One day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you’ll agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged onto a half submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters, who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen. Mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that is when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.

-Sir Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals

Quite a few countries, Italy for example, will either sell you a castle for dirt cheap or just give it to you, as long as you promise to restore and maintain it.

Which is, to be clear, an absolute pain in the ass, since those castles have very strict restrictions about how to repair and upgrade them, materials and even companies you’re allowed to use, etc. Not to mention they’re a bitch to heat in the winter.

Hey, staying alive to snuggle cats and spite your parents works too.

Not comfortable, comfort. The comfort of routine, the predictable, the familiar… and fighting against a fascist government is very uncomfortable, especially from that perspective. Once they cease to feel comfort, then people act.

That’s why massive social revolutions tend to be preceded by famines. Food comfort (that is, the idea of always having food available, even if so expensive one needs a 5-finger discount to get any) is one of the major motivational comforts, so its loss tends to hit very hard socially.

At least in my case, family. My family is really big and loves parties, his family is really big and loves parties. That quickly becomes a 250-300 person guest list.

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”

-Martin Luther King Jr

The truth is people are rarely good or bad. The vast majority of people are simply creatures of comfort, and will be adverse to losing that comfort over all other things.

I sent the club a wire stating, “PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON’T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT PEOPLE LIKE ME AS A MEMBER”.

-Groucho Marx (Telegram to the Friar’s Club of Beverly Hills to which he belonged)

You might actually be able to help him. There are trainings you can do to help a dog get used to sudden loud noises; hunting dogs for example get this training so they can work around gunfire. No reason it wouldn’t work for things like thunder and fireworks too.

As it so happens, it did nearly kill him. Some locals beat the shit out of him afterwards.

But hey, he said he could afford the fine, so I’m sure he could afford the medical bills too.

You do realize how much Doge was able to dismantle specifically the parts of government that tax the rich, right?

But aside from that, people tend to conflate appearance for substance. He feels controlling the government makes him powerful because he appears powerful.

I dunno, in Japan at least there was a lot of woowoo as far back as 1000 years ago. The gardening version of Feng Shui that Japan adopted has fun stuff in it like ‘don’t put a rock in upside down, or it will curse you for seven generations’.

They were told to ‘get a man’ and often pushed out of work, as they were almost always single mothers, who were seen as ‘sluts’ and ‘failures’.

To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.

-Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Might be tetras, which prefer large groups.

No-one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine they made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life is only the core of their actual existence.

-Sir Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

As long as you remember him, you carry a small spark of his existence with you. And with every story you tell, his ripples will continue to spread.

Also: older eggs. The newer an egg is the more the shell will try and stick after hard-boiling.

Well, okay, first, a point of order: ‘Free Speech’, as outlined in the First Amendment, simply means that the government can’t persecute you for saying things they don’t like. The First Amendment has no bearing, or jurisdiction, on private businesses.

Not that our government hasn’t been violating the First Amendment too, of course. But that wasn’t what you were ranting about.

And were we ever up the tubes? I mean, I suppose we were, and still are, if you consider white rich male landowners to be the only ‘America’ that counts… which they certainly seem to believe…

But for everyone else it’s always been kind of a shithole, let’s be honest. For some more than others, of course.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

(That’s Frederick Douglas’ 4th of July speech btw)

I mean, what’s mentioned in this thread is what rich people I know do. Plus saw a lot of it in Palm Beach.

Because they’re also power-hungry assholes who like to watch people scurry around an office on their whim. That and they figure that they’d slack off at home and do nothing, so of course their workers will too, and how would they know?

And the stuff he saw himself. He mentioned in an interview once that he kept his office job for a long time after making it big with Dilbert because he got so much material.