Cobb

David Goldman's New Bank Math

I just need to get this on the blog so I can come back to it and try to understand what's going on.

Here’s how it all adds up: There are about $3 trillion of non-agency mortgage-backed securities outstanding. For the sake of simplicity, let’s say that 65% are so-called AAA’s, and all are selling around where the ABX index is selling, or 35 cents on the dollar. That’s about 35%  times 65%, or $682.5 billion of market value. The banks buy all of them. Over time, half of the non-agency (not guaranteed by the federal government) mortgages default, and the houses sell for 50 cents on the dollar (which is where the market seems to be clearing). With recovery costs, etc., the securities ultimately pay 75% of face. The $682.5 billion investment is worth $1.4625 triillion, or an increment of about $800 billion. That’s roughly what the banks have to write off this year.

That’s how the banks replenish their capital, provided, of course, that all the hedge funds and other prospective investors don’t get any. In fact, there’s plenty of other cheap paper out there, including $2.8 trillion of asset-backed securities and $1.3 trillion of Collateralized Debt Obligations. And if that doesn’t work, there’s the good old curve trade: with funding at 0%, banks can buy agency MBS and clip the coupons.

The trick is to keep asset prices low enough for the banks to buy it on the cheap, which sadly means bankrupting most of the hedge funds. Of course, the banks already own a ton of devalued paper, and a bit of creative accounting (of the sort proposed variously by the Group of 30, by Deutsche Bank’s Mike Mayo, and others) is required to paper over the insolvency of the system. The banks, as Goldman’s analysts said, becoe a public utility.

To get the securitized asset market moving again, first you have to find a home for all the miserably devalued securitized assets out there.

Here’s how it all adds up: There are about $3 trillion of non-agency mortgage-backed securities outstanding. For the sake of simplicity, let’s say that 65% are so-called AAA’s, and all are selling around where the ABX index is selling, or 35 cents on the dollar. That’s about 35%  times 65%, or $682.5 billion of market value. The banks buy all of them. Over time, half of the non-agency (not guaranteed by the federal government) mortgages default, and the houses sell for 50 cents on the dollar (which is where the market seems to be clearing). With recovery costs, etc., the securities ultimately pay 75% of face. The $682.5 billion investment is worth $1.4625 triillion, or an increment of about $800 billion. That’s roughly what the banks have to write off this year.

That’s how the banks replenish their capital, provided, of course, that all the hedge funds and other prospective investors don’t get any. In fact, there’s plenty of other cheap paper out there, including $2.8 trillion of asset-backed securities and $1.3 trillion of Collateralized Debt Obligations. And if that doesn’t work, there’s the good old curve trade: with funding at 0%, banks can buy agency MBS and clip the coupons.

The trick is to keep asset prices low enough for the banks to buy it on the cheap, which sadly means bankrupting most of the hedge funds. Of course, the banks already own a ton of devalued paper, and a bit of creative accounting (of the sort proposed variously by the Group of 30, by Deutsche Bank’s Mike Mayo, and others) is required to paper over the insolvency of the system. The banks, as Goldman’s analysts said, becoe a public utility.

To get the securitized asset market moving again, first you have to find a home for all the miserably devalued securitized assets out there.

The Brotherhood of Steele

There is not enough billboard space in Los Angeles to express the measure of symbolic change now evident in the election of Michael Steele as chair of the RNC. I am very pleased to see that he has finally landed on his feet in an office worthy of his character and political appeal.

There's going to be a lot of shrugs, head shaking and raised eyebrows over the next media cycle. For me, it's a sigh of relief. There's not much to say ahead of this as far as I'm concerned. Steele is a good government, responsible conservative who in my mind best exemplifies the Old School values that Cobb has been all about for years. He is a social conservative without being an evangelist harpy. He is a fiscal conservative without being a rabid supply sider. He is the right man for the job of setting a lot of myths straight about the past, present and future of the Republican Party. I think the man deserves a party.

Interestingly enough, I think the politician that Steele's temperament most resembles is that of NY Governor David Paterson. He's been around the block and he's all business. He's not particularly glib or charismatic, but he's a natural born leader.

Obviously the stock for black conservatives is going to rise in media trading. You can certainly expect that we'll share a little of the spotlight for a while. That can be good and bad depending on who's doing the spinning. But I'm really excited to hear how Right Radio is going to take this considering some of the negative propaganda put out on Steele about his dalliances with the RLC, my particular favorite group within the Republican Party. Social conservatives may have some beefs. But I'd say that black conservatives are more social conservatives than not with regard to basic values. I am a social conservative, but not an evangelizing one - I think such matters are hot buttons for energizing a base, not for forward policy. This should be an area of interest once the dust settles.

Steele has a significant job ahead of him, but the non-job that everybody will certainly soon be talking about is handling the Republican Party's 'racial agenda'. It will be interesting to see how pretzel logic will attempt to rule the day in describing what it means for Michael Steele to be the head of the presumed party of white racism in America. But what you're actually going to see is Steele and Palin remaking the party with a revitalized energy and spirit, and you're going to see a good deal more lip service paid to marketing and outreach.

In my view, the GOP's issues are not with marketing and outreach, but with figuring out a grand strategy in the wake of Karl Rove's decade of machinations. So I'll continue to pay particular attention to Brooks and Douthat and their new way of speaking out. They have a winning way and a fine message based on the same conservative values as ever. With the calm, convincing and workmanlike dedication of Michael Steele at the helm of the GOP ship, it won't be long before the sailing will be smooth. Job One: 2010

A very good commentary with Steele from December.

al Nashiri's Right to a Speedy Trial

Obama faces a curveball smacked right back at him in the refusal of a military judge to suspend his activities at GTMO as ordered by Obama's highly politicized executive order. The suspect, al Nashiri, is held responsible for masterminding the bombing of the USS Cole has a hearing scheduled and the judge is saying that it will go forward. His argument is that what he's doing is authorized under the current law that Congress has passed and that until it's illegal, he has an obligation to obey that law.

So now Obama, in order to score poltical points with his constituency and close GTMO finds himself a defacto denier of the rights of those prisoners to get due process of law. Technical but true.

Obama's Foreign Verbiage Trap

VDH has just described what I think are the dimensions of a trap that Obama thinks he is too clever to avoid. But he's not, and he's going to learn it the hard way.

Basically, he's going to say something soft and nice and special to some country, some group that he thinks that bad old America has done wrong. Then the leader of that country is going to put him on the spot and call him on it. Loudly. Then Obama's going to s-s-stutter and realize he's the President of the United States and he's going to blink - because there's going to be some American in his office explaining to him with hot breath what's up with his rhetoric. Obama will have to choose. And it's going to cost him.

Why? Because unlike Bill Clinton, Obama still has a soul left.

When abroad it is not wise to criticize your own country and praise the antithetical world view of another—especially if yours is a democratic republic and the alternative is a theocratic monarchy that has a less than liberal record on human rights, treatment of women and homosexuals, and tolerance for religious plurality.

But here’s what Obama said:

“… All too often the United States starts by dictating…in the past on some of these issues…and we don’t always know all the factors that are involved. So let’s listen…Well, here’s what I think is important. Look at the proposal that was put forth by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia…I might not agree with every aspect of the proposal, but it took great courage…to put forward something that is as significant as that. I think that there are ideas across the region of how we might pursue peace.”

The end, if unintended, result is that the Saudi King comes across as courageous, while the U.S. President and State Department (e.g., “the United States”) are portrayed as dictatorial-like (“dictating”) in the region.

I knew this was coming, and I shouldn't be surprised that it has come so soon, so obviously and with such craven panache. But when when a few American heads get cut off, Obama will polish up his Texas accent and King Abdullah will be crushed by the mighty wheels of the Obama bus. We'll see how much soul Barry has left, and how much he'll be able to trade on his middle name.

Utility Bank of America

Well the financial blood is really starting to flow. Wells Fargo announced a 2.83 Billion dollar loss today on the quarter. Apparently it was a big fat hunking mistake for them to by Wachovia but they couldn't pass up on the deal. Then they bit into that big shiny and caught a mouthful of worms. But they're still talking as if they were the only good bank left in America.

Taleb as well as a bunch of other bears are over in Davos wearing denim amongst the glitterati and the notably absent princes of Wall Street. He gives me the only sort of nationalization I think I can live with and it goes a little something like this.

A 'utility' bank is basically the sort of bank that you and I use every day, and have been using all of our lives. Why, because the overwhelming majority of us have no business doing anything over the FDIC limit. So basically if that's all the bank you need, who cares who runs it? It can't be that hard, there isn't that much risk. Let the government nationalize all of those basic retail banking functions in a new class of institution. These banks will be insured and guaranteed never to fail. They have slim profit margins, tight regulations and no fat bonuses for executives. They are the boring banks of yesteryear, run by the kind of schmoe you think of when someone says 'dances like a banker'.

A capitalist bank is basically the sort of bank that does whatever the hell it wants. It's the kind that runs hedge funds, leveraged buyouts, any damned thing it wants. This is the kind of bank that NEVER gets bailed out by the government under any circumstances. It is a live by the sword, die by the sword, swashbuckling sink or swim pure market Club for Grown big swinging capitalist balls bank. You don't like it? Tough.

These are two extremes. What's in the middle? Well, what needs to be in the middle? If you ask me, I say every other kind of financial institution, except they don't all get aggregated into these banking towers of Babel. Citigroup. Citi is dead. So why should Traveler's suffer because of Citigroup's toxic banking assets? I'm sure a lot of people at Travelers are asking just that.

It's becoming clearer to me that this whole wave of consolidations was the first big mistake. Everything is 'too big to fail' but it's all still failing. Why? Because the rabbit holes in these huge financial conglomerates were so twisty and deep. So bust 'em up and let the nasty assets stick to the tarbaby bad banks. There are still a bunch of good names out there we still recognize that could be spun off - that must be spun off. I mean I liked my Providian Visa before it got eaten by Washington Mutual, but now JP Morgan Chase has it. Wells owns Wachovia that ate AG Edwards. What was wrong with AG Edwards? Split up that damned balance sheet and let some of these things die. The sooner the better.

It has become clear that nothing is too big to fail.

If I were Warren Buffett or Bill Gates, I'd start a new bank today. Brand new bank with no history. And I'd hire a bunch ofsmart banking people and start from scratch. The first investor group who does that is going to win marketshare. That is, after Obama gets Geithner and Summers to invent a reverse auction and start putting these assets to bed.

Time's a wastin'.

Obligatory Seriousness on Obama's Iran Non-Policy

It stinks. 

At the current rate, Obama is on track to be responsible for allowing a nuclear Iran. If he can't muster anything more seriously than these trite verbs:

Q Will the United States ever live with a nuclear Iran? And if not, how far are you going in the direction of preventing it?

THE PRESIDENT: You know, I said during the campaign that it is very important for us to make sure that we are using all the tools of U.S. power, including diplomacy, in our relationship with Iran.

Now, the Iranian people are a great people, and Persian civilization is a great civilization. Iran has acted in ways that's not conducive to peace and prosperity in the region: their threats against Israel; their pursuit of a nuclear weapon which could potentially set off an arms race in the region that would make everybody less safe; their support of terrorist organizations in the past -- none of these things have been helpful.

But I do think that it is important for us to be willing to talk to Iran, to express very clearly where our differences are, but where there are potential avenues for progress. And we will over the next several months be laying out our general framework and approach. And as I said during my inauguration speech, if countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us. 

Then I don't think that anybody needs to take him seriously except his domestic peacenik contingency. Hooray. 

"Persian civilization is a great civilization"? How about "Farsi is a really cool language"?. Obama is being nice for no good reason, so let's give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that there's somebody inside the Iranian government (fwiw) who takes it as a sign that he will be forgiving of dissidents from the nuclear program. But it seems to me that the chances of stopping it with this ratio of carrot to stick is dubious. I'll be listening for some words about the updated findings by the IISS.

Or is Obama just as credulous and the most raving paranoiac Republicans always said he was?

Eco Tripping

I am eco tripping. Eco for economics. Others are eco tripping. Eco for ecology.

Monday evening I got through about six or seven podcasts from Bloomberg and and picking up on several things, the latest of whom I think deserves to be in the T50 Project - for my project encompassing the top 50 thinkers I will focus on from here until the old deathbed. This new guy is David Zetland, economist focusing on the matter of water supply (and demand).

What I learned from Zetland the other night helps explain something I simply couldn't quite believe in a conversation I had last year with a water guy at Deet's house. The conversation drifted (because I pushed) onto the subject of water. If I remember correctly, there was some matter of controversy in which river(s) should be diverted to provide water for Southern California. My new associate turned opponent and said 'conservation' which angled him towards rationing and other such mandatory controls on consumption. I naturally replied that all you have to do is let the price rise and people will use less water. I couldn't believe that he opposed that suggestion, but he did.

I can't remember if he went into a diatribe about water being a right, and I wish I could find the blog entry where I'm sure I recounted the discussion. However Zetland tells me that most water districts do not price water. What? 

The way we have worked with water provision forever is as if it were unlimited. There has never been a supply problem and so the economics of water provision have always been cost plus a small margin. The water itself is free, you pay for the infrastructure of delivery and maintenance on that. So if you purchased 200 gallons a month or seventeen acre-feet, the marginal cost of water was zero. Now of course if you got 17 acre feet of water, chances are you've already paid for the huge fat pipe and are getting water at a somewhat different rate. However the difference between getting 17 or 25 was essentially zero, even during times of drought, because the water itself was free.

Zetland says that it regularly requires the equivalent of a bureacratic miracle for water providers to actually implement a progressive pricing system on their water supply. Why? Because this is the way we've always done it. And because ecologists and other environmentalists generally don't like the idea of saying that water is not free. Yet in fact pricing water in a progressive structure actually works better than regimes of conservation and mandated rationing, just like us market oriented people would think. 

That doesn't change the way most Americans, especially water bureaucrats think. That needs to change.

Belonging

I've been reading about Atomic John, the man who reverse-engineered Little Boy with fascination. One of the interesting quirks about his journey is that through it he discovered the conceit of secrecy in the tight-lipped attitudes of most of the men he queried about the Bomb.

This morning I found over on Facebook the continuance of the Me Meme and discovered an interesting tale of discovery as people I knew and sorta knew tell things about themselves that we don't generally know. Being Americans, it's meritocratic. We have developed a social market and we are finding, through this type of revelation and confession, a new way to be appreciated.

It is a phenomenon I now observe in the breach. Who would we be if we could not express such things? What indeed impels us to express them at all? I am one of those people who is particularly hard-pressed to determine what my value is. I hate talking about what it means, it's very difficult and consequently very important for me to negotiate some deal on my worth. It is why I am attracted to the sciences and to economics and to theology. I need frameworks, dogma, metrics, laws. I am singularly convinced that I cannot sell myself, so I am doing it all the time and not at all. It makes me responsive in an insecure sort of way.

And so what I admire in people is their steadfastness and their faith in being a vessel of spirit for a cause or idea greater than themselves. I like it when musicians interpret the very same song. I like religious rites that find the same God the same way. Without that, it seems to me that people are grasping, grasping in desperation.

We Americans, especially those of us with some gall and/or ability are always keen to note the fete manque, the lost opportunity, the narrative that might have been if we had only. But what if we belonged? What if we only had 15% of ourselves as personality? It was the first thing I noticed upon arriving in New York from Los Angeles. Here in LA we are allowed to invent personnas and have the nerve to believe our story could be made into a movie. In New York, you're a New Yorker, meaning very specific things - you don't have the luxury of determining what your apartment means if it is on the Upper East Side. It's an Upper East Side apartment, period. You wear shoes appropriate to your occupation - whether or not you do, everybody judges you by your shoes. If you need to get from point A to point B, in your relationship, in the city, in your personal development - so what? So do 200,000 other people, right here, right now, exactly like you. A successful New Yorker knows these things and doesn't try to make believe that in another life it might be some other way. There is not an alternative marketplace - in NY even the alternative is institutionalized.

So it is, I think, with the world, and the history of the world as it relates to people. Either you are attached and belong - you recognize and conform, or you are constantly contingent and on the market selling yourself.

The question is, which is more fulfilling? The answer is that the grass is greener on the other side.

Laughter from Iowa

Iowahawk has me busting a gut. 

Book the Third: Obamacles dazzles the masters at the Agora
After Obamacles had completed the perilous sea voyage to LAX and retrieved his bag from the carousel,
He entered the agora of Occidental, where wily Obamacles dazzled the masters with recitations:
Fanon, Menchu, Zinn and Chomsky, Saul Alinsky, Eldridge Cleaver, Kurtis Blow.
After two years his masters said,
    "fair Obamacles, we can teach you no more, for your bullshit has surpassed even ours.
    Hie thee now to the Isle of Manhattus, where in the agora at Columbius
    you may study a bullshit so deep and complex and angry it is beyond our philosophies."
Yet bold Obamacles was equal to the challenge. "Give us your thesis," said the masters at Columbius,
and Obamacles conjured a mighty paper on Soviet disarmament, double-spaced and expertly margined.
Its beauty was such that the masters wept, and laid a baccalaureate wreath upon him;
But the masters ordered the beautiful thesis destroyed that so no mortal would again read it.
Then one day at the Duane Reade on West 123rd, the Oracle of Doritos appeared to him again:
    "You have passed your first test, brave Obamacles, but the peril is yet beginning.
    For now you must travel west to Chicago, the dreaded Isle of Monsters;
    And become yourself a community organizer."
To which Obamacles replied, "I really should cut down on the ganja."

Eight Years Ago This Week

Reflections on old reflections. Item the first, opposition to Ashcroft.

you nominate people because of their beliefs and because of their extraordinary ability. and when you have a mandate from the people to head in a new direction, you have an obligation to place someone in power who will do so. bush has no such mandate from the people, and therefore is being arrogant and divisive in his nomination of ashcroft.

bush did not campaign as pro-life and against row vs wade, these were not campaign promises. he did not campaign as a regressive on civil rights.

think about the primary complaints against janet reno by the opposition. in what way does ashcroft legitimately represent that opposite?

is there any suggestion that ashcroft would disarm the fbi in situations like the branch davidian standoff? is there any suggestion that ashcroft would appoint more special prosecutors rather than less? no.

it is because he is anti-abortion that he is being nominated and that is a direct concession to the christian right and it has nothing to do with substance of what republicans demanded and failed to receive from janet reno.

if the american people ask for x and get stealth religion instead, that is decietful. this is my problem with gwbush & the ashcroft nomination.

It turns out that the problem that the American people ultimately had with Ashcroft had nothing whatsoever to do with abortion, but with the legal activism which was a logical consequence of the demands that he, in the wake of 9/11, break the firewalls and connect the dots.

I think in retrospect, that Ashcroft, like Gonzales fell victim to an America that refused to be a wartime America at the direction of a president genuinely comfortable with his own culture of conservative values, who broke his neck to be a wartime president. Little did we know at the time.
--

Item the second, Northern militancy on the question of rights for Africans.

the abolitionist movement in the main did not possess the political power in the american congress during the lincoln presidency to force the north into armed conflict with the south on principle. abolitionist leaders in the congress like charles sumner were *reactive* as opposed to proactive with regard to militia actions in the western territories.

preservation of the union was the primary official motive of getting into war. but already guerrila fighting had begun precisely over the matter of slavery in the western territories.

john brown was the spearhead of the militant abolitionists, but he had great problems influencing the rest. in brown's thinking, a war was inevitable and he was bent on escalating the conflict, on the terms of equality under god, a far more radical position than that officilly stated (early or late) on emancipation.

so if you would like to believe that *the* moral motivation for the federalists was the negro question, then you would have to show john brown as the leader of that movement. clearly, brown had no federal sponsors.

i think the crux of this question can be answered by evaluating the positions in the congress of the matters of the two revolutionaries most militantly opposed to the general oppression of the african. and those two are nat turner and john brown. in the end i think you will find that the north was NOT escalating the wars started by those two, but fighting their own war for separate purposes.

lincoln defended the principle of human rights for the african, but that fell far short of civil rights. one could argue that some segment of the african population in the south enjoyed human rights prior to the war. it's rather like newt gingrich attacking bill clinton on the question of marital fidelity.

It's particularly interesting in retrospect. Listening to Gwynne Dyer via Dan Carlin's History podcast last night, Dyer said 'War settles things'. Which dovetails to something I said here to the effect that war becomes the reason for everything, whether or not it was the cause.

It can be imagined in a cynical way by a neocon such as myself that Bush went to Iraq for reasons other than the 23, and specifically NOT for the sake of Iraqi freedom in spite of the name Operation Iraqi Freedom. It is something we generally presume about Lincoln, those of us who looked close enough. Lincoln had no great cause to seek social equality for the African, but it's often said that he did. His geopolitical reasons, to keep a great nation together a mere 50 years after the War of 1812 when we finally proved we were an independent nation, had to be more prominent in his mind. So I think.

But what of those real freedom fighters? How was their cause abetted by the war? Obviously they had their own reasons to join the fight. In the end, we assert with finality that the war, costly as it was, was properly decided - the good guys won, and an oppressed minority began its path to liberty thanks to an ideological slant on a violent conflict initiated by an American president.

I don't see how, in the long run, we won't celebrate the overturning of Saddam Hussein likewise. Even if we don't give Bush full credit. After all, what should Obama reverse? What do you think his orders to his commanders in Iraq will be? Or is nobody thinking about that these days?

A Stupid Racial Chart

I've been writing humorous excuses for Rush Limbaugh and his minions over in another forum and out of the blue it occurred to me to draw a chart. The chart would be a pie chart of the estimated number of times I have been called 'nigger' by the race of the person doing the calling. Is there a such thing as a logarithmic pie chart? Because the white slice is so relatively puny that the chart becomes illegible. It would have to be measured on two different scales.

I thought of the matter this morning in reflection on the That Uncle post. I asked myself honestly if I were disrespecting the ordinary black person, and the answer is that I treat black people the way they treat themselves, but not always - because there are certain insults I would never hurl, certain assumptions I would never make, certain tropes of disrespect I would never support. I treat black people the way I would want to be treated as a black person, with respect for Old School culture, period. Oh yeah, and props to Obama for slow dancing at the youth party last week. That was righteous.

For me personally, all this is easy. This meaning relating to and dealing with black Americans. Easy as pledging Alpha, which is to say an effort that thousands have done for a hundred years.  For me as a writer it's difficult. I'm in uncharted territory. Or at least I tend to think that I am. Point me to the author that makes me redundant and I'll figure out something new.

That Uncle

"When are black people going to realize that they don't own black people?"
-- D. Bowen

Now is the time for me to begin casting around for a new reason, a new angle, some way to be purposefully 'black'. I'm kinda stuck and out of ideas at the moment.

If I was trying to be consistent, I would call this 'The End of My Blackness: Part Eight' but even that meme is tired. Where I am is simply across a line, which is something I should have expected as much as I've talked my way towards it. The line is faith and devotion to black cultural nationalism. I have come to accept that it is unnecessary and inconsequential. And I think that Aggregation has to go out the door too. It's down to the cultural production voices crying into the wilderness. And this must mean with no anticipation or perhaps respect for a popular movement, I probably need a sponsor. And so I'm considering exactly what it means to take a culturally black sponsor. It may or may not go the way I want, but since I'm planning to do a lot more technical work this year, it may not matter at all. I expect that my boy Jimi will help me figure that out, and maybe Farai too.

---

(I wrote a letter to Farai)

--

Here is an excerpt from a salient bit which may or may not stand on its own without some context which is not all here:

So I'm at a point where I am thinking, in an entirely new way after all of the many simple ways I have before, that there is no meaning left in a popularly construed blackness worth respecting. Furthermore, there is no substance in a uniquely construed blackness worthy of sustaining. We have arrived at the future and there's nothing more to do except tabulate the number of people who still can't believe it and the slackness of the jaws of people still amazed by it.

I'm one of the unknown number of Americans whose abeyance offstage was minimal. I haven't needed black people to be anything or white people to be anything for me to have everything I needed for my liberty. I've been too busy writing my own script to worry about the other characters - perhaps that's solopsistic, but it's true. And people recognize that I'm not ad libbing my life.  But I'm at the point at which something has changed in the larger dynamic that has me a bit off beat. I can't put on the same old mask and work the angles.

If I could have a conversation with Randall Kennedy and Debra Dickerson and you and the rest of those figures, I might figure something out. Here's the thing. There was always only a middle class dream for African Americans. Beyond that, nobody had done much thinking. People who logically undid the fiction of race must have been equally stymied. I suppose they had to go to Africa and forge a new brotherhood. And there's the thing. Generations of African Americans have had the same wish, and now that wish (although it happened inexorably) has been fulfilled. Do you remember dreaming of the year 2000? Did your dreams include America going broke in 2009? No wonder nobody is prepared.

The best context I can think of at the moment are these two posts:

The Black Endgame

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.

The thing is, you never know. You just watch the who's tugging, and you keep track of your own imaginary lines. Or maybe you lose track. Or maybe you stop counting. Or maybe you decide that the world is not enough. More likely however, the world keeps turning, and something new becomes what's happening.

Thirteen years ago some black businessmen from Harlem told the black people of Harlem to resist and refuse this new thing called the Internet. Refuse it unless a black company can get the rights to own the wires. And a few years later there became this thing called the Digital Divide, because it was said that black people had no computers and no stake in things digital. Today, black teenagers have all of that and then some in their pockets. I watch them download music and send voice messages and digital pictures at the mall. That's more than most people at MIT did thirteen years ago. Nicholas Negroponte bade us be digital in 1996. All of us are. How big is the black question of being digital? Very small indeed. Who cares about black wires?

Casting Off Radical Ideas

Part and parcel of tossing one's hat into political philosophy's ring of fire of is the sheer weight of un-learning and assigning alternate values to the accumulation of ideas that shape one from youth. In my father's house were shelves and shelves of books - the natural direction of my intellectual curiosity went there. As a matter of pride I have often considered my inheritance of this library, the province of my black cultural nationalist father and upbringing. Further, it has often been my naive assumption that anyone not responding to the term 'negro' was at least partially invested in understanding the intellectual connotations of the Black revolution. These days, I become more convinced that blackness *is* a simple herrenvolk term. We are the tribal people of us, created very simply, in native alienation and considered impervious to intellectual distinction. The very idea of debating Booker T. Washington vs WEB DuBois itself seems parochial and out of touch, if not childish.

In that regard, there is no black intellectual future. Black intellect serves at the foot of an old master, whose imperative was 'race raising' which in the end is a futile if not tyrannical exercise for any man. Alas we must deal with greater struggles.

...

I understand that it is premature to suggest that everything blackfolks generated politically that is not deeply centered in Obama's philosophy is worthless. But that does not change the fact that Obama is *our* president, meaning the American president, not just black people's president. And what the Obama administration is going to mean and how it's going to be remembered will not be a function of what black people feel about him or his expression of what black politics has been until now. Like everything else in American life, the mainstream story will survive, the alternative and 'authentic' black story will live only in dimly remember legend, and books by blacks.

There's only one regret in this, I suppose, although I've never been so entranced with the burden of my own writing that I feel the possible dilution in its valuation a dilution of self. I note with some unease the ease with which the easy adoption of Obama might become all that black politics ever was. Which is to say that those Progressives and Conservatives not directly served by the moderation of Obama are likely to be forgotten by all but graduate students, just like all those who realized the shortcomings of MLK are but mere footnotes. I walked in the door MLK opened with a minimal set of obligations lightly sprinkled. Just like aging white liberal Boomers blithely drop the line 'I marched with Dr King', so today's politically victorious will dribble 'I voted for Obama' when challenged in the future. That is the way of political inheritance, the facts be damned. Just like I still get smeared with the ridiculous charge of supporting the Republican Southern Strategy, so gratuitous flattening of history will take place in the future.

In the meantime, I'm going to keep writing at about the pace I am now. One or two, maybe three posts a day - an easy volume. And I will focus more on my technical life over at Cubegeek. I'll decide how black I want to be and figure out whatever that means in this new world order. I'm pretty sure black cultural nationalism is dead. Let's see how long people think it still makes sense to call what I write that of an Uncle Tom and how long that kind of stupid racism remains in currency.

So here's the bottom line. You cannot 'sell out' an independent people. I accepted that a long time ago. Maybe some of those people who never thought they'd see this day will realize that they are and finally recognize...

Black Men, 1984

Obama Gonna What? Interrogation

Details on the legal equivocation on Obama's new policy on interrogation can be found at Flopping Aces. The following is a trick question:

1. Torture is prohibited as defined in section 2340 of title 18, United States Code.

2. Murder, torture, cruel or inhuman treatment, mutilation or maiming, intentionally causing serious bodily injury, rape, sexual assault or abuse, taking of hostages, or performing of biological experiments is prohibited.

3. Other acts of violence serious enough to be considered comparable to murder, torture, mutilation, and cruel or inhuman treatment, as defined in section 2441(d) of title 18, United States Code are prohibited.

4. Any other acts of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment are prohibited.

5. We are prohibited from engaging in willful and outrageous acts of personal abuse done for the purpose of humiliating or degrading the individual in a manner so serious that any reasonable person, considering the circumstances, would deem the acts to be beyond the bounds of human decency, such as sexual or sexually indecent acts undertaken for the purpose of humiliation, forcing the individual to perform sexual acts or to pose sexually, threatening the individual with sexual mutilation, or using the individual as a human shield.

6. Acts intended to denigrate the religion, religious practices, or religious objects of the individual will not be tolerated.

Why is that a trick? Because it is the Bush policy.

The Alphabetic Meme

A is for Abnormal. I have one flat foot and one arched foot.

B is for Baseball. I have never seen the Dodgers win in person. Every Dodger game I go to, they lose.

C is for Canada. I went to the Vermont Reggae Festival, which is close to Canada. I didn't believe it existed either, and I've never been to Canada - not even Windsor near Detroit.

D is for Dihanne Carroll. I was the original kid to be cast as Corey Baker for the TV show 'Julia'.

E is for Embarrassing. When I first heard the news that President Reagan had been shot, the first thing I blurted out was 'Did they get him?'. I'm sure it's the crudest thing I've ever said. I was at work in a bank at the time.

F is for Fat. I have gained an average of 3 pounds a year since I got married 14 years ago. I once lost 10 pounds in 3 weeks.

G is for Fort Greene. I have partied with Spike Lee & Wynton Marsalis in Brooklyn.

H is for Handwriting. In the sixth grade I got straight As and a C in handwriting. My father made me practice my cursive for weeks. Now I print.

I is for Incindiary. In the sixth grade I smoked my first cigarette and started a fire that almost burned down a neighbor's garage.

J is for Juggle. I only learned to juggle because the first person I saw do it was drunk and I couldn't stand the idea that a drunk could do something I could not.

K is for Kwanzaa. I was present at the very first Kwanzaa.

L is for Life Threatening. I have witnessed a teenage kid pull out a Glock and point it in the face of a man standing five feet away from me.

M is for Misfortune. I have worked directly as a peer or direct report to at least four people who have made millions of dollars in my industry. My car isn't even paid for.

N is for Neat Freak. I love putting things into boxes. The perfect gift for me are small things and small ornate boxes to place them in.

O is for Osteo. I have been in three motorcycle accidents but never broke a bone. I did get my nose broken by a wild pitch.

P is for Pervert. When I shave my moustache and beard and wear glasses, I look like a psychopath.

Q is for Quibble. My IQ has consistently been between 129 and 136, but I'm surely too lazy for that to matter.

R is for Relations. I have family in France, Italy, Senegal, and South Dakota.

S is for States. I've been to 43. All except (Maine, Alaska, Kansas, N. Dakota, S. Dakota, Montana, Wyoming)

T is for Typesetting. My first company, EBB Text & Graphics printed the ballots for the 1988 Soul Train Awards.

U is for Undercover. One of my friends is an ex-CIA operative, but we don't talk about it.

V is for Vice. I would spend all of my money on expensive watches.

W is for Writing. I have written about 6500 blog posts, 1100 comic strips, 154 restaurant reviews and 51 songs since 2001.

X is for Ex-Xerox. I used a mouse and email for the first time in 1985.

Y is for Yellow. I absolutely love Panang Curry. I would even eat Panang Curry Dog.

Z is for Zymurgy. Other than my uncle's homemade hard cider, I had my first drink of alcohol at the age of 26.

Pipes & Heinsohn: World Conflict Since 1950

Conflicts since 1950 with over 10,000 Fatalities*

1     40,000,000     Red China, 1949-76 (outright killing, manmade famine, Gulag)
2     10,000,000     Soviet Bloc: late Stalinism, 1950-53; post-Stalinism, to 1987 (mostly Gulag)
3     4,000,000     Ethiopia, 1962-92: Communists, artificial hunger, genocides
4     3,800,000     Zaire (Congo-Kinshasa): 1967-68; 1977-78; 1992-95; 1998-present
5     2,800,000     Korean war, 1950-53
6     1,900,000     Sudan, 1955-72; 1983-2006 (civil wars, genocides)
7     1,870,000     Cambodia: Khmer Rouge 1975-79; civil war 1978-91
8     1,800,000     Vietnam War, 1954-75
9     1,800,000     Afghanistan: Soviet and internecine killings, Taliban 1980-2001
10     1,250,000     West Pakistan massacres in East Pakistan (Bangladesh 1971)
11     1,100,000     Nigeria, 1966-79 (Biafra); 1993-present
12     1,100,000     Mozambique, 1964-70 (30,000) + after retreat of Portugal 1976-92
13     1,000,000     Iran-Iraq-War, 1980-88
14     900,000     Rwanda genocide, 1994
15     875,000     Algeria: against France 1954-62 (675,000); between Islamists and the government 1991-2006 (200,000)
16     850,000     Uganda, 1971-79; 1981-85; 1994-present
17     650,000     Indonesia: Marxists 1965-66 (450,000); East Timor, Papua, Aceh etc, 1969-present (200,000)
18     580,000     Angola: war against Portugal 1961-72 (80,000); after Portugal's retreat (1972-2002)
19     500,000     Brazil against its Indians, up to 1999
20     430,000     Vietnam, after the war ended in 1975 (own people; boat refugees)
21     400,000     Indochina: against France, 1945-54
22     400,000     Burundi, 1959-present (Tutsi/Hutu)
23     400,000     Somalia, 1991-present
24     400,000     North Korea up to 2006 (own people)
25     300,000     Kurds in Iraq, Iran, Turkey, 1980s-1990s
26     300,000     Iraq, 1970-2003 (Saddam against minorities)
27     240,000     Colombia, 1946-58; 1964-present
28     200,000     Yugoslavia, Tito regime, 1944-80
29     200,000     Guatemala, 1960-96
30     190,000     Laos, 1975-90
31     175,000     Serbia against Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, 1991-1999
32     150,000     Romania, 1949-99 (own people)
33     150,000     Liberia, 1989-97
34     140,000     Russia against Chechnya, 1994-present
35     150,000     Lebanon civil war, 1975-90
36     140,000     Kuwait War, 1990-91
37     130,000     Philippines: 1946-54 (10,000); 1972-present (120,000)
38     130,000     Burma/Myanmar, 1948-present
39     100,000     North Yemen, 1962-70
40     100,000     Sierra Leone, 1991-present
41     100,000     Albania, 1945-91 (own people)
42     80,000     Iran, 1978-79 (revolution)
43     75,000     Iraq, 2003-present (domestic)
44     75,000     El Salvador, 1975-92
45     70,000     Eritrea against Ethiopia, 1998-2000
46     68,000     Sri Lanka, 1997-present
47     60,000     Zimbabwe, 1966-79; 1980-present
48     60,000     Nicaragua, 1972-91 (Marxists/natives etc,)
49     51,000     Arab-Israeli conflict 1950-present
50     50,000     North Vietnam, 1954-75 (own people)
51     50,000     Tajikistan, 1992-96 (secularists against Islamists)
52     50,000     Equatorial Guinea, 1969-79
53     50,000     Peru, 1980-2000
54     50,000     Guinea, 1958-84
55     40,000     Chad, 1982-90
56     30,000     Bulgaria, 1948-89 (own people)
57     30,000     Rhodesia, 1972-79
58     30,000     Argentina, 1976-83 (own people)
59     27,000     Hungary, 1948-89 (own people)
60     26,000     Kashmir independence, 1989-present
61     25,000     Jordan government vs. Palestinians, 1970-71 (Black September)
62     22,000     Poland, 1948-89 (own people)
63     20,000     Syria, 1982 (against Islamists in Hama)
64     20,000     Chinese-Vietnamese war, 1979
65     19,000     Morocco: war against France, 1953-56 (3,000) and in Western Sahara, 1975-present (16,000)
66     18,000     Congo Republic, 1997-99
67     10,000     South Yemen, 1986 (civil war)

*All figures rounded. Sources: Brzezinski, Z., Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty-first Century, 1993; Courtois, S., Le Livre Noir du Communism, 1997; Heinsohn, G., Lexikon der Völkermorde, 1999, 2nd ed.; Heinsohn, G., Söhne und Weltmacht, 2006, 8th ed.; Rummel. R., Death by Government, 1994; Small, M. and Singer, J.D., Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars 1816-1980, 1982; White, M., "Death Tolls for the Major Wars and Atrocities of the Twentieth Century," 2003

Starting to Miss McCain Already

The more I look at the line-item detail of Obama's Stimulus Package, the more I agree with David Brooks. This thing makes no coherent statement other than 'don't just stand there do something' and is hardly responsive to the particular problems we are in.

The bill has three essential failings. First, it lacks any strategic vision. This $825 billion bill has to be passed within weeks. There’s no time for fundamental rethinking or new approaches. Instead, there’s a sloppy profusion of 152 different appropriations — off-the-shelf ideas that mostly create costlier versions of the status quo.

The committee staff took the kernel of President Obama’s vision — infrastructure programs to create jobs — and surrounded it with an undisciplined sprawl of health, education, entitlement and other spending. There’s money for nurse training, Medicare, Head Start, boatyard support, home weatherization and so on. Eleven of the programs in the bill account for the vast majority of the actual job creation. The rest may be worthy or not, but they have little to do with stimulus. The total package is so diffuse, it costs $223,000 to create a single job.

I haven't heard the first person that Obama has told no when it comes to spending money. If closing GTMO would save Americans a single billion, that might have made 3/10 of 1% of difference. But this is just ridiculous. Here is truly a chance for a bold President to show how in touch he is with the people and not beholden to the status quo in Washington, but out of 258 lines, how many are for ideas that didn't already exist?

I expect this stimulus will be about equivalent to Bush's FEMA exercise in New Orleans. He should have just given us all the cash.

22 Billion for Homes in the Sticks

I just got a copy of a spreadsheet outlining the budget details for the Stimulus Packsage. There are some 22 billion in loans for what's called section 502 housing loans.

The Section 502 Rural Homeownership Loan Program of the Rural Housing Service (RHS) makes loans to low- and very low-income households (incomes up to 80 percent of area median) in rural areas to purchase, build, repair, renovate or relocate houses, including mobile/manufactured homes.¹  Loans can also be used to purchase and prepare sites and/or to provide water supply and sewage disposal facilities. No down payment is required, and interest rates are subsidized. Through the Section 502 direct loan program, RHS, a "lender of last resort," brings homeownership to those who otherwise could not afford it.

Households with adjusted incomes between 80 and 115 percent of median income, as defined by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), may qualify for the Section 502 single-family housing guaranteed loan program. In the guaranteed program, unlike the direct program, loans are made by banks or savings and loan institutions rather than by RHS.

But the administration is actually going to make 4 billion in direct loans of this sort. This is rather interesting to me. But there are probably a lot more interesting surprises in the Stimulus Package which now has about 280 line items adding up to about 362 Billion dollars.

..But It's Not Political

OneUnited Bank is a little bitty bank. But it's the biggest black owned and operated bank in the country. It was created, not long ago, through some clever merger work. Listen to their own words:

We are the first Black internet bank and the largest Black owned bank in the country, with offices in Los Angeles, Boston and Miami.

In 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, and 2004, we were awarded the highest Bank Enterprise Award by the U.S. Department of Treasury for our community development lending. We are a designated Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI).

In the past five years, we have financed over $600 million in loans, including churches, affordable housing, office buildings and retail stores - most in low to moderate income communities such as South Central, Compton, Liberty City and Roxbury. However, we never participated in subprime lending. We have always maintained strong credit criteria.

In 2007, we have achieved record earnings and good asset quality, providing the fuel needed to continue to support our community development lending.

Our growth has been through acquiring community banks across the country that are equally dedicated to our mission including - Founders National Bank of Los Angeles, Family Savings Bank in Los Angeles, California, Boston Bank of Commerce in Boston, Massachusetts and People's National Bank of Commerce in Miami, Florida.

As some Cobb readers might know, I grew up in a black and Japanese neighborhood of Crenshaw, where the tallest building for miles around was the five story headquarters of Family Savings. It was where I deposited my first nickles and dimes. Later on, as I had my first job, I opened a checking account over at Founders. But some time around 1981 when I started working at City National I kept my money there for free. I kept money in Founders even though they had no ATM network and when I started my first business back in 87, I kept money in Founders. But I finally got fed up with their poor service and the fact that six years later, they still had no ATMs and didn't join an ATM network. That was the last time I entertained the usefulness of black banks.

As it happens, an old friend of mine may or may not be a hotshot at OneUnited. Either that or Broadway, I don't remember which. His aim has been to do good for the poor community and may be on the edge of Aggregation.

Anyway, OneUnited happens to have a friend in Barney Frank as the WSJ reports, and is being echoed around today.

Troubled OneUnited Bank in Boston didn't look much like a candidate for aid from the Treasury Department's bank bailout fund last fall.

The Treasury had said it would give money only to healthy banks, to jump-start lending. But OneUnited had seen most of its capital evaporate. Moreover, it was under attack from its regulators for allegations of poor lending practices and executive-pay abuses, including owning a Porsche for its executives' use.

Nonetheless, in December OneUnited got a $12 million injection from the Treasury's Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. One apparent factor: the intercession of Rep. Barney Frank, the powerful head of the House Financial Services Committee.

Mr. Frank, by his own account, wrote into the TARP bill a provision specifically aimed at helping this particular home-state bank. And later, he acknowledges, he spoke to regulators urging that OneUnited be considered for a cash injection.

It's hard for me to judge how troubled OneUnited may or may not be, but it's clear that it takes minority lending a serious priority. Frank is making a cagey decision - for if OneUnited were to fail, the noise of the collapse would be amplified, not least by this blog.

Also in the story is another bank with which I have been personally involved, Ohio's National City, at which I spent several months last year helping them upgrade their IT systems. Hell, I almost bought stock in the joint, because before the credit crisis was fully upon us, they were clearly undervalued. They were very well on their way to making clear which assets belonged to whom, although I didn't understand how or why that would be complex when I heard the internal buzz. Later as I came to understand how CDO Swaps worked against loan tranches, I could see what they were on about. Nevertheless, they were very seriously fighting irresponsibility and recognizing the changes they would have to make in order to save their company and yet...

Several Ohio banks received funds after Ohio's congressional delegation complained bitterly about the treatment of Cleveland-based National City Corp., which regulators forced into a merger rather than provide with cash.

It just goes to show you, it's not what you know, but who you know. 

In other news, as I follow more and more economic blogs and drop more political blogs, the consensus seems to be that we're going to have zombie banks. Which means that if there's going to be some interesting stimulus down the pike, I may have to get my mortgage from the Fed since all of the banks will only lend to 800 FICOs. Wouldn't that be cool?

Deceptions of the Press

There's a new sheriff in town (God Save the King), and the good news is that he's smart and pragmatic and he talks a very good game. He has the opportunity to 'talk down' the American people to a safe landing. Right now we're on a steep dive towards economic calamity. In that regard, Obama says (rightly?) (but will he) that we don't have time for ideology. I'm perfectly happy for Obama to be Mr. Fixit, and I support him 100% in that capacity.

But there's something else going on and I'm not watching it closely because I expect it broadly. Yesterday I heard it clearly. The press is becoming expert in doublespeak. And I think that right now is the time to watch the sort of dodging and redefinition as all of the nothing going on in American actions is represented as 'change', and all of the subtle editorialized innuendo of 'factual reporting' makes mountains of the molehills on the margins of American policy - loudly ticking off the dozen differences which characterized the narrow spaces between the moderating Democrat and Republican candidates for the 44th Presidency.

We already know that we have a do-nothing Congress, and we already know that plans for TARP have flip-flopped about a half-dozen times with only a few disbursements and much economic hemorraging unstemmed. We also already know that opportunities to make bold pronouncements on world affairs, like the conflict in Gaza have gone without comment by the new President. But in the interest of national unity, the Lippmanesque press will fudge and spin to make the slow turning of the wheels of government action appear to be 180 degree spins in the proper direction.

For example, on NPR yesterday, various commentators pretended that we won't be able to tell if the Surge was a success until after the American troops have fully withdrawn. Since the Obama Administration says Iraqi elections are upcoming, it makes perfect sense for them to not have a strict timetable for withdrawal. So there is an evasive and duplicitous redefinition of 'the situation on the ground in Iraq' going on as we speak, such that Obama can say 'righteously' what Bush said 'deceptively'. So long as one can accept the boldfaced lie about what is actually going on, by following only that which the new administration talks about, the complete situation on the ground becomes a matter of press opinion. And they have decided not to cover it, or more specifically to report that which was factually known to the Bush Administration as a matter of current speculation. It was an absolutely stunning display on KQED radio yesterday morning with Michael Krasny and his guests, Orwellian in every respect.

Those differences significant or insignificant as they may have been between McCain and Obama will now be the focus of a press dedicated to show that 'change' indeed has come and that America will be OK under the bold new leadership of this young President. An attitude adjustment will be performed for 'our' benefit, and yet the facts will only change slowly. We will be prompted to feel good about what is no good and we will be shown mind-numbing complexity in matters observed seriously by the Obama Administration 'for the first time'.

I can't stand it. Because that's not the worst.

If Fernandez is to be trusted, and I do trust him, there are currently reports that scores of Fatah members have been killed and tortured over the past few weeks in Gaza by Hamas. Try to find that story as the UN sends John Holmes over in assessment.

You’ve all heard about the massacre of almost 200 people in the Congo, on Christmas Day, 2008 right? And you know every detail of the Lebanese Army’s assault on the Lebanese army’s assault on Nar el-Bared Palestinian refugee camp, correct? Richard Landes had a discussion with an Oxford PhD student about how some deaths are more equal than others.

I recently had an email exchange with a PhD student at Oxford who saw my posting about the study of war casualties in which I pointed out that .06 percent of those killed in wars since 1950 died in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and .3 percent of the Muslims killed in conflicts since then were killed by Israelis. He was struck by how his colleagues could talk of nothing but Israelis killing Gazans, despite the extraordinary violence to be found the world over, much of it really intentional.

So let me remind you all now that I refuse to take any news of Obama's role in Mideast peace seriously. It is a slow burning ember which is the hypnotic focus of people with little perspective. The situation is simple - there are fools with no real government trying to destroy an entire modern democratic state and these fools are committed to suicide as a strategy. We're supposed to care.

And yet when these fools commit torture and murder, it is not permitted to call them terrorists. This is your American press. We shall inevitably see a truly smart man in our President use that duplicitous press as his bitch. Excuse me while I doubt it.

Obama Has Your Credit

Prediction: The Federal Government is going to suck up all the credit in America, and the American consumer won't be able to get any. 

Figure 1: Federal borrowing as a % of GDP: Roosevelt vs Obama's First Year

Spengler notes:

Before America entered World War II, Franklin Delano Roosevelt borrowed no more than 6% of gross national product in a given year. During his first year in office, Obama will have borrowed perhaps double that amount.

Roubini notes:

U.S. financial losses from the credit crisis may reach $3.6 trillion, suggesting the banking system is “effectively insolvent,” said New York University Professor Nouriel Roubini, who predicted last year’s economic crisis.

“I’ve found that credit losses could peak at a level of $3.6 trillion for U.S. institutions, half of them by banks and broker dealers,” Roubini said at a conference in Dubai today. “If that’s true, it means the U.S. banking system is effectively insolvent because it starts with a capital of $1.4 trillion. This is a systemic banking crisis.”

Losses and writedowns at financial companies worldwide have risen to more than $1 trillion since the U.S. subprime mortgage market collapsed in 2007, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

President Barack Obama will have to use as much as $1 trillion of public funds to shore up the capitalization of the banking sector, following the $350 billion injection by the Bush administration, Roubini told Bloomberg News. Congress last year approved a $700 billion rescue fund, of which half remains to be disbursed.

Deep Thought Was Off By Two

My snarky thoughts, stolen gratuitously from some website

In Douglas Adam's "The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy", a  highly-advanced race of people built a gigantic computer in order to  find the answer to a question. That question was "What is the  answer?" When pressed by the computer to be more specific, they  narrowed the question down to something very simple.

"Deep Thought", they said (that was the name of the computer, you  see) "Deep Thought, what is the meaning of Life, the Universe, and  Everything!?" Well, Deep Thought pondered the question for a moment,  then informed the scientists that they would have to be patient,  because such a question would take a while to work-out; seven-  and-a-half million years, to be precise.

So the Highly Advanced Civilisation waited patiently while Deep  Thought worked on the question, until the momentous day finally  arrived when the Greatest Computer in the Universe was to have the  answer to the Biggest Question in the Universe. The scientists  gathered around, counting down the minutes and seconds, until at  last! With no great fanfare Deep Thought churned and clicked and spit  out the answer to the question which had occupied the minds of an  entire race of people for eons.

"42."

Excuse me?

"The answer to your question is 42."

Needless to say, the scientists from the Highly Advanced Civilisation  were just a tad put-off by this answer, and began to question the  computational abilities of the Greatest Computer in the Universe.  Deep Thought spoke up. "Perhaps", it said, "Perhaps you didn't ask  the right question".

Now that I've gotten that out of my system, I have the following impressions and expectations of President Obama.

Firstly, He needs to face the economic bad news with something decisive - and at the very least get the dogs off Geithner. Next he has to put forth a definitive statement on Hamas and the Israeli government. They have completely pulled out from Gaza, and of course nobody is paying that any mind.

Today is the day that GM failed to be the world's largest automaker for the first time in 77 years and Citibank is in trouble.

His freezing of the trials in GTMO are not much of a big deal - it seemed to be expected, but he's said reasonable things about it before. A freeze may be his way of sending a neutral signal that he's doing something to undo what Bush had been doing 'wrong', but without doing anything to actually undo the prosecutions.

I'm looking forward to some real news. Maybe Obama will make some

God Save the King!

God Save The King

I've already made the mistake of not taking inauguration speeches seriously, and being a creature of habit, this year is no exception even after three decades of me making that same mistake. Not only that, instead of breaking the habit, I've gone and been influenced by other commentary. Not much, but enough to fill in first impressions just enough to be rather callow. That said, I don't feel altogether dismissive enough to let Obama's speech go without comment, but I'll file it under Obligatory Seriousness. 

Firstly, there are two ways to deal with the Obama Phenomenon, and yet again I am being consistent. One way is to take in the entire scene, and the other is to read the text. I read the text, period. It is the same thing I did for the Saddleback interview and for the second and final debates. Although on the second, I also watched. That was a mistake as well. Thus I have very little to say about what I've heard about the secondary events - the cheesy poetry, Justice Roberts' hideous gaffe, or Aretha Franklin's re-writing of our American version of 'God Save the King'. But I will say that there's something very unsettling about the passive voice repeating 'Let freedom ring' when the proper lyric is 'Great God our King' after 'Protect us by thy might'.

Ironically, 'God Save the King' is everything that's on my mind at this moment so many Americans I find worthy of second-guessing if not mockery have suddenly found it in their hearts and minds to acknowledge what a great country this is, today. I wish there was some way I could make instant movies that could morph - Micheal Jackson's Black or White video-style, colored faces cheering jubilantly about Obama into white powdered faces trumpeting the greatness of the British Empire, my old bean. Of course there's nothing wrong with chauvinistic patriotic blather, it ought to be encouraged. I just wonder if any of these blokes recognize how they sound to my ears. Not that I'd rain on anyone's parade in person today. I save my reflections for the page. 

The speech was good. Almost very good, but lacking in a theme. It was very full of bullet points and metaphors that only lasted one sentence or two. There is very little in the speech not to like and I think it represents the evolved pragmatism that the once effusive Obama would probably not have given. This is not the Obama who won Iowa. This is the smart, tough guy who is aiming to be the smart, tough President, and it's about time. 

Today, Bank of America lost 29% of its value. The incredible process that led up to that fact surprises and worries me a lot. Today, the 44th President of the United States of America was sworn into office. The ordinary process that led up to that fact doesn't worry, nor surprise me a bit. I know that one process has nothing to do with the other, and yet the political process must now begin to direct and correct the economic process. That is not an occasion for balloons and bunting, but one for prayer. God Save the King. 

What's Up

I'm going to put on a suit and travel to SF today. I have some business and a conference to attend. I'm somewhat ambivalent about the prospect that somebody might make some hopeful remark as happened the last time I got suited up. I have so enjoyed the opportunity that the 'sphere has given me to debate politics and religion but these are things I'd rather not intrude on my daily life. But I'll smile and take the compliments and observations without being snarky about it.

Flicks
It's official now that I am a dud with the family as regards my current taste in film. Over the past few weeks, I've consumed 'It Takes a Thief', 'Giant', 'Red River', 'Bridge on the River Kwai', 'The Bachelor & the Bobby Soxer', 'Singin' in the Rain', 'The Road to Bali', 'Monkey Business', 'Double Indemnity' and 'Sunset Boulevard'. Unfortunately I don't have time to deconstruct and review each. I'm simply trying to separate them from the social context of the American manners we Righties are supposed to be so nostalgic for back in the days when there were no black faces in prominence. What did Hollywood reflect well and what was just Hollywood? The questions continue and I will inject observations from time to time as I endeavor to use some more of these popular metaphors. I do have to say that Grace Kelly was all that, and I don't think I've seen Myrna Loy at her best. Cary Grant got away with a whole lot that Bob Hope worked his ass off for. Barbara Stanwyk - uh.. what's the big deal over her?

Songs
I bought fifty Elvis love songs. A typical few emerge from deep in my consciousness, 'Spanish Eyes', 'Make the World Go Away' (ironically, vis a vis my discussions on worldliness this weekend) most notably. I also got some Hawaiian songs, following Road to Bali, realizing that I had none. Now that American Idol has spun up again, it's somewhat easy to appreciate Presley's voice. I'm getting a feel for it, and I have to say that it sounds almost completely neutral and unaffected - which means it is the voice of America. The arrangements can be a bit bombastically arranged and I tend to like his more Country & Western sound. We'll see.

Eats
I think I've found one of the last bartenders in Los Angeles. Although I haven't been to the Beverly Hills Hotel, so I can't say definitively. This was Robert at the Kyoto Grand downtown who has reinvented the mojito. You know I never understood what was so great about this mojito craze anyway. His is called the chinay or some such, and it is the bomb. It's actually worth the trip.

Down here in the South Bay we have a new little cafe which my youngest daughter, Sprite, cannot get over. She raves that it is the cutest and that her croissant sandwich was the best she ever had. The joint is called 'Yellow Vase'. It is very French, airy, and old lady friendly. Folks from the hood who have been to Lucy Florence would know exactly what to expect - I only wish the twins had this kind of traffic.

Games
I am just about to polish off my last RPG for a while, Dead Space. Fallout 3 dominated my Christmas vacation much to the detriment of my Java, and following up I found Dead Space as one of the favorite games of those Bethesda developers. Dead Space is a great combination of Prey and Mass Effect, pruned down to a crisp story with better graphics than either. It is superbly realized with interesting controls and is probably one of the best third person shooters ever. It does win, hands down, for the most grisly kill finishing in any game I ever played. When the baddies win, which is fairly often, the humiliation is complete. I just laugh, shake my head and leave the room.

Fam
Doc and Pops are on opposite sides of the Obama phenomenon and they both are beginning to remind me of Churchill's definition of a fanatic: someone who can't change their mind and won't change the subject. BD, my oldest Beautiful Daughter joins me in some appreciation for the romantic comedies of the 40s and 50s, but stunned me this weekend in her preview performance of Little Shop. Next month, her theatre company will be at the Hermosa Playhouse - she's a Doo Wop Girl and she's better than I thought. The whole production is fairly awesome. The Spousal Unit is getting into the rhythm of work although she doesn't really like it. I can say with 80% certainty that she is resigned to the fact that there is absolutely nothing better to be than a stay-at-home mom, this week.

We had Deli Night yesterday after a lovely brunch and then a huge ball of fun at the Go Kart track. Boy now peppers his speech with French idioms and says that we don't seem to be a family with parents, rather with a big brother and a big sister. I'm not sure how to take that, but I'm taking it as a compliment for the moment.

Self
I pulled a muscle in my back yesterday. Fortunately I had enough Motrin to squeeze into the go karts without extraordinary difficulty. I'm off to buy a cane so that I can board my flight with the geezers and babies. Maybe I should get a fedora while I'm at it. I'm thinking that as I get my theology in gear I'm going to mock my political opponents by taking no domestic affair seriously except to prairie dog up with the occasional 'told you so'. I mean who could possibly be surprised the Hamas broke the cease-fire or that Obama's speech electrified exactly 53.7% of Americans? Happy days are here again, the welfare state is near again, let us celebrate the queer again... nah it's not that bad, but let me not get started yet...

All in all I'm angling towars technical immersion. It's happening slowly but surely and the machinations of the chatting classes seem less and less important - I completely missed the entire controversy over Rick Warren and didn't know that he has offered succor to those 'radically status quo' Anglicans. Theologically interesting, politically stupid, but more on that later..

Loury & Franklin on Symbols

A thoughtful reader passed on this discussion of note about the role of Rick Warren in the Obama oevre and other matters of some political and religious significance. This is the kind of debate I hope to be hearing less of as time goes by. My pendulum, while quite interested in the way in which the Catholic Church deals with the natural world, has swung towards the natural world itself. I am finding myself less and less drawn to matters of interpretation, especially of symbols, and most especially of symbols coming from politicians. 

Firstly, I find much of the controversy over the selection of Rick Warren to be a great deal of smoke and mirrors, and I think that it is overplayed precisely because of the recent passage of Proposition Eight. At the outset, Loury went in a significantly excellent direction which was to get some response about what to do with dissent from the progressive agenda, and I think once that question was left out there unanswered, it gave both parties license to sidle up to the particular issues that bother them most. The particular thing that worried Franklin the most was that of the Vatican closing debate. 

As the sort of conservative I am, I find something extraordinarily wise about the decision to close debate, and I wonder how it is that any religious leader finds otherwise. I think perhaps it is, now that I reflect on Franklin, because he is part and parcel of the Ecumenical Movement which energizes this desire. I see it as perfectly logical for the sort of Christian who finds some threat in the obiter dicta of Sarah Palin to have the propensity to keep debate open indefinitely. Because sooner or later there will be some value in this eternal debate for the inclusion and sanctity of his every constituent. At that point, debate can close, right? He will keep arguing for the ordination of women until such time as it becomes 'common sense' that women should be ordained, and from that point forth debate shall close, as it is surely presumed today.

So it comes as no surprise that the vector of this Ecumenical Movement, dedicated as it seems to a program of enforced diversity must seek to find some very special meaning and moment in the inauguration of this man, Barack Obama, as the first black president of the US. Loury was correct to note how thin this skin must be and how foolish it might be to notice the skin color of the pilot on the bridge of the first ship behind which is the entire fleet of American power. The steering wheel was not built for black hands, but for human hands - there are only so many degrees of freedom that fleet can be steered - but then again we are only talking symbolically. It allows them to make the non-point but Loury's use of the word 'patina' was altogether correct. 

It seems to me that the two gentlemen are, perhaps unwittingly, contributing to the raising of political expectation in all areas of life and are thus making enemies of religious dogma of the sort which they also unwittingly lament. For it is conformity that they resent and resist. And it seems to me that it is only confession and creed that can establish the kind of unity of purpose they both desire. Unless they are willing to pay that price for establishing harmony, they are going to keep debating in circles, fruitlessly ad infinitum.  

Being of This World

I find various interpretations of the meaning of Jesus to be disturbing. What I find most disturbing is the idea of a 'personal savior'. And so in the Trinity I find most comfort in the Father. I guess that I think that people need the example of Jesus - Jesus spells everything out, makes it plain. But Jesus the comforter in times of trouble... eww. It seems to be a substitute for a disciplined virtue, or for courage. When I say that I just want to do God's will, that's the thing that makes my faith strong. For me to know God's will, and to do the right thing in times of trouble seems so much more of what I think is actually Christlike, than to fail in the world and seek the solace of Jesus. I feel that so many Christians are only Christlike in the one aspect of being forever at Gethsemane and that this is how ministers are telling people to approach God, from the point of view of someone whom life has defeated. It gives people just enough Jesus to make it through the day. And in that, their faith becomes like a payday loan, an advance from heaven they get and pay back (almost) via weekly journeys to church. I haven't read Augustine, but I feel destined to and others like him as well which is why I ask for your recommendations. It was Neuhaus who began thusly in giving me great inspiration:

That religion and particularly Christianity presents itself on the basis of reasonable truth claims that are to be engaged and to be presented as persuasively as possible in a reasonable manner. His lecture at the Regensberg University was directed chiefly against ideological secularists on the one hand who want to radically divide faith and reason and directed against Christian thinkers who want to assert a kind of pure Biblical Christianity against the great achievement which is the synthesis of Greek philosophy and revealed truth.

This great achievement is what I'm on about. The intimacy, the very co-dependence of faith and reason is the very proposition that I have always believed was that which bound the Jesuits to education, worldly works and intellectual distinction. It is something missing in almost all of my past. I have been mystified by the lack of Christian virtue in most of the intelligent people I have known and confounded by the lack of refined intellect is most of the spiritual people I have known. It's as if nobody knows that anyone like Augustine ever existed - I've never heard his name in any sermon. And so we are parceled out like indentured servants to a world of usefulness completely disjoint to that of the human spirit because so few recognize the unity of heart and mind in the active synthesis the Church has provided. And so many walk around proud to be 'not of this world' as if God created the entire thing as a joke and our lives as an exercise in denial of our sensory gifts. And so my displeasure at the testimony of the world-weary sufferer who brings his burdens to the feet of Jesus - who can assert (falsely) that in Jesus forgiveness he can dismiss the concerns of a world that is all bad. It was greatly said that the corrupt regime knows no innocents. And those who are faithless in reason always misinterpret Original Sin as the corrupter of all Earthly institutions and thus feel no sin in rejecting their righteous authority. This is the great sin which is at the core of the abuse of the name of God in the affairs of men. We say that 'for God so loved the world', so who are we to hate the world? Who are we to assume its corruption? Who are we to deny our responsibility to it? Some would say that we are vessels of spirit only... ah but the Holy Spirit directs our minds as well.

I think too many people take the grace of God for granted. They fail to realize their duty to reason, they fail to recognize that good works are necessary, that implicit in the command of loving your neighbor is the maintenance of society. They try to make their faith all about their own soul and believe that if they can send a telegram to Jesus that his reply will be specific to their salvation, like a phonecall from Morpheus or The Operator to get them out of one jam or another in the phony Matrix.
We are of this world, it is our world, and there is no escape.

Fragments of the Day

The French Lunatic Problem

When I was a teenager, my family lived for a month in a farmhouse near the French town of Puy l’Eveque. We were renting from a large multi-generational family that ran the farm that surrounded the house. We hadn’t met more than a few of them before the night that a torrential rainstorm came roaring out of the west.

In the middle of the storm, there was a knock on the door. An old man was there, whom we all guessed must be an emissary from our landlords. He was holding an odd piece of wood with a hole in the middle of it. My sister and I could speak high school French, badly, and my mother could speak a bit better than that. This conversation was a bit harder to begin than the usual, however. What did the man want? Did he want to know if we were safe in the storm? We all realized we didn’t know the word. A quick glance at the dictionary. “We are all safe”,

The man laughed uproariously and spoke rapidly to us. We didn’t understand a single word. Oh. We had said that we were all coffre-forts, the kind of safe you keep money in. Try the adjective! We are safe, we are out of danger! En securite! Hors de danger!

Hysterical laughter and more rapid-fire talk. Now we wonder if he needs us for something? Maybe that piece of wood? Is the house next door in trouble? Is this a warning? We try this and more, and everything we say is apparently the funniest thing he’s ever heard. In fifteen minutes, we haven’t understood a word he’s said. My mother finally just drags him next door, hoping that we can sort this out in a combination of bad French and bad English with the matriarch of the family.

She comes to her door and looks in shock and dismay at the old man. He isn’t a member of her family. He’s the local lunatic who occasionally gets out of his facility and comes up to this house. He’s not speaking French: nothing he’s saying is intelligible in any language.

Doubt
Neither can quite escape doubt and belief; for the one, faith is present against doubt; for the other through doubt and in the form of doubt. It is the basic pattern of man's destiny only to be allowed to find the finality of his existence in this unceasing rivalry between doubt and belief, temptation and uncertainty. Perhaps in precisely this way doubt, which saves both sides from being shut up in their own worlds, could become the avenue of communication.

Cloaking
A device that can bestow invisibility to an object by "cloaking" it from visual light is closer to reality. After being the first to demonstrate the feasibility of such a device by constructing a prototype in 2006, a team of Duke University engineers has produced a new type of cloaking device, which is significantly more sophisticated at cloaking in a broad range of frequencies.

Microsatellites
The Space Review reported in 2006 that “right now, a pair of mysterious, highly-mobile microsatellites dubbed ‘MiTEx’ is roaming about in geostationary orbit (GEO). Their mission and their capabilities are unknown; even their orbital position is classified.”

Vatican Three?

This is what I was looking to find when I asked this question.

For decades, the Catholic left has called for a Vatican Council III to “complete” the work of Vatican II. Others on the left, such as Garry Wills, dissent from that call, claiming that Vatican II put the teaching Magisterium out of business once and for all, “diffusing” ecclesial authority throughout the Spirit-guided private opinions of the People of God. This move is implausibly presented as what is meant by the sensus fidelium. The burden of Steinfels’ argument is that liberal Catholicism made a great mistake since the Council in not distinguishing itself and, when necessary, separating itself, from its “dubious allies” of the Catholic left. Turning from its intellectual and theological tasks, liberalism got bogged down in the canonical litany of leftist complaints about contraception, homosexuality, women’s ordination, and clerical celibacy, along with endless agitations aimed at “power sharing” in church government—and all of these linked to the larger question of papal teaching authority. Moreover, sectors of the Catholic left became increasingly part of a political and cultural left that is increasingly secularist and post-Christian, and even explicitly anti-Christian. Liberal Catholics, says Steinfels, should have made it clear that, in very important respects, these dubious allies of the Catholic left were not allies at all.

The association with the Catholic left created, he wrote, a crisis of irony, a crisis of intellect, and a crisis of inclusiveness. The absence of irony and historical perspective led to fanaticism and a sectarian spirit. The refusal to make serious arguments nurtured anti-intellectualism and an emphasis on an ever-expanding inclusiveness which emphatically excluded those not of like mind and resulted in a loss of Catholic identity. The Catholic left, he says, has no patience with liberalism’s devotion to “compromise, incrementalism, or extended analysis and debate.” “The Catholic left,” he writes, “is an offspring of liberal Catholicism, but is rooted in the dramatic appeals and confrontations of the 1960s” rather than the liberal, and mainly European, tradition of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But so smugly triumphalistic were liberals following the Council, while at the same time—and somewhat contradictorily—so fearful of their powerful enemies on the right, that few were, and few are, prepared to challenge the dubious alliance with the Catholic left. The old maxim applied: the enemy of my enemies . . .

Now we're getting somewhere.

It's Not Policy, But I Can Do It If I Like

Obama triangulates on waterboarding.

The proposal Obama is considering would require all CIA interrogators to follow conduct outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the officials said. The plans would also have the effect of shutting down secret "black site" prisons around the world where the CIA has questioned terror suspects - with all future interrogations taking place inside American military facilities.

However, Obama's changes may not be absolute. His advisers are considering adding a classified loophole to the rules that could allow the CIA to use some interrogation methods not specifically authorized by the Pentagon, the officials said, although the intent is not to use that as an opening for possible use of waterboarding.

What a weasel.

Right Wing Anti-Racism

It's not often that the loyal opposition talks about the Right blogosphere. Sure we'll hear the odd opprobrium directed at the usual suspects. Nor can I say that I spend half as much time reading the Left as I thought I might this year. I took up some cudgels at Yglesias and at Ta-Nehisi Coates, but I found their volume and brevity left me plinking, and plinking really isn't my style. I'd rather load up 1500 words of ball and grapeshot and let heave.

So I don't blame loyal Cobb readers for suggesting that nobody any other than me and the Conservative Brotherhood are responsible of all of the purported 'anti-black' rhetoric out in blatherville. You may remember the first 'annual' internet racist hunt that turned up just about nothing except for Steve Sailer. And then all concerned said it was all 'code words' and 'subtle racism' and other sorts of neglible boowah that we in the grown-ass man camp dismiss. Nevertheless, there are some big fat ugly racists in American society and American history, and we all do well to identify and excoriate.

And so I give you this entry by the fine folks over at American Thinker, entitled The KKK, Hollywood and President Wilson. Probably not the best way to end the week, but for the record anyway. Much of this was not news and shouldn't be. Jonah Goldberg did a very good job of describing the Eugenics Movement and its roots, but you know some people just freeze up when you mention Goldberg's name.

Today, cowardly elites are busily singling out Southerners and their Confederate flag bumper stickers. Why? Because taking their pitchfork brigades to Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, requires real courage.

I'm really not particularly impressed that there will be a significantly disciplined political anti-racist movement in America, but I am satisfied that Americans are sufficiently moral to carry it off. Except that anti-racist politics doesn't quite fit. That is to say that the problem is that racism is not a nail and anti-racist politics is a hammer. Sometimes anti-racism needs to be a baseball bat, a fly swatter or a laser beam - although some would argue that it needs more often than not to be a bunker-busting MOAB. The problem is that I generally don't trust the judgment of anybody prominent to make the proper determination. Christianity is anti-racist. American society is generally anti-racist. That's sufficient for me.

I know that there are many Americans today who keep insisting that the Great Conversation on Race has still not occurred. But I think that's just them letting us know that they've been asleep and they still have issues. Later for them. But as I always say, I'm not a race man, but I'm never afraid to deal with what's up. Meanwhile, you can check out the angle of some intellectual compatriots of mine.

Fear and Freedom

Don't tell people what you're going to do. It just gives them an excuse to second-guess you. Shutup until you're done, then tell people what you did.
-- D. Bowen

Doc and Pops treated me to lunch yesterday. It was all Doc really. He's not angry, he's a happy man but you have to listen a long time until you know that. He's deep in the middle of a struggle, the dimensions of which seem to be beyond him and all of us. But that's how he lives. He's the manly man - the one that rushes into the middle of the conflict. He enjoys donning the armor and putting on a heightened sense of awareness so that he's always prepared. He said that we don't understand, that he's made of cork and nothing can sink him, but you can tell that he's surrounded on all sides by deep, dark, cold water. That is the life of one LAPD officer.

The context of the quote comes from Middle America, the America of South Dakota, the one that doesn't exist here. He said that he told people that he was going to buy property in South Dakota, something that is supposed to be a crazy endeavor for a black man, in certain minds. But he got there explaining the dimensions of fear.

He put himself in the shoes of fear. He was walking near his home in downtown LA and a white woman was coming up the street towards him at night. He described himself in silks, carrying groceries - but he knew what was coming. Her jaws were clenched, she was scared to death. What could he say to put her at ease? A second scenario. The Asian woman alone in the elevator with the black man. Scared to death, but he's a cop. She's actually safer around him than anyone else. People in Los Angeles are living with Black Pathology Television in their heads, and that's all they know. It's not America.

Switch gears. What is the black man's greatest fear? He has run out of gas out in the boondocks and is lost. He has to get service at the lone gas station run by Bubba. Out front is Bubba's red pickup truck with the gun rack and inside is Bubba wearing a plaid hunting jacket. What can Bubba say to put him at ease? Doc runs down the specs on the pickup truck - he finds where Bubba's love is and the bond is made in 20 seconds. A second scenario, reality. He's driving from Yankton to Wakonda South Dakota. He talks to the man who tells him a shortcut. Wow, thanks. Takes 15 miles off the trip but you have to go through some cornfields.

One hour later it's dark and he is at the corner of Corn and Stalk. The sky is clear and the land is flat. The stars are out and they come all the way to the horizon - not that he can see it because he's in 8 foot corn as far as the eye can see. He stops the car and puts on the blinkers. He's lost in South Central South Dakota in the dead of winter and it's mind-numbingly cold. The car pulls up slowly. A woman gets out, white woman and she asks what she can do to help. "I'm lost and I'm trying to get to Wakonda". Wakonda is a five block square of houses in the middle of 1000 square miles of farmland.

She says "Follow me".

That's where America is, Doc says. Not here in the Los Angeles where officers of the law are not permitted to look at anyone's breasts lest they get written up administratively. Here, everyone is afraid of men who have to be men. It's enough to defeat the courageous. So he's out to rescue liberty and wondering where everybody's honesty has gone.

Doc has got a fantasy. It's about living where the living is honest and good. Right now he's got some small parts of middle America but in the future it's in Western Australia. Out there where people don't step on each other's feet you understand that you have to look out for your neighbor. Western Australia is like Africa without the Africans. There are no tribal conflicts, no wars. Millions of acres of unpolluted wilderness and gorgeous shorelines in a constitutional republic with liberty. Western Australia is like what America used to be before it got too crowded and hated - where people had to work to make life work rather than spend all their time trying to vote themselves into existence and politick themselves into the receiving end of demographically proportionate patronage.

I don't know much about Kenny Chesney. That's something both Doc and Pops share that I know very little about, but I do know the effect he has on people that love and respect his music. It was on the list of basics that you need for a life of liberty in Western Australia, including the four-wheel drive, the Brazilian wife, the cargo pants, Tommy Bahama sandals, and a year's supply of Chimay Ale. Silly me, I kept wondering if he was going to say broadband access. But I couldn't disagree. I mentioned Bora Bora, but he said no. Not enough land, you'd get cabin fever. You need to see out to the horizon full of land and know that the land is free.

I'm impressed.

Pops still sends all the emails about Obama in 48 point caps. Sometimes he sends them in different colors. On the way to the spot yesterday I saw a poster from the Californian Medical Marijuana League inviting people to Celebrate Change at some rally. At the bottom of the poster was the notice that smoking of medical marijuana was not allowed at the rally. Funny we were just talking about that. Funny they had to mention it. Funny I can't remember when so many people made such a big deal about going to any Inauguration.  But Pops doesn't care really about winning any political battles - really, not any battles at all. All he wants is to spend enough time with his 10 grandchildren to enjoy the fact that they're not engaged either. So that's why there is no method to his madness. He's just being, as the kids say, 'random'. Well he does know how to pick a good ale. 

I'm watching romantic comedies because people knew, back in the days of Cary Grant and Myrna Loy, and before, what their roles were. They knew how to be men and women and not issue administrative citations for improper breast observation. Masculinity and femininity have lost their moorings because the Boomers felt obligated to reject EVERYTHING and celebrate that as freedom. But now all of the descendants who watch television and movies don't know how to deal with each other's passions, and the land doesn't require them to meet people on the road and be something more than 'a young hispanic female', or however the description comes across the network. Because when Americans react to each other in the modern terms, it's based on demographically assigned fears. Walking on downtown streets and riding in elevators and shouting out of cars in traffic doesn't require people to be Americans, and so America is lost here in Los Angeles, which very few people identify as land that goes out to the horizon where the people are free.

So the votes are in and the symbol is in place but life doesn't change. It's no surprise that people of a sort would vote for the man who talks the right game, but the talking is not going to change. The clenched jaws of fear are unable to open and ask "How can I help", not here in the urban jungle. That counts for the Los Angeles with the Latino mayor and for the America with the African president. It's not the adjectives that count, but the verbs. 

Living in fear vs living in freedom is always a matter of reaching out to touch in truth with passion. I sometimes wonder if we do that enough, and today when its 20 below in South Dakota and sunny and bright here in the Southland, I think the difference has to do with the demands of the land. Out here we wear sunglasses and only smile if we've had our dental perfection done.

Pork Illustrated

Legalize It

I can't think of any time when I've been convinced that it was a good idea to legalize recreational drugs. I've always rather considered that for the kinds of people who found it worth the risk of flaunting the law to take them in the first place - well two things. Firstly, I can't imagine that they don't get enough of what they want despite the fact that it is contraband. So availability is not a problem. Although I don't know how, it's probably easier to get good weed than get good wine. Secondly, what kind of people would we be listening to anyway?

There are any number of arguments in favor of weed, and I'm fairly sure we've heard them all. What's interesting is that the medicinal argument is likely the weakest. After all, that's where drugs come from, the desire to give us something to fix what's ailing in our bodies. The problem isn't with drug use, but with drug abuse. And this is part of the substance of my argument against the legalization of recreational drugs, but the moral injunction is the better part.

Let's consider the term itself - 'recreational drugs'. What do I mean by that? I basically mean those substances that are, by their very nature, not easily capable of damaging the body. I would think that a recreational drug would incapacitate your ability to use it before it did any permanent damage. In that regard, Helium might be considered a recreational drug. It's non-toxic by nature and after you inhaled too much for the recreational purpose of making your voice sound funny, you'd pass out from a lack of oxygen. Or at the very least get fairly dizzy. It's possible to drink yourself into a coma from alcohol, but you have to try hard. Nobody who drinks a quart of hooch doesn't know they're drinking a quart of hooch. I figure that you can get too high to roll another joint, but plenty of people burn their lips on a crack pipe. That's about the extent of my first and second hand experience. By my definition, cocaine and meth probably don't pass the tests - certainly opium and heroin do not although I'm pretty sure that ecstasy does.

BTW, I broke my nose playing baseball when I was in the seventh grade. And when the doctor set it, I was fortunate enough to get a 'polar bear sized dosage' of morphine. It was because I basically couldn't get emergency service in my neck of the ghetto and it was about 6 hours before the first doctor would see me - so he hooked me up. So I can personally attest to the blissful effects of opiates. I still remember how it made me very happy with the world and how much more I hated it after the high was over. The lesson was not lost on me.

As a first principle, I firmly believe that human beings have the inherent right to make life or death decisions. And so from this principle it could be argued that if people decide to take drugs they're not hurting anyone else. Well, maybe that's true for your parents, but that's because you have Jeeves, Bitterman and Jemima to take care of you while they're out snorting it up in the Hamptons. The rest of us have jobs and a bunch of first person responsibilities and we can't all just take random mental vacations. So you say that's what the weekends are for eh? Fair enough.Then we must admit that taking recreational drugs is, after all, a recreation - one with risks, like skydiving. Hmm, sounds bourgie.

But what about the poor? It seems to me that most of the political arguments against drug prohibition are are behalf of the poor because of the onerous burdens put upon them by the state. The poor, it is argued, need more recreational escape - you can't blame them for taking drugs, you would too if you were poor. (This is an argument I hear from my fellow bourgeois compatriots). And when the poor are busted, they are treated more harshly, and so forth, War on Drugs, crack vs powder sentencing, and so on.

I would be much more accommodating of questions on the restraint of liberty except that I don't particularly find that the moderation in taking of marijuana, for best example, is so very burdened. Which is to say that it is adequately decriminalized already. I rather like the status quo, but I will admit that the specific legitimization of marijuana in America might be just the sort of thing Obama might try to get us out of the recession. And there's not much I couldn't like about such an incredibly bold plan. Everybody knows that if marijuana were legalized, somebody would stand to make billions - somebody public. That somebody would be a new class of American farmer and a lot of old tobacco farmers and their associated industries. So why not?

Well, there's this. If you think people who smoke cigarettes are pariahs, wait until you see how the majority treat potheads, who right now save everybody the trouble by doing their deeds in private. It would be a social calamity far more divisive than red vs blue, worse than black vs white, more devastating than gay vs straight. Trust me on that.

SuperSpade & Black Male Loneliness

A new friend on Facebook hipped me to a series of essays concerning issues surrounding manhood and friendship. It covers a number of bases and makes some excellent observations. Written by a blogger 'SuperSpade', it's worth checking out. Here are some interesting excerpts.

From Part Two

5) We don’t use each other as sounding boards before the jinks goes down. This is because we rarely ever tell our male friends anything of substance unless our plans or mistakes have been obliterated.

6) Unless we have something specific to talk about, we don’t call just to touch base and see what is going on in each other’s life for fear of looking like we are keeping too many tabs on our male friends.

7) We don’t feel comfortable sharing emotions with our male friends because if we even do that to begin with, we typically focus these conversations towards our female friends. We rarely tell our male friends that we appreciate them being there for us when they helped us through that tough situation. Or God forbid, we wouldn’t be caught dead telling our male friends that we love them (look up agape and phileo in the Greek language).

From Part Five

As I stated earlier, whenever I am in a relationship, the woman I am with becomes my best friend. This has its perks but one of the major downsides is trying to express how I feel by prefacing it as a best friend or a boyfriend. One of the biggest issues I have is that I have a tendency to mince my words when I know I want to share something as a best friend but I know that it has the potential to cause confusion on the boyfriend front.

And I have said on numerous occasions, “Listen, you are my best friend and while our relationship is fine, please interpret what I am about to say with your best friend hat on.” More often than not, confusion reigned supreme due to the fact that I was expecting my girl to understand issues only another man would understand.

From Part Six

I can’t tell you how many times I have been in situations where I learned that a friend of mine knew a guy that I knew and I would follow up by saying, “Oh that’s my boy.” It doesn’t matter if I only played basketball with him a couple times or he is my ace boon coon.

One of the major premises I have for creating this series is that Black men have too many boys and not enough friends. As a result, we end up fooling ourselves by calling dudes our boys when most of the time they are just associates.

Good reference and touch points for those sorts of discussions.

My First Gay Dream

Back in 91, sometime after the summer but before I broke up with my girl, she wanted to test me. The fact of the matter included some evidence that she was attracted to the girl next door, so she wanted to know if I might be attracted to the dude next door, or dudes in general. She gave what I consider to be as good an argument as any that we are all parts omnisexual and that it is society that shapes whether or not we can be comfortable with out particular predilections. Intellectually it makes perfect sense, but I think she was trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents.

Since then it has occurred to me in regarding the phrase 'latent homosexuality' that a certain type A personality at some age might consider taking the omnisexual argument to heart. That a certain hardening of self-regard would give one license to take pleasure in whatever flavor desired, critics be damned. Since I myself am something of that sort, I always consider that possibility given various attempts by male friends over the years to test me in other ways. What can I say, I've got the hotness, boys and girls can see it. Except that I'm indifferent to 99% of the boys and girls, I'm married, and I do dig my current position in society. Besides. I'm one of those guys who digs a pastrami sandwich, no matter what other kinds of french dips are on the menu. I know what I like and I'm happy when I get it. No need for experimentation or making any proofs.

It was that kind of attitude made forwardly that has made me the sort of cat who doesn't really have any 'provincial' fetters about talking about whether or not a dude looks good or those 'if I was gay' jocular conversations. In fact, I think that the way I think about men's looks is directly parallel to the way women think about women's looks. Basically I get mad and jealous when I see somebody who looks as good as I think I should look. For what it's worth, at this moment in time that person is Ron Pitts, the TV host of Destroyed in Seconds. Funny, I think he played football with a dude I grew up with.

Anyway, I did have a gay dream last night, but interestingly enough I drew the line in my dream.

As Cobb readers know, I am blessed with the good fortune of waking up every day with a song in my head. This morning it was Spiral by John Coltrane. I didn't know the title until this very moment, never really thought about it. Anyway I also have extraordinarily vivid dreams that put me in bizarre situations. I remember 75 percent of them by morning, but I almost never reflect on them. I take my dreams for granted and I enjoy the hell out of them while I'm in them but pretty much ignore them during the day. For a while when I was deep into Borges, back in 87 or so, I did a bit more with the dream work, but now the boundaries are set.

My favorite kind of dream is the kind in which I compose and perform music. If a machine is ever invented to capture dreams then I will be an even better composer than I am writer. The music in my dreams is really fabulous - you'll just have to take my word for it. I've made some pretty good raps too. My second favorite dream is athletic. Yesterday I had a surpassingly fine dream in which I was playing a kind of sport which was a combination of soccer and basketball in which the players on a grass court about 1.5 times the size of a regular basketball court competed in garb that resembled field hockey. The ball was in this case something about the size of those aerobic two pound dumbbells - it looked like a giant tootsie roll, you kicked it on the ground but you had to slam dunk it to score, but you had to juggle it into the air with your feet under the hoop before you could put your hands on it. My third favorite kind of dream is the sort I usually can only have if I'm not facing down, if you catch my drift.

The gay dream had an odd context. I was part of a military training exercise of some sort, but it had immediately dovetailed onto the end of a daring escape I had made. In other words the guys who were sent to rescue me immediately drafted me into a six man team in which we went through various gauntlets the ultimate one of which was a scuba swim of about 200 yards.  Just before we all stripped down to get into the pipe that led underwater, I noticed that two guys in our party were making out over in a corner. They came back rather apologetically and then the jokes started. Apparently everybody knew that they had a thing for each other and that they were cool with it and wouldn't mind being part of the fun. So I pretended like I was too, but then went overboard into the entire deal. So the two broke out with some penis shaped regulators for the scuba gear. I was just about to go ahead with it and then decided not to.

Now this is not exactly how the dream went, but I can't remember many more details. Aside from the fact that we made a hell of a lot of ass jokes and went seriously into evaluations of each other's asses which in my dream were all shaped exactly like lunchboxes. So I said so and everybody laughed at the joke - except, as such things happen in dreams, I was actually seeing aluminum lunchboxes. As well, the whole regulator thing has been edited somehow - because I can't actually remember the context of how it was suggested that we all walk around with dildoes in our mouths. I simply remember that I was game and then I changed my mind at the last minute.

I woke up from the dream because I had held my breath too long. I actually do have apnea and somehow I managed to only have a snorkel whereas the other guys had the full apparatus. Rebreathers I think because there was enemy shooting above the water and we were supposed to be undetected. No bubbles allowed. That's why I held my breath for all that time. I woke up from the dream suddenly and dozed back into sleep until Coltrane woke me up for good.

As it happens, I wasn't turned on by the gay thing. Or maybe I was and that's why I decided to remember and write this. But I did remark through my dream signal apparatus to my higher consciousness that the acceptance of the dildo was a first. It was in the end a kind of gay liberal gesture - something I could do to prove that I could do it.

I'm particularly aware this week of indulgences. As my correspondence with Fr. Rude continues and I get my Bible assignments, I'm trying to narrow in on the sorts of sacrifices that do and do not count. In a way it is a followup to Magnificent Obsession - how mere manners do and do not contribute to the Christlike behavior we should strive to achieve, how grand gestures of magnanimity do or do not make any difference in the eyes of God. The soundbite angle on it is whether or not Bernie Madoff was doing good. We all know the charities that are suffering because he pulled the rug out from under would-be philanthropists, but for many years it was all going smoothly. Now what. Don't the lives he saved outweigh the fortunes he ruined?

We all make gestures to show we understand, we want to belong, we want to be inclusive. It's very difficult sometimes to know which are self-serving and which are genuine.

Knots as Emergent Behavior

It just occurred to me as I was untangling a rather involved knot in my iPod headphones that knots are a sort of emergent behavior. Immediately, I asked how on earth did this thing get so tangled. The answer was simple, how could it not? The knot is the random tangle that persists. With sufficient time and and agitation, any string will eventually knot. A random end goes around a random middle, but unless it forms a knot, the same agitations will untangle it. This is a simple way of describing evolution.

Oregon Police Shooting Report

The Oregonian found;

Under Police Chief Richard Walker and then Tom Potter, the bureau cancelled all formal training for two years from mid-1989 to mid-1991. Bureau commanders- under pressure to fight gangs, drug dealers and growing violence - decided the city couldn't afford to take officers off the street to put them in classrooms. As a result, officers went two years with no training in firearms, police tactics and how to deal with combative subjects. Two months after he became chief, Potter restored some training - 12 hours of classes in community policing and cultural diversity. Full weeklong training resumed last summer.

The Police Bureau provides little or no special training to help officers deal with mentally unstable people. It also provides little help for officers to control fear when it becomes so over-powering that it warps their judgment or distorts their senses when they have to shoot.

Portland police go 14 months between firearms qualification tests - longer than allowed by any of the major police departments queried by the Oregonian. Shortly after the January 16 accidental shooting of 12-year-old Nathan Thomas, the bureau said it would propose firearms qualification every six months, starting in July.

The bureau's marksmanship standards are low compared to many other cities. Phoenix and San Diego, for instance, won't allow an officer on the street who fails to score at least 84 and 85 points, respectively, in handgun qualifying tests. Portland requires only 75 points on a comparable test. A February list of the Police Bureau's gun qualifications shows that 218 officers, including Chief potter, shot with such modest accuracy that they wouldn't have been allowed to carry a gun in either of those cities.

Throwing the Book

My cousin Rod is a school principal and is over in Facebook thinking out loud of ways to improve the culture of his school. I happen to think that my high school culture was exceptional, oddly enough my suggestion is to ritualize the punishments. The perfect punishment, I think, is The Book.

'The Book' comes from Neal Stephenson's latest, Anathem. The Book is the single greatest punishment, next to expulsion, that a school posseses. It has ten chapters each of which is an order of magnitude more difficult than the previous. You might think of them as a Richter scale of mindquakes. Each successive punishment requires that the next greater chapter is assigned.

What all the chapters have in common is that they are false. The early chapters are false in some simple, even nonsensical way but the later chapters become more sophisticated in their duplicity. When punished, a student is taken out of their routine, sentenced to study say chapters 1 through 4 and sent to solitary confinement until such time they are ready to be examined. When they are complete, they are then to sit before a board of inquiry and tested for their understanding of what The Book says. Should they fail, the punishment is repeated.

Throwing the Book is a twofold lesson. First, the solitary confinement and loss of classtime itself is a punishment. Secondly, the subject knows that everything they are learning from The Book is of no use whatsoever except to fulfill the requirements of punishment. In studying The Book it is clear that one fills their head with nonsense which is taking up valuable time. The later chapters of Stephenson's Book are designed to produce a sort of madness because much of what it resembles is sophisticated logic resembling - heresy in fact. If one were assigned Chapter 8, one might come to believe one is reading the truth and it could undo a life of learning. The longer one must learn the Book, the clearer it becomes that one has sinned against an institution of learning and that the price for that sin is a head full of ignorance. It is the perfect academic punishment.

Such a tortuous Book might not be required for the purposes of my cousin's school. Certainly what we did in our high school as analogous punishment was copy down page after page of names and numbers from the phone book. Meaningless drudgery for hours on end. It was most definitely punishment.

I would suggest such a punishment. Our was ritualized and called 'JUG' for Justice Under God. The other form of JUG was the donning of a yellow or red tattered vest and the assignment of sweeping the grounds of the campus while others were on lunch break. You were essentially a public janitor in a place of higher learning. You were given a short handled whisk broom and a dustpan to insure that you would be stooping on a regular basis. Even the real custodians had the luxury of standing with a normal broom. It had the very same quality of making clear that it cost one's mind in a humiliating fashion, but also that one was in service to the school nonetheless.

This contributes to the school culture in that it was visibly and obviously part of what it takes to run the school. But also because JUG was a ritual pennance that never changed. You knew that your JUG would take one of two forms - yard JUG during school or desk JUG after school. You knew that there was no way out of it, and oh by the way, when you were assigned JUG it was announced over the school loudspeaker before lunch. Everybody in the school knew who was getting JUG if not why.

The Love of Zero Tolerance

I am in regular communication with the Catholics of my youth, one of whom is Father James Rude, a loving affable character who was the bearded priest at my Jesuit prep school during the late 70s. Fr. Rude ran the soup kitchen in downtown LA and taught social justice as one of his courses. By the time I was a senior, his social justice course ran afoul of what I expected it to be - I was horrendously upset and performed an intellectual boycott, refusing to do the work. The details escape me, but I do remember my great disappointment now that I think of him, something I haven't done in over 30 years.

At any rate, we may or may not have begun a correspondence about social justice of the sort I would have liked to have had here in the context of that as a plank for Mr. Obama. He has assigned me to read Matthew 25 which I am about to. I posed the following question:

Given that we understand great differences in the circumstances of people, how does loving one as yourself not become gratuitous charity when one has very exacting standards it is not reasonable for the object of one's love to achieve. If I never smoked a day in my life, wouldn't the love of zero tolerance be onerous to a smoker?

At the back of my mind is the question about whether or not a society of laws serves social justice and where charity and philanthropy meet morals, laws and religious dogma. It goes to the core of an exceptionalism and an expansive foreign policy - on what basis can one society judge another and on what basis in law are the 'conquered' bound to obey given that most of us can't read the law.

'Natural' Constituencies

The center of gravity of my concern today on Farai's show was radicalization.

When the producers called me last week and gave the list of topics, I was somewhat disappointed to hear that we were going to talk about two (more) black men who were shot by police. It's a tired old story. One took place in Bellaire, TX which was incorrectly identified by one of the other guests as an 'all white suburb' and the other in Oakland. I went to Bellaire a couple years ago and it's a largely Asian suburb - a malltown looking very much like those in Southern California's Inland Empire. But you can't stop the old black vs white idea when we run these stories.

The germ of my idea against this assumption of radicalization began when I was listening to Hugh Hewitt take on one of the writers from Slate. Greenwald I think was his name. Anyway he went on about how the residents of Gaza were 'obviously' and 'naturally' going to be radicalized by the excesses of the Israelis. And sure enough this morning, one of the other guests started in with explanations about how this is to be expected in the black community.

But radicalization is not a natural phenomenon. It requires intellectual discipline and leadership. It requires, quite frankly, radicals. These are the ex parte individuals who often call themselves 'community activists' who organize protests and hire people with bullhorns to chant 'no justice no peace'. There is always some leader somewhere with a political agenda, fuzzy and ill-informed as it might be, that is behind these riots. I don't want to sound like Richard Nixon, but he was right when he said that there is a silent majority who are always for law and order and they don't ever want to be parts of the mob.  Even giving these radicals the benefit of the doubt as to their peaceful intentions, how do you square their leadership and responsibility to the community when you get stuff like this:

The mob smashed the windows at Creative African Braids on 14th Street, and a woman walked out of the shop holding a baby in her arms.

"This is our business," shouted Leemu Topka, the black owner of the salon she started four years ago. "This is our shop. This is what you call a protest?"

Wednesday night's vandalism victims had nothing to do with the shooting death by a BART police officer of Oscar Grant on New Year's Day - but that did little to sway the mob.

"I feel like the night is going great," said Nia Sykes, 24, of San Francisco, one of the demonstrators. "I feel like Oakland should make some noise. This is how we need to fight back. It's for the murder of a black male."

Sykes, who is black, had little sympathy for the owner of Creative African Braids.

"She should be glad she just lost her business and not her life," Sykes said. She added that she did have one worry for the night: "I just hope nobody gets shot or killed."

The chances that Nia Sykes is going to vote in favor of candidates who would spend more money on police is slim, but the circumstances around the shooting indicate more money for training is just what's needed to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. But whether or not police improvement of that particular nature is needed, there is some definite responsibility I think writers and journalists need to take when discussing the reactions of people who assemble into mobs.

I think a number of writers irresponsibly contribute to the radicalization of people through their injudicious use of terms like 'oppression' and their arbitrary recognition as legitimate anybody behind a protest or grievance movement.

This idea follows up the slight opportunity for people to take seriously the idea that Obama changes things. I recognize that people are now giving themselves license to believe things about black people that they never did before. When you get words like this:

He continues his commentary: "We are so comfortable defining black in certain ways, in restricting it to the politics of grievance and lament, that we sometimes do not recognize it when it takes other forms. One is reminded how people used to say 'The Cosby Show' was not black enough and never mind all those cultural signifiers, never mind the anti-apartheid sign on Theo's wall, Cliff's penchant for sweaters from historically-black colleges, all those guest appearances from elder statesmen of jazz and R&B, that episode saluting the 1963 March on Washington. Not black? No, what they meant was, this is not the kind of black we expect, not the black of violence, ignorance, poverty and clownishness."

Booker Rising response: As others and I across the ideological spectrum have commented, it's long overdue. The promotion of thuggishness, ignorance, and clownishness as "authentic" blackness is out. Authentic blackness promotes positive culture, about progress and education and staying connected with your family. Stragglers, get in where you fit in and show some class. Oh yeah, young uns, pull up those pants and put on some clothes.

You want to say 'yay' maybe they finally get it. But I think so many Americans have been so pessimistic about race for so long that they forgot what the entire point of change was all about. They kept arguing that black could only be as much as 'subtle racism' would let it be, and completely forgot about the human spirit. So I am likely, when I hear 'how can it be in 2009 that we still have this kind of racism', I'm going to turn that around on the spot. For how can it be 2009 and people still feel limited by it? It is a reductive co-dependence.

Several years ago when I started this blog, one of my axioms was that the Civil Rights Movement is over and the good guys won and nobody is about to turn back the clock. Y'all didn't believe I was serious.

No Hats

Dress code strictly enforced. No hats, oversized jeans, baggies or athletic wear.

There's a new luxury hotel in Las Vegas. It's called Encore and its proprietor is Steve Wynn. I stumbled upon the verbiage looking at his website - he's got a nightclub there called 'Tryst' and he's trying to set the scene.

Something like 68% of American GDP is the consumer economy. The surest way to get any multipliers via economic stimulus is to give cash to Americans and let them spend it in the normal ways they do - which would include wasting it in Las Vegas. Surely Steve Wynn doesn't need to expand - it's already done. He got the financing he needed for his new resort and casino so the crunch doesn't affect him so much. But if nobody shows, he'll start laying off staff and then the real painful part of the recession will begin. That's the great irony here. If the stimulus package doesn't come before people start getting laid off, it's just going to be welfare - keeping people alive between jobs, which won't come because nothing will have been stimulated, except perhaps pay-per-view.

Wynn sure picked a bad time to be exclusive. I think a lot more people are going to be wearing denim in the days to come.

Palm Pre. Uh Oh.

Just when I was about to throw my hands in the air. Palm has done it again. 

Several weeks ago my Treo lunched. It lost all of my contacts and really pissed me off. So I started looking for a new phone, but mostly new excuses to buy an iPhone. Except iPhones don't tether and I'd be stuck with AT&T. I'd much rather get on Verizon, but merely for one reason which is that I'd get better coverage. But that mostly means better coverage at my house which is a Sprint dead zone. I love Sprint's plan - unlimited digital for a simple flat rate, but their coverage leaves me wanting.

The reason my Treo lunched has to do with my PDANet application which stresses it out. Before using PDANet my Treo never ever gave me any problems. It rebooted maybe 6 times a year. But 6 times a day is not unusual when I've got it tethered to my laptop. 

The last phone I looked at, having decided that all of the Verizon phones bite, is the E71 by Nokia. I gotta have a keypad for my texting, period. So I get over to Best Buy just last weekend to put the Nokia in my hands. Yuk. It feels like an eye makeup kit. I mean it looks great but you pick it up and it's too light and too square and too thin. Don't these Nokia guys know anything about ergonomics?  HP figured this out 30 years ago with the 12C. What's wrong with you people? Same thing with the HTC Google Phone. Man those HTC phones look awesome in the glossy print ads and the big billboards at OHare, but when you touch them, the feel like they were made by Hasbro. Hasbro Vietnam that is.

So I have waited several months and have been giving my Treo a second chance and now I'm in luck because this Pre looks pretty awesome, so do the hands-on demos that I've seen. I get the feeling that this might be the phone for me. Now I can just be patient.  

No, You Are Not Well

Lip Dub - Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger from amandalynferri on Vimeo.

Here's where I get to say that there are two kinds of people in the world and otherwise assert with unquestioned certainty that there is something wrong with this picture.

It's not that I have anything against people having fun, lord knows we could use more of that. But, well, isn't there enough fun out there that we know how to get it? Obviously, theirs is a company which makes something appealing to young people with disposable income. Maybe they're a magazine or a marketing firm or a Web 2.0 company. But I'm rather sure that they don't build anything with their hands that's made out of metal, or wood, or vegetable matter. I'm not out of touch with this alternate reality to get the joke of a SILF t-shirt, but there's something honestly confessional about a guy who wears one and spins around Curly-style on the office floor. I read that to be 'If you take me seriously, you're a fucking idiot'. So I take that message to heart, since I pay special attention to people who don't try to bullshit me.

That is, by the way, how I take all youth culture. But there's that question about how much of that sort of thing gets control of what sort of national resources. Old corrupt bastards like Madoff are something we expect, but if we turn these kids loose instead - well. OK I'm being a bit alarmist. There's no freaking way these 147 pound packages of snark are going to change the shape of America - after all, they're lip synching. That's the first sign. I guess there's just an alarm inside of me - call it a Catholic School Bell. How can anybody so unserious have a job in a NY high rise, and what does that say about the bit of the economy that employs them? Granted, I'm the kind of black guy who should have been Jan Brady's boyfriend simply for the purposes of smacking up their idiot family. In real life I think people who spend $50 to ride up a mountain and slide down are an order of magnitude more infantile than those who do it with backpacks for free - and I actually worry about the sanity of backpackers more often than not.

Argh. This is deep. It's reactionary. It's making me say ugly things. Something's wrong here. Why am I so intolerant of unserious, snarky, upscale bohemians in New York? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I'm a parent. Could you imagine one of those kids as your parent?

Well, I need to have a good weekend, so I'll just imagine that they're all gay.

The Death of DRM

It took about ten years but it looks as if the death of DRM is pretty much done. Thank God that's over.

The bell started tolling yesterday as Apple declared that the iTunes store is changing its pricing and removing DRM from here on out. That's superb news, but I think that it was Amazon's MP3, DRM free store which truly signalled the beginning of the end. For the past two months or so, I've basically done all my music downloads from Amazon MP3, which while not as slick as iTunes is faster to find a song. 

All of this change reminds me of what may yet be now that these cats are out of the bag. Which is to say, what about Torrents? 

Once upon a time I tried doing that P2P thing. I don't think I stopped for a good long time. What I found was a whole lot of low quality labeling, odd versions of songs and very little of what I really wanted, especially when it came to classical and jazz. I still have multiple versions of songs in my reasonable good sized library at 96Kbps which indicate to me that I got them from one of the old P2P sources. I was a member of eMusic. I toyed with Shoutcast and of course used Winamp for a long time. WinMX was my P2P client but after a while their servers became too slow and unreliable. I'm sure I was done with it by 2002 or so - but certainly starting in 98 a good 10-20% of my MP3 library was gotten through P2P, the rest through ripping my own CDs. 

Interestingly enough the songs I got P2P were songs that I simply couldn't bear to by the album for, like one or two cuts from Blink 182 or the Offspring. Remember those guys? Yep. I still have it at 128. Title 'Keep em Separated'. But the real name of the song is Come Out and Play. I didn't know until I got the disk some time later. These were the pop songs that I had to have and that I think the industry made the biggest fuss about - the same sorts that kid hackers were interested in. 

In fact now that I think about it, the last songs I P2P'd were those from Soul Coughing back in the days they were all that. I probably went through three or four generations of trying to get their stuff before I gave up and found the CDs. The lessons were learned. P2P was for geeks with no money and lots of patience. When it came to good music, I could come up with the buck - for the pop crap, I'd take the P2P version.

Anyway, I'm on the verge of setting up some multiple servers at Vault 107 (The new name, following Fallout, of my at home IT) one of which is going to be a media server. The lack of DRM is useful just for my own peace of mind. I've got three kids buying music from iTunes and some of that could be simplified. But I'm really interested in the implications of being able to have that kind of dedicated server and now sticking a Torrent client/server type of deally there. For me, I'd certainly want that to be a secured circle of trust for my family rather than a defiant Pirate Bay sort of joint.

It does finally come down to money and whether or not business are smart enough to figure out a business plan with the masses that is adequately profitable *and* accessible. The music market has always been a mass market which was always profitable enough to be DRM free, it's just that in the days of Kazaa and prior, a larger percentage of the market was 'hack capable', and this grated on producers nerves. But a large part of the animosity between this small hack capable community, which was essentially all of Computer Science and IT, was generated because of the perception that these grungy Dot Commers were going to eat the entire lunch of old media - and through the entire irrational exuberence of the era, there was reason to believe they were right. Instead it turns out that only somebody like Steve Jobs could make the right product and that he could do so without being the sort of pompous ass that Shawn Fanning was. In the end, Fanning got millions, but not billions and it was the hedge against the possibility of a Fanning like character eating some company like Viacom that created the legal fudge and farce that is now the legacy of RIAA's bitchslapping Congress into complicit submission.

It wasn't really until iTunes exploded the market base with a user friendly interface and kids like mine started trading iTunes music gift cards, that the mass market grew enough with a large enough balance of 'hack incapable' consumers that the economicsof DRM-free digital music made sense enough to back off the legal horse. This is the market teaching a lesson that the DRM hardliners can now easily learn. Let's not forget how many Groksters have gone bust before now. But I think it is also the buildout of VOD and the big fat price elasticity of digital last mile triple-play which has emerged over the past couple years that is making the industry turn the corner.

I should also say that without Netflix and Gamefly, the entire on-demand model would not have emerged. Those two companies have shown that digital distribution on a subscriber basis can be profitable. The DRM dependence of both models, I think, is a bit overstated. I think that the simple fact is that they proved that the market would scale up larger than big media companies thought on-demand would go. In other words, the VOD buildout by big media companies with or without DRM would not have happened had Netflix and Gamefly not proved something. Yes it's true that video arcades are a thing of the past, but that really was a long time coming.

As for the XBox, Microsoft found a very good pricing model that didn't have to change. For a $300 box, and a $50 annual subscription rate online interactive gaming was always a bargain, even on $60 titles. That is simply because it's worth $60 to get 60 hours (at least) on online interactive gaming, which is actually a lot cheaper than your WoW style PC games. The upside of hacking an XBox was not value, simply geek appeal, whereas the upside of getting the latest Blink 182 single for free against the cost of a CD was big.

People also forget that there are a lot of 'hack capable' ways of getting DRM free music that have been grandfathered into other deals. I could get a high quality audio feed from my cable TV's 200 music channels and rip thousands of MP3s without running afoul of any law.

I, for one, support digital watermarking. Even in a DRM-free world, like the open source world, there should be some easy way to get a certifiable product. I would even support a third party service that would plug-in to a good music or video player. I'd actually pay more for a multimedia client that accommodates such a validation service. But anything that limits my ability to take my collection of digital content anywhere for any reason for the rest of my life? Niente!

I don't suppose I could complete this matter without talking about podcasts and Tivo. The habits of the new generation of digital entertainment consumption are set. The genius of Brandon Tartikoff is a thing of the past. It doesn't much matter what time things are scheduled to be delivered, so long as enough people know that it's coming and it's in-season. The other form of this, by the way, are boxed-sets. So long as I can get a 'boxed-set' of any serial content, its value changes. Companies understood this with regard to movies 10 years ago which is why the accounting of 'ultimates' came into practice. 'Ultimates' accounting value content products based on current and residual cashflows, plus as an asset. I haven't looked at that part of the industry in a while, but I don't think that was a mistake. Podcasts enable not only a long tail, but a longer asset value - so does the Netflix library. But the primary change is that the consumer wants control of where and when. Indefinitely. In other words, the consumer wants all entertainment content in their own cloud and they want it available on demand.

Guys in the software business, like me, understand this. And we sit and watch as it take multiple combinations of companies with small parts of small business models do bits of the big picture over multiple years. It's going to eventually go our way. Why? Because we build the technology.

How Are You Doing?

We Bowens are double dipping this year. The Spousal Unit has taken a gig. We're trying to get ahead of the game and save more moola just in case something ugly happens. I have a good deal of confidence that my company will remain strong through the first half of this year even in the face of disaster - much of the company depends on government contracts in India which is growing and we're still doing acquisitions in our division. So worst case scenario we get zero business in the first quarter, we probably won't layoff until the third quarter.

But according to the Bloombergs I'm listening to a lot of people with global focus are predicting 9+% unemployment and a jobless recovery. I know what a jobless recovery feels like - not good. So you better believe I'm saving for a rainy month or two.

IT is still what's called an early cyclical. That means when recovery hits, IT is one of the first places new money goes. So all I've got to do is get through this year, and no matter how the recovery starts, when I start getting business, that will be the very beginning. Our sales pipeline is fat but slow. We know people want to do stuff, but they're waiting and waiting and waiting. Everybody is waiting for the bottom. So yeah I expect things to slow down to a trickle - we may do 50% utilization and a hell of a lot of training and marketing advance work.

I for one am very interested to see what Obama has in mind for stimulus.

I want to know what you all are seeing out there in your neck of the economy. Is your job threatened? How do you see this thing playing out?

Wicked

Wicked is a feminine play done right. In so many of today's well-meaning attempts to show girl-power it often comes in the form of making men into stupid caricatures and literally giving females the right to be those sorts of powers men abuse. They are not the real powers that spring from genuine talent, rather they are rather like the list of 'white privileges' - things taken for granted but not earned. And so you have female characters in fictions of all sorts pulling antics out of that grab bag of masculine authority and making parodies of themselves. Nothing says this so much as female FBI agents on television breaking in doors ahead of SWAT teams, guns drawn, then saying 'clear!'.

Wicked is the stage production of a nicely complicated backstory to The Wizard of Oz as shown from the perspective of Glinda the Good Witch and Ephelba, the Wicked Witch of the West done as a musical. First and foremost, not having seen a musical myself since... hmm.. a very very long time, I enjoyed the hell out of it. You tend to forget, just watching mainstream entertainment, that there are people who can actually sing, dance, and act. And once you get to see fetching talent on the stage, the magic of theatre can make a simple story marvelous. Such is the case for Wicked which we caught on a serendipitous whim.

In Los Angeles, there are about 5 more performances remaining and if you don't have tickets now, you only have miserable chance of getting a pair on any given night. It just so happens that The Spousal Unit and I took that chance and won the ticket lottery last night at the Pantages. There were 500 folks out there and 26 seats available. Needless to say there was Price is Right drama and excitement as the names were called.

I'd never been to the Pantages in Hollywood. It's very much alive and well - with all the beaux-art trimmings in their restored faded glory. It's a bit smaller than the Village in Westwood, but the same style is evident. The joint was packed and nobody took Visa that chilly night.We had eaten earlier ar Kung Pao Kitty and stopped in for a shot at the Frolic Room which is right next door, but we ended up in the crush for concessions anyway. I got a pocket full of Skittles. I have never eaten so many Skittles in my life. I'm never going to eat Skittles again. Our seats were neck bendingly close to the stage, but considering that we got $200 seats for $25 bucks each, and could see all of the action up close, it was worth it. However, if I had paid $200 bucks to sit that close to the very edge, I would have been pissed.

Yes the costumes were spectacular, yes the musical numbers were very close to memorable, yes the set was very cool and yes there were scenes that bring your average sentimental middle aged, middle class man to tears. But the most remarkable aspect of Wicked is how well it works as revisionist feminist history, something a guy like me tends to reject out of hand. It really could not have worked better.

I tell you that I have lived down here in this affluent seaside community of 67,000 for about 7 years now, and while watching my daughters grow I have not yet been able to figure out the mystery that is the suburban American teenaged girl. But I swear that I have some crackling insights to Miss Goodie Blondeness due to the superb performance of Galinda (with a Gah). As a stereotype, I simply didn't see the appeal. Now I get it. But the story of Ephelba, a talented misfit who desperately tries to do good all her life, well let's not pretend that Wicked bears too much scrutiny, it's a damned good story about women. Better than most.

The Wicked phenomenon is well-deserved. If there were some way you could avoid spending an arm and a leg to take in the production it would be well worth your while. It's unlikely to retain any of its power in a filmed adaptation primarily because what makes it a killer show is the singing of the protagonists, and unless your home studio is as expensive as that at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, you are simply not going to get the extraordinary treat of what a killer soprano voice can do.

Magnificent Obsession

Magnificent Obsession is a cornball flick. It is the sort that I find fascinating too - a tale of morals and manners and altruism. Something the wealthy Americans of the post-war era needed. As a melodramatic overview of our morals and dreams, it's a watercolor work of art. 

Some time this afternoon between my run to Karl's Jr and the Asian Water Place, I was thinking about Islam, and why I don't have a Christian reason to support Israel. The thing that bubbled out of my brain as I merged into the left lane of PCH was that their DNA is not far apart. Oh yes, and it was in the context of why 'The Day The Earth Stood Still' was such a sucky flick. It makes no sense for sentient civilizations capable of engineering that genetically hybrid thing Klatu was to archive Terran fauna at the scale they did. The DNA is simply not that different. If intelligence evolves in an emergent way, then the paths converge - thus the Singularity, thus Judeo-Christian merges with all the sky god religions. The differences aren't so great. Which means that the Klatu aliens were fratricidal, like all them Semites. Our moral instinct is therefore to show the similarities and the differences. And eventually we will. With film.

So Magnificent Obsession, like the Philadelphia Story and several other classic American films I like, are immediately translated by me as a habit I've had since childhood, into a black cast. But while I was watching this one - the only person I could think of as Rock Hudson was in fact Wesley Snipes. He's the only black actor I can think of who can play an intelligent and sensitive badass. Jackson can't do it. Denzel isn't bad enough. Omar Epps could pull it off but you can't make him look big. Delroy Lindo could do it, but I've never seen him do convincing romance. Fishburn is just too damned bumpy. Hmm. I'm fresh out. It leaves only one man, now that I have gone through the lot. Eriq LaSalle. Eriq LaSalle could play a snot nosed millionaire playboy who suddenly gets religion falling in love with... hmm, who's the woman? I suppose it would have to be Angela Bassett done softly, which she could do very well. 

Translating Magnificent Obsession, which has a very subtly Christian undertone, and too damned many ethereal choruses in the background when somebody says something 'profound' into an Islamic themed motion picture would be the job of a proper multicultural artist. I would have thought, way back in 1988 when I got on board that wagon, we'd be knee-deep in that kind of talent by now. Perhaps not until movie production is even cheaper will the industry not be a single file line of ass kissers - meaning some kind of anime something. Perhaps that will be the final great contribution of the videogame industry. Books about manners don't have quite the impact of watching men and women do what they do. Sorry.

You cannot look at Magnificent Obsession and not feel like you're watching, at least you can't from my generational perspective, animated versions of Barbara Ann Bread. (Well what do you know, Googlewhack). OK how about Little Debbie? You know what I mean. You cannot for the life of you imagine these women naked - they had a kind of naive respectability about them which was an affect that in the end actually made them respectable. Everybody in contemporary film and TV is gratuitously naked as compared to Agnes Moorehead, not that she was a romantic figure in this or almost any film - but there she is in this one, the stern and proper nurse; she could very well have been wearing a burka throughout. But you wouldn't mind that because she was supposed to be respectable, which is something we understand at the compiled end of Judeo-Christian-Islamic ethics. Women who aren't sluts shouldn't dress like sluts - or undress like them for that matter. Today it is de-riguer for a woman who is supposed to be attractive to have at least one introductory scene in which she's acting like a model - the introduction of the fiance of the First Son in the new season of 24 is illustrative. The little twat gets petulant because her man wants to spend 20 minutes talking to his old best friend instead of roll in the hay with her one more time. She's liberated. She takes her jollies seriously. 

At least in the 70s feral motorcycle flicks the gratuitous show of boobs was, well more obviously gratuitous. Now we look at women in long dresses as if something has gone horribly wrong with their sense of self. 

This recession could be a very good thing for us conservatives. Sex could become complicated again. Speaking of which, I just caught a bit, while falling awake and asleep of Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, and it suddenly seemed completely obvious how men and women of his temperament could talk their ways completely out of marriages. It's astonishing when I looked at those arguments between drooping my head down, how emotionally unsuited for anything approaching marriage those pathetic souls were. I'm going to get through those again and give myself the comfort of knowing I undid myself well. When I was 13 and watched 'Billy Jack' I didn't realize that was a rape scene. It seemed kinda cool. I figured that's how it went, you know, now that pre-marital sex is OK. After all, it's the 70s and everything is better now than in the old-fashioned days. More freedom!

Rock Hudson was, of course, homosexual. We all know this in hindsight because we're supposed to. And it was a secret in Hollywood, or an open secret or something, because it was supposed to be. And films like Magnificent Obsession poured a great deal of time and effort into demonstrating how a fool who expects everything from the world might become a wise man who contributes instead, and how difficult it is in that kind of moral world to find love. True love worth pursuing. For our hero it takes years. But how is the sex? Isn't that the bottom line - how did Rock do it? How did Jane Wyman do it? Wouldn't it be interesting to know that Rock and maybe that other hunky guy were doing it? That's what enquiring minds want to know these days. Because 'how is the sex' is what the question is all about, if you can find out. Which is why a smart producer would keep the details of his actors' sex lives under wraps. At least that's how it used to be when in the years like 1956 when they still made movies about true love, ethical true love that takes years to achieve back when women wore elbow length gloves and strings of pearls that never suggested cleavage. All the 'how' about sex was still generally a private matter between respectable people. You could make those kinds of movies today in an Islamic nation I bet. 

What is America's Magnificent Obsession today? It's such a catchy title that you want to just send your lawyer to talk to their lawyer so you can use it in a commercial about underwear or high cholesterol foods. If I had to guess, I'd say that Radiohead gets it right in that song Creep. 

I don't care if it hurts 
I want to have control 
I want a perfect body 
I want a perfect soul 
I want you to notice when I'm not around 
You're so fucking special 
I wish I was special 

But I'm a creep 
I'm a weirdo 
What the hell I'm doing here? 
I don't belong here 

We've been convinced. Well, I don't mean me in that we. You've been convinced, my beautiful Americans, that you're not good enough - that the complexities in your life are your fault. That if you could just win that game show, if you could just... You know. The next movie I'm going to write about is THX 1138, and the preview is that what they do is that they confess. You know. The people. They confess to a god they can probably guess does not hear them, but they confess anyway. 

Americans don't confess. We obssess. 

We keep looking for a perfect way out. We keep trying to make ourselves better, holier, stronger, faster, smarter, more ethical, more *something*. Because the guy next door disgusts us. He drinks the wrong beer, and those pants! What is he thinking? There's judgment out there, America. The world is judging us, right? And when the shit comes down, I don't want them to think I'm like you. Sooner or later the shit's going to come down, right? And we're going to be all wrong - I mean look at all the *stuff* we've taken from the planet. That's what makes us all wrong, right? 

I'm toying with you. Sorry. What I want you to do is confess your sins. To yourself is ok. And then give yourself permission to go ahead and feel content. Rock Hudson and Eriq LaSalle, they had to prove it to Jane Wyman and Angela Bassett. And the Jews and Muslim stars of the same film had to prove it as well. And once we saw them prove themselves worthy of true love, with all their clothes on, somehow the fact that everybody in the film was stinking affluent or stinking rich didn't smell so bad. It's an old story about how somebody who is achieves noblesse. It's rather about exceptionalism. Exceptionalism still counts - it always has and it always will. It's in our DNA and our DNA converges over time. Somebody just has to take a little extra time and translate, or run parallel versions in our imaginations. 

I had nothing else to do and I wasn't sleepy so I decided to let you in on that. 

What's Wrong With Public Schools?

There is probably no better place to kick off a rip roaring discussion which is central to the quality of life in America than on the subject of public primary and secondary education. Why don't we jump into that bear trap here at Cobb?

There are several big ideas that come to mind when I talk about public schools, but I'm going to start with giving my background and I would like others to do the same, because I think it can put a lot of things in context. I'm going to spend most of my argument speaking about what I want and expect for my own kids as they go through the system and what I've learned from my experience, then I'll talk about what I think could be improved for my own district and why I think that should be a standard. I do this with much of Malcolm Gladwell's recent book Outliers in mind.

I went to a public elementary school that was all black in the late 60s. I then attended a Catholic middle school, also all black and in the 'hood and then a Catholic prep high school which was a broad mix of classes and ethnic backgrounds, much more like the city overall, but no girls. 

Anyway as I've said many times here. My wife and I decided to live in California primarily so that our kids could grow up to be near their cousins of the same age. That was the biggest factor in deciding where we would live - that we would have extended family all around. Similarly, my brothers and sister all moved out of the hood to more accomodating communities for their own and family lives. While my kids were in pre-school ages we were all within a 20 mile radius for my parents' 10 grandchildren. The next choice was, because of our finanical situation and the cost of living in California a choice between renting & public school in an upscale neighborhood, or buying & private school in a low rent neighborhood. This was the second most important strategic decision. We chose the former although we started most seriously considering the latter. There were three big factors in our choice and they had to do with our perceptions of the public parks and their programs, the weirdness of the local private schools and their costs, and the districting rules for public schools. 

It turned out that it didn't take us much time to figure out that if you wanted your kid to get music instruction or any special benefit classes on the chance that they might excel, you basically faced a lottery. Everybody knew which schools had the foster children and which had the gifted children's program. I say 'everybody' meaning, picky parents like my wife and I could nose around and find out what's what. The limited resources made the structure of the schools into a game, which is why the lottery existed. 

I am convinced that the ethics of multiculturalism and the dominance of collegian manners in our society (which happen to coincide with liberal if not progressive politics) have added to the kind of confusion about what the proper role of secondary education should be, and some of that has leaked into the primary grades as well, but not as significantly. 

What kinds of things should public education do well that it is not doing? What kinds of things does it actually accomplish well that don't need rethinking? Where are the major controversies about the performance of public education? What works for you?

Strange Days 2009

As some of you know, some fraction of the value of this blog is that it carries context with it. Some of it is historical and some of it is in real-time opposition, contrast and synergies in the comments. But something just came up that makes me think of the historical - although it is outside the blog. It's the movie Strange Days.

Strange Days was the first DVD I ever purchased. I remember because of the coincidence of it being about a new way to consume information. For those of you who don't know, it's a story that centers around a sort of drug dealer who deals in memories. There is a device, in 1999's future according to this film released in 1995 but made many years earlier in the wake of Rodney King prior to the LA Riots.... This device allows one person to experience another's thoughts. So the whole film has this anticipatory feel to it, anticipation of social collapse which was in the air during those days. I would say that this was the last film that I took very seriously as illustrative of the sort of doomsday Y2K millenarian social breakdown of the sort that my bete noir Nulan continues to anticipate.

In one of the opening scenes to set that stage, the protagonist aptly played by a shaggy Ray Fiennes drives down Hollywood Boulevard as the radio voiceover speaks of school shootings, expensive gasoline, teetering economy. We see the LAPD as paramilitary enforcers with APCs on the street, roving gangs and somebody mugging a Santa Claus. The entire point of this in the film is to play up the sense of a powderkeg society - and Fiennes finds a memory tape that documents the execution of a political rapper the equivalent of Chuck D at the hands of the LAPD as well as the brutal rape and murder of a prostitute who was a witness. Obviously - take Rodney King to the nth degree, with multiple rapes and murders and have the evidence all on full sensory tape and you have the perfect storm for revolution. The tale of intrigue surrounding the discovery of this evidence is the story. Everything was thrown in the mix.

As a young progressive, this was the kind of cultural production that got all eyes burning. As it happened, I took this film particularly seriously because I was aware of it as it was being made. There was a call for extras - they needed a multicultural mix for a climactic scene. I and my girlfriend were hyped to participate, but she more than me. She answered the call and related some controversy about the ending as communicated to her by Angela Bassett who stars in the film. As you could imagine, back in those days, progressive politics tried to intervene in the very process of making such a film.

Fourteen years later I squeamishly sat through the brutality of this film with an eye towards placing it in the context of 'feral motorcycle films' of the 70s days of malaise. Yet it stands up to time very well as a fine litmus test of several tropes I deal with in the crossfire of political debate today.

I expect that the themes of this sort of film will be explored again. I find it an interesting take on the future of the past - in terms of explaining what people used to think, or perhaps what some people always think. The film avoided being preachy in that it didn't portray any of the main characters as everyman. Surely the suburbs and ordinary middle class seemed to disappear into a Los Angeles that looked like a rave turned inside out, but like most action thrillers, there isn't much for ordinary people to do except stare with their mouths open - to be innocents and marks, people who get pushed out of the way on the stairs during chase scenes. So you can argue that Strange Days is not social commentary about the way we will be living. But does anybody give films like this such an easy way out. I think not.

Have you seen it?

Leon Panetta: Competent

Of course I would rather have the title Leon Panetta: Adept. But perhaps this is Obama's way of showing everyone that he's not going to do anything extreme or forceful, but merely competent. No doubt, competence is what we need, now more than ever. But it would be nice (wouldn't it?) if BHO had an ace or two up his sleeve. 

It clear that a lot of the spooks aren't impressed with Panetta and so it is likely that the chronic problems we have in Intelligence are going to continue to simmer for the next four years. But mediocrity seems to be all we can expect from the strategic muddle of disorganization that is the American intelligence community. 

So while I don't expect much from Panetta, I think I can trust him not to screw things up worse than they are already screwed up. That said, it was Rahm Emmanuel who characterized the Clinton White House as the most scattershot organization he'd ever seen in government. I can't imagine that the fence between he and Panetta is mended, so my inside baseball hunch is that Obama may be dismissive of the entire intelligence agency aparatus and that he intends that State will give him all the flavor he needs. After all, he was 'right' on Iraq all along, wasn't he?