Cobb

Always the Lowest Prices

Drezner reports a breathless NYT story about how WalMart has funded right-wing think tanks.

In plain English, the Walton Foundation gave AEI an average of $33,000 a year, PRI $35,000 a year, and a whopping $3,667 a year to Heritage.

Besides the fact that the story reveals no link between the donations and think tank outputs, besides the fact that these groups would be ideologically predisposed to support Wal-Mart anyway (just as EPI would support the union position), it's worth stressing that in the think tank world, these are nothing amounts. These sums of money buy a B.A.-level RA and some cockatil shrimp at a reception. After reading the article, I'm not amazed that Wal-Mart is giving money to these think tanks -- I'm amazed they'e giving so little.

As we all know, WalMart is all about low prices. It's because they do comprehensive supply and demand planning, and they squeeze suppliers to the breaking point. They've already done the math, and have figured out how cheaply these vendors can be locked into the collossal WalMart embrace!

The Links

I've been thinking about the Links and the Wilfandel Club recently. They're still around.

History of the National Organization

On the evening of November 9, 1946, Margaret Hawkins and Sarah Scott, two young Philadelphia matrons, invited seven of their friends to join them in organizing a new type of inner-city club. The two women envisioned an organization that would respond to the needs and aspirations of African-American women in ways that existing clubs did not.

Those co-founders embraced a threefold purpose for The Links. The members would contribute to the civic, educational and cultural milieu and this direction persists today. Based on these purposes, The Links would implement programs which its founders hoped would foster cultural appreciation through the arts, through development of richer inter group relations, and through the participation of women in social and civic responsibilities.

The first National Assembly was held in Philadelphia in 1949. Delegates were present from Atlantic City, Baltimore, Central New Jersey, Petersburg, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Raleigh, Saint Louis, Wilmington, Delaware, and Wilson Rocky Mount-Tarboro Chapters.

The Links organization was incorporated in 1951. Today, there are more than 11,000 members in about 270 chapters located in 40 states, the District of Columbia, and international chapters in Nassau, Bahamas and Frankfurt, Germany.

During the early years, the National Links organization directed the major portion of its Grants-in-Aid support to three other national organizations, the NAACP, NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and the Urban League. The organization possesses a life membership in the NAACP and supported the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund at its inception. In the 1960s, The Links, Inc., began a period of priority support for the United Negro College Fund. To date, The Links contribution to UNCF totals more than one million dollars. In its over 50 years of existence, The Links, Inc., has made its name almost synonymous with strong programming and philanthropy.

The National Program of the Links, Inc., consists of four facets:

• National Trends And Services
• Services To Youth
• International Trends And Services
• The Arts

In 1985, Projects L.E.A.D. (Links Erase Alcohol and Drug Abuse) was introduced as a national project of The Links, Inc.

The Links organization has four geographic areas, which are Central, Eastern, Southern and Western.

Bush's Best Speech Ever

I didn't see this, I've only read it. So I don't have to put up with my own prejudices about GW's elocution. Therefore this makes it the best speech I never heard. It is serious. It is comprehensive. It is direct. It is everything it needs to be. Historians will note this as clear evidence of the conceptual work done since the rhetoric of the 'Axis of Evil'. (Cleaned up and blockquoted 9/13. mb)

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you all very much. (Applause.) Thank you all. Please be seated. General Hendrix, thank you for the invitation to be here. Thanks for the kind introduction. I'm honored to stand with the men and women of the Military Officers Association of America. I appreciate the Board of Directors who are here, and the leaders who have given me this platform from which to speak. I'm proud to be here with active members of the United States military. Thank you for your service. I'm proud to be your Commander-in-Chief. (Applause.)

I am pleased also to stand with members of the diplomatic corps, including many representing nations that have been attacked by al Qaeda and its terrorist allies since September the 11th, 2001. (Applause.) Your presence here reminds us that we're engaged in a global war against an enemy that threatens all civilized nations. And today the civilized world stands together to defend our freedom; we stand together to defeat the terrorists; and were working to secure the peace for generations to come.

I appreciate my Attorney General joining us today, Al Gonzales. Thank you for being here. (Applause.) The Secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, is with us. (Applause.) Three members of the United States Senate -- I might say, three important members of the United States Senate -- Senate President Pro Tem Ted Stevens of Alaska. Thank you for joining us, Senator. (Applause.) Chairman of the Appropriations Committee, Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi. (Applause.) The Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, John Warner of Virginia. (Applause.)

I thank Norb Ryan, as well, for his leadership. I do appreciate all the folks that are at Walter Reed who have joined us today. I'm going to tell the parents of our troops, we provide great health care to those who wear the uniform. I'm proud of those folks at Bethesda and Walter Reed -- are providing you the best possible care to help you recover from your injuries. Thank you for your courage. Thank you for joining us here today. May God bless you in your recovery. (Applause.)

Next week, America will mark the fifth anniversary of September the 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks. As this day approaches, it brings with it a flood of painful memories. We remember the horror of watching planes fly into the World Trade Center, and seeing the towers collapse before our eyes. We remember the sight of the Pentagon, broken and in flames. We remember the rescue workers who rushed into burning buildings to save lives, knowing they might never emerge again. We remember the brave passengers who charged the cockpit of their hijacked plane, and stopped the terrorists from reaching their target and killing more innocent civilians. We remember the cold brutality of the enemy who inflicted this harm on our country -- an enemy whose leader, Osama bin Laden, declared the massacre of nearly 3,000 people that day -- I quote -- "an unparalleled and magnificent feat of valor, unmatched by any in humankind before them."

In five years since our nation was attacked, al Qaeda and terrorists it has inspired have continued to attack across the world. They've killed the innocent in Europe and Africa and the Middle East, in Central Asia and the Far East, and beyond. Most recently, they attempted to strike again in the most ambitious plot since the attacks of September the 11th -- a plan to blow up passenger planes headed for America over the Atlantic Ocean.

Five years after our nation was attacked, the terrorist danger remains. We're a nation at war -- and America and her allies are fighting this war with relentless determination across the world. Together with our coalition partners, we've removed terrorist sanctuaries, disrupted their finances, killed and captured key operatives, broken up terrorist cells in America and other nations, and stopped new attacks before they're carried out. We're on the offense against the terrorists on every battlefront -- and we'll accept nothing less than complete victory. (Applause.)

In the five years since our nation was attacked, we've also learned a great deal about the enemy we face in this war. We've learned about them through videos and audio recordings, and letters and statements they've posted on websites. We've learned about them from captured enemy documents that the terrorists have never meant for us to see. Together, these documents and statements have given us clear insight into the mind of our enemies -- their ideology, their ambitions, and their strategy to defeat us.

We know what the terrorists intend to do because they've told us -- and we need to take their words seriously. So today I'm going to describe -- in the terrorists' own words, what they believe… what they hope to accomplish, and how they intend to accomplish it. I'll discuss how the enemy has adapted in the wake of our sustained offensive against them, and the threat posed by different strains of violent Islamic radicalism. I'll explain the strategy we're pursuing to protect America, by defeating the terrorists on the battlefield, and defeating their hateful ideology in the battle of ideas.

The terrorists who attacked us on September the 11th, 2001, are men without conscience -- but they're not madmen. They kill in the name of a clear and focused ideology, a set of beliefs that are evil, but not insane. These al Qaeda terrorists and those who share their ideology are violent Sunni extremists. They're driven by a radical and perverted vision of Islam that rejects tolerance, crushes all dissent, and justifies the murder of innocent men, women and children in the pursuit of political power. They hope to establish a violent political utopia across the Middle East, which they call a "Caliphate" -- where all would be ruled according to their hateful ideology. Osama bin Laden has called the 9/11 attacks -- in his words -- "a great step towards the unity of Muslims and establishing the Righteous… [Caliphate]."

This caliphate would be a totalitarian Islamic empire encompassing all current and former Muslim lands, stretching from Europe to North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. We know this because al Qaeda has told us. About two months ago, the terrorist Zawahiri -- he's al Qaeda's second in command -- declared that al Qaeda intends to impose its rule in "every land that was a home for Islam, from [Spain] to Iraq. He went on to say, "The whole world is an open field for us."

Poppa Was A Rolling Stone

I've been asked to consider the validity and implications of several myths about black males. I may even talk about it on radio or television some day. So as per usual, I will kick out my gut feelings and get socratic and analytical on these issues of concern.

But let me start with an overall angle, and that is that there is a sigificant problem with coming at 'black males' from this perspective. I resent the whole anthropological tone, and it really grits my teeth when I hear somebody announce that, 'I am a black male..' or 'the black female needs...' It reads like a pet manual. That said, both of my parents were sociologists by training, and I know where all that is coming from. We started it. One of these days we're going to end it.

The first myth, as you might have guessed from the title, I will paraphrase in the following way. "The black male exhibits a preturnatural ability to sire multiple offspring without exhibiting domestic responsibilities." Or as a rapper might put it, 'I hate to bang and blow, but yo I gotta go'.

Is this a myth? No. Is it a rule of thumb? No. Is it the default expectation in American society? That's a bit tougher to say, but I think I'm going to have to say yes it is. What do the statistics say? According to Shay Riley at Booker Rising (who gets her numbers from very reliable sources) we are:

8.8 million families: 52% single parent (43% single women, 9% single men), 48% married. 9% of black kids live with grandparents (1940: 77% married, 18% single women, 5% single men)

I have to say that I'm down with Daniel Patrick Moynihan on this issue which is tangential to the abortion and adoption issues. Kids raised in married families have advantages. The strong black Old School position is, get married, stay married. I mean you really have to ask why it would be that blackfolks who are in The Struggle, would think of it as an advantage to raise kids singly. If you're trying to be middle class, it should be obvious that two parents are better than one, and that Marriage is better than shacking. I listen to Destiny's Child and I say, of course I can pay your bills. That's what a man does.

We still have understanding of the term 'living in sin'. The stigma hasn't fallen completely away. Legally, there used to be different laws of inheritance  and different  laws for the roles and responsibilities of parents. But you know sociologists can't leave well enough alone. So the legal basis for discrimination against bastards is gone.  You can't even say that word with its original meaning intact. But the moral injuction is still real and ought to be respected.

America is not quite comfortable with the Old School black father. But you know that's what Earl Woods was like. You know that's what Colin Powell is like. You know that's the role Charles Dutton played in 'Roc'. It's none of this 'Everybody Loves Raymond' wishy-washy stuff. It's about standing tall and being the force of stability, honor and discipline that a black father must be. And half of us are doing the right thing. I would, quote frankly, like to break those demographics down by class too. It's something I suspect Roland Fryer or one of the Freakonomics crew may have done. Bottom line, married black fatherhood is threatened, but the opposition will fall apart. We will be the survivors because we have the confidence that comes with the righteousness of doing the right thing, and we will pass it on.

I could go on into the reasons that the failure of the family has occured in America, but I really don't want to go there. Rather I want to emphasize and underscore the need for strong families of the traditional sort, and challenge those of us who hold to that ideal to remain strong and intact. I'm looking forward, and learning what advantages I have as my wife and I plan for and work our family.

We know, and everyone should know the simple fact, if you're raising children, follow Cobb's Rule #2 There is Marriage, and then there is everything else. I very much like the way it's put in this very relevant article by Kay Hymowitz:

Read through the megazillion words on class, income mobility, and poverty in the recent New York Times series “Class Matters” and you still won’t grasp two of the most basic truths on the subject: 1. entrenched, multigenerational poverty is largely black; and 2. it is intricately intertwined with the collapse of the nuclear family in the inner city.

By now, these facts shouldn’t be hard to grasp. Almost 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Those mothers are far more likely than married mothers to be poor, even after a post-welfare-reform decline in child poverty. They are also more likely to pass that poverty on to their children. Sophisticates often try to dodge the implications of this bleak reality by shrugging that single motherhood is an inescapable fact of modern life, affecting everyone from the bobo Murphy Browns to the ghetto “baby mamas.” Not so; it is a largely low-income—and disproportionately black—phenomenon. The vast majority of higher-income women wait to have their children until they are married. The truth is that we are now a two-family nation, separate and unequal—one thriving and intact, and the other struggling, broken, and far too often African-American.

Note that the author doesn't pretend that it's a black problem. It is an American problem that is more hurtful to poor blackfolks in the ghetto. It's only a black problem to the extent that black politics is responsible for saying "I ain't mad at ya" to those who embrace single parenthood. If the goal of black politics is to be the preservation and uplift of the African American nation, then it cannot turn a blind eye to this problem, nor can it equivocate on matters of family structure. But a certain stream of black politics has constantly done so, just as it has on matters of drugs and crime. It makes excuses instead of just saying no. It gets all crafty with its rationales, but it cannot do so in the case of family matters without denial of Moynihan which is what Hymowitz sees so clearly.

You really have to read Hymnozitz' entire piece, it has an extraordinarily comprehensive tracing of the provenance of the shaky arguments pitched against Moynihan. And I should note to black partisans that Moynihan was building on the work Kenneth Clark and E. Franklin Frasier. This also relates directly to The Underclass Question I posed. I have been hesitant, due to the influence of Glenn Loury's analysis, to place the primary variable of the Underclass directly in the home, but it does make sense to locate it there. Where, after all, does social indigency come from? The streets, is probably the best answer. And why would a married family be at the mercy of the streets in terms of the values they teach their children. It simply defies what we know to be true about married black fathers. How can any self-respecting black man stand up and say that  'the legacy of slavery' rules what goes on in my house?

Along with Cosby, I throw shade against the Forty Percent.. those below the middle class who don't appear to be holding up their end of the bargain. The Civil Rights Movement was a success. We destroyed Jim Crow, but you can't take blackfolks to the next level if you as a man haven't handled your own business at home. And for this, I'm convinced there is no government cure, and nothing politics can do but preach. We can't have people coming around to police how black men handle their social relationships. That's all on us.

As my father used to say: "But me no buts". Just handle your business. Let me make it unequivocably clear, the black men who don't marry are the ones destroying the Black Family, their own.

 

Secret Prisons: Fact

So there's this place, you know, called the Salt Pit, you know? No you didn't know. You couldn't know, but now you know. Well, click here and you'll know. You'll know 'that', you can guess 'why', but you'll never know 'how' or 'to what extent'. That's why they call them secret prisons.

The WaPo reports:

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

Out here in the amature paranoia zone, we had an inkling that such things existed. I mean, why wouldn't they? Astute paranoids can google this number N4476S and find interesting yet inconclusive facts. It's hard to hide aircraft.

Be all that as it may, we at Cobb expected as much. And I hope people start taking Posner's advice more seriously. Because you cannot just say to the world that you're going to bring people tp justice, if you don't eventually bring them. So as long as we take prisoners, which in and of itself is an act of moral, civilized behavior, we're going to have to keep certain folks incommunicado. Sounds fair to me.

Clearly, the transparency of the American system is admirable. No wonder we have so many dissidents.  They get their day. Oh and one more thing before knees start jerking. Congress knew.

Impairment and Correction

Everytime I hear the terms 'ADHD' or 'attention deficit disorder' my skin starts to crawl. And then when assertions that "we don't know how to teach boys" follow, it really steams me up. When I hear tell of children on drugs it makes me ill.

I know the drugs work. That's what's scary. That we can have drugs for every definable disorder assumes something I'm not ready to concede, which is that health dictates behavior.

If a perfectly healthy human is capable of speaking Japanese, should we medicate everyone who doesn't? If a perfectly healthy child is capable of learning to standardized tests in elementary school, should we medicate everyone who doesn't? It's the same question and the answer is obviously no. Both situations beg the questions of what should be learned, what should be taught, and how society should function around those who don't learn. What I percieve is that our standards are artificial, and that is dangerous and corrosive to American society.

Imagine that twitchy boy. He's on a farm. In front of him is a book on how to get eggs from chickens and how to prepare them. Nobody will cook for him. Will he starve? Will his attention deficit disorder be so severe that he cannot have enough patience to crack an egg to eat? Of course not. ADHD, not that I'm an expert and know for certain, is not that severe a condition. It is an impairment, like intoxication. But if it is a congenital impairment is the medical solution proper?  I'm skeptical because I believe that finding the kid a path to put his twitch to use is possible, and because I believe that he should be able to overcome without the use of drugs.  But I do believe that the kid should have a choice.

See, here's the great qualifier. I'm myopic. Without glasses or contact lenses I'm useless for all sports except for board games. I think it's socially important to play sports. I know that if it hadn't been for sports, my understanding of honorable competition would be a lot narrower than it is, my character would be, relatively speaking, flawed. I'm a better person because my impairment was corrected. Of course, wearing glasses has its own problems. But I think they are a bit less serious than those of taking drugs.

You see? I'm in a dilemma. Maybe a doctor could help me resolve it.

New Orleans Requiem

Main Entry: re·qui·em
Pronunciation:'re-kwE-&m also 'rA- or 'rE-
1 : a mass for the dead

Watching Spike Lee's documentary on New Orleans is difficult. That's because he has a deft touch for communication which is extraordinary. He is deeply sunk into the work and if you know anything about Spike Lee movies, you know how good he is at getting the camera in on people talking from the heart. Conclusions? That's not Spike's business. But I have a few.

On Refugees
I called them 'refugees' and I said a word was just a word. But it wasn't until Spike's documentary that I rethought that. What struck me about his angle was that here were people who finally got to the point at which they were demanding the basics of what they deserve as American citizens. So while Belafonte pontificated about what Hugo Chavez might have done, the people stuck in the Astrodome weren't trying to accentuate the hyphen in African-American. Gone was the rhetoric about 'Plymouth Rock landing on us', it was straight 'taxpayer talk'. I'm American, I deserve mine.

There is a very good segue from this into talk about who belongs in America and who doesn't. But I'm only going to mention it in passing. My nickel says every African American displaced by Katrina would vote with Ted Hayes on matters of illegal immigration.

On Compass
Chief of Police Eddie Compass comes off as a much more sympathetic character than he was portrayed in the news. The impression given by Lee was that he was merely a public relations liability rather than an incompetent leader given the fact that so many of his officers up and quit -  not to mention those who allegedly joined in the looting. I bought Compass' story.

On Nagin
Spike Lee's film basically validates everything I've been saying about Ray Nagin since day one. I defended him then and I support him now that he's won re-election.

On The Bomb
Non issue.

Other than that, really there's nothing to say. I mean there are issues that remain with the rebuilding and I'm sure there are many arguments that could be made, but I don't think it is proper or constructive for us out here in the country to debate it. There are those who have difficulty with Spike's take on the matter, but the answer to that is the same as it has ever been. Make your own damned movie. But none will capture the flavor and the pain and the feeling of loss that he has so completely done.

I fell asleep for the 3rd time watching Lee's parade of sorrow and I won't be going back to finish. What's done is done and it is almost as heartbreaking as it was in realtime. My aunt remains back in the city trying to find a way to help rebuild by attending meetings and speaking out in various places. And there is yet again, a part of me that feels like I could be some help if I were able to go, stay and work. I feel that there isn't a hole in my soul brought on by the tragedy that would stop me in my tracks and reduce me to uncontrollable tears. But maybe that's the real qualification necessary to be dedicated to the end. Situated as I am, on the perimiter of disaster, I feel it best to simply remain aware.

I read this morning the following paragraph, which strikes me as particularly useless and cruel.

When you have an enclave of non-working, welfare receiving, non-intact families headed by uneducated and unskilled single moms, what do you expect? When nothing is expected from these people other than to wake up and go to the mailbox to see if the next government assistance check has arrived, should anyone be surprised that they are singularly unable to care for themselves? Now, of course, not everyone living in New Orleans fits this description, but a significant majority do and certainly most who could find no way to leave the city or, if they could, stayed behind because they had no family of friends to go to.

Am I being too harsh? Well, not if you pay attention to what is happening in Houston, a city which opened its arms to an unprecedented extent to Katrina victims. A year later, Houston has had enough of the displaced citizens of New Orleans it had reached out to help, but not because of any additional burden placed on its social service system. Houston is fed up because of how these people conduct themselves.

There is no solution for 'these people'. Even those who exactly fit the description have a place in America and that is the burden of the nation to bear and it should be born with grace. Instead this was written with the bias of one incapable of strength and irresponsible to the cure. As far as I'm concerned there are only two kinds of people: those who provide and those who require provision. And of the providers there are those who are responsible and those who have abdicated their responsibilities. For the latter group there is nothing but shame, a lifetime worth, and what indicts them is the reality of a twisted neighborhoods and shattered lives.

There is opportunity and what seems to me an almost inexhaustible well of goodwill citizens do and should have for New Orleans. It will cost money and take time. It will take thought and compassion. We have all that. It's all about do.

The rest of us, I think should observe and respect silence for the dead.

The Practical Limits of Neoconservatism

It isn't very fashionable to be a geopolitical neocon these days. That is because the War in Iraq is going badly. It is going badly because it has been managed poorly, and it has been managed poorly because of GWBush's fidelity to expediency and value of loyalty over flexibility.

But even though the Bush Administration has its foot in a steaming pile, there are reasons to be optimistic in Iraq, as well as for the prospects of our current and future efforts against Jihadism. That is because America is so much more than GWBush and the best minds in this country are really looking to address and solve these problems. That includes neoconservatives.

I have always asserted that the greatest mistakes that Bush made in his lead up to war in Iraq was that of his timetable and subsequent inability to maintain coalition. However neither of these are a damaging as the simple fact of losing to the Iraqi insurgency. While it is clear that Jihadists have taken to Iraq as a front, I have been persuaded that the Iraqi insurgency was genunine and is primarily a consequence of patriotic sentiment and not of ideology. It needn't have been that way. In that regard there was no equivalent to the Taliban, who without weapons of mass destruction, deserved the thrashing they got at the hands of a more righteous American-led coalition. Although a case can be made for al-Sadr, I wouldn't make it.

For me personally, now is a time for retrenchement. I am currently assimilating all of the best criticisms of the Bush Whitehouse which isn't too difficult given the paucity of people not suffering Bush Derangement Syndrome or Right Wing Kneejerkism. I think it puts me in the company of experts, which is all I can hope for. What remains is a strategic rethinking of what it is America must do in projecting its ample resources in a different manner.

I think that a fundamental premise of the PNACian neoconservatism has been broken, and that is the power of American military hegemony. It can be asserted, although not with finality, that the threat of American military intervention is not so effective at this moment in history as it was before Iraq. But that is not because the effectiveness of our military is in question, but that the political will exists in the US to sustain that threat. What George W. Bush sought to accomplish as a 'uniter and not a divider' has been utterly destroyed. Red and Blue states came to be under his watch, and his very personality has been divisive. He has inspired instead great logic defying defenses and seditiously shrill denunciations. And this has left the prospects for neoconservatism in the lurch.

What might have saved the face of neoconservatism would be a good war. We don't have it. What might have saved the face of neoconservatims would be effective diplomacy. That has been patchy. What would have been best for neoconservatism would have been that GWBush himself was a neocon. But he isn't, and that has blurred the distinction between those things that neocon policy makers would like to have seen happen and what has actually transpired in the past 5 years.

When asked about neoconservatism and the PNAC agenda many people will mistake corporate cronyism, an earlier criticism of Bush vis a vis Cheney and Halliburton. That is not a principle. Many people would assert that pursuit of oil in the Middle East is an unalterable principle of neoconservatism. It is not. I hear neoconservatism conflated with a fundamentalist Christian antipathy to Islam almost on a daily basis. Nothing could be further from the truth. The GWOT would be in effect no matter who was President of the US, Jihadists don't have an anti-Christian agenda so much as an anti-semitic, anti-Western and anti-statist agenda.

What I think can be fairly placed at the foot of neoconservatism was Wolfowitz' eagerness to convert the threat of military hegmony to military engagement. In short, I'll cop to 'pre-emptive war' as a neocon overproduction. We were on the Cheney Bus. We drove the Cheney Bus. And in that regard, I'm not so sure it mattered to us whether the causus belli was marketing of WMD, post-hoc rationalization of an Al Qaeda connection, the danger of Saddam's expansionism, regional stability, the corruption of the Oil For Food program or the suppression of Democracy. It could have been any and it didn't need to be all of them. Of course I had my own reasons for supporting the War in Iraq and I won't back away from them. In fact, I'd say that it's one of the aspects of this crisis that has gone exactly as it should have:

There are no insurgents in Kurdistan. Nor are there any kidnappings. A hard internal border between the Kurds’ territory and the Arab-dominated center and south has been in place since the Kurdish uprising at the end of the 1991 Gulf War. Cars on the road heading north are stopped at a series of checkpoints. Questions are asked. ID cards are checked. Vehicles are searched and sometimes taken apart on the side of the road. Smugglers, insurgents, and terrorists who attempt to sneak into Kurdistan by crossing Iraq’s wilderness areas are ambushed by border patrols.

The second line of defense is the Kurds themselves. Out of desperate necessity, they have forged one of the most vigilant anti-terrorist communities in the world. Anyone who doesn’t speak Kurdish as their native language—and Iraq’s troublemakers overwhelmingly fall into this category—stands out among the general population. There is no friendly sea of the people, to borrow Mao’s formulation, that insurgents can freely swim in. Al Qaeda members who do manage to infiltrate the area are hunted down like rats. This conservative Muslim society does a better job rooting out and keeping out Islamist killers than the U.S. military can manage in the kinda sorta halfway “safe” Green Zone in Baghdad.

In a region where rule by reactionary clerics, gangster elites, and calcified military dictatorships is the norm, Iraqi Kurdistan is, by local standards, an open, liberal, and peaceful society. Its government is elected by a popular vote, competing political parties run their own newspapers, and the press is (mostly) free. Religion and the state are separate, and women can and do vote. The citizens here are tired of war, and they’re doing everything in their power to make their corner of the Middle East a normal, stable place where it’s safe to live, and to invest and build.

Now it is entirely possible that my reading of the neoconservative agenda is warped. It is true that I haven't read either of Fukyama's books. But I remain convinced that as much as any active citizen, that I understand its principles. In either case I am willing to take the full heat for those which I do support even as we witness potential disasters in our foreign policy.

So what I'm saying is that there's a practical gap between the aims of the neoconservative engagement and the implementation of foreign policy that has been hijacked by events, undermined by lack of poltical support and straight botched by incompetency and lack of coordinated planning. We have chosen a bold path, I think rightly, but we have also made strategic errors.

I'm keeping my eye on the PNAC signers and watching them as they process reality, and I close with these principles intact: 

[The] United States must be prudent in how it exercises its power. But we cannot safely avoid the responsibilities of global leadership or the costs that are associated with its exercise. America has a vital role in maintaining peace and security in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. If we shirk our responsibilities, we invite challenges to our fundamental interests. The history of the 20th century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire. The history of this century should have taught us to embrace the cause of American leadership.

Our aim is to remind Americans of these lessons and to draw their consequences for today. Here are four consequences:
• we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future;
• we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values;
• we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad;
• we need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.

Such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next.

Steve Irwin RIP

Steve Irwin was my kinda guy, and now that he's gone he will be sorely missed. There have been all kinds of imitators, notably Jeff Kerwin, but after the great Marlin Perkins and the inimitable Jacques Cousteau, Steve Irwin was tops. Sure Jim Fowler handled all the animals on Wild Kingdom was the man, and after a while it was the younger Cousteaus who did most of the swimming. Irwin was always in the thick of the action, and he's gone out with his boots on.

Obviously he was a big hit in our household though we haven't watched him in some time. He was a genius of sorts whose energy and enthusiasm for his subjects was unbounded. There will never be another like him. Crickey!

Individual vs Collective Sovereignty

In this piece I'd like to respond to Craig Nulan's question regarding Corporate Sovereignty. But I find that in doing so I'm circling around some very important first principles.

..I'm curious to know whether your actual core advocacy is for the rule of law per se, or, for the rule of law as a necessary environmental substrate for corporate sovereignty?

Is your political philosophy rooted in the ideals of corporate sovereignty or individual sovereignty? Which governance model do you consider most conducive to advancing the cause of Black partisanship?

I'm going to take a long time to answer that and go some important places along the way. Please bear with me. But first let me address the reasons I have used the term 'collective' instead of 'corporate', one is to telegraph the answers one should expect of a conservative and the other is that I recognize the aspect of the collaborative in all human social activity is the same.

First directly to the corporation itself. What is a corporation? It is an entity organized for the profit of its shareholders, generally a business with organizing principles that pools the capital resources of a large number of people and groups for the attainment of a set of specific goals. A corporation is very often an abstraction in that regard. Its goals may have nothing to do with the goals of the individuals and groups invested in it, nor is it necessarily under the direct control of its owners. And in that arises the moral dilemma which I believe drives Nulan's question. The corporation is a very powerful organization indeed, and with the willingness of investors to profit at any expense, a successful corporation can accomplish almost anything.  Specifically, corporations can be engaged in destructive, immoral enterprises. We'll keep that in mind.

My admiration for Capitalism is twofold. Primarily I am astounded that it channels randomness and allows us to predict the future. I mean this in the very deep way that the mathematics of Black Shoals gives investors ways to manage risk and thus create risky enterprises, and in the deep way that accountancy gives order and completeness to infinite activities. Secondarily that it provides for an extraordinary organizing principle specifically opposed to war. Competition in commerce satiates bloodlust, and the metaphors for war in the business world are apt.

Nevertheless I hedge against Capitalism via Religion. I think we have few pure examples but in general, under Western law, both are expressed fully. More on that later.

I have a longstanding principle in my head which I have held before I converted from Progressivism to Conservatism and it works along the lines of the bigger they are the harder they fall. I call it the social implications of Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem. Basically because no system of logic can be complete and  consistent, nor can any human endeavor. Nevertheless our brains don't hang when we are inconsistent; we percieve things to be consistent. So our systems of governance and everything else have inherent flaws that cause conflict even when we think they are perfect. The more all-encompassing the system, the more people are involved the greater the possible cost to humanity by the inevitable flaws. I have always therefore arranged my life around small perfections, now that I think about it. (This is taking me back to Freshmen and Sophomore years), chief among such small perfections were mathematical and philosophical proofs, software programs and musical compositions.

The individual solution to being a victim of the inevitable conflicts and crashes of all collective endeavors was limited loyalty. If one leads a life of liberty, one became relatively safe. I think this is demonstrably true.Out of ignorance or choice, all of us have limited loyalties to all of the institutions. So I have always believed that individual freedom to adhere to or oppose or ignore any institution or collective endeavor is a fundamental necessity. To deny this choice of the individual is to lock them to the fate of the collective, which will inevitably fail. This is essentially predestination, and we simply can't have that, it's slavery. Even when we don't and can't see how an institution or collective endeavor is distined to conflict or fail, we Americans are fundamentally opposed to permanent associations. Nobody could have predicted how Enron might fail, and though it was a complete catastrophe we wouldn't force those employees all to go down with the Enron ship and be permanently unemployable by any other company. We assume their limited loyalty, we assume their liberty.

And yet I believe that there are limits to whose bounds we are irrevocably wed whether we want to be or not. No human can defy the laws of physics. In fact our very existence depends on them - and yet we live under them ceaselessly. Not only that, but the the laws of physics are never unenforced. Yet because of the way we behave (despite fantastic wishes to travel faster than light or travel through time) we do not feel particularly encumbered by the restraint placed upon us. We are enjoying Liberty (relative freedom) but not absolute freedom. So too the laws of society can be arranged in such a way that we can enjoy liberty without feeling particularly encumbered by the law. The law can accomodate the perception of liberty (remember we are inconsistent but believe we are not) in two ways: limiting scope and limiting enforcement. But the aim of the law is to gain adherence and therefore maximize its aegis. The law must be seductive, it must offer adherents benefits for which they are willing to trade freedom. In America this underlies our social contract.

Before anyone gets jittery about trading freedom to the laws of government, recall that any and all of us do that for the sake of a job. Relatively few of us are propertied to the extent to which we don't have to submit to contracts of employment. We certainly give up a great deal of freedom in order to eat in the belly of this urban beast called the American city. We need a job, a gig, a 9 to 5, and we give up, on average directly 40 and indirectly probably another 28 out of 168 hours of our week to that. That's 40% of our lives, another 30% of our lives we're asleep. This underscores our perception of liberty. I believe Americans know very well of their ability and desire to use the old cliche 'take this job and shove it' in defiance of the costs to their liberty that jobs impose.

At this point I should say that it should be obvious that our contract with obeying the law puts us under less obligation with regard to enforcement than does our contract with employment. However our contract with employment generally has a much narrower scope than our contract under the law. Our boss hovers a lot closer than the cops. Note the irony of the inversion though. In the social context of work, your boss is a lot more likely to influence how you dress, communicate with others, physically locate yourself and spend your time than a cop, but the things that your employer actually requires of you is narrow. Whereas there are host of laws that have to do with the way you raise your children, what your employer can do, how you drive to work, that you pay taxes, how you may recieve health care.. In any case, since all of these are collective endeavors, the law, the business of employment, as an individual your safety depends upon you acting in your own self-interest expressed as limited loyalty.

So we accept permanent limits to individual loyalty as a matter of individual survival. We structure law to be seductive and not oppressive or meddlesome. That's where I am.

Black Partisanship is very much like corporate lobbying. But it assumes racial and therefore permanent fidelity. You will always hear people talking about the 'permanent interests' of African Americans as inviolable axioms of black politics. In fact blackfolks are black when they want to be and so demonstrate their limited loyalty to these black poltics. In otherwords, they refuse to be spoken for and daily prove that black unity operates only in theory.

My political philosophy is rooted in defense of the individual's right to defy any and all institutions. I expect him to enter into social contracts and business contracts and sacrifice freedom in exchange for protections and relative liberty. And I expect the individual to respect those contracts but have the right to arbitrarily terminate them and exercise limited loyalty. I think contracting parties working for collective endeavors need to recognize that their ideas and organizations cannot be both consistent and complete and that the more people they encompass the more dangerous and costly their failures will be. I will say that I believe that nations are as big as this stuff scales, and under certain circumstances, empires. I believe America is too big to be a nation and too libertarian to be a proper empire. I like it this way, though. Geopolitically I am interested in watching the border conditions at which nations fail or are formed. What's in transition now are destabilizing elements of intelligent decentralization due to the advances in information technology like the war between the blogosphere and the mainstream media.

During this time of destabilizing transition between the 20th Century nation-state and globalization, I am increasingly authoritarian, which is to say that aspects of my conservatism are hedges against the dissonance of anarchy. Interestingly, I do so because I firmly believe that somewhere on Maslowe's pyramid is place where the evolved and stable institutions of government and religion and cultural associations with land/turf are strong fallback positions. People who have no opportunity to take advantages in the changes and evolution at the top of society, what us self-actualized individuals are doing with all of our free time and capital, need to be satisfied with their lot in life. It's bad enough that we can have mad scientists underground tinkering with nuclear physics, we can't have everybody experimenting with all the dimensions of life and still have a place to call home.

But I do expect the fruits of experimentation to trickle down in an orderly fashion. It's a great thing that space-age plastics can be used for baby bottles. It's a fabulous thing that hydroelectric power from the Pacific Northwest lights a classroom in South Central LA. So I cannot abide a lower class collevtivism that is oppositional to the infrastructure and institutions that provide these advances. I'd rather see them doing as they do, which is to say buying baby bottles and lightbulbs at Wal-Mart.

Our nation, such as it is somewhere between nation-state and empire, managing the dislocations of the 21C should provide for its citizens a bedrock of laws which handle the social contracts for all of its classes of people. It should be premised on liberty for the individual and yet be supportive of collective endeavors be they non-profit, religious, educational, capitalist corporate, with the right of the individual to challenge any such contract. That's what we have. Open borders and all. I think we all have an obligation to defend such a remarkable system and hold up our end of the bargain of citizenship.

Ed Brown: Point of Light

We've all got our ideological agendas. Not Ed Brown, he's practical. Ed is one of those people I know but don't know. We've been in communication online at least ten years, but I've never met him in person. But that's not important. What's important is the work he has been doing on behalf of kids in his neck of the woods.

More specifically he recently met with the Ehrlich administration to discuss improvement of public education in Maryland.

It was a wide ranging discussion that covered my bullet points, what the administration was doing, the work of the year-long education commission chaired by Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, strategies, problems, successes, and future plans. It was a true discussion. By that I mean, they hit the points they wanted to hit, but so did I and we exchanged ideas, some of which were new to them, some of which were not.

As part an parcel of his due diligence he discovered, not surprisingly, something that I think classically defines the sort of political disputes we will be encountering within black politics from this point forward. It is important to have an eye, as Ed does, on the goals which support our core values and not try to score political points out of a sense of opposional posturing. Too long this has been a hallmark of 'righteous' black politics.

But more importantly than that, Ed represents the power of networks of intelligent folks who can shed light on what goes on in various cities. Within black politics and for issues of particular concerns to African Americans, we have yet to develop, sustain and publicize such informal networks. That has always been the aim of Vision Circle and it's one of the reasons I chose Ed to be a part of it.

As we move forward and Vision Circle is reborn, Ed's example will help show what we can do to inform our opinions and shape our politics. I think he represents the new kind of activist. I must also give props to Akindele Akinyemi who is (and has been) dutifully attending that same kind of business in Detroit.

Much props to Ed Brown. Make sure you check him out. And shout out some news his way if you live in Maryland.

Ahmadinejad's Empty Bunker

As far as I know, Crazy A is playing chicken with the international community. Now I don't go out of my way to give the international consensus a great deal of foresight, but El Baradei hasn't embarrassed himself lately. As Bush and everybody else who has spoken up says, Iran has passed the deadline to stop refining uranium.

Now there's nothing wrong with refining uranium. Lots of countries do it. Canada doesn't and they have nuclear reactors, so it's clearly possible to pursue nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without refining uranium. But Iran says it wants to do what it wants to do, and since it's quite possible to make electricity with enriched uranium, that's their story and they're sticking to it. But they're also sticking it to us by refusing to let El Baradei and his inspectors in to see exactly what he's up to.

Since nobody can see inside his basement, there very well may be a monster inside. We can't know, we can only presume. So what if he's trying to play us like Saddam? What if all Crazy A wants to do is provoke a pre-emptive strike at Natanz so he can then get Geraldo Rivera there to show the world all that's there is a smoking crater (and maybe some baby milk formula)?

I wouldn't put it past him. You have to have at least half a brain to insinuate yourself into the top of Iran. Nevertheless, the whole deal is very Cold War. Was there any doubt that when Ronald Reagan made similar claims about Star Wars that we were enemies of the Soviet Union? Granted, Hezbollah isn't quite a satellite nation, but the formula is rather familiar. Iran may very well want to be our new arch-nemesis, and so is fully engaged in subterfuge and provocation.

Now I'm going to throw a curveball, something I haven't heard anybody say, which folks ought to consider. Asia is on our side. Japan is the West. South Korea is the West. KL, Hong Kong, Singapore? They're all down with US. I mean say what you will about Israel. I'm not trying to buy an Israeli-mobile. But a Nissan Skyline? Yep. Do I like to eat kosher food? Not really, although I only eat Hebrew National hotdogs at home. Still, I'd much prefer kalbi, sushi and boba anyday. We have been geopolitically distracted by the nasty-ass hijinks of Saddam and Nasrallah and the Kidnapper turned King, Ahmadinejad, but let's not forget that this is still the era of the Pacific Rim. I'm a native Californian, and I grew up in a black and Japanese neighborhood. So we've got a fairly deep vibe over here and I'm here to remind you.

So Crazy A's hocus-pocus may or may not materialize. Hell, Iran may even be able to make cars and trucks and boats and missiles, not as much as when AQ Khan was dealing but some. But they're not about to match up with what the Japanese and Koreans can make in electronics.

China and Russia are still way more important, and I really wish they would both give us some more positive signals. But I suspect that they're going to just keep chuckling because they have no compunction in opening up a can of jackbooted whoopass when it comes to domestic terror, and both of them would like to call us hypocrites if it came to that on our soil. So they'll let a few little missiles slip through the cracks, and if they end up in Iran or Yemen, they don't care how that irks us.

But if Jihadism is successful in making our Asian trade dip, then I expect to hear some angry words from the Tigers.

Either way, there's a hole in the ground in Iran that's got a lot of people uncomfortable, and for good reason. It contains either a slap in the face or a beheading, but there's no question it's aimed at our head. Now's the time to amp up our coalition, because there looks to be showdown in our future.

The Underclass Question

Is there a black underclass? If so, how large is it and where does it or does it not intersect with the folks that Cosby admonishes?  How do we use the term and what do we mean by it?

By underclass, I would mean a dynamic set of people who are socially indigent. That by their behaviors and beliefs, that by their lack of assets, both personal and material, that they are fundamentally incapable of upward mobility in American society.

There's a Hole in the Sky Through Which You Can Fly

Awesome. I just finished Prey and was suggesting that what they've done with gravity was definitely going to be copied. Voila. This is exciting. It's almost enough to make me want to be a PC Gamer. Well, I've been thinking about that for a while, ever since I realized that XBox 360 controllers can work via USB into PCs.