Kombinat!
Wealthy Towns, the Commons and Elitism
There! Look here! I made a post which later I attempted to publish but server refused. Instead I published it a as a comment at WealthBondage. But few days passed and there I was again looking at doing something here, like posting, writing, putting words you know and I found that perhaps I could sorf of kind of post it here, as it was already written you know. So here it is below for archival purposes since the action is really at
WealthBondage with Tutor even saying Bravo! to Kombinat! as if that could pay our bills but of course saying Bravo! to K! is good, it goes right to feed this author's elitist ego. So more Bravos! please. We do have plenty of Bravos! in our basement but we'll be happy to store any new ones coming our ways as well. One never knows when one can be in desperate need of a Bravo! and when that day comes we'll just go down to the basement and pick one or two to fight the gloom of daily living which is so so heavy you know.
OK so of to that post here for archival purposes.
I rarely write posts that make a point
nowadays. Today I am thinking of writing one suspecting that I will completely lose you, my reader in my elucidations for I am attempting to
write on the topic of Commons and Wealthy Towns as I was prompted by my last visit to
The Happy Tutor's blog (as I am often wont to do for its efficacy to nourish my mind and diminish my stupidity for just one more day) where I found the link to
David Bollier's post on Wealthy Towns, the Commons and Elitism from which I quote:
"it can be far easier for rich people to defend the commons than it is for communities of low-income people, who may have few political choices. Wealthy towns have already got theirs, and can more easily “afford” to forgo that last, extra increment of market gain. Poorer towns are forever scrambling for whatever economic gains they can eke out. Corporations are only too aware of this vulnerability and have become experts in preying upon it, donning a mantle of populism to push through projects that will enrich their shareholders."
It is simply shocking to see such a nice person as David make such a completely incorrect assumption on what motivates 'The Rich' to be champions of the commons as he calls them. The guess presented in the beginning of the post "When do the wealthy become champions of the commons? (...) it's when market activity begins to destroy things that they value, and it becomes clear that only an intact commons can save them" is a bit nostalgic and simply wrong. Let us not think for a moment that the rich who live in towns like Hercules, California or the Island of Nantucket can "forgo that last, extra increment of market gain." It may seem that 'they can easily afford it' but they never will for indeed their banning the large chains stores from their historic downtowns, or waterfronts is done in the name of economic gain. It is exactly that 'extra increment of market gain'
We should not measure the value propositions of The Rich using the measurement devices of The Poor. Only The Poor would say "Look, even the rich now know the value of commons" - In fact The Rich might say "We know the value of our wealth but you, The Poor, assume that we value The Commons". - The rich do value the commons, 'their' commons which they call 'our' Commons where 'our' doesn't include 'the poor'. Indeed the 'Value Proposition' of the island of Nantucket is the very act of banning the large chain stores from its downtown. The Wealthy Towns know how to get that 'extra increment of market gain'. Many people who live in such towns are indeed shareholders in Corporations that build large chains stores in millions of other poor towns. Why would they need a large chains store in their backyard? They make their money from you having such a store in yours.
If you seem to think now that I paint the Rich as greedy assholes I am safely assuming that you are viewing this post with the eyes of The Poor. Yes, many of them are assholes yet the Poor greedy assholes far outnumber them in every town in the U.S but that is not the point. The point is that 'The Commons' is not a matter of the Rich or the Poor and who gains from its existence. Any conversation framed by the economic gain will never be a conversation about The Commons. It will be a conversation about the economic gain.
Candidia in her post epitomizes the 'for ever framed by Wealth Bondage' view of The Commons in her saying "You take the Wealth Bondage SuperCenter and I will make sure the Dumpster is behind a nice green shrub." Candidia knows all too well (only because Tutor is here moral advisor) that 'inside the WealthBondage' the conversation will always be about WealthBondage no matter what the topic is. As long as it is 'inside Wealth Bondage' she 'benefits'. Our Civility (whatever is left of it) dictates that conversation be about responsibility, participation, equality of access, participation, governance of the spaces we share, the culture we create, the very language we speak. It is not a conversation 'outside' WealthBondage, it is an all together separate conversation. I purposefully did not include the word 'ownership' for The Commons can not be bought or sold and it has only one owner. (Here is a note for stupid people: Any conversation outside Wealth Bondage is inside WealthBondage so don't ask who the owner is and quit that addiction to stupid questions)
Let us also not make a mistake here and assume that we know what The Commons is (are?). I believe the conversation has disappeared and reviving it in the context of the economic advantage will not be a conversation about The Commons any more (see note for stupid people above) The Commons is a phenomenon of civic life, cultured life, civilized life. Let us look at history, remnants of the past but let us not be nostalgic about them less we relegate ourselves to mere spectators as Capital parades before our eyes tossing us trinkets for momentary amusements. As Citizens of United States it is our obligation to not only participate in the parade but to lead it and most of all we must decide where and how Capital marches with us. The parade begins in Town Halls with strong local governments. It's were Citizenship meets Capital and they have a conversation about The Commons. it seems Wealthy Towns know it even though they are mired in WealthBondage.
That's about it. Thanks for reading.
Who Moved My Cheese Olympics
Wealth Bondage: Who Moved My Cheese?:
Now, we could play at lobbing dead mice into the open trap-door of a dumpster and your opponent has to find and give you a piece of cheese to eat, or a perpetually-valid voucher for a 10-lb. block of Wisconsin Cheddar.
Quicken for Mac 2006. The Ex Communists Revenge
Quicken for Mac 2006 is a software revenge of the Ex Communist Commandos trained in the art of confusing the fuck out of the unsuspecting customer. You may have read my
first attempt at working with this Trojan Horse Naziwear and my second
report about infiltration of Kommunist Klones. But the latest trick I found is this. Let's say 2 years ago I bought 1 share of BRK B (that would be the B stock of Berkshire Hathaway. Hi Warren!) for $3076 because I wanted to save some money on my GECCO car insurance and receive these nice Annual Reports with chairman's letters to shareholders but I decided that I should really sell that stock few months later since I had sold car my car and I could get Annual Reports on the web. So I sold the stock, one share. Both transactions were entered in Quicken for Mac 2006 Deluxe. All was seemingly well with BRK b for ever having been glued to the memory of Quicken files.
Few months ago I realized that I really don't want to see BRK b is in the list of all my securities. This was a stock I didn't really pay attention to any more and I didn't want to track it nor have it visible in my Security Detail window as I was scanning my Empire's holdings weekly. - So what did I do? I could have just hidden it in my list of securities yet I had decided that I would probably never need to see it again and I have selected to delete it from the list of securities. - Ha! But how does Quicken for Mac 2006 Deluxe react to such a move by a small time Empire Building Invstor? It doesn't say to me "Yo. Fucker, you got some transactions for this security and if you delete it the transactions will be orphaned". No No No. Instead it simply removes the security from the list; and it removes it from the already reconciled transactions in my register for the account. It keeps the transactions but it removes the reference and what those transactions are now referring to is a non exisiting item, a blank. But I only found out about it 3 months later.
One day I happen to scan my Register and I find several Reconciled transactions with share prices, commissions and and total cash ins and outs and I have no fucking idea what they refer to because where the security's name is supposed to be I have a blank space. - After getting pissed off at the Ex Communist Commandos who guide the work of the programmers at Quicken producing a shitty piece of software called Quicken for Mac 2006 I try to figure out what happened, and this is where BRK b came into being. It was easy to spot from some 20 transactions the one share for $3076. Thank Jesus Bunker that there is such a stock as BRK b trading at $3000 per share or I would have never been able to figure out what happened. I remember deleting BRK b, having been successful at it and not having any objections from Quicken I have deleted other securities I no longer cared about since my relationship with them was brief and a long time ago (say 5 years ago) and some of them were bought by other companies and were no longer traded. It seemed like this house cleaning made sense to me. But Quicken did its part diligently. For every security I deleted it simply removed all references from the already existing transactions.
Now comes the fun part. I needed to find what all those 20 some transactions were related to. Kombinat! is great at record keeping. it knows all and can find all at all times so I found the transactions and all I needed to do was to enter back the security names in my Register for the transactions with blank names. Easy, right? Well, yes but Quicken upon having accepted the name of my newly reset retyped reentered security automatically started changing the transactions amounts because even when the security was deleted somehow someway Quicken continued keeping track of the closing price of that security for the day I sold it and instead of keeping the prices intact (yes, they were Reconciled mind you) it insisted that indeed perhaps I did sell that particular security at the closing price of the day. But guess what, Quicken didn't alert me of this at all, it just automatically changed the price and when I saved the record it prompted me to reconcile my account anew because amounts were not correct any more. So if you are an investor you may not know exactly for how much you sold each share, you just know the proceeds and commission. This is after all you are interested in really. Total proceeds and commission for tax purposes. But Quicken uses the number of shares times the prices it thinks you sold it for plus the commission you already have had entered and calculates the total proceeds for you without asking you. This I concluded was the revenge of Ex Communist Commands who now are in charge producing this shitty software called Quicken for Mac 2006 Deluxe.
Now I am really tired and I don't want to write any more about the next Communist Trick called Stock Splits and how that is handled. Let's just say completely shitty, like an Ex Communist Commando would do to confuse your Capitalist Spirit. Oy Shitty indeed. (yes, Quicken for Mac 2006 Deluxe belongs to the Museum of Communism)
spiritual but not jewish
mystic bourgeoisie: spiritual but not jewish:
But racism isn't about Jews or blacks or browns or pinko Reds. It's about the Other. The dark and dangerous unknown. Terra incognita. As it said on the old maps: here be dragons. And on the edges of our modern inner cities: here be... [pick your poison
Mike Golby's Cape Town's Little Boxes
:: YBLOG ZA :: Mike Golby :::
The point is that I can go from one side of the city to another and what do I find? Little boxes. Less elaborate little boxes, but little boxes nonetheless. Whether like the one pigeon, I look to the mountain or, like the other, to the Cape Flats, all I see are millions of little boxes—staring back at me. In the end, that's what it's all about (the pun's intended).
Some Capetonians have better little boxes; most suffer worse.
...
The Cape Flats used to be covered by sea. The land will return to the sea. Before it does, though, I get quite a kick out of that which I call the Cape Flats's Revenge. A sea of people, it's filling fast and is starting to erode the green-leafed quietude of the suburbs hugging the mountain. It's about bloody time something or someone came back to haunt us.
Next week, we'll look at security fences.
Emptybottle.org: Ball Squeezing Time
Emptybottle.org: Ball Squeezing Time:
For a while, I've been having the occasional dull ache in the lower back. I figured that it was sleeping in my customary discus-thrower pose on the new, Korean mattress my wife had bought a few months back. Being new, and in particular being Korean (although cunningly named 'Lady Americana' to give it that so-important New Jersey cultural cachet), it is approximately as hard as a slab of granite. Not that soft, dissolute western granite, either. Good, hard, Korean sleeping-granite, ripped from the very earth in the mattress mines of Kangwon-do
Not so imaginary selling habits of merchants
Merchant: Yes, this item is $83
Customer: I'll take it.
Merchant: That will be $92 then please.
Customer: But you said it was $83
Merchant: There is a $9 fee for payment processing which is factored in to make a final price.
Customer: Huh? Then I will pay with cash.
Merchant: The $9 fee is for all kinds of payments, cash or credit.
Customer: This is ridiculous. (customer walks out of the store slamming the door)
Merchant : People are so rude these days.
Tom Wolfe interview
Interview: Not just another ice-cream-suit-wearing, pen-wielding master of the statusphere:
Picasso left art school at the age of fifteen, on the grounds there was nothing more they could teach him. This is extolled in biographies of Picasso. Unfortunately, he never learned perspective. In his realistic period, early in his life, there's never a room with perspective. He puts a figure or two and a stick of furniture in the foreground, and everything beyond them is fog. He never really learned anatomy. In many of his realistic pictures, fingers and thumbs are like a bunch of asparagus that you buy in the grocery store. He was never very good on things like foreshortening. If I were as ill-prepared as Picasso or Braque I would have thought up a name like Cubism, too, as a way of legitimizing one's lack of skill.
Creatures of Language Remote Controlled by Status Rank
Tom Wolfe's 2006 Jefferson Lecture: (via
RageBoy)
Even before I left graduate school I had come to the conclusion that virtually all people live by what I think of as a "fiction-absolute." Each individual adopts a set of values which, if truly absolute in the world--so ordained by some almighty force--would make not that individual but his group . . . the best of all possible groups, the best of all inner circles. Politicians, the rich, the celebrated, become mere types. Does this apply to "the intellectuals" also? Oh, yes. . . perfectly, all too perfectly.
The human beast's belief in his own fiction-absolute accounts for one of the most puzzling and in many cases irrational phenomena of our time
Usefulness of Latin?
Usefulness of Latin?:
in order to learn READ, READ, AND READ"!!!.
That´s all...
Cristian Jacobo
United we Stand. Divided we Fall. Kombinat! Profits from Fall
A thought popped in today spoken many times - "United we stand, divided we fall" - so it seems under the pretense of Uniting Us to Stand we are being Divided to Fall. This is what I perhaps wanted to point at in previous post.
The World for Sale is a transactional slogan of Spare Parts Merchants. But the spare parts are not spare. They are torn from the whole, ripped out from the cohesive flow. Kombinat! is a Chop Shop. Those who stand up and say "I am a Uniter" are the Chop Shop Kombinat! owners. - They profit from breaking up silence into noise. The racket is; take a public good, for example: the freedom to stroll the neighborhood streets at night without fear of being mugged. Then maintain the state of fear and build the entire safety industry; locksmiths, padlocks, gates, barbed wire, lights, fences, bulletproof glass, private security cars and police cruisers driving slowly every hour and in all of it profit profit profit and never allow the public good of freedom to stroll without fear return for there is no profit in it.
- There is a reason why we don't want to know our neighbors. We are being divided into Individuals, cared for as Individuals, attended to as Individuals, addressed as Individuals, and we are addicted to being Individuals. We are presented Images like that of a Lone Tree in the middle of a field towering over the small blades of grass. Stupid Lone Tree because the Forest it grew in was cut out from around it. Now the Tree can be admired as Individual Special Unique Tree. This stupid Individualistic Capitalistic Tree which later can be protected and fought over and attended to as Individual Tree for Profit. Yes, Tis better to call Police or install yet another outdoor motion sensor lights, better yet buy a gun or more than one gun to protect your fucking individuality because the blades of grass might one day attack you. Yes Mrs Smith, we are on our way. Someone will be right there with you to attend to your individual fucking needs. Of course Mrs Smith you are a tax paying citizen and you demand to be heard of course of course.
Neighbors. Next to each other in a forest, community, city - pretending to be Lone Trees in the middle of a meadow towering over millions of blades of grass planted there by Kombinat! Of course Mrs Smith, we'll be right there to make sure the blades don't do you any harm. Of course you are a paying customer, debit or credit Mrs Smith? Yes, you are our highest priority.
Don't be fooled. Kombinat! is more interested in planting Blades of Grass for the profit is in making you an individual. Such is the World for Sale and it has nothing to do with Free Market or Prosperity for Prosperity is an attribute of Community and Liberty and Freedom belongs to all. In it there are no Individuals. Freedom is either for us or for none and it requires us to open doors, leave our guns at home and go over and knock on our neighbors doors, invite them to stroll the streets at night with you for what we are afraid of is losing our individuality sold to us by Kombinat! Chop Shop Merchants. For we are afraid of Another's sight and smell and stink. Afraid that our neighbors may not like our individuality ,why your neighbors are sold the same goods as you. They too are in fear of losing their individuality, their Capitalistic Lone Tree image standing there opposing the Blades of Grass. - Faking their best image of Freedom. There alone, parts of whole, profit producing individuals longing sometimes for the warmth of the forest but too addicted to fear of losing individuality.
Frank on Electrical Aliens
Listics - Frank Paynter:
The deregulated power industry is run by aliens from outer space intent on looping the Earth with huge high voltage cables, a harness they will use either to drag us all to a fiery doom within our own sun or perhaps to a darker fate in the lair of a huge space spider that feeds on planets roped in by the spider symbiotes sitting on power industry corporate boards. We don’t know which but it would be good to avoid either fate I think.
The Ultimate Fighting Anarchist -- In These Times
The Ultimate Fighting Anarchist -- In These Times:
“What I do is completely different than war, because everyone wants to be there, and it’s a competition. There’s no victim. We’re all entertainers,” he explains. “If there is any contradiction, it’s that we’re part of the capitalist machine, and I’m really just a wage slave. You know, we don’t make any money without fighting, and if I win I get more; if I lose I get less. But it’s simply a sport. Sure, it’s somewhat like a gladiator sport, but it’s voluntary.”
Monson grew up middle class in Minnesota. His mother still works as a nurse, and his late father worked at a penitentiary. He graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he wrestled, and then received his Masters in Psychology from the University of Minnesota. During his graduate work, Monson had his political awakening—a course entitled Community Psychology.
“Oh man, that class really opened my eyes,” he says. “Just looking at the way the world is run, the way that the people that might be disabled or have mental issues are left behind. How education and general welfare are not a priority, and how the elite run everything for their own benefit. Then I started reading a bunch of stuff—Animal Farm, the International Socialist Review, Chomsky—and I started thinking in a different way.” Monson the Ultimate Fighter uses Plato’s allegory of the cave to describe the experience.
World For Sale
George Grosz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
In Grosz's Germany, everything and everybody is for sale. All human transactions, except for the class solidarity of the workers, are poisoned. The world is owned by four breeds of pig: the capitalist, the officer, the priest and the hooker, whose other form is the sociable wife. He was one of the hanging judges of art. -- Robert Hughes
And rightly so everything and everybody in in this world is for sale. "Maul halten und weiter dienen"
Prohibition of Protest
Guardian Unlimited Books | By genre | Harold Pinter talks to Michael Billington:
MB: At the moment in Britain there is a great hunger for verbatim theatre. Is that a movement you support?
HP: Absolutely. It has produced a lot of good work at the Tricycle and the Royal Court, though I'm alarmed at what has happened to My Name Is Rachel Corrie in New York [the play recently co-edited from Corrie's diaries and letters by Alan Rickman and Guardian features editor Katharine Viner] ... The real fact there, as you know, is that Rachel Corrie was a young American woman who was looking at the Palestinian situation in Israel when one of the bulldozers that was demolishing Palestinian houses ran over and killed her ...
But that play has now been withdrawn by the producing theatre in New York and that is, I think, typical of what is happening more and more in Britain and America: suppression of dissent and the truth. I'd just point to the example of the prohibition of protest within a certain area outside the Houses of Parliament. One woman walked into this zone and read out the names of British soldiers killed in Iraq of whom at that time there were about 80. She was arrested, fined and now has a criminal record. What she was actually doing, in reading the names of the British dead outside the Houses of Parliament, was reminding people in Parliament of their ultimate responsibility. So the lid was put on her straight away.
