion in North-West India, and if, finally, Afghan assassins had murdered a Prince and Princess of Wales? Certainly the cry for vengeance would have been raised, and can we be sure that any measure milder than the Note sent from Vienna to Belgrade would have been despatched from London or Calcutta to Kandahar? It is only after saying this that we feel justified in stating that the terms of the Austrian Note and the action of the Austrian Government, when most of these terms have been conceded, appear too stiff, too rigid, too relentless. There should have been more solicitude for the peace of Europe, and a livelier perception of the fact that neighbourly conduct and good feeling cannot be inculcated by military measures. All the same, it is a fact that City men sympathise with Austria. And it is a fact that the provocation begun by Servia has been continued by Russia. If a great war begins Russian mobilisation will be the proximate cause. And we fear that the poisonous articles of the Times have encouraged the Czar's Government to hope for British support. Fortunately, the attitude of the Times is utterly opposed to the feelings of the business community, and to the instincts of the working classes. In maintaining strict neutrality Mr Asquith and Sir Edward Grey can count upon the support of the Cabinet, the House of Commons, and the nation. So far Great Britain has taken the lead in Europe on behalf of peace. The value of that effort is due to the honourable and straightforward conduct of Sir Edward Grey, which did so much to localise the Balkan wars and to prevent the mobilisation in Austria and Russia from terminating in an explosion. It is also due to the great efforts made in England and Germany during the last two or three years to re-establish the old friendship which ought never to have been disturbed. It is very noticeable that there were many cries of "Hoch England " as the crowds which demonstrated in Berlin on Sunday passed by the British Embassy. It is also noticeable, we think, that both in France and Italy public opinion supports British efforts on behalf of peace, and there is one moral, drawn, we are happy to observe, by a Jingo contemporary, that the influence of Great Britain at this crisis and her strength as a mediator are due to the fact that "she alone of the Great Powers is not bound by a definite alliance." It is deplorable that at such a moment Mr Churchill should have given sensational orders to the Fleet, as if, forsooth, whatever happened, any British Government was entitled to plunge this nation into the horrors of war, in a quarrel which is no more of our making and no more our concern than would be a quarrel between Argentina and Brazil or between China and Japan. The attempts of the yellow Press and of the Times to drive the Government into a European war are happily not seconded by the sober-minded part of the Unionist Press in the provinces and Scotland. And we are glad to note the pacific line of the Standard, which is in keeping with its old traditions as a moderate representative of business feeling. The commercial and working classes of this country are just as friendly to Germany as to France, and they will almost unanimously reject the idea of helping Russia to extend its empire in Europe and Asia. Moreover, by keeping clear of the war we shall be able to assist the small Powers and neutral countries—Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, to maintain their integrity, their neutrality, and their independence. Mr Asquith has said plainly that no British interest is directly involved, and we should hope that the Cabinet as a whole reflects the general feeling of the nation that we should observe strict neutrality and avoid even the appearance of taking sides in a quarrel which is not of our making. There is no sign that British interests will be attacked. Happily the principal organs of unofficial Liberal opinion have been speaking out clearly and boldly. Every British interest points irresistibly to the maintenance of strict neutrality. And, of course, by so doing we shall be in a far better position later on—if the worst comes to the worst—to mediate effectively between exhausted combatants. Posted but NOT written by Lou Sheehan </p> 19044621 2014-08-03 21:21:19 2014-08-03 21:21:19 open open the-war-and-the-panic-jul-25th-2014-14-39-by-the-economist-19044621 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan 'Octomom' sets egg-brooding record A deep-sea octopus is observed guarding the same clutch of eggs for nearly 4.5 years http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/02/octomom-sets-egg-brooding-record-a-deep-sea-octopus-is-observed-guarding-the-same-clutch-of-eggs-for-nearly-4-5-years-19030894/ Sat, 02 Aug 2014 05:04:18 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Posted but NOT written by Lou Sheehan SCIENCE NEWS The deep ocean has spawned a new record: the longest egg-brooding period. In April 2007, Bruce Robison of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, Calif., and colleagues sent a remote-operated vehicle down 1,397 meters (4,583 feet) into the Monterey Submarine Canyon. There they saw a deep-sea octopus (Graneledone boreopacifica) making its way toward a stony outcrop. One month later, the scientists spotted the same octopus, which they dubbed ‘Octomom,’ on the rock with a clutch of 155 to 165 eggs. The researchers returned to the site 18 times in total. Each time, there she was with her developing eggs. Most female octopuses lay only one clutch of eggs, staying with the eggs constantly and slowly starving to death while protecting them from predators and keeping them clean. When the eggs hatch, the female dies. The scientists report July 30 in PLOS ONE that the octopus was observed on her eggs for 53 months, until September 2011, the longest brooding period of any known animal.</p> 19030894 2014-08-02 05:04:18 2014-08-02 05:04:18 open open octomom-sets-egg-brooding-record-a-deep-sea-octopus-is-observed-guarding-the-same-clutch-of-eggs-for-nearly-4-5-years-19030894 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan Obama and the “Public Sentiment” Ralph Nader August 1, 2014 http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/02/obama-and-the-public-sentiment-ralph-nader-august-1-19030861/ Sat, 02 Aug 2014 04:59:58 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. -- Louis Sheehan ] Obama and the “Public Sentiment” Ralph Nader August 1, 2014 Dear President Obama: Abraham Lincoln once said that “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.” Presumably, he meant Presidential action on popular issues can and should overcome influential interests. At long last, the “public sentiment” seems to be aligning with some causes you are advancing. First, support is increasing for restoring the federal minimum wage to account for the inflation that, since 1968, has greatly diminished its purchasing power. The federal minimum wage is presently stagnant at $7.25 per hour. You are supporting the Harkin-Miller bill (H.R.1010 and S.2223), which would raise it to $10.10 per hour over three years. You have already issued an executive order to require federal government contractors to pay their employees no less than $10.10 per hour, effective in 2015 (see timeforaraise.org for more information). Restoring the purchasing power of the minimum wage has over 70% public support and would lift the wages of 30 million hard-pressed American workers. Had you pushed to raise the federal minimum wage in 2010 when the Democrats controlled Congress, the House of Representatives might not have been given over to the Republican Party in those November elections. In light of this missed opportunity, you can still pressure Speaker John Boehner and House Republicans to support raising the federal minimum wage by noting that Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and former Republican Governor of Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty, now support this effort. Affected workers need you to step up the pressure in the remaining months of this forlorn Congress and get an existing discharge petition to the House floor for a vote. Second, U.S.-chartered giant companies like Pfizer, Medtronic and, perhaps most foolishly, Walgreens— given its 8,000 protestable stores—are planning to move their headquarters to countries that lure them with lower tax rates, such as Ireland and Switzerland, abandon their U.S. “citizenship,” and re-incorporate in those jurisdictions. This is all for another tax escape to add to their existing ones, including large tax credits to Pfizer and Medtronic for research and development that corporatist lobbies have written into the U.S. tax code. “I don’t care if it’s legal, it’s wrong,” you have indignantly exclaimed in recent speeches. You are supporting legislative efforts by Democrats in Congress (H.R.4679 and S.2360, sponsored by Representative Sander Levin (D-MI) and Senator Carl Levin (D-MI)) to prohibit such drains on corporate taxes intended for the U.S. Treasury and make the ban retroactive to May 2014. Third, and perhaps most impressively, you are questioning the “economic patriotism” of many giant U.S. corporations who have received support (financial and otherwise) from U.S. workers, taxpayers and the public laws and benefitted from the infrastructure of our country. The mere implication that these companies are unpatriotically abandoning their native country has outraged the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (to which you paid a courtesy visit in 2011) along with the predictable Wall Street Journal editorial page. That highly vocal reaction means you touched on a vulnerability that has been on the minds of tens of millions of Americans. May you continue to promote the importance of insisting on the patriotic character of corporations, since the U.S. Supreme Court (5 to 4) keeps telling us that corporations are people. The public sentiment awaits your leadership on other positive redirections as well. Large majorities on both the left and the right: favor breaking up the “too big to fail” New York City banks; support cracking down on corporate crime and fraud (see the Hide No Harm Act of 2014); and, the more they know about its benefits and fairness, support a Wall Street speculation tax, a sales tax that could bring in about $300 billion a year, fund repairs of our public infrastructure, and dampen some of the reckless gambling with other peoples’ money, such as pension and mutual funds. The many rallies in New York City, in front of the White House and around the country— some of which have been led by the National Nurses United—are pressing Congress for such a transaction tax. Such activities have laid the groundwork for your exercise of the “Bully Pulpit.” Another easier initiative, pointed out in my new book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State, is to highlight, once again, the legislation that you as a Senator co-sponsored with Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) in 2006 to require that the full text of all federal government contracts above a minimum amount be available online. As I’ve written previously, putting the full text of these contracts online will: give taxpayers both savings and higher quality performances; let the media focus more incisively on this vast area of government disbursements to inform the wider public; encourage constructive comments and alarms from the citizenry; and stimulate legal and economic research by scholars interested in structural topics related to government procurement, transfers, subsidies and giveaways. There is already support by members of both Parties in the Congress for this measure. Online disclosure would provide for greater scrutiny of some $300 billion in annual contracts by the media, taxpayer groups, competitors and academic researchers. Yes, indeed, Mr. President, wondrous and beneficial changes can come to our country when you and Congress heed the long-standing “public sentiment,” more recently called the “voices of the people,” and translate that “public sentiment” into beneficial action by our government. Sincerely, Ralph Nader Posted but NOT written by Lou Sheehan </p> 19030861 2014-08-02 04:59:58 2014-08-02 04:59:58 open open obama-and-the-public-sentiment-ralph-nader-august-1-19030861 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan General Motors Is Broken -- Ralph Nader http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/07/31/general-motors-is-broken-ralph-nader-19002536/ Thu, 31 Jul 2014 09:07:37 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. -- Louis Sheehan ] General Motors Is Broken http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/07/general_motors_ignition_switch_defect_a_crisis_of_inattention.html The auto giant is suffering a crisis of inattention. Here’s how to fix it. By Ralph Nader he recent Senate committee hearing on how General Motors dealt with its deadly ignition switch defect provides the latest glimpse into the crisis of inattention, deferral of responsibility, and lack of accountability that permeate America’s largest automaker. GM acknowledges, so far, that 13 people were killed as a result of more than a decade of institutional cover-up and negligence brought on by an imperious corporate culture. Clarence Ditlow, head of the well-regarded Center for Auto Safety, has predicted that the death toll will go into the hundreds. In the hearing, GM’s general counsel, Michael P. Millikin, came under criticism for his failure to act and—in the words of subcommittee Chairwoman Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.)—for his “Whac-a-Mole” approach to ignition switch–related lawsuits, even though engineers at GM were aware of the defect. McCaskill twice questioned whether Millikin should still have his job and why CEO Mary Barra has not fired him. Barra defended Millikin, who himself testified, “We had lawyers at GM who didn’t do their jobs, didn’t do what was expected of them. Those lawyers are no longer with the company.” Once again, a GM executive passed the buck to midlevel employees while taking little of the blame himself. Another subcommittee member, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.)—a most penetrating questioner—asked Millikin whether GM would waive its (deceptively obtained) liability shield from lawsuits prior to its 2009 bankruptcy and taxpayer bailout, or whether it would make public documents related to the internal investigation of the defect. “We will not,” answered Millikin to both questions. “Lawyers typically are supposed to be the corporate conscience,” Blumenthal says. “They’re supposed to be the ones that make sure that corporations comply with the law in spirit and letter. Here, the lawyers for GM actually enabled cover-up, concealment, deceit, and even fraud.” Barra told the Senate committee that GM is taking steps to change the corporate culture that failed for 13 years to acknowledge the ignition switch defect. Barra spoke of firing 15 employees, “some for misconduct and incompetence, others because they didn’t take responsibility or act with a sense of urgency.” She talked of creating a Speak Up for Safety program meant “to encourage and recognize employees that bring potential safety issues forward quickly” as well as appointing a new global vice president of safety who would report to her. GM will also establish a fund to compensate people injured and the families of those killed because of the defective ignition switch. The devil is in the details. GM’s lawyer, Ken Feinberg of Feinberg Rozen LLP, detailed the prerequisites for the compensation program, noting that there is “no aggregate cap on the amount of compensation GM will make available to eligible claimants.” The key word is eligible—it happens to exclude all of the millions of recalled GM cars with faulty ignition switches except for the original 2.5 million recalled Cobalts and Saturns. “The fund failed to include other recalled vehicles and defects that resulted in deaths and injuries, and are barred by statutes of limitations or the GM bankruptcy,” Ditlow explains. “The least GM could do for taxpaying consumers who bailed them out is compensate them for their losses due to defects in GM vehicles. Even for ignition switch victims covered by the Fund, it will be difficult, if not impossible, for a consumer to prove that ignition switch failure caused a crash if all they have is their statement that the ignition switch cut off.” GM should introduce a monetary reward for safety reports by its engineers that could help prevent death and injuries. History has shown that GM executives are willing to talk about safety only when they get caught misbehaving. After all, this is the company that in the past has dragged its feet on safety standards for years, such as with shoulder belts and airbags. Since GM sales are rising, concerns about losing customers seem to have gone away. That may help explain why the auto giant refuses to produce more information about its negligent practices, refuses to support proposed corrective legislation, and seems increasingly comfortable that any Justice Department criminal inquiry will not reach the upper echelons of GM management and will only result in a fine that GM can easily absorb. What would it take to instill long-lasting change in a company that now has a storied history of selling unsafe automobiles? One very simple solution would be for Barra to establish an independent ombudsman office. GM’s proposed global vice president of safety—another bureaucratic link in the hierarchical GM chain of command—does not inspire much public confidence that safety defects will receive the immediate action they require. By contrast, an ombudsman would be authorized to receive, in complete confidence, the assertions of conscientious engineers and other internal whistleblowers and report them directly to GM’s CEO and president. This independent office could ensure that safety defects are taken seriously and that employees would be protected from retaliation or job loss. It would then become the CEO’s direct responsibility to follow up on the ombudsman’s report and decide whether it warrants triggering federal regulation on reporting the discovery to the Department of Transportation. GM could also introduce a monetary reward for safety reports by its engineers and other employees to the ombudsman that could help prevent death and injuries. There is a precedent for this: Many other companies here and abroad have long given assembly line workers rewards for proposing more efficient ways to manufacture products. If there is any benefit to the current firestorm over GM, it’s been to bring attention to the urgent need for stronger auto safety authority and enforcement budgets for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration—something that’s been long opposed by auto industry powers and their congressional allies such as Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.). Now is an ideal time to strengthen NHTSA. First and foremost, Congress must make it criminal for manufacturers and their officials to knowingly violate the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act. Citizens must be given the right to sue NHTSA when it fails to enforce the Safety Act, and all industry meetings with NHTSA officials should have detailed minutes that are placed in a public docket within 48 hours. The agency’s pathetic vehicle safety budget, now at $134 million, must be tripled, starting with funding a research lab like those at other regulatory agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration and Environmental Protection Agency. Today’s NHTSA rents lab space from Honda, a company that it regulates. The agency has no meaningful electronics and computer expertise, even though vehicles have become computers on wheels. NHTSA’s administrator admitted to Congress that the agency didn’t even know how the advanced airbags it mandated worked. An added incentive to stop corporate cover-ups comes from Sens. Blumenthal, Bob Casey (D-Pa.), and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who have just introduced the Hide No Harm Act of 2014 (S.2615), which would make it a criminal act—with punishment of up to five years in prison—for a corporate executive to cover up a harmful or deadly safety issue. Such action is long overdue. Only by holding top corporate executives’ feet to the fire can we avoid these deadly mishaps in the future. Ralph Nader’s most recent book is Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State. Follow him on Twitter. [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. -- Louis Sheehan ] </p> 19002536 2014-07-31 09:07:37 2014-07-31 09:07:37 open open general-motors-is-broken-ralph-nader-19002536 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan aretr / UFO http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/07/29/aretr-ufo-18988689/ Tue, 29 Jul 2014 00:04:23 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. -- Louis Sheehan ] Post by meldrew on Oct 21, 2010 at 12:55pm www.richplanet.net/detail.php?dbindex=61 President Jimmy Carter was the first President of the United States of America to have officially reported the UFO he saw to the authorities. He was also the President who said that if elected he would see that UFO-Alien Full Disclosure would take place. That the American public would be told the truth about everything was one of the campaign cries of Jimmy Carter. Carter made a promise he could not or would not be able to keep. After Carter won the White House, he paid a visit to the then-CIA Director, George Bush. Carter had an interest in UFOs ever since experiencing his first sighting sometime in 1969 while standing outside a Lion's Club in Georgia. His campaign speeches promising to unravel the government's long held cover-up was the ''Parting of the Red Sea'' for Ufologists not only in America but around the world. Here was the one guy who would open up the ''Promised Land'' and lead them into Full Disclosure. Carter wanted the U.S. Government's UFO secret documents declassified. George Bush more or less told Carter that the President of the United States did not have the need to know the information contained in those documents. Can you even begin to imagine that? What lends even more mind-blowing credibility to this alleged event between Carter and Bush is the credibility of the allegation maker: Daniel Sheehan. Daniel Sheehan was born in1946 and graduated from Harvard Law School. There, he was co-founder of the Harvard Civil Rights and Civil Liberty Law Review. He went on to work for the American Civil Liberties Union and became general counsel for a host of entities including The Disclosure Project-a group dedicated to getting the U.S. Government to allow full and unfettered access to what the Feds know about the UFO-Alien phenomenon. According to Sheehan, Bush Senior, who was the CIA Director, refused Carter's request for disclosure of the UFO documents, even to the President of the United States, because it was generally believed in the halls and corridors of the secret, black-ops government that Carter would then turn the truth over to the American people. Director of a California think tank, Sheehan's credentials are impeccable. Sheehan's career is a litany of high-profile cases like, ''legal counsel team for the New York Times' Pentagon Papers case, defense of the Berrigan brothers, going after the Kerr-McGee nuclear plant (Karen Silkwood), Three-Mile Island, Iran-Contra. At the Disclosure Conference, Sheehan says the Bush-Carter story was relayed to him in 1977 by Marcia Smith of the Congressional Research Service, part of the Library of Congress.'' Sheehan's interest in this phenomenon came about when Sheehan met Marcia Smith through a mutual acquaintance. Smith told Sheehan that she was involved in a research project for the Science and Technology Committee of the Library of Congress that would address the issues of the potential existence of extraterrestrial intelligence and make an evaluation of the data on the phenomena of UFOs. When Sheehan queried Smith as to who exactly wanted this study done, her answer was none other than Jimmy Carter. This all was with a view to investigate exactly what could or could not be turned over to the general public, according to Daniel Sheehan. Smith asked Sheehan if he could, since he was the then-General Counsel to United States Jesuit Headquarters at their National Office in Washington D.C., get access to the records on the UFO-Alien issue contained in the Vatican. Though Sheehan made repeated attempts to gain access to the Vatican's documents through official channels, he was refused each time. This makes one wonder just why, if all there is to this UFO-Alien issue is weather balloons, flocks of geese, and swamp gas, would the Vatican (or any government on the earth, for that matter) have top-secret, and highly unattainable records pertaining to a nonexistent issue? After telling Marcia Smith of his roadblock with the Vatican Library, she asked if he could help with a team that was lobbying Congressional leader to reinstate funds for the SETI (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program. Sheehan indicated to Smith that he was glad to help out. Smith also later asked him if he could help out with an investigation into ''the potential theological religious implications of potential contact with extraterrestrial civilizations.'' This again begs the question that if there's nothing at all to this phenomenon, then why this study? Sheehan agreed to Smith's request but insisted he have access to the documents pertaining to this issue that she had garnered for an investigation she did for the Science and Technology Committee in Congress. When asked what exactly Sheehan wanted to see, he indicated he wanted access to ''the classified sections of the Project Blue Book.'' Astoundingly, Daniel was granted access. He was not allowed to take notes, photos, or carry anything into the room containing the documents or out with him when he left the Library of Congress where the documents were stored. After proceeding through multiple layers of security, he was shown to the room with microfiche machines. Before entering, he was told he could not take his briefcase with him. Almost absent-mindedly, he had a yellow legal pad under his arm that wasn't confiscated before he entered the room. He proceeded through small canisters of film. It didn't take long to find proof. He discovered photos of what appeared to be a disc-shaped craft. It had crashed. ''It had hit into this field and had dug up, kind of plowed this kind of trough through this field. It was wedged into the side of this bank. There was snow all around the picture. The vehicle was wedged into the side of this mud-like embankment -- kind of up at an angle.'' The men taking photos were unmistakably, in Sheehan's mind, American Air Force personnel. As Sheehan continued to review the film, he discovered a close-up of the craft that revealed symbols or glyphs written on the craft. He thought it was an insignia. He wanted to record what he saw, but remembered he was not allowed to take notes. He knew it was likely his legal pad would be discovered when he left the room and the guards would examine it to see if he had taken notes. However, since he wanted those insignias, he had to find a way to record them. He decided to arrange the cardboard backing of his legal pad in such a way against the microfiche screen so he could trace the symbols. When he left the top-secret document room, he was searched. His pad was taken and flipped through for notes. Finding none, and not noticing the traced symbols on the cardboard backing of the yellow pad, it was returned to him by the guards and Sheehan left. Sheehan not only revealed to Marcia Smith what he had found but he also revealed the information to his boss at the Jesuit National Headquarters. Meetings and conventions were convened on the issue. Reports were written. President Carter saw at least one of the reports made by Marcia Smith, which included information from Daniel Sheehan's discoveries. Sheehan still has the yellow notepad with the symbols but says no analysis has been done on the symbols. Oh, are you wondering about the reports Marcia Smith finished after Daniel Sheehan's discovery and what they said? Well, Sheehan read them and according to Sheehan: ''The one report that Marcia showed me on extraterrestrial phenomena actually stated that it was the conclusion of the Library of Congress, Science and Technology Division, that from two to six, at least, other highly-intelligent, technologically-developed civilizations exist right within our own galaxy.'' [http://www.presidentialufo.com/marcia_smith_story.htm] ''The second report,'' says Sheehan, ''they had drawings of different shapes of UFOs that have been sighted,'' continued Sheehan. ''They didn't site any particular cases, but they said that they believed there was a significant number of instances where the official United States Air Force investigations were unable to discount the possibility that one or more of these vehicles was actually from one of these extraterrestrial civilizations. They put this together, and sent it over to the President. I ended up seeing a copy of it.'' The Carter Administration, though not bringing about Full Disclosure, had a very busy four years of UFO phenomena. I can't help but wonder if he had had another term in office, what could have come of all of this? Article : Doug Bower Post by meldrew on Oct 21, 2010 at 12:55pm www.richplanet.net/detail.php?dbindex=61 President Jimmy Carter was the first President of the United States of America to have officially reported the UFO he saw to the authorities. He was also the President who said that if elected he would see that UFO-Alien Full Disclosure would take place. That the American public would be told the truth about everything was one of the campaign cries of Jimmy Carter. Carter made a promise he could not or would not be able to keep. After Carter won the White House, he paid a visit to the then-CIA Director, George Bush. Carter had an interest in UFOs ever since experiencing his first sighting sometime in 1969 while standing outside a Lion's Club in Georgia. His campaign speeches promising to unravel the government's long held cover-up was the ''Parting of the Red Sea'' for Ufologists not only in America but around the world. Here was the one guy who would open up the ''Promised Land'' and lead them into Full Disclosure. Carter wanted the U.S. Government's UFO secret documents declassified. George Bush more or less told Carter that the President of the United States did not have the need to know the information contained in those documents. Can you even begin to imagine that? What lends even more mind-blowing credibility to this alleged event between Carter and Bush is the credibility of the allegation maker: Daniel Sheehan. Daniel Sheehan was born in1946 and graduated from Harvard Law School. There, he was co-founder of the Harvard Civil Rights and Civil Liberty Law Review. He went on to work for the American Civil Liberties Union and became general counsel for a host of entities including The Disclosure Project-a group dedicated to getting the U.S. Government to allow full and unfettered access to what the Feds know about the UFO-Alien phenomenon. According to Sheehan, Bush Senior, who was the CIA Director, refused Carter's request for disclosure of the UFO documents, even to the President of the United States, because it was generally believed in the halls and corridors of the secret, black-ops government that Carter would then turn the truth over to the American people. Director of a California think tank, Sheehan's credentials are impeccable. Sheehan's career is a litany of high-profile cases like, ''legal counsel team for the New York Times' Pentagon Papers case, defense of the Berrigan brothers, going after the Kerr-McGee nuclear plant (Karen Silkwood), Three-Mile Island, Iran-Contra. At the Disclosure Conference, Sheehan says the Bush-Carter story was relayed to him in 1977 by Marcia Smith of the Congressional Research Service, part of the Library of Congress.'' Sheehan's interest in this phenomenon came about when Sheehan met Marcia Smith through a mutual acquaintance. Smith told Sheehan that she was involved in a research project for the Science and Technology Committee of the Library of Congress that would address the issues of the potential existence of extraterrestrial intelligence and make an evaluation of the data on the phenomena of UFOs. When Sheehan queried Smith as to who exactly wanted this study done, her answer was none other than Jimmy Carter. This all was with a view to investigate exactly what could or could not be turned over to the general public, according to Daniel Sheehan. Smith asked Sheehan if he could, since he was the then-General Counsel to United States Jesuit Headquarters at their National Office in Washington D.C., get access to the records on the UFO-Alien issue contained in the Vatican. Though Sheehan made repeated attempts to gain access to the Vatican's documents through official channels, he was refused each time. This makes one wonder just why, if all there is to this UFO-Alien issue is weather balloons, flocks of geese, and swamp gas, would the Vatican (or any government on the earth, for that matter) have top-secret, and highly unattainable records pertaining to a nonexistent issue? After telling Marcia Smith of his roadblock with the Vatican Library, she asked if he could help with a team that was lobbying Congressional leader to reinstate funds for the SETI (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program. Sheehan indicated to Smith that he was glad to help out. Smith also later asked him if he could help out with an investigation into ''the potential theological religious implications of potential contact with extraterrestrial civilizations.'' This again begs the question that if there's nothing at all to this phenomenon, then why this study? Sheehan agreed to Smith's request but insisted he have access to the documents pertaining to this issue that she had garnered for an investigation she did for the Science and Technology Committee in Congress. When asked what exactly Sheehan wanted to see, he indicated he wanted access to ''the classified sections of the Project Blue Book.'' Astoundingly, Daniel was granted access. He was not allowed to take notes, photos, or carry anything into the room containing the documents or out with him when he left the Library of Congress where the documents were stored. After proceeding through multiple layers of security, he was shown to the room with microfiche machines. Before entering, he was told he could not take his briefcase with him. Almost absent-mindedly, he had a yellow legal pad under his arm that wasn't confiscated before he entered the room. He proceeded through small canisters of film. It didn't take long to find proof. He discovered photos of what appeared to be a disc-shaped craft. It had crashed. ''It had hit into this field and had dug up, kind of plowed this kind of trough through this field. It was wedged into the side of this bank. There was snow all around the picture. The vehicle was wedged into the side of this mud-like embankment -- kind of up at an angle.'' The men taking photos were unmistakably, in Sheehan's mind, American Air Force personnel. As Sheehan continued to review the film, he discovered a close-up of the craft that revealed symbols or glyphs written on the craft. He thought it was an insignia. He wanted to record what he saw, but remembered he was not allowed to take notes. He knew it was likely his legal pad would be discovered when he left the room and the guards would examine it to see if he had taken notes. However, since he wanted those insignias, he had to find a way to record them. He decided to arrange the cardboard backing of his legal pad in such a way against the microfiche screen so he could trace the symbols. When he left the top-secret document room, he was searched. His pad was taken and flipped through for notes. Finding none, and not noticing the traced symbols on the cardboard backing of the yellow pad, it was returned to him by the guards and Sheehan left. Sheehan not only revealed to Marcia Smith what he had found but he also revealed the information to his boss at the Jesuit National Headquarters. Meetings and conventions were convened on the issue. Reports were written. President Carter saw at least one of the reports made by Marcia Smith, which included information from Daniel Sheehan's discoveries. Sheehan still has the yellow notepad with the symbols but says no analysis has been done on the symbols. Oh, are you wondering about the reports Marcia Smith finished after Daniel Sheehan's discovery and what they said? Well, Sheehan read them and according to Sheehan: ''The one report that Marcia showed me on extraterrestrial phenomena actually stated that it was the conclusion of the Library of Congress, Science and Technology Division, that from two to six, at least, other highly-intelligent, technologically-developed civilizations exist right within our own galaxy.'' [http://www.presidentialufo.com/marcia_smith_story.htm] ''The second report,'' says Sheehan, ''they had drawings of different shapes of UFOs that have been sighted,'' continued Sheehan. ''They didn't site any particular cases, but they said that they believed there was a significant number of instances where the official United States Air Force investigations were unable to discount the possibility that one or more of these vehicles was actually from one of these extraterrestrial civilizations. They put this together, and sent it over to the President. I ended up seeing a copy of it.'' The Carter Administration, though not bringing about Full Disclosure, had a very busy four years of UFO phenomena. I can't help but wonder if he had had another term in office, what could have come of all of this? Article : Doug Bower Post by meldrew on Oct 21, 2010 at 12:55pm www.richplanet.net/detail.php?dbindex=61 President Jimmy Carter was the first President of the United States of America to have officially reported the UFO he saw to the authorities. He was also the President who said that if elected he would see that UFO-Alien Full Disclosure would take place. That the American public would be told the truth about everything was one of the campaign cries of Jimmy Carter. Carter made a promise he could not or would not be able to keep. After Carter won the White House, he paid a visit to the then-CIA Director, George Bush. Carter had an interest in UFOs ever since experiencing his first sighting sometime in 1969 while standing outside a Lion's Club in Georgia. His campaign speeches promising to unravel the government's long held cover-up was the ''Parting of the Red Sea'' for Ufologists not only in America but around the world. Here was the one guy who would open up the ''Promised Land'' and lead them into Full Disclosure. Carter wanted the U.S. Government's UFO secret documents declassified. George Bush more or less told Carter that the President of the United States did not have the need to know the information contained in those documents. Can you even begin to imagine that? What lends even more mind-blowing credibility to this alleged event between Carter and Bush is the credibility of the allegation maker: Daniel Sheehan. Daniel Sheehan was born in1946 and graduated from Harvard Law School. There, he was co-founder of the Harvard Civil Rights and Civil Liberty Law Review. He went on to work for the American Civil Liberties Union and became general counsel for a host of entities including The Disclosure Project-a group dedicated to getting the U.S. Government to allow full and unfettered access to what the Feds know about the UFO-Alien phenomenon. According to Sheehan, Bush Senior, who was the CIA Director, refused Carter's request for disclosure of the UFO documents, even to the President of the United States, because it was generally believed in the halls and corridors of the secret, black-ops government that Carter would then turn the truth over to the American people. Director of a California think tank, Sheehan's credentials are impeccable. Sheehan's career is a litany of high-profile cases like, ''legal counsel team for the New York Times' Pentagon Papers case, defense of the Berrigan brothers, going after the Kerr-McGee nuclear plant (Karen Silkwood), Three-Mile Island, Iran-Contra. At the Disclosure Conference, Sheehan says the Bush-Carter story was relayed to him in 1977 by Marcia Smith of the Congressional Research Service, part of the Library of Congress.'' Sheehan's interest in this phenomenon came about when Sheehan met Marcia Smith through a mutual acquaintance. Smith told Sheehan that she was involved in a research project for the Science and Technology Committee of the Library of Congress that would address the issues of the potential existence of extraterrestrial intelligence and make an evaluation of the data on the phenomena of UFOs. When Sheehan queried Smith as to who exactly wanted this study done, her answer was none other than Jimmy Carter. This all was with a view to investigate exactly what could or could not be turned over to the general public, according to Daniel Sheehan. Smith asked Sheehan if he could, since he was the then-General Counsel to United States Jesuit Headquarters at their National Office in Washington D.C., get access to the records on the UFO-Alien issue contained in the Vatican. Though Sheehan made repeated attempts to gain access to the Vatican's documents through official channels, he was refused each time. This makes one wonder just why, if all there is to this UFO-Alien issue is weather balloons, flocks of geese, and swamp gas, would the Vatican (or any government on the earth, for that matter) have top-secret, and highly unattainable records pertaining to a nonexistent issue? After telling Marcia Smith of his roadblock with the Vatican Library, she asked if he could help with a team that was lobbying Congressional leader to reinstate funds for the SETI (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program. Sheehan indicated to Smith that he was glad to help out. Smith also later asked him if he could help out with an investigation into ''the potential theological religious implications of potential contact with extraterrestrial civilizations.'' This again begs the question that if there's nothing at all to this phenomenon, then why this study? Sheehan agreed to Smith's request but insisted he have access to the documents pertaining to this issue that she had garnered for an investigation she did for the Science and Technology Committee in Congress. When asked what exactly Sheehan wanted to see, he indicated he wanted access to ''the classified sections of the Project Blue Book.'' Astoundingly, Daniel was granted access. He was not allowed to take notes, photos, or carry anything into the room containing the documents or out with him when he left the Library of Congress where the documents were stored. After proceeding through multiple layers of security, he was shown to the room with microfiche machines. Before entering, he was told he could not take his briefcase with him. Almost absent-mindedly, he had a yellow legal pad under his arm that wasn't confiscated before he entered the room. He proceeded through small canisters of film. It didn't take long to find proof. He discovered photos of what appeared to be a disc-shaped craft. It had crashed. ''It had hit into this field and had dug up, kind of plowed this kind of trough through this field. It was wedged into the side of this bank. There was snow all around the picture. The vehicle was wedged into the side of this mud-like embankment -- kind of up at an angle.'' The men taking photos were unmistakably, in Sheehan's mind, American Air Force personnel. As Sheehan continued to review the film, he discovered a close-up of the craft that revealed symbols or glyphs written on the craft. He thought it was an insignia. He wanted to record what he saw, but remembered he was not allowed to take notes. He knew it was likely his legal pad would be discovered when he left the room and the guards would examine it to see if he had taken notes. However, since he wanted those insignias, he had to find a way to record them. He decided to arrange the cardboard backing of his legal pad in such a way against the microfiche screen so he could trace the symbols. When he left the top-secret document room, he was searched. His pad was taken and flipped through for notes. Finding none, and not noticing the traced symbols on the cardboard backing of the yellow pad, it was returned to him by the guards and Sheehan left. Sheehan not only revealed to Marcia Smith what he had found but he also revealed the information to his boss at the Jesuit National Headquarters. Meetings and conventions were convened on the issue. Reports were written. President Carter saw at least one of the reports made by Marcia Smith, which included information from Daniel Sheehan's discoveries. Sheehan still has the yellow notepad with the symbols but says no analysis has been done on the symbols. Oh, are you wondering about the reports Marcia Smith finished after Daniel Sheehan's discovery and what they said? Well, Sheehan read them and according to Sheehan: ''The one report that Marcia showed me on extraterrestrial phenomena actually stated that it was the conclusion of the Library of Congress, Science and Technology Division, that from two to six, at least, other highly-intelligent, technologically-developed civilizations exist right within our own galaxy.'' [http://www.presidentialufo.com/marcia_smith_story.htm] ''The second report,'' says Sheehan, ''they had drawings of different shapes of UFOs that have been sighted,'' continued Sheehan. ''They didn't site any particular cases, but they said that they believed there was a significant number of instances where the official United States Air Force investigations were unable to discount the possibility that one or more of these vehicles was actually from one of these extraterrestrial civilizations. They put this together, and sent it over to the President. I ended up seeing a copy of it.'' The Carter Administration, though not bringing about Full Disclosure, had a very busy four years of UFO phenomena. I can't help but wonder if he had had another term in office, what could have come of all of this? Article : Doug Bower </p> 18988689 2014-07-29 00:04:23 2014-07-29 00:04:23 open open aretr-ufo-18988689 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan From The New Yorker Masland Carpet October 1, 2012 http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/07/20/from-the-new-yorker-masland-carpet-october-1-18923857/ Sun, 20 Jul 2014 06:26:07 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] A Reporter at Large Transaction Man Mormonism, private equity, and the making of a candidate. by Nicholas Lemann October 1, 2012 1.6K Print More Mitt Romney’s time at business school coincided with the waning of big corporations and the beginning of the rise of finance. I. CHURCH This summer, I spent most of an afternoon in Salt Lake City with Douglas Anderson, a friend of Mitt Romney’s. Anderson lives in a housing development in the foothills of the mountains that rise to the east of the city. We met in his living room, which leads to a patio with a view across the Great Basin—a view that isn’t so different from the one that the first Mormon settlers in Utah had as they crossed the mountains, except that what you see now is prosperous urban sprawl, not a desert. Anderson, a bald, amiable man in his early sixties, is a Democrat, but, like Romney, he is a Mormon, with deep roots in Utah; he is part of the business-school and management-consulting worlds; and his father always made it clear that holding a high political office would be the excellent culmination of a career. In Belmont, Massachusetts, where both men lived for years, Anderson was the Romney family’s “home teacher,” assigned by the Church to pay monthly visits to support the family and its religious life and to offer a little guidance. In 1989, Anderson and his family moved to Salt Lake City. On the coffee table in the living room was a large, leather-bound copy of the Book of Mormon. Above the desk in Anderson’s study was a picture of Jesus Christ standing on a high bluff and looking down into a valley, with the caption “Oh, Jerusalem! Oh, Jerusalem!” Anderson told me an almost surreal story about his first encounter with Romney, in 1968. Anderson was a freshman at Stanford. Romney had been a student there in 1965-66, before he left for France, to do the missionary work that young Mormons pursue. Anderson was walking across the campus one day when a student he hardly knew approached him. “Are you a Mormon?” the young man asked. Anderson said yes. “Do you know Mitt Romney?” No. “Mitt Romney is the finest person I have ever known!” Then he walked away. Another Mormon friend who shares Romney’s background (church, business school, long residence in Belmont, Massachusetts) is Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor and renowned management guru. He remembers first encountering Romney in an economics class at Brigham Young University, in 1970, just after Romney returned from his mission and married Ann Davies, his high-school sweetheart. “He was the big man on campus,” Christensen told me. He owned an A.M.C. Javelin, the hottest car made by the auto company that his father, George Romney, had run. “He had a beautiful wife. His father was famous, he was handsome. Everybody wanted to be what Mitt was.” Inside the world that Mitt Romney inhabits, he has always been a person of destiny. It isn’t just that he is the son of a corporate chief executive, governor, and Presidential candidate. He is the scion of one of the most prominent Mormon families, with a direct connection to the Church’s founding prophets, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. The Romneys converted in England and came to the United States in 1841. The first American member of the family, Miles Park Romney, was born in the short-lived paradise of Nauvoo, Illinois, over which Joseph Smith presided. After Smith’s martyrdom, the Romneys took part in the terrible forced exodus that ended in Utah. Mitt Romney was born in 1947, the year of the centennial of the Mormons’ arrival there. The youngest of four siblings by six years, he was born when his parents were middle-aged. Romney, with his square jaw and brilliantined hair and old-school cultural references, is a throwback to an earlier time. His father and mother were born in 1907 and 1908; his oldest sister was born before either of Barack Obama’s parents. from the issue buy as a print e-mail this Romney often comes across as not being able to relate to mainstream American life. In his astonishing performance before a group of rich donors in Boca Raton, Florida, in May, recently made public by Mother Jones, he said that the forty-seven per cent of Americans who pay no federal income taxes are never going to vote for him, because they think of themselves as “victims” and “believe that government has a responsibility to care for them.” That forty-seven per cent includes millions of people who do pay payroll taxes, and retirees, and people who are disabled and unemployed. You’d expect somebody who proposes to run the federal government to know that. One could see Romney simply as a rich person who thinks the way many rich people must think; one could see him as a super fund-raiser who is good at telling a certain kind of wealthy audience what he believes it wants to hear; or one could see him simply as somebody who can’t connect to outsiders in any natural way, who goes through life trying one somewhat forced and awkward technique after another, because he thinks he has to keep his real self private. It isn’t easy to comprehend what sort of heart and soul and mind produced those remarks. Romney is very deeply a product of a series of interconnected, tightly enclosed worlds, with their own rules: Mormonism, business school, management consulting, private equity. Understanding him requires understanding the subcultures that produced him. Romney, on his mission in France, lived a life oddly similar, in its daily texture, at least, to Obama’s as a community organizer in Chicago: long, penurious days spent knocking on strangers’ doors, “tracting” in the hope of finding someone who wanted to hear Joseph Smith’s miraculous story. But in 1968, toward the end of his mission, Romney had several unsettling experiences. He was in an auto accident in which a passenger in the car he was driving was killed. When the French student protests broke out, members of Romney’s mission (who were garbed, “Matrix”-like, in white shirts, black suits, and skinny ties) saw them as a terrifying example of the threat posed by the left. And Romney’s father, long considered the front-runner for the Republican Presidential nomination, was dropping out of the race, before the first primary. These days, people often describe Romney as an old-fashioned “Rockefeller Republican”—moderate on social issues, internationalist on foreign policy, and pro-Wall Street—who is pretending to be more conservative out of expediency. This is misleading on two counts. In the heyday of Rockefeller Republicanism, George Romney’s billboards in New Hampshire said, “The Way to Stop Crime Is to Stop Moral Decay.” And that campaign resulted in an enduring sense in the family of personal bitterness and betrayal toward Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York. Just after the 1966 midterm elections, Rockefeller summoned George Romney to one of the family’s properties, the Dorado Beach hotel, in Puerto Rico, and promised him full support in the 1968 Presidential primaries and election. This meant that Romney would begin the race with the delegations of Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania in his pocket (the governor of Pennsylvania had allied himself with Rockefeller), plus a panoply of Rockefeller connections, funding sources, and policy advisers, including Henry Kissinger. Yet he was not remotely an establishment figure. In “The Making of the President 1968,” Theodore H. White wrote, wonderingly, “Somewhere out beyond the Alleghenies the old culture of America still persists, people who think Boy Scouts are good, who believe that divorce is bad, who teach Bible classes on Sunday, enjoy church suppers, wash their children’s mouths with soap to purge dirty words, who regard homosexuals as wicked, whose throat chokes up when an American flag is marched by on the Fourth of July.” (All five of Mitt Romney’s sons were Boy Scouts and three became Eagle Scouts.) The Old Guard, White thought, would never put up with this sort of character: “There is a natural timberline in national politics beyond which certain kinds of men cannot thrive.” More specifically, Rockefeller, who could never completely give up the idea of himself as President, began to hint that he might get into the race after all. At a certain point, it was made clear to Romney that all those Rockefeller resources were not going to be available to him. Romney bowed out, feeling that he had been played for a fool; Rockefeller never entered the race. In March, 1968, Michael Bush, a member of Mitt Romney’s mission in France, wrote to his mother, “Mitt Romney is working in Bordeaux now. We were together a while this morning and of course we discussed politics. (Politics is often a missionary discussion topic.) It was interesting to hear about George Romney from the inside. It appears that Rockefeller gave Romney a dirty deal. In a letter Elder R. received just after his Dad’s withdrawal, Gov. Romney explained that the poor predictions for New Hampshire were not the reason he withdrew. It was because Rockefeller was stepping out of the non-candidacy ranks. Rockefeller had ardently promised his support, right down to the line—winner or loser, but when he said that he would accept a draft, Romney doubted his sincerity and told Rocky that he knew then that he had been a stalking horse.” Was that when the seed of Mitt Romney’s Presidential candidacy was planted? We’ll never know, because Romney and his friends are wedded, no doubt sincerely, to the standard Republican rhetoric about his political ambition as a matter of “being of service” and “giving back.” If the seed was planted back then, one of the lessons plainly was that you want to be the guy in the race who has the most money, not the guy who is dependent on the guy with the most money. Like most élites, the Mormon élite is a small world where everybody knows and has close ties to everybody else. One of the important Mormon families is the Eyrings. Henry Eyring, like George Romney, was born in Mexico in the first decade of the twentieth century. Mormons had established a colony there, so that they could continue to practice polygamy. In the nineteen-thirties and forties, Eyring was a distinguished chemistry professor at Princeton. His son Henry B. Eyring, who taught at Stanford Business School, is now the second-ranking official in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, with the title First Counsellor in the First Presidency. In 2006, Henry B.’s son, Henry J., gave up a career at the management-consulting firm Monitor, where Mitt Romney’s eldest son, Tagg, has worked. The Church assigned him to a team in charge of transforming a small two-year Mormon college in Rexburg, Idaho, into a major Mormon university, called B.Y.U.-Idaho. In 2005, Kim Clark, the dean of Harvard Business School, became president of B.Y.U.-Idaho; for many years in Belmont, Mitt Romney was home teacher for Clark’s seven children. When I visited Rexburg, Henry Eyring, a rail-thin, bald man in his late forties, gave me a tour of the campus, which consists of new brick and stone buildings separated by well-tended lawns and paths. A large temple stands next to the campus. Our tour ended in the main auditorium, which seats fifteen thousand, so that the entire student body can worship together. We sat down in the balcony and talked. “My great-great-grandmother was a Romney,” Eyring said. “That’s the family connection. In fact, my grandfather’s father was married to two Romney sisters. They were driven out of the United States, to Mexico. Then they were driven out of Mexico, by Pancho Villa and the Mexican Revolution. They lived in a stockyard in El Paso for a year, and then in Pima, Arizona. The middle of nowhere. But they got an education. There is within us, as a people, a drive to get all the education you can, to conquer the wilderness, if you will. We must become all we can be. We must master our circumstances—we as a family. Not for aggrandizement. For self-actualization, as Abraham Maslow would say. Let’s go to Zion.” The heads of B.Y.U.-Idaho and Brigham Young’s other sister school, in Hawaii, are former Harvard Business School professors. Three of Mitt Romney’s sons have Harvard M.B.A.s. I asked Eyring why so many prominent Mormons are attracted to business school. The educational ethic, he said, is “to be intellectually curious but to be practical. That will take a disproportionate portion of the population into commerce—schools of business. Make the desert blossom as the rose, in the words of Isaiah. The two most significant graduate schools in the Mormon educational system are business and law. There is a great interest in executive leadership. You’re talking to a J.D./M.B.A. Mitt is a J.D./M.B.A. When a Mormon goes to law school, he rarely thinks about law firms. It’s more about government and diplomacy.” Eyring noted that Joseph Smith’s expulsion from one state after another, and his murder in Illinois, impressed on Mormons the importance of being empowered participants in government. “We are interested in law because of governance, business because of building things. Mitt’s father moved back and forth across the line. You have to be a builder. You can build it in business, or you can build it in government. You are not going to be driven out of your home. You will not be persecuted. You will be safe. You will get an education. You can advance.” Some weeks later, in Boston, I asked Clayton Christensen the same question. “Let me give you a two-minute history of Christianity,” he said. “In 300 A.D., the leaders decided they had all the answers. God doesn’t give you a new answer until you ask a question. The leaders had the New Testament. It had all the answers. God had given them revelation. What’s unique about Mormonism is that, starting with Joseph Smith, we started asking questions of God that we didn’t have the answers to. The intellectual curiosity: we, or the Prophet, ask God.” He went on, “Most religions come to believe in the Zeus model of God. He was outside the universe and created everything. Latter-Day Saints believe that God is in the universe and his power comes from understanding the rules of the universe perfectly. Everything we learn makes us more like God. The impetus to learn is so strong because it helps us to become more like God.” There is a special intensity in the playing out of Mormon culture across American society, because it is an American religion, whose canonical events took place here, not all that long ago. Back in Rexburg, I asked Kim Clark what in Mormon culture generates such an intense preoccupation with business. Henry Eyring identified business with building and practicality; Clark identified business with personal leadership, which is also a preoccupation of Mitt Romney’s. “There are aspects of the doctrine, the practice, the experience that prepare people well for leadership,” he said. “My mother, every day, would look me in the eye and say to me, ‘You are a leader! Stand up for what you believe in. Don’t let people drag you around by the nose. You have a responsibility to your heavenly father. You have a responsibility to do your very best.’ And on my way out the door she’d add, ‘You remember who you are. People sacrificed for you. They died so you could have what you have.’ I’m sure I’m not the only L.D.S. child who heard that from his mom. That came out of the pioneer experience. It’s deeply ingrained. Being persecuted, driven across the country. I was five! And then the Church gives you those leadership opportunities. For little kids, three years old, there’s something called Primary. I gave my first talk to an organization when I was four or five years old. At twelve, they put you in a leadership position. At nineteen, you get sent on a mission. At twenty, you’re responsible for other missionaries, and it’s serious. It’s people’s lives. All through your experience, you’re trained to be a leader.” II. BUSINESS All of us see the course of our lives as particular, and Mitt and Ann Romney tell their story that way. But Romney’s life as a young man took a typical path for a devout Mormon: freshman year of college, then a mission abroad, then an early marriage and enrollment at Brigham Young (where it is not uncommon for more than half the class to be married when they graduate). Ann, also the child of a businessman, and brought up as a lightly affiliated Episcopalian, converted to Mormonism. The marriage took place twice, once in Michigan, so that her parents could attend, and then in the magnificent temple in Salt Lake City (which only Mormons with a “temple recommend” can enter). From Brigham Young, Romney went to Harvard, where, as a compromise with his father, he enrolled in both the law school (his father’s preference) and the business school. Romney was a golden boy there, as he had been at Stanford, on mission, and at Brigham Young. When Romney was at Harvard Business School, all second-year students were required to read Alfred P. Sloan’s “My Years with General Motors.” In the decades after the Second World War, G.M. was one of the most successful institutions in America, the sort of place where the brightest Harvard Business School graduates dreamed of working. The most influential figures in business were the chief executives of large corporations. Wall Street, in those days, was a sleepy backwater, and it was almost unimaginably less important to American economic life than it is now. In the nineteen-seventies, the balance of power began to shift from production to capital, and corporate America started to seem lumbering and inefficient. This shift was the business world’s version of the sixties—one (younger and impatient) group of politically conservative businesspeople challenging another (older and more traditional) group. The field of battle was not politics, culture, dress, or taste in music. It was the American corporation, and the consequences for the whole society were profound. The business sixties wound up rearranging most of the American economy. General Motors has fewer than half as many employees today as it did in 1955, and, among the American corporations that were great at mid-century, it’s hardly alone. George Romney was an organization man. Mitt Romney became a transaction man: someone who moves assets around with a speed and force that leaves many of the rest of us bewildered. The insurrection in business has profoundly affected the lives of most people who work, pay taxes, and get government benefits. It is the backdrop to this Presidential election. By the time Romney graduated, in 1975, the best students at Harvard Business School were dreaming not of rising through the management ranks at an industrial company but of working in the financial world or at strategic-consulting companies. The most prestigious of these was a relatively new boutique firm called Boston Consulting Group, and Mitt Romney got his first job after business school there. The mystique of B.C.G. and its founder, Bruce Henderson, couldn’t have been more different from that of Alfred Sloan and G.M. B.C.G. was small, and it didn’t run or make anything; it merely gave advice. Corporations with tens of thousands of career employees brought in teams of five or six people from B.C.G. to spend a few months studying their business and then tell them how to become more economically powerful, by making structural and strategic changes. The consultants interviewed employees and customers and suppliers, and got competitors’ public data filings. They analyzed the information using techniques that Henderson and his colleagues had developed, with names like the experience curve and the growth-share matrix. B.C.G., its older and bigger competitor McKinsey, and many imitators helped to break apart the corporate structures of postwar America and reconfigure them. Romney was an ideal consultant: polite, well trained in presentation skills, and, as the son of one corporate executive and the namesake of another (he is Willard Mitt Romney, after Willard Marriott, the leading Mormon business executive of the late nineteen-forties), comfortable in a boardroom. Kim Clark says that Romney was “very smart, but also great with senior executives, really capable of developing relationships with them. You have to be really good on your feet, good at understanding what people’s concerns are and how they think.” In 1973, Bruce Henderson’s second-in-command at B.C.G., Bill Bain, left to start his own strategic-consulting firm. Slight, neat, and quiet, Bain was a former fund-raiser for Vanderbilt University, with no formal training in business or economics. Bain & Company worked for only one company in an industry, under conditions of high secrecy. Its consultants were recruited with obsessive attention to brains, impeccable dress, manner, and credentials. Whether it was the atmospheric sizzle or the analytic steak, Bain & Company prospered. Often, the top few strategic-consulting firms were competing for the same work, so a slight edge in the youthful perfection of one’s M.B.A.s could tip the balance. In 1977, B.C.G. put Romney in charge of recruiting at Harvard Business School. Midway through the recruiting season, Bill Bain persuaded Romney to leave B.C.G. and become Bain’s chief recruiter at Harvard. “So the person who was saying, ‘Join B.C.G.,’ was now saying, ‘Join Bain,’ ” Clayton Christensen says. “Mitt is so persuasive. He could get rich selling used bubble gum. That gave Bain the critical mass to compete with B.C.G.” Sometimes large historical developments are obvious only in retrospect. In 1979, an obscure division of the U.S. Department of Labor in charge of regulating pension funds loosened something called the “prudent man rule,” enabling funds to invest more aggressively, for higher returns. Organizations like the California state employees’ pension fund and the teachers’ retirement system of Texas suddenly became power players in American capitalism. So did university and foundation endowments and, later, sovereign-wealth funds. The people running these large pools of capital invested to get the best returns, and so helped to drive the remaking of companies, the restructuring of the workforce, and globalization. When the country was dominated by large, established institutions, workers were, often implicitly, guaranteed job security and comfortable benefits. In the new economy, these arrangements were eroded, which put pressure on the political system to pick up the slack. Meanwhile, the hot shots at strategic-consulting firms were becoming frustrated. Sometimes their clients made a great deal of money thanks to their advice, while the firms got only a fraction of what they saw as the value of their work. Conversely, clients were free to ignore their advice, or to be slow about implementing it. In 1976, two members of the faculty at the University of Rochester’s business school, Michael Jensen and William Meckling, published an article in the obscure Journal of Financial Economics called “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure.” It provided the intellectual foundation for bringing together one set of ideas about how to change the ownership structure of a company with another set of ideas about how to change the way it operated. That consolidation led to the creation of Bain Capital, in 1984, and made Mitt Romney very rich. Jensen and Meckling argued that publicly held corporations were poorly managed, because their chief executives, with their generous salaries and high job security, had no real incentive to “maximize the value of the firm.” If a company could be restructured so that it was run by the owner, and if it could take on a lot of new debt that it had to pay down with cash, then it would maximize its value, rather than the comfort and prestige of its C.E.O. In the nineteen-eighties, Harvard Business School hired Michael Jensen as a faculty member, and the battles between him and the pro-corporate professors defined the intellectual life of the school just as much as the battles over critical legal studies defined Harvard Law School when Obama was a student there. Jensen argued in favor of junk bonds, hostile takeovers, leveraged buyouts, and stock options for chief executives. Mitt Romney and others, with these new techniques at their disposal, were able to raise pools of capital and use it to slice, dice, and rearrange the American economy. In a speech in 1993, Jensen announced that the country was experiencing a “third industrial revolution.” It was as economically consequential, he said, and likely to become as politically and culturally controversial, as the industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century. One day in the early eighties, a note appeared on the bulletin board at Bain & Company, saying that anyone interested in starting a new venture-capital fund should get in touch with Mitt Romney. Bain Capital was modest when it launched (the first investment pool was thirty-seven million dollars), and agnostic about whether it borrowed money to buy existing businesses or built new businesses with its own money. One of its first two ventures, a small airline that ran military shuttles between Tonopah, Nevada, and Las Vegas, was in the first category. The other, an eye-surgery business headquartered in Boston, was in the second. So was Staples, Romney’s favorite example of a Bain Capital investment. The consultants were going to bring their consulting skills to bear on the companies they owned, and, as owners, they could guarantee that their advice would be taken. (Bain & Company had unsuccessfully suggested the eye-surgery company, MediVision, to one of its clients, Bausch & Lomb.) But, within a few years, Bain Capital had become almost completely a buyout firm: it bought businesses, retooled them, and resold them. The returns were typically much higher than they were from investing in start-ups. Buying assets with borrowed money can be spectacularly profitable if the asset can be resold at a higher price. After Romney left Bain Capital, the head of the management committee was Bob Gay, whose father, a prominent Mormon and a friend of George Romney’s, ran Howard Hughes’s business empire. Gay was brought in because he was a Wall Street guy who knew the deal business. When a company is acquired by a private-equity firm, something dramatic is guaranteed to happen to it. The debt increases the cost of doing business, because of interest payments. The investors have to get their money back within ten years. And the deal has to generate income for the private-equity firm. Some moribund companies are turned around or fruitfully combined with a powerful new partner; some close plants and lay off workers; some take on debt just to pay fees to the investors; some are sold and then go bankrupt. Even as Bain Capital was making a lot of its money in buyouts, it still took pride in its consulting skills. Romney likes to say that he was a consultant or a venture capitalist, not that he was in private equity. Consultants think that people in private equity make most of their money from the way a deal is structured (Bain Capital aggressively pursued that aspect of its business), not from how well they analyze a company and its problems. Some Bainies liked to talk about “the nuclear reactor”: their all-powerful analytic methods, which the dummies on Wall Street didn’t have. They weren’t traders; they were efficiency experts. What they did wasn’t mere “financial engineering”; it was “operational engineering.” They replaced management, reorganized the supply chain, upgraded equipment, changed the accounting system. Romney loved to order up charts and graphs; in his personal pantheon of admirability “data” ranks right up there with “leadership.” During meetings, he still challenges the person making the PowerPoint presentation, poking holes in the argument, demanding different ways to solve the problem. In his own mind, he is a master chief executive who started a very successful business that brought a particular approach to problems—not a guy who used debt to buy and resell businesses. Bain Capital did many dozens of deals under Romney. One of them involved a carpet company in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, called Masland, which had been owned and operated by one family for four generations. It went public in the nineteen-sixties. In 1986, it was acquired in a hostile takeover by Burlington Industries. The next year, Burlington itself came under attack from a corporate raider, and it arranged a leveraged buyout with Morgan Stanley. Desperate for cash, it put Masland up for sale. Bain Capital bought the company, which by that time was largely selling interior components to the auto business. Before making the deal, Romney flew to Detroit with the C.E.O. of the company, Bill Branch, and met with Masland’s biggest customer, Ford, to make sure that it would stay on board after the deal. Then Romney helped the company acquire another interior-components supplier, in Wisconsin, which had General Motors as a customer. In 1993, only two and a half years after the acquisition by Bain, Masland went public. On the profits from that transaction, Bain made seven times its initial investment. In 1996, Masland was merged with an auto-parts company called Lear. In 2005, Lear formed a partnership with W. L. Ross & Company, a big New York private-equity firm. In 2008, the original Masland manufacturing plant, in Carlisle, which at its peak had employed a thousand workers, shut down. So goes the transactional society, as it plays out across the middle range of the economy and the middle of the country. Three years after Bain Capital was founded, Oliver Stone’s movie “Wall Street” came out. Gordon Gekko, its protagonist, expressed his greed by doing buyout deals. A few years later, in “Pretty Woman,” Richard Gere was a private-equity guy who redeemed himself by falling in love with Julia Roberts and cancelling his plans to buy a company and do all the things that private-equity firms do. In popular culture, private equity had become the most conveniently available symbol of everything that people didn’t like about the transactional economy. In 1994, when Romney ran for the U.S. Senate against Ted Kennedy, Kennedy’s campaign figured out (as President Obama’s campaign has this year) that an essential element of a race against Romney was to run against the private-equity business. Within private equity, people don’t talk about the questions that are on the mind of the public. One professor at a leading business school whose subject is private equity put it simply: “Can I change the free cash-flow equation of the company? If I do, I win. If I don’t, I lose. It’s not the job of private equity to create jobs. The job is to create value. That sometimes creates jobs, and sometimes not.” A comprehensive study of private equity published last year found that the industry has a negligible effect on employment. Private equity is business on steroids: seek efficiency and economic return, not large social goals (unless you think those are large social goals). Because Mitt Romney is incapable of explaining his career in a way that makes it sound admirable to people who aren’t in business, the country, for now, is directing at him its very mixed feelings about the financialization of the American economy. Everyone who knows Romney agrees that his father is unusually important to him. “His dad is his biggest hero,” says Ben Coes, who managed Romney’s successful 2002 campaign for governor of Massachusetts, seven years after George Romney’s death. “He thinks about him at least once an hour, if not more. He worships the guy.” In 1994, just after his unsuccessful Senate campaign, Romney called William Weld, then the governor of Massachusetts, to ask if he could stop by with his dad to talk about volunteerism. “Mitt and his father came in,” Weld remembers. “I got out from behind my desk. George talks for forty-five or sixty minutes, with one or two interjections by me. Mitt not only didn’t say a word; his eyes never left his father’s face. The expression in his eyes was hero worship. . . . And six months later his father was dead.” When Mitt Romney announced that he was going to run against Ted Kennedy, George Romney started making appearances at the Bain Capital office. He was delighted by Mitt’s decision, and evidently thought of politics as a higher calling than business. For Mitt, honoring and pleasing his father seems to have been the highest calling of all. Finally, in George Romney’s mind, his son’s real career had begun. III. POLITICS Just about the only thing in life that Mitt Romney is obviously not very good at is the public aspect of running for office. During his four campaigns for office—U.S. senator, in 1994; governor, in 2002; President, in 2008 and 2012—he must have undergone endless hours of training and practice, but the magic just isn’t there. In June, I spent a few days on the campaign trail with him, in Wisconsin and Iowa. Romney’s trip had several purposes. A film crew was gathering footage for campaign commercials to run in the fall; Romney stopped in Janesville, Wisconsin, talking privately and doing an event with Paul Ryan, soon to be his running mate; and it was another attempt, apparently fruitless, on the part of the campaign to demonstrate the candidate’s concern with ordinary people. This segment was officially called the “Every Town Counts” tour. Romney rode around in a sleek bus painted with all-American scenes of mountains, church steeples, and ships in harbors. Romney cannot light up a crowd. He dresses the way one is supposed to dress (checked shirt, no tie), he dutifully repeats his applause lines at every stop (“Last time there was hope and change—this time it’s ‘We hope to change the subject’ ”), he takes his body through motions and gestures meant to read as forceful and high-energy—and nothing happens. This summer, his audiences were strikingly small, and white, and middle-aged or older. One problem is that Romney’s voice lacks resonance and range. Another is that, even in brief appearances, he tends to offer up three- and five-point policy plans that bore the audience. He talks to voters businessman to businessman, on the assumption that everybody either runs a business or wants to start one. Romney believes that if you drop the name of someone who has built a very successful company—Sam Walton, of Wal-Mart, or Ray Kroc, of McDonald’s—it will have the same effect as mentioning a sports hero. And Romney’s political references (the Dodd-Frank financial-reform law, the organized-labor cause known as “card check,” Obama’s failure to negotiate new free-trade agreements) don’t register much with the people who turn up at rallies. He sounds like someone speaking at a Rotary Club luncheon in the nineteen-fifties. The weekend before the Republican Convention, I travelled to Powell, Ohio, a picture-postcard small town just outside Columbus, where there was a Romney rally early on a Saturday morning. Ryan spoke before Romney. He was loud and kinetic, and full of cultural references (football, deer hunting, Catholicism), which got far more applause than his comments on economics and policy. When Romney took the stage, he picked up on the distant shouts of a group of protesters who were outside the security perimeter of the rally, and began to riff. He referred to the protesters as a Greek chorus, went on to recall the grandiose Greek columns that stood behind Obama when he accepted the Democratic nomination in Denver, in 2008, and finally arrived at the Greek fiscal crisis and how the Obama Administration was leading America in that direction. His punch line was “Everything they do reminds us of Greece!” Then he predicted that although Obama would accept the nomination this year at the Bank of America Arena, in Charlotte, he would not call the arena by its name, because he would never acknowledge a bank. Then it was on to Chinese-currency policy. After the rally, I interviewed Romney. He was sitting at a folding Formica-topped table in a corner of the town’s city-council chamber, with his travelling press aide, Rick Gorka, at his side. Romney has done a lot of meeting and a lot of selling during his rise in business and politics, but mainly indoors, in small groups of peers. He’s as adept in that setting as he is unnatural talking to a big crowd. Unlike most candidates, he did not communicate a sense either of being too restless to give you his full attention or of having to establish that he is the alpha and you the beta. He was direct and pleasant and engaged. His voice sounded husky, rather than flat. His gestures seemed spontaneous, not staged. Because Romney’s answers to the standard political questions are usually scripted and unrevealing, I asked him about business. Why had General Motors, the economic titan of his youth, fallen so low? “My dad had a statement he would make that proved to be true in this industry, as in all others,” Romney said. “I remember, as a boy, saying to him, ‘Dad, we make the best cars, don’t we?’ And he said yes. And I said, ‘Then why don’t we sell the most cars?’ And he said, Well, someday we may. And he said, ‘Because, Mitt’—and this is a quote—‘there’s nothing as vulnerable as entrenched success.’ And the auto industry, in particular General Motors, was so successful for so long that it didn’t recognize the need to innovate, to become more productive, to become more efficient, or it would ultimately be vulnerable to foreign competition. So the industry itself, its managers, made some critical mistakes.” Romney ticked off the mistakes. “One, they agreed to union contracts that were uncompetitive with those of other companies around the world, and ultimately with the so-called transplants, foreign companies doing business in the U.S.,” he said. “By calculations that some consulting firms did, a U.S. car was two thousand dollars more expensive to build than a comparable foreign product.” He added, “The benefit packages, the work rules, the wages, and other decisions by the management were not consistent with the need to be more competitive.” I asked Romney how he would reconcile this account with the central theory of his first employer, the Boston Consulting Group, that experience gives a company a powerful economic advantage. Actually, he said, Bruce Henderson’s insight was tempered by the word “could.” A successful company could have low costs, it could make a better product, and it could have a highly profitable run. “But if companies become complacent,” he went on, “in my dad’s lexicon, they could become more vulnerable. And the history—I.B.M., Western Union, A.T. & T., the history of the great nations of the earth, the great empires of the earth—there’s nothing as vulnerable as entrenched success. “And there are some enterprises that have found that they can, despite their huge success, reinvigorate themselves, reinvent themselves, and maintain their lead. G.E. did that under Jack Welch,” he said. “Bruce Henderson’s vision was important because it said what’s important is not just how good you are as a company; it is how good you are relative to your competition. . . . And Bill Bain’s innovation was to go one step further, and to say, ‘We don’t just give the company a road map; we help them implement that road map.’ Because giving someone an answer without actually helping them implement it will often not yield a result. So both firms, Boston Consulting Group and Bain, and then ultimately McKinsey and others, all caught on to the same vision, which is: help American and foreign companies recognize that they must change to survive.” Romney clearly loved talking about this, and he was showing how he thinks about running things, including the federal government. The motif of understanding business and government in terms of a competition between entrenched, unproductive costs and efficient investments, which animates the video of the talk to donors in Boca Raton, ran through our conversation. He went on, “I’ve seen, for instance, in a company like Marriott International—you have Bill Marriott, who is the chief executive officer there, and there’s the Host Hotels, which was part of the company at one point. It’s now a separate company. It’s headed by another Marriott brother, Dick Marriott. Both of them have been highly successful over many decades . . . and their chief executives are constantly pushing the businesses to become more efficient, more customer-friendly, to expand into new markets.” He led into a discussion of politics by talking about the strategic myopia of many business executives. “They agree to actions which are good on a short-term basis but may be more hazardous long term. And so, for instance, if you’re the chief executive officer of General Motors back in the nineteen-seventies and a contract comes forward which has onerous legacy costs, why, you know that those costs are not going to be borne on your term, because it’s going to be done for future retirees. And so you might agree to something that is harmful to the company long term but, by the way, beneficial short term, because who wants to take a strike, to prevent a provision that’s going to hurt ten years or twenty years down the road? “This is particularly true, by the way, in politics,” he went on, “where politicians regularly agree to huge contracts with back-end-loaded benefits, and the day of reckoning finally comes, but they’re long gone.” He allowed a hint of sarcasm to creep into his voice. “While they were there, everything was great. But look at the contracts they entered into!” I asked whether it was possible to run the vast, diffuse American government the way you would run a business. “The private sector is less forgiving,” he said. “If you make serious mistakes in the private sector, you’ll lose your job, or, if you’re in a position of responsibility, you might lose other people’s jobs. In politics, politicians make mistakes all the time and blame their opposition, or borrow more money, or raise taxes to pay for their mistake. In the business world, the ability to speak fast and convincingly is of very little value. I remember the first time I met Jack Welch. I expected him to be a super-salesman. Instead, he spoke quietly, somewhat haltingly, but brilliantly. Stuff matters a lot more than fluff in the private sector.” It was clear where Romney placed himself. “I can’t imagine making politics my profession,” he said. “I can’t imagine having to think about winning elections through a lifetime, to be able to put food on the table and provide for my family.” Because his profession was in the private sector, “I don’t get wound up about winning an election. Instead, I think about what I want to do, hopefully communicate that as well as I can to people, and, if they vote for me, fine, and if they don’t they don’t. That’s their right.” He recalled watching his father on Election Night in 1964, when George was running for reëlection as governor of Michigan. Lyndon Johnson had won the Presidency by a landslide. “The numbers had come in, and in Michigan Johnson was way ahead of what our pollster, Walter DeVries, had estimated. And Walter DeVries came in. Our family was in a hotel room. He said, ‘George, you probably can’t win. Most likely you’ve lost tonight.’ And I, as a seventeen-year-old, was thinking about how embarrassing it would be to go to school and have your dad having lost as governor, and those kinds of personal things. My dad, I looked at him, he was not in the slightest affected.” George Romney told his son, “I’ve put out what I think I can do, and if they want someone else that’s their right.” Mitt Romney said, “He was not defined, in his own mind, by winning elections. He was defined by the things he believed. And if people wished to follow his lead that was up to them.” Romney went on to talk about the social-welfare functions of government. “Government, by and large, is less efficient than churches and private institutions and family members. A family member can say to someone, ‘I’m not going to give you another dollar until you clean up your act, son!’ A government can’t do that. A government has to say, ‘If you qualify, you get it.’ And, that being said, one has no choice but to have a safety net provided by government for housing needs, for food needs, for welfare to get people back on their feet. I recognize that, support that.” Between Presidential campaigns, Romney wrote a book, “No Apology,” without a ghostwriter. It reveals a man doing a slow burn as he watches the man who won the election take office and make the wrong decision on every major issue. So I asked him what he would have done differently in January, 2009. “Let’s start domestic,” he said. “The President failed to focus on the economy. He delegated to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid the stimulus. He did not personally guide the process with Republicans and Democrats, hearing the ideas of both, shaping a piece of legislation which he thought would be most effective. Instead, it was done by Congress. He instead devoted his time and his political capital to the Affordable Care Act, to cap and trade, to Dodd-Frank, and to other pieces of legislation that he thought were going to be historic in their scope. “No. 2, related to foreign affairs. We had men and women in harm’s way, particularly in Afghanistan,” he said. “We knew that there was a decision point about Afghanistan that would be coming forward. We had tens of thousands of men and women in conflict, but he spent almost no time meeting with the commanders and leaders of our military to understand the needs in Afghanistan, to understand what level of a surge, to understand what level of troops might be appropriate for that kind of action. And so when the decision point came he had to delay. I think that was a mistake. He concluded to put in thirty thousand troops instead of the forty thousand that the military had requested. That was a mistake.” On foreign policy, where he has no direct experience and no long-standing team of helpers, Romney consistently shows a moralistic streak; his critique of President Obama is partly managerial, and partly based on the idea that Obama’s foreign policy is all about “apologizing for America.” Regarding the nations of the Middle East, there needed to be a concerted effort to move them “toward a more representative form of government, particularly among our friends. And then when our enemies—when I say our enemies, I’m thinking of Iran, or Syria—we obviously would have very little influence of that nature with them, but when there were movements that began to spring forward seeing greater representation in those countries, we should have been all over that, encouraging it, standing with them, shouting from the mountaintops. Instead, the President, wanting to engage with Iran, was silent when the dissidents took to the streets.” He went on, “It was as if the President was trying to show our foes in the world that we are not biased, we’ll work with anyone. In my view, the right course for a President is to show our friends that we are linked arm in arm with them, and to show those that oppose our interests that we are happy to talk with them, to engage in diplomacy with them, but we will not give an inch to their agenda.” Romney also discussed Russia (whose support of Iran and Syria he strongly objects to) and China (which he feels is playing unfairly in trade with the United States). In both cases, he believes that by getting tougher he could get the other superpower to change. Then our conversation returned to businesses and countries that founder. “We’re all worried,” he said, “but the consequence of not recognizing problems when they’re small and dealing with them can be severe when the problems become large. And that’s frankly what’s happening with the country over all.” He went on, “The President said Medicare is going to be bankrupt in eight to nine years. And we have to fix it or reform it. And he’s made no proposal whatsoever to do so. I don’t know how you can be President of the United States and not say, Well, here’s something that will make Medicare work permanently. Or here’s something that’ll fix Social Security permanently. And here’s what we need to do to make our tax system fair, equitable, and one that encourages growth. And, by the way, trillion-dollar deficits? For four years?” Romney described this as “a very dangerous course, because, as you know, at some point the people who loan us all this money, if they get nervous that they’re going to get repaid in dollars that might not be worth too much, they are going to ask for higher interest rates, and if that happens our budget is going to get overwhelmed by high interest costs. And it can kill our economy. And, by the way, kill jobs. We see what’s happening in Europe.” Our time was up. We stood and shook hands. “I enjoy speaking about substance, as opposed to just the political process,” Romney said. IV. THE RESCUER Throughout his years at Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company, and Bain Capital, Romney was an active Latter-Day Saint. The Mormon Church does not have a professional clergy, so its members perform the clergy’s functions themselves, and they also tithe. The late-adolescent mission is, in a sense, meant to get Mormons accustomed to devoting a great deal of time to the Church. In Massachusetts, Romney became a bishop and then “stake president.” He played a role in building a temple in Belmont. There are many stories of his pastoral activities: the time he rushed over to Doug Anderson’s home to help after a fire, the time he deployed a group of Bain Capital employees to go to New York to find Bob Gay’s missing teen-age daughter, the time he straightened out a wayward son of Kim Clark’s. If elected, Romney would arguably be the most actively religious President in American history. Clayton Christensen told me about his days as a struggling young consultant. He is from a modest background in Utah, and had married and started a family while still a student, so when he bought his first house, in Belmont, he and his wife had to fix it up themselves, a process that took twelve years. One night, exhausted, he was on his hands and knees on the living-room floor applying polyurethane. There was a knock on the door; it was Mitt Romney, who explained that he had driven by just to check up earlier in the evening, and had seen Christensen through the living-room window. “There’s a better way to do it, Clay,” Romney said. “Here, let me show you.” He produced a tool that he had devised at home. As he was telling me this story, Christensen (who once or twice had to wipe tears from his eyes when he was speaking about Romney’s church activities) got out a sheet of paper and drew a diagram of Romney’s solution. Romney had laid three four-inch paint brushes side by side, then fixed them to each other with duct tape, then attached the brushes to a pole—“so rather than being on my hands and knees, I was standing up, and applying the polyurethane with a wide brush. I was done in half an hour.” Romney’s career in the years since Bain Capital has repeatedly followed the narrative of the rescuer, the person who combines moral passion and practical skill to fix seemingly insoluble situations. He referred to the first of these in our interview, the rescue of Bain & Company, saying that he had applied three simple rules: “Focus, focus, and focus.” According to colleagues of Romney’s, Bill Bain and his group of founders had created a financial structure that enabled them to take out bank loans on behalf of the firm in order to pay themselves the big lump sums that they felt they deserved but that the consulting business doesn’t ordinarily produce. Then the business took a dip, and the company began missing its payments on the loans. In 1990, Romney returned from Bain Capital to save Bain & Company. He worked long hours, studying the data and talking to all the parties. Within a couple of weeks, colleagues say, he was able to persuade Bain and the other founders to give up most of their overly generous payments, and to get the banks to forgive a portion of the loans. That removed enough immediate financial pressure to re-start the firm. When Romney ran for office for the first time, against Kennedy, in 1994, he felt called to clean up a moral cesspool. The Romneys were disgusted by the stories they were seeing on television about Kennedy’s carousing, especially during testimony at the Florida rape trial of Kennedy’s nephew William Kennedy Smith. There seems to be a connection in Romney’s mind between lack of personal discipline and, in government, a free-spending, fiscally irresponsible liberalism. As Clayton Christensen put it, “People who run against him are liberal in the sense that they vote for legislation that takes money out of one person’s pocket and puts it in another person’s pocket, and say they’re compassionate. They don’t get it. They don’t have any idea of what life is like at the bottom of the pyramid”—but Mormons, who work hands-on in an elaborate church welfare system, do. If Romney had won the Senate race, he would have instantly become a plausible Presidential candidate, especially since Massachusetts borders the key Presidential primary state, New Hampshire. Romney’s taking over of the 2002 Winter Olympics, in Salt Lake City, followed the same rescue narrative. Salt Lake City had been an unsuccessful bidder for the Winter Olympics three times. Not long after it finally succeeded in its bid, there were reports that members of the Salt Lake City Olympic Committee had given bribes to the International Olympic Committee. The mayor of Salt Lake City resigned and the lead Olympic organizers were indicted. In Romney’s version of the story, he selflessly answers a call to service, and moves to Utah to save the Olympics. Actually, he competed for the job (which another prominent Mormon scion turned politician, Jon Huntsman, also wanted), and he seems to have understood that it had the potential to launch him into public life. In Salt Lake City, he recruited one of the founding crew at Bain Capital, Fraser Bullock, to serve as his chief aide in running the Olympics. But, before he completed his assignment in Utah, he had an even closer Bain associate, Bob White, who was back in Boston, preparing for a race for governor in Massachusetts. The situation in Salt Lake City was not quite so dire as Romney has made it sound: the indicted officials were eventually acquitted, and there was always government funding for the Games. Still, by all accounts he did an excellent job. Massachusetts, to Romney’s way of thinking, also needed to be rescued. The state budget was in deficit, and the heavily Democratic state legislature didn’t have the discipline to fix the problem. The sitting Republican governor, Jane Swift, came to understand that she had to step aside so that Romney could run. The 2002 campaign had a much stronger flavor of the Bain Capital approach to life than the 1994 Senate campaign had, and this carried over into governing. “Mitt Romney believes in his competence as a manager,” Rob Gray, one of the people Romney hired to run his gubernatorial campaign, told me. “If he’s elected, he’ll do an adequate job of dealing with the issues of the day. He’s not a vision guy. He’s not policy-driven. He thinks he’ll do a good job.” Ben Coes, the campaign manager, who is in private equity, told me that he got the job because he had gone to Romney’s house and given a dazzling PowerPoint presentation. Then he implemented an elaborate system that used databases and poll results to divide the state into eleven cultural groups, identify the six most likely to vote for Romney, and find volunteers to establish personal contact with each identifiable member of those groups. These techniques, along with the money that Romney was able to spend, helped him win. In office, Romney was heavily involved both in management—he brought in another of the Bain Capital founders, Eric Kriss, as the state’s top administrator—and in the drama of reëstablishing morality in government. He pushed out the state’s head of patronage, the president of the state university, and the head of the Big Dig highway-construction project. He improved the state’s finances and passed health-care reform. Romney was harder-working and far more cautious as a policymaker than William Weld, the previous Presidentially ambitious Republican governor. He saw his major initiatives as exercises in problem-solving, not as expressions of lifelong convictions. Or one could say that the process itself—identify the problem, analyze the data, kick around solutions until the best one emerges, lead—is his conviction, not the principle involved. He took on health-care reform because rising medical costs were putting stress on the state budget. He endorsed an individual mandate to carry health insurance, which was a favored conservative idea at the time, and opposed a similar mandate for businesses, but when the state legislature made it clear that both mandates were going to have to be in any bill that passed Romney accepted that and signed with a smile on his face. Problem solved. He was always thinking ahead. Within just a few years of taking office, he was laying the groundwork for a Presidential campaign. After the 2008 campaign failed, the Romneys moved to San Diego, where their sons live. And he was soon at work on his book, “No Apology,” setting out his Presidential vision for 2012. This spring, after Rick Santorum dropped out of the race for the Republican Presidential nomination, Romney called Michael Leavitt, who, as governor of Utah, had supported the idea of bringing him in to run the Olympics and, as Secretary of Health and Human Services, had signed the waiver of federal rules he needed to launch the Massachusetts health-care plan. (Leavitt says that Romney was the only governor he dealt with who always came with a PowerPoint presentation, which he would deliver personally.) Romney asked Leavitt to set up a Presidential-transition office in Washington. He called it the Readiness Project. One day during the summer, I dropped by the Readiness Project office to talk to Leavitt. It is on the ninth floor of a brand-new, grade-A office building near Union Station and the Capitol. There was no sign on the door or listing in the building directory. The office was neat and hyper-organized, with no piece of paper visible on any desk. There were conference rooms with screens and whiteboards (all blank). On the walls were poster-size color photographs of the Grand Canyon, the Alamo, and the Golden Gate Bridge. At the exact time my meeting was supposed to begin, the receptionist came over and said that she was very sorry, but Governor Leavitt was running late. About two minutes afterward, he came in from the elevator lobby, and asked what conference room we had been assigned to. It was the Constitution Room; the receptionist walked us down a hallway and keyed in a security code that unlocked the door, and we sat down. Like everyone I met who’s close to Romney, Leavitt was clean-cut, friendly, and straightforward. He had a firm handshake and he looked me in the eye. Our conversation had a combination, which I had become accustomed to, of directness and opacity. He told me that when Romney called to offer him the job “he said that the point is not just to get the nomination, and not just to win, but to be prepared. So I want you to start thinking about this.” What would Romney do as President? “I believe Mitt truly believes the pattern he has followed in other turnarounds will provide benefit to the country,” Leavitt said. “Job one, it’s a disheartened country. Give people confidence again. Two, bring things into balance. Give the speech about sizing our response to our resources. Three, build a team that can execute the plan. He believes that formula is a sound one.” Romney is a creature of two realms that he evidently believes American society doesn’t understand, and that have been the frequent object of hostility: his church, and the corner of business where he has spent his career. He combines an utter confidence in his ability to fix anything with an utter lack of confidence in his ability to explain to people what he intends to do, which is why he appears so stiff and so unspecific in talking about his prospective Presidency. Even Romney’s friends and business associates find him guarded. He doesn’t give anybody, except his immediate family, access to his emotional life. He has the caution of a crown prince who has always been intensely aware of the demands imposed by his destiny. This election is activating large parts of the American psyche. After the 2008 financial crisis and the long, painful recession, people’s desire for a big fix, a new social compact, is palpable. The main project of the business careers of Romney and the other transaction men—to make American business competitive in the global economy—may have succeeded on its own terms, but most Americans haven’t shared in the benefits. Even Michael Jensen, the chief theorist of private equity, expressed some doubts to me about how the transaction economy has played out. Private-equity firms can be more attentive to their fees than to the value of the company, he said, and too inattentive to the overarching purpose of financial engineering. “Value, in the way I’ve defined it, is the score that shows up on the scoreboard,” he said. “It’s not the objective. It’s not the strategy. Your life can’t be just about you, or your life will be shit. You see that on Wall Street.” If Romney loses this election, he will be, to some extent, a victim of the widespread resentment of the new economy, and of the Obama campaign’s skill at directing that resentment toward him. But the story won’t have ended. It’s not clear what will reverse the rise in economic inequality and uncertainty. Government is unpopular, and the Democratic Party has its own ties to big money. The larger forces of global capitalism will continue to unfold. Perhaps a future Republican candidate can persuade the country to see the world as he sees it. Romney, it seems, can’t do that. Clayton Christensen told me that when Romney was made a bishop, in the early eighties, Christensen took him aside for a little talk about how he needed to open up more. “He never at church was able, in front of the whole congregation, to talk about himself,” Christensen said. “You have to push a neuron across the synapse. If you’ve never landed a neuron across that path . . . It’s as if Mitt has never had the thought of talking about himself.” Christensen decided to offer Romney a Biblical parable: the story of Moses, which, as he recounted the conversation to me, he delivered to Romney with a distinct M.B.A. flavor. “God spoke to the guy: ‘I want you to lead Israel out of Egypt.’ He tried over and over. Nothing worked. Finally, it worked. The Red Sea parted. Up to that point, you would have had a Plan B and a Plan C. Here there was no backup plan, ladies and gentlemen. Sure enough, God parted the Red Sea. “So then, on the other side, Moses had no experience in management. His father-in-law shows up, and says, ‘Moses, you’re a horrible manager. Ever heard the word “delegation”? Can you do this, Moses?’ And Moses had never been responsible for the supply chain in any industry, but now we have run out of water. So he banged the rock and out comes water. Then he goes to Mt. Sinai. He gets the instructions, he sees what the people are doing, and he’s so mad. They can’t handle anything beyond the elevator pitch for God. So then Moses told everything about himself. Mitt, look at the impact his openness had on Israel! Most of the other prophets, you had no idea what their life was like. All the other prophets aren’t in the psyche of Israel. Why?” I asked Christensen if the talk worked. He shrugged. “It had no effect whatsoever. The neuron can’t get across that synapse.” ♦ ILLUSTRATION: Barry Blitt </p> 18923857 2014-07-20 06:26:07 2014-07-20 06:26:07 open open from-the-new-yorker-masland-carpet-october-1-18923857 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan New Yorker Can linguists solve crimes that stump the police? by Jack Hitt July 23, 2012 http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/28/new-yorker-can-linguists-solve-crimes-that-stump-the-police-by-jack-hitt-july-23-18747758/ Sat, 28 Jun 2014 06:53:39 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Dept. of Linguistics Words on Trial Can linguists solve crimes that stump the police? by Jack Hitt July 23, 2012 [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Subscribers can read the full version of this story by logging into our digital archive. Not a subscriber? Get immediate access to this story, along with a one-month free trial, by subscribing now. Or find out about other ways to read The New Yorker digitally. July 23, 2012 Issue Related Links Audio: Jack Hitt on forensic linguistics. Keywords Forensic Linguistics; Robert Leonard; Roger Shuy; Unabomber; James Fitzgerald; Natalee Holloway; Ronald Butters DEPT. OF LINGUISTICS about forensic linguistics. These days, the word “forensic” conjures an image of a technician on a “C.S.I.” show who delicately retrieves a hair or a paint chip from a crime scene, surmises the unlikeliest facts, and presents them to the authorities as incontrovertible evidence. If “forensic linguist” brings to mind a verbal specialist who plucks slivers of meaning from old letters and stray audiotape before announcing that the perpetrator is, say, a middle-aged insurance salesman from Philadelphia, that’s not far from the truth. Tells about the testimony of forensic linguist Robert Leonard in the 2011 murder trial of Chris Coleman. Discusses the work of James Fitzgerald, a retired F.B.I. forensic linguist who brought the field to prominence in 1996 with his work in the case of the Unabomber. Fitzgerald had successfully urged the FBI to publish the Unabomber’s “manifesto.” Many people called in to say they recognized the writing style. By analyzing syntax and other linguistic patterns, Fitzgerald narrowed down the possible authors and finally linked the manifesto to the writings of Ted Kaczynski, a reclusive former mathematician. Fitzgerald went on to formalize some of the tools used in forensic linguistics, including starting the Communicated Threat Assessment Database. The CTAD is the most comprehensive collection of linguistic patterns in written threats, containing some four thousand “criminally oriented communications” and more than a million words. The pioneer of forensic linguistics is widely considered to be Roger Shuy, a Georgetown University professor and the author of such fundamental textbooks as “Language Crimes: The Use and Abuse of Language Evidence in the Courtroom.” The field’s more recent origins might be traced to an airplane flight in 1979, when Shuy found himself talking to the lawyer sitting next to him. By the end of the flight, Shuy had a recommendation as an expert witness in his first murder case. Since then, he’s been involved in numerous cases in which forensic analysis revealed how meaning had been distorted by the process of writing or recording. In recent years, following Shuy’s lead, a growing number of linguists have applied their techniques in regular criminal cases, such Chris Coleman’s, and even certain commercial lawsuits. Mentions a suit between Apple and Microsoft over the use of the phrase “app store.” Writer visits Robert Leonard at Hofstra University and describes some of his cases, including the investigation of the murder of Natalee Holloway in Aruba. Mentions Carole Chaski, the executive director of the Institute for Linguistic Evidence and the president of Alias Technology, which markets linguistic software. Chaski has been working to perfect a computer algorithm that identifies patterns hidden in syntax. read the full text... read the full text... Jack Hitt, Dept. of Linguistics, “Words on Trial,” The New Yorker, July 23, 2012, p. 24 </p> 18747758 2014-06-28 06:53:39 2014-06-28 06:53:39 open open new-yorker-can-linguists-solve-crimes-that-stump-the-police-by-jack-hitt-july-23-18747758 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan New Yorker: The F.B.I.’s criminal profilers try to think their way into the head of the offender. http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/28/new-yorker-the-f-b-i-s-criminal-profilers-try-to-think-their-way-into-the-head-of-the-offender-18747120/ Sat, 28 Jun 2014 03:23:09 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Dept. of Criminology Dangerous Minds Criminal profiling made easy. by Malcolm Gladwell November 12, 2007 The F.B.I.’s criminal profilers try to think their way into the head of the offender. [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] On November 16, 1940, workers at the Consolidated Edison building on West Sixty-fourth Street in Manhattan found a homemade pipe bomb on a windowsill. Attached was a note: “Con Edison crooks, this is for you.” In September of 1941, a second bomb was found, on Nineteenth Street, just a few blocks from Con Edison’s headquarters, near Union Square. It had been left in the street, wrapped in a sock. A few months later, the New York police received a letter promising to “bring the Con Edison to justice—they will pay for their dastardly deeds.” Sixteen other letters followed, between 1941 and 1946, all written in block letters, many repeating the phrase “dastardly deeds” and all signed with the initials “F.P.” In March of 1950, a third bomb—larger and more powerful than the others—was found on the lower level of Grand Central Terminal. The next was left in a phone booth at the New York Public Library. It exploded, as did one placed in a phone booth in Grand Central. In 1954, the Mad Bomber—as he came to be known—struck four times, once in Radio City Music Hall, sending shrapnel throughout the audience. In 1955, he struck six times. The city was in an uproar. The police were getting nowhere. Late in 1956, in desperation, Inspector Howard Finney, of the New York City Police Department’s crime laboratory, and two plainclothesmen paid a visit to a psychiatrist by the name of James Brussel. Brussel was a Freudian. He lived on Twelfth Street, in the West Village, and smoked a pipe. In Mexico, early in his career, he had done counter-espionage work for the F.B.I. He wrote many books, including “Instant Shrink: How to Become an Expert Psychiatrist in Ten Easy Lessons.” Finney put a stack of documents on Brussel’s desk: photographs of unexploded bombs, pictures of devastation, photostats of F.P.’s neatly lettered missives. “I didn’t miss the look in the two plainclothesmen’s eyes,” Brussel writes in his memoir, “Casebook of a Crime Psychiatrist.” “I’d seen that look before, most often in the Army, on the faces of hard, old-line, field-grade officers who were sure this newfangled psychiatry business was all nonsense.” He began to leaf through the case materials. For sixteen years, F.P. had been fixated on the notion that Con Ed had done him some terrible injustice. Clearly, he was clinically paranoid. But paranoia takes some time to develop. F.P. had been bombing since 1940, which suggested that he was now middle-aged. Brussel looked closely at the precise lettering of F.P.’s notes to the police. This was an orderly man. He would be cautious. His work record would be exemplary. Further, the language suggested some degree of education. But there was a stilted quality to the word choice and the phrasing. Con Edison was often referred to as “the Con Edison.” And who still used the expression “dastardly deeds”? F.P. seemed to be foreign-born. Brussel looked closer at the letters, and noticed that all the letters were perfect block capitals, except the “W”s. They were misshapen, like two “U”s. To Brussel’s eye, those “W”s looked like a pair of breasts. He flipped to the crime-scene descriptions. When F.P. planted his bombs in movie theatres, he would slit the underside of the seat with a knife and stuff his explosives into the upholstery. Didn’t that seem like a symbolic act of penetrating a woman, or castrating a man—or perhaps both? F.P. had probably never progressed beyond the Oedipal stage. He was unmarried, a loner. Living with a mother figure. Brussel made another leap. F.P. was a Slav. Just as the use of a garrote would have suggested someone of Mediterranean extraction, the bomb-knife combination struck him as Eastern European. Some of the letters had been posted from Westchester County, but F.P. wouldn’t have mailed the letters from his home town. Still, a number of cities in southeastern Connecticut had a large Slavic population. And didn’t you have to pass through Westchester to get to the city from Connecticut? from the issue buy as a print e-mail this Brussel waited a moment, and then, in a scene that has become legendary among criminal profilers, he made a prediction: “One more thing.” I closed my eyes because I didn’t want to see their reaction. I saw the Bomber: impeccably neat, absolutely proper. A man who would avoid the newer styles of clothing until long custom had made them conservative. I saw him clearly—much more clearly than the facts really warranted. I knew I was letting my imagination get the better of me, but I couldn’t help it. “One more thing,” I said, my eyes closed tight. “When you catch him—and I have no doubt you will—he’ll be wearing a double-breasted suit.” “Jesus!” one of the detectives whispered. “And it will be buttoned,” I said. I opened my eyes. Finney and his men were looking at each other. “A double-breasted suit,” said the Inspector. “Yes.” “Buttoned.” “Yes.” He nodded. Without another word, they left. A month later, George Metesky was arrested by police in connection with the New York City bombings. His name had been changed from Milauskas. He lived in Waterbury, Connecticut, with his two older sisters. He was unmarried. He was unfailingly neat. He attended Mass regularly. He had been employed by Con Edison from 1929 to 1931, and claimed to have been injured on the job. When he opened the door to the police officers, he said, “I know why you fellows are here. You think I’m the Mad Bomber.” It was midnight, and he was in his pajamas. The police asked that he get dressed. When he returned, his hair was combed into a pompadour and his shoes were newly shined. He was also wearing a double-breasted suit—buttoned. In a new book, “Inside the Mind of BTK,” the eminent F.B.I. criminal profiler John Douglas tells the story of a serial killer who stalked the streets of Wichita, Kansas, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. Douglas was the model for Agent Jack Crawford in “The Silence of the Lambs.” He was the protégé of the pioneering F.B.I. profiler Howard Teten, who helped establish the bureau’s Behavioral Science Unit, at Quantico, in 1972, and who was a protégé of Brussel—which, in the close-knit fraternity of profilers, is like being analyzed by the analyst who was analyzed by Freud. To Douglas, Brussel was the father of criminal profiling, and, in both style and logic, “Inside the Mind of BTK” pays homage to “Casebook of a Crime Psychiatrist” at every turn. “BTK” stood for “Bind, Torture, Kill”—the three words that the killer used to identify himself in his taunting notes to the Wichita police. He had struck first in January, 1974, when he killed thirty-eight-year-old Joseph Otero in his home, along with his wife, Julie, their son, Joey, and their eleven-year-old daughter, who was found hanging from a water pipe in the basement with semen on her leg. The following April, he stabbed a twenty-four-year-old woman. In March, 1977, he bound and strangled another young woman, and over the next few years he committed at least four more murders. The city of Wichita was in an uproar. The police were getting nowhere. In 1984, in desperation, two police detectives from Wichita paid a visit to Quantico. The meeting, Douglas writes, was held in a first-floor conference room of the F.B.I.’s forensic-science building. He was then nearly a decade into his career at the Behavioral Science Unit. His first two best-sellers, “Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit,” and “Obsession: The FBI’s Legendary Profiler Probes the Psyches of Killers, Rapists, and Stalkers and Their Victims and Tells How to Fight Back,” were still in the future. Working a hundred and fifty cases a year, he was on the road constantly, but BTK was never far from his thoughts. “Some nights I’d lie awake asking myself, ‘Who the hell is this BTK?’ ” he writes. “What makes a guy like this do what he does? What makes him tick?” Roy Hazelwood sat next to Douglas. A lean chain-smoker, Hazelwood specialized in sex crimes, and went on to write the best-sellers “Dark Dreams” and “The Evil That Men Do.” Beside Hazelwood was an ex-Air Force pilot named Ron Walker. Walker, Douglas writes, was “whip smart” and an “exceptionally quick study.” The three bureau men and the two detectives sat around a massive oak table. “The objective of our session was to keep moving forward until we ran out of juice,” Douglas writes. They would rely on the typology developed by their colleague Robert Ressler, himself the author of the true-crime best-sellers “Whoever Fights Monsters” and “I Have Lived in the Monster.” The goal was to paint a picture of the killer—of what sort of man BTK was, and what he did, and where he worked, and what he was like—and with that scene “Inside the Mind of BTK” begins. We are now so familiar with crime stories told through the eyes of the profiler that it is easy to lose sight of how audacious the genre is. The traditional detective story begins with the body and centers on the detective’s search for the culprit. Leads are pursued. A net is cast, widening to encompass a bewilderingly diverse pool of suspects: the butler, the spurned lover, the embittered nephew, the shadowy European. That’s a Whodunit. In the profiling genre, the net is narrowed. The crime scene doesn’t initiate our search for the killer. It defines the killer for us. The profiler sifts through the case materials, looks off into the distance, and knows. “Generally, a psychiatrist can study a man and make a few reasonable predictions about what the man may do in the future—how he will react to such-and-such a stimulus, how he will behave in such-and-such a situation,” Brussel writes. “What I have done is reverse the terms of the prophecy. By studying a man’s deeds, I have deduced what kind of man he might be.” Look for a middle-aged Slav in a double-breasted suit. Profiling stories aren’t Whodunits; they’re Hedunits. In the Hedunit, the profiler does not catch the criminal. That’s for local law enforcement. He takes the meeting. Often, he doesn’t write down his predictions. It’s up to the visiting police officers to take notes. He does not feel the need to involve himself in the subsequent investigation, or even, it turns out, to justify his predictions. Once, Douglas tells us, he drove down to the local police station and offered his services in the case of an elderly woman who had been savagely beaten and sexually assaulted. The detectives working the crime were regular cops, and Douglas was a bureau guy, so you can imagine him perched on the edge of a desk, the others pulling up chairs around him. “ ‘Okay,’ I said to the detectives. . . . ‘Here’s what I think,’ ” Douglas begins. “It’s a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old high school kid. . . . He’ll be disheveled-looking, he’ll have scruffy hair, generally poorly groomed.” He went on: a loner, kind of weird, no girlfriend, lots of bottled-up anger. He comes to the old lady’s house. He knows she’s alone. Maybe he’s done odd jobs for her in the past. Douglas continues: I pause in my narrative and tell them there’s someone who meets this description out there. If they can find him, they’ve got their offender. One detective looks at another. One of them starts to smile. “Are you a psychic, Douglas?” “No,” I say, “but my job would be a lot easier if I were.” “Because we had a psychic, Beverly Newton, in here a couple of weeks ago, and she said just about the same things.” You might think that Douglas would bridle at that comparison. He is, after all, an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who studied with Teten, who studied with Brussel. He is an ace profiler, part of a team that restored the F.B.I.’s reputation for crime-fighting, inspired countless movies, television shows, and best-selling thrillers, and brought the modern tools of psychology to bear on the savagery of the criminal mind—and some cop is calling him a psychic. But Douglas doesn’t object. Instead, he begins to muse on the ineffable origins of his insights, at which point the question arises of what exactly this mysterious art called profiling is, and whether it can be trusted. Douglas writes, What I try to do with a case is to take in all the evidence I have to work with . . . and then put myself mentally and emotionally in the head of the offender. I try to think as he does. Exactly how this happens, I’m not sure, any more than the novelists such as Tom Harris who’ve consulted me over the years can say exactly how their characters come to life. If there’s a psychic component to this, I won’t run from it. In the late nineteen-seventies, John Douglas and his F.B.I. colleague Robert Ressler set out to interview the most notorious serial killers in the country. They started in California, since, as Douglas says, “California has always had more than its share of weird and spectacular crimes.” On weekends and days off, over the next months, they stopped by one federal prison after another, until they had interviewed thirty-six murderers. Douglas and Ressler wanted to know whether there was a pattern that connected a killer’s life and personality with the nature of his crimes. They were looking for what psychologists would call a homology, an agreement between character and action, and, after comparing what they learned from the killers with what they already knew about the characteristics of their murders, they became convinced that they’d found one. Serial killers, they concluded, fall into one of two categories. Some crime scenes show evidence of logic and planning. The victim has been hunted and selected, in order to fulfill a specific fantasy. The recruitment of the victim might involve a ruse or a con. The perpetrator maintains control throughout the offense. He takes his time with the victim, carefully enacting his fantasies. He is adaptable and mobile. He almost never leaves a weapon behind. He meticulously conceals the body. Douglas and Ressler, in their respective books, call that kind of crime “organized.” In a “disorganized” crime, the victim isn’t chosen logically. She’s seemingly picked at random and “blitz-attacked,” not stalked and coerced. The killer might grab a steak knife from the kitchen and leave the knife behind. The crime is so sloppily executed that the victim often has a chance to fight back. The crime might take place in a high-risk environment. “Moreover, the disorganized killer has no idea of, or interest in, the personalities of his victims,” Ressler writes in “Whoever Fights Monsters.” “He does not want to know who they are, and many times takes steps to obliterate their personalities by quickly knocking them unconscious or covering their faces or otherwise disfiguring them.” Each of these styles, the argument goes, corresponds to a personality type. The organized killer is intelligent and articulate. He feels superior to those around him. The disorganized killer is unattractive and has a poor self-image. He often has some kind of disability. He’s too strange and withdrawn to be married or have a girlfriend. If he doesn’t live alone, he lives with his parents. He has pornography stashed in his closet. If he drives at all, his car is a wreck. “The crime scene is presumed to reflect the murderer’s behavior and personality in much the same way as furnishings reveal the homeowner’s character,” we’re told in a crime manual that Douglas and Ressler helped write. The more they learned, the more precise the associations became. If the victim was white, the killer would be white. If the victim was old, the killer would be sexually immature. “In our research, we discovered that . . . frequently serial offenders had failed in their efforts to join police departments and had taken jobs in related fields, such as security guard or night watchman,” Douglas writes. Given that organized rapists were preoccupied with control, it made sense that they would be fascinated by the social institution that symbolizes control. Out of that insight came another prediction: “One of the things we began saying in some of our profiles was that the UNSUB”—the unknown subject—“would drive a policelike vehicle, say a Ford Crown Victoria or Chevrolet Caprice.” On the surface, the F.B.I.’s system seems extraordinarily useful. Consider a case study widely used in the profiling literature. The body of a twenty-six-year-old special-education teacher was found on the roof of her Bronx apartment building. She was apparently abducted just after she left her house for work, at six-thirty in the morning. She had been beaten beyond recognition, and tied up with her stockings and belt. The killer had mutilated her sexual organs, chopped off her nipples, covered her body with bites, written obscenities across her abdomen, masturbated, and then defecated next to the body. Let’s pretend that we’re an F.B.I. profiler. First question: race. The victim is white, so let’s call the offender white. Let’s say he’s in his mid-twenties to early thirties, which is when the thirty-six men in the F.B.I.’s sample started killing. Is the crime organized or disorganized? Disorganized, clearly. It’s on a rooftop, in the Bronx, in broad daylight—high risk. So what is the killer doing in the building at six-thirty in the morning? He could be some kind of serviceman, or he could live in the neighborhood. Either way, he appears to be familiar with the building. He’s disorganized, though, so he’s not stable. If he is employed, it’s blue-collar work, at best. He probably has a prior offense, having to do with violence or sex. His relationships with women will be either nonexistent or deeply troubled. And the mutilation and the defecation are so strange that he’s probably mentally ill or has some kind of substance-abuse problem. How does that sound? As it turns out, it’s spot-on. The killer was Carmine Calabro, age thirty, a single, unemployed, deeply troubled actor who, when he was not in a mental institution, lived with his widowed father on the fourth floor of the building where the murder took place. But how useful is that profile, really? The police already had Calabro on their list of suspects: if you’re looking for the person who killed and mutilated someone on the roof, you don’t really need a profiler to tell you to check out the dishevelled, mentally ill guy living with his father on the fourth floor. That’s why the F.B.I.’s profilers have always tried to supplement the basic outlines of the organized/disorganized system with telling details—something that lets the police zero in on a suspect. In the early eighties, Douglas gave a presentation to a roomful of police officers and F.B.I. agents in Marin County about the Trailside Killer, who was murdering female hikers in the hills north of San Francisco. In Douglas’s view, the killer was a classic “disorganized” offender—a blitz attacker, white, early to mid-thirties, blue collar, probably with “a history of bed-wetting, fire-starting, and cruelty to animals.” Then he went back to how asocial the killer seemed. Why did all the killings take place in heavily wooded areas, miles from the road? Douglas reasoned that the killer required such seclusion because he had some condition that he was deeply self-conscious about. Was it something physical, like a missing limb? But then how could he hike miles into the woods and physically overpower his victims? Finally, it came to him: “ ‘Another thing,’ I added after a pregnant pause, ‘the killer will have a speech impediment.’ ” And so he did. Now, that’s a useful detail. Or is it? Douglas then tells us that he pegged the offender’s age as early thirties, and he turned out to be fifty. Detectives use profiles to narrow down the range of suspects. It doesn’t do any good to get a specific detail right if you get general details wrong. In the case of Derrick Todd Lee, the Baton Rouge serial killer, the F.B.I. profile described the offender as a white male blue-collar worker, between twenty-five and thirty-five years old, who “wants to be seen as someone who is attractive and appealing to women.” The profile went on, “However, his level of sophistication in interacting with women, especially women who are above him in the social strata, is low. Any contact he has had with women he has found attractive would be described by these women as ‘awkward.’ ” The F.B.I. was right about the killer being a blue-collar male between twenty-five and thirty-five. But Lee turned out to be charming and outgoing, the sort to put on a cowboy hat and snakeskin boots and head for the bars. He was an extrovert with a number of girlfriends and a reputation as a ladies’ man. And he wasn’t white. He was black. A profile isn’t a test, where you pass if you get most of the answers right. It’s a portrait, and all the details have to cohere in some way if the image is to be helpful. In the mid-nineties, the British Home Office analyzed a hundred and eighty-four crimes, to see how many times profiles led to the arrest of a criminal. The profile worked in five of those cases. That’s just 2.7 per cent, which makes sense if you consider the position of the detective on the receiving end of a profiler’s list of conjectures. Do you believe the stuttering part? Or do you believe the thirty-year-old part? Or do you throw up your hands in frustration? There is a deeper problem with F.B.I. profiling. Douglas and Ressler didn’t interview a representative sample of serial killers to come up with their typology. They talked to whoever happened to be in the neighborhood. Nor did they interview their subjects according to a standardized protocol. They just sat down and chatted, which isn’t a particularly firm foundation for a psychological system. So you might wonder whether serial killers can really be categorized by their level of organization. Not long ago, a group of psychologists at the University of Liverpool decided to test the F.B.I.’s assumptions. First, they made a list of crime-scene characteristics generally considered to show organization: perhaps the victim was alive during the sex acts, or the body was posed in a certain way, or the murder weapon was missing, or the body was concealed, or torture and restraints were involved. Then they made a list of characteristics showing disorganization: perhaps the victim was beaten, the body was left in an isolated spot, the victim’s belongings were scattered, or the murder weapon was improvised. If the F.B.I. was right, they reasoned, the crime-scene details on each of those two lists should “co-occur”—that is, if you see one or more organized traits in a crime, there should be a reasonably high probability of seeing other organized traits. When they looked at a sample of a hundred serial crimes, however, they couldn’t find any support for the F.B.I.’s distinction. Crimes don’t fall into one camp or the other. It turns out that they’re almost always a mixture of a few key organized traits and a random array of disorganized traits. Laurence Alison, one of the leaders of the Liverpool group and the author of “The Forensic Psychologist’s Casebook,” told me, “The whole business is a lot more complicated than the F.B.I. imagines.” Alison and another of his colleagues also looked at homology. If Douglas was right, then a certain kind of crime should correspond to a certain kind of criminal. So the Liverpool group selected a hundred stranger rapes in the United Kingdom, classifying them according to twenty-eight variables, such as whether a disguise was worn, whether compliments were given, whether there was binding, gagging, or blindfolding, whether there was apologizing or the theft of personal property, and so on. They then looked at whether the patterns in the crimes corresponded to attributes of the criminals—like age, type of employment, ethnicity, level of education, marital status, number of prior convictions, type of prior convictions, and drug use. Were rapists who bind, gag, and blindfold more like one another than they were like rapists who, say, compliment and apologize? The answer is no—not even slightly. “The fact is that different offenders can exhibit the same behaviors for completely different reasons,” Brent Turvey, a forensic scientist who has been highly critical of the F.B.I.’s approach, says. “You’ve got a rapist who attacks a woman in the park and pulls her shirt up over her face. Why? What does that mean? There are ten different things it could mean. It could mean he doesn’t want to see her. It could mean he doesn’t want her to see him. It could mean he wants to see her breasts, he wants to imagine someone else, he wants to incapacitate her arms—all of those are possibilities. You can’t just look at one behavior in isolation.” A few years ago, Alison went back to the case of the teacher who was murdered on the roof of her building in the Bronx. He wanted to know why, if the F.B.I.’s approach to criminal profiling was based on such simplistic psychology, it continues to have such a sterling reputation. The answer, he suspected, lay in the way the profiles were written, and, sure enough, when he broke down the rooftop-killer analysis, sentence by sentence, he found that it was so full of unverifiable and contradictory and ambiguous language that it could support virtually any interpretation. Astrologers and psychics have known these tricks for years. The magician Ian Rowland, in his classic “The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading,” itemizes them one by one, in what could easily serve as a manual for the beginner profiler. First is the Rainbow Ruse—the “statement which credits the client with both a personality trait and its opposite.” (“I would say that on the whole you can be rather a quiet, self effacing type, but when the circumstances are right, you can be quite the life and soul of the party if the mood strikes you.”) The Jacques Statement, named for the character in “As You Like It” who gives the Seven Ages of Man speech, tailors the prediction to the age of the subject. To someone in his late thirties or early forties, for example, the psychic says, “If you are honest about it, you often get to wondering what happened to all those dreams you had when you were younger.” There is the Barnum Statement, the assertion so general that anyone would agree, and the Fuzzy Fact, the seemingly factual statement couched in a way that “leaves plenty of scope to be developed into something more specific.” (“I can see a connection with Europe, possibly Britain, or it could be the warmer, Mediterranean part?”) And that’s only the start: there is the Greener Grass technique, the Diverted Question, the Russian Doll, Sugar Lumps, not to mention Forking and the Good Chance Guess—all of which, when put together in skillful combination, can convince even the most skeptical observer that he or she is in the presence of real insight. “Moving on to career matters, you don’t work with children, do you?” Rowland will ask his subjects, in an example of what he dubs the “Vanishing Negative.” No, I don’t. “No, I thought not. That’s not really your role.” Of course, if the subject answers differently, there’s another way to play the question: “Moving on to career matters, you don’t work with children, do you?” I do, actually, part time. “Yes, I thought so.” After Alison had analyzed the rooftop-killer profile, he decided to play a version of the cold-reading game. He gave the details of the crime, the profile prepared by the F.B.I., and a description of the offender to a group of senior police officers and forensic professionals in England. How did they find the profile? Highly accurate. Then Alison gave the same packet of case materials to another group of police officers, but this time he invented an imaginary offender, one who was altogether different from Calabro. The new killer was thirty-seven years old. He was an alcoholic. He had recently been laid off from his job with the water board, and had met the victim before on one of his rounds. What’s more, Alison claimed, he had a history of violent relationships with women, and prior convictions for assault and burglary. How accurate did a group of experienced police officers find the F.B.I.’s profile when it was matched with the phony offender? Every bit as accurate as when it was matched to the real offender. James Brussel didn’t really see the Mad Bomber in that pile of pictures and photostats, then. That was an illusion. As the literary scholar Donald Foster pointed out in his 2000 book “Author Unknown,” Brussel cleaned up his predictions for his memoirs. He actually told the police to look for the bomber in White Plains, sending the N.Y.P.D.’s bomb unit on a wild goose chase in Westchester County, sifting through local records. Brussel also told the police to look for a man with a facial scar, which Metesky didn’t have. He told them to look for a man with a night job, and Metesky had been largely unemployed since leaving Con Edison in 1931. He told them to look for someone between forty and fifty, and Metesky was over fifty. He told them to look for someone who was an “expert in civil or military ordnance” and the closest Metesky came to that was a brief stint in a machine shop. And Brussel, despite what he wrote in his memoir, never said that the Bomber would be a Slav. He actually told the police to look for a man “born and educated in Germany,” a prediction so far off the mark that the Mad Bomber himself was moved to object. At the height of the police investigation, when the New York Journal American offered to print any communications from the Mad Bomber, Metesky wrote in huffily to say that “the nearest to my being ‘Teutonic’ is that my father boarded a liner in Hamburg for passage to this country—about sixty-five years ago.” The true hero of the case wasn’t Brussel; it was a woman named Alice Kelly, who had been assigned to go through Con Edison’s personnel files. In January, 1957, she ran across an employee complaint from the early nineteen-thirties: a generator wiper at the Hell Gate plant had been knocked down by a backdraft of hot gases. The worker said that he was injured. The company said that he wasn’t. And in the flood of angry letters from the ex-employee Kelly spotted a threat—to “take justice in my own hands”—that had appeared in one of the Mad Bomber’s letters. The name on the file was George Metesky. Brussel did not really understand the mind of the Mad Bomber. He seems to have understood only that, if you make a great number of predictions, the ones that were wrong will soon be forgotten, and the ones that turn out to be true will make you famous. The Hedunit is not a triumph of forensic analysis. It’s a party trick. “Here’s where I’m at with this guy,” Douglas said, kicking off the profiling session with which “Inside the Mind of BTK” begins. It was 1984. The killer was still at large. Douglas, Hazelwood, and Walker and the two detectives from Wichita were all seated around the oak table. Douglas took off his suit jacket and draped it over his chair. “Back when he started in 1974, he was in his mid-to-late twenties,” Douglas began. “It’s now ten years later, so that would put him in his mid-to-late thirties.” It was Walker’s turn: BTK had never engaged in any sexual penetration. That suggested to him someone with an “inadequate, immature sexual history.” He would have a “lone-wolf type of personality. But he’s not alone because he’s shunned by others—it’s because he chooses to be alone. . . . He can function in social settings, but only on the surface. He may have women friends he can talk to, but he’d feel very inadequate with a peer-group female.” Hazelwood was next. BTK would be “heavily into masturbation.” He went on, “Women who have had sex with this guy would describe him as aloof, uninvolved, the type who is more interested in her servicing him than the other way around.” Douglas followed his lead. “The women he’s been with are either many years younger, very naïve, or much older and depend on him as their meal ticket,” he ventured. What’s more, the profilers determined, BTK would drive a “decent” automobile, but it would be “nondescript.” At this point, the insights began piling on. Douglas said he’d been thinking that BTK was married. But now maybe he was thinking he was divorced. He speculated that BTK was lower middle class, probably living in a rental. Walker felt BTK was in a “lower-paying white collar job, as opposed to blue collar.” Hazelwood saw him as “middle class” and “articulate.” The consensus was that his I.Q. was somewhere between 105 and 145. Douglas wondered whether he was connected with the military. Hazelwood called him a “now” person, who needed “instant gratification.” Walker said that those who knew him “might say they remember him, but didn’t really know much about him.” Douglas then had a flash—“It was a sense, almost a knowing”—and said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the job he’s in today, that he’s wearing some sort of uniform. . . . This guy isn’t mental. But he is crazy like a fox.” They had been at it for almost six hours. The best minds in the F.B.I. had given the Wichita detectives a blueprint for their investigation. Look for an American male with a possible connection to the military. His I.Q. will be above 105. He will like to masturbate, and will be aloof and selfish in bed. He will drive a decent car. He will be a “now” person. He won’t be comfortable with women. But he may have women friends. He will be a lone wolf. But he will be able to function in social settings. He won’t be unmemorable. But he will be unknowable. He will be either never married, divorced, or married, and if he was or is married his wife will be younger or older. He may or may not live in a rental, and might be lower class, upper lower class, lower middle class or middle class. And he will be crazy like a fox, as opposed to being mental. If you’re keeping score, that’s a Jacques Statement, two Barnum Statements, four Rainbow Ruses, a Good Chance Guess, two predictions that aren’t really predictions because they could never be verified—and nothing even close to the salient fact that BTK was a pillar of his community, the president of his church and the married father of two. “This thing is solvable,” Douglas told the detectives, as he stood up and put on his jacket. “Feel free to pick up the phone and call us if we can be of any further assistance.” You can imagine him taking the time for an encouraging smile and a slap on the back. “You’re gonna nail this guy.” ♦ ILLUSTRATION: GLEN BAXTER </p> 18747120 2014-06-28 03:23:09 2014-06-28 03:23:09 open open new-yorker-the-f-b-i-s-criminal-profilers-try-to-think-their-way-into-the-head-of-the-offender-18747120 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan New York Times http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/28/new-york-times-18747111/ Sat, 28 Jun 2014 03:20:37 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Ghost of the Confederacy ‘Clouds of Glory,’ Michael Korda’s Robert E. Lee Biography By FERGUS M. BORDEWICHJUNE 27, 2014 Photo Lee, photographed by Mathew Brady in Richmond, shortly after the surrender. Credit Photograph from Library of Congress Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Share This Page [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Robert E. Lee occupies a remarkable place in the pantheon of American history, combining in the minds of many, Michael Korda writes in this admiring and briskly written biography, “a strange combination of martyr, secular saint, Southern gentleman and perfect warrior.” Indeed, Korda aptly adds, “It is hard to think of any other general who had fought against his own country being so completely reintegrated into national life.” Lee has been a popular subject of biography virtually from his death in 1870, at the age of 63, through the four magisterial volumes of Douglas Southall Freeman in the 1930s to Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s intimate 2007 study of Lee and his letters, “Reading the Man.” Korda, the author of earlier biographies of Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower, aspires to pry the marble lid off the Lee legend to reveal the human being beneath. He draws a generally sympathetic portrait of a master strategist who was as physically fearless on the battlefield as he was reserved in personal relations. He was, Korda writes, “a perfectionist, obsessed by duty,” but also “charming, funny and flirtatious,” an animal lover, a talented cartographer and a devoted parent, as well as “a noble, tragic figure, indeed one whose bearing and dignity conferred nobility on the cause for which he fought and still does confer it in the minds of many people.” Graduating second in his class at West Point, Lee was commissioned into the engineers, then the most prestigious branch of the Army. He spent several unremarkable decades directing the construction of coastal fortifications, including Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, and somewhat more memorably, diverting the course of the Mississippi River at St. Louis. The Lee legend was born during the Mexican War, when he won the highest praise from the commander of the invading American army, Winfield Scott, for his bold reconnaissance behind enemy lines, during which he participated in three battles and crossed enemy territory three separate times in 36 hours — “the greatest feat of physical and moral courage” of the campaign, in Scott’s words. In 1859, when Scott was the overall commander of the United States Army, Lee was tapped to lead the company of Marines that captured John Brown at Harpers Ferry. Two years later, as state after state seceded from the Union, Lincoln offered Lee the command of the federal forces. He of course declined, and took his talents south. Korda portrays the Lee of 1861 as a man tragically torn between loyalty to his nation and his native state. That Lee agonized over his decision is certainly true. However, Korda does not consider the fact that Lee was also heir to an antifederalist tradition embedded deep in the political circuitry of the Virginia elite, and of his own family: 70 years earlier, in 1790, Robert’s father, the Revolutionary War hero Henry Lee, declared in response to what he considered a slighting of Southern interests, “I had rather myself submit to all the hazards of war and risk the loss of everything dear to me in life, than to live under the rule of a fixed insolent Northern majority.” Many other Southern-born officers remained unshaken in their loyalty to the Union. Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Korda provides crisp and concise, if conventional, accounts of Lee’s major engagements. We rarely hear from ordinary soldiers or feel the terror of battle amid the fog of war, but Korda is good at explaining Lee’s strategic thinking, the maneuvering of armies and the sometimes crippling limitations imposed by logistics, bad maps and worse roads. Lee was not infallible. Although Korda generally gives him the benefit of the doubt, he admits that Lee was “not always an effective commander,” too often leaving it to his subordinates to guess at what he intended. He is too generous in his assessment of Lee’s disastrous frontal attacks at the Battle of Malvern Hill that capped the Seven Days campaign, and his equally futile assault — now famous as Pickett’s Charge — on another impregnable federal position at Gettysburg, in 1863. To Lee’s credit, as Pickett’s shattered survivors straggled back to their lines, Lee leaned from his horse to shake their hands, telling them, “All this has been my fault.” Yet without Lee, the Army of Northern Virginia would most likely have been defeated long before Appomattox. Korda acknowledges that it is impossible to consider Lee without facing the problem of slavery. Lee owned slaves himself, and he arguably did more than any other man to try to create a country founded on slavery. Korda asserts that Lee was at least “moderate” on slavery, writing that he “was never, by any stretch of the imagination, an enthusiast for slavery.” That said, Lee did nothing to bring slavery to an end, and regarded abolitionists as troublemakers and revolutionaries. Korda quotes a revealing letter that Lee wrote to his wife, Mary, in which he described slavery as “a moral and political evil,” but went on to say, “I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race. . . . The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially and physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their instruction as a race.” How long their “subjugation” would be necessary, Lee complacently concluded, “is known and ordered by a wise and Merciful Providence.” As Allen Guelzo noted in “Gettysburg: The Last Invasion,” Lee’s army systematically kidnapped both former fugitive slaves and free blacks in Pennsylvania, dragging scores, perhaps hundreds, of them back to slavery in Virginia. Lee may not have approved of this atrocity, but he did little or nothing to stop it. “Clouds of Glory” is unfortunately marred by more than a few annoying errors of fact. Northern politicians with Southern leanings were called “doughfaces,” not “doughboys” — a 20th-century term for American soldiers in World War I. At the time of the Nat Turner rebellion in 1831, the enslaved population of the United States was about two million, not four million. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed in 1854, not 1845. More troubling is a footnote in which Korda likens the burning of Atlanta in “1865” (actually 1864) and William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea to the firebombing of Dresden in 1945. “Britain’s bomber command . . . simply had more sophisticated technology than Sherman did, but the intention was the same,” Korda writes. He uncritically asserts that “Sherman introduced what a later generation would call total war, involving the burning of cities, homes and farms on a wide scale.” Although Sherman’s march was destructive of property, it was far less extensive than Lost Cause mythology claims, and was carried out with remarkably little loss of life: Perhaps fewer than 2,500 Confederate soldiers were killed in open battle, and very few civilians died. The bombing of Dresden took tens of thousands of lives, virtually all civilians. The worst war crimes of the Civil War were perpetrated by Confederates, in the savage massacres of black federal soldiers at Fort Pillow, Tenn., and by Lee’s own troops at the Crater at Petersburg, in 1864. “Clouds of Glory” will satisfy readers who wish to be reassured that Lee was a splendid and courageous soldier, as well as the fine-mannered epitome of antebellum aristocracy. Those who might regard him as a reactionary who betrayed his country, and whose skillful generalship prolonged an unwinnable war on behalf of a cause that Grant called “one of the worst for which a people ever fought,” may find Korda’s enthusiasm less persuasive. CLOUDS OF GLORY The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee By Michael Korda Illustrated. 785 pp. Harper. $40. Fergus M. Bordewich’s most recent book is “America’s Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union.” A version of this review appears in print on June 29, 2014, on page BR11 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Ghost of the Confederacy. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe </p> 18747112 2014-06-28 03:20:37 2014-06-28 03:20:37 open open new-york-times-18747111 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Zimbabwe's Unfolding Humanitarian Disaster: We Visit the 18,000 People Forcibly Relocated to Ruling Party Farm Friday, 27 June 2014 09:06 By Davison Mudzingwa and Francis Hweshe, Inter Press Service http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/28/zimbabwe-s-unfolding-humanitarian-disaster-we-visit-the-18-000-people-forcibly-relocated-to-ruling-party-farm-friday-27-june-2014-09-06-by-daviso-18747104/ Sat, 28 Jun 2014 03:19:00 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Zimbabwe's Unfolding Humanitarian Disaster: We Visit the 18,000 People Forcibly Relocated to Ruling Party Farm Friday, 27 June 2014 09:06 By Davison Mudzingwa and Francis Hweshe, Inter Press Service [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Masvingo, Zimbabwe - As the villagers sit around the flickering fire on a pitch-black night lit only by the blurry moon, they speak, recounting how it all began. They take turns, sometimes talking over each other to have their own experiences heard. When the old man speaks, everyone listens. "It was my first time riding a helicopter," John Moyo* remembers. "The soldiers came, clutching guns, forcing everyone to move. I tried to resist, for my home was not affected but they wouldn't hear any of it." So started the long, painful and disorienting journey for the 70-year-old Moyo and almost 18,000 other people who had lived in the 50-kilometre radius of Chivi basin in Zimbabwe's Masvingo province. When heavy rains pounded the area in early January, the 1.8 billion cubic metre Tokwe-Mukosi dam's wall breached. Flooding followed, destroying homes and livestock. The government, with the help of non-governmental organisations, embarked on a rescue mission. And even unaffected homes in high-lying areas were evacuated by soldiers. According to Moyo, whose home was not affected, this was an opportunity for the government, which had been trying to relocate those living near Chivi basin for sometime. "They always said they wanted to establish an irrigation system and a game park in the area that covered our ancestral homes," he tells IPS. For Itai Mazanhi*, a 33-year-old father of three, the government had the best excuse to remove them from the land that he had known since birth. "The graves of my forefathers are in that place," he tells IPS. Mazanhi is from Gororo village. After being temporarily housed in the nearby safe areas of Gunikuni and Ngundu in Masvingo province, the over 18,000 people or 3,000 families were transferred to Nuanetsi Ranch in the Chingwizi area of Mwenezi district, about 150 kms from their former homes. Chingwizi is an arid terrain near Triangle Estates, an irrigation sugar plantation concern owned by sugar giant Tongaat Hulett. The land here is conspicuous for the mopane and giant baobab trees that are synonymous with hot, dry conditions. The crop and livestock farmers from Chivi basin have been forced to adjust in a land that lacks the natural fertility of their former land, water and adequate pastures for their livestock. The dust road to the Chingwizi camp is a laborious 40-minute drive littered with sharp bumps and lurking roadside trenches. From the top of an anthill, a vantage point at the entrance of this settlement reveals a rolling pattern of tents and zinc makeshift structures that stretch beyond the sight of the naked eye. At night, fires flicker faintly in the distance, and a cacophony of voices mix with the music from solar- and battery-powered radio sets. It's the image of a war refugee relief camp. A concern for the displaced families is the fact that they were settled in an area earmarked for a proposed biofuel project. The project is set to be driven by the Zimbabwe Bio-Energy company, a partnership between the Zimbabwe Development Trust and private investors. The state-owned Herald newspaper quoted the project director Charles Madonko saying resettled families could become sugarcane out-growers for the ethanol project. This plan was subject to scathing attack from rights watchdog Human Rights Watch. In a report released last month, the organisation viewed this as a cheap labour ploy. "The Zimbabwean army relocated 3,000 families from the flooded Tokwe-Mukorsi dam basin to a camp on a sugar cane farm and ethanol project jointly owned by the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front [ZANU-PF] and Billy Rautenbach, a businessman and party supporter," read part of the report. The sugarcane plantations will be irrigated by the water from the Tokwe-Mukosi dam. Upon completion, the dam is set to become Zimbabwe's largest inland dam, with a capacity to irrigate over 25,000 hectares. Community Tolerance Reconciliation and Development, COTRAD, a non-governmental organisation that operates in the Masvingo province sees the displacement of the 3,000 families as a brutal retrogression. The organisation says ordinary people are at the mercy of private companies and the government. "The people feel like outcasts, they no longer feel like Zimbabweans," Zivanai Muzorodzi, COTRAD programme manager, tells IPS. Muzorodzi, whose organisation has been monitoring the land tussle before the floods, says the land surrounding the Tokwe-Mukosi dam basin was bought by individuals, mostly from the ruling ZANU-PF party. "Villagers won't own the land or the means of production. Only ZANU-PF bigwigs will benefit," Muzorodzi says. The scale of the habitats has posed serious challenges for the cash-strapped government of Zimbabwe. Humanitarian organisations such as Oxfam International and Care International have injected basic services such clean water through water bowsers and makeshift toilets. "It's not safe at all, it's a disaster waiting to happen," a Zimbabwe Ministry of Local Government official stationed at the camp and who preferred anonymity tells IPS. "The latrines you see here are only one metre deep. An outbreak of a contagious disease would spread fast." Similar fears stalk Spiwe Chando*, a mother of four. The 23-year-old speaks as she sorts her belongings scattered in small blue tent in which an adult cannot sleep fully stretched out. "I fear for my child because another family lost a child due to diarrhoea last week. This can happen to anyone," she tells IPS, sweating from the heat inside the tent. "I hope we will move from this place soon and get proper land to restart our lives." This issue has posed tensions at this over-populated camp. Meetings, rumour and conjecture circulate each day. Across the camp, frustrations are progressively building up. As a result, a ministerial delegation got a hostile reception during a visit last month. The displaced farmers accuse the government of deception and reneging on its promises of land allocation and compensation. The government has promised to allocate one hectare of land per family, at a location about 17 kms from this transit camp. This falls far short of what these families own in Chivi basin. Some of them, like Mazanhi, owned about 10 hectares. The land was able to produce enough food for their sustenance and a surplus, which was sold to finance their children's education and healthcare. Mazanhi is one of the few people who has already received compensation from the government. Of the agreed compensation of 3,000 dollars, he has only received 900 dollars and is not certain if he will ever be paid the remainder of what he was promised. "There is a lot of corruption going on in that office," he tells IPS. COTRAD says the fact that ordinary villagers are secondary beneficiaries of the land and water that once belonged to them communally is an indication of a resource grabbing trend that further widens the gap of inequality. "People no longer have land, access to water, healthcare and children are learning under trees." For Moyo, daily realities at the transit camp and a hazy future is both a painful reminder of a life gone by and a sign of "the next generation of dispossession." However, he hopes for a better future. "We don't want this life of getting fed like birds," says Moyo. *Names altered for security reasons. </p> 18747104 2014-06-28 03:19:00 2014-06-28 03:19:00 open open zimbabwe-s-unfolding-humanitarian-disaster-we-visit-the-18-000-people-forcibly-relocated-to-ruling-party-farm-friday-27-june-2014-09-06-by-daviso-18747104 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan SCIENCE 3 Blackholes http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/28/science-3-blackholes-18747044/ Sat, 28 Jun 2014 03:02:34 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>3 Blackholes Collection of three supermassive black holes detected Posted on June 26, 2014 in Science [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] The galaxies we see in the present-day Universe were built through the merger of smaller ones. Almost all of the galaxies contain supermassive black holes at their cores. Basic logic would suggest that the mergers would also have placed supermassive black holes in close proximity at the cores of galaxies. What’s less certain is what happened to them once they were brought together. Ultimately, the fate of these black holes will be to merge. But if the process is slow enough, we should see a large number of binary supermassive black holes lingering in the cores of galaxies, producing gravity waves as they interact. We’d love to detect those gravity waves, but it’s hard to justify building the appropriate detector until we know they’re out there, which means we need to determine whether supermassive black hole binaries are common. Today, an international team of researchers is announcing that they’ve found a triple black hole system, with two of the objects forming a tight binary system. The good news for gravity waves is that they found this system in one of the first handful of systems they checked, and they suggest that the signs of these systems might be relatively easy to spot.</p> 18747044 2014-06-28 03:02:34 2014-06-28 03:02:34 open open science-3-blackholes-18747044 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Israel Claims $3B in Cyber Exports; 2nd Only to US http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/26/israel-claims-3b-in-cyber-exports-2nd-only-to-us-18735280/ Thu, 26 Jun 2014 05:11:35 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Israel Claims $3B in Cyber Exports; 2nd Only to US Netanyahu: 'We Have a Land Flowing With Milk and Cyber' Jun. 20, 2014 - 03:19PM [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] DEFENSE NEWS | By BARBARA OPALL-ROME ISRAEL-CYBER-SECURITY-NETANYAHU HERZLIYA, ISRAEL — Israeli exports of cyber-related products and services last year reached $3 billion, some 5 percent of the global market and more than all other nations combined apart from the United States, according to Israel’s National Cyber Bureau (NCB). Officials here say the latest data, cited last week at an international conference here and presented in detail at a closed briefing of the Israeli Cabinet in late February, clearly ranks Israel as the second leading cyber exporting nation. “As far as industry goes, Israel is a superpower indeed,” Tal Steinherz, NCB chief technology officer, told participants at a June 9 session of the annual Herzliya Conference here. “Our part of the international market equals the entire world apart from the United States... We’re talking 5 percent of all world exports,” he said. Itzik Ben-Israel, a retired major general who chaired a high-level task force that pushed to establish the NCB, said Israel aspires to 10 percent of the global market in less than five years. By then, MarketsandMarkets, a Dallas-based research and consulting firm, estimates the global market to grow beyond $150 billion. “We’re already at 5 percent. With the capabilities we have now and the programs and partnerships that are being planned, I see us realistically reaching that goal in the near term,” Ben-Israel told Defense News. In a briefing to Cabinet ministers, NCB Director Eviatar Matanya noted that Israel’s $3 billion in 2013 exports was three times that of the United Kingdom’s. Israeli firms last year raised $165 million in investment funding, a figure he said represents 11 percent of global capital invested in the field of cyber. According to NCB data, 14.5 percent of all the firms worldwide attracting cyber-related investment are Israeli-owned. Israel’s cyber industry, Matanya said, comprises 20 multinational corporate-funded research-and-development centers and 200 local start-up firms. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made it a personal and national goal to elevate Israel’s status as a global cyber power. Since he established the NCB in 2011 — an increasingly high-priority organization that reports directly to Netanyahu’s office — the government has augmented annual cyber defense spending by 30 percent, despite a budget crisis. In parallel, Israel is investing hundreds of millions of shekels each year on infrastructure to transform the southern desert city of Beersheba into what Netanyahu calls “a global cyber hub for innovation.” The effort involves relocation of national labs, military intelligence units and C4I organizations, a new National Cyber Command, a new industrial park co-located with Beersheba’s Ben Gurion University and a high-speed train connecting it all from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. “We established the National Cyber Bureau for the purpose of transforming the state of Israel into a cyber superpower,” Netanyahu told ministers after Matanya’s closed-door Cabinet session, a summary of which was provided to Defense News. Beyond the national security requirements driving Israel’s Cyber program, Netanyahu said the national effort would yield tremendous economic benefit. “I see [NCB] also as a huge economic force multiplier. There is tremendous international interest in our abilities,” he said. Netanyahu’s office has also directed the government’s chief scientist, the Ministry of Industry and Trade and other agencies to serve as “angels” and incubators to nurture and assist start-up firms. “I see the Prime Minister’s Office as a public relations agency for the cyber industry,” Raviv Raz, a young chief executive officer of an Israeli start-up firm called Hybrid Security, told the June 9 Herzliya Conference panel. Raz said his firm, which specializes in applying artificial intelligence for detection and identification of what he called “bad website users,” received generous funding assistance at multiple phases of the business process. “All entrepreneurs start with an idea, and for that, the chief scientist can help ... Then there are grants to see you through the prototype phase, and this is followed by the need to raise money, where it also assists,” Raz said. “Israel is becoming a mega power in cyber, and we are a good example of how this is happening,” he added. “The government gives, and takes no equity.” In a Cabinet meeting this month, just days before the Jewish holiday of Shavuot (Festival of Weeks) that commemorates, in part, the first fruits of the harvest, Netanyahu likened national cyber investments to modern-day “first fruits.” “We always knew that we have a land flowing with milk and cyber,” Netanyahu said. ■ Email: bopallrome@defensenews.com.</p> 18735280 2014-06-26 05:11:35 2014-06-26 05:11:35 open open israel-claims-3b-in-cyber-exports-2nd-only-to-us-18735280 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan Netanyahu: We struck Syrian army forcefully and will continue to hit those who harm us Jerusalem Post http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/26/netanyahu-we-struck-syrian-army-forcefully-and-will-continue-to-hit-those-who-harm-us-jerusalem-post-18735245/ Thu, 26 Jun 2014 04:38:42 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Netanyahu: We struck Syrian army forcefully and will continue to hit those who harm us By GIL HOFFMAN 06/23/2014 16:46 PM sends warning to Assad and vows to take further steps against Hamas, including house demolitions. Binyamin Netanyahu Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, June 15, 2014 Photo: AVI OHAYON - GPO Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu warned Israel's enemies throughout the Middle East on Monday that Israel would strike back if any of them attempt to harm the Jewish state. Speaking at a meeting of his Likud Beytenu faction in the Knesset, Netanyahu praised the Shin Bet security service, police, and IDF for identifying and apprehending the murderer of police deputy major general Baruch Mizrahi, whose arrest was revealed Monday. Related: Netanyahu: Israel will take all action necessary against 'scourge of terrorism' Netanyahu noted that he had ordered the demolition of the home of Mizrahi's killer, a Hamas operative released in the Gilad Schalit deal. He vowed to take more steps against Hamas, including more arrests and house demolitions. The prime minister told the faction that he had taken steps against terrorists in Israeli jails. He said their visiting hours were cut to the minimum required by international conventions. Responding to a question from Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon about Israeli prisons being "summer camps," Netanyahu said the terrorists' cell phone usage would be cut and they would not be permitted to watch the World Cup. He also reported to the faction about the IDF's airstrikes in Syria that came in retaliation for the deadly missile attack that killed teenager Muhammad Karaka. "We demonstrated strength overnight versus the Syrian army that took action against us and if there is a need, we will use more force. We will continue to take forceful action against anyone who harms us or attempts to harm us," Netanyahu said. He received support from the ministers in his cabinet, including those on the Left. Finance Minister Yair Lapid reminded his Yesh Atid faction of the revenge taken following the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre when he said “Even if it takes time, we will get to all the kidnappers.” Justice Minister Tzipi Livni did not show any impatience with the ongoing IDF action in Palestinian cities in the West Bank. She justified continued action against Hamas. “Our central goal remains returning the kidnapped and arresting the kidnappers,” she told her Hatnua faction. “We won't stop until we accomplish our goals. Meanwhile, the IDF is acting to weaken the infrastructure of Hamas, a terrorist group that does not recognize Israel's existence.” Livni said Israel must continue trying to reach an agreement with Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas for Israel's interest while taking action against Hamas and other terrorist groups. Economy and Trade Minister Naftali Bennett told his Bayit Yehudi faction that following the arrest of Mizrahi's killer, the era of releasing terrorists was over. “The concept of releasing terrorists has reached its end,” Bennett said. “It only leads to more deaths. They say it will bring peace or they get reformed. But we live in the Middle East and in the Middle East, a murderer remains a murder. The PA must be held accountable for funding killers and encouraging murder. Labor faction chairman Eitan Cabel said the opposition had lowered its profile to let the prime minister and defense minister do their work in bringing about the return of kidnapped teens Eyal Yifrah, Gil-Ad Shaer and Naftali Fraenkel. “Speaking for all of us, I hope that there will be good news,” he said. “We are hoping for a miracle.”</p> 18735245 2014-06-26 04:38:42 2014-06-26 04:38:42 open open netanyahu-we-struck-syrian-army-forcefully-and-will-continue-to-hit-those-who-harm-us-jerusalem-post-18735245 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan The Food Safety Movement Grows Tall Posted: 06/20/2014 2:18 pm Ralph Nader http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/22/the-food-safety-movement-grows-tall-posted-06-20-2014-2-18-pm-ralph-nader-18715442/ Sun, 22 Jun 2014 06:19:15 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] The Food Safety Movement Grows Tall Posted: 06/20/2014 2:18 pm By Ralph Nader Let us celebrate today the latest initiatives of our nation's growing food safety movement. Across the country, consumers are demanding the right to know what is in their food, and labeling of genetically engineered food. It's a vibrant and diverse coalition: mothers and grandmothers, health libertarians, progressives, foodies, environmentalists, main street conservatives and supporters of free-market economics. Last year, a New York Times poll found that a near-unanimous 93 percent of Americans support such labeling. This is no surprise. Genetically engineered food has yet to be proven safe. In 1998, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) admitted in court that it had reached "no dispositive scientific findings" about the risks of genetically engineered foods. There is no scientific consensus about the risks of eating genetically engineered food, according to a statement last year signed by nearly 300 scientists. The scientists agree that "Concerns about risks are well-founded" and that a "substantial number" of "animal feeding studies and reviews of such studies...found toxic effects and signs of toxicity" in animals fed genetically engineered food, compared with controls. "Some of the studies give serious cause for concern," the scientists write. For example, a review of nineteen studies on mammals, published in Environmental Sciences Europe, found that the "data appear to indicate liver and kidney problems" arising from diets of genetically engineered food. According to Consumers Union senior scientist Michael Hansen PhD, the ability of genetically engineered crops to induce allergic reactions is "a major food safety concern." When it comes to genetically engineered food, there are questions about risks, but no convincing answers. There is no mandatory pre-market safety testing for genetically engineered food. These questions of risks and safety have festered for years because the big agrichemical companies use their intellectual property rights to deny independent scientists the ability to test genetically engineered crops, or to report their results. Scientific American called these restrictions on free inquiry "dangerous." "In a number of cases," the magazine reports, "experiments that had the implicit go-ahead from the seed company were later blocked from publication because the results were not flattering." When scientists do publish studies adverse to the interests of the big agrichemical companies, they are met with vicious attacks on their credibility, their science and even in their personal lives. Sixty-four nations have already required labeling of genetically engineered food, including the members of the European Union, Australia, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa, even Russia and China. The food industry is feeling the pressure. Paul Bulcke, CEO of Nestle, the world's largest food and beverage company, said that: "It is not business as usual anymore. Pressure is mounting from all sides and angles." Despite the overwhelming popularity of labeling, Congress refused to act, so citizens took up the cause in their own states. Under heavy corporate lobbying and deceptive TV ads, ballot initiatives for labeling of genetically engineered food were narrowly defeated by 51 percent-49 percent in both California and Washington State. In May, legislation in the California Senate led 19-16, but failed without the 21 vote majority needed for passage. Finally, on May 8, in a major victory, Vermont approved the first unconditional statewide labeling law for genetically engineered food. "Vermonters take our food and how it is produced seriously, and we believe we have a right to know what's in the food we buy," said Gov. Peter Shumlin. Since then, the food and agrichemical industries have escalated to a full panic. On June 13, the Grocery Manufacturers Association and three other trade associations -- the heart of the junk food industry -- filed a lawsuit in federal court to block the new Vermont labeling law. The good news is that people are rushing to Vermont's defense, including Ben & Jerry's ice cream, which will re-name one of its flavors "Food Fight! Fudge Brownie" to help fund a vigorous legal defense of Vermont's new labeling law. Elsewhere, industry is spending lavishly against the food movement. In New York State, the Daily News reported that: "Trade organizations, farm groups and corporate giants such as Coca-Cola and Kraft have spent millions of dollars on lobbyists and campaign contributions to defeat" labeling of genetically engineered food. The food industry is quick to scare consumers with the canard that labeling of genetically engineered food will raise food prices. But manufacturers change their labels often, so their claim doesn't make sense. It has been debunked in an study by Joanna Shepherd Bailey, a professor at Emory University School of Law, who found that "consumers will likely see no increases in prices" as a result of labeling genetically engineered food. In Congress, U.S. Rep Mike Pompeo (R-KS) introduced a bill at the behest of the Grocery Manufacturers Association -- dubbed by its consumer opponents "the Deny Americans the Right-to-Know (DARK) Act" -- to block any federal or state action for labeling of genetically engineered food. Sometimes, politics is drearily predictable: Can you guess Rep. Pompeo's largest campaign contributor? You got it: Koch Industries. But the shame is fully bipartisan: sleazy Democratic lobbyists like former US Senator Blanche Lincoln and Steve Elmendorf are plying their trade for Monsanto and the Grocery Manufacturers Association to keep you from knowing what's in your food. Meanwhile, the food disclosure movement is going full speed ahead with ballot initiatives for GMO labeling in Oregon and Colorado, as well as legislative efforts in many other states. There's a great lesson in all this: when left and right join together, they can defeat big corporations and their subservient politicians. That's the theme of my new book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State. Food labeling is hardly a radical idea. Conservative economists are quick to point out that the free exchange of information about products is crucial to the proper functioning of a free market. Even Monsanto supported labeling of genetically engineered food in Britain. But it spends millions to oppose labeling here in America. Such is corporate patriotism in the 21st Century: St. Louis-based Monsanto believes the British deserve more consumer rights than Americans do. There are other reasons to be concerned about genetically engineered crops. Genetically engineered crops have led to increased use of pesticides. For example, a study by Professor Chuck Benbrook of Washington State University found that between 1996 and 2011, genetically engineered crops have brought an increased use of more than 400 million pounds of pesticides. Mutating weed resistance is requiring the Monsantos to sell even more powerful herbicides. More details on these backfiring GMO crop technologies are contained in the new book titled The GMO Deception edited by Professor Sheldon Krimsky and Jeremy Gruber. Perhaps most alarming is the corporate control of agriculture in the hands of the world's largest agrichemical companies -- Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Dow, Bayer and BASF. "The Big 6 chemical and seed companies are working diligently to monopolize the food system at the expense of consumers, farmers and smaller seed companies," said Philip H. Howard, an associate professor at Michigan State University. These companies may be meeting their match in the mothers and grandmothers who have powered the movement for labeling of genetically engineered food. Like Pamm Larry, the pioneering grandmother who came up with the spreading idea reflected by the California ballot initiative for labeling. Mothers know that food is love. Certainly, my mother did. She taught me early and often about how important it is to eat healthy food. She even wrote about these values in the book, It Happened in the Kitchen. I'd like to think that she'd feel right at home with the mothers and grandmothers of today's food movement. I sure do. In some ways, that's the point: a movement that makes you feel at home, no wonder it is so popular. Follow Ralph Nader on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RalphNader </p> 18715442 2014-06-22 06:19:15 2014-06-22 06:19:15 open open the-food-safety-movement-grows-tall-posted-06-20-2014-2-18-pm-ralph-nader-18715442 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Hillary’s Haughty Hyperbole! Ralph Nader June 18, 2014 http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/22/hillary-s-haughty-hyperbole-ralph-nader-june-18-18715419/ Sun, 22 Jun 2014 06:04:53 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Hillary’s Haughty Hyperbole! Ralph Nader June 18, 2014 Last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review section featured a one page interview with Hillary Clinton, author of the just released Hard Choices which brought her a $14 million advance from Viacom’s Simon and Schuster. My first reaction was “Can anybody believe this?” I’m referring to the replies by Mrs. Clinton to questions about her book reading habits which turn out to be prodigious. How can such a super-busy person have the time to absorb such a staggering load of diverse books? The Times sends questions in advance to the person that they are going to interview each week. This gives the person being interviewed enough time to think about their favorite books and be precise about titles. The titles Hillary said she is reading could have been poll-tested for the 2016 presidential race. First Hillary declared that she is absorbing three books at one time, which she explained are among the “pile of books stacked on my night stand that I’m reading.” They included Mom & Me & Mom by the late Maya Angelou. To the question, “What’s the last truly great book you read?” She listed not one, but four of them: The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal, The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert, Citizens of London by Lynne Olson and A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. Revving up, she took on with gusto the question “Who are your favorite contemporary writers,” including “any writers whose books you automatically read when they come out?” She replied that she “automatically” reads “anything by Laura Hillenbrand, Walter Isaacson, Barbara Kingsolver, John le Carré, John Grisham, Hilary Mantel, Toni Morrison, Anna Quindlen and Alice Walker,” plus “the latest installments from Alex Berenson, Linda Fairstein, Sue Grafton, Donna Leon, Katherine Hall Page, Louise Penny, Daniel Silva, Alexander McCall Smith, Charles Todd and Jacqueline Winspear.” Whew! That’s not all of her responses. I have read some of this popular New York Times column’s interviews over the years, many with professional authors, fiction and non-fiction, and not one replied with such an oceanic immersion, even though many of these authors regularly read many books for their craft. The former First Lady explained that she finds time to indulge in “guilty pleasures and useful time fillers,” by reading “cooking, decorating, diet/self-help and gardening books.” Time fillers? For one of the busiest people on Earth? Has Hillary discovered the 72 hour day? It gets better, when asked her opinion on the best books about Washington, DC to recommend, she chose Our Divided Political Heart by E.J. Dionne Jr., who “shows how most everybody has some conservative and liberal impulses, but just as individuals have to reconcile them within ourselves, so does our political system if we expect to function productively.” To the question “Is there one book you wish all students would read,” Hillary could not hold back providing three: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen, and Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally. As for the “one book that made you who you are today,” Hillary replied, as she does often, that it was the Bible, which she elaborates “was and remains the biggest influence on my thinking.” Which parts of the Bible remain unknown, but presumably she has read the wide range of choices including the parts about “an eye for an eye,” “turning the other cheek,” and “the golden rule.” More insights into her eclectic interests came from responses to the question “which books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?” “You might be surprised,” she admitted, “to see memoirs by Republicans such as Decision Points by President George W. Bush” (whose criminal Iraq War she voted for), “and Faith of my Fathers by Senator John McCain” chief sabre-rattler in the Senate. Perfecto! With this interview Hillary has used her literary interests to pander to homemakers, ethnic groups, poets, lovers of fiction, adversaries, hard-line Republican leaders in Congress, religious groups and the swooning credulous. Why is Hillary Clinton unable to resist straining our credulity? A few days earlier, Hillary told Diane Sawyer of ABC News that she and Bill left the White House “dead broke.” This comment prompted the press to report on their combined $23 million book contracts, ample Presidential pension, $200,000 a speech for Bill and other rewards provided to them by friends. Sure politicians are calculating, even cunning. Those are occupational traits. Maybe Hillary thinks she can push the envelope into prevarication and distortion with impunity. After all, as a Wall Street corporatist and a war-mongering militarist, she has gotten away with much worse. Rocky Anderson, the former twice-elected mayor of Salt Lake City, cited polls and examples in his presentation to the mass-media in which he both addressed Clinton’s “recognized reputation for lying, distorting and evading,” and suggested important questions that they may wish to ask Hillary on her North-American book tour. One such episode involved her trip to Bosnia as First Lady in 1996. By her account she landed under sniper fire and had to run “with our heads down to get into the vehicles.” This narrative was contradicted by the videos and the report from accompanying CBS reporter, Sharyl Attkisson. The video shows Clinton and daughter Chelsea, in Attkisson’s words “speaking with young people at the airport, taking their time and not rushing, heads down or otherwise, to any vehicles.” For the full list of Anderson’s basic questions, go to the Facebook group: Progressives Opposed to a Clinton Dynasty. On June 10, 2014 the lines of people seeking autographed copies of Hard Choices started lining up at 3am in front of the Barnes & Noble bookstore at Union Square in New York City, the launch of Hillary’s book tour. The New York Times reported that “dozens of Secret Service agents” were establishing orderly processions by the customers. Retired presidents and their families are given a permanent, small Secret Service detail. A private citizen doesn’t have “dozens of Secret Service agents” to help sell her books. The reporters didn’t push this subject. It is a small wonder that Hillary’s march to the White House is being described as “a coronation.” With so many curtseying instead of inquiring, how can her path by anything but Queenly? follow on Twitter | friend on Facebook | forward to a friend Copyright © 2014 Nader.Org, All rights reserved. </p> 18715419 2014-06-22 06:04:53 2014-06-22 06:04:53 open open hillary-s-haughty-hyperbole-ralph-nader-june-18-18715419 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan EGYPT – THE LOST CIVILISATION THEORY By Alan F. Alford http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/22/egypt-the-lost-civilisation-theory-by-alan-f-alford-18715406/ Sun, 22 Jun 2014 05:52:02 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] EGYPT – THE LOST CIVILISATION THEORY By Alan F. Alford The Panleonist Lost Civilisation Theory The panleonist theory proposes that a highly advanced civilisation existed on the Earth during during the precessional age of Leo (c. 10900-8700 BC), but was destroyed by a cataclysm circa 10500 BC and hence became a ‘lost civilisation’. The theory proposes that the lost civilisation encoded the date 10500 BC into their monuments (e.g. by astronomical alignments) so as to commemorate the date of the cataclysm. The panleonist theory is best known from the writings of Robert Bauval, Adrian Gilbert and Graham Hancock. But it has its roots in an assortment of different writings. Firstly, in Plato’s story of Atlantis, which recalled the destruction of an advanced civilisation nine thousand years before the time of Solon, i.e. c. 9600 BC. Secondly, in the prophecies of certain mystics, such as Edgar Cayce. And thirdly, in the writings of Zecharia Sitchin, who dated the beginning of history to the Great Flood in 11000 BC, at the beginning of the age of Leo. It is on the writings of Bauval, Hancock and Gilbert that I wish to comment here, in particular their claims that the Giza Pyramids and Sphinx were built to commemorate the date 10500 BC. The Orion Theory In ‘The Orion Mystery’ (1994), Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert made a very interesting discovery, namely that the three main pyramids at Giza (of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure) formed a pattern on the ground virtually identical to that of the three belt stars of the Orion constellation. This was a perfectly plausible hypothesis. However, Bauval and Gilbert then entered controversial territory. Using computer software, they wound back the Earth’s skies to ancient times, and witnessed a ‘locking-in’ of the mirror image between the pyramids and the stars at the same time as Orion reached a turning point at the bottom of its precessional shift up and down the meridian. This conjunction, they claimed, was exact, and it occurred precisely at the date 10450 BC. In ‘Keeper of Genesis’ (1996), Robert Bauval teamed up with Graham Hancock, and took the 10500 BC theory further, claiming corroborative evidence in the form of the Sphinx at Giza (see below). In ‘Heaven’s Mirror’ (1998), Graham Hancock tried to argue that the date 10500 BC was encoded also at the ancient Cambodian site of Angkor Wat (the temples, he alleged, were in the image of the constellation Draco at exactly 10500 BC). On 15th September 1998, I issued a detailed rebuttal of Hancock’s Angkor Wat theory, which I published on my website. I concluded that ‘Hancock’s case is extremely weak, and by pursuing it with such vigour (claiming ‘no doubt that a correlation exists’ p.126, and then winding back the skies to 10500 BC to claim a ‘precise’ match) he risks bringing this kind of research into disrepute. He certainly does Robert Bauval no favours, for many people will now highlight the poor quality of Hancock’s research to debunk the more plausible (though unproven) 10500 BC alignment at Giza.’ My comments were to prove farsighted. On 4th November 1999, BBC screened a Horizon documentary which raised serious questions about Bauval and Hancock’s panleonist theory. Hancock, in particular, was ridiculed for his theory of a 10500 BC alignment between Angkor Wat and the constellation of Draco (rightly so in my opinion). But Bauval too was criticised for being careless in his calculation of the 10500 BC alignment between the Giza Pyramids and the stars of Orion’s Belt. To the shock and horror of Bauval’s followers, the BBC claimed that the accurate 10500 BC ‘lock-in’ between the Giza pyramids and Orion’s Belt was not quite so accurate after all. Worse still, in the ensuing furore, Bauval and Hancock actually conceded the point and admitted that the alignment was not precise. Bauval and Hancock went on to accuse the BBC of bias, and their complaint was upheld in one respect (although not in the majority of respects) by an independent commission. Nevertheless, in the heat of the argument, the fact was obscured that (a) the alleged accuracy of the Pyramids/Orion’s Belt alignment had been absolutely central to Bauval and Hancock’s original argument of a lost civilisation of 10500 BC; and (b) the alleged accuracy of the Pyramids/Orion’s Belt alignment had been successfully rebutted by the BBC. The present situation is this. It is accepted that the alignment between the Giza pyramids and the stars of Orion’s Belt is not precise but approximate. Therefore, no firm conclusion can be drawn about any particular date which the monuments might have commemorated. Accordingly, the panleonist theory of Giza is entirely baseless (nevertheless, it remains an important discovery that the layout of the three Giza pyramids mirrors the shape of Orion’s Belt). The Sphinx Problem One of the foundation stones of the panleonist theory is the Great Sphinx of Egypt, which is presumed to have the body of a lion, thus evoking the precessional era of Leo (10900-8700 BC). In his follow-up work with co-author Graham Hancock, Robert Bauval wound back the skies to show that not only did the three Giza pyramids line up with the three stars of Orion’s Belt at 10500 BC, but also, at the same time, the constellation of Leo rose exactly due east of the Sphinx. This occurrence, they said, was unique to 10500 BC, and it was therefore beyond coincidence that the Sphinx had been carved in the form of a lion. According to Bauval and Hancock (and other researchers, such as John Anthony West) the weathering of the Sphinx by rainwater supports a date of construction c. 10500 BC, at the same time as the ground plan had been designed for the three Giza pyramids. I would like to make three critical observations on this theory. Firstly, the geological evidence for an older Sphinx, based on the work of the geologist Robert Schoch, is more in line with 5000-4000 BC than with the extreme date of 10500 BC. I know from personal discussion with Robert Schoch that he is quite unhappy with the way Bauval, Hancock and West have hijacked his evidence to fit their pet theory. Secondly, as I pointed out in chapter 1 (p. 24) of my book ‘The Phoenix Solution’ (1998), there is a much more plausible reason fot the importance of the age of Leo in ancient Egypt, namely that the Sun rose against the backdrop of Leo during the heliacal rising of the star Sirius at the summer solstice throughout most of Egyptian dynastic history. The leonine imagery of the Sphinx (if indeed it be a lion) points us not necessarily to the 11th millennium BC, but rather to the much more plausible era of the 4th millennium BC. Thirdly, I would question the assumption that the Sphinx has the body of a lion. In fact, as Robert Temple has pointed out, the Sphinx has ‘no mane, no tufted tail (and) no raised haunches’, which we would expect of a lion, and nor does it have a lion’s powerful shoulders. Furthermore, the lion was a dualistic concept in ancient Egyptian myth and architecture; lion sphinxes, for example, were generally built in pairs, protecting the entrances to temples. And yet the Sphinx of Giza is most certainly a solitary figure; there is no evidence whatsoever for a second Sphinx. On balance, it seems to me that, as Robert Temple has suggested, the Sphinx was built with the body of a dog, presumably to symbolise Anubis (with the cat’s tail representing a later modification). Anubis, it should be noted, was the god who guarded the Earth and the Underworld, and protected the body of Osiris. With the Pyramid representing Osiris (Pyramid Texts, Utterance 600), it would make sense that the Sphinx was originally an image of Anubis (its head was probably recarved from the head of a dog to the head of a king). The Anubis theory may, or may not, be correct, but its plausibility brings into question the widely-held assumption that the Sphinx has the body of a lion. Of course, if the Sphinx has the body of a dog, then astronomy is of no use whatsoever in dating it. All things considered, the Sphinx offers no evidence whatosever in support of the panleonist lost civilisation theory. It might well date to the pre-dynastic era (as I have indeed argued in ‘The Phoenix Solution’), but probably to no earlier than the 5th or 6th millennium BC. Summary Much credit is due to Bauval, Gilbert, Hancock and West for getting us all looking at Egypt again with a fresh perspective. But the debate must move on, and frankly I would like to see an end to this obsession with 10500 BC. At the present time, there is not one single piece of evidence anywhere in the world to justify the idea that 10500 BC was being commemorated by a lost civilisation. In my view, this obsession with 10500 BC has done great harm, and continues to do great harm, to the cause of those, such as myself, who would make a serious challenge to official dogma on the origin of the Giza pyramids and the history of civilisation. Yes, there is a mystery which requires an explanation. But what if the answer to the mystery lies not in 10500 BC but rather in the more plausible period of 6000-5000 BC? The worst thing we can do is investigate the past with a preconceived dogma to rival that of mainstream academia. Rather, it is time to take account of all the scientific evidence and draw our conclusions accordingly. Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 18715406 2014-06-22 05:52:02 2014-06-22 05:52:02 open open egypt-the-lost-civilisation-theory-by-alan-f-alford-18715406 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan Netanyahu ‘loathes’ Obama, Israel’s opposition leader charges http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/15/netanyahu-loathes-obama-israel-s-opposition-leader-charges-18669316/ Sun, 15 Jun 2014 03:15:31 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Netanyahu ‘loathes’ Obama, Israel’s opposition leader charges PM’s hostility to president is ‘endangering Israel’s security,’ claims Labor’s Isaac Herzog, in rare confirmation of long-rumored strained ties between ‘Bibi’ and ‘Barack’ By TIMES OF ISRAEL STAFF [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “loathes” Barack Obama, and his hostile attitude to the US president constitutes a danger to Israel’s well-being, the head of the Israeli opposition charged on Friday night, in a highly unusual acknowledgement of the long-rumored strained personal ties between the two leaders. minister, Labor party chairman Isaac Herzog slammed Netanyahu for failing to listen to the international community, failing to present peace proposals of his own for an accord with the Palestinians, and failing to work properly with Obama. It was “a tragedy” that Netanyahu had not presented a peace plan, and was instead “dragged” into responding to other proposals, said Herzog. “The second tragedy, that endangers the security of Israel, is his loathing and hostility for Barack Obama,” Herzog went on, describing this as “one of Netanyahu’s gravest failures. Herzog, who was minister of welfare under Netanyahu from 2009-2011, was speaking in an interview on Channel 2 news in the aftermath of this week’s formation of a new Hamas-backed Palestinian unity government. Netanyahu had called on the international community to stand up against what he described as a government backed by a terrorist organization, but instead the US led the world in making clear that it would work with the new Palestinian government, and the EU, the UN and much of the rest of the international community quickly followed suit. US President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu go informal at Ben Gurion Airport, March 22, 2013 (photo credit: Avi Ohayon/GPO/Flash90) Netanyahu and Obama have long been perceived as having a strained relationship, with policy differences emerging over how to stop Iran’s nuclear program, and the prime minister’s expansion of settlements, among other issues. Obama gave an interview which indicated criticism of some of Netanyahu’s key policies just as the prime minister was flying to meet him at the White House in March, and Netanyahu was seen by some in the US as having sought to bolster Mitt Romney’s prospects in the 2012 presidential elections. But formally Israeli and American leaders have generally insisted that the two work together professionally. Obama took pains to speak of “my friend Bibi,” using the prime minister’s nickname, when he visited Israel last year, and Netanyahu reciprocated by calling him “my friend Barack.” For a figure as prominent as Herzog to use Israel’s most-watched news program to declare that the prime minister loathes the US president was unprecedented. Sources close to Netanyahu have claimed that Secretary of State John Kerry had promised the prime minister that the US would not work with the new Palestinian government, and had thus breached understandings with Israel. Herzog charged that Netanyahu “does not listen” to the international community, and they don’t listen to him. Under Netanyahu, Israel was now “completely isolated,” he said. Opposition leader Isaac Herzog, left, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Photo credit: Kobi Gideon/Flash90) As opposition leader, Herzog receives regular briefings on diplomatic and security issues from Netanyahu and other leading figures. He has been urging relatively dovish members of the governing coalition — notably the Hatnua party led by Tzipi Livni and the centrist Yesh Atid of Yair Lapid — to leave the government and back him. Herzog said Israel needed to negotiate with the Palestinians on the principle of a two-state solution based on the pre-1967 lines, with land swaps and “arrangements” to resolve the contested fate of Jerusalem. When it was suggested to him that Netanyahu was prepared to go along with such ideas, Herzog retorted, “His mistake is that he’s not put a proposal on the table. In comments earlier in the week, Herzog had blamed the US and EU recognition of the Hamas-backed Palestinian unity government on the “complete collapse of Israeli foreign policy” under Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman. “Netanyahu and Liberman failed to understand the international arena,” he said. “Netanyahu speaks [but] the world doesn’t listen,” said Herzog Wednesday, adding that the prime minister’s failure to lead a diplomatic process “let Hamas into the West Bank through the front door.” Herzog warned that if Netanyahu did not act on the diplomatic front, “Israel will lose the support of the international community and the ability to preserve [Israel] as a Jewish and democratic state.” The opposition leader called on the prime minister to come up with a clear plan to avoid Israel becoming a binational state with a Jewish minority. “The man who describes himself as strong against Hamas is revealed as being strong at nothing but talking, Herzog wrote in a Facebook post. Israel has castigated the US over its position, arguing that by maintaining ties with a government supported by a terror group, the US was indicating to PA President Mahmoud Abbas that it was okay to “form a government with a terrorist group.” “I’m deeply troubled by the announcement that the United States will work with the Palestinian government backed by Hamas,” Netanyahu said Wednesday, noting that the Islamist group has murdered “countless innocent civilians.” “All those who genuinely seek peace must reject President Abbas’s embrace of Hamas, and most especially, I think the United States must make it absolutely clear to the Palestinian president that his pact with Hamas, a terrorist organization that seeks Israel’s liquidation, is simply unacceptable,” he said. Earlier Wednesday, Kerry defended a US decision to work with the new Palestinian unity government, despite Israeli criticism, emphasizing that the new Palestinian leadership did not include any Hamas ministers. Speaking to reporters in Beirut, Kerry said Abbas “made clear that this new technocratic government is committed to the principles of non violence, negotiations, recognizing the state of Israel, acceptance of the previous agreements and the Quartet principles.” “Based on what we know now about the composition of this technocratic government, which has no minister affiliated to Hamas and is committed to the principles that I describe, we will work with it as we need to, as appropriate.” While on an unscheduled visit to Beirut, Kerry said: “I want to make it very clear we are going to be watching it (the government) very closely, as we have said from day one, to absolutely ensure that it upholds each of those things it has talked about, that it doesn’t cross the line.” The new Palestinian cabinet was sworn in Monday, after a surprise reconciliation deal reached in April between Hamas and the PLO. Read more: Netanyahu 'loathes' Obama, Israel's opposition leader charges | The Times of Israel http://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahus-loathes-obama-israels-opposition-leader-charges/#ixzz341JqNttu </p> 18669316 2014-06-15 03:15:31 2014-06-15 03:15:31 open open netanyahu-loathes-obama-israel-s-opposition-leader-charges-18669316 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Can Progressives Learn from Eric Cantor’s Defeat? Ralph Nader June 13, 2014 http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/14/can-progressives-learn-from-eric-cantor-s-defeat-ralph-nader-june-13-18666081/ Sat, 14 Jun 2014 01:35:58 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Can Progressives Learn from Eric Cantor’s Defeat? Ralph Nader June 13, 2014 The stunning upset defeat of House Majority Leader, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) by Professor David Brat, an economist from Randolph-Macon College, in Tuesday’s Republican Primary has several takeaways for progressives besides envy and shame over why they do not directly take on the corporate Democrats. First, among all the reasons for Cantor’s fall, there were the ones encapsulated in the Nation’s John Nichols’ description of Brat as an “anti-corporate conservative.” Repeatedly, Brat said he was for “free enterprise” but against “crony capitalist programs that benefit the rich and powerful.” David Brat pointed out that Cantor and the Republican establishment have “been paying way too much attention to Wall Street and not enough to Main Street.” Brat supported “the end of bulk phone and email data collection by the NSA” and other government agencies on constitutional grounds. Professor Brat attacked the Wall Street investment bankers who nearly “broke the financial system,” adding the applause line: “these guys should have gone to jail. Instead of going to jail, where did they go? They went to Eric Cantor’s Rolodex.” An advocate of ethical capitalism, with religious-Christian overtones, Mr. Brat went after the deal-making in Washington, such as Cantor’s close relationships with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable. He especially berated Cantor for weakening the proposed bill to ban insider trading by members of Congress by exempting their family members and spouses. He chastised Cantor on immigration, taking advantage of the latter’s wavering appeal to voters who believe that large corporations, represented by Cantor, want a never-ending supply of cheap foreign labor to hold wages down. On the other hand, Brat opposes a minimum wage on libertarian grounds. In addition, David Brat, described as a “commanding orator who mixes fiery rhetoric with academic references and self-depreciating humor,” wants a balanced-budget amendment, a “fair or flat tax,” and is opposed to federal educational programs such as “No Child Left Behind.” Brat is a mixed bag for progressives. But in that mix is a clear populist challenge by Main Street against Wall Street and by ordinary people against the corporate government with subsidies and bailouts that the Left calls corporate welfare and the Right calls crony capitalism. Therein lies the potential for a winning majority alliance between Left and Right as my new book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State, relates in realistic detail. Second, Professor Brat spent about $230,000 to Eric Cantor’s $5.7 million. However, David Brat more than made up for the money deficit with energy, focused barbs and the shoe-leather of his committed followers. On election night, Brat made the point that progressives would do well to heed, as they obsess over big money in politics; “Dollars don’t vote,” he said, “people do.” Interestingly, Tea Party forces and donors claim they thought Cantor was so unbeatable that they didn’t even fund David Brat even though he had two national radio talk show hosts speaking well of him. Can’t progressives find that kind of energy with their many broader issues and larger support base? Can’t they find capable so-called “nobodies” with hidden talent to become publically heralded champions? There are fresh voices everywhere who can take on the corporate Democrats, like the Clintons, who work with Wall Streeters and espouse crony capitalism and with neocons to advance militarism abroad, along with corporate-managed, job destroying trade agreements and off-shore tax havens? Unfortunately the driving energy of progressives, including the dissipating Occupy Wall Street effort, is not showing up in the electoral arena. The political energy, the policy disputes and the competitive contests are among the Republicans, not the Democrats, observed the astute political commentator and former Clinton White House aide, Bill Curry. The third lesson from the decisive Cantor upset is not to embrace the political attitude that calls for settling, from the outset, for the least-of-the-worst choices. Progressives have expressed and harbored strong criticisms of the Democratic Party establishment and their adoption of corporatist policies, but election cycle after election cycle, fearful of the Republican bad guys, they signal to the Democrat incumbents that the least-of-the-worst is acceptable. Like the liberals they often consort with, progressives do not ask: “Why not the best?” with the plan that they will either win or at least pull their Party away from the relentless 24/7 grip of big-time corporatism. The final takeaway from this fascinating Virginian contest in the 7th Congressional District near Richmond was that Cantor’s tactics backfired. The more Cantor spent on TV, radio, billboard ads and mailings, the more David Brat became known and the more people were reminded that Washington and Wall Street really do not care about people on Main Street. That is truly the nub of a Left-Right alliance. In recent decades, pollsters would sometimes pose a variation of the question: “Do you believe that X candidate or Y party or Z in Washington cares about people like you?” The responses revealed a sizable majority of people, regardless of their ideological or political labels, said “no.” With the interest of the public, the community and the country in the forefront, those “nos” can become “yeses” for a long-overdue rejuvenated and just society driven by reality and edified by its ideals. </p> 18666081 2014-06-14 01:35:58 2014-06-14 01:35:58 open open can-progressives-learn-from-eric-cantor-s-defeat-ralph-nader-june-13-18666081 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan DISCOVER MAGAZINE FROM THE JUNE 2014 ISSUE http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/31/discover-magazine-from-the-june-2014-issue-18567724/ Sat, 31 May 2014 23:56:57 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] DISCOVER MAGAZINE FROM THE JUNE 2014 ISSUE 20 Things You Didn't Know About... Noise Did you know the Big Bang was noiseless? By Jonathon Keats|Friday, May 23, 2014 RELATED TAGS: SENSES Share on facebookShare on twitterShare on emailShare on printMore Sharing Services39 Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock 1. The Big Bang was noiseless. Everything in the universe expanded uniformly, so nothing came into contact with anything else. No contact, no sound waves. 2. Astronomer Fred Hoyle coined the term Big Bang in the ’50s, not because he thought it was noisy, but because he thought the theory was ridiculous. 3. For a really big bang, you should have heard Krakatoa in 1883. On Aug. 27, the volcanic island in Indonesia erupted with the explosive power of 200 megatons of TNT. The eruption could be heard nearly 3,000 miles away, making it the loudest noise in recorded history. 4. There are people who would outdo it if they could. They pack their cars with stereo amps to pump out 180-plus decibels (dB) of noise at so-called dB drag races. That’s how loud a jet engine would sound — if it were a foot away from your ear. 5. Jets get a bad rap. According to psychoacoustician Hugo Fastl, people perceive airplane noise as if it were 10 dB greater than the equivalent noise made by a train. 6. Since the decibel scale is logarithmic, growing exponentially, that means a jet sounds 10 times noisier than a train when the noise levels of both vehicles are objectively the same. 7. The only difference is that people find plane noises more annoying. The effects are dubbed the “railway bonus” and “aircraft malus.” 8. The first known noise ordinance was passed by the Greek province of Sybaris in the sixth century B.C. Tinsmiths and roosters were required to live outside the town limits. 9. Recognizing noise exposure as an occupational safety hazard took longer. The first scientific study was initiated in 1886 by Glasgow surgeon Thomas Barr. After he tested the hearing of 100 boilermakers, he determined that incessant pounding of hammers against metal boilers caused severe hearing loss. 10. One of Barr’s solutions to the problem of “boilermaker’s ear” was to suggest that clergymen shave their beards so that workmen could lip-read their sermons. 11. No wonder unprotected boilermaking was a problem: The human ear can perceive sound waves that move the eardrum less than the width of an atom. 12. You can fight noise with noise. The first patent on “active noise cancellation” dates to 1933, when German physicist Paul Lueg proposed to silence sound waves by simultaneously generating waves of the exact opposite orientation. The principle is now used in noise-canceling headsets. 13. Bring yours to the bar. Researchers at the Université de Bretagne-Sud have found that men imbibe more than 20 percent faster when ambient noise is cranked up from 72 to 88 dB. 14. And people are only getting louder. According to the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, the volume of an animated conversation between Americans increased by 10 dB during the ’90s. 15. Social and ambient noise causes hearing loss, often misdiagnosed as an effect of aging. Preventing it would require that cities become 10 dB quieter. 16. Deafness isn’t the only medical danger of noise exposure. The stress causes some 45,000 fatal heart attacks a year in the developing world, according to researcher Dieter Schwela of the Stockholm Environment Institute. 17. And then there’s the unintended assault on ocean dwellers by noisy navy sonar. The disorienting sound drives beaked whales to beach themselves, and it makes humpbacks extend the length of their songs by 29 percent. 18. To carry the same amount of information in a noisier environment, the whale songs have become more repetitive. Noise can be the nemesis of any signal. 19. Except when noise is the signal. Back in the ’60s, Bell Labs astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson kept picking up static with their radio telescope. They eventually realized that the noise was the sound of the universe itself, a remnant of a dense, hot plasma that pervaded the early cosmos. 20. Their discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation won them the Nobel Prize because the remnant heat showed that the universe must have begun with a violent explosion. Sorry, Fred Hoyle. The Big Bang is proven. </p> 18567724 2014-05-31 23:56:57 2014-05-31 23:56:57 open open discover-magazine-from-the-june-2014-issue-18567724 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS Pakistan: Worse Than We Knew Ahmed Rashid June 5, 2014 Issue The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001–2014 by Carlotta Gall http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/31/new-york-review-of-books-pakistan-worse-than-we-knew-ahmed-rashid-june-5-2014-issue-the-wrong-enemy-america-in-afghanistan-2001-2014-by-carlotta--18567698/ Sat, 31 May 2014 23:36:37 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS Pakistan: Worse Than We Knew Ahmed Rashid June 5, 2014 Issue The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001–2014 by Carlotta Gall Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 329 pp., $28.00 Alexandra Boulat/VII A pro-Taliban rally in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s Balochistan province, circa 2002 During the Afghan elections in early April I was traveling in Central Asia, mainly in Kyrgyzstan. I wanted to inquire into the fears of the governments there as a result of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. What did they think of the growth of Taliban and Islamic extremism in Afghanistan and Pakistan? Officials in each country cited two threats. First, the internal radicalizing of their young people by increasing numbers of preachers or proselytizing groups arriving from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Middle East. The second, more dangerous threat is external: they believe that extremist groups based in Pakistan and Afghanistan are trying to infiltrate Central Asia in order to launch terrorist attacks. Islamic extremism is infecting the entire region and this will ultimately become the legacy of the US occupation of Afghanistan, as the so-called jihad by the Taliban against the US comes to an end. Iran, a Shia state, fears that the Sunni extremist groups that have installed themselves in Pakistan’s Balochistan province on the Iranian border will step up their attacks inside Iran. In February Iran threatened to send troops into Balochistan unless Pakistan helped free five Iranian border guards who had been kidnapped by militants. (The Pakistanis freed four of the guards; one was killed.) Chinese officials say they are particularly concerned about terrorist groups coming out of Pakistan and Afghanistan that are undermining Chinese security. Although China is Pakistan’s closest ally, its officials have made it clear that they are closely monitoring the Uighur Muslims from Xinjiang province, who are training in Pakistan, fighting in Afghanistan, and have carried out several terrorist attacks in Xinjiang. Terrorist assaults from Pakistan into Indian Kashmir have declined sharply since 2003, but India has a perennial fear that Islamic militant groups based in Pakistan’s Punjab province may mount attacks in India. Many Punjabi fighters have joined the Taliban forces based in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, and they have attacked Indian targets in Afghanistan. India is also wary of another terrorist attack resembling the one that took place in Mumbai in 2008. For forty years Pakistan has been backing Islamic extremist groups as part of its expansionist foreign policy in Afghanistan and Central Asia and its efforts to maintain equilibrium with India, its much larger enemy. Now Pakistan is undergoing the worst terrorist backlash in the entire region. Some 50,000 people have died in three separate and continuing insurgencies: one by the Taliban in the northwest, the other in Balochistan by Baloch separatists, and the third in Karachi by several ethnic groups. That sectarian war, involving suicide bombers, massacres, and kidnappings, has gripped the country for a decade. Some five thousand Pakistani soldiers and policemen have been killed and some twenty thousand wounded, both as targets of terrorist attacks and during offensives against them. The economy has sharply declined, and there are widespread electricity shortages. The political elite is divided and at odds with the military over how to deal with terrorism, while many in the middle class are leaving the country. Two years ago all the states in the region would have publicly or privately accused Pakistan’s military and Interservices Intelligence (ISI) of supporting, protecting, or at least tolerating almost every terrorist group based in Pakistan. The ISI had links with all of them and often collaborated with them. Recently those relations have changed. Governments in the region now accept that Pakistan is in some ways trying to fight terrorism on its soil. But those governments are also concerned that the Pakistani military and political elite have lost control of large parts of the country and cannot maintain law and order. The US and Western countries fear that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons arsenal is vulnerable and that terrorists in Pakistan may be planning an attack comparable to that of September 11. There is still no overall political or military strategy to combat Islamic extremism. The Pakistani army tries to suppress some terrorist groups but not, for example, those that target India. Such a selective strategy cannot be maintained indefinitely and poses enormous risks to the entire world. Since the mid-1970s the ISI has supported extremist Islamic groups in Afghanistan including the Taliban, but that policy may now be changing. Contrary to many predictions, the situation in Afghanistan may be taking a turn for the better. Despite the threat of Taliban reprisals, seven million Afghans turned out on April 5 to vote in the first presidential election in which President Hamid Karzai was not a candidate. This was also the first genuine attempt in Afghan history to transfer power democratically. A remarkable 58 percent of the 12 million eligible voters turned out—35 percent of them women. Although the Taliban did not make a show of force to stop the vote, relatively few people voted in many Taliban-controlled areas in the south and east. Preliminary results released on April 26 show the Tajik leader Abdullah Abdullah in the lead with 45 percent of the vote and his Pashtun rival Ashraf Ghani trailing with 32 percent. Over three thousand cases of fraud still have to be investigated before the count is final. Since neither candidate had a majority of 50 percent, there will be a runoff election between the two by the end of May. A new government will not be in place before July, which means that a security agreement with the US, which all the candidates have agreed to, will be delayed. The US and NATO want a military force of some ten thousand to stay in the country in order to train the Afghan army and gather intelligence. Such an agreement will be necessary if the US Congress and Europe are to be persuaded to keep the Kabul government financially afloat. Afghanistan needs a minimum of $7 billion a year to pay for its budget and army. In January the US Congress cut by half the $2 billion earmarked for US aid to Afghanistan. To bring the civil war to an end the new president will try to open talks with the Pashtun Taliban in Afghanistan. Pakistan is now also keen on such talks because two thirds of Pashtuns live in Pakistan, including members of the Taliban, and there has been talk by Islamists of carving out a separate Pashtun state. Will the Pakistan military put pressure on the Afghan Taliban leaders who live in Pakistan to talk to the new government in Kabul while Pakistan deals with its own Pashtun problem? A lot will depend on whether a much weakened Pakistan still has the power to force the Afghan Taliban to engage in negotiations. All the recent books I have seen on the Afghan wars have recounted how the Pakistani military backed the Taliban when they first emerged in 1993, but lost its influence by 2000. Then, after a brief respite following September 11, 2001, Pakistan’s military helped to resurrect the Taliban resistance to fight the Americans. My own three books on Afghanistan describe the actions of the Pakistani military as one factor in keeping the civil war going and contributing to the American failure to win decisively in Afghanistan.* Now in The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001–2014, Carlotta Gall, the New York Times reporter in Afghanistan and Pakistan for more than a decade, has gone one step further. She places the entire onus of the West’s failure in Afghanistan and the Taliban’s successes on the Pakistani military and the Taliban groups associated with it. Her book has aroused considerable controversy, not least in Pakistan. Its thesis is quite simple: The [Afghan] war has been a tragedy costing untold thousands of lives and lasting far too long. The Afghans were never advocates of terrorism yet they bore the brunt of the punishment for 9/11. Pakistan, supposedly an ally, has proved to be perfidious, driving the violence in Afghanistan for its own cynical, hegemonic reasons. Pakistan’s generals and mullahs have done great harm to their own people as well as their Afghan neighbors and NATO allies. Pakistan, not Afghanistan, has been the true enemy. Dogged, curious, insistent on uncovering hidden facts, Gall’s reporting over the years has been a nightmare for the American, Pakistani, and other foreign powers involved in Afghanistan, while it has been welcomed by many Afghans. She quickly emerged as the leading Western reporter living in Kabul. She made her reputation by reporting on the terrible loss of innocent Afghan lives as American aircraft continued to bomb the Pashtun areas in southern Afghanistan even after the war of 2001 had ended. The bombing of civilians was said to be accidental, supposedly based on faulty intelligence; but it continued for years and helped the Taliban turn the population against the Americans. Before human rights groups or police arrived in remote, bombed villages, Gall was often there first. Thus in July 2002, she writes of driving “for three days over dusty and rutted roads” to reach a village in Uruzgan province that had been bombed during a wedding. Fifty-four wedding guests were killed, including thirteen children from one household, and over one hundred people were wounded. The survivors of this massacre “were collecting body parts in a bucket”—Gall’s quote of the provincial governor that haunted reporters and other observers in Kabul. She continued: Sahib Jan, a twenty-five-year-old neighbor, was one of the first to reach the groom’s house after the bombardment. Bodies were lying all over the two courtyards and in the adjoining orchard, some of them in pieces. Human flesh hung in the trees. A woman’s torso was lodged in an almond sapling
. Bodies lay in the dust and rubble of the rooms below. Some of those killed were friends of President Karzai and these bombings infuriated him and caused his relations with the US to deteriorate. As late as 2009 Gall was still covering such disasters, as when US planes bombed the village of Granai, killing 147 people—“the worst single incident of civilian casualties of the war.” Carlotta Gall was, in effect, a one-woman human rights agency. She spent much time and effort exposing the torture and killing of Afghans taken prisoner by the Americans. This was a highly sensitive issue—the American victors did not expect American media to expose their wrongdoings. But Gall went ahead. She told the heartbreaking story of Dilawar, a naive taxi driver who was wrongly arrested in Khost in eastern Afghanistan, incarcerated in an isolation ward at the US airbase at Bagram, and then beaten to death by his American jailors. She spent many weeks tracking down Dilawar’s family and obtained the death certificate issued by the US Army: I gasped as I read it. I had been looking to learn more about the Afghans being detained. I had not expected to find a homicide committed by American soldiers. Nobody was ever charged and the same US team of interrogators was deployed to Abu Ghraib in Iraq—the other site of grisly US treatment of prisoners. Gall’s modesty does not allow her to mention that it was this story that led to the making of the 2007 Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side. Robert Nickelsberg Prayer flags at a Taliban graveyard on the outskirts of Kandahar city, Afghanistan, February 2005; photograph by Robert Nickelsberg from his book Afghanistan: A Distant War, just published by Prestel All her skills were put to the test when she reported on the death of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad and tried to discover whether senior Pakistanis had been hiding him all along. Methodically adding one fact to another, she concludes not only that some were, which is convincing, but that all the top officials in the military and the ISI knew of his whereabouts, although the evidence she offers for such widespread knowledge is not wholly plausible; and her assertion that there was a specific “bin Laden desk” at the ISI appears, from my own inquiries, to be flimsy. For many Pakistanis the main failure of the government is that nobody has ever been punished or held responsible either for hiding bin Laden or not discovering him earlier. Gall surmises that the ISI had let it be known that bin Laden’s hideaway was an ISI safe house. That is why nobody ever knocked on the door—a reasonable assumption. However, the fiercest opposition to her views comes from American officials themselves. They insist, as they are obliged to do, that none of the top Pakistani leaders knew of bin Laden’s whereabouts. Gall’s conclusion that the Obama administration deliberately kept the ISI’s role in harboring bin Laden secret in order to save the US–Pakistan relationship is difficult to accept for two reasons. The first is simply the propensity of officials in Washington to leak to journalists. The second is that US–Pakistani relations would collapse a few months after the killing of bin Laden over different issues, notably Pakistan’s support of the Taliban. The US therefore would not have been so concerned to protect its relations with Pakistan. Most states today, including the US and NATO countries, believe that the Pakistani military is no longer in control of the Taliban in Afghanistan or capable of putting decisive pressure on them. The army leaders have too much of a problem at home with their own Pakistani Taliban. Their ability to persuade the Afghan Taliban to make peace with Kabul is very limited. Moreover, the Pakistani military has shown no willingness to kick the Afghan Taliban out of Pakistan and back to Afghanistan. The civilian government is trying to negotiate with the Pakistani Taliban but the military is against such talks and would rather use force, a major division in policymaking in Islamabad. There are enormous risks involved, such as the two Talibans merging to fight the Pakistani army. The Pakistani military belatedly understands that a Taliban conquest in Afghanistan would eventually ensure that Pakistan would find itself with a Taliban government in Islamabad. As Gall recounts, the Pakistani army has spent years propping up the Afghan Taliban, training their fighters, allowing them to import arms and money from the Arabian Gulf and to recruit among Pakistani youth. As Gall shows, the army even decided which tactics the Afghan Taliban should use. The army is now desperate to find a political solution that would send the Afghan Taliban home. Many army and police officers find themselves confused as they are ordered to protect some Taliban and other extremists and kill others. Pakistani officials are supposed to be loyal allies of the US and they take its money but they also are encouraged by powerful Pakistanis to promote anti-Americanism in society and the army. There has been no adequate explanation for these dual-track policies, which have ravaged state and society and undermined the army internally. Moreover the army is still not prepared to give up its militant stand against India. Gall writes that Pakistani soldiers “were fighting, and dying, in campaigns against Islamist militants, apparently at the request of America, but at the same time they were being fed a constant flow of anti-American and pro-Taliban propaganda.” Unfortunately she does not acknowledge that there have been shifts in the military’s thinking and that it faces the more open kind of confusion over its strategy and its loyalties that I have described. Her book starts and ends on the same note even though thirteen years have elapsed. Afghans have observed that the ISI has not interfered in the Afghan elections. Contrary to its policy since the 1970s, it has avoided favoring Pashtun candidates. It has also tried to improve relations with the former anti- Taliban Northern Alliance (NA) warlords it once opposed by meeting with the leaders of Tajik, Hazara, and Uzbek groups that were the major components of the alliance. Consequently all the Afghan presidential candidates have softened their comments on Pakistan, avoiding the harsh rhetoric of Hamid Karzai. Yet for the reasons described by Gall, the Pakistani military still does not comprehend how deeply Pakistan is hated by most Afghans. Even today the worst atrocities and suicide bombings causing civilian deaths are often blamed on the Taliban elements “trained by Pakistanis.” Hatred for Pakistan is possibly even stronger among the Afghan Pashtuns who have been Pakistan’s traditional allies. The Pakistani army must undergo deep self-examination and show considerable humility in dealing with the Afghans if it is to genuinely create an opportunity for peace. However there are large gaps in Gall’s analysis that cannot be ignored. Pakistan was not the only cause of the failure to control the Afghan Taliban; the failure in Afghanistan has been an American failure as well. The lack of a US political strategy stretched over four administrations. Two Presidents—Bush and Obama—were unable to make up their minds about what to do in Afghanistan or how many troops should carry out which tasks. The overwhelming militarization of US decision-making and the hubris of American generals undermined diplomacy and nation-building; the US failed to curb open production of opium and other drugs. There was constant infighting between the White House, Defense, and State Departments over policy. There was also widespread corruption and waste both in the private contracting system used by the US military and in some of the operations of the US Agency for International Development. The list of such American failures is indeed long, and assigning responsibility for the losses in Afghanistan will occupy US historians for decades. Gall’s second omission is not to recognize the negative effects caused by the neighboring countries, apart from Pakistan, and their constant interference in Afghanistan. She ignores the Afghan civil war after 1989 when all the Afghan warlords had international backers. She fails to mention that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia backed the Taliban while Russia, Iran, India, Turkey, and the Central Asian republics supported the Northern Alliance. More recently Iran has given sanctuary to the Taliban and al-Qaeda, India is funding the Baloch separatist insurgency in Pakistan, and Afghanistan has provided a refuge to the leader of the Pakistani Taliban. The US presence has failed to provide protection for people in the region. Most Afghans will tell you today that what they fear most about the Americans leaving is that intervention from all the country’s neighbors will start again. Gall doesn’t blame neighbors other than Pakistan. Why did Pakistan adopt policies of intervention in Afghanistan, especially after September 11, when it had essentially lost the game in Afghanistan? There has been a disastrous logic to the military’s policies—which more thoughtful Pakistanis have always resisted. Here some history is useful. The Pakistan military has used militant political groups as an arm of its foreign policy in India and Afghanistan since the 1970s. This was allowed by the West as part of the cold war. During the 1980s the CIA funded the Afghan Mujahideen and Islamic extremists from forty countries when they were fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. It was not until September 11 that Pakistan’s use of Islamic extremists as a tool of its foreign policy became unacceptable. After September 11 General Pervez Musharraf and the military regime believed that they could, for a time, appear to meet US demands by capturing al-Qaeda leaders while avoiding harm to the Afghan Taliban. Musharraf was always treated as a messiah by the Bush administration; but a year after September 11 well-informed Pakistanis knew that Musharraf had started playing a double game with the Americans by covertly supporting a Taliban resurgence. What was the Pakistan military’s logic in doing so? After the war to oust the Taliban was over in 2001 the military faced the defeat of its Taliban allies and had to suffer the Northern Alliance and its backers—including India and Iran—as victors in Kabul. Musharraf felt he had to preserve some self-respect; and Bush appeared to acknowledge this when he allowed ISI agents to be airlifted out of Kunduz before the city fell to the Northern Alliance and its backers—a series of events well described by Gall. Bush had also promised Musharraf that the NA would not enter Kabul before a neutral Afghan body under the UN took over the city. But as the Taliban fled, the NA walked into Kabul without a fight and took over the government. The Pakistani military was further angered at Bonn in December 2001, when the new Afghan government was unveiled and all the provincial security ministries were handed over to the Northern Alliance, with Pashtun representation at a minimum. This was the usual outcome by which the spoils of war went to the victors, but for Pakistan’s generals it was further humiliation that bred resentment and a desire for revenge. The military was equally perplexed about why the US did not commit more ground troops to hunt down al-Qaeda instead of leaving that task to Northern Alliance warlords. The military was convinced that the Americans would soon abandon Afghanistan for the war in Iraq and leave the NA, backed by India, in charge in Kabul. Bush’s refusal to commit even one thousand US troops to the mountains of Tora Bora where bin Laden was trapped sent a powerful message to Pakistan. By 2003 US forces in Afghanistan still amounted to only 11,500 men—insufficient to hold the country. Five years later in 2008 there were only 35,000 US troops in Afghanistan, compared to five times that number in Iraq. The Pakistani military’s insecurity about American intentions and the growing power of the NA, India, and Iran led to its fateful decision to rearm the Taliban. It believed that the Taliban would provide a form of protection for the Pakistani military against its enemies. Instead the revamped Afghan Taliban helped create the Pakistani Taliban and the worst blowback of terrorism in Pakistan’s history. It is the Taliban’s terrorism within Pakistan rather than US pressure that altered the military’s position from backing the Afghan Taliban to its now seeking a peaceful Afghanistan. Gall’s account of the rise of the Taliban is also open to question. She writes that three commanders in Kandahar and Kabul—two of them drug smugglers and one of them a landlord—initiated the Taliban movement. Between 1994 and 1998, in Kandahar and Kabul, I interviewed nearly all the students who were the founding members of the Taliban and the three men she names were never mentioned, except as intermittent financiers. The founders of the Taliban were pious, conservative, simple young villagers who had fought the Soviets as foot soldiers and were now deeply disillusioned with their former leaders for fighting a civil war. They came together to rid Kandahar of criminal gangs. They then traveled around the country asking warlords to help end the civil war and bring peace. When that failed they decided to launch their own movement. Contrary to Gall’s account that they wanted power over Afghanistan from the first, the Taliban founders initially had only three aims—to end the civil war, disarm the population, and introduce an Islamic system. Until they reached the gates of Kabul in late 1995, they had no intentions of ruling the country. Instead they were demanding a Loya Jirga, or meeting of tribal elders, to decide who should rule. Some, like Mullah Borjan, were actually royalists who wanted to call back the former King Zahir Shah from exile. Gall says Borjan was killed at the behest of the ISI in 1996, although it is widely accepted that he died a year earlier in the first attack on Kabul. All the founding members of the Taliban I interviewed gave a different account from Gall’s of the rise of their leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. They all had equal status, the requisite piety, and a strong record of fighting the Soviets. There was no natural commander among them. After much debate they picked Omar as the first among equals, the most pious and apparently the most humble. His status rose only after he insisted that his colleagues swear an oath of allegiance to him. He continues to be powerful. Too much of Gall’s information and analysis on the history of the Taliban seems to reflect the views of the Afghan intelligence service, whose own interpretation is flawed and one-sided. Today, with Pakistan torn apart by unprecedented violence and the situation in Afghanistan still precarious, the Pakistani military has strong reasons to change its past policies of sponsoring wars fought by nonstate organizations. Some changes are happening, but only at a glacial pace. Serious reform needs to start at the lowest level of the military, at the schools and colleges from which the army is drawn, where drastic curriculum changes are needed. The ISI needs to be brought under a code of conduct and accountability, particularly with respect to its dealings with violent organizations. Its personnel should be trained in political realism rather than in ideological prejudices. Unless changes in the army can be made more quickly, there is still the danger that this nuclear power could slip into chaos. </p> 18567698 2014-05-31 23:36:37 2014-05-31 23:36:37 open open new-york-review-of-books-pakistan-worse-than-we-knew-ahmed-rashid-june-5-2014-issue-the-wrong-enemy-america-in-afghanistan-2001-2014-by-carlotta--18567698 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Khety II (nomarch) http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/31/khety-ii-nomarch-18567671/ Sat, 31 May 2014 23:09:53 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Khety II (nomarch) [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Khety II Nomarch of the 13th nomos of Upper Egypt Predecessor Tefibi Dynasty 10th dynasty Pharaoh Merykare Father Tefibi Burial Asyut Khety II was an ancient Egyptian nomarch of the 13th nomos of Upper Egypt ("the Upper Sycamore") during the reign of pharaoh Merykare of the 10th dynasty (c. 21st century BCE, during the First Intermediate Period).[1] Biography He was one of the last of a long line of nomarchs in Asyut with strong bonds of loyalty and friendship towards the herakleopolite dynasty: his father was the nomarch Tefibi, himself son of the nomarch Khety I, and a herakleopolite pharaoh had joined the mourning for the latter's grandfather (i.e. Khety II's great-great-grandfather). After Tefibi's death, Khety II was installed as a nomarch by king Merykare himself, who sailed up the Nile with his court on a fleet. It is known that Khety II undertook some restoration works in the local temple of Wepwawet.[1] He was loyal to the 10th dynasty until the end, and probably died shortly before the fall of Asyut by the Theban pharaoh Mentuhotep II of the 11th dynasty, which preceded the final capitulation of Herakleopolis and thus the end of the civil war. Under the reign of Mentuhotep II, the old line of nomarchs represented by Khety II and his ancestors was replaced by a new, pro-Theban one.[1] His unfinished tomb at Asyut has been excavated several times since the late 19th century, most recently in 2003-2006.[2] References Hayes, op. cit., pp. 467–470. El Khadragu, Mahmoud, "New Discoveries in the Tomb of Khety II at Asyut", Bulletin of the Australian Centre for Egyptology 17, 2006. Bibliography William C. Hayes, in The Cambridge Ancient History, vol 1, part 2, 1971 (2008), Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-077915.</p> 18567671 2014-05-31 23:09:53 2014-05-31 23:09:53 open open khety-ii-nomarch-18567671 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan Was Flight MH370 Taken Out by a US Drone? http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/29/was-flight-mh370-taken-out-by-a-us-drone-18556904/ Thu, 29 May 2014 01:20:14 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Flight MH370: mystery cargo continues to raise questions www.theweek.co.uk http://www.nnrusa.com/ LAST UPDATED AT 13:12 ON Fri 23 May 2014 Flight MH370 conspiracy theories: what happened to the missing plane? The mystery of flight MH370: 7 other planes that vanished Questions continue to circle around a mystery shipment that was on board Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 when it disappeared more than two months ago. NNR Global Logistics, a Penang-based company that handled some of the cargo, has refused to reveal its contents. The company admitted that 200kg of lithium-ion batteries formed part of the shipment. But a senior official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Engineering and Technology (E&T) Magazine this formed only part of the consignment, which weighed a total 2,453kg. He said that NNR Global has been told by its solicitors not to disclose details of the cargo because of the ongoing investigations into the missing aircraft. E&T says that "what is even more surprising" is that the company that produced the batteries has also not been named. Neither NNR Global Logistics nor Malaysia Airlines have been willing to identify the manufacturer, saying that it was "highly confidential". When questioned, the airline said that the remaining weight was "radio accessories and charges" but this was not documented in the cargo manifest. The manifest stated only that NNR shipped 133 pieces of one item, weighing a total of 1990kg, and 67 pieces of another item, weighing a total of 463kg. There were also strict instructions on the manifest that the batteries should be handled with care and that there was a flammability hazard. However, several experts have ruled out the theory that the plane might have caught fire, as it would have struggled to fly on for several hours afterwards. According to Malaysian newspaper The Star, NNR Global's base is less than 100m from Penang International Airport. "The complex is guarded by the police and only those with passes are allowed entry," said the newspaper. The underwater hunt for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane has resumed and will complete a search in a targeted area of the Indian Ocean before handing over to private contractors within the next week. Flight MH370: book claims missing plane was shot down 20 May A new book claims that the missing Malaysian Airways flight MH370 may have been shot down accidentally by US-Thai joint strike fighters in a military exercise that went wrong in the South China Sea. The book also claims that search and rescue efforts were deliberately sent in the wrong direction as part of a cover-up, the Daily Mail reports. Flight MH370 – The Mystery, by British writer Nigel Cawthorne, bases its theory on the account of a New Zealand oil rig worker Mike McKay who says he saw a jet liner "burst into fire" on the evening the flight went missing. McKay said that he saw something "burning at high altitude" over the oil rig on which he works, the Songa Mercur located off Vung Tau, on the south east coast of Vietnam. Cawthorne suggests that such evidence indicates that there may have been a cover-up over the disappearance of the MH370. In the book's introduction, Cawthorne says that relatives of the plane's passengers will "almost certainly" never know the fate of those who went missing. The family of Rod Burrows, an Australian man who was aboard the flight, criticised the timing of the book's release, 71 days after the jet went missing. Irene Burrows, his mother, told the Melbourne Herald Sun that the publication of the book was premature. "Nobody knows what happened so why would anyone want to put out a book at this stage?" she said. "There's absolutely no answers. It's devastating for the families. It's ten weeks tomorrow and there's nothing," she said. In a blog post, Malaysia's former prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, wrote that he believes the US Central Intelligence Agency must know something about the plane's fate. "Airplanes don't just disappear," he wrote on his blog. "Certainly not these days with all the powerful communication systems, radio and satellite tracking and filmless cameras which operate almost indefinitely and possess huge storage capacities. "For some reason, the media will not print anything that involves Boeing or the CIA." In an effort to counter the increasing swirl of rumours, Malaysia said today that it would release data from the British satellite company Inmarsat which had been used to define the search area for the missing plane. "In moving forward it is imperative for us to provide helpful information to the next of kin and general public, which will include the data communication logs as well as relevant explanation to enable the reader to understand the data provided," the Malaysian government said in a statement. Relatives of those on board Flight MH370, who have been critical of Malaysia's response, have previously claimed that Inmarsat's data did not "support a definitive conclusion that no other flight path was possible," The Guardian reported. Read more: http://www.theweek.co.uk/world-news/flight-mh370/57641/flight-mh370-mystery-cargo-continues-to-raise-questions#ixzz32zWJh0jv Posted by: Louis Sheehan </p> 18556904 2014-05-29 01:20:14 2014-05-29 01:20:14 open open was-flight-mh370-taken-out-by-a-us-drone-18556904 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan EU Parliamentary election polls show England's far-right UKIP party and Le Pen's party in France leading in their respective countries; in Greece, the far-left sees gains. http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/27/eu-parliamentary-election-polls-show-england-s-far-right-ukip-party-and-le-pen-s-party-in-france-leading-in-their-respective-countries-in-greece--18549215/ Tue, 27 May 2014 03:57:58 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] The rise of far-right wing parties in Europe By REUTERS 05/26/2014 03:21 BRUSSELS - Eurosceptic nationalists scored stunning victories in European Parliament elections in France and Britain on Sunday as critics of the European Union more than doubled their seats in a continent-wide protest vote against austerity and unemployment. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls called the breakthrough by Marine Le Pen's anti-immigration, anti-euro National Front in one of the EU's founding nations a political "earthquake". Anti-establishment parties of the far right and hard left, their scores amplified by low turnout, made gains in many countries although in Germany, the EU's biggest member state with the largest number of seats, and Italy, the pro-European centre ground held firm. In a vote that raised more doubts about Britain's long-term future in the EU, Nigel Farage's UK Independence Party, which advocates immediate withdrawal, led the opposition Labour party and Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservatives comfortably with almost half the results declared. A jubilant Le Pen, whose party beat President Francois Hollande's ruling Socialists into third place, told supporters: "The people have spoken loud and clear ... they no longer want to be led by those outside our borders, by EU commissioners and technocrats who are unelected. "They want to be protected from globalisation and take back the reins of their destiny." With 80 percent of votes counted, the National Front had won 26 percent of the vote, comfortably ahead of the conservative opposition UMP on 20.6 percent, with the Socialists on 13.8, their second heavy defeat in two months after losing dozens of town halls in March. First official results from around the 28-nation bloc showed the pro-European centre-left and centre-right parties will keep control of the 751-seat EU legislature, but the number of Eurosceptic members will more than double. The centre-right European People's Party, led by former Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, was set to win 212 seats, preliminary results issued by the parliament showed. "As the EPP has a strong lead ... I am ready to accept the mandate of the European Commission president," Juncker told reporters in parliament. "We will have a clear pro-European majority in this house." The centre-left Socialists led by outgoing European Parliament President Martin Schulz of Germany were in second place with 186 seats followed by the centrist liberals on 70 and the Greens on 55. Eurosceptic groups were expected to win about 141 seats, according to a Reuters estimate, the far left 43 and conservatives 44. A glum looking Schulz would not concede defeat, telling reporters he would negotiate with other parties. "It is a bad day for the European Union when a party with such a racist, xenophobic and anti-Semite programme gets 24-25 percent of the vote in France," he said. "But these voters aren't extremists, they have lost trust, they have lost hope." UKIP MAKE BIG GAINS The political fallout may be felt more strongly in national politics than at EU level, pulling mainstream conservative parties further to the right and raising pressure to crack down on immigration. In Britain, where voting took place last Thursday, UKIP had 29 percent half way through the count, with Labour and the Conservatives neck-and-neck for second place with just under 24 percent each. That will pile pressure on Cameron, who has promised Britons an in/out referendum on EU membership in 2017 if he is re-elected next year, to take an even tougher line in Europe. His pro-European Liberal Democrat coalition partners were set to lose nearly all their seats. "The whole European project has been a lie," Farage said on a television link-up with Brussels. "I don't just want Britain to leave the European Union, I want Europe to leave the European Union." In Italy, pro-European Prime Minister Matteo Renzi's centre-left Democratic Party was on course for a triumph, building a strong lead over the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement of former comic Beppe Grillo, early projections showed. The anti-immigration far right People's Party topped the poll in Denmark and the extreme-right Jobbik, widely accused of racism and anti-Semitism, finished second in Hungary. In the Netherlands, the anti-Islam, Eurosceptic Dutch Freedom Party of Geert Wilders' - which plans an alliance with Le Pen - finished joint second in terms of seats behind a pro-European centrist opposition party. Although 388 million Europeans were eligible to vote, fewer than half cast ballots. The turnout was officially 43.1 percent, barely higher than the 2009 nadir of 43 percent, despite efforts to personalise the election with the main political families putting forward a leading candidate or "Spitzenkandidat". In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats secured 35.3 percent of the vote, down from a 23-year-high of 41.5 percent in last year's federal election but still a clear victory. The centre-left Social Democrats, her coalition partners, took 27.3 percent. The anti-euro Alternative for Germany won seats for the first time with 7 percent, the best result so far for a conservative party created only last year to oppose bailouts and call for weaker southern members to be ejected from the single currency area. GREEK FAR LEFT GAINS In Greece, epicentre of the euro zone's debt crisis, the radical left anti-austerity Syriza movement of Alexis Tsipras won the vote but failed to deliver a knockout blow to Prime Minister Antonis Samaras' government. An official projection gave Syriza 26.7 percent, ahead of Samaras' conservative New Democracy on 22.8 percent, reflecting popular anger at harsh spending cuts adopted in recent years to meet the terms of Athens' EU/IMF bailout programme. "Europeans are celebrating the defeat of the bailout and austerity in the country the European leadership turned into the guinea pig of the crisis," Tsipras said. The two parties in the coalition, New Democracy and PASOK, won a combined vote larger than that of Syriza, and political analyst Theodore Couloumbis said the government's survival was not at stake despite its narrow two-seat majority. Sunday was the fourth and final day of voting in elections to the European Parliament, which is an equal co-legislator with member states on most EU laws. Far-right and radical left groups will have roughly a quarter of the seats, enough to gain a much louder voice but probably not to block EU legislation. Officials said final results and seat allotments would likely not be finalised until later on Monday. The record low turnout was in Slovakia, with just 13 percent. The highest was 90 percent in Belgium, where voting is compulsory and there was a general election on the same day. Sweden appeared to have elected the only feminist party member of the EU assembly. Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 18549215 2014-05-27 03:57:58 2014-05-27 03:57:58 open open eu-parliamentary-election-polls-show-england-s-far-right-ukip-party-and-le-pen-s-party-in-france-leading-in-their-respective-countries-in-greece--18549215 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan David Lloyd George http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/23/david-lloyd-george-18527613/ Fri, 23 May 2014 23:23:03 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Lou Sheehan ] David Lloyd George, 1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor, OM PC (17 January 1863 – 26 March 1945) was a British Liberal politician and statesman. As Chancellor of the Exchequer (1908–1915), Lloyd George was a key figure in the introduction of many reforms which laid the foundations of the modern welfare state. His most important role came as the highly energetic Prime Minister of the Wartime Coalition Government (1916–22), during and immediately after the First World War. He was a major player at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 that reordered Europe after the defeat of Germany in the Great War. He arguably made a greater impact on British public life than any other 20th-century leader, thanks to his pre-war introduction of Britain's social welfare system, his leadership in winning the war, his post-war role in reshaping Europe and his partitioning Ireland (between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland which remained part of the UK). He was the last Liberal to serve as Prime Minister. Parliamentary support for the coalition premiership was mostly from Conservatives rather than his own Liberals. The Liberal split led to the permanent decline of that party as a serious political force. Although he became leader of the Liberal Party in the late 1920s, he was unable to regain power, and by the 1930s he was a marginalised and widely mistrusted figure. In the Second World War he was known for defeatism. Although many barristers have been Prime Minister, Lloyd George is to date the only solicitor to have held that office. He is also so far the only British Prime Minister to have been Welsh and to have spoken English as a second language.[4] He was voted the third greatest British prime minister of the 20th century in a poll of 139 academics organised by MORI, and in 2002 he was named among the 100 Greatest Britons following a UK-wide vote. Posted but not written by: Louis Sheehan</p> 18527613 2014-05-23 23:23:03 2014-05-23 23:23:03 open open david-lloyd-george-18527613 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan WATCH: New robotic system seeks to meet threats posed by landmines, explosives. Jerusalem Post. http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/18/watch-new-robotic-system-seeks-to-meet-threats-posed-by-landmines-explosives-jerusalem-post-18475450/ Sun, 18 May 2014 07:27:06 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Lou Sheehan ] By JPOST.COM STAFF LAST UPDATED: 05/14/2014 inShare New unmanned system could be applied to Israel's border patrol duties and forward combat engineering missions. Israel Aerospace Industries revealed on Tuesday the new Sahar robotic system intended to meet threats posed by explosives and mines. The project was developed jointly with Kinetic North America and Watairpoll LTD. The system prototype is being presented this week at the AUVSI exhibition in Orlando, Florida. Sahar is a completely autonomous system with the ability to tackle various operational activities such as detecting land mines, dealing with improvised explosive devices and various other threats, then removing them. A statement by IAI expressed that these and other similar tasks are currently undertaken by ground personnel or remote-controlled robots which require a great deal of skill and time from their handlers while the proximity necessary to deal with such threats poses a great danger to human personnel. The Sahar system was developed to overcome these challenges. IAI hopes to apply the new technology to Israel's border patrol missions and combat engineering's reconnaissance missions. Posted but not written by: Louis Sheehan</p> 18475450 2014-05-18 07:27:06 2014-05-18 07:27:06 open open watch-new-robotic-system-seeks-to-meet-threats-posed-by-landmines-explosives-jerusalem-post-18475450 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Did We Just Get One Step Closer To Finding The Zodiac Killer? Author’s New Book Points Finger at His Dad • By Justine Hofherr http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/17/did-we-just-get-one-step-closer-to-finding-the-zodiac-killer-author-s-new-book-points-finger-at-his-dad-by-justine-hofherr-18464759/ Sat, 17 May 2014 01:44:08 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Did We Just Get One Step Closer To Finding The Zodiac Killer? Author’s New Book Points Finger at His Dad • By Justine Hofherr • Boston.com Staff • May 14, 2014 3:44 PM Will a new book cause the case for the Zodiac killer to be reopened...or even solved? Maybe. Louisiana author Gary L. Stewart claims that the Zodiac killer, infamous for sending taunting letters and cryptograms to the Bay Area press, was his father, late rare book dealer Earl Van Best Jr. The serial Zodiac killer operated in northern California in the late 1960s and early 70s. In letters, he claimed to have killed 37 people, but only five have been confirmed as his victims. Though he was never identified, the horrifying story has fascinated people for decades. In 2007, the film “Zodiac,” based on the murders and starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey Jr., was released and grossed an estimated $65 million at the box office. Stewart, an electrical engineer, was abandoned by his birth parents early in life. According to The Washington Post: Adopted as an infant by a loving family, Stewart never knew the identity of his birth parents until his birth mother ? Judith Gilford ? reached out to him in 2002. He soon learned that she was 14 when she ran away from home with a 27-year-old rare book dealer named Earl Van Best Jr., later giving birth to his child in New Orleans in February 1963 when the two were on the run from the authorities searching for Gilford, a minor. Against the wishes of Gary?s frightened, confused teenage mom, Best abandoned their month-old son in a Baton Rouge apartment building. Armed with this new information, Stewart embarked on a mission to better understand his father. He sifted through government records, news reports, and tracked down numerous friends and relatives of his birth parents. As Stewart learned more about his father, he eventually became convinced that Earl Van Best Jr. was, in fact, the Zodiac killer. Stewart then teamed up with journalist Susan Mustafa to document his decade-long hunt for the truth about his father’s identity. His book describes Van Best as a “troubled boy with disturbing fixations,” “a frustrated intellectual with high culture pretensions,” and “a jilted lover” with an inability to quell his rage. HarperCollins told New York Magazine that Van Best, who had a criminal record in San Francisco involving forgeries and bad checks, had a mugshot that bore an uncanny resemblance to the police sketches of the Zodiac killer. The book, “The Most Dangerous Animal Of All,” hit bookstores in the U.S. on May 13. If you can’t get your hands on a copy, you can always rent the movie. You can reach me at justine.hofherr@globe.com. Follow me @Jhofherr29 Reposted by: Louis Sheehan </p> 18464759 2014-05-17 01:44:08 2014-05-17 01:44:08 open open did-we-just-get-one-step-closer-to-finding-the-zodiac-killer-author-s-new-book-points-finger-at-his-dad-by-justine-hofherr-18464759 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Reckless in Kiev: Neocons, Putin and Ukraine Al Jazeera Marwan Bishara http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/13/reckless-in-kiev-neocons-putin-and-ukraine-al-jazeera-marwan-bishara-18432047/ Tue, 13 May 2014 04:48:14 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Reckless in Kiev: Neocons, Putin and Ukraine Why Obama and Putin must desist from reckless military interventions in other countries' affairs. Last updated: 10 Mar 2014 15:55 Marwan Bishara Marwan Bishara is the senior political analyst at Al Jazeera. RSSBooks Moscow has largely failed to contain Western Ukrainian tendencies despite its sticks and carrots, writes Bishara [EPA] Like most of the people speaking about Ukraine,I am no expert. But I know one or two things about the history of the Cold War to recognise a polarising cliche when I hear one, or a demonising characterisation that leads to further escalation of a dangerous situation. Already, the ripples from Ukraine are having long terms strategic ramifications regardless whether a diplomatic solution is reached soon. Alas, much of that depends not on Ukrainians but rather on Moscow and Washington - my very focus here and in the next episode of EMPIRE . Both have cynically pulled and shoved this country in the name of freedom and security, euphemisms for imperial interests, and pretexts for intervention. Russian President Vladimir Putin has made bold moves and a few conciliatory statements since the crisis deteriorated, with lots of improvisation in between, in an attempt to achieve the twin goals of preserving Russia's interest in Ukraine and stemming the tide of Western expansion in Ukraine and former republics of the Soviet Union. And in the process reconstitute Moscow's area of influence His abrupt and repressive ways are questionable; indeed reprehensible. Counting the Cost - The price of military intervention How Washington reacts depends largely on its original motivations and goals for getting so deeply involved, and on whether the White House was privy to what US diplomats, notably Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and US ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt,, were cooking in Kiev. In other words, what did Obama know and when did he know it? Putin: Ukraine as a redline After so many east European nations and former republics of the Soviet Union deserted Moscow in favour of the West, Putin has made it clear over the last decade that Ukraine, like Georgia, is a Russian redline. And like all imposed lines, it's red on one side, green on the other, in this case, allowing Moscow to intervene while denying Washington the same power or privilege. This is of course a familiar notion in global power politics. (In Palestine, the green line is red to the Palestinians, green to Israelis.) But geopolitical familiarity shouldn't be confused with international legality. Ukraine, a country of 45 million, has been a major Russian economic and strategic partner, and is the last major buffer zone separating it from NATO. So it comes as no surprise that Moscow, the powerful former patron, subordinates Ukraine's sovereignty to its own national and strategic interests, two decades after it gained independence. Post-Cold War agreements, that granted Ukraine its independence and disarmed it of its nuclear weapons, allow Russia to maintain as many as 25,000 Russian troops in the Crimea region, the region with a Russian majority witnessing much of today's tension. Headed by a former KGB agent, Russia is most likely to be clandestinely and deeply involved in the internal affairs of its neighbour. Or as the Europeans have come to realise, Westerners come and go but Russian secret services have been at home in Ukraine. Headed by a former KGB agent, Russia is most likely to be clandestinely and deeply involved in the internal affairs of its neighbour. Or as the Europeans have come to realise, Westerners come and go but Russian secret services have been at home in Ukraine. Nonetheless, Moscow has largely failed to coopt or contain Western Ukrainian tendencies, despite its sticks and carrots including Putin's December offer of $15 bn in loans and discounted gas prices. Putin, who remained rather cool in response to Western meddling in Ukrainian affairs, has finally fired back rather aggressively after the removal and flight of President Viktor Yanukovich - referring to it as coup d'etat. Nuland: 'Yats is the guy' Victoria Nuland is the gal who made headlines after her infamous "F*** the EU" remark during a phone conversation with US ambassador to Ukraine Geofrey Pyatt. The exchange that appears to have been monitored and leaked by Russian intelligence - was posted on youtube under the Russian title - "Maidan Puppets". Although Nuland's profanity got all the attention, her arrogance during the conversation was far more telling and dangerous. Like an imperial commissaire from a past era, she assigned roles in the future government, and made it clear who would and who wouldn't join, dismissing Vitali Klitchko and anointing Arseniy Yasenyuk - who did become the present prime minister, all the while casually referring to them as "Klitsch" and "Yats". She insisted, "Yats is the guy" to lead. The same Yats who’s in Washington this week to discuss the future of Ukraine. If this sounds like a brazen old-fashion interference in another country's affairs, well, it is. It's also rash and counterproductive. When the foreign diplomats in question join demonstrations and give out cookies to protesters, as Nuland and others did, they're in effect saying; to hell with Russia. Judging by her record, Nuland is happy to provoke a crisis leading to a break up with Russia. But - at least - she and the State department, and yes, the CIA should have known that Russia wouldn't allow it. Or did they know it? Enter a major crisis that could escalate into a military confrontation. It's "deja vu all over again" - with the neocons providing the pretext to America's military interventionists to make the case for muscular intervention or even war, such as Nuland's former boss, Dick Cheney, the godfather of the 2003 war on Iraq. Cheney was quick to point out that Obama's weakness prompted Putin to act and that military rather than diplomatic moves are need to deter Putin. Cheney recommended at least three immediate military steps: Deploying missile systems in Poland, preparing for NATO military exercises close to the Russian borders, and arming and training Ukrainian forces. It's the closest thing to what American Russia expert Stephen Cohen called: "Two steps from a Cuban Missile Crisis and three steps from war with Russia for the first time." If it walks like a
A woman for all seasons when it comes to Washington politics, Nuland was at home in the Clinton and Bush administration as she is today at the Obama administration. She served as assistant Vice President Dick Cheney, ambassador to NATO, and an Obama State Department spokesperson before taking on her current position in September 2013. But there should be no mistaking her ideological leaning. Not only because she's the spouse of leading neoconservative, Robert Kagan. Or, that she's the sister-in-law of another prominent Neocon, Fredrick Kagan and wife Kimberly, both think-tank type military historians. Russia declares support for Crimea breakaway They all belong to a Washington clique of neoconservatives that continue to affect foreign policy who, like most of the other collaborators in the movement, haven't served in the military and are referred to by their detractors as "chicken-hawks". "F*** the EU" is the new improvised version of Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and the neocons' hostility towards "Old Europe". In his 2003 book, "Of Paradise and Power", Robert Kagan highlighted the difference and division between the US and Europe - Americans from Mars, Europeans from Venus. The Kagans reckon Europe should be marginalized because it's too soft, overly diplomatic. A charge the Europeans reject. Especially when it's the Polish, America's close friends in Europe, who have spearheaded EU diplomacy in Kiev before and after the crisis broke out in Ukraine. Another example of neocon-leaning activist, who has been playing an important role in Ukraine and paving the way for the anti Russian movement, is Carl Gersham, the head of the National Endowment for Democracy, NED.He served as head of the CIA associated Radio Free Europe at the height of the Cold War. Paradoxically, he's been at the helm of this democracy promoting organisation 30 years or longer than most of the world's autocracies. If you look up Ukraine at NED's website, you'll see the almost 70 programmes listed in 2012 that are financed by the organisation. That's not to say that Ukrainians have been merely instigated or that those who receive funds are suspect. Certainly not. They do have legitimate reasons to protest against corrupt leaders and in favor or better standard of living. But from Putin’s perspective, Gresham's activities constitute meddling in Ukraine’s affairs, plain and simple. For the record, I don't fault the neoconservatives for their idealism or declared position on the promotion of human rights, freedom and democracy. I am personally a staunch supporter of these principles in international relations. What I do question is their double standard - for example on Israel/Palestine - and methods - all too eager to use military force. The neocons are pretty messianic in the way they see the battle for universal freedom as integral to American power and the fulfillment of its destiny. Fortunately, President Obama has refrained from escalating militarily, preferring instead to remain diplomatically engaged. Unfortunately, however, the damage is already done. And it's doubtful the Russian Western relationship could get back on track any time soon. That's why Presidents Obama and Putin need to make it clear they regret their diplomats' political intrusion in Ukraine, and reject reckless foreign military interventions in other countries' affairs. And they must avoid war at any cost. A redline for both sides. Marwan Bishara is the senior political analyst at Al Jazeera. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy. Source: Al Jazeera Posted by: Louis Sheehan </p> 18432047 2014-05-13 04:48:14 2014-05-13 04:48:14 open open reckless-in-kiev-neocons-putin-and-ukraine-al-jazeera-marwan-bishara-18432047 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan Monica should apologize to Hillary May 11, 2014, 1:23 pm Read more: Monica should apologize to Hillary | Shmuley Boteach | Ops & Blogs | The Times of Israel http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/monica-should-apologize-to-hilary Shmuley Boteach http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/12/monica-should-apologize-to-hillary-may-11-2014-1-23-pm-read-more-monica-should-apologize-to-hillary-shmuley-boteach-ops-blogs-the-times-of-israel-18430804/ Mon, 12 May 2014 20:11:01 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Monica Lewinsky is back in the news after a decade hiatus. She returned to tell us, as the headline of The New York Post put it, that ‘her life sucks.’ Because of her notoriety she can’t find a job. Because of her infamy she finds it difficult to sustain a relationship. There is nothing particularly newsworthy in any of this. Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign up! But then she added she feels that Hillary was doing a disservice to women when she appeared to blame her own “emotional neglect” of her husband for driving him to Monica. Lewinsky is scandalized that Hillary is blaming herself rather than her husband, the perpetrator. Let’s be clear. The only thing that should bring Monica Lewinsky back into the public eye is repentance and a public apology to Hillary. It’s utterly crude to come back just to cause the woman more pain. I don’t care if people love Hillary Clinton as a public personality or hate her. This has nothing to do with the fact that in her husband’s affair she is the victim. Anyone who thinks otherwise has a broken moral compass. If our society is to retain any sense of values then it will declare the truth. Monica Lewinsky is a home wrecker. Pure and simple. She was an adult when she had an affair with a famously married man. This was deeply immoral and she owes the man’s wife an apology. What she further owes Hillary is just getting out of her face. She has to stop rubbing the offended party’s face in her own pain. Was Hillary responsible for Bill’s affair? Absolutely not. Not one bit. It was not her emotional neglect of her husband that led him to cheat. He always had the power to choose. There was nothing she did that removed from him his capacity for moral choice. If his wife was neglecting him emotionally then he could easily have gone to marriage counseling, talked to his wife about it, gotten a friend to talk to both of them about it, or, worst case scenario, seek a separation and divorce. All of these are moral choices. They may be painful, they may harm the family, but they are moral. But lying and cheating and deceiving is deeply immoral. And personal accountability dictates that we are responsible for the bad things we do and should never blame someone else. Do I believe for a moment that Hillary is right to blame herself for the affair, if that is indeed the truth? No. Absolutely not. But one thing I know for sure. The last person in the world who should be telling her this is Monica Lewinsky. It’s not for the woman who had the affair with her husband to stick her nose in it again. It’s for her to apologize and then stay clear of the couple. I have written an entire book on infidelity called Kosher Adultery. To write the book I interviewed countless couples where a partner was unfaithful. Discovering your spouse has lied to you and compromised the intimacy of the marriage is one of the most painful things in life you will ever discover. Those who are immoral enough to have relationships with married people deserve the same condemnation as the cheating partner themselves. And both need to repent. There are few things in life more cruel, heartless, and selfish than having an affair with a married man or woman. The harm it does to a family is incalculable. The pain it causes the victimized spouse is forever. When Moses encounters God for the very time he does so by seeing a manifestation of the divine in a burning bush. God orders him to remove his shoes, lest he tread on holy ground and desecrate it. Marriage is holy, marriage is special. It is that same holy ground. Outsiders dare not trample on it. The Clintons are fair game politically. If someone wants to dismiss them as political opportunists, that’s their prerogative. If you want to vote for their opponents, go ahead. If you want to assail their policies and positions, well, that’s what democracy is all about. But for those who want to delve deeply into their marriage – analyze it, hurt it, dissect it, make assumptions about it, intrude upon it –I’m sorry. That’s not their place. It’s wrong and it’s a violation. As a society we either believe in marriage or we don’t. It’s time for us to choose. Posted </p> 18430804 2014-05-12 20:11:01 2014-05-12 20:11:01 open open monica-should-apologize-to-hillary-may-11-2014-1-23-pm-read-more-monica-should-apologize-to-hillary-shmuley-boteach-ops-blogs-the-times-of-israel-18430804 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Ex-Mossad chief calls Newsweek spy story ‘delusional’ http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/12/ex-mossad-chief-calls-newsweek-spy-story-delusional-18427875/ Mon, 12 May 2014 07:00:15 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Danny Yatom says Israel has more advanced methods than crawling through hotel air vents to snoop on vice presidents By Spencer Ho and Times of Israel staff Posted by: Louis Sheehan A former head of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, on Sunday brushed off as “delusional” a Newsweek article alleging an Israeli spy hid in the vents of a Jerusalem hotel during a visit by then-US vice president Al Gore 16 years ago. Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign up! “We did not spy on [Gore] or any other American targets in Israel or abroad,” Danny Yatom, who was chief of the Mossad at the time, said in an interview on Army Radio. “I think that there are much more advanced methods that everybody who’s seen movies and read books on the subject knows to say to himself that these methods of agents crawling through the ventilation ducts to get to the room of the vice president of the United States — these descriptions are delusional.” According to a former senior US intelligence agent who spoke to Newsweek, when Al Gore was vice president, a surprise guest was hiding in an air duct in his hotel room during a trip to Israel 16 years ago — an alleged Israeli spy. The source detailed how after US Secret Service agents swept the room, clearing it, one of the men stayed behind to use the bathroom before Gore was to arrive, when he heard a sound. “So the room was all quiet, he was just meditating on his toes, and he hears a noise in the vent. And he sees the vent clips being moved from the inside. And then he sees a guy starting to exit the vent into the room,” the former operative told Newsweek, adding that the Secret Service agent did not scramble for his gun. “He kind of coughed and the guy went back into the vents.” Former US vice president Al Gore (Photo credit: CC BY 2.0, Erik Charlton from Menlo Park, USA/Wikimedia) Former US vice president Al Gore (Photo credit: CC BY 2.0, Erik Charlton from Menlo Park, USA/Wikimedia) On Thursday, Newsweek published a report quoting unnamed former US intelligence officials, alleging that Israel’s aggressive spying activities in the United States have been routinely hushed up because of the country’s powerful connections in Congress. Israel has emphatically denied the claims. Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz said Saturday that an impression was forming in Israel that “someone” was trying to harm the “excellent” intelligence cooperation between Israel and the United States. The Newsweek article came two days after a story published in the magazine cited US intelligence officials and congressional staffers who have been privy to information on Israeli spying activities, calling the extent of it “shocking,” “sobering” and far exceeding similar activities by any other close US allies. The issue of spying has come to the forefront in recent months as the possible release of Jonathan Pollard, a jailed American-Israeli spy, was brought up in connection with Israel-Palestinian peace talks. Pollard, a US-born navy intelligence analyst, is serving a life sentence in a North Carolina prison for spying for Israel. He was captured in 1985. The issue of Israel’s spying also became an issue in its bid to join the US visa waiver program. Reports have indicated that Israel’s covert activities were holding it back from achieving its goal of joining the program, which would allow Israeli citizens to travel to the US with much greater ease. A former aide told Newsweek that even if Israel takes the required steps to enter the program, there are reservations within the American security establishment about letting them in. “They’re incredibly aggressive. They’re aggressive in all aspects of their relationship with the United States,“ the aide said. “If we give them free rein to send people over here, how are we going to stop that? Read more: Ex-Mossad chief calls Newsweek spy story 'delusional' | The Times of Israel http://www.timesofisrael.com/ex-mossad-chief-calls-newsweek-spy-story-delusional/#ixzz31Twzt7N0 Follow us: @timesofisrael on Twitter | timesofisrael on Facebook </p> 18427875 2014-05-12 07:00:15 2014-05-12 07:00:15 open open ex-mossad-chief-calls-newsweek-spy-story-delusional-18427875 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan 5,000 years later, the wheel gets an Israeli update Read more: 5,000 years later, the wheel gets an Israeli update | The Times of Israel http://www.timesofisrael.com/5000-years-later-the-wheel-gets-an-israeli-update/#ixzz31S3QkrXj Follow us: @timesofisra http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/11/5-000-years-later-the-wheel-gets-an-israeli-update-read-more-5-000-years-later-the-wheel-gets-an-israeli-update-the-times-of-israel-http-www-time-18426266/ Sun, 11 May 2014 23:11:17 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>With a flexible shock absorption system built into the wheel itself, SoftWheel boosts stability without sacrificing speed — in wheelchairs, bikes, cars, even planes By David Shamah May 11, 2014, 4:24 pm Posted by: Louis Sheehan Read more: 5,000 years later, the wheel gets an Israeli update | The Times of Israel http://www.timesofisrael.com/5000-years-later-the-wheel-gets-an-israeli-update/#ixzz31S3X2lbX Follow us: @timesofisrael on Twitter | timesofisrael on Facebook SoftWheel, an Israeli company, is giving a high-tech update to the wheel, the ancient engine of civilization that enabled humans to explore their world. Its new technology, focused around a flexible shock absorption system built into the wheel itself, allows for better stability when needed without sacrificing speed. “With all due modesty, I say that what we have created is a game changer,” said Daniel Barel, CEO of SoftWheel. “Our wheel technology can be developed for and retrofitted to any vehicle,” notably including bikes, cars and jet planes. Read more: 5,000 years later, the wheel gets an Israeli update | The Times of Israel http://www.timesofisrael.com/5000-years-later-the-wheel-gets-an-israeli-update/#ixzz31S3IrWCl Follow us: @timesofisrael on Twitter | timesofisrael on Facebook Its new technology, focused around a flexible shock absorption system built into the wheel itself, allows for better stability when needed without sacrificing speed. “With all due modesty, I say that what we have created is a game changer,” said Daniel Barel, CEO of SoftWheel. “Our wheel technology can be developed for and retrofitted to any vehicle,” notably including bikes, cars and jet planes. The airline industry is already in touch with SoftWheel, and the company sees immense potential there. But planes and automobiles will have to wait a while, Barel said, as the Israeli firm is focused first on wheelchairs and bikes. “People in the airline industry heard about what we were doing, and asked us to develop landing gear incorporating our technology,” said Barel. “We weren’t sure it could be done at first, but, after doing some work on the project, we became convinced that it could be done, and could save airlines lots of money. We’re now developing the landing gear system, which will eliminate the need for the expensive hydraulics currently used to ensure that a plane lands properly. This technology has not been updated in sixty years.” Still, in planes and cars, “it takes years to make changes. They have to be approved and implemented, factories have to adopt new manufacturing techniques, and so on,” said Barel. Much better to start with the wheelchair and bicycle markets, which are easier to break into. “Most of the world’s wheelchairs are used in hospitals, but there is a large premium market for people who want to live active lives but are restricted to wheelchairs by their disabilities. These people want to be as mobile and self-reliant as possible, and our technology makes this possible,” said Barel. Barel sees bikers embracing the SoftWheel. “Our wheel will enable bikers to ride faster and more smoothly,” he said. “In standard wheels, about 30 percent of propulsion energy is reserved for suspension, even if that suspension isn’t necessary at a specific time. With our system, suspension can be turned on and off as needed, reserving more energy for speed.” Daniel Barel (Photo credit: Courtesy) Daniel Barel (Photo credit: Courtesy) The oldest wheels found are about 5,000 years old from Mesopotamia, and it’s on that basic technology that modern wheels roll. What Barel and a team of engineers from Ziv-Av, an Israeli engineering firm, are doing entails a reimagining of the wheel — with a system redesign that incorporates shock absorption that turns itself on when necessary. The system, called Symmetrical Selective In-Wheel Suspension, uses sensors and three compression spokes to hold the wheel in place. When it encounters an impact, the wheel’s hub shifts, with the shock absorption cushioning the impact. The threshold can be preset by the manufacturer or user. Once past the impact, the wheel returns to its previous rigid state, saving the energy normally reserved for impact absorption in standard wheels and enabling it to be used for propulsion instead. Generally, only very high-end wheelchairs have shock absorption built in, necessitating wheelchair-accessible entrances to buildings. “It’s difficult and painful to use a wheelchair to cross the street, with the chair’s rider feeling the strong impact of a chair going off the sidewalk and onto a curb,” said Barel. “With a SoftWheel-equipped chair, a wheelchair user can cross streets or go down steps without feeling the impact.” Bikes, both manual and electric, are another big market for SoftWheel, which employs six people and is located in the Haifa area . “With cities around the world implementing biking programs for commuter, there is a big market for more comfortable rides,” said Barel. “Our wheels can easily replace the standard ones used for bikes, and make bike commuting much more comfortable.” For wheelchairs and bicycles, adding SoftWheel suspension is all about increasing energy efficiency and making the ride much more comfortable. For the car and plane markets, the system will be able to save manufacturers a lot of money, Barel predicts. “The bigger the vehicle, the more suspension you need, and both cars and planes have elaborate suspension systems,” said Barel. “In order to make up for the energy expended on the suspension, engines have to be made to work harder, using more fuel and resources. With our sensor-based technology and the suspension system built into the wheels, you can save a lot of fuel.” Ditto for cars, said Barel, although implementing the SoftWheel system in planes and cars won’t happen overnight. “Plane designs have to be approved by the Federal Aviation Industry in the US, and implementing changes in the automobile industry takes time. But eventually, both industries are going to adopt our design. Until now you had to choose between comfort and efficiency in wheel design, and now, for the first time, you can have both.” If the SoftWheel catches on in the way Barel thinks it will, Israel will become a world center of wheel technology and production. “Nearly all the materials we use to produce our wheels are made in Israel, and we are currently building a large production facility in northern Israel to build SoftWheels,” said Barel. “This, like our product, is an innovation as well, because not too many industrial products are made in Israel. All around we are developing a new paradigm, one we believe the world will embrace.” Read more: 5,000 years later, the wheel gets an Israeli update | The Times of Israel http://www.timesofisrael.com/5000-years-later-the-wheel-gets-an-israeli-update/#ixzz31S3EMqYo Follow us: @timesofisrael on Twitter | timesofisrael on Facebook </p> 18426266 2014-05-11 23:11:17 2014-05-11 23:11:17 open open 5-000-years-later-the-wheel-gets-an-israeli-update-read-more-5-000-years-later-the-wheel-gets-an-israeli-update-the-times-of-israel-http-www-time-18426266 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan Sitting comfortably versus lying down: Is there really a difference in energy expenditure? J.L. Miles-Chanemail address , D. Sarafian , J.P. Montani , Y. Schutz , A.G. Dulloo http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/10/sitting-comfortably-versus-lying-down-is-there-really-a-difference-in-energy-expenditure-j-l-miles-chanemail-address-d-sarafian-j-p-montani-y-sch-18419315/ Sat, 10 May 2014 04:10:02 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Sitting comfortably versus lying down: Is there really a difference in energy expenditure? J.L. Miles-Chanemail address , D. Sarafian , J.P. Montani , Y. Schutz , A.G. Dullooemail address Received 27 September 2013; accepted 17 November 2013. published online 25 November 2013. Abstract Full Text PDF Images References Summary Background & aims Energy expenditure (EE) during sitting is widely assumed to be higher than that while lying down, but supporting evidence is equivocal. Despite this, resting EE in the sitting position is often used as a proxy for basal metabolic rate. Here we investigate whether EE differs in the comfortable seated position compared to supine (lying) position. Methods EE and respiratory quotient (RQ) were measured (by ventilated hood indirect calorimetry) in 19 healthy subjects (9 men, 10 women) after an overnight fast. Supine measurements were made using a comfortable clinical tilting table and sitting measurements made using an adjustable, ergonomic car seat adapted for the hood system. After about 30 min of rest in either position, metabolic monitoring was conducted until stabilization of EE for at least 15 min in each posture. Results EE in the sitting position was not significantly different compared to supine (</p> 18419315 2014-05-10 04:10:02 2014-05-10 04:10:02 open open sitting-comfortably-versus-lying-down-is-there-really-a-difference-in-energy-expenditure-j-l-miles-chanemail-address-d-sarafian-j-p-montani-y-sch-18419315 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan Deception: A Review and Critical Analysis of the book, Encounter In Rendlesham Forest By Peter Robbins, April - May 2014 http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/10/could-get-a-movie-deal-also-we-already-had-somebody-18419271/ Sat, 10 May 2014 03:54:46 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Deception: A Review and Critical Analysis of the book, Encounter In Rendlesham Forest By Peter Robbins, April - May 2014 Posted by: Louis Sheehan This paper is provided copyright free and the reader is welcome to post, print, distribute, copy or otherwise share it in total without prior written consent from either the author or original publisher. Requests for permission to use excerpts should be secured by contacting the author at probbinsny@yahoo.com . An earlier version of the review contained in this book appears in UFO Truth Magazine, issue number six. Table of Contents Introduction 2 The Review and Investigation 4 The Investigation Continues 46 Conclusions 58 “I am afraid there is little I can offer; the only official report we have is from Lt Col Charles Halt which you already have. As far as I am aware, this report was looked at when it was received, and it was subsequently concluded that the events described were of no defence significance. The Ministry of Defence re ceives many UFO reports each year, and while we believe that explanations could be found for most, we accept that some will remain unexplained. It would seem that the RAF Woodbridge sightings would fall into this category. ... Finally, I wish you the best of luck with your book.” Excerpt from a February 2 1993 letter sent to me from the Ministry of Defence in response to my letter of inquiry, signed N. Pope “True we can put a book out then go on a book tour its OK with Warren and company so that what we shou ld do. We will finish our research put it in a book so everybody can see it at once and then go around and talk about it. Everybody else does that why not us! Maybe we put the cart before the horse Jim! Travis (Walton), Warren, Robbins and (Robert) SALAS a ll wrote one why not us! Everybody loves there books while we’re at it lets see if we 2 could get a movie deal also. We already had somebody offer to write it for us today how hard was th could get a movie deal also. We already had somebody offer to write it for us today how hard was that. I think I hear my phone ringing gotta go!” John Burroughs, April 7, 2012 “We have never attacked another direct witness, nor will we. We have pointed out incorrect information, and corrected that information with others. I believe you might be one of the people who can very well not handle what is going to be released ab out RFI, or where our investigation that John and I started on December 26, 1980 is about to cumulate in the near future. We can’t wait for it all to be factually all put out to the public, for them to analyze and to debate.” Jim Penniston, March 10, 2012 “Buy putting it in a book we will be able to show everything we have done. ... This is the best way then we can take question afterwards we want to thank Peter, Larry and Robert for the suggestion.” John Burroughs, March 23, 2012 “There are moments that g o beyond each of our poor lives.” Charles de Gaulle Introduction Some months back, my friend and colleague Gary Hazeltine, who is also publisher of UFO Truth Magazine in beautiful in West Yorkshire , asked if I’d be willing to use one of my regular magazine columns to review a new book due for publication in late April 2014. Issue number six of UFO Truth would going out to subscribers in early May so it was imperative that I locate, read, then write my review a s soon as possible, then make my deadline, something I regularly excelled at failing to do. Knowing something of my uneven history with two of the authors, Gary just wanted to make sure I was up for the assignment; he knew I would write an objective, even - handed review. About a month before its release date I requested a review copy from the publisher through proper channels. Several weeks later it had yet to arrive. I was visiting New York City that week and as usual when in town, stopped by my favorite bookstore, The Strand on Broadway and 12 th . I quickly made my way down the stairs to the basement, then advanced on the UFO and 3 paranormal stacks where, specifically the shelves belonging to the “P” authors. There it was, two copies actually, weeks before publication date, and at half the list price. Thank you Strand. Once home I flipped through it, but it sat for about a week before I actually begin reading it and making notes. And so it happened that as I read and wrote, making my objections and rendering praise in review form, I began to notice something, subtle at first, then more apparent, then truly begin to emerge from just below the surface of the words. If my imagination wasn’t running away with me I could only characterize what I was observing as a pattern, but a pattern that seemed to have been deliberately undertaken, in an intentional manner, and calculated only to manifest negative intent. And the more I observed it come into play, the more uncomfortable it made me feel. This feeling was soon re placed by one of anger, and finally one of serious concern. More, it was something very few readers would ever pick up on or even look for. The reason for this was that each separate element in the overall pattern was a specific piece of information only a vailable or found in Left At East Gate . Each data point was presented respectfully, if incomplete or in reconfigured form, then through the use of seemingly ‘’objective commentary and a dose of good common sense, would conclude that the pattern - point’s ‘fi ndings’ (again) strongly suggested there was good cause to doubt Larry Warren’s credibility and motivations regarding his involvement and claims, something which only reflected poorly on my professionalism, research and investigation skills, and reputation . By this point I was fully engaged in writing the most comprehensive book review in history and as a result, late in meeting my deadline as usual. It was handed it in running hysterically long, though Gary agreed to print it in its final form, even if he did have to breakdown and redesign the immediate page layouts. But somewhere along in my reading and writing the review, I began to write a separate paper, the intention of which was to focus on, detail, document and explain my concerns in a more appropri ate form. It was not lost on me that if I failed to make a case for what I perceived to be a grave series of concerns, no one else ever would. And possibly, no one else could. Over the next weeks I put more and more time into the paper until, by no stretch of the imagination, could it be defined as a ‘paper’ any longer. It was about here that I realized I was writing a book. I also realized how crazy it would sound to tell friends and colleagues I was writing a book that I had decided would take no longer t han a month to research, investigate, write, fact - check, edit, review, finalize, and have in print in just under a month, start to finish – with an expanded version of the original book review 4 included. Just under sixty pages of fourteen point translates i nto almost ninety standard book pages, so a book it is, even if a small one. Let me just add the following. I took no pleasure and little satisfaction in writing any part of what you are about to read. At the same time I knew it was important for me to do so. I did look for some way out of this, or for some alternate set of reasons that might explain or justify why Encounter In Rendlesham Forest was written in the precise manner it was. But I haven’t been able to and must conclude that parts of this book w as written with conscious intent to deceive its readers, and in so doing, demean the value of an outstanding book I had put almost ten years of my life into, and to minimize the contributions of the man responsible for setting that incredible undertaking i nto motion. I appreciate that in publishing this book I must take responsibility for all of the opinions, views and alleged conclusions expressed herein and I do. And now, Deception, the only book ever written that begins with a book review, I think. Peter Robbins Brooklyn New York May 7, 2014 The Review John Burroughs and Jim Penniston’s book on the Rendlesham Forest UFO incident is finally out, as written by Nick Pope in collaboration with the two eyewitnesses involved on the first of three nights of UFO activity, now collectively known as the Rendlesham Forest UFO incident. As any author of a serious work of nonfiction can attest, the actual writing of such a book should not be an extremely challenging process and one not to be undertaken lightly. There is no question that doing the initial research is critically important, and, but the ability to bring it all together in a fully professional manner is something else again. Having devoted nine years of my life to coauthoring a work on the same subj ect I speak from experience. Jim and John’s choice of Nick Pope as the lead author seemed a logical one. Nick is an established writer in the UFO field and author of four previous books on the subject. He brings with him both name recognition and the 5 uni que caveat of having served in Her Majesty’s Ministry of Defence for more than twenty years, several of which were spent officially charged with looking into UK UFO reports, a credential unique to this author. But there are downsides to this collaboration. To begin with, Penniston and Burroughs long - awaited personal story is communicated to us almost entirely in the second person and suffers for it. Let me say at the outset that no one I know disputes the involvement of these two witnesses, or the fact t hat their encounter experiences and those they incurred at the hands of ‘debriefers’ in its aftermath resulted in ongoing personal suffering, serious physical ailments, and uncontested symptoms of Post - Traumatic Stress. Even so, John’s somewhat glib notion about the ease of writing such a book on their own (“how hard was that.”?) seems to have proven a task beyond the pair’s collective abilities. Then again, neither of them are trained writers, nor have they ever claimed to be. In 1999 or 2000 I reviewed Nick’s first of two works of fiction, Operation Thunder Child, for Vicki and Don Ecker’s then - outstanding publication, UFO Magazine . I gave it a rave and deservedly so. It was an outstanding piece of ‘what if’ fiction and earned a review that reflected not hing less. Writing this review for Nick’s first new book in fourteen years has been proven to be something else again. A rather minor criticism to start with. This book is repetitious at times, in cases restating the same information, and occasionally on the same page. A far more significant shortcoming encountered in Encounter In Rendlesham Forest is that the book is entirely devoid of footnoted annotations. This is certainly a much less time - consuming way to write an inve stigative work, but diminishes its value as a serious research tool immeasurably. The book I co - wrote on the Rendlesham incident, Left At East Gate, included hundreds of carefully researched annotations, and make no mistake about it, compiling, organizing, and proof - checking each one was a boring, repetitive, labor - intensive process, but one I undertook gladly as both Larry and I felt that doing so was essential to the value and integrity of what we had set out to do. The absence of same here left me with t he distinct impression that rushing this book into print was more important to the authors than doing the best and most thorough job they were capable of. This leaves the reader with only the limited appendices, the book’s index, and if you want to include it, the table of contents, as reference tools. The index is problematic in itself as it lacks a surprising number of significant inclusions. I know it is a challenge 6 to make sure that all of the subjects, locations and individuals you’ve written about are listed in a book’s index and that you’re always going to miss a few no matter what, but it’s the job of the authors, their editor, and their publisher to do their best to assure that this is accomplished as successfully as possible. Encounter In Rendles ham Forest opens with a succinct introduction to its protagonists while setting the scene and offering some necessary background. The first chapter launches directly into the events of the first night with attention given to the other personnel who were di rectly or indirectly involved. I was surprised though at how disappointing it was to finally read Penniston and Burroughs’ long - awaited account, this only because – with the exception of a number of quotations and statements from the experiencers, it is to ld entirely in the third person by Pope. Nick shares the pair’s story clearly enough, but it is devoid of any real feeling or vitality, and I think it’s a shame that the witnesses themselves decided against relating this all - important narrative in their ow n words. What such a telling might have suffered in terms of loss of the professional polish that Nick supplies would have been more than made up for in heart, tension, and the ‘in - the - moment’ quality that can make the act of reading a good work of nonfict ion work so exciting. Jim and John’s selected statements, while welcome, are not an acceptable replacement for this. The two write their own chapter at the end of the book so why not here? Nick Pope never experienced the stress, challenge, or fear associat ed with these events, and when compared to experiencer accounts such as Travis Walton’s in Fire In the Sky , Whitley Strieber’s in Communion, Jesse Marcel Jr’s. in The Roswell Legacy, and Debbie Jordan and Kathie Mitchell’s in Abducted!,” there really is no comparison. Whitley of course is an accomplished professional writer but none of these other authors were. Here I must include Larry Warren as well. The incredible job he did in painstakingly writing, recreating, and relating his personal experiences in L eft At East Gate, also someone with no previous writing experience, Is consistently ‘in - the - moment’ and spot - on throughout. Then again, I’m biased. Hard work, definitely, but what a gift to the reader! The failure to fully recreate the most shattering nigh t of the witnesses’ lives gives us a book that opens on something of a flat, disappointing note. But as I read Nick’s treatment of the pair’s experiences, I couldn’t help but think about parts of Larry’s account, and in the form of a number of haunting si milarities shared by all three men during their respective 7 encounters: the malfunctioning radios, the ferocious static electricity charge in the air, John and Jim’s description of walking into the area “as akin to wading through deep water.” Larry’s memory of his movements having “become very slow, as if I were in a vacuum.” As Penniston and Burroughs approached the small clearing “there was a silent explosion of light.” As Warren and the men with him looked up to regard the reddish sphere of light, it “exp loded in a blinding flash (and without a sound).” Penniston observed “that what had first appeared to be a sphere of light in front of him had dissipated and now had the appearance of a craft of some sort.” Warren recalled “The explosion (of light) produce d no noticeable heat. But now, right in front of me was a machine occupying the spot where the fog had been.” Absolutely fascinating stuff. But when we come to the point in the narrative where Penniston touches the craft, there is a complete absence of any mention of his now - famous and insistent claim that a long binary code message down - loaded into his head. His December 2010 announcement of this allegation set off a major and still ongoing controversy in ufology, so why not introduce this charged moment i n the context of where and when it was actually supposed to have occurred? I do not know why Nick made this decision, but as a writer myself, I know that I’ve withheld such key information from its proper chronological place as a narrative device to buil d the reader’s sense of anticipation or tension. To the informed reader though I fear that in this context it may only come off as a bit ‘stagy.’ It certainly led me to feel that a ‘big reveal’ would be coming later on in the book. Unfortunately when we fi nally do encounter the binary code in the second to last chapter in the book, it is more with a whimper than a bang. As we continue to follow the story, we are reminded of how the pair chose to play down their anomalous experiences from the get - go, neith er of them wanting to be fully forthcoming in their respective written statements or reports. Nor is there any mention of the forty - five minutes of missing time they’d experienced, and with good cause. The UFO ridicule factor was and remains very much aliv e and well, and likely on steroids in a 1980 military context. Ask yourself this question: if you were in John or Jim’s place, would you have wanted such information to become a part of your permanent military record? Me neither. It was Deputy Base Command er Halt – very much a fixture in the men’s lives at this time and for more than twenty - five years to come, who suggested they use the phrase “unexplained lights” instead of ‘UFO’ in relevant reports. We are also reminded that the 8 Law Enforcement security b lotters for that night were removed, then classified, never to be seen again. In chapter two, “The Next Morning,” we begin with some military UFO - related history, information on base procedural matters, and are introduced to more of the personnel who had roles in the events during and/or leading up to the event. Burroughs and Penniston retrace their steps and return to the clearing where they again see the indentations in the soil associated with the craft. The next morning three others return to the site with them. Measurements and photographs are taken while plaster casts of the indentations are made. One of the men, Sgt. Ray Gulyas, later returns on his own to take personal photographs and make his own plaster casts. In chapter three, “Into the Darkness, ” we jump directly to the particulars of Col. Halt’s third night’s encounter and those of the men who accompanied him into the forest on another now - famous part of the Rendlesham chronicles. Nick supplies much detail here and excerpted statements from some of the men involved. Chapter four picks up where “Into the Darkness” ends and culminates with the episode’s most dramatic aspect, that of the unknown coming in over the group’s heads and shining a pencil - thin beam of light into their immediate area. Cha pter five, “Charles Halt Over the Years,” runs five pages, ironically, the exact length I take to review it here. It is the first point in this book where I felt the writing specifically calculated to present the reader with a consciously limited and highl y controlled assessment of its subject, this by way of what it does not include rather than what it does. The treatment begins with what for me is a major inaccuracy: “Until John Burroughs and Jim Penniston decided to speak out, Charles Halt had probably b een the person most closely associated with the Rendlesham Forest incident.” No, he “probably” was not. Larry Warren “probably” was. And while the author and I can debate the semantics of the use of the word ‘probably’ here, it is Larry Warren’s name and p resence that have been front and center in this regard for more than thirty years now. The reason any of us even learned the names Charles Halt, John Burroughs and Jim Penniston was due only to Larry Warren’s having given them, as well other names of indiv iduals involved to Coventry Connecticut Police Lieutenant and UFO investigator Larry Fawcett, this back in 1982. True, Halt’s name was included in the original October 2, 1983 New of the World coverage of the incident while Warren’s was noted in the same a rticle under the pseudonym Fawcett had created for him, but the following year Warren came out under his own 9 name, and very publicly at that, and it is that name which has remained at the forefront of those associated with the Rendlesham Forest incident ev er since. It was years before the colonel publically began to speak out on his involvement, during which time Larry Warren was left to go it alone in the face of public speculation and accusations, this while Halt, Penniston and Burroughs (commendably) con tinued their hitches in the Air Force. Nick then cites a series of statements made by Halt underscoring his involvement. This is certainly fair and appropriate, but the first of them is dated November 2007, hardly making him a pioneer in getting the word out in terms of chronology. Halt’s pro - UFO and pro - UFO cover - up statements are worthy of our respect, especially in their having come from an honorably retired United States Air Force officer, and it is his opinion that the intelligences behind the RFI we re extraterrestrial in nature, the likelihood of which I agree. It is also in this chapter that Nick makes reference to a September 2012 clash between Halt and Colonel John Alexander, a retired Army officer who undertook his own unofficial investigation in to the possibility of a government UFO cover - up. When Alexander concludes there was no Rendlesham cover - up, Halt responds that he is naïve, something with which I concur. But again, far more important is what Nick has chosen to leave out of this chapter, a nd in the process creating the distinct and decidedly false impression that all is copasetic between the officer and the two former enlisted men. He does this by omitting a number of ‘facts in evidence,’ at least in this reviewer’s opinion. In his article, “Rendlesham Forest Thirty Three Years On,” which appeared in the October 2013 issue of UFO Truth Magazine , Mr. Halt makes clear at least some of the ‘missing in action’ information I refer to: “The individuals originally involved in the first night/sigh ting have changed their story numerous times, to the point that one wonders what’s going on. At least four individuals - the three that were involved in the initial sighting and a wannabee (Warren, in Halt’s incorrect opinion), according to them were brou ght to the Office of Special Investigation (OSI) and “debriefed” with injected drugs and hypnotized by Special Agents. They (Jim and John) did not make me aware of this until several years later. If I had known then I would have gotten involved. I am convi nced the purpose of the “debriefing” was to get the facts and to plant false memories. There’s no doubt the “debriefing” was a success. On one occasion, one of the individuals (Burroughs) has taken me to the wrong “landing site” and made claims that 10 were c learly wrong. (Italics Halt’s) For 20+ years I repeatedly saw a notebook from the incident that was supposedly made that night on scene. I never saw any binary codes in the book and there are several glaring errors with what’s now being shown as authentic. None of this means the event didn’t occur. I’m firmly convinced the individuals that are now making different or absurd claims were messed with, for the lack of a better term. It’s truly sad the way what’s happened has ruined the lives of several of t he participants. I have tried to help them on several occasions only to be re - buffed. I knew two of the original participants from the first encounter (Penniston and Burroughs) very well personally. One worked with me countless hours as a Police Liaison in the command post on exercises. He was earmarked for special promotion. As a result of the UFO incident this didn’t happen. Another, I rode with on patrol numerous times. Both had their careers derailed and their personal lives turned upside down. They wer e never the same after the incident and the “debriefing.” For me, Charles Halt long ago emerged as the most enigmatic player among the witnesses. He is in the unique position of being both witness/victim and manipulator, especially with regard to the infl uence he had over Jim and John for most of their adult lives – and in that respect he has successfully played the pair off against Warren for several decades now. It’s both interesting and depressing, and not without some irony, to observe that the kind of critical undermining which Halt has used against Warren for so long he now applies to undermine the credibility of Burroughs and Penniston. Oh what a tangled web we weave. There is no question that Larry Warren’s 1982 ‘outing’ of the colonel caused signif icant problems in both his professional and private life, this while he has always maintained it has nothing to do with his opinions about or attitude toward my coauthor. Halt’s treatment of Burroughs has been particularly shabby though, exemplified by his statement about John having taken him to the wrong landing site, and that Burroughs had “made claims that were clearly wrong.” How can Halt possibly know with certainty what the correct or incorrect first night landing site was? He was not there. John Bur roughs was. Given this fact, I found it interesting that throughout the book Penniston is particularly respectful and supportive in his references to Halt as exemplified here: “ Colonel Halt is an officer who truly believes you are only </p> 18419271 2014-05-10 03:54:46 2014-05-10 03:54:46 open open could-get-a-movie-deal-also-we-already-had-somebody-18419271 draft 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day, by David J. Hand by Gabriel Popkin http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/09/why-coincidences-miracles-and-rare-events-happen-every-day-by-david-j-hand-by-gabriel-popkin-18414242/ Fri, 09 May 2014 01:30:31 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day, by David J. Hand by Gabriel Popkin 9:00am, May 6, 2014 Magazine issue: May 17, 2014 Incredible things happen routinely. People win the lottery — twice. Golfers hit holes-in-one several days in a row. Basketball players appear to get a “hot hand” (SN: 2/12/11, p. 26; SN Online: 10/29/13). Do these chance events validate superstition or suggest a hidden influence in our world — a higher power, perhaps? Absolutely not, argues Imperial College London statistician David J. Hand. The laws of mathematics and physics suffice to explain a world of coincidences. Hand weaves his principle from several strands dubbed the “law of inevitability,” the “law of truly large numbers” and others. Essentially, he argues that because so many things happen, and because we are biased toward noticing unusual events, we should not be surprised when an occasional startling coincidence emerges from a sea of ordinariness. Instead, we should be surprised if one doesn’t. In making his case, Hand devotes much space to debunking fallacies such as ESP-proving experiments and Carl Jung’s “synchronicities.” He also really likes dice. But if you’re not a gambler and already assume a rational universe, you may wonder how the improbability principle might apply to more pressing societal problems. Here Hand offers a few tantalizing examples: a mother exonerated by statistics after being convicted of double infanticide; CEOs whose swiftly appreciating stock options were found to have been postdated to just before a dramatic price increase; the unsettling frequency of stock market crashes. But more would have been welcome. Hand also seems forever worried that his reader will forget the previous chapter’s exposition, leading to much repetition. Still, his informal style, wide-ranging curiosity and knack for elucidating complicated mathematics make the book an enjoyable — and mostly convincing — read. Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27 Posted by: Louis Sheehan</p> 18414242 2014-05-09 01:30:31 2014-05-09 01:30:31 open open why-coincidences-miracles-and-rare-events-happen-every-day-by-david-j-hand-by-gabriel-popkin-18414242 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan The world according to Putin [From the Economist] http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/08/the-world-according-to-putin-from-the-economist-18413403/ Thu, 08 May 2014 19:56:56 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Posted by: Louis Sheehan From the Economist The world according to Putin Why should the Russian president’s innovative attitude towards borders be restricted to eastern Europe? May 10th 2014 | From the print edition WHEN Vladimir Putin justified his annexation of Crimea on the ground that he owed protection to Russian speakers everywhere, this newspaper took a dim view of his line of argument, pointing out that since linguistic borders do not match those of states, it would lead to chaos. We now recognise that this approach to international relations betrayed a deplorable conservatism. Since we pride ourselves on pushing the boundaries in search of a way to clamber out of the box and reach the summit of blue-sky thinking, we reckoned we should grasp the nettle of radical Putinism and run with it. We have, therefore, redrawn the world’s boundaries according to Mr Putin’s principles. We think readers will agree that the resulting map has considerable appeal. Under Mr Putin’s dispensation, things look up for the old colonial powers. Portugal gets to reclaim Brazil, Spain most of the rest of Central and South America and France most of west Africa, which would probably be fine by the locals, since many of their current governments are not much cop. A mighty Scandinavian kingdom comes into being—including Finland, although Finnish is very different from the Scandinavian tongues. Since Swedish is Finland’s second language, the Vikings would have strong grounds for bringing about the sort of peaceful merger based on shared cultural values for which they are famous. In this section Exorbitant privilege The world according to Putin A unified Arabia would stretch from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. There might be the odd squabble between Sunnis, Shias, Christians and adherents of archaic notions of nation; but united by a common tongue, the Arabs would be sure to get along fine, especially if they teamed up to smite the Persian-speakers on the other side of the Gulf. The two Koreas would become one, which might be a good thing—or not, depending on which system prevailed. Since Hindi and Urdu are both a mutually intelligible mixture of Sanskrit and Persian, India could make a claim for Pakistan—and vice versa. The existence of nuclear weapons on either side would bring added spark to the debate over linguistic precedence. Best of all, Britain would regain its empire, including—since it spoke English first—the United States. It would, obviously, give Barack Obama a prestigious position—Keeper of the Woolsack, say—and a nice uniform. Britain might, however, have to surrender some of London’s oligarch-dominated streets, as well as Chelsea Football Club, to Russia. A sizeable minority of The Economist’s staff also speaks Russian and would like to claim Mr Putin’s protection in advance of the next pay negotiations. There is, however a hitch. Consolidation would be undermined by linguistic independence movements. Dozens of segments would peel away from Mandarin-speaking China. Mayaland would agitate for autonomy in Central America. Swahililand would demand independence in Africa. The world’s 7 billion people speak more than 7,000 languages; in Russia alone there are more than 100. Perhaps, on second thoughts, Mr Putin should quit while he is ahead. </p> 18413403 2014-05-08 19:56:56 2014-05-08 19:56:56 open open the-world-according-to-putin-from-the-economist-18413403 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Better Eating, Thanks to Bacteria By JEFF GORDINIER http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/05/07/better-eating-thanks-to-bacteria-by-jeff-gordinier-18401377/ Wed, 07 May 2014 04:45:21 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Originally published in the New York Times. Posted by Louis Sheehan. Better Eating, Thanks to Bacteria By JEFF GORDINIER SAY this about Sandor Ellix Katz: the man knows how to get you revved up to eat bacteria. “Oh, this is nice kimchi,” he said on a summer afternoon at Momofuku Noodle Bar, using chopsticks to pull crimson-coated knuckles of Napa cabbage from a jar. “I like the texture of the sauce. It’s kind of thick.” Kimchi, like sauerkraut, is one of the world’s great fermented foods, and Mr. Katz, a resident of Tennessee, was curious to see what David Chang’s team of cooks in the East Village would do with it. Lately Mr. Katz has become for fermentation what Timothy Leary was for psychedelic drugs: a charismatic, consciousness-raising thinker and advocate who wants people to see the world in a new way. A fermented food is one whose taste and texture have been transformed by the introduction of beneficial bacteria or fungi. And Mr. Katz, who turned 50 this year, considers it a big part of his mission to remind us that the tangy delights of that metamorphosis surround us — and always have, if you look back at the arc of human evolution. “I don’t believe there’s a restaurant in the world that doesn’t have products of fermentation on their menu,” Mr. Katz said. “If you have bread, you have fermented food. If you have cheese, you have fermented food. If you have salad dressing or anything with vinegar in it, you have fermented food. If you have alcoholic beverages, you have fermented food. I mean, you really can’t get through the day without eating something fermented.” Nevertheless Mr. Katz, whose latest book, “The Art of Fermentation” (Chelsea Green), recently went into its third printing, maintains a special fondness for the funkiest manifestations from around the world. “When I walk into a restaurant, I peruse the menu to see if they have any special ferments,” he said. He was in luck at Momofuku, where the crew, led by Mr. Chang, prides itself on exploring new microbial pathways. Tim Dailey, a sous-chef at the Noodle Bar, brought Mr. Katz a glass of an amber-hued German-style helles beer that he had brewed (and that is not regularly served at the restaurant). There were pickles, too, and an egg marinated in soy sauce; a summer-squash salad that had been laced with white kimchi (that is, a kimchi without the usual spicy creek of red chile pepper running through it); and an assortment of warm fungi arrayed upon a pool of black-garlic yogurt. “Oh wow, what’s that?” Mr. Katz asked when that last dish arrived. “It’s a mushroom salad,” Mr. Dailey said. To share a meal with Mr. Katz is to be reminded that you are sharing it with a vast army of invisible dining companions. As he dug into the mushrooms and yogurt, he talked about a recent study, the Human Microbiome Project, that has deepened the understanding of how our bodies are occupied by “trillions of bacteria,” most of which appear to be committed to the noble enterprise of keeping us healthy and functioning. Mr. Katz believes that fermented foods help replenish a diverse variety of probiotic bacteria in our guts, and his interest in the topic can be traced back to a health crisis of his own. In 1991, while working in New York City politics, he learned that he had contracted H.I.V. Suddenly unsure of how many healthy years he had left, but certain that he didn’t want to squander them trudging through stress-throttled 80-hour workweeks, he moved to a rural commune in Tennessee. “I didn’t have experience as a gardener, but that was something I was interested in pursuing when I got there,” he said. “I felt myself called by plants.” Blame bumper crops of cabbage for his fermentation fixation: Since he had to do something with the cabbage before it rotted, he soon found himself making sauerkraut, and learning more and more about its health benefits and the role that preserved vegetables had played in the course of civilization. “Agriculture doesn’t make sense without ways of storing the harvest,” he said. “Stuff happens when you try to store food, or inadvertently let food sit around. Just as our bodies are covered with microorganisms, everything we eat is covered with microorganisms.” (Still, Mr. Katz often stresses that fermented food hasn’t “cured” him of H.I.V., although he does think it’s possible that friendly bacteria have helped reduce some side effects of the medications he takes.) If, as books by other authors have argued, cod changed the world and the Irish saved civilization, Mr. Katz’s work often brushes up against the idea that the discovery of fermentation provided a crucial step in human evolution. We ate, we drank, we changed. “It seems likely that our primate ancestors were familiar with fermenting berries and were even familiar with the phenomenon of inebriation,” he said. Human beings “figured out how to liquefy the berries and make beverages,” spurring the development of both pottery and poetry. There’s no denying that fermentation has drastically expanded the spectrum of what’s available to the human palate. “Ferments are huge sources of flavor complexity,” Mr. Katz said. “That’s why people find cheese so compelling. That’s why soy sauce has become a universally loved condiment.” At home, Mr. Katz devotes much of his days to flavor experiments. “This woman in North Carolina taught me that Cherokee people used to take their excess corn and pickle it in a brine, and it’s incredibly delicious like that,” he said. “I’ve been doing a variation on that where I cut kernels off the corn and make like a fermented corn relish. I ferment it just for a few days in a jar and it gets this beautiful, sharp flavor.” Pungent tastes and aromas don’t dissuade him. A while back he tried his hand at making balao-balao, a Filipino specialty in which rice is fermented with shrimp. “I loved it, and as the days passed and the flavors got stronger, I liked it more and more,” he said. “I brought it to a potluck meal that some friends had organized. And as I reheated it, I noticed that it got really, really smelly. A year later my friends are still telling stories about that crazy smelly fish that I tried to serve them.” Naturally, a seeker like Sandor Katz couldn’t resist an invitation to visit Momofuku’s laboratory of fermentation, so after lunch he took a short stroll to an unmarked sliver of office space in the East Village, where he met Dan Felder, the 28-year-old head of R&D for Mr. Chang’s network of restaurants. There, in the Momofuku test kitchen, Mr. Felder gave Mr. Katz a glimpse of a brilliantly demented-fermented future: Erlenmeyer flasks full of new iterations of soy sauce, jars of vinegar conjured up from ingredients like strawberries and cherries, little mounds of paste that represented the next wave in miso. There were vials of explosively flavored tamari, a mere droplet of which might garnish an oyster. “It’s basically, ‘How do we make umami from scratch?’ ” Mr. Felder explained. As with molecular gastronomy and the farm-to-table movement in the past, a deep focus on fermentation can help a chef like David Chang (or René Redzepi at Noma in Copenhagen) stake out fresh territory for creative expression. Every time the Momofuku crew hatches a new flavor, Mr. Felder said, “the more expansive our repertoire can become.” To demonstrate this, he reached into a fridge and removed some laces of creamy fatback dusted with salt and a mold-colonized barley used to make products like soy sauce and miso. “Koji-cured lardo,” Mr. Felder said. “This is a new frontier.” Mr. Katz reacted to the lardo and everything else like a kid in a kimchi shop, even going into a brief reverie when a jar of Basmati koji was opened and his nasal passages got to bask in the fragrance. “Oh, my God, what a beautiful aroma,” he said. “It’s a gorgeous mold. I am so in love with koji.” Traditionally, miso has come from fusing that mold with rice or barley, then adding it to a base of soybeans. But Mr. Felder brought out several versions that had been made, instead, with ingredients like pistachios, pine nuts, lentils or mung beans. “I’m fascinated by this idea of nut-based misos,” Mr. Katz said. “I want to taste them all, really. The pine nut was amazing.” “That’s Chang’s favorite,” Mr. Felder said. “You get this incredibly creamy mouthful.” Mr. Katz swooned over the pistachio miso, too (“Oh, my God, this is so delicious”), and as he prepared to leave, his blue eyes were brightly shining. “It’s really exciting for me to see these crazy new applications,” he said. “I feel like this is going to influence my experimentation.” </p> 18401377 2014-05-07 04:45:21 2014-05-07 04:45:21 open open better-eating-thanks-to-bacteria-by-jeff-gordinier-18401377 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan
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