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Trickling down wealth in a monthly forum donation… ;)

willingness of idiots to pay large sums of money to endanger their lives

And the lives of their 19 year old child who, according to reports of his aunt's testimony, was terrified about the trip.

if the manner of a billionaires death was reflective of the amount of pain and suffering they and their companies caused to people and the planet gaining their billions, the world would be a much better place.

It's more the shoddy nature of it all and the willingness of idiots to pay large sums of money to endanger their lives.

When you have that much money, you can forgo experts and your opinion actually have ground just because.

For those who are earning under 30k/years, their opinion are worth fuck all next to a billionaires no matters how many decades they have in experiences and knowledge of said subject.

They weren't True Believers.

They dropped 3 nukes on Spain and had to ship many tons of contaminated soil to the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_­Chrome_Dome

Wowsers.

They couldn't find the coordinates for Slough.

Do you spend a lot of time trickling down?

Oh good, billionaires offer his opinion that is not needed.

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And in a strange link to the billionaires, one of the nukes was found by the submersible that then did the first dive to the Titanic, and according to my morning wikipediaing is still going. Clearly when these things are built properly they go on a long time…

So I am crystal clear, you're saying I am removing a lot of nuance from the comparison of traveling to the bottom of the ocean with approaching a homeless person and burning money in front of them?

Or people travelling to see interesting things?

Would anyone notice if a nuke was dropped on Slough?

You can get pants for that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slough_(poem)

http://www-cdr.stanford.edu/intuition/Slough.html

Certainly not the inhabitants (or the non-existent cows).

Haha that's great.

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now,
There isn't grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
Those air -conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,
Tinned minds, tinned breath.

Mess up the mess they call a town-
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half a crown
For twenty years.

And get that man with double chin
Who'll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women's tears:

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.

But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It's not their fault that they are mad,
They've tasted Hell.

It's not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It's not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead

And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars
And daren't look up and see the stars
But belch instead.

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.

Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.

Reminds me of Megadeth - Polaris

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3NMhe6mWO8

Lol’d at the idea of there being nuance in the posts in this thread over the last few days. All a bit ‘ding dong the witch is dead’ for my tastes.

Yep, it's a belter. Apparently Betjamin regretted being so harsh about Slough, but the overarching sentiment is spot on.

Yah, Betjeman and Mustaine have always seemed like kindred spirits to me.

[csb]I was at the gig at Antrim Forum where Mustaine started a sectarian riot that inspired Holy Wars[/csb]

Betjeman would've had deeper regrets if he'd tried to rhyme with Milton Keynes or Welwyn Garden City.

Slough is much improved nowadays and he might be pleasantly surprised by a stroll there.

is that so, stanford.edu?

Whenever John Betjeman is mentioned I get a nostalgic flashback to the late 70's when my dad used to play this recording he had obtained of JB reading 'A Shropshire Lad'.

Of course because it was my dad and I was in my teens along with my younger brother and sister and we were into I dunno Adam and the Ants or some other shit that was popular at the time we ribbed him endlessly about this. But the old 'swimming along, swimming along to Dawley' line has stuck in my brain ever since.

It's Proto rap I suppose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jnT4tOl_qQ

I was listening to Origin Stories about nuclear war / arms race and they mentioned a number of near misses, wiki has a number:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls

This one in particular:

One of several vessels surrounded by American destroyers near Cuba, B-59 dove to avoid detection and was unable to communicate with Moscow for a number of days. USS Beale began dropping practice depth charges to signal B-59 to surface; however the captain of the Soviet submarine and its zampolit took these to be real depth charges.

With low batteries affecting the submarine's life support systems and unable to make contact with Moscow, the commander of B-59 feared that war had already begun and ordered the use of a 10-kiloton nuclear torpedo against the American fleet. The zampolit agreed, but the chief of staff of the flotilla (second in command of the flotilla) Vasily Arkhipov refused permission to launch. He convinced the captain to calm down, surface, and make contact with Moscow for new orders.

i.e. two out of the three people on an isolated sub needed to launch their nukes at America agreed to do so, only one withheld authorisation.

Daniel Ellsburg, who died a week ago, wrote a very scary book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, about the subject.

Slough is much improved nowadays and he might be pleasantly surprised by a stroll there.

I got sent to Slough once when I was an apprentice, the company I was working for took me out to lunch and there were strippers in the pub at lunchtime.