Soon I learned Mali Wee was driving to Penang. Where is Penang I wondered? Another China town I had never heard of which Mali is visiting? Driving all the way to China from Singapore? This seemed unlikely.
And so I consulted Google to learn Penang is a town in Malaysia, within driving distance from Mali's home island.
Reading about Penang I soon found myself reading about the Sultan Abdul Halim Muadzam Shah Bridge. The article about this bridge was highly detailed, as to how it was designed, how it was paid for, and the actual construction, including delays.
And yet, even with a delay or two this actual Penang feat of complex bridge engineering was completed in about the same amount of time Fort Worth has been stuck slow motion building three simple little bridges over dry land, whilst pretending these pitiful bridges present some sort of complex engineering challenge and are of some sort of signature significance..
Oh, I forgot to mention, the Penang bridge is 24 kilometers, as in just about 15 miles, long. And built over actual water of the ocean sort. Deep ocean water with tides. And possible tsunamis. And so unique engineering was required so this long bridge could handle Mother Nature behaving badly.
No local congress person's inept, unqualified son was in charge of this Malaysian bridge project. Apparently Penang is not a backward backwater, but a modern city where public works projects are actualized efficiently. Unlike what is allowed to happen in an American backwater like Fort Worth.
So, seeing that this bridge in Malaysia has a Wikipedia article about it I wondered if the same was true for Fort Worth's imaginary signature bridges, known as the Panther Island Bridges, which have been trying to connect the Fort Worth mainland to an imaginary island, over dry land, for years.
Well.
On Wikipedia regarding Fort Worth hosting of America's Biggest Boondoggle one can only find one article, titled Trinity River Vision Project. The article has changed since I last saw it. With the changes changing the content to be total propaganda.
Propaganda so bad Wikipedia has a warning at the top of the article, which we screen capped at the top, along with the first two paragraphs of the propaganda.
First the warning....
This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. This article needs additional citations for verification. (October 2015) The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline. (June 2009)
Wow! This topic has had a notability issue since June 2009. Over ten years ago. The previous iteration of this Trinity River Vision Project article was extremely embarrassing in multiple ways. The example which sticks in my memory is the mention made of the imaginary island, describing among that imaginary island's attributes one attribute being the large colony of feral cats.
The feral cats and all the rest of that previous article has been replaced with what appears to be propaganda puffery lifted directly from the Trinity River Vision Authority website. Read the entire Trinity River Vision Project article to fully realize the level of propaganda nonsense, but for illustrative purposes of the propaganda we will copy just the first two paragraphs...
The Trinity River Vision Project is a master plan for 88 miles (142 km) of the Trinity River (Texas) and its major tributaries in Fort Worth, Texas. The river is of significant historical value to the City of Fort Worth, as the current central business district was developed in 1849 as an army outpost along its banks.
More than a decade in the making, the master plan was conceived by volunteers and community leaders before being adopted by city, county, state and federal officials. The goal of the master plan is to enhance and preserve the river's corridors within the city, so that they remain essential greenways for open space, trails, neighborhood focal points, and recreation areas.
There are so many examples of stupid idiocy with no connection to reality in the above two paragraphs I am not going to bother elaborating.
Suffice to say, Wikipedia needs to delete this propaganda. And someone needs to write a reality, fact based article for Wikipedia about the Trinity River Vision Project Boondoggle.
Maybe I'll find the time to do so...
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