Cobb

Open Collaboration vs Propriety

I've begun reading 'The Success of Open Source' as I try to get my head around the idea, or the fact, that open source databases have leapfrogged enterprise engineered databases in many important ways. It's a disorienting feeling I have, so I need to reconcile it with reality. That's the thrust, but I think there are important implications as well.

If there is one thing I've always liked about my industry and also hated it is the way in which programmers have been organized to work and create wealth has managed to be casual. I thought about this today while looking for a bathroom that was not being serviced in the spanking new building where I'm working. And so I'm curious to know some of the underlying principles, if there are any.

You see the building I'm currently working in has been architected for collaboration. Nobody owns a desk, anybody can use any 'cube' which is more like an open plan workstation, to dock their laptop and do whatever it is they do. There are lockers disbursed through the building so that if you have stuff, that you can park it securely as your itinerant work takes you wherever in the building. There are small private rooms with phones and glass doors so that you can do a conference call. Some are as small as a large telephone booth, others can seat three or four folks.

Now the unwritten rule of this architecture has to be written, and you will find spontaneously printed notes all around the joint reminding employees that camping is not allowed. In other words, it defies the spirit of the collaborative environment to claim one of these small private rooms for yourself. But enough people have camped for the signs to become necessary. I even noticed one printed in large red letters in the elavator this morning.

This environment comes complete, as one would expect in Silicon Valley, with an area with beanbag chairs a ping pong table and subsidized soft drink machines. It's hardly what one would think of as panoptic. Yet despite its thoroughly contemporary style you'll still find a catering truck pulling up to to the front of the building every day at lunch. I've been to a large number of companies in my time, and I would argue that this particular campus is on the more advanced edge of the IT high tech sort. In the building I visited yesterday, there are no corner offices. In the corners are conference rooms. Everything about the place says, young, smart, tansformative & green. Yes green. Outside the front door of my building is a solar powered trash can. Don't ask.

Is propriety at risk here? Yes, a little bit, but I cannot tell to what extent. My immediate reaction to the no camping sign is split. One could easily be chagrined that old habits die hard. On the other hand re-engineering is not necessarily quality improvement. To work in a building that encourages collaboration and play is a hallmark of the new style of business organization you find in Silicon Valley. But is hierarchical organization necessarily bad? Is the desire to be territorial wrong? Is it necessarily a good thing to have a rumpus room in a corporation?  I think it all depends at root on one's understanding of the ways and means people are organized around property and how that is perceived by workers and their management.

For example. If I understand the open source movement correctly, it produces a high quality product because the inner workings of products are subject to arbitrary and massive scrutiny. In architecting a building where people work around that same principle, you don't own your office because your work should be subject to arbitrary and massive scrutiny. Camping implies propriety, of keeping to yourself, of privacy.

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The downside of proprietary engineering development that I am intimately familiar with originated with my experience at Xerox. Xerox fumbled the future because it slavishly attended to its customers - customers who were not future-oriented. Likewise when you make your money designing to spec in a bespoke manner for a limited set of customers you are likely to satisfy them very well but you will be inefficient for the masses. Open source takes advantage of the masses and a new arrangement between customer and provider. So I am aware how propriety inspires loyalty and trust and how loyalty and trust can be the enemies of innovation.

There are great implications about this new kind of property which is inherent in the open source movement, but the manifestations of the broader social implications are just beginning to appear.

Valkyrie

I promised myself that I would never suffer through another Tom Cruise movie. And I haven't, although I was a little anxious at the beginning.

Cruise can now claim to have acted next to Kenneth Brannaugh and not look like an idiot. But he chose a character well suited to his lack of dynamic emotional range as an actor and it suited him well. Cruise cruises on cold, composed determination with a dash of impatience and a dab of sentiment. The sentiment dries up and blows away within the first 15 minutes and so we are all OK to watch the plot to assassinate Hitler.

Valkyrie is a particularly stiff picture with a goodly number of old heads attending the plotting and conspiring. For all of the dramatic potential of such a flick it came down to bomb ticking tension and the nervous energy of deception behind protocol. Fortunately, there was a cast that did fear fairly well. 

These days I am succumbing to my share of WW2 obsession now into my fourth or fifth selection the subject in the form of The Hitler Book, which is an interesting volume compiled from confessions made under duress.

Anyway, I give the movie 82%

A Culture War Declined

I haven't had much time in the past week to think about the culture wars, but I did listen to NPR excerpts on the Michael Medved show on the way driving to Monterey from San Jose. One of these had something to do with a visibly Christian TV family of some degree of physical attractiveness and intellectual vapidity. I forget their names, but there is some hay being made over their imminent separation. The reasons they give are inevitably selfish and shallow, especially considering that they have eight children under the age of 10. If I remember correctly, there are twins and sextuplets, all products of fertility drugs - just perfect for circus entertainment. I hear that something is being made of the fact that some social conservatives have adopted these freaks as pets and that their itch-scratching proves us all to be idiots. Yeah. The second was some highly intelligent woman that Medved could not believe was going to get artificially inseminated. So there you see the theme, sexual experimentation at theexpense of the traditional humdrum of marriage.

I am no fan of soap operas. Can't stand 'em. Never liked anything about them and think poorly of people who watch them. Except for my wife. Mostly. So far, I've managed to ignore 99% of their content. But I do recognize two of the actors. Anyway, one scene in the Young and the Restless managed to interrupt my breakfast the other morning as a dramatic revelation of passion played out on the screen, man to man. As is customary, it all led up to a 'Oh no you didn't!' moment and then cut to a commercial. So I asked the Spousal Unit what's up with that. If Hollywood had decided once and for all that America needs a perfect gay couple, just like it once needed a black TV news anchor, then which soap opera would be used to introduce it? She figured it would be the Young and the Restless, and as of 2009 it hasn't yet been done. So the denouement to the scene will be that the propositioned man will reject the proposing man despite having allowed him to thumb his cheeks and lips for the dramatic moment. You see there is no gay relationship on the soap operas. There's a reason for that.

In disposing of my need for political currency (and to be honest, Dennis Miller is the primary reason) I am discovering the Hype Ratio of conservative politics. The gravest mistake it makes is that it drapes its legitimate moral concerns in the billowing cape of millenarian paranoia, rather than a simple recognition of sin. The righteously lived life is truly its own reward, but many on the Right suffer as if the presence of decadence makes their lives impossible.So they are bound to a siege mentality and always holding out for a hero.

It's much easier to be appropriately flip. The eight kid divorcees are simply brazenly selfish fools selling out their babies on the same train that brought them fame. The intelligent woman is simply incapable of living with a real man, but she has money and Hollywood friends instead. Homoeroticismsimply isn't mainstreamable. It's not the end of the world - the world is full of fools and sinners and so what? Nothing. 

There may come a time when our entertainment geniuses decide that brainy, heroic women do artificial insemination and deserve their own sitcom. And they will cheer among their crowd reflecting upon the reign of repression attending Murphy Brown. There might be a day when the obviously gay actors can play obviously gay men instead of supposedly persnickety men trying to meet the right girl. The in joke will be out and everything will be obvious. We may find ourselves in the long tail of entertainment that sends social conservatives into the streets screaming with their hair on fire. At that moment I will simply raise an eyebrow and direct your attention to one of seven deadly sins.That's all.

This world is bounded by extraordinarily great forces few of which turn on the sorts of trivialities we have come to judge ourselves and our neighbors. And just as there was a class of Americans who cared only about Elvis Presley during the Korean War, there will always be a class of Americans foolishly distracted from weighty matters. The Culture War rages on, but the stakes are not as high as I think the warriors believe. Beware the Hype Ratio.

The Hype Ratio

One of the things that we notice about the news cycle, which has become a feature of our society is the extent to which it defines the public interest in defiance of perspective. As we move forward towards a Banksian Mind Singularity, we should keep in mind this ratio.

The Hype Ratio is the extent to which the public is alerted to something in which it has relatively stake or say. I now think of the Hype Ratio as some function of the inability of smart questions to be answered readily. There are many factors to consider but I want to focus on the fraction which has to do with the non-integration of information pathways which is a function of the profitability of mass media. But let's look to the future and see how it should be and how I think that the smartest information technologists are thinking about it.

I invoke both Ray Kurzweil and Iain Banks when I talk about Banksian Mind Singularity. Kurzweil is famous for a number of things, but lately his prediction is that there will come a point in time in the future that non-human intelligence will outweigh human intelligence. He's right of course, except what he doesn't understand is that human culture won't give a damn. We'll still be watching Michael Jackson videos in 200 years even though there will have been invented ninja-bots that can outdance Jackson. The point is that when cars run faster than horses, we may no longer care about horses. But even though horses have always outrun humans, we still care about the fastest human runner. And just as we care about the fastest kids who can do math in their heads or drummers who are much slower than drum machines, we will still care about Bernie Madoff when the math told us not to invest in him. Bottom line is we will always be able to ignore non-human intelligence even if the whole of it is smarter than the whole of humankind. And it will not necessarily be at our peril. The value of human life is not subject to optimization, and this is the error that so many make.  We still don't understand, the lot of us, how ecology of the earth works. Our relation to the other species of the world is about as tenuous as the commerce secretary's relation to job creation. It ain't cause and effect and we have no idea how the system actually works, but we take his word for it.

Iain Banks, in his Culture novels, describes a galaxy full of advanced civilizations of many different species. In this galaxy are great mechanical intelligences which have evolved under a law that protects all sentience. The greatest of these minds are deployed to attend to the functions of navigating warships - essentially all humanity and its governing body has outsourced the business of war to battling AIs. But as part of that same advance technology are smaller units which mind over planetary systems and their economies. They are all interconnected as peers and any individual human has access to just about everything they could possibly want to know, immediately.

It is important to consider Banks' vision primarily because he asserts something that is fundamental and inalterable. Human freedom, no matter what it desires, is always constrained by the laws of physics. From physics come economics. Understand as well that in Banks' speculative future, energy technologies are mastered, therefor the economies are vast, and significantly beyond human scale problems.

A Banksian Mind can thus be like an ultimate butler. It answers all of our questions in as great a detail as we are capable of absorbing. But we still have our free will to ignore it - still we keep them around as servants - all of our professional advisors wrapped into one, towards our ideal of human perfection. The Banksian Minds will be our guidance counselors, our dentists, our tax accountants, our bodyguards and our Jeeves. The important thing to note about the Banksian Mind is that in its sentience, it is co-dependent on humanity, and it is this co-dependence and the recognition of individuality that throws something of a wrench into one of Kurzweil's notions about Singularity, which is that we would merge with our sentient creations symbiotically and thereby change what it means to be human.

So what does instantaneous access to all information give us? In the Bansksian Mind Singularity, the Hype Ratio drops asymptotically to zero. Everything you want to know, you can know with accuracy and certainty. The difference and the distance between you and your goal is reduced to two dimensions instead of three. Ignorance is not part of the equation, rather it is primarily a matter of distance and time, or more properly speaking, energy and time.

Now, let's go back to the contemporary reality of the news cycle and its dysfunctions. I can be influenced to consider the implications of a great number of irrelevant matters. The first reason for this is that the mediasphere can be thought of as expository. The fundamental characteristic of its operation is that it finds out things that it thinks that people want to know and then translates that information, according to its editorial priorities, into a product for daily consumption. And the invention of CNN and the 24 hour news cycle has made it into a product for constant consumption. The internet on the other hand, is a medium which has been gradually infused with an extraordinarily broad and deep data set (more than just 'news') and in the way it functions like the MSM, it is enabled by search engines, but primarily though queries. That is to say it is not pushed, it is pulled. Furthermore, it can be researched.

The extent to which the accuracy and certainty of any news item can be guaranteed is in inverse proportion to its complexity and volatility. This makes for some strange dilemmas facing editorial boards of the news cycle. On the one hand, the accuracy and certainty of a train wreck's body count or the death of a hooker, or the cuteness of a baby can be readily ascertained by contemporary news organizations. The pertinent information can be gathered and processed at low cost and the impact on an audience of consumers can be nearly guaranteed. However the accuracy and certainty of any comment about the sentiment of investors on Wall Street as indicated by the DJIA is greatly dubious. Nevertheless, you are apt to hear on June 25 that the Dow closing up 190 points was due to X. We accept that diet of misinformation based on any number of rationalizations, but there's also the factual reason that we don't necessarily understand enough about the issue being reported to know any better.
We know that we are buying news. And over time as alternative ways of getting high quality information become available, we will pay less and less for that news.

I predict that the same thing will happen in education.

Michael Jackson: Dead

Like most black boys of the seventies, I grew up hating Michael Jackson. There were two unique reasons and they both related to girls. Firstly, we hated Michael because the girl standing next to you would rather say that she loved the distant and mysterious Michael before she'd bother to say she could stand you. Secondly, everybody knew that Jermaine was cooler. Michael was just cute, and we couldn't understand why anybody let him get away with it.

That was until Dancing Machine when he did the robot.

Michael Jackson out-created everything and everybody with about 12 moves. It's not much of an opus, but what it was will always be singularly his. He was an American original who had the best friends popularity could win and money could buy.

Despite what anybody thinks about MTV and the Buggles or Michael Nesmith, Michael Jackson invented the music video in collaboration with John Landis. Thriller was the kind of phenomenon that invented a genre, and that will stand as Jackson's greatest legacy.

I have listened, as a married man ever since Janet Jackson's album, Janet, to every female pop star that has risen to the top. None of them has managed to outdo Janet who stands as the last such superstar to have been at the top of American pop culture before and after the lapdance. As we continue our louche ways and find what was once only viewable on HBO descend into the sleaze bucket of 'R', the necessity of innuendo has become obviated. It was Janet Jackson's last great tour that broke the barrier and forever destroyed the ability for female pop stars to be anything but trampy if they are to be considered sex symbols at all. I cannot imagine that there is any more titillation left after Janet's lapdance and tit stunts. She alone has her reputation tinged by those, wheras the rest have drowned in the appropriate shame their 'showmanship' exploits have earned them. That is because Janet has learned to stay tight to innocence, learning at the feet of the master, her late brother.

We have always done this comparison between Michael Jackson and Prince. And as time goes on, it is completely obvious that Prince is the far greater talent, but Prince was not ever and will not ever be a bigger star. That's because we get him. You cannot play double entendres with Prince, there is never a doubt in your mind that he lets his guard down and becomes approachable. But Michael was always an unapproachable freak who has both managed an incredible amount of control over his image and managed to nurse the exact behavior of childlike appeal as the robot dancing teen through his adulthood. I imagine that in feudal days there were courtiers and courtesans of Michael Jackson's bearing in many kingdoms. Like some eunuch groomed from birth to exist in entertaining service of an emperor, Michael Jackson has made ultimate sacrifices for his art. In the end, Prince is a human being and Michael Jackson is not. Prince is an artist, a star and a musician. Michael Jackson is a human sacrifice to Michael Jackson.

The Twelve Moves

• The Toe Stand
• The Crotch Grab
• The Robot
• The Moonwalk
• The Scream
• The Spin
• The Hiccup
• The Face
• The Glove
• The Socks
• The Kick
• The Shuffle

Everything that makes Michael Jackson a great dancer is his ability to improvise his way through combinations into an iconic pose of which he was a master. If he could walk through life under strobe lights, it would illustrate all of what his dancing managed to be as it was recorded. If you watch and know, you'll see that on many occasions he performs popular dances that are current and then adds his signature moves. He is not a dancer to watch all the way through, but he improved over the course of his career knitting the moves to a perfect vignette.

Smooth Criminal is the best example of Jackson dancing at his finest. It gives a clear overview of his understanding of what he looks like when he moves and working all of the angles of his strengths in coordination with other dancers it showcases all of his moves.

But then there is Billie Jean.

The Motown 25 performance left us all speechless. It was a moment in time that obliterated the old Michael and gave birth to the man in whose shadow he would walk for the rest of his life. To the great fortune of all concerned, he refined and eclipsed that performance and perfected that thing that was dancing, Michael Jackson style. And as much as we all know it so well and have seen it so much there remains something ineffable about seeing it all come together.

I suspect that there are a number of other observations that I could note as I talk about Jackson's transcendence, but I would just leave that for the moment. Here, finally is the performance that I think best captures the energy of Jackson at his finest. It is subliminally fascist. It is the perfection of pop art. 

This is what we are never going to see again.

Chilling With Dictators

So the Obama invite to the Ayatollah has made the news. Of course there has never been a reason to doubt his word. He said he had no preconditions to meet with the kings of Iran and so it has become clear. Don't ask 'what was he thinking'. You voted for him. 

AT&T Fail

  Why is AT&T so retarded? You will note that AT&T Knowledge Ventures, the people responsible for whatever kind of crap website this is, hasn't updated their info since 2007. This is how I'm supposed to be getting picture mail from other people. Not only does it suck because I can't get the picture without going to a website, but I have to fetch an ID and password sent from the SMS. That was totally impractical without iPhone cut and paste and now when I do it, it doesn't even work. I have never seen this work with my iPhone. So by the time people on the other end of my bitching find out it does work, sometime promised at the end of the summer, they won't send me any more until Thanksgiving, or Homecoming if I'm lucky.

FAIL. This is just utterly pathetic.

And furthermore. Accroding to their stupid contract, I cannot upgrade to the faster iPhone until next April without paying full price, meaning what 500 bucks? I am beginning to believe that the iPhone is not a phone at all, but a computer, because the way they are pricing this stuff is wrong.

I bought a first-generation iPhone that uses AT&T's EDGE network. Why don't I get to upgrade at the lower prices? I've had my phone a lot longer than people with iPhone 3Gs. Welcome to the world of mobile phone pricing.

AT&T's not coming straight out and saying why, but it is refusing to let some customers with the original iPhone get the iPhone 3G S at the upgrade prices.

What really rankles is that last year, all iPhone owners were allowed to upgrade to the iPhone 3G at the subsidized prices because they had paid full price for the first-generation (that model had not been subsidized by AT&T). Now, however, people who didn't make that move last year are not offered the same deal.

That disparity has really pissed off some people. "So let me get this straight, my line shows eligible for upgrade on 8/11/2009 (18 months), but because I am not upgrading from an iPhone 3G, I have to wait until then even though someone who got an iPhone about 12-13 months ago can?" asked an AT&T customer identified as "TEXASEX1998" on the company's support forum. "We have a Family plan and spend over $300 a month with AT&T, but if I have to wait 18 months and someone who got a subsidized iPhone a year ago doesn't, I am bolting to another carrier."

That's just nasty. It's generating hate, and hate will result in defections. The moment the iPhone has another carrier, I'm leaving AT&T, even if it costs me money. I'm very happy with the hardware, but I hate the service. I wish wish wish I could do business with Verizon.

Form Over Content

The first thing I think people get wrong about me is that they think I'm on a crusade. I'm simply trying to avoid perdition. And I think that the road to perdition is marked by a number of signs that say 'black people should..' So I should take a moment to clarify to myself and to all folks what I think are a couple good ideas and reasons to stay out of the black solutions game aside from the obvious which is that it is fundamentally unhealthy to think as black people as a problem. Then again, the Negro Problem can be a compelling issue lo these fifty years later. If so, what exactly was the problem that WW2 solved and how did it manage to get all the attention it did in that short period of time? I guess compelling is a relative term.

I have been graciously invited to participate in various events leading up to CNNs Black in America 2 production. It's a very frustrating thing to contemplate. In the end I'm going to have to withdraw myself from consideration with the admission that I'm only assuming that such an effort would be frustrating and contradictory. It might be unfair to consider that CNN is likely to give my ideas and input the same sort of coverage that the LA Times and the New York Times have in the past - which is less emphasis and time than they deserve to a larger audience of which certain unflattering things are assumed. The end result of this would be that the coup would be to get me over on CNN's clock, program and agenda. 

The thing is that I'm an essayist, and the proof is in the following, accolade, syndication and collaboration I have generated right here at Cobb. If there is any reality to the split and conflict between this medium and that thing we often pejoratively call the MSM, it's that we're here and they remain there. I mean it's one thing for a producer or editor to shoot me an email, but it appears to be an altogether other thing for them to offer their interview of me here where I stand. And considering that is what I expect from my peers, in the form of trackbacks, blogrolling, badges and syndication, I consider that MSMs refusal to do so is a matter of form over content.

Nevermind the indented. I changed my mind.

So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to attempt to get that thing that would be essentially CNN's endorsement of me as a thinker worth a moment's attention by getting them to do what NPR, Pajamas Media, Amazon, NYU and Newstex have done, which is to specifically send their audience here through the mutually agreed linking and badging. It's very much like coming to my house to interview me. 

In the back of my mind, however, there is a man on the street interview somewhere in the expression of CNNs approach to this old Negro Problem. And in the very same way they would disrespect General Schwartzkopf in a documentary about Desert Storm by putting his segment in the show next to the opinions of some knuckleheads in the street they would do so to me. I know that's difficult to understand or accept, but that's the way that I percieve my opinion, or that which approaches my way of thinking about the subject is handled. Does that make sense to you? Do you see what I'm getting at? 

Now of course I don't need CNN and they don't need me. Nor do hundreds of other black bloggers need me nor I them. But there is a certain easily understood protocol that is exactly what the blogosphere has been doing for many years - it's the reason we succeed. That is to meet ideas as equals, writer to writer, right here on the web, where there is plenty time and space to get deep into issues that require depth. 

So let's see how this works out.

Instead I'm going to the other direction. I think Nixon's term was benign neglect. I'm trying not to care - to be purposefully indifferent. I realize that a lack of orthodoxy allows it. I can jump right in any time I feel like it.

Steyn Says It Summarily

Mark Steyn on Obama's indifference:

The mullahs stole this election on a grander scale than ever before primarily for reasons of internal security and regional strategy. But Obama’s speech told them that, in the “post-American world,” they could do so with impunity. Blaming his “agents” for the protests is merely a bonus: Offered the world’s biggest carrot, Khamenei took it and used it as a stick.

He won’t be the last to read Obama this way.

The End of Blackmail

When living for hope fails, people get wise. People get pissed.

While the president is swatting flies in interviews with fawning journalists, people in Iran have gone buck wild. He's not saying anything because he doesn't react, he thinks things up and comes up with a considered position. There's just one problem with that, he's behind events and not defining them. One thing for sure is that when GWBush was the President, everyone in the world was redefining their position in reaction to what they thought Bush was going to do. That initiative is now reversed. Obama seems to be more like the great film critic rather than the actor on center stage. Maybe he thinks he's like Addison DeWitt in 'All About Eve', that he can control everyone because he exposes their weakness and then can dictate terms about how they can maintain their good name. That's not leadership, it's blackmail. First the banks, now the auto industry. Who's next?

One day in the not too distant future, people are going to decide, long before the president wants them to decide, that they don't care about 'hope' and 'change' and all of his excellent speechification. They're going to want to be ugly and mad about things the president will be unable to fix, and they're not going to be patient. He's going to say 'cool it, baby' and they're going to give him the finger. I chuckle for a moment at the irony because whenever I use the phrase 'cool it, baby' I am thinking specifically about Maxine Waters after the outbreak of the LA Riots. She got on TV saying that the president and all those politicians in Washington have no idea what's going on in her community. The people have lost jobs and have lost hope and no amount of pretty words were going to satisfy them. Nobody wanted to hear Maxine Waters say that. One man's riot is another man's rebellion.

Iran reminds us that when very big things get deeply out of sorts in a nation, relatively ugly things don't seem so ugly any longer. Ordinary political corruption that you can ordinarily stand makes you really mad when you can't get away with anything. When unemployment hits 10% nationwide, if one out of ten men want to smash things... ick.

As I watched the video (and I could only take about 4 minutes of it) I kept thinking this man could be hitting a person with that bat. He could be doing his rant and taking it out on a human being, and he's not getting tired. I know that it was an edited and finessed bit of video and the they guy obviously has more than a couple neurons to rub together, and it makes it all the more scary. Because in a down economy lots of smart people are going to be angry, and a lot of angry people are going to wise up.

Scary.

Indulge Dad's Self-Indulgence

My birthday was a couple weeks ago, one week after my brother's birthday, two weeks before my father's birthday. The grads and dads signs are going up and I realize I haven't planned my Fourth of July weekend.

My family knows that I am impossible to buy for. Nevertheless I responded to their requests and published my own heretofore private list entitled Dad's Desires. The reason Father's Day is often silly is because as some have wryly noted, dads are fairly good, if they have any money, at getting what they want for themselves and they not generally emotionally moved by the little gifties. For Dad, it's really the thought that counts, because quite frankly all you could ever possibly buy me is junk that I don't really want. The stuff I actually do want is way too expensive, and it hurts to even put that on the list because what I really need to do is learn to live without it.

The thing that made me happiest - the best gift I got for my birthday was a gift card to Sam Ash, the music store. My bass needs a tuneup, but not nearly as much as Boy's flute. So I got his flute tuned up with my money.

Well, OK that's just me, but if you're really interested in giving your father the great gift and he's not likely to publish such a list as I would, here's the secret. Give him permission to spend his own money on himself. Because he knows what he wants, and although it might seem as stupid to you as soap on a rope, it really means something to him. It's just that he's been holding back from being selfish, which is exactly why he's such a great dad. Just let him have a guilt free weekend. It's all he ever needs. Then Monday morning he'll be back to the grind working for you.

Now in case you're curious, there are some Dad's who are supremely predictable. That's because to a certain extent they have already indulged themselves. They already have a signed basketball from the head coach at NC State or they already have two drawers of their Craftsman cabinet full of wrenches. They already have one turntable and a microphone or they already have new bindings for their Rossignols. You already know if your dad is a Harley Davidson kinda dude. You can already see that's he's got one boxed set of Frank Sinatra. You know how he keeps prattling on about that steelhead that he caught when he was 12, and he never lets you forget that he only likes to play Titleist balls. Men, like it or not, are brand sensitive and there's generally something he digs to an unnatural extent. Feed it.

A Question for Shirky, Surowieki & Rheingold

Here comes everybody and the wisdom of crowds produces smartmobs.

Why don't I believe it? Because I am a conservative thinker, in the way David Brooks describes as epistemologically modest. I don't believe that I can know everything and so I don't presume to rethink what history has shown.

But I think what the theories of collaboration are attempting to do is enable frameworks of organization that accellerate the process of change. I question whether or not: A) this is possible. B) if so is it wise. And consequently what is the proper speed of change? And my instinct weighs in against revolution. So if putting a million minds together is revolutionary, what are we revolting against and is that a good thing?

I began thinking about this when Facebook decided to change its interface and become more Twitterlike. I now understand that some of the brains behind Facebook could do this because they could. Which is to say they've got cats like Hammerbacher who... strike that. They don't have cats like Hammerbacher (which is sort of the point) they've got Hammerbacher. Hammerbacher knows what it takes to build the guts of a system like Facebook so as to make it scalable to the tens of millions. Suffice it to say he's a genius. 

But if you understand something about power laws, then you understand that genius is generally responsible for that which gets done in the area of expertise. Genius doesn't give up being genius and integrates all that is needed to know which might be produced by collaboratively enabled grassroots. And so there is a horrifying itch in the back of my head that collaborative networks may function as little more than panoptic seives for those with root. That's part of the problem I'm anticipating.

Let's try for a moment to imagine that we see no benefit in the term 'empowerment'. Let's imagine that 'democratic' was not a fairy adjective and that we're not emotionally invested in 'democratization'. Let us be purely pragmatic and say that what we care about is getting X done, and not the sense of well-being that derives from any individual's sense of participation in getting X done. Let's imagine that it was simply impossible to broker aggregations of that sense of well-being from mass constituencies. Or to put it consisely let's say that we don't give a rats about the consent of the governed, but we still want to have it. What's to stop us from building social networking software? Nothing.

Do you see where I'm going? I don't mean to suggest, because I'm not second-guessing, that there are sinister aims in those who build and seek to build such social systems. But there is an inherent conflict and competition between such new forms of collaboration which are non-hierarchical and older forms which are hierarchical. And key in this is the matter of loyalty (which is a value I will now focus upon as I weigh in against this 'progress'). As I do so, I want you to keep in mind the reasons people you know who have resisted Facebook have presented as their case. 

What if the mobs are not smart? What binds their action together? What is their aggregate purpose? I don't beleive that there is any sort of integrity to smartmobs. They essentially react to reactions at an accellerated pace, and they bring their own preconceived notions. As we speak, I am watching Republicans with an agenda against Obama use his diplomatic plans for Iran to justify calling protestors currently in the streets backing Mousavi as a true democratic movement. It has nothing to do with whether or not Mousavi is good, bad or democratic. But an election, as the prototypical collaboration engine, can only be used to produce very simple results. It is the result which is designed by its facilitators: the license of consent. The brokerage of aggregations of the sense of well-being imparted by "Our guy won". When it doesn't work, as it hasn't worked recently, we know that everything is called into question (if proportional participation is high). But when it does work the only thing that forestalls calling everything into question is the degree to which the benefitting geniuses can wait for another spin of the wheel. 

It occurs to me that the more you enable mass participation in social networking software, the more finely grained the expression of desire becomes. Which is to say, if you limited, twitterlike, what 10 million people are able to say, Twitter appears more decisive and more consensual. Whereas in Facebook which allows for structured inputs of a much broader variety is less likely to be exploited for the purposes of collaboration. MySpace is more free, as it is less structured, and the Web itself cannot be aggregated in any coherent factor. Elections work because you have fewer choices. And of course any student of logic knows that assertion of a falsity can be used to prove anything. The chances of choosing a false candidate seems very high, and isn't that the purpose of a political campaign? To engage as many as possible? Not to exemplify and embody every degree of your Yes, but to overcome your No. When all you have is a Yes or No to a candidate and the election satisfies you, then you leave the polling place intact, but then as reality intervenes, you go to Facebook or MySpace or the entire Web to articulate all of the finer points of your Yes But or your No Because. Except that the social software doesn't really empower you because it is trumped by an election.

The genius who gets things done in any representative system is who is elected. On Facebook those with standing have already been promoted. In standing and promotion I am introducing some finer grain of distinction along the long tail toward genius. And I suppose I should say that the greater the standing, the greater the influence they would have over the shape and function of the system and all of its colloborators. Let us consider the implications of power laws in what is taken sometimes at face value to be a meritocracy. The inventors are the ultimate geniuses of the system, and the those who win by exploiting the system successfully gain standing and are promoted by the sytem (otherwise, what's their incentive to participate?).  I'm saying that this state of affairs doesn't change whether or not there is a direct hierarchy, and I have a strong sense that there is not so much empowerment going on in open collaboration as it would seem.

What I have found to give some solace, in fact much solace, is the hierarchical example of feudalism. With fuedalism, the value of loyalty is embodied in the ethics of chivalry. When you are betrayed by your hierarch, it is very clear and present. When a market leader within and open collaborative framework gains the authority to change the nature of the framework, you can be betrayed while still believing the meritocracy stands. Nobody is under any obligation to make the implications of that change clear and present to you. You remain in the long tail giving consent to what you believe to be a framework for empowerment, but power remains concentrated. 

So what exactly is the change that these collaborative frameworks seek to establish? Again, not insuinating anything sinister, just questioning justifications. It might be change for it's own sake. It might be a geek factor which gets lucky, they built it and people came. I'm also considering my own ideas about upgrading Robert's Rules of Order to internet speed and distance and the creation of a virtual parliament. I'll deal with all that later. But this is the way I'm thinking about how social networks operate.

Shirky on Twitter

Apropos Iran, but recorded in May.

Iran On Fire

The odd thing about reducing one's political input and output is that there is no narrative in which to participate. I am not bothering to inform my opinion on a lot of issues. I simply know the situation is bad. So for the moment I have nothing to say about our president that I haven't said before - it seems pointless to advance the narrative.

This picture does not speak a thousand words, which is why I chose it. It simply and clearly shows, like the many other hundreds, that there is political violence in the streets of Iran. I think it's going to get worse.

As an American, what I think now is what I've always thought, which is that until such time as people live under governments which operate more like ours in structure and concept, then they will suffer the inevitable tragedies of tyranny.

We watch and wait.

Foreign Testimony

I've been thinking about frameworks for credibility and circles of trust for a bit and also about thinking at scale and thirdly about the communicability of analytic data. So it's a timely moment to speak up about the Iranian elections.

It is my opinion, given the networks of trust I have established, that indeed there was some fixing of the Iranian election. I claim to know this because there are particular analysts of geopolitics that I find credible. These are people I know more or less personally but that's not the right word. I know that they exist and they know that I exist. I have had the experience of them recognizing my name and writing emails to me. That is an element of trust and connection.

One of the things I am saying is that these are not media fixtures - they are not journalists per se. They are writers in different fora who write on a periodical basis on the events I find compelling and through a variety of means I have found them to be credible. In other words I am evaluating them not on the basis of the way they are presented to me authoritatively with any assumptions, but on their performance in a network of similar minded people. Not only am I evaluating the performer, but I am evaluating the audience feedback to that performer with regard to his ability to respond to the feedback I find useful in the analytic context.

This is one of the reasons I have shut down comments here - in order to participate in those higher feeback loops on a more regular basis.

Now if somebody in a smartmob tells me that Paris is burning or that the Iranian election is a sham, how do I know to trust that person? Suppose they give me some claimed figure like "Mousavi got 66% of the popular vote." I'm a database guy, I could, given the raw records, have a system to determine that particular metric. But that data is challenged or challengeable because of its availability. There is no transparent system in place and nobody but interested parties with their hands on it.

This too is the same problem with those people actually on the ground in Iran who voted. How do they know what they claim to know?

It is conceivable that news organizations would provide what they can of a vetting process on raw data and certify it then publish certified data for independent analysis. That would be something quite useful. What is available in the 'public record' is not necessarily useful if it doesn't present sufficiently certified raw data for independent analysis. This ought to be the aim of the new class of periodical writers. I would aim to support such a process given the coming ubiquity of tools and exhibits available to the blogosphere.

But what we will continue to need are circles of trust.

In the matter of the Iranians, we are at something of a conundrum. In one regard, there is a certain political spin inherent in the willingness for the American government to engage with Iran in such a way that authorities there might communicate internal goings on with authorities here. But there is also, because of our relationship, incentives to publish dysinformation. That is surely the case in the latest election. Disputed as it has become we would be remiss not to suspect tampering with any news out of the country as regards those election results.

However, somebody has got the election results. Somehow they got here. What is the chain of evidence? Who told what to whom? Who knew what and when did they know it? Who did they tell and why?

The tools exist of course for sufficiently sophisticated consumers of information and news to get closer to these questions given the disclosure of certified artifacts. This is what I seek. 

When You Stare Into the Mirror

The mirror stares back at you, and in the process of seeing yourself see yourself, you see that you see. Yes but do others see what you see?

Getting dizzy yet? If not, try this:

“The gross assumption here that both undergirds and haunts tourism, as well as particular practices in ethnography and intercultural scholarship in general is that the researcher/tourist is a privileged viewer and is not held to the culture-specific codes of propriety that govern human sociality in the spaces of their observation”.

Mark Anthony Neal gives a respectful review of Performing Black Masculinity. Remember the joke about the self-absorbed people who say "Well I've talked enough about me, what do you think about me?" This is the sad state of black identity fermentation. What started as nationalism 40 years ago has twisted itself up in self-referential mutations of navel gazing. Except it's called 'gaze' without the navel part, because the Other is supposed to be engaged and thinking seriously about what it means to look. This was an interesting subtext in 1990 but now it appears that it is the text.

All of this is much ado about nothing except perhaps for the twenty dozen academics who can recite this pomo stuff without cracking a grin or falling into a spiral of snake tail eating that disappears into a black hole. And so we get books and reviews of books about the intricacies of what it means to walk into a barbershop and get one kind of 'gaze' and then to walk into a beauty shop and get another. Whoa! Seriously variant vibes, dude. It could like totally stress you out. Like especially if you are like a big black dude with dreadlocks and not really like that Predator dude or Samuel L Jackson on the inside. And like what if on top of that you were gay? Whooaaa! Duuuude. That's deep.

Or perhaps it's more serious. Maybe the intricate existentials of black manhood are so worthy of study that there should develop an orthodoxy that completely redefines manhood as we know it. Wait. That's called tribalism, and the world has been there and done that. I don't think it has worked out quite so well, at least not to the extent that books about the greatness that was the dignity of Bayard Rustin get under the skin of people who do things.

It seems to me you have two fundamental choices. You can admit that you're an individual and deal with the dissonance, or you could determine to conform into something larger and go with that flow. They are both species of my admonition: Get over yourself. And quit trying to generate new a new ethics of thoughtcrime.

Gaze. Sheesh.

OK now I am done being snarky and I ask the serious question. How many times, and against what species of evil should any man be redefined? How much existential space will newly recognized forms of manhood carve out and where are they going to go? The answer lies at the extremes - those of birth and death. When you deal with that fundament of humanity at a level that matters, then you're saying something. The problem is twenty dozen pomo academics aren't saying anything.

As an old man in the classic sense of being closer to 60 than to 30 years of age, I am prone to study military history. I want to know the extent to which certain things run men to gather in actual crowds of thousands to work in concert, and I am rather dumbfounded by the notions that academics and scholars who write books that influence thousands might think of themselves as leaders in a similar sense, especially in these times where the currency of relativism is high. It seems to me that nothing cheapens life like the idea that everyone is so freaking different that they need their own existential space. On the contrary - it is only when you get underneath all of that delicate self-actualization that you recognize your coghood in the gearworks of humanity. This is exactly why I defy the exotic ramifications of post-modernism.

Whatever Happened to Trackback?

Since I've bombed comments from Cobb, I expect to get trackbacks instead. I've gotten them and I'm happy.

But.

As I go around the web searching for publicity, something well shy of the second oldest blog profession of link whoring, I've noticed something new. For lack of a better word, it's shotgunning. Instead of linking mutually between bloggers, many bloggers have decided to cast their fate to any number of publicity engines. Some of these I know, most of them are completely alien. I think this signals the death of trackback, or perhaps some vote that it never worked. I like trackback, in fact I'm devoted to it, but I wonder...

At the top of these publicity engines are things we know. That would include Digg, Reddit, Delicious, RSS. Then there are some which are vaguely familiar, like Bloglines and Fark. But what the hell are Blinklist, Newvines, Shoutwire and Spurl?  Simpy? Mr. Wong?

It seems to me that if you give your users a choice of this pub engines to register their liking of your blog post you disperse, rather than concentrate your readership. I cannot imagine that this is anything more than link inflation. I mean you'll need a search engine to look through all of those registries of your blog to find you blog. And then what are the chances that helps you towards knowing?

There is a really hilarious and yet insightful parody over at The Onion. It's this video about police detectives sorting through some ungodly number of digital artifacts to figure out that a fire was not arson. But of course real detectives don't have to actually do that - they reduce the number of things they have to think about and they blow off the superfluous.

Police Slog Through 40,000 Insipid Party Pics To Find Cause Of Dorm Fire

But what are we encouraged to do that gets us to the bottom line? It seems to me that broadcasting and expecting 'the wisdom of crowds' to do the work of detectives is a lazy, brute force tactic. It's the direct opposite of scholarship. Trackbacks represent the investment of a bit of detective work by one blogger to another. That's valuable. Link ubiquity is not, it's just an enabler for search engines.

One thing that I am doing that is different is publicizing through Twitter - but that's because I hand pick those I follow, and I presume that others do the same - ie they handpick me. I'm registered at bit.ly. We'll see how that goes.

Richard Burton the Schmoe

As part of my American cultural recovery project, I am making sense of classic movies as well as rock & roll. My reading is sorta temporarily on hold due to an attack of technology paranoia.

In my Netflix queue I am finally getting rid of some movies. The latest two were real disappointments that in the end I found to be unwatchable. The first of these was Brief Encounter.

Now I can imagine that during those days the star power of Richard Burton and Sophia Loren must have been something, but this British romance has all the horsepower of a Reliant Robin. After about 40 minutes of tedium I just turned the damned thing off. Aside from the idea that either of those two, given who they were, could play coy, I now see what the essential problem is. This film was a remake of one made in 1945. A post-war thing made a lot more sense. Anyway. Boring.

The second was unwatchable because the acting of Richard Burton was so incongruous. This was Look Back in Anger. Here you have Burton as the life of the party, sorta jazz musician, who comes home to a rat trap and... well it was rather bizarre. The sort of madness inside the character just made no sense, Burton's fury was so unhinged and so instant and his remorse so thin that you wonder what it was that kept him from hacking people to bits. I may be speculating, but here's my theory. This was supposed to be a movie about a black jazz musician whose uncontrollable rage fueled self-destruction but they couldn't get Poitier to do it - and so it ended up being the Bird Parker story recast in British colors - the movie that couldn't be made before there was a Forrest Whitaker. Anyway. Burton was way too scary and I had zero sympathy for anybody in the whole slimepit. I turned it off.

So Burton is 0 for 2 at playing schmoes in my book.

Never Forget Peripherals - The Edge is the Center

Just so I'm on record for saying so, the next revolution after the cloud is done, is with peripherals. There's going to be a lot of fabulous interest and I think some very good money to be made as computing goes utility. But never forget peripherals. I'm going to make an example of three.

1. Guitar Hero
The gaming industry was set on fire with the introduction of the Wii, but I poohed it and I was right. My point was that the most intense gaming experiences are not done with broad sweeping motions and that the people who would be the finest gamers in the world would have a lot more in common with musicians than with athletes or soldiers. In other words, eye-hand coordination in a gaming world can and should be reduced to your hands and fingers, not you arms and legs. As exciting as Project Natal is, I'm not sure I want to hold my arms out for an hour playing a driving game with an imaginary steering wheel.  In fact what revolutionized the gaming industry that is still delivering is the creation of the guitars and drums for Guitar Hero. In this you have an intermediate complexity of eye-hand in a dumbed down instrument and it has generated new leagues of fans.

2. iPhone
You already know what's great about the iPhone. But now just think of it as the thing that makes everything that AT&T does seem interesting. In fact, you could sell AT&T on the basis of what the iIPhone puts into your hand. And now it is widely known that AT&T is bashed because it does support everything the iPhone does.

3. Nike & Oakley
Huh? Actually these two are the tip of the iceberg. What you really need to understand is all Nike and Oakley do are make gear. But the attention they pay to the detail of the their products is extraordinary. You don't know or care about the infrastructure that enables them, you care very much about what you touch and what touches your skin. These are high touch vendors. They are outfitters. Outfitters enable the outdoors. Without the Nike shoes, nobody cares about the running track.

This is all about gear. It's about user interface. When it comes to networks, the edge is the center. Delivery networks are plumbing and like the New York City water supply, you need to accomplish massive engineering perfection ahead of time, but people spend the money on the sink, the faucet, the Jacuzzi down the tail, and it will be the beauty of the peripherals that increase the demand for the network. That will be the business driver.

The Law of Large Numbers

The law of large numbers insures that all probabilities become certainties in this business.

--Aaron Kimball

Aaron Kimball's business is big data. I'm doing my hedge study which is tedious, paranoid, and arrogant, but I think necessary. And I've come across the beauty of this law which applies in many ways to other way of thinking of complex systems, especially as regards to their robust operation. 

What's The Name of the Law?

It comes as something of a surprise that for all the noise being made by the Administration over executive pay, that the rule that would have saved us from all this economic damage apparently still hasn't been made into a law.

Following this story, the big deal is revealed to be a huge flaw in the system. It's a flaw that you'd think doesn't require a law, but apparently does - and fixing the law is simple. Just make it. You wouldn't think, for example, that you'd need a law that says don't stick a fork in the toaster.

The CDS market collapse was best described as taking out four fire insurance policies on the same house. It makes the burned house more valuable than the standing house, unless you're the fool who didn't know you insured the same house twice. Once you allow CDS payout value to be greater than the value of the insured item, it's crazy time. There are a thousand ways to make false profits, until the music stops.

Fix it.

Tibet vs Ohio

Where's the Spreadsheet?

At the Urban New Media Conference, I didn't get a chance to make a specific point that I would have liked to. And I realize that the bottom line may simply be, on the radio side of it, there's just no money in it. But what I didn't get a chance to hear was the political interest/excuse in it. What is 'it'? It is publishing budgets in progress.

If you live in California, you know what it's like to listen to the local radio stations tell you how the State Assembly and the Governor are going back and forth and back and forth on budget negotiations. Then Arnold and Karen Bass will come out and say that they're just days away from a deal...

But where's the spreadsheet?

I am interested in the ability of local online communities in partnership with local media to sustain a high quality discussion about political and economic events of primary interest to them. Participatory democracy at the local level needs to take place on line in partnership with radio leveraging synergy. I love listening to guys like John & Ken here in Los Angeles, but I want to check the facts myself. It's good to get caught in the emotion of politics, but in the end you need to analyze things for yourself. That can happen real quick when you seen budget numbers and who promises what.  Consider the following:

(OK Don't) - I don't have a spreadsheet insert thingy here and I should be the expert but putting one in isn't worth doing to sustain the point. The point is simply that right now you have to imagine budget line items in the rows and partisan constituencies in the columns. And at in every moment of public budget negotiations until the end, all of the columns are multiple until they are negotiated down to one.

The problem is, of course, that we don't get to see the starting positions and how far in which direction they go as the negotiations progress. We're stuck with the bottom line.

I'd like to change that. Wouldn't you?

If You Build It...

If you can stand the music of Shovelman you might find something of interest among the odd, whimsical and clever devices to be found at the Maker Faire. Their theme 'Remaking America' is more fanciful than likely but who could possibly be against whimsy?

I am not and will not stand against whimsy, but does this leach over into foolishness? I think it depends entirely on the intent of the inventors, which I started to consider when I looked at the steam powered scooter. Putting myself into the shoes of a steampunk mechanical engineer, I immediately thought how cool it might be to rev up my scooter and have nothing but safe and harmless steam come out. I'm sure you could pull a lot of greenie chicks with that move, unlike some slick dude in Chevy v8 even whose hair represents unsustainable dependence on foreign oil. But then on second thought, what's my steam deally using to create the heat?  Well, I obviously couldn't burn coal, or fuel oil, or gasoline - maybe propane?

Yeah propane! Surely the accumulated bourgie biases against the hickness of propane can't survive an onslaught of enlightened conservationism. Well, my bet is that they'd collide and the end products of the reaction will be obscurity and mumbling. After all, propane has been a clean burning, cheap fuel for decades as any redneck or blackneck camper or upscale cabin owner knows.

But there's not only propane, there's also methane aka natural gas. Both can be compressed or liquified for easier transportation, and of course the technology for doing so it old, boring and reliable. And there's nothing sexy or sophisticated about it, well, not like steampunk scooters. So you'd have to hide your canister of CNG behind some facade to make the chicks think that the whole thing is run just on steam alone. Might as well add some patchouli oil to make your steam fragrant and claim that the air that goes in is dirtier than the air that comes out. That's the line that always kills 'em. To choose between methane and propane, well. That would be a commercial and scientific decision, something that has to make sense of markets and the dynamics of combustion. In other words, the rationality of making a truly rational choice for the heat source of your green steam would have to rely on dealing significantly with physical and economic reality. Exit whimsy.

Of course there aren't going to be any mass production of these clever devices. I find it unlikely that the Maker Faire is a real showcase for emerging technologies that would actually change America. Unfortunately for the clever dudes and dudettes around that way, there are other people with similar knowledge who are employed in organizations that tend to master markets as well as science. They are 'trapped' in the industrial complex of America engaged in this thing called 'business'.

Growing up as I did on the Left, it was a very hard lesson to learn that there was a difference between products and technologies. A product, you see, has to arrange and prioritize the assemblages of technologies in response to or anticipation of demand in markets. Unlike a Faire, where you pay to be an exhibitor of cool technology, a market pays you. Unlike punks and geeks, the market is not impressed that something can be done with technology. The market always selfishly asks, what's in it for me?

But markets can be twisted, and given enough disposable income and idiotic memes, people can be persuaded to demand all sorts of whimsical devices which are thus transformed into profitable products. Sometimes a better, more rational and efficient product comes along, and sometimes you're stuck with AT&T or Oldsmobile and you can't easily get out of your commitment. This is called buyer's remorse, something teenagers and wealthy weirdos basically don't understand. And so niche markets are maintained and everybody's happy.  We know that teenagers with disposable income and showoffs with bank help to maintain the myth that 'if you build it, they will come', and it's a nice myth to have. But really, try to remind your kids exactly what a Faire is.

Fun With Green Dweebs

Understand that such people would demand that their sacrifice be shared. But more interesting is how the BSers are giving these poor slobs a confirmation of the extent of the problem they perceive. They go through the experience, feel vindicated/inspired and they turn into the BSers. It's viral.

Fareed Zakaria: First Look. Meh.

I'm somewhat disappointed so far in my reading of Fareed Zakaria's latest book, the Post American World. It's leaving me with a bit of that feel I got from Maury Pauch. I know this is supposed to be invigorating and I get the appeal, but I'm really not learning anything here.

Zakaria is chock full of facts. In fact, the more I listen to him, the more I feel like I'm reading a journalist and not an historian or a foreign policy expert. And that's the difficulty. His narrative doesn't hold together in either an inspiring, challenging or theoretically coherent manner. Mind you, he's not as bad as Friedman, but it's rather the same. 

My problem is that Zakaria's frames of reference go back and forth somewhat arbitrarily, and the ideas and events he chooses to highlight to support his points (though he actually makes few) are flattened to equal significance. They come together like talking points for a level of discourse that falls greatly shy of authority. In other words, he'd be a great blogger. 

The 'sphere however, or at least the slice under my admittedly limited surveillance, doesn't say much about him or his work. So even I don't have a good deal of comfort in knowing that what I sense is objective. Nevertheless his contribution is substantial, for a journalist. The difficulty is that it has to come out as it does which is in my estimation rather scattershot, but I think that is the unavoidable consequence of his attempt to handle such a huge sweep. And so I think Zakaria is likely to become one of those futurists that Niall Ferguson says needs to study what historians need to know about their own biases. He's likely to be one of those unfortunate souls reality force to eat his words

In one of his opening chapters, for example, Zakaria speaks of the nation state as a relatively new construct and that the US' position as one accentuates, in its decline, the fundamental understanding that non-state actors, ethnicities and religions will play a greater role in the future. He doesn't seem to bother to suggest that nation-states will fight back and ultimately until such time that all these other entities grow standing armies and central banks, all of their political desires will be little more than noise. But then within a dozen pages he counts as a weakness the very insularity of Americans. 

Americans rarely benchmark to global standards because they are sure their way must be the best and most advanced. The result is that they are increasingly suspicious of this emerging global era. There is a growing gap between America's worldly business elite and cosmopolitan class on the one hand and the majority of the American people on the other. Without real efforts to bridge it, this divide could destroy America's competitive edge and its political future.

and finally,

We are the only country in the world to issue report cards on every other country's behavior. Washington DC has become a bubble, smug and out of touch with the world outside. 

And nobody else is smug, insular and unconcerned with - oh say Western Civilization, which is the point of this thesis, or so it seems to me. But making the world safe for an intellectual elite - those people who actually understand that global climate changes are mostly driven by the new 800 coal fired plants to be in the hungry BRIC world - is nobody's priority. So that puts Zakaria in the unfortunate position of what I think the rock group System of a Down calls 'self-righteous suicide'.  Zakaria notes that there is no New World Order, but he doesn't seem (as of yet) appear prepared to throw any moral or civil harnesses around the ambitions of emerging nations. The G7 is stupid and arrogant for putting together a Kyoto Protocol that doesn't take into primary consideration the energy needs for the economic boom in the BRICs. Yeah, so what are the BRICs for preparing to unleash pollution hell on the world just to do what we already did? 

Which brings me to my own interesting observation. As citizens we understand that we must defend and protect civil rights and behave with civility in order to be civilized. Note how the following sentence makes no sense. As globalens we understand that we must defend and protect global rights and behave with globality in order to be globalized. Exactly. It makes no sense. But this does. As humans we understand that we must defend and protect human rights and behave with humanity in order to be humanized. 

Now it's awfully cosmopolitan to visit China and marvel at the astonishing creation of the Great Wall, and surely a journey to the great city of Benares has its spiritual rewards. But neither of those places generated that thing we understand to be human rights or humanism. And it seems to me that if we are to give license to there being anything better about this post American global future, all of that depends upon those emerging powers to take responsibility for humanism - to build upon what Britain and the United States have built as superpowers. This is not a standard that I percieve Zakaria to be much interested, fascinated as he is by decoupling of the Sierra Madre treasures of the third world. Yes they do have to show us their steenking badges. Let's see if he gets that. 

The long arm of history does not necessarily bend towards justice, but it should. I worry that Zakaria's emerging world wants little more than payback and that fact bothers him little. 

Donavon F

Saint Rocke used to be a bar called the Pitcher House. It's on the border between Hermosa and Redondo and these days the property is looking very upscale. A combination of circumstances landed me there last night in the presence of a fabulous band.

I do a lot of rock recovery these days in my spare time on Rockband, but I don't have the right vocabulary for Donavon Frankenreiter. He plays rhythm acoustic and sings. There's a lead and a bassist, a keyboardist on the left who plays a rusty trumpet, and a dude who makes that one snare, kick, hihat and three cymbals rock like a whole rhythm orchestra. As they played through a set of at least a dozen songs, his sound and attitude felt exactly like he looks. Here is a surfer dude gone scraggly with his acoustic guitar cranking out mellow tunes in front of the fire at the end of the day looking like a sun drenched Tom Selleck with ink. He's doing simple songs without any drama that you feel like you should already know and he's leaning over the mic and for a moment there you're feeling groovy like you're staring right back into the best of the 70s. Then towards the end of the set you're saying, wow this is actually phenomenal. These guys could rock millions, and on their best songs they sound like a combination of Wild Cherry, Jim Croce, Chicago, The Bee Gees and The Rolling Stones. 

The band is perfectly gelled together and they are like uncrisp jazz. They play a combination of upbeat straight ahead folk rock that occasionally gets funky. The lyrics are thoughtful and simple - this is a pure band without pretense, a round talent that is not extreme in any direction but radiates a mellow kind of Eddie Rabbit energy without sounding pop-like. They are very California and at some point I expected them to do a blues song but they didn't. So the entire feel was familiar but unique. I also felt like I would expect them to do a cover tune but as far as I could tell they were perfectly original. Needless to say they rocked the joint and the girls were all dancing with each other right up front in the SRO crowd of a 150, always a good sign. 

I get the feeling that he could blow up or that he could stay exactly the same. He's authentically self-contained in the way that the best Californians are. He has a complete mellow style and he's clean. That's the thing that struck me about the evening. Anyone who knows the old Pitcher House with its hung junk, foosball and sawdust remembers how hacked and beer smelly the joint used to be. If you just glanced at DF without stopping to listen you would think that his fit and style, but there's nothing degenerate about him or his band. They're older than young and they're not stupid, clowny or showy. Like they weren't up there trying to prove they had the energy to move the crowd. They just played the music and it happened. 

Lee Archer Once Again for D-Day

Lee has always been a hero. This may be the last time we see him on TV.

Coming to Some Conclusions on the Old School Project

For the past 15 years or so, my invisible partner in crime has been Dr. Lester K. Spence. He is, professionally, what I have been on a part-time basis for the past oh say 20 years. Actually more like 25 which would be about 1984 - yeah that's about right. That is a compelled investigator into the dynamics of and prospects for black politics as a righteous participant seeking improvements to American civic life. His path has taken him through a doctorate in political science, mine through profligate writing and Socratic dialog in all sorts of computer mediated communication spaces. 

Through all my years of attending conferences and seminars and in reading dozens of books on the subjects, I have come to respect his opinion higher than just about anyone. Where I have been skeptical and challenging, he has been thorough, correcting and determined. What I know of him as a person is that he has a much bigger heart than I, and given his powerful analytical ability, he keeps it real and informed with scholarly discipline. So where I can afford to be dismissive and blithe, Spence is my antidote. He knows what's real and I think he has his fingers on the pulse of black politics with an attitude that is appropriately serious and intellectually adequate to the task. 

Since I am no longer interested in Socratic dialog here at Cobb, I have endeavored to do so at a few specific blogs. I haven't mentioned his, and I didn't expect to be there, but that was a mistake. The fact is that I will follow his work until the end. This morning he posted this matter on racial disparities in health care, and in writing my response I have come to some conclusions about all the reasons I have ever dealt with race as a compelling subject in these 25 years, and specifically those of the past six that I have written here at Cobb. 

He begins:

Now where is race in this debate? Melissa Harris-Lacewell asks this question, pointing to disparities in care (black and brown individuals and communities receive poorer care than our white breathren), in health outcomes (black and brown individuals and communities suffer more from a variety of illnesses and maladies). It’s important to note here that these differences cannot solely be reduced to class, although class is an important component. Even controlled for income and education, black life expectancy is lower, black stress levels are higher. Even controlled for class and education, black and Latinos are less likely to get quality care from doctors. But there are actually a number of frontline organizations from the Joint Center, to the Praxis Project, to the Opportunity Agenda, bringing these disparities to light and ensuring that legislation ameliorates them.

Do read the whole thing. The issues of health care are, of course, sophisticated and nuanced. But my response to the racial component does put quite a bit in perspective. 

I conclude: (with some very minor wording changes for clarity)

I think you illustrate very clearly how the dissonance on race makes the smooth edges ragged, and how a lack of an orthodox way of looking at race on any subject matter makes it impossible to achieve a neutral position in dealing with disparities. I think you appreciate how there aren't enough competent social scientists in the world to establish that orthodoxy and nothing seems to defy the oxygen sucking quality of those racial designated hitters. You also clearly see how partisans manipulate this dissonance to their advantage without regard to the moral capacity of their political opponents. Well, Sisyphus, you have adequately assessed the dimensions of your boulder. 

To repeat my angle, it is my contention that the path of integration requires a sort of social mobility that has been enabled by the acceptance of Civil Rights law. And to the extent that Americans are fluid in their identity, there should not be resistance to that social mobility. Or to put it more simply, if it's easy to sell out your race, and race is what's holding you back, then sell out. It seems to me that the integrity of the racial construct is critical for anyone, be they social science subject, majority or minority object, to satisfy the balancing of the racial formula. This integrity is at odds with the implications of racial integration. In otherwords, the actual solution which satisfies the demands of a discrete narrowing of racial gaps (ever the benchmark), requires a sort of nationalist fidelity across all parties. So long as non-white but good is not good enough, perfection by race is the enemy of good.

You see, if you teach to a standard, say high school algebra. There is no way you can suppress the benefit to people who had a headstart unless you make math teaching a zero sum game. So to constantly harp on the gap between those who *obviously* started with some combination of advantages and those who didn't is to beg the question of establishing a zero-sum game. That's the problem here and it appears to be deep and fundamental. You require a racial signifier that cannot be satisfied by achievement, only by parity. Such a standard of 'equality' is the moral equivalent of coveting thy neighbor's house.

If you could do this exclusively in the context of wars on poverty.. it might not be such an odious problem. But it cannot be denied that American poverty lies fairly lightweight when contrasted with world poverty - which relegates all of the moral agitation rather empty. It all sounds like middle class politics to me. We want to live to 84 instead of 72. What a conceit! 

I exaggerate, but the matter of poverty is key. What concerns me is whether or not the aegis of 'black' as in 'up you mighty race' establishes in any broadly accepted context, matters relating exclusively to poverty as was with King's primary agenda. But in the American reality of the majority of black Americans being middle class, how do you make 'black' issues, dysfunctional and poverty and indigence issues with moral suasion considering the existential ties to so many millions who don't suffer at the base levels of Maslow? Because if the politics of hiring legions of social scientists is not about all about alleviating objective human misery, it's nothing more or less than middle-class racial spoils politics. That's hardly fitting of anyone claiming moral authority for their project. 

I've been asking the question, 'who owns black?' for six years or so, with the premise in mind that a post-black-nationalist adjudication of flaws could redirect black American energy onto a more righteous path. But I have found blackness itself too postmodern and without a useful orthodoxy. In the end, race being a social construct, it is too subject to both regressive obstinance and clever manipulation to be useful to a moral cause, precisely because it is so politically fungible. The only absolute with regard to race is its history. With every day that passes, that history becomes larger and more immovable. It cannot be reformed. It can only be abandoned.

In some ways this is not a particularly new sort of conclusion. I'm the guy who writes a new 'the end of my blackness' essay every 4 years, only to find myself like Michael Corleone, pulled back in again. But then again, if I thought the cycle was endless, I'd be raising my kids much differently than I am. I am of the sort who expects race to be trumped and rather than studying anti-racism (which I gave up long ago) I study the trumping cards. This is not so easy, not because of what race is, per se, but because determining the appropriate context for individuals in Western society is difficult. I'll be talking about that over the next week or so with an eye out for what I'm calling Adler's Dichotomy. I've been a part of the set that asked for abandonment of 'white' identity as a solution. Now I see that black identity is equally doomed, and I see how the perpetuation of these ideas of identity can be managed and the extent to which they corrupt Christian and Western civilization. How much? Enough to merit dropping, but not as a precondition to progress.

I am Old School. That history cannot change. I inherit a great deal. But I also inherit and have cultivated a powerful sense of individuality, modernism and critical detachment. These figure large in my desire to advance myself and my family in this society and in the world.  These things about me force me to study more, think more, write more, do more than fit into prefabricated buckets of identity. To the extent that I am a writer and I experiment with my imagination, I am something of an elusive figure - it is the price I pay every time I try to describe or defend myself. And I struggle with a deep sense of isolation without the consequent satisfaction of absolute self-confidence. But that's just me and it's not about me. Or at least it wasn't as I championed and promoted the Old School. Maybe in the future it will be more about me. 

Karma Trekking & Karma Police

There's a cat on Wealth TV (yeah I know, but they have great HD camera work) named Damon Redfern who narrates an interesting show called Karma Trekkers. Although he is not as bad as Jeff Smith, he's something of liberal lapsed Christian Brit searching for original cultural and spiritual meaning out in the great wide world. Eating and photographing your way across the planet is an excellent way to live if you don't have any kids and your wife is the production crew, but watching KT is beginning to unnerve me. I'm wanting to turn down the volume, expect the music is good. How do I know all these things about Redfern? It has only taken a couple shows for him to reveal it in his off comments.

I caught my first view of the show long ago but only watched it all the way through this week. It was his second part of a two parter on China, and I really enjoyed it. Primarily because both I and Redfern were clear that no amount of documentary was about to capture all of what China is. So we were both happy, I think, to take in what little we could without coming to any conclusion except - wow I didn't know that, hey what is that, gee isn't that fascinating? 

Then he went to Malta. I like Malta, a lot. My biases start showing up through my attraction to the military history of the place and the role of the Catholic church. Then he went to Ireland, or was it Scotland? I must confess that I only watched a portion of that show as he started talking with the Druid chick and thinking about leprechauns and fairies. It actually wasn't such a bad show - his conversations with the historian was very good, as was his conversation with the royal dude at Malta. In fact, if he had more of these conversations and did a two hour show, I think it would be a great improvement. But probably not as appealing to those who are apt to follow in Redfern's footsteps.

Which brings us to Burma. It was the Burma show that rather unnerved me. I can't imagine myself talking about the beauty of these thousand temples and the unchanged skyline and the same train in operation since the days of the Raj without dealing more directly with the entire question of 'Myanmar'. And then he actually, actually spent a good amount of time looking for a fortune teller. In every way it seemed to me that Redfern must have made a conscious effort to avoid speaking of the obvious, which is that the people of Burma have suffered from a severe lack of modernization. Why? Because the military junta that renamed the country were colossal screwups and among hyper-inflated economies, Burma set records. And then suddenly the entire romance of Karma Trekking came crashing down under the weight of a thousand liberal stereotypes. Now it was just longing pictures of cute children and of Redfern thoughtfully scribbling in his journal and eating rice with his fingers and trying not to disrespect the local customs.

Yike.

Of course without Redfern as the tall bearded Western barbarian, like Clavell's Anjin-san, contrast and the struggle for recognition of what truly is cannot be made. By being a pliant tourist, or rather what I interpret to be something of a signatory to a speak-no-evil code of multiculturalist tourism, Redfern is in the awkward position of being almost superfluous to the camera work. Thus Karma Trekking needs its companion show which shows the military and political history as well. Very difficult to do with just one host, and likely to cause problems with the issuance of visas as well. 

The show must go on. So let's all take it light, neh?

--

Thinking of Redfern's observational dilemma brings me back home to the the states and the difficulty posed by the emergence of Obama's presidential narrative. It is difficult because it has little to do with black Americans as we know them, which brings into question exactly how we know black Americans (or not). The entire difficulty I am having with black politics, or those sentiments that could pass a lazy media's definition of politics, is how it too evades economic sense. 

An entire generation of so-called black leaders made mistakes similar to post-colonialists all around the world, which was to try to moderate between capitalism and communism without fully grasping the fundaments of either. But in that moderation was an implicit understanding that the politics of meaning and of identity were more important. And so for the sake of Negro unity and subsequently black unity, it was assumed that economic progress would automatically follow the reconstructed people. But when it came to truly addressing how that was to be accomplished, there were no thoughtful plans. And so we are faced with an elaborate 'black politics' that makes no economic sense, doing little more than repeating brain-dead platitudes like 'when America catches cold, black America gets pneumonia' and other such simpleminded coalmine canary analogies. Black America is economically weak by default, the default of the weakness of any economic thought in what passes for black politics.

And yet there are any dozen karma trekkers as well as black karma police who have a studied romance with black American spirituality, music, and food among our various celebrated cultural tourist attractions. And like Redfern, they can make, with their cameras and thoughtful poses, quite splendid documentaries without any mention our elephantine economic disgrace. 

The karma police are, of course, those discredited black leaders who attempt to ride herd over our political and cultural capital - those who would serve as the gatekeepers to black authenticity be it cultural, spiritual or political. Yes, political. It's all of a piece the way I see it. But it's all of a small piece and I don't get too excited about it. My blog and perspective is just drips of Chinese Water Torture to those who try to corral, which at one time included me. The inducements to speak for and lead a race are mighty, but it's a thousand times harder that those who pretend to have done so would ever dare to admit. It might be done from Wiemar, but only if the economic timing is right, and this is something all black leaders have lacked. 

I am not suggesting that all that is needed is some economic genius to sally forth and make things right. If it were so, then Earl Graves and his sons would have done so long ago. Rather I am suggesting that some general repetition of the drumbeat of ever increasing economic sophistication is key to the continuing evolution of liberty in black America. It cannot happen otherwise. The identity well is dry despite the harping of the karma police. 

--

The trekking for and policing of karma are profitable enterprises. They surely will continue to be. But they are purposefully blind to the greater economic forces at work in this world. That's only OK if you're a tourist.

Elsewhere: field negro: Does "our" culture discourage wealth building?

Ivan Van Sertima: Dead

There is a small crowd of intellectuals in my head who are likely to pass from the scene unnoticed except for some devolved minsunderstanding of the nuance of their complaint. In a world of baller bands signalling logo-wise the exhortation of the famous cycler to LIVESTRONG how can the work of Ivan Van Sertima compete? I don't think it ever will. But it's difficult for me to say that's categorically a bad thing.

Van Sertima was, of course, the biggest of the touring intellects on the old black nationalist college tour. He, the author of, They Came Before Columbus and various other lesser known revisionist histories, was the benchmark against which many undergraduates measured their black consciousness. "We came to America not as slaves but as masters." Gets towards the meat of his oevre which was to give black self doubt some authentic scholarly research in support of ideas that prove that Africans were not all the retards of White Supremacist myth.

Van Sertima unlike many who followed him was significantly dignified and coherent. He occupied the middle realm of black existential coaches. Very few people followed his career path as an historian and anthropologist which demonstrates the great irony of his appeal. Yet almost all of us recall his gift of the recognition of the Olmec head. It's African. Or more to the qualified point it is African enough. Because whether or not you buy into Van Sertima's scholarship, you cannot deny that he was the right man at the right time in the development of black social capital. Before him, you might find men such as John Hope Franklin, C. Eric Lincoln and C. L. R. James. People vaguely recognized by our generation as living and having something scholarly to do with the me-centrism of blackness, but not up close and personal - not in our faces or our media. They wrote those big old books that nobody ever made us read, learn and get tested on. Following Van Sertima was a class of Afrocentrists who continued the soul-lifting exhortations of African greatness, but didn't really bother to write large, deep or often. The likes of Jawanza Kunjufu, LeGrand Clegg and Frances Cress Welsing were greatly derivative of the respect built up by their antecedents. 

Of the lot of these public intellectuals, I preferred Naim Akbar the most. He, unlike the others, was a trained psychologist and dealt with the disorders of black existential dilemmas directly. He needed no racial conspiracy theories, no confrontation with academic power structures or dichotomies of sun people and cave people to deal confidently with those whose need to spend student body money brought them to campus after campus during the 80s and 90s. 

Van Sertima was therefore, right in the middle of our more radical roots, bringing forth a controversial subject with academic credibility on a matter of import that is no longer important. He raised more eyebrows than he raised the race, but was just quite enough Sidney Poitier not to get dismissed. In retrospect, I suppose that it was important that we saw him speak in his unidentifyably sophisticated accent and saw him not get assassinated. He proved that a black man could be scholarly, move around America at will and not be destroyed by anything other than lack of market share. He figured largely in the the weave of the black politics that was, or what I'm now calling the collection of sentiments that was our political attitude. You will hear this echoed in all mentions of him. 

The legacy of Van Sertima is certainly lost. There will be, in our future economies, no sophisticated analysis of the content of African influence in the cultures of the Americas and no need for it. All will be urban, suburban, exurban and indigenous, with the indigenous end rounding down to ever smaller fractions. How ancient cultures came to be will not figure large in their wills to power. In America, the authenticity of race and ethnicity have been deboned by actions of affirmation. Neither La Raza nor the Afrocentrics can withstand the symbolic power of their magical exemplars. All that remains of racially charged and overfreighted anthropology is... well anthropology.

This may be bemoaned by those who studied the academic war between Bernal and Lefkowitz, but only a few of us remember that. And surely there are several handfuls of tenured blackademics who remain to crank that old wheel. But I think an honest assessment of the passing of Van Sertima will close the door on the black consciousness chapter of political revisionist history. 

Seinfeldian Observations on Indefinite Articles

An article is a word that combines with a noun to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun, and may also specify the volume or numerical scope of that reference. The articles in the English language are the and a (the latter with variant form an). An article is sometimes called a noun marker, although this is generally considered to be an archaic term.^{[1]
-- Wkipedia (June 2009)}

This morning I watched the Spousal Unit remove several tubes of toothpaste from their packaging, and so I found myself reading instructions.

Best used if squeezed from bottom.

Why is it that instructions don't use articles? Assembly instructions especially use this clipped sort of English that never uses the word 'the' or very many prepositions either. It's fodder for jokes. You can't tell whose bottom or which bottom needs a good squeeze. Are the Aquafresh people telling us that we need to be more sexy in more ways than one? Is it not enough to use the toothpaste for minty bright smiles, but we have to squeeze someone's bottom as well? Or are we supposed to put it in our bottoms and squeeze from there?

My first inclination was to think that in the bad old days before electronic publishing (now there's a term nobody cares about using any longer) that access to variable spaced fonts was limited, and it was the prohibitive cost of having instructions printed up that forced and economy of words. If so, then why would we continue the practice today? Surely nobody has any love for the brevity of such English. Instructions are generally a source of great anxiety and frustration. Next to Legalese, Instructionese is probably the most dreaded dialect of English. I can't imagine that they do the same trauma to the syntax of other languages. Or maybe this was just some huge practical joke by Scandinavians when they realized they had a market for unassembled furniture over here in the States.  Hey Lars, what's the English word for 'dowell'. I'll tell you only if you leave out the word 'the' in all the copy. Ha ha, that's really funny Lars, let's do it anyway. Yah, let's.

The French would never do such a thing. They've sexualized all their nouns. There's no such thing as an 'it' in France. 'It' is either a he or a she. I suppose that's why more often than not, the French don't get it. But at least their instructions are easy on the eyes, not that they build anything. Haha. Wait, do we like the French. Let me check the instructions.

Insert Obama into White House
Visit Leno
Insult Queen
Blame Bush
Cheat GM Debtholders

No I didn't see anything for the French and I'm fairly certain that I've only got a particular version of the Obama instruction set and not the exhaustive collection. But you see how this brevity can be very annoying and lacking in nuance. It's very computer-like and unlike the sort of English we actually want people to be able to speak.

What to do, what to do? 

I suppose we could agitate for a law that reconciles this bonehead English with the version educational types find useful for their trade. You know, with the appropriate obeisance to French postmodern philosophers. So instead of 'Best used if squeezed from bottom', we might have the following fine print:

The main theme of of this empowering essay on dialectic discourse is not situationism as such, but neosituationism. Therefore, if postsemiotic patriarchialist theory holds, the application of liberating anterior pressures is the subtext of choosing between prematerialist feminism and the capitalist paradigm of renewed oral reality. “Society is impossible,” says Sartre. So It could be said that Bailey would favor a Rousseauian cum-Hobbisan pan-liberation of all pressures simultaenously resulting in the most empowering externalities.

I mean what's the point of having small fonts if you can't use them to put intellectually stimulating messages on tubes of toothpaste? But maybe that's a bit of overkill.

Nevertheless, as I've said before, the Obamacrats (because everything is ultimately fodder for my brain-dead politicking) find solace in sophist[icated] language. We can rest easy because their hubris is somewhat limited. Since they honestly believe they are the only ones with language capable of communicating real knowledge, they haven't bothered to dictating the form of ours. Still enthralled by the twin sirens of math and science they haven't bothered to apply real discipline to their own Arts and Letters and thus are unaware of their own solopsis, yet confident enough in it to throw empty barbs at those enamored of common sense and plain talk.

Now on the other hand, especially among those who dig drivers and shooters, gearheads from the Right who like things that go boom or vroom, there is a certain obsession with technospeak. This is, as we should all readily admit, the only reason we are attracted to Chloe O'Brien. And we are therefore responsible for the meatheaded dialog of men in black fast roping for helos. How many heartpumping moments have had as their climactic moment the final declaration of 'Clear!'? I'm not talking about... well I guess I'm talking about defibrillation too. But that would not be a heartpumping moment, at first. I was actually extending the SWAT metaphor over fences, through batterrammed doors, behind flashlights and weilding MP9s with ACOG scopes. Hup. Hup. Hup. Clear! Not even so much as a noun in that fragment.

I suppose that on our end we have Tom Cruise to blame for starting the romance. How many people are as culturally challenged as to shop for chicks in desert bars via the lyrics of the Righteous Brothers? You may very well be named Iceman for all that Neanderthal expression. I'm trying hard not to show it but baby I know it, we've lost that loving feeling for complete English sentences. By the way, here's the finger for the inventor of the Scantron. When will we ever learn that there is no such thing as mass higher education?  

So I am left not knowing whom to blame for the invention and perpetuation of Instructionese. So I will rebel by squeezing my wife's bottom. I'll let you know how it turns out. Not.

The Dirty Clothes Cycle

Much of the American economy is dedicated to the proposition that middle class life should be as convenient as possible. We spend the majority of our moola on getting better quality of the same goods. And so the supply responds with the new and improved. That's been about 67% of our GDP. With any luck, that number will decrease marginally and our savings increase. Marginally though, we still are going to have to figure out a way to issue credit or else the rest of the emerging world will ignore American finance. It's a halfway done deal anyway, but there's still 2012.

Today's little lesson is about the entirely predictable consequences of new and improved consumer cycles. 

I left my clothes in the washing machine too long and they got sour. So I had to wash them a second time. This would happen to you if you happen to be one of those fortunate slobs like me who has so little closet space that there is a specific balance and significant fraction of your clothes that you need to keep in the dirty clothes cycle. 40% of my clothes are hanging in my closet, another 15% in my dresser. Then 25% are in a large box in the garage for the off season. 2% are at the dry cleaners and another 2% have gone into the single sock singularity and will never be heard from again. I do have the advantage of being married, so 0% of my clothes are at various girlfriends houses - this is at a 20 year low from the peak in 1989 of 12%. That leaves about 16% of my clothes in the dirty clothes cycle, adjusting for the specific accounting of the offsite dry cleaning. This is approximately 3 1/2 loads. 

I have a full hamper of dirty clothes, and one full basket of clean clothes that have not been put away. (I was going to say folded & hung, but there's only a 60% chance that they will end up so organized.) I have another load that is wet and in the dryer awaiting my push of the start button, but blogging is so much more interesting. I have an interest in keeping that many clothes in the cycle. I'd have to do more storage, folding and hanging and laundry if I were to reduce my dirty clothes cycle. 

As fascinating as all this is, and I'm sure there are great analogies to monetary policy in there somewhere, it's not the reason I began writing this. Rather the offhanded comment that the Spousal Unit made that since we use Gain, they might not be so sour. Gain is cheaper than Tide and smells green. Not green as in environmentally correct, but as in that urban sense we have of artificial colors and flavors. Gain smells green like Big Red Soda tastes red, and Lysol has a kind of blistering yellow presence. But if I were one of those poor unfortunate souls who wanted to be a scientist for the sake of great discovery, I might have sadly only discvering the inside of a chemistry lab for detergent additives at Proctor & Gamble. Not a bad profession, mind you, but terribly obscure. The career making move for me might be the concocting of some new additive for Gain that would fight the sort of bacteria that gather on clothing after they sit wet in the washing machine for two days. You know, that sour smell. Upping the green smell content might fool us slob husbands and our tidy wives, but to the ethical chemist.. well, he'd know. There's real bacteria in there. And just like with the new class of pump liquid soaps that we now spend five bucks on to wash our hands more clean than brain surgeons and astronauts, there's probably a good sized market for an additional five grams of anti-bacterial active ingredients in your laundry detergent bottle. 

GAIN WITH ANTI-BACTERIAL ADDITIVES !!

Well I wasn't a marketing major, but you get the point.  The new ingredient would change the marketplace and the smartest people would come up with 'reasons' that it needed to be in your detergent - although the breakthrough is operating on the same two principles as ever. A) We can make more profit. B) Your life needs to be easier. It's easier for me to suggest that A gets more obscene than B, but that is an untested assumption. 

Clearly the commies and leftists would suggest that 'A' is the greater sin, or perhaps the root of all evils and the un-Americans and Jihadis tend to believe 'B' is the greatest problem. But I posterize a more colorful palette of thought. In fact I think both are OK so long as they don't reinforce themselves into a cycle worthy of ridicule, like my dirty clothes cycle. The fact that my clothes are in organized disarray and for the sake of my expanded wardrobe, it is in my interest to keep some of them 16% of them necessarily dirty indicates some inefficiency, some excess. 

I'm going to suggest at this moment an 'Asian' or 'third' or 'balanced' way. There is clearly something wrong with the system but nothing wrong with the incentives that power the system. It's just that they are out of balance. Sixteen percent of clothes staying dirty, because I'm too lazy to provide adequate washer -> drier liquidity can generate the weird science of anti-bacterial detergent and the attendent mendacious marketing. Or I could just expand my closet space and reduce the number in the cycle to 10 percent. 

Which solution to this problem I select depends upon my cultural favoritism. I might admire chemists and demand the detergent. Or I might admire carpenters and expand my closet. Or I might admire self-improvement and increase the throughput. Or I might admire child labor and make my kids do it. Or I might admire a revolutionary pose and rant against all parts of the the clothing cycle at once. Down with closets & washing machines! In which case I would probably lose my wife and end up upping the girlfriend stash ratio as well as the fraction of my clothes just somewhere around the house and unaccouted for.  Or I might admire austerity programs and argue for fewer clothes. Or I might dig on Christian charity and give more to the Salvation Army. 

Today's mind poker is this, now that I've done some thinking and listened to Fareed Zakaria's 92Y presentation (the whole thing, not just the YouTube excerpt): What's the point of innovation? I mean, after all it's just a cultural choice in solving something out of balance in the cycle. It doesn't necessarily need to be the detergent chemist who gets the marginal improvement in responsibility. 

Zakaria is of course the author of the instant best-seller The Post American World. His (end of history) position is that there were three great periods in modern history and the second, which is the domanation of America in the 19th and 20th century is coming to a not-too screeching halt, but a halt nonetheless. His oughts, include recognizing the world-altering significance of the BRICs ascendance into the ability to have .. oh 67% GDP consumer economies. He calls it the Rise of the Rest, something smart people will rejoice in. My take on Zakaria is that in preaching to the choir of Bush discontent, he elides a great deal and also makes some fundamental mistakes in his interpretation of the Rise of Rest. I've also bought the Post American book so I'll get into more of that later. But my point stands. If America stands head and shoulders above the rest of the world, why should we be fascinated by the fact that others are learning to stand up? The tallest building, the biggest shopping mall, the largest oil refinery are all outside of America - but that's all so 20th Century. If Argentina is experiencing 8% GDP growth and in 20 years they'll be what California was 10 years ago, why is that a great call for celebration? Unless you're Brazilian. I say what happens in Brazil stays in Brazil, and I don't necessarily have to have a conniption simply because Brazilians have washing machines and now participate in the global household chemicals market. 

Deeper still is the matter of American exceptionalism, which I say still counts for plenty. Zakaria himself admits that nobody should be overly concerned about China's authoritarian communism because the model is doomed to fail. Why then should he single out obiter dicta of the head of the Phillipines saying that China is their big brother? The thing is not to be overly impressed with the rest of the world catching up to America but being very concerned about what sustains America beyond what it has accomplished - because if the future of America is to 'ride the Axiom' becoming fat and lazy until the rest of the world becomes habitable... well that's just contrary to the spirit our constitutional democracy nurtured in the first place. 

If we are in an absurd cycle, we have to figure out very specifically what our cultural priorities are. That will become the incrementally profitable economy we Americans will grow. Those cultural values will clash in a global market when 16% of something looks absurd. So ahead of us lies a greater war than ever because in 50 years the world will have 5 Europes. Maybe that's why they are teaching passivity in school.

A Simple Rhetorical Test

Over on Facebook, I make two paragraph arguments. Sometimes they lead to real discussion, most of the time I'm talking out the side of my neck, like everyone else. But as usual, I tend to use rather precise language. I'm a programmer, sue me.

In one of those passing skirmishes, someone mentioned that Europe (rightly) embraces health care insurance. So I added the following simple comment.

I have health care insurance.

You know how to say this in an argument, as if it were no big deal. *I* have health care insurance, so what's the problem? Your adversary Obamacrat will sneer, well of course you do, you're part of the ruling class. The point is that everybody doesn't have affordable health care insurance. 

You may then calmly remind them that the sentiment they just expressed is precisely why we call them Socialist. While you're at it see if you can keep them away from the suggestion that humans have a right to be healthy, or failing that, at least get them to donate blood. 

Star Wars: Game Beats Movie

It was only a matter of time. Note the Jihadi subtext.

Cadillacs, Corvettes, Cabbages & Kings

I have owned a Ford, but never a GM car. I looked at the long infomercial today at the GM site and, well. It's kinda like going to a new church and being greeted. Within a short period of time you start to get the lingo. And after you've heard it for the sixth time it starts to get a little creepy.

I should stay away from analogies because in fact I am rather experienced in reading corporate culture. As a management consultant, I've worked with scores of different companies and I assure you that few things are as deterministic of a company's ability to deal with change as their culture. I look at it from the perspective of technology. Consider email, for example. Does the email at your company work flawlessly? If not, it's a cultural problem. Email technology is 30 years old. There is no reason why yours shouldn't do exactly what it needs to do. It's simply a matter of the culture involved that makes your company ready to solve the email problem or not.

When it comes to GM. Their problem is rather simple. It is that they have never built cars that are irresistible to my generation. Nobody my age or younger wants a Cadillac or a Corvette. I used to rent Buicks back in the 90s but it wasn't until 1998 that GM started to put CD players in their rental fleet. That was 14 years after the invention of the compact disc. I was told, obviously the Buicks are for mature drivers, but the Skylark was the one for young folks. What? A Buick Skylark?  I kept looking at this infomercial thinking, they have absolutely no idea what the next generation of car buyers want. None. You look at Scion and you understand why GM doesn't lead, but follows.

My own guess at why has to do with the fact that GM has forgotten about gearheads - that in the era of hot rods, the cars were cheap and fixable and young people loved them because they added their own stamp. That's why DeSotos didn't survive the 50s. These days Mitsubishi Evos and Subaru WRXs evoke hot rodding. A Camaro? Not with my kids. I think GM thinks they can do Baby Boom numbers in a GenY economy. Retro ain't that chic. 

I'm simply convinced that GM thinks old and wrong. Then again, I knew that when Perot was there. 

No Black News

I'm not the most diligent reporter in the world, but I went searching for black local news and from what I can tell, ain't no more. From this point forward, when it comes to large enough news, if it ain't mainstream, it ain't happening. 

Ever since I did my TVOne show a couple years ago I was intrigued to find why all of the best black produced political, news and information shows were on PBS and NPR. I didn't find a comprehensive answer today but I think the signs are clear. There's no money in it. Independent black news reporting in the next five years will take place on the web or it will not take place at all. In the words of Angela Bofill, it's time to say goodbye.

Today was the first annual Urban New Media Conference put together by Kevin Ross and the USC Annenberg School of Communication. A panel of notables, including, Mark Ridley-Thomas, Rolonda Watts, Rev Mark Whitlock, Karen Slade and Jasmyne Cannick were on hand to give an accounting of the state of things and what gives for the future. The state of affairs for traditional black media is bleak. I mean really, really bleak.

How Bleak?

Ebony and Jet have only one full-time photographer in the country. Shared between them. Radio One lost 60 million last quarter. Black Enterprise is laying off.  There was a loss of about 20% of black radio stations and markets last year. 

I think we are witnessing with black media what we witnessed with black banks. Understand that this is a particular type of extinction. The money just goes to other banks. Just like people from New Orleans just moved to other cities. But there will no longer be, if the current trend continues, no exclusive purchase of black owned media on black news and information. The entire practice, if not the idea, is going up in smoke. 

I don't mean to suggest that this conference was a failure or some exercise in futility. What was palpably noticeable in this gathering was the absence of desperation. People came to this forum with agendas that did not depend on the forum. There was no feel of 'you people are not doing enough for the community'. It was more like, this is what the challenge is, how are you going to deal with it? If there was any one flaw with the conference itself, it was that sharp people in attendence might have liked to get more time to network in the space provided. 

Of the panelists, it was my estimation that Rolonda Watts got it best. Now while my interest isn't in entertainment, she had an instant grasp of the fact that this new media works very well with her brand, and it is a brand down the long tail. There are only so many people who want to see a dance lesson with James Brown, but Rolonda knows that when she streams that video, her crowd is going to be there and she doesn't have to beg a network for airtime. What she has got may not be a mass market phenomenon, but it is a significant number of eyeballs on the web. So even if she were at the very end of her broadcast career, she has a long soft landing by monetizing her properties in the lower cost medium of the internet. You're not going to get huge media buys for those segments, but they're not sitting in a vault gathering dust either. 

Local Radio + Local Blogging

What's of interest to me, whether or not there's a possibility that our economy and markets will support it, is a link between national news production and local news production in the new media. There's a sort of irrelevance black-owned media has at the national level. My example would be Soledad OBrien from CNN is going to gather all the ratings there are to be had when her special airs. Those black news producers on NPR or PBS if and when they get an opportunity will pale in comparison, and yet I am of the strong opinion that shows like Michel Martin's Barbershop would be a big hit if it could be done locally. What's required is a business model that understands the handoff.

Here's what I mean. 

You take a local black radio station like KJLH. Extremely loyal following, but struggling in these tough times just like everybody else. They might not be able to get Colin Powell to drop by the station, but the Congressman from the district? Sure. There is plenty of pull that radio stations have locally, but when their audience wants them to get serious about news and politics they have to use the web the way the Netroots have. 50,000 listeners might be very small for a radio station, but it's huge for a community website and if you had 50,000 registered folks on a community website, there would be no issue that would escape notice. So how does black radio make the handoff to those bloggers and local politicos in the Netroots? That is what this kind of conference can facilitate.

Let me give you an example of the gap. When Jamiel's Law became a hot topic of discussion here in Los Angeles, I blogged about it and I spoke about it on Warren Olney's radio program. I also followed the issue in the online part of the LATimes. I didn't get an opportunity to follow up at any of the hearings or press conferences, but I think I saw pretty much everything that went on online. There was an energized, activated community around a hot political topic of broad interest and of special concern to blacks and latinos in Los Angeles County. A radio station like KJLH could have increased its connection to its audience and brought a great deal of focus and actual representation if they worked the issue in coordination with bloggers and online communities. I can't say that they didn't spend a good deal of time on that issue in their broadcast, but I don't listen. I do watch the web, and I know they weren't here. 

There are no black issues but local issues. The question is, who owns access to those voices? Local radio working in tandem with online communities are the absolute best way. And the sharpest voices online will naturally syndicate themselves in the blogosphere. That's the way it works. Townhall.com is the proof. If black radio doesn't move soon to use their local cred to cover community politics on the web, they will lose the opportunity. It's really the only thing they have.

In 1984 or thereabouts, the Black Business Association, a bunch of us undergrads, took a field trip to Motown in Hollywood. At the time, only Michael Jackson was doing the video thing, but I'm pretty sure this was before his collab with John Landis on Thriller. Motown was getting no play from MTV, but it was made directly apparent to us that this was a business decision of Barry Gordy. He thought videos were an expensive waste of time and told his artists that they would not be getting any support for that. This was whispered to us in desperate tones. Of course the whisperers were right and Gordy was wrong, and the rest is history. If anybody thought black talent would get no play outside of Barry Gordy's Motown, they were dead wrong.

This relates to the web opportunity of local radio stations in this critical way. Now I might be wrong but I don't see how local radio promotes local talent in the music business. You can make money as a radio station playing hiphop and urban contemporary no matter what your location and if you're not playing the top national hits, you can't possibly be making any money. When it comes to listening to Snoop or whomever, I've got DJs at the club, iTunes, Cable, XM/Sirius, the record store, movies, video games, and cellphones. Eight ways into my ear that ain't radio, not to mention concerts and bootlegs at the barber shop. People are going to get their Beyonce on - music in local radio is a me-too game with a declining market share. But in any and every community, the opportunity to be the local personality on the air is a great driving factor and it is something that a local radio station can have a lock on - and while my focus is news and politics, it doesn't have to be that. 

Still, it seems to me that local community activism and politics that does not get involved with an active online community of the local people is just asking to be co-opted by Soledad O'Brien and her editors and producers. They will decide what the coverage of X is going to be when it hits your neighborhood if the local radio station does not make that move to engage the community online. 

An online community of eyewitnesses cannot be pushed around, but they can be accellerated and energized through synergy with local radio. And that's all the good news there is.

The bad news is that black radio in particular will fail to be significant if they don't make the connection. That means that program directors are going to have to find a way to connect with the right sort of online communities and/or bloggers. They're going to have to find a business model that takes advantage of the dynamics of the web and they're going to have to be smart about the way the technology is configured. It's a separate line of business with different cost structures. 

I am of the opinion as I said above, that without this connection, there will be no black news. There will be no community ownership or control of the comings and goings of those communities, because quite frankly, a website that cannot get 100 comment threads on local issues cannot compete with newspapers which are failing anyway. 

Again. If this particular extinction does take place, it will follow the course of everything else. The unique market and social conditions of communities will be subservient to national policies. Now in some ways that's a good thing. Nobody wants a Big Mac Philly Style. They want a Big Mac. But if all you have is McDonald's, then Philly Style disappears. You have to get critical mass in the convergence or else. 

Let me close with one final word about money, and I want to talk to you mister black newspaper editor who's about to get laid off. If your skills are to mean anything, you need to take them to the web. The web will evolve an economic model that will get you paid a new way sooner than your newspaper will evolve an expanding market that will get you paid the old way. Your question is not if, but when. And if your interest and business has been local political and cultural news at the community level, then you have an obligation to do what you do best in this new medium. I would have liked to believe that there were lots of black news producers just twiddling their thumbs trying to get their content into mainstream and large networks - but I'm coming to believe that those people are few and far between. Meaning for black radio stations, maybe 75 news folks in the whole country. Online, that would be a juggernaut organization. But in declining local news markets, it ain't much. 

Watch GM. They refused to downsize, lower their costs, revise their business models and now it's too late. Their hand has been forced. The internet is over 15 years old, there is no excuse. 

Mortimer Adler, First Look

What's more interesting than this interview, aside from the fact that it is rather fascinating, is that Adler's syllogism around the existence of God makes more sense the more you believe in multiple universes.

(im)Proximate Causes

I recently re-listened to the SALT lecture that turned me on to Niall Ferguson, and I've been thinking about what he said about the biases of historians. He suggested that more historians ought to try to understand the lessons of chaos theory. This would enable them to check their bias against tipping points. The bias of historians is that they prefer large events to have large causes. It might not be true that the flap of a butterfly wing on one side of the planet causes Katrina on the other, but such things are possible.

Ferguson:

Chaos theory was something that inspired me when I was writing a book called Virtual History, because I was acutely aware of the sensitivity of political and social systems to initial conditions and the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings can cause the hurricane at the other end of the earth. It's important that historians understand this because historians have their own heuristic biases. Please let me make that clear, one of our heuristic biases is that we really do want great events to have great causes. We hate the idea that a war as big as the First World War could have origins that date back no further than July or June of 1914. We want big origins for big wars. We want the origins to be in at least the 1890s maybe even the 1870s and I have read books that date the origins of the First World War back to 1815 which is a hundred years before it broke out. Now that seems to me to be based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the historical process, that a small misjudgment, and I think there was a small misjudgment on the part of political actors in European capitals in 1914, sufficed to cause four and a quarter years of carnage.

So it was with that in mind that I have studiously avoided the headache of an over-skeptical read of Paul Krugman's pinning 'it' on Reagan, whatever 'it' may be. With this bias I have just stated in mind I will now read it and point out something.

OK. Here's Krugman:

Together with looser lending standards for other kinds of consumer credit, this led to a radical change in American behavior.

We weren’t always a nation of big debts and low savings: in the 1970s Americans saved almost 10 percent of their income, slightly more than in the 1960s. It was only after the Reagan deregulation that thrift gradually disappeared from the American way of life, culminating in the near-zero savings rate that prevailed on the eve of the great crisis. Household debt was only 60 percent of income when Reagan took office, about the same as it was during the Kennedy administration. By 2007 it was up to 119 percent.

All this, we were assured, was a good thing: sure, Americans were piling up debt, and they weren’t putting aside any of their income, but their finances looked fine once you took into account the rising values of their houses and their stock portfolios. Oops.

Now, the proximate causes of today’s economic crisis lie in events that took place long after Reagan left office — in the global savings glut created by surpluses in China and elsewhere, and in the giant housing bubble that savings glut helped inflate.

All this mashes a lot of history into a few short paragraphs. Then again Krugman's NYT column inch real-estate is precious. But I specifically remember Reagan creating 401(k)s, Keoughs and IRAs specifically to address the lack of American household savings. He did so with the specific incentive of making interest earned on them tax free. Don't you remember that?

Somewhere in my pile of writing there is some observation of mine that reckons with the increasing exposure of Americans to credit cards and the stock market. Having been an actual bank teller in a downtown building with 30 foot ceilings, I specifically remember in 1981 that not a lot of ordinary people had credit cards. But they were made available.

I was a college student during most of the Reagan era, and I don't remember any of his speeches being oriented to goad me into being a highly leveraged consumer. At the time, the acknowledged geniuses of the era were Peter Drucker, the originator of the MBA and the authors of Megatrends and In Search of Excellence. I remember those guys, do you? The goat, the financial shitheel of the era was one Danny Wall, the redheaded stepchild who was supposed to be responsible for watching over the Savings & Loan industry. But my memory may be as faulty as Krugman's. The economic 80s, to me, were all about us recognizing with some finality that the Japanese could end up owning America so how were we going to fight back? If some people interpreted that as a Reaganomic exhortation for consumers to get over their heads in debt... well I don't recall it. I do seem to recall that his critics blamed Reagan for spending too much of America's money on Contras and weapons systems and stupid little wars in the Caribbean and in Central America.

Is it possible that all of the critics of Reaganomics were focused on the wrong specifics while Reagan was in office and that only now has Krugman got it right?

Metathought on Google Wave

I saw something last night from Google that made perfect sense to me. It was that the same two brothers who were the brains behind Google Maps are the brains behind the next generation of email. It's called Google Wave and it is a brilliant blending of instant messaging, email, intelligent conversation threading and blog content management. It might have been more but I fell asleep watching the 80 minute video.

It solves a great number of problems that we emailers have been working our way around for 20 years and promises to put us on the Axiom for 700 years.

I have been considering the nature of a society, or a moment in time and a crevice of society, that celebrates and rewards toolmakers. And I think I have seen the end result. It oddly comes from another show that I watched last night (aside from Wall-E) which was on the Wealth Channel. It turns out that one of the guys that gets on the list for the most expensive cars in the world was showing off his Ferarri 430 Scuidera, his bright yellow Rolls and his Bugatti Veyron. All were customized to excruciating perfection, exactly the way he wanted it done. He kept referring to them as works of art, which they certainly were. This made them one of a kind and useful to nobody else in the world except as the ultimate status symbols, which was why they were on the Wealth Channel in stunning HD. The toolmakers in this case were celebrated by signing their names on the carbon fiber under the hoods next to the prominent steel embossed serial number plates. (His Bugatti was the fifth one imported into the USA). So, essentially and especially given the HD documentary, he has converted these automobiles into instant collectors items. The toolmakers don't have their tool's utility as its own reward, but the customization of it to please a completely other sensibility.

This sensibility has long been in evidence in the computing industry, which has long overproduced any dozen redundant technologies in 8 flavors. It is why the Linux world exists in such variety even though all we ever needed was Red Hat, a viable alternative to BSD, MacOS, Solaris, HPUX, AIX, System V and Windows. Instead there are some 3 or 4 dozen operating systems including the embedded world which is a complete mystery to me, each with dozens of programming languages. So it comes as no surprise that only the juggernaut of Google can do something utilitarian like perfect email once and for all. Further it comes as no surprise that it only takes two or three really smart people to do it.

So what is Web 2.0 and all that social software and clouds and grids all about?

That's a big question for another day, but the short answer is the computer equivalent of suburban sprawl. Nobody, save perhaps the NSA, has sat down and built an actual computer and software system from the ground up for 40 years. There is no planned community. There are only applications and marginal evolutions of applications for an interoperable world that has 60 ways to do the same thing which frustrate us all into looking towards Google to finesse them all back together in unifying ways. Surprise.

But Google is not going to do that, which is why I mentioned the NSA. You see outside of getting applause, stock options and face time at conferences, the rock stars of software development have no transcendent purpose. Only those who have had such purposes have really mattered, and I think we are in short supply these days. So it makes me wonder exactly how Google defines the 'evil' they will not do. It's certainly inclusive of the 'evil' the NSA must do.

From a technological perspective, Google is the embodiment of infinite scalability. Its compute engines are the Saturn Five of the computing world made all the more impressive by their tethering of millions of actual horses to make the horsepower rather than giant, fallible boosters. But I am confounded by the idea that the Rasmussen brothers, the brains behind Google Wave, would be so satisfied with the Google compute environment for what it is that their minds conceive a compute beast with such power could do. It's the old trade off of what kind of millionaire you want to be - the rap star wants $17 worth of respect from 5 million fans. The investment advisor wants $5 million of respect from 17 clients. They have obviously decided to catch the attention of the twittering masses.

So what is the transcendent purpose of making email, instant messaging and blogging incrementally simpler for 50 million Google users? Surely that will not enable one more significant writer on the planet.

This is what I notice every time a new Web 2.0 3.x or whatever program comes out of the software programming world from American rock star programmers, and was at the very beginning of this demo. It's all about 'Hey let's find a new restaurant' or 'Check out my vacation pictures'.

I think I've made my point.

So how about Google Medical Records, bitches?

A New Generation of Depravity

If my guess is correct, David Lynch has a daughter and that daughter is making a movie called Surveillance. That movie, I can watch for 11 bucks on PPV before its theatre release. I think the Lynches are hedging their bets. The preview is just about as sick as it gets. The abstract? Imagine 'Reservoir Dogs' no make that 'Wild at Heart' no make that 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' retold by a 12 year old girl.

Very symbolic and self-referential. Imagine frustrated adults trying to understand a horrific crime told through the eyes of a not so innocent innocent. Think about as gruesome a tale as you can imagine, then make semi-reasonable people deal with the fact that they are powerless to figure out why they have to hear it from such a witness. 

There, in a nutshell, is the depravity of Hollywood dealing with its own depravity.

Affirmative Action vs Black Families

One of the main focuses of the Cultural Revolution was the abolishment of the Four Olds: Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas.
-- Wikipedia on the Cultural Revolution

When I went to college the second time, I made it happen. The first time I let it happen to me and so it didn't, properly. As part of my second attempt, I sent out letters to all sorts of groups and organizations seeking scholarship money. I found one which was a ladies bridge club. They sent me $50. I bought my first college book with that money, specifically Salas & Hille's Calculus.

The ladies were black and had sent me a handwritten letter with the check. I wrote them back thanking them for the money. Although I got many other scholarships all for much more money, none were as significant to me as that. To me it was the embodiment of the best of Old School values. 'We work twice as hard even if we only get half as far'. They were taking care of their own in me.

Many years later I sat down to write a novel. I had added other experiences to this which signified something important. The first was meeting a young man who was the head of marketing for the Kool Jazz Festival. The second was meeting filmmaker Charles Burnett at a film festival with a great number of corporate sponsors. The third was attending the Essence Awards as the guest of a friend who worked for Toyota, the major sponsor. And there were any number of experiences I had watching young black children receive t-shirts with DARE or other corporate logos on them. All of these things, I perceived to be Affirmative Action. As I wrote my novel, there was a chapter about the Ladies of the Club, referring to the legendary Wilfandel House in Los Angeles, home to the wives of established upper class  black families  and their charitable concerns. In my novel, they lamented their declining influence on contemporary youth. Their connections to Hampton U meant less when blacks were now being admitted to UCLA and Yale. Their scholarship money meant little in the face of new corporate community relations funds scholarships. Their all black Talented Tenth efforts were losing sway in a black community increasingly integrated with the mainstream.

In the novel, they represented the best of the black bourgeoisie and stood in opposition to new, fast money they saw being laundered through the crack trade. The dramatic point was that they were booed off the stage by a real-estate tycoon who was part of that vice. It was one of the many symbols of change I saw in black America during the 80s.

These days being a conservative challenges me to consider the downside risks of institutional leverage, especially dependence on political largess. That's straight out of Thomas Sowell. And while I'm in no position to assess what Affirmative Action has done in terms of money and numbers of people, I do know that it is not black Talented Tenth Old School money. It is not the $50 from the black ladies of the bridge circle, it is the $500 Xerox Minority Scholarship. I got both, I know. I know what it is like to look at your parents and wonder whether or not they are secretly rich given their wisdom and strength. I know what it is like to evaluate your parents and realize they have no economic power worth beans in this big old world. But the symbolism in my book stretched that point. And I wrote about black youth who chose the streets turning a deaf ear to their mothers only 16 years older, and to their unknown fathers. I wrote about a world where the word of 30 year old ex-con with a gun and a kilo of cocaine was about as powerful a word as anybody knew. Where the word of a rapper with a $5,000 gold chain was gospel truth. Where the promises of a girl with a big butt and a smile was as good as life's pleasures could get, if you could get her kid locked in the other room. That world was the stereotypical foil to the institutional world of stereotypical integration of black faces in McDonald's commercials, of Kool & The Gang's song Celebration being played at the Super Bowl of buddy cop movies and the Old OJ Simpson running through airports.

Living Colour once had a song that asked, can you tell me how to get to your America? Some people said hard work, some people said colorblindness, some people said black power, some people said Affirmative Action. Some people said fuck your America and fuck you too. Me, I was a little different. I said it was my America. All I had to do was prove it. I didn't think that was too tall of an order, you see I was writing this novel in the front seat of my BMW parked on the beach of the Pacific Ocean, and my imagination and spirit were free. All I needed in life that hadn't been provided for me by my family was wealth. I figured that made me just like everybody else, except the rich of course.

There has always been a way for me to respect the Old School. I have had the good fortune to come from a good family. Everyone has their journeys and their needs. I have never had a need to sell out, because when you start out in the middle class all you have is ego's ambition. So what if you don't get filthy rich? Good is good. I've never had a reason to despise being black. I've never had a reason to disrespect my origins. The only thing I am not is great. I'm a child of God and all that. It's all good. Good is good.

They say you can't cheat an honest man, but people are right to wonder who's selling out to whom and at what cost. As a conservative, I am challenged to consider the downside risk of institutional leverage. And the formula for liberal vs conservative is simple. The conservative uses the power of the family to guard against the corruption of the state. The liberal uses the power of the state to make up of the corruption of the family. If the black family is in disrepair, if it gives no strength, if it's not good, then the kids end up wearing some corporation's t-shirt and thinking inside the box of some institutional agenda.

Except that there's nothing wrong with that. Get in where you fit in, but remember where you came from. In your heart you know whom you owe.

Obama's Basement

General Motors is officially a state owned business. Which means it will soon be a state run business. Which means no matter how many people watch the new Transformers movie, them Camaro sales are not going to save it.

So what happened. Well, not to put a fine point on it, GM wrote home from to daddy Obama for some more money so he wouldn't get kicked out of his apartment onto the streets. Except Obama isn't his real dad. GM's real dad is the market, but the market disowned him. So the new adopted dad couldn't bear to see GM out there in the cold, cruel streets despite the fact that GM has thrown in with some roughneck union friends who are shaking him down. Well new dad sent more money and GM is still losing his apartment. So now GM has moved back home and lives under Obama's roof.

The question is now, how many of these street kids, unable to make it on their own are going to end up in Obama's basement.

A New Virtual Community

“There are no great men. Just great challenges which ordinary men, out of necessity, are forced by circumstance to meet.”
-- Bull Halsey

If the notion in my mind finds footing it will be that my primary place of online interaction will be at First Things as I slowly put this blog to rest. I think I will find it necessary at times to expand on various ideas that come into my head and for the sake of my own citizenship's amenuensis go on about something here. But of all the blogs I've read and all the communities I've seen online over the past decade, this one holds the most promise.

I'll surely continue to read the same places. And I suppose that I will likely connect with a few people on Facebook for what it's worth. But I have come to the conclusion that the occasion which impelled Cobb into existence is of little interest. And the past year I have spent looking in different directions has not yielded me a different audience. There are no great challenges here, except to keep people focused and civil. Heh, as if I held a chair and a whip.

First Things and American Digest. And I should be a member of the Belmont Club, and I think they will have me.

This week I should be attending Kevin Ross' forum at USC at which time he will introduce the Urban Electronic Media, that thing I have been doing since 1993 on the Web and on private networks and a dozen BBSs for ten years before that. I thought about writing a history and presenting a paper, but in the end... well the reward is in the journey, and for those who have not made it, I think it would be presumptuous of me to suggest my current state is the ultimate destination.

I have earned a strange sort of fame here without much feeling that I myself have become more well known or understood. What I have done is gotten everything, without a syllable to spare, off of my chest. I have said everything I've wanted to say at redundant length. And of those core subjects, of politics and culture, of conservatism and race, of domestic affairs, geopolitics, and all of the categories, all that is left is my own diary and brain spew. Those would only matter if I were a great man, and I am not. I have only risen to this moderate challenge of evolving my own thought in public - of resolving the conflicts of the failure of the Left and of Progressives with the promise of the alternative.

But I don't hope for and shouldn't hope for continued attention, least of all because I am only a writer in the breach. I should perhaps be all about my career, that thing which actually butters my bread. I cannot say with much confidence that what hybrid I have become, investing these many thousands of hours over the past decade has enriched my pockets, but only my understanding. So I am a wise prisoner of my relative poverty.

So let it only be said that there was one man who defied his tribe and the small kibbles and bits of conventional wisdom to embrace all of Western Civilization, that he has learned much and found outside of his small box a great wonder. I have strived for conservative brotherhood and public citizenship and what I have found is great nourishment for myself. If my shared journey has helped others, it is not from my own power but from something we have always shared internally, that motivation for seeing a clearer truth. I was the one talking the whole time and recording my words. And here they will stand, for as long as Typepad remains in business as well as the archival joints.

That is all.

From Cobb Vision

A Bowl of Cherries

Life is not this.

And so I am considering allowing only trackbacks to Cobb, given the sort of commentary this blog has generated, little of which I find constructive, enlightening and recently even relevant.

I find myself looking at old posts and realizing Memer is gone, A. Charles is gone, Submandave is gone, EC is gone, Dell Gines is gone, Liz Ditz is gone, and I cannot recall the last time members of my own Conservative Brotherhood have posted here. And so clearly Cobb is in decline.

Aw hell. Today is June 1. A perfect day for transition. So shall it be written, so shall it be done. Comments are over. Nobody ever comments on the posts I personally find most interesting anyway. Get your licks in today. You have been declared noise, the lot of you.

Truthing Tiller's Killer

The murder of Dr. Tiller was not the act of a lone wacko but a highly orchestrated conspiracy. This conspiracy was directed by Pentagon officials put in place by Obama and strategic elements of the Left Wing media. It's aim is to ignite a firestorm of support among un-Americans, atheists, the pro-choice movement, gun haters and those populist Obamacrats still not under the bus to redefine the use of the Patriot Act and extend the power of the Executive branch for Obama's purposes. 

Now the truth has been said. Your mission is to prove it and squelch dissent until 2012.