All right, morning everyone. Well, this is how Dreamhost builds a public cloud with OpenStack. I'm Carl, I'm the cloud architect at Dreamhost. So, giving you a little bit of background, this is mostly going to be a technical talk, but we've been in business since 1997. We're gonna be old enough to drive next year, so that's kinda cool. We spun off Ink Tank as a support company for Ceph, if you're not familiar with Ceph. It is an exabyte scale storage platform, entirely open source. We're using it for both our Dream Compute and our Dream Objects products that we launched earlier this year, and Dream Compute we launched on Monday. We really believe in the whole open cloud philosophy, and so a lot of this is going to be shedding a lot of light into what happens inside of the black boxes of what we build for public clouds. A lot of the other cloud providers don't tell you what hardware they're running on. I'm gonna show you pictures of it. So, why are we doing this? Well, Simon Anderson, our CEO, likes to say to empower entrepreneurs and developers. And this is the primary motivation for why we're building a lot of the products that we build at Dreamhost. And in order to do this, we had to come up with some design tenants of how we wanted to build this, how we wanted to make it go. And amongst those, we're making sure it's reliable. Maintenance is the normal, it's not an exception, so we don't wanna have to sit there and go, oh, it's a high availability platform. We can push a couple of buttons and the upgrade will just happen and it'll never go down. We wanted to throw all that thinking out the window because we had been using it in the past with a lot of our traditional shared technologies. It hasn't quite worked out. So, in this, the mantra that marketing wants me to say is it's built for resilience, whereas the DevOps term is designed for failure, but whatever. We also wanna isolate tenants from each other by default. So, on a relatively large cloud provider named after a big river in Brazil, the tenants are separated, but we kind of kid that it's like Swiss cheese cloth in between you and the person next to you. You know they're there and if you do the right things, you can see them and we didn't wanna do that at all and that drove a lot of the decisions of what we did in terms of networking and in terms of hardware selection. We also wanna make it easy to expand, easy to upgrade and we wanted to automate everything. These are the big concerns that went into trying to make all of this work. So, once we had figured out what we wanted to accomplish, we had to figure out, okay, these are the problems we're gonna have to serve for it and that of course presented obstacles that we needed to get around. First one was storage. We're doing shared storage on everything. All of your boot volumes sit on a shared storage backend. This is actually kind of awesome for us because it means we can perform maintenance on the cluster without having to turn off your VMs. Said large provider had a couple of incidents last year where they had to reboot all of the VMs in a couple of data centers. We didn't wanna have to fall into that trap. Obviously, if you're doing something that, that it's gotta be massively scalable. It has to run on commodity hardware. We want a single solution for everything and again, it has to be fully automated. In networking, it has to support IPv6. I'll get to that in a second. Tenants have to be isolated from each other and actually isolated from each other. Part of the reason for this is because we're a shared hosting company. We've been giving people logins to shared machines for a long time. Terrible things happen. We didn't want that to happen to our customers in this product. What Bob does and what Alice does aren't going to directly impact what the other person does unless both of them agree that they want to share information through a comment, through routers. We're using lots of 10 gigabit ethernet and faster. And we are specifically designing everything with no single point of failure. We're not using standard spine and leaf core architecture design and all of our cloud products. Specifically so, we can do maintenance and we don't have to worry about one big core at the middle of it failing and taking everything offline. Hypervisor was another obstacle we had to come across. There are many choices in the world of hypervisors. Most of them are supported by OpenStack now. And these are some of the big things that we wanted. The third option is interesting because we're interested in trying stuff that's not x86 down the road. So we'll see what that does. And we also didn't want to do anything that was going to require modifying guest operating systems which some of the larger hypervisors do. Eventually we might need to install an agent in order to do some of the advanced networking stuff that we're deploying but for right now we wanted to try and keep it simple as possible so that you can run as many VMs as you want without having to do any major changes. And we're also giving you the flexibility to run pretty much whatever operating system you want within reason. Like I'll draw the line at MS-DOS 3. IPv6 is really big for us. We plan on keeping this product running for more than six months and that means we would have run out of IP addresses if we didn't implement IPv6. It's kind of entertaining.  The first thing that I do when I'm talking to them is I say, do you support IPv6? And everyone goes, yes, of course we support IPv6. And my next question is, do you route it? And that's when everybody goes, in October maybe? So it's been interesting for us but somebody needs to drive the boat on that. We need to get to the point where IPv6 is widely deployed and it gets us back to the internet that we were all promised in the late 90s where everyone is directly addressable. So we are kind of doing that which meant we needed to go make some decisions and making decisions is hard but that's okay. So for hypervisors, we chose KVM. It's built into the kernel, it has lots of eyes. It addresses all of these various issues that we wanted to go at for everything. Doesn't cost us a dime, which is cool. A lot of the other hypervisors don't cost us anything as well but it's nice. It also supports multi-platform so we can do stuff that's not X86. It gives us a lot of flexibility in drivers and there's a lot of eyeballs looking at it which is really important to us for trying to keep things up. Obviously storage, we're backed by Ceph. So we have in DreamObjects, we run the largest known deployment of Ceph commercially in production. This will be the new largest deployment of Ceph in production. Our initial cluster is going to be 4.5 petabytes of raw storage. We're giving everybody a fixed size default boot volume and then you can add however many other volumes you want. They're all backed on RBD and the cool thing about it is because of Ceph, there are some rather impressive security advantages unlike using iSCSI or other technologies like that. If you allocate a new disk and you try to read data from it, you're gonna get back zeros until you write something to it, which is really cool. You don't have to worry about somebody else getting your data once you've pulled on your instance because you uploaded a file you shouldn't have. Physical networking hardware. This we thought a little bit outside the box. We're buying our networking hardware directly from the Taiwanese ODMs. In this case, we're getting all of our boxes from Delta Networks. These are traditional Broadcom trident-based platforms, 48 gigs of 10 gig ports, four gigs of 40 gig ports. It can be four or 40 gig ports. One U pizza box. We put one of those atop of every rack. We use 10 gig to connect to the host. We use 40 gig to connect to our spine switches. The hardware is fairly fantastic. The software that it ships with, not so great. So we partnered with Cumulus Networks. These guys are in stealth mode, but they let me say their name, which is very cool. They build a Linux operating system for commodity switches. Our switches run Linux. It's the exact same command line tools as everything else, and it's absolutely awesome. It makes automating it a breeze because now all of our switches just look like servers. For logical networking, we partnered with Acera. We're doing software-defined networking on top of all of it, and yes, we are exposing it to our customers. If you're curious if we're using the bridged model or the overlay model, we are using the overlay model. This gives everyone their own network space. You can spin up as many switches as you want. And every time you spin up a switch, we assign an IPv6 slash 64 internet routable to it for free. So, oops, you can't see one of the lines on this, but that's all right. So the question is, when you're doing a network infrastructure like this, who needs spanning tree? You can't really see it, but the bottom two stacks of equipment are essentially each one is each rack, and that's our layer two domain. Layer two ends at our leaf switches. We do layer three OSPF ECMP connections to our spine switches, and they connect to other pods. All of the links coming out of the racks are 40 gig. There's two of them. This gives us the ability to do maintenance. If we need to do software upgrades on our spine switches, we just do one, nothing goes down, bandwidth goes down a little bit, so there might be some performance impact, but we're not gonna actually take anything offline. Everything has redundant links. Everything talks to everyone, even in a failure situation. All of our racks are our failure domain. If we lose power in a rack, that's fine. We just go spin up the VM someplace else because they're on a shared storage platform that spans multiple racks and multiple rows inside of our data center. We use Chef for all of our automation, and yes, everything we're doing for deploying our open, our public cloud is going to be open sourced, upstreamed to the open stack for Chef cookbooks. We're doing that now. You can actually go on to my GitHub site and see all of the cookbooks that we're doing. We're in the Folsom branch. Check it out, and we want people to check it out because targeting developers and entrepreneurs, if you've got four machines sitting in your basement and you want to spin up an open stack cluster, go for it. Develop your application on it, and then when you're ready to move to something that needs more CPU horsepower, more bandwidth, more uptime, you're running the exact same stuff we are. Just pick up your VMs and move them over. So we also use Orista switches for our internet and sand access point. These are kind of cool, but the one thing that you may notice is, did I just say sand? And indeed I did. When we were designing our infrastructure, we had the kind of the same feel that Troy Toman did this morning. We wanted all of our API endpoints for open stack to be inside of VMs. And then if only there was some open source, cloud infrastructure orchestration platform to manage and maintain all of those VMs. We were basically doing this for two reasons. One, we wanted to scale, and two, we wanted high availability. To start with, we didn't really have the time to implement everything the same way Troy did, and running open stack to run open stack is a little inceptiony. It's not necessarily bad, it's just a lot of work. So we went the enterprise route and bought some VMware licenses and are running it on an HP left hand storage platform. It's not cheap, but it works, and it gives us the ability to focus more on getting the product out the door and then we can go back, clean it up, build it all on top of open source architecture, use open stack to drive open stack, go forward from there.  This is the hardware that we run on. So those boxes at the top are two use systems made by Dell, they're the Cloud C6145 series. They have two motherboards in them. Each one of those motherboards has 64 AMD CPU cores and 192 gig of RAM. All the boxes you see underneath those are storage. Each one of those drives, and there are 12 of them on each node holds a three terabyte hard drive and we just build these out as we need them. It's a tremendous amount of capacity. All of those machines have two 10 gigabit links going into one of the Delta switches. Those Delta switches have 40 gig links talking to each pod as we call them. This is our beta deployment, so it only has three pods and they're relatively small. There's a lot of bandwidth here for us to move stuff around. This is what customers see. It's horizon, we did a little bit of theming on it. So it looks kind of cool, but if you're a power user, this is what you see. We're running the OpenStack APIs. We're not doing anything fancy, we're not putting in any different authentication systems. It's all Keystone, it all follows the same APIs. If you're running OpenStack someplace else, you can easily move your stuff to us. We use Glance for our image storage. The only thing we don't do is we don't use Swift. We use Ceph for our block storage. We use Ceph for our object storage as well. And with that, I'll take questions because I'm sure some people have some. Yes, hop up to the microphone if you're gonna ask a question, otherwise I'm gonna have to repeat it. Hi, are you using Ceph block storage and the object storage in the same cluster? No, we have a separate cluster for object storage. So the DreamObject cluster is in a separate cluster, in a separate data center. And then the block storage stuff that we're using for OpenStack is all a separate cluster sitting underneath the machines with the hypervisors on it. You're not gonna join them together later on, or? We may. Currently, Ceph doesn't support multiple availability zones, but once that happens, we might do that so that we can do replication between them. And at that point, we'll probably spin up hypervisor nodes in the data center that DreamObjects is currently in. We're hoping to. Our goal is to shoot for SATA disk performance on all of our block storage nodes, which is a little bit ambitious, but we'll see what it looks like. We're hoping to be able to get it better as time goes on, but that's what we're starting for right now. And I'm sorry, I forgot to repeat the question. Anyone else? How are you isolating your customers? Are you creating a VLAN and a firewall? It's not a VLAN, it's entirely software-defined networking. So literally, every customer gets their own virtual switch. If they do a ping scan of the network that we give them, all they see are their instances. We spin them up a switch, we spin them up a router instance, we have a open-source project that we're working on called Aconda, which is basically just a service VM. We spin up one of those for each tenant, it plugs into the internet, and it plugs into the customer's switch. It is actually a router. It's running routing protocols like OSPF, your V6 stuff is routed straight through, so the address space that's on there, on your switch is internet accessible. By default, we firewall everything except SSH and ping, but you can go in and put holes in for whatever you want. We turn on router advertisements so all of your VMs can get V6 addresses. We also give you an RFC-1918 public IPv4 space on that switch, and then it acts much like Amazon.  It's all API controlled, and we're actually trying to push all that upstream. It's gonna be an extension for right now, but we're working on getting this integrated in using the advanced networking services, stuff that we're talking about this week, into Quantum. So every one of those Aconda instances gets one public IP address for free, we'll sell you more if you need them, and then you just use NAT rules to connect everything back through. So essentially, everybody gets a fixed IP, you can't SSH to it directly, but you can SSH to your V6 address directly, and then everyone gets one floating IP and you can map it to whatever you want. Load balancing we are looking into, we're not doing anything at the moment. It's something that we're looking at for a later release of the product. We can run things like HA proxy on the Aconda instances, but we haven't gotten to the point where we're going to build VMs running proprietary load balancing solutions. It is something we wanna do, we're just not there yet. You'll have to talk to them about getting the software. Their software is not open source. Obviously it's built on Linux, all that part is, but there are components of it that are not. They're proprietary to the switch vendors. The switches themselves are running Linux. We manage them with Chef. Everything shows up on interfaces. We use Quagga to do all of the OSPF stuff. So we have Chef write all those configuration files and do all that configuration management for it. It just pushed out all the switches, which is really kind of cool. It's not necessary that it wasn't good enough. There were a couple of limitations that the Delta switches have with the Cumulus software that the Orista switches didn't. But for the most part, it switched diversity. Instead of being locked into one switch vendor, which has burned us in the past, with this platform we can run multiple different switch vendors. And so the idea was, let's do that. If something goes wrong with one switch, we can rip those out, replace them with different switches, still running the same software, which is kind of cool. Obviously the Orista switches don't run the Cumulus software. Delta's do, but you can get switches from Acton, you can get switches from like four or five different other providers that Cumulus will install the software on for you, which is kind of nice. And that way, if we have a hardware issue or if we have a supply issue or if a vendor is two months late shipping us hardware, we can buy it from somebody else and work through that way. So it's more diversity than it is any particular feature reason. The Cumulus stuff currently doesn't support a couple of things that we needed that the Oristas did, like VLANs. So that's why we did those for the SAN and for the internet access stuff. But there's no reason why we couldn't, we just chose not to in the interest of time. Yes? Sure, why we wanted to use Seth instead of Swift? We built it. So we kind of have an impetus to use it. That's one of the big ones. The other one is Seth gives you file system storage, block storage and object storage all on the same backend. So instead of spending a lot of time, we're a relatively lean team. So it's about us spending a lot of time learning how to stand up a Seth cluster and learning how to stand up a Swift cluster. The idea was let's just do it all on Seth and use that for everything instead of having three or four different storage technologies. Plus being the people who started the development of Seth, we have an impetus to show the world that this can be used in a production environment. So that is one of the reasons. Also, for the block storage stuff, Seth is really compelling because we can just sit there and continue to add block devices to it and just continue to add commodity hardware nodes to expand it. Unlike with some of the bigger SAN solutions, it's really expensive to get to that point. Other questions? Yes. So for volume service stuff, we are using NovaVolume. We're going to switch to Sender here shortly. But yeah, every volume is managed through NovaVolume, including your boot volumes. So when you pick an image in Glance with the new stuff that is in NovaVolume thanks to the work that was done in Sender, you can say what image you want. It'll do a copy on right inside of Seth because we store all of our images in the same format inside of Seth to create your boot volume and then your VM boots off of that. Plants for solid state storage, that is an excellent question. So there is a lot of desire for solid state storage, but the problem we have is the way Seth works is that it's a lot like Swift in that there's a lot of data moving around. We're worried that with the current state of MLC SSD drives, we'd probably burn through all of our SSD drives in six to nine months, just in the number of writes that we're doing on them. So for right now, no, we might do that later. The other thing is Seth currently doesn't support storage tiers, so it would be difficult to have one small section of SSD instances and be able to utilize them effectively. We could create a Seth pool that is just SSD backed, but then you gotta worry about where those VMs are going to go and because we're just using as a fall open stack, that's not very smart at the moment. So it's something we may investigate down the line if there's customer demand for it, but for right now, we're gonna stick with spinning rust just because it's effective. Yes. An excellent question, our friends at Piston do that. And the reason we decided not to do this is because adding a bunch of storage to a machine that is going to run a lot of hypervisors makes a lot of sense inside of a small deployment but in a large deployment like this, putting 24 drives into a 4U box with 64 cores and 192 gig of RAM becomes really expensive. Whereas if we get a box that is dedicated to be a hypervisor and a box that is dedicated to be storage, it's much more cost effective and that's really what it boils down to. Core count, we have a desire to keep, so we're not oversubscribing on memory at all and we have a desire to keep our CPU over subscription less than two to one. So Intel's current generation, excuse me, current generation virtualization technology is finally at the point where AMD was about five years ago, but their core count is through the floor. The current Sandy Bridge stuff, you can get eight cores. I haven't seen anything that's more than that right now, but the eight core chips are unbelievably expensive, whereas we can get 64 AMD cores for the price of four quad core current generation Xeon systems. So that's really what it boils down to. There are some cool features in the Intel stuff and I'm hoping AMD is gonna catch up on that. Some of the security features, some of the crypto features would be cool to have, especially in a public cloud environment if we can figure out key escrow, but we're gonna have to work through it to get there first. Right now we wanted to be able to support a large number of VMs efficiently and keep our oversubscription ratio down. Other questions? We are currently not using the Ceph file system in production. We may start doing that for log storage, but for right now we're just using the object storage portion of Ceph and the block storage portion of Ceph. We are using Quantum for networking, so we've been heavily involved with the Quantum networking development for a while now. We're using the Nasera plugin for Quantum, so all of the API calls that you do to create networks and spin up switches and plug in virtual NICs off of your VMs into the ports, all done through the Quantum API. Anybody else? If anybody has those any other questions, I'll be at the booth when I'm not in sessions. Feel free to come by, or you can just drop a business card with your question on it and I will shoot you back an email. I promise not to spam you. Otherwise I think that's it. Thanks everybody for coming. Thank you.


Welcome to the law with Lawson. Now, today, there is no slides. Now, see, I'm a think tech host that normally doesn't invite guests, so there ain't going to be no guests today, and no slides. But we're going to talk about the MISKY case, right? And that seems to have captured our state's attention. Last year was a K.Loha trial.  And one day I'm going to summarize, you know, what that trial was about, because you're going to be hearing more about the K.Loha's and Key's kind of show, because I think that may, it may. Now, you know, it's just my humble opinion, but it may tie into this MISKY indictment, because the way it works in federal court is like this, man. When the fairs indict you, right? And the fairs don't do that many cases a year as compared to state cases. And a federal prosecutor does not have to take a case unless he or she wants to, right? And that's why their conviction rate is well over 95% across the board. When I say across the board, I mean throughout the United States, right? It's like the FBI may work up a case and bring it to a federal prosecutor. Federal prosecutors say, look, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not taking that. In state cases, if the police, let's say, gets a call, somebody robbed a bank or whatever, they go over there, arrest a person, charge them with bank robbery and take them down to the, you know, then the prosecutor has to prosecute that case here in a state prosecutor, but not federal. And so when they choose a case, and I used to tell my clients all the time, man, when it's about federal indictment, I'm like, hey, man, you know, we're going to be fighting for real. And so getting back to this mischief, so anyway, so when the fairs indict you, normally they have a ton of evidence to prove against you. And what they're looking for, if you start cooperating, keep in mind, Casin K. Lohan, Louis K. Lohan, before they got smoked by that jury last summer, you know, they remember they was talking about that trash. We're not guilty. We didn't do this, right? And Louis, Louis K. Lohan, some of y'all in the mainland, some of my followers on the mainland, y'all may not know too much about the ex chief of police here in Hawaii, Louis K. Lohan. He's on his way to a federal prison. He hasn't been sentenced yet. He's been smoked, convicted. When I say smoked, that's the law of lawson language for a jury just convicted you. And then his wife was a high ranking deputy prosecuting attorney. In fact, the second highest ranking prosecuting attorney underneath are then Honolulu prosecutor Keats kind of Cheryl, who, by the way, is under federal investigation after receiving a target letter. And I don't know if I touched on this last time or not, but a target letter, this is my professor mode.  But anyway, what's the target letter? When it fairs into a target letter, what they're saying is, you know what, we have enough evidence to indict you, right? So I would get a client. They'd come in like professor, I mean attorney lawson, I got a target letter from the federal prosecutor. What does it mean? Am I in trouble? Yes. If it's a target letter, you're in trouble. What do you mean I'm in trouble? Well, a target letter means this, that they have enough evidence to indict you right now. If you want to make it easier on yourself, they want you to come down and talk to them. What do you mean by talk to them?  And if you've been watching some of the national stuff of Michael Cohen and the national security advisor, the one that was just given a pardon, Flynn, Michael Flynn, and right, when they come in, when a person goes into cooperates, they call it being queen for a day. That means that you can admit to any crime you want to admit to. As long as you tell the truth. So they may tell your client, look, we're only going to charge you with one count of racketeering. All the bank rivalries, all the drug selling, all the things you've done in the past, we're not going to charge you with that. As long as you don't lie to us, when you agree to cooperate. So when your client comes in, they say, hey, attorney Lawson, I got a target letter from the feds. It's about the drug game that I've been involved in, the drug conspiracy I've been involved in. Do you think they got enough evidence to convict me? Then what the lawyer does is they normally call the prosecutor and say, Hey, look, I got Johnny sitting in front of me right here. He says he's got a target letter wish you got on him. Right. And a lot of times the prosecutor may or they may not say, well, look, let Johnny know we got this on him, text messages, phone sale records, cooperating witnesses. We got him on videotape, you know, at the drug house or whatever, coming in and out the house with packages. So let him know that we have this evidence and then see if he wants to come in and cooperate. And let's say Johnny says, yeah, I do want to cooperate. Then when you take Johnny down to the fairs, Johnny becomes the queen for a date, right? You can admit to anything you want to, but if you lied to him, Johnny, everything you said, all the things you've admitted to can still be used against you and you're going to still end up getting charged. And so why am I talking about that with respect to the miscarriage indictment?  For me and my Cracker Jack crew back at Think Tech, Hawaii Studios, Eric, we kind of set up this program for you so that you can, it's almost like you're being in law class. And so, you know, you got all these secret indictments that's been filed and buying motions and they contain a lot of information, right? And what they're telling, what they're saying is, look, this conspiracy, this enterprise, this miski enterprise, right? 11 people have been indicted. One of the charges is that the miski faces for murder is the death penalty. And we'll get to that in a minute. But all this is racketeering, right? RICO. And you say, and the reason why they're charging like this, and when you add a death penalty on, it's because the fairs are telling miski sooner or later. We got enough evidence to convict you. And what they're hoping is that he'll cooperate and then bring in, and some of the other 11 defendants will cooperate. And when they come down to cooperate, what the prosecutors want to know is, again, when they're queuing for a day, is don't tell us about people underneath of you. Tell us about some of these other individuals.  When you look at these indictments, right, and some of the charges, and some of the stuff that this miski and his little gang did, and you sit back and say, how could no one charge you? There was some, there was some serious assaults that happened in 2012. One of them, the allegation is that miski, I don't know if you guys remember this, but we had, we used to have a pro bowl here in Hawaii.  And one night at this Elm Club that miski is a ledger of own club Elm. It's a ledger. He took a bottle and hit an NFL lineman over the head with it. That man could not play in the game the next day. And miski was charged with that charge dismissed. It's also been reported, and according to the federal filings that's been filed against miski in this case, that there was a similar incident with another individual. And that case is still pending since 2012. And so, you know, when the prosecutor sits, some of these 11 individuals down and they start asking questions like, Hey man, don't tell us about little Johnny, the guy that used to, you know, run nickel and dime bags of marijuana from one location. We don't want to hear about little Johnny. We want to hear about big Pete, right? Maybe a politician, maybe a prosecutor, maybe a high ranking police officer that allowed you and these other criminals that you charged with to exist so long without ever being prosecuted. How does that happen? And so that's going to be the pressure that's being put on. But let's get back to them. So they're indicted for what? Rico. And Rico was started in 19, said, what's Rico? That's the racketeering. And Rico was started, it's like conspiracy, right? Corruption. And it was started by the fairs in 1970 to come after the Godfathers, right? The mafia, the mob, because prior to that Rico conspiracy charge being found, each time, let's say Johnny, your rest, Johnny Needle knows, right? Mafia guy, right? For selling five grams, I mean, that's five kilos of cocaine.  And so you can't charge a conspiracy, right? You can only charge Johnny Needle knows. And then Johnny Needle knows normally is not going to say too much about the higher ups. And if he does, he's only going to know the next level. He ain't going to be able to go all the way back to the boss. Y'all remember the guy father, when they had those congressional hearings.  But to a large extent they're like, look, I don't know who the boss is. I just know my next level of Rico allows the government to come after an organization. It could be a legitimate corporation. It could be a fly by night conspiracy, or it could be, you know, what they call this is the miski enterprises. It could be legitimate businesses use as fronts to run or to be fronts for a drug business. And that's sort of what their legend here with miski, you know, they said they owned different companies, past control company and other types of companies throughout Oahu. And those were fronts for him to run drug business and other things. And he owns some night clubs too. So let me get back to this crack, this cracker jack. And I tell you, so what are some of the things that, so anyway, let's get back to Rico real quick. So part of that is that conspiracy. And what Rico does is once you charge an individual with Rico, you can also seize their assets. Now normally you're innocent until proven guilty, right? And what the prosecutors use Rico for was not only to round up the individuals, but to seize their assets. They did that with miski. Remember, last week they unsealed an indictment and they went around and arrested 11 individuals all at once. Why do they do that? Because again, when these cases, and I did a lot of these cases on the mainland, so what happens is the indictment gets sealed. What do you mean by sealed, Lawson? That means the grand jury has indicted you, but the prosecutors went to the judge and says, look, we don't want, we don't want this to be public. We want this sealed. So no one knows this has been filed. The defendants do not know they've been charged. They won't know they've been charged. They think they're free. And in this case, there was one indictment that had been sealed for over a year, right? From June of 2019, miski had received an indictment along with somebody else for selling cocaine. That one was sealed since June of 2019. It was unsealed last week, along with what they call a superseding indictment on this other conspiracy that we're talking about right now. But it's sealed, and it's sealed for a reason. It's sealed because we don't want anybody knowing, anybody being a defendant or witnesses knowing that they've been indicted because we're still doing other investigations. When that indictment becomes unsealed, when it becomes public like it did last week prior to it becoming unsealed, the prosecutors bring over to SWAT teams, what they did in this case is, and I found it interesting that they didn't use HPD in this case. It goes back to how is it that these individuals are allowed to engage in an organized crime for all these years, over a decade, and never be prosecuted? Could it be because they have officers on the payroll? We don't know. Could it be because they have prosecutors, Kath and K. Loha, who was just convicted last year, who's the last year had connections in miski and covering up for miski, right? Well, the other prosecutors, we don't know. But I found it, and you've seen those press conferences, you've seen them when the FBI and the federal prosecutor, they say, you know, we just unveiled this indictment, and we indicted this mass conspiracy, and we want to thank the local police department for their investigation, too. You didn't hear that last week's press conference. You didn't hear Kenji Price, the U.S. Attorney, hearing a wife say a damn thing about HPD, and that ain't by no mistake. But again, this is my humble opinion. So when they unseal the indictment, they arrest everybody at once, because we don't, and what happens is they don't want, like, you arrest 11 defendants. You arrest like three people in the morning. They're going, their families or other members of the conspiracies don't call the other individuals, and tell them, man, you need to get rid of whatever evidence you got. They just arrested these other three. They're probably coming after you, too. So evidence gets destroyed. The way you avoid that is you hit everybody at once. That means that you've got a mass amount of police officers, SWAT teams, all set up around wherever you think these 11 individuals are. And then at go time, maybe nine o'clock in the morning, maybe 5 a.m., whatever time they set, they hit at once. They execute search for wants in other areas, businesses, et cetera, all at once. So you can't call back to your business, say, destroy those tax records. All that happens at once, right? And so that's what happened last week when we saw all these guys rounded up. I think it was one individual that did not get arrested, but they eventually found him and arrested him also. All right. So going back to this point, now that they've been arrested, right, and you got that conspiracy and the RICO, right, all of them engage in the conspiracy and some of the stuff that they talk about, I'll just read it to you real quick because we don't have a lot of time here. The miski is charged with murder and aid in aid of racketeering and violation of whatever, you know, the cold miski is charged with conspiracy commit murder. Miski is charged with murder for hire. Miski is charged with kidnapping. Miski is charged with conspiracy to commit kidnapping. Miski and defendant Stancil Lance, I can't pronounce Lance and Deha Moon and Harry and whatever Harry's last name is, are charged and murdered for hire conspiracy. Miski Stancil and Freitas are charged with conspiracy to use chemical weapons. Miski and defendant Preston commited or charged with conspiracy to commit kidnapping. Miski stands on and viewing with our charges conspiring to commit assault and aid of racketeering. Miski and Stancil and Freitas are charged with using a chemical weapon. And I think there was allegations that, you know, there was a competitor nightclub that was competing with this club and that miski is alleged of own and somebody released some type of chemical gas inside this nightclub and people, you know, became sick because of it. So you got, you know, conspiracy to distribute 500 grams of cocaine. What's the conspiracy to commit murder? The young man that was killed because, and it's alleged that Miski entered into a murder for hire plot to kill a young man who was last seen in Hawaii kind, who miski believed was driving an automobile where miski's son was killed. And as a result, the feds have found a death penalty claim against miski in this indictment. Now you say, hey, hey, hey, whoa, wait a minute. Hawaii is a non death penalty state, Lawson. So you can't do that here. Yeah. The state of Hawaii does not have a death penalty. We got rid of death penalty in 1957. And the primary reason why we got rid of it is because of the way it was unevenly enforced against people of color. But that's another show. We're getting back to it. So how can affairs charge the death penalty in a state where we don't have it because the federal jurisdiction is separate from state jurisdiction? And so we've seen this happen. The last death penalty case federally was bought here was in 2014 against a soldier who was accused of killing his child along with his living, I think either his wife or his girlfriend, both of them were charged with the murder of his little girl. And he did not get the death penalty even though he was charged with it. He was not convicted for it. And so again, Attorney General Barr has to okay the local U.S. attorney, Kenji Price, and say, go ahead and smoking. Now, now when I say smoking, I mean giving the death penalty. Now, let me preface this by saying I'm against the death penalty. Right? But that's neither here nor there. The federal government is not against the death penalty.  In fact, they just executed the first federal inmate since 2003. And I think they either did another one later on this past week or at least they're going to at least two or three more within the next couple of weeks. If it hasn't already been done, I didn't check one before I came on the air. But my point is this, Barr believes in the death penalty. And keep in mind that I believe, well, President Obama was the president the last time the death penalty was used here in 2014. So some people say, well, you know, it is an election and somehow Trump is not in office and Barr is gone. By this time, by the time this trial comes up next year, the death penalty may be out the table because we'll have, if Biden wins a Democratic AG, it didn't matter in 2014. And so I doubt if it matters when a new AG comes in or getting back to it. So how's that death penalty work? Here's what's odd.  How much time I got left? All right, so you're entitled to a jury of your peers. I got a few minutes, right? You heard that, right? Constitutional guarantee. But for, so a death penalty case has two phases. You had the guilt phase. Did you commit, so, you know, all these charges I just read in this indictment about miski murder for hire and all that, all those things trigger the death penalty.    Well, since you kidnapped them and they died while you're kidnapping them, you can be subjected to death penalty. So, you know, miski's alleged to have gotten a few guys, right, hired them, purchased a boat for like 400 thousand dollars to take the kidnap this young man, take him out on the boat and then dump his body. That's the allegations coming out the indictment, right? And so that can subject you to death. And if Barr says to Kenji Price, the U.S. Attorney here, go ahead and smoking, then miski will have a trial and part of it will be two phases. You have a jury trial on whether or not you actually committed murder for hire, whether or not you actually was in a conspiracy to kidnap this person and then have them killed, period. If the jury finds you guilty of that, then you have a second trial for what? To see if you should die. And so how do you determine whether or not somebody gets to death penalty, right? The government has to show that based on the way that you committed the crime, the aggravating circumstances, those things that just aggravate the situation, just, right, outweigh what they call the mitigating. And so the defense lawyer is doing, they put on mitigation. I used to do death penalty cases in Ohio. Ohio still has a death penalty. Very few lawyers have done death penalty cases out here. Maybe those, maybe a couple of federal public defenders. And I think even then they had to fly people in because it takes, you should undergo some training before you do these, because if you get to the second phase, it's totally different from the first phase. And so now as a defense lawyer, you're trying to put on mitigation. What do you mean by mitigation? Where you're going to show how your client was raised? Well, he was raised in a broken home and he has an IQ level of 70 or whatever that mitigation is, right? And I don't know, Miski at all. But you know, from what we've read is that he lost his son. He was angry. You know what I mean? And he wasn't thinking straight and he was just whatever.  And so even though he was cruel in the way he carried this out, you know, he struggles with whatever.  We don't really care about none of that other stuff you are talking about, right? But the defense lawyer has to put on the mitigation. And then after the prosecution has to prove beyond reasonable doubt, that's aggravating factors. What's aggravating? According to the indictment, you, Miski, actually kept tabs on this man. You kept him close to you. You provided housing for him. You was real nice to him.  Before she kills her mate. And then you, Miski, according to the indictment, had another young lady take this young man's girlfriend out for like some type of massage and, you know, and all this stuff so that you could separate this young man from his girlfriend.  You went out and purchased a boat. You meticulously planned this. This was cold-blooded. So, yeah, that's aggravating. That's aggravating, right? That's an act, right? So if the prosecutor proves that and the jury buys it, then they can say death. And then the individual goes on to death row, which is in terror hope. So we got three minutes to go, according to my Cracker Jack crew. Hit it up by Eric. We probably got about 10 people working in the studio. Eric's in charge. So, yeah. So that's what happened there. Now, so what's the deal? You know, again, if Miski wants to avoid death and if the government wants to even deal with them. See, some of these cases, they like, look, we don't even care if you got information for us. We got enough information to indict other higher ups from your other co-conspirators, right? Because again, these guys act like they're tough guys. And I know they've been talking about this as organized crime in Hawaii and all that. I mean, but haven't done cases in Chicago, Nashville, and other cities since no, these guys, they just mean, right? Just mean, but they're not like meticulous or organized, right? Miski had, if you go through the stuff, he just had a temper allegedly. But what will happen is if they do want to deal with him, they will use that death tone as leverage. You don't want to die. Then you got to give up somebody. And it can't be somebody loitering you, Miski. If you at the top of your little enterprise, your criminal enterprise, we want somebody higher. What do you mean somebody higher? We want to know what other politicians, what other prosecutors, what high-ranking police officers cover for you? Because we find it hard to believe, Miski, that you could thrive in an area like this when you need all kind of information and stuff from the department of health, licenses, and stuff like that to run your business. How have you been able to do all these things? And nobody stops you. And I think all those things are going to come out.  Buckle up. This is just the beginning. This is not the end of anything. This is the beginning. Keep in mind, Keith Connichereau is still under federal grand jury, still investigating him. Miski's indictment came out before Connichereau. What's that mean? There are other people that got target letters. If you look at the news that was reported in this case, I think several other target letters went out the same day that the superseding indictment was unsealed. That means there's other individuals they're looking at. And so normally, and again, the way it works in the federal pond, down there in the federal pond, is little fish eats big fish. In other words, don't come to us talking about that you can give us information on people below you and expect a deal.  You want to get out this license? You got to bring us the people that's bigger than you.  And that's how that's going to roll. So again, hey, this is the law with Lawson, the law dog bringing it to you raw. Because Jay Fidel said, hey, man, you want to do a show? I said, yeah, Jay, can I bring it to it? Can I give them the law raw? Can I feed it to them raw? Jay said, yeah. And so, hey, that's the way it is. With this, and again, right now, I think they're going to be, they being the co-conspirators in this case, the government has asked that they be detained without buying. And right now, I believe that that hearing is going on as I'm doing this show. My guess is that at least Miskie and a few others are going to be detained without buying. And I would not be surprised if all 11 get no bond, no bail. And again, we can talk about what is bond, what is bail, what's it for in another show. But Eric is telling me, I got to go. He said, I got to go. So until next week, this is the law with Lawson and I'm signing off. See you then.


Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States, accompanied by our national commander, Keith Cruel. Of course of the past year, as your national commander, I have had several opportunities to speak with our next guest. He has a keen interest in positions adopted by the American Legion, becoming a fellow legionnaire from Pacific Palisades post-283, President of the United States, Ronald W. Reagan. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. It's wonderful to be back with you today. All of you in the American Legion have served your country honorably in time of war, but you've also served her nobly in time of peace by making the American Legion one of the most important and effective civic organizations in our country's history. I salute you today as do all Americans. You know, one of the great things about the American Legion is the broadness of your agenda. While you pay special attention to matters of military readiness and foreign policy, any issue of the American Legion magazine shows how well-informed all of you try to be about a broad range of domestic issues. And it's on the broad range of issues that I want to talk with you today. So for a few moments, let's talk about the unfinished business that awaits us as a nation and as a people. I think we can all be proud of the economic progress America's made in the past few years. I won't bother to recite here all the statistics about how the inflation interest rates and unemployment have come down, or the many indicators that demonstrate America's current economic expansion. Because the real question you and I must now ask ourselves is how can we solidify the gains we've made and ensure that the prosperity we're now enjoying will endure not just for the rest of this decade, but on into the next century? To do this, we have to make sure the federal government never goes on a spending spree like the one it was on when we came into office. Just in case you've forgotten, but evidently you haven't forgotten, federal spending nearly tripled in the decade of the 70s. Taxes doubled in the five years before we took office. The liberals in Washington were so sure that we could spend ourselves rich and drink ourselves sober, were surprised to see the economic mess they'd created. They didn't understand the real problem in Washington and the real reason for our recent economic woes was really very simple. In fact, if this sounds familiar, maybe it's because I've been saying it for so long. Government is too big and it spends too much money. Now no one feared government's tendency to spend in tax and become the oppressor of the people more than those who built this nation. They had lived with the anxiety of a collapsing currency and runaway inflation. And that's why the founding fathers gave us that remarkable constitution that placed so many checks and balances on government. But they also wisely provided for an amendment process through which later generations could perfect the constitutional system. Well, the performance of government in the last few decades shows the constitution needs a little perfecting and the people need a lot more protection from the fiscal transgressions of government. I think that all of you know that the balanced budget amendment would put sharp restrictions on federal spending, that would force the federal government to do what so many states and municipalities and all average Americans are forced to do, to live within its means and stop mortgaging our children's future. So today I'm asking for your support and help. We need the balanced budget amendment. We need it for America's future. Is that contrary to the ideas of the founding fathers? No, it isn't. When the constitution was adopted, Thomas Jefferson said there was an oversight. It should have contained a clause forbidding the government from borrowing. Well, second, we need to give the office of the presidency the powerful tool it needs to cut out the pork barreling and special interest expenditures buried in those catch all appropriation bills the liberals in the Congress are so fond of. Today I'm asking for your support and help. We need the line item veto. We need it for America's future. Now, is that a wild experiment? I asked, is that a wild experiment? As some have suggested, no. 43 governors have that right. I had it when I was governor and it works. Finally, our current tax system burdens some too heavily while permitting others to avoid their fair, or to avoid paying their fair share. It makes honest people feel like cheats and it lets cheats pose as honest citizens. It encourages the underground economy and waste millions of man hours on forms and regulation. It drives money needed for growth and investment and jobs into unproductive tax shelters. It is an obstacle to entrepreneurial spirit and economic expansion. To put it simply, our tax system is unfair, inequitable, counterproductive, and all but incomprehensible. Even Albert Einstein had difficulty with his form 1040. And he said, this is too difficult for a mathematician. It takes a philosopher. So let's end the trauma of April 15th. Let's stop the nightmare of tangled regulations and twisted requirements that every American faces at income tax time. Let's make it possible to bring everybody's tax rates further down, not up. And today I'm asking for your support and help. We need a simplified tax code. We need it for America's future. Now, as we get on America on the road again economically, we also need to return her to respect for the sound values and traditional beliefs that account for her greatness. And to accomplish this, we must rectify two of the greatest wrongs of the past few decades. First, we must rid ourselves once and for all of the old liberal superstition that crime is somehow the fault of society and not the wrongdoer who preys on innocent people. Now, we've already appointed some very fair but tough-minded judges. And I just wish there was time to report to you in detail on the efforts of the tough new steps this administration has taken against drug trafficking and organized crime. What it all means is that we're putting more career criminals in prison than ever before. So it should be no surprise that for the first time in many years, the crime statistics are coming down and staying down and have been coming down for two years in succession. Yet critical legislative initiatives against crime remain right where they've remained for the last three years, dead in the water in the House of Representatives. Our Comprehensive Crime Control Act includes bills calling for bail reform, tougher sentencing, justice assistance to states and localities, improvement in the insanity defense, and major reforms affecting drug trafficking, prison crowding, and forfeiture. All of these reforms and others we've forwarded are badly needed and constitutionally sound. In fact, our initiatives, the core crime bill, passed the Senate by a vote of 91 to one. But in the House of Representatives, the liberal leadership keeps them bottled up in committee. So today, I'm asking your support and help. We need this tough new anti-crime legislation. We need it for America's future. And when I keep saying we need your support and help, what I mean is that there are people in Washington that need to hear from you. You know, it is not necessary to make some of them see the light as long as you make them feel the heat. Now there's another major wrong that's done traditional American values that needs to be corrected. Our forefathers were religious people, and they were also enlightened enough to realize the follies of religious intolerance. What they did on one hand was to erect a wall in the Constitution, separating church and state. And on the other hand, they provided in the same document for the free exercise of religion. They knew that morality derives chiefly from religious faith. And that no government or that government no more should handle religious expression than it should show preference for one religious group over another. Now I can't think of anyone who favors the government establishing a religion in this country. I know I don't. But what some would do is to twist the concept of religion, freedom of religion to mean freedom against religion. So let me repeat what I've always believed. Religion is one of the traditional values which deserves to be preserved and strengthened. We are and must remain a pluralistic society. When we speak of church and religion, we speak of them with a small C and a small R so as to include within the constitutional protection of all churches and all religions. The unique thing about America is that every single American is free to choose and practice his or her own religion or to choose no religion at all. And that right must not and shall not be questioned or violated by the state. We must protect the rights of all our citizens to their beliefs, including the rights of those who choose no religion. That is why our administration opposes any required prayers in schools. At the same time, we call for the right of children once again to pray voluntarily in our public schools. And that stand is in the spirit of the Constitution as our forefathers wrote it and as we have lived it for most of our history. Let us restore that balance. So today, again, I'm asking your support and help. We need the prayer amendment. We need it for America's future. But in addition to strengthening our economy and reasserting traditional American values, our agenda for the future must promote economic growth by extending new opportunities to all our citizens. Right now, this administration has before the Congress a series of measures that would give us a great start in this direction. But once again, these are measures that have been held up by the liberal leadership in the Congress. And once again, we're going to need your help to get them moving. First, tuition tax credits for the parents of parochial or independent school children. Second, the federal enterprise zones bill that will provide jobs and opportunity for those in our inner cities. And third, a youth employment opportunity wage so that young people, especially minority youngsters, can get that first job they need to begin their climb up the economic ladder. Today, so today I'm asking again your support and help. We need tuition tax credits, enterprise zones, and a youth employment opportunity wage. We need them for America's future. And finally, let me turn to a matter I know is of special interest to all of you, America's national security, the safety of her people, the right to a future of peace and freedom. We've come a long way in the past few years in restoring our margin of safety. I mentioned at this convention in 1980 that we needed this. Today, every major commander in the field agrees that America's military forces have better people who are better armed, better equipped, better trained with better support behind them. Now, besides moving to restore the strategic balance, we've added tanks, fighting vehicles, combat aircraft, and we've also added some 70 ships to the US Navy. We will have 600 ships four years from now if the Congress honors our budgetary requests. In the past three years, we have added to our sea lift capability more than in all the years since World War II. And our 1983-85 budgets reflect a 100% increase in sustainability funding, which will significantly increase staying power for all our armed services. Now, just take Europe alone. We can now deliver 25% more tonnage there in case of crisis, and we've improved our air sortie rate by 60%, and both on land and in the air, we have more accurate weapons, newer equipment than ever before. Now, these are the kind of things which will make sure we never have to cross the nuclear threshold. Yes, our defenses are being restored, and so too are our alliances. We have completely reoriented American foreign policy, imbuing it with a new energy and moral purpose, and in the process, we have rallied our friends throughout the world. Even as we've successfully resisted Soviet expansionism, we've opened a wide series of diplomatic initiatives that will eventually bear fruit, not just in arms control treaties, but in arms reduction treaties. And most of all, we've been candid about the differences between our way of life and that of totalitarian systems. We've carried on the struggle of ideas. We have spoken up for freedom. We're determined to keep America a beacon of hope to the rest of the world, and to return her to her rightful place as a champion of peace and freedom among the nations of the earth. But now, there are four important things we must do to move forward with the gains we've made in foreign policy. First, we must complete the task of military modernization and improved readiness. This is directly related to the prospect for arms reductions. In the past, we've succeeded best when we've bargained from strength. We have a moral obligation to pursue technological breakthroughs that could permit us to move away from exclusive reliance on the threat of retaliation and mutual nuclear terror. We must pursue vigorously research on defensive technologies that can permit us to intercept strategic ballistic missiles fired deliberately or accidentally before they reach our own soil or that of our allies. Now, some are calling this Star Wars. Well, I call it prudent policy and common sense. Second, we must maintain our traditional alliances. Our interests and NATOs are complementary. Their strength helps us and vice versa. Third, we must continue to work hard toward balanced and verifiable arms reduction treaties with the Soviets. Treaties that will be made all the more feasible by maintaining our resolve to keep our defenses strong. And fourth, we must continue our forward strategy for freedom and speak up for human dignity whenever it's threatened. I preach no manifest destiny, but I do say, we Americans cannot turn our backs on what history has asked of us. Keeping alive the hope of human freedom is America's mission. And we cannot shrink from the task or falter in the call to duty. In the past four years, we've offered renewed hope to millions of people in developing lands. And we're beginning to see them turn away from the East and toward political and economic systems based on personal freedom. So we must not be apologetic about our nation's commitment to freedom. We must present to the world an America that is not just militarily strong, but an America that is morally powerful, an America that has a creed, a cause, a vision of a future time when all people of the world will have the right to self-government and personal freedom. So today, again, I ask your support and help. We need to continue to restore our strength to pursue emerging technologies, to consolidate our alliances, to move forward energetically with strategic arms negotiations, and most of all, to continue proclaiming the American dream of human freedom to the entire world. We need these things, and we need them for the sake of America's future. Another subject of great interest to legionnaires is the POW-MIA issue. And your responsible support, your responsible support of our efforts in the National League of Families is greatly appreciated. We've made some recent progress with both Laos and Vietnam, and we'll continue our highest priority efforts until we achieve the fullest possible accounting of these brave men. By the way, I want to add something that also needs to be said here. The men and women veterans who've proudly served their country in the military have earned more than simply the respect of their countrymen. They have earned the benefits to which they're entitled, including veterans' preference in government employment. As long as I'm president, those will be the policies of the United States government. And I want you to know that for as long as I'm president, the door of the Oval Office is open to you, to your leaders, and to your concerns. You know, I can't leave this discussion without thanking all of you in the American Legion for the enormous help that you've given us on the Central American issue. It's been a long struggle, and thanks to your efforts, we're finally making progress. But the struggle isn't over yet. There are still those in the Congress who want to hinder our attempts to help El Salvador, and there is also a move underway to desert the freedom fighters in Nicaragua. So on this issue and many others, I hope you will think about sending a reminder to the Capitol this year. I hope you will think about ending that stalemate in Washington by voting this year for responsible candidates at the congressional level so that this administration can have a Congress it can work with, and our agenda for the future can become reality. I think you join me in my belief in this agenda for America's future. It's one that will create growth, opportunity, and progress at home, and pursue peace and freedom abroad. From reducing the growth of government to supporting prayer in our classrooms, we aim to strengthen families, local communities, private institutions, and voluntary organizations. Our goal is to reaffirm traditional American values while we get government out of the way of our people and their boundless capacity for change, innovation, and progress. Our hope is to keep alive America as a beacon of hope, a shining city in a world grown weary of war and oppression. You know, I wanted to speak to Oliver today about the future because I believe the things so many of you struggled for so valiantly have not just endured. They have grown and prospered and turned brighter with the years. What a change from only a few years ago when patriotism seemed so out of style. I'm not sure anyone really knows how the new patriotism came on so quickly or when and how it actually began. Was it seed first planted that day our POWs who had braved a horrendous captivity in North Vietnam came home, said God bless America, and then actually thanked us for what they said we had done? Or was it at the 1980 Winter Olympics and the miracle of Lake Placid? You remember the chance of USA and the hockey team that didn't know it couldn't do the impossible. Or maybe it was that unforgettable moment when after 444 days of captivity, our Iranian hostages came home to parades and freedom. Well, wherever the new patriotism came from, there can be no gain saying it's a rival. Maybe you've seen the television show, Call to Glory, that celebrates Air Force officers serving in the twilight struggle of the Cold War. Or maybe you've heard country singer Lee Greenwood's new song, God Bless the USA, whose first verse, his first verse says it so well. If tomorrow all the things were gone, I'd worked for all my life. And I had to start again with just my children and my wife. I'd thank my lucky stars to be living here today because the flag still stands for freedom and they can't take that away. And I wonder if anyone can forget that scene on the White House lawn last November, shortly after the Grenada rescue operation. What a change it was to see young students praising and thanking our military. And as my friend Paul Axalt recently noted, what a change to see graffiti on foreign walls that doesn't say Yankee go home, but says God bless America. Or how about those young men and women on our Olympic team this summer? Who's ever said more about this country than those young Americans? Can we forget those young American sprinters who swept the 200 meter race and then led by Carl Lewis, went around the track with a flag, embraced their families, and then knelt to pray? And what about the moment when they introduced George Foreman, the former Olympic champion who was brave enough to wave a tiny American flag at the 1968 Olympics when he had won his fight after there had been a demonstration previous to that in which there was no flag waving? The news accounts described how the fans in Los Angeles rose and cheered filling the old arena with an emotional ovation that brought tears to many. All I've ever tried to tell anyone, George Foreman, said is that I'm not a black man or a white man or anything else. All I've ever been was an American. And for me, there was that visit to Normandy earlier this year, where I'd read the letter of a loving daughter who had promised her father a Normandy veteran who had died of cancer eight years earlier that someday she would go back to Normandy for him. She would see the beaches and visit the monuments and plant the flowers at the graves of his fallen comrades. I'll never forget what you went through, she had told her father. And dad, I'll always be proud. Well, reading her letter was one of the hardest speeches that I ever gave. But I'm sure you, of all people understand, for many of you, even though your days of military service are receding, there are still reminders like that, poignant and piercing. It's always been so for old soldiers, trusted too well. And outside of Albany, coming around to bend, his train halted briefly. It was near a flagman shanty. The flagman came out and looked up through the train window into the general's eyes. The flagman waved his arm. There was no hand. General, I lost that with you in the wilderness, the flagman said, and I'd give the other one to see you well.  Nimitz and Halsey, MacArthur, Bradley, Patton, Ike, they're all gone now. And boys who stormed the beaches for them at Normandy or Ewell, are grandfathers now. Korea, too, fades into memory. And even Vietnam now belongs less to journalists or politicians than to scholars and historians. In the book by Gene Smith, in which that story about General Grant is recounted, there's another story about an old soldier. His name was R. J. Burdette. And he returned years later to an old battlefield, one he had told his wife he could find stone blind. But when he got there, there was grass and violence. It was May and children were playing on what he recalled as a shell crater. And although in his memory he wrote, there was still the day of might and strength and terror. It was gone. Well, I know you joined me in a prayer today that for America, such days and places are gone forever. That as much as we honor those who died to make us free, we also fervently hope that such sacrifice will never again have to be asked for. And that the day is not far off when there will be no new battlefields to visit and no old soldier stories to hear. Some will say that such hope is in vain, that the weight of history or human experience is against us. Well, I don't believe it's too much to hope that the years ahead will bring peace and freedom, not just for the people of this kindly, pleasant, greening land called America, but for all mankind. Thank you and God bless you all.


When the greatest event unfolded in human memory, when the prehistoric aurora of the perceived gods seemed angered, the ancient American population exploded with cultural rituals and worship of the event that they thought could be controlled with worship and sacrifice. Structures arise above the tree canopy, their stairway to the apparent abode of the gods. They wondered what it was and they tried to reach the cosmic place of the squatter man who would kill, torment and destroy humans in their habitat. The destruction came after a period of prosperity as the plasma manifested through the discrete phases and this overwhelmingly influenced the desperation felt by the ancients. The apparent god they thought could be appeased with further sacrifice, worship and dedication. But this was the event of cosmic disorder that would see earthlings everywhere scrambled for answers as utter desperation took hold onto the society they had known for generations. This was the manifestation of a preconception that would blind us for centuries to come, the worldwide cataclysm of the prehistoric aurora. Wait, do you hear this? Mesoamerican cultural belief tells us that at the beginning of time, the first god created himself and eventually gave birth to four other children who then presided over the four cardinal points. This was the manifestation in the sky and immortalized in the legend of the five sons which tells us of a time of the one god, a time of prosperity before the four other gods manifested and destroyed the world before civilization emerged from the ashes they had created. The source of the ancient golden age was also where a manifestation of destruction emerged. It can be hypothesized that a planet like Saturn could shine as a failing sun or something like that before going through an end cycle similar to that of what the sun will go through as its fuel renders to an end. Electrically exchanging plasma with other planets including the earth, the intensity of the plasma hitting the earth would seem like an attack from the once giver of light and an effort to appease the event spawned religious belief everywhere. In Mesoamerica a great squatter man type deity emerges in the form of telateculti exactly representative of the form of the squatter man in the petroglyph record. During the age of the fifth son, her eventually dismembered body would give rise to the civilization known to the world as the Aztecs and from these facts it can be assumed that the misinvolving this deity are representative of the electrical activity taking place in the sky. Influencing the cultures who witnessed it beyond recognition as the trauma inflicted over the millennia long event separated this time from the age of the golden epic. Telateculti to the Aztecs was a source of life and because of this they constantly wanted to appease her mostly doing this by sacrifice of blood involving the human heart being torn from the body in an effort to ensure the continued stability in world order as the previous cataclysm sparked by a great solar manifestation which was perceived as gods was still in memory when the planets were literally the gods exchanging highly charged plasma vaporizing earthlings the apparent anger of the gods. The idea of a creation myth involving a squatter deity goes back to the classic Mayan and the fifth century before Christ a figure which is based on similar deities in the even earlier Ulmik remembrance. In the creation mythology of the Aztecs however and other Meso-American cultures of the late post-classic period the gods Ketsu Kuato and Tezcalitipoca taking the form of gigantic snakes descended from the heavens one day and found Telateculti sitting astride the ocean. Snakes descending to the earth are also depicted at Gobekli Tepe events that seem impossible to us today where very common throughout the ancient world and the entire planet saw it as one. The two gods in the forms of snake-like manifestations seem to encounter the creator roaming the earth and so they took it upon themselves to destroy her a mighty tussle ensued in which Tezcalitipoca lost his left foot they eventually ripped Telateculti in two from the upper half came the sky and the other lower half became the earth the shockwave evaporating into cosmic dust as balance returned to our world. The other gods were not best pleased to hear of Telateculti's treatment and so decreed that the various parts of her dismembered body should give rise to features of the new world and her skin became grasses, her freckles, the flowers her hair became the trees, sunflowers, and herbs her eyes became springs and wells her nose became the small mountains and valleys her shoulders the large mountains and her mouth became the caves and rivers Despite being ripped to pieces and transformed into geographical features the Mesoamericans still continue to think that Telateculti as an earth goddess and they attribute any strange sounds coming from such features as either the screams of Telateculti and her dismembered agony or her calls for human blood to feed her Indeed, the goddess gained a reputation for having an insatiable appetite for the hearts of sacrificial victims This appetite had to be satisfied or the goddess would cease her nourishment of the earth and crops would fail This is how the ancients perceived the end of the electrical bombardment of the earth during the Saturnium supernova event Their paranoia was so intense of their perceptions that they literally played out scenes as they thought they saw it in the heavens The cultural rituals of sacrifice are appeasement events of a time they would do anything to not return to Perhaps the key is in what they saw during the last struggles of Saturn as cosmic order evolved to what it is today Another aspect of the goddess was that Telateculti was thought to swallow the sun every evening regurgitated the next morning at dawn Echoing the Egyptian tradition and this solar connection ensured she was part of the prayer offered to Tezcaritipoca before an Aztec military campaign, for example In various forms, she is an ancient Mesoamerican deity but the earliest representations in sculpture are found at the Mayan city of Mayapan in Yucatan This dates to the late post-classic period More common in Aztec art the goddess is often represented as a spread-eagled figure representing the hawker or squatterman which is misjudged in the process of childbirth The deity's mouth usually gapes with fangs or teeth or flint blades showing tremendous plasma showering from her presence in every radial way possible The most famous representation of this deity is on the colossal stone slab found near the base of the templo mayor of the Aztec capital Tenochitlan now central Mexico City The pink and desite stone was broken into four pieces by the weight of a colonial building once above it Put back together it weighed around 12 tons Carved in high relief on the stone is the familiar squatter figure of Telateculti wearing a skull and bones dress and with a river of blood flowing into her gaping mouth representative of the prehistoric Aurora event Another representation of the goddess is found on all four sides of the coronation stone of the Aztec ruler Montezuma II and with her the glyphs for water and fire traditional symbols of war The historian M. E. Miller is of the opinion that the face in the center of the celebrated Aztec sunstone is in fact Telateculti and she there symbolizes the demise of the fifth and final son of the Aztec cosmos literally representing what they saw in the sky The goddess was often carved onto the bottom of sculptures where the base touched the earth and on the underside of the special stone boxes which were used to keep the sacrificed hearts in which she was seemingly so partial to Telateculti appears as a famed monster in the form of a cornerstone of a pyramid platform at El-Tahin and this links the architectural belief of the stone as supporting the pyramid to her mythological function of supporting the earth the worship of a sky deity and the effort to reach the heavenly abode to actually see what was going on before mayhem was unleashed agriculture was lost the deity signifies the end of the greatest event in living memory a longing in the minds of the ancient earthlings of an event that is literally lost to history but what do you guys think about this anyway? Comments below and as always thank you for watching