THOUGH YOUR CORRESPONDENT HAS YET TO RECEIVE FROM YOU READERS ENQUIRIES REGARDING A NUMBER OF THE TERMS I USE IN THIS WEBLOG from time to time, perhaps it was time to offer some explanations for your benefit before serious enquiries start overwhelming the comments and/or e-mail.

I hope this will be of some help.

For starters, take "capitalism with American characteristics:" Such is an ironic, perhaps sarcastic, take patterned on "socialism with Chinese characteristics," a slogan the Chinese Communist Party was using a few years back to promote their ideal of a market economy based on Marxist/Leninist sociopolitical parameters; i.e., with substantial State involvement to the point of interference.

In that vein, I picture the likelihood of certain Zealots and True Believers in conservative free-market thought pushing the ideal of "capitalism with American characteristics" to counter "socialism with Chinese characteristics."

As in a "pure" free-market capitalistic model "completely and finally released from undue and unnecessary regulatory burden" from the State and subject only to "healthy self-regulation" based on industry-sponsored Codes of Good Practice theoretically expected to encourage competition and innovation--but, on closer reading, is "cloaked" with various "outs" as endorse cartel behaviour in the name of "protecting free-market capitalism as one with American national and soverign identity," and vice versa, consistent with prevailing conservative belief in doublethink they don't want you and me knowing about.

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IN A RELATED VEIN OF SORTS, THERE'S ALSO "CAPITALISM AS GREAT WHITE FATHER OF THE LOWER CLASSES"--another (un)likely conservative article of faith suggesting that "chronic and habitual welfare cases" (National Minorities especially) were somehow "secretly conditioned into Communistic, Socialistic or otherwise un-American beliefs" by way of "failed and failing systems of State welfare and Social Security," thereby seen to be "hindering any real chance for empowering themselves."

And, in conservative thought, the "last and only hope" welfare cases have is to "wholeheartedly and willingly accept free-market capitalism as their Great White Father."

The concept, ironically, playing upon United States Government mindsets towards Native Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as expected them to see the "Great White Father" (in some versions, "Great White Grandfather")--the United States Government, through the Bureau of Indian Affairs--as saving them from themselves, howbeit by resettling them on reservation lands and forcibly subjecting such to deliberate poverty and misery through the likes of "mission schools" which, more often than not, used LeTourneauism as an agency of coercive suasion to get Native Americans to forget their heritage and accept "civilised" (white) ways.

Only to fall apart in the aftermath of the Bryan v. Itasca County Supreme Court ruling in 1976, which held, in essence, that Native Americans living on reservation lands were entitled the right to self-government (even though the ruling was actually about states assessing property taxes upon Native Americans resident on reservation lands).

In effect, my use of such a notion is intended as historical irony @ the expense of conservative Zealotry and True Belief which (when all is said and done) is nothing short of contempt for the poor and marginalised of society, and with tacit State sanction besides. Especially when they're likewise expected to remain ignorant and stupid by deliberate design as part of their enforced poverty (which the conservatives will blame on public education and its "Secular-Progressive" dominance).

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NOTE, TOO, READERS, MY FREQUENTLY REFERRING TO THE UNITED STATES AS SUPPOSEDLY "MORALLY SUPERIOR" in this blog.

The intent, again, is irony--this time, @ the Religiopolitical Right's expense, such an element contending that the United States was "divinely predestined" to be the Shining City on a Hill, Jerusalem of Gold, the Portal and Gateway to Heaven according to a Fundamentalist/Primitive Christian brand of religiopolitical thought which its Zealots and True Believers are forever contending is, was and will forever be the One Foundation of American Soverignty and Soverign Identity "antient and pecuilar."

Especially considering the possibility that many in the Religiopolitical Right are of the "do as I say, not as I do" persuasion which can easily be cover for acts of moral turpitude which may be their undoing--especially homosexuality, pedophilia, patronising prostitutes and perousal of child pornography.

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SO NOW YOU KNOW. (Or do you care to dispute these points?)