Posts Tagged Barack Obama
News Art – US ELECTION = CHESS ANALOGY PROBABLY
The mid term elections have resulted in a heavy blow to Obama’s Democrats.
The Republicans are now the majority in the House of Representatives which means gridlock on any decisions. Voters angry at lack of progress on the economy have voted to now tie the hands of their President, making any policy change extremely difficult.
Once you understand that politics is a game, it becomes surprisingly simple.
Much like chess, it is merely a matter of guessing what your opponent will do, several moves in advance, and always having a new strategy ready.
Defeat for Obama in Mid Term Elections
To demonstrate this I set up a chessboard. To represent significant players in American politics I made the pieces human sized (I chose to only represent the politicians who are primordial dwarves).
I then let the games begin. Because of the election results, whenever a piece attempted to make a move I had to inform them that the move had been blocked by a new majority from the opposition and they would have to try another move.
Every move was blocked.
After eight hours of not moving the game had become incredibly boring, no progress whatsoever had been made and everyone watching was unemployed.
Eventually it was agreed that if pieces moved more towards the centre these moves would be more acceptable but by then it was time to choose a new leader of the game and I had to go find money to fund my campaign to be the next chess challenger.
I ran on a platform of changing the game to boggle and harsher treatment of benefit cheats.
News Art – BUDGET CUTS AROUND THE WORLD
President Barack Obama spoke on Tuesday of an initiatve to cut government agency budgets while Britain, Germany, Spain and France have also spoken of austerity plans. The new British Prime Minister David Cameron and his Chancellor George Osborne warned yesterday of tough spending cuts and the need for big sacrifices from the public.
George Osborne and his budget cuts
This is about everyone having to make sacrifices. As something to inspire us I tried to think of who in society makes the greatest sacrifices in life and I immediately thought of mothers. There is no one who is more filled with love and more willing to give everything for someone or some thing than a mother for their child.
I then thought about my friend who is a recently new mother – well I say friend, more aquaintance… and I say ‘recently’, it was AGES ago now – and I thought, imagine if you asked this mother to not talk about her kid for just 10 minutes.Or even imagine if you just asked her not to link a discussion about, say, sanctions against Iran’s nuclear power programme, back to the dull fact that her toddler Megan shouted ‘no no no’ in a very cute, angry voice this morning.
For her to agree to this would require one of the greatest sacrifices known to man and it is this kind of selflessness we are all going to need to aim for in the upcoming financial squeeze.
I then saw the CLEAR link of this girl’s pain at sacrificing talking about her child briefly to how the UK Chancellor George Osborne would feel if he were asked to stop talking about his precious budget that he keeps banging on about for just one evening. I imagine his ‘friends’ are in for a lot of conversations such as this…
Friend: ‘George! How’s it going? Haven’t seen you in months! I’ve not been too good myself, lost my job, ended up homeless. Had nowhere to-‘
George: ‘Ha ha, oh that reminds me how my budget was looking a bit fat today and then I realised how I could move a lot more rehousing responsibility onto local charities. They’re so cute when they cry out for funding’.
Friend: ‘Oh I heard you’re just Mr One Topic lately. Maybe we’ll catch up in July’.
So I have sculpted this image of a mother and child/my friend and her very aggressive toddler/the general population and cuts in public sector spending/George Osborne and his budget to represent Sacrifice.
April 13th 2010 – OBAMA WARNS OF NUCLEAR THREAT FROM AL-QAIDA
Posted by Heidi in Politics, Uncategorized on May 29, 2010
Addressing a world summit, President Obama warned that if al-Qaida acquired enough loose nuclear material for an atomic weapon it would be a “catastrophe for the world”. He said ” the risk of a nuclear confrontation between nations has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up”.
Suffer the Little Children
This news item had me crying for days about the terrifying consequences for humanity if we do not fight against our inherent love of war and conflict.
I believe, as I’m sure many of us do, that one day man’s hatred of his fellow man will become so great that we will outgrow dirty bombs and nuclear weapons and soon scientists will just grow genetically enhanced children who are super giants, able to literally pick aeroplanes out of the sky.
I have depicted this nightmare future in this terrifying bronze sculpture. It is now at the Imperial War Museum as a warning against war and science.