In 2016, $3.5B was spent on lobbying.
That is equivalent to $5.9 million per member of Congress.
The average annual salary of a congressman is $175,000
We spend more and get less than industrial nations on:
Airline tickets
Medicine
Medical treatment
Education
Cable internet
Cellphone service
Food
Education budget: $78.2B
Corporate Tax Breaks (corporate welfare): $100B
In the richest country in the world, no body should work full time and not make it.
I know that we don’t have the IQ no the empathy for empowering the Green Party, but at least vote for Bernie.
Or is it too late now?!
If you want to be a film maker, a musician, or an artist, who the hell cares about money. Money is morphine for the passionless people.
Life is a chain of our preferred delusions
My grandmother used to plant flowers in the empty shells of Israeli bombs in Bintjbail, Lebanon. They used to make good pots.
I can never forget this symbolism.
“Melancholy isn’t always a disorder that needs to be cured. It can be a species of intelligent grief which arises when we come face-to-face with the certainty that disappointment is written into the script from the start. We have not been singled out.
Marrying anyone, even the most suitable of beings, comes down to a case of identifying which variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for. In an ideal world, marriage vows would be entirely rewritten. At the altar, a couple would speak thus: “We accept not to panic when, some years from now, what we are doing today will seem like the worst decision of our lives. Yet we promise not to look around, either, for we accept that there cannot be better options out there. Everyone is always impossible. We are a demented species.”
After the solemn repetition of the last sentence by the congregation, the couple would continue: “We will endeavor to be faithful. At the same time, we are certain that never being allowed to sleep with anyone else is one of the tragedies of existence. We apologize that our jealousies have made this peculiar but sound and non-negotiable restriction very necessary. We promise to make each other the sole repository of our regrets rather than distribute them through a life of sexual Don Juanism.
We have surveyed the different options for unhappiness, and it is to each other we have chosen to bind ourselves.” Spouses who had been cheated upon would no longer be at liberty furiously to complain that they had expected their partner to be content with them alone. Instead they could more poignantly and justly cry, “I was relying on you to be loyal to the specific variety of compromise and unhappiness which our hard-won marriage represents.” Thereafter, an affair would be a betrayal not of intimate joy but of a reciprocal pledge to endure the disappointments of marriage with bravery and stoic reserve.”
Alain De Botton
New World War coming up:
Iran + Turkey + Syria + Lebanon + Qatar (backed by Russia)
Vs.
USA + Israel + Saudi Arabia + UAE + Kurds
– Oil prices will sky rocket
– international refugee crisis
– new massacres and wmd disasters
The only way to stop it:
– successful coupe in Saudi Arabia that brings down MbS
– impeachment of Donald Trump or a severe change in US Foreign policy right now.
– coupe or impeachment in Israel against Netanyahu by the Israeli left.
“All the unhappiness of man stems from one thing only: that he is incapable of staying quietly in his room”. Pascal
“The Secret” doesn’t work.
Fantasizing (dreaming) gives us the reward before we have accomplished the task and saps the energy we need to realize it. More dreams now mean less achievement later.
But we can’t help it, and it motivates us, so we should ask ourself the following after each dream/fantasy:
“What’s getting in the way of my fantasy? And what will I do to overcome that?”
Your chance to find your “soulmate” scientifically is 1 in 10,000 life times.
Randall Munroe
NASA Roboticist
Founder of XKCD
Wissam Charafeddine 