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Keeping fountain pens in working order makes me realize how much time our ancestors must have spent maintaining their writing instruments. Monks, I believe, used pens made of feathers, reed, or bone. Fountain pens came along in the 1700s. But keeping them in working order still would have been a regular chore.
Eventually just rinsing the fountain pen’s parts aren’t enough to get the ink to flow again. The pen needs to be soaked to get the dried ink out.
The Epstein files
If you try to zoom out and consider the Epstein files from the planetary level, what do you see?
What I see is a global ultra-rich ruling class like nothing the world has ever seen before. The French Revolution was just a tempest in a teapot by comparison — one small country, with power so fragile that they all lost their heads in a few short years.
Oxfam says that the global top 1 percent possess more wealth than 95 percent of the world’s population. How did that happen? And it’s not just money and property that they own — it’s power, and entire governments. It’s probably safe to say that the top 1 percent also own more power than 95 percent of the world’s population.
No doubt they get away with 95 percent of their crimes. They’re used to that. They count on it. The Epstein files are a test of whether they can get away with crimes (and the cover-up of those crimes) that are so abominable that even the deplorables — who normally admire right-wing power — aren’t willing to ignore it.
The other thing is that, for all their money and power, they are pathetic, greasy, ugly little worms who buy young bodies to help enable their denial that they’re old and utterly undesirable, and that, without their money and power, they have less going for them than most of the homeless people living on the streets of San Francisco.
This is the story of our times, and the ball is in our court. How long will 1 percent of the global population be able to treat the rest of us like property? No guillotines would be needed. Just tax them to death.