Cobb

Conformity

It just occurred to me that if religious conservatives were hounding gays to get married in the eyes of God, they'd be a lot more hesitant to agitate for it.

NPR finally aired the gay man I thought I'd never hear in this, the one who said none of his gay friends were hustling down to city hall, that the whole point of coming out of the closet was to avoid getting pestered about marriage - that marriage is the ultimate conformity and that the gay lifestyle was an alternative to that.

Thank you.

Conversion

Been Down

Obviously Cobb has been out of commission for four days. It's a long and complicated story about lost passwords, Dreamhost's down control panel, Yahoo's inability to answer the phone and a domain registry organization in Melbourne. All's well that ends well, I suppose.

Proposal

Where Ice Cream Comes From

In My Sweaty Palm

I have in my hand, the first check paid from the first invoice from my first customer for the new business I started this year. If you told me this would be the case six months ago I wouldn't have believed it. I was ready to sell out to the Man and get back on the corporate treadmill. But now I am my own boss, once again. I'm not leaving this business until I can sell it for a nice chunk of change.

Tomorrow, I'm heading over to Wells Fargo in Redondo to sit down with my officer, Diana and have a cup of coffee while she gets me immediate credit on this fat check. Then I'm going to head over to Comp USA and buy that HP 6110 that I've been needing for 6 months.

And then I'm going to buy myself an ice cream cone.

Whatevers to That

Since I have wasted an entirely good day off work not working and blogging instead, I may as well keep bloviating with a list of things that are somewhat interesting but not really:

• Water on Mars
  Several billion years ago. So what? Here is definitely a case where fiction is far more interesting than truth.
• Martha Stewart Guilty
  You think she'll go to jail? Hm, in five years maybe she can trade stories with Kobe Bryant. There's got to be a market for consulting the rich and famous as they prepare for life in the big house. Or maybe I already saw that on the Discovery Channel.
• Congressional Computers Lack Security
  What a shock. This merits a gate suffix? Puhlease.
• Bush Uses 9/11 Photos
  That's really tacky and I should kick him for it, but whatever. I don't watch TV, it didn't affect me.
• Howard Stern Booted from Clearchannel
  Boo hoo.
• Jayson Blair is Published
  Celebrity drives. Ethics is in the trunk. What else is new?

If there's anything else that has fallen beneath the radar of my elevated sensibilities, whatever to that as well.

Sandra Tsing Loh, Unperson

NPR's Gen X yuppie ditz, Sandra Tsing Loh, has been disappeared from the airwaves. Maybe this FCC overreach is not such a bad idea, for a season at least. The question is, when are we going to be rid of Dr. Laura? No time soon, I'm afraid. In the meantime serious people, as opposed to the silly, can have a breath of fresh air as the airwaves in the vicinity of KCRW, Santa Monica will remain blissfully free of Loh's annoying foibles.

The reason? A dirty word.

When you get old enough to stare ugliness in the face enough times, it must make you a believer in karma. Not enough good things happen in this world for the right and proper reasons and we Americans are fairly neurotic because of that. This is why our politics are so crazed, people want to prove that something John Kerry said 30 years ago is exactly the same position it is today. Isn't it ironic that the people most frenetic about such consistencies are liberal atheists? If you want consistency, you might consider religious dogma. Outside of this you should get used to being disappointed and not having the appropriate causalities you desire. Sure it's good that Bush got rid of Saddam, but if the wrong reasons harsh your mellow dude, you're just going to have to get over it. Similarly, Loh is gone for saying 'fuck' on the air, but she should have been 86'd for her (dare I say twinkie?) mind-numbing superficiality. I'll get over my anguish.

I have my gripes with Ruth Seymour dating back to her ruthless badgering of Muslim guests and callers during the first Gulf War, so I long ago switched to Pasadena's KPCC. But I give her a pat on the back for this one. Good call, Ruth.

Addendum to Loh. Lenny Bruce was funny. You're not.

Aegis & Causality

MK at Parablemania argues that gay marriage is indeed a cause of the decline and failure of marriage as we now know it. Citing the kind of bastardy stats usually hurled at our own Negro population attacks Andrew Sullivan's dismissal of causality of the decline of Nordic society.

Marriage in Nordland is in severe decline. In 2002, an extraordinary 82.27 percent of first-born children in Nordland were born out-of-wedlock. A "mere" 67.29 percent of all children born in Nordland in 2002 were born out-of-wedlock. As I explained in "The End of Marriage in Scandinavia," many of these births are to unmarried, but cohabiting, couples. Yet cohabiting couples in Scandinavia break up at two to three times the rate of married couples. Since the Norwegian tendency to marry after the second child is gradually giving way, it is likely that the 67-percent figure for all out-of-wedlock births will someday catch up to the 82-percent figure for first-born out-of-wedlock births. At that point, marriage in Nordland will be effectively dead.
Now consider the county of Nord-Troendelag, which is bordered by NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology). NTNU is where Kari Moxnes and Kari Melby teach � two radical pro-gay marriage social scientists. Nord-Troendelag is like Massachusetts � a socially liberal state influenced by left-leaning institutions of higher learning. In Nord-Troendelag in 2002, the out-of-wedlock birthrate for first-born children was 83.27 percent. The out-of-wedlock birthrate for all children was 66.85 percent. These rates are far higher than the rates for Norway as a whole.

When we look at Nordland and Nord-Troendelag � the Vermont and Massachusetts of Norway � we are peering as far as we can into the future of marriage in a world where gay marriage is almost totally accepted. What we see is a place where marriage itself has almost totally disappeared.

I've never quite taken this argument seriously, but now I am having a second look.

Farewell Spaulding

Spaulding Gray is dead.

He washed up on shore in black courderoy pants, a fairly uninspiring way to be found. An unfitting end to a life of inspired honesty, and yet an honest one. It wasn't surprising. He told his family and friends that he would take his own life, and so he did.

Gray meant a lot to me as a writer with self in the subject. I wonder if he wrote his own eulogy somewhere, somehow it seems impossible for anyone other than him to tell us about him. And yet no writer ever knows how their work will effect others, so every tangent from his point of departure is his work in process. But he's no longer part of the process. Life isn't fair, and death can be sudden but reflection goes on. As we reflect on Spaulding Gray's reflections of himself, we are called to honest testimony of our own humanity and bridging the distance between lives lived and truth told.

Farewell Spaulding.

Black Business Assn

Extended Family

My brother's ex-wife's fiance's sister is one of the top highschool basketballers in the nation. Even thought she's just a sophomore, according to what I've heard, she's good enough for everyone to start counting WNBA chickens. This is worrysome.

I only know one guy, with whom I haven't spoken in some time, who is a honest to goodness sports dad who has had the mixed blessing of his kids being potential pro athletes. So I am way out of my depth talking to G, the baller's dad, about the subject. He's apparently something of a phenomenal coach in California women's basketball.

Anyway, I suppose I'll get to know them and the whole thing better. I'm just really not prepared for basketball zillionaires in the family.

All Apologies

I have been a mask of myself over the past few posts and I'm not particularly proud. What I have said in my litmus test about profanity is selfish and lazy. So I hereby pledge to work harder to avoid profanity.

As I drove this morning to pick up my mother from the clinic (sigh), I continued to fume about Ironbear and what his resignation represents, writ large sociologically. But I'm not going to indulge that here - just see Bell's Rules. The next moment I reviewed my beatdown of Acidman/JarheadDad and it came back to the N Word.

If you have a problem with a hideously objectionable individual who happens to be your boss at the corporation, you might choose to call him 'a running dog of the imperial capitalist class'. If you chose those words, you would be hard pressed to convince anybody that you were anything but a communist of some sort. Likewise, if you had a problem with a hideously objectionable individual who happens to be African American and you choose to call him 'a nigger' you can't convince anyone with an ounce of brains that your not some sort of racist.

Our choice of words mark us.

I've been XBoxing Live for a few months- actually a year, and it's time to renew my subscription - and recently I've noticed how annoying it is for me to play with adolescents intent on proving their mastery of curses, the latest and most annoying perjorative which is "That's so gay."

I get really tired of this rabble, and I can't tell you how often I drive by churches and temples wanting to be inside where the utterances are more profound than profane. It's not that I am seeking safety from offense, but respite. It's unfortunate, all this mindless anger, all this witless expression, and the dissonance it creates saddens me. People curse and spit and throw plates of linguini. Their limited eloquence cannot bear the weight of their passion and so they are ignored. I can do better, and so I will.

In this, I am not trying to be a role-monkey. I'm simply trying to discipline myself and do what I know I am capable of doing. As I said, I look on the last few days of posts and I can't say that I am proud of the way I've said things, knowing I had just run out of patience and let a 'fuck' suffice.

What's done is done. The future awaits.

Parablemania: A Kindred Spirit

I've just discovered Parablemania. I like it. I think that I have stumbled upon a treasure, a place where theologists and ministers post and discuss ethics. Beauty.

Naturally, I'm following remarks on the Gibson film and same-sex marriage.

Viral Superdistribution

This is a big idea.

On NPR Sunday's "On The Media" show they reported a distributor in Mexico which targets bootlegger's networks and co-opts them. There's some impurities in this method because it uses the Federales to help the business target these resellers, but the idea is perfect. Manufacturers can profit from a distribution model that uses the very same guys who peddle bootlegs on the streets. Four bucks per DVD? Yep. They do it, and the quality is better (obviously) than those taken by handicam in theatres.

This is the kind of business I could really go for myself.

Libertarian Socialists

Here's what I honestly want to know, if somebody can help me out. What do they teach about the role of taxation in business schools these days?

When I started reading management theory and the business press in the early 80s we were obsessing over beating the Japanese and modernizing American business management practice. There were essentially two schools, Deming and Hammer. Big business started implementing supply chain tracking and kan ban methodologies and other JIT practices. Manufacturers reduced the number of vendors, the ISO 9000 regimes came into practice. CAD/CAM and factory floor automation investments were being made. And of course all the stuff in my field management computing were all the ingredients being mixed together to make American companies fiercely competitive on the global scene.

These are the kinds of innovations that management has been using. So why is it that all we ever hear about from libertarians in particular is that what we really need is deregulation and tax abatement. Do they know the first thing about how to make profits or are they really just shills for corporate welfare?

Tell me, because I think they are just making excuses for businesses to vote themselves into profitability, and are thus nothing more than socialists for the business class.

Four

Public Intimacy

I just volunteered a bit of information with a meta tag cleverly named 'ICBM' which denotes my GPS coordinates. It's curious that I have done so as well as Orkutrified myself. That's a lot of information.

I don't know that it's particularly useful though. I've always talked about the economy of frequent flyer miles as the ultimate 'invasion of privacy'. It illustrates the paradox of personal information.

As much as I reveal here, I couldn't tell you with any certainty that there have been more than 1000 unique individuals who have ever bothered to read Cobb.

We truly are alone in the world.

Backbiting

Just another backbiting moment with regard to gay marriage. I still say it's mostly about money and social overreach. Here's an intersting tidbit from Hit & Run.

Or take the issue of estate taxes. Right now, a wealthy 80-year-old widow can leave all of her property tax-free to a 20-year-old boy toy if she marries him a month before her death. If the same widow wills her property to, say, her niece who has been living with her and providing constant care and companionship for 10 years, the niece will have to pay a huge estate tax. Where is the justice in that?

On the positive side, perhaps the rage over gay marriage, like that of feminism and contraception, will prompt us to review what it is we actually believe about marriage - and how consistently (or not) our system of laws treats marrieds. I welcome that.

Loony Libertarians

I scored 18 on The Libertarian Purity Test. It's amazing to me that there would be anyone who scored more than 50 points. What are such people like?

Lucy

You are Lucy!


Which Peanuts Character are You?
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Looking For Trouble

I'm in a snitty mood this evening. This is me today, wearing my grey cutoff shorts, my Trojans football jersey (XXL) my red bandana and my dark Oakley shades biting an Arturo Fuente torpedo with unbrushed teeth. If I would have had a shotglass with Jack to help me hawk up a good brown spit, it would have topped off the day, but there was none of that at my neice's birthday party.

I was all daddied out from Saturday, and all the babies could tell. Nobody could hand them to me because they all started to scream. Good.

But all this is just burying the lede of what's really got me steamed. It's the Black Commentator again and all the Black Commentator wannabees. I'd bet a nickel that Baldilocks has already beat me to calling bullshit on Aristide's whining about being 'kidnapped' but I really have to rant on this matter.

What is up with all this follow the leader crap? I'm upset at myself oftimes for being topical, but can't these people think of anything original? Where oh where was all the outrage about the Haitian condition 4 weeks ago? There can be no doubt that shit is hitting the fan in every crack of the world, not least of all Haiti but not until Bush can be blamed for something do these cockroaches crawl out and party. Can they not pick a country anywhere on the planet and say two things about it without reference to the great white conspiracy + Colin Powell and Condi Rice? Hell no. That would require them to think.

I'm halfway guilty here. I try to think globally but I realize I can't hold that many nations in my head. I'd like to talk about the government in Cote d'Ivoire and why the French sent troops but the Americans did not, when they were calling for us. I tried. I'd like to talk about the economics of slavery in the Sudan and why we shouldn't try to buy them. I want America to be a proper empire, but my attention span isn't very good in Africa, South America or anywhere else. I just kinda focus on Iraq sometimes. But one thing I don't do is start talking out of my ass when something bad happens without any consideration to what has gone before, specifically I'm willing to listen to people in the blogosphere who study those places.

So it's really annoying to me that I have to hear this spew about Aristide being kidnapped. It's a stretch from people who just need to connect unconnected dots in their wack proofs of GW Bush as the ultimate evil.

Anyway this is uncharacteristic of me and I really should find some of that Jack and just mellow the hell out. I'm really not disappointed so much as annoyed. If I keep up this sour attitude against black political commentators, I'll find myself in agreement with people like David Horowitz, a fate worse than death.

Shaking The Devil's Hand

Can't shake the devil's hand and say you're only kidding.
-- They Might Be Giants

This is the letter that a lot of people hate. People who prefer Arthur Ashe to Muhammed Ali, people who prefer MLK to Malcolm X. This is the letter where the charming well-spoken black man tells them to piss off. You've been warned.

What I'm talking about is respect. Smash called bullshit on Acidman's rant against people he considers no count niggers. Acidman said he doesn't care who he offends. Today I'm going to agree with him. The reason is simple. If he said anything like that around me, he'd get his ass kicked. You know it, I know it everybody knows it. So when it comes down to it, no real intellectual exercise in explication is necessary. Some whitefolks simply don't respect blackfolks and are looking for opportunities to talk about it. So fucking what? It's not like this isn't America and we've never heard that story before.

I was so taken for a loop that this cat Ironbear had such respect for me and yet was confused about what to do with his previous respect for Acidman that I began writing a complicated story about respect. Part of that came out in the "Legacy of Slavery" post from this morning. But let me tell you what, this is an old tired assed story and I need to slap myself for thinking twice. "Gee, I think my friend is a racist, but I think he does have a point about black poeple." Here's my answer. Fuck you and your friend. Don't ask me for permission, because I don't want any part of your sorry ass confusion. If your mother didn't raise you right and you hang out with cracker ass crackers, that's your problem. But your problem ends at my doorstep and you know that, that's why you're tiptoeing. I don't have time for this.

Intellectual clarity is a blessing. So is guts. Don't play around with men with both.

Now here's the abstract conservative part scavenged from the overlong thing I wasted Saturday writing:

The better part of wisdom is to know when to stop asking questions. Wisdom is not only a fullness of knowledge but a paucity of foolishness. Lines must be drawn if one is to respect one's own self. You can't engage everyone or consider the validity of everything. No reliable decisiveness comes from endless curiousity, no strength can be maintained without decisivenss. A little bit of everything adds up to a whole lot of nothing. This to me is the essence of conservatism. It isn't that conservatives are always correct, but that they can only be so wrong.

Support

The Legacy of Slavery

I don't know jack about slavery. Never studied it at all. My cousin the playwrite tells me that it's an absolutely fascinating subject. A while back, he read a great number of letters written by black soldiers in the Union Army to their wives and former masters. He informs me that what most people know about slavery could fit in about 500 words. He's generally right, especially when it comes to me.

Now as a black pundit, I get to talk about 'dysfunction' a lot. Not because I want to, it's just how some people wriggle their way into conversations, especially people with about 500 words to say. Within those 500 are often 'the legacy of slavery'. You remember the Reparations debate, all that stuff before nine-eleven? Anyway, I never went back to slavery. I have been quite satisfied in my understanding of the great disparities between black and white as a succession of oppressions. So I basically go back to my great grandfather's time just before WW1 and the great Flu epidemic in the early days of the Great Migration. But most specifically I take the Great Depression as a starting point.

When Hoover was president, enough blacks and enough whites were dead even in poverty for that to be a ground zero in my arguments. So I am prepared, when I have to talk about it, to say that all the racism just in the last 70 years is sufficient to account for every discrepancy between blacks and whites in America. You don't have to go back to slavery. Just go before the invention of the suburb in the days when every 10th white american was in the Klan. Go to the days of Eugene Debs and all of his whites only unions. Go to the days of the segregated army adn the all-white civil service. That's enough.

Any legacy of slavery that got manifest through the not too distant bad old days is truly deeply embedded in America. So much so, I contend, that it doesn't much matter politically. Nobody is capable of making changes within this democracy capable of undoing something that deep. At this moment I am not prepared to say what any of those embedded qualities ar, other than to suggest that they are not psychological.

So when it comes to the subject of 'dysfunction' and I hear 'legacy of slavery' applied to things like teenage pregnancy, gang violence, drug addiction, etc, my bogosity meter peaks. Now I understand that slavery was very real and very devastating, but any black family that survived the Depression, in my opinion, has overcome. On the other hand racial essentialism is not real, so anyone who attributes such dysfunctions on race stands on even shakier ground.

There is nothing inherited by African Americans via the 'legacy of slavery' that a fair amount of money and social power can't fix.

How much? Your guess is as good as mine. More later.

The Public Restaurant Analogy

An analogy I'll be using from time to time:

The US is a strange place. This is the country where any joe with a decent shirt and fifty bucks can go and eat in a restaurant sitting next to a multimillionaire. They move with equal ease, we all understand the rules of a restaurant as a public place. And yet, sitting within a couple yards of each other, they are not likely to speak in a way that will change their lives significantly. You brush against people with solutions to your problems and you never know it. That is so strange.

Daddy Saturday

Yesterday was quite a day away from the keyboards.

I spent a couple hours at the local Trader Joe's selling Girl Scout Cookies, and I am learning something rather fascinating about fatherhood. There's a kind of love that seems very strange to explain - it must be something general. I feel like I'm becoming wiser about love. Yesterday was one of those occasions when I felt really cool walking hand in hand with my daughter. It's almost precisely the same feeling you get when you and your date hit the party and you know she's the most sizzling babe in the joint. You just get all smug and the look on your face says "She's with me". Except when it's your seven year old daughter in her Brownie vest and pony tails your face says "She's from me."

Pattern

Deep Variances

Deep Variances
M. Bowen
August 2001
---

Abstract
Deep Variances are high level indicators of problems at a deeper level of hierarchy. It can reveal fudge factors and other low lying problems which might not otherwise be noticed at a high level. The effect is that it quantifies problems in a manner suggestive of the *breadth* of a particular problem in contrast to the *severity* of that same problem. Severity errors propagate normally up a dimensional hierarchy when they are sufficient, but a breadth indicator such a Deep Variance can give an early warning even when certain high level balances seen ok.

Example
For example, imagine a high level of variance volatility at a low level of a dimensional hierarchy. There are high negative and high positive variances. These 'balance out' in aggregation. So an individual considering overall progress might not think to look into the detail.

Emud

Proof

Pattern Recognition

Do you know what this is? I'll give you a hint. It could kill you. It's rather amazing that people are capable of giving meaning to weird arbitrary shapes, but I assure you that this is a very important shape. You might recognize it in the context of these other ones, but think about it before you click.

Amazing huh?

AQ Kahn: International Goat

We know too much about this guy.

I have a strange feeling that AQ Kahn knows a great deal more than he is saying and that he is alive for very, very specific reasons. The last time I felt this way about somebody, it was when Skilling quit Enron 'to be with his family'. There is some massive conspiracy afoot.

Crossover

Construction

Drezner on Mexican Immigration

Note to self, Drezner is right.

Race, Cyberspace & The Digital Divide

Grace Lee interviewed me (fairly and with balance) for this month's ReadMe, NYU's Online Journal focusing on Race Cyberspace and the Digital Divide. It's a pretty good piece. I'd be intrigued.

Slowly but surely, the digital divide---the much-noted gap between black and white America, when it comes to computer usage and Internet access---is closing. Although it currently makes up only a small percentage of Internet users (blacks account for only 8% of all U.S. Net users, while whites constitute 78%), the African-American online population is expected to more than double by 2005, according to a recent study by the Trade Association Report. As the growing popularity of Afrocentric sites such as BlackPlanet, CushCity, and Africana hints, the African-American influence on new media and Net culture is sure to loom large, in the near future. That said, ReadMe wonders how much diversity there is on the Net. The black-run weblogs, warblogs, community portals, and e-commerce sites discussed in this special package of articles do not take away from the fact that the Web is not the colorblind utopia foretold by Wired magazine in the giddy '90s. In issue 4.3, ReadMe removes the virtual-reality goggles and takes a hard look at race in cyberspace

One small correction, although I participated in CIN Steering Committee Meetings at Xerox El Segundo and help configure parts, the physical CIN was built by others. I was moderator of the XeroxBlackNetwork and a vocal participant in the closest thing we had to a political forum which was the Philosophy discussion group.

Church of the Grisly Christ

I have returned from seeing the latest Mel Gibson movie. It was painful.

We Episcopalians say "He suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the scriptures." A good third of this movie stops at about the second word. Mel Gibson has beaten Jesus to a bloody pulp in this film and I'm wondering if there is any sect of Christianity that has made such a graphic iconography of his torture. I hope not because I've had a wonderful lifetime of 'hating' Baptists; they'd have to step aside for the Church of the Grisly Christ.

The film's opening is off to a lurching start. Jesus suffers in the Garden of Gethsemane realizing the weight of his doom. As we watch, we know he's going to die, but his trembling seems overdone. There are not enough words to carry us forward - indeed this film is almost subliminal. Only knowing what Christians know gives any clue of the pain to come, but even the most seasoned Christian in the audience can only guess at the horrors in store.

I found myself asking, especially at Golgotha - the place of the actual crucifixion, how is it that Christians chose this particular moment as a focus for the great symbols of faith. The answer is obvious from the film's perspective.  In essence, the Christ is the one, the only and ultimate martyr of Christianity. The sacrifice of body and blood are not merely symbols but the gritty gorey reality of ancient Roman brutality, and what was so monumental about Jesus' sacrifice was that he knowingly, preciently perhaps, walked directly into that hell on earth. For all the films ever made of the life of Jesus, certainly one should give contemporary audience the full weight of the pain of that bloody sacrifice. In that, the Passion is an extraordinary success, the Saving Private Ryan of its genre. Mel Gibson can now be acclaimed as the master of period violence. If he had only been the director of Gladiator, that fate would have been sealed forever. But the Passion could have done it on its own with little need for Mad Max, The Patriot or Braveheart.

This is a subliminal movie. Its script is the merest suggestion of familiar scripture and it does little to give us anything but our own memories to underlie the drama. It provides a modern vision for ancient stories, a realization as graphic as movie technology can provide but it does so without so much narrative as necessary to hold an ordinary film together. One is left with the distinct impression that Gibson studiously avoided adding a single word that might contradict some bibilical interpretation, and so left the talking, literally to the camera. By having all the dialog in Aramaic and Latin he has created an authentic, if claustophobic, world. The film provides no context, it refuses the backstory of John the Baptist, for example. It doesn't allow the man on the street to be heard or the mob to shout anything more than 'Free Barrabas'.  One must come to such a film with a great deal of subtext already in mind because the story is told like a courtroom drama where only the prosecution speaks. He could be any man, and perhaps he was. As he stands accused and for much foreground story, Jesus is mute. He stands oddly defiant, neither subversive, nor superior as the Pharisees led by Caiphus denounce him and ask for his head.  So I can understand why some Jews would become upset with what they might percieve as a dramatization of that which many [failing] Christians insist binds all Jews as Christ killers. There is no subtlety in the portrayal of these religious leaders, these are the Bad Guys, outraged at the impiety of this Nazerene. The slap and spit, they manipulate mercilessly, they call for blood. 

The film handles Judas' anguish at his betrayal with some brilliance, his madness, grief and desparation are perfect material for Gibson's macabre touch. Yet in all of this there is but one actor who takes us onto our toes. Only Pontius Pilate, played brilliantly by Hristo Shopov head and shoulders above any previous Pilate, gives us something studied, even Shakespearean. His inner conflict gives the film its only mystery and tension. The rest is a kind of eyes open grand guignol one can only bear to watch once.

Of the dramatic depiction of Jesus himself, the stroke of genius is the actors' single, open amber eye. This one unblemished spot on the body racked from head to toe with ripped flesh conveys the silent dignity of a man condemned and resigned to that fate. In the single open eye of Jesus the Nazerene it is possible to see divinity.
   
But it is not divinity which is the subject of The Passion. The great wincing weight of this film is found in the lacerated body of Jesus himself. I defy anyone not to be moved by watching, over and over in slow motion, a mother's tears as her son is flayed to the bone. The unmerciful cruelty is so wrenching that it is nearly impossible not to feel compassion. The Roman thugs so delight in their brutality, the throngs so transfixed by the spectacle, the Marys so pitiable and traumatized that there is nothing left to do but cry. Through this unflinchingly goulish lens, Gibson does damage to the import of the message of Christ. I immediately thought, this must certainly have happened a thousand times all over human history, so what difference does it make that the torturers are Romans, that the accusers are Jews, that the martyr is Jesus? It matters and yet it doesn't. If it weren't Jesus, we'd walk out of the film having endured the bludgeoned point quite long enough, and yet because it is Jesus we stay, waiting for him to be Jesus. But he's just a man beaten into a gelatinous hulk stumbling up a hill, we pity him, we cry for him, we wish it were otherwise. Is the film heretical? No, it casts Jesus in the light of a warrior rather than as a teacher. Jesus has his heroic moment while chained to the whipping post, standing courageously as the King of another otherwordly kingdom, bloodied but unbowed. And then the beatings come with even more cruel ferocity. He is beaten into oblivion. It is surprising in many respects that nobody loses their lunch in this film as half the audience is wont to do. It must be the blood, the blood of Christ that gets to you, not the vomit, teeth and piss any other man would have shed under such torture. So what makes this the perfect sacrifice for the whole world is not the consistency of Jesus deportment as teacher to the end, but his willingness to soldier through the greatest pains imaginable. This is the point slammed home in Gibson's Passion, the sheer bonecrunching agony of it all.

Can one person's death be so significant? One could watch this film as a cautionary tale about inhumanity or about what happens to justice during occupation. So much of the import of the life of Christ is bound up in the travesty that someone unfamiliar with many Christian principals, while getting it on this basic physical level would lose sight of the transcendance. It wasn't that Christ died so horribly, but that he loved so transcendently, that he taught so wisely, that he lived with such integrity.

Gibson has created more than a film but an event which will prompt discussion about the nuts and bolts of Christianity. It marks us all that the incitement for this is such a grisly affair.

Zeke Wins!

As of Date: 03/03/2004 Time: 02:54 Votes Percent

JUDGE-SUPERIOR COURT OFFICE NO 53

DANIEL Z ZEIDLER 224,996 28.08
DAVID LOPEZ 172,263 21.50
BOB HENRY 136,994 17.10
CRAIG J MITCHELL 131,536 16.42
MICHAEL D SHOOK 85,325 10.65
CRAIG A RENETZKY 50,027 6.24

TOTAL PRECINCTS 4,571 PRECINCTS REPORTING 4,571 100.00
REGISTRATION 3,670,157

Excluded Middle

New York City is heading on a bold new vector. The will be eliminating middle schools. Their move, to make elementary go K-8 and some highschools 6-12 is going to be controversial but I think it has a lot going for it.

I'll simply say this; at our local elementary, there is a buddy system between 5th graders and Kindergarten kids. It's a beautiful thing. The influence of younger children on older kids and vice versa can be used to teach responsibility in the best way.

Nothing Doing

Death, For Laughs

You will be sucked dry by a leech. I'd stay away
from swimming holes, and stick to good old
cement. Even if it does hurt like hell when
your toe scrapes the bottom.


What horrible Edward Gorey Death will you die?
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Sluts and the City

I hated 'Sex and the City' for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it reminded me in a rather painful way what it is like to be a black man in NYC, which is to say (in one way) rather completely outside the consciousness of the kind of skinny cute white chicks that pass for models of America's feminine consciousness. You want to know how I felt watching it? Like Sally Field in Terms of Endearment when she had lunch with her friends at Tavern on the Green. It made me so glad I don't trip like that.

Nevertheless, I have been fond of asking women that I found attractive even as a married man as to whether they believed that 'Sex and the City' met any basic standard of realism. The answers, I can say with some surety, depended upon whether or not they attended a predominantly white university. Don't ask me how I know. I'm using sexual profligacy in educated white women as a metaphor for...oh I dunno..the corruptions of courtly life and the desire to partake? How shall I say.. Uma Thurman in 'Dangerous Liasons'. Role model? You decide.

On His Way Rejoicing

“ON HIS WAY REJOICING”
By Robert Thomas Bowen, Sr.
Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church
New Haven, Connecticut Saturday, February 28, 2004
~
“You turn men back to dust,
saying, ‘Return to dust, O sons of men.
……
You sweep men away in the sleep of death;
They are like the new grass of morning –
Though in the morning it springs up new,
By evening it is dry and withered.” (from Psalm 90)

Part I – Recognition
At a time like this, tears come with little effort. The body of one more of God’s creatures has been stilled. His name is Raymond Curtis Bowen. His full and hearty laugh is now but a memory. Those rolling pop eyes, as big as golf balls are forever closed. The quick dance steps of an imaginary character he called “The Ready Critter” have faded. The steady raising of the proper glass with the appropriate beverage prompts a smile among us, but is no more….The magic of this man. He proudly donned a God-given cloak of intelligence, charm, pride, and more than a hint of Yankee boastfulness. He was the gentleman in every sense of the word. And these qualities were firmly built on a foundation of devotion and love. Not the soft, soap opera kind of love; but love at a deeper, more meaningful level. Love as wide and full as the life he lived…bursting with joy and delight. The evidence of his effect on others is not simply our presence here this morning; but the many ways in which our otherwise regular lives have been irreversibly touched and changed. We can smile and call it The Chico Syndrome. He was a special man, a distinctly splendid and special man.

And he was rich beyond measure. His cup (to say nothing of his glass) always ran over. He took delight in what he said, what he saw and what he did. Books were not written by him or about him; nor were there TV specials nor holidays set aside to tout his accomplishments or honour his life. And yet…and yet Raymond Curtis Bowen was truly a great man. A great man. Not in the standard, the traditional sense of conquering nations and building cities. Rather he conquered hearts and built trust. He was great because of his impact on the lives of everyone with whom he came into contact: His friends, co-workers, neighbors and neighbors’ kids, Connecticut State Guardians, New York, New Haven Hartford Railrodians, his children grandchildren and great grandchildren, nieces and nephews. And, of course, his esteemed fellow St. Lukians! He was Chico, Ray, Uncle Ray, Grandfather, Past Master, 2nd Lieutenant, Phi Gam Permittee, ad infinitum…a man of all seasons, for all the right reasons. He was respected, appreciated, admired and, yes, even envied. He was special. And because of this short list as so much more, he was loved by many.

Part II – Celebration
We have more than ample reason to look upon Chico’s earthly sojourn as indisputable evidence of not just God’s power, but God’s limitless capacity to mould and extend gifts to his people. And there is no distinction between a gift and a blessing. Raymond Curtis Bowen was a blessing. And blessings are not to be sadly mourned or even pitifully grieved. Blessings are to be fully acknowledged and richly celebrated. Back in sometimes sunny California, Reverend Lynn Collins reminds St. John’s parishioners that if we have been blessed we should, in turn, be a blessing to someone else. Doesn’t that go right to the heart of the kind of man Chico was? Always blessing us with his insight, his wisdom, his uncanny ability to draw attention to himself and then, throw a conversational curve and talk about subjects and people beyond himself: French and Russian literature, epics of ancient Greece, DuBois, Garvey, Ellington, Sarah Vaughn and Shakespeare. A strange and wonderful tapestry of knowledge coupled with rare imagination.

Well, Chico more than did his part. Now we are called upon to do ours. Our charge is simple although important. It is, I think, to unabashedly thank God for this 91 year old gift…this Connecticut-born, worldly wise, spiritually secure, God-believing, God-fearing Masonic Shriner Afro Anglican Yankee Episcopalian with an Elk’s point of view!

Part III – The Return
A few short weeks ago, a small group from NBC visited Chico in Wallingford. NBC means “New Haven (Aunt Gloria Williams), New York (Rodney Bowen) Baltimore (Ray Bowen, II and Ray Bowen, III) and California (Bob Bowen).” To put it mildly, it was an unusual experience. Chico slipped in and out of being lucid. He would smile and then, for no apparent reason, he would frown. At one point a single, large tear rolled down his right cheek. He said three simple words: “I miss her.” The most dramatic display, however, was his repeatedly making the sign of the cross. Over and over again.

This was accompanied by gestures which can be likened to taking communion. His endless chant was: “Prayers…first thing, every morning. Prayers…first thing every morning… Prayers…first thing every morning.” When he said this, his speech was steady, measured and unmistakable. Chico then said he wanted to go home. Home. But when any of us asked where home was, he didn’t know. Or, perhaps if he did know, he wouldn’t say. We were in the Masonic Home solarium and he then looked up to sky. What had been an almost deadpan expression melted into what can only be described as a smile of pure serenity. It was as though he saw something…or someone. Then, a rather sly grin slowly came across his face. His silence informed us that we would not be privy to the details of what had just occurred. Raymond Curtis Bowen had made a connection with something or someone that was beyond our ability to grasp. For a brief period, he had entered another realm. It was as eerie as it was real. It was a special moment for a special man. We left shortly after that. The rest is medical and mortal history.

And now he has come or we can say he has gone…full circle. Back to basics, to his own beginning. The inevitable closing of the eternal loop that waits to envelop us all. In his last years, Chico may have moved slowly; but he got across the final finish line before each of us. He won. And we no longer need to wait on him. To change his clothes or adjust his ever-crooked tie, to coax him to finish his apple sauce. Now, he’s there waiting for us. Raymond Curtis Bowen is no longer on his way rejoicing. His journey is complete. He is at home…at peace…at rest…rejoicing! And we are fully assured that he is not home alone. On the blessed contrary: He has finally joined hands with his Maker and rejoined hearts with his beloved mate, Lucille Harriott Frances Cobb Bowen (aka Miss Madam). For him, it has all come together because…God is good! All the time!
~
(From Psalm 104)
“I will sing to the Lord all my life;
I will sing praise to my God as long
As I live
May my meditations be pleasing to him.
as I rejoice in the Lord.
Praise the Lord, O my soul.
Praise the Lord.”
~
“Prayers, first thing…every morning.”
AMEN

What Failure?

If you pressed me into a corner and asked me if I truly believe that the majority of Americans are sufficiently disciplined in their geopolitical worldview to sustain the proper policies for America, I'd say no. It takes me back to Chomsky who, in his inimitable way, pulled back the blinders.

Nevertheless, while I think Perle's rhetoric gets outsized, I fundamentally agree with him and the PNAC imperials. We have fairly good prospects to become a fairly good empire. The problem is our cushy citizenry, but in a two party system, they can be marginalized through bipartisanship. Sound cynical? Yeah, it sounds cynical to me as well.

At any rate, here's Scott Ritter shooting from the hip. I wonder if he overestimates the power of democracy. Certainly nobody is programmatically manipulating the blogosphere (although if it can be assumed that the CIA has moles everywhere of import it would be great sport to figure which of the bloggers in the top 100 is the mole), and we are not decieved. But what we can do about what we know is limited - we're too granular to exert power like other forms of mass communications.

From Scott Ritter, Feb 26 2004:

Well, if you're looking at it from the standpoint of the American intelligence services and the British intelligence services, nothing went wrong. I mean, one of the greatest frauds being perpetrated today is the concept of an intelligence failure. They didn't fail. Their mission has been all along regime change, so that succeeded. What we're confronting here is one of the greatest intelligence successes in modern history. They were tremendously successful. They were able to use deception, deceit, fabrication, manipulation, the classic tools of the trade to gain their objective, which was the elimination of Saddam Hussein.

Duck Duck Goose

Slant

Mobil's Torrance Refinery

Yesterday I saw one of the biggest flares ever at Mobil's Torrance Refinery, right around the corner from my house. It occured yesterday afternoon around 3pm.

It was tremendously smoky and the flames were a very hot orange. It looked a lot darker than the orange I associate with the burning of gasoline but the smoke was so thick I kept convincing myself that it was gasoline. I couldn't smell anything but I was curious as to what it was and how much. It's always fascinating to me that there are tons of things in the air. So I gave them a call this morning to find out their story.

The woman answering my question said that the refinery was starting up some units to increase production and they had to flare while the units were warming up. I think she said something about 140 degrees. So I asked if they were burning gasoline, which is what I suspected because of the thick black smoke. She said it was 'mostly hydrogen' then hung up.

I may not be a chemical engineer, but I wasn't born yesterday. You don't get thick black smoke when you burn hydrogen. There was a whole lot of something else in that smoke.

The year before last, I was building a system for Toyota which is immediately east of the refinery. Toyota has an environmental warning process that all employees should be aware of, so the refinery will notify them if something hairy is going down. There have been no emergencies in my experience either at Toyota or at the refinery, so I wasn't surprsed that they would have a hotline. I am also not surprised that I couldn't get any specifics about what was flared and how much. The refinery can't get away with murder, but it's very likely that they are getting away with assault.

Who polices flares? Nobody apparently.

I know that the SCQAMD once had a program to enter air pollution into a cost accounting scheme and it resulted in a lot cleaner air. Their website looks rather dead, which is no surprise since our whole state is broke. Still, I think it has always been the responsibility of citizens to collect local information and declare it publicly. Now that the blogosphere exists, the tools are at our disposal.

I dig heavy industry. I think there's a natural attraction to it since I'm a soft-handed white collar kind of bit counter. I like the huge machines and the fat red buttons, the yellow striped zones on the floor and the blare of safety horns. But I've also gotten sick working in a chemical plant and I think the public could be better served by better access to compliance and monitoring tools.

So I poked around and found this information about air pollution. I think I've found a new hobby.

Snide Remarks on Strike Resolution

The grocery strike is over here in Southern California and now is the time for the "I told you sos" to start galloping through the parlors of the chatting classes. I'm going to be uncharitable and point out the obvious.

I'm mostly negative on the concept of collective bargaining, but I'm more negative about hyping the supposed superior morality of unions. Unionism is little more than co-dependent managerial infighting. It's like having two adversarial personnel departments working for the same CEO. Either way, unions are entirely dependent on the corporations against which they battle, so how they are considered to exist in a entirely different moral universe is a solopsism worth debunking.

It is in the context of that which I say the union has been successful in screwing a nice hole in teh pockets of all perspective new employees of the supermarkets. (Of course it's equally true of management.) Those employees with union membership and seniority keep their own benefits and all the new guys get to be treated as second-class citizens since they will contribute dollars out of their own pockets toward their benefits. This two tier system throws a disgustingly phlegmy wrench into the concept of union brotherhood. It's a miserable state of affairs.

"It was take it, or there's the door," said Ralphs cashier Carlos Beltran, 25, who voted "yes" at Local 770's polling place in Hollywood. "They are all thieves, the companies and the unions. They're just sticking it to us."

Lovely.

Not only that, the union employees voted themselves a little cash bonus, proving quite honestly that everyone has their price.

Instead of raises, veterans will get lump sum payments this year equal to 30 cents an hour for every hour they worked in the 12 months before the old contract expired. That would be about $500 per employee based on an average 32-hour workweek. A second bonus would be paid after the end of the second year of the contract, equal to 30 cents an hour for every hour worked from March 6, 2005, through Oct. 6, 2006, according to a contract summary obtained by The Times.

Please let us not hear anything more than arched eyebrows for golden parachutes. We've captured something about human nature here. I think I'm going to have some fun in my own private fisking of labor bloggers. Where's American Black on this?

Race & Weapons

Over at Tolerance.org, they've got some interesting tests, rather like the Implicit Assumption Tests. Since this morning I'm obsessing over race and last week I went shooting, I thought I'd mix the two together and see how I fared. I'm actually pretty good, or I test pretty well.

Your data suggest little or no automatic racial association with Weapons or Harmless Objects

The score above has already been corrected for the order that you performed the task. If your score was 'Inconclusive', click here. Compare your score above with the distribution of all respondents scores below.

This table does NOT contain your data. This data is from a random subset of others who completed this task, and reflects the percentage of people who fell into each level of bias or no bias.
Interpretation Percent of Total Respondents

Strong automatic association between African Americans and weapons 29%

Moderate automatic association between African Americans and weapons 13%

Slight automatic association between African Americans and weapons 23%

Little to no automatic racial association with weapons or harmless objects 26%

Slight automatic association between European Americans and weapons 5%

Moderate automatic association between European Americans and weapons 3%

Strong automatic association between European Americans and weapons 1%

If your test showed a "preference" for a group, the result points to a hidden, or unconscious bias. The results of over one million tests show that unconscious bias exists in most of us.

I favor these tests because I firmly believe that they can be indicative of what people really believe. In my time as the Boohab, arguing about race with people realtime all over the net, I concluded that it's about what people believe and the reasons for that which are mostly to account for racism in this nation. Unfortunately most debates about race don't get to such matters, rather they focus on external events and ethical behavior in response to racial conflict.

As an aside, I made a couple mistakes during the test which I think the researchers might find significant. I twice misidentified a black maglite flashlight as a weapon instead of a harmless object. Can you guess why?