Appearances Can Be Deceiving
See the sedate, mild-mannered looking guy to the right? He looks like a banker, maybe, or an accountant; maybe a shopkeeper.
Who he was, was something very different. This 1915 photo depicts Walter Dalrymple Maitland Bell, a Scottish adventurer, big game hunter, prospector, fighter pilot, competition sailor and one of history’s premiere badasses, and the first in a series of Profiles in Toxic Masculinity.
I use this term ironically, of course. All the subjects to be portrayed in this series are products of their time and should be judged accordingly. In today’s world, though, there is a distinct tendency to downplay the value of general ballsiness, and I intend to choose the subjects of this series by one standard:
They must have had grit. True grit.
Bell had that and more.
His Maculate Origin
Born in 1880 to a wealthy family of mixed Scots and Manx descent, Bell lost both parents before his tenth birthday. His older brothers attempted to raise the fractious youth but, after the young Bell was ejected from several schools, he decided that a posh life on a luxurious Scottish estate wasn’t for him and ran away to sea.
At thirteen years of age.
In 1896, having evidently found life at sea tedious, the young Bell turned up in Uganda, where a railroad building crew was being pestered by lions, who liked to snack on their workers. The railroad wanted someone to help with the lion problem; the sixteen-year-old Bell had a single-shot .303 rifle, and so said to the railroad “hold my beer” and proceeded to slaughter the man-eaters.
Remember marveling at the fortitude of the two guys depicted in the 1996 film The Ghost and The Darkness? Bell did the same thing. Only instead of two lions, he killed a mess of them. Alone. With a single-shot rifle. In a caliber normally considered good for deer. At age sixteen.
Eventually the task of hunting down slavering 500-pound apex predators with a taste for human flesh got too boring for the young Bell, so he determined to go halfway around the planet to join the gold seekers in the Yukon Gold Rush. But it turns out that gold-seeking was about the only thing that the young Bell couldn’t get the hang of, so after enlisting a partner to equip him he went back to what he did best: Killing things, in this case spending the winter of 1897-98 shooting deer and moose to keep the denizens of Dawson City eating. For that purpose, he had obtained a .35 caliber Farquharson single-shot rifle, but when spring came his partner absconded with the cash from the winter’s hunting, leaving Bell with nothing but the rifle and the clothes he stood in. A letter to his family seeking funds to return to Africa yielded nothing.
The now nineteen-year-old W.D.M. Bell wasn’t about to let the mere condition of poverty keep him from going where he wanted to be, namely, halfway around the planet (again) to Africa. So, he did what any young man of gumption would do under the circumstances: Joined the Canadian Mounted Rifles. At this time the British Empire was pulling in men from all over to fight a bunch of pesky Afrikaans guerillas in the Second Boer War, so much to his satisfaction, Bell soon found himself on a ship back to Africa.
In South Africa Bell discovered his was just as good at shooting Boers as he had been at shooting lions, at least until he had a horse shot out from under him and was taken prisoner. Being a prisoner of the Boers evidently bored him as much as hunting down man-eating lions by himself, so he escaped, made his way back to the British lines and served the rest of the conflict as a scout.
But it was after the Boer war that Bell embarked on the career that would make him famous.
His Adventurous Career
The Boer War ended in 1902. W.D.M. Bell found himself unemployed, but he had a rifle, he had his wits, he had his enormous pair of solid brass balls; so, he did what any enterprising young man of 22 would do and became a professional ivory hunter.
Remember what I said about judging people by the standards of their time? As a young tad, reading the works of such lights as Ruark, Hemingway and Capstick, I often thought of one day hunting elephants. Nowadays, knowing what I do of the intelligence, social structure and empathy of pachyderms, I don’t think I could bring myself to shoot one. And there can be no doubt that the ivory trade did great damage to the elephant herds of Africa in the early 20th century.
In 1902, though, the ivory trade was in full sway. The enormity of the Dark Continent made the supply seem inexhaustible. Bell waded into the business and, as was usual for him, eschewed the popular wisdom and did things his own damn way. His favorite elephant rifle wasn’t a big-bore double as was popular at the time, but rather a 98 Mauser chambered in the .275 Rigby – better known as the 7x57mm Mauser. He also used a single-shot .303 British rifle and a Westley-Richards bolt gun chambered in the .318 Westley-Richards.
Using such light rifles on elephant presented a considerable challenge, but Bell was up to the task, experimenting with various angles and examining the skulls of slain beasts until he perfected the “Bell Shot,” a difficult shot angling from the beast’s rear, putting the small-bore full-patch slug through the neck muscle into the brain. He was an expert with his chosen rifles, having once been observed shooting fish jumping from a lake as well as shooting birds on the wing.
In his career Bell killed over a thousand elephants, all bulls but 28. He once estimated that he walked over seventy miles for each bull killed, which makes an impressive total and no doubt used up a lot of good shoe leather. In the course of his travels he also killed over 800 Cape buffalo and countless smaller game for camp meat and hides.
It was during this time that he hunted in the lawless wilderness in northern Uganda that was known as the Karamojo; he was thereafter known as “Karamojo” Bell, a name that would accompany him into the broader fame that awaited.
Karamojo Bell hunted from 1902 until 1915. If that date rings a bell, that’s because there was an event going on in Europe at the time, one big enough to draw W.D.M. Bell away from hunting all over Africa; that event was, of course, the Great War.
His One-Man War
In 1915 Bell laid aside his elephant hunting rifles and headed for England, where he talked his way into pilot training. Given that this was a time when aircraft were made of wood and canvas and had engines only slightly more reliable than the parking brake on a rowboat, that took guts, but I think we’ve already established that Bell had a surfeit of those.
His first wartime posting was back in Africa, where he served as a reconnaissance pilot in Tanganyika, spying on German East African troops from above and sometimes leaving his observer behind so he could take potshots at German aircraft from his unarmed recon plane with a hunting rifle. But as the war in Europe heated up, he was assigned first to Greece then to France, where he shot down several German aircraft – and, by mistake, one French one.
By war’s end, Bell had five Mentions in Dispatches, but had fallen ill for the first time – what lions, elephants and German pilots failed to do, a case of “nervous asthma” did. The illness succeeded in taking Bell out of action for a brief time, allowing him enough time at home to marry one Kate Soares, the daughter and sole heir of Sir Ernest Soares.
His Golden Years
After the war, Bell went back to Africa only briefly; just long enough to knock out a 3000-mile canoe trip through the Gold Coast and Liberia. He then retired to Corriemoillie, his 1,000-acre highland estate at Garve in Ross-shire, Scotland. But retirement say heavily on Karamojo, so he and Lady Kate decided to become competitive racing sailors, commissioning the steel hulled racing yacht Trenchmere and competing in cross-Atlantic races until the outbreak of the Second World War put an end to the fun.
During his life he managed, somehow, to write three books on his adventures; The Wanderings of an Elephant Hunter (1923), Karamojo Safari (1949), and Bell of Africa (1960). All are, of course, highly recommended reading.
Walter Dalrymple Maitland Bell suffered a heart attack in 1947 which confined him to his Scottish estate. He passed away in 1954, full of years and tales of adventure. A sailor, hunter, soldier, fighter pilot and general badass, Bell was of a type not often seen today; his good friend, the American Colonel Townsend Whelen, may well have been speaking of Karamojo Bell when he said “Unless a man has considerable skill with and reliance in his weapon, he will not remain cool in the presence of dangerous game close by.”
Karamojo Bell had that and then some.
Comments
165 responses to “Profiles in Toxic Masculinity I: W.D.M. “Karamojo” Bell”
Great read – much appreciated!
Great read Animal, reminds me of Churchill, a badass as well
Excellent. If the rest are even half this good, I’m looking forward to them. I’d never heard of Bell before, but I have a new hero and will be checking out his books.
Fantastic. What an amazing guy.
Looking forward to the rest of the series. Thanks, Animal.
Stop right the hell there.
No kidding. I’m pretty sure I could eke out some degree of satisfaction there.
I rooted for the elephants.
As would I. But we are creatures of our time, just as Bell was a creature of his.
Roy Chapman Andrews next?
(pride of Beloit)
Oh, he’s on the list.
Roald Amundsen make your list?
He certainly ought to.
Any MoH awardees? Reading war citations tears me up. (and I’ve been doing a lot of it for work the last few months).
Great job Animal! So interesting!
Footnote #1: I got to see the actual lion skull that inspired The Ghost and the Darkness. I had a friend that worked at the Field Museum in Chicago, and I got a behind the scenes tour. It was just a skull at the time, but now they have the whole lion preserved and on exhibit.
Footnote #2: This is going to be a great series, and I hope my favorite Victorian explorer Percy Fawcett makes an appearance.
Great read, Animal! Thank you.
I recommend Joe Foss for a future entry. MoH from WW2 and commissioner of the American Football League.
I second that thought.
Kind of reminds me of Badass of the week without the profanity. Good write up. I’m looking for some good biographies but hard to find someone that’s accomplished but not well know. I’ll have to check out one of his books.
I was wondering what was missing.
Bad ass.
Great article!
apparently Whelen didn’t develop the .35 Whelen. it was Howe of Griffin & Howe who asked Whelen if he could use his name on it.
great write-up, Animal.
We need someone to write about guys like Wilt Chamberlain and Don Juan and their bag count.. Pie, get on it!
He once estimated that he walked over seventy miles for each bull killed, which makes an impressive total and no doubt used up a lot of good shoe leather.
It doesn’t count if he wasn’t wearing his Fitbit.
For a total of 68,000 miles. Was he accompanied by a blue ox?
That’s about 3 days hard walking per bull. Not out of the question, if not for one detail. How could any man haul brass balls of that size overland on foot for that distance?
Great write-up, Animal.
The paradox of the brass balls – they that have them aren’t weighed down by them.
Shooting down French aircraft isn’t a mistake, they are the traditional enemies of the Eng… on wait, he’s Scotch, isn’t he. Whoops. Sorry froggy.
Meh, The Frenchman probably had it coming anyway.
He probably farted in Karamojo’s general direction.
Did he really shoot them down or did they simply surrender while aloft?
Makes my life seem a bit paler by comparison.
A bit? I was pissed off this morning because i was out of heavy cream and had to drink my coffee black.
I drove through a dense, four foot high snowdrift yesterday and I swear I got maybe 6 inches of air. I thought I was pretty cool…until now.
Honestly? If I was born in that time, I would already be dead. Rare illness as a child that I most likely wouldn’t have survived even 40 years ago. There are advantages to being born in the time of plenty instead of the time of hardships.
Same here. If I had been born twenty years earlier, I would never have seen my second birthday. Mater Dean is convinced to this day that the only reason I didn’t die is that my attending physician at the San Diego naval hospital simply would not permit it.
I also vaguely recall being told that there were one or two other wee ones in the hospital with the same condition, and one (?) of them didn’t make it.
Sweetened condensed milk comes in squeeze bottles now, yw.
Excellent beginning to what promises to be a very interesting series. You really have a gift for this, Animal.
Neat story. Makes me wonder what I am doing with my life. At least I am not setting myself to thrice lose the race for the presidency (twice being to a man everyone was/is sure will lose).
Yes, Hillary Clinton really may run for president again.
Former Clinton pollster Mark Penn told Fox News this morning there are a number of scenarios that may lead to a third Hillary candidacy.
After defending Clinton’s credentials as “one of the most experienced politicians around,” Penn went on to say of the reported recent confabs between Hillary and declared candidates, “Those meetings are going to be somewhat awkward because she hasn’t declared that she’s not definitely running, and she, in fact, at the same time is looking over the field and I think will make a decision later in the year whether or not to run herself.
Penn said the chances of Hillary running depends on how the field shapes up.
“If the party looks too far to the left and there’s no front runner, she’ll get in,” he said.
“I think if Joe Biden gets in, that probably means she won’t run if he gets in. If he doesn’t get in, I think the field will be open for her,” Penn said.
He went on to indicate Clinton has long despised the year before the election year, so that may underscore the point she will wait as long as she can to declare her candidacy.
Somewhere, SugarFree is laughing maniacally.
I don’t want the nightmares again!
At least I am not setting myself to thrice lose the race for the presidency (twice being to a man everyone was/is sure will lose).
So she can become this generation’s William Jennings Bryan. Without the oratory skills.
Why can’t she go the Debs route? A few years in the federal pen would do her right.
What a difference in time makes. The 13 year olds of today have to ride a school bus 1/2 mile to school. The 20 year olds need a safe space in college. So many of our ancestors suffered just a 100-150 years ago and yet some arose to the heights of Bell. What the next generation will bring we don’t know but in all likelihood there will be few real life heroes such as Bell. Thanks, Animal, I won’t complain if my toast is burned. Waiting for more.
So much this…
Prosperity creates pussies.
Burnt toast?
*weeps*
*greasy avocado tears*
We live less than 1/4 mile from the middle school, and yet my wife doesn’t want to let our son walk or ride his bike to school. Insanity.
1/4 mile is right next door. What sort of shithole neighborhood makes right next door dangerous?
Absolutely nothing makes it dangerous except her vivid imagination. There’s a wooded area between the school and our neighborhood with a path he’d have to go through, and I guess she think’s it’s full of werewolves or something?
My sister and brother-in-law bought property that has the back yard adjacent to a state park. They send the boys (~10 years old) into it to go play. A quick Google Map shows it’s about .04 square miles of area that’s easy for them to get to. The total area is much larger and goes all the way up to Lake Erie.
It is a marsh though, so the biggest threat is probably the EPA.
That’s what you get for introducing her to the STEVE SMITH follies in the worst chatroom on the web.
LOL. I would be lost in the woods all day long when I was a kid. If I had gotten stuck in a bog it would have been game over.
Show her the cop car that’s parked not even a block down the road.
there will be few real life heroes such as Bell
I don’t there have ever been more than a few like that.
Perhaps not heroes in that sense of the word but well known for their deeds, the Sgt Yorks, Audie Murphys, Bob Hope. Many (most) of us can’t name a single person from the awards of a few days ago but we can pick out Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart and other icons from days gone by. There just doesn’t seem to be many durable Henry Fords.
Musk is laughable and other than a few of us hardly anyone know who he is or what he does.
Writers back then really lived their experiences. See also William Hope Hodgson, Joseph Conrad and John Buchan.
Are there any women with toxic masculinity?
I mean, besides Hilary Clinton.
Caitlyn Jenner?
Toxic Shock Syndrome?
How many male->female transitions die from an infection of their improperly-immuno-equipped skin-cleft.
Aileen Wuornos
That girl in the Marines recruiting commercial
Tootsy?
This chick.
Does that count?
Just like AoC clapping back at Republican Nazis!
*wipes tear from eye with wank rag*
Reminds me of the possibly apocryphal story about a Chinese general. He carved “General Whatshisname dies under this tree” on a tree along a path he knew the general would take, timing it so that he would arrive at night. When the general lit a torch to read the message on the tree, archers opened fire.
Tom Hanks on “Bosom Buddies” ?
Janet Reno
The live tweeting from The Hat and The Hair has begun!
Heh.
Humanist huh?
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/peace-cross-memorial-at-center-of-landmark-supreme-court-fight-over-religious-displays
Psst… don’t tell them this exists. On second thought, do.
Another Profile in Toxic Masculinity: Simo Häyhä
Thanks, I was just about to post re: Simo Häyhä. Total badass.
Witold Pilecki voluntarily allowed himself to be captured and imprisoned at Auschwitz in order to gather intelligence on the place for the Armia Krajowa. He managed to survive for over two years, during which he managed to have reports smuggled to the resistance outside the camp and even cobbled together a radio out of spare parts with which they broadcast reports surreptitiously. He escaped in the spring of 1943. In 1944 he fought in the Warsaw Uprising, again being imprisoned by the Nazis after it was put down. After the war, he was sent by the exiled Polish government to return to Poland and gather intelligence on the Communists, in particular investigating Soviet war crimes in Poland. In 1947 he was captured, and in 1948 convicted in a show trial and executed.
Imagine defeating the Nazis, only to have the commies take over. Unbelievable. Thanks, FDR!
Everyone looks at World War II like the good guys won.
Not completely.
Three countries started world war II with acts of aggression: Japan, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
In the case of Germany and the Soviet Union, their joint invasion of eastern Europe was intended to satisfy terrirorial ambitions. At the end of the war, the Soviets had accomplished everything they set out to accomplish when they first allied with Nazi Germany.
Not to mention that Britain completely failed to achieve its war
objective, and was bankrupted, lost it’s empire, and went
socialist losing it’s freedom in the process. I’d say that
Britain lost WW2 by any measure other than which side
of the table they sat on at the end.
IIRC, they were even on food rationing after the war longer
than Germany was.
And China was weakened to the point where the CCP won
the civil war. So another loss by the so-called winners.
Meanwhile the two losers got to concentrate on their
economy while someone else paid for their defense for
fifty years. (Not that that would have been worth
being half over-run by the Soviets.)
“IIRC, they were even on food rationing after the war longer
than Germany was.”
The British Left took over before WWII ended. Labour nationalized industries, and did all manner of other stupid socialist shit. Then all that bad luck just swept in.
The first West German government was a right wing one, and in particular the first thing they did economically when regaining sovereignty was eliminate the price controls of the military government. Adenauer and his economic team were liberals, not socialists.
Japan was always anticommunist, and under American, and particularly under the rule of MacArthur, who was not in any way a man of the left, they were able to quickly recover.
This is why I believe Churchill was so unique. He almost certainly knew that from 1940 on, continued resistance/warfare would doom the country. Britain would never again be a dominant or even major power. A more pragmatic man would’ve sacrificed national honor to preserve everything else.
The decline of the UK was self inflicted. You only have to look at the success of Germany and Japan in the postwar era, under right of center government.
Attlee presided over the nationalization of the energy sector, steel production, transportation, and telecom sectors. They created the NHS and the cradle to grave welfare state. Created the council estate beast. Drastically devalued the currency.
It wasn’t the war that ruined the UK, it was the postwar policy of the Labour government. Rather than pursue a liberal course, they went socialist. Meanwhile the Germans went the other way, and they call it an “economic miracle” but it wasn’t a miracle at all, just sound economic policy.
I don’t mean to take away from the post-war leftward stupidity, but I don’t think Britain could ever recover from what it sacrificed.
I’ve read about that guy. A hero by any measure. Finally
recognized by the post-communist Polish government, so
there’s that at least.
Thanks. Came here to say that.
Professional Small Boy (and rompin’ fun writer if you’re into outdoors stuff) Peter Hathaway Capstick wrote several biographies of men who preceded him to the Dark Continent. The most accessible is probably The African Adventurers.
Can also recommend the non-fiction of Florida Man Randy Wayne White. Batfishing in the Rainforest, or The Sharks of Lake Nicaragua are great places to start.
Next year’s Super Bowl commercial. Miller Lite accepts container of corn syrup and trades Bud Light their container of Round Up that they received by mistake.
http://news4sanantonio.com/news/offbeat/study-shows-popular-beer-wine-contain-traces-of-weed-killer
I’m really entertained by the corn syrup fallout. There’s two billboards I drive by on my way to and from the office that have:
Busch beer: Proudly made with corn from America’s Heartland
Then there’s a Bud Light one that says:
Made with American grown barley
And related home brewing link showing people can tell the difference between home brewed beer made with different types of sugar.
I was pretty surprised that the maker of cheap skunky rice-beer tried to compare ingredients.
Last Glibs meetup.
TW: sound.
Without getting too chemistry heavy, there are some interesting differences between dextrose and sucrose, namely that the former is made of just a single sugar molecule while the latter consists of both a glucose and fructose molecule. Perhaps the additional molecule of fructose, a sugar found in fruit, is what’s responsible for the cider-like flavors some claim to perceive when brewing with sucrose, and possibly the subtle harshness I detected in the batch I made with table sugar.
The answer is yes. Fructose matters.
The interesting part to me (without getting too far into the weeds here), was that the book Brew Like a Monk specifically referenced that the Belgian brewers used beet sugar because it was cheaper to use. And Radical Brewing recommends all different types of sugar for different effects, one in particular being jaggery. All of which are sucrose based.
I use Belgian candy sugar (beet sugar) when I make my sour ales. I assume that it is a contributing factor in the final flavor profile.
This is also what makes honey interesting. Honey is predominately free glucose and fructose. But it does have significant amounts of double and triple sugars.
And the ratio of all of these can vary dramatically based upon the source of the nectar.
So a bit of randomness in the outcome depending upon the source of the honey.
light belgian candy sugar is useless, IMO. Just use plain sugar.
In past threads I mentioned the British using sugar in lots of recipes. They primarily use invert sugars.
Sir Richard Burton?
I read his magnificent biography.
*narrows gaze*
Thanks for the fun read. “Gumption”… Love that word.
I read some of that $93 trillion estimate of the GND at lunch.
a federal jobs guarantee between $6.8 trillion and $44.6 trillion
No way to narrow that down at all?
Enough high-speed rail “to make air travel unnecessary,” would cost roughly $1.1 to $2.5 trillion.
That provision alone should cost $93 trillion.
That’s just the cost of writing the proposal for the budget proposal of buying the rails, not actually building it.
Can’t wait to take the train to Hawaii.
Underwater trains – don’t have to worry about air friction /s
Well if you get rid of prevailing wage laws and get a lot of Irish, Chinese, and blacks to work on it. You might be able to make the math work.
Tons of flyover land could be confiscated without some trouble, but getting those trains into the places they’d have to go to remotely make sense would easily eat up tens of trillions of dollars.
Blithering idiots to put any stock in any part of it. Taken as a whole, its supporters are certifiable. Or just cynical, power-hungry commies.
“Chinese government has no trouble with eminent domain when building massive projects. So let’s make our government like Chinese Government.” Don’t kid yourself that this isn’t part of the long term strategy.
-100 social credits
That’s one way to remove women from power, abort them soon enough.
I have a proposal. The next time anyone proposes trains as the solution to transit issues, we propose they sit down and win a game of an 18xx game. If they know better how the trains should run, it should be easy for them.
Those are one of my groups favorites. Picked up 1846 from
GMT a while back, and it has eclipsed 1830 as our
favorite. Great games. If there’s anyone in the Madison
area interested, I could put something together.
A bit out of the way for me, but if you like 18xx games, how do you feel about other economic games? I picked up the recent reprint of Container, and love it.
Read about it, haven’t picked it up. Looks interesting though.
Other than that one, the problem with most economic
games is that they’re either trivial, a rehash of Monopoly (which
is also trivial), or they’re not actually economic games, they
just have economic chrome.
All of which can be fine, if that’s what you’re looking for.
Another favorite is (long out of print) “Merchant of Venus”,
which has a very clever supply and demand mechanism.
It’s a bit short on inter-player interaction though.
It was out of print for a while (8 years or so), and the recent printing isn’t getting run again. However, it’s also an easy enough game to proxy (someone in one of the BGG threads made a lego version of the game). There’s only two random bits in the whole game: what different colored containers are worth to you in end game scoring, and what color factory you start with. In all the games I’ve played you’ll generally have people losing auctions by $1,
A very nice light weight economic game is Mogul. Everyone starts with a set amount of action tokens, when the bid phase is happening, you must drop one of your tokens into the bowl. If you pass (either because you have no tokens, or wish to), you take all of the tokens out of the bowl. So there are times you need to pass on something that would be advantageous to you in order to have more power in the later bidding actions.
Can we require that you must win a Power Grid tourney to become Sec of Energy?
Actually, Power Grid should be a requirement for being on a budget committee.
Sure thing, and Diplomacy (solo victory only, no shared victories) for Sec of State.
Ironically, the girlfriend (who dislikes heavy economic games) loves Power Grid.
Also, also, no calculators allowed in the PG budget committee games.
AS ITALY!!!!
Of course, that probably means the position can never be filled.
🙂 Despite heavy involvement with the online
Diplomacy community in the 90s, I’m not very
good at the game itself. I do like the game though,
and keep meaning to get back into it.
(cough, cough)
/buffs lapels
I have done it too, but it requires idiots on the other sides. Italy should, at best, provide a nice assistance to a shared victory.
If you look at the public communication there, Russia in the end handed the game to me out of spite. One of the reasons to never let spite drive you in a game.
I was right. Looking at the opening moves, you got Austria to attack Germany. That is suicide for both. They shouldnt even have to discuss it, they put their backs to each other and fight in opposite directions. You got the center opened up right away. That might be the only way for Italy to win.
Italy is difficult, but Italy-Russia is a great alliance, and
people are afraid of Russia, so Italy can sometimes
sneak out a win by being under-rated.
The first thing that comes to mind when I think of all that rail is that it would require a lot of land. Which would have a big environmental impact. Also, people live on land, so you’d have to use eminent domain to get it, which means paying off those residents and/or going through lengthy lawsuits. I can’t imagine it ever getting built. But I don’t have another way to waste $93 trillion so my opinion doesn’t matter.
But I don’t have another way to waste $93 trillion so my opinion doesn’t matter.
Monuments to the glory of our masters? Pyramids? Undersea cities? I think you can come up with a few ideas to blow 93 trillion.
A Death Star?
What the hell’s is an aluminum falcon?
Thanks. I’ll have two.
Although I’m not sure why you spelled it wrong. It’s Deth’s Tar. No relation to anything else at all.
My suggestion: use that $93T to build nuke plants, desalinization plants, and sea walls. A one sentence plan that is simultaneous less ridiculous, less freedom reducing (other than the taxes, obviously), more beneficial to the people, and more effective at fighting climate change than that entire GND monstrosity. By AOC’s own criteria, I am now free to criticize her plan.
OK, back of the napkin:
3,550 100MGD desalinization plants to provide all the water for the US from the sea: $2.4T
800 4.7M MWh/yr nuclear power plants to provide all power for the US via non CO2 emitting sources: $7.2T
13,000 miles of seawall sufficient to withstand the next century of sea level rise: $1T
Total = $10.6T
If you can’t be bothered to put it on the front of the napkin, your calculations aren’t worth a shit.
The other $83T is for graft and overages.
Don’t you mean: “The Gadfly Foundation”?
Fine, I’ll set aside $1T for a booze tab for the Glibs if y’all keep this hush-hush.
Positive Train Control, mandated by the Federal Railroad Admin., has been held up for years by, for example, Indians Tribes who object to the cabling or transmission towers being laid along existing railroad tracks through their land. Maybe “the Green New Deal Plan” assumes that Enviros will simply roll over and not challenge “habitat destruction” or whatever. Which, of course, allows for us anti-government warriors to do the court challenges and hold up high speed rail boondoggles forever.
A space-train to Mars?
I bet we could build a working space elevator to orbit for much less.
But on the positive side it’s easier for terrorists to sabotage, so you need a bigger, fatter deep state to prevent such mishaps.
Since personal, private transportation is banned, you simply rip up the interstates and run your rails through the former highways.
That gets you from farm land to inner cities. Pretty much all the necessary land right of way you need except that which goes through the Rockies.
See how easy that is.
And then the neighborhoods near the rails gentrify and the poor have to live out in the sticks.
You dummies clearly haven’t figured this out. Getting enough money is easy-peasy: first, offer a bunch of corporations tax breaks totaling $93 trillion. Then withdraw those offer. BOOM! $93 trillion dollars liberated from the corporate cronyism fund.
*raucous applause*
Excellent Animal. I like your articles quite a bit. Keep ’em coming.
I’m partial to Americans so I hope James Buchanan Eads is on the list.
I friend had a replica .303. Nice rifle, heavy, but fairly
accurate (for me at least) as is. I was hitting reasonably
close shot groups about where I was aiming without
any prior practice. Other than the weight, I’d be ok if
I had to rely on just one of those. Not that the
weight is unbearable, it’s just that we can make
them lighter with modern materials.
In the unlikely event you weren’t already convinced Elizabeth Warren is a despicable thieving cunt
In 1990, twelve countries in Europe had a wealth tax. Today, there are only three: Norway, Spain, and Switzerland. According to reports by the OECD and others, there were some clear themes with the policy: it was expensive to administer, it was hard on people with lots of assets but little cash, it distorted saving and investment decisions, it pushed the rich and their money out of the taxing countries—and, perhaps worst of all, it didn’t raise much revenue.
UC Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman, whose research helped put wealth inequality back on the American policy agenda, played a part in designing Warren’s wealth tax. He says it was designed explicitly with European failures in mind.
He argues the Warren plan is “very different than any wealth tax that has existed anywhere in the world.” Unlike in the European Union, it’s impossible to freely move to another country or state to escape national taxes. Existing U.S. law also taxes citizens wherever they are, so even if they do sail to a tax haven in the Caribbean, they’re still on the hook. On top of that, Warren’s plan includes an “exit tax,” which would confiscate 40 percent of all a person’s wealth over $50 million if they renounce their citizenship.
Those dopey old eurofags just weren’t confiscating hard enough.
In P Brooks -topia, Elizabeth Warren would be pelted with flaming bags of dog shit every time she ventured out in public.
Based on how much support this shit gets will show how far down the rot has gone in this country.
It occurs to me that in some sense, property tax *is* a wealth tax.
As always it comes down to “how much of my stuff do you intend to
take, and by what mechanism”. Everyone will of course have to
decide for themselves if the results of that constitute tyranny
or civic duty.
It bothers me that tar and feathering isn’t still a thing.
her plan is only 60% away from being the new Iron Curtain.
There was time when US politicians clamored for the right to emigrate without heavy penalties.
My criteria for taxes amounts to “how nosy does the government have to
be to collect the tax”. I generally prefer property taxes on these grounds.
A wealth tax though fails, since the government pretty has to know
everything to collect it. The income tax has the same problem. It’s not
even that the government has to know how much income someone
makes, it’s that they have to know about every single transaction,
monetary or otherwise, someone does, so they can determine if
it’s “income” or not.
Suggesting an “exit tax” is one of those things that I think shift a politician beyond the pale. I’m not wild about taxation at all, but penalizing someone for deciding to leave the country is especially vile.
Does this take into account the destruction of the economy that happens in year 2?
“Feature, not bug.”
I assume there are suitable gaps in her proposed law to exclude Dem-friendly billionaires.
… I went to go draw a quick sketch of the family tree for the House Grosz in “Prince of the North Tower” and “Beyond the Edge of the Map”.
I’ve already had to break chunks off to separate sheets because it was getting too big to fit in a single image.
It occurs to me that in some sense, property tax *is* a wealth tax.
Absolutely, and there are people out there whining about how “politics” prevents the federal government from getting in on that action.
I’m surprised they haven’t, really. I don’t think there’s any states
that don’t have a property tax, so a federal levy on whatever
the assessed value is wouldn’t be administratively difficult.
At least in my district, there are several taxing authorities,
but I just write one check, and they (must) figure out how
to distribute that out. Adding one more distributee wouldn’t
be much of a problem, if any.
Google says the state with the lowest property tax is LA with 0.18 percent. So, no zero’s.
https://www.thebalance.com/best-and-worst-states-for-property-taxes-3193328
HI and DC being on the list for low property taxes is deceiving since property values are so high.
This article in 100 years…
Nicely done!
I expect them to wipe meat from the history books. No one will know it ever existed. AOC will be the goddess who saved us from unspeakable behaviors.
What an awesome way to spend my lunch break – great article, great idea for a series.
Seconded! I’d love to see more of these.