What happened, however, was that huge numbers of people sought power as the only transcendent good; and given the normal distribution of most human qualities such as talent, it was inevitable that most people who sought (and achieved) power were mediocrities.

The Flowering of Mediocrity

Theodore Dalrymple

When someone is said to be lacking in ambition, it is usually meant as a criticism, as if people had a transcendent moral duty to be ambitious. How else but by ambition will mankind advance?

I grant that ambition is sometimes, or often, necessary, but it is a virtue, like bravery, that is not self-standing. To be brave in a bad cause is worse than to be cowardly in the same cause. And it hardly takes much historical knowledge to realize that ambition can be the closest ally of monstrous evil.

If everyone were ambitious, what a terrible world it would be! The constitution of human society requires people of very different qualities, the unambitious as much as the ambitious. In some respects, the unambitious, those who are not driven to achieve anything, are fortunate: They are not tortured by the idea that they must improve on what they have already done, that they must forever go onwards and upwards. They can be content with their lot in a way that the ambitious never can be.

Of course, such contentment has not had good press; but that is because writing is always done by the ambitious, as history is usually written by the victors. The dilemma is posed in the following fashion: Is it better to be a discontented man or a contented pig? The “correct” answer is contained in the way the question is phrased; for who would say it is better to be a pig than a man? (I leave aside the question of the pig’s actual level of intelligence and self-consciousness.)

The ambitious tend to regard the unambitious as wallowing in the swill and mud of ordinary existence. They have the contempt for the unambitious that the intellectual often has for those who’ve never read a book. No doubt this picture is sometimes true: One meets people whose steel-plated complacency repels. But this complacency is far from confined to the unambitious; it is found among the ambitious who have succeeded triumphantly without any particular talent. It is often written on their faces, as unmistakably as hardship is written on other faces.

My thoughts turned to the question of ambition when I considered our gardener in France, who comes twice a week. He is a man in his 50s who has always lived alone and who refuses all payment more than 50 percent higher than the minimum wage, though we would be prepared to pay him more.

To see him work is a rare pleasure. He obviously loves what he does. He works fast, efficiently, and with an aesthetic sense. You soon realize that supervision of his work would be an impertinence. Seeing him from the corner of your eye, however, you see that he never lets up. If he says he has worked three hours, he has worked three hours, with no time off for mooning or coffee breaks.

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Be seeing you

Babylon Bee

U.S. — According to sources, a plane carrying emergency supplies and $10 Billion in disaster relief flew over the Hawaiian island of Maui on its way to Ukraine.

Island residents were at first delighted to see the disaster relief plane on the horizon until they saw it adjust its course to avoid the heavy smoke. “Where are you going?! Help us!” said a mother of four who had become homeless overnight when the fires took her home.

Upon seeing the chaos below, the aircraft’s pilot reportedly muttered to himself. “Hmm, I wonder why we aren’t going there. Oh well! Ukraine, here we come!”

The crew aboard the disaster relief plane reportedly took exciting photos of the Hawaiian destruction that they agree will make for a great addition to their disaster scrapbook.

At publishing time, the pilot had been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for expertly navigating the plane around the pillar of smoke that rose up from the smoldering ruins of Maui like a furnace, saving the aircraft from being covered in soot.

Bee seeing you

Indonesia needs billions of U.S. dollars in investment to shift away from coal the country doesn’t have. The wealthy international partners in the JETP have pledged half of the $20 billion investment while the other half is expected to come from large banks under the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero.

These countries sign on to keep the other sweetheart deals coming. They have no intention of spending their own money for climate change. With a little pleading they know the New Green Deal AOCs will eventually pay up, or rather YOU will pay up.

https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/indonesia-delays-20-billion-climate-plan

by Tyler Durden

Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,

Due to disagreements over policy, the cost of funding, and legal hurdles, Indonesia, the largest economy in Southeast Asia, is delaying the start of a $20 billion climate investment plan as part of a deal signed with the United States and other wealthy nations last year.

The investment plan, in its draft, is not expected to be launched until later this year, because it would need unspecified “additional data” to be included, Indonesia said on Wednesday, as carried by Bloomberg.   

At the end of last year, Indonesia, the world’s top coal exporter and heavily reliant on coal for power generation, signed an agreement to launch a Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) co-led by the U.S. and Japan and including Canada, Denmark, the European Union, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, and the United Kingdom.

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Be seeing you

I know what you’re thinking, $51 million to Maui, $13 Billion more for Ukraine, seems a wee bit unbalanced. But you’re thinking about it all wrong.

And if a few thousand Americans have to be charred, again, for the next transition to the new and improved world the social engineers working for the Internation financial cabal controlling everything desire for themselves, they won’t even think twice about it, again.

https://thegoodcitizen.live/p/burning-the-last-man

Good Citizen

Joe Biden doesn’t care about Hawaii. Why should he? A man who doesn’t know what day it is can hardly be bothered to wipe the drool off his chin from the blue polyester beach chairs of Delaware’s most exquisite resorts. He need not concern himself with a thousand charred Americans.

It’s not historically unusual for Presidents to shrug about a thousand charred Americans. Democrat socialist hero FDR didn’t care about a thousand sailors charred in nearby Pearl Harbor. He actually spent nine months doing everything possible to help get them charred. “The war begins tomorrow, gentlemen.”

• 6 Dec. – the war cabinet: FDR, top advisor Hopkins, Stimson, Marshall, Secretary of the Navy Knox, with aides John McCrea and Frank Beatty “deliberately sat through the night of 6 December 1941 waiting for the Japs to strike.” (Infamy ch 16 sec 2)

President Richard Cheney didn’t care about a few thousand charred Americans on September 10, 2001. There was a $2 Trillion DoD pilfering to hide and a prewritten Patriot Act that needed passing. “Are our Saudi friends in position? Good, place the thermite charges, gentlemen.”

Papa Dementia’s handlers don’t care about Hawaii or a thousand charred Americans. Why should they? The people of Hawaii will vote Democrat, consistently, forever, no matter what happens to them. They aren’t losing any votes over some silly infernos. Even the charred Americans will have no trouble voting in 2024, for whichever puppet is put forth with (D) beside its name.

Ring doorbell video footage could emerge of Oprah, Hillary, Hunter, Schumer, and Pelosi, hiking around Lahaina with that wet poodle Wasserman-Schultz following on a leash pouring gallons of petrol and tossing Molotov Cocktails and Hawaiins will still vote for the party on board with the WEF-UN global domestic terror agenda.

You will acknowledge the climate agenda for our great resent or we have ways of making you burn.

I know what some of you are thinking. All this caustic and callous language in the aftermath of a horrific tragedy is in bad taste and should warrant an apology, sincere or performative, or a coupon for half-off good citizen salt.

Not today, kids.

Don’t shoot the messenger. You knew what you were signing up for here.

Yes, people are dead, but I didn’t light them on fire. I didn’t send them fleeing into the ocean off Maui. Or into the seas off Rhodes, Corfu, Sicily, all fires started by record high temperatures from climate change men with matches and lighters.

But lo and behold what just came off the X wires! What if I’m wrong?

Hiding in plain sight: they can’t help making confessions.

See, they do care! They really do care! And as an act of caring so so much, they’ve offered victims of the Maui infernos $700.

I know what you’re thinking, $51 million to Maui, $13 Billion more for Ukraine, seems a wee bit unbalanced. But you’re thinking about it all wrong.

Because when you do think about it, $700 could rent each household a cadaver dog for a day to help locate the bone fragments of loved ones.

Not the Bee headline: FEMA rents cadaver dogs to families of missing Maui victims. $51 Million for victim families sent from Treasury Account FEMA 001 to Treasury Account FEMA 002.

If the people of Maui want more federal assistance, these days there are really only three ways to go about succeeding and it’s not that difficult:

1. Start a Go-Fund-Me for Hunter’s offshore shell companies with a designation for 10% for the “big guy”
2. Declare war on Russia
3. Become a Purple state

Option three will require the importation of rational-thinking humans, by the millions and there’s no time for that.

Option two is dangerous and could see Hawaii wiped off the map.

Option one seems the quicker and less painful way to go.

What did Hawaiians really lose after all, other than their loved ones?

All that beautiful beachfront property was such a waste in the hands of locals.

What were they doing with it that was so special?

Exhibiting their pride in culture, heritage, and historical traditions and joyously sharing it with the world while providing small businesses the opportunity to flourish off tourism creating thousands of jobs?

Pffff. What good does that do for ze forse industreeeel revolushun?

How does that help Blackrock or Vanguard?

Build Back Better can’t happen without a lot of wholesome destruction and devastation.

Times a’ wastin’ people. The earth is dying. We need those 15-minute smart cities up and running pronto!

But not on the third most expensive beachfront property in the world after Monaco and Malibu.

Lahaina will have to be built back better somewhere else, maybe moved south and inland, away from the marmalade sands and blue waters perfect for the big-shot developers that fill DNC coffers. They have to get something for their “donations” after all.

The sooner any valuable American property turns to ash and dust the sooner insurance companies can rip off property owners, and benevolent Billionaires like Oprah and Data Zuckerberg can swoop in and add to their thousand-acre portfolios of ancient sacred Hawaiian lands.

Paradise is no place for the feudal classes anyway. They don’t know how to enjoy it like the Oligarch class does.

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