Copyright Gary Edward Nordell, all rights reserved. Powered by Blogger.

Wednesday, September 27, 2017

FORGET PRAYER, WE NEED AN AIRLIFT

The island of Puerto Rico is, they say, obliterated by Hurricane Maria. Electrical power and other utilities will be unavailable in some areas for six months.

Lots of people have prayed that the people of Puerto Rico would be safe from each new hurricane. Doesn't help: the hurricane goes where it wants and survival is very much a matter of luck.

Most of the church buildings are gone, also. Can't light candles if there aren't any.

Politics in America has become a divisive and hostile affair, largely caused by the fascist Oligarchy and their manipulation of the Republican Party.

But back in 1948, Americans were proud of our success in World War II, and already clear that Russia was a threat to democracy. So when East Germany closed all access to Berlin, the Western allies organized an airlift, sending 278,228 flights to Berlin from June 1948 to September 1949. The cost of the airlift was shared between the U.S.A., U.K., and Germany and is estimated at $225M to $500M (which would be $2¼B to $5B in today's inflated economy).

It actually doesn't matter how much a modern airlift might cost, we have got to do something or we will know that who this country is is Trump's not-very-great America.

The population of Berlin in 1948 was 2.4 million; the Puerto Rico population pre-hurricane was roughly 3.5 million. The United States is moving too slow while real lives - American lives - are in the balance.

You know the drill: Call both Senators and your Congressperson.
Say anything, but include the phrase 'Puerto Rico Airlift'.
http://www.callmycongress.com/
http://www.callyourrep.co/

And also call your local television and newspaper companies to let them know that this solution should be covered by them. And pre-emptively, tell your backward Republican in-laws that it is their party's fault that action has not been taken in Congress.

American lives are in the balance.

Copyright 2017 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

Saturday, September 09, 2017

September 2017 Quotations (56)

"An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind."
~~ Mahatma Gandhi [1869-1948]

"I think a simple rule of business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress."
~~ Mark Zuckerberg

"The purpose of any company should be to make people's lives better. Otherwise, they shouldn't exist."
~~ Bill Ford, chair of Ford Motor Company

“When we get to the end of the story, you will know more than you do now . . . “
~~ Hans Christian Anderson [1805-75]

"Cinema begins with D.W. Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami."
~~ Jean-Luc Godard

"Success isn’t everything but it makes a man stand straight."
~~ playwright Lillian Hellman [1905-84]

“I don't know if I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want someone who made it interesting.”
~~ Edith Wharton [1862-1937]

“I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.”
~~ Langston Hughes [1902-67]

"Abundance is not something [that] we acquire. It is something [that] we tune into."
~~ Dr. Wayne W. Dyer [1940-2015]

"Life’s meaning has always eluded me and I guess it always will. But I love it just the same."
~~ E.B. White [1899-1985]

"Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. You can go not only into the future, but into that wonderful place called other, which is simply another universe, another planet, another species."
~~ Theodore Sturgeon [1918-85]

"We all change. When you think about it, we're all different people all through our lives, and that's good. You gotta keep moving, so long as you remember all the people that you used to be."
~~ 11th Doctor Who

“I don’t believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun.”
~~ Virginia Woolf [1882-1941], from her diary (entry dated October 2, 1932)

"Leadersip is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that this impact lasts in your absence."
~~ Harvard Business School

"A dream doesn't become reality through magic. It takes sweat, determination, and hard work."
~~ Colin Powell

"I have chosen to be happy because it is good for my health."
~~ Voltaire [1694-1778]

"The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts [that] you are thinking."
~~ Eckhart Tolle

"The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others."
~~ Hindu goddess Chandi

"The best education comes from action; the most memorable lesson is a mistake."
~~ Tim Fargo

"Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional!"
~~ Haruki Murakami

"History has shown that democracies are healthy when the principles that bind people together are stronger than those that divide them."
~~ investor Ray Dalio

"People buy into the leader before they buy into the vision."
~~ John C. Maxwell

"The first step to becoming bold is to stop believing that boldness is meant for other, better leaders."
~~ Dan Pallotta

"Find something that makes you happy. And think about it a lot."
~~ Esther Hicks

"Fox News is a media colostomy bag that has begun to burst at the seams and should be emptied before it becomes a public health issue."
~~ actor Jim Carrey

"Success is never so interesting as struggle."
~~ Willa Cather [1873-1947]

"Mother Earth has been abused, the powers have been abused, this cannot go on forever. No theory can alter that simple fact. Mother Earth will retaliate, the whole environment will retaliate, and the abusers will be eliminated. Things come full circle, back to where they started. That's revolution."
~~ Native American activist Russell Means [1939-2012]

"Live the full life of the mind, exhilirated by new ideas, intoxicated by the romance of the unusual."
~~ Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961]

"That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet."
~~ Jhumpa Lahiri

"One always tends to over-praise a long book because one has got through it."
~~ British author E.M. Forster [1879-1970]

"There was no answer except the usual answer [that] life gives to the most complicated and insoluble questions. This answer is: Carry on with your everyday affairs, that is to say, put it out of your mind."
~~ Count Leo Tolstoy [1828-1910]

"The answer is that there is no good answer. So as parents, as doctors, as judges, and as a society, we fumble through and make decisions that allow us to sleep at night – because morals are more important than ethics, and love is more important than law."
~~ Jodi Picoult

"The trouble with life isn't that there is no answer, it's that there are so many answers."
~~ anthropologist Ruth Benedict [1887-1948]

"There is no answer, only a question."
~~ Derek Rydall

"Dwelling on the negative simply contributes to its power."
~~ actress Shirley MacLaine

"To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself."
~~ George Orwell [1903-50]

"You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do."
~~ Eleanor Roosevelt [1884-1962]

"Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it."
~~ Dr. Maya Angelou [1928-2014]

"If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again there is no use reading it at all."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]

"Walking is the perfect way of moving if you want to see into the life of things. It is one way of freedom."
~~ Elizabeth von Arnim [1866-1941]

"Leaders don't create followers, they create more leaders."
~~ Thomas J. 'Tom' Peters III

"Without water we are nothing. Even an emperor, denied water, would swiftly turn to dust. Water is the real monarch and we are all its slaves."
~~ Salman Rushdie

"I don't know how to save the world. I don't have the answers or The Answer. I hold no secret knowledge as to how to fix the mistakes of generations past and present. I only know that without compassion and respect for all of Earth's inhabitants, none of us will survive – nor will we deserve to."
~~ Native American activist Leonard Peltier

"I would like to see every single soldier on every single side, just take off your helmet, unbuckle your kit, lay down your rifle, and set down at the side of some shady lane, and say, nope, I ain't gonna kill nobody. Plenty of rich folks wants to fight. Give them the guns."
~~ folksinger-activist Woody Guthrie [1912-67]

"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge'."
~~ Isaac Asimov [1920-92]

"If you don't see the book [that] you want on the shelf, write it."
~~ children's author Beverly Cleary

"All great changes are preceded by chaos."
~~ Deepak Chopra

"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge."
~~ physicist Stephen W. Hawking

"The further [that] a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it."
~~ George Orwell [1903-50]

"The first mistake of art is to assume that it is serious."
~~ music critic Lester Bangs [1948-82]

"If you don't become the ocean, you'll be seasick every day."
~~ Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen [1934-2016]

"Hold fast to your vision and do something every day to bring it into manifestation."
~~ Michael Bernard Beckwith

"All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography."
~~ Federico Fellini [1920-93]

"After one look at this planet, any visitor from outer space would say 'I want to see the manager'."
~~ beat poet Wm. S. Burroughs [1914-97]

"Money lost, something lost. Honor lost, much lost. Courage lost, everything lost – better [that] you were never born."
~~ {Johann Wolfgang von} Goethe [1749-1832]

"What on earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book, and a cup of coffee?"
~~ Anthony Trollope [1815-82]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

Friday, September 01, 2017

Superstorm Solution

Harvey is just the first Superstorm this year. Hurricane Irma is already forming. We can expect many more, due to Republican Party failure to deal with what is now called the Global Climate Crisis.

Texas and the Gulf Coast are now waterlogged. There will be mosquitos. So the solution for preventing malaria epidemics in America from each storm is to reverse the ban on the pesticide D.D.T – temporarily, say for one year (and same after each record-breaking storm cycle.) Such a reversal should also be limited by geography, such as to the Gulf Coast or Florida or New York City.

Eco-activist Rachel Carson [1907-64] was right about the dangers of D.D.T. yet it remains the most effective preventive, and the current practice of NOT using D.D.T. in Africa is the cause of thousands of unnecessary deaths. Carson always said that carefully managed use of pesticides was an important option. Let's give it a try.

Copyright 2017 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved