Goat Notes

"These revolutionary posts will change the economic platitudes of a generation!" - Daily Stenograph

In these recessionary times, there's one thing that's never been in bigger demand - armchair economic punditry! Whether it's cutting through the forest of futilitarian facts with the trusty machete of timeless folk wisdom, or whomping up a super sciencey argument for why Master should be counter-intuitively congratulated for giving the dog a good kicking, we are living through a paradigm-asploding age of unprecedented economic explaininess! Could this unquenchable public demand for Genuine Knowledge Advantage™ ironically become the very consumer-spending kickstart that bumps our anxious society out of the surly slough of a quintuple-dip depression!?!!!

Sadly, nope.

"What is this shit?" - Ickenham & District Sciolist-Intelligencer

And that is why we need a new kind of popular economics writing - I call this Feconomics, with an eye to the failure of popular oeconomics writing to occur anywhere anyhow ever. It absolutely ought not to be confused with any other movement which may sound accidentally similar. The subject matter of Feconomics!!eleventy!!!™! is divided, like my arse, into two parts:

(1) Such economic notions, simplifications, and slogans as make useful foundations or provocations in the academy, and thereby make the roses grow; but in the workaday world serve no purpose except to foul the turbines at which they are projected. These are mostly deployed to make complex problems sound trivial.

(2) Processed economix food product - real, pure, clear-quill Frankfurtian bullshit. This is mostly deployed to make a complex and intractable problem out of the fact that some bastard is kicking your dog.

"This Goat Thinks Your Economic Clichés Are Killing You" - Clickbait Platinum Preferred Reviews

So. There may be a few posts coming along with this tag, as I happen across the raw material from time to time.

Feconomics™^™. Because we're up to our arms in it...

What is the correct singular for sheeple?  Shouldn't it be sheepson?

And what is the correct response to an accusation of being a sheepson?  Should one give the offender a good lamming, lambast them on the Internet, or shrug and say "Meh?"

Tired of reading liberals' lazy anti-libertarian caricatures on the Internet, I thought it was time I created a properly researched one of my own. All of the wisdoms below the cut have been encountered in speech, text, or action, up and including Number 30, from persons professing some sort of libertarian affiliation or other. Whilst I could certainly come up with a selection just as bad from other political stances, it is not my job to suggest to anybody how to be a piss-poor progressive or a crappy conservative, so I shall leave those tasks to others more closely concerned with them.

( Thirty-six ways to fox your freedom )

The easy-going lifestyle of Little Acton up the Junction is in danger!  Arch-villain The Big Boss and his army of soulless Taylorites have come to town with bills and clipboards, hell-bent on wringing the last dram of productivity from the luckless Little Actonians.  Shall all joy, good-fellowship, and leisure depart from the ancient County of Middlesex forever?

Mild-mannered clerk Darren Doolittle says, "Blow that for a game of soldiers!"   But saying "Blow that for a game of soldiers!" is just the easy part!!!  In order to banish The Big Boss and eff off his ineffable efficiency experts, Dazzer Boy will have to cast an idle glance in the general direction of the hero inside himself, and get his well-padded posterior into the lycra leotards of the immovable

CAPTAIN ARGON!

Captain Argon!  Captain Argon!

Captain Argon!  Half the comic's past!
Plot has not got started!  He cannot be arsed!
Captain A, whatever...

Find a copy lying around within easy reach of you, later!!!!

Overheard by financial journalist Nick Goodaway of the London Evening Standard, from a group of youths travelling home on the Jubilee Line (the silver one on the Underground, and one of the two that serve my own district) - this change rung on an old seasonal song of my childhood:

Christmas is coming, the bankers are getting sacked.
Please put a billion in their fucking pay-off pack!
If you haven't got a billion, a million will do.
If you haven't got a million, then SOD YOU!

Vox populi, vox dei.


ETA: For those happening upon this post at random, and not already familiar with my opinions, note that I haven't got a million or an appreciable fraction thereof, yet notwithstanding I have been obliged with the rest of us to put money into rich chancers' fucking pay-off packs.  Please interpret my sentiments accordingly.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 600 words of much-needed light relief, as we learn exactly how Dougal Dare-All unexpectedly took the loathly tower.

The humour is distinctly mediaeval and robust, but then Dougal & Co. kind of are.  I think he gets points for restraint, under the circumstances.

Down to the big lowland towns, tomorrow.  Not necessarily beyond them, since my domestic circumstances are threatening to get kind of mediaeval and robust on me, and I may need to invest a couple of hours' housework persuading them not to.

A happy New Year to one and all!

I have not been awful active in a literary way over the holiday. 2,650 words of Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland, all of them from a long Council of Infodump very little of which will survive the redraft. But the developments it sparked have changed both my present chapter and the whole dynamic of the Rising beyond all expectation. Again, I am cast upon strange tides, and many-braided Allwater has taken me to some places I never imagined I'd see.

Two new visions which may bear future fruit, and which have at least helped keep me out of mischief. One was a reverie into which I fell upon the Holyhead train, in which I learned that one Man's Eru is another Orc's Azathoth - and that one side's desperate doomed stand against overwhelming horror and power can look remarkable similar on the other side of the lines. But not necessarily in the same genre. I like Doc Wolfram and Splicewire and the Lady of the Last Ditch almost as much as I would hate to live in their world, and it is just conceivable that I've met a dark fantasy notion with enough heart that I might be able to yarn about it. Certainly I haven't stopped having new flashes about that setting yet.

...And one that came to me in a dream, of a hunt on St Lucy's Eve, where I involved myself in a thousand-year adventure with St Lucy herself, and the Titaness Luna, and a charming and witty Iranian emigrée named Soraya, to wrest the light of the world from the heartless legalist glare of Delian Apollyon.  The end of this dream is not yet, so I shall say no more.  But if there is really a sensible answer to its central problem, I should give a great deal to be able to tell of that, too.

Ars longa, vita brevis, as always.

Meanwhile, here is a merry year's-getting toast from me and all the Katherines; and here are certain New Year's resolutions, looking to a day when they have gone to their long slushpile. 

Wassail, dear friends and good neighbours!  Drink hale! 

[Glug]

A massive 180 words since Friday on the Luke Lackland part of Killer-Kate &... - but at least I've got it started off. My trouble here is that I'm so consummately not a soldier, and yet at this point I have to have some real mediaeval irregular warfare going on. Can't skate over it, can't add any more Robin Hood derring-do or magical tricks than I have already, without turning the Langdale Rising into the kind of lies I don't want to write. At least I know what game Luke is playing now.

I'm now five chapters from the end of the yarn, which is exactly where I've been for nearly half the year. But this is five chapters a lot nearer the end than I was in the summer! 

To illustrate my meaning, this was my original chapter outline for Lord of the Rings before the tale grew in the telling:

1. A Long-Expected Party
2. The Shadow of the Past
3. The Wight Stuff
4. A Knife in the Pub
5. Many Meetings
6. "We Cannot Get Out!"
7. Fosterling of Laurelin, Daughter of Ungoliant
8. The Breaking of the Fellowship
9. The Muster of Rohan
10, The Passing of Foromir
11. Helm's Deep and Ugluk's Stand
12. Where the White Moon Dies
13. The Battle of the Cross-Roads
14. Mount Doom
15. Galadriel in Gondor
Epilogue: Mistress Lobelia's Spoons.

But in this tale I am (so to speak) now five chapters away from the end at the Siege of Gondor, rather than five chapters away in Helm's Deep.  Which is quite a lot of progress, really!