Cobb

The Virtue of the Essential Human

The experiment of America, as an aristocracy of merit, challenges us all. To take the idea of citizenship seriously is to approach the best understanding of individuality and the rights of man. I think that requires of us a great deal. There is only so far the offices of government should go in recognizing us as we necessarily think ourselves to be.

Many years ago, I held the somewhat common notion that the Declaration of Independence might have listed complaints against the deprivations of racial offense and become the basis of an anti-racist Constitution. The fact that it didn't suggested to me some original flaw in the founding of the nation, which a proper evolution of thought would correct. But I did all that for the purposes of the anti-racist promise, without much regard for the substance of the original complaint.

So I believe this is a common error of any class of people who regard themselves as so separate as to not identify in common with the pains suffered by those with more to lose. Or more plainly said, what would I care about the King quartering his troops on my property if I have no property? Shouldn't the Declaration talk about *my* peeves?

It is this kind of error that I believe is at fault in the mischaracterization of contemporary political complaints as matters of rights. And the popularity of this sort of overproduction ultimately dilutes the polity's ability to preserve and defend those self-evident rights the Founders had in mind. And so we have lost focus as a nation and wasted our political energies on frivolous matters thinking them to be literally righteous.

How can we come to believe that America is incapable of defending the dignity of a 13 year old girl from improper search and seizure? It must be because we believe people like Ginsburg must strident instruct people unlike Ginsburg in such basic matters of human dignity.

How can we come to believe that some certain people must in their struggles to achieve freedom act from a playbook of radical reinterpretations of human history? It must be because we believe people like Fanon must stridently instruct people unlike Fanon in such basic matters of human freedom.

And so each group has their unique message to the world and each must find, independently, their own separate path to dignity and freedom. Well, whats' the difference between that idea and any of Hitler's ideas? Nothing.

I find it difficult to presume to lead some fraction of the people or to defend some fraction of humanity as a worthy political aim. I am greatly convinced that the human animal does not vary so much that he can be served well by a wide variety of principles. There are a simple few and the paths towards attaining and defending them are few. But having found those paths, we must find our human center of gravity, each individual conforming at their core, and place that center on those paths. Instead we have put our sex lives and skin colors as our cores and we have made mountains of the discomforts such fetishes have brought us. And in our every personality trait, thinking moderation and conformity itself a sin, we have expanded our appetite for taking our every difference as deep and fundamental. We have monetized the long tail of arcane whim and now ply it as political currency. We passionately attend the details of vegetarianism as if they were matters of war and peace and we run our state treasuries into ruin for the sake of propping up a million subsidies of such trivial import. All such foolishness is done at the peril of our common good because we have determined that our diversity is the most important feature we possess.

This is the evidence of a crisis in confidence in our underlying principle. We Americans are invested in a globalist, multicultural hedge against the sort of common sense Thomas Paine had. We pretend that we are of a different strain than he and that our expanse and our eclectic humanity, our advanced sensitivities to the great variety of human experience makes us wiser. The great variety of human experience can all be cruelly ended with a pike through the heart, and the heart in every human lies in the same place. It doesn't matter how much we value what our tongues have tasted or where our feet have trod, our heart remains our core.

So we must resolve to understand and hue to what is essential to our individual humanity and to reassert its common core. We must recognize the minimal yet essential role of government's defense of simple liberty and not attempt to gainsay it by attempting to guarantee too much. We can only be a nation with liberty and justice for all if all are for the nation correctly focused on its principles and not our own differences. When we seek to be too many things as a people we lose sight of the common purpose of nationhood, and we belabor our citizenship with freight it cannot bear; we turn our politics into a fleamarket and dilute society with a million complaints.

The most important things in life are as they ever were, and no greater ideas will be invented than liberty. So let that be our focus on this day.

The Declaration

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.

He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states:

For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing taxes on us without our consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:

For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule in these colonies:

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:

For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

Loyal To Powell

If there was ever any doubt to whom Colin Powell is loyal, consider his latest grumble.

Colin Powell, one of President Obama's most prominent Republican supporters, expressed concern Friday that the president's ambitious blitz of costly initiatives may be enlarging the size of government and the federal debt too much.

No shit, Sherlock.

And Sara Palin is quitting her job. Guess she's loyal to Palin.

Cat Circle

  Yeah I did it. Can you?

Try here.

Sense of Freaking Humor

It occurs to me that I have been something of an ass. This occurrence doesn't occur very often, but that it happens at all shows what a super cool dude I am. I mean, like... you know?

I stumbled onto some really extraordinary YouTubery this morning that made me LOL. And although I LOL from time to time, I realize that I haven't carried that attitude forward in the blog since having made the dramatic decision to mash the mute button. What a self-important jackhole I am. Now I'm like totally my blog is all signal and no noise. Yeah right. I'm going to get a million hits this way, yeah like 2012. (Actually I'm at about 750000 right now).

So, EC over on Facebook was talking about how spoiled we are, we Americans and I was going to say something deep about it that went a little something like this. Oh yeah it was an anti-victim thing for black Americans about electrical current or something - like being a historical beneficiary of Western Civilization and having indoor plumbing and just sitting on the couch eating Cheetos and watching Ricki Lake, or maybe Keith Olbermann and what he's saying is making you feel self-righteous and a victim at the same time and then you're all talking back at Rush Limbaugh and at the snack bar at the gym after work you're all like talking about the controversy but what really has you upset is Jacko is dead and nobody really understands what he meant to us...

And it's so absurd, the whole conversation is surreally dramatically silly. We don't split hairs, we split atoms of difference.

So anyway, Boy was at the beach and school's out and he used the term 'Asian invasion' and I'm thinking that he's becoming a douche because he's complaining about the number of non-locals in the path of his boogie board. So I'm thinking, hey. Is he getting his recommended daily allowance of cool Asianity? And the answer is, not really because the fact is he's racially confused. I think I would be genuinely surprised if he could make sense of multiculturalism - he didn't realize that he was the other black kid in school back when he was in elementary school. It's not worth it to set any records straight - there are no straight records.

But I got started on my LOL track almost by accident because Unk in Florida sent me a heavy dose of 'black people should' this morning. And I can't remember the last time I heard the expressions, Miss Ann and Mister Charlie, but woot there it is. And it gets excruciating, but I...understand.

So things are all good, really. I'm back on the job with a big fat client who desperately needs what I can provide. And it's still in California, and this weekend for the first time in about four months, I am feeling perfectly happy with my own personal economic prospects. And yeah I've been reading about Hitler and obsessing over leapfrogging technology in my competitive environment but this weekend it's really time to chill and laugh at the absurdity.

It's time to remember a sense of freaking humor. Why on earth did I forget?

American Independent Radio

If you had a ground floor opportunity to redo BET from scratch, what would you do? Guess what?

Every once in a while an opportunity comes around where there are only a few people who know what's up and they're not well enough connected to take advantage of something right in front of their face. I perceive this to be the case right now in minority radio.

If I were to get the opportunity to have a radio program, it would be called The Vector and it would be very much like Cobb in many respects. I would direct it to the internal Third World and point the way to the Second. To me, the best of the Second World would be well represented by the man who owns a small, multimillion dollar business. It's where I'm trying to go. In some respects, I'm not perfectly qualified to host such a show, but in other ways I'm the perfect man for the job. But that's not the point of this post, rather it is to draw attention to what's going on at Sirius & XM with regard to what appears to be a minority set-aside for satellite radio spectrum.

A cat I met last month, Malik Shakur is in the thick of following the FCC machinations and has an application in process for some of this spectrum. He's determined and his website is getting little traffic. I notice these things and I hope that to the extent people notice me, I can direct some attention his way. It's very difficult to be a one man crusade, especially when there are so many people who very desperately want to achieve the same goal. We're just not all networked.

So as I said, I'm going to get folks I know, whom I have confidence would be excellent in the radio business to get aware of Malik's efforts. Something important can happen here.

The Happer Report on Climate Change

Tells Al Gore and the IPCC where to put their hockey stick.
Download ClimateChangeNot

Obama Gonna What? - Taxes

Sounds like the press corps has grown some teeny ones. But of course the fudgy answer to the direct question comes as no surprise.

On Transcending Multiculturalism: A Sotomayor Addendum

I think that the experience of living as a free man is precious and quite frankly more rare than it should be. And I think that in large societies the (peasant) masses are not free, and so learn to operate with a certain lack of respect. Ultimately it is a weakness. In our society the unfree have traditionally been marked by race and so I look at the extent to which blacks have navigated well without standing to full height and maintained a subculture of doing so. Because my aim is to break out of that subculture whose very existence is the result of suppression.  

So for the lack of a better term, I would expect a man of means and property to bear himself in the same way anywhere around the world and I think there are ways that such a man indicates that level of power which responds to its equal. The same thing could be said of soldiers in uniform, or frocked priests, or medical doctors. There is a universal understanding.  

I'm not certain that the same thing applies to middle classes. I think middle class people are very much products of their environments by default and must strive to become free men, shedding the conventions of peasantry and the peculiarities of their upbringing. There is a gap they must cross. Many may reach prominence but not all cross the gap. It's the difference between Bobby Short and Bobby Brown.
--  

For Sotomayor to be the great leader she aspires to be, I think that whatever she might do to appeal to peasant, ethnic, middle class, sensibilities degrades her. I think her first loyalty should be to higher, more rigorous principles. I cannot tell the extent to which her speech to La Raza and the Aztlan movement unbalances her from that higher loyalty, but I think that the American ideal is to be transcendent. It is what we expected of Bobby Kennedy and it is what his critics played upon vis a vis his qualifications to be President.  

To 'be' a minority is, to my reckoning, a concession to a prior state of oppression, a perverse badge of pride and a reason to never transcend, to never cross the gap. In the end, I believe it will always end in appeals to tribalism. It is a character flaw to be scrutinized.

The keyword for future reference is 'cosmopolitan', although it does not properly imply an intellect of rural propriety which of course must exist. I speak of this in the context of black politics and identity formation here:

Part and parcel of tossing one's hat into political philosophy's ring of fire of is the sheer weight of un-learning and assigning alternate values to the accumulation of ideas that shape one from youth. In my father's house were shelves and shelves of books - the natural direction of my intellectual curiosity went there. As a matter of pride I have often considered my inheritance of this library, the province of my black cultural nationalist father and upbringing. Further, it has often been my naive assumption that anyone not responding to the term 'negro' was at least partially invested in understanding the intellectual connotations of the Black revolution. These days, I become more convinced that blackness *is* a simple herrenvolk term. We are the tribal people of us, created very simply, in native alienation and considered impervious to intellectual distinction. The very idea of debating Booker T. Washington vs WEB DuBois itself seems parochial and out of touch, if not childish.

In that regard, there is no black intellectual future. Black intellect serves at the foot of an old master, whose imperative was 'race raising' which in the end is a futile if not tyrannical exercise for any man. Alas we must deal with greater struggles.

Hitler, Finally

I never thought I would reach a point in my life where I would try to imagine myself as Hitler. But I am getting inside his head and thinking about what it means to have absolute power. I drove six hours on the road yesterday and listened to The Hitler Book. So I came to appreciate an interesting set of ideas.

The first was that if I knew that I would be supreme leader and likely to send thousands of men to their death that I would want to toughen myself up. And so I would have my enemies delivered to me after their arrest and I would learn to execute them myself. I would do this enough times so that the habit of killing men seemed ordinary. I would do so in private however, and I would not kill women and children.

The second idea was that I would be faced with the nature of my being as a supreme leader, and I was inspired to imagine myself addressing my top military leader with the following words.

You are a man, and as my instrument you may very well be a great man. But I am beyond humanity and this is what you cannot forget. Obey me, be my instrument and you can remain a man. Disobey me and you will be a ghost. You have only to please me in this world and this world will be yours. Displease me and you will lose the world. All you have is the honor of serving me. I will only accept one defiance from you and that will be when you come to tell me that to obey me is to disobey your god, and so I will send you promptly to him.

Apparently, Hitler could not avoid the fact that he believed what he was doing was for the great benefit of Germany. The winner of an election cannot be dissuaded from that belief until he is deposed.

Hitler himself is not so interesting as is the ways in which he represents the ambitions of the 20th century. I wonder how different he is from any other such leader, and how different the German people are from us. Yeah, now I do actually wonder.

Like most other folks who have studied Hitler's Germany, I scratch my head wondering how London, Washington, Paris and Moscow could have been so blind.

The Cult of Beer

They say that The Hangover was based on a true story. It doesn't surprise me that the sort of dissolute flyboy who gets to tell stories in Hollywood would have something like that experience in their past.

I keep noticing that a lot of people who love Michael Jackson get mad when you tell the ugly truth about him, and so I notice the parallel. Stay with me I'm going to dig a little bit deep here, but first understand about me that I never got drunk until I was 26 years old. I always resisted the cult of beer. I really never had what I thought was a good reason to step into oblivion. I don't know how much of a survivor's mentality I have, but I feel like I have it.

If you ask me what it is that keeps me from a great deal of sin, it would be that my temptation has a very specific address. And what seemed like a infinite plain of beautiful black women in my youth has shrunk to a small dot on the map. At some point in my young adulthood I began to notice how many black women from the 'hood who looked so delicious at age 19 did not look so hot at age 29. It was not simply age, but aging poorly. My rationalization was that I was simply comparing them to the sort of women who did have ample access to dermatology and orthodontics, not to mention gyms, leisure sports and healthy food. Let me be clear about it, I was a spoiled young man, and developed a rather discriminating taste, but the backside of that is that I behaved with the prejudice that a lot of black women simply didn't know how to live well.

Such a stigma is not well deserved for the legions of good upstanding women who simply don't obsess over their appearance for the likes of Lotharios like me. But when it came to vice, well, I don't apologized for my dismissals. Yes that includes smoking herb, cursing, baby-mamaship and fingernails that are way too long for working hands.

The Cult of Beer includes mostly white boys who wear polo shirts, but for the sake of argument I extend that soul-killing vice to the 'round the way girls with bad skin and poor taste in men. It obviously includes the likes who find Las Vegas attractive for just about any reason. And now that I think about it, I do have to amend my story.

The first time I got drunk, I must have been about 22, having taken a bus trip with my friends to Las Vegas after they dragged me into it. I was sitting somewhere towards the rear of the Oriental Palace, the big purple casino, drinking my second drink. The first was a Singapore Sling and the second was similar. Oh yeah, a Navy Grog. Not knowing what kind of drunk I would be, I quickly discovered that I was a happy, aggressive drunk. Still am. And so to the first such person that passed my sight, I said 'Yo whassap Rabbi'. Except that he was Arab with two very large bodyguards. He asked me again what did I say, and I repeated myself, unembarrassable. The two large bodyguards grabbed me by the shoulders and told me the Arab's long name, and I made it stutteringly known that I meant no offense. The Arab recognized my stupor and forgave me, but I'm sure the two dudes were going to squeeze an apology out of me one way or another. And so it was like the 16 year old girl who gets pregnant the first time. I was just doing the alcohol because nobody could see why I wouldn't - I didn't need it to behave as stupidly as they seemed to want to do, and with it, my stupidity took me straight to the danger zone. So I sobered up the rest of the evening thinking what a stupid place Las Vegas is, since all anybody wants to do is work themselves up into a state that they lack the courage to approach without the influence. It's still the way I think about getting high, although I expect that when I retire, I  might actually enjoy experimenting with drugs simply for the sake of experimentation.

In the meantime, I don't work for beer, much less live for it and I find all of the cultists appropriately flawed. Which brings me back to Michael Jackson, and Mike Tyson, and Bobby Brown, and Michael Vick, and you get the picture.

In my family I have cancer survivors still alive over the age of 70. So why does Michael Jackson, who has managed to give away over 300 million dollars in a lifetime of charitable giving, die weighing 110 pounds? And the simple unavoidable answer is that he didn't know how to live. He joined the Cult of Beer.

There are people whose character flaws disable them. And somehow we've managed to produce so many apologies for such flaws that there is an industry of rotgut entertainment that puts them at ease. The Hangover is one such film, although it's the best of its kind which makes it slightly transcendent. I could go into the tripartite character of the three amigos who search for their missing friend as three heads of today's contemporary American dude, but that's beside the point. The point is that Vegas invites such flawed characters, and as the popular wisdom says, wealth amplifies character and accelerates desire. All of those dudes were headed for a brick wall of some sort, but instead of giving them the safety zone it would give a normally righteous individual, it gave gasoline to their dysfunctional fires.

The Cult of Beer is a wish for dissolution. It's a perverse pride in self-destruction, a flirting with doom. Like Bill Clinton wanting to get caught. What do you give the man who has everything? An irresistible opportunity to throw it all away. Sometimes they provide it for themselves.

I'm interested in character and in the judgment of character. I want to live in a society that is not afraid of judgment, a civil society. A civil society is self-correcting. An out of control society does what Van Der Luen says, it gives up hope, determines itself to be on the wrong track and accelerates on the bad vector hoping to jump the rails. I understand the perversity of hopelessness. And sometimes I am callous enough to encourage it. It's how I felt about Nationalist South Africa. I said forget the Anti-Apartheid Movement, just let the evil spin out of control until the people couldn't take it any longer. But I don't play that game any longer. I want judgment, daily. I want people to say out loud what they know to be true. Michael Jackson was a freak and he died like a freak because he didn't want to live right. And he had every, every, every opportunity and no excuse.

This is the Era of No Excuses. Beware of the Cult of Beer.

Open Collaboration vs Propriety

I've begun reading 'The Success of Open Source' as I try to get my head around the idea, or the fact, that open source databases have leapfrogged enterprise engineered databases in many important ways. It's a disorienting feeling I have, so I need to reconcile it with reality. That's the thrust, but I think there are important implications as well.

If there is one thing I've always liked about my industry and also hated it is the way in which programmers have been organized to work and create wealth has managed to be casual. I thought about this today while looking for a bathroom that was not being serviced in the spanking new building where I'm working. And so I'm curious to know some of the underlying principles, if there are any.

You see the building I'm currently working in has been architected for collaboration. Nobody owns a desk, anybody can use any 'cube' which is more like an open plan workstation, to dock their laptop and do whatever it is they do. There are lockers disbursed through the building so that if you have stuff, that you can park it securely as your itinerant work takes you wherever in the building. There are small private rooms with phones and glass doors so that you can do a conference call. Some are as small as a large telephone booth, others can seat three or four folks.

Now the unwritten rule of this architecture has to be written, and you will find spontaneously printed notes all around the joint reminding employees that camping is not allowed. In other words, it defies the spirit of the collaborative environment to claim one of these small private rooms for yourself. But enough people have camped for the signs to become necessary. I even noticed one printed in large red letters in the elavator this morning.

This environment comes complete, as one would expect in Silicon Valley, with an area with beanbag chairs a ping pong table and subsidized soft drink machines. It's hardly what one would think of as panoptic. Yet despite its thoroughly contemporary style you'll still find a catering truck pulling up to to the front of the building every day at lunch. I've been to a large number of companies in my time, and I would argue that this particular campus is on the more advanced edge of the IT high tech sort. In the building I visited yesterday, there are no corner offices. In the corners are conference rooms. Everything about the place says, young, smart, tansformative & green. Yes green. Outside the front door of my building is a solar powered trash can. Don't ask.

Is propriety at risk here? Yes, a little bit, but I cannot tell to what extent. My immediate reaction to the no camping sign is split. One could easily be chagrined that old habits die hard. On the other hand re-engineering is not necessarily quality improvement. To work in a building that encourages collaboration and play is a hallmark of the new style of business organization you find in Silicon Valley. But is hierarchical organization necessarily bad? Is the desire to be territorial wrong? Is it necessarily a good thing to have a rumpus room in a corporation?  I think it all depends at root on one's understanding of the ways and means people are organized around property and how that is perceived by workers and their management.

For example. If I understand the open source movement correctly, it produces a high quality product because the inner workings of products are subject to arbitrary and massive scrutiny. In architecting a building where people work around that same principle, you don't own your office because your work should be subject to arbitrary and massive scrutiny. Camping implies propriety, of keeping to yourself, of privacy.

--
The downside of proprietary engineering development that I am intimately familiar with originated with my experience at Xerox. Xerox fumbled the future because it slavishly attended to its customers - customers who were not future-oriented. Likewise when you make your money designing to spec in a bespoke manner for a limited set of customers you are likely to satisfy them very well but you will be inefficient for the masses. Open source takes advantage of the masses and a new arrangement between customer and provider. So I am aware how propriety inspires loyalty and trust and how loyalty and trust can be the enemies of innovation.

There are great implications about this new kind of property which is inherent in the open source movement, but the manifestations of the broader social implications are just beginning to appear.

Valkyrie

I promised myself that I would never suffer through another Tom Cruise movie. And I haven't, although I was a little anxious at the beginning.

Cruise can now claim to have acted next to Kenneth Brannaugh and not look like an idiot. But he chose a character well suited to his lack of dynamic emotional range as an actor and it suited him well. Cruise cruises on cold, composed determination with a dash of impatience and a dab of sentiment. The sentiment dries up and blows away within the first 15 minutes and so we are all OK to watch the plot to assassinate Hitler.

Valkyrie is a particularly stiff picture with a goodly number of old heads attending the plotting and conspiring. For all of the dramatic potential of such a flick it came down to bomb ticking tension and the nervous energy of deception behind protocol. Fortunately, there was a cast that did fear fairly well. 

These days I am succumbing to my share of WW2 obsession now into my fourth or fifth selection the subject in the form of The Hitler Book, which is an interesting volume compiled from confessions made under duress.

Anyway, I give the movie 82%

A Culture War Declined

I haven't had much time in the past week to think about the culture wars, but I did listen to NPR excerpts on the Michael Medved show on the way driving to Monterey from San Jose. One of these had something to do with a visibly Christian TV family of some degree of physical attractiveness and intellectual vapidity. I forget their names, but there is some hay being made over their imminent separation. The reasons they give are inevitably selfish and shallow, especially considering that they have eight children under the age of 10. If I remember correctly, there are twins and sextuplets, all products of fertility drugs - just perfect for circus entertainment. I hear that something is being made of the fact that some social conservatives have adopted these freaks as pets and that their itch-scratching proves us all to be idiots. Yeah. The second was some highly intelligent woman that Medved could not believe was going to get artificially inseminated. So there you see the theme, sexual experimentation at theexpense of the traditional humdrum of marriage.

I am no fan of soap operas. Can't stand 'em. Never liked anything about them and think poorly of people who watch them. Except for my wife. Mostly. So far, I've managed to ignore 99% of their content. But I do recognize two of the actors. Anyway, one scene in the Young and the Restless managed to interrupt my breakfast the other morning as a dramatic revelation of passion played out on the screen, man to man. As is customary, it all led up to a 'Oh no you didn't!' moment and then cut to a commercial. So I asked the Spousal Unit what's up with that. If Hollywood had decided once and for all that America needs a perfect gay couple, just like it once needed a black TV news anchor, then which soap opera would be used to introduce it? She figured it would be the Young and the Restless, and as of 2009 it hasn't yet been done. So the denouement to the scene will be that the propositioned man will reject the proposing man despite having allowed him to thumb his cheeks and lips for the dramatic moment. You see there is no gay relationship on the soap operas. There's a reason for that.

In disposing of my need for political currency (and to be honest, Dennis Miller is the primary reason) I am discovering the Hype Ratio of conservative politics. The gravest mistake it makes is that it drapes its legitimate moral concerns in the billowing cape of millenarian paranoia, rather than a simple recognition of sin. The righteously lived life is truly its own reward, but many on the Right suffer as if the presence of decadence makes their lives impossible.So they are bound to a siege mentality and always holding out for a hero.

It's much easier to be appropriately flip. The eight kid divorcees are simply brazenly selfish fools selling out their babies on the same train that brought them fame. The intelligent woman is simply incapable of living with a real man, but she has money and Hollywood friends instead. Homoeroticismsimply isn't mainstreamable. It's not the end of the world - the world is full of fools and sinners and so what? Nothing. 

There may come a time when our entertainment geniuses decide that brainy, heroic women do artificial insemination and deserve their own sitcom. And they will cheer among their crowd reflecting upon the reign of repression attending Murphy Brown. There might be a day when the obviously gay actors can play obviously gay men instead of supposedly persnickety men trying to meet the right girl. The in joke will be out and everything will be obvious. We may find ourselves in the long tail of entertainment that sends social conservatives into the streets screaming with their hair on fire. At that moment I will simply raise an eyebrow and direct your attention to one of seven deadly sins.That's all.

This world is bounded by extraordinarily great forces few of which turn on the sorts of trivialities we have come to judge ourselves and our neighbors. And just as there was a class of Americans who cared only about Elvis Presley during the Korean War, there will always be a class of Americans foolishly distracted from weighty matters. The Culture War rages on, but the stakes are not as high as I think the warriors believe. Beware the Hype Ratio.