"utter irrelevance" ossia Louise amongst the Gnostics

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

¡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

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

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!

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

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?"

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?