Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Is it just me, or do any other regular readers of this site have trouble penetrating Owen Paine's dense thickets of archer-than-thou prose jags? Take his current post, for example--I have no idea what the point is, or what he is saying.

What do you say we all chip in and buy OP a copy of Strunk and White?

Van

Van Mungo: you'll learn to love OP's wild and whirling words. He's just trying to marry his vast and underutilized education with righteous rage and madcap humor. Pity the guy!

"Why are the pwog elites so under the evil charm? Why the hypnotic stare? Why "we must rebuilt it restore it reanimate it reform it redeem it" blah blah blah? " (OP)

This one is easy -- we pwogs (inauthentic lefties) deep down are terrified of the changes required to bring in a truly eqalitarian society. However ill-gotten and underserved, we just can't let go of the one ladder rung above destitution we grabbed in the golden sixties and seventies.

Van -- Owen has a Strunk & White. I'm it.

You probably don't know this, but Owen is in fact a quadriplegic aphasic amnesiac dyslexic nullidexter. He "writes" his posts by blowing puffs of air into a plastic tube, in Morse code.

The result is sent to me, and I do what I can to make the great man's painful exhalations into something that resembles ordinary English prose.

Of course I don't want to overdo it -- that wild Tom O' Bedlam thing is half the charm, don't you think?

Seneca--
Thanks for the English translation of whatever language OP is writing in. Did you take a course at Berlitz to master Painish, or are you self-taught?

Perhaps OP could hire you to do executive summaries/English translations of all his manic rambles. As long as Michael Smith keeps according him limitless space out here, it would be a major service to regular visitors.

Thanks,
Van

O Van, Van, my man, you are being very harsh here. Go read Christopher Smart, and then come back to Owen. He grows on you, believe me.

Michael--
Harsh or frank? OP's posts can be fun, but sometimes frustrating when style eclipses sense. Anyway--thank you for your heroic labors. If anyone ever needed a Maxwell Perkins by his side, it's OP.

Van

OP reminds me of Ralph LaCharity. Are they kins in wordsmithery?

recall the severed hand of the alien
in the orignial

"thing from outerspace"

suddenly after hours of examination
it starts to move clench click its nailed fingers together
the gathered lab folks gasp

but the grave turtlenecked lead investigator
simply notes
in a level if a trace dramatic tone
after consulting his wrist watch

"at 3:14 pm the hand begain to move "

mjs could play that chap

btw, the brave experiment in free thinking on the Middle East seems to be over. Will it be called the Washington spring?

I take sensei op-san's meaning quite well. Speaking for his class, Sandy Weill told the paper of record "We didn’t rely on somebody else to build what we built," and his class ought to be quoted back those own words and told to live by them.

[See http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/15/business/15gilded.html]

My objection to OP's observation here is that it is a piece of pre-SMBIVA wishful thinking. What Dem-Zombie does OP believe will rise and so speak? Ain't. Gonna. Happen. In. This. Universe.

Owen is being sneaky. He knows there'll be no Dem-Zombie rising up to denounce the hand outs. But he's speaking the language of people getting ready to make a move.

My chapter of Rotary International is outraged by the Sandy Weills and the other welfare queen banksters. They've been caching weapons and asking contractors for bids on guillotines. There was, as one might expect, a lot of debate over that. My faction, the populists, believes that gallows offer fuller employment. My brother-in-law's faction believes any program of this kind needs to offer skills training, in addition to the corrective discipline. They won they pointed that hanging generally yanks the head off the malefactor anyway.

I mention this in strict confidence, of course.

md:

a leitmotif found often here in comment cages

what oughta to be done
in the interests of the people
won't be done by a corporate stoolie party like the demodytes

so stop requesting it op

of course tha facts are straight
stuff like walkin away
ain't in the good emperor's play book
but
i'm not sure that's enough
to clam me up

i suspect some folks
like street level versions
of our keloggs kid
decent bright folks
actually believe
this hi fi bail
is for the best of the most of us

if only because
they can't imagine
a system without gargoyles
of credit like simon w
hanging at every
roof corner

at least
not this side of generalissimo stalin
at any rate

"Let me also say that I think a blanket guarantee without some kind of seizures will just fuel a vast — and justified — populist rage'

that's typical krugman
ever the jinx foxy placations

status quiet if not quo

never the brake thru moment
when he asks himself
why do i want to save this
stinking credit system at all ???

the great federal credit bypass

i guess it won't happen at any rate
but it would demonstrate

all to well once and for all
we the weebles
don't need those
private hi fi suckers anymore
much as al's beloved guillotines
showed france and the world
we don't need no stinking nobles

uncle fed can lend
to us directly
and uncle IRS
thru automatic
two way tax and subsidy systems
can both keep us in internal balance
and
on our socially optimal accumulation path

economics is
the science of the feasible
not
the art of the opportune

I guess that last comment of OP's shows he can write elevated prose/verse after all! We knew the antic style was just a mask all along.

OP asks in Krugman's voice: "why do i want to save this stinking credit system at all ???"

I would add why are conservatives more apt to espouse the alternative? For whatever reasons, conservatives seem to be more self-reliant, while liberals are more dependent on the big family or big institutions(see George Lakoff's strict father versus nurturant family metaphors in conservative versus liberal rhetoric.)

Someone who works for the NYT and Princeton, or UC Berkeley, and jets around the country a lot, probably thinks of the company behind that little credit card as a kind of endlessly giving mother. Indispensable to life!

conservatives are more self-reliant, like how noble bobby jindal rejected all but 97.4% of the dirty wasteful stimulus money, saving his state's soul for long enough to clear the news cycle