Cobb

Owen Brown & My Piece of America

There is an outside chance, perhaps 30%, that I have already accomplished my greatest contribution on this planet. Perhaps there is something about being an American that makes us believe such things deep into our 40s, and thusly I am deluded. Whatever the figure, I recognize the inclination I have to elide a number of things I know when speaking. I know more that I say and I don't mind it so long as I say the most important things to say, which are often more humble and encouraging than anything else. There aren't many occasions when I wish to impress people, and my passions are my own.

It is in recognition of such things that I approach my 48th birthday with another sense of generosity - that of curating some aspect of my experience I think ought to be worth something. So I've been thinking that we all ought to know something extraordinarily well. Not that that something needs to be important, but just that we stay close to it for a long enough time to know it gets translated well into the next generation. I don't know how long ago it was when I first thought of this, but the fact that Tantalum is element 73 and the Iranians have been purchasing it for making capacitors with military applications reminded me. How many times do we know the periodic table without really knowing something extraordinary about one of the elements. What are there 210? 210 people could make that their life - to know all there is to know about their element. 67 is one of my favorite numbers, that would make me the curator of Holmium, I guess. Like the old woman from Airplane who pops up and says 'I speak jive', there might come a moment when we have something to say.

If I might take a detour to be the critic while I'm at the humble task, I would jab my neighbors in their intemollectual ambitions. There's something wrong about the shotgun morality of Considering All Things that has as its terminus the adopted program... I mean you have to be convinced that there is something essentially wrong with the world to become a moral crusader, but you have to be convinced that most things are wrong with the world to be generally supportive of moral crusaders. And that is the question begged by someone to takes an abstract approach to knowing moral things, which is the opposite of knowing a few or one thing very well and waiting for your turn to pop up and speak your perfectly inflected jive. Anyway enough of that.

The thing that hits me today is before I created it, there was no Wikipedia entry for Owen Brown, the third son of John Brown who died here in Southern California. It was 10 years ago last month when I visited his gravesite in Altadena on a spot called Little Rountop. At the time, I was fairly deep into my anti-racist activism and made the rather cornball decision to hang with whichever homies showed up for John Brown Day. It was one of those moments when I felt old, but not quite old enough. Which is to say a lot of things, none of them well. I'll explain it better later. The bottom line is that I feel drawn to preserve various arcana about Owen Brown due to that trip which meant quite a bit to me at the time, and now again in retrospect.

You see the big deal was that I had read Cloudsplitter and that book, like few others before, rocked my world. Reading about the life of John Brown from the perspective of author Russell Banks using the voice of Owen Brown forever altered my presentism on the issue of race. As you are probably well aware, there is a theory that people in today's America are better judges of matters of race than were those of our earlier history, and without the input of any number of non-whites, whites were inherently incapable of understanding the depth of their own racial depravity. It is this particular fiction that keeps any number of Americans in thrall to the sorts of declarations that roll off the chin of anyone a hair darker than George Hamilton. Because minorities have empathy. As if the very word originated in the original Ibo and didn't have an English equivalent until the importation of slaves to Virginia. 

At any rate beside the bohemian dingbat quality of Postfun's fetish of Race Treason, which at the time I thought profound, I did have an excellent and transcendent moment at Owen Brown's grave. How could I know Tim Wise would go so..tangential? And while I no longer live in Altadena nor subscribe to ideas for the improvement of either black or white races, I have a special fondness for the place feeling some responsibility as an archivist of that moment, and of the disposition of the memorial. So it comes as something of a surprise to me, now that I am one of the GPS class, that some various legal battles regarding access to Little Roundtop have scored one for the good guys.

As a consequence, I will make it my business to curate some fraction of Owen Brown's life and keep some Google Bots trolling the news for any mention of his name. Further, I will make available some collection of digital artifacts.

Download Owen Brown Package

Racial Confusion in the No Excuses Era

I suppose that I have become the jerk that I wanted to see. Several months ago, while there was more than one kind of doubt about Obama, I suggested that there might come a new standard if he were elected. It still hasn't seemed to catch on to the loud minority of Obamacrats that he was against Gay Marriage. So perhaps his own family values have become some sort of 'oh that's just for poor black people' kind of condescension. But at the time I said:

A lot of shiny happy Republicans have decided that now is the time to celebrate the fact that Barack Obama has a winning style and can talk seriously about basic family values. They are sanguine about the possibilities that Obama can be once and for all the absolute positive role model for everyone. As Eddie Murphy once said, Can a black man can have a suitcase? Yes. This is what I call the Obama Effect, the idea that the success of Barack Obama marks an era of positivity for blackfolks, ie translates into positive gain by racial affiliation.

The problems with any such suggestion as an 'Obama Era' is that week after week he amply demonstrates to everyone that there is very little upon which he can be depended to represent in principle. He is pragmatic to his beige bones. He talks about 2/3rds the game of Bill Clinton and is about twice as teflon-coated. So I've decided to do my projections and say that it is now the No Excuses Era. There's a black president, so what's your excuse? I have to say it that way because proving Obama inconsistent is trivial.

Well there are two points of confusion that you would think might be resolved. The first is whether or not anyone has any business expecting that claims of racial superiority shouldn't be beat down in the American media. But it's clear that what multiculturalism has done, like acid rain on our institutions of higher learning and mass communications, is weakened all of the structures and eroded their clarity over the years. Once upon a time white male bashing was an ironic sport, it has now mutated to an article of multicultural faith at no less a level than Supreme Court nominees. The multicultural mantra has gone beyond simple cultural relativism into pledges of allegiance to un-America. Puerto Rico and now Cuba are elevated because Hispanics are so important. What's so important about Hispanics? Nothing at all if E Pluribus Unum means anything. I leave research into that question as an exercise.

The second point of confusion manifests itself among the head witch doctors of my original tribe over the proper context of assessment for Princess Tiana. Among some of the critics are folks over at Essence magazine, and we already know about them. In case you weren't listening, Essence recently recommended that black women should find mates by frequenting strip clubs. Then there's the redoubtable NAACP, and of course Oprah. Why anyone would take advice about boys & girls from Winfrey is one of those areas where you actually have to shrug and cave to muslim critics of American decline. But the deeper point is that Disney must consult with such entities before peddling their 'soon to be classic' material to a bourgie audience in thrall to Disney's concept of wholesome family life. Aside from the fact that Disney's difficulty with princesses is more than a little twisted, it shouldn't bear so much scrutiny in the first place. After all, it's just a cartoon with merchandising tie-ins. Pixar doesn't have such difficulties. Then again, people are somehow smart enough to dismiss Pixar characters whereas Disney characters are soo.....

OK now I'm done talking about race.

They're overfreighted with significance, that's all. That being part and parcel of the fact that once upon a time young people read books about the adventures of men and women. Now they just watch videos about men and women shaking it. All the literature for teenagers is about teenagers being teenagers - an end in and of itself. And some poor fraction of America must suffer through this cultural minefield dripping with salacious vapidity like raindrops off the dancers in Step Up 2. Except if it ain't sexy it's gotta be Disney. Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling be damned. 

Sad. Just pathetically sad. Americans have such an identity crisis.

35 Pieces

Dropping 35 : Music Video
Brilliant!

A Look Ahead - British Motorcars

My favorite TV show is Top Gear. Here, on a South African radio show, starting at minute 2:10 Clarkson begins his rant on the failure of the British auto industry. It's all gone. There's hardly a better testament to all we Righties go on about soft socialism than this.


Is this the American future?
It's almost frightening to think about how many British carmakers there used to be but are no more: Leyland, Triumph, Vauxhall, Rover, MG, Morris, Bristol, TVR, Jaguar, Morgan, Bentley, Aston Martin. What have they got left?

And how's this for a footnote?

SST? When's the last time you heard that said with any enthusiasm?

Friday Fragments

'Anti-Black' Post of the Week
Essence Magazine, that bastion of black thought, lists the top 100 places to find black men. Place #5 is Strip Clubs. Of course they are technically correct. And so a number of single black women with some shred of dignity have gotten all in Essense's grill. They naturally have the company of people with sense and sophistication, and of course the Old School. It would be curious to find out how many of the outraged people actually recognize that they are being social conservatives. I just have to shake my head, suck my teeth and sigh. Nevertheless, I think that all women should go to a strip club at least once, just in case they haven't been acquainted with their competition. In fact, they should go enough times to understand the entire dynamic, but definitely not to pick up dudes. 

I have said that black culture is transparent, but I'm beginning to wonder if I should distinguish black culture at all. Or rather I should say that, giving it an arbitrary name, in the Obama Era there is no such thing as black culture. It's not as if blackfolks own the titty bar industry. So perhaps this will be my last 'anti-black' gesture. 

Just Talk to the Cylinder
Obama is still waiting to give diplomacy a chance as Iran continues it's relentless push to acquire WMD. Spook86 reports: 

Mr. Morgenthau also noted that the material shipped by LIMMT "included 15,000 kilograms of a specialized aluminum alloy used almost exclusively in long-range missile production; 1,700 kilograms of graphite cylinders used for banned electrical discharge machines which are used in converting uranium; more than 30,000 kilograms of tungsten-copper plates; 200 pieces of tungsten-copper alloy hollow cylinders, all used for missiles; 19,000 kilograms of tungsten metal powder, and 24,500 kilograms of maraging steel rods . . . especially hardened steel suitable for long-range missiles."

If I remember correctly, most Democrats and others suffering from BDS suffered an inability to process the connection between dual-use technology and WMD. So it is likely that supporters of Obama's geopolitics will ignore these ominous signals. I haven't listened for any backtracking on North Korea but I suspect that verbiage is also in full bloom rather than in rational retreat. 

Sotomayor vs Souter
I will officially say one thing about the SC nominee. She's probably no worse than Souter, therefore so what. I heard Mike Gallagher this morning on Right Radio, which I haven't been listening to for a while, and his complaints were so incredibly shallow that I think he's lost his sense of humor. 

Jensen Button Wins at Monaco
Aside from the fact that Button is certainly at the very least, knee deep in young nubiles and not coincidently the world's best race car driver of the moment, Monaco is a cool place to party. In fact, the very idea of Monaco is extraordinarily appealing to me at the moment. I wonder if Monaco has an immigration problem, and my nickel says they don't. There is something very extraordinary about that place.

Speaking of auto racing, I haven't heard enough good stuff about Danica Patrick. What's wrong with you people?

The Impossible, Obvious Dad

Sowell's Three Bombs

Thomas Sowell dropped three bombs on his latest foray over at Bloomberg on the Economy. I'm finally getting something of him. He enjoys being blunt and he seems to have little patience for the intellectual geeky fun of economics. In that, he's much like a historian.

Tom Keene would often talk about 'pain-free' recession when indicating some of the small bias he has. But I still say he's one of the best journalists in the world. Sowell gets straight to the libertarian point that the government should 'do nothing' whereas Keene is searching for a more tantalizing insight. But I think Sowell is dead right. The politicians are rewarded for sound and fury, which may signify nothing, but justifies doing anything. So they do something, which more often than not defies accountability. In the case of TARP, they justified putting together a huge pile of money for the purposes of doing A, and then went and financed B. B being GM. But to the bombs.

Bomb the First. Marriage.
Black Americans that are married have had poverty statistics in the single digits for 15 years.  BOOM.

Bomb the Second. Home Ownership.
There is no statistical evidence that home ownership improves community. BLAM.

Bomb the Third. Home Ownership.
Sowell didn't stop renting himself until he was 51 years old. KABLOOEY.

The third bomb is more like a blip but felt more impressive when I heard it, an echo of the second. Sowell made the point which discredits some idea I held for a long time but hadn't revisited or thought about in a while. It's the Gautreaux idea. Actually, Gautreaux is a program that is compatible with or follows from the idea that if you put poor people in good houses, then good will necessarily come of it.

One implementation of that idea is Urban Renewal, and we've done a great deal of that. All of public housing programs come from the idea that it was the slum and the tenement which degraded the people and led to their social dysfunction. That if you took the people out of the gutter, the gutter mind wouldn't follow them. And what we have to show for that is failure, most notoriously in Chicago. Sowell notes that Democrats tried in the 20s, Republicans tried in the 30s. Both tried again in the 40s and 50s and nothing in his statistics shows that people were better off in government granted housing.

That's a lot to swallow.

The New Health Care

I got a twitter about why people go to chiropractors for menstrual pain even though it doesn't work. The same reason people go to chiropractors at all, because they're friendly, they help and you like coming back. Nobody wants to go to the hospital. So I'm thinking....

The new health care is something you go to all the time, like once a month. And you like to go because the building is new and clean and there are young people there and people are having fun. And the lobby is airy and the people at reception are cheery and you go and your doctor knows you. But he's not just a doctor, he's a young person and you see the young people most of the time because most of the time there's nothing  seriously wrong with you. And there's no co-pay unless you miss three months in a row.

It's a pharmacy and a health spa and an urgent care facility and a spine center and a homeopathic joint and there are circles of wellness and you are in the outer circle where you are never too far from serious doctors, surgeons and specialists who work the inner circles. The entire place is built like the Pentagon, except its more like a capital G with concentric circles plus a way to get quickly to the middle if your problem is that serious.

The point is that you don't mind going and you are in constant contact with people who can quickly form teams to handle your case. Everybody is longitudinal.

--

Blackfive has tweets from a conference;

DBA - Doing Business in Africa

We get letters. One comes from a thoughtful reader who has some particularly interesting data to share. I've only begun to uncover some of the mysteries disclosed but I've been fascinated by the subject as I'm sure many of you have.

An inside-the-boardroom survey of attitudes toward corporate investment in Africa among leading U.S. corporations. The information was gathered between January and November 2008 in a series of closed door interviews with senior officers of 30 American Fortune 100 corporations by senior associates of Baird's CMC.

I think that right about now, I'm confident enough in what I know from my industry to stand as an expert in just about any corner of the globe. What I don't know is what it's like being the capitalist and risking my moola in strange places, especially these days. But with our zombie situation it's likely that the only new money being made is going to be made in emerging markets. What's encouraging is the mantra of 'Trade not Aid' that I've heard from Africans.

I happen to know a couple brothers who have done well for themselves and their companies working in South African telecoms, and I have met a Chinese gent who owned some interest in the textile business in Nigeria.

Thompson Ayodele writes on the subject just this morning:

As debates on whether to halt or increase foreign aid continues, Daniel
Hannan, British MEP, comments on the presentation made by Thompson Ayodele
on the same issue earlier this month at the European Union Parliament in
Strasbourg, France.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/daniel_hannan/blog/2009/05/19/stop_giving_us_aid_say_africans

As Thompson puts it: "The British Treasury is empty. So you are going to
be borrowing money in order to give it away. And the countries that get it
will be poorer as a result". Yup: but at least we'll have shown everyone
how nice we are.

I'm not sure that the West has run out of new ideas about how to improve the quality of life of human beings, but we're pretty much gone so far as to start thinking about what we should do for animals, plants and the atmosphere. So from my point of view, what remains to be done is to catch up the rest of the world with what we know and have done. It will provide the same energy for them as it has done for us. The African future is bright.

UPDATE - I found the video I was looking for:

Don't Marry Be Happy

I couldn't resist.

Here is a little song I wrote
If the gay life floats your boat
Don't marry be happy
In every life we have some trouble
When you marry you make it double
Don't marry, be happy......

When you ask the state to wed
The people come to judge your bed
Don't marry, be happy
California passed Prop 8
And you could not retaliate
Don't marry, be happy
Look at me I am happy
Don't marry, be happy
Here I give you my phone number
When you marry call me
I give you plane ticket
Don't marry, be happy
Ain't got no cash, ain't got no style
Only same sex to make you smile
But don't marry be happy
Cause when you marry
Your case will drown
And that will bring everybody down
So don't marry, be happy (now).....

There is this little song I wrote
I hope you learn it note for note
Like good little children
Don't marry, be happy
Listen to what I say
In your life expect some trouble
But when you marry
You make it double
Don't marry, be happy......
Don't marry don't do it, be happy
Put a smile on your face
Don't bring everybody down like this
Don't marry, it will soon pass
Whatever it is
Don't marry, be happy

Prop Eight Upheld

So the first thing I noticed was who was twittering what, since Twitter is the fastest way to get breaking news of interest to bored Americans. Sticking my nose in the sewer, guess what I smelled?

THERE'S NO LIMIT ON HOW MANY COMPLAINTS YOU CAN FILE
it's quick, easy, fun, and above all legal
and I imagine, pretty effective if enuf people play too..
I just did a quick look-up, so please feel free to figure out who else is anti-american,
and post their info so that other people can join the fun also..
:)

That's the Prop8 Counterattack Virus being spread at your local Craigslist. I couldn't make that up.

The LAT reports at the end of their brief coverage highlighting a picture of outrage:

Even with the court upholding Proposition 8, a key portion of the court's May 15, 2008, decision remains intact. Sexual orientation will continue to receive the strongest constitutional protection possible when California courts consider cases of alleged discrimination. The California Supreme Court is the only state high court in the nation to have elevated sexual orientation to the status of race and gender in weighing discrimination claims.

Which is what we always knew. Nobody is being discriminated against and those that are should take their individual cases to court. That would be a parallel to the Civil Rights Movement, not declarations by fiat of what marriage is or is not.  I said this long ago but I leave that as a Google exercise for another time. Today, I have a new motto with a hat tip to Bobby McFerrin.

Don't marry, be happy.

I'd still like to see the language of the majority opinion, but I'm too busy to really search. Why? I guess I'm just satisfied that's all.

Sotomayor

I don't know how to judge a judge and neither do you. But just because I have no objective standard to help I am not going to get all exercised about who she *is* or where she comes from or what she looks like or the fact that she's a she.

Dennis Miller said something this year that has had a profound effect on me, and it's just common sense, but I'm going to have to name it. I'm calling it ducking down Miller's Alley. Miller's Alley is a one way street home. He basically said don't spend a lot of time worrying about something that is completely beyond your ability to change. I'm the kind of person who needs to be whacked upside the head with this message, because I'm out there on the boulevard like a motherless child. I need to turn down Miller's Alley and head home where I make a difference. So do a lot of people.

What happens in American politics is that we get annoyed with what we think other people believe. And most of us don't really know what we believe because we cannot sustain a productive conversation about things worth knowing. We argue because it solidifies something in us that we don't want mushy, giving us a false sense of security. But solidified arguments are not so very useful as understanding the process of discovery. That's not what we are doing - we are not discovering anything of value, instead we are uncovering a new class of clowns who look like us but are clearly wrong. Every political development in our national life gives us a new class of freaks to avoid like the plague. 'They' are ruining 'our' America.

So today is the day of California's ruling on Proposition 8. Today is also the day that the first handlers out of the block will start Sotomayor on her path through a guantlet of pundits, pollsters and political parasites, in anticipation of the greatest show on earth, the Senate Confirmation Hearing. The screech of tires has already begun and its just a matter of weeks before the ultimate crunch of steel and broken glass. But in the meantime the squeal will get louder and more incessant.

I know it's irresponsible of me as a public citizen to head down Miller's Alley, but it's really not my job. I think I might do a better job if I were employed as a pundit, pollster or partisan, but I'm not. And so I'm going to reserve judgment on the judge. I will watch without worry.

Eagle Eye

Eagle Eye is the most preposterous chase surveillance flick I've ever seen. But it was still watchable. Why? Because Shia LeBouf gives one of the best lip curling, jaw trembling breakdown and cry scenes ever. Not that there was any emotional momentum behind the moment so early in the film, but he's got the physical acting skill down well enough for it not to be corny. I'm now thinking that I have to go sit through Bait once again to see if it has aged well, same thing for Paycheck both of which are appropriate comparison flicks. Right now I'm giving the not to Bait as the best of the three. I never did see Cellular, and I don't consider any of these to be in the same league as Firewall. And no I didn't bother to watch The Net either.

What's useful about this flick aside from the fact that it couldn't possibly take itself too seriously (does it?) and aside from the fact that I now know that Michael Chilkis can indeed grow hair, is that it's a good view of what might be considered possible. So we come back to it in five years and see how many amatuer panoptic hacks in government actually tried something as preposterous as the evil computer as this one.

I find it interesting because the only reason that these films get you to suspend disbelief is that you follow the gullibility of the characters themselves. Like the people who always trip running away from the monster. So I wonder the extent to which such small credulousities scale up. Which is to say since nobody in the film really made any effort to throw away their cell phone, or give up the altruism of the protecting that thing they were psychologically unable to abandon, such manipulations become plausible.

So let's take that road and see what we find.

Imagine that you, the one out of 20 Americans who bothers to reflect on the real meaning behind Memorial Day, were the target of some extreme coersion of the sort created by the evil mastermind of Eagle Eye. It tells you to forswear your patriotism and go cook hotdogs instead of going to the grave of your father at Arlington. I'm not saying this right. The better context is that of radical transcendence. Remember the philosophical context of radical Islam. God has the right to demand that you blaspheme. So the Eagle Eye premise, despite the incredibility of the technical manipulation, asks a good question. Can your faith in everything you believe in be manipulated to get you to defy the very principles of everything you believe in? Yeah.

And after you come through all that, which way do you go? It's a very Robert Ludlum kind of question, as his heroes were always burned out in service to something that doesn't necessarily deserve their loyalty - something gone awry in a valued institution which momentarily (?) perverts it.

Since I do have some measure of torture on the brain this week, it is the kind of scenario I found noble, if not admirable, in the character played by Denzel in Man On Fire. If he uses obscene methods to achieve moral ends, the price is self-sacrifice. And with that in mind, and then thinking once more about John Henry Eden, we should never give over the authority over life and death to 'sentient' machines. Why? Because their self-sacrifice is meaningless, or close to it. I mean, nobody cares that a smart bomb is destroyed in its act of destruction. Why then should we care about the fate of a machine that becomes a weapon?

Hmm.

Thoughts About Courage & Safety

I watched John Frankenheimer's excellent 'Grand Prix' over the weekend. It's an extraordinary film about men and women, love and marriage, freedom and challenge, courage and ambition. And it's got a lot of very fast cars.

As a gearhead, I am increasingly taken with Formula One Racing and all sorts of high performance endeavors, and I am struck with how rarified things get. I think a lot of it is stomach, not necessarily skill. There are just people out there saying - to hell with it all, I'm just going to try to be the best whether or not I have a lot of company. One condemns oneself to obtaining perfection. But this wasn't what prompted me to write today.

See, early in the film, the James Garner character wrecks his car at Monaco. It got caught between third and fourth gear and some other strange mechanical foulup that they couldn't fix in the non-existant pits forced him off the road. And then I saw this strange ritual of women and men running across the track with a stretcher to fetch him. Some of the movie is dedicated to make the point that a good number of the race fans come to see explosions and blood. F1 in those days seemed to have 90% of the ghosts we have today - few people die of late, but then it was part of the draw and of course part of the thing that made those men something different.

But today the sport is a great deal more safe, and so I wonder a little bit if the quality of courage in today's race drivers is diminished. Moreover, in everything we do if we are safer do we lack courage? There's a thin line between extreme performance and foolishness isn't there? And as we study and study and improve and improve aren't we making it all easier?

What's Up With Me?

Flicks

I haven't done quite as many. Star Trek, Terminator Salvation, The Wrestler and the journalism flick with Russell Crowe, plus the end of 24 is about it for me. Nothing barks at me. Top Gear is back. Man I love that show, and I'm starting to like House all over again. Never picked up on The Tudors. F1 & Rolex Grand Am. Same as it ever was.

Songs
I'm fairly deep into Rockband so that's hipping me to some rock that I didn't know. I think that I am about to become a huge Lynert Skinnert fan. I'll even learn how to spell it. I watched a documentary on the Rolling Stones, which I've never thought much of, and I'm specifically remembering that one of their critics says that by 71 they were basically done with their greatness. I'm finding a few more reasons to love The Who and perhaps the Dead will awaken some juices. Metallica? I still don't get it. GnR is better to my ears but still not lyrical enough. So I'm guessing that maybe only Pearl Jam has an opportunity to unseat the Stone Temple Pilots in my mind as creators of the best rock music in 50 years. Of course none of that changes the fact that it is American Roadhouse Rock Blues which is the ultimate music and the lord and master of all guitarists is Stevie Ray Vaughn. Still I dig that Scandinavian dude who plays acoustical on YouTube, Peo Kindgren. 

Eats
I'm busting my diet because I threw out my back again, and being unable to exercise just makes all of this crap futile. If I can't run I may as well eat. Still I keep forgetting to buy Pepsi Throwback and stock up on it, because it uses real sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup. I still have a case-a-week addiction to Red Bull, which is just so typically yuppie that... well I don't annoy myself so there. I do notice, however that certain people give me a look when I just drink it like water. I am starting to develop a tolerance for aspertame and so am doing Vitamin Water 10 with my meals. I can do it with the orange stuff but not with green tea, so for a short time Arizona was in the diet. No more. I'm back to about 208, having gone down to 204 the day I thought I was cool to do hills on my mountain bike. Now my chiropractor says...

Games
It's all about the Rockband baby. I have just got to the point at which I'm playing everything on hard as a bassist and consistently hitting 92-98%. I did a couple perfect and got no achievement. What's up with that? There are an astounding number of.. well mediocre songs and a bunch I'll just never give a chance. I can't wait until there is more Steely Dan and yes My Old School on expert guitar IS impossible. My sight reading has improved dramatically and I expect that this could be a very good way to teach real guitar and bass. 

I'm regretting selling Gears now that new DLC is coming. But my gamer buds have been less reliable since the passing of FastlaneKen. We'll break the spell, I suppose. 

Fam
Spirit is the new name for Scholar and she may have to be renamed 'Flyer' if all goes as planned on the Cheer team. (It's not cheerleading, it's Cheer). She's muscling up like a little square shouldered feminine rock and just Monday she demonstrated full splits. We got her some blue pads so she can practice her more gymnastic routines. I'm really glad she's finally got some sports - much of her middle schooling was bereft because of Osgood Schlatters. Now she's a dynamo. 

Deet's new play is coming out in a couple weeks. Definitely have to check that out, even though it's very Green. Hey, why don't we have a Green Party? Anyway, the dramatic wing of this family is significant, now that I think about it. I'm looking forward to seeing this one. Maybe we can collaborate.

Self
Technical immersion is working out OK. I have cloud paranoia and this nagging suspicion that analytical database technology is in the leapfrog stage and I better get my head around the new players. I'm particularly liking Nirvanix & Vertica. I have a sneaking suspicion that Intacct is going to live for about two more years independently and then get bought.

I'm coming out of a week long funk of multivariant origins, primarily the back spasm. The Unit helps a lot in that regard. It's time to plan vacations. I've decided to actually use drugs, naproxen and cyclobenzaprine. But I bought a cane just in case, plus since I dig House.. But I will be getting outdoors soon one way or another, and definitely to Monterey at the end of June.

Books
Just finished the latest John Sandford. Also Beevor's Stalingrad. Still digging slowly through Will Durant's Story of Philosophy. Handed over a Crichton over to Boy who I think will dig it. Think I'm going to get into Gayle Lynd's Last Spymaster - she's the one who has taken over the Ludlum franchise and as a real intel analyst has an inside track. 

Tech
It's all about big data, baby. But I'm still brainstorming UI ideas for multitouch access to big data. It's really my dream thing. I speculate that within a year Apple is going to come out with a touchpad. It will be based on the iTouch/iPhone OS and it will be Kindle compatible. If Apple doesn't make a portable reader (and if the Macbook Air physics weren't just a prototype) I will eat my hat.

Meanwhile I'm thinking a lot about the connection between Obama's CTO Vivek Kundra and an old associate of mine. Data.gov is now out there. It's a big fat hairy deal, and it is significant enough for me to begin a love affair with the Obama Administration - but don't tell Michael Steele.

A Fate Worse Than Death

Is torture a fate worse than death?

I think that's a very difficult question to answer. Academically, and for the sake of argument, it makes sense to suggest that.
Now it seems to me that it takes a rather curious personality to volunteer for waterboarding. But you certainly cannot say that waterboarding is torture if torture is a fate worse than death. Which leaves us with a very simple and perplexing question which does not appear immediately answerable by someone who is not familiar with the particulars of the Geneva Convention (as if it were the last word).

Situation: Battlefield capture.
You are the officer and you are engaged in a firefight in enemy territory at the suspected HQ of the local AQ honcho. You win the firefight and enter the premises. You take fire and return fire inside the building, and then you corner the last five in a room. They surrender in a Mexican standoff. You now have them handcuffed inside their quarters.

The only reason you did not kill them is because you want to extract information from them. Forgetting the policy, legal and procedural distinction between brutal interrogation and torture, is it useful to torture them or should you have killed them?

What about if you tell them that they are going to be killed and that they must confess now, and then you kill them? Is that any different from torture? Is that any different from brutal interrogation? What if you give them 24 hours to live?
--

Everything that mitigates against killing the captives says that whatever is in store for them is NOT a fate worse than death. Everything that compels the enemies to not booby-trap their headquarters and initiate a self-destruct sequence says that whatever is in store for them is NOT a fate worse than death.

What if the order from our side is 'Take them alive' and the order from their side is 'do not be taken alive'.

What I conclude is that there is no objective answer which is practical. In other words, the moment there is any deviation from a zero-tolerance principle which requires no law and allows for no extenuating circumstances ever, then the entire morality of the situation is compromised. Morality becomes situational. A situational morality is not a true morality, it becomes merely political, and the entire value of a policy is its acceptability by those who design it and those who agree to abide by it. In that regard policy merely has to be reasonable and consistent. A moral judgment is not applicable, because - even as ambitious journalists can demonstrate, anybody can invent a reason to do it.

So that's my answer to the question of whether or not it is moral to participate in this exercise in journalistic voyeurism. You just watched somebody being tortured. How can you live with yourself, morally? The answer is that the context excuses it from being a moral question.

That being said, I am satisfied that the entire context for judging the appropriateness of torture, or brutal interrogation as the case may be, depends entirely on the legality of the policy. And that is a political question, consistent definitions of 'torture' be damned.

Terminator Salvation: A Terracentric Romp

The thing about Terminator Salvation is that it makes clear how much the earlier series depended on special effects. As sci-fi, there's simply too much action in the story for it to be a story. But if you're going to have some adventure on Earth, this one works, mostly.

Terminator Salvation reads like an action movie, and with director MCG it meets a sort of merging of genres which is useful but nowhere nearly recognized. That is to say, if what I saw is what I think I saw, then TS is the first of a new breed of action films, one that draws from both film and from video games. And that's not as bleak a prospect as it sounds for a couple of reasons.

The first reason is that Iain Banks has written the best sci-fi in the English language. And until somebody starts making Culture films, there is nothing new to see. Thanks JJ for reviving Star Trek but there's a whole lot of galaxy out there and you nimrods haven't done nearly enough with it. Quite frankly, Alien vs Predator has a lot greater story potential to get us out of the Terracentric realm of sci-fi. So as long as we're Terracentric, hell WW2 is more interesting.

The second reason is that video games are not as Terracentric. I mean, there's some bet that JJ got his mining ship idea from Dead Space, which was a fabulous sci-fi horror drama in space. But even if he didn't, there are huge visual vocabularies to ripoff in the future of film. I'm just waiting to see the crossover between video game art direction and that of film. Watchmen is just the beginning. 

This brings us right back to TS. Now what I thought I saw were a lot of very compelling scenery in the film which was evocative of video games I've played. First and foremost, post nuke Los Angeles was straight out of Fallout 3. That vision is nailed. Second, when they got off the street into the wrecked garden, the scene with the shotgun lesson, that looked very much like the arboretum from Gears where you used the Hammer of Dawn on that Berserker, remember? Of course you do. The view of the flying contraption in Death Valley, where they were testing the Off Signal - when Connor looked through the binoculars, the streams of heat from the engines in orange was just like the transparent animations of the Final Fantasy movie. Excellently done. 

The convergence of these visual vocab is really a great development. I like it. Now if we can only get off Earth. Why? Because the drama of nuclear weapons is extraordinary and we want to see grid fire destroy a planet. Now that JJ has destroyed Vulcan, the quota of boom has been raised. You can't do that on Earth any longer. Besides, the opening cut scene from Star Ocean: The Last Hope is as dramatic as it gets. You simply cannot keep destroying the Earth and imposing draconian utopias in the chastened aftermath, it's so...Japanese. 

The good news is that TS makes good use of the Terminators and the human resistance element. It's not as good as JJ's Star Trek or as good as Will Smith's I Am Legend, but I think it's a lot better than most action movies, and certainly better than any of my memories of the Terminator series. MCG gets one shot in one scene just brilliantly, and it's early in the show. I don't think there has ever been a shot done on film that does upside-down better. Best helicopter crash ever.

The White Offender

I get letters. A thoughtful, 'white suburban' undergrad asked a few insightful questions. Namely:

Are you of the opinion that racism is not a problem, merely a circumstance surrounding all civilizations/cultural integration? Or, are you saying that racism is inherent in the human psyche.... Or something completely different...

and

If I'm not mistaken, you also had a section about how the perceived cultural oppression of Black Americans is illusory and sustained by learned inferiority??

The short answers are:
A. Racism is a character flaw. It is immoral behavior. The rewards for such immoral behavior are diminished but remain.

B. Black culture is transparent. This means that anyone can use it to any effect they choose. If you find that you are not getting what you want through some cultural effort, try another. If you're going to KFC, don't order a Big Mac. (hat tip to Run DMC).

The more involved position is this:

Let's consider the idea of racism as immorality. How moral do you have to be in order to have a stable society? Well, we tend to organize our thinking around class. That is to say, we Americans accept that lower class people will not be as morally fit as upper class people. Accordingly when upper class people offend, we are generally more outraged. This works independently of power. Russell Simmons is a very powerful individual, yet in the comedy acts he produces and promotes there is a fairly low standard of morality. But any dentist at a whites only golf club would find himself in a world of trouble were he to say some of the exact same words as a comedian onstage at the Apollo Theatre. It's not power, it's class.

We therefore accept a sliding standard of moral behavior according to class. What then is the use of activism? Is activism reducing the immorality of low class people or is it raising the morality of high class people? In America most anti-racist activism is of the latter sort. You can simply accept this as a matter of considering your own position as a university student. Anti-racism is surely a more compelling topic on campus than it is in the low rent areas. And I suspect that your expectations - which are normally American - would be that you would be much more outraged at the dismissal of anti-racist activism in the boardroom of some corporation than you would in the vestry of some inner city church.

My point is simply this. The immorality of racism is absolute. There is only one principled acceptable standard which is zero tolerance. But if you are to accept that premise, you will find, objectively that there is more work to do in the lower classes. This compromises the activist pose, the cache if you will, of the anti-racist activist which generally comports to typical leftist ideas of 'social justice' and 'power to the people'.  But the masses are the problem and that is because they are invested in their racial identities to a greater extent than the upper classes are.

I strongly believe, and I think the career of Eddie Murphy underscores all my points, that the primary difficulty posed by white supremacy in America is economic oppression. I would also point out that there is nothing in MLK's Dream that suggests he expected anything more in his vision of social justice than middle class standing for black Americans. Therefore, once a certain economic level is reached by black Americans, their own interest in the effect of racism on them is diminished. That is, of course, the thesis of William Julius Wilson - there's nothing new in me saying so. I'm sure you'll find that the attitude is: "So long as we get paid, who cares what they call us?"  I think it would be interesting research for you to ask people, of the racism they regularly encounter - that they feel disables them, at what level of annual salary would the ordinary racism be palliated. As Dr Funkenstein said, the bigger the headache the bigger the pill. How big a pill does the average racial minority need? Moreover what are the effects of self-medication?

From a black nationalist perspective, my original position, activism in the upper classes, or some change in white America was not a priority. Rather, I refer you to this, my favorite quote from Malcolm X.

The platform that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, our religious leader, stands on is the platfrom of complete freedom, justice and equality for the 20 million black people or so-called Negroes here in America. And he teaches us that because of the seriousness of the condition that our people now find themselves in that it is absolutely impossible to solve our problems with means other than religion. And he teaches us that the religion of Islam is the only religion that will instill within our people the incentive to stand on our own feet. And instead of trying to force ourselves upon whites or force ourselves into the white society or blame the white man for our predicament and constantly beg him for what he has, he says that the only way that we can solve our problem is to unite together among ourselves, among our own kind, clean ourselves up, rid ourselves of the evils that we've become addicted to here in this society and try and solve our problem ourselves.

So at a very basic level, the human solves his own problem by refusing to stand in the racial box defined by his oppressor. Except many black Americans insist on prioritizing a black, rather than human context. Another good question is the 'Afrolantica' question. If you got rid of racism overnight in America, how much of your blackness would disappear overnight?

Racism is a particular sin. Like all sin it is learned behavior. People do it because it feels good or it gives some advantage. In that way it is like any other immoral failing. It is a failure of character. It is therefore part of the human condition, not because 'race' is real or natural, but because human fallibility is. Immoral people from anywhere on the planet who come to America will find out exactly how racism works here in short order and attempt to exploit it to their benefit.

As a 'suburban white kid', you will likely be the object of some orthodox indoctrination about how 'all' black people feel about certain slights to their dignity. People will await your 'getting it', and should you fail to, your own racial identity will be blamed. My advice is to keep reading books and thereby individuate yourself. You'll find the books are older than you, and therefore so are the solutions, which will only go to show some political overproduction in your educational environment.

You'll also enjoy the great irony of becoming an upper class individual with the benefit of your learning, and the masses are still the same. And yet the most delicious irony of all is that today, without racial malice aforethought you have not offended. But by the end of your studies your peers will likely assure you that you have been offending all along, and now you know exactly how (or generally how) not to offend in the future. It's rather like a prison education, but is it truly moral instruction?

Good luck.

--

Man, I'm starting to sound like Shelby Steele. But really, I'm raising kids in America. We don't have time for this foolishness. And it is precisely that thing, class, that multiculturalists have ignored which undermines their entire thesis and apparent upper hand in discussions about race. They never expected the black upper class to say anything, but that we would remain marginal and permanently wed to Talented Tenth racial servitude. Instead, we have broken off, like Bill Cosby, dissenting from the notion that 'black culture' does not respect class or morality. And it is this difference which inoculates us from the Left cache of liberal chic and hearts that bleed for blacks in dysfunction, as if white supremacy was the only reason for their condition.

Black Americans are doing exactly what they want to do. This is what people keep forgetting.

The Gang Press of War

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
-- Marianne Williamson

According to Beevor, there were gangs of Russians pressed into the service of the Werhmacht. Since Hitler was a racist, he had to change the racial designation of these men such that their ethnicity wouldn't defile the uniform. They were thus called Cossacks and some were made officers in the army headed towards Stalingrad. Others, known as Hiwis from 'hilfswillige' were more often than not Russian POWs. The Russian Red Army was so brutally strict that it was often better to desert to the other side rather than be summarily executed for not obeying orders.

Since I am in a bleak mood, owing to my back injury and slow days, it has become easy for me to imagine the necessity of war. War is a prison of necessity and no man escapes. And thus it becomes the mismeasure of manhood, and yet the very basis upon which his life depends. It seems there is only one way to survive a war with one's self intact and that is to be a career officer. Everything else is destroyed. All other concerns fall into the singularity of war's destruction. You will be conscripted into the affairs of killing the enemy. A nation at war preserves only the dimensions of military thought. A desperate nation at war includes the madness of wishful thinking and barbarity for its own sake.

Imagine yourself, not a fighter, but a social worker in drug and gang intervention. Now you are charged with the supervision of forced labor over the captured enemy. They will break rocks and build roads or be shot and you must make them or be sent to the front. Nobody has a choice - the entire aspect of voluntarism and free association is gone. Everything is enforced at gunpoint. Your humanity has come to be expressed in the gesture of the extra ration of water, the two minute break. What kind of man are you now?

You are the same kind of man, except you are functioning in a different economy - the economy of war. Nothing is any more precious than it is insipid today. If somebody hands you a glass of water, it is a cheap and meaningless act that will never mean anything, but your life has been reduced to that. That is the tragedy of war, of slavery, of captivity. 

I bring this up to remind us that all such deprivation resides in the direction of crime. Our deepest fear is our greatest weakness. It is our acceptance of deprivation, our willingness to conform to the economy of shame. This weakness should remind us of the necessity of defending liberty such that we might shine as we ought. Our great weakness is that we are inadequate and we know it, and we accept it, and we accept punishment for it, and we enable that which is merely bold to rule over us. We trade in the economies of shame and blame the economy and we forget in whose image we were made. We forget our obligation to shine.

Are we pressed or do we volunteer? For the privilege of being designated Cossack?

Some say that our nation is at war. It is a figure of speech. We are not. We are merely engaged in military activities in service of geopolitical positions. Sure there are bombs being walked into marketplaces and men dropping down nylon ropes from helos, but we are not a nation at war. We are a nation that watches basketball contests and talent shows. We are a nation with an entire class of political money minders whose greatest accomplishments are to scandalize themselves and incrementally bankrupt millions of dozing fools. We are a nation that watches simulacra of war in movies and video games - we keep our limbics limber through the literature of Michael Bay, harboring up our store of grit and gumption for some showdown in the dystopic future. You know, in case some commie destroys the iTunes store, or some alien creature tramples down the Brooklyn Bridge. Then we're ready to rumble, or pwn as the adolescent case may be. Oh our brutal spirits are dormant, but they're in there.

An old soul like mine, doesn't need war. I don't want it. I don't feel the need for fire's purification and evil's wakeup call. I'm still hoping for a good situation. But I recognize how sleepy we have become, how easily we have subordinated our best selves behind the comfort of an easy peace. Just walk away from Vietnam. Just walk away from Iraq. Just walk away from Afghanistan, Pakistan. Close your eyes and find your cool cave, your spirit animal is a sanguine penguin, an amiable panda, a furrymuck squirrel.

Peace and prosperity cannot be trusted by the corrupt. They need war and sacrifice and conscription. They mistake liberty for decline because of the way they sinfully indulge their free time. They don't understand the rewards of industry or the moral constraint of free and honest enterprise. All profit is moral hazard to them that horsetrade and try to bankroll virtue with loot of vice. There's always some dirt in their deal, and so they assume that the biggest deals must be hugely dirty. If there were no truth in that such people would never come to power. 

I don't know what it might take to get us to shine, to chrome dip ourselves and smooth out our inevitable pits and pockmarks so that life's mud doesn't stick. More likely it's a daily scrubbing that gives us a finer finish. But we cannot wait for the gang press of war.  We have to wash our faces every day and prepare to work. An early start beats fast running a steady daily prayer beats shouting and screaming at the last moment. America is moving from crisis to crisis. We are in glum preparation for a dozen wars, we are girding ourselves for economies of shame within economies of doom. We have irony as our sidekick, a snide muse aiding in our craven calculations.

Bolsheviks vs Nazis. No escape.

Norman O. Brown's Animal Spirits

Back in the late 80s I had begun my journey to understand the rest of life. Computers I knew. There wasn't much to know back then and today there is too much. Nevertheless my understanding of the liberal arts was nascent and simple.  I was heartened by the observation of some great intellectual whose name I have forgotten - but he said that the life of the mind is circular and complete. That if you begin studying science you will find the same truths ultimately confirmed by the arts and vice versa. It is with that in mind that I had the confidence to be something other than a singular geek, although I cannot say with any conclusive certainty that I have become a Reconnaissance anything. Still, I have my moments.

I didn't know Norman O. Brown, like I don't know many figures of the liberal arts. But I had invented him as a foil to my own sensibilities. Here, R. R. Reno introduces him as the father of all today's post-modern primitivism.

These days, multiculturalists attack the very idea of a normative culture, but often with vague claims about “inclusion” and no clear idea of what sort of world they seek. In contrast, Brown sees clearly. Brown wants to release us from the tensions of history. Therefore, it is essential to let go of purpose. “The unrepressed animal,” he writes, “carries no instinctual project to change his own nature.” History is all about doing. In contrast, Brown wants us to affirm pure being, which he associates with the free, non-purposeful play of children. Or as he puts is elsewhere, we should embrace “that simple health that animals enjoy.”

Yes. I know, I know. I was just saying this in my Prick essay.

Stowe Boyd retweeted somebody saying, microblog style, that sometimes it's worth being gay just to annoy Republicans. To which I had to respond in the reverse, sometimes it's worth being Republican just to annoy gays - and it certainly is. But nobody tends to believe that old queers can take it, that they can just dish it in victimized frustration. I'm the one that's frustrated. Live and let live is what I say, but that doesn't apply if you're gay, or black, or Republican. Except that I should capitalize Gay and Black because they are not so much identities as political identities. The fact that we don't capitalize them shows the blurriness of our thinking and inability to recognize the difference between being and doing. Everything, it seems, is argued ad hominem because everyone, it seems, is trying to be loved. Doing something, to be loved. Say that slowly and realize how people struggle to achieve a state of grace, a retirement threshold after which you *are* something by acclamation. And so there is a political struggle, work and doing, to designate 'gay' as a state of grace, after the foolishness that granted the doublespeak of colorblindness that false honor.

I have been arguing against being in favor of doing for years now. It's one of the tropes of Cobb and now to see it reified elsewhere gives me glum satisfaction. There are at least two of us who see our cities on fire with the heat of wanton ignorance. And we know the arsonist.

I have also been saying that the Sexual Revolution is another sad revolution with no particular destination in mind and I was thinking just yesterday on how we conservatives are the enemy of Progress. This giant disambiguated 'progress' that goes under the heading of 'the modern world'. The modern world has been around for a century and because our cars are faster we naively try to believe that everything is getting better at the same pace, or that all incremental intellectual changes to what was are good. Surely, "we didn't know anything then".

I find myself fighting the temptation to leave society every day to stop pushing the boundaries of what my life has become. I am caught in the struggle between the appeal of solitude and responsibility to my fellows. Half of me wants to find a house by the lake 10 miles off the main road (with internet of course), the other half wants a penthouse on Central Park West. Which is the better retirement? There is some proper passage regarding this in Ravelstein. And I am reminded of all the books I am missing.

I attempt an economy of words. I hear this was Bacon's great gift, but I digress.

Conservatism is under threat for a number of reasons, all relating to the failure of society to maintain a level of integrity that allows a sufficient number of adults to remain in control. We conservatives are engaged out of discontent and the others out of desire. The deconstructors seem to have the upper hand.

Depends On Who You Ask

I'm a couple days late to the party over Wolfram Alpha because I didn't realize that it was a public website. But now that I have discovered it, I'm asking all sorts of question that I haven't been asking before.

In particular I have decided to try to figure out, given a large data center room of specific dimensions, how much Halon would I have to buy and what size containers could they fit in. I know what I have to know and I also know that Alpha doesn't know how to answer my question. But once I get the mathematical part of it quantified, I'm pretty sure Alpha will help. But today its contextualizer exists but it's weak.

I am intrigued by the ways in which Alpha will make proper assumptions or interrogate the knowledge seeker to get the right context. You see it was only by looking at Wikipedia that I discovered that the proper amount of Halon required to put out a fire is 3-7% v/v. I have never seen the 'v/v' designation before. It means volume ratio. The air mix will have to be 3-7% Halon for it to perform its chemistry of suffocating the fire. So if a room has a volume of 1000 cubic meters, you'd need about 50 cubic meters of Halon. Now how much can you compress Halon and what would 50 cubic meters of it weigh? Again Wikipedia gives me the context.

I got frustrated with Alpha before completing the problem which remains unsolved, but I like that there is a public Mathematica out there. Purchasing a copy has been one of those things on my big intellectual guilt To Do list, like reading the essays of Montaigne and Pliny the Elder. So, being lazy, I'm happy to be thus frustrated. At least I saved the moola.

But still, knowing that Alpha is out there to ask makes for an economy of askers. That's all good. But it also reminds us what we don't know. For me, it reminds me that I haven't been contributing to Obscura, my curiosity blog. Today, I've added a new entry. You see since Alpha understands something about chemicals, it reminded me that I once worked in the chemicals business, back before we banned CFCs. My favorite CFC was called 112. Back in the day, I used to be able to tell how pure it was (we ran a big still) by smell. I might have been a ChemE if the business had an ounce more glamor and I owe a great deal to the man who gave me that job.

It bears repeating that 112 is heavier than air and that we worried about suffocating if we were in the pit under the still. That's the one place on site Mr. O wouldn't let me go. And of course Americans love the conveniences that the chemical industry provides but lets environmentalists create a hostile environment for the business of making them. Every once in a while I think about the chemical industry and how I hope biotech evolves it and how little the average Joe really knows about what goes on at chemical plants. So lots of the CFCs we processed hug the ground. You couldn't get it up to the ozone layer if you tried. But if enough winds blow you could get some up there in 15 years. But everybody is on the hook for some science only a few people understand.

Alpha is a step in changing all that. It's the third kind of resource the Internet needs in addition to a global traffic search like Google and a context generating encyclopedia like Wikipedia.

Sixoseven Fragmentation

My latest album is released here.

Download Fragmentation

Sixoseven is my band which consists of me, my imagination, some software and 5GB of feral royalty free-samples that I corral and arrange. Fragmentation is my latest release which includes some old, previously unreleased tracks and some new material. There's really no theme and I threw much of this together over an inspired weekend, thus the title.

Hot Sunday
This is my first cut starring me actually playing the bass guitar. I remember finding the beat and just knowing exactly what bassline should be playing with it. The distortion on the bass actually kinda works. But there wasn't much else to say.

Candy Pops
I composed Candy Pops for Scholar several years ago when she had to do a presentation. Her assignment was to invent a breakfast cereal and sell it to the class. So you have this little sugary piece. I teased her about putting a cricket in the middle of it. It still makes me feel lightheaded and cheerful to hear it.

Thunder Under Water
If somebody told me that I couldn't make a funky danceable song featuring country rock guitar, this would have been my answer. You can feel the energy build up and then I just let the beat drop to remind the shitkickers that I made them boogie with boogie music. But the fact is you can't keep grooving without real live guitars. So this is about as good as it gets. I figure it would be good for a NASCAR promo.

Northridge Breezeway
This is my favorite from the album. It's a kind of meandering smooth ambient R&B hiphop joint. Very 94.7 The Wave. Very chillaxed with a surprise bit of Art of Noise.

Barry Five-0
I had to make a Barack Obama song. So I thought about it for a while. He's like an action TV theme show with a bold groove. But too fast to be classy and still he tries. Really simple to understand. Repetitive but catchy with an upbeat drone. Ends nothing like the beginning.

Wabashaw
Believe it or not, this is my first drum and bass song at 166BPM. I think it turned out very nice. I think I'll do several more of these. 

Nasqeron
A tribute to the great gas planet of Iain Banks. Confusing, distorted. I began it a year ago and threw and ending on to it this weekend. It sounds very much like the Sixoseven of yesteryear, ambient house in one key.

---

Next album I'm going to do a lot of DJ stuff, remixing familiar old school funk dance tracks. I promise some AWB and some Ohio Players, maybe some Confunkshun and Parliament.

About That Earthquake

I think they are calling it the Inglewood/Hawthorne or the Lennox Quake. It happened last night about 8:45 while we were watching America's Funniest Videos. I could hear and feel it coming and was on my feet in a half second after it was clear that some real shaking was going on. I grabbed my daughter and my wife and pulled them towards the back door after something crashed off of a shelf.

I had to do some quick calculations and guess which way glass might be flying if we were outside rather than inside as I paused in the doorframe. But even as I could hear car alarms going off and see powerlines swaying, I sensed that it was just about over. So I didn't worry about glass. Everybody was fine although my daughter was still cowering a bit. Five seconds after the first aftershock I headed to the computer and began recon.

Flap was the first one to Twitter. He must have been sitting at the terminal when it happened. I first tried for CalTech but could only get to the front page of their website. Slashdotted. Twitter was alive so I sent several messages. My youngest daughter was en route from her best friend's house. She had just sent me an SMS two minutes before the quake asking about who was the artist who recorded 'Man in the Box'. Sent back 'Alice in Chains' and then 'OK?' almost back to back. Her SMS didn't get back to me until she was already home. 'Did you feel the earthquake'.

I didn't even bother trying to use the phone for voice. I figured everything was tied up and so as I sent my fifth tweet, there were voices in the house confirming that suspicion. Facebook seemed to be alive - several message were coming through, Twitter style, from local friends. My brother Doc finally got a text message through. I tried to send a reply but it wouldn't go. There was nothing at Google News yet, but the TV news guys were breaking a story.

LAX area they said. It felt to me like a 5.5 but it was very short. So 5 sounded reasonable. I got to the USGS and filled out a questionnaire for their records. Their site said 5.0. Next I decided to check my XBox Live buddies. One out in Fontana felt it and kept right on playing Guitar Hero. FB friends from San Diego chimed in. Lots of people who never felt one spoke up. This one was really very short which was surprising given the joltiness of the big jolt. It wasn't a surprising earthquake, there was a good number of seconds of twitching before the big shake slammed home, but then it was over. Still, I figured aftershocks would be coming. I felt two.

Some of our paintings were all crooked. I never figured out what fell down off which shelf. But everything was pretty much back to normal within half an hour. And that's the way it was.

A Christian Mob

You don't use words like that
St. Louise is listening.
-- Soul Coughing

Today somebody who decided to call himself Jesus Christ the Molester got a virtual beatdown by a Facebook mob of Christian persuasion. It could be proven but it won't, so I take note of it. I know the name of the inciter, and I was on my way to get some licks in but he was already dead. The criminal facilitator was Zynga's Mafia Wars.

Yesterday I was directed to this video. The inciter's name is forgotten but could be discovered. It's vaguely conspiratorial with little disambiguation between Muslims. But when it comes down to it, nobody cares if you are Sunni or Shia, Protestant or Catholic. Ultimately it's just Jesus or Muhammad.

You don't remember Electric Sheep, but I do. The story is called Spiders.

It is just a matter of time between this war and the next. Because I listen to podcasts that lull me to sleep about history, and so as I listen to Beevor's Stalingrad I wake in the morning and I don't hear cannon and I wonder why. See yesterday I also got a very wise tweet about how a country's decline is pretty much marked by the moment they start beating up the Jews. But what happens when they start beating up the Muslims?

We are living in a democracy that isn't functioning properly. I'm pretty sure that we have an adequate level of corruption and incompetence to ruin us. But something is telling me, very likely my back injury, that I am very close to being officially and old man and somewhat past being part of the solution. I am not past caring, which is the difficult part. It's the part that makes me feel helpless and angry. So I watch the Christian Mob pounce and I think 'I told you so'.

Conviction. Conviction is the energy that rules the world. I wish everyone would live so long as I have.

Dunhill Blue

There are lots of things I used to do before I got married and had kids that I don't do any longer. But I do smoke about three packs a year.

I found myself lying awake at 5:30 this morning which is odd considering how out of it I was last night. The fitted sheet is coming off one corner of the bed and when that happens, the shock of raw mattress intrudes on my slumber. So I decided I may as well go to 8 o'clock services.

The two way fan that fits in the window sill would be a joke in Brooklyn, but here in Southern California it is just right for the oncoming summer. I installed it after some struggle with sliding the window up the other day. I brushed aside some cobwebs and turned it so that it blows cool air in and set it on high. By 6pm I was putting on long sleeves and had cured the oxygen deficit that had me feeling faint. This morning that fan and the other that sits on my dresser were both quiet and the early morning low clouds and fog along the coast had still not raised their dreary blankets from the neighborhood. It's May and I put on a mock turtleneck, my new style to go with my new hair.

This morning's service was about friendship. According to scripture, the New Commandment says that we are friends with Jesus and he no longer calls us his servants because servants do no know what their master is thinking. But Jesus is sharing the love of the Father with us and so we are all commanded to share love with our neighbors. Father Joseph reminded us two things. One, that we don't have to agree when we love our neighbor and Two, that it is not a suggestion that we love our neighbor, but a commandment. You *must* agree to disagree and live in love because God has decided to be your friend. And if God has condescended to love us miserable human beings, who are we to be intransigent?

I have had my post called 'A Christian Mob' in park for the past few days. I can't figure a way to complete it. In fact I can't find a way to complete much of anything these days. I am preternaturally lazy. My back still hurts and I'm feeling completely sympathetic with characters who are broken down and tired. Like Jean Paul Sarti in Grand Prix. Like Randy the Ram in The Wrestler. Like Paul Volker must feel. There are evolutionary dead ends all of us must face. Sometimes we come to grips with our irrelevance other times we come to grips with our apathy. They are both very hard to accept, especially if you've been a success. In the end, I gather you have to die trying. Some ambitions are like that. The alternative is that you start from scratch halfway through your life. I'll check out Shakespeare, I'm sure he had something to say about that, or perhaps he didn't. After all, he didn't make it much past 50.

The Christian Mob is about some great fraction of us coming to consciousness about Mark Steyn's predictions. It's going to be hard on a lot of people who don't agree to disagree. Muslims, I mean.

After services I went to my trunk to put away my jacket. On the little shelf opposite the GPS drive, I had stashed away a pack of cigarettes. Dunhill Blue. They were part of my few remaining deceptions. I bought them on the Friday afternoon that I snuck away to see Star Trek without the family. I stuck an unlit fag between my lips and trolled around View Park having stopped to closely observe some of the more fabulous houses on Angeles Vista. I was on my way to the richest black Starbucks in America, but I didn't have my lighter. I wondered if anyone does that - walks around with an unlit square in their mouth. Oral fixation. Indecision. Chalkline walking.

Sure enough there was a cream colored Silver Cloud convertible in the prime parking spot at Starbucks Ladera. I parked the Transporter 40 paces away and headed to the door giving a once over to the crowd of men outside. Grande mocha whip. Apple fritter warm. Six bucks. I sat alone, made one trip back to the car for my reading glasses, registered with the free AT&T wifi and caught up on my email while sitting alone amongst the groups of affluent middle aged black men. There were three conversations, and two of them were about basketball and one about real estate. I figure that the guy who dresses very much like T.D. Jakes, the commercial real-estate guy from Jersey, had a good chance of being the owner of the Rolls Royce. Or else it was the Caribbean gent who sat alone like me with a similar appearance of oblivion the the too-loud conversations about Jordan's retirement, Kobe's personality and Trump's craftiness. Meanwhile, I texted a friend to see if he were in California. No, still at the Cape. Rocket science.

On the way to church there were five motorcyclists in the fast lane. Three of the five were on red Ducatis, the other two were equally red, but I couldn't tell what kind of bike. I wish I were in a motorcycle gang. Five Ducatis are enough. Stand apart together. There were half a dozen black men at the alumni golf tournament last week, half of them were in our foursome, except there were only three of us. There were only four guys from our entire class of 78 in attendance and I was the only one not an officer of some sort with one of the many alumni associations. D is my connection to that holy land of my own history, all the black Catholics in LA with which I am connected in my exuberant youth. I have traveled too much in my life to have kept all of my roots close enough, and so on this cloudy morning I am thinking about the fleeting camaraderie of semi-private events. Two weeks ago it was the funeral of a gamer whose voice brought joy but whose face I never knew. Four years ago this Starbucks was a regular hangout.

I am a writer. Which is why I am writing this to you. I am overly perceptive. I am overly articulate. If it wasn't for the internet, I'd be in a library right now and these words would be going into a diary.

The apple fritter was much better than the Dunhill I never ignited. But that means I shouldn't eat again until 3pm. The Spousal Unit called and I headed home. And since we all go to different churches at different times, agreeing to disagree but one in love, I dropped my eldest daughter down at the contemporary Baptist's joint on Pacific Coast Highway. She noticed the pack of Dunhill Blue and asked what they were doing in my car. I told her that they were here for no good reason, but I didn't tell her that I hadn't smoked one.

She needs to know that I cleaned up my act to have a family. That there are a lot of things I used to do but no longer do. I'll figure out some way to communicate that, because like most teenage girls who are 'only' 3.2 GPA students, she figures somehow that she's not good enough. I'm trying to figure out how women negotiate as the weaker sex through a civilized form of quid pro quo that doesn't seem to exist in the swamp of our contemporary society where the Gospel is spread through Powerpoints. There are far too many lines instantly available through Google and nobody seems to have the patience to read between them. Every movie has a rating, every query has an answer, and almost nobody is trying to speak to the entire world. It's all rude niche marketing.

I'm an outsider. I possess alien observation mode. I know that none of it is prefab for my consumption, so I've got the critical thinking skills. None of the world makes sense to me, not in an easily expressible manner. Nor do I trust it much, which is why I process it all independently and spew it out here. I try not to be so flavorful or artistic as I once was on The Well or at Cafe Utne. It's good enough to have subscribers in the UK. I've got the English standards figured out. No need to try and be so awfully clever. The kind of writer I want to be is not niche. That would be for my motorcycle club, or my guys in Beef Alcohol & Tobacco, whenever they show up.

This is why I need my friends so much. Which is why I need the church. Which is why today's lesson is so important. It's a lonely world. I could not invent an invisible friend as complicated as Jesus, and even if I could, I could never expect that such a friend might haunt the dreams of so many millions asleep or abruptly awake at the crack of dawn on Sunday. We can all agree to disagree. That's easy for guys like me who may not say it, but am thinking, 'fuck you' to all those insipid personal questions. A person who can tell people to fuck off but is not a total asshole recognizes that we all belong together at a higher level. That's a bit complicated to explain but I'm not going to do it right now - I just know the type. Gregory House, for example.

So there's an emphasis on do instead of be. Yeah I did smoke Dunhills, that's what I did, not who I am. Now I don't - I just was remembering.

Egocasting, Literacy & Relativism: The Answer

(From the Archives May 2005)

In a world where college students in their 20s still haven't mastered enough skills to live a middle class life; when there are millions of ideas and billions of literate people all trying to hit the big time, whose knowledge can we trust?

It's time to swing the pendulum back to the body. And maybe, perhaps just maybe for the first time since the communist revolution we might begin to start thinking about the New Man.

Surely philosophy students would consider me lazy, but I've never managed to find much about C. Wright Mills. His name has popped up several times in my studies and travels as a father of the Pragmatists, of which I am a somewhat sloppy devotee. I always picture him in the phrase 'the philosopher wore hiking boots' and I imagine him something of a muscular Ansel Adams. The man himself and his work are a mystery beyond that and I wonder how it has come to pass that he is. If I didn't have to work for a living I might find out.

This week I have been working with a man who has lived most of his life in three states: Idaho, Wyoming and Utah. He is actually capable of discerning smog over the city of Salt Lake, an acuity which completely eludes LA me. So I have stopped a moment to contemplate what a man of the American West knows in contrast to the rest of us. So while I have no answers to that or the question of Mr. Mills I will entertain the notion that they both converge on and inform what I am about to say.

We are on the verge of great discoveries in evolutionary biology and cognitive science. I think we are going to discover in this century why we behave certain ways in certain environments and lay plain some scientific mysteries that we plainly understand as people. What part of the brain makes us laugh? Why does music affect our emotions? What exactly does it mean to be afraid of the dark? What is the physiological description of spiritual epiphany? What chemicals are involved when we open up our eyes and discover a Great Salt Lake over the peak of the mountain we have been climbing in search of a new homeland?

The eternal truths of humanity are based on our shared experiences. Yes, blue looks like blue to all of us, but perhaps that stuff they ate on the Neb was Crispy Wheat. But think of it this way, if we didn't all evolve the same way and there actually was a great difference between the way we function how would anybody ever get pregnant? We are not different enough for blue not to look like blue.

So in the near future, the oil is going to stop flowing, Moore's Law is going to poop out and nobody is going to come up with any new ideas for television programming, theatre programs or religious deprogramming. The intellectual breakthroughs of the 20th are going to slow down and we will be, as Morpheus says we will marvel at our own magnificence, and then will come the doldrums.

And we will all video record ourselves and we will spend countless hours looking at the video recordings we made a year ago, ten years ago. We will study mankind's history and rediscover the discoveries of the ancients. The art of discovery will turn science inside out, and nobody will go to the moon, we'll all just gaze at our navels. The difference is that this time we'll understand it in a completely different way. We are going to re-invent emotional intelligence.

I say this now with a bit of worry, because I want to wear the hiking boots and find a way to live somewhere where the bandwidth is high and the cost of land is low. I want Dyson's Utopia and a new chemistry kit to truly understand and grow my own herbal cures.

A Basic Human Rights Question

Human beings have the right to make life or death decisions.

This is a political statement, and one of fundamental import in matters of liberty for the US. To state a matter of fundamental principle, I agree that humans *can* and to a large degree, *should* retain the liberty to make them under particular circumstances. In a society of law, which is built like ours, for a fairly low common denominator (it seems low to me, but is it really?) that set of circumstances are pretty narrow, and probably rightly should be.

If we were to fall into a feudal state of affairs, we would be a great deal more free in principle, but less free from local tyranny. Nobody would much care if one peasant killed another peasant except as the dead peasant was in debt to somebody who might want to collect from the killer. But in America, we non-propertied people aren't so free as to kill each other without consequence. This is done for the peace of mind and comfort of the millions.

However, we can beat our kids and we can abort our fetuses. Within reason. We can defend ourselves with deadly force, and we can go out and create as many babies as we please. Within reason. So yeah, we can basically exercise our inherent abilities at the life and death level.

I've always asserted that we also have the right to punt that responsibility over to the state. But I'm not so sure about that any longer. And perhaps I was wrong in the first place. Implied in punting is that we give up our own right - we cede the right to the government. And I think that is not a proper libertarian agreement. If I give a cop the proxy of using deadly force to defend my life, it shouldn't mean that I should be restrained from doing so.

This is important because I think there should be some consistency at a deep level which thoughtful people know we don't have.

Some people think that the state has every right to kill (as a proxy) for what is determined to be a capital offense. Some people think the state has no right. I'm in the middle, and have always been depending on what I think the state's fitness is for recieving the proxy. But it begs the fundamental question of justice, and what I am beginning to see is that some people think that individuals are incapable of delivering justice, whereas others think that the state is incapable of delivering justice.

Isn't that odd?  See I think I am not too far off when I suggest that people who oppose the death penalty because they find the state too brutal, are far less likely to accept that individual victims or designated survivors are capable of righteous revenge. 

I also think I'm not too far off when I suggest that people who assert individual rights are quite uncomfortable with the state preparing in every way to facilitate being a proxy. Which is to say if I've got the right to abort and the right to punt that decision, what's wrong with the state making it easy for me?

Ultimately it falls to a judgment of other individuals' fitness to carry out the deed and their fitness to establish a proxy. 

And pacifists don't count, because in the end, what are you going to do to make me change my mind if I'm intransigent? 

I say all of that because I think that some questions of scale need to be accounted for. But exactly what that scale is makes all the difference. Who can judge an individual, a crowd, a society? How tightly must power be scrutinized and at what level? These are the factors that muddy up the morality.

And so finally I want to say this, just to wreck your mind for the afternoon. Isn't abortion worse than torture? OK put it this way - if you torture 3 adults for the comfort and piece of mind of 1 million, is it OK? What if you abort half a million fetuses for the comfort and piece of mind of 1 million? 

The Black Man's Guide to Living Large - Part One

In 1995, I was in the middle of a contract for my own business. I took the day off because I could. I decided to wear a suit and so I took a stroll in downtown Atlanta in the middle of the week. I came to the sudden realization, I suppose rather late in the career of someone determined to live large, that the experience put me in an entirely new realm.

The fun part was knowing that I had all my bills paid and the money was rolling in and I had lots of cash in the bank. My net worth was all good. So I walked down by Morton's which I had only been to once before several years back all impressed knowing that now I could go get me one of those monster steaks if I wanted. Or I could buy another suit. Instead I walked through the mall at Little Five Points and window shopped in every store. I impressed myself. I bought nothing.

At the same time I noticed the people noticing me. Working people with no free time in the middle of the day in the middle of the week. They were the kind of folks I had once been, wondering how the hell anybody could afford anything in these crazy overpriced shops and restaurants. I recall that not four years before I had my first $100 date in New York City, and I was amazed at the fact that I would spend that much money as a single man and not put any pressure on the young lady to put out even though that was the expectation all around. I recall being a freshman in college the year that alfalfa sprouts and avocado became popular sandwich ingredients and that it took me two hours pay to afford such a sandwich. That afternoon in Atlanta, the Black Mecca, I thought about all of the previous moments I had reflected on the times that I poked my head through the decidedly low ceilings.

How high is the glass ceiling by the way? It's relative to your expectations, and expectations vary like crazy.

It turns out that yesterday I had one of those moments, except I played it like I am more likely to play it now. So let me explain how I play it now and why. In that, there is another tale with which some Cobb readers may be familiar. But to my way of looking at the existentials of being black, the only thing missing is millions of dollars. And while there are plenty of old money black families who remain so fussy as to eschew outreach,

About five years ago, I had something going on called the China Deal. To make a long story short, I had guessed that I had stumbled onto that particular job that made me feel like this was the one I always was looking for. Some days it feels like a set of circumstances that were too good to be true, but you know they say that you cannot cheat an honest man. So I didn't get cheated. Nevertheless, although the opportunity didn't pan out, I was there. You know, that place you get to when you know your hard work payed off. When you say "I've got it made" and now everything else is gravy. That's where I was - mentally. It was very satisfying to look back at my life and say with confidence, I'm a success, so what do I feel like doing today?

Having been through that moment, it has been easy for me to relax and let the goodness flow through me to others. I am validated and prepared to deal with new opportunities. I look at myself and I say, why shouldn't I be happy? And I am. Happy for me, and thus sometimes a little bit lazy. This is very different, however, from the feeling I had in my last days of being single. Back then, I felt unleashed.

'Unleashed' is very much like 'off the chain' meaning apt to do anything just because I can - nobody can hold me back, especially not me. It's the energy of feeling not responsible to anything or anybody because you are not the stereotypical person you think other people think you are. So you have this kind of snarky mocking attitude towards everybody. That was me before I got married and had kids.

Now I'm married, survived the seven year itch, have kids who are succesful and bright and have taken on much more responsibility than I get paid to take. I'm not unleashed at all. I have leashed myself to a new set of restraints on myself, just going above and beyond, responsibly, also because I can. I'm at a point at which I think I honestly can do a little good in the world. Imagine that. But what I'm not going to say is something like, 'pretty good for a skinny black kid from the ghetto'.  Why? Because those were never really the standards by which I wanted to be judged. Even when I was a skinny black kid from the 'hood, I had more self-esteem than anyone thought I deserved, which was what got me in trouble with people who thought a skinny black kid from the ghetto is all I could ever be.

So that is the point of departure for the idea that's been bubbling under the surface for a couple weeks which has something to do with why there is no black men's magazine that you could possibly imagine that would be edited by Denzel. And why I kind of sneer at Steve Harvey's new book. And while I'm at it, let me repeat the deepest thing I every heard about hiphop. Hiphop is a success because young black women are that desparate for men in their lives. And it reminds me that the market for literature for young black straight men is tiny. All the books published in the past 10 years could be locked in the trunk of Suge Knight's Escalade and never heard from again.

--

What happened yesterday is that I met Sam, a very bright and successful young black man. Funny as hell. We share a black Catholic school background, and although I can't tell if it bothered him much, at some point in the day I felt a certain confidence given to me. You know the kind, the code switch in the lowered voice, the voice that indicates some fraction of embarassment and perhaps even pain. It's the pain of being beat by Biff and Chad, the pain we sometimes take out on Becky if we can roll like that. Sam's not ugly, I know he could do that kind of roll. So could I. But Sam reminded me of another cat who actually did. He was the man who called himself a 'nouveau nigger' drove a Ferrari, wore polyester three piece suits and only dated Beckys. Blonde, blue bombshell Beckys. You can imagine him parking the red 308 on Rodeo Drive, making her stay in the car and getting out of sight just to watch everybody wonder who was the owner of the ultimate boy toys. Then he'd pimp walk, loud-talking, beep the alarm and burn rubber giving the bird to the jewelry store owner who had him followed.

I cannot remember the last time I wanted to make white people pay. I guess it was the day before Nelson Mandela was freed. I've spent a long time, the greater part of my life, indifferent to the majority of white Americans and their racism in practice and much more time to their racism in theory. Just like the Catholic priest who never bothers to stand on a soapbox at Venice Beach, I don't fear the apocalypse. I don't await the second coming of Malcolm X or secretly thrill at the threats of Farrakhan. Ordinary whitefolks never hurt me. Then again, Biff and Chad aren't ordinary. Biff and Chad walked in doors we honestly thought we ought to be able to walk through and couldn't. And so Biff and Chad were never the hopheads in front of us, they were a kind of spirit transferred. Because wherever it was we discovered a bigger fish, there was surely somebody trying to be Biff and Chad there.

I don't know how long it was after I had been watching golf on TV as a kid that I realized that there was someplace called Augusta and that place never had a black member (if that's true). I don't know who it was that told me the best scuba diving was in the Red Sea and in Belize and it made me both proud and jealous. Proud because I've got black Belize and most Americans aren't welcome in the Red Sea where rich Russians tend to gather and jealous because as much as I dig Jacques Cousteau I had no idea about these places. You grow in sophistication and then you find someplace more exclusive and you know Biff and Chad are not cluing you in. How long does that eat at your soul until you get all frustrated and feel the need to bogard - to put on the dark glasses and smack up the nearest innocent white boy?

Every black man has at least one whiteboy he can beat up on. It doesn't take much, I mean we're all Americans here and black men and whiteboys in my generation learned to drill early. Eldridge Cleaver wrote the book. He wore his mask. Steven Weed wore his, as did Bernie Goetz. Even the sweet deals were stereotypical. I didn't ask to be shown that movie about Gayle Sayers and Brian Piccolo, but we all knew that our Christianity was insufficient just three years after 1968. But is that what we really want to be, as thinking men? No we don't. We're all too complex for that. And yet sometimes we feel like we have to be unleashed instead of merely free.

Up From Freedom is the name of my autobiography if I get to write it. I don't think I will have achieved anything like Frederick Douglass, but somehow along the line enough of America forgot old Frederick so that MLK had to repeat the obvious, and a new generation had to come up with a new name for 'Free People of Color' and enshrine their own heroes and new schools of thought. And so for my little piece is something that wasn't taught to me which is how to comport oneself on the other side of that Mountaintop MLK kept talking about. How to be cool, if cool was the thing to be, in the face of people you fear to be Biff and Chad even if they are not. I'm talking about how to sublimate the cool pose of fake manhood and experience life with the sunglasses off, with the music turned off, with the hostility turned off, with the fear turned off.

I'm talking about being happy.

Eric Holder, 2002

VDH has the rundown.

“It seems to me you can think of these people as combatants and we are in the middle of a war. And it seems to me that you could probably say, looking at precedent, that you are going to detain these people until war is over, if that is ultimately what we wanted to do.” Later in 2002 Holder elaborated, “One of the things we clearly want to do with these prisoners is to have an ability to interrogate them and find out what their future plans might be, where other cells are located. Under the Geneva Convention, you are really limited in the amount of information that you can elicit from people…[They] are not, in fact, people entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. They are not prisoners of war…Those in Europe and other places who are concerned about the treatment of al-Qaida members should come to Camp X-ray and see how the people are, in fact, being treated.”

Big Air

Where are the trillions? I don't know. We can all guess, and perhaps sometime next week the Administration will give us an answer. But until then, and for a long time after, the stink is going to follow the Inspector General of the Federal Reserve. She's worse than Brownie. And it's just this sort of incompetence that I expect from the minders in government. I myself provide a good example.

Cobb readers know that by profession I am a data architect / management consultant. I build the systems that corporations use to keep track of their money. What I can tell you is that I have the capacity to make very very transparent systems. I can also tell you that it's not in everybody's interest to have transparent systems. But that's not the thrust of my argument. You see there are also goofs and errors and blindspots. There are certain things that can be done that are not done in the business of watching the money of a business and there are lots of reasons. Now because of my personality, I tend to see those gaps in terms of laziness and incompetence. It makes me seem more prickly than I am. But I just behave that way because if it were my money...

But it's not my money. So while I'm responsible for building the systems that allow every penny to be tracked, I know that I'm not always required to do so. And it's not my money so I don't have to care. You see, having about 20 years of experience in this business, I could figure out in a week or so, given the right conversations with the right people, exactly how to set up a sophisticated system that would pay for itself in terms of analytic value...

But it's not my money and I don't get paid on that basis. I get paid on time and materials, not percentage of ROA improvements.

Two years ago I wrote Monetizing Carbon and introduced the concept of Big Air. Big Air is what will happen if markets are established (even if they are just tax credit markets) for CO2. I think it's a bad idea to monetize carbon. Why? Because it's not going to be the money of the scientists who actually know global warming, if there is such a thing. It's going to be the business of the money minders, like the accountants and systems folks who design that thing that looks after the money of the business. Those systems will only be as good as a few people want them to be. And we already know that the corporations who will suffer will make their compromises and the corporations who will benefit will make their inputs and the system that emerges will create a new inefficient dynamic. Why? Because the thing that enables it will be anchored in the cement of law, but tethered to accountability by the rubber leash of regulation. In other words, Big Air will do pretty much what they want to do for a long time before the entire system evolves into something of long-standing value.

The fundamental question that I think gets below a great deal of the back and forth here is how capable do we really believe our government to be? Are we really good at commoditizing and making that commodity do what we want it to do? How good are we with water, for example? How good are we with land? How about trees? And what is the cost of not?

I heard somebody say the other day that our children have been taught to be afraid of salt and sugar. I gave my Spock eyebrow to that notion and noticed the extra attention my kids have on it. We have a salt and sugar economy and we know that too much is bad for us, so how are we doing on that? There are large acts of faith being pushed into our proxy democracy. I think we should sober up.

Hands off the air.

Now I'm going to suggest something else, another way to achieve certain ends. It's cynical and snide, a modest proposal if you will. But before I go all the way there, I'll set up the precedent. You see what I think is going to keep the Administration in line and tame their ambitions is that somebody somehow is going to communicate clearly to the American people, before it's too late, the cost of these trillions of stimulus and life preservers. And because of that the people are going to be sensitive to other things drowning. It's going to have to take a communications miracle because taxes, unlike prices, take a while to kick in. We didn't need anyone to tell us that crude oil prices were going to affect all of us, it was made manifest quickly in something we do every week. But every week we don't pay for big mistakes in government. But by the time the big moves that the current political majority voted for with regard to free health care and free prep school and free alternative energy and free clean air, the wrecks in the economy will help them to understand it's their money. 

But maybe what we really need is a war. War is always the answer to every question, because in the end when humans don't get what they want, they rage. And once they've burned down the house they don't care about the crackers in the bedsheets any longer. The problem is solved. It goes something like this. nag nag nag nag nag nag nag nag Nag Nag Nag Nag Nag Nag Nag Nag Nag Nag Nag Nag NAG NAG NAG NAG NAG NAG NAG NAG NAG NAG NAG NAG NAG

RAGE

And then all the nagging stops. Like you don't hear any complaints about traffic problems in New Orleans any more do you? Nobody complains about the lousy PATH train service to the World Trade Center. Everybody has forgotten about the horrid misdeeds of April Glaspie. The poor room service at the Hotel Rwanda? Not a problem. This is, by the way, how people are going to forget about Netanyahu, Hezbollah will get much bigger bombs. And so finally the way people will forget about global warming is that suddenly there will be a much more immediate crisis. I don't think it will take a very large war. Maybe something brief with Mexico. Or maybe a nice civil war in China. My money is on the latter. And when China has their civil war, when Pakistan collapses, when Egypt and Syria go at each other, somebody will realize that there are suddenly fewer human beings and that their economies don't go towards wasteful consumer products. 

How do I reconcile this with my Christianity? I'm not sure. What I know is that people aren't serious until they are and the distance between 'ought' and 'must' is farther than we think. I don't trust the public 'ought' because this is where it has lead us.

Fiscal Responsibility, Obama Style

I never have to say anything again about how incredibly incompetent the Obama Administration must be if this is how they do business. This is jaw-droppingly astounding. Her name is Elizabeth Coleman. Off with her head. Now.

Lucky For Me, I Didn't Need the Book

The most important thing to do in life is spend your time wisely. And so now there's a book about that.

In Rapt, acclaimed behavioral science writer Winifred Gallagher makes the argument that the quality of your life largely depends on what you choose to pay attention to and how you choose to do it.

Gallagher grapples with provocative questions - Can we train our focus? What's different about the way creative people pay attention? Why do we often zero in on the wrong factors when making big decisions? - driving us to reconsider what we think we know about attention.

As suggested by the expression "pay attention," this cognitive currency is a finite resource that we must learn to spend wisely. In Rapt, Gallagher introduces us to a diverse cast of characters - artists and ranchers, birders and scientists - who have learned to do just that and whose stories are profound lessons in the art of living the interested life.

No matter what your quotient of wealth, looks, brains, or fame, increasing your satisfaction means focusing more on what really interests you and less on what doesn't. In asserting its groundbreaking thesis - the wise investment of your attention is the single most important thing you can do to improve your well-being - Rapt yields fresh insights into the nature of reality and what it means to be fully alive.

There is nothing I hate worse than being on somebody else's schedule if I think they are wasting my time. It's quite probably my worst habit. I'm not sure really but I can probably guess that it's something people can sense from me. I really love the company of good people but heaven forbid they begin sentences with 'maybe you should,..'. In fact, I want to hear people's advice; it's a great alternative to literature. But, I'm an awfully acute peg to put into a obtuse hole and I really get upset about it. The best way to give me advice is to tell me how you think God would solve the problem we are faced with and then I'll try to go Him one better.

Some of our personality traits serve us well and we are in an enviable position when we can honestly say "I've always known that" when an interesting how-to book comes out. And so it is with me an spending my own time focused on those things that satisfy my curiousity and give me contentment. I know exactly what they are and they allow me to remain humble and I cannot tell you how much I am thankful for my humility. It gets a competitive ass like myself out of a lot of sticky situations.

These days however, I'm in something of a panic. I've discovered some very interesting things adjacent to my career that it's not clear I may get an opportunity to participate in officially. As Morpheus says, it's like a splinter in my mind.

Fancy Fencing

The best thing about a good entertainment is that, like a roller coaster that leaves your stomach acrobatic 10 minutes after the ride, you can still enjoy it on the way home.

If you ask me, 'Fancy', is the best line from the new Star Trek movie. Except that that's not what Sulu said. It's what I thought he said in response to the question 'What kind of combat training do you have?'. Even though I've already seen the movie twice (Shh, don't tell my wife), I heard it wrong both times. So I asked last night after the 10:30 show what everyone's favorite part was and I said that part. The Spousal Unit let me know that Sulu said 'Fencing' which was even more delicious because George Takai is a fencer.

Star Trek is a sure footed action flick with an appropriately anamolous story line that works through the simple magic of creating an alternative reality. It does more than respect the heritage, it brings it into vivid relief. This film now bumps 'The Voyage Home' out of the top three for me. And so Wrath of Khan and First Contact remain with Abrams Star Trek as the best films.

There isn't much more to say about the film. It deserves all the hype and fulfills. The casting is superb, especially of the young Leonard McCoy, just bang on for Bones. Abrams and Bad Robot are our fantasy imagination, and this is their golden age.

Oil Dependence in the Post-American Century

Nice title eh? I'm going to throw out, briefly, this little provocation. I'm going to say that it's a good thing and why the hell not? My basic argument in support of this position is rather Machiavellian but it has the advantage of contrary to the conventional wisdom.

In the end, as hate-American-firsters will testify, our nation consumes the lion's share of global energy and especially oil. We also show little interest in slowing the trend, nor are we ashamed to train our big guns on any threat to supply. Our demand trumps all, because we can demand it. Unless and until the US gets too broke to pay for oil, foreign or any other type, then we will pay for it and keep our little oil minions fetching it to us. Until it runs out. Then we'll find something else for them to fetch and they'll go fetch it. We America, are Jabba the Hutt, and what Jabba wants, Jabba gets.

It has been suggested by friends on the Right, that money from our desire for oil falls into the hands of terrorists, and that by consuming oil produced by various mongrel people of dubious moral standing we enhance the ability of those dogs to bite our generous hands. We are in effect, arming them to the teeth. Perhaps that is merely another cost of doing business, and that in the end it is a cost we can and will absorb.

So I am apt to consign all of that expense and danger to the back burner of my mind. It has been well rotisseried these past few years, and on the whole the American body count has been low. Lower than the mortality of ordinary flu. At some point I think I might want to get some of my Homeland Security money back, but already Bank of America has eaten it. We have a new 9/11, starting with the fall of Lehman. Or perhaps The Fall of Lehman is more appropriate.

Should we really be afraid of Wahabbis? Should we really bother building nations for those dogs? Maybe the paleos were right all along. Bomb them at arms distance and let them bomb us at arms distance. Let's stop being so clinical about it. Considering all the thrash and gnash over waterboarding, perhaps Stalin was right. Waterboarding three terrorist masterminds is a tragedy, leveling a city in Afghanistan is a statistic.

I'm just saying.

Hemp Confusion & Hopkins' Razor

Why is it that potheads are pushing for a hemp economy? Do they think that the DEA is so stupid that they cannot test for THC content? Or perhaps that cannabis growers could hide among the hemp farmers so that testing becomes uneconomic for John Law?

It seems a pretty thin excuse.

I shall employ what I now call Hopkins' Razor, after friend E.C. Hopkins who said that people don't compete because they don't want to get humiliated, not because they don't want the prize, but then they make a figleaf of an excuse which becomes an axiom of faith. Hemp farmers say that American culture is anti-hemp because of cannabis. In reality, hemp farmers don't want to compete with cotton farmers.

Granted, it's pretty damned difficult to get started in the agriculture business in the 21C, but I think Hopkins applies.

Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do

There ain't nothing I can do, or nothing I can say,
Some folks will criticize me.
So I'm gonna do just what I want to anyway,
And don't care if you all despise me.

If I should take a notion
To jump into the ocean,
It ain't nobody's business if I do.
-- Billie Holiday

Billie is dead. Isn't it strange that those Americans who find little else to love about the symbol of Billie Holiday singing Strange Fruit and living in despair are so apt to destroy the import of this song? What do I mean? I mean the welfare state and making it your business.

As we are all aware, the Governor of California, whose election is beginning to trouble me, is flirting with the idea of legalizing marijuana. As well, that provocative busybody Gavin Newsome, is flirting with prostitutes and pursuing an agenda of legalizing their trade. These are a few other vices that the government is trying to horn in on.

When I was a kid, I never had a good head for cards or dice games. I never quite understood gambling. Sure I was good at math, but not that kind. I couldn't get my head around those figures, but I sure did know people who could. A kid named Phillip Driver was the most brilliant chess hustler I ever knew. He knew what it meant to take a half point off the spread. You couldn't even pitch pennies and win against him, and he was devastating at dice. Of course he got kicked out of our Catholic school because such enterprises were frowned upon. And we all know that we can't run dice games or run numbers or have bingo without running afoul of the law. But still somehow we do. There's not much three card monte on street corners in LA, that's because people don't walk - they take the bus, so that's where the games are. The personal gambling still happens.

But in Gardena, you can play Pai Gow Poker. That city takes a piece. Obviously if you're in one of the new counties where there is Indian gaming, the deal has been struck. But let's not forget that millions of Californians manage, somehow, some way, to get their sex for hire and their weed and their crystal meth and nitrous for their cars and their porn and everything else. I'm a civil libertarian. Always have been. So my argument is fundamentally that people find their own way to happiness, even if that happiness is morally suspect. I tolerate a lot of uncivilized behavior in civil society that I disapprove personally because I'd rather not have the government enforcing codes of social behavior outside of crime.

So for the sake of our argument, let us imagine that along the spectrum of human behavior that half is civilized and half is uncivilized. Let us further say that one half of the uncivilized behavior is evil. That leaves 75% of human behavior which is better or worse, but not evil. I would consider prostitution and getting high as not inherently evil - they're in the 75% Then again, running through a stop sign or painting graffiti on a subway are not inherently evil either. But both are uncivilized. So in our society we have decided in the aegis of the law covers a great deal of our behavior, both civilized and uncivilized. There are crimes which are not evil, and that covers prostitution and getting high. 

I think we'd all agree that we'd have a police state if we were to enforce every law all the time - if we tried to force people to be civilized. And so it works out that while we have laws against uncivilized behavior, those laws are understood that they are not to be enforced. In that regard the morality of the law is in our minds, but the government is not necessarily in our faces. 

So where am I going with this? As soon as we take prostitution and getting high off the black market for the purposes of regulation or taxation, we are getting in people's faces. This is counterintuitive to all of the arguments we've grown up with, but there is no getting around the fact that all of the conflict around these uncivilized human behaviors is being handled right now without any assistance from the government or regulation. That's what a black market is. It happens in darkness.

To shine light on prostitution and getting high, to give them the protection of society, is to bring more of the spectrum of human behavior into the regulation of government. Pimps, johns and hookers will fill the civil courts with their beefs. Drug dealers and suppliers will have arbitration in small claims court. For what?

More and more of human behavior under the spotlight and control over government is a bad idea. Why this is considered 'liberal' defies reason.

Now That's Decline

I'm sitting in my quiet study finally at rest from a fairly productive day. And the most relaxing and surprisingly enjoyable moment just past. I discovered a new song in my old library. It's Dvorak's Opus 98B. Symphony #9 - The American Suite. He wrote it in New York in 1894 and it is a lovely piece of music.

It is often said that conservatives romanticize the past - that history is largely ugly and that we have yet to see our greatest days because the American legacy is scuffed. But I think even those who find Europe superior to us in every way would have to admit that we inspired Dvorak among many great composers. I wonder what orchestral composers do when they write music which reminds them of America today.

So I have a gripe for this context which is that I have discovered that our governor is considering a serious debate about legalizing marijuana. I know why. It is seen as another way to tax something people want and therefore help get the state out of debt. We've been down this road before. In 1984 people other than me in the State of California supported Proposition 37 which passed and legalized gambling 'to help pay for education'. Look what's on the ballot next, Proposition 1C:

The state would be allowed to borrow $5 billion from future lottery profits to help balance the 2009-10 state budget, as well as borrow additional funds later. The California Lottery would have greater flexibility to increase its sales and profits. Lottery payments to educational institutions would end, and the state General Fund would increase its payments to education to make up for the loss of these lottery funds.

So we expand the lottery and make it more profitable, take money away from the originally intended beneficiaries to pay for current deficits. Oh, wait, we borrow money from future profits. It's fiscally irresponsible in every way.

Not long ago, we went through similar shenanigans with Indian gaming. And now the City of San Francisco is prepared to decriminalize prostitution. So adding to fiscal irresponsibility, a heaping helping of moral ambiguity, and you have a formula for decline.

It will take a great deal to destroy California. We've got Google. We've got eBay. We've got biotech. We've got aerospace. We've got Hollywood. We've got UC, Cal Tech, Stanford, Claremont and USC. We've got every fruit, vegetable and meat growing out here and we've got a fresh supply of every type of person on the planet, except perhaps for sober and wise government leaders. It will take a great deal, but a lot of people are trying their best.

Legal weed? Last time I checked all my liberal friends and my progressive friends were cool with that. Probably because they're already smoking.

Cheap Sunglasses

You have the same dilemma as I do. If you buy sunglasses that are cheap, you don't care if you lose them or break them. So you always lose them and break them. If you buy sunglasses that are expensive, you keep track of them and they don't break so easily. But eventually you lose them and then you get mad. Meanwhile you have a few cheap pair of sunglasses on their last legs and you're still unhappy. This is the consumer's dilemma.

What about the saver's dilemma?

After this depression, the L, we're going to start saving. Most of us already have. So here's the thing. Once you've saved a whole bunch of money by eschewing all of those sunglasses, cheap and expensive, you have a different problem. See now you're a little bit more independent and you've gotten rid of that seductive marketing in your head. You've started dismissing people who buy all those trendy trinkets. You don't need an iPod or all that garbage music at the iTunes store. You don't need yet another Hollister shirt. You've realized that JC Penney is actually pretty good. You don't need a new car, an old truck is just fine. And instead of fifty bucks burning a hole in your pocket for all that impulse crap at the Best Buy checkout line, you have several hundred, maybe even a thousand or two.

Now the money that meant nothing means something, because you're in control of a big chunk of it. More importantly, you're in control of yourself. Before you pissed it away on the then meaningful question between no-name and Ray Ban. Now you could actually buy something important, or better yet have that deliciously smug feeling of being able to walk through a mall of delights and afford everything but buying nothing. Look at all those fools in their expensive sunglasses, you think to yourself.

Now the dilemma is actually still the same, except you're in a bigger pool of sharks. It's not about investing in a better pair of sunglasses, but whatever it is, you expect to watch after it more closely and it had better not break.

So what if the whole insipid consumer economy just went away, and all we could do was buy land and housing and staples? What if we didn't have any simplistic, seductive, low level nonsense stuff to buy and keep us occupied? What if we always had to take money seriously? I think that we would be ballistically mad if we had to deal with real money for real products. In other words, some sort of consumer deflation would be good for us.

100 Days, 18 Czars, Zero Confidence

Need I say more? Well, the WaPo says it all.

You've named 18 so far, according to something I read in Foreign Policy. That includes a border czar, a climate czar, an information technology czar and -- I don't think Thomas Jefferson grew enough hemp in his lifetime to dream up this one -- the "faith-based czar." Your car czar, Steve Rattner, was in the news last week, trying to keep Chrysler out of bankruptcy.

It took Russia 281 years to accumulate that many czars. Even with hemophilia, repeated assassinations and a level of inbreeding that would gag a Dalmatian breeder. You did it in less than 100 days.

What on earth is our President doing right? Can anyone name me one new idea? I really haven't been paying attention to this 100 days blather, and the few things I have heard all sound like handslap, soundbite reversals of policies it took the prior administration years to evolve. But who the hell are these czars and what the hell are they doing to our democracy?

RINO No More

There is probably no greater frustration than being a despised political minority. Well, I imagine being gimped would be a real bummer, but I'm not talking about all experience just the experience of political writing. I was going to say blogging, but I'm not so sure that I'm all that hot of a blogger any longer. I can't remember the last time I cared to put somebody on the blogroll or do a carnival or anything of that bloggy nature. I'm just happy that the 12 of you sit down around the fire and let me do this thing I do. From me to you.

And so I'm looking at that Raging RINO graphic in my roll of steenking batjes and I can't even remember all of the reasons I put it there. There are two that remain in my head. The first was that I put it there in recognition that I was not so ignorantly partisan that I would defend GWB just to spit in the eyes of his enemies when he actually needed criticism. That was the result, of course, of my reading of Fiasco by Thomas Ricks. And so I had to step out, while still digging Michael Yon, but being realistic about the prospects for the geopolitical neoconservative agenda, which I still support.

The second reason I put that label up there was because one of my favorite Republicans, Christie Todd Whitman started 'It's My Party Too', and I have always had a soft spot in my heart for the moderate factions of the Republicans. You know, like the guys who cared not a whit about Christian values but everything about fiscal responsibility. So I suppose I can take a minute out of character and yell for a moment.

ABORTION IS NOT THE ISSUE THAT IS DESTROYING THE AMERICAN NATION. IT'S THE INTEGRITY OF THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM.

Social conservatives have given us NOTHING but grief. And if we save a million fetuses between now and 2012 all they're ever going to do is grow up and pay trillions in government debt we have incurred because of the financial crisis.

Ahem. Excuse me. OK where was I? Oh yeah. Whitman and Arnold and McCain and all my favorite moderate Republicans and Goldwater Republicans who never got enough clout in the party to keep the manic moralizers from dominating the domestic agenda - moralizers who have demonstrated no real moral leadership that extends past partisan lines which makes the value of their sermons about what? Hard for me to say. I haven't really spent that much time making a case against those who follow Dobson, because I think Dobson's a good man. Actually, rather politically (ahem) unsophisticated, but a very good man. But what can he do now? He can start a soup kitchen, maybe.

At any rate, it's not only this Depression that has rendered the RINO pose obsolete, but the moves of the RLC itself which has not managed to assert itself despite all the thunderous mumbling around the ascendance of Michael Steele to the all powerful RNC, something I am extremely disturbed to find almost irrelevant at this moment in history. I am reminded of the distinct and pointed discussion around the theory of Reparations in full tilt boogie and September 10th 2001, then who cared?

I am going to be very, very happy in four years to have stayed employed at my six figure level. I find it entirely possible that there will remain an American upper middle class, but we probably won't spend so much on huge sunglasses (Have you noticed how the Jackie O look has come back these past two years?). But in all seriousness, the RINO means nothing, less than nothing and that is because the marginal utility of being a Republican partisan means next to nothing. The GOP took the wrong path in its heady days of moralistic machinations.

It lost the immigration issue. It lost the social security issue. It lost the economy.

It only helps the GOP to speak the facts because the swagger of superior principles (which they are) means nothing when the country stops working. Just keep your heads on straight my Righty friends and calmly speak the truth. I shouldn't have to remind you, and it shouldn't be so difficult. But posturing as pure Republican is foolish, so posturing as an almost but not pure Republican is derivative of that. So goes the RINO, because quite frankly if we don't get through this Depression properly, the entire Republic will be in name only.

Prick

I get a weird feeling these days. If a little knowledge is dangerous, a lifetime of learning is goddamned catastrophic. And so nothing gives me so much pleasure as doing business with old men. The survival of an intelligent, ethical man into old age is the testament of civilization.

Just the other day I'm working a conference and the gent I'm working with is shooting the breeze with an old fellow in a cap that says Ketchikan Alaska on it. Already I like him. And there are certain things that can be communicated in a moment or two, eyeball to eyeball or palm to palm. Yes, there are still good men left. But we're quiet, and that's the tragedy.

I've been thinking about the old slogan 'silence = death', and used it with some cheek yesterday against an old gay friend who decided to tell those against gay marriage to shut the fuck up. I didn't feel particularly happy about it, but it had to be said. A lot of unpleasant things have to be said, and it seems that it's up to men like me to say them. What's odd is that it doesn't change what is real, just our ability to deal with what is real publicly. What's worse is that so many lack the judgment and experience to tell whether or not somebody like me is just being a prick. Yesterday I had doubts myself.

Perhaps because it was I was being doubly aggravating. Stowe Boyd retweeted somebody saying, microblog style, that sometimes it's worth being gay just to annoy Republicans. To which I had to respond in the reverse, sometimes it's worth being Republican just to annoy gays - and it certainly is. But nobody tends to believe that old queers can take it, that they can just dish it in victimized frustration. I'm the one that's frustrated. Live and let live is what I say, but that doesn't apply if you're gay, or black, or Republican. Except that I should capitalize Gay and Black because they are not so much identities as political identities. The fact that we don't capitalize them shows the blurriness of our thinking and inability to recognize the difference between being and doing. Everything, it seems, is argued ad hominem because everyone, it seems, is trying to be loved. Doing something, to be loved. Say that slowly and realize how people struggle to achieve a state of grace, a retirement threshold after which you *are* something by acclamation. And so there is a political struggle, work and doing, to designate 'gay' as a state of grace, after the foolishness that granted the doublespeak of colorblindness that false honor.

All this makes me an angry white male, in spirit. I'm sick of it. It's moral pollution and it is making me choke and sputter. Some days I just can't breathe properly - I have to get away to where the air is clear of that awful cloying desire to eliminate the need to be constantly pleasant.

This morning's DVR breakfast showed me a banquet of rampage. Sports fans gone violent in the anonymity of the crowd. Crowds turned mobs from one isolated act of stupidity. Police march authoritatively to disperse the whole mobs, noobs and naifs dragged along in the stampede. It doesn't take much to wipe out civility. All you need are bored individuals to stand up for a simple idea - fans, not performers, not analysts, nor anyone involved in the material production of that thing in question. You don't have to be light in the loafers to defend those who are. You don't have to suffer Joe Orton's misery to enjoy the spectacle of the play. You merely have to pay attention and be sympathetic. Our social politics are a mob of sympathy and our political leaders only point out the affronting storefronts. We gladly smash and grab through the glass of civility at the manniquins of propriety. Everything is ad hominem. If this is democracy, perhaps we need something else. Maybe a vacation in darkest, frigid Alaska where nobody ever gets drunk enough to flash their tits in the middle of the street and cause a panic.

I want to be cold. Coldly rational and slow down the banter. Allow me to be warm in my personality and love you for your company. Allow me to strike and parry coldly at the thought balloon above your head. I know the difference between you and the idea in possession of you. I learned as a sophomore in 1976, but already the Bicentennial murals had the black hand shaking the white hand implying everything without words - no thought balloons to wrestle with. Just skin meaning. Like tribal conjugation. Like a sweat lodge jury, as if everything could be negotiated through physical proximity alone.

You may as well be silent if you cannot debate properly.
You may as well be dead if none of your words can challenge.

I don't have to tell you what STFU means. It means that we are at the end of our rope and so we are prepared to hang separately. It means I cannot stand your presence and that I can teach you nothing. It means you do not deserve the light of what guides me and it cannot be added to your own. And that may be a failure of patience, which can always be forgiven. But it might be a failure of empathy which spells nothing less than doom. Even the tortured are asked to talk.

I don't like our politics, primarily because the overwhelming majority of it is petty, and the consequential ends of our contributions are not consistently applied through the ends of power. There's a giant spin cycle in the middle of our every government whose centrifugal forces flatten the nuance of public debate into partisan plastic. And that nonsense is hostile to our capacity as citizens to think and speak aloud those things which are in our mutual benefit. We're complex individuals dammit! And we must wrestle with unpleasant matters in sophisticated ways that do respect to our capacities. But today we snipe out of small political existential boxes.

Where are we going? I know where I must go. I must have my science. And if I spend the rest of my life navigating the safe confines of the abstractly rational, I will have failed in courage. I will have failed my society. And so much of me desires to do just that, but I would then have a passive and cynical sense of humor in response to what I must interpret as social futility. That can only lead to alcohol or worse. Men in bars laugh loudest. But I'd rather be clear eyed and geniune, engaged with my people everywhere we speak the same language. Not metaphorically but English. I want everyone within earshot - webshot to know I'm still engaged. But that means I'm going to have to prick thought balloons. What does that make me?

Still compelled, I guess. And so I hope to live to be an old man.