Cobb

One March Don't Make No Movement

For all the positive sentiment by those who find themselves compelled (for some strange reason) to prove that they love their fellow [Mexican] man, unless the rest of us heartless, racist bastards, there's a fundamental problem with all of this demonstration. By definition, it can't go anywhere unless some form of amnesty is passed. If and when that amnesty is passed, it will be effected by the liberal faction of American politics, not by any grassroots movement.

People have spoken at length about parallels to the Civil Rights Movement. There are and there aren't and I think they are different than those getting airplay. Internally, I think Latinos are going to be dealing with the effects of a discussion among themselves that will parallel those of blacks, but externally it is not Latinos that are driving the political discussion in America today.

Latinos are going to have to face Cosbyesque questions on the Mojado issue - which are the same kinds of questions all emergent Americans face. When are you going to stop supporting lawbreakers out of racial and ethnic solidarity?

If there is any parallel to the Civil Rights Movement, that's it right there. Whitefolks had to ask themselves that - when were they going to break racial solidarity and support a lawful society. In America, the law and order folks have always won, and I have no reason to believe the outcome will be different in this regard.

There are, of course, always backsliders. In the Mojado case the parallel are white liberals (again) who are down for the radical chicness of loudmouths who flaunt the law and 'teach America a lesson'. But this too will pass. I think of what a joke it seems obviously to call someone like Eldridge Cleaver a black leader, however he got airplay in his day as someone representative of black power.

What's interesting about this 'movement' of illegals is there there is no leadership. There is nobody identifyable (aside from Nancy Pelosi who doesn't really count) who has spoken up from the grass roots and made any cogent points. So here's a parallel. In that way, the support by Latinos of Mojados is very much like the black ghetto support of the illegal drug economy and protection of drug gangs from police. Everybody knows it's wrong, there's this vague feeling of distrust by a significant element of the ethnic group, and it really comes down to a big collection of families who break the law and abide lawbreaking for their own financial gain. Just like the mother who drives a new car paid for with drug money, a lot of Mojado families are paying rent from illegal employment. Inevitably there will be some conversion of Mojado gains into the mainstream. Who knows what form it will take. We had a thousand rap producers emerge from the crack trade. But the Old School lives on, and I'm happy that Ice Cube can't get a spot on Oprah's show.

There's not a political movement here. Just an extended scam. And I believe that white liberals of the radical chic variety will keep idiotic notions alive for decades sucking the oxygen away from reality-based politics in the Latino electorate. Latinos will live to regret the day that they assumed racial solidarity with the lawbreakers among them.

Oh Lame Saint

The Da Vinci Code was a great book. And the film version was a stunningly faithful reproduction of the book. So if you've read the book, you have already gotten 99% of the thrill. The film adaptation is incapable of delivering any more drama. In fact...

The Da Vinci Code is a ponderous film that needed to take liberties with the book and just didn't. It made the biggest mistake a film of this import could make which was to leave it as a mystery. Let me put it this way, in the entire movie, there are never more than 40 people in a scene, unless there was a scene I slept through. If you are on the verge of discovering a mystery that would purportedly blow the entire world up, it would be nice to have some people get excited about it.

I mean there are plenty of fans of the Gnostic Gospels. How about a subplot in which it is revealed on the internet that new clues about the Priory of Scion have been discovered. How about some  drama in which one Bishop captures another Bishop and puts part of the Catholic Church in check?  Nothing of the sort, not even a phony CNN voiceover. The Da Vinci Code film never goes outside the bonds of a murder mystery and there's not even romance. Even Bond flicks have more plot diversity.

The movie is solidly competent. If you haven't read the book, it's definitely worth seeing. The problem is that if you have read the book, all the mystery is gone. Plus, there is something about reading about such revelations that seem more impactful than watching people say so, or was it that I just don't buy Tom Hanks as a university geek any more than I did Indiana Jones? Still, the scene in Teaing's living room was very well done, and generated a bit of energy. The problem was that the intensity of this trialog was not  kept up throughout the film. I bit more passion, I think, might have saved this film from mediocrity.

There's nothing about the theological controversy this film may have generated that gets me going. I don't know if I should have expected more or paid closer attention. But it seems to me that Christianity in its current state is so completely, how shall I say.. inured to contradiction, that there's really nothing to challenge. Or perhaps I should be more specific to say that the Catholic Church is the only one in the US with rules tight enough to be broken. So many Christian sects and communities pay so little attention to theological dogma that such matters don't count.
Such are big tent issues.

Crabby

Today is just one of those days where I'm mad at the world and myself. I have this sense of malaise that is related to everything and nothing. But I know where it's coming from, it's personal.

Have you ever had one of those days where suddenly everything makes sense? Kind of like a breakthrough and you realize that things are a lot less complicated now that you've seen X or done Y? I've had a bunch of those recently and now I'm mad. I'm mad because I understand that I've been living under a rock, relatively speaking.

So now I'm in that wreckless and aggressive mood that makes me want to run over people walking too slow across the street and what they hell did they expect because there's no light or crosswalk.

The other night I found myself explaining the concept of blogging to one of the most beautiful black women I've seen in a long time. It was both exhilirating and frustrating. I'm like Pocahantas singing that refrain, "how can there be so much that you don't know?". I mean how do you live in America and not know what a blog is? Well, you pay no attention to current events. I understand, because I don't know the names of the judges on American Idol or who any of those people are. We all live in our own ghettoes.

Aside from all this I was sick as a dog yesterday. I don't get sick, you see. I don't get headaches or other basic infirmities. I mean, yeah I could use some cosmetic dentistry, and a few more hours per week on my new mountain bike, and there's probably some dermabrasion I could use if I ever get invited to be a regular on television, but other than that I am in perfect health. This is what you get from defeating measles, mumps, chicken pox, rubella, and every flu known to man at an early age. I just don't worry about my health and I buy the minimum insurance on all my insurables. So when I get sick, I refuse medicine. I just get mad and beat up the goddamed virus. So perhaps that's what's going on. My system, in fighting off whatever this junk is in me is making me hate people too.

The way I hate people is like this. I become convinced that you are an idiot and I determine that without my assistance, you are going to self-destruct and take out some innocent bystanders. My concern over this forces me to help you when I ought to be crap-slapping you. This is how I hate people.

Meet Me In Chicago

A week from today I will be in Chicago as part of a business trip and also attending the Booker T. Washington anniversary. I wonder how many of my readers are out there and know what's up in the Windy City. I'd like to take in a Jazz club and a big fat dinner, or at least hang out with somebody who can give me a flavor of the town. I'll be there through Monday morning, so maybe we can work something out. Preferable evenings would be late Friday and after. Earlier my evenings are somewhat spoken for. But you know how corporate events can be, some are worth ditching for some really interesting.

So drop me an email or something. Let me know.

Overworld

Finally, after about six months, I have finished reading Larry J. Kolb's 'Overworld'. This book is rather like the spy book I've always wanted to read but never quite thought would get written. It is, unlike every other book about espionage, written in a way that is in no way suffused with the deadening patriotic backstory that flattens so many other verisimilitudes. Real names, real places, real dates, real enough and yet fake enough - the truth about spying, indeed about human history is all metaphorically there.

Doc tells me, and Schneier proves, that it's very easy to come up with dastardly schemes to destroy and terrorize. But it's a lot tougher to actually do such acts. Penn & Teller tell us that every fire-eater runs the risk of liver disease because over the course of a lifetime of spitting kerosene, you eventually swallow a great deal. It is not that being a fireater is so horribly difficult, it's just that what separates the amateurs from the pros, is that the pros know they are killing themselves over a lifetime. Kolb shows that the very essence of spycraft is deception, and the greatest and most difficult aspect of it is that you are called to make confidences and then betray them. You ultimately kill some part of your ability to be trusted with humans if you put yourself in service to the Agency. Wasn't that the lesson of Titus Andronicus? Be very wary of selling your services to kings. You'll end up Doing.

Kolb sold his services to Adnan Khashoggi, who has at times been known as the world's wealthiest man. To be that kind of wealthy, one must have fingers in dozens of pies, one must have cash flows and therefore business flows of all kinds flowing. One gets to know the price of so many things. Bags of diamonds, secret Indian banks, aircraft of all sorts, and of course the kinds of dangerous ambitions attached to wealth, and ability.

The world Kolb describes is one of almost unimaginable ability. This is what's so striking about it. Somewhere on the planet are individuals who are extraordinarily clever, people who must keep things secret and yet known. People who must be able to do and yet deny doing. And I find something of a truism working on a third level. A friend told me that 50,000 is difficult to get because everybody knows what to do with it. Ten million is easier because it doesn't become cash, and relatively few people know what to do with it. Kolb's world starts around 100 million, which then becomes a beast of another sort, because now governmental and legal organizations try to track what happens with it forever. That kind of money changing hands for any unusual purposes is dangerous, because everybody wants to know who did what with it. And for knowing just how such things are facilitated, a million or two spent is well worth it. This is how you spell danger.

Once upon a time, I had an opportunity to hobnob with playboys. It was fun to hang out in Beverly Hills and tell jokes with the soft guys on the money side. A retired astronaut, a jazz muscian, an heir. Within their mini-mansions, they were safe, but they showed genuine fear of the Engines. The people who managed to corporations that generated the wealth, the Merovingian attorneys who crafted exquisite financial corsets, the back room dealers, the enforcers. These were the people they'd have as little as possible to do with. Every business isn't a dirty business until you go high enough. The consequences of every lie becomes more and more deadly, and everybody lies. I think I understand a bit more these days about the consequences of success and the reigns on ambition. It is very much like the quote from Akeelah and the Bee. We're afraid that we might be powerful, because on any given day, we might feel a little crazy, a little wreckless. Now imagine that people who are, and they get their backs in a corner.

Kolb's trade is knowledge. Knowledge of who can do what and what it takes to get them to do that thing, or perhaps undo another. As a messenger, he worked the interstices of networks of power. How do you get 2 pounds of substance X to destination Y without drawing too much attention? How do you get this story printed in that paper if it's as true as you think it might be? 'Overworld' illustrates how the messenger becomes the message because nobody really knows who is doing what. Do you remember terms like 'Country Two'? The webs of intrigue are always changing shape and yet with international matters, they have indelible effects.

Kolb's narrative reads like an insider's view of history in the making, except it is a history that has no lessons nor national objectives. In many ways it is rather what I expected when I used to read Gore Vidal for the up close and personal view of the shaking and moving. Like Vidal, Kolb has had to suffer exile. They are men who know too much. Unlike Vidal, Kolb has not lost any sense of faith in mankind or his nation. He doesn't judge, rather he is observant and articulate, which is all you can hope for.

Overworld is appropriately redacted, because the right to know is never guaranteed. In a world of players as wiley as we have, secrets and lies are often one's only protection. And so Kolb teaches that coincidences aren't bloody likely. Whether we want to believe it or not, there are those capable of making a buck or gaining influence in a million ways, and whenever dots connect, somebody is a winner. These are not arbitrary occurences, everybody is watching, and somebody is playing. We are conspiratorial creatures.

Kolb has had to go to ground. His high flying career was put to an abrupt end after the election of VP Singh against whom his associates had him pushing press accounts that may or may not have been true. And so Kolb spent his time writing the book, which in many ways serves as an exculpatory device, while in exile somewhere in Florida. In moving from the overworld to the underworld he had to give up using his credit cards, or banking in the way most of us do. Such is a discipline I would like to learn. While we complain about identity theft, those of us who might have a petty identity worth stealing, there are methods of substantially protecting one's identity we are clueless about. At Cobb, as I investigate the process of emergence, I find these kinds of issues fascinating. What must be done to protect oneself in the world of smooth and tough operators? Kolb offers lessons.

What do you get in reading 'Overworld'? You get fascinating personal stories about Muhammad Ali and Daniel Ortega. You get an idea of what it's like to be in the sights of deadly political enemies. You reckon with the basics of spycraft. But I think Kolb's greatest contribution is to show how fundamental the issues of trust and matters of betrayal are at the heart of the motivations of man's affairs and how deeply the armatures of state & international power are implemented at the personal level. It is said that rights are a gift of the strong. Indeed there are moments when you recognize that one can become enmenshed in situations in which one needs very explicit permission to survive the next hour.  Kolb describes the drama of being on an international flight which is diverted specifically to remove him from it. He survives and tells the tale, but he just as easily mightn't. It all depended on who knew what first, and who decided to make the right phone call.

Of course I recommend the book although it took me months to get through it, not any fault of the writing, but my own laziness. I recognize Larry as the kind of outsized and meticulous character I often aspire to be, one for whom an anchoring loyalty is absolutely necessary, until you realize you may never have had it. He has survived through wit and cant, if not purpose. Reading him is like watching the the head-cam of a man who just happens to be running with the bulls, who has another reason for being in Pamplona. I admire his frankness and his well-developed sense of understanding the delicacies of business, personal and political relationships. 'Overworld' might well be subtitled, 'The Way Things Work'. Thanks for the tour.

Pence + Fence

Mike Pence has a brilliant solution: the W Visa. If you want to be legal in the US and are not now, you have to voluntarily deport yourself and get the new guest worker visa which is only available outside of the USA. Brilliant.

I can get behind this concept. It's clearly not amnesty. If Mexican citizens want to work in this country so bad that they would take a weekend to go across the border and come back, reregistered and above board, that would be a clear indication to me that they are separate from the Mojados. But allowing any current illegal to sit in place doing nothing and then being declared above board is a non-starter.

I say go with Pence and a Fence.

The Third Cauldron

Eugene Volokh writes an old parable:

In Hell, there are three giant cauldrons in which the sinners are being boiled. On the rim of one stands a regiment of demons, shoulder to shoulder, constantly using their pitchforks to smack down the sinners who are trying to escape. On the rim of the second walk a few demons, who occasionally whack someone down. The rim of the third is empty, but no-one is getting out.

What's going on here?, the visitor asks. "There are three kinds of people," the Devil says. "The first kind is in the first cauldron. When one looks like he's trying to escape, all the rest follow him. We need a lot of demons to manage them.

"The second kind is in the second cauldron. Occasionally someone is trying to escape, but the others don't pay any attention. It takes just a few demons to deal with this kind.

"The third kind is in the third cauldron: When one is starting to escape, all the others drag him back down by the ankles."

Which cauldron has the most blackfolks? According to the theories I've heard most of my life, it would be the third cauldron. That may or may not be true of black people themselves, but it is certainly true of black politics. I've explained this in other terms - I've called it the 'human shield' practice. It is the excuse always used by those who would be opinion leaders to gain additional concern for blacks with steady lives to be extraordinarily involved with those in unsteady situations.

Every once in a while an example of this rationale surfaces in cyberspace. None speaks so well of that as does the example of writing and comments at Jimi Izrael's joint over the issue of Cosby. Now that we are talking about Cos, over a year from his original rant, I consider it a seminal part of the discussion about black politics.

It must be incredibly frustrating to be caught up in a discussion of dysfunctions and shortcomings of 'the race' which seem both inescapable and intractable. Consider "How to Get Young Black Youth Reading and Writing on Their Correct Level" Any worldview that makes general presumptions of such problems and generates prescriptions of this sort, are doomed. And yet that is the worldview that so many Americans are locked into.

From my perspective, I think progressives see blackfolks to be creatures of the first cauldron and they envision the demons of white supremacy pushing us all back in. They see no reason why we shouldn't all succeed together. Conservatives like myself see folks like ourselves to be creatures of the second cauldron. Sure there are demons, but people are individuals and pick different paths up the walls of their personal hells. What works for you doesn't necessarily work for me. Leftists see America as hell and prefer to suffer together in the third cauldron. They imagine there to be demons everywhere inside and outside the cauldrons.

As for Cosby, he's Old School and retains a surfeit of concern for the involuntary brotherhood of all Africans in America, the descendents of slaves. But what I think that he and every one of us will all have to eventually concede is that the cumulative experience of being African in America has left us with nothing but ourselves. We inherit little that will take us, single-handedly to the next level of society. And so while a generation of blackfolks struggle with the lack of a direct black path to the promised land, life goes on. We suffer from the racial myths expounded upon by Booker T. Washington and WEB duBois that there might very well be a special strategy for the Negro. I think perhaps only Woodson was enlightened in this regard. The sole exceptional duty for the Negro is to discover exactly which cauldron of hell he is boiling in.

Know yourself, and start climbing.

Oh You Mean That Segregation

I got into anti-racism back in about 1989 and got more seriously into it somewhere around 1993. The original reason was, I swear to God, that it was the only politics I could see that I shared with all other blackfolks. On the whole, it has been frustrating and painful, which only means I have learned a great deal.

When I decided to be serious about the subject, I asked academic friends what I really needed to know. They answered 'Massey & Denton' and 'Oliver & Shapiro'. Oliver & Shapiro basically said that the most significant economic differences between blacks & whites was that of accumulated wealth. Now it's true that some blackfolks can't be motivated until you tell them whitefolks are doing something they can't do for racist reasons. But whatever the reason, O&S's bad news basically told you what to do. Figure out how to get wealthy. At least that was my attitude.

Massey & Denton were a different story, because their findings were a bit more astoundingly intractable.

Massey & Denton "During the 1970s and 1980s a word disappeared from the American vocabulary," begins American Apartheid ". . . That word was segregation." But the practice of segregation certainly has not disappeared, as Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton glaringly expose. One-third of all American blacks live in one of just 16 urban areas, in neighborhoods so racially segregated they have almost no chance at interracial contact. The authors argue that segregation--and disassocation from not only other cultures, but other ways of life--is at the root of many problems facing African-Americans today

So now we're hearing stories about Resegregation, as if Segregation never happened. Let's look to Omaha. Our first stop: Rosenberg:

My advice (not that anyone, as usual, asked) is that the question of whether the Omaha school district should be unified or somehow divided should be decided (like just about everything else, in my opinon), without regard to race. That is, if smaller, decentralized school district organization makes sense on educational or fiscal or other grounds, it should not be opposed simply because that might result in districts that are “racially identifiable,” and I say that even though apparent racial rabble-rousers like Ernie Chambers support such an outcome for racial reasons. On the other hand, a legislative intent to create “segregated” districts presumably would (and certainly should) be unconstitutional. As I said, it’s complicated.

Dell Gines wrote me:

Omaha is segregated already by virtue of economics and demographics with 28% of all the blacks in the city living in one zip code, and 72% living in four adjacent zip codes, so any break up (of the current district) would by default have a higher concentration of blacks unless you hopscotched demographically.

 

The fact is the current school system is a mammoth beast (45,000 with a plan to increase to 60,000), where there is no busing, and the schools in the black areas of town are already "segregated" if you will. Currently in the 'black' areas of the city, minorities are 15% to 20% less likely to have graduated and yet this same school system has skirted pre-existing minority concentration in the 'black' area schools, and wants to use the specter of segregation to maintain control and growth options.

It's not fair to compare Dell and John. Dell lives there and has read the legislation. And that's my snarky remark for the day. I had this doc in draft for several weeks and now that the blogosphere has forgotten it, I wanted you to know that I had something to say back then too.

Bottom line. So long as we have hypersegregation, by economics and race, pretenses to equality are..hmm how a word I never use.. risible.

Fix Me A Sandwich

Professor Kim asks the proverbial question, what would it take to get your vote. I'm taking it to the extreme and specific - what would it take for a Democrat Presidential candidate to get my vote?

First of all, he'd probably have to be somebody I've never heard of but was suddenly impressed with. That would be someone like Tom Harkin when he ran in 92. (I supported Brown in 92 because I never trusted Clinton).

Second, he'd likely have to be a Governor or perhaps a Federal Judge but more likely a head of one of the large civilian agencies. They'd have to understand how to get things done in government.

Thirdly, he'd have to triangulate and say so up front. He would have to have a series.. a long and intense series of Sistah Souljah moments in which he made it clear that he had no place for creeping socialism or international unionism in his party. In fact, he'd have to infuriate the radical Left so much that groups like International ANSWER would feel like they have been kicked to the curb, that they'd seriously have to look at people like Leonora Fulani and the Greens in order to participate.

I'd consider voting for a Red White and Blue party of the non-college educated Second World, bootstraps, Budweiser drinking family man.

Fourthly, he'd have to wear a moustache. Just like a fireman or a cop.

Fifthly, he'd have to be a huge sports fan who could go toe to toe with any newscaster on the air. Preferably football, but baseball or hockey would do. Basketball.

He'd have to be an unabashed macho kind of dude who is smart because he had to make things work, not because he had his pick of tutors and Ivy League schools. He would have to have a kick ass attitude and a fairly hot looking wife. He should have a son who is taller than him who is in the Armed Forces or plays football.

In fact, I know who I would vote for: Frank DeFord. Or somebody who reminds me of Ed Harris. Any other Democrat.. all they could do for me is follow the Republican party line and fix me a sandwich.

On policy, he'd have to be ready to tangle with the insurance industry and force open pricing and commodity health care. He'd have to forget any plan that tries to deliver anything but Second World health care to working families who get none today. No social revolution, just common sense.

He'd have to be an America first geopolitical hawk with no stupid conspiracy theories against corporations nor airy fairy notions about the UN's role in world affairs. He'd have to build the Southern Wall, and be able to convince Republicans to sign on to any regularization package.

He'd have to tell everybody who flunks out of school, tough tomatoes; and he'd have to know how to spell.

Fishing With The Troop

I suppose it had been a long time coming, this trip. Now that it's over, I recognize how special and interesting it is, this thing called American boyhood. It leaves me nostalgic, and puzzled, and frustrated and inspired all at once. All this from a weekend of fishing and camping with some of the boys from the local Scout troop.

There are a couple things burned into my mind about this trip, most of them are images of my son who is now 12 years old in full boy bloom. Saturday afternoon he was shirtless in short pants holding a huge tree branch over his head on which he had impaled a large rotting fish. He was marching triumphantly through 6 inches of brackish standing water as four other boys followed with similar style their splashing feet covered with the mud from below. As I busted them they were crawling under a fence at the lakeside trying to find out just how deep the water was. I tried to appreciate at the time that these were classic signs of adventurous and curious boys testing all limits of propriety and manning the territory but all I could say was something like 'get out of there, have you lost your mind?' I was being the adult, which in Scouting is a very particular thing.

I have been meaning to write up my notes for Youth Protection. You see several weeks ago, I was certified for this by one of the District officers whose job it is to instruct us about the nature of sexual, emotional and physical abuse. It's remarkable how much you can learn in two hours if you have the right materials and right instructor. We did. I took 7 pages of notes and I promise to write them up. One of the things I learned, I flunked on my very first outing. Adults and kids sleep in separate tents. I managed to get a couple kids other than my son to help me assemble my large two room tent. Come nighttime I was fairly certain my boy and his best friend would be in the front room, but the Scoutmaster booted him. It was a little embarrassing to have such a massive tent with only two people in it, I offered to trade so that a bunch of kids could share the larger tent and my boy and I could have one of the many smaller ones, but Tim declined my offer. Smart man, Tim. As the babble continued late after lights out it dawned on me that he'd been here before.

It was the sixth grade when I learned to curse. My favorite thing to do was to put every curse word I knew into one huge 19 syllable phrase the last of which was 'punk'. None of the kids I heard were so bad as I, so far as I heard anyway. But there was more than enough boy talk to remind me how funny it must have been to talk about balls sometime back in 1971. Nothing says 12 year old boy like repeating juvenile rhymes about shredded gerbils as pizza topping or rearranging the lyrics of 'Iron Man' to include Michael Jackson and a minivan. It's as aggravatingly simple-minded as you could possibly imagine, the 15th time you hear it you want to throttle somebody. But you can't because somebody rips a fart during ghost story time and you can't help but laugh yourself. Or finally you hear a joke about yo' mama that you actually never heard before. This year the thing that nearly sent me skidding off the freeway with laughter was a perverted Christmas carole:

Get a job you stupid bum bum bum bum.
Money don't grow on trees you bum bum bum bum.
Won't you stop drinking that rum rum rum rum
Because it's making you so dumb dumb dumb dumb. Dumb dumb dumb dumb...

You get the picture. I almost got the truck inverted, and almost blew my adult status. But that's something I can't afford to do, nor can any of us. But what I could never do is blow my man status, which is exactly what the boys want you to do, or not.

I am greatly fortunate to have grown up in a family of boys, in roughneck neighborhood full of mostly boys. I attended an all boy's prep school as well. So I am acutely aware of male goings on. And what boys want to do is challenge and grow. They have a strong desire to follow men when they don't know what's going on, and then dispose of them as soon as they think they do. Of course they still need men because something will go wrong, and no boy is as smart as he thinks he is (nor is any teenager as badass as they think they are.) The trick is to get them to take what they know as seriously as possible and make them responsible to it, while keeping the actual complexity of the situation within their peripheral vision. Practically speaking it means letting them get close to the snake but not letting them kill it or pick it up. It means letting them swim out in the channel but not past the point you feel comfortable diving in to save them. A bold boy will quickly exhaust your ability to answer why and why not, get the gist of the situation and act on impulse. There isn't an adequate intellectual way to constrain them. This is what men know about men, or should. And it is why boys learn best by following examples.

As a Scout dad, part of my job is to (assess and) bond with the other Scout dads on the trip. We make a leadership hierarchy. You have to understand that the only way we keep values in force is by committing ourselves to submit to the rules. Every man has to lend his strength to the team in order to project a greater governing power. This creates the boundaries within which boys can be boys. Without this, it is impossible to control thirty 10-13 year old boys. This is what older men know how to do, so save up their strength and be at the precise tipping point at the precice moment and apply just enough strength to be superhuman. This is expressed in a thousand ways in life. Watch an old pro play racquetball against a younger, faster newbie. The pro knows where the ball is going to be, the newb smashes it with all his might and yet is run ragged by the pro. In camp, you use The Voice, but sparingly. You can't go down to their level, but you have to prove that you can. You may not catch any more fish than they do, so you expound on tying flies, or bring up another unassailable fish story. You don't have to chase an actual bear out of camp, but they sleep sounder knowing you did once. You hope, with some loyalty to the rules intact, they eventually discover the complexity and balancing act you did so seemingly effortlessly.

These are the rules of life and this is one of the ways we learn. I have no question in my mind but that they are universal.

Tom and Tim were the leaders in this expedition. In the course of discussion, it didn't come as any surprise that Tom was retired military or government service. Tim's son was the Eagle in charge of most of the hands on ordering around of scouts, and kept them entertained with various tricks with fire. Tim drove a pickup truck with a lightbar. Tom knew which unit of the Forest Service rangers were overseeing the campsite we rented, and I'm sure he let them know which Troop we were. There is a recognition that we're all part of a bigger sort of stewardship over our natural resources, over our children, ourselves.

I thought a little bit there, and more now, of how some boys seem obnoxious and incorrigible, but if we listen to them long enough we come to understand their fears and weakness. Sooner or later boys will invent credentials and posit a "wouldn't it be cool if" with the "I knew someone who did". They were already talking about features of Halo 4, a year before Halo 3 is due to be released. Oh isn't it just the same with politics? You hear all of the dirty talk and testing the depths of waters. You try to use The Voice sparingly, but for the sake of liberty you let boys be boys. (My cliche is 'boys will be monsters'). But in the Troop, the Eagle in charge of the patrols can always call for the Scout Sign and all will calm down and salute. The order of the day, the rules can be invoked to keep the engagement moving forward, and then the chaos gets a bit more orderly for a moment, and things get done.

In current events I often find myself standing on the shore watching people swim out into the channel. I hear the invented dirty talk and the nerve, and I wonder if they ever stop to salute anythin gor anyone. Sometimes I think people actually think they owe their allegiance to the Earth and not to each other. I wonder if they ever consider committing to submit to the rules for the good of the Troop. I often believe they revel in the realization that they can be part of thirty uncontrollable boys, asserting that anything goes and fetishising their own energy.

But those are thoughts for the city. Back up at the lake, aside from the pain of sleeping on anything less than my Sealy, what I most remember are the smooth motions of a boy growing confident with a rod and reel. Of best friends horseplaying in the river, of a father and son fixing a collapsed tent in the rain at 2:30 in the morning, of a long row of wildflowers aside a dirt track, of clouds wafting by 2 miles above the gap in the massive oak trees above our camp. I remember filthy shoes and breakfast burritos, boys whittling spears and men watching from canvas camp chairs. Faces around a campfire waiting for the 'Gotcha!' and lucky #2, the second porta-potty from the left. Cheeseburgers and rabbits, mudflats and driftwood; the purple dragboat you could hear 2 miles away; the 18 inches of squishy silt in the channel oozing through my toes. The two year old boy whose squealing finally died down after 20 minutes of his father cajoling him in smooth Spanish, the rowdy twins throwing mud everywhere. The tatooed grunge dude who asked if alcohol as legal, the 6 foot 4 black dude who walked so slow and grunted hello with his pants hanging low. The middle aged black man with the triple rig who swooped in caught two fish and left before any of us got a bite, the young dudes with the dyed hair, the six steaks, the Johnny Walker Red and the brand new Malibu wake boat.

Of course there were our boys in the Troop, but you don't get to know them from me. I'm part of their protection, and proud to be. But they reminded me of how fragile boyhood can be. You simply don't know what you don't know, and you have to trust that those tipping point moments, when The Voice is used on you, are the right moments, and the authority is the right authority. You can't know, as a boy, how safe you are, how smart you are. I watch the boys interact with their friends in escalating wars of "but did you know this?", or joking around animatedly with some and quiet or sparring with others. I watched them as I dropped them off at home go from Scout to child. I listened to them call each other names, and some fight back and some cry uncle. But I do know this for sure: Scouting is a great place for all of them and with us men and women looking after them, they're going to have a time in their lives where things had some structure and liberty under the stars - where they could explore and learn outside of the confines of certain expectations.

Sometimes you just have to march through the muddy bog with your friends at your side and a dead fish over your head. I understand. I truly understand.

The Internal Empire Revisited

I have not had the time last week to follow legislation and amendments on the floor of Congress the way I might have liked. But I got this comment from ed:

Frankly I think had this amendment be implemented it would have destroyed America as a country and converted it into a balkanized hell.

By 'this amendment', he means the one with a provision to automatically up the immigration cap annually. But here's the deal. I'm not afraid of 40 million Mexicans or South Americans joining the US legally. The Spousal Unit is in the food service business, so we've been doing a lot of work with such folks, and quite frankly have had some long term plans to make nice in several countries to the south. I believed and still believe that this Hemisphere is ours, it is our Empire and we need to start cultivating it. But right now is not the time to capture foreign lands, rather to build up the Internal Empire.

America is not balkanized. Despite idiot multiculturalism, despite political correctness, despite the proliferation of madness, alternative lifestyles, underground cultures and black markets in our country, the powers that be are still the powers that be. I may be off on this because although I've been invited to the $1000 a plate dinners I still haven't attended any, but I believe the ruling class of America is not fundamentally at odds with itself in partisan warfare. The 'balkanization' is just among us people in the middle class who have spare time to argue about stuff we don't really control. In short, Wal Mart is still Wal Mart & McDonalds is stil McDonalds.

In reviewing what I've said before, I think that the force of this post still holds. Everybody assimilates their own way and we should respect that. Assimilation does not make for homogenization. I clearly didn't have a clear idea about the gravity of the Mojado problem, but part of my argument about SB 60 was that you shouldn't have to be a citizen to have car insurance, but you did have to have a driver's license. That the driver's license is overworked as a valid proxy for citizenship is a problem in and of itself.

But more on point, here's what George P. Schultz talking about America which is perfectly aligned with my vision of the Internal Empire:

George P. Shultz: The President has done a good job and in community after community there have been strong expressions that this is not about Islam, this is not about Muslims, this is not about Arabs--they're not our enemy. Our enemy are people who somehow have been caught up in this pattern of terrorism and violence--they are our enemy. And so in the spirit of what has made the United States a great nation, we are a diverse nation and we honor that diversity, and we think and people here are loyal Americans. And that's--I'll never forget, on July 4, 1986, we had the hundredth anniversary of the Statue of Liberty being put in New York harbor. It had been refurbished, and President Reagan--the lights went on, the torch was writ--lit, and President Reagan spoke. One of the things that he said was, you can go to France, you can never become French, you can go to Japan, you'll never become Japanese, you can go to China, you'll never become Chinese, you can go to Italy, you'll never become Italian, but anyone can come to America from anywhere and become an American. It was a thrilling--and a deep statement about the nature of America, and of our attitude. We're a diverse country. And when you attack America, you attack the world, because the world is here. And furthermore, in the World Trade Center, I'm told that nationals of some eighty countries are among the lost or missing. The Chinese representative called on me the other day, told me--I think he said a hundred and thirty one Chinese national's among them--just to take an example. And practically any country you name. So, the United States is the world. And we're in favor of the world, and these people are the enemies of the world.

Friday Fragments

Black Men!
Two of my favorite shows, both hourlong dramas have black men as the lead characters. I really hadn't thought of it in terms of racial significance at all, but I suppose if you look at it that way, it kinda is. (The Unit, starring Dennis Haysbert & Thief, starring Andre Braugher)

Black XBox
I just finished my second run through the vaguely Eastern European gauntlets of Black and I think, at long last I have tired of blowing things up. Written by the guys who did Burnout, the guys behind Black have an extraordinary sense of destruction. They know exactly how to make demolition excellent fun. There has been no shooter that has ever quite captured the tile shattering goodness of the famous Matrix shootout until Black, and man do you get a ton of it.

How Regular is Regular?

As I work through the issues and arguments, and I must say that I am often led by the opinion of Hugh Hewitt, I am finding that the building of the Southern Wall is more important to me. And boy do I want to see some Mexican Americans be a part of that.

Hewitt has introduced the term to my vocab of 'regularization' by which he means some process of illegals working off their debt to society. I say classify them as felons first, and make that clear. Again, I am making the distinction between those illegal immigrants who came on legal papers and are overstaying, and those Mojados who conspired and crossed the border illegally with forged or no documents. In both cases, neither class should ever vote, nor be expected to get citizenship, but at some point they and their families should not have to look over their shoulders. This establishes a permanent second-class citizenship, then again a felony is a felony. I think it is reasonable to expect that anyone who willfully shortcuts the legal process should pay that price.

A program of regularization is different from that of amnesty. And in fact it ought to address previous grants of amnesty as well. If we have some 20 or 30 million people living in America who will never be American citizens, we ought to know exactly who they are and what they can do. In that regard I am in support of a second form of ID that would be appended to personal income tax records and required of all employees, similar to the I9 requirement. This is your work ID.

Call it a Work ID. This could be a set of five 5 digit numbers on a credit card secured with a PIN to be used by all Guest Workers. This would tie employers, tax agencies and immigrants to one system that would track that entire economic sector. I think that from a pure security perspective, a second national ID used in combination with the SSN would improve all kinds of things. Again, I'm thinking of this as a real-time authentication kind of system, not just papers.

As has been suggested widely, I agree with and support a fast track path to full citizenship through service in the armed forces. I've heard six years bandied around. That's seems a bit much, but I guess I don't have a good feel for how long it takes to fully immigrate. I've heard eleven years. That's obscene. I can't imagine why it should take a day over 7 years to be granted full citizenship, and I recognize how the length of this process defeats the hope of many who would go the whole nine legally if it wasn't eleven.

Regularization, not amnesty is, acceptable. Let's see what comes out in the legislation...

If there are about 1 million Mexicans of whatever mix getting across to the US per year and normal regularization takes 11 years, then there are concievably many millions more wanting to come. I seem to recall the poll saying perhaps 40 million more from that country alone. That's geopolitically strategic, and that's another angle we need to consider in regularization. That is to say Mexican regularization would be a special case, and yes it should apply retroactively.

It is clear to me that as much as I'd like to see plenty low wage workers make the US competitive in global markets, that is not what this influx is producing. Rather, it is producing a labor black market that depresses living wages American citizens wouldn't take so easily given our minimum wage laws.

The Enemy of My Enemy

I'm at an interesting crossroads in the annals of bloggian diplomacy. It has come to my attention that Michelle Malkin, with whom I've only had one gripe vis a vis the actual vs apparent radicalism of MEChA, has put together an immigration blog. Right smack on the top left is a set of associations which make me cringe, specifically Steve Sailer and VDARE. But there are also a couple whom I heartily support, including Lonewhacko, Junkyard Blog and Counterterrorism Blog.

As far as I'm concerned, although I may look closer, Sailer and VDARE are Blood & Soil Patriots. These are the sort I prefer not to call friends, but I would probably find no stauncher advocates of putting up the Southern Wall. So if it take an alliance with them to get things done in this country, given the dithering of George W. Bush on this important matter of national security and the value of American citizenship, what should be done?

Well, believe it or not, I'm one of those people who believes very strongly in community action. If the blogosphere is an army of Davids, then I think that there are spectacularly effective things that can be done, in collaboration with talk radio & local law enforcement, to move citizens to action. And one of the things I have in mind is a blogospheric journal of day labor sites as sting-worthy targets for La Migra. We are a million eyes and ears.

As a short tangential story, after the beating of Rodney King the numerous times that I had seen young black men squatted handcuffed to the curb became crystal clear in my memory. So I went out on the weekends with my videocamera and I filmed a lot of police action. I decided to get closer to reality. The reality I found did little to confirm my suspicions - mostly cops were handling traffic accidents and supporting emergency personnel. After spending hours filming, I got more cheers from other suspicious blackfolks as I videotaped than I actually got any decent footage of police corruption in process. In fact, when I thought I had hit the mother lode, a huge gathering of police vehicles near a highschool in the 'hood, it turned out to be a charity basketball game with the local black radio station.

But if I want to find undocumented workers, I bet you I could find some at several day laborer spots in a heartbeat.

It cannot be that the INS is unaware of these places. The LAPD can't not know, and yet they persist. Their very stability works out for labor black markets. There must be some other catch, and I am going to try to find out what that is. I do so for all the reasons I have stated before (and I am adding a new category to the blog, 'Immigration' so that becomes easier) and I am moving forward on this matter. My enemy is Mexico. I am growing to dislike that nation as they undermine the quality of our citizenship with their devil-may-care attitude and hypocrisy over immigration. And while I understand that I may have unsavory allies in this matter whose influence in national affairs I would rather shout down, at least they are American citizens vested in the improvement of this society.

I'll tiptoe when necessary and won't necessarily join hands, but I am joining forces.

Return to Mugello

The other night I downloaded a new demo game from XBox Live. How cool is that, neh? This was MotoGP 06, the latest version for the XBox 360. This was the first game I ever played on XBox Live (or maybe it was Mechassault). And the memories came rushing back.

This is good old-fashioned fun, if you can call racing online in realtime with 7 other human beings and 8 AIs 'old-fashioned'. But this is what we did in the good old days when we only had the XBox Live demo disk. Mugello, Mugello and more Mugello. One track, lots of gamers and huge hoots of fun.

The track is exactly as it was before only sharper. There are more details in the backgrounds and that little bit of annoying and challenging blur as you hit the gas is gone, but the feel is very much like it always was. One thing that the Moto GP folks have going for them is by far the most interesting set of tracks in all of online racing, and they must have nailed it the first times out because there are no changes. What we online racers know is that Nurburgring is substantially different between Project Gotham Racing 2 and Forza Motorsport with Forza coming out on top for detail and presumeably, accuracy as well. But in PGR3, the track is much more closely aligned with what the Forza guys did, and so, I believe it is more accurate. So here's the deal. If MotoGP 06 has Nurburgring, it will be the absolute bomb.

I'm very much looking forward to the new game, and meeting some old friends online that I haven't seen in years.

The Buzz About Akeelah

Akeelah and the Bee is a great movie that seems perfect for over-analysis. I think I'll indulge, but first the DaddyMan side.

I took my kids this weekend to see Akeelah and man was it a weeper. As you know, I have no defenses against weepy movies. This one is a classic "you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll applaud" kind of deal. I've been seeing all of the five dollar words at the local Starbucks, but I've seen very little marketing elsewhere. But since it's your standard family-friendly flick, the word of mouth is already out there. So I don't expect a whole lot of extra marketing dollars.

Anyway it's definitely worth a look see, but I wouldn't buy the DVD. I give it an 88%. Now onto the extended deconstruction.

It's interesting how blithely all of the ghetto stereotypes have been reduced to a neat set of movie conventions. While it's true that I haven't bothered to see 'Hustle & Flow' and it's been a while since I watched 'The Wire' on HBO, it's fascinationg how quickly we've advanced the acceptance of these without much depth. You see, I'm comparing this movie with 'Finding Forrester', which is in my opinion, the best of the ghetto fish out of water succeeds against the odds movies. And while I understand and appreciate the assimilationist theme as a motivator in filmmaking, I wonder how accurate this reach is. 'Akeelah' the film goes there in almost every dimension. I say this in light of the self-congratulation that accompanies the appreciation of 'Crash', yet another movie in a related race genre.

All said, Akeelah demonstrates what we all know to be true, and I take it once again from Premature Autopsies.

[N]obility is always born somewhere out there in the world, and when you live in a democratic nation you have to face the mysterious fact that nobility has no permanent address, you hove to face the fact that nobody has nobility’s private phone number. Nobility is not listed in the phone book. Nobility is not listed in the society column, nobility shows up where it feels like showing up, and where it feels like showing up might be just about anywhere. If it could rise like a mighty light from among the human livestock of the plantation, you know it can come from anywhere it wants to.

In the most inspiring moment of the film, as far as I'm concerned is the moment when Akeelah decides to misspell a word she knows in order to save her competitor from the humiliation his father is heaping upon him. She would rather come in second place than win a contest that would get this boy in more trouble with his father, a father's love that she misses so dearly in her own life. I would be so bold as to suggest that this very capitulation is central to the question of nobility, and in many ways I think it explains some of the disinvestments of black culture in the mainstream.

I came to 'Corporate America' in the 80s with a great number of myths in my backpack. It was a shocking revelation to me that so much of this mysterious place (my parents were both civil servants) was lame. In fact today, I make my bread and butter improving various aspects of that lameness. For me, and folks like me, with a relatively overdeveloped sense of strong black identity, the amount of character one could extract from a corporate job seemed surprisingly small. And yet we have been subjected to a significant amount of middleclass browbeating from the same corporate lame brains when we were on the outside looking in. The more prideful of us would say, to hell with you, and many of us still do, but some without the advantage of having been on the inside at all.

Akeelah was an insider at that moment, fully capable of triumph, but that didn't matter. She got her character and motivations from other places. Such is the nature of an open and properly plural society and we are faced with that question all the time. Which confers dignity on which? Is it victory itself or the character of the champions? In Akeelah's case, especially with an audience with something to prove about black girls from South LA, her noble character as champion is the pleasant surprise. But coming from close proximity from that same place, I know that the noble character was there all along.

Yet Akeelah's triumph, handled through the cliche of several montages, and some really solid scenes, does indeed demonstrate some of that child / village reciprocity. There is nothing made so clear in this film as how necessary it is to motivate kids to achieve what is great. The quote repeated throughout the film is one I am quite familiar with (but I don't remember how). Is it Audre Lorde perhaps, or James Baldwin?  Ahh.. Nelson Mandela quoting author Marianne Williamson. It is the resonance of the Bogard, that constant act of assimilating rebellion by the uppity, those who dare to desire what is presumeably not theirs to have. And it is Lawrence Fishburne's lesson to the young Akeelah which he strives to deliver by any means necessary. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, how many black heroes must a young girl quote before she can become a woman? How many lessons before dying must be taught? Maybe all of them. That depends on how far we go ourselves.

All of our fates lie in the readiness, willingness and ability to grapple with our own achievement and failure as we instruct those who would follow. We don't know what youth will do, but whatever it is they do, we have to go there with them. That is, if we seek to be represented in the future. We need to be the unforgettable teachers, and even when we think we can go no more, and even when we can't control, we have to be there alongside them on their journeys to success.

That's how the future gets spelled. One letter at a time.

I Told You Sony

Slashdot confirms my predictions:

To put things in perspective, the Curmudgeon Gamer has created graphs showing inflation-adjusted console costs. The PS3 is far from the most expensive console in history (that would be the Neo Geo, at almost $1000 adjusted price), but that hasn't stopped analysts, publishers, developers, and gamers from grumbling about it the week after E3. ABI Research has publicly stated that Sony may have 'hamstrung' itself with the console's high price. Publishers and developers are worried because (despite Sony's protests to the contrary), developers just don't have the kits to make the games. From the GameDaily article: "'A lot of developers have not gotten the kits,' said Sega of America president Simon Jeffrey while attending E3 last week. 'There certainly will not be a lot of titles available.' The result is that publishers that do want to take part in the PS3 launch will have to release games that don't fully take advantage of the power of the Cell processor, added Jeffrey."

Here's what I said before comparing Sony to Apple:

Sony puts rootkits on CDs, fueling rage, hatred and alienation among former devotees. The Minidisc never goes anywhere and the usage of DATs is considered selling out in the underground of hiphop. Nobody can pronounce VAIO and nobody really wants VAIO laptops any longer. They're overpriced and they break. Sony is so over.

Post Blogging the President

I'm at work but this is an issue that is important to me. I won't be live full time. I'll be popping back in here periodically. The best stuff will be written later this evening.

1. Secure Borders
Bush confirmed that the National Guard will be hands off. Just eyes and ears. UAVs! Some contractor feels good. Catch and release is over. Good. As of when?

2. Temporary Worker Program.
What the heck is this? Background checks? This is a management nightmare and I cannot believe it will work.

3. Employers to account.
How does anyone chaeck the document fraud? Ahh. Cogent Systems. I told you.

4. No Automatic Path.
He said the magic words. No Amnesty. So waiting in line shows they pay their debt to society? Not harsh enough for my tastes. English, Clean Record & Paying Taxes. So when are they swept up?

5. Assmilation.
Nothing new here. Bluster.

Frist's 20 Amendment Slots
This is hilarious. Here you have the good Senator reserving a huge number of slots for dithering. If this 375 mile fence amendment is to be done, then we're going to have to use up all the amendments to get a full border full of fences.

Read My Lips: No New Mojados

This is my prediction of Bush's speech tonight. He's going to split the difference. I won't like him for it but I have fairly low expectations of his ability to move on domestic issues. He'll gradually build a wall and he'll gradually regularize the 12 million illegals. (I've been saying 11 million). He'll make a big show of the National Guard mobilization and throw more money at DHS for this crap.

I also think Hugh Hewitt is correct that the 'Deport them all now' crowd will grumble loudly and accept the wall. But they will backstab indefinitely.

As a side note, here's some interesting facts about one of the richest guy in Los Angeles, Ming Hsieh. I got this from the LA Business Journal today.

[Hsieh] Founded South Pasadena-based Cogent in 1990, which developed automated fingerprint identification technology that can quickly match a print to a database of millions. Company raised almost $250 million in an initial public offering in 2004; grew into a $1.7 billion company last year. Hsieh owns 55 percent of outstanding shares. Cogent has a lock on border security through contracts with the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security, the governments of Venezuela and Jordan, and the Italian police.

So let's see how happy this guy might be. Let's see how happy Republicans are going to be.

Whose LUDs?

So the guys and I are standing in line at the Subway waiting for the tatooed slackers behind the counter to be done with the sandwich-making for the 3 people who have been in front of us for 15 minutes. The subject turns to the NSA in the news today. I fall back on a couple old saws.

Back in the Bubble days, we went through all this privacy crisis about cookies and who knew what about your websurfing habits. So since I was a sales guy I had to put the whole thing in terms of money and risk - things I figured my audience would understand. So I repeat them today, bottom line, the government doesn't want to invade your privacy half as much as you think they do, and you couldn't stop them if they did want to. The question lies primarily in understanding what your value is as a target of investigation.

So the cookies, credit cards and fear objection to shopping online went a little something like this (recall that this was when Orbitz was a startup). Your travel agent (that almost extinct creature) has all kinds of information about you. Multiple credit card numbers, what kind or rental car you like, what kind of food you like on the plane, what hotels you prefer, your home address and all that. If you're a business traveller, you'll spend thousands and thousands of dollars with this person that you will never see in your life. Now admit it, have you ever in life met your travel agent? So the question was, how much do you think companies pay to get information out of your travel agent? The answer is basically nothing. You volunteer up all that information for something called 'frequent flyer miles'. You (your company) basically has to spend about $20,000 for you to get something worth about $500. That's a real economy.

So my killer question was, how much do you think anybody is going to spend to find out information about you if you're just spending $300 a year online at Barnes & Noble? Very little.  You're not worth it. If anybody is going to cheat you out of your cretid card info, it's going to be that pissed off waiter getting paid minimum wage who watches you wolf down that gourmet meal at the restaurant when you under tip.

The other thing I pull out of my hat was my experience with Safeway. Now this was several years ago so I think I can break the silence. But basically they told us that all of that shopping cart data that was attached to your personal ID was collected, but it was too damned expensive to process. They had terabytes and terabytes of data but all the compute time it took to mine it for potential savings based upon the gathered information was so expensive in terms of expertise that it wasn't worth it to try and process it. They told us to shutup about it because they wanted their competitors to believe that they actually were doing it so that the competitors would buy the same huge Sun servers and Oracle software that didn't work for them. They just sat on top of the data and squirreled it away in hopes that someday data mining techniques and supercomputing would get cheap enough to do it.  Safeway basically should have done what Walmart did, just forget marketbasket analysis and customer profiling and deal with basic supply and demand for the purposes of smarter pricing. Profiling is a much more difficult problem.

It might surprise you to know that there about an average of 16 thousand murders every year in the US. And I think it's reasonable to believe that NYC's clearance rate of about 2/3rds is probably typical. Considering the massive amount of resources America's largest city has to offer it is probably parallel to the federal effort at anti-terrorism. So here is another factor to deal with. If there are about 5000 unsolved murders in the US every year what can be predicted about the amount of terrorism we might foil, and given that we don't pre-empt them, how many terrorists will get away with murder? For the sake of argument, imagine that the Department of Homeland Security is twice as good at their job as the NYPD. That means we could expect that 17% of all terrorists will escape.

Anybody who watches Law & Order knows about LUDs. Anytime somebody is murdered, the first thing the detectives do is go to the phone company and get the records of who the last person was that the deceased talked to. They don't have the content of those conversations, just what number, who that person is who owns the number (but not any proof that the owner was the one talking) and how long the call was. According to what I've seen, a warrant isn't required in real life. And yet even with this tool, a maximum of about 70% of murder investigations are solved.

I would add one more talking point to this discussion which is obvious. The telephone companies already have this information. What rights do they have to it? What contract might have been breached in selling or giving away that information about your phone calls? What is the dollar value of that transfer of information and how much is it worth it to mine data about you?

Long ago when online banking first came to us, I envisioned a new kind of entity. I assumed that people would trust banks to be trustees for their digital deposits. I thought there might be a such thing as a digital safe deposit box in which you might secure your bits. It hasn't happened. The technology appropriate for that has been decentralized and you can do it yourself. However there isn't much protection easily applicable to your phone and other communications. What I think is needed is some kind of attorney-client privilege shield, the kind that hasn't been broken often, for such matters. One presumes that Google might have done well by the expectation of privacy geeks online, that may or may not be. But what is clear is that people have not been willing to pay for security in a way that might sustain such a bank as I envisioned, and it is unlikely to become a recognizeable business any time soon. It will just be something that geeks know for the benefit of geeks but won't be successfully commercialized. At some point it could be, but how much would you pay?

To be snarky about it, I should ask what protections those people whining most loudly about their privacy concerns have taken to safeguard themselves. I ask those who bleat in fear of global warming why they haven't moved north to Canada. In the end, despite their complaints, they realize it's just not warm enough yet, besides moving would be too expensive. I say likewise the NSA isn't invasive enough and there's no money in it.

Infinite Hours of Oblivion

If you asked me to name the most sophisticated pastime available in the world of entertainment, I would have to say that thing that is the book circle. Half of my life I've attempted to cajole people I've had the opportunity to meet in the flesh to spend as much time as I do reading the books I think matter. I had no idea that would be a failed enterprise, and with that beloved community in mind I have wasted many years on the web in pursuit of some sort of collective pseudo mind meld. And so if I interpret the gist of Thomas Mann correctly, I've been on a fool's errand. The individual, like the cheese, stands alone; absorbing, fermenting, smelling solo, hoping only one day to be appreciated at cocktail parties among the brainy, powerful, wealthy and beautiful. End of metaphor.

What I have found to be a much more reliable form of sophisticated shared experience has been online gaming.

I'm a writer you see. All day it's what I do. Except that I write for computers, which in turn, control people. I've been aware of this fact since day one. I am one of those people who hates to be misinterpreted, so I have some satisfaction in knowing that those fruits and delights my programs serve up cannot under any circumstances be delivered to those who don't follow my precise instructions. This is the secret power of the programmer. We change human behavior. It's the same writer's conceit, the same as any Hollywood screen or jokewriter. We change lives.

Now I recognize that online gaming is not really the be all and end all. It could be, but it's going to take another generation for it to evolve to the level of sophistication and interactivity of, say playing in a marching band, and probably two before improvisational jazz. But hey, a flute has too many buttons for most of us. When I'm doing real-time analog first person gaming, all I care is that my child can catch the ball. For most of us, what's out there works just fine.

I have yet to play an MMORPG for a substantial amount of time. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, I have a fairly high resistance to cheesy sword & sorcery. Your basic dungeons & dragons stuff doesn't impress. Secondly, I've found some of the players, well.. too many of the players to be just juvenile or perversely odd. Let me qualify this by saying that the bulk of my experiences are dictated by There, SecondLife and the original Everquest. I have flirted with getting World of Warcraft this year, but I have yet to make the leap. But there is something about this league of PC gamers who get completely immersed that feels a bit too weird.

Now I can say that I do want game immersion. I was a big fan of Myst from day one, and killed countless hours hacking and slashing through those lovely logical jungles. I also enjoyed the early Tomb Raider stuff, and The Dig earlier still. But there seems to be a fine line between immersion and obsession that I simply cannot cross. Being committed to online millions in the form of some avatar is just wrong. Those who know me know that I'm all about do instead of be, and most of the MMORPGs seem to be about be. So I like online shooters and racers, but not those in which you invest significant time trying to seduce other people into recognize your avatar socially. See the difference?  Besides, who's going to outdo The Sims?

If I'm going to sink hours upon hours of time in a virtual world online, I prefer real-time strategy. So you will have found me fairly deep into Rise of Nations. Rise of Legends is <strike>coming</strike> here(!)and having seen the preview, I think it's going to be even better. When it comes to RPGs, I truly enjoyed Knights of the Old Republic all the way up the the final boss battle, which in the end seemed completely superfluous. KOTOR2 held my attention for about one fifth the time and then I dropped it like a hot rock. Fable, depsite the criticism that it was too short, seemed to me to have achieved perfect balance. That's one I played twice.

None of this, however, compares to the passionate work that is the creation of Bethesda Softworks, Elder Scrolls IV, Oblivion. Imagine Myst but bigger, scarier, and richer. Even for an inveterate player like myself, the visual experience is stunning. There are areas within the world of Oblivion that generate visceral reactions as powerful as any film visual. Oblivion is, hands down, the grand universal heavyweight dominating champion of RPGs.

A New Sheriff's Online

Actually, it's the Chief. LAPD's Chief Bratton (and presumeably others on the force) are blogging. This is excellent.

Just yesterday, KPCC had the nerve to give Tony Muhammad 15 seconds of airtime on behalf of his stupid quote (and 10 others in his demonstration) in search of a re-establishment of the federal consent decree against the LAPD. His speech was notably lacking in facts and high on rhetoric. I am looking forward to seeing this blog establish a dialog with the public in helping us to understand the way the LAPD assesses its own role and effectiveness. The Coalition of the Damned are professional malcontents.

Anyway, I don't have any other particular expectations but that it will become a great new source of information and feedback. Bratton has my thanks for this effort.

A side note is that a lot of comments on the first post say 'welcome to the 21st century' as if blogging were the hallmark. A snarky PD might well say welcome to reality. We'll see how the voice of the LAPD sounds...

Raging RINOs: Joining the Disjointed

"I want to wear dreadlocks. It shows that I'm a rebel."
-- Anonymous

One of the reasons that I'm not rich is that I am arrogant and think too highly of my own wisdom. Furthermore, I'm one of the true geeks that really enjoys sitting in front of a computer screen all day and half the night. My skills assessments say that I should have been either an architect or a surgeon. Well, so much for not being arrogant. But I could have been a damned good lawyer. But at the time I was considering law school, I didn't realize that lawyers didn't necessarily have to be straight laced. So I didn't talk to enough lawyers to understand what kind of money I could have made dealing with very very gray areas. Depending upon how broke I retire, I may come to regret the decision I made not to do law. I simply believed in my naivete that I couldn't stomach the idea that the law might be as spaghetti as I know computering is. At this point in my life, I relish that very complexity and inconsistency. Eh. You live and learn.

As part of my arrogance, I am not much of a joiner. Thus I write. Why? Because I am not satisfied most of the time that somebody else might have said what I'm thinking only better. So what? I still have to say it, or as far as I'm concerned, it hasn't been properly expressed.

This is the reason I am not a Raging RINO.

I thought about joining up with these cats a week or so ago when somebody accused me of 'drinking koolaid'. I hate koolaid, both real and metaphorical. See, I'm a builder. I have no time for theories I haven't invented. I make stuff work, and half the time, I make crap work. The important thing to me is that it works.

So the question of the propriety of the Raging RINOs or any other such camp, is 'do they work'? So if the Raging RINOs as a party faction do work, then eventually I might join them. But I don't want to drink their koolaid either. Well, actually the RINOs don't have koolaid. All they are saying is what they are not. Now I'm a secular conservative, so I basically fit. Yeah I'm a Christian, but I'm not a Republican because I'm a Christian, nor am I a Christian because I'm Republican. I happen not to see any fundamental conflicts and some interesting synergies, but I don't want anybody confusing possible rivalries. For example, how would I answer the question, why Raging RINOs and not Blogdom of God? I'm sure I could come up with an answer that sounds waffly. But fundamentally since the RINOs don't have a real pledge they're really not really raging are they?

So I'm basically here. If it's just another tag to generate blog traffic and I'm generally sympathetic with the 'no koolaid drunken here' message, is it better to join a group of non-joiners, or just not join them?

The other problem, aside from my hair-splitting persnickety attitude, is whether or not this RINO thing helps my Conservative Brotherhood message or dilutes it. I am leaning towards believing that it helps it, depending upon the practicality of how much more traffic Cobb gets as a result of joining the RINOs. If perhaps I think of it as nothing more than a label, then that could work. The problem which I don't really have but might get is...

OK enough dithering. I'm joining. But you understand my point, right?

American Sports Hypocrisy

As celebrations, or lack thereof, are in the offing for Barry Bonds inevitable breaking of Babe Ruth's home run record, I have to go there. There is the place of race and hypocrisy.

Here's my gut. Two things. One, Barry has decided not to break Hank Aaron's record because he knows and respects Aaron in the way that black sports royalty does. Two, he has decided to beat Babe Ruth's record both to be considered greater and to spite anybody with any notion that blacks shouldn't be numbers one and two, whether or not such people exist.

So on the one hand Bonds could be left with his own inside old boy racial preferences for Aaron and fighting an invisible enemy. He could be the only one accused of playing ethnic favorites, but enemies who will mention race and the Babe will step out of the woodwork and legitimate whatever race card Bonds might be said to be playing. This is my prediction.

Now I completely understand where Bonds is coming from. He's about my age and this was the burden we were handed in our youth. It basically goes something like this, yeah you're talented and all that, but don't take yourself too seriously; you're never going to beat X. X being whatever white superstar or old boy people could pull out of their imaginations or history. Speaking for myself, I can remember such things being said about legal and accounting partnerships when I was in prep school in the late 70s. It's one of the reasons I went into science, just like Asians. We bogard. We've got something to prove.

What happens when you achieve the impossible in such a way that proves you have nothing further to prove? What further if along the way you figure out that nobody is giving you the props you deserve and you decide not to be perfectly graceful for their benefit? You become Barry Bonds. Or at least that's the way I see him. And you know, I think that's exactly the same thing that happened to Moe Greene, and inveterate Cobb readers knows that cuts me deeply.

About the performance enhancement? Well, my opinion is that it's rather like Las Vegas. Gambling is legal there and people from every state where it's illegal go there. Vegas gets bigger and bigger, other state laws get looser and looser. Why do we even bother pretending this is not the way things are? In the end, we have to admit that gambling is a relatively small moral complaint given the real threats against this nation. So is juicing. I say pay college athletes and let them take every drug under the sun. It's just entertainment.

People who lament the loss of the purity of sport are hypocrites. There is no purity in spectator sports. There is purity in playing sport for honor. That's what you get at the local sandlot, that's not what you get broadcast in primetime in HD.

Da Vinci Code Quest Hacked

Like probably a million people around the world, I played Google's Da Vinci Code Quest. I basically ran through most of the puzzles in a burst of geekery a couple nights ago. Then I knocked off all but three the day before yesterday.

Yesterday at about noon Pacific, the final puzzle became available. Knowing that yesterday would probably be the day, I started working on the Restoration and Symbol puzzles that morning. So just when I finish the Restoration for Day 14 and I get the answer right, Google comes back at me and tells me that my request looks like a virus and would I please prove that I'm a human.

OK I can see that. So I enter the nonsense letters in the box and... my puzzle results are erased. It's just like I didn't even do the puzzle. What the?? So I do the damned puzzle again, burning precious minutes while thousands of other people are solving the last puzzle and it happens a second time. What a load of crap.

So I conclude one of two things. One, either Google couldn't handle the load of people sending in responses to the puzzle, or some enterprising hacker got a botnet sending in correct answers to Google and Google's own defenses kicked off legitimate contestants. Either way it pissed me off enough to blow off the contest.

So this morning I finished off the last four puzzles I had to do for the hell of it. Two Restoration, one Symbol and the final Observation. I killed them in about 40 minutes before I brushed my teeth. I sent in the information and Google made it look like I may have a chance, but the whole damned thing was compromised as far as I'm concerned. We'll see if they acknowledge the hack or whatever it was that happened yesterday when I was solving the Restoration puzzles.

Interestingly enough, I never really figured out what I was consciously doing to solve the first two restoration puzzles. It wasn't until one the third one gave me trouble that I bothered to read the actual instructions. Then it made sense and I bopped through them with a bit more alacrity.

I don't generally go in for puzzling on the norm. I get bursts of extreme geekery. Like one day I decided on plane trip to the East Coast that I would memorize Pi out to 100 digits. It turned out to be easier than I thought, once I got going. I did it in 4 hours.

I hope I never end up in jail.

The Disconnected Fifth's Dionysian Trap

Orlando Patterson, someone whom I have heard much about but not read, comes out swinging with some interesting hardlines, most of it properly directed at economists and researchers. By stating what appears obvious to me, and sketching out some future directions for research, he centers the question of the 'dysfunctional black male' back squarely within the area of culture.

It's not often that I think that there is a reasonable national debate on the things we in the black chatting class dig debating, but this is one of them. Earlier this year there was some debate about a widening gap or some such about how hard it is for black men. I don't think I bothered much with that because of what I see as obvious about blackfolks. We choose our lives.

So I find it intersting that since I've gotten back on XBox Live, I've experienced an interesting confirmation of these core 'graphs by the good Dr.:

SO why were they flunking out? Their candid answer was that what sociologists call the "cool-pose culture" of young black men was simply too gratifying to give up. For these young men, it was almost like a drug, hanging out on the street after school, shopping and dressing sharply, sexual conquests, party drugs, hip-hop music and culture, the fact that almost all the superstar athletes and a great many of the nation's best entertainers were black.

Not only was living this subculture immensely fulfilling, the boys said, it also brought them a great deal of respect from white youths. This also explains the otherwise puzzling finding by social psychologists that young black men and women tend to have the highest levels of self-esteem of all ethnic groups, and that their self-image is independent of how badly they were doing in school.

There are a lot of white boys that want to be niggas, and do a lot of showing out of that sort in their trash talk online. Just this past week, gaming on Project Gotham Racing 3, I heard such conversations. The appeal of being a cool nobody that can rag on society with impunity is apparently immense. How can you be completely irresponsible to middle class values and cool at the same time? The instruction manuals are rapped from coast to coast.

This is a subset of degeneracy that our affluent society tolerates. It's annoying that loudmouth knuckeleheads who do little but make noise, crime and babies pollute our population. But it's very easy to get away from them. They have no mobility, no power, no real influence over anything but their particular niche markets. People like me get really pissed that there are lots of people with the nerve to name that the sum total of 'black' culture. I say it is part of an historical stream of vulgar banditry going back though and beyond Sherwood Forest - that there is nothing special about classes of losers, outcasts and anti-social bohemians. But in America, it's uniquely tied in with this invention called 'youth culture' which allows half-grown humans to have their own music, dress, ethics, sports & slang all mass marketed and co-opted into a segment of mass consumption.

Still, it's a choice. It's a bit too easy of a choice because it is bankrolled, and yet I wonder how many with libertarian sensibilities would allow a bit of common righteousness to give the smackdown to the prophets of this hiphop subculture. Too many folks don't bother to disambiguate race and culture amid the confusion of political correctness and multiculturalism. We in the Old School have few such qualms or confusions. Just as Chris Rock says, just as Cosby says, we know the difference between blackfolks and niggas. We're not afraid to call a spade a spade. Why? Because racial segregation forced us to live with them a lot longer than everyone else. We know the ultimate costs. America may yet learn.

 

Two Mind Splinters

When I was on hiatus, I found that my creative urge kept popping up and I also kept reading a lot of online material. So during that time, since I wasn't blogging, I kept track of things by using delicious, which I previously had no use for. Now I find it somewhat invaluable for the oddments that creep up from time to time. But there are some things I still cannot find, and it burns me up.

Don't you hate it when somebody asks you a question that you know that you used to know? You walk around all day fixated on this stupid bit of information that you can't get your mind to remember. OK, it's just me. I obsess over such things. Part of my personality is that I get off my butt to answer questions, but not generally to volunteer information. I think I'll be a wonderful grandfather rather than a tedious one for that reason.

So to initiate this, I have two particularly nasty splinters in my mind that I just cannot get rid of. And so far, Google and the Internet Archive have been singularly unable to come up with the answers I seek.

Baby Bin Laden Animation
The first is one I've mentioned several times before. I especially want to find this because it was such an annoying meme when it surfaced sometime after September 11th but before Bush started the invasion of Iraq. You probably remember it too, and now the git who published it is probably rightly too embarrassed to keep it on the web. It had a cartoon map of the Middle East, with little British (imperialist) soldiers in pith helmets. It predicted Armageddon as all the Arab states rushed across the borders into a (quagmire) Iraq and basically illustrated this scenario where the whole region erupted with a mass of baby Bin Ladens. The Left distributed it like it was the Qaran and we all suffered through the madness of this 'wisdom'. So now that it was clearly disproven, where did it go? Somebody knows what it was called, where it came from and where it is now. Just not me, and it's killing me. Hopefully it's killing you to and you won't rest until we all have a delicious tag.

Multicultural Last Name Survey
Some university or research institution came up with a very cool way to determine if someone was truly worldly by giving them a list of 100 (or so) last names. If you knew somebody with the name 'Patel' for example, it proves that you have had contact with Indians, and so on and so forth. They had done enough research on this matter so that it was very difficult for you to score 100. It was directed at Americans and could be a barometer on how often you get out. I can't find it anywhere, can you?

Because My Kids Have Homework

The following comes as no surprise to conservative dads:

Here are five fun facts culled from the event sponsored by the Entertainment Software Association.

1) The average game buyer is 40 years old.
2) The average game player is 30 years old.
3) Thirty-eight percent of all game players are women.
4) Twenty-five percent of Americans over the age of 50 play video games.
5) Forty-four percent of game players say they play games online one or more hours per week.

The boy has demonstrated that he has some of the same tastes in gaming as the old man. This is satisfying. But he and the girls cannot play Monday through Wednesday, period. And homework always comes first.

In other E3
There's a lot of interesting numbers coming out of E3 here in town this week. I'm Tivoing the G4TV broadcasts, but I'm so deep into Oblivion this week that I haven't paid much attention to the news except for the occasional Slashdot coverage. The rumors about Sony's upping the price on the PS3 are true which is just going to accrue points for MSFT.

All this motion-senstive controlling, I think is a mediocre to poor idea. Nothing shouts 'newb' like somebody working their shoulders when gaming. Quite frankly the whole thing makes no sense to me from an ergonomic perspective. As I was implying here, it's all in the fingers. I mean look at classical pianists. The most sensitive and lightning fast moves humans can produce come from eye-hand, not eye-shoulder coordination. Fighter pilots, diamond cutters, any ultimate skill of the sort you can name are going to do their best work with their fingers. Making people sweat when they could sit is for the DDR crowd. Not buying it over here.

On Darfur: Steyn Rules

This is pure gold. I'm sorry but I have to bite it.

The American Prospect's Mark Leon Goldberg penned an almost comically agonised piece fretting about the circumstances in which he'd be prepared to support a Bush intervention in Darfur: Who needs the Janjaweed when you're prepared to torture your own arguments the way Goldberg does? He gets to the penultimate paragraph and he's still saying stuff such as: "The question, of course, is whether the US seeks Security Council support to legitimise such airstrikes."

Well, no, that's not the question. If you think the case for intervention in Darfur depends on whether or not the Chinese guy raises his hand, sorry, you're not being serious. The good people of Darfur have been entrusted to the legitimacy of the UN for more than two years and it's killing them. In 2004, after months of expressing deep concern, grave concern, deep concern over the graves and deep grave concern over whether the graves were deep enough, Kofi Annan took decisive action and appointed a UN committee to look into what's going on. Eventually, they reported back that it's not genocide.

Thank goodness for that. Because, as yet another Kofi-appointed UN committee boldly declared, "genocide anywhere is a threat to the security of all and should never be tolerated". So fortunately what's going on in the Sudan isn't genocide. Instead, it's just hundreds of thousands of corpses who happen to be from the same ethnic group, which means the UN can go on tolerating it until everyone's dead, at which point the so-called "decent left" can support a "multinational" force under the auspices of the Arab League going in to ensure the corpses don't pollute the water supply.

What's the quintessential leftist cause? It's the one you see on a gazillion bumper stickers: Free Tibet. Every college in the US has a Free Tibet society: There's the Indiana University Students for a Free Tibet, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Students for a Free Tibet, and the Students for a Free Tibet University of Michigan Chapter. Everyone's for a free Tibet, but no one's for freeing Tibet. Idealism as inertia is the hallmark of the movement.

360 Finally

It's 4 months after Christmas and I finally got my 360.

Was it worth the wait? Well, since I'm a grownup, the answer has to be yes. It's got what I liked about the original XBox and more, so of course I'm satisfied.

Anybody who has been poking their heads in at the local Best Buy has seen Call of Duty playing on the HD Samsung on the display. Having the 360 at home is even more mind-rocking, especially if you have an HD set. I don't, but it's still pretty awesome. So the first question is whether or not new 360 games look better than old XBox games without the addition of HD and the answer is a resounding yes. Sure 'Call of Duty 2' has been hyped, but not overhyped. It's that good, and the standard of graphics is that much better. The same is true for PGR3 and Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, two other must-have titles that I have.

I'm simply shocked at how often you hear arguments about how many PS2s are out there and how the greater number of titles makes them a winner against XBox. That's completely silly. As every real gamer knows there are good games and there are great games. The very good games and the great games are almost always on both platforms. There are only a few exceptions, namely (Guitar Hero, Resident Evil) and (Halo, PGR, ) for the XBox. It really comes down to that handful, which is essentially nothing if you are a PC gamer as well.

News from the talk on XBox Live.

• A big Microsoft / Bungie announcement on the last day of E3 on 'The Forerunner Project'. Everybody knows it's Halo 3. The question is when does it ship? I say 30% odds of it shipping this Christmas.
• If the PS3 goes for 600 bucks, it's the beginning of the end for the PS3.
• Gamers hate the new controllers for both the PS3 and the Wii.

More on the actual games later.

The new wireless controller eats batteries pretty quickly. Then again I'm sure I've done some 20 hours of gaming over the past two weeks. Other than that, thinking that I might hate it because it's too small - I basically retrained my hands. Now I'm cool and I almost never think about it. They must have known something like this might happen. I've got a good 50 foot range on the wireless controller and no lag or anything like that. Once again the ergonomics pros at Microsoft have pulled off a surprising success.

It took me about 30 minutes to setup the new console. It was a snap, actually easier than the first time. All of my old Live info moved over with no problem.

The new panel interface is also a fairly brilliant piece of design. There's a huge amount of information that can be set from there, which I've yet to navigate. But it's very intuitive for a guy like me and a significant improvement over the prior version. Concretely, the XBox Live panel being available at anytime is brilliant. The ability to send game invites to multiple friends is a big improvement. The update of friends coming available is very nice, especially now that you can see, essentially when somebody accepts a friend invite. The messaging interface defaulting to voice is very nice. Some of the defaulted selections could use a bit more contrast in the default skin. I've moved it to the Halo theme and it's better.  I would have been happier to allow gamers to upload any avatar icon and leave it to feedback to determine whether or not they were too 'underground' rather than have it the way it seems to be now.. locked up with a dozen goofy defaults. MSFT needs to publish an avatar studio.

I have mixed feelings about Microsoft Points. They work too easily. It's a convenient way to spend too much money on gaming.

Cobb's Rule #14

Respect your Foes.

Today's lesson comes to me by way of me having repeat myself in several ways that I've noticed. I won't go into them in any detail. The second way it comes is in the way of The Field Negro with whom I have a debate over the usefulness of George W. Bush and the actual political clout of the masses of African Americans.

He comes with a pretty damned funny satirical interview with the President. Although I have to say I am something of an enemy of irony and snark, he shows that he hasn't succumbed finally to the terminal phase of Bush Derangement Syndrome. An excerpt from the FNNN (Field Negro News Network):

FN: Have a seat right here Mr. President, I know it's a bit uncomfortable, but this aint CNN.
GB: Not a problem field-negro, I am used to this, remember, I have a ranch out in Crawford Texas so this is nothing.
FN: Have you ever had any field-negroes on your ranch? (Laughter)
GB: Oh no field-negro, I can pretty much do all those chores by myself. I have had a a lot of house negroes though. (Laughter)
FN: You are a funny guy Mr. President. I have always said that of all the politicians in Washington, you are the one guy I would just hang out with and share a drink or two. I mean before you gave up drinking of course.
GB: Of course.
FN: Mr. President I can't tell you how glad we are to have you here in the fields with us.
GB: Thanks field- negro. You know, my family and I always supported UNICEF, I mean nothing is more important than a proper education.
FN: Mr. President, I think you mean UNCF; UNICEF is the United Nations children's fund.
GB: Oh, well which one is the terrible mind to waste one?
FN: That would be UNCF sir.
GB: Yeah well that one. Our family has always supported negro causes. When I owned the Texas Rangers, we had a lot of very good African American and Latino players, and we were a better team for it.
FN: Yes sir, I am sure you were. Now if I may....
GB: Hold it, (Interrupting) I don't want to just leave on that point, because that's important. It's important for the American people to understand that I put the best product on the field for the people of Texas without regards to the race of my players, and I will do that for America. Look at Condi, and that Gonzales fellow.

I say this puts him in the class of The Politburo Diktat. I must confess that I can't really parse all the double negatives of TPD, so I guess I am missing out on some very good satire, but this one I got. Kudos to the Field Negro for not keeping a straight face. I think that's where the metaphor works wonders.

Just in case anyone thinks I have lost my mind, I don't think that The Daily Show is a responsible organ of current events. Therefore I haven't and probably won't bother to see what all the fuss was about last week at whatever press conference in which some people think one of the cast members was 'speaking truth to power'. I have seriously doubt that any of the producers of The Daily Show have the skill, or character to run a halfway decent news department. Comedy is comedy, and this is not King Lear.

OK I will repeat myself. The most important reason to respect your foes is that when you are keeping the trains running on time, they have plenty of time to make jokes and crack wise without understanding all the factors involved in actually running the railroad. Ultimately you have to answer all their wrongheaded questions and accusations and hope they're intelligent and ethical enough to admit when they're wrong. It's therefore important that your foes actually have a clue, otherwise you will have to crush them rather than survive a possible transition of power.

One more thing. Foes are one thing, sworn enemies you must crush.

Greatest Rap Lyrics - Part 1

Craig Mack's Flava in Ya Ear was one of those songs that just electrified the world. You listened to it, you couldn't believe it, you didn't know the title or the rapper but all you knew was you had to hear it again, and again. I think this is one of the last hiphop songs that had that effect on me although it's difficult to recall which may have been the absolute last.

Craig Mack
1000 degrees
You'll be on your knees
and you'll be burnin', beggin' please
Brother FREEZE! {BOY!...}
Man's indisputed
and deep-booted
funk smoke that leaves your brains booted
This bad M.C.
with stamina like Bruce Jenner
the winner
Tasting M.C.'s for dinner
You're crazy like that glue {...you're crazy, boy, You're crazy.}
to think that you
could out-do
my one-two
that's sick like the flu {...shake 'em down, Mack}
BOY, I flip
BOY all the time, 'cause
BOY, the rhyme you're kickin' {HAAAAAAAAA! BOY!...}
ain't worth a dime
Seems like there's no competition
in this rap world expedition
You come around,
I'll knock you out [of] position {... knock 'em out!}
No flav
could ever dig a grave
for the Mack
the power pack
in black
makin' cement crack {...make it crack...}

Every rap fan on the planet knows this rhythm now, but there is no way to rap this without having heard Craig Mack do it. This is the second stanza and it is nothing like the first or the third. It's just completely unique. The 'stamina like Bruce Jenner' moves at a completely different pace than 'youre crazy like that glue'. The phrasing can't even be called classic, it simply hasn't been duplicated. Now there is one possible exception to that which is 'Shake Ya Ass'  which also works in stanzas with refrains each stanza with unique phrasings. That too was massive breakout single, unique in every way.

Making a rap like this is extraordinarily complicated. It's something I think George Clinton thought he was doing on several occasions, breaking walls of beats per line with compression, or letting it go over into the next measure. Failed completely.

Not enough can be said about the complimentary responses {in braces} that the second voice adds to the rap. As far as I know, only Flavor Flav has done this consistently in his world-rocking duets with Chuck D, but this unknown rapper behind Craig Mack is a serious partner in making 'Flava in Ya Ear' one of the great lyrical triumphs of all time.

A Gordian Knot of Morality

One of the most miraculous things about American society is how good we are about communicating what we want in the language of law. 'There oughta be a law..' is a popular phrase for good reason. It happens. We know how to make it happen, it's part of the American legacy. It's also something of a problem.

Volokh is sustaining a discussion which seems to me to be remarkably petty about the merits of laws against smoking on public streets. If you look closely, there's something to see, but it ain't much. But if you step back, there's something to be said about the Paradox of Self-Amendment, and how we have twisted our way around into this odd predicament.

Back when I was more of an intellectual stripling than I am today, my first attempts at being 'deep' involved me in a discussion with Peter Suber, more in my mind than in reality because there was basically one letter each to and fro. He was of the opinion at the time that there was no revolution latent in the principles of client-server computing. He was wrong in principle but right if he was talking about timing. Basically I make my living working in the Business Intelligence field, part of which is a technical enabler of that alter we pay obeisance to: Corporate Governance. Cluetrain Manifestos notwithstanding, there has been a real evolution in the way corporations organize their information. One could argue, revolution, considering that not 20 years ago, the very idea that a business manager would even want to use email, much less use it to improve his business was almost unthinkable. Still, for a newb like me to tangle with man like Suber was and still is hubris.

The Paradox of Self-Amendment is basically the notion that you can set up a system with a consistent set of rules, but if some of those rules allow you to change other of those rules, it is possible to manipulate the system to contradict itself. This is the danger with all 'living documents' and so it is with a 'Living Constitution'. I understood this early on, and it might be one of those things that made me suceptible to arguments about Original Intent. I think that I have become a Strict Contructionist for political reasons over time, but I've known the dangers we talk about.

One of the basic conclusions I came to with respect to this has been a principle in my anti-racism. I have always insisted on a race-neutral, actually race-blind Constitution and a race-conscious politics. When I assert that 'colorblindness is the moral equivalent of racism' I have always meant it about politics and policy, but never about rights.

Anyway, in this vein, what piques my interest today is how the American public has come full circle on the morality and social meaning of smoking. I grew up in an America that defended the very concept embodied by the Marlboro Man. The Marlboro Man has been shot and hung in effigy by a crowd of light loafered lefties, who would like nothing better than for us to believe his silent vigil was spent in contemplation of a male lover. Not all change is good.

Since we are a democracy of the people, we get to stand up and make pronouncements about what we think. Since we're bourgie, risk-averse and have tendencies towards scientific animism, we worry about a lack of Progress. And so it becomes inevitable that we try to legislate our way into a safer, surer future. And if the people who just don't get it are left behind, sobeit. We all have our obligations to the law and my aren't we fortunate to have insightful people like Juan Cole and Kos doing our forward thinking for us? Even the cats at Volokh get swept into the mix. Then again, they are lawyers. Their job is to alternative craft or navigate a thicket of laws, which will undoubtedly soon cover every aspect of human behavior, morality, ethics, thought, emotion and feeling.

Fortunately there's war.

And so my liberal detractors may take some heart today that I can consider myself to be something of a warmonger. I am slightly ashamed to say that I am slightly attracted to the clarity and cleanliness of the destruction of civilization. I think it was Patton who said, "Compared to war all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance." And after the chaos of battle, everything gets attributed to war.  If there will be men who will fight war, then they will not be men who concern themselves with whether or not other men smoke on sidewalks. Do we need a purge? Is there a cancer of propriety growing within our society? Have we lost our sense of what humans are capable of, is that why so many Americans are astonished by a half-million Mojados showing up to assemble in peace? Is that the greatest sense of drama we can imagine? I should talk, lamenting the mincification of a commercial icon.

I think we are missing something. I think our kids have worn bicycle helmets too long. I think we have too many people who take drugs, play guitar and say the world is full of shit. I think we spend entirely too much time developing sensitivities and that the most sensitive of us get too many opportunities to make laws and policies that compress the zest and violent energy out of American life.

I will raise my boy to be tough and rugged, and raise my daughters to love that kind of man. And if we never need his courage, then we will be fortunate. But better to have it and never need it than not to respect it and be incapable of summoning it.

If there is a greater shame than to die of lung cancer, it is to have died of lung cancer without having had a dogface doughboy's reasons for smoking.

30 Bucks for Half a Tank

Gas prices are rediculous. So now it's time to goose the market a little bit. I highly recommend checking out GasBuddy.com.

The Non-Guilty Pleasure of French Hardcore Rap

"Aiguisé comme lame
Pointu comme un couteau
Chauffé comme une flamme
Et puissant comme un fusil d'assaut."
-- Raggasonic

Maybe I should have made the title of this a little less specific, but there it is. I'm listening to some hardcore gangsta rap by DJ Cut Killer (avec le Funky Family) and I don't understand it, but I get it.

As I sit here completely engrossed in a funky beat, I know without a shadow of a doubt that whatever it is they are saying in French is as trashy as a rat smoking crack in the sewer. But since I can't really understand a word of it, it's just cool. Every inch of the flavor is translated through the music, the beats, the intonation, the edge, the phrasing - you can taste it but you can't name it. Every once in a while the rappers get bilingual and I have to cringe for a moment, but most of the time... nah.

I've been a fan of French Rap since '93 when I first encountered MC Solaar. I was walking about aimlessly, trying to pick up intellectual chicks somewhere in the Boston metro area when I heard something over the speakers in a record store that stopped my heart. It turned out to be DJ Jazzy Jay's collection including Menelik, Democrat D, Sleo, Sens Unique Posse, Moda & Dan (my favorite cut) and of couse the one and only MC Solaar. And for my own memory, Michael, you did know Solaar before you knew Francine Mondon. Oh her? She was the cutie law student from West Africa studying in London. Her brother was making a killing in mudcloth and kente. Ahh single life amongst the New World Africans of the 90s... but I digress.

Several years ago, the Spousal Unit went to Paris to hang with our cousine. She brought back Raggasonic and the fire was rekindled. Here was profanity I could blast in my new 8 speaker Turbo Beetle without a stitch of guilt. I have long liked the mix of flavor and mental gymnastics that this kind of music brings forth as well as the mau-mau effect it can evoke at the suburban stoplight. While I am way too mature and sophisticated for that kind of posturing now (as an august member of the Republican Club), on occasion I will lapse.. like every spring and summer afternoon when the sun is shining, my rims are clean and my windows are down.

My all-time favorite? IAM's Le Feu. It is one of the best party raps since K7's 'Come Baby Come'. Also Poussiere d'Ange from Raggasonic is the bomb. Straight out of <strike>Compton</strike> Le 19eme Arrondissment. WHAT!?

The Undefined Entity

I read with regret that Ambra regrets having joined The Conservative Brotherhood.

She calls it an undefined entity. But I think her real problem was that The Conservative Brotherhood is too well defined, and a bit too political for a primarily spiritual person. As a blog league, The Conservative Brotherhood has a more precise definition than just about any other in the sphere. And Ambra, whom I greatly admire, had a problem with with that definition because it wasn't precise enough, specifically on the question of Pluralism. It only proves that you can only please some of the people some of the time, and certain individuals almost never. Ambra is one of those sparkling and annoyingly contrary individuals, which is why she's such an interesting read. I wish her well on her new adventures. Anybody who can walk away from a job at Google and The Conservative Brotherhood has grit.

Meanwhile here at The Brotherhood, things have been going well. So far as I know, we are the only place in the world who give any polling data that captures the pulse of conservative black politics. We will soon be buying and selling blog advertisements. Joseph C. Phillips, one of our members, has a new book coming out. And of course I have re-cranked up Cobb after a 1 month hiatus.

The big news is that we have added several new writers to the league:

Akindele Akinyemi is the man in Detroit. His insights to the inside ball politics in Motown are basically unparalleled. He's no-nonsense, comes with the hard line and is a real organizer on the ground.

Bob Parks, is the nationally syndicated columnist with the high profile billboard who is Black and Right. A real candidate with experience in electoral politics, Bob's a natural born leader. Catch his review of immigration law. That's the kind of quality we're talking here.

BeeJiggity brings the flavor from Chicago with wit and candor. Do check out his style. He's down with the Brotherhood.

RattlerGator is our man in the Sunshine State. If it moves in Florida, he's got it covered. His extensive reportage on the Florida Legislature on a daily basis is a must read for those who want to be in the know.

Mahndisa Rigmaiden has one of those typically scary intellects found in.. well physicists. Join her on a quest for the profound truths of the universe in her delightully accessible blog.

Our main direction is towards growth in both membership and readership, and quite frankly away from tightly worded statements of purpose and all that. The focus of the portal will be to highlight local politics and identify more specific activities and individuals on the ground. As well, we will continue to poll. This gives us a distinct and useful contribution to the breadth of information which complements the talking heads style on national and international issues at Booker Rising, and the rich sets of interesting facts and stories at The Black Informant.

I continue to be impressed with the amount of material we are putting forth, and yet I am still unsatisfied that we are getting the coverage and readership we deserve. So this year will focus strongly on growth and blogospheric market penetration. We continue to be way ahead of the curve in identifying conservative black opinion on all major issues, but we could use a lot more citations in major and online press. We're also getting into multimedia. New member Bob Parks is podcasting his radio broadcasts. We still have a ways to go, but I have a few marketing tricks as well as tried and true blogospheric tactics up my sleeve.Speaking of new members, I'll be doing some more detailed introductions over the next few weeks. These are exciting times. Stay tuned.

All of these things serve one purpose, to put people in touch with the conservative dynamic in black American politics. We are strong and focused on bringing our opinion to the forefront. We have new and important things to say on the issues of the day and we cannot be ignored. Our presence is not only making itself known, but we are growing.

We appreciate and thank you for your support.

Obligatory Seriousness on The Moussaoui Conviction

• He didn't kill anybody, he shouldn't get the death penalty.
• He was tried in open court, the government completely stepped on it's own feet, and he still got life.
• It took too damn long.
• American jurors are not stupid.

Let me also say something. The more American judges who get to try these cases, the better we get at developing a community of prosecutors and judges who start to understand the seriousness of the global threat. I am 2/3rds of the way to saying that the intelligence services ought to get another deck of cards out for the top AQ hierarchs and save some of their secret tribunals for them. The rest should be 'accidently' shot in the field or brought to the midwest so ordinary American courts can put them through the crushing wheels of justice. But I'm not saying all that, just 66% of that.

Let me put it this way. If the CIA has secret prisons, and what self respecting spying agency doesn't, they should spend their energy decieving the judicial branch in ernest. That way there are no Gitmos.
Let me add one more thing. I find it very difficult to put up with a stunning lack of.. how shall I say.. terror in the minds of our enemies. A whole lot of Americans are going to watch United 93, and we're not going to be afraid of these guys any longer. We're going to want to get our hands on them and throttle them ourselves. Just like Mike Tyson, these guys can only be frightening for so long. Don't they know what we are capable of? So if the CIA has to leak some intel about a nefarious plot, please leak one about a plot thwarted by the intrepid corps at Homeland Security against the terrorists. Not this arrogant petty political crap pulled by Mary McCarthy. The American public hungers to hear about the prosecution of the war - we have the bloodlust, except that Asshat-Americans are pointing the fingers at us and satiating it at the wrong enemy. Heaven forbid some liberal wanker paint blood on a Taliban soldier's door. We know you won't fight "Bush's War", but you obviously are spoiling for a fight. Americans are spoiling for a fight, so let us hear something worth fighting for.

Anyway, let's get efficient about this. One down, 30,000 to go.
 

Blackwell Wins

You know there are still people who carry a grudge about Kerry losing in 2000. And among those who still talk about black vote suppression, there remain whispers about how blacks in Ohio must have been suppressed for Bush to win in 2004. Ken Blackwell has proven, beyond a doubt, that the Ohio Players are here to stay.

We're here. We're Republican. Get used to it.

In The Beginning Was The White Man

I have taken my dog out of the racism pit owing to my dissatisfaction with the politics of anti-racism in the US, but my sentiments and pity remain on the side of good in this. Over at P6, a momentary meeting of minds between Shelby Steele and Earl Dunovant is an interesting insight into one of the things I think is wrong with the whole defensive position. Steele, as you may know, is the champion liberator of the guity white American mind. He has thus become an interesting sort of accomodationist of the black agenda while at the same time decrying just about every black agenda there is.

I wasn't going to comment on White Guilt and the Western Past because you weren't messing with Black folks' head for a change.

But I must say, I am impressed.

You started like a true fan of Prometheus 6.

It began, I believe, in a late-20th-century event that transformed the world more profoundly than the collapse of communism: the world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political legitimacy and even sovereignty. This idea had organized the entire world, divided up its resources, imposed the nation-state system across the globe, and delivered the majority of the world's population into servitude and oppression. After World War II, revolutions across the globe, from India to Algeria and from Indonesia to the American civil rights revolution, defeated the authority inherent in white supremacy, if not the idea itself. And this defeat exacted a price: the West was left stigmatized by its sins. Today, the white West--like Germany after the Nazi defeat--lives in a kind of secular penitence in which the slightest echo of past sins brings down withering condemnation. There is now a cloud over white skin where there once was unquestioned authority.

This idea of the West is a Western interpretation. I can't imagine for a moment that the idea of white supremacy as a world historical force likewise permeates Asian, Arab or Muslim historical narratives.

Toda su base es pertenece a nosotros.

The Tragic Mojado

We were having such a good time yesterday that Doc forgot his bulletproof vest.  Fortunately, he doesn't pull duty today. The bad news is that there will probably be only about 2000 officers on alert for today's street protests in support of illegal aliens.

I sat quietly through the discussions on the subject yesterday as we celebrated my aunt's 68th birthday over in Culver City. Somehow I have this sense of the tragic that something will go wrong and that there's nothing I can do about it but say 'I told you so'. I am preparing to watch some kind of political and civic train wreck.

At the very time we were talking about this, old reruns of Miami Vice were on TVLand. Doc had seen this particular episode in which an undercover sting goes rotten and the security guard Crockett disarms in order to keep his cover gets shot by the bad guys. After the crooks flee the scene, Crockett has to go and be a real cop and attend to the wounded security guard who lays face down with four bulltholes in his back. Alas it is too late, and there arises the classicly cliched scene in which the enormity of the error hits all at once. In my aunt's living room we all sob NOOOOO! at the same time, then crack up laughing at Don Johnson as he acts out the scene.

I am coming to recognize all those liberal and conservative laments coming down from ivory towers in the 90s when multiculturalism first got started, and I wonder if we are truly witnessing the death of modernity. I can't help but notice how Latino is getting translated into low-wage, illegal, unskilled day labor. How Islamic is getting translated into fascist, violent, religious repression. It seems that the very insistance that we recognize the culture and values of marginalized people is reinforcing the very stereotypes multiculturalists were striving to avoid. And so what must be said at this juncture is a reiteration of Cosby's complaint; some of you people are not holding up your end of the deal. The point of multiculturalism is to underscore modernism, to show that there is respect for cultural flavor, but only within the context of a social contract. Illegality is a deal-breaker.

So I'm going to reawaken a perjorative today to make the distinction between Mexican Americans and Mojados. Mojado means 'wet', which would be short for wetback, meaning those fresh from an illegal border crossing over the Rio Grande. These are people we don't want - people who scheme to break our laws and live in this nation for the economic benefit of getting paid on the regular, but are unwilling to pay the dues required in the form of citizenship. It may not seem fair to pile on the people who mop the floors and leave the yellow warning signs that say 'Piso Mojado' when our spoiled kids drop french fries at the food court, BUT. THEY AREN'T REFUGEES, THEY'RE OPPORTUNISTS.

As I said before, it is no trivial feat to scrape up the money and courage to pay some coyote to sneak you across the border. It's not easy to walk across a desert and live a life undercover hiding from law enforcement, racists and scandalous employers in a country where you don't speak the language. In fact, it's a hell of a lot harder to do all that than to fill out the forms for a green card and stand in line behind the legitimate immigrants. Yes it's a shame that all this vitriol will fall on the person of the tragic Mojado, but that's what people who stand for law and order do. They shame publically and they call the cops. It's our patriotic duty, that we'd love to share, if you'd just wait your damned turn. We cannot afford to reward the cheating of the Mojado, no matter how tragic their circumstances.

This day without Mojado labor is a drop in the bucket. It doesn't affect me at all, and I think a lot of people will be surprised to find that those it affects the most will be their neighbors at the low end of the economic ladder. Bus drivers will have it light, nobody will be able to buy balloons, paletas and churros today. A few floors won't get swept, a few driveways won't get paved, a few lawns won't get mowed. God forbid some of us will have to eat at home for a change, but service at the Italian restaurant was fine at lunch today. The American economy will chug along just fine, and what today is for folks like me will be what a bad day on the NASDAQ is for folks like them, just another day. And suddenly people may come to realize that the biggest effect of all this is political.

That's when the tragedy really starts. Because when it comes down to it, the political majority is going to stand for law and order first. No Mojado movement is going to put sustained political pressure on the democracy that is the United States. Maybe then it will sink in how this is the difference this series of unfortunate events and a true grass roots political movement. Just try and fill up the jails and see where that lands you. The Americans will be bailed out and go back to their liberal suburbs and the Mojados will go back to Mexico. Mexican Americans will silently be thankful for their citizenship, just like Antonio Villaraigosa. He's not waving any flags today, and that should tell you something.

For those people defending the Mojado cause, I think you're heading for a Don Johnson moment.