Sic Semper Tyrannis

"Strike The Tent" by W. Patrick Lang

    

To Order Directly From the Author:

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PO Box 16103

Washington, DC  20041 

Pricing for Perfect bound Softcover: 

The Butcher's Cleaver:  $23.95 (Hardcover $33.95)

Death Piled Hard:  $18.95   (Hardcover $28.95)

Down the Sky:  $15.95  (Hardcover $25.95) 

Please add $3.99 S&H handling for each book ordered, or $11.89 for all three books in the Trilogy.

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"Science currently holds that time travel is an impossibility, but readers of Down the Sky, the final volume of Colonel Pat Lang’s Strike the Tent trilogy will question that assertion. Code-named “Hannibal,” Confederate penetration agent Claude Devereux is firmly lodged in the upper echelons of the Federal war machine. Now a Brigadier General of the Union forces with the new Congressional Medal of Honor on his chest, Major Devereux of the Confederate Secret Service knows time is running out. His minders in Richmond may no longer trust him, his personal life is a shambles, and Union spy-catcher Lafayette Baker is determined to bring him down. Only his peculiar, personal friendship with President Lincoln holds his enemies at bay.

"Egypt military coup is 'very possible', says Mubarak's ex-spy chief"

"...the Brotherhood is forming paramilitary forces modelled on Iran's Revolutionary Guard to be ready in 2 to 3 years and which will fight to protect the Islamist group's political power.

Abdel-Moneim Abul-Fotouh also came under fire from Suleiman, who claimed the Islamist presidential candidate was the founder of the Gamaa Islamiya (Islamic Group), an organisation behind a wave of brutal violence across Egypt in the early 1990s.

Suleiman also condemned the performance of Egypt's new Parliament, saying that MPs have focused on petty issues while ignoring the essential needs of citizens."  Al Ahram on line

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As I have said before, Islamist parties have but two goals.  1- Attain power and creae a Sharia law state, and 2 - Hold on to power at any cost or by any means.  The Islamist candidates now running for president disguise their true aims, but anyone who knows them knows that they are the enemies of modernity.

If the election for parliament creates a situation in which the elected president is forced to cooperate in writing a constitution that makes Islam "the answer," then a toady like Amre Moussa will go down that road with them, resisting as best he can in the traditional Ottoman/Egyptian bureaucratic style.

The generals will not wait indefinitely after they see that trend comfirmed by this actions.  The election of an Islamist president will cause the crisis to be sooner rather than later.

The liberals?  Like the communists in Nasser's time there will be places for them; exile or prison.  pl

http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/42277/Egypt/Politics-/Egypt-military-coup-is-very-possible,-says-Mubarak.aspx

Advocacy and Analysis

I will try once again to state the difference between analysis and advocacy.  My post explaining what the Catholic Church in the US is doing is analysis not advocacy.  Analysis is an explanation of what is occurring.  Advocacy is an arrempt to persuade.  pl

The NATO summit was a flop

"Zardari's refusal to reopen the supply routes left a diplomatic blot on a summit that NATO sought to cast as the beginning of the end of the conflict in Afghanistan. The Chicago gathering did produce a formal agreement by the alliance to hand over lead responsibility for security to Afghan forces by mid-2013, and pull out nearly all U.S. and other NATO troops by the end of 2014 even if the Taliban-led insurgency remains undiminished.

U.S. officials insist ample fuel and other supplies are being delivered via much longer and more expensive land routes in Russia and other nations north of Afghanistan. But the Pentagon says reopening the land route in Pakistan will be essential to hauling vast stores of military equipment and vehicles out of Afghanistan during the withdrawal."  LA Times

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I guess BHO does not really accept the idea that Afghanistan and Pakistan are sovereign entities that are not obliged to do his bidding.

WH spokesmen are now citing the great "success" in Iraq as "proof" of how well things are going to end in Afghanistan.

We have yielded effective operational control to the Afghans.  A formal transfer of opcon can wait until after November.

The Pakistanis are still blockading our supplies and are demading large bribes before they will be willing to open the spigot.

The former Soviet states are getting rich by "solving" this problem temporarily.

General Allen, the WH's man is leaving for EUCOM command soon.  I hope the skiing is still good at Garmisch.

Ambassador Crocker has announced hat he is returning to retirement this summer.

Looks like the little furry critters are leaving.  pl

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-nato-afghanistan-20120522,0,2278946.story

Obama is losing the Catholic vote

"A recent survey by the Pew Research Center shows that, despite the administration’s self-portrayal as the champion of “women’s issues” amidst a supposed Republican “war on women,” the president’s reelection advantage among women has declined in recent months as well as with another key demographic -- Catholics.

Obama was ahead among Catholics by 9 points in early March, and is now trailing by 5 points.

The Pew survey finds that, among Catholic voters with an opinion, 47% would today vote for President Obama, and 52% for former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.

That same margin, were it to hold on Election Day, would mark a swing of 18 million voters away from Obama."  Foxnews

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I wrote a while back that the collective response of the Catholic Church to the insurance mandate issues would come when the collective that is the Church came to a consensus.

Here you have the response.  There are"outliers" not adhering to this position but they know that in the end they will either accept this position or leave the Church.  Groups of rebellious religious do not run the Church.

 

Was Megrahi really guilty?

"Much of the evidence was later challenged. It emerged that Mr. Gauci had repeatedly failed to identify Mr. Megrahi before the trial and had selected him only after seeing his photograph in a magazine and being shown the same photo in court. The date of the clothing sale was also in doubt.

Investigators said Mr. Bollier, whom even the court called “untruthful and unreliable,” had changed his story repeatedly after taking money from Libya, and might have gone to Tripoli just before the attack to fit a timer and bomb into the cassette recorder. The implication that he was a conspirator was never pursued.

In 2007, Mr. Lumpert admitted that he had lied at the trial, stolen a timer and given it to a Lockerbie investigator. Moreover, the fragment he identified was never tested for residue of explosives, although it was the only evidence of possible Libyan involvement.

The court’s inference that the bomb had been transferred from the Frankfurt feeder flight was also cast into doubt when a Heathrow security guard revealed that Pan Am’s baggage area had been broken into 17 hours before the bombing, a circumstance never explored."  NY Times

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I have always thought that Megrahi was a convenient scapegoat.  Before the "Counter-Terrorism Task Force" at CIA (or whatever it was called then) fastened on him and his later aquitted colleague as the culprits, the CTTF had floundered for a long time, unable to "sort out" the crime.  Careers had been damaged and a new director of the center was brought in to "crack the case."  Miraculously, this man (a turk at his job) discovered the truth hidden in the midden heap of faulty evidence.

Libya denied the crime until the Saudis persuaded Qathafi that he could come in from the cold with regard to the United States by confessing to the deed and offering up culprits who could bear the burden of guilt.

Qathafi found that easy enough to do and threw in his non-existent nuclear weapons program as a sweetener.  The warehoues full of equipment that the Libyans had no idea what to with were an easy sacrifice.  The Bush Administration and its CT "experts" lapped this up as proof of their genius and knowledge of how to handle the Arabs.

Who really did it?  Probably some combination of Iran and the more extreme Palestinian groups would be my guess.  pl

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/21/world/africa/abdel-basset-ali-al-megrahi-lockerbie-bomber-dies-at-60.html?pagewanted=1&ref=obituaries

Ft. Hood Welcomes Vietnam Vets home

I wrote this next thing as part of an autobiographical work.  It seems apt now.  The time was 1969.  pl

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"In May I turned over command of the team and went to the coast to spend a week at battalion headquarters writing reports and being debriefed.  While at Battalion, I went to dinner one night at a brand new Chinese restaurant located as a concession on the big U.S. Army post at Long Binh.  There were four MI people at my table and nearby several junior officers from the 101^st Airborne Division were eating at another table.  Among them was a young captain wearing the faded, worn uniform in which he had come in from the field.  He had the haggard, sunburned look that came with living in the outdoors.  He had the look that in the French Army is called “Le Christ descendu de la croix.”  During the meal, the restaurant door opened and in came MG Melvin Zais, the 101st’s CG and his aide.  A week or so before, the 101^st had repeatedly assaulted a hill in the central highlands, the hill which came to be known as “Hamburger Hill.”  They assaulted it nine or ten times from the bottom up instead of landing on the top and fighting their way down.  This did not make a lot of sense given the number of helicopters in the division.  Rumor had it that Zais had ordered the attack to be made in this way to demonstrate to the American command and to the NVA that the 101^st was still as fine a fighting organization as it had been when he had served in it in World War II.  It had been a difficult fight.  A lot of men died.  They took the hill.  The young-old captain put down his chopsticks and placed his sun cracked hands on the edge of the table to watch General Zais.  Zais ignored him, although the aide whispered something to the general about him.  Tension grew in the restaurant.  The captain’s friends talked to him.  One of them put his hand on the man’s forearm.  The young man struggled to his feet despite the restraining hands that tried to drag him back into his seat.  “Blackjack!” he roared across the restaurant, shaking his fist as he did so.  (Blackjack was Zais’ radio call sign.)  “Blackjack!” he went on.  “Damn you!  You killed my company!  Damn you!  Are you happy now?  Are you happy? You killed my company..”  Zais never looked at him.  He stood up and walked out the door trailing his aide.  The captain sat down, put his elbows on the table, and covered his eyes with his hands."  pl

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Every once in a while I hear some fool say how much better "the force" is now.  You are welcome America.  You are welcome.  pl

http://www.kwtx.com/ourtown/home/headlines/Fort_Hood_Vietnam_Veterans_Welcomed_Home_Monday_152107835.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Dak_To

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ia_Drang

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Hue

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_937

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fire_Support_Base_Ripcord

Look at the numbers.  pl 

 

More on the Glass-Steagall Act by Hank Foresman

Carter Glass was a conservative, in the Burkean and Madisonian sense; Henry Steagall was a southern rural Democrat; and like many from the South his politics was populists in that he wished to protect the common man from the power of corporations, banks, and railroads.  Together they help enact one of the most important Banking laws of the 20^th Century the Glass-Steagall Act.  While there were a number of provisions in the Glass-Steagall Act its most important functions were, as stated in Wikipedia:

The Banking Act of 1933 (Pub.L. 73-66, 48 Stat. 162, enacted June 16, 1933) was a law that established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in the United States and imposed banking reforms, several of which were intended to control speculation.  Specifically It was intended to erect a barrier between the activities of commercial banks and investment banks.

Carter Glass born in 1860, his early years were shaped by the cycles of boom and bust in reconstruction South.  Booms and bust cycles that tore families’ asunder, booms and bust that left scars on countless communities across the South, to include his hometown, Lynchburg Virginia.  As a result of his own experience and his observations Glass believe there was a proper role for government in controlling the excess of capitalism. 

Oh, Jerusalem!

"The status of Jerusalem is among the most explosive issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, defying resolution throughout two decades of on-again, off-again peace talks. Today, the Arab and Jewish sections of the city are worlds apart.

Job discrimination against Arab Jerusalemites is common and investments in infrastructure and education in east Jerusalem are far below the levels plowed into the western sector. The discrimination has stifled economic development, fueled chronic joblessness and stoked poverty.

"We often use slogans in regard to Jerusalem and refrain from looking at the reality of Jerusalem. The result is that the discrepancy is something that many people have trouble adjusting to and accepting," Olmert told Israel TV."  Foxnews/AP

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Ehud Olmert was Deputy Mayor of occupied Jerusalem under that great and good man, Teddy Kollek.  At the time he looked like a genuine hard a-s on this subject and would glower at Kollek in meetings when the subject of the rights of the Arab citizens of the city came up.

When he became PM, he evidently had his "road to Damascus" moment (irony alert), and began to make offers to the Palestinians of some sort of shared sovereignty as a road to peace.  The Palestinians, never wishing to miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity grandly rebuffed him with the "not enough" slogan.

The old, walled city of Jerusalem lies at the heart of any chance of a settlement not built on Arab and Israeili skulls.  The Christian and Muslim quarters of the Old City plus other parts of East Jerusalem, like Shiekh Jarrah, the Mount of Olives south of Mount Scopus and Abu Dis are indispensible parts of any partition that the Palestinians might accept.

A shared administration of such necessities as electricity, water, trash disposal, sewage and policing is possible.  There have been existing plans for schemes of government based on such ideas for many years.

!n 1973 I heard Admiral Moorer, then CJCS lecture on peace for the Holy Land.  When he finished, I asked him how he would deal with Jerusalem in a settlement.  He fell silent and then said that this could be settled "at a later time."  Is this the time?  pl

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/05/20/former-israeli-pm-jerusalem-must-be-partitioned/#ixzz1vQgkL56M

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem

 

House votes for US domestic propaganda.

"An amendment that would legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences is being inserted into the latest defense authorization bill, BuzzFeed has learned.

The amendment would “strike the current ban on domestic dissemination” of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the Pentagon, according to the summary of the law at the House Rules Committee's official website.

The tweak to the bill would essentially neutralize two previous acts—the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and Foreign Relations Authorization Act in 1987—that had been passed to protect U.S. audiences from our own government’s misinformation campaigns.

The bi-partisan amendment is sponsored by Rep. Mac Thornberry from Texas and Rep. Adam Smith from Washington State."  Buzzwire

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George Orwell would feel justified by this.  In "1984" he saw clearly that a situation of foreign and domestic threat could be used as an excuse to cut the guts out of democracy and impose oligarchic rule by those who choose to believe themselves the shepherds and the rest of us the sheep.

This amendment, if passed into law by the Senate of the United States, would enable the "information operations" crowd in the armed forces and CIA to fabricate themes and "facts" for the purpose of controlling the collective "mind" of the citizens if the US.  They are now fobidden by law from that effort.

We are now subjected to the "private" delusions and propaganda of the supposedly independent media outlets.  How much worse will it be when the government itself regulates what we are told in the interest of consolidating opposition and hatred for the "enemy."  pl

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mhastings/congressmen-seek-to-lift-propaganda-ban

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four

 

The FBI file on the Weizmann Institute

"In October of 1992 personnel at the Yuma Proving Ground, which tests nearly every significant ground combat weapons system, detected a University of Buffalo computer system user had penetrated their military computer network via New Mexico State University. The senior majoring in Chemical Engineering hacked the UB system to obtain high-level privileges using access codes stolen graduate students. Soon after the BU hack "computers from the Weizmann Institute for Science accessed computers from NM SU to penetrate computers at YPG." FBI investigators suspected the BU student, arrested by Amherst Town police on October 8, 1992, passed the secret access codes to Weizmann. FBI counterespionage officials uncovered Weizmann's clandestine nuclear development role and US funding network, but closed the investigation."  Irmep

http://www.irmep.org/ILA/weizmann/

 

HARPER: JP MORGAN CHASE SCANDAL IGNITES SUPPORT FOR GLASS STEAGALL

The shocking admission on May 11 by JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon that the bank had suffered a $2 billion loss on a bad derivatives bet at their London office has served as a painful reminder that nothing has really been done, since the financial meltdown of 2008, to fundamentally change the gambling mania with "other people's money" on Wall Street.  In just one week since the original Dimon admission, the price tag on the London derivatives blowout by JPMC has more than doubled.  As of today, the bank is acknowledging $4 billion in losses, and the figure is expected to reach $20 billion by the time the complex highly leveraged bets are unraveled.
 
The JPMC revalations are particularly embarrassing to President Obama, who has publicly praised Dimon as one of the most competent bankers on Wall Street, and who had him at the top of his list of candidates to replace Tim Geithner as his Treasury Secretary, should he win reelection.  Sources close to the White House have told me that the President and the First Lady maintain their personal bank accounts with Chase.  At least the President puts his money where his mouth is.

Gun Rights Forum

Paul Deavereaux (no relation to Claude) sent me this comment which I woiuld like to make the starting point for a discussion on Firearms ownership rights.  He lives in California.  pl

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"Well, in brief, some kind of laws that won't take my guns away from me :-)  

As I posted, I currently own three firearms -- a riot shotgun and two antique but nicely maintained .22 rifles -- no handguns at all. Speaking for myself, with my level of training and no official need to carry a handgun any longer, any protection offered by handguns is way offset by the danger to myself and my family. So I got rid of my handguns. And feel good about it. Safer. Which is the point.  

As for controls, I think long guns and handguns should be legal but need to be treated a little differently in terms of oversight.  

Gun ownership/purchase should be permitted only to those individuals who have completed a proper, certified and rigorous course in their use and their legal liabilities and responsibilities (service in the military does not exempt one from completing the civilian course).  There should be individual courses for handguns and long guns. The courses can be administered by gov't agencies or by duly licensed private individuals and groups (NRA etc). Cost for the course should be fixed at a reasonable figure so as to not be prohibitive (used as a 'gateway' to restrict gun ownership to only the affluent).

"...a giant leap, for commercial space," Reuters

"An Obama administration plan to cut the cost of spaceflight services faces a key test on Saturday when a privately owned rocket lifts off for a practice run to the International Space Station."  Reuters

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Man's future in space ultimately depends on the commercialization of the costs and profits of flight.  There are some things that government must lead in and the governments are doing that in deep space exploration development and continuing subsidization of attempts to make space, a business for those who have the vision to see the possibilities.

The SpaceX  Falcon 9 and Dragon equipment will be tested severely tomorrow.  Much depends on the outcome.  pl

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/18/us-usa-spaceship-idUSBRE84H0LM20120518

"UN nuclear agency chief to visit Tehran" Fox News

"IAEA chief Yukiya Amano's visit could signal an agreement has been reached that would allow his organization to resume a probe of suspicions that Iran may have worked on developing nuclear weapons, according to the Associated Press."  Fox News

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It would be wise for the Iranians to reach such an agreement and confound the likes of Natanyahu.  The world and particularly the United States waits for an opportunity to judge that Iran follows the guidance of Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei in adopting a policy that abjures nuclear weapons as inherently ungodly.  pl

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/05/18/un-nuclear-agency-chief-to-visit-tehran/#ixzz1vEdqWLEP

 

"Christmas in Killarney" Dempsey and the 1st AD band

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kxc5Inqo7U

pl