Halo Halo / Tiny Tips
Halo, halo
Commiserations to you job-seekers out there who fancied themselves as Chief Executive Officer of the international corporation RCC Inc. The position has been filled. There were 135 internal candidates vying to fulfil it with an external individual, Trump, suggesting that he should get the job because he was already running America and as the job involved a one-day week, Sundays, it would be a doddle to do. Note, it was not made clear in the job spec whether megalomania was an essential prerequisite.
What can the new CEO look forward to? According to RSVPLive the job pays a salary of £228,000 a year. Throw in the benefits that go with the position and you’re looking at a cushty little number. The Mirror reported that the last holder ‘had a jaw-dropping net worth of £12million due to the assets associated with his papal office. These include five cars, an apartment and clothing’. The job also includes a ‘top-floor palatial penthouse apartment – which boasts more than 12 rooms, quarters for staff, a terrace and extensive views across Rome’. Throw in lots of free international travel and lots of sitting on a throne whilst ‘authoritative’ visitors including politicians, celebrities, royalty and billionaires come to you from all over the world to bow and scrape and make you feel very important. On reflection, having to be pleasant to these sorts of people may qualify as one of the negatives.
There is unlikely to be any interference from the Chairman of the company, a very reclusive person, a bit like Howard Hughes, whom no one has heard from in aeons. Although do be aware that if sufficiently peed off he might rain down plagues, pestilence, floods and other unpleasantness. The job requires celibacy which given the Chairman’s pettishness means at least you won’t have to worry too much about the life survival likelihood of your first born.
Note that the temper tantrums are taken from that book of fiction which has served as a playbook which, the present post’s predecessors have used to impose, or try to impose, a monopoly of religion and power over the world’s population for two millennium. This includes the use of stick and carrot techniques with the promise both of ‘pie in the sky’ and ‘eternal torment’: see James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a young Man which includes a harrowing passage detailing a sermon by a catholic priest on the torture awaiting disbelievers in hell.
The new CEO is American-born Robert Prevost who has decided to adopt the alias of Leo the fourteenth. In 1878 the ‘thirteenth’ issued an encyclical against the ‘sect of men who, under various and almost barbarous names, are called socialists, communists, or nihilists’. In 1891, another encyclical appeared sympathetic to the plight of the working class but actually defended the rights of the property-owning class to the hilt. God given rights, doncha know.
Some new boss, same old boss.
DC
Billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been unmasked as the mystery buyer of one of Washington, D.C.‘s most expensive properties: a $23 million mansion that he quietly paid for in an all-cash deal that was so secretive, the home vanished from view on Google Maps soon after it closed (Yahoo, tinyurl.com/3c85x5bc).
Lenin brought his Bolshevik Party to power on the cresting wave of the democratic workers’ councils, or soviets, in 1917. Then, with a few changes, he essentially restored tsarist autocracy. Freedom of speech, the press, and assembly were again suppressed, and the absolute power of a non-elected monarch, a dictator, reappeared along with a centralized bureaucracy. Under Lenin, the chinovnik-bureaucrat apparatus once more became the master of the land and of thousands of industrial enterprises. It included many tsarist bureaucrats, who, together with a few Bolsheviks, were the bosses in the ministries. Lenin’s bureaucracy blended with the tsarist bureaucracy and quickly adopted the same rules. Everything that upset or challenged the interests of centralized economic and socio-political life was eliminated (Canadian Dimension, tinyurl.com/3pb8vfzm).
A city divided by a 12-year gap in life expectancy… Sally Cartwright, the county’s director of public health at Cambridgeshire County Council, agrees that a lack of access to cheap, nutritious food, expensive gym memberships and insufficient exercise and community facilities in the area have all contributed to the gap in life expectancy…. Differences in wealth affect people’s health, she adds, as well as other triggers such as smoking, heavy drinking and poor diet (BBC, tinyurl.com/yhyjc8ev).
A veteran financial consultant and insurance executive is warning his fellow capitalists that their commitment to profits and market supremacy is endangering the economic system to which they adhere and that if corrective actions are not taken capitalism itself will soon be consumed by the financial and social costs of a planet being cooked by the burning of fossil fuels (Common Dreams, tinyurl.com/2f8dap2b).
Some argue that ecological change has historically posed great challenges to existing systems, and therefore, climate change must do the same to capitalism. This view overlooks a key fact: unlike previous modes of production, capitalism is fundamentally based on change. Then there is the assumption that climate change will create such severe problems — food shortages, infrastructure collapse, mass death — that capitalism simply can’t cope. But capitalism has always been adept at placing death in some corners of the world, so that life – and profits – can continue elsewhere. Mass death has never been a fundamental problem for capitalism; the system itself was built on colonialism, wars, and genocides (Rebel, tinyurl.com/kb3cwmfm).
A legal team representing Hamas pro bono — since it would be illegal to receive money from the group — claims in its own filing that while Hamas’s actions fit the definition of ‘terrorism’ in British law, so do those of the IDF, the Ukrainian army and even the British military (The Times of Israel, tinyurl.com/mpkrmkkn).
(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view).
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