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One thing that really stood out to me was the fact that they chose to shut down the Tube at a low-income neighborhood, which likely disrupted the lives of many poor people and did nothing to fight climate change. It’s the path of least resistance. Spoiled trust fund brats that want to “change the world” via meaningless protest are active…
One thing that really stood out to me was the fact that they chose to shut down the Tube at a low-income neighborhood, which likely disrupted the lives of many poor people and did nothing to fight climate change. It’s the path of least resistance. Spoiled trust fund brats that want to “change the world” via meaningless protest are actively harming poor and working class people. I’ve noticed that this describes most young protesters in general.
Multiply a spoiled trust fund brat a thousandfold and you get the Special People preening at Davos and instruct us to eat insects as they dine on caviar and foie gras before flying home in their Gulfstreams and Globals.
The current delusion regarding EVs being the salvation of the Earth clearly demonstrates the contempt for the poor. Most people cannot afford to buy a new $70.000 vehicle that needs to be replaced (or at least, the battery pack does) every 10 years. Hydrogen fuel can be used in a combustion engine with minimal modification and an exhaust of water and cool air. Porsche is in collaboration with a company at the southern tip of South America using wind power to extract carbon from the atmosphere to create a methane based liquid fuel which is carbon net zero and requires no modification to run internal combustion engines. These alternatives to EVs which serve only to overload the power grid which then consumes more fossil fuels to charge their filthy, polluting battery packs are NEVER part of the conversation. Don't forget the occasional battery pack combustion while charging or after getting wet that burns down homes. We saw it first hand after Hurricane Ian floods, and the Teslas were spontaneously combusting where they were parked, and sometimes on the tow trucks. They also don't charge effectively much below 40 fahrenheit.
Yup. Smacks of good ole contemporary Woke Gen Z/Millennial narcissism, as usual. Spoiled. Coddled. Attention-whores. It’s all for social media. Woke prestige. Very sad. This is what we’ve done to our kids. We did this. ‘We’ meaning western wealthy democracies. Maybe it’s a sign that, ironically, we’ve done TOO well.
Michael Mohr
‘Sincere American Writing’
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/
Sheluyang, your 'change the world' quote brings to mind the lyric from Ten Years After:
'… I'd love to change the world
But I don't know what to do
So I'll leave it up to you'
It appears these misguided intellectually underfed kids don't know what to do either, so they leave it to a controlling 'cult' guru they are supplicants to, to think it through for them - so that they merely become soldiers in a self defeating asinine display of blind belief, initiating stunts they surely one day will want to disown. Much like the writer of this article.
I find most left causes hurt the poor and most vunerable.
"One thing that really stood out to me was the fact that they chose to shut down the Tube at a low-income neighborhood, which likely disrupted the lives of many poor people and did nothing to fight climate change. "
And for this they got exactly what was coming to them. When climate "activists" pointlessly destroy priceless artworks, they do so at venues patronized by spineless liberals who won't fight back. Come to America, Extinction Rebellion, and glue yourselves to a subway station in the Bronx.
I would pay to see that.
LMAO
A non-activist driven personal experience just like this was my white pill epiphany.
I was in Santa Clara in 2012 for work. As I sat in gridlock (every morning on the 101) I watched as brand new Teslas zoomed by me in the “car pool” lane that had recently been expanded to include “energy efficient vehicles” in the name of “climate change.”
I looked over and saw a Hispanic day laborer in a work truck next to me at 7:30 in the morning, sitting in gridlock trying to make his way to an hourly job. You know, a person for whom access to that lane may have made a 15% difference to their days pay, and my head almost exploded.
My undergraduate and graduate degree are in applied statistics. I'm supposed to know better than to rely on anecdote. But that moment destroyed the progressive myth for me forever. It wasn't Obama bombing kids in ‘08 (though that certainly changed my vote in '11), I could blame that on one bad apple. I always believed the middle of the Democratic Party was the only hope we had - but that moment forcefully disproved that hypothesis. CA was supposed to be THE center of the modern left, and this is what the modern left had become. It was wealth worship masquerading as something probably more pathetic and embarrassing that I couldn't even grasp.
Anyone ever wants to ACTUALLY make a difference, create a car pool lane you can only use if the Kelly blue book of your car is below 15k. Yes, scammers while buy cheap cars just to use it (every system can and will be cheated by horrible people), but most common folks are way too vain to purposefully buy down, so the majority of the benefit will go to those who actually need it.
As I’ve said a million times, the reason we’ll never have a flat consumption tax is because it would actually tax the wealthy, and no politician, and CERTAINLY not the modern left, could stand for that.
Great take. BTW, "white pill"? What data point do you use to identify the "migrant day worker"?
Imma fan!
Admittedly, I’m taking huge liberty with “white pill” in this context. Modern lexicon “white pill” essentially means “reasons to be optimistic.” Blue pill/red pill are pretty straight forward (political parties - God help us), “black pill” is pessimism. I claim white pill because realizing what a joke our pretend political parties are was a very eye opening moment for me. Changed how I viewed a lot of things, and I think for the better. So some may call deciding all politicians are corrupt megalomaniacs ultimately in it entirely for themselves, and the people voting for ego reasons and likes are just, as bad a black pill moment, but for me it felt the opposite for some reason. So white pill I shall.
On the data point - if you’ve ever done the Bay Area commute you know the traffic is so bad you can literally hold hands with the person next to you if you so choose. But I also did landscaping for three years in high school/college summers and you know a landscaping truck when you see it… backpack leaf blowers, shovels and rakes as far as the eye can see, and tree base dirt everywhere is pretty indicative of the day to come. LOVED that job and the feeling of accomplishment you felt as you literally transformed a landscape. Amazing how important being able to see the results of your labor can be for self esteem.
Hope that helps!
I have two young sons who have purchased their own homes. They have both discovered gardening - the shock of physical exertion followed by satisfaction with the fruits of one’s labours.
Welcome to adulthood, I told them.
Proud Mumma.
Thanks for the reply, DataMan. Self esteem comes from accomplishments not participation trophy's.
We made the move east out of San Diego Cnty in the early 90s. I ran a hydraulics field repair service. I understand traffic. Big reason why we went to Kansas/OK.
Good to know you,
Daniel
At one point British Columbia’s ‘socialist’ NDP government was subsidizing electric vehicles by $10,000 when the only ones available were $120,000 or more. That is modern progressivism in a nutshell. Woke politics are simply a smokescreen for screwing over working people to further enrich the global elite and their university educated lackeys.
Good for you BTDS. I am pretty much anti-stats because they can be so readily manipulated by people with malicious intent. But in my heart of hearts I know that the truth is that a a good argument relies on both anecdote to make it human in the sense of worthwhile to humanity or some subset thereof,and statistical data to make it practical.
I've run marketing programs for huge companies and small companies and stats are like most things - they can be used for good or used for bad. Marketing is the same. Nudge Theory can be used to help people lose weight, improve mental health, or become more productive by using our own cognitive biases towards a positive end, or Nudge Theory can be implemented through Twitter to make common people believe, by manipulating their media and "nudging them along," that there's a majority of people out there who actually believe men can get pregnant (it's less than 1% of the population - and they don't believe it either).
We are ALL left brained and right brained, we are all extroverted and introverted, and we are all both heart and mind. A strong mind and a tender heart by Martin Luther King Jr. is perhaps the greatest sermon ever given. It is the personification of the argument that we must both be moved by stories (tender hearted) and grounded in fact (strong minded). I'd like to pretend I get the mix right - I don't - but I do actively try. Admittedly, I probably fall too hard on the stats side and lack a certain degree of empathy that would serve me well. Luckily I married a woman that has enough empathy for both of us - and reminds me often, whether I want her to or not :)
If all the statistical data were set forth by ethical humans such as yourself the world would be a better place.
I live in Sunnyvale CA, am politically moderate, and I feel sick whenever I have to go to Palo Alto or deal with people from Palo Alto, Los Altos, Atherton and their phony concern for "the poor" and "the environment", etc.
The same people saving the world with their $120,000 cars in the carpool lane have low-income housing in Palo Alto--but only for "schoolteachers"! Yes "poor" people are OK, as long as they have masters degrees. (See: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/making-it-in-the-bay/palo-alto-los-gatos-affordable-housing-for-teachers/3035338/ ). This strikes me as the most racist thing ever.
Yes. Marc Andreessen's defense of property values recently when the city council was considering multifamily housing in Atherton after lecturing others on affordable housing - pathetic! https://nypost.com/2022/08/08/marc-andreessen-opposed-affordable-housing-in-his-town-report/
I live in Los Altos. We have two cars for three drivers (my parents live with me), a 2005 and a 2001 volvo. We are the only one in the pool of Teslas in our school. Good thing my kids don’t ask that many questions about our weird car situation , I must have done something right..
Yet they say climate change disproportionately affects the poor, when in fact, net zero will crush the poor, in the wealthy west and third world countries.
Climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the radical left (communists).
I am not the only one to equate climate change fanatics to Marxism:
"Lord Christopher Monckton, a special adviser to UK’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, narrated in an interview, “The environmentalists are merely watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside, or I call them the traffic light tendency: yellow (afraid) to admit they are really red. You may think this is just rhetoric but I used to know one of the founders of Greenpeace, the late Eric Ellington, then whom nobody less political could be found. He was genuinely concerned that nobody should mess up the planet, and so he and his fellow founders all had rather idealistic notions about what they would like to achieve. Within a year or two, he said, they all had to leave because they weren’t political. When the Marxists moved in, and in his words, ‘took the movement over,’ they were unable to stop it because they were politically outmaneuvered by the hard left.”
Since man walked out of caves and formed social groups, tribes, there has been nut cases in sandwich boards wandering around proclaiming, "The end is near."
Today we call the nuts, Democrats.
Excellent post!
Thanks.
Agreed. I’ve noticed that too many concerns of progressives are of a classist nature, and not a climate change issue, or racism, or sexism, or transphobia or homophobia.
It’s mostly about the haves and the have-nots! Even our immigration issue at the border is about that. It’s evident to me that those who espouse open borders care very little for the cry of the poor. The immigrants who are coming here risk life and limb to get here. They spend meager life savings or worse to travel from all over to arrive here. But our government doesn’t care about the risks they take or the dire situations they find themselves in once they arrive. It’s a humanitarian crisis but those who live comfortably and own multiple homes in swanky locales don’t care about that. They would have us believe that they are the compassionate ones. All of it brings me to tears of sadness and frustration. The cache’ of progressive concerns is troubling to me? Why are they the “cool kids?” Because the media in most forms cater to them. It’s ruining the US.
"cool" is what you make it. I've lived in some of the most liberal enclaves in America and small classical liberal midwestern towns and worked with the definition of anti-liberal (lefty) elites and anti-liberal (conservative) small town mechanics. Trust me when I tell you all those people have VERY different definitions of cool.
Regarding the class issue, I actually think its two sides of the same coin, but two very different sides. It all begins with a search for ego. The biggest issue most of the wealthy progressive left (and right, frankly) face today is they have never overcome real difficulty in their life. They may have "faced" difficulty, but VERY few of them have felt any real hardship and had to overcome it and thus build real, and sustainable, ego. Our fathers who could build a car didn't need likes on Facebook - he can kill his own food, prep it & cook it. He literally built the house I grew up in. He fixed motorcycles in our garage when he wasn't literally fighting fires. Those people knew stuff that actually mattered.
Today, I can pontificate about almost anything. I've read more in the last two years than my dad has in his life. I've literally traveled from corner of the globe to corner of the globe for work. I can barely change a tire (but I can, thank goodness). I, of course, don't think I have a fragile ego, but deep down I know feeding myself would be a REAL challenge, and that means there is a hole there whether I want it to be or not.
You wrap that all up and you get two things - HUGE ego fragility for a massive amount of the country - which means almost every decision they make is in protection of their own ego, and guilt about the fact that, deep down, they know every decision they actually make is about their own ego.
No one cares about the border because they know it isn't THEIR issue. Every political decision they make is about making things as easy for them as possible. They offset this selfishness by voting for everything that makes life as "easy" for everyone else as possible as well (on-paper - no way they're actually going to figure out if BLM actually makes life better for black people, then they may be called to face the reality of their own selfishness as well). The easiest way to assuage one's guilt over their own selfishness is to pretend they also want what's best for everyone else also - as long as someone else is paying for the work and actually doing the work.
And just to be clear - the ultra-individualistic voter - the "everyone must do everything for themselves" voter isn't much better (but they are better). We could live just fine with ALL ultra-individualistic voters - quality of life would just be way worse because we wouldn't be leveraging the best of each of us, but it would work. This faux-collectivism in the name of selfishness can never have a positive ending. Soon or later you always run out of someone else's money and someone else's time - or you end up with slavery and euthanasia (hi China and Canada).
And ironically, it all begins with a simple hierarchy of needs analysis - when you move beyond the simplest needs without earning ANY of it, it becomes VERY hard indeed to assuage your own conscious. Lefty progressivism is, unfortunately, often the outcome. Just as the Romans.
Fair enough. Bottom line is no one is perfect. But there are ways to work on issues in our Constitutional, and yes capitalist, society to help others even as we help ourselves. Decent laws passed by decent legislators would be a start. It’s such a complicated situation. But certainly our easy, Western life, especially for the more affluent, leaves us with lots of time on our hands and that, more often than not, gets us into mischief.
Yes, but in part, it’s not their fault. The climate nihilists have strategically weaponized the creation of a generation of mentally ill kids to promote their climate agenda.
A few months ago, there was an op-Ed on The Hill entitled: Climate Anxiety isn’t the Enemy: Embracing it can Speed Change, which basically said the quiet part out loud.
The author explicitly calls for driving kids into a depression around the climate change, then using that condition to their benefit in their war against modernity.
I wrote about it here:
https://www.gordoncomstock.com/p/our-children-are-not-tools-of-your
The daughter of the pastors at our Lutheran church is a climate fanatic. I'm not sure if it's the cliche of the pastor's daughter rebelling or what but her parents are supportive of her zeal, and it's coming through in the Sunday sermons more often now. I'm seeing this a lot lately: the commercials with the message: "Jesus was a refugee." That's shameless political advertising, and I promise the people behind those commercials would not also say "Jesus is my Lord and personal savior." Not that religion has not been abused since the beginning of civilization, but the blending of Democrat policy rhetoric into legacy conservative alcoves is a bold new frontier and demonstrates, more than anything, just how much money is going into gaslighting the masses. The most revealing thing about this article is that the only message is fear; solutions are unimportant.
More egregious to me is the latest one that ends with the execution of the criminal… as if that would be Christ. I can’t believe that commercial. Unreal!😡
That commercial grates on me as well. It is erroneous as Jesus remained in his place of birth and worked tirelessly to improve it before finally making the ultimate sacrifice.
They’re talking about Joseph taking Mary and Jesus into Egypt but no, not the same and a definite mile too far.
A friend of mine has a daughter two years removed from four years in college. Spent four years in her indoctrination and what was produced was a scared sniveling young woman who was frightened every day with anxiety that the world was coming to an end. Btw she works as a waitress.
She's probably a crappy waitress too.
So sorry to hear that! Fear is crippling. It leads to hopelessness and a “why bother?” attitude. I hope she feels better.
It’s a crime what we’ve allowed to be done to our children and they will never forget it. Nor should they.
This we is.not responsible for that. I blame the it-takes-a-village set.
Yes, well. That's always been my problem with environmental activism since I continue to believe, as I believed in my 20s, that the most serious problem facing humanity is the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a plutocracy.
Most of the remedies suggested by climate activists disproportionately affect the poor.
I wouldn’t conflate all power with wealth , outside of that I agree to few making decisions without accountability is a defining issue .
“Most of the remedies suggested by climate activists disproportionately affect the poor”
Words adequate to describe the malcontents being led by the self-styled messiahs described in the article elude me so I’ll settle for ignorant fools. Anyone doubting the description need look no further than the picture of the Waterloo Bridge blockade. Most of the clothes they're wearing, the roller skates on their children's feet, the geotextile sign warning us of imminent extinction, and even the fertilizers used to facilitate growth of the wilted flowers rely on petrochemicals (substances obtained by the refining and processing of petroleum or natural gas) to be produced. If killing off the fossil fuel industry is their ultimate goal, perhaps they should consider the old adage, "be careful what you wish for". A little deeper research reveals many other life sustaining products that are reliant upon the availability of petrochemicals. The following are a few listed in Medicine After Oil by Daniel Bednarz:
“manufacturing of analgesics, antihistamines, antibiotics, antibacterials, rectal suppositories, cough syrups, lubricants, creams, ointments, salves, and many gels. Processed plastics made with oil are used in heart valves and other esoteric medical equipment. Petrochemicals are used in radiological dyes and films, intravenous tubing, syringes, and oxygen masks...”.
Perhaps more pertinent to the perpetually anxiety ridden cultists is that almost 99% of pharmaceuticals contain petrochemicals. One wonders how the gloom and doom crowd will be able to cope with the current “climate crisis” or the next, inevitable Armageddon without being able to pop a few valiums. I have to admit though, it would be entertaining to watch a Greta Thunberg whirling dervish performance at the next UN Climate Summit if she were deprived of her Asperger’s meds.
Putting on my best Hayek, that individual wealth accumulation is just one manifestation of the overall magnificent economic growth that has raised the world out of abject poverty and allowed us to flourish. Resentment of others wealth accumulation will poison your soul. Hell, that’s what inspired Marx. To paraphrase Churchill: capitalism is the worst system, except for all the others...
I have read Hayek and agree. Douglas Murray in The War on the West speaks of gratitude for the amazing time we live in. Gratitude is contrasted with resentment. It seems so many of the ideologies we are subjected to, including climate activism are motivated by resentment. Not so good.
I'm fine with capitalism. It's the only economic system that incentivizes individual creativity.
I'm not fine with privilege when it manifests solely because somebody's great-grandfather was smart enough to assemble a fortune.
And I totally get that this is an unpopular view, but I'm not going to defend it further because today, all I want to do is laugh and say mean things about wacky climate activists.
You very likely have a grossly inaccurate view of wealth and power in our world.
Can you elaborate? Hard to judge the accuracy of either of our views of wealth and power given they are unstated here.
Could you explain how one might solve the privilege "problem" while keeping capitalism? And are you sure that the benefits would outweigh the costs (or do you believe the costs would be minimal)? Once the government can decide how much of the wealth you accumulate you can keep and pass onto your family (or whomever you choose), is it still a free system?
I’ve never been able to understand the obsession with the handful of people who are fabulously wealthy. Why do I care how much money they have? How does it affect my life? While their works have very much affected my life and everyone else’s in a positive way (yes of course there are negative sides to any new technology etc].
You could take every penny the super rich have away (while alive or after they’re gone) and give to the government with all its good intentions, and the poor kid stuck in the ghetto in a failed, violent school would be in exactly the same situation.
A lot of the anger I’ve seen towards wealthy people (of whose acquaintance I am definitely not) is rooted in envy.
Not a good way to live IMO.
It is rooted in disgust of asshole trolls like you that makes excuses for the rich assholes.
But it's rooted in frustration... If you look at the relationship between the people and the government, the advantage given to the most wealthy by the people that they finance elections for has created a belief in many people that the system is rigged, and the American dream is now only accessible to a select few. The last time this happened, the British didn't like the outcome. The cycle will repeat again.
The way to reconcile this is to look at the wild, where human beings started. You just have to be able to translate the semantics. There will always be a pecking order, it's just that the human condition of today dictates that we don't live in small, tribal groups and it's much more difficult to work out the pecking order. But if you compare it to the wild, unless the parent of any particular species is equipped to effectively teach their young, the young are usually doomed to not make adulthood. The ones that survive are usually better equipped to continue the species. Yes, natural selection. Since we no longer have predators as a species, we have become our own predators, and the hunting dynamic is incredibly complicated.
In the case of the most wealthy, there is an additional dynamic in that they ultimately have to make a certain contribution back to the society or, as is examples past, society hunts and destroys them, disseminates their wealth back in to the group, and the cycle begins again. It is only because modern society created central government (at the behest of the most wealthy), that there is now a mediator between the classes. The problems with that arise when the elected officials in government stop being the median, and allow themselves to be corrupted by the wealthy to do their bidding. It is at that stage that all societies invariably begin to seek to reset the cycle... We need a reset very soon.
Privilege seems to be the modern face of “luck of the draw”. Did Pharaoh’s son feel guilty about his birthplace? Doubt it. How about the royals? (At least until Harry). Human existence has always been the story of the haves and the have nots. What is new is the empowerment of the culture of resentment, of those who have a lot against those who have more. Glenn Loury points out that African Americans are the richest black people on the planet - by a lot. But instead of gratitude we hear about resentment. I will feel humble and blessed and lucky to be an American, but I will not feel bad about my privilege.
Like so many people, you don't realize that, except for tiny pockets here and there, capitalism has been dead for most of our lifetimes. This system where government picks winners and losers, and benefits from both, is nothing like capitalism. The second government gets involved, the whole supporting structure of true capitalism is destroyed. The reason we are surrounded by so many substandard products today is because the system is no longer designed to weed out the products and services that don't cut the mustard, but keep everything on life support so that government may collect revenue, plain and simple.
Exactly right. That's why I call it "crony capitalism."
Michael: Capitalism is dead - really? I couldn't disagree more. And what "system" is it that's "designed to weed out the products and services that don't cut the mustard"? I thought that was the job of the marketplace....if your product sucks, people stop buying it...if your product is great, you can't make it fast enough. Please help me understand.
If you think capitalism isn't dead, then you just don't understand the true definition of capitalism. This is why I said it has been dead as long as we all have been alive. What has taken it's place is NOT capitalism. Think outside of your own head space for two seconds. In this world, if a product sucks it isn't pushed from the marketplace, it is either subsidized by government, or put in to a market that has no choice but to accept it. If capitalism still existed, Tesla, for example, would not. They would have been out of business before most of us ever knew who they were. The difference between you and I is that I'm not programmed by the world around me to believe that this is all there is. I know how it should be and what REALITY is, and I'm not afraid to recognize it.
It is not dead--capitalism has brought the world poverty rate from over 50% in the 1980's to under 10% via the microchip in just 40 years. That's in every living person's lifetime.
But it's NOT capitalism... Capitalism is not state sponsored, does not include a confiscatory tax system, does not include government regulation. Capitalism is the financial equivalent of libertarianism, which you probably don't understand either.
Okay let’s bash the crazies..
I don't think it's the money that's the problem, it's the methods they invariably use to accumulate more of it once they have some. Like passing "progressive" tax structures but then building ever more complex exceptions which require lots of money to exploit.
You’re mixing up the "they"s. The rich accumulating money don’t pass the "progressive" tax structures. The government does that to "help" people and, by coincidence, increase its own power. The rent-seeking is inevitably created by government as it puts itself in the middle of everything with a hundred thousand regulations and so on. As government power over business and industry grows, the rich wealth creators pour money into the political process to try and control the decisions the government is making over their livelihoods as well as come up with complex exceptions to the tax code.
Government creates all these problems and then tries to solve them by more of the same, in an endless vicious cycle.
Who do you think writes those progressive tax structures?
Midwits in Congress who have not the slightest idea of unintended consequences nor any interest in same nor capability of learning. In recent decades, as Congress has ceased to do its own work, it's been unelected midwits inside the Federal bureaucracy. Same but worse.
I can guarantee you "plutocrats" would write a very different tax structure (presumably more to their own advantage). Do big companies and the super rich spend a crap ton of money lobbying the govt to adjust those structures and create carve outs for themselves? Of course they do. Like everyone they are responding to the incentives that govt creates.
Unlike in Europe (where the middle class pays for its own benefits), here "the rich" pay the vast majority of taxes. Our code is more progressive than that of EU countries. The plebes here do have to pay payroll taxes, for which they will get a rude surprise when it turns out there is no money for them to get benefits back out in the future. More govt brilliance.
Right.
When the accumulation of wealth turns from _work_ to _rent_ (in the economic sense of the word), you have a problem, in my never humble opinion.
But this has little to do with the issue we're supposed to froth over today, which is Baaaad Climate Activism. 😀
It's a rigged game. And it's not new. An endless supply of subsistence labor and the unfettered exploitation of natural resources without consequence or restraint. People defending the right's of the rich should consider the 2008 grift that destroyed the saving's and wiped out the pension funds of millions of American's while hurling lives into chaos across the globe. The perp's walked. And there was no hesitation when it came to gutting and turning American industrial cities into war zones. T.Piketty won the Nobel Prize in economics for outlining the ongoing ascent of the new feudalism.
"... accumulation of wealth in the hands of a plutocracy..."
So if given the chance, you would have taken away Steve Jobs' money?
No.
But I would have prevented him from bequeathing the majority of his fortune to his wife and progeny.
"...to his wife and progeny...."
But Patrizia, men work and takes risks precisely so they can take care of the wives and progeny. That is what motivate them.
You must single not to understand this.
In which case, why would he have bothered to accumulate more wealth at all? We allow people to get wealthy because the rest of us benefit more from their industry than they do themselves.
You”allow people to get wealthy”? Wow, thank you so much comrade.
How would you have prevented someone from doing with what’s rightly theirs. Sounds like you codify with the CCP. The world needs less fascism.
If you feel comfortable pretending that totalitarian finance isn't pissing down your shirt collar and that it isn't allied with the CCP fine. Go back to sleep.
Thank goodness we live in a free country where people can keep the fruits of their labor. You aren’t much different than the “gangs” that Roger warns us about. Steve Jobs and many other “plutocrats” created so much value for the world-why can’t they keep some of it and give what they kept to whomever they wish? Communists are such pathetic people.
I'm anything but a communist, but I think the fairest taxes around are "death taxes". Let people earn what they want when they're alive, but after death, give the government who provided the platform for you to work a cut, say 50%.
Government provided a platform? Seriously? This may be the most ignorant comment today.
Bow wow wow wow wow. America is a Constitutional Republic and we are citizens in it. The totalitarian bitch slap good cop/bad cop capitalist/communist grift is the reason American's live from crisis to manufactured psyop crisis every day of their lives. Nobody wants your $$$$$ or the theft of your labor more than the surveillance state bureaucracy now serving totalitarian criminal finance. (Davos is in session.) Trillions in missing and unaccounted for tax dollars, American city's in ruin's, mounting debt , inflation and chaos no solution's forthcoming. The DNC has Bill's on the House floor right now pushing for the criminalization of American free speech and thought. The only thing you've got is the Constitution and the Bill of Right's it contains. When that's gone so are you.
Whatevs, dude.
I think I get you. When I was a child I saw wealthy people’s children “piss away” pretty good fortunes with profligate lifestyles. But nowadays the fortunes are so vast and the levers of control so accessible to the irresponsible receivers of these fortunes, that they can eat away at the pillars of our society. The exes of two bazillonaires come immediately to mind. Billions of dollars being misspent can wreak existential havoc.
Fascist alert!
Walter’s “The Preachy Misery of the Enlightened Class” in today’s Unbound posting seems to echo this theme; I love visiting the Cascades up near Winthrop, but you will definitely find this entrenched, Trust funded class, all around and preaching their expectations upon you.
@RKO could you post a link?
https://walterkirn.substack.com/p/revolutionary-rut
Thank you!
The climate change fanatics are the rainbows and unicorn left wing nut cases. History, facts and figures mean nothing to them. Feeling good means everything.
It is the "Oh, look at me. I am altruistic and saving the planet. Aren't I wonderful?"
Great point, if they only knew what it takes to mine rare earths.
"They" don't need to; much of rare-earths are processed in China. We just buy them and no harm to our precious conscience. Just like anything else perceived as harming the planet, as long as America doesn't do it, we greedily support others that do.
I think it was early last year, the United States sent a delegation to Africa to scold them for their lack of environmental considerations, while promising a few million dollars in aid to work toward climate targets. At the exact same time, China has been in Africa investing tens of billions in infrastructure and forgiving debt. Where is most of the world's cobalt mined?
The world has been so badly outmaneuvered by China in the past three decades that we have already lost World War 3. I hope everyone feels really good about themselves for the Pyrrhic victory that is Ukraine, because in the greater scheme it means nothing.
They are on board. it's a giant wealth transfer program lol.
We aren't talking about the moderate left. The UN push for this is definitely Marxist. The corporations don't care about this issue. They are global. It's business as usual for them. I agree with your two party system statement though it's a separate issue.
Go hang out for a while at Watts Up With That, where they debate gridding, homogenization, and such.
Should fit right in with your aeronautical studies
My favorite story is the one where Jordan Peterson explains how he eliminated the problem of campus protestors by holding his talks at 8am. None of them wanted to get up early. Still makes me laugh.
Hilarious. I remember that too. A little insight there.
That's priceless LOL
You have to see the posts on the Reddit politics section talking about the guy as if he's stupid, who listens to this guy, how his degrees mean nothing, they are going to remove his license, etc. All coming from internet warriors under the age of 25 who received participant trophies all their adolescent lives, I doubt ever worked, nor have any grasp on what the real world entails.
Yes, I'm hoping to retire in about 15 years, so hopefully there is some Soc Sec left for me.