Back in the 1980s I worked for Greenpeace for a while, and ended up on an action in upstate NY that was targeting toxic waste dumping. The concept of the action was to get expert climbers to put huge banners up, and at the same time to do a fly-by via a hot air balloon with a similar anti-toxics sign .
The climbing part of it went fine, and the climbers put a huge banner on the New York State Capitol in Albany, NY, which made the national papers and was a great success. But, the part I was involved in, the hot air balloon part, was a mess–damn things aren’t very controllable in direction, and in the capitol action, when we were supposed to be flying over the capitol, we instead went the other way entirely, never making it anywhere near, and were stuck over the Hudson River for a long, long ride, till we finally crashed into a corn field, tearing a huge trench in the corn, and pissing off the farmer, though luckily for us he turned out to be a GP fan.
We had several of these wrong way balloon rides across upstate NY, one in which, while going up, my arm got jerked in the lurching basket, I completely missed with the burner (you have to aim a long blue flame from basically a flame-thrower up into the hole in the bottom of the balloon) , and quickly burned out three panels from the ballon.
The GP pilot in charge, named Flip, said, “No, problem, happens all the time.” So we kept going up, again the wrong way.
On another wrong way trip, we crash landed right on an Air Force base, forget which one now, but it’s one of the major ones up there. Right on the runway.
To say they sounded royally pissed off on the icom aviation radio would be an understatement.
Most likely, to teach us a lesson, they launched 4 F-111 fighters
(these things: http://www.aerospaceweb.org/ai…
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just right a few feet over our heads, as we were standing on the runway, and trying to control yards and yards and yards of unruly balloon, and pack the whole mess up in the wind.
The noise was so bad it took a minute before we could hear anything at all. When we finally could hear a little, Flip turned to me a said:
“I think they’re trying to give me penis envy.”
And, that always struck me as what the US is essentially doing, every day, in almost every part of the globe–shaking it’s penis, “projecting power”.
Here’s a partial list:
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After 9/11 I was in VA, and met some guy who was literally jumping up and down, saying “I can’t wait, I can’t wait”
“Wait for what?,” I said.
“For IT to start,” he said.
“For WHAT to start?”
“The bombing, The bombing, we’re gonna show them”
We’re willing to put up with no jobs, corporate giveaways, and paying for multiple wars, all because it gives us a little thrill in our collective joint, that we can kill some people, somewhere far away.
the potency, that ability to reproduce is nearing zero.
They are censoring the miscarrage swine vaccine thing and the second part, the melt your lungs out starts in March.
Just in case you didn’t want to know that.
It may not be very big around, but it sure is SHORT!
Which title, I might add, appears on the front page as:
I had to click through to see “in what”.