Another year.......GONE!!!

LET THE HOLIDAYS BEGIN!!!

Necrophilia

Cats dig the wax

Glossing the Games

NAME OF THE GAME

With thousands of board games out there, and more being invented every day, dedicated board-gamers need a glossary to describe the various types and genres. Here's a few of our favorites:

Euro or Eurogame: Also described as German-style, these games eschew direct conflict. Randomness is limited and players aren't eliminated by bankruptcy or annihilation on the battlefield. The Catan games are the best known Euros.

Ameritrash: Emphasizing drama and direct conflict, these often include an element of luck, where

fates can tum on the roll of the dice. Think Risk.

Take that: Games, often card games, that give players an opportunity to target a particular opponent.

Press your luck: A mechanism that tempts the greedy with rewards to take yet another turn even as the odds mount for lose it-all disaster. Seen in TV game shows and Russian roulette.

Co-op or Cooperative: All the players work together to beat the game itself. See Pandemic, in which everyone is trying to defeat global outbreaks of virulent diseases.

Dungeon crawl: You and the other players are stuck in a scary, underground labyrinth, battling monsters and scooping up loot. Gloomhaven, currently the top-rated game on the BoardGameGeek website, is a dungeon crawler.

Filler: A game that's easy to learn and takes 15 to 20 minutes to play. What you pull out to kill time while you're waiting for other players to show up to play a heavier game.

Dexterity: A game that could involve flicking something at a target, balancing blocks in a tower or using chopsticks to snatch sushi pieces floating from midair.

Engine builder: A mechanism where your aim is to build a machine, empire, company or system that becomes more powerful as the game progresses.

Hidden traitor: Players work together to accomplish a common goal, except for one player who is

secretly trying to foil the group.

Asymmetric: A game that assigns players widely varying roles and goals. Imagine Monopoly recast

with one player as a real estate developer, another as a tenants rights activist and a third as the

jail.

From an article by RICHARD CHIN

Chicks dig the wax ... uh, while they listen to the radio? That's OK, rock on young miss.

Immutable Laws

On last Sunday’s The Circus (Showtime) Steve Bannon said something that hadn’t occurred to me until then. He predicted with certainty that the Democrats would impeach Trump (that had occurred to me) but also that Mitch McConnell would, at that point, offer him what Bannon called “an acquittal deal”. Mr. Bannon is, as he is accustomed to be, interesting and wrong.

His mistake is to ignore two immutable laws of American politics. First: Trump can never be trusted to uphold his end of any deal and everyone, even McConnell, knows that. Second: only Republicans impeach, they only impeach Democrats, and they always fall short of the votes to remove.

But what about Nixon? you say. Nixon demonstrates how the process works when the shoe is on the other foot, as in the present case. In this situation the Democrats deliberate impeachment and produce articles which are voted out of committee and the Republicans response is to shove their president out the door. 

I can’t say I’ve examined even the outlines of Republican thinking on the matter. Who can really know such mysteries? Even Bannon, I’ll admit, likely has a better grasp than I. But I am holding to the immutable laws above. Sure, times change, political parties evolve, even flip polarities. In my bones, however, I feel it is late in history for the creation of entirely new patterns in the constitutional landscape.

The Hearse Song (The Worms Crawl In) - Harp Twins, Camille and Kennerly

Don't ever laugh as a hearse goes by For you may be the next to die They wrap you up in a big white sheet From your head down to your feet They put you in a big black box And cover you up with dirt and rocks And all goes well for about a week And then your coffin begins to leak And the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out The worms play pinochle on your snout They eat your eyes, they eat your nose They eat the jelly between your toes   There is something soft and green Puss comes out like whipping cream You spread it on a slice of bread And that’s what you eat when you're dead Your chest caves in, your eyes pop out Your brain turns to sauerkraut And the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out The worms crawl over the dead man’s snout They eat your eyes, they eat your nose They eat the jelly between your toes   And the worms crawl out, the worms crawl in The worms that crawl in are lean and thin The ones that crawl out are fat and stout Your eyes fall in, your hair falls out They invite their friends, and their friends too They all come down to chew on you And the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out The worms play pinochle on your snout They eat your eyes, they eat your nose They eat the jelly between your toes   But at first you weren’t really gone, You could hear the mourning song. You yank the rope to ring the bell You call for God and you curse hell    So this is what it is to die,  I hope you had a nice goodbye Did you ever think as a hearse goes by That you might be the next to die?

Ghost Riders in the Sky - Artist đàn bầu Vân Anh

Certainly a top ten Ghost

A Disorderly Retreat

Ukraine is a borderland. That’s the meaning of its name. And the border that it sits on, between Nato and Russia, seems to run through the middle of the country. In such a way that it can be shifted quickly, as it has in recent years, from one side to the other. The shift in 2014 dislodged more in American politics than was apparent at the time. Five years later ‘western’ Ukraine is exhausted, bewildered by the loss of its American client status, and seeking terms with the east.

There are students of imperialism who maintain that Trump represents a faction of the ruling class who reject confrontation with Russia and favor confrontation with China. I have no doubt such theorists can be found and that they are well funded and have copiously documented strategies. Since the failure of the neo-conservative campaigns of the Bush era, however, I suspect all such strategies are no more than wish fulfillment and the true plans of the American empire are to hold the line and pray their credit holds out.

Moreover, everything indicates that if such a strategy is loose in this administration it is operating without any sort of executive control. In the case of Ukraine it would be possible for an American president to establish a policy seeking to mediate the conflict between Kiev and Moscow as part of a new detente with Russia, allowing American power to focus on an economically ascendant China. It would not be easy and would run counter to a great many positions that have been solidly entrenched over the last thirty years. But, just as with Nixon’s Chinese play, it becomes an option when the most strident voices of aggressive imperialism, those emanating from the Republican party, are brought to heel.

But nothing of the sort is going on here. Trump has no strategic ability and is completely without the friends required to carry out such a change in direction. Politically he is pure reptilian complex. Idiotic. What is being unveiled is just another instance where Trump, whose private interests were honed in the relatively primitive world of accumulation which is big city real estate, attempted to monetize his power out of the very complex world of global capital. But this time he has double-crossed the empire.

The allies he will need in the days to come are caught in what is likely to be a withering crossfire. Having never made a serious attempt to build a case for imperial withdrawal or for rapprochement with the Kremlin he is left without a political defense in a court where he will face a jury of imperialists instead of an audience of the devoted.

The deep state has never trusted Trump. It is indifferent to whether he is Republican or Democratic and it has no fear that he will subvert its authoritarian toolkit. But all candidates for high office need to display, by recognized pedigree or by cultivation of contacts, allegiance; not so much to the democratic traditions of the republic, but to the  position which it now occupies in international capitalism. Trump has never bothered.

Vetting candidates is a function of the parties. But, while the GOP made a half-hearted attempt to derail Trump in the last election, it failed. And its failure has now put in peril its fitness to rule the empire. If it defends its president it endorses the unsightly corruption of the worst currents of privately held capital and throws up its hands before the multitude of foreign policy crises which make landfall on our shores with the regularity of hurricanes. If it removes him it risks ending its status as a mass party.

What we know as the two party system was the outgrowth of national expansion, regional divisions, and the coexistence of slave and wage labor. Republican paranoia about a one party state may demonstrate its unconscious understanding that it has lost its utility as either a bulwark of American capital or as a contributor to any of the solutions which the entire world will require from the working mass of its citizens in the near future.

In each art the difficulty of the form is a substitution for the difficulty of direct apprehension and expression of the object. The first difficulty may be more or less overcome, but the second is insuperable; thus every poem begins, or ought to, by a disorderly retreat to defensible positions. Or, rather, by a perception of the hopelessness of direct combat, and a resort to the warfare of spells, effigies, and prophecies.

Richard Wilbur

Five Million Dollars!

Aerial shots for this month's Game Night sponsored by Deutsche Zeppelin-Reederei.

The Wasteland

The Improvements

Development

The word 'improve' itself, in its original meaning, did not mean just 'make better in a general sense but literally meant to do something for monetary profit, especially to cultivate land for profit (based on the old French for into, en, and profit, pros - or its oblique case, preu). By the seventeenth century, the word 'improver' was firmly fixed in the language to refer to someone who rendered land productive and profitable, especially by enclosing it or reclaiming waste.

The Origin of Capitalism - Ellen Meiksins Wood 

WHAT THE BUK?????

Boris the Spider

Object: Destroy all your opponents choppers or guns.

Chopper Strike

Yankee Imperialistas have come to play

Losses mount

Cornered

Victory in the fight for world domination

Aww, what's up the Donald?

Confederate Coal

If then all organic instincts are conservative, historically acquired, and are directed towards regression, towards reinstatement of something earlier, we are obliged to place all the results of organic development to the credit of external, disturbing and distracting influences. The rudimentary creature would from its very beginning not have wanted to change, would, if circumstances had remained the same, have always merely repeated the same course of existence. But in the last resort it must have been the evolution of our earth, and its relation to the sun, that has left its imprint on the development of organisms. The conservative organic instincts have absorbed everyone of these enforced alterations in the course of life and have stored them for repetition; they thus present the delusive appearance of forces striving after change and progress, while they are merely endeavouring to reach an old goal by ways both old and new. This final goal of all organic striving can be stated too. It would be counter to the conservative nature of instinct if the goal of life were a state never hitherto reached. It must rather be an ancient starting point, which the living being left long ago, and to which it harks back again by all the circuitous paths of development. If we may assume as an experience admitting of no exception that everything living dies from causes within itself, and returns to the inorganic, we can only say ‘The goal of all life is death’, and, casting back, ‘The inanimate was there before the animate.’
Freud - Beyond the Pleasure Principle

"What a loser you are, ain't nothing wrong with rolling some confederate coal*," one person replied.
Conservatives Are Purposely Making Their Cars Spew Black Smoke To Protest Obama And Environmentalists

America has always dreamt of empire. As the centuries went by that empire grew in its imagination as it did in territory. With victory in WW2 and, in particular, with its grasp of the technical means to destroy anything on earth the attainment of a universal empire seemed to have been achieved. But the decades since have filled with reversals and the imperial dreams have become a twilight of anxiety.

Politically the war effort against the Axis was led by the Democratic Party which had taken the form of a truce between labor and capital. The Republican Party kept its own counsel throughout as representative of those who would refuse all compromise in the struggle against socialism. With the end of the war they were able to regain a political balance in a two party arrangement behind American military and economic domination of global capitalism.

Ideologically this domination was expressed as a liberal adherence to the ideals of human rights but also as a conservative adherence to the instruments and structures of imperial realpolitik. While American power enjoyed its ascendance this duality was maintained by both political parties. The points of debate between them were nearly interchangeable.

The political ecology of imperialism included a gentlemanly range of polite domination for, well understood, the good of the dominated as well as those methods which are unfortunate, are kept at arm's length, and are only discussed among friends. It is this long-standing accord to which the centrists of all parties still genuflect. But its hold on their mass base has slipped. While cracking can be seen in both the first casualty is the GOP. Throughout the 2016 campaign Trump proclaimed that this election would be the last chance for his voters to turn back their numberless enemies. Why?

The end of the world is always at hand. There is every indication that Trump was prepared to carry his campaign beyond the loss that was predicted rather than accept final defeat for the forces of reaction. Behind the trope of the end times, however, there is a reality of precariousness for the class position of his confederates.

The full maturity of global capitalism has not created the satisfaction of empire which its prophets foretold after the fall of the Soviet Union. It has, instead, raised the cost to the imperial homeland while distributing the benefits among nations more broadly. For the working class worldwide the result is the squeeze. And for the Republican base this has meant a difficult conversation with their leadership.

The enrollment of workers in the burden of empire requires a payoff for some and the whip for others. American politics is infused with the aura of the payoff. It is the dream, the frontier, the pie in the sky. In the 20th century it was real for many. In the 21st its disappearance must be explained. For the Democratic Party that requires a balancing act between the socialist aspirations of its voters and the party’s fealty to capital. That contradiction may be growing but it isn't unfamiliar to anyone in its ranks.

The Republican party has a new problem. Because they cannot allow that the diminishing returns from the empire are caused by anything structural to capitalism they must lay blame outside the happy fellowship between their right minded voters and their patriotic rulers. The entire apparatus of the American empire is found to be at fault along with its allies. And here the stories of antisemitism and white supremacy become not just privately allowed but necessary. The loss of status which is felt by the former favorites of the system does not arise because they are, at the end of the day, just another bunch of proletarians to be squeezed but because they have been betrayed by those who bear the mark of the outsider.

So the walls go up. But it's too late. The invading socialist society is everywhere. The ruling class has withdrawn within castles that are global even though they have room for very few. If you have been left outside but crave the inside you will be suffering a variety of breakdowns. And with the most fragile this will often manifest as an urge to return to the inorganic, the Todestrieb.

At the pinnacle of empire we have witnessed a president, frustrated to his core by the inability of American military forces to sufficiently subdue rebellion in Afghanistan, give vent to a genocidal level of wish fulfillment in proclaiming his repressed urge to exterminate the entire country. We are all far too familiar with this kind of involuntary thought process by now. As it is in the palace so it is in the countryside.

Historically both parties have shared in the criminal side of American politics. The post-war capture of the forces of the southern Lost Cause by the Republicans, however, established a carousel between the respectable faces at the heights of capital and the unmentionable associates of the Klan and Nazi right. What had been a voting block split between the parties is now a Republican stronghold.

But what began as reinforcement of Republican ranks has corroded the party’s connections to its own upper tier. In the acceleration of events in the 21st century the party’s base has come to mistrust those who would instruct them in the requirements for the proper management of empire; experience, credentials, and polish. Things may not be going well for it around the globe but the idiotic schemes, by which I mean those that are simply held privately with little or no vetting by the councils of state, those that are proclaimed on stage by a celebrity of little discernment, they will not right the ship.

With no evidence of progress in their lives all Trump’s audience knows is that they are surrounded by the “external, disturbing and distracting” and all they wish for is the “reinstatement of something earlier”. But repose is not in the cards and what existed earlier is no longer with us. Trump is lost and temporary shepherd of the lost. The numbers of the desperate who take the path to their own inorganic state are rising. As are the numbers of those who choose to first destroy at random before ending their own life or surrendering. Then there are the confederates who proclaim their loyalty to the dead by “rollin’ coal” or simply parading their private firepower. All are showing their readiness to volunteer for a militia of the clampdown when the time is ripe. And for most, at the end of their tether to life, that time is now.

Fascism, in embryo here, is also a wish to return to something earlier. An attempt to resolve the contradictions of the world with the blessings of the inorganic whether by war or by rapture. By the naming of the enemy the new GOP has, in its own way, shown us from which quarter the winds of change are blowing. No rally is complete without a ringing denunciation of the political program of the working class. Whenever they identify a specific target we can see they are wrapped in illusion. As socialists we have to admit that the workers are hardly prepared for the grand struggle which the right believes is already upon them. Our traditional organizations are at best bogged down and at worst arrayed against us. But, in their upside-down fashion, the Republicans recognize that we are, nevertheless, the reality of change and progress that they dread.


* Confederate coal, it should come as no surprise, was a southern technique of sabotage against Union railroads, explosives hidden in lumps of coal.

Au revoir to summer. Chicks dig the wax on the beach.

That! This World Needs Me!

This Is My Lucky Day!

Mankind Is Doomed!!

Roman dice 1st - 3rd centuries AD

The Golden Cups - I'm So Glad (1968)

Also the Void

In the old times the peasantry cultivated the land in common and lived well though modestly.

That is, until the arrival of the monster, Trogdor.

Trogdor burninated the land and the inhabitants thereof and the peasants were greatly afraid. He showed no mercy.

 In their fear they called upon the Knights and Archers to defend them from Trogdor.

But they were of little use against Trogdor and insead became an oppression upon the peasants striding here and there across the countryside.

Finally they summoned the mighty hero, Troghammer. But he was no better than the Knights and, in the end, the peasants were crushed.

What was their fate? Wailing and gnashing of teeth.

What lesson can we draw from this sorry tale?

Yeah, beats me.

Wonderful Game of OZ

BB is not buying whatever it is you're selling as she stirs her coffee.

Chicks want to see if YOU dig the wax.

The WayBack Machine

Spreadsheet of Game Night history

Bubblin' Crude

Drill, Baby, Drill

Black Gold, Texas Tea

And up through the ground came a bubblin' crude

"Does Rockefeller produce a drop of oil, or Carnegie an ounce of steel, or Hill an inch of transportation? Were they and all their class to resign, would the spinal cord of these great enterprises be severed and humanity paralyzed?"

Eugene Debs, Capital and Labor: Parasites and Hosts

Supergirl!

https://www.usdish.com/blog/marvel-vs-dc-your-states-favorite-comics-2019

Annette digs the wax

Archaeoludology

Machine learning is about to revolutionize the study of ancient games

Nancy spots a commie, doesn't tip the feds

Sophia digs the wax with a cig

Malcolm John Rebennack (November 20, 1941 – June 6, 2019)

SOUR GRAPES!

     THE ENDING THAT WAS HOPED FOR... 

Simple Reproduction

Whatever the social form of the production process, it has to be continuous, it must periodically repeat the same phases. A society can no more cease to produce than it can cease to consume. When viewed, therefore, as a connected whole, and in the constant flux of its incessant renewal, every social process of production is at the same time a process of reproduction.

Marx - Capital Vol 1 Ch 23

Production, other than specialized weaponry, seldom takes the stage in Game of Thrones. In the final episode it receives some attention as the Small Council attends to the required repairs to the infrastructure of the realm after the Last Battle. This isn’t why we’ve watched it. Nor can we complain that the working population of Westeros is invisible except when it is being slaughtered or seeking refuge. We seek out fantasy, in part, to evade production.

The “constant flux” which has commanded our attention over eight seasons is the story of a ruling class. We have been fascinated by a vast compilation of political battle among an enormous cast of aristocrats and their retainers. We are enthralled by stories of the aristocracy because, to start with, they are no longer our ruling class but, more fundamentally, because the reproduction of a hereditary ruling class is human reproduction.

The abstract and sophisticated narratives which are part and parcel of our world of abstracted production carry over the much older stories but they have never disappeared and they dominate the mass market. We don’t need to look very closely at Game of Thrones to find them. Above all we find the story, over and over, of inheritance. And each time we do the story ends badly. With the interesting exception of Sam (Tarly?) Jr there are no surviving heirs who were born after the execution of Ned Stark. And among the principle members of the Westeros aristocracy none are married at story’s close.

The Queen who was pregnant lies crushed. The Queen who was deceived into sacrificing her only child and became mother to dragons is murdered by her nephew, the true claimant to the Molten Throne, who is then sentenced to celibacy. His sisters survive unmarried. If there are heirs to any of the great houses of Westeros we know nothing of them. And the throne itself is given to a paralyzed seer nominated The Broken.

We have been prepared for this. The most notable wedding was a massacre. Characters have been widowed at a rate more than medieval. Children are sacrificed and men are castrated for a variety of causes. And now the surviving House of Stark have each one abandoned the field. Jon has left for the northern forest, Arya for the western sea. Sansa has seceded, and even the new king has taken to the flyways searching for Drogon.

Speaking of the House of Stark, is winter still coming? Wasn’t it supposed to last a long time? From my perch in the True North I can’t say I’m impressed.

What they leave behind in the six kingdoms does not inspire confidence. The new Master of Coin seems distracted. Rebuilding will likely require substantial loans from the Iron Bank. Interest rates will probably rise since the new administration cannot claim the AAA rating of the Lannisters. And won’t they still have to amortize the Golden Company even after they were executed? The game which the Mad King set in motion demonstrates a crisis of social reproduction and brings it to a head. Isn’t that why we not only watched but were fascinated?

If the feudalism of Westeros is crumbling because of the insanity of its rulers then the election of a paralyzed shaman could be a solution. That would certainly be a comforting thought for the major parties of our own republics. But aren’t we still uneasy about Westeros? And aren’t we uneasy about our own world? If not then why have we so raptly consumed a story that proclaims its subversion of its own genre? Whatever our favorites in the game would we have been content with any of them on the throne any more than we are with the three-eyed raven?

Again and again the feudal claimants have disappointed us. This is because feudalism has disappointed us. And so has capitalism. Nothing is produced that is not over production. Nothing is consumed that does not entail debt. And the planet groans. Maybe the mass dissatisfaction with the final season shows that we are looking for a new story. Wheels, broken or merely mired, are not the problem. What we require is another path forward.