Cobb

A Rude Question About Third World Diets

Today I have the squirts. 

The reason is plain. There was a sale on Powerade at Smart and Final and so I bulked up. I'm very sure that I'm getting at least 40oz of hydration a day by drinking two bottles. That and my Red Bulls.

So it occurs to me, as I'm running through Charmin that in countries without toilet paper, the squirts must be an order of magnitude more.. umh, well shitty. Especially in those countries where young children dehydrate and die from diarrhea. So if I didn't have Handi Wipes handy, I would probably want to drink a lot less water and eat a lot more meat. If I gotta poop and hand-wipe, I want to poop out pebbles.

So there's my Freakonomic question for the day. Does the diet in poor countries skew towards foods that make pooping more round, firm and fully packed, or maybe do they prefer a more liquid consistency? Or does the left hand not even enter into the general vicinity of the question?

Spank!

posted without comment.

The Bastards of Class Boundary Transgressions

I watched a lecture by Richard Stallman this morning and it was brilliant, and then I watched another by him and it was awful. The difference was that in the first one he was summarizing the lessons of his work and life and in the second one he set himself up as an example.

The problem with self-righteousness is related to another problem that I understand but have not yet given it a term. I'm usually pretty good at doing so, but this particular phenomenon escapes my ontology. It will take a minute to explain. 

We all know that hackers can own our computers. But they don't. Why? Because we're not worth it. And even if they steal 10 million credit cards, it's not really a profitable business. Why? because the average Joe doesn't have that much credit. We are beneath the radar. It's safe to be ignorant because ignorant people aren't particularly dangerous. That's the phenomenon. Let me describe it one more way. If you are the ordinary Joe and you wear jeans and a t-shirt it's not a scandal, but it would be if you were a UN diplomat. 

Let's call it, for the time being, the Class Boundary Scrutiny Problem. 

Stallman, in his odious lecture was explaining how Apple Computer was closed and proprietary and for that reason he would not even accept an iPad as a gift. He did a little browbeating of a person who brought up the question about a jailbroken iPhone, the questioner was being a little obsequious and Stallman was being a little self-righteous. 

When you are a tenured professor, you have the luxury of time to develop the skill of not using many cultural idioms. You can speak directly from knowledge without the necessity for idioms. But for most people in the world, we are trying to find ways and means to secure our lives. And the world is very complicated and doesn't readily yeild up sinecures like tenure. So we search. And in our searching we communicate with one another trying to make sense of our lifestyles, our religious, politics, diet, exercise, educations, job skills. There's a lot of information to process. But we'll alwyas be ignorant of something and until we reach the point at which we might be a tenured professor or acknowledged expert, there is always some detail or nuance that we do not know. We are in an inferior class of skill or knowledge. But that is acceptable because of the Class Boundary Scrutiny phenomenon which makes us good sports almost by default.  

Except Stallman didn't respect that. He said, you should be like me. He is the diplomat scandalizing the Joe for his denim.

This is not about Stallman per se. It is about whether or not people can be safe in their ignorance. I say they should, according to gerneralizable class boundaries. 

You see, I have a choice on a Saturday night to go out and watch a popular movie in theaters, or stay home and watch videos of Richard Stallman and write arcane essays about my insights. The former unites me with the masses, the latter alienates me. Well, let me qualify that. Knowledge alienates only when it is applied with discipline. But whether or not that discipline is applied, I at least have an additional layer of dissonance between myself and others who are not possessed of that same knowledge. That is because it takes me time to learn it and it takes me time to explain it to those who have not learned it. That's the minimal amount. If I apply the discipline as Stallman does, it seems like self-righteousness until I preach.

So today, the young man in the video and I both learned a lesson about the fact that certain chipsets, hidden within machines that might claim to be open, are not in fact open. Stallman bragged about his open source BIOS. The very idea of having an open source BIOS never crossed my mind, and I'm a programmer. Naturally, if I applied the discipline, then I alienate myself not only from Apple fanboys, but from the people who are completely satisfied with Apple products. 

You see, if you are of a certain class, you have complete freedom within that restraint. How then could you be equal to any other human at a higher level? You cannot, but you pay the price with the implied contempt of the superior class, and you reap the benefit of the neglect of the superior class. You are not important enough to merit attention, and thus escape the brutal scrutiny of a would-be peer. Unless, you find someone who, like Stallman in the second lecture, is unctious with his contempt. Those are harsh words to apply to that particular lecture, but since much worse has been said about Stallman, I only use it to make clear the social nature of such a class boundary transgression. 

BTW, when I think of the epithet 'bastard' this is exactly what I mean. A bastard, someone whose father doesn't recognize them, is the recipient of the worst kind of contempt. The bastard never gets the benefit of the doubt, is obsequeous and defensive at once. At some point they either transcend and find peace within themselves or they become a Bastard, which is someone who harries the newbs without mercy. A bastard is thus a person who possesses no grace and offers no quarter. 

So you see in this regard we do and should use class to protect our honor and our ignorance. We can merit this by not being salf-righteous bastards but still make efforts to reduce the dissonance between ourselves and those who are more or less informed. It works both ways you see. You cannot assume that simply because something complicated that you don't understand is not going the way you expect, that you should immediately whip out the torches and pitchforks. As Chris Rock said, that's when 'keeping it real goes wrong'.

Obligatory Seriousness on Racial Bias, Silicon Valley & G+

Hey. Look me over. Tell me do you like what you see?

The difference between me, Prince and Steve Jobs is that those two care and I don't. I wouldn't write a song with a chorus 'Baby I'm A Star'. And I wouldn't pitch a hissy fit if somebody took my image out of my control. It turns out that there's a great line from De La Soul's 'Bitties in the BK Lounge' that says "I've got too much family to heed your threats". That says it all.

So when my existential partner Y asked me to write a few hundred on the subject in the Title field, I had to determine that I was going to do it as a favor and also because the chances of getting somebody like me to write is very slim - and people are going to assume too much about what I assume the others are going to write. But it's not because I particularly care about black images or what people are or are not doing to insure that there is some minimum level of black participation in this or that activity. That's so Bicentennial. 

From where I sit, there are people who get it and there are those who don't. The 'it' to which I refer is the arc of computing and the imperatives of changing the way humanity communicates, creates and thinks digitally. That's what this revolution is about. I'm one of the people who get it, and that is because I have a great deal in common with hackers like Steve Wozniak. But it takes zillions of dollars to implement visions of what's been in the air since Vannevar Bush. Which is to say the 'it' is as easy to understand as 'Put a man on Mars' or 'Put a babelfish in my ear'. I think there are at least a million people like me in America (which I suppose would put me in the 1/3 of 1%), and on the whole we get paid very well to do honest work engineering the digital future step by incremental step. But we don't get the zillions. Then there are 'great men' as in 'great man theory' who by a combination of extraordinary circumstances (I'm thinking very much of Outliers) get to make a fortune or two along the way to that future, stacking up dollars from very pedestrian projects, like licensing email servers, or building yet another app to 'connect' you with your 'friends'. Some days I wish I was one of those who get paid to get it, but I threw my lot in with Xerox, and you know that story. Inevitably, somebody starts counting noses and bank accounts by race in order to confirm or dispute the orthodoxy about racial progress in America. Yes there is a digital divide. I just described it.

Maybe I should have said that I have more in common with Cliff Stoll or Dick Feynman. Or maybe like Tim Berners Lee or Torvalds in building Git, I'm trying not to bask in glory. Either way, I'm like the many more millions of Americans who dreamed about being an astronaut back in the days when nobody made snarky jokes about the Marlboro Man, and when Buddy Baker drove 200 miles per hour without an airbag. Like them, I find great satisfaction, in a job well done. I'm a builder and I like getting the details right. 

When I started programming my version of Eliza in Basic, automated the high school elections and wrote a CB/Smokey & The Bandit Trucking simulator in Fortran IV all before my 17th birthday, nobody knew you could make money programming computers. There was no such thing as an undergraduate degree in computer science, and nobody was encouraged to play unless you were one of the kids in Seymour Papert's kindergarten. I was odd then; I also 'got it' the same way many of us 'got it'. But I didn't stand up and cheer for Giordi LaForge, and I never called Benjamin Cisko a role-model. All us computer geeks had an image problem, but there is no way to communicate through any sort of mass media what it is like to finally get that program to compile, or to get that database query running in 1/20th the time. You know what just happened a few weeks ago? I got the creator of Fortran Man to comment on my blog. That's exciting. I've been watching Dirty Jobs on Discovery Channel for years. Nobody has ever done one on tape apes. 

When you decide that you are who you are, it's nice to have a few people recognize you in truth. Even though none of us have been to Mars, I have no doubts in my mind that I am the man I was raised to be, and most of my modest ambitions have been fulfilled. In short, I don't see how I could possibly be angry that I am not some man that I am not - which is inevitably the kind of benchmark these racial nose counts end up counting. If racial equality means I have to be Larry Ellison, well you need to ask that question to Chuck Phillips, who - as black as he is, hasn't reached out to me or anybody I know. 

I happen to think of the social web as an enforced ignorance of Dunbar's Number - except that it's monetized. Every day somebody is adding me on Google Plus or Twitter because I'm one degree of separation from certain individuals who have thousands of 'friends'. Hip hooray for those who have figured out how to monetize friendships - you will get the audience you deserve. As for me. Well, I actually do like to spend time with my family. And now I'm going to do just that. Here's the picture. Tell me that I'm wrong.

Yeah, I got root. But more importantly, I got roots. 

--

Now I'm going to try to deal with the counterfactual which I would describe in the form of the following challenge. If someone were to offer me 2 million dollars to do a black startup, would I take the money? The answer is hell no, and the reason can be described in one word, Solyndra. I know how race works in this country, and I understand the presumptions about accepting money for trading in on you position in the race. You now have 2 million reasons to represent, and for me, that would become the biggest payday in my life. Eddie Murphy can afford to do that kind of clown movie, I cannot. I could never face my family saying I got paid for my looks and that's how I'm feeding you. Are you kidding me? And I know all the appropriate qualifications, but I couldn't stand the association or whiff of impropriety. To tell the truth, I couldn't even do it for black politics - and I was there. 

The Long Arc of What?

Years ago, long before and during the great academic battle known to insiders as Bernal vs Lefkowitz, black American academics were rather open in their admission that there was a great project afoot. The project was historical revisionism, and as I gather its intent, the idea was to occupy higher chairs of academic authority much the way that a prior (actually the same) generation occupied campuses during the 60s. 

The slogan of the movement was "Only when lions have historians - will hunters cease being heroes." And so the project to turn 'Eurocentrism' on its head with some Afrocentrism began in earnest. This occurred somewhere around the mid-80s when it was no longer seen as particularly novel for there to be any black American college professors. It was just before the start of the Cosby Era when I, and thousands like me made our ethnic presence known, welcomed or not, into and beyond the mainstream of American culture. No longer was it just John Landis producing Michael Jackson, millions of Americans were recognizing black talent in just about every walk of life. I took all that for granted, never doubted that this was the proper America. It was progress, to be sure, but I was as convinced that such progress was inevitable as I was about the computer's growing role in society.

I paid close attention to the leonine historians, the growing acceptance of Multiculturalism and the extent to which black culture was indeed something unique or just a rhetorical figleaf for raw racial interests. There was a lot to sort out. Splitting the difference between race and culture for me was like the debate between nature and nurture in the realms of describing intelligence. And much of that went by the key term of essentialism. There was and remains a fundamental difficulty with Americans navigating these roads for any transcendant reason, and that is basically the answer to the question 'who do you think you're talking to?'. The leonine historians considered themselves speaking truth to power and often purposefully went into dialect to make their points. You could call them dog whistles or crypto. but usually the message fell into the old rhythms of race raising rhetoric - for, of and by black Americans. So long as there was more than one group supporting such matters, as eventually became the status quo for American Studies, nobody would look too closely at the essentialist contradiction at the heart of the matter.

There is no literature for me, there is only literature. There is the stuff that inspires and that which transcends, or maybe it's all just a bunch of words. No matter what the truth of humanity is, it cannot be easily reconciled to specific literature. Today, the matter is too dispersed. You cannot tell with any objective accuracy what literature people are using in their heads to get along in life. So what the purposes of literature are, is subjective, as is most critical evaluation of it. You know good literature when you see it, and so too you know what stinks. Is it just a matter of taste? I tend to believe so. Just as I don't believe that in history, the 'great man theory' applies. I don't believe that particular artifacts of literature make or break a cultural center of gravity. The allies won WW2, but it might have easily have been Patton, or Montgomery who carved up Italy from North Africa. It doesn't much matter which. 

So when I think about what literature is 'necessary' for the advancement of ideas in support of a culture angled towards the politics of anti-discrimination, it doesn't much matter to me whether that literature is produced for a white American audience or a black American audience. From where I stand, it doesn't much matter if it's directed at Americans at all, living or dead. There is some essential truth that the literature must present and as far as I'm concerned it is either good literature or it is not. 

It brings me to question the surviving purpose of the leonine historians. And that is because now I am a crafty older man, I'm interested in finding out how wars are survived. When human beings survive war, then that is a good thing. Does it matter if it's Patton or Montgomery who wins? Only symbolically for those of us who are merely instructed in the history, long after memory no longer serves. 

 

I Am Not Your Friend

My cousin Star lives in a high rise apartment building in Manhattan. She's a commercial real estate broker, five foot ten and stunning. The first thing you notice when you walk into her pad is the large painting she made in the style of Basquiat, and secondly if the blinds aren't drawn, the New York skyline. I hung out with her for a week and learned a lot about her, and our family that I never knew. What I appreciate about her is that she is excruciatingly honest and not shy about anything. Of course she has a marvelous sense of taste and an engaging personality, but there are many things about us that are radically different. What I love about her is hard to define, but it's stronger than ever. 

This essay is about identity and some of the ideas I will take when I start looking at the right way to implement identity management. So the first reference you might want to consider is The Last ID.

--

It took Star all of three days to get to the point at which she was comfortable enough with me to perform two very annoying acts. The first was to force me to watch Loose Change, the hiphop video / obiter dicta comspiracy tape about who was actually behind the 9/11 attacks on America. I didn't realize that my cousin was a Truther and it took many hours for me to discover this, as close as we are. All the while we were watching this video that she had obviously not watched herself in many years, she kept voicing impatient concern that this might not be the proper version of the documentary. So while she is fundamentally on the Truther side of the equation, perhaps what she recalls being more convinced by something other than the exhibit in question. The second annoying act was for her to read, given my birthdate, my full horoscope and assert with confidence that it was quite accurate. In fact it was. 

I could go on about other evidence I have to support my prejudicial notions about the practicality of Star which is hindered by such poisonous superstition, but she's more than good people, she's family. And today, all of that evidence is none of your gluten-free business. In a town where advertisements for Moving & Storage have taglines (I am not making this up) "Rick Perry: That voice in your head is not God", she fits right in. 

--

I don't fit right in anywhere. So when I think of social media, as I often do, and in response to many such questions I reply "I don't have any friends."  So when I consider what's missing from social media and identity management it is the extent to which it does not identify the importance of certain of your traits with any bidirectional weight. 

If I cared as much about 9/11 today as I did when I was reading 'The Man Who Warned America' or 'The Looming Tower', I would have found my sojourn in NYC unbearable. As it stood, as I was referencing my iPad during the movie, I had a hard time recalling the name of that first book. If I had known somebody who died there that day, as Star did, the significance of the 'Truth' would be greater to me. So how could I adjust my affinity to such a 'friend' and still actually love her? It's easy to do in real life, but not done at all online. Star didn't even know what a Truther is, so it would not be something she would put in her profile for me to accept or reject in the first place. 

--

The context for what I'm attempting to describe as an affinity system goes under the label 'WWID' for What Would I Do? And the first thing that I say about it is that it is a self-generated 'purity test' whose results you own and then selectively publish. 

As oldheads on the internet know, one of the first viral documents was the Armory Purity Test. I took it about 22 years ago - that's an old document by internet standards. Well, it actually precedes the WWW; it was  on USENET. (USENET seemed so huge back in the day). So if you bother to take the test, you will recognize peculiarities about the set of questions. But what if everybody were the author and everybody were the test takers and all of the results could be stored in a document under your control? This would be the beginning of WWID, except of course that there would be literally hundreds of such tests and many thousands of questions brought to bear. One could imagine, based upon the matter of 9/11 one such test with 500 questions.

I propose a system of such generalizable tests with each individual question indexed and tagged and then correlated into bunches. These bunches over time may vary but the more popular questions will tend to be central in them. People will then take these bunches of tests at their leisure, answering one or some fraction of all of the questions and have their answers under their secure control. Then for the purposes of affinity, the user of the system may publish results under an anonymous avatar linked to their Last ID in order to make matches.

Tests may be generated for any purpose. They may be job appliations, consumer preference surveys, political push tests, religious fidelity tests, entrance exams, special knowledge competency tests, psychological profiles, intelligence tests or medical diagnostics. Anywhere there is a question with an answer that in some way can be used to identify some personal trait of an individual, this system can be employed. 

--

I am not your friend. But there is probably some subject upon which we could communicate a great deal for a couple of hours. I am trying to avoid short painful conversations, and engage long fruitful discussions. This tool would help a great deal more than Meetup + Facebook. 

Occupy Yourself

I've been annoyed by the flock of uninteresting people who have added me to their Google+ circles (probably under the caption of 'asshole') as I have made my snarky comments about 'OccupyWallStreet'. I have a message for them. The map is not the territory.

There may very well come a day this year when more people find a reason to get up, paint a sign, show up and yell in unison to the tune of marxist demonstration than to football games. I'm not particularly annoyed about the fascinating stupidity of football and the vast amounts of time and money the media spend covering it. So it follows that I shouldn't be annoyed by the much smaller crowds who are nowhere near as loud making their noise all over America. But there is something about the significance of people on the streets that cannot very well be ignored, despite the simple math and the apt comparison. 

What one hopes, as one always should, is that these vagrant outraged citizens can find some way to organize their passions constructively and integrate that into the proper channels of power and influence. After all, getting rid of the Federal Reserve is not something anyone possesed of wit attempts at those buildings. They do have bollards and armed guards because that's where the money is. But I suspect there will be many foolish attempts which will make for a good highlight reel. 

My liberal colleagues are always searching for 'teachable moments'. But why Ron Paul has come to hog some center of this attention demonstrates a defective syllabus. And I'm not too sanguine, given the sort of verbiage attaching itself in sympathy with this movement, that economic education is underway. But, that's what frenetic energy does. Maybe they will get some new and coherent candidates to pipe up.

In the meantime, they're just stinking up the joint, but that's what peasants do. 

That's My Old School

When I was a kid, Clifton Wharton was my hero. Hands down. I have never heard his wife before, but she's a marvel.

Playthell Benjamin's Open Letter

Posted without comment.

Dear Cornell

 

After reading your Op-Ed column on Dr. Martin Luther King in the New York Times, I felt compelled to sit down and write you a letter. Since the conversation that I want to have with you is about public matters i.e. the fate of our nation and the Presidency of Barack Obama, I decided to make it an open letter and put it on the internet so everyone can see it. I feel it is my duty to respond to your column because you are such an influential public intellectual and moral scold people listen when you speak. Like E. F. Hutton on finance, you da man with many people on matters of morality and politics. Since I have publicly pledged to praise saints, celebrate heroes, unmask charlatans and chastise scoundrels I could not remain silent. You have all the trappings of intellectual and moral authority – Harvard education, PhD, author of influential texts, able orator, Princeton Professor of Religion – but the more I watch what you are doing with these powerful assets…I fear you are squandering them my brother, and you are in danger of hurting us all with your folly.

 

The Last Economy

 

Evry 1nc ina while i wondr f teh intrnet is makng us stoopid. Bt mbbe itz jus chng. U no how kidz txt eachothr w abbrs n sht. Like nt even spelng words out. Still. U nvr no. Thngs chng. 

How far can the next economy go, and what will it be made of? Dunno. I cn tell u wht it wont b.

Good Comeback

Cracked me up.

All Mobs Are Similar

So I just finished skimming the US Air Force document on handling civil unrest, which outlines things like tactics for all levels of protest. The cool paragraph tells the story of how the planners of a protest decided to use women, children and the elderly as the body of the protest and called in media, expecting to get great coverage of riot cops busting putatively innocent heads. Instead, the Air Force sent in uniformed female officers who were unarmed. 

But the other thing is that I read all of the tactics and came to understand how three months of training could turn any reasonably fit man into a riot cop. And starting with the 36 inch riot baton, a helmet and a sheild, much could be done to suppress random violence. Random violence is what you can expect from a mob - anything more would be dealing with terrorists, which is what I would be by certain definitions, aware as I now am about US Air Force riot control tactics. Fortunately I'd much rather drive a convertible hot rod than go to anarchy school. 

On the smarter end of the engagement, I thought how exactly I might go about diffusing the pretense of civil protest, and while it runs quite afoul of the typical tactics and one strategic rule of riot control, I can't resist its possibility. 

Imagine that first thing in the morning of Day Two of the purported riots. You, as The Man, erect the following: In a large town square close to where things are burning and bricks are being thrown, you setup just that kind of unarmed female circular cordon. In the middle of that cordon, you have bright lights and cameras going 24/7 focusing on a dais setup in the middle. On the dais are a dozen judges, also preferably female and elderly hearing complaints from the crowd. If you have a complaint, then you must come in front of the lights and speak in public inside the cordon. Protesters are then realtimed into the permanent record.

How long could violent protesters garner any amount of sympathy from the public if such a dais were maintained? 

Reggie Watts

I couldn't make this up. What if you had an entertainer who was a combination of Bobby McFerrin, Robin Williams, Tay Zonday, Bobcat Goldthwaite and Stephen Wright? You'd have Reggie Watts on a bad day. This man is completely and totally spontaneous - even moreso than Eddie Izzard, but without Williams' mania. OK. Enough 'splaining. Just check this out. 

Socialists & Racism

If there is anything true about the epithet 'sell-out' it is that it doesn't take much financial renumeration to pull former comrades heads out of the collective ass of the collective. I prefer the term 'pinche vendida', which is most appropriate to the drama of the petit bourgiosie. 

There is a principle fallacy that I believe most Westerners adhere to and I am investigating it because of its many corruptions. Interestingly, it comes from a gut instinct I learned as a black nationalist in distrusting white liberals. The fallacy is that the middle class via political activism can make the poor into middle class. It ain't true, or at least it cannot be done without the sort of transfer of wealth on the pain of riots or similar legal fiat that I find reprehensible. At least some radicals have the honesty to say thier intent is to afflict the comfortable, another euphemism for "(fuc | soa)+k the rich". Understand that I find such honesty and aim to be an honorable calling, but make no mistake, I'm not on that side. 

With this in mind one must qualify any political program whose honest goal is 'upward mobility' for the masses (read 'deserving poor'). For the socialist program there is that interesting matter of race, and this is where the histogram above comes into play. Notice the particularly long tail of the households doing more than $75k. This is something I believe to be uniquely American, but I'm open to dispute about that. Still the real meat of this graph is the purple part with the 60% of American households doing less than 57K in 2005 dollars. I boldly assert (and here's where you can dispute me again if you care to) that this is where the Left is focused and sniffing up the ass of that Left, the mainstream anti-racists of America. The reason is because it is in this realm that racism has its greatest effect on the fortunes of Americans.

As anyone with a racial agenda will quote you, there is a well-known economic statistic about the fortunes of the white high school grad vs the black collegian with two years of undergraduate studies under their belt. I would be happy to remind you that people with such educational prospects, by and large don't often get past the 60%. I would think it amply fair to say that those people are about average. So when, on average, the white dude with highschool and the black dude with college are compared and this is given as proof of how racist America is, you are likely to get a shrug from me. Why? Because that level of achievement is not something I find particularly inspiring. But let us give the Leftists their due. In fact let us stipulate that this is the core of economic racism in the United States.

Those of you familiar with the film Brazil and Orwell in general should understand quite well how much energy has been spent spelling out the effect of dystopic authoritarianism on the fate of the common man. It is of course reasonable that the Left and Right focus on that meaty part of the histogram in the context of democratic politics. So how much social mobility does the entire program of the socialist program get to the meat of the American public? I'm going to be hugely generous, and say 25% And I'll tell you why I'll say 25% - because it's outrageous to think the American public wouldn't vote themselves a 25% raise if they could, or that socialists would smack down the capitalists among us to foot the bill if they could. While I'm at it, let's take a look at what credit the Left gives itself. If you pile those 150 things on top of each other do they add up to a 25% raise? Go ahead and add them up - it's really a great list. 

But I bet you that if you ask a black partisan how much of that benefit goes to their constituents they will still come back with a demand for the same half dozen things. Better education. Better jobs. Better healthcare. Better housing. Better policing. Better political representation. And they will tell you the bottom line is that right in the meat of that demographic a 25% raise would deliver all of that. Take a poll yourself. Ask a householder at 57K how much of that big list he'd give up for a $14,000 raise.

So what good does all the anti-racist agitation of the Left do their constituents? Very small marginal amounts that can only be measured in pyschic dimensions, which is about all the comfort I think they can give, because any marginal benefit to a middle aged householder in the meat(grinder) of the American economic demographic is good patronage. So if someone can be convinced that racism cost them a $2000 raise, well that's catastrophic economic structural racism - not really but you certainly have the attention of somebody in the the 57K demographic. 

How racist is the American Left? It doesn't matter because it's all relative. Like the hunter who doesn't have to outrun the bear, the American Left only has to be less racist than the American Right, by whatever measure because in the middle it's a game of inches. One notch over on the histogram is world historic for the man in the middle, and it is quite simple to show the operation of simple bigotry as monumental to the man of modest means. Black kids locked out of a country club swimming pool in suburban Philadelphia? Huge for the man in the middle. Monstrous for the poor. Asset forfeiture for stop & frisk in a single corrupt police force. Tragic for the man in the middle. Obscene for the poor.  

It doesn't matter whether the Left or socialists stop this bullcrap. It matters that they draw attention of their potential constituencies to these pint-sized atrocities. It matters that they will attempt to work on behalf of the poor who may not actually be beset by these problems, and that they will proclaim loudly that a $500 beef is RACIST!!! 

It has been a long time since I've been interested in anti-racist activism, and I have despaired of any hope. I recognize that the rhetorical patronage delivered by race hustlers is all that gets delivered. And I also understand what they fear the most, which is that by and large Americans in the middle won't give a damn about race. But it doesn't take much racism at all to keep them in the victimology business.

Kinda makes me yearn for the days of black power.

Conservative Cultural Criticism Made Clever & Hip

Trompe L'Oeil

Part of my intellectual curiosity dircles around the what I call informational thermodynamics. That is essentially a notion about the amount of energy required to keep a certain idea accurately alive in the minds of people. This is powerful enough notion but it is complicated by this, the fact of trompe l'oeil, which simply states that the human mind is subject to predictable failures.

These failures are part of our biology. The way we naturally think makes us take shortcuts. We abstract so that we can make up for the limited amount of brainpower we can muster at any time. What I hope is that Taleb's work will bear this out. Clearly he's ahead of the pack in his Fooled By Randomness (notebook). As much as we can know, many things are opaque, and man do I love his idea about intervention bias.

What occasioned this note is that I'm discussing jazz with Jewel and on the subject of Loussier we got to the object of Pachelbel. There is something classical about the fundamental chord changes of songs that humans find aesthetically pleasing. Oh snap. Now I have to read Benzon. But as the classic YouTube rant shows, Pachelbel is everywhere. 

--

Somewhat separately but related is puttering. When do our own idiosynchracies start to become obvious to us, even in our most intellective behaviors? I noticed this in my father the other day as he got his new computer and then proceded to become fascinated by the old photos that he moved onto it. He continued this routine about three times and I suddenly realized he was puttering. He remarks about how many thousands of pictures he has. He then says that some day he's going to really start organizing them. He then laments about what a huge and awesome task that will be. He start looking at one set of photos and gets engrossed. The next day he goes out and takes more photos. 

Last week he gave me 40GB of pictures with the admonition that under no circumstances should I load them up to the cloud. He doesn't want anyone to see them. His audience is himself. It has been this way for 15 years, I'm sure. 

--

And finally there is the observation that I tend to make more often that so much of global consumer culture privileges marketing. I do not chew gum, and I mean almost never. If I have five sticks a year I can't remember. But Ironman and I noticed yesterday that we have lots of different kinds of gum, and it's all in the packaging - but in the substance of gum itself, nothing at all is new in the past 40 years except for that new brand that can change flavor. Marketing, I now more completely understand, is the art of making the old seem new, to make the dull shiny. Transferrence is our predictable failure. 

 

Wonders and Signs

For the past two or three weeks I have been immersed in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, and it has been a fascinating character study. I am still singly struck by the life of Jack Shaftoe who became great by winding up in a great number of scrapes. It is the kind of life I could not imagine for myself and  yet in a small way it is the amount of traveling and performing recondite tasks for forgetable bureaucracies that have made me. I like my work, for the kind of sense of completeness it gives when properly done, but I can't say that in the historical scope of things that my work, or anyone's work, much matters.

I've been reviewing at a high school level, which is about all anyone needs to know, the particulars of the Russian Revolution. Or more precisely the two revolutions of 1917. It is a wonder to think that any cabinet member of the Kerensky government in its three configurations might ever be considered at length. Who would know what it took to become the right appointee at the right time? Those close to those doing the doing would know, and most everyone else would never know. That's how the circles of trust have operated. 

I grew up in an odd time in American history, a time when most people believe and thereby gave permission to those who proclaimed that we lived in an era of progress. Moreover it was an era of scientific and social progress defined well in advance of the eventuality. All of the murals had the psychedelic colors of the future, round and pleasing like the shapes of the 7up Submarine. We had already decided what the future was going to be and were so sold on that vision that people still ask why certain dreams didn't come true? Where's my flying car? Where is the colony on the Moon? Where is fusion? Where is world peace? Why didn't the population boom happen? Why didn't Rachel Carson's predictions come true? Hasn't capitalism ruined the world? Why haven't we run out of oil? I once heard an excellent explanation of all this. It was the idea of Pop Culture. 

Pop Culture was more than just the simple thing we think of today. It was, in many ways, the ultimate expression of democracy. It was the idea that by making high artistic concepts accessible to the average Joe, in quickly recognizable forms, that we would extend the benefits of liberty, education and all of the previously exclusive intellectual and aesthetic prerogatives of the ruling class. This is one of those extraordinary ideas that's much deeper than the meta discussion of Andy Warhol. It's one we still grapple with, and I see its evolution in much fascination with network effects and smart mobs ideas which are influential with the digerati. 

So to circle back a moment, is it really true that a high school education is all we need to understand the Russian Revolution? At a certain level, yes. At a Pop Culture level this is probably true. We can all understand the negative connotations of 'Siberia' without reading Solzhenitsyn. Most human beings never will read him. But is that enough for the purposeful wisdom necessary to foreclose the possibility of embracing another version of Siberia? Probably not. 

Here's the other thing. As beneficiaries of real progress and the disintermediation of various gating organizations, we Americans have come to expect more personal power. We can all have in our pockets more compute power than the entire NASA space flight control center of the Apollo Program. We can buy the sort of automatic weapons and communications gear that could enable a single regiment to beat all of Lee's Army. But how would we communicate the wisdom?

I'm saying we could not via Pop Culture or through any but the most demanding disciplines. And that is the sort of thing one tends to believe after having read a 2800 page set of books, which oddly enough I didn't actually read completely - so much as read and listened to via audiobook - a combination I find quite compelling.

We must be suspicious of mass communications and recognize what our literacy demands. 

Mercury in Retrograde

We had a power outage this morning onsite. A thoughtful gent tells me that this might be related to Mercury being in Retrograde, which will continue to be the case until 8/26. I have seen enough systems to know that sometimes a dumb explanation is better than none at all, and immaterial causality is better than explicitly wrong causality. So I have begun to pepper my vocab with phrases like 'swing a dead chicken' and 'the plate in my head' more often. And even though I did buy a nice I Ching generator for my iPad, never have I considered astrology.

But do you remember this?

 

Wow. I know every lyric. And I used to swim in that soup as a teen. Incredible.

Bachmann's SAT Question

"Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President," 

Pick the response most accurately representing the author's writing.

• A) African-American families today are married less often than those in slavery.
• B) African-Americans benefitted from slavery.
• C) The Tea Party is racist, insulting and clueless.
• D) President Obama is responsible for the failure of black families.
• E) Marriage makes slavery acceptable. 

 

What I should have done was actually go out to different blogs and news reports to see the actual foolish conclusions drawn, but most of them are too long to sustain a coherent point. It's just another opportunity to play the game of morally superior interpretation of history. 

I don't know Bachmann, nor do I pay attention to her, but it's clear that she has walked into a burning building. 

Bokeh and Chromatic Aberration

So I've fallen out of love with the Fuji X100 and in love with the Olympus E-P3, but I still have a long way to go in figuring out how I justify spending 900 bucks on a camera. Things were much easier when the kids were little and you could satisfy them with small toys. But today my daughter is thinking photography will be her thing. She collects photos and graphics from all over the web and posts them to her blog, so I want to help develop in her a sophisticated eye. But I think it's going to be expensive.

We went to Samy's in Culver City last weekend and found for a modest $150 the great film camera bodies of old. Nikon and Canon 35mm SLRs. I reminesced. The guy behind the counter didn't take my bait - he wasn't in the mood to talk technical about the differences between this and that camera. Basically, if you're not going to spend 1000 bucks your choices are pretty limited and you can't expect a 60 year old man to give a snort. Within 20 seconds of me opening my mouth, he ran off into the back and brought back the $500 Canon Rebel Jr or some such, with all the lines on his face saying, OK just buy this now. 

Oh no, I'm not going to buy it now, I'm just wanting to put my hands on the thing so I can connect that to my online shopping and research experience, I shot back with the lines on my face. You are inferior to Amazon, that is unless you talk to me and explain the minute technical differences. But the fact of the matter is that we went in cold and had no real sophisticated questions. We were just nimrods wasting everybody's time. But now I'm armed with two technical terms that I can throw around and be a further jerk the next time I go. 

Bokeh is the characteristic of items in frame in the secondary focus area. Good bokeh gives such objects a soft blur, bad bokeh gives them an edgy blur. Chromatic aberration (is when) the edges of objects look prismified. 

In my mind's eye, my daughter is staring at negatives on a light table with one of those magnifiying jobbies that look like an upside down shot glass. In reality I can sense the need for a $1500 monitor for her new Apple computer and a ghastly amount of expensive software, on top of the 900 bucks for the camera I'm buying for me but allowing her to use. I can't put a price on the experience of passing along what I know about photgraphy, but everybody I need to buy something from can, and they will. 

I watched a couple videos which have completely demystified what goes on in a darkroom. I cannot believe how boring that is. It took 20 minutes to kill a lifetime romance with red lights and mysterious liquid-filled trays. Now that's done, I'm all about the digital. (Sigh)

Today Means

Today means small things in practice, and great ideas in theory. Great ideas that a large number of us do not fully understand. We pursue without really grasping the ideal of happiness. But we are happy enough.

I used to spend a great deal of time puzzling over what America is, how it operates, what it means. But it was only when I started to read more philosophy and history that I came to a reasonable conclusion. That conclusion is that we are a people more wed to our history than we know, and that history is of a more elevated character than we say. So we complain. We are people who have time to complain, meaning we are not defeated and we expect better for ourselves. 

This morning I picked out a paragraph from The Root, a publication of constant complaint. In The Root's consistency, they have re-published an article from one year ago today saying that it is just as relevant:

What, to a black American in the age of Barack Obama, is the Fourth of July? I answer: the day that reveals to him, more than any other, how much America owes to blacks and their struggle for freedom. If it hadn't been for people like Frederick Douglass, this would not be a country worth living in. The lofty ideals of the Founding Fathers would have been no more than stirring but empty rhetoric.

What I understand about this is the rigor with which my generation of black Americans view the world through the lens of inherited Struggle. We have aggregated every pain and triumph into an existential philosophy of lure and loathing. America. What does it mean for *us*? That is the question we love to endlessly turn in our heads. To settle for an answer that does not result in some strain of complaint is to admit a false comfort. We have in America, a permanent home as symbols of man's inhumanity to man, and it is such a powerful symbol that it is unlikely to ever be eclipsed. Except of course that our Spartacus has become Ceasar. 

We might have spent an eternity, were it not for Obama, speaking of Martin Luther King, Louis Armstrong, and Sojourner Truth. We might have spent 10 political seasons, were it not for Obama, speaking of Michael Steele, Colin Powell and Ward Connerly. All these proxies of fate, will in time, fade from significance, because of what America actually is, and who we actually are in it. Americans are only believers in the creed of liberty. That is all we ever were and it is all we ever will be. We are devotees, no matter where our location, to a set of clear ideas that we uphold like a flag in the wind only pointed with fleeting accuracy at its North Star. Whenever we tire, someone else picks it up, and the march continues. 

It has been a long time since I've listened to Premature Autopsies. But I never forget its observation that nobility can come from anywhere. 

Some people might ask, "What is this man doing talking about nobility? Doesn’t he know that this is a dragon-spawned and blood-encrusted century? Doesn’t he know that the dragon breath of our time is breathing down the neck of the year 2000? Doesn’t he know that this is the era of flash and cash?" I will say to them that the interwoven labyrinths of greed and manipulation are as old as the FIRST lie, When you lie you are trying to manipulate; and when you try to manipulate for false profit, you reveal your greed; and when you swallow that dragon dust cooperatively you reveal yourself as a chump, a sucker, one of those folks Barnum said was born every minute. But I will answer them also by saying that nobility is always born somewhere out there in the world, and when you live in a democratic nation you have to face the mysterious fact that nobility has no permanent address, you hove to face the fact that nobody has nobility’s private phone number. Nobility is not listed in the phone book. Nobility is not listed in the society column, nobility shows up where it feels like showing up, and where it feels like showing up might be just about anywhere. If it could rise like a mighty light from among the human livestock of the plantation, you know it can come from anywhere it wants to. You see, nobility is listed though. Yes, it is listed. Nobility lists itself in the human spirit, and its purpose is to enlist the ears of the listeners in the bittersweet song of spiritual concerns.

That doesn't sound like a complaint when you read it, but when you hear it played to the accompanyment of the New Orleans dirge in the cadence and accents of the black minister then you know - it is the bittersweet song of spiritual concerns. 

I am constantly reminded of the irony of those backhanded compliments such as the Root constantly replays when speaking of the Founders. You don't often hear many such complaining African Americans speak of their duties to lead with love the ever benighted white boys. The word 'us' is not often enough broadly employed. What does today mean to all of us? That is the question that should be turning constantly in our heads. If we were to forget all of the foolish self-serving rhetoric of identity, then we might recognize how many of the world's people believe in the creed of liberty.

I have brought my family to reside at the coast of the Pacific. When I was climbing my mountain, my throat was dry. When I reached the peak and saw the promised land, the waters of justice were still frozen in the snow. I recognized them for what they were and did not resent their color. Soon I saw the trickle, the stream, the mighty river, and I joined with all to find the mighty sea. I remember when I was parched and climbing, but I was destined as are all men, to rest here.  We are not truly Americans until we believe in liberty and justice for all. 

Digital Boogie

From ViHart, of course.

Apology to that Gay Brit

I was living in New York City when Richard Branson was in his heyday making Virgin Superstores here in the states. So within a week of its grand opening, I went to the new store in Times Square. Ooh shiny! 

As I wended my way through the brightly colored aisles, I happened into a very helpful individual who issued me a challenge. And as I sit doing overtime work this morning to the sound of a giant collection of Mozart, I am brought to mind of that challenge. You see I was looking for a particular classical song and I couldn't remember it. Well actually I wasn't but at the spur of the moment I thought I'd buy one, and so I was stuck with a mind splinter as he told me that he could name any classical song I could think of. Just hum the tune, he said, and I'll tell you what it is. 

These days, I hear that there's something of an App for that, called Shazam. And this smiling dude kept following me around waiting to engage his wonder twin powers. I was annoyed because I couldn't think, for the life of me, what classical song I might want to buy from this solicitous geek. I couldn't help myself and I couldn't help him. It was a lose, lose situation. A challenge issued that couldnt' be met. 

So lately I think of him as a homo. Someone with a genuine interest in doing me a favor that I can't think of a reason to want. 

Last week, my son, my wonderful son who uses YouTube videos to help him play ragtime music on the piano, asked me about Sonata #11. Except of course he was humming it and I knew it, but I couldn't tell you then it was Mozart or Sonata #11 aka K331 aka the Turkish March. You know it too. Everybody knows it, but doesn't know that they know it. 

I should have done something to meet the Virgin dude halfway, because I was genuinely pleased to have been put on my heels by the request. He was bored as he could be in his shiny hell. As you can guess, the center of gravity was somewhere Kris Kross and Sir Mix-a-Lot. We obviously had that boredom in common, and now there are no more Virgin Superstores. It was an idea that came and went like a tornado sweeping up the goods from those who live in cultural trailer parks. But for whatever enriching value classical music has, there was that. Shazamming oneself at home doesn't compare favorably.

Now we're all in the circle of Mozart love, but how can anyone forget Baby Got Back?

 

The Definition of Big

The Atheists' Burial Ground

..from these honored dead we take increased devotion...

My new favorite TV show is River Monsters. Now that I have a new DVR that can hold 70 hours of HD, I might just get more episodes of everything. So I'm recording the marathon for this weekend. In the last episode I watched, I watched him listen to the tale of a busload of people drowned in a plunge into a river teeming with piranas. He winced in the company of the eyewitness. He doesn't appear to be the sort of fellow, who would merely do that for the camera. In fact, one of the things I like most about the host Jeremy Wade is that he's quite genuine. Not a guy for the cameras, or for the fakery. I admire his salt.

I'm considering ignoring most of the gnu atheists and their arguments but I can't help but jab every once in a while. I probably confuse atheists with humanists because essentially the loud ones keep explaining how much more savage religious people are. I percieve loud atheists to be the ones spitting on graves and mocking the hallows. So I wonder if any bother to draw logical lines. 

I Quantum of Solace, the latest James Bond movie, Bond's seeming best pal is an ex-agent named Mathis. When he is killed, and after Bond kills the killers, Bond unceremoniously shoves his body into a dumpster. Bond's horrified date makes a remark to which Bond replies, "He wouldn't care." And his real name wasn't Mathis. I imagine atheists wouldn't care where their carbon atoms go, but I wonder how disciplined that particular lack of care would be. 

Why not desecrate atheist bodies, or better yet bury them under a Star of David for spite? Why not leave them in the open air at the crossroads for the ravens to pick? How about dumping their body overboard in the dead of night and never producing any evidence of their death outside of a hasty press release? 

I don't know how long a buried body has a right to its peace. The law is subject to regionalisms, but it is an interesting part of the law which is probably largely unexamined in perhaps the same way marriage law was before the homoactive began their plotting. There is certainly ample low hanging fruit for the Dawkins' dorks to deconstruct. 

I'm having second thoughts about criticizing the amorality of legal positivism. For all the Godless, cultureless, and clueless need some edifice upon which to justify their grubby self-interests; it might as well have the imprimatur of law. Call whatever statutory mumbo that comes out of the political sausage machine jumbo and the peasantry will salute. It creates order and passes for civilization. 

The stupid little atheist whipping boy in my head is confused about honoring the dead because he belongs to the cult of youth and  school of libertarian hands-off good will toward men. There is nothing in his universe worth sacrificing a life for, except perhaps the 'reproductive freedom' of his zipless galaxy of doable chicks. But he should know that nobody will come to his funeral if it coincides with some frothy secular event, like turn off your cell phone for an hour to save the planet day and his friends miss the tweet. His mother, poor blighter, is Eleanor Rigby. 

Gil-Scott Heron: Dead

There is a poem by Nikki Giovanni that sums up in about 25 lines everything I think about black consciousness. I could write about it for years, but the essential thing to say doesn't take more than 30 seconds. There are lyrics in a song by Lionel Ritchie that sums up my confidence that I would grow to be the man I expected to be despite all the odds. There's a song by the Isley Brothers that puts me immediately at peace every time I hear it. If I didn't know better I might say that everything I needed to know about black culture could be summed up that way. 

Once upon a time I didn't know better, and in those days it was important for me to find a way to express every emotion and cultural concept in my shared black language. I called it, as I finished my last experiments in it The Well-Wrapped Universe. I would never have to use any metaphors besides those invented in the 'hood to communicate my humanity to all of humanity - and as Earth Wind & Fire said, "If you don't understand me, it's your fault."

I knew I was being selfish even as I over-exaggerated self-referentially in post-modern blackness as a 'Boohabian persistent black object'. But it was still charming and fun in the 90s. I felt the beginning of the end when I found myself, a bit to my surprise, across in Europe trying to make myself understood. I knew I couldn't be so persistent when I found things I was looking for in Borges' poetry and in the lamentations of Chinua Achebe and spiral tales of Carlos Fuentes. Yeah, I was that multicultural. 

The problem with Gil Scott Heron is the same problem as with John Cheever. It's the same problem as with Issac Hayes and with Jesus Christ Superstar. He's too damned specific. It's like saying New Orleans and then humming When the Saints Go Marching In. You can't get away from the fact that Gil-Scott Heron wrote 'Angel Dust', 'Whitey on the Moon' and 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised'. You might want to think of Curtis Mayfield in some broader context than the Superfly Soundtrack. You might want to try to extend the cultural significance of The Wizard of Oz, but it's still always "I'll get you my pretty, and your little dog too". And Vince Geraldi will always be Linus and Lucy and Mikey will always be Life Cereal and Wil Wheaton will always be Ensign Crusher. Forever.

Issac Hayes is the big bald black man who made the ungh sounds of the 70s like a natural man was supposed to. And Jesus Christ Superstar made all pop culture Jesus freaks and hippies approachable for a moment. But what I didn't know when I was 13 years old was that those symbols wouldn't last forever and explain more about the world than just that moment. It was hard for me to accept that Kwai Chang Caine's grasshopper lessons wouldn't serve me long after the show was canceled - especially when I learned that role was supposed to be for Bruce Lee. 

And I began to become resentful of all the things I knew to be true but only for my Well Wrapped Universe. I began to hate the fact that the world couldn't catch the flavor and it didn't want to study. That there is what Gerald Early calls lure and loathing. But I played in all sections of the orchestra, and mastered all the languages and idioms. 

Still. I was prepared to hear that Marvin Gaye's 'Whats Going On' was not the greatest album ever recorded. I was prepared to hear that Alex Haley's Roots was not the greatest American story ever told. But it was hard to give up the arcane gems. It was hard to have to explain The Last Poets. It was difficult to remind people that LA had KDAY, KGFJ, KJLH and KACE, each a different flavor of black radio. And as time went by, it was disappointing to explain Yellow Back Radio, you know, and break it down. It was painful to read High Cotton alone. It was ridiculously hard to give up on explaining George C. Wolfe and so now I explain the real killer. 

The real killer is when, above and beyond the Well Wrapped Universe you find superior examples. It's like dissing Michael Jackson in 1982 when John Landis was just discovering him.

So I look back on Gil Scott Heron and what can I say? He was deep to me as a teenager when I sat in the back of the bus and recited him and Richard Pryor like the perverse psuedo badass I was, or pretended to be. When the world was ruled by The Funk, and when Issac Hayes said ungh, you said ungh back. When you looked with admiration at the matron in the white uniform and 14 inch arms who stood in the back of the church and swung a mean tambourine; when the hardest working man in show business dropped to one knee and the sweat on his forehead let you know he was The Godfather; when all you had to do was say Aretha and everybody shutup. That was the day for Gil Scott Heron and all the ghetto poets of America. When Flip Wilson was preaching in The Church of What's Happenin' Now. When the New York Times used slang words to let the reader know that a Negro was speaking. That's when Gil Scott Heron's message to the masses was a thing to hold in reverence. When everybody had the expectation that some wino had more humanity in him than the President, when hippy dippy weathermen were funny, when you were excited to see Goldie Hawn  pop out of a little door and say 'sock it to me'. That was then. 

It's all so specific that unless you're over 40 years old, you probably have no idea of half the things I'm talking about. Just like I didn't get Bugs Bunny jokes about A ration cards or victory gardens or the aphrodesiac powers of nylon stockings until I went and studied. 

You can go and study Gil-Scott Heron, but his world is over. It's just taking up space in a part of my brain I don't use much any longer. His voice is coming out over the transistors of my old leather covered Federal radio on 1230 AM, hot times soulin' on the weekend, KGFJ.

A rat done bit my sister Nell
and Whitey's on the moon.
Her arms and legs began to swell
And Whitey's on the moon.  

There's some things you remember for which you'll never need Google. I'm prepared to accept those things only mean something to me, and only because it used to mean something to the me I used to be. That's what it means not to be televised. 

Quote of the Day

John Burroughs argued that the tendency to blame others was the ultimate admission of failure. It was an acceptance of the inability to change one’s destiny and therefore the belief that someone else was in the control of it. -- Belmont Club

Coolest Electric Bicycle Ever

Just wow. I want one. Check out the gears on this badboy.

Illogical Hateration for the Other King

This weekend I went cruising through the old 'hood looking for people who have forgotten me and I have forgotten. This time, for the first time in a while, I felt that my hooptie was a bit too shabby to show off. But I was feeling very good anyway. My old street looks small, but maybe that's because more people have cars parked on it. I suppose that's a good thing. 

I spent the most time at Rancho Cienega Park. Sometimes we called it Rancho, but most of the time we called it Dorsey Pool. l spent a lot of time reminiscing about the good times we had there and most significantly about the great moment I had remembering something in particular about the pool. I have several fond memories of the place, but I just want to go into one which was about the lifeguard. I will never remember his name, but he was one of the first young adults I met in the neighborhood that had visions beyond. I remember one time that he walked a bunch of us over to Thrifty and bought us all triple cones, and it was no problem for him. He was nice, he was cool, he was smart. But most of all, he understood jazz. So he would play stuff like (I presume) Roy Ayers at the pool instead of the normal stuff. But there was one particular song that he played that I loved. I remembered the intro for many years afterward but never knew the song. Like the beginning of Flashlight or Strawberry Letter 23 there was that palpable excitement. It couldn't less than 25 years later when I discovered that the song was by Herbie Hancock, a version of Watermelon Man, now as then one of my all time favorite Jazz Fusion songs. But I'll always remember The Lifeguard at Dorsey Pool.

But I don't have any similar memories, nor am I inclined to consider many about the person of Celes King III who died at the age of 73 in 2006 - give or take. I did know that he occupied this building on Santa Barbara and then King Boulevard right next to a police station, and like many other mysterious men and women of color was said to be one of the great leaders of Black America by such publications as Ebony Magazine. He was a bailbondsman and from that came his fortune.

Celes King III was many other good things, but from my point of view no great thing. If I knew the name of The Lifeguard I would name Dorsey Pool after him, but as it stands it has been named after Celes King. Somewhere in the annals of the meetings of the bureacrats of the 10th District there is the glorified set of whereas clauses that show why above all other men in history that pool should be named after Celes King. Such words will never be emotionally compelling to me. I just won't be able to get over the fact that he made money as part of the "Prison Industrial Complex". 

I know he was CORE. I know he helped a lot of people. In fact, I think he was a Republican too. I have that vague feeling that I wrote about him somewhere back in the mists of time. But Google doesn't remember and there is no Wikipedia about the man, so I speak my ill and that's what we get. 

The Rancho Cienega Pool was by far, the most beautiful building in my neighborhood. It cost a quarter to swim there when I was a kid and 50 cents if you were over 18. Now kids under 18 swim free and adults cost 2.50. There used to be three panels in the roof that could retract and let the sun directly in, but that mechanism has been broken for decades. And oh by the way right next door are the Arthur Ashe Tennis Courts at which Venus and Serena spent a lot of community time doing clinics, or so I'm told. So King is in good company. One day, they may restore the pool to its former glory. I hope so, and maybe King's good name might aid in that restoration. But I tell you what. I hope I get to be that big a millionaire first, then they could rename it after me. 

A Note About Royalty

In my world of thinking, I tend to agree that men are motivated by three things: Fear, Glory and Greed. This is an old idea of Aristotle's or somebody whose name fits into that same ancient bucket. Is interchangeable with Honor to my way of thinking, and in a small enough community, all your honor is glorified. But for the majority of us peasants, most of our good deeds go unnoticed. 

In these days of fame and media celebrity, one can be glorified without being particularly honorable. That is something of a problem for peasants who don't realize their position as peasants. After all, if you can get rich by being a buffoon, what is the point of dignity? Part of the Peasant Theory is to remind us that rights are a gift of the strong, and we must attend to whether the strong are righteous or else we will find that our 'rights' are merely arbitrary favors. Therefore we must consider with our own best thinking whether the strong are actually honorable. 

Not so much in American meritocracy, but in much of human history, ordinary people are bestowed titles and honors by the powerful, and the powerful are often royalty. We are fortunate to understand that royalty is expected to be honorable, and therefore there is honor in service to royalty. It does sound awfully feudal, and it is. We humans understand feudalism in its essence - I would say that it is something we know innately. We study history attending ultimately as to whether kings were bad or good. It is the focus of all our literature, broadly speaking. 

So all of us in the English speaking world ought to have some interest in the goings on between this or that royal family. While I confess that I've been completely out of the loop in that regard for the sake of honor, we all ought to be as interested in the Royal Wedding as we are with any major election in the West.

 

Tracked!

If honesty is the best policy, then here are the facts that my iphone knows about my whereabouts. It's actually not that scary is it? 

If you haven't heard, our illustrious new Senator Franken has decided to go after Apple for having this information on your iphone. It being somewhat persistent give an opening to those of us concerned with privacy. But here's the thing - once again. If you go to a restaurant and pay with a credit card, you are giving information away to a complete stranger, or two or three, as it changes hands. Are you that interesting? Is your money? Is your location? Sure it's easy for hackers to get your info, just like its easy for mechanics to steal your car.

My point is, no matter how important your private information is to you, it's even less important to the overwhelming majority of people. 

It turns out that I found some fairly interesting things about my Mac and iphone today with regard to where stuff goes on my machines. Also, the best guess is that the information that persists is done in error. All this app that takes my data to this visualization has is a few days of information. I was actually hoping for a lot more to show up, but maybe I did something wrong. Either way, I'm pretty much broadcasting from Foursquare anyhow.

Abandoned Amusement Parks

There are more than you would think, and the only thing we are missing is nostalgia.

These days I have been gathering a different kind of junk to fill my garage. I'm putting together emergency go-bags and survival kits. I spent a couple hours browsing last weekend at the local Fry's and REI to check out the gear. My next major purchase is going to be a good two-way radio. Funny when I think about how I want that vs my desire for an iPad - a thing that gives me no more function than I already have. I go to Consumer Reports and there are no listings for walkie talkies. And that's not odd either. After all, what is CR, but something you spend money on to help you spend money?

It started with me looking for Marineland. It was the world's largest oceanarium (yes there are words for such things) back when it opened.

Coincidently, 'All My Children' goes off the air this year after 41 years. That is a thing I never paid attention to, nor much respected people who did. And yet it was just another frivolity that stands as a kind of ironic testament of the strength of America. America is still a country where people can afford to waste money, and yet with systems in place that are brutally honest. It seems like an irony that you can go to prison for stealing a car worth $500 measly bucks, or do five years in the penitentiary for stealing $100 cash with a $50 gun, and yet we have a Federal government that has spent 20 years worth of everybody's future taxes already and it doesn't get shut down. Last time I checked the debt was something like $36,000 per household. Yet somehow you have to marvel that we had that much to steal, and still we hate theft. We can still get our emotions involved around the principle of very small things. We can care about that $500 car that much. People talk about 'my' soap opera. We are an ownership society.

There's a great documentary by Niall Ferguson about the divergent paths of the New World. The English idea of property and landed gentry vs the Spanish idea of property and the rights of the crown. The English idea of property was inherently more democratic, so more people had the right to make money first through ownership of land. Naturally we should all be quick to point out the difference between more pople having the right and everybody having the right, but more is much better than 'select few'. The point of natural rights is that success is possible *from* everybody but not *by* everybody. The important thing to note here is that that when more people can have and do have, more people can fail and the costs of failure don't decapitate society. It is a fundamental feature of robustness.

As well, one can naturally expect that some of the many who  succeed do so in a surfeit of goofy ways. That's the downside of having an ungentrified aristocracy of merit. Lady Gaga, whomever she is, merits the attention of the vapid millions. But how could she outlast any other goofball amusement park? Lion Country Safari seemed like a good idea at the time. People could be amused by feeding sardines to seals, once upon a time. But when times get tough, all that crap fails. Well, most of it. And still people will hold true to the principles, no matter how small the amounts.

So if we have an earthquake in California (ya think?), people who let the water run in the shower for ten minutes just so it can get warm enough while they're running water in the sink to shave their faces, all in order to be presentable for meetings that accomplish one or two things after lunch, will scramble looking for a clean, clear pint to drink. Water is still water.

Land is still land and groceries are still groceries. Houses made of bricks will always be better than houses made of straw or sticks. Amusements will be abandoned, staples will not.

These days I'm thinking about the value of things I know and the absolute value of things I have.

Future Coup - Surviving Nero

 If Petraeus said he'd run for President, the Right would forget about Sarah Palin in a heartbeat, and we would have a President an order of magnitude (or two) more educated, worldwise and honorable.  I think we'll have a military coup before we have a lamer who can completely ruin the country. If it has come to Donald Trump, and even Haley Barbour, who's not entirely awful. I think patriots in the armed forces will start to think twice...

Who *should* be president and how big a screwup would it take for us to have an American Ceasar?

Dalit Goddess English

Transcendent value or shameless exploitation?

Radioactive Fish

"..and then he looked right through me as if I wasn't there."
-- Killing Me Softly

My research is incomplete, but I'm not convinced that there is a such thing as radioactive fish. Let me tell you why.

Ionizing radiation does not work like a poison, it doesn't stay. It is actually kinetic energy of electromagnetic particles. The best way to think of how radiation kills you is to think of a million tiny water needles running through your body over a period of exposure. They are so small that you don't feel them, but they leave a trail of dead cells in their wake. Depending on what cells they hit, they do different kinds of damage. In red blood cells they do lots of damage, they just bounce off of bones. Once these 'water needles' run out of their kinetic energy, they disappear, or melt away like water. The point is that they don't leave any trace of themselves behind, that is, if they are the tiny ones like electrons or gamma rays.

Neutron radiation is different. Neutrons are big enough to knock atoms out of balance and kick out another neutron and destabilize them. Neutron radiation is the key to why nuclear power works. One neutron hits another neutron sometimes with enough energy to kick out some electrons and more than one neutron. In elements like Uranium where there are big huge numbers of neutrons, you could create a chain reaction. That's all nuclear fission is, like a bowling ally infinite loop that creates bowling balls. Collisions and collisions.

How long can an unstable atom spit out more neutrons and energy? That's it's half life and it depends on the atom. It's like certain atoms carry a grudge if they get hit by a neutron. They have long half lives. Cesium is like that. Iodine is like that. Obviously Uranium is like that. Water, on the other hand is not like that. In the first place, it doesn't have a lot of neutrons. That's why when the Japanese nuke plants got out of hand, they doped the water with Boron. Boron is neutron greedy and it doesn't get unstable. But normally neutrons don't do much to water. 

Something that is irradiated doesn't necessarily become radioactive itself. It depends on if it gets hit by neutrons or not, and then if it does get hit by neutrons is it the stuff that carries a neutron grudge.  And this is where you have to make the distinction when it comes to fish. So far as I know fish are made of materials whose atoms don't have long half-lives. I mean if they did, how could the fish live?

In a nuclear reactor, the worrisome part are heavy elements that are radioactive. In Japan, some of these heavier elements which I believe to have been present in the feul cores escaped after the explosions. What is not clear to me is how the reactor containments have not been breached (as I keep hearing) and yet these more heavy elements escaped. Some logical clarity and less dumbed down reporting would be helpful. At any rate, it's suff like that, carried away in particulate matter (smoke) that lands on fruits and vegetables that cause the radioactivity 'of' food. It's not the radiation, it's the contamination by heavy radioactive material. In other words, toxic waste.

So we get more to the question of fish, and in particular the role of seawater in this ecology. The engineers generally use and reuse purified water to cool the reactor core and drive the turbines. That's a closed loop system for the most part, but still, the water does not stay radioactive even though it is exposed to neutron activation. The half life of water is about 7 days, and as far as I can tell it doesn't get very radioactive. Perhaps not at all. But the thing is that for the emergency, the engineers have used seawater to cool the reactors. To the extent that seawater contains various salts and trace elements with longer half-lives than water itself, this is the 'poison'. Sulfur, for example has a half life of 88 days. But in average seawater, sulfur is about .091%. Magnesium, on the other hand has a half life about 10 minutes, but there's more magnesium in seawater than sulfur. .129% So now you're beginning to see the start of a math problem.

If you have 10,000 tons of seawater exposed to x amount of neutron radiation (as a fraction of the total ionizing radiation given off by the nuclear core) what fraction of that will be absorbed by the trace salts in that seawater when dumped into the ocean? And by dumped into the ocean that means 10,000 tons of seawater in an area roughly the size of the region fished for your sushi flavor of choice. I can't imagine that a generic fishing boat is going to be within 10 miles of shore, and 10 miles of ocean can contain how many tons of water? So then you have that whole dispersal question and how many drops carry out into the fisheries. So you have some fraction of radioactive mineral salts and their half-lives to account for and guess how much of that gets into fish...

You should clearly see that even when the seawater pumped out of Fukishima is seven million times what it 'should' be, there are a lot of factors dispersing that radioactivity, including the fact that radioactive material itself degrades.

On the whole as a class of environmental disaster, this is, in my view, two orders of magnitude smaller than the blown oilwell from last year in the Gulf of Mexico. It's the radioactive smoke from an explosion, not largely contaminated seawater that's the problem, and the cesium and iodine on the fruits and veggies (particularly spinach) is the most dangerous stuff, not the seawater.

So eat your fish.

 

20th Century Affluence

This video is a short work of creative art which brings to mind several allegories of first world desire. The automobile has been perfected and now serves far beyond its utilitarian purpose. Nevertheless the basic performance of transportation, even without style, is evident in the Ferarri. It executes transportation excellently. This Ferrari, however, like many others, is for the elite. It is performance yes, but it also speaks to other - shall we say virtues? - that the 20th century man aspires to. You can hear all that alluded to in the music, in the selection of backgrounds.

The Ferrari empowers. In the 20th Century, overcoming distance over snow, through deserts, in the rain, these were the abilities of the powerful man. For a price, Ferrari offers these abilities. That is what this marketing tells us. The Ferrari is a tool that helps us be all that we want to be. I deconstruct this slowly to remind us of what we already know. I only have to say 'red Ferrari' to me contemporaries and all the vision appears. So the video does not challenge, it invites us to luxuriate in what we already know we want; it serves to remind us that there is a tradition of power and greatness that we are invited to join.

There are, as we know, problems with automobiles. Not even Ferrari makes cars for consumers that are made of Titanium which would never rust. It still eats gas. It still takes up space. It still has too many bretheren on the road with which it still all to often collides with fatal results. It still pollutes. It still dominates the Western economies, but not as much as it used to.

There is another way to be empowered, and it is the way that the 21st Century will be marked for. It will be information technology rather than transportation technology that offers great abilities. The Apple may become the tool that helps us be all that we want to be. It won't be the desert road that daunts us so much as the area in the desert with no 'bars' - no signal. As we built the railroads so we have been building cell towers, and as once looked out at wilderness where no paved roads or telegraph wires existed, so now we define the boondocks as areas of the planet which are neither wired nor appropriately wireless.

Hands on the steering wheel with the flappy paddle shifters will be replaced by hands on the touch screen with high resolution. The engineers who today are building networks with Cisco will be forgotten as are the men who surveyed mountain passes to plot roads. Once the infrastructure is all there, it will be all about the vehicle, not the substrate. Sure, there will be perfected networks just like there are racetracks, but the average Joe will be stuck in network traffic. 

I watch the Ferrari commercial. I watch the Apple commercial. I've always wanted and hoped that our world would turn virtual, that we would have access to the world's thought as we have mastered access to its four corners, five continents and seven seas. I'm just thinking now how appropriately luxurious it is that Ferrari's logo still bears the outline of a horse. Once upon a time in the 19th Century, it was the horse that empowered. 

Progress is not what I'm evoking here, but change and the economies and cultures that attend such change. 

A Rude Question About Black Neighborhoods

It wasn't true in fact that Mr. Arnold had my parent's permission to whip us, and I cannot remember him ever trying. But there was no question that Mr. Stanley, Mr. Arnold, Rev. Robinson, Mother Sadie, and Mrs. Myers were in close enough communication to my parents that our wrongdoing was almost always seen and certainly punished. We did get chewed out twice, but not beaten twice.

So there is the urban legend about black neighborhoods where this was the case, and it is always said with some nostalgia for a more well-behaved past. As well, it is popular to raise this mutual old school parenting in the Hillary Clinton aphorism about what it take to raise a child. A village eh?

Isn't that just tribal?

Closing in on T50

Several years ago, I launched a project for my future learning and reference. I called it T50 which has to do with numbering out fifty thinkers whose works I would follow on my path to wisdom. Driving to work this morning I thought about those I have accumulated. You'll find them often cited here as regulars to Cobb would be familiar with most of their names. So here's the update in no particular order.

• Christopher Hitchens
• Thomas PM Barnett
• Malcolm Gladwell
• David P. Goldman
• Iain M. Banks
• Craig Venter
• Niall Ferguson
• Clay Shirky
• Nicholas Nassim Taleb
• Richard Fernandez
• Steven Berlin Johnson
• Michael Pollan
• John Boyd

All of those are pretty much on the permanent list. I'll pretty much be assured to read every book they put out from now on. Then there is a secondary conditional kind of list of folks who are near, but in whom I may lose interest over time.

• Nouriel Roubini
• Dan Carlin
• Victor Davis Hanson
• Michael Totten
• Gerard Van Der Luen
• Danny Hillis
• Stewart Brand
• Daniel Pink
• Dan Ariely

Then there is a pantheon of dead folks from whom I think I'll find something interesting, although that's harder to tell.

• Spinoza
• Karl Popper

OK well, basically Spinoza is all I can think of at the moment.  Oh yeah and Popper. It's also interesting, I imagine to look at some of the folks I've consumed on my way to where I am now.

• Cornel West
• James Baldwin
• bell hooks
• Derrick Bell
• Umberto Eco
• Noam Chomsky
• James Littel
• Eugene ONeill
• JL Borges
• Carlos Fuentes
• Robert Ludlum
• Moliere
• Ishmael Reed
• Chinhua Achebe
• K. Anthony Appiah
• Hugh Hewitt
• Martin Amis
• TC Boyle
• Nicholas Negroponte

The trail behind me is longer than the one in front of me for sure. And it's interesting to look back and speculate on what I thought I needed to know from each of those, what I got and how much it means to me now.

One of the more profound effects of T50 on me is that I have less patience for the interactivity of blogging, but that really started when I got interested in Ferguson and history a few years back. So I expect to continue to get less and less satisfaction from this kind of interaction and more from finding like-minded folks IRL at various meetups. One of these days I'm going to find the right clique -  it will save me a lot of time and give me a great deal of comfort in reading away from the screen.

You Need Me On That Wall

"Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinburg? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to."
--Jack Nicholson as Colonel Jessup

Better

This is from Ayaan Hirsi Ali whose voice has been forgotten recently. I take this moment to note that Obama, in his engagement of the War for Libya, has not given us any transcendent matters to consider - not even his own ideas about rapproachment with 'global Islam'. And thinking about this reminds me how very much like GWBush he has become in that he takes no inspiration from anyone but himself and his own judgment. Odessy Dawn is a pragmatic moment and Obama takes the pragmatic path, and yet there is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a figure whose life lessons might have been incorporated into Obama's strategic vision.

Ali says:

Here is something I have learned the hard way, but which a lot of well-meaning people in the West have a hard time accepting: All human beings are equal, but all cultures and religions are not. A culture that celebrates femininity and considers women to be the masters of their own lives is better than a culture that mutilates girls’ genitals and confines them behind walls and veils or flogs and stones them for falling in love. . . . The culture of the Western Enlightenment is better. (italics in the original)

Better.

 

Oh yeah and this:

“They say that we are all Libyans and we are one people,” said the woman, who gave her name as Eman al-Obeidy, barging in during breakfast at the hotel dining room. “But look at what the Qaddafi men did to me.” She displayed a broad bruise on her face, a large scar on her upper thigh, several narrow and deep scratch marks lower on her leg, and marks from binding around her hands and feet.

She said she had been raped by 15 men. “I was tied up, and they defecated and urinated on me,” she said. “They violated my honor.”

She pleaded for friends she said were still in custody. “They are still there, they are still there,” she said. “As soon as I leave here, they are going to take me to jail.”

Better. 

The Enemy of My Enemy

Sweet!

When it was over, DeAndre Liggins leaped atop a table on press row and popped outward the word ’Kentucky’ on his blue jersey toward a delirious UK cheering section.

The sweetest, most significant University of Kentucky basketball victory since 1998 had just gone final Friday night in the Prudential Center and even allowing for the cold-blooded Brandon Knight’s second game-winning shot of the 2011 NCAA Tournament, no UK player was more responsible than Liggins.

Make it Kentucky 62, Ohio State 60.

 

Astonishing Tsunami HD Video: Tohoku

Over here in Southern California, we woke up to no big deal. An extra 2 foot swell was all that was expected here in Redondo Beach. The sardine beaching earlier this week was more dramatic. But all day I saw nothing but boring news about Japan itself. Several nuclear power plants brought offline, no radiation, end of story. Wha? This was a 8.9 magnitude quake. That's enormous. It wasn't until I found this video, now 14 hours old with less that 200 views that shows what's up. 

This is devastating. 

National Silly Head Radio

I have been beating up on NPR for so long that I feel sorry for them. It started essentially when Sarah Vowel and David Sedaris took over. There’s a lot to like about NPR and I’m sure we could get into a lengthy debate about the relative importance of the likes of Carl Kasell, Ira Flatow and The Tappet Brothers all of whom are near and dear (and old) to my heart. And of course I would be a complete ass not to mention that much of my famousity owes from my stint on The Barbershop thanks to Michel Martin, and my good friend Jimi Izrael.  But then what really broke things for me was Day To Day. Every morning that I had to listen to that NPR Lite just wore down the cell bars that was holding my conservative monster in check. And at some point I just snapped at the vapidity of it all. Plus David Brancaccio leaving Marketplace? Yike. 

By the time NPR fired Juan Williams, I was too through with them and really expected nothing more. But you can't stay mad forever. So I have found myself turning back, begrudgingly. It's rather a different beast. Now there are commercials all the time, and there are a bunch of names I don't recognize reporting, only showing how strange it is to realize that NPR is essentially about 30 people. And even what they do is getting, well. How can I say it? NPR just can't compete with some really good podcasts - they just don't geek out enough. NPR is about flavor and style. It's not cutting edge anything. It's just like HBO. I don't mean to say that it has the amoral in-your-face-ness that was HBO when I stopped watching several years ago, but that it has become something of a parody of itself having become predictable and no longer being the best at what they do. NPR is cracking up, and crapping out.

The news of course is that the corporation that is often times too eclectic for its own sanity has essentially become reactionary. NPR is the Not-Fox for people who like to hate Fox. It is as predictable as a Frontline documentary, always stirring that same old cauldron. Always making everything personal and always taking the predictable angle of the big picture while pretending to understand it all. It is only that kind of organization that would make a point to fraternize with the Muslim Brotherhood. 

Red Flag No. 2: At the lunch, one of the men says MEAC is connected with the Muslim Brotherhood. That should have been Schiller's and Liley's cue to skedaddle. The Muslim Brotherhood has been in the news of late because of fears on Capitol Hill and elsewhere that the radical group would gain power in Egypt during last month's uprising. Combine that with this statement on the MEAC website -- "share our philosophical approach to the spread of Islam and the establishment of Sharia worldwide" -- and the NPR fundraisers should have been out the door.

Everybody has got a cool Muslim friend. Just like in the 60s every uptight white suburbanite had a cool black friend. That doesn't mean you should hang out with Eldridge Cleaver. NPR is conducting itself like Patty Hearst, or so it would seem. They've been captivated by their ability to be the Not-Fox and now all their flavor and style is starting to wear out its charming welcome. 

So my local affiliates are yammering like hunger art idiots about the battle on Capitol Hill for funding. Yes it pledge drive time, by far the most annoying and embarassing foolishness that ever gets broadcast. And when somebody tells me I can get a coffee mug for my contribution of 12 bucks a month, I'm thinking - that is about as clever as the best coffee mug ever, the I Love NY coffee mug, circa 1982. But the worst part of it is that during pledge drive time, they can't even honestly say that NPR gives you insightful news and information that you can't get anywhere else. I can get better, much better. For free. With video. On demand.  And not from the same people I've been listening to for 20 years, or the snarky new yahoos that are replacing them. 

NPR ought to stop pretending to represent the conscience of American philanthropy and start putting some longer format goods in place. Because for the short and pithy, the internet has got them poleaxed. Take Ira Flatow's Science Friday for example. Good show, but once a week? Compare that to Twit. Leo Laporte has single-handedly destroyed NPR on the tech matters. He produces at least 20 times as much content. 

I say it's time to break NPR up. Give me three or four really excellent, focused organizations. One for hard politics, one for hard news, one for real business, and one eclectical mashup for the Vowel & Sedaris crowd. The rest of the real talent of NPR are going to be able to find their own producers. But what can NPR really do?

If God Wanted Man to Have A Climate Monitoring Satellite..

He would have allowed the Taurus XL rocket to take its payload into orbit. Of course the fickle finger of God's Physics decided to confound the plans of the sad men and women who attempted this week to launch the ironically named 'Glory' satellite. Last month, the mission was bold:

The Glory satellite will monitor how the sun and tiny particles in the Earth's atmosphere, called aerosols, affect the planet's climate. Scientists hope the new satellite will address key uncertainties in climate research by enriching scientists' understanding of manmade and natural aerosol contributions to global climate change.

The satellite's onboard instruments will also collect data to enhance scientific models, and could help paint a clearer picture of the causes and consequences of climate change.

Today there is no joy in Mudville, and the mysteries of weather will remain mysteries. Awww. How will we survive without knowing what the weather will be like?

The Wine Snob Paradox

Just coining a term affixed to the problem of transferrance.  Freakonomics had a podcast about this phenomenon that I listened to a couple weeks ago. It was the 2010.1215 podcast btw. One day they may have a smart way to catalog it permanently. The title is 'Do Expensive Wines Taste Better?'. Well of course they do, a fair price is what the market will bear!

What Month Is It?

McWhorter:

It can be strangely hard to admit that a battle has been won. But especially considering that the typical white person isn’t exactly a walking encyclopedia of “white” history, it’s time to admit that America knows its black history as well as anyone has reason to wish it to.

Yeah. 

So You Know What Time It Is

Impressive.

Predicting the Future

We're all thinking about it. But what do we know?

 

Somebody Talk To This Ginger Dude, Now

Copper Cab is feeling awful. For a lot of reasons. It's painful just watching him deal with the crap in his life. He's dealing with it, and YouTube has shown that he has over 13 million hits for his 'Gingers Have Souls', but at some point a troubled young man talking into a video camera in his backyard is nothing more than that.

Soaking the Rich

For people who bitch and moan about 'income inequality', is this the solution?