LET THE HOLIDAYS BEGIN!!!

T. C. Atlantic - Faces

More Roman Dice

Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band - I'm Gonna Bring A Watermelon To My Gal Tonight ...

Post-Halloween Louise

The Ship of Monsters (1960)

Egyptian game, Mehene. Rules unknown.

Rot und Schwartz

Frankenstein - Edgar Winter Group - 1973

1911: Amundsen vs Scott

Caravana - Los Schowys

Happy Centenary Thelonious

Batman - Batmen

The Batmen

Break the Wheel

The Iron Bank

This post is a tangent to Red Frog's Tyrion the Liberal (8/30/2017) which I recommend you take in before proceeding here although there would be no law against reading them reversed. However you wish, dear reader. In any case please be warned that both here and there be Spoilers! Not that I myself believe in spoilers but I'm told that some of you are quite orthodox on this point. I have no intention of sparing such readers beyond this paragraph. Indeed, I will attempt, before I am through, to spoil season 8 as well.

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Enough filler. Let's begin with dragons. Red Frog notes that George Martin has said that the dragons are the equivalent of nuclear weapons. On this point and its implications I will be silent once I explain why. I am putting dragons, along with dragonglass, Valerian steel, three-eyed ravens, red witches, faceless men, and whatever else I have left out into a box labelled Magical Devices.

Magic, I have no doubt, occupies a central place in Game of Thrones. And it certainly tempts the viewer to subject the story to a Jungian reading. There is one magical element that I will get to later, the resurrection of the dead. But, for the most part, I am going to attempt a political economic reading. One that I hope will also shed some light on the dead.

Now that Daenerys and her crowd have landed at Dragonstone the story has been unified in the Westeros theater. Until this season it has been laid out across three economic zones; feudal Westeros, the Dothraki steppes, and the slaveholding merchant cities of the Essos coast. Under Daenerys the Dothraki and the slave army have uprooted and transferred the surplus of Essos, at least as far it can be expressed militarily, into Westeros. At season end the Greyjoy fleet and the Golden Company are offstage and sure to reappear in some form but the players of the Game are now all assembled within the Seven Kingdoms.

This geographic unity testifies to the social identity of the contending forces. We have come to love the Mother of Dragons as an amalgam of Spartacus, Lincoln, and Lenin but her claim is to a feudal throne on the basis of an aristocratic bloodline. Her military has an imperial character, uniting nomadic and slave armies, but it has no class basis now that it has crossed the Narrow Sea. If the contending houses, as we are led to believe, are historically based on the War of the Roses we might want to cast Dany, with her army, as a sort of Lord Protector and final two seasons as something of an English Civil War.

But I am, instead, insisting on the economic identity of Houses Targaryen and Lannister, equally expressions of a landed nobility living from the surplus of an invisible peasantry. If our story is to end with a victory for The Stormborn it could create a unified imperial state spanning Essos and Westeros but it will not "break the wheel".

Which brings us to the dead. Here is the real contradiction in the Game. The history of The Game of Thrones is one of murder and slaughter. None of the houses shrink from it and they all depend on it to maintain power. In such a system the maimed and the vengeful will accumulate but, above all, the dead will pile up. In our own world of reason and light the dead are no longer visible but in Westeros they persist. Immune to cold, to fear, and to hunger they are perfectly suited to the long winter to come. In addition, they are organized. If anything in this story points to a political economy beyond the feudal it is the army of the dead.

George Martin, Benioff, and Weiss are unlikely to leave us with a future of great promise. Think of the fate of Ray, the warrior turned septon, who nursed the Hound back to health (The Broken Man, season 6). It is not an optimistic writer who will immerse us in the Middle Ages. Stories of heroes with swords will always be with us. But in this world a man who lays down his sword in the spirit of co-operative labor is hung without mercy. In this world, where commodity production is unheard of or ignored, the working class is absent but I suspect that it is represented structurally by the army of the dead.

My prediction for the final season? I'm short on Daenerys and on Cersei. I'm long on the Iron Bank and on the white walkers.

Louis Prima Is Never Showing Up

If you've heard me tell this story before that's ok. I keep coming back to it as I watch our current events. It's told in the movie Big Night (1996). Two brothers, played by Tony Shalhoub and Stanley Tucci, have emigrated to New Jersey to open a restaurant which is now on the verge of going under. The younger brother, Secondo, is in charge of the business side and appeals to the owner of a successful restaurant down the street. The owner, Pascal, played by Ian Holm, claims to be friends with Louis Prima and promises, if the brothers will throw a big feast, he will get his friend to stop by and turn their fortunes around by bestowing his blessing.

They invite everyone they know. But as the evening rolls on folks wonder where the guest of honor is. It is only as dawn approaches that Pascal's girlfriend reveals that the bandleader will not be dropping by, was not in fact even invited. Pascal's reaction to this is matter-of-fact, "I am a businessman. I am anything I need to be at any time".

The Republican Party is a tight weave between those of the propertied class who are most focused on the threat from below and that mass voter who is in passionate agreement that the working class must never hold power.

"So the Democrats have no ideas, no policy, no vision for the country other than total socialism and maybe, frankly, a step beyond socialism from what I'm seeing.(BOOING)"  Trump, Phoenix, Aug. 22

 But this alliance is a tense one because nothing is more necessary to the maintenance of our current relations of production than the insecurity of those who are so eager to uphold it. The linchpin holding it together right now is Trump's promise to restore American factory jobs. How is this believable? 

As a second generation real estate huckster Trump has been well positioned to tap into a persistent tenet of vulgar economics buried in his audience's view of global capitalism. In their shared conception wealth is obtained in the sphere of circulation, in the terms of the "deal" where the sharp party cheats the stupid party. Trump has learned this from a life collecting rental income but its endurance in public discourse is owing to the neglect and denial of labor as the source of value and unpaid labor as the source of surplus value.

Applied to international trade this results in the very strange idea that the national economy at the center of global capitalism, the U.S., the country and capital most responsible for the creation of the modern economic empire, has been drained of its wealth by the stupidity of its political class and the sharp dealings of its rivals. Even the Republican powerful gagged on this and were reluctant to admit, as 2016 developed, the need for such risky propaganda. What Trump saw and what the rest of the GOP did not was the level of desperation in their base remaining from the crash at the conclusion of the Bush administration.

Returning to our story. We can all understand when a celebrity of the stature of Louis Prima can't make an engagement, schedules being what they are. But that is not the situation here. Other than an initial flurry of reactionary proclamations to the applause and satisfaction of nativists and gun clubs it is every day more apparent that there is no broader program here. Whether or not Trump believed he could renegotiate the world economy and restore the American factory workforce to its post-war glory while leaving it bound hand and foot to the usual bosses nothing aside from rhetoric should be expected. Most of the working class never believed him. And for those that did disappointment will grow.

The Rolling Stones - 2000 Light Years From Home (Official Lyric Video)

Ann-Margret - I just don't understand (1961)

Ancient Dice

Loser Takes All or We Are All Losers Here

"I'll keep it short and sweet. Family, religion, friendship. These are the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business. When opportunity knocks, you don't want to be driving to a maternity hospital or sitting in some phony-baloney church. Or synagogue."

Johnny Ringo makes a guest cameo



Doh!



"Never lose a bet with Bart Simpson"

Heads Will Roll

A Bastille Day Game Night complete with

Guillotine

The Committee of Public Safety

Plus a falling out among thieves

ÖZTÜRK SERENGIL dances the Twist

Munchkins, The Very Complicated Extension

Tomb Room



Munchkins



Third Grade

Lawrence of Arabia

Captain Beefheart And His Magic Band - Safe As Milk (1967) (Full Album) ...

Captain Beefheart - San Francisco 1966

The Circulation of Arms

The schema of Risk type board games is as follows: armies seize territory, territory yields money, money buys armies, A → M → A₁. Following, no doubt, beliefs long held on the American right Trump is not straying far from just such a scheme for his interpretation of imperial status. American military dominance, as expressed in the worldwide system of American military bases, is the result, in this view, of conquest. Trump has connected this with American nagging for increased military spending by NATO countries and arrived at what amounts to a 2% tributum capitis payable, retroactively, to the imperial treasury.

Properly certified experts on the affairs of empire can scarcely find the words for their astonishment. There are such experts within the Trump entourage and, we are told, the President was fully briefed on the standard expression of policy in NATO forums. Trump wasn't having it. Our allies, preoccupied with the strategic maneuvering that they certainly recognize by now as necessary in light of the new American "condition", were, by turns, bemused and publicly cautious. As Blessed Reagan would say, "there he goes again".

In our modern world imperialism is neither expressed nor conducted so nakedly outside of private clubs and gun shows. There are ways to do these things which are effective, or were effective, and deniable. But Trump is only comfortable in private clubs that he owns. Occasionally convinced of the necessity of addressing a proper audience in a proper manner his rhetoric never, at those times, really escapes the gun show.

Toot as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law

Shake it, CJ

Some uplifting wax

Hands in the Sea

Nice looking game of the First Punic War. Two player.

Inside Looking Out

Roman City Wall

Trump has decided that he cannot proceed without obtaining political control of the FBI. He may have left himself thin cover by pretending to have fired Comey for his election campaign antics but he has certainly complicated the second, and most crucial, phase of his strategy, installing a compliant replacement.

Had he consulted his inner Roy Cohn he might have tried a different approach and admitted that he wouldn't tolerate an independent director and his investigation. His more recent confession of his real motives shows that he knows he let Roy down but the damage is done. The political risk would have been far greater but, if he were able to withstand it, he would be in a much stronger position. Instead he is in a tangle that he will probably survive but which he will never escape. By dissembling he has shown weakness, confessed, in effect, that his political support is draining away.

Why? The slippage is no secret even if the numbers, among his base, are still small. But what has made him aware? Stay with me here as I follow a hunch. Trump is an actor. His true stage is not the White House but the rally. Over the course of the campaign he mastered a one-man performance which, unlike his previous career as a television actor, required a rapport with a live audience. In his last rally in Harrisburg Pa. he, for the first time, made a significant alteration to one of his themes. He explained that the Chinese were no longer guilty of currency manipulation to the detriment of the American worker but had, instead, rallied to our side in the containment of North Korea.

Now he presented this as evidence of his mastery of the diplomatic deal. He was trading his economic offensive against the Chinese for their acquiescence on Korea. And, inserted into his usual litany of applause lines, it did draw a favorable cheer. But I found myself asking, "really?". Is his base buying into this or are they just responding to his cues for applause? I suspect the later and, furthermore, I suspect he knows it.

In one of my "6 theses for the early days of the Trump administration" I said:

Everything points to the absence of any new information behind Trump's actions so far. Decisions are based on strategies that appear to date from before the election and, some, long before that. Events will, soon I think, sharpen the contradictions between those strategies and the real world and it seems that the White House will be very slow to adapt its response if it does at all.

I believe this is the first new information that Trump has felt compelled to bring into his rally performance. President Xi Jinping should be recognized as the first with the skill to bring new information into this White House. In his interview with Time Trump seemed to be very impressed with his recent lessons on Chinese and Korean history. But he would not be the performer he has shown himself to be if he did not sense some reluctance by his audience to follow him in this new path of enlightenment. While his stump shows moved easily between right-wing commonplaces on topics foreign and domestic his actions in office have fallen into quite separate categories.

Early in is tenure he was willing to sacrifice control of the exterior empire to the Pentagon. His interest in foreign affairs has never been deep, never exceeded the nursery rhymes of reaction and the necessities of business deals. And so he was willing to jettison Flynn and downgrade Bannon. Neither had provided a pennyworth of strategy beyond that of the generally agreed upon generals once the real imperial dispatches began to arrive.

There are, in any event, no victories to be found in the trans-alpine empire. American resources are over extended. Our military is highly efficient in destruction but incapable of political assembly. Among subject populations every dime of loyalty costs several dollars. Trump's attention span  for the far flung theaters of imperial grind likely is shorter than that of his audience. Again, Xi Jinping must have won him over with a well crafted five minute Introduction to Chinese History.

But the interior empire is another affair. Here is where he has allies and here is where he wants to build a power base. He holds the support of the Republican Party since its only other option is to collapse. He also relies on a cold alliance with the military and Wall Street. They do as they will and he lets them be. But the support he truly identifies with are the simmering forces of resentment and repression. Those on the front lines of the crackdown, like the rank and file of ICE, and those who dream of the redemption of their insignificance in action against the alien and the subversive. And right in the middle of this social formation is the FBI.

As the interview process opens for Comey's replacement there can be no doubt whose resume is being conjured during the midnight black mass in the White House residence. It is the putrid specter of J. Edgar Hoover. I suspect the spell requires DNA from the shriveled remains of Henry Kissinger which explains his silent presence in the Oval Office on Thursday.

sun ra - nuclear war

kiss your ass
goodbye

Goldfinger - James Bond Theme - Munetaka Inoue And His Sharp Five

Delia Derbyshire/Air

Hi, Hi, HI....Cluck, Cluck, Cluck!

           THE COLONEL & HIS DROOGIES

The Colonel on a camel

Sub Iisdem Trabibus

The only men who, as I opine, ought to be allowed the use of Clubs, are married men without a profession. The continual presence of these in a house cannot be thought, even by the most uxorious of wives, desirable. Say the girls are beginning to practise their music, which in an honourable English family, ought to occupy every young gentlewoman three hours ; it would be rather hard to call upon poor papa to sit in the drawing-room all that time, and listen to the interminable discords and shrieks which are elicited from the miserable piano during the above necessary operation. A man, with a good ear especially, would go mad, if compelled daily to submit to this horror. 

With love and simplicity and natural kindness Snobbishness is perpetually at war. People dare not be happy for fear of Snobs. People dare not love for fear of Snobs. People pine away lonely under the tyranny of Snobs. Honest kindly hearts dry up and die. Gallant generous lads, blooming with hearty youth, swell into bloated old-bachelorhood, and burst and tumble over. Tender girls wither into shrunken decay, and perish solitary, from whom Snobbishness has cut off the common claim to happiness and affection with which Nature endowed us all.

I have seen Snobs, in pink coats and hunting boots, scouring over the Campagna of Rome: and have heard their oaths and their well-known slang in the galleries of the Vatican, and under the shadowy arches of the Colosseum. I have met a Snob on a dromedary in the desert, and picknicking under the pyramid of Cheops. 

Stinginess is snobbish. Ostentation is snobbish. Too great profusion is snobbish. Tuft-hunting is snobbish. But I own there are people more snobbish than all those whose defects are above mentioned: viz., those individuals who can, and don’t give dinners at all. The man without hospitality shall never sit SUB IISDEM TRABIBUS* with ME. Let the sordid wretch go mumble his bone alone!
* the sacred enclosure of private walls

All quotes from The Book of Snobs  (by One of their Own) - W. M. Thackeray

Jetpack - Bus Stop

Dajos Béla´s Danseorchester - GLAD BONZO - Novelty Foxtrot

I know the feeling

Tiny Tim - Me and the Man on the Moon

Tales of 1001 Nights

According to a superstition current in the Middle East in the late nineteenth century when Sir Richard Burton was writing, no one can read the whole text of the Arabian Nights without dying.
Robert Irwin - The Arabian Nights, A Companion

Fitting for a work whose theme is the postponement of death through storytelling. I'm not superstitious. Nevertheless I take solace in the fact that no one can tell us with certainty what the whole text of the Arabian Nights might be. This is a book whose history is so uncertain that its first European translation, by Antoine Galland who completed it in 1717, has sometimes been regarded as its most definitive text. Most, but not all, of his source manuscript survives but there is evidence of a second, lost, source. While it appears that the work was well known in the Middle East by the 11th and 12th centuries it was the interest generated by Galland's translation that gave the impetus for the first printed editions in Arabic.

The Arabian Nights seems to have always been text but its individual stories are drawn from other written collections and, beyond that, traditions of oral recitation and folklore. But it also had a parallel life as public recitation. Irwin includes mention of one such actor who has escaped the usual anonymity of his calling:

Because of their low status, individual storytellers were rarely noticed by the historians and compilers of biographical dictionaries. A rare passing mention of a storyteller comes in an obituary notice of a jurisprudent, Shams al-Din al-Fa'alati, in a fifteenth-century chronicle, whose author, Ibn Taghribirdi, notes that this man rose from humble and even disreputable origins, for one of his brothers was a geomancer and the other an astrologer, while his father earned his living by telling stories and by selling astrological predictions to professional wrestlers.

Scheherazade, however, is no creature of the oral tradition. We are told right off that she

... had read books and histories, accounts of past kings and stories of earlier peoples, having collected, it was said, a thousand volumes of these, covering peoples, kings and poets.

I think we are seeing, in the Arabian Nights, the calling of the fairy tale, the dynastic saga, and myth into the urban marketplace. Fabulous treasure troves, always beyond price, are everywhere to be unearthed. But we are also told the price of a meal and the rent of a shop.

I am in no way capable of judging the worth of Malcolm Lyons translation other than to note that a translation that can hold a reader for more than 2600 pages has much to recommend it. For those of you inclined to pursue scholarship on the poetics of the Nights I can refer you to Nocturnal Poetics: The Arabian Nights in Comparative Context by Ferial Ghazoul,

The Arabian Nights deals ultimately with the realities of the unconscious and it is structured as an endless discourse where narrative patterns conjure and cohabit each other. Without a definite destination but with a rigorous order, the narrative disseminates and proliferates.

Game of Bang

Hippodrome

Super rare and scare HIPPODROME circus board game published by Milton Bradley in 1900. The box top shows a highly colorful chromolithograph of a female circus performer laying down with her lions; a male circus performer perched upon an elephants head; a circus ring including a female performer standing atop a horse; and numerous clowns including the name of the game, Hippodrome, spelled out by a bunch of clowns in contortionist positions.

How to Spot a Communist

Фрэнк Синатра поет на русском

Folk Songs of the Rocketmen

The Golden Wiretapps

The Case

The President sat alone in his bathrobe. None of those fools could see it. That black president was still out to get him and only he and his glorious tweets of fire could rouse the adoring masses to preserve an America where the unappreciated heir to a New York City real estate fortune could chisel and bluster his way to a presidency where he could sacrifice the entire planet in the name of obscene private wealth.

And then the super secret gold phone rang. "Mr. President? General Mike is requesting immunity from prosecution. He says he has a story to tell."

The Mystery

What did General Mike know? And when did he know it?

The Story

General Mike was a close advisor to the President and, ever so briefly, his national security advisor. He, along with many others in the campaign, was entangled in a web of Russian financial and political interests which sought to discomfort the other candidate and had no objection to installing an incompetent neophyte on the throne of the American empire.

But the real money flowing into the General's pocket while he was advising the campaign came from an Israeli natural gas company that wanted to grease the political skids in Turkey so they could hook into the Turkish pipelines. A possible scheme to this end was for the General to arrange to nabbing of a Turkish cleric now enjoying refuge in the US and a prime target of the Turkish prime minister.

Gas From Israel And The Flynn Wiretapping - Behind The Deep-State Infighting Over The Trump Election

The Solution

The investigators must uncover which former assistant to the General who still worked in the NSC under the protection of Bannon and Kushner was passing imperial secrets to the head of the House Intelligence Committee that could be construed as supporting the President's assertion the he was "wiretapped".

Oh, wait, they already know that.

Well, then the investigators must uncover the mystery of how both capitalist political parties in the US have become such venal tools of the dominant financial interests that the choice offered in a presidential election is between a gasbag TV celebrity and the spouse of a former president celebrated for tossing the interests of his working class voters to the wolves.

The Clues (reveal only if investigators are stumped)

Follow the trail of dead Russians. (add six months)

Audit the President's financial records. (add four years)

Solution Timetable

Master Detective          2017                6 points

Private Eye                  2018                5 points 

Flatfoot                        2020                4 points

I Should Have Been Crucified

The Jackets - Wasting My Time (Video 2013)

Miharu Koshi and Haruomi Hosono, Swing Slow - ‘Good Morning,Mr.Echo’

Hey! That's no way to treat the stereo!

Cosmic Voyage (1936)

Yikes, CJ is armed!

Very Bad Things

Pontiac at sea level, 1938

American capital exited the 2nd WW in a dominant position due to its incomparable industrial power. In the postwar years that position was eroded and finally disappeared. American domination continued despite this for a pair of reasons. The first, a preponderance of military power, was eroded by Vietnam and similar struggles and was finally lost with the invasion of Iraq. Although still capable of vast destruction it was shown to be incapable of reaping economic benefits to outweigh the enormous cost. It has left the American economy with the burden of an unstable and expensive stalemate that is the largest factor in its fiscal bind. This leaves us with what is not, strictly speaking, a comparative advantage but is, nevertheless, a bargaining position in world trade, we remain the world's largest consumer.

This final straw, codified in numerous trade deals and expressed in the US$' status as reserve currency, is now, assuming the Trump administration stands with its protectionist trade policy, evaporating. And what will American workers gain by it? Nothing.

Buy American. Hire American. How does this work? It is possible, though by no means easy or even long lasting, to drive up the wages of American labor by imposing tariffs on foreign commodities and by other protectionist legislation. Congressional support for this is not assured. But another measure which uses existing law and is already underway is to remove undocumented workers, and their lower cost, from the workforce.This will be less effective at raising wages than at satisfying the reactionary lusts of Trump supporters and at repressing demands from the undocumented workers that remain.

But an even more basic problem remains. It lies at the foundation of Trump's support. It's the belief that, as a businessman, he will be able to reverse the secular decline of American wages. Leaving aside whether he qualifies as a successful businessman or merely plays that role on TV he faces the same limitations that all presidents of a capitalist America have faced. Even with his party controlling Congress (perhaps especially with that) the president can do very little to compel capital to pay high wages to workers. Trump is trapped in the same economy as his predecessors. Although factions vie for control of economic policy none will bring it to stray far from the needs of capital.

Whatever steps this administration does or doesn't take to "protect" the economy a shrinkage of global trade is underway. Colliding with this are unsustainable levels of public and private credit. If the American market is walled off from global trade to any extent there will be a price to pay. There are financial chickens that must come home to roost. And Trump, to the extent that he knows anything and to the extent that we can discern what that is, knows it. Almost unbidden he expounded at length on this in the debate of 9/26/16:

And believe me the day Obama goes off and he leaves and he goes out to the golf course for the rest of his life to play golf, when they raise interest rates, you are going to see some very bad things happen because the Fed is not doing their job. (And the other leaving that looks good is the stock market)

The hard lesson that awaits those who have placed their faith in the business acumen of Trump is that if America could be managed like a privately held business that would have happened long ago. The "administrative state" which is slated for deconstruction is not a valueless appendage on American capitalism. The state is the very measure of the contradictions of private society. It is possible, marginally, to shift the state away from its regulatory functions in favor of its coercive role. Indeed, that is an enduring plank in Republican publicity. But that doesn't abolish the state. It probably doesn't even shore it up much.

This leaves the Republicans with their usual economic function. They will attempt the further ballooning of global credit via the blind political support for military spending. But how worn away is that? Its decrepit condition can be seen in the proposed budget. Every increase in the war budget must be seen to be offset by cuts in social spending. A very modest increase in waste paid for by undisguised and savage reductions in the standards of living for the working class. For now, tidbits for those who already have everything. But where will the next TARP come from? What will be left in the bag of tricks when the "very bad things happen"? The Boss, the state, the Republican party, and the Democrats to boot, they will all be struck dumb. Well, of course, they won't really shut up. But who will be listening?

The Main Enemy Is At Home!

A little bit complicated?



France, England, and Germany deal with some complications.



Two to three hours? Investors start your engines!



Capital is in place.



Austria has the pud.



"The war of 1914-18 was imperialist (that is, an annexationist, predatory, war of plunder) on the part of both sides; it was a war for the division of the world, for the partition and repartition of colonies and spheres of influence of finance capital."
Lenin - Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1914)



France, England, and Germany toe to toe in the channel.

"Proletarians of all countries, follow the heroic example of your Italian brothers! Ally yourselves to the international class struggle against the conspiracies of secret diplomacy, against imperialism, against war, for peace within the socialist spirit."
Karl Liebknecht - The Main Enemy Is At Home! (1915)