Cobb

Destiny of the Born

I read this over at the Jane Galt abortion thread:

I am a lifelong Roman Catholic, which I realize means I have no intellectual credibility on this issue. However, when our adopted son was 7 or 8, he began watching a PBS program on abortion. We realized very quickly what he was watching and monitored the program very carefully. He watched the entire program. When it was over, he came into the kitchen, looked at the two of us and said: "If my real mommy had had an abortion, I wouldn't be." Rather amazing for a child his age. To this day, he has no question regarding what he thinks about abortion. Neither do we.

It's probably not fair for me to disagree with a child, then again if I didn't somebody else would. That is rather the point. If his mommy had had an abortion, he wouldn't be able to give his parents a post-facto justification for not aborting. But not only that, this is the child speaking from the position of the parent's child. In which case he might have simply been another child with the very same authority; the one not aborted. In either case he is the child, the chosen one, the one that exists. It doesn't matter how he came to exist, his existence justifies his statement, but the weight that the statement carries depends upon the fact that his adoptive parents accept it.

I often think of this paradox with my own children. No matter who their mother is, they would be my children. They cannot possibly be equal to any others who were not born, yet in fact they are, they are the inevitable, and because of that any abortions or secret children any women I might have known biblically are immaterial. They are that they are.

Confused?

How about this way? There is a slot in my future (as of 15 years ago) called 'First Born Son'. It doesn't matter how he comes to be or in what order of sexual encounters or failures. Once he is born, he becomes First Born Son. It's like destiny. The moral question might be, to whom and to what does FBS owe this honor? Should his right to this destiny be compromised by prior abortions? That is to say do people who are born owe some debt to the unborn? Do you? do I? Do anti-abortionists have standing to plead on behalf of the unborn, or are they too compromised because of failed matings which predated their successful birth?

Such are questions which must be answered in describing and defending the rights of the unborn.

This is something we wrestled with in Catholic school. We called it the Question of the Sperm on the Floor.

When Signal is Noise

There is something profound being said here, but I'm going to have to read it several times before I get it.

Imagine there are two equal sized groups of employees: good and bad.   Good employees produce twenty units of value for an employer, while bad employees produce ten units of value.   The problem is, it is not easy to tell which employees are which.   With many competing employers, each employee will be paid what he appears to be worth on average.  A good employee will be paid twenty, a bad one will be paid ten, and an employee of random unknown type will be paid fifteen.

Imagine that employees can go to school before they look for a job, but that they would learn nothing useful at school.   They might go to school anyway though, to signal their ability.   Imagine it costs good employees six units of value to complete school, while it costs bad employees twelve units.  In this scenario, we can have an equilibrium where good employees complete school, and bad employees do not.   Employers would pay twenty to graduates, and ten to non-graduates.   

Good employees get a net of fourteen from going to school, which is better than the ten they would get from skipping school.   Bad employees would only get a net of eight from going to school, and so they are better off skipping school.  Notice, however, that both types of employees would be better off if school were not possible, as they would each then get fifteen. 

This example illustrates the concept of inefficient signaling: the effort to make yourself look better than others comes in part at the expense of those others, which means that all else equal we do too much signaling.

Ten Things I Want From the Next President

1. A commitment to the destruction of Al Qaeda, a well-thought out strategy for an achievable victory in Iraq in-term and a firm posture towards counter-terrorism at home and abroad.

2. A commitment to federal deficit elimination in-term.

3. A commitment to defend the rights of all Americans in civil unions and in marriage, separate but equal.

4. A commitment to prosecute businesses that hire illegal immigrants, a robust and secure guest worker program, a secure southern border and a new treaty with Mexico which commits both countries to the repatriation or repudiation of their citizens here in America.

5. The establishment of a separate domestic intelligence agency under the auspices of the Secret Service and new Federal counter terrorist circuit court. A thorough review of the Department of Homeland Security aimed towards cutbacks.

6. A federal works program aimed at the trades, plumbing, electricians, carpentry etc and tax incentives to small businesses aimed at the home building market.

7. The creation of an American Standard Associate's degree. A no-nonsense, no excuses degree program established in community colleges coupled with decertification of open-enrollment 'universities'.

8. The elimination of catastrophic health care requirements.

9. The elimination of mandatory sentencing laws, parole and any program that effectively increases scrutiny on prisoners once they have been released. Establishment of a prison colony in Alaska & a return to hard labor sentences.

10. Establishment of a federal works program to divert water from the Great Lakes to the Southwest.

More 'Senseless' Violence

Today at lunch I sat over Chinese with my new associate 'G' who was a BMXer back in the day. We reminesced over ramps, Oakley grips and cracked frames. I raised my lament over the facts that kids today don't understand physical risk because we don't allow them to learn such things the hard way.

But there's the hard way of the law of nature and there's the hard way of felony conviction. Apparently, some legislators have got an itching to teach fraternities a hard lesson. In the Gator State, violent hazing is now a felony. The first example conviction is discussed over at Bomani's joint. I beg to differ.

In another discussion I just happened to have this afternoon right after lunch, another new associate of mine traded stories about violent crime in Brooklyn. My side of the story, you may have heard. Her's was a bit more frightening because she was confined to the back seat of a cab when the gaffling took place.

But the point I want to get to is that human life is violent. Our experience of pain and suffering is one of the things that separates us from machines. We learn from it, and what we learn isn't always avoidance. Hold that thought.

Now as for the specifics of pledging a fraternity, I'm of the opinion that it should not be any more violent than football practice. In case you have no idea of what that might involve consider the most healthy person you know running at you full speed in order to knock you on your ass. Now repeat that about 50 times a day for four months. That's football. The general consensus is that fraternity rituals are not so brutal. They don't need to be. That doesn't mean they don't get out of hand and shouldn't be regulated, but it doesn't mean that they are 'senseless violence'.

Florida A&M University students Michael Morton, 23, of Fort Lauderdale, and Jason Harris, 25, of Jacksonville, were led from the courtroom in handcuffs, as was Harris' lawyer, Richard Keith Alan II, who was charged with indirect criminal contempt.

The students were charged with hazing Marcus Jones, 20, of Decatur, Ga., who suffered a broken ear drum and severe bruising to his buttocks after he was punched and struck with wooden canes.

Circuit Judge Kathleen Dekker said that one year might have been sufficient to punish Morton and Harris but that she added a second year to make sure that their sentences serve as a deterrent.

Now I'm sure that the broken ear drum sealed this one, but the principle in question is whether or not violent action can or cannot be used in training or ritual. I have a problem with a 'no' answer, because I say it all depends upon the context of the violence. I am absolutely certain that the harshness of fraternity hazing builds brotherhood. Such knowledge is as old as the first army, and as contemporary as 'Remember the Titans'. It is entirely reasonable to expect university students to have an adequate sense of understanding this in administering fraternity hazing, the problem to me seems to be one of standards. So I would recommend that all fraternities who retain any sense of manliness to establish some relatively stringent guidelines along the lines of military training and hazing before the practice winds up in the hands of yet another judge determined to make couch potatoes of the lot of us.

If one of those university students gets sexually abused in jail, what are the chances he can sue the judge?

Silent Bishops

This afternoon, for the second time in 20 years, I tried to send an email to the man who taught me about computers, Paul Seliga. Seliga taught me that 'originality is the art of concealing your sources'. We can all assume that he didn't invent the aphorism. What occasioned the email was my presence here in Philadelphia and a query about St. Joseph's University over in the ritzy part of town. It's Jesuit, as was Paul.

I say was, because I cannot tell whether or not he is. You see he never responded to my email and after reading this blogpost about the silence of bishops, I'm not sure that he will.

For so long, I fumed, futilely, at The Stalemate of Silence, the title imposed on the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church for its stalwart refusal to be human beings like us and just talk. No bishop called to say ‘Hello.” I did, though, in several letters to His Excellent Eminence above Eminences of Excellencies, without reply. I forget the pecking order for the show of reverence, being just one buried deep within the common herd of souls on their way to hell.

I know a Bishop, and I've never found her reluctant to talk to me. She's a personal friend and mentor, although I only speak to her every 4 years or so. In fact, now that I'm on the East Coast, I imagine that I am closer to her than I have been in some time. I'll look her up.

I've not had the expectation, although it is growing, of the Catholic hierarchy to speak through major media on matters of morality. And while I certainly hope that the State doesn't tell the Church what to do, it would be awfully nice to have a troop of clerics speaking out instead of the usual suspects. I wonder if their silence is one of complicity or embarrassment. Why bother removing doubt by speaking out? The Catholic Church may be silent because it is bluffing and any announcement may be a tell.

The great bluff of the Catholic Church may very well be that like the author of the blog I referenced, many of its ex-initiates may feel profoundly liberated by secular life. The Catholic hierarchy may be so full of...inconsistency.. that it is unable to be reformed by anything short of a top down purge. It would be a striking admission, of course. But the Church must be able to communicate to humans, and we humans are changing the way we communicate daily through technology. Church is getting left behind.

As an amateur philosopher and theologian, such matters are of pressing concern to me, but they are not articles of faith. I am not fundamentally disappointed with what the Church is because I think I understand what the Church is supposed to be, and that's a tall order by any measure. So there's nothing I'm so concerned about other than which way reform is going to push the leadership and what it's going to take to distribute change. This is especially true of the Roman Catholic Church.

MDM + CDI Convergence

I haven't been writing so much about technology and my business. That's about to change, because there are actually some very interesting things that are beginning to happen that I may be taking part in. So let's talk shall we?

The first bit of news is that Hyperion has invested into Purisma. Hyperion is the mothership of BI and BPM and it's where I've cast my lot for over a decade starting with Arbor Software in the fall of 1996. I am, by the way, one of those rare creatures I call a 'double DBA'. I understand both relational and multidimensional database structures. My guess is that I could extend that a bit both ways if I were so inclined. Like most old heads, I have some experience in the hierarchical database technologies of yore. And like most new jacks, I have some experience in object models and object databases. Unlike most people I have a whole hodload of experience cobbling enterprise systems together in the real world under the creakiest and most robust IT architectures. I can tell you stories about hybridized VM dispatchers to 64bit parellel databases that would blow your mind and stories about Excel clouds on OS/2 & token-ring that would have you reaching for the Pepto Bismol. Suffice it to say that I've earned my bones as a data architect; it's a hell of a job and I love it. 

Now here's the deal with Purisma. It's got Bob Hagenau. Bob was the guy behind Acta, and Acta was the coolest ETL on the planet a few years back. It got absorbed by Business Objects because Hyperion was slow to the draw and shy of acquisitions. If it's doing nice things today, I have no idea. But it was the key to getting data out of the 'data jail' of ERP systems, especially the high security prison of SAP. As such they were Sapphire certified and even understood Z tables and weirdness in the SAP data model that most ABAP coders mumbled about and SAP tried to hush away. So I have some confidence that Hagenau is not a time-waster and that when it comes to complex data, he'll make some of the jagged edges smooth.

Purisma's business is simple. Master customer data. Hyperion's business is simple, monetize and benchmarkify everything for management. Those are the simple explanations behind the two of the three three letter acronyms that are most significant in this piece. CDI is Customer Data Integration. That's Purisma. BPM is Business Performance Management, that's Hyperion. The killer app between the two will be customer profitability across all channels.

Now there have always been customer profitability models and they're not too hard to build. What's hard is that what your department calls a customer and what marketing calls a customer and what finance calls a customer are three different things. And all of you have incompatible systems that don't let your company decided once and for all what a customer is. In comes the third three letter acronym, MDM. MDM is Master Data Management.

Hyperion purchased a leading MDM vendor a couple years ago. They have a hot product which is now called, drum roll please, Hyperion MDM. What it does is centralize name calling in your organization. Huh? What? Name calling? OK think of the product you are familiar with in your company? What is it called? OK now what's the serial number? What's the product code? What do the engineers who built it call it? Who in marketing changed the name? When? How did they spread the word? What do people in accounting call it? What's the code for it in the accounting system? What about the inventory system? What about when you OEM it to another company? Complex? Well it's your product, you ought to know all of these things. You don't, because you haven't managed your master data. You don't have a chief name caller in charge who has octopus arms that coordinate the names of everything in every system. MDM gives you that ability.

In this regard, CDI is a very particular MDM application. It allows you to understand all the names of all your customers no matter which channel you touch them through. Something in the back of your head says, didn't Siebel promise this years ago with their CRM systems? Sure they did, that was marketing, this is technology. My nickel says Purisma does the job way better than Siebel does, because Siebel is not selling customer data management, they're selling CRM. If you get CRM but not a single view of the customer from Siebel, you don't send it back. If you don't get a single view of the customer from a CDI vendor, you send it back. Different incentives, different results.

So Hyperion, who gets the BPM theory and builds some pretty damned good products, is being smart in seeing the future of CDI and investing in Purisma. But are they hedging against their own MDM product? No. MDM is expensive and takes some doing to implement, it's not easy to sell either. But so long as Hyperion can cover the base of CDI and MDM through whatever agreement they're making with Hagenau and company, they are not going to miss the opportunity to position their company as knowledgeable about the space, and so their money is where their mouth is.

All that remains is for field commanders like myself to staff up some troops and actually battle test these technology weapons against the enemy of corporate information entropy. I'll let you know.

Cold

All is well out here in Philly. I'm pretending that the cold is destroying me, but actually it's the jet lag and insomnia. More blogging to come tonight.

The Iran Line

I'm blogging from a plane so I'll be brief. If Bush authorizes a missile strike on Iran's nuke plant, does that go further politically thqn Clinton's in the Sudan? Remember that Clinton missed.

The GEICO Cavemen

An interesting set of ruminations on the fate and fabulousness of the Cavemen is going on over at Ron Rosenbaum's joint. I don't think the idea has jumped the shark at all. I think it has only just begun to realize its potential. Sure there's been a misstep, but this one is primed to really take off. Anything is better than an Aussie gecko.

As a symbol of uppity put-upon bourgie folks engaged in the passive aggressive spin cycle of the perpetually offended, the GEICO Cavemen engage in refrains familiar to this black man. It's only a matter of time until one of their lines strikes a nerve as too closely resembling reality, but that could make it even more funny.

I've enjoyed the series of commercials from the very beginning, and my favorite is the news interview. The way in which the caveman establishes a subtley condescending arrogance is is absolutely great. But the real potential of the series, since there are two Cavemen, will be found between them. You see, so far neither of the Cavemen have shown any cracks in their facade, but what if they actually decide to take their critics at their word? One presumes that they've never purchased the product in question in protest, and the assumption that they've been fighting is that they're too simple-minded to actually accomplish it. What if one of the Cavemen has an idiot cousin?

I envision a scene in which one of the Cavemen comes home for a holiday dinner and his mother remarks about how good it was to see him on the TV. His father gruffly says that he is proud of the way his son has stood up for his principles and points to people around the table with his fork, you should all remember his example.  Then his wiseass younger teenaged sister (with the pierced nose) says "You're all hypocrites! None of you even has GEICO insurance!", to which dumb brother responds, "I tried that online thing but it's too complicated". Mom says "You hush!". Everybody eats in silence.

BAM!

It goes without saying that in this country, the Caveman bit could not work unless the actors were discernibly white. Whitefolks fit stereotypes easier. But I do like one of the earliest (if not the first) commercial in which one of the grips who was a bit more primitive looking than the current two stars, walks off in a huff saying 'Not cool, man' in a classic valley dude accent. It illustrates class / cultural identification so very well.

Paying too much attention to the Cavemen themselves is a mistake, because everyone is being parodied here. The straight characters are being mocked for their obliviousness and their condescension; they're being 'whitefaced' and mocked for prejudices. So the next barrier that needs to be broken in order to give live to the series is the humanization of the straights.

Imagine a very attractive woman standing at a podium on the dais concluding a speech at a swanky fundraiser. ''And that is why we stand in solidarity with our brothers. After all this is America!" (Cheers). She sits down next to the Caveman and steals a kiss. He says "You were great". She grins and then nervously whispers "You do have GEICO insurance, don't you?"

BAM!

Through all this, the primary Caveman must remain intrepid through all. He must have a strong sense of integrity. He must never indicate whether or not he has the insurance. He must not be plagued with self-doubt.

Anyway, I hope we are treated to such wonderful examples in the future. The ad guys have shown themselves to be worthy of the icons they are creating, as they are being hilariously entertaining and effective at the same time. These are commercials that are being passed around on YouTube between friends. That's success.

The Strongest Tribe

I'm up at 5am getting ready for my trip east. I was dreaming that at a dinner with my new boss, the fellow he was making fun of in absentia was actually me. I'm going to confront him about it. Since that disturbance jarred me awake I decided to stay up and acclimate myself to Eastern Standard Time. I fly tomorrow.

My subscriptions on Google Reader once again show 100+ and so I have a lot of reading to do. Sometimes I don't know why I bother, but still I found my way once again to Michael Yon whose descriptions of life on the war path under CSM Mellinger will go down in history. He was describing his ride to Mosul with the 2-7 Cav, and so I looked them up. I wound up learning quite a lot on the tangent. I recovered the words and name of that Irish tune we all know but don't know the words or name. I discovered a very thorough page in Wikipedia on the Comanche. One degree of separation further I once again recalled the Sioux, Apache, Cheyenne, Paiute and Arapahoe.

I was most intrigued by the Comanche and read into their demise a tale of woe. It brought to mind my claim that I represent a people who would rather die on their feet than live on their knees. As I checked the populations of the various bands and tribes of Natives, I found myself very aware of the reasonableness of chiefs who presided over the larger groups. Whereas the Comanche's 12 bands would join for raids and then split afterwards, others might confederate and decide to be a less mobile and warrior people. The Comanche had no use for such arrangements. They were masters of the war horse and could kidnap and resell anything on two or four legs. In this manner nothing could stop them, and though the US government promised they would, none of their battles stopped the Comanche raids. It was only the extermination of the buffalo, the basis of the Comanche culture, that weakened them sufficiently so that the US Army could finally defeat them. But their organization itself was too wily.

Like other Natives, the Comanche lived off of the land. They traded well and stole well and spoke well. They dressed well and they knew how to live on the road. They reminded me of Genghis Khan's horsemen, a distributed swarm. Much of course has been said about the nature of asymmetrical warfare and the difficulty of defeating cellular organizations by hierarchical organizations. I suspect the challenge was even greater during the years of the wild West. And yet the US prevailed.

The conventional wisdom calls this genocide. I've heard it said dozens of times that the white settlers were fueled by hatred and contempt for the red man and that Manifest Destiny was nothing more than an excuse for the ultimate final solution: racial extermination. It cannot be that simple. As I looked at the various territories assigned to the Comanche I noticed that the worst deal they ever got was 160 acres, but no mule. I figure Comanches being Comanches, they could get their own mules.

The Negro got no reservation. We got cities instead. The arrangement wasn't formal but that is what happened. Unlike the Natives, we Africans were all in the white man's business. We were inseparable from it, even trafficking in ourselves. And by hook or crook, the black man survived where the red man did not.

I think of the contention that 'African-American' was created in defiance of our European ancestry and heritage. Being all up in the white man's business was an integration of choice as well as necessity. Were we not ferocious in battle as Buffalo and Revolutionary soldiers? Mammies that we were, we didn't hold our charges hostage, nor raid and kidnap and ransom our way to independence. We developed a manner of trickeration that made us appear to be living on our knees when we were in fact conniving from full height. We gamed American civilization, and continue to do so to this very day. We gamed it by knowing it, living it, consuming it whole and twisting it slightly to our own advantage. And despite all of these recent claims that we Africans ought to be close to our distant tribal cousins on the western countries of Africa, we were decidedly not.  If we were dependent on the culture of the yam in the Gambia as the Irish were on the potato in their homeland, we would have starved as Gambia and Ireland have starved by comparison to America. That which destroyed the Comanche had no effect on the black man's survival. We were once tribal, and that is the African in African American, but we have been beyond tribalism for a very long time here in this land.

I'm not familiar enough with the years between Reconstruction and the Depression to tell you all of the things that went on in African American life. But we all know that people who were once slaves took advantage of their freedom and changed America to its liking. I look at marvelous paintings of Souix warriors and Comanche chiefs in their tribal glory, and I don't see a multicultural marvel. I see human fossils. I see more importantly a clash of economies, of a people inescapably wed to a resource incapable of being renewed. I'm very Jared Diamond in that regard. One can say very specific things of the Comanche and the 2-7 Cav, whose crest is a sword with the words Garry Owen, have immortalized their spirit of unstoppable raids and living on the war path. But the 2-7 Cav is not leveraged on the economy of buffalo. They have more formidable and flexible resources. Even today's  treacherous congresscritters with their non-binding resolutions fear defunding them. So too, African Americans are immortalized, in themselves and their great host of cultural iconography and deep influence in this country. When you look at the painting of a black manservant in Alabama, you see a face whose descendants persist. There is a greatness to that.

Through all America's wars, through all the economic disasters, through all the plagues and floods, through all the deviltry and injustice, through all the confusion and dissent,  strife and turmoil,  grief, loss, and pain, those Africans have persisted. We have persisted in the marrow of America, inseparable from all its business, its religion, its culture, its essential being. More than any other tribe, this land is our land. At least, that's what I was taught. I have no reason to doubt that it's true, which is why, perhaps, so many of us like to pretend that it's not true. It's a luxury that trickeration has afforded us. In that regard, dual-consciousness is neither a blessing nor a curse, but a dimension of back-talk of the sort America has always needed and often heeded. It is, in a very real way, part of America's humility, and a reflection of how it lives with itself.

I'm going to Philadelphia. When time permits, I'm going to recall David Brooks' book on Bobos and walk the Main Line. I've already read the minutes of the Bala Cynwyd Neighborhood Club, and I've already recalled that Will Smith's production company is called Overbrook Entertainment. As you might well imagine, I am keen to know what we blackfolks do when handed the flag, and am always watching the crusty actions of the upper crust. I'll be staying downtown in a business class hotel doing what we do in the business class which is providing expertise to the proprietors of America. (I'll let you know if these guys are for real, wink wink, but I'll eat steak on the expense account one way or another.) This time, unlike during my entrepreneurial days, I'll be suited up. You'll find me perhaps reading the Wall Street Journal in my trenchcoat on Market Street, anonymous and unremarkable.

Thanks again, to my grandparents.

The Next New Media

Stowe Boyd is having an interesting fit with some old PR flacks who are flacking for old PR. But 'Public Relations' is about stultified comments. PR is as old as the cliche of exonerated defendants being mobbed by the 5 O'Clock News on the steps of the courthouse.

What I believe is next in the new media is the purpose built news organization. Think of the economics of film production scaled down to the size of a television pilot. You get a very smart person or subject matter expert out into the field to do some findings of fact from some spot on the planet, and then you package the content for that. The difference is that it is prepaid.

You take the attitude of 'What do I have to pay to get a straight story out of Mosul (Somalia, Southern Lebanon, Wall Street), you assemble a team of experts at home, and then you send an adventure team to the field. They report realtime and get whatever scoop they get without worrying about editorial spin or what the sponsors might say, and then you have the kind of first person omnicient research vehicle that has no peer in the world. The trick is just assembling the right team. The difference is they don't have to be journalists, in fact they shouldn't be, they should be the experts that journalists call.

Take the book 'The Ends of the Earth' by Robert D. Kaplan. Somebody at Random House obviously had enough sense to know that Kaplan could come back from his jaunty junkets with some material worth publishing, but they did it in book time with book economics. How old is that? I just linked to a story by Michael J. Totten that is approximately five or six months too late. This is the time it has taken the blogosphere to get some eyewitness testimony by an expert to contradict the conventional wisdom about the nature of battle between Israel and Iranian Hezbollah. The trick is to go, Ross Perot - like, into the heat of battle, as the case may be, with someone hooked into a million minds.

How do you fund such a thing? OK this is going to be scary so hold your hats. Through Typekey. What if Six Apart charged me an extra dollar per month to contribute to a producer's pool of money that would pay for Michael J. Totten's trips to the Middle East? You damn well better bet that I'd pay. What if Wordpress charged a nickel to get Michelle Malkin to go count mosques in Iraq? I'd pay. The blogosphere will select the experts. All we need is the machinery to get them out into the field, and the talent to film-crew is a commodity, or it will be within 5 years when nobody in their right mind will want to be following Wolf Blitzer around.

Let's call this thing Open Source Documentary Production. It's all about short term, high visibility, realtime reporting on a hot subject. It's about getting somebody possesed of deep context into the field. It's about putting a different head on the body of television and film journalism. It's about a new source of funds for production. It disintermediates broadcast television editorial staff and academic funding committees. It's audience is the blogosphere and ultimately the world. It's about putting faster money into the hands of subject matter experts who can get first hand data, undedited and unfiltered, to the hive mind of the blogosphere, as much as we can be said to have a hive mind.

What this cannot replace is the cultivation of sources that traditionally financed media has the time to... well, buy. It cannot replace the daily beat of news provided by the MSM. What it can do is shift the balance out of the news rooms and editorial places. That job is already done by the 'sphere. We can already handle the truth and all the flavors of bias. What we want is our kind of focus.

Obviously, there will be some editorial and economic decisions made in terms of the choices between equiping one trip vs another, but I don't think that it is wishful thinking to believe that part of the structure of open source handles much of that. People, given a chance, will vote, and people will continue to bless their own votes. Give the blogosphere what it wants, legs and feet in addition to its minds, and it will get up and walk.

I'm sure that Gerard may have already considered the idea, but I'm going to send him an email all the same.

An Israeli Soldier Speaks

Michael Totten has the kind of intel it seems only the blogosphere can provide:

You can’t compare with fighting against Hezbollah and fighting against Palestinians. Hezbollah has had such a long time to get prepared for these attacks. And they were dug in. Everything was planned, and the weapons, the ammunition, everything was accurate, everything. And the mortar rounds they were all fixed, everything, all the mortars were already fixed on targets where they knew the Israelis were going to come through.

With the Palestinians, it’s very amateur with the Palestinian freedom fighters or whatever they call themselves.

And this:

If you ask me what should have been done in the villages in Lebanon during this war, I think Israel wasn’t harsh enough. Now, I’m not right-wing, I’m not…I just think that if we are in a war…it’s like, if you play with fire, people get burned. There’s nothing you can do about it. These whole villages, they were empty, just filled with Hezbollah terrorists. They should have been totally wiped off the map. Except Israel left them standing. Many of our soldiers were killed because of that, so Israel wouldn’t be blamed after the war for war crimes and destroying civilian houses.

When they say that Israeli artillery was aimed at civilian targets, I can tell you a bit about how the artillery works. If I find a target in the middle of a village, like one house that I see that there are armed people going in, and I will aim artillery, heavy artillery, on it. Not Air Force, not like pin-pointed targets. Artillery will dispense rounds 100 meters from that target also. It’s not accurate. Anyway, even if a target is next to it, these houses were empty. No civilians were walking around South Lebanon. I know. I was in their villages. In their houses. Anyone who was there was definitely working for the Hezbollah or working as a Hezbollah fighter.

And there are even more surprising (to some) revelations. Read the whole thing.

 

Essay Contest

From the Pen & Ink Collective:

What comes to mind when you see pictures of Huey P. Newton holding a shotgun? Or the images of mass marches against the Vietnam War? Or how about the students taking over Columbia University in '68?

Our generation has grown up in the shadow of the 1960s. The War on Iraq strongly parallels the situation this country faced as it was bogged down in Vietnam. The Bush administration continues its attack on a woman's right to choose, a victory that arose from the Feminist Movement. And many people are calling the current struggle for immigrants' rights the modern equivalent to the Civil Rights Movement.

But how does our generation of political activists view the 1960s? What were its strengths? What were its weaknesses? What did it achieve and what was left out? Why did the momentum of that time finally die? And what happened to that generation of activists and revolutionaries? There has yet to be a collective voice from our generation that has openly attempted to answer those questions.

Young political activists today face a complicated political climate. Change is possible, but not easy. What lessons, both good and bad, can we learn from the social movements of the 1960s to make sure our contemporary activism does not go in vain?

Our goal is to compile a thorough analysis of this era. That's why we in the Ink and Paper Collective are calling for young (30 and under) activists, organizers, and revolutionaries of all stripes to submit letters that are serious reflections on the 1960s. We want submissions to cover all the particular parts of that era whether it be the Black Power movement, the French revolt of May '68, SDS, the fight for ethnic studies in our schools, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the Feminist movement, the Chicano movement, the Native American movement or whatever issue you feel most passionate about. If you have something to say, we want to hear it!

Send your submission (anywhere from 1,000 to 3,500 words), along with a brief bio (around 75 words) to:

[email protected]

Submissions due:    February 20th, 2007

The Ink and Paper Collective is Sam A., Javier A., and David Z.  We were founded out of anti-war, labor, and independent media activism in our local communities.  Some of this activism includes our participation with and dedication to work done by groups like UCSC Students Against War, the Student and Worker Coalition for Justice, the Labor Film Collective, and Colectivo Media Insurgente, as well as many others.

Yeah well. I'm probably going to follow up on this to see if we have healthy competition or if that side of the aisle is really as lame as they sound. This is from the Kwaku Network.

 

Was Eugene Holman Right?

I was browsing Booker Rising and found McWhorter on blackness vis a vis Barack Obama. I know that Spence had commented on this aspect of blackness related to comments by Debra Dickerson. Whew. That's a lot of names to drop. As an Old School pontificator, I've tried to rescue the idea of blackness from its baser associations of subversive political separatism, the vulgarities of hiphop and the great unwashed of Cosby's slackers which I often call the Forty Percent. I'm not interested in rehashing all that but reconsidering exactly which mental shelf to put it on as it tends to bore me silly. I suddenly remember the idea of blackness as a caste.

At SCAA, it was Eugene Holman who said the following in 1993:

The biological criteria used to determine whether a person is 'black' or 'white' are the consequences of the genes responsible for determining skin color, hair texture, relatively superficial characteristics which may or may not co-occur. In any case, our biological heritage is determined by so many factors that the amount of genetically determined variation we find within the groups traditionally defined as 'races' is much greater than the amount found between them.

The social criteria are quite different.'Whiteness' is ususally understood as 'absence of discernible blackness'. This means that the offspring of a 'pure white' and 'pure black' are going to be 'black', and if they have offspring with 'pure whites' their offspring will also be 'black', even though their genetic heritage is three-quarters 'white'. In terms of genetic heritage, many of the individuals classified as 'black' are actually 'white'.

This means that studies such as 'Testing, Testing - Literacy and the NEAP' posted here a few days ago by Mr. Hu are actually interpreting the different scholastic performances of discrete social groups arbitrarily defined on the basis of a continuum of genes. Given that America society has tended to 'award' people with the type of genes found at one end of the continuum, the situation reflected in the study becomes self perpetuating in the same way as in caste-based societies.

Holman was one of the brightest and clear-headed contributors to SCAA during it's prime. And we took the many implications of his tree-trunks statements to every leaf it seems. But I was struck powerfully by his use of the term 'caste' as something too powerful and permanent to absorb and believe. So I still remember it to this day.

At the time I was convinced that an intellectual revolution was afoot. I said (as I did in those days in lower case)

i will agree with this to the extent that it is so defined by the dominant majority and operates that way for the sake of much analysis, however, as blackness is redefined by black American intellectuals it takes on a different tint. as i say this, i recognize that the project of such insurgent intellectuals is not (as it was in years past) 'blackness' per se. nonetheless, the organic quality of these intellectuals and the cultural forms and modifications of pedagogical styles employed by them are often directly of that black 'caste'.

as i look at the work of intellectuals such as bell hooks, cornel west, ishmael reed, angela davis, e. michael thelwell, toni morrison, george c. wolfe, wynton marsalis and greg tate, i cannot imagine them doing so without a black audience. and i know all of their work to be transformative. how then could they claim a black caste background and audience as a fixed thing? 'combinating together different records for the mega-mix' as they do with organic and bourgeois forms, they cannot call it simply black, rather i would think they consider it complexly black.

black caste seems overly monolithic. from an observational standpoint, it makes sense to see it that way, but in terms of desribing it's inner dynamics it falls way short. depending on how well is distributed the production of folks such as these, that who self-identify as black may ultimately extend past caste, class and racial definitions. in a multicultural, or virtually cultural and postmodern world will black be black?

i think this question is of vital importance to the 'post-soul' generation of african americans. not only do we resist racial pigeonholing in transformative ways, we celebrate our transformation *as blacks*. is that circular? i think not.

Today, 13 years later, I see little done by insurgent intellectuals which has guided any significant aesthetic of black cultural production and given the masses of blackfolks any tools by which they might extricate themselves from the caste of oppression. In fact I see left intellectuals as perpetuating tropes of oppression as a rallying point for black politics. In the area of cultural production nothing has changed in the main. Hiphop is no better today than it was 13 years ago. If there's any consolation, people have less hope in it now than then. Outside of the existentials, there is nothing but hiphop that's new and moving cultural blackness. Thus I emphasize the Old School, as in what we were before all these left intellectual movements captured the imaginations of the Talented Tenth. Recovering Booker T remains my aim, when I aim at all at things black.

But check out what Holman says here:

Certainly the opportunities open to black Americans in the 1990s are much greater than they were in the 1960s, so the struggle went on and achieved results despite the fact that some of us opted out.

What I'm thinking about now, though, is that my experience has convinced me that black Americans tend to be so inward looking, preoccupied with their own experience within the context of American and African history, that they neglect the European element which is an important part of cultural and genetic makeup. An investigation of many of our family histories would reveal that besides our ties to western Africa and, often, native America, most of us also have genetic ties to the English, Irish, Scotch, and Dutch slavemasters who owned our ancestors. We usually repress these connections from our self-image, but that does not negate their existence. The way in which 'black' and 'white' are usually defined also tends to focus our attention away from this issue.

I think that everyone would gain if these connections were given the importance they deserve, and one aspect of investigating them requires a committed interest in European languages and cultures.

But the other thing I found and then lost was a comment that somebody felt that the very construction of the term African American was a purposeful evasion of that which we inherited from Europe. That's fairly heavy and really the first criticism of the term that makes me doubt its usefulness. I still don't use it in any context besides pure demographics, but I cannot deny that connotation which kicks a leg out of the notion of 'native alienation'.

So my preliminary conclusion is that there is a kind of static and weak pool of ideas about black identity that cycle around into caste. This caste is not inescapable but neither political nor cultural means within the popular mainstream are sufficient to break it's grip.  In this way, the permanence of racism is established by a personal inability or unwillingness to give up racial caste. It's something whites or blacks could do equally and unilaterally but choose not to. I don't mean to suggest that there aren't racist reasons but to state that they are weak. Holman's life absent the black/white racial frictions of America, as are the lives of other expatriate blackfolks are proof enough, but there is more. Fundamentally, one must give the lie to the one-drop theory and acknowledge ones own roots which for all of us is European in some way, at the very least in the English language.

Countdown

King Day Parade Photos

From Los Angeles, I bring you this collection of over 250 pictures of folks in and around the King Day Parade on Crenshaw Blvd through Leimert Park. Enjoy.

Cobb Heads East

On a new rescue mission, I have been drafted to go to the city of brotherly love. Should that be capitalized? Well, it's Philadelphia. It's going to be fun. I haven't been to the East Coast in a few years, and not to Philly since '92. I hope my hookup skills will serve me better than they did in Scottsdale. Nobody I knew there returned my calls.

I should take the camera this time. I didn't get much 'graphed in the desert and there were a few things to see. Of course I much prefer the metro to the suburb and I'll be right in the middle of the city. Oooh. I gotta book my tickets and all.. OK I'm set. Downtown.

So what should I look out for in Illadelph? Does anyone know any good places to grub? Plus, I suppose I'm not going to be too far from my family in Baltimore. I'll check them out one weekend I suppose. What's worth seeing? What's worth doing? Maybe I'm going to have to rent a movie that intrigues me about the place...

Only In America: Wheelchair Backflips

Footage of Aaron Fotherinham doing some pretty sweet tricks in his wheelchair. He also performs the worlds first wheelchair backflip. Video found on www.colourswheelchair.com

American Military Hegemony

Part of the PNACian principle is to establish, by dint of American economic superiority, a military hegemony. That hegemony appears to have been broken by the threat of asymmetry proven by the apparent stalemate of Iraq. I would argue that desire to express and project a military hegemony is part and parcel of our selection of wars. That indeed is why Bush will argue that 'We cannot afford to lose in Iraq'. In that regard, it is not so much for Iraq, but for American military hegemony.

The cost of a failed hegemony is, of course, that those many thousands of Americans now free from the draft *must* be eventually conscripted, because we will be engaged in more places due to a lowered set of military expectations of us from our enemies. This is indeed an extension of the Baby Bin Laden Theory. Yet we have been unable to convince the polity of Americans to long let our military monster off its leash in order to forestall 'the inevitable'. This makes sense but it erodes the usefulness of military hegemony.

The bases upon which America might provoke a military action unilaterally are well-established. We don't seem to have a problem bombing Afghanistan forward (heh) into the Stone Age, nor threatening the same to Pakistan when it comes to directly percieved threats to American soil like Bin Laden's AQ.

But the American military industrial complex, which has proven to be far less of a threat to democracy than Ike warned, is a forward thinking beast. All of the most important weapons systems we have been designing and engineering are about establishing an escalating obsolescence. The fundamental theory is that we can spend our enemies into bankruptcy by leapfrogging conventional warfare technology at a rapid clip. This process and publicity about this process give America confidence and potential enemies sleepless nights and paranoia. The facts about post-Cold War America are that we have the ability do do a great deal more damage than we do.

My position is that America should be a military hegemony and that we can do so at an expense much lower than that of empire. Maintaining that hegemony may require more shock and awe and collateral damage than we expended in Iraq to date while Petraeus and the Pentagon perfect strategies and tactics for Counter Insurgency in the ongoing wars against jihadis and other asymmetric threats.

On Girly Girls

I think a girly girl is a child who is actively looking for aspects of her femininity and really enjoys such expressions. Scholar is such a child. I can't think of a more comprehensive way to put it, but I know it when I see it. Here are a couple observations, which are actually easy because I can compare her to her sister.

• She puts makeup herself and on other girls.
• She will make pointless arguments or quips merely to distinguish herself from a male's opinion.
• She will initiate 'girl' play. Tea parties, dolls, etc.
• She keeps up with the girly qualities of other girly girls.

I was quite surprised at how quickly Scholar exhibited this behavior. Before she was in Kindergarten she expressed desire for the princess dress, and coordinated hairbows etc. I think a lot of it was because she was such a cute toddler and it was something all of her caregivers responded to.

Now that she's almost 12 I find her girlyness expressed in different ways. She's heading towards cheerleaderness. She has already created a production for one of her classes. She's and expressive dresser and up for parts in her school play. I'm not so good in recognizing the more subtle aspects of what the appropriate bounds of divatude are. I need to work on that. I never really understood 12 year old girls.

What I do understand are character issues, and I'm trying to hone in on those things that are girly but not un-virtuous. For example, I know for a fact that Scholar gets into dramatic situations. She does the drama queen act, but in a way I know this to be a fundamental difference between boys and girls. I expect Boy to man up and not complain, get it done. I expect my wife to protest loudly the very moment something's not Kosher (so I can fix it), but I don't want my wife to be petty or create drama for its own sake. I am aware of the duality of Pioneer vs Princess and I certainly don't expect any of the Bowen women to have a sense of entitlement without effort, and yet I very much respect their desire not to get their hands dirty and scream when someone is doing them dirt. It's quite a balancing act.

Such spectrums are not always clear or without contradictions. But I have to disambiguate what I think is nature from what I think is nurture, and keep all kinds of nonsense away. I believe that if I concentrate on character, I'll be OK but the trick is to recognize how girls express character and personality while they're not yet women. Fortunately, I have the Spousal Unit who grew up in an all girl family.

Blogger President

I'm definitely on that meme. Give me a President who blogs. McCain's stock is going down. He's really fumbling with his words - Hugh Hewitt nailed him today. Our next President, whoever he is, has got a lot of fast talking to do, and the one who blogs best will get my vote.

So far it's all Mitt for our team.

A Black Conservative Review Of Immigration

I had to stick black in the title of this for two reasons. The first is that I'm not convinced that there is a Conservative position worth articulating. And by that I mean Conservative in the tradition of what is conservative about the Founders. It is an admission that I have a bit of work to do understanding how Augustine leads to Jefferson leads to Hayek in the moral philosophy of Conservatism. The second reason is that Erin Aubry Kaplan is getting invited to represent in hoity salons and since her invitation is about 9 months too late, there is some consensus that black opinion has not been tapped on this particular subject. So 'black' is for the search engines, y'all.

There's nothing particularly that I would like to amend from Cobb's Rules on Immigration although I'm certainly at a more dispassionate remove from the days I wrote them. If it appears that I hadn't acknowledged the reasonableness of non-tattoo identification, then let this be that acknowledgment. However at this moment it is clearer to me that there seems to be no resolve in the matter of law enforcement. It seems like every month there is a new outrage.

The prosecution of Ignacio Ramos is really a slap in the face. Add to that this latest story:

A gunman in a group of six to eight men came within 35 feet of National Guardsmen watching the Mexican border earlier this month, according to a Guard report.    

The four Guardsmen from Tennessee were manning an observation post near Sasabe on Jan. 3, looking for illegal border crossings. The men approached, split into two groups and surrounded the site, according to the report.

The troops began to withdraw to avoid a confrontation. As they were loading their gear into their vehicle, one of the armed men approached within about 33 feet, according to the summary.

"Both groups kept their weapons 'ready low' and never pointed them at each other. No shots were fired," the report states.

The troops finished loading the vehicle and drove away. They then called Border Patrol agents, who tracked the armed men back to the border but were not able to find them. Officials have said they do not know who the armed men were and what they were doing near the observation post.

People in California are really fed up with the epistemological battle over 'immigration'. The matter is illegal immigration and the great nothing that is being done about it.

So there's just a little update really of what I've said before with a couple new items thrown in. Just being timely. The issue isn't so very complicated. Illegal immigration hurts. Blacks and Mexicans are at low level conflict here in Southern Cal. Some people think that Black+Brown politics will achieve something special, it won't. Blackfolks are getting kicked to the curb by the same radical chic buttlickers who have nothing constructive to add to the American political debate other than their own obsessions about race and ethnicity and pity for the poor.

NOTE: Those reading this post from the mention in Christopher Bracey's book should consider my Conservatism Category. Those without the patience to read should consider my YouTube musings.

This Week In Iraq

In The Club

"When I saw the reticence, I didn't want anyone to misunderstand my motives. Politically, it was the right thing to do.There are other ways to gain fellowship with people I respect."
-- Pete Stark

I seem to recall some heated discussion we had around here about exclusive country clubs or some such. So you ask who is Pete Stark. He's one of the first whitefolks who tried to join the Congressional Black Caucus back in 1975. His application got kicked to the curb despite the fact that the district he represented was about half black. You should see the wisdom in his compromise, but it is the kind of wisdom some black partisans are not likely going to give any credit for on the other shoe.

So today's man bites dog story is that what goes around 22 years ago, goes around once again. This time, the congresscritter is one Stephen I. Cohen out of Memphis who hit the screens of the CBC.

    As a white liberal running in a majority African American district, Tennessee Democrat Stephen I. Cohen made a novel pledge on the campaign trail last year: If elected, he would seek to become the first white member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

    Now that he's a freshman in Congress, Cohen has changed his plans. He said he has dropped his bid after several current and former caucus members made it clear to him that whites need not apply.

Sounds a little bit like that sign I used to see in Brooklyn. "Don't even THINK about parking here." I don't think this is such a big deal. There's not much that the CBC does that anybody recognizes or really cares about. It's just another club, and a decent one worth having. It has been about 13 years or so since they've been completely defunded for their exclusivity, and that's about the last time anybody has really cared about a major controversy involving them.

The Deepest Conversation in the World

The deepest conversation in the world is emanating from the mouths of atheist scientists and other extraordinarily brainy people that we haven't been paying attention to. They are wondering aloud whether science itself is biased and if the scientific method is useful in finding all of the knowledge mankind needs. They are asking whether or not the scientific community itself can be depended upon to be rational when it comes to questions about reason and the epistemology of faith. In short, why does the mere mention of religion and God make so many scientists suddenly lose their minds?

As I mention this controversy, I have to recommend to you a new site that has some truly mindbending questions about bias. So it looks like we have forestalled the epistemological nightmare long enough and a lot of us are going to start questioning whether or not we really know what we think we know. It has the possibilities of putting us in a completely different place in 20 years, that is to say a very bad place if we don't pay attention, because if these guys start going nuts, the American academy is going to fly apart at the seams, especially if we are subject in any way to Dhimmitude. So if you're ready to dip your toe into matters of doubt on objectivity, you absolutely must bookmark and often visit Overcoming Bias.

As for me, I've always claimed to be biased and informative. Me and Oprah both. We care about what we care about and we think a lot of honesty about a very few things is vastly superior to 'unbiased objectivity' on everything. I put it in quotes because I think, and you do to really, that there's something creepy and weird about an unemotional deadpan who continually speaks in such a way never to embarrass himself or anyone else on the planet. For that we have the craft of writing reference books, thank you. Reference books are not for the decision making process of life. Who would you rather have as a babysitter, a boy whose favorite book is Tom Sawyer or a boy whose favorite book is the Guinness Book of World Records?

At any rate let's get to the incredibly hefty good stuff. I'm writing this intro to the Deepest Conversation because again it goes right back to the mind-blower of Benedict's in the recent past, 'To Act Against Reason'. Christianity is reconciled to rationality through painstaking works of theology and moral philosophy. I am working, starting this year, in trying to understand and recognize that path. Furthermore I am connected by profession and inspiration with some of the principals embroiled in this.. OK no further ado.

The page is here.

My mentor at a couple degree's remove is Daniel C. Dennett. It was his book, The Mind's Eye, that got me hooked into computer science much deeper than as a mere coder. As you see, I've developed some competency in writing English and that owes primarily to my understanding that my mind can influence other minds. I write for machines and people, and I am deeply concerned with how machines and people think and arrive at decisions. I endeavor to build architectures of discourse to aid in such decision making processes. This is my vocation and my avocation, they are linked directly in this regard. I see my vocation as fueled by the determinism of business - that is to say that my customers want to understand with perfection the dollars in their companies. I can build deterministic systems with an interesting set of computering tools. I see my vocation as fueled by the dynamism of the stochastics of politics - that is to say that my readers want much less exactness, they want analog push and pull, they want tao and insight, but not control. I can build narratives with an interesting set of rhetorical and media artifacts. The aim of both of these disciplines is to enable highly functional reference resources and frameworks for decision making. Dennett set the context and I've known this clearly since 1982 when I first read the Mind's I.

Dennett, however, is a large skeptic on matters of faith, as is Richard Dawkins who in this controversy has raise the ire of a number of theologians and anthropologists specializing in the history of religion. I too have engaged the 'faith vs reason' debate with the ferocity of a college sophomore fresh from reading 'The Fountainhead'. (And I'm not embarrassed to link to a 20 year old email, but I digress). The attractiveness of liberation theology to me in the early 90s, in the wake of some faith in US government hitting some brick walls around Iran-Contra time, made me recognize the value of religion as primitive and fundamental pedagogy. I was also digging Iron John at the time and investigating archetypes, oh yeah and Paolo Friere too.

So I have significant reasons to believe, in a Hobbsian sense of reason being a spy for desire, that religion makes sense. And I reject Hitchens' quite logical assertion that if religion can get you to consistently believe one fundamental lie (the existence of God) than it can justify anything. In fact religion as a discipline does not lead one to nihilism, the morality of religion is a restraint against nihilism. And so I am disheartened but what I perceive to be Dennett's objection to theology. Again, I'm not specific enough because I'll have to read this work over and over before it coheres in my head, but I sense him on the wrong side - that their reading of Pascal's Wager completely overlooks the ethical lesson of Job. There is a very fundamental strength I see in that faith in a perfect being has earthly rewards. Scientists would seem to be on the side of kings, rather than transcendent ethics.

I'll have more to say on this as time goes on.

Inevitable?

From the Belmont Club

The initial vision behind Operation Iraqi Freedom was to provide an democratic alternative to the Muslim world. And the question implicit in any "redeployment" strategy or change in direction is quo vadis? Do we really mean to take on radical Islam in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Europe? Because they will still be there however far one flees from Iraq. And how do we intend to fight them in those places? If the West could not bear to abandon a "catch and release" policy in Iraq do they expect it to be implemented in Western Europe? Now that Iran has decided to destablize Afghanistan by supporting even forces traditionally unfriendly to it, for so long as they attacked Americans, we now have a reprise of the Iraq in Southwest Asia with Iran and Afghanistan playing the roles of Iran and Syria. Given there is no prospect of cleaning up the Taliban hiding in Pakistan, what is the way forward in Afghanistan that is not different from the way forward in Iraq?

There is no escape from the current conflict. There is nowhere to withdraw. The West must find a way to defeat a networked radical Islamic threat one way or the other or leave the planet. The jihadis have every intention of inheriting the earth.

Your reaction?

A Gathering of Old Men

Truth be told, I've always wanted to be my grandfather. That's Raymond on the left in cool repose. He was an orphan of my great grandfather Charles Sparrow Bowen. He taught himself Latin and could quote from Ovid. He was the hardest happy man I ever knew and the only one who could shut up my father with a stare. In that he was enormously powerful, yet and still he remained inexplicably humble, especially in the presence of my grandmother whose nickname was Miss Madam. Miss Madam had the kind of presence that made you check your fingernails for dirt and otherwise stand at attention. I can still do a perfect imitation of his gruff voice, very New England he was.

On the right is Uncle Phil. He froze his ass off in Korea and partied his ass of back on the home front. I used to bounce on his belly and had nothing but love for him my whole life. He was the man whose presence let me know my father was not a completely square tight ass. He once whispered conspiratorially to me as I drove him to the liquor store as we ran short of beer one night that 'Your father is so full of shit, he's done worse than me but he doesn't want you all to know'. I responded 'I know', but I didn't and Phil knew I didn't.

These two are Old School for sure, had little tolerance for BS that they didn't initiate themselves. They lived for their families, which for Uncle Fat Phil was us. He didn't play the role and didn't play like he would. These were men who never complained about their lives. They are part of my strength.

Thanks.

Viva Pinata: Who Doesn't Like Playing God?

My primary controller is broken and I don't have cash to buy another. I've been out of the shooting rooms for about two weeks, and I've been playing Viva Pinata. That's the excuse I'll be giving the guys on Gears of War and Rainbow Six, but the fact is that this game is a lot of fun.

OK so the basic premise is this. Viva Pinata is a god game, which is to say that it is The Sims with animals. There is actually something stunningly compelling about the basic premise even in this Fisher-Price interface. You're basically allotted a scrubby patch of junkyard that you must convert into a garden. You start with a few basic seeds and a broken up shovel and a worm or two. Your job, turn this wreck into an environmental paradise.

Since the game is obviously for the younger set, you'd think that perhaps they've dumbed down nature. OK yes there is a stork involved, but the player is responsible for getting pairs of animals to do the 'romance dance', which is a mini-game within the sim for each species. I've been playing for about 18 virtual days and have managed to collect, very un-Noah-like about 20 different species of animals. You learn very quickly which animals eat which others or if plants are their thing. For some reason, the frogs and newts really go at it, and bees and ants hate each other with deadly passion. The snakes are remarkably tame. There are 'sour' animals too that simply prey on every species, there are poison plants and inexplicable sicknesses too. You find yourself after a few upgrades overseeing quite a menageries of plants, trees, insects, rodents, mammals, flowers and god knows what else is in store. Viva Pinata is a masterwork of farming and husbandry with ecological details that pull few punches.

Now it's true that animals that die explode into pieces of candy, after all they are pinatas. So it's lighthearted enough for any kid who can handle an XBox controller. But it can get as complex as you can manage. Still, the engineers seem to have found a way to moderate the pace. So it doesn't seem to game you as hard as you might expect of a game of this complexity. On the other hand, if you're going full hog as I am, you can find out nice farming economies, purchase helpers of various competencies and get real traffic minded in designing your plot of land.

Like with the Sims, you can build  ponds or fill them back in. You place trees and plants, fences, birdhouses and the like. Creatures require certain environmental niceties. So if you want to get a mouse, you have to plant radishes.If you want rabbits, you have to plant... hmm what do you think? But that's just to get them to visit. If you want them to mate, you have to get them on a proper diet and provide the right house. For example, if you want a baby snake, you have to attract the snakes. Then you have to feed them each a frog and build a snakehouse. But to get the frog you have to have a certain amount of pond area, and the frogs have to have eaten some flies to stick around. Well to get flies, you have to have the right kind of flowers. You get the picture. There's a deer that skirts by every once in a while, I'm desparing because a sour bat just bit my sparrow.

What god game would be complete without some control over life and death? Since all pinata are candy on the inside, you can whack a fox upside the head with your shovel and feed the pieces to a frog.You can also play capitalist, find a cash crop and just hire a hunter to go track down a rabbit for you rather than spend the time crafting a seductive ecosphere. There's also a bum in the game. I have yet to figure out what purpose he serves, so I whacked him on the head with a shovel once too. It didn't matter, he keeps coming back begging for coins.

I'm somewhat embarrassed by how much I like the game. I mean it can be very insipid at times. All of the creatures have big baby doll eyes, and you can look at them doing things inside their homes, which inevitably elicit cries of "OOooh they are sooo cute!", from my ten year old daughter. Yeah when you think about it, these are like beanie babies come to life. So yes absolutely it will hold your kidnicks transfixed. It is rich gameplay with dozens of different species to play with and watch interact. There's even a feature that allows kid friends to share animals via XBox Live. If I were so inclined, I wouldn't mind one bit giving XBox Live to my daughters. VP is a perfect environment for kids, and it's way more expansive than the games that kids play on PCs like Millsberry and Club Penguin.

If Microsoft is smart about gaming, and I know they are, they will come up with a set of Viva Pinata class games. It will be the biggest hit since Pajama Sam and the Humongous Entertainment series. The kinds of controls that are in place for XBox Live for such games good, I know because I have such controls for Boy on his account, and when it comes down to it every parent who wants some control and direction over their kids online use would much rather have it done on a game console than on the family PC.

Now, sadly, I'm going to give the kids their controller back.

Superior

Rumors of Spite Denied

"While it's true that my nose and my face have issues they are both aligned within the broad mainstream of the Democratic Party".

Spirit

By Allen Wheelis

 

We come into being as a slight thickening at the end of a long thread. Cells proliferate, become an excrescence, assume the shape of a man. The end of the thread now lies buried within, shielded, inviolate. Our task is to bear it forward, pass it on. We flourish for a moment, achieve a bit of singing and dancing, a few memories we would carve in stone, then we wither, twist out of shape. The end of the thread lies now in our children, extends back through us, unbroken, unfathomably into the past. Numberless thickenings have appeared on it, have flourished and have fallen away as we now fall away. Nothing remains but the germ-line. What changes to produce new structures as life evolves is not the momentary excrescence but the hereditary arrangements within the thread.

   

We are carriers of spirit. We know not how nor why nor where. On our shoulders, in our eyes, in anguished hands through unclear realm, into a future unknown, unknowable, and in continual creation, we bear its full weight. Depends it on us utterly, yet we know it not. We inch it forward with each beat of heart, give to it the work of hand, of mind. We falter, pass it on to our children, lay out our bones, fall away, are lost, forgotten. Spirit passes on, enlarged, enriched, more strange, complex.

   

We are being used. Should not we know in whose service? To whom, to what, give we unwitting loyalty? What is this quest? Beyond that which we have what could we want? What is spirit?

   

A river or a rock, writes Jacques Monod, “we know, or believe, to have been molded by the free play of physical forces to which we cannot attribute any design, any ‘project’ or purpose. Not, that is, if we accept the basic premise of the scientific method, to wit, that nature is objective and not projective.”

   

That basic premise carries a powerful appeal. For we remember a time, no more than a few generations ago, when the opposite seemed manifest, when the rock wanted to fall, the river to sing or to rage. Willful spirits roved the universe, used nature with whim. And we know what gains in understanding and in control have come to us from the adoption of a point of view which holds that natural objects and events are without goal or intention. The rock doesn’t want anything, the volcano pursues no purpose, river quests not the sea, wind seeks no destination.

   

But there is another view. The animism of the primitive is not the only alternative to scientific objectivity. This objectivity may be valid for the time spans in which we are accustomed to reckon, yet untrue for spans of enormously greater duration. The proposition that light travels in a straight line, unaffected by adjacent masses, serves us well in surveying our farm, yet makes for error in the mapping of distant galaxies. Likewise, the proposition that nature, what is just “out there,” is without purpose, serves us well as we deal with nature in days or years or lifetimes, yet may mislead us on the plains of eternity.

   

Spirit rises, matter falls. Spirit reaches like a flame, a leap of dancer. Out of the void it creates form like a god, is god. Spirit was from the start, though even that beginning may have been an ending of some earlier start. If we look back far enough we arrive at a primal mist wherein spirit is but a restlessness of atoms, a trembling of something there that will not stay in stillness and in cold.

   

Matter would have the universe a uniform dispersion, motionless, complete. Spirit would have an earth, a heaven and a hell, whirl and conflict, an incandescent sun to drive away the dark, to illumine good and evil, would have thought, memory, desire, would build a stairway of forms increasing in complexity, inclusiveness, to a heaven ever receding above, changing always in configuration, becoming when reached but the way to more distant heavens, the last… but there is no last, for spirit tends upward without end, wanders, spirals, dips, but tends ever upward, ruthlessly using lower forms to create higher forms, moving toward ever greater inwardness, consciousness, spontaneity, to an ever greater freedom.

   

Particles become animate. Spirit leaps aside from matter which tugs forever to pull it down, to make it still. Minute creatures writhe in warm oceans. Ever more complex become the tiny forms which bear for a moment a questing spirit. They come together, touch; spirit is beginning to create love. They touch, something passes. They die, die, die, endlessly. Who shall know the spawning in the rivers of our past? Who shall count the waltzing grunion on the shores of ancient seas? Who shall hear the unheard poundings of that surf? Who will mourn the rabbits of the plains, the furry tides of lemmings? They die, die, die, but have touched, and something passes. Spirit leaps away, creates new bodies, endlessly, ever more complex vessels to bear spirit forward, pass it on enlarged to those who follow.

   

Virus becomes bacteria, becomes algae, becomes fern. Thrust of spirit cracks stone, drives up the Douglas fir. Amoeba reaches out soft blunt arms in ceaseless motion to find the world, to know it better, to bring it in, growing larger, questing further, ever more capacious of spirit. Anemone becomes squid, becomes fish; wiggling becomes swimming, becomes crawling; fish becomes slug, becomes lizard; crawling becomes walking, becomes running, becomes flying. Living things reach out to each other, spirit leaps between. Tropism becomes scent, becomes fascination, becomes lust, becomes love. Lizard to fox to monkey to man, in a look, in a word, we come together, touch, die, serve spirit without knowing, carry it forward, pass it on. Ever more winged this spirit, ever greater its leaps. We love someone far away, someone who died long ago.

   

***

   

“Man is the vessel of the Spirit,” writes Erich Heller; “. .. Spirit is the voyager who, passing through the land of man, bids the human soul to follow it to the Spirit’s purely spiritual destination.”

   

Viewed closely, the path of spirit is seen to meander, is a glisten of snail’s way in night forest; but from a height minor turnings merge into steadiness of course. Man has reached a ledge from which to look back. For thousands of years the view is clear, and beyond, though a haze, for thousands more, we still see quite a bit. The horizon is millions of years behind us. Beyond the vagrant turnings of our last march stretches a shining path across that vast expanse running straight. Man did not begin it nor will he end it, but makes it now, finds the passes, cuts the channels. Whose way is it we so further? Not man’s; for there’s our first footprint. Not life’s; for there’s still the path when life was not yet.

   

Spirit is the traveler, passes now through the realm of man. We did not create spirit, do not possess it, cannot define it, are but the bearers. We take it up from unmourned and forgotten forms, carry it through our span, will pass it on, enlarged or diminished, to those who follow. Spirit is the voyager, man is the vessel.

   

Spirit creates and spirit destroys. Creation without destruction is not possible; destruction without creation feeds on past creation, reduces form to matter, tends toward stillness. Spirit creates more than it destroys (though not in every season, nor even every age, hence those meanderings, those turnings back, wherein the longing of matter for stillness triumphs in destruction) and this preponderance of creation makes for that overall steadiness of course.

   

From primal mist of matter to spiraled galaxies and clockwork solar systems, from molten rock to an earth of air and land and water, from heaviness to lightness to life, sensation to perception, memory to consciousness-man now holds a mirror, spirit sees itself. Within the river currents turn back, eddies whirl. The river itself falters, disappears, emerges, moves on. The general course is the growth of form, increasing awareness, matter to mind to consciousness. The harmony of man and nature is to be found in continuing this journey along its ancient course toward greater freedom and awareness.

TV One's Black Men Revealed: Ep 2

I watched the Black Men Revealed show on TV One last night and it gave me that old creepy feeling, but not exactly.

Long ago when I used to watch Tony Brown's Journal on Sunday mornings it would wake me right up. In no time the show would be into a topic and I'd be screaming back at the television. Then I would have to shutup to hear the next thing that was said. It was frustrating. I hated the fact that there was never enough time to cover the topics I really wanted to discuss. Not so today; I have Tivo. So the Spousal Unit and I got into it. It took us two and a half hours to get through a one hour show. We ended up on a tangent, a very deep tangent that had a moderately satisfactory resolution. So on the one hand I had the satisfaction of being shook awake and passionately into topics on the tube, but I didn't have the empty feeling of having the discussion snatched away too soon due to the limits of television and the sponsorship of Pepsi. 

The biggest difference between then and last night's broadcast was that I know two of the participants. I'm acquainted with Leo Terrell. We used to see each other semi-regularly at Ofari's over in Liemert Park. It has been a while, actually. Hmmm. And of course my Brotherhood brother Joseph C. Phillips was sitting to Terrell's left, which can only happen physically. Leo was on fire, but you could tell he enjoyed himself. Joseph had the unique ability to quiet the room when he spoke. Everybody held up their end very well and it was very enjoyable to get that motion.

This happened to be the first broadcast I've seen in the series, and I have to say that the package works. The editing was very well done and the pace was swift with a lot of detail. The Unit and I agree that it's a very compelling show that needs to focus on one topic and let the brothers go. Get rid of the dominoes and keep it rolling. It's something that you could do only without commercials, which means it would make for a very nice DVD. But I sincerely hope the series gets extended. The formula works. Now that the producers have been through a season, they'll be able to refine it into perfection. The best thing about the show is that you never got the feeling that there wasn't some aspect an intelligent black position that was left hanging. There were lots of spaces to throw in your two cents, but in the end you couldn't say that one of these brothers just didn't belong. In short, it was a bomb show.

That was the one that I was originally slotted to shoot, but there were some changes and I went to another one. February 4th, mark your calendars. As for now, I'm not surprised at how well it came off, but just very pleased to see it done.

There's basically one thing that I think should have been said in last night's discussion that didn't get said. When it came to Leo's continuing reference to 'selective enforcement', I think he complained a little bit too loudly. Like the brother on the left hand side of the screen, I didn't buy Leo's numbers, and furthermore I would have brought up the fact that when it comes to the net of the numbers of black men in 'the System', it's a small fraction of the overall black male population.  My position is that selective enforcement is our burden, and of all the burdens black men have faced in America, this is the slightest. My father dealt with selective enforcement and Jim Crow and his grandfather dealt with those two and the miseries of sharecropping. If we're going to talk about problems, then we need to own the solutions and cultivate the strength, none of it is beyond our grasp. So man up and deal. That's this black man's perspective.

I learned a little more about Leo. I like him, he's an admirable man, a made man of his times. And he conserves and advocate's spirit. But I think he's been around too many criminals. I know taking him out to dinner wouldn't change the way he sees the world, but it would give him some time with good people, like those on the set of this program.

As for the other myths, I know I wrote something down here somewhere. I just can't find it. They must have fallen into the cracks on that busted disk drive of mine. Oh well, you know the answers. Discussing it is all the fun.

Sad Times

World War What?

Depending upon who you ask, there are anywhere from 20 to 50 or so wars going on right now. In fact, I wonder why it is that this hasn't been asked. The argument I present is that the US has to decide where to put troops on an economic basis. What's at stake? There are a host of such questions, obviously.

• Global Security has 41, listing the US in four.
• Wikipedia lists 20.
• Info Please also has 20.

I put this as information vis a vis GWB's stated Axis of Evil. We're not in many. We could be in more.

Switch

He Watch Channel Zero

I don't know what's up with the Spousal Unit but she's on a strange little tangent to hook the kids on dumbed down black comedy. It wasn't until I played the preview for Midsummer Night's Dream that my idea might be just as vapid. Of course it was Michelle Pfeiffer that helped me realize my folly. We may be making a mistake this week in our parenting skills.

But since I'm launching on a small tangent of snark myself in reviving the Comic, it means that I'm gulping down a megadose of WTF gelcaps.

In medias res, I offer exhibit A, from some disgusting joint called 'The Beast' which is a place from which I can never come. I might go there, but I am fundamentally incapable of letting the microbes in my body, miticlorians they may be of the Dark Side, to arrange my brain into the type of cynical bastard that writes such things as the Fifty Most Loathsome People in America.

The common factor? Flavor Flav. There is nothing remotely redeeming about that person, not even bleeped out jokes about him.

Charges:           Fondly remembered as the loopy jester of the world’s most serious           hip hop act, this monofaceted neo-minstrel landed a career in public           debauchery on VH-1 when Chuck D’s threadbare coattails finally gave           way. After spending two years publicly chasing a gargantuan Danish lush,           Flav decided to seek love in the traditional way, by plumbing the depths           of human depravity on the most cynically trashy dating show in a field           of strong contenders for that title. "Flavor of Love" is a contrived,           exploitative confirmation of every racist and misogynist stereotype           regarding gold-digging ghetto hoes and stoned, groping deadbeats you           never heard, setting the civil rights movement back several years, prompting           Public Enemy to issue a disapproving disclaimer, and causing our staff           to reconsider the first amendment.

Exhibit           A: "You’re blind baby, you’re blind from the facts on who you are,           ‘cause you’re watching that garbage."

Sentence:           Locked in a room with a clone of himself.

               

Thank God for God. 

Revival

Pass The Herb

Over at my man's, Avery is running down some of the slang from his highschool years. I put in some paragraphs and got carried away.

Not long ago there was a hiphop dictionary and some kids from Finland or Sweden were the first to put it on the 'Net, but Charles Isbell and I were the original kings and spent a lot of time setting the etymologies straight. I forgot how much fun it could be and how deeply into my psyche the argot and challenges of young black manhood are. I say young black manhood guardedly because only in abstract political ways and basic human ways are there any similarities between what I mean by it and what you might interpret that meaning to be today. The only way out of that impasse is to pass along some of the original language in context. And so I continue.

I never bought any weed in my entire life. Everything I know about weed comes from the fundamental act of sharing the illicit commodity. There are a lot of things one might assert about blackness, but there is little that matches the intimacy made by passing the herb.

In retrospect I cannot call those people friends. Nobody said anything about 'friends' except your mother, who was always immune to their elements of cool. No matter who TeeDee and Boo where to you, to your mother, they were always your 'little friends'. Depending on your willingness to be associated, they were 'just some dudes I hang out with' or they were 'my boys'. I never ran with a gang. If asked what set I'm from, I had no answer, which is not to say I shut up. I simply told them that there are no Crips or Brims in my neighborhood. And this was perhaps known well enough about Crenshaw and Jefferson that it was rarely a problem. I didn't have a 'crew', but I did have my boys. A crew had purpose and we had no missions, only each other and the games we played. We were boys, and that's the best way to describe it.

The Arnold's front porch was good for three things. The other two were hopscotch and hair braiding. It was painted red and sat under an aluminum awning. The rain gutter came down on the driveway side and the wrought iron was painted black. The steps were too shallow for sitting but there was plenty of room to sit on the milk crates in the corners back in the shade even as the laggers were tossed for clicking heels over the six. It was usually Wanda who had the shoebox, but what she was doing with the weed and the seeds was a mystery to me then. I never held the bag, only the harsh sweet smoke of the second toke. They knew I was no good, and I cultivated that knowledge, of holding the roach or hitting the second joint. So I always got a good fat draw of the first fat splif and passed what was left the herb to the next kid on the porch.

I was the best diver and the best wrestler. I was about as fast as anyone so I got to play wide receiver and free safety but in our small world everybody had to hike sooner or later. But not everybody got to QB or roll the joints. Those were specialties. I can throw a football from pole to pole now, which was all the bomb anybody needed. Four front lawns were forty yards with a first down at every driveway but we were not about rushing and played three completes. Even a punt was a pass if you downed the ball first. The rules for football were clear and the competition was one I gladly engaged, but I didn't want to know so much about the herb. I didn't ask much and they didn't tell me anything. It was part of the conspiracy to keep me brainiac I suppose. There must have been some delicacy in the knowledge that I would have to be seduced every time to get high; I never came asking and I only said no enough to make them ask me.

The ladies know that I started drinking at age 26, right around the crisis that birthed my black political agnostics. When the guys start talking about their exploits to get beer and booze before they had peachfuzz I think to myself 'whiteboys!'. I don't have to explain the intimacy of the Arnold's porch. It shares no context with the adventure to the corner liquor store bribery and barfing out the car trope. Adolescent drunkenness is a competition, a headlong rush to pukey oblivion. These days, they say 'sick' as a compliment. The invitation to share weed is a circle of badness tangential to intellectual ferment. You're supposed to be enlightened high, you were supposed to take to the sky and compose Strawberry Letter 22. Drunks are supposed to punch holes in drywall and each other, beer is something to hurled at hockey games. That's why I always laugh at that little white lie, 'medicinal purposes'. The bad boy life of smoking and drinking at 26 I composed and ended of my own volition two years later. That's why the ladies know it.

There are other paragraphs to come, I suppose. Just not today.

Volt

Well here it is. A hybrid I like. Unbelievable, but true. The Chevy Volt. Now that wasn't too hard was it?

Sam Brownback?

I just saw Brownback facing the talking head on CNN. He's running for President. Welcome to the terrordome.

OK I've got to say it, even though this nation is ready for a president named 'Sam', I swear he looks like a cross between 24's President Logan and Barney Fife.

But we gotta listen.

The New Al Sadr Question

The new question about The Wanker, aka al-Sadr is whether or not, and under what conditions he should find himself facing a bullet or a rope. Interestingly enough, my answer is to use subterfuge.

You see, Maliki has said what was necessary to say, which was that all militias will need to be disbanded in order to be in compliance with Iraqi law. There was no exception given for (whats left of) The Madhi Army. al_Sadr brings 30 seats to the Iraqi Parliament and Maliki depends on those seats to maintain power. So there is an advantage to driving a wedge between al-Sadr and his militia.

If al-Sadr wants to go legit, that is to avoid arrest for the murder charges that are possibly still floating out there, he's going to have to go seriously political. al-Sadr therefore must make a choice between some influence over the new Iraqi Army and police forces, and the ragtag irregulars who rule the streets (sorta) of Sadr City.  So the Ballot or Bullet choice is on al-Sadr's head.

The symbolism of breaking al-Sadr may not go far enough, however. It seems to me that the Iraqi people are siding with the people in front of them, and the those today are the militias. But I think our best deal is letting al-Sadr face re-election rather than a firing squad.

Amen to Open Source

Spence reveals why he's a man not to be overlooked. He sees the ugly truth and is not afraid to confront it, not with complaint but with purpose.

The foundation of democratic politics is transparency, accountability, and agency.  The black leadership model as currently posited exhibits none of these traits.  No transparency–all the deals are backdoor and privatized.  No way of removing a black leader like Sharpton from his post (or even if he was elected, uncovering his deals because of the lack of transparency), so there is no accountability.  And even the language of “a black vote” combined with a general unwillingness to compete over offices at any level, translate into a lack of agency.

A Parlor Question About Defeat In Iraq

There is a hefty chunk of America that is convinced that our military exploits in Iraq have done all they can do. I'm annoyed about the thoughtlessness and vapidity of the 'military' analysis of the Surge by the opposition, but at least they are aligned on the important principle that the solution is political. This of course begs the question of which politics are important. Not for us, but for Iraq.

It doesn't take much thought to realize that liberal doves and partisan Democrats want to put on their brass knuckles. Despite the fact that they have gotten rid of all the neocons and Rumsfeld and now they are piling on the Attorney General, they will keep throwing rocks at our windows until pieces of glass are stuck in our faces. This is understandable, expected and perhaps even inevitable. What isn't inevitable is the fate of Iraqis. And so while doves are preparing to grab whatever reigns are necessary for a swift exit from Iraq I wonder exactly how honorable it will be if commanded by the opponents to the war, and so the parlor question.

If such a thing can be explained in terms that are not precisely reactionary and spiteful to Bush, please explain to me. What kind of politics is good for Iraq?

This is something of a trick question. That is because the war, such as it is in the eyes of the opposition, is done. If everything American is bad for Iraq, we get out of Dodge ASAP and then what happens? The fighting stops? Democracy flowers? Oil flows? Iran decamps? Al Sadr shuts up? Maliki is satisfied? The Kurds watch Monday Night Football? The Turks do nothing? Samarra is rebuilt? Abu Ghraib is forgotten?

As with the Gulf War, Iraq will remain. Is it our responsibility or not? If so, without troops, what do we do for Iraq?

This is my roundabout way of asserting that the number of American troops in Iraq is not a pressing question, nor is the morality of war itself a pressing question if you haven't determined what political outcome is worthwhile. And the political outcome of Iraq desired by those in opposition (even at this late date, calling its very legality into question) seems to be something I cannot determine above the noise of partisans shouting down Bush.

Leave them to their own ways?
Give them money?

What should be done, for Iraqi politics, without American armed forces? I think very little. Which is why I'm still holding out for victory.

Two Hot Cars

I've checked Flickr for new photos from the Detroit Auto Show. There are two clear winners. The first and foremost is the new Ford Interceptor Concept.

The second is the Holden Efijy Concept.

FISA Unfogging

My guess about what's going on with regard to the President's domestic surveillance program is this; they were always rather close to getting 98% of what they wanted, but there were provisions for them to fudge it and they resented anyone telling them that their fudge was fudge.

As best as I can tell, the Bush Administration has backed down from a previously loudly defended 'right' and complied with the fallback position they told the country was untenable a year ago. And somehow I doubt that the 'battlefield conditions' have changed significantly in that regard.

So there will be no more warrantless wiretaps, and the egregious examples that Right radio had navigated us to are no longer to be considered high priorities to the Bush White House. In other words FISA will no longer be evaded. 

My position changed, and the last thing I said in February 2006 was that, prior to my previous assertions, the system was broken and chances were that Bush would be violating the law. Today the rule of law is established to the standards of the most rational of the opposition to Bush's envelope pushing among which I was a late joiner.

What's left open is whether or not the FISA process itself has been speeded up. I cannot tell by a quick parsing of CQ, but you may be able to.

What's Spinning Now

I haven't written anything about music on this blog in a long time. I'm in a strange kind of transitional period.

Isley Brothers
On the one hand, I have discovered a kind of personal nirvana in playing the bassline for 'For The Love of You' which I learned two weeks ago. I can literally sit for an hour and play the song over and over again until I'm in a kind of trance. The same is true with 'Atlantis'. I've done this both weekends I've been home from Arizona and it's almost not fair to my family. The groove is that deep. This is where I've been musically.

KBAQ
I have listened to nothing but classical music in my renta-car for the past two weeks. In all of that, I've only heard one new piece that makes me hunger for more. It was Stravinsky's rendition (I think) of the Eroica Trio. The rest of it has mostly been oddments and sleepy-time music with an occasional robust Copeland thrown in. I know there's got to be some Prokofiev or something I need to hear, but in all these hours I haven't heard it.

Paul Schwartz
Through the late summer I've been grooving with Paul Schwartz. Nothing new here, just more of the mellow same.

Frank McComb
Frank has three albums out that I haven't heard, two of which I didn't know existed. The first is The 1995 Bootleg. I listened to every sample available on the iTunes Music Store, and I'm going to get it first chance I get. The others are The Truth and The Truth Volume 2. Very soon, I'll be knee deep in McComb. Oh and get this, he does a cover of Stevie Wonder's 'Golden Lady'. Gotta have it.

Negro Opera
I've still been lax in finding that Negro Opera I've been hungry after. I may end up just hovering over Leontine Price or even Paul Robeson. We'll see.

Korn
I heard some unmistakable Korn the other day on the freeway. Or maybe it was somebody's cell phone. These things conspire to remind me that I haven't heard any good rock in a while. 

Radiodread
Finally, the last good set of tunes I purchased was a custom CD from Hear Music. Wow, that was before Thanksgiving. It contained several tracks from a reggae band that did covers of Radiohead. Awesome stuff. Next I've got to get their Pink Floyd. The group is called the Easy Star All-Stars. Very much worth it. Check 'em out.

Oh yeah, and I've got Craig Mack on the brain this morning. I need a cure for that.

Jiggy's Man

Jiggy writes:

I'm 44 married for 1 1/2 years . My husband won't get a job. He fill trapped by a 9 to 5 job so he willing to do hustle jobs instead. But that does not always turn out. He pay only half of the rent only. What should I do? Or how can I make him see pass that?

There are lots of ways to go with this one Jiggy, but my instinct says punt, which is to say one day you have to get up, look in the mirror and admit that this isn't going to work, and start working on a new plan and a new man.

I respect that you expect your husband to work a steady job. If you're going to stay married it is wise to keep your man on that track. You need stability, he needs stability. When you're both stable, the marriage has that big advantage. But if he wants to take risks, and you are not ready for those kinds of risks, then you're in your rights to say that it won't work for you. Tell him straight out that you need a boring 9 to 5 kind of man, and you would make it worth that kind of man's while, because I know you will. But if he can't play that role for your love and your hand in marriage, then he doesn't deserve it. He needs the kind of woman who is willing to ride the financial roller-coaster.

There's nothing wrong with the hustle if you're ready to be a hustler's wife, but if that's not the kind of drama you can handle, it's time to set your sights elsewhere. He can handle the risk.

On the man side of things. Well. It's got to be my house. I pay the rent in my house and I make the rules. When the wife brings in money, then it's all gravy. That goes for the nice curtains and paintings on the walls, copper bottom pots, scented candles and extra fluffy bedspreads. You know, civilized stuff, and sometimes an extra steak when she feels like cooking one up for me. And yes she has her own bank account and yes that's her business. But I handle my bills in my house, that way it's always my house.

There are days when I look at my checkbook and say, damn. If I didn't have all these bills and I didn't have to pay for all these bedrooms, I'd have 600 dollars for this weekend. I could have a lot of fun on 600 dollars. But I know I work for my family, not for me. That's what being married means. Ball and chain and the whole nine yards, and I take 95% of my pride out of that because that's where I want to be. When I wasn't married, I took my pride in making other kinds of things work, but that was then.

When I'm the man, the first thing I have to decide is if I'm going to have a small house, medium house or big house. But whatever size, it's my house. So sometimes when the hustle ain't working you just can't live large. You've got to have some things in the bank, and running the big house with marriage and kids, that takes a whole lot of energy. And if you're not ready to put out for all that... well, you got to live like a mouse for a while. And guess what, the chances of coming back to all that are slim, like going back to school. You may as well treat it like a one way decision.

I hope all that helps Jiggy. Best of luck.

After All, It's Only Money

If you believe the Beatles, then all you need is love. If you ask the New York Times, all you need is money. Somewhere out there is 1.3 Trillion dollars just floating around. All we need to do is take it from the bad people and give it to the good people and we can solve all of our problems.  Aren't we fortunate to have the genius of the Democrats to tell us exactly which pockets to pick in order to deliver utopia? Vote for Hillary!

The problem is, of course, we already voted for the Clintons and they didn't deliver the first time around.

Universal health care is a great idea. I like it, seriously. But we obviously have to deal with the people who are in the business of delivering it today. They're not in Iraq. One thing has nothing to do with the other, but who knows, maybe that's what Obama or Christopher Dodd or Edwards might promise. We'll just convert Martin Marrietta into a health insurance company, right?

Putting the annual cost of war in perspective means evaluating the cost of not making war on your enemies, period. How about some honesty around here people?

The Ohio Blacklist

From Schneier, you might be a terrorist if..

You're on the Blacklist Download terrorist_exclusion_list.pdf . Here are a few of the enemy orgs:

1. Abu Nidal Organization (ANO)
2. Abu Sayyaf Group
3. Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade
4. Ansar al-Islam
5. Armed Islamic Group (GIA)
6. Asbat al-Ansar
7. Aum Shinrikyo
8. Basque Fatherland and Liberty (ETA)
9. Communist Party of the Philippines/New People's Army (CPP/NPA)
10. Continuity Irish Republican Army
11. Gama’a al-Islamiyya (Islamic Group)
12. HAMAS (Islamic Resistance Movement)
13. Harakat ul-Mujahidin (HUM)
14. Hizballah (Party of God)
15. Islamic Jihad Group
16. Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU)
17. Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM) (Army of Mohammed)
18. Jemaah Islamiya organization (JI)
19. al-Jihad (Egyptian Islamic Jihad)
20. Kahane Chai (Kach)
21. Kongra-Gel (KGK, formerly Kurdistan Workers' Party, PKK, KADEK)
22. Lashkar-e Tayyiba (LT) (Army of the Righteous)
23. Lashkar i Jhangvi
24. Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)
25. Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG)
26. Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group (GICM)
27. Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK)
28. National Liberation Army (ELN)
29. Palestine Liberation Front (PLF)
30. Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)
31. Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLF)
32. PFLP-General Command (PFLP-GC)
33. al-Qa’ida
34. Real IRA
35. Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)
36. Revolutionary Nuclei (formerly ELA)
37. Revolutionary Organization 17 November
38. Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front (DHKP/C)
39. Salafist Group for Call and Combat (GSPC)
40. Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso, SL)
41. Tanzim Qa'idat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn (QJBR) (al-Qaida in Iraq) (formerly Jama'at al-Tawhid wa'al-Jihad, JTJ, al-Zarqawi Network)
42. United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC)

I wonder if I get in trouble for having these words on my computer.

Dog-Whistle Politics

Yes.

Why must they feel like that? Why must they chase the cat? Gotta be the dog in them.

During the UK election campaigns in spring of 2005, a new phrase entered the Westminster lexicon: dog-whistle politics. A dog-whistle is used to create a special high-pitched sound which only attracts the attention of a particular dog rather than all the dogs around. The analogy then is to put across a political message in such a way that it will only be understood by potential supporters rather than voters in general...

--The Macmillan English Dictionary, 'Word of the Week' archive