Cobb

Bungie Destiny: Speculation One

I am already extraordinarily excited about the next videogame from Bungie, Destiny. Halo was the first videogame that made me take videogames seriously all those many years ago. They took Halo to the next level multiple times, and when you consider the ways they have gone, including Halo Wars and ODST, there's a lot you know they can do. 

One of the most impressive things the Bungie guys can do is design a multiplayer battlefield that you want to play over and over. I really enjoyed learning about the story about how they used heatmaps based on real play to find where killzones were located. Since I have been playing Halo 4, now taken over faithfullly by the excellent team at 343 Industries, it's clear that there is more than enough Halo lore to keep that impressive gameplay quality alive. And so I will be doing some speculations about what I expect to see and what I like to see.

Big Team Battle Goes Massive
One of the most awesome and impressive gaming I've ever done, considering that I have never played in any MMO, was a 16 on 16 battle in one of those WW2 sims. I want to guess that it was an early Call of Duty but I don't recall. What I do remember was the shape of the battlefield and all that. I would play, literally for hours on end, with my same squads until there were places we could master, but even then we could be surprised. A classic battlefield will draw players in over and over, and whomever manages to own that territory can gain cred.

So imagine if you will, Halo players, a battlefield something on the order of Valhalla / Ragnarok which is a gateway to an even larger battlefield. In order to get to the larger battlefield, which is of strategic value to the game, you must play a Halo style big team battle with respawns putting you back. You press the enemy and lines of battle determine where you respawn.  

We know that Bungie is building seven planets. So I suppose we can guess that there are maybe 10 battlefields per planet. I don't even want to think about space battles, but I'm sure that after Reach, the Bungie guys are itching to do that as well. Just think about that. Seventy maps all with big team battles, each with its own set of unique obstacles and rewards. That's what I'm talking about. 

--

Forgo Forge
I started watching some old Bungie viDocs and I can't tell you how tiresome it was listening to the guys brag about Forge and Forgeworld. Please don't bog down the game with a bunch of Forge crap. It's like the rap stars that tell the audience to say 'Ho!'. I didn't pay money to say Ho, you're the entertainer, not me. Say Ho your damned self. Build the worlds, dude. Or just open source the whole damned engine, because we don't want amateur hour, we want professional design. If you don't want to design the world, give up all your tools to another studio. 

That said, if you build a map that sucks, nuke it. We're talking a 10 year game lifespan. Nukes happen. 

If you do a top ten of all the greatest Halo maps, you will get 20 consistent answers. So there was a time that I hoped to see a best of map pack. I'd love to play The Pit or Zanzibar or any number of the old school maps in Halo. It's kind of what I expected when the Anniversary Edition came out and Bungie showed they could repupose old content. Based on that theory alone, Destiny could be astounding.

Right now however, on any given day all the great maps on Halo 4 are getting play only during Big Team Battles. On a hot weekend, you see maybe 7500-11000 players. I know there's competition with Gears of War right now, but that's the best maps. New DLC is getting no play, and those are great maps too. So please don't bog down the new Sol System with bootleg factories for crowdsourcing maps. You'll rue the day. Halo isn't a god game, it's a shooter. Destiny had better not be a god game.

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Bungie's 'Destiny' News: Developer to Reveal More About the Game at E3, Unveils New Concept Art

Destiny's Fate

The Castle

I have begun something of a stupid quest, because in fact I'm done with questing. I have all of the answers to big questions that my life requires and I am settling down to being practical. Nevertheless the habit of reading for the sake of enlightenment dies hard, and in between the epic video games and the occasional universal series, there ain't nothing else out there. 

So I'm kind of hooked on W. H. Auden's University of Chicago syllabus. The first of these pegs to knock down was Kafka's The Castle. 

I never had much of a predilection for Kafka whom I generally associate with Camus, Sylvia Plath and William Burroughs. He always represented to me a kind of lunch lady serving hunking dollops of self-pity lit for the appetites of Slackers and Schleprocks. So there was never any incentive for me to actually get into his sort of genius. Now I think I'll have to, having read The Castle. 

The story drew me in immediately and now having finished it I have noticed in its first person narrative a kind of strength of character I seldom notice around contemporary individuals. The sort of self-possession K. exhibits while endlessly frustrated among the peasants and commoners all striving to be part of the obiter dicta of functionary hierarchs is remarkable. Even more so when you recognize how much he must condescend; he is barely above freezing and starving. He commits to associations and relationships out of that necessity and that is all he can do. 

I am impressed with the possibility that The Castle is an unfinished book. One can imagine that its lack of completion is prescient - that this is and remains the condition of the modern Western man and that there is no resolution to the problem of the meaningless ascent into the Castle -- that there is no Lord and the functionaries function around a void. 

Well, that's all I have. More on the first person after I finish Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun and Roger Zelasney's Amber Series. 

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The Auden Project

Lure of the Guild

There is something retro deep inside me, and I think in all of us, when it comes to dealing with alienation of modern, global life. I think the proper thing to do is to work your way through modern, global life and supplant its alienation with a whiff of the tribal and a considered portion of the guild. You know the guild, the moose lodge, the order of buffalo, the brotherhood of the otter - something like Fred Flintstone had. You see, George Jetson had no running buddies. 

I am reading Gene Wolfe's tales in the Book of the New Sun.

What impresses me now the second time around literarily, since Stephenson's OMVI, is the concept of a small group of men who are self-sustaining in their ways. They could be monks in their monastary, perhaps a royal family in their castle, maybe a group of makers in their hackerspace. Organized around an arcane competence. Prepared to initiate noobs into apprenticeship and grow them into journeymen. Dedicated to sentence fragments with implicit subjects, but descriptive nonetheless. 

From Wolfe comes the Seekers of Truth and Penitence. Aah but maybe it's just little old me finally tasting a good portion of sword and sorcery. As I've read on, I can see how this story goes down the tunnel of a single quest and how different it is from more of what I'd call an 'open world / sandbox' adventure, of which Iain Banks is the master. And I've also gotten most of the way through Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber, and see some of the same interesting, but limiting first person-ality. 

This morning I heard the first whiff of the conspiracy theory behind some elaborate and scary intra-agency rivalries that verge on warfare. According to this particular Lt. Colonel, there are some sneaky agencies that run training operations in public and have patsies in place just in case something goes wrong. But I will deal with that at length on its own because that subject would overwhelm this, which is simply the following. 

Since 9/11, I sorta kinda predicted then end of the nation state. Of course I don't know what I'm talking about, because some time later, Colin Powell convinced me that state sovereignty is too powerful for anyone to let go. So state sponsored terrorism remains to me, an evil to be taken quite seriously, and more seriously than any other kind. But that doesn't change the fact that many states have many elements with many agendas, many of which come into and out of power. Today's African National Congress is in much better shape than yesterday's. Today's KKK is pathetic. Today's OWS gets no news. So the nation state continues, but watch for the movements below that level. 

Here in the US, we've gone diversity happy. I am convinced that just about anyone who flies diversity flags is eating their own dog food, much of which they didn't grow themselves. Which is to say that out of 1000 diversity programs, 990 are funded by non-diverse sources. In other words, we have a lot of cliques on the inside that aren't really on the inside. A lot of guilds have politicked their way into permanence, but a dependent permanence. Kind of like the class of people with driver's licenses and gas station credit cards as compared to auto mechanics and petroleum engineers. As long as there are auto mechanics and petroleum engineers willing to work for the public, driver's licenses and gast station credit cards are meanningful, but the guild of diversity is like the guild of driver's license holders. You can call it important. That doesn't make it important.

So all of this depends upon how well the rule of law and open society functions, leveraging the standing of the American general public. But at some point, I have decided to prepare myself for what might come next, which is the degredation of all that. How shall I say it? When it's time to cross the desert, the entire value of your cool low rider is nullified. Time to buy a Jeep.

So I'm interested in, as I said, my own martial education - but in the context of a reasonable guild. Not survivalists, but people whose value transcends the relative luxuries our open society provide today, but are not promised for tomorrow. That means that I need to make real tribal links. 

Everybody Hates A Level Playing Field

This is an argument for class and against equality. 

Imagine that you were introduced to basketball by Michael Jordan. He teaches you how to dribble, to shoot, to block, to assist. You get pretty good. And then he starts playing. Every day you are playing against Michael Jordan; every day you are losing. After a while, the sport would cease to be appealing to you, unless you were Clyde Drexler or Dominique Wilkins.

My observation of meritocracy is that it must be tyrannical. There are technical, political and aesthetic tyrannies at work at the core of any contest. Sometimes we made our decision about sport vs activity based upon whether the score was determined by judges. Ice dancing, springboard diving, skateboard vert ramp. All of these require judges rather than timers or other measuring devices. But a winner must be determined no matter what. If it's not, then a game isn't fair. Fairness seems rather odd in this respect - if everybody plays by the same rules, you always produce proper winners and proper losers. We seem to forget that this is what fairness demands. Fairness demands that you create losers. Somehow we've perverted sportsmanship. It's true that it's not whether you win or lose but how you play the game. Right. If you play fair and lose, then it's a good game. But if you play so that there are no winners and no losers then you have destroyed the rules, and thus the meaning of sportsmanship and the integrity of the idea of fairness. Meritocracy is hardball. Rules are tyrannical.  All of that is fair.  

We all used to play a game of 'sport vs activity' which generally focused on the courtly games vs the roughneck games. Is golfing a sport? What about skiing? Well, not like football or boxing. As it turns out, every sport, every competitive activity has its requirements most of which at the pro level are far beyond us. I don't know about you, but I'm never going to dunk on Akeem. I'm never going to hit a 90mph fastball. I'm never going to pass a stock car on the high side at 190mph. I'm never going to drive a golf ball 350 yards. I'm never going to surf Mavericks. And yet these are the things the best of us do every day. Nevertheless, I should be able to enjoy auto racing, baseball, surfing and basketball not only as a spectator, but as a participant. I don't want to play one on one against Jordan, but what about fairness? A level playing field is a killing field. That's why we have leagues.  

--

Here in America, we tend to be bastards. My definition of a bastard combines facts and observables. A bastard is always a heartless bastard and exerts his cruelty upon others because of the cruelty at the heart of his very existence. He was not loved by the man who made him. So bastards are unforgiving when it comes to the rules - they expect none and give no love or quarter. A gentleman may have his honor and with honor comes grace which is taken and given. Why should honor be sacrificed for a lack of excellence? A forgiving and gentlemanly father understands this, but such is the understanding only rarely received by bastards. So bastards stand as border guards, bayonets at the ready, following the only orders they get, surviving on the thin gruel of regulatory compliance.

I shouldn't say that we tend to be bastards, rather that our promise of meritocracy gives fine comfort to those who would be bastards. Here in the States, we don't go in for hereditary titles and the other trappings of royalty, peerage and primogeniture. We prefer SAT results, Body Mass Indices and FICO scores. We make sport scoreboards of our humanity, often to our detriment. But how can we avoid a discussion about who was the best rock guitarist of all time, or the top five romantic comedies or Mopar vs Ford vs GM? We cannot, because the bastards among us will not let us have history settled. America is the land that killed the gentleman's 'C'.

We may come to regret that, yeilding as we do all sorts of credits to all sorts of characters, ungentlemanly as they may be. You see in order to create the illusion that we are personally and institutionally in service to the ideal of equality, we must assert a 'level playing field'. It doesn't bother me much that I cannot hang with Michael Jordan, but I feel as though I am often surrounded by those who are bound and determined to level things out. To have he and I play by the same rules on the same court and call that equality is only something a heartless bastard would ask. It is quite enough for any sort of meritocracy I would respect that I can see and be inspired by Jordan, and play equitably amongst my peers, in my class, in my league, in my own neighborhood.

So who is really a bastard? The one who says we all must play on one playing field without any regard to our actual abilities. The one who won't let us group up into leagues. The one who, in service to the unreal ideal of a level playing field for everyone, makes the boys play against the girls, the rich play against the poor, the strong play against the weak, the young against the old, all without regard to their actual ability. The right way to do have fairness and meritocracy is to have a hierarchy of leagues and an open, unlimited class. 

Sports people knew I was coming to this. America loves sports because we get to participate. We get to watch Tiger Woods; we watched him climb the leagues. We have leagues and classes and invitationals and opens and tournaments and qualifiers so that the tyranny of rules can apply where we can apply ourselves among our peers. 

--

There's something I have called the Logarithmic Shadow. I have described it all kinds of ways. In one way I've described it in Cobb's Rule #7: Never trust a man whose shoes cost more than you're whole day's pay. The Logarithmic Shadow is how I describe how the poor survive at all given the power of the rich. Most of us don't know Michael Jordan. Most of us are even incompetent to be a high school basketball coach. So what keeps Jordan from messing all over our neighborhood basketball games? What keeps the CIA from bugging your PTA? What keeps Special Forces snipers from shooting schoolyard bullies? It's the same thing that keeps you standing outside of the club where Lady Gaga is hanging out tonight. It's the same thing that keeps you stuck in traffic on the freeway.  

The big dogs have bigger fish to fry, and you ain't one of them. Be grateful.

So I will describe the Logarithmic Shadow as the respect for leagues, boundaries and capabilities. It's NOT fair if we all play on the same turf. That's a class violation, and class violations are what makes the small tyrannies of rulesets into big tyrannies of societies. See you didn't like me saying meritocracy is tyrannical did you? OK. The proper American meritocracy implicitly means multiple levels and hierarchy. We mean climbing the social ladder. We mean, if we're serious, we mean superior and inferior. We mean winners and losers. We mean brackets and championships. We mean win, place, show and also ran.  We mean fair competition, not a free-for-all.

---

Now that we have that understanding, I'm going to point out some things I don't like which are consequential.

I don't like a President who doesn't act Presidential.
That means a President who hogs the spotlight and doesn't delegate authority is the man whose shoes cost more than your day's pay. When he's the big dog paying attention small fry that means three things. One. He's going to win with overwhelming force 95% of the time. Two. The bigger fish are getting away. Three. The 5% of the time he loses to the small fry, degrades the office. Stay in your lane.

I don't like all this rabble about 'income inequality'.
If you can walk all day barefoot, then that's your advantage over the man who can't. Ask the Viet Cong. If you can live without eating steak and lobster, without manicures and tummy tucks, without air conditioning and power windows, good! He who lives without luxury will not be a slave to fashion. But the girl who wears fake Prada sunglasses is both self-delusional and a fraud. The man who cannot save $100,000 cannot save the planet. Stay in your lane, people. 

 

Prayers of the Rich & Famous

I've been thinking about the power of prayer along with the power of Facebook likes. I would guess that they are about equal in sentimental value. 

When something bad happens, people need to be fixed. As readers of Cobb know, I deal with recompense in two dimensions, healing and curing. Is there anyone who beleives that prayers are for curing? Perhaps, but let us presuppose that they are a minority and what is desired in the acceptance of prayers is the sentiment of healing. But let's take this one step further and particular.

What if the person offering healing actually has a cure? What then is the value of their prayers and apologies and sentiments? What if your banker decides to foreclose on your property and then offers you a sympathy card? What if someone who could repair your wallet only decides to feel your pain? You get the picture.

This is why I have increasingly short patience with the sentiments of powerful people.

Sir

Most of my life, people have addressed me with respect. I'm starting to realize something - or maybe I should say I stumbled upon a realization which is both enlightening and a little sad. I am that man. 

It has always annoyed me when people I considered affluent and silly have demurred from being called 'Mr. Smith'. Oh please call me John, my dad is Mr. Smith. It betrays a false sense of humility - I don't quite understand what causes it but I have my theory. My theory is that they are connected, privileged and untalented & unserious. Informality is all the formality they can afford. They are the people who go everywhere and do nothing. They have an embarassment of riches - they are the owners of small fortunes, large houses and unpaid loans to wealthy in-laws. They smile a lot. 

My daughter observed that we live in a very nice neighborhood where the rich people don't act rich. Yes, we have some of those good neighbors. We live in a place where reasonably rich people can live normal lives; I'm attracted to such neighborhoods. But occasionally we pay the social price in the company of boys who inherit and don't grow up. 

Myself. I'm like a cousin to Robert Schimmel. Son of the Holocaust survivor. When things go bad, that's when I get funny. But most of the time, I'm serious, and for most of my life, I have preferred to be called Mr. Bowen. Yes, that's my father's name, and his father's before him and his father's before him. 

---

A couple weekends ago, I found myself in Carmel. Carmel is a town where rich people come to act rich, especially if there's an event at Pebble Beach. You can tell by the little logos. That one says US Open. That one says America's Cup. Here's a man wearing tortoiseshell glasses driving a fully restored cream and brown Citroen 2CV Charleston. Here's a man discussing the finer points of a $300 fountain pen. These kids are from Tokyo. I happen to think rich people are interesting in their element. Here's a tall fellow who exclaimed that he went through a cowboy hat phase and he and his brother have one of every sort. Shopping in Carmel is not enlightening, but like shopping everywhere, it's always fun to see people get gratification. 

I have expensive taste. I like things that do what they are supposed to do, for a long time, and are designed be repaired by engineers who expect they are used properly. Occasionally, I admire very well engineered things that are superficially functional and exquisitely beautiful. So I priced some Damascus steel folding knives at the cowboy hat store, but I don't have 3500 bucks to spare. I tooke th brochure anyway. I too am going through a cowboy phase, only I don't have easy access to capital. Still, because of my tastes, places like Carmel are not totally foreign to me, I appreciate restored old cars as much as anyone - I am generous with knowing nods for all gearheads.

As the Spousal Unit and the First Daughter were finding the discount arcade, I ambled purposelessly along the boulevard overhearing resort namedropping conversations in French, Japanese, Catalan and Connecticut Yankee. Most of it was the informed burble of Victorians and their best servants, updated to California Casual. One has to admire the spunk of men who would study golf, or hotel science so deeply and wear their khaki slacks, blue blazers and rep ties with such smug confidence all the while knowing the are lackies at the highest level. One hopes they are not abused. The stunning soundbite I caught amongst all of the street chat was:

"Well you have to treat everyone with respect because you never know."

It hit me almost at once that I was in America. The America I remember from before 9/11 when I used to think about the wonderment of fancy restaurants. In any fancy American restaurant, the guy two tables away from you just might be a multimillionaire. Of course that truth remained after 9/11 but we started getting all dysfunctional about what America meant. I'm talking about the open society that we still are. Free parking on the street in Carmel.

One of the things I remember most about that book I read about the rich, the wealthy and the super wealthy was that a lot of the wealthy are pretty peculiar folks, meaning that they are the guy who spent 20 years perfecting goat cheese, or ball bearings. If you were the guy who invented the Maglite, you started off with a dream to have a really good flashlight and then one day everybody in law enforcement wanted one. Four years later, you're a regular old guy with time and millions to burn in Carmel. You go to all the Red Sox games. You buy the wife a new Benz. Yeah the watch costs 6 thousand, but whatever. You just buy stuff that works, not all that flash. You can find things out if you really want to know. You have time. You have money. You have patience. You're not under pressure to make a whole lot of mistakes. You appreciate a good meal. You realize you have been blessed, and you take your freedom seriously. By my reckoning, a reasonable man, once rich, will get over the hump and mellow out or wreck his life within 5 years.

Obviously there are a lot of factors. But people have always called me 'sir', and aside from some testy Koreans back in 1990, I can't think of anyone who has ever pestered me out of their store. Although, I do get the itch in some of those men's departments in NYC on 5th Ave. So it occurred to me that outside of the actual buying, bossing people around and ordering things done, people are starting to treat me like I might be something of a wealthy patron. I don't generally ask stupid questions. I'm not in a rush. I've got my inner peace, and I take my freedom seriously. 

---

Today I realize that I am visibly older and chilled out. When I dress, I can no longer do the casual abandon. I have been working at home for 2 and a half years. Going out is always going out. And I'm noticing that I'm they guy who is often mistaken for a civilized individual. In other words, people treat me like I'm rich. And I am. In any context in the world I'm doing just great. The only thing I need is to replace what I already have that breaks. That and get my kids through college. But I got them through highschool and it went, more or less, according to plan - here in the most expensive neighborhood in the world.

I am Mr. Bowen. I only have regular American upper middle class standing, which is very often very tenuous, but I'm accustomed to dealing with the headaches. I've paid the taxes. I've paid the attorneys, almost. I've paid the dues. I haven't been worn out or defeated, and I'm not pretending that I'm going to take over the .. whatever or save the planet. But I'm someone you can look up to if you are young, and I'm not going to pretend that life hasn't taught me some serious lessons. I've got the deadpan humor to prove it. I know what to say when people die. I know how to react when shit hits the fan. I know when I need help and I know when I can be helpful. I know my dependents and my dependencies.

It never gets old. Facing life never ceases to be scary. I may be getting to that point at which I become like the old soldier who hasn't died yet. Like the gambler who makes a killing cheating, gets caught and knows how to shut up and give the money back. I understand the role of chance, and I know not to ever depend on it but capture it when it comes.

I have much life.  

A 32 Minute Lesson On Integrity

This is the new criticism. You need to understand it.

First Quarter Report

It has been a rather extraordinary year so far. I like the way it's heading.

I realize that I am not foolish and that if I only maintain an even keel, I may very well move ahead, but sometimes I sail into rough waters. That's where I am right now, but there's light in the distance. 

The Age of Sail
I have replaced my science fiction with a somewhat new genre of reading which is making me an interesting person. They are personal stories, fictions all, of character. And I am investing more and more time into embodying into myself a bit more - how shall we say - perhaps a bit more Griffindor. Some bravery, some presence.  In my work, I am getting more aligned with the technologies that are most likely to make us money and gaining confidence. Some great fraction of this I am attributing to my reading of the Aubrey Maturin series which twist my Anglophilia towards the inevitability of my Anglo American cultural heritage. At some point I'll need to recover some French, but these days I am feeling how much my sense of propriety is Western in those traditions. I see direct parallels in the organization of the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars and the software industry - don't ask me how, it's complex, but I'm seeing it nonetheless. Sometimes one can do a great deal with a Brig. And certainly I see how Aurbrey's fortunes and misfortunes mirror my own. All one can do is sail. Sail against all odds and maintain your ship. Arcane and forgotten, we will all be, but for today there remain prizes at sea.

EDC & The Grey Sheepdogs
If my son didn't bust his budget, I would probably own a rifle now. As it stands I have only gotten my pockets a bit more emptied of cash and filled with survival gadgets. Knives, tools & lights. A quarter of watching videos about hunting, shooting, sniping, hand loading and many other gun oriented immersions have given me a stirling education about what's out there to know and what I actually want to know. As an extension of my go-bag paranoia I have come full face with what lethality I feel comfortable with and what the Sheepdog Class generally talks about. Of course I harken back to Bill Whittle's revolutionary rant and the consequences of what the more vocal Right has been yammering about for the past several years. On the whole, it feels a little like parenthood. I have this instinctual aversion to the hard work of going Grey which I can already tell will be overcome by my unwillingness to be irresponsible. I hope that I'll fall into it naturally. But I suspect it will all be some kind of inevitable accident, like parenthood. 

Going back to my new year's resolutions:

Quick - Say it all before you stop caring.

• New refrigerator (check)
• New Couch (picked out)
• New XBox (meh)
• Calesthenics - 1 each per day to 100 each situps, pushups, 4 count jumping jacks (better idea)
• Tai Chi (on the way)
• New Bike (not)
• Integrate Cubegeek & Cobb (soon come)
• Move static websites to Amazon (had a better idea)
• Move Limbo to Evernote (mostly done)
• Mac Mini (postponed)
• Start Men's Meetup in SouthBay (check)
• Find a Bar (in progress)
• 35 Year Reunion (check)
• Finish First Draft of Borky's Beach (meh)
• Read Classics {Middlemarch, Don Quixote, Finnegan's Wake} (also in progress)

The score is good.

In fact, I'm seriously downgrading my gaming, going bigger on the exercise and Tai Chi towards Aikido and some Kendo equivalent. Writing is not so important as doing things outdoors, and the indoor stuff is more about my regular work than some ineffables for my personality. So like I said, all is moving along positively.

The problem is simply this. I need to find a way to get more money. And that means I have to get aggressive and make a plan. I've been sitting on my cool surfboard waiting for the big wave. It's time to put a motor on it and cover more ocean.  

The Royal Family
I am coming to some harsh conclusions about my Family First attitude, and I'll be putting them to the test over the next few years. But it's starting to feel like I'm losing a great deal of trust in public institutions, and that very much means public corporations. I'm starting to feel very proprietary. I don't have words for it this minute but it rather goes back to a sense I have about the inevitability of war, of nepotism, of irresponsible classes and of the consequences of meritocracy in a libertine society. The preliminary conclusion is that the people who are best off in the world are those who are the masters of guilds and patriarchies. Is that exactly fuedal? Not sure, but it sure ain't public and it ain't democratic. The masses are a force of nature. (New Cobb rule, that). 

Tonight I watched a repeat of two hours of HD colorized video of WW2. What struck me was how many Frenchmen were turned in a matter of months into refugees in their own country. I know how relatively easily that could happen in Los Angeles, and how very difficult it would be in more rugged, remote country where civilians already knew how to shoot rifles. 

The Auden Project

As readers of Cobb know, I swore several years ago that I will not spend another dime on movies with posters of a man with a gun and a woman wrapped around his leg. Unfortunately, they don't do movie posters any longer, so it's harder for me to judge. And, quite frankly, I enjoy movies with heroes. Movies need to have heroes and we would be a poorer society without such heroic narratives upgraded with car chases, defenestrations, explosions and machine gun fire. Why? Well, imagine what kind of place this would be if a Saturday night date consisted of vegetarian dinners and movies by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The suicide rate would triple. Hell, we'd be Greenland. 

But the point is that I cannot resist heavy reading, at least in literature. So I have taken it upon myself to shoulder the burden of W. H. Auden's syllabus which had been making the rounds of the Chatting Class & Cool Kids recently. In fact, I've already eaten my first slice of that hearty bread in Kafka's 'The Castle'. Strangely nourishing - review soon to come. Here's the rest of the meal:

• Dante - The Divine Comedy
• Aeshylus - The Agamemnon
• Sophcles - Antigone
• Horace - Odes (Loeb)
• Augustine - Confessions (Loeb)
• Shakespeare - Henry IV pt 2
• Shakespeare - Othello
• Shakespeare - Hamlet
• Shakespeare - The Tempest
• Ben Johnson - Volpone
• Pascal - Pensees
• Racine - Phaedra
• Blake - Marriage of Heaven & Hell
• Goethe - Faust
• Kierkegaard - Fear & Trembling
• Baudelaire - Journals
• Ibsen - Peer Gynt
• Dostoevsky - Brothers Karamzov
• Rimbaud - Une Saison en Enfer
• Henry Adams - The Education of Henry Adams
• Melville - Moby Dick
• Rilke - Journal of my Other Self
• Kafka - The Castle
• TS Elliot - Family Reunion

All that and 9 Opera Libretti. 

And thus my Auden Project.

With today's news that Iain Banks has terminal cancer, I had to fly to John C. Wright's page to discover where I might ever find his like, or at least those authors that the Cool Kids know which will get me by rights to participate in the Long Talk. So as we speak I am downloading somebody named Gene Wolfe, who apparently has a universe, and we begin with the Shadow of the Torturer. So this may be a light side trip, or maybe even a detour. We shall see.

Welfare in Suspense: The Private Solution

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?

To wit:

"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. 

A Martial Education

"I don't believe in guns"
"What do you mean? They're not fucking leprechuans!"
-- Seven Psychopaths 

I have determined that my liberal arts education is complete. It took too long, and I wasted too much time on it. But at least I have gotten to the part at which the appeals to to those pop and middlebrow entertainments that are the vast legacy of mass communications fail to inspire me. I am resolved, for the most part, to the high arts and they give me genuine pleasure. It took a surprisingly long time. 

I'm not even sure that I was aware that I was in that pursuit. I was scooting along via inertia and aversion. The 'Noble Arena' I began seeking back at State, was more of an escape from Midnight Star in hopes that hiphop would get better, than anything more than a isolated fondness for Liszt and Debussy. It took me years to find the kind of industrial hiphop I truly loved as I suffered through Finitribe, Bad Brains, Barmy Army, and Skinny Puppy. It took me a decade to get past the Granta school of literature. It took me a very long time to settle on the sort of fashion I wish to use to convey my civilization in unspoken ways. All of this continues to evolve, but without the sense of urgency that kept telling me that I still didn't get it. I get it now. My Liberal Arts eduction is settled. I understand what to do with my frustrations when what is commonly out there insults my intelligence.  Also importantly, I know what and what not to expect from a deep dive into Epictetus or Sophocles. I can appreciate trees as well as forest. 

So now what I am missing is a Martial Education.

In parallel, all of my life I have thought at length about the fact that I did not have to go to Vietnam. And in my first full-time job I spent a lot of time with Vietnam vets. I remember how counter-intuitive it seemed to me that they were so level headed, honest and mellow as compared to that nacscent gangsta culture that marked the knuckleheads in my old neighborhood engaging the drug trade. But who was more deadly was never in question. 

There were times I flirted with the idea of ROTC, but never quite seriously. I very much would have liked to have gone to the Coast Guart Academy, but I was a lousy long distance swimmer and I didn't want to cut my hair. The idea of overcoming such obstacles was not something I placed a lot of stock in. There have been three or four times in my life I was determined to take my body image into my own hands and each was only a partial success. I've always routed around the failure. I'm tough and scrappy. I never really wanted to be.. well it's more honest to say that I long, long ago gave up on being tall, heroic and commanding. I've never even slam dunked on a 9 foot hoop, nor bench pressed more than 180. I spent all of high school shorter than 5' 7" and under 150 pounds. I've always had an indomitable spirit, admittedly to the point of what was always interpreted as arrogance. But it was the sort of arrogance one does not assume of bigger, taller men. In them it's called 'natural leadership'. In my last days before fatherhood, embarked on my penultimate physical fitness project. It was called the 'huge project' in which my aim was to make myself look an order of magnitude more pugnacious and swaggery. I suppose exactly like LL Cool J without the tatoos.

I started eating like a pig, and I really haven't stopped since 1993, roughly 50 pounds ago. I had a short hiatus in '03 with a literal poverty diet and dropped down to 185 via cardio-kickboxing and unemployment. But all the flab is back, on top of my sturdy frame. And quite frankly it's all belly. From a rear view, I still look athletic, but the side view is an abomination. I need to crank off four inches of waist. The odd thing is that until about a year ago, I had a certain amount of confidence that one crash program, maybe six weeks of unemployment, was all I needed to get right back to where I was in '93. Now I realize what foolishness that is. I still had a decent beach volleyball game, but that was all skill and not athleticism. 

I'm joing the geriatric gym this week. But that's only part of the story - what I'm really after is the martial mindset. What I'm coming to realize like a boot to the head that what I've been thinking about the martial world is all just theory, fiction and video games. OK that's a kind of triple redundant statement - but it has not been about getting in and kicking any physical ass. And so having purchased in my fever, some EDC and tactical folding blades, and taking shooting quite seriously, it has become quite plain to me that I need to just get out there and do. I have tools, but having the tools is meaningless. It's worse than meaningless, it's foolishness. 

I don't expect that mastery will come soon or simply, but I know that competence will. And that amounts to putting in something every day. And so I've begun to stretch - without the preconceived notion that I'm going to get over some magic bubble and suddenly become what I once was, only smarter. This is to a new body. A new beginning. Because it's necessary. I am no longer satisfied with the comeraderie of first responders. It has got to be me.

 

DIY or Die

Sophisticated glamorous things fall apart, the prosumer will not hold on.

I have lived long enough to know that the good things in our society come and go. There is always somebody gaming your business plan, and all the gains to be made are at the choice points of inflection. Otherwise, basically nobody cares what you think unless you are paying them to.

Today's news is that Google is turning off reader. This is likely to consign the protocol or RSS to the dustbin of history. Which also means that small players can step up and grab market share for something Google finds too miniscule. RSS has hit the Whoopi number. Whoopi Goldberg famously said of network television, it's the only place where people with 1 million friends are called losers. 

In the space between total industrialization and bespoke craftsmanship is a medium sized long tail. This is the place I have decided to approach. I think I can. As I have been cruising the areas of Etsy and EDC and TNP and Atwood, I have found a goodly number of medium sized joints that remain willing to be of service. And it is in this area that we must make our differentiations. You see, I am convinced, having long ago decided to become a Neo-Victorian, that I am liking where my new tastes are taking me. And I am finding less and less disappointment as the mass marketers gradually degrade their products as they sell them to the late adopters...

Once upon a time there were record players. You had one, remember? When the record skipped, youscotch taped a quarter to it and that fixed it. The record was good for about a hundred more plays and then it went to the shelf, hopefully out of the sun's rays. When I started selling radios, I learned all the parts of a record player were actually components that a bunch of different manufacturers could specialize in and the world opened before me. The 'record player' had a tonearm, cartridge, stylus, turntable with either belt or direct drive a variable speed motor you tuned with a strobe against the platter. It's output went to a phono amp of two sorts depending upon wither your cartridge and stylus were moving magnet or moving coil. This went into the control pre-amp and maybe through an equalizer and then to a power amplifier, or several depending upon whether or not your speaker system was bi-amped with large amps for the bass separate from the midrange and tweeters. Let's not forget subwoofers. All of these could be purchased separately mixed and matched and arranged for a price, but the quality was stellar. A long way from a record player.

Once upon a time there were motorcycles and automobilies you could put together and take apart. There were aftermarkets and technical training schools. But today, not so much. And you cannot buy component stereo any longer - not in the mainstream. 

I just purchased a watch repair kit for $15 at Amazon. It doesn't pay to be a jeweler any longer. I remember the last time I sent my best watch to be cleaned, or my wingtips to be resoled. It was about at the turn of the century, both times by men older than my father, grumpy with fascinating hands. I wonder if these are technologies to be hacked and done by self in the future. I reckon that they must be, because who is going to have money for replacement?

Think about it when your smartphone dies.

Gearheads, Hackers and Makers

We live in a built up world. We survive on the detritus of prior generations, we are an augmented species. We are tool designers and tool builders and tool users. And of course some of us pay a bit more attention to the tools, old and new, that help us become what we want to be.

Gearheads
A gearhead is a user, but a gearhead is a special kind of user. The closest thing we talk about is a 'prosumer'. A gearhead is an aesthete of tools. Look at Gilligan in the opening theme of Gilligan's Island. The mate was a mighty sailing man. See how proud he is of that rope and his gear?  That's a gearhead.

There are dysfunctional gearheads too of course. The most common of which is the fanboy. A fanboy says that Stanley Clarke is the greatest bassist on the planet, which may be true, but he doesn't know why and he doesn't know how Stanley plays. He just knows what he likes - that's his side of the story and he's sticking with it. Fanboys are cool, if you're not put off by obnoxious people. At least they care.

Hackers
Hackers are gearheads who take things apart and put them back together again. They (we) are fascinated that a solution exists and they want to figure out how. The hacker is never satisfied just making something work, they want to get inside the black box and figure out how to make it work better, or make it work differently, or even figure out a way to make it stop working altogether. A hacker tries not to trust anything if he can't figure out where its brain is. That's a Harry Potter metaphor for you. DJs who scratch and mix are hackers. Cooks who mess with recipes are hackers. Even kids who pull the pickles out of their hamburgers are hackers.  

Makers
Yes I like threes and I like hierarchies. Makers top off this one. A maker takes an idea and fabricates a solution. A maker builds a tool or a gadget or a song or a poem or a shed or a shim. Makers want to put their names on things they've built - they are bridge builders. They want to own the process and come up with a totally new way. Sometimes makers are combinators. Annie Hall's style was completely made up. Who knew? Wallace and Grommet are makers. Makers can be, but are not always perfectionists. They're about form, but more about function. They are enablers. Oh, yes and obviously on Gilligan's Island, the Professor is a maker.

--

When I think about the distance I've traveled over the past two and a half years in my career, I have had to come to grips with a new set of folks. And within LAMP and Open Source I've had to move from mere gearhead appreciation into hands on hacking and scrutiny. I've done a little making as well. 

Tangential to Neo-Victorianism and Steampunk, I think that the direction of young people is towards these archtypes, with a combination retro and junkyard motif. A lot of things that are manufactured for consumers who are not as aesthtically demanding as gearheads will fail to suffice. Most will be hacked beyond recognition, and those that survive will be the projects of makers.

In some areas, makers of this new sort are completely outclassed. Nobody with a 3D printer is going to make a gun barrel worth beans. Bitcoins will never become real currency even at the level of frequent flyer miles. But in other areas, makers, especially bespoke makers will have a very broad canvas of designs and technologies to draw from. My favorites among these are makers in the automotive sector of the economy. Shops like Deus Ex Machina, the motorcycle builder and ICON, the Toyota truck builder.  

In Which I Describe the Decline of the West to a Russian

(Boris asks..)
Honestly, how in the world did the same-sex marriage happen to appear on the left-wing agenda in the West? Don't they have other things to worry about? It appears to me that this speaks of a serious ideological crisis the Western left are in. Convince me otherwise.

Boris, I share your sentiments.

The way I read this development in the West originates in the nature of rebellion and change during the Post WW2 period of America's growth. As you can imagine there was a certain arrogance that America rightly drew from its victory in Europe and a set of elites quickly formed. The younger Baby Boom generation, to its credit saw some of this as stifling. Nobody wanted to grow up in a Cold War world. But they incorrectly blamed all of their parents shortcomings for everything wrong in the world, and like never before the American Establishment was blamed for everything. The emergence of a genuine Left never really happened, but Marxist ideology was the only framework upon which elements of rebellion and revolution in miniature grew up. 

What was truly original and genuine was the counter-culture. So the American Free Speech, Free Love, Drug Consciousness, Women's Rights, Environmentalist, Civil Rights, Pop Art, Black Nationalist, Chicano Pride and Gay Pride movements all gathered force during the 1960s under the broad Anti-American protests against the War in Vietnam. We have had wars before and since, but never had there been such resonant ferment for change. How much of that was actually, genuinely aiming for Marxist revolution - not much at all. It was only culturally coordinated, not ideologically sound. And yet no doubt, true Marxists took advantage.

My opinion is that this counter-culture, this rejection of nationalism, is the only way most Americans who are not technically educated in the hard sciences know how to organize their sentiments towards improvement of society and the world. They begin with a rejectionist premise and devalue all of the social rules that have evolved in the West before the end of WW2. There is a generation of academics whose joy is revisionist history, and their intellectual framework is the language of French deconstructionists and post-modernists. They have made a fetish of 'other' identity and rejected most forms of conformity. They seek to elevate the abnormal and question the normal. I see them as cultural relativists.

It is thus a convenience that their interests are served by a Socialist state whose rejection of religion and celebration of the common man fulfills Marx's historicism. If the state can provide, then traditions and culture are of no use.

So under the guise of 'social justice' and 'equality' they have sought to give radical autonomy and authority to anyone who is willing to question American tradition and even the Constitution itself. They have repainted America's exceptionalism in the same tiresome diatribes of 'sexism' , 'racism' and now 'homophobia'. These are their transparent weapons of shaming, shunning and silencing. They are Leftists of opportunity, rallying behind candidates 'of color' and advocates of 'victims' of all sorts, who use 'social justice' as a figleaf for whatever government actions they see fit. This brings us to the very edge of fascism in America - a kind of 'whatever works', 'pragmatic' policy with none of the benefits of evolved political philosophy. True Marxists have never been fooled by candidate Obama, but those who would take their tired counter-cultural ideas to the next level seized the day. Now all criticism of America's first black President is reduced to 'racism'. 

America still possesses millions of patriots whose fidelity to the Constitution is unshakeable and whose resistance to the Orwellian levels of doublespeak now accepted as legitimate politics remains strong. But there is no simple way to coordinate their efforts and sentiments. I believe young Americans are impervious to the political overproduction of the 'Left' baby boomers and will see nothing special or energizing about the non-idelological counter-cultural identity politics of their grandparents. In a shrinking economy, they understand and value family and well-thought out structure. The personal failures which mark today's victimology does not stir today's youth to great sympathy, and they are not so eager in a post 9/11 world to trash their homeland.

As you can see, these identity politics have made millions of Americans insular and naive. They have impressed themselves with their ability to aggregate votes and support candidates here at home. The provinciality is stupefying. The great writer Aldous Huxley said 'an intellectual is someone who has found ideas more interesting than sex'. By that standards, we have few intellectuals left, because in America the standards of decency have dropped abysmally. We have more teenage venereal disease than almost ever in our history, and the single mother is yet another abnormal made to be the new 'normal'. Here we have someone defending left politics and exemplifying interracial sex as the great benefit. It is no wonder that such people have no vision in foreign policy and are apt to disengage America from the world. They are navel-gazers of the first degree and that is why they allow great failures of industry, education and economic solvency. They do not wish to elect leaders who solve real-world problems, they wish to elect leaders who make nice speeches and blame others and cry in public. 

The average American is encouraged to think street culture is legitimate and that family traditions and obligations are irrelevant and outdated. They are encouraged to seek sexual liberation at any cost, and to put the value of the life of animals and plants above that of human beings. Such are the people who can listen to rebellious rock and roll into their 50s and 60s and find the very perversion of homosexuality to be inherently interesting. But it is not homosexuality itself, but the socially transgressive political activist sort designed to make everyone else uncomfortable that these people seek out. Think about it. These activists are exploiting the sex lives of their fellow citizens in order to make a swipe at everyone else. Pathetic, but effective.

I live in a country where people are afraid of sugar, and brag about the fact that they are building hospitals instead of steel.

I Never Liked Bioshock

(mid rant)

In Reference To: John Teti

Sideboob: Mercenaries 2

I found the original Bioshock exactly that boorish because of the thin veneer of ideology which was so one dimensional that it failed utterly to give any depth to the excellent art direction. I had hardly taken a step into the world when I get monologued to death by what amounted to an interrupted carnival barker. Hey I opened a door, ooh check that out, uh oh here comes that stupid voice over. It was so ham handed as compared to say.. well the other excellent FPS/RPGs that I just couldn't put up with it. Arriving on the train into City 17 in Half Life 2 was a miracle of immersion. Escaping execution from the burned out town in Skyrim, brilliant. Coming out of genetic rebuilding in Mass Effect, genius.

Infinite never raised my hope much further despite the very cool graphics - it stayed much too close to a politically mythical America to be useful. Nothing about the series has seemed sandboxy enough, and the invented universe simply didn't have enough resonances for me. Considering, for example, the historical verisimilitude of the latest Assassin's Creed, at least there's the net absence of the integral part of a meaningful role of the Assassin in the American Revolution. There's a kind of Groundhog Day irrelevance to all your passion, and Assassin's Creed is OK with that - or at least it is at it's best when not too much is made of the significance of your avatar's murderous rage. The same thing can be said of the deft denouement of Skyrim. Even after you've contributed to solving the world's problems, the world still exists, with new problems. Mass Effect, not so much.

To be fair, these are inordinately complex problems to solve. The narrative has to get you going, especially when your character is too weak to beat up an ordinary policeman or guard. Some successful games ignore the problem altogether. Here is the world, here are the badguys, here's the stereotypical mission and you badass your way through. That can be loads of fun, witness games like Mercenaries 2, or Borderlands.

Deus Ex is rather the exception that proves the rule. Or rather I should say, it's a very well done game that forces you to think differently about FPS/RPGs. As a moral exercise, I simply found it too challenging. There were too many ethically gray areas that I was forced to put my avatar through - and I did find that realistic. It made me feel as though there is no real way to be heroic if you were actually endowed with such powers. It made you feel the limits, and if you are a serious gamer and take what happens to your avatar seriously, Deus Ex will put you through some emotional changes. Lying, cheating, stealing and killing in Deus Ex, takes a toll (or it did on me).

The other game that made me feel something like that was GTA San Andreas. It got really revolting to be the bad guy. It was something -- well I've never had the stomach to watch Clockwork Orange all the way through -- I imagine to being akin to being brainwashed. The rewards for any positive moral behavior in the game are washed out of your system, and it being a sandbox game, you can't even pretend to be motivated by the arc of the story. There was none.

Obviously I see a world of sociological and psychological discussion in the universes that game designers create. And it is that angle that has always struck me as being a blindspot for a lot of the game criticism that gave such high marks to the artistic merits of the BioShock series.

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Bloody Pirates!

A Steampunk Riff

A couple weeks ago I was hanging at Salt Creek with Ted and Tim. Ted asked me if I was going steampunk and I said no, but I should have said yes. The thing is, I'm a Neo-Victorian, a formalist and a stoic, but personally I think a lot of that will get expressed in my evolving style which is somewhat steamy.

I first got a taste of Neo-Victorian ethics from Neal Stephenson's 'The Diamond Age', a decade or so again. I have since reread the book and much of what sounded stunning then made simple sense the next time. My second dousing came from another aesthetic tangent, which was inspired by the assemblage of Tom Sachs. The third pillar of this emerging way came out of my growing attraction for some pop culture, from the original Sherlock Holmes books and then into the two Guy Ritchie films plus a healthy dollop of Downton Abbey with a not inconsequential dose of Stephen Fry's Jeeves & Wooster. Yeah I know it's House but I can't remember his real name. I think the final two nails for me is my growing appreciation for bespoke maker stuff, and finally if not most importantly, the revolution that is for me Dickens' Bleak House. 

What's currently top of mind is filling in the martial education I didn't receive from this society. I would like to have the patience for swords, but carrying is going to be troublesome. So it's going to be short blades and Aikido for the near term, as well as precision rifle. On the daily I am still in the throes of excitement over EDC, and am evolving my kit as appropriate for my gearhead/hacker/maker profession and my Western American sensibilities. I hike. I backpack. I camp. If we'd had game out this way, I'd be a hunter. If we had streams, I'd be a fisherman. As it stands we have ocean, so I'm a body surfer. The bottom line is I'm a regular outdoorsman and that will play into the ultimate style. There's also a heavy streak of intelligence and spycraft in my personality. Cloaks are my style. Obviously I am a writer and coder - so there are my indoor martial skills. 

I think all of this coalesces for me in a kind of Old School Tactical. Finally I have gotten tired of most things carbon fiber and that whole Oakley vibe has soured. I'm more apt to be satisfied with low cost materials and replaceable parts. Except for my iPhone. But a kinetic watch with Zulu straps? Bang on. Repurposed Altoid tins? Yep. Black leather boots? Amen. 

My steampunk idol would be Teddy Roosevelt and although I've not yet read so much of Rudyard Kipling and of adventures in the Raj, I'm expecting some freebooting spirit to be alive in what comes next for me. While I'm currently reading the Aubrey Maturin series as well as my first overview of Kafka (The Castle), there is something about the eras of discovery between those two periods that has my interest. You see in the Age of Sail, most everything made was made bespoke but subject to divine rights. By Kafka's time, the pendulum toward attempting to manufacture everything for the masses and its attendent bureacratic hierarchies had destroyed what was golden. 

This fits for me into the establishment of a new web of trust among the Alternative Slice that will be the foundations of the first post-national collective. The question is how it will manage in a world of sovereign currency. I suppose rather like the black markets. 

Redondo Nike Track Festival - A Great Tradition Begins

(whole cloth)

A special Thank you from Coach Bob Leetch

This past weekend Redondo Union High School played host to one of the finest track meets in the nation. What was one of the largest high school sporting events in the history of the South Bay was also an extremely high calibre meet. We hosted 2,200 athletes from throughout the southland to 3,600 events in the span of two days. EPI Elite marks are a standardized level of excellence used to determine high level track and field marks. They are very hard to obtain. The top performing meet in the country so far had produced 60 EPI Elite marks. Last Friday and Saturday the Redondo Nike Track Festival produce 138 EPI Elite marks! In terms of excellence our meet has quickly jumped to become one of the top 10 invitationals in the United States. Pretty big time stuff.

And this was not produced by a group of paid professionals hired to host a meet like the famous Arcadia Invitational or the Mt. Sac Relays. This was hosted by, set up, built up, broken down, cleaned up, escorted, cooked for, picked up after, announced by and run by us. Parents, coaches, friends, family all of us volunteers somehow connected to this track program. Rich Gonzales, our dear friend, editor of PrepCalTrack.com and Meet Director of the Arcadia Invitational said, "To host this large a meet with that much precision and timeliness was amazing. Hats off to your amazing crew. That is one of the finest meets in the country." 

The size of the meet was impressive. The level of excellence achieved during the meet was astonishing. But the warmth and personal touch from each and every volunteer is what makes this meet special. To hold a high calibre meet with these types of numbers became a vision of mine the moment our school bond to improve our facilities passed. I knew we had the facilities and I also knew we had the type of people that cared about this program and our fine school. But this weekend we exceeded any of my expectations. We ran an amazing meet close to perfection. But it is the friendly, caring manner that every volunteer displays that makes the real difference. Every athlete and coach I spoke with commented on how much fun they were having and how nice they were being treated. Folks, we run a class operation and it shows. One of the best compliments came from the coach at powerhouse Notre Dame High School. He said, "We love this meet. One of the reasons we come here is to show the kids coming out of soccer and football that our sport is Big Time. The Redondo Nike Track Festival makes all our kids feel like stars. After this meet the kids are really fired up. And everyone is so friendly and nice. How do you do it?"

One of the things I determine in a town's 'quality of life,' is it's sense of community. To me this is how involved are we in our own town. Do we try to shop at a local grocery store, buy our morning cup of joe from around the corner. Do we support our little leagues, local charities or even get to know the people who work and live around us? I think all these things that make up a community are very important in our daily lives. This weekend we showed that we have an amazingly strong sense of community that is very active in promoting the lives of so many around us. This was all of us. Everywhere you looked, we were there helping, leading, assisting all with a smile that said, "have fun, run fast, jump far, be strong, I'm here to help." Our kids performed superbly. How could they not, everywhere they turned was a familiar face offering encouragement. One of the real joys of this meet is the look of pride on the faces of our kids when they see a their own parents making a contribution. I see the pride in their eyes and I know it is making an enormous impact on them.

I would like to thank all who helped make the Redondo Nike Track Festival the amazing event it is. Everyone who helped in any way is responsible for our successes.

We could never do this without the substantial financial support from the Nike team, Scott Lash, Vida Rabizedah and Lino Almeida are the key players who have worked behind the scenes for months in the planning stages all the way to helping decorate the track. They are not just our sponsors, they are our friends. Whenever we need a thing this team is first in line to help. Since this meet began I have work closely with Scott and Vida to shape the concept of this unique meet.

Special thanks to Laurie Baker, Melanie and Kevin Sullivan, Leslie Mull, Cathy Herold, Tracy McMartin, Doug Boswell, Wendy and Tony Ulizio, Susan and Kevin Ryan (the voice of Redondo Track & Field), Dave and Mona Dill for taking many of the time consuming lead positions. And my lovely wife Kirsten Leetch for taking the reins and organizing the whole event. They are the real nuts and bolts of our organization. They put in months of work before the first starting gun went off. Thanks to our friends Debbie Brossard, friend of Leslie Mull, who flies out from Scottsdale, Arizona every year to work the lower concessions and my best man Nick Carr and his girlfriend Wendy who fly down from San Francisco every year to help with field management. Those three don't even have any skin in the game!

On behalf of the entire coaching staff, thank you for all your hard work and efforts. Each and every one of you has touched our program and in a simple way made lives a little better and Redondo Beach a finer community.

 

Bob Leetch

Track and Cross Country
Redondo Union HS
1 Seahawk Way
Redondo Beach, CA 90277

Gill/USATF National High School

Coach of the Year

 

Sequestration

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?

Cowboy Up

(catch me in mid rant)

Coates' point:

whitefolks: we feel fear so we want an armed society - therefore our privilege is the asshole's privilege to unconsciously dominate.
blackfolks: we know fear and never have that privilege. 

my point: grr. how long has gangsta rap been praising guns and social domination?

Reference: Korman 

Sideboob: Geras

DeepBackground: Bill Whittle's Grey Tribe

T50: Pinker & Honor Culture

Text:

Coates annoys me because he can't be bothered with his own individuality. Every time he presumes to talk about black society I want smack him upside his peanut head because.. He's a presumptuous dweeb something akin to a ghetto cowboy poet. Cowboy poets are fun to listen to until they start acting like they represent white society, then they become plainly ridiculous. When Coates starts talking like he doesn't have PhDs in sociology, anthropology and political science he'll be a lot less annoying to me, and a lot less interesting to everyone. Except of course, the curious among us - who don't necessarily have to represent racial privilege or it's opposite - as he tends to do all the time. But hey, it's the Atlantic. Good work if you can shit talk your way into it.

I'm on that armed chivalry kick by the way. And my recent trips to the gun stores filled with Coates' experimental subjects, 'whitefolks', never seem to be quite of the same mind as he was projecting last time we were all talking about the Tea Party and redneck social privilege. I see people who consider themselves exceptional among the sheeple trying to represent an America where certain crap just doesn't happen - an armed NIMBY subset of America dragging its heals against the headlong rush towards Idiocracy. 

The recent market phenomenon of shelves bare of ammunition and guns of all sorts is compelling and obvious proof that all of the gun nuts of our traditional fears have never been anything but a minority. But Americans all over the place are having their personal '9/11' moments when they realize things they never thought would happen in their lifetimes are happening with astonishing brazenness. 

For example, it was somewhere around 1992 when I realized that black male and female duets singing love songs simply didn't exist any longer. It's not just no Sammie Davis any longer - the good old days of America are no longer the 50s - they are the 80s. I'll get into that tangent another time. My point is that cities, counties and states are going broke, and this unemployment rate is the new normal. The president who promised unity created polarization. Somebody has to stand up in front of Congress and beg the CIA not to assemble Skynet over America. And just about the only thing you cannot do in the media is call a 9 year old a cunt. Other than that, anything goes. We have met the enemy and it is us. We're not going out like that.

I happen to be one of the ones that doesn't see anything particularly special about ghetto society. My theory is now conformed with Steven Pinker who notes that where the law's norms are rejected - people get accustomed to fighting for personal honor. Tell me which Congressman's honor you would fight for? Exactly. The zombies are everywhere, and it's just a countdown to the apocalypse. Meanwhile captains of the chatting class at the Atlantic keep telling us our mainstream culture is perpetrating a racial fraud on the genuine ethnic street cultures of the Americas - people who don't make the law. So which way does that point? Chivalry, and feudalism as opposed to modernism and patriotism. 

I've got my sword and buckler, you sons of unmarried whores. Maybe I don't represent America. Maybe I don't have any rights worth defending. Maybe everything out of my mouth is racist. But you're going to have to take it from me. Does that make me part of the asshole white society? Nah. It's just me. Cowboy poet.

20 Reasons Why The New Pope Cannot Be Acceptable to Americans

It's all about the nature of the election. It's just not American.

• No billions spent on negative advertising for months on end
• No special interest groups claiming voter fraud
• No bogus debates full of stupid questions.
• No radio talkshow hosts trashing the opposition.
• No music videos, catchy slogans and balloons.
• No social media asking what *you* think.
• No pictures of the candidate with wife and kids.
• No billboard signs with the candidate's name in bold italic fonts.
• No promise to bring home the troops or to send more troops.
• No promise to spend more money or to spend less money.
• No superficial differences exaggerated for effect.
• No interview with Oprah, David Letterman or Jay Leno
• No ghostwritten autobiography.
• No bashing of the prior president.
• No promise to fight against China.
• No promise to fix Detroit once and for all.
• No promise of jobs for any class.
• No weasel words on abortion, death penalty, immigration, or gun control. 
• No complaining about how stupid, fat, bullying & oversexed American high schoolers are.
• No jetting from coast to coast to collect money while telling corny jokes to rich people.

 All that and the decision took less than 15 days. How could any American possibly support the Pope? The Vatican clearly doesn't know a thing about what we expect from leaders. Send Jimmy Carter to examine this process!

 

The Scientific Catholic Church

I found this interesting comparison between Catholics & Protestants on Quora:

Although blessed with diversity, Christian belief generally has some primary, fundamental doctrines that create a backbone from which virtually all other denominations and branches must adhere. Regarding Catholic and Protestant points of departure, I would suggest the following:Catholics tend to believe:

1. The power and primacy of the pope
2. Emphasis on Mary the mother of Jesus
3. Employment and acknowledgment of specific saints
4. Confession of sins to an earthly emissary
5. Increased regard for ritual and human works/effort in attaining salvation

Certainly there are more, but if I had to contain it to five (which I will also do below) it would be those. As for Protestants, I would go back to Martin Luther's language in elucidating the differences: Protestants tend to believe:

1. Sola Scriptura: The Bible is the only authority for Christian belief.
2. Sola Gratia: Grace can only be given by God and is the only way to salvation, not works or personal merit.
3. Sola Fide: Salvation comes through an individual's faith or relationship with Jesus Christ, not through sacraments.
4. Solo Christo: Jesus Christ is the only mediator between God and man, and only through Christ comes salvation.
5. Soli Deo gloria: Glory and honor goes only to God; no human—however sainted, canonized, or humanly honored—deserves to be religiously praised.

My reading of this gives me an immediate reaction. If you are in any way agnostic, or even atheist, you would have to admit that the Catholic faith is a great deal more practical than the Protestant faith. IE if God actually doesn't exist, or if man isn't inherently able to understand the nature and will of God, then the Catholic church is the one to go to.

In short, if you were a scientist and were to build an institution aimed at determining the mind and will of God, you would build it much more like the Catholic Church than you would the Protestant Church. 

By the way, I never get tired of repeating the fact that I was taught both Biology and Computer Science by men wearing the collar. 

Fate

Secrets of the Bowen Library

I spent some time with Pops yesterday and dared for the first time ever in my adult life to peer into his notebook entitled Nationhood. I was appropriately astonished. 

There is no secret about the fact that I grew up as a Black Nationalist. I think most Cobb readers are aware that I was present at the invention of Kwanzaa and participated in the very first celebrations, some of which were done at my family's house in Los Angeles. I have characterized my father as a scholarly flavor of cultural Nationalist. But I have always noted his unwillingness to talk about those days other than the broad descriptions of the fact that we were preparing to abandon the US back around 1968 and that the FBI had tapped our phone. Robert Bowen founded the Institute for Black Studies and the Redwood Theater Group. Both entities had offices on West Adams Boulevard in Los Angeles for a time. I've spoken of this from time to time. As well I have mentioned that I spoke French and Swahili at home as a child and that my father was in touch with many Movement individuals. 

The few pages I read in the Nationhood binder were full of names to whom Mr. Bowen sent letters. These were the names of men and women of significance in the US public affairs. We spoke about this obliquely. I read the names listed on two pages of the binder out loud and listened to his grunting reactions. We children all know our father's grunts, do we not? The correspondance between my father and these individuals was a striking revelation. I do not know the extent to which those letters exist or their original content. There are a few notable individuals with whom I am certain a lengthy correspondance did take place. For example, I do know you can find one at the King Center's online archive. One thing I can say for certain is that there can be little doubt of my father's attitude towards the fate of black Americans in this country, and his saying out loud was certainly heard. He was a radical in no uncertain terms. If I ever doubted that the FBI had been following us, reading a few pages in Nationhood cleared that right up. I am now obligated to find out how much. 

What is only mildly interesting is that my father never taught or expected any of us to hate or dislike whitefolks, so much as to take pride in our own accomplishments. But what is fascinating to me now is the relief into which it puts his life and its influence on my own. Here is a man who has the equivalent of Nazi war medals in his closet, and he must live life in the world which has defeated Nazism. Every thinking man faces the exuberence of his own youth, but he has had to mentally re-integrate himself into the society from which he had exiled himself, and us. Talk about reversal of fortune. He is a man of bold sophistication who has had to turn it all into an appreciation for the simple pleasures of life. I can only see it in the parallels of the lives of ex-Nazi war criminals and fathers of the nuclear age - men in their 70s genuinely interested in talking about everything but the past whose details are the object of our fascination. Here is Edward Teller sipping tea in the garden speaking about what a lovely day it is. Here is my father sitting in his library of Black Nationalist secrets complaining about how fat his dog has become. 

To know anything about Pops today is to know his absolute devotion to the operation of the woman's shelter downtown where he never fails to volunteer, and to doting over us and his 10 grandchildren. His intriguing relationship with his Episcopalian faith, his dogs, his photography, his disgust for Wynton Marsalis and Satchmo, his love for jazz, the city and architecture and his irredeemable puns and goofy alliterations. His inability to keep any public prayer short, his Obama trance (which the two of us have learned to keep out of our conversations).  All of these which make him interesting in the present lie in sharp contrast to the man he used to be.

Pops has over the past 3 years, come into what is now clearly a very comfortable grasp on his mortality. He is slowing down ever so slightly and much more open to talking about his end times, his satisfaction with his time on the planet. Today however, it is clear that his intentions with the Library are to leave them with the family.

I mentioned to him the fact that our old friend Dr. Ligon was singly unable to place his collection anywhere. As far as I know, the proprietor of California's first black bookstore, has a legacy in cardboard boxes that survived the LA Riots that burned down his place of business, but only just. Pops has insisted that the Getty have no parts of his photography and so I have taken the past 12 hours to transfer about 20% of his digital collection into my possession. What is to become of the rest of the Library? Well, we have a very solid connection to the African American Studies Department at Brown. So perhaps I may convince him at length to hand it over to them. Otherwise the secrets will remain in the family as is his current desire. 

My father does not have any hunger, nor in fact is he properly constituted with the ego required for the spotlight his past would shine on him. And I cannot think but that I might exaggerate the importance of his writing and correspondance. He wasn't an attorney, nor a politician. He was in fact a genuine thoughtful man for others, a man of the people - a people whose best interests he believed lied only in their total independence from the United States. And when that possibility was aborted, he immediately turned to the cause of public health and became instrumental in the establishment of MLK Hospital in Watts, a legacy now more brilliant in intent than in realization. 

I think .. no, I know that my father's legacy will be best illuminated through his photography. Some of it should be here at Wellington House. More will be soon. 

Rand Paul Is No Hero

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. 

I dare you. 

EDC

I have fallen for a new kind of weird sense of materalism. I cannot tell you how many hours I have tried to make an arrangement that matches the beauty shots at everyday-carry.com but this is about as close as I can get.

This is more than I put in my pockets, but less than I actually leave the house with if I'm going to be gone all day, and certainly a lot less than I pack if I'm taking the computer bag. It is a good representation of some of my absolute favorite material possessions, not including my new eyeglasses. 

Starting at the top left, about 10 o'clock:

• Seiko SKX007
• Hamilton Khaki Field Quartz Chrono
• CRKT M16 13Z
• Fenix LD12
• Paracord Key Ring w/ Flint
• PNY 8GB USB Key
• Xicar Element
• iPhone 4S + Otter Box
• Mophie Juicebox Pro
• Apple EarBuds
• Plantronics Voyager Pro
• Leatherman Juice CS4
• Johnston & Murphy Snap Billfold
• Tungsten Steel Wedding Band
• Tombow Object
• Fisher Bullet Pen
• Pentalic Traveler Sketchbook

 

 

Extreme Death: The Making Of...

I'm not a cynic, I'm a skeptic. Ever since 9-11 I wake up every morning an ask, what blew up while I was asleep. It's not because of any poison nature I have; in fact I have a song in my head every morning when I wake up. If nothing blows up, I can generally remember what that song is. Something blew up today, but yesterday's song was the ILGWU "Look for the Union Label" song. Hand to God.

However when I moved to NYC in 1991, I was fairly accomplished as a road cyclist. The roads in New York suck. So I was forced to ride in Prospect and Central Parks, which at the time were choked to the gills with that human offal known as rollerbladers. We have since gotten rid of them much to our credit, but while they were still a scourge and a blight on civilization I took immense pleasure in watching their blooper videos. 

This is now a skeptical sport amongst most of us. America's Funniest Home Videos has been replaced by YouTube in delivering this lovely dish of schadenfruede. We can watch skaters, boarders, skier, moto jockeys and four wheeling Darwin Awards candidates all damned day. Add to that video from Russian dashboard cams and it's 24/7 slapstick. Who could ask for more?

We could, so we did. And the agency of deliverance is Red Bull.

My wife is trying to cure my addition to Red Bull, and for the moment that means she is fixing me tea in the morning instead of chilling my cans. I must say, Constant Comment is the bomb and I've always loved it. So perhaps this Formula 1 season I might even get over Seb Vettel and all things Red Bull. Nah. But still, I think I am getting my fill of extreme stunts filmed in HD with those ubiquitous GoPro cameras.

It (cynically) occurs to me that the best thing about being a cameraman is that you actually do get to see the extreme sports dudes kill themselves. And since they have adrenaline addictions you will get plenty opportunities to see them try and fail over and over again. You understand that my theory about this phenomenon is that only upper middle class Westerners go in for this sort of mania. People from the ghetto don't go looking for death defying sport, they rather wait until it's intimate and then they invite it in the front door. It's funny now that I think about it, I can remember Chris Brown's name, but not the name of the chick he beat up. Either way, the point stands. Young people who are light in the brains department seek to find ways to cheat death by inches at high speed. Some by making friends with hoodlums and its barbarian culture, others by making friends with cameramen who are willing to film them as they jump off cliffs. Thrillsville, dude!

There is nothing quite so painful as watching some scruffy mook attempt and attempt and attempt a reverse transfer 540 double air against some snow covered wall in Helsinki. But this is what YouTube brings our boredom. And to put yourself (because there is plenty of room) inside the head of such a mook is to realize that ulitmately they are going to pull off the trick or die trying. I believe the philsophy goes something like this:

"I am not afraid to die, I am afraid not to live."

Where 'life' in this case is not the responsibility to one's fellow man, but proving oneself to be a singularly fearless daredevil. It sounds rather excitingly brave and admirable until you consider the question of wheter or not they'd continue such feats without cameras and rock & roll soundtracks. C'mon. You know none of these mooks are fugly. 

Since I have disengaged from the public square, I won't bother to reiterate my old interest in seeing them be good cannon fodder in some nationalist enterprise. I don't suppose I care quite enough. In fact, I am rather feeling good to think that we have so very many such mooks and that their audience is so large. In terms of survival and running from the bear, I console myself with the very existence of such surplus population. Now *that* is being cynical. 

But then why do we watch? 

Libertarianism Is OK

(some rant from somewhere)

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 don't even know anybody from Mississippi.

Bloody Pirates!

Well I just finished Assassin's Creed III and it was fairly enjoyable for a time. And then I killed the last dude but it didn't let me do anything more. Evidently, the whole running around in the present day cave thing had something to do with it. I have to say that the tag team between the ghost women was probably the worst thing I have ever seen in the series. I played the whole putting the power cube into place and watching the cut scene thing on mute and listened the the beginning of my new Alastair Reynolds book. I put in the last block watched one more cutscene and then the whole thing ended. If I never hear another Assassins vs Templars conspiracy theory it will be too soon. Drop that whole thing. 

Here's my suggestion. Let's say that the Animus technology after the murder of whomever it was we killed, fell into the hands of some Anonymous hackers who then open sourced the code and now 3D printed several Animii. Now anybody can go back in time to any period of history filled with bloody violence and intrigue and step into character. Here's the thing, there was no time in this story where that whole premise of synching memories gave me more life bar or anything that I noticed. It was more all about crafting (2/3rds of which I never got around to) and buying better weapons. So really this whole freaking episode was horribly imbalanced as an RPG with levels. What it reminded me of more than anything else was Red Dead Redemption, which was bloody great. AC3 was great because the story was great, the animation was great and the main mission was great.

The fight engine is better than ever - better than Batman, better than in any other RPG even though Bethesda gets awesome props for their taking turn based fighting to the next level. The sea battles were groundbreaking AND awesome. Nobody has anything like it and I want more. The Assassin missions were very good, and the capturing sections of the cities was even more well done than in the previous editions. Climbing up steeples and trees to synch is getting pretty tired, but having oceans, remote islands, cities and wilderness - absolutely spot on. All the other modern day hokum is filler with one exception. Jumping around skyscrapers really does give me the shakes. You feel the fear of heights in AC3's skyscraper piece. I will say this, however. The only thing that could improve Assassins Creed's fighting system would be to add some cover and/or stealth features. That aspect of gameplay just seemed too much out of the control of the character. Give the Assassin a third of Sam Fisher's stealth tricks and you will have filled the fight engine thingy to perfection. 

So drop the hooey and give us more historical shitstorms to drop into and alter with our badassery. And what could be better for that than piracy? Oh perfect. And it just so happens that I watched Treasure Island with Eddie Izzard, and it's probably the best pirate film ever - a great story done in two 90 minute segments. Everything else seems cheesy by comparison - kind of like what Saving Private Ryan did to WW2 movies. It borders on the imagination's rendering of the pirate adventures of Half Cocked Jack Shaftoe in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Series. (Which means Assassin's Creed 5 has to be Mongols and horse, sword & bow battle).  

Watching the preview video today gets me all ready for this. Some maroon at Forbes wants more Animus, but I say it's time to shitcan all the backgroundery and get straight to the intrique of the simulated world. All of that was necessary to setup the universe but the reach of the Templars and Assassins grows more tenuous and unbelievable in each further episoode. OK I think I've made my point. Blackbeard? Great. There's got to be ships of the Line of Battle involved and all that. So I know if any of you Ubi guys are reading this, you're going to want to read David Davies. 

And while I'm at it. let me suggest that you could probably spin off at least one more Master and Commander kind of game. Hey wait, there's a series isn't there? Hmm. I'm now newly  all into naval battles and there must be a huge amount of history to mine. Multiplayer naval battles? That's got to be pretty cool, and replication of wind patterns and all that in recreations of battles? Awesome. I will have to say that having your ship's crew cheer when all of the enemy is sunk is a new kind of exhilaration in video games. I have never played AC multiplayer but something on this nature.. I'd like that very much.

Anyway. Three cheers for Pirates!

Related articles

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'Assassin's Creed 4': Five Things We Expect...and Five Things We Actually Want

Shiny

Changing my life.

Obligatory Seriousness on the Harlem Shake

This type of shit happens every century.

Gearhead #1

Buy A Shotgun!

This is moronically hilarious, but Mr. Biden, I will buy whatever kind of gun I damned well please.

The Next Mr. Tibbs

Apparently, there is a 'superstar' cardinal in the running to become the next Pope. His name is Cardinal Peter Turkson. And since there is a sizeable Progressive black American contingent here still doing some thinking about such things, he represents the next Head Negro In Charge. But like many other black heroes, he is a hero not because he has done anything in particular, but that generally speaking, he's the boss over white people. There has been a running joke and brag that is somewhere between 30 and 500 years old about who white people's 'worst nightmare' is. You may recognize "He's *your* President" as another variation of this joke. 

In order to pin an intellectual handle on this concept, I'm going to overload the previous handle of 'The Tibbs Threshold'. You see, there is this famous American movie set in the Jim Crow South, or perhaps just after the beginning of its decline, starring Sidney Poitier - a gentleman of distinction of the sort you only seem to get in James Bond movies today. And Poitier represents Authority and in the process of solving a homicide becomes all sorts of white people's worst nightmare.. etc. Once I invented a concept called the Tibbs Threshold - which was necessary for me while I engaged the dubious occupation of amateur race man. The idea of the Tibbs Threshold is that some white people will insult black men without recognizing that he might have sensibilities developed enough to be insulted. This is essentially how I feel any time someone tries to give me a pound. I don't do dap, and I don't like being called by my first name. "But I thought you were a revolutionary brother, down with the post-colonial struggle." No. 

At any rate, the significance of any Tibbs figure, be he Barack Obama, Derrick Bell, Thabo Mbeki or Reginald Lewis is that he is a sort of unimpeachable source of black power and is a real authority over matters for which black Americans have been underrepresented, ignored or barred. And of course there are always efforts to associate this man with the people. Now of course this doesn't always work. Lots of these would-be role models, heroes and power proxies aren't actually capable or even interested in becoming a champion of the common man. But by definition, that is what a clergyman is supposed to be all about. The leader of the Catholic Church must certainly be about that - so the probability that Turkson would be for the people is relatively high.

But who are Turkson's people? There is where the racial expectations of black Americans are likely to be dashed, raising all kinds of interesting questions back and forth. And that's about all I'm ready to speculate about at this point. 

Obama, Trayvon Martin, Christopher Dorner

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...

Your Black Republican Problem is Not My Problem

Ishmael Reed wrote in the NYT:

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. 

Dorner the Individual

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. 

The Negro Speaks of Books

I just saw one of those Facebook things about who reads what books etc. Of the hundred they listed, I read 26 and then there were 7 others that I tried and found tedious, or just never got around to finishing. It was an odd list. Then I got to putting together a list of black books, horrified as I was by the set recommended by the Huffington Post. So without comment, I've read 90% of these..

Roots - Alex Haley
Black Boy - Richard Wright
Beloved - Toni Morrison
The Women of Brewster Place - Gloria Naylor
For Colored Girls. - Ntzoke Shange

The Color Purple - Alice Walker
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
Black No More - George Schuyler
Autobiography of Malcolm X - Malcolm X
Their Eyes Were Watching God - Z. Huston

Cane - Jean Toomer
Middle Passage - Charles Johnson
The Wig - Charles Wright
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
Native Son - Richard Wright

Another Country - James Baldwin
Disappearing Acts - Terry McMillan
A Gathering of Old Men - Ernest J. Gaines
Kindred - Octavia Butler
A Raisin in the Sun - Lorraine Hansberry

Up From Slavery - Booker T. Washington
Narrative - Frederick Douglass
Narrative - Olaudah Equiano
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Harriet Jacobs
The Souls of Black Folk - W.E.B. DuBois

The Big Sea - Langston Hughes
If Beale Street Could Talk - James Baldwin
The Best of Simple - Langston Hughes
Dutchman - Amiri Baraka
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man - James Weldon Johnson

Captain Blackman - John A. Williams
The White Boy Shuffle - Paul Beatty
Miseducation of the Negro - Carter G. Woodson
Faces at the Bottom of the Well - Derrick Bell
Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby - Stephen L. Carter

The Economics & Politics of Race - Thomas Sowell
The Content of Our Character - Shelby Steele
Breaking Bread - Cornel West
Black Macho & the Myth of the Superwoman - Michele Wallace
Notes of a Hanging Judge - Stanley Crouch

The Alchemy of Race and Rights - Kimberly Crenshaw
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual - Harold Cruse
Race Matters - Cornel West
Ethnic America - Thomas Sowell
Malcolm X Speaks - Malcolm X

Afrocentricity - Molefi Asante
The Oxherding Tale - Charles Johnson
Sula - Toni Morrison
Japanese by Spring - Ishmael Reed
Flyboy in the Buttermilk - Greg Tate
Buppies, B-Boys, Baps & Bohos - Nelson George

The Inutitionist - Colson Whitehead
The Colored Museum - George C. Wolfe
The Piano Lesson - August Wilson
Sugar Cane Alley - Euzhan Palcy
Biko - Donald Woods

Kaffir Boy - Mark Mathabene
High Cotton - Daryl Pinckney
Parallel Time - Brent Staples
Colored People - Skip Gates
Jazz - Toni Morrison

Waiting to Exhale - Terry McMillan
Bloodchild - Octavia Butler
The Neveryon Series - Sameuel R. Delany
Yes I Can - Sammy Davis Jr.
The Street - Ann Petry

The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin
Sister Outsider - Audre Lorde
If He Hollers Let Him Go - Chester Himes
Devil in a Blue Dress - Walter Mosley
The Rage of a Privileged Class - Ellis Cose 

 

Gun Sales Obiter Dicta

(I heard this on the internet)

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!

A King of Reason

I am reminded that there are quite useful bodies of knowledge out there that serve the exact purposes of we ships at sea. I have the good fortune that people are looking out for me, even in my doldrums of doubt and nary progress. One such rescue came in the form of a pointer to an award winning philosopher by the name of Alvin Plantinga. While you and I have been guessing, he has been proving. 

In my dreams of avarice, I am in possession of a great mansion. It is all I have ever truly desired. For in this house is a parlor populated by poets, priests and politicians and I let them have at it. Something like my blog in its heyday, I suppose. Yes, I want a salon. I rather guess I ought to go about designing it, neh? All this online scribbling is wonderful but there's no food in it. 

Anyway, for the T50 to ever get a chance to have a private audience, which would ultimately be publicized, this ought to be an interesting way to go about it. At any rate, here's this dude. Check him out. 

Obligatory Seriousness on Christopher Jordan Dorner

We woke up this morning with a police helicopter hovering over our neighborhood. Two women delivering newspapers early this morning were shot about 4 blocks from my house. I sleep like a rock, but once I was up the annoyance was persistent. It turns out that a couple or three counties in Southern California are on alert on the lookout for a manifesto writing ex-cop and Iraq reservist whose name will now live in infamy whether or not they shoot him dead. 

You see Dorner has promised to wage asymmetrical warfare on the LAPD, and he sounds like he knows how to do it. So obviously they'll be bringing in any number of hotdog specialists to track down this man who doesn't seem to have any pathological pictures available for the press to make him look crazier than he is. Now that I think about it, I hope they don't bring drones - but I have a feeling this could be the beginning of something ugly for a number of reasons.

Manifesto Destiny
Whenever somebody writes a Manifesto, it basically means - "Hey I know I dont' have a legal case but I'm about to go off the deep end - here's why..." In Dorner's life story we learn that he's been fired for not getting some other cops fired, and essentially being zero-tolerance for called 'nigger'. It's rather sad when even Snoop Dogg has more self-esteem. I mean nobody likes being called ugly names, and anybody ought to take offense, but usually a slap in the face followed by throwing breakables across the room generally gets that point across. This nutcase is talking about whipping out the .50 cal and sniping the freeway. 

How Many Is Many?
Right now, although it's unclear, Dorner is a suspect in a double murder. A basketball coach and his fiance were the first targets, tangential to some ugly part of his career. Since that happened yesterday, I think he has either shot or killed two or three police officers. So obviously they've got eight or nine law enforcement agencies on a big old manhunt. Last I heard, he hightailed it up to the mountains. So the irony of course is if he's actually up there, then they'll be chasing him through the woods with dogs. So he's some sort of mass murderer, I'm just not sure what the tipping point is. Either way, a lot of us will feel a lot better to see him hogtied. 

The Devil You Don't Know
Whatever the manifesto says, whatever the locals report, whatever the amount of dirt you might find in the LAPD, there will be a campaign of shame against Dorner. It's not really necessary though. A double homicide is all the bad you have to know.  So that's why this is obligatory seriousness.

Under the Jail
Dude is planning jihad and he's not afraid to die. Blaze of glory? Naw. I say get the gas and the tranquilizer darts. This dude needs to be humiliated. Too bad we don't pillory.

Related articles

Christopher Jordan Dorner, Disgraced LAPD Cop, Suspected In Irvine Murders

Manhunt for Former Cop After 3 Officers Shot

Wrapping Up

Scholar's work at the Knob Hill Community Center is all done but the paperwork, and once again I have paint spots on my knuckles.  

Getting Religion

Twice now, I've been hearing that religion is something I must have recently got, or should be in the process of getting. It's a puzzling thing to hear, and I'm a bit disconcerted about it. 

Here's what I think is going on. I think that I have all the inward commitments without spending much time in my outward expressions. I'm also playing a long, big game, and take it for granted that most serious people are. But in the way I suppose that warfighters must do their pushups every day, since I don't exercise some clearly visible form of religious discipline it might be construed that not only am I not in the long game, but that I might be indifferent to it. 

Well. I'm not going to pretend it's not complicated, because it is very complicated - my spirituality is complicated to the point of being exhausting. Talking about it is like dragging a large stuffed dog out of the closet and describing how it was when it is alive. But the long and short of it is this:

I do not understand why there are Catholics and Protestants who are not mutually exclusive. In other words, without a clear definition of procedural heresy, I am willing to bet my eternal soul that my interpretation of the meaning of the life of Christ is just as valid as that of any ordained minister. And I base that on the fact that the words have changed. What words? Why the words by which churches organize their rites to communication the Gospel to the laity. That means either the church is less than certain about what and how it should communicate, or it percieves that it must adapt its messages to the people and the times. We've been through this in reference to Spinoza.

Somewhere there must be some fraction of The Theology that explains how in some way the change from Latin Mass to English has improved the understanding of the laity in the matters of their own salvation. The implication being that saying some different set of marginally less well understood words in rites may have jeopardized the souls of the millions before Vatican II. Unless it didn't and the spirit of God is not captured in recitation at all. Between these extremes is a truth that I never expect any priest to sit down and explain to me. On the other hand, I cannot say that I've given too many that opportunity. Rather I am convinced that I'm already a good enough Christian in my public deeds - which is public writing and yet not so presumptuous as to second guess the Grace of God. In other words, if I'm wrong, then maybe all of Lutheranism or Presbyterianism or Methodism is wrong. If you can't explain the theological differences between those sects, you're really not in a position of religious authority as far as I'm concerned. But if you can tell me why an Adventist might be a better sort of Christian than a Baptist, then you might inform my own syncretism. 

Outside of that, I know I'm a good enough Christian, so much so that I don't bother saying so. Actions speak louder than words.

But since I do deal in words, it is important to me that mine be clear and cause the effects for which they are spoken and written. And in fact I do have within this corpus an entire section of Matters of the Spirit. When I last left things off, I was wrestling with the foolishness of the New Atheists. And yet that is another something which is bothersome. 

I will simply say that I do in fact need my own personal priest, and I think of myself often in the same way as the Clint Eastwood character in Million Dollar Baby. I am not bloody likely to get the sort of priest I think I deserve, which is actually all I'm really looking for - when I bother to look. It is something I expect I can find in the best of friends, which is why I am seeking a particular sort. You see I'm looking out for my soul and defending it against corruption but I need someone who can understand what kind of shit I'm apt to deal with in the process. I know myself and I am not looking for absolution, just someone who can recognize the level of deception I am capable of and occasionally remind me of what I'm supposed to be doing because I should, not merely because I can. I don't need abstract scolding, I need somebody to hear out my dastardly daydreams understand their deliciousness and tell me of consequences I hadn't considered. Walking the straight and narrow is boring. Pushing a mafioso off a roof is much more satisfying. Surely in the eyes of God, the risk of the latter is more valuable than the discipline of the former. So I could use the kind of spiritual partner who understands why I watch gangster films and climb fire escapes. 

Sometimes I get the feeling that I am dealing with people who are unable to  deal with Colonel Jessup and I wonder if that's the sort of religious expression they are expecting out of me. 

I am not on a mission to comfort some restlessness or brokenness in my heart. I continue to seek wisdom in all of its manifestations. Sooner or later I expect to come to a reconciliation of religion and philosophy and all sorts of other things too tiresome to discuss at the moment. To me, religion is the application of rigorous self-discipline to moral improvement and spiritual refinement. Religious organizations, like the Christian Church give us a template, a form and a set of frameworks and communities within which we may pursue and apply that discipline. I think I've got mine all set, but I am not utterly convinced I could not be improved by the right friendships and relationships with proper members of proper sects. But I do think I'm special. 

I think I'm special enough to merit the consideration of all I've written on the subject. Absent that, I will consider advice as advice. 

There's another thing here as well, and that is the extent to which I perceive that weakness of the Church to exercise its discipline in an effective way towards the betterment of society that doesn't sound like and yet underweigh by half any marketing campaign. We live in a very corrupted society and world, and it seems to be all the Church can do is to barely hold on. That's a problem. 

On The Proper Failure of America

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. 

The Occasional Brotherhood

Thirty five years ago I graduated from high school. It was, in fact, my 17th birthday. Tonight I entered the time machine to find out what happened to those long lost brothers. 

I had two missions, both of which were accomplished. The first was to find Ted whom I've been looking for since I discovered that his son knew my son from high school. The second was to try to say something resonant and hopefully inspirational to Paul without making a blithering idiot out of myself. I was pleasantly surprised to have carried these matters off although I did tear up at the end of the second task. If either of those had failed, I would have been disappointed despite the worlds of other secondary missions I had.

I needed to close with Don and make sure he didn't end up in a body bag in a ditch. He took a real risk hitchhiking down here from Oakland. I needed to explain to Chris why after several years, I had not shown up to his volleyball game. I threw my back out the first time and proved myself something of an embarassment. Either way, I never could manage to connect. Although I may be giving up the sport because of my bad shoulder, it was good to make that explanation. I wanted to see if Mike had gone nuts from his CT work, but it turns out that investigations are much more satisfying than HUMINT, so Mike is cool. Mario was his usual cool, leader-of-men self, and he actually got me to fetch him a beer. There's something very clever going on in that dude's head that I might figure out one day. 

I wanted to ditch the Mass. I really have a bad attitude about what I perceive to be an unholy amount of tinkering with the traditional wordings of professions of faith. It truly, truly unnerves me. Especially when I am so apt to want to get into extraordinarily gritty philosophical and theological discussions. The only person I got into that dimension was Phillip with whom I now have a new double bond - one through psychology and the other through Vermont. But I did end up in the chapel after all having not driven slow enough from the South Bay to get to the campus. And so took communion having humbled myself in realizing how many of us have died. 

I promised Dennis that I would attend his next function. I will. I misspoke to Rob about Mayfield. I knew I was connected somehow and I thought it was through Richard. It turns out that my sister Kay is a teacher there, duh. Richard went to Campbell Hall. I confessed to Robert why exactly I am no longer a 'liberal', basically because I can't stand radicalism, and well, I used to be radical. I promised Vernon, whose wife is lovely, that I can perhaps enter into a longer term discussion about how to think about the tools I'd love to provide him with. I once again said nothing of consequence to Pat whose charm is immediate and disarming. 

What I didn't realize was that Steve and I were so much alike politically - to the extent that I am 'political' any longer. And here is what I would like him to understand, among other things. It may be that more cities have to fail, and it's very difficult to predict what level of failure, failure is. There's a longer and deeper story here, but I guess I'll have to handle that separately.

There were other surprises. Andrew and I have similar perceptions about the ballbusting tactics of the Han Chinese, and we absolutely agree that they are bling obsessed. I can tell he's a real gearhead, but we didn't actually talk cars, amazingly. You see I really wanted to poke him about the new Vette and F1 racing here in the States, but perhaps another time. 

I have a very good sense that Weston and I should have long talks. I don't know why, but I am reminded that he has a mischeivous sense of humor. I swear that Dan C. does indeed look like the most interesting man in the world. I only saw Ricardo for a moment, same thing with Roland. I should have spoken to Ben but didn't get around to it, same thing with Dan S. By the time I got around to talking to Al and Rod, I was on old man time - like man I should be in bed but I'm only here now to sober up.

Of course I had to remind Richard that he was absolutely my best friend in high school which he made me immediately, of course you were about it. And I kept shaking my head with amazement at how much Jim looks like the President. I was in surprising violent agreement with everything Thomason said and implied about the overstressed nature of American high school and I think very deeply about the effect it has on my daughters. 

--

I spend too much time outside of the company of such men and the unease I had five years ago in approaching all that was both symbolic and real about that fact melted away this time. I did not spend any time analyzing the fact of our brotherhood or the premises behind it. I simply decided to take it for granted, and so when Jim and Bill made a small point about our absence of color lines I told them they were full of shit. Such things needn't even be mentioned, but it was beautiful to be kissed anyway. I reminded me, immediately of what kind of man I am not but Bill is, and by that I mean radient of love enough to teach the arts to young people. I am way too hard for that. In fact, I told my wife that no matter what happens to me, no matter how rich I get (if that is to be my fate) I will never wear Tommy Bahama - it always reminds me of Weekend At Bernies. But Bill is a member of what I take to be the proper Hawaiian Yacht Club, and he's happy that Ellison will bring more boats to the islands.

Such are conversations, especially when you watch Layne and Tom and Duke and Jimmy, that seem to go on. And I know they are conversations I have missed, taking my own path as I have. I know I am in a serious way, outside of everything, as I have become accustomed to that point of view. That is why this is one of 8000 blog posts - I am talking to myself. Talking to myself sometimes makes me very sure of certain things and sometimes uncertain of very sure things. Finding my old brothers alleviates a great deal. 

Five years ago I became a little bit more determined to get in closer with a few local brothers: Harold, Larry, Phil & Darryl. We had a couple bar nights and a couple smokers at my house. It was therapeutic. It was just magical to share to get loud and be ourselves in a way that life doesn't ordinarily ask us to be - perfectly honest and giving each other a chance to remind us how we can be. This year Don got us to breakfast for Phil's birthday and Ricky was here from Houston and Richard from Chicago. The magic picked right up.

And yet it is occasional. As I struggle with the death of a few men I have known and realize how matter of factly I have dealt with death in both the real and the abstract, I tend to forget that these are dramas others know as well - and for what touchstones of virtue we shared half a lifetime ago we can walk right into our brothers' lives and speak. Tonight it was easy. Ordinarily we don't go there. 

It's on me to make this brotherhood more than occasional. I know that there are more surprises and cross-connections that can be discovered in six hours. But I could hear in Mike's tone something we all seem to understand. We experienced something that is more increasingly rare today. And there will come a day when we all face death in the realization that people will see it as something more or less expected. Our rarity, our uniqueness... I am reminded that we are uncommon with a necessary quality in common. 

I don't know how many folks read this blog - I can only assume that more of my old classmates will than do ordinarily. I write this way less and less nowadays - I have always expected this arena to be of the continuing conversation. I already discount that happening here; unfair perhaps, but then so is missing brotherhood. There are so many conversations I started that I will complete in my own speculations until we all meet again and that may have to suffice. My brotherhood is not contingent, but it is occasional.  And this was an occasion for all of us to remember what care can be (because it has been) undertaken for our best interests as young men. As always, that is how civilization is born and how it is borne. 

Goodnight y'all. I'm always here - give me a shout. 

78 - the greatest of great

Puzzles, Mysteries, Rabbit Holes & Black Holes

(Originally Summer 2010)

In my world of problem solving there are four classes of work, puzzles, mysteries, rabbit holes and black holes. Puzzles are those problems where you have all the pieces and you know what the end result will look like. All you have to do to a puzzle is solve it. Puzzles are just a matter of time and effort. Mysteries are tougher. You don't know all of the pieces and you might have to build some of them to get the solution, so you know what things are supposed to be, but how to get from point A to point B is, well, a mystery. Mysteries unravel as time goes on and soon become puzzles, if you're crafty or lucky.

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.

The black hole might sound like an infinite rabbit hole from which there is no escape. But it's actually worse. It's a rabbit hole that you didn't know you were already in. In the argot of the intelligence business, it is the unknown unknown. Not only do you not understand the class of problem, you don't know if you have it, how long you've had it or what you've been doing all this time to make it better or worse. A black hole is where people in the Matrix live, who've never heard of the Matrix. One might equally call a black hole a black swan, but I'm trying to be original here and there is this subtle difference. Whereas a black swan is necessarily a future event upon which much or little might hang, a black hole is a present condition - one whose origins and ends are unknown. Leave it at that.

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Adding to this, I would say that upon the discovery that you have been in a black hole and that is revealed, you get one of those 'everything you know is wrong' moments. In that way it is like a black swan. A black hole moment is like discovering the lyrics to a song you thought you knew all of these years and suddenly you see them printed and you're like 'wow'. Sometimes it changes the meaning of everything you thought. Most of the time, you kind of interpolate yourself out of trouble - because you might not have been that far off with the mumble you mumbled in place of the actual lyrics. But it still warps you because you never knew you had a problem. 

The False Majority

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. 

 

Looking Back On When I...

I pledged Alpha Phi Alpha in 1984. I think that was the year. Maybe it was 85, I honestly don't recall. But somebody raised the question of a kid having a hand in his own destruction. He wanted to pledge, and he found the hazing too rough. If he dropped from the pledge program, he would have the stigma from the fraternity that he wasn't man enough to do it. If he continued and got hurt, he would blame himself for being stupid.

My crazy theory is that it has a lot to do with the way people think about black manhood, and that is why this problem persists in black fraternities. Basically the (bad) idea is that only a black man can teach a black man how to be a black man, and the separate and distinct kernel of that blackness is the 'hard' experience. IE only a 'true brother' will pledge you hard so that you will be tough enough to handle what a 'real black man' will have to face in life. 

To me that is a ghetto mentality no matter how you slice it. Now my line was pledge quite roughly, to the point at which one of our sessions was interrupted by cops asking us pledges out of earshot of the brothers if we were ok. But for me - well, that's what I wanted to do, but I did it without any of the deeper black manhood issues hanging in the balance.

I pledged for several specific reasons but with one overall purpose in mind. That purpose was the make the most out of every big man on campus credibility cookie I could garner. The reasons were as follows.

1. Black unity

2. Alpha affinity

3. My best friend

4. My roommates

On Point One
What I could believe in 1984 was that a black man would be president in my lifetime. What I could not believe is that one would do so without being part of the black Establishment. So my part and parcel of belonging to the frat had a great deal to do with what I said in my interview. "I am going to be part of the black leaders of tomorrow, we're all going in the same direction and we're all going to end up in the same place, I might as well join up today". That illusion was well disabused before I left college, but it seemed like the right idea at the time. I figured out black diversity the hard way, but I did figure it out. If I would have known at that moment what I knew a couple years later, I probably would have not pledged.

On Point Two
This was basically the question 'Why Alpha', and it's basically as much answer as Myers-Briggs would give. Alpha was a personality match. Tradition!, First among equals, arrogant... blah blah. 

On Point Three
One day I was hanging out with my best friend, whom I thought to be one of the smartest guys I knew. He was wearing a cardigan sweater over a white t-shirt. As we got out of his car to go to lunch, he pulled out a pair of black Ray-Bans from his glove compartment. When he put them on, I joked that he looked like an Alpha from a step show. He told me that he was an Alpha. What!? He said it was the hardest thing he ever had to do. Damn. I had to do that.

On Point Four
It turned out that my roommates were going to pledge Alpha. We could study together, we could help each other through the program. We turned out to be the only three out of the pledge class of seven that finished the program.  

On the whole, in retrospect, I'm glad that I pledged undergrad and if I had to do it all over again, it would be a toss-up. I'm sure that if I had to go to college, I would have tried not to care so much about the BMOC cookies, or at least expected a whole lot fewer from the frat. However, the fact that I got to be a national officer in my engineering organization turned out to be the introduction to business travel and the world that made me. It's hard for me to imagine the other me I might have been without that particular introduction to non-geek intelligence. But that's something of another story...

Dreams, Schemes, Prayers, Players & Man's Plans

I don't know what life was like before MLK. I don't know what life was like before Malcolm. I was too young to have experienced either. I know what life was like in my own household - with parents whose minds didn't need much prodding to know what they wanted for me. You see, I cannot imagine that either of those men's minds were full of ideas that never existed before - that their's was an era of great ideas and ours is not. That before them there was nothing and after them only wakes. There is right and wrong. There is stasis and chage. There is grey and hesitation. But there is not progress and there is not regression. 

Some minds are easy to change when they are wrong, such are the minds that bear up our civilization. Some minds refuse to change when they are wrong. Do the combinatorics and calculate the percentages on every subject and you might know the state of the world, but I think the Buddhists and Stoics are right to eschew such global scheming and live in the moment.

A field of red white and blue shivers on the Mall listening to poetry. I heard the iams from the television stumbling my way to the refrigerator this King Day morning. As foolish as I find the very idea of consecrational poems coming from minds younger than those to be consecrated, I heard two words from that fresh face in the January air: 'many prayers'. Many prayers. Many prayers.

Prayer is contemplation of the ultimate in deep meditation. A prayer must take effort because if it can be anything, it is a reckoning with what we know to be true. A prayer must be at long last an acknowledgement and submission to profoundest truth - the truth that serves no man but upon which man's survival depends. In the manner of Christian ethics we submit to God's Grace which flows eternally and we neither earn nor deserve. It is what it is and in prayer it is up to us to recognize. That requires effort and discipline. 

A prayer is not a request. That is a wish. Time spent in preparation for the fulfillment of or arguments in defense of a wish is not prayer, but wishful thinking. Imagining the circumstances under which case the wish comes true is dreaming. It is a fancy, a phancy, a fantasy and the conjures up the fantastic. 

It is often difficult to bridge the space, or quite literally to explain the materiality of change between what has been dreamt and what has been prayed for. We say that dreams come true. We say that prayers are answered. These are passive voice sentences which the human mind attributes any actor in range. God gets most of the blame and praise because a studied God makes more sense than aggregated superstitions and chances. But the instruments of fate are still illusive to us; many claim to be God's hands in action, but we are wise to cast suspicion on such bold pronouncements. Who among us is God's prophet? I dare you. 

Men can scheme. Men can plan and discipline themselves to the tasks of a plan, and make manipulations suitable to the aims of any scheme. We can do so in sunlight or in shadow, but our consequences are real no matter how. We succeed and fail by measurable degrees. We can gauge men's plans and schemes and know who did what according to which plan and under what scheme which tasks were done and which left undone. This is in great contrast to Acts of God, which is nothing more or less than the unfolding of the truth of the Universe, the forces on every boson that ever was, whose materiality is an uncalculable mystery shrowded in infinite distance and unparsably minute fragments of time. But the dramas that guide men's lives and fortunes - we process them swiftly. We inutit it in the arch of an eyebrow. We interpret it in the slouch of a walk. We smell it in desparate breath. We see it written in blood. We know when a family is broken and we know who to blame. We know when a business is collapsed and we know who blew the cash. We know when a building is crumbled or erected, a baby born or a body buried. We know the fathers and mothers of mankinds deeds. We know them because we are them and we know the truth of ourselves whether or not we are apt to admit it. 

--

One of Cobb's Rules is to never underestimate the intelligence of people in power, and over the past few years, since I have abandoned the ebb and flow of politics itself, I have come to understand more about the mind and of psychology. I have come to a clearer undstanding of those deceptions that are planned and those that are products of indiscipline or our mere ability to be fooled. And I pay attention to how we backtrack to explain what appears to be. 

One of the great deceptions is that dreams and prayers are as powerful as scheme and plans. They are not, nor will they ever be, because power is always in the hands of men, and never in the hands of chance. Not even in orbit above the planet are tons of equipment held aloft by chance. Don't imagine that your earthly fate is either, my friend. 

Whomever is speaking, however close or distant from the truth, they will offer dreams or schemes. They will present players or prayers. Plans are the affairs of man from which we can annex action to actor - the rest is the working of wishful thinking, fantasy and the dreams of romantic poets, the seductions of youthful lips whispering wanted whims. And this is now as it has ever been. 

Why do minds change, how do we see the world anew? Is it from a review of our plans, assessment of our tasks, calculation of forcasts versus actuals? Or is it a estimation of dreams come true, fantasies realized, prayers answered? 

I have presented this on a day set aside from work to celebrate a dream, but now that it's done, I am going back to work. 

Social Ceilings and Floors

The other day I thought about somebody I haven't seen in over 35 years. His name is Steve H. and he was, by my reckoning one of the most socially superior people I have ever known. Steve was captain of the swim team and so when I was a frosh, we celebrated at his home in Toluca Lake. (And through these facts, a sleuthier person than I could identify him, sorry Steve).

Or maybe not. You see I couldn't find him for free, and I have been able to find a lot of people online for free. In fact Steve is the first person I was really interested in finding for whom there was no trace whatsoever. And it reminded me of the way I embarassed myself, slightly, in Steve's parlor. 

You see in 'hood terms, I could play piano and I could play tennis. In real terms, no. And so I played a touch of piano, that classic boogie woogie blues that every kid learns, and experience a bit of the clutch the pearls shunning, which I remember as stunning in the moment. I think that if the event had occurred a year earlier, before I had gotten to know any whitefolks at all, it might have struck deeper. 

I will inquire about Steve at the reunion, some classmates or teachers might recall the H's considering what must have been some significant wealth they appeared to have and the tendency of private educational institutions to favor such families over more market-oriented funding sources. I think, quite frankly, that he has disappeared way over my head through a ceiling that is far from transparent. I would guess that he has, or has become a good lawyer and that that whole internet thing is beneath them.

I liked Steve. He was the kind of kid that we seem genuinely glad to know exists though we doubt them. Like pro-baller 'Admiral' David Robinson he seemed too goodie to be true and as such attracted the kinds of taunts juvenile kids and adults tend to dish. He was a freckle-faced redhead, good-natured, straight A kind of kid. His father was literally restoring a P-51 Mustang fighter plane in his garage, and he lived in a mansion on a lake. I don't know what happens to kids like that - they tend to disappear from my life. And I presume that they disappear up.

--

A year ago I visited the old neighborhood having attended the year previously the 50th birthday party of my first grade girlfriend. Her big 50 was such a success, and we all enjoyed hearing stories of the old 'hood so much, that she decided to do it again right at the old neighborhood gym. So on my way there I stopped in the old street and knocked on the door of Sims, one of the three boys exactly my age I grew up with as a teen. Sims had a picture of Mike T. on the mantle. 

I didn't like Mike T. Nobody respected him. His bigger brother, who was maybe a half brother, beat him up and his father was a drunk and beat him up too. T had a bad attitude and he couldn't play football, or basketball. He was just on the large size of scrawny, cursed and mumbled all the time, got the words to songs all wrong and was constantly scratching his balls. We figured he had the itch. 

I didn't recognize T in the picture on Sims' mantle but commented on his loud ugly yellow jumpsuit. It took Sims about five minutes of rolling on the floor laughing and recovering himself to tell my dumb ass that that was a prison uniform and T was in for murder. It was a visitation photograph of him with his teenaged daughter. Oh.

There have been people I used to know that my brother the cop has arrested, and when I left the old neighborhood, I could have probably guessed which of us would end up 'dead or in jail'. Mike T was for certain. 

I think about Mike as one of the knuckleheads who became famous when NWA became famous. Their every bit of style, and everything 'gangsta' that came out of Los Angeles came from them being little brothers to guys like Sims and I. We never made a dime from our cultural influence - that all landed on Ice Cube's crafty hands, but the whole gangsta reality came from the likes of T, who sunk through the floor.  I wouldn't expect to find him on the internet either, not that I would be looking.

--

I had a good couple hours hanging out with my 16 year old daughter today, and as we commonly do, we talked about her generation. We have great conversations and in this one agreed that maybe America isn't going to hell, but we sure do get tired of people who have lost their faith. Their whining is not only tolerated but broadcast, and it grates on our nerves. She told me that we have raised 'fence children' who listen to a lot of good, bad and ugly without getting overly affected by it. She's right. We're all very socially observant, but we articulate neutrally on only pontificate on our own dime. For that reason, I think we'll all see our way through.

On the shelf to my right is the 1955 Funk & Wagnell's edition of Emily Post. I think that perhaps 10% of its prescriptions are known and fewer still understood. Something's up with social mobility. Something negative. I think more Americans are beginning to take all of this zombie stuff a bit more seriously, and dish around the Constitution a little more casually and hate each other a bit more easily. Ceilings and floors are getting thicker, and it's not about 'income equality', it's about trust. 

These days I'm reading Schneier's latest two books. They are not so much news as reminders and frameworks. Good stuff. 

The (Old) Guide to Cobb - Concepts & Terms

Cobbian Terms

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Who is Cobb? What is Cobb?
 Cobb is my second middle name. I am Michael David Cobb Bowen. Most people don't have two middle names. But it is a conservative thing and a tradition in my family to have middle names. To have two, I suppose is double, and Cobb is definitely the most conservative part of my name. So when I decided to blog from an Old School Conservative point of view and yet keep it more personal than ideological I went with Cobb.

Lots of people call me Cobb, and that's OK. It is my name.

Cobb is the name of the blog. I don't speak of myself in the third person as Cobb, I only speak of Cobb, the blog. 

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The Black Political Context  Not only has the black monolith been broken, so has the political solidarity of 'the' black community. I see it this way. Those who have sought to inherit the mantle of the black political vanguard, ostensibly the 'Talented Tenth' have split into three camps.

The majority camp is the Liberal Left. They are aligned with Democrats and Greens. They are about 60%. The majority of blacks vote with them. The second camp is the Progressive Independent camp. They tend to be unaligned. They are about 25% The third camp is the Conservative camp who are aligned with Republicans and Libertarians. They are about 15%.

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What was the original purpose of Cobb? The purpose of Cobb is threefold. First and foremost it is to satisfy my craving to write and engage with everybody far beyond the contexts that everyday life provides. I am a writer and I love to write.

Secondly, it is to address a political agenda.

Thirdly Cobb addresses a cultural agenda.

I try to exemplify in a personal and analytical fashion, the orientation of black Conservative thinking in my generation. While I am a bit unusual as a writer, I think of my situation within America as fairly representative of a typical upper middle class black American suburban family. I think that the distance between mainstream conservatism and black conservatism is short.

In this personal mode of expression, I seek to break down stereotypes about who Conservatives are and how they come to support their ideological positions and I discuss in a Socratic dialog the issues of the day.

Additionally, I do so with particular care and respect for black Progressive politics. I seek to make the differences clear and to talk about the mistakes of Progressivism. As for the black Left, I attempt to keep my disdain from making me tell lies about them, but much of the respect is gone.

With regard to black politics, Cobb is something of a Talented Tenth / Old School project. I think of my audience as all folks who are particularly interested in the intersection of culture and politics and particularly the evolution of black politics in the post-Jim Crow era of American history. I am doing my share to advocate towards an organic black conservative politics in American life.

What is Cobb about now? (2010 & beyond)
Cobb stands as a factotum tracking where I’ve been and my intellectual interests over time. At the current time it serves as a testbed for thought experiments and expository essays about:
Global Economy
Political Philosophy

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Cobb is Not 

Cobb is not about changing or improving race relations. If you can't get along with other ethnics that's your problem. Cobb is not 'for blacks only' it is open source black thought straight from this horse's mouth. If you can't read English, you will find yourself severely handicapped. Cobb is not sponsored by any ideological group. It's syndicated by blog aggregators. Cobb does not coddle. Cobb is not everything about Michael Bowen, it's a project. It had a beginning and it will end. Cobb is not afraid to use profanity. Cobb is not for kids. And Cobb is not Boohab.

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The Old School  

The Old School is a somewhat mythical orientation of conservative black culture and politics. You know it when you see it. The Old School is Christian, it is family oriented, it is unapologetic and bold, it is organic and self-sufficient. It takes little for granted and is ready to go down swinging. It is deeply American and deeply black. It is strong and proud, stubborn and graceful. I think of it engrained in the values and person of my grandparents who beat polio and got optimistically married during the Great Depression. The Old School includes but is not limited
to the Talented Tenth. Whereas the Tenth is on a noble mission, the Old School tends to mind it's own business.

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African Americans  

Black is to African American as Catholic is to Christian. Black is a flavor. African American is a demographic description. Black has meaning, subtlety and context. African American is just a huge bunch of undifferentiated people of African descent.

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Blackfolks & Whitefolks  

Blackfolks are folks who call themselves black. Whitefolks are folks who call themselves white. I am not trying to be demographically accurate or politically correct. I'm just speaking about average Americans with an average amount of racial consciousness who know they fit into one or the other bucket.

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Aggregation
 Aggregation is the black dream of the beloved community in the upper and upper middle classes. It is the purposeful establishment of a pro-black old money Establshishment in the tradition of American money, philanthropy and social exclusivity. It is definitely a Talented Tenth dream.

The 'Aggregate Community' is the next evolution of the Talented Tenth. They will be those who, for better or worse, take control of the legacy of African American history and life. I think the maintenance of this aspect of black history is at risk because of the failure of many African Americans to accurately represent the Old School.

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Statistical Morality
Americans tend to speak about the status of groups of people in statistical terms in order to introduce themselves to subjects concerning them. This is troublesome for two reasons. On the one hand it traffics in stereotypes and reverse-stereotypes about in-groups and out-groups, but does not deal with causality or individuals. It therefore cheapens the quality of discussion and sets up litmus tests and glass ceilings and false dichotomies. Secondly it does not begin to approach with respect to which the dynamic in question is transient. It goes against the principle of discovery.

For these reasons I find sociology to be a discipline that warrants suspicion, the same kind of suspicion economics warrants. However I find that economists tend to be a bit less dogmatic and more self-deprecating in their predictions than sociologists. That is because I believe economists have a great deal more accurate and detailed data than sociologists and thus realize how contingent their models are on complexities beyond reckoning.

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Sherwood Forest
 Sherwood Forest is a metaphor for the less than civilized parts of the black diaspora and of the world in general. It is a place where untoward behavior is the norm and where. as Slick Rick would say "This type of shit happens every day."

The proper attitude to have towards Sherwood Forest and its denizens is benign contempt, for just beyond the edge of the woods is civilization and everyone from the woods are welcome to join. That means, however, that they must live by rules they didn't create in order to benefit from the civilization they didn't create. This also means that those who live outside of Sherwood Forest, be they master or serf, has little business worrying themselves about the dastardly and pathetic deeds which go down there.

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Scientific Animism
 Scientific Animism is the hightened and superstitious belief in information that is presented by scientists or any expert by people unwilling and/or unable to determine the truth value of that information. 'A recent university study shows that...' is an example of a type of story that is taken as an indisputable fact by people who never show an interest in critical thinking. Scientific Animism is a class of logical fallacy of the appeal to authority but is unique that it makes a fetish of scientific discovery without using the scientific method. It takes theory as fact, and finding as universal.

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Eclexia  Eclexia is a sin.

"A little bit of everything adds up to a whole lot of nothing."

-- Cobb's Rule #1

There is probably no such word as 'eclexia', I just made it up, but the sin is real. It is the fatal attraction to novelty and change. It is the mindless sacrifice of tradition at the alter of the new. It is the inability to find satisfaction in the settled.

Eclexia is characterized by a restless antipathy to the established and an overweening desire to get away from it. The eclexic is eclectic to a fault. Their fatal flaw is that once the novelty of the thing has worn off, once it becomes established, their interest and respect fades rapidly.

Eclexia is a sin because it is fundamentally disrespectful of the efforts made by people who bother to study something specific. It acts against collaboration in solving standing problems. It refuses to focus. Thus the eclexic requires some outre personality which allows him to eschew the 'mundane' tasks that are faced by all of us. In that regard, eclexics are dependent on an established alternative subculture - something that allows them to easily be understood as 'cutting edge' or 'radical' even if they are not talented or committed in any way.

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Cobb's Operating Theories

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The Civil Rights Movement Won 

And there is no going back. The Jim Crow era of America is over. But yeah we have stragglers. They are a distraction, and all such reporting on that distraction is overkill.

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Black Culture is Transparent  

There is essentially nothing about black culture that isn't in the public sphere. There is no 'dirty laundry', it's all public domain. Blackfolks have no secrets worth hiding. There are no 'black things' that other people can't understand, there are only contexts that other people (and black people) are too lazy to understand.

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The Black Monolith is Broken  

There is no single class of blackfolks. There is no single religion for blackfolks. There is no single 'Black Community'. There is no single political orientation, no single mode of cultural expression, no single dialect and no single region of the country for blackfolks. If you see one, then you are thinking in stereotypes.

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Economics Beats Politics
 There is no political agenda for black empowerment that will ever have any more force than that of the economy.

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Racists Are a Minority  

The overwhelming majority of Americans do not want to be racist or be considered racist. There's no money in it, no social benefit in it, and considerable risk.

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Integration Wins  

There is no separated destiny for African America. As America goes, so goes those with the round nose.

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Cobb's Enduring Themes

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Support Your Local Police  

There is no such thing as 'black on black crime'. There are good guys and there are bad guys. There is no reason to try to invent new social experiments.

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Marches are for Illiterates  

If you don't have a pitchfork, torch or billy club, stay off the streets. There is no such thing as a 'political' street. America is a republic, not a township. Write a blog, write your congressmen, get on public access.

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American Metaphors

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Try Strawberry  

America is like McDonald's. Everybody knows the menu is big, but their selections generally don't change. In a lifetime of drinking chocolate shakes, how many times do you select strawberry? People like to complain about America, just as they claim McDonald's is bad for you. What is more accurate is that among a wide variety of choices, they are responsible for poor ones, and after all haven't cooked for themselves.

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The Mercedes Birthright  

Every American inherits a Mercedes Benz at birth. It is the infrastructure of the American system. However, it is up on blocks, the wheels are off, and there is no gas in the tank. You can sit behind the wheel in comfort and pretend that you are driving. You can fall asleep in the back seat, roll up the windows and ignore the world. But you have no idea about the real experience of America until you figure out how to get some wheels and mount them, get that car off the blocks and figure out how to get some gas into that engine. If you figure that out, you'll be able to drive 100 miles per hour. But if you don't bother, you walk like everyone else.

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The Elephant's Right of Way

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Cobbian Personnae

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Them Bowens
The Spousal Unit is my wife.
Boy is my son.
Scholar is my elder daughter.
Sprite is my younger daughter.

Doc is my brother, the LAPD officer
Deet is my brother, the Obama fanatic
Pops, my father, the retired urban studies professor and God fearing Lefty
Moms, my mother, the in-home caregiver and evangelical actress.
Dutz, my dear dreadlocked sister, married to
Mr. T, my piecred college professor brother in law

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Cobbian Associates, Partners & Antagonists
The Existential Partners: These are men I might very well be had my life taken a different turn or God given me real talent.
    Nulan = Craig Nulan, mad genius, hermetic mystic & ethical scold
    Spence = Lester Spence,  superdad, dance floor dervish & brilliant academic
    EC = E.C. Hopkins, perfect gentleman, philosopher king & citizen soldier
    Iz = Jimi Izrael, urban griot, fearless mensch & starchild personified
    Lee =  ubergeek, industrious ai researcher & black felix unger
    Playa = man's man, lady's man & world class unix hacker
    George = George Kelly, aesthetic adept, perfect host & genuine philanthropist

Fish = Michael Fisher, first order black capitalist & machiavel
FN = Wayne, the Field Negro, the last angry black man
P6 = Himself
DS = Darkstar, destroyer of wishful thinking
BB = Brotherbrown, old friend from the neighborhood

Stretch = drinking buddy, frat brother & firefighter
Mr Jones = family friend, civic patriarch & private banker

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Cobb's Rules

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cobb

1. A little bit of everything adds up to a whole lot of nothing.
2. There is Marriage, and there is everything else.
3. Talk what you know.
4. Civilization is where you put it.
5. Don't second guess people.
6. Always have stretch goals.
7. Never trust anyone whose shoes cost more than your whole day's pay.
8. An enemy is someone who doesn't mind if you fail.
9. It's better to be the King of a small hill, than a Prince at a higher elevation.
10. An early start beats fast running.
11. Perfect is the enemy of good.
12. The Planet is fine.
13. None of your ideas are any good until somebody else can take advantage of them without your permission.
14. People don't have weakenesses so much as they overuse their strengths.
15. If the poor and oppressed knew how to work the system, they wouldn't be poor and oppressed.
16. It is never a good idea to underestimate the intelligence of people in power.

Corollary Wisdom

What do you give a man who has everything? An irresistable opportunity to throw it all away.

The Devil's Advocate only argues because he is disgusted and contemptuous.

No matter where you park your car, the birds will always find it.

How to Handle Black People: A Beginner's Manual

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Cobb's Bitter Enemies

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 Mr. Stupid
 I am the enemy of empowered ignorance.

The Coalition of the Damned  

People who spend all of their time jumping on anti-establishment bandwagons are a drag on politics and reason.

The Dainty Dillitantes  

I'm sick and tired of so-called adults who are shocked at the barbarity of human beings. Beware of the phrase "I would like to think that.." It is by definition, wishful thinking. Also watch for "I can't believe that in (insert year hear) we still have..."

The Eclexic Relativists  

The first thing you will notice about these folks is that they will go anywhere in the planet (but mostly to Sherwood Forest) to come up with a counterexample which satisfies their arguments. You can't drive your SUV because the Bambuti Pygmies of the Ituri Rainforest don't need them. Their multicultured murals may be nice to look at, but their ideas are about as thin as the paint.

The Eternal Barbarians  

Also known as 'The Element'. Thugs, gangsters, pimps, whores, perverts, derelicts, haters, liars, crooks, con men and their hangers-on and wannabees.

The Tribalists 

People who believe that race, ethnicity, country of origin, or sexual preference are a permanent feature of the human soul and should be recognized as such in law and standing are the bitter enemies of humanity itself.

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Coalition of the Damned

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Cobb: The Coalition of the Damned
The Coalition of the Damned. People in Lebanon are attending the funeral of their former prime minister. He was assassinated by a suicide bomber with a car ...

 

Cobb: Humiliation & Fortitude

So things hang in the balance for the parties directly invovled and activism on either side ratchets up the attention given. Depending on which way this thing goes, I may have to worry about my niece making a bad name for herself among the cop fraternities of Providence. Sounds like 1966.

If I had my way, I'd just call the whole thing off. Cop families wouldn't have to worry about whether dad has a job, student families wouldn't have to worry about whether son has an education. Everybody gets chewed out and humiliated and all parties recognize how much they need mutual respect. Humiliation this time, fortitude next time.

Cobb: Devin's Advocates

There is a difference between criticizing the system and dogging the system, and those who might bother to read the DA's report might notice that there are better ways to address the problem than to fire a scapegoated symbolic officer. In fact, Bratton has done so in retraining the force with regards to the standard felony stop. In one scenario, officers will park their cruiser within 10 feet of the back bumper of the suspect's vehicle in such a way that the car will not have enough space to pick up enough speed to be deadly. I know this because my brother's a cop and has been retrained. But I wonder if those who dog the system know that reform has already taken place. I imagine that if they were constructively engaged with the LAPD, they would know such things, but that is not the aim of Tony Muhammad, nor any other unelected mouthpiece of the Coalition.

It must be sad not to know how wrong you are, how politically ineffective are the desires you have been exhorted to champion. It must be frustrating to be in such a state of mind that you only feel you can gain if the police lose. But no matter how sad and frustrating things get for the Coalition of the Damned, they're simply wrong. They have picked a poor set of spokesmen and a poor set {Stanley Miller, Devin Brown, Tookie} of symbolic victims. I hope, for their sake, sooner or later they'll determine that they're on the wrong te

Cobb: Make Me!

Doc's patience is being tried by knucklehead members of the Coalition of the Damned. Mine too.

Their new prophet of rage, Tony Muhammad, blasted cops for not raising the dead. Well actually, that's not the whole truth, he blasted firemen for not raising the dead. Well, that's not the whole truth either, because Tony Muhammad wanted to raise a ruckus at the funeral of the dead homie in question as an opportunity to get in cops' faces. That's more like it. And so when he and his bodyguards (why do you bring bodyguards to a funeral? ) didn't disperse at the order of the police the conversation went south.

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Cobb's Terminology

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Classes of Racism

The reasoning behind it has to do with the notion that all racist acts are not equal either in intent or effect. The state does have a compelling interest in insuring that society does not exclude groups but I don't see that it is useful in policing all instances of racist discriminations. For this reason I have come up with three classes of racist offense. These of course are informal and don't stand up to legalistic definitions but you should get the picture:

Class Three - Background Noise

This will include all such insults, slights and disrespect as is generally expected to be found everywhere in this nation. Examples include but are not limited to being ignored by cabbies, flying confederate flags, nazi propaganda, being mistaken for the help, being shown costume jewelry, being asked one's opinion of, or to account for the opinions of the Fungibles, and most nigger calls.

Class Two - Political Intransigence

Class Two racism involves denials of public accomodation or private standing which are not criminal, yet grossly unfair and unjust. Such acts would include imposition of glass cielings, racial profiling, white flight, medical misdiagnosis, educational tracking, false arrest, false imprisonment, racist vois dire, racist jury nullification, denials of service with plausible deniability, any institutional individual or institutional racism which must be tried in civil courts and all such active bigotry one associates with hate groups which fall short of incitement.

Class One - Crime

Theft, criminal defamation, cross burnings (now), hate crimes, murder, rape & all that stuff for which America has never made any extraordinary effort to repair.

 

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Cobb: Effective Resonance

Colorblindness cripples. How much it does so becomes apparent when its principles are applied without nuance. The plaintiffs who argued their case before the Supreme Court this week sounded to me to be of the persuasion that there should absolutely be no regard to color. This is a problem.

I'm not close enough to the law to understand what the Constitution directs historically with regard to its ability to percieve race but I do have a principle I think which ought to be applied. I call the idea 'effective resonance'.

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Cobb: The Old School Core Values

The Old School Core Values

Pride

We are African Americans of all backgrounds and ethnicities. We are proud of our heritage, and respect the lives, triumphs and tribulations of our forebears in this country and beyond. We aim to represent their greatest hopes for us and honor their memory.

Patriotism

The United States of America is our home, not simply by default but by choice. We take our duty to our home seriously and we defend it. We seek to improve it by our work and values and leave it better than we found it.

Family

We are extended families and we put family first. It is the primary organization to which our lives are dedicated. We fight for the proper upbringing of our children. We demand respect and consideration of our elders. We love and support our brothers and sisters.

Industry

We work twice as hard and sometimes get half as far, but we work with dignity and we expect and enjoy our rewards. We are not materialistic but we know the value of a dollar. We seek self-improvement through creativity, dedication and effort in our jobs, businesses and partnerships.

Piety

We have abiding faith in God and the principles of righteousness. We strive to be true to transcendent values and take the long view of our purpose on Earth. We conduct ourselves as vessels of spirit and we guard our own souls and the souls of others from corruption.

Liberty

We believe in the rule of law and rights of people to be free and to determine their own fate. We fight tyranny and oppression of all kinds keeping in mind the battles of those who struggled and died that we might be free.

Pluralism

We believe in a tolerant and open society, and we welcome all people to enjoy its benefits and responsibilities.

I've been thinking about a simpler way to express that perplexing thing that is my Conservatism. Yesterday somebody asked me about why I'm a Republican, suggesting that I'm a minority within a minority. I quickly replied that, no in fact I'm in the majority party whose president was re-elected, and then we (actually) went down that path of whether the President is legitimately the President. But then I got to the point of her question and headed back towards my epiphanies of 2003 which include references to Stalinism and respect for the middle class. Nothing I could explain without appearing to be an egghead, which I am, but every brilliant idea needs an elevator pitch.

For now, I'll stick to the core values, but I'm working on the pitch.