Do you see that little brown 2,8% slice?
That’s the amount of time Belgium’s biggest political party @vlbelang got in the most watched state media news. Hundreds of millions are poured into state media, both by Belgium and the E.U., to keep the current regime afloat.
Opposition parties like VB are also (shadow)banned on social media (by order of the E.U.) and banned from advertising in traditional media. Even billboard companies ban them because they rely heavily on state contracts.
This is the case in nearly every European country. Important to understand when you wonder why common sense parties don’t simply get absolute majorities.
That's right. Nobody is escaping this.
The Mormons are below replacement. The Muslims are below replacement. India is below replacement. America is below replacement. Mexico is below replacement.
Even Communist North Korea is below replacement!
8 years later, Mario Götze was sitting at home with his son, cheering as Messi finally lifted the World Cup.
Kinda feel guilty for disliking him all this time 🥲
Erling Haaland, Norway’s large, maniacal striker, has several exceedingly Norwegian traits. He sometimes exercises by chopping wood in the forest. He consumes 6,000 calories a day. After training sessions, he drinks raw milk. He owns a tax-sheltered investment company in Luxembourg named Pillage. He bought an edition of the “Heimskringla,” a 13th-century Old Norse saga, for $130,000—then donated it to his local library because, he explained, “I’ve never been much of a reader.” He has flowing blond hair, often compared to a Viking’s. He brings the intensity of a raiding party to the sport. Haaland scores goals at a higher rate than almost any soccer player ever. He has said, “I think of football all the time.” His wake-up alarm plays the theme song for the Champions League. He once posted a photo of himself on a plane, staring ahead intensely, with the caption “Just raw dogged a 7 hour flight no phone no sleep no water no food only map.” The Guardian once called him a “ravenous Nordic goal-yeti.”
Haaland’s style of play elicits not wonder but terror. He is enormous: six feet five, 200 pounds, about the size and speed of the N.F.L. wide receiver Randy Moss. “Watching him, I sometimes find myself giggling as I might over a big, obscene crash at a demolition derby,” Zach Helfand writes. Read more: https://t.co/iAtLMOvrv0
A 4th-century funerary slab from the catacombs depicting St Peter and St Paul: the new Romulus and Remus who spiritually re-founded Rome, once the persecutor of the saints, as a holy city on the foundation of their blood
This is why no one in any Western country can cut any welfare spending ever and why we keep going further and further into debt.
Because any time anyone reduces spending on anything, an example can be wheeled out of a person who suffered or even died as a result.
On this basis, there can never be too much spending, too much aid or too much tax.
Indeed, the author of the tweet I am quoting will almost certainly oppose paying taxes of 100% or having 100% of his country's GDP be used in aid to the developing world. Despite the fact that his failure to give all his/his country's money away is demonstrably killing people right now. How many lives could be saved by having all of his money go to Africa? How many millions could be saved by having all of the federal budget be sent to the poorest parts of the world?
“In all the good Greek of Plato
I lack my roastbeef and potato.
A better man was Aristotle,
Pulling steady on the bottle.
I dip my hat to Chaucer,
Swilling soup from his saucer,
And to Spenser, and to Bunyan,
Jawing like a man and a gunman.
I bow to the English poets
Who got the world’s work done, boys,
When they made the language their own
And did not leave it alone.
I praise the French who take
A fine care for their verse’s sake,
And the Germans who find a fault
In any line with a halt.
But the moderns, they are a-writing
As if they had heard of fighting,
As if they had heard of the Muse,
As if they had heard of the Jews.
They have heard of the Russian Revolution,
And the Spanish, and the Chinese one,
But they have not heard of the one
That is always and everywhere won.
I give you the end of a golden string,
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate
Built in Jerusalem’s wall.”
John Crowe Ransom, Chills and Fever