Sitting here at the PC looking at dumb videos on YutzoPutzo, at about 2:30-ish, suddenly the power went off. It didn't come back on, so I dutifully shut everything in the computer room down. Saw lights outside, watched a ComEd guy finish pulling the fuses from the pole outside. Figured it was going to be a while, so I tried to go to bed.
Didn't work. Couldn't sleep without the CPAP.
To make a long story shorter, I ended up knocking around the house trying to find a way to get some freaking sleep when I could not pressurize my airway, and was almost entirely unsuccessful. The power came back on around 6-ish, which gave me some fraction of an hour before my alarm went off. *sigh*
So, I dragged ass all day long.
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If you have ever read Mika Waltari's The Egyptian, you read about this city. There's a big part in the middle of the story where the main character ends up as the court physician to the pharoah Akhenaten (Tutenkhamen's father) and it talks about all the social upheavel of Akhenaten's reign over Egypt.
Amarna is the city that Akhenaten built; and after his death, it was abandoned. Well, it's been found again. Neat.
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Sarah Hoyt discusses what's going on with our self-styled elites and their scheming and machinations for the world, vis-a-vis this idiotic "global minimum tax" that the pomo crowd has latched onto.
And they want the world to tax corporations, because that means the corporations won't run from the US.... they think. Let's suppose they manage to impose their will on the world (I doubt it. I think mostly it will be YEARS of discussions in the UN, amounting to nothing.) Other countries will NOT ENFORCE that tax. and the corporations will know it.It got me to thinking, though, about all these morons who think that we need to kill off about 95% of the world's population in order to make things "sustainable".
The Junta only tells itself it will work.
And then it hit me: it's the same as the $15 dollar an hour minimum wage. Nothing to do with "living wage." It's their attempt to prevent jobs and employers from fleeing blue cities that bleed them dry. If payment is the same everywhere, they're sure they can keep them because of the "advantages" of cities.
But since the advantages now involve feral homeless camping everywhere, crazy edits on what can be open and closed, releasing criminals to roam the streets, etc. even if they get that national minimum wage.... it ain't gonna work.
Seven billion people in the world. 5% of that number is 350,000,000, about the population of the United States. Let's say half a billion for easy numbers. Do you know what happens if there are suddenly only five hundred million people left in the world?
The remaining half-billion starve to death.
No, really! The elites expect to be the ones who survive; but they don't know how to do anything other than tell people what to do; and that's a problem. Who farms? Who raises the animals? Where does the food come from?
There's another problem, of course: economically, you cannot support a technological civilization on half a billion people. Oh, you might have people with the necessary skills, but everyone will have to work sixteen hour days just to stay alive.
Every person in the world represents a certain amount of economic output. Some people are more useful than others; some people are net consumers of economic output while others are net generators. If you work for a living, and receive a halfway decent salary, you are a generator of economic output. Your labors generate wealth. A lot of the people in the world do something that is economically necessary, and thus turn their labor into wealth.
Now get rid of 95% of the population.
In that sorely depopulated world, there are no iPhones, no soy latte milko machos, no electric cars (or any cars!) nor is there any electricity to charge their batteries. There are no elites who sit on their fat asses all day long in meetings about the best way to advocate for transsexual fairness because everyone needs to be outside busting his ass growing food. And they're doing it with horse-drawn plows and hand tools and no fertilizers or pesticides because there simply are not enough people in the world to support an economy that can make those things. Or to run power plants or refine oil into diesel. Or to build ships to carry goods across the seas.
Fucking idiots like Bill Gates believe that the human population of Earth needs to be reduced to some "sustainable" figure like that--half a billion--but in that world, Bill Gates doesn't live a life of luxury, paying other people to do manual labor for him. No, he works his ass off on his own farm in order to earn enough money to buy the things he needs to live--and by the way, his vast fortune is utterly worthless because no one accepts fiat currency any longer, and no one has seen a working computer since the plague finally burned itself out.
The tinfoil hat crowd is convinced that the mRNA "vaccine" for COVID-19 is one way that people can be marked for elimination. Give them the shot and their bodies produce a unique signature which reduces the severity of a Wuhan Flu infection, but which could be used by another disease organism to sidestep the person's immune system. So, it's part of a one-two punch: everyone who gets the "vaccine" is then vulnerable to the follow-on disease, and most of them will die.
Me, I just don't fancy being a guinea pig for the drug corporations, and the stupid shot isn't even a vaccine, anyway. It doesn't make you immune to the virus, and it doesn't prevent you from spreading it. They're trying to figure out how to make it mandatory, and the drug companies have been completely insulated from any liability if the thing screws you up. None of that instills me with any confidence whatsoever. (But if the guys in the tinfoil hats are right, then the push to vaccinate everyone becomes a lot more sinister.)
Sarah Hoyt's optimistic take is that we're in for a shitstorm--but a short one, and at the end of it, the pomo-nazi-socialist-SJW-NPC crowd has taken it in the shorts, and very, very badly.
She says they can't win. I'd like to believe that.
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Anyway, it's Friday. We've got that much going for us.
I'm going to take a nap.