James Connolly, Socialist and Commandant of the Dublin Brigade in the Easter Rising, his statue is on Beresford Place. Sculpted in 1996 by the Éamonn O’Doherty, it is a fine bronze life-like statue of Connolly proudly standing in front of a curved wall with a sculpted plough and the stars replete with one of his best-known quotations, “The Cause of Labour is the Cause of Ireland / The Cause of Ireland is the Cause of Labour”.
Connolly was born into poverty in Edinburgh, Scotland, to Irish parents and for his part in The Rising, was sentenced to death. If the mortally wounded Connolly first tied to a chair and then strapped to a stretcher to enable his execution, wasn’t so cowardly executed by a British firing squad, I often wonder how different modern Irelands politics would have been if a true socialist had been elected to government during the formation of the state.
The world has never been more divided between the 1% who own the world, they have the wealth. They own the lands 🌎, the houses 🏡, The banks, The factories, the shops. We read about the richest in the world 🌎, how they are getting richer every day every hour every minute. While the rest and getting poorer. City 🌆 are Now full of homeless people. There needs to be a redistribution of wealth. Here is one woman’s contribution.
Marlene Engelhorn is an Austrian activist and journalist of German descent known for advocating the reform of inheritance tax policies and gay rights
This is an article from the website for fortune.com
About a 31-year-old Austrian billionaire giving away an inheritance..
Marlene Engelhorn hadn’t given much thought to the wealth that surrounded her as she grew up. She always considered the fortune, inherited from Friedrich Engelhorn, the 19th-century founder of German chemical giant BASF SE, to be her family’s money rather than hers.
So Engelhorn settled on an idea: Let 50 strangers decide how to give it away.
Those strangers, all of whom live in Engelhorn’s native Austria, will meet for the first time this weekend at a hotel in Salzburg. Dubbed the Guter Rat, or Good Council, they were chosen through a statistical process run by research group Foresight and range in location, age, race, socioeconomic background and other demographic factors chosen in an effort to be representative of the overall Austrian population.
Engelhorn’s goal is not only to give away €25 million, but also to spark conversations on wealth inequality. She’s frustrated that her windfall wasn’t taxed — Austria eliminated its inheritance tax in 2008 — and doesn’t see traditional philanthropy as a good solution because it still gives her too much power.
I’m just one brain, I’m just one person and so to me, this is a huge relief knowing that the process of redistribution is much more legitimate and thorough and democratic than I could ever do it,” she said in an interview. “Nobody needs another foundation.”
The knowledge of the way wealth was accumulated in these companies, and through them in my family, has reinforced my conviction that extreme wealth as power must be regulated,” she said.
Engelhorn’s approach is a dramatic example of the ways in which heirs of dynastic wealth are choosing a different path than previous generations. Her ancestor Friedrich Engelhorn left BASF in the late 19th century and invested his fortune in the predecessor to Boehringer Mannheim, which was bought by Swiss pharma giant Roche Holdings AG for $11 billion in 1998. Part of her desire to give her fortune away came from the tax loopholes her family used during that sale, she said.
Engelhorn’s approach is a dramatic example of the ways in which heirs of dynastic wealth are choosing a different path than previous generations. Her ancestor Friedrich Engelhorn left BASF in the late 19th century and invested
Engelhorn’s goal is not only to give away €25 million, but also to spark conversations on wealth inequality. She’s frustrated that her windfall wasn’t taxed — Austria eliminated its inheritance tax in 2008 — and doesn’t see traditional philanthropy as a good solution because it still gives her too much power.
Then she came into more than €25 million ($27 million) from her late billionaire grandmother in 2022. She had already co-founded the group TaxMeNow and discovered a community in various progressive groups for guilt-ridden rich people like wealth-redistribution advocates Resource Justice and Patriotic Millionaires. But now the 31-year-old had to grapple with the fact that she was a millionaire in her own right.
Engelhorn grew up going to private schools and then the University of Vienna, where she studied German literature and language. She came up with the idea for the Guter Rat after reading about citizens’ assemblies, a democratic tool that’s gaining popularity in Europe. In the absence of taxation, it seemed like the most egalitarian way to share her wealth.
“Philanthropy is only to be taken seriously when it considers its own abolition,” she said. “I can’t wait for my government to tax me. They’re not going to do this anytime soon. But we do need this wealth to be redistributed into society.”
The project was announced in January, when the Guter Rat team, with the help of Foresight, sent invitations to 10,000 randomly selected people all over Austria above the age of 16. Engelhorn held a press conference announcing the undertaking so people didn’t think it was a scam.
The response was immediate: Within the first two days they received 700 emails from people who’d heard about the plan, with many sharing their own ideas on how to spend the money, said Alexandra Wang, who is leading the project. (Wang and Engelhorn met when the former was a fundraiser for a progressive Austrian think tank to which the latter was a donor.)
Of the 10,000 people the invitation was sent to, 1,424 registered to participate, which is an unusually high response rate, said Martin Haselmayer, a researcher at Foresight. A rate of 5% to 7% is normal for citizens’ assemblies, he said.
The 50 people who were ultimately selected will meet a total of six times between now and June. The first two gatherings will be primarily educational: This weekend, after collecting Guter Rat merch and settling into the Salzburg hotel, participants will hear from two economists about wealth distribution. The second weekend will involve a broader philosophical conversation about what a just society looks like, said Wang, who hopes the project will create a road map for others.
“This is a lighthouse project that I hope will inspire a few people out there to rethink their values,” she said.
Starting on the third weekend, the participants will really dig into the fate of Engelhorn’s money and aim to decide what to do with her €25 million by the summer. If all 50 members can’t agree on where the money should go, it will be returned to her, but Engelhorn and Wang don’t expect that to happen.
Aside from being the face of the project, Engelhorn is no longer involved in the process, but she will give a brief speech to thank the participants this first weekend.
“I’m not so fixated on the result,” she said. “The most important thing to me is the public discussion of wealth and equality.”
Since 13 November 2022, the Israeli Airforce has 36 F-35s in service, including the testbed stationed at the Flight Test Center at Tel Nof Airbase, and operates three squadrons at Nevatim Airbase.
Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II Israeli procurement it’s a partnership between Israel and the United States of America.
Part of the plane are made in the UK in particular Northern Ireland.
15% of every F35 that Israel is using to bombard Gaza is made by British industry. CAAT estimates the value of the components UK industry supplies for Israeli F35s to be worth at least £336m since 2016.
In Northern Ireland there are three locations parts are made :
The EU is a political and economic union that have common institutions and an EU parliament. The member states of the EU share common interests and common values.
The main purpose is to uphold peace, promote economic and social solidarity and bring the European people together.
The first European Union was formed by six countries in 1958 although it was not called ‘European Union’ (2009) then.
The six founding countries are Germany, France, Italy and the three Benelux countries (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg).
Since 2013, the EU has 28 members, but this will change after 31 January 2020. While several countries such as Albania, Serbia or Turkey are still waiting to be accepted to become a member of the EU, one member country will leave the EU on 31 January 2020. Then there will be a transition period
Member countries
Motto “united in diversity “
European flag has a circle of 12 golden stars on a blue background which symbolise unity, solidarity and harmony among the European member countries.
The EU is home to 513 million inhabitants in total living in the member countries. Thus the EU is the third largest population after China and India.
Biggest by land mass France 🇫🇷
Smallest Malta 🇲🇹
Biggest by population Berlin 3,4 m
Paris Charles de Gaulle in France
EU is the largest trade block in world 🌎
The richest country by gdp Luxembourg 🇱🇺
Poorest Bulgaria 🇧🇬
The EU capital city is Brussels,
• Brussels in Belgium (EU headquarters)
The chamber
• Strasbourg in France (European Parliament)
• Frankfurt/Main in Germany (European Central Bank)
EU central bank
• Luxembourg City in Luxembourg (seat of the European Parliament and the European Court of Justice)
Luxembourg
The presidency of the Council of the European Union rotates every six months. The Council of the EU represents the governments of the member states and the presidency is held by the national government’s head of state. Germany 🇩🇪 take over from Croatia 🇭🇷 in July 2020.
It’s run by 3 bodies
•
• The EU Parliament that consists of directly elected members who represent the people of their member country.
• The EU Council that consists of the heads of state of the member countries who make the decision for and support the decision made prior in their country.
• The EU Commission represents the interests of the European Union member states and the proposes new laws that the parliament and the council then discuss and can then adopt.
Therefore there are three leaders of the European Union:
Eu Commission President, Ursula Van Der Leyen German
EU Counsel President Charles Michel Belgium
EU Parliament President David Sassoli Italian
Money: The European Central Bank was founded in 1998 and the European currency was introduced in 2002. The European currency is the EURO for 19 countries of the EU
Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain
Leopardstown racecourse it’s just spitting Distance from my house. Wednesday evening in the summer for the flat season is Good entertainmentwhat band is playing after the racing.
I was totally surprised to see such crowds as of the new bank holiday weekend ( Saint Brigid day ).
From the racing post
“ The Dublin Racing Festival was even more popular with British racegoers this year after early figures suggested they made up around 38 per cent of the 36,020 spectators at Leopardstown’s prestigious meeting at the weekend.
Leopardstown stand
The number of British spectators was a massive increase on the 2023 meeting, when an estimated 27 per cent made the journey among a total crowd of 34,591.
Last year’s overall attendance was an increase of 40 per cent compared to 2022 and the track has maintained its upward curve, with 1,429 more attending this year’s two-day festival in a four per cent increase. Saturday attracted 20,017 spectators, while Sunday saw 16,003 people come through the gates.”
When my father was 90 years of age I asked him of his memories during the Second World War. He told me he was in with his father digging 🥕 In their back garden. There was a flash of light and a boom noise in the distance with the noise of a plane going over. He said his father reckons it was a bomb hitting Dun Laoghaire. The next day it was in the papers – a bomb had been dropped on Glasthule.
Mural of WW2 bombing in Glasthule
20 December 1940: At approximately 7:30 in the evening, two bombs fell on Glasthule near Dún Laoghaire (the first at the junction of Rosmeen Park and Summerhill Road and the second between Rosmeen Park and Rosmeen Gardens), injuring three people.
I Luftwaffe photo of Dún Laoghaire Nov 1940.
20 December 1940: At approximately 7:30 in the evening, two bombs fell on Glasthule near Dún Laoghaire (the first at the junction of Rosmeen Park and Summerhill Road and the second between Rosmeen Park and Rosmeen Gardens), injuring three people.
Banter From Martin 