One of the funniest failures of US school system is the fact they are legally obligated to teach us all the states but they never actually show how big Alaska is like I have actually had teachers tell me that Texas is the biggest state. We have all just convinced ourselves that Alaska is that small shrunken down thing on most US maps and the people that know it’s the largest state can almost never accurately describe how large it is.
For context here is a picture
what
It has a national park that’s bigger than maine. Or Switzerland. A park.
I lived in Alaska for two years and I will never get over the sheer overwhelming bigness of it.
Nights where the sky is clear you can see clusters of stars or the Northern Lights dancing. When the lights are rippling especially strong and fast you can hear a static crackle in the air. When the moon is out after it’s snowed, you don’t need flashlights to see. Everything glows and glimmers like polished quartz.
But when the sky is clouded over so you can’t see the stars, you can kind of almost sense the mountains towering over you and helping to block out the light, these giant monoliths acting like this void darker than your soul. I’ve never experience night like Alaska night.
Everything is big, the mountains, the sky, the valleys.
“Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.”
— William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure (via philosophybits)
so what you’re telling me is they are going to artificially deflate the numbers by stopping testing so that in another month or so they can tell us all that we’re on the “downside of the slope” and send us all back to work so all of us can die? is that the plan?
This is capitalism’s vast irrationality and inhumanity in action. Markets and The Economy™ matter more to capitalism than the concrete distribution of resources according to tangible human need.
Resources exist in abundance – give them to people. Housing sits empty – give it to people. The rules of the feast table should apply to our economic system – no one gets seconds until everyone has gotten a plate.
We stand at a crossroads in these chaotic times: socialism or barbarism! The ruling class repeatedly chooses the latter. We need to organize and choose the former!
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
People have been reblogging this with some points that seem fair to call attention to – milk expires quickly, farmers are locked into a situation where they have to throw stuff out, etc. But the larger point we were trying to illustrate in the original post was that this system compels people to do irrational things in the name of market laws. We have a surplus of goods around us and yet we arbitrarily build up social constructs (property laws and exchangability) to prevent people from comfortably living off of these goods. Goods are produced and given away only if profit can be extracted from the process. These aren’t immutable laws of nature, though, and most of human history hasn’t operated this way. Not to suggest that things were just peachy keen in slave empires or feudalism – class stratification in general is a big part of this, not just the particular market laws of capitalism. But it’s still important to realize that these irrational all-pervasive market forces are a comparatively recent invention and that these historical moments of crisis demonstrate how truly anti-human production-for-profit and class inequality truly are. We believe that the economy should be more broadly democratized and managed on a for-need/for-use basis by the people actually impacted by the outcomes; that would entail workplace/community democracy, as well as a new emphasis on direct distribution of goods (rather than having those goods wait around to be bought).
Goods sit unused – give them to people. Make sure everyone has the means to live a comfortable life. These seemingly obvious goals are perpetually blocked by billionaires and profit-sharks, who’d rather see people sleeping on the streets in the middle of a pandemic than have their bottom lines suffer any hit. Things are fundamentally top-down; we believe it is a reasonable proposal to start moving things into a bottom-up direction. That requires choosing socialism at this crossroads of human history.
Another reminder: capitalism artificially imposes scarcity.
people who praise ‘capitalism’ always list the positive qualities of the free market, which has limited relation to capitalism
this is the exact opposite of the free market, this is capitalism, where people with money bind and gag the normal sane mechanisms of the economy, politics, and basic human behavior to force things to go their way instead of, for example, following the law of supply and demand which says if supply stays the same but demand goes down then the PRICE GOES DOWN to encourage people to buy. but that makes the capitalists let out a pterodactyl scream as they cant fathom a year without an increase in profits no matter how insane that concept is from every angle which is why they cant process that people who arent paid and have been squeezed by increasing rent cant also afford diamonds golf and applebees while steadfastly refusing to change any of those industries or the price of rent, refusing to even consider creating cheaper housing thats desperately -in demand- and would rather build expensive housing that sits empty, baffled nobody can afford it
What made me just outright giggle at the absurdity of it all is reading about these bunkers in particular: https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-of-survival-condo-project-luxury-doomsday-shelter-2017-4 and seeing that their plan to keep the Unwashed Masses from intruding on them during the apocalypse is armed guards up on the ground patrolling the perimeter, which just illustrates the mindset of these people, they think they can buy anything, including the idea that people will voluntarily stick around and defend them once society collapses.
Okay
I went to that link and looked at the pictures and like….they don’t post the location of that bunker but.
I think I know where it is.
I’ve been north of Witchita Kansas, which is where they say it is, and I Recognize That Landscape, y’all.
Also, the Mr. Is a professional welder.
So like. Uh. Well.
Sure would be terrible if someone saw this and felt motivated to break a law or two
So um the article deadass says it was an old missile silo and like there were nike missile bases all over… I looked up the Wikipedia article for the bases in the us and scrolled to Kansas to find this map which confirms it’s base SC-50-C. 
