The Kleptocratic Empire

[pan]

Stealing us blind.

[pan]

Jerry Seinfeld's Clio acceptance speech reminds me of some of the themes from Bataille's Copernican reversal of economics.   The audience, full of ad men and women, is laughing a lot......are they fully aware and just do it anyway?

[Mouse]

someone offered me a job as a copywriter once, and I just said no.

in the post, how many days away, after centuries they are coming to my house,
their wooden heads cracked and crownless.

[BO]

Of course they're fully aware. Seinield just exposed what everyone already knew. So, how do they (we) rationalize the inherent immorality of our actions? By delluding ourselves into thinking that we're special -- above all others, including God. The joke's on us.

[pan]

Kinda like American Exceptionalism for the individual.  Or, as you have pointed out, American Capitalism encourages sociopaths.  Nothing quite like relying upon a, by definition, amoral system to define one's moral values.

[Mouse]

cracked and crownless, naked and black, mother and child;
what dark did shelter them, century upon century,
revolution upon war, invasion upon invasion?

cracked and crownless, naked and black.

[pan]

Apparently it isn't just in the US where money = free speech.

[BO]

Free speech, freedom of religion? Godless heathens in government request man to remove nativity scene from his yard. Love it!

[pan]

If you are going to do the nativity scene you have to support the Market!

[waldopaper]

 

Fuck the Fruitcake 

(Christmas 2014)

 

‘Then up spoke the Faerie Queen, an angry queen was she
"Woe betide her ill-fard face, an ill death may she die
Oh, had I known, Tam Lin," she said, "what this night I did see
I'd have looked him in the eyes and turned him to a tree"

--Tam Lin 

 

I write one-page Christmas story because I can’t bake fruitcake.  Same deal.  I suppose there are people who really know how to bake a fruitcake and have fruitcake fans who really look forward to some kind of seasonal delicacy.  Not me.  TL; DR: too long (wink) didn’t read.  Fuck the fruitcake.  Here is a story for you.  Historians a hundred years from now will say that 12/25/2014 occurred during the “collapse of capitalism.” 

 

What else happened 100 years ago?  Oh yeah.  World War I.  Patriotism, nationalism and all that.  Birth of the postmodern era, death throes of imperialism rackety natter blah. Nobody knew anything about any of that shit, and only a few understand it today.  It comes in a tin from your aunt Ida who got it on sale last August.  Nobody knows what’s in it but it has red and green stuff and it all tastes the same.  Barbara Tuckman, eat your heart out. 

 

They couldn’t see mustard gas, machine guns or the global flu pandemic coming and neither can we.  Isn’t that a scream?  It gets better.  The oceans are dying and we are thinking about money, which is now so much ass-paper.  Blabber about how family and community means so much… until we decide it doesn’t.  ‘Tis the season to get your jollies, because all that is going into ye latrine along with patriotism. nationalism and honor.  Stealing food. Torturing prisoners. 

 

Nobody noticed capitalism collapsing.  Nobody noticed the oceans dying.  Everybody was told their (whose there) way of life (whatever that) was threatened and months later they were pulling dry old turds apart looking for peanuts to eat.  Buddy Phrutbatt would like some of that fruitcake now, but it was blown out the dining room window along with glass, plaster and various pieces of Mom and Sis.  Dad Phrutbatt stumbled out with part of his brain missing. 

 

Blown up the lawn-ornament Santa’s ass while it was kneeling to lawn-ornament Baby Jesus was Aunt Ida’s fruitcake.  Dimming vision Dad saw white plaster red eye his last chance to peck her corn whole.  Buddy saw the bomb blast heading home with a holiday goose.  Honk went toot in Santa’s Ida bun boot humped Dad til he was dead with a gingerbread-man bite giving him a horny head.  That was Buddy said was the last decision Dad would make. 

 

He could have decided to love the whole world instead of caring about his or her wheedle whack fuck feelings.  He could have decided Idawanna, highly concentrated in Christ mass confection, was a cure for having a skull shaped like a crescent wrench.  Now the terrorists win.  Buddy has nightmares about Dad humping like a hammer headed shark.  Words do not kill quite like explosives do.  One can blow a hole in your soul.  Dad decided what to do. 

 

How many hints we have entitled!   To make before or long.   After we fuck the fruitcake   

[BO]

Thanks for the laugh, Waldo. I miss your missives. Now I gotta go pull some dry turds apart... LOL

[BO]

Like a Joe Bageant with financial acuity, here's Jim Kunstler's forecast for 2015:

Life in the breakdown lane.

(I've posted the intro. The whole enchilada is here.)

“Don’t look back — something might be gaining on you,” Satchel Paige famously warned. For connoisseurs of civilizational collapse, 2014 was merely annoying, a continued pile-up of over-investments in complexity with mounting diminishing returns, metastasizing fragility, and no satisfying resolution. So we enter 2015 with greater tensions than ever before and therefore the likelihood that the inevitable breakdown will release more destructive energy and be that much harder to recover from.

I don’t know how anyone can trust the statistical bullshit emanating from our government reporting agencies, or the legacy news organizations that report them. Yet the meme has remained firmly fixed in the popular imagination: the US economy has recovered! GDP grows 5 percent in Q3! Manufacturing renaissance! Energy independence! Cleanest shirt in the laundry basket! Best-looking house in a bad neighborhood…!

¡No hay problema!

This is simply the power of wishful thinking on display. No one — with the exception of a few “doomer” cranks — wants to believe that industrial civilization is in trouble deep. The staggering credulity this represents would be a fascinating case study in itself if there were not so many other things that demand our attention right now. Let’s just write this phenomenon off as the diminishing returns of career log-rolling in politics, finance, media, and academia. All the professional “thought-leaders” pitch in to support the “hologram” of eternal progress that issues their paychecks and bonuses. This culture of pervasive racketeering that we’ve engineered has made us obtuse. The particular brand of stupidity on display also points to another signal vanity of our time: the conviction that if you measure things enough, you can control them.

I’m of the view that the measurers only pretend to measure and can only pretend to control things, especially in the most fragile of the systems that we depend on for running all the other systems of techno-industrial economic life: finance. The pretense has endured a lot longer than many of us had expected. The legerdemain employed by banking officials and their handmaidens was greatly augmented by the sheer wish that fragility (i.e. risk) had been successfully and permanently banished from the universe. That “magic” at least sustained a universal faith in currencies until the middle of last year when so many monies went south — except the dollar, levitating on blowback of the deflationary wind flattening everything else.

All this unreality in money and markets should be expected in the conditions just preceding systemic collapse of an entire trans-national industrial civilization, just as one should expect societies to construct their most grandiose monuments to themselves shortly before collapse. The Mayans R us. One year, they were cavorting bloodthirstily atop their garish painted pyramids and a generation later the jungle was stealing back over the temple steps and the population was a tenth of its former size. The same thing is going to happen to us, except there will be a hell of a lot more worthless, toxic debris left on the landscape.

Of course, even that is a more long-term projection than the exercise at hand calls for, viz., the forecast for measly little 2015. So without further throat-clearing, permit me to break it down for you: Moar words...

[stonefruit]

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