Yearly Archives: 2018

Remember Vets – By Doing Something!

Posted on May 28, 2018 at 8:40 am by John Flannery |

At the Vietnam wall of remembrance

We have had another Memorial Day and remembered the sacrifice of the men and women who served this nation.

But we really should be doing a lot more than simply – “remembering them.”

We must do better and demand that our elected and appointed officials “do something.”

My late uncle, Charles Flannery, served in the armed forces led by General Patton when the Allies attacked by way of Sicily, landing on the beaches of Italy.

Charles was shot in the chest, lifted off his feet, spun around, knocked unconscious, and taken prisoner. He returned home quite emaciated.

Years after the war, Charles died in a hospital in the Bronx that, according to my elders, refused to give him more blood, to save him from that earlier chest wound.

Ours was one family, as young as I was, that resented the nation’s unfulfilled promise to our Uncle Charles.

Our nation has been long on promises to vets when leaving our shores to serve our nation abroad, and quite uneven, often indifferent, falling way short to meet their needs, upon their return home broken and damaged by their service at war.

One clear indication of how we are currently failing our service men and women is the statistic that we lose so many soldiers upon their return to suicide. Continue reading →

The War Continues

Posted on May 22, 2018 at 6:03 am by John Flannery |

Paul Muth, Vietnam Vet

Brunswick’s Paul Muth was a medic assigned to Anloc in ‘Nam.

An Lộc is in Bình Phước Province in South Vietnam, about 72 miles north of Saigon.

Paul left the service in ’74 and thus not before the North Vietnamese offensive in ’72, when 100s of the North Vietnamese, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, outnumbering Paul’s Division, overran their position along Highway 13.

There was hand-to-hand fighting and Paul only lived by pulling a dead body on top of himself in a trench, hidden from the enemy’s advance by this fleshy cloak of death.

When the Viet Cong attack was successfully halted and pushed back, Paul was saved by the airborne; they pulled Paul from beneath his brother-in-arm’s lifeless body.

Paul’s war nevertheless continues. Continue reading →

Enough Development Already!

Posted on May 15, 2018 at 5:45 am by John Flannery |

Lovettsville Glen structure

There was a professor of political science at Columbia College, Charles Hamilton, who wrote how citizens are manipulated.

Those in power allow for the expulsion of political energy by the masses who oppose change.

The political class proposes a path of exhausting process, seemingly giving the public a voice to object, knowing full well that the process is outcome determinative, and will end as it was contemplated to end when it began.

Under a veil of legitimacy, the process begins, wheels spin, springs compress, political levers are applied, and the public immerses itself in meetings, soft-voice facilitators, hearings, digitally memorialized opinions, statements, and papers galore.

The public enjoys high hopes that what they honestly want will be enacted by their “elected” representatives.

Many well-meaning citizens are thus engaged, and mollified with the hope of prevailing, as they participate like the dickens in the process until the last suspenseful moment, when they find that their “vision,” and all that they said and did, was never meant to be taken seriously. Continue reading →

Truth Ache

Posted on May 8, 2018 at 6:06 am by John Flannery |

We do not need to read the philosophy of Wittgenstein or Socrates to know what is true or false.

But perhaps we need to review what goes awry in human psychology when a person with a seemingly right functioning mind defies what is known to be transparently true and argues instead for what is patently false.

Some clearly suffer an impaired cognitive function when their operative principle is that they wouldn’t see it — if they didn’t already believe it.

Plato devised an allegory of citizens in a cave, locked in position, looking forward, seeing only the reflected shadows before them on a wall projected by unseen actors behind them; shadows were their reality.

Others know very well what is true but they lie as a means to an unworthy end. Continue reading →

AT&T’s uphill battle – to put a long pole on a short hill

Posted on May 1, 2018 at 5:31 pm by John Flannery |

AT&T SCHEMATIC OF 155 FOOT MONOPOLE

AT&T won no friends in Western Loudoun with its earlier shuffle on the topmost ridge of the Short Hill Mountain, shaving off trees and tunneling into the mountain, day and night, so secret, that almost everyone was convinced it was the “guv’ment” up to its old tricks, and the “data center” that AT&T claimed it was, had more to do with Mount Weather, the designated bunker for well placed elite government workers in the case of a nuclear attack, and that AT&T’s project was most certainly something other than a data center; the questions remain unresolved.

Emboldened by the local government’s seeming pliability, AT&T is now demanding a special exception to erect an 155 foot hi-tech shaft monopole on the crest, the very top, of the Short Hill Mountain.

The community is gathering its forces to give our public officials a spinal implant and to stop AT&T, on the merits, and based on the County Ordinance, from erecting this 155 foot monopole, and setting a bad precedent for projects on the crest of the mountain. Continue reading →

Indifference to the Earth, Our Home

Posted on April 24, 2018 at 5:48 am by John Flannery |

Open field (photo by John P. Flannery)

There is this ridiculous notion that the earth is some magical waste dump that can absorb every harmful thing we do.

Some believe we can spew forth every kind of toxic garbage into the air, water, and earth and, magically and somehow it’s all good.

This happy time worldview is a direct result of a rampant childlike indifference to preserving and protecting our natural resources, and our own lives.

The “need for greed,” to get top dollar, that infects our energy industry “leaders” makes them distort the facts of global warming in the junk science they publish.

Our leaders take the corporate contributions of fossil fuel predators and vote their way, insisting that we not trust our senses that that’s what they are doing, even as they do it at the cost of our health and safety and survival. In the bargain, they stall cleaner, safer renewable energy sources.

Remember those tobacco execs swearing before Congress that they weren’t spiking cigarettes with nicotine, and that no one’s health was at risk. Continue reading →

Inside the Belly of the Beast – The Just Us System

Posted on April 17, 2018 at 6:11 am by John Flannery |

Sworn as an AUSA by US Attorney Paul Curran, SDNY

I’m a recovering N.Y. federal prosecutor.

I say “recovering” because you never quite get over the power and authority you enjoyed as a young man – as a ‘puppy” prosecutor.

In New York, a port city, the cases are a big deal, mobsters plot their crimes a few blocks from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in lower Manhattan, vast quantities of drugs, heroin and cocaine come into the Big Apple from every direction imaginable, there are illegal transfers of money, in and out of banks, securities fraud and oceans of bad acts and words deceiving the public, plots and devices hatched by a variety of rogues within walking distance of Foley Square, where the Courts and federal prosecutors are lodged.

If you do it right, when you’re a prosecutor, no matter the jurisdiction, your mission is to do justice for the individuals charged.

The Executive US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Sylvio J. Mollo, pulled the flag around him while he was testing my resolve to become an Assistant U.S. Attorney.

Sylvio said, “when you stand before the court as an Assistant U.S. Attorney, you represent the people and the government, but, like the flag [that he had in his hand], those you represent are silent, not there with you, and they depend on you to do what’s right.”

Years after walking out of my last grand jury as a prosecutor, I started representing the Accused, upset about how the government was pushing around those they accused – in a way I’d been instructed was just plain wrong. Continue reading →

Non-Fat Meat and no Dead Animals – Really!

Posted on April 10, 2018 at 5:46 am by John Flannery |

Best selling Author, Paul Shapiro – “Clean Meat” (courtesy photo)

Many of us have cut off the fat on meat. I did as a kid. Some of us go further, and cut out meat entirely.

It may be because it has fat you don’t like or because you dread to kill an animal to eat its meat.

You can’t ask an animal, for example, to contribute only, say, his leg because that’s all you want, begging the question whether we must waste the whole animal for some small part of the evening repast.

There is also a drain on our limited natural resources, on our eco-system, and, to choose a simple example, consider what it takes to make a single egg or a gallon of milk.

Paul Shapiro, the former head of the Humane Society of the United States, wrote it takes fifty gallons of water to make a single egg – “enough to fill your bathtub to the brim.”

As for our bovine bounty, Paul wrote, it takes “nine hundred gallons of water needed for every gallon of cow’s milk…”

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has famously said that the compromised purity and shrinking inventory of the world’s water supplies will be the oil crisis of this century.

In 1932, the famous WWII PM, Winston Churchill, predicted, “Fifty years hence, we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.”

Paul has now written a best seller, titled, “Clean Meat,” that describes a “suitable medium” to escape Churchill’s attack on his observed wasteful “absurdity.” Continue reading →

Rising Waters

Posted on April 3, 2018 at 8:16 pm by John Flannery |

I was at a fair a few years ago, to attend a live broadcast, and don’t remember our topic, but, on the way, in somewhat of a rush to find the set on time, I passed by two booths, side by side, one with a realtor, and a contingent of members from the Union of Concerned Scientists at the other.

The realtor had houses for sale on the seashore at North Carolina’s Outer Banks.

The scientists had pamphlets discussing the consequences of global warming including rising seawaters.

I suggested the realtor might want to talk to the next booth about his business plan, and just perhaps consider renting out properties instead of selling them.

According to coastal geologists, storms, development, and sea level rise have caused sections of this 200-mile island chain we know as the Outer Banks to collapse. Shifting sands, new inlets, newly formed ecosystems are transforming the banks. More houses on spindly stilts now rest in the surf. Continue reading →

“Father Tom” Simmons, Apologist for Nazi Propaganda

Posted on March 28, 2018 at 12:41 pm by Pariahdog |

“Father Tom” Simmons, St Peter’s Church, Purcellville, VA

The following letter to the editor was published in the March 23, 2018 Purcellville Gazette.

Neighborliness

So a member of the clergy isn’t very bothered by two neo-Nazis peppering private property of Loudoun residents with Nazi literature, but he adopts the view that the “hard, hard left” is abandoning “neighborliness” in favor of “agitation, propaganda, smear tactics, intimidation, speech-suppression, harassment, and violence.”

It is comforting that Rector Simmons believes recent Nazi literature arriving uninvited at residences in Loudoun is only limited to “two dopes” — a “couple of knuckleheads.” One wonders how he is so sure that this is the extent of the people holding and espousing such hateful, extremist views that he can criticize fellow clergy for raising an alarm.

Alan Dershowitz – “No Safe Spaces” interview

Alan Dershowitz might not be concerned because Nazi views “have no resonance on university campuses today,” but it might be useful to recall that the rise of Nazis in Germany in the 1930s did not start on university campuses. At first, everyone thought Nazis and their alienated leader were outliers who would never have any real impact. That belief was catastrophically wrong. How did Nazis grow and maneuver their way into power? History teaches us it was an absence of serious focus on opposing their “agitation, propaganda, smear tactics, intimidation, speech-suppression, harassment and violence.” Sound familiar?

“Neighborliness” is not expressed by hateful messages delivered surreptitiously to our neighbors. Rector Simmons should join his clergy brethren in saying so loudly and avoid being complicitly silent just because he believes it is only two knuckleheadded dopes. Perhaps Rector Simmons should recall the words of a noted Lutheran pastor who was very experienced with what happens when dopey, knuckleheaded Nazi social/political beliefs go unrecognized and unapposed by early, full-throated condemnation…

“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out – Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out – Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Martin Niemoller

John D. Tew

Purcellville