Cobb

Obama Speaks on Iraq

Obama's speech to Marines at Camp Lejune was on the radio the other morning, and I heard what sounded like the majority of it on my commute. It is perhaps the most I've listened to him since Saddleback, which is basically more than five minutes. Somehow, this time he didn't annoy me into shutting him up.

Listening to Obama reminds me a lot of how extraordinary Bill Clinton is as a politician. Bill Clinton spews very intelligent and logical rhetoric. Obama sounds mushy by comparison. Clinton's words work on surface emotions with quick political effect whereas Obama appears to want to go for emotional tectonic plates. He's tranquil but always letting you know how deep he is, which is why I find him so disturbingly effaced when he reverses course and buries his political liabilities. It's something I'll have to get accustomed to just in order to hear him out. Since I care a lot and spent quite a bit of time learning about Iraq I did hear him out.

On Iraq, Obama wasn't exactly saying nothing and talking loud but the things he said sound all pointed back towards Americans who simply disagreed with Bush on everything rather than to Iraqis. He clearly comes across with a paternalistic attitude towards the poor bastards who suffered through all the killing of war which he linked to every war in sad resignation. In Obama's version, the entire Iraq war is shaped into a tragic kind of sacrifice that nobody really wanted - a purposeless accident of human failure in general but from which honor emerges nonetheless. And so there was no mention of any goal of war except the toppling of a dictator for which he gives America back-handed credit. The honor is in the suffering and the sacrificing, not in the courage or the vision. And so he offered relief for the suffering and sacrifice of the American troops in the form of higher pay and benefits, but he offered no courage or vision.

For the Iraqis, his message is clear. It can best be summarized thusly, you're on your own, you're not so special any more our efforts in regional diplomacy are our new priorities, you've used our guys long enough. No new military, just new diplomats. And by the way we're talking to everyone because our idea of progress is like that. He offered some vapid statements about 'cradle of civilization' and 'two great rivers' like some eighth grade book report which were stunning in their departure from any specifics about who from his team was actually doing what in Iraq. It was a statement of exhaustion of a kind of shaking the cobwebs out of the head of a downed boxer, saying what am I doing here in round 10? OK, round 12 I'm out of here. It is exactly the expression of an impossible and undefinable victory - a logical, pragmatic best-laid plan of escape.

Obama offered weary troops visions of engraved markers on bridges and town squares with yellow ribbons, a new GI bill and a salutory welcome home to cheers and applause. He made examples of young heroes cut down in brave defense of their fellows and called them by their first names. It would have been interesting to see his face as he did so.

This is Obama's forte, delivery of the promises of long andticipated succor and relief. So long as his teats are full of the milk of domestic revenue and diplomatic sweet-talk, they will bounce enticingly. How long? 

Obama sidled up to a hard line against a nuclear Iran. 

This reflects a fundamental truth: We can no longer deal with regional challenges in isolation. We need a smarter, more sustainable and comprehensive approach. That is why we are renewing our diplomacy while relieving the burden on our military.

That is why we are refocusing on Al Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan, developing a strategy to use all elements of American power to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, and actively seeking a lasting peace between Israel and the Arab world.

Yesterday it was Dan Carlin who suggested the difference between Republicans and Democrats in foreign policy worked something like this. The Republicans send out a swaggering steely eyed gunslinger who says out loud in broad daylight, if you don't do what we want I'm going to kick your ass. It's like showdown at the OK Corral, eyeball to eyeball with everybody watching. The Democrats send out a wealthy, fickle ingenue who waltzes the opponent out of public view into a back alley and whispers in their ear if you don't do what we want I'm going to kick your ass. It's a transparent game of Mutt and Jeff spanning administrations. Under such conditions, countries should best desire to be left alone, except that our gunslingers and ingenues are irresistible. The problem is that one is left with the idea that Obama comes to the realization of a nuclear Iran a bit late. Four years of sweet talk to Iran, badmouthing Israel and seducing the Saudis and Syrians could be a genuine naivete the effect of which stretches American patience to the breaking point. A canny Obama could set up the perception that anyone who refuses his offers will never get a better deal from Americans. The problem is that he's not explicit enough to do anything but signal that dialog is in order.

Not that the economic homefront is giving him time to do all that.

Obama continues to indicate to me that he can throw money and kind words at every problem. It's the kind of responsibility he believes in. And so we're off to Afghanistan.

A Boohabian Retrospective

(from the archives July, 1998)
Posted without comment

Boohabian Q&A
	Perhaps the supreme irony of black American existence is how broadly black people debate the question of cultural identity among themselves while getting branded as a cultural monolith by those who would deny us the complexity and complexion of a community, let alone a nation. If Afro Americans have never settled for the racist reductions imposed upon them -- from chattel slaves to cinematic stereotype to sociological myth -- it's because the black collective conscious not only knew better but also knew more than enough ethnic diversity to subsume those fictions. -- Greg Tate
Edited by M.D.C.Bowen last updated July 11, 1998

---

Boo Who? - Who or what is a Boohab?

Well properly speaking, a boohabian is a prophet of phlow, but I borrowed the term from lyrics by a group called the Broun Fellinis, whom I estimate have created the greatest leap forward in the hiphop/acid jazz genre with thier album Afrokubist Improvisations. Their music represents to me, a post-racial ethics which is thoroughly and intelligently suffused with the best of American soulful traditions. I appropriated the name 'boohab' and called him an 'organic hiphop metaphysician'.

In cyberspace, I am known as boohab to hundreds of folks who act and react in webchat. There are several major fora, Cafe Utne, Slate Fray, Salon Table Talk, Electric Minds, SF Chronicle's Gate & Gravity. In these areas and others I have taken it upon myself to serve as a catalyst and facilitator of discussions of race. I've been doing so pretty much since their inception (with the exception of the Gate), and before them at The Well, Compuserv, Delphi and Usenet's S.C.A.A. Boohab is sort of the thinking person's Kibo of Race.

Here's something I wrote in 1994 it's probably the best way to describe what my orginal goals were with regard to black cultural production in cyberspace.

everything i do in cmc is an experiment in blackness as a post-modern concept. i am futzing with identity in cyberspace and trying to figure out what happens to your race when people cannot see you, hear you or smell you. (hee haw). everybody knows that you have some freedom in computer mediated communications (cmc) to choose who you be. if i choose to be black, how would i express it? if i choose to be white, how? why? what can i say in cmc that i would never say face to face? what silences are overcome w/ respect to racial issues, which are created?

i am extending the hiphop aesthetic to cmc and i propose bSpace as a black cultural exponent and concept in cmc. i am working with a few folks to create that space over time. some of that will happen in the cool zone. i have been reading all of the major literature (or so i think) about cmc and cyberspace and i must say that socially destructive white punk kids get about 3 orders of magnitude more press and critical attention than black folks. likely the best book on the subject is by howard rheingold, 'the virtual community - homesteading the electronic frontier' and we exist as blacks soley on page 144, in the same paragraph as ufo fanatics. also 'the metaphysics of virtual reality' by michael hiem inscribes the very ideas of *why* cyberspace in a 'eurocentric' framework.

as an organic intellectual, i challenge these as they relate to the possibilities of black identity in cmc. we all know who created it and we generally know why and what they had in mind when they did so. now that the i-way is opening up to the general yuppy public, what happens? what changes? when people bring their desires to cmc, it will be transformed but i investigate empirically what it is now and how that changes as black folks join up. i remain primarily focused here in usenet because it is open to the public, whereas i would find it much more enjoyable to hang out in more private areas. what do black folks say in private areas that they don't say here? what do they say here that they dont say privately? why are black people in cmc at all? what motivates them to use the technology? these are very important questions to me because i have been making a living doing computer work for many years and clocking big dollars in a culture that hardly expects me to...

The Man Behind the Boohabian Curtain - How old are you? What is your educational background?

A: I was born in southern California in 1961. I was a bright but bored student one year ahead of all my peers through Jesuit prep school. I dropped out of college twice, once from the electrical engineering program at USC because I couldn't afford it, and once from the computer science program at Cal State because I wanted to get rich, and I trusted the wrong kind of people to help me.

Thumbnail sketch:

• Family Man
• Alpha
• Republican
• Episcopalian
• B.I. Geek
• Writer
• (soft) Black Cultural Nationalist

Why Race?- Did you get into it with the goal of using the internet to further racial progress, or did that come later? or does your perspective as a black man in the us and your socio-political views mean that all of your activities are engaged in with that as an ultimate goal?

A: I was never really interested in race-relations, per se. as far as I was concerned, blacks and whites who wanted to get along would do so with no further assistance from me. my original artistic motivation was to 'save hiphop'. At the outset, I imagined that CMC would provide a new media which would extend the hiphop aesthetic to sampling multimedia, especially historical texts. I was very excited by the possibility of hyperlinking very dense lyrics a la public enemy to a kind of chomskyesque deconstruction. for me it was experimenting with writing and creating a new style. I thought of it as a mix of Cornel west crossed with Spaulding Gray crossed with George Clinton with a sprinkling of Rudy ray Moore. that was the artistic side.

The other side was the grass roots organization side which could be described in the dynamic we call the 'hookup'. Coming out of the guerrilla video / self-representation school, I thought it absolutely critical that black communities have their own public backchannel which would correct mainstream media distortions as well as directly inform blackfolks everywhere of models of success. Specifically, I believed that every black community organization which would consider publishing a newsletter would publish to the web. that was my webmaster/political angle. the bottom line impetus for that was the misrepresentations of the la riots, American provinciality and what I call the "semiotic swamp". Here is my original working document which outlines The Melioration Project.

It turned out that only a very few places on the Internet sustained the kind of bandwidth for the interactive hiphop provocation, and very few grassroots organizations were ready willing or able to get online. This was 1993, so I waited.

As I wandered the Internet deserts looking for fertile soil I ran smack into any number of hostile tribes. their hostility was often born of ignorance, and direct resistance to bringing the stochastic subjects of race to the sweet determinism of Internet purity. in the end, I found all of my more elevated sensibilities about black cultural production falling on deaf and/or intentionally plugged ears. So I needed to create a website.

I ultimately got hooked into anti-racist politics as a means to enabling all Americans to understand the context for why anyone would be purposefully black, as boohab is. Anti-racist activism has its own intrinsic value in the context of a democracy, and it is certainly a compelling thing to do, but in one way I got into it because I couldn't get a broad enough cross section of people to understand the context of my project to extend hiphop. Furthermore hiphop hit rock bottom, and Cornel West published 'Race Matters'. I felt that the opportunity to do in cyberspace what Spike Lee had done in film or what Anna Devere Smith had done in the theater was still there, but would not reach a critical mass who could comprehend the flavor.

My perspective as a black man is deeply rooted in the prerogatives of the group formerly known as the talented tenth and the post-soul generation. I am very much a part of a part of African American culture which is rarely ever shown to, much less understood by the American mainstream. I despair of its representation, even though there are some artistic works that come close to describing the flavor. but what I do in cyberspace is not about me, all my net writing is a creation, a pedagogical device; it's all purposefully lowercase. so in creating boohab, I try never to get personal or to personalize. it means nothing to me, as a black man, to be understood/accepted. boohab is pure politics, but with some artistic flavor. boohab in that respect represents the public citizen in me - it allows me to be 'derrick bell' without putting my name in jeopardy, sort of like 'TRB'. boohab rarely engages outside of the subjects of race. I have disciplined my whole reason for being in cyberspace to continue the work of boohab, which will (with any luck) soon come to a close.

Musical Moments

I am bound to follow up on the discussion of the music that made me, the albums that I obsessed over in my youth. There's just stuff that has to be said by me as a writer about music, so much of my life I had arguments in silence with Robert Hilburn of the LA Times, and now I'm out here not talking about it. What's wrong with me? Time to turn that boat around.

We start at the top with The Last Poets - This is Madness. Along with Moms Mabley, this is an album I found in Pops collection that I probably wasn't supposed to find because it was filled with cursing. It must have been one of those long summer days when I was bored to death and started poking around in the bookshelves, and I come across this album with a bright interior. And the words! The words just lept of the page searing my consciousness - I never saw them written down before. Imagine the nerve of such people, talking about revolution and here it all was. Now my father liked Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, The Four Freshmen and Nancy Wilson. Now that I think of it, I can probably recall a great number of his favorite records, including the transparent red vinyl of Peter and the Wolf he got for me. But seeing this in the bunch was too much. Of course I memorized the killer track Mean Machine and still remember snippets like 'automatic pushbutton remote control, synthetic genetics command your soul'. It was difficult for me to understand how this record could exist - it was pure uncut revolution on wax - who turned the other way at the record factory? And look at those black Africans on the cover. They were beautiful and powerful with big afros and fire. It was the coolest, most subversive, thrilling thing that could be. Just listening to it gave me thrills. I don't know if I ever let my father know that I knew that he had this album. It was that powerful.

All N All- Earth, Wind and Fire. I found All N All on the downstroke. The album had been out for years, I'm sure, before I actually purchased it. In fact, I lived a relatively impoverished life with music. It wasn't until I was around 19 with my first real fulltime job that I was anything more than a slave to the radio and the tape deck. I remember the cassette I owned with a piece of 'Be Ever Wonderful' that cut off suddenly and began to play backwards. I fell in love with half a song and played it for years not knowing the rest since it had fallen out of radio rotation. So when I finally got the album it captured me completely. One night at USC as a tender frosh, I got to dance the perfect slow dance to 'Would You Mind'. Ahh where did you go? How many hours have I spend staring at the artwork of this album? But the great personal triumph and impression was 'Runnin'. This was a completely new discovery, the kind of jazz I was just beginning to appreciate. I don't know what the term is for that transition they did with the horns and voices in the middle of the song, but it blew me away. Runnin' is probably the first song I knew that made me comfortable with multiple tempos in a single performance. If you don't understand me, it's your fault.

Dirty Mind - Prince. When Prince's first album 'For You' came out, I wanted to be Prince. When Prince's second album came out, I didn't want to be Prince any more, but I could see maybe how I might try something as crazy as riding naked on a horse. When Prince's third album Dirty Mind came out, I just stood there with my mouth open. See, I could handle the blistering guitar and screaming of Bambi. It was way cool to be into that - it was pushing the envelope. But Dirty Mind didn't only rip up the envelope, it burned down the post office. Yes, 1999 was a much richer and more rewarding album, and Controversy lived up to its name. But Dirty Mind was the album that had a much bigger impact. To say that you were a fan of Prince before he became the huge success that he was by Controversy was to take a serious risk. I took the risk. 

Majesty of the Blues - Wynton Marsalis. Wynton came along right at the perfect time. As soon as I read up on him, I purchased Think of One. We were born in the same year and he spoke directly to that part of me that was respectful and arrogant at the same time. I dug him on that album, played it to death and then even more with Black Codes from the Underground. And then with Herbie Hancock's Quartet my favorite jazz ballad for a long time would become 'I Fall In Love Too Easily' featuring a melancholy Wynton that betrayed something I hadn't heard before. JMood, years later broke through but it wasn't until Majesty of the Blues that he connected with me on a gutbucket level. The astounding Death of Jazz just brought me low. I determined that this was going to be the song they played at my funeral. And then with Premature Autopsies, I had words that connected me emotionally to all the things that jazz and the black soul in America symbolized. It was an album which was a soundtrack to my pathos, and it put me on a road to a more robust feeling of something ancient flowing in my blood.

Tutu - Miles Davis. Nobody wants to say so, but Tutu is the greatest hiphop album ever recorded. It wrecked jazz for good by bankrolling Kenny G, 94.7 The Wave and every jazz artist desperate to escape for bebop. It may not seem like it but it's true - just nobody wants to say so. Miles went the length whereas with Youre Under Arrest, he was just playing. But in Tutu is a reinvention that showed everyone that the masters can work with the sixteen beat and that Herbie wasn't just out there freaked out. The nerve of Miles to do a Scritti Politti tune just completely solidified everything I had been out in the wilderness saying back in the days when I wanted to scratch Hey 19 and put some meaty beats under a jazz arrangement. I got a chance to see Miles around that time down in San Juan Capistrano. It was phenomenal.

Obligatory Seriousness on Obama's Use of the Word 'Responsibility'

It's easy to think clearly when you assume the worst in politics and then ignore the whole beast. So I follow economics instead of policy, seeing that policy is lunacy. I'm working on not subjecting myself to the ungodly torture that is cognition of the word 'responsibility' coming out of the piehole of the man responsible for an imminent multi-trillion dollar deficit. I'm merely awaiting a modern reincarnation of David Stockman.

In the meantime, there is some enthusiasm in finding Martin Peretz coming to his senses over his latent recognition that Obama is quite content to be appointing Saudi tools as diplomats. Which is to say that there's the distinct probability that so-called thinkers on security in the Obama Administration are indeed surrender monkeys with 'America Last' tatooed on their pudgy asses.

Carnap, Occam, Utility, Emergent Behavior & Thermodynamics

Looking up an old college professor I used to hang out with, I ran into one of his peers. He brought forth Carnap, a name I haven't heard since my days at State.

Carnap tends to evade the traps of epistemological confusion with the notion of utility. Carnap's razor, as contrasted with Occam's is conservative of utility, whereas Occam's tends to dismiss complexity. I happen to think Carnap's is a better system for determining the value of a knowledge framework, however there are two things missing I think.

In the observable universe there are several dynamics that I think need to be taken axiomatically. The first is that of the net energy of a system. The second is the role of emergent behavior, or 'one-wayness'.

In every aspect of human behavior and of the behavior of objects in space, there must be some energy used in order for change to occur. The amount of change is directly proportional to the amount of energy expended. This applies to all things. You cannot instantly understand calculus any more than you can instantly transport yourself to a position in space one mile away. So whether or not you are configuring your thoughts or your body some effort is required. The question of free will vs predestination figures in this. You may have free will to make the choice of climbing Everest, but unless and until you climb Everest, there is no change. The decision to clime Everest may take 1/2 calorie of effort in your mind, but to configure your mind and body to actually accomplish the deed takes a great deal of energy. There are also limits to the way that energy must be applied to your mind and body in order to accomplish the task. It is in this manner that one must also evaluate the knowledge framework of Climbing Everest.

It may take, the average man 200 hours of reading and research into mountaineering to be adequately mentally prepared. It might take him an addition 200 hours of exercise and physical conditioning to accomplish minimum fitness for the task. Each of these energy factors are determined in some way by external factors as well as the man's pre-disposition to the framework of Climbing Everest. In another, less fit or less mentally capable person these 400 hours would be insufficient. Indeed our ideas of what a 'superhero' might be depends upon our understanding of the amount of time and energy such a being can absorb in order to climb a mountain. It might take Superman equally 1/2 calorie of effort to decide to get to the top of Mt. Everest, but because he is super he can immediately generate the energy needed and get there in 15 minutes under his own power. Whereas a mere mortal would need to spend money, thereby leveraging other external powers, to fly him into the country, purchase supplies and equipment, hire assistance, etc. We might simplify this into a thermodynamic equation and say that it requires 30Kilowatts of energy to climb Everest with the understanding that no human being could absorb that much energy in 15 minutes. Their body would be destroyed. And yet 30KW could launch some inert projectile to that same height and location. Free will is thus externally constrained by physical and intellectual circumstances, energy and time must be applied in order for a single human, or a society to accomplish change. When we speak of this in terms of societies, we speak in terms of economics.

So it is not merely enough to consider the utility of a knowledge framework, one must consider its efficiency in terms of the thermodynamics and economies of accomplishing change. The razor then gets more complex, but also more accurate in describing what the costs are associated with maintaining the utility of the framework. It is not merely the intentionality of the framework that is to be judged in the context of better or worse, but the cost.

Now there are certain other axioms of the natural world that serve to make a framework of knowledge more or less efficient. That is the 'one-wayness' of certain natural phenomena. The most obvious is the passage of time. There is no amount of energy a human might possess to stop, slow or reverse the passage of time. Einstein theorized (after the use of an enormous amount of mental energy) that a human being or object travelling near the speed of light would experience time differently and we can take that for what it's worth. However it must be understood that it take an enormous amount of energy to get a human near light speeds even if that speed is relative to another object.

Another type of one-wayness is what I would call non-adaptive emergent behavior. The perfect example of this is knots of string. If you apply random energy to a string, say by leaving it in your pocket all day and periodically putting things in and out of that same pocket. It is very likely at the end of the day that the string will have knots in it. This is the essense of evolution. Certain things, even with randomness have meaning. As the old saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day. I would add that if it's moving quickly backwards (with energy) it is right more than twice a day, and if it's moving slowly forwards it might not be right once in a whole day. The efficiency of a knowledge framework also depends upon its ability to make use of such non-adaptive emergent behavior and one-wayness of natural phenomena.

We might say that the numbers between 2 and 4 might not be 'real', but human beings have developed number systems over the ages. It makes sense for a new knowledge framework to make use of numbering systems that already exist - that have evolved in the collective human experience as randomly jostled as it may have been by the energies of the universe. It then makes sense to observe that strings will knot and humans will count. Frameworks built upon these natural one-way phenomena will be more efficient. That is not to say that knots won't be untied or humankind could not be reduced to innumeracy, but both of these would require focused and directed ... what? You guessed it. Energy.

There are all sorts of ways of thinking through philosophical questions that are made plain, I think, with this thermodynamic context.

As I mentioned at the top, I speak about the net energy of a system. This means that knowledge frameworks require a certain amount of constant energy to maintain their state. If people stop going to university to study philosophy, only certain low-energy observable philosophical understanding will be maintained in humanity - common sense if you will.  It took me only about 20 minutes to write this document, but these are things I've been thinking about for a long time. Now that I can save it to the web, with the assistance of your attention and the many subscribing entities to this space, it may persist in an easily accessible form. With any luck it will meet with its appropriate criticism, some additional energy will be spent in rebuttal and we might craft an even better understanding.

Self-Destruction

Brooks, Black Engineers & Epistemological Modesty

Not long ago, I lamented the fact that although I've been following David Brooks since 'Patio Man', I had never heard him mention Oakeshott and like conservative thinkers. Today as he speaks of those and others, I remember something about my own journey that puts me in the conservative camp.

These experiences drove me toward the crooked timber school of public philosophy: Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin, Edward Banfield, Reinhold Niebuhr, Friedrich Hayek, Clinton Rossiter and George Orwell. These writers — some left, some right — had a sense of epistemological modesty. They knew how little we can know. They understood that we are strangers to ourselves and society is an immeasurably complex organism. They tended to be skeptical of technocratic, rationalist planning and suspicious of schemes to reorganize society from the top down.

When I met the man who would be one of my closest friends we clashed almost immediately. The year was 1983 and I was a sophomore at State. I was a fairly newly minted leader in NSBE, the National Society of Black Engineers, a hugely successful undergraduate organization. The occasion was the annual Camping Conference at which we would perform a kind of drop squad maneuver on a couple hundred inner city youth. That year I had been elected to be Head Counselor and I was holding a meeting to discuss themes and agendas. My idea over which I and 'Moleman' collided was 'Engineers of Black Society'. Moleman looked at me like I was some alien species dropped on his lap, oddly fascinated but truly disgusted. I compromised.

But I did not compromise my belief that we were indeed working out those things that all us Talented Tenth had been put on this earth to do, which was to lead the masses of underprivileged blacks out of the ghetto and into the Promised Land. And of course there was no controversy in the aim at all, but the ethics of the situation demanded that we didn't just blurt it out so obviously. Nobody expected that black ghetto kids would amount to anything if other ex-black ghetto kids didn't lavish so much attention and other people's money on them. This was why it was and is so easy to get such funding that mere undergraduates can do community service on a part-time basis and get props. I was a community organizer, you were a community organizer - we all were community organizers, except I was alien and disgusting enough, as a college sophomore to call it the engineering of black society. I do have that ability to be blunt.

As most Cobb readers recognize, all of this energy and motivation came to a screeching halt as I recognized in microcosm that there was no black orthodoxy. My soul bled out as it was metaphorically pierced by Mishima's own sword at the failure of my culture to save itself through the ministrations of such neo-nationalist organizations as NSBE. I found peace finally in defying the practice of black unity in 1986 and true solace in even abandoning the concept of black leadership in 1992 and now approach the bliss & responsibility of rejecting blackness altogether. All of these revelations are related to a sane and sensible epistemological modesty, and so Brooks' words bear repeating as I join the company of his leading lights in concept..

We are strangers to ourselves and American black society is an immeasurably complex organism. Therefore we should tend to be skeptical of technocratic, rationalist planning and suspicious of schemes to reorganize American black society from the top down.

There is an implication by default that there might be some reorganization from the bottom up. I am even more dubious of that. As well there will be no spiritual, humanist planning for American blacks either. There's just no herding those cats, except for the lame ones who lack the energy and spirit to escape the corrals of stereotypes.

So I bear witness to a certain deflation of myself, of thousands of hours spent in the faithful rendition and interpretation of a lost civilization, like some old cloistered fanatic scribbling out sentences and wrangling out rap couplets. But the echoes and ghosts of that Struggle are still with us and people still find ways to attribute their condition to shackles of old arguments and disproven identities. We live in the past's future, ignorant of our own presence. Strangers to ourselves.

Manny Hanny

I've been thinking about banks, like all of us. Do you remember Manny Hanny? It turns out that it has been all over the place. If it's any comfort, I find it difficult to imagine that whatever nationalization we do that the government will own them forever. Money changes hands. Always. 

Timeline of Mergers

• 1905 – NYS Chartered Citizens Trust Company of Brooklyn
• 1912 – Broadway Bank of Brooklyn
• 1914 – Manufacturers National Bank of Brooklyn
• 1914 – Name Change To Manufacturers-Citizens Trust Company
• 1915 – Name Change To Manufacturers Trust Company
• 1918 – West Side Bank
• 1921 – Ridgewood National Bank
• 1922 – North Side Bank of Brooklyn
• 1922 – Industrial Bank of New York
• 1923 – Columbia Bank
• 1925 – Yorkville Bank
• 1925 – Gotham National Bank
• 1925 – Fifth National Bank of the City of New York
• 1927 – Commonwealth Bank
• 1927 – Standard Bank
• 1928 – United Capitol National Bank and Trust Company
• 1929 – State Bank & Trust Company
• 1930 – Pacific Trust Company
• 1931 – Midtown Bank of New York
• 1931 – Bryant Park Bank
• 1931 – Midwood Trust Company
• 1932 – Chatham Phenix National Bank & Trust Company
• 1937 – Equitable Trust Company of New York (1930-1937)
• 1939 – Banca Commerciale Italiana Trust Co.
• 1942 – Standard National Bank, Woodside, N.Y.
• 1946 – Flatbush National Bank of Brooklyn
• 1947 – Fidelity National Bank in New York, The
• 1949 – National Bronx Bank of New York
• 1950 – Brooklyn Trust Company
• 1953 – Peoples Industrial Bank
• 1961 – Central Hanover Bank & Trust Company
• 1961 – Name Change To Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company
• 1991 –Goldome (assets)^[3]
• 1992 – Merge To State Chemical Bank

An Affirmative Action Health Care Plan

I realize that no Republican expects Obama to do much good for the country and that he will be experimenting and doing this and that to appease his constituencies, from the hopeful center to the manic left. But it just occured to me that there is something he could do to please me. That is to demonstrate his brilliance in the place he has unquestionable authority.

If Obama can revolutionize health care for the US Armed Forces, then maybe we in the private sector will stand up and take notice.

The current news isn't good of course, but it only makes it easier for him to prove that he can do the right thing.

Personnel costs represent the second largest "piece" of the budgetary pie; DoD plans to allocate $125 billion for personnel this year, roughly 20% more than it will spend on acquisition. 

While increased pay and bonuses account for some of that increase, the real growth has been on the health care side. According to Michael Fabey of Aviation Week, the Pentagon's health care budget has grown 144% since 2001. As you might expect, a portion of that growth reflects combat medical costs in Afghanistan and Iraq. But according to defense analyst Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, most of the increase can be traced to "the constantly escalating costs of routine medical services." 

In other words, the Pentagon is paying more to operate its own medical facilities and for TriCare, the DoD-sponsored health insurance program for military personnel, retirees and their dependents. That should come as no surprise, since other, government-run medical programs have experienced similar increases over the same period.

The health of the Army is said to be a high priority matter for Obama, and did manage to got everybody jumping up and down over his choice of Shinseki to head the VA. So here is an opportunity, fruaght with possibilities, that he can make the health care standards of the US Army a beacon of light to the world. The countdown starts today. If he can do it with that percentage of Americans who live to defend us, then he can do it for ordinary folks.

We tend to forget that there are certain times when innovation for the whole of society comes from the organizational principles of national armies. That includes command and control and a host of other beneficial concepts. It is a little known fact, for example, that malaria was destroyed in France by Americans because of the necessity of saving the lives of Allied troops during WW2. These are precisely the areas where the President has full reign and Obama should exercise his power in this way.

Just as Affirmative Action through the integration of the Armed Forces made huge changes in the way our civil society operated, social engineering of health care from the Pentagon is the President's prerogative. Let that trickle down.

Hulk Not Smash

The only interesting thing that caught my attention at the Oscars was Philippe Petit's balancing the statue on his nose. Aside from that, the action montage was pretty cool. That was my inspiration to PPV Edward Norton's Hulk last night. I liked Ang Lee's better.

Norton's David Banner in this movie sets up the franchise perfectly, and for a throwaway prequel to something Marvel obviously has up its sleeves, this is the movie it was supposed to be. But you know, no matter how much emotion and great acting you put behind comic book characters, they're still comic book characters.

Quite frankly, I think America has lost its ability in this moment of the zeitgeist to care a damn for comic book heroes - not even of the X-Men variety. Watchmen is right on time and the voice of Rorschach will have our ears burning. I feel guilty for even having bothered to watch.

Silence of the Wealthy

The interview you're never going to hear.

Q. How are you doing?

A. I've been better but, hey - to tell you the truth I'm doing just fine.

Q. Really?

A. Yes. I lost about 30% in my portfolio over the last year, which is about average but I've got all kinds of smart people helping me figure out what to do with my money. You know what they say, 'the rich get richer and the poor get poorer'? Well these are the days when the rich get poorer and the poor go broke. Which means of course that the broke starve. But really have you heard about anybody starving? I'm poorer but I'm just not quite as rich. It hurts like a boo boo, not like a broken leg.

Q. But didn't you lose millions?

A. Yes. I lost millions, but let me give you an analogy. When I lose millions, it's like Kobe Bryant only scoring 10 points in a game. I can have two losing seasons, but I'm still Kobe Bryant. In fact I can retire, but I'm still Kobe Bryant.

Q. But what about the banking system?

A. It's in deep and serious trouble, but a bank is, to continue the analogy, like saying the stadiums are falling apart. Yes. If all of the stadiums collapse, literally, at the same time, the NBA is doomed because there would be no place to collect the money for our performance. But that wouldn't kill basketball, it would go someplace else, and the best players will still be the best players. Sooner or later, new stadiums would be built.

Q. So you're saying what's done is done and you're fine.

A. Well, yes and no. I'm a business man. I'm interested in the future of American business. But I've already won the ordinary game. I'm playing a different game. Not the same game at a different level, but a different game. I'm just continuing to do what I do, but more on a historical scale. For me it's not about survival, it's about the history books. But like ordinary folks I'm interested in the future of the country. I don't want to be the last of my breed - I want others to be able to do what I've done.

Q. What are you getting at?

A. I'm a capitalist. But I understand how quickly people's sentiments can be turned against the sort of thing I've been doing. It's no good to be the last king of Russia, not only for your own skin, but for your children and the entire law and culture of what we've been doing. Imagine yourself being a millionaire during the LA Riots. The way you look at people rioting - burning down their own neighborhoods, and by the way the businesses you own. This is how I see the potential of certain populist ideas. It might seem obvious when you understand how people would hate the police when a few of them screw up and then a riot means the police can't do their job. And then it becomes obvious that the cops are outnumbered, it's impossible for police to do what they do when there's no trust in the police department. And you can see that people are hurting themselves when they become a mob. It's the same thing when people lose trust in CEOs and investors and the market itself. Really, the entire idea about what is good capitalism in the West is changing in the popular mind. There's going to be political overkill.

Q. Well how close are we to that happening?

A. Hard to say. Things can change quickly.

Q. What would you do then?

A. Same thing any reasonable human being would do. Go where there are no riots. Then come back even stronger if that opportunity exists or just write off the loss.

Q. Write off America?

A. America is what America is. I'm as sentimental about it as anybody. Even more, probably. But what happens to your neighborhood? If it's not the same as it was, if the values are not there in the people, then it's not the same neighborhood. It's the people you love - the relationships, not the place.

I don't want you to get the wrong impression. I think we're going to get through this. But some things will change in the popular consciousness. The idea of what's acceptable in America is changing.

Q. Well, we're out of time and I think this interview was a weird idea, which is why I didn't publish it.

A. That's OK. Just don't tell anybody I'm still rich OK?

Q. What's in it for me?

Race Pro: First Look

This weekend I spent a little time with Race Pro, the new driver from Atari. While most of the guys in the Cult of Sun Tzu (my clan) have begun to rave about it, especially our Lethal friend, I'm a bit more reserved in my judgment. Still, it's a very good game.

Now the Lethal One keeps telling us that this is the perfect driver if you have the Microsoft Wheel. I do, and I don't ever use it because i have no good rig for the thing. So it's somewhere in the garage. Nevertheless, I'm good enough on the controller, or at least I think that I am, to place after i get the gist of the game. The problem is, I haven't unlocked enough of the autos to tell you. But now that I just got my hands on the racing Viper, I'm starting to be convinced that this is more excellent than it seems.

Race Pro is, quite frankly a combination of PGR, TOCA and Forza. So far it's a pretty decent mix for the kinds of things I like. The TOCA part is that you have a real season and you have to earn money to get into races. It's kinda realistic, but nowhere near as fun and interactive as Grid. And it should be said that this is a $40 game, not a $60 one, so it's a decent budget game. Like Forza you can hack you ride and tune the handling. But it's all about handling which is better and more realistics for tight class-based racing. Sure it's cool to put a 800hp blown hemi into a Mini Cooper, but... Like PGR the driving can be nicely forgiving and the online competition is handled nicely. 

Race Pro is unique in several ways, some good. My first gripe is that there is no E-brake. WTF. I get realism but jeez. On the plus side, the tuning of the suspension and all that makes a significant difference, and I actually get it. I changed my differential settings and I noticed the difference right away. I changed my spring softness and got 5 seconds off my lap time. So I can make all of the different cars handle the way I like them to handle. I think I'm going to learn a lot more about tire camber setups and all that and use them in Race Pro more than I ever bothered in Forza. 

I don't like the fact that so far I can't change the look of my hoop. All of them are pretty ugly and realistic. I also think that they should have had multiple grains of heads up. It's either extremely busy and distracting or not there at all. I like the grains of the assistance and driver aids better than in Forza. The track line is not interactive and therefore not helpful as Forza's is, but the shift indicator for what gear you should be in is very nice. The in-car view has fairly readable dash, so on certain open wheel cars, it makes up for the lack of heads up. 

The tracks of Race Pro are very good. There are a few that are familiar, Road America, Valencia, Laguna Seca and Macau and several new ones that are nice challenges. There's not much detail paid to graphic niceties - spectators are few and wooden; trees and landscaping might as well be from the PGR 1 days. I wouldn't be surprised to see jaggies. But the tracks themselves are first rate, technical and well realized. So far my favorite is Brands Hatch, and Pau is giving me conniptions. 

The AIs in this game are brutal. If you hookup to Pro mode, as opposed to Semi-Pro or Rookie, be prepared to get your car flipped. There are some vicious algorithms underneath some of these guys. Also, if you cut the track, you get DQ'd. That's right. I haven't played many online sessions in open rooms, but there is no turning off collisions and other goodies for button mashers. 

This is a serious driver's game and it shows. Still, the balance is that it's as technical as any drving game needs to be but forgiving enough on Rookie settings to be a lot of fun. The tracks are interesting enough to provide a good variety of racing conditions. Right now, however, qualifying and unlocking vehicles is likely to try the patience of most workaday gamers. This is a drivers game, not with bells and whistles but with cranks, knobs and switches. 

Weirded Out

My new favorite website is the Onion.

WASHINGTON—A majority of African-Americans surveyed in a nationwide poll this week reported feeling "deeply disturbed" and "more than a little weirded out" by all the white people now smiling at them.

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Black citizens have reported a disturbing 350 percent increase in interracial high-fiving since January 20.

First witnessed shortly after President Obama's historic victory, the open and cheerful smiling has only continued in recent months, leaving members of the black community completely unnerved.

"On behalf of black people across this nation, I would like to say to our white brethren, 'Please stop looking at us like that,'" said Brown University psychology professor Dr. Stanley Carsons. "We're excited Barack is president, too, and we're glad you're happy for us. But giving us the thumbs up for no reason, or saying hello whenever we walk by, is really starting to freak us out."

Has this been happening to you?

People Still Don't Get It

I have decided that I'm going to spend a little less time talking about things over which I have no control. I owe that decision to Dennis Miller and the fact that what I think happens next is that insurance companies are going to start to fold along with the banks. And basically when insurance companies fail, the ghetto kid in me rejoices like the moron that he is. Bottom line is that it's all about survival, and I almost forgot that I know how to laugh and enjoy life in survival mode.

Here's the thing I think people still don't get. One of the most popular ads during the Super Bowl was the ETrade baby. And guess what, they are still making those commercials.

I have yet to see any comment on any blog noticing how ridiculous it is that there are commercials on television featuring talking babies that buy and trade securities. Think about it. How stupid are we? That stupid. My hat's off to the marketing geniuses at ETrade. You are selling snow to eskimoes, no, you are selling salt and pepper to the grigoes in the cannibal stew pot. What a country! PT Barnum would be proud.

The Twenty Five

Kali Tal has put forward one of those memes that is devastatingly unnerving, which is a shocking thing to do considering how vapid most of these memes are. But I'm afraid I'm going to have to take this one seriously, well because of the subject matter. It's the way she puts it.

Think of 25 albums, CDs, LPs (if you're over 30) that had such a profound effect on you they changed your life or the way you looked at it. They sucked you in and took you over for days, weeks, months, years. These are the albums that you can use to identify time, places, people, emotions. These are the albums that no matter what they were thought of musically shaped your world.

The albums that changed my world. There are so many ways to look at this, the hardest thing to do is just write them down and not start telling stories about how they changed my world. All of the albums below are albums that changed the way I thought about music, or hit me so hard that I just played them to death and wanted people to know that I was playing them to death. They make me think of particular parts of my life  -= which is very interesting in that there were those parts where music meant so much whereas there are spaces in which music was just music. But yes, I obsessed over each and every one of these albums, no doubt.

• This Is Madness - The Last Poets
• Spirit - Earth Wind & Fire
• Dirty Mind - Prince
• Think of One - Wynton Marsalis
• Tutu - Miles Davis
• Carmel - Joe Sample
• Sequencer - Synergy
• Duck Rock - Malcolm McLaren
• Modern Man - Stanley Clarke
• Sampler 84 - Wyndham Hill Artists
• Keep On Movin' - Soul II Soul
• Who's Afraid of - The Art of Noise
• Crossroads - Tracy Chapman
• Hallucination Engine - Material
• Aphrokubist Improvisations - Broun Fellinis
• Fishbone - Fishbone
• Les Cool Sessions - Jimmy Jay
• Sonny Rollins Brass - Sonny Rollins Brass / Trio
• Dancehall Stylee Volume 1 - Various
• Exodus - Bob Marley
• Songs In The Key of Life - Stevie Wonder
• Thelonius Monk & John Coltrane - Monk & Coltrane
• Purple - Stone Temple Pilots
• Beyond Words - Bobby McFerrin
• A Tale of 3 Cities - Steve Coleman and Metrics

There has got to be something missing but there's so much emotion up in all these I can't even go on. Astounding.

A Digital Divide Artifact

A Reminder of Who We Are

Rick Santelli

Yesterday I was stuck in mobile mode which doesn't play videos on the CNBC website, and so I found myself in a small panic when I couldn't find on YouTube or anywhere exactly what it was the Rick Santelli said. When I finally got a chance to hear it, well, it was just common sense.

Santelli is a great character. He's what I call and empirical genius. He's the kind of guy who doesn't need theories because he's a smart man in the trenches of the financial business every day. And when he doesn't know and knows that nobody else knows, he'll say exactly that. When a guy like Santelli can't get a job in America, I know that the country is finished. Which brings me around to a couple points that few have said much about lately but will be saying soon - which is that Obama's Ivy Leaguers ain't all that, and there are a lot of things wrong with the idea of handing over trillions to the smartest guys in the room at the White House - which is what we'll be hearing from the smartest guys in the room from everywhere else. Santelli is one of them.

The Greatest Picture In the World

This picture resonates very very deeply with me. It is something that I've been influenced by, as a concept for just about all of my adult life. It is the picture of a beautiful young black woman in the backseat of an expensive and powerful automobile. It may sound strange, I know.

The original time I was gobsmacked by the concept was one Sunday I was driving down Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles. I was heading northbound and stopped at the light at Slauson. Stevie Wonder's 'That Girl' was playing on the radio and I was in a great mood, thinking about 'that girl' whom in my life I had yet to meet. On my left, in the left turn lane a young woman drove up in a new Volvo sedan. She was the very image of black upper middle class life, and in the back seat of her car was her daughter, both in their Sunday best. I could see her wedding ring from my vantage point and it was clear that she was heading towards View Park or Ladera, the Hill. The image was burned into my psyche. I wanted to be that husband. 

Now that I have the Transporter and it still manages to remain somewhat stylish, though I'd rather have my Hummer, especially during these bleak days, I must remind myself to take that picture with my daughters. 

Is Bling Dead?

Is bling dead?

I don't really know. Maybe it died already and I'm just so out of touch with hiphop that I don't know. But I find it difficult to believe that the entire industry can stop on a dime and undo what it has been doing for all these years.

The last time I checked in, Flo Rida had his new cheering dance song and was still wearing the big gold. Around that same time, that girl group Pussycat Dolls had a big hit starting off about wanting to be a movie star. Now that was several months ago. Has bling changed that much? Is hiphop fast enough to make money on the fact that people are starting to lose their jobs? Is there resentment in the streets for rappers who still talk about how much money they make?

The Socialist Tell

Any honest investigation of the Obama Administration's modus operandi and would have to ask the following question. I don't have an answer but it sure as hell is perplexing to me.

If you don't believe in socialist principles, why bail out so many institutions with government money? Why not just allow bankruptcies to move forward?

I think Obama wants to be the glorious savior of the union, but he has warped ideas about what the state is good for. So he is allowing politics (the politics of social justice) to dominate his thinking about why government assistence has to be forthcoming. A truer capitalist would allow weak companies to die by the sword. A reasonable approach would be to understand what can fail and get moving with some partnerships in key spots. He might just do that in time, but the Stimulus Package was completely wrong - I'm saying it's a done deal. What is done in the name of Stimulus will not be undone.

I think he's going to nationalize as much as possible, and run up the debt to ridiculous levels, and has no respect for what private capital might do or how to incent it properly.

Every day that Barack Obama pushes forward with ideas and plans about how the executive branch can solve this problem is a day too long. Let the judges liquidate. Let the bodies hit the floor. Let the market clean up.

Nothing To Brag About

I'm likely to give Barack Obama's presidency six months before I trash him. 100 days is meaningless, and the first 30 has been so full of barrel fish it doesn't even seem fair.

However, this is how I see all the scandals. Firstly, if you're going to get new blood into the capitol, some of this nonsense comes with the territory. The fact of the matter is that Joe Sixpack has no clue about how powerful and wealthy people actually live. The idea that some people might get $100,000 worth of free perks probably does seem incredibly scandalous, as does the idea that somebody might have forgotten to pay $20,000 in back taxes that they just happen to have lying around.

However Barack Obama has fanned the populist flames that boil this pot by castigating rich people in general and CEOs in particular.

It's been might quiet around Obamaland. The reason is clear. They have nothing to brag about. There are a dozen ways to snipe at this guy, and I think its fair that he and all of his fatuous admirers be taken down a peg. I could, but I'm not going to right now.

See the way I see it is this. There's only one lesson to learn from the mistakes that Obama is inevitably going to make, and it's the big lesson. It's an old lesson too. In fact, the best way I've seen it described (popularly) is in the following video.

The Backbreaker

In 2003, there was a fire in the San Bernardino Mountains near Lake Arrowhead. It was called the Old Fire. One of the many things it destroyed was a Boy Scout Camp. I was there this weekend.

One of the few times in my life I felt particularly underprivileged was the first time I went to Lake Arrowhead. It turned out that for some reason we wound up at one of the Boy Scout camps there. I remember that it was one of the coolest things I had ever seen, looking very much to me like a Wild West fort and town. I knew it was private and that we were there as guests.

That evening I found myself, at the age of 12 or so I guess, in a big circle of boys seated in a large hall. The leader explained the game. Every boy was to be a state in the US. Whomever was 'it' had a rolled up newspaper and was to smack a boy on the head if the name of his state was called. But if that boy could stand up and say the name of another state before he got smacked, then he forced the boy who was 'it' to remember which boy that was and run over and smack him. Sometimes a boy wouldn't know his state had been called, or when called didn't stand and speak fast enough, or would even say the name of his own state or the state of the boy who was 'it'. If so, the newspaper would come down on his head and he would be 'it'. It was a kind of pseudo-intellectual form of duck, duck goose. I had never seen it played before, nor since, until this weekend at Lake Arrowhead where I was the leader.

It was a snow trip weekend, and Boy and I went up with the Joneses. Mr. Jones was the leader of the adults and our contingent of 22 some odd scouts. We were joined there by 4 or 5 other somewhat smaller troops. We had our own monstrous and new bunkhouse. The order of the day was sledding. There was at least 16 inches of new snow everywhere. The sun was out in the cloudless crisp and still air. It was perfect weather. So on day one, as soon as we finished lunch, we found the right hill and began building the jump we would soon christen 'The Backbreaker'.

Some time after your 30th birthday and somebody half your age dunks on you, you start growing a new sense. Call it the smart step. The old man knows the shortest distance between two points through complexities that the young man attacks with brute zigzag force. It's particularly evident in racquetball and I've seen golf hustling up close. Very similar. In general, the old man smart step sense gives one premonitions when physical activity of young men begin to encroach on blooper territory. Even in the absence of the siren call, "Hey everybody, check this out!" we can smell disaster. Understand that women do not posses this sense at all. It's because they've never been the idiot boy - they don't experience pain as a challenge, imminent bodily danger as a thrill or defiance of death as a victory.

My smart step sense was in park this weekend, because I too wanted to hit the slope. And I did.

The approach was about 50 short feet on a 30% slope. Since most of us had saucers with no means of control, it was decided that we would make a chute. The chute consisted of low walls of compacted snow on either side reaching 12 feet up the slope from the end of the jump. The jump itself was a simple four foot drop. We even had the nerve to give it a lip. Think Wide World of Sports agony of defeat. Irresistible. 

If you keep your feet in the saucer and hit the jump just right, a 120 pound teenaged boy will get a good half second of air and 20 feet of distance down the slope. Half the time, the boys went cockeyed separating themselves from the saucer and doing foot, elbow and faceplants in the snow beneath the jump. Sometimes they'd miss the entire ramp forcing observers to jump over them as they came careening down the spectator side. But enough times, good enough for the guy with the camera and lightning reflexes to get great shots, the boys came flying down with a thud right on target. Bam! Ouch! Whooo! Even us old guys with various disk abnormalities and compressions took a shot, me more than a few.

Only a select number in the sweetspot of age and condition continued to walk normally the rest of the day. The smaller boys wiped out catastrophically and shied away. The older men calculated once or twice was enough. The rest, including Boy, fetched themselves and their instruments of calamitous conveyance up and down the hill all afternoon.

I need another Motrin. I can't wait until next year.

Obligatory Seriousness on Chris Brown

Right now, aside from the obvious which is the way he looks, there is basically no difference between Chris Brown and Brittany Spears. I'm not sure if that is the official rule of the household, but I'll check with BD to see what her opinion is, because quite frankly I wouldn't know the first song he did. Not all of the dreck on teen pop is indistinguishable, but in the end as they go down the path from fame to douchbaggery aren't they all finally?

Now if I remember correctly, BD liked Rihanna as well. So she may have a pitched opinion. On the other hand, she's doing her own bit of show business, plus she has a very good eye and ear for American Idol. So she might already be completely blase about the entire blowup. She's got her own bit of talent and hangs around folks with performing talent. It's likely to make her less susceptible. Or see more tragedy in it. I'd ask now, but she's still backstage at the theatre around the way - this being her second weekend in Little Shop of Horrors.

The theatre company she belongs to, Belasco, does Little Shop, Pajama Game, The Wiz, How To Succeed in Business, Annie, Damn Yankees and a couple other productions whose names escape me. With middle schoolers and high school teens, there's really good quality productions and a great showcase for talent. It's an entire dimension of growing up that guys like me missed back in the day. We had our radios, we had our favorite DJs, we had our mixtapes. That was about it. Showmanship had to be expressed in different fora, which is why basketball became so theatrical. Well, that's my theory anyway. So I have an interestingly odd sense of pride watching her and her little sister on stage. There isn't much echo back to the 70s Broadway. We had Ren Woods and Stephanie Mills do Dorothy. We had Alphonso Ribeiro as the Tap Dance Kid, and Jennifer Holiday doing Dreamgirls. That's about it, except for the cast of Fame, in my generation. With apologies to Hansberry, Baraka and Wilson there was nothing else entertaining on the stage. Don't ask me about Pippin and Purlie and Porgy. I don't know.

So I expect that as another wave of pop stars get flushed that at least there are some kids with some understanding that all of show business isn't corrupt and that there's more out there than just what's new.

Now as I write this, it occurs to me the Jimi Izrael was being timely and riffing when he asked if it's alright to hit a woman. Big question. The basic answer is no. The extended answer is 'it depends', and what it depends on is your chances in court. I am inclined to believe that the average dame who smacks a man is not doing a face slap against his rogueish advance. But I cannot think of any occasion when such a move is not proper - slap him then walk. It works in the old movies that everybody has seen and we all know what it means. That shouldn't be too difficult to parse. I think the average dame is thinking she might knock homey out or at least do some real damage. It works in the new movies that everybody has seen, but we should all know that's fake. But some of us fools don't. 

My advice to the average dame is this. If you don't play football, don't ball up your fist and expect something to happen when you hit a man, unless what you expect is to get decked. My advice to the average dude is this, grab her wrist and take it behind her back. Apply pressure but do not strike. Frogmarch her out the door and lock it. Then stay away from the windows.

Nine times out of ten it's the man's fault. Which is why nine times out of ten a slap in the face will suffice.

To Hell With Hawker

This morning, Rush Limbaugh was right. 

The word has come down from the King that his new CEOs which he now protects under his throne shall not be paid more than 500k per annum. The new Austerity Plan also mandates (well, not mandates, but who dares challenge the King?) that thou shalt not fly any private corporate jets. 

So who cares if Hawker Beechcraft, Lear Aviation and Gulfstream go out of business? Only the people that work there. Unfortunately, they did not pay their lobbyists enough because the King has come down on them and their associated industries. Why? Because of appearances. What difference does it make if the corporation has owned the jet for years. Sell it, and don't buy another one. Don't lease, don't charter. Just don't. 

San Diego: The Road Not Taken

Part of the problem of being, shall we say mentally-bound, or over-intellectual is that you see the value in a great number of arguments. It's a two-edged sword. You can imagine yourself in any number of situations, perfectly happy with your defense of the rationale of it. I'm rather like that when it comes to living. I could see myself living just about anywhere there's broadband, good public schools and supermarkets. It's all about the same to me.

In something of that spirit, about two years ago I was seriously considering (as seriously as I can be taken) moving to San Diego. The Spousal Unit and I did the research, picked the neighborhoods and started planning. I can't remember exactly what it is that came up - oh now I remember. At any rate, we shelved that plan in the early spring and stayed put. Later on that year, the very neighborhoods that we had most seriously considered, burned to the ground in some of the biggest fires in California history.

After that close call, we even considered it once more, because my next customer was at the southern end of Orange County and I started to grow an affinity for the area around the famous Saddleback Church. Logically, those houses nearer the calamity might be priced like something actually reasonable. In the end, we just wiped our brow glad we missed the fire.

Now San Diego homes are in the news again, and the news isn't good.

Also along those lines, the San Diego Union-Tribune reports that 28% of homeowners in San Diego County owe more on their mortgage than the house is worth; statewide, the number is 26%. The median home in San Diego last year sold for 45% (or $160,000) less than the same house had previously sold for.

Bargain or trap? Who knows?

So it's stuff like this that's making me try to close my mind and stop believing that there are options. It's counter-intuitive, but this kind of conservatism just might save my skin.

The Existential Vulnerability Problem

I happen to be in the middle of this thing myself. I'm not sure that I can learn my way out of it. Well, that's sort of the dilemma I am trying to describe. What happens when you try to learn your way out of a problem? You become vulnerable. You risk self-destruction. You invite self-destruction.

It seems to be ever a fundament of the human condition that we are unsatisfied. And sometimes that dissatisfaction is the dissatisfaction of one's knowledge or more more specifically of one's worldview. It has always fascinated me that the human mind doesn't halt when it contradicts itself in the way we expect perfectly logical computing machines to. We are particularly adept at adaptation. When we arrive at a situation in which our prior knowledge presents us with an impossibility, we figure a way to rationalize what's going on. We disbelieve what is in front of us. We do just about everything but freeze in our tracks, immobilized by the recognition that what stands before us defies all of our experience.

Speaking for myself, I waste a great deal of my time in life foolishly anticipating that moment of impossibility and live in a sort of contingent present - discounting the moment. And at the same time I am arrogantly in the moment asserting myself as if I couldn't possibly be wrong, forcing everyone else to prove my way isn't correct. It is contradictory behavior. I can remember what prompted me to start behaving this way. It was a quote by Einstein. The gist of it was this:

Isn't it fascinating that life has a beginning and an end so that taken together it can be seen as a work of art?

I very much liked the idea that a finite human life struggles for its own internal consistency, and that at some level of perception might be like a snowflake: individual, beautiful, comprehensible. So I owned my own life that night, a sophomore in some dorm, convinced that it was worth something even if I might never know what that something was.

But examining one's life, from time to time, and comprehending it honestly, moving forward along the logical and honest arc of experience is not a smooth curve. It has dislocations and discontinuities. It moves forward through time, but not necessarily in an orderly fashion. Sometimes you stop and wonder if you've been doing it right at all.

I am on the verge of giving up the conceit that my life has any meaning whatsoever. It is the result of a number of simple things that I will only be able say in retrospect formed any pattern. And without trying to justify, by merely observing this process in myself, it brings up this notion of vulnerability that I'm on about this evening.

I find myself this evening staring at some extraordinary full color pictures of Hitler days. In particular I found an extraordinarily beautiful automobile, the Mercedes-Benz 770K W150 that he used in parades. It certainly must have been something of a shock to millions that their entire concept of the world was wrong - people capable of producing extraordinary examples of ordinary human achievement. In other words, life's work. A life's work can be misspent. It brings me back to 2003 and my discovery of Conservatism - this whole new way of dealing with my recognition of what Stalin had done.

And in those brief days as this thing was happening to me, I had no idea, not even that I would be vulnerable in any way. It merely seemed that I had broken through some barrier of naive or arrongant youth. But now I like to think that I was just turning in another direction, a liberty, a luxury I had and still have - to reconsider the lessons of life, make adjustments and to start anew with confidence.

So today I am thinking very much about Doc's admonition about talking about the future. Don't say what you're going to do, just do something and tell people what you did. I am trying still to learn the lessons of kings, but why? I guess I'm just curious, and maybe that's good enough.

Two Counter Arguments

Every time I hear an argument against a tax holiday on payroll deductions, the answer is the same. In all of the conversations, this one point has tended to be remarkably diametrical. 

Q. What's wrong with giving people a payroll deduction as part of the stimulus plan - basically why is government spending better than tax relief?

A. When the government spend money, it is actually spent. When people get a tax rebate, then they are more likely to save the money. What we need in stimulus is actual spending.

Blah blah blah.

So when did saving money suddenly become bad? Bad for whom? It's certainly not bad for me to have more money to spend or save as I choose. How about you?

But let's be economic about it shall we? 

1. Why did Morgan Stanley buy B of A? Because MS needed the deposits of a retail bank to offset the toxic assets on its balance sheets. When economists answer 'consumers will save the money' where do they assume we'll save it? Under our mattresses? If they are so sure we'll save instead of spend, it doesn't take a genius to see that we will either put it on deposit in banks or invest back into the stock market. Since when is that a bad thing?

2. What happens to the argument against wealth destruction by those who say saving is a bad idea? If I lost 30% of the value of my 401k in 2008, and now the market is at a bottom, I'd be a fool not to reinvest new money that I never had before. That's saving too. Plus it has the added benefit of stimulating the equity markets. Since when is that a bad thing?

OK so maybe this isn't two different counter arguments - they are part and parcel of the same argument, which is so long as consumers get the tax relief, the some part of the economy is guaranteed to benefit.  But I guess that is not the part of the economy that the Obama Administration wants to benefit. It wants that part which is aligns with his strategic spending goals to benefit, which is why if he spends a trillion the way he wants, he's going to run into a brick wall with Americans like me. 

The analogy is simple. America has been hit with a financial hurricane. Obama is quadrupling the budget for FEMA instead of giving us direct relief. 

If Barack Obama made 2009 the year that Americans paid no Federal Income Tax, he would go down in history as one of the greatest presidents ever. What are the chances of that? And what are the names of the people who are going to get their pockets lined by this stimulus package instead? 

Obama Gets a Foreign Policy Clue?

Well, well what do we have here? Apparently the new NIE people are out and have come to realize their error. You see, two years ago we put up with a lot of BS, some of it tangentially supported here by A. Charles who has mysteriously vanished, that all of the evidence was in and that Iran should be trusted not to be pursuing nukes, and that a substantial change in attitude was necessary in US foreign policy towards Iran. In other words, Iran hawks be damned, Bush is an idiot. 

Over at Belmont the news lies this way:

The Obama administration is clearly going to great lengths to educate Congressional liberals and the public at large on the danger posed by Iran.  The point, presumably, is to dispose of the lefty canard that Iran is a fundamentally peaceful country caught in a security dilemma of American construct.  It also commits Obama to an aggressive (even if non-military) posture toward Iran, which is comforting to those of us who believe that we need a hardball, if nuanced, strategy for containing, deterring, and, if necessary, interdicting the Islamic Republic.
Procedurally, this episode is going to reinforce the view of conservatives that after Iraq, at least, the intelligence agencies undermined the Bush administration at each opportunity.  If there was “politicization” of intelligence during the Bush years, it cut against Bush policies more than it facilitated them.

If all this is going as Iowahawk claims, then some of my precience about Obama's potential will be vindicated. Funny that I finally find the post that I've been looking for the past month or so in which I talked specifically about Obama's capacity to be rational. Way back then, 4 months before Rev. Wright, I said:

There's an odd undercurrent in the argument against Obama for President. And it's true that he has made some stupid remarks on foreign policy, but that undercurrent pretends that he won't get smart fast.  

...

I'm not necessarily convinced that Obama is unreliable for politics as usual. I think that he is an original thinker and is ready to try new approaches, but that there's something conservative about him underneath the appeal that won't make certain mistakes.

Right about now, I'm wondering how long Obama is going to continue his role as chief BS artist. It clearly made Geithner look stupid. Oh, by the way here's the scoop on the one day delay on Geithner's presenation of our Dear Leader's Plan. Emmanuel and Axelrod recrafted the presentation, according to a guy on Bush's econ team, to make it look more different than what Bush had already been doing. The term he used was that Obama is spending too much time on 'product differentiation'. And of course it makes perfect sense, even without that particular insight, that if Obama's transition went so freaking well, that he couldn't have been changing that much - after all, what does anybody think Geithner's been doing all this time? 

Which reminds me. Where the hell is Austan Goolsbee? Did he completely discredit himself or what?

The Return of Neutron Bomb Management

I predict that it won't be long before people look once again at the career of Jack Welch. Most of the time, when it was done in the runup to his selection of Immelt as his replacement at GE, the outlook was sunny. Not too long ago people forgot that he was once known as 'Neutron Jack'.

I myself am trying to take a longer view and try to remember how bad things were when they were bad. What I recall, especially in the days when any idiot with two years of HTML and ColdFusion under their belt was considered a startup genius, was that there was a time in America when business management mattered. Not creative MBA tricks and the sort of souped up financial sophistication - but Lou Grant -style management. What we used to call MBWA. Management by walking around. Meaning touching people talking to people, motivating people, hands-on stuff  where people felt good about working for that rare thing we call a 'management team'.

Being a consultant, I know some of the things that happened to management teams, and it wasn't all good. But it began with the pennywise decision to outsource. I'm not protectionist by a longshot. My gripe with outsourcing is that it disembowels business knowledge from the core of the physical company. Amazon.com is a virtual company - let it reign. But most companies are not virtual companies and they shouldn't be. And we're all going to find that out the hard way in a short matter of time. Shrinkage is not just a joke from Seinfeld.

So this means that a lot of managers who aren't Jack Welch are going to be faced with making the same kind of tough decisions that Jack Welch made in the early 80s. It's not just the 'proverbial' hardest thing a manager does, it's the real deal hardest thing. Laying off people who don't deserve being let go because they are lazy or stupid or unethical, but because the company simply can't afford to keep them on payroll and must cut costs.  Jack Welch was smart, and returned his company to profitability big time. But all of us aren't so smart about restructuring and strategically wise cost-cutting. A lot of us will gut ourselves in the process us cutting fat. A lot of us will depopulate, not without anguish, but without strategic smarts. Just because it hurts to lay people off, doesn't mean the pain is over, especially if you do it incorrectly.

I might use all of the above verbiage to preface a sales pitch for the kind of management consulting I do. But it's simply the truth. It won't be long before lots of bosses come home ashen from the grief associated with sending people off the payroll. It could be you that does the sending. It could be you that gets sent away. But when people start singing  "You Send Me", it won't be to their darlings. 

I'm going to dust off my copy of 'Good to Great'. Downsizing is not going to be easy.

Global Felonies

From Christopher Hitchens

Essentially, there are four such criteria. One is genocide, which, according to the signatories of the Genocide Convention (the United States is one), necessitates immediate action either to prevent or to punish the perpetrators. Another is aggression against the sovereignty of neighboring states, including occupation of their territory. A third is hospitality for, or encouragement of, international terrorist groups, and a fourth is violations of the Nonproliferation Treaty or of U.N. resolutions governing weapons of mass destruction.

(c.f. Least Favored Nation)

The Banality of Slavery

I probably don't give enough credit where credit is due to Dan Carlin whose history podcasts are not only interesting to me but to my kids as well. You should know that if you are still one of those folks who listens to the radio during your commute and at your lunch break, that's how you fall behind those of us who remain fascinated by the world. There is so much better stuff on podcasts.

In his most recent history program, he touched on the ubiquity of human trafficking and the particulars of chattel slavery. Full of the requisite apology, because after all Carlin is political as well, he outlined the world's second oldest profession. His angle on slavery and forced labor was very interesting. He asked the basic rhetorical question is slavery essentially evil? But I think he was getting at something more revealing since he talked about 'debt slavery' as well. As his program progressed, it began to be very clear from my interpretation that he was getting at something fairly deep, which is the extent to which we draw meaning from our relationships to each other and to technology.

As Carlin said, there are two ways to have leisure. You can either have a machine cook your breakfast or you can have people do it for you. For a long time, even being a technologist, I have always been more on the organic side. Why have some expensive machine smooth the sand in the long jump pit at the Olympics when you could have some kids with rakes? I considered this when I was in Sydney - about the mechanisms in society that would allow an engineer to be educated, for the farming out and funding of such a project, for the fabrication of the actual machine and training of the personnel who would move and operate it. Obviously the technological avenues are more fragile and expensive, but are they better? Why not save all the hassle and expense and just hire some local kids - why deal with machines instead of people?

Where the heart of the matter gets interesting are those implications of 'less than slavery' relationships of a human centric world. If we extend the continuum of the humanistic value of human labor down the skill or pay chain, eventually you end up at slavery.

There used to be a chap who visited Cobb with some disgust when we talked about immigration issues, and he would call me a 'cheap labor conservative' because I oppose the minimum wage. I've always seen the possibilities in allowing a class of businesses to operate without certain regulations that would solve the homelessness problem, and I've always had sympathy for America's ability to accommodate an internal Third World. After all, an economy that tolerates slavery, or near-slavery is a full employment economy. I think it is reasonable to assert as an axiom of human society, the more you seek to give meaning to people who, for whatever reason cannot compete, the more accommodating you are of slavery.

Now the way to read this is not with regard to the deprivation of human rights and dignity that is implicit in chattel slavery. A person who doesn't own his own labor is not a person in any social way, but a mere human being and way less than a citizen. But it is in that gray area that some inspection is useful. Still I am more interested in the matter with regard the economics we can afford. After all, as Carlin mentioned, Marx understood that the Industrial Revolution changed our ideas about human dignity and labor. It was this fundamental abstraction that he took to the extremes in a historicist way. Marx and his followers looked at somebody whose life and dignity were clearly understood in the pre-industrial world - Joe Chandler, for example. Joe made candles and lamps for the sailing ships, lived near the docks and got tallow from cow fat he bought at market. Joe bought his wagon from Wayne Wright who built it with materials from John Woods, etc. All of those were the relationships and social standing from pre-industrial society Until they were all disintermediated by Sears & Roebuck's lamp section of the catalog, and the ship company could buy lamps from the factory and put Joe, Wayne and John out of business. Instead they put Sam Widget on the assembly line in the lamp factory.

So where does Sam's value as a human being come from? He just looks at an assembly line all day. Where in fact does Cobb's value as a human being come from? I just type at a computer terminal all day. A new kind of society has to have new humanizing values for new kinds of work. This is what Marx understood. In a moral way, he enables us to get away from slavery which is a more natural relationship in a pre-industrial world. But Marx' great mistake was that he figured that all humanizing values must come from work and thus put labor at that center of his universe and the locus of power, he placed around the state's (and revolution's) control of those definitions. This usurped the value of other vital humanizing factors like spirituality. But Marx must have understood how building a framework for humanizing the industrial revolution took us towards a new, modern world.

Fascinating Reading in Bolton

I've finally got to the juicy stuff in John Bolton's 'Surrender is Not an Option'. It is mind-bogglingly extraordinary how Byzantine the UN is, and when you come to understand how it operates you will shake your head in disbelief. 

All I'm going to say is this. Most of us have no idea how corrupt it has been, nor any idea what gets into the sausage of UN resolutions. But I assure you that I have come to understand that much of what gets through is antithetical to the way Americans like to conduct business. I hesitate to say 'lowest common denominator' but it often applies. The entire process is so convoluted and tendential that it defies gravity. I am given to believe that the UN is something more than a post-modern hall of mirrors but not much more. 

Bolton reveals the fact that better than 25% of UN procurement process for PKO (peacekeeping operations) was wasted. But the inspectors who investigated the fraud were not invited to say why the higher ups in the secretariat were not going to act on it or make that fact public. 

Bolton reveals that those same investigators found charges of sexual abuse against civilians by UN bluehats. Say what? You've never heard that? Of course not. It would be too embarassing and so the UN never said anything in public about it. Until now. Which is why Bolton is hated.

The Problem With Aggregate Stimulus

One of the economic terms you'll hear tossed about is how Keynesian economists look at GDP in terms of aggregate demand. The basic theory is that if you stimulate the economy through spending, demand will increase and therefore supply must increase. Keynes found himself looking at zero or negative GDP growth and that was a problem. Think of it this way, a society with lots of good things outdoors and everybody wants to stay indoors. Keynesian stimulus means spending money on improvements to, say baseball stadiums so more people will come outside and play baseball, and spend money on tickets.

In the context of the government stimulus we can talk about 800 billion or 2 trillion because we think that is the cost of the size of a package to jumpstart a whole America full of people who have parked their asses and are not coming out to play in the market. There's a big problem. The problem is not that these economists are completely off base, the problem is that aggregate demand is simplistic but real demand is not, and when you give things over to the federal government to decide exactly how to stimulate demand and jumpstart the economy, their biases and inefficiencies will of necessity cause troubling dislocations.

This is why I say that a greater proportion of the stimulus should be in the form of a tax break, and in particular a payroll tax holiday and a sales tax holiday (leave state and local taxes alone). It is the most equitable form of stimulus because it reaches everybody who is a wage-earner today, immediately.

Notice that whatever the cost of the stimulus, taxpayers are going to evenly take up the burden. That will be shared as equitably as payroll taxes now.

Let's look at what looks to be an egregious but will likely be a typical example of such a dislocation, using the terminology already gaining political favor as we speak. The consensus is that infrastructure projects will be the sort that will have the appropriate 'multipliers' to jumpstart the economy, where x money in will result in 1.5x (say) of economic activity. Yay. Now we know that Caterpillar just laid of 20,000 employees last week. How long do you think those people will be unemployed before the political process of stimulus reaches an infrastructure project meeting the right criteria so that they can be hired again? What if you are in the medical information systems business? The government priority is on making health care work. If you are laid off today, how long will it be before the government hires you back?

Now think about your business, and the amount of money you get by doing business with the government. What if you were in some politically unpopular business, say like coal mining or tobacco farming or insurance? Let's say your business is not targeted for stimulus and you get laid off because of the softness in the industry. How long do you think you will be out of work?

And you know what the argument is that is being made against tax cuts? Well, people will just save their money. You mean like for a rainy day when we lose our non-stimulus sector jobs? You're damned right we'll save our money, and if and when we get dislocated and laid off because the government decided to see some other stupid company like GM as more important than my company, then the gross inequality of the stimulus package will become perfectly obvious.

What happens then? Lobbying. Incredibly fierce and intense lobbying for stimulus from every industry, every region, every sector of the economy. Some will get, some will not get. How do you think that's going to play out?

Across the board payroll tax holiday gets to everybody immediately. Equitably. Across the board sales tax holiday makes all goods and services cheaper immediately. Our GDP is 64-70% consumer spending. The overwhelming majority of us take our paycheck to the supermarket and the mall and that's what we do. The big ticket items we put on credit, but guess what, there is no credit. So the only place where real stimulus can be immediately made is in those things we all need every day. Don't believe me? McDonalds profits are up 7%. UP.

Bailouts are selective. Stimulus legislation is selective. Only across the board payroll and sales tax holidays are equitable.

Where is the Geithner Stick?

The Geithner Plan does not appear to me to have anything working for it but gravity. I think of banks as weighed down birds hovering over a pit of insolvency. Then again so is every business. What if they decide to limp along?  How do you convince a bank, or any other business, to perform well and in the best interests of a newly shaped economy? The fact that this question cannot be answered with anything but compelling force is the fundamental dilemma we face at this crossroads.

The answer is industrial policy, which is a euphemism for socialism. There is no way around it.

Who killed capitalism? The bad capitalists. It is as it ever was. The question for our times is to discover if those who remain understand what is at risk and if they can hold out. You see, every day I hear economists and financial experts saying that a 7% ROI is the best that can be expected from now on. And you can bet that when inflation hits and interest rates start creeping up, the smartest people are going to be hard pressed to make their businesses have higher margins than that for investors.

I'm still reading the reaction to Obama and Geithner and I don't have a comprehensive bead on the particulars, but there has got to be more than just gravity at work here. If my bank doesn't pass the stress test, and I refuse government funds, then what? Am I automatically a bad bank? What happens to a bad bank? Am I forced to liquidate? Does the government take me over? On what authority? What happens to a bad car maker? What happens to a bad business? Is the government now going past regulation into something more authoritarian? And how is the Average Joe supposed to know when enough is enough?

A trillion dollars of carrot is a hell of a lot of government spending. And Obama's entire presidency hinges on whether or not the economy swings into line under his program. So where is the stick? Will Obama just say 'oh well', if GDP doesn't obey his formula? I don't think so.

And so, you know, I think that you have two choices in this situation: You can prolong the agony and shareholders will be happy until they’re not happy, and that could be a year from now or two years from now, or, in the case of Japan, eight years later. Or you can just go ahead and acknowledge that, yeah, there’s a lot of work that has to be done to put these banks back on a firmer footing.
-- Barack Obama, Feb 2009

NL 276

I have a cold and my wife gave me some pills. I don't know what they are but they're supposed to be good for me. It's a white capsule shaped like a coffin with vertical edges, not cylindrical like a Contac. There is a vertical bar in the middle on one side that goes edge to edge, cutting the pill in half. On the left side are the capital letters NL on the other side are the numbers 276.

It took some time for me to find anecdotal evidence that they are generics from CVS. So I will use the power of Google in referencing my website to help people know that it hasn't killed me or made me worse.

The best little post I could find was this:

nl 276 is a generic
dextromethorphan HBr 20 mg...cough suppressant
guaifenesin 400 mg...Expectorant
I have a bottle of it, mine is from CVS

Here are some interesting links.

http://www.drugs.com/ppa/pseudoephedrine-hcl-guaifenesin-dextromethorphan-hbr.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaifenesin

Dextromethorphan I've heard about forever. By the way, I was told to take these by the Spousal Unit once every four hours.

What Do You Mean We?

Like the woman who was pregnant when she voted for Obama because she thought he'd change America's health care in time for her baby, a lot of people are going to be disappointed to find that this stimulus plan is not going to be as broad and timely as the economy will be in wiping out jobs.

The targets of the stimulus will be clear, a lot of government spending by government employees and their networks, which are incredibly slow. You will find, I predict, an astonishing reversal by Obama supporters when they start talking about 'no-bid contracts'. And the American people are going to find out what 'shovel ready' means the hard way.

But here's the real pain. How long will it take the government to find you when you get laid off? How long do you think? When is the last time you actually got a job through a government program?

Stimulate Me!

You know what? Forget it. I want a tax holiday. I want no Federal income tax withholding for 2009. Where is the movement? That's change I can live with. Where is the Internet place where I sign up? Let's get this party started right now. Spread the meme.

A RINO Rant

Speaking as a RINO, (and there are lots of different kinds) I'm willing to let the label die. I happen to like an old school of Republican that got kicked in the teeth by knuckleheads like Tom DeLay and Trent Lott who did nothing but strongarm Congress into something resembling the WWF instead of a deliberating intelligent body. And what did that get us? Zero. Zilch. Nada. Nothing.

There is no legislation out of Congress that any Republican is proud of, and it's the job of Republicans, not ideologues like Viguerie or private citizens like Dobson, to make the government work. And applying ideological tests to the practical business of running government is IDIOTIC. Smart people know this because they are rightly scared to death about Obama micromanaging battle tactics in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The right thing to do is leave it to the professional experts on the ground.

 The problem with the Republican Party is that we have failed to generate interest and accountability to professional experts on the ground. Every Republican rightly blames Barney Frank for presiding over foolishness at the GSEs. OK so who was our man? Some tried to say it was John McCain, and he did have his differences, but they were differences of opinion that in the end didn't make the critical difference. Republicans have over-relied on the Executive, and the executive branch has not worked well enough with Congress on a professional basis. That leave Party politics with nothing to talk about but ideological issues which are now flat-footed and impractical.

It is facile and false to assert as some do, that conservative ideas are bankrupt as evidenced by the failures in our financial system. It is fair to say that Republicans fixated elsewhere and left the professional jobs to political stuff. In other words, Republicans paid so much attention to what hay could be made on politics and cranking out majorities from the base, that we took our eyes off the ball of content. For example, we talked for MONTHS about fired lawyers in the DOJ without ever thinking about what those lawyers were even supposed to do. Now I tell you what's going to happen, because I'm going to be part of it. That is that Republicans and Democrats are going to adopt economists, just like we adopted experts on terrorism, and the ideological battle is now heading toward Keynes vs Hayek. It will be on Obama to DO, but the wars of ideology will continue.

For Steele to get the GOP in order is a no-brainer. All he has to do is knock on more doors and get more money from more people. Obama won the White House with no ideas whatsoever. Ideology is nice, but the party lives and dies on votes and money. Fighting your own team is what losers do and right now we're the losers. The new larger GOP will be happy when it starts winning congressional races for whatever reason. And when Hugh Hewitt stops spitting on the ghost of Lincoln Chaffee it will be a welcome relief.

The Conservative Movement, chapter one is complete. We won. It's over. Everybody knows what those values are. They're alive. They're everywhere. They're correct and they're boring. Everybody wants a tax cut. So what? Everybody can live with smaller government. So what? People who value life will continue to and those who don't won't have real families, they'll have institutions and dysfunction. So what? As soon as America gets attacked, the hawks have their way like they always do, we roll up our sleeves and kick ass. So what? Companies who can't compete in the free market will die because at some point every American will revolt against taxation. Entitlements will bankrupt the system. So what? Everybody knows these things, but only a few people can fix them. And the Republicans have not been COMPETENT to make the conservative ideas that EVERYBODY KNOWS work in American government.

Talk is cheap. Wino, RINO, albino. I don't care. Show me some Republicans who can get the job done for America.

Obama & Social Justice - Off the Table

The longest discussion we had on Obama here at Cobb was begun on October 13, the very cusp of the credit crisis. I made a provocative inquiry that bears repeating.

Submitted for your consideration. Barack Obama represents himself as a candidate for Social Justice, and as such, based upon socialist ideas, defies the authority of America as the ultimate philosophical origin of his legitimate power. Obama believes more in social justice than in the American Constitution and will seek to change American life in deference to principles originating out of Leftist critiques of Capitalism and of Western Society.

Obama will exploit class, race and gender narratives in order to achieve his vision of social justice and will attempt to transform the political consciousness of America by convincing it that its principles of equality as envisioned by the Founders was insufficient to sustain a moral society. This vision of social justice will of necessity hew to principles of Marxism.

As President, Obama would be necessarily constrained to effect significant changes in the way America works, but his emphasis and attempts would all come in defiance of the individual for the purposes of the collective.

I challenge anyone to show what principles Obama has championed and what rhetoric he has spoken that contradict my assertions here. I believe that Obama is intelligent, opportunistic and ruthlessly pragmatic and that any argument that fails to locate his core beliefs is further evidence of his ambition. Therefore, whether or not he wins this election, those core beliefs and their intellectual provenance must be identified.

I think the man is sufficiently overcome by events, and rather like George W. Bush, his legacy will have everything to do with is ability to deal with a crisis that he was not prepared for. Just as Bush was highly influenced by the Neocons in the most significant of his detailed tactics in not for his overall strategy, Obama will be influenced by the legacy of Yale Economics, Keynesians all, and their arms in his administration will be in the persons of Geightner and Summers who will act as if monetary policy is dead. His new auxiliary headed by Paul Volker will also be a part of the economic influence posse which is currently unnamed.

The Right will blame changes in social policy and entitlements as part and parcel of Obama's overarching 'Socialist' strategy, but I don't see it that way. Just as I didn't see GWB as a 'warmonger' unable to resist a 'Christianist' clash of civilizations. Rather I see Obama still as ruthlessly pragmatic. He will address the job in front of him, and he won't have much time for this social agenda. The man is out of the ghetto and he has a completely new, upgraded and smarter set of attendants than bushy eyebrowed radicals like Alinsky and Mansonesque rich white trash like Ayers and Dorn. I think Obama is going to enjoy the work. I certainly would if I was in his shoes.

So this is the ultimate abandonment of what I predicted, Obama's rhetoric for the masses. It's not because he didn't want to try and make those social dots connect. It's because he realizes the stakes are too high for him and he's on the big stage now. But I think it's also because we are now living in an age when, incredibly 100 billion is not a very large number any longer. So his executive order on SCHIP will be forgotten two weeks from today in the larger scheme of things.

On the other hand, in our wildest dreams, none of us suspected that Citibank and Bank of America might not survive an Obama administration. The way (if at all) he lifts a finger may become more symbolic than anything in the campaign.

The Greatest Wallpapers

The best photography on the planet is done for National Geographic. According to a gentleman I spent a whole hour talking to a on plane specifically about photography, it's one of the few places people really still take the art seriously.

If you have a moment, check out their website. They have a whole section dedicated to photography of the best sort, and from those awesome photos you can find the best wallpapers on the net.

Obama's Anthem

Once upon when I was dead broke and painting to make rent, I learned the sort of romantic self-pity that was the great attraction of Tupac. Just this evening, I heard the song that pretty much sums up what Obama supporters must have been thinking for most of the past two years.

It's a song by Queen + Paul Rodgers called We Believe. OK I get it. I don't believe, but I get it. Am I wrong or is this not the man's anthem?

Seven Year Belly Itch

Today's economic lesson comes from Bloomberg again talking to a top dog economist at the IMF who notes that the Treasury is going to be issuing a new bond - the 7 year bond. So the US is issuing a whole new class of debt, and there's speculation that Treasury may issue a 20 year bond as well.

Among bond traders and experts, there is something known as the 'belly of the curve' which is speaking about the yield curve of the treasuries. If I understand this correctly, a yield curve is a projected estimate of the return on bonds across the types of instruments. Here are the current numbers.

So there are long term and short term bonds and if you look at the middle, or the belly of the curve, that's where most of the interest rates that affect our lives are based. Considering the credit I get, I suppose they just take whatever that number is and multiply it times 7.

Now here's the strange thing I don't quite understand, among the millions of things I don't understand. The Treasury is issuing debt and the Federal Reserve is buying it. Somehow this allows the Fed to bail out somebody. It sounds awfully queer to me. The LAT explains it this way:

With its benchmark short-term interest rate already at rock bottom, the Fed can’t make any more use of that tool to influence market rates. So the central bank in mid-December signaled that it might buy Treasuries for its own portfolio as a way to pull longer-term rates down or at least keep them from rising.

The Fed, led by Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, went a step further after its meeting last week, saying it was "prepared to purchase longer-term Treasury securities if evolving circumstances indicate that such transactions would be particularly effective in improving conditions in private credit markets."

Here’s the problem the Fed faces: Traders and investors have some legitimate reasons to push Treasury yields up from their recent record lows. For one, Wall Street knows it is facing a massive supply of new government debt to fund the financial-system bailout and economic stimulus plans.

The Treasury today said it would borrow $67 billion next week alone via sales of three-year, 10-year and 30-year bonds. To attract enough buyers, the government may just have to pay more.

What I know is that I understand stocks, and I understand options. I understands puts and calls. But I don't understand the bond market. I just know that I get sick of California initiatives that call for a bond. I always vote them down.

A long time ago when I used to work at a bank, I worked the Certificate desk. I really loved that job. I used to sell TCDs during the crazy days of the early 80s - the last time gold was up this high - but interest rates were crazy high then too. Now they're rediculously low. I especially liked the quirky kinds of securities and whatnot. In fact, now that I think about it, it used to be my job to hold collateral titles on boats and whatnot to secure various loans. It was at that desk that I learned about municipal bonds (munis) and commercial paper - stuff I've forgotten since. I used to crack up the loan officers when I used to tell them how much money I could make on munis and commercial paper, while the bank was losing money on TCDs. But nobody paid much attention to munis because at the time they were paying a miserable 5%. Well 5% is not miserable any more, and I wonder where I can get some.

Of course I wouldn't think about buying a bond from anywhere in California right about now, but that's another sad story.

Industrial Policy - Line Item by Line Item

I just happen to be auditing some corporate numbers today and of course me being the kind of certified professional I am, I have access to things like corporate salaries. So we're going to talk about micromanagement for a moment.

You see I have a big beef with the jawboning of bank CEO salaries. The government has no business doing this, not even in a crisis. And the idea of putting it up to a political kind of populist litmus test is really disturbing. So I'd like to put together an analogy which should give people who think this stuff is fair, a moment to consider something. First of all, think about yourself and where you work. Now think about your department and what it does. Now imagine the budget of your department waved around like a red flag in front of the bull of public opinion.

Hmm.

Now at the company I'm working at, I can see that with regards to salaries, the executives make a total of 26.7 million. Now everybody that works in marketing makes 26.5 million put together, and the folks who work under the heading of Administration make about 85 million. But since we just got finished dealing with the Super Bowl imagine a scenario in which Senator Frothmouth decides not to pick on executives, but on marketing.

The interesting thing is that for consumer products, we are very much the target of marketing. We may not know all the things a CEO is supposed to be judged on, but we know a bogus TV ad when we see one.  How about Budweiser ladies and gentlemen. Does anyone honestly believe that you are really going to change how many people drink Bud based on the TV ads?  Who else had stupid commercials? Hmm. Pepsi had a pretty cool one and a pretty stupid one. Cut half of the marketing team at Pepsico's salary in half!

The crowd I hang out with meets bigwigs on a semi-regular basis. Although I don't go for that sort of thing, I could probably wrangle a bunch of skybox seats in any given sport if I tried hard enough. That's all marketing too. We don't need skyboxes in this economy, any idiot can see that.

I think you get the picture. Any sort of anything can be singled out by politicians and their media flunkies for criticism and jawboning. That's not how you make policy, that's how you make enemies of business - the businesses we all depend on. Let's keep this whole thing simple. Buy it and take control of shutup.

There are only two intelligent choices in an economic crisis of this sort. Nationalization or Laissez Faire. In between those extremes is regulation and taxation. Read my lips, WE DON'T HAVE TIME. It is absolutely impossible under crisis conditions for the government to come up with an improved set of regulatory frameworks or tax incentives that will create the proper stimulus. I hope Obama gets the message very soon that half stepping doesn't work on a tightrope.
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While I'm at it speaking of tax policy, I am in total agreement that a rebate is not going to produce stimulus. So while I would be personally psyched to get a payroll tax exemption (Oh my GOD, that would be cool!) I know exactly what I would do with it, which is the same thing most Americans would do, save it for a rainy day. The statistic is that when Bush mailed the checks last year, 83% of it went to savings. That's something of an astonishing figure but if it's true that means households are all hunkering down - everybody wants to spend nothing.

It is not entirely clear to me how consumer spending will get us out of the recession, but buying a pair of socks actually makes sense in macroeconomic theory. The equation is
GDP = C + I + G + (X − M). More on that later...

Fifty Line Items

VARIOUS LEFT-WINGERY:

1. $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts

2. $380 million in the Senate bill for the Women, Infants and Children program

3. $300 million for grants to combat violence against women

4. $2 billion for federal child care block grants

5. $6 billion for university building projects

6. $15 billion for boosting Pell Grant college scholarships

7. $4 billion for job-training programs, including $1.2 billion to provide “youth” summer jobs for people up to the age of 24

8. $1 billion for community development block grants

9. $4.2 billion for “neighborhood stabilization activities”

10. $650 million for digital TV coupons, including $90 million to educate “vulnerable populations”

POORLY DESIGNED TAX RELIEF:

11. $15 billion for business-loss carry-backs

12. $145 billion for “Making Work Pay” tax credits

13. $83 billion for the earned income credit

STIMULUS FOR THE GOVERNMENT:

14. $150 million for the Smithsonian

15. $34 million to renovate the Department of Commerce headquarters

16. $500 million for improvement projects for National Institutes of Health facilities

17. $44 million for repairs to Department of Agriculture headquarters

18. $350 million for Agriculture Department computers

19. $88 million to help move the Public Health Service into a new building next year

20. $448 million for constructing a new Homeland Security Department headquarters

21. $600 million to convert federal auto fleet to hybrids

22. $450 million for National Aeronautics and Space Administration

23. $600 million for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

24. $1 billion for the Census Bureau

INCOME TRANSFERS:

25. $89 billion for Medicaid

26. $30 billion for COBRA insurance extension

27. $36 billion for expanded unemployment benefits

28. $20 billion for food stamps

PURE PORK:

29. $4.5 billion for U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

30. $850 million for Amtrak

31. $87 million for a polar icebreaking ship

32. $1.7 billion for the National Park System

33. $55 million for Historic Preservation Fund

34. $7.6 billion for “rural community advancement programs”

35. $150 million for agricultural commodity purchases

36. $150 million for “producers of livestock, honeybees, and farm-raised fish”

RENEWABLE WASTE:

37. $2 billion for renewable energy research

38. $2 billion for a “clean-coal” power plant in Illinois

39. $6.2 billion shall be for the Weatherization Assistance Program

40. $3.5 billion shall be for energy efficiency and conservation block grants

41. $3.4 billion shall be for the State Energy Program

42. $200 million shall be for state and local electric-transport projects

43. $300 million shall be for energy-efficient appliance rebate programs

44. $400 million for hybrid cars for state and local governments

45. $1 billion for the manufacturing of advanced batteries

46. $1.5 billion for green technology loan guarantees

47. $8 billion for innovative technology loan guarantee program

48. $2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects

49. $4.5 billion for electricity grid

REWARDING STATE IRRESPONSIBILITY:

50. $79 billion for State Fiscal Stabilization Fund

Armey on Keynes vs Heyek

Ripped off from the Wall Street Journal is this timely note from Dick Armey.

Classical economists up to that time had emphasized a balanced budget and government restraint as the primary goals of fiscal policy. The simplistic notion that "aggregate demand" drove investment and employment threw all of that out the window, but it had one particular convenience for policy makers. Government spending is, according to Keynes's construct, a key component in determining aggregate demand, so more spending, even to resod the Capitol Mall or distribute free contraception, drives the economy in the short run.

A father of public choice economics, Nobel laureate James Buchanan, argues that the great flaw in Keynesianism is that it ignores the obvious, self-interested incentives of government actors implementing fiscal policy and creates intellectual cover for what would otherwise be viewed as self-serving and irresponsible behavior by politicians. It is also very difficult to turn off the spigot in better economic times, and Keynes blithely ignored the long-term effects of financing an expanded deficit.

It's clear why Keynes's popularity endures in Congress. Intellectual cover for a spending spree will always be appreciated there. But it's harder to see any justification for the perverse form of fiscal child abuse that heaps massive debts on future generations.

This is a brilliant piece of writing which takes us directly into the heart of the matter facing us. I Hayekian, and it seems that when I've just about worn myself out on the crisis facing me as a geopolitical neocon, here comes another to pull me back in. Keynes vs Hayek, with the troglodytes of Congress weighing in on the Keynesian side.

Every you hear a Republican say 'mortgage our children's future' this is what they're talking about. The huge bill that will come due from all of this deficit spending. I think there may come a time in my life when, with regard to taxation, it will be cheaper for me to live in Canada.

I know Obama cannot control this Congress and this is his first test. He is either in the tank with them, fulfilling dreams of profligate programs, or he is powerless to constrain their appetite for uneconomic foolishness. I almost wish that he was a socialist at this point. At least he'd have the stones to actually take over the insolvent banks.

Sentiments into Policy

It's really getting on my nerves, this whole cowardly approach to the banking crisis. I'm trying to figure out if the media is just being stupid and dumbing down substantial debate or if nothing really substantial is going on in Washington.

Headline: Obama caps executive pay tied to bailout money

This is simply retarded. If you're going to run a bank, then run the bank. Limiting executive compensation has nothing to do with what makes a good bank good and what makes a bad bank bad with regard to the mess we're in. Stop bailing out insolvent banks. Buy them or let them go bust. This half assed populist monkey business is a waste of time, money and political capital.

There's going to come a time within the next 6 months when Obama will have lost his momentum and his approval rating with drop. When that happens lobbyists are going to ramrod Congress into doing something incredibly uneconomical, and all of the economists who have sway today are going to be mere academics again. 

Now Zinni

Ricks reports:

It isn't good news that the Obama administration apparently offered retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni the job of ambassador to Iraq and then rescinded it without telling him.

Zinni has stepped on a lot of toes through the years, but he is highly respected both inside the U.S. military and in the Arab world. I think he would have made a good proconsul, especially if both the U.S. civilian and military sides of the effort reported to him.

That bus keeps rolling along.

Sex is the Opiate of the Masses

Not religion.

Today I am reflecting on a few Black Eyed Peas songs that I have not bothered to skip through on my iTunes this morning, and that phrase got stuck in my head. I will add one more old quote of mine from Aldous Huxley. "An intellectual is someone who has found something more fascinating thatn sex."

Thoughts?

Crash & Burn

Boy do I love transparency.

I guess the problem with being a community activist for too long is that you actually don't get to know many serious, ethical and competent politicians in Washington. And so when you finally get to the bigs, you have to pick stalwarts from the usual suspects. Problem is, transparency's a bitch.

I think it is a bracingly marvelous thing that we have a trail of crumpled bodies under the gleaming wheels of steel of the Obama bus. The big upside of being a saint is that by comparison nobody has high standards. Let us pray that Obama can keep that reputation long enough to get through some more of the dead weight inside the Beltway.

Now Thomas Ricks, the author of the finest critique of the Iraq War, 'Fiasco', is getting a sinking feeling in the pit of his gut about Obama's troubles in getting competent folks into the most key positions of power in the American government.

That sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach is caused by the course of Obama's cabinet picks: Richardson blew up on the launch pad, two of the more prominent picks have tax problems, his CIA pick seems inexplicable, his no. 2 guy at the Pentagon needed a waiver from his new anti-lobbying rule, and Hillary Clinton and her hubbie strike me as a ticking bombs.

It's starting to make me think that the Clinton backlash machine might not have been totally disengaged. What networks is Obama going to have to tap in order to tap the right candidates, and what kind of quids do those pros quo?