Doug's Darkworld

Another week goes by, another blog post on Doug’s Darkworld. I have been really busy with amazing developments in my life, so not writing as much these days. Still, will keep up at least one post per week. In fact my current plan is to keep posting until at least 2050, so my three readers can look forward to hundreds of more posts as the decades roll by. Longer if possible, I’m with Woody Allen on this one: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work… I want to achieve it through not dying.” Moving right along, a random look at the week’s events in no particular order.

People are rioting in Greece over “austerity measures.” “Austerity measures” is a euphemism for “The upward transfer of wealth has slowed down so the poor and middle class need to sacrifice more.” I’d say I’m a cynic, but the more I understand the world the more I am thinking that civilization in general and governments in particular primarily exist to facilitate the needs of the ultra rich. There are exceptions of course, some governments are better than others, just as some Lords treated their vassals and serfs well.  (Most didn’t) Still, the benevolent governments appear to be the exception. The proof is in the pudding of course, industrialization has meant that the wealth produced by humanity exceeds by many orders of magnitude the wealth humans produced in the pre-industrial era, and yet the vast majority of the world’s population still lives in soul crushing poverty.

And I suspect it’s going to get worse before it gets better, because with the rich controlling the mainstream media in a way never before seen, it’s become easier and easier for them to convince people that this is “normal” and there’s something wrong with wanting to redistribute the wealth. I hear intelligent educated people claim that redistributing the wealth would be unfair to the rich and that even if it was redistributed, the rich would just get it all back in a few years. First of all, if Bill Gates and his ilk suddenly had to survive on a $100 grand a year, I’m pretty sure they’d muddle through somehow, though the power whining would no doubt be deafening. As for the idea that they would get it all back in a few years, so what? Accumulating wealth is what the rich like to do. And frankly, many of the world’s concentrations of wealth took centuries to accumulate, it’s not like they are going to re-accumulate in a single lifetime.

In any event, I know I am over-simplifying the problem, and confiscating the wealth of rich people isn’t some panacea to the world’s problems, far from it. I’m just railing against the fact the the rich have managed to completely squelch the idea that there is a problem with how the world’s wealth is distributed, especially in the USA where they’ve managed to make it a pejorative to be a socialist. Yeah, wanting a fair shake for workers and universal health care for all is something to be ashamed of, give me a break. The powers that be even convinced people that “regulation” is a problem. Even a cursory look at the golden era of the late nineteenth century where there was essentially no regulation at all shows what a nightmare the unregulated world was for workers, the poor, and consumers.

Oh well, I was going to cover a bunch of topics, but got carried away there. TTH. (TTH means These Things Happen, it’s an unpublished acronym.) So jumping to the last topic I was going to cover and skipping the part about how to make a million dollars in the rubber band trading market, another sign of the upcoming apocalypse. For the second time ever, a hurricane has formed in the South Atlantic. OK, for the second time since the satellite era, just to be fair. The first time was in 2004. Hurricanes require vast expanses of warm water to form. This is another bad sign that the Earth is heating up. Actually, the fact that the Earth’s heat content continues to rise is far beyond the “bad sign” stage. Still, that’s meat for another post.

Have a great weekend everyone!

(The above image of a woman garment worker’s strike is public domain under US copyright law. It dates from around 1910 I think, and is in Chicago. The picture has been altered to include four late 20th century anachronism, can you spot them? I couldn’t find a copy of the unmodified picture on line, more proof that the Internet is actually making things worse instead of better in terms of spreading knowledge. The answers can be found here.)