Cobb

'Buked

Boot Time

I haven't bothered with Windows Vista, and with any luck I won't have to for several years. XP Pro is as good as it gets under Microsoft, and I'm not taking the home network any further along the Microsoft upgrade path. We'll go to Mac first. I refuse DRM, and XP does everything I want.

Over at ZD Adrian Kingsley-Hughes asks why long boot times matter. I essentially get his point, but what he overlooks are the number of software installs, not to mention seemingly random software patches from MSFT that require soft boots. Also, whether we want to admit it or not, there are many companies who require that people turn off their PCs in order to save energy. I know that's dumb and such businesses are on the verge of collapse, but...  But the biggest reason long boot times are annoying is because they don't have to be.

Leaving aside the brilliance of Knoppix and other Linux on a CD rootkits that can embed very cool Windows utilities, we know that there are a whole lot of extra things that go on during the boot cycle depending upon what software you have installed on your machine. Why not just push those back to the post boot phase? When I'm logging in I know that a whole lot of profile driven stuff is loaded onto the machine. How many times have I sat waiting to get a wireless connection in an airport hoping the last few minutes of battery life don't slip away before the hourglass over my toolbar disappears? What's going on here? Something. There could be a class of applications that I want to be able to use right away just after boot, and just like power consumption priorities, I ought to be able to determine readiness priorities.

An Attempt At Fairness & Balance

I have recently added Matthew Yglesias, Kevin Drum, Joe Gandelman and Sean-Paul Kelley back into my RSS reader. What I'm attempting to do is find out how these folks, who have shown ample intelligence and insight, may or may not be representative of the other end of the political blogosphere. At the very least, I know I'll be expanding.

I've already spent a little time throwing a few barbs across the transom in the form of comments, but I hope to elevate that to trackbacks. In the meantime, I have to get into the habit of checking back to see if anyone is following up on my comments. That's going to take a little getting used to, but I think it's worth the effort.

The first thing I've noticed (and I've even ventured over to MyDD in reading through referenced posts) is the sheer volume of commenters these guys have as compared to the blogs I prefer. So the first thing I'm thinking is why do they put up with all of the nonsensical folks who have the annoying habit of saying 'me first' when they are the first person to post a comment? My gut reaction is that they care about numbers and interactivity rather than more precise analysis.. but maybe I've been spoiled by Spook86. The liberal and left game in politics is to grind the administration into whatever kinds of backwaters they can come up with, and the onus is on us to reason a way forward. No wonder there is no consensus.
 

West Ambler Johnson & Norris Hall

Everyone is feeling the pain.

You can hear the anxiety. The news conference that I just heard was unbearable. I had to turn it off. But I tell you America wakes up, and we have a spirit that tells us something must be done, now. Our thirsts for answers, our thirsts for justice are swift and acute. Whatever there is to be done, and most of us don't know, we want to be a part of it. Why? Because we are accustomed to knowing that answers and justice can be provided.  We always want to be part of the solution.

I am saddened of course of this tragic news. And I'll tell you straight out, my first thought was, man this is horrible. I was reading the news on my palm at 13:05 Eastern as I was coming up the elevator after lunch. I gasped and shook my head when I read there were 21 dead at the NYT. The second thing on my mind was the first thing I wanted to say - If the shooter was Muslim, there's going to be hell to pay. We all know that, and I think my reaction was very much like everyone else's. Now we wait.

My third reaction was to put this in international perspective. Thirty dead in a rampage is news we almost come to expect from Iraq. But even so that's a big number. Listen to me. I have an idea of what a big suicide bomber attack is versus a small one. And so I know that in America this sort of thing is not about to become commonplace anytime soon. Not in my lifetime, not while Americans are still the people I know them to be. We will come together.

Whether or not this was politically motivated, it's a terror attack. And the kind of harsh honesty about how, why and who is going to come up to the same kinds of questions about ourselves. Let me quote from the Founders. For some of us it might even sound like a cliche. Some of us may have never heard it or taken it seriously. But in the end it is the solution:

For the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our Sacred Honor.

Until we are ready to make such mutual pledges to ourselves and to our posterity to provide for our common defense and domestic tranquility, we'll be unable to distinguish ourselves from the shooters. Being an American means more than just being here, it means pledging allegiance.

The Wanker Coalition Resigns

I'm not so sure we should be shouting hallelujah but this sounds like good news.

Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric, withdrew six ministers loyal to him from the Iraqi cabinet today, in the first major shake-up of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government since it was installed a year ago.

Legislators working for Mr. Sadr said that Mr. Sadr was withdrawing his ministers from the 38-member cabinet because the Iraqi government had refused to set a timetable for pulling American troops out of the country.

I understand that there's a balancing act here. My guess is that Al Sadr will try to blame the US on his withdrawal, but it certainly frees Maliki now to crackdown on Mahdi militants.

National National Awareness Month Awareness Month

Roscoe Lee Browne

Roscoe Lee Browne died this weekend in Los Angeles at the age of 81. He was a role model for me.

I think everyone's first reaction to Roscoe Lee Browne was "who does he think he is?". And the more you watch him, the more transfixed you become and then you start doubting yourself for doubting him. As a young man I was always told that every black actor was always more dignified in person than they could ever be allowed to be on the screen. To think that Browne could possibly be more dignified than he appeared on television seemed incredible, it made everything he did even that more impressive.

I've only seen him in the past several years in his role in 'Black Like Me'. He played according to form, something of a stereotype of himself, an 'overeducated' black man in the American South. His voice, his diction were true to form. He was in that very classic way, an actor. Pronounce the long 'o' in the word actor.

Recently, hanging out with relatives the conversation ran to alumni of Lincoln University, where my father first went to study physics. I learned that Browne was an audacious character. He was a quite the track star and ladies' man, I was told. It seemed hard to reconcile Browne cutting such a figure, but that he was. And so I remember him as a man audacious enough to defy those expectations of him, to imbue with unforgettable and undeniable dignity and presence, the small shell of a black actor in 20th century America.

Last Words on Imus

The triumphalism over the dead body of Don Imus is something I couldn't avoid as the channel got stuck on CNN this evening. I caught MC Lyte whose hair was pretty kicking, with her camo top, spew some verbiage about who can talk about nappy hair and who can't. But I liked the chubby dude (Jason Whitlock) who said he's sad to see Imus go out like that.

I'm trying to get a feel for how much blackfolks feel like they need to ride this horse, because I don't like the direction it's heading.

I'll just add thee bits to the details here.

1. It is a free speech issue as long as it's bigger than Imus himself. Anybody who says rappers are not part of this is indulging in wishful thinking. This is exactly why it's a free speech issue, because the entire political thrust of the efforts against Imus beg the question "who's next?". If nobody could ask that question, then it would be just one wisecrack, one slap on the wrist and we'd move on. Imus is the straw that broke the back, and now people feel like some kind of direction must be taken one way or another.

2. Imus will move on to XM/Sirius or some other non-broadcast medium. America is not, and should not be the kind of country where three words can kill a career, period. Imus will reconnect with his audience.

3. Look through all of the apologies, attacks and invocations of moral rectitude. If you find the word 'unforgivable', then you know that you've found an opportunist.

That's all.

The Bird Is Back

Gaming Update

Cars
It's a driving game so I had to try it. It's playable for about 6 hours, nah, make that 2. I bought it for the kids and even they got bored with it within a couple days. This game is so lame I'm almost embarrassed to have unlocked any achievements.

Crackdown
Crackdown is a very good game. It's too bad that I could never get a multiplayer session going. I think it would have been rather cool to have multiple players with the kind of superhuman skills I eventually acquired to whip on some gangster butt. But as it stood, even in single player mode, it was exceptional.

In just about every way, Crackdown is the new standard to be beat when it comes to such 'urban assault' games. I mean the Grand Theft Auto series, Saint's Row and the True Crime series. Crackdown is as well balanced a third-person shooter as Brute Force (finally), and superior in every way to the others, especially with driving. I don't know what is is with these developers. There's has never been a game where you can fight well and drive well. It's either one or the other. I'm sure there's a technical reason for that.

Technically the game was flawless. I got no glitches (not that I go hunting for them). The look is a combination of a kind of cell shading and realism that makes you think of American superheroes as opposed to the Japanese sort. The environment is massive and diverse, every type of cityscape imaginable is in the game.

What makes Crackdown special is that you gain skills in multiple dimension, rather like a RPG you learn by doing. Plus there is a huge environment. So it is very RPG-like, but it's unlike other RPGs in that you never go inside buildings into caves or rooms or mazes. Instead it's an outside game where you use buildings like Spiderman. You can scale tall buildings like a rock climber (you don't stick to walls, you find handholds), this is completely unique and very cool. Additionally, they have nailed the Anime Jump in this game better than any other. Going rooftop to rooftop is a huge thrill, and when you land with a thud, it shakes and cracks the ground. Smashing. All that and rocket launchers, vehicles and the ability to throw containers.

Still for all the fun Crackdown packs into its game, I found myself wishing for more online action. But since I'm going to go ahead and buy it in order to the Halo 3 Beta May 16th, I suppose I'll have time to get with that action. Crackdown is right on the edge of being a great game.

America Alone

Mark Steyn isn't a great writer, in fact his book, America Alone isn't a very good book. I think he's way better as a radio commentator and columnist. So this effort seems a bit scattershot for me. But I think it's just the kind of book that someone like me needs to have read. It gives me a handful of double-ought shotgun shells of red hot facts to spew. By 'someone like me' I mean someone with a reason to defend America in the face of all the gibberish that passes as constructive dissent.

The other day, I was talking with some friends about global warming. 'Jack Jones', is Boy's best friend's dad. We're kind of 'best neighbors'. Jack's an investment adviser with a rather serious portfolio of clients. So he gets paid to make sense of global events. He reminded me that there's some interesting things going on in the commodities markets with corn. I told him that I look to the supermarket shelves: when we're down to just 3 kinds of corn flakes, then I worry. He agreed. More likely the price will go to 7 bucks a box first. On global warming, he reminded me of something we can all try at home. Put ice cubes in a glass, then fill it with water. When the ice melts, the level of the water goes down, not up. So let's not worry about flooding Manhattan.

Mark Steyn has given us a signal to worry about and it is the fall of Europe. If there's anything completely coherent in 'America Alone' it is that it paints a bleak picture for the EU's undeclared war against Islamism. The EU, according to Steyn, is outsourcing its democracy to Muslim youth. So what we Americans need to watch, instead of corn flakes and coastlines, are what concessions EU ministers will do in the face of its losing demographic battle against Muslim youth and how bold the radical Islamists will be in that rising tide. Here are some buckshot for you, the most popular name for male babies in Amsterdam is Muhammed.

The current talking point on Right Radio these days is whether or not Liberals and Democrats have any idea of the size of the Islamic foe. The answer is no, of course not. The correct estimate is that it may or may not matter because nobody, it seems, has any strategy to help 'Moderate Islam' actually moderate the rest of Islam. But the syllogism works something like this:

Who is the enemy? Jihadis?
Where do they get support? Islamists
Who are the Islamists? People who want to live under sharia.
Where do Islamists get support? From all sorts of Muslims.

There are dots to connect for sure. Let the FBI do that. But the fact of the matter is that Jihadis only get support from Muslim communities, and Muslim communities in the West are working their way towards and through all sorts of concessions via a multicultural imperative of Western liberals. The only chance to have Jihadis are through politically active Muslim population bases. And these bases are all over Europe.

Steyn isn't long on solutions. He tends to offer a rather dim outlook. His gripes are classically conservative but he doesn't do so much to rally the troops. He speaks in the voice of someone who thinks it should be obvious that what we have in the West is worth preserving, so he doesn't go into all that. In that regard he's not got a popular book. He's not likely to win any converts to his vision through any cheerleading, however he does show a hundred different examples of what we generally understand in the conservative movement. That's good enough.

What Steyn gives me is a reason to be a bit more strenuous in my questioning of our ethics with regard to the tolerance of Islam. I've never bought into the 'Clash of Civilizations' theory, primarily because I don't regard Islamists as particularly civilized, nor do I give much credit to the Iraqi militants in their free for all. So I am more likely to ask whether or not the momentum in political Islam is pro- or anti-Western and who arises to block or accommodate cultural concessions. I think that my experience with emergent American populations will be instructive in this, especially since I believe I see clearly through the hokum of multicultural politics. I know a self-hating, self-destructive white liberal when I see one, and I know exactly how loud minority activists walk all over them. And I see their mutual disinvestment in patriotic faith work its retarded miracles. So I'm watching, and guess what? I'm not beyond consideration of loyalty oaths.

I have a great deal of confidence that American prejudices against Europeans can and will be easily awakened from slumber if we see more of the sort of sissyfied crumbling that Spain demonstrated in the wake of the Madrid bombings. And I now expect to see more of that sort of event in the near future. What 'America Alone' does is prepare me to understand how it was that the British allowed their sailors and marines to be captured, Europeans truly are far along the road towards capitulation. They're much worse than we are. We at least still have red states, whereas all of the EU has seemed to have gone baby soft blue.

Americans on the whole will recognize what's up. Half of us do already. It's not close to being too late.

Five Hundred Books

The most shocking thing about discovering the Library Thing, a great website that allows you to catalog all the books you own and have read, is that you don't know much. I am struck by the truth of Larry Arnn's suggestion that there is only so much anyone can truly understand. It's better to decide early on to learn one thing of importance.

I've felt the tension of the pull of philology all my life. As a black man of my generation, one is constantly bumping into people who are agog at your sense and sensibility if you are indeed intelligent and articulate and all those other edifying qualities which are in short supply in any population. But that doesn't change the fact that there is no pre-ordained path for you. Sure, you are told that you can grow up to be president, but you don't get invited to the mayor's house.

Cobb's number one rule is "A little bit of everything adds up to a whole lot of nothing." It is the dire warning against the sin of eclexia, the addiction to novelty and alternate universes. Surely this is the temptation for everyone who lives the life of the mind. There is so much to know, why not know something of everything? Who isn't complimented by the label of 'Renaissance Man'? Jesuits taught me to be well-rounded. Isn't that what a straight-A student is? Equally good at everything? (I was the opposite in all honesty, I cared about science, French, soccer and diving in high school and little else.) I didn't learn that rule for a long time. I'm not sure I've adequately lived by it. In fact, deep down, I feel like I have all the time in the world to learn everything I want to know, so I don't mind spending five years blogging about conservative black politics while not seriously intending to make any money from it.

So it is that part of my ego that is bruised when I compare the number of books I have actually read to those other people I find at Library Thing. I'm well-read, but not really. I have entered periods of disciplined curiosity, but I'm no scholar.

I remember nights in books.

I remember reading "Around the Cragged Hill" by George F. Kennan back in the early 90s when Madonna was on her third or fourth incarnation in Vogueing. And I sat in my apartment refusing to go out and meet people because the book was more interesting than all the reality I could access without reading. I know how knowledge isolates, but for this black man it hasn't been consistently elevating. I might have been a bowel surgeon instead. I might have focused my intellectual energies on the human eye and waited for the world to ask me questions. Instead I sought the elevation that comes from having one's own curiosity satisfied. Is this the autodidact's dilemma? I don't know, I never selected that book to read.

And yet I remain fascinated by those who would consume, if their profiles are to be believed and reckoned with, two or three thousand books. I would imagine that a person completely disappears, that all their personal stories become stories experienced reading rather than negotiating the stochastics of life among fans of Madonna. It is a strength and a weakness to be the foremost American scholar of Proust. It's like balancing your entire life on one tiptoe of the mind. It is at once elevating and destabilizing. The narrow soul require more indulgences from those around him. The broad character improvises without the benefit of theory, like he's always done.

There remains that story of transformation from that movie.. and heaven forbid we start talking about film too. There once was a criminal who escaped to a house in the countryside and read a thousand books. His crimes finally caught up with him in the form of his partners in crime who got busted and did the time while he read at his leisure. He outwitted them in the end.

I may have read 500 books that I'll ever remember. Every week or so another dozen or so pop into my head, but I'm surely asymptotic to that magic number. I think it's enough to know. Maybe.

Roots, Native Alienation & Political Unity

"Have you forgotten, that once we were brought here, we were robbed of our name, robbed of our language? We lost our religion, our culture, our god. And many of us, by the way we act, we even lost our mind."
--Khalid Muhammad

The term 'native alienation' can best be summed up in that soundbite. And it stands to reason that a leader on the Nation of Islam would say those words, offering as they do an opportunity for blackfolks to undo and redo their entire lives. It is a constant theme in the circuit of black cultural assertiveness training. Why are you confused black man? Because you don't know your self. And thus the indoctrination begins.

This wouldn't work unless there was credible history behind it, and of course there is. The most cursory understanding of American chattel slavery would tell you that the horrors led to a rootless people. Legacy of slavery arguments are a plentiful staple in current debates around black identity, social dysfunction and political insurgency.

As I watched the first several hours of Roots this week with the eyes of middle aged, and some would say wise man, I recognize the extent to which slaves were portrayed as existing with a kind of disgust for one another. It was all in LeVar Burton's eyes. He was astounded by the complacency of the blacks within their permanent state of humiliation - that a mother would walk her daughter at night to the door of the overseer. The spectacle of the indulgence of a young girl's body is too much for any free man to stomach.

Kunta Kinte loved freedom, but it was also freedom in the abstract, for what is a powerless free man alone in a slave society? Had he escaped, he would have moved from one small prison to a larger one, one that required a bloody war to break open. Kunta made the decision to pass his dreams to the next generation, to free the mind of his child rather than to free his own body.

The adult Kunta, John Amos remarks that the white man wouldn't even let us have us. It is one of the few profound statements that transcend the necessity of "I can't believe they let a black person say that on TV" moments that Roots gave us in the 70s. The simple secret to breaking blacks' spirit was to destroy the dignity of one or several and place them in the care of the black contingent. Between utter humiliation and death was the life of the black slave, how and why they should ever come to love each other with no prospects for family was their horrible dilemma. There was no us worth having. It was a life full of eternal frustration. And yet there was Fiddler.

Louis Gossett Jr's character Fiddler was a man who was able to appreciate freedom in the abstract and the relative comforts of slave live in practical terms. He retained as much spirit as is possible under the circumstances, and provides the delicious irony of the insurgent archtype. More than anyone, Fiddler understands power and its abuse and the contingency of the margin of relief for the slave. "Perhaps, is as good as it gets for a nigger", he says.

Belle, brought to life by Madge Sinclair whose name has ever since been synonymous with grace and strength, was to be the destiny of Kunta Kinte. Broken by the lynching of her first husband and forced to watch her own babies sold away, she found the will to survive with her generosity intact. With the humanity that remained, she restored Kunta's broken spirit and thereby recovered her own. She found a way to elevate every menial task Kunta was assigned to that of respectable man, and so she found way to give true love to a man who wasn't even free.

The premises of the Old School stand against the false transcendence of Afrocentrism. We are not Kunta Kinte, living in the shadow of a free past in Africa. We are freeborn in America with the reality of a depressed 'us'. Our challenge has always been to find someone worth loving, worth sacrificing for, amongst the background of broken spirits. With malice towards none, we had to find our Belle in the New World. Our challenge has always been to forge the best in us and create a new covenant. This is indeed what we have done. We have redeemed ourselves inside with freedom denied and outside with freedom won. African heritage became as irrelevant to us as English blood to the Founders. The moment we remade our selves, there has never been a reason to recover more.

For some, it may have been the founding of the AME Chruch. For others, it may have been joining the Union Army. For some it might have been the Great Migration to the urban North. For some, the new covenant might have come with college graduation. Every black family has its inflection point and there have been millions of such transformations since the beginning of our sojourn in this land. It is in this that we have found roots worth celebrating and protecting.

Like Jelani Cobb (with whom I am sometimes confused) I find nothing credible in the Willie Lynch letter, and while Roots itself has suffered charges of dubious scholarship, it remains true that the difference between finding oneself broken by the examples of broken blacks continues today. Except today the indoctrination must be stronger than those in the days of slavery. When blacks were slaves, it didn't take so much to keep them in the humiliated unity. But to establish political unity among free men is nearly impossible when the strategy for doing so is establishing a sense of brotherhood with those completely stripped of dignity. It's the old 'black human shield' trick. We may be moved to compassion, but compassion and political unity are worlds apart. Political unity requires mutual self-interest.

Khalid Muhammed and others since will continue their attempts to unify blackfolks to their political causes, and legacy of slavery arguments will still be invoked. We have heard them in the Coalition of the Damned, and we recognize victocrats plying their old trade at every turn. But those hucksters continue to forget that black families have persisted against all odds, and that black Americans continue to redeem themselves in new covenants of love today as they did in Alex Haley's distant memories.

The Imus Double Standard

Well now you've gone and done it. Don Imus have been fired.

I'm just fresh from a discussion over at Jane Galt in which the owner of that excellent blog said the following:

There's a double standard for whites and blacks in our culture regarding racial epithets. As there should be. A black man calling a white man "cracker" is not nearly so bad as a white man calling a black man "nigger". That doesn't mean endorsing the use of the former epithet, or liking the people who use it. There should be cultural opprobrium for both. But there should be much more cultural opprobrium for the latter, because it is a symptom of a cultural sickness that needs to be stamped out not just for social comity, but because justice demands it.

In fact, justice demands that there be no such thing as a double standard. As for 'social comity' whatever exactly that is, perhaps we can afford one, but I doubt it. Specifically anyone who calls the Rutgers women, 'nappy-headed hos' is a crusty lowlife and should be treated accordingly. As I've said before, there are social consequences for acting like a crusty lowlife and even greater ones for being one. The question is whether or not Don Imus is one, a judgment that I'll never be able to make fairly on this side of history.

You see here's the rub. What if Imus, now headed down the path of destruction well trod by Jimmy the Greek, Fuzzy Zoeller and Michael Richards, is not actually a crusty, racist, lowlife scum. What if he just dips into the reservoir of humor that we all know sometimes works, and bombed? What if, like Ice Cube, he's just going through a rebellious phase, when what he really wants to do is make nice family movies? OK, let's not take it that far and keep it simple. Imus screwed the pooch. Was what he did unforgivable?

Hold you breath before you answer because I'm throwing a curve ball about double standards.

Ah. You blew it. See by forcing Imus to resign we have just raised the standards of broadcasting. Why is that a problem? Because we refuse to do it for Ice Cube. I hear you whining. Ice Cube is just an entertainer, nobody takes him serious look at all the crap he's done over the years.... Exactly my point. Which is to say there is a double standard. White men are supposed to be serious and taken seriously at all times. The power of their words resounds around the planet and crushes, kills and destroys, so we must insure that all white men be pure of heart, mind, body and soul. Right?  But Ice Cube? Nahh. Nobody needs to take that Negro seriously anyway, ever.

Let me quote via Winds of Change this lovely bit by a cat name Hicks:

What we have then are two positions about the nature of speech. The postmodernists say: Speech is a weapon in the conflict between groups that are unequal. And that is diametrically opposed to the liberal view of speech, which says: Speech is a tool of cognition and communication for individuals who are free.

dsyh

read the rest! »

If we adopt the first statement, then the solution is going to be some form of enforced altruism, under which we redistribute speech in order to protect the harmed, weaker groups. If the stronger, white males have speech tools they can use to the detriment of the other groups, then don't let them use those speech tools. Generate a list of denigrating words that harm members of the other groups and prohibit members of the powerful groups from using them. Don't let them use the words that reinforce their own racism and sexism, and don't let them use words that make members of other groups feel threatened. Eliminating those speech advantages will reconstruct our social reality - which is the same goal as affirmative action. A striking consequence of this analysis is that the toleration of "anything goes" in speech becomes censorship. The postmodern argument implies that if anything goes, then that gives permission to the dominant groups to keep on saying the things that keep the subordinate groups in their place. Liberalism thus means helping to silence the subordinate groups and letting only the dominant groups have effective speech. Postmodern speech codes, therefore, are not censorship but a form of liberation - they liberate the subordinated groups from the punishing and silencing effects of the powerful groups' speech, and they provide an atmosphere in which the previously subordinated groups can express themselves. Speech codes equalize the playing field.

See? Don Imus is not a free individual to be judged equal to Ice Cube or anyone else in this free society. He is a White Man, and therefore for the good of all of us must be specially policed.

But now that he's been cut to shreds, who's next? Do you think we can go after just one overrated media star who is not a white male? How about... hmmm, Kanye West!?

Return of the Mask

Islam vs The Black Church

Reading Mark Steyn's 'America Alone' is an exercise in frustration. He hacks and hacks and won't leave you alone, and the implications of his work are ugly and dangerous and impossible to ignore. It's one of those books where you can only read 20 pages at a sitting and then you want to run out into the streets and pick an intellectual fight.

I have just been under the tear jerking influence of an extraordinary Passion Play done in black under the direction of a crackling minister named Alton Trimble. As well, I have been watching Roots on TV One. I am convinced that there is a vitality to the black family that will persist despite our own dysfunctions and those of our nation. But that doesn't change several important facts about the history of how black politics has contributed to the strength of multiculturalism in America.

Let me say a few things about multiculturalism in America so I can move on to the point. I have written that the best multiculturalism is nothing short of diplomacy, and that's all good. But need to amend this ultimate form and perhaps back off of it to the extent that it subverts nationalism, which I am tending to believe is a price I cannot abide. So for the moment let us conclude that the following is the best that multiculturalism can get.

Class Two - Diversity & Pluralism
Diversity is one step up from PC and makes perfect sense. However it is misapplied as a principle when it's really just a strategy. The value of diversity is that it stands as an indicator of a willingness to make the effort to be inclusive. The best of diversity delivers a kind of robustness, it fortifies an institution by giving disparate groups an interest in its success. But this need be done purposefully with the intention of maintaining that robustness without losing links.

Pluralism is not a consequence of diversity, rather I think it the proper result of a non-chauvinistic secularism in a democratic society. You can have a healthy pluralism without the attempted mutual understanding of diversity. I think they reinforce each other but that they are not the same.

And for my religious conservative Christian defenders and apologists, I don't think we should subvert or disown the free exercise of religion, nor discount the moral rationality of doctrine.

Now to the point. Will the black church defend America given that American Muslims will take the opportunity to demand sharia? That is to say how much black culture and Christianity will resist a spineless multiculturalism that accommodates Islam at every turn?

I say that blackfolks are way too strong and way too deeply ingrained in American life and history to be profoundly persuaded by the visions of Islamists. Despite the fact that blackfolks are comfortable with Muslims among us and that we have strong ties to multicultural politics and we have strong critiques of America, black self-interest cannot and will not be undermined by jihad.

This is a subject I haven't really investigated and there is only one specific episode I can recall there being black commentary. That was the issue of the French laws demanding that Muslim women remove their headscarves in public school. That was a tricky question. I supported Chirac's ban and then I reversed myself. I only considered, in the final analysis, the context of French racism against Algerians. I had not considered the context that Steyn and recent history brings, which is the subversion of the social contract by non-integration and the capitulation of law and tradition brought on by the triumph of multiculturalism over nationalism.

There is no question in my mind that black self-interest is aligned with the American national culture and the American interest. While it is facile today for most black Americans to be against the war they are so primarily because this is "Bush's war" and they are against Bush, but not because they are in trans-cultural sympathy with Islamists. There are black voices who do sympathize with Islamists against the West and America in particular. They are merely political squeaky wheels and like gangsta rappers they are tolerated at a distance. They may delay the final decisions black Americans will make but they will not change our inevitable course, which is patriotic and will stand against creeping Sharia.

Most Americans black or not have yet to recognize how capitulations to Islamic traditions will send waves of conflict through American society if multiculturalism triumphs over nationalism here the way it has in many parts of Europe. But the black church will be a strong conservative force against that multiculturalism and directly against Islam. Stark divisions will arise in black communities as radical Muslims attempt to impress blacks that their cultural ways are superior. Our experience with the Nation of Islam is instructive in that regard. We have already become the transformed nation that swallowed the Negro. We are the new people we had hungered to be, and no sort of Islam is going to change that.

As I watch Roots now 30 years later, I sense the tension in the writing of the about the life of the adult Kunta Kinte as he takes Belle for his bride. Kunta is proud of being an African, Belle rejects being called one despite the fact that Kunta sees her resemblance to his own tribe. She claims three generations of American heritage in opposition. Kunta is a devout Muslim and has spent most of his life trying to escape the plantation, but he chooses family first. It is a deeply symbolic union and it is the beginning of a very deeply felt narrative. All black American men will claim the courage and persistence of Kunta Kinte, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who has raised his child to the heavens shortly after their birth. But we also know that it is our bond with the land and the people of America that makes our journey to freedom our own.

Islam has nothing to teach free black Americans about their own liberation.   

Michael Steele's Africa Campaign

Check this out:

Michael Steele, Maryland’s 2006 Republican Senate candidate, announced Wednesday that he is joining LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae LLP.   

“The synergies are right,” said Steele. “The firm has taken innovative risks in the past with business and law. That is what I have done in the past with my own business and politics.”

Steele will be a partner in the New York law firm’s Washington office. The former Maryland Lt. Governor expects to help elected officials and corporate executives prepare for congressional investigations under the new majority on Capitol Hill.

“We want to send the word out to these individuals who are subpoenaed that we are there to help and can help network and provide solid counsel,” said Steele, who is also looking forward to working with telecom and bioscience companies in Africa.

“My goal is to bring our clients to Africa, and Africa to our clients,” said Steele.

A completely different direction. Why be a has been in America when you can be a kingpin in Africa? Maybe I need to look into this kind of stuff.

            

HMS Cornwall

Don Imus and the Tibbs Threshold

"They call me Mister Tibbs!"
-- Sidney Poitier

One of the more difficult lessons to learn in internet writing is that you never really know who's reading, and you never know emotionally how what you write is affecting them unless and until they write back. After a while, you adjust your tone until you get the kind of feedback you want from the kind of audience you want. If you do it right, you'll generate a legion of followers. If you do it wrong, you'll get flamed, despised, ignored and ultimately dismissed.

Radio is the same.

Let me tell you what I think about this latest tempest in a teapot. Well, there are several things. The first thing I think about is 'Effective Resonance' when I think of racist events.  And the rule of Effective Resonance states that the public response to any act of racism should be inversely proportional to the power of the affected party. If there is a racially motivated killing, we should be much more responsive to the murder of an innocent child, than the death of a soldier in combat. The crime against Rosa Parks on that bus meant a great deal more in 1955 than if some redneck takes the front seat from a old black woman today.

With the Imus case it is clear that his comment, no matter how ill-intentioned will have no bearing on the Rutgers women's abilities to play basketball, graduate from college or move forward with their lives. It was an insult that none of them even heard directly, but second hand. It didn't and doesn't affect their power. Consequently, common sense dictates the response that Effective Resonance posits. Generally speaking, here at Cobb, I would dismiss this event as Class Three (the trivial class) Racism, have a Coke and a smile. Next. But there's something else going on here and it's not just Political Correctness.

Counter intutive to Effective Resonance is the Tibbs Threshold. This doesn't deal with power so much as it does with regard to respect. When I came up with the term in 1996 I described it thusly:

let's say that jimrutt got on my last nerve. (personally, i find jim a good adversary most of the time and would never bozo him out) and that his opinion on a subject tangential to black culture, i found not only wrong but downright insulting. to my sophisticated sensibility as a black man, i might find that he has crossed a line at which i am justified in smacking him. that line for me might make no sense whatsoever to many non-blacks. i call it the 'tibbs threshold' after the fictional character played by sidney poitier. in their own environment, the idea that a black man might be so offended that he would strike a white man is something reserved for a short list of offenses. use of the n-word, perhaps. however for mr. tibbs, of elevated bearing and stern stuff, potential offenders have much less breathing room and rightfully so.

Jim Rutt was a character from the Well, back in the day. He went public and 'scribbled' much of his online writing in anticipation of storms of PC backlash attributable to private conversations in a private forum possibly getting public. But the point is that across cultural divides, the signposts are not always clear. As a crusty character you can expect that your insults will be taken more outrageously than you make them when you.

Just as there are Americans who can't locate Iran on a map, yet still think their political opinion about war and peace matters, there are Americans who don't really know jack about black women's attitudes about their hair and sexuality, yet still think their opinion on race matters. Such people are not aware of the Tibbs Threshold.

The difficulty in 2007 is that African Americans have political and social clout. Much more than we did only 20 years ago. Consequently simply because Effective Resonance might work in the favor of the I-Man, crossing the Tibbs Threshold can knock his block off. That's because the Rutgers Women are champions. Yes it's true that even more than the average black woman, they can dish it out and take it, but they've got more dignity than a little, and because of that fact it's more dangerous to insult them. That is common sense too.

It just so happens that TV One, the new black owned and operated TV network (yeah I said it) is airing a 30 year anniversary commemorative edition of Roots, hosted by star LeVar Burton. The family and I watched the first three hours of the miniseries last night which include the tale of the Middle Passage and the Captain's taking, despite his professed Christianity, a black woman as a 'belly warmer'. My daughters have just an inkling of what's going on, but every grown black woman in America has such stories deeply ingrained. My brother Doc called me last night to tell me that a female friend of his told him in response to the Imus tale that black women believe that if they all went natural, black men would abandon them. She said no matter how powerful Condoleeza Rice is, that she would never wear her hair unpressed. For all her power and glory, if she were to wear a short nappy fro, Oprah would be completely undone. Never spit in the wind, never step on Superman's cape and never insult a black woman's hair.

Am I serious?  I don't have to be, black women will flood the zone and give you no uncertain terms.

I don't feel sorry for Imus. He's a big boy, and I'm sure he's stepped in bigger piles before in his life. I'm prepared to defend him from the perspective of Effective Resonance. But Cobb and the Old School is about the politics of social power, not so much the politics of human rights or civil rights. When it comes to black politics, there's no priority or necessity to go after Imus or anyone like him. (And please don't suggest that my defense of William Bennett is like Imus - Imus was straight wrong). So I don't really care what happens to Imus one way or another. However, I'm here to tell you that this is no aberration and it's not merely PC. You simply cannot insult champions, period. The shadow of Mister Tibbs is long here, and there will always be a price to be paid when you test the mettle of blackfolks with real dignity and not just 'self-esteem'. Remember Fuzzy Zoeller? Of course you do. He's more famous for what he did wrong than for whatever he did right. That's the blackness blackball, the new form of social power your parents didn't warn you about. Get used to it.

Many folks, including me, have made the point of the irony of hiphop's continual onslaught of vulgarities against black women. But, to put it bluntly, that's niggas and bitches calling each other niggas and bitches. In other words, every population everywhere on the planet has its lowlife characters and brain-dead subculture, African Americans are no different. It just so happens that in America's entertainment industry we are adept at raising such effluvia to an 'art form'. Only in America can you finance viral marketing campaigns, studio time and distribution deals for idiot savants with names like 'Slim Thug'. It's all part of the larger devolution of Western cultural backbone.

The point is not what idiot savants with airtime do... oops. I guess it is.

Yo Mama

If You Have To Ask

The Don

Johnson Beharry

Johnson Beharry is the first recipient of the Victoria Cross since the posthumous awards to Lieutenant Colonel H. Jones and Sergeant Ian John McKay   for service in the Falklands War in 1982. He is the first living recipient of   the VC since Keith Payne and Rayene Stewart Simpson, both Australian, for   actions in Vietnam in 1969, and the first living recipient of the VC in the   British Army since Rambahadur Limbu, a Gurkha, in the Indonesia-Malaysia   confrontation in 1965. As of 26 June 2006, he is one of only 12 living   recipients of the VC, and the youngest.

Beharry was born in Grenada, and has four brothers and three  sisters. He moved to the UK in 1999.

On 1 May 2004, Beharry was driving a Warrior Tracked Armoured Vehicle that   had been called to the assistance of a foot patrol caught in a series of   ambushes. The Warrior was hit by multiple rocket propelled grenades, causing   damage and resulting in the loss of radio communications. The platoon   commander, the vehicle’s gunner and a number of other soldiers in the   vehicle were injured. Beharry drove through the ambush, taking his own crew   and leading five other Warriors to safety. He then extracted his wounded   colleagues from the vehicle, all the time exposed to further enemy fire. He   was cited on this occasion for "valour of the highest order".

While back on duty on 11 June 2004, Beharry was again driving the lead   Warrior vehicle of his platoon through Al Amarah when his vehicle was   ambushed. A rocket propelled grenade hit the vehicle and Beharry received   serious head injuries. Other rockets hit the vehicle incapacitating his   commander and injuring several of the crew. Despite his very serious injuries,   Beharry then took control of his vehicle and drove it out of the ambush area   before losing consciousness. He required brain surgery for his head injuries,   and he was still recovering when he was awarded the VC in March 2005. He   suggested on at least one occasion that he would return to military service if   physically able.

According to the British newspaper The Telegraph, a planned 90-minute drama about Beharry was canceled by the BBC because it was "too positive" and would alienate members of the audience opposed to the war in Iraq.

 

Children of Men

Children of Men is not as good a film as I thought it might be. It's awfully disappointing, and I'll have to say that it compares somewhat unfavorably to "V is for Vendetta". For my dollar "28 Days Later" remains the champion of the dystopic future of London film.

The premise of Children of Men of universal infertility is stunning and brilliant, but nowhere in the film is the drama of the kind of desperation one would expect of such a tragedy. I got a more riveting sense of emptiness and loss from Spielberg's "AI". Instead we get a kind of brooding tale drawn in the lines of the face of actor Clive Owen. He does an admirable job as the intelligent but scared man dragging a woman around the dangerous countryside, but he doesn't lose his mind or nerve and never quite turns heroic. His ability in the end to dodge bullets that are felling hardened revolutionary militia men just stretches the credibility of this flick beyond the sustainable.

In fact it is the end of this film where it all unravels. Aside from the gratuitous positioning of an idiot fascist Right against the weed smoking compassion of the Left with nobody by sheeple and radicals in the middle, there's a kind of clumsy individualism at play here. To her credit Julianne Moore dies quickly, but it really ruins the emotional and intellectual balance of movie. Where we might have had some deeper and more interesting dramatic tension between two ex-lovers still mourning a dead child while protecting the world's next madonna, we instead have an incoherently babbling gypsy woman and her dog.

One can tell that this film followed a novel too closely and left us without an internal dialog. Instead we have some stunningly gratuitous scenery. The film's greatest moment comes just before its hugest failure. The child is at last and finally born, a healthy girl. Her crying transfixes an apartment block which is in the middle of a deadly skirmish between muslim radicals, the underground radicals who have found the pregnant woman and a hundred British riot troops with tanks and APCs. As they walk through all the people fall to their knees and reach to touch the holy infant, all goes quiet but the sound of the baby's crying, the first child born on the planet in 18 years. The troops cease fire. The trio walk through the silenced crowd, and then it just goes totally wonky.

Not a single person from inside the building comes outside to defend the infant. Which is to say that this miracle of birth is not worth anybody's act of courage. Nor does the man call out for protection from the troops. Nor do the troops offer it. Somebody shoots a rocket launcher and then the firefight is on again, and the trio run off unhindered.

That is the most idiotic turn of events I've ever seen, and it defies the entire premise of the film which is that the birth of a child would be a world alteringly hopeful event. Yet those there at the very beginning do nothing. It's astonishingly cynical if we are to take it seriously, otherwise just pathetically juvenile screenwriting. In the end, there are only three or four individuals who show any backbone and presence of mind during this film, and that is what makes it so dreary and quite frankly unbelievable. I wanted this film to be better than it was, but it failed miserably. They shoulda got Spielberg.

And now my final and fatal blow.

The one thing that might have saved this movie would be the conversion of a depressed drunk, cynical man, representative of mankind, into a true hero. Instead he slinks and skulks his way through the entire movie. The rebels shot the mother of his child, in the face. She died in his hands. He hides. And so, in this regard, this movie makes Clive Owen less of a man than Tom Cruise in 'War of the Worlds'.

But maybe, just maybe, that's the difference between Americans and Brits. We still have some balls left.

America: Christian Nation?

On several occasions as I visited Ofaris, now two long years ago at least, I can recall one particular gent among the conservatives who would consistently defend America as a Christian nation. I've heard the argument before but never so pointedly and often as from this guy. Everything it seemed depended on our recognition of his assertion. I've always been rather uncomfortable with his emphasis although I could certainly see the merit of his position. I've only more recently figured out how to deal with that class of debates.

Though my frat brother JC Phillips was often at the same functions, and familiar with the same arguments I never was quite sure if he was pressing them until he wrote the following:

God made man free and independent. As free men, we must own our bodies, our ideas, and the fruits produced by same. It is upon this concept that we properly define rights and upon this rock America was founded. Rights are those things to which we claim by virtue of simply being human -- by belonging to God – and are therefore things that cannot be granted by other men.

In response to that I wrote a bit offhandedly:

What I'm afraid many Christians, and especially fundamentalists don't understand is how the same inviolability of conclusions can be [derived from] secular philosophy.

He followed up for some clarification and so I turned my full attention to the question of whether America, at its founding was or should be considered a Christian nation.

I think that the secular case for our founding is clear - taxation without representation, and I am not particularly convinced that the founding of the US was an act anointed of God. I am not familiar enough with the case of Israel to say, but I believe that in that case and others, they see their nation existing as it does and where it does as fulfillment of a holy covenant. America, by contrast, was never a 'promised land'.

I do believe, however, that the founding principles of the US were a natural consequence of the understanding of the purposes of man. That is to say this country's founding was exceptional in that the Founders did their level best to assess the nature of man and his needs in the world and organized a nation around the defense of those needs. The concepts of the Rights of Man, thus is central. But I am not so sure that the French were any further off from the truth of those definitions as they overthrew their monarchy. I've yet to hear anyone declare Robespierre as a divinely inspired character or that France is similarly a Christian nation.

I believe that a more comprehensive accounting of the Enlightenment values of democracy, citizenship and inalienable rights will find a combination of secular and inspired sources in their proponents. But I do believe that faith in God was totally integrated into the thinking of many Founders. In fact, I have recently come to appreciate that Christianity's strength is found in its consistent practice in reconciliation with reason. This is something I learned only last year thanks to Benedict and Larry Arnn. So it makes perfect sense to me that the highest form of rational, moral thinking can indeed be considered Christian and divinely inspired. God inspires men to think. I do indeed trust in American theodicy, but I don't believe it to be an exclusive parent of our rights. Further I do not believe that patriotism is the full and final expression of our souls.

With regard to our contemporary dilemmas, I think it is facile to suggest that our devotion to the life of Christ is near enough to those so inspired in history (William Wilberforce comes to mind) to argue that our faith will defend such founding principles as rigorously as their faith did. We therefore must depend on the constancy of atheists, heathens and even imbeciles to their unreflective self-interests as well as the thoughtful defenses of our nation that come from non-religious study. Christians may desire America to be a Christian nation but if today's American Christians were the only defenders of our core principles, we would be in poor shape indeed. In this I am constantly reminded of the life and efforts of John Brown who stands above all in my thinking as the model Christian of his time. He clearly saw what his fellow Christians did not, which was the inherent corrosion of a nation with a double standard for inalienable rights, citizenship and democracy. And while I don't now doubt that the Founders recognized the extent to which their vision was compromised by the reality of slavery, none of them stands as tall as a divinely inspired operator as does John Brown, Harriett Tubman or Sojourner Truth. So this is an indictment of the failings of Christians to their earthly duty in understanding and defense of the Rights of Man even as they are divinely inspired. Even as we are called, as I was yesterday, to Worship, Glorify and Praise the Holy Name of Jesus, I am acutely aware of how little patriotic sacrifice is demanded of us from the pulpit. God inspires us to think but do we think hard enough to be considered worthy?

My reading of the accounts of "The God of Nature" is that thoughtful men of the period did indeed grasp the profundity of creation and I believe most felt morally obligated to understand the workings of nature. My details are kind of sketchy on this as my best references are 'Master & Commander' and Stephenson's excellent Baroque Series, both fictional works of verisimilitude. I see the accommodation of Christianity to scientific discovery as a form of revelation. Think of it this way, today when we bless our meals, we know that they contain vitamins and minerals essential to our health, it even gives us more reasons to be thankful. We would be foolish to thank God for Twinkies. (I guess). My point is that I don't see any fundamental conflict between Christian faith and reason. The Church accommodates and grows as it must with the growth of knowledge and still the core of faith remains. We believe that our ethics are constrained, but not our knowledge, and so this is why we conflict with radical Islam, which forces its adherents to be circumscribed and defined as souls in submission to an absolutely arbitrary God, a God who might defy nature, a God who might black out the Sun tomorrow for no humanly comprehensible reason. If we must respond to an arbitrary God who would defy nature and the world, then there are no reasons for good works in the world, all we could do is worship, glorify and praise the name of God, and what do worldly things matter?

So I think I may have shown the parallel between religious fundamentalists who would claim that all man can and should be is a vessel for worship. God could just as easily worship Himself were that all we could be. Why bother with Creation? Why make us apart from dumb animals? God could look in the mirror and give Himself perfect worship and not be bothered with the Universe at all. Instead God created the Universe and set us on a path of discovery, and that righteous path will lead us back to Him, and I think we have galaxies to conquer before that journey is complete, and yet in all our ignorance we can still feel close to God. We can still know, down to the smallest most insignificant act, which direction is towards Good and which is towards Evil. In that we are profoundly blessed. Because no matter how small our life and efforts, we can still know the love of God.

America is different from a nation of worshipers and its greatness as a nation in the affairs of the world does not owe from the piety of its Christians. It is from our freedom to engage the world and our experience of the life of liberty that gives us the knowhow and wherewithal to be an agent for positive change. I think the life of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and her choice to become an American is ample and adequate testimony to that, as are the lives of millions of other immigrants who have had to undergo no religious conversion to recognize and respect what it is great about America.

America needs the devotion of all its citizens engaged morally in issues of liberty and freedom in a tradition not only established by the founders, and not only by Christians. We need to be a nation dedicated to the purposes of a continuing defense of liberty for ourselves and for the world. If Christian charity motivates you towards that end, fine. I expect that conservative Christians engaged in the moral issues of the nation will understand these things implicitly or come to very fine conclusions in their study of Natural Law; I support that tradition and I admire it. I don't think that is the only way to discover the truth about what's great in America and I hope that those who may be put off by a shallow understanding of this tradition get their heads on straight about it. As I tend to say, it's about do not about be.

A Visit To NPR

So my fledgling media career is up one more step as I was invited to participate in the new experimental radio show at NPR. You might know it as Rough Cuts or The Barbershop. It's Michel Martin's baby and we're trying to get it jumping off.

The NPR folks have a description for it, but it's the closest thing yet to a bunch of smart, interesting brothers getting together to rap about current events. Michel, with the velvety smooth voice, kicks off the session and we're off. Jimi Izrael is the ringleader on the air and we do a kind of round robin on topics of the day.

On my episode, we covered several subjects quickly and I think I got in a few soundbites edgewise. I was prepared for something a bit more raucous but we were pretty good. See in this case everything was virtual. Jimi was in KY, Q was in DC, I think, Naravette was in San Diego and Michel was.. I have no idea where. But I tell you this, I really like radio. I've done hundreds of conference calls and you have to use your voice to express things that you ordinarily would with your hands, so I have a bit of practice on that. But nothing could keep me from being extraordinarily nervous this time. Have you ever been in a situation where you think you have to pee and you know that you've already peed your last pee? That's what level of nerves I had. I was freakin'. But as soon as people started talking to me I was cool.

NPR West is a sweet little joint. As I cruised around to the men's room I passed offices of Alex Chadwick and a bunch of other famous people. That was fabulous, but I tried not to gawk. Well, Chadwick wasn't there anyway. Architecturally, it reminds me of Cars Direct which is probably just around the corner. You have your basic light industrial building with the open floor plan and rather up-to-date cubicles. All the folks in there were fashionably casual.

On my way out guess who I bump into? Karen Grigsby Bates. Am I allowed to say that? Aw, she's already famous and has hundreds of fans anyway. When I used to hang with my academic friends over at UCLA, we all agreed that she was the only reason to bother opening up the LA Times. So I tell her that the last time I saw her was at the Baldwin Public Library, but now that I think about it, I'm thinking that might not be correct. In fact it's way not correct. That was Erin Aubrey Kaplan and I know I like KGB way way better than I like EAK. We rapped about this and that.. uhm books we read, the topics in the discussion. It turns out that she has read Cobb from time to time. Lovely.

I'm embarrassed to confess that I can't remember the names of the other cool folks in the joint. The receptionist who used to be a plum farmer from Central California was a very charming lady and we rapped about a whole bunch of stuff. I was so jazzed up after the taping and none of the other folks were there so I had to just pour my little heart out and talk to be talking. She made me feel cool. I told her about my first severe sunburn which was part of my introduction to Central California that I got in Madera long ago when I was an AAU diver. AAU # 3323662. Dang, where was that buried in my head? N, was the sharp kid who had a copy of the new Modest Mouse CD and a thickish book about Independent Film in America. I hope he remembers it's Cobb and not DeKalb, but such is the media plug business.

I managed to break up the entire discussion with an offhand confession about my feelings towards Terry Gross which I think freaked everybody out. That I was able to freak out NPR folks, people who have a thing for David Sedaris, I take as sign of their true humanity, and I didn't even have to dig into the Conservative grab bag.

So in my next step toward famousity, you can check out the latest clip of Rough Cuts, Tell Me More over at NPR. They have my link wrong but that's cool for the time being. I'm sure they'll clean that up. Plus you're here so you know what's up with the blog. By the way if you want to skip right to our piece, it starts at minute 35.

Intellectual Conservative

I'm adding Intellectual Conservative to the blogroll. There are three reasons. One I like the name and the tone, and two is that I'm updating the blogroll today. The third reason is content. So check out these two articles.

Honor, Obama, and Honoré

Suppose it came down to two – Barack Obama vs. Katrina’s General Russel Honoré: would it even be close?

Soaring one:

"If you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our slumber, and slough off our fear."

"In the face of despair, you believe there can be hope."

Rooted the other:

“I can tell you that's B.S.”

“Wishing something is not making it happen.”

“If it's easy, it would have been done already.”

Tall both, Black both, of mixed heritage both, yet in the end, lad vs. leader.

 

Maybe there will come a day when civilians have no sense of citizenship and we are stuck choosing military leaders to lead our democracy. Until then, although I deeply appreciate the comparison, it's only a theoretical. Then again, that's a good thought worth considering despite it's direct irrelevance to the campaigns at hand.

Also there's this:

Jack & Jill

I did not grow up in Jack and Jill, an elite, service organization for black mothers. An unknown to white and many black Americans, Jack and Jill has provided a safe meeting place for black upper class kids since the 1950s.  When you imagine Jack and Jill, think Skull and Bones for black moms. I exaggerate for effect but not as much as you might assume. I first learned about Jack and Jill at the University of Virginia. A close friend from Jamaica warned me that Jack and Jill was yet another feature of Black American culture that he disdained. I suspect he held his opinion because his mother had not been asked to join.

Like Skull and Bones, Jack and Jill can be clubby. You can become a member in one of two ways. Either you are born into Jack and Jill as a legacy. Or, you are sponsored by a member. That's it. Wealth will not get you in. Political power will not get you in. Academic success like producing four Harvard graduates will not get you in. (Read Our Kind of People by Lawrence Otis Graham for the low-down on Jack and Jill)

From time to time I consider the fact that I haven't linked up with the Links or the Boule or Jack & Jill or 100 Black Men. I sometimes feel contrite, and other times I feel embarrassed for not having an adequate amount of surplus ducats for the life of philanthropy. But I never feel out-snooted. I always kinda figured I could walk right in, after all I do know some of the right people. There's no question that in spirit, The Spousal Unit and I are of the right deportment with regard to upright living and all that, but the truth is we have been out of touch with the Tenth for some time now. Hmmm.  That said, chances are that we parents need Jack & Jill more than our kids do.

Eggs

Gibraltar May Crumble

I've been thinking about the impermanence of organizations. Their flakiness, their inability to be for us what we want them to be. I'm in a meditative mood and considering the metaphorical suicide of the Latigo Flint blog, the death of the Black Radical Congress Website, the passing into obscurity of Noel Ignatiev and the Race Traitors, and hopes and dreams for the Blackosphere never realized this the third or probably sixth time.

Come to think of it, I haven't done much of this kind of writing in a long time. The reason is work and Philadelphia and face time. I've had a lot of that lately, but I'm curling up into a ball these days of Spring Break. Not with a book as I have been the past few weeks, but with myself, my curiosity, my memory. And in that are memories of hopes and the dashed damned truth of individual vice and individual virtue. Some days I think that's all we have, because as Chinua Achebe said, things fall apart.

I say there's not going to be a blackosphere, formally. The Kwaku Network will persist. I feel for Earl as he crafts his Intrapolitics and Niggerati networks only to be met thus far with relative silence. I feel for the hordes of hopefuls clogging up DKos and then falling off in anger and disgust, watching the shrill take over. I'm struck by the utter vapidity of the economic commentary of the latest podcast by my own blogfather, the Agonist. And it all brings me back to a book I started but never finished by Thomas Mann. Every step you take into wisdom and individuality, you leave someone behind. I think of Gore Vidal in exile. I think of Alanis Morrisette on her deathbed, unable to smile. I think of all of the dusty men who'd like to be remembered as Ravelstein, and a dead and dying generation of authors, Vonnegut, Mailer, Roth, Updike, Bellow, Miller, Baldwin...

You try to choose what to build. What retains the spirit best? Should you teach or love or fund?

See there's this book on my shelf called 'Faces at the Bottom of the Well', and it's written by Derrick Bell. And now that I've come to have Library Thing, I have come to realize how few books I've actually read. I can only remember about 350, not including textbooks. And I keep thinking of all the books I've bought adn read and felt ever more alienated because of what I learned.

When I was at NPR the other day I asked myself if I could do radio and I thought that the answer was yes, because of the length. It's all about length, my length is the length of a blog essay. That's the length of a 7 minute rant on the radio when I start ad libbing. And I realized that I never had that feel for the novel, for the cadre of writer's workshop people who would pore over my manuscript and write notes in the margins and type it up for me on onionskin with a Royal. I've only brought my folio of poems and diary notes around with me as a tender public intellectual, no manuscripts, no screenplays. That's not my length.  And this is all important to know because of how I might relate to the deepest values and pass them on. Would I build an organization? Would I teach? Would I love? Where does the writing go and who cares? If the lessons are so important and universal, who's to say the next generation won't figure it out themselves?

Organizations twist and shout, shake and break. Somebody else will assume the debt on the 2 million subprime loans and it will be a different sort of company. Maybe they'll only need a slim margin and will take a gentle approach. Maybe not. But New Century is dead and so are all the direct dreams it funded - not the customers, the builders.

Derrick Bell had the Quad A, the fraternity that would have Malcolm X, Colin Powell, Denzel Washington, Johnnie Cochran, Michael Jordon, Tiger Woods and Jah Rastafari all hanging out and scheming a way to build a new black world. And the question of the day for that Blackosphere would be, do we let in Noel Ignatiev and Tim Wise?

You can't spit in a room of critical race theorists without hitting someone who apes 'race is a construction'. Plop, right on their beige faces. They are anti-essntialist to the bone. But what if the construction of race, just like that of everything else, crumbles? Where does all the rhetoric and time wasted go? If people stop reading the polemics and the theories on race where do they go next? I think they'll go to gender, liberals you know never stop asking questions and proposing solutions based on the number of people they can effect. All that identity momentum would have to go somewhere else. Perhaps they could try something truly radical and start demonizing the tall, proposing a world that spins towards the hobbits of humanity who never invaded another country or lorded over anyone. Then of course all of the blacks and whites would have to make up and start beating up another demographic. It all depends on the strength of the institutions that carry the new message. Speaking for myself, I'm rather loathe to hump the racial traffic. My marginal utility as a black commentator drops monthly. Which I suppose is fine with me. I didn't even want to get started this way.

The SCLC, the CORE. the SNCC. All dead. The KKK is bankrupt, the White Citizens Councils are all gone. There are only a few black newspapers left in this country, and more and more Hispanics attend HBCUs than ever before. We've all got this curious fetish which turns out to be little more than curiosity when it comes down to it, and we're stuck making pronouncements about the nature of people, a fascinating and inevitable subject to be sure, but sustained by a crackpot framework. That's why I move towards philosophy and theology. I suspect their institutions will be a bit longer lived. Long enough, I suppose to get through to some basic truths generation after generation. These other organizations were never going to get us there were it not for the unique confluence of forces that made America - dozens of them actually. Lucky us to have English cousins to help build and design huge looms on rivers in New England, and refine steel in Pennsylvania. But now what do we care about textiles and steel? Not much it seems.

It's good for us emergent folks to live in a faster world rather than a slower one. I would like the world to slow down for the sake of surety, but it would only ossify me as a black man with nowhere to go but sideways. The idea of having children doing nothing more than I ever did strikes me as crippled. Unless I was a doctor, or lawyer, or banker. The permanent un-outsourceables.

I'm thinking about what gives. What changes and what does not. And that is the episode for today.

I've been thinking about the impermanence of organizations. Their flakiness, their inability to be for us what we want them to be. I'm in a meditative mood and considering the metaphorical suicide of the Latigo Flint blog, the death of the Black Radical Congress Website, the passing into obscurity of Noel Ignatiev and the Race Traitors, and hopes and dreams for the Blackosphere never realized this the third or probably sixth time.

Come to think of it, I haven't done much of this kind of writing in a long time. The reason is work and Philadelphia and face time. I've had a lot of that lately, but I'm curling up into a ball these days of Spring Break. Not with a book as I have been the past few weeks, but with myself, my curiosity, my memory. And in that are memories of hopes and the dashed damned truth of individual vice and individual virtue. Some days I think that's all we have, because as Chinua Achebe said, things fall apart.

I say there's not going to be a blackosphere, formally. The Kwaku Network will persist. I feel for Earl as he crafts his Intrapolitics and Niggerati networks only to be met thus far with relative silence. I feel for the hordes of hopefuls clogging up DKos and then falling off in anger and disgust, watching the shrill take over. I'm struck by the utter vapidity of the economic commentary of the latest podcast by my own blogfather, the Agonist. And it all brings me back to a book I started but never finished by Thomas Mann. Every step you take into wisdom and individuality, you leave someone behind. I think of Gore Vidal in exile. I think of Alanis Morrisette on her deathbed, unable to smile. I think of all of the dusty men who'd like to be remembered as Ravelstein, and a dead and dying generation of authors, Vonnegut, Mailer, Roth, Updike, Bellow, Miller, Baldwin...

You try to choose what to build. What retains the spirit best? Should you teach or love or fund?

See there's this book on my shelf called 'Faces at the Bottom of the Well', and it's written by Derrick Bell. And now that I've come to have Library Thing, I have come to realize how few books I've actually read. I can only remember about 350, not including textbooks. And I keep thinking of all the books I've bought adn read and felt ever more alienated because of what I learned.

When I was at NPR the other day I asked myself if I could do radio and I thought that the answer was yes, because of the length. It's all about length, my length is the length of a blog essay. That's the length of a 7 minute rant on the radio when I start ad libbing. And I realized that I never had that feel for the novel, for the cadre of writer's workshop people who would pore over my manuscript and write notes in the margins and type it up for me on onionskin with a Royal. I've only brought my folio of poems and diary notes around with me as a tender public intellectual, no manuscripts, no screenplays. That's not my length.  And this is all important to know because of how I might relate to the deepest values and pass them on. Would I build an organization? Would I teach? Would I love? Where does the writing go and who cares? If the lessons are so important and universal, who's to say the next generation won't figure it out themselves?

Organizations twist and shout, shake and break. Somebody else will assume the debt on the 2 million subprime loans and it will be a different sort of company. Maybe they'll only need a slim margin and will take a gentle approach. Maybe not. But New Century is dead and so are all the direct dreams it funded - not the customers, the builders.

Derrick Bell had the Quad A, the fraternity that would have Malcolm X, Colin Powell, Denzel Washington, Johnnie Cochran, Michael Jordon, Tiger Woods and Jah Rastafari all hanging out and scheming a way to build a new black world. And the question of the day for that Blackosphere would be, do we let in Noel Ignatiev and Tim Wise?

You can't spit in a room of critical race theorists without hitting someone who apes 'race is a construction'. Plop, right on their beige faces. They are anti-essntialist to the bone. But what if the construction of race, just like that of everything else, crumbles? Where does all the rhetoric and time wasted go? If people stop reading the polemics and the theories on race where do they go next? I think they'll go to gender, liberals you know never stop asking questions and proposing solutions based on the number of people they can effect. All that identity momentum would have to go somewhere else. Perhaps they could try something truly radical and start demonizing the tall, proposing a world that spins towards the hobbits of humanity who never invaded another country or lorded over anyone. Then of course all of the blacks and whites would have to make up and start beating up another demographic. It all depends on the strength of the institutions that carry the new message. Speaking for myself, I'm rather loathe to hump the racial traffic. My marginal utility as a black commentator drops monthly. Which I suppose is fine with me. I didn't even want to get started this way.

The SCLC, the CORE. the SNCC. All dead. The KKK is bankrupt, the White Citizens Councils are all gone. There are only a few black newspapers left in this country, and more and more Hispanics attend HBCUs than ever before. We've all got this curious fetish which turns out to be little more than curiosity when it comes down to it, and we're stuck making pronouncements about the nature of people, a fascinating and inevitable subject to be sure, but sustained by a crackpot framework. That's why I move towards philosophy and theology. I suspect their institutions will be a bit longer lived. Long enough, I suppose to get through to some basic truths generation after generation. These other organizations were never going to get us there were it not for the unique confluence of forces that made America - dozens of them actually. Lucky us to have English cousins to help build and design huge looms on rivers in New England, and refine steel in Pennsylvania. But now what do we care about textiles and steel? Not much it seems.

It's good for us emergent folks to live in a faster world rather than a slower one. I would like the world to slow down for the sake of surety, but it would only ossify me as a black man with nowhere to go but sideways. The idea of having children doing nothing more than I ever did strikes me as crippled. Unless I was a doctor, or lawyer, or banker. The permanent un-outsourceables.

I'm thinking about what gives. What changes and what does not. And that is the episode for today.

An Easter Saturday

I've written almost 40 restaruant reviews over at Yelp. It's about all I can do because my job is giving me frustrations that I can't write about. I also have huge compositions in draft that I can't work my way through. I'm frustrated with the loss of my Amis book, and I'm home doing more gaming than I have in a while. So the only thing that comes out of me these days are missives on Cotton and restaurants in the hood.

Everybody seems to be impressed that Obama is raising multimillions. Does that make him a sell-out or is he playing the same game as the rest of the gang? I haven't seen the question raised, which means people are afraid of thinking of him as a mainstream candidate. But we still can't call him 'magic' even though that's exactly what the pundits on Left, Right and Center did yesterday.

Speaking of Left, I resubscribed to Sean Paul Kelly the other day and it's very hard to take. I don't understand why lefties beat the same drums so loudly. I thought about this in consideration of the defense of Ahmadinijad's release of the British captives and bringing up questions of Abu Ghraib. That's astounding enough to merit a piece, but all I'm going to say is that it really didn't matter to me if they were tortured or not or whether we 'brought that upon ourselves', we meaning the Coalition of the Willing. The ROE should have allowed the British warship to sink whatever it was the Iranian kidnappers were driving.. and the blatant act of aggression by the Iranians should have been met with Israeli-like (or greater than that) overwhelming response followed by an immediate stand-down. As Sean Connery said: "That's the Chicago way".  But I mean, this guy on the left is justifying the Iranians based on Mossedegh in 1953, and so are a lot of other people. Incredible.

I just finished "Why I Love Conservatives" by Bruce Fleming and that has been very illuminating even though its a few years old. It gives some indication of the deep structural differences between liberals and conservatives which are very useful tools. I've been talking about modernism in such terms. I think I'm going to take the insights and use them to show why blackfolks are conservative. I know the answer.

As part of my pledge, which I haven't done much of this year owing to being on a plane about 8 of the past 12 Sundays, I'm going to a new never before been to church for Easter. Some joint in Long Beach. Then brunch with the Joneses, and then home to ham. Damn, I forgot to call my mother. Too bad we don't have any sun. I need a new picture of my babies. Speaking of which, I'm going to have to definitely get Boy a new cell phone.

I gave him a good dressing down and pep talk about judgment. We're going to be working on his judgment skills for the next several years. The angle is that he should be able to know exactly what his mother and I would say about every situation, and until he can start saying those things aloud with confidence then he is going to be bound by strict baby-style rules and nagging. He's going to have to internalize our rants and rules until he gets it. Which means the Spousal Unit and I are going to have to synchronize watches a bit more frequently. Still the basic formula is in tact, she handles all of the details, and I handle the big stuff. As they grow, they pass more into my territory of action and control but not until they pass through Mommy Micromanagement do they get to the Big Daddy School of Hard Ass Pragmatism. Hopefully we'll shepherd them into Cobbian Wisdom, but that's after college.

I took Boy to see 300 last weekend and I have to admit it is less than half the movie it was the second time around. It just loses all form and shape when you're not eyeballing it for the first time. It seems every bit as cartoonish as humorless critics accused it of being. Speaking of humorless left critics, I believe that for some of them this image was in the backs of their pointy heads, some Nazi art by Arno Brecker. Fortunately that episode was at the end of the day at the Point Mugu Air Show which was a huge success and entertaining as all get out. I took a huge number of photos and video but since Cotton was on my mind, I never wrote the appropriate piece. Bottom line on that, there is nothing so amazing as watching an F-22 Raptor do a high G turn at just the angle away from the stands so that the jet wash hits you in the crowd.

Otherwise, things are cool. I have appropriated two bass lines from George Clinton and am basking in the peaceful feeling of playing along to two of the greatest funk anthems of all time. Oh no, not the Moose!

Harold & Belle

2920 Jefferson Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90018
(323) 735-9023

Harold & Belle's is basically the bomb old school New Orleans joint of Los Angeles.

I grew up down the street from this restaruarnt and I remember when they first opened. They are just off of 10th Avenue on Jefferson. Let me give you a little history. Up until the mid 80s, this part of Jefferson Boulevard still had trolley tracks in the street. They never came over to this part of town to dig them up and fix the street. And just past 10th Avenue was the end of the trolley line headed West. So the trolley would turn around making a left turn just past 10th Ave. The RTD inherited this property and buses still stop at 10th. Right next door to that is Johnson's Barber Shop, but more about that another time.

Harold & Belle got one or two hype reviews in the LATimes in the late 80s and then they exploded. The restaurant itself is very simple, the food is perfect. I'm telling you this so you know, my family on my mothers side is French & Indian Creole from a certain part of New Orleans where that makes all the difference. It still does if you appreciate original New Orleans jazz and Creole cooking. And of course if you ever had (no you didn't, sorry) my Anna Maux's gumbo, you'd know what I know about real good eats. Where dem folks be making groceries. I know of what I speak. Harold and Belle's excels by those standards. And now that many great chefs have been displaced by Katrina, you ain't gonna get this stuff just anywhere.

They used to have a live Jazz band come in on Friday's for happy hour and you could get a bucket of crawdads and sit five feet from them having a good old time. The oysters were the freshest and you could practically taste the bayou in them. It's been a while since I've been around old Harold and Belle's but I know it's still a very popular joint.

In fact, the last time I went to my barber, Nicky he told me our old pal Zeus got his car stolen there, not long ago. That's kind of funny considering Zeus, you know the big wrestler, Tiny Lister? That Zeus. Yeah the neighborhood's crusty but unless you're driving a big fancy Hollywood kind of car, you don't have anything to worry about. They do have a private parking lot. I think Harold & Belle will always be there, but I'm going to get down there again before too much time passes. I can't remember the last time I had great jumbalaya.

Gatorade

Not If but How

This is the substantial critique I have of GW Bush's prosecution of the GWOT.

The President’s indignation might resonate more loudly with the American people if it were not so heavily laden with hypocrisy. Shall we call to mind that for six years Bush and his senior cohorts rode roughshod over the best advice of their military commanders.

Read the whole thing.

New Panda Buffet

5120 Rodeo Rd
Los Angeles, CA 90016
(323) 291-5555

"New Panda Buffet is one of my kids' favorite joints, and any time we go to Grandfather's house in that neck of the woods, they beg me to go.

This is my old stomping grounds and I remember that this building was the first black owned and operated Sizzler Restaurant franchise on the West Coast. Man we were proud to go to Sizzler and get that fat toast. That was then.

Today, Asians run the joint swiftly and efficiently and pack them in every day. If you're headed in on the weekend, be prepared to wait a little while or get there just before the brunch rush on Sunday. The wait is not bad, maybe 15 minutes, but once you get inside and start smelling all that food, you get itchy to get a table.

New Panda is really your standard buffet. Well that is if you are accustomed to the kind you find in NYC in midtown. I'm not talking about Hometown Buffet or the kind you find in Georgia. I'm talking about sashimi and maki, cold shrimp, chow mein, broiled salmon, fried chicken, char shu pork, big chunks of all kinds of melon, fresh pineapple, corn nibblets, chinese style BBQ ribs, potato salad, jello, everything fried rice, short ribs, whitefish, fried catfish... man I'm drooling just talking about it. So actually it's got more than your standard NYC buffet. It's right at the edge of a large strip mall near the old Baldwin Theatre so there's plenty of parking in the huge lot, but you may have to walk a bit.

Of course it's all you can eat, so you best believe that you're going to find some world champion eaters in this joint, so you'll need to move aside when they walk by. It's a good deal if your kids are under 10, and if I remember correctly they have 3 price ranges by age.

It's a loud happy family place and on Sunday it's pure chaotic pandemonium. You get a table and the waiter gets you a fork and a tall cup. You tell him what you want to drink and then you're off. There are something like three or four hot bars and a huge cold bar. So you're off to get a plate and pile on. But don't pile too much because they don't like throwing away food, and they won't take your plate until it's empty. Then you're free to go get another and another. That's the best way to do it, even if it means you take four trips. But at least that way, the waiter will be happy to take away your empty plates and refresh your drink.

I guarantee that you will wobble out of New Panda Buffet very happy. Bring your biggest appetite. You won't be disappointed."

Monetizing Carbon

Once upon a time I listened to a radio program on NPR or Pacifica that went further than any other I've heard before or since to describe the aim of 'sustainability'.  The big idea was that in order to improve the environment all we have to do is change the way we account for the byproducts of industrial production. That literally means attaching dollar figures to the smoke that goes up the stack. It means changing the asset value of a forested acre of land vs a deforested acre of land. It means taxes and credits for tons of sulfur dioxide emitted per year. It means monetizing the environment. I thought it was brilliant.

These days, the global warming activists are at it again and their battle cry is Carbon! What they will find in their intemperate war is that those targets of their ire, Big Oil, Big Lumber, Big Corporation X, are not perfect accountants, but they are smarter than they are portrayed to be. Any CFO worth his stock options knows how to run the numbers, and what is fudge and what is fact is a wide gray area known to few. If you know exactly how Enron was dangerous, it is because you understand how difficult it is to crack open the accounting practices of a successful business. It's even more difficult when the business model is relatively innovative or novel. This will always be the case as carbon or any environmental asset is newly established as a balance sheet asset or liability.

Let's take a simplified view. Your knucklehead son's job is to mow the lawn. But you've decided to take an environmental interest in your lawn. You don't see enough butterflies in your flowerbed and you do a bit of ecological studying. You find that butterflies need flowers with larger leaves which requires more nitrogen in the soil which requires artificial fertilizers or mulch. Naturally, you take mulch. So how do you  incent your lazy boy to make a compost heap and mulch your garden? You monetize the grass clippings. Now instead of paying him $10 to mow the lawn rake the clippings and throw them away, you pay him $7 for the mowing and $3 per bag of clippings delivered to the compost heap. Since a bag of fertilizer costs $5 you figure you're being environmentally friendly and saving money too. Everybody's happy.

Now you know your knucklehead son better than anybody. Tell me how he cheats. Use your imagination and his. If your son is very honest, then think about Huck Finn. If I was the knucklehead son, I'd argue that more clippings are more valuable. I wouldn't rake the clippings on the lawn, I'd get free clippings from the kid next door whose parents could care less about compost and butterflies and industrial fertilizers and sell them in the compost market you have established.

Back in the real world, I want you to imagine a new cluster of multinational corporations 20 years in the future. Environmentalists have successfully lobbied to have all greenhouse gases monetized. Now not only all of the planet's oil, but all the planet's air is a valuable natural resource whose refinement and recycling is a large part of the global economy. We now know exactly how much proven resource there is. We now exactly what contributes to the composition of the breathable atmosphere. We now know exactly how pollutants travel through the atmosphere, how to collect them and remove them. We now know the dangers of cutting down trees and the economy of the paper industry has been turned on its head in subservience to the air industry. That's right, air industry.

If you hate Big Oil, how are you going to fight Big Air?

I don't know if pandora's box is half open or half closed. The idea that we could and should regulate greenhouse gases inevitably means that we are putting a price on air, and that will inevitably spawn an economy. Can we avoid such a future? I hope so.

Latigo Flint: Dead or Alive?

Not long ago I meditated on the death of the blog and character of Latigo Flint. I was attempting to make a point about metaphorical and artistic suicides. It is clear to me now via several emails that folks took my words more literally.

I CANNOT CONFIRM THAT THE ACTUAL PERSON WHO CREATED THE LATIGO FLINT BLOG IS ALIVE OR DEAD.

I have received no news about the author and only know him through the blog and personna of Latigo Flint. I have come to learn that his first name is Brian. If anyone out here in LA knows the real Latigo Flint, please let us know that he is OK. Anonymity will be preserved etc. If anyone knows his full real name, I would gladly make inquiries to the authorities.

I very much know the feeling of regret and sorrow about suicides. I have experienced it myself and I recognize that tone in the most recent email. Let us remain optimistic that Brian has merely gotten bored with blogging and is going about his life in healthy spirits.

I apologize to anyone I have misled and I will try to be more precise with my metaphors in the future and leave no question as to whether I am speaking of a person or a work of art.

UPDATE: I CAN CONFIRM THAT THE AUTHOR OF LATIGO FLINT IS ALIVE AND WELL.

Cotton Update

I cut a video to get the entire blurt out of my system, but I suspect this thing isn't over. Still, it pretty much sums up everything I've bothered to think about this.

There's really nothing new in this that I haven't said or implied except for two or three things.

#1. The 58 year old is ethically responsible for what happened to Cotton. I've been speaking about her broadly as part of the school, but something tells me that there was a discussion between her and some other folks about what charges would be brought against Cotton. The fault lies broadly with the community for washing their hands of her and letting her get into the system, but as the victim, it is her desire for justice that may have been overzealous or politically motivated. I have a choice of victims to blame, I blame the ones I think should be most responsible.

#2. Who's jumping on board the political case? Anyone in the Texas Legislature? Has the DOJ assigned some US Attorney, or have they been fired too? What's the venue?

#3. Who's jumping on board the appellate case? Where's Barry Scheck? Who's putting forth money for a legal defense fund? It's far too easy to say that 'Superville is racist' and just leave it at that. Some heavyweight is going to have prove it and smack him down on appeal. The governor should pardon her.

There are a couple things I neglected to say which I should have re-emphasized in the video.

#1. The cases for the Coalition of the Damned were Tookie Williams, Stanley Miller and Devin Brown. You could add Mumia Abu Jamal, MOVE and Seas of David to that list, and peripherally various victims of obvious police abuse, like Amadou Diallo & Rodney King.

#2. There exists the possibility that Cotton's insistence on innocence implies a tacit rejection of any offer of probation. This could be linked to the federal case, or just an insistence on a jury vindication.

There are some mistakes and omissions:

The Coalition of the Damned is a subset of the Progressives and Liberal black politics. I don't mean to imply that Progressives and Liberals are fundamentally anti-cop, and anti-System. Nor do I mean to imply that Liberals and Progressives are wrong to join with the Coalition when the System needs reform.

Finally there are things I don't feel comfortable saying on video that I prefer to write about.

That fundamentally is around issues like the situational ethics of living in a relatively racist, impoverished or dangerous area. On the one hand you can't blame people for living in Paris Texas, and of course everyone has to take a stand for justice wherever they live. But African Americans live in other states besides former slave states for good reasons. I wrote similarly about Katrina in the pieces What's Broke Stays Broke and Derbigny.  My general attitude is rather harsh on the matter, only because I try not to second guess people. So I only assume that when bad things happen to people and they blame the environment, it's not as if the environment snuck up on them while they weren't looking.

Other than that, I expect that the video makes it clear, if my writing does not, that I consider this a failure and a tragedy, that I am perfectly willing to believe that Shaquanda is as good as people make her out to be and that even if she wasn't that the school and community should have handled her and protected her to the best of its ability. I hope it also makes it clear that I expect prosecutors to prosecute and judges to judge and that when 370K defendants get into the System, I expect the System to do what it does.

Additionally, to the extent that there are some who will consider this moment of inflection the 'birth of the blackosphere'... well I'm rather of the same sadness I expressed over the exploitation of Devin Brown's dead body. I still insist that it is just plain wrong to make political symbols of children whether that child be Megan Kanka or that murdered kid in Colorado. It's shameful.

That's pretty much all I have to say on the matter, for now.

Pardon Me

Academic Weight for the Blackosphere

Antoinette Pole's disciplined research is getting publicity, apparently places where it matters. Here's the abstract on her paper.

This paper explores the role of black bloggers in the blogosphere. Among the top political blogs, blogging has primarily been undertaken by white men, coined by Chris Nolan as the "Big Boys Club." This research assesses how bloggers of color use their blogs for purposes related to politics, and it investigates whether the blogosphere facilitates political participation.

The data for this paper are based on in-depth interviews with 20 black bloggers conducted in November 2005. Primarily exploratory, this paper examines the issues and topics discussed by bloggers of color, and whether and how bloggers are using their blogs to engage in political participation. In addition this research attempts to assess whether black bloggers face discrimination in the blogosphere. Findings from this research suggest that black bloggers do in fact use their blogs to encourage their readers to engage in various forms of political participation. Finally, the data also show that bloggers reported that they do not feel discriminated against or excluded by other bloggers.

Notable joints:

• The International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society
• Brown University
• Andy Wibbels

What Hostage Crisis?

It's a Free Country, But Damn!

My Jewish friend in Conservatism, Erroll Phillips passed this one along. I just have to shake my head in sorrow when I see this kind of crap. Then when I see how self-righteous these people are it actually gets scary. Related to this, another good friend whom I don't often see introduced me into a situation which I have to say was one of the most frightening experiences of my life. It was a Scientology convention and we slipped in as 'reporters'.

Long story short. I think I know the feeling when people marching and chanting BS slogans can send a chill down your spine and then you realize that you're surrounded by dangerous fools.

Rosie O'Donnell: Nutcase

So maybe I'm on the late freight and way behind the front lines of the Conservative Reactionary Force, but I just found out today that Rosie O'Donnell has used her TV talk show to expound on the theory that WTC 7 was demolished with explosives.

Think, people, think.

One of these days people are going to look back at broadcast television and ask producers what they were thinking. I don't happen to be one of those social conservatives who believe that absent a moral reckoning that America is going to hell in a handbasket, but I do expect that broadcast media take some responsibility for keeping a lid on wackiness. I mean on one hand, sensible people are going to take the source into consideration. It's Rosie, what are you gonna do? On the other hand, the same thing needs to be said about Snoop Dogg, and network TV execs need to think about what pollution they're creating.

Anyway, I've gone through the trouble to get the real deal from Popular Mechanics. 

WTC 7 Collapse
CLAIM: Seven hours after the two towers fell, the 47-story WTC 7 collapsed. According to 911review.org: "The video clearly shows that it was not a collapse subsequent to a fire, but rather a controlled demolition: amongst the Internet investigators, the jury is in on this one."

FACT: Many conspiracy theorists point to FEMA's preliminary report, which said there was relatively light damage to WTC 7 prior to its collapse. With the benefit of more time and resources, NIST researchers now support the working hypothesis that WTC 7 was far more compromised by falling debris than the FEMA report indicated. "The most important thing we found was that there was, in fact, physical damage to the south face of building 7," NIST's Sunder tells PM. "On about a third of the face to the center and to the bottom--approximately 10 stories--about 25 percent of the depth of the building was scooped out." NIST also discovered previously undocumented damage to WTC 7's upper stories and its southwest corner.

NIST investigators believe a combination of intense fire and severe structural damage contributed to the collapse, though assigning the exact proportion requires more research. But NIST's analysis suggests the fall of WTC 7 was an example of "progressive collapse," a process in which the failure of parts of a structure ultimately creates strains that cause the entire building to come down. Videos of the fall of WTC 7 show cracks, or "kinks," in the building's facade just before the two penthouses disappeared into the structure, one after the other. The entire building fell in on itself, with the slumping east side of the structure pulling down the west side in a diagonal collapse.

According to NIST, there was one primary reason for the building's failure: In an unusual design, the columns near the visible kinks were carrying exceptionally large loads, roughly 2000 sq. ft. of floor area for each floor. "What our preliminary analysis has shown is that if you take out just one column on one of the lower floors," Sunder notes, "it could cause a vertical progression of collapse so that the entire section comes down."

There are two other possible contributing factors still under investigation: First, trusses on the fifth and seventh floors were designed to transfer loads from one set of columns to another. With columns on the south face apparently damaged, high stresses would likely have been communicated to columns on the building's other faces, thereby exceeding their load-bearing capacities.

Second, a fifth-floor fire burned for up to 7 hours. "There was no firefighting in WTC 7," Sunder says. Investigators believe the fire was fed by tanks of diesel fuel that many tenants used to run emergency generators. Most tanks throughout the building were fairly small, but a generator on the fifth floor was connected to a large tank in the basement via a pressurized line. Says Sunder: "Our current working hypothesis is that this pressurized line was supplying fuel [to the fire] for a long period of time."

WTC 7 might have withstood the physical damage it received, or the fire that burned for hours, but those combined factors--along with the building's unusual construction--were enough to set off the chain-reaction collapse.

I'm not going to do anything silly like join a consumer boycott of the companies that sponsor Rosie's show. But she does get the verbal bat. Some people think she's entertaining... Whatever to that.

Cali Goes For Clinton

According to TownHall and the Field organization:

THE RACE: The presidential race for Democrats in California.

THE NUMBERS - DEMOCRATS

Hillary Clinton 41 percent

Barack Obama 28 percent

John Edwards 13 percent

(all other candidates below 5 percent)

___

The Field poll was conducted March 20-31. For the Democratic candidates, 417 voters who say they are likely to vote in the Democratic primary in California were asked their preference to win the Democratic nomination. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 5 points.

OF INTEREST: When Al Gore is added to the field, Clinton gets 31 percent, Gore gets 25 percent, Obama gets 21 percent and Edwards gets 8 percent.

Clinton gets the strongest support among Hispanics, older voters, those with less education and those in Los Angeles County. Obama does well among young voters. Edwards did better among voters in Northern California than Southern California.

Now that's a damned shame. Obama gets less than Gore and Gore's not even running. But I can vouch for the youth vote turning out for Obama. I think he's got a lock on the new media. He's doing a very good job on that.

My brother Deet held an Obama party at his crib this past weekend and raised some dollars for Barack. If I remember correctly, there was a webcast of some sort associated with the fund raising. So the Obama campaign most definitely gets the power of the net and that of distributed networks. He's going to be very strong in '12.

A Stunning Amount of Reality

Barry McCaffrey seems to be the bearer of hard news. He always seems to be in the middle of some controversy, but that's the kind of person you want at the War College. I got this letter from Michael Yon. This is about as real as it gets.

Naturally 7

I haven't been excited by an R&B group in many years. Well 2 years ago to tell the honest truth I was lightly moved by Usher and I'm glad he blew up. I think he's kept head, but I haven't been checking. Evidently, these brothers are hanging out in Europe. Their new album 'Ready II Fly' can be sampled at their website which is running out of Germany.

What do they sound like? They sound like a combination of Boyz II Men, Take Six and what every R&B hiphop group has really not had enough talent to do. If you can, imagine a grown-up Blackstreet with the same kind of groove, better voices, smarter lyrics and none of the immaturity. All of their cuts, except this one obviously, appear to be originals with no sampling. The album is a great mix of styles, and they don't get bogged down with any kind of hook here. They're not trying to be, they are. And they're grown too, thank God.

Any one of their cuts can blow up. Take your pick. Chances are it will be the remake of Phil Collins, it's what they need. The new album is available at Amazon as an import, the world is about to wake up with any luck. It's too bad I'm broke until Friday, chances are they'll be gone (Amazon only has three copies left). This group's video is viral and I got it on the Kwaku Network this morning. If you've seen that idiot overexposed kid on the Verizon commercial, this is what should in his place.

This is music you can actually listen to instead of just groove to on MTV. Here's to a last breath of hope from NYC by way of France & Germany.

Juvenile Felony Defendants

I did find an extroardinary document which relates directly to the reasonableness of the sentence recieved by Shaquanda Cotton from Judge Chuck Superville. Apparently she's not so unusual. Read the whole thing of course.

Download JuvenileFelonyDefendants.pdf

Here are some interesting tidbits:

• An estimated 24% of the 370,000 sampled defendants in juvenile courts in the Nation's 75 largest counties from 1990, 1992 and 1994 were referred for violent offenses, 46% for property offenses, about 18% for public order offenses, and 13% for drug-related offenses.
• More than half (55%) of the juvenile defendants formally processed in juvenile courts in the Nation's 75 largest counties were adjudicated delinquent .
• Among juvenile defendants adjudicated delinquent, 40% received a disposition of residential placement and 50% received formal probation.

Of juveniles sentenced to prison for violent offenses
7% were sentenced to 2 years or less
43% from 2+ to 6
26% from 6+ to 10
22% >10, 2% get Life

I can't tell if that 'prison' includes juvenile residential placement or if that only applies to juveniles who are tried as adults. Anyway. I think that the statistics show that Superville was not out of bounds. As Slick Rick might say, this type of shit happens every day.

Extreme Stunts vs Regular Patrols

The Public Trust: Rights and Responsibilities

The direct matters of the Cotton case, now blowing over (with any luck) brings us to a very interesting set of questions which make it a fascinating jump-off point for black politics. The way I'd like to see it is Civil Rights vs Black Power, but it quickly gets more complicated than that.

The basic starting question for me is how should blackfolks comport their attitudes towards the public sector?

I once explained the near monopoly of blacks on the left in the following way. Blackfolks want everything white Americans get, and it is trivially easy to demonstrate that among the things they have historically not gotten is equal access to all the pork and benefits of government services. So it should not come as a surprise to anyone that when blacks rights to vote were assured they would vote themselves largess in any way possible. Secondly, it has been an operating condition of a great deal of thinking about black empowerment that blacks were going to be the only people who were going to satisfy black political needs. There was just too much distance and difference between black and white communities for whites to adequately represent black political interests. So this reinforced not only nose counting by color, but 'black enough' questions, and the entire premise behind majority minority voting districts.

It is patently obvious to me that a great deal has changed since the above assumptions took root in the newly voting black electorate, and that a lot of black politics needs rethinking. Clearly as a Republican and Hayekian Conservative I've come to some different conclusions about the best interests of blackfolks, but of course it's not just me. But that doesn't change the fact that a plurality of blackfolks believe that it is in their best interest to have an entirely unique view of America and thus their politics must reflect this uniqueness. My observation is that most of this unique view has more to do with historical conditions rather than contemporary ones. You are much more likely to hear 'legacy of slavery' and '400 years of oppression' in justification for an alternate politics than something arranged around a desired future. But politics being politics, I don't second guess reasons and wherefores. People have every right to believe what they wish about America and their place in it, and they should arrange their political priorities accordingly. Despite this habit of looking back (among other habits like always counting noses by race, and always comparing black & white) it should be therefore self-evident that 'black politics' doesn't converge. That the 19th century terms of 'crabs in a barrel' and 'Uncle Tom' still have currency is more than enough proof.

Spence tags me indirectly with the following, and to a certain extent he's right. Politics is attitude. It's my first question. 

Our rights as citizens are not based on our behavior.

Within black space the biggest problem we face is neo-accommodationism. A newer version of the ideological framework that guided Booker T. Washington and others during the turn of the 20th Century, it is primarily based on the idea that black people can advance their interests gradually by adopting contemporary American norms and practices to perfection. When extra-ordinary politics do take place on behalf of one person, that person’s behavior should be absolutely unassailable according to middle class American norms.

Take the Montgomery Bus Boycott. If you recall, Ms. Parks was not the only woman to refuse to give up her seat. There were several before her. But Ms. Parks was chosen because she had no character flaws that people (black or otherwise) could use against her.

All the talk about whether Ms. Cotton was “really innocent” wasn’t based on her actual record as much as it was on putting forth the idea that she was a bad-ass kid who deserved what she got. And as soon as this bad-ass kid label is applied, the discussion moves away from systemic issues, and to more personal issues (like whether Ms. Cotton’s mom is raising her right). We’ve got to fight this rhetorical move whenever we see it, because at best it demonizes working class black men and women, and at worst it renders us incapable of advancing progressive political interests.

 

Not for nothing would Spence evoke the test case of Rosa Parks. You could certainly throw in Homer Plessy into the mix. So related directly to this question is whether or not Shaquanda Cotton should be considered a political prisoner?

What I cannot get over is the idea that a family that has decided to have their child educated in a public school wouldn't do everything in their power to make that the locus of positive interaction. If you have a political battle with a school system, is it wise to keep your child in that school? If you absolutely have no choice in the matter, and you cannot find peace with the school, you're in a bad situation. Is there some advice other than what we would expect Dave Chapelle to say (When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong)? What has been assumed here and not demonstrated to my satisfaction is that there is a systemic abuse in the public schools of Paris Texas and it has become a shortcut to juvenile hall for minor infractions on a racial basis. Rather, everything about the Cotton case seems to be exceptional.

It is not our sympathy for working class blackfolks that should be in question, rather our sympathy for Shaquanda herself and the institutions that are supposed to protect her. I am of the opinion that for the sake of a bigger political prize, that young Ms. Cotton was forced into a grievous situation that could have been avoided. She had been drafted into a larger game where the risks were great and the rewards were small, if they existed at all.

So have we all in the Kwaku Network.If it weren't for the phrasing of the way this story came to us, most of us, would have blown it off. The difference between 'seven years in prison' and 'minimum of one year in juvenile hall' is the difference that makes this story large. I think a lot of self-congratulation is in order, kinda. But we were a year late, which begs a lot of questions about the ways in which we were made aware of this matter. As a grass-roots network, we're extraordinarily faulty.

So now I'm going to preach.

At every turn, African Americans who claim distinct goals from those of the political mainstream and majority are going to have to make very precise choices about the quality and nature of alternative types of representation they accept and champion. The choice between King and X is easy. In America you choose King. In Mauritania you choose X. The ability for blackfolks to launch and maintain separate institutions is difficult enough but to expect them to triumph in legitimate conflicts with the mainstream is extraordinarily tough. This is not a small country. This is America.

Challenging the morals and ethics of our public institutions is our duties and we should never shirk our responsibilities of guarding the integrity of ourselves and our communities. Sometimes that requires conflict. Every battle requires sacrifice, and this one has been no different. What do we stand to gain as we move forward?

Cotton has lost a year of school, innocence and the protective anonymity of childhood. God help her if her story goes to television. But to say that there is a greater good to come of all this is to accept that sacrifice. Yes, I'm going to get some blog traffic from talking about this. Yes, Cotton will become a talking point among talking heads. I don't like that, and quite frankly I would have been a lot more comfortable not making an example of her or her mother or of Paris Texas' public institutions and community groups. Somehow I just don't think it's worth it. In a way it's like the Sgt Tillman story. No good can come from making an example here.

I'll still talk about it, but I don't like to. I cannot join the stretch to make this politically significant in anything but abstract terms.

Torture & The Need to Know

Part of the reason I think the question of torture is so important is because our culture wants to know.

I'm imagining a scenario presented in 24, in which the (vice)President has threatened a nuclear strike against another country suspected of carrying out one on American soil. As far as the President is concerned, one nation is responsible and they must be punished. However the counter-terrorists in the the (heroic) CTU squad is chasing down leads by any means necessary so that they can <em>prove</em> one way or another that certain parties are innocent or guilty. It could be another country that's actually behind the attacks.

Is the President justified in lashing out (ignore the nukes for the example) and killing in a retaliatory strike if it can never be definitely proven by confession extracted by tickle or torture? The value of tortuous interrogation is the value of knowing. It seems to me that if we didn't care about knowing and proving then we could strike militarily with a preponderance of evidence rather than absolute certainty...

This brings up an interesting conundrum for those who oppose Iraq because we didn't absolutely know about WMD. Would they have had Hans Blix torture Iraqi scientists to prove there were no WMD instead of have the entire war in Iraq? Would they have him do the same in Iran today to get the absolute truth about Iranian uranium enrichment?

This absolute need to know and absolute prohibitions on torture are servants of absolute certainty. In the end, given that we are human, it's absolute folly.

New Century Kicks the Bucket

I can't find a newspaper anywhere today that doesn't have a story about New Century's bankruptcy, but I can't find one story anywhere that tells me exactly where I would send my next mortgage payment if I was with New Century. Perhaps it's too early to tell, but there is one very significant thing I've learned and that is how big New Century was in relation to another program I've known and recommended, NACA.

NACA came about as a negotiated settlement between Bank of America and a shrewd consumer advocate by the name of Bruce Marks.

The Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America (NACA) is a non-profit community advocacy and housing services organization. NACA’s confrontational community organizing and revolutionary mortgage program have set the national standard for effective neighborhood stabilization programs that make homeownership a reality for working families.

NACA began in 1988 in Boston as the Union Neighborhood Assistance Corporation (UNAC). NACA has been the driving force behind the research, exposure of, and battles against predatory lenders and discriminatory lending practices that destabilize communities and devastate families.

In 1994, a four-and-a-half year advocacy campaign by NACA culminated with Fleet Bank committing $8.5 billion to community lending, paying hundreds of millions of dollars to settle lawsuits, and launching a revolutionary mortgage product with NACA. These victories enabled NACA to fulfill the dreams of thousands of people who had thought homeownership impossible.

NACA continued its campaigns against predatory and discriminatory lenders. These campaigns led First Union, Barnett Bank, Riggs Bank and others to make major community lending commitments and participate in the NACA program. After a four-year campaign, Associates Financial, the country’s largest finance company, also joined this long list.

Other lenders such as Bank of America (previously NationsBank) and BankBoston saw NACA’s product, process, and superior performance as an excellent opportunity to expand their market and serve working people. They created partnerships with NACA that give them access to customers they never would have reached.

OK a quick moment of truth. According to the LAT:

New Century originated $51.6 billion in mortgages last year. At the start of this year it had 7,200 employees in 216 sales offices in 35 states, funding loans primarily through independent mortgage brokers and also through Home 123, a direct-to-consumer business.

Now if there is anything whatsoever to the claim that the subprime market was predatory, Bruce Marks is going to be all on top of that. Clearly the legal precedent exists to show that enough of a problem existed to fund the whole of NACA through lawsuits. But unless and until Marks can figure out a way to capitalize on the current situation, the best friend of the folks needing subprime just kicked the bucket.

CNBC has been obsessing over this story for several weeks. They read the writing on the wall. So let's see what the political fallout is going to be. Anybody who starts ranting about corrupt executives is just blathering. Nobody loses 50 million bucks in personal fortunes without feeling pain. Nobody who has to layoff thousands of people feels no pain.

I think that clearly, the days of 100% financing on jumbo loans is over, and probably all 100% financing is dead. So all the folks that got in, nice going. The other thing to keep in mind is that these subprimes are a relatively new market, and if people are going on a headhunting expedition to make some socialist points, they are only going to ruin it for potential subprime customers in the future. What I'm saying is that if some Congresscritter decides they need a Michael Milken for the ages in the subprime business and start a campaign of demonization and regulation, then all of the companies who might have gone for New Century's business and done a better job are going to stay at arms length. Congress needs to keep it's nose out of this and let the market correct itself. Again, nobody knows the subprime market very well, this is the first big down cycle, and naturally it takes its toll. But there are lessons to be learned from New Century, and they shouldn't be, never make subprime loans again.