A letter of marque is written authorization given by a State to private citizens to attack and take ships of the enemy. Hacked emails to and from Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State reveal that she was running a private government out of her house with a private and secret staff, dealing with foreign governments outside official State Department business. There are those who wonder where she got the money to hire the very expensive specialists who ran her secret government. Did she issue letters of marque? I spoke to the skipper of the twelve gun Baltimore schooner Jenny Lind today and he said the cruise to the Gulf was very successful, with fifteen tankers laden with sweet crude oil taken just off Aden and sent home with prize crews. He chuckled and said,

A sweet sailing ship is the Baltimore schooner
Her spread of stiff canvas eats into the wind
There’s plenty of prizes we should have got sooner
There’s naught on the sea like the sweet Jenny Lind
We caught a big tanker and boarded her quickly
And locked up her crew in the bilges below
Her captain was stiff and a tiny bit prickly
He said that his bosses at Exxon would know
I showed him my Letter of Marque and he squinted
And said that he knew the name written in ink
I took him aside and I more or less hinted
That he’d be remembered, which caused him to think
We captured more ships, he said, shaking with laughter
And sent them all home to be sold for cold cash
But what was the name, I said, what was he after
He said he imagined ‘twas put in the stash
He nudged me and said an election was coming
With Letters of Marque flying off of the shelves
The trade routes with swift brigs and schooners were humming
With papers fair signed by the Clintons themselves

Despite virulent opposition the United States of Barack Obama is about to sign an agreement with Iran that will allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons, an eventuality that will inevitably lead to nuclear war and hundreds of millions of deaths. Barack Obama has written a letter to the Supreme Leader of Iran, expressing his love and solidarity.

The Office of the Supreme Leader, Sayyid Ali Khamenei

My Dearest Sayyid,

I’m trying oh so hard to get your nukes on line
But you should know I’ve trouble here at home
My enemies obstruct in everything I do
That’s why I write this little note to you
I cherish all this love that we call yours and mine
My heart and soul from you will never roam
We love and need each other in the greatest way
That’s why I drop this little line to say
Our work will see the birth of a new Caliphate
We’ll laugh to see the infidel despair
And Andalus returned to you, so kind and wise
And so this note for your sweet loving eyes
We share a love for Islam and the West we hate
We stride the world and conquer without care
And in the end our love will last a thousand years
And so I close with eyes with loving tears

All My Love,
B

Another Country song needing some notes and minor chords.

A THOUSAND YEARS OR SO

We knew the moment that we met
That we had loved before
We smiled with eyes so sudden wet
In love again once more

Once more to love each other so
To share our love and tears
A love we knew so long ago
A thousand lonely years

Chorus:

A thousand lonely years, oh Lord
A thousand lonely years
Without her Lord, so long a time
And oh so many tears

An angel with her folded wings
Shone with a golden light
And said that Heaven grants such things
But only for a night

We kissed goodbye just as the chime
Said it was time to go
And knew we’d meet again in time
A thousand years or so

Everyone has a multiplicity of phones; iPhones, Androids and various devices of similar description, all capable of receiving email and text messages and connection to the internet as well as the ancient and fast disappearing cultural rite of actually speaking to another human being. How many phones does a man need? I have been a phone all my life. An Anglophone. Had I been born two thousand years ago in Britain I might have been a Saxonphone, baritone one hopes. Had I been an All-Pro tight end and coach of the Bears I might have been, by the merest transposition of two letters, a Diktaphone. Had I been an English teacher I could have been a grammarphone. Which is why, for my entire life, I have found it easy to phone it in.

The number of the phones I need
Is difficult to tell
Confined for life like Mr. Bede
In my small monkish cell
I get my emails one by one
Slipped underneath my door
I read them when the day is done
Just like the day before
I have a phone there on the wall
It rings or so they say
For I so seldom get a call
Yet still my bill I pay
Some yearn for the past simpler life
Without cell phones and such
Where man could live without much strife
In his poor phoneless hutch

In light of Hillary’s typically Clintonian behavior re the emails and the foreign money coming in while she was SecState, behavior that reveals to all her conviction that the Clintons do not need to obey the law, the New York Times writes, rather sadly, that despite her problems the Democrats see no choice but Hillary Clinton in 2016. Nonetheless, there are those who wonder if perhaps age, weariness and problems may cause her to decide not to run. Lying abed, I dreamed I spoke to my friend Waltradamus about the Hillary problem for the Democrats, and what would happen if there were no viable candidate to take her place. He said the answer was simple. The twenty-second amendment does not forbid anyone from running for a third term, it only forbids anyone from serving as president for a third term. Therefore, the Democrats believe they can prevail over the Constitution by running Barack Obama, and if he wins again fight it out in the courts, where the twenty-second amendment will be struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional because it does not apply to any other elected Federal official. Further, with the election tied up in the courts, who is the interim president? I woke covered with sweat and looked at the clock. It was getting very late for all of us.

My stomach crawled with giant worms
Barack Obama for three terms
And then a fourth, and then again
A life so long He reaches ten
Augusta now His private course
No golf cart He, a snow white horse
His subjects cheer as He rides by
Huzzah le Emperor! is the cry
The Capitol has been torn down
And every monument in town
Has been removed and in its place
Are giant marbles of His face
I woke again, a horrid dream
Before I recognized the scream
‘Twas Waltradamus, rigid, stiff
Unmoving as the crumbling cliff
Gave way before my frightened eyes
And very much to my surprise
The country tilted and the slide
Took state by state on its death ride
I woke again and day was here
Could such a thing be very near?
A monstrous, cruel and dark regime?
Of course not, it was just a dream

I have posited in these pages on more than one occasion that the United States is dividing, amoeba like, into two separate and distinct moral, cultural and ideological nations, the Southern half retaining most if not all of the founding principles of the United States and California, the Northwest and the Northern half becoming increasingly a hard Socialist state ruled by cliques of government unions, third world Mexicans and disaffected grievance minorities. I believe the division into two separate countries will be more or less peaceful, with commerce between the two, but like the amoeba, once fully separated, two permanent and distinct societies will emerge and stay that way for the foreseeable future, until such time as the hard socialist North, in order to solve its intractable problems brought on by historic inevitability, devolves into dictatorship, at which point the real crisis of the future nature of the United States begins. A nation divided amongst itself cannot stand, and force of arms will determine which United States will live and which will die.

A nation so divided
By nature is provided
The means to solve the problem in due course
One can resort to reason
Perhaps resort to treason
But if all fails then one resorts to force
But force means nothing’s settled
It merely leaves folks nettled
So say the folks who’ll say just let them go
But force resolves the question
And just as a suggestion
Just ask a Carthaginian you know

The world has never seen a leader like the Kenyan, Barack Obama, whose actions and inactions have transformed the world to a degree to which he could only have fitfully dreamed. In eight short years he will have accomplished much; the near destruction of the culture and history of the United States, and the murderous and rapid ascendance of Islam. A man borne by the gods, a man of broad reach and a broader grasp of the uses of power. A man of the people, but not of our people.

Has ever been a broader reach
A firmer, steel-tipped grasp
Two fierce lit eyes, a flint in each
Resolve a lock and hasp
The world has never seen the like
Of this tall Kenyan man
A fluid mongoose ‘fore the strike
Not since God’s time began
Alone is he with Jason’s fleece
Olympus is his home
His giant hands the hills of Greece
Fierce blazed with Styrofoam
The Kingdoms of the Middle East
Each one a Western foil
He single handed loosed the beast
And watched the deserts boil
So confident, a strong lip curled
The Kenyan firmly stood
Beside his self-created world
And blowed it up real good

The Western world has long accepted the web of lies that is Muslim propaganda regarding the nature of the Crusades. President Obama, at a Christian prayer breakfast, excused the Muslim atrocities of beheading and burning captives alive by proclaiming that Christians did even worse things a thousand years ago during the Crusades. Everyone, including Obama, accepts the thousand year Muslim propaganda about how the Crusades were a Christian assault on peaceful Muslims living contentedly in harmony with their neighbors on the southern shore of the Mediterranean. The truth is entirely different. When the Muslim Arabs poured out of their barren lands to conquer and enslave their neighbors far and wide, they swept westward across North Africa, taking the Christian cities of North Africa by fire and sword, killing the men and selling the women and children into slavery. The Crusades were a failed attempt to recover the Christian cities and lands conquered by an invading and murderous Muslim army. ISIS is not an aberration, beheadings and burning alive is the Muslim way of war.

The distant hoofbeats sounded without warning
And moments later Muslim sword and lance
Struck down the Christians leaving none for mourning
The peaceful Christians stood but little chance
The men lay dead regardless of their bravery
The women and the children beaten, chained
And marched to Araby and sold in slavery
And so it went till no Christians remained
The Crescent flag of Islam flew unhindered
The Great White Sea was now a Muslim lake
The Christian cities burnt and black and cindered
Yet plans were made those cities to retake
And so were born the Cruses and the Templars
Who fought for Christ and for the long dead souls
Who died but who in time became exemplars
Of those who would don Crosses for their roles
The Crusades were attempts to retake places
Where Muslims with great cruelty and the sword
Had killed wholesale, removing all the traces
Of those who followed Christ with one accord
The Crusades failed despite the Cruses’ valor
The Muslim held the southern shore for good
The Great White Sea had changed its name and pallor
And Muslim galleys sailed where’er they would
Yet still today the lie’s told as intended
The Crusades were destruction and cruel death
To peaceful Muslims happy and contented
The lie still lives, and told with every breath

The voting is over in the Israeli elections, and exit polls indicate that Bibi Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, will be defeated, a prospect so greatly desired by the Israel and Netanyahu hating Obama that he sent money and Democrat Party election fixers to Israel to defeat a sitting leader of along time faithful ally of the United States. Obama and his coven of Red Witches sit around the big table, and Obama says, “This one is a freebie, it’s done and there goes Bibi.”

The Witches smile one at a time
Amused by inadvertent rhyme
Obama shakes his head and says
“The man must go, he’s irked the prez
A man who dared to hurl insults
At me, a man who gets results
I’ll teach that pipsqueak who’s the boss
He’ll cry and moan after his loss
The world will see I’m to be feared
What’s that you say, he’s won? That’s weird.”

The orb spider’s web is a marvel of structural engineering and design. The silken strands are equal in tensile strength to steel. After securing the load bearing anchor cables she spins the connecting webbing, securing each secondary cable to an anchor cable, until the web is symmetrical, beautiful, deadly and complete. In the angle formed by the exterior housing of the fireplace and the side of the house, an orb spider is busily building a web of silken filaments so fine as to be nearly invisible, except after a gentle Spring rain, when the web, catching the sun, shines with millions of tiny, brilliant diamonds.

And yet within a hunter waits
Her patience never strained
She knows her world has many fates
And every one explained
She was not taught in school to spin
Possesses no degrees
Born complete and without sin
She builds with practiced ease
Catastrophe is but the way
Her life just seems to tilt
In her brief life most every day
Her home must be rebuilt
And cheerfully she’s back to work
Repairing severed strands
She knows that life is not a quirk
That all is in God’s hands