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Nerd.
Oh, sorry. I was looking in a mirror. These books from George R. R. Martin are incredible, to say the least. Epic, intriguing, exciting, complex, and of course sexy …. they got it all. And the series Game of Thrones, named after the first book but based on the whole set, is equally amazing. They’ve done a masterful job of adapting the books to the screen.
So far, we have one season per book, but my youngest passed a rumour to me that the third season will encompass only half of the third book, A Storm of Swords. SInce I was thrilled with A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings, I certainly cannot wait for this next installment. Frankly, I found the last two episodes of season 2 so profoundly good that I expect to read the whole series again before season three is ready to air.
But … the actual point of this post was to show this spectacularly funny Facebook vignette from George Takei’s Facebook page. (Sulu from Star Trek if you were born and raised in a cave.)
I won’t bother explaining the jokes … you’ll just have to read the series yourself
I haven’t railed against the rampant greed of the bourgeoisie for a while now because, frankly, it is so ubiquitous that it is like picking low-hanging fruit or shooting fish in a barrel. CEOs, board members, large shareholders … all cut from the same cloth these days.
And if ever there were a story that perfectly illustrates the plight of the middle class at the hands of the increasingly-rich (if that is even possible any more) ruling class, this is that story …
The Spam Factory’s Dirty Secret is a brilliant exposé that documents what happened when the Hormel (pronounced like normal) family’s business transitioned to the Hormel (pronounced HorMEL) of today in the mid 1970s. They went from being a shining star of employee salaries and benefits, workers’ rights, veterans’ opportunities and all things beneficial to a union-breaking, wage-slashing, benefits-reducing, profit-seeking, worker-hurting machine …
This quote sums it up nicely …
But, unlike Jay Hormel, Knowlton was reaching for increased profits (as well as a hefty bump in his own salary) by wresting away worker benefits.
I underlined the root cause of the problem since the 70s … greed. That’s right … even the “shareholder value” mantra that has been taught by business schools since that time is simply rooted in good old-fashioned rampant greed. Greed of the bourgeoisie – those who control the means of production and who occupy this overpaid upper-crust niche in our society.
Here is a quote from a worker who got sick in their plant while working at the head table, where one task was to use compressed air to blow a pig’s brains into a mush and drain it into a barrel for shipment to Asia where it is used as a thickener in stir-fry. This task created a red mist that coated every worker at the table.
"I feel thrown away," she said, finally. "Like a piece of trash. Before, I worked hard and willingly for QPP (ed: a subsidiary that leases a piece of the same plant as a union-busting move), but after I got sick and needed restrictions and told them I was in pain, they threw me away like trash and were done with me."
The bourgeoisie are nothing is not efficient and cold-hearted. Many have ice in their veins that make them seem extra-planetary to the average person. Have you ever thought why? Well, there is plenty of research that show that the incidence of psychopathic tendencies in the CEO population is at least 4 times the average in the general population – with influence far above that percentage, so it is not exactly a surprise that the dollar usually wins. These are the people that we have making some very important decisions with far-reaching implications – like where the middle class work force should reside – and the seeds of our mutual destruction are being planted right here …
If this all sounds a little too leftist to you, then you are probably just fooling yourself that all is well. Read the article and imagine that happening everywhere in some form or another … because it is.
Im guessing our annual household income to be about $20,000, after our tax returns and any miscellaneous income I make. Depending on how it is calculated, our family hovers around the top 14%.
5857 people gathered in Khadda market, Karachi at midnight August 14 to create a new world record!
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