Cobb

The Americanist

I have just discovered something wonderful, a story of church and state. The media blitz over the culpability of the Catholic Church (most certainly goosed by our old pal Hitchens) sets up a question of neoconservatism. If in America there is a separation of church and state, why should the church be responsive to the state. This is not a moral question but something of a legal / procedural question. One of the unstated assumptions about wrongdoing and resignations is that if a person X in an organization Y committed crime Z shouldn't leader Alpha resign? The problem is, of course, that any church isn't any government isn't any corporation so the entire 'organization Y' equivalence fails. 

So I want to take this tangent for a while. The analogies are too juicy. What I sense from a kneejerk is that a certain contingent of 'God Is Not Great' readers are convinced that the Catholic Church possesses WMD. 

In the meanwhile, an interesting POV

(stolen whole cloth from the ivory tower at Crooked Timber)

theAmericanist 03.31.10 at 12:14 pm

Not to get self-referential, but it seems like it might be useful to explain my monicker in this context: in the 18th century, it became necessary to create an American bishop—John Carroll. Like all consecrated bishops, he was required to condemn all heresies and heretics. Unlike others, he refused—because that would have meant that he would have been damning George Washington himself (a Mason). The Vatican let that slide for about a century.

But Carroll’s refusal began what was eventually known as “the Americanist heresy”. The American divergence from Vatican doctrine really got going in the 1850s, when Pius IX issued the Syllabus of Errors which said, among other things, that freedom of speech and religion, and the separation of Church and State, were not compatible with being a faithful Catholic. (Catholic apologists note that Pius did not claim the Syllabus was infallible doctrine; most folks figure this is a distinction without much difference.)

In mid to late 19th century America, there was a wave of Catholic immigration as well as a resurgence of the faith among foreign stock (US citizens with immigrant parents), particularly among German-Americans in the midwest. The leaders of that resurgence, notably Hecker and Orestes Brownson, didn’t emphasize certain aspects of Catholicism (e.g., Mary), but were passionate that being a good Catholic AND a patriotic American was not only possible, it was a Very Good Thing. (The Vatican wasn’t quite sure.)

One of these guys served in the Civil War, and eventually became Cardinal Gibbons, who gave us the Baltimore Catechism. (Taught Babe Ruth, too.) He was in charge of the American Church when a bunch of French knuckleheads provoked Leo XIII to investigate, and eventually condemn “Americanism”.

It’s sometimes called the phantom heresy, because neither the US Church nor the Vatican wants to recall what it meant—particularly now. In a nutshell, the Americanist heresy was the idea that civics has a moral value in itself. When I read about that, I thought: well, that’s me. Thus, my online id and alter ego.

Leo XIII condemned the Americanist heresey in 1899 by citing Church authority: civics, he said, has no moral value UNLESS it reinforces the authority of the Pope.

The thing about the Americanist heresy is that, in the end, it WON: much of the core ideas of the heresy (for example, the redefinition of “outside the Church there is no salvation” ) became Church doctrine at Vatican II, notably because of JC Murray.

So it’s central to the reactionary approach the Church has taken since Vatican II, personified by Benedict but beginning with JPII before he became Pope, when he served as the Vatican’s designated dissenter from the birth control commission (which included not only laymen, but also married women!); JPII’s dissent became the Vatican’s position on the relationship between celibate authority and sex.

The Americanist heresy doesn’t recognize the tainted Biblical idea of rendering unto Caesar (which was, after all, a defense of slavery), it acknowledges instead that secular authority in a democracy has an inherently moral power which the Church must accept. (As a Union veteran of the Civil War, Gibbons knew this keenly—the Catholic Church was the largest American denomination that did not split over slavery: nobody needed to tell Gibbons that Southern Catholics were wrong, no matter what they were told from the pulpit.)

LOL —anyway, TMI. It just seems relevant to any discussion of how and why the Vatican just didn’t order all bishops to turn all criminal priests over to the cops. (But if anybody wants to produce the play I’ve written about all this, let me know.)

Artur Davis

Artur Davis is coming under heat for wanting to be the governor of Alabama. I've heard this guy's name before and each time I hear it, the things I think are more favorable.

The first time I went searching after Davis was in response to a generic charge leveled at the Black Congressional Congress under the heading of a racial defense of former head of Fannie Mae Raines. Davis, as could be expected of the loyal opposition, had some fight in him against the line of argument that suggested that the CRA was wrong-headed from the word go. I was on the anti-CRA argument side for a short period until I heard the argument that made the most sense to me. Let me explain.

The CRA was an initiative to help lower income and worser credit folks get mortgages. A noble cause if there was any, but socialist against the principles of capitalism. Still, everybody can use a hand now and then. The way the Clinton administration went about satisfying the goals of the CRA was to lower the lending standards of banks and this was one of the policies that jumpstarted the subprime mortgage market. Now if you are going to argue against the expansion of bad debt, an unkind way to do so would be to blame the victims of foreclosure. Plenty of people on the Right went directly for that jugular. But when it was explained to me in detail how the CRA goals were implemented the answer jumped right out at me.

If you want to get more people at the tables in Vegas, you don't change the rules of blackjack against the house, you give out free chips.

The Clinton Administration changed the rules of blackjack against the house by changing the lending standards of banks. As much as people like to blame Greenspan by saying that low interest rates were the devil, it doesn't matter how low the prime rate is if you have bad credit -not creditworthy means not creditworthy - no loans get originated beyond a certain high risk.  But when the policy is to give out 'ninja' loans it doesn't matter how high the interest rate is. Default is default.  Nonperforming loans aren't good to have even at 13% interest. Who's paying? Nobody.

What Clinton should have done was give away free chips and not abuse the rules of risk for banks. Davis, for his part, backed away from his sentimental defense of Raines and thus put himself above the racial traffic that got people carried away defending Raines or blaming CRA beneficiaries. Score one for Davis.

Since then I've had occasion to hear Davis speak on various issues, and he sounds to me like a solid competent Blue Dog. If there's any Democrat I like, it's a Blue Dog. But it wasn't until today that I discovered that he had voted against Obamacare. This is a politician who stands on his own two feet. Amen to that.

A Time to Gloat

Over the past several days various heads have been saying a lot of unjustifiably nasty things about us losers in the Republican party. So it's party time for the cowards who feel that their moment in the sun has been prepared. 

I don't know what to think about David Frum and that is because I've never really thought about him before. But I think it's an awfully convenient time. I'm taking the opportunity to examine the biases of the triumphant. One exchange in particular, tangential to the recent madness in Congress, but clearly along the lines of Liberal vs Conservative has my attention. 

What's going on is a massive reactionary painting in broad strokes of a Republican party that is nothing but ugly. These non-specific lefties are continuing an old tire narrative that says that when we on the Right say no, the reasons we give are only masks for our inherent, ineffable and irredeemable racism, sexism, xenophobia and religious extremism. It's enough slander to make one hoppin' mad, but then we'd be violent too. 

I want to address this by being boring and specific, but I also will not turn the other cheek. I haven't figured out exactly how to deal with the issue because I don't think it will be sufficient to correct without punishment. So I am likely to excoriate... ahh who knows? I'm rather peeved that the entire matter has gotten under my skin. But look at what is being said in this case by one Charles Blow:

A Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday took a look at the Tea Party members and found them to be just as anachronistic to the direction of the country’s demographics as the Republican Party. For instance, they were disproportionately white, evangelical Christian and “less educated ... than the average Joe and Jane Six-Pack.” This at a time when the country is becoming more diverse (some demographers believe that 2010 could be the first year that most children born in the country will be nonwhite), less doctrinally dogmatic, and college enrollment is through the roof. The Tea Party, my friends, is not the future.

According to this reactionary slop the Tea Parties have become a big ball of 'them' without any reference to what they believe or what their aims are. And the Republican Party has become co-signers to and funders of immorality. It's a transparent smear, but I no longer find it amusing to point out how ridiculous it is. 

The irony of this is that not long ago we were supposed to be talking about a 'purple' America. But now it's clear that the likes of Charles Blow can't wait for the demographics of the future to automatically marginalize his white, evangelical, uneducated enemies. 

Daniels-Ryan 2012

There. I said it.

George Will has gained and lost his mind probably 4 times by now, but I like this article very much. Dig this:

To make the economy -- on which all else hinges -- hum, Ryan proposes tax reform. Masochists would be permitted to continue paying income taxes under the current system. Others could use a radically simplified code, filing a form that fits on a postcard. It would have just two rates: 10 percent on incomes up to $100,000 for joint filers and $50,000 for single filers; 25 percent on higher incomes. There would be no deductions, credits or exclusions, other than the health-care tax credit (see below).

I must have lost my mind this weekend, because I'm paying more attention to political current events than I normally consider healthy. But when I'm Googling 'solvency' and 'entitlements' and I see this, my ears perk up. Paul Ryan's Roadmap for America has got my attention for the second time this month. Hmmm.

Justice Comes to Luxo Jr.

And all those years we thought he was cute. We just covered up the death of I.

Health Care Details in Retrospect

When Scott Brown won the Senatorial seat in Massachusetts, part of his mandate I noted was the fact that his state (under Romney) had come up with a superior health care plan to the one proposed by Obama. Some of those details have been made clear, in this article:

Republicans say Obama and the Democrats co-opted their original concept, minus a mechanism they proposed for controlling costs. More than a dozen GOP attorneys general are determined to challenge the requirement in federal court as unconstitutional.

...

Obama rejected a key part of [Republican] Pauly's proposal: doing away with the tax-free status of employer-sponsored health care and replacing it with a standard tax credit for all Americans. Labor strongly opposes that approach because union members usually have better-than-average coverage and suddenly would have to pay taxes on it. But many economists believe it's a rational solution to America's health care dilemma since it would raise enough money to cover the uninsured and nudge people with coverage into cost-conscious plans.

Romney's success in Massachusetts with a bipartisan health plan that featured a mandate put the idea on the table for the 2008 presidential candidates.

Fiscal responsibility is the key. If it's not, it's not conservative.

A Short Musing about the Conservative Brotherhood

I was just reading something I wrote way back when about racism. I wrote that I would like to see racism ended (or some such) but not as much as I would like a million bucks. The same applies to black conservatism. I would like to see it recognized for the simple and beautiful thing that it is, but not as much as I would like a million bucks. And so that is why I don't spend so much time fighting racism or promoting the Conservative Brotherhood. I'm working on the million bucks.

Last week I found the L. Detweiler letter. If you're old enough to remember or are interested in arcane facts about the internet, you'd find this letter fascinating. Suffice it to say that when that controversy was boiling, it was the hottest topic in the geek universe. And so I'd imagine that it could be said that when I founded the Conservative Brotherhood, it was a fairly interesting matter. I would think that most people do not know what T C May is. You can't Google it. You'd have to know contextually what to look for. But just to give a little context, there was something called the Kleinpaste server. It was named after a dude who no longer stands in the spotlight, but was nonetheless part of an historically significant evolution of a world we take for granted.

So I'll say that I was the founder of the Conservative Brotherhood, and nothing has changed about my attitude towards the principles that impelled me to do so. But I'd rather make a million bucks and time is money.

No political activism is not my passion. It's merely compelling, but not as compelling as the philosophy and theology behind it. And I'm not so passionate about compelling issues as I am for doing right by my family.
If I get the million dollars, I'll have more time to make the Brotherhood all it can be. But I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you. Making a million ain't that simple. 

Family first.

Black Conservatism: It's Like Being a Red Sox Fan

I wonder if I have, at any time, put together an be-all, end-all essay that answers all the sorts of questions it must be awfully hard for a certain class of people to answer with their own imaginations with any sort of accuracy. I'm talking about the class of questions amounting to, Gee isn't it hard to be a black Republican?

The answer to the first question - the one I'm asking about my own output is yes and no. The answer to the second question, the existential question that begs the first question is no and yes.

NO 1. It is impossible to satisfy the curiosity of human beings who are intrigued. They have to be told over and over again, reassured by an acceptable narrative that the facts in front of their face are just a small subset of reality and the reality with which they are unfamiliar and intrigued by doubt, is in fact real reality. I have a difficulty with that because human beings are unlike computers into which the proper program, once written, can be fed such that it runs with having to be retold from scratch over and over again. So I gather that for the sort of people who remain continually intrigued by the very existence of black conservatives and Republicans, there aren't enough books in the Library of Congress to put that pique to rest.

YES 1. I'm fairly certain that if you're asking this question, which I find relatively simple, if exhausting to answer, then you haven't read this blog. So the complete answer to the question is to read the blog. It unfortunately only has categories which are convenient for my purposes. That would be Conservatism, not Black Existential Risks In Conservatism. So here's the link. See for yourself do I sound as if I were in pain.

N0 2. It's like being a Red Sox fan.

YES 2. It's like being a Red Sox fan.

What's difficult is figuring out if the person asking the question knows anything about baseball at all or is a Yankee fan.

--

But to add to the pile of obiter dicta, here's a quick story I recall to take as a 'teachable moment'.

In 1982 when I went to State. I attended what was then known (and probably still known in some circles) as a 'predominantly white college'. At the time, I was just before the tipping point of the equilibrium. Which is to say as a Freshman more black Americans graduated from HBCUs, and when I was a junior more black Americans graduated from 'predominantly white colleges'.  So if somebody asked me in 1982, with a certain presumption if I was comfortable attending a predominantly white college, I would have said, "It's like being a Red Sox fan."

There was a similar question raised by a clever man who called himself Elijah Muhammad. It was the central question of his book Message to the Black Man. He posed the question rhetorically, Isn't it foolish to be a black Christian?  He then went on to outline how the various sins and crimes and injustices Africans in America suffered at the hands of white Christians proved them morally bankrupt etc. The rest is history.

--

So yes it's true, I am that sort of Red Sox fan.  These questions are not deep enough for me. So I return the question with a question.

If your team doesn't win, are they really playing baseball?  And if nobody reads your blog, could you possibly be telling the truth?

I know. I know. But I'm the guy who studied Computer Science at a predominantly white college back in 1982. And I married a black American woman. And I have three kids. And I live in the most overpriced neighborhood in the word. It was what I wanted to do. Works for me.

Let Us All Be Free

The following are Tracy Chapman lyrics that now apply, to my way of thinking, against Barack Obama.

But every day is born a fool
One who thinks that he can rule
One who says tomorrow's mine
One who wakes one day to find
The prison doors open the shackles broken
And chaos in the street

--

They're tryin' to dig into my soul
And take away the spirit of my god
They're tryin' to take control
And monitor my every thought

I won't let down my guard
And I was born to fight
I ain't been knocked down yet
I was born to fight
I'm the surest bet

There ain't no man no woman
No beast alive that can beat me
'Cause I'm born to fight

--

VDH I think, strikes the proper tone:

If we assume that Obama & Co. wish to radically remake the United States — along the lines of a European socialist society, or perhaps to the left even of a Belgium or Denmark — then the past 14 months were as predictable as the sun rising.

To transmogrify a center-right country into a liberal utopia, certain things follow: higher taxes on the better-off to pay for redistribution and to bring “fairness” to society (e.g., called “redistributive change,”“spread the wealth,” “patriotic,” “paying your fair share”); increased government coercion to force the reluctant to conform (e.g., new IRS agents, more regulations and government intrusion, mandatory new fees); a growing constituency to administer and receive entitlements (e.g., I never really heard much about ACORN or SEIU until the Obama ascendancy); a public relations campaign to demonize the skeptical as enemies of civil society, starting with “selfish” and “greedy,” escalating to “racists,” and finally reaching the dangerous level of “terrorists” who “threaten officials” (those who used to court Michael Moore, or snooze about books and movies suggesting scenarios of killing George Bush are suddenly worried about uncivil discourse); a new neutralist foreign policy to match defense cuts on the horizon and to adjust our stature abroad with our new more revolutionary profile at home (cf. the treatment of an Israel or Britain to the new efforts at winning over Iran and Syria; or our shrinking Navy and Air Force); a highly educated, urban technocracy not subject to its own new protocols and dependent on an ever growing bureau (e.g., Geithnerism, or the strange career of Van Jones); and a new euphemism  in language (there is no “terrorism” any more, liberals disappeared and were replaced by “progressives,” we have no more enemies from the radical Islamic world, etc.)

The Omega Male

Precisely. Slate nails it.

I've been resisting the temptation to use Kim Du Toit's vulgar phraseology of the 'pussification of the Western male' for several years now despite its essential truth. Finally, there is a term that hits the right note and focuses on Ben Stiller, the actor who has personified his various dimensions over the years. Thank you Jessica Grose:

While the alpha male wants to dominate and the beta male just wants to get by, the omega male has either opted out or, if he used to try, given up. Greenberg says of his somewhat stunted best friend, "We call each other 'man,' but it's a joke. It's like imitating other people." The omega male is not experiencing the tired trope of the midlife crisis. A midlife crisis implies agency, a man who has the job and the family and chooses to reject it. The omega male doesn't have the power to reject anything—he's the one who has been brushed off. He's generally unemployed, and his romantic relationships are in shambles—he's either single or, if he's married, not happy about it. "I'm doing nothing and I'm tied to no one," Greenberg boasts.

I will be using this term for a while.

Acting Right

A thoughtful reader suggests that I consider new implications of an integrated class of black American youth suffering the stigma of 'acting white' in proportions greater than ever. I react crankily but in the spirit of 'what are we really talking about here' ?

In general I think 'role-modeling' is a poor substitute for reading the great books and smacks to me of the subtle bigotry of low expectations. My kids have never gone to a school where non-whites were a majority - so I'd imagine that they'd hear the 'acting white' stuff a fair amount according to the theory, but the subject has never come up. I think this is a marginally interesting subject that would make a fair bookshelf companion to 'stereotype threat'. But.. well, how should I express it? My attitude is to tell my three kids to take over the world, and I moved the family into a very expensive neighborhood by choice - one that I lived in when I was a young adult, not from an abstract position. I told them that nothing those kids have they earned themselves except for their grades in school and their own achievements after school. For this I've been rewarded with at least one of them being on the honor roll going on 18 semesters straight (I just had to count, never kept count before now). All three made it for the semester just closing.

I think there is something to say about the inexperience of 'new money' which has a direct parallel among emergent folks who are 'new middle class', and my nickel bet says that a means tested cross-section of folks would find a greater correlation among that dimension than skin tints. Of course I understand one can't really sustain a conversation in the main without shouting race and then subtly breaking it down behind the scenes - after all only Murray and Herrnstein are themselves. But my own personal paradigm is that of old money vs new and networks of smart money vs those fools who find themselves and their money soon parted. Coming from a family who valued education for its own sake I recognize a sort of overproduction of narrow middle class values. So what I'm suggesting on the whole is that I'm skeptical of class-raising consciousness, not only from a prior- black nationalist skepticism of white liberal agendas, or from a current conservatives wariness of Marxist materialism and the role of third parties in providing for the needs of the masses, but also from the direct paucity of inspirations of those who have 'made it' a la Brooks' Bobos in Paradise. In other words, I'm a very difficult person to get excited about any sort of class imperatives. It seems to me that there are only a small and permanent set of things that make people truly happy, and that's why everybody throughout history have gone after money and power - and in the end history is written about those who get it. Power and money make the nation and the fortunes of all ride on the backs of the health of the nation. The greatest glory humanly possible is to be the nation's champion.

The virtue of the middle rungs in a free society? Well. That's hard to say.  I mean, I have a hard time understanding why people get drunk. I mean a really hard time. I just don't get it. Is carousing a privilege or a vice? I mean if you're gainfully employed and you're a drunken bum in your finished basement bar it's cool, right? But the man who begs for beer on the corner? When is it, and from which perspective do we just let people be whatever they want to be? What if the entire American middle class is on shaky moral ground this decade? What are we to make of their advice to those in the income quintile below? How seriously are we to take the middle finger of the blue collar worker, or the first time voting Shiite in Iraq for that matter?

What's interesting to me is a small, enduring set of values about which we could say with minimum ambiguity are our pledges of allegiance to that which is proven true in Western Civilization and upon which we pledge our fortunes, our blood, our sacred honor. All else? Why do we even bother to care, much less proselytize?

As you can see. I'm catholic. I care about acting right. Everything else is a distraction.

prior Cobbage on 'Acting White'

Acting White, Acting Not

So if acting black or acting latino means not having college aspirations or having intellectuality as a hallmark of one's personality, it can only be repulsive to dainty folks with multiple degrees after their names. It is not necessarily an injustice. It's simply counter to the wishful thinking that suggests we all need to be *that* literate as a society. I say we become that literate at our peril and it is this nations ability to deliver Constitutional guarantees to its poor huddled masses and internal Third Worlds, that will make us robust enough to survive the challenges of the future and global economy. I say if the Chinese can pay $20 a day, why can't we? I say we need lower class workers to feel just as American as I do without feeling jealous and envious of me. I talk to my gardener like a man. What's the problem?

Where The Wild Things Are

My father tells me that his mother used to tell him something. When he was moping around a day after he got punished, he kept wanting to hash over the unfairness of the punishment, even though he was free to go out and play. "You just want to stay mad", she would tell him.

I'm old enough to remember SCAA. SCAA was soc.culture.african.american, the first and legendary black oriented USENET newsgroup. I was the FAQmaster of that joint and so I was something of an authority on its history. What killed this, the most popular and foremost venture of American blacks into the 'information superhighway' was its uncanny ability to attract every white supremacist possible.
We got fed up and left, but I didn't stay mad.

Yesterday, as I turned to the subject of race, I found myself engaged over at the Field Negro's blog. Suddenly some of those memories came back. The old debates about race that I had long gotten bored and sick of were in full flame over in the comment section. I almost forgot about that rotten taste in my mouth. Here's where the people who want to stay mad are. Why else would the proprietor of a blog refer to himself in slavery terms?

What I think is this. Every racist with enough nerve to speak out is speaking out, 24/7 and they are doing it where their targets are. Which is to say, if you want to find where the white supremacists and their apologists are, just go to your local black political website. That's where the people stay mad. That's where the wild things are.

So if you want to actually talk about how many racists are holding up non-photoshopped signs and extrapolate how many items of white supremacy make it onto the planks of the Tea Party - well, I'm sure there's some sociology department at Brown University where the grant money awaits that kind of hedge-fund mathematics. But if you'd like to count noses, just head to the web. There you will find people in realtime doing their dirty racist business. That's not where they ALL are, but that's where they show up every day.

I've had several occasions to fight the spectre of the Southern Strategy in intransigent and defensive minds, and several years back sponsored an internet racial snark hunt of sorts. I didn't get results so much as I got smacked around for defending 'them', them being all of the conservatives I hang out with who are 'obviously' racist. I'm not interest in combating racism online or in any political program. It's not as if it were criminal. I mean it quite seriously that I have to chuckle when the racist meme of the day sweeps through - like this fistfight on a bus in Oakland. When there's a crime, I'm pro-cop and pro- law and order as usual. That's all anybody needs to be, outside of church.

Old Enough To Remember, Wise Enough To Forget

The Geek Code.

OK I still think it's rather cool, if outdated. Maybe somebody should update it.

The Great Tea Party Race Challenge

I have been on the mailing list for several conservative organizations for years now. Last week somebody suggested to me, not in their own words, but just pointing to a YouTube of Keith Olbermann, that the teabaggers are a bunch of racists. 

So I'm going to throw out a challenge. Anybody who can come up with the racist codewords in the Tea Party Express emails that I've been getting since late July 2009 will win a prize. Now I have no idea what's in most of these emails. I only read about 5-10% of them. In my mail, 'Tea Party Express' shows up 287 times. So if the Tea Party is racist, you should certainly be able to find the language.

By the way. I also get stuff from 'Our Country Deserves Better' also from Vigeurie's Conservative HQ, plus from David Horowitz and Family Security Matters. I'm on the list of Special Guests, The Center for Security Policy, the John Langston Forum and Bill Wilson's Daily Grind. This is how I keep track of the pulse of the Right. I certainly don't read it all, but I catch the drift and get the flavor. 

I expect that those who write stuff like the following get all their information second hand.

Those folks wouldn't pee on you to put you out if you were on fire Cobb, part of that is because you are Black (however deep your sense of linked fate may be), so why defend their nonsense?

So I'm prepared to go open source. Show me the magic words that make these guys racist. If you can pick 'em and they show up in my mail, you win 20 bucks and and admission. 

Bipartisan My Ass

The only thing more frightening than watching a ship sink is not knowing how to swim. So I watch with sadness as we head towards a path of government control. I'm unsure exactly how to feel, and that is because I haven't subjected myself to the subjective opinions of those trying to justify and those trying to demonize. 

This past week, I was pleasantly surprised that the CBO declared the whole rats nest would be below a trillion. But then I can't really think of anything else to say with any clarity. On this matter, which I hope doesn't pass, here's what I believe. I believe that people like me who make good money and have a choice will avoid this like the plague, and that we will be taxed more for it. That we'll be resentful and pony up and grumble under out breath. That the same people who were extraordinarily overjoyed by the election of Obama will, in 12 months, realize that they've been sold yet another bill of goods and that it will be too late. 

I haven't felt much like this since the days of Constructive Engagement when I flipflopped on the matter. The reason, then as now, is that sometimes reform is so impossible that even the best intentions and the best laid plans don't merit support. And so, America thinking its way rationally out of the bankruptcy of Medicare and Medicaid and finally Social Security seems like such a distant possibility that it may just be better off if the whole thing goes broke. I'm not skeptical, I'm cynical. I'm shorting the US Government and the whole brainwashed electorate. 

Understand that I don't think by any respects that America is 'ungovernable'. It's just that the people in office have it so wrong and the public is so powerless that neglect seems to be the best option. That's where my head is at. As I said. Cynical. I'm so glad that I'm in the software business, but I can see even more why attorneys make out. It's astonishing how true that is. The American consensus is broken, and people just want to stay mad. Now is the time for courage, but I don't expect it. I expect civility to break down for a period. 

Next week, I'm going to be in the wealthy part of DC. And as usual, I will continue doing my consulting work on the IT systems at Fannie Mae. I won't expect to see bricks thrown or pickets. I will expect to see us high-paid consultants build stuff that only we understand because matters of accountability go towards form rather than what's simply right. What's simply right is the enemy of political agendas that are locked in conflict, and that's where we are today. Anybody with half a brain could answer the question of whether or not there will be Federally funded abortions under the new proposal. A first year law student could write the text unambiguously. Instead we have all sorts of power and obfuscating forces on two sides of no consensus wheeling and dealing so that both sides can bark out that their side has won. And the answer at the end of the day of whether or not the matter is true or not will be "it's complicated".

That's how everything is going to be because that's what the President wants. It's complicated, and it's expensive. And it's his doing. Reconciliation is the enemy of truth.

Bogard

(from the archives - April 2005)

This is for the [black male] youth.

What I can't do is undo what I've done. I can't go back before the age of 14 and be back in all black schools in the hood. I can't unlearn what I've learned. I can't suddenly put the fear of whitefolks back in my head, but I can try. Hanging with Lee helped remind me of all the distance I've traveled, of all the hard work that put me in my happy spot, doing what I never thought probable or even possible back in the day. So thinking about what I think is real for young black men today whose future is dicey, I'm going to come up with my best advice. For what it's worth. And I'm thinking in particular about some of my young cousins down south, whom I don't really know, but I'm just guessing.

As usual, I start with Baldwin.

All you are ever told in this country about being black is that it is a terrible, terrible thing to be. Now, in order to survive this, you have to really dig down into yourself and re-create yourself, really, according to no image which yet exists in America. You have to impose, in fact - this may sound very strange - you have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.

Probably the hardest thing about being a young black man in America is that nobody believes anything you say or do that doesn't confirm some stereotype about black men. It's like you simply don't exist and nothing you say or do will make you seem real to people unless you add something typical at the end, nah mean? You don't have to say a word, and the cop thinks you're a suspect. But you can go to a job interview and talk all day about your real character and they still don't hear you. That's real. And guess what, it never ends. You are going to have to talk your way into every situation and keep reminding people honestly about what you are expecting, even if it sounds stupid - like damn, why do I keep having to explain this to you?

#1 Bogard
You have to Bogard. You have to talk your way in, even when you're not sure you have what it takes. You have to get into a situation where you can try and fail until you get it right. You have to let people believe that they're a little bit more responsible for your success than they actually are. After all, you're doing the work. But that's how people are a lot of times with black men. They don't believe we can do without their assistance because they can't just look at us and perceive our skills and potential. Bogarding means trading on your potential, never forgetting your potential, not being worried about hearing 'no', and never stopping pushing the envelope. As soon as you fail, and you will, you're going to hear the same old crap, and the moment you start to believe it, then you actually will be heading in that direction. There are 6 billion people on this planet. There are at least 1000 who have got your back and can help you. Find them. They're waiting to hear you.

#2. Listen and Learn
You're young, and you don't know anything. What you have going for you is energy, ambition, and nothing to lose. Therefore you need to soak up knowledge in every form that's related to your ambition. Be all about it. Get the magazine, watch the TV show. Read the books. Find the experts. Become a geek about it. Show your love for that thing, because this country is big enough for you to make your fortune in it, whatever it is. It's almost scary how much you can accomplish just by listening. You really have your whole life to learn it. That's why you follow your love.

#3 Get Out
Get out of your comfort zone. Get out of your old habits. Billions and billions of burgers have been sold at McDonalds, and everyone knows what's on the menu. But I bet that you order the same thing every time. Order a vanilla shake from McDonalds next time. I bet you never have. Watch a TV show you never watch. Buy a shirt you would never wear and see what happens. You are more flexible than you think. Listen to me, I sound like Morpheus. But it's true. You have to be able to think on your feet, because you already know the same stuff that's coming to you where you are. But the most important thing to do in this category is to travel. If you have a car, get a map point your finger at a place and drive there. Get out of your car and walk. Be there for a while.

I remember several years ago talking to brothers in Oakland who went to the Million Man March. One of them had never left Oakland in his entire life, he was in his 30s. They rented Ford Explorers, him and about 10 partners and drove clear across the country. He said that the trip was far more interesting than the destination. Why? Because he couldn't have, in a million years, guessed how people across the country would have treated him. He told me about stopping at a truck stop in Iowa and a conversation he got into with some white truck drivers, and he couldn't believe how easy and friendly the people were. But he needed that excuse, 'going to the MMM' to get him out of Oakland.

This is not about making friends with white truck drivers in Iowa, this is about expanding your social ability. Making friends is going to be one of the results. People trust people who feel they can handle them. And the only way to be able to handle all the strangeness about people is getting out with people different than yourself. I go to Baldwin again:

Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which robes one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes.

#4 Be Intimate
Everybody thinks they know who you are and what you're all about. You need to have imagination to get out of that. But you also need to be intimate with people. You have to let people into your sphere. That's difficult.

I hated people all up in my business. I liked handling my own business because almost nobody could give me what I needed. So why bother telling them about yourself? Because everybody knows somebody, and that somebody might be the key. So you should let people know what you're all about, even if you think they disrespect that, or can't help you in any way whatsoever. At the very least, you get associated with your ambition. It's better than the alternative which is they make up their own minds what you are all about without any real input from you. People talk. People can't shut up. Use that to your advantage.

#5 You Are Not The First Black Anything
And the ceiling gets higher every day. What do you think blackfolks who've got it going on have been doing all this time? There are miles and miles of headroom. There is no place I've been and nothing I've studied where there haven't been blackfolks with great accomplishments. Anybody who tells you different just hasn't been out much. But you're still going to be outnumbered. That's neither here nor there. You are responsible to the people who are responsible to you. There is not a great big club out here waiting... well, there is the NBS Summit, but just take it for granted that the black race is doing just fine. You just need to get your hookup in order.

#6 Save.
Handle your money well. Get into a relationship with your bank today. Read everything possible about money and remember this. The best feeling in the world is walking through a mall and knowing you can afford anything in it that you want, but not buying one thing. Save your money. The only way to get money is to keep money. Buy savings bonds, and live low.

#7 Don't Doubt America
America is the country where things work. Whatever it is, if it's possible, then it's happening here somewhere. If it doesn't work in your neighborhood, then you're just in the wrong part of America. The fact that you can read this is proof. If you think you can fight with 'America' and win, you've got it all wrong. Lose that attitude because America is a lot bigger than you think. You'll find your place in it.

#8 Do Not Ignore Luck
You have to learn how to handle misfortune, and good fortune. That was hard for me to learn. I wasn't prepared to take advantage of any situation that wasn't completely in my control. Why? Because I assumed that the outcome would always be bad. I wasn't prepared to be surprised either way. In the end I would just end up mad because I couldn't take all the credit. But sometimes you just have to take the leap of faith.

#9 What Goes Around Comes Around
It's true. You will pay for your mistakes with people. You need to apologize and move on. Don't try to make your enemies pay. When you are actually powerful enough to do so, others will gladly do it for you. But until that point, you need to just collect your stuff and walk away. Don't give anybody a reason to do dirt to you, because you will be in delicate situations.

#10 Find Your Chillout Zone
You must find something you can do, on your own, that chills you out. You cannot depend on somebody else for that. You need to be able to get into your chillout zone when life throws you a knuckleball. For me, it changed. When I was in college, I ran. I could run for 10 miles and just leave the whole world behind. After that it was cycling. Then it was writing all my demons out on paper. But whatever it was, I knew I could come to that thing and find peace. Nobody had to come and restrain me, I didn't find myself on my knees like Usher begging for forgiveness for my own peace of mind. It had to come from within.

#11 Recognize
If you can get half of these things right, you have a good shot. But it won't change the perception of black men in America. So you have got to do a little to recognize others who have their heads on straight. And this is more than just a head nod in passing. It's affirmation of good work or a good deed. It's not paranoid, we brothers got to stick together when you know you or this other man is wrong. It's acknowledgment of achievement, not just survival. A black man can survive in jail. That doesn't mean anything. It's not just about living, it's about living right. It's about making a social space for doing good and keeping that space clean.

Men make choices and live with their choices. These are all tools that I think can help young black men keeping in mind the specific things I had to learn as a young black man. I come from a strong family, but these things still weren't obvious. But look at these lessons closely, see how universal they are?

This is for the [black male] youth.

What I can't do is undo what I've done. I can't go back before the age of 14 and be back in all black schools in the hood. I can't unlearn what I've learned. I can't suddenly put the fear of whitefolks back in my head, but I can try. Hanging with Lee helped remind me of all the distance I've traveled, of all the hard work that put me in my happy spot, doing what I never thought probable or even possible back in the day. So thinking about what I think is real for young black men today whose future is dicey, I'm going to come up with my best advice. For what it's worth. And I'm thinking in particular about some of my young cousins down south, whom I don't really know, but I'm just guessing.

As usual, I start with Baldwin.

All you are ever told in this country about being black is that it is a terrible, terrible thing to be. Now, in order to survive this, you have to really dig down into yourself and re-create yourself, really, according to no image which yet exists in America. You have to impose, in fact - this may sound very strange - you have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.

Probably the hardest thing about being a young black man in America is that nobody believes anything you say or do that doesn't confirm some stereotype about black men. It's like you simply don't exist and nothing you say or do will make you seem real to people unless you add something typical at the end, nah mean? You don't have to say a word, and the cop thinks you're a suspect. But you can go to a job interview and talk all day about your real character and they still don't hear you. That's real. And guess what, it never ends. You are going to have to talk your way into every situation and keep reminding people honestly about what you are expecting, even if it sounds stupid - like damn, why do I keep having to explain this to you?

#1 Bogard
You have to Bogard. You have to talk your way in, even when you're not sure you have what it takes. You have to get into a situation where you can try and fail until you get it right. You have to let people believe that they're a little bit more responsible for your success than they actually are. After all, you're doing the work. But that's how people are a lot of times with black men. They don't believe we can do without their assistance because they can't just look at us and perceive our skills and potential. Bogarding means trading on your potential, never forgetting your potential, not being worried about hearing 'no', and never stopping pushing the envelope. As soon as you fail, and you will, you're going to hear the same old crap, and the moment you start to believe it, then you actually will be heading in that direction. There are 6 billion people on this planet. There are at least 1000 who have got your back and can help you. Find them. They're waiting to hear you.

#2. Listen and Learn
You're young, and you don't know anything. What you have going for you is energy, ambition, and nothing to lose. Therefore you need to soak up knowledge in every form that's related to your ambition. Be all about it. Get the magazine, watch the TV show. Read the books. Find the experts. Become a geek about it. Show your love for that thing, because this country is big enough for you to make your fortune in it, whatever it is. It's almost scary how much you can accomplish just by listening. You really have your whole life to learn it. That's why you follow your love.

#3 Get Out
Get out of your comfort zone. Get out of your old habits. Billions and billions of burgers have been sold at McDonalds, and everyone knows what's on the menu. But I bet that you order the same thing every time. Order a vanilla shake from McDonalds next time. I bet you never have. Watch a TV show you never watch. Buy a shirt you would never wear and see what happens. You are more flexible than you think. Listen to me, I sound like Morpheus. But it's true. You have to be able to think on your feet, because you already know the same stuff that's coming to you where you are. But the most important thing to do in this category is to travel. If you have a car, get a map point your finger at a place and drive there. Get out of your car and walk. Be there for a while.

I remember several years ago talking to brothers in Oakland who went to the Million Man March. One of them had never left Oakland in his entire life, he was in his 30s. They rented Ford Explorers, him and about 10 partners and drove clear across the country. He said that the trip was far more interesting than the destination. Why? Because he couldn't have, in a million years, guessed how people across the country would have treated him. He told me about stopping at a truck stop in Iowa and a conversation he got into with some white truck drivers, and he couldn't believe how easy and friendly the people were. But he needed that excuse, 'going to the MMM' to get him out of Oakland.

This is not about making friends with white truck drivers in Iowa, this is about expanding your social ability. Making friends is going to be one of the results. People trust people who feel they can handle them. And the only way to be able to handle all the strangeness about people is getting out with people different than yourself. I go to Baldwin again:

Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which robes one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes.

#4 Be Intimate
Everybody thinks they know who you are and what you're all about. You need to have imagination to get out of that. But you also need to be intimate with people. You have to let people into your sphere. That's difficult.

I hated people all up in my business. I liked handling my own business because almost nobody could give me what I needed. So why bother telling them about yourself? Because everybody knows somebody, and that somebody might be the key. So you should let people know what you're all about, even if you think they disrespect that, or can't help you in any way whatsoever. At the very least, you get associated with your ambition. It's better than the alternative which is they make up their own minds what you are all about without any real input from you. People talk. People can't shut up. Use that to your advantage.

#5 You Are Not The First Black Anything
And the ceiling gets higher every day. What do you think blackfolks who've got it going on have been doing all this time? There are miles and miles of headroom. There is no place I've been and nothing I've studied where there haven't been blackfolks with great accomplishments. Anybody who tells you different just hasn't been out much. But you're still going to be outnumbered. That's neither here nor there. You are responsible to the people who are responsible to you. There is not a great big club out here waiting... well, there is the NBS Summit, but just take it for granted that the black race is doing just fine. You just need to get your hookup in order.

#6 Save.
Handle your money well. Get into a relationship with your bank today. Read everything possible about money and remember this. The best feeling in the world is walking through a mall and knowing you can afford anything in it that you want, but not buying one thing. Save your money. The only way to get money is to keep money. Buy savings bonds, and live low.

#7 Don't Doubt America
America is the country where things work. Whatever it is, if it's possible, then it's happening here somewhere. If it doesn't work in your neighborhood, then you're just in the wrong part of America. The fact that you can read this is proof. If you think you can fight with 'America' and win, you've got it all wrong. Lose that attitude because America is a lot bigger than you think. You'll find your place in it.

#8 Do Not Ignore Luck
You have to learn how to handle misfortune, and good fortune. That was hard for me to learn. I wasn't prepared to take advantage of any situation that wasn't completely in my control. Why? Because I assumed that the outcome would always be bad. I wasn't prepared to be surprised either way. In the end I would just end up mad because I couldn't take all the credit. But sometimes you just have to take the leap of faith.

#9 What Goes Around Comes Around
It's true. You will pay for your mistakes with people. You need to apologize and move on. Don't try to make your enemies pay. When you are actually powerful enough to do so, others will gladly do it for you. But until that point, you need to just collect your stuff and walk away. Don't give anybody a reason to do dirt to you, because you will be in delicate situations.

#10 Find Your Chillout Zone
You must find something you can do, on your own, that chills you out. You cannot depend on somebody else for that. You need to be able to get into your chillout zone when life throws you a knuckleball. For me, it changed. When I was in college, I ran. I could run for 10 miles and just leave the whole world behind. After that it was cycling. Then it was writing all my demons out on paper. But whatever it was, I knew I could come to that thing and find peace. Nobody had to come and restrain me, I didn't find myself on my knees like Usher begging for forgiveness for my own peace of mind. It had to come from within.

#11 Recognize
If you can get half of these things right, you have a good shot. But it won't change the perception of black men in America. So you have got to do a little to recognize others who have their heads on straight. And this is more than just a head nod in passing. It's affirmation of good work or a good deed. It's not paranoid, we brothers got to stick together when you know you or this other man is wrong. It's acknowledgment of achievement, not just survival. A black man can survive in jail. That doesn't mean anything. It's not just about living, it's about living right. It's about making a social space for doing good and keeping that space clean.

Men make choices and live with their choices. These are all tools that I think can help young black men keeping in mind the specific things I had to learn as a young black man. I come from a strong family, but these things still weren't obvious. But look at these lessons closely, see how universal they are?

Republicans for Sustainability

There are three things to say here. Two of them are new things, one is not an aha moment. I'll leave that for last.

The first Aha Moment came this morning as I was cruising the web with all my tools and feelers on moderate. It came in the form of the following video. The aha was the simple honest statement that you wouldn't think to hear at all, which is that the Republicans have several bills on health care reform but they are not being paid any mind as the majority is painting the Right as heartless bastards.

Medicare goes bankrupt in 2017. That used to seem like a long time away. It's not. Here are Republicans for sustainability.

--

The second mind blower followed a radio show I listened to this evening. "Insurance reform" is a bad way to go about helping Americans stay well. It turns on the pre-existing condition matter. If the government requires insurance companies to insure risky individuals, they essentially force the hand of the business. It no longer becomes an insurance business. An insurance business, the brains of it, is managing risk. You pay a premium against a risk - the amount of the premium depends upon how much risk the insurers assign you as an individual. The insurance company has several main tools with which to balance. The level of risk, the amount of benefit, the amount of premium, the insured population. When the government forces the hand of insurers with regard to the insured population and the amount of benefit for the purposes of funding universal health care, they are turning insurance companies into something other than what they are. The insurer can no longer manage risk - they essentially put their assets up as collateral against the general illness of the nation.

There will be lawsuits. Big lawsuits. When insurers are taken out of the risk management business by government mandates, they will be reconstituted or go broke. I'd like insurers to be sustained. How about you?

--

The third idea, the old one is that the way to survive is to be rich. Nobody is rich enough to really survive what this ball of confusion is likely to produce in terms of economic catastrophe - but you don't have to be faster than the bear... I feel sorry for my fellow Americans. I will explain on the downside, as I did with the financial crisis. People don't think things can get worse. They will.

The End of Books

More Macthink

Computing is fun again. It's new and mysterious. There are unexpected surprises and so far, no unexpected headaches. It has been just a few days, and I'm digging my Mac.

The first surprise is that many of my finger disciplines are working OK on the new machine. The Alt-tab is pretty much the same and everything that's CTRL is Command. I think Pops used to call that symbol 'splat'. 

The second surprise was how easy and quick it was to setup Time Machine, and what happened when I launched it for the first time. Whoa. Dizzy, trippy. Check out the background.

I has been many years since I built websites with BBEdit and I am proud to date myself as an old head. Now I'm ready to make the next step. Here's a little story.

Once upon a time, meaning between 1991 and 1994, I was a complete devotee to Mac. When the first PowerMacs hit the market I was all over it. I cashed in part of my 401K to buy a 7100 with upgraded memory and a huge honking' NEC 19 inch monitor. I came from the spoiled side of the tracks - Xerox, with object oriented and client server paradigms dancing in my head. So I was already sold on multimedia and deep UI. But UNIX was not to be trifled with - despite the fact that the entire Unix area was mired in legal morass, I had faith in these new things called Pink and Taligent. They were going to pickup where Xerox failed and left off. So I believed.

I had dismissed Microsoft. Everybody knew that MSSQL was, in its infancy, some sort of non-ip stack runt child of Sybase. Also, everybody knew that as pretty as Mac was, DAC, the Apple initiative to connect databases with all that GUI goodness was a total failure. It never competed with anything but OLE. Yes that, OLE. As primitive as ODBC was in 1992, it was far and away superior to anything the Mac Quadras or PowerMacs could use. Yet I held out hope that there could be a visualization suite or something that could compete. In fact, I seriously considered getting out of the EIS business altogether and getting into multimedia. Does anybody remember Voyager?

So I studied more of my Unix, got a subscription to Codewarrior, just in case, watched Applix with anticipation and gritted my teeth as the Sybase / Powerbuilder juggernaut steamrolled over just about everything - especially after the debut of Windows 95. Watcom was king, and I had to start relenting on the promise of the Mac - Pink and Taligent continued to be vapor.

Sometime after lusting after those PowerPC clone Macs for several months, I had to concede. The cool advanced UI and visualization power just wasn't going to happen. So I stayed where the data was.

Now there were a lot of things going on that would change the landscape. An important thing was the Web. I saw Mosaic early enough to be wowed by it, but it was all read only at the time - nothing dynamic. So I think it was that combination of things, including Citrix that led enterprise software towards the whole monster that 'thin client' turned out to be.

I don't hate thin client with a passion, but it basically killed the beauty that was visual programming. And if you have ever had the privilege of building end user apps in a visual programming tool.. ah but enough with the nostalgia. Thin client is dumb. Thick client is the bomb, and the nicest thick clients are called 'instruments'. IE forget keyboards and mice, unless those keyboards are ARPs or Rolands or Yamahas. To deal with the next level of computing requires the beauty of a richer interface and we have the entire history of music production to guide us, as the geniuses who put together Rockband understand. Thin client reduces, thick client and instruments expand.

The Mac is a thicker client than Windows. More time has been taken with UI on the platform. That's a good thing. But it's still primarily using the mouse/keyboard paradigm. That changes with the iPhone and iPad.  I'm looking forward to great collaboration between the instrument builders and virtuosos of the future. My direction is to build a multi-touch data browsing and visualization instrument. First stop - XCode.

1968

When you are a Conservative like me, you are trying not to be a Progressive primarily because you don't think human beings and human society should be tinkered with too much. You are against social engineering, but simultaneously you are fairly welcoming of change and progress. The fundamental premise of modern liberty is non-racial and non-sectarian. My favorite aphorism of this meritocratic notion is that you never know from where nobility will arise.

In 1968, America burned. It burned because MLK was assassinated. King represented a great deal in terms of the pace of meritocratic change America needed. A man like King was inevitable given the conditions of blacks in post-war America. What was clear was that in many parts of the nation, a certain aristocracy was not meritorious and it blocked the liberty of millions. A sleepy and intransigent America needed a wake-up call. But was the violence inevitable? I say that it probably was but I want to know more.

All this was a timeline I did not appreciate as a child and was never sufficiently instructed as a student. It was all still happening, and in many ways it still is.  The historical context of nationwide riots gives us the kind of perspective necessary. To my way of reckoning, the political force of a Tea Party movement is picayune as compared to the political sentiment that, once denied can spark the torching of cities. I see people getting bent out of shape by Olbermann and Limbaugh and yet still laughing with Maher and Stewart - there's a sort of fake political outrage in the air these days. Yes people are griping and complaining but nobody is going to murder Rush. 

I'm looking for the book. The best one on the era. Because I'm curious. Eyes on the Prize is no longer sufficient.

Fat

I have been put in the mind of fatness over the past week. But only a bit of it is self-centered. I'm at a marginally comfortable 214.5 which is less than I was at the beginning of last year but more than I was at my best. The trend is good, but not fast enough. Still. If I lose 4 pounds a year and keep it off, I'd be losing it faster than I gained it. Maybe I don't need to be so dramatic. I'm giving up lemonade this year, and I'm doing more salad lunch. Easy stuff.

But the first fatty is a comic named Iglesias (with an I). He calls himself fluffy, but I'm sure they've figured out the right makeup to hide the chins. Still, I like his attitude. He's going to die fat, and not without all the tacos he wants. I like people who are not afraid of food.

The First Lady wants to save the children. Don't we all? We're going to save them from the wrong food. I don't know. Why not pick something obvious like crack and meth? There's no question about that stuff, but Big Macs? I don't think so.

On Freakonomics Radio, they're talking about the ancillary costs of obesity. Uh oh. Here we go. Apparently somebody has come up with some statistics about how much extra gasoline and airplane fuel we waste because of the leadbellies amongst us. If you're fat you're not green.

I used to hate fat people. Now I only dislike them, and the answer is yes, I do think that there is something wrong, as in character defect, with people who are oversized mumpies. Who do I tolerate more? I suppose that's a tough question. I mean on the one hand, I really do like people who are foodies. And I can tell a foodie from a pig. So a significantly epicurean fat boy is cool with me. On the other hand a fat person who just eats to be eating? The eating disorder people know who they are. It's like smoking and drinking and any other vice. You overdo it and you're wrong, period. Don't tell me alcoholism is a disease, because they don't have that disease in Saudi Arabia. It's against the law. Human behavior can be modified.

What I'm not, is a slave to fashion. What I mean to say is that when I look at a P90X commercial, I just kind of want to vomit. This is what we used to call Reebokism - the body as fashion. Wake up people, fashion is fashion. Buy some nice clothes. So there's the other exception. Clearly, Ricky Jay and Alfred Hitchcock are fat, but they don't have a weight problem. They style their way through it. I can deal with that. I have to say though, Heavy D really never did do it consistently well. Selfless people at the other end of the spectrum, I also find way more attractive no matter how much they weigh. 

So I suppose I'm pretty much like everybody else on balance. I see fat as a vice which can be balanced or outweighed by virtue.

Mac Plunge

I done did it. I've put my money where my mouth is and begun a new adventure into the land of Mac. I went and purchased me a MacBook Pro. I opened the box today in my bedroom and the first thing I said was, "It's beautiful". I have to admit it. The love is back. It has been 13 years since I last played with a Mac of my own, and I can say that it looks finally to be what it should have been. I have a lot of relearning to do, but it helps that this machine is gorgeous. By this time next year I will likely be some kind of diehard.

Right now I'm just doing the preliminaries. Getting a bunch of open source software. Synchronizing bookmarks via XMarks. Getting Dropbox. Some of the transition will be easy. Some will be difficult. Right now the toughest thing is finding a password tool that is as good at PasswordSafe.

I need to hook up with Mac people of substance and experience. Save me some time.

Borderlands

Borderlands starts off exactly like a video from Gorillaz and it gets better from there. Like most gamers, I was surprised at the novelty of this little unknown FPS looter game, and now I'm many hours deep into it. 

Borderlands is a pretty straightforward adventure. You're a mercenary on a strange planet looking for alien technology and clues to a great treasure. All sorts of baddies inhabit the joint and all sorts of missions bring you closer to the goal, which is The Vault. You power up by experience points, competencies, dollars and increasingly powerful weapons all of which spurt out of the dying bodies of your foes, be they man or beast. You pick them up, buy and sell and try to stay alive. The entire shebang takes place on planet Pandora which is, like everything else in the game, a cel-shaded menagerie of desolation - kind of like the wild west desert from Warner Brother's Road Runner cartoon mixed in with a Robocop / Heavy Metal / Mad Max aesthetic. Actually, I'd say it borrows most from Mad Max - there's even a character called Mad Mel. So you're out there with your BDU of weapons, revolvers, repeaters, SMGs, rifles, saws, snipers, grenades and shotties leveling up through the wastes. 

What makes this super cool is the elemental mods. There are several 'elementals' that make your weapons more powerful. They are fire, acid, electric shock, and explosion. As you might imagine, when you're shooting the bad guys, it's much more fun when your bullets can make a splashy 1pH  shower that melts them into a green pool of goo. Did I mention that the death animations are awesome? The electric shock kills fry the skin off their bones.

Also, rabid fun are the grenade mods. You got your basic grenades and then you can make them sticky or bouncy or MIRVy or health stealing in addition to the elemental mods. Coolest. Grenades. Ever. Except they're generally not as deadly as grenades in any other game. They've been detuned. Considering what they do, it would make the whole game a no-brainer if they were as destructive as they should be.

The baddies themselves and just about everything else but the music are very imaginatively rendered. There's a great twisted sense of black humor underlying the entire game (if you haven't already surmised). And the best exemplars of that are the flaming badass psycho. Yes that's what they call them. Imagine a lunatic skinhead whose body is on fire running at you with a hatchet screaming at the top of his lungs like 'I'm taking my pound of flesh'. Hilariously creepy - more hilarious if you have an acid shotgun or an exploding sniper. Oh and don't forget the midgets with their shotguns. They have the helium voices and the recoil knocks them on their butts, then they get up and come at you again. 44 magnum to the head works every time.

There are so many missions, but the skill levels are tight. So if you find yourself outranked (you can see the rank level of your enemies) in a battle by more than one or two levels, you can pretty much forget it. Even though you can stop the action to do a bit of turn based fighting, switching weapons to find the weaknesses of your foes, they will outnumber and overwhelm you. Best to do some side missions and level up so that you're two or three levels up. Then the game is a lot more fun. 

Yes there are boss battles, no they're not that much fun, yes they will have you respawning like a newb, yes they are worth it. Yes there are interesting surprises and the joint is massive, if disjointed. I mean the place is very large and you need fast travel and vehicles (which it has) to get around.

You get to develop all sorts of skills. There are four characters from which to choose your avatar. I took the hunter, who specialized in sniping. My special power is a raptor familiar called 'Bloodwing' I send to take out an enemy at long distance. It can be armed with an elemental too, and for each level point my skills combined with those of my special power can be enhanced. Accuracy, loading times, loot rate of return - that kind of stuff. I haven't checked out the multiplayer and I think a MP coop would be very cool, but I'm late to the party getting this. 

There is no detail overlooked in Borderlands. It looks way simpler than it is and it plays very simply too, but they've engineered the hell out of it to deliver consistent fun and challenge. Not too dramatic, not too cliche and always something new to see. I think the cel shaded environments are brilliant and just the right mix of devastation and rube goldberg tech. This is a first rate game. Yeah. I love it. 

Is it awesome? No. The story is not the point and so there's no emotional support for the mission. You just loot and shoot - cockeyed mercenary stuff but not as fun as Mercenaries Two. Still, I'd give it five stars. 

American Fidelity

The other night, my cab driver was a negrino, a black Italian. We had a wide-ranging discussion about family and Italy and discrimination as he drove me from Chevy Chase down to 14th and V Street. He was dad to some kids who had been his nephews. He has come back and forth to and from the US and Italy. He's on his way to get these kids, who would ordinarily be considered just 'black', their Italian citizenship. Because black people don't stick together over here. The conversation wasn't so cut and dried, but my job is to take a tangent from everyday life and wax philosophical.

I recall another Italian friend I made in the early 90s at Columbia U. We talked then about American provinciality. I was of the conviction that American society was immature and didn't deserve to be as rich as it was - that us winning WW2 was a fluke. So when my Columbia friend asked why Americans didn't bother to study the rest of the world, my answer was tinged, but I think truthful then as now. I said look at yourself. You came all the way to NYC from Italy to become a Columbia MBA because when you graduate, you'll be very close to truly rich Americans. You'll get a job on Wall Street and you'll be set for life. Me, I only have to take a subway and I'm here at Columbia, and I don't have to ask such questions in a foreign language. In my current argot, we're all peasants, but some of us live closer to the castle.

Nigel Farage has a low opinion of the president of the EU. Americans have no opinion of him, because as Farage states, we don't know who the hell he is. Nor do we Americans have any opinion of Belgium, the country from which he comes. Europeans on the other hand, have very specific opinions of Belgium. What was the joke? Belgium is full of child pornographers and chocolatiers. They only make the chocolate to attract the kids. It's hella funny but we don't get it. For us Yanks, Bruges is just like Prague, a cool place to make a movie that needs lots of old buildings to set the scene.

American fidelity has a great deal to do with who we can know. Where do we go for the hookup? And so naturally I think of black Americans as no different in this regard, even though I have more opinions about black Americans and I get the jokes. It's a matter of proximity, and I've got proximity. But to the extent that one doesn't get a chance to see over the walls to Wall Street or one's own English speaking guardian angel or angel investor, you're likely to be cynical about any hookup. I observe today two kinds of people. The people who don't ever, and the people who always seem to get into beefs with the guy behind the counter at McDonalds. It's the latter guy I'm talking about. Of course he doesn't stick together with black people. All he knows are the trifling people and he doesn't have his own hookup.

I told my cabbie that lots of Americans don't get out much. I'm not so sure Europeans get out much either. But getting around in Europe is not so hard as getting around in Texas, and whereas there's not much to see in West Texas, there are hundreds of years of history in West Switzerland. So naturally there's a reason for the Swiss to speak French. But the parallels pretty much break down after a bit. We're Americans and we're as difficult to know as Belgians, and our child pornographers can beat up their child pornographers. Try to explain USC vs Notre Dame to a Parisian. It's difficult. But when you look at who keeps winning the games, it's easy to find the hookup. Parisians will beat a path to USC - they'll learn the language of the Trojans. That's how it goes.

I think a lot of people conflate a polyglot ability with an elevated and worldly sensibility. Sorry but I just watched 'Inglorious Basterds' and I find it hard to believe that the right German accent from the Brit officer would have made him feel less emnity for the Bosch. Is mastery of French really all Algerians are required for their portion of Fraternite?

Americans ought to hang together a bit tighter. We tend to sell each other out for the blonder babe, for the taller baller on our team, for the corner office. Yeah that's competition and it brings out the best in some of us. But it also defeats some of the purposes of society. I'd be the last to suggest, now, that we're too rich for our own good and that some good old fashioned depression-era deprivation would bring us to our European senses - that we peasants would start traveling more fare and wide and picking up languages and cultures in our journey towards the castle. Maybe all of that is a distraction.

One of these days, if Kurzweill is to be believed, your cell phone is going to translate your voice in realtime to any target language you choose. It will be a revolution. When that day comes we will find a large number of barriers falling, and the same sorts of philosophical differences between us that we have always had no matter what language we speak. But there will be one less excuse to be made that suggests we are not fundamentally the same, one less difference to treasure and a lot of translators out of their jobs.

All of that is going to happen first here in America, because America is the nation built from scratch on ideas, and it will be the nation best equipped to render meaningless the origins of the other nations in blood and soil.

Perils of Ideals

I began to watch a documentary about Nietzche and the Nazis. It sounds like the name of a very dark girl band, but it was serious. About 20 minutes in I grew tired, but still remembered the irony of Point 10 of the NASDP:

10. The first obligation of every citizen must be to work both spiritually and physically. The activity of individuals is not to counteract the interests of the universality, but must have its result within the framework of the whole for the benefit of all.

I bring this up in consideration of a quote I just ran by from Mark Steyn who seems all too often to be stating the unacceptably obvious. To wit:

So there was President Obama giving his bazillionth speech on health care, droning yet again that “now is the hour when we must seize the moment,” the same moment he’s been seizing every day of the week for the past year, only this time his genius photo-op guys thought it would look good to have him surrounded by men in white coats.

Why is he doing this? Why let “health” “care” “reform” stagger on like the rotting husk in a low-grade creature feature who refuses to stay dead no matter how many stakes you pound through his chest?

Because it’s worth it. Big time. I’ve been saying in this space for two years that the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible. In most of the rest of the Western world, there are still nominally “conservative” parties, and they even win elections occasionally, but not to any great effect (let’s not forget that Jacques Chirac was, in French terms, a “conservative”). The result is a kind of two-party one-party state: Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.

It is unclear whether Americans are heading towards Statism as Steyn fears, or exactly how American entrepreneurs will be marginailzed into codependent corporations. But the groundwork for state capitalism is already deeply laid in our current and recent history. It remains to be seen if any but the largest great capitalists will be able to resist it. Credit, for all intents and purposes, now belongs to the State. It seems that we may have to sue our way out of it.

The parallels between statism and Nazism are not immediately apparent, and not enough people it seems took Jonah Goldberg at his word. We're all a little frightened though. Things can go any number of ways. But I keep seeing that same level of emotional extremism being directed at Sarah Palin and I worry about how little it would take for a proper idealist to grab a significant portion of the electorate, Obama having proven the possibility once. I wonder what trees remain in the American political forest that would brake such an ill wind.

My path at Cobb has been to duck, and I probably will continue in that direction. I don't want to be part of today's political mainstream. I wonder when they will come for me.

Here's Representative Massa:

Naughty Death, Nice Death

Death confuses me. When I confront it, I'm never sure whether I should be naughty or nice. Let me explain.

Since I'm serious about pursuit of the Dosh Point, I feel as though there will be a sizeable amount of (human) baggage that I will no longer have to deal with. I will still have to face the fact that I'm not in the business of saving lives and so I dare not cop the sort of attitude that Dr. House maintains. But I would love to. My brain works that way and I am not an ordinary guy because of it. So a part of me just doesn't want to have to deal with the small talk. Just pure reason, you know? Rationally dealing with sentiment. I know that's naughty, but on the other hand, dammit, people die and I'm going to die and nobody has time guaranteed for us. So why should I put up with bullshit? And you know what I mean. Life is like a shit sandwich; the more bread you have the less shit you have to eat. 

Except for the emotional shit, which is inevitable. 

Nevertheless, time is precious, precious, precious. Please don't waste my time. I think I hate that more than anything else. I know. I know it makes me appear to be more cranky than I am. And I'm a happy man.

But I just came from a funeral, and I know this because I'm starting to attend more of them it seems. I certainly think a lot more about death. But what do people talk about at funerals? They talk about the sentiment, all the things that made him a nice man - when he was patient when he didn't have to be. When he spent time helping others when he didn't have to. When he spent his hard earned money when he didn't have to. 

I don't have an answer today. I'm just sayin'. I don't know whether death should make me much more forgiving of everybody, or much more unforgiving of people I don't really like.

--

The man who died, CM, was a friend to many and whose past was unknown to me. I just knew him as the dad of Sprite's best friend. I knew him as a cool character, the kind of guy you know would have your back in a bar fight but would be the last person to start one. He was a man who paid his penance and enjoyed the quiet satisfaction of having his priorities straight.  I liked him, and whenever the tedium of dadage became humdrum, he seemed to always have the right attitude. 

I remember when he lit up in the stands at one of our daughter's softball games. The umpire, whom I can only remember as a caricature now, stopped the game. We were outdoors. He stopped the game. C, gave me a look that I'd like to remember as, 'should we kick his ass?'. He put the butt out, quietly without saying a word, but it should have been on the ump's forehead. It was said at his funeral, "He was a real man." I should be so fortunate.

A Change of Scenery

It's a big country. A really big country. I am amazed by its sameness and its differentness. Why? Because these days I'm no longer in Cleveland's Winter, but in Washington DC's approaching Spring.

I have only been to Reagan National before it was Reagan National. I only recall that there were some sort of strange transport vehicles that took me out to the plane. It had to be more than 20 years ago. College days swiftly pass. So I was in no way prepared for Dulles. IAD is probably the most strikingly beautiful airport I've ever been in, and it was a complete surprise. 

What wasn't a complete surprise, but a pleasant one nonetheless is how different Virgin America is from every other airline. I've never been on Jet Blue, so I cannot say, but now I'm sure there are only three airlines in America. Southwest, Virgin America and the undifferentiated rest. The mind-numbing sameness of every airline is so apparent - I start to wonder if anybody in the others even try to care. They must be nursing such fiscal pain and organizational gridlock that nobody even bothers. Their food has gone from bad to worse to practically nothing. Their inflight entertainment blows chunks, and everything else about them is the same, dreary hellacious bore. Having been a frequent flyer on and off for the past 15 years, I can assure you that the most exciting thing about flight has been getting a good price and a window seat, which doesn't happen nearly enough times. 

Virgin has it all. Pay per view, inflight wifi, seat to seat chat, 110V electric sockets, Google Maps, and food you order by touchscreen. For that I'd pay premium, except Virgin doesn't require that I do. Further, its website is zippier than Expedia's. And get this. I had to change my flight twice before I went to DC. In the end, my seat was cheaper than the original amount I paid. The website remembered my $130 credit and applied it to my next flight. I didn't even have to speak to an agent. United has cheated me several times on that score. 

I recall several months ago there was a marketing blitz by Marriott to show off their new Courtyard hotels. I generally try to stay away from Courtyard if I'm staying for a week because they never had room service. Courtyard was a good idea in 1999, $120 good basic business travel rooms, standard around the country. But it got killed by Westin's W, which was so simply luxurious by comparison... well. It made the extra 50 or 75 a night seem like not much - after all, you only pick a Courtyard for a short stay. So Westin reinvented the hotel bed by giving a broad variety of pillows and a new mattress, and all the mattress companies have been trying to sell us that for our homes on AM radio for the past three years. It seems that I have finally got to one of those Courtyards that Marriott redid. 

People keep telling me it's because everything looks good compared to Cleveland. Maybe so, but the Courtyard at Chevy Chase is noice. I suppose that's what I should expect for the hotel that's next door to Brooks Brothers and catty corner to Tiffany, but I still got a great corporate rate. I didn't know anything about Washington DC, really I didn't. And I know that the neighborhood came before the comedian, and that the comedian was trying to say something classy about himself, but.. this place is sporty even with the grimy snow. And now that I've browsed several times over the past week, I finally understand why women rage over Jimmy Choo. 

Well yes it's true that my new customer is Fannie Mae. I have to say that it has been a long time since I've seen a happier bunch of employees. I rather expected to see everybody over there staring at their shoes in shame, but nothing could be further from the truth. I get the feeling, after only a week, that the work they do there is extraordinarily complex and that nobody has taken the time to straighten up the inevitable kinks and spaghetti that results from adding layer upon layer of system. Without speaking out of school, there seems to be some fairly serious bureaucracy that slows down things but that's not exceptional. They seem to have adapted clever ways of getting around it, whereas at Cisco, for example, they make so much money that nobody bothers to get around it. So yes what I'm saying is that the bureaucracy at Fannie Mae is more efficient than that at Cisco, and their security is more intrusively painstaking as well.  So far, though Cisco is a far sexier place, I'd rather work in DC. 

You would have had a hard time convincing me that I would enjoy taking the bus to the point at which I would wear a buspass on my retractable ID. I take the 31 or the 32 or the 37 express if I can. I took the subway by mistake and ended up hiking a mile up Van Ness from UDC. Weirdest houses I've ever seen. Shabby Tudor Gothic duplexes each the size of a McMansion. I think only a college professor could dig that, but there were the plastic toys in the snow of one of those silent brick sentinels. Kind of like an upscale Detroit brick neighborhood, except here the street is narrow. The telephone poles show evidence of digital cable; dog walkers don't bother to curb their animals; the bus stops are only on one side of the street. 

Just behind that slope across from the ruined turf of the athletic field at UDC stands the fortress of the Chinese Embassy. I could tell that it was a highly secure building but at the time I had no idea what it was. Odd and apart from the 70s concrete of UDC - a new graduate facility perhaps? I eyeballed the patrol. No. Something completely apart. Just behind this castle was the Intelsat facility - reminding me of the old Fluor HQ in Irvine with its turrets. One of the smartest women I ever worked with once loved her employment at Intelsat. An Egyptian named Heba who took entirely too much shit from her scrawny husband later in Texas. 

By Thursday I was refreshed. I found enough of my old friends and relatives to declare Tuesday Homie Night in DC. I visited more of my project sponsor's staff in Herndon (or is it Reston?). It all looks like Irvine to me. A stunning number of modified glass box corporate parks with big names. Everybody's got an office in the Capitol, or in this case, across the river in VA. There's a lot to see out here, and I reckon I'm going to be getting to know much more.

Yeah I would be one of those inside the Beltway. Sans doubt. There is sophistication here, the isolating kind I'm sure - but then again I'm where America comes together, binges and purges regularly in the flow of democratic orderly change. Smart money is here, or at least money. I'll be working across the street from Sidwell Friends, where the Obama children will attend school. The ship that's DC is not going down anytime soon - believe me, the rest of the American empire will crumble to dust and blow away before the lawns of Chevy Chase turn brown. The Capitol of America is entrenched. Entrenched I say. Like Wall Street I think, it has its own happy imperviousness. The young attorney working on cases at the bar downstairs at Clydes. The smooth fop with his pipe and scarf outside of Sushi-Ko looking like Don Cheadle after the Ocean's Eleven payday. The first date couple, he from the Levant, she from the Virgin Islands in the corner at Indique Heights. The young married couple, both working non-profit organizations, living and loving handsomely. They're young and beautiful, smart and strong, and they are living well in this corner of our nation. 

This edge of the city is as multicultural as Los Angeles. The vibe is similar, but less East Asian. More Middle Easter, more Indian. For a cosmopolitan mix, it seems odd. The black is more upscale than anywhere I've seen but downtown Atlanta. The white is more attorney and older than anywhere I've seen but lower Manhattan. The latins are rare, and then they're Castillian. The Indians are plural but far less female than expected. The Chinese, as usual, are marking time and hiding their kung fu. The kids are the same kind of upscale feral as we have here in Redondo Beach, but oddly respectful. That's what I'm seeing on the daily in Friendship Heights, where even in the winter the bus stops and the man in the electric wheelchair moves from his spot on the curb as the bus kneels for his needs without missing a beat. The electronic female voice calls off the streets "Veazy Street, Stop Requested". It's a city, as the old Russian detective said in her trip to America, full of written signs as if nobody knows the place but everybody can use the place.

There's energy. But is there balance? I don't know. Next Tuesday night, a report from Eatonville.

History is Fun

Bunning vs Reid

From the AP

"Bunning said again Tuesday that he opposed the extension because it would add $10 billion to the budget deficit, and he attacked Democrats for abandoning promises to pay for legislation instead of contributing to a budget deficits projected to hit almost $1.6 trillion this year. Bunning proposes to pay for the extension with unspent money from last year's massive economic recovery package, but (Senate Majority Leader Harry) Reid, D-Nev., objected."

Well that's easy and simple. Don't add another 10 billion as an unfunded mandate to exend unemployment. Move the dollars from TARP to bail out Mainstreet instead of Wall Street.

The Way of the Servant

(from the archives, 2005)

You cannot achieve Servitude without having attained Mastery.

I while ago I came up with a pedagogical hierarchy for my craft, the craft of computer programming, systems building and data architecture. I have found a certain resonance in this and in life.

I have been learning lessons in humility the past couple years and many of them could be summed up in this quote by John Boyd:

"The most important thing in life is to be free to do things. There are only two ways to insure that freedom — you can be rich or you can you reduce your needs to zero."

Furthermore, I am motivated at this point in my life to be a vessel of spirit. One of the heads of CocaCola said famously (although he probably wasn't the first "There is no limit to what you can accomplish if you are willing to share the credit."

I think that the first time I comprehended the idea of Spirit outside of the context of religious teaching was via Allen Wheelis. It had a resonance that I could see, it added a transcendent quality to the kind of writing I planned to do as a Freshman studying Computer Science. I was going to embed knowledge into the soul of a new machine. I felt demiurgic. And so I have come back to collect this matter more than twenty years later.

The Roles of Ambition

The Clueless Newbie
The Newb has no idea but he's absolutely dumbstruck by the possibilities. He knows it, and he's just asking questions and trying not to get on anybody's nerves. He wants to get in on it because he realizes the value of this whole area of expertise. What the Newbie needs most is to get taken seriously. He needs to try something.

The Apprentice
The apprentice knows what he wants to do, but not quite how. He has skills but not experience. He has ambition and drive and he's out to prove something. He's full of 'I can do this' and he hates making mistakes. He's looking for ways to do what he knows can be done, and he sets out to find the right tools. He hates hearing that it's been done and that his thoughts have been thought before, but his callsign is determinate. He's aiming to be graceful. What the Apprentice needs most is a win.

The Workhorse
In my craft, that of software, it takes at least two years to get to know anything about anything. Whatever the tool is (and you're lucky if you get to pick a tool that has enduring value), you're going to be using it inefficiently for at least two years. Unless you have the good fortune to get onto a very well organized project that allows you to concentrate on a decent variety of applications of a single tool, you're going to fumble around with it. The Workhorse knows his toolset. He can make it do whatever it's supposed to do. He has confidence and competence. You can throw anything at the Workhorse and he can explain it in the language of his tool. He'll make it work, and that's what he likes to do. What a Workhorse needs is a steady stream of work and a stable environment. The Workhorse stands on the brink of Mastery. He knows two or three ways to accomplish the same task. He stands in fear of the irrelevance of his toolset.

The Hotshot
The Hotshot has achieved Mastery. He has explored the limits of his tool and has made it do things that it wasn't designed to do. He's ready to get to the engineers of the tool and tell them what they ought to do with it next. He is arrogant with his capabilities and is ready to shout down pretenders. He has done The Big Thing that his toolset was designed to do and now he's unstoppable. He is now hungry to go out and conquer.

The Roles of Mastery
At this level we reach the plateau of Mastery. When a tool stops changing, there is nowhere to go , The first step above mastery has two forms. One is the Guru and the other is the Goto Guy.

The Goto Guy
The Goto Guy is the one to you go to for results. He is the Hotshot who is now dedicated to creating others in his own image. He is all about market domination. He has earned the respect of most and the envy of Hotshots. He is the first person a Newbie wants to talk to. The Goto Guy must be approachable and gregarious. He can see the big picture but is focused on results. The Goto Guy needs resources and opportunity. He builds momentum and seeks to establish permanance through engendering real-world dependence.

The Guru
At the same level of Mastery as the Goto Guy is the Guru. The Guru is like the Goto Guy but as the Goto seeks domination in the world of application, the Guru seeks perfection of the tool. He adds to Mastery, the extraordinary details and subtle refinements of technique. He is worldly but extrapolates and projects. He is the keeper of the integrity of the toolset refines its Way. He seeks to establish permanance through engendering adherence to conceptual beauty and completeness.

Below Mastery is Ambition. At Mastery is Balance. Above Mastery is Power. The Servant moves in all these directions at once.

 

The Roles of Power

The Lord
The Lord is a man with long arms, busy hands and a loud mouth. He is the bossman, and he knows you only too well. He makes it his business to make your business taking care of his business. The function of the Lord is to attach himself like lamprey at he base of your skull and insert himself into your thought process so that you consider your every action with respect to the Lord's business. He lords over you. The Lord employs spies and sargeants. He has eyes, ears and arms everywhere. What the Lord fears most is treachery and heroism, for these are the generators of unpredictability. The Lord is a master planner and strategic thinker, he gets his fingers into everything.

The Demiurge
The Demiurge is the Second Soul to God. His power is the generate awe and inspriration through magnificent acts of creation. The Demiurge consumes resources and is impatient. He is visionary and seems to pass through life with a different sense of time and space. The Demiurge is equally creator and destroyer. He is urban renewal, he is revolutionary, he is dramatic. He splits the world into two, those who stand behind him and those who stand in his way. The Demiurge is already an irresitable force, the most important question is where does he get his license, for very rarely unless they play in the realm of the mind or spirit, is the Demiurge his own source of power.

The Primary
The Demiurge builds the amusement park, the Lord makes you wear proper clothing, pay admission and stand in line and checks to see if you are tall enough for each ride. The Primary is why you are all there in the first place. The Primary needn't exist and sometimes does not. The Primary is the Reason, the Idea. The Primary motivates everything. He is unquestionable and irresistable. He is not only Master of the tools but Master of the environment. He stands with his finger on the center of gravity of his domain, he balances the Tao. Everyone believes they know the Primary, and everyone thinks they know what he wants, but only the Lord and the Demiurge get that close. And on occasion they find that there is nobody there. The Primary takes all the credit and all the blame. He is Servant of the system of his creation, he directs its creation and destruction.

The Way of the Servant
So now that you've lasted this far, we arrive at the way of Servitude, Service and Servility. I haven't decided the best term, but the concept is clear. The lessons of middle age are that Servitude is a result of power. It rather goes full circle. As Primary, Demiurge or Lord, you are subject to attack. The mistake of the Gangster is that he wants to be all three, but a Hegemon disappears into his system. He becomes at one with the process and can assume any role. He is in service to his creation, his tools, his system and at a certain point, doesn't care which role he takes. His only concern is the success and integrity of the system of which he partakes.

This is truly sublime and it is the beauty of this that attracts me. If power corrupts, it is because people forget to Serve. And it is only in absolute Service that absolute power can be borne. This applies to Kings as well as Popes, and this is the point I wanted to support about Ratzinger's humility. This is the thing that will enable him to weild power. American liberals want him to be a Demiurge but they forget that inherent in great creation and reform, is great destruction and the chaos of change. They want him to serve the ideas they have championed with no regard to the balance of the Catholic Church.

I have had in the China Deal, my opportunity to become Demiurgic, and it will be some time before I see such an opportunity to come again. And so I have returned in the mode of Service to become once again, a Goto Guy in my old domain. It's a good place to be.

The Servant is free to move no matter what his ambition. But the Servant can be false. He can feign servility and actually be self-serving or serving a false ideology or a treacherous master. But the dedicated Servant, the true Servant is brother to all in the system.

There is something greater than power in the Way of the Servant, it is the beauty of the expression of the human spirit, for our power lies not within ourselves or our actions, but in our collective shape. We are constrained from knowing our collective destiny and so it can be said that all we know for certain is the depth of our commitment. In this is found our honor, and if we achieve, our glory.

You cannot achieve Servitude without having attained Mastery.

I while ago I came up with a pedagogical hierarchy for my craft, the craft of computer programming, systems building and data architecture. I have found a certain resonance in this and in life.

I have been learning lessons in humility the past couple years and many of them could be summed up in this quote by John Boyd:

"The most important thing in life is to be free to do things. There are only two ways to insure that freedom — you can be rich or you can you reduce your needs to zero."

Furthermore, I am motivated at this point in my life to be a vessel of spirit. One of the heads of CocaCola said famously (although he probably wasn't the first "There is no limit to what you can accomplish if you are willing to share the credit."

I think that the first time I comprehended the idea of Spirit outside of the context of religious teaching was via Allen Wheelis. It had a resonance that I could see, it added a transcendent quality to the kind of writing I planned to do as a Freshman studying Computer Science. I was going to embed knowledge into the soul of a new machine. I felt demiurgic. And so I have come back to collect this matter more than twenty years later.

The Roles of Ambition

The Clueless Newbie
The Newb has no idea but he's absolutely dumbstruck by the possibilities. He knows it, and he's just asking questions and trying not to get on anybody's nerves. He wants to get in on it because he realizes the value of this whole area of expertise. What the Newbie needs most is to get taken seriously. He needs to try something.

The Apprentice
The apprentice knows what he wants to do, but not quite how. He has skills but not experience. He has ambition and drive and he's out to prove something. He's full of 'I can do this' and he hates making mistakes. He's looking for ways to do what he knows can be done, and he sets out to find the right tools. He hates hearing that it's been done and that his thoughts have been thought before, but his callsign is determinate. He's aiming to be graceful. What the Apprentice needs most is a win.

The Workhorse
In my craft, that of software, it takes at least two years to get to know anything about anything. Whatever the tool is (and you're lucky if you get to pick a tool that has enduring value), you're going to be using it inefficiently for at least two years. Unless you have the good fortune to get onto a very well organized project that allows you to concentrate on a decent variety of applications of a single tool, you're going to fumble around with it. The Workhorse knows his toolset. He can make it do whatever it's supposed to do. He has confidence and competence. You can throw anything at the Workhorse and he can explain it in the language of his tool. He'll make it work, and that's what he likes to do. What a Workhorse needs is a steady stream of work and a stable environment. The Workhorse stands on the brink of Mastery. He knows two or three ways to accomplish the same task. He stands in fear of the irrelevance of his toolset.

The Hotshot
The Hotshot has achieved Mastery. He has explored the limits of his tool and has made it do things that it wasn't designed to do. He's ready to get to the engineers of the tool and tell them what they ought to do with it next. He is arrogant with his capabilities and is ready to shout down pretenders. He has done The Big Thing that his toolset was designed to do and now he's unstoppable. He is now hungry to go out and conquer.

The Roles of Mastery
At this level we reach the plateau of Mastery. When a tool stops changing, there is nowhere to go , The first step above mastery has two forms. One is the Guru and the other is the Goto Guy.

The Goto Guy
The Goto Guy is the one to you go to for results. He is the Hotshot who is now dedicated to creating others in his own image. He is all about market domination. He has earned the respect of most and the envy of Hotshots. He is the first person a Newbie wants to talk to. The Goto Guy must be approachable and gregarious. He can see the big picture but is focused on results. The Goto Guy needs resources and opportunity. He builds momentum and seeks to establish permanance through engendering real-world dependence.

The Guru
At the same level of Mastery as the Goto Guy is the Guru. The Guru is like the Goto Guy but as the Goto seeks domination in the world of application, the Guru seeks perfection of the tool. He adds to Mastery, the extraordinary details and subtle refinements of technique. He is worldly but extrapolates and projects. He is the keeper of the integrity of the toolset refines its Way. He seeks to establish permanance through engendering adherence to conceptual beauty and completeness.

Below Mastery is Ambition. At Mastery is Balance. Above Mastery is Power. The Servant moves in all these directions at once.

The Roles of Power

The Lord
The Lord is a man with long arms, busy hands and a loud mouth. He is the bossman, and he knows you only too well. He makes it his business to make your business taking care of his business. The function of the Lord is to attach himself like lamprey at he base of your skull and insert himself into your thought process so that you consider your every action with respect to the Lord's business. He lords over you. The Lord employs spies and sargeants. He has eyes, ears and arms everywhere. What the Lord fears most is treachery and heroism, for these are the generators of unpredictability. The Lord is a master planner and strategic thinker, he gets his fingers into everything.

The Demiurge
The Demiurge is the Second Soul to God. His power is the generate awe and inspriration through magnificent acts of creation. The Demiurge consumes resources and is impatient. He is visionary and seems to pass through life with a different sense of time and space. The Demiurge is equally creator and destroyer. He is urban renewal, he is revolutionary, he is dramatic. He splits the world into two, those who stand behind him and those who stand in his way. The Demiurge is already an irresitable force, the most important question is where does he get his license, for very rarely unless they play in the realm of the mind or spirit, is the Demiurge his own source of power.

The Primary
The Demiurge builds the amusement park, the Lord makes you wear proper clothing, pay admission and stand in line and checks to see if you are tall enough for each ride. The Primary is why you are all there in the first place. The Primary needn't exist and sometimes does not. The Primary is the Reason, the Idea. The Primary motivates everything. He is unquestionable and irresistable. He is not only Master of the tools but Master of the environment. He stands with his finger on the center of gravity of his domain, he balances the Tao. Everyone believes they know the Primary, and everyone thinks they know what he wants, but only the Lord and the Demiurge get that close. And on occasion they find that there is nobody there. The Primary takes all the credit and all the blame. He is Servant of the system of his creation, he directs its creation and destruction.

The Way of the Servant
So now that you've lasted this far, we arrive at the way of Servitude, Service and Servility. I haven't decided the best term, but the concept is clear. The lessons of middle age are that Servitude is a result of power. It rather goes full circle. As Primary, Demiurge or Lord, you are subject to attack. The mistake of the Gangster is that he wants to be all three, but a Hegemon disappears into his system. He becomes at one with the process and can assume any role. He is in service to his creation, his tools, his system and at a certain point, doesn't care which role he takes. His only concern is the success and integrity of the system of which he partakes.

This is truly sublime and it is the beauty of this that attracts me. If power corrupts, it is because people forget to Serve. And it is only in absolute Service that absolute power can be borne. This applies to Kings as well as Popes, and this is the point I wanted to support about Ratzinger's humility. This is the thing that will enable him to weild power. American liberals want him to be a Demiurge but they forget that inherent in great creation and reform, is great destruction and the chaos of change. They want him to serve the ideas they have championed with no regard to the balance of the Catholic Church.

I have had in the China Deal, my opportunity to become Demiurgic, and it will be some time before I see such an opportunity to come again. And so I have returned in the mode of Service to become once again, a Goto Guy in my old domain. It's a good place to be.

The Servant is free to move no matter what his ambition. But the Servant can be false. He can feign servility and actually be self-serving or serving a false ideology or a treacherous master. But the dedicated Servant, the true Servant is brother to all in the system.

There is something greater than power in the Way of the Servant, it is the beauty of the expression of the human spirit, for our power lies not within ourselves or our actions, but in our collective shape. We are constrained from knowing our collective destiny and so it can be said that all we know for certain is the depth of our commitment. In this is found our honor, and if we achieve, our glory.