Here’s an update on the Jessica Lane Chambers case, the young woman in Mississippi, who was burned alive in 2014:
Somehow, I don’t believe he acted alone. In all fairness, let me refer readers to the Last Refuge blog, for extensive dissection of this case (http://theconservativetreehouse.com/2016/02/23/breaking-new-developments-in-jessica-lane-chambers-murder-case-press-conference-tomorrow/ ).
Filed under General Interest
This will just be a quick list of links to some important events taking place beyond the American presidential primary sideshow:
On Turkey, watch carefully, as Erdogan’s Turkey wobbles:
On China:
On Saudi Arabia:
Filed under Foreign Policy, General Interest, Military, Politics
“I really don’t even know what I mean” (minute 4:40)…. yep, that about sums it all up!
Filed under General Interest, Politics
Trump the “great” twit or tweet or perhaps it’s retweeter…. Hey someone said and pass it on – that’s so “presidential”, but here it is at minute 1:31, with his new sleaze attack on Marco Rubio’s citizenship:
And the “powederedwigsociety”, the original source of the tweet, has a copyright of 2015, although it’s hard to discern who put that website up or runs it, but that didn’t stop Donald Trump from retweeting their garbage.
Filed under General Interest, Politics
Donald Trump, the politician, operates just like the Clintons, which should prove very interesting if he actually does hijack the GOP nomination. He is a fraud! His supporters can cough up his carefully crafted book, his sounding tough, he’s a successful businessman and reality TV star and I am sticking to he is a fraud, a con-man, as much a liar as Hillary Clinton, but most of all at heart he’s a petty bully. Hillary is a very dangerous bully, because she is a woman and women like her (sociopaths) will stop at nothing to get what they want (refer back to The Woman’s Way of War).
Frankly, if Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are the best America can do for candidates, we deserve to be relegated to laughingstock status on the world stage. Trump is no match for Putin, that’s for sure, but even worse he is no match for Hillary Clinton and besides, I still believe in time my suspicions that Trump hired dem political operatives in the beginning, who are operating in the shadows will prove to be true. No political operatives who really want to win the general election would allow their candidate to intentionally drive his/her negative ratings sky-high and encourage the vile, outrageous outbursts that characterize Trump’s campaign style. He won Iowa and South Carolina in the GOP primary, in a crowded field, but with way less than 50% of the GOP primary voters supporting him. His negative polling consistently is higher than Hillary Clinton’s, often polling above 60% and once the parties have their candidates selected (or a coronation, as the case may be for Hillary), the Clintons will unleash their dirt on Trump and bury him.
Here’s some new oddities in Trump’s sideshow antic out of Iowa, where he held that veteran’s fundraiser to divert attention away from the FOX News debate he was boycotting, because FOX would not let Trump control their choice of moderators. He tried to strong-arm a cable network based on his “feelings” that he wasn’t “being treated fairly.”
So, what happened to the money raised for veterans? Well, some has been disbursed to some veterans groups according to this Weekly Standard report, but their report highlights some warning bells that his Trump Foundation operates much like the Clinton Foundation. When Michael Warren, the reporter emailed the Trump Foundation with questions about the fundraiser this is what happened:
“On Thursday, I contacted the Donald J. Trump Foundation by email with a few questions about how the $6 million had been or was being disbursed. Five minutes later, I received a phone call from Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s presidential campaign manager. Lewandowski said a list of the recipients had been made public and that more recipients were being added all the time. How much had those recipients received? Lewandowski couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say. As a non-profit organization, he said, the Trump Foundation would release all the required details of its disbursements at the end of the fiscal year. To find out before then, he said, I’d have to contact the recipients themselves.
“The list is publicly available,” he said. “You can do your homework and ask the veterans’ organizations.”
Why wouldn’t the Trump Foundation want to publicize how much it had donated? (Especially given the fact that in recent years, Trump’s charity organization had given more money to the Clinton Foundationthan to veterans.) And why, when asking about the Foundation’s disbursements, had a representative of the campaign called? With no other options, however, I took Lewandowki’s advice.”
Why indeed did Trump’s campaign manager respond to questions about the Trump Foundation? That melding of the “charity” with the “political operations” is vintage Clinton and as it turns out, the way Trump does business too. There’s also some big pharmaceutical executive who rents space in Trump Tower, whom some recipients believe is connected to the Trump Foundation:
“”We found out like everybody else did, when the Trump Foundation put the list up on the website,” said Kerri Childress of the Fisher House Foundation, one of the groups on the Trump Foundation’s list. “And frankly we haven’t heard anything since.”
Childress says the Fisher House Foundation has yet to receive a donation, though she was quick to add that it’s not uncommon for pledged donations to take weeks or months to actually be disbursed. Neither has the Task Force Dagger Foundation received a check, says managing director Keith David. “We did receive a check from the Stewart J. Rahr Foundation, and they share the same floor with the Trump Foundation,” David adds. Rahr, a pharmaceutical executive-turned-Manhattan-playboy, is friends with Trump and rents office space in the Trump Tower. It’s not clear whether or not there is a relationship between Trump’s and Rahr’s foundations.
Another vets group, Operation Homefront, posted on its Facebook page that it received a $50,000 donation Monday from the Rahr Foundation, which the group says they “understand is made in connection with Donald Trump.” Beyond that, says Operation Homefront spokesman Aaron Taylor, they don’t know much about it.”
The similarities between Donald Trump and his friends, the Clintons, just keep multiplying, so if it ends up that Trump too hired dem political operatives to help him “win,” don’t act surprised! Sure wish we could track the phone traffic between Trump, some key Clinton sewer rats, and then Bill Clinton… Oh, to be a fly on the wall….
Filed under General Interest, Politics, Public Corruption
The cathedral theme in my previous post brought to mind this video I saw circulating on facebook recently. Warning to men, agnostics, atheists and even those who hate schmaltzy stuff, this is a female-empowerment, feel-good message with a strong religious message tossed in too:
Filed under Food for Thought, General Interest
Moving away from politics for a change, here’s a very interesting article from The Atlantic, “Hearing the Lost Sounds of Antiquity,” explaining how researchers are melding cutting edge technology with historical research to recreate the sounds from history, even sounds from the fourth century:
“History is mostly silent to us now.
Thousands of years of human stories have been told in paintings, and sculptures, and sheet music, and text; in shards and shells, and other fragments of things left behind. But because the history of recorded sound is only 160 years old, the original sounds of the distant past are lost to time.”
The article explains the technology used to recreate the lost sounds from history, but also offers some exciting ways the researchers believe their work could lead to new ways to understand history, beyond reading dry old histories or studying crumbling architecture:
“The data showing what happened to the chirp in each part of the church is fed to a computer, which then registers the impulse response for the unique space. And here’s where it gets really interesting: Once you have a building’s impulse response, you can apply it to a recording captured in another space and make it sound as though that recording had taken place in the original building.
“So you can take chanters with the original [Byzantine era] music and put them in a studio that has no acoustics,” Kyriakakis said. “They can sing a chant, and then we can process it … and all of the sudden we have performances happening in medieval structures. It’s like time travel to me.”
The implications go far beyond the ancient world. Kyriakakis, Donahue, and Gerstel imagine creating a catalog of impulse responses for historic buildings, then recreating the sounds of those structures in what would be, essentially, a museum of lost sound. With an integration of virtual reality technology, visitors could even get the experience of how the sound would have changed as people moved through a given space. (Theoretically, they could share these recordings online, too, but both Kyriakakis and Donahue say it’s harder to render the sound authentically over headphones. They talk more about the idea in a USC Engineering podcast.)
The museum they’re envisioning would include churches, like the ones they’ve already mapped, but other structures, too—everything from ancient theaters and the Parthenon (an experiment that would also require mathematical modeling to bring back the missing part) to modern baseball stadiums and train stations. “If we open up this idea,” Kyriakakis told me, “there’s no limit as to what can be measured and recreated.””
Now, consider researchers in a free society devoting energy to something that benefits everyone, while in other parts of the world we have a retrogression taking place where all the worst horrors of barbarism and depravity are embraced by religious zealots and their view on preserving history is to loot and then destroy ancient sites:
“So why is Isis blowing to pieces the greatest artefacts of ancient history in Syria and Iraq? The archeologist Joanne Farchakh has a unique answer to a unique crime. First, Isis sells the statues, stone faces and frescoes that international dealers demand. It takes the money, hands over the relics – and blows up the temples and buildings they come from to conceal the evidence of what has been looted.”
Okay, I promised this wasn’t going to delve into politics, so let me end here before launching into a foreign policy rant and let’s think about how these researchers recreating sounds from antiquity have actually come up with a sound in ancient cathedrals referred to as:
““They also discovered something that we call slap echo,” Donahue added, “when you have walls fairly close to one another and the frequencies go back and forth. It goes ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta. [In the ancient world,] they described it as the sound of angels’ wings.””
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/02/byzantine-angel-wings/470076/
The sound of angels’ wings…….. now that’s pretty amazing!
Filed under Food for Thought, General Interest, History
The Pope jumped into the American political race yesterday, so while the Vatican is trying to clarify the Pope’s comment about Trump’s always talking about building a wall, as not being Christian, and offering the building bridges between people as the proper Christian way, lest we get sidetracked, some things struck me as odd, that go well beyond the Pope’s statement and timing to interject himself into US politics.
First, the Pope gave Trump more oxygen to get back to his original appeal, from which he has drifted considerably in recent months – that America’s national security is threatened by uncontrolled borders and illegal immigration. A “wall” and or whatever means are necessary to secure our borders is a primary duty of our federal government, one both political parties have abdicated for decades.
Second, the Pope allowed for Trump to monopolize the media coverage and news cycle heading into a critical GOP primary in South Carolina, on Saturday.
Who knows why the Pope gave Trump more attention, when a Trump loss in SC could speed up a Trump demise, which assuredly the Pope would welcome, as one who obviously aligns with leftist South American social justice politics.
As to Trump’s response, one thing struck me as very odd. For once Trump came out and appeared to be reading prepared remarks and seemed at great pains to keep his emotions in check. I wondered who wrote those remarks for him, because the remarks seemed very tempered compared to Trump’s usual rants and rambling spiels. I’d love to know who Trump’s closest political advisers really are? They aren’t his campaign manager or his snotty campaign spokeswoman, that’s for sure. Once again, who are the real Trump political advisers?
Filed under Culture Wars, Foreign Policy, General Interest, Politics
For a long while, I believed the analysis that our going into Iraq fueled the radical Islamic fervor and set the conditions for ISIS to form, but here’s a new look from David French, “The Rise of ISIS Predates the Fall of Saddam Hussein,”
that dismantles my view and it’s worth studying. More information should prod us to reconsider our previous conclusions, especially on complex geopolitical issues. French quotes extensively from Kyle Orton’s New York Times piece, “How Saddam Gave Us ISIS”, so please read both articles. French begins:
“The New York Times has published a necessary corrective to those who view the invasion of Iraq as essentially Year Zero in the Middle East — the origin point for all the calamities that followed. Have you heard that ISIS is George Bush’s fault? Think again. Writing in the Times, Kyle Orton properly attributes the rise of ISIS in Iraq to cultural and religious forces that long pre-dated the American invasion of Iraq. It turns out that Iraq was no more immune to increased radicalization than any other Middle Eastern state, and Saddam reacted in part by embracing the new religiosity”
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/431380/rise-isis-predates-fall-saddam-hussein
Jay Nordlinger added, “Saddam and Fille,” which also expands on French’s piece.
Definitely worth taking time to reassess what we think we know about the history of Iraq and ISIS, because sometimes those things that Rumsfeld dubbed “known knowns” are shown to be incorrect, making it imperative to be willing to reassess when new information comes to light.
Filed under Foreign Policy, General Interest, Islam, Military, Politics, Terrorism
Happy Valentine’s Day! Hopefully, I’ll come up with some original posts soon and in fact, although there’s one in my draft’s folder already written on “Wholesale Public Corruption,” it’s probably best to wait to post that one until a few more bits of evidence pan out conclusively. All of my Messages of mhere story did happen in 1998 and early 1999 – that story is the truth! The larger mystery of why so much effort and money was expended to shut me up, over my comments posted at the online, public, Excite message boards on the Clinton impeachment scandal, has taken longer to unravel. I believe it goes to something deeper than just the Clintons, as stated in recent posts, hence my post “Wholesale Public Corruption”.
Until the moment arrives when I decide to post that, let me express my deep sorrow and also deep fear at hearing of Justice Scalia’s passing yesterday. Another blow to The Constitution being able to survive the forces at play to “fundamentally transform America,” it took only hours before the partisan forces, on both sides, took to the media to lob their attacks at each other. They didn’t even have the respect to let his body be laid to rest, before unleashing this new front in their ongoing battle, really just a smokescreen to dupe the American people, whom they think of as mindless idiots or low information voters. While Americans angrily join these manufactured partisan battles, attacking each other, these power-brokers in America keep consolidating their own power among their elite group, where membership in either political party is by invitation only. So, enough of poltiics today, instead here’s another fascinating historical tidbit from The American Minute:
People often sign Valentine cards with X’s and O’s.
The Greek name for Christ, Χριστό, begins with the letter “X” which in Greek is called “Chi.”
“X” became a common abbreviation for the name Christ.
This is why Christ-mas is abbreviated as X-mas.
In Medieval times, the “X” was called the Christ’s Cross, or “Criss-Cross.”
The “Criss-Cross Row” was the way colonial school children learned the alphabet, where they would start at the X and say “May Christ’s Cross grant me speed (success)” and then proceed to recite the 26 letters.
It reminded students that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”
“Mortals ne’er shall know
More than contained of old the Chris’-cross row.”The Christ’s Cross was a form of a written oath.
Similar to the ancient practice of swearing upon a Bible, saying “so help me God,” then kissing the Bible, people would sign a document with or next to the Christ’s Cross to swear before God they would keep the agreement, then kiss it to show sincerity.
This practice has come down to us as “sign at the X”, or saying “I swear, cross my heart.”
This is the origin of signing a Valentines’ card with an “X” to express a pledge before God to be faithful, and an “O” to seal the pledge with a kiss of sincerity.
So, we still get the kisses part, the O, of XO correct; it was the X meaning hugs that is not. You can read the entire American Minute post at: http://www.americanminute.com/index.php
Filed under Culture Wars, General Interest, History, Politics, The Constitution
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