Cobb

Arabian Nights

Blade Trinity, Gearheads & Cargo Pants

My favorite pants are the fatigue green cargo pants that I got from Target a couple months ago. Since I have these, I can delay my decision to purchase that new Treo 650 I've had my eye on. I priced it out yesterday and it's over 750 bucks. Yike. But today I have all kinds of pockets, I can keep all the bulkier low tech gear in multiple pockets. I also have a fairly expensive backpack from Targus with an uncountable number of pockets, flaps and zippers.

So as I was walking from work the other day with the single strap of the Targus weighing down my right shoulder and me patting myself down to make sure I had everything it made me pause to think how it came to be that in 2004 I'm still carrying 40 pounds of gear.

Yesterday, I snuck out and saw Blade III. It was OK. The good parts were really good, and rest surely has to be a lot more fun for guys in their 20s than me. Still, it got enough under my skin to ask myself why I'm taking Capoeira instead of Krav Maga. So I think I know the answer.

It's cool to carry a bunch of high tech gear, no matter how weird i makes you walk.

Still, what have I got weighing me down that might lighten my load (and give me more room for more gear)? Definitely the laptop can be reduced in size. Chances are that I'll have a nice flat panel to plug it into whenever I work onsite so I don't need a big screen. The transformer isn't going to get any lighter. I wouldn't need all the Cat5 and the 4 port hub if my clients would bother to go wireless. I still carry Quadrille pads and a paper based calendar, but I probably would use a PDA based time tracking system if somebody did the interface nicely for under 50 bucks. I don't know how I can get much better than the data crammed on 20 DVDs in that little ballistic nylon book.

But right about now I'm really sick of my wallet. I'm considering the possiblity of keeping an alternate wallet. This is where I'm going to do a lot of research and learn - my new company is investing in smart cards big time. As an aside, I would like to believe that I started the geek fashion trend of wearing a USB flash drive on a lanyard around my neck last December. When you see a geek doing so, think of me, thank you. So this is where the confluence can work. I think lanyard fashion can catch on as well as bling.

Back in 96, the spousal unit had an all areas pass to the Olympic Village in Atlanta. She was a bit more restricted in Sydney, but there was no question that that big old badge & pass she wore around her neck was hella valuable. The trick is to get teenagers and fashionistas to jump on the bandwagon. What it's going to take is a very large and flashy card. People will wear 'em. Watch.

Right now I use Schnier's Password Safe. So even if you snatched the Cruzer off my lanyard, you're not going to get any of my secrets.

So I figure a PDA with the camera, 500MB of CF memory and the ability to transfer data back and forth with a standard XP machine, and I'll be good to go. That is, until I get a katana and a pistol with silver bullets.

UPDATE: I decided to put in the picture. That on my wrist is, what else but a Casio G-Shock.

Crighton's Smackdown

I finished Michael Crighton's latest (audio) book 'State of Fear' this story yesterday afternoon. I thought I had gotten to the didactic part that morning, but he was just getting warmed up. He delivers a blistering critique of sloppy thinking and hidden agendas which borders on stentorian. By the time you get to the end of the book, it sounds like a stern lecture from Professor Bullfinch *and* Dr. Grimes. His appendix is a dramatic summary judgement on the massive errors of the Western world's romance with the deadly pseudo-science of Eugenics. It makes this book something more than I originally guessed, and it just might take America for a little controversial ride.

Crighton has basically outed academic whoredom and cults of certainty. He has called into question our motivations for seeking knowledge and free inquiry. There have been plenty of folks, like by buddy Tim, and the Invisible Adjunct, who have called into question the ethics and reasonableness of some (if not most) of what goes on in the American Academe. Crighton dramatizes the results of the madness. It's a fairly slamming broadside. Let's see what shakes loose.

The Power of Prayer

A little story I found. Lovely.

A voyaging ship was wrecked during a storm at sea and only
two of the men on it were able to swim to a small, desert like
island.

The two survivors, not knowing what else to do, agreed that
they had no other recourse but to pray to God.

However, to find out whose prayer was more powerful, they
agreed to divide the territory between them and stay on opposite
sides of the island.

The first thing they prayed for was food.

The next morning, the first man saw a fruit-bearing tree on
his side of the land, and he was able to eat its fruit. The other
man's parcel of land remained barren.

After a week, the first man was lonely and he decided to
pray for a wife.

The next day, another ship was wrecked, and the only
survivor was a woman who swam to his side of the land. On the other
side of the island, there was nothing.

Soon the first man prayed for a house, clothes, more food.
The next day, like magic, all of these were given to him. However,
the second man still had nothing.

Finally, the first man prayed for a ship, so that he and
his wife could leave the island. In the morning, he found a ship
docked at his side of the island. The first man boarded the ship
with his wife and decided to leave the second man on the island. He
considered the other man unworthy to
receive God's blessings, since none of his prayers had been
answered.

As the ship was about to leave, the first man heard a voice
from heaven booming, "Why are you leaving your companion on the
island?"

"My blessings are mine alone, since I was the one who
prayed for them," the first man answered. "His prayers were all
unanswered and so he does not deserve anything."

"You are mistaken!" the voice rebuked him. "He had only one
prayer, which I answered. If not for that, you would not have
received any of my blessings."

"Tell me," the first man asked the voice, "what did he pray
for that I should owe him anything?"

"He prayed that all your prayers be answered."

For all we know, our blessings are not the fruits of our
prayers alone, but those of another praying for us.

This is too good not to share. With obedience come
blessings.

My prayer for you today is that all your prayers are
answered. Be blessed.

"What you do for others is more important than what you do
for yourself"

This was shared with me by a friend...hope you will share
with yours too.

Boredom

Botox, Drag Racing & Athletic Nobility

In drag racing, you can use regular gasoline, or you can use nitro. You can use normal aspiration or you can supercharge your engine. Each modification has a class and those classed together race together. The sport is all about getting over the finish line the fastest. However, the most popular class of dragsters, top fuel dragsters, are not the fastest. The fastest dragsters are the jet cars. In this model of sport we can find answers to the ethical mind-pretzels now twisting sporstwrigeters all over this country over recent revelations about drug use in pro baseball.

My position is this. Let them take drugs.

There are two primary arguments I hear against the sanction of drug-based performance enhancement in pro sports. Only one of them makes sense to me. That is that the rules say no drugs, so all drug users are cheaters and thereby debase the game. I can live with that. But the prohibition against drugs themselves for the purpose of leaving asterisks off of records is a silly sentiment.

Part of me wants to poo the folks who sweat bullets over the 'messages' sent by drug-taking athletes, because I'm not a part of sports fandom. I have no sports heros, nor do I seek them. I appreciate a good game, just like the next guy, but rarely do I retain enough information from season to season to be a real participant in the meta-game. So I don't care if Kobe is a homewrecker or not. He's a ball player, is he any good? Yeah? Good. Is he better than Jordan? No. OK. End of discussion. That's about as far as it goes with me, unless I'm trying to make an allegorical point about something larger than sports.

But the fact of the matter is that sports heros are real and they do have social weight for many of us. People care about the demeanor of top athletes, they are real role models. So prohibitions against drug-taking by athletes makes sense for more reasons than the integrity of the game. But we should understand that which athletes we choose to idolize is somewhat arbitrary.

There seems to me nothing inherent in the values we seek to revere in sport which limit them to football or baseball. If there is a such thing as athletic nobility, surely it can't be limited to a handful of contests. The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, the human drama of athletic competition, certainly all of these are found in sports other than those we dote upon. So it seems to me that some of our ethical dilemma in picking the wrong sports heroes because we are picking the wrong sports. Think about it this way, there was once a time when boxing was considered the domain of athletic nobility. That is no longer the case. Although some would argue that we have lost something permanently as a showcase for heroism, I say it has just moved on to another sport. We are not at a loss for heroes, they just work another arena. Or maybe our society doesn't value courage, strength and speed as much as we thought.

But let's say we allowed drugs in our pro sports. Whatever the values our society places on its mastery I think it is absurd to assume that the critical elements of every sport would become threatened by generally allowing dope. I could be wrong, but I don't believe that we know so much about long distance running as we know about weightlifting. Every highschool kid knows that steroids will grow the kind of muscle mass that makes for a better weightlifter, but what kind of drug makes one a better ski jumper, a better hockey goalie, a better golfer a better video gamer?

So I think that people should admit that it's not the drugs, but the cheating that makes the difference in athletic nobility. If we allowed it, the drug regimen would become just another part of the diet and training discipline athletes use. For those who believe that a drug free purity is necessary, create another class of competition. I happen to think that the Olympic Games best suits the class of competition which should be drug free. After all, many of these are the sports which have little else going for them but the prestige of athletic nobility.

What's interesting about all this is that we already embrace the augmentation of the critical element in the realm of entertainers. Who believes that Hollywood stars are all natural beauties? Living in Los Angeles, I can tell you that the classifieds are full of ads for every kind of physical enhancement imaginable. Dermatologists and cosmetic dentists and surgeons in LA live better than royalty. But is Chris Rock any less funny because he has $40,000 worth of dental work? Is Baywatch any less watchable because some of that stuff ain't real? No. This kind of preparation just comes with the territory, and isn't it fun to see what Whitney Houston looks like without makeup? Sure it is. Just like it's fun for me to know I'm taller than Mike Tyson and Lee Majors.

I know a guy who was the captain of the lacrosse team at Ohio State in the 70s. He said they practiced without pads. There will never be another Jim Thorpe or even Bo Jackson. Time, diet and training regimens move on. Let 'em use drugs. So long as it's not cheating, it raises the bar.

Wanker Benched

From Xinhua:

Iraq's Shiite Muslims led by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani on Thursday unveiled a broadly based electoral alliance which excludes radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

The alliance, called the United Iraqi Alliance, is comprised of 228 candidates and groups the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution, the Islamic Dawa Party and the Iraqi National Congress, Dawa party official Ali al-Adeeb said at a press conference.

The list of the alliance also included independent Sunni Muslims belonging to various tribal groups, he said.

However, Sadr, whose militia battled US-led forces in Baghdadand Najaf before calling a truce in August, "is not on the list," said Hussein Shahrastani, a member of the coalition's organizing committee.

Iranian-born Sistani has been overseeing the work of his to paides to compile the list for the Jan. 30 parliamentary election, in which Shiite parties are expected to perform strongly.

In the first popular vote since Saddam's ouster, Iraqis will choose a 275-member assembly that will write a permanent constitution.

State of Fear

I'm listening to Crighton's latest novel on CD. Within its pages are the most devastating critique of the environmental movement you're likely to encounter. This is something of a different twist for Crighton; it feels different. There's enough swashbuckle to keep the story going, but where it really delivers is in the stunning arguments. It's precisely the kind of thing I expected from the internet, and ultimately the blogosphere - to take popular conceptions two steps deeper and reveal the fallacies and misinformation beneath them.

The plot is fairly pedestrian. Get a spectator enmeshed in a series of global events which are driven by conspiracy and throw in some characters who explain the technical details of what's actually going on. In this story, science - Crighton's usual nemisis - takes something of a backseat to pseudo-science, what I call scientific animism. This is the strong belief in scientific-sounding, professionally delivered information without the ability to understand the theory, or the proof behind it.

It's a compelling story of eco-terrorism and 'The Ecology of Thought'. Now I'm going to get back to it.

Appointment With Mr. Z

Not long ago, I wondered aloud what happened to all the New Jacks. Among them are LA Reid and Babyface. It turns out that Reid has done adequately well for himself at Island Records, and now he has Jay-Z working for him. It looks to me like a private kingdom in the public world and a clear triumph for (ahem) uppity negroes.

Proving yet again that he is the hardest-working retiree in the music industry, the rap star Jay-Z has agreed to become the president of Universal Music Group's Def Jam Recordings label.

The appointment, announced yesterday, puts Def Jam, the hip-hop label, in the hands of one of rap's biggest-selling artists. Universal, part of Vivendi Universal, will give Jay-Z, who has little corporate experience, the vacant top job at one of its biggest divisions, granting him authority over everything from album production to marketing strategies, and an artist roster that includes stars like LL Cool J and Ludacris.

Yay.

Spence on the NAACP

My man Spence has put together an amazingly concise breakdown of the structural problems of the NAACP.

In my experience, I have noticed symptoms of the problems with the organization, especially in my dealings in Boston in the early 90s. I had not, in my dismissals understood that they were structural, rather I assumed that they were the result of failed leadership. Having some history with black organizations, I was very aware with the kinds of folks most attracted to the kinds of platform an NAACP position offered. So my interpretation of 'incapable' as a description of the organization always presumed a political and philosophical roadblock. Now I see the kinds of things the organization can never address as they are constituted. Smells like opportunity.

Nevertheless, anyone who would have any expectations of the NAACP should read Spence's analysis in order to better understand its limits.

Larry Kramer, Shaddap!

Patton Oswalt has gone soft. Whoda thunk? But he did have something of his old edge in his standup special last night. He hates hippies, and although he could have refined that piece, the way he ripped NPR was delicious. I'm ready to rip NPR again, because all I've heard today is bleating about 12 gay soldiers and whining by Larry Kramer.

Message to the Gay Man. America doesn't hate gays, we're just sick to death of you. Message to all combattants in the Gay Wars. Shut the hell up. Go home and get some sexual satisfaction and be happy.

I am getting the distinct feeling that I'm going to come back from China with some of the same 'Anti-American' criticism of American media that I did when I came back from Sydney in 2000. I'm going to be full of piss and vinegar, all vitriolic about the lame mindlessness of it all. Why? Because the softness and cynicism of American journalists is getting on my nerves - this is what they report, the sense that gays in America are losing their rights.

Gays in America are not losing their rights, because gays have no additional rights to protect. And perhaps I am unduly emboldened by the recent Supreme Court decision in Texas, but how much is a lifestyle a right?

Free to be Me.
Is state-mandated tolerance a Constitutional principle? Should it be? To what extent should laws lubricate the inevitable friction between people? In the coming world, I see the value of 'PC' as a personal skill, like courage or intelligence. In this nation we will cyber our way into each others lives, very carefully negotiated. And we will be surprised and somewhat astounded at the ability of others to trust without electronic verification. Why? Because we somehow have lost the ability of discernment in the main. We didn't realize that kid would grow up to be a serial killer, he was just 'challenged', remember? Too many of us have gotten so accustomed to saying "OK, I guess so" and "But there's nothing wrong with that.." and "All he needs is a little.." that we've practically forgotten how to say No. We have disabled, or perhaps I should say crippled, our ability to use the words 'superior' and 'inferior' as adjectives for people.

Understand that this has nothing to do with the suggestion that gays are either inherently or even transitively inferior or superior. It has to do with the fact that we have zoned out so far from dealing with what King would have us do, the content of character, that we have confused volume with credibility. And nothing speaks volumes like the ability to launch organizations like GMHC and ActUp.

See, I refuse to believe that Larry Kramer has a bigger heart than I do. And I don't think that anyone should buy that as a premise of his credibility. Any normal person who watches people die feels that kick in the gut. And I beleive he is invested in the kind of rhetoric which suggests that anyone who disagrees with him is a heartless hater. Understand that this is a fallacy that so undercuts his credibility that he deserves to be verbally beat down. And yet it is something that we cannot depend upon our journalists to do, at least not those at NPR. Not today.

In fact, I have Acted Up with ActUp and I have danced my feet numb at the Javits Center with the GMHC crowd. When you're at the party, you drink the Kool Aid, but you don't take the recipe as Gospel. A bit of critical thinking shows the ordinary strange people to be simply invested in hope for ill friends, neighbors and fellow Americans. But those of us who wear Eddie Bauer and keep our hair cut short have souls too, and if I may indulge in a bit of rhetoric, we probably care more for you than you care for us. After all, I don't need to rebel against society to be happy. The grudge is yours.

I'm trying to imagine how Larry Kramer calculates that on November 2, 2004 that every pharmaceutical company in the world stopped their research into finding the cure for AIDS.

Yes 13 out of 13 states have this year just said No to Gay Marriage. It is a reality check on the ambitions of activists who have, I think, been watching too many Broadway shows. The drama of AIDS activism doesn't motivate everyone, but mistaking that for the single avenue to compassion and mutual understanding is a severe error of judgement. Then again, haven't I already said that we are losing ours?

When it comes to fighting disease, we all have mutual interests in reasonable progress. (The reason I moderate this takes some understanding, follow the neonatal thread.) But when it comes to public declarations of support for our sexual choices, everybody stands in line behind Brittany Spears. We don't give a fig and you can't make us. Elope, dumbass. When we're done griping, we'll give up half a banana split, but not until the volume is turned down and the credibility is turned up.

It's time for a new poster boy. We can't expect our namby pamby media to give Kramer the thorough fisking he deserves. I am hopeful we can do better.

Neonatal Tech and the Meaning of Life - Part One

In 1990 I dated a pediatric surgeon. It was one of the strangest relationships I ever had. I've never met anyone with a more twisted sense of humor. I never quite laughed along with the cracks about meconium inhalation, but I understood finally where that came from.

Now my cousin was a trauma surgeon once. So I grew accustomed to hearing things like "I can't wait to get my hands into somebody's guts." And according to those elaborate skill inventories, I've been assessed to have three perfect careers, architect, programmer and surgeon. So I truly understand the mentality of the men and women who keep their hands bloody for a living. So I finally understood that part and parcel of the professional ethos was a healthy respect for the human body. As a part of this I think it is only when you understand how incredibly complex and robust a system it is, do you begin to respect it. Still, bodies succeed and fail in inexplicable ways. You have to accept the capriciousness of the system too. It's an odd mix of temperaments.

I don't know how one can be a GP without having a healthy dose of cynicism, especially when one practices medicine in the United States. One of the first surprising things I learned was how doctors get sold by drug companies like us ordinary folks get spam. I attended a black tie event - some medical awards ceremony - and it seemed like half the people there were drug dealers, er pharmaceutical salesmen. We were plied with branded pens, post-it notes, refrigerator magnets and all sorts fo junk. I played along with the game, pretending to be a throat specialist (since it's well known that there are a healthy number of African Americans in that specialty here on the West Coast) just to see how far one of the guys would go.

Now back in that day, part of the cynicism extended to the widely reported phenomenon of the 'crack baby'. At Children's Hospital, they were spending millions, literally, to show that they could save low birthweight babies who were born addicted to crack cocaine. And they did. There was a revolution going on in being able to keep premies alive with newfangled procedures and advanced incubators that were practically synthetic wombs. Just for those pictures we all remember so well - little grey infants smaller than an adult hand, shivering weakly. That's what got the rich old codgers and dowagers out of their seats and into writing fat checks. The irony that crack babies were driving what would inevitably save thousands of premies was not lost on anyone, especially not me.

Right about that time, the culture wars were still in full swing, as were the accusations about 'black genocide'. The idea that the black man was an 'endangered species' did the rounds, not without probable cause. As well, diatribes about 'welfare queens' and teen motherhood were all anyone ever talked about in those days before The Verdict and OJ. From my perspective, I preferred to cut through the BS. How could this so called genocide be successful if all the black teenagers were having so many babies? It has long been one of my arguments about the persistence of African America - there are more of us now than there were back then, plus now we have Yo MTV Raps. We're not going back to Africa, we're doing just fine here. Part and parcel of that argument was that 'God don't make mistakes.' If a human body can get pregnant and deliver a child, then it's our economy that is out of joint if that child suffers, not 'black sex drives'.

The medical fact is that teenage mothers don't deliver as healthy a babe as a more mature woman comepletely aside from socioeconomic factors. Furthermore as a proper definition of survival of a species is concerned, all that must occur is that creatures' life expectancy gets through and beyond reproductive age. So there are almost none, if any, endangered ethnicities on the planet, strictly speaking. What we really care about is the longevity of the cultures, not the actual humans. The actual humans were doing well biologically. But then again, some were not. Enter technology.

If a couple cannot get pregnant, they had better have some money. Because if you want a baby and your own body is in the 'pathetic' category - if you swing that hammer but can't ring that bell - you had just better come out of your pocket and buy that kewpie doll. They are for sale, you know. My new partner says there is an incredibly brisk adoption business in China, the clients are all woefully out of shape Swedes, Finns and Danes. Make a note of this vis a vis Gay Marriage. But if your body can't reproduce, maybe God is trying to tell you something. We've all heard the stories of fertility clinics etc. This is all part of the equation..

I'm going to break off this piece and continue it later. The points I want to associate here have to do with the economic and professional incentives of the medical industry to get and spend on sperms, eggs, fetuses, premies and infants. Most babies in the world are born via midwifery, a cultural artifact that is all but extinct in the US of A. Go around and ask women you know about an epidural. Of course the desire to have a baby is very strong in everyone. Some folks will bear the pain, others will just shop. There is an economy here, and American values weigh in heavily. It's about race, it's about money, it's about technology, it's about culture and values and God and politics.

People want to chop each others heads off about Roe V Wade. I'm about to live somewhere where the government dictated how many children you can have. So I'm going to be particularly interested to understand what happens when you let the state that close. I'm civil libertarian on this matter, not pro-life, but anti-abortion. Where should the lines be drawn? To be continued.

Virtual Revenge

I may as well be explicit.

What happened to me about 18 months ago was that I had decided to stop contracting and go for a full time job. Some really cool people at a very large entertainment company (who's logo is the whole friggin' planet) started the interview process. Everybody loved me, but there was a big boss. So while I'm turning down other contracts in anticipation of getting this gig, the interview process drags out. I had 5 interviews, all of which were great successes until the very last one, which was the boss's boss's boss.

I may come to understand how the entertainment business is unlike every other, but a manager who has no comprehension of RAD methodologies shouldn't be able to hire IT professionals. But On top of this, they did the gauntlet interview process. Which is you put a candidate in front of 20 people who can all say no (including kids 2 years out of DeVry), but only one who can say yes.

Anyway, I wasted eight weeks and turned down work that could have fed me. My mistake was not hedging the bet. But the Hollywood folks were smiling in my face and telling me how great it was going to be working with me. Finally the market dried up and I basically was out of work for 6 months. I had to borrow some figure north of $12,000 to make ends meet and not get evicted.

It turns out that there are a lot of American entertainment companies that are trying to do what we're about to do. So it is very likely that there will be a crossing of paths in the future, something I never imagined at the time. I very well may be in the superior position.

I've badmouthed this man and his company enough times. I've gotten over it. I survive, comme d'habitude. Ce n'est pas une grand chose. Still, I have enough nerve to commit some farcical practical joke, if not a brick through his window. The idea is appealing and he certainly deserves as much. Yet anything I might do now, if I were to go out of my way in order to accomplish it, would not be proper in my ethos. It is an action that belongs in the moment, and the moment has long passed.

I know some of the reasons for that man's hesitation, and the story is really not so simple. He is also a powerful and reputable enough individual to expect revenge from time to time. I have no doubt that he knows that he makes enemies, this is part and parcel of the way Hollywood works. So while the thought of revenge had only surfaced recently in the context of other entertainment companies in Hong Kong wanting in on the action...

I may very well raise this from the position of an idle threat to an ethical challenge. The problem is something like this. On a scale of 1 to 10, do I really want to do it? 2. Does it need to be done? 8. Would I be glad to see it happen? 6. Would I do it, given the chance? 7. To me it has the appearance of an opportunity to do right which by the way I have a personal stake in. I can generate the motivation to do it, but only if the body floats down the river half dead.

Ching, Ni Shwo Man Yidyar

This week I'm going to get a CD to play in the car or on the computer. The spousal unit picked up a cassette from the local library but I really have poblems with analog tech. Besides, the distortion was crazy freaky. I could hear about four levels of echo, as if playing the tape so many times had shifted the magnetic substrate several times.

I clearly can recognize the language as compared to Japanese, Korean or Vietnamese. Chinese comes mostly from the front of the mouth. Spoken at something of a monotone (if the announcers on the radio are any indication) the inflection within words is very subtle. Whereas Japanese inflection and rhythm is a completely different. It's spoken more in the throat, louder it seems. French is a back of the throat language too, but all of these are easier than Arabic, which I don't think I'd ever be able to speak with any appreciable speed.

Chinese seems easy on the mouth, but the difference between a dz and a sz might give me problems. Also the way things are translated into English and English phonetics is going to trip me up a little. For example I know I've seen 'jyang' and 'jiang' spellings for the same word, as weel as 'boo' and 'bu'.

It's going to take me at least a year to be as bad with Chinese as I am with Spanish, but at least when I listen to Spanish on the radio, I can pick out enough words to know what the converstaion is about. On the other hand, it's a good excuse to get some more Jackie Chan movies.

Muzimei

Muzimei, a Chinese blogger has gotten her ISP shutdown, apparently for releasing the names of the men she's slept with. Fascinating. I wonder if mentioning her name here would bring me traffic or comments. I am very interested in knowing whether or not as an American blogging in China, I would bring negative attention from the authorities, since I don't even consider what consequences might arise from my writing here.

Anyone?

I'm also checking a few expat sites, since I'm on the late freight with this.

Who is Henry Bekkering?

If you don't know, now you know.

Damn! This is pure energy. He's on fire. He doesn't just defy gravity, he rips it to shreds. Most of all, he's fast.

Bete Noir

The Vector

In August or September of 2002 I got fired for the second or third time in my life. I'm that kind of asshole, but I didn't realize how close I was back then.

If things go as I plan, I'm going to serve up a cold dish of revenge. I have a couple people in mind. I have to make sure they know what a drag they were on my life. You see, the lesson I learned in interdependency was that, anybody who doesn't mind to see you fail is, by definition, your enemy. I didn't understand that - I thought that people had to dislike you and consciously plot against you. But in fact, all people have to do is know you, and ignore or discount those who actually do plot against you. These are those who won't let you know that the truck is about to hit you. They want to see a crash, and it doesn't matter to them that it's you. It doesn't matter how many episodes of Seinfeld you have discussed over lunch at the food court, they are your enemy nonetheless. It's a scary prospect for a guy like me, with thousands of names in my Outlook, only a half dozen which know what the DC stands for in the middle of my name.

That's ok.

The difference between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives know the truck is always coming. They're looking for ways to escape - to get away clean. The liberals are trying to set up traffic lights and warning signs so that nobody gets hit. That's why liberals are so attracted to despair. They know the feeling, while trying to be nobody's enemy, of watching a fellow human splattered. Writings of despair could be shared by liberals and conservatives. Perhaps it is the proper nexus. It was despair that changed me.

I turned Republican when I realized that catastrophe is inevitable, and the only salvation is becoming larger than life, and pre-emptively thrashing your enemies. Capitalism is a great medium for this agenda. If you don't become larger than life, then you are stuck at the mezzanine of despair, of knowing that life is a giant highway and the trucks never stop running people down. The liberal never seeks to become the truck. Instead, they endlessly warn the weak and bury the dead. It's a state of mind I cannot abide. Despair cannot be my byline. I want to be sensitive, I cannot be jaded. Burying bodies, praying for the trucks to stop, coming up with new schemes and watching them all fail... I don't have the patience for that. That's a job for Monroe.

I didn't know back then how close I was to being the mower rather than the mowee. I didn't give myself enough credit. I didn't think that I could make the leap, instead I was prepared to climb the slope one step at a time, like everybody else - like the food court lunch crowd who watched me get fired. And I realized when it happened that there was nothing they could do about it. They weren't bosses, they were employees just like me. They were just like opinions and assholes. They were commodity people with brains for hire.

So when I read about what Stalin did, I knew that my turn was inevitable.

It's not difficult to be reconciled to death. All you have to do is wander enough weary streets, and you're sure to find some population of humanity who bear greater burdens than yourself. It's easy in Houston, or wherever you might be. There are always rats self-medicating in the maze, but the problem stays. I'm a human, you say to yourself. We're all going to die, you say to yourself. Sooner or later we're going to get hit by that truck, you say to yourself. I'll just try to watch my back, you say to yourself. And then you start envying your children's naivete instead of teaching them how to win. You start putting limits on your expectations and you bog yourself down into a waking oblivion. It's easy. Everybody does it. You're doing it right now.

I think there's a difference between humility and reconciliation to death. I'm not sure I can spell it out. I'll have to wait until I get to the other side of success - that success that has the feel of inevitability to me right now. When I see the six figures cash in the bank, I'll let you know. Because then I'll hope that I'm humble but not reconciled to death. I asked my partner, the man who told me that in 5 years we'll all have mansions in Hawaii what could go wrong with our plan. He said that we could get sick or die.

The vector of my life is changing. I'm now in Chapter Ten. I realized that all those trucks are going somewhere and that I was at cross purposes. Instead of being a sheep and hoping for a good shepherd to get me across the road safely, I should have been hiking back to the garage and finding out how to build my own truck. All those trucks are going somewhere, even if I go in the opposite direction, it's better to be a driver than a pedestrian. And all this time I was an asshole pedestrian describing the trucks to all the other pedestrians. I'm surprised nobody pushed me in front of one. Maybe they did, there are lots of free hands in the crosswalk.

Have you ever been in the crowd and somebody moos as a joke? That shit's not funny. Get out. That joker is your enemy.

And through circumstance, me looking in the right direction, me running at the right speed, I've been able to grab ahold of a passing streetcar. I went back to the garage and built my own truck, this business, this corporation, this creation designed to limit my liability, to allow me to cruise the highways of commerce and to use banks instead of letting banks use me. It's my new vehicle. Yeah, I was pushed. I was that kind of asshole. An arrogant sumbitch who acted like he really knew something.

I am meeting the kind of people who tell me they will never be employees again. They've been on the other side and their head has just gotten too big. They've come to know bosses and owners and realized they could do it too. I convinced myself a long time, but I half-stepped. I admit it. I also got blindsided by the Feds, well actually I saw that truck coming - I just thought it would wing me. I remember walking around downtown Atlanta in 1995 in a new sweater on a Thursday. I was a contractor, self-employed with a few thousand in the bank. And suddenly I realized I had all the time in the world to do anything I wanted. I could hang out in the library at the Atlanta University Center and pester the librarian about Malcolm X. I could hang out in the barbershop on Sweet Auburn. I could check out the bars on the Bankhead Highway. I was free.

But I didn't prepare myself for big problems. I was straddling the fence. I wasn't corporate and going after the money and big business. I was independent and living large. I was happy being affluent, I wasn't trying to be rich. All I had to do was take care of two or three customers and I was chillin' in six figure incomeland. A nice place to be for a man with two babies and a Nissan. So when the offer to be an employee raised its head, I figured that was cool, too. As long as I got bonuses and stock options and an expense account, it would be cool. You can't complain about that, not until 2001.

I hitched my wagon to Silicon Valley, but not quite high enough. I wanted to be a top dog professional in Silicon Valley, and that was good enough. I watched the venture capitalists and Stanford Mafia with disbelief. They can't really be so apathetic about the soul of the industry, so I thought. But they sold us all out. I got fired by an economy that failed to recognize the brilliance of us six-figure professionals. I was in a different class of sheep and got run over by a bigger truck, and I took it personally. Funny. Jimmy L offered me a gig with his company near the top, but I stuck to my specialty. I was going to transform the world with the technology I had mastered, but I didn't realize that 'the world' could decide not to listen when the markets soured. I had convinced myself that the world needed products, but the world just needed money, including the world which was my division in my company. The spigot shut and I was walking the streets.

The answer to the question is undeniably this: It is always better to be the king of a small hill, than a prince at a higher elevation. That's because there are always things that princes don't know, but kings must know it all. I could be wrong. But I'll keep my little corporate castle all the same.

Now I'm going international. I've got to keep my eye on more balls. I've got multiple governments, cultures, legal systems and currencies to watch. The fish are getting bigger, and there is a new class of dangers and opportunities. I'm going beyond America. I'm sure to learn new lessons, some the hard way. But this time I know what kind of asshole I am; boss / owner asshole. Asshole LLP. Stay tuned.

The Last Temptation of the Religious Right

I don't believe that the Religious Right is the great power that many people think. Quite frankly, I think their influence is oversold and they take credit for a number of things that happen that have nothing to do with them. Like all moral graspers, like white liberals 'responsible' for black success, their greatness is more testament to their egos than their abilities.

Be that as it may, the Religious Right in all of its manifestations, has something going for it, which is principle. It will be its strength and its weakness. The way I see it, only when the Religious Right is absolutely consistent will it have credibility. Its mistakes will be amplified just as wildly as its successes.

The difference between the Religious Right and Fundamentalism has most everything to do with the supremacy of the Constitution. The difference is between those who are pursuing the 'temporal kingdom' and the 'spiritual kingdom'. A nice illustration could be found in the following analysis:

At the outset of his ministry, after God acknowledged him when he was baptized, Satan tempted him. What temptation would be worthy of divinity? Certainly it was not the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, or the vainglory of life as we have interpreted so trivially. Satan set out to defeat his purpose to seek and to save the lost which would demand the cross. What appeals could Satan offer?

First, he let Jesus feel human need. Lesser men have endured fasting longer even as did the Irish patriots who starved themselves in 1981. There would have been no sin in eating food or for the Creator to turn stones into food.

In this temptation the devil seems to be saying, "Now you know how it feels to be hungry and suffer with humanity. Millions are hungry, sick, cold, homeless, and in various other miseries. You have the power to remedy this. Make bread and earthly supplies to relieve them. Hear their cry. You can make this earth into a paradise." But Jesus is responding, "Man cannot live by the bread of earthly relief alone. He must have spiritual healing which can only come through the cross. A renewed Eden on earth is not the answer."

Then Jesus looked down from the height of the temple upon the people who would be crying out for his crucifixion within three years. He had the power to awe them into obedience by his miraculous demonstrations. In that state of submission, none would have cried out for his death; so, the cross would have been avoided, leaving man in his sin. It would have compromised sin instead of atoning for it.

In the third facet of this one great temptation, after he is shown all the kingdoms of the world in panorama, Satan seems to be saying, "If you will join forces with me with all your infinite power and wisdom, you can easily rule over all mankind. If you resist me, there will be rebellion, suffering, and sorrow in continual alienation from God." Even though an earthly, materialistic kingdom would avoid the cross, it would be a perpetual reign over a world lost in sin.

What I need to establish is some working definition that clarifies the activities of the Religious Right, its organizations and their constituents' activities. But again, I seek to do so because I believe that the association of the re-election of GWBush and the Republican majority in Congress with Evangelical Christianity is too facile. As anyone who thinks a moment could tell you, Jimmy Carter was an Evangelical Christian. Do we have a problem with evangelicals in government? It may not be a question of religious belief at all.

Notice that Satan's temptation of Jesus focuses, in one sense, on the suffering of mankind. Satan offers Jesus what amounts to the position of Philosopher-King. That position is everything that Liberals want for government to accomplish. The elimination of rebellion, suffering, and sorrow. Is that so bad? No. But the point of Jesus life, death and resurrection was to bring people to God and salvation through the acknowledgement of Jesus own grace. It wasn't to convert earthly kingdoms to righteous kingdoms. Jesus' mission was not to reform governments, change laws, elect politicians or set policy, but to be the one and only spiritual redeemer.

So what do Evangelical Christians believe that they are supposed to be doing in politics?

I think we need immediately to distinguish between the top-down and the bottom-up. Because anybody who thinks that Karl Rove is doing Christian things for the sake of Christians needs a bit of public humiliation. There is an enormous difference between spinning the image of GWBush and Republicans in general to appeal to the 'values' of Christians and the bottom-up rhetoric of this being a Christian Nation. Rove doesn't care what kind of nation this is, so long as his man gets to run it. This is the wake-up call that evangelicals in politics need to heed. You may think you have the keys to the kingdom, but it's not the US government.

So we need to try and understand where Dobson and company with their values-centered organizations are headed, or where they think they are headed given the credit they have been overgenerously been given for the re-election of the president. This moderate Republican is not about to stand by idly to give over my earthly kingdom to religious activists of any stripe, nor any other type of special interests who are out to convert the Republic. Anyone on the Religious Right needs to beware of their own ambition, and get right with God. Which way are you trying to go?

Plague

Projection

Get Your Giftie

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion:
What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us,
An' ev'n devotion! -- Robert Burns, 1786

We see you as a number, of course.

NAACP: Do or Die

Following up on the NAACP, Booker Rising takes issue with my position:

The moderate-conservative Republican argues that Kweisi Mfume, the outgoing head of the NAACP, didn't do the job that might save the NAACP from obsolescence. He argues that to remain relevant, the NAACP must become a multicultural organization: "That the NAACP is black and not Asian and Latino is a problem. It is a problem that the NAACP must resolve or face increased marginalization. Its byline is that it is the oldest Civil Rights organization. That's like saying the Communist Party is the oldest party in Russia. That means it's more about the past than the present. Problem."

We vociferously disagree. After all, no one is calling for the National Council of La Raza to include (non-Hispanic) blacks. And this strategy erroneously assumes that the interests of blacks, Latinos, and Asians are similar. How does one explain illegal immigration? It's in Latinos' interest for there to be lax enforcement. Strict border enforcement is in black folks' interest, as we bear the brunt of illegal immigration's effects. However, we agree that the NAACP must focus its priorities on today's pressing issues - not those of the 1960s.

There is almost no significant civil rights issue on which MALDEF, Asian groups and the NAACP disagree. This was a point I tried to drive home inthe wake of the LA Riots. The media was making the country believe that it was blacks against all asians, when the problem was specific to certain korean merchants. Blacks and Japanese, especially in Crenshaw, never had beef. Nor did blacks and Chinese or Vietnamese. But the very divisiveness that puff journalists were able to highlight could have been squashed by an NAACP under somebody other than Chavis. I thought that somebody was Mfume.

Now today MALDEF, La Raza, and all the rest are doing the same thing they were doing 20 years ago with no greater integration with the NAACP as before. That's a political fact. But on Civil Rights issues like California's prop 187, they were all on the same side against it. Meanwhile no real multicultural coalition organizations have arisen, as each group has taken their political and social capital and run their own way. Fine. but.

Civil Rights is Civil Rights. I don't think there is much work to be done. For American citizens the bar is the same, and it's reasonable to say that the Congressional Black Caucus has done all that needs to be done with regards to providing leadership, which is to say not a whole lot. I don't see what little meat on the bones is worth splitting amongst those few organizations if their concern is truly Civil Rights. Which illustrates my point, it's not. They are ethnic poltical organzations. To the extent that is true, I think it is a failure of the legacy of the NAACP, and if the IRS thinks so too, good.

So make it one civil rights organzation for everyone, or drop the pretense and be the Black Left Coalition.

The Jungle

"This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine until my children can walk the streets in freedom, in safety, inpeace of mind. So let it shine!"
-- Rev. Leonard Jackson, Dec 2004

The other day, police and clergy marched on MLK Blvd for peace. Sound familiar? It should. As Robin Harris said more than a decade ago, we're talking about the Ghetto, where the cost of living is going up and the chance of living is going down.

This time it's Eighteenth Street vs the Bloods. It's getting dark in the Jungle so get indoors behind the steel plates, lest you catch a stray bullet. Nothing new. Same as 1986. Same streets, different gangs. The speeches and calls are so familiar. Too bad. There's only one solution, it's called escape. Escape requires mobility, mobility requires skill, skill needs desire and discipline. I wonder if they are praying for these things, and yet somehow I doubt it.

Several years ago, I had wanted to bomb (tag with spraypaint) the Crenshaw Wall with the URL for my website. And someday I may yet do it. VisionCircle is ready for primetime. One or two more authors and it could be awesome - it's already growing in strength and relevance. If I put the URL on the Wall in spraypaint, how many hits would I get from around the way? Hard to say. But answers are out here, if people would stop listening to the same tired voices.

Aahh but street knowledge is irreplacable. There's no substitute for it. It's the only thing that will save you in the streets. The question is whether or not you are destined to remain there.

I drove my family through the Jungle a few weeks ago. I forgot the context of why we were there. Maybe it was just after a big dinner at the New Panda Buffet on MLK that was originally built as a Sizzler. I drove up Stevely where my girlfriend used to live in 1979 just before the dawn of the Crack Wars. We drove around to Hillcrest School and Cocoa and I recalled the beginning of the bad old days as well as the good old days before them.

See when the Jungle was first called the Jungle, it was all good. I clearly remember when those apartments were brand new and their pools sparkled. I recall how much everybody wanted them, especially those folks who had previously lived in Liemert Park when that was the spot. The difference, of course, was that Liemert Park had homes as well as apartments and that provided stability. But by the mid 80s, Liemert started to slide downhill to the point where black college students at USC began to swear off it as the premier spot for off campus housing.

Perhaps today in these post-riot, post-Gates days, relations between cops and communities can get to the level of trust necessary to hand the smackdown to the criminal element. It wasn't long ago when gang sweeps meant that basically every black and latino kid got picked up. When investigations showed something like a measly 8% criminal booking rate for these mass arrests, already hostile relations got worse. That's a lot of BS to undo, but it will have to happen, and that's why this march, as futile as I think it is, symbolizes the positive relations which must occur if gangbanging is to be made less deadly.

There's a difference of course. 18th Street is a Latino gang. Blackfolks still remaining in the Jungle and Liemert are among those left behind. Black Flight is real too. View Park may not be far enough away in the future - remember how a very popular black restauranteur was gunned down in Ladera Heights this year. My old neighborhood is growing more and more Hispanic. There's a new dynamic afoot - let's see how it goes down.

In the meantime, there's the old standby of exodus. It's a strategy that's worked since the days of Moses.

Hack Verizon

Verizon is digging their own grave, but only because clever folks are speaking up.

These guys are right for setting up the attention. A couple thousand bucks might not be enough to do anything, but when it gets to 5,000 then hackers will come forward. It's an eyebrow-raising proposition.

Bluetooth hasn't really fulfilled much of its promise. I wish it would because as nice as USB is, I sure would like to get rid of all the cables behind my desk and television. Let's get it started.

Glowing

Identifying the people in this picture is a lot easier than with the gang of Bobbie Soxers. Auntie is on the left and Moms is on the right with me. You can't see me because there's no fancy neonatal technology in 1961. Nobody knew if I would be a he or a she. I'm there though, about to become a real boy in less than a month.

I'm pretty sure that this is the LA Zoo. Things have come a long way since then I'd say. The folks had a very difficult time getting housing on base at Pendleton, but I'm told that my immanent arrival helped soften hearts that otherwise were closed to persons of color in those days. So I was ultimately born in Oceanside, CA; a good place to be from.

Not long thereafter, we headed up to Los Angeles and I grew up in the shadow of the Dons.

Bobby Soxers

Somebody asked whether I'm from Louisiana. I'm not but my mother is. This is the crew (krewe?) she used to hang with back in the day. Now the fact of the matter is that she looks so much like her sister that I'm not exactly sure which one of these young ladies she is. She's either the one in the back with the big smile or she's the one in front with the medallion.

Of course I always like finding pictures like this which seem so anomalous in the face of the propaganda of black depravity. My propaganda beats yours, so take that. Check the Wellington House series for more such photos.

The Big Ten

I've picked out a few of the hundreds of pictures and hours of video that have recorded the event for Cyndi and I. These make the place look a lot more sparse than it actually was, but I didn't want to put a bunch of folks pictures out on the net for no good reason.

We all had a great time running the gamut of the best emotions.

I am being reminded of how much love I have gotten over the past 15 years she has known me and the 10 we've been married.

Lighting the unity candles. No wax burns this time.

Tony cut us some hearts. He's the man when it comes to catering.

In order to avoid the politics of proximity, we sat at our own little table.

I don't know which of the neices or nephews drew this, but it's completely adorable. Nice to know you're making a good impression.

This is the least embarassing flick of me getting jiggy that I could find. F9 still has to watch her feet when she dances. I'm so glad there's no MTV in the house.

Awww.

Man we used to look really good, and slim.

Massive Shooters & Adhoc Clans

CNET reports that a record of sorts has been set for hosting simultaneous online gamers.

Hardware maker Unisys announced Wednesday that its ES7000 server helped set a record for the most online game players ever hosted on a single server. The feat occurred last June at DreamHack 2004, a major computer conference in Sweden.

Game enthusiasts at the conference set up a session of the popular shooting game "CounterStrike" with 1,160 simultaneous players hosted on a single Unisys server, equipped with 32 Intel Xeon 2.2GHz processors and 32GB of memory. The Guinness World of Records recognized the session as a world record earlier this week.

So let me see if I understand this correctly. There were over 1100 gamers playing at once?

If this is correct, then it opens up the possibility of huge games. Now I don't play MMORPGs like Everquest, but I have been There and on Second Life. So it's possible that this kind of stuff could actually happen. But in shooters, there is so much more going on in realtime than just chat and dance moves.

Halo2's 'proximity' feature is particularly notable in this regard. They have already breached the barrier of having what goes on around a player in more focus than what's going on in the background. I can see the game glitch occasionally enough to see objects I move towards get less jaggy. So I know that they have mastered the first person experience with regard to prioritizing events close up and deprioritizing remote ones. So this suggests to me that a 'Halo 3' could do some rather intersting things. Let's speculate.

If the user experience of the game is prioritized by proximity it means that the immediate environment 'renders itself' around the player - it's work that is piped to the client by the server given a 'gps location'. This means that there's a kind of limit to what you need to know as if you were in a Newtonian field of an Einsteinian universe. In otherwords, your playing field can be massive beyond comprehension but all you know, or need to know, you can handle with your own little compute box. A massive server however can keep track of global Einsteinian events. So where are we headed? We're headed towards shooters that have battles which last longer than individual gamer and clan sessions.

Right now the greatest thing about Halo2 is its ability to deliver the cool guts of shooting action to an individual gamer by matching them up relatively quickly with people who want to do the same thing. This is very important and I'll talk about it more later. But the fact that the Bungie folks understand this key feature menas that they will be open to the idea of adhoc clans.

So in a massive shooter served by a massive box, you can be delivered to a battlefield, get orders, and try to take positions in a battle that was going on before your arrived. Here is the nature of an adhoc clan. Halo3 could have waves of Earth fighters engage city after city in the Covenant planets. Battles that last for days can be engaged...

Plazes

Now here's something I like. It's called Plazes. It answers the question, where ya at?

Plazes is the first global location-aware interaction and geo-information system, connecting you with the people and Plazes in your area and all over the world. It is the navigation system for your social life.

Plaze = Location + People

A Plaze is a physical location with a local network - private or public, wired or unwired. A Plaze constitutes of the information about the actual location like pictures, comments and mapping information, as well as the people currently online at that Plaze.

This, enabled for broadband wireless is going to enable smartmobbing at a small scale. Crew hookups is what's likely to happen. It will be fairly extraordinary.