Revelation 19:17-18
I then saw an angel standing on the sun, and he shouted to all the birds flying in the sky, “Come and join in God’s great feast! You can eat the flesh of kings, rulers, leaders, horses, riders, free people, slaves, important people, and everyone else.”!
Discuss.
4th Grade Xtrian School science exam (h/t Joe.My.God):
“What if someone says the earth is billions (millions) of years old: You weren’t there.”
Croak!
Ribbitt
Does this mean that birds are TeaBaggers?
I’m OK with the birds picking the flesh off the ‘kings, rulers, leaders…important people’, but leave the horses alone, and let the (now former) slaves and the free (ordinary) people put something together that doesn’t rely on, or more importantly, enrich and empower, some new king.
We need to tax (and dis-incentivise) rentiers, to tax and dis-incentivise capital income and wealth accumulation (sorry Roger) – labor needs to be advantaged.
Imagine a world we we all worked at what we were good at and found fulfilling – and were rewarded justly for those labors. Imagine if everyone had enough, and we made sure of that, as a people, because we’re all family, we’re all in this together.
This may be corny or naive, but a scene from the movie “Last Samurai” has always stuck with me – when the samurai Katsumoto was revealing the essence of his culture to the captive and dissolute Cptn Aldrin, in a scene outside the temple, surrounded by a sea of cherry blossoms, he said (paraphrasing) “One could spend a lifetime searching for the perfect blossom, and it would be a life well-spent.”
This scene comes back to me when we have discussions on these threads about education and especially the costs of education and the explosion of school-related debt. Many of the conservatives wail about people being educated in disciplines that don’t ‘pay well’ or ‘contribute’. The examples are often English or theater or art majors. I would counter that I would much more happily support, through my labors, training of our young people to critically analyze thoughts and writing, or to create art, or to discover scientifically just for the sake of discovering, than to churn out another business or communications major destined for a cubicle somewhere, or an engineer that is going to bring us a brighter/faster screen to stare at while the world goes by, to numb us into not realizing…so much.
I think it would be a vastly superior investment of part of my labor, to support a dreamer or scientist or artist searching for the metaphoric ‘perfect blossom’ than to spend it on drones or surveillance cameras and data vacuuming or another stealth bomber or a system that creates and depends on hellish sweatshops in Bangladesh or fetid pools of carbonous sludge in otherwise verdant Canadian forests.
Now, we do need people who are organizers and facilitators, and engineers can be invaluable, don’t get me wrong. But in our system, laboring is a fool’s game, and wage-slavery is really slavery. The vast majority of us own next to nothing, or nothing at all, and a tiny majority own nearly everything and benefit from all those laboring slaves. Our system has advanced, on the axis of justice, nary at all since forever.
We live in a feudal society, and we are ruled not by the wise or the just, but by the greediest or most aggressive or most sociopathic among us.
@ 5
The TeaBaggers do not recognize any path of scholarship that doesn’t make money for other people. The ONLY thing the modern American Conservative considers valuable is money itself. All laws of man are less important than that. All aspects of civilization are secondary. They only serve Mammon, that mythical god of wealth and prosperity.
Scholarship of obscure concepts does not serve the needs of the bankers or industrialists, nor does it contribute to their power structure. Thats why they sneer at climatologists and biologists and rationalize their contempt for the natural sciences by accusing those who avail themselves of such knowledge of being greedy, and manipulating the system for their own gain.
They cannot recognize their own personality structure in their projections of selfishness upon the non-greedy people. They cannot Grok the idea that not everyone is corruptible or as selfish as they are. To them, it is entirely necessary to spend taxpayers money on preventing a football team from leaving a city, or to prop up industries that engage in criminal acts of fraud, but it is borderline criminal to search for the sources of diseases or new technological developments that would enable a society to maintain its status as a modern, technologically advanced society by shifting energy sources away from an obsolescent and deteriorating model. To them, it is milking the welfare cow for someone to study anything other than money.
Conservatives recognize nothing beyond the immediate generation of cash flow for the people that already have so much of it they could never spend it all in a thousand lifetimes. They know the price of everything, and the value of nothing. They only speak in terms of of cost to themselves, not benefit to the greater society, especially when they themselves cannot exclude that benefit from anyone but themselves and only then in terms of money.
If a sure cure for cancer was found tomorrow, it would never see the light of day, but would be held as a closely guarded secret for the people who presume themselves the elite through the mere ability to gather and hoard wealth. It is perfectly acceptable to be a psychopath as long as one has an intellect that is oriented toward the hoarding of money. There is no other human endeavor that has any value. Especially when taken in the context of the “greater good”.
I am the the environment. I eat the dead that their remains may become new again.
I am that I am.
Dude had some good acid.
@5 Hey, don’t worry about me, I’m just along for the ride. As long as they hand out free money. I’ll take it. I honestly don’t know why they give me money. If this gravy train ever stops (I doubt it will), I can live on my modest state pension, because my expenses are low. (What does a rabbit need, anyway?)
@7 Everything I eat becomes shiny round dark-colored pellets.
@8 I assume you’re referring to #7?
@11
No, I was referring to whoever wrote the original text. “I saw an angel standing on the sun” The only time I have heard anyone talk like that was after doing some serious psychedelic drugs. Uh, not me. It was someone else.
@12 Wouldn’t that be the guy posting at #7?
Grok? Really grok?
#1. Heinline in was a fascist of the first order
#2. The word made my iPad iOS self corrector have a meltdown.
#3. That wasn’t hippiedom’s finest moment.
#4. Birds prefer sunflower seeds over the flesh of kings.