There’s something fishy about the story of German sailor Juergen Gustav Kantner, whose beheading video was just released by Abu Sayyaf rebels (ASG). Apparently Kantner, 70, had been kidnapped by Somali pirates before this. What are the chances, considering all the gin joints and circumnavigators these days? In a further coincidence, the umpteen sensational articles are all short on details, including the dead woman found on Kantner’s boat, her identity discarded by even the media. Why? Her name was Sabine Isne Merz, 59, sometimes cited as Sabina Wetch. She and husband Kantner were ransomed in Somalia in August 2008 after 52 days in captivity. This time Merz’s body was found aboard the Bermuda-rigged “Rockall”, but a whole Sulu Sea away from where the couple was allegedly captured.
I’d like to lay out the geography of what’s been revealed so far, so emerging facts will more easily shake themselves out online.
According to the ASG, the Germans were seized in November 2016 while sailing on Tanjong Luok Pisuk (spelled Luuk in media reports), an inlet on the Northwest coast of Borneo, in the state of Sabah, Malaysia. Then, halfway down Sabah, Merz was purportedly killed in a shootout with her captors off Tawi-Tawi Isand in the Pangutaran province of Western Mindanao, the Philippines. Her body was found beside a shotgun on the Rockall, abandoned off Laparan Island in Sulu province. Some reports say the sailboat was moored, some say adrift. Though Tawi-Tawi and Sulu belong to the Philippines, they are governed by the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), from which today’s gruesome video is thought to originate.
Juergen Kantner met his end at the edge of a curved blade wielded by Muslim rebels in the Philippines’ long contested province of Mindanao. A nearby indigenous resistance in Cebu, under the leadership of Lapu-Lapu five hundred years ago, stopped explorer Ferdinand Magellan halfway round the circumnavigation for which he’s given credit because on a previous trip he’d come around from the other direction to “discover” the Malay Archipelago. By coincidence, Kanter and Merz almost bridged the gap.
LOCKDOWN. The term has become ubiquitous, though lifted easily out of context, being self-explanatory. Its predecessor “batten down the hatches” used to be too. Before the advent of recreational sailing it came from a work environment synonymous with incarceration, in the days of debtors prison for penury, before which were slave galleys. As an idiom, batten the hatches still means to fasten things down, brace for difficult weather. “Lockdown” was used this week to describe the city of Boston, as its neighborhood of Watertown was swarmed by militarized police, the residents commanded to “shelter in place”, officers barking at them to stay in your houses, under penalty of being shot, by accident we like to suppose, for their own safety is the implication, or be arrested for obstructing justice. We’ve come to know what lock-down means. It’s a prison term for everyone stuck in their cell, until further notice, sometimes indefinitely. Colorado’s Supermax prison operates in a permanent state of lock-down. Of course in this age of school shootings –another self-defining expression, like “going postal”– lock-downs have become an educational tradition, and isn’t likening schools to prisons forcing an interesting slip into Freudian reality?
You don’t care what our neighborhood Pikes Peak Justice & Peace Commission has gotten its leash tangled around –I shouldn’t– but the latest is just too funny. FIRST, in November they sponsored an Israel-BDS protest to boycott a local Ahava outlet and promptly got two participants arrested. Wrongly of course, but the police were awaiting them with a letter fashioned for the occasion by the City Attorney giving the CSPD authority to drive the activists from the private property. Although planning had been kept on the QT, do you think the reception might have been due to monthly confabs which the PPJPC executive director keeps with city law enforcement? Later in debriefing, the director pronounced his incredulity that the “new policy” hadn’t been spelled out to him at the last meeting. So what kinds of things do the PPJPC & CSPD discuss? SECOND, just as the PPJPC fell for the Save Darfur intervention-as-peacemaking faketivism, then zipped it for Obama’s false hopetivism, now the pitiful dupes call their Muslim-Jewish-Christian “Evening in Jerusalem” gathering a THREE CUPS OF TEA PARTY! Would this be in deference to 
First the MV Rachel Corrie suffered a breakdown shortly after leaving port. Then the Challenger I lost its steering mechanism and another Greek ship has to return to port. Though derided by Israeli critics as “tin buckets,” the ships had been certified sea-worthy before the convoy set sail. Suspicions about system failures can wait until proper investigations. Cyprus denied the Challenger permission to harbor for repairs, so its passengers were transshipped to the Mavi Marmara, and the convoy delayed its rendezvous. The revised timing will deny the Israeli navy a chance to attack during the night. The relief ships will not be approaching the contested waters off Gaza until after daybreak.
When 16-year-old Jessica Watson arrives in Sidney tomorrow, she will be the youngest person to sail around the globe alone. The precocious Aussie will be denied an 
In addition to the typical teenager sweets fixation was another unexpected first, although clearly enough foreseen by Team Jessica’s sponsors. Video blogging on a daily basis meant that Jessica had to worry about her makeup and hair. She holds the world record I’ll bet for first solo circumnavigator to concern herself with wardrobe and beauty products.
Finally the USS New York, famously built from the steel of the fallen twin towers, sails into NY for a photo-op near the site of the WTC, looking every bit to me like a fortified extension of the official 9/11 cover up.
SUNY Binghamton student Tim LaPietra coaxed Ted Kaczynski to write a parable for the Autumn 1999 issue of the campus publication OFF! Predictably, the peer review of SHIP OF FOOLS was snarky, e.g. 
The European countries more than matched the US government give aways to the super rich and as a result, the markets everywhere are celebrating this Grand Theft Robbery today. 
Escaping tyranny by sailing to the New World was a temporary fix. A ghost has come back to haunt us. We have another King George. 
Protect America, my ass. To say that this shocking theft of our freedom is to save us from terrorists, from Al Qaeda, is a frank lie. Terrorists are well-trained. They move with stealth. They have face-to-face meetings. They don’t call each other’s cell phones and chitchat about the latest and greatest plans. Our government is well aware of this. No, PAA is directed at us. The American public. Especially those of us who slander the dictator. 
I’m working on an idea for a logo, I mean icon -a personal icon. It could work in a static pose, or animated. Here’s the concept: Icarus.
Bush’s attempts to try his “unlawful combatants” in military tribunals were cut down, finally, by the Supreme Court. So what’s our Judge Roy “Dubya” Bean to do?