When earth's last picture is painted, and the tubes are
twisted and dry,
When the oldest colors have faded, and the youngest critic
has died,
We shall rest, and, faith, we shall need it - lie down for
an aeon or two !
Till the Master of All Good Workmen shall set us to work
anew !
And those that were good will be happy: they shall sit in
a golden chair;
They shall splash at a ten-league canvas with brushes of
comets' hair;
They shall find real saints to draw from - Magdalene,
Peter, and Paul;
They shall work for an age at sitting and never be tired
at all !
And only the Master shall praise us, and only the master
shall blame;
And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work
for fame;
But each for the joy of working, and each, in his sepa-
arate star,
Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things
as They Are !
[Babylon Bee] WORLD — Hundreds of millions of people around the world mourned the sudden death of Twitter last night with hundreds of millions of heartfelt posts on Twitter.
"Twitter is dead. This is it. Goodbye, cruel world!" wrote Washington Post journalist Geebles Snortleton as it became clear the social media site had only a few hours of life left. "It's been great! I'll miss you all! Find me on Meta! It's the wave of the future!"
The post has thus far received 12 likes and 3,487 retweets.
Analysts reported over 300 million similar messages were tweeted on the platform that same evening, leading to a record-breaking spike in Twitter usage.
"Elon has killed Twitter. He has made my blue check irrelevant. He has allowed unqualified people to express their opinions. This isn't just the death of an app, it's the death of democracy itself," said Timothen Fordlestan, another journalist at the Washington Post. "This will be my last tweet on this platform."
At publishing time, sources had confirmed it was not, in fact, Fordlestan's last tweet on the platform.
[MAIL] Charlize Theron has been slammed by fans in her native South Africa for branding Afrikaans a 'dying language' and claiming only '44 people still speak it.'
The Oscar-winning actress, 47, who was born in Benoni, Gauteng Province, sparked a social media backlash when she said on US podcast Smartless on Monday: 'There's about 44 people still speaking it [Afrikaans] - it's definitely a dying language, it's not a very helpful language.
The Monster star's comments quickly invoked ire from South Africans on social media, who branded her 'disrespectful' and accused her of making the comments to 'appease Hollywood.'
#3
Now see, at the core it was just illegal immigration when the Boer's moved into the part of Africa the african's didn't live in until the Boers made it possible. I thought the Dems LOVED illegal immigration.
Should 'Musk-it'
[Breitbart] On Thursday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Ingraham Angle,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) reacted to news that the Department of Defense failed another audit and couldn’t account for 61% of its assets by stating Congress should “build upon this audit, make sure the DOD is getting good value for our taxpayers” before 2024 and argued the department has far too many civilian employees and spends too much time on ensuring “our drill sergeants are using the right pronouns.”
Cotton said, “So, Laura, the reason we finally know this is that during the Trump era — the Trump administration, Congress insisted that the Department of Defense finally go through with these kind of audits, and we ought not wait until 2024 and a new presidential election. We should start right now, build upon this audit, make sure the DOD is getting good value for our taxpayers. I mean, right now, you have almost as many civilians in the Department of Defense as you have troops. We also need to make sure the focus is where it should be, which is making sure that our troops have the best equipment and training to defend our nation, not that our drill sergeants are using the right pronouns. So, there’s a lot of room for oversight in the new Congress of the Department of Defense.”
[Mises] Commentaries about World War I frequently discuss causes and consequences but almost never mention the enablers. At best, they might mention them approvingly, as if we were fortunate to have had the Fed and the income tax, along with the ingenuity of the liberty bond programs, to finance our glorious role in that bloodbath.
Economist Benjamin Anderson, whose Economics and the Public Welfare has contributed greatly to our understanding of the period 1914—46 and is a book I highly recommend, nevertheless takes as a given that the Fed and the income tax had a job to do, and that job was supporting US entry into World War I. After citing figures purporting to show how relatively restrained bank credit expansion was during the war, Anderson writes:
We had to finance the Government with its four great Liberty Loans and its short-term borrowing as well. We had to transform our industries from a peace basis to a war basis. We had to raise an army of four million men and send half of them to France. We had to help finance our allies in the war, and above all, to finance the shipment of goods to them from the United States and from a good many neutral countries.
We had to do none of these things. Only the government made them necessary, and the government was not acting on behalf of its constituents when it formally entered the war in April 1917. The US was not under serious threat of attack. The population at large, Ralph Raico tells us, "acquiesced, as one historian has remarked, out of general boredom with peace, the habit of obedience to its rulers, and a highly unrealistic notion of the consequences of America’s taking up arms." He reports:
In the first ten days after the war declaration, only 4,355 men enlisted; in the next weeks, the War Department procured only one-sixth of the men required.
Bored with peace they may have been, but it was hardly reflected in the number of volunteers.
WINNERS AND LOSERS
While the war industries were poised to rake in record profits, Marine major general Smedley Butler, who was awarded his second Congressional Medal of Honor in 1917, provides details on the fighting men’s share in this bonanza:
It was decided to make [the soldiers] help pay for the war, too. So, we gave them the large salary of $30 a month.
All they had to do for this munificent sum was to leave their dear ones behind, give up their jobs, lie in swampy trenches, eat canned willy (when they could get it) and kill and kill and kill ... and be killed.
But wait!
Half of that wage (just a little more than a riveter in a shipyard or a laborer in a munitions factory safe at home made in a day) was promptly taken from him to support his dependents, so that they would not become a charge upon his community. Then we made him pay what amounted to accident insurance—something the employer pays for in an enlightened state—and that cost him $6 a month. He had less than $9 a month left.
Then, the most crowning insolence of all—he was virtually blackjacked into paying for his own ammunition, clothing, and food by being made to buy Liberty Bonds. Most soldiers got no money at all on pay days. [What, nothing for the Red Cross?]
We made them buy Liberty Bonds at $100 and then we bought them back—when they came back from the war and couldn’t find work—at $84 and $86. And the soldiers bought about $2,000,000,000 worth of these bonds!
The "bonuses" awarded the veterans were silver certificates that came with a catch—although the men could borrow against them, they couldn’t redeem them until 1945(!). The Depression deepened in 1932; the so-called Bonus Army of veterans, family members, and friends marched on Washington to demand immediate payment of their promised compensation. After a clash with police that left two protestors dead, General Douglas MacArthur led a tank assault that drove the Bonus Army out of Washington.
In 1936, the government decided to replace the silver certificates with Treasury bonds that could be redeemed immediately.
THE CUNNING ENABLER
One could argue that states are the true enablers of hell on earth, since only states have entrenched systems of wealth predation and can employ kidnapping (conscription), propaganda, and other means to create a world war.
But is working toward a stateless world a worthwhile use of one’s time? If 2.5 million veterans of the war to end all wars couldn’t get the government to pony up a bonus until nineteen years after they paid stay-at-home bureaucrats, how can we possibly get rid of government itself?
Given that states have the power to wipe out all life on the planet, we should at least consider them an alien presence. That they haven’t reduced the world to ashes already is not a sign of caring and careful leadership. Combine their monopoly on legal force, nuclear arsenals, a rabid foreign policy, monumental bureaucratic bungling, and the steady hum of printing presses and withholding taxes, and you have a formula for turning the earth into a moonscape.
If we can’t rid the earth of states, we can at least try to disempower them. Whatever belligerent aspirations US and other world leaders may have, these would be mere pipe dreams without the wealth-sucking arms of the state. States that can’t get money for war can’t go to war, or as Pat Buchanan might put it: no money, no war.
And if we had avoided World War I, what might the world look like today?
CONCLUSION
In a footnote to Rights of Man, Thomas Paine wrote: "It is scarcely possible to touch on any subject, that will not suggest an allusion to some corruption in governments."
Given his proposals for government involvement in our lives, modest though they were, Paine seems to have forgotten his own profound observation.
17th allowing popular election of senators, so the big blue cities elect two senators, disenfranchising flyover regions, ratified 1914
18th - prohibition of alcohol, ratified 1922 repealed by the 21st, 1933
19th - no restriction of voting based on sex, ratified 1920
So the 16th and 17th got us to where we are today.
Posted by: Bobby ||
11/19/2022 8:34 Comments ||
Top||
#2
..note the 19th skipped over the a priori condition that citizens who had the vote also carried the responsibility of militia service (aka skin in the game).
[Brownstone Institute] A series of revealing texts and tweets by Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced CEO of FTX, the once high-flying but now belly-up crypto exchange, had the following to say about his image as a do-gooder: it is a "dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us."
Very interesting. He had the whole game going: a vegan worried about climate change, supports every manner of justice (racial, social, environmental) except that which is coming for him, and shells out millions to worthy charities associated with the left. He also bought plenty of access and protection in D.C., enough to make his shady company the toast of the town.
As part of the mix, there is this thing called pandemic planning. We should know what that is by now: it means you can’t be in charge of your life because there are bad viruses out there. As bizarre as it seems, and for reasons that are still not entirely clear, favoring lockdowns, masks, and vaccine passports became part of the woke ideological stew.
This is particularly strange because covid restrictions have been proven, over and over, to harm all the groups about whom woke ideology claims to care so deeply. That includes even animal rights: who can forget the Danish mink slaughter of 2020?
Regardless, it’s just true. Masking became a symbol of being a good person, same as vaccinating, veganism, and flying into fits at the drop of a hat over climate change. None of this has much if anything to do with science or reality. It’s all tribal symbolism in the name of group political solidarity. And FTX was pretty good at it, throwing around hundreds of millions to prove the company’s loyalty to all the right causes.
Among them included the pandemic-planning racket. That’s right: there were deep connections between FTX and Covid that have been cultivated for two years. Let’s have a look.
Earlier this year, the New York Times trumpeted a study that showed no benefit at all to the use of Ivermectin. It was supposed to be definitive. The study was funded by FTX. Why? Why was a crypto exchange so interested in the debunking of repurposed drugs in order to drive governments and people into the use of patented pharmaceuticals, even those like Remdesivir that didn’t actually work? Inquiring minds would like to know.
#3
The media bleats about conspiracy theories and is quick to accuse. But the most obvious reality is that there is a sub minority of insanely wealthy individuals. Many of whom in unguarded moments reveal a nearly incandescent contempt for the even slightly less wealthy along with a need to corral and manage them.
I don't buy the straw man argument that a globalist conspiracy to impose a new feudalism would mean the participation of everybody in every government. Far from it. The idea need only be sold to the sub minority of the beyond wealthy. After that the world is full of wanna be stooges in search of a master.
Chubby here along with his peculiar girlfriend found a way into the chips but it never occurred to either apparently that they could be easily jettisoned. Just like Epstein, the great trader who never traded a semi familiar face ready made to be thrown to the crowd.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
When earth's last picture is painted, and the tubes are
[Babylon Bee] WORLD — Hundreds of millions of people around the world mourned the sudden death of Twitter last night with hundreds of millions of heartfelt posts on Twitter.
[Mises] Commentaries about World War I frequently discuss causes and consequences but almost never mention the enablers. At best, they might mention them approvingly, as if we were fortunate to have had the Fed and the income tax, along with the ingenuity of the liberty bond programs, to finance our glorious role in that bloodbath.
[Brownstone Institute] A series of revealing texts and tweets by Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced CEO of FTX, the once high-flying but now belly-up crypto exchange, had the following to say about his image as a do-gooder: it is a "dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us." 
