Cobb

The Feral Motorcycle Movie

Along the lines of matters involving the security of the Middle Class, I offer these observations of the movies that fascinate.

Last year when I spoke about the greatness of Ronald Reagan I mentioned that one of the things he engendered that was most impressive to me was 'Morning in America'. I liked having the confidence back, but it wasn't some time that I realized how much I had fed on the diet of dispair that had become deeply embedded in our national culture. One of these days soon, I'm going to watch Network. I never have, but I bet I know everything about that mood of desparate degeneracy it will evoke.

When I look back to my teenage years in the late seventies, I was as eager to grow up as any. But there was a deep cynicism I fed on that was only gradually punctured by light. Perhaps it was too late; I still retain a taste for the dark and desparate movie. Having grown some sophistication it is  easy to see this now in retrospect. So here follows a list of some of the top films that remind me very much of the kind of insecurity we felt. Nothing spoke of that more clearly than the Hollywood cliche of humanity gone feral. Somehow in these post-apocalyptic epics the bad guys always managed to get dirtbikes and leather. Go figure.

Heavy Metal: Harry Canyon
The dysfunctional future is never anywhere so cynically realized than in the episode of Heavy Metal involving the Loc Nar. The future is filthy, violent, sleazy, greedy and utterly devoid of virtue. Everything is a dangerous con game, and only the paranoid survive.

The Omega Man
"Robert Neville, a doctor,due to an experimental vaccine, is the only survivor of an apocalyptic war waged with biological weapons". That just about says it all, eh? This is probably the most intelligent zombie flick ever made, but man is it ever dark.

Mad Max
What hasn't been said about this film? It is the sine qua non of the feral motorcycle movie, all the way to what I imagine Tank Girl was. Thank god they only made three in this series.

Escape From New York
I'm probably the only man in my generation who hasn't seen this film. There was something about it and The Warriors that I simply didn't want to see. But I did see Escape From LA and I'm sure that I didn't miss anything. But New York as tragic Gotham is standard fare. I think you are catching the drift.

I have to admit finally that as an action flick with something of an interesting story, I dug Waterworld for what it was worth. Not so many of these movies are made today. Our fears are more centered around what evil and heroic cliques can do, than what global calamities may befall us and rewind the world back to zero. I enjoyed the production values of the remake of Planet of the Apes too, but man was that dialog crap.

The powerful middle class clique is central to the premises of heroism in The Matrix series. Looking forward to MI3, I predict it will fail or succeed according to how well Cruise is integrated with a team. That was key to the first film, and kind of fell off in the second. We cannot accept that ordinary people a Dirty Harry style heroic individuals any longer. Nothing speaks to this quite like the success of Jack Bauer who would be nothing without his team at CTU. Dennis Haysbert's new series 'The Unit' is the prototype moving forward. He nails it. As we understand these cliques of ability and power, we will start to comprehend the decentralized world. This is the problem of the 21st Century.

 

A Report Card for GW

I am not a Republican because of George W. Bush. For some people this sounds like a contradiction. To quote Craig Mack's partner, I don't understand how they don't understand, so I'm going to throw down some futuristic, robotic, George Jetson..

GW Positives:
Taking the War to the Enemy
George W. Bush could not wait to get over to Iraq and start stomping Saddam into the carpet. He absolutely did the right thing, so much more the better if he took Saddam's threat against Sr, personally. Bush has done what no president since Roosevelt has been able to do. Turn the Defense Department into the War Department. He did it in plain sight of the world community. He took the opportunity to once and for all put America on an old school military throwdown. No illegal funding of Contras. No CIA assassinations. No half-assed single helicopter rescue missions. No symbolic bombing gestures. Just hundreds of thousands of ass-kicking GI boots on the ground. And the biggest complaint anybody can really muster is 'You shoulda sent more' to which his perfect response is, we didn't want to turn Iraq into a police state.

I just found some fascinating support for this particular 'Bushism' in a review of my heretofore all-time favorite government person, George P. Schultz.

Greenspan's Economy
Despite his bumbling with Snow and that idiotic steel tarriff, Bush has done the right thing with respect to the domestic economy by not doing anything to override Greenspan. And the successor to Greenspan is continuing the same thing. Interest rates are creeping up, but for most of his watch GW has left well enough alone. That said, 2003 was the worst freakin' year in my life economically speaking. But on the whole, I'm perfectly satisfied. Enron got what was coming to them. Bernie Ebbers got appropriately clobbered as did the crook running Tyco. I still don't understand how SBC ate AT&T, but Michael Powell let it happen.

China Policy
Bush has not flubbed the China card. He let the thinktankery spit fire on the matter of 'currency manipulation' and he has held a hard line on Taiwan. So far, there have been no major negative repercussions. He's riding that thin line quite well. China holds a lot of American bonds. They're still holding and not selling them off. That's good. The US has engaged China into diplomacy on NKorea, and we've still neither sold out Taiwan nor embarrassed the Mainland on that issue.

Axis of Evil
Bush put the world on notice that Iran and NKorea are being eyeballed by the big bad USA. He played that card well. While I think it's crazy to expect that we could resolve major issues with three nations under one administration, the stakes were raised. Whomever is next in the Oval Office is going to have to deal with them.

Pakistan
It's not often said how difficult and yet successful Bush has been in treading the fine line of supporting Musharraf who is essentially a military dictator, and gaining progress in the GWOT. The bust of AQ Khan was a huge success. The ability for the US to keep Pakistan and India from each other's throats is also a big plus for the Bush Administration.

Secretary Rice
Condi rocks.

Cheif Justice Roberts
Also rocks.

Dubai Ports
GW said the right thing and stuck to his guns. Good on him.

Social Security
He may not have any of the answers, but he has been gutsy enough to bring this problem front and center with the American people. No there is not crisis, further there is no evasion.

GW Negatives:
Mexico Policy
This is an unmitigated disaster. The Bush guest worker program is catastrophic BS, and he has a lot of nerve pushing it. I think Fox has something on him.

Deficit Spending
He's busted the budget, and has played the one note of tax abatement to death.

Outing Plame
I still believe it was a crime.

Defensive White House
We have suffered the most weaselly press secretaries in memory. Bush should have hired David Brooks.

The IQ Factor
As one who has done a fair amount of public speaking, it kills me to have a President who can't. His speechwriters are excellent, and there is almost no time when he says the wrong thing. Still, he should be able to wrangle the press corps and do many detailed briefings himself.

No Vetos
Bush hasn't stood up to Tom Delay. That's weak, for a number of reasons.

Africa Policy
Too little too late. But that AIDS stuff was great and right on time. That's Condi's doing. Condi still rocks. I'm rethinking and triangulating on Africa now, however.

Colin Powell
GW Bush killed Colin Powell's political career. For that he shall never be forgiven.

DHS Shuffling
One of these days that organization will be right. Not under Bush.

If I have patience later, I'll comment on all the meaningless crap spewed from Bush Derangement Syndrome patients.

On the whole, I give him an 83% That's a B or a B- depending upon how conservative you are.

The Field Negro Responds

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
-- Rudyard Kipling

Such are some tenets of manhood. I subscribe. Yet there are others.

This is the crux of the black conservatives position and simply stated, it goes like this: We can and should do nothing in Darfur, because they are Africans and we are Americans; and other than similar pigmentations we have nothing in common.

Thus begins a diatribe against that old cartoon character 'the house negro' by someone who is running that metaphor into the ground. I think it was Noam Chomsky who said something like, the only thing I care about is if people tell the truth about my work. I understand. I understand.

There is really no excuse, this being cyberspace and all, not to quote exactly what other people say if you intend to rebut their arguments logically. On the other hand if you are content to just misrepresent other people just to satisfy your inflated sense of self, why bother? On the other hand you might just be too lazy. Who knows? Perhaps he who calls himself the House Negro will stand in the light and work a bit harder, perhaps not. I've been online 13 years; I'm easy to find.

More precisely what I said was that despite the fact that I personally take the tragedy... oh snap, this is cyberspace, I can tell you exactly what I said.

So we have a fundamental problem here. The people who watch BET and UPN are not a fundamental engine of geopolitical change, and as well meaning as the Field Negro is, speaking as one whose heart has bled on occasion, I would boldly suggest that he pick a better audience for his fulminations.  Furthermore I would suggest that anyone so inclined to motivate the stricken masses of African Americans to acts of great charity and moment disabuse themselves of such fantasy. It ain't gonna happen.

...

Any attempt to create an alternate channel of geopolitical power in the United States is absolutely doomed to ignominious failure and shame. Those who would disagree would do well to recall the fate of the Free Azania Movement's subservience to Ronald Reagan's Constructive Engagement (that I just wrote a little about). No American cares as much about the poor blighters in Sudan as we did for the brothers and sisters of Sarafina in South Africa. And no amount of weeping and wailing is going to do an end-around the US Department of State, not even by seditious armchair generals. So if you think (yet another) march of the peasantry is going to materially change what's going on in Africa... get over yourself. Please.

I'm not going to repeat myself or dumb down what I already said. If you don't get it, maybe you shouldn't be reading this blog.

Now what's interesting about the Field Negro's perspective, and I presume that he is a Talented Tenther from way back, is that I am actually more predisposed to pay attention to someone as educated as he appears to be. I only qualify that with the fact that I am even more likely to listen to someone degreed in, or working in the field of political science in particular when it comes to geopolical issues like the genocide in Darfur. So it's safe to say that someone like me is his natural audience. BUT.

The problem I have with his exhortation, aside from the fact that no respectable political science wonk of African descent has used that 'house negro vs field negro' metaphor at the college level in two generations, is that it's directed at the hoi polloi. It's like KRS-1 getting on stage at a rap concert with an audience of 18 year olds and complaining that they aren't good enough parents. Huh? What? What do you expect if you're going to pick an audience who by definition ain't qualified? And just in case you didn't hear his original complaint, let me quote it for you:

Unfortunately, we are too busy being entertained by UPN and BET, and too busy washing and waxing our cars to care.

Now he might be talking about a 'we' of 50,000. But it sounded to me like he was talking about a 20 million person we, in otherwords a fat cross-section of working class African Americans. But I can't argue with the substance of his point - them African Americans don't care, and ain't gonna, but it is not, as he implies, because black conservatives are telling them not to care.

Now the real problem with silly metaphors is that while they may be somewhat instructive under certain circumstances, they are mostly silly. And people who use silly metaphors can't teach me jack. And I think that if they had a little bit more respect for their audience, they'd stop being so damned cute. I mean how seriously can one take the policy recommendations of an individual who consistantly refers to the President of the US as 'the frat boy'? As it is I think I'm gonna puke if I hear another junior high school level lecture about 'house negroes' and 'field negroes'. But then again, perhaps it is the ambition of the Field Negro to be the intellectual leader of those who find that kind of talk 'deep'. As for me, I think I'll stand with Condi Rice:

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Thursday that the African Union (AU)peacekeeping mission in Sudan's Darfur region was not strong enough and that NATO should take on a larger role there.

"I think everyone recognises that the AU mission, while it has been successful thus far, is not robust enough to deal with the continued violence in Darfur, and particularly the problems that are emerging in western Darfur," Rice told a news conference at a NATO ministers meeting in Bulgaria.

The AU's 7,000 poorly equipped troops in Sudan's western province of Darfur have been unable to stop violence in which tens of thousands of people have died and 2 million have fled in the last three years.

That was Friday the 28th. And the source is Reuters.

Me? Well this black conservative says we should, as a general principle, pre-emptively strike those militant forces that threaten our interests. Darfur is not a threat, but it certainly destabilizes the region. I've more specifically called for American boots on the ground in Liberia, and also in Cote D'Ivoire when they were calling for Americans and the French weasels were pulling their troops back. Sudan would be on my Least Favored Nation list. So I think Rice is turning the screws at the right level, considering half of this country would piss its pants at the mere mention of the word 'invasion'. Again, this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who understands geopolitical neoconservatism, but it probably would to people who only understand what the Field Negro is talking about.

As for Pan African brotherhood. Hey, I'm all for it, but that's personal. The situation in Darfur however is geopolitical, and I don't confuse the two.

So I hope that clears things up a bit. Let's see what the Field Negro says. I'll wait and not be tired by waiting.

Three National Tripwires

I've been thinking of reasons not to worry and reasons to worry about the fate of nations. And I've come up with what I believe to be the three most significant proximate causes for the devolution of nations. The good news is that America is in good shape.

The Corruption of the Upper Class: Tyranny
As much as we talk about this, and we talk about it a great deal here, well, BDS sufferers do most of the talking, we are fortunate to have a very open and clean system. The banks don't steal our money, the trains still deliver, the stock markets are open, the press is free (if retarded) and judges are not shot nor bribed.  But the fundamental premise is that when the elites become irrevocably corrupted, it is the beginning of the end.

The Insecurity of the Middle Class: Civil War
If and when the middle class loses all sense of security, they take things into their own hands. We flirt with the far margins of this all the time, but we're a long way from the bad old days of feral motorcycle movies. I've always seen the evolution of Cocooning, the two child family and the pre-eminence of the 4WD SUV as evidence that America's middle class feels less secure. However we still enjoy taking weekend drives in convertibles which is a double hit against insecurity. The middle class that can no longer feel encouraged and protected by elites will subvert them and use their own skills against them and each other.

The Sickness of the Lower Class: Plague & Famine
Basically, when the poor start to drop dead and pile up, there is little that can be done to save a nation. Clearly, we have more people who die of congestive heart failure than failure to eat, and we do remarkably well when it comes to immunization and public health. No, everybody doesn't have dental and pre-natal, but our infant mortality rate is pretty respectable.

National Black Get A Job Day

Somebody named Ty over at the Black Informant said something that ought to be shouted from the rafters. So I'm doing what I can to spread the word to the Kwaku Network.

May First, all the illegal aliens and their friends are going to strike their jobs in a day of idiot solidarity. Every black unemployed man and woman should take that day, march into their employers and offer to do their jobs for the same pay with the added benefit of being an American citizen.

If you get the job, great. If you don't, rat the employer out to the local INS office.

GOP Rent-A-Negro

I have been waiting a bit too long to get this post started. My apologies. What I want to do is comprehensively address the POV of many critics who have posted here and elsewhere with incredulity about the role of blackfolks in Republicanism and Conservatism. The popular idea floating around is that basically, the only reason blackfolks are 'drinking the koolaid' of the Republican party is because they are getting PAID. It's a myth, and so long as I don't debunk it, it grows in power and remains a convenient way for the incredulous people to be morally dismissive. I hope to debunk that myth so that it can then be called what I think it is, a lazy excuse and a lie.

There are two ways to address this. The first is to go after the premise of drinking the koolaid. That's difficult to do primarily because most blackfolks who are antagonistic towards the GOP are pitifully ignorant of it. They don't distinguish between the various factions within the Party, they don't know the differences between Bush & Reagan, they don't know the difference between Fiscal and Social conservatives, they don't distinguish between Neocons and Paleocons, and they inclined to believe that any garbage that sticks to Donald Rumsfeld for example, sticks to every black Republican. So instead of them listening to what it is we're actually saying, they're pitching whatever garbage they can dream up and saying 'what about this?'. In other words they have been educated by gibberish and they believe it enough to consider their antagonism logical and proper. Most of the time it is broadly prejudicial, flatly ignorant and quite frankly embarrassing. People who don't bother to consider the intellectual distinctions between blackfolks are pains. Likewise more often then not I am likely to ignore such people, or tell them they are full of dookie. To which they generally respond that their dookie doesn't stink as much as my dookie, the problem being they have no idea which dookie I claim, to what extent, to what ends and for what motivation. So basically, I'm not going to chase down that monkey business because it's like arguing with people who think all rap sounds the same. They're never going to get it, so to hell with them. My message to you is learn to speak in politically coherent terms and you'll get real feedback, in the meantime all of your questions sound like stupid questions to me.

The second way to address this is to refute and/or quantify what little they do understand about the business of political advocacy vis a vis the GOP's 'Message to the Black Man' as it were. This is a bit easier to do, since it generally focuses on nameable individuals, and the vicissitudes of selling out. Still there are problems. Despite that, I'll press forward on this tack - basically if and how much is the GOP in the Rent a Negro business.

Part of my predicament is that I don't know whom I'm talking to. So the first thing I would ask in this vein is, how much money do you think is a lot of money? Some people think, for example, that $10,000 is a lot of money. Others would say that's something, but not much. It really depends on one's perspective. So what I'm going to do is suggest a relative measure of influence and a somewhat false equivalence for the sake of making my point and putting things in perspective.

Let us imagine, then, that you believe that everything black conservatives & Republicans say to black America and America in general is complete and utter degenerate dog vomit. I will then conversely say that the very same is true of the entire genre of Hiphop music. In the end we will thus try to determine who gets paid more for saying what and the net effect of that verbiage on black American behavior, etc. And so we begin.

Ain't Jemima Pretty?

Whenever my wife needs me to move the couch around the living room or some yardwork, I become 'John Henry'. If'n the job is big enough, I will put on my work gloves and a bandana. No matter how big or small the job, I adopt a southern accent, act very politely and slyly ask Ma'am if there is anything else her husband h'aint done 'round the house. It's our little joke.

Recently, somebody wrote me romantically of the old days on the farm when black women raised white kids to be polite and respectful, when biscuits were made from scratch and that black man over yonder could fix the most busted up tractor before noon. Doubtless, there were many miracles wrought by many a black man and woman three generations ago down South. But we African Americans today don't even know what a plow looks like, much less how to hitch a bull to one. What happened to Old Joe and Aunt Mae? Why did we forget them so soon?

Was Alice Walker telling us something? Surely every black man who owned his own house and farm wasn't a two-timing tyrant like Mr. __ or a spineless party boy like Harpo. Surely it wasn't only women who went North to find their fortune, or who stayed home to set what's what at the Thanksgiving Dinner.

There's a position somewhere between silly romantic notions and ignorant disdain I think has been charted out most elegantly and powerfully by Ernest J. Gaines, and I think it's something we ought to remember. Some time ago, on my journey South to the 'Mecca' of Atlanta I was on the same trip as Jill Nelson when she wrote 'Volunteer Slavery'. I had finally learned enough about Corporate America to discover that it was just another part of America and not so tightly wrapped as in our striver's row bourgie dreams. And so the next themes were encapsulated in 'Pushed Back to Strength' and a rediscovery of the Blues Aethetic via Murray's Seven League Boots. It turned out that neither were quite appropriate to me and I ended up consuming mostly Applebome's work on the South - discovering the truth of that which had not been better stated until Brooks' Patio Man.

As I reflect on it, those were probably the last two books of black fiction that I ever imagined using to do any rough shaping of my life. I browsed them mostly in my mid thirties and from that point on was quite satisfied that I would have no more black existential battles, which has been true. Which makes it all the more significant that the last great black book for me was Gwaltney's, and although I have read most of my Baldwin since then no lesson has had quite the impact. The net result of this is that all of the great African Americans are men and women of the 40s and 50s. Those old enough to remember the Depression and who could see change a-comin'. Those who were confident and strong; those who clung fiercely to their families and grew great men and women from poverty. We still know them, and yet we forget them.

My cousin actually read, scholar that he is, some original slave narratives. He said that he was constantly amazed at the strength, intelligence and perserverance of those writers. They were every bit as smart as us, and they did it without Image Awards, or role-models, Affirmative Action or even the benefit of the most fundamental guarantees. They were people who understood themselves and people. I can't remember all he said, but I know it threw a wrench in any theory of 'the Legacy of Slavery'. If there was one, it was one of strength he'd be proud to inherit. There was no native alienation, no great gap and loss of Africa, and things native. These were the people who changed Christianity and invented Gospel music. They didn't ask the Lord to take away their stumbling blocks.

Maybe it was Malcolm. Surely it was Sidney who gave us our man in suits. That polish, that erudition. Oh we wanted to wear the duBoisian suit and elucidate, didn't we? We wanted to be Paul Robeson, All American and urban, urban, urban. We wanted to say, "Get outta my way, buster.", like a Park Avenue swell. We wanted to be flying aces in uniform - officers and gentlemen. We wanted Dorothy Dandridge, not the country girl. I wonder if we wanted wrong. I wonder what we might have had if we stayed and fought for Tuskeegee instead of going up north to Howard. Maybe the Dirty South wouldn't be so dirty.

In Cobb, this edition, I am looking back as a conservative to some simple truths. I am trying to grow my family organically as fast as the progress I can make allows. I am trying not to make mistakes of expecting now to be better than then so I don't invest in futures that aren't reasonable. I am essentially trying to be Old Money without the Money so that when it comes I won't be foolish. I understand that the first corruption of a society is found in the depraved indifference of its elites, and I am biding my time to take the reigns when I have become adequately wise. So long as my soul is relatively pure I will feel this ambition and love for my fellow man. If there is a will to nobility, then I hope that is the pull I feel. And I am recalling the spirit of those people - their soul and my moral projected memory of Old Joe and Aunt Mae. They are the people you would trust with your life and I think we would all do well to remember and embody their grace, competence and dignity, even if we're just moving a couch.

Simon Says

"For men, being married is like playing Simon Says for the rest of your life, and you never get to be Simon".
-- Jay Leno

A couple years ago Kim DuToit wrote a controversial article about the defanging of the American male. Although I actually prefer his term, I'm not sure that I want to repeat it here at Cobb. Although I generally agree with the sentiment that du Toit had a little bit too much to prove, he was onto something.

I watched 'Walk the Line' for the first time and cannot forget the exchange between two women in the grocery store.

Lady in the Aisle: Divorce is an abomination. Marriage is for life.
June Carter: I'm sorry I let you down, ma'am.

I'm trying to think of any example in life where Americans would level such criticisms at each other in public life. Not only to dish it out, but to take it with the appropriate humility. It's the most stunning exchange in the entire film and I think I understand it perfectly.

What the characters in that film understand better than most of us do is that marriage is not a respecter of persons. When a man and a woman enter into marriage, they should respect each other, but they should respect their marriage even more. To respect your woman because she demonstrates {list of things contemporary liberated women are supposed to be respected} certain attributes is nothing more nor less than a real friendship. But to respect your woman because she is your wife represents a whole new level. I think it is a level that many married couples must eventually reach, but we are not doing our share as a society to help them understand that. I don't believe that it is anything that requires exclusively religious faith, but we have certainly been reduced to a society in which few others than the religiously faithful defend the principles and purposes of marriage.

So it's rediculous but apt to compare marriage to a game of Simon Says. Why? Because men don't know how to be husbands and women don't know how to be wives. And in a marginally post-feminist society in which 'liberators' who are nothing more than libertines keep producing most of the popular pap, we are overcome by false messages of male submission in marriage. Marriage, so goes the popular myth, makes women less womanly and men less manly. It only improves the standing of gays and lesbians. Of course that's perverse, but it's what makes Jay Leno funny.

And so we pay lip service to jokes about what men must inevitably suffer through and hearing truth in it, mistake that for Truth. We shrug off the inevitability of it all, and then half of us spend half our lives with The Abomination. Some would say divorce is as inevitable as obesity and heart disease. I think it's time that healthy people grab the mic.

So let me state the obvious. A good marriage makes a man stronger and a woman stronger. The act of submission is to Marriage, not simply of weak men to catty women. There is no truth to the essentialism of feminine power that rises from within women during marriage. That dysfunction is nothing more or less than a bad marriage.

The Non-Islamic Bomb

OK so I just wrote about how I thave a good amount of confidence that we'er going to survive a nuke or two on our major cities. Well, not explicitly, but I implied it. And I'm pretty sure that cancer is not going to kill us all off - in fact it makes us tougher. But what if there were something even more insidious and potentially deadly out there?

I am starting to discover what people think about me. My mind is fertile and lots of ideas are capable of taking root and growing there. In other words, my head is full of steer manure. As if I didn't have enough to concern me, and old buddy I met here in Vegas has got something growing under his fingernails that he scratched into me. Nanobiotech.

Nano who? OK here's the deal and we'll go straight to the scary part. What if you were a mad scientist bent on destruction? With nanobiotech you could conceivably manuafacture Marburg in your garage. Or if you were bored and a tiny bit more clever, you could give the Bird Flu virus just the kick it needs to be transformed into something that passes from birds to humans. Not that it would necessarily be deadly in the communicable form, but you certainly wouldn't take the blame. Most of the planet already thinks it is inevitable. Play god by doing science.

The problem of the 21st century is what to do with the power that will soon trickle down to elite cliques. There used to be a time when the kind of doing that got respect and power in this world, was the doing done by very large organizations. If you wanted to accomplish something of significance and note in the world, you had to have a several hundred million dollars and several hundred bureaucrats, logicians and assorted henchmen at your command. Well that's still the case, except that there are a lot more individuals who have those kinds of resources at their disposal, and it is not altogether clear that they are as well regulated by the force of nations any longer. Of course there are billionaires in the mix too. This level of player is not so well tethered by the would-be Leviathans of society. And while human beings are still meatbags with particular weaknesses, a couple cliques with people like Mark Rich or George Soros in them can wreak interesting havoc.

Since we still live in an era of Scientific Animism, a general belief in progress and riches can collude with self-interest in dangerous ways. What if Bill Gates and a few of his best buds decided that we really need cloned sheep? What's a couple billion in research dollars? Not only a drop in the ocean of big governments but multinationals and global drug traders too.

So we know that there is ability out there. We could argue about motive forever. The bottom line is that sooner or later, especially if we elect another born-again pro-lifer who despises medical research of the godlike variety, some non-government entity is going to start engineering some very small potentially very dangerous microbes.  I'm not paranoid, but I'm not falsely secure either. Government doesn't make it better, but it makes it slower so more people can figure out what's going on. In the case of nanobiotechnology, maybe that's the best thing.

Islam isn't the only force for radical change in this world which can spliter off into unhinged areas. Every billionaire and his tribe, every multi-millionaire and his country club / yacht club / health club contingent is a medium-sized disaster waiting to happen. They'll call it investment in biotech..

Vegas

I'm having too much fun. Whoda thunk you could win money in nickel slots?

The Spousal Unit and I are chilling at the Luxor and just doing nothing productive except winning at the games. I have some pretty decent material in Draft but I'm just too lazy. So there's only this so far on the conference that I'm here for.

OK I'm going back to bed.

Flowers in Chernobyl

I've seen as many Peak Oil scenarios as anyone, and people tell me that I'm crazy for not being paranoid.

I'm not, however. Why? Because I know people aren't going to panic. They're going to make a lot of noise, and they're going to be like boiled frogs, but they won't be running through the streets with their hair on fire. The reason I know this is because... well because we're not panicked now.  I have faith in American's ability to reckon with wild economic swings.

I worked in a bank in 1980. I can remember a time when our country had 14% inflation, when the price of gold was over $700. I can remember when the President was shot. I've lived through two stock market crashes. I can remember when a four bedroom luxury home with a swimming pool cost $75,000 in Los Angeles. I can remember when no cars had shoulder belts or dashboards made of anything but steel. I can remember when our country's currency was based on the gold standard, and we took that away.

Depending upon what people believe, we can pull an economy out of our imaginations, and we will never run out of imagination.

The other day, I head a story on the radio about the wildlife that has come back to Chernobyl. It has mutated, but the mutations were not in the reproductive organs of the animals. It made me think of exactly how humans might mutate after a nuclear holocaust. It's something we haven't thought about much, not like we did in the 50s when we fretted about that being our fate. It's hard to imagine that children would not be raised on cartoons about superheroes, all of them originated from some ideas about nuclear mutations on humans. No Godzilla for my kids. So what if we nuked ourselves into a mutated race of humanoids? How would we come out the other end? Like zombies? Or maybe we'd end up with larger brains, or perhaps mottled skin. That's what I thought. It would not be skin color but skin color patterns that set us apart - the Clears vs the Leopards. Maybe some of us would get extremely hairy, or perhaps new eye colors would be the result of our mutations.

We would survive. Not just cockroaches.

According to people who sound like they know:

Multiple metabolic pathways govern the accurate duplication and distribution of DNA to progeny cells; other pathways maintain the integrity of the information encoded by DNA and regulate the expression of genes during growth and development. For each of these functions, there is a normal baseline frequency at which errors occur, leading to spontaneous mutations and other genomic anomalies.

That sounds to me like there are lots of parallel processes going on that make sure mutations don't happen so dramatically. We get cancer all the time - those are mutations, but maybe we are mutating other things all the time as well. Our ears are getting slightly twistier, our fingernail growth is slowing down, our ability to see colors at night is changing. Who knows what all?

Do people actually look the same as they did 400 years ago? Wouldn't we notice? Couldn't we tell? Is there no-one who looks anything like George Washington today? If you've watched television like I have, you'd think that all the hairy chested men in America disappeared after the cancellation of Magnum PI.

And if all that's not quite dramatic enough, how is it that the people who live in Tierra Del Fuego have survived all of this time? Does oil shoick and inflation and mutation not affect them? I think that our concerns about global warming and peak oil and nuclear winter are all a bit overhyped when compared to the real facts about human adaptability. The end of our lifestyle as we know it, is not equivalent to the end of humanity. It just means we'll have to upend our current values; that the rules of our current economies will change.

I'm learning to be immune from such dire warnings, especially coming from people who don't even understand their own teenaged children's music.

Sock Puppet Full Disclosure

I've done it maybe twice or three times. Once over at The Black Informant as a character named 'Ward Booty' and once or twice in my own blog. I can't remember the subject, but I was just mad as hell and needed to cuss somebody out. But I've never defended myself or gave props to myself as anyone other than myself.

My Dinner with Andre 3000

If I could chill with my favorite mythical blackfolks, who would it be and why?

First off, I reserve the right to demand a recount. This will not be the be-all and end all list. It's just what I'm thinking right now. I'm the host and the dinner is laid out in a big modern glass house in the woods like Fallingwater. It's a bright spring day and outside the lush greenery sways in the breeze, the sounds of a brook can be heard above the hush. Songbirds are getting their mack on, and it's pleasing to hear.

The living room has large fluffy couches and a brown berber carpet. I'm kinda sprawled with a glass of Frangelico, and the guests arrive.

John W. Thompson

John W. Thompson is chairman of the board of directors and chief executive officer of Symantec Corporation. Under Thompson’s leadership, Symantec has grown from a small consumer software publisher to the market leader for security and availability solutions to help customers manage their rapidly growing digital assets. With global operations in more than 40 countries, the company is viewed as a strategic partner to its customers, providing a broad range of security, storage, availability, and performance management solutions to help them proactively manage their IT infrastructure.

Prior to joining Symantec, Thompson was with the IBM Corporation where he held senior executive positions in sales, marketing and software development. Thompson was general manager of IBM Americas and a member of the company’s Worldwide   Management Council.

Thompson completed his undergraduate studies at Florida A&M University and holds a master’s degree in management science from MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

In September 2002, President George W. Bush appointed Thompson to the National Infrastructure Advisory Committee to make recommendations regarding the security of the critical infrastructure of the United States. In addition, Thompson has   served as the chair of the Silicon Valley Blue Ribbon Task Force on Aviation Security and Technology to identify and evaluate technology-driven solutions to improve the security and efficiency of national and local aviation.

Now here's a confession. Symantec announced a fiscal problem this week and the stock took a hit on Wall Street. As soon as I read the story, my stomach took a dive. Why? Because I know that Thompson runs the joint. I sweated for him, momentarily, just like I used to sweat for Bryant Gumbel in the 70s when he first got on the Today Show.

On Monday, software company Symantec released a Form 8-K stating that the Internal Revenue Service has served the company with a notice of deficiency for a shortfall of close to $1 billion for the years 2000 through 2004.

For 2000 and 2001, the IRS has stated that Symantec     (nasdaq:       SYMC -        news     -            people     ) owes $900 million in back taxes relating to transfer-pricing accounting between Veritas, which was acquired in 2005, and a foreign subsidiary. In addition, the IRS also seeks $100 million arising from the company's 2003 and 2004 transfer pricing accounting.

Here's another confession. The thing that worries me most about being an activist black conservative is that all the cats like Thompson are Democrats and I'll never get invited to the right parties. Then again, he's way out of my league anyway. Check out these numbers:

Total Annual Compensation 2.7 Million
Mkt Value of Exerciseable Options: 83.8 Million

Since it is my pet peeve this cycle to smack about the myth that black conservatives are getting rich off white conservative money, I just wanted to put a little bit of that in perspective. Here's somebody most folks don't even know exists, and I'd bet you anything that the money he's worth far outstrips what black conservative activists are getting from the likes of Sciafe and Co. I know I shouldn't be going off track when I just wanted to give the man props.. but hey. It's my blog.

Middle Class Morality in Sudan

It has been my experience that Americans of all ethnicities suffer from a particular ailment called 'middle class morality'. It is the conceit of this mindset that their marches and their votes and their PTA meetings and their essays and their calls to talk radio hosts are great engines of change in the affairs of mankind. In fact, all of these efforts do little more than energize and antagonize other middle class Americans depending upon which 'side' of a particular 'issue' they happen to select.

Only every once in a while do significant numbers of the American middle class happen upon some fundamental truth or insight into what's really going on in the world. Most of the time, they are ill-equipped to do anything about it. Examples abound, and I won't belabor the point. Pick a headline, any headline.

There are few things more annoying than the pretensions to power of this bourgeois naivete. But there is one thing that consistantly is and that is the bleating and complaining of those middle class moralists who are convinced that too few Americans are exercising this so-called power. In order to amplify the noise, add a bit of self-righteous socialism with allusions to the great strength of the long-suffering masses. Pour in a dallop of racial exceptionalism and you have the recipe for a perfect storm of insufferable bloviation.

Today's flatulence comes in the form of this whingy harmattan from none other than The Field Negro:

These atrocities against our people take place in other parts of the world, while African Americans choose to do nothing. We go to Durham North Carolina and speak out against the Duke lacrosse team for allegedly raping one of our sisters, or to Mexico to confront their President for making derogatory remarks about us, but there is silence while thousands of black Africans are being slaughtered on a daily basis. Where is Jessie, where is Al, where is the CBC? To his credit Colin Powell did speak out about Darfur and has taken the issue to the UN on behalf of the United States. But it was frat boy who said nothing like this would happen on his watch, and yet, it's happening. But I am not going to get on frat boy about this issue, this is about black folks here at home, not about the President. This is about black folks not having a clue about what's going on in the world and not realizing that we are part of a larger world community.

I have seen more white people involved in this struggle, and trying to bring this issue to the forefront than blacks. And for that, we as black folks should all be ashamed. The UN called this the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, and still black folks in this country remain silent. No outcry, no marches in Washington organized by black leaders, no ink from the black press, nothing; just silence.

There is finally a march being sponsered by the American Jewish World Service and other religious groups. And the Jewish community has raised over two million dollars towards the effort in Darfur. Also, I would like to give some props to New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof who is the only journalist in the world who seems to be trying to keep this story alive. -The last time I checked he was a white man- I understand that the Jews have a unique sensitivity to this issue, but so should we. Unfortunately, we are too busy being entertained by UPN and BET, and too busy washing and waxing our cars to care.

What The Field Negro and other professors of outrage need to understand about the long suffering masses of .. well, field negroes.. is that they are spending all of their energies and talents just trying to get in where they fit in. That is to say, daily suffering the indignities of The Struggle, their generations long quest for inclusion and permanent membership into the American Middle Class. They all want to turn their Nix Check Cashing ID cards into American Express Gold. These are not the people who are evaluating the transcript of the latest meeting of the OAU, rather they are people who put on 'X' hats from Spike Lee's joint and pretend to understand Malcolm's philosophy. Geopolitics is not their strong suit.

But let us imagine a perfect world in which the masses of blackfolks have access, by dint of the magic of the internet and the precience of various blogspot brainiacs, to the most up-to-date and prefect information about the tragedy that is Darfur. Let us further presume that they want to do right. What can they going to do about it? They aren't going to do anything because they aren't organized for doing, nor do they have the funding, skills nor motivation to be organized for doing.

So we have a fundamental problem here. The people who watch BET and UPN are not a fundamental engine of geopolitical change, and as well meaning as the Field Negro is, speaking as one whose heart has bled on occasion, I would boldly suggest that he pick a better audience for his fulminations.  Furthermore I would suggest that anyone so inclined to motivate the stricken masses of African Americans to acts of great charity and moment disabuse themselves of such fantasy. It ain't gonna happen.

Americans are foolish, and none are perhaps so brazenly so as us Neocons. We continue to get our way in the world because the dearly lamented Karl Rove was able to cobble together a ragtag coalition into a majority, twice. The resounding answer to our prayers was a pliant George W. Bush who, overcome by events and neoconservative nudging, was converted 180 degrees from his provicial attitude on nation-building. Hooray for our team! With the assistance of the grit, determination and backbone of two great men, Mssrs Cheney and Rumsfeld, he has taken our American middle class morality to the Middle East and delivered the mother of all smackdowns to a messianic tyrant called Saddam Heussein. That's what I'm talking about.

Any attempt to create an alternate channel of geopolitical power in the United States is absolutely doomed to ignominious failure and shame. Those who would disagree would do well to recall the fate of the Free Azania Movement's subservience to Ronald Reagan's Constructive Engagement (that I just wrote a little about). No American cares as much about the poor blighters in Sudan as we did for the brothers and sisters of Sarafina in South Africa. And no amount of weeping and wailing is going to do an end-around the US Department of State, not even by seditious armchair generals. So if you think (yet another) march of the peasantry is going to materially change what's going on in Africa... get over yourself. Please.

I'd go on and on about this, but I have to go wax my car.

Leon H. Sullivan

Congressional Medal of Freedom
Awarded by President George Bush
November 18, 1991

The Reverend Leon Sullivan, a civil rights leader and pastor emeritus of the Zion Baptist Church in Philadelphia, has devoted his life to the causes of liberty and justice. Reverend Sullivan founded the Opportunities Industrialization Centers of America, one of the largest and most prestigious job training organizations in the world. He later founded the International Foundation for Education and Self-Help. In 1971, Leon Sullivan was elected to the Board of Directors of General Motors, becoming the first black American to participate in the direction of a U.S. auto company. America honors this man of principle, who in word and example has shown so many people the way to freedom.

Most of us know the Rev. Sullivan as the author of the Sullivan Principles with regard to dealing with South Africa. I seem to recall that by doing so he got into a world of trouble here at home. Essentially, the Sullivan Principles were aligned with, and in fact were the cornerstones of Constructive Engagement.

When he died in 2001 Andrew Makyuth noted:

His Sullivan Principles, an ethical code of conduct for companies doing business in South Africa, gave legitimacy to the desegregation of work facilities and equal opportunities for black people at a time when the South African government balked at recognizing African trade unions.       

As the antiapartheid movement accelerated and became more radical in the 1980s, the Sullivan Principles were derided as too tame, too gradual. But they set the stage for corporate divestiture from South Africa, contributing to pressure for the government's eventual capitulation, leading to the peaceful elections in 1994.       

"The Sullivan Principles were the right thing at the right time," said Tom Manthata, a former antiapartheid campaigner who worked with Archbishop Desmond Tutu at the South African Council of Churches. He is now a member of South Africa's Human Rights Commission.       

But if you listen to folks like 'The Flaming Grasshopper' you might hear rhetoric that goes a little something like this:

Remember apartheid South Africa? Remember the voluntary corporate code of conduct called the Sullivan Principles? Remember Reagan’s “constructive engagement?” The Sullivan Principles and constructive engagement were a cover for “business as usual” in an effort to dispel criticism of the brutal suppression of the majority of the South African population, financially underpinned by U.S. corporate investments, bank loans, and trade.

...In the early 1970s, global corporations, including about 350 U.S.-based transnational companies, were pouring millions of dollars into racist, white-minority-ruled South Africa, to earn lots of money. Why not? There was cheap, controlled, and abundant black African labor, cheap natural resources, a western banking system, an industrial economy exporting products to Europe and the West, and a police and military state elected in a whites only “democracy” to keep the trains running on time.

The Google Reader Revolution

Google Reader has enabled me, better than any tool I've ever used, to organize my online reading. It's doing everything I need it to do, gracefully. I've got about 40 subscriptions running on various blogs and it has never been so easy to scan the variety of information my hungry mind needs on a daily basis.

Finally, I can be a more serious blog reader, which I've always wanted to be. I think I can safely expand to about 20 more subscriptions and really not miss a great deal. I've added over on my right sidebar the top things that pique my interest so you can check them out too.

The New Patriotism

What does 'Taxation Without Representation' mean when spoken by an illegal alien?

One of the standing gripes I have with Republican politics is the extent to which it's all carrot and that carrot is tax abatement. Current Republican appeals to patriotism are shallow when they rely primarily on the morality of the Religious Right, which is often in conflict with the constitutional bright line between Church and State. The saving grace of the GOP is its nationalism. The lack of patriotic nationalism is the primary reason why libertarianism is 'cyber selfish', an intellectual conceit of the working rich. I cannot abide the lack of nationalism in Libertarian politics, and so while I consider myself a strong civil libertarian, I remain a Republican.

Got all that?

One of the questions on the subject of illegal immigration strikes at the heart of this particularly overhyped appeal of the Republican Party. That question is the legitimacy of illegal immigrants based upon their payment of taxes. Republicans claim to be patriotic but do everything they can to avoid payment of taxes and consider that avoidance their solemn right. How hypocritical is it to fight immigration on the basis of overburdended public services? If some Republicans had their way, they would defund public services to the bone. So does anyone really care if public schools go broke? Sure. Democrats do, and they are willing to make the patriotic sacrifice of paying taxes in order to make that happen. Which strategy goes further to secure domestic tranquility?

Fiscal Conservatives all over, especially Newt Gingrich, are pitching a bitch over GW's spending binge. I don't see anyone in Congress pitching War Bonds. We're on the verge of voodoo economics all over again. So what do we let break in support of Bush's political appeal to the GOP Base? My vote says don't mess with my economy. If you need to increase revenues, then do it. Just like the dropping of interest rates to stimulate the economy, there are limits. You cannot ride the tax abatement horse forever. The reality of Republican nationalism is that we're more than willing to spend more money on defense and the right mix of government services. Entitlements and the Welfare State are not breaking the bank, they're breaking conservative spirit. "The full faith and credit of the United States of America" is not in jeopardy because if Congress decided (and they will) to raise tax revenues, they have plenty of room to do so. America will groan, but we will comply. What are we going to do, take our money and businesses to France?  I do take Walter Williams' argument seriously. I still want government spending as a percentage of GDP to be low. But I probably differ with most fiscal conservatives on the question of nation-building. We'll see what Fukyama says, now wiser. Either way, the Federal budget should be balanced and we ought to be all about that.

The Republican party is not situated on the proper nationalist ground to stand firm against illegal immigration. That is because rhetorically we have situated our strongest political sentiments with the right to be left alone by government. Isn't that all illegal aliens want?  We are selling our citizenship cheap, and George W. Bush is leading that charge in the wrong direction with his guest worker programs and amnesty. We have got to show how we are invested in America, or else.

Understand that the appropriate nationalism is not about blood & soil. It's about defense of liberty and our inalienable rights, the rule of law and the market system we have thus far so nobly advanced. It is about real civility and sacrifice for God and Country. It is about our cultural heritage from Dodger Stadium to Lincoln Center to Yellowstone to the Underground Railroad. That sounds like public service to me. It's what we ought to expect from each other, and everyone who comes here to live, and it cannot be based primarily on the act of paying taxes or not paying taxes.

You can't just buy your way into America.

Throwing Rocks & Naming Names

I continue to be amazed at the rocks that get thrown at black conservative heads that were picked up from strange places. All the while people who are throwing them, think they came from our backyards.

Just today I got three thrown at me but the rock thrower did me the courtesy of giving me their names. Mona Charen, Peter Kirsanow and Dinesh DSouza. The strange thing is that before today I've never heard of two of those folks. As I write this, I have only done the most cursory websearch on the first two, basically to see how their names are properly spelled. Other than that, their positions and statements are a complete mystery to me. DSouza, I know. And so I responded.

As for D'Souza, the only person whom blackfolks pay attention who even says anything like him is Shelby Steele. Nobody has paid any attention to D'Sou[z]a since his book 11 years ago. Still, it behooves us to ask exactly what he was saying and if it has any merit. To the extent that I have considered my own attitude about marginalizing the significance of racism on black progress, I think it's worth a review.

So here's my controversial challenge, which I'll write up at Cobb. Let's simply work his title into a pledge - call it 'The End of Racism As An Excuse'. Which is to say nothing more than this. Africans in America are not defeated by white supremacy, nor do they expect any condescending whitefolks to help them out of the problems of racism. From now on it's all about Black Power and not white conciliation. If you are a white racist, expect to get knocked over by strong blacks who have been getting stronger for 400 years. Nothing in our political agenda will be about asking for your favors, for your niceness, for your love, for your care, for your protection or for assuation of your guilt.

I was feeling a little bit froggy and jumped all over it. As I was writing, my inner Chuck D started pumping his fist and as I continued he got smacked aside by my inner Ludacris who threatened to bogard the entire name of this essay. But I really need to chill on that and play this more logically. After all, that's what I'm asking my critics to do.

The solution, it seems to me, lies in all of us being a lot more clear about whom we agree with and why. Not that it's ever going to kill the noise, but it will help people see a bit more clearly. I had to do some editing over at Wikipedia today on the Black Conservatism entry. As you can clearly see, a lot of it has been written by someone who is not. I've rounded a lot of the edges where it really needs whole sections chopped out because the tone of the whole thing is 'This is the history of hate against black conservatives... here we try to explain why it's logical', which is just wrong, wrong, wrong. I blame Colin Powell, by the way. If he would have run in 2000, America would be a much different place.

This is the kind of thing that people forget. The blizzard of hate against Trent Lott or George W. Bush obscures exactly what it is the black Republicans and conservatives stand for. We get cursed out for what we put up with, and we do put up with a lot, but we don't often get enough credit for what we do get right, which is all we really want. But who do I mean 'we'?

What I can say is what we're saying in the Conservative Brotherhood, but only because I have my RSS thang working. And I still don't think anyone has shown me where Walter Williams has misspoke, nor Glenn Loury. I think we appropriate Booker T. Washington quite well, speaking of whom, I am very likely to celebrate in Chicago this June with new allies at The New Coalition. These are the people I think black conservatives ought to rally around, then again, I'm a particular kind of black conservative.

So the task that lies before us is to get a better grasp of our differences and our similarities, not only within the black conservative wing, but across all of the issues that confron Americans and all of the major positions that thinktankers and legislators are actually acting upon. Tall order. Big project. Long time. Worth it.

In the meantime, I'm going to try to help by getting a few more polls going on. Help me out if you will.

What's Spinning

In addition to some Squarepusher and the new Gorillaz album that I've picked up recently, there are three CDs that are just burning my ears up all day and night. Each of them are four out of five stars, and I thought you should know.

I'm Free
Ray Parker Jr. has been to the desert on a horse with no name and he's come out smiling. If you listen to 'The Guitar Man' his new album 'Im Free', you might think that you're listening to America, not the country, the group. But you are listening to a new Ray Parker and realize that this is the man with an ear for the kind of pop that used to rock the nation sweetly. Ray Parker sings about sex in a way that's almost embarrassingly honest. It's grown up, not 'adult'. The most sexy word he uses is 'sex', but not in a George Michael kind of way, rather in a forgive me father for I have sinned kind of way. In fact, I don't think that before this album I've ever heard the word 'fornication' sung.  But that's not half the beauty of this album which has three cuts that sound destined for the Smooth Jazz Hall of Fame, and two more that are anthems for party cruises. On I'm Free, Parker comes off as a combination of Jimmy Buffett meets Billy Dee Williams, but never far from the Ray Parker of old who was never ashamed to admit that he was in love with the other woman. Does it come off as a Mid Life Crisis album, unabashedly so, but one with a happy ending. There's nothing bitter about it, and it basically goes to show that you cannot keep a good man down. Every pop star ought to have the maturity and fun loving triumph that Parker shows. It's good listening. I hope it hits.

A Tale of 3 Cities
One of the best rap albums of all time was cut back in 1994 by a jazz prodigy and four rappers you never heard of before. I don't know how to express how slammin' and funky is Steve Coleman and Metrics album 'A Tale of 3 Cities'. But if you haven't heard it, then you owe it to yourself to know what hiphop might have been in the hands of artists rather than pop stars. You don't need to be so very prepared for this venture into verbal ballistics and sonic excellence, but it will help you get your bearings if you know The Roots, Buckshot LeFonque and The Freestyle Fellowship. That's the level we're talking here. I dug this one out of the archives and it took me back to the last days of real inspirational hiphop - of Broun Fellinis and that new group called the Fugees who did more of what you liked Digable Planets for. Its got all of the raucous without the raunchy, and did I mention lyrical devastation? This is destined to be a classic - it slams even these 12 years later, and I still want to listen to it. That's practically a miracle in the hiphop world and almost unheard of with rap lyrics you haven't even memorized. 

Beautiful World
I don't know why but there is nothing quite so annoying as Sting reinterpreting his own music. It is almost the very definition of pretense. Better he follow Rod Stewart and record some standards. On the other hand, there is nothing that shows the genius of Sting's ample songwriting skills quite like other reinterpretations of his songs. If you want to hear a perfect rendition of 'Fragile', then you need to run, don't walk and get your hands on Take 6' 'Beautiful World'. You will find there a gorgeous set of covers that not only do justice, but go one better. Bill Whithers, Donald Fagin, Stevie Wonder, Michael McDonald have never sounded so good. Take 6 takes a short sidetrip from their usual devotional music into the realm of smooth R&B and rip it up. I can't decide which cut I like better between their remake of Donny Hathaway's 'Someday We'll All Be Free' with Lalah Hathaway, or of Lovely Day the classic Bill Whithers cut. Maybe it's the funky rendition of 'Loves in Need of Love Today', or maybe it's 'Takin It To The Streets'. You just gotta hear it all, over and over.

Rethinking Rosenberg

John Rosenberg and I have had a fair number of differences over the years, but few of them were based upon a disagreement of terms, rather of the significance of our respective advocacies. That's about as deep as I want to characterize our discussions for the moment. Suffice it to say that I've let the matters drop as I headed into a different direction.

One idea I have certainly abandoned since finding Cobb's feet was any investment in the idea that whiteness studies would gain a significant foothold among hardheaded rationalists. Quite frankly, although I don't lament it so much these days, I have essentially given up on a credible and popular anti-racist movement. Rightly or wrongly, the overwhelming majority of Americans have decided for themselves that they are not racist and their personal commitment to such transformative politics is an unnecessary discipline. Note that this applies equally to blacks and whites. As silly as multiculturalism gets, that basic battle is won, and is probably not yeilding anything more significant that a new lexicon of dainty terms for new classes of non-mainstreamed Americans. Mark my words you will soon know the difference between little people, dwarves and midgets.  Seriously, the hope was that your generic white person would undergo a liberating post-racial identity change. Those were thoughts I sustained before 9/11. I know it ain't happening anytime soon, especially with immigration battles ahead.

With that in mind and my commitment to beat up on identity politics for the sake of Western modernism and social mobility, there has to be some shelf upon which to put racial priorities. Class is a no brainer, though insufficient. Nevertheless with regards to black empowerment I think advances in economic and social status in only marginally improved by accomplishing a higher national consciousness. Or put another way, if all racial progress can be considered frozen by the very existence of a Republican president and yet blackfolks still advance economically, and continue to graduate from college, maybe far too many eyes are on the wrong prize.

I dealt with this kind of practical brick wall long ago during the years of 'Constructive Engagement'. Frustrated at (now foolish that I think about it) the refusal of American corporations refusal to shutdown their South African operations I conceded that a 100% embargo of Nationalist run SA was not worth fighting for. So now I am reviewing my weak but consistent defenses of the racial preferences of Affirmative Actions of all sorts in the context of the failure of a popular political consensus. We have a set of laws that don't seem to be getting under anyone's skin any longer. Ward Connorly's crusade has gone about as far as it's going to get in a nation preoccupied with larger geopolitical issues. The Supreme Court has spoken in Michigan, and there's not much to talk about. So if there's no motion in the law (Hmmm, I wonder what happened to / is happening with the Civil Rights Commission - LKS? Anyone?), which way should our ethics be pushing us?

I've always asserted the necessity of a colorblind Constitution and color conscious politics working out the kinks of racial hostility and injustice. But I think that our politics too have hit a spot of equilibrium... All that said, I'm ready to take a fresh look at Rosenberg's persnickety form of intolerance for racial tweaking of any sort. Maybe he's operating under delusions, maybe he's onto something.

I'm watching, and you should too.

Prospects for the Black Working Man

A thoughtful reader asks:

Cobb do black people you know just care about getting on today or do
they just want to live in the past and draw a sense of self from
perceived injustices?
I grew up in a rural community where all the black males i knew were
working men, not tutored but  dependable. Where are these men today?
When I drive by a work site I look to see how many apparent
undocumented aliens are working there. I do not see too many black
males. Do the young blacks you know know how to work?

I can't say with any certainty personally, because I'm not living in a black community now. The blackfolks I know are mostly friends and family and most of them, who do come in regular contact with blackfolks in the 'hood are doing so from a leadership perspective. That is to say I have a brother who's a cop. He's only interested in busting heads but he certainly as a black man knows the difference between who's a knucklehead and who's not. I have an aunt who is a special ed teacher and consultant. I have a cousin who is a high school principal, a brother who is a FedEx supervisor. Also many of my folks interact with blacks at church.

Suffice it to say that from our class and cultural position we are not pessimistic that folks like us are disappearing although we're certainly getting a lot more dispersed. None of us buys into any theories that the race is in trouble. There is nothing especially troubling about statistics we hear about. But we all do our share to do what's necessary, and I think it's the same motivation as anyone would have, with the additional clarity of recognizing racial fact from fiction. But it's all abstract. None of us are working anywhere near the communities we grew up in. You can't be a success in America and stay put. Only gangsta rappers talk about where they're from and can stick around.

I grew up with very clear expectations that I would be going to college and graduate school, and some of the pain of segregation was that such things didn't matter. You were black so you lived with all the other blackfolks no matter who they were. So there have always been subtle but telling differentiations between blacks that I don't think suburban whites think about. Very few blackfolks in my generation grew up in a class-homogenous black community. We're all a little ghetto. We could never be so up-front about class distinctions as we can now. So we learned a level of love-hate which is very sophisticated. It's the thing most people can't fathom who weren't born into it. So do working class blackfolks want to work? Sure, I guess. But I don't associate with them on the regular so I can't tell you what they're up against on a personal basis contemporarily. Seriously, I don't know any working class young black men in their teens or twenties. I'm in my mid 40s. The last time I lived in the 'hood was around '91 - that was Brooklyn.

I do know and can say with some certainty that the expectations of working class blackfolks are high. Much higher than that of immigrants. We're all a little bourgie too. Every black man I know or hung out with feels underemployed and under-appreciated. Very very few black men work for black men. I think I never have. There isn't much of a black network that I know of for working class jobs. People are now talking about forming a black equivalent of the Knights of Columbus. But this is very difficult too.. You have bourgie college men trying to organize ghetto working class boys?

I know institutionally blackfolks are out of luck when it comes to having access to decent jobs. You'll have ghettoes filled with those qualified to work without ready access to the kinds of jobs they might do. It's easy to see where a black neighborhood looks economically abandoned, someplace that looks like there's nobody in it that has any pride in their surroundings.. and they don't. There's nothing but storefront churches and barbershops and liquor stores. But the men who live there take the bus to work at FedEx way across town, or a supermarket in a white neighborhood.

I don't understand what has happened to blacks in the trades. What I believe is that racism there has been so sharp that there has been basically no expectation from black men that they would be accepted or do well. Mexicans have flooded that market in California with a vengeance. I've been in Mexican hardware stores. Home Depot is the most bilingual place around.

Where I grew up, the working class kids almost all went into the military, or auto repair, retail or nowhere. I can remember when the new Pep Boys opened up around the corner. New store. No black mechanics, in an all black neighborhood. It took a long time for that to change and basically friends of mine were hanging around the bays trying to hustle customers before they could pull up. Mexicans followed suit years later. You couldn't drive up to Pep Boys without somebody offering to pull a dent and bondo your car.

So I've always seen the problem with black working class employment in terms of the isolation of the 'hood, and the complete disconnect between high school skills and making a good living. There were ways opening up in civil service and affirmative action put a lot of hitters on first base in the 70s and 80s. But black neighborhoods.. I've never seen the potential for them to organically develop. And I think they won't until Mexicans with no further expectations than inner city life take over. I've seen where Mexicans will put a creche on their front lawn and think it's something to improve it. People who would dig up their porch walkway and put in bricks, and that's what they do for a living. The difference is that blacks didn't want to be there in the first place, to a lot of new immigrants, this is the promised land. You can't put pride into a black community that was created by segregation. All the pride goes into the people, not the place.  All the college-bound families got out as soon as they could. Whites flew first. Working class kids had to hustle to get the good jobs or else run across town. What was left were the no-skilled people and gangbangers who were our associates and aped our style. They were never going to be satisfied with what was left behind, that's why they ended up ghetto fabulous instead of poor but happy like the immigrant Mexicans. The underground killed off what was left, leaving oldfolks, single mothers, baby brothers and the left behind. Brothers, but not brothers. From the same place with the same flavors, but vastly different prospects, ambitions and expectations.

Where I came from the cliff was around 1984. My neighborhood basically stopped producing full grown black men around that time. We have been meaning to go back as a family and find out what happened to a lot of our old neighbors. Maybe this summer.

But here's the whole dilemma in a nutshell. I want you to think of a white man, maybe an Irish guy who served in the military. He drinks, he curses and maybe he's beat his wife a couple times. It's 1950. Can you see him as a plumber? Maybe an electrician? Maybe a used car salesman? Could he be a success in America without fundamentally changing his personality? Yep. For a similar black man today, that is only true in professional sports or the rap trade. Is this a stereotype or is it reality?

Like I said elsewhere, Black Nationalism was powerful mojo. It overproduced. There are too many black men who don't know any better who believed or still do believe that Malcolm's path is their own, that they can transform a street hustle into a program of black power, and that jail is just part of the black man's path. Or it might be sports or it might be entertainment, but it's not anything.

Blame & Thanks

I'm laughing my way to the bank tonight. Thanks George. I got about 6k back this year from the Feds and 1.5k back from the State. It's all going to pay down debt, so while I really want that 42 inch plasma this money is not going to buy, I'll feel a whole lot less guilty next time I drop by Best Buy.

Of course if you owe, then curse out the President. It's out of your pocket. So are you blaming or thanking this year?

RWB

RWB stands for 'Republican While Black', and so I've come up with an analogy.

I've been thinking a bit about an imaginary fight I have with some cats over at P6 vis a vis snarky remarks about me and my blog. I did finally get over myself and say what I think needed to be said, but during the course of this fight, I happened along a fairly decent analogy about blacks and conservatism.

As you've certainly heard, a lot of black conservatives are called 'self-hating'. When that's not pure haterade or psychobabble, it is a catchphrase for 'against the interests of black people'. Now as problematic as it is to define a static set of interests for all of African America, we can assume that there might be such a thing. Most concretely many of my ideological foes have tossed around a football that says 'only 2% of black America supports President Bush'. If all black conservatism was about was supporting this President, we'd be a sorry bunch indeed, but conservatism is bigger than Bush. Let's not get into set theory; suffice it to say that the circles of interest overlap, but they are not an identity.

How do I live with the fact that most blackfolks are clearly not Republicans or conservatives without feeling somehow less than black? In two ways. Because of these two ways, it's very easy for me. In fact it's much easier to just do it than to explain how. But since I'm a writer I am compelled to anyhow. The first way I think I explained fairly well. It was the pro-black active force. The second way, I don't think I've explained well, it is the non-racial interest force. The first I explained here:

A man with dignity doesn't need to join a club. His membership dignifies the club.

People need to convince me that membership in an American political party cuts off the sound of the drum, because I don't believe it. What I hear, when people complain about the Republicans and African Americans is that joining deafens the sound of the drum, blanches all that was black and irreversibly corrupts the soul. I say these people have the wrong expectations of political parties in general and are probably not quite well stocked enough at home to survive hostility and indifference.

If you don't believe that good triumphs over evil. If you believe that you can be faded. If you think there can be no such thing as a righteous black Republican (or American, or Muslim, or Gay) then I would suggest you go get your Nikki Giovanni on, because deep down you have not won your own revolution.

So that's basically the Ralph Ellison, take-no-prisoners, I-yam-what-I-yam approach. I can't be faded and to hell with anybody who says different.

The second way is the non-racial interest force (I am so tempted to make this a three dimensional analogy by throwing in particle physics terminologies - help me Mahndisa!). I explain it this way...

When I was done with college and started working full time, I didn't have the credit to buy a new car, but I did save money to buy a used car. What made me think of this very analogy was that this afternoon a Mercury Maruader roared past my BMW 740. I thought to myself, what a strange automobile. You'd only buy a Mercury Maruader if you absolutely loved American cars, like they do in Detroit. But back in '86 if you wanted an American Muscle Car, the hottest thing in the factory showroom was a Ford Taurus SHO.  But you know what? I just couldn't bring myself to buying the Ford. I went for a used BMW, a red 2002 with BBS rims instead. That car was just right for me.

I wanted American cars to be better than German cars, but who was I kidding? I didn't hate America because I didn't buy American cars, I was just profoundly disappointed. My joy in driving the BMW outweighed my sadness with the Fords. Of course I took a lot of crap for driving BMWs over the years, and I have occasionally found this or that American car worth driving. As a road warrior, I'm god status with Avis or National or one of them, and I can recall a time when I would refuse to drive anything but a Buick Regal or Skylark. When Pontiac started putting CDs in their car stereos for the first time in the late 90s, I dug those. But in the end, when it came to me and my car, I'm just a BMW kinda guy. No apologies.

To extend this car metaphor, I'm certain someone could demonstrate with unerring efficiency that my choice of automobile puts me way out of joint with blackfolks. There's no doubt, as my wife from Detroit would tell me, that every BMW on America's roads is one less UAW job for her homefolks, where blacks have done very very well for decades in the very soul of Motown. I'm taking food out of the mouths of black union employees for my arrogant tastes.

It's not about waiting for Ford to catch up to BMW. It's about getting in your BMW and driving those roads you know the Fords are going to skid off. 15 years later, I expect the adaptive transmission, the Dynamic Stability Control, the sat-nav.

Now what I've done here is made the choice and said my choice is not only preferable, but superior. You can argue with me about that, but you cannot say that I'm self hating. It's about DO, not BE. And unfortunately, the Democrats and the liberals are not driving in the direction I want to go. I'm in the driver's seat and now I'm a better driver because I was not loyal to the people making cars for the common man. Sometimes it doesn't pay to be a patriot.

I hate analogies. But I think you catch my drift.

People who are not Republicans keep telling me that the GOP is going to eventually reject me. At some point in the not-too-distant future the German soul of my BMW is going to realize there is a black ass on the leather and eject me through the sunroof. They keep telling me that there are no black faces on the BMW commercials, that they didn't have homeboys like me in mind when they designed them. And sure enough, I have been stopped by cops who didn't think it was my car. "Car theives don't know how to operate these sophisticated machines, you were driving with your bright lights on, so I naturally assumed..."

But it is my car. I bought it, and I'm driving it the way I want to.

So let me jump out of analogy hell and say it straight up. This is my country, and I will vote the way it suits me, and I will think politically the way it suits me. And I am not going to feel sorry about the fact or the idea that there are millions of people who are 'supposed' to be the same as me, but have made (or are presumed to have made) different or opposing choices. Nor am I going to concern myself that the millions of people who do make the same choices as I do are not 'supposed' to be the same as me.

More specifically, I stand with the Republican party for my own reasons, reasons I happen to believe are objectively superior reasons, and we are headed in the same direction. You can say what you like about every other Republican, living or dead. You can call me delusional because of what you interpret must be my rationale. But I am very clear about which direction I am headed, and I am convinced that it is the correct and proper direction.

See me at the stoplight? My windows are rolled down, my music is blasting and there's a smile on my face. See ya.

Black Headhunting Revisited

Bomani was musing about heavy hitters he's down to meet before the end of his days. It just so happened that I had met a couple of them. Sometime before meeting any of them I had, through my association with NSBE been in the position of meeting many others. And that quest had been a personal mission of mine for some time.

So I went digging down to look for something I wrote called 'The Rapsheet' waaay back in the early days of the web while I was still on that quest. It took me to The Cool Zone, my first ever website and the concerns of a younger me. Here's a discussion I had with Makala from the good old days at SCAA, back when I was still an intellectual insurgent of the progressive stripe. Makala's comments are italicised.

(from the archive April 1993)

In <[email protected]> [email protected] (Makala P Mweene) writes:

>My favourite part of the academic year has come to a close with the end
>of Black History month. I am talking about the public lecture circuit
>and those sagacious, intrepid individuals who come around to tell all the
>truth without fear or favour....I am going to play devil's advocate and
>pass judgement on some of those I have seen in my stay in this great
>land of yours........


>1) Haki Madhubuti;
>                  Soft spoken, very well reasoned. Very realistic, very
>  intellectual and intelligent. Very articulate, well travelled and has
>taken the lessons of life realistically and responded well to them....

>"The essence of his approach seems to be that families must be strengthened.
>Children, especially boys,  must have a father figure. He believes in the
>power of fatherly example, by responsible men on behalf of single mothers
>and wives of irresponsible husbands. He seems to intimate that polygamy shou
>ld be a consideration for those women who cannot find compartible single
>men......He espouses principles of economic self reliance and the raising
>of children in a politically conscious, psychologically positive enviroment.."
>A strong advocate of Education ...... grade A+

I've read a little bit of Haki's stuff here and there. His achilles heel is
that he a vicious homophobe. If he can get over that, he'll have a bit more
credibility, but with many he is beyond reclamation. He still can't
get over the idea of familiy values. That may be good for some folks
but, quick who was Martin Delany's daughter? Catch my drift?

Of course my focus was upon institutions and my presumption was that the black middle class and especially the talented tenth would be a great deal more into institution-building than they actually are. I'm certain that I had overestimated their capacity and willingness to do so.

I have to say that I was, at the time of reading and thinking about Haki, under the dangerous influence of radical feminists. Now as I look at Madhubuti, he looks a great deal more appealing, not that I'm likely to find an essay from him anywhere online. But part of this effort is one of recovery and maybe we'll find some of these folks and coax them out of their hidey holes.

Ten Thousand What? Says Who?

I just got an eyeball popping email. I'm sorry but somebody pinch me. See, I thought I heard the tail end of this discussion on Laura Ingraham's show earlier this week and I was wondering what kind of crackpot... But just let me blurt it. Dr. Charles Murray wants to give you $10,000 a year. Cash.

According to Dr. Murray, who makes the case in detail in his newest book, In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State, the plan would reduce poverty, fund universal health care, spur economic growth, balance the federal budget, and give people more control over their own lives.

So I'm going to check on the details and see what real economists are saying about this idea, but it looks like he's saying that we can afford to completely dismantle the Welfare State and hand every adult American 10Gs a year. You know what would happen if somebody had the wherewithal to get a national referendum on the matter? It would pass in a heartbeat. You know would happen next? Think Dave Chappelle Show, Season One Episode Four.

OK that's funny, but Charles Murray is deadly serious about this, and his argument is very hard to resist.

It's actually easy to do. If you step back from the intellectual gridlock that passes for policy debate today, here is the overriding empirical reality: We are already spending about $1.5 trillion a year on transfer payments (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, income support programs, welfare and subsidies of all sorts, including corporate welfare). If we simply divided up the money we are spending anyway and gave it back to people in the form of cash, we could provide everyone with the resources for a decent standard of living, including money to pay for healthcare and save for retirement.

There are other benefits to this approach. No more taxpayer-financed freebies for favored corporations. No more subsidizing people who grow politically protected crops. A few hundred thousand government employees liberated for productive work. Perhaps most important of all: We would remove from the bureaucracies the responsibility for dealing with the human needs that remained, and relocate that responsibility to the people who can do something about them--family, friends, neighbors, communities. In the process, we would revitalize the institutions through which people find those valued places I was talking about. We would take the stuff of life back into our own hands.

And we could do all this within a few years. If, for example, we cashed out income transfers and provided an annual grant of $10,000 to all American citizens age 21 and older, the projected cost of the new system would match the projected cost of the current system by 2011, and get cheaper from then on. And it would represent a dramatic increase in assistance for almost all low-income families, even in the most generous welfare states.

Holy smokes. There it is. The ultimate tax rebate and reparations all wrapped into one, plus a half a million slugwort government bureacrats kicked to the curb all in one fell swoop. I'm not going to resist this one. So what if he wrote the Bell Curve? Uh.. did he submit this book to peer review?

 

Knowledge is Pain

It might have been an episode of 'Magnum, PI', I don't recall. What I do recall was the shot in the belly and the blood on the Hawaiian shirt.

G. Gordon Liddy was playing the role of a corrupted colonel who shipped drugs or something dastardly in Vietnam. He has managed to keep the story under wraps until a crusading journalist (who must have inspired Michael Moore) discovered the awful truth. This journalist war shorts and sandals, was scruffy as an old mutt and doggedly pursued every bit of muck he could rake on Liddy's character. He always suspected something but never really knew anything and so he manufactured alternate realities until he stumbled upon the real truth. He badgered witnesses who wouldn't fess up; he couldn't understand why the Vietnamese didn't want to let the world know.

In classic style, Liddy confronts the journalist and delivers the monologue before pulling the trigger. He says that he was once ideologically fanatic as the journalist was, but that living in Asia had taught him a lesson that Americans rarely learn. Westerners believe, quoth Liddy, that the truth will set you free. Au contraire (please translate that into Mandarin, ed), the truth is a great burden that serves no man. The truth only brings suffering and pain. Liddy then provided the lead exclamation point to that sentence at about 1200 feet per second into the abdomen of the newly enlightened journalist, who presumeably died wiser than he ever lived.

If you could prove that George W. Bush engineered the entire War on Terror and that Cindy Sheehan was actually a prophet sent by God, would you pick up a gun and spend your life coming up with a way to shoot him in the head? If not, then there's a lesson here for you, which is that you can live with lies. Think about what that means as you stare into your computer screen. Observe your fingernails. Are they dirty? How do they get dirty?

Cobb's New Crib & Thangs

So I'm settling down in my new digs at cobb.typepad.com and so far I'm doing OK. I thought I might give an update about what's going on daily.

Project Hell
First off, I've been in project hell. The job is just murder. White collar murder which is like third degree manslaughter with depraved indifference, but still deep in felony territory. We've gotten to the point where people are acting like there's no tomorrow, literally. We've got text in memos flying around like this:

It seems a shame that we can't assume professional peers would understand mutual needs to complete an application. The project seems constantly bogged down by this "you didn't get the request right...try again...repeat" situation. I will require that xxxx personnel try their utmost to explain (and document) their needs  the first time. I would ask that the recipients of that information identify any gaps immediately.

As I said in the call yesterday, xxxx no longer has any room for schedule "flexibility". We will from this point forward maintain detailed documentation of delays occurring from activities beyond our control. This documentation will serve to engage and support change request procedures as specified in the statement of work. We (xxxx) will make every effort maintain productivity and effective dialog, but will not be held responsible for negative schedule impact due to third party delays.

This basically means questions like, "What have you done for me in the past half-hour?" are no longer off the table. We have meetings where the first thing out of people's mouth is: "Where specifically in the requirements document did you specify that I do precisely this, and please forward all emails pertaining to the matter over the past three months."  Project hell. It has given me an appreciation for my lunch break that I haven't had since I was a Teamster in Local 232. Not since San Francisco 1995 when Starbucks was still considered hip, have I taken so many coffee breaks.

I gripe because I'm a professional consultant, and we're supposed to earn our high priced salaries by telling people how they're screwing up, but damn. As usual, it's nobody's fault in particular but just a confluence of bad luck, indifference, incompetence and shortages of time and money all sprinkled together here and there.

Skipping A Beat
Doc was hospitalized for a day a few days back with almost precisely the same deal that hit me. Sharp pains in the chest. His EKG came back a little abnormal at first so they did blood work and in the end came up with the same diagnosis. You're fine.

Such matters have a nice way of scaring the ... hmm how can I not turn this into a cliche... You know what I mean. The old stomach & jaw drop combination; that thing that actors in B movies do as they stare at something monstrous up and behind the camera before the cut to the 2nd unit film. Oh damn, Hollywood speak.

Spider Roll
Speaking of which, I took the Spousal Unit out to a fancy, pricy, trendy dinner the other evening. This is the kind of thing I will very much miss and not miss at all if I move to NC. See you take one very high priced architecturally provocative building in Venice, CA and stuff it with a bunch of chefs, none of which is from New Orleans and you have the nerve to sell Gumbo. Oh wait, did I mention the 40-something guys with soft shoes, nice watches and sweaters thrown over their shoulders? It looked like a casting call for 'Curb Your Enthusiasm'. I'll say one thing for this joint, it had a normal cieling, which is saying a whole lot considering the huge number of trendy joints with the exposed HVAC and long suspended halogen spots. It's a good thing we had plenty to talk about because if I would have had to listen to any of the conversations around me, I'm sure I would have puked up my lobster enchilada.

Yes I said lobster enchilada. Delicious. Then we had a spider roll, which is as you all know a soft-shell crab maki. Then we had a big ole pile of carpaccio. She says it was beef carpaccio but I swore that I ordered salmon carpaccio. I couldn't really tell the difference because I was on my second martini. I couldn't believe that the waiter had no bleu cheese to stuff into my olives, but I decided to be nice about it. Still, when he told me he had a boulliabasse special, I had to turn my neck to check for somebody Creole looking in the open kitchen there. Nope. Just Mexicans and Japanese. You know, one of these days Mexicans are going to start cutting sushi and that's going to be the end of an era. I don't mind the fusion so long as it's legal, but I'm really wondering what's up with my peoples in the kitchen.

See, my waiter knew, and the SU had ordered the steak-wrapped scallops, that when I ordered the boulliabasse that I was going to be a harsh critic. So he said that it's not going to be like my grandmother's. Damn right. This thing cost 50 bucks. It had crab. And lobster. And shrimp. And scallops. And fish. But nary a bay leaf. Don't get me wrong, it was delicious. But it was red, like a lobster bisque. It was still a roue, but not clear and dark. No fowl, no sausage, no file and of course no rice in the bottom of the bowl. And suddenly I missed New Orleans and wondered if we're all going to lose it, not the place, but the memory of the food. That's what fusion is. Food for greedy sybaritic people, and this was a luxury dish with all the luxury sweet seafoods... It's not enough to be at the top of the food chain and be satisfied by a deep tradition but you've got to consume the whole world at once, Japanese, Creole, Continental and Mexican with fine Russian vodka.

Fortunately we had coupons and the whole thing only cost $65 bucks out of pocket.

The New Crib
I'm ranked 1.1millionth in Technorati's sweepstakes. But the old blog is around 4800th. So I've got to get off my butt and start notifying people to head over here at Typepad instead of my old domain. It's going to be impossible to delink the old archived docs but that's the way it goes. I care about rank only to the extent that it serves to acclimate folks to the Old School. But I'm very satisfied with the Typepad service so far. It turns out to be a bit more sophisticated than I thought it would be.

Since I'm a Waffle, I've added subordinate blogs (from Blogger) in the left column. I need to take the leap and get completely custom so I can add raw html and javascript into the main template. That way I can add Blogrolling and other stuff, showing off my blog seniority.

It Actually Is My Space

Out here in the 'burbs nothing gets under the skin of the soccer moms and the power moms as wreckless teen behavior. I'm on the verge of seeing it in my household as my oldest daughter turned 11. The other week, I found the scrunched up face of some teen idol on her desktop. She has since found a non-thug picture. The kid, Chris Brown, even has a picture of himself in a Boy Scout uniform.

So this past weekend, I updated my daughter's website the old fashioned way with Dreamweaver. We put on her favorite links, changed her pictures and colors and a few other things. As I was doing it, I thought about MySpace. What a shame, I thought, that so many other kids have to network in an unsupervised jungle.

I've done a couple things to make sure my own kids don't get into all kinds of grit available to us porno consumers. And still the occasional lesbian video ad pops up when they are looking for pictures of panda bears. (True story, I still can't explain it). One thing is that I get them email accounts in my own domain. That means I can forward every incoming mail they get to my account. In six months all I've gotten are registration notices for Bratz, Neopets and Millsberry. In a previous life, I put a keylogger on a computer in my house, but for now I'm very confident that my kids' taste in only activity is pefectly wholesome. And considering the amount of homemade media they have, their appetite for what's online is relatively small. I have had to preview (and therefore sit through) an entire CD of Black Eyed Peas for my daughter so I know that before long, my patience for this kind of supervision will ultimately come up short, but all in all I think I have a fairly good set of defenses. Now.

In the future however, I am not likely to have such patience. I still haven't completely rid myself of any suspicions that Chris Brown is all that; I haven't really inspected the website. But I'm also preparing myself to live without paranoia. Just as I realized after a while that my kids would not turn into retards by watching Barney, so long as they had plenty of superior alternatives, I am confident that the winning formula has to do with cultivating elevated sensibilities rather than building walls. A kid who already knows that nobody on American Idol has any real talent is a lot better off than the kid whose parent cringes everytime they watch fearing their daughter wants to be the next (insert interchageable slutty popstar here). Or as my girls used to say about whatsername, that's "So Yesterday".

But I know I am taking distinct advantage of my IT and web skills by giving my kids the same tools I use. Yes they all have Google Mail and chat. Yes they all have their own desktops. No I don't use Net Nanny. Yes they are relatively proficient at recognizing bogus downloads. Yes I still did get attacked by the Comet Cursor. And so it is likely that they'll end up with real blogs instead of the fake ones in MySpace, and they'll learn the difference between Opt In and Opt Out. They already know to keep passwords secure and what it's like to forget one. But I feel for those parents that are behind the curve, whose kids are pulling cyber-fast ones on their luddite moms and dads.

I suspect that if things get out of hand in my household, I'll end up buying the kids cell phones. When they have to pay for their communications out of their own pockets, they'll come to recognize the sensibility of not inviting 1000 'friends' into their circle. Who knows, they might even learn that just physically going up to someone and talking is way superior to every online experience.

Wait, did I say physically? Uh oh.

A Radical Protest Idea

I've got a job keeping things flowing and I basically don't have time to hit the streets, but an extraordinary idea hit me today. Why not borrow a page from MLK in a protest against illegal immigration?

If Americans intentionally staged illegal demonstrations at the same place and time that those protesting in favor of 'undocumented workers' police and society would be faced with a very interesting challenge indeed. Should you arrest and prosecute Americans who are protesting in defense of the law while leaving potential illegal criminals on the streets protesting for rights they don't have or deserve?

Imagine an America where there are a million citizens in jail for defending our borders while 11 million illegals wander about free. It can't get any more stark than that.

On Manufactured Consent

Intellectuals' ability to think of people in the abstract is a dangerous talent in a world where people differ in all the ways that make them people.
-- Thomas Sowell

Chomsky, he's got a point, but his point is not the point.

What Chomsky desires is a discrete and deterministic system of truth-in-politics. Politics doesn't work that way - politics are marketed and marketing information is the best way of dissemination. It's always imperfect. You simply cannot get a consistently high majority of people to consense for the same reasons on the same issues. It's because everyone is not, and cannot be exposed to the same facts and arguements and reach the same conclusions. So there are always imperfect decisions. If that were not the case, then everybody in the blogosphere would be redundant because the only 'valid' dialog going on about.. say wiretapping AQ would be the sealed information that Congress already has.

The fact of the matter of decision-making is that imperfect information is sufficient. In fact, the ability to make decisions with imperfect information is a survival trait of humans. If it were otherwise, we wouldn't run from deep growls in dark caves unless we were 73% certain it was a bear and not a dog. In other words, we would be lunch. So Chomsky has to get over his obsession to perfect. Everybody lives with lies and half-truths.

The way to think about this is not to go off the deep end of post-modernist regimes of truth. There are still useful decisions made by humans for human purposes that don't make sense for philosophers and logical purposes. This is a problem that computer scientists deal with fundamentally. If you can perfectly abstract a problem and get a computer to reason through it, is the application of perfect logic necessarily perfect for people? We all have a gut feeling that 'no' is the right answer, but we can't explain that gut feeling. That's exactly the point. Our rationality includes gut feelings, the kinds of feelings that computers, lacking guts, cannot make.

The way to think about it is to go towards the multiple-intelligences paradigm, knowing that everybody uses some unique balances of those intelligences to make decisions. Collective decision making is thus a series of compromises that are appropriate to the people making those compromises. We should also note abstentions, intended and implied, and this is very important in what I'm talking about vis a vis Chomsky. People who don't show up to make a particular decision are indeed always saying, it's not important enough for me to care, and that is a vote in absentia which essentially says what we used to say in the 'hood. "My name is Bennett and I'm not in it."

As an example of this consider the position of Kali Tal vis a vis the legitimacy of the decision making paradigm of the blogosphere itself:

Styles of discourse are not natural. They differ from culture to culture, and are a product of socialization. Socialization takes place through institutions--the family, schools, religious traditions, etc. Men and women are socialized to different styles of discourse in this culture (again, I refer you to the voluminous and oft-duplicated research on this question). When women adopt male discursive strategies, they're punished for it (again, see the research on conversational patterns and the disruption caused by women embracing "male" speech patterns, and see both my posts [and other women's posts] to this list). The mechanisms of punishment are engaged automatically, without deliberate or conscious effort on the part of the men in the conversation because that is simply the "normal" reaction to female speech that challenges the status quo. That's the very definition of institutionalized oppression--when enforcement mechanisms become diffuse, naturalized, and automatic, so that no individual needs to take responsibility for keeping another in her place. It just "happens."

That may or may not hew to anything other than theoretical femininity, but it's a realistic enough explanation as to why women our outnumbered in higher eschelon blogging circles. Common sense shows women and men argue differently. Whether or not it strictly applies to women, there are clearly some people who could but prefer not to blog in the discursive style we have come to know an love. Bottom line, some people are voting with their feet away from the blogosphere, which most everyone agrees is a very liberating and empowering force for democracy.

So as tired as everyone is of hearing conservatives talk about market solutions, it is indeed the reality of our democracy and all democracies that endure. We get the best politicians our votes can buy, and politicians get the best votes their money can buy. Call it attention, call it whuffie, call it the currency of memes, call it what you like. People get it, spend it, save it up, waste it, ignore it, and there is no way to perfect it. In an increasingly information literate society, there are economies of thought and a fair price is what that market will bear.

I want to expand for a moment on Chomsky's heartbreak. His presumption is very much like the presumption of those who lament the 'Digital Divide'. I have always made a point not to second guess those who decided that the internet was not their cup of tea. Simply because a 'superior' form of information exists, does not make it instantly useful to masses of people. Masses of people who might know but don't care, discount the value of that thing. You can't make them want it, even if it's objectively good for them. From Chomsky's left perspective then, the duplicity of those who manufacture consent, once exposed to the masses would be their undoing. But just as the failure of the stock market only directly hurts those most invested,  we have to start recognizing that everyone is not invested in 'superior' democracy. I'm not talking about those powerful cabals who would subvert it given the chance, but those who opt out for fear or distrust or whatever reason. They are making, by their own lights, the best decision.

So it is quite possible, romantic notions of equality in franchise notwithstanding, that we are indeed more Republic than democracy - that the rubber stamp of the biggest investors, call them the instituional investors in democracy, is all that is required to run a stable nation. If my science is correct, the Chomskys of the world will always and forever be trying to aggregate the Long Tail of democracy into a loyal opposition. While I agree that the Long Tail is of equal or greater value than the oxygen suckers of consensus with the unbeatable market share, my science says that by definition the Long Tail cannot and will not be aggregated. In other words, maybe the answer to the universe and everything is indeed 42, as in 42% - that is all you need.

Such a conclusion will always draw crocodile tears from those who make it their life's aim to combat Hegemony. Then again, aren't they also always 'alternative'? Heaven forbid their passions become mainstream, they'd abandon them in a heartbeat.

John Hope Bryant

A national community leader cited by the past four sitting U.S. presidents for his work to empower low-wealth communities across America, an active advisor to the past two U.S. presidents, an author of BANKING ON OUR FUTURE, a book on youth and family financial literacy by Beacon Press, John Hope Bryant is a businessman, a former United Nations goodwill ambassador to the United States, a partner with former President Clinton in an effort to educate every child in Harlem, New York in financial literacy, a Presidential Appointee for President George W. Bush, a Young Global Leader for the World Economic Forum, the founder of Operation HOPE, and working with HOPE spokesman Ambassador Andrew Young, the author of a new movement in America, and a clear and compelling vision for the eradication of poverty in the 21st century; a movement called the Silver Rights Movement.

John Hope Bryant is one of the most authoritative and compelling advocates for poverty eradication in America today. To the producer of the NBC Weekend Today Show John Hope Bryant is “a revolutionary of our times,” and to U.S. President George W. Bush, John Hope Bryant is “a social entrepreneur.”

Rape of the Year

Just in case you didn't know, there are experts on this type of thing.

Key Facts

• Every two and a half minutes, somewhere in America, someone is sexually assaulted.
• One in six American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape, and 10% of sexual assault victims are men.
• In 2003-2004, there were an average annual 204,370 victims of rape, attempted rape or sexual assault.
• About 44% of rape victims are under age 18, and 80% are under age 30.
• Since 1993, rape/sexual assault has fallen by over 64%.

And so it is with great sadness that we witness a question of causation.  Although I understand where the sentiment comes from (and perhaps because of that), I want to rid this matter of sentiment. If there is a set of myths in America that need a bit of busting it is that nothing bad happens. We all know that bad things happen to good people, but when such incidents are used to deal with other agendas, that's when the great travesty occurs. You know what I'm talking about. Pretty white girl goes missing. Yeah, it happens. Black woman gets raped. Yeah, it happens. So what are we supposed to do about it? I think the answer is pretty obvious. Support your local police.

In these days of PC and disingenuous apologies, I have never seen such a well-reasoned and considerate statement as made recently by the President of Duke University. (Bomani has the full text.) And while there are still folks who are content to suggest that Duke is a white supremacist institution and that by implication, this is the kind of stuff we can expect from their students, I find myself wanting to play devil's advocate. I can't of course because rape is a terrible thing and if any of these kids is found guilty we're going to hear about it in urban legends forever.

Interestingly enough, my son, who plays the flute is also a big fan of lacrosse. One of the sharpest black men I ever met in the halls of corporate America, one whom I've modeled myself after, was the captain of his lacrosse team at Ohio State. So I've always had a positive regard for the game, only more enforced by my kid's desire. And since in all probability I may end up in NC, I would be absolutely thrilled to see M12 make it onto Duke's team. And if he has to be the only black kid doing so.. well, in my family we're used to being the 'only black' this and the 'first black' that. I can only hope that by the time he's accepted, all of this will have blown over. But you cannot expect that people who would politicize a sexual assault to lose an opportunity to make their simple mined points.

So my advice is to kill the noise and let justice run its course. University, for all of its faults, is not any more conducive to rape than anyplace else. The same sewers run under your neighborhood too. Act like you know.

Six Questions: Asked & Answered

James Manning asks:

1. What do you attribute to the plight of black men?
2. What are some things we can do to assist black youth?
3. What part does racism play in the plight of black men?
4. Do you believe Conservatives actually care about this issue or using it as an extension of the "Southern Strategy"?
5. What role has Liberal policies played in the state of black men?
6. What would you do to alleviate the hopelessness that plague man young black men?

1. The Ghetto.
The ghetto was designed, built and maintained to isolate blackfolks from the benefits of the mainstream of America. Jim Crow worked so well, that the Nationalists of South Africa took it as a model for Apartheid when they came to power in 1948.  Living inside the ghetto during your formative years encapsulates your life so that you believe that it is your destiny. And so millions of ghetto folks have basically come to love the ghetto and expect nothing different for themselves or others whom they think are the same as themselves. This is appropriately called 'The Ghetto Mentality'. There is only one thing new about this in the past 50 years, which is that the success of commercial hiphop has broadcast this mentality back into the ghetto. It is thereby reinforced in a new way upon ghetto folks and folks external to the ghetto. The ghetto is incapable of destroying or reforming itself. It was a prison to begin with and it remains a prison today - except that some people are proud of it.

2. Duh.
Remove said pauper from the ghetto and educate them. cf Carter G. Woodson, Booker T. Washington & a million other teachers.

3. 7.5%

4. That Depends
If you are talking about black conservatives, then the answer is no. If you are talking about libertarian conservatives, the answer is no. If you are talking about conservatives in the blogosphere, the answer is no. If you are talking about racist conservatives, then the answer is yes. How many conservatives are racist? I answered that in question number 3. How many of those racist conservatives have a racist agenda with the GOP, none that get any play or props in the national party. See David Duke, Pat Buchanan for examples, your ghetto may vary.

The Southern Strategy has been followed up with about 50 other strategies since the 50s which most people who flap their lips about the GOP have no clue about. Be that as it may, the very presumption that the plight of the black underclass is bound in politics is a liberal fallacy which has been essentially disproven. There will never be a liberal administration in American government which will specifically target and save the black underclass. The Republicans will tell you this in a heartbeat, the Democrats never will. Or to put it in their words, 'Keep hope alive!'.

5. 7.5%

6. Reinstate the Draft
There are several places for the relatively low-skilled American male who is not a criminal. Most of them involve jobs that don't fit the profile of the ghetto fabulous. Black Nationalism has done great things, but it has also overproduced in a way that is particularly noticeable now. It has created outsized egos in the heads of young black men who sustain an inordinate amount of false pride. They think they better than they actually are, and that they have nobody to answer to. They don't answer to black women. They don't answer to God. They don't answer to law & order. They don't answer to their families. They don't answer to their communities. In a way, this false pride only reveals a true lack of self, all explainable of course by the Ghetto Mentality. And since nobody will dislodge them from the ghetto for any purposes other than jail, which only accellerates the bad, the situation pretty much festers. It dries up like a raisin in the sun; it doesn't explode worth jack.

The draft would put thousands of ghetto men to productive useful work. It has always been thus since the dawn of civilization, and even before that. Men who cannot find their way to independence need to be put to work, lest they become predators on society. The Armed services are not afraid of ghetto boys and will straighten out any nonsense notions they have accumulated by dint of their ghetto isolation from the real world. They will either sink or swim, but they will have been given the same deal as billions of men throughout history - the chance to serve their country with honor, dignity and respect, even if they're just dishwashers or truck drivers.

What Color Fish Are In the Narus Net?

A question of legality.

In the news today is the revelation that the NSA has been using something called a Narus 6400, which I take to be a very high capacity and fully programmable packet sniffer, to intercept massive amounts of data from AT&T and one presumes, a bunch of carriers in order to persue the President's initiative on connecting the dots.

We know that Congress has been briefed and we have the assurances of key 'critters that the scope of these investigations, while pushing the envelope of the FISA warrant protocol, is most certainly aimed at terrorists and their associates. So while there are plenty of folks who appear permanently outraged, an interesting question did pop up over at Kevin Drum's joint.

Data mining means what you do with the data after you've collected it. You use statistical analysis and other techniques to discover relationships and patterns, on the basis of which you can take further action.

Where did you get the data? That's what is at issue. They giot the data illegally without a warrant. THEN they used data mining to narrow the scope of their privacy invasion, so that they could get more data illegally without a warrant.

Kevin Drumfuk, the ex marketing guy, knows enough about marketing to be dangerous. By dismissing all this as "data mining" he has led countless other moderates to be relatively unconcerned about this NSA thing -- except for the technical issue of Bush not obtaining warrants for the deeper penetration.

It was logically clear from the beginning why Bush didn't go for the warrants. He couldn't, because the evidence he would have had to use to justify the warrants had been illegally obtained in the first place, by wide-scale and indiscriminate wiretapping. Whether they used sophisticated data miningh strategies or just plain common sense mdoesn't matter. It was illegal from the word go.

Once you cut through the screaming, the question boils down to this. If you're tasked with catching and skinning only blue fish, is it legal to use a net that catches every colored fish?  The common sense answer is (whether or not the legal answer is) that so long as you throw the other fish back, it doesn't matter. Or does it?

What little I know about domestic surveillance I learned chasing down some arguments about how the LAPD or FBI might deal with a drug dealer, as well as when the discussion was on Carnivore. Basically, when you tap the wire you tap the entire wire - ie you use the big net. While you listen, and tape, the only part of the conversations that are admissible in court are those relevant to charge. So part of the data mining question is not so much whether or not the Narus box is located at AT&T's central switches, but what volume of data they are sending back to NSA, in other words the collection protocol.

Forget the instrumentality for a moment. If I were the NSA, I would allow the box to be remotely programmed so that if I have a new target profile, I wouldn't have to send a tech to each site. I would also take the smallest reasonable amount of data out of the switch center to make my searches more efficient (reduce the data mining universe and insure against false positive hits) and to reduce my legal liability for eavesdropping. Not to mention that the more data that travels from AT&T to the NSA, the less relatively secure it is. 

Drum's nemisis is arguing that NSA is collecting an un-audited & ungodly amount of data from which to mine nuggets of terrorist conspiracy, and that Republicans will necessarily keep a huge amount of this data for their own nefarious and corrupt purposes.

The disconnect between the NSA and the Republicans is something that lots of whiners blithely pave over. NSA professionals are of a different breed than GOP apparatchiks, let us keep that in mind. But here's where it gets interesting.

If I were the NSA, I would want to reverse-engineering Narus' technology. Why rent the cow when you can own the farm? The question on Narus' liability would depend a bit on whether or not its machine was doing all it was supposed to do, and if NSA hacks it and makes it grab more than it should, then Narus could be in trouble. But if the NSA had a reputation for doing such dirt, it would be difficult for them to ever get outside help, and I seem to recall that they were trying to improve their ability to leverage tech that wasn't invented there. Clearly EMC has done alright for itself (and it comes as no surprise that they own VMWare when you think about it). Still, the NSA's interest in domestic surveillance is basically 4 years old.

Cobb's Rules on Immigration

I intend to answer every question I find in the 'sphere on immigration. I'm not going to shout from the mountaintops that I'm a Republican to demonstrate that Republicans know best. I'm not that kind of a shouter..

Principles: The current situation is untenable and must be corrected now. We encourage immigration. Obey the laws. Speak the language. Pledge allegiance. Get along with your neighbors. Be a good citizen, or be gone. We will tolerate no second-class citizenship.

Item A. Build a Wall
Yes. A metaphorical wall and a physical wall. There are three components to the wall. The first is a beefed up Border Patrol with all the technology and protocols that they use in Israel to keep Palestinians on their side of the fence. Everybody knows that the Israeli wall works.

Part One.
We will charge Mexico a tarriff on imports to this country that nets out to our cost for increased border patrols.

Part Two.
We will tatoo all Mexicans apprehended at the Border. These tatoos will be used against their cases for future applications for legal immigration.

Part Three.
We will increase border patrols by 50%. Half of this increase will be accomplished by the hiring of full time professionals of the sort employed currently. The other increase will be staffed by a special extension of the National Guard. We will encourage American citizens to volunteer their time.

Item B. Legal Immigration - Expand it.

Part One.
For ten years, we will increase annual legal immigration by 25% from one million per year to 1.25 million. The extra 250k will come from a special expansion of low income workers typical of current illegal immigrants, but we also tie it to the unemployment rate. If unemployment is high, then the increased immigration shuts down.

Part Two
We will accellerate the naturalization process of any current legal immigrant currently serving in the armed forces. 24 months is sufficient, or one full tour of combat duty.

Item C. Amnesty. No.

Part One
All current illegal immigrants will be classified as felons. Let's say they would be about Class I felons. That's 'i' as in the ninth letter of the alphabet, which is as far a felonies go, fairly low on the totem pole. (See here).

Item D. Conversion.

Part One
All Class I Felons on the Immigration charge forfeit the right to vote, permanently. This supercedes any state initiatives to fastrack other felons onto a re-establishment of rights. That means 11 million are permanently disenfranchised. That's harsh but I can live with it. They can become resident aliens once registered and their kids can become naturalized. If they wanted to be citizens, they should have come legally.

Part Two
All such felons are granted immunity from deportation, on the condition that they are not found guilty of any crimes above misdemeanors for a period of 7 years.

Item E. Employment

Part One.
The minimum wage is rescinded. All other employee rights are in force.

Part Two.
All employers are required to submit I9 forms for all current employees.

True Demons

While I am not immune to them, I am finding my countrymens' foibles as mediocre. Whether they be the mendacious seductions of upward mobility or the salacious temptations of funky depravity, it's all so very humdrum. In other words, I am jaded.

I am not jaded in the sense that my senses are numb, but that my mind percieves more of the same. Murder is murder and rape is rape. Lies and theft and deception are nothing in particular. I am coming to an understanding that these are ordinary events whose course, while tragic, seem to lack something special. So just the other day I happened onto an idea that struck me as particularly capable of getting rid of this dreary state. Not since the 10th grade where I was asked to invent a torture for my Modern Europe history class, has such an invitation been proferred. And so as I have considered it, I am faced with a fascinating possibility which illuminates much.

The invitation is here. Devise a terrorist plot. Come up with something truly evil.

I have indulged in this but not with any particular delight. In fact, as I began writing my piece, an admonishment that my borther Doc, the LAPD officer told me resurfaced. It's relatively easy to imagine horrible things to do, but another entirely to actually do the deed. Let me take you on a related tangent.

Each day of your life, you encounter attitudes, behavior and ways of thinking that are annoying and selfish. Usually, however, these obnoxious people have a form of checks and balances that keep them somewhat in line with normal society.  We tend to automatically assume these checks and balances are in place. This is the "social contract" that allows people to function and get along together in their day-to-day activities. We don't realize how ingrained and unconscious these rules of behavior and ways of thinking are.  It is both shocking and unnerving when we encounter someone who doesn't follow these unstated rules.

What few people realize is that these checks and balances are missing with  the criminal or violent person.  Nature abhors a vacuum. With this absence of counterbalancing influences, certain behavior flourishes and grows, taking up that empty space. What is apparent to a small degree in a normal person enormous in the criminal. The magnitude and extremes to which a criminal is willing to go are unbelievable to most people. They simply cannot grasp it. It is like the child who was taken down to the shore to see a beached whale. Standing next to the whale, the child turns to his mother and asks, "Where's the whale mommy?" What we want to do here is help you see the whale.

It takes a little thought to come up with something more devious than Hollywood writers can come up with. I watched 'Capote' last night and basically couldn't get through it, not because it was disturbing but because of its attractiveness as a film to the essence of the odd and disturbing. It became very obvious to me why someone in Hollywood would consider this something of a masterful film. Here you have an obviously talented man who feels very strongly that he is alienated, and intent on revolutionizing and scandalizing his parlor guests, whom he presumes to be the literate world, he reaches into the depths of horror. He becomes the intimate of killers in order to become the life of the party. He plays on the depravities and weaknesses of people and turns it into the engine of his glory, in successfully doing so, becomes a one name celebrity. There's a Truman show for you.

If Capote is a one-eyed man in the land of the blind, what does the man posessed of true vision see, and what of it does he speak? This is the question that leads me in matters of character as I am exploring in this moment of my life. What is worth persuing if one is both gifted and reflective? And since I don't have a comprehensive framework for supporting whatever logical answers I could come up with today, I am apprehensive about the composition of The Red Quarter.

The Red Quarter is my submission, standing incomplete, to the movie plot contest. It is a blueprint for terror using what I know and think about what might work and the reasons why. It is insidious in that it uses whatever that form of security that says it doesn't matter if people discover the plan, it will work anyway. The very act of publishing it works like the idea of the Pink Elephant, you cannot, once somebody has mentioned it, stop thinking about a Pink Elephant. The Red Quarter uses the very character of Americans against America. The Red Quarter gives people a reason to do wrong and a methodology by which to accomplish it, and it strikes at the heart of those things Americans cherish most.

I will say this about The Red Quarter and nothing more until I can figure out a way to contextualize its potential to do harm: the closest thing Americans have experienced to the terror of how the Red Quarter would operate is the Tylenol Murders of 1982.

I do not believe that Americans have a death wish, but I do believe that there are millions here who take up the political belief that their best contribution to the health of the nation is to work against its  interests. Surely there are those who think that 'America' can be bullied into reform of one sort or another, and there are always plotters who believe that the proper failure will energize the masses to support their grand designs. Those who have seen the improbabilities of 'V for Vendetta' know what I mean. All of that notwithstanding, it would require a dedicated core of plotters to trigger the fission of The Red Quarter and it is that level of desparate conviction which is nearly impossible to come by without the resources of a State.

As Dan Simmons reminds us:

“Thucydides taught us more than twenty-four hundred                       years ago – counting back from your time – that                       all men’s behavior is guided by phobos, kerdos,                       and doxa,” said the Time Traveler. “Fear,                       self-interest, and honor.”

In some basement complex in some nation's capitol, or perhaps in their pajamas, someone is actively thinking about how America could be destroyed.  With adequate resources, that which is deadly to us could be initiated.

What matters is that we recognize the difference between consideration, contemplation and conspiracy, between education and advocacy, between word & deed. We all harbor the demons of destruction in our very nature. Given the right fear, self-interest and honor, we are all capable of enormous atrocities. But what pushes us from theory into action is that thing that makes all the difference - our will. I have no desire whatsoever to see those aspects of the Red Quarter actually happen. It would destroy those things I care most about in our nation. And yet somehow I do want to see Schneier's lesson taught, that we have to rely upon ourselves more in order to be more completely immune from the terrors of the inevitable enemy.

Perhaps we should look with some comfort in the knowledge that we may yet be called to be another 'greatest generation' given the threats to our nation and person. Perhaps it is our complacency that drives the minions of Hollywood to debase themselves and send us filmic messages of corruption. Perhaps that is a blessing in disguise, reminding us of fears and horrors we normally never face. Perhaps giving monsters normal names like 'Freddie' and 'Jason' keep us in mind that we are never far from unleashing vengeance on our foes. Or on the other hand maybe they're just too talentless to acutally inspire us towards self-improvement. Be all that as it may we ought to be mindful of our capacity for self-destruction and think very seriously about our willingness to speculate and contribute to that end.

Go ahead. Scare yourself. Then count your blessings and defend your homeland. Oh by the way, here are some naughty ideas.

Cobbcast 001 - Black White

Download Cobbcast-001-Black_White.mp3

Take Me To The Next Phase

Blogging again? Spence asked what's next.

We'll I'm rather past the existentials of black republicanism and I think i've stated the case clearly enough for the Old School. I'm a bit more interested in the fundamentals of American citizenship and hacking through the gooeyness of bourgie overkill. I'm heading towards Victor Davis Hanson from the Old School perspective, and trying to reconcile the African American experience within the context of a nation that might be losing its mind. IE how does the middle class align itself with a power class that is not corrupt? How does the emergent minority stay righteous beyond uppityness? What are the dangers and pitfalls?

An example might be, how do you get beyond the shallow multicultural ethic that denies the illegality of illegal immigration? Or how do you choose between a career in something flighty and something that contributes to the strength of the nation. Take Affirmative Action. If X number of careers are set aside as reparation for a prior crime, does it matter what the career is? What if blacks became the undisputed champions of the fast food industry, do we then take responsibility of obesity? How might we have told the talents that made hiphop what it is to avoid becoming degenerates before we knew it would become a billion dollar industry? How long do we need Ice Cube to represent the anger of the ghetto? What are we to make of this when some will rocket to the top of society - how does the blue collar family judge Condi, along strictly political lines?

stuff like that.

Plus, this gospel of Judas is interesting, so there will be more Lucifer Jones. Maybe two sideblogs, one for Lucifer Jones and one for the Cubegeek.

Three Hours Flat

One of the reasons I'm resurrecting my blog is because of continuity. I owe continuity to my virtual partners, even if they're tired of hearing me repeat myself. A boring familiar voice is better than silence, and as I've mentioned, I'm occasionally worth reading.

What makes me waste a little time on this blustery Wednesday is the fact that I have learned, within three hours of it becoming 'public', of Google Real Estate. I don't know how many degrees of separation I am from the leaking source - it doesn't really matter; I just find that to be a fairly amazingly short period of time, and I feel fortunate to be in the loop of know.

I've been thinking about explaining the basics of BI to noobs as well as senior managers whose companies have yet to exploit the economies. In answering an imaginary question of where the industry will be in 10 years (actually the iQuestion was 'Where do you see yourself in 10 years?'), I said that there will be four players. They will be Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and ... Google. I'm hoping to see myself with Google, the reason isn't obvious but I have mentioned it before:

Google does not charge the user. All of Google's software and hardware is at Google, behind locked doors, just like the IBM data center. To Google, you are a user, not an owner. You couldn't own the Google software because you would clog up Google's precious computers with your idiot code which couldn't possibly be as efficient and secure as Google's own code. They are masters of the algorithms and queue management. Google releases no product that doesn't scale to infinity. Google never gets a virus. Google is a free IBM datacenter. Google is the opposite of IBM despite all these similarities because its business model does not involve charging the user. Microsoft and IBM are the same because they charge the user. Microsoft makes you configure your machine and calls it freedom.

Furthermore, Google deals in human scale media. Google does not deliver compacted abstracted codes. Google delivers whole books, whole libraries of books. Google delivers satellite images of the whole planet. You are incapable of asking too much of Google, and their orientation is to deliver that all to you for free. Plus they take away all of the headaches that Gates delivered, the world of limitations of PCs. Clunky, insecure software written by anybody.

Google is one of the only computing products that hasn't bloated. Even Linux is running into controversy over kernel bloat. Pigs aren't flying, they're recompiling RPMs on their anti-Microsoft boxes. Same paradigm, same headaches. Free software approaches perfection, but there is no guarantee. Google guarantees, and that is why Google is rich and there are only two or three Linuxes left worth mentioning, all equally user poor.

But Google could charge the corporate user because Google has got what every enterprise desires: fundamentally unlimited scalability. They have the opportunity to license the way they do business and thereby revolutionize the IT business. Google is the ultimate ASP - they always have been, and they've been providing incredibly fast information for years now. Google can simply wait for every Tom, Dick and Ajax to write their little Web 2.0 app, and then determine whether or not it scales into a nice business model. They plug it into the Googleplex and voila.

It is not a stretch for me to see them doing this with 2 million spreadsheets, which is very likely what your corporation's finances are really running on despite MSFT's, Oracle's and SAP's protestations to the contrary.

So here's the question I posed to my BI noob interviewer. 'It takes about 15 minutes for you to find out whenever a car bomb goes off in Baghdad. How long does it take you to learn that your business has lost a customer?'. The answer to this question is generally sub-Google speed, which ultimately is unacceptable. The gap between real-time analytics is not so much technology as it is IT methodologies and captialization. This is something most companies would rather have, but not pay for up front. Some enterprising practitioners (like me) and some Google people could meet one day and come up with an ASP business model for enterprise BI. If and when that happens, MSFT, Oracle and SAP will find that they are a lot slower to the middle-tier webware market than they thought.

I am consistently surprised that people remain skeptical of fat clients. We are seeing 3GHz PCs with 100GB of disk and still people go Web. The hows and whys of that we can discuss later, but it is clearly a fait accompli. Whatever happened to port 80? It's now a thousand different ones for everyone's 'administrative client'. Client server has been swallowed up by very specific clients, ie browsers running interpreters. Whoda thunk? That being the case, applications development companies are essentially web development companies.

I have a hard time believing that people who built WebMethods or Vignette (nothing personal) are going to be developing the applications of the future. The narrow scopes of what IT organizations and (outsourced) consultants build these days unfortunately don't stand a chance against the big huge apps Google rolls out.

One final analogy. Once upon a time, Bloomberg relied on hardware. He had a near monopoly when it came to (bond trading I think). The smarts of that moved to PCs and the second revolution was exemplified in the day-trading bubble. (By the way, once upon a time the same was true of Metaphor DIS, specialty hardware to fat-client software to running on browsers in the BI space). Clearly the next evolution in tiered computing will be making browsers smart enough to do all fat clients do, cleaner. Now it's all about the scalability of the back-end. I have a hard time believing that the same decision makers who are gung-ho about punting to procurement departments when it comes to <strike>outsourcing</strike> staffing IT are going to think twice when offered the opportunity for 2 second response time without capital spending.

Elephants All the Way Down

There's an old story about boy who asks his father what holds the Earth up in space. The father tells his son that the Earth is held up by a giant elephant at the bottom of the globe. The son, not satisfied, asks what holds up the elephant. Why a larger elephant of course, replied the father.

Dell Gines asks the question "How Do You Justify Fighting For Black Elevation When You Have Got Yours?". The answer is the same.

In many ways, his readers are confused. Here one quotes Malcolm X:

“You talk about the progress of the Negro−−I’ll tell you, mister, it’s just because the Negro has been in America while America has gone forward that the Negro appears to have gone forward. The Negro is like a man on a luxury commuter train doing 90 miles an hour. He looks out of the window, along with all the white passengers in their Pullman chairs, and he thinks he’s doing 90, too. Then he gets to the men’s room and looks in the mirror−−and he sees he’s not really getting anywhere at all. His reflection shows a black man standing there in the white uniform of a dining−car steward. He may get on the 5:10, all right, but he sure won’t be getting off at Westport.”

No he isn't getting off at Westport, neither is he walking behind an ox in an unplowed field.

But one of them is on the right track:

Dell: Your question is not without merit, bhat is your definition of “participation”? What about the $75K attorney who has 3, 4, or 5 kids at home, who is making sure he can afford to send his kids to a good school, spends his evenings at home with his wife and kids, rather than out clubbin’ or having “late nights at the office” bangin’ out his secretary? Raises kids who are well-mannered and respectful, ensures that they are excelling in school and not our running the streets doing drugs and creating babymama drama. Is that guy not “participating”? Something tells me that if a lot more folks were “participating”… a lot of our social ills - and I’m not just referring to the Black community - would start curing themselves.

It's elephants all the way down, or in the case of American progress, it's class all the way up. The basic question is whether or not you accept the basic premise of 'elevation' and whether having accepted it, you are willing to abide by its rewards and punishments.

Most politically active blackfolks are oriented around 'The Struggle' which just about all will agree is a class struggle. More specifically, it is the struggle of the black underclass to enter and remain in the American middle class. Nothing speaks quite directly to that notion as the very definition of success given - that of an attorney employed by a corporation on a 75k salary. Very bourgie, in a good way, very middle class. Quite simply, elevated.

Such a person is a winner. Why then are black aspirations so unresolved by the presence of such winners? Primarily because The Struggle continues for millions more. And by dint of the foolish notions of race trumping class, the problem with the logic presents itself.  See Xyborg:

As long as the majority of Black people either are (or are perceived to be) at the bottom of the socio-economic pile then even the Black person who has got “his” will continue to be judged by the condition in which the majority of his/her people appear to be in.

This is an illigitimate excuse. Read properly as a reason to remain with the struggle it also nullifies the reality of class elevation. It say, essentially, so long as somebody somewhere treats you like you are lower-class, you should align your politics with the lower-class accordingly. Nothing speaks to the truth of college-educated people remaining ignorant than the broad agreement with this ill logic.

That blackfolks cower in fear of labels like 'sell-out' and 'Tom' indicate that at bottom, they are persuaded by this argument. They doubt their own success.

Of course it is true that successful middle class people are made paupers by arbitrary forces. Of course the 75k lawyer could get sued into bankruptcy by a 150k lawyer. It is absolutely the case that a million dollar white supremacist could instantly destroy the work of an entire branch of the NAACP. There's always a bigger elephant. Of course black liberation philosophies should not be satisfied by the existence of 100,000 75k lawyers. All of this is to say that there is always struggle at every level of life. It has always been thus and ever shall. But you cannot dismiss the fact of black elevation. What terrified 9 Little Rock High School students 50 years ago terrifies nobody today. South Boston is not scary. When I was 10 years old, my aunt was frightened to death of driving at night through rural Georgia. I was not then, I doubt any blacks today are. The very prospect of facing a sheriff in Alabama was a daunting prospect for blacks of the Jim Crow era. Today they are likely to shake hands with a good ole boy who is black.

The struggles of the black underclass may long be with us, but they should not dominate African American politics. Dell asks a legitimate question that ought to be answered, and I believe that the answer lies in charity. It will be the charity of the black rich, as today it is the charity of limousine liberals that floats the boats of hope for the black underclass. Nobody will be as familiar with their plight as those two generations away from it themselves. But in the intervening generations, nobody should deny the elevation achieved.

Everyone is familiar with Ernie Banks painting of the man with the hand down and the man with the hand up. The problem with this painting is not the intent, but that both arms are equally skinny. The difference and the distance between the black underclass and today's white collar upscale class is significant but it is not that great. It is foolish to believe that the philanthropy of the salary man is sufficient to permanently alter the prospects of the indigent. Peoples' futures are not secured by spare change and spare time, but by fulltime dedicated work and capital. That capital is not going to ever come from any bourgie class, but a class of real capitalists, and that dedication is not coming from anyone but those in the bottom of the boat.

Each man has his own struggle. Let him face it honestly.