Sic Semper Tyrannis

"Strike The Tent" by W. Patrick Lang

    

To Order Directly From the Author:

Rosemont Books

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.

"The Major Won the Croix de Guerre" Alan Farrell

 In honor of Memorial Day I have decided to put up Alan Farrell's story as titled above.  It is one of my favorites.  The unit involved was really a "hatchet company"  of MACVSOG. 

pl

Download The Major Won the Croix de Guerre

Download The Major Won the Croix de Guerre

 

 
 

Why a dead heat?

"Even Democratic pollster Peter Hart, one half of the bipartisan team that puts together the monthly Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll, now puts Mr. Obama’s chances of re-election “at no better than 50-50.”

According to the average of eight national polls released in the two weeks until May 23, and compiled by Real Clear Politics, Mr. Obama has a marginal 1.8 percentage point lead over Mr. Romney.

The presidential race is effectively a dead heat.

The turnaround in Mr. Romney’s fortunes has stunned even his Republican allies, leading to a Wednesday headline in Politico, the U.S. capital’s political newspaper, reading: “GOP discovers that Mitt Romney could win.”

Of course, the national polls are of secondary importance, since the election will be decided in fewer than 10 swing states, as each candidate aims to accumulate the required 270 electoral college votes required to claim the Oval Office."  Globe and Mail

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Last week someone rebuked me for quoting Foxnews.  How about a newspaper in Canadia? "Terre de mes aieux..."  Well, some of them were from there.

Given the persona of Romney and the inherent advantage of incumbency, IMO BHO should be well ahead nationally.

He is not.  Why?

Factors against Obama:

-  A lot of people are secret racists and would never vote for him.

- A lot of people don't like his "European Socialist Policies." Most of those do not know what that means, but, no matter.

- Public confidence in the national economy is a "lagging indicator" in the public mind and the economy is only dimly understood by tens of millions of people who nevertheless are enfranchised.

- His left of center administration tends instinctively to take positions that irritate many in the US in the belief that non-"progressives" are not worth listening to.

       * Gay marriage is one of those.

       * An embroiled court room battle with the Catholic Church is another.

- There is deep suspicion that the tendency to embrace "progress" will be unfettered in a second term.

- Some Jews and other Zionists think him not friendly enough to Israel and they are doiong all they can to beat him.

Factors for Obama:

- Romney himself who seems to be completely incapable of identifying with non-rich people.

- Romney's polytheistic religion.

- Bain, the "vulture capital company."

- Romney's entourage of neocon foreign policy advisers.

- Women. Blacks and Hispanics are going to "stick with" Obama.

Think of a few more.  pl

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/worldview/new-polls-suggest-us-election-race-in-dead-heat/article2442441/

Iraq, a memoir. Tyler

                  Tal Afar was nothing like Mosul.  We had been moved up from Mosul after our battalion commander, in a bid to get to ‘where the fighting was’, handed over our sectors to the Iraqi Police and Army and declared ‘Mission Accomplished’.  He was bucking for a chance to go to Ramadi, where the marines were limited to moving around at night and the fighting was thick and furious.  I reckoned that the ploy was transparent (I found out years after the fact that the CG in charge of Northern Iraq didn’t think much of our Colonel) in its attempt to get some serious war ink on his record and in all likelihood a lot of us killed.   The 172^nd Stryker Brigade was not what I would call the most ‘elite’ of organizations.  I had come from the 1/501^st PIR, and served a tour of duty on the eastern border of Afghanistan, so I had a frame of reference that many of the ‘captains’ who had promoted from second lieutenant to captain were lacking.  Mainly that there was no need to go looking for fights in a hostile country, because sooner or later they find you. 

Memorial Day 2012 - Foresman

While not officially Memorial Day my wife and I attended a funeral today in Arlington Cemetery; the funeral was near the Amphitheater and the Tomb of the Unknown, after the funeral my wife and I took a few minutes to walk up the hill to the Amphitheater.  Sir Moses Ezekiel VMI Class of 1866 designed the Amphitheater.  He is buried near by in Section 16 of Arlington, as he was a veteran of the Civil War having fought with Battalion of Cadets at the Battle of New Market on May 15, 1865.  Having never visited his burial site which is at the base of the Confederate Monument I thought it was appropriate.

In Virginia Confederate Memorial Day is celebrated on the same day as the national holiday.  According to Wikipedia, Memorial Day began as a celebration of those who had died during the Civil War.  Over time it has come to be a celebration of those who died in all wars.

It was fitting we visited Sir Moses Ezekiel grave.  Not only did he design the Amphitheater, but he also sculpted the Confederate War Memorial, and of course Virginia Morning Her Dead on the grounds of his Alma Mater the Virginia Military Institute.

"Islam is the Answer?"

OK.  Amre Moussa lost.  Well, that is some consolation.  I fear for the probable run-off result.  It seems that Shafiq was not a big enough political figure in the last Mubarak government to attract the enmity of the secular faction.  He is their standard bearer.  This is a great irony.

My bet will be on the MB candidate and that will set up the situation that Omar Suleiman discussed with the interviewer in my last piece on Egypt.

Thee is no constitution.  The last constitution is no longer a factor.  The question arises of the legitimacy and authority of a new president.  This is a typical "Egyptian fire drill."

The generals will be in a good position to contest the authority of a president they do not want.

pl

http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/36/122/42755/Presidential-elections-/Presidential-elections-news/Live-updates-Mursi,-Shafiq-top-race;-Sabbahi-claim.aspx

Mother Teresa and BHO - Cardinal Wuerl

"The mandate’s definition of a religious organization contradicts decades of precedent and practice. Republicans and Democrats alike have long agreed that the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty includes not only what goes on within the four walls of a church but also the religiously motivated acts of service that fulfill the mission of that church’s faith. Only now, with this mandate’s demands, has the federal government said that we must leave our conscience behind when we step into the public square.

If the mandate’s religious exemption is left unchanged, it would allow an employee of the federal government to determine what is, or is not, a religious ministry. The Archdiocese of Washington is this area’s largest nongovernmental provider of social services. Catholic schools in the archdiocese teach and nurture 28,000 children. Catholic hospitals provide millions of dollars’ worth of uncompensated care every year to our city’s poor and vulnerable. As the Catholic maxim states, “We serve others not because they are Catholic, but because we are Catholic.” Yet it is possible that not one of these organizations would fit the mandate’s definition. Does anyone really think that the work of Mother Teresa wasn’t religious?"  Cardinal Wuerl

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We have been too quiet here for the last few days.  This will stir things up.  Wuerl is saying here what I said in laying out the Church's position as to the purpose and therefore the identity of religiously centered institutions connected to the Catholic ministry to mankind..  He says that the Church's people do these things because they are done in God's name and therefore these institutions are essentially religious.

Some of our correspondents here are Catholics who insist that  they, not the hierarchs like Wuerl are "the Church," and that their collective will and identity trumps.Matthew: 16:18.

IMO that sets the stage for a schism (split).  Well,, when you get that settled let me know so I can choose which church I prefer.  pl

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/protecting-our-catholic-conscience-in-the-public-square/2012/05/23/gJQAj05XkU_story.html

There Be Dragons - Jonathan Goff

At 3:44am this past Tuesday, a rocket blasted off from Cape Caneveral, Florida on a historic mission to demonstrate the ability of a commercially developed and operated transportation system to safely deliver cargo to the International Space Station. This flight is only the third flight of the Falcon 9 rocket, developed by Elon Musk’s startup Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), and the second flight of their Dragon capsule, so the tension in the atmosphere at SpaceX was understandable. The first launch attempt, last Saturday morning, was scrubbed due to a leaky check valve in the central engine’s turbopump, which was fortunately caught by the Falcon 9’s flight computer, enabling a safe abort of the engines with only half a second to spare before the planned liftoff.  SpaceX was able to diagnose and repair the problem over the weekend, and was ready to go again at the next launch window, on Tuesday morning. Fortunately, the Falcon 9 delivered a flawless performance, lifting the Dragon capsule safely to orbit a little over nine minutes after liftoff. I had literally been keeping my fingers and toes crossed for the whole flight while watching things from home (my past experience in rocket testing has made me somewhat superstitious). I choked up at the reaction of the SpaceX team when the Dragon’s solar panels finally deployed. If you need some inspiration, and haven’t seen the flight footage, I’d strongly suggest watching the unedited SpaceX broadcast (launch starts at ~44:40 mark).

While those initial thrilling moments were an excellent start to a historic mission which is the culmination of nearly six years of hard work at SpaceX and NASA, the most historic portion of this mission is about to begin tomorrow morning. Over the past two days since the launch, the Dragon capsule has been slowly catching up with the space station, while performing several tests to demonstrate to NASA the capsule’s ability to safely operate near the station. Earlier this morning, the Dragon performed a maneuver that allowed it to pass only 2.5km below the station, where the picture at the beginning of this post was taken by an astronaut on board the ISS (Don Pettit, the one who will be operating the robot arm for tomorrow’s “berthing” operation). This final test verified the ability of ISS crewmembers to send commands to the Dragon, and to test the inter-vehicle communication system. With the completion of today’s tests, SpaceX has actually fulfilled all the requirements they had originally planned for their second Dragon flight. However, over the past year, SpaceX has worked with NASA to gain permission to combine the second Dragon flight with the third and final Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) demonstration flight, where the Dragon capsule will ultimately berth with the station (using its robotic arm, controlled by astronauts on-board), cargo will be unloaded from inside the Dragon capsule, and a small amount of non-critical cargo will be loaded back into Dragon for the return flight. It is this final set of operations, which will start in the early morning hours tomorrow (around 7:30am on the east coast) and end with the hatch to the ISS being opened early Saturday morning, which will be the truly historic part of this mission—marking the beginning of service of the world’s first commercial space cargo delivery vehicle, completing SpaceX’s part in the COTS development program, and marking SpaceX’s transition into operational service as part of the Commercial Resupply Services program which it won flight contracts from at the end of 2008.

 

"This tale shall the good man tell his son."

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/the_athenaeum/

My sister, Maureen, has re-posted her Memorial Day piece from 2009.

China Warns Australia to Choose "Godfather" - China or U.S. - Oilprice

"It is rare in diplomatic circles for governments to speak bluntly, particularly in the Orient, where manners are highly prized.

The exceptions to this rule are retired military officers, who are often able to voice sentiments too impolitic for other channels.

One of the more startling pronouncements in this vein occurred last week when Song Xiaojun, a former senior officer of the People's Liberation Army, warned that Australia cannot juggle its relationships with the United States and China indefinitely and "Australia has to find a godfather sooner or later. Australia always has to depend on somebody else, whether it is to be the 'son' of the US or 'son' of China. (It) depends on who is more powerful, and based on the strategic environment." Noting the rising importance of China as an export market Song added that Australia depended on exporting iron ore to China "to feed itself," but "Frankly, it has not done well politically.""  Oilprice

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Australians?  What say you?  pl

http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/China-Warns-Australia-to-Choose-Godfather-China-or-US.html

STFU - by TTG

Hillary Clinton just boasted about using black propaganda against jihadist web forums at a conference with Admiral McRaven at USSOCOM headquarters. Kind of defeats the purpose of using black propaganda. This news is now posted on sites all around the world. No doubt it's already on the jihadist sites as well. 

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2012/0523/Clinton-says-US-has-hacked-al-Qaeda-websites-in-Yemen

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UPDATE

There is now a lot more information available about Hilary's announcement. It's a significantly different story from what Kimberly Dozier from AP described in her article. This wasn't black propaganda or hacking. It was the work of the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, a group composed of military and civilian specialists that uses the web and social media to track and undermine Al Qaeda's efforts to recruit new members. They openly bought ad space on the jihadist forum and inserted ads challenging jihadist propaganda.

Bravo! The IC, DOD and DOS working together and working smartly. This is what smart power is all about. And it's a hell of a lot cheaper in blood and treasure than a shooting war. Hillary was right to crow about this. More info at these links at newsfeedresearcher and lawfareblog.

TTG

"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 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