Cobb

The Only Thing That Needs To Be Said About Katrina

You're on your own. Spook86 reports:

But, as Larry Kudlow points out in a column at RealClearPolitics, there is an unreported story from Hurricane Katrina that cuts to the heart of the recovery effort. How much, he asks, has the federal government spent on New Orleans and the Gulf Region since the storm?

The total (so far) is $127 billion, including tax relief.  Put another way, the federal largess is enough to write a $425,000 check for the 300,000 people left in New Orleans.  Perhaps, as Mr. Kudlow suggests, we'd be better off in using that approach. A White House "fact sheet" details $50 billion spent for rebuilding schools, levees and other infrastructure; that total also includes $16.7 billion for housing recovery.

What happened to the rest of that money?  Your guess is as good as mine.

Anybody and everybody should now understand what we Conservatives understand. If people had $425K, they would handle their business quite well without the government (or not). But that they have depended on the government and now that tax money which was wasted on bureaucrats and agencies trying to do for other people what cannot be done. That is be the right eyes and ears on the needs of people and make the right decisions on an individual basis.

Short of that, which is all we're ever going to be, one has to wonder how the government can spend that many billions and the effect be totally unrecognized. My guess is that there are politics involved in which people have vested interests in not bothering to look closer (myself included) and spin positive or negative no matter what. I am struck, for example, at how many people are convinced Katrina was a man-made disaster and not an act of god. I am also struck by the consistent arguments that the extent to which the government can or cannot respond to the disaster establishes a benchmark for its willingness to assist blackfolks.

I think 127 Billion in government aid ought to speak for itself. In fact i think it does. In the end, we will all have to agree despite our best intentions, there are some things that people have to be willing and able to do themselves. And guess what. That applies to Iraq as well as New Orleans.

Junior (B-Boy Buana)

American Poverty

From CQ:

Poverty has always been a judgment call, relative to a standard of living that serves as a mean for comparative purposes. In America, the system most often used is the one Rector employs for his study -- a relative comparison naturally based on income. He takes the bottom quintile of households based on income and looks at the living conditions -- and finds that the Dickensian images evoked by the word poverty does not apply in the US, at least in most cases.

The poor in America live in the following conditions:

* 43% of the poor own their homes, and the average home is a three-bedroom house with a garage and 1.5 bathrooms

* Over two-thirds of households have two rooms per occupant, which belies the notion of overcrowding

* 80% of the poor have air conditioning

* Almost 75% own one car; 31% own two or more

* The average living space for the American poor is larger than the average space for all people in Paris, Vienna, and London, among other cities in Europe

Rather than Two Americas, what we find is that the poor resembles the middle class in living standards. Even nutrition appears similar to the middle class. Both groups get more than their daily needs, although the poor report more short-term shortages than the middle class, but only 2% of the poor report that they "often" do not have enough to eat.

That 2% of the bottom 20% of income earning households represent the real poverty in America. It exists, without a doubt, but on a much smaller scale than the political class would lead people to believe. The Census Bureau data shows that the US has successfully implemented an ownership standard based on the liberty of private property, a system that almost everyone in the US can access.

I think I just became Ebenezer Scrooge. Maybe this is the reason for leftist relativism. If it weren't for relative poverty, they wouldn't have anything to talk about.

A Talk With Pops

Now is the time, on the occasion of my father's final retirement, to give props to pops. In every little way. He is an extraordinary, ordinary man, whose abstractions continue to amaze and delight me. He dropped by last night and as is more or less usual, we got to jawjacking about life. The Spousal Unit piped up towards the end, and although I kept insisting on raising my points, you can tell why I love and need her so much.

Download a_talk_with_pops.mp3

Pride

If I had grown up in the Philly ghetto, Pride, the film now out on DVD starring Terrence Howard and Bernie Mac, would have taken me way back. Instead it turned out to be one of those movies that make for a very palatable pseudo-experience appropriate for black middle class parents to watch with their tweens when they want to talk about 'back in the day', rated PG.

This movie reminds me so much of Roll Bounce that I don't know where to begin. So I won't and I'll end it right there.

Yes it's a good movie. Yes it's a predictable movie. Yes it has it's moment. But the formula is worn so thin that I'm not even sure that I should criticize it. What should I expect? Remember the Titans? Quite frankly, I hope every one of the sports integration / coming of age / ghetto vs suburb / based on a true story movie gets made. We got it for football with Titans. We got it for basketball in Glory Road. Every one of these has their twist. So once they're all done and all the Motown royalties are paid for the slow motion montages, we can sit down and truly ask ourselves what we have learned.

The twist and angle of Pride, which pretty much resides on a very direct plot with no interesting subplots whatsoever, is that sometimes it just doesn't work out at all. And that's just fine. 'It' being the ebony and ivory syrupy goodness. That's unusual for upbeat heartwarming stories. But that's what Pride gives us, a movie where the white guys are for the most part, bad guys.

In fact, I did deal with arrogant white preppies in 1974 on the swim team. They were my teammates. They got that vibe basically right, for what it's worth, but this is a pat zero-sum flick that works just with the basics, not the subtleties of interracial conflict and alliance.

Good film, but.

Congressional Reserve Duty?

A number of disengenous claims that all Americans should serve military duty or that the draft should be reinstated have been made by the Left, most notably by Charlie Rangel. I wonder if such Critters might consider their own duties in that regard. This morning over at CQ I read the following (emphasis mine):

Interestingly, Graham is the only serving member of Congress to serve his reserve duty in Iraq. He works in the JAG Corps as an attorney, and he focused on detainee issues and law enforcement during his two-week stay. As part of that effort, he sat in on a trial of two Iraqi policemen accused of siphoning arms to Shi'ite militias, a trial that took place outside of the Green Zone. A car bomb attack occurred nearby during that time, so Graham has had some experience with the realities of Baghdad.

Graham still remains critical of Nouri al-Maliki's leadership, but argues that he's become almost irrelevant to the reforms. The August recess allowed National Assembly members to go home and face their constituents -- who gave them an earful about their lack of progress on reforms. The changes on the ground have provided momentum for the reforms necessary, and Graham says that all Maliki needs to do is get out of their way.

There are some great quotes by Congressman Graham, so do read the whole article, especially as he counters the verbal judo of Senator Warner which has been all over NPR this week. Is there some kind of reserve duty that Congressmen are actually bound to do? I would guess not, but I would like to know which of our elected officials are in the Reserves and what their respective positions are. A great deal has been made of the military cookies of Senator Warner, who is as old as dirt and has been in the Senate since I graduated from college. But what has he actually seen in Iraq? Hmmm.

Farewell Alberto, We Hardly Knew Ye

So the world is rid of Alberto Gonzales thanks to the constant harassment of the bloodthirsty opposition. So this morning on the radio, we were treated to a healthy dose of finding out, in retrospect, what a lovely and brilliant man he was by his defenders.

Me? I hardly gave much attention to Gonzales, and I've never given the witch hunt against his administration any scrutiny. The 'indictment' of Gonzales never much went past 'Gonzales, bad'. At least Republicans had the decency to make crude jokes about Janet Reno. But the humorless bloodlust of the likes of Chuck Schumer in this affair is chilling, and he and his Congressional hit squad have successfully politicized the heretofore entirely boring bureaucracy of the DoJ whose career bureaucrats have been chugging along silently while their bosses boss has been decapitated for no good reason.

You would think that the checks and balances of government would be engaged for better cause than this, but it is clear to me that the while the approval level of the Congress is at 18%, this is really the best they can do. We really need a new Newt Gingrich.

Colossus

Among the perks of my new gig, I've gotten a Linksys IP phone and a new laptop. I haven't figured out where to put the phone, nor do I even know the number yet, but I have named my laptop Colossus.

It's a Lenovo T60 Think Pad, the sweetest portable machine I've ever had. What's stunning about that is that it's actually lighter than the T41 (Caruso) that it's replacing. This one's got the wide aspect ratio screen, 1680 x 1050 a dual core 2GHz chip and 1GB of RAM. That sounds a little bit underpowered by my lights, but HA, I don't code any longer, buster! All I have to do is play iTunes, and work Office 2007. With 100GB of disk, I'm not going to have to lug around an external USB drive any more either. Whoohoo!

The battery is perfect. I can run the giant for 3 hours which is perfect for a nice fat DVD on the plane. I can even charge my Treo through the USB. I've got three USB 2.0 slots by the way, and that's just lovely. And no, I'm not about to upgrade to Windows Vista.

The more I play with 2K7, the more I like it. Finally a spreadsheet with more than 64K rows! That's what I'm talking about. Since I'm sleeping with the Borg, I've actually bothered to figure out Excel pivot tables. Not bad. Ugly, but not bad at all. The UI is killer, I must confess. Now I am going to try the built-in speech recognition. This should be cool.

One more thing. I got a PCMCIA smart card reader today. What the heck am I supposed to do with that?

Madagascar, But

Hot off the Kwaku Network, a series of romantic slides of various African scenery. This one is of Madagascar. After having watched a season of Man vs Wild, I've been thinking about the Walt Whitmanization of the planet. Why do we think this picture is beautiful? There's nothing there to eat. You cannot sustain any decent sized population under those mountains. My guess is that it would take just as much imported technology and capital to mow down those foothills and fertilize and irrigate farmland as it would to drop a Mickey D's in the same spot. Civilization is where you put it. Ponder a moment about a suitable backstory on the slim European woman who shot this photograph.

Baggy Pants Fashion & The Decline of American Society

Following up at Booker Rising, I noticed the following:

An Atlanta lawmaker and civil libertarians debate a proposal to police pants. The trend of wearing baggy, drooping pants that ride around the thighs - the better to show off a young man’s taste in boxer shorts - is the target of Atlanta City Councilman C.T. Martin. “I don’t think women should have to see that. I don’t think young girls should have to see that. I don’t think children should have to see that,” said Mr. Martin during an interview on the "Today" show.

Inspired by his constituents - particularly teachers - who are tired of looking at other people’s underwear, Mr. Martin has introduced legislation in Atlanta that would outlaw clothing that shows off underwear, be it boxers, thongs, sports bras or even bra straps. Two cities in Louisiana have similar laws providing for fines up to $500 and up to six months in jail, although no one has yet been charged under the laws. “I’m a firm believer in the First Amendment,” said Mr. Martin. “It’s not about putting anyone in jail. It’s about trying to get some educational discussion about the future for young people.”

It's not racial profiling any more than it is racial fashion. Which is to say it's an ambiguity that is entirely subjective. Fortunately, it's a dumb idea. It's just as dumb to defend the wearing of prison clothing as fashion as it is to attempt to criminalize it. I take the trend as yet another example of the failure of multiculturalism and another vote of no confidence in the upper classes of America.

Once upon a time, I lamented in a poem about police. Speaking derisively against middle class morality I wrote that certain poeple always said "There oughta be a law" and half of the time they got one, we're all the worse for it, because every law needs police, and there are already too many things police are doing for us that we ought to feel confident doing for ourselves. While I'm not one of those who complain against the 'prison industrial complex', I certainly recognize overproductions of law and order through the Justice system. But the alternative is exactly what multiculturalists most hate, which is cultural hegemony. Remembering my quote of last week, PC is the mincing language of those who desire physical proximity but not spiritual communion or philosophical synergy. In the wake of Robert Putnam's report on diversity, all is consistent. When people mix but don't assimilate, when you give everybody social license, when the demand is not for Culture but for multicultural eclexia, we must over-rely on laws and police. We must take it all to court, because we refuse to accept being judgmental.

"Who am I to judge?" is the appropriate response to baggy pants fashion only if you have no opinion. Yet I find it difficult to believe that people have no opinion about the appropriateness of wearing droopy pants in order to show off one's drawers. It seems to be one of those things that people either love or hate but cannot ignore. My judgment is that it is simply foolish and a bit degenerate. I've never worn the fashion and since I'm clear about the prison and gang associations, I don't approve. I would also tend to dislike and distrust anyone who did wear that fashion.

Without a strong national culture, we are doomed to PC and fashion police. But our strong national culture has been divided by the politics of war and the foolish overproductions of multiculturalism. it will take some time to mend all that. In the meantime, people are questioning whether or not anything is real, and that is the sad state of much of America today. People are asking if Conservatism is a cult. People are looking towards environmentalism as a religion. From the perspective of many Americans, our national culture doesn't mean beans, and so the thuggish bohemianism of gangsta droopy pants is yet another foolish excrescence accepted into popular culture. All that foolishness should not be against the law. You can legally enforce good taste and good sense. The moment you attempt to, it becomes a contest of witlessness. It's just so sad that so many people are caught up in that nonsense.

I think Fred Thompson understands this. This week he said the following:

"I simply believe that on the present course that we're going to be a weaker, less prosperous, more divided nation than what we have been," Thompson told the crowd in a deep baritone that rarely strayed from an even tone. "I do not say that lightly, but I think it's the truth. And I think the American people are ready for the truth."

There are three major challenges, Thompson said, and none are being given appropriate attention or sufficient commitment. National security ("our country's in danger; it's going to be that way for a long time to come"), the economy ("we are doing steady damage to our economy, that if we don't do things better its going to result in economic disaster for future generations") and the polarization, cynicism and incompetence gripping the capital ("in order to have leadership you got to have somebody who's going to follow; our people follow, but they don't have any confidence in what's being said or who's saying it").

Many conservatives see civil libertarians as corrosive of society. I understand that sentiment. To what degree is an open question. Fred's priorities are correct. So how tightly woven is the third priority to the first two? That is the same degree to which exclexia poisons the strength of the nation.

Bowen Guerilla Film Festival - Camp Version

Deet, Doc, Dutz and I were all together in town tonight and the subject went to movies. We've decided that we're going to grab a laptop, a DLP, some powered speakers and a handball court and throw up some old hilarious new age blaxploitation films. And so like Emmett of the Unblinking Eye, we came up with a list of campy black films that would just keep us busting a gut.

Since I'm me, I only remember my suggestions which were as follows:

CB4
If only for Chris Rock's 'big ass biscuit' scene.

Def By Temptation
Without Kadeem Hardison, it really can't be complete.

Fear of a Black Hat
Without question, this is the most sophisticatedly funny black film ever made. Nothing else even comes close. Well, maybe...

Tales from the Hood
Just classic. When this film broke, I was sure we were on the verge of a new wave of young black cinema. It could've happened.

Sprung
Although I enjoyed flicks like 'A Thin Line Between Love and Hate' and was glad it came out - In fact I think it was a rather landmark romantic comedy - I'm so glad that this one didn't take itself so seriously.

Boomerang
Just has to be there to round out the series, although it's not as campy as the others. It was still hilarious, and probably the very last time Eddie Murphy was funny and good looking in a film.

White Men Can't Jump
Is really a film that I have to believe will hold up over time although I've only seen it once.

Strictly Business, Booty Call, Coming to America
Maybe.

Friday
Most definitely.

and finally, the most underrated and hilarious campy black comedy of the 80s and 90s:
I've Got The Hookup

It's enough to make you think twice about my generation.

Skinny Puppy Break & Krump

This is one of the best break and crump faceoffs I've ever seen on film. When I was a part-time b-boy in 1984, it would have made me incredibly happy to know that hiphop would live on at this level. This is the next generation of hiphop dance, and this I am proud to say it most righteously inherits Old School props. So anybody in the younger generation who who wants to know what those of us close to the original aesthetic were talking about, this is it. Thank you for keeping the real shit real.

Ode To Moe

Once upon a time, there was a joint called Moe Ginsburg. No mo'.

I was just Yelping and thinking about filling in some more information about favorites and quite frankly there aren't many places I've been that excite me when it comes to shopping. Maybe I'm getting old and crusty, but .. there isn't much of a thrill in acquiring bourgeois goods for me. But I do like getting a deal, and when it comes to getting a deal, there were few such dealers as Moe Ginsburg.

I got a dark blue suit at Moe Ginsburg which was the first incarnation of the Hollywood Suit, which has done me solid through the years when I needed to look particularly slick. Combined with a sweet pair of wingtips that I purchased from Haig & Haig in Midtown NY, my Hollywood suit did its duty. Since I consider myself a blended player (the best looking of the smart people or the smartest of the good looking people / the most pointy haired of the tech people or the techiest of the suits ), every once in a while I had to do a complete makeover to effect the proper impression with the proper folks. This is why I like few things as much as suiting up and sitting in architecture discussions that sound as if they should be over my head.

In your 30s, a Moe Ginsburg suit is what you should be wearing, because it indicated that you don't have cash to burn, but you wanted to look the part in NYC, where the shoes you wear mean everything. Growing up in Los Angeles, this was a hard won lesson, but the staff at Moe's made it easy to effect. It would be tremendous to have a Moe Ginsburg out here in LA, but we don't do that stuff any longer. I think it's a shame, despite the fact that I am typing this wearing cargo pants and Sketchers.

These days, it seems like everyone buys and sells 100s. Once upon a time, the staff at Moe's would tell you about threadcounts and why one suit was better than another. They didn't mind taking the time. They loved talking about fabrics and stitching and lining (yes my slacks were lined.. do they even do that any longer?). Ahh memories...

Well, at least Hides in Shape is still around.

Self-Flagellation

From CQ:

The Congressional Black Caucus and Fox News finally surrendered to reality and canceled the presidential debate scheduled for September 23rd. Most of the Democratic candidates refused to attend, claiming that Fox was so biased that they couldn't endorse it by appearing on their network (via Memeorandum):

This is what irrelevance looks like, when you decide that the world is so hostile to your point of view that you shut up.

So That's Bellevue

I'm up in Microsoft territory doing executive things. It's all very familiar.

It turns out that I actually know this neighborhood, and have been here several times before having no idea how close I was to the Microsoft campus, mere blocks as it turns out. In fact, I bought my second favorite sweater at the Sears off 148th a couple years ago. I can still remember snippets of a conversation at the Black Angus around the corner.

Moreover, I'm staying in Bellevue, a city which is an order of magnitude more appealing than Seattle, that is, for the sensibilities of a traveler who cares about such comforts as a modern American city (or malltown) can provide. Starbucks, PF Chang, Wall Street Journal, Hyatt, Wifi. I'm good.

Microsoft itself is it's own universe, but the culture is immediately recognizable. Everybody is IT, and there looks to be masses of middle managers in their 30s. That means that it is a lot like Silicon Valley was.

I'm getting used to having an assistant, which is probably the most marvelous business invention known to man. I may never fill out an expense report again. Excellent., BTW 'Excellent' is my new phrase, consciously like C. Montgomery Burns, my 'hero'. But seriously, this is going to be more fun than I imagined. I've got to renew my passport, I'm heading for the festival in Goa.

More later. jeez, almost no time for blogging...

How to Buy A House

Put 20% down, and spend no more than 1/3 of your gross annual income on the mortgage.

Conservative advice that is roughly 75 years old. You're welcome.

The Only Thing Power Respects

One of the other conversations I had at the church retreat this weekend was about the nature of power. Pops and I were talking about the quality of dissent, which is something that is of vital interest to me. The specific example I used to initiate the discussion was over the example of Mountbatten vs Churchill in the matter of India. Indeed I'm reading Hitchens on Jefferson and while there are interesting enough things to discover about Jefferson himself, the conflicts over directions of the early republic are even more fascinating to me. I suspect that I'll come to understand more about the Federalists vs Anti-Federalists in due time.

Pops' provocation was that power is going to do what it does. At a certain point, he argued, principled dissent becomes meaningless.

It is an interesting question. To what extent can it be said that dissent becomes meaningless in the context of Western capitalism? Do the winners change the system so much that those they opposed never get a chance to have their way? Is the West a winner-take-all construct?

I ask this because I am thinking about the limits of human power and human civilization. That is to say at any particular moment in history, the power available to any group of people is more or less fixed. When one encounters various criticisms of things the West has done, what can be said in most every case is that there was some dissent - some individual or group in power who thought better of the inevitable mistake. We know this through a thorough reading of history, often with multiple perspectives on that history. The very act of recording such decisions for posterity and of our study is a central premise of our civilization. We try to get better, we reform, we are informed by principled dissent. And yet at the same time we will not undo the wars against Native Americans or give back Oklahoma. It is fair to judge us on that basis, but it is not fair to characterize us as if it was indeed manifest destiny that Western Civilization from its design and inception would perpetrate atrocities such as those exemplified by its deepest critics. We would still be the West even if we hadn't won the Wild West. The Enlightenment and other principles of the West would still be had serious moral lapses not taken place.

It seems to me as a black American, that it is the responsibility of the dissenter to remain engaged and effect reform. To walk away from Jim Crow would be to assert that it was the very nature of America and of the West, and that it was inevitable. Only by embodying the hope of overcoming and changing America for the better did those who suffered the indignities of Jim Crow triumph. They did what was required - the established the political will and maintained the broad coalitions necessary to change the nation for the better. This stands as an important example for all of us, which is to be mindful of the majority because without their support, reform is impossible.

Since the time of Public Enemy's days of greatness, I was struck by their rebellion's popularity. While they were saying "fight the powers that be", I always wanted to "be the power that fights". I think this is the proper ambition for those who are emergent in society. You cannot forget where you come from, but to use a family analogy, if you parents beat you it is upon you not to beat your own children. Yet some are so devastated that they refuse to bear children at all. They are the defeated. But the principled dissent comes from those who willingly take the risk and raise their own family properly. And thus it is our burden to rise to the positions of power and Do the Right Thing, instead of cursing power.

The only thing that power respects is power, and rightfully so. And it is only through the pursuit of power that emergent dissenters can come to recognize its corruptions and promise. Those who would narrow their arguments and determine themselves always to be a despised minority will never reach the point at which their principled dissent will matter. It is therefore the responsibility of those in the system to assure the integrity of it, by keeping fast to their own integrity and remaining a vital part of the system. To abandon the system is to abandon it to its worst corruptions. We who dissent, must snatch the flag from usurpers, not burn it in disgust.

To take the flag into one's own hands is patriotic. It is what we should be.

Stern Faces & Chiseled Chins

I just discovered this, exactly how I don't know. But something went click and I remembered that Baldilocks was talking about Devil Dog Poetry. Heh. Guess what? Same thing. Well I want to have it on my website too. Blam. I can't wait to find the transcripted lyrics.

Details: Staff Sgt Lawrence E. Dean II interviewed here.

A New South African Friend

Deacon Lester McKenzie doesn't know it yet, but I think we are going to be good friends. I hope we are at any rate. He's the new priest at St. John's Church, my church of old that I've attended three weeks in a row, this week at the church retreat at Big Bear Lake.

As usual with my attractions to people, there is an ulterior motive which can be traced to a question I am uncomfortable theorizing in complete confidence by myself. I need the experience of other people to give weight or devastate my preliminary conclusions. Through this weekend's convergence of events my question is about the matter of moral reckoning. So first let me tell you the story that gives this priority.

On the way to the lake, I listened to Offramp on NPR. The story "Dad's in Jail" began about the School of the Americas, and how it was complicit in the murder of several clergy in a South American (or Central American) nation. The vague parameters of this story is familiar to all of us from the 80s. It is why we made so much noise over the Contras. The School of the Americas is where our military advisors train allies in special forces operations and such, and gave us people like Manuel Noriega. As I have said at least a dozen times here, and now once more to underscore the point, all of the horrors we were indirectly responsible for including, if applicable, the murder of those nuns, has been repudiated by GWBush. Never send a proxy to do an American military job.

So the Dad of this story full of moral outrage about these murders decided to cross the line and stand to be arrested trying to close down the School of the Americas. This Dad was about 70, he was, I believe, a teacher and obviously his son a professional journalist. And, convicted of a misdemeanor for tresspassing, was sentenced to serve 2 months in a minimum security Federal prison here in LA County.

It's a quaint little story about moral outrage with a beginning, middle and end. The end being that a precious lesson about conscience was applied to us in the radio audience, me while I was driving 80 MPH in my BMW headed to a weekend campout by a lake. Of course Dad had to learn some prison etiquette, he got his shirts ironed in trade for some Snickers, and released on time and unharmed to his son, earned greater respect - his civil disobedience badge of courage, time at Club Fed.

I could not be impressed by this. I wonder if you caught that in my tone. But is this not the measure of our dissent? Have any of us sacrificed even this much over a murder? What good is my blogging, or your reading my blogging when it comes down to the quality of our dissent? Indeed of what value is our moral reckoning at all?

Needless to say, Dad would have never turned himself into the authorities of the country where nuns get shot. That Americans have the luxury of not having all of their assets confiscated and can pretty much pick up their retirement where they left off after a stint in jail, well, it doesn't get much more civilized than that does it? Let us recall the context of an Iraqi interpreter just for kicks. Or not. Let's get back to Big Bear.

It turns out that the Deacon and I have a lot in common superficially. We are both middle aged black men, he a bit younger than I, both Episcopalians. We both love Los Angeles. He says "It's just like Capetown only 10 times bigger." We both began our careers in IT, we're interested in the online presence of St. John's. We both love music by Ladysmith Black Mombazu and at various times in our lives done road biking, body surfing and capoeira.  We sat up in front of the dying fire last night revealing these things to each other one sleepy sentence after another.  I think that I will find that there are deeper similarities between us as well, at least I'm hoping so.  He spoke about the chaos of 1986 when I mentioned that was about the first time we heard LBM here in the States.  It wasn't time to go there, but inevitably I will.

And so in the context of all of the moral analysis I do at Cobb, for what it's worth (and I've been reading Hitchens on Jefferson with my daughter - the power of words can be immense), I wonder what strength our moral reckoning has. Are we exercising liberties that are meaningless in the face of the suffering that goes on in this world? Are our best efforts at making moral stands merely pithy exercises of privilege? How does one from the Apartheid era of South Africa take our moral actions? Why indeed would he come here of all places to serve as a priest?

At this morning's service I offered up a prayer in public for those who do not have heroes, for the undefended, for those who suffer anonymously or off the record. Because I know that Iraqis have defenders, the finest our nation can afford. Not military advisors working through proxies who might murder men and women of the cloth, but our own sworn officers and their dedicated charges fighting in the name of the sort of liberty we would wish upon Iraqis, ready or not. Someone ahead of me whose cousin is in that fight offered up the prayer for our soldiers.

I am looking forward to being local. I didn't know that there was a place in the Valley where I could get great South African food. I didn't think I'd find someone from halfway around the planet who would dig Unomathemba like I do. I didn't know there was a beach called Dungeons where the waves get up to 17 feet off the Cape of Good Hope. This is a good sign. It is indeed a very good sign.

Game or No Game?

Something somebody mentioned to me the other day stuck in my head. I forget exactly whom it was, but they said that they could not be controlled by whitefolks because they took no money from them. Moreover yesterday as I drove home, I was in full rock mode. I was blasting RHCP, Green Day, Stone Temple Pilots, Papa Roach, Linkin Park, Rage Against the Machine, Limp Bizkit, Eminem, Radiohead, Puddle of Mudd and Korn.

It was a trip as I drove through various neighborhoods on my way home from Century City thinking about what people might be thinking of me as a black man with the boomin' system rippin' rock shiznit. Century City, Beverly Hills, Palms, Baldwin Hills, South Bay.

Is dealing with whitefolk a social skill? If so what does it say about non-whites who acquire this skill? Please discuss.

The Man, or Not The Man?

Fish entertains paranoid fantasy in his continuing docu-drama of the great evil conspiracy of white supremacy. This week the stars are Francis Cress Welsing, the grand dame of the crackpot racial theorists, the woman who wrote the worst book I ever read. And even  more wacky, he goes all the way to the Planet of the Apes. I guess he's going to have to get all that out of his system.

In the spirit of racial paranoia, I picked out a few discussions around the 'sphere to see what folks are talking about tangential to those things and people that might destroy our precious bodily fluids.

• Afronerd has a great discussion about the alleged racism of some iconic American entertainers: Elvis Presley, Guns N Roses, Burt Reynolds and John Wayne.
• Tigerhawk discusses the end of the world as we know it. What color will the hordes be? Will you be ready?
• American Digest illustrates one of the reasons I both don't fear China and think that the EPA is not a bad idea. 
• Sam reminds us that every once in a while we still have to deal with Third World problems.
• EC sees how we might be seduced into oblivion if we ignore the power of gods who appear to be mere mortals.
• Over at the Club, a discussion about supplication to Islamists. What if Christians said 'There is no god but Allah?'

That should keep you busy.

Me? I'm going camping up at Big Bear Lake. Practice my redneck survival skills. Then it's off to Redmond to meet the great poobahs of the Borg. I wonder if they are as scary as I've always heard...

The Cultural Tour of LA - Part One

I've been writing restaurant reviews for the past six months and it has been a lot of fun, but what I haven't really done that I've now got an occasion to do is put together an entire cultural tour of the joint. So as I ease into that, I'm thinking of the top ten things you have to do as a tourist in LA. I know the list will grow to 50 but I gotta start somewhere. What things would I just not want to miss?

Lucy Florence
Any trip to LA is really not complete without a stop by Leimert Park Village. So the first stop has got to be the Lucy Florence coffee shop and gallery. The way to get there is half the fun too. I would recommend the back door side which is to take La Cienega to Slauson and come East on Slauson to Angeles Vista down to the village. That would give you a glimpse of the part of black LA few people know or talk about, my old stomping grounds. Or you could come in the front door from the 10 South on Crenshaw right down the strip. Either way is a tour through the core of Southwest LA, as contrasted with the more infamous and often mis-represented South Central LA. A Sunday afternoon is the perfect time since the drummers will be out in the park.

Sunset Cruise
On a Friday or Saturday night, one absolutely must cruise Sunset Boulevard. Depending on the amount of time you want to spend you can do the Full Cruise, the Eastside Cruise, the Westside Cruise or the Core Cruise. If you're going to do anything but the Core, you need to start at least one hour before sunset, especially if you want to head to the beach. The Full Cruise starts downtown at the LA River. There it's called Cesar Chavez. Head East through Silverlake and begin the right hand side of the Core at Vermont. Then drive through the seedy grit of Hollywood in the Core that gets gradually more cool until you're right in the middle of it at around Fairfax. Then drive west on Sunset to the sea, turn that jungle music up, as you go through Beverly Hills past UCLA to the 405, the end of the Core. If you want to continue on, the Westside Cruise goes all the way through Brentwood to Palisades. Then you can take your final left turn at Temescal Canyon and down to PCH.

Beach Time
The ultimate LA beach experience would have to be centered at Hermosa Beach for eyeballing. That is, if you want to check out the dudes and babes, the culture and the glitz, ground zero will be the Hermosa Beach Pier. This is the get out and walk part of the beach, as opposed to the cruise in your car with the windows down on the coast road part of the beach.There are plenty of joints of all sorts to cater to your beachy needs. If you want to get some authentic high quality beachwear, this is the place to be. Grab a beer at the Poopdeck and check out the volleyballers, or take a long walk on the long pier.

Walking, Shopping, Noshing
For urban sophisticates, (read people from NY, Boston & Philly) who feel like they don't want to get too immersed in doing LA things, one can exercise well-rehearsed street walking skills in crowds at the Santa Monica Promenade. There are bookstores, movie theatres, coffee shops, clothing stores, shoe stores, restaurants, bars, street performers, kids with balloons, babes on roller skates, dudes with tattoos, the entire microcosm of LA urbanity. Now there are alternatives. You could do Citywalk. You could also do the Irvine Spectrum, but my money is on the Promenade.

The Getty
Speaking of sophistication. You really don't know anything about Los Angeles until you have been to the Getty Museum. The first and foremost reason is the view from the South balcony. It is *the* way to view the city, and (if it's a clear day), you can suddenly see the beauty of this place from an angle you have never seen in any movie, photo or painting. The museum itself is spectacular and relatively uncrowded, but you do need a reservation.

Ports O Call
For a flavor of Latino LA, I haven't found anything to match the Sunday brunch at Ports O Call Village in San Pedro. There's something about ordering a huge amount of fresh seafood to order and sitting down with your family on the large wooden tables in the incredible hubbub of the place while mariachis play. It's a great solution for the big hungry. Plus, if you feel like it, you can take a harbor cruise for a fairly reasonable price.

Empress Pavilion
OK I know that it sounds cliche, and yes it's in Chinatown, but man you simply must experience the Dim Sum service at the Empress Pavilion. If you've never had dim sum served in the traditional style.. well it takes a little getting used to, especially if you're a pushover. Women push carts full of steaming delicacies and seduce you into trying a little bit of everything. It's all good from the simple to the adventurous. If you're really feeling wild, ask for the chicken feet. If not, everybody loves shumai and har gow. 

Farmer's Market
Farmer's Market is right in the heart of West LA and it's a perfect way to waste all kinds of time, walking around and gabbing with your buddies. Some nights there is public karaoke, and it's a great place to watch the big game in one of the open air bars. There is every kind of food on the planet, all fresh and delicious. If you can walk through Farmer's Market without eating, either you have the greatest discipline on earth or your jaw is wired shut.

That's all for now. But there is so much more.

 

End of Negro Race by 1980 - the Story, Jet, Oct 7, 1954

End of Negro Race by 1980 - the Story, Jet, Oct 7, 1954
Originally uploaded by vieilles_annonces

Well, what do you know?

There are a whole lot more interesting stories and magazine covers where that came from. Check out Flickr's Vielle_Annonces.

The Black Man in the Porsche

My new job and my new office is in Century City, well, my LA office. I have another one or two up in Washington, but I haven't seen them yet. But so far the new gig is going really great and I'm hearing exactly the kind of bad news and good news I expected to.

Since I'm still new, I'm trying to figure out the best route through West LA traffic which is a bitch and three quarters most hours of the day. Even Google Maps is stymied. I'm a scant 19 miles from my office. Depending on traffic, the trip costs anywhere between 30 and 90 minutes. I'm averaging 75. The good news is that I have good music to blast.

Today I took the route through Beverly Hills. On my way just past the Peninsula Hotel, scene of the joint where I began my quest to the China Deal several years ago, I espied a young black man in a convertible Porsche Carerra. What struck me about his profile was that he was wearing the exact bluetooth headset I have picked out for myself when I get my first check. It's was a silver Jawbone. Also, like me, he's right eared. Several things flew the old noggin at once. First, I asked myself if I might know him. Nahh. But why not?

One of those things is that I thought of an old friend that I knew in college that I lost track of. Two in fact. One we nicknamed 'E'. He was a tall but modest fellow who struggled through some of his advanced engineering classes. He had a silver Porsche and he dressed like a prep. E had a fondness for pullover sweater vests, and according to us (the BMOCs) E looked a lot cooler than he actually was. Of course we secretly just wanted to pull the chicks with his Porsche. I can still remember the first time he relented. We were heading to some club somewhere and we were heading south on the 405 between the 10 and the Marina Freeway. My roommate The Football Hero dropped it into 3rd gear and blam, before we knew it we hit 110. Exhilarating. E practically shit a brick.

The other guy, was actually very cool. He went to Long Beach State and he had actually already paid for his Porsche, unlike E whose was a gift from his father. Call him Derrick. He was already a macher in real estate, and if I wasn't such a stubborn ass I would have learned the biz back in the mid 80s with him. But I was convinced that Computers were the wave of the future and I wanted to change the world through technology, not be another dumbass rich real-estate agent. It wasn't the first time I was offered an alternative career and it wouldn't be the last time I turned one down for my digital geekery. Then again, at the time I was certain that I was on track to a Harvard MBA so I figured I'd catch him and everyone else on the downstroke.

A funny thing happened to me on the way to Harvard.

Whenever I see a brother who obviously has some ducats in the fridge and some actual international style, I think of them as another friend that I would have had but missed. Having been fairly well connected out here on the black collegiate West Coast (it is said that our pledge line helped revitalize interest in Alpha Phi Alpha) I had every intention of being a major connecting force among the Talented Tenth. I was chapter secretary of my campus frat, a national officer with NSBE, and a bunch of other stuff that it seems silly to go into at this point, other than to say that I think back to how tenuous those bonds could be. I never took them for granted and yet I had no idea how difficult they would be to sustain. One of my standard and continuing complaints stood against the fact that so many of us needed to travel far and wide across the nation to make our fortunes. I have, as have the great majority of my closest college pals, moved from here to there to make our way.

At once I am struck by the casual way we assured ourselves that we would keep in touch and the ease with which we drifted or broke apart. I can remember vividly the Sargeant Waters type politics and biases that bound us and separated us. We all pledged to be righteous for black America. I recall how impressed we were that we could share the company of Ivan Van Sertima, Naim Akbar, Haki Madbhuti, Guy Bluford, and a dozen others on the college speaking circuit. I recall the envy and wonder in the eyes of people in the streets of Boston when they realized that we had taken over the Copley Plaza Marriott and Jesse Jackson was here because of our conference. It was our time, and we were the center of our universe. And now it's 20 years later.

One old friend of mine is the CFO of Jackson State. One the top dog at GEM. Another old colleague, Gary May, is fated to be one of the last 'first blacks'.  Which reminds me, I should add them to the Keeping It Right category. American life has been good to us. But still there's that disconnection, that diasporal distance. We're all pursuing different parts of a large dream. Where we were once a small young community all in one place, we are now distributed and it's hard to keep track of which direction everyone has gone.

It's a bittersweet irony to know that brother in the next lane is your brother and neither of you know it. But somehow you know despite all the myriad ways we've found a great deal more in life than many gave us the right to expect, we've lost something too: the intimacy of the links that kept us together back in the day. And I wonder were they ever that strong to begin with? Is that why we get so invested in the idea of unity, because deep down we know life will take us away from each other?

I've always been one to value the existential partnership of black men. I know that there is something we must be to each other. For me it has always come easily. I come from a large family of men, I was the oldest of four boys and in a cohort of male cousins fairly close in age. I was in all the cliques in my neighborhood, played every sport, climbed every tree. It made me independent enough to always speak my mind no matter what. I always knew that the easy friendship could be regained, I could always catch a brother on the downstroke. I still take that quality for granted, there is nothing that could make me doubt that I'm a righteous black man - even when I get on everybody's last nerve I can say that nobody has ever left me hanging. 

For the next three months or so, I'll be spending a lot of time in Washington state. Priority is what it is. But soon thereafter, I'm going to be at my new HQ in West LA, just a mile or two from Beverly Hills. It puts me in the mind of where I'm supposed to be and opens the possibilities of doing locally what I've been unable to commit to for the past few years. The Brothers' Cup is a part of that and I know it's about my turn to pass it on as well as grow the circle. More than any time in the past decade, I'm feeling that I'm going to be settled here in LA. I'm going to check my degrees of separation. It's about that time.

Troy A. Stovall

Troy A. Stovall brings over 15 years of experience in the fields of telecommunications, information/communication technology, management consulting, investment management, and non-profit leadership/management. Beginning in July-2004, Mr. Stovall assumed the position of Senior Vice President, Finance & Operations for Jackson State University (JSU) in Jackson, MS. In that role, Mr. Stovall has responsibility for the finances, facilities, construction, auxiliaries, economic development and strategy implementation for a university with over 8,000 students and a budget of over $90M. In addition, Mr. Stovall serves as Treasurer of the JSU Development Foundation and Executive Director of the JSU Educational Building Corporation (EBC). Mr. Stovall is also Managing Member and Founder of LeMaile Stovall LLC, a management consulting/advisory/interim senior management firm targeted at small/mid-size technology firms and economic development agencies looking to enhance their strategic thinking, management team, internal operations and funding sources. Prior to LeMaile Stovall, Mr. Stovall was Co-Founder and CEO of GulfSouth Capital, Inc. and Managing General Partner of GS Ventures (GSV), LLC. At GulfSouth, Mr. Stovall was responsible for overall investment and fund-raising responsibility for $100M+ across 3 funds: GSV, Palmer Foundation (education and the arts in MS) and John N Palmer's (SkyTel Founder and Ambassador to Portugal) personal investment portfolio.

Prior to GulfSouth, Mr. Stovall was a Senior Engagement Manager at the strategy management-consulting firm, McKinsey & Co., where he served firms in the telecommunication services and equipment, computers, specialty chemicals and information technology sectors in areas of operations, organizational design, and strategy. Mr. Stovall was a leader in McKinsey's Telecom Practice where he authored well-reviewed papers on Internet commerce, ISPs and wireless data.

Mr. Stovall has also had experience at Rockwell International, AT&T Bell Labs, and Southwestern Bell Telephone Company (SWBT) in their management-training program, Advanced Management Program (AMP). He received two SWBT Key Awards for Outstanding Service in 1989 and 1991.

Mr. Stovall has held several leadership positions:

* With the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), including National Conference Planning Chair, National Finance Chair, Alumni National Treasurer, and National Advisory Board. Director for Internet America (OTC BB:GEEK.OB).
* Southern Methodist University's (SMU) School of Engineering Executive Advisory Board and SMU's Electrical Engineering Department Advisory Board, from 2000-2004 serving as its first Chairperson.
* Mr. Stovall holds a BS in Electrical Engineering cum laude ('87) from SMU, MS in Computer Science ('89) from Stanford University and an MBA ('94) from Harvard Business School.



Mr. Stovall is married to the former Sonya L Wiggins, they have two children, Zora Lauren and Langston Anthony, and a Shih Tzu named Lucky.

The Putnam Report on Diversity

Wow.

Here's where I am on multiculturalism. I originally liked the idea when I first heard of it in the late 80s. I read the Closing of the American Mind, Cultural Literacy and Multicultural Literacy and concluded that Americans were provincial and that we assimilate into a dumb and bigoted contemporary pop culture. Something must be done. Now I think that multiculturalism's promise has been eclipsed by its implementation and that it is long past time to expose the flaws and the deceptions.

Recently Robert Putnam of Bowling Alone fame has dropped a bomb:

The truth, Putnam found, is that the greater the amount of multiculturalism and diversity in a society, the lower the level of civic engagement and shared sense of community cohesiveness. The multiculturalists who have dominated our social thinking for nearly 50 years got it all wrong.

There are a lot of ways to explain this, and the simplest two I find credible are:

1. Americans are less interested in citizenship than they ought to be. So acceptance of 'diversity' is a defacto acceptance of an anything goes, or better a 'whatever' attitude towards civic involvement. When you know that every group gets their day of opinion, and nobody is supposed to be offended, then the idea of civic engagement is lost because one accepts that there is no common goal. Diversity is diversity of type and diversity of goals with no attempt a synergy. It is merely a declaration of the presence of difference without any acknowledgement about common goals, and methods of attaining those goals. When the goal itself is mere diversity, you have a fait accomplit without actually having accomplished anything collaboratively. We all know the multicultural metaphor, it is not a melting pot, it's a tossed salad. People refuse to melt.

2. The diversity industry is nothing more than a whitewash for a racial nationalist agenda. The NAACP, despite the fact that its name says 'colored people' is not really talking about 'people of color'. They are in fact of blacks, by blacks and for blacks. They don't get along with MALDEF or any Jewish or Asian organizations of the same stripe.

I think that it's about time that the cracks in multiculturalism start to show up. It took a national emergency to wake a lot of former liberals up, and I'm one of them. My record shows some happiness in digging Nathan Glaser's "We're All Multiculturalists Now", but no longer. Here are some other angles.

A trip to Greensboro, NC proved to me that all diversity isn't equal:

As a big city creature, there's a certain level of cunning and wariness I have among crowds. There's a lot to expect from people when there are millions of them in close proximity. Living in LA and NY has made me come to expect just about anything from just about anyone. It's the characteristic of the large set. But when you downscale, you reduce variety by definition. And so I am coming to appreciate that there are various flavors of diversity. Growing up in Southern California, sure you speak a little Spanish, but you also learn to distinguish Veitnamese from Japanese from Chinese from Korean from Philipino. I can't say I'm so good differentiating Indians from Pakistanis, but I'm not completely inept. Point? It's more than just 'Asians'. And let's not even get started on 'Hispanics'.

In Greensboro at the conference there were many testimonies of pride in their own diversity, but there was not one Asian in the whole joint. I haven't seen one during the whole trip, not even at the airport. As far as I can tell, Greensboro's diversity is a species of black and white. And so, I may very well imagine, is the case for other Southern cities of its size and shape.

I made an in analytical opinion piece on diversity earlier this year which covered several different ways of thinking about diversity.  The piece called All About Diversity did not look specifically at the Community Perspective which is Putnam's important angle, but did look at the empowerment perspective, the political perspective and the market perspective.

As far as the community perspective goes,  I do tend to agree with Putnam. We Americans rather like diversity, I think, so that we can feel more comfortable doing our own thing. And certainly our recent blowup here about 'radical black assimilationism' made it clear that for a certain cut of black cultural nationalists, there ain't no future in the Rodney King directive. We cannot all just get along, and perhaps the point is that a lot of us don't want to. So blacks are free to be black as they define it, Asians are free to be whatever it is they are. It's all cool so long as everybody shows up and nobody is excluded. In that way diversity creates nothing new, at all. It explains a lot about PC, which is the language of polite condescension necessary for people who think it's important to be physically close but not spiritually intimate or philosophically aligned. 

Bioshock Demo

Bioshock feels somewhat familiar but it's definitely innovative, still I'm not hooked.

I had no idea what to expect from this game. I know there's been some buzz about it and somebody asked if I'd played the download. Knowing I hadn't, I quit playing Shadowrun and hopped to it. The 1.3 GB downloaded fine (actually faster than R6V Black Pack which is about half the size) and I started it up.

I sat in the water for a good 20 seconds before I realized I was actually in first person mode and should start swimming. Duh. The very beginning reminded me of my first Splinter Cell adventure. Rich graphics, fine control. Then I started down the rabbit hole into the Ayn Randian fantasy turned nightmare. Whoa. A thinking person's game says me. Then the slasher stuff starts and despite the fact that I dig the retro, I'm already thinking.. man this is claustrophobic and creepy. Sometimes I like that vibe, most of the time I don't. So I start through this wild underwater city and as the gameplay gets going, I feel like I've been sent back to Myst. I'm a treasure hunter in a bizarro world plagued by zombies.

The voiceovers are really excellent. I think I was playing it with my own soundtrack, but even so, the voice talent here is immersive. And as I get a couple of the skills and start to hack and slash my way through a half legion of psycho-baddies, I see some of the attraction. Then I get into a bot attack and I try to hack the bot but can't hack it. Oy. I can see that this is going to take some skill to. In other words, it is like a very creepy and claustrophobic Myst, and it ain't easy.

I keep on trucking until I die a couple times, and then finally get to the end of the demo (what? already?) and watch some of the action samples. Ya know? I just can't get with it. It looks too similar and even though I know at some point I'd probably have to swim outside, it's too boxed in. If I could sneak through some of the rooms, I'd probably be more inclined to dig this. But none of the action seems to appeal to me. It all seems to be zombies and I can't stand zombies, not because they creep me out or anything, but because they're not live humans in an online interactive play. I don't know.

Take for example Silent Hill. I very much dug the suspense of that. Also, I think Prey was an extraordinary game. But on both of those, I enjoyed them without a demo. So in one way I think the demo of Bioshock has turned me off of the game - so I've only experienced some small fraction of the action I'm not more interested to see it. That makes it a hard call. If, for example, I had only played Route Kanal for Half-Life 2, I would have not thought it was a great game at all. Bottom line: the jury is still out on Bioshock, but the demo is a total failure.

Shadowrun

The longer you play Shadowrun, the more you love it. It starts off novel, and then it gets better and richer.

I see that there are not a lot of high falutin' reviews for this game, and the reasons are clear. It's basically a stripped down online team based FPS without a single player mode. The graphics are just OK and there are just some dumb animations - for example when you climb ladders in the levels, your body parts don't move. You just go up the ladder. But when it comes to rich gameplay, it doesn't get much better than Shadowrun.

Before I played this game, I heard that it was very different and more complex than most FPS games. And it's true. There are so few conventional ways to play the game, that nobody has figured out how to glitch it. There's no such thing as spawn camping, primarily because you can respawn at anyplace on the map.

When it comes to big team battles, which is basically every game, this game does actually compare to Halo. Except that there is more flexibility. With the larger maps, you don't get so much of a frenzy of action, and the conflict isn't as predictable as it is with Halo. On the plus side, every game has two ways to win. You can either eliminate your enemies, or capture 'The Artifact' and take it to a base in the enemy camp.

For people who like to be big and bad and just blast away, or become headshot snipers, you simply cannot do it. You must be a team player to win, and you must coordinate attacks, defenses, weapons and races. In other words, it's more of a thinker's game than a button masher's game. There's not much use for cover in this game, and those who can master a manual use of cover have a definite advantage.

As with any shooter, your game play depends primarily upon the economy of life. In a game like Call of Duty when you can respawn an unlimited number of times and games are fairly long, certain kinds of actions make sense, like surging all players to a contested territory again and again. In a game like Splinter Cell, at the other end of the spectrum, when you can lose just be being discovered, a great deal more thought goes into every physical move. The trick is finding a balance. The trend has been towards collaborative resuscitation during battle and this is what makes for truly exciting play in Shadowrun.

Shadowrun also gives a practically infinite number of ways to play as a team. You have four races times six weapons (weilding up to two at a time), six magic spells and six technologies. You can arm three triggers to employ a combination of spells and tech while the right main is for your weapon. There are three game modes and that multiplies out to a bunch. All the levels are fairly spacious and some are downright maze-like.

There are two great ways to play that I find particularly fun. The first is juggernaut mode in which you take a troll character (the big strong brute) and a minigun and just mow down your adversaries. Two trolls parked under a Tree of Life, both with miniguns can deal death like crazy. The other and very popular mode is ninja mode. One of the weapons you can buy is a katana sword. As an Elf, with the speed boosts of Wired Reflexes and Transport magic, you can rapidly sneak up on enemies and deal a deathblow which is very similar to the back of the head melee in Halo, only more dramatic. Players that have been dealt such a blow begin to bleed out, which means unless somebody revives them or they find a Tree of Life, they'll be dead in 10 seconds.

Shadowrun also gives teabaggers a new, more productive hobby which is clearing bodies. If you are struck dead, there is a possibility that a teammate can resurrect you, especially if you are the victim of a cheap shot. So not only does an opponent need to be killed, you need to rip their corpse to shreds as well, otherwise they may come back to haunt you. It takes longer than an execution move in Gears of War, so there's risk involved in this coup de grace. However a resurrected body is a bit more frail than a fresh one. Chances are you won't survive a second death in any one round. Each game is a first to six round victories. 

One of the more subtle aspects of the game is the use of the DPad which allows you to convey battlefield information to your teammates. Although the maps are large and complex, every area has a name which appears in the lower left hand corner of your headsup. Using the DPad left, will tell your teammates that you need assistance. A Cortana-like voice will say "needs assistance at the Habitat, two enemies" and text that message on the screens of your teammates. You can also spot enemies with the up arrow or order allies to a spot on the map with your right arrow. Not many players use this function to the fullest but it can definitely make a big difference.

I'm going to try to get more of my shooter pals to play Shadowrun. We're just starting to play a lot of the new extensions to R6Vegas, especially VIP. But I think they'll come around. In the meantime, until Halo3, it's Shadowrun for me.

Bad Boy Attraction

Why do beautiful women go for bad boys?

Two and a half reasons.
The first and foremost reason is because bad boys know that they are bad more certainly than good boys know they are good, and women like a known quantity in their men. In other words, good boys, for the most part in American society are wishy-washy, and women's instincts tell them to stay away from wishy-washy men. From my perspective, most American women think that they are crazy in some deep part of themselves, and the last thing they need is a man who is more unsure of himself than they are.

The second reason is that women pride themselves in making their men respectable, even if the only thing respectable about their man is that he could possibly be associated with her. The easier this job is, the less self-esteem some women have. I would say this rule applies more especially to single women without kids. Not very many women have the patience to go on a male reclamation project when they've got crumbsnatchers to raise.

The half-assed reason that women go for bad boys is the worst reason of all, which is that they see bad boys as better than them. That is, some women need to be dominated because they know they are no good themselves. So they throw themselves to the dogs. This is a sign of a bad daddy in baby girl's past, and we know how twisted that can get. Such women are doing eternal penance.

So there it is.

Damn. Dropped 7 Points

                           Congratulations,  Mike!
Your IQ score is 129                       

         
                        

                    

                             

This number is based on a scientific formula that compares how many questions you answered correctly on the Classic IQ Test relative to others.

Your Intellectual Type is Word Warrior. This means you have exceptional verbal skills. You can easily make sense of complex issues and take an unusually creative approach to solving problems. Your strengths also make you a visionary. Even without trying you're able to come up with lots of new and creative ideas. And that's just a small part of what we know about you from your test results.

Obama is Acceptable

The latest on Obama is that there is a significant difference between his acceptability as a political candidate for President and his electability.

One day this spring, Obama's pollsters were crunching numbers, and they discovered something odd....When they compared the percentage of Democrats who said they strongly approved of Obama with the percentage who said they would vote for him, they found that the latter number was significantly lower than the former. Inside the campaign, aides dubbed this "the Gap." It was a sobering, hard number that quantified the difference between vague enthusiasm and actual votes. For Hillary Clinton, the gap is much smaller. The majority of voters who strongly approve of her also say they will vote for her.

In fact, Hillary was collecting about two-thirds of Democrats who liked her, while Obama was collecting less than half. The numbers suggested that the calculus for Hillary voters was much simpler: Democrats who liked her knew all they needed to know about her. But for Obama voters, there were questions. Was he tough enough? Did he have enough experience? Could he actually win in the general election?

Kenan & Kel Vs Chuck D & Flava Flav

Attending my change of heart to (temporary?) cynicism with regard to black ethnic partisanship, I'm curious briefly to recognize this change in other contexts. I wrote at Booker Rising:

I have concluded that (simply) the majority of left & centrist black politicos are trying to establish a hegemony which is directed at the fate of the 40%, and thus they will refuse any non-socialist remedies as racist. They won't hear out Moynihan, they won't pay attention to the experiences of other nations... They are essentially saying that all black politics should ever be is about racial uplift of the poor and underclass.

The consequence of that is that the black middle class will be kicked to the American curb as a non-ethnicity, and all of our previously deep black nationalist cultural creations will end up like St Patrick's Day. Mark my words, we are headed to the land of Kenan and Kel vs Chuck D. Because the serious thoughtful black middle class will ultimately become alienated from our own ethnic politics.

Fisher is picking up on the meme that 'radical black assimilationism' is a part of the system of White Supremacy. What if it is? What if blacks are becoming 'white' in the same way that the Irish became white? What if it becomes entirely reasonable to say that the comfortable black middle class is no longer black, and is free to intermarry (like we do) etc, with relatively no fetters? What if the future of the black middle class separation from the black poor and underclass procedes very predictably from this point forward through a series of 'Sista Soulja' moments that spontaneously arise in the popular culture.

I mean it's relatively easy to pick them. OJ Simpson, R Kelly. Pick a black dysfunction, give it a name and some large fraction of the black middle class will betray the race before the cock crows three times. Is this inevitable? Perhaps so. Perhaps more than any other social force on the planet, the American popular mainstream culture is the most seductive and destructive of ethnic traditions.

If that's the case, then the integration of blacks and asians and latinos will come at the cost of the purposeful perversity of multiculturalists. In other words, everybody becomes modern, interchangeable and white bread. We'll all be round pegs with round eyes. Meanwhile in search of flavor, ethnicity will become a commodity fetish. Get your freak nasty music here, get your hot and spicy food there, get you exotic beauty there, get your holistic alternative wisdom here. A smorgasborg of slightly downscale stereotypes for our consumption.

In such a system of pimping and whoring, nobody's hands are clean, and everybody gets what they want. Why not?

In The Night

In the night with daughters
I subject myself to the dangers of the street
I camp to feel the pain in my joints. To feel the hardness of the ground wreck my backbone just so.
Just so they can frolic with flashlights and hear the owls hooting by.

From inside the dusty tent
All the silences of the darkness are amplified
The skunks shuffling through the hedge
The squirrel poop dropping from the pine branches
The unexperienced night breeze, and the gnawing of termites mark the hours.

There are no weirdos. There are no knifings or hollering men with their brown paper bags.
There are no stray dogs or broken glasses in the street.
There is only the marginal discomfort of an adventure. But if I were to dream perchance there would be nightmares. Of Pookie in the alley on New Years Eve. Of the hard bathroom tiles and the negligent youth director. Of the dare beneath the sycamores and the face full of shit. Of the placid lie and Officer Bell. Of the griddled goldfish and the mothers pulling hair. Of the garage fire and the swinging skillet. Of the swaying booty butter and subsequent Itch.

Of the betrayal. Of the omerta. Of the dodge.
Of the broken walk, the ringworm and the bus ride to jail.
Of the shiv and the sherm. Of the roaches in batter.
Of the patrols and the checkpoints. Of the drawling reproach and the sitter's backhand.
Of the unwashed baby and hand-me-down clothes.
Of the uncle that uncle that everyone knows.

Of the quiet, the endless quiet, the silent long ignorant years and the secrets never told. Of the fear. The monstrous unendurable fear until the Juneteenth of May in the Jungle of Nool, when a voice from above not caring nor cruel, said throw down your bowl and give up your gruel. It was only my echo, the sound of a fool.

I have journeyed far from the hole and dream it anew.
I see myself in lightweight togs unarmored for throwdown. Like grubs under petrified wood, my brothers all younglike and full of it mirror my sadness, anonymous to all but those who can't do, and can't teach and still preach as if God really changes things.
And I've seen his hope crumble wearing the cleanest white t-shirt a dollar can buy
And hedging his bets just like those who don't try. Ahead is the wall. A stumble. A fall.
And he comes up all scratch-faced, bruised lips swelling bigger.
You know what they call him. Just like they called Bigger.

The erudition of despair a well-worn symphony drumming a 4/4 time in the temple of doom.
You're black and you're black.
You're black and you're black.
You're black and you're black.
You're black and you're black.
And pride and tears and love and sorrow. Joy and agony, misery and emptiness. Tick away with each beat of my heart, our heart, the old black heart. Without childbirth or violence who would know we bled red? So black is the beat, so dark is the heat, so deep are the tears that through four hundred years we memorize ancestors fears.
And await calamity.
Anticipate treachery.
Condone lechery. Better spend those dollars now boy. There ain't no future in your frontin'.

Camping with daughters, without locks, without dread.
Outside of a devil's domain. Outside of a nightmare of pain.
Outside on the lawn. From easy dusk to pleasant dawn.
If I should die before I wake let it be in the blankest of sleep.
Let me not dream that I am that I was lest I curse the name of God
For abandoning me to the ghetto, my prison, my birthplace, my all.
Let me remember the love of my middle age in the land of the free
past that middle passage that brought me to be
Mocked in my skin and yet finally me.

What's Up with FISA?

Richard Posner's proposal for a CT Circuit prompted me to say the following in substance:

Given a choice between countering terror and protecting civil liberties, most courts in the US will protect civil liberties. That is because most  judges in the US don't know much about countering terror, and judges tend to talk what they know. He suggests that what we need is a Counterterrorism Court.

It is clear that our criminal courts and FBI are unsuited to properly investigate and prosecute possible domestic terrorists.

It seems to me that it is most important to be proactive in this manner before we start writing law under duress. The import of this discussion is supposed to be, how do we avoid bastardization of law and misapplication of war powers in the wake of domestic terror attacks. If you don't like the Patriot Act, then the answer is to come up with something better.

There is no question, considering COINTELPRO that domestic radicals and subversives can be infiltrated. But it's rather common knowledge that the FBI was exceeding its mandate in that regard. So too Posner asserts that their charter did not allow them to exploit the potential of their infiltration of the Florida cell wrt bombing the Sears Tower. Once they infiltrate and develop evidence that can result in a criminal prosecution, they're done. It isn't within their ability or charter to connect dots back to kingpin organizations.

We shut down the mob with RICO. We don't have such tools to deal with domestic terror. We have the capacity but not the organization.

When the British are cited for having London as the most surveilled city in the world with their 'Ring of Steel', people often forget that their MI5 is a domestic spying organization. MI5 of course has the experience as do Londoners of dealing with car bombs in the city on a regular basis during the decades long conflict with the Irish Republican Army. We have no such experience.

There are many folks who argue reasonably, among the many more who do not, that the Executive branch has gotten out of hand. As well, there is a theory that the GWOT should be a 'police action'. So Posner's suggestion should be welcome to those who are interested in total victory as well as those who continue to sweat bullets over the Bush Administration's troubles over FISA warrants.

In the past week, Congress has, according to the anti-war crowd, caved in on new legislation surrounding the matters about warrantless wiretaps in pursuit of terror investigations. This is primarily because, as every one of their arguments I have seen plainly state, that crowd fears political reprisals. All of the FISA squawkers keep thinking that Bush is just a heartbeat away from Nixonian dirty tricks. I can understand a bit of cynicism, but this has descended into paranoia. There is one single significant civil liberties violation that has taken place under Ashcroft and Gonzales, and that is the Hamdan case which was eventually, if not promptly, checked by the Supreme Court. We have entered a period in which the President isn't even allowed to fire at will employees without raising a cloud of suspicion.

As an aside, I have not been following the inquisition of Gonzales, but it occurs to me that without the benefit of a doubt, there are very few people who could stand up to the level of harassment he has been getting at the hands of Congress. I worry about having people in office who are so calculating that they could. Then again, I think Janet Reno accorded herself with an order of magnitude more finesse than Gonzales, and I trusted her.

But what's clear again is that the Congress is ineffective in doing anything constructive in law that assists in victory over Al Qaeda on an independent basis. Instead they have spent all of their time countering executive orders and frameworks of dealing with matters like the definitions of enemy combatants, advanced interrogation techniques, funding of armor for the troops, the legality of GTMO, the Plame investigation and of course FISA, all of which they have lost.

But the problem with all of this SIGINT interception is my guess about how the process might actually work. To be in compliance with the law, which seems insufficient, and to use technology properly which is non-trivial is something that seems very difficult, inherently difficult to know. For example, the difference between the word 'concerning' and 'direct' as Kevin Drum notes, can make a big difference in the scope of data to be processed, whether or not one is alarmed at potential political hijinks.

From my observations of the technical aspects of this job, I understand that the more data that is selected, the less effective data mining techniques will be. My guess is that the NSA have more data than they effectively deal with and that they are archiving it until somebody comes up with a better mousetrap. If I were a betting man, I'd look at something like Hbase. Anyway, I'd be very interested to know about the methodology and that makes a difference.

Lets say, for example, you have the capacity to pull everything during a period of high chatter. That would be easier to do than to maintain a set of filters at the distributed points in your collection system. On this principle it works a little like your Google Mail. You get all the spam and you are able to hold it in your possession until you physically clear it. This gives you the opportunity to review all of that stuff you believe has a high probability of being spam in case some of it is not. If your best-guess filters toss out all spam at your collection points then you increase your number of unknown unknowns. Without filtering at collection points you can possess a large pool of data, and yet without investigating its contents, process it with a smart set of tags. You can then connect some dots based on the smart tagging and reduce your potential set of data to a more reasonable size. Again this is like labeling your Google Mail by doing a search on the To:, From: and Date: fields but not on the content.

Now to do voice recognition on the content, I think that would essentially require a warrant, which is different from wiretaps, because wiretaps aren't discrete. A telephone conversation may or may not be 'loaded' with actionable information. In an ordinary telephone wiretap you can only listen for and use stuff surrounding key words and I believe you can only possess the key sections of the conversation. Surely the FISA and all 'wiretap' laws are the basis upon which SIGINT must conform. These would be easy to circumvent as phone caller. I could play a game of treasure hunt, setting up times and phone numbers that send parts of a complete message in a series of phone calls. And of course as a cryptanalyst at NSA I couldn't know this was being done without access to greater sets of data.

Again, I'm only scratching the surface with my conjecture, but I know a great deal about how the changing of one word in a system requirement alters the way the technology is applied to a problem, and the technologist always knows where the holes are before the people writing the specs do. By the time rigorous protocols for users of the system are in place, any number of realities may have changed. So my sympathies are with the DBAs of course - the tech people who have to maintain these monstrously huge repositories (hmm, and suddenly I realized why Lee, my good buddy is so jazzed about the random access voicemail downloads he gets pushed to his iPhone), who know where they might look but are restricted from looking.

But SIGINT is only a partial solution as Posner and now I understand. The greater problem is the lack of judges America has with experience in dealing with these kinds of cases. Surely there are more than three judges in this country who can assist in the GWOT. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the FISA approval process is a bottleneck, whether it's retroactive or not. The more focus that the political opposition gives to this FISA stuff, the more we are vulnerable.

The executive and activists on their behalf wouldn't need to bear such paranoid or well-motivated scrutiny if the other branches of government had credible victories of their own.

Kabnis

"God Almighty, dear God, dear Jesus, do not torture me with beauty," Kabnis beseeches. "Take it away. Give me an ugly world. Ha, ugly. . . . Dear Jesus, do not chain me to myself and set these hills and valleys heaving with folk-songs. So close to me that I cannot reach them. There is a radiant beauty in the night that touches and . . . tortures me. Ugh. Hell. Get up you damn fool. Look around. Whats beautiful there? Hog pens and chicken yards. Dirty red mud. Stinking outhouse. Whats beauty anyway but ugliness if it hurts you?"
-- Jean Toomer

Georgia forced the mixed-race Toomer (and Kabnis) to confront the African American past—the mixture of agrarian beauty, spiritual yearning, violence, and oppression—and to ponder his own place within the races and within the race to which society assigned him. Toomer responded with a mixture of poetry, lyrical sketches, short stories, vignettes, and finally, in the work's third and final section, the genre-bending "Kabnis," which mixes the lyric, the narrative, and the dramatic modes. The resulting composite, Cane, evokes powerful feelings of aesthetic pleasure, despair, confusion, and longing for mystical transcendence.

A Black Canon

(from the archives June 2004)

The last bits of this post is where my head is at today. I've been reading a bit more these past few months, and I expect to spend more time with books than I have been with commenters and the blogosphere. In fact, I'm at an inflection point considering whether I should invent a new personna and move on from the Cobbian project which has suddenly and swiftly become at this moment in time more trouble than it's worth.

I am reflecting on something the Field Negro told me when I dined with him in Philly...

Amy Ridenour has recieved a letter. I respond at length.

Hello,

I mentor a young black man who is going to go to college next year. I was wondering if you had a list of literature or suggestions for some reading material. He is interested in economics and business. I was hoping for some ethics, philosophy, and history titles as well. I would prefer if the authors were black. He attends a majority white private Catholic school where he is one of the brightest students; I want him to have some black intellectual experience too.

Thank you for your time.

[Name Deleted]

P.S. I heard about your site from Trueblackman, (I don't know his real name) on Free Republic

It helps to be a voracious reader, no matter what your field of study. It's only with that kind of appetite that you get to the good stuff. There is a deceptively large amount of good stuff out there. I say large because any good 20 books is quite enough reading for a setting one straight permanently. This is deceptive because if the books don't click or you wind up with the wrong picks, you can go for years until you get the book that carries you forward.

Onto the lists and some personal context. I too attended a white private Catholic highschool, and I'm sure mine was better than his. Oops that slipped, but we Cubbies trip like that sometimes. I read Roots when I was a junior, but it did nothing for me like 'The Man Who Lived Underground'. There is something very important about getting to the right black literature that can change your mind forever - because it's very easy to fall into the trap of ghettoizing black literature based on 3 or 4 popular but weak books. It wasn't until I read (or tried to read) LeRoi Jones' "Blues People" that I even accepted the idea that blacks wrote scholarly books. I had always grown up around so many people who quoted Maya Angelou or Ntozake Shange as if they possessed all the black knowledge there was.

So I think the most important thing is to handle the Existentials first. You have got to be able to click with somebody who lets you know that you are not as alone as you think you are, being somewhat exceptional and in altogether a different potential direction than Method & Red. What I'm saying is that in the empirical fields, your coursework will be enough to know. Mastery is mastery - either you've got it or you don't. There isn't going to be much new 'what' from a black perspective (outside of Sowell and Williams), but there's a good deal of 'how as a black me' that is answered in black literature, without which you cannot empower yourself to be quite as well adjusted as a human being as such demanding courses require. Sheer brainpower will not triumph. You've got to be smart too.

The Existentials

Marcus Mabry - White Bucks & Black Eyed Peas
I have found a recent photo of Mabry as well as his bio at Newsweek. I am stunned. There seemed in this young man, when read his book a dozen years ago, nothing but a kind of sentimental soft clumsy geekiness - greatly out of context for the man he appears to be. I actually felt sorry for the guy, and then was very harsh, as black poets are likely to be, when I read of his trials and tribulations at Stanford. I have since come to believe that he's Republican and considered re-reading his book. Mabry needs rethinking from me, but I think he provides an excellent example of how that nebulous and aimless feel as an undergraduate inevitably gives way to the kind of conviction and purpose we all eventually acquire.

Brent Staples - Parallel Time
I found much to admire in Staples' tale. Here was a man with a goodly amount of cheek and backbone who took on the University of Chicago with gusto. He faced the multiple worlds presented to him admirably and sensitively. I see him as a playful master in his environments, reflective and confident. He embodied a kind of black man's spirit that one might tend to believe does not exist in truly intellectual types. And if I have been harsh with John McWhorter, part of it owes to the context of Brent Staples. If you only know those blacks that are presented as intellectuals through popular media, you miss , and quite frankly if there were only 10,000 of us in this nation, chances are that you won't see or recognize us in public.

Paul Beatty - The White Boy Shuffle
People who read this book had to call me on the telephone and tell me that they swore I wrote it under a pseudonym. When I read it, I couldn't believe it myself. Beatty is completely off the chain and led around by his brain bouncing off walls in joy and pain.

High Cotton - Darryl Pinckney
Although people who knew me as a youth mostly identified me with Beatty, Pinckney understands who I am inside. This is one book that I think comes closest to my soul. I can't know what it might mean to other folks, but it means a great deal to me.

Colored People - Skip Gates
Good book. Nice read. Very Old School.

The Philosophicals

Cornel West - The American Evasion of Philsophy
No matter what is said about Cornel West, he wrote this book. A lot of people mouth off about 'Judeo-Christian Values' but really understand little about what's going on in the core thinking that has made America great. This is an indispensible introduction and survey of the great public thinkers who have led the American school as distinct from the European. If you read nothing else, read this. It ain't easy, but it's worth it.

Charles Johnson
There's a lot of Charles Johnson to read among which are 'Middle Passage', probably his best work, and 'The Oxherding Tale'. Very logical, very playful and working on many different levels. Lovely bunch of good stuff.

Ishmael Reed - Japanese By Spring
Everything you need to know about the fallacies and foibles of multiculturalism wrapped in a wit that will send you whimpering to a corner trying to catch your breath from laughing your ass off. Don't go to college without it.

Candide - Voltaire
I read this one too late for it to make a difference. It's quick, it's easy, it's a must.

Malcolm X Speaks
Really everything you need to know about Malcolm X is distilled and captured in his speeches. I read this one cover to cover in a short period of time and it completely changed my estimation of the man, his times and his accomplishments. If you ask me, there all there. Michael Eric Dyson makes the treanchant point that for all of his threat and bluster, Malcolm never took his Fruit of Islam down to the South to butt heads with the Klan. Was Malcolm a coward? Who knows. What you can know is how electrifying and thoughtful he was in his response to the challenges of his day. You should also know that many Indians I have met compare him to Subhas Bose. Don't forget that.

Cane - Jean Toomer
How does a civilized man live alone in a wilderness of anonymity? How do you keep the engines of intellect running in your head when you are surrounded by people who have no idea of the skills you possess? Toomer's Kabnis spoke to me.

(from the archives June 2004)

The last bits of this post is where my head is at today. I've been reading a bit more these past few months, and I expect to spend more time with books than I have been with commenters and the blogosphere. In fact, I'm at an inflection point considering whether I should invent a new personna and move on from the Cobbian project which has suddenly and swiftly become at this moment in time more trouble than it's worth.

I am reflecting on something the Field Negro told me when I dined with him in Philly...

Amy Ridenour has recieved a letter. I respond at length.

Hello,

I mentor a young black man who is going to go to college next year. I was wondering if you had a list of literature or suggestions for some reading material. He is interested in economics and business. I was hoping for some ethics, philosophy, and history titles as well. I would prefer if the authors were black. He attends a majority white private Catholic school where he is one of the brightest students; I want him to have some black intellectual experience too.

Thank you for your time.

[Name Deleted]

P.S. I heard about your site from Trueblackman, (I don't know his real name) on Free Republic

It helps to be a voracious reader, no matter what your field of study. It's only with that kind of appetite that you get to the good stuff. There is a deceptively large amount of good stuff out there. I say large because any good 20 books is quite enough reading for a setting one straight permanently. This is deceptive because if the books don't click or you wind up with the wrong picks, you can go for years until you get the book that carries you forward.

Onto the lists and some personal context. I too attended a white private Catholic highschool, and I'm sure mine was better than his. Oops that slipped, but we Cubbies trip like that sometimes. I read Roots when I was a junior, but it did nothing for me like 'The Man Who Lived Underground'. There is something very important about getting to the right black literature that can change your mind forever - because it's very easy to fall into the trap of ghettoizing black literature based on 3 or 4 popular but weak books. It wasn't until I read (or tried to read) LeRoi Jones' "Blues People" that I even accepted the idea that blacks wrote scholarly books. I had always grown up around so many people who quoted Maya Angelou or Ntozake Shange as if they possessed all the black knowledge there was.

So I think the most important thing is to handle the Existentials first. You have got to be able to click with somebody who lets you know that you are not as alone as you think you are, being somewhat exceptional and in altogether a different potential direction than Method & Red. What I'm saying is that in the empirical fields, your coursework will be enough to know. Mastery is mastery - either you've got it or you don't. There isn't going to be much new 'what' from a black perspective (outside of Sowell and Williams), but there's a good deal of 'how as a black me' that is answered in black literature, without which you cannot empower yourself to be quite as well adjusted as a human being as such demanding courses require. Sheer brainpower will not triumph. You've got to be smart too.

The Existentials

Marcus Mabry - White Bucks & Black Eyed Peas
I have found a recent photo of Mabry as well as his bio at Newsweek. I am stunned. There seemed in this young man, when read his book a dozen years ago, nothing but a kind of sentimental soft clumsy geekiness - greatly out of context for the man he appears to be. I actually felt sorry for the guy, and then was very harsh, as black poets are likely to be, when I read of his trials and tribulations at Stanford. I have since come to believe that he's Republican and considered re-reading his book. Mabry needs rethinking from me, but I think he provides an excellent example of how that nebulous and aimless feel as an undergraduate inevitably gives way to the kind of conviction and purpose we all eventually acquire.

Brent Staples - Parallel Time
I found much to admire in Staples' tale. Here was a man with a goodly amount of cheek and backbone who took on the University of Chicago with gusto. He faced the multiple worlds presented to him admirably and sensitively. I see him as a playful master in his environments, reflective and confident. He embodied a kind of black man's spirit that one might tend to believe does not exist in truly intellectual types. And if I have been harsh with John McWhorter, part of it owes to the context of Brent Staples. If you only know those blacks that are presented as intellectuals through popular media, you miss , and quite frankly if there were only 10,000 of us in this nation, chances are that you won't see or recognize us in public.

Paul Beatty - The White Boy Shuffle
People who read this book had to call me on the telephone and tell me that they swore I wrote it under a pseudonym. When I read it, I couldn't believe it myself. Beatty is completely off the chain and led around by his brain bouncing off walls in joy and pain.

High Cotton - Darryl Pinckney
Although people who knew me as a youth mostly identified me with Beatty, Pinckney understands who I am inside. This is one book that I think comes closest to my soul. I can't know what it might mean to other folks, but it means a great deal to me.

Colored People - Skip Gates
Good book. Nice read. Very Old School.

The Philosophicals

Cornel West - The American Evasion of Philsophy
No matter what is said about Cornel West, he wrote this book. A lot of people mouth off about 'Judeo-Christian Values' but really understand little about what's going on in the core thinking that has made America great. This is an indispensible introduction and survey of the great public thinkers who have led the American school as distinct from the European. If you read nothing else, read this. It ain't easy, but it's worth it.

Charles Johnson
There's a lot of Charles Johnson to read among which are 'Middle Passage', probably his best work, and 'The Oxherding Tale'. Very logical, very playful and working on many different levels. Lovely bunch of good stuff.

Ishmael Reed - Japanese By Spring
Everything you need to know about the fallacies and foibles of multiculturalism wrapped in a wit that will send you whimpering to a corner trying to catch your breath from laughing your ass off. Don't go to college without it.

Candide - Voltaire
I read this one too late for it to make a difference. It's quick, it's easy, it's a must.

Malcolm X Speaks
Really everything you need to know about Malcolm X is distilled and captured in his speeches. I read this one cover to cover in a short period of time and it completely changed my estimation of the man, his times and his accomplishments. If you ask me, there all there. Michael Eric Dyson makes the treanchant point that for all of his threat and bluster, Malcolm never took his Fruit of Islam down to the South to butt heads with the Klan. Was Malcolm a coward? Who knows. What you can know is how electrifying and thoughtful he was in his response to the challenges of his day. You should also know that many Indians I have met compare him to Subhas Bose. Don't forget that.

Cane - Jean Toomer
How does a civilized man live alone in a wilderness of anonymity? How do you keep the engines of intellect running in your head when you are surrounded by people who have no idea of the skills you possess? Toomer's Kabnis spoke to me.

Second Guessing Black Folks

Ever since 1993, after reading 'Drylongso' by John Langston Gwaltney, I came to a fundamental realization about blackfolks and stepped off my Talented Tenth mission. It was a singular reorientation of my relationship to black people. My guiding principle became: Don't second-guess blackfolks. I may come to change this. It's huge.

Not long ago, I accepted the 'anti-black' label which I may or may not have earned. The reason was because I raised the burden of proof for the 'average' black individual. My presumption is that black politics is and perhaps always well be aimed at organizing for race raising, and within that context, it is aimed at those still living in the shadows of the American dream. In order to push the direction of black politics towards the right and expand it overall, I threw down a gauntlet which argues that this uplift goes counter to the main. That is to say what a black partisan should be assuming is that his politics addresses the concerns of people who cannot hack it in American cities. In other words, mainstream politics is for normal people, black politics is for oppressed and crippled people. For me to accept 'anti-black' is cynical and derisive, but I think that stance, as distasteful as it is for a writer to assume, is far less actually cynical than the presumption that masses of black people need a politics which presumes their powerlessness and oppression in America.

The effect of this reorientation has been subtle but profound, and it has influenced my attitude in writing. For now I deal with black partisans from the center and left as obsessed with defying the odds and the system that has worked for every other type of American including the sixty percent of African Americans who have already achieved middle class standing. Along with this attitude is my presumption, again, that blackfolks are grownups and can manage their own affairs.

I would like to believe that African Americans can and will do as they please and need no politics more or less than anyone else. But my opposition to center and left black partisans as well as my geographical remove from the 'hood leaves me in splendid isolation, and from that position I can make some stupid pronouncements, which my critics rightly smack me about.  I think that perhaps I have gone overboard beyond what is appropriate for the purposes of this blog which are essentially expansive, not combative. The problem is that I can't seem to do it both ways.

I can't accept that black people lack the ability to navigate their way through America an find their way to middle class status without an interventionist, handicapping politics. Given the very traditions we claim to revere, of the strength of black family and all it took to survive slavery and Jim Crow; given our respect of men like Malcolm X and our claims about black power, one would think we've got plenty enough to go on to make it in the cushiest nation on earth. And yet all this (which I call The Sound of the Drum) seems to elude the Forty Percent, those who have the black skin but seem to lack the black backbone. And still all this blackification is annoying to me, because I firmly believe that there is no essence in blackness, that blackness is a cultural, political and intellectual construct born out of a historically specific period. I would like to fix that in place and include people in and kick others out based on their proper understanding of The Sound of the Drum. I do so because it is clear to me that all of the ills and boogabears black center and left partisans claim to be the bane of the Forty Percent are evidently not strong enough to beat us all down. So who owns black? The ones who win or the ones who lose? Who defines black politics, those whose work and values result in success or those whose failings dog us? Basically whom is black politics for?

My answer is and has been, break it up by class. The problem with that of course is that American politics and political rhetoric tends to be zero sum. And as I have demonstrated here, it seems rather impossible to assert noblesse and Right politics simultaneously among an audience of black politicos. Of course on the Right we understand, but the rest do not.

And so I have come to a new preliminary conclusion: Give the people what they want.

'Give the people what they want' works like this. Basically employ alternative means than political debate to discuss the issues of the day. But at a more significant level, it basically means to commiserate with the doomsayers and assume a position of self-righteous charity towards the poor misfortunates who don't measure up to my new burden of proof. In other words it goes from cynicism to duplicity, which is precisely what I feel is the current posture of the Democrats. Since I am evidently talking to a class of black politicos who are seeking to move the crowd, I may as well move with them.

I have determined for myself, that it is not worth suffering the slings and arrows of black political proxies of the underfed, undernourished and otherwise underprivileged of black America. So I'm going to give them what they want. I'm tired of being genuine, and so I relent. I therefore declare that I am the last real black man alive in America, and if you can coax me out of my cynical, duplicitous shell, instead to telling people what they want to hear, I may even tell the truth.

In the meantime, I will be talking about health care, education, charity and other soft subjects for your listening pleasure. Maybe. I'll see how long I can stand it.

The Most Poignant Tale I've Heard All Year

I'll be the first to admit this is not a set of strategic facts, but what it is seems rather undeniable from my perspective. It's not the first time I've seen something like this from Michael Totten, and I'm perfectly willing to admit confirmation bias, but damn!

MJT: Tell us about living under Saddam Hussein.

Hammer: It was crazy life, like feeling safe inside a jail. If they sent you to an actual jail nothing changed. They arrested everyone, literally everyone, for no reason and sent them to jail for two weeks just so they could see the jail.

I went there three times. The first time because I worked for a movie company. They sent all of us to jail. It had nothing to do with me.

I was given a three year sentence. My family has money, so I paid the judge 50,000 dollars. I gave it directly to the judge, plus four new tires for his car and a satellite TV. He gave me a three month sentence instead of a three year sentence. He scratched “3 years” off my sentence and wrote “3 months” in by hand.

They sent me to Abu Ghraib. I saw so many things. If you want me to talk about that I would need a whole newspaper.

MJT: Tell us a little about Abu Ghraib.

Hammer: On the bus to the jail I didn’t have handcuffs. I asked why. The guard said “Look behind you.”

The first guy behind me got a 600 year sentence.

The next guy got six hanging sentences.

The third guy was sentenced to be thrown blindfolded out of a second story window. Twice.

Another guy f*cked his mother and sisters three times. He was freed on Saddam’s birthday.

Another guy had his hand cut off.

There was this last guy. He went to the market with his wife. She waited in the car when he went to buy something. When he came back to the car his wife was screaming. Two guys were in the car with her. One held her arms and the other was raping her. He grabbed his AK-47 and chased them away. They ran to their car and he shot them. Their car blew up. They were mukhabarat [Saddam’s secret police]. He got a death sentence. On his second day in Abu Ghraib they killed him and sent the mother- and sister-f*cker free for the fourth time.

The guards who ran Abu Ghraib sold hallucinagenic drugs to prisoners for money. They forced me to take them.

You need protection in there. You find someone and give him drugs and cigarettes. You pay off the guards to just punch you in the face or move you to a different cell instead of kill you.

I was freed 26 days after I arrived, on Saddam’s birthday before I finished the three months.

I can’t live with this nightmare anymore. 

This is where the locus of my moral life is and has been for the past few years. Everything else pales in significance. And guess what. that's not even the worst part of his tale.

The Frayser Plan

Dr. Louis Frayser is a family friend and a great man. He's one of those incredible old guys who remembers his great grandparents, which in his case means people born in the mid 1800s. His family is from Macon Georgia, and generally speaking he knows a thing or two. He's just what you would expect from an old country doctor who makes housecalls, a heart of gold. He can be an irascible old coot, but what I love about Dr Lou the most is his insatiable curiosity and willingness to be philosophical. We've had some really fascinating theological discussions - he's one of those people for whom you can't wait to find their considered opinion.

Imagine my surprise when he told me last Sunday that he started a blog and has put together a proposal for Universal Health Care, among other things.

Well it turns out that his blog isn't exactly bloggy, but it is on the web and his proposal is a rather massive piece. Not blog length at all, but rather comprehensive. So I have promised to pub him up and give him the benefit of my ear and popularity. Moreover since I'm trying to figure out the whole thing, I've decided to take pieces of his thesis apart for analysis and discussion. To that end, and towards a new direction at Cobb, I'm adding the category of Health Care.

I put the entire proposal up at the Conservative Brotherhood site, and Frayser will be my first expert to help me digest this entire subject.  You can't help but love the audacity of his plan:

It is almost common knowledge that our health care system is in a state of chaos. Dominated by governmental bureaucracies and the bureaucratic maze created by the various mega health maintenance organizations, insurance companies and a supporting cast of hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and laboratories. Costs spiral and our federal deficit swells. Worse yet, those needing and seeking health care are often put off, delayed or denied the needed care. The bean counters in the various bureaucracies decide who gets care and, if they get care, what care consumers (patients) get. Medicare and Medicaid costs, including pharmaceutical costs, are like a runaway train. These costs comprise the lions� share of the federal deficit. This has been well documented in many writings published in the New York Times and other major papers and by television money reports. Efforts to positively, definitively, and permanently correct the health care problem have failed. To date, changes in the system proposed by politicians and others have been little more than Band-Aids applied to a wound hemorrhaging money. As a result, the taxpayer is drowning in red ink. China, who floats a huge piece of our deficit, has a choke hold on our economy.

The purpose of this proposal is to offer a completely new approach to health care in our country. This system rests upon the following principles:

A. The principle of competition and right to choose, are central to American capitalism and central to this proposed health care system.

    B.    The concept of �free care/free medicines� is completely and permanently eliminated from this system.

C. Revision of present methods of reimbursements that will result in a major, major reduction in health care costs and hence a major, major reduction in the federal deficit.

D. We can provide universal health care for every American citizen. However, to date very little discussion has been offered regarding the role of universal health care in the reduction of health care costs. I propose to do so.

E.    Relieve private industry of a significant portion of health care costs for employees.

F. We should support an existing mechanism, community clinics, for providing comprehensive health for everyone including those indigent persons who don�t qualify for universal health care.

It is my belief that this proposal, which rests on the principles cited, will remove the costly nightmare that is today�s health care system. The specifics of the system now follow.

And so, beginning next week, I'll start talking about health care and setting up a framework for analysis and understanding.

The Brotherhood Expands

We welcome Desmond Burton, aka Afronerd to the Conservative Brotherhood. Afronerd is:

A new and needed web sanctuary for people of color with intellectual and artistic pursuits. In this blog we will be addressing interesting and varied subjects, i.e. current national/world affairs, culture, science, religion, politics, entertainment and literature(including graphic novels a/k/a comic books.....yes comics). We hope you enjoy the exchange of ideas. Peace & Godspeed.

Whatever you do, don't miss Afronerd Radio. It's a spiky and entertaining time and you won't forget it. Afronerd and his colleague run a great website and a truly challenging podcast. We're glad to have this new voice on board.

BTW If you haven't checked out the Conservative Brotherhood site recently, please do. The RSS aggregator has been updated and gives you access to all of the stories posted by the Brotherhood.

I've Been Writing Too Much

Yesterday I spent some quality time with my best friend. We knocked around LA a bit, settled on giggling through the Simpson's Movie again, and got into a fairly heated debate in which our worldviews clashed over the war in Iraq and something called the Unitary Executive.

We covered about three dozen points and our basic disagreements over the War were as follows.
He says that the invasion of Iraq was a bad idea, that stability could have been achieved through containment and that we should not be in a two front war. He says if we would have just worked in Afghanistan, we would have achieved stability in the Middle East.
I said Afghanistan is not the Middle East. I say that the timing of the invasion is irrelevant, that military conflict with Iraq was inevitable and that in the end our long term commitment doesn't have to be cost-effective.
He says that Iran is stronger and that Hezbollah would not have fought Israel from Southern Lebanon if we weren't in Iraq.
I say Iran is weaker because of Ahmandinejad and that he's screwing up his economy, and that we wouldn't have busted up AQ Khan's network nor gotten Libyan concessions unless we put boots on the ground in Iraq.

 

Unfortuntaely we spent no time talking about Al Qaeda or radical islam. And we quit that discussion after I realized I couldn't nail him down to a good figure for the size of the invasion or occupation force - he wouldn't cop to Shinseki's view, and we basically hadn't read the same books. Since he has clearances, he claimed some inside dirt but I think he was shitting me, but it was time to watch the movie.

In our basic disagreement over Impeachment:
He says Congress must impeach or the Imperial Presidency will become a permanent feature of American democracy and that this is a very dangerous thing.
I say that Unitary Executive theory is a strawman, that people just don't like Bush and still for all his stonewalling nobody has found a smoking gun. Plame game being the prime example of a frustrated witch hunt.
He says that the President's end-around FISA is a prima facia case for high crimes and misdemeanors.
I say where's the beef and who died? Nobody has been harmed and he has no idea how many times this end-around was taken.
He says that's not the point. That Cheney could be an axe-murderer but we could never find out so long as the President tells his subordinates to ignore Congressional subpoenas thwarting their investigative powers.
I say we prosecute axe-murderers all the time and we don't need to change the system or change the Executive because we suspect somebody might do something wrong in the future - we will react to the axe murder when we have an axe-murder, crippling the executive is prior restraint.

So as you can see, we had a wonderful time. The fact that we have so much to say proves that we haven't been sharing resources, which is a bad thing for long-distance friendships. So now that he's finally finished his tenure package, he'll have time to return my calls and we can work all that out.

In reviewing some cases I've done on assimilation, I recognize quite painfully that I am way too hermetic in my own little bloggy world. And I resist putting myself into the mix, but break that barrier anyway. So what I'm trying to say is that I very much appreciate all of the tart dialog that we have here and would much prefer to do it in person. It is simply impossible to sustain the bandwidth and complexity of the subjects I like to talk about in the context of a written blog. And yesterday helped point out to me the effect that my writing is having on my ability to communicate these subjects face to face. I can't tell whether I should try to improve my writing or give up altogether. I'm not going to decide any time soon.

Another thing that I noticed is that my orientation is towards solving the big problems ahead of you, and I give a lot of props to people who make commitments of time, money, blood, sweat and tears. My philosophy is oriented towards iterative improvements and long-term organization building. So when I look at the goal of stabilizing the Middle East, I lean fundamentally towards nation-building. That's why I'm a neocon. I want a solution. I don't need a solution now, I need a commitment now. I expect you to fail your way to success. And that's always the way progress happens, unless you can buy progress off the shelf.

Anyway, that's one of the reasons I look to the HOW of the GWOT and am not ready to call it quits. I'm looking for methods, which is why I am impressed with Petraeus in terms of lessons learned. I'm also of the notion that an early start beats fast running. A half-assed player *in* the game is better than a smug expert *out* of the game.

I write too much and I ought to video more, because when I video I am able to express myself without the stridency that my quest for unambiguous clarity forces in my writing.

One more thing. I tend to amble up to topics and chew vigorously on one corner of them. What I rarely do is give a thesis-style overview and framework. I think those are good when they're funded, but I prefer to write from the bottom up. So the Internal Black Culture Wars, was a change for me, a top-down overview. As it stands we only got into the political troika debate, which was healthy for what it was worth.

I still want to get better at this. So.. aluta continua.

Radical Black Assimilationism

Clare X Brown is throwing down. I anticipate a great deal of blather, bloviation and ahistorical doubletalk in this discussion. And I expect that it will all boil down to this:

Blacks living together in peace and harmony with whites is unnatural and improbable, and whenever it happens it destroys black power and thus black people and increases white power.

That's my quote and I'm putting words in her mouth, which is actually a good thing considering the words that are coming out. But I have this thing for clarity. At any rate her idea is a fundamentally reductionist and racist observation. The identification of 'radical black assimilationism' as a component of 'global' white supremacy is in itself another ploy for removing disciplines like economics (not to mention individualism) from the worldview of colorstruck people captivated by racial conspiracy theories. It reinscribes another race-based imperative and adds another level of obfuscation to something that ought to be crystal clear. Character is more important than racial identity. But there are a few words that are key in her premises.

Why is it so difficult for black people who assimilate to acknowledge that this is what they believe in?  Perhaps it is because they know – at least on a subconscious level - that assimilation is extremely destructive to the black community; they realize (as bell hooks has noted) that assimilation is a “strategy deeply rooted in the ideology of white supremacy.”  On a deep level they may recognize that assimilation is a form of mentacide, that is (in the words of Bobby Wright) the “deliberate and systematic destruction of a group’s minds with the ultimate objective being the extirpation of the group.”

It doesn't matter much what her definition of assimilation is, so long as we accept that it is a form of 'mentacide' which involves 'group's minds' and other groupthink. If one accepts the priority of the interests of racial groups over the interests of individuals, well that says it all right there. Who knows what is a fair balance for CXB? But if we are all subconsciously infected with a germ that makes us want to be loyal to our racial group, then we must need her instruction to help us heed that natural instinct. You know, in case we start getting too independently friendly with non-blacks and all the people that are aimed at destroying that subconscious natural instinct. Our essence, our fundamental inescapable, melanin-enhanced, genetic blackness.

I don't know how dumb Clare X Brown thinks we are, but we'll soon find out. I'll continue my commentary here because she's not publishing my comments there. Then again, I may have the foreign germ.

So let me offer a few milestones so that my position, in contrast to Brown's, is clear.

First of all, I don't like the way she lumps all sorts of blackfolks and indicts them with her new trumped up charge. She refuses to take people at their word:

Black progressives (liberals, socialists, Marxists, feminists etc) are particularly hypocritical, since they act in ways which indicate that they want to assimilate, and advance causes which in effect MEAN assimilation into the white population, but at the same time, they are not honest about what they are doing.   They insist on couching their objectives in other terms.

Duh. You just invented this farcical disease. Why should anybody subject themselves to your ridiculous category? Oh. Wait because they're black, and they can't help but be a part of what you describe. They cannot change their essence.

Secondly some definitions. I don't think I'm going to get a clearer definition of radical assimilation from Brown. So I'll use the following definitions for the sake of clarity.

Integration means joining an institution or society and sharing your ideas openly. Give and take.
Assimilation means joining an institution or society and leaving your ideas behind. Get in where you fit in. Assimilation and conformity are pretty much the same thing.
Radical assimilation means joining an institution or society and pretending that you were never outside of it. It means erasing your history of being outside and rejecting any ideas foreign to that institution or society.

Fair enough?

The first thing that came to my mind when I thought of radical assimilation from a cultural perspective was people who disabuse their family. I mean there's a fairly low price to pay for being a traitor to your race today. But being a traitor to your family name. That's deep. So I think of people who change their name from James Williams to Jabari Mfume. I think of people who change their name from Chaim Goldfarb to Chad Green. I think of people who leave their religion, like lapsed Catholics who become radical atheists.

So it seems to me that if you are a black radical assimilationist who defies black nationalism, then you would have had to be a black nationalist in the first place. That is, unless Clare X Brown believes that all black people are *naturally* black nationalist, which of course does a disservice to black nationalism as an intellectual construct, and to black people as masters of their own individual and family destiny.

Brown, if she is to be taken seriously at all, must be talking about politics. It's the only area of black life where she can legitimately criticize people's choices. But if she just wants to bash her political opponents, bash if you must, but at least be honest about it. Stop using the black race as a human shield. You have no claim on it.

Black on Black Crime: No Such Thing

There is no such thing as black on black crime. There is simply crime.

There is nothing black people do to deserve to be victims. Bad things happen to good people.
There is nothing black people do to to generate predators. Bad people are everywhere.

There is no such thing as black justice. There is justice.
Black criminals don't deserve special punishments. Black victims don't deserve special compensation.

The fundamental rule of civilization is that we need each other and so we must learn to live together in harmony for our mutual benefit. Those that refuse are a threat.

Criminals are fundamentally sociopathic. They decide that they don't have to conform to society's rules. And so they knowingly prey on people who do follow society's rules. It is our responsibility to punish them by removing these people from society. This is a consistent principle that applies to the everyone. It's as basic as sending a misbehaving child to a corner or grounding them to their room. It goes all the way up to incarceration, deportation, and execution.

--
People who believe in theories of 'black on black crime'  are, by definition, removing black people from the same considerations as the rest of the human race. It's racist.

Trades & Class

I have been interested in the health of the 'Second World' for a long time - basically ever since 2003 when big corporations stopped being nice to my little business, and I started working for the first time in what's known as the 'mid-market'. Instead of big fat organizations like Cingular Wireless or Kaiser Permanente I started building systems for small companies like a real-estate developer in Utah and a solar power company in Southern California. At one of these companies, a restaurant chain, I discovered myself in an old aerospace town that was undergoing rebirth. I noticed a lot of trucks, a lot of tradesmen and a lot of non-flashy business. In my new job, I'm about to re-enter that world.

But what is making me think about the Second World in particular these days is a discussion I had with my cousin 'The R' who is the principal of a charter school in NYC. He said that in China, everybody knows that at some point in their free public education, they are going to have to take a test. It is a nationwide standard test which is basically pass/fail. You get to take it once and one time only. If you pass, then you can go to college. If you fail, then you cannot. We need something like that in America.

The people who fail the test are in no way shamed. They become the tradesmen of the nation. They will engage in business and they will be properly educated in the appropriate subjects. Here in the US, our popular culture is dominated by yuppie sensibilities, including bourgie decadence. We don't give enough props to skilled workers in America unless its in a Ford or Chevy truck commercial. We must do better, and I think that the single most important educational reform we could implement is something like this test.

I'm a firm believer in apprenticeship. There is a great deal of work that goes on in America that collegiate types don't know, can't know and never find out. Nothing illustrates this so much as the kinds of television shows I love on the Discovery Channel like Dirty Jobs, Hazard Pay and, quite frankly Cash Cab. We tend to think of intelligence in very narrow ways and something about the way we have grown businesses in the post-war era has warped our sensibilities about what's actually valuable labor. I am thinking at this moment that 'The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit' would be a good read right about now. That model of corporate employment has practically disappeared, but how and why it came about, I think owes a great deal to what we thought about ourselves then. Quite frankly I think we were flush with cash from winning WW2 and had to fill all our new buildings with bodies. The smartening up came later, with the reforms that generated the need for MBAs started by Peter Drucker. Like most software guys in the enterprise space, I know how worthless a lot of MBAs can be. It was IT, JIT manufacturing and supply chain management that put the productivity into the 90s. My point is not to jab at MBAs, but to suggest that in many ways management was fit into the mold of the corporation rather than grown from an understanding of the core business. Corporate culture should be, corporate politics should not. There is a level of politics in the Second World that you simply cannot achieve. Nobody has the time for it, the margins are too slim.

Apprenticeship in the trades beginning that track after the National Test will open up not only a host of new and real opportunities for Americans in the skilled workforce, but change the culture away from the yuppie-centric. A national acknowledgment that certain skills are key to our nation's health might have any number of secondary benefits.

I think it would reduce the amount of money spent on college education that is of little practical benefit. It makes no sense to have English majors selling car insurance. Sure, I suppose you don't want your insurance guy to be inarticulate, but he shouldn't compare thy term life to a summer's day.

I must admit some of my bias against a proliferation of non-profits. I think we have a surfeit of Americans who independently muck up our understanding of a lot of issues that face the nation precisely because it doesn't hurt them to be eternally wrong. Whenever I listen to NPR I keep hearing about some foundation that is searching for the cause and the cure for homelessness. It's been about seven years now, you'd think they would have come to some solid answers. America doesn't need to flush these inefficiencies, but I don't think universities should be spewing out alternative lifestyles at the expense of everyone else. Taking the pressure off of students to achieve in that particular way, when they end up doing something else altogether would be an excellent thing for the culture of achievement and American meritocracy. It simply doesn't make sense for us to produce 5000 lawyers if only 3000 are good enough to work the real jobs and the other 2000 become hacks fighting the 3000 for prestige and influence. Let them fix bridges instead.

All of this interesects with class in an important way. An old British friend told me, that in America everybody looks at the rich guy and says 'I want to be like him'. But in the UK they say that they want to shoot him. We are unfortunately becoming more like the UK. We have too narrowly defined success and too many of us are faking it. We need to emphasize the importance of success in skilled labor, both white color and blue color. When we do this, people will be better able to respect their roles in society and we'll be better adjusted to recognizing different kinds of merit. America will not function properly if class warfare is the order of the day.

Imagine you could know, without question, what the best trade schools were. Whenever you wanted a plumber, or somebody to train your dogs, or somebody to take a family portrait, you'd recognize their school and credentials the same way you might recognize an attorney from Yale Law or CPA from Wharton.

I strongly believe that American labor markets should be robust and that we support a strong culture and emphasis on skilled labor education. It is vital to the future of America that we recognize and embrace Americans who provide such labor under the protections of American citizenship. If we do not, we will continue to outsource labor to nations who do not respect or protect liberty, we will integrate into a global economy of indentured servitude. This is a direct extension of the problem we currently have with illegal immigration from Mexico, with the difference being that most of those illegal immigrants are unskilled labor.

The Brother's Cup

Several people I respect have been messing with my head. They have been talking about hands on and local. One of them is my brother Deet. He lucked into a meeting with the mayor of Pasadena about a month ago, and the Mayor said, "What would you like to do?". I tried not to drool as Deet told me the tale of how he bumped into the mayor at an Obama reception. They talked and the mayor was impressed with Deet, because he's a Bowen and we have that effect on people. So he got another meeting.

This meeting was at some snazzy restaurant with notables noting that Deet was hanging with hizzoner. The answer to the question was that he wants to work with kids. Meaning at-risk, somewhat troubled, street kids. And in particular, he was interested in The Boys & Girls Club. Not long after that Deet got the executive director's tour of the Boys & Girls Clubs. Now he's thinking very seriously about working with the kids as a volunteer. See that's the thing about Deet, he's not interested in it for the money, and I think it is a thing that stuns us more worldly types a bit. He just wants to help.

The second piece of this inspiration came from a colleague out in Fort Worth. I'm a little mad at myself for not writing this earlier because I've now forgotten some of the details. But we stood for about 15 minutes talking about her summer vacation which she spent as a camp counselor at Camp El Tesoro which is run by Campfire USA. But her's was a special session of the camp which dedicates a week each year to kids who have suffered some traumatic loss. This year she had boys who had lost their fathers. Not as in dad walked out to get a pack of cigs and hasn't come back, as in dad is dead from leukemia and I watched him go from my hero to this wrinkled sliver of a man. It was a touching moment as she gave the matter of fact details of how on one day, one moment can make a difference of lasting significance for a kid whose life has been shattered.

The third piece was a brief discussion I had with Deet & The R at an IHOP the week after the family reunion. We talked about what it would take to put together a Drop Squad. I've always been a fan of the Drop Squad concept, and there have been many an occasion when I have watched from the bus stop as black men in brand new Mercedes Benzes cruised by on their way to places unknown. I always wondered what they knew and how they came to know it. My idea of a Drop Squad was essentially a summer pledge program for a single young man in which we would bounce him from house to house and douse him with an experience that would mark him for life. The R related a story about such a program in which several boys from the ghetto were sent to a high school in East Africa where they would see true poverty as well as other boys their age working on the same materials and yet doing it from conditions of extreme poverty. The program ran out of funds halfway through, the boys came back to the projects, which they now saw as not so bad after all. That program was a complete disaster, and it reminded me of someone else who had a similar experience. So while I'm on the subject let me relate that story.

A friend of mine's ex-girlfriend was one of those highly motivated individuals who wanted to give back to the community. She got her degree in one of the social sciences and then completed her masters, I forget which, but decided against going to law school. She was a straight A college student, very bright and very committed. She decided to go directly to the the projects and manage at-risk kids. She got Liberal Fever. She didn't want just the bad kids, she wanted the worst kids. She was sure that what she had learned in her years of schooling and her presence as a role model would make a big difference. After a while she became consumed and we often heard stories about how she would use anger management techniques to stop kids from literally shooting each other. At some point she decided that she wanted to go even further and went to Sharpeville in South Africa. Something snapped in her. I never got the full story, but basically when she realized how little people had, as compared to her life of privilege she lost all of her ambition. She came home to the states and could not leave her room. She wouldn't work, she wouldn't eat. She was traumatized.

Local Local Local

(from the archives, June 2004)

I have been appointed to startup the new Southwest Los Angeles chapter of the CCR, the California College of Republicans. This chapter's territory is the 47th Assembly district which encompasses, among many other neighborhoods, Ladera Heights, View Park, Baldwin Hills and 'the Dons' which comprise, next to PG County in Maryland, one of the largest upscale African American communities in the nation. It's where I grew up.

The CCR is one of about 7 grass roots statewide Republican feeder organizations. Each has its own charter and character. I have only met a few of the CCR officers, but I do know that the statewide chair is of Arab descent. (The other two CCR folks I have met are black including the president for LA County, and the president of the South Central chapter.)

This Thursday, I will be attending my first meeting, headed by Austin Dragon, the South Central president. Julia McGinty (I believe is her name) will be the featured speaker. She is an officer in the Schwartzeneggar camp.

My purpose in Republican activism is to establish an independent grass roots black conservative voice which constitutes a credible and practical threat to the status quo. This should affect Democratic complacency, black political fence-sitting, Republican disrespect and the overall domestic dialog on black progress. My goal was to increase black Republican registration threefold over the next 7 years. My expectation was to move from 5 to 15%, and I expected that the constituency in question would be comprised largely of upscale white collar blacks as well as small businesmen and Independents. However I am finding that there is even a broader spectrum of blacks that the GOP might appeal to.

Along the way I expect to do a lot of mythbusting and basically see for myself what's up with the Republican Party. I am especially concerned at the distance and difference between Ward Connerly and a black constituent base, and my inspection of Thomas Wood, a coauthor of prop 209 (CCRI), demonstrates that there is some real sense of responsibility to anti-discrimination. In otherwords, smart Republicans are calling Ward on his ahistorical shit.

I have been impressed with Republicans in local politics, especially Steve Soberoff, for whom I voted in the last LA mayoral campaign.

Online is crap. And that includes Project 21 which although I don't find suspect in its motives, I find lacking in its sophistication. Still, I think my own prejudices about people needing to come Correct makes me more critical than I need to be. I don't think that the average voter needs a 10 page thesis on why they should vote Republican (or just register Republican), I think they just need a few good reasons. And I find the reasons against such a move to be generally stereotypical ranting.

My focus in Republican politics is local, local, local. While I may be a strategic thinker, I am really interested in patronage. What do I get for delivering votes? Who do I get to know? What plans am I made aware of? This isn't rocket science. Half of the people in government are having conversations that African Americans are not a part of and that has largely been by African American choice. I choose to find out. Nobody's stopping me, and so far I've been encouraged and welcomed.

There is only a limited amount of *anything* that's going to get done through politics. And I think that the reason the Sharpton and Jackson et al still get credibility is because blackfolks haven't chosen anyone else. What do we want from politics? What do we want from government? And if the whole universe of black demands are more health care, more civil rights, more decriminalization of drugs, then Sharpton is the answer. If your political agenda comes from the civil rights movement exclusively, then Sharpton has you covered. But if you want something else then you have to turn to somebody else. So part of this is about finding what else is available, because black patronage has been very narrowly defined. That may have been enough for daddy, but it ain't enough for me, and it won't suffice for my children.

The Conservative Brotherhood is working. We may decide to do a group blog but for now, we're all independent voices on the right. And since these are people who already are self-motivated, credible and popular, we don't worry about falling off. I think this is the kind of organization we need to build. Just networking people who, like Cosby, have always been doing the same old thing. It's just a little bit higher profile - because people don't know.

Cramer Goes Ballistic

I'm a big fan of Cramer, but P6 hipped me to this clip and it's a real stunner. This is why I love this guy. I don't think he can be any more clear. I'm still trying to find out what's going on. Perhaps it is the $300 Billion I spoke of earlier this week. If so, and it's coming all out of the pockets of hedge funds, then this is the Armageddon in 'fixed income' that he's talking about. If so, then I misspoke at P6. Bear Stearns has been halved by losses in two hedge funds.

Bowen Throws the Gauntlet

Sec'y of State Debra Bowen decertified most of the voting machines in California yesterday. OK now you've got our attention. So who's going to fix this mess. I say there needs to be somebody like Schneier and Lessig to sit on a board for an open source project to solve the electronic voting problem once and for all.

Danziger sums it up nicely:

Because the infrastructure - the plumbing - of our society is something we pay very little attention to. And yet when infrastructure fails - as we saw in Minneapolis last week or Manhattan two weeks ago - it fails spectacularly. Our electoral plumbing is also creaky and in bad shape; Florida in 2000 was bad - but at least the votes could be recounted (over and over again). With today's insecure DVR technology, the problem is that we will have more races like the one in Sarasota Florida in 2006 - in which there was a 15% under-vote possibly due to a glitch in the ES & S DVR systems. The final results in the race can never be audited, and the loser litigated to try and get the election run over again. Look, no voting system - no human system - is perfect, or exempt from error, fraud, or challenge. But just as our bridges need to strong enough to ensure that they don't spontaneously collapse, our voting systems need to be robust enough that we're not left in bitter dispute after an election on who voted and how. We don't need voting technology less secure than airport poker machines in Vegas and less auditable than Enron's books. This isn't a partisan issue. It isn't something that 'we can get to later.' A political system everyone agrees is legitimate should last us a long time. And if officials at all levels of government have to work a little harder and spend a little money to maintain and defend the fairness of our political system, I can think of nothing better for them to work on. Can you?

Progress

Call the Cops Dunbar Village

Somebody got gang raped in a place called Dunbar Village.

Even almost a month later, people are still learning about this horrific crime.  THAT IS UNACCEPTABLE.  The SILENCE is UNACCEPTABLE. The SILENCE is IMMORAL. I fully intend to shame the hell out of these people until they speak on it. Do we need them? NO, but you can't hold yourself as some kind of defender of decency or civil rights leader/activist and then ignore one of the most heinous hate crimes committed against a Black woman and her child that I have ever heard of in my life. If they are going to be silent about this then they need to turn in their charter and close up shop. YESTERDAY! I need your help. It is not enough to be outraged, we need you to act. TODAY!

Every once in a while people make stunning blunders. Today I found one so incredible I hardly know what to say. Well actually I do know what to say, I just don't know how to say it politely. And I've chose not to so there.

How can a blogger be so blind as to react to this crime by protesting against Jackson and Sharpton and the NAACP? If there is anything more stupid than running to Jackson as a black leader, which he is not, it's running to protest Jackson because he's not showing leadership, which he can't. That's just stuck on stupid.

WHEN A COMMUNITY HAS A PROBLEM WITH CRIME, YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO CALL THE COPS.

But here we have a ghastly heinous crime, and this blogger is calling the media and all readers to call Jackson. So what we have here is a complete and total DUH moment upon which I am going to capitalize. I will lay the blame at the foot of the Coalition of the Damned, which has evidently convinced the bloggers at 'What About Our Daughters' that they are so powerful that they are the only ones capable of delivering justice. Ahem. The criminal courts exist for that purpose..

Argh. Dumbass.