Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Radiant beauty and ugliness through the face of a child:

"Chernobyl's Legacy Radiates after Twenty Five Years" is the headline if one clicks on the link below. It is the picture of a child, with one arm, short short stubby legs and a BEAUTIFUL face but it is NOT a pretty picture so you are forewarned!

Still, like a picture of the Holocaust, I believe it is important to view because words on a page are simply black letters on a white background strung together which cannot hope to convey well enough the emotional seriousness of an issue.

They did not raise the classification of Fukishima to 7, the same level as Chernobyl, for nothing. I believe the nuclear disaster at Fukishima is many times worse than Chernobyl but political power and the money behind it will never tell you the entire truth. This picture on Huffington does the job to adequately convey nuclear power's threat.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, supervisor of the Manhattan Project during the development of the first nuclear bomb, was correct when he quoted from the Hindu Baghavad Gita after the first explosion of it: "Now I am become death destroyer of worlds."

Who said a picture is worth a thousand words? This proves they were right!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
TRUMPED by a child: I have a confession to make. For about 1/2 hour I gave Donald Trump consideration because I was so brokenhearted that the leadership I THOUGHT would transpire under Barack Obama was less than I expected. I was brokenhearted by the November 2010 Congressional so called “shellacking” and I thought it happened because the president had fallen leadership short. The president did not come out STRONGLY against the summer of corporately driven town hall MADNESS which wanted to kill desperately needed health care reform and by doing so kill the chances of a Barack Obama second term. I was brokenhearted that he did not explain well enough to the American public what his health plan entailed. He had the bully pulpit but I believed he did not use it effectively and often enough. He did not evoke the kind of leadership that was needed to negotiate through the maze of an intractable and disunited Congress but left it in their lumbering hands to hammer out the golden calf.

I was heartbroken that Wall Street got away with (and still is) highly unethical crimes and worse that the president picked for Treasury in his cabinet the very men behind the Wall Street fraud; he chose those who helped create it and who advocated for policies that fed the beast. He put the very foxes in charge of the coop they and their ilk nearly destroyed.

I was brokenhearted when the president said Lloyd Blankfein, and Jamie Dimon, two of the most sickening Wall Street CEO's from the worst of the worst institutions which gamed the golden egg goose, were touted by the president as "good businessmen." The president said after all some sportsmen make big money as if that could excuse what Blankfein, Dimon and his cronies did while people who lost everything committed suicide. Blankfein, Dimon and others laughed all the way to their respective mansions with taxpayer bonus millions they did not deserve and should not have gotten.

I was brokenhearted that the Middle East wars Obama promised to end do not but rather increase spilling young blood in perpetuity, costing billions each day and not winning any friends. I was brokenhearted that someone like Corporal Manning who whistle blew on heinous military conduct and did what the Nuremberg trials instructed the world to do by exposing crimes against humanity even if one’s own country is the perpetrator. Manning was and continues to be held without trial in this country, possibly tortured and convicted verbally by a president who taught civil liberties at Harvard in a country where innocent until proven guilty is the golden rule.

I wanted leadership -- STRONG leadership I hoped I would get but thought I did not. I wanted leadership which would resurrect the country and create the JOBS it so desperately needs, dismember the inequities and loopholes of the tax code, bring US corporations doing business overseas back by taxing them if they choose to set up corporations abroad. I wanted a strong stimulus package and received a weak one. I wanted strong bank regulation but Obama and the Congress he was supposed to herd could deliver only tepid reform.

After 1/2 hour considering Trump, feeling that his stand on birther and so called “conservative” social issues were merely pragmatism he does not truly believe, I decided against considering him a serious candidate. Why would I think otherwise as he allegedly tries to gain a Republican nomination or in the alternative boost his Celebrity Apprentice ratings. When he had the audacity to say the president was not Ivy League and when he called Robert DiNiro a man of little intelligence I KNEW jealousy is the blood coursing though Trump’s veins and that he does not deserve the honor that attaining the presidency bestows.

Trump is a mean and brash man; an uber egotistical blowhard with fake hair that is metaphor for the faker he is. Trump does not care whom he hurts or what he says to hurt them and he stoops as low as a tabloid newspaper journalist to do it. I suppose a businessman often does not care whom he hurts and we have the Great Recession to prove it. Trump, is in reality a LITTLE man a very LITTLE man who needs to puff himself up to prove to himself his worth. It is ironic for a man who supposedly measures his worth by the alleged billions he accumulates to feel the need to do so. Others measure worth by different yardsticks.

I will vote for Barack Obama in 2012 because I can have the adult conversation about which the Republicans talk ad nauseam. 1 Corinthians 13:11 tells us: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I gave up childish ways.” As an adult I know one cannot get everything one wants. One must compromise and often.

I know Barack Obama has given us much we never would have gotten if a Republican held the oval office. I have faith that the president in a second term will do even more. I know Barack Obama is on our side and as the adult I am he will have my support.

NOT ANYMORE

  I wrote this last week and for the most part sat on it because I did not want my writing to imply anything against Israel. As stated agai...