Showing results by author "Chris Knowles" in All Categories

7 August, 2017 It was at the height of a mid-Winter storm in the South Atlantic. Under a full moon, in the middle of the night, the offshore patrol vessel HMS Clyde had maneuvered itself as close to the deep-sea drill rig 10 miles to the Northeast of East Falkland as it dare lest it be tossed against the rig's four forged tubular steel tension legs. Owned by Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales, or YPF, the Argentinian state-owned rig had been pumping oil from the Atlantic seabed within British territorial waters for fifteen months under the terms of an agreement between Great Britain and ...

On August 4th, 2015, Russia submitted a claim to the the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, established by the Law of the Sea Convention, to over 463,000 square miles of seabed within its 44% sector of the Arctic Ocean. The claim included not only the already-acknowledged territorial waters which extend 12 nautical miles Northward from the Russian coastline and the Exclusive Economic Zone which extends 200 nautical miles toward the North Pole, but to a total area extending 350 nautical miles from land. The basis of the claim was that the portion of the Arctic ...

In 1949 the Communist Party of China (CPC) under the leadership of Mao Zedung drove the Kuomintang and their leader, Chiang Kai-shek, off the mainland and onto the island of Taiwan. The CPC established a government on the mainland which has persisted to this day. Taiwan, formally known as the Republic of China, has flourished as a democracy for the past 70+ years. Although it is not formally a member of the United Nations and has no formal diplomatic relations with the United States, it has maintained a friendly relationship with the U.S. and the West for seventy years. For that period, the...

Building a sales team that grows under its own volition is the name of the game. This is where fortunes are made and lives are changed. But the question is, how can this be possible for you? In this audio program, you will learn to build relationships for your network marketing team through a proven system, which includes steps to develop the power of daily habits. Learn how consistency and persistence can magnify your results for every new distributor brought into your business.

In the Summer of 2021, the economy of the Russian Federation was teetering on the brink. The proceeds from the export sales of fossil fuels by Rosneft and Gazprom, the two state-owned crude oil and natural gas companies, was all that was propping it up. Then word reached Moscow that Saudi Arabia was going to release large new volumes of crude oil on the commodities markets sending the price plummeting and capturing a greater percentage of the export market. Russia’s economy could not withstand this. In order to diminish the Saudi supply of crude oil, Russia decided to launch an attack ...

Chris Knowles was born on October 24th, 1949. He was raised in Washington, DC. He entered The Sidwell Friends School, Washington's most exclusive coeducational college preparatory school, in September of 1952 at the age of two. In the Fall of 1962, he was 13 years old and beginning his Eighth Grade year when the photointerpreters at the National Photo Interpretation Center at the Washington Navy Yard detected Soviet offensive ballistic missiles stationed on the island of Cuba. This marked the beginning of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the intervening years, he attended The University of ...

Ever since 1993 when President Bill Clinton first spent his Summer vacation on Martha's Vineyard, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had been fascinated by the United States' willingness to have such a concentration of the nation's power elite, both governmental and otherwise, concentrated on this one-hundred square mile island in the Atlantic Ocean. It created such a perfect target for terrorists wanting to destabilize both the Administration and the nation as a whole. By August of 2015 al-Baghdadi was the leader of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, more colloquially known as ISIS. Seeking political ...

Pope Francis was elected in 2013. As the first Jesuit pope, Francis brought to the papacy the agenda of social justice observed in Jesuit works across the globe. Pope Francis inherited scandals from the reassignment of pedophile priests in Boston to the abuse and neglect of unwed mothers, children and orphans at the Church-run Magdalene laundries in Ireland. But the one institution which no pope had ever been able to reign in was the Vatican Bank. Today Pope Francis is revered as an enlightened patriarch with an interest in climate change. When American company Solyndra, marketing "green" ...

Freemasonry, the world's oldest and largest Fraternity, is based upon the tenets of Friendship, Morality and Brotherly Love. These principles are taught through lectures and morality plays. Most members of the Fraternity incorporate these principles into their own personal value system. But, for some, it can become an obsession. For one such Brother these tenets became a driving, rather than guiding, force. For one such Brother, this obsession played itself out in a shocking and deadly way. Thus, it became the task of Detective Sean O'Hanlon to discern the difference between real life and ...

Diego Garcia is an island in the Indian Ocean. Technically a British Indian Ocean Territory, since 1966 it has been dominated by U.S. military facilities headed by Navy Support Facility Diego Garcia and its current 2,800 personnel. China’s lucrative trade route to Europe ran through the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean. To help preserve European countries’ economies, the U.S. Navy established a quarantine against Chinese cargo vessels. This led to naval engagements between American and Chinese forces. Due to the inability to resolve the dispute diplomatically, ...

Thomas Moore and John Anderson were Masonic brothers of Georgetown Lodge in Washington, DC during the period leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Commander Moore worked in naval intelligence at the National Photographic Interpretation Center at the Washington Navy Yard. His responsibilities included the analysis of reconnaissance photography taken by U-2 spy planes overflying Cuba 90 miles off the Florida coast. John Anderson was a translator on the staff of the Soviet Embassy in Washington blocks north of the White House. His responsibility was to turn the ideologically ...

The story begins in 1860 on a sheep farm in the foothills outside of Aberdeen, Scotland, with the birth of Angus, a new generation of the MacLeish clan. Thirty-five years later, the next generation would awaken in a small farm shack at the base of Castlerock Mountain in northern Vermont. The only child of his generation, Timothy had two sons, Ian and Allyn, who served with valor in the 10th Mountain Division during World War II, received graduate degrees from Ivy League colleges, and returned to the family farmstead. But one returned with a view to improving practices of farming; the other,...

No sooner had the aerial reconnaissance photographs of the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea been analyzed than the evidence of China's island-building activities was forwarded to the Pentagon and the White House. Those satellite images revealed that the Chinese military was turning reefs and atolls into solid ground supporting airfields, ports, helipads and barracks. The discovery of new Chinese military staging areas adjacent to the earth's busiest shipping lanes for oil and natural gas was followed within weeks by China's announcement that they would purchase all of Russia's surplus...

On June 23rd, 2016, the United Kingdom conducted a referendum to determine the will of its people to remain in the European Union or to withdraw from it. The results were 16,141,241, or 48.11%, to remain, and 17,410,072, or 51.89% to exit. The following day Prime Minister David Cameron, who supported the “Remainers” in spite of his membership in the Conservative Party which supported the “Brexiters”, announced his intention to resign. On July 13th, Theresa May, another Conservative, became Prime Minister. On March 29th, 2017, Prime Minister May triggered Article 50 which began the ...

Sean Patrick O'Connell was the son of Donald and Mary Pat O'Connell. His was a middle-class upbringing in a middle-class neighborhood. Though he went off to college after high school graduation his performance was less than stellar. When he left college he volunteered to serve during the Vietnam War. His was an exemplary, though short, military career. At the war?s end he returned to school and did well. In his senior year he submitted a Fulbright Scholarship proposal which was approved. What distressed his family, classmates, school and the Fulbright committee was that his studies would ...

Since 1979, the United Front Work Department of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has had offices in Chinatown in New York City and elsewhere across the United States. Its purported purpose is to assist American residents of Chinese ancestry deal with such mundane issues as obtaining driver’s licenses and filling out work papers. But its more significant purpose is the suppression of anti-Chinese Communist activities. It works in collaboration with the CCP in recruiting those of Chinese ancestry such as graduate students working in classified American military projects. They are ...

For the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, more commonly known as ISIS, the two week period from October 31st through November 13th, 2015, had been extraordinarily successful from a public relations point of view. It had both made an explicit ideological statement and would serve as a recruiting tool for faithful Muslims around the world. Not only had 396 people lost their lives in terrorist attacks, but those attacks had taken place both in the Middle East and in Western Europe. The message those attacks sent was unmistakable. We know who our enemies are, we can find them, and we can kill ...

Since before its founding, the United States of America has depended upon its militias to defend and maintain its freedom from incursion by foreign adversaries on American soil. Although frequently the subjects of scorn or ridicule, there are over 500 militias in existence within the country's borders today. Since 2013, China has openly been conducting invasions in America, only this time the invasions do not entail "boots on the ground". They are digital in nature. Blueprints for the latest-generation fighters and bombers have been stolen. Chinese knockoffs can be found in the skies today....

Ever since the 13th century, the Silk Road from China to Europe was used to carry everything from silk and pasta to exotic spices from the Far East to Western Europe. It was the route by which both Orientals and Europeans were enriched. In the early 2010s, China devised an agenda by which they would restore the Silk Road under the "One Belt, One Road" policy. The One Belt carried goods across China, the Indian subcontinent, and Turkey to Istanbul and the starting point of the several routes of the historic Orient Express. The One Road was the maritime route to Western Europe by way of the ...

Ever since the conclusion of World War II, which was precipitated by the dropping of two atomic bombs, one each on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the specter of the nuclear annihilation of mankind on this “big blue marble” has hung over society like an omnipresent cloud. During the Cold War, which lasted from 1947 until 1991, conventional wisdom held that the end of life on Earth would eventually be brought about by the exchange of nuclear weapons between the United States and the Soviet Union. And then, in 1957, British author Nevil Shute wrote the incendiary novel On ...