MLB & ICBMs -- Both of them will be hitting America's heartland soon
Baseball was very good to me. ICBMs, not so much.
The MLB
Another baseball season is coming soon to a taxpayer-subsidized major league stadium near you.
Major league baseball no longer interests me at all -- thanks to the way the league is set up to enrich the big market teams and permanently impoverish small market teams like Pittsburgh, which has essentially been a AA farm team for three decades.
But during my long career in journalism I had some highly enjoyable encounters with Tommy Lasorda, Vin Scully and the cast and crew of 'Eight Men Out.'
I even tried to get Pirates' fan George Will to admit -- in the mid-2000s -- that MLB was broken, but he stayed true to his favorite sport.
Snooping on Montana's Nukes -- Not by balloon
Central Montana's people have lived with hundreds of Minutemen missile silos planted in their backyards since the 1960s. The Sentinel anti-ballistic missile system plans to give them 400 new ones.
Montana’s permanent bumper crop of ICBMs doesn’t get much attention these post-Cold War days, thankfully.
But when that Chinese spy balloon came a-floating across the state’s Big Sky last month, it was assumed that it was snooping on the hundreds of missile silos and command systems stuck in the ground around Great Falls and Malmstrom Air Force Base.
If the Chinese intelligence services want to get a better look at our country’s aging but soon-to-be-replaced missile defense system, it might be easier for them to just drive around on the wide open ground of north central Montana, as I did last summer.
The silos are all over the place, including in the woods.
Meanwhile, over the next couple of decades the Defense Department is going to swap out all the aged, rusty-dusty, never-used Minutemen and dig 400 new silos with 21st century wiring and electronics.
It'll only cost about $260 billion, supposedly.
That expensive project, which is now slogging through the paperwork and public comment process, has received virtually no scrutiny or criticism by politicians in Washington -- not even anti-war warriors like AOC and her gang have said a peep.
And the national media, which is still fixated on important issues like Trump, transgender issues and whether bad driving is caused by climate change, has paid no mind to a huge federal project that will provide a "Missile Rush" to central Montana.