Cobb

Protection

Top Five Dead or Alive

Picking up the meme..and extending it a bit.

They're all so great that I shouldn't even have to identify them other than by one name. So I won't in general.

MCs: QTip - Posdnous - Rakim - Chuck D - Dres
Athletes:  Ali -  Thorpe - Jordan - Pele -  Owens
Composers: Beethoven - Monk - Bach - Debussy - Ellington
Musicians:  Horowitz - Gould -  Armstrong -  Hendrix - Corea
Comics: Pryor - Allen - Rickles - Crystal - Marx
Female Vocalists: Fitzgerald - Wilson - Franklin - Price - Cline
Male Vocalists:  Caruso - McFerrin - Crosby - Sinatra -
Actors: DeNiro - Stewart - Grant - Olivier - Nicholson
Actresses: K. Hepburn - A. Hepburn - Dunaway - Kelly - Dench
Directors: Kurasawa - Hitchcock - Capra - Ford - Spielberg

Enough.

Words

George Carlin: Past It

George Carlin is not funny any longer. I know that I've become a conservative, and I know I've become a grownup, but I know I haven't lost my sense of humor. Read the comic and see for yourself. But this is just not effin funny. It's kinda pathetic. I mean even though I understand what he's supposed to be doing he's just.. I don't know .. too old and presumably too intelligent to sustain this kind of fantasy universe.

I'm rather sorry for wasting your time on this, but if you want to know what it feels like to be a conservative, try watching a few more, and realize that this guy has been telling the same kind of cynical shtick for three decades. 

Carlin at his best is a great asshole individual. But you realize that he couldn't hold together a softball game. He's really a great exponent of the Hollywood leftist self-congratulatory anarchist. Just listen to this and believe that he's really serious.

Menino vs Mooninites

Boston eats it's own farts.

I just learned that the president of Cartoon Network has stepped down over the controversy of Aqua Teen Hunger Force guerilla marketing stunt that unintentionally sent the city of Boston into a bomb scare a couple weeks ago. Stupid!

It's not very often that I side with performance artists, but they have completely outsmarted the Boston government and media. And so now they must pay. Something is rotten here.

Observations of Philly

M said it yesterday, Philadelphia is a blue collar town. You can say that again. I've been here close to two weeks and I've taken in a few sights, a lot of advice and some frigid weather. On the whole I'm OK with Philly.

Given a choice between Philadelphia and Boston, I think I'd take Boston, but it's only because I haven't found anything in Philly to love. Time and experience might very much change that, but it hasn't happened yet. Both towns are very much alike in terms of cultural geography, but Philly is a lot less sophisticated. That's not to say that there is no elegance here, there is, and it's nicer than that in Boston quite frankly but it all seems to be in one place rather than spread out. Give me a choice between Boston and Philly, I'd have to take Boston, but only because I've only seen Philly in winter. Given a choice between Boston in winter and Philly in winter, I'd pick San Diego.

I haven't seen the ugly side of Philly and it's not stalking me, but I see the edges in my periphery. This town is notorious for the rowdiness of Eagles fans. When it comes to the games, women and children should stay at home.

Last night was the best night by far. It was one of those nights when my charm was working on all 8. I started off heading to Bluezette but first I saw the Liberty Bell for the first time. It's shiny! Whoda thunk. That's about all the revelation on that score, but it's done. I want to hear freedom ring. Somebody ought to make a replica - or maybe they have and I have heard them, but it was too cold for me to hang around and find out. Plus the little museum was closed. And so off to Bluezette.

I headed towards the Penn Landing from 6th St down the numbers. The themometer at the radio studio says 29 degrees. Nice and warm compared to earlier this week. I could walk all night. I finally got to Bluezette and I think it's closed down, so the hell with that place. My boy told me it was the place to be, but reviews in the Zagat clones are full of excoriation. So I had to trudge back over towards the Old City. And then I had some fun of the sort I never did before.

Everybody knows that a black man can't catch a cab in New York. When I lived at 125th & Broadway and I knew I needed to catch a cab downtown, I would always stop first for an ice cream cone. That way I could break the 20, eat half a cone while I wait and throw the rest at whichever cabbie was fool enough to ignore me. But here in Philly, cabs are plentiful and I have not once had any trouble getting one. Instead, I decided to be cruel and reverse the joke. I walked up Walnut and flagged down four cabs then told them all nevermind. I laughed myself silly. This is something you can do in Philly. Well, maybe not on Walnut any more.

I ended up once again at Zanzibar Blue and this time it was hopping, at least compared to the other two trips. The first night I had to sit near the TV that was repeating itself ad infinitum about that dead glamor chick's baby. Presciently it was all on the day before she died. Do I sound callous? Every man's death diminishes me, every airhead millionaire suicide not so much. Anyway I had a ball with Texas, NorCal and Philly folks around the bar even before the 2nd margarita (straight up, no salt, house tequila). NorCal and I went around the corner to the Mahogany Cigar Bar.

Finally I found something to love about Philly. Now Zanzibar is all that. In fact, it has got to be the third best jazz joint of all time when it comes to ambiance. Still, there is something about the enticing power of a brass rail bar full of drinking and smoking men in suits that makes me feel really comfortable. There's no better way to explain it than to recognize straight out that I could very well be playing the 'what happens in Philly stays in Philly' game with various fillies, but instead I can indulge in other less consequential vices uninhibited: Alcohol and Tobacco. Aside from all that, there's the distinct pleasure of hanging out with old timers.

We talked about everything and nothing, of cabbages and kings deep into a forty dollar Maker's Mark & Montecristo buzz. I stumbled back to the hotel by way of the Ritz Carlton smelling singlehandedly like half of an old-boy network. But I was much richer in terms of knowledge of the serious authentic Italian restaurants in the city and something called a 'greens sandwich'. The rest I can't remember but it's in my Treo somewhere.

I slept in this morning, exactly 30 minutes. My internal clock is readjusted completely. Thirty degrees is perfectly comfortable and I'm suddenly not interested at all in the Liberty Bell. Today I strolled through the Galleria in my homeboy suit recognizing how much it reminded me, in its own way of the Albee Square Mall in Brooklyn. I picked up some Slim Twins and now it's time to shave my head for this evening's festivities. What they might be, I have no idea. But I'm sticking around Philly this weekend.

Unless Tooley says different, because truth be told, I wouldn't mind throwing some DC into the mix.

Perceptive

Articulate

OODA Diagram

UF-250s: Statistical Morality Again

The Cobbian early warning system is on medium alert. I'm probably getting a couple days ahead of the Kwaku Network but I suspect the NYT's story on Stop & Frisk is going to raise some eyebrows and voices.

Here are the paragraphs to beware:

Mr. Spitzer first dug into the issue of street stops after the Diallo shooting and found that Hispanics and blacks were being disproportionately targeted. After adjusting for varying crime rates among racial groups, his analysis found that blacks were stopped 23 percent more often than whites. Hispanics were stopped 39 percent more often than whites.

In the wake of those findings, the city signed a law allowing the Council to collect the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk data on a quarterly basis. Separately, the federal class-action lawsuit, Daniels v. City of New York, alleged that the police habitually used racial profiling in stop-and-frisk situations. When the city’s corporation counsel settled the case in January 2004, the agreement required the police to disclose data on such encounters through 2007.

Why? Because they haven't been reporting the statistics on a regular basis. I understand the policeman's POV which is that they're supposed to be on the streets policing instead of stopping to fill out paperwork on every action they initiate. It's a manual process that I'd loathe doing. However, a significant enough polity has demonstrated that they don't trust police judgment as much as they do paperwork and oversight of that paperwork (a new system that's obviously not functioning properly). So here's the mitigating paragraph, that is if you trust NYT paragraphs about police paperwork.

Paul J. Browne, the chief police spokesman, said later that the department’s analysis of the numbers showed that while 55.2 percent of the stop encounters last year involved blacks, 68.5 percent of crimes involved suspects described as black by their victims (or by witnesses, in the case of homicides). Hispanics, he said, made up 30.5 percent of those stopped and 24.5 percent of suspected offenders. For whites, he said, the numbers were 11.1 percent and 5.3 percent, respectively.

So it looks like Hispanics are getting the butt end of the stick and blacks and whites are getting away - racial-profiling-wise. The NYT shows that cops have made over half a million such stops last year and that complaints about the stops doubled. Arrests have doubled and summonses have increased fourfold. Then again, that's if you trust statistics written by cops that you don't trust.

Maybe it's worth it maybe not, but I sure would like to get my hands on that data. I mean, in my business, half a million records is a drop in the bucket. I could turn around charts on that bad boy in half a day. If anyone can figure out a way to get it to me, I'll set it up sweetly.

In the meantime we'll have to deal with more speculation about the morality of this or that statistic. It's always something like that. What I'd like is an analysis of false positives and some idea how well the city is processing these summonses and what they're all about. I mean are we stopping people looking for weapons and drugs and finding weapons and drugs or giving them jaywalking tickets instead? The devil is in the details, and we out here in the 'sphere don't have 'em. Surely the NY Civil Liberties Union, the City Council, the PD, Eliot Spitzer, and everybody else will have their opinions about the data... if we can trust their opinions about statistics gathered by police we don't trust...

How about getting us some of those UF-250 in a tab delimited format, eh?

A Technical Note

All of my domains have been down for about a week. My account had been in arrears and my hosting service cut me off, the fiscally conservative bastards. But I shut them up with my rejuvenated Visa card, and you can now see Cubegeek, Vision Circle and MDCBowen.org.

During this downtime, I haven't been getting the notifications of the comments posted to this blog, so please forgive me for not being more interactive this week. I actually thought that nobody was talking for a while.

The Inadvertant Catastrophe

How seriously should anyone take unconscious racism in American society today?

I think activist political anti-racism has been subdued by a combination of smarmy PC, reactionary hostility, black power and good manners. On the whole the major psychological impact of negative black self-esteem has been wiped out. Then again, I live in the Starbucks class. What do y'all see?

The Mystery of the Referenceable Blogger

Very much like my Mystery of the Black Blogger problem, Robin Hanson wonders aloud if the 'sphere will go towards a model of referential integrity like that of academic publishing or of popular unattributable flavorful communitarian model like that of popular journalism. I say the latter is inevitable, because people don't necessarily care about the truth and authenticity as they do about being relatively informed. If you can get the gist without footnotes, you will.

But, if social norms allow academics to ignore blog posts, by not citing clearly relevant and influential blog posts just because they are blog posts, then blog writers will have little incentive to offer insightful comments that can be fit easily into an academic network of cited insights.  Blog writers will instead have the incentives of newspaper columnists, to provide an engaging style with little expectation of originality or cumulative expert influence.  Such blog writers might well cite each other, but more as a way to create an engaging multi-character show for their readers. 

So can we create an academic blog world, where blog posts get academic credit?  If someone gets a Nobel prize for developing an idea that was first explained in someone else's carefully written but short blog post, will that blog author be celebrated, or will he be ignored as the sort of distraction that academics can't be expected to pay attention to?  A lot will depend on whether blogs can organize themselves into networks of specialists, so that it is feasible for someone working on a particular topic to find the careful serious blog posts related to their topic.  This is obviously harder to do for many small blog posts than for fewer larger papers or books.  But it is not obviously impossible, and this is the blog world I hope to live in.

Aside from the fundamental conflict between the credentialed and the well-informed, there is the problem of incentives. Academic teaching is something of a subscription model of information dissemination. The great value in teaching is found in the efficiencies of f2f interaction and variant explanations that are readily available to a good teacher. Replicating this online would take way too much effort, and online is not a good place to try although video transcripts of seminars can be pretty damned illuminating.  But there is also the economy of valuation of teaching materials based upon the publication business.  Sure there's MIT's Open Courseware, but it is the exception that proves the rule. Nobody publishes academic quality materials for free.

I would absolutely love for Google to put Lexis-Nexis out of business, but that's going to take a generation of IP holders to die and some serious changes in copyright law and convention. I am a huge champion of their efforts to digitize the libraries of the world. This has been a dream of computer scientists from day one, and it is one that will not die. We have to reorient valuation of learning paradigms towards human interaction and let the world of media be cheap. I think that this will ultimately happen, someday.

There is great value in peer-reviewed materials. This is the kind of credentialing that the academic community can and should teach the blogging world. There are tools that can be easily built, but nobody is really interested right now except weirdos like me who have no money or time, which could establish this kind of rating and ranking. The brief explanation is that right now we in the 'sphere are oriented around a long tail of popularity rather than one of credibility or usability. We don't have market enablers of cred, and that's what we need. Now there may be something new in Ice Rocket, Technorati or Google Blog search that I have missed, but right now for the overwhelming majority of Internet content all we know are Hits and Stars. Two dimensions ain't enough.

And so we instantiate our own peer networks which are the aggregations of the biases of our in-groups. These become ossified over time. When's the last time you changed your blogroll? At one time I had close to three times the link traffic to Cobb as I do now. The market does not move swiftly enough to be accurate, and again, there are only a small set of ratings criteria.

Now I've identified and solved this problem, in fact I did it years ago. Who's going to fund that out here in web-land? (That link will be available Friday, in the meantime try this)

Jobs vs DRM

Steve Jobs has now said what all of us knew a long time ago. DRM is never going to work. And while I've always been a fan of Liquid Audio's watermarking way back since Webnoise 99, I never supported copy protection. Thus sayeth Jobs:

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free  and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.

So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.

Now the record companies have to wake up to the reality of five years of empirical proof of digital music distribution, now strikingly illustrated by iTunes and face the facts brought to light by Steve Jobs. Furthermore Jobs has to face the facts about the limits that iPod only syncing has provided to limit the ubiquity of iTunes and vice-versa.

The bottom line is that DRM is a royal pain for consumers, especially given the weakness of hard disk technology as a medium for storing digital music. We love songs for decades. Hard drives work for 2 years. We have to keep moving our music all the time and any veteran will tell you that the best way to keep it is on a laser medium. Until the GDrive is reality, this will continue to be a problem.

Church & Black Men Redux

I happened to be flying somewhere over the Eastern US when my episode of Black Men Revealed aired. Sorry I can't recall much from it right off the top of my head. Everybody I've talked to reminded me of fragments; none of them saw the whole thing.

Your comments go here.

Global Warming vs Levittown

From my new favorite blog, Overcoming Bias, Hanson speaks of deprogramming:

"When you deprogram people," he emphasized, "you force them to think. The only thing I do is shoot them challenging questions. I hit them with things that they haven't been programmed to respond to. I know what the cults do and how they do it, so I shoot them the right questions; and they get frustrated when they can't answer. ... They realize that they've been duped and they come out of it."

In that spirit we ask the proverbial tree huggers what's better, global warming or global cooling? As Sensing suggests, they actually want global stasis. They want the coastlines to stay where they are, they want the treelines to stay where they want. In otherwords they want to create of nature what English country gardens do, make it perfectly predictable.

So perhaps the answer to the Kyoto Protocol is to start a global project to encase the planet inside a giant HVAC snow globe. But didn't they try that already? I thought environmentalists hated planned communities.

 

Would You Vote for You?

I'm not still suffering a wave of nausea from Robin Williams' Man of the Year, nor even Katt Williams' HBO special which was on the tube at 1 this morning as I unpacked in my hotel room. I've got a strong stomach, but I'm still disgusted. Today's news is that some blogger named Amanda Marcotte is now a central part of the Edwards 2008 campaign.

She's got a past. To wit:

In the meantime, I’ve been sort of casually listening to CNN blaring throughout the waiting area and good fucking god is that channel pure evil. For awhile, I had to listen to how the poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and fucked her against her will—not rape, of course, because the charges have been thrown out.

Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it?

So unfair.

Obiter dicta to be sure, but attributable obiter dicta.

It's not fair to say that our democracy, indeed the vast majority of entertainment and infotainment that passes over the airwaves, is aimed at a demographic addicted to irony and other postmodern sensibilities. But cursory looks, which is all most of us take, bolster that thesis. A lot of us on the Responsible Right remain patient and wait for such info-markets to swing back to rationality like hemlines and necklines. There will be sea changes in the future and people will once again celebrate seriousness over snark and earnestness over cool. In the meantime the vulgar millions and their celebrity minions still seem compelled to say 'fuck' to underline their weak ass points, and outrage is a fixture. Sometimes I wish I could shout, "Hey over here! We're trying to be reasonable and measured. But it doesn't make for a good Michael Bey movie.

What is up with these characters who do all the shouting? Both of these Williams are pure hype and yet you can see how desparately they want to be taken seriously. Their very presentation defeats the purpose. It's as if they don't believe that an individual can be serious and effective at the same time. I think the reason has everything to do with the kind of career path they must take to arrive past the butt end of the long tail. They have to be loud and confident, and they spend more time tailoring attitude than they do their capacity to listen and learn.

I don't know Marcotte, but it's clear that she's had her moments of rage, as have we all. But could we stand for all that? Do we really want someone who spits fire for the sake of spitting when it comes to political leadership, or any kind of leadership for that matter? I strongly believe that character counts and one of the primary pillars of character is respect. How can you respect people if you're constantly shouting and cursing at them and behaving as if everyone who disagrees with you is a complete moron? I think it is inevitable that such an attitude ends up fueling catty character assassination, the stock in trade of jesters and mimes. I don't think that's what Americans are, but perhaps the mavens of Madison Ave know how many billions of dollars off the mark I am. I don't care about those billions, rather I care about the quality of citizenship, and I despair that we are being played, all of us, for chumps with short attention spans. But all of us aren't and a significant subset of us are trying to be the same people we would vote for.

It would be a cynical candidate who decided only to address his or her endorsers. So somewhere in leadership we have to recognize that we are called to lead all of those under our jurisdiction whether or not they agree with us. The best leaders always call us to values that are enduring and make us remind ourselves why on good days we take ourselves seriously. The best leaders call us to our best and common principles and force us to confront what we all face, moreover they call us to make efforts and sacrifices. This is why a call for change for its own sake, novelty for its ability to grab our attention, attitude over substance are all hallmarks of false leadership. All that requires is for an audience to be bored, or a cynical person to be fed up. In that case, any dude'l do, when what's necessary is a cockadoodle doo, a wake up call.

If you were one of those who could be, one an ordinary day, so cynical and bored with a rape case, that you would bother to write out your fuck script for the world to see, then you need to check yourself. By erasing her blog posts, Marcotte has done so and yet still has some explaining to do. I see her impulse to clean up her act as something latent within all of us, and I hope one could say that it was the positive influence of candidate John Edwards that made her do so. This serves as a valuable lesson. Sooner or later, you'll get the audience you deserve. What will they make you say?

I'm willing to forgive Marcotte knowing only those paragraphs above by her. Everybody plays the fool, sometimes.

Saas vs Appliances

Don Linstedt has been watching something that I think I should be watching, and that is the emergence of appliances into the enterprise applications space.

Every so often a future suggestion that I've discussed (made by more than just me) actually happens. Now I'm not the kind of guy to normally say "I told you so." However on this occasion, I feel it's important to announce that the market is changing, dramatically - and that software vendors NEED TO TAKE NOTE!!! EAI is now available in plug-and-play appliance format. In this entry we'll discuss what this means, and how it will affect ETL/ELT, EII, and EIEIO (old Mac Donald had an appliance... E-I-E-I-O).

Cast Iron Systems announced in 2006 their EAI appliance. They've made some incredible enhancements, and were recently reviewed again: http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/01/26/05TCcastiron_1.html?APPLICATION+DEVELOPMENT

While the review was neither favorable nor unfavorable, it highlights an important point I've been making about appliances: they will become a combination of hardware and software vendors, specifically ETL/ELT and hardware, EII and hardware, EAI and hardware, and eventually BI and hardware will hook up. Why not? Hardware increases sales, increases price points - at the same time, it can increase ease of use.

He's right. And moreover if these appliances work as advertised, then they will be the counterbalancing force to the ever increasing complexity of tiered services. That means IT can take control where it was losing ground to complexity and simplify at the same time.

My experience is telling me that IT is having increasingly difficult times managing all of the tiers required for the web-centric enterprise. When a repository is not on the same subnet as an application server which is located somewhere else than authentication, stuff gets crazy and nobody wants to debug that. We get a cascade of bouncing servers because the people who installed whatever ear file aren't around any longer or nobody quite knows why some rows are locked in a database whose name doesn't really explain which application is using it. Let's not even get into the prodigious number of bot users which administer tasks for each and every one of the applications dancing in unison. It has been a nightmare, and because of that nightmare I had predicted that more and more companies will find SaaS an increasingly irresistable option.

BUT..

This appliance technology promises plug and play enterprise applications and that's even more irresistable, especially as vendors collaborate. I'm excited.

Man of the Year

This time, I'm flying first class. It's nice, but busy. I forget the ritual and the service keeps interrupting my train of thought. I suppose there are worse problems in the world. Robin Williams for one.

Since I didn't have my computer open on the flight, I had to write 'insufferable twit' in my notebook. At first I kept wondering why 'insufferable twat' wasn't right. And then I remembered that I keep forgetting exactly what kind of profanity 'twat' is about, but it so resembles 'twaddle' that the phrase seems right. Fine, I apply it to the leading actress.

The film is 'Man of the Year' which settles in my mind how Barry Levinson ought to bear the brunt of blame for the incessantly arrogant and shallow shitload of snark that issues from the collective Hollywood craw. I had to watch it just to see how right my instincts were. Dead on.

I won't bore you with the details of the movie but rather try and address the shameless lack of character of its characters. Nah. I'm not going to even bother with that. It just seems incredibly awful how the jesters can even credibly pull this trompe l'oeil past grownups who say yes or no to movies. Of course it's about saying yes or no to Williams, and for the delight of putting 'education, health care & the environment' in one of his manic rants in one corner and 'oil companies, chemical companies' and some other kind of company in the other corner, legions appear ready to sell their souls.

Fait accomplit.

Being, Nothingness & Pascal's Wager

I've been having a number of interesting dreams lately. It means that my mind is kicking on all cylinders which is to be expected having spent a week out of my familiar environments. Interestingly, one of them was about a nuclear explosion somewhere on American soil, but I've had that one before. It didn't wake me up. The worst dreams are, of course, those that wake you up in the middle of the night and force you to try and dream about something else. There are the excellent ones in which you accomplish something you couldn't in real life and then you dream it again. There are also the type that are startlingly vivid and even as you wake up you're not sure if what transpired was real or not until your first coffee. My dream was the rarest of all.

My dream had me come to a realization that something in my life was pointing me towards but never quite went over. I dreamed that I was not.

Give yourself a cookie, you figured it out from the title. It's a very fascinating question that I'm sure goes to the center of all philosophical inquiry: why is there anything at all? But I cut to the chase of my own existence. Mine assumes Descartes. I know that I am. And suddenly I was extraordinarily thankful for that fact. I prayed more fervently to God in thanks for that than I have ever prayed in my life. And I did that same thing again today, for no reason at all.

I feel safe in assuming that my existence is a natural consequence of the existence of the Universe. Who I am and what my part is, I am incapable of saying, but as a natural transducer of whatever purpose I serve, I am inevitable. It doesn't matter that the "I" in whatever my purpose ends up being is done by me, Michael Bowen, and therefore I can only be grateful for the self-awareness that I am indeed part of something. It's important to me, and my instincts confirm that I should defend my life. My life is everything to me no matter what my purpose, but I'm convinced that I have been given the instinct to defend whatever my life is or becomes. Even as I disappear into nothingness, I am something, because I have been.

The acknowledgment that I exist rather than not gives me no insight into what God is or if God hears my prayers. But it gives me all the more reason to order my life. I can see how people can come to believe that they are immortal or important by acknowledging a Creator - this is clear as it has been instantiated by my dream. It doesn't matter what God is, I think. Any story is as good as any other. I assume that God can forgive us for not being able to comprehend his being.

Last week I wondered what could be made of the fact that we are home to billions of bacteria. Do they owe their lives to us? Do we owe our lives to them? What is the relationship between the function of bacteria in our bodies to our moral consciousness? It is imponderable to the bacteria I think. And yet the symbiosis such as it is, absent teleology is self-evident whether or not we acknowledge it. Our hunger to know drives study of biology or theology as the case may be. At some distant point in the future we come to a better understanding, or not. If we are incapable of distinguishing bacteria or individuating them or their prayers it doesn't alter our relationship until the moment we initiate our 'second coming' via anti-biotics or a change in diet. In any case, I believe we can take comfort, if Religion can be right in even the smallest way, that prayer is meaningful beyond our ken.

But now I have no doubt that I have my own life to be thankful for. To whom matters not, but I say God. And for the conceit that my infinitesimal understanding of the nature and will of God might be rewarded through a greater understanding via Religion also gives me great comfort. The smaller and more meaningless more accidental I might be convinced that I am by those rejecting any concept of divinity, the more meaningful the meaning I attach. But I must be wary that I do not defy reason. That's the core promise - that my being and my reason are intertwined inescapably. I can then serve the known universe and the unknowability of God at once.

And once again I pray in thanks that I can know and do this, rather than not be at all.

The Fountain

Aronofsky draws the portraits of obsession, of transcendent love, pain and fear. His latest film is The Fountain and it draws me to quiet.

If you should know me, you might would know that I shave my head in search of a cleansing perfection of the self. I am drawn to mirrors, yes. I eye my eyes, perhaps as writers do, to find within me an expression of truth, of revelation. It slows time when I respect time, when I can be focused with a singular purposeful if small action. Films that have such an effect on me to bring me slower are great blessings. The Fountain is such a film.

It is an allegory about a love that fuels and yet combats reason. It contains a tale of perfect service. It is about honor and promise.

The film is beautiful, although on my hotel television I could not see very well. Aronofsky makes his protagonist cry in anguish. He brings his man to tears and it is something no other American director has done so well. In that regard and considering his past work, one comes to believe that there is no one else in the medium that understands or even sees the soul of men.

Aronofsky has given Hugh Jackman a character into which a soul can be poured, and in this portrait there is no moment of confusion or hesitation. I think I can see in every other less-souled motion picture a series of panic seconds around which we are to project our own understanding. No such effort is required here. This film has emotional weight. So I think that is why I have been crying at movies. Because the actors in every other one cry so poorly that I have to do it for them. Because their characters are so soulless and their fate so confused that I am moved to pity.

The bar has been raised.

On The Poster

A month or so ago, I had a wide ranging interview with Kay Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute. Her article, The New Black Realism is in the Winter 2007 issue of The City Journal. I am pleased to be on the poster as a strong face in the tapestry of today's black America.

The demographic data show that there are now an awful lot of Michael Bowens, for whom the old narrative’s presumption of black oppression rings hollow. In 1960, when the civil rights movement was getting under way, only 45 percent of blacks lived above the poverty line. Today, three-quarters do. In fact, one-third of blacks make over $50,000 a year, while only one-quarter remain poor; 16 percent of blacks earn over $75,000 each year. Though neighborhood segregation is still a fact of life in America, concentrated urban poverty has declined noticeably. In Harlem and Bed-Stuy, young professionals, black and white, are filling former tenements with Braun coffeemakers and furniture from West Elm. Oakland, the birthplace of the Black Panthers and Black Power, is now majority white. And Watts, site of two of the country’s worst race riots, is now only 38 percent black, down from 90 percent in 1970.

I just had [an expensive steak] dinner the other night with my cousin JB who is doing very well himself. We dined at the Capital Grille here in downtown Philly and he described to me the highs, lows and responsibilities of holding down three jobs. JB is in the college recruitment business, he is also part owner of an auto repair shop and he manages half a dozen or so rental properties, which he owns. JB is about 30. This is the new face that's coming up and it is an ordinary face in the crowd of black America. (Well there is some family handsomeness apparent). The point is that while characters like Joe Biden think they've identified something 'articulate, bright and clean' (!!!), it is not something new or strange. And an old guard of politicians is going to have a tough time making sense of all that when Hymowitz may be the first they've ever heard of it.

We understand that politics and marketing are numbers games, but that's no excuse to ignore the principles. It's something of a shame that pols and media are rolling the dice rhetoric and recognition. They are playing stereotypical odds without connecting to principled individuals like JB, who quite frankly doesn't have a reason to listen. He's handling his business, which includes dealing with the confused looks when he comes casual to the bank, and locating the right county for avoidance of Philadelphia city taxes, but the world seems to little note nor long remember how he's the life blood. If you can't figure it out, let me help you out. He helps families get their kids into college, get their cars back on the road, and move into nice neighborhoods.

It goes without saying that a lot of the discussion of black politics tends to ignore the presence of folks like myself and JB. It probably won't be until the numbers 'justify' it until the national conversation is significantly updated. But Hymowitz sees the trend, and today for a brief moment, my face is on the poster.

The Last King of Scotland

This movie is too good to be another lightweight Bulworthian whiteboy fish out of water story, but you could read it that way. In vague corners of my brain I hear such echoes. From where they arose, I do not know.

The brilliance of this film is to put one rather expectedly in the shoes of the outsider while not allowing any third person omniscience to intrude on the experience preach to the audience. As far as American- or Brit-goes-to-Africa-to-do-good films go, I think it's a first to have one that doesn't give a geopolitical reality check way up front. Instead we see what the good doctor sees, an intimate view of a very charming, charasmatic, ambitious and powerful man. And then we watch that man, the ruler of a new nation descend into paranoia, one made seemingly reasonable by the assassination attempt witnessed. What we don't see until it's too late, are the bodies piling up, and the ministers disappearing.

I thought about the nature of becoming a pet in the context of a bunch of reading I did yesterday on con games. The old cliche is that you can't cheat an honest man. Maybe not but you can certainly spoil one into his own personal oblivion. This is what the happens to the poor good doctor as he assumes responsibilities way out of his depth and then is reduced to a pitiable dupe. That story, of the naif who thinks that the forthrightness of private life is all the world of politics and diplomacy is missing, is one which ought to be repeated. It was the better part of The Constant Gardener.

Forest Whitaker was brilliant in his own inimitable way. I find it amazing that so few people knew of him. OK, I find it stupid that Hugh Hewitt never heard of him. I'm one degree away from Forrest, and for the luck of the draw we would have been classmates at Palisades. Of course we know some of the same folks including my sister. He's up for the Oscar and the smart money is banking on him.

Still for all that I cannot say that it was a particulary entertaining film, nor was it especially dramatic or enlightening. It was however, a very well made and grown up movie, one you're glad you saw for at long last doing the trope well. And so The Last King of Scotland closes the door on sentimental African adventure movies once and for all. Without preaching and without stereotyping for once it has been done well.

Now if we can only see such films from African directors.

Twist and Shout

Three Democratic Senators are running for President in 2008. We will have Biden, Clinton and Obama. Between them, they will have to account for and explain their interpretation of their party's relationship to the outcome of Iraq. While 'failure' is glued to the lips of partisans still writhing in the paroxysms of Bush Derangement Syndrome, there is a new disease whose symptoms are historical revisionism. I call it The Twist, and it will be interesting to see how well these three do the explaining they will have to do, especially if and when things go well in Iraq.

VDH runs it down rather nicely in a way I have felt in my gut for some time. As I mentioned before, there is a certain lack of satisfaction, indeed some danger involved, when your political opponents are truly retarded. And so I've urged some restraint in the beatdowns of liberal fools on the slight chance that they would at some point come to their mediocre senses. And so as 2008 approaches, the full moon of Democratic moonbattiness is on the wane and their calculations are going to have to start appearing more respectable and responsible. They won't stop lying of course, but they'll begin telling more reasonable lies, and that's a good thing. It means they are going to be responsible to a higher order of constituent, as VDH indicates, those above the shrieking madness of Michael Moore and Cindy Sheehan. That's a start.

As this process of political evolution progresses and some new meme appropriate to the situation in Iraq is made manifest, the second motion will be made. This will be The Shout. It will become the mantra of the leading candidates, because it's really too late for the Democrats to come up with a real, deep geopolitical strategy. Kerry would have gotten a smackdown, and the Iraq Study Group would have mattered more. Clinton and Biden will sit on their laurels and Obama can triangulate and promise the kind of integrity which is only found in perfect hopes. So really the only question is who gets to shout the final Shout after the Twisting is all done.