back at the dawn of the printing press, I was a young assistant in an investment bank. There were after work gatherings, and some of the elders would sometimes bequeath a little intelligence on us:
When researching the financial credit quality of a town, as one would do in those days before purchasing a bond offering (essentially "loaning money") from said town, this icon of the industry told us that he would visit the town physically on any given weekday, and the first thing that he would check would be whether the cemeteries had been mowed. He reasoned that a town in possible financial distress and looking for budget cuts would likely cut the cemetery care budget first, as that would offend the least of the living voters.
That banker was a Boston Brahmin through and through, but he wasn't stupid. I learned a lot in those days.
Thank you for letting me tangentially reply..:)
Sadly, the proles have been propagandized into using both physical and digital weapons not to save themselves, but instead to actually abet the rulers in their goal to retain dominion in perpetuity whilst they quest for their own immortality.
In other words: "yeah there's guns, and who owns them? Like Biden said, "if you want to fight the government, you need an F-15 (or whatever)". There's plenty of weaponry to stave off or even overthrow the ruling class, but the problem is that the enough proles are willing to actually assist the ruling class in subjugation of the proles so that the ruling class continues to rule.
Revolt? No need for violence. Just stop working for "the man", as they called it in the 60's. Once the ruling class can't get payroll processed or runs out of toilet paper, the war is won. And for God's sake, stop carrying "the man's" weapons.
Listening to another doomsday philosopher on social media.
So sad.
The Bible says:
"But about that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." Matthew 24:36
So stop worrying about it. Live your life as Jesus advised us to do so. Follow the two commandments:
"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind," and "Love your neighbor as yourself."
Matthew 22:37-39
Jesus simplified things so much for us, and here we are, cowering like the apostles in the time between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. Live your life as Jesus told us. Jesus is the Alpha..AND THE OMEGA. When the time comes, as it will for all of us, whether through personal bodily functions ending or universal calamity, He will be there to receive us. He has been there always. Have faith in the very Bible that you quote so much!
Jesus gave us a single prayer. It is the only one that we need. In it, we request bountiful resources ("our daily bread" and to be forgiven our sins - as we also should forgive those who sin against us, meaning "let he who is without sin..." and that judgement is for God alone. - and to be DELIVERED FROM EVIL. Notably, Jesus did not tell us to pray for the elimination of evil. Evil must exist, but we must have the will to resist it and we pray that we have as little contact as possible with it. This is the way. Jesus spelled it out so plainly for us, yet we still find ways to shake our own faith.
Be strong. Not violent. Do not judge. Jesus will be there. The Alpha and the Omega.
Sheesh.
The initiative is always the same. Control.
"Right"? "Left?" Two wings, one bird.
There is a small group of people who wield a great amount of power. So much so that money is meaningless to them - when they want something, they simply demand it and it is provided to them. It is up to the underling providers to work out whatever trinkets need to swapped for the demanded good.
This is a great deal for those powerful people. They have access to literally any earthly item at any time. But the difficult part is keeping that power. Needless to say, many would covet the same power if it were available to them.
World population makes the task of maintaining control even more difficult. Managing a few million people in ancient Greece is one thing. Almost eight billion souls is quite another.
Force is not an option, at least not without a panoply of "force multipliers" - things or actions that can be controlled easily by a small group but wield power over many.
Hence, we have things like "government" - especially "representative" government, in which the proles place power in the hands of a "representative" few, who are then controlled with compromise, bribes (remember, money is infinite to the powerful) and false promises. Bottlenecking power is a great way to create force multipliers - control the one or few in power and have power over all. It's difficult, but not impossible. to bribe 350M Americans, but a couple of hundred in DC? Piece of cake.
Dictatorships and royalty? Even better. Just one target to bribe.
There's lot of other things: powerful bombs, real or imagined, diseases, real or imagined, weather modulators, et cetera, that also assist in both curtailing population growth and maintaining power over the living proles.
ah, that felt good. Now where were we? Oh yeah, censorship.
Censorship is just another force multiplier. George Carlin spent his life explaining the relationship between words and ideas and experienced a very public debate over censorship many decades ago. He knew that censorship is but another tool in the arsenal of the force multipliers of the powerful. His main premise is that by limiting our words, the powerful limit our thought.
Sadly the days of questioning our masters, despite all of the hubbub regarding red and blue and orange and pink, are gone as we fight over the last cookie on the plate which was cleared by the powerful ones centuries ago.
My pessimistic side says that final clampdown won't be dramatic at all. We'll simply slip into a Demolition Man - style society of "peace and safety", having gladly given up all freedoms, including freedom of thought, for Taco Bell and commercial jingles. Maybe we're already there?
The absolute nerve of some websites to put material taken FROM OTHER SITES and put them behind their own paywall.
To wit:
is paywalled to me.
But, by simply searching the headline in Goggle, I find that the original post was made by Dow Jones, and is free to read at any number of other websites, including Morningstar:
I'm sure that Marketwatch has some kind of deal with (or maybe shares owners with) Dow Jones, but paywalling something that is freely available elsewhere is reprehensible.
Or, caveat emptor I guess. Stupid people deserve stupid prizes.
(P.S. No, I don't take financial advice from hacky websites. But a lot of my NPC friends do, and I need to know what shitty advice they are getting so that I may casually refute it in conversation.)
Someone call Prime Minister Netanyahu! He can tell us if it's Iran!
Hm. Nothing to see here. "Naturally occurring" anthrax has always been a scourge.
They all did arrive. Lightning has been a bear with me and I am grateful to have even this slow version. Alby was a waste of broken links and sats. Yakihonne was quite easy. Any suggestions?
lol i'm the joke. multiplied by wrong factor. cuz i was too lazy.
Mea culpa. But don't say that I didn't warn you. 
Those penguins know how to run a bitaxe. Don't let them fool you. Why do you think they stay in cold climates?
I 99% agree. I can't find the 1% that deserves to be saved though.
Thank God for Windows "Millennium" (Windows ME). That's what made me jump to Ubuntu, and here we are 25 years later running Arch like I know what I'm doing lol.
Exactly. I voted in 1980 (Anderson) all the way through Ron Paul (2008) before I gave up. The fact that candidates can literally say anything while (s)electioneering and then completely renege on every single platform without any repercussion whatsoever made it obvious that the whole thing is a game.
Watch "The Jones Plantation" on tubi.com for free.
The constitution was written and "ratified" by a bunch of rich European victims of primogeniture, bequeathing power to an invented entity - power which they themselves did not have to bequeath to anyone nor to any contrived new entity.
Then they declared that the document is valid "forever", calling it "government with the consent of the governed" even though not a single American in the past 200+ years has ever declared his or her own consent to same. The whole system is a joke.
lol USA sending money to the Rothschilds. "Sorry, North Carolina - dem houses built by the Amish had to be knocked down. Wish we could do something for ya"...
Government of any kind is bad.
Government run with sociopaths is worse.
Government run with psychopaths is the worst possible outcome. Congrats USA!
"Four dead in Ohio"
>Gotta get down to it,
soldiers are cutting us down
"Should have been gone long ago"
What if you knew her and
found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?<
"Four dead in Ohio"
>Gotta get down to it,
soldiers are cutting us down
"Should have been gone long ago"
What if you knew her and
found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?<
lol i'm playing NetHack right now. Human valkyrie, one of the easiest roles. Just kill everything.