collective insanity: deference to billionaires instead of compassion for their addiction

Bill Gates, world-famous Harvard dropout, as a 22-year-old

Bill Gates, longtime poster child for the very rich – people addicted to wealth and power – is currently being deferred to as someone apparently willing and able to help save us from the worst horrors of our time.

from the book On Corruption in America by Sarah Chayes:
We reinforce better values by ceasing to assume that if someone is spectacularly rich, he must be smarter and more hardworking than the rest of us. Instead, we should view such people with suspicion. If there is one thing work on this book has taught me, it is this: it is impossible to become a billionaire without bending the rules. Most of the members of that class run their operations and live their lives in ways that injure our communities. Most are trying to rig the system even further. These are not upstanding citizens. They are parasites and freeloaders—however they try to justify themselves. We do not owe them deference.

We can do this. We are our society. We can make it reflect the beauty in us. We don't have to wait for the next devastating calamity that lies on the horizon to discover, in survival, that precious communion. We can find it now, in the battle to ward off that calamity. We can find that fierce joy.


from an article on billionaires by Caitlin Johnstone published on October 31:

Human civilization is being engineered in myriad ways by an unfathomably wealthy class who are so emotionally and psychologically stunted that they refuse to end world hunger despite having the ability to easily do so.

The United Nations has estimated that world hunger could be ended for an additional expenditure of $30 billion a year, with other estimates considerably lower. The other day Elon Musk became the first person ever to attain a net worth of over $300 billion. A year ago his net worth was $115 billion. According to Inequality.org, America's billionaires have a combined net worth of $5.1 trillion, which is a 70 percent increase from their combined net worth of under $3 trillion at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.

So we're talking about a class which could easily put a complete halt to human beings dying of starvation on this planet by simply putting some of their vast fortunes toward making sure everyone gets enough to eat. But they don't. This same class influences the policies, laws, and large-scale behavior of our species more than any other.*



2021-11-04T20:28−07* / at the about* post – at bit.ly/dateposted – anyone can link to this post from its date: November 4, 2021
*a link – or not; see a note on notes and links and a disclaimer / … and maybe browse or search the archive*

it is impossible to become a billionaire without bending the rules / Sarah Chayes (!gb)

see also: articles by Caitlin Johnstone on Substack ! (!?)
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free OCR: two examples

image on Google Drive*

That graphics file, uploaded to Google Drive and opened from there with Google Docs, results in a document that contains the image along with any recognized characters in it automatically appended as text.*

Now take a look at another example: a more challenging image* – and the result.*


2021-11-03T18:02−07* / at the about* post – at bit.ly/dateposted – anyone can link to this post from its date: November 3, 2021
*a link – or not; see a note on notes and links and a disclaimer / … and maybe browse or search the archive*

for more details on this feature, see the official Google Docs Help explainer*

it is impossible to become a billionaire without bending the rules (!gb) / source of first image

Order of Service, December 11, 2016 site:vancouverunitarians.ca ! (!?) / source of second image
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Potemkin village

2021-10-27T14:32−07* / at the about* post – at bit.ly/dateposted – anyone can link to this post from its date: October 27, 2021
*a link – or not; see a note on notes and links and a disclaimer / … and maybe browse or search the archive*

Britain now has Potemkin supermarkets. / Umair Haque*
see tweeted article, archived*
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Robert Graves: Mammon and the Black Goddess


image: from Google Books – screenshot (frame only)

Mammon:*
I felt rather shaken last year when asked to deliver an annual Oration to the London School of Economics and Political Science; I concluded that the Committee must have heard of my economic and political naïveté, and of my dedication to a poetic way of thought, and wanted perhaps to hear me enlarge on the text ‘If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.’

I admit having once used this comeback on a businessman who was kindly urging me to write a best-seller rather than poems which no ordinary mortal (meaning himself) could understand. Yet poets need never have empty purses. . . . This may sound somewhat starry-eyed, like the Biblical injunction to trust in the Lord, for He will provide. . . . But since economists study the science of money, maybe they should be reminded once in a while of certain poetic and religious imponderables without which economics make no sense—or no more than do the logistical war-games, played by budding generals at Staff Colleges, which disregard such unlogistical factors in real warfare as morale, weather, accident and miracle.

Let me start with the etymology of ‘money’. . . .


2021-10-26T21:22−07* / at the about* post – at bit.ly/dateposted – anyone can link to this post from its date: October 26, 2021
*a link – or not; see a note on notes and links and a disclaimer / … and maybe browse or search the archive*

*Mammon: Annual Oration, The London School of Economics and Political Science, December 6, 1963 (!gb)

“If there’s no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.” —Robert Graves (!gb)
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advanced nuclear energy for enriched life (ANEEL)


see tweeted article, archived*


2021-10-24T20:10−07* / at the about* post – at bit.ly/dateposted – anyone can link to this post from its date: October 24, 2021
*a link – or not; see a note on notes and links and a disclaimer / … and maybe browse or search the archive*
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For thou knowest not the hour …


October 3 fireball was NASA Picture of the Day for October 12*


2021-10-18T00:0020:46−07* / at the about* post – at bit.ly/dateposted – anyone can link to this post from its date: October 18, 2021
*a link – or not; see a note on notes and links and a disclaimer / … and maybe browse or search the archive*


see also: item on CBC website* … and one on Globe and Mail website, cached* 

fireball over SE British Columbia at 11:33pm local time on October 3, so 2021-10-03T23:33−07 … or 2021-10-04T06:33Z
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Mark Curtis: The Guardian is calling for more money …





2021-10-14T0621−07* / at the about* post – at bit.ly/dateposted – anyone can link to this post from its date: October 14, 2021
*a link – or not; see a note on notes and links and a disclaimer / … and maybe browse or search the archive*
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on power (Jonathan Cook)

Power is the force that shapes almost everything about our lives and our deaths. There is no more important issue. Understanding power and overcoming it through that understanding is the only path to liberation we can take as individuals, as societies and as a species.

Which is why it should be simply astonishing that no one in the media, supposedly a free marketplace of ideas, ever directly addresses matters of power – beyond the shadow play of party politics and celebrity scandals.

And yet, of course, this lack of interest in analyzing and understanding power is not surprising at all. Because the corporate media is the key tool – or seen another way, the central expression – of power.

Very obviously power’s main concern is the ability to conceal itself. Its exposure as power weakens it, by definition. Once exposed, power faces questions about its legitimacy, its methods, its purposes. Power does not want to be seen, it does not want to be confined, it does not want to be held accountable. It wants absolute freedom to reproduce itself, and ideally to amass more power.

That is why true power makes itself as invisible and as inscrutable as it can. Like a mushroom, power can grow only in darkness. That is why it is the hardest thing to write about in ways that are intelligible to those under its spell, which is most of us, most of the time.*


2021-10-13T16:20−07* / at the about* post – at bit.ly/dateposted – anyone can link to this post from its date: October 13, 2021
*a link – or not; see a note on notes and links and a disclaimer / … and maybe browse or search the archive*

emphasis (bolding) added to the excerpt above
understanding power (!*) / search on author’s website
understanding power (!*) / search on this website
understanding power (!gb) / search on Google Books
understanding power (!a) / search on Amazon

read a copy of the tweeted article on archive.today*

pinned tweet


a post that cites a tweet may not have much more to do with that tweet; this post is an example

a post that cites a tweet may do much more; the post dated 2021-04-05 – the date of the tweet displayed there as a footnote – is an example: it shows the relevant page of Garner’s Modern English Usage


2021-10-03T09:36−07* / at the about* post – at bit.ly/dateposted – anyone can link to this post from its date: October 3, 2021
*a link – or not; see a note on notes and links and a disclaimer

a larger version of the tweeted image above is featured in the post waste not, want not, be well

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