Obama:Buddy Can You Spare a Dime?

drawing by marguerita
More and more lately, I find people asking me: What do you think President Obama really believes about this or that issue? I find that odd. How is it that a president who has taken on so many big issues, with very specific policies — and has even been awarded a Nobel Prize for all the hopes he has kindled — still has so many people asking what he really believes?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/opinion/01friedman.html?_r=1

 lyrics by The Doors 
You know that it would be untrue 
You know that I would be a liar 
If I was to say to you 
Girl, we couldn't get much higher 
Come on baby, light my fire 
Come on baby, light my fire 
Try to set the night on fire 

The time to hesitate is through 
No time to wallow in the mire 
Try now we can only lose 
And our love become a funeral pyre 
Come on baby, light my fire 
Come on baby, light my fire 
Try to set the night on fire, yeah 

The time to hesitate is through 
No time to wallow in the mire 
Try now we can only lose 
And our love become a funeral pyre 
Come on baby, light my fire 
Come on baby, light my fire 
Try to set the night on fire, yeah 

Obamaout of Touch? I’m angry,”,Mr.Obama said

drawing by marguerita .... the finest in Oval Office:“I don’t want to quell anger. I think people are right to be angry. I’m angry,” Mr. Obama said

— and it is: a clumsy simile for our terror-ridden time, followed by a clumsier joke for our P.C.-ridden time. But presidents don’t generally get a break on minor stuff.
“It’s almost like they’ve got — they’ve got a bomb strapped to them and they’ve got their hand on the trigger,” President Obama said on Thursday of the banks he’s chosen to bail out. “You don’t want them to blow up. But you’ve got to kind of talk [to] them, ease that finger off the trigger.”
Weekend Opinionator: Obama’s Communication Breakdown - The Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com

News for Today:Old is New!

drawing/collage by marguerita
Yet another sign of the emerging trend of 2009:
In 1972, The Times’s Russell Baker noted that the people he had always thought of as “the kids” did not seem to be reproducing. Baker decided that the Woodstock generation was conspiring to cut the birth rate so they would always be in the majority and could “go on being the kids for the rest of their lives.”
Maybe not selling out is going to come back into fashion, too. But if there’s nobody left doing any buying, does it still count?Op-Ed Columnist - The Stump Theory - NYTimes.com

The Social Being versus The Machine Being Transfer

collage by marguerita

Time that was previously spent interacting socially has increasingly been displaced by the virtual variety. A recent editorial in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine made the timely point that social networking “encourages us to ignore the social networks that form in our non-virtual communities. … The time we spend socializing electronically separates us from our physical networks.”

From there, Dr. Sigman makes something of a leap, suggesting on the basis of no experimental evidence that virtual social networking, by way of Web sites like Facebook or Twitter, probably does not confer the same health benefits as actual, unmediated social interaction.Is Social Networking Killing You? - The Lede Blog - NYTimes.com

What is man? Questions and Answers....

drawing ( #9) by Marguerita from series Zyg and Mea

1. In our time, when day by day mankind is being drawn closer together, and the ties between different peoples are becoming stronger, the Church examines more closely her relationship to non-Christian religions. In her task of promoting unity and love among men, indeed among nations, she considers above all in this declaration what men have in common and what draws them to fellowship.

One is the community of all peoples, one their origin, for God made the whole human race to live over the face of the earth.(1) One also is their final goal, God. His providence, His manifestations of goodness, His saving design extend to all men,(2) until that time when the elect will be united in the Holy City, the city ablaze with the glory of God, where the nations will walk in His light.(3)

Men expect from the various religions answers to the unsolved riddles of the human condition, which today, even as in former times, deeply stir the hearts of men:

What is man?

What is the meaning, the aim of our life?

What is moral good, what sin?

Whence suffering and what purpose does it serve?

Which is the road to true happiness? What are death, judgment and retribution after death? What, finally, is that ultimate inexpressible mystery which encompasses our existence: whence do we come,

and where are we going?

Declaration on the Relation of the Church to non-christian religions - Nostra Aetate

Pope Calls Any Denial of Holocaust 'Intolerable' - NYTimes.com

Entretempo: Relativity and how to have a roof over the head and food on the table

collage by marguerita

The wave theory was wildly successful in explaining nearly all optical and electromagnetic phenomena, and was a great triumph of nineteenth century physics. By the late nineteenth century, however, a handful of experimental anomalies remained that could not be explained by or were in direct conflict with the wave theory. One of these anomalies involved a controversy over the speed of light. The constant speed of light predicted by Maxwell's equations and confirmed by the Michelson-Morley experiment contradicted the mechanical laws of motion that had been unchallenged since the time of Galileo, which stated that all speeds were relative to the speed of the observer. In 1905, Albert Einstein resolved this paradox by revising the Galilean model of space and time to account for the constancy of the speed of light. Einstein formulated his ideas in his special theory of relativity, which radically altered humankind's understanding of space and time. Einstein also demonstrated a previously unknown fundamental equivalenceenergy and mass with his famous equation between

where E is energy, m is rest mass, and c is the speed of light in a vacuum.

Obama 's Status Quo

drawing/collage by marguerita
Like nuclear danger, the planetary ecological crisis threatens something that has never been at stake before our era: the natural foundations of life on which humans and all species depend for survival. Economic and military ups and downs are for a season only. Extinction is forever. Obama and the Return of the Real

Politicians often fail to resolve practical problems

drawings by marguerita - The portrait that emerges all over is....dashed expectations.


"What you are seems to be unacceptable,
you look for an identity that will be acceptable. Usually this identity is found in faces you are talking to.
You make a habit of studying people, finding out the way they talk, the answers that they give and their points of view; then, in a form of self-defense, you reflect what’s on their faces and how they act because most people like to see reflections of themselves.-” Marlon Brando

The Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.

In one passage, for example, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is quoted as saying that in the months after the 2003 invasion, the Defense Department “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the number would jump 20,000 a week! ‘We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.’ ”Mr. Powell’s assertion that the Pentagon inflated the number of competent Iraqi security forces is backed up by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former commander of ground troops in Iraq, and L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator until an Iraqi government took over in June 2004.Report Spotlights Iraq Rebuilding Blunders - NYTimes.com