Delighted to hear of plan to allot miserly funds to peasantry/pensioners. Very decent of autocrats, last spotted forcing slave labor to construct Olympic spectacle. Is nothing sacred? Answer in a word is, no. But not that decent, since more in autocrats’ interest than in peasantry/pensioners’, lest they once again take to long march. Which, apparently, is—as it’s always been and evidently always will be—necessary. By now if only in the interest of salvaging something of what used to be planet earth. Unless technocrats locate another more or less similar planet whereat humanity might begin again the long process of destruction of both collective self and planet.

Our own unknown-radical Medicare and Social Security programs might well be about to be history. Absolutely, if pols get their way on behalf of sponsors. When didn’t pols on behalf of selves and sponsors get their way? Since a couple revolutions? Before and after those.

I was just thinking of how keeping up Christian rhetoric is equally problematic when keepers of ideology are Gucci-shod. Gucci not exactly what one fisherman wore or any other fisherman before or since ever wore. I’d bet what remains of my lost cause of a 401 that Tony and James (Dobson, not the guy who wrote the chapter in the Bible) wear Gucci, along with all media hosts and Washington pols, and Russian, Chinese et al. elites. While wives and/or girlfriends sport handbags too. Not to be sexist. If the host or pol is a lady, then hubby and/or boyfriend with at least a Gucci wallet or six. Real ones, not Chinese fakes. What’s the difference again? Oh yeah, price. They all look alike to me. As do autocrats look and sound by any other name: “Just call me, boss.” How about instead of “boss,” we call ya just a f-ing fruitcake? Sociopathological torturer? How about greasy-greedy (and torturing) SOB, aka, pig of a mama pig both of a sty? Apologies to actual porcine that somehow were saddled with bad rep. Any can think up their own apt insult for all the good doing so does. Destroyers of worlds (ahem) wallow in insults taken as complementary signifiers signifying wealth and power. “Let (us) eat cake.” (More recently put only slightly differently by Carly Fiorina, one-time HP mistress. Due credit for truly refreshingly honest expression of contempt for those not of her investor class.)

But forget commies and god botherers (as Aussies refer to religious) both of whose hypocrisy pales to that of speakers (hopefully disingenuously spoken, since even worse if not) of democracy elsewhere including here. To speak, the operative verb word. For instance, one thing to speak, “reform,” another to effect “reform.” Which would amount to effectuation of material (then also mental and spiritual) change in the universe as widely understood to be/exist in brute fact. For some long time more than a few millennia. In the existential sense, the universe wherein people are born of dust not long before returning to dust. That is, in the universe not wholly of speech-spectacle according to pols, pundits, shareholders and managers (bureaucrats of all ideological and/or political stripes) and other professors both professional and amateur.

In Beltway speak, as at most other locales around the globe, “reform” means now you see (and hear) it, now you don’t.

It’s not as though five centuries from now historians will themselves be able to speak of a discernable distinction with a difference concerning the old U.S.S.R., the flagging empire that is currently the U.S.A. and the new-and-improved Peeps Republic now on the verge of new empire. All three merely one or another form of ongoing autocracy—economically, socially and politically. Liberation of and for all a more distant goal by now than ever before in the history of humankind. (Is there other history?)

Now, how about some cake to insert in those shorts?