Truths and inspirations for 13 February 2024

If something's hard to read, click to enlarge.

(For the link round-up, click here.)

People choose freedom and democracy over tyranny and oligarchy.  Economic systems have very little to do with it.

It's not a safe space for those who want to limit access to ideas.  It's a safe space from them.

Yeah, he did say that.

I checked the "child marriage" thing and it's basically true.

The world before modern vaccines.

Remember, though, that all of this combined was a mere pinprick compared to the ghastly atrocities the Japanese had been inflicting on the people of occupied China for years.  Ending the war this way was for the best.  If the war had lasted even one week longer, how many additional innocent Chinese, Koreans, and others would the Japanese have murdered in that week?  Their lives mattered too.

In the fifties and sixties the US economy was truly the envy of the world.  One worker without a college degree could buy a house and support a wife and three or four children on a single income.  Decades of deep tax cuts for the rich have created a useless parasitic oligarchy wallowing in obscene wealth beyond the wildest dreams of the kings and plutocrats of centuries past, while half our people scrabble for bare survival even with a forty-hour-a-week job.

Of course most Iranians, Lebanese, Turks, Israelis, and Syrians are white, but I assume that what they mean by "white" at the bottom is white people with no recent immigrant ancestors.

Nazis then, Nazis now -- same stinking shit in human form.

Contrary to popular belief, the Thirteenth Amendment did not abolish slavery.  Its text reads "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States....."  The modern Constitution still allows literal enslavement of convicted criminals.