Proactively “From the Sea”; an agent of change leveraging the littoral best practices for a paradigm breaking six-sigma best business case to synergize a consistent design in the global commons, rightsizing the core values supporting our mission statement via the 5-vector model through cultural diversity.
The Hurt Locker opened in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, and will go into wider release over this upcoming holiday weekend (I saw the film from a screener copy). This is a must-see film, not for any particular message but for anyone interested in an honest presentation of the kind of warfare fought in Iraq. On Thursday, I’ll interview Marc Boal on The Ed Morrissey Show in greater depth just as it opens on more screens.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Sunday put troops on alert after a coup in Honduras and said he would respond militarily if his envoy to the Central American country was kidnapped or killed.
Chavez said Honduran soldiers took away the Cuban ambassador and left the Venezuelan ambassador on the side of a road after beating him during the army's coup against his leftist ally, Honduran President Manuel Zelaya.
The Honduran army ousted Zelaya and exiled him in Central America's first military coup since the Cold War, after he upset the army by trying to win re-election.
In that case, I'll stand with the Honduran military. I like my bastard better. Lefty wanted to remain in power unconstitutionally - and the military said, "No."
I'm ok with that. Hold the elections on time in 2010 an in the meantime put the next in line in the seat --- and all will be forgiven. If the military tries to stay in power, then to h311 with them.UPDATE:I don't like this initial reaction by out SECSTATE. Why are we on the same side as Hugo and Fidel?
Yesterday the Central American country was being pressured to restore the authoritarian Mr. Zelaya by the likes of Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Hillary Clinton and, of course, Hugo himself. The Organization of American States, having ignored Mr. Zelaya's abuses, also wants him back in power. ... It's not surprising that chavistas throughout the region are claiming that he was victim of a military coup. They want to hide the fact that the military was acting on a court order to defend the rule of law and the constitution, and that the Congress asserted itself for that purpose, too.
Mrs. Clinton has piled on as well. Yesterday she accused Honduras of violating "the precepts of the Interamerican Democratic Charter" and said it "should be condemned by all." Fidel Castro did just that. Mr. Chávez pledged to overthrow the new government.
What did Zelaya do?
That Mr. Zelaya acted as if he were above the law, there is no doubt. While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite, the power to open that door does not lie with the president. A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress.
But Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own and had Mr. Chávez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela. The Supreme Court ruled his referendum unconstitutional, and it instructed the military not to carry out the logistics of the vote as it normally would do.
The top military commander, Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, told the president that he would have to comply. Mr. Zelaya promptly fired him. The Supreme Court ordered him reinstated. Mr. Zelaya refused.
Calculating that some critical mass of Hondurans would take his side, the president decided he would run the referendum himself. So on Thursday he led a mob that broke into the military installation where the ballots from Venezuela were being stored and then had his supporters distribute them in defiance of the Supreme Court's order.
The attorney general had already made clear that the referendum was illegal, and he further announced that he would prosecute anyone involved in carrying it out.
...and the Hondurans?
Honduras is fighting back by strictly following the constitution. The Honduran Congress met in emergency session yesterday and designated its president as the interim executive as stipulated in Honduran law. It also said that presidential elections set for November will go forward. The Supreme Court later said that the military acted on its orders. It also said that when Mr. Zelaya realized that he was going to be prosecuted for his illegal behavior, he agreed to an offer to resign in exchange for safe passage out of the country. Mr. Zelaya denies it.
Many Hondurans are going to be celebrating Mr. Zelaya's foreign excursion. Street protests against his heavy-handed tactics had already begun last week. On Friday a large number of military reservists took their turn. "We won't go backwards," one sign said. "We want to live in peace, freedom and development."
Besides opposition from the Congress, the Supreme Court, the electoral tribunal and the attorney general, the president had also become persona non grata with the Catholic Church and numerous evangelical church leaders. On Thursday evening his own party in Congress sponsored a resolution to investigate whether he is mentally unfit to remain in office.
I think Mary O'Grady in the WSJ is right, the Hondurans that threw Zelaya out of the country are patriots. Our government is close to being on the wrong side of history.
If we stick to the vaporish words of the CINC,
"I call on all political and social actors in Honduras to respect democratic norms, the rule of law and the tenets of the Inter-American Democratic Charter. Any existing tensions and disputes must be resolved peacefully through dialogue free from any outside interference," Obama said.
... is about right. Unlike the first quote above, this is better from the SECSTATE,
"We call on all parties in Honduras to respect the constitutional order and the rule of law, to reaffirm their democratic vocation, and to commit themselves to resolve political disputes peacefully and through dialogue," Clinton said in a statement.
Maybe we can stay on the right side of history and not join Hugo. In the end though, the Hondurans seem to have things under control.
Efforts by local congressmen to block moving a Norfolk-based aircraft carrier to Florida and to give more clout to opponents of the Navy's proposed outlying landing field won approval in the U.S. House in Washington on Thursday.
The measures were included in the House legislation that would authorize $680 billion for defense spending in 2010, including a 3.4 percent pay raise for all service members.
The House kept intact an amendment that would cancel spending $46.3 million to dredge the harbor at Mayport Naval Station near Jacksonville, Fla., in preparation for a new carrier. The amendment was written by U.S. Rep. Glenn Nye, D-2nd District, and co-sponsored by U.S. Reps. Randy Forbes, R-4th District, and Rob Wittman, R-1st District.
Nye said Thursday that the amendment was not a hard sell in the House.
"I think we had the power of logic on our side," he said.
The three legislators have said it doesn't make sense to authorize spending money for the dredging when the Navy has agreed to wait another year to make a decision on carrier homeports.
"The Department of Defense needs to first determine whether or not moving a carrier away from Norfolk is a good idea before they start spending money on the transfer," Wittman said in a written statement after the vote.
The money for the dredging would be redirected to construction and repairs at Navy and Marine Corps Reserve facilities.
The defense bill also includes an amendment by Forbes that would give communities more control over whether the Navy could construct an outlying landing field, or OLF, in their jurisdiction.
Forbes' amendment would allow a county being considered for an OLF to have a final say on whether to accept it. The Navy would be unable to build a landing field if the local government formally opposed it within 90 days of final site selection.
U.S. Rep. Walter Jones, a North Carolina Republican, also successfully included an amendment to the House bill that would prohibit building an outlying landing field at Sandbanks or Hale's Lake in the northeastern part of his state. The Navy has considered those locations and three others in Virginia's Southampton, Sussex and Surry counties.
Joy. Myopic localism at its worst.
I think in Latin it is, Magis expositus quod minor instructus.
I am serious. No kidding --- I just found a strange new respect for Evelyn Waugh --- no kidding.
This guy sounds exactly like the guy Skippy and I would want to go to war with ... here's why.
I enjoy driving off the Interstate. Likewise, I like to troll around old used book stores and the book sections of flee markets. Combine that with and interest in the under told stories of warfare - I bumbled into and interesting little book about an interesting and, at least to me, unknown corner of WWII. For example, Ken Ford's Assault on Germany : The Battle for Geilenkirchen.
If you crack it open to page 26 and started reading the following, I ask you; how could you not spit out a few bucks for this book .... and then not want to get hold of Waugh's Brideshead Revisited?
Waugh had applied to the War Office for leave to complete his late3st novel - Brideshead Revisited (Everyman's Library Classics) - but was told that he had been found employment with Major-General Thomas as an ADC. At a meeting arranged over lunch a the Aperitif Restaurant in London, Waugh tried to warn Thomas that he was not the ideal man to be an aide-de-camp, but nonetheless the general was rather taken with the thought of having a literary celebrity on his staff and accepted the novelist for a week's trail.
It was a disaster. Waugh arrived at the Divisional HQ on Tuesday, 29 February, and was gone by the Thursday of the same week. The reason for his short stay and his relations with the general, were recorded in Waugh's diary:
The primary lack of sympathy seemed to come from my being slightly drunk in his mess on the first evening. I told him I could not change the habits of a lifetime for a whim of his. The HQ was architecturally deplorable and the staff glum and drab.
One of the staff officers at the HQ, Lieutenant-Colonel Williams Thomas, remembers Waugh's short stay and a quite different reason for his departure:
Evelyn Waugh was always pretty well 'oiled' and got sacked shortly after his arrival when he came gangling down the stairs in 'A' Mess singing, "His father was a harpist, his father was a harpist." Waugh had been checking in Who's Who and discovered that Thomas's father had been a harpist to Queen Victoria. We all thought it was hilarious. I do not thing Waught was ever forgiven for letting the cat out of the bag!
That is a character to go to war with ... for a couple of days only, perhaps.
What a great name for a great man. Fair winds and following seas Lieutenant Commander Max Shean, RN.
Lieutenant-Commander Max Shean, who has died aged 90, was one of the small band of young men who, in the face of extraordinary peril, carried the sea war into enemy harbours; in the process they won a total of 68 awards for bravery, including four VCs; for his own exploits, Shean received a DSO and Bar.
His first mission was Operation Source, the attack by a flotilla of X-craft on the German battleship Tirpitz in north Norway in September 1943. The X-craft were manned by passage crews and towed there by parent submarines, while attack crews, including Shean's, prepared themselves in the towing vessels.
Disaster struck, however, when Shean's X-9, behind Syrtis, broke her tow and the passage crew was lost. The towrope became tangled round Syrtis's port propeller, and Shean, whose diving suit was in X-9, plunged over the side into the freezing waters. Wearing overalls weighted with steel bars in the pockets, Shean repeatedly duck-dived until he could free the tangled rope. Knowing that, if attacked from the air, Syrtis would dive and abandon him on the surface, Shean was more frightened than he had ever been; and when he was hauled on board, the submarine's commanding officer rewarded him with a brusque "Well done!"
One of the lessons of Operation Source was the potential for confusion during multiple attacks; so on Operation Guidance, in April 1944, Shean, now in command of X-24, was towed by Sceptre to Bergen, Norway, to make a solo attack on a large floating dock.
Shean successfully penetrated the fjords to reach the harbour, but faulty intelligence caused him to lay X-24's explosive charges under a 7,800-ton German merchant ship, Barenfels, instead of the floating dock. Otherwise it was a model attack, and 24 hours later, sick and suffering from headaches caused by the stale air in the boat, Shean and his crew rendezvoused at sea with Sceptre. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for his great courage, skill and determination in a most hazardous enterprise.
Following D-Day, Shean's flotilla was deployed to the Far East in command of an improved craft, XE-4. When Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Ocean Areas, and an experienced submariner, saw his first XE-craft he declared it was a "suicide craft" which had no place in the Allies' order of battle. But when orders came from Washington to cut two underwater telegraph cables off Japanese-occupied Saigon, he found that the British midget submarines were the only force capable of achieving this.
.- but was told that he had been found employment with Major-General Thomas as an ADC. At a meeting arranged over lunch a the Aperitif Restaurant in London, Waugh tried to warn Thomas that he was not the ideal man to be an aide-de-camp, but nonetheless the general was rather taken with the thought of having a literary celebrity on his staff and accepted the novelist for a week's trail.
