must be an even numbered year coming up...

...because the early sings are calling for mid-term elections and the campaigning ( which never really stops among representatives ) is about to accelerate to the point of weekly mailings extolling the virtues of candidates..much like this one which "...was prepared, published, and mailed at taxpayer expense" ( have a shufti just below old pete's photo )...it is true that the "town hall meetings" aren't scheduled to begin until next month which is, barely, officially part of election year...still...never miss a chance to hammer home name recognition to the voters...especially when they are paying for the privilege...that aside i have some questions...if he's attempting to defend steelworkers from the ravages of foreign steel he is failing...you can find steel from chins, india, turkey, and who knows where else right here in pete's district...and when it come time to license bp/ammoco to dump more benzine into lake michigan he has a marked tendency to vote "yea"...he has many donors: Industry Total Building Trade Unions $74,792 Defense Electronics $69,500 Defense Aerospace $58,200 Electric Utilities $51,750 Lobbyists $45,894 ...and building trades unions are the largest single donors ( these figure are from 2013-2014 on the "open secrets" web site...the most recent i can find at the moment ) but they are seriously outspent by corporate donors...we should take his "defending workers" claims with a healthy grain of salt...i have absolutely nothing negative to say about those who have served in the armed forces so i would encourage him to continue working in their behalf...as far as "keeping america safe" goes, from what? from church shootings to snipers with bump stocks in las vegas the violence i am seeing appears to be home-grown terrorism...we live in dangerous times, however i am thinking the greater threat is internal...as for the airport. i don't fly much and i don't need L-1011s parked in my back yard...and what public transport do we speak of? i don't know where the train pictured in this mailing is but it isn't in pete's district...neither is that spiffy road...freeways here are a rat's nest of construction and delays...nope..i may be paying for it but i'm not buying it...another foul election season dawns...where is the lake of fire?

one more nail

unlike the behemoths from christmases past ( i.e. "retail season)...

that were a strain on the paper carrier...

today's pre holiday paper weighs in literally pounds lighter...admittedly this is a christmas eve paper and the others were from october and november..however this dearth of heft is and index of what the papers have been like all autumn...light..on content ( sorry ) and advertising...even the high end advertisers seem to have wandered off howling into the wilderness...

the only special "pull out" in today's paper is the history channel's 2018 broadcast schedule...

even the sunday magazine, usually the haunt of high end real-estate and heirloom jewelry ads had been reduced to running ads for "avocado mattresses" and something called chateau gaby...the engineered desires that capitalism brings have not vanished...however this is a sure sign the vector for the orgasmic moment of purchase has changed and amazon doesn't need to advertise...just wait for us all to come to it...and it does eliminate some shadow work...i am not commuting to stores and hauling purchased around...they just land on my deck...true it's not greener but it is easier...another trap...and this may explain the overly familiar letters i have been getting from the contributors tot he times, tucked away in the sunday paper, thanking me for bring a subscriber and supporting the good work they do ( while the editor sends me an email telling me how much more my subscription will cost in 2018 )...it's a fucked up world and no mistake...from a to z.

kleptocratic oligarchy

“[democracy is an] institutional arrangement or arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s votes.” joseph shumpeter. capitalism, socialism, and democracy p.269_________________old joe wrote that book in 1942 i believe ( the quote here is from the 1950 3rd edition ) at the height of frd and the new deal...joe was an economist and a political scientist so, of course, he loathed frd and "the people" every bit as much ass john jay did...he would have taken poor barbra to task for believing in a "common good" which he believed was a smoke and mirrors device trotted pout by competing professional politicians every election cycle to manipulate people into voting and then was promptly stowed away as the pols moved to make decisions based on an entirely different set of motivations ( do i hear echoes of stalin's "It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything." ? perhaps...certainly holds true in this country at times )...i hear the house of representatives ( representative my ass...last figures i saw showed 271 millionaires in congress...how can i expect them to represent my interests...i would be an idiot to think they would..."public service" is part of the special vocabulary of oligarchy ) have passed the tax bill that represents the greatest upward redistribution of wealth since dutch reagan doddered through the white house hallways..i am not surprised...it will not be defeated...it will pass...wealth will flow upward...there will be celebration...but not here...not among the people i know...acceptance...adaptation...okay...then one adaptation we need to engender is to make the government as irrelevant to ourselves as possible...once they have stolen all they can from below they will turn on one another...that may be the point at which to act....fuck these people.

the dismal science

the second photo is a side-bar from the new york times i scanned into my computer because the answer to that question, while it has several sub-texts, is fairly obvious and my hope is it was rhetorical rather than a literal search fro information...if it was a cry in the wilderness ( and the times can howl out there occasionally ) i will have to rethink my position somewhat ( not much however...all media are pretty much stenographers to power and outright propagandists...joe goebbels got nothing on these folks )...okay...back to the side-bar...economists wonder a lot...they are the theologians of capital and have erected complex structures of bullshit rationalizations for greed and when those structures prove faulty they have to retrench and explain away the "anomalies" that so disturb them..usually they do this by blaming "externals'..inconvenient facts that disrupt the smooth lines of their bullshit theories so they ignore them as irrelevant..which is why the "externals" ( like the environment we all live in and its capacity to provide raw materials and absorb all the ugly by-products industrial capitalism creates...that is irrelevant..or was until quite recently..and they are still trying to get around it..it will be a stubborn issue for them )...so, basically, what i am saying is they are asking that question because they don't have an answer that fits the theories...there is an answer though and it is unpalatable in public relations terms...greed...capitalism is a consequentialist system...it's what people have that matters to it not how they acquire it...so ruthless greed is an acceptable mechanism for acquisition...if workers have more money ceos and shareholders have less...since they sit atop the pyramidal, authoritarian ( how many rights do you have at work? ) they are in a position to write the rules ( and this would include a great deal of monetary influence in the august halls of the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of government ) and make the distribution of wealth their province and they take as much as possible...wealth is the final ethical good of the system...factor in the amount of money that is being funneled in to repair the damages wrought by the "non-exisxtant" bogey man of human driven climate change and the money supply has another sink-hole developing that will be even more demanding that any scam driven "fiscal crisis"

this photo of a smoky evening horizon sent to me by a close friend in southern california yesterday could serve as an index of where a good deal of cash is going to be going soon..and you will , no doubt, see extensive legislative efforts to limit or eliminate payouts of any sort of remuneration to all but the share holders in the very near future...there is slime in swamptown and they will crawl for their handlers.

calling thorstein bunde veblen

"diamonds are a girl's best friend and dogs are a man's best friends. now you know which sex has more sense." zsa zsa gabor_______"we have your back because you have ours. and that's why it's me writing this letter instead of someone in marketing. because these times demand partnership with dedicated subscribers like you who value groundbreaking reporting and what it adds to their lives..." nick kristof. op-ed columnist in a charming "dear subscriber" leter that came with my sunday times last week_____except for the fact that the alleged "groundbreaking reporting" is the bait for the shills...the lure for the glib advertising that pervades the times...and don't try to tell me it isn't aimed at an elite group of buyers...section f of today's times is a paean to "holiday baubles"...eight pages of articles with titles like "i wear art" and advertisements ranging from "lagos" at bloomingdales to valentin magro on west 48th street in new york "by appointment only" and not a single price listed anywhere...no surprise that zsa zsa showed up...look up "mercenary" and doubtlessly her likeness would be the illustration..."the holidays" are upon us and scrooges "false and commercial festival" is about to lurch into full swing ( unless you have been in a big box store since october in which case you have already burned out on the whole thing )...so as we stagger from one dysfunctional seizure to another let us keep in mind the hegemonic dictum, "work, obey, consume, die" as a focus for the coming month...it's a consequentialist system and material wealth is the ultimate ethical good...it's not who you are, it's what you have...it's what the new york times tells me every time it is delivered to my door ( expecting about a four pound paper sunday )...they are the "paper of record" and have "all the news that's fit to print"...it must be true...one wonders why they hate don trump so though...he is nothing if not of the elite and they are stenographers to power...it is mystifying.

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.