Monday, May 24, 2010

Being a Nuclear War Country

The Guardian reports that the current president of Israel Shimon Peres, who was the defense minister in 1975, sought to sell nuclear weapons to apartheid South Africa. So, let me get this right. It's not okay for Iran to have nuclear weapons because of who they may sell them to but it's okay for Israel to have nuclear weapons because they are responsible in selling them? Wait...Israel has nuclear weapons? No county should have them.

8 comments:

Big Mark 243 said...

Don't gig me for my (mis)use of quantatitive words..!

It actually makes sense as they both share(d) a philosopy of being a superior class of humanity. It makes perfect sense.

They are both countries with no real regard for other human beings as their sense of self is justified in faith. How can they see themselves as 'evil' when their diety empowers them to rule in judgment against all others?

Israel is crappy. They simply moved into someone elses house and put them on the street.

zorro said...

I wish the United States citizenry had not been so anti-semetic in the years around WWII. Roosevelt wanted to create a Jewish settlement in South America instead of in the middle east. That might have worked out.
But if our citizenry had not been so anti-Semetic, it would have been great if we could have taken in all the displaced Jews into our country. Why? For starters, 1/3 of all the Nobel Prizes in science given to Americans were given to Jewish Americans. They make up about
1 % of the American population.

Judith Ellis said...

Mark - I see you jumped on your word usage before I could. But I'm cool. Your opinions are yours. No problem there. :-)

Judith Ellis said...

Zorro - I didn't know that but it would have NEVER worked. The land itself is what matters to these people, both the Palestinians and Jews. There is a rather elitist smug to your comment. Are you suggesting that Jews are smarter than others? There is no doubt that America benefited from the intellectual capacity of displaced Jews, but what exactly is your assertion? I don't know the percentage of Jews in the financial industry on Wall Street and in position of Treasury in Washington and New York but there are indeed many. Are they innately corrupt?

zorro said...

I have no idea if Jews are smarter, but it is a fact that
they have 1/3 of all the science Nobel prizes attributed to the United States. And they make up 1%-2% of the population.
I'm not Jewish, so it can't be an elitist comment on my part. I believe there are more Jews living in the US than in Israel. I think world wide there are maybe 6-8 million Jews. That's quite astounding considering how much influence they have. I'd like to have them all on our team is all that I'm saying. If someone had thought of that in 1945 and been able to sell it to the American public (a total impossibility), the world might be a more peaceful place. But then again, we would have won the Vietnam War if we had actually had Dr Manhattan from the Watchmen on our side.

I'm at a loss when it comes to Israel. One minute it seems like a Palestinian homeland will be created and the next, Jewish settlements are being built on the same land. I know Jews starting settling in the area in the 1800's when the British were in control. And Harry Truman was supposedly convinced to push create Israel by a longtime friend who was Jewish. I had a roommate once when I was in college who was Jordanian who had been told that Albert Einstein had made a deal with the U.S government guaranteeing a Jewish homeland in exchange for the science behind the A-Bomb.

So all I can come up with is a solution as improbable as getting Dr Manhattan to help us with Vietnam.

Judith Ellis said...

Yeah, there are no people who are smarter than others; there are only opportunities. There are two Jewish Supreme Court Justices representing 1% of the people. Is this because they are smarter? Of course not. Where are the Muslims? How about the atheists? It boils down to lobbying, rightly or wrongly. Those Jewish Justices who have served seemed to be well qualified--no problem there. But is it remains the question of how does this come to be with such an under-representation of 1% as you noted? Regarding Israel and the Palestinians, I wonder if America is too vested into another country. The Jewish lobby is strong and this is a problem as I see it. (There is another Jewish lobby that seems to be a bit more balanced, J-Street.) I think all policies regarding Israel, Afghanistan and Iraq need to be looked at anew. I think that we should not rubber stamp anything else anymore and this include the billions of dollars that go overseas and for defense contracts here. The new defense budget is $760 Billion. I want a line by line budget. I want every penny accounted for. The rich continues to get rich off the backs of the poor and working class. Looting and lobbying is how the class has been set up. History reveals this as a fact. Many of the defense artillery I have read is not even needed. ENOUGH!

zorro said...

Paul Krugman has the best solution that will never be enacted. Push the top tax rates back to where they were in 1980.
If high rates started to kick in when you made, say more than 10 million a year, there would be no more incentive to attempt to make 1 billion if the tax rate at that level was 80%.
No one needs that much money. Robert Reich pointed out that a salary of 1 billion for someone in a hedge fund would pay the salaries of 20,000 teachers. No one is worth a billion dollars. Not even the guy who came up with the vaccine for polio. Or at least, Salk, the inventor didn't think so. He refused to patent it.

Judith Ellis said...

I like Krugman's solution, Zorro! It's a good one.