Cobb

Paragraph 56

56. The Christian religion and other religions can offer their contribution to development only if God has a place in the public realm, specifically in regard to its cultural, social, economic, and particularly its political dimensions. The Church's social doctrine came into being in order to claim “citizenship status” for the Christian religion. Denying the right to profess one's religion in public and the right to bring the truths of faith to bear upon public life has negative consequences for true development. The exclusion of religion from the public square — and, at the other extreme, religious fundamentalism — hinders an encounter between persons and their collaboration for the progress of humanity. Public life is sapped of its motivation and politics takes on a domineering and aggressive character. Human rights risk being ignored either because they are robbed of their transcendent foundation or because personal freedom is not acknowledged. Secularism and fundamentalism exclude the possibility of fruitful dialogue and effective cooperation between reason and religious faith. Reason always stands in need of being purified by faith: this also holds true for political reason, which must not consider itself omnipotent. For its part, religion always needs to be purified by reason in order to show its authentically human face. Any breach in this dialogue comes only at an enormous price to human development.

-- Benedict XVI

This is why I am Catholic. The Church speaks to me and offers me the whole of its knowledge, embracing all of human experience, directed by the unifying voice of the Pope. It works to unite me with God recognizing that as a full human being I require more than blind acceptance and unconsidered submission. The Church intrinsically defends my freedom by recognizing all of my capacities and needs and points my way to human self-realization on it's only path - towards God.

Despising the Unknowable

Down this way in Miller's Alley, we don't get bent out of shape over things we cannot control. So it goes without saying that it's not bloody likely that we're going to make a big deal over something we can't even see. Yet the firestorm heading this way over the fact that Dick Cheney is involved with a still secret CIA anti-terrorist program has got people freaking out left and right.

It's all a matter of trust.

I trust Dick Cheney because I read his biography, and I determined that I found his character admirable. I understand very well that the man lost much sleep over concern for American safety from terror. It's true that the government has had a heavy hand in much we might have handled for ourselves. In the same way we tend to discount the effectiveness of color-coded warnings at the airports, we Americans are ready to look after our own safety. We know that we have our own back, but does Cheney have it? For all of us, he did, but only half of us believed him. Those of us that did would still have been fine, for the most part, if he said we were primarily responsible.

I suspect that the secret CIA program is domestic spying above and beyond the whole FISA envelope. My guess is that the CIA took over or co-opted the infamous Carnivore and ran botnets. But that's just wild speculation. My other guess is that it might have something to do with other secret sites that were built after the first set of secret sites were closed and as such were involved in reditions. But whatever it was that the CIA did, domestically or otherwise, one cannot prove much right now. It means that the Left and Democrats will have to jumpstart an entirely new sort of diatribe. Civil liberties can't be the subtext, nor can international relations. Whatever it is, coming out on Obama's watch, it is fundamentally unproductive to drag Cheney or Congressional oversight through the mud.

It seems to me that the only way to win is on one extreme or another. Squelch the entire matter, or expose it 100% Of course that would be logical. So long as there is some way to squeeze an emotion out of the American public, there will be an illogical political win inherent in this matter. This undermines the confidence that logical Americans have in their own politics.

The terrorists win

Only the Lonely

This morning I'm doing a blackness tour in my online reading. Same old stuff. Feeling a pinch odd that I could be hanging with Jimi at The Root if I tried and cared enough. Kind of pissed that I may have become perennially difficult to understand and thus always something of an outsider. Wondering how long I can do it all without becoming a caricature of myself. I mean, I don't have to make any excuses about sleeping with little boys or hitting the crack pipe, but then again I'm not Michael Jackson or Marion Barry. If I were to hype up the Cobb personna I could get away with being perverse. The thing is, I'm not perverse, I'm actually just achieving knowledge and some wisdom at an accellerated pace. It makes me move on.

So the subject at P6 is Martha's Vineyard and which section the Obamas might find most comfy for their summer vacation. The same-old is the same, 'it doesn't matter how rich you get...' observation that their likely choice will be Oak Bluffs, the ink-welliest spot on the isle.

My favorite parts of the Vineyard are Menemsha Bight, West Chop and the Katama beaches south of Edgartown. I hadn't made it out to Gay Head, but would prefer that because I don't see what the point of living on the water is if you can't see the sunset. To read the NYMagazine article that spurred all this talk, there is a distinct racial geography to the joint and social and psychological incentives not to buck the trend.

The Only Ones deal with glass ceilings at work, unfortunate misunderstandings in their neighborhoods, condescension from blacks who think their education or class makes them inauthentic, and identity crises in their kids. When they get to their Vineyard vacation homes, they want to escape that casual, institutional, and intra-black racism and be around people who help them feel less anomalous. Trey Ellis, who wrote the script for The Inkwell, the notoriously bad film about the black Vineyard experience (Ellis himself called it terrible), says, “The black part of the Vineyard is like, I would imagine, being gay and going to the Castro. It’s this mecca where you can be yourself and be with people who have so much in common with you. No one has to feign some street cred when they’re playing tennis.” It’s a source of communion and of pride. “When you see a beautiful black family with their kids, it makes you feel really good about being black,” says Chrisette Hudlin, wife of Reggie and a lifelong Vineyarder who travels there every summer from L.A. “As a person who’s high-achieving and striving for the best for their family, you’re looking at these other black people who have the same goals, and it makes you feel good as a black person. You don’t feel out of place.” Several Only Ones say there’s nowhere in America that makes them more proud of black people.

This is particularly true among parents, who talk about the importance of introducing their children to other black upper-class families so they can know they’re not as peculiar as they might feel. “Black kids need to be around successful black families, because other blacks from humble beginnings want you to apologize for being successful,” says psychiatrist Carlotta Miles. “On the Vineyard, you don’t need excuses or self-consciousness or defensiveness.” Drew Dixon Williams grew up in Washington, D.C., where her mother, Sharon Pratt, served as mayor, and she spent summers on the island. “It’s sort of embarrassing to say this, coming from Washington,” she says, “but I used to say with a straight face—because I was too young to know better—that I would get my black experience on Martha’s Vineyard. I didn’t have to be defensive about not being black enough or being black in the first place. We were all from The Cosby Show.”

Only Ones. I'm not sure that I don't like that. There have got to be more OOs like me, who tend not to break a sweat over our OO factor. But I hear what Drew Dixon Williams is saying. The thing is that I don't particularly care a great deal about my kids' black experience. I'm not trying to psychologically prepare a racial Maginot Line in their consciousness in defense of The Insult. There is no Black Experience(tm). There used to be one, but an old man died with the recipe, and now everybody thinks they have it right - like the drama over the recipe for the perfect hamburger. Sometimes it's better to just have a hot dog and call it a day.

But there was a time when I thought I was a Big Mac in my odd situation of being in the black upper middle class all by my lonesome, which was to say 30 and single and trying to pull the perfect babe. The rarefied atmosphere of Oak Bluffs was exactly what I was looking for - a bunch of Cosby kids looking for another bunch. And yet I still needed to play volleyball, because that's what I did. And so when I did that, I ended up at Katama among kids who didn't work. I mean to say white kids who shuttled between the Vineyard and Palm Beach depending on the season. Trust funders, social specimens to us in the real world, or at least that was my assumption at the time. But back in Oak Bluffs, the more urban setting, last whites night (as in post Labor Day dress codes) resulted in more dancing in suits, the same phenomenon I had grown ill of years before.

The irony was that when I came to the East Coast originally, having broke up with my progressive girlfriend, there was a great expectation in me that I would find in New York the very equivalent of a dense, upscale black community on whose margins I could dance my New World Afrikan dance. In the advanced bohemian brashness I considered my pose to be, I could speak to the artistic expression doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers and sportos could not approach without being so crass as the lot of entertainers we suffered in the degrading state of hiphop. I wanted the audience of the new black progressive novel, the people who went to BAM and who dug Wynton. I wanted the people who were looking for the creative blacks now unleashed parallel to Spike Lee who would inherit the mantel of August Wilson without caving into what eventually became the Black WB. It was a narrow ledge that needed broad support, and it turned out that there was little such concentration in the Big Apple. Deciding against all that after a couple frustrating years in recognition that ex-gangsta drug dealers and their coteries were bankrolling all the new black cultural production, I was too through with it all. By the time I got to the Vineyard, it John Singleton and Terry McMillan were the king and queen of black highbrow which was all actually just middlebrow, and the likes of George C. Wolfe belonged to... well the same people who made The Blue Man Group rich. What we got was Diddy, Dre & Jay Z. Three new Barry Gordys living three times as large. What we didn't get was one theatre on Broadway or playwrites to replace Jones or Hansberry, no new Paul Robeson or Leontyne Price.

That little black community simply wasn't wealthy enough, and I think today it probably still is not. And so I predict that it never will be because none of us will survive the inflation of the post-Obama world who aren't already wealthy today. The hamburger will stay hamburger and never move to the black cultural filet mignon of my dreams. Not a raisin in the sun, but a jerky beef that produces hard little turds of frustration no matter how much water you drink it down with. Mine is all shat out, but it took years to comprehend both the size and cost of this failure. In the end I have to live with our history, of having Michael Jackson's death celebrated as if he were our new black shining prince.

The fool's errand is pumping the old fighter of blackness full of steroids and painkillers to fight another round of the Culture Wars. And you wonder why a people who should have found quite enough in their humanity or even Christianity generations ago are still tied to minding the color line and carving out discursive space around Obama, the Great Black Avatar. As if he could be.

This morning I read that the NSA is building a new data center just south of Salt Lake City. I think I could retire there in 15 and do some consulting until my fingers become too arthritic, white as that joint might be. Still, I'd prefer Boise, where at least they drink vodka openly. Nevertheless I pause to think of all the undiscovered countries too non-black for the OO taste not to mention that of the average middle class black Americans. I understand the desire to perfect a black aesthetic which stands above the dysfunctional fray of the multifarious legacies of slavery, and racial brownian motion of American society. I understand my generation's deep desire to accomplish the Beloved Community, to have an unassailable elite black vanguard with the social clout of the voice of Thurgood Marshall in the wake of the Brown decision - all black Americans backing him no matter their class status. But nothing is so monolithic and sure. Rather we are black mothers and fathers to Benjamin Buttons whose adventures lie in foreign lands beyond our experience. It's good enough to make home right, a home right with God.

The Only Ones, those who deign to be that and stay that, would be a lonely bunch. As Steven Pressfield says, a tribe has no law so much as it has a code of honor.  America and the West are not tribal, but black Americans are perhaps the last tribe here, still trying to get it all together. Looking for unity in all the wrong places, as victims, as leaders, in the meritocracy, in the rarified moral arena of our stentorian politics. Everywhere we are reminded that our code of honor stands for jack in the social marketplace. It's only the head bob on the street, the appropriated high five, pound and now fist bump all forever lost to the leveling heat sink of transparent American culture. Nobody cares enough to learn Swahili and so the heat death of black American culture is inevitable. It can only be sustained by physical proximity and along the same lines of fear and distrust as Jim Crow ever established.

The distinction of being from the best and brightest of these, the least of my brothers, is being played out now, five steps over my head in Obama's house. His election was the last leverage our black social capital will ever aggregate. We'll go down finally, like the Irish after Kennedy. And no fat headed, thick accented brothers of our sort will remain stock characters in our popular entertainments and consciousness. There will be no future Charlie Rangels just as there are no future Tip ONeils. There will only be the same-old, the dialog that becomes a lonely monologue.

Some Unstated Thoughts About Achievement

One of the themes I have been considering is the necessity for war. But more importantly is the very accomplishment of war. It has been a while since I began entertaining the idea. At this point I trace it back to the days when I first started thinking about Patton.

It is a popular idea, which may or may not be owned by the Left, that war is essentially stupidity writ large. That the act of war represents a failure of intellect - an inability to think through problems. Note the use of the term 'resort to violence' as a way of achieving one's ends. The kneejerk ethos would suggest that 'violence as a last resort' is the thoughtful way forward. But none of that really scales to war. Making war is an enterprise that requires a great deal of thought.

As one of those permanent institutions in the history of civilized mankind, the standing army is the beneficiary of generation upon generation of wisdom. And as such it is appropriate to think of those generals and military officers as the beneficiaries of said wisdom. They may or may not learn well, but as a class of men who are expected to lead tens of thousands of men during the regular course of their careers, sometimes to death, quite a bit depends on them. Most certainly central to the authority vested in military officers is the fact that civilization turns on their actions. The ability to wage war is the greatest fortune a people possess, for it is the manner in which they preserve their very lives, when their lives themselves are threatened.

I am studying the means of war because at this moment in American history the study of economics is fruitless. Nobody knows what to do with a surfeit of unemployed, educated, literate people but make them EGBOK promises. So what if that fails and we depose the promisers? We might very well suffer a coup of the sort Iran has suffered and what would all those angry people do? Who knows, but even if they were to 'resort to violence' that would be a trifle compared to the the business of waging war. You cannot spontaneously generate a fighting army. You cannot transform rage into battlefield victory.

If one is to take Machiavelli seriously in taking politics for non-violent war, then business is perhaps, some fraction of politics. Surely the power of law outweighs the power of money in this world. An economy is a well-managed game and those who cheat or lose are rarely shot. The stakes simply aren't so high. And so all those who might think that the global corporation is some new sort of superpower really don't understand power. When it comes to ultimate sacrifices, rich and powerful people always end up paying for soliders. Nobody can match the organizations that print money, and even the narcotraffickers who printed cocaine were ultimately no match. Surely soldiers will fight and die for money, but more will fight and die for the honor that politics bestows.

Equally there is much to be said for religion, but I am coming to think of religion as a hedge with regard to its conspiracy in national governance. The Catholic Church does not demand that Christians defy the laws of men. Men fear jail more than excommunication. That is the way of the world today, except obviously in areas that are unpoliced.

My point is that the greatest projects of mankind still do inevitably involved armed conflict, and when people starve that is what results. Feeding an army will always be possible and humans will not 'civilize' themselves past that. All the greatest mistakes end in war, it is how we solve ultimate problems. We will fight until we are exhausted of fighting, and the man who leads the most and smartest of his tribe to victory at war is by definition the greatest man.

The difficulty in understanding this fundamental principle I place at the feet of a sort of false ethics. It is literally the power of a hegemonic understanding which is the same thing as mass hysteria or a successful grand conspiracy. Only people leveraged by a system whose roughneck roots they are completely isolated from can develop a worldview that defies the acknowledgment of war as the ultimate solution. Only people who circumscribed or extremely disciplined to live in a fraction of their humanity do not know.

So I measure things in terms of cost of life. I measure things in terms of loyalty unto death. I judge achievements by the willingness of those who oppose it to die trying. Whatever can be gotten can be gotten for a price. Every ethos that doesn't extend that to the ultimate price can and will be sold out, betrayed, undermined and refuted. When I came understand this in terms of politics, it was a revelation. It was then I wrote 'The Cost of Not' and came to recognize racial equilibrium in America. 

I live in the belly of the economy of America in its upper middle class. What I have isn't really much. It was hard won for me as an individual but the slightest war wipes me away. So I am reconciled to my spoiled and recondite existence, all relativism aside. I play by the rules of the inner circle privileges, but I never forget the outer boundaries - the human ultimate that lies outside.

Never forget that you can be punched in the nose. So don't be so proud of things you have that you didn't have to punch for.

Shotgun Method Stalled

My theory is this. You never really know what's going to succeed, so you do as much as possible with as much energy and brains as you can muster. You might be inconsistent, but that's life. Run all hedges all the time. Opportunity is fickle.

I've been working in a new gig incrementally assimilating a hodload of information from 12 people simultaneously for three weeks now. And in addition to all that firehose diet, I've been up late socializing with real people instead of here at my comfortable garret scribbling into cyberspace. It's an odd combination that has me exhausted. I'm going to work 8 hours today, but that's a virtual today because it's going to be spread over the weekend.

There are some excellent dynamics of communication that I'm finding out, and things I am learning about myself as well. I really prefer to listen than to speak. When I speak, I present. I want to make sure that everyone is in a perfect position to understand all of the implications to everything I say and I want it to be clear that I'm the dude in charge. All eyes on me. When I'm not presenting, I make witty rejoinders off tangents which tend to be unproductive. And yet I am essentially, at bottom, unquestionably a team player. I want everyone to be, as much as possible, on board, up to speed, in the loop, aware and engaged. Everybody should know the deal, be aware of the factors, know the direction. Specialization comes from direction in both a division of labor (top down) and volunteer to action (bottom up). Let it all shake out, ease off on the attribution of credit except when you are acknowledging other people's good work. Make frustration your own problem. And speak about it when you are prepared to call yourself the weak link - preface it by 'Help me understand something here..', or 'Can I ask a really stupid question..'.

What I don't do is sell when I'm responsible for building. So long as I don't know THE answer, I use guarded language. And THE answer is not really THE answer, it is a plausible solution that has buy-in. It's the thing that everybody explains similarly like...'well, what we were thinking at the time was... and we decided to... because ...'. And that can always lead to 'now that we know... we can ... and all that requires is that we...' and you write a new solution updating the old instead of saying 'we all know that ... didn't have a clue when he insisted that we ...'. Still that doesn't change the fact that most of the time, only a few people know anything close to the answers that will open up the door to a honest solution.

I'm reading Steven Weber's book on Open Source and have finally come to understand that the typical freetard at Slashdot is pehaps not representative of what all that movement has been about. I should have known better, and now I think I will have come to decypher a very important slice of my industry. I have never worked in open source and have always asserted that a software engineering team (small) directed Germanically with an ample feedback loop from paying customers would always build a better product. I might still be right, but sometimes it's not about product, but technology. Which means I have to learn this parallel dynamic. I'm not going to unlearn what I know about product sales, marketing etc, but... I'm coming to understand and make sense of what I've intuited about the craft of programming as it relates to ideas about productivity, property, collaboration and a bunch of other things.

Significantly, I am feeling a bit less pressure in writing that which is architected in my mind and giving away the code for redistribution. It makes me think about Lightship Server Internals, a class I and my peers were screaming for when we knew that the code was in escrow someplace in New Hampshire. (It's a long story).

So my motto right now is 'soldiering on'. It's a new quarter and I've changed my passwords and bought new underwear and socks. I am focused on making my team a success. That means that I cut down on the hedging and overbroad goalset and focus on what's directly on my plate.

A Scary Thought

Driving through California's Central Valley gives one a lot of time to think. But only when I was smelling something thickly agricultural did I think last week of the valley itself. It wasn't until I was on my way back home and crossing the road to Bakersfield did I really ponder all those fruits and vegetables and livestock en masse.

The thing I was thinking was a dirty bomb, and I scared the piss out of myself.

From Wikipedia:

The Central Valley is one of the world's most productive agricultural regions. On less than 1 percent of the total farmland in the United States, the Central Valley produces 8 percent of the nation’s agricultural output by value: 17 billion USD in 2002. Its agricultural productivity relies on irrigation from both surface water diversions and groundwater pumping from wells. About one-sixth of the irrigated land in the U.S. is in the Central Valley.^[4]

Virtually all non-tropical crops are grown in the Central Valley, which is the primary source for a number of food products throughout the United States, including tomatoes, almonds^[5][6], grapes, cotton, apricots, and asparagus.

Four of the top five counties in agricultural sales in the U.S. are in the Central Valley (2002 Data). They are Fresno County (#1 with $2.759 billion in sales), Tulare County (#2 with $2.338 billion), Kern County (#4 with $2.058), and Merced County (#5 with $2.058 billion). 2002 Data Sets

Now I could probably do some smarter thinking about it, but I just figured that the right dirty bomb in the Central Valley would just kill all the agriculture and basically Los Angeles would starve.

It's Crow Eatin' Season

A couple of things are staring me right in the face and I know that it's because I'm not inclined to write a great deal about current affairs that I'm not flailing at my keyboards. A couple neat crows served hot will suffice.

Palin Derangement Revealed
The first piece is here, in which a reasonable sort of feminist has revealed the vituperation of those who share the label if not the principles. Now as then, I continue to be astonished by the level of hatred directed towards Palin that she never deserved, nor anyone for following her. The day she was nominated I said that she represented good politics, but not revolutionary theatre. I obviously underestimated many Americans deep seated desire for revolutionary theatre.

Iranian Muslims Learn From Iraq
Who is the top cleric in Iraq, and what does he say about the legitimacy of elections in Iran? Then again, what would he know? These are the questions that any number of dissenters from the necessity of America's military and nation-building mission in Iraq are going to have to ask themselves right about now. Hitchens asks and answers these questions with alacrity. He usefully goes into explicit detail about relations between groups of Muslim clerics in the region.

It has entered my periphery that some Obama flacks are suggesting that there has been some great dynamic shift in 'sovereignty' over the past week in Iraq, which is thinner tripe than on my weekend BBQ. What they can't really speak to is the old Obama promise of a 1 division per month draw down when he gained office. The force deployment in Iraq hasn't changed direction of size. We're still on the old plan from September.

Kim Jong Il Spits Fire
Seven missiles. Count 'em seven. What part of Axis of Evil does this Administration not understand. Well, clearly the Korean part. According to this report, none of this is dangerous from a state on state warfare perspective, rather the Norks are simply improving rapidly. In other words, the DPRK is going from minor threat to considerable threat, except that there's no clear signal from the White House that we much care, and as far as I can see no change in the standing orders to the US Navy which has already demonstrated its ability to pluck missiles from the sky.

Others Knew Too

Sony went wrong a long time ago. All it has is God of War, and more PSPs.