MGx - Musings, Essays & Ballads

Apparently, the subject of the widely distributed Oprah’s Big Give letter is claiming the letter to be a hoax. The person asserting the hoax is demanding that I remove any reference to the Oprah’s Big Give letter from this blog.

After rereading the post I can see no reason to retract it despite being threatened with legal action. My first amendment rights allow me to comment on such matters. The real thrust of the post was about where I thought the community should make a Big Give, not about the financial foibles of the letter’s subject.

Lastly, I hope that the letter is a hoax and was not written by the sister. However, if it was not the sister, then it was very artfully done to appear like a sister. One can only surmise that the motivation of someone who went to such tremendous effort to evidently only embarrass the subject must not be benevolent.

Also, the subject advises that the information obtained from a council member relating to the length that the city will do without a police chief was exaggerated by a few weeks.

Rawstory is reporting as we have noted here, our national infrastructure has been neglected.

“When infrastructure declines, we’re going to become a second-rate country,” says engineer and former New York City transportation commissioner “Gridlock Sam” Schwartz.

“No matter where you live, there are critical infrastructure issues,” says David Mongan, president of the American Society of Civil Engineers. “In some cities, bridges, roads, power lines, pipelines; are simply too old. In others, the explosive population growth has outpaced [their] infrastructure’s ability to satisfy the needs.”

If you are a hang glider or a para sailer or wind energy developer you absolutely have to love this area. Wind is everywhere and gusty and blustery and wonderful most of the time. However, as a bike rider I have to say no, no, no when the gusts exceed 21mph… consequently I am heading out for a ride before the afternoon high winds kick in.

This is too funny

This has been one hell of a week and I am still running all over the state today and again tomorrow. My bike has been collecting dust in spite of the fantastic weather. Next Saturday is the Kiwanis bike tour for the Doernbecher Childrens’ Hospital. 100k from Sturdivant Park to Frona Park and back again. Join it if you can there is a barbecue afterward.

My biggest objection to Hillary is that she has yet to run as a woman much less as a mother. Had she voted in Congress like a mother, had she campaigned like a mother had she spoken to me like a mother she might have had my support. Instead, she has forsaken her gender, except when it is useful, in favor of a tough guy persona. Robert Scheer compares her to McCain and points out the obvious similarities between them.

The Washington Post referred to “Clinton’s apparent effort to distinguish herself from her rival for the Democratic nomination … by offering a more hawkish approach to world affairs.” That rival, Barack Obama, has called for negotiations with Iran’s leaders and condemned Clinton’s proposal as saber rattling.

But the Washington Post story provided evidence that Hillary’s hawkishness is not merely a campaign posture, as evidenced by her two key foreign policy advisers, who the Post reports helped come up with the “obliterate Iran” idea. One of them is Martin S. Indyk, the former Clinton administration ambassador to Israel, who was as strong as any of the neoconservatives in advocating the invasion of Iraq. In an article he co-wrote with Kenneth M. Pollack for the Los Angeles Times three months before the Iraq invasion, which cited their insider status as former government officials who “had access to the most sensitive U.S. intelligence on Iraq,” the two claimed that Iraq had “thousands of tons of precursor chemicals for chemical warfare agents, thousands of liters of biological warfare agents. …” That “insider” information was false.

The Clinton campaign’s national security director, Lee Feinstein, is another leading Democratic hawk and Clinton administration alum who promoted the threat to obliterate Iran.

The scariest thing about Hillary is that unlike McCain, she is highly intelligent and that intelligence could very likely get us into even more trouble than another bumbling Bush wanna be. Obama is no dove either having voted against the war but for subsequent funding requests.

Much to the consternation of my democrat friends I will probably vote third party once again….

Space, the last frontier…. Read this retired air force officers take on the ‘new’ air force here

The air force’s vision of total domination used to stop at the stratosphere. Yet, according to its grandiose website, it now extends “to the shining stars and beyond”. I hesitate to ask what lies beyond. God? Certainly, there’s something unbounded, almost god-like, in the air force’s space fantasy.

When it turns to space, the air force readily admits its desire to dominate all potential foes. As Peter B Teets, a former air force under secretary and director of the National Reconnaissance Office, declared in 2002, “If we do not exploit space to the fullest advantage across every conceivable mode of war fighting, then someone else will - and we allow this at our own peril.”

There’s nothing surprising about this “king of the hill” mentality. A decade ago, as a uniformed officer, I attended a space conference in Colorado Springs. Major topics of discussion included space weaponry already on the drawing board and being funded. Included were space-based directed energy weapons (”10 to 20 years away” was the prediction then) and “Brilliant Pebbles”, a constellation of thousands of miniature killer-satellites, proposed in the 1980s, that would be used to intercept ballistic missiles and which, fortunately, went unfielded, though not for want of lobbying to revive the project.

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Television news video caught Philadelphia police officers kicking suspects. It is like watching rabid dogs tearing a deer to pieces. Disgusting!

Well, the Global War on Terror is not going well, evidently and that shadowy band of high tech Ameriphobic cave dwellers are reaching Fosset and Ludlumesque powers of connivance and worldwide disruption. From Asia Times

…more than five years after Bush’s speech, the administration seems determined to maintain a military “surge”, having added 20,000 soldiers. Making no apologies for the war’s contribution to an increase in terrorist activities, Bush’s officials continue to rationalize it as a commonsense response to ongoing violence, conveniently omitting the US’s own part in this violence; the report doesn’t classify any of the thousands of innocent victims killed by US or coalition forces as victims of terrorism.

Maybe we ought to consider something novel like diplomacy and sharing and common sense.

This is really funny, from Rawstory