Re: I bet you thought I was full of it!

-----Original Message-----
From: Meanface [mailto:meanface1@comcast.net]
Sent: Friday, April 28, 2006 9:55 PM
To: Ray Marshall
Subject: Re: I bet you thought I was full of it!

now you're placing yourself in the same block as an aged russian dissident.

Being on the “geezer� side of life, I guess I could consider myself to be “aging.�

why, that guy couldn't even speak english when he was growing up. he would be a perfect candidate to ship to mexico, and then he could cross the border illegally at nogales, trek across the arizona desert, and end up in a waiter's job in new york city. i actually read "one day in the life" more than once.

He must not have had a good lawyer. Two companies ending up publishing the book the same year in English. I have both first editions. And his English is different in each edition. He probably didn’t even get paid royalties from one of them. I suppose that’s like being a switch-hitter in baseball.

solzhenitsyn must have had a ghost writer because the copy i read was in english. i never read "gulag" for some reason, which escapes me right now. i don't know what the hell is going on, and, since no one from the government has asked for my advice, i basically leave things alone.

Nobody ever asks me, either. But sometimes I have to scream just to relieve the pain.

funny this should come up, however, because one of the guys i fly with is a retired b-52 pilot and now flies cessna citation 10 aircraft for net jets, a world wide charter service. he's 58 and volunteers his time to the sheriff's dept. he's a great pilot and a great guy. anyway, the other day he mentioned that he was afraid that someone was going to explode a nuclear weapon in the united states before he and i started pushing up daisies. he's no politico, but his musing about the nuke was out of character for him. he hoped he was wrong, but since i was on final approach at the time, protecting himself from death from one of my landings was a more imminent danger and the topic was dropped.

I worry about that too. Right now there are probably 600 ships lined up to unload at Long Beach. Each one has maybe 1000 containers. One “suitcase nuke� is probably the size of a desk. Of course, it wouldn’t be China doing it because if Long Beach were closed, their trade with the US would be cut off because nobody could unload for years. But some nutcase with a lot of money just might do it.

life is good.

Yes, life is good. But it’s good to pray also to do our part to keep it so.

----- Original Message -----

From: Ray Marshall

To: Rick Marshall

Sent: Friday, April 28, 2006 7:01 PM

Subject: I bet you thought I was full of it!

But Solzhenitsyn agrees with me.

And I swear that I didn’t see this article til 8:55 p.m., about 12 hours after my rant about Bush of this morning.

Maybe he’s not insane, but Bush is walking a very dangerous line up against the very paranoid Russians.

Solzhenitsyn accuses the West of plotting to surround and undermine Russia
By Adrian Blomfield in Moscow
(Filed: 29/04/2006)

Alexander Solzhenitsyn has accused the United States of launching a military campaign to encircle Russia and turn it into a NATO chattel. The Nobel laureate also delivered his strongest endorsement yet of President Vladimir Putin, surprising Kremlin critics who argue that the country is growing more authoritarian.

Replying in writing to questions from the weekly Moscow News, the 87-year-old former Soviet dissident said military action by the United States in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan underlined the menace to Russian sovereignty.

"Though it is clear that present-day Russia poses no threat to it whatsoever, NATO is methodically and persistently expanding its military apparatus in the east of Europe and is implementing an encirclement of Russia from the South," he wrote.

He also attacked western support for recent revolutions that toppled Moscow-backed regimes in Ukraine and Georgia.

"All this leaves no doubt that they are preparing a complete encirclement of Russia which will be followed by the deprivation of her sovereignty," he said.

Russia, he suggested, was all that stood between NATO and the "downfall of Christian civilisation".

He praised the efforts of Mr Putin "to salvage the state from failure". Arrested in 1945, Solzhenitsyn was a prisoner in both an elite laboratory for captive scientists and a labour camp in Central Asia.

After his release his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was the first work to draw attention to the camps in the Soviet Union. His longer The Gulag Archipelago provoked a furor abroad, prompting his deportation to the West in 1974. Solzhenitsyn returned to post-Soviet Russia in 1994.