Hillary the Shape Shifter, Flint Water, Fukushima, and Pussy Riot

A rule I follow in my personal life, and also in my political life, is to deal with the biggest problem first. I believe that this approach often results in the smaller problems being solved automatically. Sometimes it's easy to figure out what Job One is, but when there are dozens of huge Job Twos looming, it's not so easy.  

There was a time when the obvious Job One on the whole planet was to impeach Bush Jr and Dick Cheney. Now, with terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Syrian refugees pouring into Europe, and ISIS spreading far and wide, we're seeing the result of our failure to accomplish this.

Today, I believe Job One for Americans is to get Bernie Sanders elected. It may seem that Hillary would be a fairly innocuous president, and in the scheme of things, we know that she would be a competent president. But what kind of country do we want to live in? An oligarchical empire that crushes millions of lives and destroys Earth's environment in order to add to the wealth of billionaires, while forcing us pay its bills? Do we want to continue living under our present system of soft fascism, in which TV's are used in place of gulags and America is slowly transformed into a Third World nation right before our eyes? 

The main purpose of my blog post today is simply to share this video (2 minutes) of Hillary helping Bush Jr sell his illegal, immoral, and unwarranted 2003 invasion of Iraq. This invasion and occupation has resulted in the deaths of 1.5 million Iraqi people and 5,000 brave American soldiers, destroyed the whole country of Iraq, and recruited millions more terrorists, all while stealing about $3 trillion dollars from our Treasury, or more accurately, from our children's future labor! 

Every minute our children and grandchildren work to pay taxes to cover the cost of this war crime will be a minute that they will be in slavery, having their labor stolen from them to pay for crimes of which they are totally innocent! We too are enslaved, every minute we work to pay the percentage of our taxes that goes to the Pentagon, that pays Bush's and Obama's war debts, that pays for the hundreds of F-35's that can't even fly correctly (over $100 million each!--the software required to fly them is already more than 24 million lines long, and programmers are finding it impossible to make the plane fly at night!). Hillary is very good at making people forget who she really is, but this old video, just 2 minutes long, is a good reminder that Hillary is a shape shifter.

We must avoid automatically caving in and voting for Hillary. If we vote for Hillary while Bernie still has a shot, it will be an admission that we live in a country where the government is absolutely no longer a servant but a master. We will be admitting that we have no choice but to be party to murder and to be complicit in the further breakdown of our country's culture and infrastructure. And we will be gladly accepting our position of privilege while knowing that millions of our fellow Americans are going without healthcare, without affordable college, without decent jobs, without safety in their neighborhoods, and even without enough food to eat. 

How would Hillary handle the present Flint, Michigan infrastructure EMERGENCY? Would Hillary go after the perpetrators, who have knowingly poisoned tens of thousands of (mostly black) children? Here’s How Hard It Will Be to Unpoison Flint’s Water. There's a huge looming Job Two for you! What is the United States government going to do about this emergency affecting tens of thousands of Americans? This is staggering! And how many other of our cities, with their aging water, sewer, and natural gas systems, are on the brink of similar problems? 

I think it's doubtful that the oligarchs will allow Bernie, a self avowed socialist, to actually win the presidential election, but people thought it was impossible for a Catholic (JFK) and for a black to become president, and yet these things happened! The prospect of Bernie winning is very exciting! How could young voters not be totally excited about voting for Bernie? His wining would be an actual revolution. Checkmate, elite .001 percent! We didn't like the only two flavors you made available to us, Trump/Rubio/Cruz or Hillary (Coke or Pepsi?), and you have been trumped! The elites lose! We win!

After losing Iowa, will Trump now deflate like a stupid looking balloon full of hot air and blow out of sight? My intuition tells me that many Americans are becoming willing and able to look at reality instead of meekly allowing politicians to trigger their feelings and control their loyalty by pushing their pre-programmed buttons--about gays, immigrants, abortion, socialism, etc. People are finally starting to notice what most of you reading this have been able to notice instinctively for years--that is, when a politician is talking total bullshit. 

A quick check of videos on YouTube, such as Stephen Colbert's excellent Trump vs Trump debate, shows that Trump is all over the board on every issue. Electing Trump president would embarrass America before the whole world! And allowing Trump to have the keys to our nuclear arsenal would literally endanger every human on Earth. What a humiliating, insecure, frightening position to put people from other countries in, who didn't have the opportunity to vote for or against him. This election is important, brothers and sisters!

The Hillary vs Bush video I've linked you to here shows that Hillary is in no way a progressive, but truly just a neocon in Democrat's clothing.

Bernie is the only viable candidate, the only one actually talking about the wellbeing of the people. If he won, he'd still have to beat his head against the brick wall of Congress, but by the same token, we would have restored sanity to one of the three branches of our government! That's something we didn't achieve with Obama, who immediately appointed Goldman Sachs' Tim Geithner Secretary of the Treasury and doubled the size of the war in Afghanistan. 

Another huge Job Two is Fukushima. The media behave as if the the earthquake and tsunami that disabled the Fukushima reactors 5 years ago were the disaster, but actually the disaster is just getting started, the biggest industrial accident in history, threatening Japan and ultimately the world. Can I interest you in a tuna sandwich? What will happen if they have to evacuate Tokyo?

And last but not least, Pussy Riot is back in the news! From the New York Times:

The Russian punk protest group Pussy Riot sashayed back into the public eye on Wednesday with the release of a music video savaging the country’s prosecutor general, Yuri Y. Chaika, who locked up three members of the group in 2012. 

It is a black satire of the Russian criminal justice system, in which the women, playing prison guards, rap lustily about money and torture a man with hot clothes irons.

Unlike Pussy Riot's previous videos, this one features high production values and choreography! And the young women aren't wearing ski masks! The whole NY Times article is here.

What do you think? Are we being naive if we once again let ourselves believe that a president can make a difference? Please click the comments link below and let me know.

Fuk Fukushima

A guy named Gerbil from the Fukushima Action Group just commented on a short little video I made of scientist Michio Kaku summing up the Fukushima situation. He shared a song he wrote. 

It's called "Fuk Fukushima". Check out the trumpet solo towards the end!

I responded to the comment he posted to my video:

You guys are doing THE thing that needs to be done now. Some people--just a very small percentage of any population--are really good at figuring out what Job One is. Several years ago, Job One, no matter what one's political affiliation, was to impeach Bush and try him and his administration for treason. Now, Job One is for all of the major countries (and even the minor ones, who could donate plenty of labor) to work together making a cement/boron sarcophagus to seal off Fukushima for at least the next 500 years. 

You don't wash the dishes while the kitchen is on fire. This is the most important job facing Earth residents right now, and it totally transcends politics, so it would be a great first international project, and it would set up future international projects we need to undertake in order to keep Earth habitable and safe for humans. Keep up the good work. You guys are amazing. Your trumpet solos could wake the dead (fucking Republicans). I consider quitting my good job (I'm a technical writer putting 2 smart, radical kids through college) and working full time on pushing for action in Fukushima, but I realize I have practically no voice, and that dealing with Fukushima is about 417th on the priority list of most Amerikans. And now the Japanese aren't even allowed to talk about it. 

Japan, Guest at Your Party

I was walking around in Berkeley last week and an analogy for the Fukushima problem popped into my head. As I walked, I dictated it into my iPhone's digital recorder (and almost got creamed by a bicyclist riding about 30 mph on the wrong side of the road through a red light--he came so close to hitting me that his clothes touched my clothes!). At the time, I really believed in my idea--I thought it was a brilliant analogy. But I lost faith in it a few days later after I'd dictated it into my computer and edited it. (Macs have an awesome voice recognition capability, but few people use it. You just talk normally and say "period," "comma," etc. when needed, and it types what you say with almost perfect accuracy!)  It sounded too crude and stupid to use.

However, in an email conversation with a friend about Fukushima, I did use it, and I was pleasantly surprised that she liked it. She wrote, "I like your analogy. It really hits the nail on the head. It's crude and weird in a way that people can actually relate to. I think that is the problem. Fukushima is SUCH a big problem that no one can relate . . . can get their mind around the seriousness of it." So now I feel a bit more confident to publish it. It's not like many people read this blog anyway!

By the way, I just added a way (on the upper right of this page) you can sign up for email notification of new blog posts, and I plan to make this blog active again. If this post isn't your cup of tea, please don't give up on me. There are a lot more where this one came from . . .

I think about Fukushima every day. If you study Fukushima, you get more and more and more freaked out. It's like when Dorothy's dog pulled the curtain aside and you could see the Wizard of Oz for what he really was. Millions of people have been given a chance to see the soul of raw capitalism: what kind of human beings would stuff thousands of hot radioactive fuel rods in a swimming pool atop a flimsy little building on the beach of a country known for earthquakes and tsunamis? I've been looking at radiation maps, and I heard Canada's top nuclear scientist on the NBC Nightly News say that just one more sizeable earthquake "and it's bye-bye Japan. People on the west coast of North America [including Jeff Syrop and his family, who can actually see the friggin' Pacific Ocean from their back yard] will have to evacuate." So basically we're playing Russian Roulette. Japan's TEPCO is running around doing clown-car half measures while Japan and the rest of the world are pretending everything is hunky-dory.

I feel an urgency to somehow do my part in sounding the alarm. People need to wake up! The major countries need to work together on the largest scale project every attempted by humankind and solve the problem of Fukushima!

So, without further ado, here is my crude analogy:

Japan, Guest at Your Party

Japan is like somebody who comes to your party and shits in his pants, and the shit is dripping down his leg and getting on your carpet. Some of your guests are already stepping in it! The room is just beginning to stink. But the this Japanese guy is excessively prideful and he can't bear to lose face, so he tries to ignore the problem and refuses to do anything significant about it.

It's a pity, too, because there are several professional janitors at your party, and there are some workers from a professional laundry here as well; their laundry facility is right across the hall from your apartment! Also attending are some of the best doctors in the world. But this fucking Japanese guy won't say anything about his obvious problem. Instead he insists on talking about his favorite subjects: cars and high tech. How shiny my Toyotas are and how sleek are my Lexuses! As surreptitiously as possible, he uses tissues to dab his shoes off each time more shit drips on them, and he keeps hiding the used tissue in his pockets and up his sleeves. It's really fucked up.

Clearly Japan is distressed. People at your party are losing interest in Japanese cars and game stations, and they're all considering canceling their invitations to the big sporting event Japan is having soon at his house (the fucking Olympics!).

The host and the other important guests at the party know that Japan is very distressed, but they are too busy and too greedy to help him because they don't want to impede the flow of conversation and fun at their party. They're making all kinds of deals with one another and enjoying the pretty girls and good scotch! Hardly an offer of help for poor inconvenienced Japan can be heard!

It's likely Japan has food poisoning, which might cause every organ of his body to shut down. He might die! Stupidly and selfishly, the host and the most important guests aren't acknowledging this. If Japan dies, it could destroy the livelihood and safety of all the guests at your party; almost all of them do business with him. And some of the guests are already getting sick! Soon Taiwan and the Philippians might start shitting on themselves. Maybe next it will be your good friends Hawaii, Alaska, and California! It's possible that if he doesn't get treatment soon, Japan could infect everyone in the room with his disease!

Why won't Japan make a serious effort to help himself? Why won't we make a serious effort to help him? What the fuck are we waiting for?

Please click on the comment link below and let me know what you think we can do to get our country seriously involved in this project. Also, are you personally worried about it or is it not a concern for you? A panel of UC Berkeley scientists recently published a paper stating that not much radiation has actually reached us yet, and while they didn't try to diminish the seriousness of the problem, they found that at this point, we're not in any danger of ingesting or breathing dangerous amounts of radiation. Still, every time I eat a tuna sandwich, I think twice now!