I had two cats from the same litter. The female was superfocused on birds, rarely paid any attention to mice or voles which are pretty abundant here in the countryside. She very rarely managed to catch any birds in the wild, but if one made the mistake of flying into the house, it was game over in seconds. She could jump surprisingly high.
The male on the other hand was only interested in rodents. It was like to him birds didn’t exist. For yeard he kept our house totally free from mice, roaming the yard and doing his thing very effectively. I’d pay good money to have a cat like him again.
I wouldn’t let my cats out in the city, but out here I’ll let them live by their insticts. The nearby highway kills a lot more birds and mammals daily than they ever could.
They very obviously weren’t talking in total across the US. Just their property and their nearby highway. I find what they said to be quite believable even with the total amount of birds cats kill across the US
Anecdotes are not data, however. They might think cars kill more, but data shows that nationwide, the opposite is true by an order of magnitude.
You see birds killed by cars on the road because the dead birds stay where they’re hit. You don’t see the ones killed by cats because cats don’t usually leave them there.
Yes the economy is very solid with roughly 1/4 of the population having a significantly negative net worth, another quarter of the population at roughly 0 net worth, and then something like I dunno 500,000 people having net worths over half a billion.
Very very solid foundations for late stage capitalism to transition into techno-feudalism.
Remember when the average 30ish year old American /owned/ where they lived?
Anyway, lets keep building low income housing… but mostly age restricted only for retiring, sundowning Boomers.
Their children can just die on the streets I guess, who cares!
At least the boomers will have the comfort of dying alone and hated (by their children and caretakers) in old folks homes rife with elderly abuse.
Millenials /might/ be lucky enough to survive the one two combo of climate change and peak oil leading to fertilizer and thus food shortages with an an averaged life expectancy of 65, allowing them to live out their roughly 5 Golden Years approximately a decade after Social Security will have gone bankrupt.
Or, even better, possibly Social Security will just be eliminated even earlier by insane Republicans that are voted in by their loyal followers who apparently dont realize or care that they themselves will die without it!
Is going long on ‘panicked worldwide mass migration’ a valid stock market strategy rofl?
You shouldn’t blame places like Haiti and the South American nations where we toppled entire regimes to keep new markets open for our exploitation class.
Their economies were kneecapped by the global markets, especially us. They literally lack the resources to keep their kids fed because of our influence and interventions aimed to extract wealth for our private ownership class.
The US, on the other hand, chooses not to, which is worthy of infinite scorn and condemnation.
It needs to be destroyed, but they have too much control and successful means of divisive propaganda for it to be destroyed. This isn’t a class war, this is a fully entrenched class occupation, and worse, we were convinced to surrender without a fight as they told us “there is no class war, friends, and to engage in one would be unseemly I do declare.”
I take solace in knowing entropy is absolute, and Rome always falls/collapses under the weight of its own corrupt decadence in the end. The party will stop catastrophically for some descendants of our owner class, though we won’t be there to enjoy it.
There is no saving this system. The last conceivable small hope for that would have been our people soundly rejecting the Reagan revolution, where we were convinced giving the rich sociopaths ALL the money would somehow help everyone else, lol, and where the always on the take conservatives convinced their former opposition party to take the fucking bribe money into today, modern neoliberals.
And to add unnecessary icing to their cake post conquest, Citizens United made political bribery just another perfectly legal tuesday. Let your bribe flag fly!
Yes. While politically genius to basically marry Christian Fundamentalism with the Republican Party, it has more or less resulted in half the population internalizing the logic of ‘Prosperity Gospel’ preachers to such an extent that it is exceedingly rare for any Republicans to ever realize the extent of their political and theological hypocrisy.
Now they are Q Anon, living in, or at the least heavily influenced by absolutely absurd baseless impossible nonsense as the core of their beings.
They are impenetrable to well reasoned arguments, if you can afford the time and effort to make them. Even if you can, it doesnt matter, because theyve already fallen hook line and sinker for some new exquisite and nebulous nonsense story. They are violent and hateful, and also cowardly: Ask anyone what happens after they actually win an argumemt decisively with a Q Tard, or when one of their insane predictions for a certain date doesnt happen.
They either cry like babies, get extremely angry and violent, or tell you that they are not into politics any more… while still listening to the same hateful insane AM talk radio nut cases, or reading the same rags on the internet, /which they are addicted to exactly like a drug addict./
They just lie to your face because that is easier than admitting they are wrong. When some new nonsense narrative is invented by the right wing hate and fear mongerers? They go right back to being interested in politics, seemingly with no memory of how you already showed them that their same sources for this new thing to be angry about are the ones who provably lied, mischaracterized and invented falsehoods whole cloth the last time.
I view such people as little more than zombies whose flesh has not fallen off yet.
Remember Madeline Albright saying in the 90s that starving millions of Iraqi children to death was worth it?
Remember Nixon and Kissinger just laughing amidst racist slurs while discussing the genocide in East Timor?
Obscenely wealthy and/or powerful people are essentially, definitionally, obscenely classist, racist, psycopathic and sociopathic.
Every once in a while, a few finally realize how evil theyve been through their careers full of world altering decisions. McNamara was barely able to admit the entire Gulf of Tonkin incident was nearly totally made up before he died. He was not really able to express human emotions about his invention and then professing of this falsehood to pursue what ultimately was thousands of Americans and millions of South East Asians… dead. With no real strategic advantage gained in the long run.
By the time you get into the actual upper rung of Western Capitalist society, you already know through personal experience that basically all the rhetoric about “any one can succeed if you work hard!” is total bullshit, as they nearly all came from wealthy, priveleged families, with advantaged positions in terms of starting wealth, access to healthcare, access to technology, access to education and more importantly, far, far more opportunities for nepotism.
We have literally known for over a decade, via scientific studies, that the social dynamics of any decently large corporation/empirically/ reward ruthless sociopaths with promotions to higher paying, more powerful positions.
I am not religious, but it truly is the case that the love of money warps people into monsters, capable of gaslighting the world, capable of seemingly inhuman levels of hypocrisy.
Again though, this should not be that surprising. We know the ruling class tend to be psyco and sociopathic, and we know that such people basically do not have morality: it is all a zero sum game of winners and losers to them, and goddamnit, they will be the winners no matter what they have to do, or who they have to hurt.
It gets even worse when you realize that some of the ‘conspiracy theory bullshit’ is actually true.
George Herbert Walker Bush’s father Prescott opened and ran a Bank during the lead up to WW2 which was used to funnel money from many uh fascist/eugenics-curious American Business Tycoons directly into funding the nascent Nazi Party, until it was shut down by the FBI.
I could go on, but you may get the idea: There absolutely /are/ a relatively small number of families that are just outright evil through know history. Of course, it is far more complex than ‘evil secret societies secretly write history’, partially because some of these wealthy and powerful families have blood feuds with other ones, but mostly because Capitalism rewards newcomers that are exceptionally ruthless all the time.
About 25 years ago, I took in a shitty Brazilian-made .380 to be destroyed by local police dept. Filled out the form and answered questions from a young officer who seemed incredulous that I actually wanted a gun destroyed.
After I finished and was escorted out to the reception area, I used the bathroom. When I came out, I heard the officer yell to everyone the back area, “Hey, does anyone want a Taurus .380?”
One thing that would help this whole situation is not living in sprawling suburbs and exurbs that require maintaining so many more miles of pipes per person.
The big thing up their asses will be when the US recovery that aid from them… 🤣🤣 there is nothing free in this world they will have to get on their knees at the end.
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