Cobb

The Prestige

In my backpack are three DVDs: Breaker Morant, Spy Game and The Bourne Supremacy. I didn't feel like watching any of them. Instead I watched two pay per view movies in my luxury hotel home away from home. The first was that miserable excreta called 'The Marine'. I thought I had seen every cliche, but they even saved one for the final scene. The second was the utterly brilliant 'The Prestige'. It goes one step further to making Ricky Jay my idol.

Without saying more than a bit, I confess that in my profession which is business intelligence, I find James Baldwin apt. He said that the cost of professional success is intimate knowledge of the corruption of the profession. Business Intelligence like all intelligence professions, traffics in truth, in fact versions of the truth. Over my career I have come to appreciate the arts of complexity, theatre, logic, credibility, integrity and their opposites. This is why I find Ricky Jay to be something of a patron saint.

He is in just about every great thriller of our age from 'House of Games' to 'Heist', and here in 'The Prestige', he appears off to the side. Yet you know something of his genius is contributing to the great turns and complexities of this film's plot.

I'm easily impressed by decent films. I can suspend disbelief and do so willingly. It's rather like my ability to sleep on airplanes. There are occasions when I slow down enough to be a bit baffled, but when that happens I blame it on poor craftsmanship. I enjoy a good surprise so I don't try to get ahead of the plot. The Prestige did play slightly clunkily with time and there were moments when I wasn't sure who was reading whose diary in what time period (there's a lot of that in this film), but in the end the revelations were fresh and dazzling. In fact, the film was made more delicious by my suspicions that certain deceptions were occurring which may not have been. I do get that way sometimes. 

The Prestige does not disappoint. It is a thrilling mystery of the first order, and its secrets are delicious. They too go to the very last moment in the last scene. Unlike Travolta's 'Basic' however I didn't care about understanding the final deception. I was quite satisfied by the whole without that resolution... but maybe I'll come back to it.

Win, Lose and Draw

Tim Burke concludes lessons can be learned from the war in Iraq in the following way:

So under those circumstances, the ONLY good I see is that the American people learn some important lessons about the way the world works, about the limits to American power, about the importance of process in their own government, and about how to pay attention when the stakes are high. The focus has to be on reform in the process of political decision-making here at home: the war is a lost cause whatever we do. Getting caught up in the business of trying to make it turn out right is a waste of precious political energy. Is that cold? I guess so. On balance, I¹d favor preserving the lives of American soldiers, so better to begin some kind of phased withdrawal than to surge.

The assumption that we know exactly what failure or success in this war portends depends upon a wide varieties of political goals which are demonstrably affected by events on the ground. I don't question that war is a means to a political end, in fact I'd extend the metaphor. War is a means and and excuse for all political ends. It is the greatest practical thing humans do, war is. There are infinite lessons attributable, and that is why we will continue to study history for the rest of human existence.

I don't want to go too far afield in drawing conclusions or lessons from this war, but I do have a few. My perception of the actual success or failure of this war depends on what I think are more geopolitically realistic assessments than those  of the politics expressed in most of the conversations domestically. Ironicly, I percieve that such considerations are almost exclusively attributed to anti-American foreigners, whereas Americans who support the war in Iraq are considered mindless zombies in lockstep to phrases uttered by the Commander in Chief. The consequence of this is that the biggest lesson I think I've learned, or that most Americans can learn, is that our politicians and media are engaged in a conspiracy to influence us which has little to do with geopolitical reality. We have spent so much time as a nation focused on ourselves and our own opinion of our political selves that we have really devalued our actual ability to know what war is or what war does. The War in Iraq has played domestically in the exact same way as the Trial of the Century.

I don't see how it escapes anyone's notice that the PNAC whose empowered principals in the Bush Administration could hold anything but antipathy for an Arab Socialist party who was armed by Russia. So in many ways it was inevitable that Iraq would be an enemy of the American state. How 'oil' became a subtext for an unspoken ulterior motive for this war and not that basic ideological conflict is a testament to the subset of lessons Americans wish to teach each other, rather than the state of political conflict in the world.

Burke asserts a foregone conclusion that the 'surge', the increase and redeployment and change of rule of engagement will not change the war from failure to victory. My reaction to that assertion is somewhat typical of neocons. It seems to me that if the only lesson to be learned is how 'failure' is inevitable in American military matters, the implication is that discretion is not the better part but the only part of valor, and that there is nothing to be learned by costly boldness except that man's reach always exceeds his grasp. I dissent from this in both principle and in light of what has happened in Iraq, and there are several dimensions of triumph that I believe are unassailable.

First of all there is, no matter what one views as the ultimate cost, the absolute certainty that a tyrant has been forcibly removed from power. The destruction of Saddam and the Baath Party was absolute and unequivocal. There are those who continue to argue that our fundamental military ability has been destroyed by the 'adventure' in Iraq. They think we broke it by using it. Ask such people if they believe the American military is capable of removing Kim Jong Il in North Korea or Ahmadinejad in Iran and you will hear echoes of the same pessimism which doubted we could ever take Baghdad. I always had complete confidence in our ability to take control of Iraq and can recall bragging about how Saddam would be forgotten after some period. Just like Manuel Noriega, he would sit helpless and defeated under arrest in America, and so he did. So there is a Vietnam like spite in dismissing our military capability that has a dog in the fight of destroying the credibility of the Pentagon which seeks to find vindication in its definitions of defeat. They would have us believe that the fundamental nature of warfare has changed and that the destruction of the Baath Party and Saddam Hussein is relatively worthless and meaningless. I find this completely at odds with reality. The reality is that the capitol has been captured and turned over to a new government. That is a victory.

Secondly, no matter what the outcome of the insurgency, there will be no weapons of mass destruction deployed by either Iraqis or terrorists finding aid and comfort to any post Saddam Iraq for the next ten years at least. I count that as pure victory. Again, it takes an extreme kind of denial of material reality to suggest this has little or no meaning and is not a clear victory for the stated purposes of invasion.

Thirdly, and very importantly, the 'Baby Bin Laden Theory' has been completely discredited. By taking the battle to AQ and terrorists who would desire to fight America, we have routed the Al Qaeda organization and many smaller ones. The proliferation of enemies of America is not indeed a reality.

The great failure of this war, in my view, is a failure of nation building, and ultimately a failure of diplomacy. In every respect, to the extent that significant aspects of the strategic objectives of this war were to leave a regime in place which resembled a Western democracy, America has failed. We are incapable of construction with the efficiency promised, expected and delivered. It is the unexpected consequences of this failure which has put 'extra' lives at risk. I put extra in quotes because I'm not sure that I believe in a 'small' war. Despite the fact that Iraqis did not vote, nor Afghans, to war against the US and its allies, they have always had the freedom to lay down arms and not be targets of our war machine.

I take this opportunity to remind skeptics that at no time has any international organization pointed to our war in Iraq and suggest that we have precipitated a humanitarian crisis. By that standard alone, we have victory, because clearly Saddam Hussein was guilty of genocide. I continue to call opponents of this war on that standard, and still anti-war activists deny the Anfal holocaust.

There remain a number of areas which I feel are historical lessons of war which one cannot call failures or triumphs. They are simply the inevitable consequences of being involved in warfare. They are lessons of warriors. I think it will be seen in retrospect that the decision to put General Petraeus in charge of Iraq showed the wisdom of GWBush in recognizing the difference between a war of occupation and that of counter-insurgency. Petraeus is our best man for that job and it has been evident to me since Thomas Ricks' book. We fought the last war with todays army and were unready for the war we needed to fight. We learned the war we needed to fight and now going forward with Petraeus we will fight it.

That is too little to late to save the grand neoconservative dreams of rebuilding Iraq into a strong Western democracy. And despite the fact that Iran and Syria have been emboldened we have contained the conflict to that country. I see the regional politics at work and I know that the complete solution needs to involve the entire region. We will see somewhere in the future what a semi-starved Iraq will do to contribute to regional instability - but I think given what we have learned about the difference between Israelis trust in Westphalian diplomacy and the vagaries of Arab politics that our current form of diplomacy is inadequate to keep armies bottled up indefinitely.

If GWBush had years of irrational optimism for the prospects of an orderly transfer of power from a dictatorship to a democracy, it was an irrational optimism I shared. I don't think that illustrates that our armies are incapable of defeating our enemies, but that they are incapable of creating the space and time needed to grow a new political class while guaranteeing the function of civil society. Rome wasn't built in a day, nor can Iraq be rebuilt in five years to American satisfaction. Loss.

What will be satisfactory to the Iraqis themselves is left to be seen, but we know they reject Al Qaeda. We know they reject Saddam Hussein. We know they have no WMDs, and we know no opportunities to clash with Israel were taken. Win.

Today the head of the UN Oil for Food Program was indicted for fraud and conspiracy. I believe that the 23 plus factions in Iraq are fighting over oil claims too. I know that the kings of the world of oil will continue to be the kings no matter who rules Iraq and anyone's ability anywhere in the world to profit from oil necessitates negotiation with the West. Does oil wealth corrupt? That depends upon how corrupt you think Shell is. You have Saddam's regime for comparison as well as the example of the UN. That lesson is a draw as far as I'm concerned.

There are those playing in the media spotlight of domestic dissent who will claim that Abu Ghraib was a great embarrassment to America as a symbol of human rights. But I find it difficult to believe such an opportunistic sentiment in light of what we know occurs in American prisons all the time. I recognize the failure of Abu Ghraib, but I have little respect for the moral outrage. In the annals of war, there is nothing so horrible there or at Camp XRay, and those with a true sense of history know this.

I would like to end with two observations. The first underscores our failure at diplomacy but.. How is it that we have not felt the sting of sanctions against the US from 'Old Europe' and those who failed the Coalition of the Willing? Where is the diplomatic price we have paid? If it exists, the fact that it is obscure to us underscores not only our failure to pay closer attention to diplomacy but to pay attention to the acts of foreign governments in response to our failures. All we know is that gas costs more, but oil is about $56 a barrel today, down from over $80 last year.

The second observation is that somehow we have avoided any new domestic terror attacks in spite of those carried out in the UK, Spain and elsewhere. We have outed Hezbollah and we have killed much of AQ. We could probably get many more in Pakistan were the diplomacy right. We are not safe, but we are not so vulnerable either. I know why despite others' pleading complete ignorance our defense's ultimate purposes.

Our soldiers will come home, and I will understand something of their true victory, and recognize their continued importance to our nation's defense. Others may try to unwind that carpet from under them for domestic political points, but I'm facing the world.

The Good Shepherd

DeNiro directs.

There's a kind of seriousness about Robert DeNiro, he represents the seriousness of necessity. In this film, he remains behind the action but suddenly a whole breadth of his career work falls into perspective. 'Heat' and 'Ronin' remain favorites, and 'The Good Shepherd' rises as one of the premiere films of this genre.

TGS illustrates a dark American patriarchy of honorable silence, of secret knowledge and the impracticality of trust. It is in many ways, a very attractive film to me personally. In one respect I want to put it in parallel to 'The Road to Perdition' with regard to the burdens of fatherhood and the sacrifices one must make in dealing with overwhelming powers. Yet there is a cold and calculating rationality to the protagonist's loyalty to his country and to his family which obliterates any sentimentality the film might have communicated. It is both fatally attractive and repulsive at once in that regard. It shows the hardball aspect of patriotism vs family as did Littel's 'The Company', and it showed the thin line of honor that such cloak and dagger operatives have. In the end, all they may have is their intent - if that is the new nature of warfare, then this is it. Perhaps we are deluded to believe that citizen/soldiers of this sort can have families.

The other part of this film that seems to be captured quite faithfully is the world of private school maleness. I cannot say whether or not this is part of a dying tradition in America, but I can see the weaker aspects of the same ideas in my own schooling of that sort. The formality between teacher and student and between students betrayed the tension evident in the kind of familial need for acceptance and respect in such relationships. And the bottom line, as always, is trust. I felt a melancholia for the protagonist whose every false move was betrayed, who paid dearly for each misdeed, who had to suspect his closest associates and had to find ways to understand the motivations of his greatest enemies. In many ways, this is boys' school in microcosm, and it plays large in the affairs of men, of fathers and sons, at the heart of all power struggles.

This is one for the collection.

On Pecora: Religion & Modernity

Pecora starts off into a long series of numbered arguments. I expect that this year I will understand the difference between a treatise and an inquiry, but for the moment I'll just take this piece by piece. I'm a bit dismayed by his approach and I think he gets a bit deep into the weeds without answering some fundamental questions about religion and modernity, ie the basic conflict. But I suspect that has more to do with my being unaware of the conflict as philosophers see it.

Because there is such a great deal of material to cover, I'll just do so in the comments along with y'all.

I percieve that the reconciliation between modernity and religion is adequately done by the conception of natural law. The freedom of religion asserted and allowed in America allows rights conferred by the state not to usurp those established by 'Right' as in God-given rights. So I think that the conflict between religious and secular rule can be minimized. I've heard it repeated that Protestantism is a validation (post-hoc, apparently) of capitalism. I don't believe so despite many gospels of prosperity. Nor do I favor Pecora's characterization of Conservatives as somewhat fundamentalist.

The King is Dead. Long Live the King

A boy is born in Hard Time Mississippi
Surrounded by four walls that aint so pretty
His parents give him love and affection
To keep him strong moving in the right direction
Living just enough, just enough for the city..

His father works some days for fourteen hours
And you can bet he barely makes a dollar
His mother goes to scrub the floors for many
And youd best believe she hardly gets a penny
Living just enough, just enough for the city..

His sisters black but she is shonuff pretty
Her skirt is short but lord her legs are sturdy
To walk to school shes got to get up early
Her clothes are old but never are they dirty
Living just enough, just enough for the city...

Her brothers smart hes got more sense than many
His patiences long but soon he wont have any
To find a job is like a haystack needle
Cause where he lives they don't use colored people
Living just enough, just enough for the city...
-- Stevie Wonder

This song always reminds me of the times when it was a hit. I was about ten years old taking a bus to UCLA's summer sports program. When the song came on the radio, all the kids on the bus would stop whatever we were doing (like squirting lotion onto passing cars, or punching each other when a car with an out of state license plate passed) and sing it in unison. We all knew the lyrics.

It was a year or so before I heard the long version with the New York interlude in which the kid in the song is tricked into committing a crime his very first day in NYC and sentenced to 10 years. The final chorus of the song goes into a minor key harmony which haunts me to this day.

The song appeared in my queue this morning just as I finished my expense reports for the last two weeks in Arizona. If somebody would have told that boy on the bus in 1971 that he would be eating $50 dinners every night and staying in hotel rooms that cost $300 a night, I wonder if he would have believed it. And while I know the difference between wealth and affluence now, I didn't back then. I wasn't living just enough for the city, but my sentiments were for people who were. I might have thought it was all of our destiny to sing Stevie Wonder songs until we were all free (or perhaps Donny Hathaway). What freedom meant then and what it means today are critical to any interpretation of Martin Luther King Jr.

I actually did, in this past week have a dream. It was an idle daydream though, and it was about Malcolm X. He the leader of the Sunni Nation, the successor to the Nation of Islam. He was wearing an all white kufi and speaking from his offices in the Sears Tower in Chicago where the Sunni Nation kept their television studios. In my daydream, Malcolm X was deriding President Bush and Sec'y Rice for their unwillingness to use the many Arabic speakers in Sunni Nation to negotiate with various Iraqi factions. But as biting and satirical as he was on the matter of Iraq, he had nothing to say about Black Americans. He had satisfied himself that the many businesses, properties and members of the Sunni Nation were living right.  His attitude had not changed, and his call to Afro-Americans was the same as it had ever been:

The platform that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, our religious leader, stands on is the platfrom of complete freedom, justice and equality for the 20 million black people or so-called Negroes here in America. And he teaches us that because of the seriousness of the condition that our people now find themselves in that it is absolutely impossible to solve our problems with means other than religion. And he teaches us that the religion of Islam is the only religion that will instill within our people the incentive to stand on our own feet. And instead of trying to force ourselves upon whites or force ourselves into the white society or blame the white man for our predicament and constantly beg him for what he has, he says that the only way that we can solve our problem is to unite together among ourselves, among our own kind, clean ourselves up, rid ourselves of the evils that we've become addicted to here in this society and try and solve our problem ourselves.

In my dream, the Sunni Nation had accomplished that, and in their rigorous discipline and highly selective high schools they had set an example to America and the world.  All they did was to build several large mosques in major American cities and gradually bought properties around those mosques. The largest remained in Chicago and New York City. They were black neighborhoods within black neighborhoods where the streets were clean and cops almost never had to go. The street names had changed as they passed through, and Arabic was spoken regularly. Some Arabs lived nearby but not many.

That was about all there was to my dream. The watchword of the Sunni Nation was 'de-integration' and lots of people liked to call it the American dream. But it was Malcolm's creation, and he didn't have anything to do with other people's money.

I only have one dream about Martin Luther King Jr. It's an old one that has repeated several time. It is an image of myself sitting or standing on his shoulders. He is standing on the crest of The Mountain and ahead of us is a shining green valley. He is saying that he has been to the Mountaintop and seen the Promised Land and he won't make it there. I was looking at the mountains at the far end of the valley knowing that the peaks there were even higher than this one. It is always that brief and that loaded with symbolism. I was already invested in the land after the Promised Land.

It is that Far Mountain that I think I've been climbing all of my life, and there hasn't been any rest. And I've always asked and never found a completely satisfactory answer to the question of whether it is better to be king of a small hill or a climber on the greatest mountain. These days I try to be both. I guess that means I'm rolling my own boulder up the mountain which picks up pebbles and dirt on the way up.

Martin asked us to judge each other by the content of our character. It's been amusing and disappointing to find so many characters with no content, especially those who quote King so often. In many ways, the lessons of King are very simple, and my appreciation for him is ordinary.

I take it for granted that at a certian level of living, we are bound and determined to die on our feet rather than live on our knees. Where I'm living, the impulse to improving my quality of life is not fundamentally anti-racist. Of all the evils in the world, racism isn't one whose obstacles most restrain my progress. And since it is axiomatic at Cobb that the great effort of the Civil Rights Movement has been irreversibly accomplished, there is not a great sense of urgent recovery of King's more profound insights. Which is to say he is no more heroic than Eisenhower for winning his war. The wars are won and ours is not so much to ponder the greatness of that moment but to take what has been inherited seriously and responsibly. In that regard, King Day is very much like Kwanzaa, it is not about the man but the circumstances around which the right man did the right thing at the right time. As these circumstances evolve, so should our awareness. And so we revisit in silent meditation with reverence for a moment and then face today.

King stands tall in a group of warriors who have made America a better place, who put the country on the good footing with its premises. In that his legacy is sealed and permanent and resounds with that of the Founders. I look forward to someday making my pilgrimage to Washington when his monument is complete.

We live in America, we Africans, with abundance. No longer can we be singularly characterized by living just enough for the city. It was nothing short of courage that got us here, and we honor the courage of King and the citizens behind him as we celebrate the redemption of our nation with faith in its principles and honor for its defenders.

The Last Word on Devin Brown

Patterico rips the LA Times again and thus settles the last of media forensics required of people not sustaining conspiracy theories. Devin Brown was dangerous and wrong, cops were in policy and right. Do read the whole thing.

The bottom line is this: the paper has been dragging this officer through the mud for almost two years in numerous stories on the front page. But when he’s vindicated, the paper spins the vindication as secret — and when it’s no longer secret, then they simply bury it.

Clearly, the LA Times is in cahoots with the sustaining of the foolish claims and politics of the Coalition of the Damned. That's what a biased newspaper does.

As for the Coalition itself, there aren't really any strong advocates for them around here, so I'm not going to swat at flies that aren't present. But clearly their continued influence only demonstrates how off base is a segment of black protest politics. For whom? For what?

Muhammad Ali At 65

The other night on ESPN Classic, there was a retrospective on Muhammad Ali's career. It's one of the best. It's not complete by a long shot, but it has a certain edge on his career vis a vis the Nation of Islam and his conscientious objection that rub me the right way.

I betrayed my father as a youth by writing to Muhammad Ali telling him that I wished he were my father. I should ask Pops if he remembers. I remember waiting for a reply, and somewhere dimly I think I got one. Ali had that kind of effect on me, he said what he meant and it flowed naturally. Ali's spirit was that of a candid and clear defiance. He defied all that expected him to be anything less than a free and full man, but even looking at that picture one cannot be fully apprised of his greatness. The dialog only goes as far as that narrative of the triumph of a black man over those whites who would deny him whatever.

This post is a reminder of what a champion he was outside of the ring, in profound ways that only a few people have come to understand. Perhaps one day we'll know the rest of the story.

The Verities of Religious Discourse

One of the most intelligent and ethical gentlemen I know, Bill Benzon, who also plays a mean trumpet and has an enviable library, has poked me on the subject of religion. He may be on the way to elevating the discourse by doing a bit more poking. As they say in Texas, I'm all in.

Over at the Valve, where men more learned than I practice their arts of argument we find Benzon's associate Robert Adams more or less directly addressing my own take on the value of faith. He remarks:

[..] What of the claim that an individual who has religious belief is mentally better placed than one who has not?  To set individual counterexamples aside for a moment (‘I know an atheist and he’s extremely well adjusted; I know a religious believer and he’s a manic-depressive’) might it be the case that, in the main, religion enables people to cope with life better than no-religion does?  Is there evidence that it provides explanatory structures and purpose that helps people get through their days; it ameliorates the fear of death and the pointlessness of suffering; it gives them mental and emotional strength.  Clearly, here, I’m making an empirical not a metaphysical claim.  If religion does these things – and it’s a big if, of course, but if it does – then it does so regardless of whether the belief itself is true or false.  If this is the case (and I’m being extremely speculative here) it might explain, by pinpointing an evolutionary advantage to the believer, why religion is so widespread amongst humanity.  So the question I don’t have an answer to: is this true?

Although I hate to digress, this sounds precisely like the question a black man might ask of America. It sounds precisely like the famous response of Gandhi's to the idea of Western Civilization. And so it very well may be the very heart of cynicism. A scriptural response pops immediately to mind despite the fact that I have never been one to resort to scripture; it begins 'For God so loved the world..'

If God loves the world in any way we might understand love (and I take it axiomatically that God does) then we should understand that He gives us the life of faith as one for our own benefit. One of the lessons of Jesus in context is that he did not come to raise an army or a nation. His temporal gift to the world was a human example and a portal to understanding what it is to be Christlike as we are called. It is thus axiomatic that a Christian life is a good life. A life of faith improves life, and God, understanding our very nature better than any student, would know exactly what to give us in order that we best life that life.

This, it seems to me, to be the lesson of Job as I now understand it. A life of faith is one of virtue and all great and good things are associated with God. A proper life of faith accepts that unity of God and good and the love of virtue for its own sake. This best fulfills human nature, and thus the lesson of Job remains with us as testament. Old Testament.

In all that, as a member of an emergent generation, one who has not had the mysteries of the world presented as a challenge to my possibilities of leading it, rather as a puzzle that conspires against my very survival, like the black man asking of America if it is true I should presume that it is, for in the power to destroy is often the power to create. There is ever the struggle to use knowledge for good and so one must presume that it can be, otherwise why struggle for anything at all?

For myself, I believe that the soul is eternal, that the value of human life is axiomatic and that we understand intimately what gives us a better or worse life. Any system of knowledge that denies the soul and denies our capacity to care for it denies the fact of humanity and humanity's eternal purpose. Religion is that which gives us a discipline which sustains that purpose. Theology is that which refines our understanding of the tools, ideas and methods of Religion. In that, theology I think is inherently metaphysical and the metaphysical cannot be reduced to godlessness.

Aluta continua.

The Most Racist Thing That Ever Happened To Me

This morning the Spousal Unit opened a drawer with pride. She waited until Scholar was out of the room and then beamed as she showed me her stash of school supplies. There were colored rulers, protractors, scores of markers, pencils, colored pens, crayons, erasers, staples and even scissors. It was like a small stationery store. It reminded me of Mrs Byers.

Mrs. Byers was my third grade teacher at Virginia Road Elementary School. I think I may have gotten her fired. But immediately as I saw the stash it brought to mind the time when she had us doing the sunrise journal. Every day we were to go to the newspaper and find out what time the sun came up and go outside and watch. We were to remember this time, come to class and write it down on a piece of paper. Some days into the experiment I asked Mrs. Byers for a pencil. She went into a diatribe about how 'you people' should bring your own pencils to school. Everyone hated Mrs Byers and apparently she hated everyone.

In that year I proceeded to piss myself in class about three times because I was afraid to ask Mrs Byers to use the lavatory. That and the pencil incident were raised to the principal through my parents, I assume. That same year I had tested twice at an IQ level of about 134. So there was a conflict to be resolved. The following year, Mrs Byers was gone. It would be a cool narrative if I thought there were anything like causality or racial justice involved, but I cannot make such a big deal out of it. I was eight. All I know are the truth of things I saw first hand, and I know what it's like to be told by a teacher to hold it in because she's not going to let you go to the lavatory.

I can't tell you if that's the most racist thing that ever happened to me. I'm actually hard pressed to come up with an example that stings especially. Yes I was the captain of the diving team in High School when Roots was on TV, and I recall my white teammates calling 'go Kunta' when I approached the board. It pissed me off, but nobody called me 'Toby'. I've been detained by cops and sheriff's deputies about 30 times for DWB having only received about 5 actual citations. Nobody actually hit me, and I'd only been cuffed twice. I've been called 'nigger' in drive bys half a dozen times. And I've sat around laughing happy whiteboys who have joked about how drunk they were and cops let them continue driving home. I've had white parents hustle their daughters away from me, and white apartment managers tell me that the people who just left got the apartment. I've had asian real-estate agents tell me straight out that it's unlikely that they would sell or rent to blacks, even though you look nice, and I've had corporate customers blink and scratch their heads when they see me in person. I've been asked if 'all of you are a church group or something' and I've had cops shut down a party at my apartment, telling my guests to keep their hands where they could see them.

For me, all of this is class three racism, denial of service. It never cost me any money. Of course I'm underemployed. There are all kinds of speculations I could apply to the job I didn't get, the loan I didn't get, the education I didn't get, and what I might have if I was white. But I don't, and I don't feel like Job. I feel like me, and that's just fine.

Several years ago, I tried to initiate a little campaign to document people's experiences with DWB. Nobody wanted to talk. The web page is still there. I only got myself and maybe one other person to write me anything. It was still, I imagine, too soon in black history for the pain of modern dirty laundry to be exposed. I find this both ironic and stupid considering the vehemence with which many of my African American bourgie borthers insist that we know racism to be real whereas whites spend their lives in denial. If you deny to testify, how is anybody supposed to sympathize or even know?

I don't expect blackfolks to stand up and tell whitefolks about the most hurtful thing they've experienced at the hands of whites or other non-blacks. I know that circle is part of a healing process and most people need to heal privately. I also don't expect that this blog should be a confessional.

BUT.. The alter is open. Come on down if you want to share your pain with us. I will be respectful, of course, as should we all. And I'm going to ping some other bloggers too.

Condi's Kids

So I'm in the airport checking out Lou Dobbs' show on CNN. They've got Ed Rollins and some others talking about some crap Barbara Boxer said about the Sec'y of States' inability to make cogent decisions because she doesn't have children who might be at risk of going to war.

Huh? What?

I'll just assume that Boxer is off her game, not that I know what game she has to defend. But there is some consequence to some of her fundamental assumptions. Gay marriage anyone?

Prosper.com: Capitalism 101

I am astounded, but not surprised. Here is one of those great ideas that you have to kick yourself and say "Why didn't I think of that", but only for a minute because the next thing you want to say is, let me get in on the action.

Prosper.com

Prosper, America's first people-to-people lending marketplace, was created to make consumer lending more financially and socially rewarding for everyone.

The way Prosper works is intuitive to people who have used eBay. Instead of listing and bidding on items, people list and bid on loans using Prosper's online auction platform.

People who want to lend set the minimum interest rate they are willing to earn and bid in increments of $50 to $25,000 on loan listings they select. People who lend can easily diversify using "standing orders", which automatically make many small loans to different borrowers.

This is the kind of site that I will find myself referring to on a regular basis. The possibility that it will disintermediate a segment of the banking industry is good. As it matures, I expect such markets to grow. In one way there is a kind of inevitability to it. This is a new class of investor-class activities which were once the province of a wealthy few, now available to the rich and even the affluent. Once upon a time, very few people had 'gold' credit cards with high limits. I remember the days of the Deak Perera gold card in the early 80s. Now everyone has them. Now people can trade on Wall Street without brokers. If the rich get richer, they also become more plentiful, and what we know they do with money becomes the province of more of us.

But can we handle the risk?

That will be a concern of regulators as time goes forward. Obviously there are potential abuses and fraud. Obviously, people have thought of this ahead of time. Hopefully we'll have the benefit of unregulated experimentation for a long enough time to make a sound judgment on such enterprises. In the meantime, big props are due.

On Somalia

This week has been quite a week for Somalia. The Ethiopians, our pals, have swept through with their regular army and routed a fledgling Islamist proto-government. Interestingly enough, the word was that for the short few months that the Islamist ran things in Mog, the warlords were quieted and the streets were clear of the normal gang warfare. Even though the presence of Islamicists is not a necesary condition for AQ to flourish, the Ethiopians saw that double threat the same way we do in America. The news is, apparently, that we have finally killed the AQ operative responsible for the Kenyan Embassy bombing. That would be very good news.

iPhone: For This I'd Leave Palm

I've been loyal to Palm since the Palm Pilot. I've had just about every one of their high-end machines, including my Treo 650 which I've had since the day it came out about three years ago. I've been waiting for them to update the Lifedrive, but it appears that they are too late. iPhone is coming.

I just checked out the demo for the iPhone and I'm sold. 8GB is just right. It had better be a good phone because I worry about OSX being brickable. The Palm OS memory management has been a pain in the Treo but it has never compromised the basic phone function. Other than that, I need it to pass some basic concerns.

• Uploadable utilities
• Security
• Keypad speed
• Camera quality
• Google Support

If it handles all that reasonably well, it's bye bye Treo. The primary reason is that Google has webified all the stuff I would ordinarily need on a phone.

Every Mufti Ain't Mufti

(from the archives July 2002)

mendez' book throws a new light on the spy business which has not been exploited very well in other fiction about spycraft - the value of disguise. not since watching 'the killing fields' in which dith pran keeps mumbling 'ankertill brewer' over and over, has the drama of exfiltration been so dramatically portrayed. i found it very interesting to consider the possibilities now open in identity theft and spoofing given the role of hollywood effects artists in disguise anticipating the technology mendez describes (which must already be quite dated). if eddie murphy can do it, the cia could be having a field day. think about it, does anyone know what michael dorn (worf) really looks like?

in these days as we chase down individuals in a global 'war' on terrorism, understanding this bag of tricks add a new and fascinating dimension to our thought process. this is a very worthwhile book to consume.

Arnn on Strauss Against Historicism & Relativism

Here follows my transcription of the introduction of Larry Arnn's 'cooks tour' of Western Civ produced for the Hugh Hewitt Show several years ago in which he outlines the fundaments of Straussian Political Philosophy. I am in a particularly favorable dispensation to this and it bolsters my siding with Hayek.

Larry Arnn is a student of Strauss via Jaffa. I think he's 95% correct in everything I've heard. The exception was this thing I said about the size and shape of the human soul. I believe that the soul is indeed constant - certainly through our history of being human.

I would also add importantly that the study of philosophy in this regard adds some skepticism against Jared Diamond who from the distance I've studied seems to be overly pre-disposed to give more credit to environment than is due.

Arnn says Strauss uniquely came to recognize:

..that the modern world is dominated by two doctrines that are fatal to freedom and to the pursuit of truth. The first one is Relativism, which is the doctrine that if a person thinks a thing is right, that is the source of its rightness if there is any source.

The secone one is Historicism and that is the idea that each age involves a kind of evolution of the human consciusness and perspective and the standards of right, of good action tend to flow from the age. This gives rise to all kinds of things like the political movement that seeks to perfect the society. Hillary Clinton said one time famously. "Our mission is to change what it means to be a human being in 21st Century." It turns out that she said that at the University of Texas in the commencement addresss in June of 1993. It turns out that's a big project and it takes a lot of government to complete it.

It also changes the nature of government because it has a different account of the nature of man in it. The government under this dispensation is not so much organized to respect our rights - which rights come from our nature which is a fixed thing. All of a sudden our nature is evolutionary and we are the creatures who have the particular ability to get control of process of evolution. [..] CS Lewis wrote brilliantly and famously about this.. That turns out to mean not so much that the human race is in control of physical nature around us as it means that some human beings are in control of others.

And so seeing all that unfold in part in the the Nazi project which was a form of this historicist utopianism, Leo Strauss rebelled against that.

These are elemental concepts to my Conservatism. The way they are stated here is very useful to crystalizing my approach, which from the perspective of black mental liberation are perfectly parallel to Strauss' own observance of the Nazis as a Jew. What I've been emphasizing as Old School is that aspect of patriotic nationalism of African Americans that predates the Black Nationalist movement and owe to values more permanent and prominent in times before our relativist post-modernism and multiculturalism. Or as Arrested Development might have said, it all goes back to Tennessee.

In particular however the warnings of Strauss against Historicism are very useful for getting out of the trap of an emergent blackness that constantly needs a new politics to satisfy its projects. And this is why I'm hard on black partisans who cannot hew to Old School, bumping along merrily from Afrocentrism to Nouveau this to Post- that. When black identity can't be nailed down, in fact entirely consumed by human identity, you have blacks who must out of this historicist necessity reject the whole of America and Western Civilization because they are convinced that the kind of black person they must be has never existed before and no putatively 'white' person could possibly understand recognize or respect such a human being. Therefore an irrational desire to remake black and remake white without regard to the human substrate or the modernism inherent in Western & American teaching that says that humans are self-evidently equal. Therefore an irrational desire to deny that American institutions work for human beings, that the social ostracism of racists retroactively applies to all American institutions, that America must be undone in order to function morally.

This slavish painting of everything racist white is foolish in the extreme and thus obviates any investigation of Western thought and America's place in it. It's willful ignorance that keeps hope alive - hope for some symbol or new politics that will miraculously transform whites into a new kind of people and blacks into a new kind of people. It recasts all human agency through the prism of race, and it is a trap. Moreover it is a hustle.

Dennis Haysbert

People keep forgetting Dennis Haysbert. That is people who happen to think that I'm a one-man wackjob army of weird conservativeness. It's actually rather easy to forget Dennis Haysbert, that's because he is the invisibly integrated archtype of the kind of black American that gets no political press. But just in case you need to be reminded, America would vote for David Palmer in a heartbeat.

I still haven't read the first page of Barack Obama's book but I will get around to it. I don't suspect to find much of the good Senator's rhetoric that would endear me to him or his political cause, but I expect that he will acquit himself well. We knew the personality before we knew the book, and so this is his little 'Profiles in Courage'. Be all that as it may, I don't find Obama to be the man this country need today. But to the extent that Obama is serving as a placeholder for the willingness of America to elect a black man to the office of the President, I'd say he's a weak substitute for Dennis Haysbert.

The fictional David Palmer, and more recently The Unit's Jonas Blane are characterizations of a kind of heroic American we are often told don't exist or are marginalized by omnipresent corruption. I don't believe in such fatalism, so I'm not desperate to extol the virtues of the characters he portrays. Rather, I'm simply reminding folks not to forget Dennis Haysbert, because as far as I can tell, he's walking right into John Wayne's shoes.

The Bowen-Nulan Dialectic

I sustain an oftimes heated and strange relationship in dialog with Craig Nulan whom I've known in various guises over the years as Xavier Moon and Hesychastic. It has only been over the past year that I've been able to recognize the signal beneath the noise. I think I have a fairly good idea where he's coming from but where he's going is a puzzle best left in his own hands.

There are three primary reasons that I pay him respectful attention. The first is that he does the same for me and this reciprocation has history which I respect. I have no reason not to, he does me no wrong and I have no intent of doing him any. The second is that I understand him to be coming from a very strongly disciplined spiritual place with a kind of monastic consistency. This is my primary attraction to Mr. Nulan. He is an Eastern Orthodox Christian who understands a spiritual way out of psychiatry, and I find that to be an extraordinarily powerful weapon. I also have found him to have an apparently rigorous understanding of various cognitive processes tangential to moral praxis. Although I find that he weighs a bit too heavily on such matters between consciousness and the unconscious and the meaning of such signals to that level of brain function I do appreciate that level of evaluation of the self. Thirdly I find parallels of an existential nature, and there are just certain props due black fathers of my generation. I give them up, especially to MIT grads even if they failed to pledge the proper fraternity.

That said I find him on occasion to be particularly noisome in a way I think would be hilariously entertaining in person but very annoying in print. There is nothing quite like a devastatingly intellectually superior put-down done with a smile over cocktails. If Cobb were a bar, I'd like three or for Nulans going at each other.

Here is a good place to get to the bottom of things. We can start with my Conservatism vs Nulan's black partisanship.

Black Men Revealed

Did I tell you that I'm almost famous? If the new show, Black Men Revealed is a hit, I'll be even closer to almost famous. Set your Tivos for Sunday night.

If you couldn't guess, that's me on the left. I won the domino game, by the way. We had a pretty good discussion. My episode was Why Black Men Don't Church. My brief ideas are here. That's all you can get in a medium sized essay though. My thoughts on matters of the spirit are a bit more complex, and developing all the time. If I remember correctly, we got into the Negro Church Monopoly a little bit.  Here are my notes on the taping of the show.

Guilty?

"Think that you might know, then you'll find that you're reading me wrong
My patience comes and goes, but my living has got to go on
And if you think it's easy that's only cause you ain't me, and I ain't you
Check out the difference between the two."
-- Isley Brothers

Erin A. Kaplan feels guilty:

Of course, I was luckier than a lot of my peers, who fell to drugs or violence but mostly to a sense of incompleteness intensified by a lackluster job and an inadequate education in this so-called age of opportunity. Many coped with this incompleteness in the way many black people always have, by taking what they could get and leaving grander ambitions aside. By just trying to survive.

But this is exactly where we failed — or where history failed us. It is why we are not the transition but the broken link between the generation of World War II and the hip-hop generation, which has plenty of attitude but little vision of what came before it and what will come next. It is why I feel almost like a fraud when I talk to black high school students at bare, very unintegrated campuses about why dreams are important. It is why I feel not triumphant at my own relative success — and in my more optimistic moments, I realize that's what it is — but trapped in a kind of survivor's guilt that no amount of further good fortune (or power shopping) can assuage.

The problem with dreaming the wrong dreams is that you end up disappointed. It is only when one approaches the important questions of life with some context that you don't. That's the difference between intellect and wisdom. Intellect is flexible and fast. Wisdom knows when to shut up.

Kaplan and I are the same age. I've felt no tug on my hand as I reached over the rail to lift a brother up my way. And I learned at an earlier age that you can only browbeat a brother so much. We're really not all that inspiring. After all, most of what we wanted was just the American middle class. That's an achievement, but it is not often achievement of excellence. Only excellence can long be inspiring. Integration doesn't mean excellence, only achievement. So I understand what's up when the knuckleheads call me Herb. I recognize the inability of the young, gifted and 'first' blacks of the 70s to make all the boyz in the hood stand at attention. To a certain extent we owe them, but they also owe us. That's why guilt is not a part of my expression. Kaplan's sympathies are misplaced, I think. There's room for everyone here, but everyone doesn't get a nice room. How long can you cry about the fact that this is a free society without free lunches?

--

Oprah is in trouble for reasons I've not paid any attention until last night when I found myself watching CNN. It has been years since I've been on the road and watching CNN and CNBC on the regular, it's an old comfort. But I understand Oprah. She's reaching out but not to the benighted Fourty Percent. Neither she nor Cosby has the patience. Too many young people are dreaming the wrong dreams. They will find out how little regard the world has for them, and they will self-destruct.

It doesn't take a nation of millions to hold people back, just a little demon in their head.

Mad At Mexicans

Here in Arizona, where I've been working too hard to take care of the blog, people are really angry at a story which evidently hasn't resonated nationally, yet. The story is basically this: (emphasis mine)

    Today, Maricopa County County Attorney Andrew Thomas called for an inquiry by Congress and the Arizona legislature into the circumstances surrounding last week's reported retreat by National Guard troops along the Mexican border after they were confronted by four armed gunmen from Mexico. This development was troubling given that Valley streets increasingly are being flooded with crime, drugs and violence flowing from the open border with Mexico.

   

The Border Patrol acknowledged last week that National Guard troops abandoned a post along the Arizona border after being threatened by armed men entering from Mexico. This confrontation occurred along a porous border where drug lords and their gangs operate freely.

The radio is on fire. More later.

Five Things You Don't Know About Me

I almost volunteered for this one myself, but then I know that inveterate Cobb readers might remember when I did this meme with 100 things. Nyaah nyaah search for yourself. Anyway I'm going to add five things I think I haven't ever mentioned on the blog. That could be tough.

1. In high school, I was an AAU diver and captain of the 'diving team' which included myself and two other divers. At my best, I placed 23rd in the state of California, which isn't horrible considering that California divers make most of our Olympic team. My most difficult dive that I ever did on a semi-consistent basis was a forward 2 1/2 tuck from the one meter board. The best dive I ever did was a forward 1 1/2 pike at the Chula Vista AAU Meet in San Diego County. I got sevens. I didn't learn how to swim until I was 10 years old.

2. I was a squid. A squid is a contraction of squirrelly and kid, and it refers to nutcase speed freaks on motorcycles generally under the age of 21. In 1979 had a brand new 1980 Suzuki 550 with a Yoshi pipe and clip-on handlebars. I wasn't quite enough of a peg-grinder to earn much of a reputation at the Rock Store and I totalled my bike before I could. In fact it only took nine months for me to total my bike. At the time, I wore shoulder length Jheri curl. There is no photographic evidence whatsoever.

3. I used to have a little yellow plastic dinosaur, a stegosaurus in fact, that I called Rousseau. I bought him when I turned 28 and kept him as a pet for about nine years. He's somewhere in my garage, I hope.

4. I love the smell of fresh roofing tar.

5. When I was a bank teller trainee in 1980, I didn't drink coffee or tea. Just to fit in, I drank hot water.

--
Here's an extra which I just remembered which is actually pretty interesting. When I was in grade school, I was set to be the kid who played Corey Baker in the TV show 'Julia' starring Diahann Carroll. Everybody loved me on the set, I memorized my lines and was great, but I wasn't part of an acting family. There was a little backroom dealing and I lost the role to Marc Copage.

Iraqi Oil Center Stage

I am hoping that this becomes one of those posts of mine that gets a lot of commentary. I'm never sure which one will. But I am curious to open up the discussion on this matter.

I have basically three stated positions and one unstated position. The first is that the reason we went to Iraq was not because of oil. There was no and could be no cost justification for the expense. The second was that the Iraqi insurgency is brutal because they are indeed fighting over oil. The third was that the Coalition of the Willing was short Russia and France because of a conflict over their oil rights which were granted by Saddam. The fourth which is unstated is that of course Iraq matters because of oil and when it comes to deposing dictators the effect on the world economy should be taken into consideration.

The indications that I hear, but such things will be clearer after the SoU Address, are that we are beginning to put pressure on Iran's access to oil markets. IE there's only a certain amount of political manipulation we are willing to put up with when it comes to oil supplies which is why OPEC oil ministers are not targeted for assassination by the CIA. They don't manipulate. But now would be a good time to update this conversation.

But what will be the oil situation in Iraq?

The Legacy of Michael Powell

Let's talk about Telecom.

Right off the top of my head, there are three or four things that I think about when it comes to telecom regulation and Michael Powell. The first is the matter of media ownership (mixed), the second is the changes in online delivery of media services (better), the third is the reinvention of AT&T (how?) and the fourth, only because I've peeked and been poked is the matter of obscenity, (not much).

I've been personally impressed with Powell's grasp of a huge number of industry issues. I've seen him interviewed once or twice and I was convinced he knew exactly what was going on. Secondly, I took it very well that he was well admired by the hotshot handsome guy who used to run AT&T. I forget his name. Both of these were interviews going back a piece on Charlie Rose. Checking Wikipedia, there's a Reason interview. I'll start anew from there.

On media ownership I'm disappointed by the consolidation of radio. Clear Channel clearly runs stuff and nobody is out there to stop them. I think it is almost a foregone conclusion that there aren't going to be any broadly successful broadcast radio startups. On the other hand, satellite radio is a success and puts out better quality content anyway. I think radio is finding it's own (smaller) niche in the attention of consumers and the fact is that few people care about it that much. Which is not to say that consolidation isn't problematic.

I love the idea that Verizon can provide 'cable TV' and that the VOIP providers like Vonage can compete with the telephone companies. I use Skype and Google Talk and almost all of the IT staffs I work with use IP phones internally. This variety is great and the innovation is very cool. I haven't gotten particularly bogged down with the subject of Net Neutrality, but I'm sure Powell had something to do with this development. My take on Net Neutrality is here. This would be the biggest issue I'd be interested in however - but only because I think the questions of the RIAA, DRM and peer sharing have been mostly obviated.

I have no idea how SBC bought AT&T and then became AT&T. It freaks me out just to think about it. Where are the assets under that shell?

As for the FCCs involvement in fining indecent operators, I think most of it was symbolic and a drop in the bucket. So they made an example of Janet Jackson and Howard Stern. That's nothing compared to what might have been or might still be done. Internet porn is huge and nothing's really being done about it. Broadcast obscenity is indeed on the rise, and I'm against it. I don't depend on the government to help me deal with it beyond the ratings stuff, which ain't bad, but also is not detailed enough. I was against the VChip for technical reasons. I use Tivo Kid Zone. I basically want a marketplace of content filters that I tune, rather than dependence on a set of government decided presets.

Darwin & The Emergent Soul

I'm finding a world to talk about in the wake of Larry Arnn's shout outs on the Hewitt Show. There are at least six or seven new ideas I'm considering. This is one briefly.

I think Arnn is in error to be concerned about the evolution of man. More specifically, I think he draws an incorrect inference from the theory of evolution. He says that if man is not perfect and unchanging, then the soul is not either. I think he seeks something fixed about knowledge and man's capacity to know that is somewhat 'presentist'.

I think that the spirit or the soul of mankind is a vessel for the divine in ways not fully comprehensible. However the ways and means of salvation and of moral thinking are relatively easy. If one takes it for granted that God is an infinite being, then nothing of God's is threatened by the infinite increase of man. Which is to say so long as God pushed the button that started this universe, he will always be greater. Given the glacially slow pace of evolution and the indefinite size of the human soul, there is nothing to suggest that our being a being in transition alters our ability or capacity to recognize God's message.

If Arnn suggests that theology and revelation doesn't improve, then there may be a problem. I'm not sure he does, but I do wonder why he worries about the evolution of the soul.

One does have to wonder, if one is not an Historicist, as Arnn claims not to be why God chose to send Jesus at that particular moment in human history. Why not in the time of Abraham? Why not before? Why not 5,000 years from now? And who's to say Jesus is singular? I'm sure that Acquinas must have wrestled with that one...

I find it difficult to square with the idea of the infinite God, that a changing set of hardware specs for the human animal would make the operating system of the soul obsolete. If so, I think God would think nothing of adding yet another holy service patch for us to download.

The Blue Butterfly

We don't believe our own poets.

So like with Thai iced tea and kung pao chicken, tapas and german beer, we borrow something easily appropriated and add it to our ledger. With just the amount of weight we grow up and attribute it to the appropriated fetish. Yet another proof, for those who need it, that America is all wrong. But only because there's something unsexy about James Madison.

I don't know if he's a poet, but I never bothered to find out. I'm heading in that direction and what I expect to find is a great inspiration. Much of my early years on the path to becoming the race-man x years ago started with the inspiration of the Declaration of Independence. My simply argument was that America defied monarchy because it was monarchy that deprived them. If it were racism, America would be as free of that as we are of monarchy. I am less impressed with that argument today as I was many years ago, but many dreams have found inspiration in the frameworks of freedom.

Then there's this film.

I put these things in juxtaposition because it is becoming clearer now what I never did as I studied the ways and means of science. I didn't read Jefferson or Churchill. I didn't know what it was that intellectuals of the liberal arts did, and so I had no guidance. Because of that I fell into the same trap as the Eclexics, but I felt the pain of eclexia. I felt it along the interstices of highways to nowhere, and it was and may still be my Los Angeles state of mind - a variety of everything with no center. The variety feels like freedom, but it is a never-ending search for strength and integrity with only an anchor in the self.

So The Blue Butterfly is a story about experience. About a 10 year old boy who has both a brain tumor and the courage to die and to make his dream come true at any cost. Around him are bits and pieces of broken up families. His father is dead from a drunk driver. His mother dates idiots, living inside the sorrow of waiting for her son to die. The boy's love is insects and so he unsentimentally works his way into the care of a famous entymologist and convinces him to bring him on a great trek in search of the elusive and magical Blue Butterfly. It is magic of rainforest, and of indigenous people. People who tell stories around campfires at night about spirit animals who live in a deep impenetrable swamp where leeches lurk in the waters waiting to creep the bejeesus out of city slickers. (But never under the pristine waterfalls).

The experience brings danger and mojos. The courage of the boy gets the entymologist to admit that he left his daughter 17 years ago. The butterfly is caught, and the boy's cancer is magically erased. I'm sure there were some other touching things that happened, but don't tell my family that I was asleep during that part.

The show is one part nature film, one part enviro-doc, one part smushy hack tool. It's the political hacker's delight part that gets me - because it has become so cliche that it starts to look true. Except I know better. This one was so off-balance that even the little village girl who makes the boy a magical necklace spent no time onscreen with her mother. The family is so torn apart here, the need for it so great, that you need an entire native culture and 300 species of monkeys, birds, insects, spiders and amphibians to crib it together, plus a kid with cancer and dueling native griots who have a total of 7 teeth between them.

And so it occurred to me that we don't take our own myths seriously enough. We need Others. We need films about nature out of balance like Jurassic Park, and people out of balance like The Blue Butterfly, life out of balance like Koyannisqatsi. We need exotic visions of exotic locales and the threat of icky bugs and creatures to frighten us into believing the Simple Life, which equals something only possible outside of Western Civilization. Why, because Western Civilization only produces empty people who only understand bourgie life, technology and television.

But the real reason is because we haven't taken Western Civilization seriously, only for granted and hardly deeply. It's why we get bent out of shape over trivialities like 'under God' in the pledge of allegiance, but don't bother to read the Federalist Papers or even the Declaration of Independence. We don't believe in our own myths, we don't revere our own poets. We believe they have nothing to offer the soul - it's an excuse. A weak one.

When I moved to New York, I realized people were paying attention to my shoes and not my face. In New York, your shoes speak volumes about you because to New Yorkers the city is bigger than the people and everybody knows that. Your shoes are about the places you walk in New York. It doesn't matter who you are but how you apply yourself, how you conduct yourself in the city. New York has a center because it was built with purpose around the function of the city, not the shape of the self. New York believes it's own mythology and it takes its poets seriously. That is how it is an eternal city.

When we Americans start to hear our own poetry and live in the truth of our own mythology, it will not take the courage of ten year olds to teach us the meaning of truth. We will not need magical butterflies or mystical rainforests to convince us to take care of our daughters and stop dating idiots. It won't take dreamtime warriors and fruits rubbed on our bellies to cure our cancers. We won't have to fall into mysterious holes to recognize the dangers of the world, and we won't need to bathe in tropical, leech-free waterfalls to recognize the joy of living. America is our environment, and it is every bit as challenging and invigorating as any wetland or tundra - if we would only, truly study it in anticipation of appreciation for its wonder and majesty.

Then again Hollywood film crews and directors wouldn't get so much time in Costa Rica.

A Day of Rest

Being Daddyman on my first of many weekends at home, weeks away. This schedule leaves me little time for blogging over the weekend. However, there are some interesting fragments I am taking up.

Obama Drama
Pops gave me a copy of Obama's book. Now I am obliged to read it. My only prediction is that he will be very much to blackfolks what Tiger Woods is, except that Obama will not compare favorably. That is to say what I beleive black partisans want is a Michael Jordan of politics. Instead they will get Bagger Vance. Obama will neither raise the expectations of his particular sport nor draw large numbers to appreciate it for what it is. That is to say I expect that some naive demands of Obama as a candidate for president that somehow 'America is ready for now..' will be revealed, and their failure in the main will cast doubts on both Obama's 'authenticity' and America's 'readiness' for a black president. More later.

George Washington
I'm reading the Joseph J. Ellis biography. Should be interesting.

Isley Brothers
The only bass playing I will be doing is mastery of my Isley Brothers records. That should keep me busy this year.

Shakespeare
This year I buy all the Shakespeare videos. I'm just about done with Action and Subterfuge, but there is a new Thomas Pynchon novel out and there's still America At Night and Harlot's Ghost. So I'll have fun too.

Professional Sports: The Legalization of Prostitution

In reading the post on feminism, economy and warfare I recognize immediately that I haven't covered much of any salient aspect of sexuality vis a vis birth control and reproductive freedom. So let me cover that here briefly.

It seems to me that the manner in which Tom Lykis approaches sexuality is really appropriate for questions of sexual freedom. And to the extent that I can accept sex as sport I would have to say that it is an amoral sport between consenting adults. I cannot give it any more significance than that of sport. So it is altogether fitting and proper that we consider prostitution as a professional sport.

I imagine an America in which prostitution is legalized as one in which the value of marriage would be increased immensely. But I have no trust whatsoever in the legal establishment with regard to protecting that value through proper regulation of the sex trade or changes in family law in light of the development. I also think that the demand for same-sex marriage would increase as well.

The effects of sexual liberation and reproductive freedom in an America with a healthy market for legalized prostitution would essentially be nullified. Instead of the sub rosa hooking done by various and sundry liberated females with no appetites or prospects for marriage, it would be the new small business boom, a Silicone Valley. The Tom Lykis show, which essentially reflects the conventional wisdom about extramarital sex, when there is any wisdom to be had on the het side of the equation, would be vindicated in full.

And the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony would remain the same, except people would be forced to take it more seriously since all of their 'relationships' would be shown for what they are: amateur sports.

Patterico Says

And I quote:

Rule Number One of respectful argument is to phrase your opponent’s argument — the argument you’re responding to — in such a way that your opponent would agree with it.

The rule, when followed, has at least two benefits. First, helps to ensure that the argument is about actual issues, rather than a spiraling series of accusations that the other guy is misrepresenting your position, and vice versa. Second, it forces you to think a little more about what the other guy believes, and why.

This rule is nice in theory, but is almost never observed in practice. Ninety-nine percent of argument either misstates the opponent’s argument, or at least gives it a crabbed interpretation that the opponent would not recognize as his own.

I’d like to encourage us to try to do better here.  Recognize the rule and try to follow it.

It’s hard, I know; I’m sure I violate this rule all the time.  But it’s a good goal.

Rule Number One of respectful argument is to phrase your opponent’s argument — the argument you’re responding to — in such a way that your opponent would agree with it.

The rule, when followed, has at least two benefits. First, helps to ensure that the argument is about actual issues, rather than a spiraling series of accusations that the other guy is misrepresenting your position, and vice versa. Second, it forces you to think a little more about what the other guy believes, and why.

This rule is nice in theory, but is almost never observed in practice. Ninety-nine percent of argument either misstates the opponent’s argument, or at least gives it a crabbed interpretation that the opponent would not recognize as his own.

I’d like to encourage us to try to do better here.  Recognize the rule and try to follow it.

It’s hard, I know; I’m sure I violate this rule all the time.  But it’s a good goal.

Feminism, Economy & Warfare

As I move forward into the territory of Royalty and of Feudalism, all tangential to matters of the sacrament of Marriage, I am picking up signals that there are some basic questions that our experience with the phenomenon of feminism in America hasn't answered clearly.

The other day on the Dennis Prager Show, his question of the day was to survey whether or not women who worked were more or less affectionate with their husbands than women who didn't work. The Conservative answer you might guess was winning in the survey when I turned the radio off. The Spousal Unit, with whom I was listening, ironically said she thought she was less affectionate. I said that she was equally affectionate, not out of cowardly husband-speak but truthfully. She then proceeded into Wamu to get me some more cash because I was spending the day with my kids and my brother's kids, and she went to work.

I think we well understand what it is that we're supposed to be comporting ourselves to vis a vis the nuclear family but we really have no idea where feminism is supposed to take the family. All we know is what we're not supposed to say. That's a problem in and of itself. But let me propose some provocative questions and cobble my way to some preliminary conclusions.

First, I think it bears repeating that I am not convinced that 'the Family is under attack'. Rather, I think that the presumption that all of us are equally willing to sustain strong families, is false.  In fact, I believe that too many Americans have notions of very personalized romantic love combined with a relativism that tells them anything they want to call a family is indeed a good family. I think one has to consciously make the decision to put a principled idea of family first and make it work based on a selfless adherence to those fundamental virtuous principles. People who can't find it in their hearts to do so are, to put it bluntly, rabble. To the extent that much of what we chew and mumble is sociology, let me then say that family is Primary Nurture when it comes to questions of Nature vs Nurture. But don't get me wrong, I'm not interested in IQ or any such reduction of 'capability'. Rather I only aim to say that a proper family isn't everyone's aim, nor need it be. If the poor are always with us, then so will be the poor in spirit.

My interest is in the context of feminism's effect as reflected in the popular culture, and I think it has dampened the spirits of proper marriage. I am suggesting broadly that what feminism in America has done well is confuse the roles of parents and of spouses in marriage, and of men and women in gender roles. It has done so by demonizing patriarchy without recognizing its positive role in community or the nation. This is the big problem. There are other ones, but that's the main one.

I once asked an academic what is the fundamental thing that feminism brought to all of philosophy. It's not as if nobody ever asked or answered questions about what a woman is all about or her role in society. The answer I got was that feminism brought into focus the nature of interpersonal relations and specifically that of force and coercion between individuals. Why does one individual submit? Why does another individual dominate? When such individuals are co-dependent, what arises from dominance and submission and how are such intimate relations carried to other levels within society? I think that's pretty interesting except for the last part, because what happens in other levels of society happen within very different contexts than the intimacy between man and women. But it was that slip of context that allowed this academic to suggest (very strongly and in 'good' company) that feminism was thus tied to racism and homophobia, and from there it was a straight shot into identity politics. I've undone that thinking's effect on me, but there is still the problem of feminism itself which perhaps in misinterpretation and perhaps by slight has come to mean a host of other things. But of the main point, I'll only say that the matter of dominance and submission begs an unanswered question of consent. Only in a relative world where gender-roles are flexible can the matter of consent in marriage undo itself. Only when one cannot agree with finality what the role of marrieds must be is consent undermined by the vagueries of personal satisfactions. Only when a relationship can be solopsistically defined and redefined by those unbound by any convention can such dominance and submission be the cause of pain. This is what so many refuse to understand.

But what of equality? What indeed does the feminist female do to find equality in the eyes of men? It appears to me that she must do the deeds of men. I'm afraid we do not know how to raise women thus, and I would think we never shall. Equality in all things is an improper standard because by that we must mean equivalence, and that shall never be. We only need consider what it is by rights we give women in our courts owing to the jurisprudence of centuries in matters of family. Who says there is such a thing as parenting? Not true mothers. Not true fathers. What sense does it make to raise boys as girls and girls as boys? What kind of person would 'parent' a daughter in the ways of being a good father? For what aim? Equal pay for equal work, or something more?

If there is a job that pays a woman as much as a man, then it is not a woman's job nor a man's job, but a job. In the end what satisfaction can come of such work? Someday a machine might do the same. Someday the economy might obviate it altogether. For us in the working and middle classes such sustenance is fine, but if there is manly pride in work it comes from doing it in the company of men. As for myself, if I'm any example, then it comes from the pride of providing for my family as a husband and father. But for that I'd do any work at all.

For all that, there is a singular endeavor for which feminism has no answer but negation, and that is the business of war. I submit that the premises of feminist equality are rendered meaningless by the realities of warfare - and to that extent feminism is itself a bourgeois conceit which only gains adherence in those comfortably far from the experience of it. Warfare and I mean battle, I mean combat, I mean bloody destruction are the matters of manhood. Men are not made for war but by war are we made such men as we must sometimes be. It is our constant reminder of that fact which most fundamentally shapes our society, to always be ready in some way for the conflict we bring to each other in the course of human events. I cannot say which came first, the puffed chest or the need for the puffed chest. But it is ours, men's, and it cannot be argued away. This is the the duty of patriarchy, to instill in us the honor of protecting that which is ours, our families and that self-same honor with our very lives.

Feminism give us nothing to replace our patriarchy except the sentiment for a society of powerful women. if that were to give us more just justice, more honorable honor, more merciful mercy, more gracious grace we'd be fools to reject it. Who could deny that women hold such virtues now? Don't they too have the vices of men? Are women not vengeful, petty, spiteful and haughty as well?  I don't think it is that women lack any of the character attributes men possess for leadership be it noble or treacherous. But I wonder why it is women do not bind together in order to assert such leadership of whatever character and forcefully wrest such power from men they find inferior? Why do women not conspire to do this? Why instead do they insist on feminism as their avenue to equivalence? It is a mystery for which I have but one clue.

I offer my own brief encounter with the oddment of last weekend during the Texas Tech football game. I asked the Spousal Unit that if Boy could be the greatest in the history of any sport known to man, which sport would she have it be? She answered without blinking an eye, whichever one would hurt him the least. I pressed and pressed for a real answer knowing deep in my heart that it was a question for men in a bar or a bowling alley, which was where we were, but she is no man.

So my clue tells me that women will not volunteer themselves nor their children to endure a bloody struggle. In the face of the fearsome, they will turn to men to guard and defend their virtues and their vices, their persons and the bodies of their babies. So too will boys. So too will weaker men. Perhaps that is a paradox, if so it is an eternal paradox and it is one that for the life of me I've not heard a good feminist explain. I must confess it's not an argument I've gone looking for, but at this moment in time as we are engaged in a small war with large consequences and Americans ask for marriage and society to be diluted into anything but permanent values, it is an argument I must engage. And so it starts here.

BTW. I would have Boy be a greater heavyweight champion boxer than Muhammad Ali. No question.

Back To Work

I am in Scottsdale, AZ today, and will be for the next couple weeks. I'll try to get out one good post a day, which will be easier on days I'm not traveling as I was yesterday. Upcoming is my take on feminism and patriarchy. Should be done tonight.

The vacation was a complete head-clearer. I'm in a completely different place than I was six weeks ago. It's almost worth going to the European standard.

Dell Gines Closes Shop

Dell Gines, a reluctant black conservative who enjoined some of the most boisterous topics in this corner of the blogosphere is closing shop. His blog's going dark in a month or so he just announced. That's a loss.

The Cloud of Black Disloyalty

In 1986 black people broke my heart. And since then I've known in my heart that I was African American. It's a long story I've told many times in different ways. But here's the long and short of it. I was elected and I resigned.

I was elected by the general body of the National Society of Black Engineers in San Francisco in 1984 to be the National Finance Officer. Since I was an avid reader of Thomas Sowell, I knew that the best thing I could do was put together a means of financing the operations of the Society so that their aims of recruitment, retention and graduation of black student in the engineering and science disciplines could be met. I didn't raise millions, but I did get into the hundreds of thousands.

To the best of my ability and at considerable personal expense I dedicated myself to the task. But perhaps I was too short-sighted. For all of my cleverness, I couldn't convince my sponsors that we were not two different organizations but one Society. And so since I couldn't come up with a brilliant plan I made two different solicitation packages. One for the Heroes Trust and one for the Benevolent Society. Those sponsors who saw us as the Hero's Trust were most impressed by the fact that our students boasted a higher overall GPA than the national collegiate average. They were impressed by the fact that we were Computer Science, Physics and Electrical Engineering majors doing the toughest work at the most competitive universities. They gave money, and I thanked them. Those sponsors who saw us as the Benevolent Society were impressed by the fact that we drew members from poor underserved communities. They were impressed by the fact that although we didn't graduate all of our members, we gave so many important job skills and the chance to be at university. They gave money, and I thanked them.

I took all the money and put it in one big pot, and we fought over it. You see it wasn't just outsiders who saw us this way. It was us too.

There were some of us who wanted to take that money and pay Louis Farrakhan to speak on campus, because he exemplified what black people in a black society should be all about. There were some of us who wanted to take that money and pay Bill Cosby to speak on campus,  because he exemplified what black people in a black society should be all about. There were some of us who wanted to take that money, period because we exemplified what black people in a black society should be all about. And there were even some of us who wanted to take the money and run, but we only found out about them too late.

I was also an Alpha. I was also a member of the Black Business Association. I was up for Blue Key but didn't have the time. I might have pledged Sigma Chi - I was invited but I didn't have the time. There's any number of things I might have done but didn't. The problem was that I thought all of that black activity might have a singular purpose. I was foolish enough to believe that in the end we would all come together, like we did when the Sigma (Phi Beta Who?) thew huge parties at Ackerman Union. In fact, I can remember my faith in black unity in my interview for pledging Alpha Phi Alpha. I recited my biography up until that point in my life including my participation in the first Kwanzaas and my work with both the Brotherhood Crusade and the Rainbow Coalition. I said that if Alpha is all that it's supposed to be, brothers like them and I would be together in the solidarity eventually, I may as well join the brotherhood now. This indeed was my approach to all black manhood at the time, it was one of the reasons I was so fascinated by the ascent of Wynton Marsalis. Unity. Black unity for me in 1984 was a given.

I ran for re-election and won again. The problem reasserted itself, and I found myself wanting to take sides, but I couldn't. In the end I resigned with a broken heart.

One of the battles I also faced in those college days was the other presumption of unity that white students had of black students. As I was also on the Senate Finance Committee for the student body, I passed judgment over the funding of other campus organizations. One consistent political spitball that was constantly thrown our way was that the black orgs on campus were too successful in getting money from the University, that their politics was too good, that their influence too powerful. The argument was that white students put more into the pot and got less out, that black clubs and organizations were disproportionately funded. All of that was factually true. We had certain things wrapped up because we were interested to. Everybody who put money in didn't care about getting money out, we did. When such battles came to a head, it was inevitably proposed by the opposition to such black power that blacks should be organized under an umbrella organization, and that all funding for all black clubs and organizations be funneled through that one organization. I knew that was a horrible idea. One black neck for one white rope.

And so despite the fact that disunity among blackfolks broke my heart, I also knew it to be our saving grace. The fact of the matter was that all of us were too proud and too busy on our own agendas to stop for unity. There's a lot of interesting detail in the full history of my career as a black BMOC but in the end it was the heartbreak that lingered with me longest. I went out into the work world with one certainty, black unity is dead. It doesn't work, moreover I knew deep in my heart that it shouldn't work.

As the 80s progressed and I went hard Buppie in the same way some people go hard Afrocentric, I was brimming with the confidence that my way was best for me and if other blackfolks had seen what I'd seen, they'd be with me. At the same time I shed my Talented Tenth pretenses and accepted the denouement of Black Leadership. For a few years nothing made sense to me despite my predilections, but I became a natural ally of Jesse Jackson (for that moment) when he introduced the term 'African American'.

African-American shouted out to me because it was a world historical term. We know we are from Africa. We know we live in America. We know, and I know especially, that there is no one 'black community' and that we are all different. So this demographic term is all we need, and then we can reference our history with accuracy while not suggesting that we are all on the same agenda. We are not. And there ended the heartbreak. I still had a nagging feeling about it because I sensed that the outreach mission I began as a collegian was very much unfinished. I was frustrated by our inability to fund both the Heroes Trust and the Benevolent Society, we needed a lot more black billionaires than we had who could understand a blackified E Pluribus Unum. I was also extremely frustrated that Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition had tried to jack NSBE for our money, it made me very quickly aware of how powerful our organization was and thus how relatively weak other black organizations were to fund matters of The Struggle.

At a stellar moment around 1992, I read Gwaltney after a period of several years of introspection and discovery. Gwaltney set me free of all itches - of the necessity of my concerns about blackfolks. Not only was there Gwaltney there was Ernest J. Gaines. Both of these men convinced me in no uncertain terms that blackfolks didn't need leadership. That the entire premise of the dignity of the black masses being somebody else's responsibility was false. And from that moment I swore never to second-guess blackfolks again. You see I inherited the arrogant presumption of being an engineer of black society, someone whose cultural productions would continue the journey beyond the hills MLK could not climb. Like many in my generation, I had a Moses complex. I was striving to be Christlike for black people, my chosen people, the chosen people. Their struggle was my struggle and 90% of my moral backbone and authority came from my active participation in their continued liberation. It never occurred to me that I might be superfluous. It never occurred to me, despite the fact that I knew unity was a dangerous and double-edged sword, that I might be cut off and not missed. The evidence was slapping me in the face every day, but I refused to see it. Until Gwaltney.

Suddenly, I became a man without a mission. Or at least I could say that my mission was my own property rather than something to be swept along by the tide of black history. And suddenly I felt like Theodore Cross must often feel as a white man whose works are of singular benefit to blacks who don't recognize him or even know his name or care that he exists.

I remember seeing an episode of Oprah in which a community activist who happened to be Buppie was shouted down by a working class woman from the audience. The working woman said, who are you to talk about my struggle? You don't know me and there's nothing you can do for me. I'm a proud black woman and you stand up there insulting me telling me what I ought to do and you don't even know me. (See her neck working?)

This is where we are today. My struggle has nothing to do with your struggle. There is no unity, no agenda. There is simply an African American nation of millions. Uncoordinated, but that's OK. Uncooperative, but that's OK. Uninterested, but that's OK. Those of us who took it upon ourselves to put effort and work into what we interpreted as a generational imperative are left with an unfunded mandate. A horse race of thoroughbred ideas with nobody in the stands betting on any of them. We are a small class of breeders and trainers and riders of ideas, plans and schemes which owe great debts to great minds before us. And yet somehow we are left without the instrumentality. This silence is our dilemma. This thing called 'black', these folks called black people. They cannot be compelled to heed our wisdom or our folly. Everybody is making up black as they go along and the question cannot be settled.

What is to be done about this great cloud of black humanity that refuses its master plan?

Nothing. That is the lesson of conservatism. There is no master plan. There is no final solution, and if somebody tells you they have one, kick him in the shins and run away. There should be no umbrella organization. There should be no enforced unity. We think we all share 'struggle' but my struggle is not your struggle. We'd like to believe that something will unite us as a people, but unity as blacks is impractical, and the fact is blackfolks have already voted against it. We continue to. We don't want to be united. We don't need to be united. We are happy in our disloyalty to a single agenda for the race, and we should be.

There are still reasons to fund a Hero's Trust. There are still reasons to fund the Benevolent Society. They are as good now as they ever were, but you can't make them black ideas, and you can't make black people like them. If you believe in black unity, your heart will inevitably break. Then you will know what I know about people.

One of the guys I know from my NSBE days is wrestling with his destiny to become the first black president of Georgia Tech. Everybody expects it of him, and I hear that he is coming to expect it of himself. I can recall a conversation we had a long time ago, and I wonder if he does. One day I hope to bring it up to him. But today I do not think it the least bit ironic that the same kind of pride that motivated us both 20 years ago has taken him on his path. Nor do I think it ironic or improper that Georgia Tech is not a black institution. So I wonder if in the not too distant future if and when he takes that seat how he will view his struggle to achieve it, and how the cloud of blackfolks in the world will receive his story about that struggle. It will be an interesting day.

Peacemakers

What should one teach black children about integration, about America and their place in it? It might sound like a complicated question until another question is asked and answered.

The question is: 'What do you black people want?'

The answer is: 'Everything worth having.'

If you take it for granted that it is possible to demand or earn or steal anything you want, then your behavior towards asking changes. Instead of worrying about permission, you concern yourself with your plan. A human being who has realized his humanity thus sees all of ambition of a piece like a master sailer sees the ocean. It is simply a matter of charting a course.

If one further takes it for granted that ones ambition can and will be fulfilled according to one's own plan, or God's plan for that matter, all that remains are the ethics of getting there. And in this lies the question of obstacles, namely those who would claim the same goals and would do wrong to get it. The means of achievement matters of course, so the righteous will fight for justice in order to sustain the righteousness of their ambitions. For if none can be good in achieving, the quest for glory and all planning towards such is in the end plotting for the destruction of your neighbors. It is the antithesis of civilization. We therefore require justice.

Peace is the condition of justice sustained. To achieve peace, one must make war against the wicked. Sometimes the war is great, sometimes the battles are small. Sometimes it takes armies and decades, sometimes it takes paragraphs and days. All such things are in flux, but all can see if they care to look. Peace in slavery is not peace but quiet.  Blessed are the peacemakers. Those who make peace.

Teach black children what you teach any children you expect to be fully human. Teach them to identify the wicked, and teach them the value of justice. Teach them to fight for the greatest right they are capable of understanding.

The question of racial integration is a small piece of justice. It can only be raised if one believes that there is a war between the races. There isn't one here in America although many speak of it rhetorically. A war of words has casualties of the ego. Perhaps that's why so many live in desperate fear of the word 'nigger'. For them, it is a weapon of mass destruction. I has become the 'n-bomb'. I don't find such a thing fearsome at all. There are greater treasons afoot.

Everybody's Learning How

South Africa's new surf champ, Kwezi Qika says:

...people took it for granted that Black people in this country couldn't swim. It wasn't really the case. They’ve were just never exposed to the ocean or they weren't attracted to the ocean but everyone knows Black people have rhythm. If you look at surfing, surfing is a rhythm, timing combined with a bit of physical ability and once they realize they can actually do it, they pick it up so much faster than a lot of the other kids...

OK...That sounds roughly positive. I'll take that as a caption for my nephew, who also digs the waves.

The Moral Salience of War Gaming

As Sister was leaving last night after our informal Karamu (with gumbo, yeaaah!), I was reunited with my online buds in old habit of venturing to foreign virtual lands and shooting each other in the head. She shook her head and mumbled something about corrupting our children to which the Spousal Unit mumbled agreement. You're a husband, you know how wives do, and you know exactly how to mumble back.

Ever since watching Patton a year or so ago, I've been thinking about that which gets attributed to war rightly or wrongly. I have concluded that war is man's greatest endeavor, it is the mother of all invention, the scrubber and creator of history. War appropriates all moral discourse and destroys all information that it doesn't yield, thus it is the be all and end all of humanity. There is nothing greater we can do to destroy or preserve ourselves than is done in war. We victors or vanquished have only the mind of God from which to rebuild that which we might be again after the battlefield has taken its toll.

So I am reminded of another great man whom I met on a small plane in Vail but neglected to put on my silly list of most famous people met. This broker named Bernstein; he was reading an old history. And I am reminded of the Arnn lectures I am hearing from the Hugh Hewitt archives on Jaffa who says life is too short to read 100 great books, and then proceeds to recommend three. History is the history of war, and why shouldn't it be?

So in my games, I have approached the pitch of battle, and I watch how men call each other names or brothers and how bitterly we fight or how bravely we sacrifice. And though these are only games, they are only games for men. There cannot be any coincidental reason for that. Men are drawn to war as they are to righteousness and renown. In our times of peace, it is our constant reminder of the things we might be called to do were it not for prior victories in our favor.

I'm studying war. Not this one in Iraq because to study that one is to engage too many people who have nothing better to do and no investment in the moral discipline of war itself. They are opportunists seeking currency. I am seeking a more transcendent wisdom, and that cannot be gotten by making political statements, at least not by me given the quality of the discourse I've been able to sustain. No disrespect to my present audience but who among you is Herodotus? I'd rather read him than you and I'd be better served.

You'll hear more of this.

See With Your Eyes Not With Your Hands

Gamespot has done what I thought had been done, but until ZyklonKillerBees sent me a message, I never saw it. That is the comparison between PS3 and XBox 360. Game by game, screen by screen. Now you can really tell. This isn't news to me because as I said before John Carmack of Id Software said it years ago - the XBox dev kit is superior to that of the PS3 so the XBox guys are going to write better code for graphics and all sorts of other things.

Anyway here's the scoop .

We expected the PlayStation 3 to ship with several games that first appeared on the Xbox 360, similar to how the Xbox 360 had a lot of Xbox ports at launch. And the PS3 did indeed arrive with a good number of games that originally shipped for the Xbox 360. This gave us the perfect opportunity to compare the graphics on both systems with several cross-platform games. You'd think that the PS3 versions would be exactly the same or slightly superior to the Xbox 360 versions, since many of these games appeared on the 360 months ago, but it seems like developers didn't use the extra time to polish up the graphics for the PS3. We found that the Xbox 360 actually had better graphics in the majority of the games we compared.

Go see for yourself.

Five Stupid Habits

I've been making some continuing resolutions and did OK on a few last year, but this year I've got to do more. What I have not done is discipline myself against things I already know are stupid. So in the overall spirit of becoming more of a tightass, here are five stupid habits I intend to reduce this year.

1. No More Tacky Bars
For too many nights, I found myself out with buds are by myself in a place I would never go if it were my decision alone. And I found myself in alien observation mode looking at pathetic singles trying desperately not to look so desperate. It's the good time of beer at night. Something in my gut tells me that beer is supposed to be drunk during the day with BBQ and Corn, not at night with peanuts and buffalo wings. I know this is the old man in me. So if it's going to be a bar, let it be a piano bar in an upscale hotel. I got rid of titty bars several years back, so no more tacky bars. If the bartender is not over 30, I ain't staying.

2. No More Avoiding Church
Last year I complained a lot about Pentecostals. This year I'm becoming more and more theological and I'm taking my own Anglican communion more seriously. I now know that the Archbishop of York has something to say which appeals to me, and last night I downloaded the Book of Common Prayer. I'm going to make some pilgrimages around Los Angeles to find the right kind of Anglicans instead of complaining about the weakness of the parishes I have tentatively accepted. I will also inform myself about the history of the Anglican Church and discover which forces are at work in potentially perverting the sacrament of Holy Matrimony.

3. No More Avoiding Exercise
Last year I bought a bicycle and a bass guitar. I spent too much time on the guitar and not enough on the bike. I intend to reverse that and not feel so bad about not being so funky. I hereby declare diets to be a farce. They don't work. I'm going to make my body work.

4. No More Multitasking
Once upon a time, when I was an excruciatingly infuriating young man with a Japanese girlfriend who couldn't speak English and a daily discipline in meditation on the works of Sun Tzu, I would play chess with my computer and write what is now blogged in a journal on engineering paper. I had my budget account for every dollar I spent and balanced it to the dollar every month. I rode my bicycle 50 miles a week and I read The Threepenny Review. I have conceded that living my life for others, specifically for the benefit of my family required that maintenance of self take a back seat. But I think I have done quite enough of that, and I will accelerate my family to emulate my old discipline. It begins and ends with small perfections, the end of multitasking and the completion of every duty. It is time to budget the day.

5. No More Baby Talk
Boy will soon be 13. Scholar will soon be 12. It's time to get them up the next level. The bad habit to avoid is to stop pretending they don't know what's being said when they listen to the Black Eyed Peas. My job is to give them moral context and aids in discipline and respect. Which reminds me that it's about time to buy a nice sized wooden baseball bat.

Life is wonderful.