The other day my stockbroker forwarded an eMail to me which included a lot of pictures like this . .
Hiroshima, 65 years after America bombed the shit out of it.
If that needs explanation, or if you are American, or if you are less than about 65 years old, here it is. In August 1945, the Americans dropped the first atomic bomb on the city. The surface agenda was to end WW2. The hidden agenda was a warning to the Russians and the rest of the World not to mess with Uncle Sam.
But don't be too hard on the Americans. It's well known that they always operate with the World's best interests at heart, are still sore about Pearl Harbour, and MUST, someday, somewhere, do better than they did in Vietnam. (They dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki a few days later. Yup! They're really good at the Massacre of the Innocents.)
Detroit, 65 years after the Americans bombed Hiroshima.
No, America didn't bomb Detroit, though much of Motown now looks like they did. An "argument" accompanied these pictures - laughable if it wasn't so transparently ludicrous and sad. Essentially the economic freakster who originated the argument seemed to be saying that Hiroshima had recovered and overtaken the Rust Belt because the Japanese don't have a Welfare System.
Whereas . . yes, you've guessed it, Detroit, Michigan etc have gone down the pan because the Clinton and Obama administrations wanted to expand the rudimentary welfare system that disgraces Old Glory!
Remember, this is "Economics" and economists have correctly predicted all 7 of the last 3 recessions. As I see it, the Rust Belt is rusting because America thinks the world owes it a living, and nobody, least of all a crappy little country where they once slaughtered 100,000 civilians in a single morning, has the right to build better cars than Ford, GM etc., and build 'em cheaper. Oh, the poor dears.
Here's a similar argument. I don't know if it's logically sounder, or economically more factually based, but when we're into a pseudoscience like freakonomics, who cares?
Japan supports armed forces, but they do not go rampaging round the World squandering countless billions of their taxpayers' yen on wars which they cannot possibly 'win' in any conventional military sense, and will keep them engaged on "bringing freedom and democracy" to countries they know nothing at all about except they don't like them. Instead, the Japanese put their taxpayers' yen to work doing research into robotics, machine tools, computing, you name it . . while Detroit is sacrificed to the ambiton of military cretins throwing ther weight about in the guise of national security.
Tailpiece. The eMail also asked "What happened to the atomic radiation that was supposed to last for thousands of years?" Well, the answer to that one so really, really simple that even an economist can understand it. The Japanese are still dying from it 65 years later.
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I don't leave comments on blogs that use Word Verification. Ditto blogs which I know have Comment Moderation applied. Life's too short and I'm too busy makin' money and what the Hell are these people scared of anyway? If you don't like some creep's comment . . TRY DELETING IT! You have that privilege.
And I never read unpunctuated so-called poetry. I don't understand why self-styled poets think it's clever to make their work difficult to read/understand.