Mostly Harmless

living in the united states is supremely fucked up cause we're one of the richest, most powerful juggernauts on the planet, but your average citizen has relatively infinitesimal access to that wealth and power, and very little they can do to improve things.

being poor in the US still makes you rich by some global standards, but often times The American Experience is like..... you're a passenger locked in the baggage hold of a very long train that's going very fast. and the people driving the train are running it off the rails and shouting CHOO CHOO MOTHERFUCKERS CHOO CHOOOOOOOOO as they thoughtlessly bulldoze this train through everything in its path. you want very badly to get off the train or bludgeon the conductors with a crowbar, because you don't like where it's going, but you're handcuffed in a duffel bag and the conductors have barricaded themselves in the engine cars with all the food, medicine, and tools that could be used to help you out.

and UNDERSTANDABLY the rest of the world is like "what the FUCK is wrong with that train??? it must be stopped! there are so many people on the train why is nobody breaking into the conductor's booth and stopping it??!" but most of us are just squirming for basic survival in the last few cars while billionaires sit on top of the train sniping anyone brave enough to crawl up from the cargo hold, all while shouting that you're lucky to be on such a luxurious, successful train at all.

I’ve never seen being an American explained so well.

Not enough people know the Mormons believe Native Americans are Jewish people who turned away from God and got cursed by having their skin darkened, or that Mormons literally have Manifest Destiny right there in the text, no extrapolation. I'm not Native at all, but frankly, it's one of the most disgusting things of that faith that caused me to utterly reject it. It is a vile religion that is white supremacist to its very core.

I know most everyone sees Mormons only as annoying missionaries who won’t get out of your face (including in the third world, where missionary work is a vital part of the colonization process), and some folks vaguely know they’re also big homophobes, and that is true, but they’re so much worse than, eh, “only” all that. They’re rabidly anti-communist, highly patriarchal, incredibly homophobic and transphobic, and highly nationalist - obedience to the state is one of their articles of faith, and it isn’t in there as a token gesture so they can get into most any country unmolested, either.

To be sure, most Mormons aren’t Nazis and don’t have favorable views of Nazis, but they are about as reactionary as Nazis, particularly with their obedience to the church hierarchy. Mormons like the conservative who hates everyone the fascists hate, but hates the fascists because “I’m an American, and we Americans love democracy and hate fascists,” obviously knowing nothing about, say, Chile in 1973, or how NATO was totally cool all that time working with Spain while Franco was still in charge, or how American industrialists coordinated with the Nazis before the war, or literally anything about the deeper history of America and fascism. But whether they know how fascist they are or not, they’re comfortable doing fascism, and a hiccup away from realizing they really do fundamentally agree with fascism, so long as their “prophet” is in charge.

I guess what I’m saying is, by all means, poke fun at Mormons, and make jokes about them. They really are ridiculous, and I agree as someone who was, unfortunately, raised as one. But they’re not only a joke, they’re also a threat wherever they are in numbers.

A note on mormon beliefs about natives: they believe that by marrying natives and having children with us that they can “restore” us to our supposed previous esteem.

A small excerpt from one of Joseph Smiths “revelations”

i was raised mormon + its genuinely horrifying. like 

they also own the Polynesian Cultural Center in Hawaii and several elementary and secondary schools in mexico and the pacific islands. given the information previously provided in this post, this is particularly alarming.

during the obama romney election the leaders of the church sent out a letter to be read in every congregation that was like...remember to vote in a way that god would appreciate or else :) he may be upset w you :)

they also have $32 billion in business assets that they handle through church-owned finance companies (look up Deseret Management Corporation) so they don’t have to report their expenses. their holdings include swaths of land in utah, america’s 14th largest radio chain, and utah’s largest newspaper. oh and they’re just sitting on SO MUCH FUCKING LAND WHY DO HTYE OWN SO MUCH LAND????

tl;dr: the church’s racist rhetoric doesn’t just encourage racism in its members. church assets are actively used to “educate” + convert indigenous people and maintain political control in utah

There was also a program I the past where they took native children, baptized them, and sent them to live with white Mormon families. This is recent, my dad's parents "adopted" a couple kids like this. I've never heard anything about them except a recipe they gave my grandma.

And nobody will have to go into debt for their medical bills either!

CBS???? OH, IM DISSAPPOINTED AT YOU RIGHT NOW

Also watch John Oliver's new segment on it it's really enlightening

In their breakdown of the numbers, researchers applied the existing Medicare fee structure across the entire health-care system and found it would save about $100 billion annually. Keep in mind that this basically represents less money going to doctors and hospitals, a major sticking point for medical groups that oppose Medicare-for-all. But those declines would be more than offset by several hundred billions in savings from reduced administrative and billing costs, Galvani and her colleagues estimate. The lack of patient billing under a Medicare-for-all system would also eliminate the roughly $35 billion a year that hospitals now pay to chase down unpaid bills.

The authors estimate an additional $219 billion in savings from reduced “administrative overhead” that the current decentralized system creates, including “the elimination of redundant corporate functions and the truncation of the top-heavy salary architecture of health insurance corporations.” For instance, the plan would replace dozens of health insurance executives, many of whom make well over $20 million a year, with one administrator paid the same salary as the current Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Finally, letting the national Medicare system negotiate pharmaceutical prices would save about $180 billion, according to the analysis.

Galvani’s $3 trillion estimate is somewhat lower than the annual spending estimates produced by other observers, including the libertarian Mercatus Center ($3.3 trillion per year) and the more centrist-oriented Urban Institute ($3.4 trillion per year) and RAND Corporation ($3.9 trillion).

All of these estimates — Galvani’s included — are built on various assumptions about how costs and payments and patient behaviors would work in the real world with a Medicare-for-all plan in place: How much would doctors and hospitals actually save on administrative overhead? How many people would increase their use of medical services once they’re paid for? Would a single-payer system make it easier to detect medical fraud?

“What is it that the child has to teach?

The child naively believes that everything should be fair and everyone should be honest, that only good should prevail, that everybody should have what they want and there should be no pain or sadness. The child believes the world should be perfect and is outraged to discover it is not.

And the child is right.”

— Rabbi Tzvi Freeman

Don't buy into overpopulation theories. The Earth has enough for all, and we have the capabilities to provide for everyone.

Demand is not the issue, supply chains are.

https://overpopulationisamyth.com/

Here’s a slew of sources for y’all as well:

https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/blog/2019/mar/9/how-racist-myths-built-population-growth-bogey-man

https://www.pop.org/debunking-the-myth-of-overpopulation/

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/the-overpopulation-myth

Another video explaining why population isn’t the problem

“Why you shouldn’t obsess about “overpopulation”“

“I’m an environmental journalist, but I never write about overpopulation. Here’s why.”

which comes with this handy graph that shows the poorest people contribute the least to carbon emissions

Peter Joseph on structural violence, from this video.

Brilliant

Spot on. Like Coretta Scott King said, I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical need is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.

TRUTH

Embroidery Hoops

Shimunia on Etsy

See our #Etsy or #Embroidery tags

I GASPED SO FUCKIN HARD OMG

Not to sound like a Crazed Communist~! here.

But if you have $131 billion you can probably afford air conditioning and regular bathroom breaks for everyday Americans that work in your stores. 

You’re still going to be ridiculously rich anyway.

But, yeah, let’s focus on finding life on fucking Pluto.

I couldn’t decide which of these Finnegan faces was the cutest, so I figured I’d just post all of them and let you choose for yourself.

Everyone in the pictures above would have been an example of a “passive victim”, right Iain?

Fuck you, IDS. Fuck you.

Non-British friends: if you’re wondering how to get a knighthood, it’s simple… Just drive thousands of people to their deaths with your “flagship reform”.

Oh Iain Duncan, how I wish your daddy hadn’t spunken.

This piece of shit happened in 2015, it has no bearing to this government at all, except the fact we can still expose these Tory scum for what they are.

People in this country have short memories.

The UK honours system rewards some of the very worst people. Iain Duncan Smith is one of them.

We’re about to enter 2020 and the Queen is handing out titles to reward a man responsible for the deaths of vulnerable people.

Fuck this country.

Fuck the monarchy.

Fuck the Tories.

you know, considering how many times rich people are mentioned as sinful in the Bible versus how many times homosexuals are mentioned as sinful in the Bible, it’s really funny how I’ve never seen entire Christian organizations go out of their way to criticize, boycott, or deny services to rich people… 

weird how that works, huh

bold of you to assume that christians have read the bible

Or like if "war on drugs" meant "funding addiction treatment and research"

Yaroslav Gerzhedovich - Rising Eye

If you’re the kind of person who would do that, you never become Bezos in the first place.

My Dad owned a business my whole life. It was profitable, but it didn’t expand. I ask him once why he never grew it, and he said it’s nearly impossible without climbing on someone’s back–your vendors, your customers, your employees. Particularly that last one. You don’t wait until your business is big to be a good human being. The very first time you have to choose between your own profit and your employees health insurance, you choose the later. You give maternity leave even though the government doesn’t make you. You dock your own salary to not lay people off during a recession. You have adequate staffing and reliable hours. Anybody who says you can’t run a retail business on a normal, reasonable, predictable schedule you know in advance is full of shit. My Dad did it for 35 years (always have one more person than you think you need, and 98% of your staffing problems vanish). It’s just not maximum profit. If you don’t prioritize extracting profit from every corner of your business, you never become rich enough to give billions away. 

(One of the things my father is proud of is that by the time he retired they hadn’t needed to take a help wanted ad in 30 years. Turnover was low, and when a spot opened, referrals filled it.)

Always remember that capitalism is built on outright lies and greed.

Life During Interesting Times