Cobb

Liberal Structuralism

The problem isn't at all structural, else Christianity would be wrong and it's certainly older than capitalism. But as in everything its the person trying to make the difference that does, or doesn't. And so one by one, individuals and their individual acts make up society. It's all the abstraction that's the problem. 

Be all that as it may, there was a time when an industrious and pious individual was considered at his word and deed. And our civilization, as were all civilizations, arranged around him in protection of such virtues. And somehow people have become convinced (people who in the end delude themselves into thinking their proxies matter) that civilizations can be made to do well for the masses without consideration for such piety and industriousness. That in fact the only industry that mattered was the industry of the government and that a properly run government ought to get in the way of religion. So laws proliferated and transcendent texts were put away. 

Now we have lawyers who finagle behemoth jungles of legislation and statutory swamps for the supposed benefit of the masses, and the affairs of the average Joe are now fettered with a million rules, such things that a pious and industrious individual of virtuous word and deed doesn't require, save a minimum few. Yes of course that's how lawyers were instructed - they are only capable of becoming what their schools teach them, which are agents of some edifice of complexity, for the supposed benefit of the masses. Overwrought laws implemented by overlarge government bureaucracies for overspoiled children who cannot manage their own affairs independently, like individuals of piety and industry. So long as people will be petty and unable to resolve their differences on their own, there will always be lawyers and laws springing up to fill the vacuum of common sense and decency. Listen for the herald cry: 'There oughta be a law'. Short of that, some re-education program and its attendant activism all with the same end in mind, Congressional approval and Presidential signature.

Is it any wonder that pious and industrious individuals who neither seek nor need such assistance seem to be such strange creatures to Americans? But this country was supposed to be about that type, not the sort who have grown up with all the million rules and attorney-nannies. And so the structural is forever to be amended and reformed and changed and revolutionized. Well, of course. I pity the poor fools who take their own definition of self from that unending, un-still complexity. 

What is at stake here, in my view, is the very idea of the capacity of individuals for good. And I think that idea will die for lack of experience of its fundamental operation which is the employment of one man by another. For me to see some quality in another man and for me to take the risk in paying that man out of my own pocket for him to do a job is the elemental transaction of industry. For us to agree is a contract. The pledge of one man to do and another to pay. That's what we cannot forget, lest we forget the very pillar of civilization. For any man who has good honest work and who is entrusted to do it and does it, must inevitably become a good honest man.  And so any man understanding that, should he manage to accumulate the means, must then continue and finding other men and good honest work for them in turn. The examples are all around today and in history should we bother to look. 

But there is a political class in this country that is prepared to agitate against that simple bond and redefine what work and industry are. They are inevitably those who haven't experienced the bond, and so there may be some justice in that. For who else but those who don't know good and honest work would seek to destroy the very idea? If that is our political majority then it will take some work to undo their undoing of work. 

The difference between capitalism and everything else is that capitalism honors the contract between individuals and subjects it to the minimum of interference from the government. To the man who risks to pay goes the profit without third parties telling him how. To the man who delivers the work goes the pay without third parties taking a piece. These are the relationships into which non-capitalists wish so ardently to stick their noses. They wish always to investigate, criticize, second-guess, adjust, adjudicate, reform, correct, oh and take a piece of the action for their involvement, their blessing, their approval, their eternal self-righteous and condescending tolerance.

Why? Well for the good of the masses of course. For the people who cannot manage to broker their own deals, to enter into face to face contracts for good honest work. For people to climb pre-fabricated ladders to 'success', ladders built by lawyers and their superfluous laws. For the sake of a 'structure' that is 'equitable', for the sake of a 'safety net' for the 'forgotten'. For people incapable of finding some good and honor on their own, for the people who are 'useless' to the 'current system'. For the least of these my brothers, at the express and punishing expense of those who avoid their schemes. 

You'll never find an adequate amount of charity from the liberal towards liberal causes. By definition they must draft the unwilling, they must bend those who disagree to their will. They choose to redefine the world in defiance of private arrangements so that they can tax a fraction of the world in their master plans to redefine the world. And so for their aims of global justice, world peace, universal rights they are never satisfied with localities. Their ambition is total, their need for panoptic control is insatiable. They will always claim a higher moral authority - higher than God. Because God's covenant is with individuals.

Yeah. We live in cities we wern't born in. We live in houses we didn't build and we eat food we didn't grow wearing clothes we didn't sew. We speak in languages we didn't master and communicate over computers we cannot program. We drive cars we cannot fix to places we can't even find without a map or a cluster of satellites in space.  We're leveraged, and we all ought to spend our time de-leveraging and become more independent. The Conservative direction is to enable the self-sufficient, the virtues of individual word and deed. 

The Politicization of Business

The question is one of aim, and the trouble with the current flavor of political oversight is that it is an oversight freighted with hostility. This hostility is popular and misguided and the current administration has not done, in my opinion, enough to curtail it. 

The aim of saving a business is to restore it to profitability. Period. 

A profitable business, especially the largest such business on the planet, will pay the highest salaries on the planet. This is to be expected. A board of directors, acting in the interests of shareholders, will approve compensation packages according to their understanding of what the labor market - at that level - requires. You don't take any Joe off the street and make him run GM. But the point here is now that the government has assumed the position of having some fraction of seats on the boards of directors if their mandate requires this anti-executive hostility. How can you be good for the company and be against its leadership from the position of a board member? 

The bill introduced into the House of Representative requiring a 90% tax on executive compensation is shamelessly hostile and contrary to the intent of restoring businesses to profitability. 

So now we get back to the question of aim and intent. If one sees the opportunity of putting businesses under the increased scrutiny of government oversight, whether that is good or bad for the country depends entirely on one's definition of 'business as usual'. 

If you suspect that 'business as usual' is corrupt and/or criminal and/or lining the pockets of executives, then the logical choice is to let such businesses FAIL. Not to bail them out and increase oversight. 

If the intention is to increase government oversight on general principle, then all of the bailout money is simply a bribe to put government spies and overseers in place in private industry. 

If the intention is to restore failing businesses to profitability in trying times, then something other than this hostility must rule the day.

Rudyard's Rolling R

I tend never to forget the fact that I speak and write English, and I recognize in my fondness for the language by the shapes which it forms in my thinking, but also in my regard for the British and their way with the world and the word. I wonder if they were not an Empire would Henry V not be so stirring and I must conclude it would. But the matter of Rudyard Kipling is a bit more difficult, for he is the inevitable sort of 'English' one only gets from immersion in the business of Empire. So he is therefore a controversial figure amongst those who were instructing me towards the ideals of equality. I know looking at them today one needs to challenge the imagination but the British once ruled this planet, and the consensus of my elders say they did a rather cruel, if efficient job of it.

I'm fully prepared to take the wonders of my native tongue at face value, which I thought I was going to be doing when picking up a volume of Percy Bysshe Shelley over the weekend. Instead, I found an intense mix of oceanic metaphors, polemic castigations of Kings and countries, and the word 'Poesy'. But in that second measure of Shelley, I found nothing so blistering as this:

I met Murder on the way -
He had a mask like Castlereagh -
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:

All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.

I'm going to have to come up with a new exclamation to describe such a powerful image as this. Speaking of which, I'm sure you have noticed on television programs broadcasting the world's most incredible destructions caught on (tape/film/digital media) how we have, in the face of tragedy been reduced to the ubiquitous Oh My God and perfunctorily bleeped Holy Shit. Is nothing so tragic any more, or is that merely all these train wrecks and explosions deserve?

And yet not even David Cronenberg has manage to be so succinctly descriptive of evil as Shelley in those two stanzas in any scene of his filmic horror. I am becoming more convinced that we, some of us, lack even the ability to see the simply awful for all our investments in entertaining grotesqueries. We're stuck on the Arendt phrase and pass over evil as merely banal. Yet in Shelley there strides Murder, capitalized.

So we live in times, insufficient to the task of appropriately guaging the measure of man, and it is in that mismeasure that the shadows surrounding the colonial cheek of Rudyard Kipling have been handed down to me. I should not complain so much about the lack of a noble arena and edifying air to breathe. One has to shut up and read the books after all. I hadn't; my bad. But now that is rectified. I am quite happy to ignore the implications of Kipling's N-bomb, which is supposed to be so emblematic of all that was wrong with the colonial world and the British. There is no colonial world, there is only our world such as it is, and one of the delights of it is that it has preserved Kipling's way with words.

Such Tortoises and Hares and Boys and Wolves and Thumbelinas and Hansels and witches wicked East and West fall short, far short I think of what we might have gotten were Kipling's stories told just so. And years we wasted on one unwanted boy whose magicks never traveled beyond a muggled world might have been spent in consideration of more inspiring things. But there are traps deeply laid in the matters of British mind and the place of its gentlemen and soldiers in the recent history of the world. I cannot say that I'm immune to their springing - so how exactly should one read the tale of the Ethiopian who changed his skin and gave the Leopard means to change to spots? No better explanation than the eminently contemporary Wikipedia entry:

Rudyard Kipling's Just So Story "How the Leopard Got His Spots" tells of how an Ethiopian and a leopard, who are originally sand-colored, decide to paint themselves for camouflage when hunting in dense tropical forest. The story originally included a scene in which the leopard, who now has spots, asks the Ethiopian why he doesn't want spots as well. The Ethiopian's original reply, "Oh, plain black's best for a nigger", has been changed in many modern editions to read, "Oh, plain black's best for me."

Rudyard Kipling uses the word in his "A Counting-Out Song", from Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides, (1923). The rhyme reads "Eenie Meenie Mainee, Mo! Catch a nigger by the toe!"

It gave me a start when I heard it at first, in the audiobook I was hearing.
I drove over railroad tracks just at the moment, but which had affected my steering?
I smiled at the moment of shock then I laughed calming my own mental waters.
Glad that I could take it not as an affront, but still keep it away from my daughters.

And that was the last that I thought about the matter and kept on listening, growing ever more satisfied with the quality of each successive tale, until at last the tale of the The Cat and then of the Butterfly revealed themselves to be purest genius.

Like all frat rats of my generation, I was pledged to recite Rudyard's If from memory, and was rather glad I could at last. And I recognize it called out by bits in the course of my reading and writing and speaking of larger matters. I daresay nothing of Jungle Book survives as much of a lesson to me except for the Disney songs, most annoyingly sweet Bare Necessities. And in passing through the brief and expected harangue of Pops', there's something about Gunga Din. But for the most part in this and most of my discoveries I am on my own in finding, interpreting and integrating literature and the reputations of the authors.

I wouldn't know any place but here to get a word in edgewise about my impressions of authors and their works but I am now completely fond of Kipling. At the center of Kipling is a question of standing import to my current investigations. What is the difference between Imperialism and Evangelism? There isn't much really. They are merely aggressive, convinced forms of "Hey, I've got an idea you should try." Kipling is a piper alongside the troops of Great Britain's ideas. I can't imagine the world was ever discovered or built up differently, because as in the evasion of Kipling we find that many people study at being small minded and offendable. Such people need conviction, I think. Then again there are certainly enough of us who have conviction.

The reader of the audiobook reminds us of a time when the English language was closer to something it oftimes seems unable to convey, which is conviction and respect, even authority. He rolls certain Rs in words for emphasis. It used to be a more common practice to do so, even here in America. Did Dorothy Parker roll the occasional R? I can't imagine that she didn't in the course of her discourse. And so I am remembering Kipling, and Poesy and the discipline and song of adventures into the world, thankful I have been reminded of my great fortune to inherit the language of Liberty.

Adventure

FedEx Will Play Hardball

The following is from a very close friend and former FedEx employee:

I always follow news of this, the greatest company I have ever worked for.  Fred Smith is John Galt (from Ayn Ryan's Atlas Shrugged) and Howard Roark (from Fountainhead)  all rolled up into one. 

I recall a phrase he used in the 90's when the pilots (ALPA) threatened to strike at the time: "With you or without you."  In other words I will run this company with or without pilots.....which was simply an extrordinary declaration for a CEO of an airline to make. 

I have been waiting for true capitalist heros to stand up and speak out against the (if you can't afford to stay in business, we'll own your business) Soviet-era mindset this administration. 

Fred Smith is visionary embodyment of all that's good in American business.  He is well-equipt to lead charge of the goodly majority of American business leaders who remain bullish on our exceptionalism as Americans  We reamain a nation of opportunity, innovation and high achievement.

Following was cut/ pasted from transcript of Rush (who's audience jumped fron 14.5 to 24 million after President said people should "stop listening to him)

Story #2: Card Check: FedEx Threatens to Cancel Jet Orders

RUSH: I have always been an admirer of Federal Express and of its founder, Fred Smith, who got a C-minus or something like on his doctoral thesis in college. His doctoral thesis was the structuring and marketing plan of FedEx, and some pointy-headed professor said, "This will never work but it's a nice effort," and gave him a C-minus, and now FedEx is what it is.  FedEx has an order. They have an order for 30 brand-new Boeing jets, cargo jets, to deliver your packages overnight.  Thirty jets, the order for 30 jets equals billions and billions of dollars that FedEx needs to spend to upgrade their fleet.  "FedEx said yesterday that they probably will cancel the purchase of these jets from Boeing if Congress passes a law that would make it easier for unions to organize at FedEx."  This is card check. 

They said that if card check happens, they're going to cancel plans to buy as many as 30 new Boeing planes. "[S]hould Congress pass a bill that would remove truck drivers, couriers and other employees at FedEx's Express unit from the jurisdiction of the federal Railway Labor Act of 1926... In January, FedEx said its express unit exercised options to buy 15 more Boeing 777 freighters, worth $3.75 billion at list prices. However, the company deferred delivery of some of the planes as the U.S. economy faces a bleak outlook. FedEx's actions raise the stakes in an increasingly bitter battle involving chief rival, United Parcel Service Inc, and the Teamsters union, which has been trying for years to organize at FedEx, the Journal said.

"FedEx and Boeing could not be immediately reached for comment by Reuters." Cancel 30 jets. This is how you have to deal with these people.  This is how you have to deal with the mob.  This is how you have to deal with the Mafia.  You don't go up there and lobby 'em and talk and beg and cajole.  You say, "Fine. You're going to do this? We're going to cancel our growth plans, 'cause you're going to kill our company. You're going to destroy our company."  The problem with this is that I'm sure the Obama administration doesn't care if they destroy FedEx, because they are out to punish people who don't do it their way! They're out to punish people who do not have unionized workforces. 

What the hell do you think card check is?  Card check is a giant threat.  It is a threat. Now, I know Senator Specter has said he's going to come out against it.  That gives the Republicans 41 votes. That means they can filibuster and block it, if Specter holds true to what he's saying now.  But this is a key piece of legislation.  It is crucial that this thing be defeated, because if it passes, you're going to see this like we're hearing about FedEx from a lot of different companies.  They're not going to put up with it.  They're just going to see themselves go out of business for no purpose whatsoever.  And, again, don't make the mistake of assuming the Obama administration or Obama himself, are naive and they just don't understand.  They know exactly what they're doing.  They know exactly what they're doing. 

Their operating policy is returning the nation's wealth to its rightful owners.  Quote, unquote, "rightful owners."  FedEx is not a rightful owner of the nation's wealth.  FedEx is depriving people of a living wage because they have no unions.  FedEx is evil and mean, and so are all other American business.   So is AIG, and so are all these Wall Street people.  They're evil, and they have stolen what is not theirs. They have stolen the nation's wealth right out from under the nation's rightful owners, the real owners: the poor and the middle class.  This is purposeful. It is a purposeful attack.

People are fighting back.

Roubini on Sachs vs Geithner

Some detailed examples on the mechanics of the PPIP.

In today’s FT Jeff Sachs makes a strong critique of the Geithner plan to deal with toxic assets based on the argument that the non-recourse loan will lead investors to vastly overpay for such assets compared to their fair expected value. Here is Sachs’ argument:

Obama’s bank plan could rob the taxpayer By Jeffrey Sachs Published: March 25 2009, Financial Times
The Geithner-Summers plan, officially called the public/private investment programme, is a thinly veiled attempt to transfer up to hundreds of billions of dollars of US taxpayer funds to the commercial banks, by buying toxic assets from the banks at far above their market value. It is dressed up as a market transaction but that is a fig-leaf, since the government will put in 90 per cent or more of the funds and the “price discovery” process is not genuine. It is no surprise that stock market capitalisation of the banks has risen about 50 per cent from the lows of two weeks ago. Taxpayers are the losers, even as they stand on the sidelines cheering the rise of the stock market. It is their money fuelling the rally, yet the banks are the beneficiaries. The plan’s essence is to use government off-budget money to overpay for banks’ toxic assets, perhaps by a factor of two or more. This is done by creating a one-way bet for private-sector bidders for the toxic assets, then cynically calling it “private sector price discovery”. Consider a simple example: a toxic asset with face value of $1m pays off fully with probability of 20 per cent and pays off $200,000 with probability of 80 per cent. A risk-neutral investor would pay $360,000 for this asset. Along comes the government and says it will finance 90 per cent of the investor’s purchase and, moreover, do so as a non-recourse loan. Non-recourse means the government’s loan is backed only by the collateral value of the toxic asset itself. If the pay-out is low, the loan is defaulted and the government ends up with the low pay-out rather than full repayment of the loan. Now the investor is prepared to bid $714,000 (with rounding) for the same asset. The investor uses $71,000 of his/her own money and $643,000 of the government loan. If the asset pays off in full, the investor repays the loan, with a profit of $357,000. This happens 20 per cent of the time, so brings an expected profit of $71,000. The other 80 per cent of the time the investor defaults on the loan, and the government ends up with $200,000. The investor just breaks even by bidding $714,000, as we would expect in a competitive auction. Of course, the investor has systematically overpaid by $354,000 (the bid price of $714,000 minus the market value of $360,000), reflecting the investor’s right to default on the loan in the event of a poor pay-out of the toxic asset. The overpayment equals the expected loss of the government loan. After all, 80 per cent of the time (in this example) the government loses $443,000 (the $643,000 loan minus the $200,000 repayment). The expected loss is 80 per cent of $443,000, equal to $354,000. The idea of “private sector price discovery” is therefore flim-flam. There would be price discovery if the government’s loan had to be repaid whether or not the asset paid off in full. In that case, the investor would bid $360,000. But under the Geithner-Summers plan the loan is precisely designed to be a one-way bet, for the purpose of overpricing the toxic asset in order to bail out the bank’s shareholders at hidden cost to the taxpayers. The banks could be saved without saving their shareholders – a better deal for taxpayers and without the moral hazard of rescuing shareholders from the banks’ bad bets. Most simply, the government could provide loans to buy the toxic assets on a recourse basis, therefore without the hidden subsidy. Alternatively, the plan could give the taxpayers an equity stake in the banks in return for cleaning their balance sheets. In cases of insolvency, the government could take over the bank, the much dreaded nationalisation, albeit temporary. At the end of the Bush administration, Congress voted for the $700bn (€517bn, £479bn) troubled asset relief programme (Tarp) on the assurance the taxpayer would get fair value for money (for example, by taking equity stakes in the rescued banks). The new plan does not offer that.Tim Geithner, Treasury secretary, and Lawrence Summers, director of the White House national economic council, suspect that they cannot go back to Congress to fund their plan and so are raiding the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the remaining Tarp funds, hoping that there will be little public understanding and little or no congressional scrutiny. This is an inappropriate institutional use of the Fed, the FDIC and the Tarp. Mr Geithner and Mr Summers should at the very least explain the true risks of large losses by the government under their plan. Then, a properly informed Congress and public could decide whether to adopt this plan or some better alternative.
Jeffrey Sachs is director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University

What should we make of Sachs’s critique? After discussing Sachs’ analysis with my co-author Matt Richardson we have come to the following conclusion: Sachs has a point but he has way exaggerated it with non-representative leverage. Let us first take his example and then make some general comments. For his example, assume interest rates are zero. The very maximum leverage available in the Geithner plan is 6:1 (and most likely much smaller), and the investor and government are 1:1, so let's use that ratio rather than the much higher leverage ratio used by Sachs in his example. If the investors bid 480, the investor will have used 60 of his/her own money and will expects to get zero 80% of the time in the bad state, and (60+ 0.5 x 520) 20% of the time in the good state. This gives expected value of 64, a small profit for the investor. So the overbidding is 480/360, actually 33% in the most extreme leverage case, and assuming risk neutrality and zero interest.  Clearly these are all strong assumptions: if investors, as likely are risk-averse the overbidding is much smaller; if interest rates are positive, say 2%, the overbidding is much smaller; if leverage is lower overbidding is smaller. So, in general the overbidding is much smaller than in the Sachs’ example given the parameters of the Geithner plan. Now reverse Sachs’ example with the following one. Suppose the asset has a 80% probability of 100 value and 20% probability of a 20 value. So, now the expected value of the asset is 840k. Then, in this case the investor will bid 880; thus, the investor will get expected value of 13.6 on an investment of 11. The overbidding will only be 5% rather than the 33% of the previous example or the almost 100% of the Sachs example. Clearly, the goal all along is for investors to competitively bid the price up due to cheap leverage to get banks to participate. We don't think there is any doubt about that and we said so in our New York Daily News op-ed. But at least it is a freebie that removes the bad assets. In conclusion, Sachs has clearly exaggerated the effect even in his example. But we agree that he has made a valid contribution - the banks have an incentive to offer up loan portfolios or securities with asymmetric payoffs and lots of volatility. This is potentially a big adverse selection problem. This suggests the government really needs to get full participation, In other terms, all the asset-backed securities and loans that would have naturally been securitized should be put into the list. The government should not let the bank cherry pick.

All well and good, but I cannot parse from this what happened to the stress test and which banks get this treatment and which do not. I already assume that the taxpayer gets screwed because it's Obama and he hasn't even bothered to flex the muscles of the FDIC and let recievership take its due course. Again, this is his overreach from the executive end of things trying to come up with an all-encompassing plan which forces us to use an all new toolset of his administration's invention, rather than applying some we know and have. This is paying for the steak sauce before you've herded the cattle. There once was a lot of talk about how consolidation in the banking sector was inevitable - but I don't hear that much.

It is fair to add that depending on the administration's policy on mark to market, many banks are indeed going concerns and few might head to bankruptcy at all were some holiday on that practice officially granted, but that is the effect of an accounting trick - the composition of the assets would still be roughly the same, and still unpriced. But there's no official word I can hear.

In the end, the government seems to be guaranteeing most of the securities anyway, the partnership appears a bit stingy. But somebody has got to bite, somebody with Sach's view at least.

From Billions to Trillions

Yike. Yike and triple yike. They say a picture is worth 1000 words. This chart is worth trillions. 

Krugman vs Geithner

In case you missed it, the Nobel Laureate and darling of the BDS Left has skewered the Obama Administration's political calculations for bank bailout. 

But it’s immediately obvious, if you think about it, that these funds will have skewed incentives. In effect, Treasury will be creating — deliberately! — the functional equivalent of Texas S&Ls in the 1980s: financial operations with very little capital but lots of government-guaranteed liabilities. For the private investors, this is an open invitation to play heads I win, tails the taxpayers lose. So sure, these investors will be ready to pay high prices for toxic waste. After all, the stuff might be worth something; and if it isn’t, that’s someone else’s problem.

Or to put it another way, Treasury has decided that what we have is nothing but a confidence problem, which it proposes to cure by creating massive moral hazard.

This plan will produce big gains for banks that didn’t actually need any help; it will, however, do little to reassure the public about banks that are seriously undercapitalized. And I fear that when the plan fails, as it almost surely will, the administration will have shot its bolt: it won’t be able to come back to Congress for a plan that might actually work.

What an awful mess.

Ahem.  I beleive that one of the more recent comments about Obama is that 'he doesn't need to be defended'. That is pure zealotry, and Obama's latest meanderings into this economic crisis are officially dubious. 

Back in the good old days we had Federal budget deficits around 300-400 billion. Now it's 1.7 - 2.0 trilion. There's nowhere to run and nowhere to hide as Obama drives our great nation over a cliff of debt. 

A Question of iRace

Several years ago, I made a Race Man questionnaire. Using the best questions I could figure out, I made a race-neutral series of questions that allowed me to put people into one of several buckets. It was a pretty good success, and over the years I got more than 10,000 responses. I stopped counting really, but it told me everything I wanted to know which was basically that 15% of Americans were racist and more than double that, largest majority, were anti-racist.

Do you think that would be a cool app for the iPhone?

Daniel Hannan: A Man of Cheek

These sound very much like the sort of words people recall apres le deluge. They are being spoken today. Be very afraid for Great Britain. Does anyone in our Congress ever speak so plainly?

Cramer vs Stewart

I was in the middle of other things when people all over the web went cuckoo over Jon Stewarts alleged fisking of Jim Cramer. I have one thing to say about the entire affair and in the end I believe that it is the only thing that matters.

What Jim Cramer was that Jon Stewart never will be is someone who made money for people. Cramer was responsible for running a business whose job it was to make money for his clients - and he made it to the top of that field and had the responsibility for many people's jobs in the financial industry. No matter what Stewart says, in the end he is just an entertainer and he is responsible for what? To make people laugh. What Stewart is doing is taking the cheap shot to an art form with maybe a dozen 'researchers' who scour YouTube for something he can play for laughs. In the process, he has been mistaken for and misrepresented as an 'investigative journalist' or someone whose 'standards' of 'tough questions' have put the news media to shame.

And yet he still cannot hold a candle to The Onion.

Be that as it may, in the grand scheme of things Cramer was the boss of adults who worked in a very important industry that is currently in crisis - a crisis that means something to the livlihoods of millions of people around the world. Jon Stewart, on the other hand, is a comedian. If everyone of his equal talent and standing in his industry were to declare bankruptcy and never come back whose livelihoods would be affected? Perhaps bored college students with snarky attitudes might be found throwing their lattes against the walls, but little else would change. 

When Stewart writes a book that compares favorably to PJ O'Rourke, give us grownups a jingle.

Kindle Me Baby

It is true that I gather a couple nickels in syndication. Perhaps even more may be coming my way as the new Kindle Store ignites. It turns out that you can subscribe to Cobb using Kindle. So just click on the icon and get with the highest tech program of all. For a measly 99 cents a month? C'mon. That's an irresistible bargain.

Levitt Smacks Pelosi's Pitchfork Populism

Arthur Levitt is the oldest, wisest man to brave the new media, and his weekly appearances on the ever excellent Bloomberg Surveillance with Pruitt and Keene are a real treat for someone like me who grew up on Huntley, Brinkley and Rukeyser. They say that there is no dignity, wisdom or sagacity in the Fourth Estate. Not true - just hard to find.

He has grasped the essense of what I fear is the most significant bruise on the face of the Obama Administration. Aside from the embarrassment of a misdirected compliment of Chirac, much to the consternation of Sarkozy, aside from the foolishness of seeing Crazy A of Iran as anything but The Cat Who Walks By Himself who righteously deserves shoes thrown at him, there is this idling complicity with the pitchforks of Congress aimed at abrogating contracts at AIG. Even over the voice of Larry Summers who flatly says we don't do that in America.

And yet where is Obama to quell this soak the rich mentality? On Leno talking about his bowling score. Real classy Barack, or should we call you Barry or B Man star of a B Movie? This ain't really a life, ain't really a life, ain't really ain't nothing but a movie. We expected you to have a backbone and stand up to the lunatic Left Mr President. Were we all tripping on angel dust?

With any luck, the Senate will come to its senses, and Obama will make the appropriate noises to nip this sort of Sherwood Forest hoodery in its barbarian bud. The chilling effect, as Levitt correctly notes, has already coerced some fraction of the AIG employees to fork over their dough, but who in their right mind is going to enter any partnership with Obama's government is this sort of envelope pushing his nationalization entails? Levitt is of the opinion, which I share, that this sort of arbitrary and instant taxation is unconstitutional. If Congress goes forward and Obama signs it, this will go to the Supreme Court. Forget William Ayers. This is the real thing.

Either way Geithner is going to have a hell of a hard time getting any more power to do anything, truly a squandered resource. If there isn't some decisive healing done right away, Obama may have alienated the last of his friends in the business community - which we should note are a different class of people than those idle wealthy liberal bored retirees who bankrolled Democrats and delivered him Colorado. 

He's the Wiz and He Lives in Oz

No this is not a missive against Obama although the analogy is perfect. Rather it is a reflection on the Motown production of 1978 as I watched again last evening with the family.

Seeing The Wiz reminds me so much of the 70s assumptions of a Cold War malaise, approaching calamity and the naive birth of a young black post-soul consciousness throwing off the fetters of an older generation. Adults changed into children all over that film. Diana Ross' Dorothy wasn't dreaming of getting away and going somewhere over the rainbow so much as she was an overgrown child with a dog instead of her own child - a naif who had never been south of 125th Street in Harlem, who only got swept away by accident, chasing a puppy less afraid of the world than she.

The arrival in Oz begins at night. The evil witch has turned the Munchkins into grafitti. They are freed by the accident as with the original and dance with glee. They wear apple caps and windowpanes. They do fliplops and Arabians. They are led by Miss One, a woman with an abacus around her neck reminding me of something I was supposed to know but never really did, growing up in LA. We black people play The Numbers. It is one of our cultural characteristics, like the soul stirrings and hip shaking with the tattooed couplet rhyme and the $10 word for emphasis. It is only when Ted Ross' lion plays against it that we realize how very highschool much of this was. But Ted's for later. For now I only remember that I was supposed to know, on the 'blackness' quizzes I got in my own high school days how exactly to figure out the day's number. It had something to do with the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Tell me if you know.

Oz continues into a post-apocalyptic ruin, a tenement overrun by crows with nothing but rubble around the sole existing building - rubble that extends to the eastern horizon. The King of Naifs, Michael Jackson executes his great performance to futility, the crow national anthem 'You Can't Win' (you can't break even and you can't get out of the game).

Attending his ecstatic liberation is the kind of fragmented aphorisms of context-free fortune cookie commentary that spews from his chest of garbage. He dances and spins with Ross across a yellow brick bridge. The cabs won't take them anywhere. They have to walk the walk to wherever it is they're going, and there's the only decent lesson I can take from this new version, something I interpret in a way I assume to be completely different from the old racial complaint.

At some point we get to the Poppies, seventies versions of today's booty girls, who by any contemporary standard are remarkably tame. And while I can certainly remember a lot more talk about herpes in those days than these, I find a bit of nostalgia for the time when sex was dirty and everybody knew it. Such is the abbreviated lurid segment of the Wiz treatment, sex and drugs, shacking up in a one-two punch to the soul. It tumbled our naive heroes to their momentary doom in a puff of purple smoke, and we all knew it.

Evilleene, or however that name is spelled embodies all sorts of hideousness at a limbic level. She's got evil skin, an evil fat frame bulging with blisters of red junk, a scathing peircing voice and a whip. Oh that whip. All she needed was a red hankerchief on her head and she'd have been the Beulah from Hell. I forget the actual archtype's name - check your Donald Bogle for details, but it's all in there. A kind of inverse Chaka Khan's I'm Every Woman. Everything you don't want done, she does it naturally.

And that was the last of them, I think. Because the Wiz mixed the young with the old and put babies in with Lena Horne and chic black socialites who presaged the Obama head angle walzed around the World Trade Center just to be seen green provided the new counterbalance to every grubby Fred Sandford there ever was in Hollywood's Apartheid. Or so it seemed to me as a child when Ren Woods and then Stephanie Mills became heroines from being the Dorothy of our dreams. The Wiz was Diana Ross' last gasp and marked her need to get out of our lives, the old ham. Leave it to Michael, please. Put more and more and more black people on the screen, not just the same old heads coming back to Charleston Blue, whatever the hell that meant.

The Wiz stood on the edge of the old soul world and presaged the new post-soul world. And kids like me back in 1978 knew we were supposed to respect Nipsey Russell, but we didn't know for what. I guess he was about as upitty as a black entertainer could afford to be, and thus a mere shadow of Don Rickles - but I could tell he was trying. But he still coudln't say shit, literally, which probably accounts for the outburst of hiphop, my generation's dubious contribution to the art of entertainment. But it took a post-apocalyptic vision to accomplish it, back in the days when we could still only imagine a Chocolate City which required Aretha Franklin and James Brown. The Queen and the Godfather. Of what? Of Soul. How quaint.

Beyond that, you could see they had no idea of what the future might hold, and so held on to power way too long - God damn you Baby Boom, you greedy, self-centered fools. You cheated your way to the top and now you blew it all. Some days I feel like Charlton Heston on the Apes beach looking up at charbroiled Liberty, the very icon of the 70s films that were the soul of that generation. They knew they were headed to self-destruction, and in that little spot where they left things untended some little black weeds sprouted out - suffused with naive hope out of a ruin that there would be a road to ease on down.

So, as usual, there is no great Wizard. You have to believe in yourself. You have to take frightening journeys with unbalanced half-wit characters through bizarre lands to recognize... what? Your ability to survive absurdity? Why go through the trouble? Why suffer through the vain rantings of a wanna-be king with a name like Fleetwood Coupe de Ville? Why run through a maze chased by smelly monkeys? Why? Because Bert Lahr and Judy Garland did it a generation before, and we have to have our own funked-up version of the same old lesson without which some black obsession would suggest its all only a white man's world. We couldn't even leave them Oz. Them. Us.

The Wiz is now three ways an American Classic as it joins the repetoire of standards of summer theatre. There was the original, then the black cast, and now the kid cast. My own baby girls are going to audition this week. Everyone wants to be Miss One, and we'll see. But all the girls this time around will have the traditional black hairdo of braids and extensions down here in the South Bay. We already spent our hundreds a couple weeks ago. This time the pendulum swings post-modern, and The Wiz is for kids, like it should be. I imagine that it's progress for this next generation to step into the roles and understand literally what it takes to put on the show, rather than wait for the cast album to hit the stores and the movie to make ABC Sunday Night At The Movies. I did it is always better than I watched it.

So now I critiqued it.

Passivity in the Face of Barrelfish

As some of you may have noted, perhaps with some lament, I have been playing Mafia Wars on Facebook instead of handing Barack Obama his ass.

I am, as I said I would, observing a six month vacation from so doing simply as a matter of grace. And so I am missing this opportunity to make squawking noises and sit grinning like the clever cat. It keeps my blood pressure down and liberates time for me to pursue other sorts of things than 'I told you so'. I'll jab ever so gently in passing, but I don't expect to unload both barrels anytime soon. I'm not even really keeping score. You cannot be anything but under a rock not to notice exactly what sort of failure he is becoming, then again, the majority couldn't see it coming. Just as they couldn't see the financial train wreck we're in. A few saw both, but it does them no good as it does me no good at this moment to crow.

Just you wait.

Steve, Is That You?

This morning, my brother mentioned a name I haven't heard in many years: Steve Rivers. I know I know somebody named Steve Rivers and I have strange emotions associated with him. I can't say exactly, but they weren't positive. Oh well, I'll just say. I remember the guy as a big crybaby. I don't remember why, but that's what I recall. Of course I'm conflicted about it, he might have been just a nice guy I might have punked with my rather acid wit and snobby attitude. I can't remember enough detail to know why I feel that way about Steve Rivers.

So I took the odd chance that I could find him on Facebook. Yeah right.

I spend a lot of time on Facebook (or FB, as we call it) these days, getting in touch with everybody from everywhere. I've gathered something over 300 friends and associates which is twice Dunbar's Number.

I want to keep gathering everyone, because my book says you can never be too well known. You never actually have to deal with more than a couple score folks at once and they take up 168 hours a week. So even as I figure out ways to define circles of friendship in FB's context, I don't mind appearing to be one of those sociopathic individuals with more than 1000 'friends'.

On the one hand, I am immediately drawn to the idea of concentric circles. Intimates, then close friends, then ordinary friends and associates. Then business colleagues, peers and clients, online commenters, fellow politicos and friends of those friends. But then I decide I don't like the hierarchy much, because there are always breaks. On the other hand, why not supersets and subsets and overlapping circles of friends? Hard to say really, all I really want is to keep track of how those I might forget came to know me. If there are 500, many of whom I share some experience in the distant past, how would I know what to do or say if I actually met them? I might say, Saint John's Church 1975-78 and hope they recall. But then for them it might not have been a favorable time. Such dilemmas trouble me, and I don't have a Miss Manners answer for someone who finds virtue in some lack of pretense - which is to say that I enjoy my class role though its privileges are relatively few. It's hard for me to know exactly why I should presume to have some answer acceptable to society, except that I might have 500 friends. That must mean something worthy of a thoughtful answer.

They say that FB has 175 million members, and that it turns nary a profit. How on Earth can one keep that many servers and networks and programmers all going? In a world with so many different kinds of Steve Riverses, somebody ought to figure out something. I might even pay for it. After all, at my age, with seven thousand someodd names in my electronic black book, there ought to be some better way to meet and remember them electronically. It seems people have only bothered to do so for the purposes of dating. There's profit in being the Yenta just as there is in being the Pimp, and unfortunately for our society the trend seems to be angling towards the latter having more business. So I'm thinking there's got to be a better use for profiling software than all this sort of solicitation. There's a project.

There's one thing I have thought about. That would be a kind of wristwatch worn on the right hand perhaps. When you shake someone's hand, that triggers enough of an intimate association to give some trace of a profile. At the Peace during church I give a two-handed shake. It means more. For some, I embrace which means even more. If I work a crowd, I'd want something more of me left behind and more given, and I sure as hell wouldn't want something like Facebook mediating it for me. That's *my* information. But FB is good for getting into groups and gangs of associates from all of ones walks of life. It's a big lobby and I think it's a great start. But there's a lot more that can and should be done.

The Road

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

My review

rating: 1 of 5 stars
Some books don't teach you anything but the arcane depths of despair that human beings can reach. Very much like 'Life in the Time of Cholera', this book was a tour through a macabre mind, a desolate wilderness of the desperate soul.

If by some feat of technology or magic, one could take a guided tour through the hell of another's life, any sane person would ask - of all human experience why go here?

McCarthy scores for those who are such tourists of despair. But even on technical merit, there is no redemption for this exercise in spiritual torture. Get it out of my head - it's like the mind chewing grubs from the Wrath of Khan.

View all my reviews.

That's Why They Call It Work

It's been a rough couple of weeks at the gig but things are now back on track. After I twisted my wrist, which is now healed to the point where I don't think about it more than once or twice a day, I missed a couple days of work. Wouldn't you know that's when all the systems went to hell, hell being a relative term. But you know the axiom about the squeeky wheel. So everybody went into 'drop all pretenses of success' mode for a short time, which put me on notice to deliver or else. It got to the point at which I wasn't eating lunch (gasp!) and missing entire days of blogging (OMG!).

Now these are levels of deprivation because of stress from work I am greatly unaccustomed to. I consider myself somewhat underemployed, and basically everything I do is supposed to be a walk in the park as well as an exercise in humility. But this was actually raising my level of paranoia, not just my alertness. Now that things have settled down a bit, I'm appropriately inspired and grateful. I do so very much enjoy my position.

I thought about it driving home yesterday. I've had the good fortune to have doubled my salary twice in my life. Since I expect to work another 15 years, I can probably do it again. Then again with inflation coming, it might take less time and mean less as well. Still, I'm fortunate. Life has provided me the opportunity to scrimp at a high level.

Once upon a time, I thought I would never spend so much time writing and being thoughtful. I had plenty of personality and ambition. I think of this when I remember some Ethiopian friends I used to see regularly back in my party days. Ethiopia has been on my mind recently and I remember the kind of elitish manners that used to get me places when I appeared to be more young and promising than I am today. But thanks to Gil Masters, whom I have never had the opportunity to bitchslap, I never got my undergrad transfer to Stanford - and thus all of the computer ideas I've had for years died in the mediocrity of State. I realized that I would not be making the kind of money that would let me have the freedom I desired in the world, and so I went inward instead and started my experiments there.

I don't think I've considered the consequences of that much, nor the implications of similar inward turnings in my and other generations. But suddenly it appears clear as day in the new graphic novel of Crime and Punishment that I purchased yesterday. Raskolnikov turns inward because of penury, being a shadow of himself and is wracked with feelings of exile from a noble arena. It is something I understand very well. Once the L shaped recession continues, college students looking for work all over will be feeling the same thing. They will not have the opportunity to scrimp at a high level.

I'm entertaining new dreams of writing code for my own fortune. The task has been delayed because of my diet and my new hair. I've done those things first to get me out of my old head and into a new higher energy profile. And I'm also gaming a bit less and focusing on small perfections. I have a broad and deliberate agenda that feels more and more comfortable, and it is focus more and more on local things happening within my aegis of control. So I am turning some of the intellectualism off and industriousness on, I am more producing and less analyzing.

When I look in the mirror, I surprise myself. I haven't worn my hair since, I don't know, 96? It's weird that I have to remind myself to shampoo and brush it. It has a strange texture which is somewhat unique. Unlike most brothers I know, my hair is very straight at the roots and than it makes bigger curls. It's afro-like at a distance but close up it's textured, like a dry jheri curl or very tiny dreads. It curls up that way when I wash it and I can brush it back and it stays neatly lumpy. I'd have to comb it out to be pure afro. It's a bit odd because when I was kid I had 'bbs in the kitchen' like everybody else, but something happened. My hair grows very quickly and I'm trying to figure the right length.

Heh. I'm talking about my hair. That's how to relax during an economic calamity.

Eric Lewis

Lewis strikes the chord of the chaotic zeitgeist in his wannabe Keith Jarrett improv garnering a wide variety of opinions and emotions. I told you the 70s were coming back.

Here's really what to look for because the guy is likely to become a darling - and that thing to look for is the establishment of the alternative rock of the 90s as a standard. Which is to suggest that those standards we have regarded as standards will recede in cultural memory. Cole Porter to be replaced by Curt Cobain. Wit to be replaced by rage and the articulation of feebly tender exhaustion on the upper registers of the keyboard will be the sounding board for a generation of maturing teens whose sensitivities resemble the wide-eyed weeping of the girl who just dodged the summer-camp axe-murderer. This music has all of the dynamics of uncomprehending exasperation, not of of a world of madness but of victims who never discovered the method.

Frustrations of Artistic Memory

I cannot listen to Synergy Sequencer or the New World Symphony without thinking of outerspace. A child of the space age imagines in futures of near lightspeed travel, intellectually gangpressed to galactic vessels, breathing compressed the oxygen of an extraterrestrial destiny. Earth, throwaway in the vastness of the cosmos had but weak gravity for the nearsighted youth face close to the illustrated page. Hours and hours and lazy summer hours idling away in the future of youth's memory. What's outside? The same old netless bent hoops 9 feet over cracked asphalt. What's inside, one book containing the universe.

It took me about 10 years to find 'Ragged Robin', the book of poetry I learned to read as child. So much of my imagination was formed in consideration of Zachary Zed, the last man on earth, the Ten Towers of Tarlingwell and good Sir Kay. And so I wonder how long it will take to find those illustrations of alien spacecraft. Perhaps they'll never be found, though old dreams live on in fuzzy, weighty memories. And though I found James Reeves, I may never find the man whose illustrations painted extraordinary detail on my mind, now lost.

Where did all the illustrators go? Where are their easels, their scissors and paste? They've all gone to EA and Valve, to Bethesda and Microsoft Studios. There's no magazine I think, but Graphis where they might be found outside of their commercial endeavors. And how many hours was I there in Oviatt Library eyeballing every design that made its pages through the 1980s?  I see it in the product, the industrial design in a tube of Prell with its bubble and pearl. I see it in the curve of my iTouch in its rubber special forces glove, ribbed by the designer at Speck. Our arts are subsumed objects in a global web of Krell-like manufacture, its ability bleeding away under a crisis of financial confidence. Hold on to that Maglite. It might go away. But what is the name of the man who decided the angle to extrude? Where did he first put a pencil to paper, a mouse in his palm?

The artists and craftsmen who turn the blades to cut a cricket bat or check the charcoal in the filter for the vodka that costs a little bit more. As we bleed and forget peaceful designs on our recreations, their quiet concentrations will fade from view and respect. We will forget the poetry in the din of tomorrows banging and bleating and screaming over more and more typical government corruptions. Why? Because people forgot that hope was not something gotten from political speechifying, because they forgot previously that singing about sex was not art, because they previously forgot that Ella Fitzgerald used to sing about falling leaves of sycamore and that when she did, there was a real person playing a real piano made of wood. But now who could bother to sacrifice a tree for something as Twitter-free as a park bench?

Inspiration is becoming a lost passion I think. And though I may never travel into space, I still know that thinking about things beyond consumer products gets the woman whose hammer sits idling beside the marble doing something much more inspiring than tiles for kitchen floors. I've never seen a sculptor at work, not even on YouTube. I don't even know where they teach it.

My XBox is a portal to artists, I know. I could lament that they give me zombies but I know the market. I cannot hope that there will be any unifying aesthetic, in fact, that scares me given certain audacities of hope and unity. So in my inability to find that particular guide with the cutawaysis bittersweet. Maybe inspiration stays ephemeral. Perhaps it refuses to be identified and referenced. Maybe the artist wants to remain anonymous, but I don't think so. Maybe we just lose them, and what a shame that is.

Strangers Bearing Gifts

Browsing around, I've discovered that others in the black upper middle class, though we categorically distrust the leadership and capacity of the NAACP for change, are apt to comment on its latest venture - a lawsuit against banks for lending to black people.

Long ago, I kid you not, a bunch of us anti-racist activists got infuriated about hearing that one of the board members of Texaco made a comment that 'the black jelly beans fall to the bottom of the bag'. This is the sort of attitude that bolsters the popularity of NAACP's quest to make a federal case of common sense. But all that alarmism aside, I chuckle when I think that somewhere, probably in NPR's archive but certainly in the memories of such railroaded execs are transcripts of people from the same or similar organizations complaining about redlining and looking for the appropriate boots to lick in order to get access to capital.

You cannot live in Los Angeles, for example, without knowing how loudly representative Maxine Waters exclaimed that she went around the world looking to get her district recognized as an enterprise zone. And although I've probably covered things like this a little closer than most bloggers, there have got to be any number of gross ironies in this area such as the fact that activists chose to sue Bank of America for black capitalism.

What is the opposite of red-lining? It's what Bank of America is getting sued for, nothing more or less than blackface capitalism. Well here's an ass-biter right on cue. Michel Martin gives us the following news:

The issue: a group of black professional employees -- personal bankers, financial advisers -- say they were steered to offer their services only in majority black neighborhoods. And when they complained, their employer, industry behemoth Bank of America, told them that's the way customers would want it to be. Now, B of A didn't want to talk to us -- they said they weren't ready and they issued a statement about how they don't discriminate (you can read it here).

But we were interested in the issue of customer preference. Can an institution do that, if it believes that's what customers want?

We heard from the lawyer for the plaintiffs, and a lawyer for the EEOC (NOT a party to the suit, we just wanted the big picture). We still hope to hear rfom B of A. It's an interesting dilemma.

Like I said, it's an ass-biter. Be careful what you ask for, a big, responsive well-managed corporation might actually deliver it to you, and then what will you do? Why you'll sue them for not understanding what you really mean of course. So with any luck, we'll get a Supreme Court decision defining black community service once and for all. Comfy? I didn't think so.

So there it is. A perfect example of a racial double standard applied by the political activists claiming to speak in the racial interests of black people. If a bank refuses to loan to blacks, it's called redlining. If they do loan to blacks, it's called predatory lending.

Now certainly there is a marginal case to be made, assuming the zealots at the NAACP are not complete idiots, that controlling for FICO score or other more objective criteria that some racial discrimination was made. But really that is beside the point. Why? Because the only people the NAACP has any business representing are those who are, in fact, in default. Which is to say, the primary determination of who they have decided to defend are not merely black people, but black people who defaulted on loans. So no matter what the outcome, the NAACP has decided to make a racial case - that is a black representation case all about the minority fraction of black Americans who failed in their obligations. In short, not black people, just black losers.

This should come as no surprise to anyone with two neurons to rub together. There is an industry to be made painting blacks as helpless fools with micron thin skins who can't keep their self-esteem together in the presence of jelly bean insults. Says a lot about the self-selection criteria of those who volunteer their time and effort for the NAACP.

I don't get any particular jollies from bashing the old org, what with 68 executive board members is it? But I do often wonder why it never managed to make the transition from the old politics of black civil rights to the newer fashion of multiculturalism. I mean 'colored people' should mean 'people of color'. But could the NAACP capitalize on that? Naw. They'd have to dilute their influence with MALDEF and give Image Awards to Carlos Santana. Unthinkable. I'm not the gravedigger here.

It turns out that Bank of America is not a respondant in the lawsuit. I'm sure that blackfolks at B of A were numerous enough and had transcripts enough to deflect that broken arrow. I suspect more Americans will recall these arrogant moves as well.

In the meantime, that leaves ordinary middle class folks with a dilemma of sorts. That is to say, to the extent that they too are leveraged beyond their means, consuming relatively worthless stuff with other people's money. What do you do when somebody offers you a complicated leg up, be they Bank of America or the NAACP?

Beware of strangers bearing gifts.

The L

She was looking kind of dumb with her finger and her thumb in the shape of an "L" on her forehead. 

-- Smashmouth

I am coming around to behaving like a bear. The smartest people I know, and the smartest people I don't know are saying that there is no end in sight. So right about now is a good time to get into the spirit of The L, which is what I'm calling this Global Depression. 

At first I thought, why not some play on the Dust Bowl or the Rust Belt? But I realized those are just local phenomenon. This is Global. So I went to one of the prophets of doom, Nouriel Roubini's website, which I read on the daily, almost. His latest news is this:

I just arrived to Hong Kong and I will next visit India later this week. When  the first thing you hear - from your  driver upon arrival to the airport in Hong Kong - is that business  and occupancy in hotels is down more than 30% you already know this is a very ugly recession in the entire Asian region as Hong Kong is an economic barometer for trade and economic activity all over Asia. For those who argue that the second derivative of economic activity is turning positive (i.e. economies are contracting but a slower rate than in Q4 of 2008) the latest data don’t confirm this relative optimism. In Q4 of 2008 GDP fell by about 6% in the US, 6% in the Eurozone, by 8% in Germany, by 12% in Japan, by 16% in Singapore and by 20% in South Korea. So things are even more awful in Europe and Asia than the US. So let us discuss next why there is a rising risk of a global L-shaped depression that would be even worse than the current ugly and painful U-shaped global recession:

You see, nobody can decide whether it's a recession or a depression or if there is a risk of inflation, disinflation, stagflation or deflation. All I can say is that anybody who thinks about this long enough gets a headache. And there are only a few cures for those kinds of headaches, all sorts of hedges. How do you hedge against financial ruin when all of the hedge funds are out of business. You say, OK we're ruined, but it's not the end of the world - we can always...

In the L, we'll have an alternate 60s reprise. Hairy bodies will come back, personal discovery of the amateur sort. There will be goofy demagogues who will spread a jokey kind of distrust of everything that approaches logic - a funky Jon Stewart with a mustache to replace his arch irony with genuine distrust. And then we'll listen to Jon Stewart complain, as if he were actually wise instead of just richly cashing in on today's fledgling subculture of snark.

We'll take the L. We collectively in America will take it. Me, I'm trying to find a way to rebel against it. I'll probably put my entire life at risk. Pray that I don't become like Nixon.

The Beater Principle

If you listen to as much Bloomberg as me without screaming, one of the things you'll notice is that there are different attention spans in the various guests. I am getting to the point, after several months of being able to differentiate them. Here's one of the things I've just recently noticed. 

One of the premises of stimulus has to do with the solvency of the banking system and therefore the economy. But where this runs into a big problem is that to justify bailing out the banks, you have to be in fundamental agreement that more credit is what the economy needs. This is very easily illustrated when you talk about the stunningly low number of 9.1 million new cars sold on an annual basis. That's the rate today. Just last year, the figure was 13.2 million. That's a horrible drop, and the industry is freaking out. But of course they will say that part of the reason that not many cars are selling is that there's no financing. So a bailout of banks anticipates an increase of lending supply which we hope will generate more demand for auto loans which will float the number of new car sales and thus indicate a turnaround.

Except that's not going to happen. People are simply going to drive their current cars into the ground. 

I have a problem with the TARP. To the extent that I understand it, it seeks to stimulate the economy by getting banks to lend. Well how much lending is enough? 

I forget who said it brilliantly that Credit Default Swap market was like buying four fire insurance policies for the same house.

The bottom line here is that we Americans are going to eventually wise up and recognize that Obama and his crew are powerless to change the arc of the economy in such a way as to obviate our need to tighten our belts. The hedge fund industry is over and it's not coming back. Done. Finito. And when such other inevitabilities make themselves known in our culture, then we will adjust. Business as usual will be less business, we will do without the things we know we can do without. That means 9.1 million new cars instead of 13.2. It means maybe being a one car family instead of two. It means driving the beater, the beat up car just a little longer.

What I hear is that the average 401K has lost all of the gains made in 12 years. Ouch. So we all go back to 1997. How were you doing then? Suffering? Were any of us happy in 1997? Could we stand to live at that standard of living once again, or would it kill us?  It won't kill us, it only makes us weaker.

It's All About Me

For all the years I have been blogging at Cobb, I have been putting effort into understanding things which were somewhat new to me, fleshing them out and describing the personal experience of moving forward according to what I have learned, making provocative and Socratic dialog along the way. Sure I've done a few memes, but it has not been about me personally. But this year I'm changing that, and blogging less. For the past few weeks it has been more about me.

For the first time in my life, I am dieting. I've never dieted, really. I've changed my eating habits but I have never counted calories. More generally, when I feel out of shape, I exercise myself back into shape and have done so three or so notable times in life. This time I'm not doing much exercise at all, but using a meticulously monitored calorie deficit program to lose weight. I want to get down to my retirement weight, and be ready for who I expect to be as I push 50. I'm living life with a little more gusto because nothing is promised. As for the diet, I can feel myself changing. As of this morning I am weighing in at 209.0 which is 7.6 pounds down from when I started about 4 or 5 weeks ago.

It has been a long time since I thought that being a better me would make me a better person. I've long been satisfied that the me I was was all I ever needed to be and my problem was that all of the assholes in the world didn't truly appreciate me. That remains true, but I don't really care. Somewhere inside me, I have begun to accept some aspects of whatever fate befalls me. I still follow my curiosity, but I'm not absolute about trying to exploit it. I'm not sure what that makes me - because I always want to be a go-to guy. Ask Bowen, he'll figure it out, he'll get it done. But my altered ambition doesn't make me appear to be that, I think. At once, my willingness to change makes me more capable yet less reliable. There's the irony. You can count on me as ever before, but I'm not taking those skills as seriously because now I am intrigued by what I haven't really bothered to notice or care about, and I'm more likely to get onboard that.

What I want, I think, is that my character is a bigger part of me than my skills. And my character is shaped primarily by my commitment to my family, and having been successful in that, makes me more accountable to everyone else. Because I recognize the seriousness with which people must commit to themselves and to their families. It is not skill-based. That's a labor market negotiation which gives you more or less money. You can't negotiate with family or friends or people on a skills basis. Well, I can't, because nobody understands my skills. Hell, I even forget them.

For all this I need energy. The diet will help. Exercise is a must and I have already made promises to hike and camp and otherwise be a better pal to Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones and my old boss DG are similar guys I think. Both grew up on farms in the midwest, both are very smart and very modest, and very hardworking. DG is out in Colorado, a place I often think about these days for various reasons.

I'm going to church this evening. There will be a Jazz Vespers at a Catholic Church somewhere in Westchester. I take this baby step towards Catholicism with the conceit that the rites of the One True Church will discipline my spirit in a way acceptable to God and Country. I believe that conforming myself to the appropriate shape of an individual in Catholic laity will give me... Ahh. another conceit. I will then just take the best advice Doc ever gave me. Don't tell people what you're going to do, just do it and then tell them what you've done.

That doesn't work very well at work. And this week has been quite an adventure. Having twisted up my left wrist from an idiot fall down a stairwell on Monday, I missed two days of work and have been gimped up ever since. Naturally all of the systems under my aegis decided to go haywire with the result being some peckishness which didn't swing my way... to put it modestly, as I ususally do because it's not all about me... And as I came through the week fixing everything to my satisfaction I found time to celebrate that evening with a ribeye at Houston's.

Ladies and Gentlemen I can still afford steak. I even washed my car this weekend. Over on the border of Old Torrance, there's a little school, Holy Nativity. They had a cookout and a car wash. So I brought the Transporter over and overpaid by 12 bucks, just because I could.

I'm reading an audiobook called 'Richistan' written just before the collapse (Which I'm calling The L) in which a reporter from Forbes magazine details the history and lives and habits and stories of today's wealthiest Americans. It's a vast and enjoyable piece, and I feel my own attraction to the order and discipline it is putting on my own understanding of what that place is like. Interestingly, the more I hear, the more I am recognizing the kind of satisfaction I get in my place in the upper-middle class which is, by and large very similar to how many of those blokes live - same accouterments, bigger pricetag, more of them. The tone is generational and I think that the odd men whom we often take Ellison, Gates, Buffet and Walton to be are genuinely odd rather than typical of those whose household investable worth is 1-10 (Lower Richistan) 10-100 (Middle Richistan) and over 100 million dollars in Upper Richistan.  These several millions of Americans 7 or so as of the printing are highly individual - or at least reading their stories greatly individuates them and lets me know even moreso that civilization is where you put it. There is only what people make, and the assumptions about what else is out there are generally false.

One of the folks says that money is only a multiplier and a lubricant. If you're an asshole, big money makes you moreso. If you're cool, big money makes you more cool. It is as I suspected, the blowout party would only last six months, and then you become more of yourself than you could ever imagine. I am still convinced that the world would be a better place with me aggregated with my own community of Richistanis; I have always hoped to be wealthy enough to make the best people I know rich. And so I am closer to knowing that money won't change me and much more comfortable with my tendency to behave as if I actually had more financial security than I do. It's only money. You either have it or you don't - if you have it, you spend it and then you don't have it. Except when you're wealthy - you spend it and you still have it.

The first million is the hardest, and I think it's never too late. For that I need energy.

Timing. The only timing that matters, I think, is the timing that relates to the patience of people out to do you harm. As I think about Buie's backhanded compliment from last week, there is some synergy in another of Cobb's Rules with his Orwellian aphorism 'Ignorance is Hostility'. My rule was 'An enemy is anyone who doesn't care if you fail'. The difference is, crucial, I think, depending upon whether or not you believe that ignorant masses need to be swept out of your way. But forget the masses, lets talk about the people in your rolodex. If they don't want to see you fail, then they are friends. And there are certain things we owe our friends. If they are putting broken glass ahead of your path, they are your enemy, even if the soles of your feet are much thicker than they could possibly imagine. I have the shortcoming of not being in the habit of punishing my enemies. It's a Zen thing, things generally not being all about me and enemies floating down the river and other such peaceful exhortations anesthetizing my vengeful heart. Nevertheless such middle class emotions are what I must deal with - the impatience of people who have something to prove, who can't look at things as they are because of their needs to demonstrate the 'truth' of things as they see them. We are not accustomed to being able to walk away. That's why my best friend and I call it 'Fuck You Money'. When you have it, you can tell people who need to hear it exactly that. Without it, we simply bear our burdens, bent over as we are somewhat less of ourselves.

And just hearing that come out of my mouth, I began to sympathize with Chris Brown. After all, who is going to smack up somebody worth millions who needs a good smacking?

Time waits for no man, but death and disease have infinite patience to strike on their own accord. You will not be warned, except that you must accept the inevitability. So today I am lighter and happier and more energetic, fighting the one fight I haven't bothered to for a while. The fight for my own life and the energy with which to carry it out better, being more flexible and ready for whatever change may come. It's all about my ability to deliver on promises, and they are ultimate promises to my children. So I am not worried about timing. The gifts may come early or late depending on my fortune. But as a friend and a father, a business partner and a colleague, everyone should know that they will get exactly what they deserve from me, my best, my eyeball to eyeball truth. Don't worry about the timing. Just know which way I'm facing.

Obama Gonna What? - Nuclear Energy

From Slate.

The entire discussion was, of course, outlandishly hubristic. It was made necessary by the outlandishly severe and long-lasting environmental dangers posed by nuclear waste. Six decades after the dawn of the nuclear era, the only plausible answer to the question "What do we do with this stuff?" is "Don't create any more of it." That, in effect, is what President Obama is saying in fulfilling his campaign promise to shut down Yucca Mountain. The program, Obama's new budget states, "will be scaled back to those costs necessary to answer inquiries from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission while the administration devises a new strategy toward nuclear waste disposal." That's bureaucratese for "Yucca Mountain is dead."

So nuclear waste will not go to the safest place America has figured out. It will stay in place where it is, onsite at nuclear power plants.

People used to say that Obama as was smart and that he wouldn't let politics outweigh scientific reason. Yeah right.

Casual Friday Time Machine

Samantha Pierce, one of my league-mates on the Conservative Brotherhood has a refreshing habit that I never quite picked up. It's called Thankful Thursdays, a blog-style counting of blessings out loud. But I am entering a simple turn in my life, not much different from when I was in my late 20s, and part of that means looking very closely at my surroundings and having a conversation with my prior self. I always find myself amazed at the future.

I suppose I should tell you a little more about this game, which I call (you'll never guess) 'Time Machine'. I pick an historical character like John Brown or Benjamin Franklin and I pretend that I have been charged, through the Time Travel Committee, to take this individual through the wonders of the modern world. I listen to them ramble in amazement at my refrigerator, and the fact that not only does my car travel faster than a horse, but they can listen to Beethoven at the same time. Explaining electromagnetic radiation is always one of my favorite topics in Time Machine. But even contact lenses are difficult to explain to somebody who used whale oil. I really freak them out when I complain about traffic near LAX. Ben really, really wanted to meet Fred Smith of FedEx, but I told him that the committee wouldn't allow it. He got mad and then disappeared. Good. I was getting sick of Beethoven anyway.

More often than not, however, Time Machine takes a personal turn and I talk to my former self as the big brother I never had. And it is during times like those when I can count my blessings, and find out what I have done and what I have failed to do.

On this casual Friday, I would like to suggest to you that you take a trip in your own memory's time machine, but this time for the sake of your sanity in an economy that's going from super wealthy, to merely rich. Walk around your office. Look at the people. Think about how much you work now as compared to then - how much money you make now. Try explaining to Ben Franklin exactly what it is you do.

Watchmen: Laughing Through the Pain

Watchmen the movie, unlike Iron Man the movie, doesn't know how to laugh at itself. And so when what's unbearable crosses the screen and you say 'what!?' there's not much cushion. That said, the film starts with probably the best opening credits I have probably ever seen.

Watching the beginning of Watchmen is like believing you are seeing a great American film worthy of Oliver Stone at his best. But somewhere in the latter parts you start to say, damn this is a long movie. The problem is that Rorschach is too much with us, but we don't feel his pain as we did in the book. Instead of being the conscience of the story, he's just a ugly little brute with mommy issues, which he always was, but.. But the smell of the city is not the city's own, it's just rubbed off on the characters and the city disappears because nobody relates to it. It would have been too difficult to pull off I think, and so music pulls more weight - putting us in the mood for what is essentially wooden acting. We all end up a little like Dr. Manhattan, whether these characters are alive or dead they still have the same number of particles.

Speaking of Dr. Manhattan, Watchmen goes down in history as being the naked man movie, or Blue Man Group Porno. There's no way you can't not look at dude's junk, he's a human V. So half the time you're trying not to look and the other half you notice that the camera is hiding his crotch so that you can't look. It's an awful distraction, primarily because he's speaking in this slow disinterested monotone which is still unnaturally tender.

In the end, I asked myself yet again why I bother to watch movies about comic book characters and if there is anything at all happening in American film if this is all that's happening. But that's only because I am tempted into believing that movies are worth thinking about simply because of their extraordinarily beautiful filmmaking. It is truly possible to do anything on the screen, there's nothing visual that is an inch out of place. In fact it is a movie that begs to be slowed down for easter eggs and other fanboy flotsam. It's all cleverly there, I'm quite sure.

Instead, all of the drama leading up to the nuclear brink and paranoia is spread to wide across a net of verisimiltude that is actually part of the sweetness of the film. That Kennedy, that Nixon, that Kissinger, that Iococca - they were all perfect. I was right in this film's 1985. But the kinetic energy of the Defcon countdown didn't translate well.

BUT.

Rorschach was flawlessly cast, down to the grunts. And the mask, perfect. I kept looking to see if I knew this guy because he seemed awfully familiar and perfect for the role. The music was, as I said, just right smack dab on target in every case. The 80s of the period was done to perfection. One thing you can say about Watchmen, is it has got style. The camera work was superb - there are some shots in this film I still can't figure out technically. 

I have to give Watchmen two grades. You see I found it more compelling than Sin City whose story was completely incoherent. At the same time it failed to hold together well in terms of dramatic momentum, and completely dropped the ball in certain spots. On the other hand it was visually stunning in a mixture of periods that were truly evocative of our country. If I were the sort who liked to indulge in categorical critiques of America, I would say that this film mirrors America in its greatness and its troubles and its flaws and all that kind of NPR-speak. I'm still seeing images from the opening credits in my mind as I speak.

Speaking of images, I imagine that I do have to deal with the graphic aspect of shooting a graphic novel. There is a bit of a voyeuristic quality to the sex and violence of the film. It has a lot, very little of which is any fun to watch. There's a whole lot of grunting going on. The photorealism of the entire film is reminiscent of those murder scene photos from the 30s and 40s New York I've seen somewhere. It's just bloody grisly. It makes me slightly uncomfortable to counter the vague bleatings I percieve from reactions of fellow conservatives and comic afficionados to various reviews in the mainstream press. Sure there's a boy-like boy that gets started with the simple ideas of comic books that none of us are afraid or ashamed to admit. But there's also a reality-based discipline in intestinal fortitude that keeps us coming back to stories of blood & guts in the struggle for good against evil, order against chaos, purpose against nihilism, meaning against absurdity. The difficulty I have of course is that this quest is not adequately satisfied by this fiction. We must go elsewhere. But that doesn't change the fact that Watchmen tries bravely, and unfortunately less successfuly than the book, to address the bloody battles which are entirely inherent in the travails of American superheroes.

In that way, Watchmen goes awkwardly back to back against Dr. Strangelove which by some ironic twist can be taken more seriously because it's funny. Any yet by comparison, there are still far more people with far more of their ordinary lives at stake in Watchmen, which for all its flaws remains more human than Strangelove. Can you remember one woman in Strangelove? Me neither. Oh yeah well the hot assistant. That's drama.

I have the feeling that Watchmen will bear a repeat watching. The Comedian's entire angle could be taken a bit more seriously. We'll see what other's have to say. Watchmen can and will be discussed because it's that good, and that disappointing.

A Man Who Doesn't Know Futbol

I kept waiting for the punchline in this jeremiad against soccer. It never came. And so I must conclude that somewhere in Indiana, there are people who actually believe the soccer is a game for girls. There is definitely a college professor who needs to get out more often, like into the real world outside of suburban AYSO.

Soccer is of foreign origin, that is certainly true, but its promotion and implementation are thoroughly domestic. Soccer is a self-inflicted wound. Americans have nobody to blame but themselves. Conservative suburban families, the backbone of America, have turned to soccer in droves. Baseball is too intimidating, football too brutal, and basketball takes too much time to develop the required skills. American parents in the past several decades are overworked and exhausted, but their children are overweight and neglected. Soccer is the perfect antidote to television and video games. It forces kids to run and run, and everyone can play their role, no matter how minor or irrelevant to the game. Soccer and relevision are the peanut butter and jelly of parenting.

One game of futbol and this wry bookworm would be crawling home on his knees. I understand his point, but dude has certainly never played, and as one can imagine, there's probably not three first class soccer players in the entire state of Indiana. The difference between the games his lame children play and those at any considerable skill level is certainly orders of magnitude. What he's watching is not a sport, but an activity.

So let him rant. Damnable ignorant Hoosiers.

The New Class Warfare

Except for David Anderson, I don't know any CEOs that I like. But I know lots of people I would like to be CEO. When I think back, I can't ever remember any salesman I've ever known who ever met a CEO he didn't like, until he wasn't making his quota and then everybody's a bastard.

This Depression doesn't have a name yet but it's starting to get some character. As people's fears and prejudices and other humanly baggage rises to the surface we're going to start remembering things that have nothing to do with cause and effect, but are associated nevertheless with our conversations. We are retreating into our humanity and away from our work and minds. Or maybe it's better to say that our left brains are burned out and so we are seeking comfort in our right brains. There's safety in instinctual emotion, or so we are programmed to think. One of the casualties of this civil regression will be the relative ease with which we relate to each other across class lines. I'm starting to feel it.

This weekend, I did a bit of shopping - my own economic stimulus. Well, last week I dropped 800 bucks on the Transporter for some brake work and miscellaneous fixing. The local Firestone dealer had no waiting. Usually the bays are full and there are cars queued up in the lot, the TV is on the game in the lobby and there are bored customers sitting on the cheap divans. This time I walked right to the front and got handled right away. Business is slow they said, guys have their hours cut. I told my man that it's temporary because nobody is going to be buying new cars. He understands that's what corporate is saying, but it hasn't happened yet. Overall the folks at Firestone were cheery enough and they had enough time to discuss the finer points of caster, camber and toe in.

But this weekend's shopping had a little creepier vibe. I finally got over to Office Depot to get my favorite things, containers to organize all my stuff. I also got some index cards and CD cases and a big plastic container for old video games. All told it was about 80 bucks worth of stuff that nobody really needs, except that Office Depot has a store full of it on sale, and apparently they make a living. But when I got to the cashier, she had this look on her face that made me think I just spent enough money to put her kids through school. She would look at the item, ring it up, smack her teeth and then give me the stink-eye - item after item. It made me think about Cobb's Rule #14. Never trust anybody whose shoes cost more than you make in a day. They'll think nothing of walking all over you. At the time I was wearing $120 shoes. It made me scratch my head.

Later on, in between shuffling the girls to and from hiphop and cheerleading gymnastics class, I found myself at Radio Shack buying a little more in worthless trifles. Actually, all I really wanted was some batteries - the special lithium 123 batteries for my high=powered LED flashlight. That flashlight is one of the man-things that I keep in my Oakley computer bag. Also in there is my Calibri cigar torch and my CRKT. BTW, I've gotten the CRKT through airport security several times - sometimes I forget to unpack it. Anyway, being the gearhead that I am, I wanted to make sure that I had everything, and the store manager pounced on me.

I never, ever get store credit cards. In fact, I didn't realize I was getting this one. I thought it was just a membership club. So when he asked for my social, I gave him my phony social, which is off by a digit or two, but I do remember it just as well. As soon as I did he ran around and told all of his people to open the store to me. It was a little embarrassing. But having been a sales shark myself, I recognize a good game and I enjoy letting him do his magic. In the end I got 0% financing for a year on about 300 bucks worth of stuff. He even came out to the car and helped me carry out some goods. Now that's a man who appreciates good business. Still, there was an edge of rapaciousness when he wasn't looking directly - who knows what the other guy was thinking? But I've built systems for Radio Shack within the past two years down in Fort Worth, and I know they've got to be hurting.

What can I say? I'm a mark.

It's not just shopping any more. Having a wallet full of crisp bills feels like... it almost feels like being back in the hood. The Spousal Unit is feeling rather Detroit in all this. The other thing I did this weekend was to rewire some of Vault 107. In particular, I replaced my simple two prong outlet behind the wide screen with a six banger of grounded sockets. In doing so, I opened the curtains for some extra light. When she came in, she immediately closed them, not wanting anybody who passes by to see that we have a big screen TV. Nor does she want me to park the Transporter out on the street. Quoth she, you never know.

I am reminded of the quote about stupid cops and clever criminals. In fact, I used it on Boy a couple weeks ago when he told me in so many words that he sometimes feels the sociopathic urge. He was voted Freshman Prince at the big school dance last month and confessed that it's sometimes very easy to take advantage of people. So I reminded him that even if he gets away with it, he'll always have to look over his shoulder. Whenever you go over to the dark side, you run a tremendous risk. Cops can make all kinds of mistakes, but the bad guy only has to make one.

CEOs are now bad guys. And I'm far from a CEO - I don't even fall into the >250K bucket which is the new 'rich' in the Obama socialist universe. But I do have some fairly nice shoes, and occasionally some extra cash. I'm starting to pay attention when people become a little more obsequious. I've been called 'sir' and 'boss' in a thousand transactions since I was in my 20s, but I'm listening for an edge these days. Sure I listen to the news and I know we're heading for our own version of the Dust Bowl, but the real casualty is not the wealth, but the civility. I'm not extended past my own alien-observation level of hyper-scrutiny and paranoia, but I'm listening and I'm watching.

I shouldn't have to remind anyone that a nation that doesn't allow CEOs to make mistakes or get the glory of being team captain is by definition cannibalistic. And nobody can argue that today's CEOs aren't better than ever. But somehow the exceptional assholes are now considered to be the rule. The guys who provide more benefits for domestic partners than the states - the big diversity champions are all the big soft corporate bosses. If you don't remember all that, slow down and remember it on Casual Friday, because I'm going to remind you again then myself.

Gladwell's Outliers & The Meritocratic Mesh

How many people believe that you can do anything you want? Raise your hand. You're wrong because Malcolm Gladwell said so. Now, of those of you who said in your own mind 'To Hell with Gladwell', you are right, and your stubborn mindset makes the difference. But it doesn't make *all* the difference because Gladwell, *is* right.

What is he right about? He's right about the fact that extraordinary individuals, those who are the best of the best, do not, in their Herculean efforts, make themselves successful. They stand on complex and overlapping waves of society. There are accidents of time, and place and culture, of opportunity and desire, that make the best that way, not merely extraordinary innate talent. Many times we think of our world, and especially American competition, as literally a running race. We overuse the metaphor of 'a level playing field' precisely because we view what's going on at game day as a competition of the best - that the fastest person is the best because he *is*.  We don't often think about what good luck means for people who are already talented. We think about the right place, the right time, the right combination for our own opportunity - but these things apply to the gifted too. When there's a new beauty creme on the shelves, the already beautiful use it too. And so all of the complexities of success + all of the unique opportunities are what make superstars from the talented.

From a longer view of history, what Gladwell says is almost common sense. We understand that certain things happen in history, the discovery of America, of radiation, of the earth's rotation, of the structure of DNA, of the making of steel. It could have been anybody, and sooner or later it would be somebody. America couldn't stay undiscovered forever given what ships could do and what kings and queens wanted. But somehow in our storytelling of success in America, we tend to behave as if only people possessed of extraordinary stuff rise to the top and that they do so strictly based upon their own will to power.

Most importantly, Gladwell illustrates how it is that people must wrestle with their social circumstances in order to achieve. He's not advocating a social determinism so much as he's saying that a certain view of individualism is not useful. In other words, he's putting the possibility of a comparitive work ethics out there. Start with the stereotype 'Asians are good at math' and you get beyond simplistic IQ arguments and deal with what Bryan Hirota was saying back in the day when we were bound up in that particular Affirmative Action debate.There's are reasons they are good at math but it's a social reason which has almost nothing to do with ambition. One of the reasons is language. Have you ever wondered why we use the term 'eleven' instead of 'oneteen', or 'twelve' instead of 'twoteen'. And if we ever did use 'oneteen' why not use it like 'twenty one' with the tens place first? It would be more logical and regular - like it is in Chinese. Gladwell demonstrated how the irregularity of the English language cripples our kids relatively speaking - that little difference is enough to make a difference, and it is something that might falsely be attributed to individuality.

Gladwell's book, now not so fresh in mind, since I read it in December, has one prominent lesson. That is that success has many parents, but that there are deep structural ones that we don't often consider because we are accustomed to using cliched arguments about success. We must therefore be a bit more honest about considering the circumstances and the arbitrary constraints on those border conditions between good and great, recognizing how many things make up the background for the winners in society. It's more than you think.

The Beverly Hills Theory

Giving it a name, The Beverly Hill Theory roughly goes a little something like this. BTW, it is something to which I have subscribed for quite some time.

If you are dispossessed, waiting for a calamity to befall the possessors is foolish. You either have to destroy them and everything they own, or you have to admit your desire for the things they have and pursue them. In an American metaphor, if you live in Watts, you don't wait for Beverly Hills to collapse under its own weight and corruption. You move to Beverly Hills.

That's the general sentiment anyway. There's a lot of specificity I left out. My point in introducing a namable concept is to give some context to the complaint that I notice is likely to come about as Obama fails his hopeful constituency and to outline some of my political complacency of late. You see as this WSJ article clearly states, Obama cannot tax the rich to death and solve his problems. He would have to tax the middle class to death as well. Why do I say 'his' problems instead of America's problems? Because all of America doesn't want Obama to try everything he's trying. I reiterate, more bankruptcies (judicial branch), fewer bailouts (executive branch). 

Halo Wars - First Look

So you probably want to ask me what is so great about Halo Wars as a realtime strategy game. You especially want to do so if you're not a console gamer - you know, one of those guys who has the conceit that PCs are the best gaming platform for all those reasons you see in Alienware marketing. The answer will not satisfy you because you are a bigot and because you probably know a game that did something like this before. But I still have to say it...

Halo Wars is the best RTS ever, and not just because it has a fabulous backstory.

The simple reason Halo Wars rocks is because unlike any other RTS I've ever played, it is a campaign. Which is to say instead of getting one big world in which the technologies are fixed, you get multiple battles in multiple worlds and the technology is varied as are the foes. Now it's true that End War put you in multiple battlefields with different objectives, but the enemies were generally predictable, and you would still race to enable pretty much the same variety of technologies and weapons.

Here's an example. In episode four, HW throws a curveball. Instead of massing troops and hording technologies and other large strategies, you are tasked to escort civilians from a city as the transports, which are in three different locations come under increasing attacks. I've played the scenario three times, and I've never been able to save all three evacuation transports, and you don't even get a chance to build a base until you lose one of the three. This is a completely different scenario than anything I've ever seen.

I don't take a lot of direct guff from being a gamer, but I imagine that there are people who find the very idea of video games trifling. I have only one thing to say to them. Buy the Prima Guide. It's only 208 pages and full of pretty pictures, but once you start reading into the rules, tactics and strategies, you'll realize that this is the most sophisticated kind of game imaginable. It's a war game. 

Once upon a time, not long ago, humans could beat computers & human programmers playing chess. In terms of computer and programming evolution, that was a very very long time ago. The games we play are a lot more unleashed than chess, so much so that we need artificial intelligences to direct against other artificial intelligences. One of the most interesting sorts of challenges HW provides in general is the ability for you as a single human to play with your AIs against a pure computer AI, or against another human and their AIs. With Halo Wars, you can go 1v1 2v2 or 3v3 in any number of different maps as you collaborate with other humans and their troops. The complexities are mind-boggling, but the drama is compelling.

Halo Wars is difficult.

It is not much like playing Halo at all. You simply cannot blast your way to victory. Having finished the game on normal difficulty after three days, I can attest to the fact that some online players, notably the younger ones resign before they're truly beaten. It simply requires a completely different set of skills. I'm now working on doing skirmishes to get deeper into tactics based on my brief experiences and the RPS of RTS. 

Now. I base a lot of this smack talk on my experience with Rise of Nations and Rise of Legend, which were both a great deal of fun. But I have to say, even online with real opponents it felt very linear. There's also the fact that I simply hate gaming on PCs which I see as good for just about everything *but* gaming. Keyboard and mouse just does not engage any fast twitch parts of my brain, unfortunately. There is probably somebody who should smack me up from the StarCraft view of the world, and there are things to concede. However, like with Second Life, I think it's really stupid to have any game where you are likely to meet opponents several orders of magnitude more powerful than you - in which the investment of time and money runs into months. I could conceivably do so in an MMO Fallout or Oblivion universe, and quite frankly I gave Spore a shot at that. I thought Spore was a miserable failure, but that's a long story itself. 

So yeah a case can be made that I love Halo Wars because I loved Halo and I have no idea what the state of the art is for PC based MMO RTS where you pay 15 bucks a month and clan up with solar system sized economies. Yeah you're right. I want something between that and chess, that I can play for a couple hours a night and be fully satisfied. And I am.

A Marriage Definition I Can Live With

At long last, I think I have come to the point at which I am satisfied with the Libertarian position on Marriage. Ken Starr is now as we speak, arguing in defense of Proposition 8. He says:

"I've seen very thoughtful Christians say, 'Get the state out of this. ... If you want to be married by your priest, rabbi, minister, pastor, great -- call it whatever you want. [But when you're] welcome to city hall, it's a civil union.' That may be the eventual way that we need to go, because you see the culture war that is so unfortunate."

I also like his phrasing, 'may be eventual', rather than inevitable. 

Fedco

Obama's Second Half

Obama has the chair. This is the strategy. Where is his head? How does he keep the peace? Anybody have a clue?

Additional Moments of Music

Windham Hill Sampler 84. What happened during the 80s was a burst of creativity in the popular culture of the sort we're likely to see after we get out of the current depression, and in that time was the creation of Silicon Valley as a cultural as well as an industrial center. Windham Hill was a big part of that movement and I felt very much a part of that. The haunting beauty that was David Bowie's This is Not America was the the other end of the electronic spectrum from the jarring bombast of the Art of Noise. There was of course Moments in Love in its various incantations, but that was not enough. There had to be an entire ocean of mellow, and that's where Windham Hill shined. With its minimalist approach, it was pristine and crisp. It was logical and soothing.

Mark Isham's On the Threshold of Liberty was an anthem that struck stirring noble emotions in direct counterpoint to the lament of Bowie. And while Andreas Wollenweider ended up getting on my nerves, and Jean Luc Ponty always seemed to be too busy, there was balance and a lack of pretense in the Windham Hill artists. All except for Liz Story whom I found to be a great disappointment. For many years I had a solo piano search.. well that's another long story. In the end, I must say that I never did find that solo pianist who did New Age properly for me, but I have been spoiled by Herbie, Chick, Andre, Martha, Vladimir and Glenn.

Crossroads - Tracy Chapman. I fell in and out of love around this album with the woman I would eventually marry. And for her there are a number of albums that resonate with romance and affection from that same time in my life. Those would include UB40, Basia, Clifford Brown (with Strings) and most notably the Stanley Clarke project Animal Logic. Lyrics! Not since Stevie and EWF have we had music that speaks to the soul. Again, there is a kind of purity and simple beauty in this that I found inspiring. It helped that the very idea of a black woman of unconventional beauty in dreads who spoke of unplugged revolution was automatically appealing to me back in the late 80s, but we all knew talent when we saw it.

Crossroads was her second album and although my favorite of all her songs continues to be 'I Used To Be a Sailor', this collection hangs together as the center of gravity of Chapman. The sweet sadness of A Hundred Years, the defiance of Born to Fight, the smug condescension of Material World, the heartfelt and plaintive This Time. It's an album for the ages.

Keep On Movin' - Soul II Soul. For me as I believe with many millions of others, this was the watershed album that helped initiate that international level of cool I called New World Afrika. It was one of the first acknowledgements of a global set by my generation. You knew that EWF travelled around the world, but they never brought anyone back with them. Jazzy B had the voice, the look, the sound and the humanistic vibe that took everybody by surprise. What's funny is that I remember that he came out at the very same time as Al B Sure! when all that New Jack Swing was still trying to be cooler than it possibly could be. I remember just feeling sorry for hiphop at the time when Special Ed was still on the charts as well as Kwame (whom I thought was the coolest and most avant guard in the days before De La Soul) and ESD. When Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis could still make or break people as if all of urban contemporary was closely held as if prisoner of a New Jack City redoubt, in sails Soul II Soul like an irresistible force and blows them all away. When sophisticates like myself and my buppie crew were just getting fed up with the frenetic energy of Rob Base and the Beastie Boys (not to mention Milk is Chillin'), the smooth vocals and pounding beat of Soul II Soul was the perfect respite in between them and the super smooth of Double Vision. No not Foreigner, James and Sanborn. Speaking of which, there are other albums that really locked me in during the years between 86 and 90 and I'm going to do a special on them because in that spot was some great happenings, and music was one fourth of my focus. More on that later. As for Soul II Soul, they picked the exact right shade of brown, something that wouldn't be repeated until Janet.

Fishbone - Fishbone. Now I'm going to take a step backward in time to Fishbone. I happen to believe that Fishbone was one of the greatest rock bands on the planet. And it is certainly the most underrated bands ever. This was their debut and it changed the world. For all the music in the world I grew up with, all of it was cool. Cool is not enough and sometimes you just need to be weird. For weird there was Parliament. But even that was not enough. Fishbone was frenetic. They represented the energy of the moment, and it wasn't until I knew the music, smart, fresh, funky, rocking, ska-rythmic and loud that I could express that energy of mine. It turns out that these were neighbors. Some of the band members went to middle school with my younger brother, and I can distinctly remember when I used to hang out with Angelo during that brief period in my life when I was not above disco roller skating and pop locking in the streets of Hollywood. Fishbone was on the edge, and if I didn't spend my entire life trying to be respectable I would be exactly like them, and it is that dynamic that lead me to the mosh pit at the Santa Monica Civic for the first concert of the Black Rock Coalition, in shirt, tie and jacket. I have been lucky enough to have found a woman who actually understands Fishbone. I wish I knew her then!

Hallucination Engine - Material. This album remains my absolute favorite of all. It is finally, after many years of searching, exactly my kind of music. There is the purity of ambient synthesizers, there is the sophistication of polyrhthmic beats. There is big boom of bass, the improvisation of bebop, the integration of Eastern themes. All that and Arabic lyricism as well. I have been following two threads of this kind of music since the 80s. One of them culminated in the music around Adrian Sherwood and OnU and the other around Bill Laswell and Axiom. In the end, Laswell was the champion and his music explores all the dimensions of sound I find fascinating, compelling and majestic. His collaborations with everyone from Sly and Robbie and Peter Namlook to his recreations of Bob Marley and Miles Davis are stunning. But in my opinion, his greatest work to date can be found on this album. It is track number seven, entitled The Hidden Garden / Naima. Yes, that Naima. It is, in my opinion, better than Coltrane's original. This is the music I have played in rented cars through the streets of Brooklyn and Tampa and Houston with the windows rolled down, just trying to show how that big boom can carry so much sophistication and flavor. This is the music that carries the literal wit of William S. Burroughs about deals with the devil. 

The odd thing is with this album is like so many others, I don't associate a name with the songs. I just know them. They occupy a nameless place in memory because there is no communicating them. It's like a secret knowledge, a fountain of inspiration that you try to share but the water slips through your hands as you attempt to remove it from the source. I can say 'Laswell' to a few that know him and then what? There's this, of course, but there is also the perfect Dub Chamber 3. There's also the extraordinary Panthalassa. I know a man named Benzon who once looked after my son. If there's a man who knows my mind perhaps he is the one. In music he understands the power it transduces through the brain. I look at him with library envy and wish I could explain. I'll tell him Laswell and he'll nod, then pick up his horn and play a stretch and hang on to a note mystical and forlorn. And I'll say yes after a moment and say how did you know. He'll shrug and ask me don't we all who listen for the flow? And I forget this epic trance was dreamed in God's own mind, as I just wrangle syllables interpolated for the purposes of explicating that which transpired without any sense of time as if binded to the blind.

A Hamburger Economy

I'm driving to work as usual thinking about all of the economics I've stuffed into my head recently and paused to reflect about one thing. When I go to Vons to buy a steak, most of the time I get USDA Choice, but on occasion I'll get USDA Prime. So literally, 'choice' is by definition, 'sub-prime'.

Translate that to the economy. When I doubted all this calamity could befall us, looking at it from the point of failure of the leading subprime lender here in California back in 2007, I can remember being charged to take notice of Roubini. I did, in an indirect way and fell victim to the ranting exclamations of a socialist podcaster who said because Roubini says X we should head into some bizarre direction. I'll find it if I can, just to smack myself and everyone else for not going to the source.

The facts in question were exactly how many subprime and other mortgagees were defaulting or likely to default. The alarming news was something on the order of 4 percent, which was double the usual amount. And now as we squawk comfortably like Santelli, we rather blithely accept that about 92% of mortgage holders are not going to default.

When I get a 92% on any test, I consider that an A-. An A- is subprime. And similarly, people are freaking out that we have unemployment of 10% here in California. That would be 90% employment. Also an A-, also subprime.

Nobody on the planet knows how much wealth via securitization was leveraged on that now widely acknowldeged 8% of failed mortgages. But when you stop and think about it, as Taleb must certainly think, what in the hell were people thinking such that they would bet so much on the idea that the AIG cannot survive mere Choice financial steak?

Get ready for a hamburger economy. It really isn't that bad, is it?

Petty & Mean

You must read the entirety of VDH's bullseye on the forehead of the President. It captures his Presidential character completely. Along the way it reminds Americans who has become the enemy of his populism.

In fact, for your plan to succeed, you must go after the upper, upper middle-class, those making between $250,000 and $600,000 who are restaurant owners, home builders, labor contactors, architects, surgeons, engineers, hospital executives, college administrators, Ivy-League law professors, and many dentists.

These households are wealthy, yes; but they don’t own or even fly on $50 million private jets or host private Super Bowl parties. Their income is all reported, and with such good salaries come high insurance and, in the case of business, constant reinvestment and expensive inventories. They are not greedy, but the bulwark of the United States’ productive classes who in aggregate pay over 40% of the collective income taxes, and provide most of the jobs in the country. Under your plan many in these high-tax states will pay nearly 70% of their incomes in FICA, Medicare, federal income, and state income taxes. Why gratuitously mislead the American people that those for whom you will lift FICA ceilings or up their IRS bites to 40% are in any way synonymous with the super-rich? Remember the very, very wealthy voted overwhelmingly in your favor precisely because their riches gave them immunity from high taxes, and in many cases they were far removed from the everyday risk and worry of owning a hardware store or trying to keep together a family-owned construction firm. George Clooney is a world away from a paving contractor, just as making $400,000 a year on call 24/7 is not quite making $40 million investing or $2 million for a cameo.

So please no more intellectual dishonesty, Mr. President. Those in great numbers who will pay your higher taxes are not really the rarer Warren Buffets, Bill Gateses, Diane Feinsteins, Teresa Heinz Kerrys, Sean Penns, George Soroses, Oprah Winfreys, or Tiger Woodses, whose mega-wealth really does result in private jet rides, and yet exempts them from worries that increased taxes might wreck their small businesses.

The President's approval rating is dropping, and so is the veneer of his shine, the mood of the country and the DJIA. Unemployment is going up and confidence is going down. So what does the President do? Get in a catfight with Rush Limbaugh. Damn. He actually used to look like the man for the job, now he just looks like a man in the job.

UPDATE: Now they're sparring with Jim Cramer. Damn. You know what I think this is? This is the White House vs CNBC. Because the CNBC crowd is The Investor Class. Verry interesting. 

Republican Heresy

The funny thing about Republicans is that we all think we know what's Right. But in fact we do not, and the most successful Republicans are the ones who realize that in the end it doesn't really matter.

The first thing that you have to learn as a Conservative is that the Republicans are the only ones who are going to shine your shoes. Everybody else is out to step on your toes, kick you in the shins and otherwise cut your legs out from under you. Including, guess who? Other Conservatives. The only place Conservatives agree about what's most important is when they are talking about Republican candidates winning. Otherwise the Fiscal Conservatives could care less about the Christian Conservatives who can't stand the Moderate Conservatives and everybody hates the Jews. No wait, that was Tom Lehrer. Everybody dismisses the Libertarians and everybody hates the Liberals. That's it.

Ronald Reagan mastered the song and dance routine and communicated (greatly) a Commandment he invented, no doubt to create that mythical beast called The Base. Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican. This is, of course, a formula for intellectual stillbirth. How convenient for a party who managed to get ahead of the competition and declare a revolution. There was, I don't doubt, a Conservative Revolution, the salient effects of which we are heir to. But sometimes it's difficult for me to distinguish conservative government from good government. After all, the Founders figured it out, or so we say. What's so revolutionary about following directions?  What's revolutionary boils down to the character of the American who gets enough of us to say there's a revolution afoot.

Revolutions of words and votes. Yoiks and Hazzah!

As I was saying to my boy Jimi this morning. I think 20% of the electorate is serious. The rest are playing American Idol. The most politically accurate thing I've read in the past week as I peruse the daily bloviation is Rush Limbaugh's drawing attention to the obvious fact that 40,000 people run NYC. Taxwise. Damn skippy. Alienating them is like throwing rocks at Mafia windows. You can pretend for only so long that the Mob doesn't exist, and then you're suddenly a character in Lemony Snicket.

So as Gerard wryly notes, exactly as I have, there are exactly two political leaders in America today. Rush Limbaugh and Barack Obama. They are both entertainers with their fingers on the emotional pulse of 80% of the electorate. The difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Republicans have not yet reached the point of desparation and hatred which aligns them emotionally behind their great entertainer.

Just you wait.

If you want to reach me. I'll be in the bomb shelter awaiting the call to sanity.

Uncle Taj?

I'm trying to remember the last time, if ever, I disagreed with Jimi Izrael's tone. It's something I cannot remember because not matter how gritty he gets on the front end, there's generally a fairly good sized mental engine plus socially aware gears working in the background. But his latest piece on Bobby Jindal lurches like his foot slipped off the clutch and seriously ground up the transmission. It happens occasionally, but when you've got a big engine, it sounds especially ugly. Beep beep. Call AAMCO, bruh 'cuz overdrive is shot.

The problems with saying that Bobby Jindal is going to be the GOP's Barack Obama are multifarious. The phrase to keep in mind is this: Our Negroes are authentic, your Negroes are tokens. That being all that's said is an insult to any and everybody who tends to think of people in terms of their individual character and quality. Not to say that at some emotional tectonic level American politics doesn't cash in on the face value of such reprobate assessments, but damn. I thought we were supposed at least do people the favor of saying Ivy Leauge Uncle Tom, after all Jindal is a Rhodes Scholar, which is the Ivy League of the Ivy League, not like your run of the mill Wall Street MBA. 

But even beyond that, nobody wants to be anybody's Barack Obama, least of all folks from the GOP. Over on this side of the aisle we are convinced that our candidates are qualified by their values, not by their charisma. Why else would we deploy zombie candidates like John McCain and Bill Frist?  We try diligently never ever to become a party akin to a cult of personality, and we mock the Democrats for doing exactly that. What have we been calling people who attack the persons of George W. Bush? Deranged. Exactly. It's not Bush's War, it's America's War. What disgusts us is only seeing the person and not the policy, which is why we grumble over the revisionist hagiography of FDR as we speak. Obama is like Lincoln, Obama is like FDR? Whatever to all that. Are his ideas right or wrong? Believe me, the person who wants to be Barack Obama is Rush Limbaugh, and we conservatives don't elect Rush for a good reason. His ego is bigger than his butt. There's a time and a place for mouthing off to the faithful, but it's not when one is charged with responsibilities of office to all of America.

We know liberals all love to talk about how they love people as if we don't, and we know they want to put emotions associated with race, gender and God knows what else front and center in their worldview. And they are so enamored of this practice that they actually believe that the world operates like that - a typical bourgie liberal sentiment. Well, we don't. We have all the Barack Obama we can stand, and we are not asking for any more in any form.

Now more seriously lies the presumption that the GOP is looking for additional representation from minorities, as if a single face can effect a sea change. I will admit that there's a bucketful of truth in that swimming pool. Symbolically, it's absolutely true. And the GOP is quite enough dazed and confused at this moment in time such that that much truth could override deeper truths we hold-self evident. But what nobody seems to recognize with any consistency is that quite enough people with diversity qualifications, whatever they may be, come to the Republicans. Perhaps not enough to win every election, but enough to win those we do. It's not as if anyone is desparate enough to get some third party wins here in the home of the brave. Yeah we do have a Green Party, but do we need a Brown Party? What the GOP needs are not symbolic victories, but real ones. It is a real victory when the world can see how many sorts of outwardly different looking men and women can be attracted to the core values of Conservatism, and that is more of the victory Republicans seek. Of course we want it to translate to winning seats and influencing people, shamelessly so. But that doesn't imply that we have a racial agenda. We defy a racial agenda and we claim the moral high ground for saying so and doing so. Except when we don't, which is a shame we should be called on. Just like everybody else.

Me personally, I have known a good number of ethnic Indians without ethnic names. Look at me, I'm from California - how could I not? And I know the kind of crap a lot of Asians of all sorts take for not representing what people stereotypically think they should represent. Like being Christian for one thing. So I'll bring that up. Every liberal who talks about Sunday being the most segregated hour, raise your hand if you've ever been to a Chinese or Korean language Christian Church. Yeah I didn't think so. Like they're all devotees of the Year of the Snake or their cookie fortunes weren't printed in a factory like everything else. Bobby Jindal is Catholic. Now think about that.  Bobby Jindal is the Republican Governor of Louisiana, and you know what else? One of Jindal's biggest supporters is man whose political courage I admire, Ray Nagin. If those facts mess with your mind, it's a sad testimony to the quality of your mind.

It only takes two minutes of thought to get beneath the simple-minded prejudices surrounding ethnic Americans who don't have their own sitcoms on TV or Congressional Caucus. (Hmmm, whatever happened to Dat Phan? Exactly.) I just didn't think I'd have to smack up my boy for grinding those gears. 

Google Brooklyn Writer

George, a friend to whom I've been neglectful, pokes me with the phrase:

Google “brooklyn writer” and you’ll get, Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it?

It turns out that if you google 'brooklyn writer' you get the phrase above. It was disconcerting for a moment because I thought that was his original note. But attribution is such a slippery thing between Twitter and Facebook. In the end I fell upon a paragraph I might have written myself, but instead it was written by Colson Whitehead, the writer I might have been if I loved English more than Perl.

I live in Brooklyn. I moved here 14 years ago for the cheap rent. It was a little embarrassing because I was raised in Manhattan, and so I was a bit of a snob about the other boroughs. At the time there was a big buzz about the “Black Renaissance” of Fort Greene. It was one big house party thrown by Spike LeeBranford Marsalis, Rosie Perez swinging from the chandelier. I wanted to be part of the vibrant cultural scene. Who doesn’t want to be part of a vibrant cultural scene? That didn’t happen, but it was cheap, and I grew to love it and it’s my home.

But I don't love English so much that I would bother to slave for its doyennes, masters and mad escapees from Iowa. In fact I don't love anybody that much, so I pretty much slave for my wife and three children - which is what anybody must do I reckon who has not been acknowledged as having anything more important than DNA issuing from them. We do it all for the acknowledgment of course. And for that one gets the privilege, on the occasions of romancing English bloggy style, of being called an idiot for asking questions about the existence of God in the minds of scientific atheists. By a drunk named Andy no less.

My auntie's boyfriend Richard once had me holed up for the evening at the Hollywood Holiday Inn in 1976. He had come West with his silk shirts and fancy new Nikon to present a demo tape of a group he produced to Stevie Wonder. So Richard and I had a date to go up the canyons and meet The Man Himself. Except that we didn't. We had a promise of a date. He told me something I can never forget or escape which is that Hollywood is a business just like any other business, except the people are 10 times as flaky. They're cruel too, which is worse. I further could never get over the idea that tenured professors, are most likely to deal with no more than 10 people of equal standing in their employment, yet thousands of undergraduates. It's not a situation conducive to humility or good grounding, I think. That leaves what for a writer? It was a question I could not answer and chose not to. I walked away from that Brooklyn and only periodically do I reveal a symbolic tattoo of a tear on my face.

Somewhere in my disambiguated soul is a spot for my existential partners. Currently it is buried under a great deal of misguided passion but I have yet to really tell whom all that passion belongs to. Speak of 'the fate of the black man' in mixed company and maybe you can tell me. But in that spot was some sort of filial affection for a short list of men I thought might be responsible for being what it is we black writers were supposed to be, saying what had to be said. Except there's a big whirlwind of 'what do you mean we' that pulls in detrius from a million neighborhoods papering over that would be garden spot. Sometimes a whole damned marina, the contents of a bodega and upside down hothouse have crash landed in the area. The hothouse in which Mr Tibbs names his price. How's that for a metaphor? But my soul is ambiguous as is my desire for naming partners. I'd settle for somebody to buy me a beer. If I drunk beer.

This morning, one of the fine men frontmost in mind for that list, a man who has actually bought me a beer talked about the late lamented Code Magazine. I didn't remember it. Nor did I disambiguate  its editor for a more commonly known gentleman of the same name. What did Gandhi say about western civilization? 

For the record, when Colson moved into Brooklyn, I was already gone. To Atlanta. The Black Mecca. I am no longer there either.

So it seems to me that we are stuck with a sort of stupid Global America. See nobody really cares if you write from Brooklyn because it's all connected and stitched together with this ungodly web, where sometimes it doesn't matter where you get your verbs. If a writer writes a masterpiece and Google doesn't index it, does it really exist? We talk in terms of 'eyeballs'. To be read doesn't result in action you can see outside your window. I fell in love with the romance of Vikram Seth's Golden Gate, and I joined 'The Well' somewhere back in the early 90s - so early in the life of this internetworked leviathan that the term 'digital divide' hadn't even been invented yet. Slipperier and slipperier still. Maybe we all need a Brooklyn to hang on to. It's not just black men whose fate draws a whirlwind of speculation and upendedness. It would be progress to know if we are actually going to Hell in a handbasket - at least we have a certain destination and means of transportation. But who is going to care about a Great American Novel today or tomorrow. We're all telling the ghosts of our aborted babies that America only used to be great, if it ever was, which we doubt and assume everyone else does as well. The Iranian Bombmaker's Daughter. There's a book that'll sell or at least get distribution. Find it at The Pirate Bay, download a copy to your iPod. Listen to it during your commute, or backpacking in the Sierras.

I like Christopher Hitchens. He knows when to uncap his Sharpie. It means something when British writers get punched out by Nazis in Lebanon. I'm going to say so unambiguously. So hook me up with him, because I think he's on the side of liberty and that's still something worth writing about and fighting about. You can see that from Brooklyn or Atlanta or Los Angeles if you're listening to the right frequencies. Writing into cyberspace diesmbodies thought from the gravity of location. It can give one a sense of vertigo that I can say from experience does not compare favorably to dancing with Rosie Perez.  I think I can also say that no matter what storms try to topple our sense of brotherhood, when we see our souls clearly something righteous and profound always emerges. It is not, in the end a love of English or of place, but of humanity itself. Wherever we write that, however we read that, the reward is clear.

9000 Earmarks

John McCain. Him say:

"In his pledge last September, President Obama said 'We need earmark reform and when I'm president I will go line by line to make sure we're not spending money unwisely,'" McCain said on the Senate floor.

"So what's brought to the floor today, 9,000 earmarks, billions and billions of dollars of unneeded and wasteful spending," he said.

Barack Obama, speakum with forked tongue.

Cabaret, Lebanese Nazis & A Subsidy for Sub City

Here in Sub City life is hard.
We can't receive any government relief.
Give Mr. President my honest regards
For disregarding me.
-- Tracy Chapman

It has been a long time since I hung out with my friend Art McGee. Like a lot of the oldtimers, black homesteaders of the digital frontier, he has moved on to other pastures. He has always had a real concrete connection to the infrastructure of the domestic left agenda, think tankery and liberal concerns. It has been many years since I last saw him at the African Marketplace over at Rancho Cienega here in LA. So such distance has been placed between myself and the black grass roots, or at least what I interpret them to be having once been intimate. Now it's all vague signals from a dispersed and confused confederation of tribes - like Chuck D on Air America, somehow it doesn't fit quite right as it used to.

This morning as part of my return to a more steady diet cultural reflections I couldn't help but notice as I was writing my impressions of Tracy Chapman's Crossroads, one of the great albums of my life, that I still know all of the lyrics to Sub City, directed as they were against all things un-Left. So I wonder what portion of that sentiment remains clear in the rhetoric of those people I casually refer to as whiners, and alternately know as Obama's most passionate xxx's? How can I say so without contempt I wonder? My political passion doesn't apologize very well, it's a product of being brought up black nationalist. We didn't apologize for shit, it was part of our problem and equal part of our appeal.

For the first time in life, I watched the film Cabaret. Silly Americans. It's a good thing I didn't see it when it first came out when I was young and impressionable. I can't imagine that I could have interpreted it correctly, and yet I have the unfortunate blessing of having reworked my intellectual plumbing to feel the disgust poor Brian must have had to find himself suddenly ready to smack Sally Bowles for her abortion. Those were the romantic icons of the 70s, including what I now see as incredibly stupid women who destroyed the fragile manhood of incredibly gullible men as if reckless abandon is something from which one can easily be extracted by the sudden responsibility of family. At least they were honest, but criminy the idea that she could just sleep it off and return to work. I guess finally the the ending song didn't resonate or maybe I'll get it next week. So I'm thinking perhaps that the way they got run over, steamrolled by the Nazis was predictable those confused decadent people in their underground clubs and palatial estates. They didn't have the moral backbone to stand up.

So perhaps it has come down to CSM Mellinger and Christopher Hitchens as the final two great symbols of spine. If I would be so bold as to call Hitchens an 'American' because my adjusted sense of nationalism doesn't quite understand the proper term for men and women of Continental birth who nonetheless are wed indelibly to the cause of liberty, than these two Americans possess what so many do not. A proper contempt for the enemies of freedom and civil liberty, ready to resist - as Hitchens through Totten's telling eschewed throwing a right cross for presumably sophisticated reasons.

You see it's all about foresight. Could we see it coming? When the average Negro, in whatever state she found herself became determined to need what the loudmouth nationalists were offering, could she see it coming? When Sally Bowles danced and shocked and tried to be brave without the affection of her father, could she see it coming? When we all wished we could play unplugged and complained about working in the factory like Tracy Chapman actually never did, could we see it coming? The real threats I mean. It's easy to see in retrospect that George W. Bush never laid a finger on anybody's civil liberties though clearly through the derangement of the opposition that was all they could ever 'see'. But they couldn't see it coming, that multi-trillion dollar cave under our feet we are now freefalling through.

Nah. People only see their own bleeding fingers and not quite the futility of the wall scratching that got them that way. We ask for bandaids and gloves when we need to be doing squats, the better to leap you with my bete noir brick wall. But leaping requires spine and all we ever seem to talk about is taking to the wind and working our fingers to the bone, hearing things that shock and looking about and finding nothing worth respecting. Leaping requires faith. All we ever seem to talk about is semiotics and regimes of truth and who knew what when. Few tropes of wisdom in that pseudo-intellectual 'debate'.

There is no real subsidy for Sub City. That's because by definition, life is hard. One shouldn't expect any government relief, and the less one is noticed by those 5,000 times as powerful, loud, beautiful and willful, the better. Tracy Chapman was right about one thing, all that you have is your soul. Sally Bowles experienced the greatest tragedy imaginable, being unsure about who is the father of the baby inside her, one possibility that he is the man she seduced, one possibility that he is the man who seduced her and the other man too. Those without backbones are easily seduced. Those out looking for a subsidy are the easiest of all. That was Fritz' problem. He was so seduced by wealth that he fell into the trap of selling a self he made up in its entirety - a self in jeopardy. It takes great courage to be oneself and to grow with integrity. There is no subsidy for that.

There is a subsidy for suckers. In fact there is a Nazi party waiting in the wings of human desire, always just offstage ready to sing songs. Out of the pieholes of wholesome boys are the great stirrings of childish dreams. Give them enough votes and they'll clean up all the spineless, confused fakery that attaches itself to people looking to be seduced - to be swept up and overtaken in a rush of emotional redemption. Emotional rescue is always for sale from the proper Party. All you have to do is salute the right color flag, which is a lot easier to do, even en passant on some Lebanese street, then to remember that the mind is attached to the spine.

Sometimes you're out there alone with a real sense of what you've done right in your life. There really isn't much to it despite the fact that it's very difficult to sell that amidst the noise and media power of people selling dreams and escape.

At the bottom of this cave whose pitch black atmosphere we're currently falling through is a rebirth of freedom. When you reset your own broken legs, you'll remember what's real.

VIP Records Crenshaw 1977

More Musical Moments

Continuing with the music that made me. Here is another selection of the stuff that powered my soul.

Carmel - Joe Sample. There were three distinct moments in my life when I decided to really understand jazz. The very first time was when I was about 19, and I must have asked around, because my first album was Joe Sample's Carmel. This was one of those albums I always liked playing end to end rather than picking a track and then lifting the needle again. It always put me in a good mood to listen to Joe Sample whereas other jazz I listened to at the time (not much) tried to prove its cool. I listened to Billy Cobham, Seawind and Tom Scott, and of course there was Spyro Gyra's Morning Dance and Hiroshima. But Joe Sample was the coolest of them all.

Even looking at the cover mellowed me out and reminded me of the peaceful camping trips I had taken up in Big Sur - a romance with that area of California I have never shaken.

Modern Man - Stanley Clarke. Not long after I took in Joe Sample, I ran into a cat named Ronald Stephens. He knew things about music that put me to shame, especially on the jazz side. And I wondered how anybody who had any hair growing out of them could possibly be excited by the mellowness of jazz. He looked at me and said, you obviously don't know Stanley Clarke or Jeff Beck do you? Who? He said Stanley Clarke is the greatest bass guitar player on the planet. I'm like, you can't be serious - don't you know about Louis Johnson? He yawns. He says, I play bass guitar and I can play every Brother's Johnson song, but I can't even come close to that. This I got to hear. It turns out that right around the way in the high end stereo department, the guy with a rack of Soundcraftsmens and the biggest speakers that JBL makes is cranking up Rock & Roll Jelly and Closing Statement. So now I've heard it, and I realize that I will never be the same. People are asking me if I've never heard of Stanley Clarke - I see the School Days album and realize that I have heard him before, but only in that odd way. If you've ever hung out with record store geeks, something we all used to do but never do any longer, then you know what it's like to be in the store when they play something that only the guys behind the counter can get into, and people in the store are like... you took off the Commodores to play this?  There used to be a record store between Rocket Cleaners and Boys Market on Crenshaw in the hood, and I can still remember the day they did that for what was then Stanley Clarke's newest album, School Days. I stayed to listen to the whole thing, liked Desert Song, walked out and forgot all about it. What I really wanted to hear was 'Running Away' by Roy Ayers - that was about as jazzy as my teenaged sensibilities allowed me to be. It had to be funky. Still Stanley Clarke was a great revelation to me and expanded my musical world with themes that I still find fascinating.

Sequencer - Synergy. If it's not obvious to you, then here's a clue about me. Ever since Space Race by Billy Preston, I have been absolutely addicted to electronic music. In high school, I thought that the world's greatest musician was Walter Orange. That had something to do with some confusion on my part, because I saw a picture of him and we bore each other some resemblance. What I recalled was that there was a man seated in the middle of five keyboards and Moog electronics. Every funk band that used synthesizers became associated with Orange in my young mind, and he was me. That association stayed in my mind until George Duke broke through with Reach For It, and then was completely obliterated by Larry Fast and W. Carlos. Still, I didn't own any of that music until I was 19, and on the same Soundcraftsmen / JBL setup at Fedco La Cienega's Coastron concession was the introduction of several new albums that fundamentally rearranged my musical tastes. One was the Alan Parsons Project - specifically Pyramid. The second was Mannheim Steamroller's Fresh Aire III. I dug the big Doobie Brothers album that was hot that year and Supertramp's Logical Song was often on my mind. For the first time, I really listened to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon - the problem being that anytime I inquired into the matter, people who knew looked at me like I was crazy. So, not willing to pay up for the super duper quality remastered version, I could only get a little piece of that music at a time up until that point. The second biggest favorite of that time period would have to be the debut album by the Yellow Magic Orchestra, which did the right things with electronic music that was perfectly original and not part of a disco tune. Still, the granddady of them all was Larry Fast's Synergy. At times when I get nostalgic, like right now, I think of how I used to daydream over the sci-fi illustrations of an artist whose name I need to recover to the strains of the New World Synphony. This remains one of the albums of which I never tire, and that period of music was signature in my life.

Duck Rock - Malcolm McLaren. Duck Rock was for me very likely the thing it was for everyone else. A glimpse into the future, the success of a shotgun method without any rhyme or reason that nonetheless struck more than a chord but established an orchestra hit. I have only now discovered the fact that my other idols, The Art of Noise, collaborated on this LP. But in fact it was Hobo Scratch, the 12 inch remix that just wore out the needles on my turntables. 

Go ahead, say it. We're on a world tour with Mr. Malcolm McLaren. We're goin each and every place including Spain, Asia, Africa, Tokyo, Mexico.  A hiphop bite that's been bitten all over for decades. 

You've got half the aesthetic that would dominate for the next decade in the album cover with Keith Haring and the iconic ghetto blaster, and the hard beats with scratches and electronics and signature voices, accents never heard, outtakes. Insane. Brilliant. Addictive.

Daft - The Art of Noise. AON became for me something of an obsession. Beyond the crystalline beauty of the synthesized note put to funky use by the brilliant Thomas Dolby whose Blinded Me With Science, like no other song beside Morris Day's Tricky, put me into uncontrollable break dance spasms it was Close (To Ehe Edit) that was the song that gets the Michael Bowen Lifetime Achievement as the 'Something about the music gets into my pants award'. And what's even more crazy is that Beat Box was on the same album. Astounding! I would have to say that without question {Rockit, Beat Box, Close, Tricky} are the all time greatest break dancing songs ever. The answer to your question is yes, I could break. I never managed a head spin or the signature windmill or flare. I would have needed a crew to practice with, something I wouldn't find on campus. I satisfied myself that I was the best breaker at State and famously won the campus Nerd Contest for breakdancing with taped glasses, flood pants and a pocket protector. Props must go to Charles Walker however, I did have red black and green pens in that pocket. As well I spun on my back after winning a scholarship at an awards ceremony dance. Of course I dug Scritti Politti, ABC and Yes' Owner of a Lonely Heart was a smash, but the Art of Noise was king and remained champion. There was something of an underground art to them and ZTT; I loved that they were texty. It was from them I expected codes from the underground.