Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Obamaville July 24, 2013 - Does the Term Molasses Mean Anything to You?

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About the only time we hear from the president now is when he attends another fund raiser, has rock, pop and blues stars for personal concerts in the White House, or has to apologize for something someone in his vast administration did or said.
 
Why does the White House cost keep going up, now $1.4 billion a year, when very little is being done by our elected officials?  I bet things would happen a lot faster if we stopped Beyonce from playing for the first family in the White House or withheld checks to Congressmen until they passed a budget and some meaningful laws.
 
When it comes to the performance of our elected officials including the president, his cabinet, and both the House and Senate, molasses would be the odds on favorite to beat them all in a sprint to the finish line.  Nothing gets finished in Washington, D.C. and it doesn't matter if you are Democrat, Republican, Catholic or Prostitute or any other ingredient of our vast melting pot.

 
I, for one, favor turning over the government to different groups and give them a chance to mess it up for a while.  Could they do any worse than what we have?  Our new set of political standards in America have reached such a new low that it really should not matter what background our temporary government members bring to their office.
 
If we rotated our political leaders every six months or so they wouldn't have time to arrange for kickbacks, payoffs, and all the other forms of corruption and ethics violations currently found in government.

 
Since these temporary politicians did not come up through the election process but were appointed, then they haven't sold their souls to the financial demons that control the economy, government, wars, health care, energy, education and international relations, meaning international trade and the flow of cash it represents.

It would be the first government administration in a very long time that came with "no strings attached."  Campaign financing is one of the top three most corrupt of all ways to manipulate and leverage money, along with health care, wars, energy resources, frivolous lawsuits, alienation and discrimination.  Oh my, that is seven not three ways.


Obama Kills Osama declares Al-Qaeda on the run.
 
Too bad our president didn't get Man of the Year from the National Rifle Association after he led the Navy Seal raid in Pakistan that killed Osama Bin Laden, mastermind of the World Trade Center terrorist attack.
 
At the time the news media was aglow with praise for our commander-in-chief for dealing a devastating blow to Al Qaeda, the terrorist network founded by Osama.  It was only a matter of time before they would become extinct.

 
That NRA plaque would look great next to Obama's Nobel Peace prize awarded before he even had a chance to brush the confetti off his tux from his first inauguration.
 
Here is a timeline for the few things that actually happened since Barack Obama became president.


 Barack Obama Presidential Timetable
 
January 20, 2009 -  Obama first inauguration
 
January 20, 2009 - Beyonce performs at President's Inauguration
 
October 9, 2009 - Obama wins Nobel Peace prize
 
August 2010 - Obama completes troop buildup in Afghanistan
 
May 2, 2011 - Obama kills Osama
 
December 18, 2011 - Last US troops leave Iraq
 
September 11, 2012 - American diplomatic mission at Benghazi, Libya, attacked by Al Qaeda - US Ambassador one of four Americans murdered.
 
July 22, 2013 - Al Qaeda attacks Iraq prisons, frees 500 terrorists.

 
You get the idea.  Not much for prosperity or the history books.
 
Sunni and Shiite Islam Muslims continue their war of extermination against each other.  With the Shiite in control of Iraq and Iran while the Sunni and Al Qaeda represent most of the Arab world, there is no end in sight for the sectarian bloodshed.

 
The following is the NBC News report on the prison attack.
 
By Richard Engel, Chief Foreign Correspondent, NBC News
 
Al Qaeda-linked militants have claimed responsibility for Monday’s assault on Iraq’s Abu Ghraib jail, which freed some of the terror network's top leaders amid U.S. fears that the country is back in civil war.
 
Checkpoints were set up Tuesday as the search continued for up to 500 militants freed by the attack, which followed the deaths of 250 Iraqis in 10 days of violence. 
 
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which was formed earlier this year through a merger between al Qaeda's affiliates in Syria and Iraq, said in a statement that it was behind the storming of the jail late on Sunday night.

 
The attack began when suicide bombers smashed explosives-laden cars into the prison’s front gate, while gunmen attacked guards with rocket-propelled grenades.
 
As fighters held off reinforcements outside, other militants, some wearing suicide vests, stormed into the prison and freed the convicts.
 
“Most of them were convicted senior members of al Qaeda and had received death sentences," Hakim Al-Zamili, a senior member of the security and defense committee in parliament, told Reuters.

 
"The security forces arrested some of them, but the rest are still free," Hakim Al-Zamili said.
 
The group also said it was behind a second, almost simultaneous assault on Taji Jail, to the north of city. But Iraqi authorities said those attackers had been fought off with a couple of helicopters.
 
They added that checkpoints had been set up around Abu Ghraib, as the search for the escapees continued.

 
 Both attacks took place exactly a year after The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant's most senior leader, Sheikh Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, launched a campaign dubbed "Breaking the Walls" to make freeing imprisoned members a top priority. 
 
“The mujahideen brigades set off after months of preparation and planning to target two of the biggest prisons of the Safavid government," the group said in the statement, Tuesday.
 
Safavid is used by hardline Sunnis as a derogatory term for Shiite Muslims and refers to the dynasty that ruled Iran from the 16th to 18th centuries.

 
Abu Ghraib gained notoriety because of abuses carried out by U.S. personnel while the country was under occupation following the removal of Saddam Hussein. 
 
The prison assaults followed a violent 10 days in the country, which has seen 250 killed by car bombs, ambushes and gun fights, according to violence monitoring group Iraq Body Count. 
 
The spiral of violence has led U.S. officials to warn that the country is sliding back into civil war, undoing the work achieved by the 'surge' of U.S. troops.
 
NBC News' Henry Austin and Reuters contributed to this report.

 
So what exactly is the difference between the Shiite and Sunni Moslems?  Here is what the staff at the History Channel had to say about the difference.
 
The Islam religion was founded by Mohammed in the seventh century. In 622 he founded the first Islamic state, a theocracy in Medina, a city in western Saudi Arabia located north of Mecca. There are two branches of the religion he founded.
 
The Sunni branch believes that the first four caliphs--Mohammed's successors--rightfully took his place as the leaders of Muslims. They recognize the heirs of the four caliphs as legitimate religious leaders. These heirs ruled continuously in the Arab world until the break-up of the Ottoman Empire following the end of the First World War.
 
Shiites, in contrast, believe that only the heirs of the fourth caliph, Ali, are the legitimate successors of Mohammed. In 931 the Twelfth Imam disappeared. This was a seminal event in the history of Shiite Muslims. According to R. Scott Appleby, a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame, "Shiite Muslims, who are concentrated in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon, [believe they] had suffered the loss of divinely guided political leadership" at the time of the Imam's disappearance. Not "until the ascendancy of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1978" did they believe that they had once again begun to live under the authority of a legitimate religious figure.

 
 Another difference between Sunnis and Shiites has to do with the Mahdi, “the rightly-guided one” whose role is to bring a just global caliphate into being. As historian Timothy Furnish has written,  "The major difference is that for Shi`is he has already been here, and will return from hiding; for Sunnis he has yet to emerge into history: a comeback v. a coming out, if you will."
 
In a special 9-11 edition of the Journal of American History, Appleby explained that the Shiite outlook is far different from the Sunni's, a difference that is highly significant:
 
... for Sunni Muslims, approximately 90 percent of the Muslim world, the loss of the caliphate after World War I was devastating in light of the hitherto continuous historic presence of the caliph, the guardian of Islamic law and the Islamic state. Sunni fundamentalist leaders thereafter emerged in nations such as Egypt and India, where contact with Western political structures provided them with a model awkwardly to imitate ... as they struggled after 1924 to provide a viable alternative to the caliphate.

 
In 1928, four years after the abolishment of the caliphate, the Egyptian schoolteacher Hasan al-Banna founded the first Islamic fundamentalist movement in the Sunni world, the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun). Al-Banna was appalled by"the wave of atheism and lewdness [that] engulfed Egypt" following World War I. The victorious Europeans had "imported their half-naked women into these regions, together with their liquors, their theatres, their dance halls, their amusements, their stories, their newspapers, their novels, their whims, their silly games, and their vices." Suddenly the very heart of the Islamic world was penetrated by European"schools and scientific and cultural institutes" that" cast doubt and heresy into the souls of its sons and taught them how to demean themselves, disparage their religion and their fatherland, divest themselves of their traditions and beliefs, and to regard as sacred anything Western."14 Most distressing to al-Banna and his followers was what they saw as the rapid moral decline of the religious establishment, including the leading sheikhs, or religious scholars, at Al-Azhar, the grand mosque and center of Islamic learning in Cairo. The clerical leaders had become compromised and corrupted by their alliance with the indigenous ruling elites who had succeeded the European colonial masters.


Osama bin Laden is a Sunni Muslim. To him the end of the reign of the caliphs in the 1920s was catastrophic, as he made clear in a videotape made after 9-11. On the tape, broadcast by Al-Jazeera on October 7, 2001, he proclaimed: "What America is tasting now is only a copy of what we have tasted. ... Our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more [than] eighty years, of humiliation and disgrace, its sons killed and their blood spilled, its sanctities desecrated."
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Monday, July 22, 2013

CPT Monarch Factoid - King's Stuff Headlines

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BBC - Royal baby: Moment birth of William and Kate's son was announced

Royal baby: It's a boy for William and Kate, as world celebrates future king
 
Royal Baby: Boy Joy For Kate And William

William and Kate 'couldn't be happier' about baby boy


Royal baby weighing 8 lbs, 6 oz delivered at 4:24 p.m. BST Monday

 

Tony Appleton, a town crier, announces the birth of the royal baby, outside St. Mary's Hospital exclusive Lindo Wing in London, on Monday. (Lefteris Pitarakis/Associated Press)

Congratulations to William and Kate for the birth of their boy who is 3rd in line to be King of Britain.  He will be the 2nd King of Britain after his yet to be King father, William, who is part American in his blood line thanks to Thomas Gerrard, who brought his family to St. Clements Island in Maryland and established the St. Clements Manor in 1634 in what is today Coltons Point.

For the benefit of those of you not into monarchies, succession and royal heraldry, and particularly the survivors of the dreaded 7th District in Southern Maryland where St. Clements Island and Coltons Point remain to this day, let me simplify what I said.

 

 

Much to the horror of the British royalty genealogists it was discovered that Prince William, son of Prince Charles and Lady Diana, will be the first King in English history to be part American.

They have the Gerrard family of London to blame for it.  Not only did Thomas wind up with the largest Manor House in America, over 25,000 acres, and somehow manage to contaminate the royal bloodline of Britain with American blood, but two of his daughters married George Washington's great-grandfather.


 

William's yet to be named son will be the second King of Britain with American blood.

How many queens ruled England?

Since the year 927, over 1,000  years, the monarchy has ruled England or Britain.

 

From: About.com Women's History

Queens who ruled England or Britain

1. Empress Matilda, Lady of the English (1141), never crowned
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 (August 5, 1102 - September 10, 1167)
Widow of the Holy Roman Emperor, Matilda was named by her father, Henry I of England, as his successor. She fought a long war of succession with her cousin, Stephen, who seized the throne before Matilda could be crowned.
 
2. Lady Jane Grey (1553, 9 days)

 

 
 
 

 
 
 
(October 1537 - February 12, 1554)
The reluctant nine-day queen of England, Lady Jane Grey was supported by the Protestant party to follow Edward VI, to try to prevent the Roman Catholic Mary from taking the throne.

3. Mary I (1553 - 1558)

 

 
 
 

 
 
 
(February 18, 1516 - November 17, 1558)
Daughter of Henry VIII and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, Mary attempted to restore Roman Catholicism in England during her reign. The execution of Protestants as heretics earned her the sobriquet "Bloody Mary."

4. Elizabeth I (1558 - 1603)

 

© Clipart.com
 
(September 9, 1533 - March 24, 1603)
Known as Queen Bess or the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I ruled at a key time in England's history, and is one of the most-remembered British rulers, male or female.

5. Mary II (1689 - 1694)



Mary II assumed the throne as co-ruler with her husband when it was feared that her father would restore Roman Catholicism. Mary II died childless in 1694 of smallpox, only 32 years old. Her husband William ruled after her death, passing the crown to Mary's sister Anne when he died.
 
6. Anne (1702 - 1714)


Sister of Mary II, she ruled when her brother-in-law William III died in 1702. She was married to Prince George of Denmark, and though she was pregnant 18 times, she had only one child who survived infancy. That son died in 1700, and in 1701, she agreed to designate as her successors the Protestant descendants of Elizabeth, daughter of James I of England, known as the Hanoverians. As queen, she's known for the influence over her of her friend, Sarah Churchill, and for getting the British involved in the War of the Spanish Succession. She was associated in British politics with the Tories rather than their opponents, the Whigs, and her reign saw the power of the Crown significantly reduced.

7. Victoria (1837 - 1901)
 
 


 
 
 
 

 
Queen Victoria of Great Britain was the longest-ruling monarch of Great Britain. She ruled during a time of economic and imperial expansion, and gave her name to the Victorian Era. She married a cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, when they were both seventeen years old, and had seven children before his death in 1861 sent her into a long mourning period.
 
8. Elizabeth II (1952 - )










Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom was born in 1926, eldest child of Prince Albert, who became King George VI when his brother abdicated the crown. She married Philip, a Greek and Danish prince, in 1947, and they had four children. She succeeded to the crown in 1952, with a formal and much-viewed televised coronation. Elizabeth's reign has been marked by the British Empire becoming the British Commonwealth, and a gradual further diminishment of the official role and power of the royal family amid scandal and divorce in her children's families.

 
 

For more on Prince William's American bloodline click on the following links to Coltons Point Times articles:
 

http://coltonspointtimes.blogspot.com/2010/01/histories-mysteries-next-king-of.html

For more on the Gerrard family history in America see:

Friday, July 10, 2009
St. Clements Island and Manor - Four Centuries of Uninterrupted History

http://coltonspointtimes.blogspot.com/2009/07/st-clements-island-and-manor-four.html
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Death in America - The Rest of the Story - from Guns to Hospitals

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Although it is clearly a distasteful subject, it is important people understand the truth behind the debates on such things as gun control, terrorism, homicides and other deaths in the USA.  If not, the newspaper headlines would leave you believing we are back in the wild west.
From the tragic Newtown murders to the Boston marathon, headlines and sound bites paint a dismal picture of being safe in America.  You might think you need a police escort to get our kids to school or go to the grocery store.  But is that really the case?
Here are several categories of deaths in America based on multiple public data bases.  I am extrapolating all categories to cover the years from September 11, 2001 until September 11, 2013, a period of 12 years.
Total Deaths in America - 9/11/01 - 9/11/13
Terrorism
Terrorism                                                           19
Homicides
Firearm homicides                                132,000

Firearm suicides                                    232,800

Murder by suffocation                              6,528

Murder by fire                                            1,068

Murder by poisoning                                   950

Murder by drowning                                   625

Medical

Heart disease                                       7,825,092

Cancer                                                     6,711,744

Stroke                                                     1,746,948

Chronic Lower Respiratory                1,571,196

Accidents                                              1,404,000

Bedsores                                               1,380,000

Hospital Infections                             1,056,000

Malnutrition                                        1,305,600

Prescription overdose                        1,272,000

Medical malpractice                           1,176,000

Outpatient malpractice                     2,388,000

Unnecessary procedures                      945,632

Surgery Related                                    384,000
Other Causes

Alcohol abuse                                         960,000

Illegal drugs                                             113,148

*Marijuana abuse                                              0

Iraq and Afghanistan wars                        6,737

Automobiles                                          460,000

*Abortions                                        14,400,000
*Marijuana overdose alone has not been a cause of death
**Note abortions legal under current law
Remember these are the total deaths in the 12 years since 9-11.  Consider the numbers and then consider the news media coverage of deaths in America.  No matter how you add it up, deaths from terrorism and urban gun deaths, which dominate all media, are far exceeded by multiple forms of medical malpractice and legal drug overdoses.
In fact of the 25 death or life termination categories only seven have fewer deaths than using a firearm to commit a homicide and one is terrorism with only 19 deaths in 12 years, the fewest of any category.
Ironically, there are seventeen categories with more deaths and medical related deaths far exceed those from firearm homicides and terrorism.  Note that during the 12 year period the US has spent more than a trillion dollars on Homeland Security and trillions more fighting wars in support of counter-terrorism.
The other interesting fact is the government actually admits that there has never been a death from a marijuana overdose.  Other legal and illegal drugs or alcohol are always present in victims.
Clearly media coverage is distorted and heavily favors terrorism (the Boston Marathon) and urban homicide (Trevor Martin-Zimmerman case) in order to make sure the news continues to keep the spotlight on the lucrative and ratings driven terrorism and murder categories.
With the overwhelming number of deaths related to medical malpractice, prescription drug overdose and related categories of unnecessary deaths, the absence of media and political focus is blatantly obvious.
Wake up America!  Your greatest risk of being killed unnecessarily in America comes from your doctors, hospitals and medical clinics, not guns, terrorists, illegal drugs or even wars.
So how tuned in are you to the truth?  Here is the latest Gallup poll on the most trusted professions in America.  Note the top three are all medical.  Yet the very same group of trusted categories dominate the cause of death statistics.
Hummmm.
Honesty/Ethics in Professions
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