My liberal arts education is completed and I'm starting up my martial education. I ran across something by Chap, which suddenly reminded me of how difficult that liberal arts education was for me as a young black man. What occasioned this was thinking about how I came to read 'A People's History of the United States' and what it meant to me at the time. But I'd rather sum it up this way:
The most important thing to know, if you are young and black, is that there is a powerful and influential cadre of people who believe without question that they know what's best for you. 90% of them are Leftists.
It's difficult for me to explain how hard it is to measure the boundaries of an intellectual prison. It is very much like the paradoxical lesson offered to Neo by Morpheus in The Matrix. Except that there is no Morpheus and you only have your own dreams. In order to survive, you come to distrust your instincts. You fight against yourself and keep fantastic hopes alive. You keep searching for knowledge and everybody you know points you into the same corners; you become impatient with all of the sameness. I did.
I had one extraordinary gift that helped me to escape. It was that I never had any shame, and nothing but pride in my own black and family identity. Everything really followed from that fact. I couldn't be shamed into learning something 'about myself' that I didn't already know. I assessed my situation and all I could say that I needed was money. For most of my life, that has been true - all I need is money. But I've also pushed to do something greater which is why I make a point to get out of Zinn, and that's something of the point too.
I want to leverage my work into a pile of money which is tall enough to make my family aristocratic.
This may not happen, but it is one of the reasons family is important to me. I judge myself according to how much I can produce for them and make their lives a measure sillier and more profound than my own. Sillier in that they won't have to work as hard, more profound in that they won't have to work as hard. See? If I become rich, there will be a class of predations they will be free of, mostly of their time, and then they can either choose to do something obscenely focused or something completely airy. If they only bother to follow the markets, the money will last.
If I didn't care about creating enough wealth to pass on, and if I didn't see the value of elevating my family, then I certainly wouldn't work as hard and smart as I do. I could be a happy peasant - because I have certainly surpassed the street level dosh point. Who was the racist who said that all black people wanted was a warm place to sleep and a comfortable pair of shoes? Something like that. Yeah. Call it the Earl Butz Dosh Point. Because if you're a peasant and you work hard for the simple life, every inconvenience to to isn't about pushing a boulder up a hill, but just maintaining yourself. Then you need a big brother, a good government, a leg up. When I fail in my arduous task at the level of effort I have set for myself, I become average and that to me is unacceptable. If your level of effort is to be average, then any kind of failure is equally unacceptable but you don't blame yourself, you blame the system.
In walks Howard Zinn to explain why the system has been failing the average Joe throughout the history of America. Easy job for a go-to commie. And so he has become famous. And of course communism is all about providing a good life for the masses of average people who have no intentions (and ultimately no possibilities) of making a pile of money tall enough to make their families aristocratic.
I'm about to spread the meme around with a conservative and libertarian stamp of approval. Since the idea is expressed in terms of expresso, I expect that even Liberals and especially Progressives will instantly understand it. What they may not understand is why conservatives and libertarians would support such a scheme. The answer is simple, it cuts out the middleman of government & the compulsion of law and instead uses unregulated markets and the goodness of people's hearts. You know, rather like Instagram, Twitter and Facebook are unregulated markets, or did you forget that?
"We enter a little coffeehouse with a friend of mine and give our order. While we’re approaching our table two people come in and they go to the counter: ‘Five coffees, please. Two of them for us and three suspended’ They pay for their order, take the two and leave.
I ask my friend: “What are those ‘suspended’ coffees?” My friend: “Wait for it and you will see.”
Some more people enter. Two girls ask for one coffee each, pay and go. The next order was for seven coffees and it was made by three lawyers - three for them and four ‘suspended’. While I still wonder what’s the deal with those ‘suspended’ coffees I enjoy the sunny weather and the beautiful view towards the square in front of the café. Suddenly a man dressed in shabby clothes who looks like a beggar comes in through the door and kindly asks ‘Do you have a suspended coffee ?’
It’s simple - people pay in advance for a coffee meant for someone who can not afford a warm beverage. The tradition with the suspended coffees started in Naples, but it has spread all over the world and in some places you can order not only a suspended coffee, but also a sandwich or a whole meal.
The solution is ideal. It gives the person donating the money complete control. If they have the confidence in the business that the goods and services will be delivered to those in need, that is the full level of trust required.
It occurs to me that a lot of the sequestered funds (which I haven't paid much attention to) are coming from discretionary spending categories. The double edged sword is that these are most likely to be the sorts of window dressing acronym legislation poofery that are the political equivalent of bread and circuses. Will the American public deal with this well?
Rand Paul did nothing more than pull an interesting parliamentary trick to give air to an issue of substance. That may be clever, but it is not heoric. And even if he loses his job because of it, it is not heroic. If Rand Paul had anything interesting to say, then the people would be reading it.
But the people *are* reading it and it is their own words. What Rand Paul should have done, and what any Congressman might do, is to filibuster things that the American people do not know already.
Libertarianism may have failed your African Americans, or your vision of them, but it serves me just fine.
The significance of the death of Aaron Schwartz will ring hollow in 'the black community' because there aren't very many black Americans who are employed in the highly entrepreneurial software industry. But for those of us who are, we recognize how much of the progress of this industry - in fact the entirety of Apple's new fortunes exist in spite of government's failure to understand the basic principles enabled by the emergence of new business models. Copyright is a regime solely enforced by a hidebound set of laws which protect sluggish old industries. And yet through Creative Commons, GPL and even no rules, publishing with 'legal' proper attribution, the software industry has grown tremendously with a minimum of friction. But the death of Aaron Schwartz reminds us that zealous political enforcement of old, terrible laws is just a matter of business as usual for government bureaucrats.
Like war, the Civil Rights Movement and those various legislations enacted because of them, tends with the passage of time to take credit for all of the changes in society. And it is generally accepted by everyone on the Left and Right that the Civil Rights Acts of the 60s are wholly responsible for black American economic progress and the destruction of the Jim Crow south. And yet even as we look to black history for stories of inspiration or even to our own family history, we know that greatness has been achieved without the benefit of weak or strong state government. I think too many people are losing a grip on the understanding of what makes people free - it is their own willingness and ability to fight and adapt to change, not their ability to find the proper spot some legal regime creates for them. Many critics of the Speilberg's Lincoln made loud points about 'black agency', that thing that must give credit to many who invent rather than the few who speechify and pass laws.
Most people never consider it, but the highest per capita black American income is found in the state of New Hampshire. New Hampshire has always been a Republican state. My grandparents were the beneficiaries of no particular Civil Rights legislation. By the time those acts were passed, their children had already grown up and left home. They did not live in the Jim Crow South but in New England. My great grandparents knew their fortunes were better served and left North Carolina before the turn of the century. Whenever I am told about the depredations of the Jim Crow South, the Southern Strategy and any of that old news, especially when it involves Barry Goldwater I ask myself the following simple question. If the Jim Crow South was so bad, why didn't black people just leave? We all know the irony of Juneteenth, but did it really take 100 years after the end of the Civil War for black Americans to be free? Yes, if they sat around in Mississippi waiting for a government solution to exercising their Civil Rights it took 100 years. So it comes as no surprise that men like Tiger Woods grew up in a state like California, where no chattel slavery ever existed, or that the first black President of the USA did not grow up in the South. And of course Goldwater's own state of Arizona, like Goldwater takes false blame for racism. Nobody has ever been lynched in Arizona.
My point is simple. You can't have it both ways. You can't call black America itself a nation of millions AND a 'black community'. And guess what, there have been, since 1960 17 million new black Americans added. That's millions and millions and millions of people who don't stay put.
At some point you have to realize that if only 5% of black Americans are happy with Libertarianism, that's 1.85 million people. So I want you to understand that number in a way you never forget. That's 9 times as many people as were on the Mall when MLK did his most famous speech. If 1.85 million black people walked by you and told you you don't know what the hell you're talking about 8 hours a day it would take you more than 6 months to hear them for 3 seconds each. Chances are, however, they would each have as much to say as I do which means you'll grow a beard.
I've been reading over some old stuff here at Cobb and I am reminded of what Obama is and what he is not. What he has become, is a craftier politician than he ever was, and now I think perhaps even mature enough to be the man he clearly wasn't four years ago. Be all that as it may what I want to talk about is The Police State.
As we all know, the Coalition of the Damned has been re-energized by the manifesto, rampage and suicide-by-cop of Christopher Dorner. While they entertain their fading moment and rededication to counter-cultural principles upheld by the Blackademic Soviet, I note the particular silence of the President. In fact, aside from his infamous Beer Summit (Skip Gates) and rhetorical support of the Hoodie Happening (Trayvon Martin), the first black President hasn't had much to say about the Prison Industrial Complex, of which he is naturally The Boss.
I speak up to point out this grand irony to those who are still in the clutches of the illusion that Ghetto Politics is going to remain central to the real affairs of black America. Only people who survived the Middle Passage even got to be slaves, and only those who survived American Slavery got to be Coloreds. Only the Coloreds that survived the great Flu, and Depression lived to be Negroes - but pretty much all Negroes got to be Black. But Black Nationalism and its ghetto politics are dying and the reality that the majority of African Americans are middle class is sinking in. Jay Z and Beyonce are as good as Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe. That ain't ghetto. But still after *two* black LAPD Chiefs, there are still blockheads subscribing to Mumia Abu Jamal inspired racial conspiracy theories.
I have no sympathy because I am a rich American. I try not to hate Americans, but I am often tempted to for the same reasons most of the second and third worlders must. For being so influential and affluent, an awful lot of Americans are pathetically stupid and morally incompetent. Leading the charge towards the Moronic Inferno is that half-assed Coalition of the Damned, hating on police officers and singing NWA lyrics at the top of their idiotic lungs. I am a rich American and I really don't have to put up with bullshit too ignorant to survive where their moral logic would take them anywhere else on this hostile planet.
Barack Obama is a rich American too, but he is beholden to the politics that keep the society intact - a society of Left Americans only slightly more realistic than its obdurate boneheads who on every predictable moment backbite against law and order. I don't have to put up with the bullshit he puts up with, whew. But I wonder if people who really believe the actions of Christopher Dorner are consistent with some kind of black politics are really using all of their marbles. Actually I don't wonder. I think they are using all two of their marbles. (Those with three marbles unequivocally support Affirmative Action). I know that this thing called Black Politics has been devastated by the ascent of Barack Obama and that in the end it may have been his greatest contribution to America.
Barack Obama killed Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Tavis Smiley and all of their minions. But you know zombies...
The Republican Party was influenced by the abolitionist Liberty Party, whose leading lights included William Lloyd Garrison, Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass, who latersaid: “I recognize the Republican Party as the sheet anchor of the colored man’s political hopes and the ark of his safety.”
Likewise, in an 1872 letter to her fellow activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Anthony wrote: “I shall continue to work for the Republican Party ... for what the party has done and promises to do for women.”
Why can’t that emancipationist sentiment return today? The original Republicans were born from a challenge to the far right — Lincoln gained influence by criticizing the Know-Nothing Party, the far right of his time. The same could happen today, gaining millions of adherents tired of the right’s racism and the left’s big-government stereotypes. Call it “neo-Classical Republicanism.”
The door is wide open. As Mr. Obama’s critics on the black left have noted, blacks haven’t benefited from his presidency as much as other factions of the Democratic coalition. He’s less of a Malcolm X than a Booker T. Washington, who would have endorsed the president’s belief that “a rising tide lifts all boats.”
The Republican Party I know is playing three games. The first game is the Washington game of winning and spinning. It takes whatever power it has and can wrangle to get its way inside the Beltway. That results in just what you think it does. These are the Republicans of Boehner and company - they are who they are - lords of influence, power brokers, men with no time for nonsense. The second game is the game of money and votes. If you are local, your job is find out where the money is, get that money. Money means the guy who owns the Ford dealership who shows up at fundraisers and charity auctions. Votes means the people who will walk house to house and knock on doors and sit at voter registration tables for hours on end every weekend. What you want into is the third game.
The third game is the game of ideas and ideology. It's about the culture of the Right. And that is a media game - an open game. Whoopi Goldberg said that TV is the one place where you can have a million followers and be called a loser. Everybody who is black in the American Right knows that there are a million black Republicans, and we all know that's never enough. The Republican Party cannot do and will not do what Ishmael Reed says because Ismael Reed is not standing up on national TV saying "I am a Republican and this is what I believe". Everything he said rings perfectly true and is perfectly acceptable to the GOP, but that's *his* way with words, backed by *his* name recognition by black Americans. It's the same way with Dr. Ben Carson, whom all of a sudden gets this groundswell of support because he knows how to diss Obama in a way that makes lots of blackfolks tingly. But every black American on the Right already knows this.
Any and every proper black self-reliance idea is baked into Republican values. It always has been, and the GOP is not hostile, but welcoming of all those ideas. It's the broad American media that is hostile and most black Americans - those who are waiting for Denzel Washington on a golden chariot - are playing right into that hostility. The ideas have never changed. When JC Watts was speaking on those ideas, we laughed at him because Chris Rock told us to. When Glenn Loury was speaking on those ideas, we dismissed him because we wanted to wait and hear him say Republicans are racist too. When Connie Rice was speaking on those ideas, we said she was sleeping with GWBush. When Michael Steele was speaking on those ideas we said, he can't win a statewide office. You name the black Republican, all of them have the same ideas, and all of them have a bullet aimed at their head a lame excuse on it. Do you hear what I'm saying? Crabs can't wait to get their claws into black Americans who climb up and say "I'm a Republican and this is what I believe." The ideas have never changed.
Let me tell you what it's like to be black on the American Right. No, on second thought, you figure it out for yourself. Because it works for me and my family, and that's all the black I'm responsible for. Niky Mianj or whatever her name is never going to sing that song because it's an old solid idea that works for Scandinavian farmers in North Dakota, and it works for everybody outside of the cool demographics all around the world and it doesn't make you popular. Conservative values are like calculus. Knowing them only helps you solve problems, and being unpopular isn't a problem.
Did you hear what I'm saying? Being unpopular is not a problem.
Singing has always been a good idea. You can't grow up in America not knowing how to sing a Michael Jackson song. But Hollywood is the bastion of Frankfurt School propaganda and so their job is to put their cool demographics on TV singing Michael Jackson songs. So that way you get popular. I think people like Glee because it's wheelchair and GLBT friendly, and guess what. You don't get to be on national TV making the big bucks by accident. The professionals know how to make you popular - that's the game they are playing. So Glee is what it is by design. But the songs are old and singing is good. The ideas have never changed.
I don't do media any longer. I'm fortunate enough to be a part of the second industrial revolution - the information technology revolution. That's my day job - I build stuff. I used to be in that ideas game. But after a while I realized that I didn't have to come up with any more new ideas, I just had to get more exposure to the ideas I was on about. That meant playing a media game - a game I called 'Famousity'. How famous can you get? To win that game you do your damnedest to stay in the public eye saying *something*. After a while you get famous for being famous. Yeah well, my mama didn't raise me to be a media star. Everybody knows Connie Chung, but what ideas does she stand for? She's popular, that's all.
So somebody tells me what the GOP *ought* to do to get black votes, what they really mean is somebody ought to make the Republican Party *popular* - because they have an *image problem* with 'black America'. But the ideas have never changed, and being unpopular is not a problem.
America does not have to take Christopher Jordan Dorner seriously. But we would all do better to understand something that applies to him and applies to all of us as well. In the terms I have used at this blog it is this: Human beings have the right to make life and death decisions.
Dorner is, by all appearances, not on a rampage, but on a vendetta. He aims to take revenge into his own hands. An organization has done him wrong and he plans to make them pay, in blood.
There is a slight difficulty with this morality play. It is that nothing that comes of this drama, no matter which way it plays out, can be called justice. It will be vengeance. The difference is that justice is in the public interest and vengeance is something between squabblers that don't represent anything other than themselves. The more observers and critics attempt to draw large symbolic meaning from this drama, the more wrong they will be, unless they make that distinction. If the LAPD gets its way, then it will have avenged itself, that means nothing whatsoever to society. If Dorner manages to satisfy his bloodlust, it is not a triumph for the little guy, it's all about Dorner. So the problem we have is that everyone playing sides thinks they are cheering, in some way, for their own collective interests, and that is just wrong.
Our society is, for worse, collectivising itself. More and more people are getting involved in fewer and fewer issues with larger and larger battles. The 'significance' of more and more current events are in play for 'society'. America is less of a society of independent individuals than it could be, and I say, than it ought to be. And because of that, we have invested more (too much) of our time into defending groups and institutions that actually don't serve us well. I hope we all learn to be a bit more self-reliant in the future.
Dorner is guilty of expecting that his own personal sense of integrity would be served in his police and military work. And that is to be expected considering how people (on the Right) tend to glorify the deeds and character of first responders and military personnel. But a real trooper knows that subjugate themselves and swear oaths not to their own sense of right and wrong, but to the Corps, the Army, the Air Force. When you die in the course of duty, the flag they drape over your coffin does not have your name on it - you don't die for yourself, you die for your country, your city. And so that is how you are to live. If you can't go with the flow, then head for the door. The cost of being a professional is understanding exactly where your organization falls short. This is a psychic burden young Mr. Dorner could not bear. He couldn't stand a lie if it cost him his job. And he couldn't stand the cost of not having the glory he presumed from having that organization at his back. In other words, it was like discovering there is no Santa Claus. That is why Dorner is transparently sociopathic - his expectations of society, of the LAPD of the US Armed Forces were that they would always and everywhere support his personal convictions. That's not how it works.
As an individual, Dorner's course makes logical sense, to him. No matter what you know, no matter how intelligent or foolish, no matter what your ability to gain support in your community or society at large, you will always have a point of view that diverges. An individual knows what he knows and sees what he sees and makes judgments according to his experience and learning. All colloboration is a compromise, even between identical twins. We cannot get inside of each others heads - we can only empathize with what we assume to be good enough rationalizations for actions. It always comes down to cases, and every individual's case is different.
Human beings have the right to make life and death decisions. Individuals can. In certain cases they must. But we are a large society and we recognize that we are better off on the whole if we can let some people specialize. The police exist, and we pay for their weapons, because we have decided to proxy off those life and death decisions to them, the professionals, the specialists. But in return we demand that they swear an oath and that they dedicate themselves to serving *us* not their own interests. The job of the police brass is to ride herd on policemen - make them wear that uniform - control their thinking, their behavior - make them stick to their duty. In the case of Dorner, they failed. Dorner's own experience caused him to make a break with the police, he put his own values above those of the the organization he swore an oath to.
When the LAPD failed Dorner, they called him names - specifically a liar, and then gave him the boot. He was fired. When Dorner failed the LAPD he called them names, liars, racists; and now he has become a deadly enemy. I cannot justify either claim, and that's really not important.
What is important is that as individuals we recognize what kind of power we give up when we pledge ourselves to organizations, groups and institutions. We need to understand that we submit to the rules, regulations, values and judgments of a collective and that means our opinion doesn't matter as much any longer. If we have a crisis of conscience, then it is our duty to abdicate. Leave. Scram. Hit the door. We have to have a Come to Jesus Moment with the leadership and get that my way or the highway decision.
I think Americans have become so individually powerless that many of us are making Dorner's mistake. We think that our own personal ethics and values are actually served by those institutions we swear by. When that turns out not to be the case, we are blindsided by our blind loyalties. We cannot believe that promises were broken. And then we want revenge and have the nerve to call it justice.
INVENTORY UPDATE: We traveled to Texas for Industry meetings concerning the shortages, here's what we were told.
Smith & Wesson-is running at Full capacity making 300+ guns/day-mainly M&P pistols. They are unable to produce any more guns to help with the shortages.
RUGER: Plans to increase from 75% to 100% in the next 90 days.
FNH: Moving from 50% production to 75% by Feb 1st and 100% by March 1. Remington-Maxed out!
Armalite: Maxed out.
DPMS: Can't get enough parts to produce any more product.
COLT: Production runs increasing weekly...bottle necked by Bolt carrier's.
LWRC:Making only black guns, running at full capacity...can't get enough gun quality steel to make barrels.
Springfield Armory: Only company who can meet demand but are running 30-45 days behind.
AMMO: Every caliber is now Allocated! We are looking at a nation wide shortage of all calibers over the next 9 months. All plants are producing as much ammo as possible w/ of 1 BILLION rounds produced weekly. Most is military followed by L.E. and civilians are third in line.
MAGPUL is behind 1 MILLION mags, do not expect any large quantities of magpul anytime soon.
RELOADERS... ALL Remington, Winchester, CCI & Federal primers are going to ammo FIRST. There are no extra's for reloading purposes... it could be 6-9 months before things get caught up. Sorry for the bleak news, but now we know what to expect in the coming months. Stay tuned, we'll keep you posted...
Related commentary from Bob Owens : They didn’t know when they’d be getting anything back in stock, from magazines to rifles to pistols. Manufacturers were running full-bore, but couldn’t come close to keeping up with market demand. It wasn’t just the AR-15s, the AK-pattern rifles, the M1As, and the FALs that were sold out. It really hit me when I realized that the World War-era M1 Garands, M1 carbines, and Enfield .303s were gone, along with every last shell. Ubiquitous Mosin-Nagants—of which every gun store always seems to have 10-20—were gone. So was their ammo. Only a dust free space marked their passing. I’ve never seen anything like it.
Every weapon of military utility designed within the past 100+ years was gone. This isn’t a society stocking up on certain guns because they fear they may be banned. This is a society preparing for war.
Barack Obama, Dianne Feinstein and the rest of the Statists have done more to promote gun ownership than the NRA ever did. Well done, Democrats!
At my reunion last night, at long last I got into a political discussion with Phil, Big Carl, Serious Mike and Cap'n Steve. Unfortunately, my feet hurt, I didn't let Big Carl get a word in edgewise, Big Mike blew in and out, and Phil and I already agree. But since this is an issue that is quite near to my moral universe, I needed to continue on. This is for Cap'n Steve and so many others like him.
The other day I remembered something about a class of problems called Rabbit Holes.
A rabbit hole is a problem whose solution begets more problems. When you begin to address it and solve one part, you create new parts. These new problems may be puzzles, they may be new mysteries. There may even be rabbit holes within rabbit holes. Often the wisest course of action when faced with a rabbit hole is to avoid it altogether. Alternatively, the wisest course is bravado, overkill and simplification. Don't even pretend that you can solve the problem with any finesse, just jump in and get busy.
I have been making excuses not to involve myself with the business of politics while still being very concerned with the proper ends of politics. My problem is that I am impatient with the kinds of arguments and discussions that are not as informed as the ones I've been having here for the past ten years. I've got work to do.
I was amazed when Jeff Bezos not long ago predicted the future with perfect accuracy. He said that in five years he will not expect that his customers will be asking him for lower quality service and higher prices. So the logical conclusion is that he must arrange his business to produce higher quality and lower prices. If you can't configure your business to do the same, then you have no future. So it occurs to me to apply this reasoning to the operation of cities, counties, states and federal bureacracies. But what I see ahead is failure. So before you get the idea that I want failure for failure's sake understand that I am taking Bezos' path. It is not coincidental that this mirrors the business strategy of my day job. To wit:
There are certain complications built into the way things are that allow people to drag their feet in dealing with obligations they ought not be caught up in. They wouldn't have such obligations if it were not for their faulty behavior and/or their failure to predict the future in the way Bezos has. There are a lot of American entities that are dancing on high cost, low quality platforms that are simply unsustainable. These are a class of rabbit hole problems. The federal deficit is a rabbit hole problem. Universal health care is a rabbit hole problem. And for the lot of these and many like them, the wisest course is not to try and patch them up, but let them fail.
As some of you know, I am building the same kinds of systems I have been building for the past 20 years on the new cloud platform. The cloud is going to let me build higher quality products for lower cost. But my company doesn't have nearly the market share or revenues of the vastly more expensive home grown systems of the clients I used to serve. They are going to have to learn things the hard way.
My negative attitude about politics means I am not going to waste my breath, time and energy trying to come up with a solution to today's rabbit hole politics. We all know they are broken and I am out of the patching business. I am no longer working with duct tape, chicken wire, bubble gum and spit. Nor am I working with bulldozers, wrecking balls, dynamite and dump trucks. I'm not even on the board for urban renewal. I'm just building the next generation of buildings which will be immune to the kinds of failures I predict in the future for the unsustainable status quo. You see? A new kind of city government, a new type of state legislature, a new sort of federal bureacracy needs to be evolved separate and distinct from what is doomed to fail. Lazy people will hobble to the new system if they survive the crash of the old, but thoughtful people will advance the new as the proper future.
Steve informed me that when the big Sequestration comes down, he expects that the Navy won't be participating in Fleet Week any longer. It came as a surprise and as no surprise. The US Navy will fail.
I take Chesterton's advice very seriously. I am not going to destroy that thing whose purpose I don't understand merely for the sake of erecting something new. I'm working in a medium that will allow us to work alongside the ailing patient - it will clone the best DNA and put it in a more antifragile body. We can work in parallel with the old and the new. I'm not engaged purposefully in a zero-sum game, just like Netflix co-existed with Blockbuster for a decade. But we're offering the old thing and the new thing too - for less.
How do you build a better democracy? You start with fiscal transparency. Not just the kind of Woodward and Bernstien hit pieces that define our entire notion of '-gate' scandals. I am convinced that today's journalism lack that longitudinal view. Tomorrows news will include yesterday's and today's data. Not just "This just in" but "We draw your attention to the health and safety of the American embassy security situation that we have been monitoring for the past 7 years" -- See? Here are the budget numbers, here are the votes for the appropriations, here are the directives, here are the projects that succeeded and these are the ones that failed. No mere 2000 word specials. A nation of millions of Americans can do 2000 word journalism specials every day for 10,000 bureacracies. This is how democracy will be changing as the old stuff dies. It's time for us to come up with a better way of putting policy together than Robert's Rules of Order.
I will be involved in collaboration with people here in California, and my avocation will be to make systems of transparency and redundancy. Every lawyer I talk to says, oh yeah it's easy for me to get case law out of Lexis and Westlaw. As easy as Google? As easy as Facebook? As easy as YouTube? If it was easy, then any high school kid who has a viral video of somebody getting beat up at McDonalds would be attaching the case docket number to the video. They would be attaching the names of the attorneys in the case and having the testimony in PDF files on the sidebar. They would have the judgment or settlement figures in a spreadsheet right there. And this would be as impossible to fake as everything else, because the people will make it their business to get to the facts and stay on type of the facts far longer than the profit area of the 'media cycle'.
This requires several tools that don't currently exist and are not easily accessible to the internet public and experts at large. Today.
This is not about being mad as hell about what doesn't work. I don't have time for that. I have new things to build while everything else fails.
It's better to be the king of a small hill, than a prince at a higher elevation. -- Cobb's Rule #9.
The last book I just finished reading is Bruce Schneier's Liars and Outliers. It is a very interesting and good book which goes into some detail about security, trust, society and all things related to rule following and rule breaking. It's very thorough, not very technical and so truthful that it almost sounds obvious. What's extraordinary about it in retropsect is that Schneier told almost no stories from his personal experience. Good on that security.
Schneier is in my T50 - the list of thinkers that I am limiting myself to hearing out for the rest of my life. It's interesting how he sounds a little bit like a boring Gladwell. Gladwell is such a good writer that he makes everything sound exciting and profound. Schneier quotes almost as much as Gladwell, but not quite - still he mentions other folks in my T50, including Nassim Taleb and Clay Shirky, and even though he didn't mention John Boyd by name, I hear a lot of OODA thinking in his talk about the 'Red Queen Effect'.
At any rate, there are bigger takeaways from this common sense sounding book that I now recongize in my own evolution. And so I remark about it here.
F1 racing has been my metaphor for the kind of work I want to do and am now doing, 15 years later than when I first really wanted to. What it took me a long time to learn is the cost of largeness. What Schneier described very well in his closing chapters is how the cost of communication in large organizations rises with a factor of each incremental person added and there comes a point at which the technologies and processes are unable to sustain any single-minded agenda. This is precisely a characteristic of what I call information thermodynamics, but what I never quite envisioned was the negative aspect. I understood that within a large organization that it costs money to keep the brass informed about how the business is actually operating, and Schneier did make use of the Dunbar Number. But what I thought was the know-have-nots would simply be dragged along with the know-haves. I didn't think that there might be a point at which it drags down the ability of the organization to accomplish *anything*.
In other words, organizations don't get 'too big to fail', there is literally a point at which they get so big that they *must* fail. The nature of that failure is primarily in what I would call an 'open agenda', but not necessarily the failure of the entity. Xerox, for example, once owned American Express. Hard to believe, but true. While I was working there, ostensibly for the workstation business, Xerox' most profitable division was VanKampen Merritt Investments. They were playing money games on Wall Street but failing to be Xerox, the innovative product company. Soon, small companies like the PC printer division of HP and a company called Adobe kicked Xerox' in what used to be some of their core competencies.
So, as certain people predicted several years ago, my disinterest in politics has left me to be a Libertarian. But I suppose as I have been called a RINO, then I may be a LINO as well. Except that there's no such thing as a LINO because libertarians seem to have the good sense to know they won't rule, and since they won't - the don't have pretenses to ideological fidelity - or at least they don't bother enforcing a party line.
It occurred to me this week that you probably could run America with half a million people. That if we were really connected on Facebook Next, and you paid us 600 times our annual salaries, we could take care of 600 people each and we would all do just fine.
Combine all this and what do you get? Well I get an idea that The System is permanently broken and that when it really comes down to it, there is no such thing as a nation of 300 million. Somewhere around whatever we were in the 1950s in breaks and there is the active nation and there is the passive nation. America keeps struggling to have all of us in the active nation with a real nationalism, but in the next 20 years that's going to break dramatically and we will split into the active nation and the passive nation. We will be more of a civilization than a society and the fakery of all patriotism will be exposed. Not that patriotism is false but patriotism that scales will break. Of course the great news is that we won't amend the Constitution, because that's too difficult. Put another way, democracy > 200 million is a Wicked Problem.
I expect that significant liberal and libertarian subgroups of the American population will have money enough to support the Elon Musks of the world and that they will come to build their cars for our markets. So long as personality and dynamism wants to be rich as in American rich, the active patriots will win the day. And we need fewer of them than we think, I think. I'm fairly confident of this rather in the same way that Vannavar Bush was confident that we wouldn't blow ourselves up with nukes.
Conservatives aren't who they think they are, by the way. If they think the country is going to hell, it's simply because they think we're all in the same handbasket. As they discover that virtue will out, they will relax. This young generation has had its fair share of douchebags and they won't put up with it despite of all their other wimpy sensitivities. The free love to remain free and they will put down their celery sticks and fight when it comes down to it.
All of this is to say that the Fifty States are in for some real big fun and the Feds are going to have their asses handed to them. I am confident of this - because the states will fail and get right first. Experts will have their way again in the future and bullshit will walk. This is my optimism for the future of everything. We have too many cultural memories to forget how free we have been. That which is too big will fail, the small, smart and agile will perservere, there will be no Idiocracy, because the majority simply will not be clued in, and they will not be able to chain the minds of those who know.
In America, we have shootings. We have serial killers and people who go ballistic. We have lots of things that nobody seems to want to count.
This morning and today I will hear people offer peoms, politics and prayers. I am as skeptical as Sting of poets, priests and politicians but De Doo Doo Doo is not all I want to say to you. I want you to be mindful of the numbers. Because today is another crisis for which a certain small but influential group of people would like to exploit as what they call a 'teachable moment'.
How this works is that they don't use numbers. They will say 'far too many'. They will say 'all too often'. They will say 'never quite enough'. They will say 'gone too far'. They will say 'beyond the limit'. They will do everything possible to make what's happening right now seem to be the biggest, the most important, the most extreme, or as Judy Jetson once put it, "the most ut". What is the most ut? Well, that's obvious, it is the utmost. And that is exactly what the poets, priests and politicians will seek from you, and they will make you feel selfish if you don't participate in their teachable moment.
These will be 'pro-actions' which will be done by pronouns, and it will all sound good until somebody says how much it will cost, you know, in actual accountable figures. As soon as the anti-gun lobby says exactly how much money they have raised, the game is up. Fortunately most of us can still be snapped into reason when the poetic rationale becomes translated into dollars. Of course the poets know this, which is why they tell you how much money the gun lobby spends - so you focus your analysis on Them and keep your hearts with Us.
People will offer prayers. It sounds nice until you try to quantify it. How much prayer should I offer when it's 27 dead? Is that a linear function? Should 'a moment' of silence do? If five minutes of silence was appropriate for 9/11, how many seconds for 27? Nobody will do the math.
Nobody will count the number of flags at half staff. Nobody will count the tears. Nobody will count the blessings of this not being Syria. Nobody will count the hours of airtime spent which paper over the other 17,000 murder victims who will have died this year, or the 30,000 suicides in this country alone. Nobody will count the refugees in Namibia or the number of ships in the Sea of Aden or the price of touchscreens in China. That kind of science is not popular because it starts clarify what is outside the Agenda. That kind of science is outside of the scope of the Narrative. Until it isn't - you know - until all the leaders of the Chatting Class cite another Harvard Study that tells us if red wine is good or bad for us as compared to the French, and that is the talking point of the day.
But the talking point of this day will be to unify the sense of outrage that none of us good people should have to endure in a country as wealthy and powerful and good as America the Beautiful.
But here's what I'm saying. Today of all days, be on the lookout for adjectives and adverbs. The people who find them to be their most powerful tools will be using them instead of numbers to get your attention. My bet says that we can expect 'senseless' and perhap a 'heinous' or two. 'Gawdawful' is rather popular. I guarantee that 'tragic' will be in the top three adverbs. And I gather that some people will even see this text as 'disrespectful'. Ahh but it is not. I challenge people to be a nation full of adults who are not led by men who weep at the obvious.
And now to my personal story.
Just the other night, there was an armed robbery somewhere in Moreno Valley which is a good 90 minute drive from where I live. But it was a short high speed chase for the cops and robbers to where my son attends university. One of the robbers decided he would hide out at CSUF among the students - maybe blend in and fool the cops. I discovered this crime in progress when I was somewhere in New Hampshire about 3024 miles away by car and 3 hours different in time zones. My news source told me that the school had been on lockdown for several hours meaning that all students should 'shelter in place'. I figure the drill is much like we see in movies, men in tactical garb going room by room and then shouting 'clear!' After four hours of looking for an armed robber, I'd be wanting a donut break if I was a SWAT officer. I know the students waiting for the drama to end were wanting one - I read the twitter feeds. It took about 3 hours to get a text from my son, who was OK. But he might have been shot. This is the third time my kids have been blanketed by scores of cops over such violent matters.
I should note with irony one of the tweets that was often repeated portrayed 'The militarization of our college campus' with a shot of these officers, along with complaints about the helicopters. All which come with the territory of politics - and disappar quickly when the first victim is shot dead (by someone other than the cops).
It's very difficult to get good information about when and where precisely people are, what their skill levels are and who is safe and who is in danger. All the texting and Instagramming of the masses lacks the precision of the kind of radio traffic we remember hearing between Eagle and Houston during the Space Age. Most people don't know the difference between Roger and Wilco, and we should not expect that to change. The point is, even when you want precision and science and facts, (like is my son dead or alive right this minute?) you can't hardly get what you want. So it's frustrating to hear the standard litany of adverbs and adjectives from the local standup newscaster. Just as often you don't get what you need. Until your son shows up - or not.
When it comes to the facts, you're on your own.
I know enough about personal tragedy to understand that sympathy is due and small gestures matter. I also know that all the sympathetic language from the anonymous public does not. But what I'm thinking about today is the extent to which people are seduced into making their sentiments into law without looking at the hard, cold facts, and how much they are coming to expect that this is how democracy should work.
This afternoon I had a passing thought that struck me about the paradox of American democracy as we go through the melodrama of red and blue states. It is how identity politics and class warfare, two social phenomenon that I find particularly nauseating, are both the inevitable result of democracy and inimical to American exceptionalism.
Class Warfare What I perceive about class in America is that it is moving from the uncomfortable zone of the Obama rhetoric towards something more entrenched. Not me. I have too much class to go in for that class warfare stuff. I'm more about class prerogatives and measured expectations. The way I've described it before is that class is the thing we really want when we finally realize how unforgiving a true meritocracy is.
The problem with class warfare in America is not that America is a classless society. It is not a classless society and never was. But America has been a transparent and open society with some shared sense of destiny. Americans still have that sense, but it is being tried. I am watching with interest as the truth of class differences and interests keeps getting reiterated for the purposes of warfare in our public life. I look at America as the place where you can take your family to Morton's Steakhouse in Beverly Hills for Dad's birthday and hey look that's Ben Stein over there at the bar. And on any day there are probably a couple millionaires right there at Morton's and everybody is cool with that. They're not trying to hide away from you and you're not trying to hide away from them. America is ideally like that restaurant. No matter how rich you are, you can trust the waiter with your credit card.
But is that continuing to be the case? Have we really started to bend that sociability to the breaking point? I think that in the main, we have. And I think it is the fault of nasty self-righteous new money bastards. In other words, an improper elite who have taken a bit too much upon themselves. But here's the thing. The more that certain opportunists exploit class differences, the more it accellerates the bastardization of the elites. It's getting to the point at which the upper middle class has to ask itself seriously if putting up with the abuse is worth it. It is also the fault of shameless lazy chav bastards. And you can witness all of their Snoop Dogg shenanigans on any cable network because the cable networks are owned by nasty self-righteous new money bastards. In other words, one set of bastards is pissing off another set, and they're all taking our society down the tubes because genuine ambition is getting a bad name. Sellouts and shoppers. Everybody has an exit strategy.
I think I have depressed myself by writing this and I don't want to any longer. I'll take up the balance on another day.
I think that to ask any political question about the subject matter of 'global climate change' is ridiculous in the first place, and asking for trouble in the second place. I shall first recount some of my own blather on the matter I recently posted to Facebook.
I agree that American politics on the matter of climate change is ridiculous, pointless and mental masturbation. The only aspect of it that actually does have any credibility is the extent to which some fraction of the populous is compelled to defend scientific research. I have sympathy with that - however the 'science clique' has resorted to demogoguery of the worst kind, and that's the thing that annoys me. So I always make a point to raise matters of scientific study that do not support the popular scientistic consensus.
Of course I also enjoy mocking Progressives on this particular matter because it is the rise of the BRICs that will, should the entire 'carbon theory' prove correct, be responsible for what warming there would be. So how will Progressives convince Indians and Chinese to *not* want first world transportation systems? And how would global anything be enforced without empire? I think these are questions they are too dainty to address - that they would rather pick on Americans than deal with the actual environmental intransigence of the global populations.
Tangentially, if science is so smart, how come they are so often hapless do-gooders? I mean how have they not figured out how to get along with each other, form a cabal and have their way with everything? Hmm. Maybe it's because they're just dreaming and have delusions of grandeur. Or perhaps they simply don't believe in actual reality as much as political reality. After all, you cannot make money betting against reality in reality-based markets. So where is the reality-based market on the delivery of cotton in China? Everywhere. It's as old as China itself. Well, anyway, back to the topic at hand.
When I get really serious about questions of climate change, the most important question I have deals with how the world's food is produced and distributed, because truly the only thing that is going to make an important difference is whether or not what is good farmland and good fishery today is going to be good tomorrow. And indeed nobody's livlihood depends more on weather than farmers. Am I right? So take JR Simplot for egregious example. They are the world's king of potatoes. And if I had a metric I would do as Paolo Bacigalupi has done in his excellent 'The Windup Girl' and begin to measure total world food production in terms of calories and then divide that by how many people are in the world. Who grows how many calories and who eats how many calories, now what's the price of calories? How we know this about gasoline and oil and don't know it for food shows how unimportant the food problem is. Today.
So when do the weather watchers, who are also money minders, at JR Simplot say. Hmm. We may have to relocate out of Idaho because the climate has changed and Idaho just don't mean potatoes any more. Do the global warmists think JR Simplot are a bunch of dumb micks who will just die out in a potato blight? They surely think that the dudes at BP are bloody geniuses who will exploit the last drop of oil where ever on the globe it may be. So I think that sort of thinking should be applied to all of the seed bankers and mega-agriculturalists on the globe. Which is to say, they will figure out how to feed us all because it's in their interests, and furthermore the weather is not going to creep up on these guys. I am trying to imagine which group of eggheads has more access to more satellite time, feeds, maps and data - the scientists at Monsanto or the grad students at East Anglia? Duh.
So now you know my drift. I am much more interested in food scarcity as reflected in the business of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the likes of Duke & Duke. Nobody ever, ever, ever puts these two things together when talk about 'global climate change' is discussed. That's because they are politicizing the 'science' and ignoring the economics. Yeah I said 'they', and I don't bother to find out who they are.
Here's the nut. Whatever the hockey stick is with climate change, farmers will move production, swap crops and otherwise be quicker than the weather or the climate. Say what you like about El Nino or the Ozone Hole, neither Katrina nor Sandy made one whit of difference to Iowa. When hurricanes get as far west as Ohio, maybe we can all take a hint. And what about you and me? You and I will eat whatever. Hell, if we can miss Twinkies and put up with non-alcholic beer, we really have no worries.
Now let me speak my other piece.
That is about the BRICs. Well, I'll just underscore the fact that so long as people on Earth will want automobiles for their personal transportation, then we'll keep using fossil fuels for cars. And we'll keep burning coal for electricity because we all want nightlife. And nobody in these environmental movements will, in the next 40 years (because they're all the same and they haven't done a damned thing about Sudan or Tibet - all they do is move to Seattle and take trips to Alaska to wash oily ducks) will suggest we go to war in order to stop the Chinese from polluting the planet, or the Russians or the Indians or anyplace else that horrendously polluted. Hell we don't even stop Mexico, and have you been to Ciudad Juarez? Holy crud!
So. Show me where agribusiness is losing the war against weather on a crop by crop basis with regard to the cost of global calorie provision, and I'll tell you exactly what I care about global climate change.
Dear American liberals, leftists, social progressives, socialists, regressive, Marxists, and Obama supporters, et al:
We
have stuck together since the late 1950s for the sake of the kids, but
the whole of this latest election process has made me realize that I
want a divorce. I know we tolerated each other for many years for the
sake of future generations, but sadly, this relationship has clearly run
its course.
Our two ideological sides of America cannot and
will not ever agree on what is right for us all, so let's just end it on
friendly terms. We can smile and chalk it up to irreconcilable
differences and go our own way.
Here is a model separation agreement:
1.Our
two groups can equitably divide up the country by land mass, each
taking a similar portion. That will be the difficult part, but I am sure
our two sides can come to a friendly agreement. After that, it should
be relatively easy. Our respective representatives can effortlessly
divide other assets since both sides had such distinct and disparate
tastes.
2. We don't like redistributive taxes, so you can keep them.
3. You are welcome to the liberal judges and the ACLU.
4. Since you hate guns and war, we'll take our firearms, the cops, the NRA, and the military.
5. We'll take the nasty, smelly oil industry and you can go with wind, solar, and bio-diesel.
6.
You can keep Oprah, Michael Moore, and Rosie O'Donnell. You are,
however, responsible for finding a bio-diesel vehicle big enough to move
all three of them.
8. You can have your beloved lifelong welfare dwellers, food stamps, homeless homeboys, hippies, druggies, and illegal aliens.
9. We'll keep the hot Alaskan hockey moms, greedy CEO's and Rednecks.
10. We'll keep the Bibles and give you NBC and Hollywood.
11. You can make nice with Iran and Palestine and we'll retain the right to invade and hammer places that threaten us.
12.
You can have the peace-niks and war protesters. When our allies or our
way of life are under assault, we'll help provide them security.
13. We'll keep our Judeo-Christian values.
14.
You are welcome to Islam, Scientology, Humanism, political correctness,
and Shirley McLain. You can also have the U.N., but we will no longer
be paying the bill.
15. We'll keep the SUV's, pickup trucks, and oversized luxury cars. You can take every Prius you can find.
16. You can give everyone healthcare if you can find any practicing doctors.
17. We'll continue to believe healthcare is an earned luxury and not a right.
18. We'll keep "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "The National Anthem."
19. I'm sure you'll be happy to substitute "Imagine", "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing", "Kum Ba Ya," or "We Are the World".
20. We'll practice trickledown economics and you can continue to give trickle up poverty your best shot.
21. Since it often so offends you, we'll keep our history, our name and our constitution and our flag.
22.
Would you agree to this? If so, please pass it along to other
like-minded liberal and conservative patriots and if you do not agree,
just hit delete. In the spirit of friendly parting, I'll bet you answer
which one of us will need whose help in 15 years.
Sincerely,
John J. Wall
Law Student and an American
P.S.: Also, please take Ted Turner, Sean Penn, Martin Sheen, Barbara Streisand, George Clooney and Jane Fonda with you.
P.S.S..: And you won't have to "Press 1 for English" when you call our country.
**If you can't stand behind our Military, please feel free to stand in front of them! **
Cute.
I think they've named a lot of things in a lot of people's heads. People who don't really have the time or inclination to engage the public via the Chatting Classes.
I have found comfort in my adopted ridiculously expensive neighborhood of Redondo Beach and now I have some feeling about propriety - some sense of not giving up an inch to the Element. It's partial. But if it were my town, where all my property was, I would defend it to an extreme degree.
If there were some way to get all the property owners in unison on those matters of keeping the proper laws in place, I think there would be no secession. But I think many have turned against the ownership society. And so we will be under a state of siege for some time. But there is everything in owning your own castle and running it properly.
My point is that secession of the mind in society is not complete, and I believe that people with a sense of propriety will simply bar the doors, not move. We will not flee to Red States. We simply will not flee. We can stand our ground wherever we are. At some point, the secession of the mind will be complete, and people once again will have creeds that matter.
So provisionally, this is the new creed of Cobb the Downsider:
Just because I thought you might want to know, I think David Petraeus is way too smart and far too disciplined to crumble under a certain kind of political pressure. And I further think that at some point he would be duty bound to say what he knew and when about various matters that would make an ex-President look foolish, but would irreparably damage a sitting President. So instead of damaging a sitting President, he found a convincing sword upon which to fall.
I'll have to remember that trick. it's really quite simple. Hell, all he needed to do was go to South America with the Secret Service...
Inevitably, people talk about America's 'Prison Industrial Complex'. Why do Americans jail so many people on a per capita basis? It's because we value property and morality, it's part of the American Dream. In other words, we do it for you, you peasant!
To understand this, all you have to realize is that we are punishing more crime than other countries. Very specifically, you cannot bribe policemen or judges in America. If you want to be a petty theif, drug dealer or thug, America is the wrong country for you. Elsewhere, you can get away with it. Here, you cannot escape the justice system. Consider the crime of assault. Notice that there is also aggravated assault and assault with a deadly weapon and assault and battery. The latter crimes are more serious, but the former remains a crime punishable by jail. Breaking and entering. Theft. Grand theft. Grand theft auto.
What is the difference between theft and grand theft? Grand theft means you are stealing something worth more than $1000. Ahh. Now we are getting somewhere. America is willing to send people to jail for crimes that don't even cost $1000. And it obviously cost more than $1000 to jail them. To arrest them, send them to trial and then house and feed them in jail costs way more money than that. What are we trying to prove?
We are trying to prove that crime against people who aren't rich is still crime, and it will be punished.
Who cares if I punch you in the face? Who cares if I break your daughter's leg? Who cares if I dent your precious automobile? Who cares if I steal your TV? The American criminal justice system. And that's why America puts so many people behind bars. Because we care about crimes against peasant nobodies like you and your tedious desires, your petty ambitions, and your peace of (tiny) mind. We save you from the consequences of your predictable, miserable failures. And this is because we have a liberal plurality. Let me remind you about one of the differences between conservatives and liberals. Conservatives use the strength of the family and private institutions to protect against the abuses of the state. Liberals use the power of the state to protect against dysfunctions of private institutions and family. Who wants more jail? Liberals want more jail.
You are correct to believe we live in a police state. It's more accurate to say that we live in a first responder state. There are millions of people employed by the government, federal, state and local, to take care of yon bohunks in their emergencies. All you have to do is pick up your pocket communication device, any time of the day or night, punch three buttons and whine out your complaint, and some officials will get involved in your life and help you out of your little jam.
Bullies text threats to a fat girl online? Call 911. Rowdy teenagers throw a brick through your window? Call 911. Drunk college students set a trashcan on fire? Call 911. Your dumbshit husband treats you like dumb shit? Call 911. Operators are standing by to send all those bastards to jail.
If you could take care of yourself, you wouldn't have to pay for somebody else to take care of you. If we in the public ignored your complaining and told you that you were on your own, there would be no public law and regulations, an therefore no public system to get into your business. We would be under no public obligation to take over your private failure.
I would like to begin entertaining speculation about the post crash economy. When America walks off the fiscal cliff, what's going to happen? For the time being, I'll just kick this off here at Cobb, but I'm thinking about starting a whole new blog for that purpose.
I had an interesting conversation with a guy I'll call Axel F. yesterday. He reminded me that the PD in Detroit is warning people away - they are on strike and there are portions of the city that are without electricity. Axel says there is no real inflection point, but that we will boil like frogs. He mentioned the experience of a dude he knew who watched Argentina go through collapse slowly but surely.
In one way this is exactly what I expected, that you only need watch the cereal aisle and the cookie aisle. Some time before there are only corn flakes and Chips Ahoy, you will start noticing that there is a lot less variety. The difference between Vons, Whole Foods and Food 4 Less becomes smaller and smaller, and the prices for the basics creep higher and higher. Then one day there are no more raspberries. Hey? What happened to raspberries?
As it stands, there are far fewer vegetables in the US than there used to be. If I remember correctly, there used to be some 50 different varieties of apples, or was it potatoes? Now there are few. It would take someone like me a very long time to notice that there is no more kale, because I just don't eat that stuff. And what about radishes and beets? Who knows where the unpopular veggies have gone? I doubt that even vegans, in their vainglory, make much of a stink about stinky vegetables. I suspect very strongly that they too are quite literally cherry picking. I am very interested in the economies of food, because I am a foodie, and this is likely to be one of my specialties if the collaborative blog comes off. I'm simply interested to know how much of our infrastructure and delivery systems are at risk, and how exactly various market mechanisms do or do not make the proper difference. Michael Pollan is my guiding light in this matter. Still, most people's point is that they only care about food with regard to how attractive it makes them and with no regard to how sustainable the crop is.
Anyway, that's just one dimension of potential collapse I'm interested in. The other is actual civil engineering and the availability of electricity. Thirdly, I'm interested in civil defense and the potential return of chivalry.
With regard to civil engineering, isn't it a marvelous coincidence that this morning I heard on Bloomberg that part of our energy problem is that environmental legislation has just bumped up the cost of oil provision beyond the capacity of the entire refining capacity of the East Coast of the US. Basically, the infrastrucutre required to upgrade the refineries specific to Pennsylvania is insufficiently economic to make petroleum products at today's prices, given the slim margins on the cost of raw oil. One of the only ways to solve this problem would be to get cheaper oil from Canada via, guess what? The Erie Canal. So that would speak directly to what I see is an education problem. Meaning we would have to start training people to be barge operators rather than chemical engineers. That the investment in Pennsylvania oil refineries is never going to happen because it will cost 2 billion dollars, that no bank is going to loan because we fell off the fiscal cliff.
I'll speak more about chivalry in the comments, but basically refer back to matters of Neo-Victorian subjects.
Because my first daughter is taking AP Government this semester, I had to watch some of the presidential debate this evening. I have to say that it was a pleasure to hear the Romney I heard several years ago before I rather casually dismissed him for his personality ephemera. Here's what I was saying then.
February 2007
What softens me on all of the negatives and nullities on the question of Rudy is that he's a moderate Republican like myself. Right in there with Arnold and Christie, he's not playing any holy roller games with American society. He's a New Yorker and he knows that you can lay down rules but you cannot enforce social conventions. That will disarm all the obsessives over the faux evangelist conservatism infecting the GOP, and it will confirm that the Republicans have turned the corner back towards Reagan.
So I'm going to be interpolating between him and Romney. Romney talks a very good game and has a youthful appeal. I haven't heard him slip yet, but I'm thinking maybe he's a little bit too smooth. We'll see. The problem is that I've only heard him field question from Matt Lauer. I've seen nothing of Romney under pressure.
January 2008
When the candidates first announced, I was the first one to go to bat for Mitt Romney. I still don't think that there is anything he has said, when I pay attention to his actual words, that I disagree with. Yet I disagree with the candidate as a person. I think he looks and sounds like a JC Penney catalog model. I cannot imagine him drinking dark beer. And that is what has turned me off to him.
There have risen some more substantive criticisms of Romney with regard to the actual way he decided to defend his religion, but for me these messages have come too late. I've already written him off and decided to support Fred Thompson. And yet now, as the races and quips and pundits get various parts of my attention, Fred doen't turn me on fire either.
In some ways it doesn't matter. I will vote for whomever becomes the Republican nominee, so long as it's not Huckabee or Paul. Their negatives are real for me. But on the top four, I think emotion will play the bigger role than reason.
I do pay attention to what David Brooks says on most occasions, and I like his assertion that some conservatives would rather win control of a losing party than lose control of a winning party. The Corner today is buff with the scoop on infighting - Republicans who hate Republicans. Yeah it's true. But we absolutely despise Democrats, so we'll live with the hate - like we always do. It brings us to McCain.
October 2008
The thing that strikes me most about Obama's debate performance Tuesday is how much his intentions for Afghanistan sound exactly like George W. Bush. But then when you hear the rest of his rhetoric about capturing or killing Osama Bin Ladin, you realize how little he cares for winning against the jihadi movement, and how little he has actually studied this problem.
Everything he says about pursuing Bin Ladin smacks of the old 'cut off the head and the snake will die' strategy. It's beyond wrong, it's foolish, especially given how he's just posing like a hawk on Pakistan. He is decidedly clumsy on matters of war, peace and diplomacy. The very nerve of him to call Musharraf a dictator on national TV is demonstration enough for me that his foreign policy would be a disaster.
It's about this time that I wish that Obama were debating Romney. Because even though Romney takes you right up to the limit of his knowledge, which is sometimes inadequate, at least he gets to the point quickly. Romney would have turned Obama into lawn clippings.
-- I listened to the debate after much hesitation. I really didn't want to. As soon as I heard Brokaw's voice and the two minute rule, I immediately thought that it's nothing more than a game show. Finally I relented.
Obama said nothing new in anything he presented. All of his responses sounded exactly like things I've heard him say before, and he never seemed to have time to give quick, direct responses to Brokaw's questions. Plus, he violated time limits. Still at least he didn't bore me to tears like Biden did, and he kept his cheeky colloquialisms to a minimum unlike Palin.
For the things that matter most to me, McCain was a clear winner, but not decidedly so. He simply didn't have the rhetorical skills to put Obama away, who was punching like Mike Tyson against Buster Douglas. If Obama is supposed to have these legendary oratorical skills, I didn't hear them, He sounded like an average politician to me. Then again, I've been listening to him say empty stuff to cheers for months now, I didn't expect any big words tonight.
Obama unabashedly puts himself in the position of saying that the past 8 years has killed the American dream. It was a strikingly stupid remark. Anyway I've decided to do a full annotation of the debate. Stay tuned.
If I would be so bold as guess what Humanities professors in the American university think they are doing, my guess would be that their millenial project is something like "Expanding the definition of 'normal' in order to make society more inclusive", and that their primary strategy in doing so would be twofold, the first leg of which is to bring into question select standards of normalcy. The second leg would be championing the 'unincluded' aka the Other by various offensive and defensive methods. They have been playing this game all my life and Mighty Casey is beginning to appear mighty lame. It occurs to me that they have mostly succeeded in forgetting the the purpose of the Humanities, having been on automatic all these years. Then again, I'm only boldy guessing.
I wonder, for example, what is the animating purpose in redefining the role of women in American society. I say that pointedly because when you decide that there should be Charlie's Angels, which is essentially what I see in today's television that was absent in the television of yesteryear, you have already gone far beyond the myth making required for the victims of female circumcision in various African cultures. It does not seem at all proper that Feminism should be class-based, then again, I'm only boldly guessing what the Humanities has staked out for its territory.
From my perspective as one of the Digiterati, I have always been concerned with what it is that humans should take pride in once they are liberated from the sort of drudgery we can program machines and systems to accomplish. Having been a bank teller, back when I was 20, I was fairly certain that my job should have been gotten rid of by the ATM. For the most part, it has. Although tellers remain, they are nowhere near as pletiful as they were in 1981. Indeed old bank buildings seem awfully oversized for the number of people employed by them, and new bank branch offices - bulletproofed and claustrophobic bear little resemblance to their marble vaulted ceilinged grandfathers.
More to the crux, we in the IT profession have been thinking about what thinking is. Chess thinking has been figured out, so has android walking and so has speech. So a walking, talking, chess playing automaton is doable, although nobody really wants one. But what is love? Who is worthy of it and how is love manifest? I think about this when I consider how absolutely impossible it seems for any American high school student to relate personally to Romeo and Juliet. Can you imagine two families in any American suburb so bent on keeping their teens from having sex that they would commit mutual suicide? It is the sort of tragedy our idea of humanity has precluded us from having. That may be a success, but on the other hand, there goes devotion. So I reiterate, what of devotion?
And what of those mountains of wisdom which no longer apply to our contemporary circumstance? If there are no great minds, and surely it takes greatness, to consider at length and reify what best to do in those, our human situations, then who are we to follow besides the whims of merchants and clergy? Poets, priests and politicians all have words for their positions; words that scream for your submission, should we be heeding their transmissions? Or is there a Humanities project which is beyond politics, commerce and religion? Are there poets? If so, what are they saying that we haven't already heard?
I have begun reading Charles Dickens because I am adjusting my expectations of life to a potential world without electricity and endeavoring to know what then civilizes besides the Android Operating System. I am looking backwards for Humanity. But I'm beginning to look around me too.
I've been listening to people talk about how they will change the world for most of my life. Incidently today there is this piece by Eric Raymond, and this piece by Bill Benzon. I do not doubt for a moment that the world has changed and continues to change. In fact, it has been enlightening to run through KOA, The Reconing to help me understand two little tidbits. Let me riff off the tidbits.
In Kingdoms of Amalur, The Reconing, we are playing the role of a fateshifter. You see, we are in the land of elves, gnomes, fae, sprites, boggarts, brownies, jottun and various other creatures. Some of these, the fae, without going too deeply into their taxonomy, are immortal. As immortals they express a great disdain for mortals, because you see, the fae are inextricably bound to the Earth. They represent birth, growth, decay and death, all of which are eternal, and so they are fated in their immortality. This is rather like the fate of neutrinos to be massless and thus travel at the speed of light. As the fateless mortal character, we exist at the opposite end of the spectrum. We are massive and thus bend fate around us and can assume any form, it is a condition of our mortality. I suppose that means I must die at the end of the game, but who knows, I'm only at level 29 and have yet to enter the kingdom of Alabastra, home of the Winter Court of Fae.
The Fae resent change, but must adapt to it, and find uses for it, or exist forever in a state in conflict with their previously eternal fate. For example, the Fae of Sorrows administer the Midden where the dead are separated from their souls. Change has made the Midden to smell to the Fae as it does to humans. Now suddenly their exalted position stinks.
So humans, as being mortals, must in the relatively short time allotted to them must find meaning amongst that which is eternal and transcendent and then force change. We must move swiftly and imbue ourselves with something permanent, or change something that seems permanent. This is what we do when we are confronted with the knowledge that we will die. For the vast majority of us, having children satisfies that condition. We smack up somebody else's life and produce one of the single most life changing changes that we can - creating life where there was none. And of course murder is the counterpart. There it is. End of riff.
In Raymond, the question of tribal prophets is answered rather matter of factly by the first commenter who serves rhetoric to the effect that all the titans of industry were prophets. Why not Ken Olsen, the CEO of DEC? And I have to agree with that point and take it to its proper conclusion which suggests that all such thinking about startup companies and tribes and such purposeful evasions of the public are a species of small-mindedness. This is, of course, the last thing that attendees of a TED seminar want to hear, but I cannot help but be reminded of the sort of eclexia implicit in these endless junkets.
I do not doubt that there is boundless creativity to be found in these tribes. And I find it telling that the speaker to whom Raymond refers begins with a micro history of Superbowl Parties and all such manner of things likely to be captured by the incessant narcissism of social media. But nobody knows what Obama does, they just like the idea that the Presidency is up for grabs and your vote, like your code, and your glib intellectual obiter dicta can be connected into a clever narrative of empowerment.
I am reminded of how many tons of rubber are produced in the world on an annual basis. We all take rubber for granted of course, and we imagine, we being those in the digiterati enthralled by the eclexia of TED, that there must be little of creative interest in the production of rubber and the management of a rubber empire. But I doubt quite seriously that we are correct in such assumptions, rather, we are determined to discount the qualities of such physical artifacts that don't flow over TCP/IP yeilding their secrets to those tools that we can appropriate freely in our open source worlds.
And how are we to change the world?
Well, we don't actually. What we do is we constantly change the way we see the world, and thus in a class of chatters, we frame and re-frame the fashionable intelligence, as has always been the wont and role of the Slice. We who work in close proximity to the Ruling Class. But TED and Google Plus and various streams of Twitter twaddle (and certainly some large unfathomable number of IRC channels) are the new channels that aggregate people into virtual neighborhoods. At long last however, the virtual remains virtual. So now we are witnessing what seem to be like sleepwalkers staring into the virtual multiverse as the stumble through actual streets and wreck their automobiles. Digital consciousness is now a 21st century virus unleashed in the 20th century world. Can it evolve?
I mean to do more than merely suggest but to state that this remote consciousness has devastating consequences for people who must of necessity put their bodies into alien spaces. And depending upon the quality of one's cybermind, every place is alien. There is no such thing as a company town, and this is the community that we are actually looking to build. The tribes fall short. And yet that is the new level of civic engagement, ever smaller, so that ever closer 'friends' feel autonomy in the societies we have built up over history. But these cities will not go away, nor will the distribution networks in place that put rubber on the wheels of all of the millions of automobiles that are also not going away. The virtual people have yet to build a town, and so the question ultimately becomes, at whose mercy are all these changes going to take place?
What is a labor union and what kind of city do they control? Now put them and their expertise in conflict with the TED crowd and what do you get? You get the election of Obama using the Leviathan power of the existing 20th century infrasturucture and physical world to force the labor union to provide the goods and services demanded by the Digerati and their tweeting children.
Do you see the problem as I do?
Silicon Valley is not sustainable. It is not a real, livable place and its vision for living is not real. The changes it makes in the world are to make the common man susceptible to the fashionable intelligence of its Digiterati with no regard or respect for the actual physical networks and infrastructure that it takes for granted. The mega corporations its princelings seek to re-think and remove are the proven successes of the 20th century, and they do not know how to scale their vision of community.
Unless you are trying to redefine the meaning of sex in every context imaginable. Who is trying to do that? Who is trying to bring new definitions of morally legitimate forms of sexual consent into the political sphere? Why?
Ask yourself a simple question. If you were to discover that there were about 12 different definitions and degrees of rape in law in America now, would you say that there need to be more or fewer laws? If you are not sure, would you agree or disagree that experts should be consulted on the matter? How certain are you that the average person know what rape is and will make a good judgment on the matter enough so that America can be considered a just society when it comes to rape?
If the question is up in the air for you at this point, then you should acknowledge that there is room for debate and that is exactly why people who disagree should run for office.
By the way, do American prisoners get charged for rape, or is that still a joke?
As part of my Peasant Theory, I claim that there are three classes of Americans. There are the 2% ruling class, the 90% peasant class and 8% are 'The Slice'. The Slice are those people who actually know how to make things work, and they serve at the pleasure of the ruling class. Or, to think about it in another way, the 8% Slice are those people who actually *do* use algebra every day in their real lives. The overwhelming majority of Americans do not use algebra and are not asked to use algebra, repair the machines and conveniences upon which our lives depend, etc.
But we also have 'The Alternative-Slice', who are the over-educated segment of the population whose resourcefulness is not employed due to the simultaneous facts that:
The peasant class does not demand their services due to a lack of understanding of how they might benefit.
The ruling class is quite satisfied with that demand lock-in.
Consider a baseball analogy. Imagine you are going to attend a baseball game, and so as the owner of the stadium you need to hire chefs. In the world of cooking skills, and the world of baseball game attendees, all that is required and expected are hot-dog level skills. Despite the fact that fresh pizza, sushi, rock candy, pineapple lemonade and oyster po' boys would all make for superb ball-game fare, you can rely on the lowball tastes of the baseball fans to guarantee you only need to hire three master chefs instead of seven. The three you hire are 'The Slice', the four you do not are ''The Alternative-Slice''.
The greatness of this country can be seen in the surplus of Slice candidates. We have a built-in reduncancy and competitiveness. But the fragility of the country comes from that same fact. The Anti-Slice is underemployed or suffers from the fact that they are out of the mainstream. If they continue long enough, out of favor or the employ of the ruling class, they become contrary, and unless and until their desires are met, they harbor all possibilities and potential for subversion and revolt. They may become more than the alternative but in word and deed the Anti-Slice.
I see the operation of Slice, Alternative-Slice and Anti-Slice in most political, technical and social discussions of the day, and I recognize that the national failure is the fault and responsibility of America's ruling class. I tend to see the Alternatives attempt to crowdsource their funding and popularity and the Antis work oppositionally to the mainstream.
Zero Sum Class Someone dismissed my class operation as a zero-sum game. It is and it isn't. Let me explain the way in which Slice skills and positions are zero-sum as a natural phenomenon.
Consider The Transcendental Etude #10 by Franz Liszt. I first encountered this extraordinary piece of music when I was a sophomore in college, back in 1984. It was in fact this very performance by Andre Watts that stunned me for life. My awareness of its existence was created by my desire to improve myself and my expectation that I would eventually be bored by peasant music - even though I would go out on the weekends and dance to Midnight Star. The complexity of Liszt's etude and the relative sophistication it takes to appreciate it, as compared to that of No Parking on the Dance Floor is easy to see. As of this writing, Watt's performance on YouTube has existed online for 33 months and recieved about 65,000 viewings. Midnight Star on the other hand has been in place for 30 months but has garnered more than 10x that audience. But the important gating factor on the matter has to do with the number of musicians capable of performing the music. It's quite possible to be a peasant and enjoy classical piano concerts; Bunin playing Chopin outranks both. It is not possible to call Watts or Bunin peasants.
Let us then focus on the fate of extraordinary musicians. The existence of YouTube forces us to because we are clearly in a period of transition. How likely are the proprietors of Google likely to build another such music hall and program such as that which cultivated Watt's original Lincoln Center performance? I heard it on KUSC back when Los Angeles had two classical FM radio stations. Is it likely that the rulers at Google might, through their desires change the way music is delivered, and marginalize the Slice of Lincoln Center performers and make the likes of Watts a reactionary Alternative or Anti? Perhaps in their quest to unseat New York as an elite cultural center, they just might.
Let us go one step beyond the performers and their venues, to the composers themselves. The genius of Chopin and Liszt is not generally open to question (unless you are part of an Alternative or Anti faction of the Slice involved in the criticism of Western music). If for some reason the American ruling class were to completely marginalize classical piano, you would end up with a natural zero sum. You cannot instantly create performers as capable as Watts or Bunin. You could not replace the works of Chopin or Liszt. They stand as the pinnacles of musical composition - they are not simply interchangeable commodities. So long as the ruling class seeks to preserve the world of piano etude composition, performance and appreciation, there is a zero-sum phenomenon that is unavoidable.
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I argue therefore that the moral integrity of the ruling class is essential to the establishment and maintenance of a purposeful and public-minded Slice, the default of which creates telented elites at war with each other for the limited resources available to them. At this point in American history, the Slice is divided and the ruling class is distant. I have questions as to how American institutions would survive a necessary transition in power from an ascendant meritocratic Slice/Alt/Anti class. There is chaos at the top.
I read Gore Vidal a little bit too young to make use of what he wrote or break too lofty in comments on his passing but there were a couple ideas that he has to want to be that I still recall the first was the idea of a scholar squirrel.
His rant against the cowardice of the professoriate was a great comfort to me in understanding how the prestige of various academics obscured the fact that there were indeed facts about history that they couldn't bear to present in full context. But that was about the extent of it and quite frankly Vidal in the end disappointed.
What annoyed me about Vidal was that he decided to take his pen and run away home, except that he made his home somewhere in Southern Europe. France or Italy, it mattered little. Essentially, he turned in his card and decided that America was no longer home. From that distance, lobbing rhetorical bombs reminded me of nobody so much as Stokely Carmichael aka Kawame Ture. I may not be forgiven for not keeping up with Vidal, but it's patently obvious to me that he didn't have the stomach for living in America. One wonders which cowardice is more odious, that which can't bear to be associated with America or that which succeeds in the fraudulent portion. Vidal criticized all the scholar squirrels, but then left them in charge of his ex-nation.
Considering that America hasn't self-destructed before his death, I guess Vidal's cowardice is all the more apparent. Then again, there may be some idyllic perfection in Southern Europe that we are all just too stupid to recognize.
Vidal was clearly at peace with the degradation of the nation he claimed to know so well. But isn't that the sort of Merovingian elan such an elitist native son given to the thrills of sexuality ought to be expected to possess? Nothing quite so awfully truthful as a sardonic old queen, eh? Especially about awful things that have the ring of truth. It doesn't make one a hero. Shakespeare's Aaron never told a lie and for his truths could spare the life of his bastard got off the evil queen. I suppose that's the best light to illuminate Vidal's legacy. He'd have us barf it all up - with the likes of Kofi Annan in charge.
The world does not, perhaps, need heroics nor courage. Gore Vidal might be a suitable boy for that world of boys and girls who needn't do anything but wish away war and sun themselves in Mediterranean light. But Rabbi Hillel said, when there is no hero, you be the hero. That calls for presence of mind and body and dedication to some risky propositions. None of which seem to be at issue for Vidal at his remove from a nation lying in the lee of the winds of property ownage, civil liberties strewn about like so many trailer parks.
He said, back in 2001:
Once alienated, an 'unalienable right' is apt to be forever lost, in which case we are no longer even remotely the last best hope of earth but merely a seedy imperial state whose citizens are kept in line by SWAT teams and whose way of death, not life, is universally imitated. Since VJ Day 1945 ('Victory over Japan' and the end of World War II), we have been engaged in what the great historian Charles A Beard called 'perpetual war for perpetual peace'. I have occasionally referred to our 'enemy of the month club': each month a new horrendous enemy at whom we must strike before he destroys us. I have been accused of exaggeration, so here's the scoreboard from Kosovo (1999) to Berlin Airlift (1948-49).
You will note that the compilers, Federation of American Scientists, record a number of our wars as 'ongoing', even though many of us have forgotten about them. We are given, under 'Name' many fanciful Defense Department titles like Urgent Fury which was Reagan's attack on the island of Grenada, a month long caper which General Haig disloyally said could have been handled more briefly by the Provincetown police department. In these several hundred wars against communism, terrorism, drugs or sometimes nothing much, between Pearl Harbor and Tuesday 11 September 2001, we always struck the first blow.
It's achingly familiar. How about this?:
Jews, blacks, and homosexuals are despised by the Christian…majorities of East and West. Also, as a result of the invention of Israel, Jews can now count on the hatred of the Islamic world. Since our own Christian majority looks to be getting ready for great adventures at home and abroad, I would suggest that the three despised minorities join forces in order not to be destroyed. This seems an obvious thing to do. Unfortunately, most Jews refuse to see any similarity between their special situations and that of the same-sexers.
Is there nothing but irony in Vidal's screeds against Christians and Christianity? Perhaps so. But you would think a more reasonable atheism would have emerged from his diatribes against the 'sky gods'. In that too, I took some measure of distance against monotheism. In fact, it more clearly places my initial discovery of Vidal back in the late 80s as I first gave the faith vs reason arguments full run in my head, as well as the delights of polytheism.
But there is no discipline but the aesthetics of those celebrities whose names don't leave our memories with the swiftness that their arguments lose their coherence over time. And we are left with nothing but memories.
I think of how obvious the minds I was raised on have failed utterly to recognize what liberties would be generated by those of us who have crafted bit by bit, the information revolution. I just have to grudgingly admit to myself that the men of letters have long abandoned the town squares they have claimed to defend. And now Vidal lies dead, another dead man whose letters will be decomposed, debated and deleted in his absence.
There is little difference between disarming people by taking away their guns, their bullets or their right to vote. If what you want is a citizenry that becomes physically incapable of causing a ruckus, then the instrumentality of disarmament is of no consequence. It is the presumption that people need to be pacified which is of utmost concern.
Liberals, and those people who were most upset about W's declaration of war on the Axis of Evil, as well as those people who aim for nuclear disarmament ought to understand this presumption quite well. If you go out romping and stomping about some entire country of people who need to be stopped NOW, then it should not be surprising that people will be alarmed at the inherent arrogance. So when I hear people proclaiming loudly that they understand human nature and what ought to be done because of that, it makes me blink and think. How about you? There is almost no argument I have ever heard in defense of gun control that doesn't first begin with the argument and presumption that there is something wrong with America, they understand that, and the way to stop it NOW is romping and stomping all over the right to bear arms. No difference.
So when it came to war, wasn't it surprising that the biggest POW camp we ever saw in Iraq was Abu Graibh? Something must be wrong with a program of pacification that doesn't fill a nation the size of Iraq with dead men, given what we know American shock and awe can do and did on some tiny island like Iwo Jima. No, what we did was counter-insurgency. We even let Iraqi men keep their own weapons. Perhaps we weren't at war really, but just out to get the bad guys. Afghanistan has no mass graves. That ain't war. Nothing happened to North Korea - we even let them come to the Olympics. Or, in the same way that the War on Drugs is quite far from my mind here in sunny, pleasant, affluent Redondo Beach, perhaps the 'war' is very targeted, and very specifically lethal.
I don't bother worrying my tuchus about mass murder in the US. That's part and parcel of my understanding of the facts. The facts are that 30,000 Americans kill themselves every year. Suicide. 40,000 is the number for automobile deaths. The number for murder? Want to guess? 17,000.
When it comes to mass murder, by the way, I tend to remember that it wasn't too long ago when America had the popular nuttery to enact the 18th Amendment. And because of that the FBI got a good workout in homeland security against moonshiners and their gangster patrons who were armed to the teeth. I don't remember that much of my high school history, but even that domestic terror was eventually handled. Yeah we changed the law back, which was a good idea for those same pacification reasons I stated earlier, but we sure did grow the FBI. So there has never been a time in the past 80 years or so when we really couldn't handle the 'fire next time'. David Koresh is about as bad as it gets. Oh yeah, and the Mexican drug gangs. But that's not really my problem. So yeah. I shrug mass murder off, but I do everything to maintain my inner peace and I always buckle my seatbelt.
People talk all the time about how we're losing civil liberties all of the time. I'm wary, but I just don't see it. I have a feeling we're more losing civility, and that's because odious people keep taking liberties with their perversions, one of which is the kind of hate-baiting that wants to make it a crime to each Christian fried chicken. But that's just more noise, and people do have a right to get out of hand and make loud, uncivil noise.
I have a constitutional right to get out of hand, by bullet or by ballot, so I defend those rights, and I stand to mock those who think they know enough about me to pacify and disarm me. I'm no joker and I won't be disarmed without a fight.
Every once in a while, especially when we come to the leftish fetishes of gun control, violence in general, infant mortality and gay marriage, some nimrod attempts to lecture me about how pathetic America compares, statistically speaking, to various Scandinavian countries.
I think it is most appropriate to compare Scandinavian countries with North and South Dakota, not the entire US. See how important they look now. But since I'm about to defend gun nuts on principle, I might as well get this video up for reference. You see.. Lego is.. whoops. I have been lied to and told that Lego is the biggest company in Denmark. And until 3 minutes ago, I like a fish, believed that nonsense not having taken 10 minutes to check it out for myself. So while the main point of this artifact is blunted. it doesn't change the fact that Lego did bring 3.1 Billion Euros in revenue to Denmark and these folks in the video are self-evidently un-criminal. Still, I would consider this task, accomplished while forced to listen to Swedish disco, to be a prison sentence.
The larger point however is that it makes very little sense to compare the US to Scandinavia, and I don't need Lego to prove that.
It's difficult for me to think of another example that demonstrates the pathetic state of affairs in multicultural America than this.
The video has entirely too much Obama in it, and I would advise you to skip forward to the 12th minute to get to the crux of the dilemma. In the scene that unfolds, you have what is essentially a reactionary police department which is responsible to politics which supercede the law. The result is an Orwellian interpretation of what causes public danger backed by a pleading for more police.
I do hope that this incident receives more publicity because I really want to know what kind of surveillance was placed on the missionaries, and under whose direction was it established. There is something very sour in the higher-ups of the municipality. It might very well end in Dearborn itself, because it certainly doesn't issue directly from Obama, but somewhere in the Michigan government is a smoking interest whose consequences are perfectly obvious. Mob rule wins if it's the right mob.
All of the underpinnings of this fiasco are expected and predicted by my Peasant Theory. This is a perfectly squishy democracy under the rule of illiterate populism as contrasted with the expectations of a righteous republic under the rule of clear and present law.
Back when I was a baby, there was some controversy over the Irish Catholicism of Candidate Kennedy. I didn't participate in that sort of thing, obviously, but I heard enough about it so that it was a big deal. Eventually, Kennedy was shot, and so finally was his brother Robert. I suspect that if I read whatever the most notable Irish newspaper in America at the time, I would hear all over the editorial section how blatantly anti-Irish it all was. And the chorus says 'huh?'
I do read the headlines from The Root every day, and they serve to remind me of a number of things. Primarily however they remind me that the American Left is at odds with itself with regard to its multiculturalist principles and priorities. That comes out as frustration with its racial narrative and the actual way that successful ethnics express their power in America.
America is a melting pot, but only the Civil War made it hot enough to melt Africans into citizenship. The Civil Rights Movement, often interpreted as a grass roots revolution, demonstrated a different kind of heat that melted glass ceilings and second-class citizenship. But between you and me, it was the triumph of Thurgood Marshall's legal practice and that of his amicus partners. I've always expressed my interpretation of the progress of the African in America as one of human rights to civil rights and continuing on towards social power. But I am rather convinced these days that there are only civil rights in law and the rest requires old fashioned clout of the sort that is never arrayed for the masses outside of revolution. In other words, the only people who get 100% Civil Rights - the only kind of rights there are, are the rich and powerful. Everybody else gets a gentleman's C, and as such they follow the prerogatives of class, education and general human fitness. Nevertheless certain aspects of these rights and privileges accrue through the example of those who amass social capital, of which African Americans have a goodly share, and quite frankly have enjoyed since society girls started dancing Uptown. You could ask Sir Duke or Marion Anderson if they were still alive.
None of that changes the fact of the Black Power Struggle which always and everywhere refused the very idea of assimilation. America is no melting pot to them, but a lumpy salad and they like it lumpy, with a particularly tart flavor of relativist salad dressing called multiculturalism. But everybody knows a black olive is fundamentally different from egg whites...
You must keep this in mind when reading contemporary accounts of the complaints of the so-called 'African American' and discussions of 'race' attending such debate. I was reminded of this starkly last week as I tuned in to some of my old favorite reggae albums, notably that of Steel Pulse. Their music provides a very useful insight.
I won't belabor the point of the following lyrics:
They took us away captivity captivity Required from us a song Right now man say repatriate repatriate I and I patience have now long time gone Father's mothers sons daughters every one Four hundred million strong Ethiopia stretch forth her hand Closer to God we Africans Closer to God we can In our hearts is Mount Zion Now you know seek the Lion How can we sing in a strange land Don't want to sing in a strange land no Liberation true democracy One God one aim one destiny
Except to point out that they come from an album entitled True Democracy. If you ask a certain type of black American if they are patriotic you will find that they are, contingent on America's ability or willingness to produce True Democracy. I leave it to your curiosity to determine what degree of multicultural salad dressing that is, or more pointedly if there is sympathy with Marcus Garvey, Franz Fanon or Black Liberation Theology.
That is a very critical question that must be pointedly raised when certain assumptions about 'the' black polity's satisfaction with the purported black agenda of Barack Obama. I understand him very well to be exactly the sort who like me, loves to play the dub version (without lyrics) of that Steel Pulse song, (yes it is very popular). Unlike me, I happen to think Barack Obama would enjoy tweaking our democracy towards the 'True' in service of a lumpier multiculturalism.
After winning office, such race-neutral politicians don’t normally embrace issues and positions that black voters might prefer. Instead, the imperatives of reelection take over. To maintain their winning coalitions, these politicians usually need to govern in a racially neutral manner as well. (Black Americans understand this: In the 2008 ABC News-USA Today-Columbia University Black Politics Survey, nearly half of all black respondents believed that African Americans must play down their racial identity to get ahead in the United States.)
Obama has followed this pattern. During the 2008 campaign, the most significant moment when race hit the national stage was when controversy broke out over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, forcing Obama to deliver a much-heralded speech on race in Philadelphia. During his presidency, racial discussions have been largely limited to his reactions to unexpected public debates, such as the arrest of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the shooting of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin.
In theory, these two episodes offered opportunities for Obama to discuss reforms to the criminal justice system — an issue he’d raised early in his campaign — but instead, he limited his response to tamping down potential racial conflicts, then quickly moving on.
I take this complaint as one typical of the racially minded who can never be satisfied that America is talking enough about race - when the fact of the matter is they themselves can never shutup about race.
But I saw all this coming back when Obama proved his charm to the American electorate years ago. All of his black politics were a fiction, and then he made all black politics into a fiction - both the traditional and the newly opportunistic. Because it was all about Barack Obama, not about any real continuation of 'The Struggle'. Nevertheless, Obama played the right background music, gave fist bumps onstage and did those things that suited the styles of the revolutionaries and radicals. A suit he wore very well. I believe my characterization of him was 'Barbara Boxer in a black man suit', which is to say a typical Lefty American with no real loyalties but to the prerogatives of Left rhetoric as usual and win, win, win, elections. His agenda was indistinguishable from that of John Edwards basically until Shepard Fairy made the famous poster. And then he went on to raised more money in his campaign than any man in American history.
I understood, as much as I found Obama to be disagreeable, that he would not paint the White House black and that he would fit, one way or another, into the President Suit - that giant robot that says Made in America and Leader of the Free World with the stars and stripes on its chest. And in several ways he has done so admirably. But some fraction of his black electorate has reason to be disappointed in themselves for following a racial line that turns out not to be the doctrine they were expecting. And thus they have to be asked about their definitions of True Democracy.
Well actually they really don't, because if Barack Obama ain't black enough for you, then perhaps you take blackness not only too seriously, and in dubious directions. But the real news is that the next US President of African descent will have much less to prove about his blackness or the color of his skin indicating something about 'race relations.'
You see, the Civil Rights Movement is over. It is as over in 2012 as the Civil War was over in when those society girls were getting their Charleston on up in Harlem. We are fast approaching the day when all Civil Rights Movement veterans will be as dead as Thurgood Marshall. Perhaps Steven Speilberg or Clint Eastwood will direct the movie that has the last word on Thurgood. I'd like to see that movie. And if the idea that it won't be Spike Lee makes you uncomfortable - well then you just peed your own pants on that one, brother. And every day we will bury with another layer of abstraction those stories that retain their racial purity, as if only Africans can tell the story of Ocean Hill - Brownsville, only gays of Stonewall, only Chicanos of the Zoot Suit Riots. Because it will be America's history, and Americans will only tell themselves the stories that they feel comfortable with. That's not because the truth doesn't matter so much, but because race doesn't matter so much.
When the truth is told, that's what America wants.
Jimi Izrael is kicking butt and taking names in the media, and there are few who are as responsible as he is when it comes to representing the flavor of my old school demographic. He's good people, he's my people and if there is any justice in this world he will be righteously famous. I think he's on the right road.
So he let it leak through some ghetto downloading service that he's coming up with a new vehicle called 'First Chair with Jimi Izrael'. I'm going to tune in. I hope it finds the right host and distribution, it would be a disappointment if it were not produced as professionally as his current NPR gig.
I would love to do a podcast with Jimi sometime in the future and I went over the transcripts of his last three NPR shows just to remind myself of the texture and tone of the verbiage we used to throw down. Brought back fond memories, because we had really good laughs. (Check out Radio Recap)
Anyway, be on the lookout for Jimi. He's real, he's wise, he deserves a listen.
All I have to say is this. Google getting into the consumer survey business is the beginning of the end of marketing as we now know it. This was something I rather expected to see and because of that I started fleshing out an idea a few years ago called WWID.
A nation mourns its youth, gone away, gone astray, dying by the bullet. And painted in stereotypical black, we have another stereotypical tragedy that cannot be anything but grist for a cycle of protest, outrage, sadness, disappointment and resentment. It quiets down until another bullet gives another HBO writer of 'The Wire' another million dollars. Because that's reality.
One day, America will let its black families mourn their loss in peace. Until that day, scribble another name in grafitti sharpie - the name of the innocent: Trayvon Martin.
What is forgotten at this moment in time is the politics behind all sorts of pseudo-para-police forces that have always been a flawed concept, but last time around had another group of politically misled people jumping up and down with anticipation. I'm talking about Philadelphia and I'm talking about Sylvester Johnson. What I said:
This is evidence that in Philly (which from my experience, fits the profile) that social segregation is alive and well. I use the term 'social segregation' lightly because I'm fleshing it out. It's basically that the idea of separatism is alive. People *expect* that there is something fundamentally different about black crime, and therefore that there must be some kind of separate solution to it. People then accept that there is fundamentally something different about how black suspects and criminals must be treated and how black families must be organized etc. This is a regional / social / cultural /political thing that's working its way back to Jim Crow. The idea of equality is being undermined from both sides of the law.
Something like 'support your local police' just doesn't work with the black community in Philly. Instead some bizarre hybrid of protest politics and God knows what else is informing this situation.
I agree that black residents of Philadelphia should expect and deserve equal protection from police. But that also means they should give equal respect for and collaboration with police. I hope this idea never gets off the ground. It's nothing more or less than a call for an ethnic militia, the root of all unrest in the modern world.
I expect that in the ebb and flow, that black politics is angling more towards an anti-militia sentiment, and perhaps especially an anti-ethnic militia sentiment now that The Man is of African descent. But surely that sentiment is not necessarily logical because this time around it's correct. After all, if that were the case, we would expect to hear a great deal more calling for the head of the President over 16 dead civilians in Afghanistan... but I second-guess people I don't even listen to.
The answer is for all peasants to support their local police, always. Because this is precisely what happens when knucklehead peasants attempt to take the law (that they don't really understand) into their own cotton-picking hands.
Obviously George Zimmerman, the shooter, needs to be arrested, tried and convicted. Obviously he will get the benefit of some over-zealous public defender and the slack in the criminal justice system. But I think he should get 2nd Degree Murder conviction, and 20 years. But adding the circumstances of impersonating an officer and acting under the color of authority, I could see the combination get him 40 years, although if I were the family, I'd like to have him pilloried and stoned.
But Zimmerman will not be stoned because we seem to have lost our perspective of what good people deserve and what bad people deserve. Something is inverted when you get umpty million saying 'I should never have to go broke because I don't have health insurance' but not 'Death to Zimmerman'.
So I ask the question I've been meaning to write about but haven't gotten around to: Who is your Leviathan?
Or in political terms, are you safer today than you were four years ago?
The most serious Occupy organization, the New York General Assembly, has announced support for a 'Million Hoodie March'
Wednesday, March 21 6:00pm Million Hoodie March for Trayvon Martin Union Square Throw on your hoodies and come gather in Union Square to show your support for justice for Trayvon Martin, the Florida 17-year-old whose killer hasn't been charged! A black person in a hoodie isn’t automatically “suspicious”. Let’s put an end to racial profiling! March 21st is the UN International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Facebook. http://interoccupy.org/march-21-a-million-hoodies-march-for-trayvon-martin-nyc-6pm/
I won't belabor the number of things that are wrong with this except to mention that it demonstrates that the organization has devolved into something typical. This demonstrates an inability to remain focused on the actual problems on Wall Street that can be identified as policy recommendations backed up by popular support.
Turning the hoodie corner = jumping the shark. Occupy has officially wobbled quietly into the dark night of surrender, perhaps realizing that their supporters have short attention spans. Racist! Squirrel!
Greg Smith is about to disappear. The reason why is because we live in an era of cowardice and deceit. The reasons for this era are beyond the scope of this essay, however I predict that Smith will disappear. He will go into that same place where I like to think I live, which is the domain of integrity and courage. It's hard for me to tell because life is a battlefield full of smoke and confusion.
Those who are supposed to be responsible to bring such matters to our attention have not, and so it was on Mr. Smith alone to reveal what we all needed to know. Some might pretend that not all of us need to know that there are moral capitalists possessed of integrity and courage, others pretend that there is no such thing. But those of us who try to have integrity and courage know such acts when we see them, and we understand how painful it is to undertake them. I am like you Mr. Smith, in case you may not have realized how many brothers you have out here in the smoke and confusion.
He will enter the realm of people who are unashamed of bronze medals and runner-up status - those of us who sense the butterfly wing's difference between the efforts required to stand on podiums and the massive difference between the accolades given by those who have no sense of the effort.
Listen to me, I am under the influence of NASA. I purchased a five disk boxed set documenting the endeavors of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. Last night I watched astronauts - men on a scientific mission enthralled with glee with the spectacle of geology of the Hadley Rille. I watched the extraordinary efforts of men in service of mankind when lives were at stake and millions of eyes were watching. And they were happy, and having the time of their lives. We were right to consider them heroes, even though, by Apollo 15, they were not standing on the podium.
There is an old poem about the strongest and fastest man and to whom life's battles are given. Greg Smith has decided to take no more from the man who thinks he can disrespect his customers and thereby pervert the only morality capitalism possesses which is the mutual benefit of parties.
This is how the decline happens. It happens as those who assumed no good are rewarded with bad news and the myth of evil and incompetence becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. But we know not to listen, for we are the disappeared. No film at 11.
By the way, it is my opinion that the Volker Rule was all that was needed but purposeful obfuscation has ruled the day, and I agree that Smith is toast.
In a contest between Romney and Obama, the country loses. Both posers are interested in selling their image and putting a lid on things. Romney because it sounds like the only thing he would say, and Obama because it's what he wishes he could do. That is to say Obama can do the first thing and Romney can do the second, neither of which is particularly good for America at this moment in history. So I think today that I'm going to follow Taleb and cast a vote for Ron Paul, the nutcase crackpot. Why? Because only a nutcase crackpot like Paul (being very specific) has the nerve to base his entire campaign on a few salient facts and properly directed wishful thoughts.
Let me take a tangent and speak about videogames.
In Skyrim and all the other best crafted RPGs, you spend a long time wandering around taking odd jobs and dodging authority until you get enough skill to take on more and more powerful characters. At some point, you don't decide which boss you want to support, you decide which boss you want to kill. When you become adequately powerful, even the swarms of police and guards are too weak to contain you. In any case, what you never do is sit around studying positions and strategies and then cast your vote for a proxy who will change the world for you.
You can only see the world by killing the obstacles in your path one by one.
Once you've done that and only once you have done that can you understand the world you have changed through your actions. As I apply this to democratic politics in the context of our bourgeois elections and campaigns aimed at the rhetorical level of peasants, I realize that my symbol is just as good as my vote. Except I get to symbolify as much as I want, here on the blog. In other words, I've recognized the value of killing obstacles blocking my view of the world, and for me, 99% of them are financial. Therefore what I need to do is make every effort to kill financial obstacles. That means voting for Ron Paul because only Ron Paul will create the conditions under which the proper disaster will occur in the short term. Obama and Romney on the other hand will sustain a stasis field which will behave like Wile E. Coyote walking on air over a deeper and deeper ravine.
Since I'm in the 5% and in an industry that grows organically by objective improvements, my primary concern is that new money keeps flowing, and also that I can take advantage of chaos and failure. I cannot advocate chaos and failure because it is not in my nature to be a vulture.
All I want is for Kirk Sorensen to have a long conversation with Elon Musk. But then again, I can't imagine how it couldn't have already happened - which is why Flibe must exist. I can't wait for the IPO.
This is the future. I'm optimistic. This is the best energy talk since Koonin.
If you have to ask Wikipedia who Cissy is, then I forgive you. But really, that's all I really had to say to a small group of wonderful but unimportant people, whom I love dearly but hardly ever see any longer. They are my snobby black brothers and sisters who know who they are. There's an old cliche, borrowed of course but the bon mot nonetheless that you can always tell an Alpha man, but you cannot tell him much. I'm an Alpha, a member of the same fraternity as MLK, WEB and Eugene Kinckle Jones. If you have to look them up, I understand and forgive.
You see, I found something out about myself the past weekend, which was that I was expecting entirely too much of my people. And because they never satisfied my expectations, I dismissed their dreams. My people are certainly not a nation of millions, nor an ethnic minority within that nation. My people are a very certain selection of a very few who tend to know a lot about a few things and not much else. I can go to my cousin and she can tell me who Whitney used to hang out with, and we could also trade stories about Don Conrnelius as well. And although I hope he's not the third, I could tell you about some other famous black entertainer whose name is not important right now. What's important is that I'm the kind of guy who could hang out for a while with Greg Tate or with Elvis Mitchell because I have. And just last week I was hanging out with some folks who work on Wall Street but come from that same small exclusive village that I do. It was easy. I knew where to go, and I wanted to and I reconnected just like that. But most of the time I don't bother.
I'm sad that Whitney died before her time, but in the way I'm connected to my little village, I knew it was coming. We all did, I mean, common sense and TMZ could tell you that. But she was trying to be more than she could be and succeeded. That makes you paranoid, especially when you realize how close you are to your little village. Hard to explain, that. But when all the people seem like little people, especially the ones you are supposed to love and respect - the ones you are supposed to keep in mutual check, power, wealth and fame are deadly. It's hard to resist doing the unthinkable when your success is singular. When everybody buys the package, you become immune to their thinking. And that is what has happened to my people. We got away with it. From Denzel on down. Well, I don't really mean Denzel, I mean Skip Gates. I mean the caretakers of The Positive Black Image.
You see, it happened. Everybody wanted it to happen. Everybody wanted Whitney to be what she wasn't - she wasn't Dionne Warwick. Whitney wasn't a complete pig; the lipstick worked. The Positive Black Image was credible, not just for Whitney but for a generation who saw Bill Cosby as Dad. It went from Sidney Poitier to Bill Cosby with Eddie Murphy in the middle. Eddie didn't have to care, and so he didn't try so much to keep up appearances - which was why his Dr Doolittle was so brilliant and good. But maintainers of the Positive Black Image needed Whitney, in the same desparate way they now need the Obamas even more.
But there's a loose and somewhat disaffected cadre out there in fine clothing and smooth diction who slip in and out of the dialect without straining. And I hope, as long as I've ignored them, that they are robust in their ability not to take themselves too seriously, but love what they have. Whenever I post a picture of my family here or on Facebook, I'm indulging that Old School select village privilege. I used to talk of aggregation and thought as most of us did, that we would all hang out by Nisky Lake in the ATL and swap Boule stories like some blackified Bohemian Club. Yes, my brother what are we taking over this year? It's happening, and it's not.
My boy (well, he used to be my boy) was just at the White House the other day. I caught the photo on Flipbook. My other boy (well, one degree of separation) is running for DA of LA. We're not actually running things according to any plan, but we're running things. It's a fragile network. It's a good word. It can easily be broken, like speaking out of school - a school that almost exists. Yes I've always called it the Old School, and like balls, strikes, racism and gay marriage, it's all socially constructed. Real but not real. It's just a conventional understanding of things that you shouldn't really take too seriously, nor should you ignore it for too long.
They said, back in 1968, that all I have to do is be black, pay taxes and die. But it turns out that two those things can actually be ignored, and Jesus has a promise about the third. The conventions we attach to them are ephemera, but we're always curious to know how are you going to live in spite of them? What's going to be your image, and how seriously are you going to play the role? As Cobb readers know, I tend to be about *do* rather than *be*, but in this matter the Stoic takes over. After all, with those inevitables you are going to do them one way or another. So attitude matters. How do you feel about all this? Are you going to be alright?
The Old School. The maintainers of the Positive Black Image, the exclusive village of the Talented Tenth origins and keepers of all things dignified and uplifting suffered a catastrophic symbolic earthquake with the death of Whitney Houston. But we knew it was coming, and we know it will come again when the manipulations of our social capital are revealed again as they will be in the future. But it's OK, because we really never needed to change the whole world. We just aimed for it. We will be revealed to be frail, damaged and all of the glory about us that people wanted to believe beyond the limits of our gifts and ability to perform, well that glory will fade. And we'll all be a little bit more sad, and a little more real, and then we can finally be only but always what our true talents fated us to be. There will be only ordinary drama and normal tragedy, simple success and standard victories. That's what equality will feel like.
So I am recovering the ordinary dreams of ordinary successful black Americans with a cold eye but a warm heart. There's always something good to appreciate about talent, but we can all do without the symbolism. Whitney Houston is dead. Dead like Elvis. May their estates continue to sell records, but not sociology. Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs. What's wrong with that?
I knew that Gingrich won the NC primary, but I didn't know until tonight that he threw CNN's John King to the gators.
Gingrich is the most peculiar of the candidates. On the one hand, he is an insider's insider having been the Speaker of the House. In that role, ushering in the Contract With America, he went balls to the wall on Federal spending in a game of brinksmanship that brings back chills. On the other hand, he has been making rounds in the media brainstorming ideas that make even Robert Reich say, hey am I really talking to a Republican here? He has a real personal life, meaning he's not *even* trying to look like some Stepford President. (and I'm probably abusing the metaphor). Conservative ideologues and hardliners dont' think he's 'Conservative' enough - and what that means is that Social Conservatives don't think so, which to my reckoning is a plus.
But this is really about Gingrich's moment in thowing the media to the dogs and putting them on notice that he will not be cowed by their bull. Everybody on the Right knows that the media has been soft bigots for the low performance of President Obama on a number of critical issues. So finally he took the stage and reversed the sexual chokehold that the Hollywood Left thinks is a game-changer for what they presume conservatives to be, and left them tapping out. We've even had a little bit of that screwy perception here at Cobb, but it can be instructive to show exactly what kind of Conservatism Gingrich will demonstrate in his campaign.
This may have been the moment, as with the Army-McCarthy hearings, that the decency of the people asking questions has been astutely brought into focus.
I have reached the point in my research where I pretty much know the outlines of the useful arguments in my areas of interest down to the level of citable text. That is to say, I've become pretty good at identifying thinkers and theories. The rest is technojargon for academic researchers and world class practitioners, of which I am neither. Technojargon is expensive because researchers and practitioner's time is valuable and the temptation to instruct is often overcome by practical incentives. In other words who's got time for writing a book when there's time to get paid actually building stuff? For those who can't actually build - whose job it is just to write books.. well those books cost even more.
McWhorter today commented about comments by somebody named Rick Santorum. I don't know Santorum in the way most Americans do, and don't really care to. Santorum was quoting (or paraphrasing) William A. Galston who made a point very clear back before 2002:
Former Clinton advisor William Galston sums up the matter this way: you need only do three things in this country to avoid poverty—finish high school, marry before having a child, and marry after the age of 20. Only 8 percent of the families who do this are poor; 79 percent of those who fail to do this are poor.
Anyway, the researcher at Brookings published his findings earlier than 2008, I have an article from City Journal in 2002 that cites Galston, who worked for Clinton, BTW. Still, what's more interesting to me is that I read this exact same prescription back when I was in college in the 80s. The author? None other than Thomas Sowell.
So here's your interesting situation. You have a white Republican in 2012 talking about something a white Democrat said 10 years earlier which was just a repetition of something a black economist said 20 years earlier, and people here on the Root 30 years ignorant of a solution that has been out there for a generation pretending to be insulted by a common sense truth that my dead grandparents knew.
You can't get the actual Galston research is secreted behind the firewall of academic publication as I mentioned before but you can get an idea of where to purchase it if you check here at Google Scholar.
And keep in mind that American poverty is pretty damned good, which is why sociologists have to study people at 185% of poverty.
The Democrats' "New Direction". Listen to the whole 8 minutes. Did Obama do any of that? Especially note where he suggests the partition of Iraq. Amazing.
The first chapters of American Sniper are a perfectly suited introduction to the aw shucks, God, Country Family school of American kickass manhood. It is mind-bendingly simple to understand exactly why this nation will continue to be greatly defended for generations to come, because anyone who reads Chris Kyle's book and knows where Kyle is coming from (I do!) will recognize in a heartbeat the kind of Texas cowboy we will always have millions of. Kyle himself would never tell you that he's a one man army, but he is just the kind to fill the top ranks of the best army on the planet so long as it's funded.
There's only a little to say about the metastory here, as I will be slightly intrigued but much informed and entertained by the story to come. That is that you see in Kyle's story, the new soldier - the prototype by which humanity will be defended for generations to come.
He is not an outsider. He is not from the dregs of society. He loves his father and his family - his is not desperate for approval. He rises to the challenges of defending his country, and it makes all the difference that he is a volunteer and that this remains a free country. So long as our military institutions retain their transgenerational links, then they will be the fuel that will power militaries of the future. We must hope and indeed pray that armies comprised of such free men will remain victorious from here on.
It's corny. It's easy to understand. Because of that we are most fortunate. We retain the formula. He's just a fighter and he hates to lose. He understands that he has become a weapon and he is serious about his patriotic committment. His mission is a job and he is remorseless and relentless. He understands the deal of morality he has made, and he values an American life first. That is the kernel of it. The rest is training and experience, and now his knowhow is plowed back into instruction. That, my fellows, is a professional, and that is what we want our military forces to be.
About four years ago, when I cared a great deal more passionately about the foolishishness of the American electorate I was stunned to discover a sort of childish petulance that needed to be slapped around, but was instead coddled by that rudderless gadfly who soon became the Democratic Nominee and then President. I had reasons to be somewhere between upset and merely despondant at the man himself, but I was clearly revolted and disgusted by his shallow partisans and their Black Eyed Peas remixes. I wondered out loud if a man who clearly had no political philosophy outside of expedience would take advantage of such a shallow set of questioners such as those lobbed to him by the mainstream press. You remember calling me shrill, don't you? Yes, because I used the same term as Jonah Goldberg.
Today I think is a good time to look back and play gotcha, and I'm going to do it with a particularly snarky article (this one by New York Magazine). Well, actually I'm not going to reprint it, except to excerpt the following bits.
Then why is Obama doing this to us? Actually, Obama says he won't ever use the power to detain American citizens indefinitely, because, in his words, doing so "would break with our most important traditions and values as a Nation."
So if he thinks the law is so bad, did he sign it as a prank? Ha ha, you thought I was going to shred the Constitution! That's pretty funny, actually. Not as good as the classic Elijah Wood episode ofPunk'd, but almost. Is MTV literally the only channel you watch?
Sometimes MTV2. Obama actually threatened to veto the legislation at first, but after the language was softened enough that he could essentially ignore it, he signed it. Also, it was embedded in the National Defense Authorization Act, a larger bill that funded the military, and he couldn't very well appear as if he didn't want to fund the military, especially in an election year in which the GOP will likely try to portray him as some kind of peacenik.
But if he's not going to use it, then it's all good — no harm no foul. Except that the next president might not have a problem with detaining American citizens indefinitely, and now that the bill is law, he or she will have the explicit authorization to do so.
There have got to be some smarter liberals out there than this fake dialog exemplifies, but it demonstrates the nature of what passes for political debate in major media. The essential gravity is that Obama is to be trusted but nobody else can be, when in fact it is clear that Obama was elected on the strength of his campaign's rhetorical opposition to just this sort of legislation. I understand that we're all supposed to be cynical about what politicians do and say, but reactionary cynicism is just as bad as ignorance; in either case you shutup and let injustice happen.
The cost of abandoning the GWOT policy of GWBush is already manifest in the deteriorating situation in Iraq and there will be no simple way to arrest that. And I tend to believe that the significant Al Qaeda threat in America has been crippled to the point at which a strong President could ask Americans to keep calm and carry on. But ours is not the sort of President that asks average Americans to perservere, he sees himself as the deliverer of cosmic justice, a rescuer, a Robin Hood. And so this is how he selects to keep his halo lit.
This is the President who leads from behind the polling of the least thoughtful Americans, and he has squeezed every internet nickel from them with his populist slogans and ran the most expensive presidential campaign in history to conjure up the biggest government budget in history which creates the biggest deficit as a percentage of GDP in American peacetime. I wish he had a real political philosophy. That way we could hold the electorate more responsible to him by disciplining their expectations within the context of proven ways to run goverenment. But what we have is an electorate that has become trained to hew to the words of anyone sufficiently radical who casts doubts on the status quo without having a demonstrated and superior alternative with any philosophical or practical pedigree. It is a cycle of desparation rooted in unreality and only connected to the enthusiasm of the mob.
That is the road to fascism. The question is whether or not Obama can craft out something that disciplines the electorate to its benefit. If he cannot but continues his populist themes, he will have taken one step closer to "power of the people by any means necessary, embodied by me".
Let's watch how he elbows through the next crisis and with what justifications.
More than half the battle of doing good politically is getting past the volume of noise generated by the reactionaries on the other side of the aisle. The reactionaries have certain predominance in the mediasphere because today's responsive media is attuned to that thing I like to call Short Attention Span Theater. This essentially means that soundbites are all that are required (and a soundbite's worth of wit) to get your message on blast. It goes from bad to worse considering Twitter and Facebook and other instant media.
So this is why you haven't heard of Gary Johnson. Not good, nor ill. He just happens to be a candidate for President this time around. So far I like what I see, and this is the second time I have been impressed with the governor of New Mexico. There was no question in my mind that last time around, Bill Richardson was the most qualified and reasonable candidate that the Democrats fielded. What people wanted me to do for Obama, I would have gladly done for Richardson, but the Democrats foreclosed that possibility for reasons that remain murky to me.
New Mexico looks better and better to me as I age. Something about that state is growing magical. So here is to hope that Gary Johnson shows some class with the airtime he will gain in the next few weeks, as more people start to ask who he is.
BTW. Did I hear right or is Condi considering VP offers?
According to the NYTimes version of popular opinion, most people would say that I'm rich. And considering what I used to think of somebody in my position, I would have been one of those people. But I don't believe it.
I'd like to think of myself as one of The Slice, the talented segment of society who, by their work, keep actual rich people rich. So let me elaborate a bit about my Peasant Theory while I'm keeping this stuff in mind.
The Origins of the Peasant Theory I originated the Peasant Theory thinking about what Americans would do if the lights went out. It was also part and parcel of my observation as an emergent minority who has made the best of class mobility over the course of my life. What does the Average American expect? What does he have a right to expect? What would he get if America was not super wealthy, and how big is that gap? One enabling metaphor was that of the National Superhighway System.
It's well known that the Interstates were all built to a specification so that battle tanks could be deployed across the country, if it ever came to that. So our highways are strong and smooth - even though the tanks don't need them to be so smooth. Having a car and the ability to drive across country is a side benefit of the military strategic plan of the powers that be. In fact, an ordinary Joe can afford to buy a cheap motorcycle (as in Easy Rider) and get across country. But that is a privilege of him glomming on to something that wasn't built with him in mind and his ability to cross country owes nothing to his native ability to travel. In short, he's a peasant that doesn't have to think or work hard to cross the country, and were it not for the strategic infrastructure of America, the military superpower, he would be stuck in his hometown. Remember that battle tanks don't need highways at all, let alone superhighways. They'd get along fine with dirt roads or no roads, but Fonda's chopper would get nowhere.
So I started to think about this phenomenon in all parallels for emergent classes of Americans. What can we expect in America that we couldn't expect elsewhere and what politics is considered legitimate, what culture is considered legitimate, what education is considered legitimate that is not actually self-sustaining but a consequence of the fact of America's power? In other words what is the difference between a peasant and a free man? What must the free man know and do for himself that the peasant doesn't bother with?
This is a view of society and of mankind that exists independently of our traditional measures of socio-economic class. And it is in this way that I seek to understand people throughout history - with specific regard to their Foucaultian relationship to regimes of power and truth. Are we really free, or are we merely riding in the comfortable belly of the beast? For me, the best way to make the distinction is to consider how people make themselves useful to the powers that be. This is consistent with feudal hierarchies going back throughout history. And what I have concluded is that there is the Slice in every society, just as there are sovereign powers and peasants in every society. What may become absolutely fascinating is whether the Slice can become autonomous. But let's leave that discussion for another day.
Class in America When I look at the standard definitions of class I have basically started with a compressed version for black Americans. These are from top to bottom {Hill, Burbs, Hood, Ghetto, Projects/Sticks} It was conveniently five, but there's probably enough reason to split Projects and Sticks into their own separate categories. My upbringing was in the Hood, in the shadow of the Hill, but with ample distance from the Ghetto. I think I live in the Burbs, but perhaps I live on the Hill considering the priceyness of this particular Burb. By the way, I've always considered $300,000 to be rich. In my mind you make that kind of money not just being a doctor, lawyer or businessman, but a *good* doctor, lawywer or businessman. Be all that as it may (and not so crucially important) these follow a kind of 'geography / demographics as destiny' sort of thinking that was useful in my investigations of redlining (with the subheader 'American Apartheid' c.f. Massey & Denton) and my own national search for the right place to raise my family. It also played along the dialogs of 'mentality' for those interminable internecine discussions about proper blackness.
The larger picture was not incedentally part of the rumnations of comedian Chris Rock who spoke about the difference between 'rich' and 'wealthy', and of course by Dave Chapelle from whose comic bit the title of this essay comes. So from that perspective, the top down view of all of America is {Wealthy, Rich, MiddleClass, Poor, Indigent}. What's most important about this selection is that I think of it directly in terms of the capacity of an individual of one class to assist a member of another, it is my rule of Each One Teach One.
The rule works like this. If you are wealthy, you can move someone from the middle class into the rich class. But it is unlikely, without threatening your own position that you can make someone rich wealthy. Similarly and pointedly at liberal politics, if you are middle class, you can make someone who is indigent poor, but you can't make someone who is poor middle class without threating your own position. Similarly if you are rich you can make someone poor middle class. These are, in my mind, hard and fast economic laws - and like the speed of light, they are regularly abused in fantasy fiction but are never broken in reality.
Weath and Freedom Let's start with rich - because it is the baseline of freedom looking at the high side of Boyd's Razor. (If you want to be free, there are two ways you can do so, you can be rich or you can reduce your needs to zero). I'll deal with the low side later. A rich man is free, and he will remain free so long as the powers that be respect his freedom. A rich man must defend his riches, he must have some skill in that regard no matter how he acquired them. But the most important aspect of riches are that they enable freedom in the civilized world. A rich man can employ others to assist him in accomplishing anything he desires - there are no basic things he cannot afford. Essentially, a rich man can fund his own destiny. I use such vague terms because I'm not trying to think in terms of affluence in the context of a consumer society, but in terms of the broad and general affairs of man. What can a man who is not oppressed do? What might he want to do with his freedom? Whether such things are wise or foolish, the free man is not constrained by his own lack of financial wherewithal.
Wealth and Work The inspirational thought presaging this essay was the idea that if I am to be considered 'rich', which I don't think I am, there has got to be two kinds. Working rich and idle rich, and I am most definitely in the former category. The same can be considered, to a lesser defining degree of the working and idle wealthy. But I suspect that the idle wealthy tend to use a bit less of the Slice than the working wealthy. The business of the world, it seems to me, is more dependent on the machinations of the wealthy whether they work or not. The Slice are the enablers, the demiurges of human affairs. I think much more depends upon their moral decisions - to the extent that they are to offer their services for the various masters they might have.
When I was a kid and we played football on the lawn at Virginia Road School, the right sideline was the sidewalk and the left sideline was made of bushes and shrubbery. Every once in a while there would be some kid that for some reason we didn't particularly like. If they crossed the line, we would bush them. Instead of tackling them on the grass near the sideline, we'd smack them wholly into the thorns and briars off the left sideline.
Herman Cain once had a television ad that brilliantly showed his face in close-up turning into a broad smile. That one should be playing in reverse right about now. He has been bushed.
It's marginally sad. I liked Cain's campaign for its iconic 'smoker ad'. Cain himself was (always was now) not slick, stuck to the issues when he could, and never gave the impression that he was entitled to anyone's attention. He wasn't a zealous missionary and he wasn't overly reliant on bunting and baby kissing. But he was no John B. Anderson.
Cain was slow. He hadn't mastered the ability to have a snappy answer to stupid questions, reroute, redirect and command the conversation. This is something Hillary Clinton has to the fault of not being able to answer a direct question with a direct answer. Cain asked us all to take a leap of faith that he was a *doer* and not a *negotiator*. Uh. Wrong answer Mr. Candidate. Because Cain was slow, he could get caught on an overburdened phrase. He needed to churn out more and therefore dilute the impact of his verbiage. Kind of like Romney in 08, except that Romney kept saying the same damned thing. Sigh. I guess I'm going to have to listen to see if he's gotten any better.
As I said before, Cain never impressed me as the sort of person with the deep desire to be a public servant. And so the degree to which he ginned that up in his campaign can now be laid aside, and he can go back to some measure of anonymity. I would suggest the South of France.
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There are people commenting that race was a big deal in the Cain campaign, and it's only true in a post-modern sense - there is an economy of wish-fulfillment entertained by a wholly impractical electorate. All I can say is that the liberal regime remains in command of that bullshit narrative, which was nicely revealed in the Economist piece I posted the other day.
The short and sweet nut of that is that for some politically defensible reason, all black Americans in politics are assumed to have a great burden of debt to the inflated champions of the Civil Rights Movement and their legacies starring the likes of Congressman Alcee Hastings, an incumbent from Florida going on 19 years. I mean how can you be a legitimate black American politician if you don't have sponsors in the CBC? If Maxine Waters doesn't like you, how can you call yourself black? Such rhetorical questions are written in stone which has yet to be shattered, while Republicans like Allen West are chipping away. But you see those questions are never asked of Asians. Everybody in America and many people around the world have benefited from the American Civil Rights Movement but only blacks are asked to bow down.
There's a great line in the new Starz show 'Boss'. One day the Hispanic alderman takes one of his boys out golfing. He talks about golf starting off with flamboyant sytles of dress, but then becoming conservative over time. That's the mark of progress and sophistication. Are there any sports where the uniforms don't calm down over time? Ice Dancing answers one of this protoges. Yes, ice dancing is the exception that proves the rule. He then talks about the tradition in American ethnic politics. That everybody starts out flamboyant but sooner or later they wear the uniform. The Jews, the Irish, the Italians and now the Hispanics. What about the blacks? The alderman responds, "The blacks are the exception, the blacks are like ice dancing."
Yes. In everything, the blacks are the exception. We're too big to be anything but everything we are. The first mistake is not to recognize that. There is nothing black about Cain and there is everything black about Cain. It just depends on your political definition of 'black', which by the way makes no difference to me and I would guess probably not to Cain. The loose rule is that any black American bold enough to declare for the Republicans against the orthodox liberal narrative, is less likely to care for those very definitions.
If Cain utters a word about the racial context somewhere down the line, you'll hear it on black radio and elsewhere.
Witness the NYCGA - the New York City General Assembly -the leadership and coordinating & funding center of the the most legitimate OWS faction that exists, the original one in New York. We'll see how long they keep their books open.
Their working manifesto:
What follows is a living document that will be revised through democratic process of General Assembly.
On September 17, 2011, people from all across the United States of America and the world came to protest the blatant injustices of our times perpetuated by the economic and political elites. On the 17th we as individuals rose up against political disenfranchisement and social and economic injustice. We spoke out, resisted, and successfully occupied Wall Street. Today, we proudly remain in Liberty Square constituting ourselves as autonomous political beings engaged in non-violent civil disobedience and building solidarity based on mutual respect, acceptance, and love. It is from these reclaimed grounds that we say to all Americans and to the world, Enough! How many crises does it take? We are the 99% and we have moved to reclaim our mortgaged future.
Through a direct democratic process, we have come together as individuals and crafted these principles of solidarity, which are points of unity that include but are not limited to:
Engaging in direct and transparent participatory democracy;
Exercising personal and collective responsibility;
Recognizing individuals’ inherent privilege and the influence it has on all interactions;
Empowering one another against all forms of oppression;
Redefining how labor is valued;
The sanctity of individual privacy;
The belief that education is human right; and
Endeavoring to practice and support wide application of open source.
We are daring to imagine a new socio-political and economic alternative that offers greater possibility of equality. We are consolidating the other proposed principles of solidarity, after which demands will follow.
1 The Working Group on Principles of Consolidation continues to work through the other proposed principles to be incorporated as soon as possible into this living document.This is an official document crafted by the Working Group on Principles of Consolidation. The New York City General Assembly came to consensus on September 23rd to accept this working draft and post it online for public consumption.
To find out more about recent items presented at the General Assembly, please read the General Assembly minutes.
I came upon a bit of statistical propaganda today - all for a good cause of course. I was re-introduced to the term 'Food Security'. What the heck is 'food security'? Are the people hungry or not? Are they starving or just hungry?
I leave it to you as an exercise to get a handle around the concept. I will do it in terms of historical comparison. Which is to say, to flesh out my Peasant Theory int he context of what Americans take for granted and what the world standard for hunger and poverty actually is. Always in the back of my mind is the Gapminder. By world standards, poverty is defined as living on less than $2 per day. Yes that's two. So ask yourself, while you are watching one of the Discovery Channel survival shows exactly how many calories you really need. Since we live in America nobody really says. Wolfram says anywhere between 1600 and 2800. Everywhere on the web there are Body Mass Index calculators which are just guides to help you become slim by convincing you that you are overweight. But that's not about the biological facts of what is necessary for you to survive. So such a wide range makes me want to hazard a guess, but I won't. I'll just say that hunger is relative. Consider the following survey question:
“We relied on only a few kinds of low-cost food to feed our children because we were running out of money to buy food.” Was that often, sometimes, or never true for you in the last 12 months?
Hell, I ate mackerel when I was a kid because we couldn't afford Chicken of the Sea. We endured the shame of shopping at Lucky Supermarkets and ate plain wrap. Horror of horrors.
Fortunately, there is some nice transparency if you want to dig into the matter. A reasonably complete accounting of the terms and methods can be found at the USDA. Since I look at boundary conditions, I immediately went to check out Wilcox County, Alabama which had the highest rate of food insecurity in America - something on the order of 38 percent. It turns out that Wilcox County's population has been shrinking since after WW2 and is now about 11,000 folks with only 13 people per square mile. I'm not surprised that there are people who miss meals in Alabama, and it stands to reason that when you're that far out in the sticks, there ain't much work nor an easy way to get McNuggets.
What strikes me when I read such matters (and in parallel, I'm reading Niall Ferguson's latest book which reveals that in 16th Century Western Europe the murder rate was 50/100,000 and the average height of a Frenchman was 5' 4") is how it is somewhat relativistic. In particular, coming across this particular paragraph was remarkable:
While children are usually shielded from the disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake that characterize very low food security, both children and adults experienced instances of very low food security in 1.0 percent of households with children (386,000 households) in 2010, essentially unchanged from 1.2 percent in 2009. However, among households with children in which incomes were below 185 percent of the poverty line, the percentage with very low food security among children declined from 2.9 percent in 2009 to 2.1 percent in 2010.
Several observations:
1. I recall that there are 119M households in America. About 38M have children.
2. Incomes below 185% of the poverty line.. OK the poverty line is not a line so much as a matrix. Here's the matrix:
Size of family unit
100 Percent of Poverty
110 Percent of Poverty
125 Percent of Poverty
150 Percent of Poverty
175 Percent of Poverty
185 Percent of Poverty
200 Percent of Poverty
1
$10,830
$11,913
$13,538
$16,245
$18,953
$20,036
$21,660
2
$14,570
$16,027
$18,213
$21,855
$25,498
$26,955
$29,140
3
$18,310
$20,141
$22,888
$27,465
$32,043
$33,874
$36,620
4
$22,050
$24,255
$27,563
$33,075
$38,588
$40,793
$44,100
5
$25,790
$28,369
$32,238
$38,685
$45,133
$47,712
$51,580
6
$29,530
$32,483
$36,913
$44,295
$51,678
$54,631
$59,060
7
$33,270
$36,597
$41,588
$49,905
$58,223
$61,550
$66,540
8
$37,010
$40,711
$46,263
$55,515
$64,768
$68,469
$74,020
So apparently it's a regular thing to not just talk about poverty, but people who are near to poverty. We are being statistically inclusive when we talk about 'the poor'.
An old friend of mine used to joke about the 'LA Poverty Line' which for single hale fellows well met was 36K in 1985. By which we meant that our basic necessities included a sporty automobile and a nice apartment near the beach. Both of us celebrated when we rose above that 'poverty' line. And while today we can easily be considered to be part of the 5%, what I refer to as The Slice, it's clear that while we were joking about poverty inflation, others in the government were not and are not.
Clearly it would be an abomination to inflate America's baseline poverty rate to something like the 150% or 185% levels. But we accomodate the public interest in fractions above 1% by including the inflated poverty benchmarks. It *is* interesting to know that food security in the 185% poverty category for children decreased 80 basis points from 2009 to 2010 from 2.9 to 2.1% - even though most of the general public doesn't use the term 'basis point'.
I think I would actually like to see the return of plain wrap, but they'd compete with store brands and probably wouldn't do so well. The American poor. How poor are they?
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