REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

R.I.P. David Koch, 79.

POSTED BY: JEWELSTAITEFAN
UPDATED: Sunday, September 29, 2019 18:43
SHORT URL:
VIEWED: 2055
PAGE 1 of 1

Friday, August 23, 2019 5:44 PM

JEWELSTAITEFAN


He passed.

He seems to have spurred such lively discussion around these parts, he should be acknowledged.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, August 23, 2019 11:54 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Another easily filled void, just like Epstein was.

He will not be missed.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Saturday, August 24, 2019 2:46 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


I wonder how comforted his money made him feel as his body-systems failed and his consciousness faded?


everyone dies alone

NOTIFY: N   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Saturday, August 24, 2019 7:38 AM

WHOZIT


They always die in 3's, I hope RBG drops next, I want to see Washington burn.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Saturday, August 24, 2019 12:53 PM

JEWELSTAITEFAN


Quote:

Originally posted by 1KIKI:
I wonder how comforted his money made him feel as his body-systems failed and his consciousness faded?


everyone dies alone

Everyone dies alone.

But few will leave a legacy which will live on, leaving his mark on America's future for decades to come, as he was able to do.

He gave away a lot of money, unlike those greedy selfish liberals.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Saturday, August 24, 2019 7:57 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Blood money.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Saturday, August 24, 2019 8:45 PM

AURAPTOR

America loves a winner!


Quote:

Originally posted by 1KIKI:
I wonder how comforted his money made him feel as his body-systems failed and his consciousness faded?


everyone dies alone



And the millions he donated , of his free will, to help others ?

The lack of empathy humans have towards those who not only did them no harm, but helped others...

I don't get it.

NOTIFY: N   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, August 25, 2019 5:44 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


George Soros gives a lot of money away too.

I fail to see how buying a stairway to heaven qualifies making somebody a good person.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, August 25, 2019 7:34 AM

AURAPTOR

America loves a winner!


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
George Soros gives a lot of money away too.

I fail to see how buying a stairway to heaven qualifies making somebody a good person.

Do Right, Be Right. :)



First of all, what anyone does with their money should be their own choice. It's kinda of a freedom thing.

Secondly, what evils did Koch commit that so enrages folks like Bill Maher and the Left ?

- Was it the factories he built which produced pure CO2 and pumped it directly into the atmo ?

- Was it the annual baby seal hunts he'd go on ?

- was it his campaign to rip off mattress tags, despite the threat of penalty of law ?

- illegal gosling juggling events, held in back alleyways and basements out in the country ?

NOTIFY: N   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, August 25, 2019 10:39 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by AURaptor:

First of all, what anyone does with their money should be their own choice. It's kinda of a freedom thing.



I agree.

Quote:

Secondly, what evils did Koch commit that so enrages folks like Bill Maher and the Left ?


Dunno. You couldn't pay me to watch Bill Maher, or whatever shit that Bill Maher and the Left watch.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, August 25, 2019 12:18 PM

CAPTAINCRUNCH

... stay crunchy...


Quote:

Originally posted by AURaptor:
Quote:

Originally posted by 1KIKI:
I wonder how comforted his money made him feel as his body-systems failed and his consciousness faded?


everyone dies alone



And the millions he donated , of his free will, to help others ?

The lack of empathy humans have towards those who not only did them no harm, but helped others...

I don't get it.



Wikipedia says in part:

Koch was a libertarian. He was the 1980 Libertarian candidate for vice president of the United States and helped finance the campaign. He founded Citizens for a Sound Economy. He donated to political advocacy groups and to political campaigns, almost entirely Republican. He moved to the Republican Party in 1984; in 2012 he spent over $100 million to oppose the re-election of President Barack Obama. Through Americans for Prosperity and other dark money vehicles, he was a leading source of funding for climate change denial and attacks on environmental regulation, unions and workers' rights. Greenpeace estimates that the Koch brothers put $127 million into 92 groups involved in preventing action on climate change. His companies are among the biggest polluters in the United States.

As of June 2019, he was ranked as the 11th-richest person in the world, (tied with his brother Charles), with a fortune of $48 billion. Koch contributed to several charities including Lincoln Center, Sloan Kettering, New York-Presbyterian Hospital and the Dinosaur Wing at the American Museum of Natural History. The New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, home of the New York City Ballet, was renamed the David H. Koch Theater in 2008 following a gift of $100 million for the renovation of the theater. Koch was the fourth richest person in the US as of 2012, and the wealthiest resident of New York City as of 2013.


NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, August 25, 2019 1:17 PM

AURAPTOR

America loves a winner!


Dinosaur Wing at the American Museum of Natural History

He's a freakin' Saint, in my book.

NOTIFY: N   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, August 26, 2019 5:22 PM

JEWELSTAITEFAN


Quote:

Originally posted by AURaptor:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
George Soros gives a lot of money away too.

I fail to see how buying a stairway to heaven qualifies making somebody a good person.

Do Right, Be Right. :)



First of all, what anyone does with their money should be their own choice. It's kinda of a freedom thing.

Secondly, what evils did Koch commit that so enrages folks like Bill Maher and the Left ?

- Was it the factories he built which produced pure CO2 and pumped it directly into the atmo ?

- Was it the annual baby seal hunts he'd go on ?

- was it his campaign to rip off mattress tags, despite the threat of penalty of law ?

- illegal gosling juggling events, held in back alleyways and basements out in the country ?

Well, many would consider it evil that he and his brother funded a whole bunch of programming at that Fake News production facility PBS. Although quite vile, I don't consider it evil.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, August 26, 2019 5:25 PM

JEWELSTAITEFAN


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
George Soros gives a lot of money away too.

I fail to see how buying a stairway to heaven qualifies making somebody a good person.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

Has Soros given any actual charity funds? Most of what I've seen of his money distribution is for doing what he tells people to do for the money - which sounds like "work" to many folk.

And no, I don't consider him paying for undesirables to have abortions, or other forms of eugenics or social engineering, to count.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, September 1, 2019 11:11 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK




Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Tuesday, September 24, 2019 10:01 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Ran across this which is truly funny and explains how I feel about "charity" and dead rich people better than I could ever say.

Quote:

The Word “Philanthropist” Is Poisonous

Well hot damn, we’ve lost a Koch brother! Do your happy dance, call out the munchkins and let your voice shake the heavens with a rousing rendition of “Ding-dong the oligarch is dead!”

David Koch, the younger of the two plutocratic faux-libertarian powerhouses who were until today collectively known as the Koch brothers, has died at 79. If you find my celebration of this distasteful, you can kindly kiss my bogan ass. Every time a toxic oligarchic death cultist dies there are always a bunch of people buzzing around social media and the blogosphere admonishing everyone to be respectful and polite because blah blah something about having a family. Such calls for civility toward our rulers are always anti-populist in nature; they stem from a fear of what would happen if the unwashed masses lost their reverence for the ruling class, and I have no respect for them. The less reverence we have for these creeps, the better.

And the narrative managers have of course been shoving us as hard as they can in the opposite direction toward reverence and adulation, with the word “philanthropist” filling out headlines for mass media outlets like Fox News, NBC and CBS. The New York Times published a fawning hagiography with the subheader “A man-about-town philanthropist, he and his brother Charles ran a business colossus while furthering a libertarian agenda that reshaped American politics.”

Now, calling American Enterprise Institute council member and virulent Mitt Romney stan David Koch a “libertarian” is ridiculous; he was as much a libertarian as Hillary Clinton is a socialist. The Kochs have always paid lip service to shrinking government, but all they’ve ever pushed for with their actions is the shrinking of the aspects of government which inconvenience the oligarchs: taxes and regulations. They’ve left the mechanisms of bloodthirsty imperialism, Orwellian surveillance and oppressive neoliberalism almost entirely unchallenged; they’re neoliberal centrists wrapped in a fake libertarian bow. But far more offensive to common sense and human dignity is labeling him a “philanthropist”.

Calling David Koch a philanthropist is like calling Hannibal Lecter a chef. https://t.co/TvjRUrJouL

— Adam Best (@adamcbest) August 23, 2019

If I could strike one word from the English language, “philanthropist” would be it. That word’s sole meaning these days is a label that gets attached to parasitic plutocrats who donate a very small percentage of their wealth to tax-exempt charities so that people won’t notice they’re living in a plutocracy and roll out the guillotines.

Any adept socializer knows that it doesn’t take much to get on someone’s good side; a little well-placed flattery at a party one night and you’ve earned a defender and supporter for life. In the same way, a casual look through campaign donations from the plutocratic class on Open Secrets will show you that it doesn’t take much to get a politician on the side of your interests; a few thousands dollars here, a few thousand there, and you’ve bought yourself a congressman. People respond to positive reinforcement, and it takes very little to elicit this response. Plutocratic charity donations follow the same principle; a billionaire who sprinkles a tiny percentage of his income around a few of his favorite causes will earn the title of “philanthropist” for life.

And when I say tiny, I mean tiny. Study after study has found that the wealthy give less to charity than those who make orders of magnitude less money than they do, which should surprise no one since study after study has also found that wealth kills empathy and makes people more sociopathic. Yet you’ll never see any member of the middle or lower class eulogized as a philanthropist, even if they give a much larger percentage of their income to charity than David Koch did.

Even when they do give money to charity, the wealthy need to have those donations solicited in the most egoically appealing way possible before they’ll deign to consider them. In an interview with Creative Mornings, author Anand Giridharadas described what he learned from disgraced philanthropy fundraiser Emmett Carson about how much bowing and scraping and conceptual re-framing that people have to do in order to convince a billionaire to part with a few coins:

“[Carson] said ‘Look, I worked in social justice my whole life, I used that term my whole career.’ Then he gets this job in silicon valley. He becomes Mark Zuckerberg’s adviser, and others in that world. And he said to me ‘It was made very clear to me very quickly [that] you don’t say this word ‘social justice’ around here.’ And I said ‘Why?’ and he said ‘Well, I think [for] people out here it sounds to them like you’re taking from them.’ You know, which… is actually correct!



“And what I learned from Emmett was something very important which is rich and powerful people in our time really do want to help but they have certain requirements for how they want to feel in their helping. They want to feel consulted, which they feel when they do things philanthropically and they don’t feel when government just takes their money and makes a collective decision about what to do. So, they like charter schools, they don’t like equally and adequately funded public schools. They like to feel useful and not blamed. Right? So they don’t like the Bernie Sanders kind of rhetoric around how Facebook’s a monopoly or around Amazon’s doing like… they don’t like that, doesn’t make them feel good. But they’re willing to help if you say ‘Wow, I mean, you built Facebook, that’s so amazing that you created a way for people to waste all this time, and maybe, maybe given that expertise you can help the kids in Newark have a better education?’ They love that. They love that feeling of like, ‘You’re useful. You’re not the problem.’



“And what Emmett understood because he’s not a writer who can just say stuff, he’s a guy who had to figure out how to speak to them, to get them to give money away and help, is like, you have to shift the language. But shifting the language is not just shifting the language. It’s shifting the whole thing. It’s shifting the politics of it because you basically have to solve problems in ways that make them perpetrator free.”

“There is a clear understanding that.. a little bit of giving may just be as a smokescreen for a kind of pillaging of the economy,” Giridharadas said elsewhere in the interview, describing the cynical use of charity by Goldman Sachs. There are some great articles by dissident media publications out today about the kind of pillaging David Koch was involved in, including this one by Jacobin titled “For Humanity, David Koch Died Decades Too Late”, and this one by Rolling Stone titled “David Koch Built a Toxic Empire — with Human Consequences”.

We’ve seen the way the “philanthropist” title is abused highlighted elsewhere in recent days with the attention swirling around the strange case of Jeffrey Epstein. In an excellent new interview with Consortium News, journalist Whitney Webb explains the ways the Epstein case ties into all the most fundamental pillars which uphold existing power structures today, including plutocracy, intelligence agencies, organized crime and pedophilia rings. Webb mentions in the interview that when Bill Clinton was first asked about his relationship with Epstein he responded by babbling about philanthropy.

“Jeffrey is both a highly successful financier and a committed philanthropist with a keen sense of global markets and an in-depth knowledge of twenty-first-century science,” Clinton told New York Magazine in 2002. His sentiments are echoed in contemporary establishment narrative management publications, like this adoring 2003 puff piece by The Harvard Crimson which sees Epstein labeled “one of the most pleasant philanthropists” after a donation to Harvard University.

Ultimately “philanthropy” is just yet another narrative control device used by and for the powerful to maintain the status quo upon which oligarchs like David Koch built their empires. If he were Russian he would not be eulogized today by the western mass media as a “philanthropist”, he would be called exactly what he is: an oligarch. An oligarch who has helped create the climate denialism in America which now sees climate contrarians receiving 49 percent more mass media coverage than climate scientists, one who backed Iraq-raping think tanks, one who helped kill unions and guzzled corporate welfare while pretending to oppose it.

Remember him as such. It’s the most charitable and philanthropic thing you can do today.



*****

On a related note, Tom Luongo (who I listen to rather regularly) has a meme that he brings up every time John McCain comes into the conversation:

A moment of silence for John McCain's tumor; it gave its life for America.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

You idiots have been oppressing the entire sexual spectrum as long as you have existed. I can't wait for the day your kind is dead - WISHIMAY

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Saturday, September 28, 2019 4:52 PM

JEWELSTAITEFAN


I consider Koch and McCain to be opposing forces.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, September 29, 2019 4:47 PM

JEWELSTAITEFAN


Quote:

Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
George Soros gives a lot of money away too.

I fail to see how buying a stairway to heaven qualifies making somebody a good person.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

Has Soros given any actual charity funds? Most of what I've seen of his money distribution is for doing what he tells people to do for the money - which sounds like "work" to many folk.

And no, I don't consider him paying for undesirables to have abortions, or other forms of eugenics or social engineering, to count.

???

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, September 29, 2019 6:43 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Quote:

Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
George Soros gives a lot of money away too.

I fail to see how buying a stairway to heaven qualifies making somebody a good person.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

Has Soros given any actual charity funds? Most of what I've seen of his money distribution is for doing what he tells people to do for the money - which sounds like "work" to many folk.

And no, I don't consider him paying for undesirables to have abortions, or other forms of eugenics or social engineering, to count.

???




Don't try to put the onus on me to defend POS Soros. I won't do it.

You're the one who has to defend POS Koch, and convince me why giving a bunch of money away when he had more money than god should actually mean anything to me.

Biden pulled the US printing press out of his asshole and gave a billion dollars away to the Ukraine. Does that make him a swell guy as well?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

YOUR OPTIONS

NEW POSTS TODAY

USERPOST DATE

OTHER TOPICS

DISCUSSIONS
Elections; 2024
Thu, March 28, 2024 09:39 - 2070 posts
Salon: NBC's Ronna blunder: A failed attempt to appeal to MAGA voters — except they hate her too
Thu, March 28, 2024 07:04 - 1 posts
Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
Thu, March 28, 2024 05:27 - 6154 posts
In the garden, and RAIN!!! (2)
Thu, March 28, 2024 02:07 - 3408 posts
Russian losses in Ukraine
Wed, March 27, 2024 23:21 - 987 posts
human actions, global climate change, global human solutions
Wed, March 27, 2024 15:03 - 824 posts
NBC News: Behind the scenes, Biden has grown angry and anxious about re-election effort
Wed, March 27, 2024 14:58 - 2 posts
BUILD BACK BETTER!
Wed, March 27, 2024 14:45 - 5 posts
RFK Jr. Destroys His Candidacy With VP Pick?
Wed, March 27, 2024 11:59 - 16 posts
Russia says 60 dead, 145 injured in concert hall raid; Islamic State group claims responsibility
Wed, March 27, 2024 10:57 - 49 posts
Ha. Haha! HAHA! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAAHAHA!!!!!!
Tue, March 26, 2024 21:26 - 1 posts
You can't take the sky from me, a tribute to Firefly
Tue, March 26, 2024 16:26 - 293 posts

FFF.NET SOCIAL