HUMAN BEING FIRST

• I was up late last night doing a radio interview on a network that plays on about 36 stations around the country. The show began at midnight and went until 2:00 am. The host and I talked about the weaponization of space and ended by discussing what it means to be a human being. We were both on the same page as we concluded that the only way we can ever have a chance of stopping the corporate military criminal syndicate is for each of us to rediscover what it means to be human - and use our energy and light to protect the Mother Earth and the future generations.



• Signs of fall are coming to Maine as leaves are just beginning to turn bits of brown and some have started to fall to the ground. The leaves on the squash plants are turning a yellowish brown as they finish their cycle. Many unattended apple trees in the neighborhood are dropping their forgotten fruit - we went for a walk today and salvaged as many as we could from a couple trees by a local school. No one seems to bother with them.



• It was interesting to see the alarm that was raised a couple days again when the magician in the White House once again caved in to the Republicans when he ordered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to back off regulations that would have tightened government smog standards. The business community cheered and the environmental community groaned. Is anyone keeping score of the list of Obama's betrayals of the people and the planet? The list is getting longer by the minute.



• Last Monday a "dedication" was held on the island of Kauai in Hawaii at the site of a new "missile defense" testing complex. The Barking Sands Pacific Missile Range will become the home of the Aegis Ashore Missile Defense Test Complex. Basically what is happening is that in September 2009 Obama announced that the Pentagon would take the interceptor missiles (Standard Missile -3 or SM-3), now on-board the Navy Aegis destroyers, and also deploy them on ground-based launch platforms. The Aegis "missile defense" system, named after the legendary shield of Zeus, is deployed on 81 naval ships around the globe with more than 25 additional Aegis-equipped ships planned. (Most of these ships are built in Bath, Maine.) Obama plans to deploy the ground-based Aegis system in Romania in 2015 and in Poland in 2018, after they are tested at the new center in Hawaii. Russia and China see these systems being continually deployed around their borders at sea and on land and they understand that they are part of the Pentagon's first-strike program of the sword and the shield. The Obama plan is guaranteed to ratchet up the arms race.