Dousing the Terrorist Flame

G is for glossary

G

glass ceiling • glas sēliNG

   nominal

   1. liberals’ trickle-down economics

e.g., Did you notice how the situations of lower middle-class blacks began to improve after the election of President Obama or mothers on welfare after Mary Barra became CEO of General Motors?

Welcome Tom Nashe.

A note from Ted Riich:  Here it is. I don’t have the – let’s use the Greek word – spla&gxna for this, the guts for political tough-and-rumble. I’m just not consistently angry enough, or I don’t enjoy my anger enough – it turns too easily to gall. So, in the interests of health and safety (mine), I’m turning “Go Around Back” over to my friend Tom Nashe. He’s ten years older than I am – so ten years angrier or inured to gall? Yet, however choleric, he’s been gracious enough to take GAB off my hands. It’s the right time, he allows: He’s retiring at the end of this academic year; he has nothing to lose and needs something to do.

I’m going to stick with the ambiguity of “The Ambiguities.” (Hey! – click here.)

Tom claims his own politics are non-existent, but that means, I think, only that he belongs to no party but the anti-hypocrisy party, no movement but the don’t talk about the poor, if you don’t know any – and I’m not including your maid or the kid behind the corner at 7-11 you asked how he was doing last Thursday while you were searching for change; and that you volunteered in a shelter once is no qualification whatsoever.

For the past ten years, Tom has lived in a single room and given away every penny he didn’t spend for food, dog food, books (or storage for books), or travel.  Moreover, he gave not one of those pennies to any “thing” with a board.

Tom has been advising – or taking potshots at – GAB all along; so he knows how to do everything I’ve tried to do. Here’s the best of the deal: He starts tomorrow with a first entry to a new dictionary of political, cultural, and commercial terms. Watch and you’ll learn what “glass ceiling” really means.

________________________

Since Nashe has NO independent web presence, I’ll continue to publish Go Around Back and accept all flak . . . which I will, however, ignore and hand to him as directly as possible.

Redistribution of wealth

Please, Mr. Oscar

Over on The Ambiguities, catch Jesus up to no good.

Hot Pants

 

Over on The Ambiguities, catch Jesus up to no good.

Click Here.

No. Click here.

Click Here

Click here.

Today in Spite

The article from Reuters (by Joan Biskupik) begins this way:

The U.S. Supreme Court case that could shatter President Barack Obama’s healthcare law this year was launched as a backup plan by a libertarian group and a powerful Washington lawyer frustrated by the slow progress of their original lawsuit.

Their success in persuading the court to take the ideologically driven case owes to a combination of canny legal tactics and the willingness of at least four justices to hear it in unusually swift time. Oral arguments are set for March 4.

Michael Carvin

The reasoning behind the case, if I may be so bold, has been this: We hate this guy so much, if we can cripple his signature program, even on a technicality – oh, especially on a technicality! – oh joy, oh joy, oh fiendish joy.  It doesn’t matter how many people it hurts.  We don’t know any of them people anyway.

“We” includes Michael Carvin, who represented George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential election dispute in Florida and the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s general counsel Sam Kazman, neither of whom has ever met either a person of color he could truly relate to or a poor person he respected.

For the original article, click here. 

. . . At “The Ambiguities,” a theory of nearly everything . . . or next to nothing at
     all. Click here to see how this fits in.

Use of Force

The Duke of Medinaceli, who succeeded Don Juan as the principal adviser of Charles II, was an indolent, affable minister, popular with his peers because he lacked the firmness to resist their appeals for subsidies. – R. M. Smith, Spain

In a politics presumed to be available to everyone, ideas and ideals play a great part.  [But] there is a direct connection between their power and another kind of power, the old, unabashed, cynical power of force. – Lionel Trilling, “Introduction” to George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.

David Koch, clubbing in the '80s.

As you can see, I have been reading
about Spain, under the hapless Habsburgs and the fascist Franco.  As always, I read with half an eye on the words on the page and half on my roiling gut.  It doesn’t matter whose or how far away in time or space, politics always gets my gut roiling.  What in my relatively happy and uneventful childhood stirred up so much hate for power? Was it that even in my small town, it was never used except either arbitrarily or to benefit the one that had it, and that it therefore seemed inevitably to be corrupting?  Power isn’t like a hammer; it isn’t a neutral tool, one you can unhand after you’ve pounded in a few nails, put in your toolbox, and walk away from.  It sticks like the tar sticks to your hands after you’ve been picking tobacco.

Money is power.  It was in 17th century Spain; it is (even more so) in 21st America.  I propose:

1. That the use of capital to appropriate things that rightly belong to someone else is plunder;
2. That it is no matter that buying elections is now legal - it is still an abhorrent use of force to take for “special interests” what belongs to “the people.”
3. That doing so is not as gentle as the term “buying” an election suggests; it is an arbitrary use of force, a brutal usurpation of others’ rights; plunder! 

All this is simple and straightforward.  It requires no lengthy explanation; there is no need for nuance.  “Free and fair elections”?  If elections but can be coerced, they aren’t free and cannot be fair.

Suits

Roger Owl and Art the Cat

How does your favorite non-profit spend its money?  According to the Huffington Post, the National Football League balanced its books last year by paying its chief executive officer $35 million.  Actually you don’t have to take Huff Post’s word for it; as a non-profit, the league has to disclose its executive compensation. But, CEO Roger Goodell’s compensation is only “fair,” according to Atlanta Falcon’s owner Arthur Blank, chair of the compensation committee.  After all, it only exceeds Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s by $12 million; it translates to barely $47 more than $5000 per hour, assuming Goodell sleeps five hours a night and works the other nineteen every day of the year – and surely he does: the charitable work of the League, providing Roman-Forum-style entertainment for the screaming masses, demands no less.

In other news, the rumor that Showtime, whose CEO is Matthew C. Blank (no relation), will apply for non-profit status in 2015 cannot be confirmed.

Thanks to Maxwell Strachan, whose Huff post may be found here.

Disclaimer: Goldman Sachs is not a non-profit.  In fact, in 2008, it profited by receiving $10 billiion of tax-payer money. 

Roger Owl and Art Pussy-Cat went to sea

      In a beautiful lucre-green boat:

They took some money and then more money

      In the form of ten-thousand buck notes.

Roger looked up to the stars above,

      And toasted to a small guitar,

“O lovely Moolah, O Plunder my love,

  What beautiful Swag you are,

                              You are,

                              You are!

 What a beautiful Hornswoggle you are.”

The day omniscience died. See today's  “The Ambiguities.”