Saturday, March 26, 2011

Good-bye Ohio State

March 26, 2011
BRUCE A. BRENNAN BLOG FROM THE WORLD AND MY MIND
The news as I see it and the views as I want them.
March 26 is … Make Up Your Own Holiday Day and Spinach Festival Day

We should call this National Popeye Day. Everyone should eat olive oil and have spinach fights, except in Japan where the spinach apparently glows in the dark now. That is my made-up holiday.

Ohio State apparently is not the best college basketball team in the nation this year, at least not last night. The Big Ten is out of the tournament. The conference, at one time earlier this season, had six teams in the top 25 but now none in the Elite Eight.

I do not believe this was based on a religious tenet, I think her family just wanted to get to the estate distribution. Elizabeth Taylor was buried on Thursday, a day after her death was announced. Generally, in America, we wait for rigor mortis to fully set in, thereby guaranteeing the deceased is in fact deceased, before we conduct a funeral. The grieving must have been too much to bear any longer or the lawyer was going on vacation.

Slaughter in America; One person has been shot at Martinsville West Middle School, in Martinsville, Ind., police confirmed today. The suspected shooter, a 15-year-old boy, is in custody, Brad Wilson of the Martinsville Police Department said in a phone interview. The victim was shot twice in the stomach and was transported to Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis by a helicopter this morning. Local news outlet WRTV is reporting that he is in stable condition. His identity has not been confirmed. WRTV is reporting that the suspect, whose identity cannot be confirmed, posted a note on his Facebook wall this morning before the shooting. "Today is the day," he allegedly wrote. According to Fox 59 TV, the shooting took place near the school's cafeteria around 7 a.m. and may have stemmed from a fight between two eighth-grade boys at a school dance Wednesday night. In a news conference this morning, police said the suspect fled the scene on foot but was later apprehended. The school, which was on lockdown this morning, is about 30 miles southwest of Indianapolis. More on this tragedy at a  later date.

Gadhafi confidants are privately telling sources the dictator is ready to hold talks with the rebel leaders. Other rumors have his family setting up bank accounts around the world and sending valuables out of Libya. They must be preparing for a rainy day. It looks to most of the world like it’s been pouring for a month or so. It could be that forest for the trees thing.

Gadhafi is living the highlife or at least as high as you can when you live in a desert. He travels, or did, with a large breasted female medical provider at all times. With Moammar Gadhafi in hiding as coalition aircraft bomb his country, he's counting on protection from a unique bodyguard corps he's been training for decades an all-female, gun-toting posse of virgins. About 40 lipsticked, bejeweled bodyguards surround the Libyan dictator at all times. They wear designer sunglasses and high heels with their military camouflage. But they're purported to be trained killers, all graduates of an elite military academy in Tripoli that's solely for women.

Gadhafi established the Tripoli Women's Military Academy in 1979 as a symbol of women's emancipation. "I promised my mother to improve the situation of women in Libya," he reportedly said at the time. His mother, a Bedouin tribeswoman born when Libya was an Italian colony, was illiterate. Moammar Gadhafi reviews an honor guard at the presidential office in Kiev in November 2008 during a state visit to Ukraine. The few foreign visitors who've been granted a glimpse inside the academy describe a spartan cement-block complex where 100 handpicked women drill in elite killing techniques, day and night, for three years. They're awoken by bugle call at 4:30 a.m. and jog for one and a half hours, before branching off into classes. Some train to fly MiG fighter jets, while others learn martial arts or how to fire rocket-propelled grenades. "The three-year training program involves all aspects of soldiering, from firing artillery and rocket launchers to hand-to-hand combat and communications," said Jane Kokan, a Canadian journalist who was granted rare permission to visit Libya in 1995 for a documentary about Gadhafi's bodyguards. Doug Sanders, another Canadian journalist who visited the academy, in 2004, wrote on his blog that he believes the elite female bodyguards, known also as "Protectors of the VIP," reveal something about Gadhafi's "idiosyncratic mind, and a revolutionary enigma in a Muslim nation where women are still far from equal in daily life."

The academy's best students are dubbed "revolutionary nuns," and they never marry and dedicate their lives to the idea of Gadhafi's 1969 revolution. They're banned from having sex and swear an oath to protect the Libyan leader until death, if need be. In 1998, a bodyguard named Aisha threw herself on top of Gadhafi when Islamic militants ambushed his motorcade. A barrage of bullets killed her and injured two others, but Gadhafi escaped unharmed.

So while Gadhafi's all-female crew and especially their photos have been featured in many tongue-in-cheek articles in the Western press, they could actually prove powerful in protecting him. Foreign intelligence agents are likely trying already to stealthily chip away at the loyalty of Gadhafi's elite inner circle. But while diplomats at the U.N. and even some of Gadhafi's distant relatives have turned on him, there have been no reports of defections from Gadhafi's all-female bodyguard clan -- though the regime would likely try its best to squelch any such publicity. "Without the leader, women in Libya would be nothing," Fatia, a 27-year-old bodyguard trainee in Tripoli, told Kokan during her research. "He gave us life. I am ready to die for him. He is a father, a brother and a friend to whom you can confide. You have no idea how humble he is."

Gadhafi is thought to be in hiding somewhere outside Tripoli, but he emerged overnight to deliver a rousing speech from the balcony of his Bab al-Aziziya compound, which was hit by an allied cruise missile two days earlier. It's also where a mysterious Libyan air force crash, purportedly by a Libyan pilot on a kamikaze suicide mission, may have killed one of Gadhafi's sons. Reporters were barred from the Tripoli compound while Gadhafi spoke last night, and he was whisked away after five minutes. "This assault ... is by a bunch of fascists who will end up in the dustbin of history," Gadhafi told the cheering crowd. "We will not surrender." But there are rumors he might try to flee. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told ABC News that some senior Libyan officials are putting out feelers about possible exile locations, "allegedly on Gadhafi's behalf." But just last week, French and British bombers destroyed an airfield in western Libyan thought to house the Gadhafi family's private jets, thereby eliminating the Libyan leader's means of jetting out of the country secretly. Now he may be looking around at his bodyguards, wondering how long they can continue to protect him, or perhaps which one would make a good mother for his next child. He needs to replace the child the British claim was killed earlier this week in a cruise missile attack.

President Obama is feeling the pressures of having started his own war. He actually cut his vacation to South America short, by a whole two hours, to get a better handle on the situation. The phones must not work south of Cuba. He is not going to Libya to get a handle on the situation, just Washington DC. He then announced America was giving up the control of the Libyan war to NATO. It was not announced when we would relinquish control, just that we would, soon. So now we have another war we started we will not control the ending to. Man, we are slow learners.

Slaughter in America; Police have arrested a 35-year-old man they say killed his son and tortured the rest of his family in a bloody rampage. Police responded to a house in San Bernardino, a Southern California desert community Wednesday after neighbors reported a man screaming for help. They found Ian Anthony Roderiquez standing inside the house and talked him into coming outside, where he was detained. Once inside, police found Roderiquez's family, his wife and five children between the ages of 8 and 16. The oldest son, Richard, was dead, and the remaining victims were seriously injured, San Bernardino County sheriff's spokeswoman Jodi Miller said. "I have not in my career seen anything similar to this," Miller told the press. Without being more specific, she said two instruments of torture were used. Roderiquez was booked on one count of murder, four counts of attempted murder and six counts of torture. He remains jailed without bail. Neighbors reported seeing the blood-covered victims wheeled out on gurneys to waiting ambulances. "Their faces looked like bees stung them. That's how swollen they were," neighbor Denise Symeou told the local press.. She said wife Sujal Roderiquez was wrapped in a blanket and "her hair was drenched with blood." Sujal Roderiquez remains hospitalized today in critical condition. Two of her children were released from the hospital Wednesday night, and the other two remain hospitalized with injuries that are not life threatening, Miller said.

Neighbors sobbed outside the home, recalling what they said was a volatile relationship between Roderiquez and his eldest son. The boy had moved out of the home to stay with a grandparent because of the problems. Sponsored Li"On Friday I was out here and his dad was yelling at Richard really bad," neighbor Stephanie Perez told the Press-Enterprise. "He would yell, 'Richard!' really loud and slam the doors." The rest of the children would frequently walk through the neighborhood, asking neighbors for food. "The kids would always say they were hungry, so I would always give the kids food," neighbor Sofia Symeou told the newspaper. "One time, the dad said, 'Don't give them any more food!' “Perez said she witnessed a younger girl asking for food and that she never went to school.

BRUCE A. BRENNAN
DEKALB, IL 60115
COPYRIGHT 2011

VISIT ANY OF THE SITES LISTED FOR REVIEW, RESEARCH, ORDERING MY WRITING PRODUCTS OR TO CONTACT ME.
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http://www.barnesandnoble.com/ (do a quick search, Title, my name)
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"Do not fear mistakes. You will know failure. Continue to reach out." - Benjamin Franklin

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