Now in Malmo

Standing with Global Network board member Agneta Norberg last Saturday evening during her 80th birthday party in Stockholm.  Agneta organized the space conference earlier that day that brought me to the Nordic region.

Last night Dave Webb and I spoke in Helsingborg, Sweden inside a cozy cave-like basement second-hand bookstore.  Afterward our friend Andre Brochu (originally from Massachusetts and came to Sweden as a draft resister during the Vietnam War) took us on the train south to Malmo where we will be speaking tonight.

I want to mention that two nights ago after our talk in Gothenburg an Iraqi military veteran came up to me and told me that he agreed with a point I made during my talk.  I told the story about the 1991 Persian Gulf War that an aerospace industry publication at the time called the 'first space war'.  The Pentagon pre-identified all of Iraq's military targets with US military satellites, including under ground communications cables, and bombed 95% of these targets in the first 2-3 days of the war.  That meant the war was essentially over at that point.  But the US dragged the war on for weeks, expending lots of weapons that needed to be replaced at military production facilities back home, as they 'field tested' the US space war fighting technology system.  The Iraqi soldier said to me, "We felt the same way.  The war was a field test of US military space technology."

During the next two days we are supposed to take the train to Copenhagen, Denmark for speaking events there.  That train journey will take us just over one-half hour.  During that train ride over the bridge into Denmark we will see the huge offshore wind turbine farm.  I'd seen it once before and have always remained certain that we could do the same in the Gulf of Maine that is said to have the most wind capacity anywhere in the US.  Imagine the jobs at a place like Bath Iron Works in Maine building offshore wind turbines - lessening our dependence on fossil fuels and giving the future generations half a chance at life.

Bruce