UPDATE: Martial Law Thread

I didn't want to split the thread on this subject, so please look at the October 6 post on Martial law, also available at this link --
--Rep. Sherman from California states that Congress has been threatened with Martial Law...

Smash-Mouth On Wall Street

Not That I Encourage This... snicker,snicker...

Knock Out: CNBC Confirms Lehman CEO Punched at Gym
Network verifies reports Richard Fuld was attacked for financial institution's bankruptcy.

By Jeff Poor
Business & Media Institute
10/6/2008 3:59:29 PM


It seems anxiety from the financial crisis is reaching new highs, but the tipping point for one individual came at the Lehman Brothers gym in the midst of the company’s collapse.
While former Lehman CEO Richard Fuld was testifying before the House Oversight Committee Oct. 6, CNBC reported he had been punched in the face at the Lehman Brothers gym after it was announced the firm was going bankrupt. CNBC and Vanity Fair contributor Vicki Ward said Fuld was attacked at the gym on a Sunday following the bankruptcy.
“Frankly, I sat there and listened and I’m with the guy who apparently, the day before Barclays announced they were coming in and Lehman had already filed for bankruptcy, went over to him in the gym and punched him because that’s how I feel when I, you know, when I watched that,” Ward said on the Oct. 6 “Power Lunch.” “I didn’t think he was contrite at all, I thought he was arrogant.”
Ward confirmed previous reports about the incident that reportedly occurred Sept. 21 and said the information came from “two very senior sources.”
“From two very senior sources – one incredibly senior source – that he went to the gym after … Lehman was announced as going under. He was on a treadmill with a heart monitor on. Someone was in the corner, pumping iron and he walked over and he knocked him out cold. And frankly after having watched this, I’d have done the same too.”
Ward determined Fuld deserved the beating based on his testimony before the committee.
“I thought he was shameless,” Ward said. “I thought it was appalling. He blamed everyone. He blamed, as you say, ‘naked short sellers’ over and over in case we didn’t get the point, when in fact hedge funds like Harbinger had money locked up in Lehman and was shorting it to try and make the most of the money that they already had. He blamed everybody but himself.”
Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in September 2008 and its assets were later snatched up by the British bank Barclays for $1.35 billion, which included Lehman’s Midtown Manhattan office tower with a $960 million price tag.

Judo With Putin

LINK

Judo black belt Putin shows off moves in DVD

By IRINA TITOVA
Associated Press Writer
Judo black belt Putin shows off moves in DVD
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia (AP) -- Vladimir Putin is out on video as a judo master. Russian state-controlled media already have shown the powerful prime minister at the wheel of massive racing truck, shirtless on a fishing excursion, and tracking a tiger through the Siberian forest - just a few of the he-man presentations designed to boost his public image.
On Tuesday, he presented an instructional judo DVD that bears his name and shows him throwing an opponent to the mat.
"Let's Learn Judo with Vladimir Putin" is the product of collaboration between Putin - a black belt - and other judo enthusiasts, including former World and Olympic judo champion Yasuhiro Yamashita. It apparently was privately made and intended mainly for Russians studying judo.
Early Tuesday morning, minutes into his 56th birthday, Putin talked about the video at a presentation before journalists and other guests at a state-owned venue. Putin said the video's title was little more than an "advertising trick." Anyone who watches it "will be learning not from your humble servant but from real geniuses" of the martial art, he said.
Portions of the promotion and the video were shown on Russian television later Tuesday. The video depicted a black-clad Putin talking about the history and philosophy of judo, as well as a white-robed Putin demonstrating moves against a practice partner - and throwing him to the mat several times.
"In a bout, compromises and concessions are permissible, but only in one case: if it is for victory," Putin says at one point in the video, as Asian-style music plays on the soundtrack.
Putin is a one-time judo champion of his home city St. Petersburg, called Leningrad at the time, and he doesn't hesitate to promote the sport.
For instance, the former Russian president has disclosed that French President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to take some martial arts lessons.
"He is interested in martial arts, and we have decided to do some training together," Le Figaro, a leading French newspaper, quoted Putin as saying in an interview published last month.
Putin also is an avid skier, and his apparent fitness and devotion to physical activity helped increase his popularity in eight years as president. This contrasted sharply with his hard-drinking and chronically ill predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, who died last year.
"The level of developing of sports undoubtedly defines the level of development of the country itself," Putin said during the video's promotion.
"Without sports, it's impossible to speak of a healthy way of life, about the health of the nation as such," he said.
---
AP correspondent Steve Gutterman contributed to this story from Moscow.

UPDATE: Rep. Sherman On Martial Law Threat --Prelude To Martial Law?

Rep. Sherman Says Congress Was Threatened With Martial Law

With a "perfect storm" of financial crisis shaking the very core of the global economy, the Democratic party poised to take the White House, and the real possibility the crimes of Cheney/Bush will be accounted for, we read this from The Army Times:

Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1

3rd Infantry’s 1st BCT trains for a new dwell-time mission. Helping ‘people at home’ may become a permanent part of the active Army
By Gina Cavallaro - Staff writer
Posted : Tuesday Sep 30, 2008 16:16:12 EDT

The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle, helping restore essential services and escorting supply convoys.
Now they’re training for the same mission — with a twist — at home.
Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.
It is not the first time an active-duty unit has been tapped to help at home. In August 2005, for example, when Hurricane Katrina unleashed hell in Mississippi and Louisiana, several active-duty units were pulled from various posts and mobilized to those areas.
But this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities.
After 1st BCT finishes its dwell-time mission, expectations are that another, as yet unnamed, active-duty brigade will take over and that the mission will be a permanent one.
“Right now, the response force requirement will be an enduring mission. How the [Defense Department] chooses to source that and whether or not they continue to assign them to NorthCom, that could change in the future,” said Army Col. Louis Vogler, chief of NorthCom future operations. “Now, the plan is to assign a force every year.”
The command is at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colo., but the soldiers with 1st BCT, who returned in April after 15 months in Iraq, will operate out of their home post at Fort Stewart, Ga., where they’ll be able to go to school, spend time with their families and train for their new homeland mission as well as the counterinsurgency mission in the war zones.
Stop-loss will not be in effect, so soldiers will be able to leave the Army or move to new assignments during the mission, and the operational tempo will be variable.
Don’t look for any extra time off, though. The at-home mission does not take the place of scheduled combat-zone deployments and will take place during the so-called dwell time a unit gets to reset and regenerate after a deployment.
The 1st of the 3rd is still scheduled to deploy to either Iraq or Afghanistan in early 2010, which means the soldiers will have been home a minimum of 20 months by the time they ship out.
In the meantime, they’ll learn new skills, use some of the ones they acquired in the war zone and more than likely will not be shot at while doing any of it.
They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack.
Training for homeland scenarios has already begun at Fort Stewart and includes specialty tasks such as knowing how to use the “jaws of life” to extract a person from a mangled vehicle; extra medical training for a CBRNE incident; and working with U.S. Forestry Service experts on how to go in with chainsaws and cut and clear trees to clear a road or area.
The 1st BCT’s soldiers also will learn how to use “the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded,” 1st BCT commander Col. Roger Cloutier said, referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them.
The package is for use only in war-zone operations, not for any domestic purpose.
“It’s a new modular package of nonlethal capabilities that they’re fielding. They’ve been using pieces of it in Iraq, but this is the first time that these modules were consolidated and this package fielded, and because of this mission we’re undertaking we were the first to get it.”
The package includes equipment to stand up a hasty road block; spike strips for slowing, stopping or controlling traffic; shields and batons; and, beanbag bullets.
“I was the first guy in the brigade to get Tasered,” said Cloutier, describing the experience as “your worst muscle cramp ever — times 10 throughout your whole body.
“I’m not a small guy, I weigh 230 pounds ... it put me on my knees in seconds.”
The brigade will not change its name, but the force will be known for the next year as a CBRNE Consequence Management Response Force, or CCMRF (pronounced “sea-smurf”).
“I can’t think of a more noble mission than this,” said Cloutier, who took command in July. “We’ve been all over the world during this time of conflict, but now our mission is to take care of citizens at home ... and depending on where an event occurred, you’re going home to take care of your home town, your loved ones.”
While soldiers’ combat training is applicable, he said, some nuances don’t apply.
“If we go in, we’re going in to help American citizens on American soil, to save lives, provide critical life support, help clear debris, restore normalcy and support whatever local agencies need us to do, so it’s kind of a different role,” said Cloutier, who, as the division operations officer on the last rotation, learned of the homeland mission a few months ago while they were still in Iraq.
Some brigade elements will be on call around the clock, during which time they’ll do their regular marksmanship, gunnery and other deployment training. That’s because the unit will continue to train and reset for the next deployment, even as it serves in its CCMRF mission.
Should personnel be needed at an earthquake in California, for example, all or part of the brigade could be scrambled there, depending on the extent of the need and the specialties involved.
Other branches included
The active Army’s new dwell-time mission is part of a NorthCom and DOD response package.
Active-duty soldiers will be part of a force that includes elements from other military branches and dedicated National Guard Weapons of Mass Destruction-Civil Support Teams.
A final mission rehearsal exercise is scheduled for mid-September at Fort Stewart and will be run by Joint Task Force Civil Support, a unit based out of Fort Monroe, Va., that will coordinate and evaluate the interservice event.
In addition to 1st BCT, other Army units will take part in the two-week training exercise, including elements of the 1st Medical Brigade out of Fort Hood, Texas, and the 82nd Combat Aviation Brigade from Fort Bragg, N.C.
There also will be Air Force engineer and medical units, the Marine Corps Chemical, Biological Initial Reaction Force, a Navy weather team and members of the Defense Logistics Agency and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
One of the things Vogler said they’ll be looking at is communications capabilities between the services.
“It is a concern, and we’re trying to check that and one of the ways we do that is by having these sorts of exercises. Leading up to this, we are going to rehearse and set up some of the communications systems to make sure we have interoperability,” he said.
“I don’t know what America’s overall plan is — I just know that 24 hours a day, seven days a week, there are soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines that are standing by to come and help if they’re called,” Cloutier said. “It makes me feel good as an American to know that my country has dedicated a force to come in and help the people at home.”
———Correction:
A non-lethal crowd control package fielded to 1st Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, described in the original version of this story, is intended for use on deployments to the war zone, not in the U.S., as previously stated.
Army Times Link

(D.R.)--I am not reassured by the brief correction at the end, and it seems this is a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids the US military from being used for domestic purposes. To quote from above: "They may called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control"...

Book Review: "Me, Chi, And Bruce Lee"

In 1963, writer George Plimpton, on a lark I presume, signed on for training camp with The Detroit Lions football team. A skinny thirty-six year-old, he totally sucked. He did however get some playing time, and got to hang out with the players, coaches and groupies. The result was his famous book "Paper Lion", which detailed his experiance in ways most football fans could only imagine.
Fast-foward to the present, we meet Brian Preston. Preston is an unasuming, polite "everyman", living on Vancouver Island, Canada. He has a taste for good Beer, and is most famous for his previous book "Pot Planet - Adventures In Global Marijuana Culture". Preston is definately a guy I'd like to have a Beer with.
After experiancing frustration with getting his views published in some venues, Preston's book publisher talks him into doing a book on Martial Arts, something Preston is unprepared and generally unsuited for. From there, we follow this self-described "cerebral, haphazard, unfailingly harmless pacifist" as he begins his "hero's journey" into the world of Martial Arts.
If anything, Preston's self-deprecating sense of humor really stands out, as he experiances a panic attack while being pinned by a sixty year-old grandma at Sifu Bob's Kung Fu school. Again as his ribs get broken when he meets Royce Gracie at a snowbound Canadian Jujitsu seminar. In China, he trains at Shaolin and during a bout of food poisening, he is preoccupied with worrying about shitting his white Kung Fu training pants. Preston is the consummate "hanger-oner" who always comes up with a good idea or solution. We experiance his disappointment at the blatant State-Capitalism that drives Shaolin under a new era of Communist/Capitalist rule. We relate to the training limitations of his middle-aged body.
But mostly, we benefit from Preston's personal experiances with people like the stoic Royce Gracie, historical expert Jarek Szymanski of the website ChinaFromInside.com , and of course, radical leftist-Christian-anarchist UFC fighter Jeff Monson.
Brian Preston compiles a thoughtful catalog of martial readings and colorful experiances from snowbound Canada to Wudang Mountain, from Shaolin to Las Vegas.
Through all this, our ungainly hero finally finds a martial style that suits him, one that he hopes to continue for the rest of his life.
"Me, Chi, and Bruce Lee" is a rollicking fun book, a great read that both takes us around the world and allows us to explore our own inner martial journey.
-Please check out this book, and hundreds of other Martial Arts titles at "Blue Snake Books", their website is available at THIS LINK... Check it out!

High Pass - Bagua Fan-Jang

Here we are working on the "high pass", also seen as Fan-Jang in the Bagua system.
The idea is to move outside (away from) the power curve and not take a hard block. This is more of a parry with one arm and taking over with the other, sometimes called "feed the tiger" in other systems. The "shutdown", or pinning the opponents arm against them is a critical technique. This is why we work to keep our "Peng", or "ward-off" expanded and full in push hands. The armbar is a good example of "Rollback". The Backfist is just the start, of course you would continue pressing on with repeated strikes or a takedown.
We may focus on the first technique, "The Shutdown" in another video, because it is such an important technique for controlling the opponent and taking their center. We'll also look at a couple of good takedowns and arm breaks to experiment with, stay tuned...

October: Cute Hippie Chick Of The Month

Up Periscope-
Looks like a methane leak...