Cobb

My (Good) Bucket List

Aww man this is impossible. But I'll give it a shot.

1. Eat dinner at the White House as the guest of the President.

2. Drive a Bugatti Veyron over 200mph.

3. Take a horseback tour retracing Lewis & Clarke's entire adventure.

4. Spend a night on the Space Station.

5. Bench press six plates.

6. Master Aikido.

7. Laze around the Tahitian sailing community for a year.

8. Attend Latin Mass at the Vatican.

9. Write my novels.

10. Christen at least one great-grandchild.

(11). Destroy my evil bucket list.

The O Man

The Local Failure of the Black Blogosphere

I'm a national guy and an international guy. I have a Local Deeds category and I haven't really used it much because I haven't really been local half the year. The past 24 months, I've spent most of my time in Seattle, Cleveland, Ft. Worth, Houston and Cincinatti. Still, I did manage to follow the Jamiel's Law topic well enough to get on radio. BTW, I think the matter has been addressed at the appropriate level although I'm not 100% behind the current solution. So most of the time I'm interested in national politics and culture.

It has been a while since a local issue of black interest has caught my attention, and when they do, it's usually something I sneer at because of the level at which it springs to national attention. You know the drill. Some racist asswipe in some backwater makes some outrageous statement or commits some felony and every African American on the Kwaku Network is sending me a 20 page diatribe with 400 email addresses on it. Then homeboy Howard Witt from Chicago sends out his email and it's on. A day later the Jackson or Sharpton camps have descended or not and then the mainstream media chimes in. Rarely do I get caught up in the rapture. Then if and when I do, I take my angle, get beat up about it until I make a video and then people say 'oh'. Or not.

There has been one singular local issue that I've taken up fully and that was the capital case against Tookie Williams. I was right. I tend to believe that my dismissive attitude towards these sorts of matters in general will be vindicated popularly with the inevitable progress of black America. I have a great deal of confidence in my perspective, but... There are a lot of Americans that have problems discussing black people as if they were people. I don't. Nor do I give any ground to those whose ethics force them to discuss black people as if they were special people. It makes me controversial, what can I say?

But to the extent that somebody has got to talk about black Americans from a local perspective, I am failing the blogosphere. I'm just not that attached to the 'hood. And one of the reasons I'm interested in the Urban Conservative Agenda is because I want to recognize those people who are. Actually, I don't care whether they are conservative or not, quite frankly, because I think black Americans are poorly served on a local level by all news organizations - nobody is doing a good job telling us what's up in Jena before it becomes JENA. Now we know too much - like Britney Spears or whomever is the Spears of the now. (Kwaku Network alerted me that one of the Jena Six shot himself last week - and this means what to the Obama Administration?)

Before I blogged my blog (brainstorm) I was a host at Cafe Utne's Society Conference. At the time I was a Progressive deeply steeped in black political and avant garde cultural traditions and as ignorant of Conservatism as most black Americans remain. It was my convention then, but not so much now, to ask people to tell me where they were coming from - literally. Gimme your zipcode. At the time, I was operating under the premise that a great deal could and should be assumed from the perspective of your demographic environs. I still think that's important but not when you're talking about national and international stuff - then you have to deal with political philosophy and history. In the context of the American Dream and the Struggle, the local details matter. In the global picture they most assuredly do not.

In the Conservative Brotherhood, one blogger in particular has impressed me above all by remaining focused on State and Local politics and that is Akindele Akinyemi. He is focused like a laser on what's happening in Detroit and in the Michigan Statehouse. I haven't really paid as much attention to him as I might have liked, then again, I'm a nationally and internationally focused writer.

The Coalition of the Damned, is by necessity, a local organization. If Houston has bad cops, then some Houstonians need to be raising their pitchforks and torches. But that has nothing to do with LA. The lesson I learned from studying the Rodney King thing to death decades ago was that the rules of engagement for cops is very different. In California, a majority of the state's police chiefs had beef with Darryl Gates. Most people didn't know that. The LAPD used to have rules of engagement that allowed officers to fire on fleeing suspect vehicles. In Houston, they banned that practice 10 years prior to the incident in LA that had me looking at police reform back in the day. The problem then, with the Coalition of the Damned is that in fact they are not a nationwide police watchdog group or dues paying organization with real leadership and an agenda and yet pretend to be. Why? Because of the failure of a real such organization to adequately do what it's supposed to. There is an October 22 Coalition run out of a post office box in NYC and somewhere perhaps there is a Stolen Lives database, but they're evidently short of some technical talent and obviously money. This continues to be the case, sad but true.

I would expect there to be some linkages to black blogging - a dedication to local matters with some discipline. Once upon a time in Los Angeles, I had such dedication. But I am intellectually incapable of making myself that person. I have never lived anywhere more than 6 years since 1982 except here in an upscale beach community in Southern California. I'm not cut out for the task of loving my town and following it around. People even see it on my indifferent face at the local highschool football game. That's what makes me good on the national, philosophical and theological. Somebody has got to have that local spirit, and I think that's exactly what CF's beef is as I interpret it. Let me tell it from my perspective, briefly.

After the Riot in LA when there was a Rebuild LA deal put together by local poohbahs (and if I remember correctly this was the beginning of Magic Johnson's role as big muck in LA) to get the black community back rolling. At this distance, it has worked very well - all of the chain stores are back on Crenshaw. But at the time when the racial tension between blacks and Koreans was at its peak, especially vis a vis LaTasha Harlins, black professionals like me were rolling our eyes. The fundamental question was why blacks didn't own the liquor stores and local retail establishments that Koreans were running in the black community. The answer was nobody black who went to college to be a business major had any intention on running a goddamned 7/11 in the hood. We were all headed to Corporate America. Black local entrepreneurship just wasn't interesting. Getting a 50K small business loan and franchising a Popeye's Chicken, maybe - but only after you hit the glass ceiling at Proctor & Gamble. It wasn't rocket science and among my peers there was no great mystery. Black people (like us) didn't want to be merchants.

CF has this experience in Atlanta. Black people like me wanted to live out at Nisky Lake and work for CocaCola. We didn't want to own a jewelry concession in Little Five Points or a taco joint in Decatur. Nulan understands very well, as I do, that there is a huge managerial brain drain on the 'hood and the ghetto. There simply isn't an economic base there that we are interested in where we were born. This is something my generation of college educated blackfolks share with lots of groups in the global economy and throughout history. See Thomas Sowell for details on nurses from the Philippines, Overseas Chinese and Indian IT workers in America. It's nothing new - entire classes of ethnics leave home, follow the bleeding edge of integration and take their families into middle class circumstances. It has been that way ever since the invention of indentures.

For some black Americans who have decided to cast their lot in the neighborhoods that reared them, we are at a great loss to hear them in their original forms. The blogosphere is the creation I always knew that the internet would provide; Digital Divide my ass. So what are black Americans doing to preserve and communicate ground level activity on a daily and weekly basis? Who are the local black bloggers and what are they talking about? Why is it that I have to learn about KIPP from Malcolm Gladwell? (Or did I hear about something like that the last time we were talking about Oakland?)

Perhaps it is the attitude of Cobb that suppresses that kind of discussion. I certainly don't want it to be. What I want it to be is something approaching the kind of heat and light surrounding the strip club shooting in Queens last year, where people from Queens logged on. But not just for the outrages, because that's not what life is all about.

I know we're never going to outdo Beyonce's music videos on YouTube, but there's got to be somebody out there who can do better than sending along the same tired Obama jokes and pictures by email.

Black Pop

My father wouldn't let me watch Good Times on television. His contempt for the show was unmitigated. He was always the type to call it the 'idiot box' and so therefore I was left on many a day in highschool with no context to jawjack with the brothers. To this day I'd have to scratch my head to name the characters. Well, I'd get 80 percent. James, Michael, Florida, Jimmy and whatshername. Which obviously proves I didn't watch the show, being a teenaged boy at the time whatshername was supposedly the hottest babe around.

Now Facebook has shown me exactly how ignorant I've been. Here is their black sitcom quiz. Evidently there have been more than a few black sitcoms. I mean for me, Frank's Place, Roc and The Cosby Show were it. If I missed an episode 'A Different World' it was OK. People used to joke that I was like Dwayne Wayne in college myself. I always like Kadeem. But if you ever wanted to verify my identity the more questions I answer correctly about '227' the more you know it's not me.

There have been a series of oafs and pseudo black men foisted upon the viewing audience of America, actors who didn't quite know how to be what we wanted them to be when all of that was important to us. They came close to appearing like our fathers, brothers, uncles, sons and running buddies, but there was always something missing. I recall Clifton Davis from 'Thats My Mama' being a second role for Ted Lange of Love Boat fame. There was almost never another chance for those black actors to be anybody other than that one lonely character, which is why my favorites were Roscoe Lee Brown, Jim Kelly and Ivan Dixon. They, at least, were men I would recognize as men.

Now that I think about it, it would be difficult for me to find many black actors today on the tube that I would think are entirely appropriate. Except now it doesn't, or shouldn't matter as much. I can't imagine that there has ever been or will be another show like A Different World - any show with black collegians that isn't about breakdancing or romantic relationships. I'll ask my daughters today what they think.

Lame Duck Jokes

The Future Black Intelligencia

Negronova offers the following observation:

I have to wonder WTF that is and it always boils down to do those who claim to want to see change by following the different path using another brand of politics, REALLY want to see change? And I'll be damned if i can't come up with another answer than "Not really." The willful ignorance from the Black intellegencia, no matter what side of the aisle, is sickening.

I am making a point to be at the seminar being held next month about the legacy of MLK between Debra Dickenson and Randall Kennedy here in Los Angeles. It has to do with the post-Obama world of blackfolks and politics. My general position has changed towards more skepticism of a black cultural or political orthodoxy and that is somewhat amplified by the popular phenomenon that is Obama, untied as he is from any real black think tank yet still reaping near unanimous support from the African American electorate.

Like most half-assed Americans, I feel like I understand MLK properly and that his life speaks in support of everything I believe in. I too enjoy the luxury of picking and choosing what to admire about the man. But he was just a man, and not a think tank - and his family has been particularly effective in blunting any effort to carry on what he might have had in mind for America's future. There is nothing but a pay-per-view system sustaining the King legacy and all think-tankery black America truly owns essentially lives in the head of David Bositis as it has for decades. And so we have emerged in the post-Civil-Rights era a diaspora of thought with a some-timy discipline.

We do have Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell. We have Armstrong Williams, John McWhorter, Shelby Steele and Michael Eric Dyson. Cornel West is out there as is Roland Fryer and Glenn Loury. I don't think any of them bother to blog and actually reach the millions, leaving it to amateurs like myself and the host of other sharp writers who deal with the issues of the day from a more thoughtful perspective than the evening news or the occassional editorial special. But is there really any insight to be gained by paying attention to these guys? Moreover do we have appropriate expectations and benchmarks for the black intelligencia, or are we only wishing them into responsibilities which nobody rightfully does or should hold?

We all know by now that there is no single black community, no single black leadership cadre, no single black voice in culture, politics or religion. It rather begs the question in my mind as to whether or not it is useful to think there should be, even at a small focus. I have the difficulty of writing at a national level and ignoring or discounting this or that story of black interest. But moreover I think we're all eventually headed into Debra Dickerson's back pocket. We are reaching, individual by individual, the black endgame. Except that from the shadows there will continue to emerge a trickle of folks wearing the black mask. But I think all of this ultimately is about attempting to reconcile ourselves to our own interpretations of the black imperative, which to my eyes always will be betwixt and between the visions of Booker T. Washington and DuBois. King for his part merely emerged as the inevitable figurehead in the march towards civil equality in law. About that endgame I wrote:

So we're watching blackness go back and forth over lines we imagine to be the end of blackness. How come we don't have but one TV show, Good Times? How come there's no McDonald's in our neighborhood? How come they don't play our music on the other radio stations? Can a black man be the Chief of Police? Those were questions at the end of blackness when I grew up. That's all done. And yet people reinvest. Well, OK forget what I said then, what I really meant was this kind of black person being Secretary of State. No what I really meant was a black Senator in a Southern state. No I meant somebody other than Jay Z as a media mogul. No, rap music winning Grammys isn't good enough, I really meant Oscars and Tonys.. no Pulitzer ..no Nobel.

Sometime after the fourth black President, somebody will ask why it's only 4 out of 60. That's not proportional. Or maybe by then the Endgame will have already occurred and people will stop asking such questions. I always recall that at the end of WW2 the big question was whether the average Negro was intelligent enough to drive a truck. People stopped asking such questions - they are Negro questions, beneath us all, long forgotten, like Negroes born at home in the Negro Community. Like sharecroppers from Louisiana wondering if they could survive in a big Northern state like Massachusetts where today the governor is black.

Black intellectuals have been, for the most part, keeping track of racial progress and watching numbers until they were magically insignificant. How long will they do that and have the attention of policymakers? Do they have that attention even now?

For my part, I'm tending to look at the long term historical parallels. I want to know, for example, how King's positions emerged in the context of his assumption of the role of the American Gandhi. So I want to look at India's independence and compare that to the black American 'nation'. We similarly have our own diversity that rather instantly moved from relative subjugation to independence. In a recent conversation about India as a democracy, an author noted that one of the things that makes Indian politics what it is has to do with the fact that it didn't evolve franchise like America or England. Instantly, poor people had the vote whereas this was not the case in the older democracies. This provides problems of identity politics in India as it does here in black America. That makes me say hmmm.

Hamas Reaps the Whirlwind

It has been two years since Israeli Cpl Gilad Schalit was kidnapped by militant Palestinians. He's still a bargaining chip that Hamas holds. You would think that they would have learned by now - but they haven't. The rockets red glare has been so frequent that there is even a Kassam weather chart.

Israel is fighting back and the proper response to all this violence is a sad head shake. But unless we are to believe that there is something fundamentally different about war and mankind, we have to acknowledge that sooner or later the Palestinians are not going to have a state. All of their attempts have done nothing but gather angry peasants into bands of suicidal militarists pseudo-governments. Its as if African Americans reconstituted the Black Panthers every three years and called it a 'peace process'. Thankfully, we among the formally dispossed people of the world have learned to live in a true sustained and disciplined peace with our neighbors.

You can expect the usual suspects to fight the Palestinian's propaganda war for them over here in the States. My position hasn't changed. Here's what I wrote three years ago.

...They are not going to change direction. They are the investors in and inventors of the suicide bomb attack on civilians. They have had years to consider their strategies and tactics and now they have deftly and soundly defeated their political opponents. It says quite a bit that those Palestinians most invested in moderation are corrupted beyond repair, and those most single-mindedly focused on disciplined change and reform are hell-bent on the destruction of their neighbors. There is no change to be had. The will of the people has been made manifest, what lies ahead is the inevitable.

The inevitable will be an even more ragtag ethnic Palestinian minority subsumed into a single dominant Israel. The dreams of Palestinian nationalism are about to come crashing down and their inevitable dependence will be made crystal clear. All we need do now is sit back and watch the tortured dreams of the manic and the single-minded madness work its magic. There can be and there will be no Palestinian nation so long as the fundamental expression of its political will is to blame its problems on Israel. And our Secretary of State should withdraw every penny of aid until the new Palestinian government demonstrates its ability and willingness to disband the Hamas Militia. Of course Hamas will not disarm, and its soldiers will not confine themselves to quarters. This is a 'nation' whose fundamental contribution to the region is destructive suicide. We should expect nothing less.

Hamas decided to build more rockets and attempt to terrorize Israelis into submission and curry more favor as every bleeding heart's sick puppy. What a terrible legacy they have brought to people of Gaza.

The Melting Pot

 The Melting Pot gives you the feeling that you're living in a parallel universe. Everything is very much like you would expect in a luxurious restaurant except there are some fundamental changes that are both subtle and dramatic.

First off the place is gorgeous. It's dark and intimate with deep woods, frosted glass, dramatic lighting and inviting carpets. The staff is handsome, courteous and prompt - all decked out in black. For a new restaurant, it's moving very smoothly. The building is circular and the theme repeats itself in large and small curves. The bar and private rooms over to the left are just begging for a Hollywood movie crew to shoot. Although it was fairly quiet when we arrived, I can see this becoming quite the spot.

I know what it is. It's like Gulfstream or Houstons, except it's round! That's the vibe. But that's just the beginning.

The menu is half wine, and as soon as you walk in the door, you can see that they are nuts for wine at the Melting Pot. They have several hundred bottles on display in a glass case that reminded me of the house in Thirteen Ghosts. Very cool. But since you know I'm not a wine guy, that's about all I have to say about that. But if you must know, they had some bomb cocktails. I myself had a lemonade, vodka and basil concoction that was frosty and chock full of strawberries. It didn't knock me over, nor was it too fruity. It was pleasantly different - parallel universe style, and it didn't make me feel like I was experimenting with my masculinity.

The other half of the menu is what the Melting Pot is all about and it is about as different as possible. What the Spousal Unit and I had was called the Lobster Indulgence. It was a huge, delicious, continental meal. Now you've had teppan, Benihana style, and you may have even had Korean Barbecue cooked right at your table, but you have never had fondue, so get prepared.

It works like this. There are four courses, three of which center around two hot pots cooking in the center of your marble-top table. Or just one if you're a party of two. Fondue is all about dipping and boiling. You get a huge variety of foods brought to you and you dip it or cook it right at your table. Yeah. Different! The first is the appetizer. In this you have six choices of cheesy treats as a basis to cook up in your two pots. We had the triple Wisconsin and the spinach and artichoke. Hey. Hot spinach dip is like Houstons, but we're in the parallel universe and the server prepares it right in front of you. For dippin', we had apples, celery, carrots, cauliflower, crusty breads and tortilla chips. Aha, now I know what those big long skewer forks are for.

Now since the restaurant is new, the servers don't have their speil down while they're preparing, but knowing what we know of Benihana, we can be sure that they're going to have some entertaining banter as time goes by. This time I decided to dominate the conversation. Next time, we'll see.

Next comes salad. I had Southwestern Cobb. Mmm bacony! The Unit had a ceasar with pine nuts. Really superb. Hey, I'm getting full already.

The main course for the Lobster Indulgence is what this is all about. I'm going to try to spare you some details because I'd be here all day. And by the way, when you go to get this which is the full-on treatment, you had better bring your appetite, have three hours (seriously) and a watch. Lobster, beef tenderloin, salmon, spiced chicken, shrimp. Those are your meats. Mushrooms, red potatoes, broccoli. Those are your veggies. Two boiling pots of broth - we chose the Coq au Vin French and the Mojo Caribbean. And nine, count 'em nine sauces. Pick a meat, pick a veggie, fondue it for 90 seconds or 120 seconds in a pot, shag it onto your plate and pick a sauce. The combination of tastes is astounding. How is it that food so familiar can be so different? It must be a parallel universe.

I never do dessert. 99% of the time, I'm too stuffed or make some kind of excuse. I'm telling you now, there is no way to resist a simmering pot of chocolate for dipping. We had two, one with milk chocolate the other with cherries jubilee en flambe swimming in dark chocolate. For dipping? Rice Crispies Treats, marshmallows in graham cracker or Oreo dusting, cheesecake, poundcake, bananas and brownies.

I'm trying to remember how I got out of the joint under my own power. As you know, I only give five stars when a restaurant shows me something I didn't know and didn't expect. This was out of this world. I've got to go again.

21525 Hawthorne Boulevard
Torrance, CA 90503
(310) 316-7500

Radio Rediscovered

If you have an iPhone or iTouch then you need to know that there is a great application for six bucks. It's Wunder Radio and it offers a great interface for you to hear every major and probably just about every minor broadcast radio station in the US. But there are international stations as well.

Right now I'm listening to News Talk FM 93.0 Kingston Jamaica. The Sizzle is the call-in show I'm hearing. Over in Wellington Town, they haven't picked up the garbage in three weeks, and that's the news.

Down in South Africa on Radio Pretoria, they're playing an old Irish ballad. But on Bush Radio they're playing Iggy Pop and Aerosmith.

I tired to get something out of Israel but the only broadcast I could connect to was in Hebrew. But yes they were talking about the war.

This can be very good. Best six bucks I ever spent. Well except for my first In N Out burger.

Hitting You Where You Live

Akindele Akinyemi has been a member of the Conservative Brotherhood for some time now. I'm going to post his end of the year message in its entirety. He is increasingly strident on a fairly strong plank of what I'm calling the Urban Conservative Agenda, this is his manifesto. Another of my commentors and a guy I've seen around the web, Constructive Feedback has this on his mind, as does D Burt the Afronerd. These are activists who have answers for those who ask what are Republicans going to do for the ghetto. More importantly they are on point to ask the very profound question about Democrat and Liberal black leadership - has their monopoly over the past 30 years produced results you can believe in?

I think these folks represent a trend that's going to have a great deal more influence in 2009 as the glow fades off the novelty of the election of Obama and Americans faced with the same problems are going to recognize that change is slow to come for those who wait for it. They have the upper hand when it comes to change, because the black meccas of America have yet to choose Republican leadership.

There are those who would suggest that we now live in an era where 'liberal' and 'conservative' have no meaning. Of course this is wishful thinking. There aren't startling new ideas, there are old proven ones that are discovered late. The Urban Conservative Agenda is a new name for old time religion that was good enough for our great grandparents. Hear Akindele out. He sounds in his message so much like Booker T. Washington that the resemblance is uncanny. The attitude is fierce, uncompromising and confident. The language is clear and to the point using terms that have floated around for a long time. Listen up.

The Creative Wasteland

The worm has turned, and this economic downturn marks the beginning of the end of the profitability of the publication of generic foolishness. Conspiratorial and propagandistic foolishness will continue, but legions of 'creatives' are going to have to eat mac and cheese for a long time. Sorry Messr Mondavi & Gallo, but your cheese eating market is shrinking.

The other night, I'm shuttling various offspring to dog-sitting duties for Mr. Jones and our dear friendly interviewer Terri Gross is slackjawed with her subject on the topic of stealing bytes. She and her guest cannot understand why the younger generation does not appreciate all of the work that goes into putting together productions. They are convinced that youth has and ethical defect. I am convinced that youth has a lower tolerance for bullshit, given the fact that they swim in deeper oceans of it than we ever did as youth. Bullshit yearns to be free, even if expensive people are producing it in anticipation of profit.

The other matter I don't think many in the cultural production business understand very well is the extent to which their ideas of property run counter to the ethos of those technologists like myself who have become the intermediaries in their 'arts'. Without electricity, 90% of today's 'creatives' can create nothing but the sort of navel-gazing bleating noises they are increasingly given to. Revenge of the nerds may not be inevitable, but the cost of technology is going up and the marginal utility of creativity is going down. Why? Because YouTube has proven that the only thing we are missing when we turn the cameras on ourselves, relative to the 'reality' programming that has substituted for artistic genius on all of the world's screens, small and large, is production values. Production value is no longer a valuable product.

We are on the verge, therefore of seeing the return of the freak show. And we are going to see some strenuously bizarre freakage in order to displace the waves of thin puke couched in elaborate sophistication. Tony Soprano is not going to cut it any longer. We're heading towards Overfiend territory, mark my words. In the meantime, expect more Johnny Knoxville style hijinks on a screen near you.

En passant, I will be employing the term 'screen' to encompass all visual media - because the world is a video. That is, the world I am mostly ignoring but must know like an enemy kept close. My expensive combination of audiobook and print book gets me through a wad of material on the swift, and makes for permanence and referencability.

The web will lock down and go private. Good information is getting sparser. Get your PGP keys and join my circle of trust. Allmuseri.

The Conservative Elevator Pitch

From American Thinker.

Good question, Bob. In America today, conservatives believe, government is cruel, corrupt, unjust; and it just costs too much. And we conservatives just can't stand there and do nothing.

Liberals created this monster, Bob. Liberals believe that compulsory government programs are the way to help the poor and comfort the afflicted. But they are wrong. Government is not compassion. Government is force. You cannot solve social problems by force.

Conservatives believe in society not as social force but as social cooperation. That's why we must reform the welfare state into the welfare society. In the welfare society the American people, not liberal experts, will be in charge of their health care, their children's education, the comfort of the afflicted, and the decent provision of pensions.

With conservative reforms America will truly become that shining city on a hill, "still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom."

I think it can be accurately said, that the entire difference between being conservative and a Conservative, is that the Conservative organizes politically to fight that stupid, brutish government rather than merely hedge and hide. This is why being merely organic is not sufficient.

The biggest things our government has ever done are being done today with trillions of dollars. It's frightening.

Fallout Three

Fallout 3 is the game of the year. I know this already. Although I only got it four days ago, I have put in 31 hours of work.

Fallout Three is superb and has set the new standard for turn based RPG combat. In a brilliant move they have created a system called VATS (Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System) that allows you to stop time, target your enemy (with a single weapon) and engage. The system then puts moves forward in time, animating all of the effects of your turn in slo-mo then moves back to real-time. The results are really well done. I have had situations in which a bear-like creature is caught in mid pounce two feet in the air above my character. I got off two shotgun blasts using VATS and splattered the beastie. 

Being from Bethesda, F3 is very Oblivion-like with several improvements. First of all, it gives the appearance of being about a 60 hour game whereas Oblivion is at least three times that. But I could be quite wrong about that - I'm about 30 hours into it and only two of my 20-odd skills are >50%.  There is a bit less human interaction and fewer ways you can seem to grow your character but plenty of diversity possible. 

The artwork is much more striking in F3. The entire effect feels more immediate whereas in Oblivion you seem to have a bit more distance between yourself and the avatar, it being sword and sorcery. With Fallout 3 you have a constant sense of being Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes. 

There are little touches that I like - for example you don't get woken up in the middle of your sleep by some creature wandering by. You are also incompetent for a much shorter period of time than in Oblivion. The action is more immediate, you don't spelunk for 15 minutes into a cave and then get ambushed by 10 creatures all the way in the back so that you need to run back another 15 minutes for life & weapons. Encumberance is handled better; you can repair items wherever you are which consumes spares in the field, lightening you. 

Whereas Oblivion was a kind of awe-inspiringly, overwhelmingly massive work, Fallout Three is merely jaw-dropping and stays closer to the plot and adventure. You don't spend inordinate amounts of time, as you did in Oblivion, shopping the diaspora for goods and visiting your prize vendors every day. 

The environment is huge, but not quite as large as Oblivion's. It's more compact and there are fewer side missions. The missions in F3 are very well crafted and have subtleties of negotiations between characters and factions that are very appreciable. As in real life, nobody is quite so evil as they may appear. The 'Blood Ties' mission surprised me in this way. 

There is a Karma system which is very nice, and some great computer hacking puzzles that make you put down the controller, get a pencil and paper and do some different kind of thinking. The quality of these games within the game shows through. 

Control of the character in the environment is good, I've gotten stuck in a few places. You get unlimited saves so you don't have to work up to checkpoints. There is fast travel between major discovery points on the map which comes in handy, but you can't jump out of combat like a genie and teleport yourself to safety. 

Like Oblivion, there is a limited 'alchemy' skill. You can combine found objects within the game and craft them into weapons and technologies. Bodies in the road are persistent, so if you kill it it doesn't vanish over time. There are thousands of nooks and crannies filled with worthless junk that you pick up and drop as well as roaming caravans of merchants who will sell you stuff. 

Your health is three dimensional. You have basic life points, you have a radiation count and you have 'effects'. Everything you eat is radioactive so you trade off health for radioactivity. At 200 rads you start to get ill and need special meds or the services of a doctor. There are all sorts of drugs to take which add 'effects' including increased or decreased perception, strength, intelligence, etc. You can get addicted and suffer withdrawl which also alters your performance. 

What is startling about the F3 world is how Mad Maxian it is and isn't. In the ruins of Washington DC, it's heartbreaking. There are two competing radio stations, both echoing melancholy songs as far as their signals go. Of course everything has a 1947-58 look and feel. Analogs of the voices of the Andrews Sisters, Bing Crosby and Ella Fitzgerald croon out songs of love and loss, of hope and sadness. A DJ named 'Three Dog' whose voice and attitude is a cross between Wolfman Jack, George Carlin and Samuel L. Jackson spins these tunes and offers helpful hints to his 'children' in the wasteland. The other, the evidently pre-recorded voice of 'John Henry Eden', the president of the US, makes nostalgia come alive and promises a brighter future - a restoration of a simpler past among patriotic songs.  After about 20 minutes or either station, you see how empty and sad the whole place is - all the books are burned. There is no legend and little history, there is only survival in the now and your character plays a part in every dream anyone in the Wasteland manages to keep.

The Workhouse - Part One

I'm writing a short story called The Workhouse. This is the first installment. The inspiration came to me as I watched Dark City in a corner of my desktop. I remember how strikingly original it was, how much of a psychological and existential puzzle it provided - a teaser for us to consider what it is about our humanity that makes us desire. The balance between heart and mind, between the illusion of time and sensation and the illusion of thought - this continuing consciousness we experience. And I am coming to the conclusion, a bit surreptitiously, that there is nothing that can be so alien to us as we might imagine. So what could we imagine?

I happen to think we imagine ourselves in the wrong direction, away from virtue into a sort of cynical oblivion - we meaning Americans, and at the same time we wish for some searing reality to give us human instincts again. The Workhouse is the story of a man who typifies this laziness but finds a way out. Maybe. I wanted to make it very sensual and impressionistic so I'm writing in the first person, as if I could many other ways...

Life is a prison, or at least it should be lived as if that were the case. I thought the other day while listening to Niall Ferguson's description of the English workhouse, how somebody might turn a profit in American providing such an experience to our Baby Boomers. How could we, if we were conscripted by a document of our own signing into a one year rehabilitation, find the beauty of work? It might go something like this...

Merry Christmas

The Insider Press

 Everybody wants to be Woodward and Bernstein, and it shows. The press takes itself too seriously and for that reason is a tool in the hands of real masters of information. This is really huge. In my most paranoid days of 'manufactured consent' I never quite figured how something of this nature might go down. Now I see it clearly. This is very likely something that information officers like Larry Kolb, author of Overworld,  understood very well.

What’s now coming to light is another tale: about the moment the Press had decided to become a political player in itself: it would not only report the news, but make the news. Stratfor believes that many problems grew from than momentous decision which have not ended to this day. If doesn’t fully disclose where the information comes from and the purposes it serves even when it is aware of an underlying agenda, it’s become like some of the auditors of the failed Wall Street firms; no longer outsiders but insiders.

I've argued that this is what the mainstream press wants to be. Long ago I advocated for some ideological transparency, but we've got worse, which is partisanship masquerading as neutrality. Of course it took independent and partisan bloggers to demonstrate this. Hurray for PJM and Stratfor, allies in truth.

Reconnected

Moms called me and said my blogging is strange. It is lacking continuity but mainly because I have been off the web for 3 or four days. My router died, and I've only been here for about an hour tops. I've been writing offline and then pushing stuff when I have a moment and some connectivity. I've been filling my own time with other things since Friday night, not the least of which was a very cool big dinner with some of my old buddies from high school.

Well I just got my replacement modem from Verizon and I'm back online. So.

The Clash of Civilizations

I think it might be useful to directly engage the premise of the Clash of Civilizations and put some of that in context here.

First let me begin by stating my general position. As a first premise which must be stated I am perfectly comfortable with the inevitable intertwining of black and American destiny. I am, quite frankly, near the point at which I am hard pressed to understand any useful distinction except for historical purposes. We are all Americans. As Americans we remain in the exceptional position as the leader of the free world as we know it - the victors of WW2 and possessed of an economy, military and culture which dominates on the world stage.

We are engaged in an ideological war with a particular set of Muslims, formally the Jihadis, who are engaged in terrorist tactics aimed at undermining the confidence of citizens all over the world in American power. In that war, we have come to understand that the major figures of Jihadi leadership have employed twisted variants of Islam to justify their cause and encourage support from other Muslims.

At a metaphysical level, I am convinced that there is no reason, within the aegis of worldly affairs, for the great religions of the world to be in zero-sum conflict. This is a bold claim based on what I will call an evolutionary biological basis. If there are two methods for gaining knowledge, one from reason and one from revelation, then the evidence of that success lies in the content of the human mind. We must be endowed with the ability to perceive and judge that knowledge equally as humans by dint of the fact that we are biologically equivalent. If any man can receive Islam it is because any man can receive Christianity because any man can receive knowledge. At some level the source is irrelevant although respecting that source may have different behavioral manifestations. It is my hope that these behavioral manifestations, manners of worship if you will, do not take precedence over the value of the lesson to be learned, but I am aware of how the Jihadi perverts this.

To the Jihadi, it is the act of defending their knowledge that overwhelms the message of that knowledge. It may even be a perversion of that knowledge itself, a destructive feedback loop. The virtuous are those who destroy the infidel, and that is the sole virtue. Of course I am being succinct.

We are faced with the necessity of religious reconciliation during a time of war, and we are faced with the fact of a sophistication which is unevenly manifest around the globe whose strength in openness makes it vulnerable to the sort of attack which does not share its premises of open society.

I am interested, from the perspective of an emergent class of Americans, in probing the depths of Western Civilization. In some ways this is a massive undertaking, but I do have the advantage of having the spare time, which is a function of the relative freedom I have been able to achieve. It's nothing new, but it is new to me and my cohort. But I am particularly interested in preserving the progress and the context of the progress made in my particular endeavor, that of information technology. Yet I recognize that the world can live without it entirely. While it becomes a habit and even an enabling necessity, it like many other sophistications of the West, is under threat.

There can be no doubt that the Jihadi and any rebel has some validity to their cause. Nobody wishes to suffer and it is surely the fear of suffering that causes men to fight. But it could also be greed. It could be honor. Whatever the cause, we are all called to evaluate what it is that we have that is worth fighting for and our committment to its defense must be renewed.

So I open it up here (rather than continuing pontificative analysis). Are we in a real clash of civilizations? Is there a latent animosity between Christians and Muslims which might come to a head? Are our very conceptions of ourselves on the planet in conflict in such a way that may inevitably bring a global holy war? Has the West gone too far? Are we too sophisticated for the rest of the world and will they inevitably be the barbarians to destroy what we have built? Are we headed towards The Planet of the Apes?

An Organic Turn

These days I find myself more and more brought to mind of John Brown. Cloudsplitter was one of the most influential books I've ever read about any American and the impression it left me on the extraordinary life of Brown is permanent. But as I have been more concerned with my relations with fellow Americans, I thought that my own vector would never quite swing back to the kind of rugged organic quality that Brown has come to represent to me. Yet at this particular moment, I am feeling that quality again.

As of yesterday morning I have been unable to access the web via broadband. I have, however, been able to get to it via my cellphone and I've worked out something to tether it to my home computer so I could get a film review out today. But in one day I have rediscovered the world inside my own terabyte which is closer to two right about now. And so I have been fastidiously reorganizing the many gigabytes of this and that with an eye out for the blessings of redundancy balanced with the requirements of security and convenience. It has been glorious funky pajamafied fun, and I have discovered programs and documents I haven't seen in years. I've also been to my new accountant and she's got good news so far on my tax burden for this year. Not only that I found a stack of three by five cards that I put together about 16 years ago. Plus I bought a multimeter, and I rediscovered my GPG keys.

It's difficult to describe exactly how that feeling of heads-down concentration on a self-contained life manifests itself in me on a consistent basis. There isn't much of a vocabulary for that particular aspect of my life in America, or if there is I'm not aware of it. Organic is the best way I've heard it described. By 'organic' I mean unleveraged by social convention. An organic person is someone who is not particularly vested in those social conventions by which bourgeios people assert their place and privelege in society. If one is not wealthy, there is a certain amount of attention to which one must focus one's mind around what will distinguish you among your peers and betters such that you shall remain in their good graces, lest you find yourself an island. An organic chooses to be as independent of such graces as possible, and one who is not self-made may end up an ascetic. But I am finding in Boyd's Razor some comfort in the idea that I may become both more organic and more deeply tied to society. I am tempted to say 'real' society because what my intent is along these lines is to reduce my exposure to the popular culture and focus more singularly on those core operations of western civilization until such time as it rewards me extraordinarily. I suspect this will not take long but there are several things I must do along the way.

I have taken the first steps, which is to replace some fraction of my entertainments with more edifying activities. I may even give up action films. But for the time being, more reading and less blogging is part of the diet as well as more science and my traditional intellectual interests and less politics, culture and current events. Much of this is consonant with the T50 project, but I am moving towards taking up more of my time with these deeper pursuits recognizing exactly how much it takes me away from what society I have, here online and in the virtual world of that thing which accepted to be the province of 'black men'. And so to some details and directions.

A. I will add to my language capabilities. There will be two, perhaps three. The first is Java. I am committed to acquiring a level of proficiency with that on par with my korn shell and perl. Both of those I began in earnest in 2001, and while I'm far from a master, I've mastered enough to be perfectly servicable in my domain of computing, and then some. I expect, at the very least, should I stay the course in Business Intelligence, that I will know enough to be dangerous in building custom functions for database systems. I figure that's the least I can do. The second language will be Latin. I have determined that it's about time for me to make that effort and extend my ability to a second language for reading. I'm told my grandfather had a fair amount of Latin and that he taught himself. How much he possessed is anybody's guess, but I expect to learn enough to understand the classic Catholic Mass - and I intend on going too. It is my personal dedication to the Long Now and my kicking to the curb the facile conveniences of contemporary, short attention span theatre which is the American zeitgheist. The third and optional language will be Python, primarily because of Google and secondarily because of XRepublic. I have a feeling that Google is about to do something with its application engine that will make assembling widget based websites something of a snap. If Python is the language of choice, it shouldn't be to far afield from Java and given my Perl, I should be able to manage it easily. If I can build XRepublic with the evolving Google toolkit that will be great.

B. I will spend more time working on my book(s). I realize that I have spent Gladwell's Number of hours blogging and the marginal utility these days on the subjects of Cobb is found mostly in retrospectives. It's really as simple as that. The blog will continue as amenuensis, but not a whole lot more. I think I have discovered that I really am not interested in the pace of contemporary studies. Watching Coates and Yglesias have convinced me. I'm never going to be writing six essays a day again. It's a contradiction in terms, and having written 'In Defense of The Regling' has convinced me, I think at long last, that I am ready for a greater amount of length in my writing. If there's not 2500 words in it, perhaps it's not worthy of my attention.

C. I am prepared to enter a new geekdom. So long as I can stay employed at my level, I think that I should angle back towards the extreme tech. I'm going to take advantage of whatever my boss offers, but I should be content to fall back to the purest technical matters.

D. I am bifurcating my style and paying much more attention to my health. The bifurcation will be of a rich traditional wardrobe around the cues of Johnston & Murphy and of a very rugged wardrobe around the cues of REI and Eddie Bauer. I'm ditching the Hollywood Suit and all attempts to be slick. I will be doing calesthenics, period.

E. Spiritually, nothing changes but the following recent recognition. I have no real desire at all to attend worship services and I resent the discipline. I think it presumes that I forget God and my ethics during the week and need to be drilled. So at the moment, the very idea in me of any attempt to be religiously observant feels hypocritical. To whom would I actually be making my prayers heard? I'm afraid my piety will be expressed in other ways, some dependent on my emergent Latin skills.

In all of this Boyd is never far from me. I want to reduce my needs to zero. I want to feel strangely alien in shopping situations - like John Brown in London, but not financially inept. I love the idea of reading that which is free from Project Gutenberg, but I have also discovered the joy of listening to audiobooks and Bloomberg during every free moment. I love the idea of being very much in touch with all that is free - and yet vital. There are millions spending millions to bite off the intellectual property chase, attention markets. I'm not going there. I'm getting the free, open source.. well, we'll see. T50 continues.

Politically, I'm where I was and trust my instincts. I'm beginning to care less and less that I'm able to explain what that means to anyone. It's not my job. The Organic Conservative is me, and I'm not even particularly anxious to find out if it's Jeffersonian or after which model it follows. It's just what I'm doing these days, and it feels good. It feels right.

The Day The Earth Stood Still

It's difficult for me to describe the level of abject capitulation of the remake of 'The Day the Earth Stood Still'. It is the most shamelessly invertebrate portrayal of humans facing doom that I have ever seen on film. If you are going with the expectations of seeing anything updated in this remake, you're bound to be disappointed. Why? Because there is a level of thought which is completely absent from the new version, and that is the matter of compassion.

It's probably more accurate to say that compassion is an afterthought and absent from the logic of the story on both sides. In the original, the alien Klatu spent a good deal of time working to gain an audience of world leaders. He wasn't in any sort of hurry. Reeves' Klatu, is rather heartlessly delivering an ultimatum after a day and a half. He's about as comfortable in his human body as the bug from Men In Black.

Even from the perspective of a Hobbsian bargain with the robot Leviathan Gort, the offer isn't even made. In the original film, the one-eyed robot was a fail-safe policeman under which all of the civilized nations had voluntarily placed their law-enforcement. Instead of administering justice to the baddies of Earth, it merely goes on a rampage of Biblical destruction. In the original, Gort was Robocop on a tight leash, in the new film, he's little more than an atom bomb on a hair trigger.

The thing that makes this film so hideously bereft of human emotion is that it concentrates on rather thin stock characters following orders. I can imagine that the committee writing it deciding to go with montages of panic in the streets around the world rather than to add more speaking roles of ordinary people faced with crisis. As a disaster movie, it's a disaster. War of the Worlds, Cloverfield, The Day After Tomorrow, all very flawed films were all more involving.

Certainly, thoughtful people will see through the shallow Earth-First posturing of the film. But surely there are millions preparing to be enchanted by the kind of bitchslap from space the film offers up. The swiftness with which the so-called scientists capitulate in this film is utterly cowardly. And as if to make up for the simple and obvious need for human survival they place the entire emotional center of the film on a kid, who displays more common sense and emotion than the entire rest of the cast combined. Alas, he is nothing but a kid.

What truly astonishes me about this film is that there is not one kiss anywhere. There are teary hugs but only between the female lead and the kid. She, by the way, does her best acting in realizing within a split second that the awesome power of the alien is implacable - her begging and blubbering is perfect. The power of love, redemption, courage and morality are like stickers on a blank sheet of paper instead of woven into the fabric of the plot. I expect a lot more from my sci-fi and so should you.

However if you are somewhere beneath the emotional maturity of my 12 year old daughter, you might think it cool to see that the cluster of civilizations beyond our technological reach finds collecting frogs and squid more interesting than saving humanity. Wait, that's exactly what a lot of twisted humans think. Oh. I get it.

Somehow I am stuck with the image of a pumpjack stopping its job in service of humanity as the most poignant moment. Somewhere somebody is cheering. More's the pity.

Straight No Chaser

If you were from where I'm from than you would know.

In Defense of The Regling

Dear Brother

I am writing you this letter to help you better understand the dilemma I am faced with here on Arn. You see I fear that we are about to destroy The Regling. The Regling is under threat and I am concerned that I may not be able to save it. The General Authority has taken a position and declared its intent according to the changing will of the majority. I fear that if the General Authority takes this step, I shall have to resign my Order and flee. I seek your wisdom on this most pressing matter as someone fully independent of our world.

Since you come from another place, I'm sure you do not know what The Regling is. I'll explain. Our people mature, owing to our longevity, at a much later age than your people do. As you know we are all born as gels, neither 'male' nor 'female'. We have, before The Regling, aspects of both genders. However, in our hair patterns, there are clues as to how we might mature after balding. We enjoy a very extended youth, carefree but also sexual. After about 30 of your years, changes occur in our bodies which make us sexually mature at which time our sexual activity and energy is redirected. It's rather like your puberty in reverse, but a bit more dramatic. Specifically we very suddenly grow a new covering to our sexual organ and our hair patterns generally fix. Either a Phanth or a Virse grows during The Regling and we begin our lives anew as P or V.

The Regling is the formal rite of passage for our people that puts meaning and discipline around a physical change. It is an educational, spiritual and communal activity. For thousands of years, The Regling has taken place in one of our many Circs on Arn. I am from the Order of the Janesek Circ which has a tradition of carrying out the rite of The Regling going back to the Fecund Migration. The people of Peylyx return to this system from all over the sector to enroll their balding youth in The Regling at the Second Janesek Circ here on Arn. It is something of which we are very proud. We have responded to the desire to keep the primary tradition as it was handed to us. In general, parents bring their youth to a Circ about 30 days out when they started to bald and then bid them farewell, leaving them under our care for The Regling for about six weeks. As we are very proud of our hair patterns you can imagine that we don't necessarily want to be caught in the public bald. At the first sign, we get to a nearby Circ. For some young gels, balding without guidance can be a traumatic experience.

Gels then taken in by members of the Regling Order. I am such a Master. But the design and purpose of the Circ has not really changed. What happens is basically pretty simple.  As your hair starts to regrow about four days after full balding you can pretty accurately guess if you will be P or V, and your organs begin to grow too. Of course as Masters, we are rather expert at making this determination, although mistakes have been made. You will go to the Left or Right in the Circ and formally take your role.

It should be noted of course that not all Peylyxian gels bald in Circ. Surely you have seen our people on other worlds manage such affairs in private. There is also Wild Regling. I have even heard that some outside of the system have performed variants of the rite in the hands of saecular masters and even non-Peylyxians. Of course we frown on such things, orthodox as we are, but we are liberal enough to recognize no soul is lost or deserving of any less respect for such choices.

I'm sorry to take so long to explain but these are, as you can imagine, very difficult and emotional matters. I'm trying to be brief and I am attempting as best I can not to rely on arguments you might call appeals to religious authority. There are people who reject Regling, or perhaps I should say that they think the formality is unnecessary. These people accomplish 'Regling' outside of the Circs. That's basically called Wild Regling. That's bad enough, but then there are people who reject Regling entirely, or fake it. They're called all sorts of names, but the generally accepted term is Fry. You see they basically want to be, well.. they reject their new adult pattern. They play the child's game.

As you can imagine, not really knowing how you are going to mature and what role you will play for the rest of your life can be traumatic and understandably so. But it is a feature of youth, so acceptance of The Regling is a sign of maturity. You will now be P or V and you must accept that. You can now take a mate, have gels of your own, etc. Maybe I'm just being emotional because I am V, I apologize. But so long as you are a gel or even balding, there are sexual games you may play that are fully stimulating. It's all very much accepted until The Regling and then you must accept your role which is to be more modest and leave such sex games aside. That was the way I learned in my Circ, and this is the generally accepted matter of social order for Peylyxians on Arn all of the inner planets.

Now the power of law of Arn is held by the General Authority and it is part of the deep Covenant that the rites of the Circs would be preserved from outside interference. Obviously the Circs have their conventions and the Janesek, as one of the major Circs is quite influential. We represent in most Arnian opinion the most respected and traditions of the Circs. Legal power is not wielded by the Janesek Order but we have considerable social influence.As you can imagine, since we do The Regling in Circs among many other things, like Unction when we die or Bartan when we are born, these traditions mean a great deal. Of course one can do all of those things Wild, but it's not quite as respectable. I mean what's the point of having a Wild Unction, that's just depressing. Anyway what has been going on for the past 230 years or so is that Fry have been gaining power and have been lobbying Ps and Vs to change the attitude of the General Authority towards intervention in Circ affairs. For the most part they have been successful, especially in the outer planets of the Peylyx System (Car and Mezsia). We all have come a very long way in understanding and respecting the choice of the Fry, so long as they keep to themselves. I mean I suppose I'm a little bit prejudiced but isn't everyone? Surely you have similar social issues among your people.

But I digress. At Regling, the Masters sort the balding and bald gels into their respective sides. Potential Ps go Left at The Regling and potential Vs go Right. During this time, you experience your first feelings of adulthood with other Ps as becoming P and Vs as becoming V as the gel sexual energy subsides. You attend to each other's hair patterns as they emerge and you grow together and give each other support. We believe that as the physical gel subsides, there emerges the spiritual. The adult Pylyxian is a vessal of that thing - which is unspoken of directly. You might think of it as something akin to what you call a soul. The Regling is an invocation of that spirit.

During the rite you only look at your former youth friends across the brook for the six weeks of The Regling. I forgot to mention there is generally a body of water that separates the potential Ps from potential Vs during the rite. I'm sure you've heard all the stories about how we Peylyxians are hydrophobic - but that is a myth. Water to us is sacred, as we require water to transmit our genetic material in adult mating. No balding gel, bald gel or potential would dare cross into the water during The Regling. It is simply not done. I share these secrets with you because I need you to understand how important this matter is to us. The point is that after The Regling finally you emerge with all your doubts of youth removed because you've the adult hair, you have Phanth or Virse. You accept your pattern. You have chanted your proverbs and made your vow, you now don you modesty and return to life as full P or V.

Now obviously this differs from Circ to Circ depending on the Regling Order but the basics are the same. But now the Fry want the General Authority to declare them P or V. Now I am V of the Janesek Circ and my pattern is of a willing and accommodating sort but I cannot accept that the General Authority has any right to make such declarations. Fry reject The Regling, that's what makes them Fry, but they are demanding full equality with P or V.  We are all Arn, I understand that. We all, in order to be civilized, submit to the General Authority. But the G.A. has never dictated the rites of the Circs and it is part of the deep Covanant that it will not interfere. The Fry and their advocates make the point that Wild Regling makes Ps and Vs of Arn who don't have an Order and don't accept traditional rites. But the Wild don't call themselves P or V, they are just Arn.  Simply because you grow Phanth doesn't make you P. Not that they respect themselves.

It probably sounds a bit disrespectful of me, but I am, after all, a V Master. I have taken an oath to remain true to the letter and spirit of the rites of the Janesek Circ. I have a duty to my Circ and to my Order. Nevertheless, we do not seek to pass judgment on those who pass into adulthood without the benefit of The Regling. Nor do we condone any of the horrible acts which have been perpetrated against those who do not declare. No one would suggest that it is absolutely necessary and many find their pattern on their own. But we have political opposition that causes us to be defensive out of necessity.

So a bit of history. About 400 years ago on Fesra, the third moon of Car, a P Master by the name of Stanwyl famously took in his own gel, Merk who was balding. He loved his own gel so much that when he balded he sent him Left so that he could personally oversee his Regling, even though Merk was growing Virse. Merk objected but Stanwyl insisted. This traumatized Merk and his entire cohort. There was a revolt and Merk killed Stanwyl and all of the masters of the Circ on Fesra and burned it to the ground. The gels retreated to the forest of Frysson and reverted to their childhood. It is a tragic story in our history. But the lesson of Merk and the gels of Frysson has been interpreted many different ways. Obviously it resonates as a story of sexual liberation and it is from the forest of and river of Frysson that the Frys take their name. But Fry is now the generally accepted term for anyone not satisfied with their role and pattern. Perhaps you've also heard the term 'merker' which is pejorative, meaning a psychopathic misfit. You've probably also heard the term 'splasher'. And while it is certainly true that some Frys will get into the water with anyone, there are Ps and Vs who abuse themselves as well.

I'm sure that you, as a member of the Culture may find our sexual traditions and rites of passage quaint. Arn is, after all, just a small world that is poor in water resources and we Peylxians have only been space faring for one millenium. But it is our primary world, the world of our origin and the seat of our accumulated wisdom. We understand that you possess technology that allows you to change your gender at will. I know our ways about water seem strange to you in that we could manufacture unlimited supplies but we remain parched.  But we find compelling reasons to follow our original genetic disposition and not to meddle with the way it makes our species unique. We find strength in our discipline and in our traditions.

The Fry have been content to live on Fesra and are fairly influential in various places on Car. For some time we have lived at a comfortable distance. And surely they have political allies among the P and V. While obviously the majority of Peylyxians pray very fervently that no-one is made to suffer by being sent in the wrong direction at Circ Regling, some simply don't believe our Regling is meaningful any longer. We do suffer from a crisis of confidence over this issue. But now there are factions gaining strength in the General Authority who want to place a saecular inspector in every Circ. They also are establishing rights for gels who do not wish to be submitted to The Regling - that they can go Wild even after the rite has begun. Leaving the rite as it is in progress is almost unthinkable, though not unheard of. The point is that the General Authority has determined to usurp our authority and to rewrite The Regling according to its purposes 'in light of the greater good'.

What is still astonishing is that on Fesra there is support growing for a new Circ that will initiate gels into F. Can you imagine? Who knows? They already may have done it. As much as that appalls me, it is for my own Order and Circ I must concern myself. It is a violation of the Deep Covenant to have the General Authority interfere with the rite of The Regling. And while some orders don't seem to mind the Fryssonian movement, mine strenuously resists. Yet we may, if these steps are taken, as the General Authority suggests they will, have to disband, or fight. So there is a very long and deep history behind the recent antagonism between the Frys and we of the orthodox Orders, and now with the impending actions of the General Authority it has reached a crisis point.

I have spoken about these matters at length in coordination with other Masters and Grandees of the Order and I have been appointed by them as the official emissary of First Among Equals Grandee Hartke Rax to your people.  Grandee Rax has ordered me to secure outside counsel and open communications so this missive explaining our situation. There are also legal scholars of the Order who specialize in interpretations of the Deep Covenant. I lack those particular skills, but I do understand that a movement such as the Fryssonians have mounted can very well modify the Covenant or sway the General Authority to interpret it to their advantage.

So in summary, our ability to control and direct The Regling is under threat. The desire of the Fryssonian movement to exert control over our affairs through the General Authority is clear, and while they have their own worlds of the outer planets to do with as they please, they have chosen to bring their complaint to Arn, Gaia, Unicum and Destra. The Peylyxian System is on the verge of war with itself, a quiet war that will sublty and surely destroy one of its great traditions under the guise of 'equality'.

I seek your opinion in this matter. I will try to make sense of any confusion I may have presented in this brief history.

Sincerely yours,

Peylyx-Arnsa Parlek Reglimus Orsimer dam Ckas
V Master, Ordus Janesek (Circ 2)

1989, Another Sucka

I don't think I can handle
she go channel to channel
cold looking for that hero
she watch channel zero.

--Public Enemy

(from the accumulating memoir)

This morning I'm finally on the beach and spending some time over at TCoates blog at The Atlantic. The subjects, rethinking the rethinking on torture and interrogation, and liberal interventionism. I'm about done with that for the morning but as I was writing, Public Enemy's 'Fight the Power' came on my iTunes and it reminded me of Coates' defenses of hiphop as an intro to critical thinking. I liked the song, but I loved the instrumental version called Powersaxx which featured Branford Marsalis.

I used to, reverse the lyrics back in the day when I was working at Xerox. Instead of 'Fight the powers that be', my angle on black power was 'Be the power that fights'. I recognize how much that put me out of synch with several elements then as now. Not to say I haven't become more sophisticated but there is that basic consistency. Reflecting on the time brings to mind the position I was in at the time which was controversial. I was a Corporate Negro, or so I was percieved by my brethren from the hood. As a member in good standing with the Talented Tenth, I was to be in place in Corporate America as a conduit of guilt money back to the hood. It was OK that I was supposedly an Affirmative Action hire, so long as I could expand community relations and get the boys in the hood more jobs.

What I did was not so much of that at all. Instead I went both upscale and downscale. On the upscale side I assisted in traditional fundraising among my peers for money to be sent to the United Negro College Fund. On the downscale side I participated in various afterschool tutoring programs.

It was during one of those tutoring programs, a night school class at Inglewood High School, that I ran into my own stumbling block. (Expand on this). Long story short, I simply didn't have the patience to be an instructor, and I still don't. But even more daunting was my feeling of complete and total frustration and futility. We were teaching CP/M or DOS. We were suggesting that the future of those kids would be in technology that was already past. There was a reason the kids were struggling and not making much progress - these technologies were stupid and would soon be obviated. But like many good intentioned people, we had already sold the educational fetish of 'computer literacy'. Still we were twisting fingers and arms around stonecutting tools for the sake of a trade that would shortly be obviated by the printing press. What were the chances I could get a decent computer with Unix or a PASCAL language compiler in front of these kids? Zero. I couldn't stand it. I walked.

It never was the machine, and today it still isn't. It's the writing. It is the storytelling and the framework of communicating something logical which is the essence of computering. The science of course is about methodological approaches to determining was is computable, given a Turing / Von Nuemann universe, and some rigor about the most efficient ways of processing what is computable. Already I'm quite surpassed by the toolsets of realtime gaming, and all those kids surely have cellphones more capacious than the entire network of fileservers at the Xerox El Segundo campus. I myself ran the largest file service on the non-research network at Xerox and that was about 900MB in 1989. Technologies change, what people need to know doesn't. But that's something you don't get to know until you have a bit of it.Knowledge and the wherewithal to see what is lacking in the lives of your fellows.

I came to understand some of the foolishness ascribed to the promise of the Talented Tenth. And I understood finally how limited our blessing was. I mean we represented something real to those on the outside. The Affirmative Action debates were all about proportional representation and our proximity to the hood was considered something of an affront. We were, in the role monkey circus, to represent the best and brightest but also to bear the shame that we were sellouts unable to truly serve our brothers. So an engineer working in a 95% white organization was supposed to both politick for Affirmative Action that would turn that same organization 12% black and represent the attitude of Fight the Power as well.

You might be able to see the conundrum here. But I already knew and acknowledged that there was not only one Black Community. After all, I was a Corporate Negro, somewhat elevated over the College Boy, who in turn was supposedly superior than the Homeboy from around the way. But we all listed to Public Enemy and watched Spike Lee movies. Still, I didn't have much to reconcile. I liked being an arrogant me. It suited my purposes to have quite enough black people around so that I wouldn't have to bear the burden of representation. I didn't want to be a role monkey, but I did want my place in the hierarchy. See it mattered if you went to a junior college or a four year. It mattered if you went to a state university or one of the elite schools, and it mattered in the black world if you pledged one fraternity or another, whether you listened to Wynton Marsalis or Newcleus.

I liked Public Enemy. It completely changed my mind about hiphop, as did Digital Underground some time later. But what I liked most about it was that it was so super bold. When Ed Lover and Dre finally got on Yo, I was very happy. More room for a brother like me. I could see the social capital of black people increasing and knew that it was not solely mediated through what I used to call the Coretta Scott King Seal of Approval. In 1986 I ranted, riffing off the character from 'A Soldier's Story' about the modern-day role monkey circus ringmasters: Sergeant Waters Strikes Again

Isn't it kind of frightening that the neighborhoods craved for so long by ghetto dwellers aren't that great. Leaves you hollow doesn't it? So what does preparing for professionalism really prepare one for? It seems to me that if there were a such thing as a fulfilling career, one would wish they could do it constantly. Plus they wouldn't always expect everybody back home to appreciate it. But how many professionals will tell you today that they honestly love their work? The black engineers and scientists will come; they will be naturals like Guy Bluford was.

E.A. Bouchet: PhD Physics, Yale University 1886.

Where are the black artists, musicians and writers coming from? Who is giving today's black youth that kind of motivation? What about historians, soldiers, bartenders, carpenters, farmers, architects, chemists and candy store owners? Who ever told a black child that he could grow up to be a great grocery store owner? It seems to me that we have got far too many narrow minded ideas about what is good for black people. Why must our 'innate responsibility' make us put a Jesus Blessed NAACP kissed by Coretta King stamp of approval on everything?

Around that time, for what it's worth, I came upon an idea that has stuck with me, and it was an aversion to the term 'senseless violence'. Being deeply immersed in black culture having stayed in my own city all this time and close to many black worlds in schools, on the party scene, at churches, at work, and with community organizations, I was readily aware of all the distinctions and similarities blacks made among themselves in Los Angeles, both sensible and ridiculous. It was a rich tapestry of nuance for me. Even on the brutal end of gangbanging, a dynamic that may probably never be properly abstracted, although I very much respect Jervey Tervalon's "Understand This"  I had some cultural literacy that let me know there was sense to be made of a great deal of violence. Blacks, as full human beings, had life or death gripes and they carried out justice of their own sort which is no different from any other in the streets of the world. The fact that the System hadn't saved us was evidence that it couldn't - there was no other justice and in some places I'm sure there is none. I understood that black people were living and dying by black swords for black reasons. Not that these reasons were inexplicable or that there was some mysterious 'black thing' that nobody else could understand, but that there was ever a lack of willpower in any white liberal effort to understand, or black nationalist desire to explain. It wasn't senseless, there was just no money to be made in making perfect sense of it. Everybody had their story and they were sticking to it.

So I recognized it was the case all over. My black world was never impenetrable, you just hadn't read the right book or been invited to the right party. And another song comes to mind as I think about it. The World is a Ghetto. And that idea stays with me as well. I'm still living in my own little nasty world, as Vanity would say. I'm perfectly comfortable in it and love sharing it as a writer. But I look back at the dissonance between fighting the powers that be and being the powers that fight, these imperatives thrust at me and my reaction to them and I recognize the power of being an honest individual. As Lionel Ritchie says, 'Everybody finds their own road, somehow, some way, some day.'

So back in 1989 as I was going through the third or fourth edition of 'The End of My Blackness' my favorite Public Enemy song became "I Can't Do Nothing For You Man".

Madoff With Your Money

Fifty Billion!

According to Niall Ferguson, who was born in '64, American dollars are worth 1/7 of what they were then. By a quick calculation, Pops who raised us in a 30k house with a mortgage payment of $177 a month... OK I am still moving my family forward. That's good news. I have to make these kinds of adjustments in my thinking when I try to understand what these billions are. It's hard to get my head around the idea that somebody has been bilked out of that much money.

See when I was a kid, I used to have New York envy. How come LA didn't have big skyscrapers like NY? Were we too poor a city? I mean it was bad enough that the Rams lost to the Cowboys every damned year, but short buildings too? So during the days of the Bunker Hill development and especially when the First Interstate and much later the Library Tower I paid attention to how much. A seventy story high rise skyscraper costs about 120 million bucks and takes two years to build. That's a good benchmark.

So basically this financial terrorist stole something on the order of Chicago, and LA, and Philadelphia's combined skylines. And then some.

Levitt on Bloomberg said yesterday that the SEC is going to get overhauled. The clamps are coming down like cement elephants. I just love it. I'm really thinking about exactly how the big accounting firms are going to beef up their auditing departments. I had a brief discussion with one of my peers about how auditors actually operate. I cannot recall them plugging into computer systems. Most auditing is done by hand. So naturally I'm thinking about e-discovery and forensic computing as part and parcel of a new regime of auditing on a go foreward basis. How do you serve the equivalent of an electronic subpoena? Because there have to be footprints. You cannot move that kind of money without leaving some tracks.

A new day is coming, and for a time the suckers market will be safer. I'm looking forward to escalating transparency.

Basra vs Detroit

On the Dennis Miller Show last evening, one of our generals on his third tour reported from the front. His AO is the south east of Iraq, with eight provinces. He mentioned that the Iraqi Army are leading operations in that part of the country and that the Coalition is in a supporting role. He says that the murder rate in Basra, a city of 1.6 million is now lower than that of Detroit.

Smells like victory.

The Rothschilds Hedge Against The Confederacy

I'm into Niall Ferguson's history of the world of finance. He tells an interesting story that I'd like to relate here tangential to our stories about Jews and usury.

You really can't talk about the history of persecution of Jews without eventually coming to the old prejudice that they are the 'international bankers' that control various aspects of world affairs. There's a little truth in that, but there is no particularly Jewish way to control the world, but there is the bond market. Masters of the bond markets are big balling shot callers, and back in 1800s, the Rothschilds were such giants. It turns out that there are still a bunch of them around today.

Anyway, it turns out that one of the most well known uses for government issued bonds is for the raising of capital during wartime. As Ferguson tells the story, the Rothschilds who had kicked butt by funding the Brits in their defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo were rather fat and happy after that time - having mastered enough of the market to beat out the Barings, their competitors. So while war was profitable for them around that time, when 1860s rolled around and various financiers were placing bets on the American North or South, the Rothschilds famously stayed out of the game.

Well somebody saw that as a big opportunity and decided to help the South issue and sell bonds. These particular bonds were collateralized by cotton. So over the course of the war, as cotton supplies dried up a bit, they became more valuable because the price was set at the prewar amount. If I remember correctly it was 6pence a bushel and went up as high as 26pence. So you can imagine the value of a bond going up when you could redeem it for cotton at about one fourth the going rate.

Well it turned out that long before the war was completely over, the South lost a battle at New Orleans. Then suddenly the price of these bonds collapsed and so did the economy of the South. Why? Because now that the Union Army controlled the Mississippi River, they weren't likely to let any cotton get through. That spelled economic disaster for the South, long before the shooting was over.

The Rothschilds called it. Speculators lost all their money, and Confederate dollars, even though they were based on the Gold Standard, long before the US had a Federal Reserve, soon became worthless. The rest, as they say, is history. But now you have some insight as to how some money played (or didn't play as in the case of the Rothschilds) into the determination of great events.

Burn Palin's Church!

Right about now, there is essentially no excuse for the sort of vile commentary on Sarah Palin. For being who she is, she has suffered some of the most lowbrow sniping I've ever witnessed in a political campaign. I'm not going to get all outraged about it. Nobody died. But somebody did try to kill. For all the talk about the 'evil racists' in the Republican Party, nobody ever threatened Barack Obama's Trinity Church. But in fact an arsonist did try to burn Sarah Palin's church.

Accelerants were found in multiple locations on the outside of Wasilla Bible Church, including around entrances and exits, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Nick Starcevic, an ATF spokesman in Seattle, said it was not yet clear what type of accelerant was used. Samples have been taken to the state crime lab in Anchorage for testing. It could be up to two weeks before investigators find out the results, said James Steele, who heads the Central Mat-Su Fire Department.

Investigators typically take scrapings from where they think the fire was lit, said Assistant State Fire Marshal Kelly Nicolello. In this case, that could include parts of the outside of the building and the soil underneath.

The Friday night blaze caused an estimated $1 million in damage to the 212-year-old building and displaced one of the largest congregations in the Valley. The 35,314-square-foot building is valued between $4 million and $5 million, according to the Matanuska-Susitna Borough.

Five church members were inside when the blaze started but they were able to get out safely after the fire alarm sounded.

Church burnings?  Has it has come to this?

Bryan Hirota's Model Minorities

(from the archives, circa 1994)

FAQ 22 - Model Minorities

---

   

Bryan Hirota

   

Statistics and figures have been floating around this     group, that when taken out of their proper context can be     misleading. The asian model minority myth is nothing more     than a myth. The following comes from the book titled     "Asian Americans - an Interpretive History" by     Sucheng Chan - and I highly recommed the book to anyone who     wants to begin any kind of study on the asian american     experience. It even covers Asian Indians [although not in an     extremely indepth manner]
   

   

Ten years later the U.S. census Bureau released data that     further under- dergirded the model minority image. According     to these figures, Chinese and Japanese Americans had outpaced     whites even in terms of median family income by 1970.     Japanese American median Family income was almost $3,000     higher, and Chinese American $1,000 higher than the U.S.     median family income. But the federal government's study     failed to place these figures alongside other relevant     information, such as the fact that 60 percent of the Japanese     American and Chinese American families (compared to only 51     percent among the U.S. population as a whole), more than one     person worked, which helps to account for their higher family     income. If per capita income, rather than family income, had     been used as the measure, then the public would have learned     that Chinese Americans (thought not Japanese Americans) were     making considerably less than the national average. Moreover,     if Hispanic groups, which earned much lower than other     whites, had been removed from the aggregate white figures,     then Asian Americans would not have outranked whites.

   

Social scientists who analyzed the 1970 cenus data reached     various conclusions depending on whether they used statistics     for the nation as a whole or for states with particularly     high Asian concentrations, whether they separated the     American-born from the foreign-born, and whether they     distinguished between males and females. Studies based on     national data, such as those by Barry Chiswick and by Charles     Hirschman and Morrison Wong, invariably showed that     American-born Chinese and Japanese men had a higher income     than white men, but as Robert Jiobu, Amado Cabezas, and David     Moulton have documented, such was not the case in California,     where 58 percent and 45 percent, respectively, of the     Japanese and Chinese in the contiguous states resided in     1970. In that state, American-born Chinese and Japanese men     indeed had significantly more years of school than     non-Hispanic whites, but their median incomes were no higher     than that of the latter, because their returns to education -     that is, the additional income derived from increased years     of schooling - were lower than those for whites. According to     Robert Jiobu's 1976 study of American-born men in California     in 1970, for each additional year of education, whites earned     $522 more, compared to $438 for Japanse, $320 for Chinese,     $340 for Mexican Americans, and $284 for blacks. Thus, the     Asian-white parity in income was made possible mainly by the     Asian American's higher level of education.

   

Other criticisms have been raised against the model     minority thesis, mainly by researchers associated with the     Asian American community organization, ASIAN, Inc., in San     Francisco. First, more than half of the Asian/Pacific     American population in the United States lives in only five     metropolitan areas - Honolulu, San Francisco, Los Angeles,     Chicago, and New York - and of these, more than nine-tenths     are found in urban centers. These cities are not only     high-income areas but also high-cost-of-living-areas. Thus,     while Asian Americans (and others) living there may earn     more, they also have to spend more.

   

Second, in areas with the highest density of Asian     Americans, the percentage of Asian Americans in low-status,     low-income occupations - that is, service workers, laborers,     farm laborers, and private household workers - is     considerably higher than among whites. In 1970, for example,     fully 25 percent of all gainfully employed Chinese men in the     United States were cooks, waiters, busboys, dishwashers, and     janitors. Such a figure gives an impression of Asian American     economic well-being that is quite different from based on     consideration of median income alone.

   

Third, a detailed study of the San Francisco-Oakland     Stanard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA) showed that     Asian Americans were unevenly dis- tributed in the economy.     Professionals clustered in accounting, dentistry, nursing,     health technology, and engineering and were underrepresented     in law, teaching, administration, social services, and the     higher levels of the medical professions. Managers were more     likely to be self-employed than employees of large firms.     Salespersons were retail clerks but seldom brokers or     insurance agaents. Clerical workers were mostly file clerks,     typists, or office machine operators, and not secretaries or     receptionists. Few Asian Americans held jobs in the     heavy-machine, electrical, paper, chemical, or construction     industries. Most female operatives were garment workers. In     short, Asian Americans were concentrated in occupations that     did not pay as well as other jobs in the same industries.

   

Fourth, the low unemployment rate of Asian Americans-     another measure often used to depict their economic success -     merely camouflages high underemployment. Wary of being of     welfare, many Asian American workers appparently would rather     hold low-paid, part-time, or seasonal jobs than receive     public assistance.

   

Fifth, the high labor force participation rate of Asian     American women in both 1970 and 1908 - supposedly a sign of     their ready acceptance by employers - is in reality a     reflection of the fact that more Asian American women are     compelled to work because the male members of their families     earn such low wages. It is true that working Asian American     women earn a higher median income than do white working     women, but they also have superior educational qualifications     and live in localities with higher wages. Furthermore,     compared to white women, a larger percentage of them work     full time, which helps toodrive their median income upward.     But despite their high educational level, they receive lower     returns toheir education than do white women, while the     disprity between their returns and those of white men is even     greater. In other words, they are not receiving earnings that     are commensurate with their years of schooling. Sixth, with     regard to the educational attainment of Asian Americans, the     sizable influx of highly educated professionals after 1965     has inflated the average years of schooling complted. Critics     of the model minority stereotype point out that the most     important consideration should not be edcational level, but     returns to education, which more clearly reveal the existence     of discrimination. For Asian Americans, even in 1980, these     returns were still not on par with those received by white     men.

   

The entry of professionals has had another effect. Since     some of them have not been able to find professional jobs,     they have bought small businesses, thereby increasing the     number of "managers" in the Asian American -     particularily the Korean American - population. However, many     of them operate only small mom-and-pop stores with no paid     employees and very low gross earnings. Unlike journalists who     tout Korean entrepreneurship as a sign of success, scholars     who have examined the situation argue that the kind of     buisiness Korean immigrants engage in is, in fact, a     disguised form of cheap labor: owners of small businesses run     a high risk of failure and work long hours. Many of them     could not stay afloat were it not for the unpaid labor they     extract from their spouses, children, and other relatives.     Nonetheless, small business currently is an important channel     of upward mobility open to nonwhite immigrants who face     obstacles in obtaining well-paying and secure jobs.

   

Finally, other groups of Asian Americans do not share the     improved economic standing achieved by Japanese and Chinese     Americans. In 1970 in the San Francisco-Oakland SMSA,     according to Amado Cabezas and his associates, Filipinos     (lumping together foreign- and American-born) earned only 58     percent of what white men earned, while Filipinas earned only     38 percent. The respective figures in the Los Angeles-Long     Beach SMSA were 62 percent and 47 percent. In 1980, in the     San Francisco-Oakland SMSA American-born Filipino men made 64     percent of what American-born white males made, whilte     American-born Filipinas made 45 percent. In the Los     Angeles-Long Beach SMSA, the comparable figures were 72     percent and 48 percent. Foreign-born men fared about the same     as their American-born peers, while the foreign-born women     did slightly better than their American- born sisters. A     larger proportion of American-born Filipinos hold working-     class jobs than do Chinese and Japanese Americans. They also     seem to receive no discernible returns to schooling.

Our Bailout, Not Yours

Noting the tiny irony in passing that the thing that makes AIG worth bailing out is that it is too connected all over the world. But in fact we might not actually like those connections if we looked closely.

The Thomas More Law Center is suing Paulson and the Treasury.

The basis of the lawsuit is that AIG intentionally promotes Shariah-compliant businesses and insurance products, which by necessity must comply with the 1200 year old body of Islamic cannon law based on the Quran, which demands the conversion, subjugation, or destruction of the infidel West, including the United States.  To help achieve these objectives and with the aid of federal tax dollars, AIG employs a three-person Shariah Advisory Board, with members from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Pakistan.  According to AIG, the role of its Shariah authority "is to review [its] operations, supervise its development of Islamic products, and determine Shariah compliance of these products and [its] investments." 

Hybrid Profitability

Last week listening to one of Bloomberg's guest experts on the auto industry I learned something new I didn't know. Hybrid automobiles are not profitable. This came as something of a shock. Nobody makes money on those things, not even Toyota, except perhaps when they license their Hybrid Synergy technology to other manufacturers.

Conservatives like to make a lot of noise about Congress dictating what automakers have to make in reaction to the possibilities that the Democrats may cram CAFE down the Big Three's throats, but there are subtleties here. One of them is that basic fact - the very fact that they're essentially broke means they want to build fewer of those things. The break-even point for GM is 12 million vehicles. No real profit until 13.5-14million. It's going to be a hard slog.

Tied to this, does anybody know which side of the fence bankruptcy judges are politically? Are the courts even staffed to handle the kind of crap they would deal with - or is everybody in the mortgage business retraining to be expert witnesses in bankruptcy court?

Bloggingheads - Coates & McWhorter

I got to get on one of those. There are some very cool roundtables which have yet to be. Stand by, I have uploaded my response and angle on that discussion. As soon as Google video has a good link, I'll be all over it.

My angle is basically this. I think for the reasonable goal of a personal rapproachment, both heads glossed over the fact that there has to be a real reconciliation between what's actually utilitarian about political hiphop and the worldview it substantiates in its consumers. When it come to what's real, some rap is correct and some is just dead wrong.

Actually, I love 'Dead Wrong' as a rap song, but because I expect nothing from political hiphop, it's all good. I can, to a fair extent indulge in those things that hiphop is very good at, which is not often socially uplifting. Then again, I like Jason Statham.

Masculinity Indices

I friended somebody the other day on the basic principle that you can't have too many friends. Since anybody's capacity is limited by Dunbar's Number, I don't mind adding a bunch, except perhaps over at Orkut which has the problem of a language and real distance barrier. I mean, if I can't sit down and eat with you, what's the point of being an irregularly communicating associate? I hate losing people anyway so I'm going to friend even the vaguely familiar folks - the woman who gave me PT in 1998, the guy who opened up my bank account in NYC in 1992. My rolodex is full of such folks.

So he accepted and sent me an odd note that I might not want to be associated with someone of his repute. I had no idea what he was talking about until a few hours later when I checked out his profile which shows him living in Scandinavia married to another dude. Ohh, so that's what he meant. No biggie, really. It turns out that he's something of an activist, so we probably have some interesting disagreements.

Of course I had no idea he was gay. I'm notoriously bad at figuring out who's sexy and in which way and who's not at work. I have such incredibly difficult standards for myself, that I don't pay any attention to what other people say they see. At work I just work. Then again there's no telling what kind of gossip I am excluded from by dint of me being who I appear to be. Certainly I signal that I don't care anyway.

Be all that as it may, it gave me a chuckle to see Finland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden at the bottom of the masculinity chart.

Masculinity versus its opposite, femininity refers to the distribution of roles between the genders which is another fundamental issue for any society to which a range of solutions are found. The IBM studies revealed that (a) women’s values differ less among societies than men’s values; (b) men’s values from one country to another contain a dimension from very assertive and competitive and maximally different from women’s values on the one side, to modest and caring and similar to women’s values on the other. The assertive pole has been called ‘masculine’ and the modest, caring pole ‘feminine’.

For example, Germany has a masculine culture with a 66 on the scale of Hofstede (Netherlands 14). Masculine traits include assertiveness, materialism/material success, self-centeredness, power, strength, and individual achievements. The United States scored a 62 on Hofstede’s scale. So these two cultures share, in terms of masculinity, similar values.

Obviously these are cultural means. It's impossible for me to make any judgment on my new friend based on these criteria. I simply remember him as a top sales dog from back in the day. But I do hear a lot of comparison between the US and Scandinavia when it comes to wonkery about gay marriage. This is an interesting tidbit to squirrel away.

I very much like the idea of cross cultural psychology aside from this particular metric. That is because I started out many years ago as a multiculturalist. Remember that real-time high quality language translation is going to be available within a decade or two, and that will have profound implications around the world. As I move forward in my understanding of Western philosophy and traditions, the power relationships between us and them - well, there's a lot of 'splaining to do, and I am very curious to understand the particular choices implied in global social mobility. I wouldn't suggest that America be quite an empire - I'm not convinced we have a strong enough core in our leadership. Clearly my friend had the wherewithal to find his spot on the globe where he's evidently not restrained - where will a global bourgeois choose to live in a profoundly networked planet?

I believe that American psychoanalysis is something of a scam - that if people could find, as Ernst Bloch said,...

Humankind still lives in prehistory everywhere, indeed everything awaits the creation of the world as a genuine one... if human beings have grasped themselves, and what is theirs, without depersonalization and alienation, founded in real democracy, then something comes into being in the world that shines into everyone's childhood and where no one has yet been -- home."

It just may be that your home isn't here, but there, wherever there may be. Obviously I take issue, though I keep the quote, with the political idea of reinventing mankind and the assumption of a futuristic evolution of the human spirit. People are who they are and psychology is just so much grease for social friction, except that it mills the rough edges off of people and turns them into ball bearings, or so I believe. Still, there is a time and a place for everything, and I believe that people deserve sanctuary if they can be self-sustaining. There's plenty of room on the planet.

I've taken the tangent off masculinity, but that's how I situate the entire matter of cross cultural psychology. Know your culture and its history, assimilate or migrate - because change is very slow.

Power Distance Indices

For the brain trust. Coming out of Gladwell's brilliant new book Outliers is my introduction to Hofstede. There's a lefty spin to this old web exposition of Hofstede's metrics.

Hofstede’s Power distance Index measures the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions (like the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally. This represents inequality (more versus less), but defined from below, not from above. It suggests that a society’s level of inequality is endorsed by the followers as much as by the leaders.

For example, Germany has a 35 on the cultural scale of Hofstede’s analysis. Compared to Arab countries where the power distance is very high (80) and Austria where it very low (11), Germany is somewhat in the middle. Germany does not have a large gap between the wealthy and the poor, but have a strong belief in equality for each citizen. Germans have the opportunity to rise in society.

On the other hand, the power distance in the United States scores a 40 on the cultural scale. The United States exhibits a more unequal distribution of wealth compared to German society. As the years go by it seems that the distance between the ‘have’ and ‘have-nots’ grows larger and larger.

Well that's one way to say it. I'm interested to know if that blogger, who may have had a thing or two against WalMart gave up the site after recognizing something more longstanding in the cultures than one might mitigate (and litigate) against politically.

Anyway this is a cool few pages. I'll take the masculinity separately.

Stonewall

Search Me

Friday Fragments

Outliers
I have decided to add Malcolm Gladwell to my T50 project. That is firstly because in his latest book, Outliers, he has encountered some backlash. He's telling people things they don't want to hear, and if it is the stuff I've encountered so far in Outliers, it is very welcome news to my ear. I told my kids about the 10,000 hour rule. Makes perfect sense to me.

Flip Wilson
One of the great showmen of our time. Well, of yesteryear. Flip Wilson was very cool, very funny and not full of himself. Here are some clips.

Three Accelerators
Work is very busy. The Spousal Unit has returned to work and I have to help with the kids more. And I am on an accelerated reading schedule. I finished the very readable 900 page Anathem in four days. I'm in an intellectual groove, so blogging may be light.

Transparency
I have reserved g-transparency.org for the Transparency Project. It looks like I can only redirect one TypePad blog at a time, so I may have to used another blogging technology. I don't like that.

Midnight Club Los Angeles
It's going to be in my top 10 video games of 2008. I'm still hooked, longer than I thought I'd be.

CRA & The Redline Revisited

A cat named Wallison at the American Enterprise Institute makes an extraordinarily astute observation about what has turned out to be a calamity. I'm going to paraphrase him. Basically what he's saying is that the Clinton Administration took the wrong tack in enforcing the CRA. In search of affordable housing and increased home ownership they forced bank regulators to change the very nature of lending instead of subsidizing constituents.

The difference is between the attitude that the system was corrupt because blacks weren't getting what was considered politically appropriate and the attitude that blacks needed help to get up to the standards of the system.

This is a very specific and important distinction to be made and part of the subtlety that is required in a review of the sorts of politics that got us to where we are today.

It is also important to note that Wallison understands that a great deal of attention has not been paid to what is known in the biz as 'rental stock'. Affordable housing starts at ground zero with low rent apartments. Part of the corruption of banking lending standards has to do with the fact that non-owner occupied housing was a big part of subprime lending.

Additionally, when people get tired of mouthing off about greed, they should think twice and three times about what incentives are created by regulations. So long as banks were able to bundle up and sell mortgages that they originated and those bundles were still allowed to have the Fannie & Freddie stamp of approval, why would anybody not?

Once upon a time we had a Savings and Loan industry.

The Non-Threatening Black Man

There is a vocabulary of black politics and culture that probably ought to be re-evaluated. Not just in light of recent events despite the seismic weight the BHO tends to throw around within certain communities of discourse, but as a general rule. History, you know.

For those of you who don't know, it is largely considered to be an insult to be called a 'non-threatening black man'. This begs certain questions. If you think about it, what threat is a black man supposed to pose? This is the question of the day.

Several observations.
1. If people decide to cross the street or clutch their pearls in the anticipation of some face to face encounter with a black man, is that not an acknowledgment of the threat? Isn't that a measure of respect?

OK all I have is that one observation. 'Non-threatening black man' is one of those terms, from my perspective at this moment in time, which presumes the usefulness of social segregation. To pose a threat is to lean towards a zero-sum society, no?

Loser Shit

The Spousal Unit and I talked about loser relatives.

The context was my discovery of a tale of petty, vindictive and straight gank-style ugliness related to the divorce of an associate. It turns out that The Bitch thought she could get away with it, it being her third divorce, she had a bit of a headstart on Homey. The basics of the deal were that he came home one day and found his office cleaned out except for his Jaz drives. The Bitch didn't know what they were. It turned out that they contained all of the records he needed to prove that she was lying her ass off in court. Various other elements of the Bitch Contingent aka The Monster In Law and the Big Dumb Fuck (second husband) were in on the scam. Homey had combined some of his assets with the Bitch and they went into business together, and well, you know how it is with losers. They tend to aggregate around rumors of easy money and various scams and capers. So various elements of the Bitch Contingent had fingerprints on Homey's doorknobs too. He changed the locks and stared them down. The process is still, as they say, still in process, but he's had to rely on the biceps of the bailiff from time to time.

So I heard from the Unit that certain cousins have been evicted from their premises (at they momma's house) and now are on the loose trying to find another sucker relative they can shack up with. Now that they're all out of jail, this would be their first priority. So we're getting phone calls from panicked relatives who want to be accomodating but...

I asked about one of the parties of the trifiling part and was related one that went a little something like this. Cousin Scar has asthma and so asked the Unit to drop him by the local CVS that day. The call came at about 10 am. Scar shows up at the Unit's door (back home in Motor City while she was on vacation there last year) around 11:30. Oh by the way can you loan me 25 bucks so I can pay for it? Sure OK. Lemme borrow your phone. So they go to CVS. On the way.. did you call it in? Oh yeah I called it in, it's all ready. They arrive and the Unit stands in line at the Pharmacy while Scar hangs out elsewhere in the store. She gets to the front and uses her credit card to pay for it. Uh. Oh, you're going to use your credit card? The girl behind the counter suddenly says that the prescription isn't ready as Scar and the Unit stand there. I thought you said you called it in and they said it was ready? The girl says she'll check it again, and it becomes clear that she's just punching keys at random on the terminal. This was supposed to be a cash deal. The Unit has her aha moment and storms out. Uh, can you drop me off back home?

I'm sure there were some other trifling details I forgot, but the entire episode reminded me of loser shit I used to deal with for a very short period in my life. The last loser I dealt with was John Grant, back when I used to work at Fedco circa 1979. John, if you're out there, you know I forgive you because I forgave you the day you wrecked my motorcycle. The first thing he said when he came back was 'Don't hit me but...'. I didn't hit him. So he was forgiven. My bad for letting him beg me into the situation from the gate.

I have never had much patience for that kind of idle nonsense. People who take all day to do one damned thing and can't even do it without begging somebody else to help out. Loser shit. Or as my uncle Fat Phil used to say on the periodic occasions I would hear of such tales in the company of adults.. 'Niggas and flies'. That's a timeless expression.

There's a difference, you know between losers and knuckleheads. Maybe I ought to write up a taxonomy. But losers can be loveable, especially good looking losers or those with the gift of gab. Losers, quite frankly would rather just lay around puffing and passing. 'The job situation' ..puff puff puff.. 'is fucked up.' You rather hope that losers just stay losers. But sometimes a trip to the pokey turns their begging more larcenous. I mean how can you blame Scar for clocking his wife who was sleeping around with his own brother? But that counts for domestic violence in our dainty society where a punch in the nose is not an act of chivalrous virtue but cause for six months in county, at the very least. I should have hit John Grant, but I know better. We live in a passive-aggressive pussified society where personal justice basically does not exist. You want to know why American's love Bernie Goetz and Dirty Harry? That's why. It's not enough to have common sense and a little bit of guts and self-respect, you've got to have access to the legal system. Or know a cop.

When Homey told me his story, he demonstrated how he walked up to the Big Dumb Fuck and stared him down. He was calm as a panda. I know that feeling. The feeling when you know you're right and you know you're going to win and that somebody powerful has got your back. You look at somebody dead in the eyes and you don't have to say a word. You know, I know, and I know you know I know. And then you walk away and let the hammer of truth fall. That's the sweet feeling of inevitable justice, and just the anticipation of it makes you a little bit giddy. But at the same time you're sad, you suck your teeth and say Damn, why don't they just get it? What makes them think that they can get away with this kind of shit?

It's the social contract of course. We all instinctively know when we are secure in truth and when we are in situations where truth and morality are perverted or even inverted. We know the sound in the voice of a friend when he's exasperated and putting up with bullshit from a loser. We know the feel of entering a zone where shit happens. We know the smirk on the face of a knucklehead who gets away with it. We basically understand strength and weakness in human beings, we recognize the presence or absense of justice.

We all, each of us, has a moral obligation to try and be right and try and be strong - especially for the benefit of those who fall from decency into loser status. We owe it to them and to ourselves to deal with them straight. To look them in the eye and let them know that we don't deal with loser shit. You don't even have to say it. They know.

Blagojevich

I'm sure the Jesse Jackson Jr. is one of the 'candidates' for Obama's empty seat whose disposition has come under an immense cloud of suspicion. Hell a full blown FBI investigation. I'm trying to remember where I've heard it said that this seat is a 'black' seat and Jackson had better get it.  Google doesn't serve, but the text is out there somewhere.

Well, like I said. People are starting to recognize politics as politics. Speaking of which, there have been what? three Democrat scandals in a row? Finally Cold Cash Jefferson went down.

Anyway, as of this morning, Jackson is confirmed as 'Candidate Number Five'. He'll be doing the appropriate mambo to insure he doesn't have to swallow his own backwash. On the other hand, offering just one million probably made him the low bidder, in which case I agree with McArdle who says it was probably the low bidder who turned Blagojevich in. Makes sense.

The New Bailout

Obama & The Unpacking of 'Us'

It was about nine months ago since I was seriously considering the cultural effect of Obama on African Americans. It was at that time when the implications of his blackness were front and center - when the very idea of calling him a 'Magic Negro' was considered seriously for the last time. Perhaps it's time to pull that one out again. Here's the context.

Before Barack Obama, everyone I know did not expect to see a president of color in our lifetime. We had grown accustomed to the racial limitations of these United States. We could attend college, get good jobs, send our kids to private schools, purchase large homes, write high literature, become sports superstars, Hollywood icons and CEOs. But president? Get real.

Obama has proved us wrong.

Perhaps he had not been jaded in the way that so many other African Americans have been because of our experience with limitations. Obama grew up differently. Yes, he knew of racist barriers, and, yes, he experienced racism in his life, we learn from his memoir, Dreams of My Father.

But although he embraces African-American identity and culture, he is a biracial person whose black Kenyan father was absent and who was raised by his white American mother and grandparents. He would not have absorbed the parental racial angst like so many of the rest of us, hearing our parents' message, whether subtle or overt, about what white folks wouldn't let us do.

And he is not a descendant of slaves—at least not here in America, though one can't discount the possibility that Obama's Kenyan ancestors were raided perhaps by Arab or other slave traders who once pillaged that region of Africa. If such a history exists and Obama, who grew up with little contact with the Kenyan side of his family, is aware of it, he has not publicly discussed it.

Because of this different kind of background, he would not know that deep well of unspoken African-American pain passed down since slavery days, from generation to generation. Such cultural knowledge is both a strength, and, at times, a source of self-limitation that only compounds the corrosive effect of the limits imposed on us by white society.

And one of the most heartbreaking effects of self-limitation is its atrophying impact on young African Americans. Why try, if I'm only going to face racism? Why venture beyond my cultural comfort zone if they (the big white they) don't want me there?

                                         

If you read that slowly and evaluate where all of the first person pluralities are coming from you will, in my estimation get a good idea of some very profound concepts. Now this article is about a month old but it is in no way dated. While it's true that whenever Republicans or Conservatives challenge the electorate to explain its racial reasoning, they do so in a combative manner and are rebuffed vociferously. But the reality of this sentiment is and should be self-evident.

I think the author, Lynne Duke, puts a very fine point on it and identifies the dimensions of the racial box a lot of Americans are going to have to think their way out of. I don't talk about blackfolks much any longer. I don't think that it is reasonable for me to believe that my black context is shared much today. Sure it works for me, but I'm a minority of one with only 150 friends in Facebook, most of whom are not of African descent. So I'll not talk about blackfolks in such a personal manner very often from here on out. Nevertheless it is an interesting dynamic.

Anyway excusing Obama out of "that deep well of unspoken African-American pain passed down since slavery days, from generation to generation" is precisely the kind of blackness that is very much now in question. How could it possibly apply so aptly to blacks under 30 who were born after Star Wars, who were 8 years old if that, when Nelson Mandela toured the US?

Long story short, Duke is dating a black consciousness and identity that has more going for it for people looking backwards than people looking forwards. All that 'us', ain't us.

Transparency Project

I'm interested in building a publically accessible system which details the budgets and spending of municipalities. I know a great deal about the technology. I've just been contacted by folks who do some of that for a living. It ought to be a blast. I think there would be a great deal of public interest in this. After all, it's trillions now...

I would appreciate any input you all might have for where this might take place now. I will investigate the difficult part which is to find out how to get the kind of software I know can make this possible, licensed and hosted. In the meantime I will putting together models and collecting data in MySQL.

NCMEC: More Government Please

This editorial by Chris Soghoian is very convincing:

While NCMEC was created by Congress, is mostly funded by the US government (and in particular, the Department of Justice), and plays a key role in assisting the FBI in its fight against child pornography, the organization isn't part of the US government. It is, instead, is a non-profit, and thus not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, the Privacy Act, or limited by constitutional protections guaranteeing free speech, due process and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure.

It is therefore, in effect, an arbiter without oversight whose edicts are enforced by 'obstructing justice' sorts of charges. I suspect that the agency was created because of a lack of equivalent talent within the Justice Department, and I would also bet that salaries of the technical experts are way off the GS schedule. Not that they shouldn't be, which speaks to some other matters of reform, but here is a technical facility that has a bit too much clout.

Integrate it.

Don't Give Blood, Amputate

Fortune Magazine delivers the bad news:

More than half of delinquent homeowners whose mortgages were modified earlier this year ended up redefaulting within six months, a top bank regulator said Monday.

Some 53% of borrowers with loans modified in the first three months of 2008 and 51% of those with loans modified in the second quarter could not keep up with payments within six months, according to U.S. Comptroller John Dugan, who spoke at a housing conference.

The report, which will be released in full next week, covers nearly 35 million loans worth a total of $6 trillion -- or 60% of all primary mortgages in the United States.

Subprime is not an insult.

The Social Acceptability of Empty Sexiness

When I started asking questions about American Sex, I realize I should have been more specific. But I was in the middle of a debate on Gay Marriage and it would have been an unnecessary and overburdened diversion. But part of the question that I was begging has a lot to do with the sexiness of sex and the happiness of sex. Which is to say that if sex could generally be seen as unsexy and unhappy then a lot of the libertine attitudes that I am able to perceive with regards to American attitudes about sex would be more clear.

In otherwords, people don't agree with the availability of porn (as distinct from pornography) in popular culture on principle, they agree with it because it's sexy and sexy things tend to make people happy. I think I can make the point clearer when I post this video.

This video is not particularly repulsive to me, nor is it funny. But I don't think anybody would say that this could pass for edifying entertainment precisely because it's not sexy. I have no idea what song or performer is the origin of the big guy's parody / imitation. I simply have removed myself from that part of pop culture. But it is very easy for me to imagine that this is the kind of stuff that very popular, fun and sexy. But it is completely empty and I think the emptiness shows through by substituting in someone who is the opposite of what is considered fun and sexy. I think, in this vein, of people who claim that fat men with hairy backs have 'no right' to go to the beach in speedos. At the same time I'm the one who would claim, that whomever the original performer of this song and dance is, she is stupid. How can I say it's stupid? Because here is another person doing it and it doesn't work.

Similarly, if ordinary or unsexy people were shown doing all of the porn that is in our popular culture, people's defense of it which often turns on the false principle of 'free speech' would be revealed to be hypocritical.

Understand that this is very similar to one of my arguments against Gay Marriage in that people exemplify their defense of it with the most fun and sexy people they can think of with no regard to what's actually going on. It's not about the content, it is about the social acceptability of the role model. Speaking of which, let's look at this from another angle. Tom Cruise.

I happen to have known a kid who could do Donald Duck imitations at summer camp when I was 14, which rather underscores 'the luck of the rich' I was briefly exploring today. But in this case, here you have a very good looking man who can hold your attention saying essentially nothing. Compare this brief video if you would to Kevin Spacey's talent on display in his famous interview at the Actor's Studio. It's probably not fair to compare the two interviews, clearly one is glammed up in black and white as part of publicity for Cruise' upcoming film on Nazi Germany. Nevertheless it demonstrates how well the medium covers the message and how much nothingness is allowed into the popular culture because of the sexiness of participants in empty activity.

The Luck of the Rich

This post is just a footnote to the forthcoming or long lost theory I've been writing. It just so happens that I pulled in two 'plates of shrimp' today. Meme synchronicity. The first comes from Nassim Taleb in this video.

The second comes from Yglesias channelling Gladwell, emphasis mine.

At the end of the day, it’s hard for me not to reach the conclusion that the backlash is, not coincidentally, coming just as Gladwell’s hit upon a politically charged topic and reached conclusions that are discomfiting to the very successful. I’ve seen a few people express the notion that Gladwell’s conclusion — that success is determined largely by luck rather than one’s powers of awesomeness — is somehow too banal to waste one’s time with. I think those people need to open their eyes and pay a bit more attention to the society we’re living in. It’s a society that not only seems to believe that the successful are entitled to unlimited monetary rewards for their trouble, but massive and wide-ranging deference.

Beyond that, it’s a society in which the old-fashioned concept of noblesse oblige has largely gone out the window. The elite feel not only a sense of entitlement, but also a unique sense of arrogance that only an elite that firmly believes itself to be a meritocracy can muster. Gladwell not only shows that this is wrong, but he does an excellent job of showing why it feels right. He explains that success does, in fact, require hard work — lots of it — and that people who think they got where they are through effort rather than good fortune are at least half right. The issue is that in some ways the best luck of all is the luck to be in a position to do hard work at a time when it pays off. Bill Gates, Gladwell explains, put in vast hours programming computers at a very young age at a time when almost nobody in the United States even had the opportunity to put in that kind of time in front of a computer screen.

I cannot find where I was talking about this before. When I do, the links will go here.

Well. All I can say in retrospect is that these three, especially the first are useful:

• America the Illiterate
• Edjumacation
• Ejumacation Part Two

Estemard's Distance

Anathem is a great intellectual entertainment, and as I read it, I am reminded that some time ago, many of my distant peers in the computer science field had presumed that Douglas R. Hofstadter was going to write this book.

In 'The Minds I' DRH introduced us to Prelude Ant Fugue a simplified retelling of a theory of Fermat. It was a delightful kind of Alice in Wonderland dialog. Fans of DRH awaited his vague promise to reintroduce us to his characters in a longer form. It never happened.

Although Anathem has taken a different sort of turn since I began writing out this fragment, I still think of it as something of a Rowlingesque primer on metaphysics. That doesn't change the fact that there are exquisite gems scattered throughout. There is a character Estemard whose spiritual dilemma resembles my own.

--

"You feel the truth but don't know it," Cord repeated. "Your service the other day, in Samble - we could hear your singing. It was very emotional."

Gnel nodded, "That's why Estemard attends -- though he doesn't believe."

"He's not intellectually convinced of your arguments," Cord translated, "but he feels some of what you feel."

Estemard was a monk who had left his cloister and found himself among pagans. He attends their services which are rollicking, and yet he does not convert. Estemard's distance is not born of skepticism of the ultimate truth but of his awareness of a more disciplined understanding. He is presented the essence of the Great Spirit arising out of a poverty of logic. He cannot accept these sacraments on their own terms.

My sympathy for Estemard is complete.

 

Sunday Fragments

Odetta?
Front pages of newspapers, WaPo and NYT sings the praises of a folk singer who apparently tickled the heartstrings of activists during the Civil Rights Movement. I've never, ever heard of her before today.

Cal State
I'm thinking very seriously about how ridiculously expensive it is to live in California, one of the brokest states in the union. We're running a 30B deficit. If it weren't for the relative low cost of California higher ed, I'd be outta here.  I complain a lot about how much it costs to live where I do. I know.

Saxbe Fixing
From the 'small minds think alike department', some pedants are suggesting that Hilary Clinton is constitutionally ineligible for the position of Secretary of State because while she was a Senator, the Senate voted for that position to have a raise in salary. This is a constitutional restriction, no doubt. The 'Saxbe Fix' is to merely reduce the salary to its prior level.

The Itis Gets Technical
Now you know.

Needle Exchange
T.Coates sez:

"Don't even know why we have a effin drug czar".

The nut of the complaint comes down to needle exchange. If there is one place where I think I might be heartless and cruel I think I say let the junkies bodies hit the floor. God have mercy on my black soul.

Feeding the Wolves

Feeding the good wolf is an old Indian proverb about the dualistic soul of man. In it a good wolf and a bad wolf struggle for control. You can't get rid of either, but you can make one stronger than the other.

My boss's boss's boss and I had a brief conversation the other night. He is one of the people who knows Larry Ellison personally. I'm sure there are lots of people who know him personally but my bbb worked with him at the very beginnings of the Oracle Corporation. I sought him out because I know people have talked about me to him, but I haven't spoken with him much and it was time he got to know more about me.

It was the reason I was in Columbus last week. We had a company update and the news is not all good, but it is plenty good enough. We have plenty enough nuts stored for the long economic winter ahead but it is going to get cold. We can see our pipelines freezing up, millions of dollars of indecision sitting on the table in front of us. It has been said that the best thing to do when you cannot work is to study. So I see both of those turns for me, in work I will probably spend a lot more time learning new technology; in my avocation here at Cobb while the Republicans are out of power I am learning more philosophy and theology. So the conversation there was about what the reasons are for shortcomings in corporate IT's view of technology vs what we could accomplish at our level. At least it veered that way after a third party joined our conversation.

I originally questioned my bbb to find out what Ellison was like and I learned three things. The first is that he likes to simplify. That which is over-complex he does not like. The second is that he has faced a transforming near-death experience. The third is that he believes in intramural competition.

I don't like intramural competion. But Larry Ellison will set teams of product developers at cross purposes and feed the winning wolf and starve the losing dog. Many things at Oracle are self-organizing in that way, it draws a number of type A personalities. I've known a lot of things about people and work ethic at Oracle, but I never quite understood it that way. It is a good way to organize a large, all encompassing organization. In fact, it's probably the only way.  I expected to hear something about Ellison's fascination with the Orient - but I can see how that's somewhat beside the point. When you hire someone who is the best of the best in the world, you only have them for a moment. You cannot expect to keep them chained to your ambitions and dreams. You can only give them a place to thrive - you feed the good wolf. Hiring is hospitality. In the context of owning the whole of the woods, you can only direct competition. You simply control the incentives.

That says nothing about the sort of work that is most interesting to me which always has to do with the transference of ideas, and thus must involve a different sort of collaboration. In my world, in order for a team to achieve a perfect understanding and maintain that understanding, there must be harmony. Harmony conveys a different sort of excellence which requires tuning. Feeding the biggest wolf give you a solo. And yet I'm perfectly satisfied in considering a simplistic duality of good and evil for the maintenance of personal integrity. What works for the one, doesn't necessarily work for the many.