Cobb

It's Official: Rocket Science is Boring

Maybe my kids will be interested to see us put a crew on the Moon, but today's announcement of Lockheed Martin's CEV Orion has got me snoring.

Despite a stalled space shuttle program, NASA is confident it can launch and sustain human exploration of the Moon by 2018, the space agency's top official said Monday.

The $104-billion plan calls for an Apollo-like vehicle to carry crews of up to four astronauts to the Moon for seven-day stays on the lunar surface. The spacecraft, NASA's Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), could even carry six-astronaut crews to the International Space Station (ISS) or fly automated resupply shipments as needed, NASA chief Michael Griffin said.

"Think of it as Apollo on steroids," Griffin said as he unveiled the agency's lunar exploration plan during a much-anticipated press conference at its Washington, D.C.-based headquarters. "Unless the U.S. wants to get out of manned spaceflight completely, this is the vehicle we need to be building."

It is indeed Apollo on steroids. It looks exactly like the Apollo down to the legs on the Lunar Module. I'm sorry but I would have expected something cooler looking.

Richard Posner & The CT Circuit

Judge Richard Posner has made a rather startling insight in his podcast with Glenn Reynolds. It is a very simple idea to understand, and that is that given a choice between countering terror and protecting civil liberties, most courts in the US will protect civil liberties. That is because most  judges in the US don't know much about countering terror, and judges tend to talk what they know. He suggests that what we need is a Counterterrorism Court. Something akin to what the French have is what I interpret, but I may be wrong. I'm not particulary fond of the nomenclature of an Inquisitorial Court, but then neither am I particularly sanguine about the prospects for a purely executive solution to terror.

I have argued that I expect that the more terrorist trials we hold in this country the better we will get at it. If the GWOT is to be refocused as an international police action we are going to have to do a  better job of investigating. Posner opines that the FISA Court is really too narrowly focused on SIGINT to be broadly effective. I agree.

It is also becoming clearer to me that between what we have at Gitmo, old treaties, the Hamdan decision, it's a patchwork. I think there is a strong case for a new type of circuit court with new powers of investigation to handle the kinds of cases we are likely to encounter with Jihadists and non-state actors going forward. I think those who have, even under the influence of BDS, suggested that there is too much Executive power arrogated by GWBush are backing into the truth. I say that the Congress clearly isn't doing a decent enough job, and that anybody with gripes about Gitmo should be behind a new sort of judiciary power.

Everything is not war. War powers are not properly defined by precedent. GWB's lattitude given the mistakes of Iraq have wasted life and resources. Posner is onto something.

So what kind of confidence can we have that a special court will focus on terror suspects and not be especially corrosive of civil liberty? Is Posner someone we could trust in this regard? If not, then who? Are having new powers assigned to the judiciary a road to hell? Is the French model worthy of emulation? Or will we just shoot Osama in the head and be done with it - ie a take no prisoners attitude towards Jihadism.

I am particularly fond of Bush's phrasing of bringing the enemy to justice. The same old justice won't do.

Hottest Ticket in Town

You know you want to go.

American Fascism and the Investor Class

I don't think there is such a thing as American Fascism, but we can call it that for the sake of argument. What's the argument?

What about Clear Channel and their connections to the Bush family? Todays politicians might as well wear advertisments on their business suits like European soccer players! You can't dismiss it that easily. Just who is that senator representing when he writes legislation? His constituents or his crack deal..., err,  campaign contributor?

While we're pretending, let's pretend that George Soros is the only Democrat businessman in America, and only Republicans are getting over. Nah, let's not.

What's exceptional about America is the 'investor class'. Let's not forget about them. The investor class is everybody who thinks that they may be able to retire and has some assets socked away in any financial instrument which is subject to market conditions. Real estate, stocks, bonds, pensions, commercial paper, annuities, term life insurance... OK? All Americans above the poverty line are invested in some small way with the functioning of this economy. We are a nation of millionaires, and these are the millionaires you meet in nice restaurants any day of the week. But I'm mixing too many metaphors. Bottom line is that a lot of business interests are everybody's interests.

First of all, way back when I had disposable investment cash, a cat named Peter Lynch dominated my attention.  I was a Progressive at the time and I was stunned at the amount of money Fidelity Investments had in the markets, notably with the famous Magellan Fund. I basically followed the money and that's where it led. You may recall the mid-late 80s too, that's when just about everybody put their money into mutual funds - at least all of my whitecollar professional colleagues. By the mid 90s I found myself in the company of more stock players and then the infamous day traders. Then in Silicon Valley I found myself one degree of separation from warrant holders and angel investors, company principals and their pals that got inside stock before companies went public. Around 2000, I was invited to be a warrant holder, all it would cost me was 50k. Interestingly enough, I had the cash at the time but I decided against it. Lucky me. My friend lost 300k or so when his company went into legal hell with the FCC. Suffice it to say that I recognized that smart, rich people lose money too, but I was already a contrarian during the Bubble, not least because I had the good fortune to meet a real life Wall Street guru in Vail - but that's another short story.

But back to Lynch. I had enough familiarity with basic investing to know that there are various classes of stock and various classes of mutual funds. And there are also rules that investment consultants and portfolio managers have with regard to the way that their funds are managed. That straightened me out quick fast and in a hurry.

I went to my boy at Merrill Lynch and said I wanted in to one of their high tech mix mutual funds. So you know they do the whole balanced risk portfolio management thing and say you should keep some money in government strips and some in REITs and some in dividend paying blue chips and some in raw stocks and some in mutual funds. So I end up into a Class B of some high growth mid-cap high tech mutual fund, because I don't have 10K cash to dump in and get into Class A. Plus this fund is already a high performer which means it's oversubscribed. Think of it like the price of a Miata. Everybody wants one so rich people get in first and raise the price. I ask the guy if maybe in 6 months I can flip it or take out half and he looks at me like I'm smoking crack. Bottom line was I was in or out and if I wanted to flip stuff, I should play pure stocks and do trading with Brown & Company (which it turns out has been acquired by ETrade). We're conservative here at Merrill, and he shot my wife a look like, calm your boy down ma'am.

See, when you run a mutual fund, you have to keep a certain number of classes open and blah blah. There's a buttload of rules that the SEC enforces. My understanding is that this cuts both ways for the company maintaining the portfolio. They buy and sell stocks in and out of the fund as a block and this information is public. So the companies know what's going on. When subscribers to the fund (investors) find out the fund is not doing well, they liquidate. The fund manager has to sell it to suckers or close the fund. There are so many mutual funds, so many companies and so many investors that it's impossible to manipulate the market. Not impossible meaning rhetorically impossible, impossible meaning practically impossible and legally impossible.

I met an Indian dude with 2 PhDs who figured out how to juke the system, so let me describe that in a quick aside, while I'm at it. Since mutual fund movements are public and many of them trade according to well established rules, you can figure out which of those rule disfavor a particular individual company and then bet against it, but this is a pure stock play. Here's an example. Let's say you hate WalMart and you love Sears. Furthermore you know that Fidelity's Retail Fund holds WalMart and Sears and a dozen other retailers. You hear news that WalMart is having a bad quarter. So the whole Fidelity fund goes down, and since it's the largest institutional holder of WalMart stock it's bad news for the whole sector and it drags down the stock price of Sears too. But you know Sears is run by a brother who has his head on straight and you understand that the fundamentals are good with Sears, so you buy Sears stock individually. Depending on the amount of Sears that's held by insiders, institutions and individual investors, Sears stock will bounce back when they announce good results. You can also play the game in reverse and short Sears when WalMart does well. The trick is understanding the math underneath, fine tuning the model and determining how much you want to risk. Plus the real bonus was when a company got dropped from an institution or was in play for buyout..etc. Just like Vegas, there's a million ways to play it. Me? I didn't bother, but it was a good lesson, and I have done channelling.

So. What about Clear Channel? The stock ticker is CCU. Who owns that stock? The facts are here. It's 90% owned by institutional investors. It's a public corporation, the books are open. If you've got something to prove, then prove it. But you can't because it's a waste of time. There are too many people whose money is tied up into such entities to let something like some crazy scheme involving the President to manipulate a public company for his own personal or partisan benefit. The fact of the matter is that everybody with money invested in Clear Channel wants the company to do well. But you cannot manipulate business with politics, that's what socialists do, that's what communists do, that's what people like me are against.

Can you manipulate politics with business? You can't do anything more as a Republican than you can as a Democrat. But honestly, I don't pay so much attention to that, and politically it's a non-starter. I mean opinions are easy to change but fortunes are not. People have an unlimited supply of political opinions but only a few they can bet their money on. Would you bet money on the results of elections? Would you bet money on the outcome of opinion polls?

This post hasn't gone exactly where I thought it would, it's kind of overkill on the openness of public companies and free markets and the inability for anyone to control their value. But I hope it has given people an understanding of how many people are actually involved in capitalism in America and that conspiracies just don't work. Bet money on it.

Jihadism: The Final Term

I think I have finally come to the point where I can agree that Jihadism is the proper term for what we are against. This ads clarity to all of the things we have to deal with. Following the lead of this post at the Counterterrorism Blog, I'll adapt my writing to conform:

Because for 11 years years, the American public wasn’t informed about the threat that lead to September 11 and because the classrooms and newsrooms of the United States were not educated enough about the global threat of “Jihadism,” we feel it is incumbent on individual citizens to educate themselves about this danger and mobilize to prevent a Future Jihad looming around the world and at home. It is important that American citizens understand who the “Jihadists” are, what they want to achieve, and how they are proceeding. Without this knowledge, the American public will be unable to be part of the political debate about national security and the War on Terror. And if deprived from the support of an informed public, the US Government, now and in the future, cannot sustain difficult decisions pertaining to the defeat of the Terrorist enemy.

This makes it clear that the enemy is not Islam. This makes it clear that Terrorism is just a method, so people who might dither on the nature of Hezbollah's recent incursion against Israeli military personnel and targets cannot dispute they are jihadis. This makes it clear that the GWOT is indeed against an ideology, and not just Terrorism itself. This makes it clear that Iran, while not a direct terrorist threat under the current regime, is an ideological threat and allows us a threat to differentiate various current and future leaders.

I'm also a little fed up with terms like 'Islamo-Nazi' as Michael Medved uses, because its Jewishcentric and automatically implies more to the relationship between the US and Israel than there needs to be - dragging more of Islam into the enemy camp than there needs to be.

This term outdoes 'Islamicist' which I've previously used in terms of those who wish to establish Sharia. It's OK to want to establish Sharia if it is moderated by the Westphalian concept of statehood and diplomacy. For example, I don't have a problem that Sharia is established in some African states like Somalia if that is generally speaking the will of the people. So long as Somalia doesn't export Jihad, then it's cool. Sudan, on the other hand is not exporting Jihad, but it is clear that the attempt to establish Sharia there includes ethnic cleansing, which is unaccetable under any conditions. So I can be diplomatically specific with regard to Islamicists and differentiate them.

The case of The Wanker al-Sadr in Iraq is difficult. Clearly, he is a force for insurgency and has cast his lot to be a fomenter of civil strife if not civil war. But it is unclear to me at this moment whether or not he is a Jihadist. Does he use such terms to incite his followers in the Shiite Mahdi Army to sectarian violence, or is his strategy to sustain chaos against the US occupation? He may or may not be. Still, he is clearly an enemy of the US and of the current Iraqi Government, and sooner or later the Prime Minister is going to have to disarm his militia or declare him an enemy of the state. Islamist militants may or may not be Jihadis. But it's difficult for me to determine if their opposition to other sects is due to political repression or if they see other sects as irrevocably heretical.

I have used the terms 'Islamist' and 'Islamicist' almost interchangeably but I have always meant for their to be a distinction. That distinction being that the Islamist wants Islamic influence on the state, whereas the Islamicist demands an Islamic state. The Islamicist demands Sharia. In that regard I view Islamicists as more dangerous. To add subtlety and perhaps confusion to this distinction, I would argue that Islamists and Islamicists may or may not be Fundamentalists. So I am acknowledging the possibility that there may be moderate Muslims who may desire Sharia in that they may not prescribe Dhimmitude to all non-muslims. Nevertheless,  I don't generally expect that any Islamic Fundamentalist would be comfortable with or supportive of secular rule. All fundamentalists want to destroy the line between church and state.

As for Islamo-Fascist, I think that it stands to reason that any Islamic Fundamentalist would establish a state which by Western standard would probably be Fascist, but I think it really depends upon the level of education in that state and how comfortable middle class muslims would be there.

Fortunately there aren't that many major muslim movements in that many countries. We can bring this down to cases, and we should. The enemy is the Jihadi.

My Fourteenth, Not Yours

Section. 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
-- Constitution of the United States , Amendment XIV

Talk is going around that we may want to de-naturalize some Mojado children. You have to go fairly deep in order to do so. And it's a bit surprising that those for whom this smithing of the Constitution was originally intended are among those chiefly interested in undercutting. I'm talking about African Americans. Consider Ted Hayes:

"The comparison is bogus. Rosa Parks was a U.S.-born citizen. This lady is a foreign national. If she wants to use Rosa Parks as an inspiration, that's fine. But do it in Mexico." — Ted Hayes, conservative Republican, on Elvira Arellano, an illegal immigrant holed up in a Chicago church to defy a deportation order after fraudulently using a Social Security card to further maintain her illegal entry status at work and who compares herself to the civil rights icon.

In case you haven't heard, out here in California the Crips and Bloods don't fight each other so much. Now it's the black gangs against the Mexican gangs. The hostility in some neighborhoods is palpable, and not just gang neighborhoods. Just last week over at the South Bay Galleria, I heard some black teens muttering about how much they hate Mexicans. If they have family or extended family somewhere in the California Penal System, there can be little doubt that is not merely sentiment.

The Fourteenth Amendment was essentially created to grandfather African slaves into the post war America as citizens. So as I said, the roots of these ideas are pretty deep, however there very well may be a legal hole as described by this extended Wikipedia entry.. nota bene:

Spirit Chorale

Omeed Popal: Terrorist?

Somebody went on a rampage today aiming at pedestrians. He mowed down at least 14 people in San Francisco. According to a guy who just called Hugh Hewitt, all of these attacks were carried out in what is a Jewish neighborhood.

If this was happening in Los Angeles, we'd have five choppers in the air and broadcasting it live, but the TV is kind of slow right now. Something's fishy.

Wizbang has other details.

Why Blacks & Whites Don't Dialog

(from the Vision Circle archives, October 2003)

I've spent a lot of time on the Internet as a race man, but I think I've probably spent more time as the fly in the buttermilk as it were. I've proven to myself and to others the value of sustaining black & white dialog on racial issues. I'd like to point out a few things that I've recently been thinking about.

From the black side there is a very powerful disincentive, or taboo against, confiding in whitefolks about the presence of racism. I think the notable exception to this is when Jews start the conversation in a particular way. If a nominally white person outs himself as a Jew, unprompted to a black person and talks about racism, I think a strong bridge is built.

It's one of those things I beleive blackfolks are immediately responsive to on a gut level. Socially, we look out for each other. This is part of the essence of what I call the Kwaku network - blacks telling other blacks about offenses done to blacks. Right now as we speak, there's a little duststorm of outrage rising over the selling at Urban Outfitters of a product called Ghettopoly. Some of this stuff rises to the NAACP (which ought to be a lot less black and a lot more PoC) but it doesn't go to your next door neighbor who is white.

There is a perception that people are going to be more white than people, 'when push comes to shove'. I don't think so, but our social intercourse has not matured in the mainstream these 50 years of integration, to the level at which black/other intimacy is generally tight enough to share these revelations. Whitefolks don't ever give up the front and fantasy that they could be 'the man' (and all I can think about is what happened to Ray Romano - how he became a superstar on his mediocre talent. Look at a picture of him today. He looks physically different. He's not a vulnerable human being any longer, he's an icon of the nominally white American dream). Whitefolks don't ever admit their trash backgrounds and humble themselves around blackfolks. Blackfolks don't ever let their guard down and simply trust whitefolks in a carefree and easy way. And of course blacks are constantly reminded of how many people just don't get it. The risk, I think for most blackfolks is too great. I don't excuse it. It's something that we must get over and I know a lot of people are trying...now I'm hearing Mike's voice take over in my head about the kind of civility that we have to show each other,*constantly*. I think it's a little bit more than that on a personal level, it is a refusal to retreat. It's demonstrating somehow that an individual is never going to withdraw into their racial safety zone and ignore the 'others'. Is there too much racial injustice in America for each of us to make that promise? Perhaps. Is the ethos of colorblindness wrecking havoc with this potential intimacy? Absolutely. Is 'diversity & multiculturalism' a sort of retrenchment into the personal politics of difference? I think so.

So there are many barriers to overcome that mitigate against the potential for a sustained interracial conversation which settles terms and can focus political energy. But if I may use a jewish analogy, blackfolks want a divine kingdom on earth. We want the laws and the powers to defeat our enemies. We developed ourselves on our own and we want to be left alone. We don't believe this intimacy and friendship is the way to go. It's tedious, it's slow, and every friend is not a fellow warrior. Who knows that better than blacks who are not 100% African blooded but still disconnected from a certain half of their family? This is why the jewish provocation works, we understand the point of view of a jewish warrior. It's not so much a friendship as an alliance, and we don't have to keep investing in intimacy to know that the battle will still be engaged. I percieve that's where the friendship thing goes between blacks and whites. The whole drama over a racial incident and the black & white person look at each other with their mouths open "I thought you were my friend" says the white person. "I guess all I am to you is a friend" says the black. That's why blackfolks consistently say they'd rather deal with a redneck bigot, because at least he's honest and they always know where he's coming from.

Lebanon Update

Eye on Shebaa
It turns out that Shebaa Farms are still disputed but Hezbollah has decided to withdraw. It's now something of a paper dispute, which is probably what it ought to be, rather than one between a state-less militia and a paranoid nation.

Annan Booed
On NPR this morning, word was that Annan's visit to Southern Lebanon was met by the [phony] public and he recieved boos. The editor of the Daily Star kept repeating himself in the one minute interview which suggests he only had one [propaganda] point to make. That was, of course, harsh rhetoric directed against US and Israel for footdragging the peace process as Israel continued its attacks. I don't know when it ever became the reputation of the UN to act with alacrity. Then again, this is another weird expectation of instant war and instant peace. It's not going to happen.

So Give 'Em Back Already
The release of two hostages negotiated by Abbas in the Gaza Strip shows a useful difference between the desparation of the Palestinians and the arrogance of Hezbollah. Rafe thinks, astoundingly, that Nasrallah is some kind of honest leader:

I was shocked to read the following from Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah yesterday:

 

If I had known that the operation to capture the soldiers would lead to this result, we would not have carried it out.

I think I'm so disillusioned at this point that I'm surprised when anyone in a position of leadership actually admits to a regret or mistake. It's a shame that a terrorist leader is setting the example here.

I was also glad to read that the Fox News journalists were freed in Gaza. It's hard out there for a journalist in the Middle East these days, but the job they do is vitally important.

Duh. Nasrallah still hasn't returned the Israeli soldiers that started this mess. How honest is that?

Flushing the Stash

I'm reading about the Spanish Civil War and trying to understand it because it has been said that there are parallels to the recent conflict in Lebanon. Here's the thing about Spain.

Although the British government proclaimed itself neutral, its diplomats in Spain urged support for the Nationalists. Britain froze all Spanish assets, an act that affected primarily the loyalist side because the government had transferred its gold reserves to Britain for safe keeping at the start of the war. Similarly, the Anglo-French arms embargo hit the Republicans disproportionately and did not prevent the Nationalists from getting weapons from Italy and Germany. Britain also discouraged activity by its citizens supporting the Republicans. The last Republican prime minister, Juan Negrín, hoped that a general outbreak of war in Europe would compel the European powers (mainly Britain and France) to finally help the republic, but World War II would not commence until months after the Spanish conflict had ended. Ultimately neither Britain nor France intervened to any significant extent. Britain supplied food and medicine to the Republic, but actively discouraged the French government of Léon Blum from supplying weapons.

Where does American money go when our Republic is in jeopardy? I don't think I've thought of that scenario before. I mean our money isn't gold, it's 'numbers' in 'bank accounts'. But who is doing the backup to tape of the zillions of transactions? Lay that aside for a moment, and we'll get back to it.

The extent to which America is rich depends on our ability to transact. That is to say $30,000 in the bank feels good because we know that at any minute we can go purchase that new car. It matters that it's fungible. It doesn't matter to us if it's a money order, cashier's check, cash, credit card, credit union loan or backed out of home equity. It's fungible. And that is all consumer goods and services I'm talking about upon which a significantly large part of our GDP is based. But what is it? It's people paying a premium for Green Giant peas & pearl onions instead of the store brand. How much of our economic security is based on the meager but marketing-driven differences between plain-wrap and premium? If Americans actually sacrificed luxury and disposable-income type items, a zillion dollar economy would disappear.

It's a frightening thing to consider what our domestic world would be like if we didn't have so many millionaires who made their fortunes on suntan lotion or cheap sunglasses (echoing Neil Simon's Wax Fruit King from 'Come Blow Your Horn') What would it take to get us culturally focused on national unity? I would greatly fear that hypno-toad.

But really. Where does the real money in real accounts go if the paperwork disappears? To the courts? New obligations materialize? Does the Army commandeer assets to keep moving? Is it gold? Diamonds?

Granted, we probably don't have to think about these things. But if there is an Islamic Bomb in our future, perhaps we do. I'm sure somebody already has, but what was the answer?

Brayboy's Back

The Black Informant Returns!

The other night my wife and I were looking at the ABC news special on AIDS in Black America. While I thought the program was pretty good, like always I had some additional thoughts on the subject that I wanted to share on the subject. I wanted to find a site online where there was at least a decent conversation going on about the subject, but was unable to find one.

Exactly.

Where there is no hero, you be the hero.
-- Rabbi Hillel

Snurtle

If you should pass a Snurtle by
And ask him where he's going
I'll bet you that he will reply
There is no way of knowing

Because he crawls so awfully slow
His trips take so much time
On whether he should stay or go
He can't make up his mind

He might come to a forking road
And choose the left or right
But by the time he makes his turn
The day has turned to night.

It doesn't matter to a Snurtle
If he goes or not.
Because his home is on his back
He's fine at any spot.

So when you pass a Snurtle
He might ask you what's the hurry?
If you have what you need inside
Then you should never worry.

Prey

Prey is one of the most innovative and subtly annoying games I've ever played on the 360. It shows both brilliance and age.

What I know of Prey is that it is an age-old project finally brought to life by its developers. I recall seing a preview of it at last year's E3 or someplace important. Everybody was treating the authors with much respect so I was interested in looking forward to the game. But I completely forgot about it and it wasn't until about an hour into the game that I realized where I was.

1. Prey is the creepiest game I've played in a long time. It's the slimiest world I can recall being in, and the alien biotech is truly alien. I finished the game and I still don't have names for the creatures and weapons.

2. The use of gravity in this game makes its style of play and the environments extremely unusual. It makes you wonder why nobody else has done anything like it. It makes me want to say that Prey is really the first thoroughly 3D game in the industry. In the world of shooters this innovation is totally unique, like the psychic powers of Psy-Ops and the unusual skills of Riddick in the Escape from Butcher Bay game. There is nothing to compare with the cool of standing sideways on a wall, aiming to the left and watching an enemy fall up.

3. Prey's fleshing out of the game is juvenile. There are really no humans to interact with that add to the creepiness of the overall storyline. Maybe it's because I'm fresh from several months of playing Oblivion but the human, even the beastial element of the AI is pretty lousy. It's not mucked up completely with idiot boss battles (there are only about 4), but for a would be Cherokee warrior, your protagonist is never called to do anything but destroy every living thing in this world.

4. The environments are spectacular. They go from the DOOMlike dark and claustrophobic, to the intricate three dimesnional mazy, to the double gravity system of twin asteroids.

5. The dialog sucks, period. The game could use a whole lot more humanity and voice acting. In the beginning, things were very compelling because it appeared that there would be a lot of humans that you would encounter in the space ship that would assist you through various parts, but that never materialized. Instead we just had zombies. I will give props to the use of the radio DJ, but the parallel plot never materialized, therefore making it a real throwaway effect.

6. The spirit world life-restoring minigame is inspired. That's really a great concept and I expect that many games should copy that. It never really got tiring although I thought it would, but the idea that you have to earn your life back is great. On the one hand, it obviates the need for formal checkpoints, and you never have a situation where you get caught at a checkpoint with 2% life that sometimes ruins really good games. Secondly, when you're never guaranteed to return to your savepoint with full life, that's a very good challenge too. Very well done.

7. On the whole it's not a very challenging game when played on the normal level although there were some puzzles that had me really stumped for a long time. Some of the more interesting puzzles and levels could have been a whole lot harder and I'm glad they left them simple, because playing in 3D where any wall or floor can become a cieling is very radical. That could burn out your brain.

8. The Ghost walking is also brilliant. I just wish the ghost could have been a little bit more deadly with his bow. Still, it's a great plus to know that you can work this kind of magic. I loved it in PsyOps and it was done well here too.

9. The eagle familiar was sometimes useful and sometimes distracting. I would have liked a way to power it up to help fight off some enemies, or be able to make it do specific tasks.

10. The multidimensional references back to places on Earth was a brilliant touch that added to the creepiness, especially when the jukebox could be heard. On the other hand we could have done without the slot machines.

Overall, this is a very innovative game you just don't want to miss. If they add some of the unique elements to their next game, it will be a triumph. Prey is a flawed classic.

The Black Katrina Bomb

Tomorrow, I will have recorded Spike Lee's documentary on Katrina in its entirety. Some time later this week I will have watched the entire four hours. But I will be focused like a laser on the theory, if it comes up, that the government bombed the levees.

You've heard the conspiracy theory many times before, attributed to nutcase blackfolks, that the government planted explosives in the levees and that this was the reason that New Orleans flooded black communities. What if that were partially true? Well, everything I just read over at Wizbang supports something of a mind-altering explanation that supports the theory that says the hurricane itself was not the cause of the disasterous flooding.

In the months since Katrina, we’ve learned that the storm was a Category 1 by the time she hit New Orleans. No “Super Hurricane," just an average storm. We’ve also learned that the New Orleans Hurricane Protection System was not overwhelmed by Katrina, it collapsed. Causing the Corps of Engineers admit they flooded New Orleans not Katrina… An admission that got scant little media coverage. The Great Flood of New Orleans was not a natural disaster but a man made one.

The reason the Corps finally had to admit responsibility was that the floodwall that failed -flooding 70% of the city- basically collapsed under its own weight. It was undeniable. The Corps tried for months to claim the water came over the top of the floodwall and washed it away from the backside. (Which would make it Congress’s fault) Everyone who has seen the break or looked at the surge data knew this was a lie; that the wall suffered a catastrophic failure before the water reached the top. Almost a year later, the Corps admitted that the floodwall suffered from multiple fatal design flaws and failed prematurely.

So I'm going to have to take it upon myself, since my dog in this fight was a defense of Nagin in saying he did everything he possibly could under the circumstances, and see how well our institutional memory of the blogosphere actually works. I didn't spend much time examining or dismissing theories about the bombing that I can remember, but I did embroil myself in matters concerning the validity and standing of black testimony vs that of the media. So let's see where this leads.

The Next Heroes

Tigerhawk asks what we can expect of the 9/11 Generation.

So what will be the impact of the generation that has come of age during the last five years? More than 300,000 young Americans have served in Afghanistan and Iraq, and many of them will come home and eventually enter careers in government, journalism, business, academia and politics. There are many more Americans who did not fight in those wars, who know virtually nobody who has, and who know what they think they know from abstract media -- press accounts, books, photographs and fauxtographs, and blogs of the right and left. What effect will these two groups have when they become the leaders of our government, economy and culture? If you answer in the comments -- and I very much hope you do -- consider particularly the likely impact of this generation on American foreign policy. What will these returning veterans teach us about the Arab and Muslim world, and how will the cohort that stayed at home react to that instruction?   

I have just recently visited the Wikipedia page of Strauss & Howe after being called a (Neoconservative) Straussian. It was a happy accident in rediscovering these gents who wrote The Fourth Turning. It turns out that their prediction of the next generation will probably be correct.

• Nomads are ratty, tough, unwanted, diverse, adventurous, and cynical about institutions. They grow up as the underprotected children of an Awakening, come of age as the alienated young adults of an Unravelling, become the pragmatic, midlife leaders of a Crisis and age into tough, post-crisis elders during a High. Generation X and the Lost Generation are examples of Nomad generations.

• Heroes are conventional, powerful, and institutionally driven, with a profound trust in authority. They grow up as the increasingly protected children of an Unraveling, come of age as the Heroic, team-working youth of a Crisis, become energetic and hubristic mid-lifers during a High and become the powerful elders who are attacked in the next Awakening. The G.I. Generation that fought World War II is an example of a Hero generation.

According to their generational calendar, the next Heroic generation are those who were born between 1982 and 2003.

Millennial Saeculum
Boom	Prophet	1943-1960
13th	Nomad	1961-1981
Millennial	Hero	1982-2003

I've often spoken about the tendencies in suburbs like mine for children's activities to be over-poiliced. Almost every kid around attended a school with a DARE program. I'm on the cusp of GenX and identify with the Boomers too. But I recognize that Nomad pattern in my life, and there's no question that I am raising my kids rather much as the Heroic profile suggests. I've been skeptical about the application of this Sacular theory beyond the borders of the US, but that's not what matters. Here I think it's broadly apt.

Prospects for Vision Circle

Those people who have contributed in the past to Vision Circle are, in my estimation, the finest thinkers present in the blogosphere on black politics and culture. They represent, in the best way, black progressive thought. Now that the Vision Circle group blog has been in hiatus for some time, I am thinking about rebirthing it as new webtools become available.

Specifically, Google is offering domain hosting of mail and calendar. These are powerful tools for communication.

Here's what I'm thinking. Imagine a national hookup. A calendar or set of calendars that enables every potential cultural and political event of significance to black communities posted in one place, at Vision Circle. If it were sponsored by all of the top black bloggers in the 'sphere, it could be rather cool.

Like everything else of this nature, it will only work if it is powered by the user community. I know that the political and cultural calendar is wanted, but the question is how to kick start such a beast. If we start with personal ads, then we could get numbers, but that won't be our real target (or would it). So basically, I'm thinking about the prospects for this kind of service - national free email, and calendar for black culture, politics and crtical debate.

I think that having 1000 folks in one domain would be a very worthwhile goal, with people on the ground in all of the major metros contributing to the calendar. Slammin.

What do you think?

Andrew Young's Neighborhood

OK here's a surprise. Andrew Young is dead right and Wal-Mart knows it. That's why they fired him. We're not supposed to be able to handle the truth and Young's got just enough juice to attract people capable of dismembering Wal-Mart's marketing tactics and get right to that truth.

I'm lazy so I'm not going to get a direct quote from Young, but I trust the guys at Slate did the appropriate amount of research when they said this:

In the Sentinel interview, Young said that Wal-Mart "should" displace mom-and-pop stores. No doubt he's correct that Wal-Mart can provide some of the same goods to inner-city consumers at lower prices. But that's only because Wal-Mart doesn't aspire to provide its employees a minimally decent standard of living. (Economies of scale, of course, also lend an advantage.) Whether the result is a net benefit to low-income blacks I leave to others to decide. But Wal-Mart's stinginess is no reason to judge harshly inner-city shop owners of any race who seek some sliver of economic security.

On the other hand I don't expect the guys at Slate however to grok how seriously black folks in the hood look at the fact that they are not business owners. The sliver of economic security that the merchant with a commercial account at the local bank is greater than that of the average family in the hood.

Yeah you can blabber about minimally decent standards of living, but haven't you Hollywood lefties even watched Clerks? What kind of standard of living do you think a liquor store employee lives? Let me make this clear. Mom and Pop stores are inferior in every way in the 'hood from step one. See at Wal-Mart there's a smiling person at the door who tells you hello and will help you find anything in the store. In the ghetto there is a scowling non-black individual eyeballing you in a security mirror from behind a plexiglas bullet shield. What part of the American dream is that? It is inequality in disrespectful defiance of folks politically oriented to feel put upon by their relative lack of economic independence and clout. It only takes a little spark to ignite a smokebomb of fuming frustrated complaint. That's what Young was smoking.

The Slate guys are right about one thing, which is a very interesting and subtle difference I think it makes sense to uphold. Andrew Young didn't describe that frustration, he expressed it. It was therefore Andrew Young acting like an oppressed minority from the 'hood, which he clearly is not. So he misspoke and misrepresented himself by trying to be political when he should have been a marketing flack for Wal-Mart. He must not need the money.

Then again, he was being interviewed at length by one of the last black newspapers in the nation. Maybe he thought Whitey wasn't watching.
 

African Marketplace 2006

I took the 80% Family to the African Marketplace yesterday over at Rancho Cienega Park. Nobody calls it Rancho Cienega Park, or at least nobody did when I grew up. It was either 'Rancho' or 'Dorsey', more often Dorsey after the High School right next door.

We parked on Dorsey's grass and paid $6 a head and proceded directly to the food court. I'll tell you straight that the BBQ from Stones was the most popular. Second came the Louisiana cuisine, then the Caribbean and finally the West African. Not surprising.

There was a whole lot more gospel in this year's occasion. It was somewhat surprising, but the difference was clear. The Youth Stage, of the three stages in the park was 100% Gospel Hiphop. OK well 90%. There was some dancing to an old school tune 'Bust a Move' and one on Chris Brown's 'Run It', but they clearly took the time to do some thinking about the themes. Not so however with the filthy, and I do mean filthy petting zoo. I have this nightmare vision about what the planners must have been thinking about when they ordered that up.. like yo brother do you know any rednecks with a goat and a llama? Yeah but he doesn't bathe and the animals are kinda pathetic looking. But we gotta have animals...

Thed did also find a fairly skillful juggler who was performing at the single most commercially themed area at the park. Some water thing that I studiously avoided.

Sometimes the most obnoxious hawker has something actually worth it. I am eating, finally, my Peach Delight which is like a combination of cobbler and dump cake with a pecan crust. All afternoon you could hear this guy yelling about his desert. "It's what peach cobbler wants to be when it grows up!". Over and over and over. He was right. It's the absolute bomb. I should have eaten some yesterday instead of saving it. I would have been in a much better mood.

Instead, I checked out a spacey group called Essence. They were a trio. The woman sung in a style reminescent of the lead female singer of the 5th Dimension with a slight touch of Neko Case twang which worked quite nice. The man sounded very much like Jeffrey Osborne. The other woman did an improvisational dance that was straight out of experimental theatre - like a combination of yoga and full-body sign language. The dancer, in black jeans and a flowing brownish / leopardish flowing sari & scarf emoted with these facial expressions that defy description. She gave the act an eerie emotional depth. But it was on their second song where they blew the doors off by adding a lanky rapper who looked like the Palestinian antagonist in 'The Siege'. Mind you, this is a gospel group. So their rap about Zion was rather staggering. I was reminded, as I watched this spectacle, of the exploits of the Diggers. This was theatre.
As it stood I found that there really isn't much to be said for buying African baubles, bangles, beads, scupltures, clothing, carvings, masks, food and music. We have been there and done that. We have got the flavor nicely done. What wasn't in that list was African culture, politics, religion, and philosophy. Instead, you had people wearing the clothes and jewelry selling audiotapes of various loud voices screaming about white people. I'm too much inured to that to even pay enough attention to it in order to make a proper criticism. If I had a good camera, I'd merely take a picture and move on.

I did stop at the Islamic tent and cracked open a copy of an English & Arabic Qu'ran. I can't tell whether or not it was abridged. But next to it was a six volume set for $75. Too rich for my blood. There was only one other person there besides the proprietor, but I didn't engage. It was just good to know that there's that book I have to own sooner or later. Later there were two others having an animated discussion, but I was done for the day and in a hurry to leave.

 

The irony of the afternoon was found for me that the most rewarding moment of the day came as I decided to leave early. I was prepared to go back to my car and listen to the last CD of 'Fiasco' and it just so happened that there were a couple dozen Africans warming up for a soccer game on Dorsey's field. So I went to have a seat and watched the game. This was a pickup game in a style I've not seen, not that I watch so very much. But it definitely had a different flavor from the Latin games I've seen around the city. These guys are fast, and they play tight with a lot more control on the run than what I typically see.

This is my first YouTube and I took the video with my PDA. They took out the sound. But I think watching real African immigrants playing a real game was a whole lot more interesting than looking at old Jim Crow signs or thinking about buying a mask to hang up on my wall.

Deep Self

A mysterious person has pierced the veil. Somebody from the company I'm working with has found the blog and presented themselves as such, commenting on a recent diary entry. It brings up an interesting angle about me, and I kinda feel like writing personally for a moment.

I spent a lot of time yesterday in public, which sets me into one of three primary moods. These three are in effect when it's just me, if I'm with somebody else then I pay attention to them. They are center of attention cool guy, alien observation mode, or counting the five dozen reasons a person like me does not belong here. I'd rather be in mood one, two is cool if I can think of an interesting literary angle, three is often not bad, unless it's a business meeting, church or some other serious affair where I'm supposed to be paying respectful attention. Yesterday was mostly three with a bit of two interspersed.

It is when I am in mood three, which I'll call 'logical rejection', that I become introspective. And my introspection is usually brief (since I know myself very well) and what follows is explication. I was at the African Marketplace in LA yesterday and I got hooked on one sentence repeating in my head as I became bored out of my gourd:

I was 8 years old when I accepted Jesus as my personal savior (pause, waiting for the audience to warm to this) and I prayed all the time. By the time I was 10, we were on very good speaking terms, Jesus and me. (warm and cuddly now). In fact, I finally asked Jesus whether it was him or my conscience talking. (turning somewhat intellectual and deep-like). Jesus told me that I already knew the answer to that, but to check back whenever I had a question my conscience couldn't answer. (whoa, deep). (extended pause). I haven't talked to Jesus much since then (uh oh) because as far as I was concerned Jesus blessed me. He left me in the hands of my conscience...

Now I'm being unfaithful to yesterday's thought. Although all of this is true, what I wanted to say yesterday was a slam right after telling people that I was saved at age 10, which is that much of Christianity only requires the emotional maturity of a child. And that is what I truly think every time I hear someone use the phrase 'heavenly father' and 'personal savior'. What is a personal savior but an invisible friend?

That is not, incidently, how I think of Jesus. It is not the kind of Christian I am. I am not a 'take all of your troubles to Jesus' kind of Christian. I do not respond to calls to redemption. One day perhaps I'll need that like oxygen, and I'll be eternally grateful that there's a balm in Gilead, but I don't sing that song today. Swing Low Sweet Chariot has always sounded to me like the very anthem of the defeated soul.

Instead, I look to Jesus as the Christ. People who say Jesus is sweet, that Jesus is love, who constantly bless and glorify the holy name of Jesus, almost never say Christ. I cannot tell you how deeply that aggravates me as a Christian. Christians, as the name implies, ought to follow the life of Christ. That has nothing to do with the Cult of Jesus.

---

It's odd that I get to that point this morning. There are a huge number of daunting tasks on my agenda and I should be about them. But my mysterious stranger has prompted this, Nulan too and the responses at my other new and personal blog about my Report From the Lower Upper Middle Class.

I don't have a lot to say about myself. I do, but I'm a fundamentally low key individual about myself. Sure, *I* pay a lot of attention to me, but I don't spend a lot of time trying to get other people to pay attention to me. I'm not sure why that is, but I could guess, or I could invent another true story that explains it. Another time.

So because I don't get other people to pay attention to me, my interactions with people, even over long periods of time tend to be surprising to them. And I think that when people find thing out about me it tends to make them mistrust me - being someone full of surprises is not good. That is why I wish I had something, or one thing, that could communicate me beyond the barrier. It's this blog of course, which is fairly complete about my thinking these days, but it's really not. I once wrote, back in 1999, I came to the Internet to influence people, not to make friends. That's absolutely true, and still is. But it is inevitable that a Socratic march towards philosophically consistent reasoning about the worlds of culture and politics can be deeply revealing of the self. And that self, presented here at Cobb is one I am perfectly comfortable with.

And yet it is somewhat troubling to be all that I am here, and those few things I am at work. That is because I am a consultant, and I am working for a not inconsiderable chunk of change to be a catalyst for my clients. I don't have time for a lot of small talk, I work, I prove, I facilitate, I move on. It's a painful thing to separate from a client when you've actually made things work for them. I am accustomed to being the accelerated part of other folks' jobs. Part of me longs for the pace of my old white collar world of Nordstrom shirts and suspenders when I was executive staff and the top floor pace was that sustained by executives using the force of their personalities and relationships to steer a giant ship of a 3% annual growth company. I'd have a hell of a golf game by now. Moreover people would expect to know my personality and be constantly judging my character in terms of the way I lead and motivate and discipline my team. But that's not what kind of career I have now, and I have become at long last comfortable with my inner geek - perfectly willing to be that as the situation demands.

But then there's this blog. Where the philosopher and the profane raconteur and the blistering political firebrand, and the haughty raceman and the... yeah whatever. You guys ought to write better intros of me. In fact, I'll have a contest. Shay has her quote column, I need a 'people are saying' thingy too.

Yesterday before I left to the African Marketplace, for the first time in a couple years, I looked to see if I had any Cobb business cards. The last time I went, I saw my old friend Art McGee. This time, I was out of Cobb cards, so I took some old Vision Circle cards. But the whole event was disappointing and I gave cards to no one. I wandered around through tents set up by the 50 Page Book Men and the Scientologists(!). But I'll write more about that separately. The point is that once again, I didn't feel like sharing. I kept seeing echoes of things and places where I was mentally and spiritually a really long time ago, and it sounded like.. it sounded like yesterday, and I wanted to be in the now. I wanted everybody to see Christ as I do. I wanted them to see blackness as an emergent behavior. Well, I say that now. What I wanted was to get out of there.

It's the discomfort I have in making the case for the differences that keeps me quiet face to face. I am much more comfortable being a strong silent type who responds to pointed questions rather than bogarding my complex agenda up front. What I've said before is that a rapper wants $17 of respect from a million people; I want a million dollars worth of respect from 17.

And so I'll sadly say goodbye, sometime in October to all the folks at my client, having been only who I've been. And with the exception of the mysterious stranger that's likely all they are to know. Ironically, I am perfectly comfortable with that.

 

On Racial Survivor

If the producers of Survivor want to make their show a four way with racial colors that's fine with me. Whatever. I think it's good television. I don't know about everybody, but blackfolks do it all the time. The Great Race, American Idol, The Apprentice, Road Rules, Real World, Fear Factor.. there has not been a reality show yet that I haven't heard from blackfolks some kind of cheering for the black winner.

I hear that the producers want to call it a 'social experiment'. Stop lying! It's a gimmick. A good gimmick, but nothing more than that. So go fetch your ratings bone and stop pretending you're highminded.

Too Much to Lose

I'm watching science videos these days. Futurama too, but mostly science videos like this one. I have an appointment, sorta, with one of the smartest guys I know. This guy calls Mark Cuban an idiot. So now I'm boning up.

I like this guy Lovegrove. He reminds me, in spirit, of George Carlin and the cranky old man I hope to be - the kind of guy who has lived enough of his life freely to know whom exactly to tell to fuck off. When a smart guy knows how to make you laugh at his arrogance and two days later you say, hey that was really profound, that's when you're dealing with genius. That's what I get from Lovegrove, and Carlin. I'm sure there are others but I want to talk about a comic routine.

The comic routine is one I haven't heard but I suspect must be rattling in the back of somebody's brain. And here's what he's saying.

We have bombs and they have bombs. We bomb and they bomb, we all bomb. Conjugate the verb 'to bomb'. We shouldn't be surprised. Bombs are easy. It used to be that bombs were hard but now everybody's got a bomb. Didn't Prince tell us that in 1999? Not the year, the song. We knew that. We just aren't quite sure how big the bombs are that everybody has. But we Americans know how to piss people off. So now people are throwing bombs.

Two Little Victories

I'm guessing that we can lay these at the feet of Dr. Rice. Finally, two specs of good news on the American geopolitical diplomatic front. TigerHawk is on the case.

Item One: Vietnam

Following a visit from a Bush administration Treasury Department official, Vietnam has closed its banking system to North Korea. This is the latest victory in a patient campaign to strangle North Korea's finances. According to the linked story, after the closing of Pyongyang's access to a bank in Macao last year, only Vietnam and Russia remained overtly willing to bank North Korean financial assets. Now there is only Russia.

Swish. Pure diplomatic victory by the Bushies. Nothing but net.

Item Two: Iran

At least some conservatives are not happy that the United States has apparently granted a visa to former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami. Actually, the wire services report only the application, but Stratfor says that it has been "processed"($). I suspect, however, that we would not even have heard about the application unless the State Department fully intended to grant it -- Khatami would not have run the risk of applying if acceptance had not been wired in advance. Khatami will speak at the National Cathedral as part of a conference on "Global Reconciliation."

Khatami is popularly thought to have been a "reformist," sufficiently so that the Clinton administration specifically decided against retaliating against the Khobar Towers bombing -- which occurred before Khatami's election in 1997 -- because it did not want to undermine him. American hawks disagree most vehemently. My own view is that the debate over Khatami's alleged reformist tendencies is all semantics. Khatami may have been inclined toward a somewhat more liberal conception of the Islamic Republic, but in the end he did not step up to support the reformists when they needed a leader. If he was a reformer, he was of the "best hockey player in Ecuador" variety.

I'm much more sanguine about Khatami, and I can specifically recall that he was the man who convinced me that our two nations could very well be partners. Maybe I was drinking Clintonade at the time (and it's true that I must have a strong stomach for Presidents with debilitating flaws) but I seem to recall that Khatami was an alright guy. What he was able to do in the face of his radical clerics was another thing but I'd give him a lot more credit than Ahmed Chalabi.

The Return of Oliver North

Douglas Farah notes how non-state actors like Hezbollah are able to sustain themselves in semi-autonomous regions.

One of the great successes of the Islamists, particularly the Shi’ites, is the ability to create separate states within weak and failing states. The prime examples are Hezbollah and, as the Washington Post chronicles today, Moqtada al-Sadr in Iraq.

One could argue that there are groups within the Iranian intelligence and security apparatus that also form non-state groups. The alliance of these elements, with no formal power, to ally in transnational, borderless associations and alliances, is what poses one of the largest threats to the Middle East and beyond.

The weakness of the states that allow these groups to flourish gives these groups, along with Hamas and other Islamist and non-Islamist organizations, the priceless ability to provide social services, remedy injustice and corruption and generally make people’s lives better on a measureable level.

At the same time, the states in which they reside do not have the strength to drive them out or confront them. Hezbollah was able to launch a war the state of Lebanon probably did not want and certainly could not win.

For Pennies A Day
Let me focus your attention on the third paragraph. In light of my newfound understanding in terms of development and aid provided recently by the altruistic folks at Gapminder, the United Nations official poverty line is 1 dollar a day. Let's call that the new world standard poverty line. By the same standard, $10 a day is middle class. I'm not remembering precisely what the bell curve distribution was on that score (I'd have to fast frame through an hour of online video) by I believe that the median is somewhere around $5-7. Those of in the US are living with an order of magnitude more moola per capita around $100/day.

So let me do a little sepculation about the price of freedom in Sally Struthers terms. For pennies a day, we could, if we had similar values, fund an insurgency or a church or a school or give direct aid to many many millions of people. When you see how many hundreds of millions of people we're talking about, suddenly the tremendous appeal of the Aid Business becomes apparent. So let me rub my hands together conspiratorily and think about what I could do.

For the amount of money I spend on Netflix, Gamefly and Showtime every month, which is about $30 bucks, I could fully fund one household at the UN poverty line. Now such a family is not likely to do much, they're subsistence level. If I upped the ante by a factor of ten, then I'm doing something. For $300 bucks a month, I've got one family, and more towards the way I'm thinking here, one soldier.

Second Fallujah saw the demise of 1,000 insurgent fighters who had previously controlled a city of 200,000. It took the USMC about 6500 troops, 10 days of intense fighting and 6 weeks of house to house searches to clear that city. I underestimate the US cost, but you get the picture. If the town is right, I can own it for $300,000 a month. The economics of assymetry are fairly appealling, no?

Now we all know by now that Congress has approved something on the order of $90 Billion above and beyond ordinary military operating expenses for Operation Iraqi Freedom. So today I am going to make a suggestion, based upon my reading of the various cockups of our full-blown military exercise in Iraq, that strategically...(pause).. strategically we ought to start thinking about buying up villiages, cities and towns. That now that we've recognize some limits of shock & awe, that perhaps it's best to fight fire with fire. Now we go back to Farah's second paragraph.

The US Department of Theater Conflict
I don't really want a return to the ways of Oliver North. In other words, no more CIA headed secret missions. I would like some of the Rumsfeldian / Petreusian military to have its operations expanded. That is to say, convert ways and means of 101st Airborne's Counter Insurgency operations into a permanent branch of the military. That means military advisors, special forces and money for massive bribery (to be blunt) and recruitment.

As part and parcel of this kind of Counterinsurgency weapon, we're going to have to change the rules of the State Department. Which means if we are ultimately going to be about destabilization and working with non-state actors in order to even the balance of assymetry, there are some very high level working principles that are going to be violated. So the point of this is to make the previously covert and unspeakable part of the overt and undeniable, which is to say subject to public and political accountability. We keep struggling with the nature of war and the fight between the Congress (well not really) and the Executive has to do with the scope of our placement of military personnel and the cost geopolitically and economically.

So I would envision a new Cabinet Level department that has elements of State, Intelligence and DOD that handle sub-Strategic threats. I think that I would split the current organizations roughly in half. One half would be Strategic global threat assessment and the other half would be this rapidly deployable counter-insurgency paramilitary force that can live in-country and work hearts and minds, while always being able to call in the shock & awe of the Strategic as a last resort. This would give the US the ability to put 30,000 boots on the ground anywhere, anytime and deal with rebel forces in such regions.

The conflict between Israel and Lebanon is a perfect example of the kind of war we might see for the next generation. This is how I would inject the United States into those conflicts. We always have interests, but we don't always need aircraft carriers, submarines and 4 year wars of occupation to defend them.

Charles Barron Who?

"You know, some days I get so frustrated I just want to go up to the closest white person and say, 'You can't understand this, it's a black thing,' and then slap him, just for my mental health."
-- Charles Barron

From Wikipedia:

Barron is on the left wing of the Democratic party. His major issues include affirmative action, reparations for slavery, and improving the living conditions for blacks through closing the wealth gap, reducing police brutality, and fighting racism. He has described himself as "pro-black" and has great interest in establishing more representatives for the black community, so that they can control their own economy and political future. ^[1]

He also believes the police and the government are enemies more often than allies, citing violence and surveillance by the police and the government departments as proof. He has often spoken against police brutality, saying that crime is not the fault of the black community. Rather, it is economic plight that brings crime, he believes, and crime can only be reduced by economic opportunities and advancement.^[2] In fact, he went on to say that without economic opportunities for blacks, "every black community is a powder keg."

Barron has taken on an array of issues, such as voting for non-citizens, and has welcomed illegal immigration with the phrase, "don't criminalize, legalize." He appeared on the television program The O'Reilly Factor^[3] and said the entire "immigration problem" is really a black-white issue. He argued that Germans, Jews, Poles, Greeks, and Italians who immigrated to the United States during the late 1800s were welcomed because of the color of their skin, but now, "All of a sudden when the complexion of immigration changes, now it's 'these people'." He rejected rebuttals from host Bill O'Reilly on the grounds that the original white European immigrants had received preferential treatment, stating "They had enough black people here already that were skilled and couldn't get the jobs that your people [referring to European-Americans] were able to get." O'Reilly accused Barron of trying to "let everyone into the country" simply "to change the complexion of America". Many viewers responded to this episode, upset that Barron would not concede that white immigrants indeed were discriminated against as well.^[4]

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Friday Meme: Not Yet

This is LaShawn's idea. Cool.

1) What haven’t you done yet in your life that you’d really like to do someday? Why? Will you do any of those things in the near future? Are you making progress toward them?

My life is going in the right direction, so I don't think I have to make any wild turns in order to do what I'd really like to do. What I really want to do is be the Kung Fu Santa Claus, someone who goes around the world delivering life changing gifts of largesse or jumbo size cans of whoopass depending on the situation. I would need to be personally wealthy, and I'm pretty sure that's not in the cards. But I could be part of a philanthropic organization. I could also do it symbolically through my writing.

I have to get some career things out of the way, so I'm reserving this for semi-retirement. The progress for those starts in 15 years, God willing.

2) If you could completely start your life over from scratch, what would you do differently the second time around (if anything)? Why?

The only thing I would have changed was to study a more conservative career. I hate the obscurity and undiscipline of the cutting edge of computer science applications. I'd much rather have been an attorney or a surgeon. Even though people know jack about law or medicine, they respect it a great deal more than programming. Plus, they get paid and there's never a lack of demand for their skills. You'll never get law  firms outsourced.

3) What do you think you’ll be like when you’re 70, 80, 90, possibly even 100 years old? Where do you think you’ll be living, and what activities do you think you’ll enjoy?

I'll be writing books from some secluded compound in the woods off a lake or the English Midlands. I'll have a large house and enjoy spoiling my grandchildren, and possibly even great-grandchildren. Alternatively, I'll own a jazz club in New York City and host the international cool people.

4) What ages do you think have been the best for you so far? Why? What do you think of your current age…are you enjoying it? Are you looking forward to your next birthday?

I'd have to say that my late 20s were the bomb. My best friend and I lived three blocks from the beach in Southern Cal and we gave beach parties that made us famous in the Buppie kingdom. I met my wife then. I was in the best shape of my life. Anybody who knew where the party was at in Southern Cal, knew the Golden Tale. That was our spot. My running buddies, 'The Babeless Crew' (named now for the first time in Cobb history) were the originators of the now semi-legendary 'Black Chill' as well as the Beach Bash-o-Rama. It was all, all good. I definitely have to write that book.

Today, I enjoy the deep joy of watching my children grow up. Parental pride is indescribably fulfilling. All I can do is show you this picture of all of my kids. I love being Dad and UncleMike. Birthdays schmirthdays. It's all about them.

Change The Game

Today is a red letter day for the Old School, black conservatives and Republicans in America. Today is the day that an American multimillionaire decided to raise funds for a candidate for the US Senate. It's an old tradition, but today the players making headlines are both African American men of my generation.

It's about damned time.

From NRO:

The Maryland Democratic Party's traditional support among blacks appears to be slipping, now that hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons — who has helped register thousands of Democratic voters — has endorsed Republican Michael S. Steele for the U.S. Senate.
    Mr. Simmons is scheduled to hold a fundraiser tonight at Baltimore's Frederick Douglass-Isaac Myers Maritime Park for Mr. Steele, the lieutenant governor and the first black to win a statewide office in Maryland.
    "Russell Simmons is one of the leading progressive voices in America," said Donna Brazile, who managed Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign.
    "This is a major endorsement for Lieutenant Governor Steele that will help him attract young people, as well as black voters," Ms. Brazile said. "Once again, this should serve as a wake-up call to Democrats not to take their most loyal constituents and voters for granted."

This is the second shoe in a trifecta of events that will make August a superb month. The first shoe was the publication and press around Juan Williams' book 'Enough'. This is the second. If something else of this magnitude happens it will be a three legged monster. But there's already enough for the word to get up and walk around.

I've long admired Russell Simmons and have basically defended him from wack charges from trippin' Lefties before. We've long known that he's been pally with Pataki and other NY powers that be, and we've known that among all of the hiphop producers out there, he's the one with his head on most straight. This is just another feather in his cap.

The implications for black politics are very significant. It's rather like the debut of Denzel on screen. For years blackfolks were on the outs and putting up with okeydoke roles - those kinds of things that made superstars of (at best) mediocre talents like Jimmy Walker. (I use the Denzel / Walker comparison a lot). In both cases, the unbelievable just took a matter of time; there was never any reason for blackfolks to sweat that we wouldn't have the talent. Steele is the man who has no problem with the huge existential hurdles many blackfolks have in dealing with Republicanism. When Kanye West made a fool of himself over Bush & Katrina, we had to suffer through yet another barrage of idiotic stereotypes about who black republicans might be and if they were 'authentically black' or 'cared about black people'. In one minute, Russell Simmons has given everybody who finds unquestionable black love and authenticity in hiphop something heavy to think about.

First they ignore you. Then they acknowledge you but dismiss you. Then they take you seriously but fight you. Then they disagree with you but say you have a point. Finally they say they were with you all along.  The denial stops today.

Blog News

Two new items to the blog of Cobb.

Item One: Newstex
After a tiresome, lazy procrastination on my part, I finally filled out the proper forms for permission for the folks at Newstex to syndicate and republish my content. It's a non-exclusive and as far as I'm concerned, non-constraining arrangement to our mutual benefit. I'm pretty excited about it. It will keep my marginally more on my toes about proper attribution and fair use, but I've been pretty disciplined on that score for a while. Newstex are some of the folks behind Gawker, so I feel that I'm in good company. Also, the publisher lives in the horsey set country of Connecticut, so I feel something of an affinity in that direction as my great grandfather Charles Sparrow Bowen also lived and worked in that area.

Item Two: Research Notebooks
Everything that merits a series of posts, but not quite a category all to itself, will very well end up in one of my Google Notebooks. I'm right now publishing (a few of) them through the right sidebar in order to give folks a peek at some of the things that I find piquant as I scour various sources in informing my opinion. I expect at some point in the future Google will find a way to make these collaborative and grow them in the direction of something Wiki. At that point, given sufficient attraction, I may reopen Vision Circle. But in the meantime I think it's a great way to document things that happen over time whether or not they materialize into something postable. I think it's a very good way to track the candidates for 08.

Lets Him Loose, Hard to Swallow

Fame. I want to live forever. Light up the sky like a flame.
I feel it coming together. Baby remember my name.
-- Irene Cara

Funny we were just talking about this. But fame is not for me. My ambition goes in the other direction, so I'm moderately interested in what this new social science says about the acute desire for wealth and influence.

“To be noticed, to be wanted, to be loved, to walk into a place and have others care about what you’re doing, even what you had for lunch that day: that’s what people want, in my opinion,” said Kaysar Ridha, 26, of Irvine, Calif., a recent favorite of fans of the popular CBS reality series “Big Brother.” “It’s strange and twisted, because when that attention does come, the irony is you want more privacy.”

For most of its existence, the field of psychology has ignored fame as a primary motivator of human behavior: it was considered too shallow, too culturally variable, too often mingled with other motives to be taken seriously. But in recent years, a small number of social scientists have begun to study and think about fame in a different way, ranking it with other goals, measuring its psychological effects, characterizing its devoted seekers.

People with an overriding desire to be widely known to strangers are different from those who primarily covet wealth and influence. Their fame-seeking behavior appears rooted in a desire for social acceptance, a longing for the existential reassurance promised by wide renown.

Erhabi: Arab Drift

See? We're all just the same. We all like to drive fast Japanese cars. Here's another one. Listen closely, you'll here Eminem blasting on somebody's box.

I'm Your Conscience

In the spirit of 'Enough'. What does it take to be a black comedian these days? Sometimes not quite enough. Props to Jamie Foxx for delivering the smackdown.

After Olmert, Opportunity

"Young men make wars, and the virtues of war are the virtues of young men: courage, and hope for the future. Then old men make the peace, and the vices of peace are the vices of old men: mistrust and caution."
-- Prince Feisal from Lawrence of Arabia

I cannot be convinced that Israel lost militarily to Hezbollah, but mine seems to be a minority opinion. But it is self-evident that observers will say that there were two wars, one on the battlefield and one in the media. Evidence for my side, I think.

With Terry Gross today was an Israeli MP, Yossi Beilin, who said something I think is rather remarkable in its faith towards negotiation. He said that now is the opportunity, since so many people are convinced that Israel is weakend, to negotiate peace with those Arabs and Muslims who by dint of Hezbollah's 'military victory', are more confident in their equality with the once mighty nation. He said that Syria is willing to talk. He said that Abu Mazen is willing to talk. He said that Lebanon is willing to talk.

It makes perfect sense that a 'defeated' Israel might do so. So while we don't have the pacification of real war - in other words we have a war that solved nothing - it's time to get creative in the peace. This is so very reminescent of the closing scenes of 'Lawrence of Arabia'. Now is the time for crafty old men to work their work.

BTW. Hezbollah doesn't want to talk, nor does Hamas. Mistrust and caution indeed.

Old Heroes

Something made me think of my favorite sports heroes. I can't remember what it was, but suddenly I was reeling them off to myself while driving to lunch. I thought I'd share this stuff that dates me.

Since this is all going to date me, I'm going to start off with a category that I think defines my generation, something we had that the world may never have again.

Favorite Astronauts:

• Buzz Aldrin
• Michael Collins

Favorite Racers:

• 'Big Daddy' Don Garlits
• Don 'The Snake' Prudhomme
• Buddy Baker
• Art Arfons

Favorite Basketball:

• Nate Archibald
• Earl Monroe
• Kareem Abdul Jabbar
• Julius Earving
• Curly Neal

Favorite Football:

• Gene Washington
• Roman Gabriel / Jack Snow
• Lynn Swann
• Billy Whiteshoes Johnson
• Jim McMahon

Favorite Baseball:

• Cey / Lopes / Garvey
• Thurmon Munson
• Vida Blue
• Manny Mota
• Fernando Valenzuela

Favorite Track & Field:

• Tommie Smith
• Bob Hayes
• Daley Thompson
• Dwight Stones
• Harvey Glance

And of course, Bruce Lee, Jim Kelly and John Saxon.

Wednesday's Wonders

1701 Is The Lonliest Number
It looks like the French are backing out of any commitment to put troops on the ground in Lebanon. And you know we're not.  It's clear that Hezbollah and Israel are going to do whatever they damned well please, UN do-gooders and international handwringers be damned. And that ladies and gentlemen, is the way of the fucking world. Clutch your pearls and swoon, but wars will be wars, and now you know the fate of third party, non-carrot, non-stick diplomacy.

Gapminder.org
I don't know how my head has gotten to a place where my knee jerks away from Aid & Development. It's probably because I lament the lost opportunity for the creation and maintenance of a proper empire, and nothing annoys me like do-gooders who can't do enough. Nevertheless, there is some really great visualization software in the hands of the Gapminder folks and Google is paying attention. This also makes me very insecure as a commercial BI consultant. Primarily because nobody at Google has gotten back to me yet.

The Day The Earth Stood Stupid
Even though I'm writing this on Tuesday, I predict that nothing particularly mindblowing will have occured by the time you read this Wednesday. Despite the fact that people closer to the action than me have predicted that Crazy A and his Islamic Jihad flunkies will do something world-historically dangerous, I think we've already foiled that plot. It must really piss them off that we've interrupted their plans. I mean consider it the possibilities. What if Israel was still getting bombed, the London plane plot was carried off and whatever Iran had planned today (like a nuclear test) actually happened? A trifecta of evil. Well it didn't. You can go back to sleep now.

Tiger's Twelfth
I still have my red Nike sweatshirt that I purchased a decade ago when Tiger Woods won his first major at Augusta. He's since averaged more than a major a year. Anything is possible, but I think you have to bet on Tiger. What are the chances he could tank like Greg Norman? Who knows? But I think he deserves a second wave of props. He has really out Jordaned Jordan. He dominates his sport like nobody since Pele.

Dorky Quote of the Week
"It would be difficult to find more dramatic examples of unjustifiable secrecy than these decisions to classify the numbers of U.S. strategic weapons."
-- William Burr

The Sound of the Drum

"We don't know who we should be because we don't know where we came from."
-- a black girl

At Google video, there's a highly rated short documentary that interviews several young African American women who tell stories of insecurity about their appearance. It could be seen as something more than that, which is the point. How much more is a problem a large number of Americans seem to be wrestling with. That's too bad, because we already know the answers. I say 'we', but it's hard to tell how big that 'we' is, or must be.

I've called those who are on the outside of self-esteem for ages-old reasons those who haven't heard the 'sound of the drum'. It's a problem Cornel West aptly described in his book 'Race Matters' as the reason that blacks have a different orientation towards America. African Americans have an existential hunger, a need to feel a part of something other than an outcast minority. This hunger drives and distorts a great deal of African American interaction in the public sphere. I think it is often expressed poorly in a desire to change Aemrica rather than to change the self. But most blackfolks do have an understanding that 'knowledge of self', is key to success. The problem is that there are charlatans and crackpots in the self-knowledge business.

For a long time, I called those hustlers 'The 50 Page Book Men'. If you live in New York or Los Angeles, you've seen them out on the sidewalk with their kinte or mudcloth covered folding tables full of thin paperback books rightously selling consciousness to the black man. Their libraries inevitably include Franz Fanon, Neely Fuller, Elijah Muhammad and Francis Cress Welsing, a veritable anarchists cookbook of racial conspiracy theory. Few if any of these 50 Page Book Men could ply their trade on college campuses. They'd have to contend with black professors who have done a great deal more diligence in order to earn their bones. And so it is to those black men and women of the streets, 'the masses' that these operators direct their efforts.

Very much like the mass media's (ivnolunary?) portrayal of blacks as indigent crooks during Katrina, there is a similar cottage industry of soundbite clipery which like the 50 Page Book Men pretend that the world is similarly uneducated. And it is the problems of the ignorant sold back to the ignorant and their middle class nemeses that complete that weary cycle of commerce. Some people have the nerve to call this enlightening. I think those people are Liberal and equally ignorant. And so in a half-baked recreation of the Clark experiments, we are reminded of how colorstruck pre-schoolers can be.

If wisdom truly came out of the mouths of babes, is our entire educational system a scam? Couldn't we just sit around at home, have babies and thereby gain insight into the ways of the world? Couldn't we then videotape their utterances and cobble together a philosophy to share with the world? Evidently, the maker of this film thinks that's how it goes. There is no benefit of the doubt to be given. The 50 Page Book Man has been updated to Web 2.0 and the ignorant selling to the ignorant continues. But that is not the Sound of the Drum, it is just the beating of bleeding hearts and the echoes of yet empty minds that you hear. There are principles and content missing.

There are those who believe that some connection to Africa or some understanding of the savage dehumanizations of American chattel slavery will light a spark in the minds of people with dark skin and give them insight to some special internal strength. It will not. It will only connect to the human emotions of shock, shame and anger. That is no program for success, merely a motivation for complaint against atrocities that cannot and will not be adjudicated. They are merely lessons of history, improperly taught. They are not paths to self-knowledge, but paths to self-pity and emotional exile.

I imagine that there are unlimited pools of motivation to exploit fellow humans. But that doesn't make me any less irritated at such continuing treachery, nor am I unmoved by the victims of this wrong-headed reasoning. I can only link this message to the Google video and hope those who watch that, can read this blog and know that there is much more to life than empty ignorant complaint and self-pity. And for them I link again to the Return of the Bogard, my anthem to black youth.

Report From the Lower Upper Middle Class

It has been about a year and a half since I've moved down a peg from the Middle Upper Middle to the Lower Upper Middle. This coincides roughly with the close of my business and the failure of my China Deal. When I was rising, I had a good deal of inspiration and was able to articulate it well. This past year what I have to report is that I'm getting a bit more comfy in the Lower spot. This has advantages and disadvantages.

The two main disadvantages are time and money. I have less of both. But then again I knew that coming in. So I don't particularly miss either of them. Like all humiliations, this one can be turned into a different set of expectations. Remind me to tell you the story of the Hamster Funeral.

First off where is the Lower Upper Middle Class? It requires that I review my view of class. Now first off there is African American class, and then there is American class. In African American class there are five segments. The basically revolve around the most significant and telling aspect of one's orientation towards American apartheid, where you live. See, all African Americans were pretty much relegated until after WW2, to live where whitefolks said they must. And even though most of America was rebooted in '32, there was enough leftover racism to kickstart American apartheid again and pretty much through the Brown and then Equal Housing decisions, a good fat 30 plus years. I would estimate that most black families didnt' do much social mobility through that era, although mine did. Anyway, there are {projects, ghetto, 'hood, 'burb, hill}. All of those pretty much stretch from Lower to Upper Middle Class in American class terms.

Indigency is the lowest class. That basically means you can't take care of yourself. Indigents are the folks that show up at soup kitchens, who would get welfare but actually cannot. They are not only below the poverty line, they're just hanging on by a thread. I really don't use the term 'homeless' but that's the fairly common term.

In the UK they talk about the 'undeserving poor' and the 'deserving poor'. I don't make much of a distinction, because it begs the question of what they deserve. While they may be speaking of charity in the UK, here we're talking about welfare state stuff. Which I'd rather not. I also more often talk of the Poor as the Internal Third World. These are people who are not generally able to negotiate the infrastructure of the US to their advantage, and yet persist. These are the guys with irregular jobs who manage to be down on their luck most of the time. I think these are the ones likely to become criminals, not the indigent, who are often criminalized for no good or effective reason. A poor person is able-bodied but just not socialized to hold it down in our society. There ought to be clear paths for these folks and I would subscribe to such things that help them out. I think of the poor in the projects and the sticks. The man who fishes for his own dinner, the woman who works in the small town diner, the man with a bum leg who used to work and is now permanently disabled and lives with his sister in the Fifth Ward of Houston.

The American Middle Class is massive. It goes from the Lower Middle to the Upper Middle. The Lower Middle starts just above the poverty line. The Upper Middle ends somewhere around a quarter million a year. Then you get to Rich. Above Rich is Wealthy. Above Wealthy are a lot of people with American citizenship but they're just beyond the class system. I'm not sure there's much we could say about them as a class that they haven't decided already. They're not constrained by class definitions. The primary difference between the Upper Middle Class and Rich is that rich people don't have to work for a living at all. They can basically live off their money. The difference between the Wealthy and the Rich is just as Chris Rock says. The Wealthy can decide to make somebody rich.

I grew up in the 'hood as Lower Middle class. It didn't feel like it most of the time. I'm one of those who got out into the world saying 'I didn't realize how poor we were'. But we weren't poor. We were known as 'underprivileged'. Which basically meant that we were as smart and well behaved as middle class and upper middle class kids, we just got our bikes from Pep Boys instead of the Schwinn shop. And we only got one bike and we fixed it ourselves when it broke. They say that the difference between the Middle Classes are not very wide, but they are very very deep. That's the truth. We are more accepting of a man with no shoes, than the man who wears the wrong shoes.

Tuesday's Children

Sandra's Reprieve
It's true that I find Sandra Tsing Loh's voice to be exceedingly annoying, but I do give credit where credit is due. Her Loh Down on Science is part of what is becoming Uncle Mike's little distribution - my daily emails of interesting and kid-friendly URLs. Good on you Sandra.

Osama & Whitney Sitting In A Tree
You heard? No? Well you better ask somebody. It turns out that Osama Bin Laden seriously considered putting a contract out on Bobby Brown so that he could get Whitney and make her one of his wives. Now that's some serious jungle fever.

Spike's New NOLA Darling
Pops has me recording the Spike Lee documentary on Katrina. I'm not really looking forward to it considering what I've read. More pain and suffering blamed on politics. We'll see.

Save Ben Stein's Money
People are talking about what Ben Stein was talking about. Once again he is crying plaintively 'Bueller? Anyone?' But Ferris Bueller took the day off. In fact, he's generally indisposed. Perhaps better than anyone, Stein knows who among the privileged classes raise their children to be careless pleasure hounds. But I think when things get desparate enough, they'll fight.

George Speaks
For what it's worth, I'm not listening to George Bush much these days. I heard he had something to say yesterday but what it was , I know not and don't care much. McCain is collecting his goodies for 2008 and that's more interesting to me.

Second Fallujah
I've just gotten up to the part of 'Fiasco' which describes the second battle for Fallujah, the one I recall being rather piqued about when it happened. Ricks says it was quite a mission. Still, I believe that I have mischaracterized the insurgency in my politics up to now, so I'll recap Iraq sometime later this week. (I'm also spelling it with an 'h' now, so as to conform with search engines.)

Moderate Islam: A Good Idea

Gandhi famously replied to the question of what he thought of Western Civilization: "It would be a good idea". I'm thinking the same thing of Moderate Islam, but not exactly so wryly.

I caught a snippet of Krista Tippet's show yesterday. It was Karen Armstrong's voice and verbaige that attracted me once again as I was flipping through the radio station presets. As I tuned in she was relateing a story of how she and a panel of experts were stunned into silence when a Christian Fundamentalist addressed them in horror and pain. I didn't catch what the details were but it didn't come as a surprise that the man in question was hauled away by security for telling them they were all going to Hell.

We've all seen these guys. Right where my eye doctor is, in a place called the Hollywood Riviera (yes it's kind of all that) there is a man with a van that defies description who daily prophesies about the end times. He's the Man in the Jesus Van. And we ignore him. And if he one day ran himself off a cliff in Palos Verdes or set a parking lot on fire, we probably wouldn't be too surprised. He's 50 or 60 years old. But what if he was 20 and needed more action than that?

I'm an Episcopalian and I have very little to do with evangelism. I personally find evangelism arrogant and sometimes repugnant. That's because I basically grew up secular before I grew up Catholic. I was smart enough to figure out how to pray and live with my conscience as something of Lutheran intellectual exercise at a pre-pubescent age. Did I talk to Jesus? Yes. Did I accept him as my personal savior? That was between me and Jesus and none of your business. What's it to you? I thought it took a lot of nerve to ask such questions of kids, but I was asked, and told how much I needed Jesus like most smart-ass kids who actually memorize their Bible verses with a smirk. I chose which Jesus I would talk to, and He was eventually the Christ as presented by the Jesuits. I chose which traditions I would share in the Body of Christ and those were eventually the Episcopal Liturgy. My Jesus, My Religion, My Church. Not yours.

I am absolutely convinced we all do the same thing. And so it comes as no surprise that I cannot recall any sermons from the Episcopal pulpit feeling a need to explain away the behavior of Jimmy Swaggart or Pat Robertson. I've listened to the most extraordinary message about racism in the American Christian Chruch presented by Rev. Frederick Price, but I don't recall much discussion about that anywhere even by those who insist that America is a Christian Nation. Oh yeah? What kind of Christian Nation?

Jerry Seinfeld is not going to take orders from the Lubavichers. Baptists of the Southern Convention are free to ignore the Pope, and they will. Mennonites are not going to make excuses for Methodists. I think you get the idea.  Moderate Islam is not going to moderate other types of Islam. 'Moderate' is an adjective, not a verb. Moreover it is an adjective of American origin. American politics are not going to make 'moderate muslims' influence Islamic Fascists.

"Some of my best friends are Sunni." Start from there.

We simply have to call spades as we see them and deal with the dirt done by those doing it. America's moral leadership on the matter is not really at issue. Even if we were a Muslim nation, we would still have sectarian and class barriers to deal with. There is something very specific that muslim fascists want to accomplish and we can resist that directly and keep our own house in order without being authoritative on Islam or Fascism. Let's stick to the religion of Freedom and let the other mullahs and popes say what they will. We can only come correct in a firm and honest defense of who we are.

Say It Ain't So, Jones

Now this is going a bit too far. I loved Marion Jones, now she's turned out to be the same kind of asshat as Floyd Landis. Word is, she's flunked the first part of a drug screening. Now the other shoe is ready to drop.

A couple weeks ago I discussed the ethics of performance enhancement in sports with Deet. He was all against it without hesitation, whereas I was waffle-like in my arguments. On the one hand, I could care less if the NFL approved it. And although the baseball scandal is a shame, it is what the fans want, a home-run derby. I think that goes counter to the true spirit of baseball, all the big homeruns and whatnot, but on the whole I'm kinda blah on that. Basketball needs no performance enhancement. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the spirit of the game. Basketball requires too much skill and subtlety for some drug to make a material difference, I believe the same thing is true of soccer.

But Cycling? Track? Weightlifting? Swimming? Those need to be pure.

But just this weekend I had one of those strange experiences when I was surrounded by a bunch of wild kids. It was at a public health fair in the Gardena area sponsored by a local church. It brought to mind how much of a difference it can make to folks that certain institutions have to have a great deal of integrity. That counts a bit less as one rises in society and has more options at one's disposal. So finally Deet's words started to ring true. You cannot have kids looking up to sports heroes and believing the only way to get up in the world is through the use of drugs.

It must be said of me two things that make this particularly important. I wear glasses and I am allergic to penicillin. So I am very wary of taking any drugs I don't absolutely need. That includes aspirin and cough syrup. I've only recently, meaning the past year or so, been willing to take Motrin. So it's critical to me that I am able to trust someone to have my best interests at heart when it comes to health matters. I recognize that athletes, more than just about anyone, understand the effect that drugs have on their bodies. So while I am perfectly willing to let them do what they want to do with regard to performance enhancement in the non-pure sports, I am more concerned today about the effect on kids.

Kids in athletics are not going to get anything near the kind of medical attention top athletes get. They're not valuable enough to doctors, schools or even parents to get a proper regimen. So any effect a doping technique has on a sport is going to be inevitably bad for kids. This augurs against my prior acceptance of the idea of different classes for the adults of 'pure' without drugs and 'pro' with drugs.

Thankfully, kids have video games and extreme sports. All still pure.

On Mania

Johnny Triangles reminds us of the difference between us and them:

DR. NO: “You are right, Mister Bond. That is what I am, a maniac. All the greatest men are maniacs. They are possessed by a mania which drives them forward towards their goal. The great scientists, the philosophers, the religious leaders – all maniacs. What else but a blind singleness of purpose could have given focus to their genius, would have kept them in the groove of their purpose? Mania, my dear Mister Bond, is as priceless as genius. Dissipation of energy, fragmentation of vision, loss of momentum, the lack of follow-through – these are the vices of the herd. I do not possess these vices. I am, as you correctly say, a maniac – a maniac, Mister Bond, with a mania for power. That is the meaning of my life. That is why I am here. That is why you are here. That is why here exists.”

My take on genius is a little bit different, but I like this.

a genius must attain mastery. he perfects and re-perfects. he throws it all away and starts over. he spins off a million tangents and throws them away. a genius plays with large dangerous tools. a genius gambles using tells too subtle for the untrained eye. the genius throws himself in the garbage just to test his own genius. he pushes the limits and pretends to be immortal just to see if he can, and finally he achieves.

Again With the Questions

Ask me three questions. Any three. I'll answer.

Enough Already

I've only gotten 50 pages into Juan Williams' new book and already I've seen MLK's name what seems like 10 times. I'm already thinking how impossible it seems to write a book about blackfolks and politics without his name in it.

Williams is vamping off of Cosby big time. His whole introduction is all hey batter batter batter, and I'm still waiting for him to swing. I can't tell you how boring this book is.. so far.  I'd much rather read Stephen L Carter. But I'll get back to it. So far..so so.

Cobblers Wikimapia

The coolest thing on the web is Wikimapia. It needs your attention. I have put in a few entries, such as the first Magic Johnson Theater.

Edelstein's Heart and Mind

As I do some much needed review and update of my geopolitical framework, I have restumbled over The Head Heeb, Jonathan Edelstein. He has been the influence that swayed me away from the One State solution early on. I'm not quite sophisticated enough to grok his regional view of things, but I'm much better now than I was then.

I find that I am still respectful of the Israeli cause, but I am also a great deal more aware of how gung ho they actually can be. And while I'm still not particularly moved to humanitarian action, and still prefer to study potential geopolitical solutions, I recognize that such good deeds as he proposes are a very good start.

You'll find that he's much more acutely focused on African affairs, which I have neglected. But I'm going there for comparison as well. So don't forget to drop by and check him out. 

Seven by Seven Ago

Seven years ago:

1. I buried my last grandmother.

god exists somewhere in tortured minds, perhaps everywhere. grandmother's grave was dug by 7 convicted men in baggy orange pants. according to the green led display in the cadillac deville provided by avis, it was 110 degrees outside. i didn't have any black pants and wore navy chinos. a dirt track leads to parcel #10 behind the church which will be auctioned off by sealed bid in september 1999. reverend hall said "cast me not off, in my old age". he looked like cab calloway. the tent and supplies for the interment were removed from the cemetary by a sport utility hearse. the guards from the louisiana department of corrections loosened uncle fred's hands and shared barbecue ribs with the family for 90 minutes after the service. i sat in the back of the chruch with paul who told me about the mill, the oil field, the high school, the mandatory sentencing laws, the sonic, the mc donalds, the kfc, the population is 1800. there are 7 old folks remaining. two months after aunt annie bought her home, they built the housing projects around the corner. i didn't see any white people all day, except for the men fixing the roof on this hotel. they put concrete slabs over the gravesites.

2.  I was still writing poetry

if i listen closely, i can sense the mocking sweat
greasing the cogs of this washing machine
some ribald engineer flicked from his brow
a dozen middlemen before.
it is draining and filling incessantly
gallons of prideful salty water coursing through these drowning suburbs.
it is the stink of conceited merit
the antigravity of a million lifted eyebrows all
directed at systemic indirection

D is for Dog
E is for Elephant
F is for fighting/fairy/fuck

A somber cynic rambling midnights into electric
membranes bangs innumreate tiny drums into insecurity.
Understanding gropes along the unimaginable, childlike, wondering.

DJ Dad

DJ Dad in effect.

Ricky Bobby

There's something about the steely-eyed ignorance of the American bohunk that's straight-out hilarious. The problem is that it has always been exploited with a mean spirited snideness that is disappointing. There have only been a few films I've ever seen that do a decent job of respectfully handling American bumpkinitude, and Talladega Nights is one of the best. I put it right up there with 'Super Troopers', 'Oh Brother Where Art Thou' and 'Raising Arizona'.

This movie is a real hoot all the way through. They made a huge casting mistake however. The rival French driver should have been played by Bronson Pinchot or Paul 'Pee Wee Herman' Rubens. The guy they cast simply could not get a laugh on his own.

This hilarious parody of a NASCAR champ has it all but the thing that really did it for me was how the winning attitude rubbed off on his kids (Walker and Texas Ranger). There's nothing quite as wrecklessly apt as foul-mouthed boys who get encouragement from their beer sotted poppa when they're ranking on somebody. I wish I could remember some of their insults, but they were a real crackup. A good dose of Granny Law whips them into shape when Ricky Bobby hits the skids and has to go back and live with his mother. (Thankfully not in a trailer park).

There's a healthy dose of satire on the culture of product placement in NASCAR, and the movie overflows with patches, labels and logos. Ricky Bobby prays to 'eight pound nine ounce baby Jesus' in one scene of inspired hilarity. I'm giggling just thinking about it.

I'm not a fan of Farrell but I'd rather watch him than Jim Carey or Robin Williams. I, for one, thought this movie was a good deal funnier than Anchorman, and not just because I happen to respect jazz flute.

Chivalry vs Equality

A thoughtful reader writes: "I wonder sometimes how men who respect their mamas and their wives and sisters and love their daughters square that with going to those places." 'Those places' meaning strip clubs and cathouses. It seems to me that is exactly how they respect their mamas, presuming that their mama doesn't actually work in or run such an establishment.

Aldous Huxley once famously said that an intellectual is someone who has found something more compelling than sex. I think that the exception is that sex itself is always more interesting than writing about sex. As regards my personality I think I'm consistent in that regard, I almost never write about sex or sports, and probably have too low a regard for those that do. So I hope you'll forgive the awkward way I may present my arguments, unaccustomed as I am to speaking on the subject.

I have always been acutely aware of the disconnect between Feminism and Chivalry. I was raised to be chivalrous and to treat all ladies with respect. I can recall specific incidents in my life in which I was confronted with ways and means of speaking about women that left me at a loss. In the sixth grade, Ronnie Whittaker and I lost a game of 'Password' because he used the word 'broad' to denote a woman. I had never ever heard the term before. To me it was an adjective, not a noun. When I got my first full-time job in a union shop, I was shocked to hear that women were called 'girls' and 'chicks'. In fact, I had to consciously force myself to start to use the term 'woman' because at the age of 18, I had always used the term 'lady'. Yeah, I was a door-opener and a Yes Mam kind of kid.

It didn't take me long to recognize, fresh out of my all-boy prep school background, that women often behaved like broads, dames, chicks and otherwise. And despite the fact that I actually read every month's edition of Essence magazine, I began to realize that all women actually had all different sorts of character flaws, just as men did. It occured to my then virginal mind that perhaps the reason that I was sometimes considered a geek was that there were actually women who preferred the company of knuckleheads, roughnecks, bangers and otherwise. In otherwords, there being a time and place for everything under Heaven, there was probably a woman for every man, no matter what their character. And they deserved each other. Which left me with the very paradox I survive with to this day.

Without getting too deeply into it, just as I have never seen the Dodgers win whenever I go to Dodger Stadium in person, I have never personally known there to be an exception to the old Catholic prejudice about good girls who don't and bad girls who do. Now of course the Dodgers actually score at home and so do I. So I'm not in an ethical quandary about such things. But I think it says something about my intentions in socialization. And so I began observing the intent of socialization of everybody, which is one of the reasons I am fascinated by people engaged in the act of engaging each other.

Like most men, I am perfectly capable of compartmentalizing and objectifying women. There are, in fact, women I have known and can only remember in terms of their bodies and/or sexual skills, and not particularly of their names and faces. I can talk 'player' talk with the best of them and still figure into the content of anyone's character my estimation of their success in the arts and crafts of seduction. That includes women, because believe me, I've read (and heard) enough testimony from feminist literature as well as the complaints of compatriots to understand how a woman's self-esteem is vital to her sexuality. So I consider myself adequately prepared by a fair gamut of thoughts and deeds with regard to matters of het sex and seduction.

So I am left with the very same paradox most American men face. Good girls don't, bad girls do, and Chivalry dictates that all ladies must be treated with respect. This must be balanced with the basic  biological fact of male virility. The most rational compromise is what we live with but defies Catholic teaching. It is that extra-marital sex is OK and doesn't count morally against consenting adults who are themselves unmarried. So that makes pre- and post-marital sex socially acceptable, notions of 'good' and 'bad' be damned. Feminism puts us in the odd predicament of railing against the sexual objectification of women (which men do naturally, I think) and the call to sexual liberation of women. That puts it in the quandry of defending women who choose to behave in sexually objectifyable ways. In other words, if Feminism must defend all women, it must equally defend the sexual liberties of bad girls.

My response is that women are responsible for respecting themselves as are men, and that both men and women must recognize how and when they are whoring themselves. Consequently there is redemption for both. But this also invalidates aspects of Chivalry which places particular demands on men in conflict with the demands of Feminism.  Ultimately, I think men are stuck with this double standard and play either side to their own advantage; if a woman prefers the Chivalrous route, he'll use it. If a woman wants Feminist respect, then she'll get that. The bottom line is that these become tactics, not principles and the bottom line is what? The man gets his woman.

With all that in mind, let's go back to the original question.  It seems to me that the Chivalric answer would be that my mama and my sisters are ladies and I would expect men and others to protect their virtue. Those who work the pole(s) are whores and they are lost to me. That's also a socially conservative Catholic answer as well as the answer one would expect from conservative Muslims as well. I suspect the orthodox Jewish position is not far off. Chivalry suggests that all men and women find an appropriate place for women with regard to their central value to society which is as the receptor of men's affections, and that women comport themselves appropriately. 

This is exactly the patriarchic hegemony Feminism expects to break. Women are much more than sex and so the sexual aspect of their being can't mean that much. I expect that the Feminist answer would go in one of three directions. The first would be against the exploitation of sex workers. Call that the ACLU Feminist answer. So long as working conditions are appropriate and nobody's rights are exploited, there's nothing wrong with the oldest profession. The second would be a reproductive / sexual freedom answer. Call it the Do Me Feminist answer. It's their body, and not your business. The third answer would be a Gender Equality answer, which would probably ask you if you have a problem with women being whores considering the whores that men are. I suspect as well in the Gender Equality answer there is the implication that not only should het women work poles but all other gender orientations and preferences as well.

I can't keep track of all that and as a civil libertarian don't quite care one way or another which answer might be most appropriate. Besides, depending on the quality of entertainment provided, I'd much rather enjoy a good burlesque show than write about it. As for cathouses, I'm afraid that I can't afford that kind of entertainment.

19th Century Resume

This and That on a Thursday

A French Peace
"Nous n'avons pas changé d'avis.Il y a eu deux éléments nouveaux. Le premier, c'est que plus personne n'a parlé de force multinationale, dès l'instant que l'armée libanaise a décidé de déployer 15 000 hommes au Liban sud, ce qui est un élément politique majeur. Et plus personne ne parle d'une force qui serait dotée d'un mandat offensif, pour désarmer le Hezbollah. Ce sont deux faits nouveaux, c'étaient nos lignes rouges."
-- Philippe Douste-Blazy

Nobody is taking about a force with a proactive mandate to disarm Hezbolla.

With news that the Amal Militia was fighting alongside Hezbollah in the recent conflict, there appears to be no moderate Shi'ite polity in Lebanon who would vote for the disarmament of Hezbollah. Considering now that there seems to be no force in the international force, and that it's very dubious that one will materialize with an adequate mandate, it appears to me that we're back to July 11th. Except this time Israel is in Lebanon and their going to take their sweet time backing out, advancing to the rear.

Bremer's War
The big fingers seem to be pointing to Paul Bremer as the architect of failure in Iraq. From the office of Lessons Learned, it seems that everything he did with deBaathification set the stage for the insurgency that has turned our occupation of Iraq into the very 'Fiasco' which is the title of the book.

In retrospect it seems so patently obvious that you shouldn't fire all of the people who have been running the country and forbid their service to the new government, but this is what he did, many times falsely against 'Baathists' who didn't even belong to the Party. He disbanded the entire Iraqi Army and created an instant supply of shiftless, unemployed men for the Insurgency. He set a timetable for withdrawl without running it by superiors and created false hope among the grunts that they would be home soon. He's got to be the biggest villain on our side in Iraq.

Landis Kills Phonak
Speaking of asshats, doped up cyclist Floyd Landis' scandal has brought such shame on his teammated that not only was he fired, but the team has folded. I knew something like this was bound to happen, and it's not over. He's cast a dark cloud over the sport in ways no other athletic scandal could.