charlie chalk

didn't exist. exists. won't exist.

[charlie chalk @wispabars]

AEGINA, GREECE, EASTER 2024 / Nick Power

@Holynowhere toils in the unsaid -- the afterthought-- with masterful concision. Poem by Nick Power. The way a stranger's friendly nod can, in an instant, straightren the back on your day...

https://t.co/gGm1yLudZ3

[charlie chalk @wispabars]

@TFIupdates do you know when the next L2 bus at stop 7296 will be? The app says the next two are cancelled.

[Drew Holden @DrewHolden360]

🧵Thread🧵

Many in the media are trying to claim that the press was merely duped by Biden’s White House about the former president’s cognitive decline.

That simply isn’t true. The media actively took part in the coverup.

Don’t let them forget. I’ve got screenshots. ⤵️

[Curiosity @CuriosityonX]

Tap this image...

Look to the top right...

That's Phobos, a moons of Mars...

And that bright point of light next to it?...

That's Us, that's Earth...

[Gerard Casey @Casey5122dark]

It has all the appearance of a domestic version of what happened in the EU with the Nice and Lisbon treaties. The Romanian electorate appear to have made the wrong decisions and will be required to think again!

[Footy Humour @FootyHumour]

This is peak South American football. The striker barely shoots at the goal, an overweight defender collapses out of nowhere, another defender completely misses the ball trying to clear and to top it off a random dog celebrates wildly in the stands.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

I’ve seen a lot of good takes highlighting the fact that the murdered health insurance CEO was himself a murderer, and a much more prolific one than any serial killer or mass shooter that has ever lived. The only difference was that his style of murder was protected by the law.

This really nails home the point that the legal system is not intended to protect ordinary citizens from the worst people in our society, it’s there to protect the very worst people in our society from ordinary citizens. You can see this just by watching the frenetic police manhunt that’s underway for Brian Thompson’s killer while Thompson himself was walking around a free man — and an obscenely wealthy one at that — despite his having made his wealth via profits reaped from corporate policies designed to deprive sick and injured people of healthcare as frequently as possible.

None of the world’s worst people are in prison. Our society is fed a steady diet of movies and shows depicting heroic protagonists fighting villains who abuse and murder people in illegal ways, when in real life the actual villains of our society murder people in ways that are completely legal. None of their abuses are against the law.

Everyone’s talking about the murderous predatory practices of US health insurance companies today, and rightly so, but we should also bring awareness to the fact that it isn’t just billionaire healthcare corporations who are killing and abusing people at mass scale for profit. ANYONE who rakes in billions is building an empire on the blood, sweat and tears of ordinary people. At the very least they are leveraging unfair socioeconomic systems to extract labor from people around the world at extortionate rates, because everyone needs money and most people are born under the unfortunate circumstance of having nothing to sell but their labor. Workers are given the bare minimum slice of the corporate pie in order to maximize profits, in exactly the same way health insurance companies deny claims to maximize profits, keeping huge numbers of people toiling in crushing poverty. These abuses are exponentially worse in the ways they are inflicted upon the populations of the global south.

That’s the bare minimum level of abusiveness you will find in these billionaire corporations — the most profitable ones are far more abusive. They actively work to create more and more war, ecocide, exploitation and resource control, because these things increase their profits. They lobby governments for more wars and militarism around the world because they manufacture weapons of war. They lobby governments for shrinking environmental regulations because they maximize their corporate profits by externalizing the costs of industry onto the biosphere we all depend on. They lobby governments for fewer worker protections because worker protections eat into profits. They lobby governments for exploitative trade agreements because globalization gives them a steady supply of cheap wage slaves with fewer workers’ rights. They lobby governments to privatize services and resources so that they can turn things people are already getting into coercive mechanisms of private profit extraction.

These abuses are the product of the exploitative, profit-driven, competition-based systems under which we live. In a system where it’s profitable to sell health insurance and frequently deny insurance claims, you’re going to see psychopaths rise to obscene levels of wealth and power by profiteering off health insurance. In a system where war is profitable, you’re going to see psychopaths rise to obscene levels of wealth and power by profiteering off war. In a system where ecocide is profitable, you’re going to see psychopaths rise to obscene levels of wealth and power by profiteering off ecocide. In a system where exploitation is profitable, you’re going to see psychopaths rise to obscene levels of wealth and power by profiteering off exploitation.

Our laws and police forces exist first and foremost to protect these abusive systems. They’re not there to protect us, they’re there to protect our abusers. They’re there to make sure what happened to Brian Thompson happens as rarely as possible, and that people like him are able to abuse people like you and me with total impunity.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

708 GB image of the Moon

[📹 Darya Kawa Mirza / daryavaseum]
https://t.co/KEF4cjMMYY

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

King cobra bites python. Python constricts cobra. Cobra gets crushed to death. Python dies from the cobra’s venom.

[charlie chalk @wispabars]

@EvolutionOfBea2 (Richard James) has created something special with this: https://t.co/MZ0CFpeRvq

[Gerard Casey @Casey5122dark]

"If war isn’t just a product of boredom or the ever-present desire to live off the proceeds of armed robbery, is it the case, as Arthur Koestler has speculated, that man is ‘an aberrant biological species, an evolutionary misfit, afflicted by an endemic disorder which sets it apart from all other animal species…’?

"Are human beings naturally bellicose? Freud seems to have thought so, holding that man naturally exhibits a lust for hatred and destruction that inevitably issues in war. It is true that men may kill when moved by anger or when consumed by lust, but war isn’t just the spontaneous killing of one man by another. War is, perhaps paradoxically, a social event, requiring a high level of human cooperation in the slaughter of conspecifics; it is, curiously, the organised production of radical disorganisation.

"In fact, pace Freud, it takes a great deal of propaganda and desensitisation to persuade normal human beings that killing one another is a good thing. The point of much military training is to persuade soldiers to obey without thinking and to treat their enemies as if they were less than human. It really helps if you can’t see the face of the person you are attempting to kill; this might explain in part why, with the advance of sophisticated weapons that enable us to kill at ever-increasing distances, the death toll of modern wars has risen spectacularly."

[excerpt from my Freedom’s Progress?]

[Nick Power @Holynowhere]

Out today - ‘Dead Cars’, the second song from forthcoming hauntology album THROAT (out October 4th) with Mark Mckowski…

Have a listen to Dead Cars: https://t.co/Pq8tDRLuoL

Preorder THROAT (Ltd 500 vinyl/ CD) : https://t.co/TJMG5RGaQX

[charlie chalk @wispabars]

@StesteMichael @IrishTimes You do realise that you're speaking in the King's English

[charlie chalk @wispabars]

@BunstanceB @spectator Just to let you know, twitter regarded your reply as"probable spam". Kind of let's you know how twitter values the contrarian voice in civil discourse.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

The termite queen: it can live 50 years, longer than any other insect in the world.

[📹 BBC]
https://t.co/2bcSrixc66

[KM2 archive @KillianM2]

We really have the worst football journalists in Europe. In the first ten minutes of Hallgrimsson's press conference, he's been asked about historical sexual abuse in the women's game, Mason Greenwood and Damien Duff.
Nobody has asked him about a timescale for qualifying for something.

[charlie chalk @wispabars]

@RealTimeWWII Jesus! Thought that was current events for a second there.

[Drew Holden @DrewHolden360]

Two weeks ago, WaPo gave “Four Pinocchio’s” to allegedly edited videos showing Biden clearly displaying cognitive problems, dismissing them as “pernicious” efforts “to reinforce an existing stereotype” while quoting the WH to say they were “cheap fakes” to mislead people.

[Western Lensman @WesternLensman]

Joe Scarborough, three months ago: Biden is better than ever he’s ever been.

Joe Scarborough, today: We must replace Biden in the name of Democracy.

🤡🌎