Cobb

Cobb is Seven Years Old Today

Seven years, 750 thousand hits. 25 thousand comments. 7400 posts.

It ain't a book, but I always said I'm a writer, not an author. 

Was it as good for you as it was for me? 

Cobb has accomplished about six missions for me. It has given me a stupendous sense of achievement. And even though it's sometimes just me sitting in my underwear in a hotel room thousands of miles from home, like I am tonight, Cobb has always been a thoughtful place to be.

Back about three years ago I put it down and published a retrospective. I think I've grown a great deal since then. But certainly my proudest moments were winning the Aaron Hawkins Award and a bunch of other stuff I can't think of at all. 

Cobb has allowed me to work through all of my issues and questions about American society and politics, and I think it has made me once again into the kind of person I once was - a humble person who listened intently to people with the genuine ability to be amazed by their stories. It has given me a way to be passive yet intensely moral which is a very difficult balance that used to put me in people's faces. I think most importantly and more recently it has allowed me to age gracefully, to accept being the older man that I will soon be when I turn 50 and drop this puppy. It has allowed me to care in public and engage as a citizen, to teach and to learn, to facilitate reflection and to clarify, to fight melodramatically and to celebrate matters of the spirit.

I realize that these are odd things to expect from electronic publication, and so I'm an odd fish, but I feel that I am in communion with thinkers and men of letters throughout history. In short, it has been a great 7 years. 

And so it continues.

American Equilibrium

Everywhere I go, amongst people of the middle and especially the upper middle class, I keep hearing this phrase: "It is what it is. Some of the time when I hear it, it is uttered with some frustration. But lately I hear people saying it with a kind of confidence, a willingness to accept reality... as it is. I think that I like this development. It's certainly better than 'whatever, dude'.

Part of my problem is that I pretend that I am speaking for the upper middle class, but I understand it's just me. 

An important part of my political and philosophical growth was my understanding of political momentum and equilibrium. That basically the state of the law and policy is the result of various interests that ebb and flow and interact more or less. American society is a dynamic beast, but it has some equilibrium. For example. Right now, America is at equilibrium with regard to immigration policy. There are no major movements pushing and pulling. The Right, for its part, has generally accepted the premise that all the new illegal immigrants have gone back home because there's no new work as a result of the economic wreckage that Obama is making out of our country. The ideas about illegal immigration haven't changed on the Right, but there is basically no movement on the matter. The Right has other fish to fry. Similarly, the Left is satisfied that now that Obama is in control, all the rednecks in law enforcement have been suppressed and we are truly a kinder and gentler nation. John McCain has been put back in his box and there's no fear of a racist crackdown any time soon. I think the broad middle, those who may or may not give a rat's about immigration, illegal or otherwise, aren't thinking about the matter and nobody is pushing them one way or another. So what we have is the status quo, with all sorts of active and inactive but dynamic elements, at equilibrium.

In other words, nobody's making a Federal case out of it.

One Hundred Forty Six Cheap Drugs From Walmart

It was 2005 when Walmart began it's low cost plan to cover generic prescription drugs. The following is the original list. You can get a 90 day supply of any of these for ten bucks.

A Good Second Look At Obama & Social Justice

One of the better discussions at Cobb was this one about Obama's intellectual roots and the shape of his campaign around the themes of social justice. There are scores of comments that take the debate into interesting places.

I think it is reasonable to say that Obama has triangulated his way out of just about every responsibility he so dramatically highlighted during his campaign. His healthcare bill, which I'm sure is a Rube Goldberg contraption of extraordinary corruption squeaked by in the House and now lies in wait for Senate machinations. Outside of that he has done almost nothing for social justice that I've been able to perceive except extend unemployment benefits to precedent-setting lengths. One could argue that this is an extension of the welfare state in principle, but I think, like everything else it is a measure of desperate pragmatism. After all, as I said, he has vastly underestimated unemployment.

Go read that whole piece if you have time and come up with your easy answers now.

Are there any diehards remaining?

Pogrom

Odd word isn't it? Pogrom. We don't use this word much in America. Why? Well because we like the term 'race riot'. But we haven't had one of those in a very long time. I was only a kid when we had Watts and Detroit, but I'm not clear on whether or not that was blackfolks burning down their own stuff or whitefolks and blackfolks killing each other on the street. I'm pretty sure it was the former, and for LA after Rodney King I'm sure it was. So we don't have pogroms.

Every once in a while, an Afrocentric will try his seventeen paragraphs of truth on me and walk away pissed that I'm not impressed. It's not that I don't understand or that I fundamentally reject where they're coming from so much as it is that there's no consequences one way or another. What do I mean by no consequences? I mean nobody's burning down any buildings. Nobody is taking a mob from house to house looking for the right kind of scapegoat to hang in a tree and set on fire. What we get is people upset, insulted and offended. We get loudmouths full of self-righteous indignation. It's almost kind of sad. You may or may not recall that a month or so ago (and I still get everything on the Kwaku Network) somebody posted a picture of a Barnes & Noble shop window with a picture of the President surrounded by books about monkeys. It was either a hoax, or not. But I remarked that the person who took the picture and emailed it to 'us', did not have the temerity to smash the window with a brick. So how offensive is it really?

Oh. Did you get my little joke? Haha.

Now I'm going to quote something from page 166 of the book I'm reading on WW2.

In reality, Yugoslavia was an uneasy amalgam not just of Croats, Serves, and Slovenes, but also of Albanians, Bosnian Muslims, Montenegrins, Macedonians, and Turks - not to mention Czechs, Germans, Gypsies, Hungarians, Italians, Jews, Romanians, Russians, Slovaks and Ukranians.

..and then across the page

In Czechoslovakia the Germans were effectively excluded from the 1919 elections in clashes with Czecch gendarmes and troops - the so-called massacre of Kaaden of march 14, 1919 - fifty-two Germans were killed and eighty-four wounded.

Now I'm just discovering skirmishes I didn't know about Germany and Poland in the years between WW1 and WW2, but I'm struck by the number of ethnic groups in Eastern Europe that were basically behaving like tribes and not Westphalian nations. My overall impression of the period between 1900 and 1920 thus far is a broad area in Europe where the idea of a nation is not firmly established. You have royal families, socialist and communist revolutionaries, and ethnic blowhards all in the mix of instability. And so for any number of reasons, no less than the madness sustainable by an organization of 50 fanatics, all sorts of small and large pogroms came to be in Europe.

We don't often think of Montenegrins or Macedonians here in the states, and it's almost impossible to imagine, given our history curriculum, that Germans might have ever been persecuted by Poles. But those are the facts, and some many thousands died due to tribal warfare in 20th century Europe outside of the two great wars.

The opportunism to defeat modernity always presents itself.

Wife the Ho

There aren't many things in life that are so poignantly absurd and profound as a rich American rockstar on the verge of... Well, I can't call it. Judge for yourself. The question is NOT how does this get on the air, nor how many millions are listening. The question is how long didn't you know this was on the air?

Destination: US

A thoughtful reader just passed on this interesting tidbit from a recent Gallup survey:

The United States is the top desired destination country for the 700 million adults who would like to relocate permanently to another country. Nearly one-quarter (24%) of these respondents, which translates to more than 165 million adults worldwide, name the United States as their desired future residence. With an additional estimated 45 million saying they would like to move to Canada, Northern America is one of the two most desired regions.

It's interesting that I think such immigrants get multiculturalism when they go to Canada. But I would hope that the 165M coming here, which I would welcome in a heartbeat, would not expect it. The question lies of course with the political prospects for Progressivism and its multiculturalist oblivion - the sort that can't figure out the difference between a Muslim and an Islamist. So long as such self-congratulatory Baby Boomers pass through the American alimentary canal, we might be more assured of a couple post- 9/11 generations who actually understand the importance and the difference and aren't afraid to ask. 

--

In a related story on Bloomberg Surveillance today, which I now listen to via WunderRadio live from NY, (since I'm on GMT -5 instead of -8), there was a cat from MIT who spoke about the wonder of entrepreneurial culture. According to this professor of business, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a hotbed of animal spirits. It's something that can't be taught, but the self-selection is already there. You do apply to get into MIT. Presumably the entry requirements for the US are a bit more lax.

There are oaths to swear and burdens to bear that immigrants would put up with. The price of the ticket. But on the whole, I love the idea. 

Ghoul Systems

What does Google do with your data after you die? What does Yahoo do? What about Facebook? How does anybody actually know when you are dead in cyberspace? Seems to me that this is a problem that hasn't been well thought out. How long would it take that thing that is the current equivalent of a death certificate to circulate to all of your web service providers, and how could it be faked? I mean if identity theft is so easy...

Obama's Biggest Mistake (So Far)

I think we just had election day last Tuesday. Yep. That's true. so it has been a year. So let's just narrow it down to one, big, fat unavoidable fact. Obama is breaking his neck to pass a government funded health care insurance plan. I am reminded of the woman who was three months pregnant in February of 2008 who wanted to vote for Obama so that she could get health care for her baby. Hmmm. I wonder if the poor woman has a job. The big fat unavoidable fact is that Obama misread the entire economy and has done nothing to solve its biggest problems. 

But let's just focus on one fact OK? Unemployment. This is the chart which I would like to bring to your attention. It's all over the web permanently, and I invite all of my blogger friends to multiply this by publishing all the brave predictions of the great and powerful Oz. 

The unemployment rate, people, is 10.2%. And there are predictions that it will go to 13%.

Additionally, the so-called under-employment rate, which includes part-time workers who’d prefer a full-time position, and people who want work and have given up looking, reached 17.5 percent last month, the highest level since records began in 1994.

Companies aren’t “cash constrained to hire workers,” and instead are being “cautious about economic bellwethers,” Rosenberg said. “It just comes down to the economic outlook,” he said.

The economy has lost 7.3 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007. 

Just to remind you of how faulty Obama has been on the economy, let us remind you of how wrong he was in June of this year.

Cherokee

I have begun to use Google Scholar more and more often. One of these days JSTOR is going to be free, and I will use it even more. For now, the guilds of academia are using economic jiujitsu to force peasants to read uncited unreviewed material and use a bit of common sense. Since common sense is not quite enough to be authoritative, I'm just a blogger and you're just a reader. But we could be authors and scholars if we had the moola. 

Be that as it may, I find it interesting every once in a while to find Google opening some interesting books. Take this one for example. The Cherokees: A Population History by Thornton, Snipp and Breen. No that's not a footnote, it's a hyperlink. A hyperlink is superior to a footnote, that's why they were invented. But you understand that footnotes are considered superior because credentialed academics use them.

So the conventional wisdom, which is part of the multicultural canon, relates the story of the Trail of Tears as a genocidal horror. Exactly how horrific was it? 

So what I want you to do first, without going anywhere is take a wild guess as to how many Native Americans were 'exterminated' by Manifest Destiny. I'm sorry to say that I have already done a little checking and cannot play along with you - generally I say things when I blog in realtime and then in the next sentence do a test, but as you can see I already did a test in the hyperlink above. If you were too lazy to click the link then you can play the game, if not then you can sit smugly like I am and imagine what other clueless individuals are guessing. 

OK good. Now you have an idea in your head. The answer is 4,000 for the Cherokee. Hrumph I can't find the link. Now as soon as I use 'Trail of Tears' at Google Book Search rather than 'Cherokee Population Study' at Google Scholar, you get a flavor of how sentiments change the interpretation of the numbers. 4,000 is a nice number because it dovetails rather nicely with the number of victims of the WTC attacks, which a host of Americans are wishing profoundly we would just get over and stop warring about just 10 years later. But is that a fair restriction on human memory, or are they right? I mean human souls were no larger then than now - the value of a human life was no greater in 1830 than today right? 

I don't have an easy answer to that question, but I am learning something about the geopolitics of tribes into national ethnic minorities and what can befall them as ideas about race, nationalism, ethnicity and other factors change in the face of calamities (economic crises and war) that challenge larger bodies. Oh wait. Here's the link. Cherokee Population Losses During the Trail of Tears, by that same Russell Thornton.  So now you have a name to associate with a highly cited authority on the Cherokee population which was somewhere around 30,000 max in the 1700s and hovers somewhere around 325,000 today. 

Now I know that the chances for any tribe to maintain and retain the integrity of their indigenous culture decreases exponentially in an inverse relation to their urban integration. So I'm not trying to say that those 300,000 have much chance from a multicultural purist point of view. Then again, I don't believe they could teach the boys at Green Giant two cents about corn or the Kentucky Derby crowd a farthing's worth of horse knowledge. No doubt they were what they were way back when they were. But what they are today are 10 times as many souls - preserved as well as anyone. I mean how many of you can trace back your family to 1830? 

What matters in this post is that charges of genocide should not be relativistic, especially from those who claim racial neutrality. A red man's soul lost to the ages is no more significant than a brown man's or a yellow man's or a white man's. And I think if our common sense were a bit more well informed about who is killing whom in what numbers throughout history, we wouldn't make such a big fuss over some of the things we fuss about. For example, how could some asshat traitor who's on a one-man jihad (or as part of a 20 man cell for that matter) affect the entire population of American Muslims? Well that depends on how faithfully you hew to the trail of actual dead bodies, rather than crocodile tears. And it depends upon how you view matters of ethnicity, religion, creed and color and those other things that we Americans are supposed to DISREGARD with respect to the enumerated rights and responsibilities as citizens under the Constitution. 

Then again, you're likely to hear that since 20 million Cherokee were exterminated by America (oh I'm sorry did I put that number in your mouth?) there are no rights and responsibilities we conscientious progressives are bound to respect from America. Or as Fernandez put it today with characteristic irony, "Dissent is the greatest form of patriotism', meaning pissing on the Constitution because of who wrote it or who happened to disregard its implications over two hundred years.

Genocides and pogroms matter. Populations matter. Massacres matter. They all matter. Do you see where I'm going with my peasant theories?  Peasants are the ones who die. They die for being on the wrong side. They die for being on no side. They die for being in the way.  You and I, we are no more or less peasants than the Cherokee. Except we have the tools of democracy (and Google) to help us understand the fallacies of peasant-think. We must think like kings or die like peasants. It helps to be able to count.

BTW. Welcome to my new category 'History'. 

Quote of the Day

"The reason a meritocracy works is that all the members of an organization operate under a single consistent set of rules. What political correctness does is overlay a second, or even a third set of unspoken rules on top of the formal ones. Suddenly nobody knows what gives and the system seems not only unpredictable but may be perceived as unfair. Worse, it encourages those with “special” attributes to segregate themselves to take advantage of the new and unwritten rules. It can be enormously disruptive."

Fernandez

Silas, AL

And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.
-- Matthew 6:28

Willie got straight A's, was a Jehovah's Witness and wore a hearing aide, and so even though they were archrival footballers, the boys in Silas accepted him whereas his homefolks in Butler rejected him. Willie has twenty seven stories, at least, about life two feet above ditch level, where sanity is only accepted on faith. Willie relates to the kind of situation where it's about taking all of the bullets out of the gun but one and hoping that's a mitigating circumstance when you're looking for the man who beatdown your cousin. He never had to shoot because they couldn't find him. He was hoping they wouldn't find him, but it was that close. Willie tells the tale of that redbone college girl who invited him to study in the dorm but turned out to be wearing daisy dukes and a halter top that Friday afternoon.  He's not ready for a brew yet, so the Mountain Dew was on me. 

It took 87 minutes for the chicken wings to thaw and get cooked up and so it was past midnight and the Iggles loss before I hiked back to the Marriott. I never expected to wait that long for some hot food, and I didn't expect anybody to walk up to me for any either. But I know the feeling of walking around downtown Cleveland pissed off and looking for something to eat, except Willie wasn't pissed off.

As usual, some folks will size me up to be a Que dog or an Alpha, depending on my attitude. Willie said I fit the Alpha profile when we got around to that part of the long conversation. But it took a long time for him to get past the immediate past which for my man was a hard knock life. I'm happy to fit my profile, but I get the feeling that it's hard for Willie to get other folks to deal with the fact that he's something other than an ex-crackhead. He just turned 33 and hasn't had a taste in two years. He has been a dental assistant and an auto mechanic, 'strictly blue collar' and tells tales of legendary BBQs and his fool friend Chuck who didn't realize what a good woman he had before they eventually got married and moved out West. 

Willie's a peasant of the better sort. One who doesn't pretend to be anything more and yet knows the transformative power of God. I asked him how old his father was, knowing I was ready to say something pithy about how young 33 actually is. He has three he says. the one we all have, the Heavenly Father, his biological father and the man who raised him. The man who raised him is 83. The man who keeps him putting one foot in front of the other is infinite and Willie is full of acknowledgement. The third man is available via Facebook and things are getting better, step by step. Willie is figuring a way to share his story of redemption with the knuckleheads he's accustomed to being around, especially the younger ones. It's easy to see him as that kind of counselor, just as soon as he can turn his inner conviction into inner strength, and his outer expression into one of evident socially redeeming purpose. But today Willie is a man whose good times are tainted - too tainted for funding by my interpretation of the eyes that fund. But I know something about American men that I don't think too many men bother to find out.

Unemployment is going to 13%, according to the latest experts on Bloomberg Surveillance this morning, and as Tom Keene puts it, there's something wrong with the term 'small business'. Officially, small business means less than 500 employees, and those are all the companies that are getting no bank loans these days. So there's a class of financiers in America that can't even be bothered with 'small business', so what are the chances for peasants like me and Willie? 

Take a look when you have a moment, because even the Google VW has been to Silas, Alabama. Right in the middle of town, there's not much of a town. And good kids come to big cities like Cleveland, where the regional banks are failing left and right, and sometimes it gets down to taking crack, or taking down scores, or as in the case of the Imperial Murders, just taking other people's lives and dignity. There's still not enough bandwidth to get all those stories out. They are born on the tongues of men like Willie. There are some towns that reject you for your differences, even if those differences are character strengths. There are some towns that accept you, and there are others that ignore you altogether.

Where do you go when all the things that are too big to fail actually fail? You go where things are too small to succeed but actually succeed. 

My mother is sending me Bible verses, and I know a third of the famous ones. So I'm thinking of King James, the only version I remember. This is the story of Christianity that stands when other institutions fail. This is the story of faith in mankind that transcends market fluctuations. This is a story of the power of redemption - of something that works for the peasants even when the royalty stands wealthy, illiquid and clueless. I can give it a Deist name or not, but it is the divine that resides in our souls - that thing that tells us right from wrong in all circumstances - that thing we try to suppress intellectually or self-deprecatingly. 

There's a lot of small business around this land. 

USS New York

Yeah. You know where they got some of that steel don't you. That's right. Ground Zero.

 

Treachery

Well I've heard enough details to make up my own mind about Hasan. He's a traitor and he should be hanged. Simple. 

Merely Black

Over at the Respectable Negroes and TCoates as Adam shared with me, there's an old discouraging existential battle going on. It is the battle between the essential and the merely black. 

The pique is some highschool teacher somewhere in the South is losing his job because he presumed that his students might be merely black. But somebody involved in his pillory presumed that his students must be essentially black, and therefore a line that might be crossed by mere humans without a problem suddenly necessitated a collection of existential shackles.

You see this teacher made his students dress up like cotton picking slaves. 

I'm not going to make a big deal about this although it truly annoys me. And by big deal I mean write a long essay explaining all the nuances. I'll just say the whole bloody thing is stupid, but just what you might expect idiot peasants to get all bent out of shape about. 

What if the kids were Italian and the teacher cast them as Romans in the story of the Crucifixion? Surely that would be something? No it would be nothing. Since TCoates is the mainstream twerp on this talking point, we all have to be sensitive because he's sensitive as we mistake sensitivities for intellectual acuity. The teacher should sue, for whatever that's worth.

Oh, but I'm not being clear. Coates is filling up enquiring minds with the details of light-skinned fantasies that die hard. Etching out literary lines of colorstruck insecurities and solidifying a caste of millions still fundamentally incapable of thinking their way over a color line. Existentially speaking that is.

I'm getting to the point at which I hate black people, just the way I hate Mexican food. That's because what everybody takes to be 'Mexican food' is only the Mexican equivalent of American junkfood. Tacos and burritos are hamburgers and hotdogs. Everything 'black' these days is cultural junk, which is why we're talking about the psyches of highschool students who cannot portray history without becoming slaves to.. well.. the legacy of slavery.

Ironic Photo of the Day

This would probably make John McWhorter feel rather strange - all these copies of his book on sale at the local Dollar Tree in Redondo Beach. Some seller did some fast talking, or some buyer had a point to make.

Revolver

If you asked the premier rock critics, at the time I was young and impressionable and on the outside looking in at your America, they would tell you the greatest and most socially significant song from the greatest and most socially significant band would be Eleanor Rigby from The Beatles. And if you ask any contemporary critic which is the best remaster of that song, they will likely point to the one that I hold in my right hand. The Parlophone 2009 Beatles remaster.

And so I listened to track number two over my Resolv 65a studio monitors and I can tell you that it sounds great. Except it doesn't sound significant, and finally I can forgive that questioning and puzzled teenager that I was trying to reinterpret all of Western Civilization through the lyrics of Lennon and McCartney. It's just a great song is all.

The most difficult thing my kids generation will face is that answers will be here, there and everywhere. All for the querying, like manna. Except it will take a lifetime of reinterpretation until they realize they've been surfing on the perspectives of the producers. What could be more crippling than a satisfied curiosity?

It's tempting to be lazy. And I'm starting to understand that temptation - to use analogies and popular culture to explain and allude to deeper truths. So no matter how clever, I'll just listen to the rest of the albums I bought today and just enjoy them for what they are.

• Sgt Pepper
• Revolver
• Rubber Soul

More songs than anybody needs to make it through a couple weeks, now that Dollar Tree is playing the tritest versions of Jingle Bells. Already.

How I Sleep At Night

Nocturnes.

I have a fairly long playlist which starts almost always with Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. I first started to go to bed every night to Beethoven back in 92. It's odd how I got into the rap criticism stuff last week without giving anyone much of an idea of what I listen to now. Here's a new on by Per and I always catch his latest solos on YouTube by subscription. And in my old classic 'recovery' style, I've learned a couple dozen new Beatles songs I never knew that I knew, and some I never knew at all. Other than that, I've got Thomas Dolby and Linda Ronstadt stuck on blast in my head. Per clears out the noise and makes me quiet down. That's beauty.

Death From Nowhere

"Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows."

It would be foolishly speculative to assign a particular motive to the mass murder perpetrated yesterday to Army Major Nidal M. Hasan. But that hasn't stopped people from their agendas of spin. Such is the way of disaster. People do what they are expected to do, only more vocally. Those who defend Islam against all Americans foreign and domestic, those who do obeisance to the noble sacrifice of the divine calling of soldiering.. all play their roles with amplification appropriate to the size of the tragedy.

But only The Shadow knows.

And of course in this case it is ironically true that it is a psychiatric specialist whose job it is to plumb the hearts of men who knows why he went on a murderous rampage, with two handguns. And now, just like the flashlight on the cover of the dime novel, we're all trying to focus on the killer.

As I have in my middle age been reduced to a shadow of my youthful ambition, I sit transfixed by the messages of the dead. Not just these 12 dad, but the millions of dead in the Fifty Years War of the Twentieth Century AD. Niall Ferguson is my ghoulish tour guide who explains the ruins of the ghosts of wars and financial disasters past. I walk with my head in his books amongst the living, sometimes ashamed that I pay so much attention to the dead. The dead who never knew what hit them. That's most of our fates. We'll stay on the stair climber even as we fight off shortness of breath, chest pains and tingly sensations in our arms because we think we can outsmart death. We look straight ahead on the elevators ignoring one another and counting our bank balances in our heads because we think we can retire in security. We clean our rifles and tie our bootlaces and polish our buttons because we think that with our gear and training we can take death to the enemy before he takes it to us.

Death is not impressed and will not be constrained by human explanations.

The answer Hasan will give is going to be simple. And the only way you'll be able to see how simple it is is if you understand how much death mankind is able to deal out without thinking. It doesn't take much thought or effort to kill 12 people. But most of us don't think long on such calculations. But to go spontaneously barking mad when you have military training doesn't take much doing. In this regard, Stalin was right about killing millions. And if you consider what a lifetime of soldiering could produce, by any standard, an Army Major who only orchestrates the killing of 12, is a miserable failure. But similar to shark attacks and lightning strikes, Hasan did the ordinary thing at the extraordinarily unexpected time and thus becomes famous, but never more dangerous than capricious nature. He'll babble out an excuse, or a reason, or a mute defiance or a jeremiad of conspiracy and then we'll all have our say of 'See I told you so'. Responsibility will be placed in a theory or a policy or a dogma and we'll all be satisfied that Hasan fits a profile - that nothing out of the ordinary happened here. And we'll all be right. Because in a world of millions of commentators, excuse me let me amend that.. in a world of millions of second-hand and third person meta commentators, 12 deaths is a light snack of melioration. Next year Hasan at Hood will be a question on Jeopardy.

But to explain 10,000 dead is something few are called to do, and so I am focused on the greater deed.

It might come to pass that Hasan at Hood becomes some rallying cry to a pogrom we will reflect upon in retrospect as future historians catalog the slings and arrows in this peaceful interregnum between the last and the next time men organized for Big Death. He will be among, perhaps, the thousand points of darkness that eventually sink our boats of hope. I think I heard last week that John Allen Muhammad was finally sentenced to die by lethal injection. He only killed 10, and he had an accomplice.

So we will have 'justice' of words and spin and other nonsense by this time next week. And then Hasan will die, perhaps sometime after 2012. That's the way of peace and we are living in peacetime. It cannot be denied for Hasan is living amongst us. But I suspect that it incrementally raises the stakes and hastens the next time around when death comes from everywhere.