Eye-Opening Perspectives for Heroic Hearts

Eye-Opening Perspectives for Heroic Hearts

Friday, July 31, 2015

Robert Redford, James Vanderbilt, Sony Picture “Truth”: NOT!

New Redford and Vanderbilt Film Spins Spider Web of History-Bending Mythology

October 16, 2015 Release of "Half-truth"

"Mythology Entertainment.....I couldn' t have put it more clearly!" -Seymore Hearses

 By Winsip Custer and Fabian Colbachi  CPW News Service

     The upcoming Sony Classic  movie, Truth, based on the book by Mary Mapes, Truth and Duty starring Robert Redford as Dan Rather, Cate Blanchett as Mary Mapes, Elizabeth Moss as Lucy Scott and Lady Beth Incognito as Ellington Field Commander Colonel Jerry Killian’s secretary, Marian Carr Knox, upon whose typing of the original memos the entire Rather/Mapes/CBS 60 Minutes story was based and who worked at the Texas Air National Guard training base from 1957 to 1979, is showing glaring signs of a John Ford or Joseph Goebbels media makeover.

     “There is no Lady Beth Incognito is there?” asked a reporter for the periodical Flim Flam in Films.  “No," said media myth-spin-watcher at the Plath Institute for Poetic Justice, Seymore  Hearses.  "The single most important person in the Rathergate story is not on the list of credits of the film's cast....the person who typed the memos upon which the whole story was based.  Bizarre, isn’t it?  I don’t even find Colonel Jerry Killian’s character in the film either.  How can that story be told without the key players dramatized and I’m not talking Mapes, Rather or Scott?” asked Hearses who has registered his concern that American actors are completely complicit and compromised in their lack of curiosity about the stories they are willing to spin for a hefty salary.
 
The cast missing Killian and Knox?  It's the gall damn-dest thing I've ever seen.  It would be like re-telling the story of Moby Dick without Ahab, Queequig, Starbuck or Ismael.  Redford getting senile?  Or was this all Rather and Redford's well-paid swan song? -Seymore Hearses

     “Take Redford’s understudy, Brad Pitt, moulded as he was for his movie roles by his early associations with Redford in the film A River Runs Through It.     Well, a sewer ran through the recent Pitt film Fury in which Pitt normalizes the blatant disregard for the Geneva Conventions with the brutal execution-style murder of a captured German soldier during World War II that helped to normalize killing for a piss-ant rookie who had no balls,” said Hearses.    
       Hearses was even more outspoken about Pitt’s part in promoting what he called “consent for war”.   At the premier of Pitt’s spam-in-a-can tank story that had nothing of Sahara’s plot and power…..and you have to remember that Humphrey Bogart starred in The Harder They Fall which challenged the brutality of the professional fight-game bamboozle, Pitt pumps us with the normalization of mindless brutality.  Did General Colin Powell or General G.W. Casey take the high ground and criticize Pitt's part in the putrid performance....‘Blow a big hole in that Nazi’s back,’” said Hearses.   “Classy!”
      Now, coming from Redford is the half-baked story of Dan Rather’s 2004 stab at GWB’s Texas Air National Guard record that had Hunter S. Thompson taking aim at the son of GHWB and the “silver foot in his mouth,” opponent of Texas Governor Ann Richards.  Hearses noted that the entire story of Truth and Duty that Mapes knew about in 1999 a year before the fateful 2000 Presidential election that opened the floodgates of the U.S. “Bushwacking” with the 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagal that brought on Enron, World-Com and even the 2008 financial meltdown seven years into the “yellow cake” bamboozle and we see why Hunter S. Thompson….for all of his over-the-wall lunacy….had apparently finally seen the light when he wrote in Kingdom of Fear:
     We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world—a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us. . . No redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we’ll kill you.
     Well, shit on that dumbness. George W. Bush does not speak for me or my son or my mother or my friends or the people I respect in this world. We didn’t vote for these cheap, greedy little killers who speak for America today—and we will not vote for them again in 2002. Or 2004. Or ever.
     Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush?
     They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us—they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis.
     And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them.


     Of course, Hunter Thompson was wrong about a traditional definition of the Ku Klux Klan.  George W. Bush may be associated with an anglophile element of U.S. power elites associated with an unrepentant Tory element that followed the ethics of Albert Pike and who were at the heart of the 1930's Fascist "Business Plotters", but this group was hardly just a Southern residual of disenfranchised citizens left over from the Civil War.  In fact, the entire U.S. Civil War was a sham that used the high moral ground of abolition of slavery to fuel the rush of the railroad to the Pacific and the poppy fields of the Middle East and the Chinese silks, spices and other products for which the opiates were traded.  But in essence Thompson was dead on.
      “Will the premier of Truth be like Fury at the Newseum in Washington D.C.?” asked Hearses.   “The 400 million dollar shrine to the death of the Fourth Estate is ironically home to Al Jezeera, the Arab language media company that bought Al Gore’s television station from its hefty oil-economy based backers.  We see here why the CIA Director, Alan Dulles, said ‘Americans don’t read.’   Which is just how actors can be recruited to spin the half-truths that are sold as Truth.  Al Jezeera, not so ironically is domiciled in Qatar, the location of the U.S. military's forward leadership in the region where any Arab affiliated media is as likely to be an arm of the U.S. Information Agency as Prince Bandar Bush's favorite Saudi channels.
     Especially troubling to Hearses is the fact that Dan Rather, while taking aim at GWB, was also a close friend and business partner with former Secretary of Defense and architect of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, Donald Rumsfeld who made his big financial killings in the development of Aspartame and Tamiflu.   “Yea,” said Hearses, “The guy from the Vietnam War era with Cheney, Kissinger and McNamara whom Nixon called ‘That ruthless little bastard.’   Did these guys get Rather into his news gathering position in Nam like he is on the front row of the Ellington Field story like a Samsung clothes washer on ultra-spin?  Who is playing Boccardi and Thornburgh in Truth?  Hummmm? Rummy and Rather owned a nine thousand acre ranch in New Mexico and Rummy also owned Misery Plantation where Frederick Douglass was 'renditioned' before being sent back into slavery.   Ask Amy Goodwin.  Rather's cousin, Rebecca Rather, co-owns the mineral rights on the historic Nassau-Waldec Plantation near Rick Perry's new home in Round Top, Texas....all right there in the Fayette County tax records.  Nassau/Waldec was home for a while after the Civil War to the Buffalo Soldiers on their way to help clear the Indians out of the West like our soldiers are doing from the oil rich Middle East while alternative energy development is under house arrest like Copernicus and Galileo.  Man, you cannot get this stuff from watching Robert Redford and James Vanderbilt or Brad Pitt movies while chugging your high fructose Coke and pushing in the buttered popcorn," said Hearses.  "Perry, whose home is not far from Waller County where the ex-Governor wisely does not call his Round Top home Niggerhead Ranch,  is only fifty miles from where Prairie View A&M's new employee, Sandra Bland, was found hung in the Waller County jail, in a county where the current sheriff was last opposed by a black police officer from Katy, Texas in Harris County whose major support came from students and faculty from Prairie View A&M" said Hearses.
     “You think that Rummy is anywhere in Robert Redford’s Truth?  Like Marian Carr Knox, Louis Boccardi, Dick Thornburgh or Knox's son, Patrick Carr, who when she declined after her visit with Associated Press' Boccardi and Bush consigliore, Dick Thornburgh,  to re-affirm the story she recorded in Rather's CBS interview.....the essence of Rather and Mapes' case.....Patrick Carr's mother would strangely not re-confirm?  How odd!  So Patrick, her son,  did it for her, but Mrs. Knox, Rather, Mapes and CBS could have done it in 2000 when it would have really made a huge difference! All of these together in 2000 are like GWB in 1972, and Rummy, too, AWOL from Truth,” said Hearses.  "Redford must be hiding them out with the Hole-In-The-Wall Gang," said Hearses, "Or with Tom Booker, The Horse Whisperer, in some remote location in Montana, while Mr. Vanderbilt is saying nothing about Cornelius' long-time battle with William Walker over a Golden Circle of Slavery in the Caribbean and their well documented fight over a canal across Central America.....all nicely hidden behind the Monroe Doctrine," said Hearses noting that William Walker's biggest backer at the time was President Franklin Pierce, ancestor of Barbara Pierce Bush.
       A year ago Variety's Dave McNary warned the public it was coming, "but who would have thunk it was so literally and clearly a history-twister just before the upcoming 2016 election," said  Hearses.  McNary wrote in the July 9, 2014 Variety article on the Redford film: James Vanderbilt, who wrote Zodiac" and both "The Amazing Spider-Man" scripts, will make his directorial debut along with writing and producing through his Mythology Entertainment banner along with Brad Fischer, William Sherak and Mikkel Bondesen.
     "Mythology Entertainment.....I couldn' t have put it more clearly!" said Hearses.
 

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Howard Stern and Dan Rather: Carlos Montoya Speaks Out. Fabian Colbachi Listens

Sirius Radio Janitor Overhears Stern/Rather Agreement

April 7, 2014 Rather Interview Stripped of GWB Questions

by Cathy Querik for WPC News Service

     Temporary custodial worker at Sirius Radio who was mopping the halls on the day of April 7, 2014 when Howard Stern and Dan Rather agreed that they would not talk about George Walker Bush's legacy nor the memos that became the source of contention between CBS News and their long-time anchor man, could not keep silent.

    "Si," said Montoya, "Senior Rather say no questions about memos or he vamanos.   Senior Stern say 'no problema'."

     Coupled with the fact that Rather's CBS producer, Mary Mapes, had learned of the story of GWB's Texas Air National Guard record back in 1999 that cost Rather his job at CBS in 2005 and could have been used in the 2000 election between Vice President Al Gore and Texas Governor George W. Bush, Fabian Colbachi, an outspoken critic of CBS's handling of the story said "it's all b.s. folks and it's bad for you."

     Colbachi contends that the avoidance of the story in 2000 was a clear example of what Noam Chomsky call "building consent for war."   "Rather was CBS's golden boy and had cut his teeth on the unnecessary Vietnam War.  Having worked at the Houston Chronicle whose newest managing editor is Vernon Loeb whose experience at bamboozling the nation toward war is seen in his work at the Washington Post where he provided the twisting of the Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch stories before turning to Paula Broadwell to write with her All In:   The Education of General David Petraeus and you begin to see the depth of U.S. journalism's heart of darkness," said Colbachi who doubts that Carlos Montoya is a real person.  "That testimony may be as cooked up as the fact that Rather was an innocent outside voice looking in and  not well-connected to the mastermind of the Abu Ghraib scandal, the owner of Maryland's Misery Plantation and co-owner with Rather of the Tecolote Ranch in Las Vegas, New Mexico," said Colbachi.

     "This Rather/Rumsfeld marriage and now Rather/Stern silence continues the policy coup that General Wesley Clark explained was the Neo-Con's mission post-2000.....the racket of war," said Colbachi.

One anonymous reviewer of the Stern interview echoed Colbachi's concerns:

     Mary Mapes says in Truth and Duty that she became aware of the GWB National Guard memos in 1999.  Why didn't she and Dan Rather bring that story to the nation before 2000 instead of 2004.....before the 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall when the floodgates were opened for the big Bush bamboozle of the economy and phony war that has cost the nation over $4 trillion.  Have Rather back on and answer that question before he's dead, Howard, or is this part of a U.S./Israeli agenda or an Allen Dorfman-type assault on reasoned regulation of the hog-wild business, government and media madhouse?

     With the arrival in 2015 of Robert Redford's new movie TRUTH based on the Mapes book about the 2004 GWB memos and Brad Pitt's recent film FURY which is little more than war porn and a Joseph Goebbels-type propaganda film that premiered at Washington D.C.'s new cathedral to journalism, the Newseum, where General Colin Powel and General G.W. Casey, both in attendance failed to address the films' blatant example of the disregard for the Geneva Conventions and we are witnessing just why Dan Rather and Donald Rumsfeld were co-owners of a ranch in New Mexico where they got their jollies killing exotic game.

    "I would like to have heard Rather tell us just why the 1988 death of Osama Bin Laden's older brother, Salem Bin Laden, in an ultra-light airplane accident at Cibolo, Texas in which the seasoned jet pilot inexplicably flew into a high power line was reported by 60 Minutes' celebrated fact-finder, Lowell Bergman, wrongly.  Flat out wrong!   Bergman did a documentary for PBS that claimed the accident was in Salem's BAC-111 twin engine jet and not an ultra-light.....a story that was never corrected," said Colbachi.  "Pretty strange considering that Bergman was considered the white knight in the slaying of the Big Tobacco dragon," Colbachi reasoned.

     Colbachi strongly asserted that Vernon Loeb's senior editor at the Washington Post, Steve Coll, went on to become the Henry Luce Professor and Dean of the Journalism Department at Columbia University and that another of Loeb's colleagues and Coll's journalism lieutenants at the Washington Post, Jeff Leen, had "thrown Gary Webb under the bus when he came out with his 1996 book, Dark Alliance:  The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.  "Webb had built his case on the prior work of the Houston Chronicle's rival reporter at the Houston Post, Peter Brewton, whose 1992 book, The Mafia, CIA and George Bush: Corruption, Greed and Abuse of Power in the Nation's Highest Office had been derailed by Simon & Schuster on whose board was Bush buddy, Hugh Leidtke.   "What you see in this handling of the Bush memos by Rather and Mapes, the shelving of the story until it can do no harm to the planned rape of the nation and export of war, is in essence the neutering of the time honored Fourth Estate without which we are a ship without a rudder headed to the crags and rocks of an unredeemable legacy.   Another bright and shinning city on a hill sliding down the slopes beneath the mush of unsupportable assumptions atop the covering over of inconvenient realities and lies.  Bend over America!" concluded Colbachi.



 

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

BUSH 2000 and 2004 ELECTION REDUX

 
 
NO COUNTRY FOR.....
 
 

CLICK ABOVE PHOTO TO ENLARGE


By Fabian Colbachi for CPW News Service

    With the 2016 elections in view and the James Vanderbilt directed Robert Redford film Truth in post production and awaiting its premiere eyes are returning again to the Bush elections of 2000 and 2004.
    Based on the book by Mary Mapes titled Truth and Duty: The Press, The President and the Privilege of Power (St. Martins Press, 2005) that covered the GWB Air National Guard memos from his Vietnam War era enlistment there is, along with Redford's movie, a new online interest picking up for the explosive 2004 story covered by Mary Mapes and Dan Rather for CBS News.
     The George W. Bush Air National Guard records and the 2004 CBS story about those records cost both Mapes and Rather their jobs at CBS in 2005 after a CBS sponsored investigation by former Pennsylvania Governor and former U.S. Attorney General, Richard Thornburgh and Louis D. Boccardi, retired CEO of the Associated Press.

"The 2004 Mary Mapes and Dan Rather story and by way of association the upcoming Robert Redford/James Vanderbilt film, Truth, looks to me like a giant piece of political propaganda.  One giant slithering smegma lathered copulative assembly.  A journalistic groin-gavotte-bacchanalia-saturnia-bender," said Fracon.

     Oddly, Dan Rather and Bush consigliore at the Defense Department, Donald Rumsfeld, who owned the Baltimore plantation where abolitionist Frederick Douglass was tortured before he was returned to slavery was also a business partner with Dan Rather in a 10,000 acre ranch in New Mexico about forty miles outside of Santa Fe where Cormac McCarthy, whose character, Judge Holden, in Blood Meridian claimed "War is God." McCarthy's film No Country for Old Men was filmed in Las Vegas, New Mexico where the Rather/Rumsfeld ranch is located. 
     According to archeologist Thomas Layton's 1999 book, Voyage of the Frolic: New England Merchants and the Opium Trade (Stanford University Press), Frederick Douglass was also known as Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey who worked in the Baltimore ship building yard that made the fastest opium clippers for the New England Brahmins.  "Yea, the Frolic which wrecked in 1850 in Mendocino County, California and held all kinds of records for speed," said one naval architect from Mystic Connecticut, Homer S. Winslow.
     "When you note that the Boston Brahmins were front and center to the work of George Luther Stearns' and his attempts to corner the bullet market and that he was a "secret six" supporter of abolitionist John Brown, Potawatomie Brown from Kansas and Harper's Ferry, or that the first black man used as a test case in the Fugitive Slave Laws that fueled consent for civil war worked at the Brown's Baltimore Merchant Shot Tower making musket balls, James Hamlet, and holy begeezies!   Now we can begin to understand Gary Webb's conversations with "Freeway" Ricky Ross in L.A.," said activist Earl Z. Fracon," and Jeff Leen and Steve Coll's attempts at the Washington Post to discredit Gary Webb's Dark Alliance.
     "Texas and the Bush memo story has been clearly managed, but which way?" asked another political whale watcher.  "When you consider that the Houston and Harris County Medical Examiner's office was in shambles during the early 2000's and that the "fixer-upper" was Michael Bromwich, the firewaller in the Iran-Contra case or that the Sidley Austin law firm took the lead in the pro-torture/renditioning debate (for torture) who knows exactly what we are dealing with? And now you can understand why Vernon Loeb, Steve Coll's golden boy spin meister at the Washington Post is now the managing editor at the Houston Chronicle after having dropped on us the lies about Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch and co-writing with Paula Broadwell the book All In: The Education of General David Petraeus," he continued noting that not only was Petraeus married to the daughter of a U.S. Marine Corp Commandant, but had his punctured lung from a shooting accident at Fort Campbell, Kentucky patched by Bush buddy, Dr. William Frist from Nashville, Tennessee.  "Talking about traumatic preparation for unswerving performance!  I'd faint in front of Congress, too!"
     "Clearly there are those out there that are concerned that to reopen the floodgate of political power to another Bush at this critical time in U.S. history is to find us returning to a regurgitated pile of putrid prevarications unbecoming of the greatest nation in the world history," said Luther Copernicus Sagan and Earl Z. Fracon in a written statement of the citizen support group Future Watch.
    "Well, I was out in Las Vegas, New Mexico where the Rather and Rumsfeld ranch is located and damned if it wasn't there at the Regal Hotel where No Country for Old Men was filmed," said Fracon, noting that the Rather family also owned the Nassau/Waldec Plantation in Texas that is famous for its hosting the Buffalo Soldiers after the Civil War.   "The Buffalo Soldiers proved that former slaves could clear land and dance to the war god's cadence with the best of 'em even though they missed out on their forty acres and mule.....along with 90 percent of dead Southern Confederates who didn't own any slaves," said Fracon.  The 2004 Mary Mapes and Dan Rather story and by way of association the upcoming Robert Redford/James Vanderbilt film, Truth, looks to me like a giant piece of political propaganda.  One giant slithering smegma lathered copulative assembly.  A journalistic groin-gavotte-bacchanalia-saturnia-bender," said Fracon.
     In June 2015, California theater director Rob Melrose directed the play Misery Plantation: A Comedy of Enhanced Interrogation that featured Donald Rumsfeld mentoring the ghost of Frederick Douglass.... Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey.  "I think the play needs a Part II," said Fracon.  "I'd call it Don and Dan Wise Old Owls Down On the Tecolote Ranch."



"Del Rio Regal Motel" in Las Vegas, NM and the
Rather/Rumsfeld Tecolote Ranch also in Las Vegas, NM.
 
 

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

2016 Presidential Election: 2000 and 2004 Revisted?

Trumping History Or Repeating It?

By Otto D. Bleu for CPW News Service

      With the arrival of billionaire casino builder, bankruptcy advocate, reality TV personality and  urban gentrifier, Donald Trump, in the 2016 political fray, people are making the comparison to the 1992 arrival of third party candidate H. Ross Perot.
     “Ah, Trump is no Perot.   Perot was USN.  Successfully extracted his company’s employees held hostages by Iran, had his pulse on the U.S. business sell-out and the giant sucking sound of American jobs going overseas.  Today, Perot is a shadow of his former self sitting in his former company's lunch room near a wall that bullets his visionary accomplishments while run by a group of MBA's from India.  You don’t think Trump would sell out Americans if goods could be made by Third World slave labor?  Go think again,” said Barney Balboa of Flint, Michigan.

     “If the Republicans close ranks and back JEB Bush there is no guarantee that there won’t be a revisit of Bush family bamboozling in Texas, Florida and world-wide as the irresponsible steam rollers that rumbled into Washington on the back of Bill Clinton’s 1999 reversal of the Glass-Stegall Act, the arrival of Bin Laden backed attack on the WTC in New York…..from within their circle of their beloved Saudi oligarchs, the invasion of Iraq and a war that mophed from a $60 billion war to a $4-plus trillion dollar war, and the 2008 financial meltdown that pumped oil prices up to nearly $150 a barrel for families heavily invested in both the S&L housing bubble of the 1980’s and the credit default bamboozle that led to the 2008 meltdown, not to mention oil.  I smell a stinky, putrid  Machiavellian, Reich-ish-Darwinian skunk in the kitchen,” said Balboa.
     Balboa pointed out that few Americans know or understand the depth of the flim-flam involved in the daily leadership of their nation.  He cited a recent reference to the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections and the behind the scenes issues that got us to where we are.  “I believe that 1992 was our last chance to change course.  In 2000 and 2004 the nation really slid down the slippery slope of no return,” said Balboa as he read a recent review of the 2004 election during which CBS newsman, Dan Rather and his producer Mary Mapes lost their jobs for covering the GWB Texas National Guard memos from Houston's Ellington Field and the secretary of GWB's commanding officer.  Balboa reproduced an Amazon.com online review of Rather’s book Rather Outspoken: My Life In News:

     The Marian Carr Knox memos were, according to former Texas Lieutenant Governor, Ben Barnes, available in 2000, but Gore didn't need them. I would like to see Rather do a follow up on just why his 2004 story remained in the wings in 2000. Also, why the pastor's son, Patrick Carr, same name as Marian Carr Knox's son who when Marian refused to retell the story affirmed her story to the media and why the other , the pastor's son was found burned to death in his Ford Bronco outside the CIA-linked Ellington Field not far from the Bin Laden owned Houston Gulf Manor Airport that was razed after 911. That Patrick Carr's last phone call was from a "friend" whose family owned property adjacent to the Cibolo, Texas ultralight airport where experienced jet pilot, Salem bin Laden, mysteriously flew into a high power line in 1988. The Houston Gulf Manor airport was bought by Khalid bin Mahfouz and Bush buddy, James R Bath, whose attorney and air fuel partner at Ellington, William E. King, was the fishing buddy of the pastor's son's uncle. The dead 23 year old had just moved to Houston from Austin where he had worked for the business partner of Rebecca Rather. Dan Rather gave Rebecca a great plug for her book and she is obviously well connected to the Rather's of Texas' Nassau/Waldec Plantation and to Houston restaurateur, Tony Vallone. There is a lot more here for Dan and Mary Mapes to tell us, but this book is a start! Be even more outspoken before November 2016, please!

And while you are at it can you comment on this recent statement.....

Strangely, Dan Rather's ranching partner in the New Mexico's Tecolote or "Owl Ranch" about forty miles from Santa Fe, was also a partner in that venture with the owner of Maryland's Misery Plantation where Fred Bailey....also known as Frederick Douglass.....the abolitionist orator who according to the 1999 book by Thomas Layton, Voyage of the Frolic: New England Merchants and the Opium Trade (Stanford University Press) was employed in the Baltimore opium clipper building business and where he was "renditioned" before being returned to slavery in the South. The owner of both the Tecolote Ranch and Misery Plantation is former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. The Rather family's Nassau/Waldec Plantation in Texas is a German settlement where the Buffalo Soldiers initially worked after the Civil War. The Buffalo Soldiers' handlers in Texas, the Smith brothers, and their relationship to William Tecumseh Sherman are covered in the 2014 book, Sulfur Lead and Poppies, which clearly delineates the connections between Giles Alexander Smith's Buffalo Soldiers and his brother, Morgan Lewis Smith, who directed the Texas work of the Buffalo Soldiers through the Truehart-Adriance Building in Galveston, Texas. "Arriving in Texas for different reasons was Giles Alexander Smith. Giles' name appeared on the record pardoning of Richard King, founder of the King Ranch." It goes on to say of Giles' brother with both men fighting for the Union at Fort Donnelson in the Civil War in a type of family dialectic......"Morgan Lewis Smith found himself appointed Counsel to Hawaii in a direct line between San Francisco and the lucrative China Trade route to the silk, spices and opium of the Middle East and emerging 'Golden Triangle.'" The book also goes on to note the Tourtelotte letter of General William Tecumseh Sherman now domiciled at the University of Iowa that seems to indicate "a type of blackmail (of Sherman) by the daughters of Lewis Morgan Smith" (pp. 76-80).

Friday, July 17, 2015

Sandra Bland, Prairie View and Sheriff Glen R. Smith

Rekilling A Mockingbird

by Leena Harper for CPW News Service


The Sheriff of Waller County, Texas where Sandra Bland reportedly hung herself using a trash bag when her pants or shirt would have provided a much stronger noose has been in explosive situations before.

In an October 24, 2008 Waller County election Houston Press' Paul Knight noted that Glen R. Smith had left Hempstead, Texas where he had resigned following a grenade prank that left one man footless.   Knight wrote:

There's a pretty interesting election going on for boss of the sheriff's department in Waller County, a mostly rural area on the western border of Harris County. The elected candidate will be the first new sheriff in two decades, because long-time sheriff Randy Smith is retiring. The candidates are:
 
- Jeron Barnett, a former Harris County deputy who works for the Katy Police Department. He was named the department's 2008 Crime Prevention Officer of the Year. If elected, Barnett will be the first black sheriff in Waller County.

- R. Glen Smith, a former police chief in Hempstead, fired earlier this year after a series of unfortunate events, including an always-dangerous grenade prank that resulted in an officer's foot being blown off. Two months after the firing, he was hired by the Waller County Sheriff's Department and secured the Republican nomination for sheriff.

     Maybe race isn't an issue these days, but considering a white/black cemetery debate in Waller County this summer, maybe it is. Barnett's father thinks so.  "I believe there will be some voter irregularities in this campaign," Donald Barnett, who is also serving as his son's campaign manager, tells Hair Balls. "This is the worst county that I have ever been to in my life, from Alabama to Wyoming."

     According to Donald, voter turn out for Jeron has been good so far, helped by the student population from Prairie View A&M, which recently resolved a voter rights lawsuit with Waller County. There have been a few vandalized Barnett campaign signs, but other than that, no real problems.

     "[Racism] has not been an issue in my presence, because I carry a 44-40 [pistol] or a double-barrel shotgun," Donald says. "I'm not going to let anybody bother me."

     Smith believes that his firing in Hempstead was not warranted, and he says the mayor had suggested that no action be taken by the city council. Race is a non-issue, Smith says, in the sheriff's campaign. "Most people are decent, conscientious people that are going to vote they think is the best person to be sheriff," he says. "Both of us are in it to make a difference in the county."

     Minnie Poz, a consultant for the Hand Grenade Safety Society of Fort Knox, Kentucky said that "Sheriff Smith's history of juggling hand grenades, if that was what he was doing, is a marker for a deeply disturbed personality.  I would want to know if Ms. Bland's return to Prairie View A&M that had a recent history of supporting Sheriff Smith's opponent, an African American from Katy who was a stellar performer without hand grenade juggling on his dossier had anything to do with the death of Ms. Bland.   In the end, with the Texas Ranger's own history of race issues, it will likely have to be the FEDS.....FBI....Justice Department and other agencies that will need to investigate just what happened to Ms. Bland.  It's a sad day all around," said Poz.  "I know that people think that the mythic Walker: Texas Ranger is something of a national hero, but just because the Texas Prison System with its leading prison in Walker County, Texas east of Waller County is seen as a leading defender of law and order, it may be hiding deeper issues of law and order and justice for some at the expense of others.  I once knew a family who was quite sure that the Texas Rangers were not interested in solving a Houston murder that they knew damn well was related to a pack of sniveling, lying drug dealers connected to the Iran-Contra case in Latin America.   One Texas Ranger asked them "did you see the drugs?"  When they said that they had not, even though the boat that their family member was on the night of his death was confiscated from key players in the Florida/Georgia/Texas Robert Vesco-related Operation Lone Star that fed the Contra pipeline, the Ranger dropped their case.  "Justice delayed is justice denied," said Poz.  Poz is also not confident that the FEDs will do the Bland case justice.  "When the Harris County Crime Lab was in shambles under an African American M.E., Dr. Joyce Carter, and skin color is no defense against corruption the county brought in Michael Bromwich to investigate.   He was the leading Iran-Contra investigator and firewaller in the Reagan/Bush Iran-Contra case that only netted Oliver North, John Poindexter, Casper Weinberger, Elliot Abrams and a few others," said Poz.

Monday, July 13, 2015

Harper Lee: On Second Thought

Atticus Finch In the Catbird Seat:   The Vichy-Ization Of American Culture

 By Tio Blanco Negro de la Valle for CPW News Service

 
     It turns out that Atticus Finch is a different bird than the one novelist, Harper Lee, a contemporary of Southern writers Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor, Margaret Mitchell and Truman Capote, first reported in To Kill A Mockingbird. Okay, the editors assisted her in rethinking her original version from the initial draft/s.  Still, it was her decision to release it with the saintly Atticus we all grew to know and admire.
     "Harper Lee's second novel is titled Go Set A Watchman, but it should be titled Go Set A Watchman By the Woodpile," said Dr. Cletus Codlicker, a director of The Institute for the Analysis of Scientific Anomalies and a long-time fan of Lee's original story of the beloved Atticus Finch.
     Atticus, as it turns out, was more like this reviewer's Castillian ancestors, like the Spaniards who inflicted their Claveria Laws on the poor indigenous people of their conquered provinces.  “Yes, indeed” said expert on the movie roles of actor Gregory Peck, John “Stubby” Arbuckle of Los Angeles, California.
     This was Gregory Peck’s favorite part of all the parts he played. “Gregory loved playing Atticus,” said Arbuckle.  “It gave him that great sense that he was defender of human honor.   Now that Harper Lee’s second novel uncovers a decidedly different side of Atticus, I am wondering just how Peck….if he could return from the grave….would feel about his favorite character?” asked Arbuckle.
     Arbuckle is circumspect when it comes to Harper Lee’s disappearance from the South and her move to New York where she was befriend by socialites Michael and Joy Williams Brown.  While Michael Brown promoted American industrialism through industrial musicals and his lovely wife supported the New York ballet community.  "For all I know, Michael Brown's family owned the Baltimore, Maryland Brown's Merchant Shot Tower where pre-Civil War musket ball maker, James Hamlet, played the dramatic role of the first African American to be tried under the war-fueling Fugitive Slave Laws, being returned to his job after the case to fashion George Luther Stearns' lead....a 'Secret Six' backer of abolitionist, John Brown, from Boston into bullets for the Civil War.  Baltimore was not only the manufacturing center for U.S. industrialists' China clippers, but home to Alexander Brown the progenitor of National City Bank for which Marine General Smedley Darlington Butler lamented his role as a "Goon on three continents" and which morphed into Brown and Root....Kellogg Brown and Root or KBR," said Arbuckle.  "Now with this assertion that Atticus was a goddamn typical bigot, no worse, a Nazi-like eugenicists like those uncovered by Edwin Black in his book War Against the Weak and like those enraged Dixie dufusses from South Carolina, the seemingly random copulative assembly of Ferguson, Missouri, Baltimore, runaway killers from New York's prisons, border jumping pistol plinkers of innocent young white girls in San Francisco and escaped drug kingpins in Mexico and the stage is set for another Hitlerian era," he continued.
     “Why Harper just disappeared for all these years is as great a mystery as the work of Margaret Mitchell, the great Southern writer from Smith College, alma mater of Barbara Pierce Bush, Nancy Reagan, Julia Child, Phebe Novakovic, Shelly Lazarus, Sylvia Plath, Gloria Steinam and Betty Friedan.    Now I knew that when Margaret Mitchell published her one hit wonder, Gone With The Wind, produced as the film by John “Jock” Hay Whitney, husband of Barbara Cushing Paley Whitney, that this sad story of Miss Scarlet and Rhett Butler was a marvelous piece of propaganda ready-made for keeping the clod hopper Southerners, ninety percent of whom had no slaves, in the dark about the real history of the Civil War, fed and watered by the likes of Caleb Cushing, Jefferson Davis, Braxton Bragg, William Tecumseh Sherman and a host of dead Union Generals buried in the Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati.  They lie there nestled next to their key oligarch and founder of the 1833 Order at Yale, home of the Connecticut-based Baltimore opium cutter-builders, the Huntingtons, Russells, Cushings, Tafts and a bevy of bodacious Boston Brahmans who fueled the U.S. Civil War under the pretext of abolitionism when it was to secure the rail route to the Pacific and the Middle Eastern opium that made them all fortunes as it was dumped for other goods along the Yangtze River in China,” said Arbuckle.  "Freed slaves in urbanized ghettos were to the U.S. what the Chinese coolies were to the British and Chinese opium wars," said  Arbuckle.
     “You can see the charade continue in the Gregory Peck movie The Big Country.  Playing the part of a sailor from a wealthy Baltimore shipping family, James McKay, he finds himself parked between two warring Hatfields and McCoy-type ranchers in the old American West.  This gentleman sailor wants peace between the feuding settlers, but nowhere in the story is the history of Baltimore  unpacked as with the 1999 book from Thomas Layton, Voyage of the Frolic: The New England Merchants and the Opium Trade,   That book reveals that Fred Bailey, also known as Frederick Douglass, was laying hulls like that of the Frolic for another New England China Trader within the social and business circle of the Huntingtons and Russells.... the Heards,” said Arbuckle.
 
"We are essentially seeing the Vichy-ization of the U.S.." -John "Stubby" Arbuckle

     Arbuckle is quite sure that 90 percent of America’s media is about the support of a military industrialist complex's proper line that keeps the mythology moving in the direction of profits for the power elites.   “Take JEB Bush’s recent assertion that the Americans whose middle class has been decimated should now be working harder than ever to hold on to whatever jobs haven’t been exported overseas to countries that practice economic slavery.  We are essentially seeing the Vichy-ization of the U.S.” said Arbuckle.  “This is now being normalized for the average American.  It's as if Humphrey Bogart who starred in the anti-fight film The Harder They Fall is now Dana White of Ultimate Fighting Championships promoting caged gore and telling Senator John McCain that if he wants whatever war he cannot live without that he has to shut-up about his criticism of this domestic brutality since it feeds the war mentality and money mill.  A killer nation must kill its heroes to continue its downward descent.  The fact that Harper Lee has given us a time machine on the Atticus Finch story at a time when James Baldwin cannot find only a single index reference in the letters of correspondence between Walker Percy and the now famous Shelby Foote, thanks to Ken Burns and his PBS-based Civil War histories which never reports as Brian Lamb’s interview with Foote did that “I consulted no original manuscripts….it’s all been gone over before.”   That admission shows the degree to which the American mythology is a string of big bamboozles,” said Arbuckle.  
     Arbuckle holds nothing back.   “PBS is part of the U.S. Information Agency’s front line of defense on the great American myth which clearly hides the reality of its history like Uri Geller attempting to make a fortune from the CIA via the Stanford Research Institute before his bamboozle was outed by Johnny Carson and James Randi or like the Iran-Contra bamboozle was outed by Gary Webb in his 1996 book, Dark Alliance,” said Arbuckle.  “That Thomas Layton’s 1999 book, The Voyage of the Frolic was published by Stanford is an amazing development considering just how close Leland Stanford was to William Tecumseh Sherman, George Bragg, Braxton Bragg,  Thomas Bragg and the Caleb Cushing connections through the Northeast where lots of good Southern writers are quickly identified, put on ice and exported to a place where their writing can do the least harm to the prevailing myth.”

Saturday, July 11, 2015

EMMA SKY UNRAVELING

HOW TO READ AN AMAZON BOOK REVIEW
 
by Simon F. Schuster for CPW News Service
 
     When it comes to reading book reviews on Amazon.com what can one make of the voting system that judges what is "helpful"?
 
     Dr. Phil Itup of the Society for the Analysis of On-line Hidden Persuaders in Dover, Delaware said "we are a nation of joiners.  Anyone who has seen The Amazing Randi's documentary An Honest Liar knows that Americans love being bamboozled.  We don't just like a good carnival freak show, but we'll tell our neighbors to like it too.  You've heard the old adage "You can't read a book by its cover?"  Well, you can read one by its index and words....the ones it uses to spin the washer and the ones that get washed out," said Itup.    "Contrast that saying with 'You have only one opportunity to make a good first impression.'   That means that just after a book is released, before the dust settles, it must make a good strong showing.  What is difficult to know is how many of the votes for and against the helpfulness of a particular review are coming from the staff of the book's publishers and from the general public.  Now we know that political polls are conducted often on less than a couple of thousand respondents and projected across the whole spectrum of society and are generally accurate.  That is probably true of a Tom Clancy novel released and reviewed by several thousand readers.  Lesser numbers are harder to judge.  That's why I like to take the reviews that have only a couple of positive responses, a vast majority of "not helpful" responses, but a good number of "comments".  The devil.....and as The Amazing Randi has so skillfully shown us.....the truth.......is in the details....less in the initial responses.  Time and unfolding evidence has a way of solving great dilemmas and this approach, for me, anyway, is Alexander's sword against the Gordian Knot of life's unexplained mysteries," said Itup.
 
     Itup noted the recent review of Emma Sky's book on the Iraq War titled The Unraveling as an example of his method of analysis of Amazon book reviews.
 
 
2 of 16 people found the following review helpful
 
 
 
on May 21, 2015
How can a book on the unraveling of the Iraq War not make at least a passing reference to the soldier who is the focus of the first chapter in Christian T. Miller's book BLOOD MONEY, Col. Theodore "Ted" Westhusing? There is, likewise, no reference to Rudy Giuliani's New York police chief, Bernie Kerik, who was indicted and jailed for corruption and was considered for GWB's Homeland Security chief based on his work in Iraq security that surely turned the stomach of Westhusing?

General Wesley Clark has laid out the U.S. Neocon's policy coup in the Middle East...the bloody bath of war profits in an oil rich region. Now Emma Sky is working for the Jackson Institute at Yale? The problem is that Yale's place in the history of the U.S. Civil War is widely unknown by Americans so how can Yale and a Brit offer an academic launch pad for reaching the high ground? For Americans to understand our own history they must read the 1999 book VOYAGE OF THE FROLIC that links the Russells, Huntingtons, Tafts and Heards to Fred Bailey, aka Frederick Douglass, who was laying the hulls of Baltimore opium clippers before he became the spokesman for abolition of slavery that would replace one form of slavery with another.....with additional products and resources in the same Middle East where civil war is a handy policy for the racket of war . This is well covered in the 2015 book SULFUR, LEAD and POPPIES. A West Point U.S. Army Ranger recently asked the author of this one "oh, that's about the war in Afghanistan? "No," he was told...."it's about or own American Civil War. Not much changes."

What Emma Sky is, EXACTLY, cannot be clearly discerned from THE UNRAVELING, nor from her current associations.



Response From F. Hobbs:

What Emma Sky is, EXACTLY," is apparent to anyone who has read her book. She is an idealistic, liberal British Jew, who majored in the Middle East studies and spent a decade working for various NGO's mostly trying to help the Palestinians build institutions during the 1990's peace process. After her country joined what she believed to be an illegal, immoral war in Iraq, she patriotically volunteered to serve in the CPA to help fix the problems her country had created and to protect Iraqi citizens from occupation troops. While there, she discovered that the most idealistic and effective people trying to rebuild Iraq were dedicated officers in the US military struggling to provide security, who desperately needed and deeply appreciated her knowledge of the Middle East, political insights, negotiating skills and outspoken criticism. Talented and well-connected officers in the US State Department generally avoided serving in Iraq. She later volunteered to work in Afghanistan and returned to Iraq during the surge as General Odierno's political officer.

Wlll Harvey exposes himself as a conspiracy theorist, not a credible reviewer of this book. Ms. Sky's book is the candid story of her experiences: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Emma Sky probably left Iraq before Westhusing arrived in the country - and certainly long before he became disillusioned by corruption - and returned to Iraq two years after his suicide. Her first tour overlapped with Kerik's, but he worked on rebuilding the police and the Ministry of the Interior, while she spent her time in Kirkuk (whose oil both Sunnis and Kurds wished to control) and representing Kirkuk in Baghdad. About the time Sky left Iraq for the second time, Yale (an institution that makes conspiracy theorists salivate) received a $50M gift from a former pharmaceutical-exec alum to create an new International Relations Institute "to help and inspire service in our young people today and create globally engaged leaders". Read her book and it will be obvious why she was asked to join.

For the record, I know Emma Sky only through her book.

Response from W. Harvey:

It is not credible to ask why Ms. Sky did not include in a book on the unraveling of the Iraq War which even Brzezinski said "was a bamboozle based on absolutely false evidence," two significant personalities related to both the U.S. military's top leadership AND the 911 city upon which the invasion was based? Why Sky does not even mention Westhusing or Kerik? This author did not create Yale's Pavlovian peccadilloes. It created its own reality and myth quite apart from the real and imagined conspiracy theorists, but no more than Robert Merton at Harvard with Black Scholes and his credit default formulas. Why say "talented and well-connected officers in the US State Department generally avoided serving in Iraq," unless they knew damn well it was a bamboozle? That being so, then the very premise of an "unraveling" just came unraveled!


21 Days....no response from F. Hobbs......


Response to F. Hobb's silence:

Dear F. Hobbs,

Also, Emma worked closely with head of MI-6, John Sawer, who for the Downing Street Memo issued some mild resistance that Ray McGovern called little more than a "hiccup". Have you read the CIA's Ray McGovern's 2012 article "Downing Street Memo": Redux? In it he is asking if a similar cooking of the intelligence that we saw with Iraq by the Brits is being brewed up for Iran by Sawer. Does Emma envision a similar post-Iran invasion unraveling and if so, why not tell us NOW? If this is "conspiracy" theory stuff......who was conspiring when you line up the British and U.S. players in the development of the Downing Street Memo? Was Iran-Contra a "conspiracy"? British and U.S. opium policy in China that led to the Boxer Rebellion? The Gulf of Tonkin affair? Tuskegee Experiment? Hiding the fact that Big Tobacco hid the health effects of smoking for decades? That the U.S. Civil Defense lauded the use of lead-based paint (see film "The House In The Middle"....available on-line) at the same time we were developing the "MAD Theory" of mutually assured destruction and the same lead producers who made our bullets wanted to see it in gasoline or paint 50 years after its use was banned in Europe? What qualifies as a "conspiracy" and what does not? Have I nailed it, Mr. Hobbs?


W. Harvey


ADDENDUM 7/14/15

On 7/14/15 an update to the Will Harvey review of The Unraveling had been made.  It seems that after the posting of the above comments 3 of 17 readers had found the review of the book beneficial.  Harvey had apparently reread Mr. Hobbs' rebuttal and found there a reason to lay out Ms. Sky's actual timeline on her presence in Iraq to see if it countered Hobbs' assertion, proving an overlap with Col, Theodore Westhusing's tour of duty.  His update read:

Dear F. Hobbs,

From The MacMillian Report at Yale with Marilyn Wilkes interviewing Ms. Sky..... Sky states emphatically "I went to Iraq in 2003 as a senior civilian representative of the Provisional Government in Kirkuk and I stayed through the surge in 2007....." She did return, but this clearly put her there when Westhusing was there when he died in 2005, so your statement...."Emma Sky probably left Iraq before Westhusing arrived in the country - and certainly long before he became disillusioned by corruption - and returned to Iraq two years after his suicide."........well, that's flat wrong according to Ms. Sky who in the same interview said that she wrote the book to pay tribute to those who died there. How strange that the highest ranking U.S. military officer to die there is not mentioned in her book given that she sees the war as a mistake and that he had seen first hand the darker elements of the war and spoke with authority about it.....like, say, a Henry Van Ness Boyington or a Smedley Darlington Butler. Ms. Sky's interview by Marilyn Wilkes is available online for a clear and concise record of the timeline.

WH


     Henry Van Ness Boyington was a U.S. Civil War Congressional Medal of Honor recipient turned journalist who doggedly followed the military corruption of the time and General Smedley Darlington Butler was a two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner who had said in his book War Is A Racket that "I had been a goon on three continents" for the "National City Bank Boys."  The place of both men in the history of the development of the U.S. military industrialist complex is explored in the 2014 book, Sulfur, Lead and Poppies.


-Simon F. Schuster


Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Shelby Foote and Walker Percy

Shelby Foote and Walker Percy: No Longer Lost In The Cosmos

A book review of The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy
by Will Harvey for CPW News Service

     What a great find! Foote and Percy open us to the world from Memphis to the Gulf of Mexico and the whole Mississippi Delta where the Percy's were/are political and literary royalty.  The Foote and Percy discussion of the place of Charles Sanders Peirce (p. 152) is amazing..."I thought last year when I finished the last that I'd write a book on the theory of language. I still think it would be important as I told you. I would even say that it is revolutionary: that 100 years from now it could be the Peirce-Percy theory (not Pierce, but Peirce and so pronounced Perce-Percy). No kidding. I'm not even being vain. It just so happens that this old fellow, Charles Peirce, a U.S. philosopher very few laymen ever heard of (by contrast say, with William James who got his idea of pragmatism from Peirce).....

     An Anglophile to the core, Charles Peirce was the "father of pragmatism," but is the American experiment first and foremost "pragmatic"? Democracies are by definition pragmatically sloppy. Anglophilia is exclusive moving increasingly toward less and less slop. There is a strange inconsistency, therefore, not so much with Percy or with Foote who told CSPAN's Brian Lamb (www.c-span.org/video/?165823-1/depth-shelby-foote) that he consulted no original material in his Civil War histories...."it's all been gone over before," but with our acceptance of their definition of American exceptionalism.   


     Equally surprising from these letters is Walker Percy's flirtation with Charles Sanders Peirce. It's as if these two died and dyed in the wool Southern princes are like Margaret Mitchell....who from the deep South was Smith College educated! In their case Peirce is going to mainline right into the Johns Hopkins order of Gilman, James and Wilhelm Wundt in the hometown of Alexander Brown, the progenitor of Brown Brother and Harriman as well as the center of the China Trader's best ship  yards.  Nor can we forget that it was Andrew Hull Foote, the New Haven, Connecticut naval office who returned from China to lead the naval assault on the South's two key river defenses at Fort Donnelson and Fort Henry the fall of which opened the South's rivers to Union gunboats.


     Their bantering about Foote's 1,300,000 word, three volume history of the Civil War that doesn't mention the letter of Jefferson Davis to Franklin Pierce located in Davis' original documents that Foote somehow believed had "all been gone over before" punctuates the boundaries of their protected cosmos.  Even if Foote hadn't caught it, Texas historians Frank Vandiver or Douglas Brinkley should have!

     Davis said: "When Lincoln comes in he will have but to continue in the path of his predecessor to inaugurate a civil war and leave a soi disant democratic administration responsible for the fact. Genl. Cushing was here last week and when we parted it seemed like taking a last leave of a brother," (Jefferson Davis, "The Papers of Jefferson Davis," The PJD Project of Rice University retrieved from https://jeffersondavis.rice.edu/Content.aid+86).

     Churning out the military babble about the Civil War is to take a nation's eyes off the real issues and to transfix them on the dusty past and unless a historian's history is truly circumspect with respect to motives reminiscent of Denzel Washington's character in the film Glory...."ain't none of us clean in this thing".....how can we let go and not repeat it? The past even though it is "Gone With the Wind," as we have seen with the irrelevant symbol of a Confederate Flag and an increasingly troubling....as in the film In The Valley of Elah (2007), Union pennant. So Percy was not Lost in the Cosmos, but in the Mississippi Delta and in half-baked histories. It has always been readily apparent history that Union General William Tecumseh Sherman was the pre-Civil War business partner of Confederate bumbler General Braxton Bragg whose California fort was placed in close proximity to the Frolic's final resting place near the Cabrillo Point Light House (Voyage of the Frolic: New England Merchants and the Opium Trade, Stanford University Press, 1999) and that Sherman would precede Savannah with the sacking of Vicksburg and the South's future rail crossing to San Diego, California. That was before all the rail ties east of Atlanta were torches and the rails very passionately twisted into cork screws as Sherman abandoned the recently freed slaves at Ebenezer Creek. Long before the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan....Iraq that happened to have been at Basra, the opium port of David Sassoon, the Golden Crescent's leading opium shipper during our Civil War, and long before the U.S. was....as with fugitive slave laws, John Brown's backing by the Boston lead-miner, George Luther Stearns, and the weapons purveyors who knew that the opium had a ready-made market, too, for the canon fodder of Eli Lilly's battle targets. Yes, as Shelby has told us and Ken Burns has affirmed, war is hell.....and a very lucrative one! "No," said Smedley Butler, "war is a racket!"


     Historian Lowell P. Wigglesworth has explored Shelby Foote's avoidance of the original documents.  "Ken Burns and Shelby Foote stand in a long line of historians and story tellers that tell half a truth, but they aren't alone," said Wigglesworth.  "One of the most powerful examples of the denial that the South's proposed route across the Great Southwest can be seen in the way that the newspapers of the Northeast in the last half of the 19th Century covered-up the fact that the race was on to the Pacific and that that race was the real motive for the Civil War.  You can't look at the popular and highly awarded books to discover the truth of the matter. They are spinning the proper line. It must be dug out of the original documents that Shelby Foote was not wanting us to examine.  Take, the coverage of the U.S. governments' camels that were envisioned by Jeff Davis, continued under Union General Giles Alexander and Morgan Lewis Smith from the Truehart-Adriance  Building in Galveston, Texas.  This was one of the best kept secrets in U.S. history, not because camels needed less water, carried up to 700 pounds and could cover up to 100 miles a day, but because their acquisition at Smyrna, home port of David Sassoon's opium empire, was followed after the Civil War by the Union until the Union Pacific made the trek unnecessary.    These camels were not just being prepared to carry food and supplies to the distant military forts of the Southwest.  The Alta California newspaper reported this orchestrated cover-up in 1885 as it noticed that a Phoenix, Arizona newspaper had seen how the major papers of the Northeast had denied that the camels ever existed.  The report begins...'Several times during the past few months the Gazette has noticed that in the Eastern press an item, copied from some Galveston, Texas paper, to the effect that the United States Government never purchased or imported to this country any camels.'  The article shows an attempt to erase a significant piece of history that essentially defined what was then an East-West trade route, but which with the evolution of new drug markets like cocaine also became a North-South trade route.    Galveston had been the launch pad for William Walker's expedition to Honduras, the  Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba and the Iran-Contra supply lines into Central America and many other ventures operating out of this petro-chemical corridor of Texas.  The false report supposedly originating in Galveston where the Union Buffalo Soldiers had taken over Jefferson Davis' camel caravan after the Civil War even as they were the primary enforcers of Reconstruction in Texas under brother-Generals Alexander Giles and Morgan Lewis Smith, there was an attempt at credible deniability originating from the front lines of this historic war zone and 'Wall Street of the South'.  The Editor of the Alta California paper caught it!   The Fourth Estate, at least there in Alta, had not yet pinched the empire's incense.  The recently liberated slaves and the poor of the South like the poor of the major metropolitan centers of the Northeast....Boston, Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis....would embrace like the poor Chinese....the coming supply of mind-altering agents," said Wigglesworth who noted the 300 percent rise in opioid addictions in the U.S. since the beginning of the "war on terrorism" and Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  "It was no accident that Lance Armstrong was doping for the US Postal Service team with it history with the Pacific Mail and Steamship Company, Cornelius Vander Starr's AIG, and the post-Civil War practice of rewarding people with 'Star Routes' across America like the Russell's Pony Express way stations," he concluded.

Government Camels: The United States Really Did Import Them--Why
Were They Sold?
From: Daily Alta California, Volume 39, number 12996, 13 October 1885.
CLICK PHOTO TO ENLARGE
 
     Is this what so enamored Shelby Foote with the legacy of Col. NB Forrest who threatened to kill General Bragg and who after Forrest left the KKK to Albert Pike is like a repentant Gov. George Wallace? When Percy both chides the "fierce Caucasion-Gentile-Visigoths" for violating the "helpless" African (God and Race, p. 177)....I can almost hear Forrest saying...."my mistake was not marching North in 1859 with my Negro and Johnny Reb army, 90% of which owned no slaves, but who now each own eighty acres and two mules....not to mention shares in our new cotton and silk fabric factories up there above the MD Line!"  Alas, Forrest was not Spartacus or Washington, but neither was, as Ebenezer Creek and his rail and shipping connections signify, William T. Sherman.

     Reading some original material might have informed Walker Percy's estimate of the relationship between Jeff Davis and W.T. Sherman when he notes a problem with Foote's Civil War history, Vol. III, "The paragraph on page 1042.." and "Most of the last 40 pp. go to Davis. OK but it seems a departure from the almost icy neutrality of the narrator up to now (you can't tell whether he's from Ala or Ohio----maybe the later considering how he treats Sherman....." (p. 188).

     Right, Percy actually caught it, and Thomas Bragg, Braxton's brother was the Confederacy's Attorney General and Braxton sat out the Battle of Atlanta in Walker County, Georgia (pretending not to surrender with Lee at Appomattox with Augusta in Walker County being home to the South's key gunpowder factory, Confederate Powder Works!) then Sherman returns to his railroad work in San Francisco after the war picking up where he left off with George F. Bragg and J. Mora Moss of the Sacramento Valley Railroad (Bancroft's Hand-book of the Pacific States, published in 1864, p. 91) with the establishment of the Transcontinental RR terminal there instead of San Diego, thanks in no small measure to Alfred Nobel's invention--Dynamite! No wonder Shelby Foote wanted to hold Forrest's sword and swing it above his head and hang his photo centrally above his Memphis desk. Forrest seems to have figured out that not only was he duped by General Bragg and his brother, but even by the KKKer's whose imported Scottish Rite leader from Wilhelm Wundt's Prussian playground, Albert Pike, who having usurped the Washington and Franklin York Riters' ethos had even incorporated through their Cincinnati, Ohio lodge, Alphonso and William Howard Taft!  Did this have anything to do with Benjamin French's White House installation of Andrew Johnson as the nation's first SR President?  Where are the conspiracy theorists when we really need them....or better yet, the serious historians who WILL check the original material?  And what might this all say about the fact that the NAACP's founder, W.E.B. Dubois, has been widely reported to be a SR member?
     Of course, these issues are shadow-dancing amid the Foote/Percy paragraphs and so much, much more, but given the evolution of U.S. history the easy reading "out of" and not "into" these conversations is what really makes them a 5 star read for those who have already read.

     Charles Peirce, Walker Percy, too, was fascinated with symbols as a determinant of human inspiration. Are we seeing the careful crafting of language, symbol and mind-science pragmatism at work here.....even in the long, passionate and paternalistic embrace of Mississippi's Confederate flag and Foote's assertion that "I told some interviewer that I knew the Negroes better than Baldwin ever began to know, mainly, I said, because, I was Southern." (find it for yourself.  James Baldwin didn't make Foote's index!).
     When we read in The Voyage of the Frolic by Thomas Layton (Stanford University Press, 1999) that abolitionist orator, Frederick Douglass, also known as Fred Bailey, worked in the Baltimore ship yards laying the hulls of the New England China Traders whose clippers were owned by the Cushings, Russells, Huntingtons and Heards, what if the Percy's control of the Mississippi Delta from New Orleans to Memphis was to insure that the South's rail ambitions were checked and that what had been thwarted by William T. Sherman was well-managed into the succeeding centuries? Braxton Braggs' death in Galveston, Texas as well as the placement of his relative's ranch that stretched across the Jeff Davis Highway route....essentially following the flat Southwest rail route that troubled the Northern China Traders and C. Wright Mill's boyhood on the Braxton Bragg Wright ranch at Lagarta with Mill's publication of The Power Elite seems to run a nice steady stitched seam along the edges of the argument, but Foote and Percy's Mississippi Delta connect nicely to Henry Stuart Foote and to Admiral Hull Foote when you look at the kick-starting of the Civil War in Charleston, South Carolina at Ft. Sumter with Edmund Ruffin and Louis Trezevant Wigfall figuring so centrally into the fuse lighting.   Suddenly the China Traders of New England and the South's rail ambitions from Savannah across the Mississippi.... through Texas to San Diego (Davis' choice) or San Francisco becomes clear(the New England Brahmin's first choice and to which Henry Stuart Foote will go before the Civil War like Wigfall's close Texas allies, John Coffee "Jack" Hays and Ben McCulloch....elected sheriffs of San Francisco and Sacramento on November 1, 1850, respectively, only to see Henry S. Foote return to Vicksburg where William T. Sherman arrived shortly, leaving George F. Bragg to hold down the San Francisco railhead.   Missippian, Edward C. Walthall, was aide de camp to Jeff Davis, but William Tecumseh Walthall whose ancestors were of the British East India Company connected Mercer family and Company with outpost on Virginia's James River was Caleb Cushing companion during his China treaty expedition. Edward will become Jeff Davis' aide in Mississippi with Davis working for the Trezevant-connected Carolina Insurance Company after his defeat).

      Cushing and his buddies duped Jeff Davis, but not the Bragg or Foote insiders....not until they were....to their chagrin....left in the China clipper's wake in the backwaters of American life.  Surprise!
     Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind was a vacuum cleaner for erasing the real source of the South's traumatized memories under the mythology of the noble slavers and it was spun by Smith College graduate, Margaret Mitchell, in concert with the Vanderbilt/Whitney fortune that underwrote the Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh blockbuster via John Hay "Jock" Whitney.  Braxton and Thomas Bragg attended the wedding of Unionist slaver, Cornelius Vanderbilt,  to Mobile, Alabama Confederate socialite with the male name, Frank Armstrong Crawford, in 1869 and Vanderbilt had battled with both William Walker and friend, the enigmatic friend of Fred Baily/Frederick Douglass, the rich Caribbean freedman, Wall Street tycoon, Jeremiah Hamilton. 
     Controlling the South's memories started with controlling its river ways and for that job the North had imported for the initial river assault on Forts Donnelson and Henry, Admiral Andrew Hull Foote, from his fort-clearing twin project on China's Yangtze River.  It was there at Forts Donnelson and Henry that Nathan Bedford Forrest got his first big taste of Braxton Bragg and Simon Bolivar Buckner. Buckner attend the funeral of Ulysses S. Grant with Bragg's pre-Civil War business partner and supposed Civil War opponent, William Tecumseh Sherman, both pallbearers.  Little has been made of the relationship of the Civil War historian who admitted "I used no original material in my research.  It's all been gone over before," Shelby Foote, to Admiral Andrew Hull Foote or to Henry Stuart Foote from Mississippi, Texas and San Francisco.
     In his Paris Review interview Walker Percy speaks of artists and writers "making" while moralists are simply "doing". The power of language is that, seems to me, words and language, like other art does both.  Like with James Powers' Greek Slave, come to think of it, or the place of James Hamlet, a name with a fine Shakespearian ring to it....."To be or not to be," James Hamlet the Brown's Merchant Shot Tower worker in Baltimore, making lead musket balls and then becoming the subject of the war-baiting test case of the Fugitive Slave Laws. 

     Making inspires doing and vice versa. When the words and works of the poets and novelists, historians, religionists and scientists keep us locked in a failed system....."what goes up? Must come down!" (Not in zero gravity)....which both Foote and Percy do as fierce pedagogues (perhaps giving us a strong clue as to why Percy's Lost in the Cosmos was poking such fun at Carl Sagan for envisioning a wide open and positive future where survival of the fittest was not about brute strength, but adaptability), then what I wouldn't give to have heard Percy with his interest in linguistics in a discussion with MIT's linguist, Noam Chomsky.  That would have helped all of us who sometimes feel lost in our own little corner of the cosmos.
     Historian Lowell P. Wigglesworth charted the Foote connections from the North's river campaign against Forts Donnelson and Henry at the outbreak of the Civil War, kick-started as it was at Fort Sumter by Edmund Ruffin and Louis Trezevant Wigfall from Texas where Ruffin's descendant, Paul Ruffin, is the editor of the Texas Review Press which would make a great platform for Wiggleworth's assertions.   Jefferson Davis, Braxton Bragg, William Tecumseh Sherman, Henry Stuart Foote....all in Mississippi or Texas and their rolling attention directed, as with Caleb Cushing and North's power elites toward the China Trader's prized opium market in China from where Admiral Andrew Hull Foote had returned to lead the river campaign against the South and we see why Walker Percy and Shelby Foote leave us lost in their well-controlled, but mythical cosmos that's fit mainly for chameleons.


Click to Enlarge Lowell P. Wiggleworth's chart





UPDATE 7/9/2015

Dear W.H.

Received an email from a reader who sent your review to Noam Chomsky for his reaction. 

Winsip



From: William Carr [mailto:willhcarr@yahoo.com]
Sent: Wednesday, July 08, 2015 3:50 PM
To: Noam Chomsky
Subject: Reference to you in review of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy letters

Dear Mr. Chomsky,
Greetings from Texas.  Could you comment....particularly on the reference to your work in linguists and Walker Percy's interest in the same?
Sincerely,
William Carr

From: Noam Chomsky <chomsky@mit.edu>
To: William Carr <willhcarr@yahoo.com>
Sent: Wednesday, July 8, 2015 4:48 PM
Subject: RE: Reference to you in review of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy letters

Not much here about Percy’s thoughts, so can’t comment.

Response:

To: Noam Chomsky <chomsky@mit.edu>
From: William Carr <willhcarr@yahoo.com>
Sent: Wednesday, July 9, 2015 5:48 AM
Subject: RE: Reference to you in review of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy letters

Dear Mr. Chomsky,
Yes, he points to his interest in linguistics as a tool for establishing a lasting Peirce/Percy legacy.  When you consider the context of his concerns for this line of thinking along with Foote's flawed management of the Civil War proper line, I believe that Percy and Foote were, together, extending like a large literary/linguistic net across their part of the nation, part of a bigger bamboozle.  With the fourth estate essentially dead....who....exactly has been controlling the bamboozle?  From your position with a front row seat at MIT and Cambridge, I was hoping you could tell us.
I am of the opinion that Anthony Sutton, as Brzezinski affirmed, was correct in that the Order is with respect to politics and ethics, agnostic.   That they have had their articulate mouth pieces left and right like the fight promoter, Dana White of the Ultimate Fighting Championships, controlling both corners and the lucrative ticket sales and concessions.  Historically, by way of example and not currently accurate.....from the right.....Senator Joe McCarthy or Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy.   From the  left William Sloane Coffin and ?

Sincerely,
WHC