x - 95 Louis Sheehan

e this was a clever piece of work that combined so much relevant colour with genuine ease of play. True, it needed a revised set of rules, but this was really the first time I felt like these were 1815 armies moving realistically on the operational level and fighting realistically on the tactical level. As such, the necessity of preventing the two Coalition armies joining was played out in a historically faithful manner. You even got a pontoon train! Looking back to my earlier article, time was certainly an issue in this game – and daringly and adeptly done. Turns were great chunks of daytime (morning, afternoon, evening – I think – and night.). Your big battles might therefore only last a couple of turns, or maybe three, but this worked alongside a very neat battle engagement system which made it very difficult to keep throwing the same units into the fray and expecting them to look interested. The one negative was the map – in my opinion. Big hexes are all very well, but to compensate parts of the map detail looked plain odd – bends in roads where there never bends in reality, but it was the only way to make the terrain stay more or less where it should. Perhaps areas would have been better, and I must admit to being one of those gamers who think areas should be employed in map design far more often. The Emperor Returns (Clash of Arms) The Emperor returns Another Kevin Zucker design, following in the operational tradition of Napoleon at Bay, 1809, Struggle of Nations, and others too numerous to mention. Two things really dominated the design mindset of this series – logistics and army command. You could not simply push all your pieces to wherever you wanted them to go – you had to issue orders from a Centre of Operations (best placed on the best bit of road you could find), or else rely on the subordinate commander’s initiative to move without directions coming from above. And every time something or someone moved, there was a danger that someone or some things would fall by the wayside as march attrition took its toll. Given the smaller distances and timespan of the 1815 campaign, this was not so much of an issue as in other campaigns, but then again, the game covered a far greater period of time, with the French army’s shift to the border catered for, and then potentially weeks of manoeuvres following after. You could play with fog of war, and this tied in with a map of nearly all of Belgium and a chunk of northern France, enabled the French to opt for a completely different approach to the historic one. L’Armée du Nord might make its main thrust further to the west, thus threatening immediately the Iron Duke’s communications with Britain; or, alternatively, you could find Boney moving further east, to imperil Blücher’s lines of communication with the Rhine. The choice was wide open, and so the battles on this 1815 rerun might well occur far away from Hougomont’s woods and Ligny brook. Inevitably though, in this system, which stressed that what went on pre battle was at least as important as battle itself, the battles you saw on your map were fought with a very broad brush – not without style or consideration of battle factors such as cavalry finishing a rout, or the French Grand Battery, but not ever a battle “in little” as other designs might seek to attempt. Weather? Well that was certainly present, but I felt it was not quite right. The game insisted, as I recall, that it was going to tip down on the 17th as it historically did. But, given how many other what-ifs you were working with, and how much Belgium you could be in, I always felt that this game needed to be less set about when the bad weather came, if at all, and where it fell…if it ever did. Oh, and where was I when I got this game? At home, waiting for the parcel to arrive. Battles of the Hundred DaysHundred Days This was essentially a Kevin Zucker operational model tied down to the actual Waterloo campaign territory. It came in a tiny box, with a tiny bland map, utterly unremarkable units and a totally unappealing rulebook. Nevertheless, all the orders and logistics/admin stuff was there, but sometimes you cannot overcome disappointing components and a sense that this is the wrong game in the wrong format, lingering away in the wrong box. I played it a few times at uni, and it then followed me home looking for love – but thirty years on, it still has not had any. L’Armée du NordArmee du Nord Just in terms of physical size, the biggest game on the 1815 campaign. It still pertains to the actual history, but the amount of room around the actual lines of advance and retreat opened up broader options. As I recall, I got this game in a London shop, where, having money to spend and wanting to spend it wisely, I spent ages in this large basement area (where the wargames were) prompting the owner to come down and make sure I had not collapsed or something. The game had weather, a sense of time and command, and a neat effect of distinguishing some casualties as men shook loose from units as stragglers or lightly wounded, from those who were clearly never going to prime a musket again. Perhaps the biggest issue with this game was its sheer physical size – you could play the whole campaign on three maps, or go for a specific day (guess what the choices were) where two of the three maps were in play. I never had room for three maps, and barely enough table space for two. As a Clash of Arms game it was attractive, but plain too big for me. Maybe others could cope, but I am tempted to say this was another game where working with a map divided into areas might have condensed things down whilst keeping options open. Waterloo Fate of FranceLDG_WaterlooFateofFrance My most recent campaign acquisition, and talking of areas, this is a game with an area divided campaign map. You move your forces on this, with a reasonable amount of room off the historic beaten track; but when it came to battle, you moved everything onto one of a number of battle mats, which contained, depending on the location, actual or representative terrain of the sort of area you were in. If you want to talk about time in this game, it is hard not to turn the issue of time into a look at the two speed nature of the design. This can be problem with games which seek to do things two different ways – sometimes the two levels marry well together…and sometimes they do not. Avalanche Press’ copious range of naval titles, for example, combine an operational level and a tactical battle system, which, despite its broad strokes, is still reasonably involved. The problem with Fate of France’s two tier system, at least for me, is that the battle tier has not got the scope it needed and can feel like a poor man’s simulation of anything that could or did occur. In plain terms, the battlefield maps are a tad too small, and, surprising for an L2 product, the battlefield graphics are utterly uninspiring. In a sense, it rather negates the ease of area movement at operations level to then have to nudge and squeeze the attractive units onto small unattractive maps. For me, bogging the game down with a fiddly, awkward battle provision was not the way to go. On the other hand, the rules are pretty straightforward, and many of the right elements are present…even if the box does not fit anywhere. Napoleon Napoleonnew-cover-400 This would have been my most recent 1815 purchase in its deluxe form, only I already had the game from some years back in an earlier Columbia version. Like The Emperor Returns, there are a great many options for the French advance as the map covered a good amount of Belgium – albeit, in its earlier form, on a map of such limited proportions it could have been mistaken in some countries for a stamp. Well, that is a bit of an exaggeration, but it was not a big map, so the new version was worth getting if only to put my broad sweeps on a broader operational canvas. Of course, from certain perspectives, this game could be ridiculed for its notable list of missing “essentials.” There is no weather; no real sense of command and control other than a basic limit to how many “group” moves the different armies can make in any given turn, and the battle system never seems to run out of Q&A prompts. But dammit, this is the game which did fog of war better than any other game in history – it helps that this is the “Campaign Daddy” of all campaigns, with tension and consequences abounding. Furthermore, whatever the quirks of the combat system (which now includes an abstracted provision of terrain) it does marry well with the operational pace of the broader gameplay, and was surely a better model for how things might have been done in Waterloo Fate of France. To put it plainly, this is still the best 1815 campaign simulation out there. I do not care what it does not have, because that is utterly secondary to the beautiful simplicity of a game that highlighted the essential campaign quandaries of all three armies. Conclusion Next year we will be at the bi-centennial of Waterloo, and naturally the mind turns to what 1815 offerings the hobby will delight us with in…2016…or 2017. There is surely plenty of scope for something really special: something that will marry time pressures to command limitations, and add weather, fog of war, drama and panoply. I just hope whatever arrives, whenever it arrives, is not too big, too complex, vexing, two paced,…the campaign, duly realized, will do enough of that in itself. About the Author Paul Paul has been involved in the hobby since the early 1970s. Of largely Belgian ancestry on his father’s side, and English (Yorkshire) on his mother’s, after finishing his education he worked in tourism and student services, and also spent some time in the former West Germany. He met his wife Boo in 1990, and they married a couple of years later. Paul his from a long line of former servicemen – one grandfather was a sergeant in the BEF of 1914, whilst two of his great grandfathers were to killed whilst serving with the Royal Navy. His own father, who was born in Britain, served with the army in Malaya in the early 1950s.</p> 19303012 2014-09-01 00:03:31 2014-09-01 00:03:31 open open waterloo-games-19303012 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Smokey the Bear http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/31/smokey-the-bear-19299794/ Sun, 31 Aug 2014 05:17:14 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Smokey the Bear Where There’s Smoke September 1, 2014 Issue Only You By Ian Frazier http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/01/only-you?utm_source=tny&utm_campaign=generalsocial&utm_medium=twitter&mbid=social_twitter Alley Pond Park, in Queens, sounds small, as if it could fit between a couple of high-rises. In fact, the park stretches for more than a mile and a half and covers six hundred and fifty-five acres that seem almost to be in another dimension, coexisting as they do with the Cross Island Parkway, Northern Boulevard, the Long Island Expressway, the Douglaston Parkway, Union Turnpike, and the Grand Central Parkway, all of which insinuate their multiple lanes through and along the park and curl their intricate cloverleafs over the green of its map like sprung violin strings. On the highways, you’re barely aware of the park, and in the park the highways are a distant noise. One of the park’s entrances winds among tall, shadowy, redwood-size columns of concrete that support an elevated section of road. Smokey the Bear was in the park the other day, walking around in an open, grassy area and having his picture taken with people. The occasion was his seventieth birthday; on August 9, 1944, the U.S. Forest Service and the Ad Council decided to use a fictional bear named Smokey as the mascot for their campaign to prevent forest fires. Later, a real bear who survived a New Mexico forest fire shared the name, but the classic Smokey remains the anthropomorphized bipedal bear in the poster, with the ranger hat and the shovel. As he strolled in a stately, slightly syncopated manner, well-wishers kept asking Smokey if he was hot in all that fur, but an occasional shrug was the only reply. He never once spoke. His eyes were set back under the brim of his hat and the overhang of his brow, and he made his point by silent moral authority. To look into his eyes was to hear the pulse of your own fire-using, match-tossing, corrupted human heart. Maybe there were a lot of Smokeys at large in American parks on that particular afternoon. This Smokey had the sponsorship of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, and its representatives had hung the pink crêpe-paper streamers in an oak tree, and set up the tables where kids could make birthday cards for Smokey, and provided the chocolate- or vanilla-frosted birthday cupcakes, and arranged for the various instructional booths—the N.Y.C. Fire Department’s Fire Safety Education, the D.E.C.’s Division of Lands and Forests, and the N.Y.C. Department of Sanitation’s Compost Project, among others. At the Fire Safety booth, the firefighters Lois Mungay and Stephen Comer were remembering some notable urban brush fires. “By Howard Beach, one time, the dry phragmites reeds were burning like crazy out beyond Cross Bay Boulevard, and we were hauling the hoses around back there in the brush,” Comer said. “We couldn’t even see where the fire was!” “Yeah—you just hear a crackling in the distance, like a fireplace,” said Mungay. “The chief was radioing us—‘It’s to your left! It’s to your right!’ ” Comer said. “Haulin’ those hoses everyplace in the reeds, finally I collapsed. They had to carry me out.” “Did you have to go in the hyperbaric chamber?” “No, it was just exhaustion. But, I’ll tell you, the experience gave me new respect for the guys fightin’ fires out West.” Just then, Smokey ambled by the booth, giving the thumbs-up sign. “Hey, Smokey! But where’s his little sidekick—what’s-his-name, Boo-Boo Bear?” Mungay asked. “That’s Yogi Bear’s little sidekick. In the cartoon. Not Smokey the Bear—different bear,” Comer said. A lot of other things were going on in this corner of the park. To one side of Smokey’s party, a group of about thirty mostly Asian young men and women were holding a get-acquainted picnic for the bridesmaids and groomsmen of a wedding planned for September. On the other side was a Spanish-speaking birthday party with a “Dora the Explorer” theme for a two-year-old girl. From a farther-off cookout, guys playing Frisbee and holding Solo cups in their free hands ran past Smokey without paying him much mind. Smokey stood bare-chested (aside from his fur) and unshod (ditto); his ranger hat and a pair of Wrangler bluejeans constituted his only clothing. His head fit onto his shoulders so well that the seam could hardly be seen. In true bear fashion, his full-length profile increased substantially at the middle. A man came up to him and asked, “Hey, Smokey—what size are your jeans?” Smokey fixed the man with a long, level, heart-stopping gaze. The man seemed to shrivel slightly. The bear crossed his forelegs across his chest twice, and then held them in a three-o’clock position: “X X L.” His expression didn’t change. ♦ [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19299794 2014-08-31 05:17:14 2014-08-31 05:17:14 open open smokey-the-bear-19299794 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Lt. Walter G. Haut Roswell base public information officer http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/31/lt-walter-g-haut-roswell-base-public-information-officer-19299768/ Sun, 31 Aug 2014 04:58:07 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan http://roswellproof.homestead.com/haut.html Lt. Walter G. Haut Roswell base public information officer "deathbed" affidavit to seeing spacecraft & bodies On UFO Updates on November 17, 2007, Kevin Randle also wrote that a man he interviewed in the mid-1990s, 1st Lt. Richard C. Harris, Jr., said that he met Haut near a base hangar and Haut told him at that time about seeing a dead alien body. Harris said Haut suggested he take a quick look, but Harris decided against this. (Harris, the base asst. financial officer, also said he helped cover up the paper trail of expenses involved in the recovery.) Tom Carey and Donald Schmitt also remark how Haut commonly dropped hints that he knew more than he was letting on to. Haut's common closing remarks in public appearances or in interviews was, "It wasn't any type of weather balloon. I believe it was a UFO! Just don't ask me why!" Haut started to become more publicly forthcoming in 2000. He gave a lengthy recorded oral history with researchers Wendy Connors and Dennis Balthauser, people he knew well and trusted. Haut stipulated the interview was not to be released until after his death. (Haut died in December 2005). In the interview (transcript) Haut first disclosed he saw the craft and small bodies in one of the hangars. He also disclosed that Gen. Roger Ramey, one of the architects of the weather balloon cover-up, had flown in for the staff morning meeting on July 8, and helped decide on how to deal with the situation. (Wendy Connors in private email, told me that Haut was already telling her privately about Ramey and knowing something about the bodies even before this interview.) In December 2002, Haut filled out a notarized affidavit (immediately below), that was sealed and again not to be publicly disclosed until after his death. A copy first appeared in the June 2007 book Witness to Roswell by Tom Carey and Don Schmitt, released with permission of Haut's surviving family. New Nov. 2008! Schmitt and Haut's daughter Julie Shuster afterwards revealed that the affidavit was drafted by Schmitt, with Haut's approval, after years of conversations with Haut. Haut then carefully reviewed Schmitt's emailed draft for accuracy, both privately and with Shuster present. He made no changes before signing in front of Shuster, a notary, and an outside witness. According to Schmitt, a doctor had just reviewed the status of Haut's health and judged him to be of sound mind. For Shuster's detailed comments in the September MUFON Journal about the process behind the affidavit, click here. In the affidavit, Haut again said that he had seen the crash object and bodies in a hangar (Hangar 84 or P-3). Col. Blanchard, a close friend his entire life, made a point of taking him out there. Haut also disclosed new information, such as personally handling the debris during the morning meeting, which he said was unlike anything he or anyone else there had ever seen before, going out to one of the crash sites (probably the large Foster Ranch debris field) and bringing debris back to his office. He also revealed that the second main crash site with the object and bodies was about 40 miles north of Roswell and had been found by civilians on July 7. He first became aware of both crash sites by the afternoon of Monday, July 7, after returning to duty from the 4th of July weekend. A key topic of discussion at the morning meeting was how to deal with the situation, since members of the press and public already knew something was going on. Haut gave insight into the reasoning behind Blanchard's perplexing flying disc press release which Haut delivered to the local Roswell media. Gen. Ramey wished to divert attention away from the more important craft/body site by acknowledging the remoter, less accessible debris site, but providing few details. Haut believed Ramey was acting under direction of his superiors at the Pentagon. It was discussed whether to tell the public the full truth, but this was decided against, and thus began a cover-up that continues to this day. Haut also mentioned being aware of teams sent out to both sites for months afterwards to search for any remaining evidence. This provided some corroboration for Bill Brazel's story (son of rancher Mack Brazel) of having debris samples confiscated from him by such a team a few months later. Haut is far from alone in his claims to seeing alien bodies, a spacecraft or strange debris. Click on the links at the top for other such accounts about non-human bodies or strange debris, such as Frederick Benthal and Eli Benjamin, two other military alien body eyewitnesses. The writeup on mortician Glenn Dennis has numerous other mostly second-hand accounts. A number of these center around base Hangar 84 or P-3 mentioned by Haut, where crash debris, craft, and bodies were taken for processing and shipment. The heavily guarded B-29 crate flight to Fort Worth on July 9, the day after Haut's viewing of the bodies/craft in the hangar, is strongly suspected of carrying bodies. See also my review of the Carey/Schmitt book for an overview of the accounts. According to Carey & Schmitt, Haut waited until the end of his life to reveal this information because he had promised Col. Blanchard to not disclose it while he was alive. Haut may have had another personal reason. He was well-aware how other major Roswell witnesses had been savaged by debunkers, a prime example being Jesse Marcel, the intelligence officer. By initially denying direct knowledge of the more controversial aspects about Roswell, Haut would be denying critics a convenient target. However, with Haut's now-public interview and affidavit confessing to being an eyewitness to the debris, spacecraft, and bodies, he will no doubt be attacked as a liar who changed his story, a senile old man, or even worse. Haut's "deathbed" affidavit is sure to stir up a huge heated controversy. Once a public figure like Haut states that there really was a flying saucer crash and alien bodies and he saw it with his own eyes, there is never any returning to the quiet life. Walter Haut was the public information officer at Roswell base during the Roswell incident of July 1947. In interviews dating back to the 1980s, he said he was mostly out-of-the-loop. His basic story was that on the morning of July 8, base commander Col. William Blanchard had dictated to him a press release that they had obtained a flying disc from a nearby ranch and were flying it on to "higher headquarters." He said he thought the original press release was the truth and he was convinced "the material recovered was some type of craft from outer space." (1993 affidavit) He was pretty sure Blanchard must have seen the debris before issuing the press release and said Blanchard would never make a mistake of confusing the recovered material with a weather balloon.. Haut, who lived in Roswell, became one of the most interviewed and public Roswell witnesses and key advocate of a saucer crash, yet continued to publicly disclaim personal knowledge of the debris or of the actual craft and recovered bodies as reported by other witnesses. However, Haut's on-the-record public statements differed from some of his private ones. E.g., Robert Shirkey Jr., son of Robert Shirkey, base assistant operations officer, disclosed on a recent Art Bell show that Haut told his father, a good friend, about seeing the bodies clear back in 1989. Shirkey Jr., said his father also told him this in 1989. (Art Bell show, June 30, 2007, 3rd hour) Shirkey Sr. in his 1991 affidavit also hinted at this when he stated "I learned later that... the bodies were laid out in Hanger 84." An excerpt of Shirkey Jr.'s comments about being told of the bodies are below, including statements about the character of the men involved, whom he knew personally, having grown up in Roswell. (See 2 minutes into clip for body comments.) Lt. Walter G. Haut Roswell base public information officer "deathbed" affidavit to seeing spacecraft & bodies On UFO Updates on November 17, 2007, Kevin Randle also wrote that a man he interviewed in the mid-1990s, 1st Lt. Richard C. Harris, Jr., said that he met Haut near a base hangar and Haut told him at that time about seeing a dead alien body. Harris said Haut suggested he take a quick look, but Harris decided against this. (Harris, the base asst. financial officer, also said he helped cover up the paper trail of expenses involved in the recovery.) Tom Carey and Donald Schmitt also remark how Haut commonly dropped hints that he knew more than he was letting on to. Haut's common closing remarks in public appearances or in interviews was, "It wasn't any type of weather balloon. I believe it was a UFO! Just don't ask me why!" Haut started to become more publicly forthcoming in 2000. He gave a lengthy recorded oral history with researchers Wendy Connors and Dennis Balthauser, people he knew well and trusted. Haut stipulated the interview was not to be released until after his death. (Haut died in December 2005). In the interview (transcript) Haut first disclosed he saw the craft and small bodies in one of the hangars. He also disclosed that Gen. Roger Ramey, one of the architects of the weather balloon cover-up, had flown in for the staff morning meeting on July 8, and helped decide on how to deal with the situation. (Wendy Connors in private email, told me that Haut was already telling her privately about Ramey and knowing something about the bodies even before this interview.) In December 2002, Haut filled out a notarized affidavit (immediately below), that was sealed and again not to be publicly disclosed until after his death. A copy first appeared in the June 2007 book Witness to Roswell by Tom Carey and Don Schmitt, released with permission of Haut's surviving family. New Nov. 2008! Schmitt and Haut's daughter Julie Shuster afterwards revealed that the affidavit was drafted by Schmitt, with Haut's approval, after years of conversations with Haut. Haut then carefully reviewed Schmitt's emailed draft for accuracy, both privately and with Shuster present. He made no changes before signing in front of Shuster, a notary, and an outside witness. According to Schmitt, a doctor had just reviewed the status of Haut's health and judged him to be of sound mind. For Shuster's detailed comments in the September MUFON Journal about the process behind the affidavit, click here. In the affidavit, Haut again said that he had seen the crash object and bodies in a hangar (Hangar 84 or P-3). Col. Blanchard, a close friend his entire life, made a point of taking him out there. Haut also disclosed new information, such as personally handling the debris during the morning meeting, which he said was unlike anything he or anyone else there had ever seen before, going out to one of the crash sites (probably the large Foster Ranch debris field) and bringing debris back to his office. He also revealed that the second main crash site with the object and bodies was about 40 miles north of Roswell and had been found by civilians on July 7. He first became aware of both crash sites by the afternoon of Monday, July 7, after returning to duty from the 4th of July weekend. A key topic of discussion at the morning meeting was how to deal with the situation, since members of the press and public already knew something was going on. Haut gave insight into the reasoning behind Blanchard's perplexing flying disc press release which Haut delivered to the local Roswell media. Gen. Ramey wished to divert attention away from the more important craft/body site by acknowledging the remoter, less accessible debris site, but providing few details. Haut believed Ramey was acting under direction of his superiors at the Pentagon. It was discussed whether to tell the public the full truth, but this was decided against, and thus began a cover-up that continues to this day. Haut also mentioned being aware of teams sent out to both sites for months afterwards to search for any remaining evidence. This provided some corroboration for Bill Brazel's story (son of rancher Mack Brazel) of having debris samples confiscated from him by such a team a few months later. Haut is far from alone in his claims to seeing alien bodies, a spacecraft or strange debris. Click on the links at the top for other such accounts about non-human bodies or strange debris, such as Frederick Benthal and Eli Benjamin, two other military alien body eyewitnesses. The writeup on mortician Glenn Dennis has numerous other mostly second-hand accounts. A number of these center around base Hangar 84 or P-3 mentioned by Haut, where crash debris, craft, and bodies were taken for processing and shipment. The heavily guarded B-29 crate flight to Fort Worth on July 9, the day after Haut's viewing of the bodies/craft in the hangar, is strongly suspected of carrying bodies. See also my review of the Carey/Schmitt book for an overview of the accounts. According to Carey & Schmitt, Haut waited until the end of his life to reveal this information because he had promised Col. Blanchard to not disclose it while he was alive. Haut may have had another personal reason. He was well-aware how other major Roswell witnesses had been savaged by debunkers, a prime example being Jesse Marcel, the intelligence officer. By initially denying direct knowledge of the more controversial aspects about Roswell, Haut would be denying critics a convenient target. However, with Haut's now-public interview and affidavit confessing to being an eyewitness to the debris, spacecraft, and bodies, he will no doubt be attacked as a liar who changed his story, a senile old man, or even worse. Haut's "deathbed" affidavit is sure to stir up a huge heated controversy. Once a public figure like Haut states that there really was a flying saucer crash and alien bodies and he saw it with his own eyes, there is never any returning to the quiet life. . 1993 AFFIDAVIT OF WALTER HAUT (1) My name is Walter Haut (2) My address is: XXXXXXXXXX (3) I am retired. (4) In July 1947, I was stationed at the Roswell Army Air base serving as the base Public Information Officer. At approximately 9:30 AM on July 8, I received a call from Col. William Blanchard, the base commander, who said he had in his possession a flying saucer or parts thereof. He said it came from a ranch northwest of Roswell, and that the base Intelligence Officer, Major Jesse Marcel, was going to fly the material to Fort Worth. (5) Col. Blanchard told me to write a news release about the operation and to deliver it to both newspapers and the two radio stations in Roswell. He felt that he wanted the local media to have the first opportunity at the story. I went first to KGFL, then to KSWS, then to the Daily Record and finally to the Morning Dispatch. (6) The next day, I read in the newspaper that General Roger Ramey in Fort Worth had said the object was a weather balloon. (7) I believe Col. Blanchard saw the material, because he sounded positive about what the material was. There is no chance that he would have mistaken it for a weather balloon. Neither is their any chance that Major Marcel would have been mistaken. (8) In 1980, Jesse Marcel told me that the material photographed in Gen. Ramey's office was not the material he had recovered. (9) I am convinced that the material recovered was some type of craft from outer space. (10) I have not been paid nor given anything of value to make this statement, and it is the truth to the best of my recollection. Signed: Walter G. Haut 5-14-93 Signature witnessed by: M. Littell (?) [Source: Karl Pflock, Roswell in Perspective, 1994] .NEW 2007! 2002 SEALED AFFIDAVIT OF WALTER G. HAUT DATE: December 26, 2002 WITNESS: Chris Xxxxxx NOTARY: Beverlee Morgan (1) My name is Walter G. Haut (2) I was born on June 2, 1922 (3) My address is 1405 W. 7th Street, Roswell, NM 88203 (4) I am retired. (5) In July, 1947, I was stationed at the Roswell Army Air Base in Roswell, New Mexico, serving as the base Public Information Officer. I had spent the 4th of July weekend (Saturday, the 5th, and Sunday, the 6th) at my private residence about 10 miles north of the base, which was located south of town. (6) I was aware that someone had reported the remains of a downed vehicle by midmorning after my return to duty at the base on Monday, July 7. I was aware that Major Jesse A. Marcel, head of intelligence, was sent by the base commander, Col. William Blanchard, to investigate. (7) By late in the afternoon that same day, I would learn that additional civilian reports came in regarding a second site just north of Roswell. I would spend the better part of the day attending to my regular duties hearing little if anything more. (8) On Tuesday morning, July 8, I would attend the regularly scheduled staff meeting at 7:30 a.m. Besides Blanchard, Marcel; CIC [Counterintelligence Corp] Capt. Sheridan Cavitt; Col. James I. Hopkins, the operations officer; Lt. Col. Ulysses S. Nero, the supply officer; and from Carswell AAF in Fort Worth, Texas, Blanchard's boss, Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey and his chief of staff, Col. Thomas J. Dubose were also in attendance. The main topic of discussion was reported by Marcel and Cavitt regarding an extensive debris field in Lincoln County approx. 75 miles NW of Roswell. A preliminary briefing was provided by Blanchard about the second site approx. 40 miles north of town. Samples of wreckage were passed around the table. It was unlike any material I had or have ever seen in my life. Pieces which resembled metal foil, paper thin yet extremely strong, and pieces with unusual markings along their length were handled from man to man, each voicing their opinion. No one was able to identify the crash debris. (9) One of the main concerns discussed at the meeting was whether we should go public or not with the discovery. Gen. Ramey proposed a plan, which I believe originated from his bosses at the Pentagon. Attention needed to be diverted from the more important site north of town by acknowledging the other location. Too many civilians were already involved and the press already was informed. I was not completely informed how this would be accomplished. (10) At approximately 9:30 a.m. Col. Blanchard phoned my office and dictated the press release of having in our possession a flying disc, coming from a ranch northwest of Roswell, and Marcel flying the material to higher headquarters. I was to deliver the news release to radio stations KGFL and KSWS, and newspapers the Daily Record and the Morning Dispatch. (11) By the time the news release hit the wire services, my office was inundated with phone calls from around the world. Messages stacked up on my desk, and rather than deal with the media concern, Col Blanchard suggested that I go home and "hide out." (12) Before leaving the base, Col. Blanchard took me personally to Building 84 [AKA Hangar P-3], a B-29 hangar located on the east side of the tarmac. Upon first approaching the building, I observed that it was under heavy guard both outside and inside. Once inside, I was permitted from a safe distance to first observe the object just recovered north of town. It was approx. 12 to 15 feet in length, not quite as wide, about 6 feet high, and more of an egg shape. Lighting was poor, but its surface did appear metallic. No windows, portholes, wings, tail section, or landing gear were visible. (13) Also from a distance, I was able to see a couple of bodies under a canvas tarpaulin. Only the heads extended beyond the covering, and I was not able to make out any features. The heads did appear larger than normal and the contour of the canvas suggested the size of a 10 year old child. At a later date in Blanchard's office, he would extend his arm about 4 feet above the floor to indicate the height. (14) I was informed of a temporary morgue set up to accommodate the recovered bodies. (15) I was informed that the wreckage was not "hot" (radioactive). (16) Upon his return from Fort Worth, Major Marcel described to me taking pieces of the wreckage to Gen. Ramey's office and after returning from a map room, finding the remains of a weather balloon and radar kite substituted while he was out of the room. Marcel was very upset over this situation. We would not discuss it again. (17) I would be allowed to make at least one visit to one of the recovery sites during the military cleanup. I would return to the base with some of the wreckage which I would display in my office. (18) I was aware two separate teams would return to each site months later for periodic searches for any remaining evidence. (19) I am convinced that what I personally observed was some type of craft and its crew from outer space. (20) I have not been paid nor given anything of value to make this statement, and it is the truth to the best of my recollection. Signed: Walter G. Haut December 26, 2002 Signature witnessed by: Chris Xxxxxxx [Source: Tom Carey & Donald Schmitt, Witness to Roswell, 2007] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19299768 2014-08-31 04:58:07 2014-08-31 04:58:07 open open lt-walter-g-haut-roswell-base-public-information-officer-19299768 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan In the Public Interest: The Crime of Overbilling Healthcare Ralph Nader http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/30/in-the-public-interest-the-crime-of-overbilling-healthcare-ralph-nader-19298450/ Sat, 30 Aug 2014 19:21:13 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan In the Public Interest: The Crime of Overbilling Healthcare Ralph Nader August 29, 2014 Over twenty years ago, Pat Palmer, in her own words, “stumbled upon a $400 overcharge in a bill my father received for a routine medical procedure.” That might have become the costliest “overcharge” the gouging, overbilling health care industry ever inflicted on itself. Because it led Ms. Palmer, whom Steve Brill (author of the Time Magazine cover story, “Why Medical Bills are Killing Us,” April 4, 2013) called “one of my earliest tutors as I tried to figure out the dysfunctional world of medical economics and billing,” to start a business investigating the overbilling of patients. Located in Roanoke, Virginia, Medical Billing Advocates of America (MBAA) (billadvocates.com) makes money by saving patients money. No savings, no charge. In twenty years, she has collected a multitude of cases of doctors, hospitals and insurance companies overcharging. This evidence reflects routine, everyday overbilling in the many billions of dollars a year. How extensive is this commercial crime wave? The nation’s expert on computerized billing fraud, Malcolm Sparrow, who is an applied mathematician at Harvard, estimates medical billing fraud adds up to a minimum sum of $270 billion a year or at least ten percent of all health care expenses. His classic book, License to Steal, showed that these ripoffs are not just clerical errors or computer malfunctions. The systemic fraud goes far beyond the organized criminal syndicates defrauding Medicare that the FBI raids once in a while. The frauds are designed with corporate interests in mind to filch your wallet directly or under the nose of unobservant insurers, from the very design of billing statements to the manipulation of codes. Pat Palmer is out with a paperback titled Surviving Your Medical Bills, which is self-published by her firm, MBAA. Ms. Palmer explained she almost gave up on “all the rules and regulations that no one is enforcing.” It’s a good thing she didn’t. Instead, Ms. Palmer decided to rile up the patients and their families directly with her book by describing how outrageously brazen billing practices are (not just an aberration) and showing how people can become common-sense investigators if they receive these shocking bills. Start with the fact that about eighty percent of all medical bills contain errors, with the average error being $1,300. Most of these overbillings favor, unsurprisingly, the sellers (euphemistically called “the providers”). Ms. Palmer says the situation has been getting worse. With the number of diagnostic codes growing from 17,000 to about 60,000 under Obamacare, to supposedly improve efficiency, the system has become even more complicated, with hospitals and few others knowing how to game or beat the system. She lists many of the ways that medical bills are hugely inflated, using the technique known as unbundling, when tests and procedures are broken down into their individual components, which allows for double or triple billing. Some hospitals also, by their own admission, incorporate their overhead in the itemized pricing of even simple items like $20 aspirins or $15 disposable razors. An example of double-billing technique is when a patient is charged thousands of dollars a day for being in an intensive care unit (ICU) and then also charged for the ventilator which is already factored into the cost of the ICU. Hospitals charge for their mistakes as in the radiology department. Another example is when they charge, say $12, for each time a nurse brings you an aspirin, even though you’re paying for these hospital services in your room rate. Transporting that aspirin is called an “oral administration fee.” Gobbleygook names are omnipresent in these bills. You can get these itemizations by refusing to accept a “summary bill,” and ask, as is your right under state law, to receive an itemized bill which sometimes will extend to pages of computer printout in inscrutable code that you can then demand an explanation in ordinary English. Hospital billings for similar services or items vary wildly and arbitrarily. Ms. Palmer found a hospital charging $444.78 for a 10-milligram vial of the neuromuscular blocking drug Norcuron. She then found another hospital “charging $17.90 for the very same 10-milligram vial.” In her book, she often refers to documented examples of massive overbilling on major surgeries, major medical equipment and lesser items. People have been charged for phantom procedures, nominal physician visits, for hospital employees transporting specimens down a few floors to the labs. Patients, are charged for omnibus services and products, then charged again and again for the pieces. Now obviously there are variations as well in levels of honesty and fraud between institutions and practices. But overall, what Palmer and Sparrow are writing about is, arguably, our country’s biggest commercial crime wave. However, strangely, prosecutors reserve their few grand jury indictments largely for the criminal underworld stealing from Medicare or other insurers. For the corporate establishment, there are always the easy ways out such as confessing error, but not intent, when caught or arguing reasonable industry practices. They quickly correct the specific bill of its offending bloat and satisfy the complaining patient, but nothing changes overall. Clearly the current criminal laws do not adequately prevent such computerized theft and need to be amended to account for this fraud. Furthermore, if our nation followed the example of other countries and transitioned to a universal full Medicare for-all-system, this would end fee for service and the Pat Palmers would be out of business (see singlepayeraction.org for more information). The main point of this book is that if enough outraged or concerned patients can follow Pat Palmer’s clear roadmap and challenge the bilkers, maybe the law enforcers will get the message and maybe the lawmakers will give these law enforcers the budgets to stop these widespread corporate crimes. follow on Twitter | friend on Facebook | forward to a friend Copyright © 2014 Nader.Org, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in at our website. Our mailing address is: Nader.Org P.O. Box 19367 Washington, DC 20036 [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19298450 2014-08-30 19:21:13 2014-08-30 19:21:13 open open in-the-public-interest-the-crime-of-overbilling-healthcare-ralph-nader-19298450 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Is There Such A Thing As A 'Good Psychopath'? byLinton Weeks http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/24/is-there-such-a-thing-as-a-good-psychopath-bylinton-weeks-19250783/ Sun, 24 Aug 2014 20:36:54 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Is There Such A Thing As A 'Good Psychopath'? by Linton Weeks August 21, 201411:11 AM ET Man in a white mask standing in the snow beside a gray river. kuzmafoto.com/iStockphoto Oxymoronic, isn't it, the idea of a "good psychopath"? But in their just published book, The Good Psychopath's Guide to Success, Andy McNab and Kevin Dutton argue that relying on some psychopathic traits can lead to a more successful life. Andy is a British Special Air Service veteran and novelist; Kevin is an Oxford University psychologist. Kevin . Andy says . Their checklist of psychopathic traits includes: charisma, charm, coolness under pressure, fearlessness, focus, impulsivity, lack of conscience, mental toughness, reduced empathy and ruthlessness. "None of these characteristics are inherently bad in themselves," Kevin says. "When they become dysfunctional is when they are deployed inflexibly in the wrong contexts." On the other hand, functional psychopaths — according to the book — are able to modulate their feelings to be more productive in business, in politics and in life. The Path To Psychopathy Don't we already have enough psychopaths in the world? we ask Kevin. By encouraging people to get in touch with their inner psychopath, aren't you removing guilt and shame and conscience from the equation? Won't that be deleterious to society? "I'm not saying that psychopaths per se are good for society," Kevin says. "A pure psychopath is going to ruin his or her life and also the lives of those who they come into contact with." But Kevin does believe that certain psychopathic characteristics, such as those listed above, "can — when dialed up at certain levels, in certain combinations and in certain contexts — predispose one to success." No Such Thing The whole idea of a "good psychopath" has succeeded in upsetting Lillian Glass, a who has written or co-written a raft of books including Toxic People: 10 Ways of Dealing with People Who Make Your Life Miserable and A Guide to Identifying Terrorists Through Body Language. "The words 'psychopath' and 'success' should never be in the same sentence," Lillian says. "Psychopaths are dangerous people, and to encourage someone to act like a psychopath is both irresponsible and dangerous." She does not subscribe to the notion that we all have some psychopath within us. "You either are one or you are not one," she says. "And if you are a psychopath, you don't dial up the levels of the traits. ... It can't be done. Psychopaths don't pick and choose how ruthless or nonempathetic they will be. They are these traits, and it is not by degree." Lillian says, "All of these characteristics are wrong when they hurt others. A lack of conscience is very wrong, and an absence of one can lead to committing criminal acts on others. Ruthlessness is not a good characteristic. It is a bad characteristic." So, we ask Oxonian Kevin Dutton, can you point to a successful psychopath who has made positive contributions to the world? "Psychopathy is on a spectrum," Kevin says. "It is neither all or nothing. Nor should 'successful psychopathy' be removed from context. But someone who was pretty high on the psychopathic spectrum was Winston Churchill." Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19250783 2014-08-24 20:36:54 2014-08-24 20:36:54 open open is-there-such-a-thing-as-a-good-psychopath-bylinton-weeks-19250783 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan ‘Dead zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico is the size of Connecticut http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/19/dead-zone-in-the-gulf-of-mexico-is-the-size-of-connecticut-19183344/ Tue, 19 Aug 2014 06:36:34 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>http://artbell.com/dead-zone-in-the-gulf-of-mexico-is-the-size-of-connecticut/ ‘Dead zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico is the size of Connecticut| 379 Views | Leave a response (Reuters) – Scientists say a man-made “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico is as big as the state of Connecticut. The zone, which at about 5,000 square miles (13,000 sq km) is the second largest in the world but still smaller than in previous years, is so named because it contains no oxygen, or too little, at the Gulf floor to support bottom-dwelling fish and shrimp. The primary cause of the annual phenomenon is excess nutrient runoff from farms along the Mississippi River, which empties into the Gulf, said Gene Turner, a researcher at Louisiana State University’s Coastal Ecology Institute. The nutrients feed algae growth, which consumes oxygen when it works its way to the Gulf bottom, he said. “It’s a poster child for how we are using and abusing our natural resources,” Turner said. More via Reuters. [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19183344 2014-08-19 06:36:34 2014-08-19 06:36:34 open open dead-zone-in-the-gulf-of-mexico-is-the-size-of-connecticut-19183344 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan NEWSWEEK Young Israeli Entrepreneurs Are Flocking to Germany By Elisabeth Braw / July 3, 2014 2:00 PM EDT http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/18/newsweek-young-israeli-entrepreneurs-are-flocking-to-germany-by-elisabeth-braw-july-3-2014-2-00-pm-edt-19167509/ Mon, 18 Aug 2014 06:52:11 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>NEWSWEEK Young Israeli Entrepreneurs Are Flocking to Germany By Elisabeth Braw / July 3, 2014 2:00 PM EDT [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. -- Louis Sheehan ] Posted but NOT written by Lou Sheehan Filed Under: World, Germany, Israel When Elad Leshem graduated with an MBA two years ago, he immediately started a company. So far, so conventional. But Leshem, an Israeli, launched his business career in Berlin. “In Berlin there are a lot of resources available, including grants, subsidies and incubators, and the city is still relatively cheap,” explains Tel Aviv-born Leshem. “That allows you to kick-start your business without a lot of capital. That’s not possible in Silicon Valley. And the city is groovy, with a lot of young people.” Leshem, 33, is not the only young Israeli who has discovered the joys of Berlin. “When I moved here to go to university, people at home said, ‘Why are you moving to Germany? I’m never going to visit you,’” recalls Asaf Moses, 31, a fashion technology entrepreneur from Ra’anana outside Tel Aviv. “But since then the number of Israelis has increased at an incredible rate. Today you can easily build a company here with just highly qualified Israelis. Berlin has become the international symbol of cool instead of a symbol of the Holocaust.” Try Newsweek Print + Digital for only $1.25 per week It’s no surprise that Israel, with its approximately 4,800 startups at any given time, is seeing some of its entrepreneurs try their luck elsewhere. As far as Leshem, Moses and their fellow entrepreneurs are concerned, choosing Berlin is simply a matter of business opportunities and the cost of living, just as it is for all budding entrepreneurs. Leading venture capital firms such as Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins have recently invested in Berlin startups, and SoundCloud, the popular music-sharing service founded by two Swedes, is also based here. Though there are no reports quantifying the number of Israeli-run startups, incubators and businesses, schools all report a growing Israeli presence in the German capital. Israeli commercial attaché Hemdat Sagi alone receives around 150 inquiries from Israeli entrepreneurs and companies each year. “Israeli companies understand the potential of operating in a market of 82 million consumers, and it’s only natural for them to try and penetrate this market, which is also not so far from Israel,” Sagi explains. “Israeli companies, not just startups, offer innovative solutions in various sectors, which are synergetic with the abilities of the German industry.” Yakov Hadas-Handelsman, Israel’s ambassador to Berlin, notes it takes less time to fly from Berlin to Tel Aviv than from New York to San Francisco. Among the Berlin-based creations are InFarm, which allows people to grow micro-vegetables indoors; Capsuling Me, which helps organizations target their marketing based on their users’ online profiles; and Screemo, which allows concert audiences to choose a band’s next song by voting with their mobile devices and seeing the result appear in real time on large screens. Berlin accelerators, including media conglomerate Axel Springer’s Plug and Play, and incubators now feature Israeli startups. “The [entrepreneurs] basically just have to step off the plane and everything is set up for them,” says Axel Menneking, international director at Deutsche Telekom’s incubator, hub:raum, which already has five Israeli firms on its books and is aiming for more. “Large German companies have started approaching budding Israeli entrepreneurs as well,” he adds. “It’s in their interest to support this trend.” Berlin’s grants and subsidies to entrepreneurs form part of a deliberate strategy to position the city as an attractive business alternative to other European capitals and indeed to Germany’s own business capital, Frankfurt. The effort makes sense for this relatively poor metropolis with a per capita gross domestic product of $40,000, compared with London’s $66,000, as startups require relatively little investment and Berlin already boasts a young workforce. Israel, for its part, keeps producing talented would-be entrepreneurs. “The Israelis learn very useful skills during their conscription in the armed forces, particularly those who serve in intelligence units, where they’re constantly exposed to problems that they know nothing about, and yet they have to come up with solutions,” observes Menneking. “That’s exactly what you have to do in a startup.” The German-Israeli Chamber of Commerce has spotted the trend, recently launching an initiative called BETATEC (Berlin Tel Aviv Technology and Entrepreneurship Committee). The program will help Israelis start companies in Berlin but also send German entrepreneurs to Israeli incubators, where they’ll receive mentoring. “The idea is that this will help the German economy, but indirectly it will help the Israeli economy as well,” says Mickey Steiner, BETATEC’s director and the former Israeli CEO of German software giant SAP. To further increase Berlin’s attractiveness, BETATEC will also help Israeli firms expand more easily in Germany and beyond. Still, Berlin isn’t an entirely obvious alternative to Silicon Valley or London for ambitious young entrepreneurs. “If an Israeli does business with a Brit or American, of course it’s good, but it’s just business,” observes Hadas-Handelsman. “This is much more. The destinies of Israelis and Germans are connected because of our past. That makes the startup trend important in itself, and it goes both ways, with Germans going to Israel.” Hadas-Handelsman hopes it will help increase trade between the two countries, one of which is the world’s fifth largest economy. He recognizes the unconventional nature of the trend, noting that “some people in Israel don’t view it favorably.” But, he adds, “we have nothing against it; on the contrary, it’s a win-win for Germany and Israel.” Entrepreneurs are not the only Israelis moving to Berlin: Artists and scientists are also putting down roots. The city now features Israeli restaurants and even a German-language Israeli online magazine. Daniel Barenboim, the pianist and conductor who was born in Argentina but who holds Israeli citizenship, is music director of the Berlin State Opera. According to one estimate, 40,000 Israelis live in the German capital today; in 1925, before the rise of Nazism, there were 160,000. According to Steiner, Israelis’ risk-taking nature contributes to their startup success. It is a quality that gives Israelis a competitive advantage in Berlin, says Leshem, who recently founded a second company following the demise of his first one. “Israelis are pushy and loud, while Germans are more conformist and quiet,” he elaborates. “Israelis have a ‘Let’s do it’ attitude and less fear of failure, like you see in the U.S. When an Israeli innovates, his attitude is ‘Let’s build a fucking great company that we can sell for 1 billion euros.’ Germans are more thorough and stable. But in a startup it’s more about fast and dirty than slow and clean.” There’s just one thing Leshem doesn’t like about doing business in Berlin: the need to speak German. “It’s really easy to start a company here, and it just costs you 200 to 300 euros [$270 to $400], but to get all those wonderful subsidies you have to fill out a lot of forms in German,” he says. “German authorities don’t care whether you’re Bill Gates. They want you to fill out the forms in German.” Other entrepreneurs point out that the city’s incubators aren’t (yet) at the same level as, for example, San Francisco-based Y Combinator, which spawned Airbnb. Moses, who speaks fluent German, calls German-language skills a prerequisite for startup success in Berlin. He knows what he’s talking about, having grown his fashion technology company, FitAnalytics, which he co-founded with a German friend four years ago, to 15 employees, who work in the trendy neighborhood of Kreuzberg. But Israeli engineers with no immediate plans to start their own companies need not bother learning the language. “There’s such a shortage of engineers here that you’ll get a job the day after you land,” Moses says. According to VDI, the Association of German Engineers, each unemployed software engineer in Germany has 3.7 jobs to choose from. On top of that are Berlin’s fast-rising costs, especially rents, which increased by 2.6 percent last year. Still, the average rent is less than $8 per square meter, a bargain compared with the current range of $60 to $120 per square meter in central London. Despite the language barriers, Leshem, a German citizen thanks to his German-born maternal grandparents, who fled to Palestine before the outbreak of World War II, has no plans to leave Berlin. He says he feels he’s taking revenge on the hateful political creed that was responsible for the death of so many, including several relatives. “Today’s multicultural Berlin is history’s joke on Hitler,” he says. “Berlin of 2014 is the happy opposite of the dark Berlin of 1934.”</p> 19167509 2014-08-18 06:52:11 2014-08-18 06:52:11 open open newsweek-young-israeli-entrepreneurs-are-flocking-to-germany-by-elisabeth-braw-july-3-2014-2-00-pm-edt-19167509 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan First World War slang words we still use today http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/16/first-world-war-slang-words-we-still-use-today-19158269/ Sat, 16 Aug 2014 22:43:24 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] http://www.historyextra.com/feature/first-world-war/10-first-world-war-slang-words-we-still-use-today?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=BBCHIS-150814-NL_BBC%20History_Newsletters First World War slang words we still use today Banter, camaraderie and a satirical sense of humour helped make life bearable for the everyday Tommy in the trenches during the First World War. But, as BBC Antiques Roadshow presenter Martin Pegler explains in his new book, we unknowingly continue to use much of that slang today Wednesday 13th August 2014 Submitted by Emma McFarnon In Soldiers’ Songs and Slang of the Great War, Pegler reveals how common words and phrases such as ‘bumf’ and ‘having a chat’ originated in the trenches. Drawing on his interviews with a number of First World War veterans conducted in the 1980s, he recalls how the men were overwhelmingly positive about their experiences – they made friends for life, and the camaraderie they shared was something that many never experienced again. Here, writing for History Extra, Pegler details 10 words and phrases circulated during the war that still remain in use today: The subject of the First World War evokes many images, many of which are used repeatedly nowadays in film and TV, but they tend to concentrate on the drama and the misery of war. The reality was that it didn’t rain every day, the trenches were not knee deep in mud all year round, and soldiers were not subjected to shelling and death every day of their lives. In fact, day-to-day life was, as one veteran told me, “90 per cent sheer boredom and 10 per cent fear, but when we were frightened, we were very frightened, though you tried not to show it”. Of course there was death and destruction – there always is in war – but these men were young, energetic and above all, optimistic. Few believed anything terrible would happen to them (it was always ‘the other bloke’), and they masked their nervousness by sharing their hardships and fears with close chums. Indeed, having interviewed many veterans over the years, the overwhelming impression was that they looked back on their service in the First World War with a mixture of nostalgia and affection, tinged with sadness at the loss of friends. Above all else, the one emotion that helped them keep their sense of perspective and enabled them to endure the bad times was their uniquely British sense of humour, which appeared in even the grimmest situations, and it was the funny stories that they most often regaled us with. Much of the humour was found in their widespread use of songs and slang. Within any profession there is a language that is largely incomprehensible to outsiders, and soldiers were little different. In 1914–18, however, for the first time in Britain’s history, huge numbers of men from every conceivable walk of life had been put together in a huge citizen army, and as a result they developed their own language. But whereas in the past this slang had mostly remained within the ranks of the armed forces, during the First World War much of it was transferred by the soldiers from the western front to the home front. The songs and slang used by these men became not only popular, but almost fashionable in wartime England, and much of this has remained with us to this day. Here are 10 examples that might surprise you. 1) ‘Having a chat’ A commonplace expression today that owes its origin to that most pernicious of insects, the louse. Body lice were endemic in the trenches, and they inhabited the seams and pleats of clothing where they bred in huge numbers, causing skin rashes and itching. The expression is often ascribed to the Hindi word for a parasite, ‘chatt’, but is more possibly from an earlier medieval English word for idle gossip, ‘chateren’. Soldiers in the Napoleonic Wars certainly referred to lice as ‘chats’. During the Great War it was common to see small groups sitting around and talking as they used their fingernails, or a candle, to kill the lice. Such groups were described as men who were ‘chatting’. 2) ‘Plonk’ The now almost universal word for a bottle of wine. The British soldier has traditionally failed since time immemorial to master the pronunciation of even the simplest foreign words, and it is merely a corruption of the French ‘vin blanc’. 3) ‘Pillbox’ Prior to the war some small defensive military fortifications had been constructed, generally referred to as blockhouses. Mostly these were made of heavy timber – many were constructed during the Boer War. However, the term was only widely adopted into English during the latter part of the Great War because of the huge numbers of concrete bunkers constructed by the Germans across the flooded Flanders battlefields. They were called pillboxes due to their similarity to the small receptacles used by civilians for carrying medication. 4) ‘Blighty’ The origin of this now very British word is shrouded in mystery. It may have come from the Arabic ‘beladi’, meaning ‘my own country’, or the Hindi word ‘bilaik’, referring to a foreign place or country. For the Tommies, it meant only one thing: home. The best possible way to get there was to sustain a wound serious enough to require hospitalisation in England, which was enviously termed ‘a Blighty one’. 5) ‘Third light’ A superstition that it was bad luck to light a third cigarette from the same match. This was actually based on sound experience: it took a German sniper about five seconds at night to see, aim and fire at a light source, and a flaring match was clearly visible on a dark night from well over 500 yards. Five seconds was also about the time it took for the third man to light up. 6) ‘Tank’ The first modern armoured fighting vehicles were produced in great secrecy by Fosters of Lincoln. To prevent any hint of their purpose being discovered by German spies, workers were told they were mobile water tanks. Some were even clearly marked in Cyrillic ‘Water tanks for Russia’. The ruse certainly worked, because their first use on the Somme on 15 September 1916 was a complete surprise to the Germans. 7) ‘Sniper’ Prior to the First World War, armies had employed specialist marksmen known as ‘sharpshooters’, but when war broke out the Germans fielded thousands of highly trained riflemen, usually equipped with telescopic-sighted rifles. British officers referred to them as ‘snipers’, which harked back to the army in India in the late 18th century when officers would go bird hunting in the hills – the tiny Snipe being one of the hardest of targets to hit. From 1914 the word was widely adopted by the British press, and it has since become universal. Sniping can now also refer to sharp or snide remarks made about another person. 8) ‘Over the top’ An example of an expression that has seen a resurgence, although now with a very different meaning. Originally it referred to the physical act of launching an attack by climbing over the sandbag parapet in front of a trench – literally by going over the top. It thus became synonymous with setting off on any highly dangerous venture, usually with a slim chance of survival. It mostly died out after the war but in recent years has been revived, albeit now meaning to embark on a course of action or to make a remark that is either excessive or unnecessary. 9) ‘Shrapnel’ Often used today as a reference to the annoying, and all-but-worthless small change that accumulates in one’s pockets or purse. It is possibly the most incorrectly used word from the war, as it is invariably misapplied to describe the lethal flying splinters from high-explosive shells. In fact, it refers to the lead balls launched from airburst shells (a little like airborne shotgun cartridges) invented by Lt Henry Shrapnel of the Royal Artillery in 1784. 10) ‘Bumf’ Printed paper that is produced in huge quantities for no discernable reason, and apparently has no information value. The junk mail we all receive on a daily basis is a prime example. It is derived from the army term ‘bum-fodder’ – paper that has only one possible practical use. It is originally from prewar schoolboy slang then appropriated by the soldiers to refer to excessive paperwork. It generally referred to the endless streams of army orders that were issued from headquarters. In the middle of one particularly savage attack on the Somme, a British orderly officer received a series of communiqués from HQ demanding to know how much tinned jam was held in stores and how many pairs of socks were required. Some things never change. Soldiers’ Songs and Slang of the Great War by Martin Pegler (Osprey Publishing) is now on sale. To find out more, click here. </p> 19158269 2014-08-16 22:43:24 2014-08-16 22:43:24 open open first-world-war-slang-words-we-still-use-today-19158269 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan title-19139811 http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/15/http-nga-gov-au-dix-my-intention-with-my-blog-19139811/ Fri, 15 Aug 2014 04:32:16 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>http://nga.gov.au/dix/ [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. -- Louis Sheehan ] The Art of War Otto Dix’s Der Krieg [War] cycle 1924 Introduction | Selected works | Slideshow | Checklist | Education (pdf) Otto Dix 'Nachtliche Begegnung mit einem Irrsinnigen [Night-time encounter with a madman]' 1924 etching, aquatint Collection of the National Gallery of Australia, The Poynton Bequest 2003 © Otto Dix, Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia click to enlarge Otto Dix was born in 1891 in Untermhaus, Thuringia, the son of an ironworker. He initially trained in Gera and at the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts as a painter of wall decorations and later taught himself how to paint on canvas. He volunteered as a machine-gunner during World War I and in the autumn of 1915 he was sent to the Western Front. He was at the Somme during the major allied offensive of 1916. After the war he studied at the academies of Dresden and Dusseldorf. Together with George Grosz, he was one of the leading exponents of the artistic movement Die Neue Sachlichkeit [New Objectivity], a form of social realist art which unsentimentally examined the decadence and underlying social inequality of post-war German society. With the rise of the National Socialists in 1933, Dix was dismissed from his teaching post at the Dresden Academy. He moved south to Lake Constance and was only allowed to continue practising as an artist after he agreed to relinquish overtly political subject matter in favour of landscape painting. Dix was conscripted into the army during World War II and in 1945 was captured and put into a prisoner of war camp. He returned to Dresden after the war where his paintings became more religiously reflective of his war-time experiences. He died in 1969.[1] Der Krieg [War] 1924 arose out of Dix’s own experiences of the horrors of war. As outlined above, he had volunteered for service in the army and fought as a machine-gunner on the Western Front. He was wounded a number of times, once almost fatally. War profoundly affected him as an individual and as an artist, and he took every opportunity, both during his active service and afterwards, to document his experiences. These experiences would become the subject matter of many of his later paintings and are central to the Der Krieg cycle. Der Krieg itself, as a cycle of prints (51 in total), is consciously modelled on Goya’s [1746–1828] equally famous and equally devastating Los Desastres de la Guerra [The disasters of war]. Los Desastres detailed Goya’s own account of the horrors of the Napoleonic invasion and the Spanish War of Independence from 1808 to 1814. Goya’s cycle of 82 etchings, which he worked on for a decade after the Spanish War of Independence were not, however, published until 1863, long after his death. Like Los Desastres, Der Krieg uses a variety of etching techniques and does so with an equally astonishing facility. Similarly, it exploits the cumulative possibilities of a long sequence of images and mirrors Goya’s unflinching, stark realism in terms of its fundamental presentation. GH Hamilton describes Dix’s cycle as ‘perhaps the most powerful as well as the most unpleasant anti-war statements in modern art… It was truly this quality of unmitigated truth, truth to the most commonplace and vulgar experiences, as well as the ugly realities of psychological experience, that gave his work a strength and consistency attained by no other contemporary artist, not even by [George] Grosz…’[2] It has become a commonplace to see this cycle as an admonition against the barbarity of war. And there is no doubt that as a human document it is a powerful cautionary work. At a psychological level, however, its truth goes deeper than this. Dix was both horrified and fascinated by the experience of war. Otto Dix 'Verwundeter (Herbst 1916, Bapaume) [Wounded soldier – Autumn 1916, Bapaume]' 1924 etching, aquatint, drypoint Collection of the National Gallery of Australia, The Poynton Bequest 2003 © Otto Dix, Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia click to enlarge In 1963, explaining why he volunteered for the army in the First World War he had this to say: I had to experience how someone beside me suddenly falls over and is dead and the bullet has hit him squarely. I had to experience that quite directly. I wanted it. I’m therefore not a pacifist at all – or am I? Perhaps I was an inquisitive person. I had to see all that myself. I’m such a realist, you know, that I have to see everything with my own eyes in order to confirm that it’s like that. I have to experience all the ghastly, bottomless depths of life for myself…[3] In the same interview, he also had this to say: As a young man you don’t notice at all that you were, after all, badly affected. For years afterwards, at least ten years, I kept getting these dreams, in which I had to crawl through ruined houses, along passages I could hardly get through…[4] This nightmarish, hallucinatory quality pervades all of the Der Krieg images. Paradoxically, there is also a quality of sensuousness, an almost perverse delight in the rendering of horrific detail, which indicates that there was perhaps, in Dix’s case, an almost addictive quality to the hyper-sensory input of war. In terms of the general corpus of Dix’s work, Der Krieg occupies a central place amongst the large number of paintings and works-on-paper devoted to the theme of war. The work is astonishingly powerful and, as stated above, it remains one of the most powerful indictments of war ever conceived. It is universally regarded as one of the great masterpieces of twentieth century. Dix’s oeuvre as a whole, and Der Krieg in particular, was hugely influential on a number of other twentieth century artist such as Ben Shahn, Pablo Picasso and Robert Motherwell. Otto Dix 'Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor [Stormtroops advancing under gas]' 1924 etching, aquatint, drypoint Collection of the National Gallery of Australia, The Poynton Bequest 2003 © Otto Dix, Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia click to enlarge The etchings were printed by Kupferdruckerei O. Felsing in Charlottenburg on BSB Maschinen Butten and Kupferdruck paper under Dix’s supervision. The portfolio was published by Karl Nierendorf, Berlin, as five separate folios each of 10 prints in an edition of 70 in 1924. The edition the National Gallery of Australia has acquired is numbered 58/70. The portfolio also includes the impression of Soldat und Nonne [Soldier and nun], depicting the rape of a nun by a soldier, which was suppressed in the published version of the suite. Otto Dix is one of the greatest artists of the first half of the 20th century and his visual legacy, including his Der Krieg cycle, with its still relevant contemporary echoes, is one of the most powerful documents of man’s inhumanity to man that we have available to us today. Its acquisition represents a major coup for the Gallery having been on the Department of International Prints desiderata list for years. Mark Henshaw Curator Department of International Prints, Drawings and Illustrated Books Notes [1] Biographical details sourced from Harold Osborne [ed], The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981 and Jane Turner [ed], The Dictionary of Art, London: Macmillan, New York; distributed by Grove Dictionaries, 1996 [2] Osborne [ed]. [3] interview with Maria Wetzel at www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk [4] Also quoted at www.historical.org </p> 19139811 2014-08-15 04:32:16 2014-08-15 04:32:16 open open http-nga-gov-au-dix-my-intention-with-my-blog-19139811 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan For sale at one euro: a house in an idyllic Sicilian village http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/15/for-sale-at-one-euro-a-house-in-an-idyllic-sicilian-village-19139758/ Fri, 15 Aug 2014 04:20:15 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. -- Louis Sheehan ] Council in Gangi selling off around 20 homes for the price of a cup of coffee in the hope of attracting new life to hilltop community The Telegraph Nick Squires in Rome 4:24PM BST 06 Aug 2014 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/11016777/For-sale-at-one-euro-a-house-in-an-idyllic-Sicilian-village.html It's yours for the price of a cup of coffee - a historic house in a terracotta-tiled hill town in Italy. In fact for the price of a full English breakfast, you could snap up half a dozen of them. The mountain town of Gangi on the Madonie mountains in the Province of Palermo (Alamy) A village in Sicily which has endured decades of population decline and neglect has come up with a novel, and seemingly too-good-to-refuse offer: it is selling off empty homes for just one euro each. That's 80p at today's exchange rate. Our village is for sale on eBay 11 Jul 2014 Gangi is a hill-top town set amid the rolling wheat fields and wooded valleys of central Sicily, about an hour's drive south of the picturesque holiday resort of Cefalu. Founded in the 12th century, it boasts a castle and access to hiking trails in the surrounding countryside. The local council wants to sell around 20 houses, many of them derelict, which were bequeathed by locals who had neither the money nor the will to renovate them. The bargain-basement prices come with a few conditions, none of which are very onerous or particularly costly. Gangi, with Mt Etna in the distance; the town is an hour's drive from Cefalu (Alamy) Buyers must pay a €5,000 (£3,970) guarantee to the local council to ensure that they renovate the properties, rather than just leave them empty. The money will be redeemed once the homes are restored. Owners have five years in which to bring the houses up to a habitable standard. Most of them are in a state of disrepair, if not derelict, with the cost of renovating them estimated at around €35,000 (£28,000). Buyers would have to pay the legal costs associated with the purchase - estimated at around €6,000 (£4,760) per property, depending on its taxable value. Gangi's council first launched the unusual initiative a couple of years ago, but with none of the councillors speaking English, it received barely any attention and achieved few results. Now the village of 7,000 people has turned to Marie Wester, an English-speaking, Swedish property consultant who lives in Sicily, to help market the deal. The Ventimiglia tower in the town of Gangi (Alamy) Through a newsletter she sends out to clients, she has already had interest from four British couples as well as Swedes, Americans and Russians. "The people of Gangi want to attract foreigners to the town because they want to bring in new life," Ms Wester told The Telegraph. "Since I got involved in the sale, there has been massive interest. I think it's a good deal." After living in Italy for seven years, Ms Wester has a shrewd idea of what local builders would charge to undertake the renovation of the properties, all of which are in the historic centre of Gangi. "The houses need new roofs and floors, you'd need to put in electricity, water and sewerage and re-plaster them at the end of it all. I reckon it would cost about €35,000 per property. "The only downside I can think of is that the village is not near the coast, but it a lovely medieval town, it's very clean and well-kept and the people are friendly." Two of the houses were bought last week by an expatriate Italian businessman and his Russian wife, who are based in Abu Dhabi. "They fell in love with our village, with the tranquillity and the clean air," said Giuseppe Ferrarello, the mayor. "We've received more than a hundred telephone calls from Italy and abroad. We are ready to welcome more people with traditional hospitality." Gangi may be in the same province as Corleone, the town made notorious for its Mafia links by The Godfather books and films, but foreign buyers need have no fear of Cosa Nostra. "The Mafia exists, of course, but they are operating at a different level - they are interested in multi-million euro construction projects, not restorations like this," said Ms Wester. "Some people think that if you come here you'll see them walking down the street with guns, but it's not like that." The one-euro-a-house offer comes a month after much of a village in the Italian Alps was put on sale on eBay for €245,000 (£195,000). Calsazio had a population of around 80 a few decades ago but emigration and the drift to the cities by young people has reduced the number of locals still living there to just eight. </p> 19139758 2014-08-15 04:20:15 2014-08-15 04:20:15 open open for-sale-at-one-euro-a-house-in-an-idyllic-sicilian-village-19139758 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Russia’s Manned Moon Mission to Cost $2.8 Billion Posted on August 6, 2014 in Science http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/13/russia-s-manned-moon-mission-to-cost-2-8-billion-posted-on-august-6-2014-in-science-19129436/ Wed, 13 Aug 2014 23:40:14 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Russia’s Manned Moon Mission to Cost $2.8 Billion Posted on August 6, 2014 in Science [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] MOSCOW, August 3 (RIA Novosti) – A manned mission to the Moon will cost Russia 100 billion rubles (about $2.8 billion), Igor Mitrofanov, laboratory director at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Space Research Institute said Sunday. “An estimated cost of one project aimed at the development of an automatic lunar station is 10 billion rubles (about $280 million). The project is to be completed in five or six years. The manned lunar mission will cost ten times more,” Mitrofanov told reporters during the COSPAR Scientific Assembly in Moscow. He elaborated that prior to the manned flight it is necessary to “learn to conduct the Moon landing all over again,” and automatic lunar stations are needed for this purpose. According to Mitrofanov, one of the Space Research Institute’s partners is currently developing three stations called Luna-25 (Luna-Glob project), Luna-26 and Luna-27 under the Luna-Resource project. He elaborated that Luna-25 and Luna-27 are landers aimed to run for one year, whereas Luna-26 is an orbiter, which will monitor the Moon for two years. Mitrofanov stressed that within the next ten years lunar bases will likely to be created. A mission to the Moon has become one of Russia’s top priorities in space. Russia plans to launch three lunar spacecraft — two to surface and one to the orbit — by the end of the decade. The first mission, the long-delayed Luna-25, is slated for launch in 2016 and land at the Moon’s South Pole. The next two missions will include an orbiter to monitor the Moon in 2018 and a lander with a drill to search for water ice in 2019. Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19129436 2014-08-13 23:40:14 2014-08-13 23:40:14 open open russia-s-manned-moon-mission-to-cost-2-8-billion-posted-on-august-6-2014-in-science-19129436 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan The Case for Helping the Kurds By Fred Kaplan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/13/the-case-for-helping-the-kurds-by-fred-kaplan-19128457/ Wed, 13 Aug 2014 20:50:00 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Slate.com http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2014/08/isis_and_kurdistan_the_future_of_iraq_depends_on_a_thriving_kurdish_population.html [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] The Case for Helping the Kurds A thriving Kurdistan is necessary for a democratic Iraq. By Fred Kaplan It’s clear for lots of reasons—political, economic, strategic, electoral, opportunistic, moral, and simply sensible, to name a few—that President Obama has no desire to get drawn back into the Iraq war. So why is he bombing Islamist insurgents in the Kurdish region of Iraq and saying he might keep doing so for months? Because what he’s doing has nothing to do with getting drawn back into the Iraq war. Fred Kaplan Fred Kaplan is the author of The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War and 1959: The Year Everything Changed. This seems a paradox, to say the least, but stick with me for a minute. We can all agree that “the Iraq war” refers to the period from 2003-11, when a U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq, ousted the central Baghdad government, and dismantled all bodies of authority, thus hurling most of the country into sectarian warfare, which American commanders tried to suppress, first through crude, brutal occupation, then (in 2007) through clever counterinsurgency techniques, which played the sectarian factions off one another, vastly reducing the violence and forging a provisional truce. However, even the advocates of this new strategy, such as Gen. David Petraeus, said all along that the benefits would be temporary at best; that all U.S. forces could do was provide “breathing space” for Iraq’s political factions to get their act together. After American troops came home (under the terms of a 2008 treaty signed by George W. Bush at the insistence of Iraq’s parliament), it soon became clear that Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki had no desire to get his act together and sustain the truce with his Sunni rivals; in fact, he stepped up his persecution against them—and sectarian war re-erupted. This is the Iraq war that neither President Obama nor any sentient American should want to re-enter. Obama’s airstrikes against the Islamists’ holdings in Kurdistan are something different. Note that three paragraphs ago, in my mini-summary of the Iraq war, I noted that the 2003 ouster of Saddam Hussein’s regime and the dismantlement of all his ministries hurled “most of the country into sectarian warfare.” (The emphasis, this time, is added.) The one area of Iraq that remained nearly immune from the chaos—the one area that U.S. authorities deemed “stable” through most of the occupation—was the northern area known as Kurdistan, home to roughly 6 million Kurds. This is true, despite Kurdistan’s multiethnic population (mainly Muslims but also Yazidis, the Yarsan, Christians, and Jews) and its various conflicts over the decades with Baghdad. The main reason for Kurdistan’s stability is that in 1970 the U.S. and Iraqi governments decreed it an autonomous area. More relevant still, after the 1991 Gulf War, the U.N. Security Council, in, Resolution 688, declared the area a “safe haven” to protect Kurds from Saddam Hussein’s wrath. (He had killed thousands of Kurds with chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.) And the United States agreed to enforce the resolution with a “no-fly zone.” (In other words, all Iraqi planes trying to fly over Kurdish territory would be shot down by U.S. air or naval power.) Under this protection, Kurdistan has thrived. Its per capita income exceeds the rest of Iraq’s by 50 percent, it has free-trade zones with Turkey and Iran (both of which were once rivals or enemies), and it has solid relations with many Western companies. The Kurds’ growing wealth has sired tensions too. As Sunni-Shiite violence has turned Iraq into a borderline “failed state,” the Kurds have started making their own deals with oil companies and made moves toward their centurylong aspirations of complete independence (which the French and British colonialists thwarted after World War I by divvying Kurdish territory among the peripheries of Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Iran). This would deny Baghdad and Iraq’s Sunni Arabs of much oil revenue. Still, it’s become very clear that, if Iraq—whether as a centralized state or a loose federation—has any hopes of ever becoming stable, much less democratic, a thriving Kurdistan must be part of it, even a model for it. When ISIS (now calling itself the Islamic State, or IS) crossed into Iraq in June, many in the West expressed worry but not enough to do a lot about it. First, ISIS seemed pretty small. Second, few realized that—under Maliki’s corrupt leadership—much of the Iraqi army had become a hollow shell of its former shelf. Third, ISIS was playing on the hostility of many Sunnis to Maliki’s Shiite government, so most Western leaders said the only way to solve the problem was for the Iraqis to form a new, more inclusive government; meanwhile, if we defended what was seen as an oppressive Shiite government, we would be viewed as “Maliki’s air force” and drive still more Sunnis into ISIS’s ranks. Finally, and most pertinent in this context, it was assumed—and, at the outset, affirmed—that the Kurdish peshmerga could defend itself if ISIS moved into Kurdistan. Top Comment If we're helping the Kurds we should give them independence and finally be done with this attitude that borders can't be changed. More... -JanDeDoot 75 Comments Join In President Obama’s Aug. 11 announcement of airstrikes over Kurdistan and increased military shipments followed the first signs that ISIS could challenge the peshmerga after all. In other words, Obama’s moves do not amount to a resumption of the Iraq war but rather a necessary response, not only to a humanitarian crisis but to a mortal danger facing a vital ally. Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan</p> 19128458 2014-08-13 20:50:00 2014-08-13 20:50:00 open open the-case-for-helping-the-kurds-by-fred-kaplan-19128457 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan Ralph Nader : What the Democratic Party Does Well: Doing Itself In http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/12/ralph-nader-what-the-democratic-party-does-well-doing-itself-in-19113031/ Tue, 12 Aug 2014 07:33:18 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] What the Democratic Party Does Well: Doing Itself In Ralph Nader August 8, 2014 Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the minority leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives, just had her political consultants send out a mass mailing to women asking for money and responses to an enclosed survey of their opinions. The mass mailing duly recites the truly horrible House Republican votes against a variety of women’s health, safety and family protections and seeks to survey women’s priorities for the Congressional Democrats’ legislative agenda. Under the category titled “Employment,” there is no mention of restoring the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour, which Rep. Pelosi supports. The closest option to check was “inadequate/or no salary increase.” The Pelosi mailing, uninspiring and defensive, is another product of the Party’s political consultants who have failed them again and again in winnable House and Senate races against the worst Republican Party record in history. These consultants, as former Clinton special assistant, Bill Curry, notes, make more money from their corporate clients than from political retainers. Slick, arrogant and ever reassuring, these firms are riddled with conflicts of interests and could just as well be “Trojan horses.” The full restoration of the federal minimum wage to make up for the ravages of inflation since 1968 would take it from the present, stagnant $7.25 per hour and beyond the proposed $10.10 to $10.90 per hour. Over thirty million American workers – two thirds of them women and two thirds of them employed by large low-wage companies like Walmart and McDonald’s – would benefit from this wage restoration, and in turn would be able to strengthen the economy by increasing their consumer expenditures. There are a lot of votes out there if the Democrats go beyond lip service and push for a major media and grassroots campaign against the Congressional Republicans who are blocking a vote on this minimum wage bill. Three of four Americans favor a restored minimum wage. Some cities and states have already taken their state minimum wage toward $9.00 per hour. They’re feeling pressure from distressed workers, from growing street demonstrations and from holding their fingers to the political winds. This is an issue whose time has come. A few months ago, even Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and other out of office Republicans who are not raising money from their corporate paymasters, declared their support for increasing the minimum wage. Bill Curry flatly says that the Democrats can retain control of the Senate and take back the House by making raising the federal minimum wage a top 2014 campaign issue. The many human interest stories about the plight of underpaid workers are compelling and would motivate more voters to turn out. After being too inactive in 2010 and 2012, the labor movement has touted a restored minimum wage, lobbied at some state legislatures for a raise, and organized demonstrations of workers, backed by SEIU, in front of fast food and other big box chains. AFL-CIO chief, Richard Trumka, has been at demonstrations and has put out materials demanding that Congress act on H.R.1010 to take the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. However, organized labor can do more with multi-million dollar organizing drives and ad buys (as they did in 1996). More demonstrations in more Congressional districts and more pressure on nervous Republican incumbents to sign the pending Discharge Petition to force Republican House Speaker, John Boehner, to let the House members vote on the bill could make a difference on this important fight. Boehner is on the wrong side of this politically popular issue, but up to now he hasn’t thought the Democrats can turn this into enough votes to discharge his speakership after November. At the very least, the AFL-CIO unions should prepare a big mass media buy soon, since there are less than 100 days to the elections. The key discharge petition in the House, to bring the modest $10.10 over three years to a vote, is assumed to have all 199 Democrats signed on. Only 19 Republicans need to sign it to get to the decisive 218 tally. Six Republican incumbents pushed for the last minimum wage raise in 2006 saying that “nobody working full time should have to live in poverty.” These six went on to vote for the raise in 2007. The trouble is that since the discharge petition was filed by Rep. Tim Bishop (D-NY) in February, there has been little publicity for it by either the Democratic House Leadership or the White House (see timeforaraise.org). And what of President Obama who is reportedly desperate to win back the House? On April 30th, he held an event with some minimum wage workers and criticized Republicans. On June 12th, he announced the details of the executive order to raise wages for federal contract workers. But he is not barnstorming on this BIG proposal that resonates with so many people in their hard-pressed daily life. He does, however, barnstorm around the country to attend exclusive high contributors’ fundraisers. How can he not understand that, with his “bully pulpit” and hard-working Americans by his side around the country, he could raise real political heat under the Republicans whose refusal to bend on this issue could result in their breaking? The mass media, after all, covers the news-making President everywhere. I’ve often said that the Democratic Party cannot even defend the country against the demonstrably cruel, anti-worker, anti-consumer, pro-big business/Wall Street over Main Street Republican Party. The voting evidence in Congress is fully accessible. The Democrats compiled, but did not adequately deploy a report on some sixty outrageous Republican Party House votes during the last Congress that, if really driven home to voters, would have resulted in a landslide Democratic win against the GOP. Instead, the Democrats allowed the GOP to cover its truly vicious tracks with flowery rhetoric that kept their day of reckoning from seeing sunlight (see for yourself). My message to Democrats is: Dump your corporate consultants. Just campaign for the necessities of the people. And publicize those Republican votes crisply, widely and repeatedly. follow on Twitter | friend on Facebook | forward to a friend Copyright © 2014 Nader.Org, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in at our website. Our mailing address is: Nader.Org P.O. Box 19367 Washington, DC 20036 </p> 19113031 2014-08-12 07:33:18 2014-08-12 07:33:18 open open ralph-nader-what-the-democratic-party-does-well-doing-itself-in-19113031 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ALIEN ABDUCTIONS? http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/08/whatever-happened-to-alien-abductions-19078872/ Fri, 08 Aug 2014 07:02:31 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] http://ufodigest.com/article/alien-abductions-0801 WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ALIEN ABDUCTIONS? Nick Pope's picture By Nick Pope - 6 days 11 hours ago In the late Eighties and throughout the Nineties, alien abductions were at the heart of ufology. How did what might be regarded as a subset of ufology become its central meme? Abductions (irrespective of whether one believes they take place in a literal sense) could arguably be regarded as an evolution of the contactee phenomenon, and for those who believe UFOs are extraterrestrial spacecraft, it’s only logical that one should look beyond the vehicles and focus on the nature and agenda of the occupants. John Keel’s 1967 article “Never Mind the Saucer! Did You See the Guys Who Were Driving?” articulates this point perfectly, but it wasn’t until the publication of “Missing Time” (1981), “Intruders” (1987) and “Communion” (1987) that Keel’s question became the question most asked in the UFO community. Click here to enlarge top photo. Of the three books mentioned, Whitley Strieber’s “Communion” did most to move alien abductions out of the ufological fringe and onto centre stage, and from there, into the mainstream public awareness. From there, things snowballed. Abduction plotlines were featured in “The X-Files” and a wide range of other TV shows and movies, while the image on the front cover of “Communion” became embedded in public consciousness, further boosted by the so-called alien autopsy film in 1995. In 2002 Steven Spielberg’s TV mini-series “Taken” illustrated that abductions were still big news and big business. All this time, abductions were the central focus for much of the UFO community, and the three charismatic figures of Budd Hopkins, David Jacobs and John Mack were at the heart of things. While the centre of gravity was America, interest was global. My own book on the alien abduction mystery, “The Uninvited”, got to number seven in the UK hardback non-fiction chart, while the US mass-market paperback edition, published by Dell, was also a best-seller, clearly showing not only that abductions were the dominant force in ufology, but also that the subject had broken out into mainstream media and public awareness. Now let’s fast forward to 2014. One hears comparatively little about alien abductions, even within the UFO community, where the main current areas of interest are government cover-ups, ‘Disclosure’, secret space program/‘breakaway civilization’, the Rendlesham Forest incident, and – perhaps most prominently of all – the resurgence of the ancient astronaut/ancient aliens hypothesis. What’s going on? There are a number of theories and it’s worth running through them. At the extreme end of the belief spectrum, for those who think abductions take place in a literal, physical way, as many abductees claim, there’s the suggestion that the alien agenda is coming to its climax. Such people regard abductions as an extraterrestrial project, usually characterized as a human/alien hybridization program. If abductions have declined, or stopped altogether, does this not suggest that the program is coming to an end, or has finished? If this is the case, what happens next? Is some dramatic development just around the corner? It’s certainly food for thought. There are, of course, some more prosaic possibilities. As a journalist and broadcaster, I know that interest in just about everything is cyclic. There comes a time when saturation point is reached and people lose interest, not least because pretty much everything there is to say has already been said. Whether this is reflected in, or driven by the media is open to debate, but editors and producers looking at abductions these days are inclined to say things like “that’s a bit passé”, or “this has all been done to death”. If this is the case, perhaps interest will return, just as interest in the ancient astronaut theory has returned. The TV show “Ancient Aliens” may have driven this resurgence, but it only worked because a new generation of people were genuinely interested in ideas that had been popularized back in the Seventies by authors such as Erich von Däniken. What other factors could explain the lack of coverage and (apparent) lack of interest in abductions? One cannot overstate the influence of individuals when it comes to driving the agenda in a subject, whether they do so deliberately or not. Simply put, Budd Hopkins, David Jacobs and John Mack played a huge role in putting abductions centre stage within ufology, and now that Hopkins and Mack are both dead, the greater part of that impetus is gone. This is in no way meant to disparage the work of other ufologists and abductees, or downplay the continuing influence of writers such as Whitley Strieber, but there’s no getting away from the fact that the deaths of Hopkins and Mack dealt a hefty blow to abduction research. There have been other assaults on the validity of abductions and the credibility of both abduction researchers and abductees. The debate over whether regression hypnosis can recover hidden memories, distort existing ones or even implant false ones was the first shot across the bows. Concerns about using regression hypnosis on abductees segued into wider concerns about the propriety of ufologists dealing with abductees. This was essentially a therapist/patient relationship in a situation where some of the people claiming abduction experiences (real or not) were extremely vulnerable. Were abduction researchers suitably qualified or otherwise equipped to deal with such people in a professional and ethical way? The allegations made by “Emma Woods” against David Jacobs brought that debate into focus, as did the criticisms made by filmmaker Carol Rainey regarding her former husband, Budd Hopkins. The recent arrest of self-described abductee Stan Romanek on charges of possessing and distributing child pornography may turn out to be the final nail in the coffin. Alien abduction may be down, but it isn’t altogether out. Travis Walton remains popular on the conference circuit and hopes to see a remake of “Fire in the Sky”. Researchers such as Yvonne Smith continue to fly the flag for the subject, while this month’s “Contact in the Desert” conference in Joshua Tree has a panel discussion on the “contact experience”. This latter point is particularly noteworthy, because it seems that we’ve gone from contactees to abductees and now back to contactees – the more neutral term “experiencers” is sometimes used, but that’s another story. In all of this, here’s the key question about the apparent rise and fall of alien abductions: does it tell us something about the true nature of the UFO phenomenon, or does it tell us just as much – and maybe even more – about ufology and ufologists? Nick Pope is a former employee of the UK Ministry of Defense. From 1991 to 1994 he ran the British Government's UFO project and has recently been involved in a five-year initiative to declassify and release the entire archive of these UFO files. Nick Pope held a number of other fascinating posts in the course of his 21-year government career, which culminated in his serving as an acting Deputy Director in the Directorate of Defense Security. He now works as a broadcaster and journalist, covering subjects including space, fringe science, defense and intelligence. Nick Pope’s latest book, Encounter in Rendlesham Forest, co-written with John Burroughs and Jim Penniston, was published by Thomas Dunne Books on 15th April and is available via Amazon and all good bookstores.</p> 19078872 2014-08-08 07:02:31 2014-08-08 07:02:31 open open whatever-happened-to-alien-abductions-19078872 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Kynisca http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/05/kynisca-19053982/ Tue, 05 Aug 2014 07:25:11 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Here I copied/lifted a part of a Wikipedia webpage …. Lou Sheehan Kynisca was born in 440 BC in the ancient Greek city of Sparta and was the daughter of the Eurypontid king of Sparta, Archidamus II, and Eupoleia. She was also the sister of the later king of Sparta, Agesilaus II. She is said to have been a tomboy, an excellent equestrian and very wealthy, the perfect qualifications for a successful trainer. She was exceedingly ambitious to succeed at the Olympic Games and the first woman to breed horses and win an Olympic victory, according to Pausanias. Her name means 'female puppy in Ancient Greek. Olympic Games While most women in the ancient Greek world were kept in seclusion and forbidden to learn any kind of skills in sports, riding or hunting, Spartan women by contrast were brought up from girlhood to excel at these things and to disdain household chores, by attending a boarding school similar to this that Spartan boys attended. The ancient Olympic Games were almost entirely male-only and women were forbidden even to attend the main stadium at Olympia, where running events and combat sports were held. Women were allowed to enter only the equestrian events, not by running but by owning and training the horses. Kynisca employed men and entered her team at the Olympics, where it won in the four-horse chariot racing (tethrippon Greek: τέθριππον) twice, in 396 BC and again in 392 BC. The irony is that she probably didn't see her victories. However, Kynisca was honored by having a bronze statue of a chariot and horses, a charioteer and a statue of herself in the Temple of Zeus in Olympia, by the side of the statue of Troilus, made by Apelles, and an inscription written declaring that she was the only female to win the wreath in the chariot events at the Olympic Games. The first person in the inscription indicates that Kynisca was willing to push herself forward. In addition to this, a hero-shrine of Kynisca was erected in Sparta at Plane-tree Grove,[8] where religious ceremonies were held. Only Spartan kings were graced in this way and Kynisca was the first woman to receive this honor. The inscription from Olympia (ca. 390-380 BC) reads[9]: English Kings of Sparta are my father and brothers Kyniska, victorious with a chariot of swift-footed horses, have erected this statue. I declare myself the only woman in all Hellas to have won this crown. Apelleas son of Kallikles made it. -- Louis Sheehan </p> 19053982 2014-08-05 07:25:11 2014-08-05 07:25:11 open open kynisca-19053982 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan ERIS http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/04/eris-19046130/ Mon, 04 Aug 2014 04:27:54 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/P/PlanetX.html A hypothetical tenth planet of the Solar System (the 'X' may be read as the Roman numeral 10 or the letter 'x' for unknown). What were thought to have been unexplained perturbations in the orbits of Neptune and Uranus, at the turn of the 20th century, led to the search for a trans-Neptunian planet. But upon the discovery of this planet, Pluto, the mystery only seemed to deepen. Pluto proved to have far too little mass to account for the wobbles thought to be present in the movements of Neptune and Uranus. Over the next few decades, speculation continued about the possible existence of "Planet X." However, today, it seems clear that the supposed perturbations were fictitious and, therefore, that these were not valid grounds upon which to suspect that a tenth planet was real. Many Kuiper Belt objects (KBO), however, do circle the Sun beyond Pluto and may reach diameters of more than 1,000 km. In July 2005, the discovery was announced of a KBO, now called Eris (formerly 2003 UB313), which is larger than Pluto and thus qualifies as the tenth planet of the Solar System. [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. -- Louis Sheehan ] Posted but NOT written by Lou Sheehan </p> 19046130 2014-08-04 04:27:54 2014-08-04 04:27:54 open open eris-19046130 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan The war and the panic Jul 25th 2014, 14:39 by The Economist http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/03/the-war-and-the-panic-jul-25th-2014-14-39-by-the-economist-19044621/ Sun, 03 Aug 2014 21:21:19 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>The war and the panic Jul 25th 2014, 14:39 by The Economist [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. -- Louis Sheehan ] On July 28th 1914 Austria-Hungary declared war against Serbia. As our article from August 1st 1914 feared, the war quickly escalated when on that same day Germany, which was allied with Austria-Hungary, declared war against Russia (which was allied with Serbia) and two days later against France. Britain entered the war against Germany on August 4th, after it received an "unsatisfactory reply" regarding Belgium's neutrality. ON SUNDAY—just four weeks after the murder by Servian assassins of the Austrian Heir-Apparent and his wife in Sarajevo—Europe was suddenly confronted with the fear of a great war on a scale of unprecedented magnitude, involving loss of life and a destruction of all that we associate with modern civilisation too vast to be counted or calculated, and portending horrors so appalling that the imagination shrinks from the task. Readers of The Economist are aware of the train of events which led up to the catastrophe. The quarrel between Austria and Servia may be said to date from the time when an Austro-Hungarian army conquered Bosnia and Herzegovina, and in rescuing it from the Turkish yoke encountered the bitter hatred of Servia. The story was begun in our columns last week by Dr Josef Redlich, and is completed in a second letter which we print on another page of The Economist. It is clear to the impartial observer that there have been faults on both sides. But no cool thinker will be disposed to deny that the atrocious murders of the Austrian Heir-Apparent and his wife, following upon Servia's successful war, in which Austria, after all, played a fair and moderate part, must have been an intolerable provocation to any "old and haughty nation proud in arms." The administration of Austria-Hungary in Bosnia has often been compared with that of Great Britain in India. In 35 years, law and order, and security and religious toleration, have been substituted for rapine, disorder, official tyranny, and religious persecution. Admirable roads and railways have been built, and industry has at last begun to reap its reward for the first time since the Roman Empire fell. It is fair, then, to ask, not only what Austria ought to have done, but what Great Britain would have done in a like case—if, for example, the Afghan Government had plotted to raise a rebellion in North-West India, and if, finally, Afghan assassins had murdered a Prince and Princess of Wales? Certainly the cry for vengeance would have been raised, and can we be sure that any measure milder than the Note sent from Vienna to Belgrade would have been despatched from London or Calcutta to Kandahar? It is only after saying this that we feel justified in stating that the terms of the Austrian Note and the action of the Austrian Government, when most of these terms have been conceded, appear too stiff, too rigid, too relentless. There should have been more solicitude for the peace of Europe, and a livelier perception of the fact that neighbourly conduct and good feeling cannot be inculcated by military measures. All the same, it is a fact that City men sympathise with Austria. And it is a fact that the provocation begun by Servia has been continued by Russia. If a great war begins Russian mobilisation will be the proximate cause. And we fear that the poisonous articles of the Times have encouraged the Czar's Government to hope for British support. Fortunately, the attitude of the Times is utterly opposed to the feelings of the business community, and to the instincts of the working classes. In maintaining strict neutrality Mr Asquith and Sir Edward Grey can count upon the support of the Cabinet, the House of Commons, and the nation. So far Great Britain has taken the lead in Europe on behalf of peace. The value of that effort is due to the honourable and straightforward conduct of Sir Edward Grey, which did so much to localise the Balkan wars and to prevent the mobilisation in Austria and Russia from terminating in an explosion. It is also due to the great efforts made in England and Germany during the last two or three years to re-establish the old friendship which ought never to have been disturbed. It is very noticeable that there were many cries of "Hoch England " as the crowds which demonstrated in Berlin on Sunday passed by the British Embassy. It is also noticeable, we think, that both in France and Italy public opinion supports British efforts on behalf of peace, and there is one moral, drawn, we are happy to observe, by a Jingo contemporary, that the influence of Great Britain at this crisis and her strength as a mediator are due to the fact that "she alone of the Great Powers is not bound by a definite alliance." It is deplorable that at such a moment Mr Churchill should have given sensational orders to the Fleet, as if, forsooth, whatever happened, any British Government was entitled to plunge this nation into the horrors of war, in a quarrel which is no more of our making and no more our concern than would be a quarrel between Argentina and Brazil or between China and Japan. The attempts of the yellow Press and of the Times to drive the Government into a European war are happily not seconded by the sober-minded part of the Unionist Press in the provinces and Scotland. And we are glad to note the pacific line of the Standard, which is in keeping with its old traditions as a moderate representative of business feeling. The commercial and working classes of this country are just as friendly to Germany as to France, and they will almost unanimously reject the idea of helping Russia to extend its empire in Europe and Asia. Moreover, by keeping clear of the war we shall be able to assist the small Powers and neutral countries—Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, to maintain their integrity, their neutrality, and their independence. Mr Asquith has said plainly that no British interest is directly involved, and we should hope that the Cabinet as a whole reflects the general feeling of the nation that we should observe strict neutrality and avoid even the appearance of taking sides in a quarrel which is not of our making. There is no sign that British interests will be attacked. Happily the principal organs of unofficial Liberal opinion have been speaking out clearly and boldly. Every British interest points irresistibly to the maintenance of strict neutrality. And, of course, by so doing we shall be in a far better position later on—if the worst comes to the worst—to mediate effectively between exhausted combatants. Posted but NOT written by Lou Sheehan </p> 19044621 2014-08-03 21:21:19 2014-08-03 21:21:19 open open the-war-and-the-panic-jul-25th-2014-14-39-by-the-economist-19044621 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan 'Octomom' sets egg-brooding record A deep-sea octopus is observed guarding the same clutch of eggs for nearly 4.5 years http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/02/octomom-sets-egg-brooding-record-a-deep-sea-octopus-is-observed-guarding-the-same-clutch-of-eggs-for-nearly-4-5-years-19030894/ Sat, 02 Aug 2014 05:04:18 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Posted but NOT written by Lou Sheehan SCIENCE NEWS The deep ocean has spawned a new record: the longest egg-brooding period. In April 2007, Bruce Robison of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, Calif., and colleagues sent a remote-operated vehicle down 1,397 meters (4,583 feet) into the Monterey Submarine Canyon. There they saw a deep-sea octopus (Graneledone boreopacifica) making its way toward a stony outcrop. One month later, the scientists spotted the same octopus, which they dubbed ‘Octomom,’ on the rock with a clutch of 155 to 165 eggs. The researchers returned to the site 18 times in total. Each time, there she was with her developing eggs. Most female octopuses lay only one clutch of eggs, staying with the eggs constantly and slowly starving to death while protecting them from predators and keeping them clean. When the eggs hatch, the female dies. The scientists report July 30 in PLOS ONE that the octopus was observed on her eggs for 53 months, until September 2011, the longest brooding period of any known animal.</p> 19030894 2014-08-02 05:04:18 2014-08-02 05:04:18 open open octomom-sets-egg-brooding-record-a-deep-sea-octopus-is-observed-guarding-the-same-clutch-of-eggs-for-nearly-4-5-years-19030894 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan Obama and the “Public Sentiment” Ralph Nader August 1, 2014 http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/08/02/obama-and-the-public-sentiment-ralph-nader-august-1-19030861/ Sat, 02 Aug 2014 04:59:58 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. -- Louis Sheehan ] Obama and the “Public Sentiment” Ralph Nader August 1, 2014 Dear President Obama: Abraham Lincoln once said that “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.” Presumably, he meant Presidential action on popular issues can and should overcome influential interests. At long last, the “public sentiment” seems to be aligning with some causes you are advancing. First, support is increasing for restoring the federal minimum wage to account for the inflation that, since 1968, has greatly diminished its purchasing power. The federal minimum wage is presently stagnant at $7.25 per hour. You are supporting the Harkin-Miller bill (H.R.1010 and S.2223), which would raise it to $10.10 per hour over three years. You have already issued an executive order to require federal government contractors to pay their employees no less than $10.10 per hour, effective in 2015 (see timeforaraise.org for more information). Restoring the purchasing power of the minimum wage has over 70% public support and would lift the wages of 30 million hard-pressed American workers. Had you pushed to raise the federal minimum wage in 2010 when the Democrats controlled Congress, the House of Representatives might not have been given over to the Republican Party in those November elections. In light of this missed opportunity, you can still pressure Speaker John Boehner and House Republicans to support raising the federal minimum wage by noting that Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and former Republican Governor of Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty, now support this effort. Affected workers need you to step up the pressure in the remaining months of this forlorn Congress and get an existing discharge petition to the House floor for a vote. Second, U.S.-chartered giant companies like Pfizer, Medtronic and, perhaps most foolishly, Walgreens— given its 8,000 protestable stores—are planning to move their headquarters to countries that lure them with lower tax rates, such as Ireland and Switzerland, abandon their U.S. “citizenship,” and re-incorporate in those jurisdictions. This is all for another tax escape to add to their existing ones, including large tax credits to Pfizer and Medtronic for research and development that corporatist lobbies have written into the U.S. tax code. “I don’t care if it’s legal, it’s wrong,” you have indignantly exclaimed in recent speeches. You are supporting legislative efforts by Democrats in Congress (H.R.4679 and S.2360, sponsored by Representative Sander Levin (D-MI) and Senator Carl Levin (D-MI)) to prohibit such drains on corporate taxes intended for the U.S. Treasury and make the ban retroactive to May 2014. Third, and perhaps most impressively, you are questioning the “economic patriotism” of many giant U.S. corporations who have received support (financial and otherwise) from U.S. workers, taxpayers and the public laws and benefitted from the infrastructure of our country. The mere implication that these companies are unpatriotically abandoning their native country has outraged the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (to which you paid a courtesy visit in 2011) along with the predictable Wall Street Journal editorial page. That highly vocal reaction means you touched on a vulnerability that has been on the minds of tens of millions of Americans. May you continue to promote the importance of insisting on the patriotic character of corporations, since the U.S. Supreme Court (5 to 4) keeps telling us that corporations are people. The public sentiment awaits your leadership on other positive redirections as well. Large majorities on both the left and the right: favor breaking up the “too big to fail” New York City banks; support cracking down on corporate crime and fraud (see the Hide No Harm Act of 2014); and, the more they know about its benefits and fairness, support a Wall Street speculation tax, a sales tax that could bring in about $300 billion a year, fund repairs of our public infrastructure, and dampen some of the reckless gambling with other peoples’ money, such as pension and mutual funds. The many rallies in New York City, in front of the White House and around the country— some of which have been led by the National Nurses United—are pressing Congress for such a transaction tax. Such activities have laid the groundwork for your exercise of the “Bully Pulpit.” Another easier initiative, pointed out in my new book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State, is to highlight, once again, the legislation that you as a Senator co-sponsored with Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) in 2006 to require that the full text of all federal government contracts above a minimum amount be available online. As I’ve written previously, putting the full text of these contracts online will: give taxpayers both savings and higher quality performances; let the media focus more incisively on this vast area of government disbursements to inform the wider public; encourage constructive comments and alarms from the citizenry; and stimulate legal and economic research by scholars interested in structural topics related to government procurement, transfers, subsidies and giveaways. There is already support by members of both Parties in the Congress for this measure. Online disclosure would provide for greater scrutiny of some $300 billion in annual contracts by the media, taxpayer groups, competitors and academic researchers. Yes, indeed, Mr. President, wondrous and beneficial changes can come to our country when you and Congress heed the long-standing “public sentiment,” more recently called the “voices of the people,” and translate that “public sentiment” into beneficial action by our government. Sincerely, Ralph Nader Posted but NOT written by Lou Sheehan </p> 19030861 2014-08-02 04:59:58 2014-08-02 04:59:58 open open obama-and-the-public-sentiment-ralph-nader-august-1-19030861 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan General Motors Is Broken -- Ralph Nader http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/07/31/general-motors-is-broken-ralph-nader-19002536/ Thu, 31 Jul 2014 09:07:37 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. -- Louis Sheehan ] General Motors Is Broken http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/07/general_motors_ignition_switch_defect_a_crisis_of_inattention.html The auto giant is suffering a crisis of inattention. Here’s how to fix it. By Ralph Nader he recent Senate committee hearing on how General Motors dealt with its deadly ignition switch defect provides the latest glimpse into the crisis of inattention, deferral of responsibility, and lack of accountability that permeate America’s largest automaker. GM acknowledges, so far, that 13 people were killed as a result of more than a decade of institutional cover-up and negligence brought on by an imperious corporate culture. Clarence Ditlow, head of the well-regarded Center for Auto Safety, has predicted that the death toll will go into the hundreds. In the hearing, GM’s general counsel, Michael P. Millikin, came under criticism for his failure to act and—in the words of subcommittee Chairwoman Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.)—for his “Whac-a-Mole” approach to ignition switch–related lawsuits, even though engineers at GM were aware of the defect. McCaskill twice questioned whether Millikin should still have his job and why CEO Mary Barra has not fired him. Barra defended Millikin, who himself testified, “We had lawyers at GM who didn’t do their jobs, didn’t do what was expected of them. Those lawyers are no longer with the company.” Once again, a GM executive passed the buck to midlevel employees while taking little of the blame himself. Another subcommittee member, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.)—a most penetrating questioner—asked Millikin whether GM would waive its (deceptively obtained) liability shield from lawsuits prior to its 2009 bankruptcy and taxpayer bailout, or whether it would make public documents related to the internal investigation of the defect. “We will not,” answered Millikin to both questions. “Lawyers typically are supposed to be the corporate conscience,” Blumenthal says. “They’re supposed to be the ones that make sure that corporations comply with the law in spirit and letter. Here, the lawyers for GM actually enabled cover-up, concealment, deceit, and even fraud.” Barra told the Senate committee that GM is taking steps to change the corporate culture that failed for 13 years to acknowledge the ignition switch defect. Barra spoke of firing 15 employees, “some for misconduct and incompetence, others because they didn’t take responsibility or act with a sense of urgency.” She talked of creating a Speak Up for Safety program meant “to encourage and recognize employees that bring potential safety issues forward quickly” as well as appointing a new global vice president of safety who would report to her. GM will also establish a fund to compensate people injured and the families of those killed because of the defective ignition switch. The devil is in the details. GM’s lawyer, Ken Feinberg of Feinberg Rozen LLP, detailed the prerequisites for the compensation program, noting that there is “no aggregate cap on the amount of compensation GM will make available to eligible claimants.” The key word is eligible—it happens to exclude all of the millions of recalled GM cars with faulty ignition switches except for the original 2.5 million recalled Cobalts and Saturns. “The fund failed to include other recalled vehicles and defects that resulted in deaths and injuries, and are barred by statutes of limitations or the GM bankruptcy,” Ditlow explains. “The least GM could do for taxpaying consumers who bailed them out is compensate them for their losses due to defects in GM vehicles. Even for ignition switch victims covered by the Fund, it will be difficult, if not impossible, for a consumer to prove that ignition switch failure caused a crash if all they have is their statement that the ignition switch cut off.” GM should introduce a monetary reward for safety reports by its engineers that could help prevent death and injuries. History has shown that GM executives are willing to talk about safety only when they get caught misbehaving. After all, this is the company that in the past has dragged its feet on safety standards for years, such as with shoulder belts and airbags. Since GM sales are rising, concerns about losing customers seem to have gone away. That may help explain why the auto giant refuses to produce more information about its negligent practices, refuses to support proposed corrective legislation, and seems increasingly comfortable that any Justice Department criminal inquiry will not reach the upper echelons of GM management and will only result in a fine that GM can easily absorb. What would it take to instill long-lasting change in a company that now has a storied history of selling unsafe automobiles? One very simple solution would be for Barra to establish an independent ombudsman office. GM’s proposed global vice president of safety—another bureaucratic link in the hierarchical GM chain of command—does not inspire much public confidence that safety defects will receive the immediate action they require. By contrast, an ombudsman would be authorized to receive, in complete confidence, the assertions of conscientious engineers and other internal whistleblowers and report them directly to GM’s CEO and president. This independent office could ensure that safety defects are taken seriously and that employees would be protected from retaliation or job loss. It would then become the CEO’s direct responsibility to follow up on the ombudsman’s report and decide whether it warrants triggering federal regulation on reporting the discovery to the Department of Transportation. GM could also introduce a monetary reward for safety reports by its engineers and other employees to the ombudsman that could help prevent death and injuries. There is a precedent for this: Many other companies here and abroad have long given assembly line workers rewards for proposing more efficient ways to manufacture products. If there is any benefit to the current firestorm over GM, it’s been to bring attention to the urgent need for stronger auto safety authority and enforcement budgets for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration—something that’s been long opposed by auto industry powers and their congressional allies such as Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.). Now is an ideal time to strengthen NHTSA. First and foremost, Congress must make it criminal for manufacturers and their officials to knowingly violate the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act. Citizens must be given the right to sue NHTSA when it fails to enforce the Safety Act, and all industry meetings with NHTSA officials should have detailed minutes that are placed in a public docket within 48 hours. The agency’s pathetic vehicle safety budget, now at $134 million, must be tripled, starting with funding a research lab like those at other regulatory agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration and Environmental Protection Agency. Today’s NHTSA rents lab space from Honda, a company that it regulates. The agency has no meaningful electronics and computer expertise, even though vehicles have become computers on wheels. NHTSA’s administrator admitted to Congress that the agency didn’t even know how the advanced airbags it mandated worked. An added incentive to stop corporate cover-ups comes from Sens. Blumenthal, Bob Casey (D-Pa.), and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who have just introduced the Hide No Harm Act of 2014 (S.2615), which would make it a criminal act—with punishment of up to five years in prison—for a corporate executive to cover up a harmful or deadly safety issue. Such action is long overdue. Only by holding top corporate executives’ feet to the fire can we avoid these deadly mishaps in the future. Ralph Nader’s most recent book is Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State. Follow him on Twitter. [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. -- Louis Sheehan ] </p> 19002536 2014-07-31 09:07:37 2014-07-31 09:07:37 open open general-motors-is-broken-ralph-nader-19002536 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan aretr / UFO http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/07/29/aretr-ufo-18988689/ Tue, 29 Jul 2014 00:04:23 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. -- Louis Sheehan ] Post by meldrew on Oct 21, 2010 at 12:55pm www.richplanet.net/detail.php?dbindex=61 President Jimmy Carter was the first President of the United States of America to have officially reported the UFO he saw to the authorities. He was also the President who said that if elected he would see that UFO-Alien Full Disclosure would take place. That the American public would be told the truth about everything was one of the campaign cries of Jimmy Carter. Carter made a promise he could not or would not be able to keep. After Carter won the White House, he paid a visit to the then-CIA Director, George Bush. Carter had an interest in UFOs ever since experiencing his first sighting sometime in 1969 while standing outside a Lion's Club in Georgia. His campaign speeches promising to unravel the government's long held cover-up was the ''Parting of the Red Sea'' for Ufologists not only in America but around the world. Here was the one guy who would open up the ''Promised Land'' and lead them into Full Disclosure. Carter wanted the U.S. Government's UFO secret documents declassified. George Bush more or less told Carter that the President of the United States did not have the need to know the information contained in those documents. Can you even begin to imagine that? What lends even more mind-blowing credibility to this alleged event between Carter and Bush is the credibility of the allegation maker: Daniel Sheehan. Daniel Sheehan was born in1946 and graduated from Harvard Law School. There, he was co-founder of the Harvard Civil Rights and Civil Liberty Law Review. He went on to work for the American Civil Liberties Union and became general counsel for a host of entities including The Disclosure Project-a group dedicated to getting the U.S. Government to allow full and unfettered access to what the Feds know about the UFO-Alien phenomenon. According to Sheehan, Bush Senior, who was the CIA Director, refused Carter's request for disclosure of the UFO documents, even to the President of the United States, because it was generally believed in the halls and corridors of the secret, black-ops government that Carter would then turn the truth over to the American people. Director of a California think tank, Sheehan's credentials are impeccable. Sheehan's career is a litany of high-profile cases like, ''legal counsel team for the New York Times' Pentagon Papers case, defense of the Berrigan brothers, going after the Kerr-McGee nuclear plant (Karen Silkwood), Three-Mile Island, Iran-Contra. At the Disclosure Conference, Sheehan says the Bush-Carter story was relayed to him in 1977 by Marcia Smith of the Congressional Research Service, part of the Library of Congress.'' Sheehan's interest in this phenomenon came about when Sheehan met Marcia Smith through a mutual acquaintance. Smith told Sheehan that she was involved in a research project for the Science and Technology Committee of the Library of Congress that would address the issues of the potential existence of extraterrestrial intelligence and make an evaluation of the data on the phenomena of UFOs. When Sheehan queried Smith as to who exactly wanted this study done, her answer was none other than Jimmy Carter. This all was with a view to investigate exactly what could or could not be turned over to the general public, according to Daniel Sheehan. Smith asked Sheehan if he could, since he was the then-General Counsel to United States Jesuit Headquarters at their National Office in Washington D.C., get access to the records on the UFO-Alien issue contained in the Vatican. Though Sheehan made repeated attempts to gain access to the Vatican's documents through official channels, he was refused each time. This makes one wonder just why, if all there is to this UFO-Alien issue is weather balloons, flocks of geese, and swamp gas, would the Vatican (or any government on the earth, for that matter) have top-secret, and highly unattainable records pertaining to a nonexistent issue? After telling Marcia Smith of his roadblock with the Vatican Library, she asked if he could help with a team that was lobbying Congressional leader to reinstate funds for the SETI (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program. Sheehan indicated to Smith that he was glad to help out. Smith also later asked him if he could help out with an investigation into ''the potential theological religious implications of potential contact with extraterrestrial civilizations.'' This again begs the question that if there's nothing at all to this phenomenon, then why this study? Sheehan agreed to Smith's request but insisted he have access to the documents pertaining to this issue that she had garnered for an investigation she did for the Science and Technology Committee in Congress. When asked what exactly Sheehan wanted to see, he indicated he wanted access to ''the classified sections of the Project Blue Book.'' Astoundingly, Daniel was granted access. He was not allowed to take notes, photos, or carry anything into the room containing the documents or out with him when he left the Library of Congress where the documents were stored. After proceeding through multiple layers of security, he was shown to the room with microfiche machines. Before entering, he was told he could not take his briefcase with him. Almost absent-mindedly, he had a yellow legal pad under his arm that wasn't confiscated before he entered the room. He proceeded through small canisters of film. It didn't take long to find proof. He discovered photos of what appeared to be a disc-shaped craft. It had crashed. ''It had hit into this field and had dug up, kind of plowed this kind of trough through this field. It was wedged into the side of this bank. There was snow all around the picture. The vehicle was wedged into the side of this mud-like embankment -- kind of up at an angle.'' The men taking photos were unmistakably, in Sheehan's mind, American Air Force personnel. As Sheehan continued to review the film, he discovered a close-up of the craft that revealed symbols or glyphs written on the craft. He thought it was an insignia. He wanted to record what he saw, but remembered he was not allowed to take notes. He knew it was likely his legal pad would be discovered when he left the room and the guards would examine it to see if he had taken notes. However, since he wanted those insignias, he had to find a way to record them. He decided to arrange the cardboard backing of his legal pad in such a way against the microfiche screen so he could trace the symbols. When he left the top-secret document room, he was searched. His pad was taken and flipped through for notes. Finding none, and not noticing the traced symbols on the cardboard backing of the yellow pad, it was returned to him by the guards and Sheehan left. Sheehan not only revealed to Marcia Smith what he had found but he also revealed the information to his boss at the Jesuit National Headquarters. Meetings and conventions were convened on the issue. Reports were written. President Carter saw at least one of the reports made by Marcia Smith, which included information from Daniel Sheehan's discoveries. Sheehan still has the yellow notepad with the symbols but says no analysis has been done on the symbols. Oh, are you wondering about the reports Marcia Smith finished after Daniel Sheehan's discovery and what they said? Well, Sheehan read them and according to Sheehan: ''The one report that Marcia showed me on extraterrestrial phenomena actually stated that it was the conclusion of the Library of Congress, Science and Technology Division, that from two to six, at least, other highly-intelligent, technologically-developed civilizations exist right within our own galaxy.'' [http://www.presidentialufo.com/marcia_smith_story.htm] ''The second report,'' says Sheehan, ''they had drawings of different shapes of UFOs that have been sighted,'' continued Sheehan. ''They didn't site any particular cases, but they said that they believed there was a significant number of instances where the official United States Air Force investigations were unable to discount the possibility that one or more of these vehicles was actually from one of these extraterrestrial civilizations. They put this together, and sent it over to the President. I ended up seeing a copy of it.'' The Carter Administration, though not bringing about Full Disclosure, had a very busy four years of UFO phenomena. I can't help but wonder if he had had another term in office, what could have come of all of this? Article : Doug Bower Post by meldrew on Oct 21, 2010 at 12:55pm www.richplanet.net/detail.php?dbindex=61 President Jimmy Carter was the first President of the United States of America to have officially reported the UFO he saw to the authorities. He was also the President who said that if elected he would see that UFO-Alien Full Disclosure would take place. That the American public would be told the truth about everything was one of the campaign cries of Jimmy Carter. Carter made a promise he could not or would not be able to keep. After Carter won the White House, he paid a visit to the then-CIA Director, George Bush. Carter had an interest in UFOs ever since experiencing his first sighting sometime in 1969 while standing outside a Lion's Club in Georgia. His campaign speeches promising to unravel the government's long held cover-up was the ''Parting of the Red Sea'' for Ufologists not only in America but around the world. Here was the one guy who would open up the ''Promised Land'' and lead them into Full Disclosure. Carter wanted the U.S. Government's UFO secret documents declassified. George Bush more or less told Carter that the President of the United States did not have the need to know the information contained in those documents. Can you even begin to imagine that? What lends even more mind-blowing credibility to this alleged event between Carter and Bush is the credibility of the allegation maker: Daniel Sheehan. Daniel Sheehan was born in1946 and graduated from Harvard Law School. There, he was co-founder of the Harvard Civil Rights and Civil Liberty Law Review. He went on to work for the American Civil Liberties Union and became general counsel for a host of entities including The Disclosure Project-a group dedicated to getting the U.S. Government to allow full and unfettered access to what the Feds know about the UFO-Alien phenomenon. According to Sheehan, Bush Senior, who was the CIA Director, refused Carter's request for disclosure of the UFO documents, even to the President of the United States, because it was generally believed in the halls and corridors of the secret, black-ops government that Carter would then turn the truth over to the American people. Director of a California think tank, Sheehan's credentials are impeccable. Sheehan's career is a litany of high-profile cases like, ''legal counsel team for the New York Times' Pentagon Papers case, defense of the Berrigan brothers, going after the Kerr-McGee nuclear plant (Karen Silkwood), Three-Mile Island, Iran-Contra. At the Disclosure Conference, Sheehan says the Bush-Carter story was relayed to him in 1977 by Marcia Smith of the Congressional Research Service, part of the Library of Congress.'' Sheehan's interest in this phenomenon came about when Sheehan met Marcia Smith through a mutual acquaintance. Smith told Sheehan that she was involved in a research project for the Science and Technology Committee of the Library of Congress that would address the issues of the potential existence of extraterrestrial intelligence and make an evaluation of the data on the phenomena of UFOs. When Sheehan queried Smith as to who exactly wanted this study done, her answer was none other than Jimmy Carter. This all was with a view to investigate exactly what could or could not be turned over to the general public, according to Daniel Sheehan. Smith asked Sheehan if he could, since he was the then-General Counsel to United States Jesuit Headquarters at their National Office in Washington D.C., get access to the records on the UFO-Alien issue contained in the Vatican. Though Sheehan made repeated attempts to gain access to the Vatican's documents through official channels, he was refused each time. This makes one wonder just why, if all there is to this UFO-Alien issue is weather balloons, flocks of geese, and swamp gas, would the Vatican (or any government on the earth, for that matter) have top-secret, and highly unattainable records pertaining to a nonexistent issue? After telling Marcia Smith of his roadblock with the Vatican Library, she asked if he could help with a team that was lobbying Congressional leader to reinstate funds for the SETI (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program. Sheehan indicated to Smith that he was glad to help out. Smith also later asked him if he could help out with an investigation into ''the potential theological religious implications of potential contact with extraterrestrial civilizations.'' This again begs the question that if there's nothing at all to this phenomenon, then why this study? Sheehan agreed to Smith's request but insisted he have access to the documents pertaining to this issue that she had garnered for an investigation she did for the Science and Technology Committee in Congress. When asked what exactly Sheehan wanted to see, he indicated he wanted access to ''the classified sections of the Project Blue Book.'' Astoundingly, Daniel was granted access. He was not allowed to take notes, photos, or carry anything into the room containing the documents or out with him when he left the Library of Congress where the documents were stored. After proceeding through multiple layers of security, he was shown to the room with microfiche machines. Before entering, he was told he could not take his briefcase with him. Almost absent-mindedly, he had a yellow legal pad under his arm that wasn't confiscated before he entered the room. He proceeded through small canisters of film. It didn't take long to find proof. He discovered photos of what appeared to be a disc-shaped craft. It had crashed. ''It had hit into this field and had dug up, kind of plowed this kind of trough through this field. It was wedged into the side of this bank. There was snow all around the picture. The vehicle was wedged into the side of this mud-like embankment -- kind of up at an angle.'' The men taking photos were unmistakably, in Sheehan's mind, American Air Force personnel. As Sheehan continued to review the film, he discovered a close-up of the craft that revealed symbols or glyphs written on the craft. He thought it was an insignia. He wanted to record what he saw, but remembered he was not allowed to take notes. He knew it was likely his legal pad would be discovered when he left the room and the guards would examine it to see if he had taken notes. However, since he wanted those insignias, he had to find a way to record them. He decided to arrange the cardboard backing of his legal pad in such a way against the microfiche screen so he could trace the symbols. When he left the top-secret document room, he was searched. His pad was taken and flipped through for notes. Finding none, and not noticing the traced symbols on the cardboard backing of the yellow pad, it was returned to him by the guards and Sheehan left. Sheehan not only revealed to Marcia Smith what he had found but he also revealed the information to his boss at the Jesuit National Headquarters. Meetings and conventions were convened on the issue. Reports were written. President Carter saw at least one of the reports made by Marcia Smith, which included information from Daniel Sheehan's discoveries. Sheehan still has the yellow notepad with the symbols but says no analysis has been done on the symbols. Oh, are you wondering about the reports Marcia Smith finished after Daniel Sheehan's discovery and what they said? Well, Sheehan read them and according to Sheehan: ''The one report that Marcia showed me on extraterrestrial phenomena actually stated that it was the conclusion of the Library of Congress, Science and Technology Division, that from two to six, at least, other highly-intelligent, technologically-developed civilizations exist right within our own galaxy.'' [http://www.presidentialufo.com/marcia_smith_story.htm] ''The second report,'' says Sheehan, ''they had drawings of different shapes of UFOs that have been sighted,'' continued Sheehan. ''They didn't site any particular cases, but they said that they believed there was a significant number of instances where the official United States Air Force investigations were unable to discount the possibility that one or more of these vehicles was actually from one of these extraterrestrial civilizations. They put this together, and sent it over to the President. I ended up seeing a copy of it.'' The Carter Administration, though not bringing about Full Disclosure, had a very busy four years of UFO phenomena. I can't help but wonder if he had had another term in office, what could have come of all of this? Article : Doug Bower Post by meldrew on Oct 21, 2010 at 12:55pm www.richplanet.net/detail.php?dbindex=61 President Jimmy Carter was the first President of the United States of America to have officially reported the UFO he saw to the authorities. He was also the President who said that if elected he would see that UFO-Alien Full Disclosure would take place. That the American public would be told the truth about everything was one of the campaign cries of Jimmy Carter. Carter made a promise he could not or would not be able to keep. After Carter won the White House, he paid a visit to the then-CIA Director, George Bush. Carter had an interest in UFOs ever since experiencing his first sighting sometime in 1969 while standing outside a Lion's Club in Georgia. His campaign speeches promising to unravel the government's long held cover-up was the ''Parting of the Red Sea'' for Ufologists not only in America but around the world. Here was the one guy who would open up the ''Promised Land'' and lead them into Full Disclosure. Carter wanted the U.S. Government's UFO secret documents declassified. George Bush more or less told Carter that the President of the United States did not have the need to know the information contained in those documents. Can you even begin to imagine that? What lends even more mind-blowing credibility to this alleged event between Carter and Bush is the credibility of the allegation maker: Daniel Sheehan. Daniel Sheehan was born in1946 and graduated from Harvard Law School. There, he was co-founder of the Harvard Civil Rights and Civil Liberty Law Review. He went on to work for the American Civil Liberties Union and became general counsel for a host of entities including The Disclosure Project-a group dedicated to getting the U.S. Government to allow full and unfettered access to what the Feds know about the UFO-Alien phenomenon. According to Sheehan, Bush Senior, who was the CIA Director, refused Carter's request for disclosure of the UFO documents, even to the President of the United States, because it was generally believed in the halls and corridors of the secret, black-ops government that Carter would then turn the truth over to the American people. Director of a California think tank, Sheehan's credentials are impeccable. Sheehan's career is a litany of high-profile cases like, ''legal counsel team for the New York Times' Pentagon Papers case, defense of the Berrigan brothers, going after the Kerr-McGee nuclear plant (Karen Silkwood), Three-Mile Island, Iran-Contra. At the Disclosure Conference, Sheehan says the Bush-Carter story was relayed to him in 1977 by Marcia Smith of the Congressional Research Service, part of the Library of Congress.'' Sheehan's interest in this phenomenon came about when Sheehan met Marcia Smith through a mutual acquaintance. Smith told Sheehan that she was involved in a research project for the Science and Technology Committee of the Library of Congress that would address the issues of the potential existence of extraterrestrial intelligence and make an evaluation of the data on the phenomena of UFOs. When Sheehan queried Smith as to who exactly wanted this study done, her answer was none other than Jimmy Carter. This all was with a view to investigate exactly what could or could not be turned over to the general public, according to Daniel Sheehan. Smith asked Sheehan if he could, since he was the then-General Counsel to United States Jesuit Headquarters at their National Office in Washington D.C., get access to the records on the UFO-Alien issue contained in the Vatican. Though Sheehan made repeated attempts to gain access to the Vatican's documents through official channels, he was refused each time. This makes one wonder just why, if all there is to this UFO-Alien issue is weather balloons, flocks of geese, and swamp gas, would the Vatican (or any government on the earth, for that matter) have top-secret, and highly unattainable records pertaining to a nonexistent issue? After telling Marcia Smith of his roadblock with the Vatican Library, she asked if he could help with a team that was lobbying Congressional leader to reinstate funds for the SETI (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program. Sheehan indicated to Smith that he was glad to help out. Smith also later asked him if he could help out with an investigation into ''the potential theological religious implications of potential contact with extraterrestrial civilizations.'' This again begs the question that if there's nothing at all to this phenomenon, then why this study? Sheehan agreed to Smith's request but insisted he have access to the documents pertaining to this issue that she had garnered for an investigation she did for the Science and Technology Committee in Congress. When asked what exactly Sheehan wanted to see, he indicated he wanted access to ''the classified sections of the Project Blue Book.'' Astoundingly, Daniel was granted access. He was not allowed to take notes, photos, or carry anything into the room containing the documents or out with him when he left the Library of Congress where the documents were stored. After proceeding through multiple layers of security, he was shown to the room with microfiche machines. Before entering, he was told he could not take his briefcase with him. Almost absent-mindedly, he had a yellow legal pad under his arm that wasn't confiscated before he entered the room. He proceeded through small canisters of film. It didn't take long to find proof. He discovered photos of what appeared to be a disc-shaped craft. It had crashed. ''It had hit into this field and had dug up, kind of plowed this kind of trough through this field. It was wedged into the side of this bank. There was snow all around the picture. The vehicle was wedged into the side of this mud-like embankment -- kind of up at an angle.'' The men taking photos were unmistakably, in Sheehan's mind, American Air Force personnel. As Sheehan continued to review the film, he discovered a close-up of the craft that revealed symbols or glyphs written on the craft. He thought it was an insignia. He wanted to record what he saw, but remembered he was not allowed to take notes. He knew it was likely his legal pad would be discovered when he left the room and the guards would examine it to see if he had taken notes. However, since he wanted those insignias, he had to find a way to record them. He decided to arrange the cardboard backing of his legal pad in such a way against the microfiche screen so he could trace the symbols. When he left the top-secret document room, he was searched. His pad was taken and flipped through for notes. Finding none, and not noticing the traced symbols on the cardboard backing of the yellow pad, it was returned to him by the guards and Sheehan left. Sheehan not only revealed to Marcia Smith what he had found but he also revealed the information to his boss at the Jesuit National Headquarters. Meetings and conventions were convened on the issue. Reports were written. President Carter saw at least one of the reports made by Marcia Smith, which included information from Daniel Sheehan's discoveries. Sheehan still has the yellow notepad with the symbols but says no analysis has been done on the symbols. Oh, are you wondering about the reports Marcia Smith finished after Daniel Sheehan's discovery and what they said? Well, Sheehan read them and according to Sheehan: ''The one report that Marcia showed me on extraterrestrial phenomena actually stated that it was the conclusion of the Library of Congress, Science and Technology Division, that from two to six, at least, other highly-intelligent, technologically-developed civilizations exist right within our own galaxy.'' [http://www.presidentialufo.com/marcia_smith_story.htm] ''The second report,'' says Sheehan, ''they had drawings of different shapes of UFOs that have been sighted,'' continued Sheehan. ''They didn't site any particular cases, but they said that they believed there was a significant number of instances where the official United States Air Force investigations were unable to discount the possibility that one or more of these vehicles was actually from one of these extraterrestrial civilizations. They put this together, and sent it over to the President. I ended up seeing a copy of it.'' The Carter Administration, though not bringing about Full Disclosure, had a very busy four years of UFO phenomena. I can't help but wonder if he had had another term in office, what could have come of all of this? Article : Doug Bower </p> 18988689 2014-07-29 00:04:23 2014-07-29 00:04:23 open open aretr-ufo-18988689 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan From The New Yorker Masland Carpet October 1, 2012 http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/07/20/from-the-new-yorker-masland-carpet-october-1-18923857/ Sun, 20 Jul 2014 06:26:07 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] A Reporter at Large Transaction Man Mormonism, private equity, and the making of a candidate. by Nicholas Lemann October 1, 2012 1.6K Print More Mitt Romney’s time at business school coincided with the waning of big corporations and the beginning of the rise of finance. I. CHURCH This summer, I spent most of an afternoon in Salt Lake City with Douglas Anderson, a friend of Mitt Romney’s. Anderson lives in a housing development in the foothills of the mountains that rise to the east of the city. We met in his living room, which leads to a patio with a view across the Great Basin—a view that isn’t so different from the one that the first Mormon settlers in Utah had as they crossed the mountains, except that what you see now is prosperous urban sprawl, not a desert. Anderson, a bald, amiable man in his early sixties, is a Democrat, but, like Romney, he is a Mormon, with deep roots in Utah; he is part of the business-school and management-consulting worlds; and his father always made it clear that holding a high political office would be the excellent culmination of a career. In Belmont, Massachusetts, where both men lived for years, Anderson was the Romney family’s “home teacher,” assigned by the Church to pay monthly visits to support the family and its religious life and to offer a little guidance. In 1989, Anderson and his family moved to Salt Lake City. On the coffee table in the living room was a large, leather-bound copy of the Book of Mormon. Above the desk in Anderson’s study was a picture of Jesus Christ standing on a high bluff and looking down into a valley, with the caption “Oh, Jerusalem! Oh, Jerusalem!” Anderson told me an almost surreal story about his first encounter with Romney, in 1968. Anderson was a freshman at Stanford. Romney had been a student there in 1965-66, before he left for France, to do the missionary work that young Mormons pursue. Anderson was walking across the campus one day when a student he hardly knew approached him. “Are you a Mormon?” the young man asked. Anderson said yes. “Do you know Mitt Romney?” No. “Mitt Romney is the finest person I have ever known!” Then he walked away. Another Mormon friend who shares Romney’s background (church, business school, long residence in Belmont, Massachusetts) is Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor and renowned management guru. He remembers first encountering Romney in an economics class at Brigham Young University, in 1970, just after Romney returned from his mission and married Ann Davies, his high-school sweetheart. “He was the big man on campus,” Christensen told me. He owned an A.M.C. Javelin, the hottest car made by the auto company that his father, George Romney, had run. “He had a beautiful wife. His father was famous, he was handsome. Everybody wanted to be what Mitt was.” Inside the world that Mitt Romney inhabits, he has always been a person of destiny. It isn’t just that he is the son of a corporate chief executive, governor, and Presidential candidate. He is the scion of one of the most prominent Mormon families, with a direct connection to the Church’s founding prophets, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. The Romneys converted in England and came to the United States in 1841. The first American member of the family, Miles Park Romney, was born in the short-lived paradise of Nauvoo, Illinois, over which Joseph Smith presided. After Smith’s martyrdom, the Romneys took part in the terrible forced exodus that ended in Utah. Mitt Romney was born in 1947, the year of the centennial of the Mormons’ arrival there. The youngest of four siblings by six years, he was born when his parents were middle-aged. Romney, with his square jaw and brilliantined hair and old-school cultural references, is a throwback to an earlier time. His father and mother were born in 1907 and 1908; his oldest sister was born before either of Barack Obama’s parents. from the issue buy as a print e-mail this Romney often comes across as not being able to relate to mainstream American life. In his astonishing performance before a group of rich donors in Boca Raton, Florida, in May, recently made public by Mother Jones, he said that the forty-seven per cent of Americans who pay no federal income taxes are never going to vote for him, because they think of themselves as “victims” and “believe that government has a responsibility to care for them.” That forty-seven per cent includes millions of people who do pay payroll taxes, and retirees, and people who are disabled and unemployed. You’d expect somebody who proposes to run the federal government to know that. One could see Romney simply as a rich person who thinks the way many rich people must think; one could see him as a super fund-raiser who is good at telling a certain kind of wealthy audience what he believes it wants to hear; or one could see him simply as somebody who can’t connect to outsiders in any natural way, who goes through life trying one somewhat forced and awkward technique after another, because he thinks he has to keep his real self private. It isn’t easy to comprehend what sort of heart and soul and mind produced those remarks. Romney is very deeply a product of a series of interconnected, tightly enclosed worlds, with their own rules: Mormonism, business school, management consulting, private equity. Understanding him requires understanding the subcultures that produced him. Romney, on his mission in France, lived a life oddly similar, in its daily texture, at least, to Obama’s as a community organizer in Chicago: long, penurious days spent knocking on strangers’ doors, “tracting” in the hope of finding someone who wanted to hear Joseph Smith’s miraculous story. But in 1968, toward the end of his mission, Romney had several unsettling experiences. He was in an auto accident in which a passenger in the car he was driving was killed. When the French student protests broke out, members of Romney’s mission (who were garbed, “Matrix”-like, in white shirts, black suits, and skinny ties) saw them as a terrifying example of the threat posed by the left. And Romney’s father, long considered the front-runner for the Republican Presidential nomination, was dropping out of the race, before the first primary. These days, people often describe Romney as an old-fashioned “Rockefeller Republican”—moderate on social issues, internationalist on foreign policy, and pro-Wall Street—who is pretending to be more conservative out of expediency. This is misleading on two counts. In the heyday of Rockefeller Republicanism, George Romney’s billboards in New Hampshire said, “The Way to Stop Crime Is to Stop Moral Decay.” And that campaign resulted in an enduring sense in the family of personal bitterness and betrayal toward Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York. Just after the 1966 midterm elections, Rockefeller summoned George Romney to one of the family’s properties, the Dorado Beach hotel, in Puerto Rico, and promised him full support in the 1968 Presidential primaries and election. This meant that Romney would begin the race with the delegations of Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania in his pocket (the governor of Pennsylvania had allied himself with Rockefeller), plus a panoply of Rockefeller connections, funding sources, and policy advisers, including Henry Kissinger. Yet he was not remotely an establishment figure. In “The Making of the President 1968,” Theodore H. White wrote, wonderingly, “Somewhere out beyond the Alleghenies the old culture of America still persists, people who think Boy Scouts are good, who believe that divorce is bad, who teach Bible classes on Sunday, enjoy church suppers, wash their children’s mouths with soap to purge dirty words, who regard homosexuals as wicked, whose throat chokes up when an American flag is marched by on the Fourth of July.” (All five of Mitt Romney’s sons were Boy Scouts and three became Eagle Scouts.) The Old Guard, White thought, would never put up with this sort of character: “There is a natural timberline in national politics beyond which certain kinds of men cannot thrive.” More specifically, Rockefeller, who could never completely give up the idea of himself as President, began to hint that he might get into the race after all. At a certain point, it was made clear to Romney that all those Rockefeller resources were not going to be available to him. Romney bowed out, feeling that he had been played for a fool; Rockefeller never entered the race. In March, 1968, Michael Bush, a member of Mitt Romney’s mission in France, wrote to his mother, “Mitt Romney is working in Bordeaux now. We were together a while this morning and of course we discussed politics. (Politics is often a missionary discussion topic.) It was interesting to hear about George Romney from the inside. It appears that Rockefeller gave Romney a dirty deal. In a letter Elder R. received just after his Dad’s withdrawal, Gov. Romney explained that the poor predictions for New Hampshire were not the reason he withdrew. It was because Rockefeller was stepping out of the non-candidacy ranks. Rockefeller had ardently promised his support, right down to the line—winner or loser, but when he said that he would accept a draft, Romney doubted his sincerity and told Rocky that he knew then that he had been a stalking horse.” Was that when the seed of Mitt Romney’s Presidential candidacy was planted? We’ll never know, because Romney and his friends are wedded, no doubt sincerely, to the standard Republican rhetoric about his political ambition as a matter of “being of service” and “giving back.” If the seed was planted back then, one of the lessons plainly was that you want to be the guy in the race who has the most money, not the guy who is dependent on the guy with the most money. Like most élites, the Mormon élite is a small world where everybody knows and has close ties to everybody else. One of the important Mormon families is the Eyrings. Henry Eyring, like George Romney, was born in Mexico in the first decade of the twentieth century. Mormons had established a colony there, so that they could continue to practice polygamy. In the nineteen-thirties and forties, Eyring was a distinguished chemistry professor at Princeton. His son Henry B. Eyring, who taught at Stanford Business School, is now the second-ranking official in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, with the title First Counsellor in the First Presidency. In 2006, Henry B.’s son, Henry J., gave up a career at the management-consulting firm Monitor, where Mitt Romney’s eldest son, Tagg, has worked. The Church assigned him to a team in charge of transforming a small two-year Mormon college in Rexburg, Idaho, into a major Mormon university, called B.Y.U.-Idaho. In 2005, Kim Clark, the dean of Harvard Business School, became president of B.Y.U.-Idaho; for many years in Belmont, Mitt Romney was home teacher for Clark’s seven children. When I visited Rexburg, Henry Eyring, a rail-thin, bald man in his late forties, gave me a tour of the campus, which consists of new brick and stone buildings separated by well-tended lawns and paths. A large temple stands next to the campus. Our tour ended in the main auditorium, which seats fifteen thousand, so that the entire student body can worship together. We sat down in the balcony and talked. “My great-great-grandmother was a Romney,” Eyring said. “That’s the family connection. In fact, my grandfather’s father was married to two Romney sisters. They were driven out of the United States, to Mexico. Then they were driven out of Mexico, by Pancho Villa and the Mexican Revolution. They lived in a stockyard in El Paso for a year, and then in Pima, Arizona. The middle of nowhere. But they got an education. There is within us, as a people, a drive to get all the education you can, to conquer the wilderness, if you will. We must become all we can be. We must master our circumstances—we as a family. Not for aggrandizement. For self-actualization, as Abraham Maslow would say. Let’s go to Zion.” The heads of B.Y.U.-Idaho and Brigham Young’s other sister school, in Hawaii, are former Harvard Business School professors. Three of Mitt Romney’s sons have Harvard M.B.A.s. I asked Eyring why so many prominent Mormons are attracted to business school. The educational ethic, he said, is “to be intellectually curious but to be practical. That will take a disproportionate portion of the population into commerce—schools of business. Make the desert blossom as the rose, in the words of Isaiah. The two most significant graduate schools in the Mormon educational system are business and law. There is a great interest in executive leadership. You’re talking to a J.D./M.B.A. Mitt is a J.D./M.B.A. When a Mormon goes to law school, he rarely thinks about law firms. It’s more about government and diplomacy.” Eyring noted that Joseph Smith’s expulsion from one state after another, and his murder in Illinois, impressed on Mormons the importance of being empowered participants in government. “We are interested in law because of governance, business because of building things. Mitt’s father moved back and forth across the line. You have to be a builder. You can build it in business, or you can build it in government. You are not going to be driven out of your home. You will not be persecuted. You will be safe. You will get an education. You can advance.” Some weeks later, in Boston, I asked Clayton Christensen the same question. “Let me give you a two-minute history of Christianity,” he said. “In 300 A.D., the leaders decided they had all the answers. God doesn’t give you a new answer until you ask a question. The leaders had the New Testament. It had all the answers. God had given them revelation. What’s unique about Mormonism is that, starting with Joseph Smith, we started asking questions of God that we didn’t have the answers to. The intellectual curiosity: we, or the Prophet, ask God.” He went on, “Most religions come to believe in the Zeus model of God. He was outside the universe and created everything. Latter-Day Saints believe that God is in the universe and his power comes from understanding the rules of the universe perfectly. Everything we learn makes us more like God. The impetus to learn is so strong because it helps us to become more like God.” There is a special intensity in the playing out of Mormon culture across American society, because it is an American religion, whose canonical events took place here, not all that long ago. Back in Rexburg, I asked Kim Clark what in Mormon culture generates such an intense preoccupation with business. Henry Eyring identified business with building and practicality; Clark identified business with personal leadership, which is also a preoccupation of Mitt Romney’s. “There are aspects of the doctrine, the practice, the experience that prepare people well for leadership,” he said. “My mother, every day, would look me in the eye and say to me, ‘You are a leader! Stand up for what you believe in. Don’t let people drag you around by the nose. You have a responsibility to your heavenly father. You have a responsibility to do your very best.’ And on my way out the door she’d add, ‘You remember who you are. People sacrificed for you. They died so you could have what you have.’ I’m sure I’m not the only L.D.S. child who heard that from his mom. That came out of the pioneer experience. It’s deeply ingrained. Being persecuted, driven across the country. I was five! And then the Church gives you those leadership opportunities. For little kids, three years old, there’s something called Primary. I gave my first talk to an organization when I was four or five years old. At twelve, they put you in a leadership position. At nineteen, you get sent on a mission. At twenty, you’re responsible for other missionaries, and it’s serious. It’s people’s lives. All through your experience, you’re trained to be a leader.” II. BUSINESS All of us see the course of our lives as particular, and Mitt and Ann Romney tell their story that way. But Romney’s life as a young man took a typical path for a devout Mormon: freshman year of college, then a mission abroad, then an early marriage and enrollment at Brigham Young (where it is not uncommon for more than half the class to be married when they graduate). Ann, also the child of a businessman, and brought up as a lightly affiliated Episcopalian, converted to Mormonism. The marriage took place twice, once in Michigan, so that her parents could attend, and then in the magnificent temple in Salt Lake City (which only Mormons with a “temple recommend” can enter). From Brigham Young, Romney went to Harvard, where, as a compromise with his father, he enrolled in both the law school (his father’s preference) and the business school. Romney was a golden boy there, as he had been at Stanford, on mission, and at Brigham Young. When Romney was at Harvard Business School, all second-year students were required to read Alfred P. Sloan’s “My Years with General Motors.” In the decades after the Second World War, G.M. was one of the most successful institutions in America, the sort of place where the brightest Harvard Business School graduates dreamed of working. The most influential figures in business were the chief executives of large corporations. Wall Street, in those days, was a sleepy backwater, and it was almost unimaginably less important to American economic life than it is now. In the nineteen-seventies, the balance of power began to shift from production to capital, and corporate America started to seem lumbering and inefficient. This shift was the business world’s version of the sixties—one (younger and impatient) group of politically conservative businesspeople challenging another (older and more traditional) group. The field of battle was not politics, culture, dress, or taste in music. It was the American corporation, and the consequences for the whole society were profound. The business sixties wound up rearranging most of the American economy. General Motors has fewer than half as many employees today as it did in 1955, and, among the American corporations that were great at mid-century, it’s hardly alone. George Romney was an organization man. Mitt Romney became a transaction man: someone who moves assets around with a speed and force that leaves many of the rest of us bewildered. The insurrection in business has profoundly affected the lives of most people who work, pay taxes, and get government benefits. It is the backdrop to this Presidential election. By the time Romney graduated, in 1975, the best students at Harvard Business School were dreaming not of rising through the management ranks at an industrial company but of working in the financial world or at strategic-consulting companies. The most prestigious of these was a relatively new boutique firm called Boston Consulting Group, and Mitt Romney got his first job after business school there. The mystique of B.C.G. and its founder, Bruce Henderson, couldn’t have been more different from that of Alfred Sloan and G.M. B.C.G. was small, and it didn’t run or make anything; it merely gave advice. Corporations with tens of thousands of career employees brought in teams of five or six people from B.C.G. to spend a few months studying their business and then tell them how to become more economically powerful, by making structural and strategic changes. The consultants interviewed employees and customers and suppliers, and got competitors’ public data filings. They analyzed the information using techniques that Henderson and his colleagues had developed, with names like the experience curve and the growth-share matrix. B.C.G., its older and bigger competitor McKinsey, and many imitators helped to break apart the corporate structures of postwar America and reconfigure them. Romney was an ideal consultant: polite, well trained in presentation skills, and, as the son of one corporate executive and the namesake of another (he is Willard Mitt Romney, after Willard Marriott, the leading Mormon business executive of the late nineteen-forties), comfortable in a boardroom. Kim Clark says that Romney was “very smart, but also great with senior executives, really capable of developing relationships with them. You have to be really good on your feet, good at understanding what people’s concerns are and how they think.” In 1973, Bruce Henderson’s second-in-command at B.C.G., Bill Bain, left to start his own strategic-consulting firm. Slight, neat, and quiet, Bain was a former fund-raiser for Vanderbilt University, with no formal training in business or economics. Bain & Company worked for only one company in an industry, under conditions of high secrecy. Its consultants were recruited with obsessive attention to brains, impeccable dress, manner, and credentials. Whether it was the atmospheric sizzle or the analytic steak, Bain & Company prospered. Often, the top few strategic-consulting firms were competing for the same work, so a slight edge in the youthful perfection of one’s M.B.A.s could tip the balance. In 1977, B.C.G. put Romney in charge of recruiting at Harvard Business School. Midway through the recruiting season, Bill Bain persuaded Romney to leave B.C.G. and become Bain’s chief recruiter at Harvard. “So the person who was saying, ‘Join B.C.G.,’ was now saying, ‘Join Bain,’ ” Clayton Christensen says. “Mitt is so persuasive. He could get rich selling used bubble gum. That gave Bain the critical mass to compete with B.C.G.” Sometimes large historical developments are obvious only in retrospect. In 1979, an obscure division of the U.S. Department of Labor in charge of regulating pension funds loosened something called the “prudent man rule,” enabling funds to invest more aggressively, for higher returns. Organizations like the California state employees’ pension fund and the teachers’ retirement system of Texas suddenly became power players in American capitalism. So did university and foundation endowments and, later, sovereign-wealth funds. The people running these large pools of capital invested to get the best returns, and so helped to drive the remaking of companies, the restructuring of the workforce, and globalization. When the country was dominated by large, established institutions, workers were, often implicitly, guaranteed job security and comfortable benefits. In the new economy, these arrangements were eroded, which put pressure on the political system to pick up the slack. Meanwhile, the hot shots at strategic-consulting firms were becoming frustrated. Sometimes their clients made a great deal of money thanks to their advice, while the firms got only a fraction of what they saw as the value of their work. Conversely, clients were free to ignore their advice, or to be slow about implementing it. In 1976, two members of the faculty at the University of Rochester’s business school, Michael Jensen and William Meckling, published an article in the obscure Journal of Financial Economics called “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure.” It provided the intellectual foundation for bringing together one set of ideas about how to change the ownership structure of a company with another set of ideas about how to change the way it operated. That consolidation led to the creation of Bain Capital, in 1984, and made Mitt Romney very rich. Jensen and Meckling argued that publicly held corporations were poorly managed, because their chief executives, with their generous salaries and high job security, had no real incentive to “maximize the value of the firm.” If a company could be restructured so that it was run by the owner, and if it could take on a lot of new debt that it had to pay down with cash, then it would maximize its value, rather than the comfort and prestige of its C.E.O. In the nineteen-eighties, Harvard Business School hired Michael Jensen as a faculty member, and the battles between him and the pro-corporate professors defined the intellectual life of the school just as much as the battles over critical legal studies defined Harvard Law School when Obama was a student there. Jensen argued in favor of junk bonds, hostile takeovers, leveraged buyouts, and stock options for chief executives. Mitt Romney and others, with these new techniques at their disposal, were able to raise pools of capital and use it to slice, dice, and rearrange the American economy. In a speech in 1993, Jensen announced that the country was experiencing a “third industrial revolution.” It was as economically consequential, he said, and likely to become as politically and culturally controversial, as the industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century. One day in the early eighties, a note appeared on the bulletin board at Bain & Company, saying that anyone interested in starting a new venture-capital fund should get in touch with Mitt Romney. Bain Capital was modest when it launched (the first investment pool was thirty-seven million dollars), and agnostic about whether it borrowed money to buy existing businesses or built new businesses with its own money. One of its first two ventures, a small airline that ran military shuttles between Tonopah, Nevada, and Las Vegas, was in the first category. The other, an eye-surgery business headquartered in Boston, was in the second. So was Staples, Romney’s favorite example of a Bain Capital investment. The consultants were going to bring their consulting skills to bear on the companies they owned, and, as owners, they could guarantee that their advice would be taken. (Bain & Company had unsuccessfully suggested the eye-surgery company, MediVision, to one of its clients, Bausch & Lomb.) But, within a few years, Bain Capital had become almost completely a buyout firm: it bought businesses, retooled them, and resold them. The returns were typically much higher than they were from investing in start-ups. Buying assets with borrowed money can be spectacularly profitable if the asset can be resold at a higher price. After Romney left Bain Capital, the head of the management committee was Bob Gay, whose father, a prominent Mormon and a friend of George Romney’s, ran Howard Hughes’s business empire. Gay was brought in because he was a Wall Street guy who knew the deal business. When a company is acquired by a private-equity firm, something dramatic is guaranteed to happen to it. The debt increases the cost of doing business, because of interest payments.