“A gifted strategic thinker”
The Dayton City Paper held a few surprises this week- June 10-16, 2009. It’s mostly about the NCR move to Atlanta. All of a sudden, I’m quotable.
In his commentary, Yvan Melnikoff calls me a “gifted strategic thinker” and says that I have “Freely contributed his insights for years and continues to challenge the status quo.” He continues to quote my post about the Young Creatives Summit- which you can read in its entirety here: Young Creative Summit: being young, doesn’t make you creative
The center spread/cover story “Dayton loses “The Cash” by David H. Langdon and Marianne Stanley, quotes my post about how ending corporate welfare- you can read that post here: Letter to the editor: Stop subsidizing the rich
I’m sure you’ll never see me quoted in the Dayton Daily News, unless it’s some “Gotcha” type ambush quote.
For those of you who’ve followed this site for a while, you know that I don’t shy away from hot button issues, or trying to start a conversation/argument by presenting extreme views on occasion. I think vigorous debate is healthy and needed if we expect to move above our current level of mediocre leadership.
We had Col. Colleen Ryan USAF Ret. from the Dayton Development Coalition speak at our veterans business group www.vob108.org today. She’s not from around these parts, but decided to stay after being stationed here for her last 2 years. Before coming to Dayton and WPAFB she had thought she would retire in Europe, but she fell in love with Dayton and the people here (her words). She still can’t get over our self-loathing and pathetic doom and gloom attitudes.
While we may have lost NCR, we still have the largest single site employer in the State of Ohio in our backyard, WPAFB, and it’s not going anywhere. The research budget at WPAFB alone, exceeds the research budget of all the Ohio univeristies combined. We have a talent pool. We have a great low cost of living, we have decent culture and we’re sitting on the third largest aquifer in the United States.
I’ve mentioned Col. Ryan as a capable candidate for Mayor of Dayton on this site. She joked with me today that she was honored. If this community would get its act together and work as a team, and make the move to Uni-Gov, it was real apparent to me today that we do have people who can present our community as a great place to live and work and locate your business here, and as soon as we stop letting the political parties pick our candidates, we might get the leadership we need and deserve.
That’s my 2 cents as “a gifted strategic thinker” for the day.
Wright-Pat is also home to the largest concentration of biggotted Christian conservative homophobes in Ohio. What next, sister city status with Tehran?
Hey, wait just a minute…
David L., did you put Donald up to this?
Cincinnati is larger than WPAFB Donald.
Bigoted – a term thrown around so loosely anymore that we may all just be that, by the definitions of those who want to apply the term liberally, generally by liberals.
Heck, I don’t care for any ‘phobes, but to a certain degree it exist in all of us. I am phobic of Obama’s lies (and Bush’s for that matter) and phobic of liberals who claim they are for actual civil liberties, all the while defeating their own cause with hypocrisy.
Gifted – huh? You have developed your thoughts over the years, through education, reading, and discussion (among other things)
Gifted is the opposite (almost) of that. Gifted would imply that you did not have to do any of the above, it is soooooooo natural the it defies reason, logic and our senses. You (like most people) are not gifted. You worked hard at it.
Hey Donnie P. Let me remind you that that collection of “biggotted (your spelling, not mine or Webster’s) conservative homophobes” you malign are the reason you can practice your freedom of speech, no matter how inane. Everybody wants to enjoy freedom, but only a select few, like the ones you slander, have the brains, brawn and guts to defend those liberties. Furthermore, if Wright Pat were to relocate (taking the biggest payroll in the state of Ohio with them) this area would look like Tehran. Let us lose this war on war on terror and you will meet some real queer-bashers in the form of the Mullahs. Their RX for homosexuality is throwing them off the roof the the tallest building in town. In the words of the Weather Girls, in Tehran, “It’s rainin men…..”
Beliefs regarding gay people have come a long way in this country, and a lot of it is generational. You will never have 100% of the people agree on that or anything else, but younger generation seem to accept people better than older generation, however there are people out there to prove that wrong.
Fight the fight, with words and positive action. Slowly will yourself on people with kindness and positive thought. It will never be perfect, nor was it ever intended to be perfect. There are a lot of people on this big ball, and I think the people that live here (USA) are getting better at handling the differences we all have. People love to talk about how great Europe is, but the fact remains they yell “monkey” at black football players (soccer, if you will) and have the world’s largest underground economies to evade taxes which would help pay for their so called “great health care” and other things. Their governments are way more corrupt than our government, to a certain degree, and they fail to practice what they preach all the time. Give me Ohio over Italy any day. Great place to visit, but the hypocrisy makes United States liberals look tame.
LOL, I don’t know Donald.
Actually even conservatives are becoming less homophobic as time marches on. A Gallup poll conducted last month shows that 60% of weekly churchgoers (not that all churchgoers are conservative — I’m a weekly churchgoer myself), 58% of conservatives and 58% of Republicans now favor allowing openly gay and lesbian people to serve in our country’s military (http://www.gallup.com/poll/120764/0764/Conservatives-Shift-Favor-Openly-Gay-Service-Members.aspx). Sure, there are probably still plenty of people who fear that the gayz will destroy our military’s unit cohesiveness and morale, but such people are a minority now.
So it’s time that President Obama keep one of his campaign promises, namely repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. It’ll save the country millions of dollars. It was understandable that repealing DADT wasn’t one of his first priorities, given the historical lesson from President Clinton’s blunder on this issue that left us with DADT, but Obama’d better be aware that a bunch of us queers will be marching on Washington later this year, and our patience goes only so far:
http://www.nationalequalitymarch.com
http://www.facebook.com/pages/LGBT-Equality-March-on-Washington-DC-Oct-10-11-2009/84093097030
Cool, another march on Washington. I was at the one in 1992. That was a lot of fun, especially since I could only find a room in Baltimore (which is very interesting city) and ended up taking a bus to DC with a bunch of Baltimore queers.
There is a place where gays and straights interact on a daily basis. It’s called state prison. And no activity gets the shanks out of the hiding places and into rib cages faster than gay jealousy. This and other boards tend to view the gay stereotype from the Hollywood-show biz perspective, where everyone is creative, witty and non-threatening. However, as anyone who has spent 15 minutes in the slammer will tell you, there is a never-discussed side of the gay world that is ultra-violent and anti-social beyond belief. It is this element, which pc forbids even mentioning, that the military objects to; not the fear that gays will re-decorate the barracks at Fort Hood. The group that makes up five percent of the population and 40 percent of the convicted are just the latest group to jump on the civil rights bandwagon, and the fact that gay-rights initiatives are trounced at the polls in every state they are contested seems to have no bearing on the minds of elites………..
In that Dayton City Paper article David,
I also said that Dayton City problems (of the sort you have been tracking both the players and the permutations for years) need to be addressed by a city party built on a city issues platform, constructed by innovators from both sides of the river, and insulated from national Republican and Democrat issues. City first. I also suggested that Dayton city development efforts (the bain of many of your commentaries) need to be streamlined and consolidated under a single organization with a single mission and that consolidation effort should be spearheaded by the same group championing The Creative Class – S.O.C.H.E.
“Gifted is the opposite (almost) of that. Gifted would imply that you did not have to do any of the above, it is soooooooo natural the it defies reason, logic and our senses. You (like most people) are not gifted. You worked hard at it.”
David’s gift is in seeing what is not being shown and making connections between events that are not apparent. Hard work is a part of developing the rational basis to support those instincts. Many people are gifted. Very few gifted people exercise their gifts to fruition.
I’m more worried about right-wing terrorism in this nation than I am about Islamist straw dogs. Mr. Ice Banal obviously knows his Liberty League tracts.