I like most parlor pinks can become — for a spell at least —
as pre occupied by orwell's 1984 “vision”

as the next gal or guy



so don't your obedient commenter today

— by way of a portal provided by smbiva's own super AL no less —-

read a '03 intro to a new edition of same by one thomas pynchon a close impersonal idol of mine

that is he was…'till i caught that often incurable thought virus the trier flu in the summer of 1974



at any rate

tommy has much to say about eric's “double think “





“.. one of the great achievements of this novel, one which has entered the everyday language of political discourse—the identification and analysis of doublethink.”

“… doublethink is a form of mental discipline whose goal, desirable and necessary to all party members, is to be able to believe two contradictory truths at the same time. This is nothing new, of course. We all do it. In social psychology it has long been known as “cognitive dissonance.” Others like to call it “compartmentalization.” …the idea seems to have presented Orwell with his own dilemma, a kind of meta-doublethink—repelling him with its limitless potential for harm, while at the same time fascinating him with its promise of a way to transcend opposites…”

and low and behold it has escaped the confines of eric's dystopic tale and spread through out are very own real deal of a brave new world

tommy:

”. We believe and doubt at the same time—it seems a condition of political thought in a modern superstate to be permanently of at least two minds on most issues. Needless to say, this is of inestimable use to those in power who wish to remain there, preferably forever.”


but a caveat arise and a nice one at that “..prophecy and prediction are not quite the same. ..a working prophet, is to be able to see deeper than most of us into the human soul.”

indeed and eric didn't go deeper then this:



” …in 1948 understood that despite the Axis defeat, the will to fascism had not gone away, that far from having seen its day it had perhaps not yet even come into its own—the corruption of spirit, the irresistible human addiction to power were already long in place, all well-known aspects of the Third Reich and Stalin’s USSR, even the British Labour party—like first drafts of a terrible future. What could prevent the same thing from happening to Britain and the United States? Moral superiority? Good intentions? Clean living?”



pretty standard stuff eh ??but then this comes along and that gets past the usual 1984 blither

.

“… the question remains, why end a novel as passionate, violent and dark as this one with what appears to be a scholarly appendix?

The answer may lie in simple grammar. From its first sentence, “The Principles of Newspeak” is written consistently in the past tense, as if to suggest some later piece of history, post-1984, in which Newspeak has become literally a thing of the past—as if in some way the anonymous author of this piece is by now free to discuss, critically and objectively, the political system of which Newspeak was, in its time, the essence. Moreover, it is our own pre-Newspeak English language that is being used to write the essay. Newspeak was supposed to have become general by 2050, and yet it appears that it did not last that long, let alone triumph, that the ancient humanistic ways of thinking inherent in standard English have persisted, survived, and ultimately prevailed, and that perhaps the social and moral order it speaks for has even, somehow, been restored.”

In a 1946 article in The Managerial Revolution, an analysis of the world crisis by the American ex-Trotskyist James Burnham, Orwell wrote, “The huge, invincible, everlasting slave empire of which Burnham appears to dream will not be established, or if established, will not endure, because slavery is no longer a stable basis for human society.” In its hints of restoration and redemption, perhaps “The Principles of Newspeak” serves as a way to brighten an otherwise bleakly pessimistic ending—sending us back out into the streets of our own dystopia whistling a slightly happier tune than the end of the story by itself would have warranted.”

clever eh ???….hmm ”no longer a stable basis” …and ah my beloved “standard english ” survives under all this

—-in the proles' argot one imagines —and gets resurected ..come the rising of the mud elfs

but he forgets standard english gets memory holed …but what if its precisely double think that saves them from new speak

or better forces new speak to split against itself…



hegel:



profounder insight into the antinomial or more truly into the dialectical nature of reason

demonstrates any notion whatever to be a unity of opposed moments..”

any notion whatever ie what remains out there beyond new speak city is the eternal becoming

no super structural totalization lasts

and with that insight 1984 collapses in on itself

or for short becomes 1989

Posted by pinky at 01:28 AM

“increasing national debt helped deleverage households by restoring income and helping decrease their debt”

exactly

nice comments

————————

i recommend uncle engineer a vicious stagnation
in household credit outstanding

by rationing credit lines/mortgage amounts not rates of course

and uncle running a massive off set fiscal deficit

with mark up cap and trade to put a lid on the cooker

watch wages fly high baby and profits squeeze down under uncle's ever lower limbo stick

easy once we the wage weeble majority
put our agents

in control of the commanding heights

of course neither of herr toma's two party poopers
has a core with any interest at all

in ending corporate domination of the economy

or its regulatory fiscal and monetary policy

then again ..its a living they offer eh??
for most of us…ya a few less then a while ago but we drift forward despite all corporate oars pulling us back …and in the oblong run we complete a political orbit

if that ain't deep progress at least its change

and as i say there's the drift ….

————
but back here on planet x

i note the scare tactic bluff really

about the default decision

that oughta be easy for those with no prospect of

additional credit

the plastic economy ain't all its cracked up to be

if you look at it from the wrong end like these folks do

the game made sense when credit standards were vanishing
hop on the credit wheel on the way up

but if basically you're a bad risk

jump off when the wheel starts turning back downward
you got all yer gittin so take a powder ..scat

jump free before the down turning wheel tries crushing u under it

…
“The culprit is of course Fractional Reserve Banking”

well…. fractional something at any rate
its always a part

its never the whole's fault

simple 2 d geometric proof availible on demand at

kapshow@hotmail.com

Posted by pinky at 01:05 AM

i stopped replicating my econ con comments

here i resume…

if a de facto duopoly system

is optimal

in a rep dem governed social market

based society

i guess that suggests

minimal competition with maximal continuity

and a robust center aisle society works best …

in the long run

reminds me of zhou en lai's
well known acessment of the french revolution

“too early to tell”

Posted by pinky at 01:02 AM

that's it
the syphinx has barked

to climb merit mountain

you just get your balls removed

cut off chinaski's balls early enough
and you get geitner

must be a mother /son thing eh ???

as to lady meritoids

denigning daddy's lap may be enough

merit dykes are secular nun-suches
in dress pants

the grounded-ness
a lady gets wearing

a pair of pants 

softens them in the clinches

takes the naughty nurse ratchet out of em

god the smacked back
hillary is hot these days

she's like the joker
to ob's bat man

Posted by pinky at 08:31 PM

“it was pretty silly to keep my mother, an old woman, alive at that expense when there are children in schools who can't get good textbooks or good teachers because there isn't enough money for that.”

exactly states the dilemma

neither anal logic chopping
nor

unplugged sentimentality

will reduce this social contradiction
to an easy

once and for always

either / or

solution

Posted by pinky at 06:31 PM

—-i'm a great fan of this man. He's a south state gub' industrial interventionist ',a cross border private credit flow south state regulator, a balanced trade advocate and a cross north /south border job seeker open trottle-ist

i can hardly ask for more out of an elitest merit class social scientists eh ??—-





“Growth in the developing world tends to come in three distinct variants. First comes growth driven by foreign borrowing. Second is growth as a by-product of commodity booms. Third is growth led by economic restructuring and diversification into new products.

Today the first two models are at greater risk than the third. But we should not lose sleep over them, because they are flawed and ultimately unsustainable. What should be of greater concern is the potential plight of countries in the last group. These countries will need to undertake major changes in their policies to adjust to the new realities.

The first two growth models invariably come to a bad end. Foreign borrowing can enable consumers and governments to live beyond their means for a while, but reliance on foreign capital is an unwise strategy.

The problem is not only that foreign capital flows can easily reverse direction, but also that they produce the wrong kind of growth, based on overvalued currencies and investments in non-traded goods and services, such as housing and construction.

Growth driven by high commodity prices is also susceptible to busts, for similar reasons. Commodity prices tend to move in cycles.

When they are high, they are apt to crowd out investments in manufactures and other, non-traditional tradables. Moreover, commodity booms frequently produce ugly politics in countries with weak institutions, leading to costly struggles for resource rents, which are rarely invested wisely.

So it is no surprise that the countries that have produced steady, long-term growth during the last six decades are those that relied on a different strategy: promoting diversification into manufactured and other “modern” goods. “


i agree with that entirely …now dani gets into the devilish details:

“By capturing a growing share of world markets for manufactures and other non-primary products, these countries increased their domestic employment opportunities in high-productivity activities. “



whoooops question how did they ggain access to north markets and world class production techniques ????

dani slips that cpounter punch to move toward his strength
“their governments pursued not just good “fundamentals” (e.g., macroeconomic stability and an outward orientation),

but also what might be called “productivist” policies: undervalued currencies, industrial policies, and financial controls.”



enter the south room's class star:

“China exemplified this approach. Its growth was fueled by an extraordinarily rapid structural transformation toward an increasingly sophisticated set of industrial goods.”
ya but dani how'd that happen ??



“In recent years, China also got hooked on a large trade surplus vis-a-vis the U.S. ― the counterpart of its undervalued currency.”



ya again but how and did they have a choice ??

“These countries did not want to be recipients of capital inflows, because they realized that this would wreak havoc with their need to maintain competitive currencies.”
ie undervalued again china is class star

complication:
” Global macroeconomic stability requires that we avoid such large current-account imbalances in the future.

But a return to high growth in developing countries requires that they resume their push into tradable goods and services….”



now having set the table fully dani answers question numero uno



” In the past, this push( into world markets ) was accommodated by the willingness of the U.S. and a few other developed nations to run large trade deficits. This is no longer a feasible strategy for large or middle-income developing countries.”

so scrap the china model

“… the (new)requirements of global macroeconomic stability”
and the( old growth model )for developing countries are “at odds with each other…so

.”.. Will developing countries' need to generate large increases in the supply of industrial products inevitably clash with the world's intolerance of trade imbalances?”



the question numero duo leads to bleak house or does it …well the sun mayhaps also rises over a new dawn accordin' to Dani

“There is in fact no inherent conflict, once we understand that what matters for growth in developing countries is not the size of their trade surpluses, nor even the volume of their exports. What matters is their output of modern industrial goods (and services), which can expand without limit as long as domestic demand expands simultaneously. “




yikes doc pangloss has arrived but first more dani dead on target:

“Maintaining an undervalued currency has the upside that it subsidizes the production of such goods; but it also has the downside that it taxes domestic consumption ― which is why it generates a trade surplus. “


ya but now that's verboten so dani plangloss prescribes



” encouraging industrial production directly”



” it is possible to have the upside without the downside.”



really doc ??? really really ???

“There are many ways that this can be done, including reducing the cost of domestic inputs and services through targeted investments in infrastructure.”


standard social market advice so i wonder why it might not be happening all over down south

but dani moves on



” Explicit industrial policies can be an even more potent instrument.”



indeed …shades of gosplan 2.0 i'd like to have him dilate here but instead he sells the turn away from undervaluation strategies

“The key point is that developing countries that are concerned about the competitiveness of their modern sectors can afford to allow their currencies to appreciate (in real terms) as long as they have access to alternative policies that promote industrial activities more directly.”


whoops

“as long as they have access to alternative policies that promote industrial activities more directly.”

recall the old anti econ con gag line



“assume a can openner”



what if world markets close to southees that have industrial policy systems



dani slips in another huge conditional improbabiliity in his sum up:

“… developing countries will have to substitute real industrial policies for those that operate through the exchange rate. ….external policy actors (for example, the World Trade Organization) will have to be more tolerant of these policies

as long as the effects on trade balances are neutralized through appropriate adjustments in the real exchange rate. Greater use of industrial policies is the price to be paid for a reduction of macroeconomic imbalances.”



.”…external policy actors…will have to be more tolerant..”

dani you're talkin trans nat inc dominated “global” institutions and markets here dani liimited liability

wire pullin hegemons …viciously jealous ravenous hegemons that “contain ” competitors

not tolerate em ..i love you my man …but are you shittin me ???

Posted by pinky at 06:18 PM

“Imagine a city of many millions of people who support themselves and their families solely by arranging words, images and sounds, or in the industries that make this work available to others.They neither farm, fish, mine, manufacture, manage, heal, teach, build nor defend. But what they do influences most everything, shapes politics and governance, provides a conception of our time, forges the culture such as it is, and stamps the imprint of the present for history to judge. Though builders may build, in the main they follow the plans of architects. Teachers teach, but they must have a text. Politicians govern, but only upon the flow of commentary that raises them up or casts them down “



thus starts the renound fictioner satirist zionist and ..as in this piece arch copyright ogre mark helprin…

note for further consideration the following bit



“or in the industries that make this work available to others”

now let us continue



“Dispersed throughout the United States, the millions of this hypothetical city do exist, in professions dependent upon the copyright protection of intellectual property. More than anywhere else, they are concentrated in New York, where you see them walking at 60 miles per hour, fully absorbed in their novels, plans, melodies, compositions, essays or designs.”



comes the meta economics :



“Their work is peculiarly vulnerable in that it is easy to appropriate. If they were farmers, industrialists or surgeons, their problems would be different. It is not possible to copy instantaneously and in virtually unlimited quantities either potatoes, aluminum or gall bladder surgeries, as one might a song or a scanned book.

Were this vulnerability unaddressed, the producers of intellectual property would be put out of business unless they were independently wealthy or worked either as amateurs or drew salaries at the pleasure of, and beholden to, boards, committees and overseers of every type.Always at risk, the independent voice, the guarantor of political freedom and personal dignity, would be dangerously depressed along with the arts that sustain civilization. Amateurs alone are insufficient — unless one believes that the work of Herman Melville, Thomas Eakins and Aaron Copeland does not merit full-time employment”

marvelous eh …beyond satire







comes the burkean gambit:



“The vulnerability, however, has been addressed, by copyright systems evolving in tandem with the ever-increasing volume of works they protect. This has proceeded over centuries, as copyright adjusts to new means of replication while sheltering the works without which the new technologies would be meaningless.”



comes the mordant siren of warning





“But copyright, the rampart of the mythical city, is besieged by a widespread movement antagonistic to authorial right and the legitimacy of intellectual property. So-called public interest groups serve the new information super powers, the Standard Oils of our age, whose interests would be advanced if they did not have to bother with permissions and payments for what they call “content.” The Creative Commons organization, for example, is richly financed by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Mozilla, Sun, the Hewlett Foundation, and others of type.”





more e mundane market economics:



“Copyright is no more a tax than the price a merchant charges for an item in his shop or what a laborer receives for his labor.

Nor is it a monopoly any more than you have a monopoly on the sale of a watermelon you might grow in your garden, or the monopoly a seamstress exercises over her work. “



then an odd turn





“The opponents of copyright disingenuously maintain that it locks up ideas, comment and debate. Title 17 of the United States Code resoundingly says otherwise, that “in no case does copyright protection . . . extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described.”



more burkean painted history :



“In previous eras, advances in the ease of replication were met by the consistent strengthening of copyright — in lengthening the term, international standardization, increased enforcement. This did not discourage the production of works, which advanced by orders of magnitude. In Thomas Macaulay's England of 1825, 600 books were published. Economic growth, universal education, more efficient printing, and a strong system of copyright together saw 206,000 books published in England in 2005. “



now the round house cometh



“One might attempt to argue the counterfactual, that even more books would have been published without copyright, but one would first have to establish that the incentive of being paid for one's work is a disincentive to producing it.”

got that ??? copywrite is payment for original producing of …copy



but in fact two armies mobilizing by night



“With the swelling powers of digitization come the antagonists of intellectual property, who address the issue without popular opposition. Corporations with intellectual-property interests now field lawyers and lobbyists, as do their adversaries. This will eventually result in a tie, which will be broken only by the public opinion that corporate moguls and magnates (often accused of dominating public opinion) have in this regard totally ignored.”



jane q public opinion will brake the tie between corporate titans ???

hence this op ed i guess



“So here we have a city — the hypothetical city and New York itself — deeply dependent upon what copyright protects but unaware of the threat it faces, even as, sector by sector, it begins to fall. “



troubled ??

well  “Are you — were you — in publishing? “

now watch the sequey here “Are you, or were you, a journalist? A screenwriter, composer, architect, designer, photographer, writer,” and the sequet back ” or in a business that brings the work of these people to the public?”



recall that earler line

“or in the industries that make this work available to others”

hmmmm other shapes crowd into the frame here oddly sterile grasping shapes

could they have sponsored this clown ???



at any rate the final clarion blast :



“What have you done to protect your life's blood and to guarantee the continued independence of your voice? As distressed as you may be now or not long from now, should copyright go the way of all flesh, some of you may soon be unable even to recognize your own profession, if indeed it continues to exist.

New technologies will always demand and deserve careful navigation and difficult readjustments. But the weakening or de facto abolition of copyright will not merely roil the seas, it will drain them dry. Those who would pirate what you produce have developed an elaborate sophistry to convince you that they are your victim. They aren't. Fight back.”



yup i kid you not he wrote that … symbol string creation for pay may vanish from this browning planet



amazing grace !!!!

Posted by pinky at 06:15 PM

the democratic traitorship of the rentier class


in this time of supremely “self made” meritorious leaderhood in the white house 

i'm reminded …often …t' wasn't always worse for our president to be born on third base

like boy emperor bush…one need simply recall that gentleman only child rentier from hyde park



my sense of fdr ” the reformer ” starts and ends with his risk taking his willingness to advocate a heterodox move

his shameless moving on after any and all bloopers

in times of severe novelty and crisis like now a restless easily bored annoyingly over confident risk taking spirit

is just what the powers that be need at the helm if they want to keep the smurfs …on board

—even if as with fdr his risk taking fearlessness is the result of a life time of near consequence free frolicking —




———-

i've been reading a soft book on the tweener years by some bold headed ex broker

and it nicely illuminates roosevelt the political economist manque

the man  could be positively spoony on matters economic .. a completely  wild and wooly

over confident under tutored amateur who was very often as dead wrong as he was dead certain



example:

one of his administration's great early achievements deposit insurance …he personally fought it to the last house vote

yes he was wrong on deposit insurance and in general he could be at best “lightly conflicted ” on the depths of deficit spending

one sees the zig zags as his head plays off his hide bound and blatantly “off ”

school marmish analogies to household finance against his tireless driving need to “do more till we fully recover”



and besides his shaky grip on massive deficit budgeteering the key to the recovery

he was also way wrong on ..well the list is endless

but here's what's important… his apparent working rule “keep punching”
and he sure did that and he followed his instincts till they blew up in his face and he took chances like he was “on the booze ”

as keynes remarked and in a pinch where his personal ideosyncratic notions failed to guide him he'd follow some one elses

sexy sounding hunch and if that flopped too if he suffered a knock down he jumped to his feet and threw the opposite

punch ….punch punch punch keep punching in rapid criss crossing combinations

take gold pricing and the hallowed gold standard:


fdr was no cleveland deomocrat he was a de facto “debaser and repudiator” by deepest inclination

and he had no sense of the sacred calf when it came to the price of gold or its alledged “spinal necessity”

at the center of any “sound “monetary system

nope .. one of his first acts in office amounted to taking us off the ” procrustean gold standard ”

in a move worthy of nixon at his best roosevelt ” suspended ” gold exports …and in a follow up move well beyond nixon's best

a month later before the much anticipated “world economic conference ” he allowed the old free silverists remnants in the house

to slip in an amendment authorizing the president to devalue the dollar against gold by up to 50% and to boot

issue a slew of ”unbacked dollars.”….man did this bit of policy send central bankers world wide into a frenzy

scrambling for advantage while solemnly proclaiming the need for “currency stabilization”

btw he went on to torpedo ” the conference” itself that summer  with pre-emptive strikes that scotched any chance at a return to gold

such bankster type sober moves he waved off like some louch moses as based on nothing more then ”a specious fallacy “

brilliant brilliant moves

moves he could no more defend ”theoretically ” then he could …..creationism



well that's not quite right fdr did have a merlin in all this and here's my favorite anti “good as gold dollar move”

during the following fall king frank spend the better part of each morning  personally buying gold on uncle's behalf

why ?? well for the same reason he did everything else that first year …so he could raise the price of …

cotton timber coal steel and corn

enter here his guru  ..yes ever the gregarious conspirator he always had a confederate if not a shadowy mentor in these escapades 

and in this case it was an agricultural economist from a second tier university ( cornell ) one george warren

— blessed be his name —who after an exhaustive study of 213 years of commodity price moves claimed to have unearthed the secret origins of the  trajectory of commodity prices in nothing less then the rate of increase in the supply of .. gold 

—- i won't go into the fact this theory as the great Pauli might say isn't even important enough to be usefully wrong —

at any rate this homely theory and his confidence in himself ultimately led to yet another official indignity aimed at the sacred calf ..a direct gold/dollar price fiddle


lets step back first:

as everyone recalls commodity prices had taken a jagged course down and down since 1930 and by 33 were in the deepest smelliest of dumpsters all of em across the board  and of course farm mortgages and other such productive borrowings hadn't adjusted their principle values or payments at least not willingly or comensurately as this slide continued so producers were
getting pretty badly squeezed to say the least



now enter  the warren theory of absolute commodity prices and …you end up with  uncle's prez buying up the magic shiny glowing shit with freshly produced green backs . …

was this in the last analysis wrong headed ?? well no it was harmless enough but did it work ?? well yes it raised the price of gold causing international currency markets to continue to roil like cheap foil and yes it made the respectable financial community in this country and beyond furious 

—in my book that oughta count as a home run or two right there —

but no it prolly had next to zero effect in and of itself on long run farm relief let alone industrial relief

but as a sample of  fdr's contempt for well heeled authority and for contemporary academic orthodoxy this adventure was part of a process of bold experimentation in a time of failed theory so yes 

yes yes and to be sure his aim was correct to reduce our small producer debt burden we needed ..and got  producer price inflation ….but keynes would shortly (36)come up with a theory that led to a straighter more powerful way to accomplish this then a gold price tinker or for that matter fdr's bigger gyro gear loose effort the NRA



yes roosevelt like some squire out of fielding was often enough off in his methods 

but he kept groping for his target and punching away

and of course most importantly he hardly ever had a problem changing his views

and swiftly too and without a sense of shame and why not eh ??

why not keep a bold posture admidst a world of smoking failures after all

“he was just a well intended amateur” ….like this nation's founding “planters “

—don't give me the anti slaveholder sanctimony…please mr trot —-



this rentier gentleman policy dabbler with the political kinetics of an ally cat had a bred in the bone

advantage over his  merit class ”peers” 

you couldn't shame him …even when he had a mind to betray his class

least of all by citing ” a recent harvard study “



alas merit rex obama on the other hand …

Posted by pinky at 06:07 PM