a staggering force

"After a year and a half of erratic tweets and rambling speeches, we can’t be certain. We don’t know how Mr. Trump would carry out basic functions of the executive. We don’t know what financial conflicts he might have, since he never released his tax returns, breaking with 40 years of tradition in both parties. We don’t know if he has the capacity to focus on any issue and arrive at a rational conclusion. We don’t know if he has any idea what it means to control the largest nuclear arsenal in the world." the new york times 9 november 2016_______"the disappointment and pain with which the result of the late animated canvas has filled our breasts would be mere affectation for us to deny, or to attempt to conceal from our readers. wholly unexpected the event took us completely by surprise. not for even a moment apprehended, the blow came upon us with a staggering force." the national intelligencer on the election of james k. polk to the presidency in 1844______________there are winners and losers in american politics just like anywhere else...there were losers in every presidential race and the media that endorsed the losers always has had bitter lamentations the day after..i will acknowledge that james knox polk did not have command of thermonuclear weapons...however he did threaten war with the united kingdom and he did oversee the mexican-american war...which led to him being considered historically as a "strong" president and drove the supporters of henry clay to distraction...they were contentious times...the abolitionist movement was growing..annexing texas and the expansion of slavery were at issue...and the cultural divisions between the north and south of the country were widening...nothing is new in american politics and the losers never disappear...( have a shufti at wolfgang shivelbush's "the culture of defeat" sometime )...to not have expected a backlash against an eight year obama presidency..or immigrants..or gay rights is to have been woefully uneducated in the peculiar traditions of politics in this disunited disparate country...the pendulum always swings back and to deny this is to be foolish...it is a profoundly conservative country and in possession of a delusional exceptionalism...a "splendid little war" almost always distracts people form domestic chaos..polk did it and became "strong"...we have a couple going on right now...no need for the trumpists to start a new one...then again the old ones are just that...old...time, one supposes, for politicians to find a new venue for young people to be killed in...one wearies of politicians...one wearies of lies and distortion...one has found orwell prescient for some time...one supposes that his distrust of the "official" versions of events was predated by other, perhaps less skilled, doubters...as a class, irregardless of party affiliation, politicians are, at best, untrustworthy...at worst they are lying, scum-sucking whores..i know where my sentiments lie

cultural paranoia, class warfare, and you

"however, you are quite at liberty to take food home from the market once the dining halls have been supplied, for everyone knows you wouldn't do it unless you had to. i mean, no one likes eating at home, although there's no rule against it. for one thing it's considered rather bad form, for another, it seems silly to go to all the trouble of preparing an inferior meal when there an absolutely delicious one waiting for you in the dining-hall just down the street." thomas more from utopia._________________a communal society is an observed society..behavior surveillance and modification through peer pressure rather than state coercion...self-policing for the oligarchy...no wonder the teleolgists love thomas more..i wonder if b f skinner read this_______ today's n y times...

had a "special advertising section" wrapped around the outside of the paper so you'd see it first..

it folded out...

into a four page spread...

all about the need for vigilance and security in the face of an increasingly dangerous, divided, and hostile world...

with a kicker on the back to make sure that adrenaline rush of fear ( greatest marketing tool ever! ) grabs hold as tightly as the marketer wants it to be...impelling the purchase...from more to orwell with stalin and hitler's paranoia thrown in, authoritarians and oligarch have always been obsessed with what "the mob" is up to and what they're thinking...it's the source of more's love for the communal...the catholic church's and every secular religion you care to name as well...the 1% are oligarchs and no exception tot his..the want public and private surveillance and orwell's telescreens are not long off ( i am using one of the grates surveillance tools the elites possess at the moment...google is eating this stuff up and laughing all the way to the bank...facebook too..just so we know i am alert to this...i am not feeling naive today )...they need to know...fortunately the are not all that good at understanding the non-linearity of causality..oh they say they do but in their heart of hearts they think they "know" where human history is heading and that they can control it...this is nonsense..human cognition is limited and we are in the environment...part of it...not external as the self-absorbed wealthy and their lackey economists would tell us..they can watch us..we watch as well..and the planet will have the final say.

and just to show we are dealing with an paper aimed at an elite audience, here's an advertisement from today's n y times magazine for a watch no one on my block will buy...some wanna-bes may like the idea...but it is not in their price range and not nearly utilitarian enough.

the great proletarian revolution

28 April 1919 1. Require the Moscow Cheka to carry out merciless arrests among the strikers and delegates, ignoring previous considerations. 2. Call Khalatov to the Council of People’s Commissars by nine o’clock. 3. Require Kamenev immediately to send for Red printers from Petersburg. N. Lenin____________________ clearly is there is no room for disputing the utopian nature of the “worker’s paradise”…even if the edenic nature is disputed by the workers themselves…if there is dissent it isn’t a utopia so send for “reliable” printers to keep the presses rolling while the secret police deal with the malcontents and restore the teleological balance. the great proletarian revolution wasn't about workers any more than the trump presidency is about making the nation "great" again...revolts by the masses are always co-opted by one elite or another...be they leather clad chekists or quasi-legal swindlers in business suits...always someone who "knows" what the masses need.

ho...mao...the original 20th century undead has company, if not competition...nosferatu lives...

please remember the fifth of november

"by excluding men under thirty-five from the first office, and those under thirty from the second ( president and senator respectively ), it confines the electors to men of whom the people have had time to form a judgement and with respect to whom they are not liable to be deceived by those brilliant appearances of genius and patriotism, which, like transient meteors, sometimes mislead as well as dazzle."-john jay federalist LXIV_______________________"the exhaustion of the masses is unquestionable."-grigory zinoviev, 15 novemmber 1917 in a central committee meeting__________________today is guy fawkes day...a quasi diminution of an act of rebellion/subversion/treason/terrorism depending on who is writing about it...and i usually don't need to wait for some particular day to express an opinion about the sorry state of hegemonic culture in these once united states...that the last election offered a dismal choice of the venal and corrupt for high office ( yes...that woman is no better...fucking sue me ) is an unquestionable fact and i am wondering just how that came to be...partly because the "masses" are "exhausted"...not so much by lying whore politicians...those have been around since the beginning ( we will get to jay in a minute ) but by the dead end appearance of the economy...the erosion of economic middle ground...the gig economy and the inability to make ends meet, seemingly no matter how much one might work...so they rebelled at the polls and installed , incredibly to my mind, just another member of the hegemonic elite who was posing as a regular guy...a "meteor" that "mislead" if he didn't "dazzle"...then again when hasn't a member of the hegemonic elite people the white house ( no dissent...obama was of that elite and he will not be unwealthy for the rest of his days..and "honest" abe may have been a rail splitter once but the house he lived in before his turn as president was a prosperous lawyer's, pot a cabin in the woods )..bear in mind that the franchise was limited tot he "better" men in jay's day and he was all for that...who knows who the hoi polloi might elect...his rants about the masses are manifold in the federalist papers..so the "people" he wanted to form "judgements" about the "electors" were not the common folk...candidates were vetted by the interests of the elite and the real decisions about who stood for what were made in an arena removed from public scrutiny...sound anything like the recent past? people believe in this system mostly because of high school civics..i have been out of high school for nearly fifty years ( 1971 ) i was skeptical about these people then ( there was viet nam and watergate ) i find them loathsome now...odd that "lock her up" ( which i am inclined to think she should be on general principles ) was such a refrain in 2016 and mat apply to that cretinous freak in say 2017 or 18...fuck these people...fake news..alternative facts...just the same old political lies and dissembling...smoke and mirrors...slight of hand...they keep us divided and they win until the system collapses from its own entropy ( shall we talk about an eroding tax base and the consequences in terms of infrastructure? climate gentrification of areas higher above sea level and the displacement of the poor? that climate change...there's the outside, objective force that will not be placated...collapse is there...take a look ) time to start looking to forming alternative cultural structures.