Intellectual Bottom Demystified at Last

Dear Dr. Bones,

Paddy and Eye just spotted what must be the Pluperfect Warrenite, that is to say, a Blue Blazer in love with the little lady from the Big University

for precisely everything that makes her so cringeworthy, all the way down to le scientisme prétendu sociale. ¡"Affect Heuristic," for Pete's sake!

New poll has Warren up 43-38 oceandreams | Sun, Sep 30, 2012 9:06 AM EST "MORE CHEROKEE" JUST SHOOK UP THE RACE. Or not. At least not yet. - promoted by charley-on-the-mta Boston Globe poll conducted by University of NH shows Elizabeth Warren leading Scott Brown 43 to 38. Survey was conducted Sept. 21-27, so this was post-debate for all respondents but NOT post Tomahawk chop video for all respondents. Oddly, the story on Boston.com calls this within the +/- 4.4% margin of error, even though they’re reporting a 5 percentage point difference.

A Obama+Brown vote is basically nullification(3+ / 1-) View voters A.) You support President Obama and you like most of his ideas and you would like to see Congress pass legislation he backs. B.) You vote for a guy who wants to obstruct and block most of the legislation at the top of the President’s agenda. So you want your Senator to work to nullify the good stuff the President that you support wants to pass? W.T.F. is the point? tblade @ Sun 30 Sep 10:49 AM

Tblade,(2+ / 0-) View voters Without thinking it through some voters seem to have a “balance” fetish. They deliberately split their tickets because they consider themselves moderate because they fear our government will lurch too far to the left or right if Democrats or Republicans respectively hold all the power. Unfortunately, recent experience seems to show they might be right about Republicans, but Democrats tend to balance themselves out just fine. This theory of voting also assumes, erroneously these days, that both parties are interested in working together in good faith. Senator Brown has not proven himself to be the cure for this as he is too much a follower and not enough leader. His ad featuring Worcester Councilor Connie Lukes has her saying, “We need more Scott Browns” and theoretically that might work and voters I think long for that. Maybe things would be different if Scott Brown rather than Mitch McConnell were Senate Republican Leader, but alas for better or worse that is not the case. christopher @ Sun 30 Sep 11:59 AM>

Affect Heuristic(0+ / 0-) View voters I am going to say basically what you said but in a different way. People so strongly want to believe that they are politically “independent” and look down on people who tend to vote across party lines. “I am an independent” > Scott Brown is an independent (his commercials and campaign repeatedly tell me so > I will vote for Scott Brown to prove my independence! > I will vote for both President Obama and Scott Brown to further reinforce in my own mind that I am independent. The funny thing is that these types of “independent” voters seem to the same affect heuristic method that many people who identify as “Democratic” or “Conservative” use to pick their preferred candidates. tblade @ Sun 30 Sep 2:24 PM

Ad quos responduisset Patricius McTammany

One must hope, no doubt in vain, that "the Defect Heuristic" . . . (( fold here )) . . . happens whenever the epigones of Herr Prof. Dok. Talcott von Parsons undertake to settle the hash of volks not unlike themselves who get a major kick out of (ostensibly or ostentatiously) not looking down on othervolks. Social Scientism being wertlos, I daresay they can do no other. Possibly, though, ¿They might occasionally stay home and do nothing at all? They could play canasta, perhaps, or charades, on Election Day with some of those self-thwarting heurists. As Eye and Paddy should have expected, but culpably did not, Big LEW is a sucker for gunk like "heuristic affect." Not only do the Learnèd Elders of Wiki manage to expound the grand Begriff without the faintest hint of a snicker, they expound it as if it grows on trees, untouched by human thought. Certainly NOT invented or discovered by anybooby in particular at a particular time or place. "¡No history, please, we are self-scientisers!" We who are not notice with delight (A) that High Prussian is the only other language in which LEW attempts to move this veddy, veddy up-market ideoproduct, and (B) even better, that before the paragraph wherein die Affektheuristik is defined winds, not especially weary, to the sea, the earnest customer has learned that Der Begriff und die grundlegenden Untersuchungen stammen von Paul Slovic. Who turns out to be only a Tert. Ed. Yank, but then, ¿What else could he be, flogging a horse like this one? In any case, those who think in German rather than in HolyHomeland™ic are presumed to be geschichtefähig even by the nerdocracy. As with us Pseltic Tigers in non-academic matters, there is ag reat deal to be said for knowing FOR SURE that one belongs to an inferior subset. Happy days. _____ [1] (( notes ))

(( Concluding unscientific postscripts ))
Happy days.
--JHM


Title -- shortlink -- 09/30/2012 16:35 (( should be commented out ))

They ('We') are ALL Twits Now

Dear Dr. Bones,

Should you ever feel tempted to think too highly of us human racists, sir, a quick look at Twitter ought to set you straight:

At least 7 Warren signs stolen from yards in Scituate last night. Not just cowardly, also illegal.

Ad quem responduisset Patricius McTammany

‘Qui pauca considerat, facile pronuntiat’ (( fold here )) The much-esteemed Blue Blazer gets far, far ahead of himself [1], and that on two fronts: (A) Like many others of the nobility and gentry, and like pretty well everybody without exception down amongst the plebes and proles, His Worship supposes that the virtue of Courage to be somehow connected with thinking Worshipful thoughts, meaning that his political enemies need not apply. H. W. has presumably no idea WHO borrowed his like-minded neighbors ideological lawn decorations, all he knows for sure is WHY -- and even that conjecture could be mistaken, though this is admittedly most unlikely. I daresay His Worship figures he can drag Lady Virtus into his partisanship on the basis that the danger of such a borrowing being interfered with either by the householders in person or by such secret- or public-sector police as the householders have engaged seems slight. Scituate being Scituate--$108,138.00 (2010)--the perps could rationally bet they would not collide with a huddle of trigger-happy gunclingers. Had they been deliberately intendin to give their intrepidity a workoout, they could have stayed home at (let’s guess) Louisedayhicksville an amused themselves by prowlin the mean-spirited streets to collect mementoes of S. Philip Fratboy’s re-election campaign. Betcha the LDHV householders an/or Boston’s Finest would soon have put a stop to that caper! It would not do formally to define virtus in a way that specifically invokes the Heroes in Blue [2] Nevertheless, anybooby who knows that her project might easily lead to a run-in with them is not to lightly diagnosed as a craven. The merits of the project have, of course, nothing to do with the case. Eye and Paddy doubt that even the Worshipful Nobility and Gentry would venture to insist on the contrary in the seminar room of a Prussian-style graduate school. Standards slip, however, when our Betters start thinking mostly with their thumbs. One hopes, by the way, that H*rv*rd, at least, has banned nifty electronic playthings from the aforesaid seminar rooms. Tert. Ed. would do better to insist strictly on the technology of Century VIII-XV-LII-- the master to read out of his book and each student to listen attentively and wriite down her very own ktêma eis aiei, from which, eventually, her students . . . .--than to succumb to most of the more recent whizbangery. Paddy McTammany would draw the line right after the invention of the Xerox, though I am willing to haggle a little. B. So much for ‘cowardly’. His Worship’s deployment of ‘illegal’ cannot be attacked root and branch, but it does displease a little at the margin. One trouble is that what these perps did could very easily be represented, by your stick-at-nothing D*rsh*w*tz breed of defense shyster, as a form of ‘expression’ to which protection under Amendment I of the Fedguv Constitution ought to be extended at least as a courtesy, and preferably by a split decision from the Five of Nine. The slippery slope here is obvious enough: next thing you know, Paddy and Eye will be nabbed ‘borrowing’ goodvolks’ garden gnomes and idolatrous bathtubs under the pretext of engaging in Kulturkritik. Probably the best thing is to leave all that to the Zoning Board. But though that is easy to say, it is not easy at all to advise the august Zoners exactly how to proceed. Worse, His Worship could be (but probably is not) deploying ‘illegal’ in the witless Planet Dilbert fashion: whatever the householders of Scituate or LDHV or Wherever Centre "do with their own property" is "nobody’s business but their own." They possess that absolute whight to "use, abuse and destroy" that Pipes Major attributed or misattributed to the mediæval civilians. To anybody who is at least as liberal and democratic as the late Comrade J. S. Mill this will be obvious tripe and baloney. To call it "self-regarding" when the neighbors of His Tweetship put up propaganda for Citizeness Warren in their front gardens that can be seen from a hundred metres off would be plumb dotty. They could have hung the damned things in the basement if their own private æsthetic appreciation had been the object of the exercise. Whatever taking them way may be, erecting them definitely was ‘expression’ under Amendment I. Even if D*rsh*w*tz, Esq., says so too, ¡Expression was it! By Paddy’s lights, then, what the self-expressers have an absolute whight to is mostly contradiction. Trespassing is as illegal as petty larceny, but it might pass with us as legitimate civil disobedience to climb over the invisible fence and risk it with Fido the pitbull to (say) paint a moustache on the mug of the little lady from the Big University. Or, indeed, a feathered headdress. Happy days. ____ [1] Our irrandomly chosen specimen of twattle comes from "Chris Matthews ?@chrismatth," whom we tentatively take to be an entirely different personage from the notorious MacL@@han-T@@ba virtuoso. (( Might be kinda fun, though, if His Tweetship were only partially diferent from somebooby else. ))

Vice-Chair, Scituate Dems | Accountant/Organizer/Operative | Opinions here are my own, and a retweet is not an endorsement. South Shore, MA · http://ChrisMatth.com

[2] A different shade of blue, obviously, from that which identifies the Worshipful Nobility and Gentry, unjoo-bito, who dwell above the clouds on the upper slopes of the Great Blue Hill, hard by the Palace of Public Tubavision on Market Street in Bestembrighton MA 02135.

(( Concluding unscientific postscript goes here ))

Happy days.
--JHM

De Cryptoratore Epistula

Dear Dr. Bones,

In the second most ever-immortal Secret Speech delivered since 1945, (( fold here )) Mittius Coriolanus Pompo, Demander of Apologies, Despiser of the Apologetic, Master of Seamus, Stepmaster to Rafalca, (( Baincapper Extraordinaire, )) Idiot Nephew of Nikita [0],  &c. &c. &c. &c. &c.,  was both like unto and unlike his Bolshevik intellectual uncle.   The great similarity, obviously, is that there was nothing really ’secret’ involved.  Every elitist in the Party audiences at both Moscow and Hooverville knew more or less all about it before the cryptorhetor opened his mouth.  The fresh revelation, such as it was, is that now high Party cadres were permitted  to actually say what they had long thought. To the assembled Hoovervillains, Nephew ’Mittens’ expounded what their freelordships had always thought, taking ’always’ in a political rather than astronomical sense.    Uncle Nikita addressed  insider ideobuddies who cannot, of course, have known about the crimes of the late Dzugashvili much before the late Dz. had got around to committing them. [1]   But then the Party neocomrades’ daddies an’ grandaddies would not have been afraid to bark out boldly before the early 1930’s.  In a rough an’ rugged-individualist way, the Great American Economic Adjustment of 1929-1941 and its sputnik,  the Lesser Economic Adjustment of 2007-2XXX, might be paralleled with the sins of ’Stalin’.  Beyond question, these two are the matters of record which neocomrades and comrades would most prefer to hush up in the path of their respective Parties.  In both cases there was a time before any up-hushing was necessary.  Not a recent time, yet not absolutely outside the memory of man either. In both cases the prime motive for up-hushing amounts to "¡Please don’t anybody blame us innocent lambs who honcho  the surviving Party!"   The Greed of Gecko and the Purges of Dzugashvili were somebody else’s fault altogether.  ¡Nothing to do AT ALL with the New Management Team!   Of course in both cases the neomanagement is not significantly different in its personnel from the bad, or at least bad-looking, old palæomanagement.  And in neither case is the remoter past disavowed:  by what is presumably mere coincidence, Uncle Nikita and Nephew Mittens can even agree on a date for When Everything Went Wrong and History Turned into Bunk.  The Great Readjusment began in October 1929;  "Bukharin (sc., the last Old Bolshevik obstacle to le dzughachvilisme dans un seul pays) was ejected from the Politburo in November 1929." Small world, ¿innit? That date, however, is the wrong end of the shtyk for our purposes, being the far or trailin’ edge of the world’s bunkiness.   More to our point is when the wrongness supposedly ended, when it became possible to make secret speeches about the wrongness but not yet desirable to thunder against it outside the Secret Sector and in particular the hire ranks of the Party.  Uncle Nikita works from exactly 5 March 1953, naturally, secretspeechwise. With Nephew Mittens, no such precision is possible.  Pretty well everythin that has taken place in WhightGuard circles over the last degeneration has pointed towards His Mass. Excellency’s wickedly betrayed cryptoratorical exercise. [2]   Moreover, America’s Otherparty did have its brief lucid or Early Reagan period, when what was "voodoo economics" both before an afterwards could be frankly avowed without too much risk of self-embarrassment.   For the cryptoration of M. Coriolanus Pompo is what one might, if hostile, describe  as "a speech writ on cocktail napkins." [3] Happy days. --JHM

[0]  This is he latest  fresh addition to His Excellency’s formal style an’ neotitulary, which grows more et cætera-worthy with every day that passes.

[1]   All really SEVERE neocomradologists and Kremlinologists agree on that, I think, but there are free-lance amateurs with different notions.  Over to The Fehrnstrom Fishwrap, for example,  of Louisedayhicksville-by-the-Sea in Massachusetts,  kiddiecon journalists who did not care to sign their names took the position yesterday, 22 September 2012, that "Warren did not have a role ... but ... some contend she should have foreseen."

That pretty slice of  tripe iillustrates how weekly standardizin’ and ever-a-new-criterium-mongerin’ can go wrong in the hands of less expensively instructed Party neocomrades.  The nameless Fishwrappers took no precautions whatever against the obvious question how they themselves, or their Party, or their beloved AEIdeology, would like to be judged by "should have foreseen."

A particularizer might particularize this as follows:  ¿May one legitimately deplore the shortsightedness of those who installed George XLIII Bush in 2000 or re-installed in 2004 without awareness that the Crawford Crash of 2008 would come of it?   No tonsured slave of Fehrnstrom or lay denizen of LDHV will agree to that, needless to say, but if she is to maintain with any scrap of plausibility that failure to foresee, F2F, is O.K. when serviles an conserviles an neoserviles an Republicanines do it, -- "Hey, ¡give us a break!, nobody’s perfect." --  is nevertheless an unpardonable deficiency in liberals an democrats an "the Democrat Party."   Also an above all in H*rv*rds.

[2]  Cranbrook an’/or the H*rv*rd Victory School are scarcely likely to notice, let alone complain of, our flagrant barbarism.   The trouble is that there seems not to be any obvious Attic word for the sort of verbal thing in which Demosthenes specialized: rhetôrike is the name of the technique with which he did it, but the thing itself was nothing more notable than only another logos.  One cannot simply English that L-word, of course, because ’-ology’ is firmly established in our vernacular with a mening that has pretty well ceased to have any special connection with the oral-aural sphere.
*Cryptorator and *cryptoratoric(al) and *crytoration are about as campy as *camp can be.  Which means that they are kinda fun as well as revoltingly spinachoid to every polished palate.

[3]  His firstlordship bein’ a teatotalitarian personally, to call it that especially delights us who are SEVERELY hostile to NapkinThink.
Unfortunately most glossators of the Secret Speech have passed over the neococktail party as if it is not there.   An honorable exception is Mother Jones, she to whom the loot was fenced.  In a list of 7 Highlights You Missed From the Romney Video the comradess mentions

Predicting easy dividends from his anticipated electoral victory:  "…if we win on November 6th there will be a great deal of optimism about the future of this country.  We’ll see capital come back, and we’ll see—without actually doing anything—we’ll actually get a boost in the economy."

There is a bit more to it than that, but MJ did at least catch that little self-exuberance, unlike the rest of the press pack.

Ideally, she should have gone on to point out how "without actually doing anything" reduces His Excellency’s hired handlers’ principal campaign strategy to nonsense.   One does not need to go out and dig up a H*rv*rd Victory School MBA ’75 an’ Baincapper Extraordinaire in order to  -- not actually do anythin’.  (¡!)    The late Perfesser Gangrenerich, or the Rev. Santorum, even Michele Baron Bachmaness itself, could undoubtedly manage  a perfectly adequate King Log impersonation.   If one is not interested to some extent in the King Stork side of Mittens, there is no good reason to be interested in him at all, unless maybe you are a relative or employee of the Serene House of Romneycare.

Moreover,  His Excellency did not merely propose to DO nothin’ much.   In a passage everybooby without exception seems to have overlooked, H. E. piously abstained from makin’ any of them risky predictions about the future:  "If the president gets reelected, I don’t know what will happen.  I can never predict what the markets will do.  Sometimes it does the exact opposite of what I would have expected."

It appears that if one but pays the outrageous full tuition required by the former Allston (Massachusetts) Academy of  Chirurgy and Haircut Science, one can master not only the art of "without really doing anythin" but also that of "I don’t know what will happen.  I can never predict."   Not a bargain to be refused lightly, that one.

Between this latest etch-a-sketch of Mittens the Economic Taoist,  and the lingering economic consequences of Dubya (also HVS MBA ’75 -- ’twas a bumper crop that year),  and the ineffable effusions of Niall Freelaird Fergusson, to name the Victory School  personnel most in the public eye, HVS has quite a lot to be modest about just at present.  No doubt American D*cl*ne Syndrome (Pat. Pend.) would be afflicting us in any case, but this sort of thing could lead to nasty rumours that the 02134 Victorians are actually in favour of ADS(PP), doin’ their level (?) best to push us out the Window of Opportunity lest perchance we decide to try not to jump after all.

Strike Two

Dear Dr. Bones,

In the second most ever-immortal Secret Speech delivered since 1945, (( fold here )) Mittius Coriolanus Pompo, Idiot Nephew of Nikita [0], Demander of Apologies, Despiser of the Apologetic, Master of Seamus, Stepmaster to Rafalca, Baincapper Extraordinaire, &c. &c. &c. &c. &c. was both like unto and unlike his Bolshevik intellectual uncle. The great similarity, obviously, is that there was nothing really ’secret’ involved. Every elitist in the Party audiences at both Moscow and Hooverville knew more or less all about it before the cryptorhetor opened his mouth. The fresh revelation, such as it was, is that now high Party cadres were permitted to actually say what they had long thought. To the assembled Hoovervillains, Nephew ’Mittens’ expounded what their freelordships had ALWAYS thought, taking ’always’ in a political rather than astronomical sense. Uncle Nikita addressed insider ideobuddies who cannot, of course, have known about the crimes of the late Dzugashvili much before Dz. had got around to committing them. [1] But then the Party neocomrades’ daddies an’ grandaddies would not have been afraid to bark out boldly before the early 1930’s. In a rough an’ rugged-individualist way, the Great American Economic Adjustment of 1929-1941 and its sputnik, the Lesser Economic Adjustment of 2007-2XXX, might be paralleled with the sins of ’Stalin’. Beyond question, these two are the matters of record which neocomrades and comrades would most prefer to hush up in the path of their respective Parties. In both cases there was a time before any up-hushing was necessary. Not a recent time, yet not absolutely outside the memory of man either. In both cases the prime motive for up-hushing amounts to "¡Please don’t anybody blame us innocent lambs who honcho the surviving Party!" The Greed of Gecko and the Purges of Dzugashvili were somebody else’s fault altogether. ¡Nothing to do AT ALL with the New Management Team! Of course in both cases the neomanagement is not significantly different in its personnel from the bad, or at least bad-looking, old palæomanagement. And in neither case is the remoter past disavowed: by what is presumably mere coincidence, Uncle Nikita and Nephew Mittens can even agree on a date for When Everything Went Wrong and History Turned into Bunk. The Great Readjusment began in October 1929; "Bukharin (sc., the last Old Bolshevik obstacle to le dzughachvilisme dans un seul pays) was ejected from the Politburo in November 1929." Small world, ¿innit? That date, however, is the wrong end of the shtyk for our purposes, being the far or trailin’ edge of the world’s bunkiness. More to our point is when the wrongness supposedly ended, when it became possible to make secret speeches about the wrongness but not yet desirable to thunder against it outside the Secret Sector and in particular the hire ranks of the Party. Uncle Nikita works from exactly 5 March 1953, naturally, secretspeechwise. With Nephew Mittens, no such precision is possible. Pretty well everythin that has taken place in WhightGuard circles over the last degeneration has pointed towards His Mass. Excellency’s wickedly betrayed cryptoratorical exercise. [2] Moreover, America’s Otherparty did have its brief lucid or Early Reagan period, when what was "voodoo economics" both before an afterwards could be frankly avowed without too much risk of self-embarrassment. For the cryptoration of M. Coriolanus Pompo is what one might, if hostile, describe as "a speech writ on cocktail napkins." [3] Happy days. --JHM

[0] This is he latest fresh addition to His Excellency’s formal style an’ neotitulary, which grows more et cætera-worthy with every day that passes.

[1] All really SEVERE neocomradologists and Kremlinologists agree on that, I think, but there are free-lance amateurs with different notions. Over to The Fehrnstrom Fishwrap, for example, of Louisedayhicksville-by-the-Sea in Massachusetts, kiddiecon journalists who did not care to sign their names took the position yesterday, 22 September 2012, that "Warren did not have a role ... but ... some contend she should have foreseen."

That pretty slice of tripe iillustrates how weekly standardizin’ and ever-a-new-criterium-mongerin’ can go wrong in the hands of less expensively instructed Party neocomrades. The nameless Fishwrappers took no precautions whatever against the obvious question how they themselves, or their Party, or their beloved AEIdeology, would like to be judged by "should have foreseen."

A particularizer might particularize this as follows: ¿May one legitimately deplore the shortsightedness of those who installed George XLIII Bush in 2000 or re-installed in 2004 without awareness that the Crawford Crash of 2008 would come of it? No tonsured slave of Fehrnstrom or lay denizen of LDHV will agree to that, needless to say, but if she is to maintain with any scrap of plausibility that failure to foresee, F2F, is O.K. when serviles an conserviles an neoserviles an Republicanines do it, -- "Hey, ¡give us a break!, nobody’s perfect." -- is nevertheless an unpardonable deficiency in liberals an democrats an "the Democrat Party." Also an above all in H*rv*rds.


[2] Cranbrook an’/or the H*rv*rd Victory School are scarcely likely to notice, let alone complain of, our flagrant barbarism. The trouble is that there seems not to be any obvious Attic word for the sort of verbal thing in which Demosthenes specialized: rhetôrike is the name of the technique with which he did it, but the thing itself was nothing more notable than only another logos. One cannot simply English that L-word, of course, because ’-ology’ is firmly established in our vernacular with a mening that has pretty well ceased to have any special connection with the oral-aural sphere.

*Cryptorator and *cryptoratoric(al) and *crytoration are about as campy as *camp can be. Which means that they are kinda fun as well as revoltingly spinachoid to every polished palate.


[3] His firstlordship bein’ a teatotalitarian personally, to call it that especially delights us who are SEVERELY hostile to NapkinThink.

Unfortunately most glossators of the Secret Speech have passed over the neococktail party as if it is not there. An honorable exception is Mother Jones, she to whom the loot was fenced. In a list of 7 Highlights You Missed From the Romney Video the comradess mentions

Predicting easy dividends from his anticipated electoral victory: "…if we win on November 6th there will be a great deal of optimism about the future of this country. We’ll see capital come back, and we’ll see—without actually doing anything—we’ll actually get a boost in the economy."

There is a more to it than that, but MJ did at least catch that little self-exuberance, unlike the rest of the press pack.

Ideally, she should have pointed out how "without actually doing anything" reduces His Excellency’s hired handlers’ principal campaign strategy to nonsense. One does not need to go out and dig up a H*rv*rd Victory School MBA ’75 an’ Baincapper Extraordinaire in order to -- not actually do anythin’. (¡!) The late Perfesser Gangrenerich, or the Rev. Santorum, even Michelle Baron Bachmaness itself, could undoubtedly manage a perfectly adequate King Log impersonation. If one is not interested to some extent in the King Stork side of Mittens, there is no good reason to be interested in him at all, unless maybe you are a relative or employee of the Serene House of Romneycare.

Moreover, His Excellency did not merely propose to DO nothin’ much. In a passage everybooby without exception seems to have overlooked, H. E. piously abstained from makin’ any of them risky predictions about the future: "If the president gets reelected, I don’t know what will happen. I can never predict what the markets will do. Sometimes it does the exact opposite of what I would have expected."

It appears that if one but pays the outrageous full tuition required by the former Allston (Massachusetts) Academy of Chirurgy and Haircut Science, one can master not only the art of "without really doing anythin" but also that of "I don’t know what will happen. I can never predict." Not a bargain to be refused lightly, that one.

Between this etch-a-sketch of Mittens the Taoist, an’ the economic consequences of Dubya (also HVS MBA ’75 -- a bumper crop that year), an’ the ineffable effusions of Niall Freelaird Fergusson, as its personnel most in the public eye, the H*rv*rd Victory School has quite a lot to be modest about just at present. No doubt American D*cl*ne Syndrome (Pat. Pend.) would be happening in any case, but this sort of thing could lead to nasty rumours that the 02134 Victorians are actually in favour of ADS(PP), doin’ their level (?) best to push us out the Window of Opportunity lest perchance we decide to try not to jump after all.

¡Cheat Fiercely, H*rv*rd!

Dear Dr. Bones,

[T]he Harvard philosopher William James ... in 1888, much concerned with cheating, invoked the idea of establishing little honor clubs, kind of like fraternities to keep people honest. The proposition, he recalled, was rather scornfully shut down. He turned to The Crimson in his discomfort, saying: “The impression this episode gave me of the debilitated tone of social responsibility here was startling. By social responsibility I mean the willingness to act for the social ideal, no matter how much obstructive individuals have to suffer ... why it should be so lacking here I do not know.”

I daresay the unjoo-bito, "gentlemen who dwell above the clouds, on the upper slopes of the Great Blue Hill, hard by the Palace of Public T@@Bavision

on Market Street in Bestembrighton 02135 MA," would not see the point of that if Paddy and Eye were to post it to them unexplained. And then, naturally, if we once started it explaining it our way, contempt and hatred would soon replace mere incomprehension. Accordingly, we will spare Their Worships provisionally.


Mister James managed, no doubt inadvertently and atypically, to be a two-hundred and thirty proof H*rv*rd with that one, for ¿What yoke could be easier to bear than othervolks occasionally suffering for their pesky obstructionism a little?

By the way, sir: ¿Do the Muses or you think one would have much FUN in a "little honor club," if such nifty conventicles really existed and one were, unlike Paddy and Eye, qualified to be selected for membership?

Moreover, there is that THE Social Ideal, of Whom Mister James speaks as if She were as universally recognizable as Beacon Hill or the intersection of State and Madison, but whose lineaments are foggy indeed to Eye and Paddy at the distance of ( 2012 - 1888 = ) six score and four years.

The person who scribbled the story for Aunt Nitsy is an innocent victim of Grade Inflation, no doubt, for ¿Who would harshly blame a young [*] dittopan full of mush for never having discovered unassisted that ’legacy’ and ’tradition’ are sneakily different?

(( http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/15/opinion/ the-long- LEGACY- of-cheating-at-harvard.html ? ref=opinion&pagewanted=print ))

Happy days.
--JHM
_____

[*] "Rebecca Harrington, who graduated from Harvard in 2008, is the author of the novel Penelope.”

A Nanospectre is Haunting the Big Blue Friends of Senator Coakley. Finally.

Dear Dr. Bones,



With fifty-secven, I think it is, shopping days left, that cloud no larger than Fabulous Fernie’s fratboy’s hand has finally been spotted from aboard the Great Blue Hill. Sort of spotted.

It is characteristic of the complacent self-wunnerfulness of the Greater Blazers that it is left to some underposter one does not recall having heard of before this post to attempt to raise a little alarum.

Of the Great-Blazerly methodology, it is characteristic how our old pal the Patroniser of Public Transport here sets out to be preëmptively fairembalanced when the little shepherd lass’s piteous cries of "¡Wolf to starboard!" finally get through to him. A patroniser of the official warrenmongers also, his Worship seems to be, though evidently not a ’monger himself personally.

Solidarity with ’mongerdom looks very firm: when the hired hands actually blowing it for us have done, the PPT will be able to look back at the record here created--created by himself, for himself--and single out Prophetic Words that explained in advance how the coherent implementation of a programme whose worth is difficult to evaluate becomes even more so when one’s client is only a FEW points behind. Of course was Her Beatitude down 70-20, or maybe only 60-30, there would be no problem. Of course. But ¿how is a mere mortal to cope with what Talking Points Memo calls 48.3 - 43.2? ¡With a mere 5.1% gap, the gods themselves contend in vain!

Though tempted, I suppose it would be a mistake to guess that the Patroniser secretly hopes Her Beatitude fails. His Worship is not going to be as unhappy about the failure as we shall be, but that is not the same thing as a positive craving for Fratboy an Fratboy’s Fernie.

But here Eye is doing just what the Patroniser does himself, answering the tripe and baloney before Eye gets out of the way and permit you have an unobstructed whiff. ¡Tusk, tusk!

Does Elizabeth Warren actually want to win or just teach us her views? locallady | Sun, Sep 9, 2012 10:47 AM EST To be fair, I think Warren’s ads have indeed mentioned Sen. Brown. But I "locallady" is not the only one making these points these days. Being just a few points down, I’m quite sure the campaign is listening to a lot of unsolicited advice; It’s hard to know what’s valuable, and then what you can actually implement in a coherent way. What I would like to see: 1.) Yes, more contrast, as this poster says; and 2.) More vision of what precisely a Senator Warren would try to get done. We on the left feel that her heart’s in the right place, but the contrasts with Brown will be starker, and her campaign more vivid and optimistic, with distinct proposals to flesh out the vision. It’s a risk, but a sensible and good one, IMO. - promoted by charley-on-the-mta Please note I support Elizabeth. I am a liberal Democratic, with a capital D. I have sent her campaign money and for awhile did phoning for her campaign. But I am unwilling to make calls any longer because I feel as though she does not want to win. This should not be shocking to many of you. Yvonne Abraham pointed out this same issue in a recent Globe newspaper column. But it does not seem to have gotten through to her or her campaign staff, who one would assume want to win. She runs these interesting but not hard hitting (unless you believe she is running against all Republicans in general or against Romney) TV ads. I don’t believe I have yet seen or heard an ad from her campaign that mentions she is running against Scott Brown, nor that differentiates them at all and of course there are huge differences that matter. She certainly has not run an ad pointing out that he is no moderate independent, as his radio and TV ads imply. Her ads are wimpy at best, and do not push the differences between what a Democratic senator would do versus a Republican, Scott Brown. I don’t believe she has ever mentioned his name in a TV or radio ad. I understand she is great out in the field, but many people do not go to rallies for candidates and don’t even read the newspapers sadly. We all know TV and radio can be very effective when done right. She has allowed him to not only define himself as a pleasant moderate who won’t vote for anything that would upset Massachusetts voters (such bullshit!) but to even to define her in some ways. Yesterday on the Up with Chris Hayes show on MSNBC Cong. Nadler from New York said how once Sen. Kennedy was replaced by Scott Brown the Republicans had and continue to have a filibuster proof Senate. He said it better than I am saying it and it would make a great ad. But again the Warren campaign won’t use it and because of her agreement with Brown, no outside group can advertise. He may have more money overall but she has plenty to run the weak ads, why not spend money actually trying to win by pointedly showing the differences? Is this going to turn out to be Martha 2 but from a different perspective? locallady Recommended by david, trickle-up, heartlanddem.

Ad quem responduisset Patricius McTammany

(( Potential or actual or esprit-d’escalier kneejerk occasioned by the Blue Challenge )) Happy days.

(( Concluding unscientific postscript ))

Happy days.
--JHM



A Nanospectre is Haunting the Big Blue Friends of Senator Coakley. Finally.

On the Superiority of Prose Over Idols, Static or MacL@@hanoid

Mittens' Moment Missed

Dear Dr. Bones,

Another dismal month By Boston Herald Editorial Staff | Saturday, September 8, 2012 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Editorials The celebration confetti hadn’t even been swept from the floor of the Democratic National Convention when the latest jobs numbers were released — and they aren’t pretty. So President Barack Obama can talk all he wants — as he did Thursday night — about “moving forward,” but the dismal 8.1 percent unemployment rate dipped slightly only because more than half a million Americans had stopped even looking for work. And that is the saddest news of all. If those who had stopped looking for work and those working part time when they would rather work full time were factored in, the real unemployment number would be 14.7 percent. Oh sure, the administration pointed to the 96,000 private sector jobs added to the economy last month. But it takes 150,000 new jobs just to keep pace with population growth, and it would take more than 350,000 new jobs each month for the next three years to bring the unemployment down to a respectable 6 percent. Yes, that’s how deep the hole is. And you know the first rule of holes? When you’re in one stop digging. But Obama gave every indication Thursday night he’s not finished trying to “manage” the economy. “I’m asking you to rally around a set of goals for your country,” he said, “goals in manufacturing, energy, education, national security and the deficit; a real achievable plan that will lead to new jobs, more opportunity, and rebuild this economy on a stronger foundation.” Goals? Or a Soviet-style five-year plan with more giveaways to corporate cronies who promise to create renewable energy and end up, well, blowing hot air. Alan B. Krueger, chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, said in a statement issued yesterday, “As the administration stresses every month, the monthly employment and unemployment figures can be volatile, and employment estimates can be subject to substantial revision. Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” It was, of course, the 43rd straight month of unemployment over 8 percent. There’s no happy face he can put on that.

Q. What went wrong? How come the Fearless Funders of Freedumb, are no good at job-creatin any more? Four years almost to a day since the Crawford Crash, an our Hoovervillains STILL have not got anythin like a proper bubble off the ground? Can Freelord Midas have lost his touch? A. That is not quite fairembalanced, ma’am. I gather you are not anywhere near being a Fearless Funder yourself, you sound like a "small people," a standard poor who does not pay much attention to NYSE an NASDAQ are up to. ’Up’ bein a not appropriate word, as it happens -- S&P 1437, D-J 13.3K, NASDAQ 3136. (Main Street registers 70.2, 21.2 Celsius) The truth of the matter, Paddy and Eye thinks, is that the Fearless Fundin’ Class has switched over to mini- an microbubbles, as it were, bubbles to which only Classmates are admitted. RSVP bubbles, if you will. Your big-tent, more-the-merrier kind of jobcreationist bubble has probably gone the way of the dodoe. Of the nickle seegar. Of the Moderate Republicanine. Bubbles there will be--bubbles there MUST be, late Baincapitalism bein what it can’t help bein--but BIG BUBBLES are out. Perhaps you should think, ma’am, of dinosaurs rather than of dodoes. Or no, maybe not: the Dinosaur Myth is usually told to self-glorify certain "small people" of the zoological world alleged by the fiend Darwin to be the ancestors of Wunnerful US. The prospects of you, or Eye, or even Paddy McTammany hiself, being better off with smaller bubbles are not bright at all. (( Allow me to whisper "American D*cl*ne" here inside double parens where the WhightGuard ThoughtCops may not notice. Wink, wink; nod, nod. Nuff said. Verb. sap. )) Naturally the _Fishwrap_’s frathouse babes (plus a few Jay School fruits of the male persuasion) are worse than useless on so grown-up a subject. To be sure, the anonymous kiddies only bark what they have been funded to bark, it would be absurd to blame them for inventin Astroturfonomics.. Have a hard time inventin their way out of the average paper bag, most of your Herald angels would. Blameless though the brat pack are personally, nevertheless, their Funders’ drivel is drivel indeed. Exactly the opposite of the true situation, and probably at least a few of the Fearless Funders are smart enough to omit the preliminary stage where they talk themselves into believin their own Class self-servicin. For of course there is no unemployment problem here in the Heimatland G*ttes, what we have is rather a sort of Jobs Plague: far too many volks with no discernible economic reason for existin. Ideally the Classmates would trade in twenty or thirty or fifty million of us for future draft picks, but that plan does not appear to work anywhere but on Planet Kiddiegames. Around here, at any rate, the Lesser Breeds Without would mostly like to export their own slackers rather than import Uncle Sam’s. (The Jobs Plague used to be called ’overpopulation’. That was back before summer was discovered to be a left-wing hoax.) Though Astroturfonomics cannot CURE the Jobs Plague, it can mitigate the symptoms to some extent, especially such symptoms as afflict Classmates rather than no-count trailer-trash. The only symptoms that matter, really. Mittius Coriolanus Pompo, who is, so to speak, Class President _ex officio_, is not, Eye fears, particularly good at symptom mitigation. Whightist noise about twelve million MORE excess jobs four or five years from now makes no sense at all if considered as directly addresin the Jobs Plague. But of course His Excellency has never been a jobcreator an does not mean to start now; the symptom H. E. is really targetin with baloney like that is popular opinion amongst the small people, who certainly do not want to hear that in effect we are the Jobs Plague and the Job Plague is us. Coriolanus Pompo, bein a double-barrel H*rv*rd, must realize that his Classmates an America’s Otherparty an Himself cannot cover up the true correlation of farces forever, but H. E. is plainly in no hurry to open the Jobs Plague can of worms before it is absolutely necessary to do so. The trouble, plainly, is that almost all of that no-count economic trailer-trash is technically entitled to vote, and we may not rush to vote for whichever crew of hack pols is first to be frank about our trailer-trashiness. "You are something there are millions of," sang the bard, and now somebooby must revise that to "You are something there are FAR TOO MANY millions of. You are Structural Unemployment. You are, in fact, Overpopulation." Coriolanus Pompo does not want to be the first to pipe that cheerful strain, and who can blame H. E.? Actually, Eye and Paddy can blame His Excellency, and we do. As follows: Assume the contrary, namely that Coriolanus Pompo is prepared to be brave for once an do what whighteousness demands. In that case, H. E. would deserve to be eulogized as a former whight-winger (W. L. Yancey) eulogized President J. F. Davis of the Palæocon States of America: "¡The man and the hour have met!" ¿What, after all, does this present, the Hour of American Decline, call for, if not for a Master of Seamus, a Stepmaster of Rafalca, above all, a Baincapper Extraordinaire? An hereditary freelord an Classmate who sincerely LIKES firin volks an is moreover willin to say so. ¡This is not an ideoproduct that grows on trees! Back in the real world, it could not be plainer that H. E. proposes to funk it, assumin H. E. makes it to the top of the greasy pole. The chances of America’s Otherparty comin up with any other Man so suited as M. Coriolanus Pompo is to meet this critical Hour in the career of our holy Homeland™ are negligible. Why, one might as reasonably expect a Donkey to do it! Nothin can reasonably be expected of the Smirk of Janesville, who safely confines his grim surgeon _shtyk_ to the out years. To the FAR out years. To the FAR out years of completely unpassable ‘budgets’ for the next FY. ¡Phoniness, thy name is P. X. Ryan! .

Not OUR Place To

Dear Dr. Bones,

Right next to the portrait of Quantillâ Sapientiâ there should hang one of her late husband, Quantillo Tempore, the moral being, "¡So many bozoes, so little time!"

Mistakes have been made due to the press of business. More exactly, due to the need to break off business on occasion, sad slackers that we are.

It appears Paddy and Eye cannot find the Blue Blazerly stimulus that evoked our coarse and illiterate response. It must have been a comment by ‘somervilletom’ in order to explain the words we below venture to put into the mouth of M. Coriolanus Pompo's Daddy. But what the e-comrade was commenting on, and where he commented, have been gathered to the bosom of Dr. Alzheimer.

Still, what we wrote seems clear enough, and exactly who proposed the job-interview _shtyk_ and in what words does not matter critically. Eye hopes.

(( deest ))

It makes a pretty picture, to have have US THE PEOPLE (( fold here )) asking Mittius Coriolanus Pompo, Demander of Apologies, (( "Somwhererville? Way down over there, son. I think." )) Possessor of the Golden Birth Certificate, Baincapper Extraordinaire, (&c. &c. &c.) in for a job interview. Certainly the WhightGuard brat pack ought to adore it: many of their Kiddiemasters talk that pious line of baloney all the time. Still, you cannot be serious. His Excellency is a double-barreled H*rv*rd ’75, after all, not only an M.B.A. crook but a J.D. shyster. Plainly it is for the Master of Seamus to weigh our jobs an’ jobworthiness [1] in the balance of Big Management, not vice versa. ¿Who the deuce do you think We The P. are? ¡Let's have some proper respect, O Somerville! Happy days. ___ [1] Also our fringebenefitworthiness, if that's a word. Our claims, in any case, to old-age pensions, and medical coverage, and police protection, and weekly garbage collection, and the like. Plus educationalism, naturally, at the lesser, but not altogether negligible, infra-Cranbrook level.

Naturally this discombobulation would happen to a McScribble to which we have already linked from over on the Great Blue Hill.


Well, we can at least provide a copy of the second out-of-the-blue provocation:

Questioning Warren's right to her Harvard professorship? Implying that she lied her way into her jobs by claiming to be a member of a disadvantaged minority, when she never did any such thing? That’s politics by smear and lies. Brown is a second-generation political politician, a creature of the political machine, who has already demonstrated that he will play as dirty as anyone. And lets not forget his staff’s “Crazy Khazei” anonymous Internet smear campaign — until through their incompetence they blew their own cover. Bob_Neer @ Thu 6 Sep 12:56 AM

Ad quem Patricius Oculusque:

Nothing that emanates from the far blue fastnesses of (( fold here )) Morningloryside Heights in the City of Bosstown (NY) is to be dismissed lightly. Nevertheless, a humble footsoldier in the E-Legion of All Progressive Humanity who likes to call meself “Paddy McTammany” feels none too happy in a political climate that features a steady dismal drizzle of de haut en bas tripe and baloney about — against — the “second-generation political politician [and] creature of the political machine.” These wannabe sneerwords are, of course, highest praise. Praise for which S. Phillip Fratboy, distinguished current warmer of The People’s Seat™ though he have the honor to be, scarcely begins to qualify. Happy days. P.S. Paddy and Eye happen to have at hand the following little freebie that features a pretty pair of Viewers from Morningloryside Heights:

After which come only Governor George Wilken an governor-to-be Mitt Willard, as already seen here.

Two trivialities, if Eye may:


(1) ¿Can you, sir, think of some way to get from ‘sneerwords’ to "Neer words" that would not mystify pretty well everybooby?

(2) Far more upmarket and toney, that pleasing "Rustic Chivalry" graphic performance instantly puts one in mind of Don Diego's notorious

((Las Meninas ))

So, then, ¿Can the Muses or Dr. Bones think of a fit tertium quid to hang between the two? [*]


Happy days.
--JHM

___

[*] The parallel is not perfect. Eye takes for granted that the sinister Brit equestrian was not original-intented to be supposed identical with the painter.    It might be interesting, though, to dig up some Tert. Ed. accounts of what Mr. Collins was up to, exactly.


A pity, by the way, that William Collins was almost certainly no near relative of

(( BigFella ))

Mau-Mauing the _Fehrnstrom Fishwrap_ Part 3.14164[b] of an occasional series)

Dear Dr. Bones,

sunapee ? +3 -1 Let me get this straight. If I vote for Romney than I Am being a bully? Never heard of an opposing vote being described that way. How about ,Obama had 4 years,we are not better off,so I will vote for the candidate whom I think will do the job? No bullying here, unless it’s being done by desperadoes. Posted 4 hours ago Reply Link Abusive

Q. "If I vote for Romney than (_sic_) I Am being a bully? (( fold here )) A. Not exactly. Your Fehrnstrom Fishwrap Republicanines an kiddie selfservatives are virtuous despite themselves, as it were, for ’tis not easy to bully anybooby *too* dreadfully in the politics of a democratic province where the wreckin crew of choice cannot enroll one whole voter out of every eight who register Or elect one Congresscritter in a delegation of nine. Still, who can listen to talk radio funded specifically for the benefit of Louisedayhicksvillains and not get the impression that alottavolks would sure LIKE to bully? Indeed, anything else would make no sense. Why be even nominally affiliated with America’s Otherparty unless "NO MORE MISTER NICE GUY!!" presses most of your buttons? NMMNG! a long-term Utopia perhaps, around here, rather than some real-an-present redstatist nightmare down in or near dirty Dixie or AK-49. But ’tis NMMNG! all the same. Big Paddy -- "For those of you at Rio Limbaugh": Eye refers to the Governor of us all, successor to your guy (hah!), Mittius Coriolanus Pompo of Mass.-medical memory -- can pass for Mr. Nice Guy. In a lot of ways. Up to a certain point. And especially by comparison with. Your 2010 Peanuts character, Charlie Brown, or Scottie Baker, or whatever that clown’s bobhancock was, exactly, did his best to terminate the niceguy infestation, but Baker’s Best turned out to be remarkably far from good enough. Doubtless your Dr. Limbaugh will bark that if only Master Zeroe had let his inner nastiness rip, Big Paddy would be on the outside looking in, Dixie-fashion, where we Irish all belong. However, your Fabulous Fernie Fehrnstrom, who certainly knows our poor MA better than the Witchdoctor of Democracy, a Fruit of Cape Girardeau, knows Her, did not campaign it that way. Fernie wouddabin an idiot if he had. At the moment, Fabulous Fernie is layin on the niceguy with a dumptruck so as to smooth the path of his second-string Charlie McCarthy, the much-esteemed People’s Seatwarmer. Hard not to think about half the ’hicksvillains barf into their cabbage an potatoes every time they hear yet another "Scott Brown radio minute." Poor betrayed Wally Wombschool ferociously craves a stout Slayer of Niceguys, an’ what does Fabulous Fernie have to give him? A Folder of Laundry! Why somebody even took his freeladyship, (( Jasonne, Dukess of Sanseverino-Wellesley, by Ignoto )) off the air again! (That schedule change must, Eye thinks, have been the fingers of Fehrnstrom at work somehow. Still, there IS such a thing as paranoia.) ¡The Bestembrightest are become a leaderless flock of wolf wannabes once more!. Her freelordship was a sort of walkin, squawkin Apotheosis of Disnicety. S/he/it gave Paddy and Eye a lot of innocent merriment along ¡NMMNG! lines, though of course we cannot feel too sorry to lose one who might conceivably have had a bad influence on dittopans of immature age. If this keeps up much longer, we may all die of a political sweet tooth. The only silver lining Paddy and Eye can descry is the llBU, little lady from the BIG UNIVERSITY. Though undoubtedly part of the Intellectual Bottom of icky Mass. niceguyism, Citizeness Warren of H*rv*rd has a definite edge to her. Don’t take our word, just go ask Howard Laurence (?) Lewis (??) Carr to tell you a few tales about his granny’s Edge. Too much of an edge for her own good has the llBU, who is probably doomed unless the Good Guy High Command can find her a Fehrnstrom-class handler pronto. So maybe there is hope for us all? Happy days. (( PS. If you do see Massa Howie, tell him we are STILL waiting for that birth certificate. ))

Nostalgianomics in One Lesson

Dear Dr. Bones,

Would you, Dr. Bones, or one of the Muses, happen to  remember who the original "in-one-lesson" Peruna salesman was?    I think vaguely of Henry Hazlitt, but so vaguely that it would be easy to be quite wrong.

And, speaking of "quite wrong," 

Reviving Caring Capitalismjconway   |   Mon, Sep 3, 2012 1:04 PM EST This Op-Ed from today’s edition (sic) illustrates where America was and what we can do to get back.  Henry Ford, no socialist, realized that if his employees could afford to buy his cars it would help his business, other executives in a variety of sectors followed.  Most making executives made “only” 4-5 times what their employees made, paid very high income and estate taxes, and viewed themselves collectively as pillars of their community and country.  The idea of an American CEO making millions off the backs of American workers and consumers and then high tailing his citizenship to another country would have been anathema in another era and is common place today.  Just compare todays Governor Romney to the Governor Romney in the 1960s who as a CEO made small, affordable cars right here in the US instead of just manipulating money like his son.  The best quote from the OP ED (sic [1] ) Riding the dynamics of the virtuous circle, America enjoyed its best period of sustained growth in the decades after World War II, from 1945 to 1973, even though income tax rates were far higher than today. It created not only unprecedented middle-class prosperity but also far greater economic equality than today. The chief executives of the long postwar boom believed that business success and workers’ well-being ran in tandem. Frank W. Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, voiced the corporate mantra of “stakeholder capitalism”: the need to balance the interests of all the stakeholders in the corporate family. “The job of management,” he wrote, “is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly affected interest groups,” which he defined as “stockholders, employees, customers and the public at large.” And some countries like Germany still do this In Germany, still a manufacturing and export powerhouse, average hourly pay has risen five times faster since 1985 than in the United States. The secret of Germany’s success, says Klaus Kleinfeld, who ran the German electrical giant Siemens before taking over the American aluminum company Alcoa in 2008, is “the social contract: the willingness of business, labor and political leaders to put aside some of their differences and make agreements in the national interests.” In short, German leaders have practiced stakeholder capitalism and followed the century-old wisdom of Henry Ford, while American business and political leaders have dismantled the dynamics of the “virtuous circle” in pursuit of downsizing, offshoring and short-term profit and big dividends for their investors. It is high time for the President to harness this spirit that drove Midcentury capitalism and the liberal political consensus-in both parties (when even the 1956 and 1960 Republican platforms called for socialized insurance, ‘progressive’ taxation and increased unionization) and highlight some of the companies that still follow this model-Costco, Mondragon Inc, the Evergreen Cooperative, In and Out Burger, and many others. Recommended by christopher, jasiu, kbusch, liveandletlive, paulsimmons, petr.

As you can see, the sky-blue nobility and gentry have turned out en masse to subscribe this pious tripe and viennasausage.
 
And the moral of that is, Volks can sincerely think they are soaring when they are sinking.  And not just anyvolks, mind you, but our own Aunt Nitsy along with a small zoo of probable H*rv*rds.  Plus Comrade Hedrick Smith, who actually barbecued the tripe in question.   As The Master did not say, "Let the cooks, not the guests, be the judges of the feast."

(( Perhaps home-aching could start at school, where, as I recall, we were supposed to mention the name of the author of  the goodstuff we scribbled onto 3"-by-5" cards.  I daresay that musty practice will have gone out the window with Dean Whatzizname in ’69 and the oblongus pie.    Since, however, at present Ye Goode Olde Dayes are that in which we wallow, ¿perhaps an obol for Auld Lange Syne?  ))


As usual when Their Worships start gertting to me, Eye tends to lapse into whightist-like attitudes, as for instance reflecting that it is easy to see how a 'jconway' might find practical bicycle parking a challenge.  I doubt it does much good to glower at the refractory two-wheeler and observe "It is high time for the President to stable this steed . . ." &c.   Without, that is, the faintest hint that one has any idea how the trick is to be done.  "Shut your eyes and clap your hands and tomorrow will be Wednesday, 31 September 1957" does not sound very promising.  But Houdini knows best.

St. Rudyard of Kiplin’ made his self-sorrowful civil engineer complain that the Government of India was under the impression that bridges are cut out of paper; the jconwayesque notion of what History is made of must be pretty similar.   Paddy and Eye do not mind the "social construction" line of patter that drives many whightist intellectualoids up the wall, but perhaps as against ‘jconway’ the Redarkenment may have a point.  Viewed from the sane side, this point is that few suppose that to say "The Pyramids are a human construction" implies they could be moved to Rio Limbaugh/Port Ste. Lucie FL in twenty-four hours.   The flip side is that the fact the transfer would take a cast of thousands six to eight weeks on a cost-plus basis scarcely proves that extraterrestrials must have built the damn things.  Or that they grew there like Topsy.

There are reasons, that is, why Baincappin’ now differs from the well-tailfinned Ikecapitalism of 1957 and reasons also why the one changed into the other.  And these are tolerably weighty reasons, for all that they have nothing to do with either Enthusiasm or Superstition.  To say that we can re-institute Ikecapitalism, or Fordianity, or ¿why not the Holy Roman Empire of the Yankee Nation?, any time we like because, after all, these arrangements did exist once, a well-attested fact which establishes that they are not logically or physically impossible -- to talk like that is not exactly false, but, for bicycle-parking purposes, I fear it might as well be. Should you actually  try to get there from here, you would not make it in this lifetime.  
       
   Happy days.
--JHM

___
[1]  Mister Poster "doubles down" on the void where his Intellectual Bottom ought to be.  

September 2, 2012When Capitalists CaredBy HEDRICK SMITHWashington IN the rancorous debate over how to get the sluggish economy moving, we have forgotten the wisdom of Henry Ford. In 1914, not long after the Ford Motor Company came out with the Model T, Ford made the startling announcement that he would pay his workers the unheard-of wage of $5 a day. Not only was it a matter of social justice, Ford wrote, but paying high wages was also smart business. When wages are low, uncertainty dogs the marketplace and growth is weak. But when pay is high and steady, Ford asserted, business is more secure because workers earn enough to become good customers. They can afford to buy Model Ts. This is not to suggest that Ford single-handedly created the American middle class. But he was one of the first business leaders to articulate what economists call “the virtuous circle of growth”: well-paid workers generating consumer demand that in turn promotes business expansion and hiring. Other executives bought his logic, and just as important, strong unions fought for rising pay and good benefits in contracts like the 1950 “Treaty of Detroit” between General Motors and the United Auto Workers. Riding the dynamics of the virtuous circle, America enjoyed its best period of sustained growth in the decades after World War II, from 1945 to 1973, even though income tax rates were far higher than today. It created not only unprecedented middle-class prosperity but also far greater economic equality than today. The chief executives of the long postwar boom believed that business success and workers’ well-being ran in tandem. Frank W. Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, voiced the corporate mantra of “stakeholder capitalism”: the need to balance the interests of all the stakeholders in the corporate family. “The job of management,” he wrote, “is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly affected interest groups,” which he defined as “stockholders, employees, customers and the public at large.” Earl S. Willis, a manager of employee benefits at General Electric, declared that “the employee who can plan his economic future with reasonable certainty is an employer’s most productive asset.” From 1948 to 1973, the productivity of all nonfarm workers nearly doubled, as did average hourly compensation. But things changed dramatically starting in the late 1970s. Although productivity increased by 80.1 percent from 1973 to 2011, average wages rose only 4.2 percent and hourly compensation (wages plus benefits) rose only 10 percent over that time, according to government data analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute. At the same time, corporate profits were booming. In 2006, the year before the Great Recession began, corporate profits garnered the largest share of national income since 1942, while the share going to wages and salaries sank to the lowest level since 1929. In the recession’s aftermath, corporate profits have bounced back while middle-class incomes have stagnated. Today the prevailing cut-to-the-bone business ethos means that a company like Caterpillar demands a wage freeze and lower health benefits from its workers, while posting record profits. Globalization, including the rise of Asia, and technological innovation can’t explain all or even most of today’s gaping inequality; if they did, we would see in other advanced economies the same hyperconcentration of wealth and the same stagnation of middle-class wages as in the United States. But we don’t. In Germany, still a manufacturing and export powerhouse, average hourly pay has risen five times faster since 1985 than in the United States. The secret of Germany’s success, says Klaus Kleinfeld, who ran the German electrical giant Siemens before taking over the American aluminum company Alcoa in 2008, is “the social contract: the willingness of business, labor and political leaders to put aside some of their differences and make agreements in the national interest.” In short, German leaders have practiced stakeholder capitalism and followed the century-old wisdom of Henry Ford, while American business and political leaders have dismantled the dynamics of the “virtuous circle” in pursuit of downsizing, offshoring and short-term profit and big dividends for their investors. Today, we are all paying the price for this shift. As Ford recognized, if average Americans do not have secure jobs with steady and rising pay, the economy will be sluggish. Since the early 1990s, we have been mired three times in “jobless recoveries.” It’s time for America’s business elites to step beyond political rhetoric about protecting wealthy “job creators” and grasp Ford’s insight: Give the middle class a better share of the nation’s economic gains, and the economy will grow faster. Our history shows that. Hedrick Smith, a former correspondent and Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, is the author of “Who Stole the American Dream?”

Nostalgianomics in One Lesson

Black Mooonday

Dear Dr. Bones,

The Great Pumpkin of selfservative journalism in the Heimatland G*ttes

(( Full Mooon Settin’ over Christokorea by Ignoto  ))

has left the brier patch:

The Rev. Sun Myung Moon died in Korea on Sunday at the age of 92.  He founded America’s Mooonpaper in 1982, and through it maintained a strong voice at the highest levels of national and international affairs.  Over 30 years, the preeminent challenges of the day have changed ... [but H]is vision ... continues to provide the motivating force for this moonpaper, [which] is committed to continuing the fight for what is right that [H]e laid out.  There is plenty of work yet to be done....

¿Ain’t there always?

Reaction to this lugubrious intelligence will, Paddy McTammany predicts, be divided into three Gaul-like parts, of which one (1) consists of your top-drawer señoritos (a.k.a.  " ‘conservative’ ‘intellectuals’ ") who will shrug Sun Myung ¿Who? off even quicker than we do.   Nobooby with enough self-gumption to be a Leostraussian, even just a Kissingeroid, can care deeply about a humble popular entertainer.

Down below the iceberg’s waterline,  where the late Rev.’s target audience dwells in factious self-darkness,  there will be (2a) a small band of grief-smitten bozos, the epicentre of whom we have already visited, an’ (2b) a much larger band of utterly indifferent bozoes.  For on the whole this is one Profit that managed to pick up not a whole lot of honour in othervolks’ country either.

The latter are bein’ just a tad ungrateful, it seems to us.   Presumably the dawnin’ of the Age of Breitbartius -- ¡Age of Breitbartius!, ¡¡Bright BAAAAAAAAAAAAR-Tee-Yuss!! -- would be afflicting us even if the Rev. ¿Who? had never been hatched.   Swiftboaters an’ eno-reactionaries would be out doin’ their expletivest for political indecency an’ *lysdexia the way their ideo-ancestors used to under Sennacherib of Assyria.   Under King Uggh of the cave community.

Nevertheless, things happen the way they happen, an’ most whightists / serviles / neoserviles in our own neck of tradition, at least, have assumed that their Father Zeus wills humanoid events to come to pass as they in fact do, not some completely different way instead, even if it comes to much the same thing in th end.  Or even well this side of the end.    In which case, neoserviles (an’ palæoserviles, an’ all the vast host of whight-winged nutbats) surely ought -- ¿no es verdad? -- to show some respect for those whom Himself has plainly appointed to be instrumental.  His now-eclipsed Effulgence bein’ patently among them. [*]

(( Full Mooooo by Ignoto ))

Happy days.
     --P. Aloysius McTammany

___
[*]  ¡Wunnerful word, ‘effulgent’!  Single-handed, it almost makes one believe Cicero never died, but is living incognito in Buenos Aires.

Diocletianus Redivivus

Dear Dr. Bones,

Let’s raise prices seascraper | Fri, Aug 31, 2012 5:40 PM EST Quantitative Easing is a confusing subject. Let’s make it simple. Quantitative easing means raising prices. In the current economy, you can see the effect. Monetary stimulus has raised the price of gold from $800 to $1600, the DJIA from 7,000 to 13,000 without adding any actual value. When you read that the Fed will attempt further monetary stimulus, know that all it means is the Fed will attempt to raise prices and hope that has some kind of positive effect on the real economy.

To be randy is so unbecoming, so laughable, (( fold here )) viewed from the outside, that naturally one wishes to accuse ALL political badvolks of it, be the true nature of their self-servicement what it may. Mow if Eye were out to annoy Freedame Seascraper, I would leave the late Miss Rand of Petersburg and Mister Nozick of H*rv*rd well out of it, and discover ostentatiously that her freeladyship is the sole remainin’ exponent of Diocletianomics. Everybody with even the faintest beginnings of Intellectual Bottom is aware that His Majesty, whose seventeen hundredth anniversary we were all recently celebrating, was first to market with a crank system [1] in which to raise prices, simply as such, is diabolical; to fix prices, salvific. First to market that we are significantly aware of, anyway. Seascrapernomics is only another pea from the August (in the strict sense) Imperial pod, quite a different crankcase than that in which Ayn an’ Bobby an’ "adult-onset adolescence" were hatched. Her freeladyship’s ideological age is no doubt neither a sedate 1701 nor a lusty 16.88, but even a native taste in concepts, completely uninformed with / polluted by Intellectual Bottom, ought to judge that ’scraperism falls far nearer the former than the latter. Her freeladyship scribbles in a thoroughly old-maidenly tone. If poetic justice reigned, her freeladyship would be "Miss Brill" in the Katherine Mansfield story, a living (?) antithesis to all things randy an’ nozzicky. [2] Geithner von Hindenburg and Bernanke von Ludendorff will not be taking advice from the likes of me, but they might find somebody better-credentialled to suggest that, if worst comes to worst, Q.E. might conceivably be defended by a strategy parallel to that of "Living Constitution" lieberals. Though doubtless a little more challenging to live in, ¿would not a world where prices remain alive and kicking be better for everybody’s moral fibre than some sad an’ dismal Planet Seascrape where continental drift an’ vulcanism ceased aeons ago, where nothin’ remains to be creationalistically destructivated between now an’ the heat death of the universe? Seascraperanity is beneath grown-up notice, except from a Comp. Lit. perspective, yet the gruesome twosome might conceivably advise our All-Highest One to deploy something vaguely similar against orthodox whightist economic reaction of the kind that thinks we ought to shut our eyes an’ clap our hands an’ REALLY BELIEVE in Comrade Krugman’s "Confidence Fairy." It appears that our bright-eyed, steel-claptrap-minded entrepreneurs won’t be steerin’ many pennies back into specuvestment an’ jobcreation until they are perfectly sure the future has been nailed dead as a dodoe. Among the more obvious symptoms of American Decline is this Miss-Brillish or Seascraperoid unwillin’ness to take a few chances. If the Mallory Factors of great wealth indeed refuse to start blowin’ us a new bubble before they detect what the freelordly baincounters take for an Absolute Sure Thing -- an’ see their fresh A.S.T., moreover, in an environment at least ninety-nine percent free of discouragin’ words against or about "The One Percent," -- why, we may languish in a bubble-free doldrums for whole decades and degenerations to come. "¡Hello there, Japan!" This last, I repeat, has nothing to do with her freeladyship the NeoDiocletian, whose economic courage-challengedness is entirely a demand-side phænomenon, an’ therefore howlin’ly heretical by the standards of the received AEIdeology an’ Heritagitarianism an’ Hoovervillainy. Diocletianomics 1.0 was heretical as well, for, despite His Imperial Majesty’s hard-to-deny personal connections with The Wicked State, the purpose of the exercise was clearly to reduce how much Diocletianus had to shell out when he went shopping exactly as Miss Brill’s will have been. The two protowhightists would have been equally astonished to be accused of jobcreativity, or destructive creationism, or any other supply-sider jazz. They simply never heard of fancy-dan neostuff like that. Freedame Seascraper, bein’ both nonfictional an’ contemporary with ourselves, can scarcely have failed to have heard of supply-sidin’. Obviously she has not profited. This obtuseness (or whatever) separates her freeladyship from the vast majority of original-thinkin’ whightist bozoes quite as much as from economic neoörthodoxy as parroted by the dupes of TopPercenterdom to lure the marks thereof. Probably the fact that her freeladyship is neither (A) a decent political grown-up nor (B) a duped kiddie selfservative of the ordinary type is what has lead Comrade Horatio to assimilate her overhastily to (C) Miss Rand an’ Master Nozzick an’ all the pomp an’ panoply of Planet Dilbert. Actually, the vast empire of economic self-crankiness is no tripartite Gaul of Cæsar, ’tis far, far wider than that, though admittedly many provinces are lightly inhabited, or even, in this age, depopulated altogether. At least (D) through (ZZZ) exist as well as { A, B, C }, with Mme. la baronne de Seascrape located out somewhere around (XX). You need not pardon my French, I shall defend it myself. The keyword to all ’scraperoid mythologies is, pretty plainly, rentier, with poujadiste running a respectable second. Comrade Keynes had her freeladyship’s number proleptically when he spoke of inflastion being "the euthanasia of the rentier." Her freeladyship would prefer not to be put down like a Seamus or a Rafalca, and really, ¿Who can blame her? As for le poujadisme de Mme. la baronne, you may read about in her freeladyship’s own words. She gave a sort of after-dinner address to the BoZo Skipper’s wardroom the other day in which there ies enough self-anecdotal evidence to begin to make NeoDiocletianomics intelligible. Indeed, her freeladyship has a marked tendency to honor the WhightGuard Officers Mess with fuller accounds of what washes ashore here at the foot of the Great Blue Hill as merest CliffsNotes™. As mentioned, Seascraperanity is utterly unorthodox by WhightGuard standards, so heathen an’ alien that Robertus Feldadmiral von Eno merely promioted the freeladylike scribble without comment, whilst the couple of ensigns an’ J. G.’s who tried to make a little conversation about it afterwards quickly lapsed into vulgar union-bashin’. Apparently the youngkers were unable to grasp that two-hundred-proof demand-siders still exist. ’Tis the "History is bunk" crew of which we speak after all. ¿What is Diocletianus to them, or they to Diocletian? The ignorance is so blank an’ virginal an’ (one must charitably hope) blissful over to WhG GHQ that the selfservative kiddies would never detect her freeladyship’s horrible heresies just from the heresy. As long as she pretends a little [*] to run with the neopack, Freedame Seascraper is extremely unlikely to be unmasked an’ burnt for what she is. By the same cause, naturally, her freeladyship’s influence on what the neopack thinks (?) an’ barks is bound to be indistinguishable from zero. Hence "beneath grown-up notice, except from a Comp. Lit. perspective." Happy days. ___ [1] Hardly anybooby in eighty-fivescore years has had a good word to say for Diocletianomics 1.0. Paddy McTammany attributes this upshot to incompetence in the way the price-shrink product was packaged and shrink-wrapped. That is to say, ¿Would YOU stand in line half the night in the chariot lot at your local ValMartium all agog to clamp your paws down on a new goodie called Edictum de Pretiis Rerum Venalium? Me neither. I just checked out what my old pal Sappy (Ms. Sapientia Conventionials to strangers) attributes the universally supposed failure. Her freeladyship of SS will be horrified to be informed that "the maximum prices in the Edict were apparently too low." ¡Too LOW, for Pete Peterson’s sake! As if His Imperial Majesty had taken Geithner von Hindenburg and Bernanke von Ludendorff for his braintrust. Now if Freedame Seascraper be as prone to self-sorrowin’ as are most of her fellow whight-wingnuttes an’ -wingnuts, it ought to keep her whinin’ happily for a month to discover that even in the Ancient Bunk Department, pretty well the last ditch conceivable for any crankery to take cover in, wild-eyed rule the roost.

[*] Her freeladyship did not in this case post something less cryptic to her suppossed ideobuddies, but in looking to see whether she had, Eye encountered the following bit of self-camouflage:

Democrats' Medicare by Napster by: seascraper Fri Aug 31, 2012 at 00:06:15 AM EDT The Democrats aren't cutting money to Medicare recipients -- they're only cutting to providers! Doctors and hospitals will treat Medicare patients because they love to do medicine! If they are worried about giving away their product, then they can sell T-Shirts at their live shows!

Nobooby amongst the base an' vile of America's Otherparty is likely to find that anythin' but highly edifyin'. Only an icky Psocialist would come back with "If they want to keep their licenses to practice, perhaps they had better comply with certain . . . " &c. &c.

Not bein' a brand-name Dilbertarian, her freeladyship most likely thinks there is in fact somethin' to be said for licensin' quacks, though for obvious reasons she did not care to say it there.



This one illustrates rather the poujadiste side of Mme. la baronne than the rentier side. Whatever pricey luxury items it may be, exactly, that her freeladyship flogs personally or microcorporationally do not, I presume, require special dispensation from The Wicked State. How it worked for medicosunder her freeladyship's economic guru C. Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus Augustus, I do not happen to know, and would not be surprised if nobody knows. No doubt the victim or patient’s heirs could sue after the fact for poisoning or the like, but that is not licensing as we understand it.

For that matter, if a nifty whzbang from Seascraper Inc. landed some TopPercenter señoritoe's yacht on a reef several hundred kilometers in the opposite direction from what Don Avarosito de Murdoch y Bahamonde had typed in, well, little Donnie could sue her freeladyship under the existing régime also.