Cobb

Iran's Oil Gambit: Dead

Just to smack around the notably silent Nulan who is generally ROTFL his BAO for no good reason, about 18 months ago he was salivating at the prospect that Iranian oil wealth would deal a body blow to the American economy. He cited the following (already hedged and dated joust) in our discussion of American Military Hegemony.

WASHINGTON – Is the biggest threat Iran poses to the United States really its nuclear ambitions - or is it petropolitics?

Last month the Iranian government quietly reaffirmed plans to create by next year a euro-denominated exchange in oil, natural gas, and other petroleum products. If successful, such an exchange could start to lap at the walls of the two existing oil exchanges - London's International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) and the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) - both owned by American companies.

If the billions of dollars in oil sales ever got going in euros, experts say, that could dry up the demand for dollars that the heavily indebted US economy depends on, and it could mean big trouble for the US economy. It's enough to make the Great Satan-loathing visionaries behind the Iranian regime salivate. The chances of success, however, seem quite remote - at least in the short term.

Quite remote indeed. But that didn't stop him from flaunting the possibility as a citation of a righteous smack of Bushitler. Well, time hits the hardest blows, especially below the belt. And so here is an update on the economic prospects for Iran. They can't even stabilize their own currency, much less bother ours:

Spengler at the Asia Times asked a year ago: what do you give someone who has everthing -- "cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer's, diabetes, kidney failure, and so forth. Iran's economy is so damaged that it is impossible to tell how bad things are. Except perhaps for the oilfields of southern Iraq, and perhaps also northern Saudi Arabia, there is nothing the West can give Iran to forestall an internal breakdown."

That degree of dysfunction was underscored by a recent Pajamas Media article describing the biggest case of corruption in Iran. Or possibly the Middle East. The chief auditor of the Iranian parliament has reported that $35 B of the country's oil revenues has just gone missing. Not that there's a heck of a lot to be stolen anyway. Despite record oil prices, the regime in Teheran has mismanaged its economy so badly that it is bankrupt. Losing the $35 billion is like a struggling retiree looking in the sugar jar and finding that the next six month's rent money is missing. Spengler writes:

Iranian dissidents put overall unemployment at 30% and youth unemployment at 50%. Government subsidies sustain a very large portion of the population; 42% of the non-agricultural population is employed by the Iranian state, compared with 17% in Pakistan.

Within fewer than 10 years, Iran will become a net importer, at which point the government no longer will be able to provide subsidies. Iran's economic implosion is a source of imminent strategic risk.

Risk to whom? one might ask. More on this later. But the huge corruption scandal in Iran may actually understate the extent of its mismanagement. The Pajamas Media article continues: "This is a serious allegation, as this amount constitutes almost half of Iran’s total oil income for that year. ... To make matters worse, this is not the first time since the start of the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that money has been used without the Majlis’ knowledge. One other famous case took place during the 2007-08 financial year. It was revealed later that $2 billion was used to import gasoline, without any consultation or approval of the members of the Iranian parliament."

Smack.

 

Yon's Moment of Truth

Michael Yon's book is about equal to the sum of its parts, but in certain ways it is a disappointment. I think greatest of all it stands as testament to the fact that we have almost no indepth coverage of this war from the perspective of battlefield reporting. There are only several reporters that we've been able to pay serious attention to, and Yon has been one of them. Yet his 'Moment of Truth in Iraq' reads like journalism - the sort which almost doesn't matter in retrospect. I would have liked a more sophisticated and comprehensive report on everything going on in Iraq, but I realized that would be impossible from a ground up report. That's what this book is, a view from boot level of Iraq, and it is exactly what we Americans, and everyone else around the world, needs to see.

It boils down to this. The American military is awesome and is representing our nation an order of magnitude better than our politicians in support of the war are, and two orders greater than those opposed. It is required reading for all those who thought that 'cultural differences' were an insurmountable obstacle to American peacekeeping. It refutes the characterization of our troops as a callous, unprofessional or incompetent occupying force. It destroys myths about the scale and intensity of the fighting and it makes the nature of the fighting transparently clear.

But best of all Yon illustrates exactly the effect that American Army and Marine commanders in the field deal with civilians, terrorists, allies, insurgents and all of the various parties on the ground. It demystifies the logistical issues and the dynamics of the politics surrounding the rebuilding of the country of Iraq.

Moment of Truth is fast and easy reading. I got through it rather quickly and I recognize many of the stories which I had previously encountered on Yon's blog. It's nothing like Fiasco or The Looming Tower in terms of sophistication, it is a popular book meant to be read by the masses, and so it should be. I think it will be the definitive introduction to the popular understanding that the US is not only capable of evolving the military capability of counterinsurgency, but that we're damned good at it and have proven it in spade in Iraq. This book is required reading for everyone, but especially people whose heads are stuck in Vietnam. This is not your old uncle's military.

Obama Ignores Iraq

Hewitt smashes Obama. McCain will make hay.

Barack Obama’s long absence from Iraq after his one and only visit to the country –a two day visit in January, 2006—is shocking. Until John McCain’s blistering attack on Obama’s apparent indifference to observing conditions there, I had simply assumed that, like Senators McCain, Clinton, Biden and Governor Romney, Obama had been to Iraq after the surge had been initiated and its initial successes achieved. After all, Senator Obama wants to be the Commander-in-Chief in wartime. Given the centrality of the Iraq theater to that war and the conditions in Iraq crucial relevance to the campaign ahead, I am astonished to learn that he hasn’t bothered to make one trip to the country since declaring his candidacy for the presidency.

Obama’s indifference to events in Iraq and the rapid and dramatic progress that has been achieved there in the past 15 months underscores the completeness of the ideology he brings to the campaign. Facts simply don’t matter to him. He has already decided the battle for Iraq is lost, even though it is in fact nearly won. The far left of the Democratic Party demanded an absolute purity on the war, and Obama gave it to them –so completely, it seems, that he decided not to even keep up an appearance of interest in the course of the war.

Harsh Words for Christopher Hill

Frank Gaffney yesterday essentially called US Ambassador Christopher Hill a swine. According to Gaffney, Hill is going to take the North Koreans off the list of state sponsors of terrorism despite the overwhelming evidence that they were providing nuclear weapons technology to Syria. A new agreement is upcoming. Stay tuned.

23 Reasons Deconstructed

The following is a text of the Joint Resolution authorizing the use of American military force to depose Saddam Hussein. It is an escalation of a hot conflict in which Iraq was shooting at American planes enforcing the No Fly Zone and maintaining sanctions on the sale of oil from Iraq. We should examine the extent to which these reasons seem reasonable in hindsight and whether or not the placement of American armed forces in Iraq was necessary. The point of all this is to analyze, independent of GWBush and the US Congress, America itself made an error in refusing to merely contain Saddam Hussein rather than to depose his regime by force.

Each of the reasons is numbered for clarity.

Tagging: Taxonomy Solved

I don't talk much about XRepublic these days. It's still a great idea but I don't exactly know enough about how to get it made. I don't have the time or the money and I don't see how I can get it at the moment. But I do recall a problem that I had with the entire system that required me to think about how to create the right way of categorizing the interest groups, resolutions and debates. Now, I think the answer is clear thanks to a presentation made by Clay Shirky (from the good old panix.com days) at Long Now.

Short answer. Tagging is a 'degenerate' form of categorization. It uses the power of social thinking about information. What millions of people think of something is a better way of getting to it than what a few experts think of a thing. The experts might be right, but the way people think about something changes over time and you need to follow that path.

Dr. Fadl's Second Thoughts

The new article by Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker is quite a stunner, that is if you follow the ideological twists and turns of the 'clash of civilizations'. Wright, the author of the authoritative 'The Looming Tower' reports that one of the primary ideologues of the Jihadi movement is recanting and redefining his definition of jihad, essentially rejecting terrorism and specifically repudiating Al Qaeda.

This is not about a moderate muslim moderating radical Islam, this is about one of the great intellectuals of the movement, the leader of Egyptian Al Jihad,  saying uh.. on second thought we were wrong. He takes radical interpretations of takfir to task.

Fadl approaches the question of takfir with caution, especially given his reputation for promoting this tendency in the past. He observes that there are various kinds of takfir, and that the matter is so complex that it must be left in the hands of competent Islamic jurists; members of the public are not allowed to enforce the law. “It is not permissible for a Muslim to condemn another Muslim,” he writes, although he has been guilty of this on countless occasions. “He should renounce only the sin he commits.”

Fadl acknowledges that “terrorizing the enemy is a legitimate duty”; however, he points out, “legitimate terror” has many constraints. Al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks in America, London, and Madrid were wrong, because they were based on nationality, a form of indiscriminate slaughter forbidden by Islam. In his Al Hayat interview, Fadl labels 9/11 “a catastrophe for Muslims,” because Al Qaeda’s actions “caused the death of tens of thousands of Muslims—Arabs, Afghans, Pakistanis and others.”

The most original argument in the book and the interview is Fadl’s assertion that the hijackers of 9/11 “betrayed the enemy,” because they had been given U.S. visas, which are a contract of protection. “The followers of bin Laden entered the United States with his knowledge, and on his orders double-crossed its population, killing and destroying,” Fadl continues. “The Prophet—God’s prayer and peace be upon him—said, ‘On the Day of Judgment, every double-crosser will have a banner up his anus proportionate to his treachery.’ ”

At one point, Fadl observes, “People hate America, and the Islamist movements feel their hatred and their impotence. Ramming America has become the shortest road to fame and leadership among the Arabs and Muslims. But what good is it if you destroy one of your enemy’s buildings, and he destroys one of your countries? What good is it if you kill one of his people, and he kills a thousand of yours? . . . That, in short, is my evaluation of 9/11.”

This is as dramatic as Malcolm X' trip to Mecca.

The Pacific Case Against Al Qaeda

There isn't, to my knowledge a trackable thread of ideas that bears watching which makes a suitable case for a political engagement with Al Qaeda which defeats it peacefully. I've always respected the pacifist case, one the Dalai Lama might make, against OIF, but it hasn't been a case I've kept much track of, if it exists.

I am in the middle of reading (and will finish by the end of lunch today) Lawrence Wright's new article about how the failure of Al Qaeda in Iraq, among other failures, has empowered various radical clerics who once advocated terrorism to turn against their prior ideas. I've always had Lawrence Wright at the top of my reading list to communicate my understanding of the nature of the jihadi enemy, but I don't know that many others may have. I imagine that is partly because I had basically given up hope in reading Matthew Yglesias and Kevin Drum as their comment sections began to sound more and more vacuous. Be that as it may, now that I am pulling back from advocacy to curiosity and analysis, I'm in a better mood to hear such wisdom out, if it exists.

Among the sort that actually have energy remaining after bashing the President, what alternative progress has been in evidence? We've been talking here about unanticipated consequences of war, and on the whole, waging war has hurt Al Qaeda, our mortal enemy, very deeply. What unanticipated consequences of 'waging peace' initiated by dissenting Americans and their 'international community' of dissenters against Bush have hurt Al Qaeda substantially?

Thinking About Squatters

Robert Neuwirth has been lecturing me and although I haven't finished hearing him out, I have already started thinking about a very interesting project. That project would be jumpstarting the lowest of the low income housing projects. In other words, what could be done to improve the quality of life of squatters from an architectural perspective? The first thing that comes to mind is to basically update the hut and the shanty as a more or less permanent kind of structure - a basic unit of housing whose design overcomes the most basic difficulties of squat housing.

The first thing that comes to mind is something about the size of a 3 x 5 x 2 meter stackable block of poured concrete with a drainage hole in a corner or in the center. Half of the roof is built in and the other half is open. There is an open door frame.

The primary use of this would be as a kind of structure that allows for extension, a building block that could become a primary kind of favela-lego building material which has features built into it that is highly adaptive. Something more than a brick, something less than a pre-fab.

I think about poured concrete because my first idea was for security and cleanability. I think I'd have a sense of security in concrete, but perhaps pressed wood or PVC or some other combination of materials would be much more appropriate. Again, I'm thinking of something that is fundamentally waterproof, antiseptic and portable.

The second idea that comes to mind is the reuse of shipping containers. I've actually seen this idea all over the place. Here's an excellent resource. These are fairly upscale but I could see that some downscale versions might work fairly well. Obviously there is some problem in getting these to the places where they should be. Here's a bit more detail about some basic how-to.

Nuewirth is a bit fascinated by the 'communitarian' aspects of drug-gang protection. His inversion of the aspects of law and order and his poetics about his encounter with the cops is, well, something I've heard a lot before. And so my spidey senses are tingling. So the second thing I do is second-guess my good intentions. What are the likely outcomes of giving away superior (we think) squat housing into current slums? Chances are that the big bad powerful guys who run things in these most ghetto of ghettoes would get them.

Maybe this is just a bad idea. The more I listen to this guy's video, the more I think so.

Intangibles in Globalization

Hybrid Vigor gives me something to think about. Although they pioneered the field, GE is finally selling its appliance business:

The decision fits the pattern that Kaj Grichnik and Conrad Winkler discussed in S+B (and in their new book Make or Break), that companies see manufacturing as a cash cow and non-core to their business. They ask the question in this article “How important is industrial capacity to a nation’s well-being?” and offer an alternative:

Old, fossilized plant footprints can become nimble networks; confrontational labor relationships can evolve into constellations of joint interest; outmoded supply chains can be transformed into clearly defined, mutually beneficial partnerships; and stolid aging factories can be retrofitted into showcases of lean manufacturing. Only those companies that appreciate manufacturing, invest in technology, and innovate in this field are likely to prosper.

Networks, labor, partnerships, lean manufacturing. These are all intangibles. Yes, the future of manufacturing lies in a company’s ability to manage its intangibles.

I was especially struck by this case because I often use GE as an example when I talk about intangible value in companies. Despite its significant reliance on manufacturing and infrastructure, GE has traditionally been known for its management capability, for Six Sigma, for being smarter that most—all intangible aspects of business. People instantly get it when I explain that the future of an industrial company like GE is dependent on how well it manages its intangibles.

A week or so ago I was musing about the success of Samsung in the appliance business. I didn't know until this month that they made refrigerators, and they're very nice ones too.

I wonder if some of the intangibles of an innovative company like GE is passed on when units are spun off to other countries with arguably cheaper labor bases. For example when IBM sold the ThinkPad, my favorite brand of laptop computer, to Chinese Lenovo, did all of the lessons of Boca Raton accrue? Experts may recall that back in the early 90s when IBM was cranking up fabs in Florida there was a lot trouble they got into over its profitability - was IBM even smart enough to do it right? Their smarts finally paid off in an excellent product, but are those intangibles passed on, or do consumers not even care any longer about excellence in increasingly sophisticated commodity products?

I'm at the point at which I don't care about VCRs and small analog televisions. Innovations that led me to pay 300 bucks for each now in the hands of a downscaled market might not matter any longer. This is particularly interesting with regard to the energy efficiency of refrigerators. As some of you may know, the labeling mandated on all refrigerators sold in the US alerted consumers to the long term cost of their operation in terms of their electrical efficiency. It cost more to use the fat copper wires and energy efficient motors in the manufacturing process resulting in a higher price for the smart American consumer, goosed as we were by environmentalist legislation to be energy efficient. But in the long term the American consumer saved operating costs on this durable good. Will such matters be considered at all in the global market for refrigerators when GE's intangibles no longer apply?

Hmmm.

Downscaling

'Downscaling' is what I'm going to call the resistance to conspicuous consumption. I have been intimating in several different ways that implication to a Boyd rule is part of the path to sustainability. I've mentioned before that certain New Yorkers have this skill and that it may become something more and more people will have to assume. The Boyd rule is that there are two ways to have all you want, one is to be rich, the other is to reduce your needs to zero. Downscaling is about reducing your needs towards zero.

Urban property is at a premium, and it's a rule of social creatures that we will urbanize. But the concentration of people will not, of necessity create conflict despite what people say about 'income inequality', and I think NYC is the proof. You have very poor people meshed cheek by jowl with very rich people, and there is a kind of indigence possible in NYC that is impossible other places - ie sleeping on a subway train. It can only happen where there are subway trains - the homeless hustle is a skill. But at an appreciably higher socioeconomic level, there is another sort of 'indigence' and this is what I'm focusing on as key to some modifications of middle class behavior past the suburban model. 

Here is a kind of preview of what I'm talking about, although there was an excellent article in the Village Voice about the phenomenon of "bohemian cadging" published many years ago. From Kottke.

Ah, to be young and broke in New York. Some astounding stories of discipline and ingenuity about what it takes to make ends meet in the city. What's striking is that some of these people are literally starving and probably malnourished. And yet they still come to the city.

Drinking and eating carry their own complications. Especially if you are, say, Noah Driscoll, a 25-year-old project manager for a Chelsea marketing company whose salary is comparable to what a rookie teacher might make.

"For a little while I only ate grapefruits for my lunch," said Mr. Driscoll, who pays $400 a month on his college loans, "because they have a lot of nutrients and they got me through the day."

Mr. Driscoll has since started packing two peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for lunch. Dinner might be two baked potatoes. On a recent Monday, it was franks and beans. On a good night, he might spend up to $6.

"To live like a human being on the salary that I make is very difficult in this city," he said. "You've got to forget about brands, you've got to forget about, you know, what your mom made you growing up, and take what's out there."

Downscaling is not, unlike the bohemian cadging and homeless hustling, born of necessity. Rather is has a kind of intellectual and social appeal by people who have choices. For example, I think that my willingness to buy most of my clothing at Walmart and Target, although I could afford Gap and Eddie Bauer are examples. So I am cool with the Southern California fashion trend of baggy shorts and cargo pants; I can indulge this fashion trend and downscale at the same time. Buying rice by the 50 pound bag, and otherwise getting consumer goods wholesale is downscaling. Or is it? There has to be a difference between downscaling and smart shopping in both the amount of dedication to the social aspects of compulsive consumption & buying junk and environmental & macroeconomic impacts of such choices. There also has to be a difference between a shallow rejectionism of market winners and smart organic consumption. If McDonald's gourmet coffee is just as good as Starbucks', which do you buy?  So one has to be particularly aware of the social vs intellectual components of these voluntary choices.

Motorcycles are, in my mind, a very good downscaling choice. In many ways I think that the guy who buys a motorcycle as his primary commuting vehicle is doing a better downscaling job than the guy who buys a Prius.

How is downscaling different than conservation? I think there's overlap but that downscaling is more of a paradigm shift. I guess that has to be the difference. As I spend more time thinking about it, I'll comment.

Scaling Back AFRICOM: When It's OK Not To Care

I was unable to sustain much of a discussion here getting into the facts surrounding the American military and diplomatic efforts in the Horn of Africa. Well, I basically lost momentum here and my YouTube thing was getting all of the 200 character comments. I still maintain the research notebook on Somalia.

The Christian Science Monitor (a damned good source) gives me the following news which I accept with some neoconservative resignation:

Washington - When Pentagon strategists sought to create a new military command to oversee Africa, they believed they could build one that          deemphasized military might and would serve as an exemplar of what so-called US soft power could do around the world.       

But in recent months, the Pentagon has had to scale back its ambitious vision to adapt Africa's political terrain, military officials acknowledge, adding they remain committed to the original idea of a military command to promote peace in the region.

For now, officials have ruled out basing the headquarters anywhere in Africa and may in fact locate it on the East Coast, a senior defense official says. They have also backed away from selling the new command as a full "interagency" organization that spans military and nonmilitary entities.

"We sort of admitted all along that we were building something that we'd never built before," says one senior defense official,          on how the command has changed. "So you gotta start somewhere, you gotta take a stab at it."       

As the US Africa Command – or AFRICOM – works to stand on its own by October, the change in plans illustrates the limits of          the US trying to use the military to try to broaden its influence across the globe.       

                           

When you consider the vehemence with which people I consider ignorant and rebellious reject the military umbrella of American hegemonic protections, you basically leave them to their fate. I should probably find some strong argument in a book, perhaps Bolton's, that gives a safe retreat from proper American geopolitical intervention. We are not an empire and have no such mandate from the people, and yet there is much we are able to do. But in the back of my mind, I know it is essentially irresponsible for America, especially the Pentagon to allow people in Africa or anywhere butcher each other without the benefit of a proper war. Sound strange? Think about it. Do you think the Geneva conventions applied in Rwanda? Of course not. And who makes any 14 year old with an AK47 obey any law? With real soldiers from real armies. America is the only country willing and able to deploy multinational forces of any substance. The AU doesn't seem to be on its game. But the illegitimate bloviation of immoderate dissent has quite enough adherents and we're not in the mood to discipline a better solution. So to hell with Africa. OK?

I note this in reflection upon the latest Long Now seminar which reminds me that America invented modern philanthropy and the new philanthropy is going through an interesting evolution. I'll pickup that tangent another time.

Colored Television

Jimi sez:

When it comes to the Black American experience, I don’t know that television has ever gotten it right—but then again, I don’t know if they are supposed to. I’ve long been a critic of people who think that entertainment should act as a kind of de facto primer/ publicist for Da Race. The problem with black people is that we watch TV not knowing what we should reasonably expect. This, I know: that if you are able to turn on the set and just be entertained by anything you find, you are one up in the game. Television, at best, is a propaganda tool used to subjugate our critical mind and prop up apocryphal notions about The Others, this, relative to the intended audience of the programming we’re talking about. So when I read an article about the Black-themed TV coming to a crossroads, I find myself not quite as optimistic as the writer. I think black television is just recycling itself, and the days of The All New Amos and Andy Hour are not far off.

Jimi forgot to put a (tm) after Black American Experience. After all, that is a trademark which is increasingly owned and maintained by a select few the kingpin of whom is Dr Dre, Urkel, Will Smith or Michael Eric Dyson, depending on who you ask. It used to be Spike Lee, but something went wrong after 'Summer of Sam'.

My folks refused to watch The Jeffersons or Good Times or even Baretta. We were allowed to watch Sanford & Son and Chico & The Man. That was basically it. As far as I'm concerned, there probably haven't been any decent represenations of the 'Black American Experience' since 'Carmen Jones', with a few moderate exceptions in The Cosby Show, the one black dude on Barney Miller, Julia, Hill Street Blues, A Different World and Roc. Period. It seems to me that anybody who has been to an August Wilson play should have been ruined for what passes as good black TV permanently. Which begs a question which is how, if you consider it a priority, would you get people to the level of an August Wilson play?

My answer is simple. Those who care, care, and the rest are just agitating out of habit. Pops told me a story a few weeks ago about some gripe some black person had about some thing back in the days, and after the problem was adjusted the gripe lingered. Our grandparents' admonition was "You just want to stay mad". It was true. People just want to stay mad - there's nothing to be done about it. You just have to let them rage and give them space, pad the room and keep precious things out of the way.

We're more than 30 years past the age of Blaxploitation and a second generation of black literature is well out there. It's a good time to compare and contrast what passes for representation of the BAE today with that which was produced a generation or two ago (and even three speaking of Carmen Jones). Because the only reason to consider the difference is aesthetically. It's a historical fact that cultural productions never raised the status of a people by proxy.

So I suppose there might be something to the activism for positive images, but I'm convinced they've all been out there for generations. People who boycott 'Soul Plane' just want to stay mad.

The Black Book Objective

A question:

Type the words "African-American" or "black" along with "bookstore sections" into any search engine. You'll most likely pull up a litany of blog posts, articles, etc. likening the the existence of shelf space designated for titles by black authors to everything from "book segregation" to "literary apartheid."

It's a never-ending debate among booksellers, customers, publishers and authors. "Will only black people buy my book if I'm shelved in the African-American interest section?" is definitely a question that I've been asked more than once.

Interestingly, I get some twinges of a creepy feeling when I suddenly find myself in the African American section of the B&N. That's because I'm old enough to remember when there was no such thing. But it doesn't compare to the feeling I get in a record store when I'm in the Rap section which while nowhere near mortal panic, can induce goose bumps. But this is mostly the case when I see miscategorizations that are obvious to me but clearly not to the store owners.

It makes no sense to me to see Jill Scott next to Coolio in a record store. Similarly, I don't expect to see Toni Morrison next to E. Lynn Harris. Now this may sound very subjective and it is, but is African American interest objective? Only to the extent somebody thinks African American interest can be objectified should there be a different section. It seems to me that every customer that wants that convenient objectification is catered to by the store. The open presumption is that such people are black and it is therefore an OK customer demographic which ought to be satiated. I disagree from a subjective standpoint.

Whatever happened to Dewey?

My Terabytes

For about two or three years now, probably more - who's counting - I have had a personal terabyte at the pad. I keep anywhere from 3 to 7 computers up and running at anytime at home, plus the 2 DVRs, the XBox 360 and now four iPods. (The Spousal Unit hasn't joined the revolution).

My thinking about convergence has changed significantly since I got the iPod Touch this year. I am astounded by the usefulness of those 16 portable GB. A couple movies, a couple dozen podcasts, several hundred songs, several thousand addresses... I could easily see that in 32GB I would need almost nothing else to carry around with me. In my pocket that is.

The biggest problem I have had in enterprise sales and development is that I've had to take a USB drive around so that I could have about 50GB of music and 100GB of  models, data, demos and methodology templates around to my various prospects and customers. I happen to use the Porsche Design aluminum ones like Will Smith in his 'I Am Legend' laboratory. But about a year ago I evolved that with the use of GotomyPC which allows me to have my own 'cloud' at home and access it from anywhere.

So now I have a fairly fine grained understanding of where all my data is but what I don't have is the right combination of access and portability through all of my devices. These are going to be the issues I would like to address considering the prospects for mesh computing in the next generation of software and hardware. I'm also going use myself and my family and associates as models, fictionalizing my ability to afford everything all at once.

I'm going to invent a new category here and echo it at Cubegeek called Mesh when I speak about this whole thing because there are a lot of interesting tangents and capabilities that I'd like to discuss. I've going to get rather sci-fi about it and cross pollinate it with Biome stuff which I haven't really worked on for a number of years.

Macroeconomic Spew

I am realizing that a number of the revolutionary ideas that I am getting from the Long Now seminars is a bit mind-boggling. As a skeptical analyst and as a pattern making human, I keep trying to make sense of it all. But I think that I have to be resigned to some shortcuts which are not of my own design. Pete Murphy offers the following:

I am author of a book titled "Five Short Blasts: A New Economic Theory Exposes The Fatal Flaw in Globalization and Its Consequences for America." To make a long story short, as population density rises beyond some optimum level, per capita consumption begins to decline. This occurs because, as people are forced to crowd together and conserve space, it becomes ever more impractical to own many products. Falling per capita consumption, in the face of rising productivity (per capita output, which always rises), inevitably yields rising unemployment and poverty. Per capita consumption data gathered from around the world for a wide range of products bears out this relationship.

I really dig this kind of thinking because it begs a large number of questions which must be explained at length. That process is perhaps more interesting. What I don't know how to do is evade confirmation bias, nor do I think I have time as a layman. All I have to do is be stubbornly skeptical until my experiences contain enough memorable surprises that I conform to the notions. Not disciplined but a good way to handle those things which I am not expert enough to distinguish from generic brain spew.

I want to bring up a few of my own macroeconomic ideas so that perhaps a pattern emerges. In the first place I am, as a data architect and amateur philosopher pointedly interested in the ability to maintain frameworks of actionable theory and knowledge. So I am vitally aware in information economies - what decisions support the activity of human beings based upon their ability to logically justify actions disciplined by ethics. But I am also vitally aware of the agency of will. (sigh, another essay). Basically, the agency of will is a way of looking at a group of people's willingness to go out on a limb given imperfect information. An axiom of this idea might be 'the hungrier man works harder'. Another might be 'the confident man kills sooner'. Another might be 'the meek shall inherit the leftovers'. But you get the idea of what I mean.

This commonsense explains a lot to me with regard to poverty, liberty, etc. Given that men are motivated by greed, fear and honor, I think they seek their own interests. They make a way logically based on what they know - they navigate their way through life applying logical/ethical frameworks. Honor among thieves, do no harm, every man for himself, golden rule, all things in moderation - whatever. These are universal.

OK. So Murphy sounds a bit Malthusian. I think population density can be negotiated based on the means of production. What keeps southern Chinese rice farmers in place at a high density? They have a tried and true ethos about how to run a village that works extraordinarily well. What keeps berber traders in north Africa at a low density? They too have a very well disciplined nomadic ethos. They know how to work it. The population density problem is an urban population density problem. Certainly what works in Brooklyn cannot work in Hollywood.

I happen to think that falling per capita consumption is a good idea and that there is some kind of equilibrium to be met beyond market considerations. That is to say I think that there is some component of human progress that requires lower consumption and that this is a natural way for humans to challenge themselves. Why climb mountains? Why play piano? Why create poetry? So long as humans see such activities as a higher form of progress and evolution we should not consider that human consumption on the whole is open-ended. After all, there is something wrong with being fat and greedy and we all instinctively know this. Unemployment is also a condition of the idle rich , the surf bum and the cadging bohemian. It's not always a bad thing. The question is whether or not we are valuing such avocation and providing mobility towards that destination, or if in fact we tend to admire the bling socially.

At the bottom end, social mobility needs to be certain but not assisted. "Getting over the hump" should remain hard work and the Welfare State breaks the fundamental work ethic that makes enlightened living worthwhile.

I understand somewhere that relatively high unemployment in the US at least is based on the fact that we tend to have many more full time jobs than part-time jobs. The consequence is that it is harder to get a job, but they tend to be 'better' in that they are long term jobs.

The Spook Who Sat By The Door

Kindle Not

I've wanted eBooks for a long time. Amazon has been hyping the Kindle for a while. I don't think it's going to fly. There are three very good reasons.

• It's ugly as hell. It looks like a plastic adirondack chair accessory.
• Feature for feature it's expensive. And it's ugly.
• Who needs ebooks when you have podcasts? Besides, if Apple makes one it would be beautiful.

I'll stick with Audible.com. The last thing I need is another expensive device that I have to keep an eye on. The chances that I leave the thing in a plane seat pocket is high. If it has all my books on it, I'm going to freak.

My current thinking on personal computing follows my own geek sensibility - which is to say what is it that I want? What I want is redundancy because everything breaks. I expect that Amazon would keep track of all the books I own but that's not quite good enough. Remember client-server people. This client is ugly. Laptops win.

The Mythical UK

One category that's bound to get more attention under my new curiosity is 'Brain Spew'. And under that category will probably come my musings about other nations, other countries. If I could unblackify my diary, the travels might go there. But from the perspective of just thinking about places, Brain Spew is good.

A thoughtful reader sends the following:

..It’s coming down to the view of the importance of philosophy and how it inhabits almost everything.  True, philosophy has political connotations, and I suppose that was where I got my start on this path, by realising how much politics affects my everyday life (like moving to a foreign country with no support network and no knowledge of the language, and being told to sink or swim there; you soon come to appreciate how much your own fortune is tied up in the local economic and political conditions and how much those conditions owe a lot to culture and society.)

I think a great deal more about my English speaking compatriots in the context of Western Civilization. Having spent a few weeks down in Sydney and partying with folks that way I picked up the accent very quickly. I'm rather mad at myself for not recording my best Sydneysider drawl. But the favor I find for Aussies doesn't quite compare with the way I feel about Brits. That's probably because I never have actually met a limey I didn't like or who didn't like me. I imagine it's just a matter of time.

But in the meantime I have found in Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, Iain Banks, Will Self & Julian Barnes my very favorite writers in English (mostly found in Granta). Aside from Russell Banks, John McPhee and Umberto Eco, they are the best. Moreover, I find in British manhood, some measure of anti-BS without the redneck edge. Whereas American intellects tend to be rather priggish, metrosexual, or rich, there seems a more honest intellectuality in the Brits. As I get into Niall Ferguson, I expect more of the same. Whilst he's Scottish, I believe, there still is the Oxford bit. Brits are attuned better, I think, to some of the traditional oddment that intellectuality puts one into. I consider Wodehouse's Jeeves, for example. He recognizes exactly the social limits of intellect, and plays his role excellently without the burden of ambition, nor the catty resentment we Yanks can't seem to avoid.

Just yesterday, as I'm scrolling through the Long Now seminars, it appears so juvenile that so many of these lecturers seem to always find an obligatory swipe at Bush as unintelligent. I have the unique experience of having been educated by Jesuits, and it was in the 10th grade that I suddenly recognized the formality of understanding debate. A semester of Debate was required. Americans seem to require an existential bond with their ideas like no other people - we can't seem to let them exist on their own and instead tie our identity to our affiliations in politics and religion. It seems only Garrison Keillor is capable of self-deprecation in that regard, then again, his sentimentality is a whole other bucket of smelt itself.

But I think I could live in England, and have often thought of retiring there. I know a family of leftist persuasion whose daughter was fetching but alas lesbian, assessed the rightward swing of America and fled. I have often considered any number of conditions that would make me up and leave the US, including extraordinary good fortune and civil war. But there has never been much question that I would want to land in England, although Anglophone South Africa has some strange appeal.

I abstractedly think of Brits most often in the context of their imperial past and the settled nature of character such capacity inspired among their men and women. There is perhaps no substitute for the propriety of world power and the responsibility for the affairs of hundreds of millions. Sure one nation under God is a good pledge, but we don't quite understand what the proper kind of man should be to handle many possessions under the flag. We seem to adhere to a Steve Jobs kind of exit strategy - our greatest man makes the billion and retires in style, but never becomes a lord over any sort of conglomerate. We don't seem to produce many Jack Welches. Everybody is a specialist, and only for American markets. We only respect the globalists who are disruptive, 'Davos Man' is the term. But in the Brit is someone for whom 'For King and Country' still resonates. One cannot appreciate the life of Churchill without recognizing that nationalist social force in the British personality. I find it the finest sort of patriotism, along with piety, two of mankind's choicest virtues.

There's nothing essential about the Brits, it is rather I think by virtue of their understanding of their own history that requires them to be who they must. I intend to gain a clearer understanding of that history in due time.

Jindal, Crist & Romney

Well it appears that John McCain has finally gotten to his shortlist. They are three governors, two from the South and one from the Northeast. Romney we know.

We've spoken about Bobby Jindal here briefly. LKS had some negatives on him from a social services perspective back in 2k3.  I've heard him speak and he's a bright one. 

Crist is a complete stranger to me, and it shows. Hell, I thought Jeb Bush was still running Florida. I can't help but notice that he and McCain would make a gray duo, but he seems to be a safe choice. Evidently, he has some sway among blacks in Florida and that certainly couldn't hurt.

I think Jindal is really an excellent choice, one that comes with some risk of Katrina baggage and inexperience, but would certainly propel McCain into an interesting new spotlight. Jindal can hold his own in any situation and I think Americans would like to hear from him, especially as an Indian politician.

The New Curiosity

I have to say that my change of perspective over the last couple of months has been very rewarding. I've ingested two very large science fiction books by Banks, the two substantial biographies one of Cheney and one of John Adams. I've munched on Socrates, consumed hours and hours of podcasts of Richard Muller's Physics overview, learned a bunch more on global warming, hiked down a path in East Africa, and discovered a host of thinkers who have challenged and delighted me, from Niall Ferguson to Craig Venter to Peter Schwartz.

My new kick is absorbing all the lectures from TED and The Long Now Foundation. I have to say that the more I find out about cats from the Hoover Institute, the more I find to like. But I cannot say that my entire project has taken shape. It may end up being very light on the blogging side since I'm mostly absorbing - this may end up being an extended Twitter with some focus on the use of blogging tech as not so much a deliberative and meliorative tool as a repository of a growing body of knowledge - basically a running dialog on the new ideas.

As I mentioned in one of the comments, I'm primarily interested in refining my own intake of high quality information one step further. It reminds me of the time when I was getting in shape for hill climbs on my bicycle. I stopped paying attention to the fun of the lightweight on the bike path and just biked solo on the hills I loved so much. And so I'm turning away from the short-term back and forth and concentrating on bigger ideas with a longer shelf life. What I'm actually curious to know is what the people who have nothing but time and freedom tend to do with their time and freedom.

I do so with a kind of sad recognition that I'm outside of the realm of friends. Which is to say I think I have finally accepted that I have a set of fundamentally alienating combination of interests that I will never be able to share. I am no longer concerned about that social isolation and I will try to reconcile that with the nagging pain I am accustomed to feeling about it.

I'm also rather amazed that I've let a good number of disciplines escape me while plying my avocation as a gadfly. This became evident as I began to look more closely at economic theory. I really should know more about it as I claim that if I won the lottery tomorrow I would like to study economics. That's a practical matter. Also I've allowed a combination of social laments keep me from doing what I'd like realizing finally that I actually don't want the rewards of being considered extraordinarily socially responsible. I am no longer compelled to pursue the admittedly compelling subjects surrounding race, culture and perhaps even politics. Instead I think I know too little about various histories, economics & biotech. Plus I've been missing out on a lot of excellent seminars.

I am still very much interested in philanthropy, but I realize there are a lot of 150 page scholarly treatises that I might have consumed instead of that much blogorrhea. And I really know better. Anyway, I'm giving up various conceits and I'm leaving the blogfather role quite satisfied that the black political right is permanently well-represented online. I'll keep Cobb because I still do need the traffic for my ego's sake.

The Obama Exploit

From Belmont:

There are two basic lines of thought in the war of memes with radical Islam. The first implicitly sees it as a virus. The other sees it as a candidate component of the world's future operating system. It's fair to say Lieberman sees it as a virus. What does Obama regard it as?

A Fukyama Fragment

Francis Fukyama seems never to be able to live down what people think he implied in 'The End of History', and although I haven't read either, it seems his answer book has been written too soon. At any rate, he had a lot of explaining to do at the Long Now forum, and I think he acquitted himself favorably.

Highlights: He seems to be true to a sort of neoconservatism which would include a number of Jewish intellectuals of the City U. school who aren't generally seen as conservative. His nemesis is Samuel Huntington whose Clash of Civilization says that culture trumps all and that the European liberal enlightenment was an accident. Finally Fukyama says that the PNAC wasn't all that. He called it basically Irving Kristol and a fax distribution.

Against The Singularity: Rejecting Locutus

Kurzweil's Law:

2045: The Singularity

• $1000 buys a computer a billion times more intelligent than every human combined. This means that average and even low-end computers are infinitely smarter than even highly intelligent, unenhanced humans.
• The Singularity occurs as artificial intelligences surpass human beings as the smartest and most capable life forms on the Earth. Technological development is taken over by the machines, who can think, act and communicate so quickly that normal humans cannot even comprehend what is going on. The machines enter into a "runaway reaction" of self-improvement cycles, with each new generation of A.I.s appearing faster and faster. From this point onwards, technological advancement is explosive, under the control of the machines, and thus cannot be accurately predicted.
• The Singularity is an extremely disruptive, world-altering event that forever changes the course of human history. The extermination of humanity by violent machines is unlikely (though not impossible) because sharp distinctions between man and machine will no longer exist thanks to the existence of cybernetically enhanced humans and uploaded humans.

The effects of the increasing technology available to individuals is often said to a force for advance, potentially with the ability to tip balances of power. With all due respect to Kurzweil, I think that the curve is fairly steep at the early end and doesn't rise much from mass adaptation. What I'm essentially saying is that the main habit that is changed by a new technology is not generally refined by the masses, and so that when it is mass produced there are secondary effects and unexpected consequences, but that eventually the technology bends towards a more human-conceit fueling technology. In other words the technology doesn't determine the human vector, humans determine the technology vector, and after necessity it becomes luxury.

Examples

• Cars. You would think that cars get more and more powerful and commute us quicker and quicker. But the perfection of the technology has gone not towards flying cars as originally thought, but towards cup holders, airbags, gps, spinning rims and 11 speaker stereo. Sure there are race cars, but racing for the few does not change how the masses drive.
   
• Computers. We control them. They do not control us. Colossus, the Forbin Project, never happened. With the great advance in computing power we are now empowering ourselves redundantly. The massive compute power individuates and will take copies of what's out there and make it convenient to us.
• Food. Once we get to the surplus we are not rewarded for eating more and more. We turn around to get human centered again. We want to show that we can do without it. Or turn it to a luxury.
  

Technology in the hands of specialists is taken to its limit by the definition of the tech. In the hands of people, however (as if technical specialists are not) it becomes reflective of the person not the tech. We reject Picard when he is not Picard.

I think Iain Banks has covered this well in fiction. He helps to explain that it is the nature of human beings to want to be humans and augmentation to make us try to live like kings is essentially all we want. We will act locally.

The Ex-Black Nationalist

(from the recent archives, never published)

In preparation for dealing with what I expect to learn from my exchange with Michael Fisher, I am considering the label of 'Black Nationalist'. As I defined the Old School, starting way back when at Cobb, I spoke about it taking the best elements of Black Nationalism and applying it to modern American conditions. I am now trying to estimate about what segment of black partisans believe that the global economy is a farce, just another symptom of the ways and means of white power.

I've always considered myself a black cultural nationalist. The primary distinction being that I believe that black culture should predominate but any attempt to be separatist from America was doomed. I've always believed that with the obvious exception of what went on in Tulsa way back when, American banks were a safe place for black money. In fact, I've never had my faith shaken that economic hustles of all types were the birthright of blacks since the end of the Great Depression. The question that really hit the fan in America is 1968 was how upright can a black man walk, because if we determine that we have to shuffle, it's burn baby burn. Matters of separatism hinged on that, and the country wisely, if reluctantly turned to a much more open place.

The question I've never been able to sustain in cyberspace, and I'm not quite sure why, is what should be done about Ujamaa, which I say is Kwanzaa's problem child. And so I think I've gone around several times on discussions about black capitalism, blackface capitalism, invisiblack capitalism and ujamaa and never really got a good feeling for what my black partisan peers feel about it. I only perceive a lingering Pan-Africanist Manning Marable vibe. Of course I can't dig that. I think black independence in the middle class is self-evident and not due to socialism, but the fruits of free labor markets, which is, DUH what we've wanted "for 400 years". We want to get PAID for our WORK. This reminds me of an old cotton gin story I heard at the funeral of my last grandmother, but that's for another time. Bottom line question is what kind of money will satisfy the dignity of African Americans? And I think the answer is the kind we already have it. That being the case, outside of the slings and arrows of disrespect, what's the beef?

Tuesday Fragments

Ferguson v Schwartz
In the debate between Niall Ferguson and Peter Schwartz, I find Ferguson a great deal more convincing as well as fun to listen to. Schwartz makes several good points, but I am surprised to hear so much in Ferguson that I agree with, especially his dour predictions for China. I am now subscribed to The Long Now's podcasts, coming around to an interesting reconnection with Stewart Brand, having been a 'wellpern'  in the early 90s.

Malcolm Gladwell, Again
Gladwell has a new book out. Called Outliers. It should be very good, and it fits along with some of the things Ferguson was saying in his Long Now seminar about the counterintuitive nature of historical causality. Historians have a bias towards wanting big events to have big causes when in fact they could have very small proximate causes. It should be interesting to see the combo here.

Yochai Benkler, Wow.
This guy is going to get a lot more attention from me. He's onto something.

Kottke.org
Added to the RSS feed. I've been hearing a lot from this place, time to put it on the brain pan.

Porsche Racing
It turns out that an old friend and mentor races Porsches. Who knew?

Closing My Ears

I'm going lightweight on blogging this week. Nobody is saying anything interesting. Hugh Hewitt is blathering on about how Obama hates NASCAR and Dennis Miller is mouthing the technicality attack on the Lockyer decision but talking about his good friends.

I'm shutting down half my RSS feeds, and just reading the books I'm reading. As a news junkie sick of news it's an interesting change.

Update from the Belly of the Upper Middle Class

I've been introspective and it's fucking with my steez. And every time I get this way I betray the attentions of people who come around Cobb for the political freakshow. And so I'm ready to say that the move needs to be made.

I've been waking up with poetry on my mind and dreaming in stanzas.
And I know I have the books to write.
And I'm getting tired of jacking busters in Liberty City.
Because I opened my mind up to the galaxy, and the military history of the fictional future when species collide after light years of travel with belligerent intent.

So I'm preparing myself for the cold detachment of the all-about-me. And I'm putting my professorial tricorder in my back pocket for the moment to shout some shit from the inner core. I got three outstanding children and an extraordinary woman who looks excellent in colonial attire. I married her an organic preparing for a little life on the prairie and she has cooked me into a 36 waist. So I go ho ho ho and need no urban bullshit. I'm self-contained and what I don't know or care about, the saplings have got covered in theory if not practice. And still they lead their tribes out here in the inflated paradise, keeping it as real as it ever needs to be, and they get that from me. We are family all us we. Call me DFC for the devastating fam control, handling my business makes me egofied, and so at the Sprite's request we are designing up a new family crest.

It only takes a minute, girl, to fall in love. But it takes a lifetime of wariness to stay ahead of the tax man. But Fannie Mae said yesterday that 3% down is OK in their books. So perhaps it's time to take advantage. This summer or next we have to be where we're going to be. I hate debt so much that I'd rather squat in renterville but I have to play the game that is the destiny of my class. I just forgot that I have thirty shelves of  literature and O'Reilly. Where is my Suze Orman? Duh. I haven't been reading Econ since Sowell in the 80s. That non-fiction has been too long on the wrong end of the indifference curve. Time to fix that, quick fast and in a hurry. I can't recall the last time I used ETrade, but I remember being a thousandaire. Today I'm not beneath it. No more trips to Legoland. It's time for five minds on the bottom line. Reduce your needs to zero.

I'm confident with my skillset. And I'm thinking Post-Cobb. I'm kind of done with the (political) Negro Problem as my personal business, and I recognize the necessity to get the past five years into book form which will occupy me over the next one or two. It will be a compilation of all this Cobbage: Working Title: Keeping it Right. I can't decide how heavily or lightly to write it. Or maybe I call it The Special Markets Group.(heh).

The Unit and I are working on shedding some pounds and garage junk. All a part of the Boydian calculation of reducing needs to zero. I'm fascinated by what conservatism has done to my interpretation of the need to be organic, and I think that's the personal revelation, which puts me somewhere Whoopi Goldberg has already been: incognegro. She mentioned the comfort of returning to America and NYC in particular where she could blend into the blackground. Now the middle class is that for me, instead of a vast flyover country of mediocrity whom I always saw as part of the problem or part of the solution. Now, without an activist agenda, they're just human beings. So long as they salute the flag, I'm happy with 'em.  I'm fully American nationalist, and it's nice and comfortable.

We hung out in Arcadia yesterday at the huge mall next to the horse track and talked about eight cities from which we ought to consider our base of operations for the next seven years. Interestingly enough, Baltimore came out high on the list. We'll see. 

The upper middle class has been a interesting fate, but at the current moment, I am losing interest in its proclivities. Which is to say, as a state of being, its appeal is marginal, it's distinctions marginal. It's the difference between a three bedroom house in 1100 squares and a five bedroom house in 2500 squares. So I'm asking myself how much time do I actually spend at home? It's the difference between a fully funded and functional Boy Scout Troop and none whatsoever. So I'm asking myself what gets done with or without one?

There's an extraordinary passage from Michael Yon's book, Moment of Truth in Iraq in which he tells the story of the Iraqi sheiks who doubt the character of American soldiers who tell them that the power can be turned back on. The Iraqis think that it is because Americans are rich that they have a naive can-do attitude. But Yon and the Americans understand that it is because the Americans have the can-do attitude that they are rich. Coming as I do from relative poverty as compared to the Upper Middle, I think I shared with many the skepticism of American character. There is a kind of proof everybody requires of America which is actually in human nature and not America itself. Faith in character begets faith in character, but sometimes you just have to see it in operation and feel around for the trapdoors and wires, smoke & mirrors. It's only when you find none that you start to believe that it is faith in character. When you live in the part of America that works, it becomes obvious, that is if you are actually looking for proof and not escape.

I watched Nancy Drew the awful movie yesterday. But BD (ex-Scholar) was peeved that I thought it was phony. She sees the value of the implausible Nancy Drew against the vapidity of her implausibly clueless & trendy friends, she buys the faith in character.

I'm thinking more and more these days of what I might be doing wrong in the larger arc of ambition.  I have long realized that money exposes people. You know, beware what you wish for and all that, knowing that people get the money genie granted. What do they become? American money is a Krell Machine. Beware of monsters from the id. I'm paying attention to the casualties of wealth. The wise man prepares for  wealth and for poverty. The trick is to reduce the needs to zero knowing what you know to be true, dropping the amount of gear and baggage to the minimum. I've got a lot of work to do because I'm a gearhead. I love driving fast cars. I love being a DJ instead of a musician, turning knobs instead of training fingers. I'm leveraged in society...

We got a piano a couple weeks ago. My daughters play by ear. I think that's where we've been going wrong. It's all about reading the music.

Jurassic Park

        I keep my eyes on writers with their ears on beats
Wondering finally if they ever leave the streets
Of if the street keeps rockin' deep down in their soul
Old man in the club not believing he's not old

Or when the kid says daddy who was Red Alert
Does papa not preach about days doin' dirt
Moving sideways or covering dub dance halls
Reminescing about the days of the yes yes yalls

Can it be like forever what it was for me
Thrilling to the black faces on MTV?
Or will it ever mutate and merge with the mainstream
And never revert to the days of the daydreams

When Turbo poplocked with a broom and a pail
Kool Moe Dee dropped wax before CDs were on sale
And Kwame with his hair like Pepe La Pew
Not everybody knows what we've been through

But that's alright we still keep in stride.
The next generation's minds are always fried.
The same game reigns in doorframes in the dark
But a classic's not a classic that's not older than Jurassic Park.

The Baxter Dissent

I predict that California will have a a constitutional amendment in defense of marriage, and that activists for the cause of gay marriage have made a fatal error. California has insured every right except the express permission to redefine marriage, and now the State Supreme Court has overstepped its bounds in defiance of the will of the people. It's going to get loud and ugly and it is now most definitely a constitutional crisis.

I concur with the thrust of Baxter's dissent:

The question presented by this case is simple and stark. It comes down to this: Even though California’s progressive laws, recently adopted through the democratic process, have pioneered the rights of same-sex partners to enter legal unions with all the substantive benefits of opposite-sex legal unions, do those laws nonetheless violate the California Constitution because at present, in deference to long and universal tradition, by a convincing popular vote, and in accord with express national policy they reserve the label “marriage” for opposite-sex legal unions? I must conclude that the answer is no.

The People, directly or through their elected representatives, have every right to adopt laws abrogating the historic understanding that civil marriage is between a man and a woman. The rapid growth in California of statutory protections for the rights of gays and lesbians, as individuals, as parents, and as committed partners, suggests a quickening evolution of community attitudes on these issues. Recent years have seen the development of an intense debate about same-sex marriage. Advocates of this cause have had real success in the marketplace of ideas, gaining attention and considerable public support. Left to its own devices, the ordinary democratic process might well produce, ere long, a consensus among most Californians that the term “marriage” should, in civil parlance, include the legal unions of same-sex partners.

But a bare majority of this court, not satisfied with the pace of democratic change, now abruptly forestalls that process and substitutes, by judicial fiat, its own social policy views for those expressed by the People themselves. Undeterred by the strong weight of state and federal law and authority, the majority invents a new constitutional right, immune from the ordinary process of legislative consideration. The majority finds that our Constitution suddenly demands no less than a permanent redefinition of marriage, regardless of the popular will.

In doing so, the majority holds, in effect, that the Legislature has done indirectly what the Constitution prohibits it from doing directly. Under article II, section 10, subdivision (c), that body cannot unilaterally repeal an initiative statute, such as Family Code section 308.5, unless the initiative measure itself so provides. Section 308.5 contains no such provision. Yet the majority suggests that, by enacting other statutes which do provide substantial rights to gays and lesbians — including domestic partnership rights which, under section 308.5, the Legislature could not call “marriage” — the Legislature has given “explicit official recognition” (maj. opn., ante, at pp. 68, 69) to a California right of equal treatment which, because it includes the right to marry, thereby invalidates section 308.5.5

I cannot join this exercise in legal jujitsu, by which the Legislature’s own weight is used against it to create a constitutional right from whole cloth, defeat the People’s will, and invalidate a statute otherwise immune from legislative interference. Though the majority insists otherwise, its pronouncement seriously oversteps the judicial power. The majority purports to apply certain fundamental provisions of the state Constitution, but it runs afoul of another just as fundamental — article III, section 3, the separation of powers clause. This clause declares that “[t]he powers of state government are legislative, executive, and judicial,” and that “[p]ersons charged with the exercise of one power may not exercise either of the others” except as the Constitution itself specifically provides.

Download lockyer_decision.pdf

Truth in Iraq

Michael Yon's book on Iraq is out. It is already in its second printing and denial of it is key to the continuing effects of Bush Derangement Syndrome. I have continually had Yon on my radar for understanding what has transpired in Iraq and I am very pleased to see that the facts on the ground will be coming to light. Only this week we were debating the ability for American civilians to know and make judgments. Yon has been and continues to be one of the world's best sources. I present a compelling review from his publisher:

  I HAVE NEVER BEEN PROUDER TO PUBLISH A BOOK

Michael Yon changed my mind about the war in Iraq, by making me understand it for the first time.

From the very beginning I was against the war. I thought it would be a disaster, another Vietnam. And until I had the privilege of working on this book with Michael I was always for immediate pull-out: why should one more American die for a doomed effort?

Michael--who is as close to totally non-political as anyone I know--showed me two things. First, because I judged by Vietnam, the war of my youth, I had radically underestimated what American soldiers could do. I knew they could blow away any regular opponent on any battlefield. But wage a counterinsurgency against an enemy with broad support in the population? Win the "hearts and minds," to use the Vietnam era phrase that now can be used only ironically? That was asking too much, I thought.

I was 100 percent wrong. Today's American soldiers excel at counterinsurgency, because they excel at the most important thing: winning over the people by inspiring them with their own courage and compassion, discipline and determination. Reading this book is like watching the movie Apocalypse Now, but in an alternate universe in which the opposite always happens. Every time our soldiers get into an incredibly tense situation with some Iraqis who might be friends or might be enemies or murderers, some situation in which what's needed is amazing calm and courage to keep things from blowing up and ending in a blood bath, our guys pull it off!

Just wait until you read the Chapter "High Noon" (my favorite), the story of the American soldiers who have to arrest a corrupt but politically popular Iraqi police chief we had put in office in the first place because he had been a real hero in fighting the terrorists. He had to be removed by Americans to show the Iraqis we really did believe in the rule of law. The whole thing could have blown up into a one-town civil war with hundreds dead on both sides. Won't tell you how it ends, but you will be amazed and very proud.

The other thing Michael helped me understand is the difference between terrorists we just have to kill (often foreigners, or local criminals) and local insurgents we should have been working with all along. For almost five years I could not tell from watching the news--and certainly not from listening to the Administration--who the enemy was, what they wanted or why they were fighting. Not surprisingly it turns out that understanding the various people we were fighting--some of whom have since become great allies--was the key to winning the war, which we are now clearly doing.

I am convinced that everything I once thought about the war was wrong. The truth is we are doing a great thing in Iraq, most of the Iraqi people really do want to be a united democratic nation and already consider America their greatest friend and ally. It would be a crime to turn tail now and abandon them now.

I owe all that to Michael's book, which is why I believe publishing Moment of Truth in Iraq may be the best thing I have ever done for my country.    

As I said this morning. Yon said two weeks ago that the US military is now the most trusted institution in Iraq. Doing right by the Iraq people is what this next presidential election is all about for me. This is the signal. Bring the noise.

Obama-Edwards

The Edwards endorsement is just what the Obama campaign needed. Together with the MoveOn and Kennedy endorsements, it solidifies Obama's left flank. There will be no further surprises from the left of him and Ithink everybody should be quite clear on that.

An Obama/Edwards ticket is the poor man's populist ticket. I think it makes the most sense and gives Obama an opportunity to triangulate his own image towards the center and snarf Hillary's votes and some of her delegates. I think it would be a brilliant political move if Obama said so now or soon, and then continued on a rightward tack through to the Denver convention.

I was wrong, this Spring was not the beginning of the end for Obama. Especially if he makes this move, it is the end of the beginning. Things are really starting to get interesting.

It also must be said that Hillary is starting to look truly pathetic. Her campaign is 20 million in the hole and she's bragging about West Virginia? Sounds desperate.

The Energy Efficiency of Nuclear Power

As one of the legs of the stool holding up the theory of 'warsocialism' the author, Jay Hanson, claims:

No alternative – even nuclear [5] – has the potential to replace more than a tiny fraction of the power presently generated by fossil fuels.

It has taken me about an hour this morning to follow a debate on the credibility of the study cited by Hanson. I have been convinced by information found here and most significantly here, that the "Storm-Smith" hypothesis is not credible and over-estimates by many times the energy costs of nuclear power, even taking into consideration the energy used in the construction of the plant, the milling and mining of uranium ore, and the full decommissioning of the plant. In addition, nuclear power can be produced from thorium as well which is three to four times as plentiful as uranium.

From the second site: (emphasis mine)

It is worth noting that the widely quoted paper by Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith (SLS), which gives a rather pessimistic assessment of the Energy Lifecycle of Nuclear Power, assumes a far larger energy cost to construct and decommission a Nuclear Power plant (240 Peta-Joules versus 8 Peta-Joules(PJ)). The difference is that Vattenfall actually measured their energy inputs whereas Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Smith employed various theoretical relationships between dollar costs and energy consumed. This paper also grossly over-estimates the energy cost of mining low-grade Ores and also that the efficiency of extraction of Uranium from reserves would fall dramatically at ore concentrations below 0.05%. Employing their calculations predicts that the energy cost of extracting the Olympic Dam mine's yearly production of 4600 tonnes of Uranium would require energy equivalent to almost 2 one-GigaWatt power plants running for a full year (2 GigaWat-years). You can follow this calculation here. This is larger than the entire electricity production of South Australia and an order of magnitude more than the measured energy inputs.

I am therefore convinced that Jay Hanson's pessimism on the potential for nuclear energy to provide is based on faulty research. That in fact nuclear energy can efficiently provide a far greater share of American electric generation. This is not a fundamental problem in physics as claimed, merely a political and economic one.

The Size of the Military Industrial Complex

Continuing to challenge various theories that provide cover for shallow criticism of the Cobbian Oeuvre, I will begin a series on the theory of 'war socialism' as I understand it.

The theory of warsocialism attempts to explain American politics in terms of a political slight of hand that defies normal human concerns by duping Americans into believing that war is the health of the nation. The results being a callous disregard for the actual welfare of humans by the US government and a perpetual need for violent conflict around the world. Essentially, it portrays the American economy as a sort of military shark that needs to war in order to survive. I seek to debunk this notion as paranoid and in service to a shallow anti-Americanism that defies the facts of the actual economy of America and the politics of Americans.

Item 1. The size of the military-industrial complex.
According to the information I have collected, the US spent in 2007 during its prosecution of the small war in Iraq, approximately 550 billion dollars on defense, about 17% of the federal budget. I will take this figure to represent the size of the Military Industrial Complex. Note that this overstates the actual size of the MIC because it represents not only all of the goods and services provided by defense contractors on an annual basis, but the personnel costs for the Armed Forces itself.

Comparing this generous figure to GDP of about 13.7Trillion, it works out to about than 4% of the country's energies on an annual basis. Considered another way, America is 96% not the military industrial complex, even being generous to what the size of it is.

Item 2. The size of other industries.
In particular I will focus on several industries larger than the MIC.
a. Construction: 1.196T
b. Information: 891B
c. Health Care & Social Assistance: 1.207T
d. Manufacturing: 3.916T
e. Finance & Insurance: 2.803T
f. Professional, Scientific & Technical Services: 886B
g. Retailing: 3.056T
h. Wholesale Trade: 4.634T

These figures, incidently, account for the employment of approximately 77 million Americans.

Conclusion: The military industrial complex is dwarfed by several ordinary industries individually and collectively. It is not anywhere near the largest sector of the American economy. The health of the American economy is not dependent on military spending.

 

Jamiel Shaw, Asking For It

The latest twist in the unending saga that is the fight over the legacy of Jamiel Shaw is that LA DAs have been putting pressure on his family to shutup about Special Order 40. Or else.

Or else what? Well, they will bring experts to testify that a reasonable person could suspect that Shaw was a gangbanger himself, therefore mitigating the circumstances under which he was gunned down. I'm waiting for a chorus of outrage but given the slight national coverage this matter has had in resonance with black channels of communication, it wouldn't surprise me if they get away with it. Apparently, young Shaw talked like a banger on his myspace site, and wore a red belt on the day of his murder. Well, that's convincing.

Over at OneCitizenSpeaking, is an excellent rundown of the relevant commentary. One of the parties is Alex Alonso an expert from Streetgangs.com a site I've used (not since the execution of Tookie) for some relevant facts on LA gangs.

This is getting interestingly hairy. The Shaw family needs at least one heavy hitter on their squad or else the various political interests bent on hanging their son in effigy will squash them. Sure an LA Times reporter has the innocent story, but it will get twisted for certain. It's as easy as dropping 'illegal' from immigrant. That's a brand of whitewash we're all familiar with, and disappointingly it comes as no surprise that for the sake of sanctuary they will piss on the name of Shaw and defend a murdering gangster.

Don't forget to check my Research Notebook.

Sambo's Restaurant

I've only been to a Sambo's Restaurant once in my life. It happened somewhere in Northern California.

It was an entirely weird experience in that the restaurant had all of its kind of kitschy marketing language as if it were something everybody knew. Like the McDougal's restaurant in Eddie Murphy's Coming to America.

The occasion was that we were up to visit my grandfather, Pa, who regularly played with his band at the Concord Jazz Festival. As a family, San Francisco was our vacation town. Just being there and staying in a hotel was a very cool thing for our young and populous family of seven. We always stayed at the Lombard Street Hotel, a moderately fabulous place whose great attraction was its external, glass elevator. We stayed on the third and top floor and looked out over the Bay from the balcony, a wondrous sight.

As you might imagine, we were too broke to get seven tickets to the Jazz Festival. But on our way home to LA, we drove down by Concord to have lunch with Pa and ended up at the Sambo's in the area.

The fact that my parents must have thought the coast was clear made some impression. I mean how could any self respecting black family go to a Sambo's Restaurant? Yeah I know there was no little black sambo as the mascot, instead an Indian looking kid and his pet tiger. Still, there must have been some part of me that walked in with that attitude, like, you white people better not say anything rude to me. While I don't remember much about the place besides the incongruity of its whole appeal, I certainly remember the attitude. I know when you get that, there is nothing whitefolks can do. The more ingratiating and sweet they act, the more you resent it as condescension. The more snappy they get with you, the more you just know they must hate your guts. The more indifferent they are to you, the more invisible you feel. When you get this attitude, they can't win, they can't break even and they can't get out of the game. And so I see in retrospect that it wasn't what Sambo's made whitefolks do, it was what Sambo's made me feel. My problem, not Sambo's.

Of course I probably saw that then too even as a kid, because although I understand, I never really held a grudge against the place. They never did me wrong. But somehow I think I must have patted myself on the back for surviving lunch at Sambo's, with my grandfather, a New Orleans Jazz musician whose concerts I couldn't afford to attend.

Breakfast At Denny's

 

Are Smokers Happy?

A moral question. Are we obliged to do for people what they won't do for themselves? Only in our self-interest.

This is something of a dodge of an intersting question posed by a thoughtful reader:

Stephanie Saul’s NYT article, “Cigarette Bill Treats Menthol With Leniency,” (link below) is a sobering reminder of how U.S. interests groups use their political power for profit.

Here we have an example of (1) anti-African American interest groups or (2) interests groups indifferent to African Americans flaunting their political power at the expense of a few million middle-class and lower-class African Americans. Menthol disproportionately harms the 5 million African American cigarette addicts who mostly smoke Newports and Kools. Who cares about these African Americans? These African Americans don’t wield very much political or economic power. So, who, politically, has enough incentive to look out for them on the Hill?

If any interest groups do care, so what? Are any pro-African American interest groups powerful enough to stop this Menthol-based compromise/attack? I doubt it.

As an aside, any mention of clove cigarettes immediately brings to mind an old friend of mine. He was a real smart white dude, a pizza faced chubby guy with a devastating wit but absolutely no charm. He and I worked in a tech support lab. He was a huge fan of electronic keyboards and the music they made. Pet Shop Boys, Thompson Twins, New Order, The Orb. This guy was the prototypical goth, just before there was such a thing. He smoked clove cigarettes, constantly. This was 1989.

By any measure of anything I knew, there was no reason for me to believe this young man could be anything but a loser. He lived with his mother in a 'slurb (a suburb whose faded glory has faded just about the point for the necessity of burglar bars) drove a beater. I'm sure I was his only friend. He used to tell me about how people did him wrong. The thing was that he had an odd kind of self-confidence. The sort I imagine you get when you realize you have no other way to go but up. And furthermore, he spent a lot of money on his keyboards, and he had the kind of pride you have in the one perfect thing that you own. He didn't spend money on nice clothes, or a nice car or much of anything. He knew he couldn't play any role of cool. And yet there he was with his clove cigarettes.

I thought smoking clove cigarettes in and of itself was ridiculous. It was all about looking cool. And for him it totally worked, but only because I knew him. It was the only concession he made to fashion. I mean he actually looked like a twenty year old Pugsly Addams. But right now I could imagine him to be as cool as Kevin Smith. He had only his integrity, and he had to live it. Life gave him no other choice.

As it stands, I cannot for the life of me remember his name. But I remember his example. At some point, the powers that be declared something against clove cigarettes and they fell from popularity. No longer could you get them at the little shops in Westwood. And I wonder if he managed to find someplace to get them, or if he cared now that they were going out of style. But I know that when he could smoke them, he was happy. And if it was discovered that they cause cancer just as much as regular cigarettes, would he change. I can't imagine that he would. It was his pleasure. One of few.

We all know how much the sticks contribute to excess death. Well we the people pretend to know, we get the message of the experts. None of us really knows how many cigarettes it takes to increase your chances 1%. We don't know the math of inhaling or of second-hand smoke like we know how many drinks until our BAC is illegal. We simply trust the smart people who are liberal enough to care for our well-being in our merciful society, which is after all, a good idea for the self-interested American. Why bother to figure things out for yourself when every expert in a white coat or photographed in front of a shelf full of huge books is willing to tell you what you should or should not do? Cigarettes = bad. OK thanks for that, Professor.

Are smokers happy?

Are we caring for their souls or trying to make them happier? Are we trying to show off what we know? I say it's a bit more of the latter than the former when it comes to passing laws. Advice is one thing, prohibition is another. When the decision is taken to proscribe, the calculation is one for society. If we ban cigarettes or cap guns for boys, we are thinking in the aggregate. We make society better if we have fewer people die of cancer. We make society better if we arrest the kind of aggression in boys that might lead to violence. To hell with the individual. We demand sacrifice for the individual for the betterment of society. Passing laws of this sort is, plainly, social engineering.

And thus we have a conflict between the needs of the few and the cause of the many. But I'm talking about the needs of the few whose brilliant ideas and social calculations incubate such prohibitions.

To consider the fate of African Americans and menthol cigarettes is the province of a few who would do for African Americans in society what they clearly have no interest in doing for themselves. Maybe they're happy, maybe they're stupid. No matter what anyone says, the facts about cancer are what they are. It's unquestionably objectively rational that one shouldn't want to die of cancer. Why fight the experts?

Why indeed.

Danger Is My Business

I never was a big fan of comic books. I was more a Mad Magazine kid. Although there was a cowboy kid comic that I liked. Me? I dug wacky packages and CarToons. When it came to TV, Speed Racer, and even the Hot Wheels cartoon.

I think about superheroes though, and I enjoyed them most on TV and not in the comic books. My favorites were Cool McCool and Super President (with a hat tip to Super Chicken, Roger Ramjet and Spiderman). Cool McCool was unquestionably the coolest, and the people say "what?". Thank you YouTube. This guy was a role model for me as an 8 year old kid. Back when boys were encouraged to be boys.

The Size of the Soul

A rather interesting thought crossed my mind the other day, and it is consequential to my reading of Iain Banks' science fiction. The idea is that the soul is actually a variable part of the human, and that perhaps in me, a smaller part than I had considered. Consequently maintenance of it is proportional to the size of one's soul. A soul is like a mind. Some people abuse their minds, others expand their minds. Some have not much regard for the cultivation of their mind and yet are plenty smart for what they are called to do.

As a related aside, folks are considering the relative happiness of conservatives and liberals.  Here's a basic outline of what I think. Conservatives are happy because they are skeptical that mankind can be perfected, and therefore don't seek utopia. Conservatives are amazed that anything works but knows no prescription for success. In fact, religious conservatives place ultimate happiness beyond the bounds of human life. Which is to say they find fulfillment through duty. It is through duty that one sacrifices. Conservatives order themselves by fidelity to maintaining bans on proscribed behavior. A minimum set of 'thou shalt nots' directs duty, and duty is to maintain that minimum negative ruleset at all costs. To violate those are to invite evil.

It seems to me that the liberal seeks an ever asymptotic approach to ultimate truth, which they know at some point might come to a clearer understanding. And it is that hope to know the ultimate truth that will cause them to overturn any established order, and so they question any duty not on the same path. The liberal path is scientific and requires experimentation. It requires a willingness to toss out conventions, like duty to maintain prohibitive rulesets. The assumption of course is that the greater truth will liberate one from suffering, that mankind will always find a way to convert greater understanding into greater happiness, that most of mankind's suffering comes from ignorance, and a presumption that those not on the asymptotic path are relatively ignorant and thus cannot be happy enough. A tempting assumption that has dangerous implications.

One who seeks an ultimate truth in the world must inevitably re-order the world to accomodate that truth, and defines suffering as the distance from the possibility of perfection.  They cannot accept that those without possession of the truth and the means to approach it are not self-deluded.

But how can anyone who lived without knowing what we know possibly have been happy? I think there is a conceit that life of the mind delivers happiness divorced from the act of discovery. I think people misjudge the size of the soul and of the mind and presume that one can satisfy one or the other by living completely in them. But the mind and the soul are hungry and become jaded and self-serving. Happiness is found in balance. Balance requires discipline. To live entirely in the mind, or the soul, or the body are conceits.

The size of the soul, the spirit is under human control. I can decide to feel or to feel deeply. To merely empathize or to empathize deeply. To be patient with the sufferings of my fellow man or to make alleviation of that suffering my life's calling. Or I could shrink my soul, and to not feel, to reject empathy and to ignore suffering. I could instead decide to live the life of the mind, or the life of the body. In all of our choices, we require compensation. To be a great mind, we must sacrifice the other two, and if through some assistance we manage that, we might find balance. For one's own needs, one requires only so much mind, so much soul, so much body. As we are endowed and seek to improve on our endowments, we can exchange our surpluses to rewards from society. The athlete or soldier is rewarded for their physical feats. The great thinker thinks for others than himself. The woman possessed of extraordinary empathy is sought for her healing insights.

That humans are endowed with different amounts of brain, soul and body power is self-evident. But I observe that once upon a path to expand and perfect one's natural endowments there is a certain inevitable dissatisfaction. Surely a farmer who understands enough math to get a good price at market would not suffer himself to understand advanced calculus. Surely the mother who has given birth would not trouble herself to love another's child equally. But the mathematician is unsatisfied with farmer's arithmetic. A priest is unsatisfied with a parent's selfish love. A courtesan is unsatisfied with mere kissing.

I have only a passing understanding of the differences between the philosophers, but I can recognize there must be some distinction in their approach to the best way to live. One might say that life is best lived in pursuit of a robust disposition, one that is not particularly excellent but recovers best from life's inevitable slings and arrows. Another might say that life is best lived in pursuit of an ultimate achievement, one that evades all things which would compromise attainment of an excellence or perfection.

For what it is worth, I think the former to be a conservative disposition and the latter to be a liberal one with the presumption that once empowered, the achiever of excellence can share that knowledge and thereby improve the lot of every man. The farmer can be schooled, finally in advanced calculus, the mother can learn to love all children, and the farmer can too become a great soul as the mother a calculating mind. Surely all religious leaders would have their flocks expand the size of their soul in their lives and fill it with more godlike attributes.

Liberalism would have us all live like kings in our time, and would educate us to do so. And the imposition of institutions of education upon us is a boost to what we would naturally come to know from our own households and experiences. Liberalism would have us expand our minds, our bodies, our souls, and have us sacrifice so that more people might experience life in greater abundance. But I don't think liberalism affords us much guidance in disciplining our balance in this regard, nor in finding appropriate ways to distribute all of the surplus edifications of our minds, bodies and souls. And thus the modern problem is what to do with all that humanity has learned.

I think in the end, it is a matter of sustainability. And in that regard, unless and until we become a post-scarcity, space-faring species, that conservatives have the upper hand. Because liberals must always fight convenient or inconvenient memory loss. When the old man dies with the recipe for rayon and we have to go back to wool and cotton is that necessarily suffering? Whenever knowledge is destroyed the size of our minds must accordingly shrink, and accordingly fewer social structures are required to inculcate things for the general public. Is that dystopia? Only relatively. It depends upon how close we are to that absolute truth. 

The world will always have a need for great men, but their greatness will always be determined by how well they manage the balance of the size of their mental, spiritual and physical development, in what they need for themselves and what they share with the people.

I have been thinking this way about the size of my soul in recognition of the fact that it is not nearly as large as that of my mother's. And I am humbled and impressed by the way in which it works for her. And I am constantly reminded of the alienation created between humans of different capacities and talents and how we need society to reward us according to our imbalancing talents and overproductions.  And I am pleased to see how all of it can work. But related to the amount of happiness or suffering we can stand, I think it's a little greedy, ambitious and certainly troublesome to believe that we can all have great minds, souls and bodies.

Samsung

I distinctly recall the US debut of the Samsung company. It took place at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. The wife and I were deep into the business of the games along with thousands of others in that great city. Samsung was making a big splash, sponsoring everything possible, giving away t-shirts, hosting a huge worlds-fair like display and such. I remember people having trouble saying the name, wondering if they could possibly compete with the likes of Panasonic, Pioneer, Sanyo and Sony.

Today Samsung is the official HDTV of the NFL and they make refrigerators, printers, set top boxes, cameras, fiber optics, air conditioners and of course, mobile phones. I made a bet back then that Samsung would be a winner, but even I'm surprised at how far they've come.

Samsung has been a trading partner with the US since the mid 70s but in consumer electronics they've grown the most. Still I was surprised to find that the trading company is a big partner with FUBU. You learn something every day.

That's My President

I love it.

US President George W. Bush on Monday warned Iran and Syria that the international community would not allow Lebanon to fall under foreign domination through their proxies again.

"I strongly condemn Hezbollah's recent efforts, and those of their foreign sponsors in Tehran and Damascus, to use violence and intimidation to bend the government and people of Lebanon to their will," Bush said in a statement.

"The international community will not allow the Iranian and Syrian regimes, via their proxies, to return Lebanon to foreign domination and control," he said.

Bush reaffirmed Washington's support for the government of Prime Minister Fuad Siniora amid deadly sectarian violence raising fears of a new civil war.

For Oil How?

A. The war in Iraq was for Americans to get control of Iraqi Oil.

B. The war in Iraq was for the Iraqi people to get control of Iraqi Oil to sell exclusively to Americans.

C. The war in Iraq was for the Iraqi people to get control of Iraqi Oil to sell to world markets.

D. The war in Iraq was to keep Saddam Hussein for threatening American access to Middle East Oil.

E. The war in Iraq was to keep Saddam Hussein for threatening world access to Middle East Oil.

Cobb on King

"Thank God Almighty I'm free at last."
-MLK

As intimidating as it is to take on such a subject as the legacy of the good Rev Dr, we ought to have at it.

The first thing that I think about when I think about MLK is a scene in which I am standing on his shoulders, surveying the promised land, which is a green valley and a great glittering city. We are on a hill which represents the Civil Rights Movement. I look to the valley and to the mountains beyond, only barely visible. I never look behind. He says he has been to the mountaintop, and I am there with him ready to run down into the valley - but I've seen the mountains beyond the valley and they are constantly on my mind.

The second image is that of black and white children playing patty cake somewhere at the foot of Stone Mountain.

--

As long as I've been on the web, I have despaired of the King family allowing MLKs papers be published and available for free. It strikes me as a sorrowful legacy, one that's simply broke, one of tragic miscalculation. The reason is money, and nobody has met the family's price. So for a message putatively for the world, it has gone unheard for the lack of the proper payday. So we've been left with a less than clear way to assess his intentions.

I've never been able to think about any wrong King might have done in principle until I understood the Black Power criticism which was that King mistook non-violence for a principle, when in fact it is nothing more than a tactic. King's solution was thus a Negro solution which couched all possibilities for dissent in the context of a citizen's dissent, and not of a human's dissent. Human dissent includes the threat of violence, the dissent of a citizen can be only that of political protest and petition. And thus King could only be a leader of those Americans who were satisfied that the level of injustice heaped upon the Negro could be reconciled within the political confines of American democracy.

It is wrestling with the implications of this final matter that occupies my thoughts about King today and it is, I think ultimately where I must be satisfied with him. King therefore represents to me the bright line between radicalism and reform. King may have been called a radical, but against the background of human history, he was not. King used all of his skills to highlight a contradiction between the promise and the presence of democratic justice in society. King used power in such a way as so it would disaggregate after his demise - he did not use it in any conventional way to force change. He was a one man minority whip who gained a democratic majority. He was the ultimate citizen-Senator outside of the formal Congress.

Like Thomas Paine or Patrick Henry, he was able to electrify the people and gain an extraordinary consensus of action and purpose. It is why, like them, he is a great patriot and perhaps the greatest of all patriots.

--
The image of King on the mountaintop is of *my* King, a black king making promises to a black people. It is in that regard that I find he can be questioned. As the great American patriot, his electrification of the government and of the people found expression in the passage of laws guaranteeing equal defense of civil rights for all - not quite a Constitutional amendment, but certainly the most significant legislation of the era. In that act he is *everyone's* King and in that regard cannot be questioned. Why he must do double duty has everything to do with black expectations of their own trajectory towards freedom and blackfolks' very definitions of freedom.

The American Middle Class is free, as free as the Founders intended, as free as anyone would defend their rights to be free. Free enough to determine their fate. Free enough to self-destruct tragically. I am free. And so I don't expect anything more of MLK. Others do not believe they are free, and so they have greater use for him than I. It is the very controversy of my claim that I think generates friction.

King has no legacy save the effect he had on American government and on American attitudes. He did not aggregate power and so there is no well of power remaining. He did not collect money, nor build buildings. He didn't amass an army or grab land. He didn't build a church or run for office. He lived to be a catalyst in a reaction that would end without a need for re-ignition.  I am confident that this was a conscious omission, one generated out of his Christian sensibilities. He would build no earthly kingdom. He would pass no such power to his heirs. It is in that breach that we find people scratching their heads wondering what King might do or what King might say. People who are dissatisfied with the freedom his reaction delivered. People who wish to recreate the old formula. The time is long past, and if there is any truth in what King said but left undone, then it is to that message and not to King that the future belongs.

Every man is born free and every man must fight to stay free. The amount of freedom depends upon the amount of the fight, because enslavers are everywhere, even in ourselves. King's fight reminded us all of that and he fought for us so that we might remember nothing is conceded without a struggle and that some freedoms are worth dying for. But King would not say which freedoms were worth killing for, and that left him the leader of men who would talk, walk and sit in jails. Of men who would endure cruelty for the sake of a moral argument. But such are not the fullness of man's desire to be free, but man's desire to be avoid combat. Thus King is the author of our comfortable freedom, and so long as we can enjoy it in comfort, we need only thank MLK.

Your Day

Another Classic

The Cobbian Oeuvre, Slammed

Nulan lobs a large and complex bomb: I attempt to deal with it seriously

I believe that I am simply undaunted by the prospect of criticizing blackfolks or the ideas that seem to motivate them. I am convinced that it is useful criticism and I do endeavor to say things that are not said elsewhere.

f'zample?

That goes straight to the question of blackness, and I have had no success whatsoever in enaging that aspect of what makes blackfolks properly black. The 'who owns blackness' question is moot, unanswerable. I'd like to engage it but I cannot. I would engage it from the perspective of the change from Negro to black and suggest that the original prospects were useful but that they cast off too much of the 'old time religion'. Instead and now I am attempting to rectify mistakes of black nationalism, primarily ridding it of marxist economics and racialist thinking. And in that regard I would suggest that my own orientation as an old dude is proper and that Huey and Karenga went wrong. Which is to say nationalism is good, how does a black nationalist become an American nationalist? Economic development is good, how does a Ujamaa mature into black capitalism, moreover how 'black' does economics have to be?

All of that is limited to what I think is the ambit of the Civil Rights and Black Power agenda, which is to establish and maintain a strong and vibrant black middle class. I think we have that. So now my question becomes, what was the primary thing that created that black middle class and sustains it? Was it the values of Black Consciousness? Or was it the rising tide of the American economy combined with black mobility in it? I don't know for sure. So I'm not sure how to prioritize my critiques of the Defense of Marriage vis a vis black OOW birth and economic causality. But I do agree that Moynihan was right, and my own perspective is that a strong black family is absolutely necessary - that it can't be done without it.

and why no corollary criticism of whitefolks inclusive of some of disingenuous posers who perpetrate right here in your salon? As things presently stand, Bill O'Reilly is beating you on fairness and balance levels and everybody and they mama know that Bill O'Reilly is a lying sack'o'shit working a very definite and highly racialized political agenda.(Juan, Dr. Marc Lamont, Rev. Al and all his little crumbsnatching negro correspondents notwithstanding.)

I have no idea what Bill O'Reilly does. None. I haven't watched 30 minutes of the man in my entire life, and probably less than 4 hours of Fox News, ever. I have watched Glenn Beck a couple of times but not enough to remember much. My corollary criticism of whitefolks is implied in everything liberal and left and most things progressive. But I don't think of 'white' politics as anything different from racist politics. At the same time, I come from a perspective of black strength. Sure I'm going to call a white racist idea out, but I am particularly expecting blacks to overcome.

My message on anti-racist politics is purposefully not directed at either race, but I do hold blackfolks to a higher standard. And what I see is a pro-black politics that tends to be more self-interested than it is willing to build a proper multi-racial coalition. I see that this is a problem for me, because in fact I tend to be dismissive of such efforts anyway. That is because I get to a point at which I think blackfolks and whitefolks ought to get along without political urging. So you're likely to hear me push back at blackfolks who have identified extraordinary sensitivity and zero-tolerance anti-racism. Like TCoates implies that Hitchens is doing against 'black women' by ranking on Michelle Obama. So my kneejerk is how many whitefolks in political coalition can you get on that zero-tolerance platform - and then the answer is 'all of Obama's white supporters' and I dismiss that. Why? Because Michael Moore says whitefolks have no right to judge blackfolks. So it all sounds like political correctness to me, none of which has a significant effect on the economic position of the average black American. I'm interested in seeing institutional racism broke down and beat up, and I hear terms about the respect accorded Rutgers basketball players.

I'm not defending Smrgol nor taking any time to appease or correct him either. He's only been here two or three months. I do think he's said some tangential stuff that didn't pass the sniff test, but I'm not trying to make an example out of him. Yet. To be frank, I think Sparkle gives me a little bit too much love. I'm always attempting to be Socratic and instructional, welcoming of conflicting ideas and drawing people out to anthropological value. I've only had to bust on Chance and Fisher but both are welcome back.

The levels to which you strain in order to appease and furnish aid and succor to disengenuous Black haters is neither "old school", original, or constructive. Right here on this thread, you allowed 1400+ words of pure-dee-pure irrelevant horseshit without uttering a peep. Now you know the stink is hella deep when thegrayconservative and A. Charles alike have to call folks out on their nonsense!!!

I appreciate the work they do. I hope neither of them get tired of Cobb. I don't see haters, I see dissonance and a profound difference of priorities. I'm not trying to mediate that I'm trying to facilitate in the midst of being provocative. There have been lots of occasions where folks have gotten into a fight where I have no dog. Fzample you essentially chased off DailyBowelPrep when you two got into it about brain chemistry. I thought it was a breathtaking discussion, but I pretty much stayed out of it. I can't exactly say what the bone of contention between you and Smrgol is, honestly. But I don't see it as zero-sum. You're both welcome. I'm not objectively evaluating a lot of the comments that aren't directed at the thesis of the blogpost. I just don't have time.

On the whole however, the comments at Cobb are dynamite, and I mean that in a very good way. We don't have any trolls, people don't cuss each other out and people with completely different experiences and priorities still engage. That's all good, and I really don't care who has the last word when I don't want to have it. I'm perfectly content with a bit more horseshit than you.

In summary, blackfolks and the ideas they hold are never far from my mind. I battle in the world of ideas as an old school conservative towards the ends of disabusing racial loyalty over superior values, and identify the pitfalls and wishful thinking of progressive, liberal and left politics.

MLK posited a human essentialist Christian ethos and constructive political and economic engagement toward that end, and got shot for his efforts. ~ one month ago, you had the audacity to reject that in favor of precisely what "superior values"? Please tell me what these superior values are, because for the life of me, I'm at a complete and total loss to identify ANY of them. If they exist, that's a major hole in my bucket.

This is the most important criticism you lay at my feet and I want to look at it seriously. I will take it as a separate issue. I feel that there is a very big difference between Black Power and King's Dream. I'm not positive that they can be reconciled. Essentially, I think King's Dream was limited by its populist appeal. I think Black Power was premature, impatient and rude. I would like to believe that King's Christianity would work in ways that American politics does not and cannot, but I am left with B16 for now. I have not engaged as much or as well as I should, the implications of a transformational Christianity and its role in American affairs. I'm not sure why I have been distracted from that task. I'm glad you bring it up. The time is right to consider Liberation Theology, the separation of church and state and the proper ethics for America. I think notions of 'social justice' are very sloppy in contemporary thought. I think King's emphasis on racial integration was absolutely right and the Christian implications of that are clear.

You say that I'm anti-black but I don't ever feel that given all I have had to say in this blog that I would be unwelcome anywhere blackfolks are.

No, I say your "rhetoric" is conspicuously anti-Black and I have encouraged you for the longest time now (as have many others - not a few of which have simply thrown in the towel) to check yourself.

I need to be checked. Believe me. I'm a legend in my own mind.

What's the American Express motto, "everywhere you want to be"? I for one am genuinely curious about precisely where you want to be Cobb? Despite all your hypothetical pinings for elite Black aggregation, do you genuinely lift a finger toward that concrete interpersonal end outside of episodic and externally constructed media interludes? Instead of being the change you claim to want to see, it seems like you're in constant audition mode for Larry Elder's or Juan William's media gig. That steez is closer to "being everywhere somebody else wants you to be", right?

I'd like to be rich enough to have people over to my house and have significant dinner parties. I would essentially expand Cobb to be a real place, and whenever heads are in California, you'd know to drop by. I want to be rich enough to become a community macher, and I think in retirement I'll write books or do radio. I need to continue the conversation so that I don't show up one day aged 60 sounding foolish.

The interpersonal thing is difficult for me. Firstly because I simply don't fuss with people face to face. My nature is to be a host. Secondly because the people whose company I enjoy are sparse. But thirdly and perhaps most importantly I am extraordinarily frustrated with what I call 'social work'. My parents were both social workers, by profession. I simply don't have the patience for it. I am so much better having this conversation we are having, then doing any presumptive community service. I am very critical of community service organizations and the politics that support them precisely because I have been intimately involved with the headache of funding and managing such entities, and I strongly resent the hypocrisy of the Talented Tenth position. This is my burden and my failure, which I would be happy to present at length. But I look at a man like Albert Murray as who I want to be. And I cannot imagine him showing his value through community service.  I think I am perhaps a bit resentful of the dismissal by a people who take Tupac seriously. My interest is in writing essays, polemics and treatises. It's a chatting class game. Moreover I am strongly attracted to the writing of Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis, a couple of drunk Brits who are extraordinarily insightful and acerbic. Charles Wright was like that.

 

Bill Cosby is welcome among Blackfolks he's strongly and publicly criticized, (having witnessed it in person here in KC - and knowing the organic networking and coalition building he's done over the past few years here on the ground largely through the historic Kansas City Call newspaper) Cobb's critique - on the other hand - were it known, would be most unwelcome, and that's not simply an unfair catch-22 criticism positing your celebrity against Cosby's. It's a comparison of your and his respective identification with Black folks, organic and day-to-day networking and interpersonal communion with Black folks, old school and otherwise - and see - it's THERE that I believe you have allowed a major hole to form in your bucket resulting in a degree of ideological and rhetorical alienation that is frankly kind of jarring and entirely at odds with your cultural and personal background.

Because I write about politics, there is an expectation that I'm supposed to move the crowd because that's what 'black leaders' are expected to do. I cannot be that. It's interestingly why I like the example of Stephen Biko. He spoke to the crowd in a South African stadium while moving through them with a microphone. He never got to the podium. The man on the podium always gets shot. I want to write. I hate crowds. That is a hole in the bucket I will never fill. I want to be a writer. I want to have a salon. I am a consultant, a host, a raconteur, hell a barfly. I can handle a swanky reception or sit on a dais, but no more than two hours. I need my privacy.

You give every appearance of having put more effort into aggregating with folks whose politics are far less post-racial than they are anti-Black - and - you're not making evident comparable efforts to evolve or convince those folks of the errors of their ways. Personally, I'm very, very tired of calling you out for this, and I'm still more tired of abiding the emanations of folk who have categorically demonstrated themselves incapable of communicating in good faith across racial lines. That is, folks who believe they own the first mover prerogative on defining and controlling racial discourse. Folks who equate pro-Black rhetoric with the anti-Black structural and institutional context giving rise to Black partisan ideation and struggle.

I see a fundamental necessity for an overt black patriotism which owes to the history of black politics. I see it just as necessary as others see the need for Republicans to disown the Southern Strategy. In my mind, I am transfixed by the image of the white man on the courthouse steps trying to stab the black man with the American flag, and in the next second the black man snatches the flag away and shames the white man by holding it higher without fear and with righteous pride. So I have very little patience for the black oppositional, and I am perhaps overly concerned with it.

I don't believe in the post-racial. I believe in the competition of compelling values. So I seek for Americans to be so invested in a proper American nationalism that their racial interests are subordinated. I expect Americans to wrestle with the temptations of racial thinking and discipline themselves to 'play nice' as A.Charles says. I want people to look at the table in front of them and to realize that they *are* diners, and not strangers to the American table as Malcolm felt he was.

But I think that black cultural production has failed to give African Americans a decent context to express their patriotism and their ability to get along with their neighbors. I think that black oppositional politics has poisoned public discourse enough to make life more dissonant and confusing than it should ever have become. I find these to be enemies of American unity. I think white racism is unchanged, but diminished. But I don't see it in country music or anything in particular.

I began many years ago seeking to establish a zero-disrespect standard in politics. So I used to look for the racist insults. I found them surely enough when Meg Whitman used photo-ops with Sharpton to prove black bonafides in defiance of the local Urban League. I found them in the calculations of political strategists. I've never had a kind word for Karl Rove. But I have also determined that polities are led not by spin doctors but by their own percieved self-interest, and those who desire to call the Democrats 'black' and the Republicans 'white' lack the courage to cross the aisle and work things out. I wrote that practically day one on this blog.

Black partisanship is not the same as Black nationalism. Black partisanship is incontrovertibly human essentialist and enjoys first mover prerogatives as compared and contrasted with any other factor in the American popular culture. That's what's old school. It puzzles me how anybody could ever get that twisted? The Black partisan policy and praxis is embodied in the last 4-5 years of MLK's ministry. How large and eggregious a misrepresentation is it to equate that with the Black nationalism you constantly hold up as the object of your political scorn?

Your view of black communion my be incompatible with my temperament as an analytical and polemical essayist. I may have to give up the claim on the Old School, because it simply may not support me. But I am certainly ready willing and able to make some very specific claims on MLK. That's next.

The Mammoth Car

This takes me straight back to boyhood. Wow.

The Temptation of Immunity

I'm wondering this morning, if I am immune to Obama.

George twittered that if I have to ask... meaning that I must not be.

It's not a question of Obama actually. Although I haven't made up my mind whether or not I can stand him, I'm already decidedly contemptuous of people who appear to me to be obsessed with him either pro or con. But I also realize that these are the same people I've been living with in the US since forever. And for matters on which there is a great deal more clarity to me, like the reasons we are in Iraq and what we should expect from that conflict, I already have a great deal of contempt for my opponents. So much so that I can rest reasonably easy that their whining, while annoying, is insignificant in the bigger scheme of things.

This is a grave temptation, and it troubles me.

You see, my entire life as a progressive has been marked by that contempt for the American middle class. I know the feeling of being deeply into the most esoteric and hip bohemian scene. I know what it's like to make Cornel West laugh. I've been the cool guy with the smart question at the Studio Museum in Harlem on the occasion of Gina Dent's book signing. I know how to be part of the cognoscenti, intimately familiar with the impetus to demand 'education' for the [benefit] of the [ignorant] masses. I know what it is to glorify the common dissonance and weave it into a fashionable trope - to make the backwards Malcolm X hat into a symbol of youthful black resistance against the lifeless gray existence of the clueless white proletariat and their corporate masters.  In fact, I know how to wordsmith that very sentence into something that sounds exactly like what we all expect Michelle Obama to say the next time she gets a chance. And I know the permanent franchise the cognoscenti have as the voice of the people, even when it's honest and heartfelt and requires days, weeks and months in the ghettos, hoods, barrios of that vast GTA version of America.

I don't want to be like that.

So I'm trying to restrain myself and say that I am not immune to Obama. To be immune from Obama is to play the corporate hedged bet. To release oneself from the responsibility of hogwash going wrong. To leave people to their fate and pretending to be surprised with the shit hits the fan and the disillusionment sets in. To play both sides from a safe distance , not care. To withdraw investments of serious consideration for the public sphere and the will of the average Joe and know you'll be protected no matter what turmoil troubles the hoi polloi. I can retreat to my gated community and shoot at whatever moves. To be immune from Obama is to not really care if he wins because you can get through it OK. It is to be invested in cynicism. Well, you ask, how much can he actually screw up?

But in particular I am concerned about his foreign policy. Would he dismiss Petraeus? I mean, there are no mainstream media guys who are on the ground in Iraq - we could all pretend that Obama's election makes everything all good, and that the American image so many people mouth is tarnished in the world could suddenly turn gold. In Obamaland, people could pretend that Myanmar is cool, and we'd never hear stories that they are denying access by USAID because we are vicious imperialists. The story just gets buried. And I could pretend that I'm immune and that I don't care, because whatever is Myanmar anyway? I could pretend that the following factoid doesn't matter:

Iraqi sources report that al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Ayyub al-Masri has been captured in Mosul. If this report is correct, al-Masri almost made it to his 2-year anniversary as commander. He took over al Qaeda in Iraq after Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed June 7, 2006 in a U.S. airstrike northeast of Baghdad.

And I could stop subscribing to the news sources that would tell me that because I could find something nice to think about and not concern myself with the hash he'd make of the hot pursuit of Al Qaeda all over the world.

I could pretend to be immune to Obama and everybody who votes for him. But that would be treacherous to my conscience. So I guess I'm going to have to make up my mind after all, and really fight against him if what I believe to be true about his policies is revealed to be the case. I'd rather be really cool and say it doesn't matter, but I'd be lying to myself.

Can't Stop