Cobb

Cobb Vision VI - The NBomb Show

I suspect that this one will be in use for time immemorial. It's not like it hasn't been said before. In fact.. hmm.. here's an old old link. The saga continues.

On second thought, I would say that the most faithful translation of 'nigger' is 'dangerous fool', instead of just simply 'fool'. In this context one is a danger to himself and to others through their exercise of foolishness. And again this is the consistent definition which works in the context of intellectual productions and standup comedy. In addition, I'm going to post the full text of the old, SCAA FAQ which had several entries...This is back from somewhere around 1996 or thereabouts.

Car Games

Every time we get into the Transporter and there is more than one kid, and always if it's F9, we have to play some brain game. F9 is the inventor of 'First Letter Last Letter' which is a word game and it goes a little something like this.

First Letter Last Letter
The basic game is to start off with a word, say 'zebra' and then the next person comes up with another word whose first letter starts with the last letter of the previously spoken word. Easy enough. But then there are variants. The first variant and the one we usually play is Category. You pick a category like animals or food or people's names and play the game. The second variant is Syllables. You go one syllable, two syllable, three syllable words until the other person is exhuasted. Sometimes we play first letter second letter, or second letter rhyme. You never know when F9 is going to throw a curve ball. The other kids hate this game.

BOL
B.O.L. Stands for Blurt Out Loud. This is F11's favorite game because she's the Huckleberry Finn of the little Bowens. She invented it, and it's just what you would expect from a girl in middle school. The first rule of BOL is that parents must grant amnesty. You start with 100 points and lose points for every confession you make that others already know about you. The dynamic of this game is very interesting. We as parents have to confess things that are on the edge of controversy but not too deep for our kids, and the kids get to confess their mischievous behavior without getting punished. Most recently we were stunned to find out that Boy has actually never caught a fish. I just hope we can keep this one going through high school.

Questionmaster
This is my game and Boy's favorite. I allow three categories. Right now we're mostly focused on English, Sports and Geography. So I give the categories and invent a question which they must answer. If the kid I ask first cannot answer, then their sib can steal. It's rather like Jeopardy. The latest variant is English Idioms. So far I've learned one idiom from them which is 'puppy guarding' which is actually like 'bird dogging' in the context of handball. This is a very good way to keep up with the slang of youngsters. And now they understand 'the cat's meow'. The problem with Questionmaster is that Boy always wants me to ask questions about plate tectonics or cellular biology where he knows exotic trivia. Ahh fatherhood.

Plates
The new favorite game is Plates, which is a variation of Punch Buggy whose vagaries I can't even figure out, but then again I don't play Punch Buggy. In California, our license plates start with one digit followed by 3 letters than 3 digits. The trick of Plates is to make humorous sentences out of those first four characters. For example the license plate '4FLS009'  could be four fat ladies sang or four friends licked sausages or four frenchmen like servitude. This has yielded some real hilarity, so much so that I've almost had to pull over the car from laughing my family into oncoming traffic.

Cobb Vision V - The Black Power Imperative

• Related: Re-Undoing Reverse Anti-Racism
• I Don't Care About You

Patently Obvious

I have a smidgen of something to say about the controversy over patents, and along with an increasing number of areas of expertise, I tend to believe that we're dumbing down and selling out the Patent Office. It's not the Office itself, but the entire kit and caboodle, case law, special courts and all that. We have a problem that bigger than our willingness to stick to some principles and insure that smart and disciplined people manage it. Surely someone will figure a way to outsource it to India.

The fundamental question I have has to deal with the level of responsibility begged by patenting the obvious, And I think it is a question that is related directly to the other question before the courts these days which is the regulation of 'greenhouse gasses'.

What cannot be monetized? The answer is nothing. So long as we can express human ambition and desire through the investment of treasure, people will put their monies where their mouths are. But the ever increasingly pressing question is how can I make a million and survive? The answer is through building something quick and dirty and getting enough of a jump on the competition so that your company can be acquired by people with enough sense to look a bit further into the future than you - or at least have the skill in managing a business or a product well enough to squeeze actual revenue out of it, rather than just cashing in on the idea. But since actual companies who manage products and people have competition as well, they must have a leg up on the competition - which is to say a legal leg up. For in the end, our economy is one of broadcasters and marketers, companies who are about equal in building, but getting to market is what matters, and it is because of this phenomenon that the culture of invention is a wholly owned subsidiary, not of necessity but of the Business Business.

But while human desire is infinite and in the species of human called 'homo consumus', endlessly manipulatable. In spite of this, human needs are fairly fixed. And so I wonder how much of the American GDP attends to needs and how much attends to desire. My guess is 2/5 need over desire. So perhaps there are wealthy marketing mavens at Procter and Gamble who understand that they should keep their legal department harassing all those in favor of legalizing prostitution. If enough men and women.. err, consumers.. figured out that bouncing and behaving hair is not really desirable in comparison to the delectables of the world's oldest profession, well it could be a disaster for Madison Avenue. That is, if they don't get the Heidi Fleiss account. Chances are, of course that this edge of the GDP will flourish quite well without broadcast advertising, as does internet porn and the marijuana business.

So why do we continue to live with the conceit that our entire economy can be leveraged by constant invention? Is this the kind of balance we should deliver, in which every generation can expect to live in greater comfort, with newer shinier kitchens? You should know that presently the answer is yes, or at least to the crowd that has managed to sell out self-stirring mugs. Surely there is a patent on this device, and surely only one company can sell it, and surely any lazy teenager could engineer one. It's obvious. And it is this same kind of obviousness that can continue to be marketed, and whose market will be protected by those of us foolish enough to live on and invest in the cutting edge of luxury.

But in a way I'm not sure how to define, I am a Conservative who says that constant and mindless innovation is but the froth at the edge of the ocean. Oh, surely it's the place where water most combines with air and rock to provide the music of the surf and the constant erosion of the land. The shore changes most and provides the waves over which the adventurous ride, but the fate of the ocean is its middle and its unchanging depth. And the greatest beasts of the ocean reside and thrive within its deep currents. On the cutting edge of the oceans, great whales die.

I am not against invention. For ironically invention of the new as it fills the market like songs by Britney Spears, lower the price of less popular, better music. But then there comes a tipping point at which preservation of the classic becomes more expensive and less profitable than creation of the novel. At that point, our heritage is jeopardized. And it is this game of jeopardy we can't long afford to play.

You recall the addage: make new friends and keep the old. Let's not try to make silver into gold.

Cobb Vision IV - Watches

Cobb Vision III - Homework

The Cobb Vision

I can't tell you how much fun I'm having creating these videos. As I get more comfortable with the format and how I think I'm coming across, I'll be more bold and see what happens. But so far I'm rather ecstatic at the sound of my own voice and the look of my own face. Let's see if it becomes contagious.

So far I've recorded eight sessions and I'm debating whether or not I should continue to number them. Sometimes I think that one will be more timely than the ones in between - the latest is the NBomb Show which is the primary impetus for the question. If I publish three a day, you still won't get it until Friday. Nevertheless it's all still at YouTube whether or not it's at the blog, so I suppose if people really want to see it, they will. I'll try not to sweat it.

I also want to take Cobb Vision out on the road, so I'll be experimenting with the entire laptop vibe. Further, I'll attempt to make some links about the subjects at hand or the songs or books that I reference. So this is the new and exciting stuff. It will keep me going for a while, that is, until I get a bad haircut.

Blue Dogs Dog Hastings

According to the Washington Post, there's new triangulation afoot as Blue Dogs are putting their collective paws down and drawing a line in the dirt across which motely mutts such as Alcee Hastings cannot cross.

House Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has decided against naming either Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), the senior Democrat on the House intelligence committee, or Rep. Alcee L. Hastings (Fla.), the panel's No. 2 Democrat, to chair the pivotal committee next year.

The decisions came despite lobbying by conservative Democrats on Harman's behalf and a full-throttled campaign by Hastings to overcome the stigma of the 1988 impeachment that drove him from his federal judgeship.

I was hoping for just this outcome, so while the controversy was making the rounds on the Right, and then some of us barfed up Trent Lott as a countermeasure, apparently the more reasonable heads in the Democrats were paying attention as well. Ahh the responsibility of governing.

It is becoming more apparent to me that American politics is rather shameless when it comes to grabbing power. There's so much out there to get, now we're even considering an attempt to reign over carbon dioxide, but that's another blog coming soon. In the meantime, let us be thankful for this moment of probity in the otherwise circuslike atmosphere as Congress reshuffles its deckchairs.

Cobb Vision II - Anti-Convergence

Cobb Vision One

My first video blog entry. Cobb Vision, with the wonderful story of what I did today on my vacation. It includes a short review of Borat, which I recommend.

Carlos Mencia

There's a bunch of aftermath in the cultural sphere over the Richards thing, some of which is actually interesting. Check out Paul Mooney, one of the smartest comedians out there, on the matter. And Nathan McCall has a dime to drop as well. But I have to admit, that for me the whole black white thing has become tired, and you know who has a good perspective on it? Carlos Mencia.

I haven't heard him specifically on this issue, but I have been catching him sporadically and he's funny as hell. He's also a Second World Patriot, like myself. I like him a lot. Here's one guy who does Paul Rodriguez one better, a second-generation latino comic who is right at home in America.

I've adjusted my Tivo.

Whist: Top Of The Food Chain

This weekend, my anniversary weekend, the Spousal Unit and I had a bit of a getaway to the Viceroy Hotel in Santa Monica. Splendid place, extraordinary style. We had the most exquisite meal I've had in a very long time.

The Unit, of course, works in the food business and we've been foodies for a long time. But since she's such a great cook, we don't go out to restaurants as often as I imagine other couples do. Plus, when we do go out, we're mostly just satisfied, but very rarely thrilled. This time we pulled out all the stops and actually did get astonished.

Whist is the restaurant.

Here follows the best I can do with words to describe what we sampled. We stared off with a nice bottle of Veuve Cliquot which is just about the only champagne I like. Our appetizer and first course was a quail & fennel affair in a tiny pile on top of a cucumber slice, dotted round with a green olive oil. Delightfully light and playful flavor.

Next came a perfect square of melt in your mouth savory foie gras complimented by a bracingly fresh persimmon and raspberry chutney. Now I was getting revved up. What could they possibly do to outdo what they've done?

The Sous Chef, Kelly came out with the next course which was a special from the kitchen, and it was an absolute marvel. Tasting this next dish has me thinking that there's something I am just learning that chefs can do, that I couldn't imagine. But here you have these monstrously meaty prawns atop a bed of frisee and they are grilled to perfection. But let me describe this sort of perfection. The edges of the prawns are crisp and in the insides squish with all the flavor plus what tastes like a splash of the ocean. What I am tasting is perfected ocean in the middle of a giant jumbo shrimp. Still, it took me a couple minutes to get to that because on the right of the very same plate is a tiny cup of butternut squash bisque with a square of brie floating on the surface. It was, by far, the greatest soup, chowder or bisque I have ever tasted, which is saying a whole lot considering the corn bisque at Bambara in Salt Lake and the lobster bisque at the Plaza Hotel in Boston. One spoonful transports you instantly into the warmth of a ski lodge fireplace. The texture on your tongue is just fabulous and you know within seconds that you are eating in a way that you imagine you would like to every day if you were incredibly rich. This is just not food you can get anywhere. It is completely other, and magnificent.

I have another slice of the delicious rosemary bread and as much as I want to savor the prawns and squash I just cannot eat it slowly. A mountain of flavors are mixing in my mouth with the velvety warm squash and the sea-frothy prawns with savory little cubes of pancetta and the bitter accents of the frisee. It's really miraculous.

On to the next course I hardly know what to expect, but sure enough there's more wonderfulness. This time it's a delicate flute, which is a fish like a flounder. In flavor it's light and would be very much like your standard Chilean sea bass except you don't butter it down and it's got more texture. It's somewhat more firm that trout and yet still flaky like sea bass. With sweet carrots and spinach. Very nice.

Right about now I'm filling up, but wait there's more. This time yet another exotic. Venison chops with cherry glaze and risotto. Bam, right down to earth. I got a bit overly dramatic since this was my first taste of venison and made a big deal of the first bite, which was a mistake because I chose the more well-done of the two chops and I don't like my meats well-done. So I got a bit more earth than I bargained for. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that doing venison right is pretty difficult, but I caught on finally to the direction they were going with the cherries. There should have been yams instead of risotto if you ask me. A righteous yam with the right spice would work that venison into a good combination.

Now I'm full, and dessert is coming. I can only take a few lush spoonfuls of the pumpkin trifle and I'm done. But I manage to get down a fresh cup of joe and sip on their deliciously complex 2002 Kracher Beerenauslese. 

The service was top notch of course, and the ambiance was just right for fine dining. If you've got a few extra bucks to drop and you want to try some truly unique and splendid dishes you definitely need to head to Santa Monica and check out Whist.

Lonely

The name of the song is 'Lonely'. We basically put it together tonight. This is the third take of the song we just spontaneously invented on the spot, and it's the first really coherent piece we've composed. It feels like a song. We don't have our signals down, so when I said 'break it down' - he didn't stop for a drum and bass solo but it worked out great, I think. I kept thinking about what Monk was saying in Straight No Chaser about getting your first reaction to the music on tape and living with the consequences if you mess up. So basically since there wasn't any written music and the whole thing was improvised from the jump, I think we did a pretty decent job.

It won't be long before Boy is going to far outstrip my abilities. In fact, I'm just hoping I can keep up with the Christmas caroles we're going to be recording in the next few weeks. So welcome to our little jam sessions.

Heart & Soul

My boy and I are having a ball recording music. This is the most fun you can have. We're going to do a lot more of this. In fact, it may be all I blog about all week. Who knows? Obviously I had a fabulous holiday. So we're doing the classics...

Yams & Bass

Happy Thanksgiving

The Million Mutt March

Kanye West has once again demonstrated his political acumen. He cites the realpolitik of staffing videos by race:

"If it wasn't for race-mixing there'd be no video girls," the rapper says in the January issue of Essence. "Me and most of our friends like mutts a lot. Yeah, in the hood they call 'em mutts."

Plenty of chatter about it here.

Chances are, that a good portion of hiphop will be conflated with black culture and blackfolks in general will be scapegoated by the idiocy of a few. Sauce for the goose, I suppose, considering all the jawjacking of the past week. Whitefolks can't stand blackfolks because blackfolks get a way with murder, and vice-versa. Can't we all just get along?

One Sub or Two?

DCM. NAD. KEF. JBL.

Do you recognize these acronyms? If you do then you'll probably recognize the names McIntosh, Revox, Carver and at some point in your life, you spent a pile of money on stereo equipment.  Well I still have my components from over 15 years ago. A Soundcraftsmen pre-amp, NAD amp, and a pair of Infinity 3way speakers. It's about time for me to get some new speakers so I started twiddling around the net to see what I could find. Nothing yet, but I did find this, an interview with the legendary Bob Carver.

I'm an audiophile from way back in the day but it has been a long time since I've put any serious money into my system. I bought a couple studio monitors for my computer a couple years ago - a pair of Resolv 65a. They're great, and I listen to mostly AAC encoded music at 320kbps which is really good enough. But now I've got the beginnings of a new itch.  For a subwoofer. Just one, that's all I need. Or is it?

Safe Harbor

Over at P6, PTCruiser writes:

Nonetheless, it would be historically incorrect (and opinion polls taken at that time support my argument) to assume that a majority of white Americans did not harbor some racist attitudes towards black Americans at that time. It is clear from Michael Richards' outburst that some Americans still do but I doubt if Richards, for example, supports siccing German Shepard dogs on black school children.

It's the second sentence that you almost never hear from the politics that says 'never let whitey off the hook'. It shouldn't be surprising that a substantial number of dysfunctional whitefolks hold to those politics as well. Welcome to contemporary liberal politics. Still, PT makes the very important distinction between racism and bigotry. It's something more of us should do.

Yesterday on the way home, I figured out a way to podcast. Turn on the radio for five minutes and then turn it off and let me rant. Maybe I'll get around to it, maybe not. What kicked it off was some caller to Michael Medved who represented himself as a black professional who lived in the Oakland Hills and spoke about how he was subjected to the racism of being accused of being the gardener at his own home, and how his children had to suffer through that every day. There are three simple solutions to that. The first is to hire a gardener. The second is to undo your childhood in small-town Mississippi. The third is to count your blessings. But the caller was not predisposed to the easy solutions, and I'm sure that although there are many black psychologists in the Bay Area, he probably isn't going to spend the money on Solution #2. Otherwise, where would his politics go?

I haven't gone over it in a while, but I should remind us of the differences between racism and bigotry. Racism is what you believe to be true in your head. It is an ideology that has to be consistent. You've got to believe some fairly significant things about race to be a racist.

Most Americans understand the dynamics of race enough to not say "I have no idea" when asked very specific questions about race. And so it's not particularly difficult to figure out if somebody is racist or not. But when you deal with the mental, if you're in the area when you are considering if somebody 'harbors racist attitudes' well.. let's parse those words in a Catholic sense.

All Catholics know that there are sins of commission and sins of omission. Things you have done and things you have failed to do. Over here at Cobb, we say than an enemy is someone who doesn't care if you fail. So let us suggest that one who harbors racist attitudes is guilty of a sin of omission in that they don't care if someone else is treated like a nigger. OK? Good.

Now lets look to the matter of bigotry.

A bigot is a racist with a dog in the game. You don't qualify as a bigot if you don't care one way or another. Bigotry requires action. Just harboring racist attitudes doesn't cut it in bigot-land. You got to walk the walk, not just mumble the words. For example. The civility and ultimate usefulness of legendary Usenet group, soc.culture.african.american was destroyed by the active bigotry of racist flamers there who derailed every conversation they could. They came back time after time and acted out an agenda of bigotry. Not to complicate matters much, but it doesn't really matter if they believed in a theory of genetic supremacy, because nobody online in the forum ever showed their faces. It could not be proven that they were white and we were black. The point is that their destructive actions spoke for themselves. A bigot is not satisfied until the object of his scorn pays a price just for existing.

People who accuse Michael Richards of bigotry are wrong. People who accuse Mel Gibson of bigotry are wrong. When Michael Richards says, "I am not a racist", I believe him. But I do not believe he is innocent of sin.

Everyday, or at least every time somebody gets offended, we hear somebody intone reverently that 'Racism still exists in America'. That's a bold statement. Really? Ya think? What they really mean to say is that most people 'harbor racist attitudes' and depending on one's faith in one's fellow man that either means 'It's all in your head' or 'all hell can break loose next week and we'll all be back in chains'. For a nation that pledges to judge people by the content of their character we have to admit to being rather poor judges. Surely there are folks who don't feel any benefit of any doubt is due, but that's their problem. Our problem is to keep a nuanced differentiation of the various offenses so that we can keep the extreme squawking to a minimum. You can't compare Richards to Bull Connor to Hitler to the woman who clutched her purse the other day at the supermarket.

The very least you can do is distinguish between thoughts and deeds. You can hold racist thoughts in your head. That's your safe harbor. You can actually *be* a racist. It's not a crime to be immoral. But when you act, be prepared to get called on it. Because as much as people like to say that America is a racist country, it is not. It is a country with a history of the worst kind of bigotry imaginable and a fair amount of it persists. But it was neither founded on racist grounds, nor could it survive as such. And so we are constitutionally bound to combat bigotry rather than to encourage it.  And it is the actions of Americans to end all that bigotry that has redeemed and continues to redeem this nation. Every day we're calling out the names of people who disgrace us.

Every sin of omission and commission is seen by God, but while we are on Earth our justice cannot approach His. It would be foolish to attempt to cleanse America of sin or of sinners. We would self-destruct. What we can and must do is strive towards righteousness and count our blessings. If you have a problem with that, perhaps you ought to see your doctor.

In Anticipation of Happyness

There will always be an unexperienced fraction of America who wants to know what black men are all about. For them, American culture serves up any number of proxies. Whatever your choice of stereotype or archetype, there's one. There are problems with this of the species that all analogies fail, but for the purposes of abstract conversations, they do quite well.

We could begin and end with OJ or Mike Tyson or Colin Powell. More recently the subject has turned to sex and Taye Diggs (or so I've heard through the Kwaku Network). But along with the Washington Post, one of the more salient conversations about the 'state of the black man' will be goosed along this holiday season by the impending and I think inevitable success of Will Smith's next film, 'The Pursuit of Happyness'.

It's the story of a man who succeeds against the odds and insures that his son understands the virtues of manhood. And that's all it has to be.

Nobody has seen the film yet, although over the weekend one could tell that it is bound to fill four hankies with tears by the preview trailer. The critics are already thinking that it is Oscar material, and although I haven't seen anything yet in the blogs, I'm certain that the expectations will be high all around.  That is because it is clearly a film that stands out as far as films about black men go. But it stands out in a way that perhaps ought to be unremarkable. I'm thinking that Denzel never had to make this kind of film, nor can I recall one in this style done by Poitier in the prior generation. Why demonstrate the elements of manhood? Why not just be a man?

Well it's because this generation needs examples. I hope they get what they need, and I hope this film will suffice. Perhaps it's the once every few years shot of vitamins this generation needs to remind them that they're supposed to be men despite the odds. I think Finding Forrester did an excellent job of that. Also Antwone Fisher was the picture four years ago.

I'm not one of those folks who cries out in the wilderness for a lack of positive images. You wouldn't catch me gnashing my teeth over the production of Soul Plane. I think boycotts are a waste of time, in fact no other comment on the recent hiccup over Michael Richards struck me as more pathetic than the one that wished more blackfolks watched Seinfeld in the past so that we could boycott it even more in the future. But the extent to which positive lessons might be learned from these films is exactly the extent to which they are not learned elsewhere. And I think we might measure that in terms of disbelief and hype.

The more that people talk about this film in terms of what blackfolks need, the more Will Smith becomes the new black role model, the more this film becomes more than just a film, the more it means that the film was necessary. Is this kind of film necessary? Is this what we need, as a people?

I'm not going to launch into a tirade about the failure of our society. I think our society works very well, and despite the fact that grumpy old men like myself chew around its rougher edges on the whole we're satisfied. And so I can continue my pledge not to second-guess blackfolks. Those who get what they need - more power to them. Git in where you fit in. But let's not make the mistake of suggesting that the lessons of this film are anything so alien or unknown to African America. We are way larger, in all dimensions, than any series of films are going to capture, which means our depravities are more profound and our successes are more stellar than can be known. From time to time someone takes time out from life to talk about life, and the unexperienced fraction get another taste that rings true. I predict that this film will have that flavor and people will suddenly remember what their ordinary lives tell them to forget.

Eric Morris

Eric Morris came to my door the other night selling magazines.

I don't know Eric and neither do you. All I know about him is that he turns 20 this week, he has been in LA for less than two weeks and he's fresh out of Durham, NC and trying to turn his life around. So he's hooked up with an outfit called Second To None and they've put him up somewhere in Buena Park. I bought a subscription off of him and we sat down and talked for a minute.

He was new, and not slick. I could tell that he was trying and hadn't gotten the salesman's crust. But I could also tell that he was reaching out to me, young black man to old black man. I gave him a chair and we rapped on my front porch as the winter darkness closed in.

I told him about half a dozen jobs I hated in the four years between my break from schooling and that the worst one was selling photocopier supplies. He told me about the other blackfolks in my neighborhood that didn't give him the time of day. I told him I didn't know any of the other blackfolks in my neighborhood, he said that I wasn't missing anything. Funny. I didn't think I was, but I never really thought of it that way.

He told me that he just learned to tie a tie. He was wearing a clean white shirt and the knot on his blue and green tie was acceptable. He wore his hair cut short, a one on the electric clippers and no mustache. I told him that now is the time to take risks if you want to do sales. All he has to do is take care of himself and when people want the product, you just have to be there and it sells itself. He laughed. I think he knows something about moving products. But these days, Eric wants to be a nurse, or at least that was the thing that warmed him up the most as we talked about the possibilities. I have faith that he's going to do alright and I told him so. He's already made the biggest and most risky move - all the way out here to Cali, and I was glad that I was able to give him a seat that evening. I hope if and when he sends me an email, that it doesn't get caught in the spam filter.

I don't second-guess black people and while I will continue to call out fools who are an embarrassment to themselves and to all Americans, I have no doubts that boys will grow to be men and that some of those men, no matter where they came from, will remain the strength of this nation. Eric also thinks about being a cop too. He's getting righteous, and I could tell that about him. When I told him that I had thought about moving to Durham, he warned me off. I said that I thought the area was nice, and he said there's nothing nice about it. Later I clarified that I meant Cary, to which he immediately assented. Oh yeah, that's nice, he said. Eric's not a fool.

It Takes One to Know One

The Anchoress is slightly fretting over the complaint of a lack of authenticity in politics expressed by Dick Meyer. The answer is actually very simple which is to deny phonies their weapons. To attack them where they live and to dismiss their creations.

There is nothing, really to authenticity. All it takes is a cursory look at any television show aimed at teenagers that involves cheerleaders. What do you tell the phony cheerleader? This is all you have to tell the phonies around you. The problem with Dick Meyer and everyone else who laments the takeover by the phonies is that they fully expect that masses of people, less perceptive than themselves, to be dazzled by the phony facade. They thus buy into the bigger fool theory and play the market like PT Barnum. They underwrite the ascent of phonies because they cosign the market of baloney. Baloney Rules! I hate it, they say, but they believe it too. And they are therefore cowed by the entire process sacrificing their own integrity.

Along the way to the inevitable conflict that forms the noose around the phoney neck, those who long for the authenticity they have personally abandoned must admit that they have lost their ability to tell the difference. How does one come up with a genuine answer to the problem of Iraq if you spend half your time arguing against the inanity of Murtha, for example? You can't because you cannot handle the obscurity of not being paid attention. And this is what it's all about.

What Meyer and others desire most fervently is for some miracle to occur in which the sloth of phonies is suddenly replaced by the discipline of authentic individuals thereby transforming popular politics to an authentic popular politics. So that the real people and suddenly be the popular people. It doesn't work like that.

Rabbi Hillel said, where there is no hero, YOU be the hero. Dick Meyer is just waiting for superman to save the day - the problem is, by not being his own superman, he and everyone like him won't recognize a real superman from a phony.

This kinda reminds me of David Brooks' accounting of Bobos

Pierce Ain't Your Average Ordinary Hound

Tennie Pierce thought he had it coming but the light at the end of the tunnel was a train. He being a 6 foot 4 black ex-firefighter who used to call himself Big Dog. Apparently, somebody put dog food into a plate of spaghetti and so he tried to sue the City of LA for racial harassment. For 2.7 million dollars. The City Council approved the settlement and then it came to light that the Big Dog used to do some of the same tricks.

Would you eat a can of dog food for 2.7 million dollars? I know I would. In fact, I would eat over the course of a month, an entire 50 pound bag of dog food. The retiree in question, 'Big Dog' surely didn't have more than a bite, but hey he's a victim. At this point in the saga, the settlement has been denied and it goes to trial in the arguably incompetent hands of Rocky Delgadillo, the LA City Attorney who is fast losing the confidence and respect of the City Council. Rocky was incompetent to find the mitigating circumstances and was the one to wring his hands over the possibility that a black jury would find for the plaintiff and therefore cost the city even more than 2.7.

Integrity? Lacking.

Pierce has got a lot of nerve and I'm sure he was counting on spineless bureaucrats like Delgadillo's staff to wuss out. I'm disgusted with the pair of them.  Let's see if we hear whimpering from the Coalition of the Damned this time around.

Happy Happy and a Little Bit Sappy

Happy Feet is by far the best children's movie of the year, especially if your children are slightly spoiled suburban tree-huggers like mine are. Be prepared to be astonished.

Happy Feet is so well-done that you almost forget that you have suspended disbelief and are watching a movie with talking penguins. So there are elements in the surprisingly elaborate story that make you stop and say, wait a minute, humans aren't going to... and then you realize that you're taking the penguin point of view. Too late, you're already hooked.

Unlike the enjoyably silly 'Open Season' and the even more hyperactively funny 'The Hedge', humanity hasn't been stereotyped into one ridiculous baddy, or sub-intelligent dorks just waiting to be outsmarted by animals. And while this film shoots for an environmental homerun it does so without offending the sensibilities of an old codger like me who makes his kids figure out what a BTU is when they start mouthing off about pollution. A lot of credit goes for a deft handling of a complicated matter that in the end, didn't stick in my craw. And if you want to know where I'm coming from, read 'State of Fear' again, and ask yourself why you haven't heard of any new Michael Crichton movies lately, as compared with the guys who did 'The Day After Tomorrow'.

Happy Feet makes a good case for heroics, and the burdens assumed by outcasts who have courage. The hero penguin confronts the sages in two penguin economies and through his discoveries brings about change. It's more than just a fish out of water story, it is one of loneliness and triumph. More than that, it's a musical.

So right about now Stevie Wonder, Prince, Queen and Earth Wind and Fire are getting a big payday, because their music is rocking this movie from end to end. There are musical arrangements in this film that are astonishing their beauty. It's something you absolutely don't expect from popular music - in fact, for someone like me there's almost nothing to compare it to. There are no contemporary musicals, and that's what Happy Feet is. I mean with real music, not just Disneyfied syrup. It opens up a huge but almost obvious and completely overlooked genre - which is the business of making voice actors with real singing voices into stars, yeah even though they are penguins. Is that what it takes? Well, I guess so, but yes you will hear some very beautiful singing in this film, not just catchy stuff. It's a full blown musical. Gimme more!

CGI has really gone to the next level. There is one scene in which the intrepid explorers are pushing their way across the snow in a fierce windstorm just as the sun is dipping below the horizon. It is reminescent of the short single scene films in the very beginning of the CGI revolution - back when Spike and Mike were still underground cult figures and we were still freaking out about Luxo Jr. It's the beauty shot of the film which leaves you struck about the wonders of the technology to express emotion.

In the end, love triumphs, good wins over evil, truth over superstition and the hero gets the girl. Yeah that's sappy, but it's also very happy. You will leave the theatre wanting to dance, I guarantee.

And He Did It Without Q

The new James Bond is the best ever. Really.

As I went into the theater, hearing good things about the new 007, I thought that perhaps they might have made a small error. Jason Statham would have been my choice for the new James Bond, and yet he's done quite well without the franchise. If 'Transporter Two' hadn't been such an over the top piece of junk that franchise would have worked just fine. As it turned out, Crank was just what Statham needed and it was a perfect bit of action film. But now that this new cat Daniel Craig has done it, there can be no other Bond.

The answer to the question of 'shaken or stirred'? What the hell do I care? Perfect, and in two seconds he has obliterated all of the mincing that other Bonds have done through the decades. Remember the scene in which Indiana Jones is faced with some thug who goes through the elaborate swordplay? Of course you do. Jones just shot the guy. This is what the new James Bond does to all the others.

The opening chase scene which kicks off this movie also seals the coffin for another action hero who will long be loved but probably not missed. That would be Jackie Chan, because there are new street climbing stuntmen who have just put back all of the speed Chan used to have and created some really death defying action. There's at least one jump that I can tell was CGI'd in just a bit, but there are some absolutely awesome moves in this flick. (And if you're impressed with the video in the link, you ain't seen nothin' yet).

Judy Dench once again shows the kind of stiff upper lip which has always been admirable in our British bretheren and in combination with this Bond and a handful of indoor electronic plumbing lackeys (nobody quite as useful as the diehard geeks in Jack Bauer's CTU or the cast of Alias) that duo pretty much suffices to save the free world. There are no spiffy gadgets, no tricked out automobiles, no submarines or killer satellites, just ordinary terrorists with ordinary bombs and ordinary torturers with ordinary chairs. In in the face of all this is an extraordinary man-jack who out punishes the next best thing who was Matt Damon's Jason Bourne. Of course with this Bond, there is no hesitation, no second-guessing, no doubt. He's all mission, he's all field work. He is first person singular and has damned well saved the genre.

If the Bond series can be saved from ridiculous excess and unbelievable plots, as it has in Casino Royale, it will set the standard for cloak & dagger heroics in the post 9/11 world. This film ranks well up there with Bruce Willis' Jackal. George Clooney's still admirable 'Peacemaker', and Deniro's Ronin which is somewhere Bond films never used to get. This one is that good.

But Craig's Bond doesn't really mix business with pleasure. He's all business. He doesn't dress to impress, he does what's necessary for the job. And in that I think this film reflects a kind of seriousness of an Anglo-American burden that's very real in the world. And that's something that doesn't get said enough in real life, let alone in the cinema.

So bring a stiff upper lip to this thrilling and excellent turn in the Bond series, oh, and don't forget to bone up on Texas Hold 'Em, because that's what they play at Casino Royale.

No More Apologies

I don't want to hear an apology from Michael Richards. I want to see somebody get their ass beat.

But the person who should get their ass beat shouldn't be Michael Richards. I'm not sure who should though. But I tell you what. When Russell Simmons makes a rule to ban the word 'nigger' from all comedy routines that go on Def Comedy Jam, then maybe I won't want to see anybody get their ass beat.. nah yes I will. You see what has gone wrong today is that a lot of people believe there is a lot of racist hate in America, but when the wrong word is spoken they cannot bear it, and they can't bear the consequences of finding out that maybe they're right. And it begs the question about what the discussion about racism is supposed to be about, and when whomever it is says that it's supposed to be about what comedians say on stage, that somebody needs to get their ass beat. And whomever is being kept awake at night by this awful, horrifying display of poor breeding, well they should probably be on the boot end of an ass-whipping too.

See I just can't get that offended about it. I'm a college-educated sophisticated man. I read the Invisible Man a long long time ago, and I remember the part when it was said that if you thought you could insult a sophisticated man by calling him 'nigger' you really weren't important enough to mind. But it appears that we have a generation around here that can't bear it. When De La Soul said "I got too much family to heed your threat", evidently half the audience did not, and we have a society which is getting brittle, people who need so much respect that it proves they're not worthy of much. If it kills your dignity to be called a 'nigger' maybe you never had enough, proving once and for all that deep down you believe you are one. Too bad for you. They deserve all the opprobrium they bring upon themselves. There's only one reason for a black man to be perceived as a nigger, and that is to be indistinguishable from the stereotype. Maybe if everyone had license to call a spade a spade, then such spade would show their true colors. Problem is, they're protected.

But on the other side of the coin, there are insults and there are fighting words. And I know the currency of the American fat-faced bourgeoisie. The People of the Passive Voice. They like dueling lawyers. For them, justice is found in the absolute drubbing of the OJ Simpson book, a right and proper snubbing. Oh, they wouldn't dare lay a hand on the man because that would be...heaven forbid, action. We have too many of those empty suits in our society too. People who think they have an intellectual point to prove by saying that they can call a nigger a nigger if niggers call niggers niggers. Well, they're right, but they forget that by doing so they themselves become niggers. And niggers kill niggers every day. And when they see that retribution coming that's when they step out of the ring and dive behind whatever it is they think they have that makes them something other than a nigger. But they're transparently devolved, and really deserve all the drama and trauma. Problem is, they're protected.

So in my proper world the match-up is nicely square. The arrogant prick who takes license gets popped in the nose by the insecure man-child. It's like a new-jack fraternity hazing. Please, my nigga may I have another. Blood calls for blood. 

This is what failed to happen at the comedy club. Maybe Michael Richards was asking for it. Maybe the anonymous black man was itching to dish it out. But we'll never know because we've had an intervention. And now every freaking pundit, wag and fool with two Kbs of bandwidth to rub together will begin filling the internet with bloviation about what this signifies. They need to get their ass beat too.

We've seen this before. Between Lebanon and Israel. And if the Democrats have their way, there will be another intervention between the Coalition of the Willing and the anarchists in Iraq. You can just hear them all nannying about 'now there'll be none of that.. go to your room'. Yeah, now it's becoming clearer who needs their ass beat. It's the unelected referrees. The Protectors. The third party legal interests. It's the somebody who says 'nobody wants to see a fight'. Actually, a fight is what's needed. Not an apology.

I'm tired of the apologies. I'm tired of the lawsuits. I'm tired of the speech restrictions. I'm tired of the mincing. I'm tired of the uneasy peace. Somebody needs to get out there and say what they mean, mean what they say and take the consequences straight on the chin. I don't expect it, but that's what should happen.

What's funny about all this is that it is inevitably where those elements of society want to be. Let's be frank. That wasn't Mort Sahl up on stage. It wasn't even Moms Mabley, whom I never heard use the word 'nigger'. And that comedy club, wherever it was, was nothing close to sophisticated. My guess is that what passes for humor in that joint goes by the same standard as what passes for writing in Hollywood. You know which Hollywood I'm talking about - the one that doesn't bother with sophistication. The one that entertains us with pimps and whores, lowlifes and gangsters. The one that writes 'fuck' into the scripts for spice. The one that commercializes the shameless. That's the kind of venue where comedians say 'motherfucker' and it's OK, because it's part of the dialog they have with the audience. What kind of offense is off limits? Well that's very difficult to tell isn't it? Because you know it's all marketing. But everybody who paid to hear knew that they were going to hear the kind of obscenity you can't ordinarily hear.  And the shame of it all is that once upon a time, if it came to that, people could step outside into the alley and have a manly resolution.

Ahh, but there's no manly resolution here. Just a bunch of whiny babies mad because they think they've got unfinished business. Yeah well perhaps they do, but it's not important business. I want to be an Unleasher. And so I say piss off to the Protectors and let these pit dogs go at each other. I'd be plenty happy if they kill each other off and take the pretenses of the comedy club business down with them. Take this to WWF where it belongs.

The Godin Threshold

I recently viewed a video by Seth Godin, the inventor of 'permission marketing', or so it seems by the way he was received at Google. His illustration of the two paradigms of marketing are the core of his vision and it makes perfect sense to me. Rather than go into those details, I've thought of a quick way to think of when the old media saturation style of marketing proves useless, and I've defined it as the Godin Threshold.

If you use Aleve or Anacin or Tylenol, then you have headaches. I don't get headaches and I don't use those products at all, ever. If I go and twist something as a weekend warrior, I use Motrin and then only when the pain is bad enough so that I don't sleep properly. You see I'm allergic to penicillin and because of this I have learned to be very prejudiced against pharmaceuticals. Plus, I'm very healthy and have a high tolerance for pain.

So I've noticed that if I added all of the time that I have been interrupted in my life and paid attention to commercials for Aleve or Tylenol or Anacin, it far outweighs the amount of time I've spent actually using the product. But even if I used Motrin, the time between uses as far greater than the time between commercials. So I define the Godin Threshold as anytime that number of commercials / number of uses exceeds one. But I don't think that one is the proper constant, I think it's a bit higher.

The Godin Threshold of my gym subscription has not been crossed. I know that in about 40 days, we will begin to be inundated with 'New Years Resolutions' commercials from Bally's Spa and all the rest of the fitness centers. So that's fairly predictable. The fact is I could use the incentive and not mind watching the commercials the first few times. In fact I rather like the fact that I can do situps at home and gloat that I'm not wasting my money on club dues. But there will come a point at which I am sick of seeing the commercials.

So there is the threshold. I can suggest an arbitrary Godin Constant of 2.3, which is probably influenced by a Tivo Factor...

No Fire This Time

The first book I read about sex was "If Beale Street Could Talk". I don't remember much about it except for the sexy parts, and what I recall of that was that it was gentle and not dirty. It was a love story, an honest love story which reinforced that which I wanted to believe about love. I cannot remember if it was my parents who thought I should read the book, but I seem to remember that Pops was pleased that I enjoyed it.

Fast forward 20 years or so and I found myself reading James Baldwin once again, after all that time. This time it was 'Another Country'. Again, a love story. But an entirely new set of details was embedded in my skull from that reading, which is the danger that love poses against the expectations of society, and how difficult it is to love with your whole heart if you are afraid of the consequences of love. How distorted a person can become for not being able to love honestly and what a mockery of a society of lies one can make if one finds the courage to love honestly.

So when I got married a few years after having read Another Country, I was certain that the rest of James Baldwin would be teaching me something about black love and not revolution. I put down my Cornel West and my organic intellectual hat for the promise of sated wisdom, surrounded by the anti-revolution that is Baldwin's truth. In Baldwin I had found the understanding that it is through the courage to change that freedom is achieved.

And now it has come to today, when at the spur of the moment yesterday I decided to pick up and read 'The Fire Next Time'. As it is my intention to do a great deal more reading and a lot less interactive writing with the blogosophere, an overview of literature is in order. You see, my current byline on blackness (which is in the process of being reconstructed) is 'Why Do I Bother'? It's a very serious question and at bottom it is the question of whether or not it is interesting or necessary to be culturally black at this moment in American history. I think it is akin to asking the question of whether or not it is interesting or necessary to be Roman after the fall of Rome, or even today in modern Italy whether or not it is interesting to be Roman.

My preliminary answer is that I haven't found the right connections as of yet to know. Which means that I have to make better sense of Western Civilization. Which means I have a lot of reading to do, starting with Jacques Barzun and James Baldwin. What I expect to find are a few salient reasons to be black which I will share with an ever shrinking number of individuals in my generation, and a deeper insight into the principles which make The West what it has become. I will emerge with stronger connections to both which will perplex and astonish myself and my readers. Chances are that the blog will survive, but in a yet unknown third form. Most assuredly, I will emerge with a harder head, at least that is my hope.

This may very well be 'The End of My Blackness, Part 7', I've lost track of the number of times I've shed my skin. But at this moment the impetus is manifold. Most recently it was made more pressing by the reading of the intro to Montaign's Essays. You see, he began writing because he had lost his best friend. I continue to write because I have no best friend. The impetus began particularly in September of this year when I started writing something I still haven't finished called 'What It Feels Like to Become Unblack'. The import of that was basically a meditation on living in the American diaspora - something I share with my homies, growing up in the hood, moving somewhere to do college, moving somewhere else to do work, moving somewhere else to get married and have kids, moving somewhere else entirely as your family grows. For myself personally, I have probably lived about 7 places, and other than the home in which I lived until I was 19 or so, I've never stayed in one place for more than 5 years. What does that do to someone who is supposed to belong to a 'black community', is the substance of that still unfinished essay. There are only perceptions and articulations there at the moment, but not much speculation as to meaning. Because, after all, what is black?

What you can know is what it means to you and what it means to people who write about it, and one could do considerably worse than James Baldwin. But actually, that depends...

I'm not sure the blackness of James Baldwin holds up over time, and so I have to look deeper into Western Civilization, as I have said. We face enduring challenges and I desire to be on the proper side of it whether or not that side is identifiably black. In the end, it may only be identifiably Michael Bowen. If that is to be black then all audiences will have to compare my black diasporic experiences in America to those of Mr. Baldwin. And I can tell you straight away that as I read 'The Fire Next Time' I am awestruck by the contrasts.

I should not be so quick to dismiss this Baldwin as I am wont to do. After all, he wrote it in 1963, and there were fires the next time. I should move, and probably will, up to his last collection of essays and leave this older stuff alone. Completeness has its merits. Yet there is so much fear in his narrative that I am stunned. It has been so very long since I have experienced the head raising efforts of my own father to make me fearless that I forgot how crucial it was. Reading about Baldwin's Harlem, his church and the pimps and whores on his Avenue served to remind me what a distance has been traveled by the consciousness embedded in my family away from those elements of society that mash down the spirit.

Now I'm going to get some lunch and then finish reading the book today or tomorrow depending on what work I get done. But so far, I'm beginning to wonder what part of James Baldwin's literature isn't flavor.

It's Official: PS3 Sucks

There was only one part of the release of the PS3 that I thought they might be able to compete with the XBox 360 and that was the online. Ever since I saw the John Carmack interview two E3s ago, I knew that the difference between the graphics of the machines wouldn't be exploitable by most game programmers. But I did that since XBox Live has been around for 3 years, that the Sony guys might be able to take it to the next level. But according to this NYT review, they have flubbed it horribly.

If there is one thing one would expect Sony to get perfect, though, it would be music. Wrong. Sure, you can plug in your digital music player and the PS3 will play the tunes. But as soon as you go into a game, the music stops. By contrast, one of the things I’ve always enjoyed most on the Xbox 360 is being able to listen to my own music while playing Pebble Beach or driving my virtual Ferrari. Doesn’t seem too complicated, but the PS3 can’t do it.

In that sense it often feels as if the PlayStation 3 can’t walk and chew bubble gum at the same time. In the PS3’s online store (which feels like a slow Web page) you can access movie trailers and trial versions of new games, but when you actually download the 600-megabyte files, you’ll be stuck watching a progress bar crawl across the screen for 20 or 40 minutes. Astonishingly, you can’t download in the background while you go do something that’s more fun (like play a game). On the Xbox 360, not only are files downloaded seamlessly in the background, but you can also shut off the machine, turn it on later, and the download will resume automatically.

The PS3’s whole online experience feels tacked-on and unpolished. On the Xbox 360 each user has a single unified friends list, so you can track your friends and communicate with them easily, no matter what game you are in. On the PlayStation 3 most games have their own separate friends list and some have no friends function at all. There is a master list as well, but in order to communicate with anyone on it, you have to quit the game you are playing.

That's not only subpar, that's shameful. I spent many hours last week getting addicted and unaddicted to the the triple threat of online shooters releasing for the 360: Gears of War, Call of Duty 3 and Rainbow Six Vegas. The online shooting world is so hot now even the Rainbow Six Vegas Demo has captivated folks on my friends list. The full game debuts Wednesday.

I feel sorry for PS3 diehards, but not so very sorry. Actually, I wish there were a way to get them onto XBox Live, just so I could have the pleasure of fragging the lamers.

Black Culture vs Economic Conditions

I heard some lyrics in a rap the other day which stuck with me. I think they were one of the hiphop soundtracks in one of the XBox games I play, but I can't remember which. The lyric went something to the effect that chances are that the real messages aren't going to get on CD. The basic effect of the lyric was that consciousness rap is not surviving in the hiphop market.

It reminded me of our alter calls to black cultural production in the 90s. If you get a chance, check out the film Strange Days with Angela Bassett. In the Rodney King, early multicultural political days, I was on the side of the aisle that said that we were on the verge of a new consciousness - that black flavor was going to transform us and deliver a clarion call, unignorable, to social justice. Now I think perhaps I was hanging around too many college students. But do check out the vibe of that film. I haven't seen Crash, but I think it would be a good comparison - expectation to reality 10  years later. Because I believe in Crash, we have come to accept a more or less permanent caste to the black race.

I say this as one who has found some lighthearted pleasure in the exploitive gangsta stereotypes expressed in games like 'Saints Row' which are almost completely without heart.

What I want to express here is the challenge I think black culture faces as an expository vehicle and as one capable of sustaining change. This morning, for a number of reasons I found myself perusing the 'Blaack' Pages of San Diego - trying to find a working website for Jack & Jill, The Links and or 100 Black Men. What I noticed were any number of remedial organizations, not one of which I clicked on had a working website, but that was just my experience this morning.

I think that I am rethinking black organization, and I don't know what to expect. On the one hand, I am satisfied that a adequate number of African Americans are making the progress to be expected of an emergent community. The Civil Rights Movement was a success and did its business properly - the legal basis of racist discrimination has been destroyed and there is no backsliding on that. But the cultural incentive to move beyond a legal level playing field has pretzelled in on itself. In other words, while I find the aims of the Urban League to be admirable of raising those working poor to the solid middle, I wonder where everybody else went. It's as if the latticework of black struggle stops at American average. The only place you find strong black networking is where a substantial number of blackfolks are living in substandard conditions, a permanent substandard that is perfectly acceptable.
Remember my Nikki Giovanni poem?

i used to dream militant
dreams of taking
over america to show
these white folks how it should be
done
i used to dream radical dreams
of blowing everyone away with my perceptive powers
of correct analysis
i even used to think i'd be the one
to stop the riot and negotiate the peace
then i awoke and dug
that if i dreamed natural
dreams of being a natural
woman doing what a woman
does when she's natural
i would have a revolution

Maybe it's not a revolution after all.

What if racism were to end? What if we assumed that it already ended. I mean the last two high profile 'police abuse' controversies on college campuses were not directed at blacks. They were at Middle Easterners (I think). They were at Brown and now UCLA is all in a tizzy. I should take a moment to remind people that in our culture we respect and obey the police because we know they are working to protect us, but this is a multicultural lesson some hyphenated Americans choose to disregard. So they're learning that lesson the hard way while a loud coalition finds another way to not study the hard sciences and call what their doing relevant to society. But I digress. The question at hand is what does black culture suggest you do once you have attained freedom and equality? It is a question nobody seems to want to ask or answer because the permanent presumption is that the playing field has never been, and never will be made level.

Even I know the old time religion asks not.

Lord, you don't have to move my mountain
But give me the strength to climb.
And Lord, don't you take away my stumbling block
But lead me around.

That's all about the Struggle. But what do you do when you've laid down your sword and shield, down by the riverside? Is there nothing but balm in Gilead? Are we supposed to just light up a joint and say we've done all there is to be done? It's a difficult question to ask of The Black People, because we all accept the notion that we are not free, that we are not realized, that we are not cured, that we are not saved. If the Black People are thus incomplete, then our message is not to be trusted, our struggle has to be continuing...

I think we ought to know better, but that's just me being siditty. That's me being typical Talented Tenth, bourgie and otherwise unimpressed with the lot of y'all 'Bama cousins.

LaShawn Barber writes:

The condition of black Americans as a group (high illegitimacy rates even at higher income levels, unstable families, disproportionately high crime rates, underachievement, etc.) won’t improve until a critical mass of that group understands and vocalizes the truth."

And Harry Jackson Jr preaches:

"Marriage and abortion are not 'wedge issues.' If black families disintegrate any further, we may slip into a negative population-growth mode. More dangerous than that, our community may implode if we do not stabilize our marriages, our children, and our extended families. The wedge issues, if examined closely, become racial bridge issues. Today, fatherlessness is destabilizing families of all races. We want morality with purpose and public policy that embraces both personal righteousness and social justice. The entire body of Christ can decide to make a moral stand. It may take years for us to get to our final destination, but we must begin the journey now."

How is it that the entire import of this message has been a wholly 'owned' subsidiary of the Conservative movement - the very people most ostracized from black communities? How is it that the cultural end of the movements of the 60s have ended up defending spoiled college students who don't have the good sense to come in out of the rain, talking smack to cops like they wanna be Ice Cube?

How is it that we can't even get the black family right? Add whatever qualification you find appropriate to the last use of the word 'we'.

There is no Racism Index and there will never be. Blackfolks organically lack the organizational infrastructure. I'll complain about that more later, but there is no black Knights of Columbus, and I'm particularly pissed about that in light of Alpha Phi Alpha's failing efforts to get the MLK Memorial funded. But like I said I'll complain more about that later. But there is an unemployment index and there is a poverty index, and there is an entire and large infrastructure primarily staffed and funded by white liberal Democrats, Socialists and Leftists of all stripes that provide a racial accounting of all manner of economic doings.

The power of black culture to move those numbers is severly challenged. I wonder if it has the juice. I know it lacks the direction. This sounds controversial, so let me restate it. The power of black cultural production. This conversation is far from over, but I'm going to throw out a bone, which is provocative and true.

Blackfolks bought too much into the white liberal hippie sentiment of the 60s. The same attitude that sought to make things right for blacks was also saying that everything was wrong with America and that their parents and the families they came from were wrong. The significant core of the Left allies of blacks in the 60s and 70s were countercultural and revolutionary. And those are two qualities that were never useful to the uplifting of the black family.

When racism is no longer a mountain, and even when it is nothing more than a stumbling block, blacks who reject conservative and common sense rules about marriage and family as the central tenets of black culture will continue to fail. Those who cast their lot with this revolutionary, gangsta and relativist post-modern bullshit, those who continue to blame the Man for not making a level playing field and not delivering 40 acres and a mule, will continue to sing sad sorry songs. And I think perhaps they will always have the ear and attention of those groups founded by white liberals and their best black friends, who will attend to the Struggles of those forever destined to abandon responsibility for their own destinies. They will always have some black organization trying to grandfather them into the middle class.

I hope black organizations grow and mature beyond such remedial and uncharitable charity work. I hope their think tanks go beyond excuse making and racial demographic traffic. I hope they move towards excellence rather than merely support and sometimes achievement. It's hard to say if they will or they won't. What's not hard to say is that they're not right today, because they are sustaining superstitions of the 60s in black communities coast to coast. They are providing aid and comfort to disproved notions and trying to twist black culture into something it might be now, but never was supposed to be.

Nancy Pelosi Doesn't Care about Iraqi People

Humanitarians must have a very hard time over matters of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The primary mission, assuring that Saddam Hussein would not ever use WMDs is assuredly done. The secondary mission, to deny terrorists and jihadis a friendly state, has been mostly done. The tertiary mission, to jumpstart a friendly democratic regime in Iraq has been a partial success. The fourth mission, to pacify Iraq itself, didn't ever seem to be a priority and it is an abject failure. The rise of the Iraqi insurgency is the unintended but perhaps foreseeable consequence of our military intervention.

In fact, the way I see it, the rise of the insurgency and the descent of Iraq into un-democratically governable chaos is the whole of our failure, and it is upon this failure that Democrats were elected this fall on an 'anti-war' mandate. But there is nothing unforeseeable about George Packer's vision:

Withdrawal means that the United States will have to watch Iraqis die in ever greater numbers without doing much of anything to prevent it, because the welfare of Iraqis will no longer be among our central concerns. Those Iraqis who have had anything to do with the occupation and its promises of democracy will be among the first to be killed: the translators, the government officials, the embassy employees, the journalists, the organizers of women’s and human rights groups. As it is, they are being killed one by one. (I personally know at least half a dozen of them who have been murdered.) Without the protection of the Green Zone,U.S. bases, or the inhibiting effect on the Sunni and Shia militias of 150,000 U.S. troops, they will be killed in much greater numbers. To me, the relevant historical analogy is not the helicopters taking off from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, leaving thousands of Vietnamese to the reeducation camps. It is the systematic slaughter by the Khmer Rouge of every Cambodian who appeared to have had anything to do with the West. If the United States leaves Iraq, our last shred of honor and decency will require us to save as many of these Iraqis as possible.

From a black partisan perspective, Pelosi's desire to withdraw ASAP smacks very deeply of white liberal sentiment. It is not the effect on the people she worries about so much as it is the virtue of her liberal character. Pelosi cares more that the US not be seen as bullies and baddies, and if the Iraqis must suffer their own fate as we disengage with flowers and niceness, well - too bad. In fact, by taking this position, she cosigns the intent of the death squads that will arise in Iraq  if we depart too soon.

It's our moral standing in the world vs their lives. George W. Bush cares about the latter. Nancy Pelosi cares most about the former.

Gears of War

Gears of War is the best third person squad shooter ever. The only thing that came close in terms of the fun factor was Brute Force, a game that I think didn't get enough props. Gears of War works very well as a balls-out shooting match. You don't really have to think your way through it, you just shoot your way through it. It's the first cover game I've played and speaking as a Halo and Rainbow 6 guy, you pick it up right away. It feels very natural, a lot better than I thought a 3rd person could be. It does transform the genre.

The environments are as detailed and immersive as can be but not overwhelming. You don't feel as if you have to stop and look around and marvel at it. It doesn't freak you out like the stuff in Prey. Instead, the detail just adds to the gritty feel of the game. There are battles where you sometimes just wish the opposition would run out of ammo, because you're pinned down behind a block of cement and can't move.

There are some monsters in this game that are truly frightening. Very much like Halo, dealing with the various types of enemies, and in combination, force you to change your fighting style. The gameplay is flawless. The feel of your character's movements are as smooth as Halo and Half-Life. The AIs are competent whether they're fighting for your or against you.

What's great about GoW is that within 15 minutes you simply disappear into the game. After the first hour it feels like you've been playing this game all your life. The controls are that simple and natural. But because there are so many different weapons (frag grenade, smoke grenade, boom shot, sniper, chain gun, assualt rifle with chainsaw, shotgun, crossbow, pistol and magnum revolver) and so many enemies, you will find, over time, various combinations and strategies evolving, very much like Halo.

There are unique touches to this game that are subtle and some are profound. For example, reloading has become an art. If you pay attention, you can reload quickly, if you screw up, it will cost you precious seconds. It's something that, once mastered will give a strong advantage. There are very few 'circle dances' in this game, as with Halo, somebody will drop within two or three seconds.

Some of the cut scenes are annoyingly long considering the real lack of a backstory, however you won't likely be repeating any levels, so it's not a problem. You're just there and you shoot. And you never repeat a level over and over, well until you get to the final boss.

The online games are stellar. If you're like me, you hate to hang around in lobbies. You want to get right to the action. This game is perfect for it. Because there is no single player deathmatch, Gears forces you to communicate and although many of the squads don't, they get squashed. The ability to concentrate fire and flank enemies are two very powerful tactics. Teams that get those things right generally become invincible. It's not about weapons so much as it is about tactics. There is no weapon that is outsized and highly contested like the sword in Halo and they are pretty well balanced. The decision to make this a squad based coop game through and through is a very distinguishing mark and a good risk, I think. But in the single player I haven't found the directions to the squad as detailed (or onerous) as with Ghost Recon or Rainbow Six. You have to develop this on your own.

I've not been able to get into many ranked matches. People don't seem to be going for it rather in the same way people seemed to be avoiding it for PGR3. I don't know what's up with that - I sit waiting minutes to get into a room and then it immediately times out. Very frustrating and much inferior to Halo 2 in that regard. That's too bad because the point system for scoring matches is very well thought out and like Call of Duty 3, you get points for reviving teammates, which is an interesting turn in shooters I think all the better ones are adopting.

I haven't seen the strategy guide but I can see tactics evolving. Each map, all of which are exquisite, has unique features that make them interesting. But each of them invites close combat. Matches can be over in 20 seconds when the action gets hot and heavy. You don't respawn in this game. Once you're dead, you sit out the round. The spawn sites are very predictable so I don't think that will change going forward.

All in all, there are a limited number of ways you can play online, but it's focused on the most action packed way of all, medium sized maps that encourage close combat, small squads, deadly weapons and quick motions. I should also say that unlike with Halo there are no circle dances where you unload a whole clip into an enemy reload and start again. You will be dead in short order, make no mistake.

--

So here's what I don't like about the game. I already mentioned that the lack of ranked game availability sucks. I don't know what to do about that but I've heard other people complain too. I would have liked to see some average of my match scores kept track of, it might be there I just can't get to it in the ranked matches.

Second, there's a bug in which sometimes late joiners to a room can't be heard. This is a real handicap if the person is on your squad.

Thirdly, it's annoying that you can't change the configuration of your hosted room once you set it up. I know it adds to the amount of gameplay, but sometimes you do wish you could mix it up a bit.

--

Here are the things I've noticed that impress me.

I've seen a few times when I spawn and start running to wherever, that my skin detail isn't fully rendered. The fact that the designers anticipated system capacity and knew what to leave off is impressive. Same thing with raindrops.

Very little lag, and lag is always associated with a player that can be identified and kicked. Also very little mic echo although more than a negligible amount.

Recovery from a down is a great idea. How many times have we gotten hit by a noob and know that they were shooting completely random as they run right by you? In Gears, you can get back up and serve them.

--

Overall the game is truly excellent in just about every way. As a single player experience it's a little tiring. As a coop, it's great. There is a lot of richness, emergent tactics and lore associated with the game, and I can easily see this becoming a huge franchise. The Gears guys have done a great job.

Dogz in the Hood

I grew up in the 'hood in the 70s. And although our family had about ...oh 8 dogs not including puppies dropped by females, we didn't know much about dogs. Abiola reports on Vicious Dogs for Vicious People and I think he's halfway on the mark. 

Can there be any doubt that these figures arise because vicious individuals seek out breeds in keeping with their own temperaments? Keep this report in mind next time you encounter some mealy-mouthed apologist spouting nonsense about certain breeds being no worse than others: if this were true, golden retrievers would be a lot more popular with the sociopathic set.

He's speaking about pit bulls and rottweilers of course, the gangsta dog of the day. While I may not be so mealy mouthed, I must admit to being an apologist the pit bull, known as a Staffordshire Terrier by breeders. I'm convinced that there are a lot of dogs whose bite is worse than their bark, all dogs can bite, but it's up to their owners to decide if they bite, when they bite and how they bite. So actually, it's more correct to say that people condition their dogs to be vicious. The association to breed of viciousness isn't one of determination, but of relative advantage.

Poodles, for example, are fairly aggressive dogs. I'm not talking about toy poodles, but the real poodle, which is a larger dog than a german shepherd. Last time I checked, more people were bitten by poodles than any other dog.

When I was a kid, german shepherds and dobermans were considered the most vicious dogs. In my neighborhood, an especially dangerous german shepherd was called a 'police dog'. It was all about the culture of raising dogs. How we named dogs, played with them and what our expectations of them were determined the character of the dog, moreso than the breed.

Where I grew up, there was no such thing as an 'inside dog'. All dogs were kept outside in the yard, never in the house. We liked dogs who dug holes - we didn't have gardens in the back yard, and if we did, then the dog had it's own run built apart from the tomatoes and collard greens. We rewarded dogs for snapping, we fed them pepper to make them mean, we taught them to 'sic'. We admired dogs that were ready to chase other dogs, cars and people. We would walk by the junkyards and kick the chain link fence just to tease the guard dogs. It was what we were expected to do, and we did so in anticipation of the day that junkyard dog might get loose. Nothing spread excitement through the neighborhood like word that one of the vicious dogs were loose. We developed a retinue of escape plans, climbing trees, hopping fences, scrambing to get on the hoods of cars (back in the days when cars were made of steel thick enough not to dent from street footballs).

How many times have I done the reverse of the famed Peanuts cartoon duel between Linus and Snoopy? I'd get a towel and make the dog chase it growling and then swing the dog around in the air while it gripped fiercely to the towel with its jaws. We thought it was fun. We grew our dogs to be badass, because we lived in neighborhoods with badass people and we wanted to walk anywhere we pleased with our dog making us more fearless than we really were. Back in those inner city days we were proud of the fact that we could get other people to see us coming and cross the street in order to avoid our path.

My family never really did manage to grow a badass dog, and it was a point of some shame among the neighborhood kids. This is perhaps why I remember particularly well what I wanted at least one of my dogs to be that he never became. Our dogs were friendly and one was even scared of everything. We didn't have large dogs; for the most part they were terrier mutts. Finally, we got a chance to buy a papered black labrador retriever. The fact is that what we most prized in dogs were their companionship on hiking trips. We loved, more than anything, a good mountain dog.

In the 1970s we had dogs but we didn't have knives or guns. We didn't have dogfights for money and we didn't have drug stashes to protect. The inner cities of today are a different matter as is the culture of refined thuggery. The East End Kids of today, the apes of Scarface, they want badass more than we did. They're less ashamed of their brutality. This is the quality they bring to the way they rear their animals and run their lives. They don't look forward to escaping their jungles and leaving their past behind them, they want to tell the world how many times they've been shot, and call it manhood. So it is no surprise that they would ignore the dogs we thought tough and go for another breed.

But I knew two pit bulls and a couple large ridgeback rotts that were nothing but friendly. And I know one in particular that loves people and hates other dogs, and I know the owner is resigned to that, having bought into the myth of breeding. But breeding, training and psychology are three different things two thirds of which are environment. You can buy a hunting dog that don't hunt, and a terrier that can't catch a mouse and a working dog that doesn't work. When's the last time you ever saw a bulldog grab a bull by the nose?

I'm impressed with The Dog Whisperer and what I've learned from his show I find to be one of the more important lessons of life. When, in 2000, I discovered the ways in which Australians regarded animals very similarly to Americans, I felt I had come a long way in understanding their culture. And I think the way people regard dogs is an important insight into their character. Because unlike any other animal, we want dogs to be our friends. What you would have your friend do says more about you than about the dog.

Kurosawa's Ran, Jones' Lear

I have the week off, and instead of writing I've been doing a lot of gaming. More than I expected I would, but then again I am coming to understand that there is nothing so compelling in the course of human events as war. War is all of it, and it is that thing which most determines our fates, long after the guns are silent and the boots stop trooping. And so I am coming to realize in my maturity that there may not ever be a substitute for it. Life is never so precious as when it is threatened. God give us war. God save us from war. I think I have come upon an ancient dilemma and it is washing everything else out of my mind.

All of this crystallized in my mind this morning as I finally watched the great battle scenes from Kurosawa's Ran, which is a feudal Japanese version of Shakespeare's King Lear. Ever since I saw it the very first time, it has been my favorite movie of all time. And yet again it brought me to tears. There is no tragedy save the tragedy of death, and no deception is anything more than a girls' game until it involves the lives of good men. I look upon that world of men bound to duty and sword and it hits me square in the gut. I don't think I can resist the Japanese vision of honor so portrayed as I mentioned vis a vis Yukio Mishima.

From Ran to Lear, there has been no portrayal quite as furious and fine as that of James Earl Jones. If he did nothing else in his entire career, he did this and his performance is burned into my brain. What Kurosawa has done with Shakespeare's ideas are splendid enough, but what this cast has done with his words are quite enough to justify the entire concept of recorded video. I wonder, is there anything like this happening in America today?

I am wanting to get away from the news. I have cultivated over the past few years, the habits of the pundit and for that today I have no desire. Shakespeare's words are ringing in my ears of our political and chatting classes 'a whole tribe of fops'. And it is in my newer interpretation of the word 'hubris', the extreme arrogance of punishing those who have already failed wherein no greater punishment is needed that I find fault with the entire political circus. The obvious fools and the fools who chasten obvious fools.

So as I change jobs, I'm going to open my mind a bit, turn around. Turn politics off, turn to the enduring. These two are a great start.

Hastings vs Lott

As my Disgust-O-Meter reaches heretofore unseen levels of pisstivity, I pause to note in passing the ugly tit for tat which is this round of appointments and nominations. Alcee Hastings is back, Trent Lott is back. Could there be a more debased spectacle than that which the US Congress is now pandering?

Rodney King Who?

I mentioned last week that it would be interesting to institutionalize the cottage industry of chronicling racism either through a racism index or via video on YouTube. I did so only semi-seriously because quite frankly I'm getting tired of and fed up with the entirety of black politics. I lack the patience and there's no pay-off. I'm going cultural. As a signpost along the way of the devolution and death of black politics as I see it, here is a juicy offering from the man who filmed the beating of Reginald Denny; a big fat lawsuit.

A journalist and well-known helicopter pilot in Los Angeles has filed suit against video-sharing site YouTube, claiming that it encouraged users to violate copyright law.

Robert Tur says video he shot of the beating of trucker Reginald Denny during the 1992 Los Angeles riots was posted at YouTube without his permission and viewed more than 1,000 times. Tur says in his lawsuit, filed Friday in U.S. District Court, that YouTube is profiting from his work while hurting his ability to license his video.

So there goes one avenue of spreading the word.

I watched 16 Blocks the other night. Good flick. Excellent example of what crooked cops can and do get away with. I'm not one to say that anything black is threatened by something that happens to one black, but one could easily imagine how this kind of crap goes down. Everybody has got their own agenda, few of which are actually in the spirit of public service - or so goes the metaphor.  With the kind of crap that Pelosi is getting away with vis a vis Alcee Hastings and John Murtha, I have little  doubt a hundred such corruptions take place in our society. The question is, who is going to tell the truth?

A Conservative Review of Abortion

Patterico is burning through a number of partial-birth abortion issues to the extent that I think he's putting too fine a point it. But he's an attorney so we can forgive him that.

Nevertheless I still do have a problem with Conservatives who come up with the wrong-headed initiative to create a 24 point rubric for determining the breadth of conditions under which these single-issue voters get their way with abortion. And I think it has something to do with the way I am turning my attention to the nexus of sex, religion and power.

First things first. What I believe:

Do I think abortion is murder? No.
Do I think abortion is manslaughter? No.
I think abortion is roughly akin to reckless endangerment. But I'd be hard pressed to think of any situation in which abortion should be a felony. But this is in fact exactly what anti-abortion activists do in their spare time.

I think the universe of legitimate and moral reasons to have abortions is small, but I think it is larger than the universe social conservatives would allow. I think the legality of abortion is not a problem primarily because I don't think we need, from a national standpoint, all of those children. This sounds like a crass thing, but I don't think it is any more crass than the assertion implied by the illegality of abortion, that we are obliged to make our sex payoff in babies.

Quite frankly, I find it difficult to take any anti-abortion sentiments seriously from some hypocrite with fewer than four children. If there's anything worse than an armchair quarterback, it's an armchair OB/GYN. And I resent their endless second-guessing of this highly personal decision making process. Think of it this way, what if we had a Minister of Sex who interrupted primetime television with a public service announcement whose tagline was 'Fuck Responsibly'. How long would you think that was cool?

Am I pro-life? Absolutely. Should people be persuaded against the practice of abortion? Sure. But just as there should be ethical limits on the practice of meaningless sex in the form of self-restraint, there should be ethical limits on the bullying trying to find its expression in the power of the State. It's not as if nobody knows that abortion is controversial and that many find it morally inexcusable. The problem is that of hubris. There is no point in rubbing the nose of a woman who has an abortion into the mud, and there is truly no excuse for the arrogant political activism of establishing prior restraint.

The difficulty is that the anti-abortion lobby has essentially lost all credibility in addressing their concerns in public debate. I don't see any evidence of anti-abortion activists trying to come up with a new public consensus. Rather they are rather shamelessly trying to stack the deck with, ahem, activist judges, and an ever tightening skein of legislative attacks around the edges of the practice. Because of the way this activism plays, especially around the highly wonky details of partial-birth, or this or that procedure, I'm convinced that advocates for reversing Roe v Wade have dropped all pretense of accepting public criticism. Thats a miserable business for a Conservative to be in.

I very much agree with the axiom of difference between Liberals and Conservatives that goes like this. A Liberal's emphasis is using the power of the State to protect against the dysfunctions of the community and family. A Conservative's emphasis is using the power of the community and family to protect against the dysfunctions of the State. So there is a fundamental contradiction in the legislative and judicial agenda to increasingly restrict men and women from abortion, which is at the very least an effort made by them to correct, albeit by drastic means, an abuse of their sexual freedom. Like it or not, abortion is restraint.

To take away this particular choice from adults, which is essentially one of lethal force, is to infantalize the public. It is to say, we do not trust you enough to allow you this life or death decision and therefore we deny you the right to make it. It is tantamount to pre-emptive sterilization. But before I run off the rhetorical cliff, I think there are a good number of fundamental points that can and should be made by anyone who cares how children are brought into this society.

If the pro-life crew says that it is preposterous to suggest that a potential parent should abort because they are unsure about the quality of life of the child, I agree with them. The possibilities are endless for any newborn and we should never abort hope. But the logical consequence of this is that those who recognize endless possibilities should be more willing to sire offspring. There is something wrong with America in that wealth is not associated with large, but with poor families. This contradiction cannot be overlooked.

If the pro-life crew says adoption and foster parentage are viable alternatives that should be more transparent and used, I agree with them. Let's get rid of the corruption of those government bureaucracies. Children are not an agricultural commodity, let's manage their placement with more compassion.

If the pro-life crew says we ought to recognize life at conception or codify the sanctity of life at some genetically significant moment other than birth, I disagree with them. You are not a person until you are born and a fecund or pregnant woman should have no more legal standing than one who is as barren as the surface of the moon.

BTW, raise your hand if you are a woman and you would rather lose a child or an eye as the result of a miscarriage.

The so I think there is a fundamental difference that I would like to express between pro-life and anti-abortion. I think it is reasonable to consider pro-lifers Conservative, but those who are seeking to overturn Roe vs Wade are not. Whereas the former are properly concerned with the abuse of sexual freedom the latter group is ready to use abortion as a litmus test to abuse the Judiciary.

I wonder about the probity of people who 'see dead people' when thinking about the effects of abortion on our nation. Such a vision does not accommodate itself to the real economy of sex, and seeks to regulate all sexual behavior in one fell swoop. It is becoming clearer to me that the anti-abortionists are enemies of liberty. And so I believe that overturning Roe is a step that we cannot afford to let them take. The principle at hand is simple. Individual liberty vs State force.

A Feminist Parlor Question

I was explaining to my Indian friends the other day why nobody loves the Lakers any longer. Kobe's rape trial. Which brings up an interesting question I have for people who are reconstructing the ideas around feminity.

Why do women hate sluts?

Black Hell

Once upon a time as a young man I was one of the leading online proponents of a number of items on the pro-black agenda.  Now I'm a middle aged curmudgeon who's generally unimpressed with the public discipline, interest and capabilities in such matters and Cobb is something like my fifth or sixth website. It occurred to me in responding to Nulan this morning that I might be more forthcoming about this history. There are, after all, occasional clueless noobs who stumble upon Cobb thinking that I was perhaps born yesterday with no black pride whatsoever. In fact, I'm something of an ultimate insider, and I do respect my history. So I have decided I should bequeath them to the new, more interactive web. Because if there is anything more tiresome than being a collector of bad news, it is doing the job solo with very little fanfare or recognition.

I would expect right now that there are approximately two joints on the whole of the internet who would sustain the audience and desire to continue the mission I abandoned many years ago, to be the site of reference to the slings and arrows that black American life is heir to. Those two sites would be Dell Gines and Prometheus 6, neither of which appears to much enjoy the fact that they have to take my Cobbism seriously. But when it comes down to it, we're all more or less from the same side of the tracks and I couldn't bear being in a world without them. I have seriously raised the question as to whether there should be a single black multi-author blog, and on my way to doing what I'm about to do, I want to say something important.

America is a worse off place because the Black Hole didn't happen. The Black Hole was going to be the multiauthor black blog of record. When it was concieved, we would have had basically the original members of The Conservative Brotherhood, along with Prometheus Six and the members of Vision Circle including Temple3, Nulan, Myself, Ed Brown and Dr. Spence. I suspect we might have also gotten EJ Flavors, Jimi Izrael and George Kelly too, and who knows who else might have joined the fray.  But we didn't do the Black Hole for a number of good reasons. That was then. This is now. I'm only saying damn in retrospect, rather in the same way one on occasion misses the huge black hollywood movies like Bingo Long, or Coming To America, or Carmen Jones.

Speaking of which, who the hell is ever going to write *the* romantic comedy for Denzel and Halle before they get old and wrinkly? Is everybody out there completely asleep? Surely they didn't think 'Breakin All The Rules' was going to suffice.

Anyway, back to the subject at hand, which is, who in their right mind would take the minor masterpiece that was Black Hell, and update it for Web 2.0? More particularly, who will assist in funding such a project to the tune of about 175 dollars for one year of Typepad so that it has a home. Because, quite frankly talk is cheap and bandwidth is not free. Ordinarily, I'll pull down a few bills from the Kwaku Foundation and do it myself, but that's not what Web 2.0 is all about. I already did Black Hell, myself. This is about concerned African Americans in the whole of the blogosphere doing something collaboratively.

I've always expected that there would be a talented collective of blackfolks on the web who might do something like this, and perhaps they did too. I hope this serves to remind us that we haven't. As usual, I will commit the necessary technical assistance as required, should interest be forthcoming. If not, then whatever.

Racism on YouTube

We actually went pretty far down the pike with The Racism Index although I must confess that I lost interest in it two days after it started. After all I've got a blog to write. But in that thread here's another pointless yet poignant idea. Now that the Democrats are in the Hizzouse and all of the doe eyed sensitive types are emboldened to come out of their hidey holes, why don't we try this experiment? Document racism in America by uploading your evidence onto YouTube.

If America is a racist nation, then surely there must be evidence of it all over the place. I mean what happened to Rodney King was not an aberration, right? This kind of thing happens every day, right? So why not show and prove?

There are no excuses. There has got to be ONE person in America who could become a huge hero who has the initiative to make the effort. Show us what's happening so we can see it with our own eyes. Show us the racism that the Man is dishing out. No more blather about what one millionaire politician said about another millionaire politician. Give us the real deal. Down and dirty. Facts. Video. If it's out there, then there's no way to suppress it.

Gerald Levert

I just wanted to say that I have nothing really positive or negative to say about Gerald Levert. But I do know that he's dead.

Gearing Up

Thanks to a bit of clever manipulation of my Gamefly Queue, I'm getting mailed Gears of War on opening day. YESSS!!!

All the reviewers say that it lives up to the hype, and I'm getting more and more psyched about it and Rainbow Six Vegas day by day.

I finally burned through the demo of R6V which I had been trying to do while eating dinner or correcting homework or otherwise multitasking. I just realized that there were two more functions that I'd been ignoring all the time that made shorter work of the tangos. One was the night vision switch. I had only popped it rather than held it and selected. So I was only using infrared which is why I kept getting killed in the bell tower. The second was target selection on the Back button which allowed me to prioritize the targets for my crew. That allowed me to triangulate and flank very nicely. I'm also completely used to the cover system now of R6V and am actually falling in love with the way it opens up the gameplay.

The controller layout for R6V is stellar. I still have a gut instinct to toss grenades with the left trigger and it's a real strength I have in Halo, but for close combat Rainbox Six is back to the top of the pile. In this regard the distinctions between Ghost Recon, Splinter Cell and Rainbox Six are really starting to show up as fully rendered directions. Clancy (and the 360) need one more complicatedly rendered combat RTS to complete the set. Something like Battlefield 2 with a bit more realism that puts you in a Colonel's seat and allows you to move sophisticated assets. A flier that lets you plan sorties for example, or something that allows you to command a squadron of Apache helos for tank attacks or close ground support. Some game has to make that leap and none of them really have. The Unit was close but a bit too silly...

As for Gears of War, I haven't really followed the hype so I'm ready for a hugely pleasant surprise. One reviewer said that the game was designed for co-op and he enjoys this co-op mode better than that of Halo. That says a lot. I also like the idea that the online mode of this is going to be limited somewhat. That means there will be a lot of games, a lot of intense action and a lot of very specific skills that will come into play. Let Halo be the one for huge online multiplayer battles in massive maps. It's a much better run and gun game than GoW appears to be - anytime you have a cover system that's what you're asking for - close in battles, and those aren't the best things about Halo. (So if you hear this Bungie, don't go building a cover system for Halo, just let us fly dropships - unless of course you already built it and ruined Halo. That's what the super suits are for, allowing us to get out in the open and not worry about the small stuff). This is by the way what make Halo superior to Ghost Recon, I hate moving all over huge GRAW maps knowing that I can get popped at any moment and have to spawn 300 yards away from where I'm trying to get.

This season is going to be awesome with R6V and GoW, online shooters are going to absolutely rock. R6 was great except for spawn camping, just the right size maps for 4 on 4 action. Also XIII was damned good. Include the new online stuff for Splinter Cell DA, which I think I will indulge quite a bit more than the prior version which I basically didn't, and this is going to be the best time ever to be an online gamer. At least in the XBox Live world. Hmm. I'm just thinking about how cool it would be for there to be a way to take a Rainbow Six squad into Second Life and just plink off those weirdos.

Ed Bradley

When I grow up I want to be like Ed Bradley.

I haven't had the opportunity to watch Ed Bradley in motion in the past dozen years or so since I stopped watching television. But I remember a man who embodied the kind of cool that Cosby never had. I cannot remember where I saw him or in what context but he occupies my mind as an archetype of mellow sophistication, wisdom and style. He moved like a man. He spoke like a man. I hear Ed Bradley and I think red wine and jazz music, elegant clothing and a man who will look you in the eye.

There were times when Mike Wallace would try to say something to prove something, when he would seem so much the unsophisticated upstart trying to catch someone in a lie. Like he was an inquisitor or something. Ed Bradley had a different effect, which was more like what happens when you put an interviewee in front of a man that has nothing at all to prove, but just some questions about what makes you tick? I've been listening to Hugh Hewitt a bit less these days while he's still stomping about in his partisan combat boots, and the death of Ed Bradley reminds us that sometimes the best questions are not the hard questions, but the personal questions. This was Bradley's great gift to journalism.

I think in the end I may have to pay whatever it costs to get my hands on Ed's interview with Tiger Woods.

In the world of television interviewers, there are but a few greats. Brian Lamb, Bernard Shaw, Charlie Rose, Mike Douglas, Barbara Walters, Howard Cosell and Ed Bradley. Three are gone. How will we ever know without them? 

Steele for RNCC

It hasn't taken long for Republicans to begin adjusting to post-election reality, and just when you think you have a bead on things, out goes the conventional wisdom and in comes a wave of fresh ideas. God I am impressed with this party. But today, being impressed is bordering on being floored.

Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, whose party just lost both chambers of Congress, will leave his position in January, and the post as party chief has been offered to Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele.

What can you say to that? Bravo for one. But it does require a bit of reflection. The obvious question is what do you do with someone you cannot elect? The obvious answer is 'Appoint'. And while I was scratching my head about where Steele's career might go next, this is the perfect answer, for a number of reasons. I say that he's got one huge advantage and three moderate challenges that he can turn into advantages for himself and the Party.

1. Advantage Steele.
Steele will dominate the media, and he will be the most popular RNC Chair in history. There is absolutely no way that making this move would go unnoticed around the world. I didn't particularly notice when Mehlman got the position, but I did notice when Howard Dean took over the Dems. If Steele takes this position, the entire nation would be on high media alert for a week. Every media outlet from Honolulu to Bangor will be begging and pleading to get him on the air. Steele has got quiet charisma. Steele's blackness will validate and reinforce the GOPs broad and colorblind agenda. He will be the third king of the troika after Powell and Rice, and settle the race question once and for all. He'll send naysayers spluttering more nonsense than they already do. Steele's personality is perfectly suited for the job and he's already proven that he can energize folks outside of his home state as he did at the National Convention in NYC and as he has with outreach. He may not be electable to the Senate in Maryland but he's a natural on the national stage.

2. Challenge: Rove.
The way I see it, it's Rove vs Steele. I'm confident that they can work together and anyone would be a fool to toss Rove aside, but Steele is not an ideological attack dog, he's a roll-up-your sleeves Protestant ethic man who appeals to practicality and moderation. And he can energize the party but people are going to have to start thinking differently. I still associate Rove with the strongarm strategies and tactics of Delay and Armey and brilliant backdoor tactics. Will Rove play ball with Steele? Yes of course he will but parts of the ideological Right, for example the single-issue contingency may feel left out. We know Rove likes to satisfy the margins in order to stuff the big tent by any means necessary.  I think that means Rove is going to have to lay low. Let's not mince words. All of Rove's redistricting and deniable leverage failed. In order to win back party unity it has to be hearts and minds. Steele is a master of this. He has very broad appeal for Republicans - you'll hear the dissent today but he's a big winner.

3. Challenge: Bush.
How do you deal with a lame duck who you basically like, but basically lost everybody the election because of his foreign policy? You focus on the domestic agenda. Steele will have to become the new face of what GWBush promised America before 9/11. Steele has to be the Uniter and not the divider. This is not a stretch at all. Steele is Compassionate Conservatism. He is Ownership Society. He is Church and Family. Steele can put the domestic agenda front and center without machinations. In doing so, he handles Bush.

4. Challenge: McCain.
McCain is a wildcard and everybody in the GOP knows it. And what Conservatives who hate him have to start recognizing is McCain's ability to get things done in the Congress. Whatever majoritarian angst McCain delivered by doing it his way in coalition with Democrats now has to be acknowledged as the way forward. And we know he's no dove. So I think that the more flack the GOP gives McCain over his maverick tendencies the more disunited the party appears, the more work Steele has to do. I don't doubt Steele's ability to bring consensus to the party while remaining smooth in the media - he proved this in his campaign. But he must be able to shush the people who hate McCain.

--

The biggest problem Steele has is where to spend his enormous political capital. Everybody recognizes him as a star, but is the RNCC the place for him? He could walk into Congress and spend a few years there doing whatever, or he could remake the party into a strong place for moderates without the perception of 'going left'.

I think it goes without saying that Steele is a shoe-in for Veep. Let us not forget Dick Cheney's path which was as a party guy chosen to interview and choose the Vice President for GWBush who just decided to take the job himself. He can always come back to try for the Governorship of Maryland. Choices choices...

Cobb: The Anti-Pimp

I'm not a blogger. I'm a writer. If it weren't for blog technology, I'd be using notebooks. In fact, I don't know what I'll do with all my notebooks. Probably pay somebody to scan them into PDF. Kinkos does it for 6.25 setup fee and 25 cents a page. Until then, I'm going to do one more link to Mark Cuban, because every once in a while I sink to the level he's talking about. If I didn't I'd be a hermit. Writers write to be read, after all.

Once every week, somebody writes me and says something nice. Sometimes they do it in the blog. Sometimes they send a private email. Every time I get the email, I try to be gracious and clever at the same time. I don't know if it works, most of the time the notes are just one-offs. But they also always remind me of the old adage we learned in parochial school. If you can help just one person...

What I do here at Cobb is open my head like a visible V8 and engage sometimes socratically, sometimes expositorily with ideas. I think my thinking helps other people think, and I am satisfied to do just that. Since I get the nice letters I know I'm doing my job, which pays me approximately zero.

I have refused advertising at Cobb, and by all rights had I not, I'd be something of a larger figure at Pajamas Media. About once a month, however, one of the kind editors there points to something interesting I've written about here, so I don't really feel left out. I must confess that the choice to refuse ads was largely an ego thing, I don't like being able to control exactly how my blog looks and I really couldn't abide the idea of a large and stupid looking ad on my site. However since I am taking my props one at a time and nobody is saying how the world is deprived of my genius because I'm not popular enough, I feel OK with that twitchy sensation I get every once in a while when I feel like Oliver Willis is too popular.

I don't want Cobb to be an echo chamber - a blog just talking about other blogs, but I'm certainly confident that it won't be because I always have some curiosity that perhaps only I care to write about. So I'm original and way far down the blogospheric dragon's long tail, despite the fact that I am quite capable of breathing fire.

Something is itching me in that I think I may have lost my sense of humor over the past few months. Nor have I indulged in much creative writing. So you may expect a bit more of that not the least because I find that the serious people have not done what I consider to be the serious thing and I've rather lost patience with upbeat politics. So I'll indulge in a little hack and smash as well as some of the biting satire of my old cartooning days.

So Cuban, this one's for your arse. It just so happens that everybody is not trying to be a rock star and commercialize their crawl up the long tail. Perhaps you and 50 Cent can get over in a cloud of 'Admit One' that you sell by the thousands, but there are still people who write poetry. When I'm ready to make money it won't be from a blog.

Non Compete

Man I've been signing my life away. Sorta. I just realize that non-compete clauses are unenforceable in California. Sez Wikipedia.

Unlike the situation in other states, non-compete agreements are illegal in California and against public policy. (California Business and Professions Code Section 16600).

[edit] Out of State Agreements are Not Enforceable

The preeminent court decision discussing the conflict between California law and the laws of other states is Application Group, Inc. v. Hunter Group, Inc., 61 Cal.App.4th 881 (1998). In Hunter, a Maryland company required that its Maryland based employee agree to a one-year non-compete agreement. The contract stated that it was governed by and to be construed according to Maryland law. A Maryland employee then left to work for a competitor in California. When the new California employer sued in California state court to invalidate the covenant not to compete, the California court agreed and ruled that the non-compete provision was invalid and not enforceable in California. Business and Professions Code Section 16600 reflects a "strong public policy of the State of California" and the state has a strong interest in applying its law and protecting its businesses so that they can hire the employees of their choosing. California law is thus applicable to non-California employees seeking employment in California.

Whether California courts are required by the full faith and credit clause of the United States Constitution to enforce equitable judgments from courts of other states, having personal jurisdiction over the defendant, that enjoin competition or are contrary to important public interests in California is an issue that has not yet been decided.

I've actually been in several situations where such dicey questions are raised, and I'm almost positive that I've signed contracts with non-compete language in them, specifically about customers that I've consulted with. Not that there are any particular customers I've had in a while that I would really want to work for full time, but there are some I wouldn't mind stealing away as clients. Up until today I've never considered the possibility.

Borat

I have not seen the Borat film. I have seen the Borat YouTube. And it's hilarious. It had me make to speak in broken English. I was laughing very much. Please you should watch Borat. He is making very many funny jokes. Ali G was idiot. Borat is genius.

Starbucks or Fight Club

The first time you and I watched 'Fight Club' we had little qualms about plots to blow up the headquarters of Starbucks, remember? That was 1999, two years before 9/11. Have you seen that movie lately? I haven't, but I think it's worth a review in light of several years of history. It is, quite likely, the model of an American Cell. The disaffected youths of Fight Club, the crypto-underground pseudo-revolutionaries hated Starbucks. Why did we sympathize? Why do people hate Starbucks? Do you hate Starbucks? I don't.

In fact, over the past few months I have become more and more enamored with the place. It started subtly with their promotion of Akeelah and the Bee. And the seed was planted a couple years ago when I initiated Tea Time.. Let me go there.

Every day at 3pm, the alarm on my Casio G-Shock goes off. It reminds me to stop what I'm doing and evaluate what I have to do to make the rest of my day complete. If there are any voicemails I haven't answered, any dinner plans unmade, any assessments incomplete I do them all to make sure that my day will be a good day. This was more important when I was running my own show and less important these days, but the habit is a good one. Back in the days of Metro Decisions, I did take the moment to enjoy an Earl Grey or Chai Spice in my stainless Starbucks insulated cup. These more lazy days, I can sometimes even slip out for a Starbucks run and grab a mocha frapuccino. But the days are getting less lazy as I move over into project management, and I actually have 8am meetings with the guys in Chennai. So I have increasingly found myself at Starbucks at 7:30 in the morning on the receiving end of an efficient query, such as 'What can I get for your sweetie?'

The answer is Grande Mocha with Whip Cream.

Starbucks plays good music. Starbucks has dark olive walls on the business end, blue porcelain fixtures hanging from the ceiling and bright wood tables and chairs. The floor is tile. The conversation is cheerful. The laptops are plugged in and the people are dressed for work. There is a cheerful efficiency at Starbucks early in the morning as people fuel themselves up for work. Everything is custom made to order, no formula too complicated. It's a staging ground for the work Americans do in office buildings. It's the white collar jumpstart.

I'm starting to recognize some of the Starbucks customers. There's the big baldhead black man who sits in the northeast corner behind his VAIO laptop with his noise-canceling headphones on. There's the guy named Abel who gets 8 cups for everybody in his office and clogs up the line. This morning there was a man doing an oil painting of a ballet dancer just outside the doors.

I used to go to the Magic Johnson Starbucks in Ladera Heights fairly regularly. That place is filled with screenwriters, chess players, party promoters, grad students and outside in front, the Friday evening cigar crew. When I was considering running for the 43rd district, they were going to be my first constituents. But I have long abandoned such ideas. Still, every time that I go there, which isn't very often, I feel the need to put up a flyer or pass out business cards advertising The Conservative Brotherhood or this blog. But I have successfully resisted the temptation of marketing myself, not only because I suck at it, but because I am gradually being convinced that fame is pollution. Have you seen the Creed? it begins:

To live as gently as I can;
To be, no matter where, a man;
To take what comes of good or ill
And cling to faith and honor still;
To do my best, and let that stand
The record of my brain and hand;
And then, should failure come to me,
Still work and hope for victory.

Simple. Honest, and yet capable of being a foundation bearing great weight. I like the simple honest hope getting a burst of caffeine in the morning in the hopes of doing a better job during the day. It is a daily dose of dedication. And while some people might see some great volume of pretense in the ordering of a 3 dollar cup of double latte with skim milk extra hot, I do not. I see it as part of a daily meditation and an expression of commitment to work. At Starbucks in the morning I see working people in pastel colors, briskly preparing for their daily duties.

That's a good thing.

Time For a New Scandal: Alcee Hastings

Once you read this, you'll have a hard time defending Alcee Hastings.

"Be assured that I'm going to be a judge for life," Mr. Hastings told reporters in 1983 after his acquittal. But the arguments that swayed a Miami jury did not sway the Congress. The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives impeached Hastings for bribery and perjury by a lopsided vote of 413 to 3. Then the Democrat-controlled Senate convicted him on eight articles of impeachment by well over the required two-thirds majority in 1989. Thus Mr. Hastings became only the sixth judge in the history of our Republic (and only the third in the 20^th Century) to be removed by Congress. He was, and is, an utter disgrace to the nation and to the legal profession. Among those voting to impeach him were Ms. Pelosi herself, Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer, the Democratic whip who is likely to become the new House majority leader, and Mr. Hastings' fellow African-American Congressman, Michigan's John Conyers, who took pains to deny that race had anything to do with the removal of the bribe-taking jurist.

Earth to Pelosi: Marginalize Hastings.

Fix Me A Sandwich: Part Two

Several months ago, somebody asked me what kind of Democrat I would vote into the office of President and generally what can Democrats do for me. The answer was Joe Lieberman and fix me a sandwich. Despite the general unpleasantness of listening to this morning's election results, at least we got rid of that kook Lamont. Now comes the sandwich, seriously.

The Democratic mantra is familiar to me, and while we haven't heard 'there is no crisis' in quite some time, we can probably expect Democrats to do nothing or sabotoge Social Security reform as they writhe in anticipation of a spiteful legislative agenda in the House. Aside from that it's time to call them on there more 'core values', namely health care.

So here's what the Democrats can do for me. Stop talking about perscription drugs and sin taxes and start talking about what that little cretin Morgan Spurlock 'discovered', namely that America is full of big fat people who eat like pigs. This is the greatest threat to the health and welfare of Americans, not the cost of the drug of the day. The biggest threat is obesity, heart disease, diabetes. If Democrats (and I know Democrats) have a hankering to stick it to the Man, the first Man they ought to go after is Ronald McDonald, not Mr Merck, Uncle Jack Daniels or Cousin Philip Morris. It ain't tobacco and alcohol that's killing Americans, and it's not drugs that's going to save Americans.

I am naturally impressed with the ability of McDonalds and KFC to deliver fast food. And although my favorite is Carl's Jr. for a number of reasons, there is something awesome to be said about a company that is everywhere around the country and can get you a complete meal for a buck. The problem, as you and I know is that most fast food is not healthy food. So if the first thing I hear out of Democrat's pie hole is something about Canada or perscription drug benefits, we know they're not serious and quite unable to disentangle their idle minds from the same jungle of lobbyists and PACs who dominate the 'Health Care System'. Both Clintons couldn't do it when they had 8 years and there's really nothing new except for Walmart's market arm-twisting. That will continue.. Oh God.. I'm just thinking what savagery these nuts have in store for Walmart. At any rate, here's the goal. Make McDonalds into Whole Foods, at non-yuppie prices.

The second angle of this of course is exercise. That means kids playing sports like Cowboys & Indians or Cops & Robbers or Patriots & Terrorists or... Football. Democrats like football don't they? Or are we going to have a House under Pelosi that outlaws sports metaphors?

Here's what we know and that everybody should know. It's common sense, and if you don't believe me you can ask Jack LaLanne (yes he's still alive). If you exercise every day, you can eat beef jerky, cake and gin and live to be 100. But if you don't exercise every day diet takes on huge significance. One would expect that limousine liberals would know this, since they now claim to be the voice of the peoples. Let's see if they are serious about dealing with the number one and number two greatest factors, exercise and diet, in dealing with the number one health problem of Americans, heart disease and the other two major preventable illnesses, obesity and obesity driven diabetes.

I think they're just in there for the power grab and try to give Republicans heart attacks, and that's the Democrat health care plan...

Steele In Black, Red, White & Blue

Merging some Census Data with the election results from the Baltimore Sun, I came up with an interesting table. Basically, Steele got killed by PG County, Montgomery County and the City of Baltimore. There are only so many imputations that can be accurately made from these data, but I think it can clearly be said that if urban black voters would have supported Steele, he would have won. But he also proves that whites have no problem voting for a black Republican candidate.. or at least for Steele, which runs contrary to much of the race baiting commentary.

Steele won a majority of the counties, which I presume are more rural. He won Somerset County which is small and the most closely split black & white. He trounced his Democratic rival in Garrett  County, which is the most white county in the state.

I really didn't get into the horseracing this time around, but I do want to analyze this one to death. As I said, Steele is the Old School candidate and the one whom I though most deserved to win. I think he's proven quite a few things here.