Friday, March 6, 2015

Richistan and political news from the second year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News


I'm taking advantage of Flashblack Friday on Facebook to attend to some unfinished business that I started not once, but twice, and foreshadowed three times.

I first alluded to the main entry featured in today's entry came in the following passage from Second Year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News: Eastwooding.
I credit that to good promotion, including at Kunstler's blog, where I got 436 page views from Zeitgeist Failure, the most from any of Kunstler's entries for all of 2012. That tide lifted another boat higher, though, and it will get an entry of its own later.
That was two years ago.

During April of last year, I actually named the post in My readers love to write comments about pets.
The actual most commented on entry from the second year of the blog with comments actually left during the second year of the blog was probably Matt Taibbi and Mike Lofgren are on the same page about the global rich with eight comments.  I'll get to that post in a future retrospective.
Later that month, I put the entry in the context of the other posts from that blogging year at the end of Holidays from the second year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News outlined the task.
I have one more entry left before I wrap up the second year of this blog--depressing political news.  Hey, what do you expect?  This may be a weird, hopeful doomer blog, but it's still a doomer blog.
I've teased my readers enough.  Follow over the jump for a post about Richistan plus two entries about depressing political news to complete a series I began two years ago, stopped halfway through, resumed last year, and finally finish today.

The most commented and eighth most read on entry of the second year of the blog was the previously mentioned Matt Taibbi and Mike Lofgren are on the same page about the global rich, which I concluded by ironically telling my readers "Welcome to Richistan."  I promoted it at Kunstler's blog in the comments to Zeitgeist Failure.
I figured you’d continue to vent your spleen over the national political parties’ conventions. Just the same, you’re right about the political parties being vehicles for earning power through wish fulfillment–and I’m saying that as a lowest level party functionary. So long as the game can go on, that’s what the game will be. It will take one hell of a reality check, such as a war with Iran, to change the game and its goals.

Speaking of changing the game, Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone on the Left and Mike Lofgren on the Right seem to agree on a different threat to business as usual–that the conflict of the future will be between a transnational wealthy elite and the rest of us. That’s something that could take place even in the midst of contraction. If anything, Lofgren is even more urgent about it than Taibbi. Welcome to Richistan, Snow Crash, and the Hunger Games, all rolled into one.

I blogged about the shared concerns of Taibbi and Lofgren over at Crazy Eddie’s Motie News, along with Jim’s state’s senior senator supporting science, Alaska and NASA exploring using airships for transportation, National Review exposing the GOP’s authoritarian tendencies on their cover, space news, and Michigan politics, including how the corn pone fascists of the Tea Party are booting out incumbents who take their jobs seriously under the guise of RINO hunting.
My comment worked wonderfully, as I described in Second Year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News: Eastwooding.  As my readers have probably figured out, the boat lifted higher by the tide of readers coming from Kunstler's blog was this one.

Nebris also linked to the entry over at The Hipcrime Vocab entry We Are All Occupied Countries on the same topic, posted the same day.  I showed my appreciation in a reply.
Thanks for posting the link to my entry and for promoting it on your LJ. I'm also glad to see escapefromwisconsin commenting at my blog. I'll be sure to answer his comment there presently.
Here's Chad's comment.
Much of the territory ceded by the government has been carved up into sovereign enclaves, each run by its own big business franchise (such as "Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong") or the various residential burbclaves (suburban enclaves).

The future is here:

"The government of Honduras has signed a deal with private investors for the construction of three privately run cities with their own legal and tax systems.The memorandum of agreement signed Tuesday is part of a controversial experiment meant to bring badly needed economic growth to this small Central American country."

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/09/yesterday-was-an-interesting-day-for-development-economics.html

More and more, the most fevered imaginations of science fiction writers are becoming actual reality (private cities, drone strikes, mass surveillance, intelligent bots, etc.)
As Nebris replied, "SciFi is Now." Sometimes it's scary and uncanny how Chad, Nebris, and I can get on the same wavelength.

Maybe I should blog about Richistan some more, as I've moved to the edge of one of the local enclaves of Richistan.  As the advice to writers goes, write what you know.

Enough of Richistan.  Time for other depressing political news, beginning with The psychology of campaign ads plus a bad sign for representative democracy.  This was the tenth most read entry of the second year of the blog, something I attribute mostly to promotion at Kunstler's blog entry Duty.
[T]he big post this past week was yesterday’s, which was about the psychology of campaign ads. One of the results was routine (people tune out the ads of the opposition), but the other was counter-intuitive; negative ads work best on people who believe in government. Unfortunately, the number of people who think the Federal government in the form of Congress works is shrinking dramatically. That’s a bad sign for the future of representative democracy.
I also promoted this entry at the the Coffee Party USA Facebook page in 2014, which earned it three of its four comments.  The news may be from 2012, but the conclusions are still valid.

Speaking of bad news for the future of representative democracy, Rachel Maddow reported that Michigan is now Ignoreland.  I give this entry an honorable mention in the top 20.  I remember it being among the 20 most read, but I lost my records when water damaged the computer I used the past two years and a search of the previous retrospectives failed to find the precise placement in the top 20, although there seems to be an empty spot somewhere in the list.  So, Honorable Mention it is--for now.  I'll check again and update when I post the retrospectives for this blogging year.

I am now done with the entries from the second year of the blog.  It only took me two years to finish, just in time to start this year's retrospectives in a little over two weeks.  May I finish them like I finished the third year's, within a month!

Previous entries in this series.
Entries in the previous series:

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