December 27th is
Fruitcake Day
Visit the Zoo Day
Howdy Doody Day *
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Wall of zombies in World War Z (2013) … The film stars Brad Pitt as Gerry Lane, a former United Nations investigator who must travel the world to find a way to stop a zombie pandemic. … Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times remarked, “World War Z plays a bit like a series of separate films and the juncture where the new final act was grafted onto the proceedings is unmistakable, but unless you knew about the film’s troubled past, you’d never guess it existed.” … A video game tie-in survival horror game, World War Z, was developed by Phosphor Games Studio and released for the iOS mobile platforms in May 2013. The game is a spin-off of the film, being set in Denver, Kyoto, and Paris, and featuring an entirely different set of characters. … https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_Z_(film)
“Not one of the elders” got behind candidate Reagan in the beginning, Arthur Laffer said. He joked that when Reagan — perceived by critics as a lightweight, a bigot and a war monger — won the 1980 primaries, the Republican establishment “poured on us like a waterfall of cockroaches.”
The window in the kitchen shaft was bulging black with cockroaches. … It soon became a waterfall of cockroaches cascading out over the edge of the roof. The Book of Smoke By Carlos Black (2006)
We do now have a “turbocharged capitalism” with greater boost and more wind/air flow, that operates in algorithmic high-frequency trading of finance capital. As observed earlier, Trump tweets may be implicated in legal/illegal insider trading of aerospace stocks. Crises may have the reach of generations and the grasp of immediate, creative destruction.
In capitalism the moment of consumption often is seen as a moment of (re)production but that problem of labor / value has been one for the ages. But its direction – for example, does its management come above or below, persists.
Debates in the 1920s and 1930s revolved between socialists who believed that a central authority could use all available knowledge to arrive at the best possible (in their minds) economic plan for society and those free marketeers who countered that, because the problems of modern society are so complex, economic planning is impossible and only markets could coordinate economic activity.
These two positions framed other proposals too, that a necessary combination of markets and planning – “market socialism” – could provide a third solution. But the world has changed and there are new obstacles to overcome.
What we do see is a “pastoral ballet on a revolutionary theme” attempted in the US and transferred to other countries from the 1960 — 1970s and attempted nationally against the mythic Reaganism that has now reemerged as Trumpism with an ethno-nationalist tinge.
And the cockroaches, like so many reproduced Kafkaesque narratives pour upon us like a mighty stream in 2017. Now Trumpism attempts to infect us virally by implanting a Twitter shorthand that renders LIVs into zombies.
Nicole Plyler Fisk
Gene Howington
FFS Guest Blogger
Joy of Fishes
Chuck Stanley
shortfinals
Terry Welshans
ann li-summers
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Flowers For Socrates 