SUV Drivers for Peace

After picking up my usual from Starbucks the other day (plain coffee with cream), I was assaulted by the sight of a bumper sticker on the back of a sports utility vehicle which was parked next to me in the lot. The car's owner was probably still in line waiting for their half-caf, low fat frappuccino latte del rio deluxe.

The bumper sticker read: "You Cannot Simultaneously Prevent And Prepare For War - Albert Einstein 1879-1955." It was applied right next to a "Don't Blame Me, I Voted for Kerry" sticker and some other limousine Liberal paraphernalia.

Sigh...

The laughable irony is that before the second World War, Einstein feared Hitler so much (and with good reason), that he lobbied VERY hard for the United States to build atomic weapons.

Here's a different quote of Einstein's that unfortunately wouldn't fit on a bumper sticker. It's from a letter he sent to Franklin Roosevelt in 1939:

In the course of the last four months it has been made probable -through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard inAmerica - that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reactionin a large mass of uranium,by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appearsalmost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.

This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable - though much less certain - that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.

BTW, Alfred Nobel, of "Nobel Peace Prize" fame, invented dynamite (hee hee).