The Wall Street Journal resembles one of those Greek mythical creatures, half human and half beast - such as the centaur, half man, half horse, or the siren, half woman half fish, or the chimaera, half lion half dragon. The body of reporters are extremely professional and objective. But the editorial staff… well, you might as well watch Sky News, though not as bad as Fox in the US.
So, when the editors decided to publish this article, you had to reach for a large spoonful of salt - certainly not the Latin tourniquet “cum grano salis” (with a…grain…of salt, too little).
The article starts with the premise I put to you the other day: an annual income of 100k is the same as, say, 5 million dollars. That means that most pensioners are possibly multimillionaires in a regime of negative interest rates.
Alarmingly, that is precisely what the turkeys who wrote this actually believe! So, be watching the sky nighttime for a sighting of UFOs! These pathetic nincompoops forget is… that it takes 50 years on 20 ks to reach one million, and the same time on 100ks to reach 5 million. Yes, the income is the same. But you don’t have to work when you’re sitting on assets… and you can draw down your capital for extra income… not counting the possibility of capital gains… and so on. Well, seeing is believing, so here is the guilty article:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-distorted-view-of-wealth-inequality-working-paper-social-security-pensions-11627679769?mod=hp_opin_pos_2
Speaking of mythical figures, I suppose the ancient Greeks used partly to remind themselves that humans are, after all, animals (Aristotle called us “zoa political”, political animals) - and for that reason they should not be “domesticated” or tethered to a confined space. Freedom is also free-dom to move, to roam, to explore. But if you count the number of shows offered on Netflix, then you would have to believe the Monty Python fable that “in the past we worked 25 hours a day… Trouble is, you tell your children, and they don’t believe you!”
So, I don’t believe there is enough time in the day to justify a subscription to Netflix - no one could watch all the shows on offer before running out of lifetime! But Big Tech is trying to achieve what the makers of the film “The Matrix” fantasised: a society in which human life has been reduced to a screen!
Here is part of the evidence:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/31/opinion/smartphone-iphone-social-media-isolation.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
That should be “zoa politika”… autocorrect doesn’t read Ancient Greek…
…and Maureen Dowd at the NYT didn’t study Latin:
“The story is chilling because it shows that Trump was not merely thrashing about on his throne. His plan to reverse the election was more orchestrated and sinister than we knew.
Could he actually have used the government to overthrow the government and become dictator perpetuo?”
That should be “dictator perpetuus”, perpetual dictator - dowdy Maureen used the ablative instead of the nominative case for the adjective… No harm done: Latin is a lingua morta… haha…
Finally, the lucky country has met… the luck of the Irish. It is widely known that “you have to put the Irish on the street …. to get them in the streets”! In other words, you have to make them homeless poor before they barricade the streets in revolt! But this is what is happening as we write, the world over - especially in the lucky country. There is enough outrage here to gobble up the earth… but I am told that Aussies are glued to their screens watching the deserted Tokyo Olympics… Go figure!
https://www.theage.com.au/national/through-the-roof-home-prices-nothing-short-of-a-crisis-20210801-p58erx.html
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