Disturbing

Forgive me if I disturb you.

Today is a cold, wet, gray day in Maine. I have myself couped up inside the house feeding the woodstove… and eating.

After finishing the dishes I went to a website that I have been following for the past few months – What Really Happened. It’s approaching the 46th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy so this mostly conspiracy theory website is reflecting on that event in American history.

I followed a link from there to this article in Rolling Stone dated April 5, 2007 about CIA career man and convicted Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt who died January 23, 2007 after years of suffering. In the article, Hunt’s oldest son Saint, no saint by anyone’s standards, tells of a confession his dad made to him in 2003 when it appeared that he didn’t have much longer to live.

Those old films of President Kennedy in the back seat of that Lincoln convertible, Jacqueline at his side, both smiling and waving at bystanders, Texas Governor John Connally in the seat in front of Kennedy, are hard to watch for me. I generally stay away from that sort of thing. Disturbing…

But awhile back I did just that and noticed something I hadn’t seen before, although obviously anybody can and most have seen it. After the first shot, Kennedy is bent forward but a sudden jolt catches him and throws him back and to the left towards his wife, as though he had been hit by a shot taken from ahead of and to the right of the Lincoln. That is the direction repeatedly given in this article as being the location of the infamous “grassy knoll” where the forever denied second shooter would have been.

Both this article and Wikipedia point out that there are multiple sources that place E. Howard Hunt who was at that time still in the CIA and carrying a huge grudge against President Kennedy, not just in Dallas that very day, November 22, 1963, but in Dealey Plaza, the site of Kennedy’s assassination.

Coincidence can’t possibly explain this.

Disturbing is all I can say. Deeply disturbing.

Fort Hood Shooting

I continue to be fascinated by the Fort Hood shooting in Texas last week. The story has it that a Muslim of Palestinian descent born and raised here in the USA and educated by the Army, a Major by rank and a psychiatrist who has been treating soldiers for mental fatigue and stress related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a man of deep Muslim faith who had himself been subjected to anti-Muslim taunting by his fellow soldiers even, finally cracked and went on a shooting rampage on-base where he was able – presumably with the help of Allah – to shoot something like 51 people, 13 of them fatally, using two personally-owned handguns over the course of several minutes and maybe even in two different locations before finally being taken down by four bullets from a civilian policewoman.

I have to admit, that is quite an accomplishment! God must be some kind of good if He enabled that!

Everyone, now including Connecticut’s Jewish (independent right-wing neocon Democrat) senator Joseph Liberman is using this event to make political hay, both on the right and on the left (but mostly on the right).

Political correctness has it that the shooter was a coward and a traitor so woe be to anyone who tries to shed any understanding on how this war on Islam could possibly cause an American soldier to snap. Instead, it is politically correct to brand this as terrorism and the proper reactionary response to terrorism (proper in a pro-Israel sense) is to lash out against Islam.

Oh yay.

Believe This

It was a year ago that Americans voted for change we hoped we could believe in. Today we discover how wrong we were. The Obama administration today set the example for what we as a nation now expect for an elected government to be legitimate.

Jews Don’t Discriminate

Or do they?

Who’d A Thunk

I noticed in today’s news that the brother of Afghanistan’s president is reportedly on the CIA payroll. This is the very same brother who is suspected of being deeply involved in Afghanistan’s corruption, or more specifically, Afghanistan’s booming opium and heroin trade. For more information I point to The New York Times.

Presumably our CIA doesn’t have the resources or the skills needed to determine if this man is indeed involved in the drug trade or for that matter in any other kind of corruption in Afghanistan.

Would someone please remind me what the CIA’s function is?

Moosehead Grows

Maine’s Land Use Regulation Commission which we all call LURC (as in lurk or snoop around, “to lie in wait in a place of concealment especially for an evil purpose”) held a hearing Wednesday on the “concept plan” for development of Plum Creek land in the Moosehead Lake region of Maine. The purpose of this hearing was to announce that LURC had approved the plan, thus terminating a process that has been going on for the past four years.

This is all in my back yard, so to speak. Plum Creek owns much of the land in and around Greenville. Plum Creek is a Seattle-based timber management company turned real estate management company when forest development markets soared in the past decade. They bought Maine forest land cheap in the late 1990s and now wish to market some of it to the public for big bucks, a process which, if it happens, could significantly alter the Moosehead Lake area. Likely consequences for my home town would be increased real estate valuations, increased demands for public services possibly including Greenville’s schools, fire department, and police, increased taxes, increased in-town traffic, and a general deterioration of the myth of Greenville and Moosehead Lake being remote wilderness. These potential negatives would supposedly be offset by the increased revenues for Greenville area residents who take advantage of employment opportunities related to these developments.

I personally don’t know what to make of all this. If this development does actually happen, it could and probably would significantly impact me personally. Although there might be benefits, there would almost certainly be drawbacks including significant increases in my property tax burdens. But the larger question is what would become of my town? How will this much development alter the Greenville and the Moosehead Lake that everybody who knows them loves?

Nobody has an answer to that question. Now LURC has made it clear that nobody really cares. It’s the money that counts.

Squatters

Last night I was at the American Folk Festival in Bangor. Friday is the first day of this 3-day 5-stage music and food and craft fair event and the music starts at 6:00. Today, Saturday, is a cold wet day so I think we'll be skipping it till tomorrow, staying home to make blueberry jam instead.
I had an absolutely wonderful evening, though, listening to music and milling around in the huge crowd. I've never seen that many people on a Friday night at that festival. But it was 1:00 in the morning before I got into bed back home. We were even stopped on the edge of our own town in an apres-midnight police roadblock. This morning I was reading a Bangor Daily News blog about everybody bitching and moaning about the finances of the festival. Hey I think the bucket brigade is a wild idea. I enjoy the guilt trip! The one bitch I've had, well there are two truth be known, but the big one is that nobody has been allowed to stand in front of the stage at the Railroad Stage, the biggest stage and viewing area of the festival. Instead, people sit in these folding camping chairs that they all bring with them. It's a first-come-first-served sort of thing where rules of etiquette would forbid any polite person from standing in front of one of these camp-chair space hogs. It's like the seated people have precedence. Well it burns my ass that these people set up camp close to the stage so nobody can go stand down there. It was even worse last year when the festival organizers had set up a VIP seating section and through most of the shows nobody sat anywhere close to the stage, empty seats! What a drag that must be on the musicians!
Well anyway, I've come up with a name for these camp-chair real estate hogs. From now on I'm calling them squatters. Go to hell if you don't like my attitude.