¡Bienvenidos a Rio Limbaugh!

Trick-or-treatin' as Standard & Poors

2012-01-28T12:41:00.005Z

Dear Dr. Bones,

_¡Feliz paleosábado!_

¿Did you know, _Señor Doctor_, that the ‘narrative’ of "The Sorcerer’s Apprentice" goes back as far as Lucian, encomiast of Great Alexander? So says Big LEW, the Learnèd Elders of Wiki, [1] and ¿who is Yoo or Eye to say different?

Though she’ll thus be celebrating her two thousandath a week from next Wednesday, Freedame Narratio is still goin’ strong. In fact, her freeladyship has just _aufgeschnappt_, ‘_shnuqqered_’, [1a] a certain Party Neocomrade (seventh grade) M. X. Gurfinklel of Pajama Junction NJ an’ Common Terror magazine.

That feat does rather resemble dynamitin’ fish in a barrel, admittedly. ¿What more natural consequence of wombschoolery an’ freedumbin’ down than that every Tom, Dick an’ Harriet of a kiddie selfservative sees no reason she herself should not set up as a Kiddiemistress whight away? On strictly _a priori_ grounds, then, the student of Neocomradology would expect the woods of Foxcuckooland to be full of Little Miss Gurfunkels. And so they are, theory and practice well met at least for once. It is rather the tippy-top oif the Whight Guard iceberg that eludes computation from antecedent probabilities. A zillion M. X. Garfunkels are just what one expected, or damnwell shoulda, but ¿who could have forseen Don Neutrino de Gangrina, the _Zauberlehrling_ blown up six orders of magnitude an’ solemnly projected on the face of the Moon? ¡Poor long-suffering Cynthia!

But one can’t begin to point out the need for charity that far from home, so, back at Pajama Junction, I assume you see that Eye am picking on Master Mikey because it thinks it can be Standard & Poor’s all by its neoself. Even with this week’s Standard in one hand an’ the bran’-newtest of Criterions in the other to help Mikey through the spells an’ pentacles an’ whatnot, the poor laddie’s chances of success are not such as anybooby sane would care to specuvest in.

On his way to the deluge, Mikey pulls a little _shtykele_ Eye would like you to make a memorandumb of, Dr. Bones, for future use agaianst. Never before just now have I seen wombscholar or ziocomrade try to establish that this-or-that is "an open secret" by quotin’ -- ta-DAAH! -- her ownneoself.

Evidently the Spectre of Narcissus Dexter now haunts Foxcuckooland.to the max. I say "to the max," for I cannot see collective omphaloscopy goin’ beyond *that* high drool mark.

There was once a joke on Airstrip One that ran (IQFM)

I am the Master of this College,
If I don’t know it, it ain’t Knowledge

but Little Mikey Gurfinkel has just discovered a _plus ultra_. Turnin’ it around into the positive, an’ without the faintest hint of a grin, the yungkher lays it down that whatever Master Narky supposes himself to know a little about--say, the financial unhappiness of Frogs--is eo ipso common knowledge, "an open secret."

From there to Psolipsism in the strictest clinical sense is not more than two minute’s walkat an easy pace. With a stroller.

Accordingly, I betcha it won’t be long before the goodvolks up the slippery slope to Castle Podhòretz are sendin’ out to fizzydog.com to have one of the dungeon labóratories drained.

Yoo will join with Eye in hoping, sir, that Little Mikey Gee successfully breasts the self-inflicted flood, charity being mandatory by our own palæostandards and Old Criteria if not necessarily by those of Mikey’s masters. And in hoping, further, that it learns its lesson an’ desists from tryin’ to emulate its famous grown-up cousin Victor, Freelord Frankingsteen, in the dungeon-labóratory arts until it has acquired a really firm grip on what the _Qabbálâ_ [1b] it is doin’.[2]

Happy days.
--JHM

(( Though I did not get that far, this particular sweet puppy of Redarkenment is cutest when it gets started barkin’ _modo fucuyamico_.

(( For example, ¿Did Yoo know, O Bones, that the poor unlucky Frogs are "a predominantly continental, military, Statist nation," whereas Wunnerful US are to be numbered rather with "the oceanic [3] nations (and [Our] late 20th century converts, the Germans)? That game could, in principle, be lots more fun than signing up with the Jumblies for yet another cruise in that same old Western Sieve of theirs.

(( ¡Infinite vistas of laughing from them open! Unfortunately, cross-dressin’ as S&P is not one of them. That is rather as if the Common Terror Cruise Line started sailin’ out of Boston, but had chosen Hoboken or Hackensack or Honduras--the Gulf of Mosquitoes--for the target of the maiden voyage.

(( Simply not doin' itself proper justice here, this little señorito isn't. If Yoo ask Eye. ))

___
[1] Die Stelle, die Goethe in der Übersetzung Wielands benutzte, lautet:

Endlich fand ich doch einmal Gelegenheit, mich in einem dunkeln Winkel verborgen zu halten und die Zauberformel, die er dazu gebrauchte, [1a] aufzuschnappen, indem sie nur [1b] aus drei Silben bestand. Er ging darauf, ohne mich gewahr zu werden, auf den Marktplatz, nachdem er dem Stößel (‘pestle’) befohlen hatte, was zu tun sei. Den folgenden Tag, da er geschäftehalber ausgegangen war, nehm’ ich den Stößel, kleide ihn an, spreche die besagten drei Silben und befehle ihm, Wasser zu holen. Sogleich bringt er mir einen großen Krug voll. Gut, sprach ich, ich brauche kein Wasser mehr, werde wieder zum Stößel! Aber er kehrte sich nicht an meine Reden, sondern fuhr fort, Wasser zu tragen, und trug so lange, daß endlich das ganze Haus damit angefüllt war. Mir fing an, bange zu werden, Pankrates, wenn er zurückkäme, möcht’ es übelnehmen — wie es dann auch geschah —, und weil ich mir nicht anders zu helfen wußte, nahm ich eine Axt und hieb den Stößel mitten entzwei. Aber da hatte ich es übel getroffen; denn nun packte jede Hälfte einen Krug an und holte Wasser, so daß ich für einen Wasserträger nun ihrer zwei hatte. Inmittelst kommt mein Pankrates zurück, und wie er sieht, was passiert war, gibt er ihnen ihre vorige Gestalt wieder; er selbst aber machte sich heimlich aus dem Staube, und ich habe ihn nie wieder gesehen.

– Karl Moritz: _Deutsche Balladen_

___
[2] A *really* firm grip would include noticin’ that if Little Mikey (or indeed Big Vic) can constitute themselves as a financial ratin’ service with no more than a magic s*ll*ble or three [1b], why, ¡so can everybooby else!

The problem, of course, is that the Serene Demographic of Podhòretz does not recognize the principle I thus appealed to. Up at the Castle, the neogentry are bound (as I conjecture) to assume that impersonatin’ Standard & Poor’s is merely another one of those many things that are perfectly OK when done by virile ganders like themseselves, entirely out of the question for silly geese like Yoo and Eye further down the Slope.

Nevertheless, everybooby, an’ her brother-in-law too, can go through the external motions of doin’ it. Eye could go through the motions, Yoo could go throw the motions, why, ¡even an unscrupulous Native of Palæstina Inventata Gingrichensis could go through the external motions!

Everybooby doing it is but potentiality at this point, yet it would not take many trying to actualize to create such a Chinese fire drill in the labóratory that a clamorer would clamor in vain for the *real* Standard & Poors to please stand up. A clamor in which it would not always be possible to distinguish virile neoganders from silly geese, even. (Party Neocomrade M. R. Levin, Esq., for example, ofter sounds a lot like Party Neocomrade Dr. R. H. Limbaugh’s imaginary butt "Mister Newt Castrati" even when there is no circumambient clamor at all. But Ailes knows best.)

[3] "Selon Sigmund Freud, qui débattit de cette notion [du Sentiment océanique] dans son _Malaise dans la civilisation_, il n’est pas à l’origine du besoin religieux parce que celui-ci provient plutôt des sentiments de désaide infantile et de désirance pour le père, remplacés plus tard par l’angoisse devant la puissance du destin."

Introducin' DVNN, the "destructive, vicious negative nature" wonderproduct

2012-01-22T10:19:00.004Z

The best defense / By Boston Herald Editorial Staff
Saturday, January 21, 2012

When nothing else works, run against the media. Hey, it’s working for Newt Gingrich.

“I think the destructive, vicious negative nature of much of the news media makes it hard to govern this country, hard to attract decent people to run for public office, and I am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate with a topic like that,” Gingrich railed at CNN debate moderator John King Thursday night. (( &c. &c. ))

Opinenotwhine

Newt comes off as a somewhat intelligent, but very angry old man. If he isn't bolstering his ego, or talking about Reagan, he really hasn't much to say.

He knew the question was coming so he prepared a typical self-righteous defense, attack the messenger/questioner. It was a fair question for the debate platform. Gingrich's dismissive tone was just more drivel from his defensive zone.

The independents in this country will never elect Newt or Santorum. Actually, Santorum is more suitable for a senior church deacon position. I am all for strong faith, just don't push yours on me.

Posted 1 day ago Reply Link Abusive

aschark replying to Opinenotwhine

It seems that you're favoring Mitt in this primary. Of course that's OK, but, as you assume, Newt's debate coaches (I'm sure he has them, but I could be wrong), prepared him to answer questions about his 2nd wife's remarks in a Presidential debate. Maybe you're right, but he was prepared for it. Mitt, on the other hand, stuttered when it came to Bain, and his tax returns. It looked like he wasn't prepared, and if he gets into it with Obama, who, I'm sure, will not toss softballs to Mitt. Don't forget, Obama became Senator, unopposed - his opponents were disqualified, or resigned from the election. I've read posts on other articles where they said that they would rather vote for Obama than Newt. That, translated, means that they want a large government, higher debt for the kids, and, when the smoke and mirrors fade, a government run Country, contrary to our Constitution. Another translation, rob Peter (taxpayers) to pay Paul (entitlements). Like Margaret Thatcher said " Socialism is good until you run out of other people's money."
Posted 21 hours ago (( 22-01-12 05:26AM )) Reply Link Abusive

It only 'seems' that the fruits of the J-school an' frathouse babes are in the tank for Mittens? Golly!

Does this second peanut have mental reservations about astronomy as well, I wonder, an' never venture anythin' rasher than "The sun appears to rise in the east, most days"?

Yet I suppose doubt *IS* possible. We know the views of the editorial bratpack's Venerable Funders, who alone enjoy True Freedumb of the Press (their freelordships own one, you see).

We do not know for sure what any individual employee, fruit or babe, of their Employin' Corporation thinks about the Ascent of Don Neutrino. Standing outside the monkey house and proceeding from general principles, I would guess that some of them don't mind it at all.

Maybe we will be able to tell better from listening to the Three Weird Sisters on Monday: Felon Finneran, or Freelord Katz of Katzenyammer, even Duchess Jason of Sanseverino-Taxis Herfreeself, might conceivably reveal, by tone of voice or choice of epithet, that (s)he does not see altogether newt to newt with the Employin' Corporation Combine of Greater Worcester County.

Did any "compassionate selfservatives" survive from Good King Dubya's golden days, they might now be sheddin' a tear or two for the plight of the Romneyphobe babe or fruit stuck scabbin' for the _Herald_ of Louisedayhicksville. She (Freedame Neocompass) might -- but at this point my imagination is getting frisky -- even quote the anonymous bratpack's openin' patter an;' wonder if the patterers secretly think that Don Neutrino's detection of "the destructive, vicious negative nature of much of the news media" might apply to their own dear Employin' Corporation.

I am not sure whether one must be well outside the monkey house to reflect on the Marx brand on of scabbin' for an E.C. that has an insatiable appetite for panegyrics of True Freedumb, but would (as I conjecture from afar) take about fifteen seconds to give any fruit or babe who went about badmouthin' St. Mittens an' cryin' up Don Neutrino, or maybe Dr. Paul from Planet Dilbert, a thorough course of Real Romneycare -- the "I like being able to fire people" product.

Happy days.

St. Anselm Meets the Fool (Round Two)

2012-01-08T13:11:00.003Z

Dear Dr. Bones,

It warms McProd’s heart to see Brookline rebuke Louisedayhicksville like this,

Holier-than-thou Rick’s got to go
Pol politicized church sex abuse scandal
By Margery Eagan
Sunday, January 8, 2012

(...) Perhaps Rick Santorum blames New Hampshire’s “cultural liberalism” for those assaults, too, though liberal is hardly a word I’d use to describe the Granite State. It is not clear what he blames for priestly attacks on teenagers and children in Ireland, throughout Europe, parts of Africa, South America and most recently Haiti.

Perhaps in his loathsome world view, it’s cultural liberalism gone wild ’round the world!

(( &c. &c. -- there is G*re’s plenty of it where that came from ))

but it will not make any difference out in the neoparishes.

In any case, the Senator himself is but an isolated curiosity.

More interesting would be to learn Freedame Eagan’s views about what is goin’ on inside the dittopans of Santorum groupies. They themselves leave a lot of the Café Ratzo _smörgåsbord_ untouched, unless the pollsters just make things up, yet somehow they mean (as I conjecture) to get all the other exponents of Private Judgment [*] in trouble with teacher.

There is no logical contradiction here, exactly, but ’tis not a very nice way to behave either.

Happy days.

___
[*] ¿About time that likely lad finally made PFC, is it not?

Leroy von Hindenburg

2012-01-05T08:56:00.003Z

Dear Dr. Bones,

Gingrich Floats Idea of Anti-Romney Alliance
mannygoldstein | Wed, Jan 4, 2012 11:41 PM EST

In an interview with Laura Ingraham, Newt Gingrich raised the possibility of creating an anti-Mitt Romney alliance with Rick Santorum.

(( Snip Ingraham, Esq. ))

Hey Newt:

First off, the fact that your first name also happens to be the moniker for my beloved city is irritating.

Second, a tip: hydrogen-filled dirigibles are easily felled – just a small flame penetrating the fabric envelope and oh the humanity!

Leroy von Hindenburg has vented a lot of the gas before it had a chance to catch fire. So, at any rate, claims the _Manchester Union-Basher_:

GOFFSTOWN — Newt Gingrich raised a few eyebrows Wednesday when he said he’s not the man to turn the country around as the next President of the United States.

“I’m not the person to do this,” he said.

His point, he said during a one-on-one interview at St. Anselm College with Charles Arlinghaus, president of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, was that no person could do it alone.

“I don’t ask you to just vote for me, because if you do, you’ll vote and say ‘OK, Newt’s in. I’m going home,’” Gingrich said. “What I ask people to do is to be with me … and let’s work side by side. This can only work as a movement.”

===

About "the humanity": her Grace the Duchess of Nicetynice is not my cup of Kool-Aid, yet it seems unworthy in those who drool of "intellectual foundations" not to offer some sort of reasoned account of why it is perfectly O.K. to gloat when Nazi dirigibles get their richly deserved comeuppance.

I seize on only one aspect of the snapshot Comrade Poster reproduces yet again. I presume it become an idol and icon of PopCult [*] because there are so many different different ‘narratives’ it can be pasted into. We started here from a reactionary pol, so I lapsed into considering the _Hindenburg_ event in its Anti-Fascist sense. But of course Luddietes have reason to adore as well, maybe the best reasons of all. And then there are the Yank Exceptionalists, bound to rejoice at any setback to attempts by Old Euros to put themselves on a par, innovationwise, with the race of Edison and Burbank and ... and Gates and Jobs. On top of all that, I am told that a big fire of any sort is always welcome to readers of local news into the MacL@@han Tube.

With all that arrayed against them, I fear "the humanity" and Her Grace of Nicetynice are iunlikely to win this particular skirmish. Precisely because we nasty gloaters are almost certain to prevail, there is no need to resort to the shabby expedient of pretending we did not hear the objection.

Happy days.
--JHM
___
[*] Over chez G@@Gle, I count thirty-five (35.0) aviation items, most of them pretty inflammatory, before one catches sight of the Field Marshall and President. To be sure, when one finally gets to him, the old boy *does* look less senile and ‘wooden’ than usual, looks almost as if he had actually been a member of "the humanity."

Nevertheless, given so vast a quantitative disproportion, it is pretty silly to deny that Inhumanism has won this round.

"Views ... repudiated by ... Republicans"

2012-01-04T13:29:00.003Z

Dear Dr. Bones,

This morning brings (what looks like) additional evidence that the perversion of Roger, zeroth freelord of Simon Pajama in the neopeerage, to illiberalism an’ antidemonocracy is not yet complete. What thoroughbread whightist would ever permit herself to sneer at "ideological purity" an’ "all-too-human yearning for simple solutions"? ¡Picture to yourself, sir, what noises Dr. Limbaugh might make of that heresy, were the Squire ever deemed worthy of hostile attention from so high on high!

I just stuck in that "what looks like," though, because it is possible that what we have here is a probative exception. Selfservative kiddies, that is, ought in general to be as uncomplicated as a June day is long, BUT when it comes to the Neolevant, naturally they must defer to those who know better. A 1001% ACU ratin’ does not, after all, altogether qualify Wally Wombschool to teach brain science or practice rocket surgery. His freelordship could be understood as classifyin’ Native Management among these residual mysteries of the learnèd, rather than with plain-an’-easy stuff like Defendin’ Western Sieve, or Tricklenomics, or Global Unwarmin’, or which team to hoot for on palaeosabbath afternoons.

Taken abstractly, that last item is no doubt the ideal level of complexity, the level that every decent, upstandin’ wad of Tee Putty ought to strive for. Not to know the foe makes one useless to one’s Venerable Funders. But to accept the fundin’ an’ the flattery an’ then go on to talk up one’s own cranky little notions rather than the little crank notions of the Fundin’ Class can be at least as bad, even supposing one’s actual choice of foes to be impeccable.

You will have seen already, doubtless, how these remarks point towards the fiendish Dr. R. E. Paul of TX-14. Admittedly, that freelordship errs as regards the actual names on his hitlist, not (for example) properly fearin’ Neville Chamberlain even when the latter comes bearing umbrellas.

Over to Simon Pajama, the neogentry have evidently decided that the specifically Pauline fiendishness has somethin’ to do with oversimplification. That seems a little hasty to me, but of course I would like to hear your own view, Dr. Bones. Like all our visitors from Planet Dilbert, even the late Miss Rand of Petersburg and Mister Nozick of H*rv*rd, Dr. Paul is clearly a crank. Granted, but ¿what has crankery to do with complexity or simplicity? ¿Or ‘purity’? If one were a Martian learning English, I think one would probably eventually arrive by fairembalanced induction at a meaning like "the flaunting of socially unacceptable opinions." [1]

The Squire does indeed spank Dr. Paul for unacceptability, even bizarrely suggestin’ that the whight-wingers of Iowa have the last word on permissibility -- a position that his freelordship will ditch in five seconds as soon as some other Thought Police offers a better product or a cheaper price. [2]

Happy days.
--JHM
___
[1] As a former native speaker, I would want to advise Marty that it is really a little trickier than that, inasmuch as certain specialized forms of "socially unacceptable opinion" go down easily enough under special circumstances. To be a crank about what is drooled from the pulpit on weekends, or dished out to youth on Commencement Day, one must not only say it and believe it, one must actually try to do it.

I admit, though, that this is only a small district in the vast Empire of Idiocy. And certainly the exceptionalism of this exception does not particularly correlate with either simplism in one direction or mystification in the opposite direction.

___
[2] Like Cook County, IA is located too far from salt water for there to be much antecedent likelihood of it producing accurate knowledge of, or clever managerial schemes for, the Lesser Breeds Without.

The Paymasters of Pajamadom are eager to get Dr. Paul out of the way, but even so, Squire Roger is jumpin’ the gun. "Views that were repudiated by ... Republicans on Tuesday" will, I presume, be about as whight a week from today as it is now--an’ quight a lot less eyebrow-raisin’. Unless, to be sure, the fiend rallies unexpectedly in New Hampshire. But if that happens, then what his freelordship has graciously scribbled here will look just as un-Nostradamic as what a more judicious dilbertophobe might have scribbled.

And the moral of *that*, Dr. Bones, is that the Squire does seem to have gotten the sentimental side of his perversion whight. Though, as I complain, not yet altogether a *simple* Simon Pajama, his freelordship has at least become a good hormone-baser, keystrokin’ what makes him feel comfy rather than gloomy lucubrations of tedious analysis.

Sammy Herald Pipes As Paid

2011-12-29T12:29:00.004Z

Dear Dr. Bones,

¡Happy Cathedral Murder Day, Señor Doctor! Eight hundred and twenty-two years, and the button is still hot.

Speaking of which,

Bring on the noise
By Boston Herald Editorial Staff
Thursday, December 29, 2011

Casino gambling is perhaps the ultimate hot button issue (...) Democracy is a messy business. But messy isn’t necessarily bad. And it beats rule by the few and the loud.

So. It is Specuvestment-Trumps-Democracy time again at Louisedayhicksville.

The editorial slaves over to the The LDHV Herald can not, naturally, injure their Funders’ cause by expressin’ the basic point like that, so instead we get "bring on the noise" an’ "the vote wasn’t bindin’" an’ "rather meaningless" an’ "squeaky wheels." Allow me to praise the latter insight particularly, reflecting strictly to myself how melodious the squeakin’s of Vox Pop sound to wingnut ear when they emerges from funder-compliant wads of Tee Putty.

As for ¿What Next?, Dollerica would not be Dollerica if ‘Mister’ Kraft an’ the Freelord of Wynn just threw in their hand at once. No doubt Bigmanaged Democracy is still only gettin’ started. The _Herald_ angels reveal themselves as but "small people," I fear, when they suggest that their freelordships should just meet with those "annoyed and ... sensitive selectmen" alone. Alone in a dark alley, it sounds like.

The Sammy Scabs fresh out of J-school an’ their circumambient frathouse babes obviously don’t have much idea how the Ebenezer Scrooges of Dollerica bigmanage. But then, neither does the Chairman of the Annoyed and Sensitive, who used a MacL@@han-Tube interview to suggest, by ostentatious and preëmptive refusal, that maybe if the gamester corporations were to make him a Krafty Wynner too.

Most important of all, it looks as if journalistic Louisedayhicksville has broken with the whole Norman Rockwell picture-postcard tradition. That old-fashioned New Iceland town meeting is no longer a treasured heirloom, little Sammy Scab has unmasked it for us as "rule by the few and the loud."

Now of course there is probably something to that: I betcha Increase Mather was pretty good at shouting othervolks down when they required downshouting. Practice every neosabbath morning for fifty or sixty years must have been marvelous preparation to be not only prescriptively Good and Great but also *¡LOUD!*.

Happy days.

_¿Bist du Zycher?_

2011-12-21T12:25:00.006Z

Dear Dr. Bones,

A casual look at this latest Kiddie-Conner wannabe had me primed to go off about how the DFPj, Dark Forces of Pajamatarianism, scarcely need him, unless, of course, Her-Son-the-Millionaire [1] has decided to throw in the moneybag -- the one with ‘PJM’ stenciled on it in fiat currency by the white hand of Freelady Simon Pajama herself. Or so I have been told.

Be that as it ain’t, what we have here, I presume , is basically a literary question. Or ‘neoliterary’ for those who prefer an eleven-foot pole. Pontificatin’ at selfservative kiddies about the quack profession exclusively is not a product for which the demand is infinite, though perhaps pious supplysiders should not attend to so low an’ almost heretical a consideration.

But I have reconsidered, and would now maintain that Freelord Zycher is not only a different barrel of fish from Master $onn¥, but a species of fish better adapted to the kiddiecon market. The key to it is rather well hidden, however, so I did not at once perceive that the whole scribble revolves around the first sentences of the third paragraphette above the freelordly bottomline, namely,

Recent research from the Pacific Research Institute examined the likely effects of these CER implications for R&D investment in new and improved pharmaceuticals and devices and equipment. Using (_sic_) data from the National Science Foundation and other sources, R&D investment would be reduced by about $10 billion per year over the period 2014 through 2025, or about 10-12 percent.

Despite that (really heroically) dangled participle, I fear that his freelordship scribbles Americanoe prose against the grain in a way that Wally Wombschool an’ Cindy from Wasilla will find too off-puttin’ to make it all the way down to the paydirt, rememberin’ at every step of their descent that CER signifies "comparative effective review" an’ has nothin’ at all to do with the Quest for the Higgs Boson. An’ even if they do arrive, an’ sorta remember what his freelordship is natterin’ on an’ on ’bout, the kiddies might easily miss that _fabula de se narratur_.

In a way, the freelordly boo-boo (as I consider it) is just that business you can find in all the for-dummies booklets about avoiding the passive voice. ’Tis a fun case, though, this one, because only if one wanted to rub in the dangle with salt would one take the active formulation to be *Obamacare uses NSF data to reduce R&D investement. Actually, the issue here is not so much who is to be the grammatical subject as who is to be semantic topic. His freelordship leaves out the Prince of Denmark, as it were. Abandoning any attempt to echo the freelordly word choices, I think what it comes to (or should have) is more or less "¡Listen up, kiddies! If we don’t get rid of Obamacare, you will wake up some mornin’ soon to find that your prospects of gettin’ (or just stayin’) rich through specuvestment in the shares of secret-sector medical corporations have been reduced drastically." [2]

Even if Master Wally an’ Mizz Cindy don’t have a lot of spare _sh’qálîm_ lyin’ around in the crevices of their potatoe couches to specuvest just at the moment, as I would guess they probably do not, they should not be left out of such a sentence altogether.

Only at this point, Dr. Bones, did I ask the pet G@@Gle to track down _M. le Baron de Zycher_ a little, and what she came back with shocks me His freelordship ...

... is associated with Benjamin Zycher Economics Associates, Inc. and holds several roles such as President and President. and is located in Agoura Hills, CA.[3]

Well, I suppose one need not necessarily be shocked, for "economic associates" is a shingle that any weasel can hang out. One can still only guess what the weasels actually *do* with their unquality time. It would be outrageous, though, if my instinctive guess was correct an’ his freelordship mostly specuvests with other volks’ money. In that case, it would be inexcusable to elide Master Wally an’ Mizz Cindy an’ all other brokees, present an’ future, actual an’ potential, out of the R&D investment reduction picture.

If, however, BZEA be only yet another whight-wing Tank of Thought, possibly the Madhatter Institute reproducin’ Herself by fission like an amœba, I suppose it would be permissible to discuss medical sector R&D investment reduction in a completely impersonal way. In that case, however, publishin’ ones ideoresearches at Pajama Junction NJ is inappropriate borderin’ on dotty. I mean, ¿Why not Carr and Driver?

Meanwhile, back in the freelordly scribble, notice what comes immediately after the passage I have swiped already:

Based upon the scholarly literature on the benefits of medical innovation, this reduction in the advance of medical technology would impose an expected loss of about 5 million life-years annually, with a conservative economic value of $500 billion, an amount substantially greater than the entire U.S. market for pharmaceuticals and devices and equipment.

I get the impression from that that _M. le baron de Zycher_ does not associate much with the base an’ vile of his freelordship’s own Party. Wally an’ Cindy will probably assume that anybooby who cannot go a hundred words without brandishin’ "scholarly literature" at ’em must be some kind of Lieberal Demoncrat in disguise.

Quight a lot of bad (IMHO) whightist agitprop makes this mistake of supposin’ that Wally an’ Cindy either like bein’ clobbered over their dittopans with footnotes an’ all the Persian apparatus of Tert. Ed. or at least profoundly respect those Kiddiemasters who so clobber. As you know, my own theory is that your typical selfservative kiddie hated School when she had to attend it, an’ to this day still hates anythin’ that very strongly reminds her of that previous condition of serfitude. Any discussion carried on the way _M. le baron_ carries on this one can therefore only be counterproductive for Party an’ AEIdeology, though to be sure it is highly likely to be nothin’ at all, because few kiddicons will get past, say, "... a rigorous evaluation of the impact of different options ..." [3] before switchin’ channels in hopes of somethin’ a little punchier.

Happy days.
--JHM

__
[1] His freelordship’s d.b.a. was, as I recall, "Paul Hsieh," but I don’t think the pet g@@gle arrested quight the whight suspect over here. "A zillion monkeys" somehow lacks that solemn gravity an’ austere sobriety one has come to rever in the Daughters of Virtue & Sons of Wisdom, LLC.

In line with the main argument above, notice that the minions of Simon Pajama do not regard either their old medico or their new pseudo as worthy of mention under the rubric of http://pjmedia.com/columnists/ . I tentatively infer that in YaleoDra™a (Pat. Pend.) there exists a sort of class distinction between Action Persons (_actionis personæ_, members of the neonobility an’ superior neogentry) an’ mere no-’count trailer-trash also-rans like P. X. Hsieh or Benjamin, Freelord Zycher.

(( To digress about the Gang of Fifteen, I am only 50% satisfied with the Simon-Pajamatan discriminations: happy, that is, to see that Don Ricardito de Fernández y Podhòretz qualifies as an Upper, displeased that Th. X. Blumer, the Voice of Greater Cincinnati Pettybiz, did not make the august freelordly cut. As you know, these are my two pet favourite pajamaclads, of far greater interest than the rest of the pack. ))

=
[2] As you see, I deploy a passive verb myself, so obviously I do not condemn a whole Voice mindlessly out of hand. In fact, passivity often helps one get the topic whight by throwing the appropriate noun phrase to the beginning of the clause.

(( "Passivity often helps," by the way, might be sent off to the Active Only Society for an advisory opinion. ))

=
[3] His freelordship is not the only one vernacular-challenged, looks like. in Chicagoland when I was young, rôles were always ‘played’ and never ‘held’. I suppose it is more material than grammatical, though delicious on any terms, to find a Party neocomrade no more than "associated with" a wracket named after precisely himself. Though I suppose it may have been Benjy’s Daddy who founded BZEA. But then again, BZEA may have been founded three months ago, for it appears the _M. le baron_ is no longer with the Madhatterites. At any rate, here is a second _Almanach Neogothique_ in which his freelordship has not the honour to figure.

=
[4] Paragraphette 3, _ad fin._

A Neorural Ride

2011-12-12T13:47:00.009Z

Dear Dr. Bones,

Mr. Cobbett (dba ‘Porcupine’) would be the ideal fan of ‘Mittens’ Romney, King of Flipflop, if he is really the same guy I knew in the 1790’s as the whightist of whight-guard Federalists. He never gave a Jacobin an even break, Big Pete Porcupine didn’t - not before becomin’ a Jake himself. [1]

Be that as it no doubt ain’t, not raisin’ "revenues just for the fun of it" is only the start of the Triumph of the Quill Porcky’s account of what Mittens did-- or wanted to do--with the swag that he was obliged to steal from the taxpayers is better still:

[He] just sent the dollar amount to the town. He said it was silly for the [S]tate to set up artificial little accounts, and that towns knew what they needed to spend money on - maybe they had a big need in a school, but not for a road project. The town would decide for itself. The towns (and unions) went bananas. The cops were sure the schools would steal ’their money’, the schools were sure the seniors were out to get them, and so on. Some town fathers didn’t want to have to make decisions like that. So the [S]tate quickly drew up a budget reinstating the cubicle walls and redundant accounting, and everybody hugged their chains and whined about how mean the [S]tate was.

Before he went altzheimers altogether, old Ebb Scrooge behaved just like that with the Bad Poor of Dickensville. If it were entirely up to his freelordship, they would get nothing at all, which they richly deserved, but since there are social conventions to be observed if one wants the lower orders admitted close enough to be able to behold and envy, his freelordship would scatter a few guineas amongst the urchins and bootblacks and chimmneysweeps and whatnot, deriving the true OnePercenterly pleasure from their greedy scrambles.

Unfortunately for Mittens, around here the Legislature is answerable, sort of, to the lower orders as well as to the Natural Masters, and so the Brave New Order could not last. Comrade Frank of KA has written a whole book about what the *intermittent* application of Scrooge-Romney-Porcupine managerial techniques leads to. It is called The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Govern. The title may be a little unfair, because our holy Homeland™ has been so long corrupted by liberalism and democracy that their freelordships’ hired-hand pols can never manage to get through Phase Zero of their Thousand Millennium Plan , which phase, very properly, consists of clearin’ the ground [3] an’ evictin’ shiftless tenants, &c. &c. So naturally a hostile like the fiend Frank has no trouble taking cheapshots.

Speaking of whightist Plans, perhaps that should be "Scrooge-Romney-Porcupine-Ryan managerial techniques," for the Smirk of Janesville has notoriously proposed to treat geezers as Uncle Ebb treated street A-rabs. As Mittens (I presume) treated Chelsea or Fall River. From their freelordships’ point of view, to do anythin’ different would not be proper plannin’ at all. OF COURSE, the competent bigmanager starts with budgetin’, and, wherever Charity begins, budgetin’ can only begin at home. Mittens must therefore, all selfishness apart, think about Mittens first, not about urchins or slums or invalids, an’ especially about exactly how many guineas his freelordship has on hand to throw at the mob. [3] That is not quight what whightists understand by "supply-side economics" but it is not far off either.

Now every rule needs a good probative exception. In this case I nominate "If you have to ask in advance what it will cost, you cannot afford it." Individual onepercenterly Scrooges an’ Porcucobbets an’ Romneys an’ siblin’s Koch (&c. &c.) do indeed act like that a lot of the time, inspirin’ awe in the breasts of us fiscal humble. Indeed, the guinea-tossin’ _shtyk_ itself is designed to *look* like spur-of-the-moment, unbudgeted largesse. Well, ever Class has its Class idiots, I daresay, but a kindly Providence has arranged that OnePercenters who really take no thought for tomorrow will find themselves demoted to the Murrayan Underclass (Pat. Pend.) by the day after. ¡An’ serves ’em whight!

So then, "If you have to ask ..." applies only to their freelordships in their personal capacity as consumers. When their Crew is out Wreckin’ in an official or public way, there is no exceptionalism. Or rather, the words of the exception turn up deployed differently: "We cannot afford it, so ¡don’t even ask!"

As usual, it is all even more complicated then that, really. A book could be written about when it pleases, an’ when it displeases, our Natural Masters to be asked. The first Freelord Scrooge hated being asked on the street, obviously; the freelordly guinea toss was a sort of unilateral-preëmptive way of avoiding solicitation from the undeserving. Yet had Oxbridge had come to ScroogeBank with a proposal for "Ebenezer College," her emissaries would have been civilly received, at least, and maybe even gratified more or less as original- intented.

Poor Gov. Mittens actually obtained his "Willardmitt College," sort of, in the form of ‘Romneycare’. Unfortunately only his freelordship’s political enemies get a kick out of rememberin’ exactly who this Willardmitt person was. By Century XXIII or so, it will all be OK, no worse embarrassment to his freelordship’s scions than, say, a Lady Margaret Professorship of Divinity is to the Beaufort clan, but meanwhile . . . .

Meanwhile, it is probably rather important that nobody exactly asked for ‘Romneycare’. My impression, perhaps mistaken, is that Governor Mittens gave us RC largely to show off, to prove that he was the biggest Big Manager of them all, the alone wheeler-dealer an’ olympics-saver who could pull such a trick off, gettin’ quacks an’ shysters an’ insurance corporation freelords an’ even the Demoncrat General Court (¡!) to pull together.

I notice that this is all "supply side" again, though in yet a third distinct sense, the sense in which all my own scribbles are supply-side phænomena, much more fun for me to write than for anybody else to read.

At this point the Muses and you, Dr. Bones, have two General Theories of Mittens before you on the table, Dr. Bones, my own as just expounded and that of Peter, Freelord Porcucobbett, who evidently takes--would like to be able to take--His Excellency for a sort of first draft of the Janesville ’, a voice cryin’ in the wilderness "¡Start by decidin’ how much you’re gonna spend! And then, for porcupine’s sake, ¡¡STICK TO IT!!"

Probably neither of these has ever been present to Mittens himself as a conscious thumbrule, though obviously his freelordship does fancy himself as Big Manager and is also extremely unlikely to reject Porcunomics (let us call it) if there be no more to it than puttin’ everybody in Uncle Sam’s household on a fixed an’ inflexible allowance.

Perhaps we had better have a slice from the horse’s own anatomy. Unveilin’ his RC schemes , Gov. Mittens proclaimed

With the small percentage of uninsured in Massachusetts, we are in a unique position to give all of our citizens quality health insurance. This will not be a government-mandated universal coverage program or a plan that requires new taxes. It will be a market-based reform focused on the creation of affordable insurance plans.

Well. Neither McTrickledown nor Freelord Porcucobbett can make much hay out of that. There is no sign of bloc-grantin’ as panacea. and, as to bigmanagerial showin’ off, his freelordship perversely goes out of the way to suggest how easy, rather than how difficult, the "unique position" of our MA ought to make his proposed trick.

Back to the mother lode (now that I found it, presumably the whightists will pick Don Neutrino de Geewhiz and it will be pretty much useless). ¿How about 12 April 2006, a day that shall live in infamy at Rio Limbaugh?

Former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson commended Governor Romney for signing what Thompson termed “groundbreaking legislation to provide health coverage to all Massachusetts families. Massachusetts is showing us a better way, one I hope policy makers in Statehouses and Congress will follow to build a healthier and stronger America,” said Thompson, a former Republican governor of Wisconsin.

¡Oops! ¡Not the whight passage at all! What I meant to swipe was

An achievement like this comes around once in a generation, and it proves that government can work when people of both parties reach across the aisle for the common good. Today, Massachusetts is leading the way with health insurance for everyone, without a government takeover and without raising taxes. (...) This would not have been possible without the courageous work of Senate President Travaglini, Speaker DiMasi, providers, insurers, consumer groups and all the other industry stakeholders who recognized an opportunity to do something historic.

That’s more like it. His Excellency did not lay undue stress on who it was that knocked all those heads of an industry stakeholder together until ‘Romneycare’ was realized, yet ’tis clear enough what is goin’ on, I think.

Again, no hint of bloc-grantin’.

Freelord Porcucobbett may object, however, with a certain degree of fairembalance, that in one way Gov. Mittens really did make it easy for himself: this is nothing particularly to do with the Commonwealth’s "unique posirion," but rather with the fact that the RC scheme faintly smells of Ponzi to the sensitive political nostril. In particular, that "without raising taxes" is distinctly a case of whistling as one passes the graveyard. Governor Patrick, and most other loyal supporters of ‘Romneycare’, talk nowadays as if making RC financially viable had been specifically discussed and then by agreement postponed to some future rainy day. Whereas I strongly suspect that not talking about it at all was _sine quâ non_.

To refine my own theory in that light, I put it to you, sir, that Mittens must especially fancy himself as a personnel bigmanager rather than as a CFO. . His freelordship got all the ‘stakeholders’ to agree, which is miracle enough in itself and does not require a fool-proof perpetual endowment as well.

Republicanines bein’ what they are--norquisted, that is, into so many pretzels--to say "without raising taxes" was required absolutely of an Otherparty freelord settin’ out to become POTUS. Accordin’ly, Mittens said it. And perhaps we may leave it at that.

Happy days.
--JHM

___
[1] His freelordship solicits bein’ taken notice of like this, it seems to me, for that "obedient servant" bologna on the freelordly bottomline can only go with the Cobbett _shtyk_.

=

[2] ’Tis s a little *more* than fair, though, that Frank did not shudder-quote either ‘conservatives’ or ‘govern’. "Almost superhuman restraint," I calls it.

=

[3] The student may insert her own joke at this point about extemporaneous $10,000 specuvestments.

Everybody in the Tank for Lizzie

2011-12-10T09:22:00.006Z

Dear Dr. Bones,

Well entanked are the mainstream Blue Blazers, that is, who piously account St. Elisabeth of Warrenbuffet ‘strong’ with the particular cerulæan species of strength which their Blueships just happen to like best themselves. One might uncharitably, but not, I think, inaccurately, speak of the ’GBH gentry’s _Kraft-durch-Geistesfundament_ approach to ungrounded collective self-esteem.

H*rv*rd has much to answer for, but that is another story. At the moment we may prescind from root causes and go mostly for the pragmatic capillaries, meaning the "Karl an’ Lizzie Show," another product from roughly the same wunnerful volks who gave us Harry an’ Louise. As you know, I have my doubts about _le ouarrenbuffetisme en Amérique_, yet Her Beatitude undoubtedly is well-advised to overlook poor Sen. Fratboy and go straight for rich Karl, Firstlord Rove. I mean, ¿Why fool around? Take out Edgar Bergen, and the New McCarthyism will instantly become a used-truck joke rather than a menace.

His firstlordship is no contemptible opponent, however. Comrade Charley, who most likely has not been on the MBTA in thirteen years going on thirty, speaks of "preposterous Rovery." Not very respectful, is that, of his firstlordship’s exalted rank an’ station. [1] More important, however, is that jesting Charley may underestimate the freelordly grasp of political strategy and operations [2] and tactics.

With this we arrive at our _droitisme du jour_, which, like a great deal of what appears on the op-ed pages of _The Wall Street Jingo_, is thoroughly Rovan in its substance, an’ likely Rove-inspired, in the sense of bein’ a demonstrable consequenc of his firstlordship’s Master Plan

POLITICAL DIARY DECEMBER 10, 2011
Scott Brown’s Strategy
The Massachusetts senator faces a tough re-election challenge from Elizabeth Warren.
By ALLYSIA FINLEY

This week Senate Republicans blocked President Obama’s nomination of former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Only two Republicans broke ranks -- Olympia Snowe of Maine and Scott Brown of Massachusetts -- and both senators are up for re-election next year.

Ms. Snowe should win handily if she isn’t toppled by a primary challenger. Mr. Brown’s re-election prospects, by contrast, are shakier. Two new polls show the GOP freshman trailing Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor who helped establish the CFPB and is expected to be the Democratic nominee. The University of Massachusetts-Amherst gives Ms. Warren a four-point lead and a University of Massachusetts-Lowell/Boston Herald poll has her up by seven points. Three months ago, most polls showed Mr. Brown slightly ahead. The senator’s approval rating has also fallen by eight points to 45%, though his favorables are still in positive territory and exceed Ms. Warren’s.

While the poll results may be disconcerting for Mr. Brown and Senate Republicans, they’re not unexpected. Ms. Warren’s campaign has spent $1.5 million on an ad that portrays her as a defender of the middle class. And the League of Conservation Voters has dumped $2 million on spots that tar Mr. Brown as a Washington insider. The real surprise is that Mr. Brown still leads Ms. Warren, 53-37, with independents. Because Republicans constitute less than 15% of the Massachusetts electorate, Mr. Brown will probably have to win more than two-thirds of the independent vote and probably pick up some Democrats as well. [3]

Mr. Brown might feel the need to bolster his credentials as an independent thinker by voting with Democrats on some issues. These occasional defections may irritate Republicans, but they’d do well to ask themselves if they’d rather have a Scott Brown in that seat who votes with them 90% of the time -- or an Elizabeth Warren.

Her freeladyship does not spell out that the notorious ratfinkess Snowe of ME did not actually vote for Comrade Cordray’s confirmation, she only barked ‘Present’. It is a little surprising to me, by the way, that Senator Fratboy did not do the same. Charley-on-the-Great Blue Hill could claim with some plausibility that Fratboy’s handlers an’ Funders must be gettin’ really scared.

I draw your attention to her freeladyship’s "real surprise ... that Mr. Brown still leads Ms. Warren." I incline to think that is disingenuous, but would like your opinion since my own is wobbly. Of course one presumes that no Jingo seriously believes that money cannot buy elections, and equally it will be a problem for Freedame Finley that the money she speaks of has been spent by the forces of unwhighteousness, who presumably ought not to be able to pull off a trick ideally reserved to the Jingo Class.

The neocomradology hereabouts gets complicated, however: naturally the WSJ freedame does not trouble us with any utterly irrelevant information about how much has been spent in the path of Fratboy’s reëlection. Pretty plainly the _Jingo_ consumer is bein’ solicited to wallow briefly in selfpity that $3,500,000.00 can have been deployed on behalf of manifest unwhighteousness. The wallowin’ is easier if one tosses in a little _suggestio falsi_ to the effect that poor Fratboy has hardly anythin’ to spend except maybe a small mark-up on those baseball bats over to his e-store. [4]

___
[1] The ’GBH gentry are in much the same pickle, rank-and-stationwise, as were the Airstrip One Republicans of 1641-1660. Always in danger, I mean, of inadvertently giving their own tenants and clients unfortunate notions along Col. Rainsborough’s lines.

With Her Beatitude, to be sure, anything of the rabble-rousing "poorest she that is in Massachusetts " sort would indeed be an inadvertance, for of course most of our poor [s]he’s cannot afford to specuvest in anything classier than lottery tickets. (Plus now maybe slot machines: "¡Thank you, Governor Paddy!") To offer them "consumer protection" againt "Wall Street" is not merely the proverbial refrigerators for Esquimaux, it is velvet gloves and carpet slippers for quadruple amputees. So to speak.

=

[2] ¿Would you happen to know, O Bones, exactly what this "operational level" that with-it violence pros always stick in between the strategy and the their tactics nowadays actually amounts to? I am happy enough to pick it up like a jackdaw and throw it at anybooby who seems to need thrown at, but I would not positively object to knowing what I am doing.

=

[3] The Party neocomradess estimates her ideobuddies in MA at fifteen percent, which is probably optimistic fudge to some extent. Until proved otherwise, therefore, I shall continue to subtract four points and speak of ‘ElevenPercenters’, opposed, naturally, to us fiends of "The Eighty-Nine Percent."

=

[4] Ye Olde Fratboy Paraphernalia Shoppe is a scribbleworthy topic in itself. Indeed, I am thinking of an epic poem . . . .

Meanwhile, and confined to prose, I guess that the Funders of Fratboy insisted that Master Scott have a storefront lest the "small people" fail to take him seriously, solicitationwise. They don’t need their smallies to actually buy anythin’, they only (as I conjecture) want’em to feel at home on the website

On the other hand, if you would kindly click here , Dr. Bones, you may discover exactly what mark-up the Fratboy Funders have decided on. Not to give away the ending and spoil your own fun and your mouse’s, I shall say no more here than that they could in theory rake in a significant number of _sh'qálîm_. ASSUMIN’, that is, that any significant number of Fratboy groupies crave to possess a "personally autographed" whight wingbat.

(( It would be fun to think of gear that Her Beatitude might countermarket with -- granny glasses, or, if clubs be trumps, a rolling pin , or ¿how about . . . ?

(( ¡Alas!, there will be nothing of the sort. Her Beatitude is out for a rather more upmarket market niche, a better slice of smallies who want their steak so bad they can dispense with the sizzle. ))

Knows from Newswhere : "Patrick Administration Erased Romney Era Emails"

2011-12-08T07:30:00.006Z

Dear Dr. Bones,

Naturally, the _Globe_ of Gotham lost this keyboard’s custom when it gated their community recently. Anybooby can see that that is the way we are headed, yet there is no need to rush unseemly into the Brave New Decline.

Anyway, an out-of-commonwealth perspective remains available gratis from the Whight Guard volks over to here . That crew manage to make the Baní Sulzberger look like locals most of the times, so profound is their internal emigration, but that doesn’t matter, I suppose, when the guardists are only reprintin’ stuff fetched from Manhattan. As follows:

According to the _Boston Globe_, the Deval Patrick administration inadvertently erased thousands of Romney Administration emails.

"That includes at least four of Romney’s top Cabinet officials. Thirty days after they left office, their e-mails were automatically purged from the state’s central computers, wiping out records of decisions on an array of sensitive topics, from health care to raising state revenues. Romney Cabinet secretaries said in interviews that they were never told by administration or state technology officials that they needed to take any steps to protect their e-mails. "No one came over to me and said, ’Do this, do this, do this, do this,’’’ said Tim Murphy, who as secretary of Health and Human Services helped formulate the state’s landmark health care law. "I just turned my computer off and went home. That’s the end of it.’’

There goes that line of attack by the Democrats. For it was they who did the erasing.

Neocomrade R. X. Eno, Freelord Redmass in the peerage of Foxcuckooland, is author of the twistatorial frame here. His freelordship has evidently not much acquaintance with Comp. Sci., for of course if "automatically purged" be accurate, the true perps must be the installers and configurators of the programme, who, in the case at hand, must be the agents of Republicanines if not themselves Party neocomrades.

His freelordship elegantly, an’ quight unanswerably, says not a word about those amazin’ hard disk drives that automatically bought and disconnected themselves, and then rode off into the sunset with ‘Mittens’. Freelord Redmass must know about them, for the very same _Globe_ scribble [1] informs us that

[A]ides in Romney’s executive office also took the unusual step of buying individual desktop computer hard drives and taking them home, removing a large volume of material relating to Romney’s deliberations. That was not done by executive office aides for Swift and Cellucci (...) Reuters [2] news agency reported this week that breaking an office computer lease by using the individual hard drives cost state taxpayers $100,000 . . . .

Especially worth hushin' up, from the Whight Guard perspective, is that second bit, which reflects rather poorly, I venture to think, on ‘Mittens’ as exponent of Big Management an' heroic Cutter of Costs. Plus there may be a Rulalaw angle, sorta. [3] Though I guess it is not technically illegal to break leases as long as you buy up the fragments afterwards. _Dixit_ Powell, Esq.

The _Gotham Globe_ goes on about it at remarkable length, "Number of Words: 2218 / Number of Unwrapped lines: 148 / Number of characters (non-space): 11552." All worth wading through, if only to meet the deliciously surnamed Brian McNiff at about word 1,425.

Happy days.

__
[1] One can sneak into The Fishwrap on a Hill if some confederate in the beleaguered garrison throws one a link from the inside.

(( In some ways, the New Dark Ages promise to be remarkably like the old ones. Complete with treacherous ‘confederates’ like McTrickledown, who am no ideobuddy to Freelord Redmass an’ the Whight Guard.

(( Admittedly, in any age it would be difficult to cite a document for the parts of it that are convenient in the path of one’s Party an’ Her AEIdeology without lettin’ the ill-disposed know where to go to look for less convenient aspects. Aspects to use against. I presume hostiles were supposed to stop when they see there is a link, or maybe when they click and verify that there is another end to it that looks tolerably plausible .

(( As Mr. Burke said to Lord Bowlingalone, "¿Who now reads _Globe_ articles? ¿Who ever read them thru?" ))

=

[2] ¿Reuters? Ah, so. ¡Why this is _Globalisierung_, nor are we out of it, we who now get our Beacon Hill news not merely from NY but from UK!

=

[3] http://j.mp/sQu66a .

Charity does NOT begin at brown

2011-12-06T11:34:00.000Z

Dear Dr. Bones,

Now *here* is a fun Vision for you, sir: Don Neutrino accompanyin’ Lady Bountiful as she makes her rounds of (specifically) the (Brown) Bad Poor.

Lady B., though, would probably object to the size of the proposed Gingrichian retainer at the outset, an’ the negotiations would get no farther. If that obstacle were surmounted, there would be the continuin’ levels of Gingrichocentric overhead an’ egohead ever after.

I expect Bounty will prefer to spend of her own unassisted, rather than take to politics in a sieve captained by Master Newt [1] an’ with course steered by Don Rubenito from the stables of Simon Pajama.

No great loss, for Party-of-Grant Jumblies wouldn’t want to make the voyage in any case. ¿Why should they travel, who are already here? [2]

To flat-out change the subject, my recent listening to, study of, whightist radio in Greater Boston has given me a fresh insight into the Republicanine Dittopan [3] , as follows: the kiddiecons’ favorite Exmas charity is, by several landslides, the USO. Or rather, a variety of USO spin- or rip-offs of the kiddies’ own, conducted by (I presume) more politically reliable moneythrowers. Allow me to disrecommend, for example, this crew, though admittedly the pet g@@gle just had an encounter with ’em, an’ they do not, as far as I know, advertise on the Three Weird Sisters. [4]

I ask you, Bones, ¿what better cause can ScroogeBank, an’ Warbucks Defense Widgets, an’ maybe even a few non-corporate citizens of exceptional Vi®tue an’ Wisdo™, find to throw a little money at for self-ostentation purposes than ‘warrors’ an’ ‘heroes’? The Brown Poor simply aren’t in the same league, object-of-charitywise. [5]

For consider the public Exmas givin’ quandry of Ebenezer XIV or Oliver VIIII or Firstlord Murdoch or the Koch Siblin’s: "¿How. oh ¿how?," wonders the kiddiecons’ Uncle Ebb to himself,"Can WE ever be absolutely sure that OUR generous, if WE don’t say so OURSELVES, benefactions will not fall into unwhighteous hands, dirty hands of Bad Poors who pull the lever for Lieberalism an’ for Demonocracy?"

Now to give exclusively to Heroic Warriors is not *absolutely* safe, but I betcha it sure beats whatever comes second. [6]

Indeed, Dr. Bones, perhaps we should reconsider our recent decision to abolish the traditional category of "good poor" and reinstate it with "persons of (State) violence, current or former" as (for now, at least) sole occuopants of the pigeonhole. Reconfigured like that, the category would mystify a Brit Victorian accustomed to the real thing--¡fancy Tommy Atkins crowding out the widows and orphans!--but I daresay not many Brit Vicks will be writing to the Times of Murdoch to protest in the year of religionism 1433-2012-5772.

Happy days.
--JHM

__
[1] In Spanshlingo, _el tritón_. In the dielect of Rio Limbaugh, at least. Madrid and Buenos Aires, I dunno about for sure.

=
[2] "¿Why must they travel, who are NOT here?" is no doubt the key question about crimmigrants an’ criminaliens , but I’m in a Buckley Minor (or Plutarchus-of-Chæronea mood and prefer not to crudely talk about my own announced subject before everybooby is thoroughly bored with what I do talk about instead.

=
[3] The RK9 DP is identical with the late Perfesser Kirk’s "conservative mind."

=
[4] For those of them at Rio Limbaugh (or Shanghai or Bangalore), Princess Goneril is WTKK-FM 96.9, and Princess Regan (no relation to Ronald XL) is WRKO AM 680, while poor Cinderella must content herself with Party Neocomrade (seventh grade) J. X. Katz, an’ fifty thousand watts at twelve hundred wingocycles of modified amplitude. Plus also the Witch Doctor of Democracy. Mizz Cindy used to call herself "Rush Radio 1200" but then suddenly that stopped. Puppy love amongst the kiddiecons no doubt has its quarrels.

=
[5] With rare individual exceptions. Brownies of the male persuasion who enlist as violence pros presumably qualify for free cellphones (or whatever bennies) on the same terms an’ conditions as those who look more like _bonâ fide_ Americanoe rifletoters.

=
[6] Almost certainly what comes second is dread diseases. And the reason is plain: Uncle Ebb an’ Daddy Ollie _y Tio Ruperto_ are nearly as likely to die of them personally as are _señores las indocumentadas y los indocumentados_ or those with that involuuntary servitude problem in their pre-1865 background. Legally, the American Cancer Society is a charity, but from the psychological standpoint of a TopPercenter, to fund heroic tumorfighters, in moderation, is no doubt much more like a prudent an’ thoroughly selfocentric specuvestment. Even if all the Pasteurs an’ Schweitzers an’ Salks an’ Cricks an’ Watsons voted Demoncrat to a man, that deplorable exxentricity would hardly matter, because there are very few of them.

Furthermore, if the lucky number does come up before Uncle Ebb ‘passes’, almost certainly succesful tumorfightin’ will be so expensive in most cases that nonpercenters need not apply. Best of all, probably, from the Ebenezeroid or Oliverite perspective, will be all the wheelin’ an’ dealin’ an’ specuvestin’ in stocks an’ shares of new secret-sector business corporations specializin’ in Big Cancer. The Bad Poor will have no better chance of gettin’ rich off the Great Tumor Boom of 2023 than of getting healed by the wunnerdrugs.

But Galen knows best.

Blimp Unready for Prime Time Twelve Ways

2011-11-28T12:19:00.003Z

Dear Dr. Bones,

The usual liberal complaint against the conservative opposition to higher income taxes is greed and the better-offs’ self-serving reluctance to pay their “fair share.” But while perhaps true in some instances, I don’t think that is an accurate writ against most of those in that now demonized $200,000 and above categories who resent forking over more. Rather, here are a random 12 complaints that I hear from those who become furious about preposed higher income tax rates:

and then we get the Twelve Tables of the Blimp, on the margins of which I shall now doodle a few graffiti of my own.

(1a) ¿Why any ‘bite’ at all? Our Betters have given us, for example, Rear-Colonel V. D. Hanson-Blimp himself, an’ the late Mr. Jobs, an’ Einstein, an’ Spinoza, an’, in short, the whole Whight Civilisation of the Western Race. To ask them to pay taxes on top of whole millennia of unilateral and preëmptive benefaction would be like interceptin’ St. Nick at the chimney to collect an exit fee.

=
(2a) This one appears to be Freelord Blimp slightly misundertandin’ the Hooverville barkin’ points, or at least runnin’ a number of them together injudiciously, plus tossin’ in rather to much of his freelordship’s favorite subject, "My big-farming near neighbor" &c. &c. Anyway, several different _respondeo_s are called for:

(2a-A) His freelordship is tryin’ to help Ebenezer XIV Scrooge an’ Oliver VIII Warbucks dodge so-called ‘progressive’ taxation, a IWP, "improper & wicked project," _Federalist X_, which antecedently *presumes* the Blessings of Inequality a couple of orders of magnitude more notably than it does anything to lessen them in practice.

(2a-B) His freelordship, bein’ a _konsequent_ inegalitarian, as no doubt befits a violence pro, real or wannabe, observes that inside the ranks of the freelordly Class there are many mansions, not all of them affordable by everybooby Classy. This is certainly the case, as a matter of fact, but how it is supposed to work towards proppin’ down the taxes of all Hoovervillains generally beats me. It looks, though, like a sound argument for havin’ six dozen different tax rates rather than only half a dozen, when one goes in for impropriety an’ wickedness.

(2a-C) Taxation of the Classy won’t--cannot possibly--rase enough money to pay for ALL the improper wickednesses that we fiends have resolved to perpetrate. This one, at least, must have been on the barkin’ points actually handed to Col. Blimp to work from. Since all the TopPercenters’ scabs bark like that, counterpoints have been prepared by keyboards more gifted than this one with things like Nobel Prizes in Economics. So ¡let Blimp go argue with Comrade Kruggie about it over here ! [1]

=

(3a) Most of what gets swiped in taxation goes whight to the Bad Poor. Here is the heart of it, I suppose, as opposed to the dittopan, whose location is discussed in note [1] to (2a-C).

Or one of the hearts, rather. What I mean by thinking at once of ‘heart’ is that this is Blimp’s best bet for appealin’ to his own hormone-baser Party base an’ vile. "Another’s tears are water," says the Russian proverb, very soundly: it is difficult to imagine a Blimp workin’ Wally Wombschool an’ Cynthia Wasillatensis up into a phrenzy ’bout taxation simply as takin’: *their* hearts won’t be broken if Ebenezer XIV cannot afford quite so many yachts an’ polo ponies next year. No, Dr. Bones, when you really wanna get the couch potatoes up off their potatoe couches an’ ready to stick a pitchfork in the enemies of the Classy, the thing to do is fib to ’em a little about how the loot is distributed once it has been snatched. "Auntie Zeituni" over in Southie, for example. Or like "foreign aid," which certainly deserves to be shudder-quoted once the whightists get through barkin’.

(( This disjunction works both ways: Ebenezer XIV an’ Oliver VIII an’ probably Blimp, in his freelordship’s private capacity, do not actually much mind if bad-poor old Auntie is happy whether in Boston or in Botswana. They only want to keep their "Bush tax cuts" plus . . . plus then maybe ask for a little more economic justice still after they get that coonskin firmly nailed down an’ the Confidence Fairy has once again been sighted at Rio Limbaugh. Only that an’ nothin’ more. Not anythin' more at the moment, thank you, but call again in the mornin' . . . . ))

=
(4a) Point IV *seems* to mean, murkily, that Blimp supposes the Wicked State can always borrow (or perhaps simply print) whatever loot it requires, so ¿Why must it rob the Classy too?

This is a very important question for serious mammonologists, but because Blimp is even farther off than the Muses and thou and I from bein’ any sort of political œconomist, I will punt this one for now, hoping to get back to it some day when I get to set the stage and enunciate The Points.

=
(5a) Though ‘efficiency’ sounds very grown-up and mammonological, and therefore also better passed over by the likes of me for the reason just given, this is maybe not entirely the case. Master Wally an’ Mizz Cindy cherish, I believe, certain lay-sheep notions of efficiency to which whightist agitproppers like Blimp can appeal, even if Mr. Ricardo would not give such stuff the time of day, not to speak of more recent practitioners. ¿How about "¡WE could sure spend that money better than Auntie Zeituni ever could!"

That is gross confusion, no doubt, a positive Confoundation of Kingdoms. But you are to reflect, Dr. Bones, that even on a good day with a strong wind empowering one’s generators, and even after more than two centuries of economics as a psocial scientism, one has to watch oneself like a hawk watching a Blimp to avoid letting moralism break in at least a little when one ventures a reflection like "X could spend the money better than Y could." That form of words does not, obviously, mean the same thing to a hedge-fund specuvestor or to a Bane Capitalist that it means to the Otherparty base an’ vile, but to suppose that even the Freelords of Finance understand ‘efficiency’ in a strictly amoral (_wertlos_) fashion is naïve.

=
(6a) Blimp is quight whight to reveal that the betterness of our Betters is not to be judged by salaries alone. Very odd, though, that his freelordship cannot bring himself to mention anythin’ in particular by name that matters more, like ‘wealth’ or ‘Power’.

=
(7a) ¡Tusk, tusk -- to sink to the level of mere Psychobabble! Hoovervillainy really *has* rotted the poor man’s dittopan.

Well, the only thing to do with "So-an’-so makes me sick" is throw it back at once like a grenade: his freelordship ought now to have some insight into how the "Occupy Televisionland" kiddies feel on discovering that nothing whatsoever is really and truly "beyond the dreams of Avarice."

=
(8a) This is certainly one of the best barkin’ points available to her who scabs for ScroogeBank an’ Warbucks Defense Widget Inc.

Blimp passes over it so rapidly that I suspect his freelordship agrees with me that this is rather too precious a pearl to cast before pajamaclads. Though all kiddie selfservatives are children, at best, when they reflect, yet there is no way of either Blimp or myself guessing their chronological ages in a market-research way, so as to know, that is, which cohorts to pander to and how.

=
(9a) This point is not so good, though next only to Point Two (I think) in frequency of gettin’ barked elsewhere.

One trouble with secret-sector Charity is that it "begins at home" and rarely falls far from the tree. When the literal gates go up around their freelordships’ gated communites, when the barbed wire, an’ the Rotweilers, an’ the mine fields, an’ the counterstormtroopers are finally set in place, no apple is likely to roll down to the Bad Poor out in the wilderness under any circumstances.

Most Conners of Kiddies do not mind this patchiness (so to euphemize), though when they essay to defend it directly, old-fangle _caritas_ tends to go supply-side an’ turn out have more to do with the True Freedumb® of Freedame Bountiful than with the requirements of the needy.

(( It occurs to me that devout dilbertarians must find our good Rear-Colonel unsatisfactory when it comes to promotin’ the True Freedumb® ideoproduct, one which they specially affect. Still,. there are three Points to go . . . . ))

=
(10a) Well, ‘technocracy’ can pass for Freedumb™-related, I suppose. ¡ScroogeBank an’ WDW certainly don’t want any stinkin’ ‘experts’ pushin’ ’em around!

But I fear Blimp is not really all that interested in it from a tip-of-the-classberg perspective such as Ebenezer XIV or Oliver VIII naturally take. It sounds to me as if his freelordship is mostly rehearsin’ some Faculty Club pet peeves of his own here, quite a number of notches down the Great Chain of Bein’ from his paymasters. Doubtless it drives Blimp up the stratosphere whenever somebody like St. Elizabeth of Warrenbuffet starts talking as if she could do his freelordship’s tertiary-academic job better than he does it, if only she could spare a weekend or two to learn some Grief an’ Laffin’ like Blimp knows. Is alleged to know.

I’d be a little annoyed, too, by that, but since there is no danger whatever of this replacement actually happening, what is at stake here is not his freelordship’s True Freedumb™, only more like his _amour propre_.

=
(11a) This is merely Point III reworded a little, yet another moan that what the Wicked State steals as taxation from the Classy goes chiefly to the Bad Poor. [2]

=
(12a) The Bad Poor are not doing badly at all on the material side, not if contrasted with "coal-dusted Dickensian London" or (let me add) the condition of most Lesser Breeds Without even today, out there beyond us pale in the Native-ridden boondocks of the world..

Nothin’ whatever to do with ™rue F®eedumb whatever has that empirical circumstance to do, though since nobooby is likely to deny it, it achieves not much for the Inegalitarian Argument to adduce it.

Actually, Dr. Jones, it looks to me as if his freelordship took off his intellectual pajamas, as it were, in the last few Points an’ went back to bed while his fingers kept on keystrokin’.

***
Presumably Blimp is anglin’ for an invitation to debate St. Elizabeth of H*rv*rdy, her of the "intellectual foundations" of Occupy Televisionland.

Well, I would not complain if that were to happen. Her Beatitude happens to be a good guy, an’ his freelordship a (formerly) high-class whightist scab, but happenstance is about all that is. So ’twould be _par congressus_ all ’round. Which is NOT to say, however, that it would be worth watching.

Happy days.
--JHM

___
[1] Considered as a rhetorical or ‘agitpropitational’ technique, of course, those who scab for the Classy in writin’ cannot posibly bark this one too often, so his freelordship is rather to be commended than otherwise for includin’ it. Even if it does tend to make his freelordship look like the possessor of dittopan that resembles a post-tornado junkyard.

NEVERTHELESS, I think Wally Wombschool an’ Cindy from Wasilla might have had their faith bolstered with a 13,409th repetition of the counterfactual without all the higgledy-pigglediness borrowed from his freelordship’s neighbor’s barn. She who sets up to vouchafe _urbi et orbi_ Fourteen Points (like St. Woodrow), or Ten (like Father Zeus), or Twelve (thus Blimp, splittin’ the difference between these distinguished Predecessors), ought to arrange them a little to suggest a little hierarchy. "First things first" is not the only acceptable rule, but there certainly ought to be some rule.

And ¡ESPECIALLY! there ought to be some kind of hierarchy in a list of points to be barked out in support of Lady Hierarchia Herself by some stout _Defensor Inequitalitatis_.

Now to put "But the Wicked State can never loot *enough* from the Daughters of Virtue & Sons of Wisdom, L.L.C. " first logically, if not necessarily literally, would be very reasonable, physical impossibility being about as conclusive an argument as exists. Since, however, it is so extremely conclusive that it rather tends to make whatever else one orates look otiose, probably it would work best as bottomline. In which case it is ten places out of order _chez Blimp_, over an’ above bein’ squirreled away amidst the higs an’ the pigs of Point II like Achilles hiding himself amongst the women.

=
[2] It’s well worth a whightwinger moanin’ about from the rhetorical or agitpropper perspective, I allow, but at the moment we are trying to discuss his freelordship’s matter rather than either his personal neostyle or the Platonic Form of Persuasion.

Dereliction of Blurbin'

2011-11-27T11:41:00.002Z

Dear Dr. Bones,

¿Who would do Mil. Sci. best, by the neocriterious an’ weekly-shiftin’ standards of Foxcuckooland, if not a news-commentary humorist?

¡Yet even a stopped clock is whight twice a day!

The McTime, by the way, is now [11/27/2011 04:49]. Put that in the memorandumb your prepare about this portentous phænomenon please, of a wingnutette that actually gets off the runway a little, accuracywise. It has nothing to do with the case, I know, but I want it around in the waiting room to keep poor Ambassador Huntsman company.

His freelordship of UT, too, has nothin’ to do with the fact that Secretary MacNamara’s War was presided over by none other than . . .

.... Hmmm. Is that "!Wait, wait, don’t tell me!" I hear you thinking, sir?

Well, there is no urgent need for *me* to disclose Ms. Clio’s punchline. You and I can talk instead about the latest degeneration of the pajamaclads, offerin’ us what *purports* to be NCH, news-commentary humor, but is really only an advertisement for somebooby’s book.

Neocomrade Rear-Colonel (as he now is-- as we all are on Monday mornin’s forty years after the game) H. R. McBooby

Should you want some more recent O. B., Big LEW says "currently a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution."

¡Small world, that his freelordship should prove a Hoovervillain! For here was I, naturally expecting the pet g@@gle to report that our latest Macnam-basher graduated from the _Voyènnaya Akadémiya imieni M. V. Frûnze_. Or thereabouts. ¡What a disappointment to encounter a conventional rake’s progress from Valley Forge to West Point to Galvez Mall 94305!

Dr. Gen Petrolæus (‘David’ to George XLIII) can go back to Princeton, but it looks as if poor unpostgraduated McBooby will have to do that fadin’ away _shtyk_ in the bright sunwhight of CA. Rather a challenge, that may be.

=
You might make a separate memorandumb for LEW’s own file: at the end here we get

McMaster was passed over for promotion to brigadier general twice in a row, in 2006 and 2007. As one of "the most celebrated soldier (_sic_) of the Iraq War", this decision was controversial among the public. "The reasoning was possibly his tendency to speak out against the status quo, although it is always for the benefit of the mission and his soldiers."

That seems to me to raise certain fairembalancement questions. To sound rather as if a certain H. R. McBooby wrote it, even. (It would be fun, by the way, to know exactly what teacup that controversy-riven ‘public’ foregathers in.)

As is notorious, your typical Officers Club violence pro acts always for the beneifit chiefly of Number One. DMS, Douglas MacArthur Syndrome, I believe they call this form of brain fever. And, if we may trust our humorist’s account of all these things (a very dubious business, but let’s go along with the gaga) Big Doug an’ little Herbie do broadcast on much the same self-wavelength: "Had Johnson actually listened to the advice of his generals — essentially that *war is war and must be fought to win* — the outcome would certainly have changed."

A native speaker would have written "the oucome would have been different" of course, but the general idea is clear enough.

It is kinda funny-peculiar that our humorist does not realize that he is blurbin’ his ideobuddy’s wannabe potboiler in a way that makes it unnecessary for it to be read at all. One the one hand, decent political adults do not doubt that noble Godzilla *could* have trampled down evil Bambi, had we been prepared to deploy "force without stint or limit." We do not need to be told that, and we account it a thoroughly kiddie notion that that is what should have happened. To make SECWAR readable about by grown-ups would require at least of modicum of sympathy with all those whiz-kid calculations about bigmanagerial cost-effectiveness that his freelordship of MacNamara brought over with him from the Ford Motor Company. Gagster Orr here gives the impression that Rear-Col. McBooby is not interested in that brand of eye glaze at all. Impressions given out by whightists are far from reliable, but when one cares as little about Mil. Sci. and Mil. Hist. as I do, it is not worth $10.68 at Amazon to check out exactly how bad this joke is.

Meanwhile, back at Rio Limbaugh, the selfservative kiddies already know their own notions through an’ through. "OF COURSE we shoulda just nuked ’the Ho Chi Minh out of ’em," barks Wally Wombschool. Hence there is no reason to expect Master Wally to wanna read all about it any more than the Muses or you or I do.

Happy days.
--JHM

___

"across the havoc of classwar, a great general"

2011-11-26T10:09:00.011Z

Dear Dr. Bones,

_M. le Baron de ‘Spengler’_ is an old semi-acquaintance, one of the few virtual Hongkonghites one knows well enough to recognize again. Exactlty what Virtual Hongkonghia may has to do with the A.R.E., Arab Republic of Egypt, is an interesting, perhaps even an alarming, question. [0]

Whatever else may be goin’ on here, certainly there is lots an’ lots of whight-wing internationalism. I think--let’s start with nomenclature, ¿shall we?--we should call spenglerisin’ something like W.W.I. rather than plain old vanilla ‘globalism’, a term that always makes me think first (1) of little Tommy Wobble with the big moustache and then (2) start fingering my revolver, or whatever that is in my pocket. Ninety-nine percent of Homeland™ whightists think Tommy is one of us, a Lieberal Demoncrat of some sort, which by it self is a splendid tribute to the efficacy of wombschoolin’ an’ freedumbin’ down. Tommy *did* have certain advantage in Life denied to Wally Wingnut an’ Cindy from Wasilla, like GGP and that whole service of sterling flatware removed from his digestive tract shortly after birth, but . . . .

I digress. The thing is, ‘globalism’ comes with lots of neobaggage attached to it, whereas ‘internationalism’ lost all its suitcases and carpetbags years ago: "¿Who now reads Thomas Woodrow Wilson?" We can now start over whight from scratch with ‘internationalism’. At first, no doubt, we will have to insist on the neoreactionary (Spengleroid) complexion of the ideoproduct almost every time it is alluded to, but eventually the epithet will drop away. This is what happened with the former "political economy," for instance: the dismalness did not get less political as it darkened, on the contrary, it got so totally political that there was nothing left for the P-word to mark a boundary with.

Bein’ a furriner, _M. le Baron_ can say certain things that would still give offense in the mouth of a Homeland™ic, like for example that real fun title of his freelordship’s, "Lootin’ the Egyptian Currency: Democracy in Action."

Out on Hongkonghia, you understand, lootin’ an’ democracy not only have about the same low prestige, but are in serious danger of not bein’ distinguished at all. [2] [3]

Happy days.
--JHM

__
[0] Every worrier retains the freedumb to worry about possible e-Hongkonghian designs on Rio Limbaugh FL, say, or on Pajama Junction NJ. Myself, I say "¿Who cares?" Should Foo Man ‘Spengler’ manage to buy all their real estate out from under the yocals, maybe those holes will stop lookin’ like the parts of the junk yard that failed to congeal into an airliner when Hurricane Crawford hit back in 2008."

=

[1] Approximately. Round numbers good enough for "Occupy Televisionland" ought to be good enough for us. I mean, ¿what are we, sir, stinking elitists?

=

[2] All whight-wing internationalists (Spengleroids) must, I think, be taken to be Lootless Cosmopolitans until the contrary has been safely demonstrated beyond doubt. Even then, perhaps one should find a different L-word for it when they do it. ‘Lucky’ comes to mind at once, but of course that would be the mind of the present keyboard that it comes to, rather than the dittopan of a Spengleroid. Their freelordships (at least the Homeland™ic ones) do not much care bein’ called ‘Lucky. Or for that matter ‘Ace’ or ‘Slim’ or anythin’ else that might suggest their freelordships specuvest an’ investulate in plebeian poker rather than in financial instruments not understanded of the smallpeople.

=

[3] Bein’, as I said, a furriner, his freelordship very genteelly abstains from takin’ any cheap shots at the _Heimatland G*ttes_. ¿What homebrew pajamaclad could scribble words like

[T]he Egyptian mob wants to help itself to the contents of armored cars, considering that the Egyptian press and blogs have reported for months that the country’s leaders are stealing rice, diesel oil, propane, and other commodities whose distribution is controlled by state companies. If everyone is stealing, why shouldn’t the man in the street get his share, too?

without instantly pointin’ out that all this is but a pale imitation an’ rip-off of the "Occupy Televisionland" show an’ of the Ponzi Security Administration?

One would have to be blind, of course, not to notice that his freelordship is agitproppin’ to make the holy Homeland™ more like his own e-Hongkonghia, tryin’. I mean, to disabuse Master Wally an’ Mizz Cindy of the pernicious notion that lingers in their dittopans, even despite all wombschoolin’ an’ despite countless daily séances with Party Neocomrade Dr. R. H. Limbaugh, that Democracy is somehow not quite as bad as lootin’. Unlike most of his freelordship’s Yank counterparts, _M. le baron de ‘Spengler’_ knows better than to yank too hard at the beginnin’ of the course of therapy. "Softly, softly, catchee monkey" -- when Wally an’ Cindy finally *do* see the whight an’ become consciously antidemocratic as well as illiberal, they are to suppose that they figured everythin´ whighteous out for themselves.

That arrangement is much more satisfactory from the agitation-and-propaganda viewpoint because if Master Wally were to say "I read about Hate-Democracy-First in Freddy von Hayek" an’ then Mizz Cindy echoes "‘Spengler’ told me about HD1 last year as an unexpected Exmas present," the HDF meme is much less likely to go pandemic. At Rio Limbaugh an’ Pajama Junction, "not invented here" (frankly admitted, that is, for of course hardly anything actually *was* invented ‘here’) is almost certain to stop an ideoproduct dead in its tracks. Though I am far from understanding the psychology of this sales resistance in full, I assume that wombschooled Wally ferociously dislikes findin’ himself painted into a corner where somebooby else--a particular Party neocomrade whose name is remembered an’ might be mentioned, though naturally it will not be--has every whight to bark "¡I told you so!"

Most of the amateur Conners of Kiddies over to Pajama Junction seem to have a sort of colourblind thumb when it comes to agitproppin’ for whighteousness. They are so ungood at meme diffusion that one laughs from them. Here we have a far-fetched freelordship who evidently understands how to do it whight, which make him more of a danger, I suppose, but also much more instructive. Better recreation as well.

As St. Winnie of the Dardanelles well said on a similar occasion: We have a very daring and skillful opponent against us, and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great general."

’Tis no accident, though, that when the _padjama du jour_ turns out to be competent for once, it should be a freelordship of whom one has actually heard before.

I fear the World’s Greatest YaleoDrama™ist is himself black of thumb when it comes to runnin’ a farm team for the Foxcuckooland Foghorns. The best of Squire Simon-Pajama’s particular neofriends an’ _protégés_, goodvolks who exist as whightist agitproppers only thanks to PJM, are undoubtly the sub-Cincinnatian Th. X. Blumer an’ Don Ricardito de Fernández y Podhòretz. This, however, is a very restricted an’ specialized sort of ‘best’ in at least two respects: (1) though McTrickledown likes them well enough, they are rather like the music of the late Herr von Dvorak in that McTD likes them much better than any general consensus can reasonably be expected to endorse.

And (2), their attraction is mostly their socio-economico-factional exemplariness. The gruesome twosome do not, in fact, agitprop particularly well, they are certainly not to be mentioned with _M le baron de ‘Spengler’_ in the same breath as technicians, but they do, in McTD’s judgment, cast a great deal of whight on who the Daughters of Virtue & Sons of Wisdon, LLC, are, an’ on where’ these freevolks are comin’ from.

Naturally Freelord ‘Spengler’ comes from too far away for a neocomradologist of central North America to take much professional interest. In the improbable event that e-Hongkonghia diagnoses Egypt whight an’ prescribes treatment that cures the patient, that would be great for Egyptians (maybe), but ought to raise scarcely a ripple in these parts. ¡Fancy Master Wally, that stout detester of "¡I told you so!", reactin’ to the advice that he an’ Mizz Cindy should take the same Murti-Bing® pills that worked for towelhead _falláhín_! I mean, "¿How unwhighteous would THAT be?

The Muses and thou, O Bones, and I would get a kick out of reflecting, safe up here in our Poison Ivory Tower, that ‘Spengler’ would have more than earned his _nom de guerre_. ¿What could be more illustrative of an _Untergang des Abendlandes_ than for the heathen Chinee (release 4.1) to solve Egypt without either quack or patient passin’ through the Western Sieve at any point? If a world that can get better without any assistance from Wunnerful US does not constitute D*CL*N*, that _verbum innominabile inter quondam Christojudæanos_, I cannot imagine what would.

But I betcha Wally an’ Cindy would shrug it off, if they noticed it at all. Like global warmin’, DCLN would not be actually happenin’, ¡not at Hooverville or Rio Limbaugh/Port Ste. Lucie! After all, ¿Hath not Karl, Firstlord an' Kiddiemaster Rove, vouchsafed that

That is not the way the world really works anymore. WE are an Empire now, and when WE act, WE create OUR OWN reality. And while you’re studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- WE will act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. WE are history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what WE do. (( &c. &c.))

?

"Left to just study," I expect Cairo and Kowloon would "judiciously" play hooky for all they are worth, but that will not be a neoreality inside the confines of the Holy Rovan Empire of the Whightwing Nation, where "not invented here" has at last become *absolutely* identical with ‘nonexistent’.

But Oswald knows best.

Introducing FlipflopCare

2011-11-25T09:00:00.006Z

Dear Dr. Bones,

One had thought ’Romneycare’ a word of mere abuse hurled from the general direction of Louisedayhicksville, but no, not at all, for here

‘Dumper’ scam bleed$ us dry
Dodgers jump on, off insurance, costing Mass. taxpayers millions
By Frank Quaratiello
Friday, November 25, 2011 (...)

A gaping loophole in state insurance rules that lets freeloaders pick up coverage to pay for expensive surgeries — and then dump it once they’re treated — has cost taxpayers as much as $37 million a year, according to a study that warns the same wrinkle in Obamacare could add a staggering $2 billion a year to the deficit-wracked [F]ederal budget. Exploiting a state provision that forces insurers to cover patients with pre-existing medical conditions, thousands of so-called “jumpers and dumpers” are buying plans just before major operations and procedures, and then chucking their coverage and passing those costs onto residents who play by the rules, according to a study by Suffolk University’s Beacon Hill Institute obtained by the Herald.

(...)

come some ’conservative’ ’intellectual’ señoritos to explain that Governor Mittens has in fact erected a remarkable bureaucratic monument to his own best an’ most spiritual neoqualities, recognized as such even by his freelordship’s political adversaries. This grand mischievement is rather as if the late General Bonaparte had left France with a coastline carved in the shape of his own Imperial mug.

So let us resolve, Dr. Bones, henceforth always to refer to ... ¡ta-Da! ... FLIPFLOPCARE , not merely because anybooby can flip in and then flop out of it as her portfolio manager may think best, but especially in honor of the Venerable Framer.

That said, it looks as if the V. F. should be reminded about it himself, because once you really understand how FFC works, you see that any resemblance to the evil new Fedguv programme mandatewise is entirely imaginary. I don’t suppose Mittens could actually get such a grown-up distinction across to, say, His Texcellency or Mr. Nine Guy or Don Neutrino de Gingrich, in front of cameras an’ commentators’ an’ (maybe) a few hundred thousand Party nutbats from sea to whinin’ sea--with stupidity, the Stupid Party itself contends in vain, after all--but his freelordship certainly ought to try.

That said, let’s shoot the messenger a little, ¿shall we? Party Neocomrade (eighth grade) F. X. Quaratiello is, I take it, local talent at LDHville, still lookin’ for a way to break out into the whight lights of the big city. Some kind ideobuddy should, I think, advice the laddie to omit footnotes like "according to a study by Suffolk University’s Beacon Hill Institute obtained by the _Herald_."

True, if I were to hand you a copy of my employing corporation’s next press release and pester you to print it, it would not be inaccurate, technically, to say "obtained by Dr. Bones" after the fact. But I put it to you, sir, that such language involves a genuine and significant _suggestio falsi_ as to which party took the active, and which the passive-aggressive rôle, in the humanoid event. Were you to report it the PNC-8 FXQ way, your empoying corporation’s poor customers are like to fantasize that you burgled McTrickledown’s apartment at the Watergate Arms in the early hours of the morning in order to do your ‘obtaining’. I appreciate that you couldn’t possibly call a press release of this type "a press release," but there is no need for you or the PNC-8 FXQ mechanism to call your sources anything at all, not even ‘sources’.

I would not go so far as to suggest that the _Herald_ of LDHV must explain exactly who pays for the BHI of SU (an’ why) every single time that muchesteemed [1] Tank-a’-Thought is mentioned. ("¿Who *is* Chuck Rounds?." inquired the late Miss Rand of St. Petersburg and Planet Dilbert, as she rose from the crypt just after nightfall. "Why, ¡he sounds like the name of a crumby restaurant!") To mandate _expressio veri_ ‘proäctively’ would be an outrageous assault on the Great Wall of Jeffersonian Separation of Market and State, even I admit that, yet silence is not proäction or proäctivity or proäctivism or proä . . . .

Well, what it comes to with the PNC-8 FXQ mechanism at the end of the day is simply _Si tacuisses, diurnalisticus mansisses_.

That said, we may move on to suspect that the PNC-8 FXQ mechanism (and/or its employin’ Corporation) decided to rewrite the BHI-SU press release they obtained somehow rather than pass it along to the LDHV kiddiecons verbatim. At any rate, that is what one infers when an intellectually respectable organ writes up a story from Major Leaker with only parts of it punctuated as direct quotation. ¡The rest of it had damnwell BETTER be accurate paraphrase!

(( DIGRESSION. The student should note that inaccuracy of paraphrase can be of various sorts, and especially that it need not be the result of willful an’ malignant twistification in the path of Party an’ Ideology. Maybe Master Cliff- simply did not understand the original from which he was scribblin’ his employin’ Corporation’s -Notes™. This happens all the time, it seems to me, and in fact one can see it happening several times daily, as follows: read through any article and then recur to the headers and especially the subheaders at the top of it. Master Cliff- , dba headline editor of The Herald of Louisedayhicksville or whatever fishwrap you like, often tries to summarize the fish as he wraps ’em, and nearly as often (as it seems to McPessimist) causes one to doubt his readin’ comprehension skills. There are ten doubts of that type for every one about Master Cliff-´s ability to keep his, or his employin’ Corporation’s, factious hormones in check. [2] ))

That said, I wish you, sir, as ever,

Happy days (through affordable health care).
--JHM

___
[1] mnogouvazhàyemiy

=

[2] In the case at hand, there is nothing to tax Master Cliff- with apart from one sill¥ ¢urrency symbo£. If that juve sort of clownin’ annoys you, though, the thing to do is stay away from LDHV altogether. Brats *will* be brats, I fear, and if one tries to reform ’em, one only winds up establishing one’s own need to review King Canute’s famous object lesson on the topic.

¡It’s Turkey Day in the Morning!

2011-11-24T11:24:00.003Z

Dear Dr. Bones,

" Thank Lord Mammon HE has got / Louisedayhicksville and we" . . . not so much.

Meanwhile, back in the stable, I wonder what hormones it triggers in Howard Lewis, Freelord Carr in the peerage of Foxcuckooland, to have a whole string of frathouse fillies not just swoonin’ over the freelordly prose style, as naturally a frathouse filly would, but actually presumin’ to imitate it, a procedure that might well be called ‘uppity’,were we discussing a different whightist stereotype.

Lemme see, the Funders of Fratboy, dba _The Boston Humbug_ , have engaged at least the followin’ Party neocomradesses

(1) Braceras, J. C.
(2) Chabot, H. X.
(3) Eagan, M. X. (Tonta to ‘Deuce’ Braude),
(4) McConville, Ch. X. (¡a lovely surname, ’specially that second syllàble!),
(5) Robichaud, H. X.

This list required no more effort of the present keyboard than to remember my pet favorite whight-wing squalk show (96.9 FM 0700-1000 weekdays) and scan the first page of search results _chez_ Humbug for St. Elisabeth of H*rv*rdy, _regina et martyr_. [1]

"Chris Cassidy," it appears, is of the other sexual persuasion. ¿Wasn’t Life less unfair back in the old days when one could always tell correctly without mounting an investigation?

As I vaguely recall there is yet another _Herald_she-angel with some Canuck-soundin’ name not unlike ‘Robichaud’, enough like it to have made me wonder for a microsecond if the humbuggers could be importin’ ’em in quantity to get a lower price.

There are so many that I presume they cannot possibly all have WON the Ideological Swimsuit Competition; the Fratboy Funders must have selected a least a few second-placers.

Gobble, gobble.
--JHM

___
[1] Notice that PNC-5 Robichaud at e-_loc. cit._ has thought of the _‘regina’ shtyk_ for her ownneoself, even if she looks no farther afield than Mrs.Windsor-Saxe-Coburg-Gotha over on Airstrip One.

BTW, I betcha wombschoolin’ an’ freedowndumbin’ are not havin’ any good effect on the Ratzingerites’ catechism classes. Though to be fairembalanced, one should say that back before the Great Decerebration, junior Papishes probably needed not much more idea of "St. Elizabeth of Hungary" beyond that She must have played for the whight or home team.

Not really hard to guess, that one. Not nearly as hard as finding a likely for-instance of the S-word tip-off pointin’ off in an unwhighteous direction, like maybe "St. John's wort." Or finding a neo-Roman nowadays who has her Don Bosco down cold, despite havin’ attended a wombschool named for somebooby other than Donnie boy herself.

_Hinweise auf eine Pfefferspraysphilosophie_[0]

2011-11-20T10:36:00.005Z

Dear Dr. Bones,

Non-violent protesters brutally pepper-sprayed at UC Davis
Bob_Neer | Sat, Nov 19, 2011 9:33 PM EST

Hat tip NYT, which reports calls for the resignation of the university’s chancellor (NB: Harvard President Drew Faust, who has Occupy protesters of her own). (( &c. &c. ))

You know...

This goes back to, officers thinking that their so-called non-violent means of control (pepper spray, rubber bullets, etc) can be used with impunity since no one is (USUALLY) permanently hurt (of course, tell that poor girl at the Red Sox (?) rally that – oh wait, they can’t).

Not only do we need to stand up for the 99% and all that that entails, but we need a SERIOUS discussion about security vs liberty and the brutality that is using these so-called less violent crowd control devices of theirs. Because if they keep sending people to the hospital in critical condition, they’re gonna get their toys taken away from them.

lynne @ Sun 20 Nov 1:54 AM

As I started to say in the title, sir, _Notes towards a Philosophy of Pepper Spray_ (seven volumes, boxed, suitable for throwing) would go a long way towards putting some "intellectual foundations" [1] under the grand Occupy Televisionland entertainment of Fall 2011.

I could write three or four tomes myself, and if I did, I would certainly devote a chapter to the exact differences between (1a) Kampus Kops and (1b) the real McCoy. There would be a long historical excursus, naturally, on Century XIX in the coalfields of Appalachia and 1968 in the Y*rd of H*rv*rd, as well as 316 slightly less pertinent instances of secret-sector enforcements of Law and Order. [2]

Vaguely parallel to that idle and pedantic distinction would run another, between (2a) ("mere") YooTube clips and (2b) professional MacL@@han-Murdochware, the latter being characterized above all, as I analyze, by distinctly non-random production values. Especially by knowing more or less when to stop, as amateur iconodules never seem to: I betcha _In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister_ was intended precisely to distinguish between the master *craftsman* and the still-wet-behind-the-awl journeyman or slapdash dilettante aristos.

As to the immediate occasion of the present pepperfoolery, suffice it to say that here we have Amateur Hour all ’round. Presumably most of the patients or victims shown may pass for "real students," though as we shall be not-writing a work of philosophy, that, too, will not be assumed uncritically. Of course I understand that the dignity of Philosophy must be preserved by excluding such sheer whight-winged nutbattism as supposing the whole _m’gillâ_ to have been concocted on the grounds of St. Elizabeth of Warrenbuffet’s in-stately home for campaign purposes, the orange gunk being furniture polish or the like. [3]

Happy days.
--JHM

___
[0]

Pfefferspray ist ein Reizstoff, der gegen Menschen und andere Säugetiere wirkt. Mit dem Begriff ist meist ein Reizstoffsprühgerät mitsamt dem enthaltenem Wirkstoff _Oleoresin Capsicum_ gemeint. Es wird in der Regel als Distanzwaffe verwendet. Insbesondere in den USA und Kanada dient es als Bärenabwehrmittel.

Hmmm. ¿How if our picturesque institutions were to sic she-bears [IV Lib. Reg. II:23ff.] instead of pseudocops on troublesome kiddies?

(( The pet g@@gle took a long time to find it, so let me put on record that it is _DAS Pfefferspray_, neuter gender. ))

=

[1] "Pardon my Drool." Or rather, more exactly, the drool of Her Beatitude, which it would be pleasant, though not probable, to think was swiped from the late Mr. Thòreau of Concord: "If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

=

[2] Taxpayer-funded tertiary educationalism in CA should make for some especially jolly litigation. Those are not "real policemen" who appear in these video representations, but, oddly enough, they are public-sector hired hands nonetheless.

"¿Pseudomorphosis, anybody?"

=

[3] I hear you objecting already, Dr. Bones, that the Lizzieards would not advance, but probably rather retard, the Apotheosis of Her Beatitude by such a fakery. Whight you are, it seems to me, but I am not at all sure it seems that way to the Lizzieards themselves. Being Faculty Lounge Lizzieards mostly, or courtiers over to the Palace of Public Television, their perspective on political sociology and psychology can diverge widely from that of the earthbound.

As I said, though, you are quight whight to expect that at least 98.6% of Fratboy voters, actual or potential, will take one glance an’ side with the pseudocops. No, there I go again, that’s ’rong too: most likely very few Republicanines will ever see it.

That last, by the way, is a definite prediction about the future made by McChicken: should the Funders of Fratboy decide to make a big deal of it, then I shall thoroughly deserve to be gloated at. So make a memorandumb of it and we shall see.

Mention of the PPT allows me to extend the above parallelism a little, as follows

(1a) Kampus Kops (H*rv*rd) (2a) YooTube artists
(1b) municipal crimefighters (2b) NewsCorp
(1c) Kampus Kops (UC Davis) (2c) WGBH

Exactly what to call the third row I have yet to decide: ‘semireal’ is dubious ontologically, and furthermore sounds to my ear as if it has been imported from the Rovan Empire . I suppose most people would settle for ‘semipro[fessional]’, but there are so many philosophical problems about ‘professionalism’ even unprefixed that a whole eighth volume might become necessary. Take a look at the pigeonholes above and let me know how you would label them generically.

"Means well but needs work"

2011-11-13T11:19:00.003Z

Dear Dr. Bones,

By MWBNW, I refer to the spoofery of ‘johnd’ over on Mont Bleu:

For What It’s Worth: The Occupy Movement
mark-bail | Sat, Nov 12, 2011 10:32 AM EST

(...) comparisons between the Occupy Movement and the Tea Party (...)

Building on the thread-starter...
(...)

In the interest of something like intellectual discipline, I wonder if Mark and Deborah would agree that Occupy Everything is at least inspired by, if not rooted in, the Arab Spring movement that began in December 2010 in Tunesia.

I think we are seeing a world-wide recognition and push-back against the class warfare that moneyed interests have been fighting against the rest of us for decades. In my view, it began in the Middle East — a region, not coincidentally, where the role of US multi-national corporations is particularly unsavory. The dilemma of Arab Spring has always been that while America (and our public figures) must support the clear commitment to freedom and democracy that it embodies, its targets are oppressive governments and regimes that American government and private industry have kept in power for decades.

In my view, this dilemma has now come home. Occupy Everything speaks to and for the 99%. Our government does not.

(...)

That dissonance is inconsistent with a free republic, and if our political system has any life left, we in the 99% will change that dissonance.
somervilletom @ Sat 12 Nov 11:33 AM

Maybe the Arab Spring took its lead from the Tea Party.

I know ideology will force many to dismiss this idea but it is possible.
johnd @ Sat 12 Nov 10:49 PM

(A) Recognizing, that one has to start somewhere ... why, even Miss Even and Mr. Newton was merely fiddlin’ with an apple one day, when ¡lightning struck! ..., and

(B) Cognizant that anybooby with a natural flair for the Crimson Art would instantly snatch up "means well, but needs work" and take a run at the New Cerberus, that A-Spring Occupation Putty that bestrides the whole world like a miasma.

A "Murdochian miasma" one might say with sound intellectual foundation (sp?) in depth or at depth: if one digs down deep enough at any point on the Johndeweyplatz in the Taxarrears subdivision of Rio Limbaugh, one hits a TV cable. McBard was whight again: "One touch of MacL@@han" makes lots an' lots of antecedently unrelated-lookin’ volks "kin." Or look like kin, anyway. or like people with kin in the game.

No. The puzzle (I presume) for Social Scientism is not that a passionate urge to see oneself performing on The T@@B exists in the first place, that, I take it, is sufficiently accounted for by the _peccatum originale_ hypothesis of Dr. Gloomygus of Hippo University in Neotunisia. The great problem is rather that the level of this selfnarcissism should fluctuate so wildly. For years an’ years, ever since the Silent Majoruty finally shut up, the tubewaves were abandoned to the (almost) exclusive discretion of Neocomrade Dr. R. H. Limbaugh "highly trained broadcast specialists." Whereas lately we have had "Open Line Fryday" (twenty-four)-seven. Not much steak, mayble, but lots and lots of sizzle.

¿What hath Fox wrought? And furthermore, an' *especially*, ¿How did Fox wreak it?

These, in this keyboard's view, are the Great Mysteries of Life just at present

Comrade Poster hypothesises that those who harp on the A-String have taken their music lessons from the Tee Putty. Literally that seems to me out of the question, the mental universe of Seemighties and Muzzies having long been consciously and deliberately hostile to all influences perceived by them as emanating from the Whight Civilisation of the Western Race, also known as "Wunnerful US." The late Prof. Hourani, for example, wrote a big book called _Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1789-1939_ . His title suggests that that all hope for successful contamination/enrichment of the Natives had been abandoned as long ago as Anno Religionismi 1358-1939-5699. That date, though itself flagrantly Eurocentric, nevertheless does sound about whight, though naturally one could argue that there was much less hope earlier than one particular author makes out, or that miracles remained possible much nearer our own times, even if they have not actually happened.

To travel as a fellow with Comrade Poster would require one to think *really* dimly of the Arab/Seemighty Mind. Unless oneself a complete wad, who could seriously think the Tee Putty tripe an' baloney better worth borrowing than the French Revolution (which is pretty much what Hourani understands by the Hell word)? The proposal is about as plausible as it would be to regard Colonel al-Násir as the proximate cause of Students for a Democratic Socient, and thus ideological grandfather to that Hate-’68 Movement fated in due course to star I. X. Kristol an' N. X. Podhòretz. One can say that the thing is chronologically possible, but, that said, ¿what?

However I can be more cheerful about Comrade Poster if we give up the strict _literaliter_, picturing vast hordes of Natives avidly following NewsCorp in quest of pointers on the technique of soggin’ in the street. Looking at the correlation of farces more figuratively, or perhaps simply from a greater distance that allows a wider perspective, I believe his conjecture collapses into my own. It seems intelligible enough, that is, to say "Murdoch dunnit" as shorthand for "None of this would have been happening--no Zucchini People, no A-Springers, no Tee Putty--had Television never been."

It is close to tautology, maybe too close for comfort, to announce that there is a sort of family resemblance among all MacL@@hanoid techniques of agitation and propaganda. It is also distressingly like unto the Gigaguru's own pet drool about mediums replacing messages.

At this point, I worry a little about possibly falling into Comrade Poster's sandtrap, the one labelled "ideology will force many to dismiss this idea." [1] It is extremely repugnant to me that everything Vox Pop. or the AstroTurf™baggers do on, by and for TV looks a lot like everything else done on, by and for TV, but of course it might be so no matter how much it displeases.

Happy days.
--JHM

___
[1] As Heraclitus says, one can never fall twice into the same sandtrap.

I must admit that I am sneaking in a second santrap here. Citizen Poster, who is not really a comrade, I fear, was just pointin' out that most mainstream Blue Blazers think highly of the A-rab Spring; of the T-putty Sog, not so much.

That implicit analysis is true enough to be getting on with, but when Poster himself gets on with it to Blazerdom rejectin' "Maybe the Arab Spring took its lead from the Tea Party" on that account, I believe he is engaged in defensive flimflam designed to distract attention from the fact that there is really nothin' much to be said for his parallelism beyond the bare chronological possibility of it, as noted above. Or, if perchance there is more, he does not mention it. And I, at any rate, cannot guess it unassisted.

I could, to be sure, dig a sort of counter-sandtrap and claim that the citizen talks this way mostly because it pleases him to suppose that all good things are--MUST be--consequences of the AEIdeology in theory, of the Party of Big Management in practice.

In fact, it is not easy to think of any sort or condition of Lesser Breeds Without who attentively mark what America's Otherparty does, or what Heritagitarians an' Catoholics an' Hoovervillains of Palo Alto (&c. &c.) preach that the Otherparty should do, and then attempt emulation at home. Leave out the Torycomrades on Airstrip One an' their counterparts in former Brit colonies of the whight-wing Anglophoney type, and you will find, I think, hardy anybooby at all. There is lots of flat-out reaction in the world, and lots of ‘neoliberalism’ as well, but very little of it has been exported from G*d’s Country.

Otherpartisans are vaguely aware of this themselves, or act as if they were. It might be worth some credentialled social scientizer’s time and trouble to try to establish quantitatively whether Party neocomrades more frequently (A) bark that they could not care less what foreigners think, or (B) fatuously flatter themselves, along the present lines, that everybody overseas is lookin' ever towards the Party of Grant & Hoover.

My guess is that contempt is much more common than the softer sentimentality, for it is hard to get away from "¡No More Mr. Nice Guy!" amongst the neocomrades. Still, a guess is only a guess, and a generalization may be idiotic. It would be nice to really KNOW.

Meanwhile, one can be quite certain that Citizen Poster himself is no run-of-the-mill Republicanine. Were he that, he would simply never have heard of the Great Blue Hill, let alone be diggin' his little sandtraps on the slopes.

I clave, thou clavest, she . . .

2011-11-09T08:01:00.001Z

Dear Dr. Bones,

¡No craven is Klaving! It claves, ever steadfast, to . . . .

Well, there is a puzzle for the student of Neocomradology: ¿To what, exactly, does our _señorito du jour_ clave?

It assures us itself -- as a bottomline, no less -- that Klavingesque ‘values’ are more important than other volks’ ‘necks’. [0]

Such assurance is needless in the particular cases of the Muses and thee and me, naturally. We had the number of Master Narcissus Dexter well before there were any sellphones to put it into: "Narky loves Narky; that is, I am I." [1] So did Mrs. Trollope in the 1830’s, to whom, as you know, I prefer to appeal to when out to address specifically Yank self-infatuation.

Now whenever a whight-wing nutbat starts goin’ on ’bout ‘values’, the first thing to do, obviously, is re-read the fine print on Terms & Conditions, verifying carefully wherein this week’s standards an’ neocriteria differ from last week’s, whether she (the nutbat) has put her weasels to work on the wordin’, tryin’ to get that five bucks a month for the ScroogeBank suckercard by crook, Capt. Hook havin’ failed his employin’ Corporation deplorably.

By my lights, the best approach to "Klaving v. Cain" is whight up the middle through the lobby of ScroogeBank. I mean, ¿What do the TopPercenters who actually matter, fundin’wise, expect from their small people, from a Don Andresito Claving Patxama? ¿from a Mr. Nine Guy? ‘Values’ is indeed the pertinent word.

Uncle Ebenezer has long since disinherited me an’ changed the locks on the vault, of course, but I believe I had enough experience of his firstlordship before we quarreled to reconstruct how the Class of neogeezers think. It seems to be quite impossible that Uncle Ebb takes Mr. Nine Guy the least bit seriously, neither expectin’ nor desirin’ that Don Ermanigildo de’ Neri should become the POTUS of us all. The merest side-show is Mr. Nine Guy, a sort of Harold Stassen writ large an’ bold an’ colorblind-letter. Uncle Ebb is gung-ho for ‘Mittens’ Romney, of course. Everybooby knows that, posibly includin’ even Don Andresito. [2]

What I am undecided about is whether Uncle Ebb--an’ Daddy Warbucks _y Tio Ruperto_ an’ the whole Unionthugbasher League Club --are responsible for givin’ us Mr. Nine Guy, whether his godfathership be a deliberate ploy by the G.O.P. Geniuses® on the _panem et circenses_ paradigm, or no more than a funny thing that happened on Mittens’ March to the Forum .

(( DIGRESSION _ad homunculum. Though clearly "small people," Don Andresito is not utterly negligible. It barked somethin’ ’bout "allowing your opponents to hold you to their absurd re-creation of your standards," a thing which does indeed happen to whight-wing nutbats with some frequency. However it fails to point out that religionism is usually involved on such cases, with Lieberals an’ Demoncrats presuming to tell the kiddiecons, or even the freelordly Conners of Kiddies, what ‘true’ Christojudæanity would entail, usually Uncle Ebb givin’ all his R.O.I. to the Bad Poor an’ goin’ off to missionize at the cow-crazed Hindoo &c. &c -- pluperfect tripe and pepperoni..

(( True, in many specifically Christian models, the former-Christojudæan product line really did include that fun exuberance _credo quia absurdum_. That, however, was long ago. And in another country. And ¡fancy keeping a straight face while calling upon the neokiddies, or upon anybooby at all, to live down to Tertullianus of Carthage! ))

Happy days.
--JHM

___
[0] Yes, of course I agree that those shudder-quotes LOOK silly. Looks, however, are not everything.

Reflect, sir, and I believe you must agree that the Neck of Arminius is quite as figurative an’ neorhetorical in the path of Party & AEIdeology, as are the señoritoly Values.

===

[1] As you see, the Big Nine figured out _el clavanismo_ several centuries ago and reported Their preliminary research respults to Dr. Shakespeare.

BTW, ¿have Ms. Clio and the Sisters thought of suing a certain Person of Pizza for infringement of copywhight or trademark or patent or whatever? And then there is the _Bahá’iyya_ . . . .

===

[2] I picture Don Andresito, in that garret that appertains to it _quâ_ ‘conservative’ ‘intellectual’, pacin’ back an’ forth with gritted teeth, resolvin’ every second even more resolutely that its own Values must not be influenced in the slightest by the practical politics of its paymasters’ Party. This performance, though, will be much more worth attending to once Mittens is in like Flynn .

The Kentucky Woolite® Code

2011-11-07T11:48:00.003Z

Dear Dr. Bones,

A Sheep in Sheep’s Clothing
williamstowndem | Sun, Nov 6, 2011 6:07 PM EST
By Lee Harrison, Chairman, Berkshire Brigades

Still hiding behind a barn jacket and a big smile, Senator Scott Brown is hoping....

(...)

"Is that code?" as Geoff Peterson would say.

First Responders….Transit modernization…Public Schools…College Modernization…educator…

Or, to put it more simply – unless you are a public union worker or on the state bid list and paying Pacheco wages – No Soup for You. Preserve the jobs of people who haven’t missed a paycheck.

porcupine @ Sun 6 Nov 7:32 PM

Of course it is code. ¿What else could it be?

The Demoncrat scribbler labels Senator Fratboy "a sheep," adding some irrelevant sartorial details. Then he complains, at length, that this very same frathouse animal always acts like a wolf. once Party Neocomrade A. M. McConnell has reminded it what species it belongs to. [1]

In the same code, which is no longer much of a secret, one writes "a porcupine" to convey (approximately) "a steady and temperate well-wisher of her holy Homeland™’s good."

Happy days.
--JHM

[1] Even Fratboy can be made a serious topic, if one perseveres a little. Or wanders off topic just a couple of hare’s breaths to rail against the Funders of Fratboy LLC.

Far more ‘revealing’ though (his own word) would be a thorough account of E-comrade ‘williamstowndem’, concerning whom all sorts of interesting questions arise, beginning with "¿Can he *really* believe that A. M. McConnell must hold, literally or figuratively, the paw of S. Ph. Brown every single time the latter casts a vote?

Now, Republicanines are no doubt a little short on bestembrightness. And of course only their third-raters an’ below go into politics, instead of off to the H*rv*rd Victory School, an’ then, by G*lly, it’s _¡Morgen die ganze Welt!_ time at the M. B. A. Corral! (Especially the offshore _Welt_, but I perceive that I digress...)

Anyway, ¿Might not his firstlordship the Majority Leader say to Fratboy, "Look here, Sonny: you always bark ‘¡NO!’ unless I or the Freiherr Untersturmleiter von Kantor specifically tell you different."? [*]

For a genuine political party, that plan ought to reduce conference inefficiency by about half, it being ordinarily a toss-up whether ¡Yay! or Neigh signifies support for reaction. Given the peculiarities of America’s Otherparty, however, an’ especially the Party neocomrades’ position vis-à-vis The Régime just at present, the time and energy saved ought to be more like ninety-five (95) percent (%).

It would certainly have avoided all fuss an’ bother in this case.

---

[*] It would be a shame to darken a Monday morning on the exalted slopes of the Great Blue Hill with any seriousness not thoroughly fake, but when it gets to be the middle of week, the Blazers might worry a little about who tells A. M. McConnell what to tell S. Ph. Brown. And through what channels, exactly.

I notice that ‘Williamstowndem’ seems to think the Spirit of Kentucky has something to do with it: "Scott Brown’s votes surely played well among his Kentucky mentors..." and --¿ain’t we got fun?-- that the Spirit of KY has it in for our own dear MA, "it was a direct attack on hard-pressed middle-class Massachusetts families." Sort of like Juno and Neptune and Carthage and a’ that, ¿doncha know?

Makes me wish I was easy-pressed and rolling in the blue grass with Secretariat and Dr. Johnson [1764, Ætat. 55], it does!

Odd, if not Old

2011-11-05T16:46:00.003Z

Dear Dr. Bones,

Here’s a pretty penny for you, Old Guy:

What is “Old Boston”? Am I It? – Tom Conroy Has Valid Ammo Against Lizzie Warren – Mike Flaherty Going Back to Council? – New Bridge Means Faster Deliveries to Casino Customers
eb3-fka-ernie-boch-iii | Fri, Nov 4, 2011 12:30 PM EST

(...)

Hey, anyone see the new draw bridge they’re building to replace the broken down one in East Boston near Suffolk Downs? It goes right to Chelsea.

Once the casino is built the the Spanish and Asian hookers along with the drugs will arrive in 30 minutes or less. Guaranteed.

Another great example of government and business working hand in hand.

(...)

¡Well, well! Almost fifty years in exile from Chicagoland, and yet I would never have guessed that Chelsea is visible from the Palace of Public Television atop the Great Blue Hill.[*]

Be that as it ain’t, not too far away looms this , which must be just about the last word in Neoboston.. As soon as they have completed that "elevated plaza deck above Wonderland MBTA Station, " I promise to hobble up to it and wave at E-comrade Ernie.

Happy days.
--JHM

___
[*] Passing quickly over "A pity that Chelsea should be visible from *anywhere*," let me say that what we have here sounds a bit like the old chestnut about Governess Paling lookin’ forth over Siberia from Wasilla Felix. Given the general level of self-humour that obtains in Blue Blazerdom, however, . . . .

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, ’tis a pleasure to have someplace to go for a second opinion (after Dr. Carr’s of the _Herald_ of Louisedayhicksville, that is, naturally) on how the OTHER ninety-nine percent live. Accordingly, I cross my fnigers and hoep nobody drops a dime to the Thought Police about that distinctly Howie-oid exuberance--¡tusk, tusk!--concerning "Spanish and Asian hookers [and] drugs."

(( ¿Does one need a special license to do stuff like that on the well-gated communitarian slopes of the G. B. H.? If so, _¿Donde se puede solicitar un permiso?_ ))

"[not] nearly as plasticized in person"

2011-11-03T08:14:00.002Z

Dear Dr. Bones,

The Brat Pack [1] are gonna be needin’ whole oceans of soothin’ drool like this before they finally swallow our old pal ‘Mittens’ [2], so please be sure to award _M. le baron de Goldman_ lots and lots of bonus points for makin’ such an early start.

His freelordship will be happy to have a cushion, I suspect, because if he keeps on as he has commenced, there will be many, many point subtractions on account of the freelordly agitprop technique.

His freelordship makes one interesting mistake on Day One and makes it very distinctly. I believe we should make a memorandumb of his freelordship’s second paragraph:

First, Romney didn’t look nearly as plasticized in person as in the TV debates. In front of a sympathetic crowd, and without notes, he sounded a lot more genuine, enthusiastic, and Reaganesque than the carefully-coiffed figure we hear on the tube.

The trouble with that, of course, is that kiddiecons are never under any circumstances gonnabe persuaded that the MacL@@han Tube does not afford them a direct personal knowledge of the figures performin’ on it for their viewin’ pleasure. His freelordship could bark on forever about how much they’d all like Mittens if they "could just really meet him," say, in a brothel or a shoppin’ mall or at a banquet for the Chambermaids of Commerce or wherever -- an’ achieve absolutely nothin’. Wally Wombschool an’ Cindy from Wasilla are unshakeably certain that Tube-based acquaintance is ¡at least! as good as the so-called "real thing." [0]

Were it in fact the case that Master Wally an’ Mizz Cindy would have to get close enough to Freelord Romneycare to shake a tentacle in order to think well of his plasticine [3] freelordship, poor Mittens would be doomed electorally. Since his freelordship is now certain to be the 2012 POTUSsal nominee of America’s Otherparty, it follows _per contra_ that Tube-basin’ can produce entirely satisfactory results when competently performed.

However, direct verbal assurances to that effect being no part of competent performance, I hereby subtract seven (7.0) points from Freelord Goldman’s score.

Let me know how *you* rate this latest ripe fruit of the Pajamatarian Mind.

Happy days (through affordable glovecare)
--JHM

___
[1] I speak loosely. The gutvolks who really NEED Mittophile drool are, plainly, the hired-hand specialists in Brat Pack Management, not that obscure, palpitatin’ wad of pajamaclad kiddie selfservatives who constitute the rank-an’-file Base an’ Vile.

At the top of the Party iceberg, jowls resplendent in the light an’ toes well up out of the chilly brine, perch their Serene Firstlordships, the Hirers of Hands, in whose interest all things (properly) Republicanine come to pass.

==

[2] http://j.mp/tiigtk

==

[3] There is rather a fun funny lurkin’ in ‘plastic’ for the "Classic Studies" subclass of wombscholar, like that good-natured dingalingess who rang up Dr. Limbaugh on Monday. There cannot, however, be very many of her out there.

==

[0] Not really pertinent here, yet never-too-often-repeated-given-half-an-excuse, are the sage observations of Karl, Firstlord Rove in the peerage of Foxcuckooland, concernin’ the former "real world":

"That is not the way the world really works anymore. WE are an Empire now , and when WE act, WE create OUR OWN reality. And while you’re studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- WE will act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. WE are history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what WE do.’’ (&c.) "

(( Actually, it may even be kinda pertinent, as follows: his firstlordship did not explain to Comrade Suskind exactly HOW a whole Rovan Empire can be built in a day. I have always taken for granted that the MacL@@han Tube must play an enormous rôle. Today, 11/03/2011 04:01AM, I notice that I have been taking this for grant and ask Dr. Bones to prepare a memorandumb of the fact.

(( ¡Be caveated, O Bones! that you will soon, in all probability, be called upon to study a neoreality labelled somethin’ like Up from Plastic: Meet the New Real Romney! . ))

.

Return to Sender

2011-11-02T11:09:00.008Z

Dear Dr. Bones,

This

Five possible demands for the Occupy movement
Bob_Neer | Tue, Nov 1, 2011 12:29 PM EST

MarketWatch columnist David Weidner offered five possible demands for the Occupy movement today that merit some consideration. (...)

is no bees’ wax of yours or mine, really, but still . . . !

If *I* was an infantile Leftist [1] -- or, even more so, a supercultivated Blue Blazer too sensible ever to camp out in the foggy, foggy dew _in propriâ personâ_--I would recommend returning this horse to sender unopened.

Maybe that would mean missing an opportunity, but the odds are _primâ facie_ against it, considering that Pegasus Five here came festooned with an introductory write-up that mentions "gobbledygook about income inequality." And "handouts." And is bottom-lined with "[L]et’s face it: [w]hen it comes to real solutions, this group isn’t even at the starting line."

Switchin’ sides, let me very briefly personate Neocomrade Ulysses (as I tentatively reconstruct him): "Ideally, O King Agamurdoch an’ all ye well-greaved Republicanines, the brat pack will actually fall for it and start clamoring for one of the above. And then we have ’em where we want ’em, because all five points are all quite impossible politically, an’ to clamor for the impossible makes the clamorer look childish an’ Yootopian, not to mention most exceedin’ly nineteen-sixties. Especially when you sic a competent advertisin’ agency on ’em."

"There can be no harm in tryin’ my plan on, O neocomrades, for we will be way ahead, should they actually bite.

"Probably, however, they will not. In that case, the Daughters of Virtue & Sons of Wisdom (LLC) are no worse off, we will simply have to wait for colder weather to set in at Zucchini Plaza, an’ boredom out in Televisionland, in the meantime repeatin’ as often as the traffic will bear that "This group isn’t even at the starting line."

"That mantra is bound to take effect eventually. [2]"

Happy days.
--Cassandra

___
[1] One of that mob which the Odysseus of The Wall Street Jingo calls "hardcore kids" (in yet another suspicious-makin’ phrase).

=

[2] "‘Eventually’ may be hastened a little by judiciously hintin’ from time to time that we, the DV&SW (LLC), have heard what the brats are goin’ on about an’ are workin’ 24/7 behind closed doors on a well-past-the-startin’-line proposal to do somethin’ SERIOUS about all that "income inequality" jazz.

"Of course we aren’t and we shouldn’t be, but there is no need to be strictly honest with hardcore troublemakers. Especially when they started it."

***

Thus Ulysses, neocomrade of many wiles.

The student will notice that to publish this scheme (worded Ulysses’ way rather than mine, naturally) is already to begin to implement it.

Myself, I would have stuck in just a pinch more _suggestio falsi_ about the TopPercenters repentin’ an’ amendin’ _suâ sponte_ now that they are aware that there exists a certain perception problem out in the boondocks. That baloney could be pushed so far one falls off the far side of the horse after the manner of Richard XXXVII Nixon’s "secret plan" for peace in Indochina, but the good volks at the _Jingo_ have been marketin’ sizzle at the expense of steak for a long, long time. They certainlÿ ought to be able to avoid gross blunders.

The effect to be achieved is pretty commonplace, really, amounting to lots of preliminary ticker tape and media time for, say, " the blue-ribbon buy-partisan Ailes-Samuelson panel on ‘The Causes and Cure of Economic Inequality in America’ " followed by . . .

... (crickets) . . . .

"I second the motion"

2011-10-31T09:13:00.002Z

Dear Dr. Bones,

Will the sexual harassment allegations against Herman Cain hurt his campaign?
david | Sun, Oct 30, 2011 10:51 PM EST

This is sort of a follow-up to Charley’s post about the tragic state of the Republican presidential field (...) don’t assume that Mitt Romney has retaken the lead.

Mitt Romney doesn't need to "retake" the lead.

Last I checked he was ahead in four early states, and I still don’t know how Herman Cain got all the press to begin with. Why was some random businessman given more credence than any of the other no-namers on the NH primary ballot as I posted the other day? I mean BEFORE a few polls showed him gaining ground, only I’m convinced because the press covered his crazy comments. My money is still on Romney to be the nominee.

christopher @ Mon 31 Oct 12:27 AM

Given her exalted standing -- on top of the Great Blue Hill, as it were, not to speak crudely of socioeconometric and tertiary-educationalist feats -- and her resulting wide horizons, your typical Blue Blazer probably does not entertain the damnfool propositions here implicitly attributed to her, neither (A), that our MA’s dear old Mittens has been overshadowed by a no-’count person of pizza, nor the much more jaw-dropping (B), that America’s Otherparty is in a "tragic state." (What, in the proposed system of nomenclature, a ‘farce’ would be, it boggles this keyboard to imagine.) [1]

As the Duke of Wellington insightfully said, "If you believe *that*, sir, you would believe anything."

Accordingly, I homologate the sentiments of the previous poster, EXCEPT FOR the words "only .... because the press covered his crazy comments," which smack of Rio Limbaugh. _Nihil est in journalismo quod non prius in populo_, or at least the scribbler and his employing corporation invariably *thought* that their rubbish would find some echo in the bosom of Vox Pop.

Moralisation is far more likely to actually lead to an outcome when pointed at oneself before pulling the trigger, so whenever "the press" seems to be conspiring to advance utter tripe and baloney, let Master Narcissus ask himself, "¿How, exactly, did I lead them to think that I might want to buy that odious gunk of theirs?" [2]

Happy days.
--JHM

---
[1] Genuine tragic pscenarios can be devised, they always can, but to be plausible about this material they must start from 20 January 2013 rather than end 6 November 2012. I myself am at present working on a YaleoDra™a to star POTUS Mittens. It is tentatively titled "Two Dips and a Nosedive."

=

[2] Miss Cerulea Birdseye, who has appeared already as "your typical Blue Blazer" , can require no advice from the likes of us humble, yet I mutter to myself under my forelock that she, too, might not unprofitably wonder what theory of herself is held by Engineers of the Human Soul who can take for granted that she takes Pizza Man _au grand sérieux_.

Something to do with Social Daltonism, I betcha the explanation has. But "this is neither the time nor the place for...." .

The ‘tragedy’ _shtyk_ is easier to work out: the Engineers must (with me) suppose that Miss Birdseye thinks it would be impossibly _louche_ and prole of her to laugh out loud at the Otherparty clown show. ’Tis far more genteel (_sc._, Beanville-Brahmanical) to furrow one’s brows and wonder, with crocodile gravity, how the sweet Republicanine puppies *can* ever have gotten themselves into such a thoroughly unsatisfactory kerfuffle..

(( I expect Miss Cerulea Birdseye has quite as much fun at the circus as anybody else, perhaps more than most of us. But one would never guess it to look at her. ))

On the Menial in Massachusetts

2011-10-29T23:24:00.004+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

Mr. Poster here

But they aren't the right KIND of jobs.

I mean, it’s MENIAL work. With your HANDS.

Not a DESIRABLE job like being an Essential State Worker in a casino!

porcupine @ Sat 29 Oct 1:06 AM

may be no _echt_ Blue Blazer, only a cultivated despiser, red in neck and claw. The casino crack suggests as much.

Still, in one way he is quight whight: commercial fisheries are scarcely going to ring in the Brave New Taxachusetts.

As everybody ought to know by now, that historic rôle is strictly reserved for Medicine/ Frankenetics and Tertiary Educationalism ("¡Think H*rv*rd, Mass General, and Genzyme!") with perhaps a small assist from venticulture , especially on sunny days with the wind behind us [1] as well as Mlle. de la Main Invisible drawing us [2] ever onwards and up 24/7 from the vanguard.

Now, none of these triune economic saviors is particular ‘menial’, but that is not what makes them salvific. Or certainly not the main factor. E-comrade Pëtr Otyètsovich has done us such a nifty little fandango -- ""... navigator, engineer, meteorologist, … EMT, cook, refrigerator repair (¿huh?) , biologist, businessman, ...." to that tune that I feel a little bad about pointing out that ‘meniality’ and its reverse have really not much to do with our poor MA’s case one way or the other. But there it is, _et magis amica Veritas_: keeping one's hands clean is all very well, but what *really* matters (I think, quite possibly erroneously) is that Tert. Ed. and the twin Frankenrackets do not require any raw materials worth mentioning.. Whereas fishing depends on ... well, let's face it . . . on FISH.

(Now there is a four-letter ‘F’-word if there ever was one.)

In the Keynesian, or even in the Chicagonomic, long run there may be problems about MA having specialized in doing well what can be done (and, in principle, done equally well) anywhere at all, but that will be then, and, ¡O lucky us! -- now is still only now. For the moment.

Happy days.

___
[1] The usual suspects have deposed that "Sectors vital to the Massachusetts economy include higher education, biotechnology, finance, health care, and tourism."

Sorry, Mr. Peter, and you too, King Jimmy: no mention at all of the Trade Apostolick. Rather a low blow, that, considering that Big LEW manages to notice "the second largest cranberry producing state in the union (after Wisconsin)."

And (there) is yet another good reason to stand up and holler, "¡Curse you, Paul Ryan!"

=

[2] ’Tis all vaguely _Faust_like, _¿no es verdad?_

"¡Mama, Mama, I've been [jugged]!"

2011-10-29T20:17:00.003+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

Or, should the Muses and you do not care for that title, Bones, ¿How about "The Jug is Up" to stick over the following little _trouvée_?, which I accidentally spotted just now whilst admiring oneself from atop the Great Blue Hill :

Massachusetts Liberal

Observations on politics, the media and life in Massachusetts and beyond from the left side of the road

Thursday, October 27, 2011
A change is gonna come

The Massachusetts Democratic Party just got a whole lot more unified for 2012. No knock down drag out Senate primary or redistricting fights. Now it's a simple goal: defeat Scott Brown.

It was the equivalent of a political earthquake yesterday afternoon with the tandem stories that Alan Khazei was taking his hat out of the Senate primary ring and John Olver was retiring after 20 years in Congress.

Gone like that was a divisive game of musical chairs that would have pitted two of the state's 10 incumbent liberal Democratic House members against each other -- the rumble being Olver and his sprawling 1st District against Jim McGovern and his Worcester-based constituency.

Pundits have noted the 1st, based on population, could easily run from the New York border to Worcester. Now that will be the home base for Springfield's Richard Neal. And a potentially disruptive fight between Olver and McGovern avoided.

And it's all over except for the shouting in the Democratic primary or the right to face Scott Brown. With all due respect to Tom Conroy, Marisa DeFranco, James Coyne King and Herb Robinson, they have even less of a chance of halting the ...

*** JUGGERNAUT ****

than Khazei did.

Not that the novice candidate would not have benefited from a primary to sharpen her campaign skills. While Warren appears to have made a smooth transition to public campaigning, it has not been without hiccups that the GOP has been quick to pounce on. A major gaffe (quick, it's Ben Cherington, not Theo Epstein) could be deadly.

But the dynamic of this race changed mightily from the moment she entered and a potentially divisive primary with Khazei slinging arrows had the potential for more harm than good.

So now there's only one face on the dartboard in Democratic State Party headquarters and the occupants won't be able to emulate Will Rogers famous line: "I'm not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat!"

Look out Scotto
.
Labels: 2012, Alan Khazei, Congress, Elizabeth Warren, John Olver, redistricting, US Senate

posted by Outraged Liberal | 5:00 AM

0 Comments:

This e-comrade has a better sense of humor than most. He runs a butterfly--several butterflies, actually, plus maybe a moth or two--down with his lady friend's steamroller five seconds after announcing that *he*, the murder-vehicle artist, is the party ‘outraged’. I like that plan a lot better than I would like a perpetual early November of bared treason, and weeping wimpery, and bleeding heartfeltness, and compassionate Kant, BUT . . .

. . . if one is going to present oneself in e-veryday life as "Massachusetts Liberal" working out of a virtuous McMansion gazeteered as http://baystateliberal.blogspot.com, it might be well if one looked a little more like the rest of the good volks whose Boy Poster one has unilaterally nominated and unanimously elected oneself to be. In fact, was *eye* a Redneck Massochist, eye do believe eye would start mumblin’ at this point darkly ’bout maybe takin' pserious steps [1] to repel infringement of patent and/or copywhight.

We will, I trust, have Massa Liberal around to shoot at regularly, so let me cut straight to the steamroller. As you see, I have ventured to add a little EMPHASIS to the above-swiped. *J*U*G*G*E*R*N*A*U*T* is enough by itself to be the _plat du jour_ for Day One over _chez Massa_.

If you have read all my scribbling more faithfully than it merits, sir, you will know I have deployed not only the ‘J’-word itself about St. Elizabeth of H*rv*rdy [2], but ‘jugged’ as well. Maybe I also borrowed Mr. Bentham's ‘juggical’, Dr. Alzheimer refuses to either confirm or deny. Anyhow, the late apotheosis of Her Beatitude struck me as a distinctly juggiform human event well before I met my _trouvée_.

At this point it would be natural to modestly announce "Great minds think alike" and go back to sleep until spring, except that Massa Liberal and Eye do not in fact see altogether I-2-I. Specifically, M.L. is the first agitpropper I have ever run into who does not think there is even the faintest far-off cloud of disapproval hanging over the word ‘Juggernaut’. Why, ¡it might as well be ‘steamroller’ or ‘Panopticon’ or ‘runcible’ for all he cares!

Beseiged as we good guys are by ravenin’ Republicanines just over every border, it is likely enough that that is the direction in which our English is ultimately headed. What surprises me is not that the vernacular should go to the dogs in this respect, but only that our own Big Juggie should get up so early in the mornin’ an’ that he should march off to join the poachers without any farewell or notice given.

Worse, no sooner does one learn that Big Juggie has defected at all, than one finds him back gnawin' at one’s figurative leg exactly as a respectable cloth-coat-Republican cur would gnaw, warnin' one like a not-so-nice cop on the _Deweyplatz_, "You might as well come quiet." [3]

Well, Dr. Bones, you can work out from these presents how quiet I, at least, propose to come.

Happy days.

___
[1]

By creating an account on Red Mass Group you agree to abide by the following rules. 1) You will not post libelous statements about any figure public or private. 2) You will not post links to any commercial services or goods without the express written permission of the management of Red Mass Group. Violation of these rules will result in a $1,000 per violation charge, each link will be treated as a seperate violation An invoice will be sent to the email account you used to join. If this invoice is not paid within 15 days of the date, legal action will be taken.

(( That little exuberance strikes me as so remarkable, Dr. Bones, that I want to hang a framed copy of it in "the smallest room of my house" so I can always find it "behind me" without difficulty. Massa Liberal probably thinks he is the hardest-nosed overseer on any political plantation inside I-495, maybe even east of the Berkshires, but he pales by comparison with the real Charlie McCoy . No surprise there. ))

===

[2] The iconography, I am told, is unlikely to be reality-based.

===

[3] To be exact, Juggie barked at me--with his mouth full, I am sorry to say-- that I "just got a whole lot more unified for 2012." _Et vide supra passim_ for a good deal more to the same effect.

Now, "with all due respect" (as Juggie further barked, though not at me) I take a little exception to this effect, because it seems to imply there is some real danger I might be too I.Q.-challenged to notice when I have just been jugged.

"Lefty Meets the Lyin’ Class" (An Open Letter to the Great Blue Hillbillies)

2011-10-29T11:24:00.002+01:00

¡Much Esteemed Blazers of Blueness!

I write in respect of the following passage noted _chez vous_

I love how they . . .

. . . . keep quoting how she’s “thrown rocks” as if she was suggesting she threw rocks literally. It makes me chuckle.

Seriously, though, the GOP continues to demonstrate that it has absolutely, positively NO PROBLEM lying like a freaking rug. They will SAY ANYTHING to get elected, lying about supporting things they’re blatantly trying to kill. The truly amazing thing is the length to which they get away with it — the fact that the media simply won’t allow itself to tell the world that the emperor has no clothes, instead creating false equivalencies or allowing GOP spin without fact checking.

ryepower12 @ Fri 28 Oct 12:49 PM

I think Your Worships ought to look at the unproblematical "freaking rug" from your Class enemy’s point of view. If YWW [0] were the Republicanine Representative of the Wisconsin First in the Federal Congress, might not even YWW find yourself scribblin’ in the _Wall Street Jingo_ looney bin ("op-ed page") of 5 April 2011 that "the safety net for the poor is comin’ apart at the seams"?

Indeed, might not YWW have scribbled that yourself yesterday afternoon for Mother Dog or Firelake Jones or perhaps the brand-new _Osservatore Zucchiniano_ or _Deweyplatzer Nachrichten_?

Exactly *where* your worships might have said such a thing one cannot guess, for it were mere delusion to suppose that the Vanguard of All Bluegressive Humanity, V(G)ABH, can ever confine itself to one particular medium of record, not even ’GBH or the New York Tomes Company. A murdochopoly, or single bottle-neck, through which all emanations of the Higher Blueness must trickle is nearly as unthinkable as it is nonexistent

Still, YWW could give P. D. Ryan mendacity lessons if I am simply mistaken in supposing that YWW frequently think thoughts that very closely resemble "the safety net for the poor is comin[g] apart at the seams." ¡Golly, would YWW have had *me* fooled!

I appreciate that Lefty was upset largely because the seams in question are bein’ continually picked at by good volks like the whiz-kid neocomrade. Nevertheless, when that specimen emitted the soundbark that runs in fuller

No one person or party is responsible for the looming [1] crisis. Yet the facts are clear: since President Obama took office, our problems have gotten worse. Major spending increases have failed to deliver promised jobs. The safety net for the poor is coming apart at the seams. Government health and retirement programs are growing at unsustainable rates. The new health-care law is a fiscal train wreck. And a complex, inefficient tax code is holding back American families and businesses

the only reason I myself feel the slightest urge to come forwards to extinguish the posthonourable neogallant’s pantaloons is that "fiscal train wreck" baloney. I admit that the Smirk of Janesville does make itself look [2] a little worse an’ smirkier than it absolutely needs to when it comes closest to flat-out lyin’ at the same point where it also comes closest to its own ‘professional’ ‘expertise’. [3]

The question, however, is ¿How close is that? And I reply, "Not very close."

Had the Smirk been sincerely worried about wreckin’ trains, it would not have blithely proposed to do pretty near nothin’ at all about the Medicare Menace for a dozen years. But ¿to call it a liar on that account? I think not. By a standard of veracity *that* severe, ¡well mun we alle singen _Cum vix justus sit securus_!.

Once we dismiss that, the most plausible count of the mendacity indictment, lesser included charges must evaporate as well, like presentin’ a Thirty Year Plan for Party & AEIdeology under the utterly absurd pretenses of it bein’ a Fedguv budget for twelve months, FY 2012. Nobooby who knows enough about such things to be dangerous can deny the utter falsity, in one sense, of that shameless ploy, but that undeniability itself lets the Smirk off the hook _quâ_ liar: it cannot properly be said to *lie* to us, after all, when none of us would even dream of believin’ a word that it barks.

With most of such factious barkin’s, questions of True v. False do not arise at all, it seems to me. A Smirk of Janesville makes queer noises ’bout ‘seams’ an’ "safety nets" to alert other Party neocomrades that it is one of them. To treat such tokens as policy proposals would be like solemnly discussing whether a Mohawk warrior’s haircut is factually accurate or logically compelling.

That is to say, somebody has made a mistake about the *genre*.

Happy days.
--JHM

___
[0] ‘YWW’ is to be pronounced so as to rhyme with _Vdd._ in Cathtilian. Which--small world--is also what it means.

=

[1] As I said, this alleged loomin’ incident took place several -- nearly seven -- months ago. So the Smirk is undoubtedly guilty of quotin’ itself. That offense, however, is quite distinct from lyin’.

=

[2] http://j.mp/cwH4gU

That beaut is at the Smirk’s own day-job website, notice. Every time I recur thither I wonder that that cartoon has still not been replaced. Nobody at all would holler ’bout lyin’, I don’t think, if the Smirk just silently put up a less off-puttin’ snapshot of itself. As one who happens to have grown up just over the southern border of Smirkestán (Lake County IL), allow me to assure YWW that the yocals do not *all* look like that up there.

The fact of nonreplacement perhaps rises to the level of the Sherlockian barkless dog in the night, in that the Smirk’s core constituency must either not notice any æsthetic problem, or else actually *like* that sort of thing. My guess is that the Core-in-Chief, the globalised Bigmanagers of NewsCorp an’ ScroogeBank an’ Warbucks Defense Widgets (&c. &c.) simply don’t care: such exalted freelordships as they would not be caught dead in Kenosha anyway.

The in-district core, on the other hand, whom I take to be small-town neo-Babbits an’ Chambermaids of Commerce much like those of Worcester County, find the smirkin’ a positive plus: after all, their clever little laddie in Congress has a whight to look smug, havin’ figured out admirably which side its bread is buttered on. To which there may or may not be added a certain smugness on their mini- an’ microfreelordships’ own score, for of course they know themselves to be safely masters, well aware that if the Smirk were *really* as clever as it accounts itself, it would not be in politics, it would be out stayin’ rich in the secret sector like a rational critter.

"Jowls trump smirks," a hostile observer of America’s Otherparty might generalize, with reasonable safety.

=

[3] The "intellectual foundation" (©, and ®, and ™) of the Smirk’s pro expertise appears to be He went on to graduate from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, with a B.A. in economics and political science in 1992 which sounds ¿maybe a tad thin? to the present H*rv*rd.

(( DIGRESSION. Big LEW, The Learnèd Elders of Wiki, almost make one side with the oppressed wingnutettes an’ wingnuts when they venture to suggest that the Smirk’s Tert. Ed. credentials are to be reinforced with rubble like "Ryan briefly worked during college for the Oscar Mayer meat and cold cut production company as a Wienermobile driver."

(( This, too, is (presumably) no lie, yet ’tis not exactly good-tasty either. ))

¡But Some of Us LIKE Nasty!

2011-10-27T05:39:00.000+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

When ‘folks’ talk ’bout havin' feelin's . . .

Unfortunate

I can’t really blame Alan (or Setti) for dropping, all things considered, but an unchallenged nominee makes me nervous. She’s done great so far, but I have a feeling this campaign will be nasty.

jimc @ Wed 26 Oct 9:13 PM Reply

. . . McNasty (’66/’72) must reflect how vastly superior it is to have an "intellectual foundation" (as somebooby just called it) upon which to lay one’s silly little head. Upon which one's hormones can get to work.

For example: strapped to the commuter rail tracks, poor Pauline, mere Ninety-Niner, IQwise, that she cannot help herself being, announces that she "feels a little scared." Had she been predestined by her Mother Nature and/or her Father Zeus to a three-digit percentile [0], however, she would speak rather of "a rational perception of the headlamp and roar of the swiftly on-rushing St. Elizabeth Express." [2]

A reactionary writer of great stylistic merit has guessed that when ‘folks’ talk like that, they are merely bein’ plight: "To avoid the rudeness of saying ‘I have detected a _non sequitur_ which I will now demonstrate, we feign that what is really, or what we take to be, a rational perception, is merely a fugitive emotion."

Though Pauline is probably safe enough for the moment, the St. Elizabeth has just terminated Comrade Hazy and plunges onward in her wild career [3]. Somebody *really* important must be late for a meeting, I guess. ¿Is the Duchess, perchance, giving another machine-in-the-garden party?

Happy days.

___
[0] Mathematical pedants will be aware that there is only a single "three-digit percentile" available, the one-hundredth, most of it already owned or leased by the Greatest University in the County [of Middlesex].

Nerds and other Levelers can count from zero at the bottom and then have no three-digit percentiles at all, thus living up to the diagnosis which lovers of the Spiritual Beauties of Inequality have very justly been making about us for millennia: if we cannot have any, we simply snatch it away from those who can. ¿What, after all, on G*re's green earth could be more fairembalanced than nothing for nobody?

Antilevelers, if that's a word, are free to visit Lake Woebegon and see for themselves how much progress has been made on reclaiming additional luxury percentiles at the high end of the ever-immortal Herrnstein-Murray ©u®ve . I suspect not a lot, but ¿what would I know?

=

[2] Or how about "saw the handwriting on the wall in terms of money and attention"?

(( Jugheads who feel a little embarrassed about being frankly juggical in public, possibly because they wish to continue to be taken for lieberals and demoncrats, ought to find that formulation helpful. It is not they, it protests, who go about scribbling graffiti on other ‘folks’' walls; they only report what Mlle. de la Main Invisible has placarded already.

(( _Facilis descensus Averno_, "¡This way to Foxcuckooland, ladies and gentlemen!" ))

=

[3] That's just ridiculous: of course: the Paulines and Alans and miscellaneous assorted "small people" are in danger of getting juggernauted by a ‘City of St. Elizabeth’ only because her course is not the least bit ‘wild’ but proceeds with utmost reliability and rigour "down the ringing grooves of [Hope and] Change," as the Poet of the Harry S. Truman Library & Museum (¿? -- ¡good old HST!) hath it.

Maybe a little behind schedule now and then, admittedly, but it is not as if these tin lizards keep jumping off their grooves all the time.

Breakfast of Champions, Party of Cripples

2011-10-24T09:23:00.003+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

The Party of Grant an' Hoover (& Fratboy, & Hudak, & Bielat, & ...) has, laboriously an' postgallantly an' neohonourably, elected zero (0.0) percent of the Massachusetts delegation to the Fedguv House of Representatives.

Now had EYE been engaged to agitprop for the Funders of Fratboy, LLC, as Party Neocomrade Ch. X. Cassidy of the _LDH Herald_ has, it appears, been, I trust that I would keep that number in mind a little as I scribbled. For there is some danger under such circumstances of makin' oneself an' one's Venerable Funders look silly.

For example, one might start by whimperin' that America's Otherparty is sadly underrepresented around here just at present. To work up some alligator tears and crocodile sympathy from us donkeys, notoriously bleeding of heart as we are, with a self-sorrowin' _shtyk_ seems to me quite feasible, though admittedly not likely to result in any concrete affirmative action on behalf of the political cripples. However, if the crips insist simultaneously on pretendin' to be comic-book superheroines able to go around (quote) SLAMMIN' (endquote) whatever gets in the path of the Big Party an' Her AEIdeology, well, the sentimental mood is swiftly ruined, the sympathy of us strangers, always precarious, forfeited almost before it was properly garnerished in the first place.

Furthermore, Lady Logic advises me that the Party of Cripples will not be -- CAN not be -- worse off than they are at present, no matter what cruel vivisection may befall all those dogs and ponies held behind closed doors in the dungeons an' labòratories of Bacon Hill. True, Fratboy Himself will perhaps fall at the hands of St. Elizabeth of H*rv*rdy--¡Father Zeus hasten the glad event!--but that has nothing to do with redistricting.

Operative Cassidy does the Party of Crips no great favor by unearthin' an' drawin' attention to certain notions of what True Fairembalancement (® & ™ & ©) requires current in cripple circles. Even if the Illustriously Freemighty Lord (_jasnie wolnomozhny Pan_) of Bielat were an academic or Party TankThinker with no personal ax to grind, _ad hoc_ery like CD lines "drawn to make sure you have an equal voice for people with similar problems" would only be yet another part of why we laugh from them. It would indeed be great fun to see a map of the Hill City Commonwealth drawn up on those lines, yellow, say, for all those precincts of MA where the prevailing local problem is the Heartbreak of Psoriasis, but dark blue where underwater real estate, or perhaps the unsatisfactory techniques of Native Management now employed down at Washin’ton City, take precedence. However it is clear that there is no such map and never will be, that what the nifty neoproposal is really about is not having His Freemightiness (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) as one’s Fedguv Rep., a ‘problem’ that ‘similarly’ afflicts everybooby from Provincetown to the Berkshires.

And of course if one gives the crips an inch, they'll soon be yammerin’ for an ell. Most donkeys have figured out by now, one hopes, that it is safest to assume that what the Party neocomrades really understand by fairembalancement would be, more or less, a dictatorship of the Worcester County Chambermaids of Commerce: "An EMPLOYER and an employee are clean different things" -- that's the ticket, Dr. Bones!

"Really understand by" here refers not so much to what goes on consciously in the dittopans of individual Republicanines, but to the effective principles of their self-behavior, those rules of thumb that most accurately predict what the kiddies will be gettin’ funded to yammer for next. In making such predictions the sudent of neocomradological science must bear in mind that the Mass. Party of Cripples is significantly different from the correspondin’ Homeland™-wide crew. Roughly speaking, the latter stand to the former as the CCUSA of Massa Tom Donahue to the freedamsels of Worcester an’ Essex, far less parochial an' provincial, far readier for prime time. Yet not essentially different. Not less zealously devoted to the EMPLOYER Ascendancy, only scabbin' for a more sophisticated representative of The Class.

Happy days.
--JHM

¡Introducing Little Orphan Jennie!

2011-10-17T08:07:00.000+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

Scabbin’ for ScroogeBank in the columns an’ e-columns of the Voice of Louisedayhicksville, a certain Party Neocomradess (fifth grade) J. C. Braceras, "lawyer and political commentator [1]", has arrived at her James Russell Lowell Moment™ (Pat. Pend.) [2]:

. . . last best hope . . . final chance to redeem . . . either validate or repudiate . . . It is about first principles. The lines have been drawn. Which side are you on?

The thing havin’ been thus attempted in prose, ¿how about we try rime?

Once to every nerd and wingnut
Comes the moment to decide,
In the clash of Doit and Shekel
For the better payin’ side.
Some great boon, the new Mass. Zion,
Offers us a rival bid
And that choice goes by forever,
¡Better grab it _pronto_, kid!

Not altogether happy. ¿Perhaps if we let the pet g@@gle chew on it a little, to break it in, like?

Una vez que todos los nerd y tuerca de mariposa / Llega el momento de decidir, / En el choque de Doit y Shekel /
Por el lado del pagando mejor .

Algunas gran bendición, la nueva Misa Sión, / Nos ofrece una oferta rival / Y que la elección va por siempre,

¡Es mejor cogerlo _pronto_, chico!

(( ¡Oh, well! ))

That will do for whight now. Please *do* make a memorandumb, though, sir, of Little Orphan Jennie. I mean to get back to her freeladyship soon and maybe scribble a little less merrily.

Happy days.
--JHM

___
[1] The political commentary of the PNC-5 JCB neomechanism you may examine for yourself, sir.

In addition to this morning’s portentous singin’ with Lowell an’ Lucifer an’ all the _Herald_ angels, the freedame puts out a regular (?) vanity e-press product called "JENNIFER BRACERAS / Political and Cultural Commentary / by a Red Mom in the Bluest State.

Possibly, though that is not what the blog is called, but only the name of the blog, or maybe what the name is called -- also floatin’ around in the factional drool is plain (he jested) RedMom-BlueState.org (for of course it was not plain at all, but tutti-frutti to the max).

(( The _Alice_ guy could have lots of fun with little Miss Jennie makin’ haddocks’ eyes at her Uncle Scrooge, an’ at her Daddy Warbucks, _¡y naturalamnente a su Tio Ruperto!_.

"We report (what is out there), you deride (what you find)."

You really should come look at this little neocircus, Bones. The ScroogeBanksters (or equivalent at NewsCorp or the Warbucks Widget Trust) have stood Little Orphan Jennie to a really spiffy, pro website.

A respectable HTML-coat donkey like me would have to spend forty-five minutes with a cookbook to figure out just how they did the label of the appellation of the droolpan in Read, Blew an’ Colourblind. Firstlord Ebenezer was presumably just indulgin’ an idiot niece, but there are real commercial possibilities here: the Frogs, and we Paddies, and every other band of Lesser Breeds Without that waves a tricolor flag (of which there seem to be several hundred) ought to be wanting one too, after maybe a little nudgin’ from the Commercial Speech Division of ScroogeBank.

=

Pardon my technicalities, sir. The affiliation of the PNC-5 JCB mechanism with the shyster community are of more interest to neocomradological science.

¡Not merely a shystatrix is her freeladyship, but a H*rv*rd one!

As a matter of fact, her freeladyship’s C. V. (as self-presented) is so similar to that of St. Elizabeth of Warrenbuffet -- up to a certain point -- that I find it difficult to avoid guessing that the liver of PNC-5 JCB may bubble with spite an’ envy whenever her freeladyship is forced to reflect how much farther than that point Her Beatitude has somehow managed to sneak. "Life is unfair," obviously. Were it not, of course their Jennie would be sittin’ pretty in the Fedguv Senate, and our Lizzie still taking parajournalistic whacks at the L. D. hicks. (At the Blue Blazers would be more likely, though, really, considering Her Beatitude’s Trotskyite attitudes..)

=

[2] My own patent application will soon be pending. ¡Imagine getting a nickle for one’s ownself every time the sweet puppies of Endarkenment start barkin’ like they had just swallowed his freelordship of Kirkegaard!

One Wiseburger Deluxe with Side Order of Flies

2011-10-16T10:35:00.002+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

The esteemed wiseburger, and obvious aspirin’ Kiddiemaster, from Fox-on-15th-Street here comes up with a number of points of compare-and-contrast between the Tee Putty and the New Bolsheviki, but overlooks what this caller would call ‘obvious’, namely that the Tee Putty are mostly the PARENTS of middle-aged selfesteemist wiseburgers, whereas the Neobolshies are their kids.

Though never addressin’ the crude chronological point head on, an’ perhaps genuinely impercipient of it, the F-15 hotshot’s "correlation of sympathies," so to call an important concept for which I have never seen the technical term, is just what the doctor ordered:

(1) TeePees are "driven from above," discloses Sir Oracle -- driven, that is, much the way Mommy an’ Daddy (an’ Uncle Superego) used to drive oneself.

(2) TeePees are "pretty clear [in their] view of the world," chockful, that is, of plausible soundin’ reasons why one would *wish* one had been turned into a pumpkin if not in bed by midnight.

(3) The wiseburger’s discussion under the rubric of *Impact* does not summarize itself quite so handily, but "without producing any substantive accomplishments" seems to be the thrust an’ crux thereof. Which fits handily into my own admittedly preconceived pigeon-holes, for or course in the long run one does (in most cases) get out from under Uncle Superego an’ his minions an’ surrogates.

This ineffectuality is that of the TeePees. The Neobolshies are rather a tricky topic seen from this angle, for Sir Oracle has (as I conjecture) not yet given up hope of makin’ a little impact Himself. Someday. Somehow. An impact on those "probably at an earlier stage of [their] lifecycle." [1]

(4) By contrast, the *Style* rubric is easy sleddin’. Naturally TeePees are sniffy an’ stodgy, Neobolshies cooool -- though perhaps not quite so well groomed.

(5) Last, an’ presumably least, come *Strategy and Tactics*. At some risk of frivolity, I would point out that the wiseburger’s own Ma an’ Pa will always be found walking upright or ‘vertical’, whereas his kiddies (an’ many other folks’ as well) are much more likely to do the ‘horizontal’ thing. [2]

=

The oracular neodeliverance concludes with "The parallels are much stronger than either prefers to admit.."

¿Perhaps one might add "or than ever-starboard-driftin’ wiseburger Yalies in their mid-forties care to distinctly recognize"? The alliance of brats with Gramps against poor Ozzie-in-the-Middle is well attested.

Furthermore, had Sir Oracle thought all these things out perspicuously, it seems to me he would have had to worry a little about the political an’ personal kinematics as well as the statics. That is to say, the second childhood of Neocomrade J. X. Weisberg is bound to unfold more alone Dr. Altzheimer’s sort of trajectory that those studied by the late M. Piaget. (In the vernacular, "Jake is not gettin’ any younger either.")

JXW certainly appears to spontaneously *like* _Neubolschewismus_ a good deal better than he likes the Tee Putty [3], but nevertheless only the latter are a club to which his own credentials might gain him admittance.

(( Fairembalancement perhaps requires my suggesting that we all thank Father Zeus heartily for the generational self-separation diagnosed above. "Geezers against Greed" would perhaps be not much more dangerous than we geezers are taken individually, but if the the average age of the victims of AstroTurf™baggin’ were eighteen instead of seventy-eight, one would have to retire the "Tee Putty" label: those clobbered would not be soft an’ malleable, especially when moistened a little with fundin’, they could easily be the sort of whippersnappers who go in for literal whips.[4] ))

Happy days.

___
[1] That is as close as Sir Oracle comes to makin’ an age-cohort-based analysis, and it is not very close, for he is talkin’ allegory ’bout the ‘lifecycles’ of agitprop movements, not of particular zöological specimens.

=

[2] No rule should lack a good probative exception, so I rejoice that Sir Oracle tossed in that "ballerina perched atop Wall Street’s bronze bull." Though, come to think of it, ‘perched’ does not strictly imply verticality. (¿Does it?)

=

[3] Even if he did not, he would have to pretend to, or else find a new employin’ corporation. The WaPo Foxoids are not yet quite ready to unmask themselves. Maybe the day after Hallowe’en. Or in honor of Inauguration Day in 2013.

=

[4] Before moving on to his five formally distinguished rubrics, our wiseburger smuggled in a sixth. Tee Putty, we learn, "has remained a purely American affair, while [Neobolshevism] strikes a global posture."

My guess is that his freelordship of Fifteenth Street has run two quite different thought clichés together here: "purely American" partly insinuates that the TeePee geezers look dowdy an’ parochial an’ provincial, not quite People of WalMart, perhaps, but definitely somewhere off in that general direction.

That part is covered under Rubric IV. However, I do not think absence of a "global posture" is exclusively about one’s Style in the fashion-plate sense. Sir Oracle, consciously or subliminally, imputes bein’ what I just called "soft an’ malleable, especially when moistened a little with fundin’" to the Tee Putty as a part of their Yank Exceptionalism: "Swarthy an’ well-mustachioeded foreigners need not apply," so to speak.

From my standpoint, this is a mistake: though as a matter of fact the Tee Putty could probably teach the Daughters of the American Revo lessons in (the absurdly so-called) ‘nativism’, of course there is nothing "purely American" about simply having become too grown-up to be a succesful thug any more.

To think that would be Fisher’s Fallacy, "It must be a terrible thing to be a Frenchman, because all Frenchmen are mortal."

"Wingnuts, sir, are an honest people"

2011-10-14T11:57:00.001+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

Probably the key to this latest thrillin’ episode of "¡Yeaaaaah for YaleoDrama™a!" is not what you are thinking, sir.

I admit this show of the Hire Bozodom *looks* as if his freelordship of Simon Pajama has simply had that vacant lot between the recently gentrified ears stuffed full of Dr. Limbaugh’s day-old dittos, that he is down for the neostruggle ’gainst the stodgy ol’ Republicanine Establishment (RK9E), all those icky Karl Hannas an’ Mark Roves an’ General St. Alexander of Hamilton, Esq., wannabes who have never yet allowed their own Party’s sweet puppies off the leash properly. "¿Who says, ‘Whightboys can’t jump’?"

To watch his freelordship jump an’ jive with The Herminator, barkin’ an’ bellowin’ "I can *too* jump, Ma, ¡you just watch me!" is so excessively meretricious that I doubt not that all has been carefully calculated for effect in some top-secret Labóratory of YaleoDra™a at Pajama Junction NJ or Neohaven CT or possibly Undisclosed Springs WY, out by the Cheney spread.

A lot of the freelordly calculation is accessible to the mean(-spiritèd)est intelligence. Naturally when his freelordship perverted from Hollywood Hebraism to the First Church of Eddie Burke, no blanket endorsement of the way the latter conduct their rites -- the way that got them called "God’s Frozen People," ¿don’t you know? -- was expressed or implied. From Day Zero -- maybe even from Day Thirteen BPE, "before the Pajamatarian Epoch," -- his freelordship will have been intendin’ to give the other whightboys remedial coachin’ in the saltation department. "To make it more FUN to scab for ScroogeBank," a sayer might say. (Your competent sayer could say this one a zillion different ways, actually, and drag in pretty well every bit of prole-soundin’ slang she ever heard correctly. Plus some bits which she perhaps did not quight.)

Meanwhile, back at the country club, the RK9E nobility an’ (Upper) neogentry continue to maintain that the Chief End of Macho is to knock little white balls around a green-side-up course. [0]

That’s only the _literaliter_ of Establishment stodge, of course, yet the _allegorice_ is like unto it: to clobber their own "small people" (whightboys) over the noggin with bags full of AstroTurf™ until the contents of their dittopans are reduced to Tee Putty once an’ for all. After which, ScroogeBank will rule unobstructed from sea to whinin’ sea, the North Atlantic will turn to gin-an’-tonic, the moon shine Bloody, but Merry, &c. &c. [1]

(( ¿Where was eye? ¡Ah!

(( Thou and I, Dr. Bones, probably spend too much about the intrinsic second-rateness of Neohaven an’ all its works an’ pomps. An’ autodrama™urgy. There is, after all, a whole world of lower rates still available elsewhere. Better make your reservations soon, though. ))

As I was saying, my view is that this drool was, despite certain appearances, not simply decanted into Freelord Simon from the vast droolcellars of Shatto Limbaugh, but clotted where we find it entirely spontaneously and independently. The Witch Doctor of Democracy would never bark some of his freelordship of Simon Pajama's here barkin's. For example "money ... too might not be as important as it is cracked up to be" is an exuberance that the WDD would never allow himself. The WDD knows his golfin’ buddies far too well to think that they are in the market for any vintage that tastes the least bit like that.

A recent pervert to the Kiddie Selfservative Movement like his freelordship no doubt needs a little time to learn the neoropes. Furthermore, in the case of Roger of Simon Pajama, there are individual quirks an' quiddities that may tend, notably (A) Neohaven, which causes his freelordship to suppose himself adequately credentialled for almost anythin' already, an’ (B) Hollywood, which his freelordship is bound to account evidence of a freelordly an’ potentially kiddiemagisterial ‘creativity’ unavailable to lesser breeds. [2]

That his freelordship aspires to be a Grand Kiddiemaster is obvious. Grander, even, than Karl, Firstlord of Rove, if possible. So it is no surprise that the latter RK9E pooh-bah should be first in line to get his windows soaped for Simoween.

Happy days.
--JHM

___
[0] Our friends over on North H*rv*rd Street appear to be pickin’ up where his freelordship of Simon Pajama left off. At least, they seem determined to apply _hammabîn yabîn_ to the name of their shoppe.

Well, O.K. If they don’t care to explain the little joke, I see no reason to get myself in trouble with Paddy and Brigit and the management of *T*H*E* Country Club by doing so for them.

=

[1] Full details of my hasty etcæteration are available in the last thrillin’ chapter of the _Neotestamentum_. San Juan may, however, left out the part about seven days of steady rain that shall put an end to Occupy Wall Street.

=

[2] By contrast, (A) Party Neocomrade (first grade) Dr. R. H. Limbaugh cannot be hindered in the rope-learnin' process by his Tert. Ed. He, blissfully, does not have any.

As for (B) ‘creativity’, that word is such a weasel that I am sure one could find some sense in which Himself of E.I.B. would humbly acknowledge that he is twice as creative as the day is long. This, however, would certainly not be a sense near akin to the ‘Hollywood’ brand c®eativity of a Simon Pajama. The Destructive ©®€@™ionism ideoproduct would be a good more pertinent.

Wisest of all, however, in coming profitably to grips with Citizen Rush is for the neocomradologist to discard the category altogether, and take the patient's own word for his utter NON-creativeness. ¿How many times does HIMSELF have to bark that all he does is express sentiments an’ resentiments that rankle obscurely already in the breasts of Wally Wombschool an' Cindy from Wasilla before we of the bicycle-challenged classes start to wonder if maybe this is not indeed the case?

Nobooby with "a Yaliewood background," so to christen the pajamatarian _Mischling_, would take that line except as a deliberate deception. Pervert though his freelordship be, yet some traits are what a caller might call "unpervertable from." Under no circumstances will Roger, zeroth Freelord of Simon Pajama in the peerage of Foxcuckooland, stop bein' a victim of IHS, Invented-Here Syndrome, where ‘here’ refers to the freelordly dittopan already alluded to disrespectfully.

Should the other lemmin’s of Party an’ AEIdeology someday refuse to let his freelordship "have ideas of his own" -- not altogether an inconceivable development, _me judice_ -- I betcha HFL will ditch them too: "¿What Life, what Joy, without golden Yaliewood?"

"demonstrated his commitment to being with everyday people"

2011-10-13T19:30:00.002+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

The Blue Blazers (BB) are more fun than nine barrels of wingnutettes, yet I incline to expect they do not actually enjoy being dissented from much more than we Lesser Breeds Without (LBW) do.

Now amongst the LBW figures a certain Comrade Conroy, who insists on making an embarrassment of himself before the Cærulean nobility and gentry by buttonholing them in their corridors of publicity and insisting that he, Comrade Conroy, is holier than is St. Elizabeth of H*rv*rdy. ¡FAR holier!

This pest wastes the time of his Betters with such silly immodest stuff as

* Doesn’t it make sense to choose a candidate who has ["Me, who have"] worked for years and offered solutions on the broad range of critical issues facing our state and our nation — strengthening our economy, creating new jobs, improving our schools, protecting our environment, controlling health care costs — rather than just one narrow area of expertise?

* Isn’t the smart choice a candidate who has ["Me, who have"] good working relationships in both government and the business community, who has taken the best of both to write new laws that are helping create jobs in Massachusetts right now?

The rhetoric is not as bad as the cause. Observe how a certain four-letter verb--begins with ‘W’--gets a thorough w*rkout. Her Beatitude will, if nominated and elected, presumably go in for all play, all the time. And never, ever, get caught Creating a JOB.

I fear it is a little uncertain that our Betters value J.C. ("job creation") so highly that that tactic will have all the impact on them original-intented, but one does not, after all, know this for sure. And in any case, it was a nice try, worthy of a 'B+' at least in my view. ¿How would you score it, sir?

Those are the last two salvos of five from the conguy. The one in the middle impressed me most:

And don’t we also want a candidate who can win back all those Democratic leaning voters in Worcester and Lowell and Taunton — the guys who defected to Brown last time? Don’t we want a candidate who can relate to them, who knows what it means to be unemployed [0], who has met them on the street and in their fire stations and front porches on a walk to the four corners of this state, and demonstrated his commitment to being with everyday people?

I’d say Comrade Conroy has put a new twist on _fas est et ab hoste doceri_: he gives the impression of having sat humbly at the feet of Senator Fratboy, or perhaps more profitably at the boardroom table of the Funders of Fratboy, LLC, to learn how to dispose of the fiendish and frivolous St. Elizabeth. [1]

That ploy is more than just rhetorical, obviously. Unfortunately the non-rhetorical part seriously misfires _chez moi_. "No, comrade, I am not, as it happens, especially shopping for "committment to being with everyday people." Committment to being on the floor of the Senate would be more to the point, and committment to voting there the way that I would vote myself would be better still. I appreciate that being one four- or five-millionth of a constituency is not likely to let me call a Fratboy or Conroy up and get my exact policy druthers on every bill that comes down the pike, BUT, although I admit it would be dotty to expect to get that much, I don't think it at all unreasonable to desire it. There is no way not to take what one gets from one's ‘representatives’ in Congress, but that is no reason to forget what it was that one wanted. [2]

The most charitable construction, I guess, is to gloss it a little and hope that the comrade has resolved to commit himself to "being with everyday people ON THE ISSUES." That could pass for Mere Demonocracy, maybe, although that ‘everyday’ epithet looks very like a weasel to me. [3] It suggests that the comrade has in mind some particular class of Weekend People, or Holiday People [4], or the like, whose wishes would count for less with "Senator Conroy."

Why, ¡the comrade might even mean the Blue Blazers! Though if he does, it is not very sensible not to ward of such a suspicion a little more when holding out his begging bowl here, right square in front of the Palace of Public Television atop the Great Blue Hill. ’Tis a bold beggar who frankly admits to his customers that all spare change contributed will probably be used against them.

I have heard it rumored that literal panhandlers sometimes use that technique successfully, and of course in a certain sense Courage is always lovely, but . . . .

Happy days.
--JHM

___
[0] Though not much into anecdotal gossipdence, I cannot help wondering whether the comrade has not carefully ‘crafted’ that sentence for purposes of _suggestio falsi_. From Big LEW's account of him, it seems unlikely that he was ever what you would call SERIOUSLY disemployed. "Between jobs," no doubt, for that is a fate that can befall even a Yalie, but . . . .

=

[1] This cannot have actually happened, but it is pleasant to reflect that if it had, the Fratboy Funders would probably have hired a hit man to give Comrade Conroy a brief course of Whitey Bolger Therapy. ¡Intolerable, that this ratfink of a seemin’ _chela_ should leak all of Master Scotty's secret campaign plans!

=

[2] "¡Take *that*, Dr. Altzheimer!"

=

[3] Or, if not a weasel, then a Populist. You will remember, Dr. Bones, that we agreed long ago that the cardinal difference beetween plain vanilla Demonocrats like ourselves and dubious Populists is that the former accept all comers as belonging to US The People, whereas the latter indispensably require an additional category of "Enemies of the People."

=

[4] Either of these would do nicely to grace the plinth of the straw statue of St. Elizabeth of Warrenbuffet erected by Comrade Conroy. Her Beatitude's alleged disdain for the ‘W’ word and for the J. C. process, noted above, amount, ¿do they not?, to wishing that weekends and holidays could be with us 24/7.

Her Beatitude is undeniably a Populist, a notorious recognizer of Enemies, from whom She proposes to deliver us small people. Not quite the same Enemies of Quotidianity that Comrade Conroy detects, but definitely Enemies.

(( More exactly, one *can* deny that proposition, but only by supposing that Her Beatitude secretly proposes to sell us all to Wall Street the moment She can do it safely. I do not much care for Her Beatitude, as you know, sir, but that is only ridiculous. ))

Seven in every ten

2011-10-10T09:39:00.003+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

"What song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture."

That was then; this is now. We *know* that Babbitt of Zenith assumed the name "Th. X. Bloomer" to camoflauge himself among the Mason jars that grow not far from the banks of the silvery Ohio. And as to the songs his incognito freelordship sings to the Warren County Chambermaids of Commerce, ¿Who needs conjecture now that we’ve got Pajamas?

Today HFL has resorted to the farther reaches of the kiddie-selfservative repertory. Rarely do the stout Neohomers of Party an’ AEIdeology strike their bloomin’ liars, an’ make a long face, an’ wail "A significant percentage of start-up businesses fail in a relatively short time."

(( Neohomer eventually whips out his handy iScam device, which informs him that seventy percent over ten years counts as ‘significant’. ))

¿Can the kiddiecons an’, more importantly, a wannabe Conner of Kiddies like his freelordship, REALLY want this bit of ‘news’ to get out? ¿Or further out, any way?

’Twill not come as much of a revelation to many folks other than Wally Wombschool an’ Cindy from Wasilla, plus possibly Joe the Wurtzelbacher, but I thought that to keep precisely that gruesome twosome in the economic dark was the whole crux and pith and gist of Vienna Sausage Chicagonomics. It has always been difficult for me to imagine the bards an’ other hogen-mogens of the Sausagenomical Community hushin’ their scandal up forever, though easy as pie to understand why Master Wally an’ Mizz Cindy should be predestined suckers for the so-called "Whig Pastoral." [1]

The trouble, however, is so plain that it ought to be visible even at Rio Limbaugh. Suppose that Master Wally finds himself most unaccountably [2] scrooged by ScroogeBank, his "middle class" (for of course a Master Wally *will* call M.C. any position he can squeeze his obesity into) position downsourced to Xanadu an’ Bangalore, or possibly outsized altogether. ¿What is he to do? ¡Not a hard question! -- OF COURSE Wally Wombschool must now go out an’ *entrepreen for himself. Everybooby knows that is the only way to avoid Death an’ maybe even Ponzi.

So Wally tries it [3], an’ promptly hits his 70/10. Well, what the younker hits is everybooby’s 70/10, really, the 70/10 of which stout Neohomer here barks, but always remember, Dr. Bones, that "another’s tears are water": ’tis Master Wally’s stubbed nose that hurts Master Wally.

From this plain and simple consideration, I conclude that the viability (as agitprop) of Whig Pastoralism an’ vulgar sausagenomics an’ the _Idylls of Bloomer depends on everybody not tryin’ to entrepreen themselves at once. Probably on most people not trying it ever.

In a way, Whig Pastoralism, in its current ‘pettybiz’ recension, resembles Prof. Dr. Turner’s frontier hypothesis: entrepreenin’ oneself works as an escape valve in practice, but only because not many Walter Mittys or Wally Wombschools ever get around to actually trying to escape. Were the whole theater to rush for that supposed egress at once, why, ¡Father Barnum alone knows how bad the disaster would be! Most assuredly, sir, not even the giant egress of Madagascar could ever lay enough gold-standard eggs to meet that panic level of demand. [3]

I incline to guess that their G.O.P. Geniuses (®) -- mot unassisted, to be fairembalanced, by our £eader$hip Democrats -- have already pushed outsizin’ an’ downsourcin’ past the tippin’ point. Anybooby really serious about _L’entrepreneuriat en Amèrique_ nowadays had better have good connections at Shanghai.

(( And ¿wouldn’t it be lots of fun to write up "The Chinese Adventure of Horatio Alger?" Or make that, if you like, ". . . of Horatio Bloomer." [3] ))

To guess that Greenback Exceptionalism is dead and gone entails, I think, the further guess that the pettybiz flim-flam will finally have to stop sometime around three weeks from next Wednesday. There will be so many seven-in-tenners visible that even Master Wally Wombschool may soon get an inklin’ why there used to be a joke about us all making a living by taking in one another's washing. [4]

Happy days.
--JHM

___
[1] I have always thought that Schlesinger Minor called it so in his _Age of Jackson_, but the pet g@@gle does not seem to agree. One might even get a silly impression that this coarse and illiterate keyboard is myself responsible.

*

[2] ‘Unaccountable’ is only for starters. Not only is Life ‘unfair’, so is ScroogeBank. I mean, ¿Did the SB’s not solemnly promise young Wally that he an’ the lovely Cindy would be eaten last of all? Yet here they are, despised an’ betrayed an’ disemployed -- an’ worst of all, ¡that Demoncrat Lieberal ratfink of a Bob Cratchitt has STILL not been fired!

*

[3] I sacrifice accuracy to merriment a little here, admittedly. Little Horry Bloomer would never have an exotic adventure, he’s as parochial Yank as a huckleberry sundae. As boondocksy as a Babbitt of Zenith.

*

[4] Meanwhile, out at the Masonjar Country Club, only a few short clicks from Cincinnati, Party Neocomrade (third grade) Th. X. Bloomer may be found congratulatin’ the local three-in-tenners (plus a few seven-in-tenners not yet unmasked) on so splendidly bodyin’ forth the Spiritual Beauties of Inequality.

"American Whig Pastoral" is by no means the only shaft in little Horrie’s quiver. Indeed, the intellectual level of American whightism may improve a little -- ¡at last! -- when the Party neocomrades can give up pretendin' that everybody is, or can be, or ought to be, a Wunnerful Winner almost on a par with their golfclub-assembled freelordships. (The real W.W.'s must get very sick an' tired of *that* cant.)

The Brown Peril and Me

2011-10-09T10:21:00.003+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

This piece addresses a completely different problem raised by Funders of Fratboy (L.L.C.) -- and echoed by the cultists of St. Elizabeth of Warrenbuffet insofar as *they* can not plausibly object to carpertbagging as a spiritual principle.

At any rate: though a carpetbag will do nicely to tote one’s AstroTurf™ about in, ¿How does one make sure that there are no little crimmigrants or criminaliens (_cimices lectulariæ_, or possibly worst pests, undocumented yet in prose or rhyme) hitchin’ a free ride?

Happy days.
--JHM

(( I really did think from the link that the story would be about His Pickupship. Something ’rong with me, no doubt, that I skipped over the subtitle as if it were not there.

(( The come-on was "The Brown Peril," a soundbark which, as the learned _Slate_ scribblers eventually reveal, dates from 1908. Political self-whighteousness prevented them from noticing that way back then it started out as a joke (¿?) on Charlie Chan and his enemies.

(( Some real epidemiologist should have a look. Messers Johns and Fairchild mess about with things in a puzzling way. In the late 1860’s bedbugs seem to be distinctly neocon(federate) in their distribution, to really go with Mark I scalawags and carpetbaggers and clue-clutchers. Yet then forty years on,

a doctor with the New York City Department of Health had the temerity to declare in the _Times_ that bedbugs had sacked Gotham. He assured readers that “a short zoological excursion” through any apartment or hotel suite would yield evidence of the “brown peril.”

(( Naturally one’s Massachusetts Exceptionalism (Pat. Pend.) prohibits one from supposing the Little Friends of Morpheus ever got much farther than, say, Scarsdale and New Canaan. ))

Concerning the Brown Peril

2011-10-09T10:19:00.000+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

This piece addresses a completely different problem raised by Funders of Fratboy (L.L.C.) -- and echoed by the cultists of St. Elizabeth of Warrenbuffet insofar as *they* can not plausibly object to carpertbagging as a spiritual principle.

At any rate: though a carpetbag will do nicely to tote one’s AstroTurf™ about in, ¿How does one make sure that there are no little crimmigrants or criminaliens (_cimices lectulariæ_, or oissibly even worst pests undocumented yet in prose or rhyme) hitchin’ a free ride?

Happy days.
--JHM

(( I really did think from the link that the story would be about His Pickupship. Something ’rong with me, no doubt, that I skipped over the subtitle as if it were not there.

(( The come-on was "The Brown Peril," a soundbark which, as the learned _Slate_ scribblers eventually reveal, dates from 1908. Political self-whighteousness prevented them from noticing that way back then it started out as a joke (¿?) on Charlie Chan and his enemies.

(( Some real epidemiologist should have a look. Messers Johns and Fairchild mess about with things in a puzzling way. In the late 1860’s bedbugs seem to be distinctly neocon(federate) in their distribution, to really go with Mark I scalawags and carpetbaggers and clue-clutchers. Yet then forty years on,

a doctor with the New York City Department of Health had the temerity to declare in the _Times_ that bedbugs had sacked Gotham. He assured readers that “a short zoological excursion” through any apartment or hotel suite would yield evidence of the “brown peril.”

(( Naturally one’s Massachusetts Exceptionalism (Pat. Pend.) prohibits one from supposing the Little Friends of Morpheus ever got much farther than, say, Scarsdale and New Canaan. ))

Blue noses and Blue Blazers

2011-10-07T09:11:00.006+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

Well, well! Happy birthday to me! Plus presumably to four lucky others per 1,431 Massachusettienses.

An up-market scribbler has scribbled as follows about our natal-day surprise packet:

Much ado about nothing all around.

Brown is getting way too upset that Elizabeth Warren made a reference to his photoshoot, especially when practically invited to by the questioner. Our side (though notably not Warren herself it seems) is getting way too upset about Brown’s joking “Thank God” reaction to her comment. I think everyone needs to lighten up a bit.

christopher @ Fri 7 Oct 12:43 AM

I, on the other tentacle, can only hope that everybooby left and whight will "heavy up" [1] about Frathousegate.

Now Hope is well enough--commended in Neoscripture, even, is Miss Hope--yet Rational Expectation usually disagrees, and goes on to turn out to have gotten the better of the correlation of farces in practice. R. E. advises me that Blue Blazerdom will not not want to do much with this little _trouvée_ that has turned up in their laps and their laptops so unexpectedly. Had their excellencies known that Frathousegate was comin’ to crash the Garden Party of Massachusetts, as it were, why, the "Gated Community on a Hill" might finally have pressed the button and we would find out whether those out-of-commonwealth contractors were having us on about how quickly modern defensive measures can be deployed. [2] As the case actually stands, the B. B.’s will probably mostly try to freeze the crass interloper out after the event with their H*rv*rd _hauteur_. Than which nothing could possibly be tastier, if not necessarily more effective.

If one prefers getting weepy about natal days and a’ that, one could compare-and-contrast, _¡Eheu! fugaces ..., what fun the Party of George Washington Plunkett (and General Jackson, and Mr. Jefferson) would have had with Senator Fratboy an’ St. Elizabeth of H*rv*rdy with how little the Party of Princess Emily and Radio Free Altzheimer’s is likely to make of it.

Less seriously, I fear e-comrade ‘christopher’ is simply mistaken about Fratboy an’ the Fratboy Funders gettin’ "way too upset." Obviously this is not the ideal way to play the Frathouse Card, but, up to a point, "all publicity is good publicity": at least everybooby’s attention is now directed in what the F. F. Club consider the whight direction, at Senator Fratboy’s sociological peculiarities rather than at whose carpets he is baggin’ economically.

The Great Blue Pumpkin himself is not quite so easily distracted as ‘christopher’:

Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) defended Brown and his comments in statements to POLITICO. “I know Scott Brown’s story, and I know that he had many obstacles to overcome in his youth,” Ayotte said. “It’s inappropriate to make light of his personal circumstances, or to disparage or belittle him for the decisions he made to improve his life. Scott is one of the best guys to work with in the Senate, and I am proud to call him my colleague.” Collins similarly turned the spotlight on Warren, saying Brown was “merely responding” to comments first made by the Harvard professor, in which she “made light of the difficult choices in his life” – a reference to Warren’s recent jab at Brown’s decision to pose nude for a magazine in his 20’s. “It’s wrong to mock anyone who had to make hard choices to overcome tough obstacles,” she said. “His story is no different than millions of Americans who are doing everything they can to make ends meet.”

Gosh, to read those statements, you’d think that Warren was the one who had brought up the issue of Scott Brown’s posing nude in Cosmo. So let’s get one thing very clear: it was Republican activist and Melrose Republican Committee Chair Scott Conway, not Elizabeth Warren, who first mentioned Scott Brown’s decision to pose for Cosmo.

Unfortunately the G.B.P. did not guess exactly whight what this keyboard would think to read such statements. Who first brought Scottie’s disvestiture problem to light is of no importance at all after thirty years. What one ought to keep one’s eye on here and now is Republicanine crocks an’ allegators sheddin’ tears ’bout "disparage or belittle him for the decisions he made to improve his life" or "make light of the difficult choices in his life."

The strategy of the Fratboy Funders is twofold: (1) DIRECTLY, they appeal to the Louisedayhicksville element among us, to those who relish Frathouse Family Values an’ despise H*rv*rd an’ all its works an’ pomps. Little of this is visible from the PPTV atop the GBH, as I was complaining yesterday before Frathousegate broke. The Great Blue Pumpkin, and all the lesser gourds and squashes and zucchini and arugulæ, hardly live on the same planet as the Louisedayhicks. No doubt their excellencies ought to try to condescend a little more than they do, but naturally one can not rationally expect anything much of that sort.

(2) INDIRECTY, however, the Blazers are precisely the target of the Fratboy Funders’ ancillary battle plan. Archie Bunker & Company are never gowintabe made suckers of with "the difficult choices in his life," but ¿_Quién sabe?_, ¿maybe a Great Blue Pumpkin will actually fall for that shameless phoniness? Fall for it and then (I presume) not oppose poor up-an’-comin’ Scott Fratboy so ferociously as to deprive his Funders of certain political self-servicin’s in which they have specuvested heavily.

The G.B.P.’s response is about as inadequate as it could be, short of utterly failing to see what the enemy is up to. His Excellency does quote that eminently pertinent tripe an’ bologna from Party Neocomradesses K. A. Ayotte and S. M. Collins, as a *completely* clueless analyst would not. But, although the G.B.P. perceives that the tripe IS pertinent, he does not seem to understand HOW and WHY.

The "shirtless cosmopolitan" _shtyk_ is a red-state herrin’ from head to tail, not just in respect of who started it. The true locus of the attempted swindle is the child-abuse topos, a business which the two North-of-Boston blabbermouths did at least manage to contain themselves about. [3]

Happy days.
--JHM

___
[1] If that be an expression _nominandum inter_ Anglophonies. "Make heavy weather of" would, I believe, have passed for idiomatic back in Skipper Morrison’s day.

*

[2] Speaking of "out of commonwealth," Dr. Bones, I trust you noticed yesterday on your AM dial that Howard Lewis, Freelord of Carr in the neopeerage, cannot mention the Blessèd Name of St. Elizabeth without ‘Oklahoma’ taggin’ along close like Tonto, or Sancho Panzer, or the Fool in ‘Lear’.

_Projectio malignans_ is the technical term, I think.

*

[3] David, Freelord Koch, or whoever else may be head honcho of the Fratboy Funders, really ought to have a stern word or two with his loose-lipped ladies. Gettin’ (some of) us Demoncrats an’ Lieberals to put up with the reëlection of Master Scottie on the grounds that his childhood was unhappy is guaranteed to fail unless the marks an’ dupes can think they thought of it all by their ownselves. Assumin’ we have to think of it consciously at all.

Here is a clear occasion for the proverbial " ‘¡Shut up!,’ he explained. " The connection between supposed grounds and desired consequents becomes laughable as soon as it is distinctly conceived. I betcha even St. Eleanor of Roosevelt would snicker if she saw the political heathen were tryin’ to get at her bleeding heart that way.

Nevertheless, it seems a pretty nifty ploy to me -- IF they can sneak it by silently enough.

"little to knock her off her stride"

2011-10-05T09:34:00.000+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

"And The WINNA is . . ."

. . . not hard to detect (¿is it?) in the following account prepared for the use of the New York Times Company [*]:

[1] Warren demonstrated her ability to combine a professor’s command of the economy with the plain language of a populist fighter.

[2] Khazei, co-founder of a national service program, spoke about the importance of building coalitions to advocate for (_sic_) important causes and solve problems.

[3] Conroy offered anecdotes about the people he met while walking the state this summer, saying their stories illustrated economic problems in this state

[4] Bob Massie, a former candidate for lieutenant governor, said he is in the race “to see capitalism move to a next step...to be sustainable and just.”

[5] Marisa DeFranco, a little-know immigration attorney, may have offered the night’s biggest surprise, punctuating her responses with fiery appeals to fight Washington.

[6] The sixth candidate, engineer Herb Robinson, made the crowd laugh with a few one-liners about his girth and his marijuana use, but otherwise looked nervous and uncertain on many questions.

The individual slaves of Sulzberger, Comrades N. X. Bierman and H. W. Robinson, are perhaps letting their own druthers show a little more than corporatist decorum ideally demands. To add to the circus fun, the two sets of druthers don't seem to coincide, though one cannot tell which is whose.

Good old Massa ‘Bob’ is obviously a goodguy, far exalted above all stiff formal nomenclature. There can be little doubt that one local cog in the Great Chain of Fishwrap is a Massietarian.

The cog's colleague is almost certainly a pious adherent of the cult of St. Elizabeth of H*rv*rdy, though this guess *could* be in error, inasmuch as if one were to encounter "a professor’s command of the economy" in a dark alley at 0300 hours--or in the columns of a certain debate sponsor at any hour-- one would take it as sarcasm. At a Lower Merrimack Valley institution of tertiary educationalism, however, and not too long after sunset, to take it at face value, as an attempted affirmative direction of the customer’s attention, is, I believe, safe enough.

¡Everything looks suspicious once you get started! It occurs to me that Citizen ‘Bob’ reforming -- no, say rather "guiding the future evolution of" -- _der Finanzkapitalismus_ single-handed might also be hostile caricature, one belonging to the "nonsense on stilts" subspecies.

***

What I think we ought to do, Dr. Bones, thee and eye, is take refuge with The Master. Starting from "Form trumps matter," the NYTC comrades must look positively ‘awesome’ to the sound Aristotelian. A clearer, or briefer, report card on the sixpack I can hardly imagine. Scribblers with so solid a grip on Form as these two exhibit should not be accused of weaselry unless the evidence against them is unmistakeably damning.

(( A formal epicycle: a guesser with a flair for symmetry might guess that items [1]-[3] reveal the Biermanite druthers, and [4]-[6] the Robinsonian. Or maybe the other way around.

(( In that case, we must not miss the next thrilling episode, wherein B. & R. (or, as the case may be, R. & B.) will, presumably, switch sides of the sixpack and thus allow the student to break their seeming tie. If the Elizabethan likes ‘Bob’ better than the Massietarian likes Her Beatitude, well, ¡That will be that! ¿Will it not? [**]

(( I suppose it would be worth knowing which the Freelord of Sulzberger prefers, even though (so fasr as I know) his freelordship and the Corporation, _¡Rex in æternum vivat!_, are technically not permitted to vote in MA. ))

Happy daze.
--JHM

___
[*] Carpetbaggers and carpetbaggery are everywhere you look in this show. If it keeps up, obviously Senator Fratboy should be reëlected by unanimous acclamation. The chances of finding a better representative of the Carpetbag Principle than he are negligible.

Non-Peripatetics tend to lay a great deal of stress on whose carpet is getting bagged, that of Hooverville (with Scottboy) or that of the Great American Muddle Class (with Ms. Lizzie). "Not very philosophical of them," I calls it.

(( Also to be said, by the way, in favor of Comrades Bierman and Robinson is that the M. C. tomfoolery appears only once, and that in direct quotation of Her Beatitude, "“No one has any question where I stand. (...) I fight for m*ddle cl*ss families and nothing, nothing will change that.”

(( The trouble, of course, is that nobooby from either party whom Her Beatitude is likely to go up against would dissent from that supposed unquestionability by the tiniest iota. Or iotum.

(( A second trouble: though ’tis indeed true that not a single booby from sea to shining sea questions where all our hack pols and mornin’-glory reformers stand on Muddle-Class Family Values, poor Ms. Booby has no better idea than the Muses and you and I what any of ’em take THE Muddle to be located, mathematically. The most one can confidently say is that they *never* mean anything so uninteresting and polemically useless as "percentiles thirty-four through sixty-seven of the U.S.A. income-and-wealth distribution."

(( But Mammon kniws best. ))

*

[**] I take it, you see, that R. & B. have already given up Messers Conroy, DeFranco and Hazy--plus "[t]he sixth candidate, engineer Herb Robinson" even more so--for hopeless. But if you can see a glimmer of silver lining in their NYTC obnubilations, please let me know. I definitely need all the help available anywhere to keep on pretending that I do not know how this one comes out.

"a few naive but honest members"

2011-10-04T10:22:00.000+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

unclefactor ? 0 Good Comment 0 Poor Comment

The Occupy Boston group do not need any advice or assistance from the teabaggers. The Tea Party is a right-wing fascist organization which is basically a front for the extremist wing of the Republican Party. There may be a few naive but honest members among their number. They should ditch the Tea Party and hook up with the Occupiers.

Posted 2 hours ago [10/04/2011 04:44AM] Reply Link Abusive

With all dew respect to Mr. Poster, this keyboard must stroke that I think he is all wet.

Nobooby *needs* "advice or assistance from the teabaggers." The ethical beauty of our North American _Teehemde_ is that they give of their own unsolicited, even as they give without crude expectation of reward.

Anyway, it is not as if scabbin’ for ScroogeBank, an’ Warbucks Widget, an’ THE News Corporation (&c. &c.) pays well nowadays. ¿How should it? Nowadays the economic Hogen-Mogens do not run any Cecille B. DeMille cast-of-thousands factories nearer than Shanghai. Or possibly still Guadalajara to some extent. To spend any serious shequelles on takin’ measures against Union thugs way out over there might make sense; around here, it would only be silly.

Their freelordships have, in this keyboard's view, figured the correlation of farces out quight whight: No danger of strikes == Not many bennies for wannabe strikebreakers. "Sorry, Charlie." (You too, Howie.)

AstroTurf™baggin’ the kiddiecons until the contents of their dittopans are reduced to Tee Putty costs very little. It is only a question of *differential* fundin’, of makin' sure that small people who would mostly bark an’ bellow like Party Neocomrade Dr. R. H. Limbaugh (rather than like, say, Miss Rosa Luxemburg ) in any case get a little extra encouragement.

Just the occasional pat on the fangs, as it were.

Kiddie selfservatives mean badly, they come with fangs pre-installed. As it were.

At the same time, they are at least 99.43% "naive but honest." Kiddiecons are not, after all, anythin’ near bestembright enough to be cynical. Or even to keep their fibs straight. What they bark is what they think, an' what they think is what they bark. As honest as the day is long, as naïve as the night is dark (in the absence of the Rev. Moon), are they.

To be sure, those self-dittoes between their ears are not homebrewed. ¡Far from it! Few developments in politics are less mysterious than "The Birth of Tee Putty from the Spirit of Finance Capital." Nevertheless, the course of subhuman events has been slightly more complicated than Scrooge an' Murdoch an' Ailes an’ Warbucks handin' out banknotes to Wally Wombschool of Louisedayhicksville MA an' Cindy from Wasilla AK in Spiro Agnew Brand (®) paper bags.

***

"Basically a front for the extremist wing of the Republican Party" is by way of a Trifecta™ win for Mr. Poster, an analysis that is at least triply ridiculous, inasmuch as the Monolith of Party an' AEIdeology has no ‘base’ as opposed to its superstructure, no ‘front’ as opposed to its backside, and no ‘wings’ as opposed to its torso.

Plus of course utterly no extremism as opposed to its sublime neomoderation.

Happy days.
--JHM

"utter irrelevance" ossia Louise amongst the Gnostics

2011-09-27T09:07:00.002+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

¿What, in your opinion, sir, is going on here:

Gotta tell you all. I am heartbroken. Waiting for the day a majority of my neighbors realize how much they have been 'dumbed-down'. So few understand the English language meaning of the words they echo, therefore the effects of reducing Government spending on Education and Infrastructure. One might excuse those in denial because they are enjoying the 'status quo'. But now, too many under-educated/mis-informed are shouting rhetoric they themselves cannot explain. So many express catch-phrases in utter irrelevance [0], that discussions melt into sound-bites from movies. There are a few who appeal for us to wake up. So I am hopeful. What does Rick Perry, Rick Scott or Scott Walker actually do for the MAJORITY of their (_sic_) citizens? With manufacturing moved to Asia, many leave the State or now work in retail. Others, remain unemployed. Lower earnings means fewer consumers. Fewer consumers slows down the economy. The millionaires travel to their new factories and ignore the plight until they get some other incentive to 'toss us a bone' (re-invest) at guaranteed profit margins. Will we resume thinking of ourselves as Americans, proudly building our country, or as selfish, greedy gamblers supporting the advancement of another nation which offers cheap labor to same business that left our neighbors unemployed? SLAVERY RE-EMERGES!

(A) Is Mr. Poster heartlessly--"thank you, Governor"--makin' fun of the kiddiecons, pretendin' not to understand that about the last thought to drift across the ditto-infested brainpan is "How if I myself have been dumbed down?"

Naturally the more Wally Wombschool OUGHT to think that, the less likely that he ever will. Wombscholarship an’ freedumbin’ down reinforce themselves positively.

Alternatively, (B) has St. Elizabeth of Warrenbuffet found a propagandist of genius who can actually market Her stuff [1] to virtual proles and _Herald_ groupies?

Well, maybe neither. My best guess why so heretical a scribble earned eighteen thumbs up over in Louisedayhicksville is (C) that the kiddies found two hundred and nine (209) words done up as a single paragraph impossibly challengin’, an’ just skimmed it. By accident, more or less [2], most of the jackdaws picked up the same gaud, the one about all of Mr. Poster's neighbors suddenly waking up an' realizing that Poster has been whight all along. Master Wally already feels a lot like that, an' so does Cindy from Wasilla. Feelin' a lot like that is among the common _sequellæ_ of gettin' clobbered over the head with a bag full of AstroTurf™.

Not much insight is required to work out that our old pal Narcissus Dexter is pullin’ most of the strings here. Exactly WHAT it is that Master Narky has been whight from the start about an' everybody else asleep to does not much matter compared to the fact Narky, at least, never let up his dragon watch with unenchanted eye for even a nanosecond. No doubt the _señorito_ is happy that some of the neighbors are finally wakin’ up, but I betcha he would not be pleased if they never do clearly realize that Narky D. attained unto whighteousness before they did. They also selfservice, no doubt, whose Party cards have six or seven digits in the serial number, but ¡let them be humble vis-à-vis their manifest Betters! Like for example Don Narcissito del Derecho.

Happy days.
--JHM
___
[0] If Mr. Poster is taken for a spoofster, then "utter irrelevance" fits whight in that all that jazz is formally a comment on a piece about the electoral fortunes of Willardmitt, second Freelord Romney in the peerage of Wingnut City -- to which it is utterly irrelevant. Self-referentially irrelevant, too, which seems to me rather a nifty trick.

*

[1] A strict critic might wish me to identify it as Professor Krugman's stuff, or even poor Barry's stimulus Peruna, rather than St. Elizabeth's. The difference is immaterial for purposes of the present analysis, for the kiddiecons would blanch an' barf at the sight of all the above, were they to recognize them.

*

[2] If you like my Hypothesis (B), sir, or even if you merely suppose that Mr. Poster is *some* kind of skilled rhetor and agitpropper, though not necessarily the Lieberal Demoncrat kind, then you might support your view by noting that the gaud in question is conveniently placed at the beginning. You might go on to notice "SLAVERY RE-EMERGES" at the far end of the _shtyk_ and conjecture that the Wally-Cindy-Narky Dexter neoreadin’ of the thing is likely to be -- was original-intented to be -- that what the neighborhood ought to wake up to (but is not news to the all-vigilant Sir Walter Wombschool-Mitty) is that somehow they have been, or are about to be, reduced to some worse-than-Hayekian serfdom.

That will serve nicely as a Tee Putty repository, it seems to me, and if Mr. Poster himself fills it up with a different ideoproduct, well, it is in the nature of repositories that they can stand pretty well anything, fillingwise. St. Elizabeth could fill this one up with "¡Let them wake up and see what the banksters are doing to them!" Comrade Frank once filled it up with Kansas.

Probably the whole business came out from under the overcoat of Valentinus , not merely chronologically, but in the sense that any other version that vouchsafed in _The Gospel of Truth_ is bound to be less comprehensive.

Little Tommy Wobble Does A Funny

2011-09-25T10:13:00.000+01:00

¡A moment of silence, please!

The Voice from the Moustache hath an Announcement to make:

In my next life, I want to be a member of the “base” — any base. They seem to have so much more fun and influence.

Happy days.

Krug Loves Lizzy

2011-09-24T12:00:00.003+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

_¡Feliz paleosábado, Don Elihú!_

We draw our Sabbath Morning text from the Book of the prophetess Nitsy :

Elizabeth Warren, the financial reformer who is now running for the United States Senate in Massachusetts, recently made some eloquent remarks to this effect that are, rightly, getting a lot of attention. “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody,” she declared, pointing out that the rich can only get rich thanks to the “social contract” that provides a decent, functioning society in which they can prosper.

Before picking on the gruesome twosome, we ought to put it on the record that that "social contract" grue annoys all the Whight People. For instance, it annoys the ‘conservative’ ‘intellectual’ Don Ricardito de Lowry :

Elizabeth Warren’s Piffle
The folly of a supposed “underlying social contract.”

A campaign riff from the Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren has rocketed around the Internet and been greeted by the Left as a rhetorical triumph.... Warren’s theme is that the rich should pay more taxes as part of “the underlying social contract.” This is taken as a slam-dunk rejoinder to the charge that Pres. Barack Obama’s proposed new tax increases are “class warfare” . . . .

Ktl

Picking on cripples again

2011-09-22T12:04:00.001+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

Here is what I just sent to _The Louisedayhicksville Tar & Feathers_

So: Mikeyboy has sunk to packie-bashin’.

I hope Mom is proud of her little laddie’s obstruction of small entrepreneurships just trying to make a killing in bad times. And in bad neighborhoods. [*]

Happy days.
===
[*] But seriously:

The rest is footnote, as far as the kiddiecons are concerned.

I am not certain that the neo-issue raised by this scriblette -- no, ‘scriblet’ is better, like ‘Chicklets’ -- and singled out by the present hate-inspired keyboard to pile on is august enough to be classified as AEIdeological in nature. There is, perhaps, a sort of pseudogravity -- the "¿Is the class of all classes a member of itself?" sort, approximately -- about wondering out loud whether the Lions of Littlebiz have a whight to take goodies from the Wicked State, thereby improvin’ (one hopes) their own bottomlines, while at the same time wreckin’ Ye Olde Republicke an’ lockin’ the Bad Poor into the impoverished badness of Murrayan Dependency (Pat. Pend.) ever more an’ more hopelessly -- though on the other hand, ’tis not as if anybody is going to let the BP out of MD if Mikeyboy’s Mom’s crew can prevent it.

The whight (though not, in this exceptional case, perhaps the rite) answers seems clear enough: Of course, the COAC belongs to itself!

An’ OF COURSE every fine, upstandin’ Littlebizzy can do whatever it takes, even unto consentin’ to engage in EBT with SNAP. _¡Not kennt kein Gebot!_. And furthermore, _¡Salus corporationis, suprema lex!_

I hear thee objecting, Dr. Bones, that most ‘packies’ are not likely to be _veræ corporationes_, for Mom an’ Pop plus some verbiage from Limbozoom are still only Pop an’ Mom. "Dan an’ Lizzy Littlebizzy," as it were. By no means a _hochwohlgeborene Freipaare Ernst von Boch_ are they. Let alone a Corporate Supercitizen proper, like ScroogeBank or the Goldman-Saxons.

(Can’t fool you, can I?)

The whight answer, nevertheless, the answer given at the back of Chicagonomics for Dummies, the answer proclaimed in thunder tones by every vibrant moral fibre of Mattress Shrugged, is that it is simply no business of ours what happens in the Secret Sector. That, oddly enough, is why AEIdeologues an’ Chambermaids of Commerce always call it ‘private’.

Mikey, son of Mom, ought to be in trouble with its own team’s Neoquisition, if you ask me. Here it is, impertinently takin’ cognizance of how Dr. Dan an’ Mizz Lizzie have chosen to conduct the affairs of Thunderword Adult Beverages LLC (666 Melnea Cass Crescent, Louiserville MA -- telephone number available soon) without bein’ itself a specuvestor, or a supplier, or a customer, or even a no-’count trailer-trash hired hand. Or anythin’ else I can name off-hand but an egregious Nosy Parker.

Perhaps, though, Mikhaïl Mommovitch works for the Party Neoquisition itself? Hmmm. I can see how that would combine with the day job . . . .

If so, its neocolleagues must find Mikeyboy rather a trial at times. That "incurable looseness of thought" mentioned in _Eminent Victorians_ is nicely illustrated here, when it suddenly drops the EBT trail an’ starts bayin’ after crimmigrants an’ criminaliens instead. Only out in Mikeyworld--turn hard whight just past Foxcuckooland--there may be no ‘instead’ about it, no change of subject viewed from the inside: "You seen one Bad Poor, Neocomrade, take my word for it, you seen ’em all." All the Bee Pees that have (so far) managed to break into the _Heimatland G*ttes_, anyway.

From our point of view, us having mentioned Dan an’ Lizzie Thunderword, though hardly from little Mikey’s own, there is a tolerably sane way to connect the EBT dot to the _indocumentados_ dot. Mikhaïl Mommovitch wants to tell Dan an’ Lizzy how to run their secret-sector littlebiz as regards accounts receivable, an’ it also wants -- or oughta want --to teach secret-sector Big Management their personnel policy. ¡Let ScroogeBank an’ Warbucks Widget (&c. &c.) purge themselves of all paperwork-incorrect Don Juans an’ Doña Lindas at once! An’ that includes all those countless shofers an’ nannies an’ groundskeepers an’ yachthands an’ polo-pony grooms an’ whatnot that work for Big Managers as individuals.

Given that looseness-of-thought problem, Mikhaïl Mommovitch Graham-Cracker should probably be viewed by secret sectorians who are in earnest as an accident waitin’ to happen. Who can guess what it will be pokin’ its Pinocchio into next an’ wantin’ to dictate to its Betters about?

Not, of course, that this crocodile can weep much for such victims as they. Mikeyboy would not be where it is today, had the Babbitts of Worcester County not befriended an’, more to the point, befunded it. If Mikeyboy turns out at last to be a sorcerer’s apprentice, even a Freedumbstein’s monster, well, ¿an’ whose fault would that be?

Happy days.
--JHM

¡Let us have our neoclichés in full, please!

2011-09-18T21:37:00.001+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

Wandering, lonely as a cloud, over the Palace of Public Television atop the Great Blue Hill, I intercepted a still, small voice transmitting as follows:

Why porcupine?

Probably because a peaceful protest against corporate power can be portrayed as the rabid, brown, left wing mobs out to get hard workin’ folks like us

jconway @ Sun 18 Sep 2:01 PM

Make that, at very least, "rabid, BLUE-brown, left-wing mobs out to get DECENT, hard-workin’, BY-THE-RULES-PLAYIN’ [**] folks like WUNNERFUL US"

But seriously (¿?), we really could do with a canonical form of this Tee Putty boilerplate, without which the Three Weird Sisters would be reduced to something like fifty percent dead air on the caller side.

There are, by the way, 9,160,000 g@@gs (in 0.26 seconds) for "play by the rules" as opposed to a mere 1,430,00 (0.22) for "we make the rules," a ratio that may be pertinent to the eventual fate of the cult of St. Elizabeth.

(( "Who, me, officer? But I was just countin’ . . . . Well, and maybe playin’ Pin-the-URL-on-the-Lynx a little with Ms. Goneril an’ Ms. Reagan an’ What’s-her-face over there hidin’ behind King Geezer." [*] ))

Happy days.

[*] _Vide supra_: [Links fixed. Please, for the love of Pete, learn how to insert links instead of typing in long URLs! -ed.]

***

[**] (( PHILOLOGICAL ADDENDUMB for Specialists (and the VERY bored ))

I sent the pet g@@gle out with my new, improved version and what I got back was

tollwütigen, blau-braun, linker Flügel Mobs aus, um anständige, hart workin ', By-The-Rules-PLAYIN "Leute wie Wunnerful US

I find it hard to decide what to like best in that surprise packet. ¡’Tis the Plenty of Father Zeus, begorrah!

(1) Winner is, I guess, that mysterious "_um sich_" with neither a ‘_zu_’ nor a verb anywhere in sight. ¡Talk about "wander lonely as a cloud"!

(2) Runner-up is the way they flip a coin each time as to whether the republicanine mood of the American verb should be spelled in New High Prussian with single or double inverted commas. An’ speakin’ of -canine, Wildhagen 1953 (675a _infra_) never heard of _*tollwütig_, giving _Tollwut_ as the name of the brain disease, but bare _wütend_ as an adjective for the patient or victim or consumer or user thereof.

(3) Naturally my little attempt to get in the target-language spirit with "by-the-rules-playin’" only made everything worse. Shoulda known that it would. "No good deed goes _unbestraft_," after all. And furthermore, ¿Hath President Berliner not said, "_Das Leben ist nicht fairembalanced_?

(4) On the nerd side, not only do the B'nê G@@G not allow one to cut-and-paste their invaluable gibberish without a struggle, they have found a way of omitting the phrase to be translated from the U.R.L., so that one can no longer toss a link around but must copy it all out -- after figuring out the paste puzzle. Though this nifty arrangement makes it a little more difficult to nail the perps in error, it does not make it utterly impossible, which alone would seem to me to make it worth their trouble.

Mais que sçay-je? (( The B.G. get that one wyrd too. Natchrully. ))

My Day at the Track

2011-09-18T09:58:00.008+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

While not occupied with creating the unhappiness of journalists, Dr. Pressbeater runs optimism races with Dr. Pangloss--and usually wins. Little Miss Sunshine still leads the pack overall, but ¡let her look to her laurels!

The bad news (if one may mention anything so uncongenial here at Seeper Downs), is that the foundations of Bake®i™e brand Proleptic Bliss may be less than sound. Passing over the worst problem [*] for now, let me draw attention to how this piece nicely illustrates the second-worst, as I rate it. Dr. Pressbeater--unless he is positively cheating, a thought beyond unthinkable--does not notice that the various passages of Scripture upon which he relies to announce our imminent national (re-)entry into Be‘ûlâ Land are not all equally authoritative.

Built on the rock, as it were, on the one hand, is (A) stuff like this:

[T]he Congressional Budget Office's projections for Social Security ... show a 1.6 percentage point increase in the payroll tax would leave the program fully solvent throughout its 75-year planning period.

Not, perhaps, PERFECTLY rocklike, yet tolerably close. Most of what is being prognosticated depends more on elementary mathematics [*] than on the former real world.

Quite different is the case with (B) the following, which Dr. Pressbeater himself introduces "by [way of a] comparison," though hardly the present comparison:

[W]orkers[’] wages are projected to rise by almost 40 percent over the next three decades.

One circumstance that makes that prooftext sound a little fishy (or sandy) is that it is not attributed to anybody in particular. Evidently one takes it or leaves it according as one's faith in Pressbeaterism was antecedently quick or sluggish. Mine is rather a sloth, though not quite a slug: metamathematical predictions are notoriously tricky, and especially about the future. Nevertheless, it seems to me permitted to a rational creature to doubt, always decorously and never importunately, that extrapolating the next forty years from the last four hundred with a straightedge (or digital equivalent) is bound to get it all right.

We may even be in for--¡brace yourselves and secure the horses, please!--a little dose of Economic D*cl*ne.

That is to say, all that downsourcing, and outsizing, and always adopting the preferential option for paper-pushing rather than some banausic activity that might get one's hands dirty, &c., may actually matter a little. I don't mean that the heathen Chinee will inevitably be beating poor old Sam at the _Finanzkapitalismus_ game by the end of next month, but . . . . WWNN.

Dr. Pressbeater is not unaware that such things have been going on, he even fits pieces of them into his curious system of conceptual grooves and crotchets on occasion, but these are only tiny sunspots on the face of the general Panglossianity. The skies over Seeper Downs are hardly ever cloudy at all, let alone "all day." And as for "discouragin’ words," well, I presume you can see that I act here on the assumption that that sort of thing is mostly left to incompetent newspaper employees, ignorant lay sheeps, and peanut-gallery peanuts to supply, if we have the bad taste to want such a product.

_Alio modo_, you might say that one of the main grooves in beautiful downtown Deambakerville is named "Normalcy-is-just-around-the-corner Boulevard."

But Keynes knows best.

Happy days.
--JHM

___
[*] The student may notice how "remedial 3rd grade arithmetic" puts in a cameo appearance.

[**] Philologists may compare Labour-in-vain Road , Ipswich MA 01938.

Indeed, both the name and the zipcode have a sort of vague allegorical appropriateness for a wider audience.

"Where are all these new faces coming from?"

2011-09-17T16:55:00.008+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones
,

¡Rejoice!

Up the figurative slippery slope at Castle Yankeestein [1], the Baron has just had good news. Project AstroTurf™ Bagger has passed the final feasability test! (You heard it here first.) One really *can* take a human--anthropoid, at any rate--dittopan an’ reduce the contents to neomush by repeated concussion an’ attrition in the path of Party an’ AEIdeology.

Here is the neomush to prove it:

sicofit replying to Popham / ? +8 Good Comment -7 Poor Comment

My solution is to vote out all incumbents, close the borders, fly all illegals back home, stop letting people whose countries are at war in to collect public benefits, and start anew. I heard a story recently about an immigrant telling a relative from Africa to come to Boston so they could get housing and money. If you walk around the city, you will see so many none Americans flooding the area. Where are all these new faces coming from?

Posted 3 hours ago [subtract from 09/17/2011 12:07PM]
Reply Link Abusive

The objectives of Project AstroTurf™ Bagger are such that it does not matter a nanoreagan what problem the patient supposes itself to be solvin’.

In fact, I can’t even guess the problem. The immediate occasion is a routine slice of _Boston Humbug_ baloney called "Romney, Perry do a job on each other / Attack records on testy campaign trail / By Hillary Chabot / Saturday, September 17, 2011" Party Neocomradess (sixth grade) H. X. Chabot never does get around to the Attack Record Trail Menace, so perhaps that is the one. His Texcellency an’ Willardmitt, second Freelord Romney, an’ first Freelord Romneycare, in the peerage of Foxcuckooland, are not, I presume, problematical in themselves not for for kiddiecons an’ the conners of little kiddies.

¿Why insist on havin’ any particular problem, though, when the solution tastes so scrumptious? "Life is uncertain: eat dessert first!" And don’t ask too many questions, or else all your clothes will suddenly turn invisible like in the fairytale. And then ¿where will you be? I ask you, sir.

No rose without a silver linin’ though: the flaw in this gem is those mysterious "none Americans." Had the oracle had been conveyed to us at any point by telephone, we could just assume "nun Americans" and carry on [2], but Señorito Poster will almost certainly have typed it in. Oh, well!

So, then, Bones: do not merely make a memorandumb of this precious treasure, please have it skinned and gutted and stuffed by experts. I propose to have it mounted in the Hall of Mirrors to be unto us as a _ktêma es aiei_.

Also to have it readily available in 2019 or thenabouts, when the _nuevoseñorito_ gets all those druthers, but still ain’t happy, a thing which is as about as predictable as yesterday’s sunset. [3]

Happy days.
--JHM

___
[1] On Route 127.5 at the Arkham-Innsmouth line, across from the sixteenth (16) Dunkin’ Donuts of twenty-three (23) on the whight or SE side of the Boston-Newburyport carriageway.

As I suppose you know, direction of Project AstroTurf™ Bagger has been entrusted to Perfesser Tarr of the E-sex Neojunto an’ Doc Feather of the Greater Worcester Chambermaids of Commerce, Inc.. With additional fundin’ provided by the ever-immortal Bacon Hill Institute .

¡Well serviced indeed is his freelordship of Yankenstein!

(( Yes, I realize it was ‘Yankeestein’ the first time ’round. Let me know which you like better, please. ))

***

[2] With or without expressly speculating whether this patient has mistaken the spiritual daughters of Lady Shariah for an obscure order of Ratzingerite _devouées_. The mistake is, again, immaterial, for obviously the couch potatoe of any Superstition or Enthusiasm who insists on wearing her potatoe bag as street clothes deserves whatever she gets. Up to a point, anyway -- "mud, not stones."

***

[3] One hopes the learnèd, neogallant an’ thoroughly posthonourable Tarr an’ Feather have thought carefully in advance about their freenoble employer’s vast an’ megalopsychic Project. And similarly the Baconian Hillsters. I am pretty confident that all that spicy arizenophobia which they mix into their mush is of scant interest either to themselves as psocial scientists or to their Venerable Funders,the Class of Employers, as selfservicers, yet if it does not break down naturally in a reasonably short period, grave problems of political toxic waste disposal may develop.

If you squint at the above mess of e-pottage a little, Dr. Bones, I believe you can already see glimmers of the danger of which I worry. Taking certain words in it certain ways, a strong reader might read it so strongly that one would have to possess -- legitimately and demonstrably, preferably with a picture ID card -- a Christojudæan name like ‘Masconomo’ or ‘Cochise’ or possibly ‘Pocohontas’ not to be, eventually, slated for summary deportation from the _Heimatland G*ttes_.

Dan Paddy Moynihan of Louisdayhicksville, an’ the Tee Putty victims more generally, has been successfully ’turf’bagged into thinkin’ that gettin’ rid of poor old Auntie Zeituni will do the trick. But obviously it will not. So ¿What will happen when the kiddiecons figure out they have been had? ¿When everybooby there are even the remotest plausible grounds for deportin’ has been kicked out, an’ yet, somehow, the streets are STILL chockful of Bad Poor, with slimy tentacles forever reaching out hopefully towards the wallets of their Betters?

You Want Jobs? Try WAR.

2011-09-17T11:14:00.002+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

I have decided to spare Comrade Blow of the NYTC and his corporate employer’s Letters Editor the following

Are too many (icky, selfish) organic citizens chasing too few jobs created by (clean-cut, futuristic) Corporate Citizens?

Not a hard problem: FOR JOBS, IT’S WAR! "

Only conscript the Bad Poor _quantum sufficeat_ and put them to work -- or ‘work’, if you insist absolutely -- in the Violence Sector. Why, ¡the conquest and occupation of Cathay alone . . . !

Bomby days.

effusion of McMerriment.

Our Betters will probably figure it out for themselves soon enough, now that they have resolved to boldly reconsider formerly closed and _tabu_-sealed policy questions. Even only a sneaking suspicion that Cap’n Ludd [1] may have been at least partly whight about the Jobs Plague must open the door, I think, for Officers Club nobility and gentry of hire rank to step through and give the Bad Poor an’ Lesser Breeds Without a refreshin’ dose of _sich durchzusetzen_.

Cornet von Blow (let us thus exalt his horn, _honoris causâ_) and Commodore Clifton, commanding the "U. S. S. Gallup," are, of course, to be commended for reopening the Ludd dossier. Equally of course, of course, nobody except ourselves who actually notices what they have been up to will have anythin’ but factious abuse to offer them. ¿What becomes of the AEIdeology, once word gets out about "five billion people over 15 years old .... [and] only 1.2 billion full-time, formal jobs"? ¿Of "The Middle Class," what? [2]

Be that as we shall see, short of actually naming the _innominandus inter Christojudæanos_ Ned, Cornet Blow and Commodore Clifton could not have made it plainer whose banner they have enlisted under.

For the record, let us have the whole swearing-in ceremony, shall we?

Clifton explains that of the world’s five billion people over 15 years old, three billion said they worked or wanted to work, but there are only 1.2 billion full-time, formal jobs. Therefore his conclusion “from reviewing Gallup’s polling on what the world is thinking on pretty much everything is that the next 30 years won’t be led by U.S. political or military force. Instead ... the world will be led with economic force — a force that is primarily driven by job creation and quality G.D.P. growth.”

And guess who is vying for the lead? That’s right: China.

And I [Carolus Jungherr von Blow] must say, we don’t appear to be poised to fight this war.

Oddly enough, the good Cornet does not, unless I have missed something, include Luddophobia amongst poise-disturbing factors. One might think he had just enlisted with St. Ike, not Captain Ned! Instead of justifying that all-but-pornographic diagnosis, the younker wanders off in quite a different direction:

In education we’ve gone from leading to lagging, our infrastructure is literally crumbling around us, ever-expanding health care costs threaten to suffocate us and our politics have succumbed to paralysis (...) the recent American educational achievement gaps — between black and Latino students and white ones; between low-income students and the rest; between low-performing states and the rest; and between the United States as a whole and better-performing countries — not only cost the economy trillions of dollars, they also “impose on the United States the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession.”

A much more familiar direction, that one. Exactly the direction, indeed, that the Muses and comrades and you and I would have expected from the Mark I civilian Blow before he heard the Word of the L*dd and neopented on the spot.

Now, although I think Luddism very well worth a second look, almost as worthy of revisitation as the (other) dogmata of Absolute Free Trade, nevertheless this is not a case for "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly." Cornet von Blow and, to a slightly lesser extent, Commodore Clifton, are headed in the whight direction, but there are serious problems about their evangelical methodology. In particular, it requires real dexterity in DDoubleThThink to maintain that the solution of "too many organisms, too few niches" can involve cranking out more, and perhaps still worse ‘overqualified’, ergozetetic organisms than ever.

It looks plain as day to me that Cornet von Blow is trying to use his new Peruna to cure himself of what now turn out to be imaginary diseases previously misdiagnosed by quacks who knew not L*dd. Were he to go all the way back to Square Zero as the good neovert should and start over from scratch, he would forget about his silly ‘gaps’ and tackle the Jobs Plague head-on Not necessarily by forcibly neoliberating the heathen Chinee, as this keyboard has modestly suggested, but certainly not by wallpapering over "educational achievement gaps" either.

The good Commodore is not much better. As quoted by a perhaps overzealous subordinate and recent neovert down around the bottom line here, his freelordship seems to have hatched a variant form of Neoluddism designed to join ’em rather than lick ’em. Clifton evidently accepts his Cap’n’s basic diagnosis -- ever fewer and fewer niches for more and more organisms -- but supposes that one can set up a local _refugium_ inside which entropy runs uphill. Just circle the wagons and the "1.2 billion full-time, formal jobs" immediately around Cap’n Ned and Commodore Clifton and Cornet von Blow, and _¡voilà!, the 3.8 (or howevermany) billion Bad Poors are effectively disappeared! They will not be out of sight and mind forever, presumably, yet at least we happy Peruna-imbibers of Greater Europe will be the last to succumb. Anyway, "In the long run, we are all dead." Tra-la-la.

Ludd-Cliftonism is most plausible, I suspect, when viewed through Antisocial Darwinist spectacles. If you pass up my chosen claptrap of ‘organisms’ and ‘niches’ and _refugia_ &c. for comparable Antisocial Keynesian paraphernalia, Dr. Bones, then Ludd-Cliftonism looks a lot like "beggar thy neighbor," ¿does it not? Which leads whight to the conceptual difficulty of working out how we shall get/stay richer than Croesus whilst marketing the fruits of our neoproductivity to beggared customers. True, mere vulgar Luddism, all Luddism simply as such, assures us that there must be always more and more of the latter, yet what we really want is, I take it, not an immense horde of ragpicker ‘patrons’ but more like scads and scads of Accounts Receivable paid in full, complete with penalties and interest. Plus, ideally, a tip on top., it bein' obviously always a pleasure to service Wunnerful US.

Though Cornet von Blow’s citations look pretty conclusive, ‘damning’ even, I daresay we really ought to look at Commodore Clifton’s book ourselves to make sure we are 100% accurate and fairembalanced about Ludd-Cliftonism.

Meanwhile, my own violence-pro approach -- "¡Draft ’em all an’ ship ’em out to police the boondocks of the world!" -- is a policy tub that stands on a completely separate theoretical bottom. One might, though, make certain concessions to the Ludd-Cliftonites. Cornet von Blow might be reassured, for instance, that there will be an immense need for Mil. Sci. instructors over on the Educationalism Front. It makes no material difference that I can detect whether we label our loci of instruction "basic training barracks" or "high schools." And since almost the whole curriculum will be new, previous gaps need not apply.

Commodore Clifton is (probably -- we really do gotta read him) likely to be more worried about what the Chambermaids of Commerce will think than about the Officers Club crowd. To him we may bark sharply "¡Military-Industrial-Academic Complex!", which is not, to be sure, a full explanation-cum-justification in itself, but strongly suggests there must be one lurking somewhere in the nearby bushes. If nothing else, we could pick up a lot of valuable curios after we neoliberate the Chicoms. [3]

Bomby days.
--JHM

___
[1] R.H.I.P. (or grade inflation) applies even to urban mythology: in addition to the solid middle-class, the "respectable cloth-uniformed Republican O-3," as it were, Big LEW says the folkloric character of Captain Ludd [was] also known as ‘King’ Ludd or ‘General’ Ludd .

We humble are content to leave General His Highness the Prince of Ludd to confer with ‘Dr.’ Greenspan an’ with all the kernels in Kentucky.

***

[2] I realize that I have been boring thee for years, O Bones, with my notion that nobooby who insists on wailing or railin’ about "The Middle Class" every chance she gets has any contribution to make to grown-up political sociology. Only this moment, though, have I noticed that the violence pros are not troubled by this pestiferous baloney: either they let you in the door at the Officers Club or they keep you out. Period. The entire category of ‘middle’ is delightfully absent -- unless one were to count warrant officers, which would be plumb dotty.

***

[3] Mil. Sci. has sadly and strangely neglected the matter of Loot, _le pillage_, since about the time of Napoléon _Ier_. This oversight should be corrected at once, and then, to insure a steady income over and above our initial windfalls, naturally we will persuade everybody on the block that they ought to treat Big Sam Globocop at the local (equivalent of) Dunkin’ Donuts both early an’ often.

¡Go[es] without sayin’, that oughtta!

Problems of Din’alin’ism (Part MXI)

2011-09-15T11:04:00.001+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

Though St. Elizabeth, Granny of God ¡and a H*rv*rd man to boot!, cries out to be ridiculed, she will keep till tomorrrow. Unless my signals are crossed, the track must be cleared at once to let this one through:

Report: ‘Romneycare’ a killer
Study finds Bay State lost thousands of jobs
By Frank Quaratiello / Thursday, September 15, 2011

The Bay State’s controversial 2006 universal health-care plan — also known as “Romneycare” — has cost Massachusetts more than 18,000 jobs, according to an exclusive blockbuster study that could provide ammo to GOP rivals of former Gov. Mitt Romney as he touts his job-creating chops (_sic_) on the campaign trail.

“Mandating health insurance coverage and expanding the demand for health services without increasing supply drove up costs. Economics 101 tells us that,” said Paul Bachman, research director at Suffolk University’s Beacon Hill Institute, the conservative think tank that conducted the study. The Herald obtained an exclusive copy of the findings.

There’s a lot more where that came from -- ¿ain’t we got fun? -- but perhaps I have administered too large a dose already. Not having had to turn a page or click a link to get from the shoppe window to the bowels of Kiddiecons-‘R’-Us, you will probably have failed to do Master Frankie Q.’s employin’ Corporation full justice in the matter of Freelord of Romneycare’s *¡*K*I*L*L*E*R*!* status. One was hoping, of course, on the basis of the headline, for hot Tales of Whitey Bulger stuff, at very least, photographs of the graves of thirty-eight (37.709) innocent victims of Willard Mitt.

Only to find that ’tis no more than yet another whight-wing wheeze or burble from The Louisdayhicksville Tuba-Trumpet. [1] [2] _¡Quelle chagrin!_

The Corporation-employed headline artist, who is presumably not identical with the scribblin’ _signorino_, is antecedently prepared to believe pretty well any scabbery that comes down the pike, includin' "Bay State lost thousands of jobs." That is certainly the way Foxworld oughtabe. No pious foxcuckoo is likely to doubt for an instant that anythin' that sounds so perfectly swell for her Party an’ its AEIdeology might not be 1040% accurate.

Decent political grown-ups, on the other hand -- an’ not so decent Willardmitt groupies also, if any still exist around here -- will demand just a little more than the bare word of the all-prestigious "research director at Suffolk University’s Beacon Hill Institute." "¿And how, exactly. would HE know?" is the crux of it, though I have to wonder a little on the side with what "on average, Romneycare cost the Bay State 18,313 jobs" has been averaged.

The odd thirteen slain jobs is a nice rhetorical touch, yet rhetorical is all it is. Had Freelord Bachman an' the B.H.I. b'hoys wanted to just make their stuff up, "18,313" is not significantly more difficult to coin an’ utter than eighteen thousand on the nose would have been. A little farther on, "reduced investment in Massachusetts by $25.06 million" seems to me positively finicky in its attempted pseudoprecision.

Be that as it may, I find it an uphill struggle to believe that the b'hoys actually sent out --and received back -- questionnaires to everybooby who has had the bad judgment to specuvest in Romneychusetts. Even more pertinently, to everybooby who did NOT so specuvest. Were you asked, Dr. Bones? Do you suppose the Chambermaids of Commerce at Beijing, for instance, were asked? What about the CoC’s of Bangalore?

Let us face it, sir: an unheard-of crew of Bachmanites can not possibly have paid the postage required, all Coorses an’ Bradleys to the contrary notwithstandin’, one wonders what they actually did do. Perhaps a selective telephone survey of used-truck dealers in Worcester County? Or how about a couple of _indocumentado_ spottin' field trips north of the Mystic? [2] Or ....

Happy days.
--JHM

___
[1] One imagines Don Francito, or its employin’ Corporation’s headline artist, or both, twirlin’ their Hoovervillainous moustaches as they came up with the little joke or libel. Not so easy, though, to imagine Wally Wombschool an’ Cindy from Wasilla actually noticin’ it an’ enjoyin’ their factious yuck. "Life is unfair." And Art goes unappreciated.

*

[2] "The only good job is a dead job" tresspasses across my mental front yard.

I shoot the intruded down with gusto and impunity, knowing that if the "Beacon Hill Institute" coven were up to thinkin’ as clearly as that, they would have emigrated to NYC or DC long since. It is an admirable thing, a tribute to Yankee Exceptionalism, that even Cousin Marriage Country an’ the second-string Babbits of Worcester County should possess their very own Tanks of Thought. _¡Nur in Amerika!

Nevertheless, if the BHI were significantly better than a provincial backwater of Foxcuckooland, the Muses and you and I would not need to wonder _¿¡Quienes!?_, or need to turn to Big LEW for confirmation of our uncharitable suspicions about Coorses an’ Bradleys an’ so forth an’ so on. (( Though it *does* make one feel good to have guessed whight about such a neo-thing. ))

The Class of Coorses an’ Bradleys (&c. &c.) will not, be needin’ any lessons in jobicide from their own hired hands. Not only is that "¿My foot, my tutor?" country, ’twould call for the audience to suppose poor Ms. Miranda has a club foot on top of her run-of-the-mill juvenile delinquentisms.

*

[3] Don Juan and Doña Lindita do not themselves specuvest, naturally. Nevertheless, a notable increase in their numbers would almost certainly reflect a decline in specuvestment by their complexional an’ socioeconomic Betters. I have no notion, myself, how the detailed quantification would work. But bear in mind that I never took Ec. 10 at _alma mater_, let alone his freelordship’s "Economics 101" at, say, Wingsdale or St. Dilbert Antistate University.

We ignorant lay sheeps would have no business presuming to follow his freelordship of Bachman an' the b'hoys through a maze of differential equations (or whatever). But, unlike Don Francito de Quaratiello an' the _Herald_ angels, we cannot feel altogether satisfied with an announcement of completely methodology-free neoresults. Not when the neoresults are blatantly designed to be used against us an' to exalt the Horn of Wingnuttiness.

The Cuteless Perplex

2011-09-13T13:36:00.000+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

I don't think they (MA political candidates) should have to comply by (_sic_) any stinking rules

It should be like having sex or buying drugs or something. Just mind your own business already.

Also – what’s is ActBlue’s connection to the Democratic party? Does it refuse to help Republicans? Independents? Does it help all Democratic candidates or only progressive ones or what? And why doesn’t the government simply own the whole fundraising system, make all donations go through a public version of ActBlue, for all candidates, if it’s so important for the public that it be done right? Who is ActBlue and how do we know they aren’t laundering and sanitizing and making stuff up?

dont-get-cute @ Tue 13 Sep 1:40 AM

As you see, sir, Dr. Cuteless writes as if she notices no differences between ‘sex’ an' "buying drugs or something."

Something must speak for itself, but as to the other two, it matters a little, I think, that there are laws on the books against pharmacological entrepreneurship.

Unenforced rules are not the same thing as not havin’ rules. The policy implications are different as well.

Obviously [1] Dr. Cuteless adores unenforced statutes, and this is -- perhaps -- a defensible position for a stout paladin of the Secret Sector to assume, but one that needs to be glossed rather carefully to insure full compliance with the AEIdeology. Most selfservatives do not bother with this particular emanation from the Party Pænumbra, simply or simplistically preferrin’ that there be no regulation by The Wicked State at all, rather that there be lots of regs that are never -- well, HARDLY ever -- insisted on.

As regards campaign finance in particular, the orthodoxy of selfservatism is almost monolithic: any attempt to control, or even disclose, what is goin' on behind closed board-room doors campaignwise is anathema. Plus furthermore ¡it is a declaration of war against Freedumb of Speech!

To defend the Cuteless heresy is at once easy and nearly imposible. Easy, insofar as large masses of (usually) ignored rules ensure that the Unitalitarian Executive has lots of discretion, nearly as much as the BigManagers of a secret-sector business corporation have. The impossibility is to get Party neocomrades not to notice that "public administration" (as it used to be called) is not in fact a Secret-Sector phenomenon. About the last thing most Party neocomrades want to see is discretion in the hands of some St. Elizabeth of Warren --- "In the paws of Wesley Mouche", as it were. So to speak.

For Cutelessism to possess any appeal, one must, I think, fancy oneself wielding the discretion rather than being subject to it. The main stream of kiddie selfservatives probably came as close as they ever will to agreein’ with Dr. Cuteless back in good Vicerpotus Cheney's golden days. Even then, however, discretionary enforcement must have seemed far less kiddie-threatin’ in questions of foreign and aggression policy than closer to home. _Vis-à-vis_ the Lesser Breeds Without, Walter Mitty can dream Cheyneyoid or Cutelessite dreams securely. Unless his papers are in a *really* serious condition of disorder, nobooby is gonna take good ol’ Walt for a criminalien or an Islamophalangitarian. [2]

===

The ActBlue stuff is news to me, so let it wait till I have compiled a dossier on it.

Happy days.
--JHM

___
[1] She might, I suppose, be spoofin’ the Blue Blazers a little.

If so, she is good at it; her e-face looks perfectly straight to me.

=

[2] Her freeladyship might find a wedge-entry point for Cutelessism over at Logan. The jet-set kiddies really do seem to hate bein' treated like probable Muzzies, when any fool can see at a glance that they are only Walter Mitty. Or Grandma Moses, as the case may be.

To pick up essentially the same _shtyk_ by the other end, airport security could "go cuteless," leavin’ all the fancy terror-detectin’ gizmos where they are, but savin’ scads an’ scads of money in the present Age of Austerity by not pluggin’ ’em in or payin’ Union thugs to stand beside ’em.

I write merrily, but recall, Dr. Bones, that there are a respectable number of Party neocomrades who claim that The Jewish State (Pat. Pend.) handles all matters of global tourrorism an’ Native Management far better than we Homeland™ers do. And the reason why TJS is supposed to outdo USA in this department boils down, as far as I can make out, to discretionary enforcement. Or call it ‘Cutelessism’.

Pickin’ on Party Cripples

2011-09-13T11:03:00.004+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

Mass. voters are ripe for the picking
By Holly Robichaud / Tuesday, September 13, 2011 -

(( ... snip factious screed ... ))

Liberated

I'm sorry, have you not heard of Ron Paul? Perry is just the red version of Romney. They're both on the same team essentially. Team status-quo/pro-corporate lobbyist. Texas Congressman Ron Paul on the other hand hasn't flip-flopped or resorted to passive aggressive behavior when confronted with past "mistakes." He also doesn't force girls to get vaccinated. I would think in times like these we would appreciate the freedoms that are being stripped from us by the day and someone that has been fighting to preserve them for over 30 years consistently.

Posted 4 hours ago (( 09/13/2011 05:58AM ))
Reply Link Abusive

'Liberated' indeed!

Not exactly representative of "Mass voters," however. Even the second-best used-truck dealers of Worcester County -- even Perfesser Tarr an’ Doc Feather up in the E-sex Neojunto -- will not soon be lookin’ for a DILBERTARIAN neoliberation.

That first syllable in our dear MA’s Christojudæan name is lots of fun -- I make the joke early and often myself -- but not so much, perhaps, when Party neocomradesses like H. X. Chabot an’ H. X. Robichaud start barkin' as if everything within a hundred kilometres of the Bacon on a Hill were _eo ipso_ ‘mass’ in the "mass murder" sense.

More broadly: without scads an' scads of "unenrolleds," whight wingnuttiness in Winthrop Country is not a MASS movement at all. Thus the formal machinery of the Party of Grant and Hoover (an' Goldwater ’n’ Atwater ....) in these parts is already a minority's minority, even before gettin' taken over by the sort [1] of persons who take over recruitment-challenged factions

Happy days.
--JHM

___
[1] To be polite, say, "Those who enjoy bein' BIG FROGS in small puddles."

Should accuracy be attempted, one might mention bores, an’ charlatans, an’ neoscalawags, an’ Filene’s-Basement-local sugardaddies, an’ everybooby who makes sure that her smallbiz self-advertises relentlessly via the Three Weird Sisters, ’RKO, ’XKS an’ ’TKK,

¿Did I mention the Herald angels?

"My Sun the Neoindustrialist"

2011-09-05T10:40:00.003+01:00

Though my politics are about the same as those of little Miss Sunshine, especially when it comes to piling on "every New Democrat and any old Republican" in the delightful quest for policy scapegoats and economic voodoo dolls, her whistling about "the time for [a] neo-industrial America" as she skips past the graveyard seems a little superficial. Missy does not much want to look at the darker possibilities, in particular to consider that maybe it’s all as simple as "Ladies and gentlemen, our turn is over. Henry Luce has had his century (most of one, anyway), and now the Lesser Breeds Without will finally be getting some too."

One can imagine Missy at Madrid around A. D. 1650, pestering grandees and Crown ministers with projects for a "neo-agricultural Spain" to replace the "postagricultural Spain" that was not working out well.

Imagination is not to be blindly trusted, however. Whatever "went wrong" in that parallel-looking case, dogmatic adherence to Absolute Free Trade cannot have been involved. Actually, the more stody and academic idolators of AFT among us like to claim -- or used to -- that their own stuff dances on the grave of an antediluvian foolishness called ‘monetarism’. I got the impression that, had that Peruna been as good as it was touted, we would all be living in the late Reaganite morning or early Obamatan afternoon of _los siglos de oro y plata_, or call it "the Habsburg Millenium." Though if we had to be living around here where we actually do live, Habsburg Exceptionalism would perhaps not be our preferred ideology. ¿Who wants to go to the trouble of discovering How The World Really Works™ -- only to find that there can be no question of it working especially well for the likes of US?

Missy is most interesting when she condescends to gossip and anecdotal evidemce, notably

Thirty years ago, when defenders of American manufacturing first suggested that the nation commit to a “domestic content” standard in the goods we bought, they were howled down by nearly every economist and editorial writer in the land. (A friend counted 98 newspapers that editorialized against it, and none that wrote in favor.)

As early as 1621 / 1981, then, little Miss Sunshine had already started working on her portrayal of Princess Cassandra of Troy, fearing _monetaristas_ / Absolute Freetraders even *before* they had altogether stopped bearing gifts. _¡Qué providencia!_: SHE, at least, has seen all along that there is something awfully fishy about that absurd ‘horse’ of theirs. [1]

Her Royal Highness looked AFT in the mouth then, and, d.b.a. "Little Miss Sunashine," she is still looking it in the mouth now. I do not want to complain too loudly of the never having moved on to the rest of the horse’s anatomy. Yet there it is -- though HRH is to be warmly [1] commended for disbelieving in Freedumb of Trade, and thus making a pariah of herself even in the eyes of the disreputable fishwrap community, her heresy has never been radical, it never goes beyond first suspecting, then knowing, that AFT has -- somehow -- become a dumb idea for US. At no point does she seem to have cared what anybody-else-in-particular’s idea of it may have been or ought to be. Still less, what The Philosopher [2] makes of it, considered globally and historically and eternally.

The result of not looking beyond the oral cavity is that this scribble insinuates, whether thus original-intented or not, that to acknowledge "mistakes were made," plus or minus two aspirins and a glass of wine, ought to suffice to restore US to true economic sunshine _pronto_. Missy is not visibly worried that her "neo-industrial America" might be no more likely to arrive than a troupe of unicorns. Missy does not say "The hour is late, but if we all pull together, we can drag that nag Manufacturing back into our national barn where she belongs." [3] Missy takes for granted that if there were a Will to neoindustrialate, then to discover the Way would be no big deal.

(( This sort of thing is how she got the cutesy nickname. ))

Happy days.

___
[1] VERY warmly! I write merrily, but bear in mind that coming out audibly for icky Protectionism used to be like endorsing the Black Death. The consensus that Missy dared to think independently of would have made Juggernaut envious.

[2] My thanks to Mr. David Hume of Edinburgh.

[3] Mr. Hume’s buddy Kant of Koenigsberg would rule, perhaps, that Missy neglects to ask the ‘critical’ question: _¿Wie soll "eine nachindustrielle Amerika" überhaupt möglich sein?_ -- "Hey, guys, before we start hunting snarks, are we *perfectly* sure they have not gone extinct over the last thirty years when nobody was looking?"

The Prophet Honoured at Home

2011-09-04T12:29:00.005+01:00

Passing over Howard Louis, Freelord Carr, we come to a peanut-gallery wingnutette who seems to live in MA without actually hatin' W. Mitt Romneycare all that much:

I notice that the people who criticize Romney always skip over the fact that he is an extemely successful business man. He built businesses from the ground up. He saved the Olympics. What a joke that some dopey guy from Utah that was affiliated with the Olympics said that Mitt "just happened to come in at the right time". Well, I hope he just happens to come in at the right time to Washington, say around Jan. of 2013. Maybe he'll just happen to get lucky there too, like his businesses just happened to get lucky.

Any sane, non political fanatic has to look at this guy as the most qualified to turn around the economy. What other national candidate with executive experience is more qualified to fix a broken economy and get the deficit and unemployment moving in the right direction again?

Someone try to debate that without using names or insults or general statements.
And if you're going to just say "Romneycare" and not cite any specifics, I'll just assume you have no idea what you're talking about.

There is a big difference between a state trying to reign in it's (_sic_) own health care costs and trying to nationalize the entire health care industry. If you try to compare the two, you are not capable of looking at things in-depth. Slogans and catch phrases that try to simplify intricate matters only prolong the problem. We need honest debate and well thought out solutions. Accusations and demonizing are only masking the problems like a pain killer when surgery is required to solve the fractured bureaucracy on a more permanent basis.

The neocomradess seems not to appreciate that she is proposin’ an innovation. Traditionally, America’s Otherparty has not run its Owners for President. From outside the mon[k]ey house, the reason appears to be that Republican hack pols are, consciously or subliminally, always presumed by their own Party base an’ vile to be third- or fourth-raters: I mean, if they were really any good, wouldn’t they be out enrichin’ themselves in the Secret Sector like rational creatures?

His Texcellency -- Don Ricardito de Perry y Stetson -- is perfectly traditional by that standard. [**]

Willard Mitt, second Freelord Romneycare in the peerage of Foxcuckooland, on the other hand, is a bit of a historical puzzle.

Perhaps his freelordship suffers from self-doubt problems an’ has decided that he is not really up to bein’ a proper Owner of America, but would make a really top-drawer hired hand, devoted to the interests of his acknowledged Betters? [*]

Happy days.

___
[*] Willard groupies might prefer to believe that their Neohero is inauguratin’ a new age, an’ therefore not to be bound by the conventions of yesteryear. Well, OK: an arguer might argue that Ownership of America is no longer what it was back under General Grant or Major McKinley, that mere ownership is nowadays trumped (ahem) by Big Management, especially now that the latter has become a learnèd profession in which one can obtain formal degrees from the H*rv*rd Victory School and lesser seminaries of Mammon.

Since his freelordship sports both an HVS MBA an’ the traditional J. D. of the hack pol (from H*rv*rd Law, as it happens), he might even be regarded as the perfect transitional figure, if one disregards the HVS MBA of George XLIII -- which, to be sure, it is rather a wonder the H*rv*rds did not revoke, considering what a mess Master Dubya seems to have made of the secret-sector business corporations he tangled with.

=

[**] Well, not quite perfectly: Don Ricardito never did trouble to get that nominal law degree.

A compare-and-contrast exercise with Freelord Romneycare as regards experience in the Secret Sector might be fun: what is Bain Capital, after all, when set down next to "several summers with the Southwestern Company, as a door-to-door book salesman"?

Come Meet Perry Mason III, Everybooby!

2011-08-22T10:51:00.001+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

Another week, another whight-wing señorito of whom few hearers have heard.

Today’s neospecimen is likely to interest us in the neocomradological community a good deal more than it interests Wally Wombschool, or the shapely Mizz Cindy from Wasilla, or even The World’s Greatest Yaleodrama™ist.

I would say, "Somebooby must have gave it a bad tip about where to get its stuff published," except that it is expressly blurbed as bein’ already a hired hand up the slippery slope to Castle Podhòretz, where classy drool about the Fedguv Constitution ought to be welcome enough, provided, of course, that it can show two _nihil obstat_s an’ one _¡imprimatur!_.

One of the things that that obstood imprintation in a tonier e-district may have been that Party Neocomrade (eight class) R. X. Richman is not authorized to affix "Esq." after the freelordly johnhancock. Our Hate-’68 nobility an’ gentry originally went neo- under the impression that they were defendin’, not smashin’, the traditional _shibbolôth_ of Academe, among them that legal commentary is best left to well-credentialled _Juris Doctores_, in return for which the freelords an’ Ziocomrades graciously abstain from teachin’ Joe the Wurtzlebacher how to unclog a water closet. _Suum cuique tribuere_, as it were. Plus, up to a point, _suum cuique bene olet_.

¿Perhaps it was the pajamas?

I mean, kiddiecons who do not distinguish -- who militantly resist distinguishin’ -- between their slumberwear an’ their street clothes are not likely to be expected by their factional Betters to worry about "Esq." and a’ that. Why anticipate that Master Wally an’ Mizz Cindy will care exactly what is, or what ain’t, on the C.V. of a PNC-8 RXR neomechanism?

Well, I betcha the kiddies don’t care, but, more important, I further betcha they will not be ravenously wolfin’ down this mess of pottage no matter where it came from. Unfortunately a scribble that could not make the cut at CommonTerror magazine will, accidents and hoaxes apart, read not unlike the sort of scribble that gets accepted there. The difference between Manhattan Island and the proverbial ‘Dubuque’ was not simply what letter grade ought to be awarded to metropolitan scribbling, but involved the nature of the product purveyed, the _causa materialis_ of _The New Yorker_ magazine. [1]

***

So much for literature / rhetoric / agitprop.

The factional or AEIdeological interest of the thing (for me) is it makes one wonder how well the PNC-8 RXR mechanism has grasped its own team’s talkin’ points. Like many, or even most, ‘conservative’ ‘intellectuals’, it does not (I think) much *enjoy* scabbin’ for its Daddy Warbucks an’ its Uncle Scrooge _y su Tio Ruperto_. In its heart of hearts, or its cold, steel-claptrapped mind, or wherever, it probably fancies itself a sort of Eddie Burke look-alike: Eddie was a stout defender of the "Venetian oligarchy" of Brit Whigs, yet nowadays the latter is far more likely to be dredged up and dusted off by Burke groupies than vice versa.

We may, I think, fancy the PNC-8 RXR neomechanism secretly cherishin’ the hope that "He sacrificed to [P]arty what was meant for [M]ankind" need not be the last word, that -- to leap at once to the flaming walls of extravagance -- America’s Otherparty will be chiefly remembered by the court historians of Princess Posterity for havin’ occasioned the eloquent an’ ingenious defenses an’ apologies of P. E. More, an’ I. X. Babbit, an’ R. X. Richmond, plus perhaps a few lessers of that ilk. [2]

To that should be added an epicycle or pænumbra about the Judæostatist or CT-magazine angle here, it being a great deal less extravagant to fancy some folks over on Team Zhabotinskiy imaginin’ that Uncle Sam must at last prove to have been but a footstool for Hyperzion. [3]

Figuratively, that would reduce the Fedguv Constitution to bein’ one leg of the _Zukunftshocker Zions_. Clear enough, but the _literaliter_ of the business is not so easy to work out.

The Jewish Statists are, or behave as if they were, well aware of the dificulties. Not only have they signally failed to borrow Madisonian constitutionalism from Wunnerful US, they prefer that their Tel ’Avîv statelet go constitutionless altogether. Evaluating this preference is itself a tricky matter, for how can a mere dummy-_zimmî_ decide _ab externo_ whether the Greatest Demographic™ has made this decision on Kantian lines, for everybody in general, or for Themselves Alone?

Essentially the same question has been endlessly addressed as a matter of reconciling Judæostatism with ‘democracy’. Given the way the D-word is actually used, that enterprise make nailing Jello™ to the wall seem a rational occupation. There might be at least a little conceptual progress made, then, by narrowing the issue and inquiring what sort of constitutionalism would be best for The Greatest Demographic™, subdivided into (A) best for Themselves to practice, and (B) best for Themselves that we others should practice.

Sub-subdivisions amongst different sorts of dummies and _zimmiyyîm_ could be added, if necessary. It is not antecedently obvious (¿is it?) that the GD Folk would be best served by any one species of constitutionalism common to, say, the United States of America and the Arab Republic of Egypt.

I am not sure it would be ridiculous to cut out the middleman, as it were, and wonder directly whether or not it is better for The Greatest Demographic™ that the US Fedguv be able or unable to ‘mandate’ purchase of health-insurance lottery tickets from secret-sector business corporations. After all, the interests of the GD Folk come into this question at least two different ways, both plain as day: in the short term, via "My son, the [millionaire] doctor," and, eventually, in the form of how healthy, both zoölogically and fiscally, the _zimmiyyîm_ of central North America ought to be permitted to become.[4]

Let me know what you think, sir.

Happy days.
--JHM

___
[1] I just noticed, O Bones, that the word ‘quality’ is ambiguous: in one sense, the quality of the Richmondite drool is simply ‘C-’. But the Q-word could also be used to point towards "amateur, fake-technical legalese" or the like.

"What it tastes like" is a thing’s quality, then, but so is "How good it is."

Further research is indicated.

___
[2] ’Tis a pity, sort of, that the late Freiherr Prof. Dok. von Strauss, who was better at this parlour game than anybooby, was not interested in the local institutional history of the _Heimatland G*ttes_. Various dummy-_zimmî_ epigones have, indeed, attempted to remedy Massa Leo’s scandalous oversight or near criminal disdain, but I fear they are so exceedin’ly epigonal that the less said about ’em, the better all ’round.

For that matter, his freelordship was no proper Hyperzionist. Up on Planet Leostrauss, I presume respectable kiddies are indoctrinated that all of the Greater European _tiers état_ is the footstool, and seated on the throne is ... ¡ta-DAAA! ... Freedame Philosophia. With Massa Leo assistin’ at Her Majesty’s whight hand, naturally.

___
[3] To say ‘permit’ of what it would be impossible, or in impossibly bad taste, to forbid is dubious, and not only because it is so likely to give offense.

But there you are, Dr. Bones -- I see no way of adequately discussing ‘ObamaCare’ and SmirkCare and the like without bringing up life-and-death questions -- questions precisely of *comparative* life and death. "In for a penny, in for a pound," say I: let us talk even about the possibility of deliberately poisonin’ the wells of the Lesser Breeds Without so as to keep their numbers down an’ thus preserve Western Sieve as we know an’ adore it.

I don’t say actually DO it, for Pete’s sake!

"So, who is your ‘we’ this time, Kemo Sabe?"

2011-08-09T10:33:00.001+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

The economic weather being what you can see out the MacL@@han Tube for yourself, it occurs to me to take a little _Schadenfreude_ upon those poor souls (poor judgers, anyway) who have pitched their ideological tents high atop the Great Blue Hill of H*rv*rchussets . It may not be quite Mount Washington up there yet, wind- and precipitationwise, but I ask you, sir, ¿five hundred millimetres of downpour on Friday? ¿¿Then six hundred on Monday?? ¿¿¿In August????

Even back in more settled times, the Blue Blazers’ self-inflicted situation was maybe a little problematical. "Conveniently located on Market Street in Bestembrighton, across from the Palace of Public Broadcasting," as the real estaters assured everybody, truthfully enough, never implied convenience vis-à-vis anywhere else in particular. Or did not imply it so explicity as to make a fraud litigation look promising.

If I remember my CliffsNotes™ to Comrade Professor Veblen whight, though, it may be that our provincial nobility and gentry select such out-of-the-vulgar-rut spots deliberately, to establish that they can afford to domicile themselves where the landscape is almost as sublime as the maintenance expenses. ’Tis not exactly CONSPICUOUS consumption, to be sure: the GBH itself may--nay, it does--stick out like a sore thumb, yet to spot the not un-McMansionlike abodes of the Blazers nevertheless requires either powerful binoculars or an engraved invitation. Or being on the receiving end of the aforesaid maintenance expenses.

(( Probably I had better move on, though, for as a mere Chicagolander by birth I have never grasped even the _literaliter_ of RE in MA: all that lovely waterfront land, choice properties that anywhere else would have been snatched up at once by Goulds and Rockefellers and Morgans first and foremost, with the Great Blue Hillbilly subclass of also-rans not very far behind, but here obviously belongs (I presume, legally) to the readership of, pardon my Prole, _The Boston Herald_. About the last place the spiritual scions of Governor Winthrop would care to be caught living in 2011 is the town named after His Excellency, an arrangement which can be explained by airport whiff and roar for the last few decades, but still, ¿how about the fifteeen score years before that? Similarly with Dorchester, Revere, Lynn the Unmentionable, and many more.

(( Conversely, ¿what on G*re's green earth do the GBH (and their worldly Evenbetters) find special about Weston 02493, "median income for a household in the town was $153,918 ... 97th most expensive zip code in a _Forbes_ survey in 2010"? Though pleasant enough, I suppose, that joint might have been picked by randomly throwing a yardarm, or a polo stick, or a Powe®Pointe® at the map. ))

But seriously, Charlie-on-the-MTA(-once-every-other-decade-need-it-or-not) finds himself unpanicked, somehow, even though "If Republicans win, we all lose money."

The _¿Kemo sabe?_ issue is blatant, although I guess it is barely possible his blueship is talking about Medicaid and the like, about, that is, our dear MA’s collective access to the Fedguv trough. In context, however, it seems all but certain that he is referring rather to secret-sector specuvestment and investulation, on Wall Street and elsewhere.

Perhaps our best analytic course is to work backwards from what we have in hand, stipulatively *defining* the WGBH ("We, the Great Blue Hillbillies") subclass as those who, on the one hand, possess at least a little gamblin’ money to lose in an up-market casino like NASDAQ, but, on the other hand, neither carry cards for the Party of Grant and Hoover nor think of themselves as members of The Class, on Whose behalf that neo-organization’s operations are now, and always have been, conducted. "Affluent without being positively needle-challenged," if you like. [*]

___
[*] Dr. Marx and the Muses and you, sir, and I are not obliged to agree with the Blue Blazers’ self-classification, or with anybody else’s. We’d be in an impossible pickle if we were, considering that at least 9,843.06 Homeland™ers in ten thousand are absolutely sure they themselves personally belong to a blessèd and mysterious entity they love to call "The Middle Class."

(( The last word on that silly drool, as far as I am concerned, may be allowed to the bard O. E. Mandelshtam:

В Петербурге мы сойдемся снова —
Словно солнце мы похоронили в нем —
И блаженное бессмысленное слово
В первый раз произнесем . . . .

(( Words don't come much more _bessmyslennoe_ than “The Middle Class.” Not in Yank English, anyway. ))

Meanwhile, Back in the Holy Homeland™

2011-07-30T10:26:00.003+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

Scott Brown’s spokesman: Yeah, he might vote for Reid’s bill.

Both sides now understand that the final bill will be a compromise between Reid and Boehner. If you’re a Republican, why hand Reid extra leverage in those negotiations by helping him to pass his own plan? The Democrats are going to knock down Boehner’s bill tonight; the GOP should turn around and knock Reid’s down too. That would preserve the Republican talking point that they’ve passed two bills in the House while the Democrats have passed nothing in the Senate and it’ll reduce some of Reid’s clout when he huddles with Boehner and McConnell. Instead, Brown sounds ready to give Reid bipartisan cover. Why? He can placate Massachusetts voters by voting for the final bill instead.

He keeps daring conservatives to primary him and hand that Senate seat back to the Democrats. One step too far this time? (&c. &c.)

One is continually reduced to doubting that the up-market and H*rv*rd and _Juris Doctor_ (&c. &c.) Blue Blazers have much grasp of any U. S. politics much to the whight of their own. If they got out and read _The Boston Humbug_ a little more, their noses would soon toughen up enough to dispense with the training wheels, and, ¿who knows?, they might even find little gems like that one for themselves on occasion.

The obvious fun of the thing, admittedly, is that the neocomrade of America’s Otherparty who scribbled it has very inadequate notions -- fantastic ones, even -- about our Hill City Commonwealth. The late Marshall Stalin had about as much reason to worry about a primary challenger as does Senator Fratboy. ¡Imagine a tail torn by intestine strife between two different factions of dog-controller wannabes! Economic an’ cultural neoeactionaries in South Carolina [*] may have lots of leeway to indulge in such luxuries, but in these parts, if whightwingers don.t all flap together, they will soon drop off the ’scope altogether.

Less obviously, Party Neocomrade ‘ALLAHPUNDIT’ does seem to grasp the essence of the Fratboy Two-Step: first vote with Von Böhner an’ the boys to please his neocarpetbaggers an’ fundmongers, but then vote with Mr. Reid because reëlection in Massachusets with EXCLUSIVELY the votes of neoscalawags is not a promisin’ plan.

The first step has already been taken: Default fears worsen as US Senate blocks debt-ceiling bill. ¿Who can look at that 59-41 split and not rejoice that ’tis Fratboy of MA who consistutes that final ‘1’? (I believe somebooby around here recently spoke of cabooses . . ..)

Unfortunately for the Otherparty, as yet forty-one-percent supermajorities only work negatively. However I daresay the neocomrades are workin’ on it even as we keyboard, strivin’ both to reduce the subpercentage required an’ to make that new, improved subpercentage decisive in ALL matters of neolegislation. "¡Just Vote NO!" may cover most of the Otherparty’s publicly acknowledged requirements, but let’s face it, if one is successfully to run a railroad an’ meet a payroll, at least a little somethin’ more than naked _¡Nie pozwalam!_ is required once in a while. [**]

But that will be then, and now is only now.

Nevertheless, the court historians of Princess Posterity will be derelict in their duty, should they fail to celebrate our own Senator Fratboy in conjunction with the Spirit of Forty-One, or ‘neominoritarianism’, or whatever terminiology becomes standard.

Somebooby must always take the first step, an’ in this case, ¡Fratboy’s the one! [***]

Happy days.
--JHM

___
[*] A province not chosen at random. Even apart from that December 1860 business, which still rankles on rainy days, just yesterday every single Fedguv ("¡boooo!") representative from darkest Calhounestan voted ‘No’ on Johannes, Freiherr von Böhner’s little dogmatic exercise in its last-ditch form:

SOUTH CAROLINA
Democrats — Clyburn, N.
Republicans — Duncan, N; Gowdy, N; Mulvaney, N; Scott, N; Wilson, N.

Mr. J. E. (ahem) Clyburn is, I presume, clinically sane, and voted against _Böhnerismus_ from the near side, so to say.

His colleagues from the Otherparty, out of sight around the bend an’ whighter than a driven snowjob, are (I further presume) the sort of goodfolks who would run against Stalin, vile traitor to the neorevolution. Or possibly they are terrorized of bein’ primaried to death themselves by even-whighter-than-whights. Either way, they fit in with the over-all ethos of ideological extortion which Party Neocomrade ‘ALLAHPUNDIT’ takes for granted. But which becomes only a bad joke when injudiciously exported to Bluesachusetts.

_¡Fas est et ab hoste doceri_! It’s (just barely) worth learning from ‘ALLAHPUNDIT’ to have some degree of familiarity with local conditions before offering unsolicited advice to like-minded politicians far away. More useful is to observe that the Party neocomrade obviously approves of this ideological extortion --indeed, he practices it--an’ is not just describin’ what happens with that Murdochian fairembalance we have come to know and love. Inasmuch as our beloved MA does undeniably rather resemble Calhounestan in Her unipartisanship, worrying a little about whether what I have labeled "ideological extortion" could happen here would do no harm, though of course the Otherparty would scarcely be the focus of concern.

*

[**]

*

[***] If any future court historians read these words, allow me to suggest that the very blueness of Bloserchusetts may have helped inspired Fratboy’s gallant neominoritarian quest. In what was otherwise a very good year nationally, the Otherparty of MA elected less than twenty-three (22.5) percent of the General Court, an’ zero (0.00) percent of our Fedguv Representatives, ¡yet in the Senate of the United States . . . !

Life being unfair, South Carolina has yet to return the favor by elevatin’ Congressman Clyburn or the like to sit in the seat of J. C. Calhoun an’ J. S. Thurmond.

(( SC bein’ SC, I won’t hold my breath waiting for that particular instance of fairembalance. ))

More Claved Against Than Clavin’

2011-07-19T11:03:00.001+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

This morning’s pajamaclad looser distinctly puts me in mind of Mr. Matthew Arnold and Mrs. Gooch’s Golden Rule, or the Divine Injunction ‘Be ye Perfect’ done into British [1]"

"Ever remember, my dear [Andy], that you should look forward to being some day [Imperial Klavan of the Kolorblind Kiddiecons]."

‘Imperial’, by the way, is at least a little more than pure spoof, for ¿Hath not Karl, Freelord Rove, laid it down that WE are an Empire now, and when WE act, WE create OUR OWN reality (&c. &c.)?

The visibility of the Rovan Empire, of its acts and its [destructivist] creations and its new-model Realities, may be a bit problematical at times, especially when his freelordship’s Party happen to be out of executive office, but the theory of Rovan imperialism is clear enough. Anyway, "Invisible Empire" has already been put under moral copywhight by a certain organization which you certainly won’t find *me* specifying in lurid detail. [2]

Perhaps we might coin and utter "the Transparent Empire of Tee Putty"? What the puttymoulders are up to is not impossible to see through, after all. [3]

Moving whight along from words to things, Kiddiemaster Klaving indeed claves [4] almost up to the "¡Be ye perfect!" mark in the path of his Party an’ Her AEIdeology. If his freelordship misses a knavish neotrick, I miss him missin’ it.

The exact arrangement of knavish neotricks is his freelordship’s only vulnerable point, I think, and naturally there may be different arrangements of them from scribble to scribble. Here everythin’ Evil in the Garden is made to revolve around "network news," which is bound to please Wally Wingnut an’ Cindy from Wasilla as they recline in slumberwear -- an’ in profoundest self-sorrow -- upon their potatoe couches of state [5]. It also, as I mentioned in the first note, makes good sense as a distraction from the spectacle of Firstlord Newscorp bein’ mobbed by Lilliputian Brit pols an’ paparazzis.

As a considered account of the correlation of farces, however, I don’t think mainstream mediacentricity is quight whight even by Wingnut City standards. Kiddiemaster Rove cannot have untended his Imperial manifesto to herald an ‘empire’ of mere entertainment. His freelordship definitely intended somethin’ a little more neoreal than that, though it serves his freelordship whight, in a way, to be so misunderstood or travestied after venturin’ on a partisan redefinition of so ordinary and vulgar a term as ‘real’. _Securus judicat orbis terrarum_: the Quackers never really got away with skyjacking ‘friends’ either, as St. Jack well points out somewhere.

Plainly, though, his freelordship original-intented the Rovan Empire to be a racket in which his freelordship himselt an’ other obviously predestinate Uppers --our old pals the Daughters of Virtue & Sons of Wisdom, L.L.C. -- dictate what is to be done, an’ then the forelock-tuggin’ classes go an’ do what is good for us. [6] If his freelordship did not mean that, he would presumably not have deployed the word ‘empire’ at all. The administration of the Rovan Empire is to be vaguely ‘postmodern’, no doubt, yet underneath all the superficial trendiness of methodology lies essential the same old "Me Tarzan, you Jane" substance as ever. Or make that "US Godzilla, you Bambi."

Nobooby can actually big-manage (the former ‘govern’) on the basis of foolish soundbarks like "We report, you decide." What Rovan imperialists require is far more like "We decide, and you report back when you have complied in full." This is not a new song. [7]

So, then: the Jungherr von Clavingck appears to the present keyboard to have taken the cliché notion of agitprop as "a fourth estate" for several times what it is worth. Mr. Walter Cronkite was never a Mussolini to the _Heimatland G*ttes_ and the chances of Kiddiemaster Ailes, or even the World’s Greatest Yaleodramatist himself, ever becomin’ one are too slight to be worth pooh-poohing. His freelordship is letter-perfect (as far as I can make out) in the twistifications an’ spins an’ miscellaneous clavin’s most likely to advance the Kiddiecon Kause. His freelordship’s failure is not to appreciate that such advancement can never amount to single-handed establishment.

Fraud is necessary, but not sufficient.

Happy days (through affordable health case)
--JHM

___
[1] I guess one ought to make that "done into Foxcuckoo."

Speaking of Foxcuckoos, can it really be pure coincidence that this factious drool should appear even as Rupert, Firstlord Newscorp in the neopeerage, must appear in the dock to be outrageously persecuted by a very inferior class of kangaroos, the Parliamentary?

¡How are the Whighty fallen! (Mr. Bulger too.) An’ fallen into such dreadful paws . . . .

***

[2] ’Tis not for you and me to put ideas into the dittopans of selfservative kiddies, sir.

(( Hmm. It occurs to me that, up to a point, the kiddies’ very wombschoolin’ an’ freedumbin’ down an’ pious allegiance to Their Ford’s ‘History is bunk’ may reduce the amount of wreckin’ their neocrew can wreak. Imagine, for example, if the Freiherren von Böhner und von Kantor were *deliberately* tryin’ to reproduce the constitution of Ancient Poland in Father Zeus’s green and entrepreneurial Homeland™.

(( Still, the traditional theoproduct was not labeled _peccatum ORIGINALE_ for nothing. Dogmatic mythographers of the former Christojudæandom have disagreed widely as to exactly what is so ‘original’ about their product, but not one ever suggested that P.O. requires to be independently neo-invented by each successive degeneration. _I.e._, the freelords an’ kiddiemasters an’ puttymongers of today need not have heard of _zlota wolnosc_ and _nie pozwalam_ to reproduce them. Or if ‘reproduce’ be ruled out as not strictly accurate in the case of the blissfully self-ignorant, then say "produce the effective equivalent of" or the like.

(( Furthermore, Neocomrade Fedguv Representative M. M. Amble-Bachmann’s recent troubles hearin’ shots supposedly heard ’round the world warns us what can go ’rong when kiddiecons an’ kiddie-conners think they do know a little bunkstory. Better ignorance and bliss, I’d vote, than flat out unwhighteousness about elementary matters of fact. ))

***

[3] A small world, sir: it appears that the Freiherr Kindermeister Andreas von Clavingck is a literary gent: "In 2008, he released a war-on-terror political novel, _Empire of Lies_."

Should you have any pots at home that require boiling, Bones, half an ounce of "Jason must confront the buried fear that he’s inherited his mother’s insanity and can’t control his own dark urges" ought to take care of them _pronto_.

***

[4] Verb intransitive: I clave / thou clavest OR clav’st / she claves / we clave / ye clave / they clave \\ clavin’ is us \ more claved against than clavin’

As to the semantic side, no doubt you can work that out for yourself empirically. "¡Don’t ever let even Foxnews tell you what is in _The Critique of Pure Reason_!

(( _Dixit_ Schopenhauer, more or less ))

***

[5] _Cf._ _kichô_ in Waleynese.

***

[6] What happens to be even better for our Betters than for us humble. But that plan makes excellent sense, ¿does it not?

***

[7] A couple of variant versions cross my mind. General Washington is quoted _chez_ Mencken as having vouchsafed that "Government is not eloquence, it is not reason -- it is force." The learned glossator elaborates

Bad government is that which is weak, irresolute, and lacking in constabulary enterprise; when one has defined it, one has also defined a bad bishop, cavalry captain or policeman. Good government is that which delivers the citizen from the risk of being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily . . . .

HLM pussyfoots, probably quite deliberately, through Church and violence profession around the most pertinent illustration of all, the bigmanagement of a secret-sector business corporation. To put the emphasis in the whight place, then, I prefer to recur to those ever-immortal last words of Charles I Stuart, "An EMPLOYER and an employee are clean different things."

"(oh-so-magnanimously)"

2011-07-18T06:39:00.001+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

Don Rossito de Doúthat y Podhòretz, whom you know, has made the mistake of ¡really lettin’ itself go, just for once!

On the occasion, as I guess, of the first full moon of the Silly Season. [1]

Usually this NYTC _señorito_ is distinctly less so than its wombmate Don Davidito de B. y P. , but today I am willing to make an exception. Unwittin’ly -- surely -- Don Rossito has lapsed into the "self-referentiality" of the Eng. Lit. Dept., inasmuch as the topic it is bratty about happens to be the brattiness of its own Party neocomrades:

It’s not that Republicans needed to tug their forelock and go along with whatever grand bargain the White House whipped up. But to win the endgame, they needed something they were willing to concede, something they could tout in public as an example of meeting the Democrats partway. Their inability to make even symbolic concessions has turned a winning hand into a losing one. A majority of Americans want to close the deficit primarily with spending cuts — which is to say, they’re primed to side with conservatives in the debt-ceiling debate. But in trying to turn that “primarily” into a “completely,” the right has squandered this advantage. By 48 percent to 34 percent, a Quinnipiac poll found last week, Americans will blame Republicans if debt-ceiling gridlock precipitates an economic crisis. In the end, the threat of such a backlash will probably impel Republicans to make some kind of concession anyway, if they don’t admit that’s what they’re doing.

(( Read the whole neosilliness, please, sir. Swiping gets to be a bore quick. ))

I asume you will share my impression that what we have here is a doctrinal nine-year-old lecturin’ a seven-year-old ditto on the need to be very grown-up. An’ sly an’ Machiavellian.

To maximize your mocking pleasure, sir, imagine what the reaction to such neodrivel will be out at Rio Limbaugh/Port Ste. Lucie. The Junior Birdpersons of Reaction are guaranteed to loathe it, havin’ been AstroTurf™bagged over the head into wantin’ it ALL -- an’ WANTIN’ IT ALL *N*O*W*. "¡Scrooge you an’ your ‘symbolic concessions’!" must inevitably be the unanimous soundbark from the Tee Putty.

The only thing ‘symbolized’ to kiddiecons by ‘concessions’ will be that we Lieberal an’ Demoncratic enemies of the Whight Civilisation of the Western Race™ have not been extirpated altogether. Bein’ a nine-year-old itself, Don Rossito can see through that one. But not clearly enough not to want what it realizes it cannot get:

... the public relations battle becomes crucial and the goal is to make the other side seem unreasonable, intransigent and even a little bit insane. Winning the later phase doesn’t require making enormous compromises, or giving up the ground you’ve gained. But it requires at least the appearance of conciliation, and a few examples of concessions that you’re willing to (oh-so-magnanimously) make to those unreasonable ideologues in the other party.

Our hero overestimates the seven-year-old ideomentality: most of the kiddies of Party an’ AEIdeology have not yet acquired a taste for nine-year-old puerilities in the "oh-so-magnanimous" line. Should Don Rossito ever make it to the ripe ol’ ideoäge of eleven, it will, as I conjecture, outgrow this fatuous fake magnanimity too. At that point it will be far more intellectually an’ ethically presentable, yet also a lot less fun. It -- perhaps one might even say ‘he’ at that point -- will then be not much more than your run-of-the-mill R.I.N.O., a Hoovervillain loyally servin’ the Hoovervillainous Class, willin’ enough to moderately take nine-tenths of a loaf rather than swipe no bread -- an’ not rub salt in by smirkin’ whight in our faces ’bout its own alleged greatness of soul.

That however will be then, if ever, and this is only now. For the moment, Age Nine is clearly much more engaged on its Age Seven front than against Age Eleven:

By backing into a compromise and shrouding it in procedural gimmickry, Republican legislators may hope to throw the Tea Party’s watchdogs off the scent. But both the politics and the substance of such a deal would probably be worse for conservatives than the kind of bargain that might have been available otherwise — if more Republicans had only recognized that sometimes a well-chosen concession can be the better part of valor.

Undoubtedly Don Rossito de Doúthat y Podhòretz could do with some -- with a LOT of -- practice in gimmickry shroudin’ before it attempts to diddle the entire holy Homeland™ from sea to whinin’ sea. Unfortunately it is in no good position to start by diddlin’ the Tee Putty, who have long been on to its little tricks. Havin’ figured the _novoseñorito_ out personally was not even necessary, however: the New York Times Company affiliation by itself would make Don Rossito a stench in the nostrils of Rio Limbaugh.

It follows, I think, that if Don Rossito were really serious about this drool, it would have found somebooby else to recommend it to the Tee Putty. Some booby not discredited in advance _chez Limbaugh_.

¿Perhaps that lesson does not occur until the sixth ideograde or higher?

And Machiavelli knows best.

Happy days.
--JHM

_
[1] If the race of vulgar Marxists had not gone extinct, I would ask one to explain why the Silly Season persists under Even-Later Capitalism. Given its Class advantages, a little neo- like Don Rossito can hardly lack for air conditionin’, that it should wax bratty *directly* from the air temperature outside the neodynastic _hacienda_.

The puzzle, really, is that nowadays even faithful peons an’ prole thugs an’ scabs can (mostly) keep cool enough in July and August. Indeed, my own researches with the Essex County Land Whale Watch and the Middlesex County Flightless Blimp Spotters strongly suggest that hardly anybooby except patent _indocumetadas y indocumentados_ spends more than twenty-three (22.954) seconds continuously without A.C. Darwinian selection would soon thin the herd, if the dash from comfy murder vehicle to equally comfy domicile (or emporium or whatever) were much longer than that.

Not being myself much of a Pscientific Psocialist, I can only note hesitantly that there may be a real parallel with Full Moon Syndrome, for now that the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced , Lady Cynthia cannot strike down many victims in the old-fashioned _literaliter_ way. Safely ensconced in their artificial neouteruses, Master Wally an’ Cindy from Wasilla -- an’ even Don Rossito de Doúthat y Podhòretz -- manage to be abstractly or vicariously afraid of the dark an’, similarly, neobratty from the heat, though both light an’ coolth, _Lux et Frigor_, prevail in their immediate vicinity.

As to *explaining* this phænomenon, assuming it really is one, far over the head of this coarse and illiterate keyboard is that grave task. We might ask Don Davidito de Brooks y Podhòretz whether its homebrew social-scientisin’ affords any clue.

Alternatively, if you can be satisfied with a merely literary ‘explanation’, I think it may suffice to mumble something vague about "memes in our cultural DNA" or the like. With a few well-chosen hand-wavings, that ought to do the trick well enough for Fedguv work. A little more specifically: ¿perhaps you remember that natural scientiser who suggested that sleeping seven or eight hours out of every twenty-four is just a habit we happen to have retained from several neological epochs back, when there was actually some physiological or Nat. Sel. point to it.

But Endymion knows best.

(( All of the above recommends the orthography "Psilly Season," which hints at phoniness as well as silliness. BEKB. ))

In No Mood for D-Fault

2011-07-16T09:33:00.001+01:00

Zandi does not factor in the one plausible escape route from this debacle, . . . to raise marginal income taxes on the upper income levels

Mr. Poster is plainly on the better or anti-Zandi side of the _Klassenkampf_, yet it would not hurt to grasp the viewpoint of the _Finanzkapital_ community, if one can do so without making unwarrantable concessions.

To wonder whether that community in general, plus Moody’s and Party Neocomrade M. X. Zandi in particular, consider it ‘plausible’ that (their own and perhaps especially their corporations’) income taxes should be increased may not be the best way to approach this factor. ‘Professional’ duty to their patients or customers would seem to require them to point out that tax rates in the USA could be -- have been -- much higher than they are now without the roof falling in. However, since it is their Class’s own pocketbooks and piggie banks of which we speak . . . .

Well, I find it plausible enough that the neocomrade and his employers would prefer to lay that particular factor aside. Perhaps Moody’s and Moody’s ‘clients’ might volunteer a little something, sacrificewise, if firmly and repeatedly asked, but it is asking too much of fallen humanity to expect them to bring up such a displeasing subject unilaterally.

In any case, at the moment M. X. Zandi is worried -- presumably on behalf of his employers and his employers’ ‘clients’ and, indeed, in the interests of his Class as a whole -- about the implications of a failure by the United States of America to meet our financial commitments. The neocomrade’s handy-dandy "How to cut the deficit --" is too vague to be taken very seriously, but perhaps no more is required when his attention is so fixed on "-- and what happens if we don’t." [*] My guess is that M. X. Zandi set out to agitate and propagandize that deficit cuttin’ is so easy a business that our hack pols and statespersons would have to be quite exceptionally incompetent to manage not to do it. [**]

From this standpoint, the interesting thing is that the man from Moody’s seems to be seriously concerned they actually might not.

More interesting than that, and a far better topic for the neocomrade analyst’s special expertise, would be to have told us what measures he has recommended to the clients of Moody’s and to his Class in case Obamageddon does come to pass. Presumably they take their yen and their Euros out of Uncle Sam’s treasury notes at once -- any fool of an uninstructed lay sheep can guess that much -- but ¿then where do they go with them?

Needless to say, however, the neocomrade can not be expected to give away to all and sundry _gratis_ what his employers’ clients are billed to the gills for. Furthermore, if there do in fact exist nifty strategies for financial self-protection in the event of a ‘default’ by poor Sam, almost certainly the fewer folks know about them, the better they will work. The patients or customers of Moody’s would be *doubly* betrayed, if what they have forked over their semi-good Bernanke bucks for were not only handed out as a freebie via Fox-on-15th but rendered more or less inoperative in the process. [***]

Happy days.

___
[*] Some editor at Fox-on-Fifteenth-Street may be responsible for the header, but, for once, it does correspond tolerably well to the contents of the article.

[**] If deficit cuttin’ be in fact extremely easy, then anybody can draw the inference that there are probably lots of different ways of doin’ it. That, in turn, means that M. X. Zandi need not ask for trouble by draggin’ in "taxes on the upper income levels." I mean, ¿Why put ideas in their heads?

[***] In theory, at least, it might be the case that no nifty options exist, or none that Moody’s Analytics knows about. M. X. Zandi could not be expected to admit it, were that the case, but it would certainly inspire him to true urgency about "-- and what happens if we don’t."

The Unrounded Well Is Not Worth Drinking From

2011-07-01T13:11:00.002+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

¡Happy New Month! (( ¡¡Twenty more NYTC freebies per browser!! ¡¡¡Alleluia!!!! )

To get the _Kaisermonat_ started with a rousin’ whimper, sir:

Don Davidito de Brooks has divined , presumably by skillful deployment of his freelordship’s customary homebrew social-scientisin’, that our (not his) _Schulführer und Schulführerinnen_ are to be blamed for the sad lack of that _geistige Eifer_ with which all young skulls full of mush obviously ought to be inflamed. [1]

What the Bolshevik Ravitch makes of this toplofty, though factious, drool it will be interesting to learn.

Meanwhile Thersites and I have agreed privately that what we have here smells a lot more like _Klassengeist_ in Old High Prussian than "school spirit" in our own vernaculars.

The French, however, might want to recycle _¡Qu’ ils mangeant des brioches!_, should they find this particular _señorito derechíssimo_ worth attending to. Don Davidito is quite as oblivious as was Her Austrian Majesty to what educational pastries cost nowadays. I wonder if his freelordship knows about those supermarket scanner gizmos that ao amazed George XLI Bush.

There is, I suppose, the possibility that Don Davidito understands the fundin’ side thoroughly, but thinks it dreadfully ungentlemanlike to gossip about Trade. Also a darker possibility: ¿How if his freelordship were deliberately tryin’ to distract our attention from the fact that _geistige Eifer_ only *looks* like being a a freebie? [2][3]

Happy days.

__
[1] Plus please don’t forget the _belebende Sittlichkeit_ ("invigorating moral culture"): _sine quâ non_, *that* ingredient is.

**

[2] Suspicion can darken fast if one abandons one’s mind to it. It would be positively nasty of his freelordship, for example, to despise all those unsatisfactory Leaders of Schools for their tacky greed an’ ‘materialism’ (in the vulgar pseudethical sense) as if every last individual spiritual slacker an’ cultural lazybones among them were a card-carryin’ Unionthug. Better skip the Trade angle altogether, I guess, than ever get started off in that direction.

Not quite so nasty, but pretty bad, would be if his freelordship wants us not to remember that residential segregation has a good deal to do with these things. _Klassensegregation_ first and foremost, but the other kind too.

Perhaps Don Davidito has some personal excuse for dodgin’ that one, though: if his freelordship expressly announced that he wants uniform (an’ uniformly high, an’ seriously enforced) standards of _belebende Sittlichkeit und geistige Eifer_ nationwide, his own Party neocomrades at Rio Limbaugh/Port Ste. Lucie an’ thereabouts would go ballistic at once. I mean, ¿what did they move to the ’burbs for in the first place, if not to get away from that sort of scheme? The sort of scheme that picks the pockets of decent, clean-cut, redstate-blooded selfservatives who "obey the law an’ play by the rules" (&c. &c. -- you must know the full lyrics to that one) in order to throw money at the Bad Poor.

To throw money at ’em by way of ... lemme see ... of "the subjects that don’t show up on the exams but that help students become fully rounded individuals — like history, poetry, art and sports." Setting aside the kiddie games at the end, perhaps, that is blatantly a proposal to sell the Party base an’ vile a product they do not want at a price they would think outrageous if they did. A ‘conservative’ ‘intellectual’ like his freelordship may sincerely care to almost any extent about that thoroughly elitist brand of well roundin’, but, over on the far side of the abandoned railroad tracks, Wingnut City is not often ashamed of their wells bein’ square. Of bein’ square themselves, too. It is very questionable if trailer-trash wingnutettes an’ wingnuts want much "history, poetry, art" for their own kids, and about as certain as anything Soc. Sci. can ever be that they will not be volunteerin’ to help finance such idle frills an’ frippery for the brats of the Bad Poor.

Even more fun than how Comrade Ravitch reacts will be the rebuttal barked out boldly by Neocomrade Dr. R. H. Limbaugh, who has dumped on poor little R.I.N.O. Davey Boy often enough in the past to make it likely that this, too, will not pass unbellowed at. As I said--as you can see for yourself--this morning’s Brooksian drool is so exquisitely toplofty that Himself would need the self-discipline of a Regulus not to mock it before the dittobrains.

***

[3] I will be amazed if the kiddiecons notice, but in a way the Brooksian ideoproduct is just what they oughtabe wantin’ over in Rio Limbaugh. To make Spiritual Toploftinesses the core of _Bildung_ an’ simultaneously leave it to be easily (though not quight whightly) inferred that they must hardly cost anythin’ at all makes the Bad Poors responsible for their own miseducation. If the B.P. only cared enough about "history, poetry, art and sports," teaches Don Davidito de Brooks y Podhòretz, they would see to it that these goodies get universally inculcated down in their slums. ’Tis not, insinuates his freelordship, as if they simply could not afford it. Were there but a will, there would be a way.

You don’t really need that Leo-Strauss-Brand Secret De©oder ®ing we found in the CrackerJack box once to work that much out. A critic might criticise that for whight-wingers like little Davey Brooks to look down on the dependent underclass for not valuin’ toney up-market cultural things that most whightists hardly value all that much themselves reeks of ... well, of ‘hypocrisy’ or ‘inconsistency’ or the like.

This argument, however, is of no use against rank-an’-file kiddiecons, who have no trouble at all esteemin’ themselves for belongin’ to that same ever-immortal Whight Civilisation of the Western Race™ that produced Giorgione an’ Rembrandt an’ Washington Allston (&c. &c.) whilst never themselves personally darkenin’ the door of a museum or lookin’ at the pictures in a coffee-table book. Though deeply interested in the FACT of their own collective self-wunnerfulness, the neokiddies hardly care exactly what it is based on.

Indeed, Dr. Bones, I ask you, "¿Hath not Their Ford proclaimed that History is bunk?"

"The Republicans have narratives"

2011-06-22T12:55:00.001+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

The choice of words, though, is secondary to having a narrative. The Republicans have narratives:

1. The recession was caused by over-regulation. Over-regulation, per the GOP, is always messing up the economy so of course it caused the recession.

2. Housing policies favoring the less well-off caused the economic collapse. Whenever we give stuff to people who don’t deserve it bad things happen.

3. The soaring national debt caused by spendthrift Democrats caused the recession and Democrats are just trying to make it worse.

Those are their stories. Yes, they are wrong and stupid. But they have traction. Lots of it. Simply yelling “reckless! reckless!” doesn’t undermine these Republican stories — especially when there’s a whole bunch of Fox commentators, er, candidates pushing them.

kbusch @ June 21, 2011 at 11:01 pm

_¡Qu’ ils mangeant des ‘narrations’!_

Let THEM, not us, climb up on verbal stilts to eat ‘narrative’!

If the Daughters of Virtue & Sons of Wisdom, LLC, could be persuaded to behave like utter stiltheads, they would lose their "respectable Republican cloth coat" Pat Nixons and that would be the end of them.

The said Freedame of the Otherparty, complete with her dog an’ her whole WalMart-equivalent wardrobe, did not add up to even a crumby _conte_, let alone a proper _narratio_. At best, ’twas only a table of Dramatis Personæ or list of ingredients. When his Freelordship of Nixon brought his mildly personal flotsam an’ jetsam to public notice, he afforded Televisionland and the electorate a chance to wag their -- ‘our’ -- own tales.

Thus has it ever been. In 1840, General the Freelord of Harrison an’ the log cabin an’ the hard cider (¡plus the Freelord of Tyler at no extra charge!) were all very well in their way, but that way was not much like _Madame Bovary_. Or like "The Devil and Daniel Webster" either.

Ms. Poster, evidently one of our team’s Beautiful People [1], likes to have her ‘narratives’ preassembled by the servants, rather than fumble around with bits and pieces herself. Up to a point Madame’s druthers are pure _de gustibus_, but they could become an impediment to effective agitation and propaganda if swallowed uncritically. The trouble I foresee is that for every consumer of ‘narratives’ who likes the pieces put together Madame’s way, there are perhaps nineteen others who would prefer some other configuration. Though it is theoretically possible that other ‘narrative’ consumers would first disassemble [2] the work of the hired hands and then put their own paws to work creating a more congenial Narrative Object, in practice one should assume that few denizens of Televisionland will actually get up off their potatoe couches to do anything so strenuous. Almost certainly, Harry and Louise MacLuhantube will simply feel bored, deciding subliminally that Madame’s Political Action Committee does not know how to natter a good narrative -- and then maybe click their way over to Fox.

Now Madame herself takes for granted that they do these things better in Foxcuckooland. She even condescends to provide three examples, although these have been CliffsNote™d down so austerely that most of their _narratio inflata_ charm is lost. A blow-up of Exhibit B in particular can be lots of fun, with the Three Weird Sisters, Fanny Mae an’ Freddy Mac an’ Barney Frank, conspirin’ to destroy the U. S. housin’ market for ends of their own.

Exhibit C, I observe, also runs to the "for end of their own" _topos_ and, come to think of it, so does Exhibit A. Evidently _narratio foxcucuensis_ is, in a manner, pure ‘narration’ -- all story and never any plot. Rarely do the minions of Rupert explain WHY we donkeys want to cause recessions an’ housin’ busts an’ then make ’em worse once we got ’em. Though it is extremely unlikely that Firstlord of Murdoch an’ Kiddiemaster Ailes (&c. &c.) have consciously adopted what might be termed the "Erector set" view of the _ars narrativa_ just set forth, yet their reluctance to dabble in motives gives their freelordships most of its advantages. After exposure to some tolerably fleshed-out version of one of the above ‘narratives’, Harry an’ Louise retain the freedumb to fill in any motivations they like, an arrangement that is convenient indeed for the Party of Big Management and of the AEIdeology.

And not just the motivations can be filled in by the patient / victim / customer, but also a good deal of significant local colour by the way. ‘Recession’ and "economic collapse" and "soaring national debt" are very general expressions, so general as to be almost Blakean idiocies. Out amongst the couchpotatoes, these portentous cloudinesses can be cashed in for how Louise got fired, an’ Harry can’t seem to get along with his credit-card corporation these days, an’ nobody wants to buy their house at a non-joke price. Those blanks are filled in first, I presume; only afterwards do the MacLuhantubes fill in the motives of their oppressors.

Naturally the Joneses across the tracks, who, let us say, got *their* shanty as a free gift from the Three Weird Sisters, would fill in the blanks quite differently. What with Human Nature (Pat. Pend.) and _peccatum originale_ and a’ that jazz, it is quite possible that the MacLuhantubes will conclude, in effect, that the Joneses wanting to stay dry when it rains (without ever properly earning and deserving their dryness) is the root cause of recessions and housing busts and economic collapses.

At least as regards the upmarket side of the railroad tracks [3], which votes a lot more regularly, this situation ought to suit their freelordships of Newscorp to a ‘T’. Or make that "to a ‘GOP’."

At the moment, though, we are concerned with literature / rhetoric / agitprop rather than with political substance, and my chief point is that the upshot would not be anywhere near so satisfactory if the Whight-Wing Persuaders had themselves supplied the concreteness of this keyboard’s feigned Joneses and MacLuhantubes. Had they done so, the resultin’ product would have borne a much closer resemblance to the Eng. Lit. or Comp. Lit. Dept. type of ‘narrative’, but at the same time it would inevitably (I think) be a product that is easily dismissed out of hand as "merely anecdotal evidence" by those who do not like the doctrinal drift.

Furthermore, merely anecdotal evidence is dismissed merrily by dismissers who do not deny that every word of it is G*re’s Own Truth, which nobooby expensively educated demands that ‘narrative’ should be.

"Merely anecdotal evidence we just made up from scratch" is a pretty useless category of wares for the agitpropper, despite being a not very friendly but technically accurate account of what M. Flaubert and Mr. Benet and the gang were up to. Not all ‘narrative’ is MAEWJMUFS, to be sure, but some is. And not just any ‘some’ but the very _crème de la crème du genre narratif_.

Such things considered, then, I’d say ‘narrative’ is mostly spinach. [4]

Happy days.
--JHM

__
[1] "Beautiful People" _es una ma®©a registrada de_ Howard Lawrence, zeroth Freelord Carr in the peerage of Wingnut City. Used here by gracious impermission of his freelordship.

[2] Notice, Dr. Bones, how easy it would be to erect a _pons asinorum_ at this ford and turn back all wayfarers who suppose that ‘deconstruction’ -- which I take to be a sort of Stiltword to end all stiltwords -- means disassembly.

[3] In accordance with the announced Erector-set principles, it is left to the student as an exercise to cross the figurative tracks and spell out how the Joneses might come to suppose that recessions and housing busts and economic collapses largely result from the MacLuhantubes (d.b.a. "the Middle Class") specuvestin’ a little too exuberantly with their real-estate equity.

Or alternatively, from the MacLuhantubes’ pig-headed insistence on makin’ sure that the Bad Poor stay poor--assumin’, that is, they can’t just be deported.

Or whatever.

[4] "¿But what shall we eat if spinach be austerely renounced?" Well, ¿how about argument?

Another Picture from The Institution

2011-06-19T13:45:00.000+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

Sort of a cartoon, actually:

The Department of Education Cracks Down on For-Profit Colleges

Should Washington scale back its huge college subsidies instead?

The neolearned an’ postgallant perfesser seems to have been outside strugglin’ with his two-wheeler when he should have been attendin’ the AEIdeological orientation part of the course offered by Wombschool Normal U. or St. Dilbert’s Antistate College or George Peppermason or wherever. I guess "There is nothing improper about the idea of a for-profit educational institution" was not original-intented as damnation by faint praise; all the same, if the Cramerite flame of zeal for Mammon flickered much lower, it would stop existin’.

And ¿what -- ¡I ask you! -- are the pajamaclad kiddies to make of "I really believe in the merits of a traditional liberal arts education" ? For that matter, ¿what do the Crameroid golfin’ buddies make of it?

To be sure, his Cramerian freelordship’s devotion to Lieberal Education is not unqualified -- "it needs to be done in high school, where we used to do it." Usually I flatly don’t believe the word ‘historian’ when it comes from the hired e-hands of Roger, Freelord of Simon Pajama in the neopeerage [1], but with Parteineukamerad Herr Professor Doktor C. E. von Kramer, an exception must be made: run-of-the-mill whight-wing bunksters would not be caught dead alludin’ to any bunk that far back towards the abyss. For it has been a long, long time indeed since "we used to do" Lie. Ed. at the secondary level rather than the tertiary. St. John Dewey, you’ll remember, used to complain of that situation all the time, starting in perhaps 1880. By the time he died in 195X, however, the situation had long since been rectified.

This qualification is, I fear, makes me a little suspicious. No doubt his freelordship sincerely craves to get all that useless unprofitable lumber -- "medieval French literature" -- removed from our institutions of tertiary educationalism, but, once it is safely out the door, I suspect M. le baron de Cramer would not much mind if it were just laid by the side of the road in a garbage bag for some fine, upstandin’ waste-disposal privateer to deal with quietly over night. Should it never make it sixteen blocks up the pike to Gated Hills Latin School, probably his freelordship’s grief would not be inconsolable.

But my suspicions pale besides those that his freelordship’s Party neocomrades ought to be entertainin’ of him. Especially if they, too, should happen to live in Gated Hills, that garden spot of South Central Foxcuckooland. For if GHLS does take the rubbish in, ’twill be their property-taxes pay for its upkeep. Whereas, had it been left where it was, at the tertiary level, at least part of the cost would be covered by misguided volunteers from the Secret Sector. The kiddie selfservatives are not, in general, sufficiently bestembright to entertain the idea that his freelordship of Cramer may be winkwinknodnoddin’ at ’em a little here. Neocomrade Dr. R. H. Limbaugh, for example, who likes to bark ’bout how he, at least, proudly lives in ‘Literal[s]ville’, will certainly conclude that M. le baron really wants to see compulsory Old French at GHLS. ¡What Rush, who happens to be _universitätsrein_ himself, will bark ’bout his freelordship in conjunction with *that* nifty scheme, I leave to your imagination, O Bones!

Probably M. le baron is just muddled, but it is just possible he is a stern _Klassenkämpfer_ unafraid to stand up for his own country-clubbers even against nominal Party neocomrades from the "respectable Republican cloth coat" mob.. That is to say, the Gated Hills Latin School is not for the neoproles down in Rio Limbaugh, who retain perfect freedumb to dispose of their local property-taxes for instruction in matters a little less upmarket-ornamental than _Le Roman de la Rose_.

To judge from noises emitted by the Three Weird Sisters of Boston [2], every neoprole takes for granted that education was decreed by Father Zeus to insinuate Dr. Limbaugh’s "young skulls full of mush" into well-remunerated employment in the Secret Sector as quickly as possible. There are serious reasons for doubting that everythin’ inculcated at the Rio Limbaugh/Port Ste. Lucie Regional High School in fact works towards that end, but, as far as I can make no, no disagreement worth mentionin’ that that is what RL-PSLRHS *ought* to be doin’, apart from a comparatively minor fringe of cultural studies designed to make sure that the neoprole kiddies know exactly which athletic an’ ideological teams they are required to cheer for. [3]

But probably M. le baron is just muddled. Examine his last paragraph, sir: plainly his freelordship does not want to see ‘his’ taxes wasted on the Bad Poor, marchin’ in lockstep with the whole phalanx of Party neocomrades on this, the most crucial, point. However the freelordly an’ kiddiemagisterial Class cannot make it on its own, She [4] requires a continual supply of scabs to keep down the Union thugs an’ Tee Putty to turn out on election days. This continuin’ supply of fresh neoblood has to come out of the arteries an’ veins of the holy Homeland™’s educational system somehow. Wombschoolin’ in the narrowest sense -- homeschoolin’ -- is not a viable option on the scale required. Even at Gated Hills, to be "privately educated" like a (probably) non-phony aristo from two or three centuries ago is so expensive as to be insignificant for the _Klassenkampf_. Dick an’ Jane (and Spot) will certainly have to be sent out somewhere to acquire their booklearnin’. Given the inertia of social constructions, it is not likely that they will soon be sent anywhere radically different from the sort of institutions currently available. [5]

The freelordly bottom line

Stacked up against this grim reality, the abuses on display at America’s for-profit colleges virtually pale in comparison

is a pretty example of a kissin’ cousin to "‘¡Shut up!’, she explained." His freelordship would much prefer to discuss the neofact that far too many Bad Poors waste their time an’ his freelordship’s Class’s money hanging around in schools, a preference that has almost nothin’ to do with the displayed abuses. Here the figurative freedame does not explain that we ought to fall silent altogether, only that we ought to allow her freeladyship to know best what to talk about.

Still spinach, though, ¿is it not?

Happy days (through affordable healthcare)
--JHM

____
[1] An’ ¡¡World’s Greatest Yaleodrama™ist!! ¡Never forget that, sir!

[2] WRKO AM 680; WXKS AM 1200; WTKK-FM 96.9.

[3] I presume it would not be fairembalanced to complain that this sort of icin’ on the cake is ‘useless’ or ‘unproductive’. After all, when -- nowadays, if -- Master Wally Wingnut gets admitted for a job interview, provin’ to the Personnel Department that he is a thoroughly orthodox kiddie selfservative may well be of the highest utility.

If Wally were tryin’ to get in the door at ScroogeBank or enlist with the Goldman-Saxon hordes, that sort of thing would not much help and might even hurt, but we all know, Dr. Bones, that the alumnuses of Gated Hills Latin hold a near-total monopoly on the juiciest secret-sectorian plums. Not (I think) so much thanks to their mastery of Old French, as to their parents’ ability to shell out for the archaic kind of pædagogy that stars Old French and the like.

(( Though off-topic here, ‘archaic’ is interesting and important. ¿Did I ever mention that study of Secret Sectoria back in the heydey of glass-and-steel-box architecture? It was the corporate proles who got all the benefits of Modern Times. For themselves, the Big Managers preferred wood panels and upholstered furniture and Century XVIII all across the boardroom. Plus naturally when one has made it really big up at Gated Hills, one immediately pretends to go into agriculture an’ pastoralism -- horses especially. Polo is even better than Old French, statussymbolwise. ))

[4] As it happens, _classis -is_ really was feminine in very early Old French. I think, though, that this particular She would ought to be a Her in any case.

The same applies to _La civilisation occidentale_, the Western Sieve ideoproduct of the Ziocomrades an’ of a few scattereed dummies an’ _dhimmís, set up as hopefully an object of love an’ devotion an’ rallyin’ ’round generally. When one only means to refer to the intellectual history of Western Europe _wie es eigentlich gewesen_, ‘it’ will do nicely, but when when spoofin’ those wunnerful neofolks who seriously expect one to cross one’s heart an’ hope to die for themselves under the WC label, only ‘She’ will do.

[5] If the kiddies’ Destructive ©®ea™ionism product worked half as well as advertised, I daresay we could start over at once with what the Freiherr von Kramer an’ other neocomrades seem to require ideally, namely a revival of the apprentice system. ScroogeBank and WalMart and the Goldman-Saxons and the Warbucks Widget Trust Intergalactic LLC would train an’ indoctrinate all their hired hands in house from kindergarten through graduate school, ignorin’ the vast wasteland of American Educationalism as if it did not exist. Dick an’ Jane could get a far, far better education from the Serene House of Warbucks, after all, than they could ever hope for at the house of their own Mom an’ Pop. (Spot I dunno about.)

As regards tertiary educationalism specifically, surely this would be a far more sensible way for Daddy Warbucks an’ Uncle Scrooge y Tio Ruperto and all the rest of that branch of the family than to set up subsidiaries to specuvest an’ investulate in "for-profit colleges" that probably won’t be so very profitable in the long run. His freelordship of Cramer -- clearly no œconomist -- speaks blithely of "tens of thousands of dollars in student loans that will eventually be cleared only when they die of old age," which would be lovely for Scrooge & Co. if they could get it. But of course they cannot get it: well before middle age, Dick an’ Jane, the shameless ratfinks, will have defaulted on their freelordly creditors-- and there will go most of those "for-profit college" profits, in all likelihood.

One scarcely needs an M.B.A. from the H*rv*rd Victory School to notice *that* locomotive racing down the track at one. Those from the freelordly Class who do actually dabble in such specuvestments certainly appear to have noticed -- that is why they want Uncle Sam to co-sign the notes with our nieces and nephews.

There exist Party neocomrades at the Tanks of Thought, Catoholics an’ Heritagitarians an’ brand-name AEIdeologues, who (pretend to) think that Sam’s signature on a note is not worth much more than Spot’s would be, but this idle chatter of hired hands is contradicted by the behavior of authentic Freelords of Finance, who take for granted that Sam will pay as promised. At least pay our obligations to themselves -- if they can think of a way to welsh only on what Sam owes to the heathen Chinee and/or the Ponzi Security Administration, I think they might go for it. But it is not easy to imagine what that way would be.

¡Chickitawbut Mountain RULES!

2011-06-18T09:19:00.004+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

Increasing the individual campaign contribution limit . . .

. . . may be an indication whence fundin’ for the _Herald_ angels’ specific level an’ quality of agitation-propaganda procedes.

Really serious Hoovervillains (say, those at _The Wall Street Jingo_) will much prefer to see fewer Luddite restrictions on CORPORATE generosity to our statespersons. Individual organisms were OK citizens for their time, but that time has now passed: "Farewell, a sad farewell, O ye slide whips and buggy rules!"

The best that mom-an’-pop (so to say) contributions can buy nowadays is, I fear, a political arm rather like the Republican Party of Cabotlodgestán. Or rather, not quite that good, for the minoritarian kiddies tend to pick up a certain amount of bucks out of alien carpetbags. Few whight-wing aliens much care about supportin’ this or that provincial candidate in the boondocks of Worcester County, yet bucks are fungible.[1]

The _Herald_-fundin’ parochial class tend, I suppose, to be *nominally* corporate: there will be a "Chickitawbut Mountain Shed and Window Company, Incorporated" (for example). Yet a very little digging around will discover that this is really just Daddy Joe an’ Mommy Matilda plus maybe Cousin Kevin with the (nominal) M.B.A.

With paymasters chiefly of that small calibre, ¿what could be more natural than that the _Herald_ angels should pipe first of "the INDIVIDUAL campaign contribution limit"?

Moreover, their editorial beatitudes doubtless piously believe all the malarkey about petty business that circulates nowadays: "The Fortune 500 an’ ScroogeBank NA an’ the Goldman-Saxons do not create jobs, ¡’tis Chickitawbut Mountain that creates jobs!" Conceptually, and more importantly -- for it is hormone-basers of whom we speak -- emotionally, the BH ideal of pettybiz might as well be Master Horatio Alger presidin’ over a lemonade stand in person with no icky paperwork anywhere in sight. The angels’ patients or victims or customers like that line too, because if that is what it takes to be a Titan of Industry, well, ¿why not you an’ me an’ Kevin? [2]

Happy days (through affordable healthcare)
--JHM

___
[1] Such fungibility is in itself a good example of the superiority of the (noble, cuttin’-edge) Corporate Citizen over the obsolescent-to-obsolete zoölogical ditto. I sometimes think of the splendid Cause for which I now bark as a matter of making it less onerous for dollars to vote.

*

[2] To adorn this year’s Silly Season, Party Neocomrade Dr. R. H. Limbaugh has resolved to set up what appears to be a slightly glorified lemonade stand, http://www.twoifbytea.com/.

The appearance is bound to be a little deceptive, though: betcha this _shtyk_ has been been shystered an’ accountant-ed almost to death even before bein’ properly hatched.

(( Also arguably deceptive is Paul Revere an’ a’ that -- ’tis not the Taxachusetts economy that Himself proposes to stimulate with his flavored water. ))

*

Dr. Cuteless Goes Social-Scientistic

2011-06-17T12:01:00.002+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

Axiom I. "People tend to do what other people say they should do"

(( Just look at Citizen Wiener of NY, shamelessly pandering to popular demand ))

Axiom II. "Political people think of ‘other people’ as the other party"

Dr. Cuteless evidently takes my own view that Psociology is half journalism and half rubbish. She puts her former into Axiom I, savin’ the hard stuff for Axiom II, which is, of course, Holmesian drool.

If you are a hack pol in the _Heimatland G*ttes_, the pertinent Others are the CCC, Campaign Contributin’ Classes. _Sine quibus non_.

Now admittedly Hill City City and the Commonwealth of Blue Masses are atypical of Father Zeus’s Country as a whole insofar as the aspirin’ local _Kontributionsmeister_ has only one party and about a tenth to benefact.

In some ways the Otherparty of Massachusetts looks like a lot more than a tenth, but this misleading appearance largely depends on a steady (?) influx of funds in carpetbags. Abandoned to themselves, the neoscalawags would be exclusively the Party of Adams (P. A.) an’ Fattman (R. X.) [*], untroubled by the comparatively patrician likes of M. Willard, second Freelord Romney in the peerage of Foxcuckooland. The piously G.O.P. sector of the CCC simply cannot afford any better product than the Adams-Fattman line. Poor unemployed Mitt, I understand, wound up fundin’ the whight-wing CCC in these parts rather than vice-versa. A nice arrangement when they can get it, no doubt, but ¿how often is that?

Truly, our MA is not like the others. [**]

Dr. Cuteless is not much better with facts than she is with Principles. ¿How often does one catch America’s Otherparty actually exhortin’ the selfservative kiddies to "get all judgmental and vindictive"? Or find us donkeys formally preaching "¡Go thou and get busy and do what you feel like!"?

Cuteless appears in fact to be maintainin’ that Otherpartisans feel some sort of mysterious obligation to behave the Elmer-Gantry-cum-Torquemada way we good guys like to present [***] them as typically behavin’, whilst Lieberals and Demoncrats keep trying to live down to "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion" (as subsequently amended), to what the Daughters of Virtue & Sons of Wisdom , a limited-liability Company, have always supposed us unrespectable to be like.

There is no mystery here, of course, only evidence that stereotypes are often not without a good deal of empirical support.

Happy days (through affordable healthcare)
--JHM

___
[*] Hey, ¿what’s with This video has been removed by the user " ?

Though I trust the video was thoroughly incriminating, were I the Freijungherr von Fattmann I’d certainly get rid of that self-portrait as well: ¡talk about "not because you were an Eagle Scout"! Even that thing the _Worcester Telegram_ got hold of would be less unsatisfactory. It does not make his freelordship look any older or wiser, or not much, but at least there is the buddin’ promise of a truly Republicanian set of jowls.

The student of neocomradology may wish to compare and contrast this freejunker’s self-presentation before the boondocks of Worcester County with a similar example involvin’ a national figure, involvin’, indeed, the Otherparty’s current ‘conservative’ ‘intellectual’ hearth-throb. Nobooby can have compelled The Smirk of Janesville to make himself look like that on his freelordship’s own Fedguv website.

I infer that the CCC must rather like what we may call "the Eagle-Scout look," at least for their junior hired hands. Later on in life, the jowls an’ that pasty-white apoplectic-lookin’ complexion -- Judge Baker of TX , say, or Dr. Limbaugh of EIB -- become more attractive. Though opposites from a medical point of view, morally the William Howard Taft look an’ the Eagle Scout look are much of a muchness, both indicatin’ a resolution to march forth an’ service one’s Party Paymasters without stint or limit. (The smirk appears to be optional.)

*

[**] Some real political Psociology about the exact identity of MA neoscalawags with money to burn on their Adamses and their Fattmen would be worth reading. My own informal notion is based on those of them who advertise their corporations on the Three Weird Sisters of Boston squawk radio, a subgroup bound to be unrepresentative.

Even at the highest level, though, small-town Chambermaids of Commerce such as I conjecture to be the chief consumers of the Adams-Fattman(-Ryan) product are very important for the Anatomy of the Elephant. The Poujadist or "small business" element don’t actually *run* the Party of Grant and Hoover -- or even come very close to runnin’ it -- but they do tend to be, as it were, the "respectable Republican cloth coat" in which the real Party paymasters like to wrap themselves up before addressin’ Televisionland and the electorate. To persuade the latter to sympthize with the misfortunes of ScroogeBank NA, or H*rv*rd Buzzard Health Partners, or NewsCorp, or the Warbucks Widget Trust (&c. &c.) would be almost impossible, but fortunately the good folks on the potatoe couches don’t know beans about money on anything but the smallest scale and can therefore often be jollied into vaguely supposing that "American business" means the Bailey Building and Loan Association from It’s a Wonderful Life .

¡¿Surely Jimmy Stewart would have advertised on WRKO an’ WXKS an’ WTKK-FM if they had been available in 1946?!

*

[***] I think ‘present’ and not ‘perceive’ is the just verb here. Not because anybooby on either side is consciously insincere, but because so much of the stereotyping is far more an intramural ritual than a serious fresh attempt to see and describe what the class enemy is actually like.

¡Bienvenidos a Rio Limbaugh!

Trick-or-treatin' as Standard & Poors

Introducin' DVNN, the "destructive, vicious negative nature" wonderproduct

St. Anselm Meets the Fool (Round Two)

Leroy von Hindenburg

"Views ... repudiated by ... Republicans"

Sammy Herald Pipes As Paid

_¿Bist du Zycher?_

A Neorural Ride

Everybody in the Tank for Lizzie

Knows from Newswhere : "Patrick Administration Erased Romney Era Emails"

Charity does NOT begin at brown

Blimp Unready for Prime Time Twelve Ways

Dereliction of Blurbin'

"across the havoc of classwar, a great general"

Introducing FlipflopCare

¡It’s Turkey Day in the Morning!

_Hinweise auf eine Pfefferspraysphilosophie_[0]

"Means well but needs work"

I clave, thou clavest, she . . .

The Kentucky Woolite® Code

Odd, if not Old

"[not] nearly as plasticized in person"

Return to Sender

"I second the motion"

On the Menial in Massachusetts

"¡Mama, Mama, I've been [jugged]!"

Massachusetts Liberal

Observations on politics, the media and life in Massachusetts and beyond from the left side of the road

"Lefty Meets the Lyin’ Class" (An Open Letter to the Great Blue Hillbillies)

¡But Some of Us LIKE Nasty!

Breakfast of Champions, Party of Cripples

¡Introducing Little Orphan Jennie!

One Wiseburger Deluxe with Side Order of Flies

"Wingnuts, sir, are an *honest* people"

"demonstrated his commitment to being with everyday people"

Seven in every ten

The Brown Peril and Me

Concerning the Brown Peril

Blue noses and Blue Blazers

"little to knock her off her stride"

"a few naive but honest members"

"utter irrelevance" ossia Louise amongst the Gnostics

Little Tommy Wobble Does A Funny

Krug Loves Lizzy

Picking on cripples again

¡Let us have our neoclichés in full, please!

My Day at the Track

"Where are all these new faces coming from?"

You Want Jobs? Try WAR.

Problems of Din’alin’ism (Part MXI)

The Cuteless Perplex

Pickin’ on Party Cripples

"My Sun the Neoindustrialist"

The Prophet Honoured at Home

Come Meet Perry Mason III, Everybooby!

"So, who is your ‘we’ *this* time, Kemo Sabe?"

Meanwhile, Back in the Holy Homeland™

Scott Brown’s spokesman: Yeah, he might vote for Reid’s bill.

More Claved Against Than Clavin’

"(oh-so-magnanimously)"

In No Mood for D-Fault

The Unrounded Well Is Not Worth Drinking From

"The Republicans have narratives"

Another Picture from The Institution

¡Chickitawbut Mountain RULES!

Dr. Cuteless Goes Social-Scientistic

"Wingnuts, sir, are an honest people"

"So, who is your ‘we’ this time, Kemo Sabe?"