The American Gilded Age ran from the 1870's to 1900 and was driven by the economic boom involving technological advances in rail transport, energy, and electrical power and electrically-powered equipment and devices.
The era spawned super-wealthy people such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, who tried to, and failed to, buy his way into the upper class strata of people in New York. (That's you, JES. You are the upper class people in New York; love your designer Adolfo Sanchez btw).
The use of the word 'gilded' is intended to say that this superficial economic wealth was merely covering over massive underlying social problems.
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| The Marble House 'red room.' A little summer cottage in Newport, built by Cornelius V. That's not a pope, though right? Well, kind of was... |
We are today, certainly very far beyond the Gilded Age and there is not even a thin veneer covering over anything.
Here in these pages, I have been trying to avoid posting pics of really expensive things - no mansions, estates, private jets and so on - because the wealthiest of us are those with the health capacity and environment luxury of being able to go into the relative countryside somewhere and harvest mushrooms and flowers for making blue-colored tea...
That's if you had clean water available to you.
Think of those poor Ukrainians 'fighting to the last baby' stuck (or locked in by wonderful charming freedom and democracy-loving neo-Nazis) inside basements with no running water supply.
About half an hour ago the Russian MoD told Zelensky that if he didn't do something they wanted (I'm not really quite sure what they even wanted right now), they were going to hit his 'decision-making centers.'
And that would be the offices of WPP in Geneva then, I guess.
Or even better still, those of the Safra Group in the Pickle Building in Londonistan.
Basically means they are going to hit him, maybe even kill him.
They know where he is.
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| More rich people water. |
And then that will be amazing for CNN. Nuclear war here we come!
Anderson Cooper, one of those from the Vanderbilt Family that lost the entire Vanderbilt Fortune, will be able to announce to you that you're going to die miserably and horribly.
But, there will be a Ukrainian actress running around a wheat field somewhere with a sickle in her hand, beheading people on behalf of the ISIS theatrical company. So, that's something at least.
The story about how in just a couple of succeeding generations of Vanderbilts, they lost the entire fortune -, is that they simply 'spent it.'
Well, hey! But what about the idea that property never goes down in value? They didn't just spend it all on simply nothing - they acquired heaps of property. Lost stacks on all of it, though. Somehow.
Cooper has shifted from trying to buy into upper social class, to actually buying - and very successfully - into the literal dregs of humanity. He's gone 180 degrees in the opposite direction from Cornelius, into the world of Washington and California politics.
Brilliant.
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| Some part of the Dendera complex. There's no meaning intended here; I just like the photographer's work! |
Any kind of Golden Age is when, if you scratch beneath the gleaming surface, you find actual substance.
...There's two kinds of etchings on ancient Egyptian walls: there's hieroglyphs, and there's pictographic metaphors.
A bull, means a rock. And a bull with wings, means a meteor. The reason it is portrayed as a 'bull' is because the bull symbolizes substance, whereas the lion symbolizes strength and focused desire, hunger, intent.
They were weirdly clever people, those ancient Egyptians. They built their houses on rock.
And when the floods came, they survived.
But the meteor, well with this figure they meant something that came - some substance - that came from above.
Now...
What you want to know, is whether they tried to convey any idea, in those graphical depictions, of how to provoke the heavens to send some substance down to you.
The other question is, and the more important question right now, is - do I know.
Here's the funny thing, right. Most people who are 'experts' in all of this, are inclined to repeat what previous 'experts' all have said countless times before. They all tell about 'stuff.' Stuff that happened, one time, or a long time, ago. Or didn't even actually happen, but people say that it did, or just plain make stuff up and imagine all kinds of things - ancient Lemuria, Annunaki, Pharaohs, Moses...
And it's all very interesting.
No one you know tells you 'try this, see what happens.'
The lion is the hunger, the desire, the cobra the power of hatred and anger, but where is the substance?
