Gunfire Shatters Quiet at AC Library
Retired Police Officer Shoots Self in Foot

Appleton City Journal, May 10, 2013, Volume 133, Number 3
by Cindy Arms, Sac-Osage Publishing Staff

Gunfire startled librarians and visitors alike around noon on Saturday, April 27, when Rich Bauer accidentally discharged a weapon he was carrying while visiting the Appleton City Library. Bauer was injured by a bullet through his foot and drove himself to the hospital. No one else was injured.

According to the police report, Bauer, who was doing some work at the library, had a semi-automatic weapon in his hand as Police Chief Bill Smith entered the library. Smith stated he was on his way to the library to meet with Bauer and was nearby when he heard five shots and smelled the odor of gun powder. According to the report, when Smith saw Bauer, he said, "I think I shot myself in the foot."

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http://www.iclassifiedsnetwork.com/editionviewer/default.aspx?Edition=8d77972b-de18-4229-931a-4f9b83fa4319

Washington gets explicit: its 'war on terror' is permanent
Senior Obama officials tell the US Senate: the 'war', in limitless form, will continue for 'at least' another decade - or two

Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Friday 17 May 2013 07.54 EDT

Last October, senior Obama officials anonymously unveiled to the Washington Post their newly minted "disposition matrix", a complex computer system that will be used to determine how a terrorist suspect will be "disposed of": indefinite detention, prosecution in a real court, assassination-by-CIA-drones, etc. Their rationale for why this was needed now, a full 12 years after the 9/11 attack:

"Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaida continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight. . . . That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism."

On Thursday, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on whether the statutory basis for this "war" - the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) - should be revised (meaning: expanded). This is how Wired's Spencer Ackerman (soon to be the Guardian US's national security editor) described the most significant exchange:

"Asked at a Senate hearing today how long the war on terrorism will last, Michael Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, answered, 'At least 10 to 20 years.' . . . A spokeswoman, Army Col. Anne Edgecomb, clarified that Sheehan meant the conflict is likely to last 10 to 20 more years from today - atop the 12 years that the conflict has already lasted. Welcome to America's Thirty Years War."

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/17/endless-war-on-terror-obama

"Essential though it is, the military action is secondary to the political one, its primary purpose being to afford the political power enough freedom to work safely with the population."

(Counterinsurgency Warfare (Praeger, 2006), p. 63)


http://www.amazon.com/Counterinsurgency-Warfare-Theory-Practice-Classics/dp/0275993035

DAVID GALULA: HIS LIFE AND INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT
Ann Marlowe August 2010

INTRODUCTION

It is a safe bet that if the United States had not found itself—or to be more accurate, identified it-
self—as fighting an insurgency in Iraq sometime in 2003, “David Galula” would still be a nearly forgotten
name. In 2003, his two books on counterinsurgency had been out of print for forty years. One, Pacification
in Algeria, had never really been published at all; written as a study for RAND, it was classified until 2005.

One of the characteristics which makes Galula’s work so robust—its infusion with both the French and
Anglo-American counterinsurgency traditions—also left him an intellectual orphan. In his lifetime, Galula
had the bad luck to be an expert who wrote in English about a conflict mainly of interest to the French. Still
worse, the Algerian war was tainted for Americans by the shadows of colonialism and torture. Though Galula
was in the United States during the early years of the American involvement in the Vietnam War, he
seems to have had only a fleeting influence on those who formed our strategy.

In France, counterinsurgency theory had enjoyed a great flourishing in the 1950s and 1960s, as the French
Army fought successively in Indochina, Suez, and Algeria. But the stars of this movement, a group of colonels
including Roger Trinquier and Charles Lacheroy,were already famous before Galula began to write. In
the context of the French tradition of guerre revolutionnaire, there was little novelty in Galula’s approach.

By 2006, when FM 3-24 brought Anglophone writers back into the game, the French had less reason to be absorbed in counterinsurgency studies. So even after Galula’s works were republished in English — and translated for the first time into French, nearly 40 years after his death—he remains almost unknown to the nation whose uniform he wore for most of his adult life.

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http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB1016.pdf

"You go to war with the army you have..uh..not the army you might want
or wish to have at a later time."

--Donald Rumsfeld, Camp Buehring, Kuwait, December 8, 2004

Iraq-Bound Troops Confront Rumsfeld Over Lack of Armor
By ERIC SCHMITT
Published: December 8, 2004

CAMP BUEHRING, Kuwait, Dec. 8 - In an extraordinary exchange at this remote desert camp, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld found himself on the defensive today, fielding pointed questions from Iraq-bound troops who complained that they were being sent into combat with insufficient protection and aging equipment.

Specialist Thomas Wilson, a scout with a Tennessee National Guard unit scheduled to roll into Iraq this week, said soldiers had to scrounge through local landfills here for pieces of rusty scrap metal and bulletproof glass - what they called "hillbilly armor" - to bolt on to their trucks for protection against roadside bombs in Iraq.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/08/international/middleeast/08cnd-rumsfeld.html?_r=0

Classical Time Crystals
Alfred Shapere and Frank Wilczek

Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky 40502 USA
Center for Theoretical Physics, Department of Physics,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 USA

We consider the possibility that classical dynamical systems display motion in their lowest energy
state, forming a time analogue of crystalline spatial order. Challenges facing that idea are identified
and overcome. We display arbitrary orbits of an angular variable as lowest-energy trajectories for
nonsingular Lagrangian systems. Dynamics within orbits of broken symmetry provide a natural
arena for formation of time crystals. We exhibit models of that kind, including a model with
traveling density waves

In this paper we will investigate a cluster of issues around the question of whether time-independent, con-
servative classical systems might exhibit motion in their lowest energy states. Fully quantum systems are the sub-
ject of a companion paper [1]. Related issues have been raised in a cosmological context [2][3], but those investi-
gations consider quite different aspects, in which the time dependence introduced by the expansion of the universe
plays a significant role. (The term \time crystal" has been used previously to describe periodic phenomena in other contexts [4, 5].)

...

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1202.2537v2.pdf

Quantum Time Crystals
Frank Wilczek

Center for Theoretical Physics
Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge Massachusetts 02139 USA

Some subtleties and apparent difficulties associated with the notion of spontaneous breaking of time translation symmetry in quantum mechanics are identified and resolved. A model exhibiting that phenomenon is displayed. The possibility and significance of breaking of imaginary time translation symmetry is discussed.

Symmetry and its spontaneous breaking is a central theme in modern physics. Perhaps no symmetry is more fundamental than time translation symmetry, since time translation symmetry underlies both the reproducibility of experience and, within the standard dynamical frameworks, the conservation of energy. So it is natural to consider the question, whether time translation symmetry might be spontaneously broken in a closed quantum-mechanical system. That is the question we will consider, and answer affirmatively, here.

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http://arxiv.org/pdf/1202.2539v2.pdf

Viewpoint: Crystals of Time

Jakub Zakrzewski, Marian Smoluchowski Institute of Physics, Jagiellonian University, 30-059 Krakow, Poland
Published October 15, 2012 | Physics 5, 116 (2012) | DOI: 10.1103/Physics.5.116

Researchers propose how to realize time crystals, structures whose lowest-energy states are periodic both in time and space.

Spontaneous symmetry breaking is ubiquitous in nature. It occurs when the ground state (classically, the lowest energy state) of a system is less symmetrical than the equations governing the system. Examples in which the symmetry is broken in excited states are common—one just needs to think of Kepler’s elliptical orbits, which break the spherical symmetry of the gravitational force. But spontaneous symmetry breaking refers instead to a symmetry broken by the lowest energy state of a system. Well-known examples are the Higgs boson (due to the breaking of gauge symmetries), ferromagnets and antiferromagnets, liquid crystals, and superconductors. While most examples come from the quantum world, spontaneous symmetry breaking can also occur in classical systems [1].

Three articles in Physical Review Letters investigate a fascinating manifestation of spontaneous symmetry breaking: the possibility of realizing time crystals, structures whose lowest-energy states are periodic in time, much like ordinary crystals are periodic in space. Alfred Shapere at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, and Frank Wilczek at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge [2], provide the theoretical demonstration that classical time crystals can exist and, in a separate paper, Wilczek [3] extends these ideas to quantum time crystals. Tongcang Li at the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues [4] propose an experimental realization of quantum time crystals with cold ions trapped in a cylindrical potential.

In nature, the most common manifestation of spontaneous symmetry breaking is the existence of crystals. Here continuous translational symmetry in space is broken and replaced by the discrete symmetry of the periodic crystal. Since we have gotten used to considering space and time on equal footing, one may ask whether crystalline periodicity can also occur in the dimension of time. Put differently, can time crystals—systems with time-periodic ground states that break translational time symmetry—exist? This is precisely the question asked by Alfred Shapere and Frank Wilczek.

How can one create a time crystal? The key idea of the authors, both for the classical and quantum case, is to search for systems that are spatially ordered and move perpetually in their ground state in an oscillatory or rotational way, as shown in Fig. 1. In the time domain, the system will periodically return to the same initial state.

...

http://physics.aps.org/articles/v5/116

Comment on “Quantum Time Crystals”: a new paradigm or just another proposal of perpetuum mobile?

In a recent Letter [1], Wilczek proposes the existence of a new state of matter, “quantum time crystals”, defined
as systems which, in their quantum mechanical ground state, display a time-dependent behavior (periodic os-
cillation) of some physical observable. The proposal is based upon a model consisting of (discernible) particles
on an Aharonov-Bohm (AB) ring,

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Patrick Bruno
European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, BP 220, F-38043
Grenoble Cedex, France

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1210.4128v1.pdf