Cobb

Snappy Answers

Borkies: The Easiest Catch

The most fascinating thing about the latest gadget I have, Google Earth Plus, is finding out how sparsely populated the planet is.

If you spin the globe and point your finger, chances are that you're going to land in the ocean, a good place to find nothing. Having watched the marathon of 'The Deadliest Catch' in which 210 boats brave the treacherous Bering Sea for a few days to bring a couple million pounds of crab back, it makes me wonder what might be found in the middle of the Pacific. I have no idea of knowing how and where fishermen drop their nets and traps worldwide, but my newfound gut is telling me that there's a lot more fish out there. It seems more likely to me that we're cherry picking what we know how to cook, but that were we to develop a taste for octopus, we'd worry less about the sustainability of the world's fisheries.

In the sci-fi book I thought I might work on in the Biome category, I came up with the concept called 'borkies'. Borkies are just small bits of fish, generally squid, which are seasoned in such a way as to be individually delicious. As part of your highschool education, you are 'taste-tested' to see what your very favorite flavors are, and you cannot graduate until you learn how to prepare your own borkies. You then can exist in a semi-dependent, semi-independent way by purchasing or making your own borkies seasoning. Most people eat theirs with rice or noodles & broth in a bowl. People basically get addicted to what's good for them.

Squid borkies were chosen because I've heard that squid are some of the easiest marine protien to mass-produce. They eat anything and they're easy to catch or farm. In the Biome, eating your borkies is one of the basic tenets of civilization.

Here in Los Angeles, a great deal is artificial. We're in a desert, after all. So gazing at Google Earth, I am drawn to places with rivers and deltas and lakes. I watch towns which were established and grown in the eras of river travel, train travel, automobile travel. I look for the docks, the stations, the interchanges that shape the physical city. Los Angeles would adopt to borkies because we are accustomed to, and welcolming of the external, the import. We are integrative and dependent. We would know how to cook our borkies.

I think mine would be squid with wheat udon in broth. Warm and spicy with a bit of egg.

Borkies: The Easiest Catch

The most fascinating thing about the latest gadget I have, Google Earth Plus, is finding out how sparsely populated the planet is.

If you spin the globe and point your finger, chances are that you're going to land in the ocean, a good place to find nothing. Having watched the marathon of 'The Deadliest Catch' in which 210 boats brave the treacherous Bering Sea for a few days to bring a couple million pounds of crab back, it makes me wonder what might be found in the middle of the Pacific. I have no idea of knowing how and where fishermen drop their nets and traps worldwide, but my newfound gut is telling me that there's a lot more fish out there. It seems more likely to me that we're cherry picking what we know how to cook, but that were we to develop a taste for octopus, we'd worry less about the sustainability of the world's fisheries.

In the sci-fi book I thought I might work on in the Biome category, I came up with the concept called 'borkies'. Borkies are just small bits of fish, generally squid, which are seasoned in such a way as to be individually delicious. As part of your highschool education, you are 'taste-tested' to see what your very favorite flavors are, and you cannot graduate until you learn how to prepare your own borkies. You then can exist in a semi-dependent, semi-independent way by purchasing or making your own borkies seasoning. Most people eat theirs with rice or noodles & broth in a bowl. People basically get addicted to what's good for them.

Squid borkies were chosen because I've heard that squid are some of the easiest marine protien to mass-produce. They eat anything and they're easy to catch or farm. In the Biome, eating your borkies is one of the basic tenets of civilization.

Here in Los Angeles, a great deal is artificial. We're in a desert, after all. So gazing at Google Earth, I am drawn to places with rivers and deltas and lakes. I watch towns which were established and grown in the eras of river travel, train travel, automobile travel. I look for the docks, the stations, the interchanges that shape the physical city. Los Angeles would adopt to borkies because we are accustomed to, and welcolming of the external, the import. We are integrative and dependent. We would know how to cook our borkies.

I think mine would be squid with wheat udon in broth. Warm and spicy with a bit of egg.

Under Represent

Internet Privacy: Knowing vs Doing

Despite all the guns out there, chances are, you're not going to get shot. Despite all the credit cards you have, chances are your identity is not going to get stolen.

I've been a little lax on following up on the many interests I've cultivated in my life, among them security and paranoia. So I've only vaguely heard tell of Bank of America's loss of private information to crackers and identity fraudsters. But I'm not really worried.

Back in the days, before the internet bubble, our division got into a lot of PR hot water over the matter of privacy. I had a nicely complex argument that shot down most arguments against our cookies and weblog inspections that went a little something like this. You need to take into consideration the value of your information. Why would a thief buy $500 tools to steal a $50 item? And while it may be true that part of the value of these recent identity theft break-ins is the size of the theft, sooner or later there has to be a fence value for each one. What is, indeed, the value of you mother's maiden name?

I've been thinking about what the value of my writing on the internet for the past 12 years has been. I've always assumed that some poor graduate student would have to troll through it after I'm gone to make some anthropological sense of the contribution of the post-civil rights black middle class. But more recently, especially since my mother says I confess too much, I've been thinking about its value to my own children. After all, they're probably the only ones who really care enough to read more than a little bit. I don't tell people to read my blog, and I don't often mention that I do blog, but I think that most of my friends know about it - and don't read it. I know that my mother is the only family member that reads Cobb on the regular. Such facts, combined with the fact that my IQ is right about at the same level as my FICO score, I don't particularly worry about my identity being stolen.

I have several issues with 'action at a distance', and so while I am often the first to indulge in the latest technological goody, I am far from being dependent or overly respectful of all this stuff. I know how fragile it is and how wrong it can be.

Since I'm not cheating on my wife or stealing from my employer or blackmailing anyone, I can see no particular enemies looking to do me in. When you think of the guns and violence, we know that people are generally killed by people they know for reasons that don't take long to figure out. It's likely to be your own son who is out joyriding in the family sedan. Because it's a family sedan, it's not so attractive to professional thieves. My identity is no Mercedes Benz, at least my identity as tied to financial data about me in hackable computers somewhere. But if there is dirt doable to me, it would most likely be by an insider. Did I spend 200 bucks on a dinner in Salt Lake City? My wife would kill me if she found out. That's my kind of worry. (Actually it was only 74 bucks).

So considering the massive amount of information about me through my blog, and who knows what the google archive has via google groups, there's a lot to know, but little to do. What's the motivation? How is the information valued? Moe importantly, how does it get fungible? Which is to say, where is the fence? What is the eqivalent of a pawn shop for the last four digits of your social security number? What do you care if your eyeglasses perscription falls into the wrong hands?

Still, I'd be a bit more comfortable if we had the option to generate our own passwords and identifyers. PGP with a picture and a signature would be plenty. Some joint like the UPS Store (where my favorite Notary Public can be found) or Kinkos could provide this service to customers - live authentication. Banks would be uniquely qualified to do similar things. In fact, I could see a privatized national ID system coming to fruition sooner than a Federal one, and I'd be all for it. Until then, all my business is in the street, and who cares?

Contract

Looking for Talent

Speaking for myself, I am looking to bring some talent on board.

It's not often that I get so absorbed in work that I don't have time to blog, but that has been the case for the past week or so. I've only been onboard in my new gig for about 10 weeks and I can clearly see it's all about momentum. So I'm piercing the veil between Cobb and Michael Bowen on the off chance that one or a few of you might be interested in getting some serious job satisfaction working on our team. Plus I'm using this to warm up whatever I'll be writing in Craigslist in a week or two.

I've got a dilemma. I have lots of work and not enough bodies. Here in Southern California, we are pulling down so much business, that I need a clone army. Unfortunately I don't have an emissary to send to planet Camino.

I am looking for four profiles of candidate to work in major accounts using Hyperion technology in Southern California for the Western Region. If you are somebody or know somebody who fits one of these general profiles, I can get you started quickly.

Don't Eyeball Me Boy

Once upon a time in the good old days, a man named Louis Gossett Jr, became an American hero. He did so by beating the crap out of Richard Gere.

Gossett played the character Sargeant Foley in the award winning film 'An Officer and a Gentleman' back in 1982. Like all drill sargeants before him and after his job was to break men and remake them in the image of a soldier.

I would challenge those who waste all of our time with their whinging over the excesses of Abu Ghraib to review the film and challenge their positive feelings about it. I think it would be a suitable exercise for those Americans who have an inner dainty voice on the hotline to the ACLU. Because it was a rare American who didn't cheer the movie or sing the song 'Love Lift Us Up'. It was a rare American who didn't think Lou Gossett should be a role model for us. But today it seems that those who are hogging the podium would have Gossett hanged in effigy. (Metaphorically of course)

You see Sargeant Foley used (oh horror of horrors) sleep deprivation. He had his recruits in boot camp stand out in the rain holding their rifles above their heads running in place. This is I believe what they call a 'stress position'. Good heavens.

Could it be that the US Military tortures all of its own recruits in boot camp so much that when they do similar things to foreign combattants and POWs that we don't even recognize our inhumanity? What are we to make of G.I. Jane? What about Men of Honor? What about the very concept of killing? It's all so confusing! Yeah right.

Blind

WWJD?

What wouldn't Jesus do? He wouldn't have children. Why not? Any ideas?

Redskins

It's not very often that I disagree with Frank DeFord, but having heard him pontificate on the matter of the naming of our sports teams, I have to wonder where his head is at. You can count DeFord as one of the many who have sided with those who suggest that naming a sports team after 'Indians' is cruel. I think not.

I could split the difference over a team born yesterday, but not over the Cleveland Indians or Washington Redskins or the Florida Seminoles for that matter. The difficulty has everything to do with intent, an issue with which most crusaders cannot bother to give the benefit of the doubt. You see, I associate the Cleveland Indians only with the Cleveland Indians. I would be more upset if they moved the team to Miami and still tried to call them the Indians. You will find, however, that most of the folks behind the movement to change these team names insist that the names are nothing but denigrating to Native Americans.

DeFord notes this and swallows it. He argues that, yes, he has heard arguments to the contrary - that such a named team or mascot brings pride to Native Americans. I say that the very fact that they are stereotypes proves that they have nothing whatsoever to do with Native Americans, and that Native Americans should pay the names no mind, unless of course they decide to root for the team in the context of sport.

I've been asked what I would think of the New Jersey Negroes or the Pittsburgh Pickaninnies. I would think 'whatever'. It is difficult for me to believe that any modern interpretation of Native American culture is near enough to actual appropriation to be anything more than an empty stereotype. But there are those who would like to fill it up, and there's the problem. But let's go there.

Coming back from the 2000 Games in Sydney, my plane made a stop in Aukland. I decided to pick up some souvenirs in the very nice and modern airport. As I grabbed a good 5 foor digideroo, what do I see to my surprise but a huge rack of sportswear for the All Blacks. It turns out to be the very popular rugby team, and the gear is very sharp. Better looking than the Raiders. I thought about it for a minute. All Black. How radical is that? I could see very well appropriating the gear and making it into an American Black Thing (tm), but to what end? No Americans know about the All Blacks, they would only know what I would try to make it out to be. It's the same as the case with the Negro Leagues. It's not about the team, it's about black pride.

So I think that people are fooling themselves if they believe that changing the name of a sports team has anything to do with Native American pride or their real culture. It's just another empty bleeding heart gesture which in no way affects the material circumstances or Native Americans.

I suspect we're going to hear more about it. I hope so.

The Dark Side

There's a lot to be said for the Dark Side of the Force that isn't said explicitly in Lucasfilm's latest 'Revenge of the Sith'. Fortunately, I have had the opportunity to play, for weeks, Knights of the Old Republic on XBox.

In that role, you have to attend the Sith Academy and understand the ways of power and passion. Having done so, it puts you in the position of understanding the limits of selflessness. Although this is the philosophical background for Revenge of the Sith, the film does not work out the details in a way that could have made it great.

Anakin faces the same challenge as Jesus or any other Chosen One. Certainly Jesus chose wisest but the depth of that wisdom needs much explaining. You see, to be selfless, one must be dedicated to principle and principle is always broken. What then needs to be the object of your loyalty? That collective you that best upholds the spirit of the principle, those people who have helped you become what you are. This selfless way always requires sacrifice. With any luck, you get to sacrifice those people who have helped you become what you are for the sake of principle. It makes you an asshole, but a principled one. I say luck because this is the thing that helps you understand the significance of Yoda's advice to Anakin which was one of the most profound statements of the film, yet almost thrown away. Yoda told Anakin that you must be prepared to let go of everything.

Sting had that stupid song that played forever and made Hallmark another million dollars. If you love somebody, set them free. This is something you cannot say to a parent. This is not something you can blithely assert because it says love for the one is inferior to love for the many. This is the way of the Jedi and it is why the Jedi are a celibate preisthood. It is also the weakness of Christianity - and why Christianity is not philosophically reconciled with the Family.

The Dark Side gives powers to passion, instinct, deception and our animal wisdom. These are the things that give us the edge over machines, that are worth loving. The way of the Sith gives structure to this philosophy but in the Star Wars galaxy it is done mostly in terms of good and evil. While it is true that there is a certain Machiavellian ruthless efficiency to Sith, it is equally true that balancing the Force requires more than the Jedi provide.

Anakin falls squarely into this gap. His ambition and desire for security come straight from his desire to protect women and children. In that he is pure of heart, it is perhaps his most admirable quality. And yet it is this fear of losing love and family that has made the Jedi Council suspicious of him from the time he was a child. Anakin is not fearless and selflessly dedicated to the way of the Jedi. He wants *his* family. He wants *his* wife. He wants *his* love and he doesn't want to hide his passion. But he must. And this is what drives him apart from Padme as he becomes a Jedi and must hew to the arcane directives of the Jedi Council. Yoda demands that he be emotionally aloof that he be ready to sacrifice all. To be a Jedi Master like Yoda, you must be a solitary sexless dispassionate Seer, fearless, selfless and emotionally unavailable except to the high calling.

This is why chicks go for the bad boys. They don't play that.

There are three episodes remaining, and perhaps Lucas might loosen his grip on the Empire that is the Star Wars franchise so that Leia's adventures might begin. Leia on the Dark Side and Luke on the light, battling for the fate of the Force in the Galaxy would make for an excellent series. This is a chance to review the role of the Sacred Feminine.

Revenge of the Sith is a disappointment precisely because it doesn't express the Yang of the Dark Side in the Sacred Feminine. That falls to the great failure of Padme to act like a real pregnant woman. A real pregnant woman would not allow Anakin to be emotionally distant or traipse off to distant planets to run down some Trade Federation. They don't stand at the window pining away silently at the distance between themselves and the father of their child. They are demanding of comfort and attention, and well they should be. Pregnancy demands that the world stop and focus brought on the home and the baby. That Anakin escapes these demands is a romantic goof and the necessary diversion to reduce the Dark Side to the evil of abuse of power. But the Dark Side is much more than that, and now you know.

Wikipedia, Finally

These days I find that I don't have much time or energy for thinking outside of my box. Everything is coming in fragments. However one thing that I find myself doing repeatedly is consulting the Wikipedia. It is easily becoming my favorite spot on the web. So I have signed up as a member and am working to add a some dimensions to it in my areas of expertise, beginning with OLAP.

I'd also like to expand a bit on bits and pieces of Johnnie Cochran because I think it's more important for people to know the details of some of the cases that made him infamous with local law enforcement than what made him famous in the mainstream media. But I need to get a feel for how good the fact-checking is on the site and what is and is not considered relevant to post. For example, Cochran was the man who got the million dollar judgement in the case of Ron Settles, which led to taking the LAPD's infamous chokehold out of their repretoire. An unintended consequence of that is that cops were more edgy and tended to rely more on batons than before. Result? Rodney King.

There's an interesting entry on Subhas Bose, whom I often compare to the shock and delight of many Indian friends, to Malcolm X. He's quite the controversial figure.

As I retreat from the hash and rehash, I am finding comfort in my geek hat. Nights like this I wonder about the future of the blog and whether or not the Cobbian mission is accomoplished. I'll know for certain by the end of the summer. Right now the direction is towards more technology and research and less politics and current events. That means I'll spend a lot more time at Cubegeek and at Wikipedia.

Wikipedia, Finally

These days I find that I don't have much time or energy for thinking outside of my box. Everything is coming in fragments. However one thing that I find myself doing repeatedly is consulting the Wikipedia. It is easily becoming my favorite spot on the web. So I have signed up as a member and am working to add a some dimensions to it in my areas of expertise, beginning with OLAP.

I'd also like to expand a bit on bits and pieces of Johnnie Cochran because I think it's more important for people to know the details of some of the cases that made him infamous with local law enforcement than what made him famous in the mainstream media. But I need to get a feel for how good the fact-checking is on the site and what is and is not considered relevant to post. For example, Cochran was the man who got the million dollar judgement in the case of Ron Settles, which led to taking the LAPD's infamous chokehold out of their repretoire. An unintended consequence of that is that cops were more edgy and tended to rely more on batons than before. Result? Rodney King.

There's an interesting entry on Subhas Bose, whom I often compare to the shock and delight of many Indian friends, to Malcolm X. He's quite the controversial figure.

As I retreat from the hash and rehash, I am finding comfort in my geek hat. Nights like this I wonder about the future of the blog and whether or not the Cobbian mission is accomoplished. I'll know for certain by the end of the summer. Right now the direction is towards more technology and research and less politics and current events. That means I'll spend a lot more time at Cubegeek and at Wikipedia.

Consider This

I don't listen to KCRW any longer. I'm on the other side with KPCC. In every way except for broadcast quality in certain parts of the Southland, I find KPCC superior. So now you know. I'm also not a big fan of Sandra Tsing Loh, so I only paused a moment when she got the boot.

Today I've learned that Cindy Burkey got the boot from KCRW and it has given my aggravated camel yet another straw named Ruth Seymour. Something about her gets on my nerves, and perhaps it is her very tenacity. The problem with tenacious people is that sometimes they barnacle on to bad ideas and it makes you wonder if they ever had an original thought. As a conservative, you need to be constantly on the lookout for such people. Especially when the sound of boots echo.

Edgewise

Bookworms

Lee told me, and Lee should know as a slightly waifish Armenian woman, that men with my appearance tend to intimidate. Although I tend to notice that people seem to say 'Oh excuse me' a lot unnecessarily in supermarkets, I am completely oblivious to the Large Black Man Effect Field that I apparently generate. Nevertheless, I do recall walking my boss out to the parking lot way back in '92 and her confessing to me that every night she brought a pair of scissors for self-defense.

I just do not have any sense of the danger that women and dweebs must feel at night in areas where bad people might be. However I've always attributed that to street smarts, which I know that I possess; I've never attributed much to my ability to appear intimidating. Sure, I have the homeboy suit and I can dress up to be perfectly at home on the set of American Chopper, but me? Threatening? I chuckle.

Nevertheless, as Matt Yglesias mentions books that he should have read, I begin to wonder about such matters, but it wasn't until somebody mentioned Catcher in the Rye that the angle for this post hit me.

I've always kinda not read books because of the thrill that books give me. Counter-intutitive eh? Until you realize that most of my life I've struggled with my concept of the 'noble arena'. It goes a little something like this. I'm single and I'm living in my two bedroom apartment in Park Slope. I ask myself, self, what should I do this evening? Should I head out to the city or should I stay home and read a book? This is a dilemma because I generally stay home and read the book, which only makes me want to go out to the city and find some people to talk about the book with. Except that there is no place for me to go where anyone ever talks to me about books. In my life, there have been about 12 people who have ever asked me what books am I reading. That includes every job interview, every cocktail party, every poetry reading, every co-worker, blah blah blah. I've lived with this

As far as I'm concerned, the noble arena exists merely as a construction of like minds in cyberspace. It's why I have spent so many years here, because when I walk out that door, apparently people are too busy trying not to piss their pants much less ask me my preferences in literature. It's not as if I hadn't spent the requisite hours trolling Waterstones on Newbury Street in Boston, or Coliseum off Columbus Circle in Manhattan. Then again, I do use the term 'dweebs', so perhaps it's entirely my fault.

There was a cat named Black who once worked for The Nation magazine. We taught Saturday school at St. Luke's up near City College, back in the day. He gave me the impression of being the kind of dweeb to whom I generally refer. I told him that the Nation should run personal ads and publish a version on the Internet. He thought that if I ever had a mind, I had lost it completely. Then again, I thought he lived in the wrong part of the Village and that perhaps his judgements were dismissible. After all, I was right and he wasn't long for The Nation.

On the other hand, I could just shutup and answer the question in the form of, "No I haven't bother to read Dostoyevsky and I don't really think I'm missing out." But the fact of the matter is that I am still at a loss to say what society I am missing out on for not having done so. This has been the case for so long that it makes me doubt two things, firstly the value of the books themselves, and secondly the extent to which the value of those books imparts themselves onto their readers. This is problematic only if those readers are not dweebs and actually do hold court and sway some real flesh and blood places. I remember being told that it helps to know Shakespeare because your boss might drop the phrase 'There is a tide in the affairs of men..' and I should know the implication. More likely I'll hear co-workers mumble quotes from 'Office Space'. And so while I don't tend to hold people in contemtuous disdain, I have rather given up the idea that I'll be hearing from the more literate end of the spectrum outside of my cyberconnections.

My other observation, which I've made before, is that I've never met any black man who said "I am Holden Caufield!" And while I expect that may change over time, and I don't often ask, I have also never met any white man who said "I am Bigger Thomas!". And so perhaps there is a real gap between those who would wax literate in any particular direction.

I am not convinced that some intellectual and cultural unity is a necessity for civil society. Even the sappy Lionel Ritchie knew that everyone finds their own way, somehow, some way, some day. So I suspect we'll all zoom the points familiar and kind even though different books and dreams take us there, and what gets said in American interpretations of English translations of Russian novelists could be recognizeable as a rhymed couplet in a rap I know, or a Gospel song I grew up with. We're all human after all. Experience teaches.

It certainly makes sense from the point of view of academics that if we're ever going to get anywhere, knowledge needs to be codified and ranked. There are roccocos and their are efficiencies, and a troubled world needs efficiency, or so it's been said. So there may be a real sense of a missed mission in all our relatively illiterate heads. But I think we'll all float on alright.

For the record, I wish I had come to understand Maxwell's Equations, and I still believe I could have saved myself a life of questions had I read my basic philosophers. I purchased the Decline and Fall of Rome, but never got anywhere whatsoever, and I'm sure I would like to be, on occasion, the devil quoting the Bible to suit my own ends. But hey, at least I read Ravelstein, and guess what, I'm just like those guys.

Bookworms

Lee told me, and Lee should know as a slightly waifish Armenian woman, that men with my appearance tend to intimidate. Although I tend to notice that people seem to say 'Oh excuse me' a lot unnecessarily in supermarkets, I am completely oblivious to the Large Black Man Effect Field that I apparently generate. Nevertheless, I do recall walking my boss out to the parking lot way back in '92 and her confessing to me that every night she brought a pair of scissors for self-defense.

I just do not have any sense of the danger that women and dweebs must feel at night in areas where bad people might be. However I've always attributed that to street smarts, which I know that I possess; I've never attributed much to my ability to appear intimidating. Sure, I have the homeboy suit and I can dress up to be perfectly at home on the set of American Chopper, but me? Threatening? I chuckle.

Nevertheless, as Matt Yglesias mentions books that he should have read, I begin to wonder about such matters, but it wasn't until somebody mentioned Catcher in the Rye that the angle for this post hit me.

I've always kinda not read books because of the thrill that books give me. Counter-intutitive eh? Until you realize that most of my life I've struggled with my concept of the 'noble arena'. It goes a little something like this. I'm single and I'm living in my two bedroom apartment in Park Slope. I ask myself, self, what should I do this evening? Should I head out to the city or should I stay home and read a book? This is a dilemma because I generally stay home and read the book, which only makes me want to go out to the city and find some people to talk about the book with. Except that there is no place for me to go where anyone ever talks to me about books. In my life, there have been about 12 people who have ever asked me what books am I reading. That includes every job interview, every cocktail party, every poetry reading, every co-worker, blah blah blah. I've lived with this

As far as I'm concerned, the noble arena exists merely as a construction of like minds in cyberspace. It's why I have spent so many years here, because when I walk out that door, apparently people are too busy trying not to piss their pants much less ask me my preferences in literature. It's not as if I hadn't spent the requisite hours trolling Waterstones on Newbury Street in Boston, or Coliseum off Columbus Circle in Manhattan. Then again, I do use the term 'dweebs', so perhaps it's entirely my fault.

There was a cat named Black who once worked for The Nation magazine. We taught Saturday school at St. Luke's up near City College, back in the day. He gave me the impression of being the kind of dweeb to whom I generally refer. I told him that the Nation should run personal ads and publish a version on the Internet. He thought that if I ever had a mind, I had lost it completely. Then again, I thought he lived in the wrong part of the Village and that perhaps his judgements were dismissible. After all, I was right and he wasn't long for The Nation.

On the other hand, I could just shutup and answer the question in the form of, "No I haven't bother to read Dostoyevsky and I don't really think I'm missing out." But the fact of the matter is that I am still at a loss to say what society I am missing out on for not having done so. This has been the case for so long that it makes me doubt two things, firstly the value of the books themselves, and secondly the extent to which the value of those books imparts themselves onto their readers. This is problematic only if those readers are not dweebs and actually do hold court and sway some real flesh and blood places. I remember being told that it helps to know Shakespeare because your boss might drop the phrase 'There is a tide in the affairs of men..' and I should know the implication. More likely I'll hear co-workers mumble quotes from 'Office Space'. And so while I don't tend to hold people in contemtuous disdain, I have rather given up the idea that I'll be hearing from the more literate end of the spectrum outside of my cyberconnections.

My other observation, which I've made before, is that I've never met any black man who said "I am Holden Caufield!" And while I expect that may change over time, and I don't often ask, I have also never met any white man who said "I am Bigger Thomas!". And so perhaps there is a real gap between those who would wax literate in any particular direction.

I am not convinced that some intellectual and cultural unity is a necessity for civil society. Even the sappy Lionel Ritchie knew that everyone finds their own way, somehow, some way, some day. So I suspect we'll all zoom the points familiar and kind even though different books and dreams take us there, and what gets said in American interpretations of English translations of Russian novelists could be recognizeable as a rhymed couplet in a rap I know, or a Gospel song I grew up with. We're all human after all. Experience teaches.

It certainly makes sense from the point of view of academics that if we're ever going to get anywhere, knowledge needs to be codified and ranked. There are roccocos and their are efficiencies, and a troubled world needs efficiency, or so it's been said. So there may be a real sense of a missed mission in all our relatively illiterate heads. But I think we'll all float on alright.

For the record, I wish I had come to understand Maxwell's Equations, and I still believe I could have saved myself a life of questions had I read my basic philosophers. I purchased the Decline and Fall of Rome, but never got anywhere whatsoever, and I'm sure I would like to be, on occasion, the devil quoting the Bible to suit my own ends. But hey, at least I read Ravelstein, and guess what, I'm just like those guys.

Fruit of Is-Loom

Currency Manipulation?

Suddenly we are hearing talk of Chinese manipulation of their currency. I think the hype is preposterous, and I am hoping that I can get a straight story.

What I know is that China has refused, for decades, to let its currency float against the Dollar. The value of the Yuan is basically pegged to the dollar. The exchange rate never changes. No matter where the American dollar goes relative to other currencies (clear enough?). Suddenly, this has been called 'manipulation'. Why? because some politicians tied to the American textile industry are crying foul about recent trade agreements that allow more Chinese clothing to come to the US. They want the Chinese Yuan to appreciate to the point at which the price of a t-shirt from China makes consumers buy American? Fat chance. I don't know about you, but I have no idea where my clothing comes from. The status of American clothing comes 98.5% from the brand of the store you buy it from, not the country of its manufacture or origin.

Already, the Chinese have increased internal tarriffs on textile products to be exported to the US in response to American pressure. That suits Chinese officials just fine. They line their pockets with that tax and Americans still buy more cheap products. What are we talking about? A dollar?

Here's something else I know. Chinese cotton and silk are the raw materials that are shipped outside of China, mostly to Nigeria and other West African countries, to be made into fabric and dyed. The fabric is then shipped back to China and sewn into clothing. So anybody concerned should understand that China is not single-handedly undermining free trade, but that they already are a player in a global market. It's not just China involved in 'Chinese' textiles.

It seems to me that the net result of floating the Chinese currency is going to be felt in a huge number of other ways and that the political pressure brought to bear for the sake of the trade deficity will have unintended consequences elsewhere. The trade deficit isn't the only consideration here, but the billions in Treasury bonds held by the Chinese. Already the (NPR) news on this story makes it sound as if something inevitably has to happen soon and that the Congressional rumblings on this matter must be attended.

How shortsighted can we be? For t-shirts.

Paris is Burnt

The NYT brought back an old memory today. Vogueing.

During 1990 or thereabouts in my flight from all things conservative and bourgie, I encountered more than your average number of representations of gay life. It had a lot to do with my new academic pals, some of who were trying to get me to admit to something of which I wasn't guilty.

There was Mapplethorpe, of course, and the Catch One. There was Marlon Riggs and all that jazz. There was also a very memorable trip to view the film 'Paris is Burning'. I can't tell which came first, but I was also really digging the Malcolm McLaren album 'Waltz Darling' which could be considered the soundtrack to the style. To my ken, Madonna' Vogue was on the late freight. But she did have the dancers. At some points later I hung out for a long frustrating night at a GMHC dance at Javits Center. Nothing particularly striking for gay folks, but certainly a good resume for a 'straight liberal' like me.

I have mentioned, from time to time, the Legacy of Stonewall. I have done so because my understanding of the entire point of being gay was to celebrate a freedom and creativity. The resentment against us 'breeders' has everything to do with the liberation available to those who eschew a range of domestic responsibilities and monogamous restrictions. In other words there is more to homosexuality than sex - it depends upon how gay you want to be.

So while it makes sense to me that there are folks who would try to blackmail the nation into believing we are all the same and we should all be married the same, there is some comfort in knowing that there remain others who are emblematic of the gay stuff I learned that gayness was, and perhaps still is. I speak of the House of Ultra-Omni. Who knows which is the majority.

As the NYT story says. Everyone seems to have forgotten what this scene was all about. The remnants remain but the talk around it has faded to zero. Paris is burnt and the embers are cold, and nobody remembers that gays used to be flaming. Might as well marry 'em all up, eh? After all, we're all the same, right?

As ever, my point remains. Marriage is a sacred institution ordained by God, the blessing of a union between a man and a woman.

Implications of Stereotype Threat

The February issue of Scientific American reviews the growing acceptance of Claude Steele's research on Stereotype Threat. This is the pheonomenon also recounted in Malcolm Gladwell's 'Blink' that subconscious suggestions materially alter the process of deliberative cognitive ability. In other words, performance anxiety can be generated and people's ability to counter negative vibes may beyond their control. That's the downside.

The upside is, of course, that Steele's initial insight and methodology will help us better understand how people think under a wide variety of situations induced by suggestions and the 'cognitive temperament' of the thinker. This has broad implications in educational testing.

Right now the implications are very likely to be exploited for the purposes of determining the effects of racial stereotypes and suggestions on various folks. I suspect we will see some quantitative measures of the stress or benefits of workplace diversity. In the end, I don't think that race will be as potent as other factors. In my race man days, I recall relating to questions about the indirect effects of racism as analogous to blonde sex. It doesn't matter whether or not something specifically 'racist' happens to you for it to affect your attituded and performance, surely your ordinary white male can understand what might happen in their workplace if Christie Brinkley were introduced. It doesn't matter what actually happens, it matters what you believe could happen. So I expect that these various factors will show, for example, that male police officers are not necessarily as safe when partnered with female officers, but not because they are simply 'sexist'.

Such advances in cognitive psychology are part of a brave new world I thought might be more closely aligned with computer science. When we believed that we would be building human-like intelligence, this was the case. It turns out that intelligences are a great deal more numerous and complex than we imagined.

Big Deal

Black Rage Revisited

Part of the reason I am attracted to the Republican party is because it is not the party of rage. It's not always the party of reason, but you cannot generally expect that any street protests are going to be Republican.

When I first posted about Black Rage last week, a commenter asked where do we go from here? The answer is, as always, found in integrative strategies which leverage black power. This speaks to something central in my reasoning which is that I believe that the works of a black elite who are nationalist and raise the American flag reflects well on the race. This elite must be independently powerful. With regard to the politics on the street, there must be some sense of the Hookup with that black elite, and I must say that the Hookup is in danger as African American express their class distinctions. Nevertheless, a continuing successful politics that does not depend on dissent from the mainstream and is integrative is the best hope against the nihilist non-politics of rage.

(from the archives, April 1999)

Preface: My thesis, going way back, is that black rage is nothing but rage, but that it has come to be accepted as political currency. it should not be, but that requires that some real democratic politics replace it. if whites cannot enjoin in this real politics which is ultimately more effective than rage, then this democracy is doomed to failure.

in other words, black rage should be co-opted by the mainstream in such a way that the causes of that rage are eliminated. this will make america civilized.

Q: Boohab, what does "co-opted by the mainstream" mean? Can you give specific examples of what you'd like to see happen? Has anyone read the essay "Mau-mauing the flak-catchers" by Tom Wolfe? He discusses how the social-reform bureaucracies in the seventies encouraged a really warped system which required that a minority group "organize" and dress and act like militants, and march on the government offices and demand jobs, which would then be dispensed according to how effectively the "militants" scared the sh*t out of the white people in the offices... of course, Tom Wolfe describes it MUCH better than I do, so I encourage you to read HIS essay, and not trust my summary.

A: "co-opted by the mainstream" in this context means that there would be no question that mainstream politics effectively deals with black issues so well that blacks are not better served by radical politics.

for example, if effectively dealing with the issue of police brutality and racial profiling did not require blacks to do anything out of the ordinary, then this could be counted as a success.

i think the benchmark would be something to the effect that the race of a candidate would have no bearing on whether that individual was more or less likely to satisfy the black constituency. furthermore, putting a dupe in with 'the right color skin' would also be unacceptable. the proper candidate should be able to articulate issues and resolve them in such a way that they *serve* the black constituency in direct response to their needs, without *isolating* them. but this is something, across many issues, mainstream politicians have been singularly unable to do. this forces blacks to seek more radical ways and means of achieving their political ends.

does anyone doubt that police forces have become *less* racist over the past 20 years? yet TODAY there is overwhelming evidence that they are still *too* racist. every opportunity mainstream politicians have had to bridge the gap (when they even bother to pay attention) they have failed. from the politics surrounding mark fuhrman to diallo, to gammage, to luima, to tyisha miller to rodney king the result is failure failure failure. we cannot name one white politician in power today who has given blacks any satisfaction on those matters. not even rhetorical satisfaction.

the result is that this gives more credibility to radicals who consistently *address* the issue, even if they have no solutions and no chance of attaining the power to implement any solutions. this is a classic case of whitefolks making themselves whiter than they need to be. in the end, the intransigent status quo remains in force, and blacks must resort to higher and higher pitched volumes to get america to wake up.

it is at this point where mau-mauing becomes more effective than ordinary franchise. but the mau-mauing does not take place in a vaccuum - the underlying tragedy continues. then whites excuse their unwillingness to listen from the tenor of the discussion. blacks excuse their hyperbole from white sangfroid. then somebody gets killed. suddenly whites realize there is some reality to the claim, but they can't figure out what black rhetoric is real - they blame the process. blacks say i told you so, but they can't figure out what white sympathy is real - they blame the process. blue ribbon bandaids are put in place, to keep 'the natives from getting restless', the issue gets incredible press, and then it goes away. the process is still broken.

the responsibility to fix the process lies with the people who *have* the power. why does it have to be considered 'reform' to get cops to stop killing black people? why does a white politician ever have to feel that he's stepping out on a limb to address this fundamental issue of personal safety? it is obvious that blacks and latinos are not receiving equal protection under the law when it comes to policing.

Galloway

Thursday Fragments

Friedman v Dyson
I am astounded at the cheek of Thomas Friedman. For the first time, I saw him on Charlie Rose last month and I hardly imagined that anyone could blurt so many buzzwords per minute. But it isn't that his rehash of things many in our profession already understand (after all, we conceived and built the tools that are the infrastructure of the practices which. It's that he uses all of this in a half-assed attempt to slap around GW Bush. It's really pathetic that smart people use all of their powers in such trivializing ways.

I believe that you have to accept when people do the right things for the wrong reason, and it is in this spirit that I welcome the hype to be associated with Friedman's 'vision'. It was clear that he's doing what I've been doing in generating an ontology for things I observe to be true. But at best, all Friedman can do is guess where these concepts will lead, and in that regard, considering the depth of the thought of the people and institutions who generated the artifacts of his 'flatism', Friedman is wasting his prescriptions on Bush and gives up too easily.

I would like to point out one thing that I believe may be very influential in the short term and I hope gains favor here and elsewhere, and that is Dyson's Utopia.

Now you look at a mind like that of Freeman Dyson and you have someone who clearly can visualize the world in a novel way, but doesn't waste it all for political cookies.

Oil Storm
The Peak Oil meme has made it to Hollywood. Hopefully, it will give the Greens something more constructive to talk about than global warming. Please understand the extreme irony of the situation. It's got to be one way or another. Either we run out of fossil fuels in the next 50 years or not. If we run out, there's no way we can heat up the planet appreciably. So please spread the news of the dualism.

24 Moments
This week's episode of 24 was pretty decent. Finally somebody said 'torture' instead of interrogation and they managed to get some gay pimpslapping into it. I really am astounded, however, by the kneejerk associated with "the public's right to know" in the case of a disaster. Do people think a missile launch could go so undetected?

Thursday Fragments

Friedman v Dyson
I am astounded at the cheek of Thomas Friedman. For the first time, I saw him on Charlie Rose last month and I hardly imagined that anyone could blurt so many buzzwords per minute. But it isn't that his rehash of things many in our profession already understand (after all, we conceived and built the tools that are the infrastructure of the practices which. It's that he uses all of this in a half-assed attempt to slap around GW Bush. It's really pathetic that smart people use all of their powers in such trivializing ways.

I believe that you have to accept when people do the right things for the wrong reason, and it is in this spirit that I welcome the hype to be associated with Friedman's 'vision'. It was clear that he's doing what I've been doing in generating an ontology for things I observe to be true. But at best, all Friedman can do is guess where these concepts will lead, and in that regard, considering the depth of the thought of the people and institutions who generated the artifacts of his 'flatism', Friedman is wasting his prescriptions on Bush and gives up too easily.

I would like to point out one thing that I believe may be very influential in the short term and I hope gains favor here and elsewhere, and that is Dyson's Utopia.

Now you look at a mind like that of Freeman Dyson and you have someone who clearly can visualize the world in a novel way, but doesn't waste it all for political cookies.

Oil Storm
The Peak Oil meme has made it to Hollywood. Hopefully, it will give the Greens something more constructive to talk about than global warming. Please understand the extreme irony of the situation. It's got to be one way or another. Either we run out of fossil fuels in the next 50 years or not. If we run out, there's no way we can heat up the planet appreciably. So please spread the news of the dualism.

24 Moments
This week's episode of 24 was pretty decent. Finally somebody said 'torture' instead of interrogation and they managed to get some gay pimpslapping into it. I really am astounded, however, by the kneejerk associated with "the public's right to know" in the case of a disaster. Do people think a missile launch could go so undetected?

US Citizen

I was in Seattle this Monday speiling up my consulting group's ability to solve a particularly nasty problem in government procurement pricing for a large aerospace manufacturer. (Hmm who could that be?). We met in a very nicely lit and carpeted secure facility and showed our drivers licenses at the reception. But I use the term 'we' loosely, because I whipped out the passport.

My passport expires next year and I will have to renew it without having filled all the pages with visas from around the globe. That's ok I suppose, because I do a fair bit of domestic travel now, and I just love using it.

In all the foofoorah about the 'Real ID', there's something that frequent flyers and our attendants understand. The passport is a superior piece of identification. It takes longer to get, it's harder to forge and generally a class of more serious people use it. The idea that some new database or registration process at the DMVs of this nation are going to make us marginally more secure is a dead issue as far as I'm concerned. It's a half step. Simply said, a passport is harder to get, fewer people have them. It's a more important document and it's a better form of ID.

It should be common sense that if you want more security, then you should add a more stringent requirement for identification purposes. But giving that same ability to everyone defeats the notion. It simply raises the bar for everyone, including forgers.

E3

The Playstation 3 is way more beautiful than the the XBox 360. I say this as a diehard XBoxer. It's not a pity, because I love my XBox now and it's ugly as dirt. Still you have to give MS a little credit for making their new box look like a large iPod, sorta. But Sony has done the right thing and gave us a swoopy burnished machine in three different finishes. Nicely.

I'm following the E3 happenings on the GamesBlog. So far so so. I live in LA but haven't had a moment's rest, so I haven't been able to cruise the bars near the Convention Center and catch some drippings. I can't say that I'm really that excited anyway. It turns out that we've got THQ and Activision as customers. I heard EA uses our stuff too, so sooner or later I'll get out to see these guys, LA being the headquarters for all things gamey.

In the meantime, I haven't been on Live for months and am still enjoying the heck out of being Sam Fisher.

V is for (Empty) Victory

Yesterday, the spousal unit put in work for the city as an exit pollster for the LA Times. As her day wore on, she had no idea which way the race was going. This morning, we have normality. Or so it would seem.

The notable experience she brought from her outpost in South LA was twofold. Firstly, most people don't like to talk about whom they vote for. If you ever had suspicions about there being a silent majority, they are hereby confirmed. Maybe 1 out of 8 or 1 out of 12 people were speaking to her at all.

Secondly, paperwork associated with voting is a huge headache. She collected a good number of survey sheets but a significant percentage of them were spoiled and had to be disregarded.

I get the feeling this kind of stuff is rather commonplace. It only goes to assure me that it is our confidence in the democratic process rather than the mechanics of the process itself which delivers us from evil. And considering that only 30% of us showed up at the polls yesterday, it's a slim margin of confidence after all. But what's done is done, and for better or worse, we have proven once again that we can have an orderly transition of power. Way to go.

As for Villaraigosa himself, I'm with the 70% who didn't feel it was necessary to say anything. I'm glad some people will get a kick out of him, being Hispanic and all. But I'm of the notion that he won't be as chauvinist about it as people make out. He clearly had the energy and the spirit during the campaign, but I found him to be a bit too opportunistic. Let's see if he can bring as much good news as he chronicled Hahn's bad.

Villaraigosa is a winner without a mandate. Nobody elected him to do anything special. We all know we need to raise taxes and get more (not just a couple hundred but 7-10 thousand) cops on the street to make the community policing initiative truly work. We all know he's lacking the the testicular fortitude to do so as was Hahn. He's talked a good game about transportation, but the Gov snaked him with a billion and a half of extra state revenues. V is not going to turn around the declining state of our health care provision either.

Villaraigosa is mayor. So let us continue to expect nothing and we won't be disappointed. Oh yeah, and keep an ear open for ethnic humor.

Down the Toilet

John Bolton & The Discovery Channel

The Discovery Channel is not a part of the liberal media conspiracy. In fact, the more I watch it, the more I like it.

I've been a fan of Monster Garage from the very beginning. Jesse James is the real man originator of this kind of reality show. The Discovery Channel has been doing a bit of this before, and I've always encouraged my kids to watch the emergency room documentaries. None of us are strangers to blood and guts.

But now there is a whole franchise of mainstream 'reality' programming, very little of which is documenting anything interesting except the perversities of annoying people. The problem is that in the mainstream reality shows, nobody is building anything interesting except for dysfunctional relationships, whereas on the Discovery Channel, they're doing engineering. I've gained a real appreciation for what serious mechanics do, and now this week, today in fact, I'm going to check in once again with 'Deadliest Catch' about the reality of crab fishing.

Unlike many of my professional peers, I have a hacker's respect for the gripping and grunting of handiwork. I've had to look at my own disfigured thumbnail for months as the bloodclot grew out. Working with certain tools can leave marks. Yes I did curse out loud. Sometimes cursing out loud is an integral part of hard work. Sometimes when a part is a piece of shit, that's exactly what you have to call it. I give a lot of respect to the Discovery Channel for airing (though bleeping) the grit. A hard work ethic isn't dainty, and a lot of times it is only the ego of a leader that gets work done. You need carrot and you need stick, and chewing somebody's ass out is a pretty good stick. This is something the editors at the Discovery Channel leave in. That's educational television.

It's been said that the best sign of intelligence is the ability to get to the heart of a problem. It's knowing what to focus on and what to ignore. Even though I haven't followed the Bolton nomination, I think a valid point can be made about the suitability of an abrasive personality. A good leader can be abrasive, and sometimes intransigence demands that. The bottom line is the bottom line.

I just wanted my liberal friends to understand that everyone isn't ideological all the time, unless the Discovery Channel is.

Osage Avenue, Our very own Waco

Professor Kim recounts with some excruciatingly painful detail bombing of MOVE and the birth by fire of crusader Mumia Abu Jamal. What she doesn't do is give me a reason to let my heart bleed. Maybe I'm just not charitable, or maybe I am authentically pride of my blackness for orthogonal reasons.

I happen to be one of those individuals who, pretty much from day one, thought Mumia was a dumbass. There are some people who think that to be truly free as the white man, you have to be as free as the white man has been to take life. And so their appreciation of Western culture has something to do with the awesome power of demolition - they are fascinated by Hitler's genocide, for example. So for anyone who picks up a little red book and is ready to quote Mao against the evils of the West, why should the life of a miserable pig matter? I have always marvelled at the balls of hardheads who felt like they were proving something by pontificating the idea of shooting back at cops. Invariably, 99% of these guys are nutjobs. What's worse is that they are intellectually incapable of pulling off anything spectacular. I mean, when it comes to anarchic sociopaths, you've got to hand it to Colin Ferguson. He killed what 6? And the Beltway Sniper, man he had the whole country on alert. But unfortunately these guys were a little bit too transparently loony for any crusading journalists like Mumia to pick up their cause as symbolic of Black Liberation Struggle. The kings of this sort of madness were, of course, David Koresh and Tim McVeigh. Honorable mention goes to Randy Weaver (Ruby Ridge), Ted Kaczinsky (the Unabomber) and Eric Rudolph (Centennial Park). Yes we hear them go boom, but are they really saying something?

Now I know that there's a Radio Raheem out there who feels put out by the idea that blackfolks don't have our own extremely dangerous killah. And certainly there have got to be some passive aggressive radical black vegans out there who desparately need to hear some news of a revolutionary vanguard based on some Afrikan values. (Please don't forget the use of the 'k', as in AmeriKKKa). So I offer MOVE as a combination of the two, even though, they apparently couldn't shoot straight. Add to the domestic discontents Hall of Fame, the showdown at Osage Avenue.

Anyone who has done any little bit of traveling in this nation understands one thing. This place is big, and there are a hell of a lot of awfully remote places. It's a bit odd that Chappelle had to go clear over to Durban, he could have gone to the Olympic Peninsula and been more isolated from the types of people that cause headaches. And so I ask the rhetorical question why is it that these fake revolutionaries who complain so much about their desire to be truly free of the Man don't head straight out to the boondocks. Because they are codependent asshats. The person who complains loudest about the amount of MSG in their diet is the same person who can't cook and always spends their last 3 dollars at the cheap Chinese joint. In otherwords, MOVE should have moved it's lame ass to the the woods and survived on their own. Perhaps they didn't have bus fare or strong enough legs to walk the distance. So like the rest of the subculture of complaint, they squatted. How refreshingly original.

The American Dream dies hard. I don't know exactly how we started the concept of 'community' as in the cliche 'give back to the community', but it sure as hell is established. We may not be glued together in the beloved community, but we sure as hell don't like the bum who doesn't mow his lawn. So it comes as no surprise that characters like John Africa ended up on his neighbor's most wanted list.

There's a place for misfits, anarchists and cults here in this country. It's somewhere between way out in left field, the sticks, the boonies and the hinterlands. So long as they stay far away from the reach of the System, then they can minimize their beef with the System. I don't quite understand why anyone should believe that people who are incapable of learning this basic lesson have anything to teach us at all. Except perhaps what it looks like to be stupid and in jail and less free than when they started making all their idiotic noise.

Not Even Blacks

Once upon a time in America, in order to be someone of note and substance to be quoted in major newspapers on issues which might be of concern to blackfolks, you had to be a labor leader like A. Phillip Randolph. Today I have come to a realization why that isn't necessary. Mexican President Vicente Fox provides an example.

You see what everybody realizes is that African Americans have made dramatic progress over the past generation. People change slowly, but blackfolks have changed quickly. Just like it's hard to believe that most everybody now has a cell phone, whereas 20 years ago only the wealthiest among us did; it's hard to believe that blackfolks go whereever they please and do whatever they want. Just like your mother, despite the ubiquity of Linux, still can't manage to upgrade from Windows 95, lots of people here and around the world cannot manage to upgrade their racial programming. This doesn't provide a real barrier to blacks of substance and ability so much as it provides a permanent sense of dumbfounded astonishment in the American media, and therefore the minds of the world.

Imagine that you are your old bigoted parents. You would look at a black man like me - six figure salary, $600 cellphone (Treo 650), black Hollywood suit, shaved head and crisp diction - like some kind of amazing phenomenon. I'm sitting in first class on the plane talking to my business partner how we just blew their minds at Boeing. This to you, in your parents' mindset, would generate an incredible sense of jaw drop. I meet your eyes with no sense of the ethics which used to dominate American social life. I am as oblivious to your ignorance as a Sony PSP is to a phone booth with a dial phone.

And so it is with a good number of journalists and observers who have decided to be more comfortable with their own old racial programming. They say that they don't need to be up on the latest version, unaware of what they are missing. Even when you hand them an update, they fumble with the options and end up confused and frustrated. They admit that their life and worldview doesn't need all the new features. They don't see themselves as broken, just a little old-fashioned. Besides, everyone is backwards compatible with old racial programming. We all can pulse dial. We can still believe that a blackface charicature is a horrific insult worthy of national attention. We can still believe that some anonymous black criminal who gets shot by white cops ought to be national news. We can still believe that it's a goddam shame that black men work on trash trucks, just like the same old stereotype that Sammy Davis put up with in the original Ocean's Eleven.

So when Vicente Fox said: "There's no doubt that the Mexican men and women _ full of dignity, willpower and a capacity for work _ are doing the work that not even blacks want to do in the United States," we in the blogosphere are forced to remember that one four letter word in this context must surely insult black progress.

Boo hoo.

Multiculturalism is supposed to awake us to the understanding of where ethnic traditions come from. Yet many liberal takes on it try to make it modernist and anti-modernist at the same time. On the one hand, they would have us respect the great traditions of an ancient culture, say the ability to use blowdarts to catch eels in the Amazon rainforest. On the other hand they would have us feel some great loss if children of that tribe were to wear sweatshirts from USC or Nike track shoes. It is this same contradiction that would have us worry that Shanequa can't get a job as a legal secretary on K Street. Sooner or later people, we're going to have to decide whether or not to upgrade our racial programming. We're either going to be modern and have the same standards of judgement for everyone, or we're going to be anti-modern and assert nonsense like "It's a Shi'ite thing, you can't understand."

When it comes to African Americans, we live with this racially essentialist dualism, and of course as you might expect, I grumble about how some of y'all manage to live like that. Still I understand what must be going through those heads, the astonishment that so many upgrades have taken place even though the old ideas still work.

I'll only add one more dimension to the analogy. It has to do with a kid from a small town, or since this is Star Wars week, a small planet. A lot of Americans skip the bonds of small town gravity and migrate successfully up the ladder of mobility. Sometimes they go back to that small town to find that their old running buddies are taking pride that they are a shift manager in the ball point pen factory. We all have to be reminded, especially those of us elites, that there's dignity in all kinds of work we would never condescend to perform. You couldn't pay me enough to retrain my mind to have the kind of focus that the short Mexican woman has at LAX as she takes her pole and erases the scuff marks off the marble floors. Only four year scholarships for my three kids would get me back in housepainting gear. My point is that all of us are from somewhere but half of us have gone elsewhere. The rich don't all stay rich and the poor don't all stay poor. Mexicans and blacks are no exception.

I don't like the fact that some folks have refused to upgrade their racial programming and still think that the majority of blacks' ambition is to compete for the same jobs as non-English speaking immigrants to America. I don't like the fact that some folks can't divest themselves of the stereotype that blacks ought to be the ones to take downscale labor. But neither of those facts get me all bent out of shape. It's also true, that blacks have had those historical struggles in our own past. There was a time when A. Phillip Randolph was our own Ceasar Chavez, and the railroad stations were for blacks what today's airports are for many Mexicans. So even with our proper modernist sensibilities, we need to recognize that some things, like the building of economic, intellectual, social and political capital, take time.

African Americans are still moving forward, many of us at different paces, as are Mexican Americans. Here in Los Angeles, I bear happy witness to that progress. Whether or not observers of these matters want to upgrade their racial software and screw their jaws shut, people from both groups are going to pursue their ambitions. Depsite the difficulties for the straight stories to emerge, the people will. Maybe some journalists ought to think about who's willing to do their jobs for less.

Tuesday Fragments

Off the Road Again
I am finally off the road, which has wrecked havoc with my avocational trains of thought. I have no idea what is transpiring in the news, and have been focused on getting my company to the next phase in a fat aerospace contract. That's looking good by the way. We had a fantastic meeting yesterday. Now I can breathe.

Derman
I'm almost finished 'My Life as a Quant' and I'm trying to figure out what kind of person Derman is. It is a curious matter that eludes me. He's there and yet he's not. As I have embraced my inner geek over the past several years (by dint of humility and fascination) there is a certain bit of personality I have exchanged. I am now wondering exactly where the ego of someone like Derman resides. Mystery.

Jill Stewart
The big news is that Jill Stewart is going to help run Pajamas Media. This is revolutionary. You wouldn't think it, but there is a serious possibility that the real endangered species in MSM is going to be the alternative weeklies. Jill will add a great deal to this effort and I'm really proud of what we should be able to accomplish.

Pontiac G6
I rented this hooptie from National the other day, and I've got to say, that's a spirited ride. I expected a lot and I got a lot. I got what looked to be the standard model. It had chrome five spoke rims and a Monsoon stereo system. It was the four door but didn't have the fancy sunroof. Even so, the right was very tight. The interior was sporty, and the power was pretty nice.

The auto-stick took some getting used to and it slipped a couple times on the upshift during hard accelleration, but the ponies kicked in when you needed it. It's really a level up in driving expectations, and the performance is clearly there.

Oddly enough, I rented a new Malibu just yesterday and the interior is clearly done by the same guys. Nowhere near the power.

Tuesday Fragments

Off the Road Again
I am finally off the road, which has wrecked havoc with my avocational trains of thought. I have no idea what is transpiring in the news, and have been focused on getting my company to the next phase in a fat aerospace contract. That's looking good by the way. We had a fantastic meeting yesterday. Now I can breathe.

Derman
I'm almost finished 'My Life as a Quant' and I'm trying to figure out what kind of person Derman is. It is a curious matter that eludes me. He's there and yet he's not. As I have embraced my inner geek over the past several years (by dint of humility and fascination) there is a certain bit of personality I have exchanged. I am now wondering exactly where the ego of someone like Derman resides. Mystery.

Jill Stewart
The big news is that Jill Stewart is going to help run Pajamas Media. This is revolutionary. You wouldn't think it, but there is a serious possibility that the real endangered species in MSM is going to be the alternative weeklies. Jill will add a great deal to this effort and I'm really proud of what we should be able to accomplish.

Pontiac G6
I rented this hooptie from National the other day, and I've got to say, that's a spirited ride. I expected a lot and I got a lot. I got what looked to be the standard model. It had chrome five spoke rims and a Monsoon stereo system. It was the four door but didn't have the fancy sunroof. Even so, the right was very tight. The interior was sporty, and the power was pretty nice.

The auto-stick took some getting used to and it slipped a couple times on the upshift during hard accelleration, but the ponies kicked in when you needed it. It's really a level up in driving expectations, and the performance is clearly there.

Oddly enough, I rented a new Malibu just yesterday and the interior is clearly done by the same guys. Nowhere near the power.

On Dave Chappelle

There's an old saying that people who talk don't know and people who know don't talk. The weird thing about Dave Chappelle is that I'm not sure I know what I know, but I feel compelled to talk. The more that I think I know what I know, the less I want to say, because it's better to say things to people face to face anyway.

This is all about two extraordinary evenings, one that I had with someone I know for sure is very close to Chappelle, and one with a man I remember as Dave himself, only I can't be positive. Let's start with the first.

Just a couple of months ago I had one of those lightning rod evenings where everything falls into place. I may have actually written something about it. And one of the dudes at the table was an extremely bright and level-headed young brother. A lot of things about him suggested to me a great deal of conscious reflection. He had something which reminded me of this thing I called 'programmers dyslexia'. When you ask a programmer or somebody with a sophisticated understanding of a complex system a seemingly simple question, they slow down their speech and give tentative kinds of answers. You can just see the gears whizzing in their heads as they try to answer just right, and suddenly a new idea springs into their head as if there was a new solution and the act of consideration changes things. And they have to try and settle on one answer with respect to the dynamic. In the end it looks just a little clumsy, especially if you have no idea of what the variables are. This cat was like that, except for the soul. When he rose to talk about relationships between people, you could tell that he was more perceptive than he let on and very respectful about what he said. In him I saw that quality of overthought when it came to people's souls.

Since I happen to know for a fact that this man is close to Dave, I am very secure in the knowledge that there is at least one person on this planet for whom Mr. Chappelle has someone who seems a good sounding board. On the other hand, sometimes decisions need to be made by someone with a strong stomach and instinctual courage. All circumspection aside, sometimes ass kicking is in order.

Of course it's impossible for someone at my distance to see if such an ass-kicking is necessary, and I'm not likely to find out. But if my interpretation of African American history is appropriate, as well as my appreciation of the existential dilemmas of the blackfolks of my generation, I think that somewhere there is an asshole that needs shutting down even if he's just a spectre inside of somebody's head. When, in fact, an ass-kicking must be delivered, it is absolutely essential that you have someone who overclocks their empathetic reasoning. And so for that reason, I knew that Dave Chappelle was never far from the influence of well-considered sanity.

And while there were certain visual clues to suggest that this extraordinary individual might very well be muslim, the explicit subject didn't arise. But in the wake of yesterday's Time article, I have put two and two together.

The second evening takes me back to New York in the 90s at 42nd and Lex. The Houlihan's which is basically like a TGIFriday's was the spot for the young, well-dressed and black that evening. I my particular frame of mind, I'd rather just have a beer. At some point, in alien-observation mode, me and another cat sitting across the way simultaneously busted out laughing at the parade of characters heading downstairs to the dance floor. For some unknown time, solidified in the ambers of memory, we started crackin' on people in the club, blackfolks in general, and hell just about everything. We busted each other up laughing half the night.

He told me he was a standup comic doing the New York thing. I knew he had the gift. I remember that man as Dave Chappelle. I only wish I had a diary entry to confirm it, because we were 'right there' in terms of the connection.

The other day I was listening to a black radio station and on it was a conversation between some editor/publisher of a magazine I think was called 'Sister Sister', the DJ and some black comic celebrity. They, like everyone else in that world, were sustaining the conversation about how impossible it is for 'everybody' to deal with black entertainers who have money. The conversation seemed to me incredibly stuck-up, paranoid and self-serving, and not the least because the participants defended Lil Kim's idiocy. As well, they remarked about Gerald Levert, who evidently has his own problems with the courts. I gather it is difficult for people who know very well that it is now KKBT who has incorporated 'Dont get it twisted' into their call sign shout out / motto, to see black entertainers as mere dismissible human beings. You've got to wonder what it is that keeps people buying the piss-boy's albums. (I heard his latest song that same day 'The Closet Part Two' - it was like a bad soap opera on wax.) Sometimes too many people don't realize stupidity is just stupidity.

There are two lessons that must be balanced. The first is: Give the people what they want. The second is: Sooner or later you get the audience you deserve.

I think of what discipline is in view of scarcity. I mean I don't have a hard time not running around being a fool playboy because I drive a Chevrolet. It's all I can afford. Can I honestly say that if I had that Porsche that I want, that I wouldn't find myself cruising Sunset Boulevard? I strongly believe that I have the discipline, but maybe I don't. It's not the kind of test I've been given.

So when I think of Dave's dilemma with regard to doing the kind of work he wants, it's difficult to say what kind of money makes the difference. On the one hand, he's paid to be at the top of his game, and now is the time to wrest some permanent scratch from the machines that deliver cashflow from ever changing demands of disposable income. It's good enough to be proud that machine works. On the other hand, Dave has already bought the farm, so to speak. He's made the move Bobby Brown found impossible to make, which is to throw down some cash and get property back off the road so deep that you never hear the booming jeeps. Why put yourself in the middle of drama city if you are truly a man of peace? Chappelle has proven that he knows when to walk away and call a spade a spade. On the other hand, who is he standing up in front of?

I've written more times with less depth on Chappelle than I recall, as I use the old search engine on myself I find the following.

Chocolate Covered Fish

Curses

Rick James, Bitch

Chappelle

So I guess I'm one of those people who wonders when Chappelle is going to give up hiphop and the shallow crowd that worships it. I mean just look at the comments I get from 'Rick James Bitch'. The power is in the honest, funny vulgarity. But how long do you feed that monster, and who owns whom? That's why you have to be a pilgrim. You have to form a kind of detachment that allows you to go anywhere. That's when you know you transcend. When you can let go of something for 3 years and then come back. Just keep that farm.

I'm going to go on some more about this, but honestly I've got sick computers, restless children, a plane to catch and a huge meeting tomorrow.

99 Problems

Spence tells me that he's falling in love with Hiphop all over again. I had one of those days when it's absolutely necessary to listen to loud music and drive 90 mph. So I called him to find out what kinda beats I could buy - it being Friday and I just got paid. No answer.

So I head down to Fry's off Edison north of Irvine and pull up my rented Pontiac G6 in the lot. I've got to get yet another hard drive for my wobbly home network. This time I'm getting a Seagate Barracuda. No more Maxtor for me, ever.

Unfortunately, as the case may be, I have found the right music to speed to, remixes of Jay-Z and Limp Bizkit. Or is it Linkin Park? Whichever. It was loud, it was vulgar, it was rude and it was rockin'. Just what I needed at the end of a long ass day.

This morning, 5% into the recovery of my machine, I tried to get the OS to recognize the video card. No luck. I enable the ATI drivers, it only allows it go secondary. I disable the primary, the secondary doesn't engage. Now I have a black screen. I can't RDP into the machine, I don't have a VNC server running and I can't think of another way in. If I had a S-channel or other converter, I could stick in a second monitor and fix the first. No such luck.

I'm behind in everything except for my big proposal for Monday. I'm not getting enough sleep. I have to get on the road tomorrow. I'm losing my mind.

99 Problems

Spence tells me that he's falling in love with Hiphop all over again. I had one of those days when it's absolutely necessary to listen to loud music and drive 90 mph. So I called him to find out what kinda beats I could buy - it being Friday and I just got paid. No answer.

So I head down to Fry's off Edison north of Irvine and pull up my rented Pontiac G6 in the lot. I've got to get yet another hard drive for my wobbly home network. This time I'm getting a Seagate Barracuda. No more Maxtor for me, ever.

Unfortunately, as the case may be, I have found the right music to speed to, remixes of Jay-Z and Limp Bizkit. Or is it Linkin Park? Whichever. It was loud, it was vulgar, it was rude and it was rockin'. Just what I needed at the end of a long ass day.

This morning, 5% into the recovery of my machine, I tried to get the OS to recognize the video card. No luck. I enable the ATI drivers, it only allows it go secondary. I disable the primary, the secondary doesn't engage. Now I have a black screen. I can't RDP into the machine, I don't have a VNC server running and I can't think of another way in. If I had a S-channel or other converter, I could stick in a second monitor and fix the first. No such luck.

I'm behind in everything except for my big proposal for Monday. I'm not getting enough sleep. I have to get on the road tomorrow. I'm losing my mind.

Black Rage

(from the archives - august 1996)

I wrote this over the course of a couple weeks back when I was working the internet as a race man over at Cafe Utne. I leave it in pretty much it's original form, although I haven't done all the bolding for emphasis as I have had in the collected piece.

black rage is not a theory.

i'm not sure that it makes so much sense to explain it in any other terms than malcolm x's. 'whatever you will do to me, just know that i will do the same to you'. considering what happens to black americans ever day *not in theory* but in reality, it's a mutha to face. most white folks who have lookedmask.jpg (22395 bytes) closely at the situations many blacks find themselves often recoiled in shock. to a person, in my experience, it comes out like 'man if they did shit like that to me...'. in the end, there is a profound respect for the many black strategies used to displace or redirect that rage.

coming from that perspective, i respect that many folks are likely to respect the words and deeds of mlk. but that is rarely the case. there is often a sense of resignation americans feel in confronting the facts that justice is so often an impossibility - that oj will be virtually barbecued forever, yet the korean shopkeeper videotaped shooting a black teenaged girl in cold blood received a suspended sentence and is forgotten by the nation. white folks and blacks alike come to agree that black rage, given american society, is inevitable. that is why white people live in white neighborhoods, stay away from downtown at night, understand the fear of bernard goetz, get the message of willie horton and respond in all sorts of ways in every aspect of american society in a predictable fashion to the images of danger associated with black rage.

black rage becomes not only a self-fulfilling prophesy but a necessary component of american politics. white folks accept their guilt and fear, as they realize their collective historical incompetence as the political majority in addressing the injustices faced by blacks. they bow out. they accept the destruction of cities and the perpetuation of tragedy. black folks do the same thing in their relationships to each other. we abandon our brothers at the first sign of trouble despite what we know, better than anyone, about the content of their individual characters, and we use our own successes and absence of (external) rage, as a justification of our own evasions of responsibility. thus the enraged black man or woman has become a staple symbol in everyone's rhetoric. but few of us are serious or busy addressing the fundamental injustice.

Black Stuff

I'm going to spend a bit of time blogging at Vision Circle as we bend the discussion towards black paradigms of organization and leadership. My focus for followup will be there, but I'll post both places in case everybody doesn't get there.

Get It Right

Sometimes you can read the words and still not get the point. Here, Scott Johnson thinks the Northerners were wrong and the Southerners were right vis a vis the 3/5s Compromise.

It should be obvious to anyone concerned that the African slaves were denied the right to vote. Therefore the basis upon which Southern politicians sought to increase their own enfranchisement had nothing to do with the purer democratic motive. So to give them any credit over the Northern politicians, who opposed counting slaves, is ridiculous.

Scott Johnson, I fart in your general direction.

If one is particular persnickety and on a mission to vindicate the Southern way, one might make the assertion that the Southern politicians at the time of the Compromise had manumission and enfranchisement directly in mind under this scheme. One might go as far as to say that the failure of Reconstruction was contrary to the will of the South and that Southerners of goodwill had always intended for the African slaves to be their political equals. After the War. Yeah right.

Apple's Los Angeles

I purchased 'Apple's America' last week in hopes that I, as a discriminating traveler, might gain some benefit from the renowned NYT writer R.W. Apple. So I was very disappointed to find, in his review of all things Los Angeles, that he hadn't done much to stray from any hackneyed stereotype about the joint. I just hate the way most people not from Los Angeles write about Los Angeles and I don't know why I expected any better from Apple.

So I'm definitely going to have to continue my series on black barbershops, if I can manage to stop hitting the road for the bossman long enough. And I'm also going to have to compete with the single white female blogger who is walking the city. I can't remember where I heard about her, but I'm certain to keep hearing about her as time goes by.

And since I'm in a foul mood I'm finally getting a distinct sense that NPR's incestuous conspiracy of tweaky individuals is starting to get on my nerves. If I hear another plug for Scott Simon's 'Pretty Birds' I am going to rip the knob off the poor rentacar stereo. I mean I've already had it up to here with David Sedaris and Sara Vowel. 'This America Life' is already psychotically voyeuristic, but do we still have to listen to these creeps for years afterwards?

I swear I'm getting to the point where I want to go native. Anywhere. Just keep me away from the coasts.

Which brings me back to Apple. He makes me want to go to Vancouver and so I'll read the rest of the book with a somewhat jaundiced eye. Then again, Apple himself and his generation are anachronistic today and there's a certain lack of hipness that is refreshing. I know he's going to give me the brass rail tour and place me in places somebody like him would be comfortable. Serves me right for skipping ahead to Los Angeles. I think he got Boston right.

Apple's Los Angeles

I purchased 'Apple's America' last week in hopes that I, as a discriminating traveler, might gain some benefit from the renowned NYT writer R.W. Apple. So I was very disappointed to find, in his review of all things Los Angeles, that he hadn't done much to stray from any hackneyed stereotype about the joint. I just hate the way most people not from Los Angeles write about Los Angeles and I don't know why I expected any better from Apple.

So I'm definitely going to have to continue my series on black barbershops, if I can manage to stop hitting the road for the bossman long enough. And I'm also going to have to compete with the single white female blogger who is walking the city. I can't remember where I heard about her, but I'm certain to keep hearing about her as time goes by.

And since I'm in a foul mood I'm finally getting a distinct sense that NPR's incestuous conspiracy of tweaky individuals is starting to get on my nerves. If I hear another plug for Scott Simon's 'Pretty Birds' I am going to rip the knob off the poor rentacar stereo. I mean I've already had it up to here with David Sedaris and Sara Vowel. 'This America Life' is already psychotically voyeuristic, but do we still have to listen to these creeps for years afterwards?

I swear I'm getting to the point where I want to go native. Anywhere. Just keep me away from the coasts.

Which brings me back to Apple. He makes me want to go to Vancouver and so I'll read the rest of the book with a somewhat jaundiced eye. Then again, Apple himself and his generation are anachronistic today and there's a certain lack of hipness that is refreshing. I know he's going to give me the brass rail tour and place me in places somebody like him would be comfortable. Serves me right for skipping ahead to Los Angeles. I think he got Boston right.

Not Having Fun

I just finished working on a piece of a proposal that can make me a star, but I'm starting to feel like Dean Martin in the original Ocean's Eleven. Maybe I'm a little bit too old for this.

My sales shark called me this morning and reminded me that Utah is a great place for mountain biking. And so it hit me like a ton of copper ore that I'm not really having fun on this trip and I'm not going to. The locus of my discontent which has overcome my otherwise sunny disposition is a particularly gimpy data pump created by Vignette that the mother company has decided to OEM. Why? Because you don't have to write code! Which means it's a perfectly idiotic tool for those of us who do write code.

So I have come to discover that this gnarled piece of caca between an AS/400 and a SQL Server doesn't pay much attention to SQL code if you don't also draw the little field connector lines in it's idiot proof visual drag and drop fecal-torium. Instead of something simple like just writing a spool phrase as one would in Oracle's SQL dialect, this crap collector makes you grab a little text object from a toolbar. Try to imagine a DTS connection object with about 50 properties. IT'S A FLAT FILE FOR CHRISSAKE! I connect this monstrosity to my query object but not before I have to manually click the 'add field' button as many times as my query is bringing over columns.

Now here's the killer. Imagine you determine, an hour and 3GB later that you'd like to make your query results a little smaller. It's not enough that you remove fields from your select statement in the gawdawful query object, you also have to pretty much destroy your flat file object and recreate it from scratch. This is something it takes a veteran like me all day to figure out.

What a waste.

I take that back. What's so absolutely perfect about this product is that it allows you to generate executable code that you can drop into obscure directories on your customer's servers. Only you know what they do and only you can fix them. That's evil genius.

Where?

Ten Questions Answered

In which I answer ten questions posed by a guest blogger over at Drezner with snark, insight and aplomb. Says me:

1. Does the rise in anti-Americanism concern you? If so, do you link it to the Bush Administration's policies? Even if you don't think it's a major issue that should be guiding policy choices, do you think it matters at the margins and can make it tougher to build support for U.S. goals?

It matters at the margins and I have no problem assigning blame the GWBush. However, I think most anti-Americanism is practically, by definition, less than rational and noisy. It's actually very simple, there is really a stark short list of real offenses for which that the Bush administration is responsible all originating in the Iraqi conflict, and the divisions in this country amplifies the cascade of bitterness. We are too close to this history to know what the real effect will be.

2. Do you really think we can make the UN further U.S. interests by criticizing and beating down the organization? Do you believe that John Bolton's style will enable him to actually accomplish things, or is it more a matter of his standing in the way of the UN doing wrong?

I have no opinion on Bolton's style or substance. I don't know where the liberal defenders of Andrew Young are. After all, he made a Nixonian gesture to Arafat in the days before Arafat refused his Best Offer. This UN Ambassador will be forgotten too. The UN simply doesn't move things geopolitically. Hell, they can't even stop Nike sweatshops. The UN ought to simply be a clearinghouse for NGO activities. When Amnesty Internatational subjects its pronouncements to UN approval, then the US can too. Until then, UNICEF cards are cute, and Annan strikes a stunning profile. BFD.

3. Do you believe that in order to effectively promote goals like democratization and human rights around the world, the U.S. must itself be seen as an exemplar of these values? Do you believe that our status as a standard-bearer of justice and liberty is so well-entrenched that revelations like the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo won't negatively affect it?

We're at least as good as the French. On the other hand, Canada has never done anything, so far as we know, like Abu Ghraib. But when Liberians suffer at the hands of their dictators, they don't call out for help from Canada. I don't hear any stories of Sudanese sending messages of thanks to the Canadian government for their shining example. The Roadmap to peace between Israel and Palestine is not coming from the model written up by Finland. The world depends upon the US because of our strength, not because they like the way we hold elections. Hell, even Mexicans get a holiday to vote. That wasn't our idea.

4. What do you really think of the failure to find WMD in Iraq? Do you believe that the Administration was genuinely as surprised as the American people were? Does this make you question intelligence assessments on other matters like North Korea and Iran; why or why not?

I think it was an honest mistake, and not an unpreventable one, nor one that mitigates the threat of Saddam. Hussein was the same kind of menace as DeKlerk. I don't think that many citizens, myself included, are in a position to assess the capacity or the proper deployment of our intelligence services. I haven't plowed through the subcommittee reports and I'm not going to. Congress has been a herd of cows through this whole matter, and largely irresponsible. I'm sick of hearing all the blame tossed at the Executive.

5. Do you believe that an international criminal court would be likely to indict U.S. servicemembers for war crimes, notwithstanding the provision that when countries are capable of investigating and prosecuting crimes in their own court systems, an international court will not have jurisdiction? Is this a real fear, or a stand-in for a broader concern over the impact of an international criminal justice system?

I believe that no nation on this planet, save those who are powerless, have any great hopes or respect for an international criminal court. America is a nation that won the Cold War and assisted in the destruction of the Soviet Union. An international tribunal's worst damage are mere pinpricks and all nations will inevitably subvert it according to their interests. There is no international anything, save currency exchanges and trading blocks. Wait until cell phones work like Babelfish, then we'll all talk.

The Moment of Death

(from the archives, may 2000)

so let me tell you a story.

i have moved to new york and it's about 2 months into my stay. i am becoming familiar with the nabes in and around park slope brooklyn. i'm enjoying the proviciality and the crust of the people and the architecture, especially the stark desolation of the 4th avenue - 9th street F. the F is probably the most used, yet slowest and therefore most frustrating train in the mta. foggy mornings headed inbound found me staring across double sets of deserted tracks at odd individuals who for reasons known only to themselves and god were headed deeper into the bowels of brooklyn. this was an attractive mystery which i contemplated often in the piss aroma of the stairwells of the 9th street F.

one evening i was going by train to festivities somewhere in manhattan that required my homeboy suit. the homeboy suit in early 90's brooklyn involved black silvertab levi's, tall matte black leather laceup boots fashionably splayed, a tight fitting black or stark white tee and long flowing black duster. at times the duster could be exchanged for a 3/4 length leather coat, but it was not that cold this early evening. in previous incarnations of the homeboy suit i had fingerless gloves; this occasion was lighter, yet my bowie knive was ever present. years later i would reflect on the fact that this knife made me and my homeboy suit the most dangerous man in the thames river valley, but this was 90s new york. i was considered unarmed.

if i had ever considered arming myself more seriously, what happened that night changed my view forever. i still hadn't memorized the trains and retained a bit of anxiety about the frequent yet petty crimes i had already witnessed in my first 8 weeks; the occasional, even gracefully choreographed chain snatchings, the in-your-face threatening mendacity of panhandlers and the wicked yet almost comic squabbling between two ham-fisted nigerian watch peddlers the other day on 42nd and lex. yet my anxiety was a product of my willingness to step in and stop that violence which was still only verbal. i have a gut instinct for stepping between combatants. i don't know where it comes from, but i must fight myself to resist stopping fights between others. i'm like the fonz, believing a well place 'hey' will cool hot heads. yet i know deep down that i should know more kung fu in order to satisfy my interventionist urge. i want to be a bhuddist cop because i hate the destruction.

so this on night, headed more or less fearlessly downtown i was shocked. a young black kid on a dirtbike heads up the ave towards my position and stops at the back door of a chinese takeout as the man steps out. the old chinese man and his old chinese bicycle are preparing their way to deliver a handlebar-bike-basket full of food somewhere in brooklyn, but they are stopped by a 9mm pistol aimed straight at his head. the dirtbike kid's heft of the glock is practiced as he pulled it from his backpack while coasting to a stop. he is as focused as any 14 year old can be, silently laughing his ass off at the terror he sees in the old man's eyes. he barks something threatening as i move slowly out towards the curb, nearly parallel to the chinaman yet still behind him enough to see over his shoulder the grinning face of his deadly teenaged adversary.

within the space of 2 seconds i realize three things. one, the kid was paying no attention to me at all - all he wanted to do was scare that man. two, i could have gotten at least three bullets into him and used the fire hydrant for cover before he realized what was up. three, if i had my own gun there is absolutly no question that there would have been another dead black teenager in brooklyn this evening. i would have killed him without hesitation.

Hotel Wifi

Standing Your Ground

"Guns, we don' like to use 'em
Unless our enemies choose 'em.
We prefer to fight you on like a man
And beat you down with our hands."
-- Mohandas Dewese

I've been hearing people talking about new laws that change the burden of proof slightly in favor of people defending their lives outside of their homes. It used to be that if you were not in your home and someone was using violent force against your person, you had a duty to run away. Passage of this law means you are not obligated to run. I'm for it, but.

I'm street smart. Before drug gangs and the Crack Wars, nobody used guns or even knives where I grew up. I lived in a knuckle-up neighborhood where kids slapboxed on the regular. We weren't afraid to go anywhere, day or night. But that wasn't because there was no danger at all, but because we had a good sense of how much danger is danger.

Today we live in an era of zero tolerance for roughhousing and martial skill. At least it seems so to me. And so it is with great skepticism that I consider any law that makes people feel that it's more OK to use a gun. This is not an argument for or against gun control, it's about people control, and I'm not sure the average person is in enough control to understand and recognize the subtleties of danger.

As I read, for this piece, my slapboxing essay, I realized that I could apply that subtle kind of logic to other dimensions of danger as well. There was a great scene in the recent movie 'Sahara' in which the hero, sidekick and femme drive up to a pass. The hero immediately reconizes the signs of ambush and gets everybody to drop their weapons and move slowly. The femme, a doctor, is completely perplexed by the situation. She's the one who squeezed the trigger and then threw away her AK-47 like it was infected with Ebola. She's the one who now lives under the new rules of Standing Ground. But she needs more than a law, a permit, a gun and some training. She, and a whole lot of Americans need Rules of Engagement.

Lots of black men like me have The Voice. Not everybody can say 'motherfucker' and make people shiver. You know it. Sam Jackson has it. Avery Brooks has it big time and he doesn't even have to shout. I understand that some people are never going to get it but should they go straight to guns?

The Rules of Engagement should assist people in saying what they need to say when danger comes their way. Anybody who watches cop shows has a passing familiarity with how people are urged with The Voice to drop their weapons and move slowly. Ordinary folks should be able to understand some verbal judo which is close to legally binding. Remember 'I warn you, my hands are registered as lethal weapons'? How about 'I am in fear for my life and if you take one step closer, I can shoot'. Well, that's what one would expect from a Standing Ground training. But there's a great deal more street smarts that can be drilled in.

Perhaps today's self-defense classes in the strip mall karate studio is perfectly adequate for providing a layer of graded sensibilities about danger. I further hope that there are sensible roughnecks out there like me who can lend a hand when it goes palm to palm. But I'll tell you what, when bullets start flying, I'm out. There's the problem. A citizen who is ready to shoot a gun abdicates the possibility of assistance from others who might be within screaming distance. Who knows how often that's going to be, but there's a lot of distance between pulling the trigger and finding an alternative - and I wonder if it's not also a matter of character.

That's right I'm going there. Bernard Goetz is a wimp, and I don't like laws that give wimps courage. What we need is a little less anger management and a lot more fear management. Nevertheless this entails some public spiritedness that perhaps we are not quite ready to give. But if this law and the rhetoric and ideas behind it are heading in a direction that puts personal safety above public safety, I'm not sure I like that at all.