Month: October 2017

It looks like the “hero” security guard in the Vegas shooting is illegal.

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UPDATE: The hero guard has surfaced and will be on the Ellen Degeneres show.

He went for the money, which was sensible of him, but does anyone think he will be asked about his immigration status ?

The “hero” security guard in the Las Vegas shooting has not only disappeared, but had a false Social Security number.

I guess that’s why he bolted before the press conference.

He also may be the reason for the shifting stories about the shooting.

There are photos of him wearing a badge and others without it.

The security guard was supposed to be interviewed by Fox News’ Sean Hannity, but the host tweeted on Thursday: ‘He cancelled.’
Campos’ disappearance came just hours after MGM Resorts International, which owns the Mandalay Bay, disputed the official timeline of the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history, rejecting any suggestion that hotel staff delayed calling 911 for six minutes after Paddock opened fire.

Maybe he did not have a gun because he could not pass a background check. Then there is the matter of the six minutes after he was shot and the massacre began.

The latest chronology raised a series of questions about whether officers were given information quickly enough to possibly have a chance to take out the gunman before he could carry out the bloodshed.
But according to resort officials, it was no more than 40 seconds between the time Campos used his walkie talkie to call for help and Paddock opening fire on the crowd from two windows in his suite.
Earlier in the investigation, police had said that Paddock shot through his door and wounded Campos after the guard distracted him from firing on the crowd out the windows.
Campos’ union president said the latest timeline does not dispute the assertion that the guard is ‘still a hero, saving his coworker, possibly stopping additional shots,’ reported Stephanie Wash.

Two timelines. Mysteries about the motive, whether there was a second shooter, who used his card key when he was gone ?

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Shameless book promo

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I’ve started writing again after a ten-year pause, so it’s pretty much like starting from scratch and I can use all the help I can get. The first two books of a three-book science fiction series, Insurgents and Awakening, are available on Amazon now, and the third, Survivors, will be up in a week or two. (The books work as stand-alone novels; you don’t have to read them as a series, though I think they’re more fun that way.) All three are/will be available in paperback and e-book editions, and the e-books are free in Kindle Unlimited.

There’s an excerpt from Insurgents here and the first chapter of Awakening here, if anybody’s interested.

I hope ChicagoBoyz readers will find the trilogy interesting, since it’s meant to be the chronicle of a totalitarian society’s collapse over a period of several generations.

If anybody happens to read one, I would be very grateful for a review.

Josh Blackman and Seth Barrett Tillman: The ‘Resistance’ vs. George Washington

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The conclusion of Seth’s brief piece:

But for some reason the Trump administration continues to stand by the 2009 opinion, drawn up when Mr. Obama was being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which came with a $1.4 million award. The Office of Legal Counsel concluded Mr. Obama could accept the money, but the opinion simply assumed the Foreign Emoluments Clause applied to the presidency. It was taken as a given with no citations either to judicial rulings or to the practices established by Washington and other founders.
 
We have submitted friend-of-the-court briefs in New York, the District of Columbia and Maryland explaining this argument. At a minimum, the historical record should give Justice pause. But ideally the department would abandon the 2009 opinion and argue in court that the president is not governed by this clause. Mr. Trump’s adversaries are arguing that Washington and Jefferson were crooks.

(The full column is behind a pay wall but is worth reading if you have access.)

History Weekend: Revisiting “Atomic Diplomacy,” the “Million Casualty Lie,” and Casualty Planning for the Invasion of Japan

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When I wrote my Sept 2nd column “Happy VJ-Day, Plus 72 Years,” last month, it was with the intent to show a couple of things.  First, that “Atomic Diplomacy” — the belief that USA dropped the Atomic Bomb on Japan to intimidate the Soviet Union at the beginning of the Cold War — was a Leftist identity based belief system unsupported by the real historical record.  And second, that it’s genesis was due to the lies and cover up of those lies by a generation of high level US national security bureaucrats like Paul Nitze and WW2 generation flag rank politicians for decades after World War II.

This column will expand on that second point by revisiting “Atomic Diplomacy,” the “Million Casualty Lie” founding myth that it pushed and recent research finds by research partner Ryan Crierie and I had on the War Department casualty planning for the Invasion of Japan.

In addition to the lies of Paul Nitze so well laid out by Paul Newman’s various books, which my last VJ-Day column dealt with, there was in fact a great deal of lying about the American casualties and the Atomic bomb.  It was a “Million Casualty Lie,”  but the Atomic Diplomacy Historical Revisionists got the lie vector 180 degrees wrong.

The Post War American military, and General Marshall in particular, was in fact hiding a much bigger casualty number for the conquest of Japan and the destruction of the Imperial Japanese military.  And they had been hiding it from public view since July 1944.

The following will show that the War Department planning process is where these lies were born during the war,  where these institutional lies were spread from and the how/why/who kept these lies going in the decades afterwards.

Chart 2. War Plans Division, War Department General Staff: 21 December 1941
Figure 1 — War Plans Division, War Department General Staff: 21 December 1941.  A simple organizational chart reflecting inadequate planning for a global war. Source: OPD 312, 105

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