04.23.06
Posted in Rants at 2:25 am by Thomas
Bush was asked if his administration was planning for the possibility of a nuclear strike against Iranian nuclear facilities.
“All options are on the table,” he said.
Since the White House seems to have misplaced their only copy of the large-print history of the 20th century for pre-schoolers, here is a quick refresher on what the options on the table mean.
The United States is the only country who has ever used nuclear weapons against another country. On August 6, 1945 the city center of Hiroshima was incinerated in a fireball, followed three days later by the industrial section of Nagasaki.
In Hiroshima, almost 80,000 people died on the day of the bombing, and the death toll after fifty years has reached a total of more than 240,000 people. In Nagasaki, 40,000 died instantly and the death toll after fifty years has reached 80,000.
Two atomic bombs. Three hundred and twenty thousand deaths.
Clueless politicians, who should have spent their two-week easter vacation on a trip to Hiroshima and a visit to the museum in the Peace Park, talk about “tactical nuclear weapons” as if the word “tactical” means “magical”.
Well, let me drop a tactical clue bomb: If you take a nuclear bunker buster and blow it up some thirty feet underground, the exposion will take an acre of dirt and pump it into the atmosphere as radioactive waste.
You will only get a few thousand people whose skin will be burnt off their bodies, so this can maybe be seen as an advantage if you are a soulless moron, but you add hundreds of thousands of people to the victims of radioactive fallout. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Iran, Pakistan and India would die horrible deaths for at least the next fifty years.
And we know what kind of deaths. Not just from Japan, but also from Chernobyl, where now every year in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia thousands of children are diagnosed with a wide variety of cancer. The parents of many of these children were living hundreds of miles from Chernobyl, but now their children are dying, twenty years after the accident.
These are heartbraking stories of children who will never even reach their twenties, who live all their lifes in pain and despair.
Go to the link above and look at these innocent victims of radiactive fallout. Is that what you want?
Is it?
Permalink
04.20.06
Posted in Rants at 12:40 am by Thomas
I just listened to George W. Bush on NPR giving an adlib statement about his press secretary who seems to have found a functioning escape capsule to get away from the exploding Death Star that this administration has become.
President Bush sounds like a broken man… he was hemming and hawing even more then usual and he had some serious issues to focus even long enough to complete a five-word sentence about a person he has been working with for several years.
I guess what is happening is that the following thought is chasing its own tail through the dark hallways of his mind: “Worst President Ever. Worst President Ever. Worst President Ever. Worst President EVER!”
It must be pretty noisy in there…
At some point early this year he must have understood that he had his shot at greatness and he failed. Not just failed like so many other presidents, but far worse than most.
He came into power with the promise of bringing decency back into the White House. He inherited the largest budget surplus in the history of the US. The world was generally more peaceful than at anytime in the last fifty years. He sat down at the poker table and got three aces on the first hand. Lucky again, like so often in his life.
He could have been one of those mediocre, forgettable, but ultimately harmless presidents. But then fate put him into a situation so way beyond anything he could handle, while he had surrounded himself with the worst possible aides and consultants. A recipe for disaster.
After the terror attacks the President was riding a wave of unreal popularity and he and his sycophantic staff started an orgy of megalomania that lastet until the end of 2005. They raided, stole, lied, invaded, bombed, cashed, imprisoned, tortured and murdered their way through four long years, two wars and several trillion dollars.
President Bush has never been a big reader and he admitted years ago that he only listens to a very small circle for his information about the rest of the world. He lived a dream of greatness in a golden cage. But it seems that somebody opened a window and let in some fresh air… there were too many scandals, too many dead soldiers, too many angry voters, too much money lost.
It must have been quite the moment when they explained to him what all of this means: Worst President Ever.
And things have certainly changed. His attacks on Social Security and Health Care have become weak and listless. His speeches are carbon copies of speeches he gave a year ago, it seems nobody in the White House even bothers anymore to write new material for the boss.
And then there is the war. Iraq had turned into one big symbol of a failed presidency, a big, steaming pile of shit that has the President’s name all over it. Even in twenty, thirty years they will still talk of George W. Bush as the one responsible for this insane, disastrous nightmare. This must be eating up Mr. Bush. And while he is a confirmed sociopath, even he must by now understand the tsunami of misery that he has unleashed on this world. Iraq will be with him to his grave.
Which brings us to Iran… the latest addition in the gallery of horrors that this presidency has become.
Seymour Hersh in the latest edition of The New Yorker is painting quite a horrible picture of what our near future could look like. And if it would be any other journalist and any other President, we could all forget about it and sleep well… but not now.
Could this President seriously order a preemptive bombing run on Iran?
That is the question… Could he? Absolutely. He has already started one illegal war, why not another? Tens of thousands of people have already died during the fighting in Iraq, so worrying about more dead people shouldn’t be a problem either.
No clear outcome? Not enough troops? No international support? No basis in law? No Problem – just look at Iraq.
It is unbelievable, but it seems that we have reached a point in time, where we can find no valid counter-argument to prevent a sitting US President from starting an unprovoked war.
Permalink
04.01.06
Posted in Modern Life at 1:14 am by Thomas
About two weeks ago I made the jump at home from an older Windows 2000 PC to a brand new Mac mini core duo. Ah… what a difference!
I already knew what working on a Mac is like since I’ve been using them at work for about ten years now, but still – what a great little machine! The day the Mac mini arrived at home I stopped using Windows and I haven’t been looking back for a microsecond.
Small, quiet, doesn’t crash, boots in 40 seconds… computing without a fuzz. I’m as excited about this computer as I haven’t been in probably 20 years back when I got my Atari ST. It’s finally fun again to play around with a computer!
Permalink
