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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 &quot;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.