Cobb

Ixtoc

June 1979. Gulf of Mexico. "Biggest Oil Spill Ever". Completely forgotten. The Earth is fine.

Ixtoc. Nine months out of control.  Now look at the picture below. The spot marked 'A' is the spot of the largest oil spill in history. 1.2 million tons of oil. Three miles away? Those would be farms.

Oil spills. Get used to it.

Obama: So What?

For about 8 or 9 months, having given the President a bit of a holiday to get into the swing of things, I have been taking digs at Obama. I don't like him. So what? I think that he has been overcome by events, and has proven to be less of an effective leader than most people believed he might be. He's got Congress, he's got the White House and he's got his hands full. Nothing in particular is convincing me that he is extraordinary. So now I think I will go back into analysis.

I had a very good time raging through some preliminaries with Dr. K who believes healthcare is a right. But on the third day we got into the details of the economics of hospital billing, etc. He's not a web guy so I can't have much more conversations with him, those that were beginning to be productive. There's a kind of rage people have to go through to get all their arguments out, and then they start asking and answering questions. That's the interesting part.

I'm still somewhat interested in the Clash of Civilizations and the way America deals its power abroad on the world stage. The economics of Europe are the pressing issue for what it bodes for the future of the EU. The PIIGS can really ruin things in a way that the Middle East doesn't. And I find it interesting how Europe may become the center of attention in the near future - especially as I remain seeing Obama as a Euro style Social Democrat to the extent that he works from ideology. At any rate, everyone's ideology is submerged except for the diehard baggers who will finally seat a candidate or two - nothing in comparison to Gingrich's Contract for America. We deal with the practical.

A Small Article of Faith

And I quote:

The word “spiritual” has no useful meaning if it does not refer to a relation to a real spirit, something from a world not our own, something supernatural, something that or someone who tells us things we do not know, judges us for our failures, and gives us ideals to strive for and maybe help in reaching them. It’s not a useful word if it means a general inclination or shape of mind or emotional pattern or set of attitudes or collection of values. There is no reason to call any of these spiritual.

The author has a point but I'm disputing it, because to fall for that point is to fall directly into the trap logicians and Hitchens would have for us. That is that the moment you cite something un-empirical, you assert a falsity that can justify anything. 

What we have is a national mood not to discriminate and it is discrimination that we are afraid of. You see, we are unable to achieve a national consensus on what proper discrimination is, what it entails and what is the right and proper way to go about it. We have given up on being selective and meritocratic in the social sphere. 

Some months ago, but still this year, I think, I was watching a video over at Sippican Cottage. I have unsubscribed to Sippican, just to cut down on the volume of reading I do - nothing to do with the quality. In that video was a lot of strange dancing. It was Pop. And somehow I managed to discover the aesthetic of Pop and what it meant to thinking people at the time. The essence that I got of it was this: Pop was a new sensibility, an artistic movement which using particular techniques would lead to intellectual and ethical discovery among the masses. I'm thinking more of the sort of thing that might be approached by Peter Coyote, and not that sort of irony-drenched kitsch of Pop Art artists like Warhol or Lichtenstein. I'm talking about the song and dance of Godspell, the bright colors in the style of Marlo Thomas. I'm talking about a soft of highbrow content that eschews unnecessary sophistication and allusion to the classics. Such an art would be anti-elitist in fact, but not in purpose. This is a good idea, I think. But I also think it got overrun by the sophisticates who were able to make it into an anti-establishment but more importantly anti-intellectual exercise. It's very difficult to present old and useful wisdom outside of all of its previously established contexts. And I'm sure that when faced with that difficulty many would be Pop creators took shortcuts. 

So it is my interpretation, incomplete as it stands, that what might have been excellent about Pop got discarded. As I think about it, the Pop world would ultimately have needed its guardians and its institutions and probably eschewed that to its own demise. I think that there was something excellent and extraordinary about Leroy Nieman and Peter Max. And perhaps the fact that they were both popularly commercialized by Burger King and 7Up respectively, added to the notion that they too would have to have some power structure behind them and such a notion could not stand. But these days, there are creative efforts bankrolled by commercialism that can certainly be considered artistic, yet there is no oeuvre aside from the excruciatingly ironic, self-defeatism that is now the predominant ethos of post-modernism. Even minimalism stands up well to the great emptiness of post-modernism. 

I bring up the good Pop because it is in that I am sensing the last vestiges of Soul and its crossover. It stood for something specific, not just assimilation but integration: two-way assimilation, assimilation with a purpose and a moral backbone. And somehow all that purpose got lost in a kind of colorblind, ethics-blind, don't ask, don't tell, don't judge, don't respect, anything goes mentality. The hard work was eschewed because then people would have to accept the possibility of rational change outside of the social sensibilities they had inherited. All good art does that, and in the 70s Pop might have done so if it had survived. Instead it went towards a kind of abstract expressionism of the individual, a million of me in the Me Generation can't be wrong. Why? Because I'm not judgmental and I won't conform to any program that is. I'm all about self-fulfillment, went the logic. And if I can find happiness in myself then the evils of society can only rise so far. It's like we were all Born Free and if we could return to the wilds of humanity without all its banks, and armies and dogmas, the world would be a better place. But all of that is anti-social. A Me Generation is anti-social. It desperately searches for a soul-mate and the nirvana of two rather than the difficult work of making a democratic society function. A democratic society requires consensus, conformity, judgment and everyday discrimination. It requires thought and choice and moral reasoning and consequential decision-making. It requires that which Fred Friendly tried to inspire. And whether that was through the artistic traditions of Western Civilization or the challenges of Pop and Soul's crossover, it was something we all decided to be too lazy and self-centered to bother with. Is it any wonder everything we call 'art' is laced with irony? Is it any wonder our spirituality cannot be religious?

Whether you choose to believe in God or not, the matter of sustaining a civil society requires the same work at bottom, and it always requires a consistent sort of moral reasoning that entails discriminations on a daily basis. And it requires that the values which guide those discriminations are made public and clear. This is something our daily politics does not have. What we have are retrenchments and recriminations. It is as if we as a nation have forgotten how to be Americans - this thing we must be in the swirl of cultures, languages and traditions our popular culture digests and poops out.

This is the challenge that stands before any atheist or secularist that lashes out at organized religion. What public institutions do we have that has enough public credibility about it and moral discrimination within it to sustain an engaged population in those commitments required of a democratic society? It is not our politics. It is not our art. It is not our sports. It is not our schools. 

BP Oil Spill: Burn the Witch

Yesterday we speculated about what it would take finally to stop the oil in the Gulf of Mexico from the uncontrolled well disaster that has befallen BP and the Coast. People in all of their outrage tend to forget that people were killed in the explosion. Instead the controversy has risen to be a test of nerve for the Obama Administration, complete with 'boot on the neck' metaphors spewing from the White House.

It came to a point this week at which it had to be explained that the Pentagon didn't have the equipment or the know-how to fix what's wrong in the Gulf. But that is to be expected, except that politically there must be assumptions that the government knows everything. The government doesn't know everything, of course, nor should they be held responsible for everything. But those expectations are part of the Obama World Order.

All the talk about BP, and watching it's stock price fluctuate reminds me of that scene in the Monty Python movie where all the townsfolk are gathered to answer the pseudo logic of the town wizard. All they want to do is burn the witch, and their logic is faulty. Of course she's not a witch. But the wise man gives another ridiculous set of logics by which to determine if the witch is a witch.

This is the gambling, you see? This is the thing that nobody can predict, and yet somebody put up the millions so that such drilling could take place. And now there is an environmental disaster that will make us forget about the last one. It's going to be rough for the shrimp boaters and sport fishermen out there on the gulf coast, but very few Americans are going to give up their second car.

My angle on this is the same as it has been. More nuclear. But this drilling in the Gulf was one of the compromises that Obama made. In California, we don't stand for offshore drilling, and while I wavered on the question for a while, I'd have to admit that I will sleep better knowing this seals the political deal for California pretty much for a generation. It's probably going to be Arizona, by the way, that becomes our big nuclear state. Georgia is first, but I have a sneaking suspicion about this. It could be Nevada too... We'll see.

In the meantime. BP will get burned. But here's a question. Why stop with the chemical dispersant? Are they actually going to try to use hay?

Titus Andronicus

Julie Taymor's Titus once again has my attention for the possibility of being the greatest film ever even as I wonder at the possibility that Shakespeare's words linger on the very edge of our comprehension. I watch and think how many of our tribe have taken to heart the lessons of such treachery and revenge.

There is a scene in which Titus stands, kneels and then falls face flat at the crossroads, and as the words flow I think that this might be our very own Petreaus' future.

Hear me, grave fathers! noble tribunes, stay!
    For pity of mine age, whose youth was spent
    In dangerous wars, whilst you securely slept;
    For all my blood in Rome's great quarrel shed;
    For all the frosty nights that I have watch'd;
    And for these bitter tears, which now you see
    Filling the aged wrinkles in my cheeks;
    Be pitiful to my condemned sons,
    Whose souls are not corrupted as 'tis thought.
    For two and twenty sons I never wept,
    Because they died in honour's lofty bed.

    For these, these, tribunes, in the dust I write
    My heart's deep languor and my soul's sad tears:
    Let my tears stanch the earth's dry appetite;
    My sons' sweet blood will make it shame and blush.
    O earth, I will befriend thee more with rain,
    That shall distil from these two ancient urns,
    Than youthful April shall with all his showers:
    In summer's drought I'll drop upon thee still;
    In winter with warm tears I'll melt the snow
    And keep eternal spring-time on thy face,
    So thou refuse to drink my dear sons' blood. 

OF course I would not think there are those capable of such direct duplicity within our myriad and crisscrossing hall of power. But certainly such desires would be made manifest if it were possible.

Microsoft: Too Big And Failing

Maybe it was Cringely who suggested it, but I'm sure the idea has been thrown around a lot. Break Microsoft up. I with the wisdom of that idea would finally get some traction inside Redmond. Or at least it's my interpretation that the big shakeup there is not going to result in the spinning off of companies.

The news is explained thusly:

Robbie Bach and J. Allard, both of whom were both instrumental in creating consumer products through Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division, both are leaving the company as part of a broader reorganization, reports TechFlash. As a result, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, will initially gain greater control over the division, which includes the Xbox, Zune and Windows Mobile products.

Ballmer? I'm trying to imagine how exactly Ballmer helps Microsoft do anything new or exciting. New and exciting is what must occur... What am I saying? That's never going to happen. Microsoft is a bit too far up in the woods for the culture of 'exciting' to permeate. Microsoft is a university and a universe. But it's sluggish and bound up in the slow that never quite leads the market. Of course, I'm biased. There are some outstanding things that Microsoft does, just not quite as great as they ought. They leave a lot of tech on the table - I mean an entirely too large chunk.

What I learned about Microsoft in my months in Redmond is that it's a Bank and a Marketing Machine, and because of those two things, all ideas are shaped in very particular ways, meaning stuff is matrixed out to the infrastructure and a lot of good stuff doesn't survive the process. Stuff that with the same amount of attention in a smaller organization might work just great. What saves Microsoft is the leverage the good-enough stuff gets when the market share gets past the adoption tipping point. Take Sharepoint for example. It is my studied opinion that Sharepoint is craptastic squared. There are so many other better ways to provide the functionality of Sharepoint that it's almost impossible for me to imagine somebody as smart as Ray Ozzie would be involved. It may have ingested all of Groove's technology, but it completely lost all of Groove's appeal. But now Sharepoint is too big to fail, and mediocrities all over the world will support it from now until doomsday. Proprietary lock-in. Leadership through religious fanaticism. That's what the Microsoft machine produces. Choice is the enemy, and therefore Microsoft has very few choice products. Yeah I use BaseCamp, and I'm looking at Google Sites.

Microsoft is the king of Gaming. So what disturbs me about this development is that the golden egg that is the XBox360 franchise is in jeopardy. Yes the Zune is a disaster. Everybody in that portable music player market got owned by Apple, just demolished. Window Mobile too. I never took that seriously - I mean did it ever even really compete with Nokia? Now that HP has Palm, there's no place for Windows Mobile to go. HP was the killer hardware for Windows Mobile back in the day. Those days are over. And that new roundy thing that looks like it feels like the Palm Pixi from Microsoft is probably going nowhere. So 2/3rds of this division is a nightmare. Painful.

If I were Ballmer what would I do?

I would abandon Microsoft technology and get some designers to design consumer products from scratch. It has to be as radical as GM spinning off Saturn. It might be too late, but it's got to be that independent. Let Microsoft use its money to allow multiple brands to emerge. XBox is a brand. Nobody cares that it's Microsoft. It works fine on its own. 

Here's what I'm suggesting - here me out. Look at your small consumer electronics companies. Microsoft has brain overkill for that product market. They only have to be marginally smarter and use their cheaper money (big deal) to make an impact in those markets, and downmarket from Apple's entry into the home electronics space, they can win. They can use the Microsoft mojo to hire top creative talent and try some really cool things. I'm going to list a handful of players I think Microsoft could outwit.

VTech. Audiovox. Jensen. Cobra. . But here's a real killer - a company and business that could have been inside Microsoft: Vizio. Yes them. Microsoft did nothing in TV, and now it's never going to catch up to Google TV whatever that might be. Before you knock the idea, consider Sync. Microsoft partnered with Ford and now their tech is making a big difference in car audio. If I was Ballmer, I'd be buying up shares of Panasonic, Sharp or Sanyo.

If Microsoft is going to survive as a huge company, then it needs to understand how to brand like a small company. It can learn from consumer goods companies like P&G, SCJohnson and Clorox.

Only The Dead

Only the dead have seen the end of war.
-Plato

This is the caption from the beginning of a movie I now possess. You may remember it: Black Hawk Down. In fact, you may remember when that movie characterized all the limp dithering we used to do in military conflict around the globe. It's coming back for a short time, under Obama and in his wake. Then it will swing back too far the other way.

These days I'm trying to think back to a time when America had little faith in itself. Back to the days of Billy Jack and the Feral Motorcycle Movie, when inflation was reality, when Iron Eyes Cody cried on the side of the road and when Richard Nixon ran his White House like Russian Roulette. I remember when we used to say that we were going to see the day when we'd have to buy clean air, back when rivers caught fire and women expected to get raped after dark in Times Square. I remember when suddenly we had to drive 55 and the President told us to keep the thermostat at 68. I remember gas lines and people who stole gasoline out of your tank and Pep Boys started selling locking gas caps.

I think we're heading backwards. I think it's because everybody has gone soft and they think we can finesse our difficulties. Not so, people. Not so. Get ready for the second set of the Seventies. I'm preparing. 

Here are two more horsemen.

• Iran is surrounded.
• Europe is broke.

They say if war is the answer, what is the question. Well, what kinds of questions do you have about the economy? Yeah. And what kinds of answers have you been getting? Exactly.

Obama as Buchanan

Goldman smacks Obama:

The world looks on and snickers. Brazil’s socialist president Lula has decided to cock a snook at the United States by allying with the odious Tayyip Erdogan, the “moderate” Muslim now transforming Turkey into an Islamist dictatorship through extralegal terror against domestic political opponents, with the encouragement of Russia. Why? Because they can. America is handing Iran regional hegemony on a silver platter, and all the scavengers, resentniks, used-to-be’s and  wannabe’s are gathering around the kill like hyenas laughing at a sick lion.

Not since President James Buchanan left American open to secession and civil war in the late 1850s has America suffered a leader so determined to undermine our fundamental interests.

From Wikipedia, bold mine.

Buchanan's efforts to maintain peace between the North and the South alienated both sides, and as the Southern states declared their secession in the prologue to the American Civil War, Buchanan's opinion was that secession was illegal, but that going to war to stop it was also illegal; hence, he remained inactive. By the time he left office, popular opinion had turned against him, and the Democratic Party had split in two. Buchanan had once hoped that his presidency might rank in history with that of George Washington.^[1] However, his handling of the crisis preceding the Civil War has led to his consistent ranking by historians as one of the worst Presidents.

Prophetic?

Consumer Slavery

My new favorite podcast is No Agenda. It's a very off the cuff kind of scatterbrained intelligencer. But it's fundamentally skeptical. At some point in the future, I aim to join the kiretsu and maybe put their bumpersticker on my website. One of their motifs is 'shutup slave!', and it fits very nicely with my theory of the American Peasant.

I have been coming across stories that make the grumpy old man in me stand up an shout 'You lie', but then I think better of it. I roll my eyes with sad recognition of human frailty, stupidity and all that and then I try to conserve my energy by telling my kids about the madness. But they don't read Cobb. So I have you. Therefore I'm thinking about introducing a new category. I'm not sure if I should call it 'This Is Not America' or 'Shutup Slave!'. Neither is perfect, but I'll come up with something.

For the time being, I'll put this one under a punch in the nose. This one being the fact that AT&T is raising its early termination fee to 325 bucks. What? That's double the current fee.

The other bit of slavery being sold in America is debt slavery. It's an old story but here's how I read it, and I may be wrong and elitist and just not recognizing how much people need credit cards, but I doubt it. 

It seems to me that too many people want to go to college and get edjumacated. You're basically reserving yourself a cubical and access to the Slice (maybe) but it's really a roll of the dice, especially if you're not in the hardest of the hard sciences. After WW2 and the GI Bill we overpopulated colleges, and I'm not sure that we've done well in all that for the country. I think we've generated a generation of broadminded people who meta-think about too much and focus too little on the business of life. We have people who can talk forever about movies but couldn't explain the operation of a SLR. It is the problem of a huge literate population - I'm making a judgment in observation but the observation is the important thing. Nobody knows what to do with a super literate society with disposable income, except to allow them to take their expectation to the limit. Which is to say, we have turned America into a society of 30 million kings. Sooner or later kings are going to want to be warrior kings or philosopher kings or capitalist kings. So let them have guns, publishing houses and credit cards. We are addicted to upward mobility and hoisting ourselves on the petards of ambition. But did our higher education for the masses prepare us for all that? This is my point, I say the answer is no.

We have created an astonishingly great open society of people with high moral and intellectual standards. We all benefit tremendously by the ease with which we are prepared as a culture to accept the true advances of science and in every area of human knowledge. But only a small fraction of us are capable of actually understanding and working with that advance in knowledge. It's the difference between being able to recognize Beethoven and being able to play Beethoven, between using an iPad and programming one, between possessing a credit card and knowing where credit actually comes from. We are an entitled society. 

Like a lot of people, I've had that old discussion about 'sport' vs 'activity'. This is the coolest review of it I ever saw. Download Toughest Sport We all play sports. That's because in our astonishingly great open society we have spare time and we're healthy. And so we have baseball diamonds in our parks and places to play football and basketball and hockey. There are dojos for sparing and gyms for boxing, tennis courts, and ski slopes. We have the entire variety of access to sports and no matter what our physical conditioning, we give it a shot. But how many of us can hit a 90mph fastball? Not many. How many of us can slam a basketball or take a hit from a 300 pound lineman, get up and play again. How many of us could return a serve from Nadal or make par at Pebble Beach?  Maybe a good fraction of us could, but the majority of us would be left out. So there is softball, there are courts with 9foot hoops, touch football and par three golf courses all over our nation. There are bunny slopes for us all. 

When I worked at City National Bank back when gold was 800 and ounce and jumbo CDs paid 13%, we were in a death spiral of inflation. Volker saved us, I'm told, although I don't know exactly how. What I do know was back around 1980 it was not easy to get an American Express card or any sort of credit card. My bank, and lots of banks, required collateral. Unsecured loans were hard to come by. But nowadays everybody expects to get and use credit cards, not just bunny slope credit, but double black diamond credit. But just because you play sports doesn't mean you play the tough sports and just because you play the tough sports doesn't mean you play on a regulation field with serious rules amongst the big boys. But little kings want to be big kings. And people who pay 17% interest on their credit card debt want to pay 9% interest. 

It turns out that most of us don't merit the attention of a real person at a ratings agency. The overwhelming majority of us don't know the name of any real banker. We might know a teller by face, but they can't approve a check worth 1000 bucks let alone your creditworthiness. Instead we're all retail credit customers, and our credit ratings are generated by about three seconds of computer time. We think we deserve better, but that's what we get for shopping our financial services retail.

Now there's some kind of legislation that has been passed this past week giving us some kind of new consumer protection. And people from PriceWaterhouse and IBM and the rest of the Slice will build out some new algorithms and workflows for the banks over the next year or two and make some more money so that you'll get a couple new paragraphs in that fine print you never read when your bank sends you the email. And that's basically like Dad coming down to the sandlot for a few innings to tell the pitcher to throw underhand for little Billy. It doesn't make any of us better players. It doesn't make any of us kings. It just validates our desire to be all that and takes some of the pain away. You now have four strikes before you're out. 

All American peasants have an asterisk behind our records. That's not freedom.

Funny Feminism

Ruth Buzzi. Ahh now that's humor. Once upon a time in America, men ran the risk of getting walloped, and women didn't have much to fear about getting walloped back. Or do I project a sort of decency that never existed? Maybe I watched too much of the Flintstones.

Dead Donors & Presumed Consent

I'm in Wisconsin with my Cousin K. Whereas my brother the cop I call Doc here at Cobb, Cousin K is an actual doctor. He is one of the many Americans who believes healthcare is a right. We disagree.

I'm trying to understand, of course, what medical nirvana would be like, and to me it starts with free everything up to adulthood. More specifically, I think every American should automatically get whatever basic standard of healthcare our public schools require for registration. That would be like the sorts of immunizations that parents have to provide proof of to keep kids in school.

Then the older you get, the less health care you get for free from the state. That hurts in principle only if the state is the only provider. People who want to indulge their cultural sensibilities to look young forever are free to purchase whatever in the private sector. But as I said before, I don't like Obama selling healthcare (insurance) from the starting point of people in their 60s dying of cancer. 

The other thing I don't like about what we got (although who knows what we'll get in four years) is that the fundamental cost of health care provision is not going down. That's just wrong. You really can't call it reform if the same thing costs more.

But here's something really crazy. According to my sources at First Things, which is now going pay per view, there's a debate among doctors about redefining the legal definition of 'dead' in order to expedite the harvesting of human organs. But that's not so scary because, well I give the medical profession more credibility than that. I don't give credibility to the current political climate of all this fast-tracking towards medical utopia. Check this out.

Indeed, legislation (A-9865) just introduced by New York Assemblyman Richard Brodsky would turn the current approach for obtaining consent inside-out. Brodksy’s bill would require every applicant for a New York driver’s license to expressly opt out as an organ donor, rather than, as is currently the case, expressly opt in. The proposal states: “If the applicant does not decline to be registered in the New York State Organ and Tissue Donor Registry they will be automatically enrolled.” In other words, unless you explicitly refuse to be a potential donor—you are one.

Don't let this one slip by, OK? 

It used to be that one would be considered a saint to donate your body to science. Now, as soon as you croak their taking eminent domain. Is nothing sacred?

GTMO Again

I remember when GTMO was a big deal on everybody's lips. I learned a lot from Stashiu over at Patterico's Pontifications. The subject came up again this morning elsewhere and so I had to look some things up. So I'm putting up this post to remind me of the keywords.

In retrospect, what I'm thinking about GTMO is rather simple. Number one, here is the declassified Operating Manual. I haven't read it but I do have it. Download Gitmosop

Number Two: Most of interrogation is not dangerous or inhumane. You'd have to read Stashiu to know that - he was there. I'm not going to do your homework for you.

Number Three: Only Hamdan had a case. The rest was mostly baseless, or caseless as the case may be. Yes I'm being flip. Then again, where are the lawsuits? If you have more information on the lawsuits, by all means, share it.

There's Always Math & Medicine

I'm with my ultra-liberal cousin's house and he points me to a book he's reading by Nell Painter. I told him I don't read those kinds of books any longer. I noticed that there's also a book by Sherman Alexie lying around. Yike.

This morning it occurs to me that American peasants who aim to gain some sense of integrity with their passion are wasting a great deal of time and energy studying the liberal arts. If you craft arguments and rearrange your brain to engage politically, sooner or later you're going to be disappointed by the powerful enemy who dismisses all of your thought processes. There is always eternal frustration at the end of the rainbow because you'll never get the document declassified until it's too late. In other words, Truth, although it serves no man, will not be discovered in time. Whether it's the truth about where Obama was born or what burned down the WTC or how many American troops are actually still in Saudi Arabia or if Sarah Palin's baby is really her own. Whatever you're trying to find out to make your political position reality based is always seven steps behind the attention span of the masses. And the people with power have already thrown the lever and moved ahead.

In memory are the coffeeshops of Boston back when Starbucks was fledgling and the eternal grad students with their shabby clothes and 8 1/2 x 11 inch flyers and dynamic inquisitional fury would attempt to decrypt the inner workings of the powers that be. The bohemian grrrls and the bluesy romantics and the prophets of rage - they all refused the conformity of getting over in America. There was a truer way to live. Except they didn't care about math or science or technology or chemistry or physics or biology. Well, maybe the biology of whatever species was on the post office wall whose continued protection could thwart any multi-million dollar anything. But lab work? Yeah right.

Obviously because of the sort of peasant I am, I'm working back the other way. I start with the conformity of math & science, of logic through computing and set my life's boots in that concrete setting. Then I try to walk my way back through the gardens of the arts and politics. I'm hobbled of course, having decided against hobbit feet. But I made that choice and am happy with it. And I have the satisfaction of the ability to know that eggs is eggs and all the microchips on the planet work on principles I understand. The magic at the end of the rainbow is stuff I could construct myself because the principles don't change because of political powers. When the powers throw the lever, it's all 110 volts, just like I need. I can load the software, I can check the source code or SHA256 the binaries.

My ultra liberal cousin has some of the same kind of liberties. He's a trauma surgeon. And it probably never gets old for him to open somebody up and see the liver is on the predictable side and that the heartbeat means X and always X. There must be equivalent satisfaction in his life to find a good trachea tube as I find in a good text editor.

People make the world go 'round not so much by what they think but by what they do. There doesn't seem to be a compelling reason to not have natural reality informing what you do - well, the shortcut is not ultimately profitable.

On the Necessity of Knuckleheads

(from the archives July 2004 )

You know, I gotta admit when I am wrong, and I think I've been caught in something of a dilemma. That being the case, I tend to think the subject is exhausted. I keep torquing the nut until it doesn't move, then I back up off it a half-turn. And so I have to talk about it.

Spence, whom I salute again, mentions the following:

It was the knuckleheads that taught me the dozens--the value of using wordplay as a means of attack and defense. The knuckleheads taught me to stand up for what I believed in. The knuckleheads taught me what it meant to be confident in myself when all around me doubted. And it was the criminally minded knucklheads that taught me the value of having game even as they gave me strong anti-role models.

There's talk, now and again, about how many black middle class parents feel the necessity of sending their kids to live with their grandparents down South for the summer, or to stay with their ghetto cousins for a spell. Assuming these parents aren't complete idiots there is a reason I could agree with although I'd probably try to accomplish it a different way. That reason is to toughen up their otherwise dainty suburban offspring.

I know my kids ain't black. And when it comes to their adulthood, they won't need to be. They're brown - like the zillions in Africa, India and South and Central America. That's a good enough sample, and it's only skin color. They can't be black like me because my blackness was born of the times, not an essential, inescapable box, but a response to a condition. But so much of who I am is locked into that alternatively golden and grim experience. I wish I could teach them things I learned the way I learned them. I cannot send my kids back to the neighborhood I grew up in, but I understand why somebody might want to.

In the three-bedroom house I was raised in, we had Measles, Mumps, Chicken Pox, Rubella, Impetigo and Roaches. Every one of us five kids who bunked there survived them all and most of us, excepting my sister and I, grew taller than six foot two. In my neighborhood school, "Meet me after class" was most likely followed by "so I can kick your ass". I've played bicycle chicken with the Ice Cream Truck and been chased by more stray dogs and gangbangers than I care to think about. My sister swore to me last week that we used to jump from rooftop to rooftop. I don't know about that but we did make zip lines from the transformer level of power poles and hogtie each other for fun. I've talked about all kinds of ghetto games from suicide to slapboxing to stomp - but I never really wrote about 'Hide & Go Get It'. Use your imagination.

One of the reasons I don't back down about talking about my Black Nationalist roots is because, like my neighborhood, all that shit made me tough. And yes it was shit. You can't get that just by reading Ulysses. You get it from surviving the risk and the danger. Perhaps the Baby Boom was the lone exception in the struggles of life, and perhaps that cannot be compensated. Perhaps some folks feel the need to run with bulls in Pamplona, but I don't. Don't get me wrong, I got out of my hood before the Crack Wars. I would have needed a different kind of level of toughness, one perhaps completely incompatible with the life I live now, were I stuck back with Frankie, Mountain, Boo, Tissino, White Jerry, Nudie, Twin (and Twin), Shabazz, Ralphie, Rabo and KK. But I learned, and I overcame.

What do we owe our adversaries? What do we owe those thugs, knuckleheads, triflin' niggas (yeah that's what we called 'em), skanks and skeezers? We owe them not to punk out. They couldn't take us out of the game, so we shouldn't quit the game. I'll get mystical for a moment and talk about Lord not taking away my stumbling block. I don't thank God for creating temptation, but I understand purpose in the overcoming. But back from the abstract to the people. What do we owe them? I think we do owe them a little bit of respect for forcing us to deal with their reality.

After all, we know that achievement is real because we look at those who fell off. We faced the same choices they did and our choices landed us standing. And we've learned that the good are punished and the bad escape because of those knuckleheads. But we also know what works in the long term.

Mammy's Little Baby Loves What?

Shortening bread?

Shortening shall be a refined, hydrogenated vegetable oil or combination of refined vegetable oils which are in common use by the baking industry. Coconut and palm kernel oils may be used only in the coating. The shortening shall have a stability of not less than 100 hours as determined by the Active Oxygen Method (AOM) in Method Cd 12-57 of the Commercial Fats and Oils chapter in the Official and Tentative Methods of the American Oil Chemists Society. The shortening may contain alpha monoglycerides and an antioxidant or combination of antioxidants, as permitted by the Federal Grain Inspection Service (FGIS), and the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and regulations promulgated thereunder.

Your tax dollars at 'work'.

The above is part of a 26 page government issued recipe for Oatmeal Cookies. I think. After a couple of pages it gets really difficult to read.

Where is Napoleon when you need him?

Oh, and if you want the whole actual recipe...Download MIL-C-44072C

A Lamp Post in Denver

Armed Forces Day in Torrance

It was all about the people. Nothing spectacular. No big show of heavy artillery. No jets for a fly-by. Just Americans showing appreciation for Americans. Simple.

Halo Reach Beta: First Look

I haven't written about games and gamers for a while. There really hasn't been much to talk about. I went down the rabbit hole of Mass Effect 2, and I'm not even sure if I wrote a review of that. It has taken up most of my gaming time before Splinter Cell Conviction. Now I finished SCC and am back to run through Mass Effect 2 a second time. Nothing's yawny, nor is anything compelling and I've been having flashbacks to Fallout 3, especially since I worked in DC. But I have to say that Modern Warfare 2 has taken all of my online buds away from me and so gaming is not so much fun any longer. Besides, I have other fish to fry.

Nevertheless, I discovered what I long forgot, that the Halo Reach beta was attached to ODST, and so I downloaded the gig last night and played it with my son until 2 in the morning. It's fairly impressive.

The first thing you will notice about Halo Reach is that it's kinda Halo and kinda not. You have to adjust your reflexes all over again. I'm not sure if that's back to ODST reflexes or Halo 2 or something else, but the layout feels strangely unfamiliar at first. Melee is no longer on the B button, and that's hella strange in Halo. Instead its RB. On the LB you have powers. Yes. These are old school spartans that have more up their sleeve than the Master Chief ever did. Shields, extra speed, and invisibility. Hmm. That makes for some interesting action, but wait. Did I mention that you can fly?

Flying (yuk yuk) adds a new dimension to gameplay that I haven't felt since Crackdown. And it's really smartly done. You are flying with momentum, not like Guilty Spark in build mode. And it works nicely to cushion falls from high places and to sneak up on unsuspecting enemies.

But really, the best thing about Reach is the speed. It is just as fast as Modern Warfare, and when your sprint ability is engaged on the LB you feel as though you're right back in those Clancy trenches. It's immediately familiar. Plus you have an indicator to know when your speed is over - so you can conserve your power. Another subtly brilliant touch from the masters at Bungie. (Or is this Bungie any longer?) Overall, the game is very fast and varied - you don't spend much time running around looking for weapons, you just pick a loadout and start running and gunning.

Additionally, you gain experience points (like MW2) and with those points you can upgrade your armor. Very cool. 

There is a new crop of weapons, some of which are brand new, some of which are kinda familiar going back to the original Halo. The needler is old looking but performs like the proper new needler. The standard assault rifle is right on. The same old pistol works predictably. There is a new needle pistol and needle rifle for Covy weapons. The needle rifle is extra cool.

Game modes are new and exciting. Invasion is my favorite. Spartans vs Covenant in a six on six with vehicles with escalating loadouts. You start as something simple and as rounds go by you get more loadout options and more weapons on the map. Arena mode I haven't played, but I think it takes ranking to a new level. Looks very interesting.

The maps are superb as usual. Growing on me as time goes by is a multilevel deally called Sword Bay or some such. Very different flavor of interior spaces, and windows I can tell are kinda optional in the beta. I didn't like it at first. Powerhouse is immediately cool, reminiscent of High Ground and Standoff. Boneyard is great. Open middle with high refineryesque buildings on both sides. Great for sniping OK for vehicles. Great for flying.

This is going to be a very great game, because the Beta is as good as Halo 2 was. I also particularly dig the new Social settings, so I can choose what kind of players to play with. Nicely.

Howard Zinn: Dead

'A Peoples History of the United States' is the book for everyone but history majors. It gives a crunchy satisfaction to all of our hungers to confirm that we have been hoodwinked, bamboozled and led astray. It comes to the top of the list just ahead of 'Lies My Teacher Taught Me' in the query of what *really* happened in America, now that we can say so. But it is far from the most profound book I've ever read. In fact, I think it led me a different color of astray, in that it gave me a sense that there were once brave, young, intelligent men and women who decided once and for all that good government was the highest calling and things went from worse to better. Howard Zinn's great work is a sweet categorization of the good, the bad and the ugly in American government. But.

The most profound book I have ever read has to be not a single book but the Neveryon Trilogy. It is the encapsulation of a mythical period on a distant world that tells the story of a feudal society's evolution into literacy. Anyone who would study history must surely be aware of the essential paradoxes of, as Niall Ferguson puts it, communing with the dead. But Neveryon as fiction did not have that problem, and yet it reads very much like a history complete with archetypal stories of slave uprisings, creation myths, golden children, errant knights, evil tyrants and prodigal sons. The key to Neveryon and how it affects me greatly is it show a society that minds its own business because it is illiterate and then it shows how literacy changes what is on the minds of peasants and how this new skill, once privy to the nobility now set free, changes power.

When I read Neveryon, I was very much interested in matters of the canon wars and cultural production. Now it speaks to me on a broader basis which is that basis of understanding the forces that provide the gift of literacy and content. That is to say, whose interest does it serve for the masses to know anything? What does it matter what you know, and therefore who owns your attention?

It is in this context that Zinn's People's History should be taken into account because its very existence substantiates three myths. The first and most important myth is that 'knowledge is power' when in fact power uses knowledge to whatever ends power wants. But if you believe that myth, then you can believe the additional two, that history before Zinn was less informed and that after Zinn we are better informed. If Zinn corrects, then there was something wrong before Zinn and something right after Zinn. But that is not actually within our place to say because we, idiot peasants like me, are drawn to the book because of this promise.

Where is Zinn's revolution? It is a question somebody will have to write down and sell. Or perhaps that was Zinn's end in and of itself. He raised the question that stuck. What was America before it had a People's History, and what is it now that it does?

Don't Put Words of Conviction In My Mouth

Eric Holder again.

Without looking, I'm going to guess that Holder was never a prosecutor.

Kobe Bryant: Arab Chic

It has been a long time since I've seen something genuinely new in urban fashion. Most people at the site where I got this photo decided not to like it because they were led to believe it's racist. (Don't ask, just don't ask). But I think it's extra cool. I'm on a diet once again, and this summer I'm going to celebrate the absence of my belly with some duds like these.

I have always liked dressing in all white or all black. This works for me. Oh wait. The long sleeve t-shirt costs 350 bucks. Ahem. The hooded scarf? Only 700 bucks.

Thank god for knockoffs.

It's Complicated Because I Say It's Complicated

Eric Holder:

When asked by Poe how he could have constitutional concerns about a law he has not read, Holder said: "Well, what I've said is that I've not made up my mind. I've only made the comments that I've made on the basis of things that I've been able to glean by reading newspaper accounts, obviously, television, talking to people who are on the review panel...looking at the law." 

On Sunday, Holder said he does not think Arizona's law is racially motivated but voiced concern that its enforcement could lead to racial profiling. 

Hoo boy. What a mediocrity this joker is. This is starting to sound like a pattern in the Obama Administration. Really highly educated people that don't make up their minds about anything, never ran a business, expect that you can talk your way out of every situation.

Dread Philosopher King Mandingo

Once upon a time in Brooklyn, I found myself at one of those Spike Lee parties. This was back when Black Sheep owned the soul of every dancer when the hook swung in 'engine engine number nine..' So I'm at this swanky flat in Ft Greene and homeboy in dreads is holding court.

He explains to the smitten crowd that as a tenured professor at an Ivy League school, he is a WASP nightmare, and the mojo he throws curveball stylee at the generic midwestern white crowd is even more spectacular. You see all of their lives, these cherry cheeked bohunks scatched and scraped to get their babies into college. Not just any college, but a fancy tip top East Coast college. All their lives they have instructed their offspring to respect their professors in order to get their ticket punched into the good life, aka non-trailer trash non-ghetto life. And all of their provincial lives they have encountered teachers of the composition of William H. Macy. 

Now Dread Philosopher King Mandingo stands between Becky and the brass ring, and the white collective shits bricks. And he just can't wait until parents night. With all their wealth and privilege there is fuck all they can do to a tenured professor - it would make a mockery of everything they've been preaching their entire lives. Thus, homeboy is the embodiment of the Wake Up Call. 

People actually stopped dancing to hear this. 

I just wanted to pull that story out of the archives of my brain because a blogger I know just reminded me of the DPKM. 

Edjumacation Opportunity Cost

Yahoo HotJobs has published a list of the worst paying college degrees.

10. Drama (starting annual salary: $35,600; mid-career annual salary: $56,600)
9. Fine arts (starting annual salary: $35,800; mid-career annual salary: $56,300)
8. Hospitality and tourism (starting annual salary: $37,000; mid-career annual salary: $54,300)
7. Education (starting annual salary: $36,200; mid-career annual salary: $54,100)
6. Horticulture (starting annual salary: $37,200; mid-career annual salary: $53,400)
5. Spanish (starting annual salary: $35,600; mid-career annual salary: $52,600)
4. Music (starting annual salary: $34,000; mid-career annual salary: $52,000)
3. Theology (starting annual salary: $34,800; mid-career annual salary: $51,500)
2. Elementary education (starting annual salary: $33,000; mid-career annual salary: $42,400)
1. Social work (starting annual salary: $33,400; mid-career annual salary: $41,600)

Add this to the Edjumacation meme around here.

• Edjumacation
• Edjumacation Part Two

I Want My TFSA

Check this out:

Since January 2009, Canadian residents have been eligible to open Tax-Free Savings Accounts (TFSAs). They work almost exactly like Roth IRAs: you contribute after-tax dollars, and all withdrawals are tax-free. All Canadians 18 and older can contribute up to $5,000 (Canadian) a year to a TFSA, and you can stuff it with a variety of investments: regular savings accounts, CDs (called GICs in Canada), and mutual funds.

Unlike Roth IRAs, however, you can use a TFSA to save for absolutely anything. You don’t have to submit receipts. You can use the savings for college, medicine, retirement, or a pony. Furthermore, if you don’t contribute your full $5,000 this year, the leftover amount rolls over. I could, if I were Canadian, put $5 in my TFSA this year and $9,995 next year. (You can actually put in even more than this, in a way too complicated to explain but easy to do in practice.)

“They’re astounding,” said Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “It’s a profound reform. It essentially eliminates taxation on savings for the entire middle class.”

Five grand a year is a significant amount of savings for most families–but not for the rich.

Edwards, who is originally from Canada, sounds a little homesick. As well he should. In 2002, he co-wrote a paper arguing that Roth IRAs should be converted into what he called Universal Savings Accounts (USAs, get it?). It describes a proposed reform nearly identical to the Canadian TFSA.

President George W. Bush’s administration had a similar idea dubbed Lifetime Savings Accounts; it went into several budgets he submitted to Congress in the mid-2000s. Each time, Congress stripped it out.

I spoke to a source at the House Ways and Means Committee, which would have to sign off on tax-free savings accounts in the US. They said nothing of the kind is currently in discussion.

I want my TFSA

The Inconceivable Arrives

(artlessly lifted from CBN.com)

Black Conservatives: The New Face of the GOP

WASHINGTON - The midterm congressional elections are seven months away. Republicans are already promising a strong effort to take back the majority and they're attracting candidates who are already making history.

At least 30 African-Americans in 16 states are running for the U.S Senate and the House of Representatives. It's a surge of black Republican activism that America hasn't seen since the Reconstruction era.

Returning to Slavery?

Charles Lollar is one of the candidates. As a major in the Marine Corps Reserves and a businessman, Lollar is taking on the second most powerful Democrat in the House, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland.

Lollar said that just as he felt drawn to serve his country, he feels called to run against those he says are steering America off track.

"The policies of socialism," he said. "The policies that say government should get involved in competition when that's not the government's role, the policies that extend government and makes it overwhelming with the tax burden where every 38 cents of your dollar goes to state, federal or local government, where you're only getting 62 cents of every dollar you earned --there's something wrong with that."

"If we keep going down the road we're going, financially - I think - it's 53 to 54 cents of every dollar we make with this health care bill intact. We're getting closer and closer to slavery," he said.

Proud of Obama, but…

Lollar said although he's proud of President Obama and thankful for the barriers he's broken for black candidates, he's convinced Obama is leading the country in a dangerous direction.

Still, National Public Radio's Juan Williams' said, "President Obama and the idea that a black man as president, I think, has encouraged lots of black people across the political spectrum because they think 'You know what, you can break through some barriers, you can have success.' Michael Steele, you have a black man as the chairman of the Republican Party."

While Steele is often controversial, conservative Ron Miller, who is executive director of Regular Folks United, says Steele is making an impact on the black community.

"I think that his presence has encouraged people, it has emboldened people and I just hope that continues on," Miller said.

GOP a 'Natural Fit for Blacks'

Actor and author Joseph C. Phillips believes the Republican Party has always been a natural fit for the black community. Conservative principles, he points out, were the foundation of the Civil Rights Movement.

"Who is a more idealistic people, American people, than black people in America?" Phillips asked. "We truly, truly believe in the ideas articulated in the Declaration of Independence: equality under the law and a limited government that secures equal rights to life, liberty and property."

Phillips recently spoke to CBN News about his book entitled "He Talk Like a White Boy." Click here to watch the interview.

African-Americans are church goers. And on social issues like gay marriage and abortion, blacks tend to be more conservative.

"I always tell my mother when she asked me why am I a Republican, 'It's because you raised me that way,'" Miller said. "When I got old enough to make my own decisions, I started comparing what I believed to the Democratic Party platform and I saw no alignment whatsoever."

A Lonely Existence

However, life as a black conservative can be lonely. Candidates still face pockets of racism among whites and those who associate with the Tea Party movement face criticism from liberals.

Lollar has even been called a racist.

"It's actually kind of funny when you think about it," Lollar said. "I use the one liner in my speeches, 'How can I be a racist? My wife is black.'"

Republican leaders know they have a problem attracting minorities, something they're focused on changing.

"In my judgment there may be no higher priority for Republicans in the 21st century then to return to that Abraham Lincoln, Jack Kemp vision that at the very center of everything we are as Republicans is the principle of equality of opportunity," House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence told CBN News.

A Black GOP Revolution?

Ken Blackwell, senior fellow with the Family Research Council and former candidate for RNC chairman, argues the GOP should widen its tent, but not at the expense of its principles.

"We are the party of job creation and opportunity and we believe in a meritorious society where individuals deserve a place at the starting line with no guarantees of how they're going to finish the race," he said.

Lollar predicts Americans will notice more black conservatives running for public offices on all levels in the coming years.

"It's time for us to reach across aisles," he said. "Be uncomfortable and reach across race lines. It's time for us to rebuild our country from the inside back out."

Eyes On the Late Prize

Five years ago somebody dropped a bootleg copy of Eyes on the Prize onto the web. I have a copy that I ran across this morning looking for another CD. I'm going to watch a little snippet of it. It turns out that the official DVD just showed up on Amazon last month. Five years late. You can get your copy for 50 bucks.

An Old School Reverie

I have met Louis Satterfield, Lena Horne, Ivan Dixon, Tom Bradley, Louis Lomax, Jesse Jackson, all in my youth. I remember Operation Breadbasket came over to Dorsey High and Jesse brought dancers. I sat in the front row. He said he was changing the name to PUSH. The cute dancer with the big fro took the moment in her song when the lyrics said 'you' and pointed to me.

They used to come to us, all of them. They believed that children were our future. They wanted to teach us well and let us lead the way by showing all the beauty we possessed inside. So we developed a sense of pride. Black pride. Unquestionable. Unstoppable. We had become a new people top to bottom. By the time I was a teenager, there were no Negroes left in America. I can remember the sunny day in Los Angeles when McFadden & Whitehead came on the radio. Do you hear the strings? The ladies chorus? The synth drums? It was a new sound. There was TSOP and Fly Robin Fly. But here's the thing that a lot of people forget about what happened after 1968, the year the US burned. NASA was still in full effect and the dream kept spreading. I've often talked about how nobody wants to be an astronaut. When I was a kid, that was the greatest thing anyone could possibly be. And in the Old School, we were setting our minds in that direction.

The leap was cultural. It was the difference between Soul and Funk. Soul had its left foot in the Blues and its right foot in Gospel. It was a moaning and groaning affair filled with longing and don't nobody know the trouble I've seen. Funk had its thighs high and its mind in outer space. It poplocked and did the robot to synthesizers and attended the arrival of the Mothership. It was going to do what it wanted and if the people of Earth couldn't handle it, we would go to a new dimension. Jesse had a clue having us say "I am somebody", but we were going to be somebody else entirely.

For a long time, I attended my generational imperative. I wanted to keep on that tangent of pride, keep that black cultural revolution alive. I felt obligated to move the new Talented Tenth agenda forward. But something embarrassing happened. And in retrospect I have considered that the problem wasn't the aim or the spirit, but it was the infrastructure and the capitalization. Revolutions are expensive. And even though spirit travels through space, time and immovable objects, you can't ever be sure that it is focused or radiates in the proper direction. 

The second thing that I noticed was that our quantum leap of emergence in spirit sometimes spent its energy, emit its photon of funk and dropped back to a lower orbit. And while a quantum seems like a great leap forward, in the great scheme of things it's not much of a distance. When you can raise spirits with something as inspirational as a song, you have to realize that maybe they can get beat back down by another song. You know and I know that only Queen Latifa escaped the gravity of rap like a queen. And yet I believe my kids are as likely to fall in love to an old Lionel Ritchie song as I was. Some inspirations of love are endless. That's why when you hear McFadden & Whitehead, whoever they are, that same message comes through.

We will come to them, the next youth. And I will tell tales of the next level, when 'first black' didn't mean bus driver, but CEO. And I think that the thing I've seen that my parents never did, the insides of big businesses from coast to coast - from every major city except Memphis, St. Louis and Milwaukee will be useful.

I know and have learned the hard way many times that nobody knows what 'black' is. Nobody knows black culture, except that everybody knows something to call black culture. It is transparent. So we will have to wait for patient historians to connect the dots in a lasting fashion for future generations. I've always thought that I was doing my part here at Cobb to write some piece of source material for future grad students to incorporate. It's really the only reason I do much self-promotion; I'm aiming for the Long Now. So I no longer get upset that some of us called the Old School doesn't 'own' black. The Old School is what it is, and how it will be remembered will be beyond our control as are all reifications of black culture for various reasons.

This weekend I got mad for the last time, reflecting on Brother Brown calling my transformation to post-blackness complete. Yeah. When we were black we did it right and everybody else has polluted the legacy, black doesn't stand for what it used to. Then again I look at Lee Archer when it actually stood for doing twice as much. He flew 156 combat missions in WW2. That's when black meant something, but they didn't even call it 'black' back in 1942. They didn't even call it the Air Force, but the Air Corps back then.

We're not what we used to be, and time marches on.

I Remember Lena

She was old when I was young, but she was beautiful. She was extraordinarily beautiful - as if she were another species of human. She came to my neighborhood to speak when I was a child. She took her time. I don't remember much of what she said, but that she believed in us. Don't quit. Work hard. Common sense things coming from a legend makes them seem more real.

She was right there. I saw her. It was unreal.

She had a kind of accent, a kind of unusual power in her voice. She had eyes that swallowed you whole. Her teeth were brilliant white pickets. Her skin was perfect in every way. She was regal. I didn't want to get too close. She didn't get tired, she didn't want to say hi and then jump quickly back into the limo. She lingered. She waited until everyone asked what they wanted to ask.

I got the feeling she outlasted all of her opposition and that she was free. She never let anything corrupt her out of frustration. Time was on her side.

The No Self

I've listened to Edmonds and Warbuton for a few weeks now - just to explore, and now something new has given me pause from their site. What if our concept of the self is wrong? What if the self is transient and what if this is natural? What if we have no essence but perhaps we keep that idea alive as a social construct or that perhaps the sense of self is something very simple, evolved because we are social animals of a certain sort.

I am keeping this in mind. On balance is the more important idea that we are created by God as purposeful beings and that without purpose, our lives have no meaning. Which is to say that the self exists only as a process of discovery of our purpose. Replace God with Truth if you are so inclined, the spectrum remains if the agency moves slightly. Self is thus the creation of self-discovery of purpose.

Hedge or Die

The most fascinating blog on the planet is Zero Hedge. It is the equivalent of a conversation about low level source code but in the world of capital markets. It is the closest to the operational minds of the traders and financial types that work The City, Wall Street, etc. that I have ever been. I thought I was getting close with Tom Keene, but baby this stuff is dynamite.

I can't parse half of it, and the volume is substantial. Fifty odd posts a day from a cat named Tyler Durden. Hmm, that name sounds familiar. You can catch the flavor of the complications, though.

When I got into computing, it was never so much about the science of it. But when I finally figured out the kind of work I expected to do - for Executive Information Systems, as it was called in the 80s, I reckoned that I was working the most sophisticated financial software anywhere except for Wall Street. What I didn't realize was how much more complex and sophisticated the financial software is for what traders and brokers and banks parse than goes on in the realm we call Enterprise Computing. It is a source of constant embarrassment for me that I'm not working with those big dogs, but I'm coming around.

There is, somewhere I intend to locate, some management package for software that tracks the life of a hedge fund. Something that allows you to create an instrument, split it into tranches, track buys and sells in and out, tracks real time mark to market (or mark to fiction) valuations and all that. That's something I want running on my Mac.

I understand that high frequency trading is one of the many corruptions of capital markets that churn money out of transaction fees and bleed investors like a swarm of vampiric gnats. But the systems that do them are not evil, the designers of such systems that make their operation integral to the profit of banks are the bloodsuckers. The levers of the real economy are not so rapidly switched, but the problem here is that systems have created vaporous value - a bps here a bps there adds up to the only kind of money these traders know how to make. That's not banking. That's not managing risk for the purpose of real business investment, that's betting on strikes and balls with more money than the gate for the baseball game. 

I'm really fascinated by how long it will be before the slanderous yet complicit oafs in the Obama administration knock heads with the opportunistic snakes on Wall Street to bloody the face of capitalism itself, which is obviously not what's being practiced at either end of the pitch. How many real industries are going to tank before we can find some bankers we can trust? Right now, nobody seems to know, although we all need to care. This is the most important question in the world.

--

Today's Zero Hedge reveals a memorandum of understanding between a private firm and the government of Greece. Apparently, Greece turned down a low interest loan (LIBOR + 125bps) in February because it insisted on having no hedges against it. You know, the kind of stuff our Senate wants to make into law - that nobody wins if somebody else fails. The Senate wants to outlaw the zero sum game for the entire US because Obama's got a grudge (that he publicly disclaims) against people who make money on Wall Street in ways he can't immediately fathom and bless. Bottom line, Greece lost out on an opportunity to get the money it needed without the austerity measures imposed by the IMF because it couldn't stomach the idea that people might bet against their ability to repay. Now when the people of Greece find out, they're going to freak. More blood in the streets, with any luck, will bring this sort of question to the next level which is what you see when people who are owed prepare themselves to whack people who default, and people who owe have decided never to pay and start saying words like 'over my dead body'.

Rights are the privilege of the strong. Liquidity is the privilege of the creditworthy. But there are times when rights are no longer defended and liquidity is simply withdrawn. These are worlds without honor and places honorable men generally avoid. The dearth of honor is spreading darkly in 2010. Pray for a movement in the light. That movement requires an honorable hedge. Otherwise, by definition, there is no exit, no quarter given. Dog eat dog.

TSOP: Ben Lichtenstein

I never heard of Ben Lichtenstein before today, but I have a feeling that if we may have some panics to come in the future, his voice may become immortal. Listen to this man. You don't know exactly what he's saying but you know exactly what it means. Ladies and gentlemen:

The sound of panic.

Here are some words of explanation:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The Paranoid Patriot

Last week I purchased a self-defense instructional video, and more often than not whenever I think about buying a new car, I think about buying a new gun instead. There's something inside of me that wants to purchase a half ton safe, anchor bolt it to my garage floor and fill it with gold from my cashed out IRA. The last time I felt something like this it was in 1993. Let me explain.

I was in Boston at the time and my company was trying to get shipshape. One of the things we had to do was go ISO 9000, so I was responsible for getting my department (client server tech support) in line for certification. As part of this process, we wanted to make sure everybody loved their job and could undergo the stresses of change. So we hired a psychologist to administer a skills assessment test - a kind of Meyers-Briggs for work.

The psychologist told me confidentially that he had done profiles on black youth from post-riot Los Angeles and the kinds of things he heard scared him to death. I lent a sympathetic ear because at the time I was inclined to be one of those guys who considered Ice Cube and Chuck D to be modern prophets of doom. After all, a nation of millions of CD buyers with bad attitudes can't be all wrong. America might not be doomed, but we did have an enraged cohort who were ready to burn the mother down. Or so it seemed. I had already bought into the line that the Fire Next Time would be put out by next week, but that didn't change my view that millions were inwardly seething and they weren't all wrong.

I had done a bunch of writing about black rage in the not too distant past and so I was sensitive to those kinds of vapors in the air. I recognized how much black rage helped to define and sustain black politics. And I knew like many people of my ilk that behind much of the fist pumping on one side and the hand wringing on the other side there has always been a threat of a long hot summer of violence in the streets. It's a phrase that had not yet lost its edge back when Spike Lee was collaborating with Public Enemy and Khalid Muhammad was trying to get his Million Youth March roving the streets.

So these days when the anti-birthers gnash their teeth in fear and loathing of what might be going on in the minds of the 'baggers in these days of our first black President, well I know the feeling. But I also know better. The Fire Next Time will be put out by next week.

Ever since Living Colour and actually long before, people have looked out at America on TV and said that's not my America. And they wanted to know how to get to that land of milk and honey and Neil Simon romantic comedies. I see interesting parallels as the various parts of America consider and project their own anger and frustration across lines. The natural political reaction is paranoia. That can only be cured by crossing lines, to stop making a lot of rock and roll noise about 'their' America vs 'our' America and go out there and find it.

--

The second part of this observation has to do with the nature of the expression of political paranoia in Americans. To be brief, I find that it brings one to their own roots. In my consideration of picking up self-defense and (finally) enrolling in a local Aikido dojo, I am reminded of the efforts of the Meiji Restoration to rid their country of samurai. Great reforms coming down from the capitol often disarm the citizenry. Does chaos make you want to go buy a gun? Maybe you've intuited something from history.

Saturday Fragments

Out of the Market
The last time I thought about putting money in the market, seriously was two Octobers ago. I almost bought a bunch of Berkshire Hathaway. I would have lost 20% of it by Christmas. I haven't calculated how much I lost this week in my IRA but I'm sure it's going to have me pissed. I stay out of the market, and have as much as I could since 2000. Right about now, I'm thinking of gold. Never thought I'd see the day again, and inflation hasn't even kicked in. Strange days, strange days.

Well That Took Long Enough
In 1979 when I was a DJ, I fell in love with a funk song by Breakwater called 'Release The Beast'. Every time I put it on, the dance floor emptied. It turns out that it made it into the new Iron Man movie. I knew I was right.

Oh Yeah Them
I forgot that I've been selectively syndicated by Center Movement. They republished my piece on Priest, Bellinger and Halperin this week. Here's how they describe this blog: Bills itself as “Curious, skeptical, analytical.” Smart, quirky and unbiased too. The Cobb of the title is not Ty but Michael David Cobb Bowen, a black neoconservative pragmatist of the Chicago school.

A Weighted Racial Friction Factor

Not long ago, I asked the rhetorical question about how much is six pounds of racism. The question is a starting point for investigating how much the question of race should be considered when looking at the prospects for what is now a majority middle class black American population. I contend that the black race has progressed into an integrated set of Americans for whom racial discussions become increasingly pointless, and needlessly aggravating. I perceive my opponents from the Left and Progressive political viewpoints tend to believe they have the facts in their favor about what race is, how it operates and why it must be countered through public policy and political watchdogeration. My enemy combatant du jour, Mr. deVega of the Respectable Negroes, whose opinion and engagement I respect (although I wish A. Charles were around) plays the foil to all that is Cobbian and wise. Sometimes he makes points, sometimes he annoys, but he is never stupid and never boring. So we engage to quibble over exactly how many white supremacists dance on the head of the pin of black pride and therefore crumble our race's ability to achieve its world historical destiny.

As always, I play against the predominant ethos of my black communal upbringing, that of the Race Man of the Talented Tenth, always looking to establish political unity and keep Charlie on the hook by subordinating myself to the black collective and using my talents for their racial uplift. I do so not out of any sense of racial treachery or bad blood but from the logical consequences of achievement by those very same standards which today's debased society finds increasingly difficult to defend. That is to say, I became a Respectable Negro a long time ago and found other prospective Negroes unable and unwilling to undertake the same disciplines in word and deed  - instead the Left and Progressive vanguards of black politics have taken to excuse making for the Down Low of The New Black, which has much more need for speaking out on racism, yet encounters orders of magnitude less than any generation in American history. And so I have found common cause as a conservative black among the larger American Conservative Movement and find myself at the nexus of some namecalling and controversy which I engage from time to time because, hell I have the free time and curiosity.

So today in my black racial trust-busting suit, I insert class only as a start and suggest we agree to finagle some numbers about the relative friction of relative racisms on the relative success of our relatives. I say only as a start to re-emphasize my emphasis on diversity / market segmentation / demographic reality as contrasted to race, although not always as a substitute for race. My operating theory is that if you divided America up into 66 demographic profiles, as they do at the PRIZM group at Nielsen, a group I've long been aware of now going on 20 years, then African Americans might span 8-12 of those groups. I happen to know that I lived in the third group from the top 'Money & Brains' back in 1988 when I moved to Hermosa Beach, CA, and following Massey & Denton my mantra was 'racial geography is destiny'. My attitude was, now that it's illegal to discriminate in housing, and you know there are no jobs in the ghetto, why would anybody stay? Today I find myself repeating such rhetoric in talking about the masses of black Americans who live and raise their families in the heart of Dixie. You catch my drift.

I bring up PRIZM because I've dealt professionally with demographics and psychographics for Philip Morris back in the early 90s and I was fascinated to discover how much time and effort is generally made to get Americans to part with their disposable income. This was going on at the time that 'corporate diversity' was just getting started, something tangential to both marketing and race. At any rate, there are very serious reasons why black Americans smoke menthol cigarettes much to their detriment - even though they may not think so. And I firmly believe that a smart enough message and marketing campaign can be made to get people to be loyal to all sorts of ideas and products. Why then, given all of the real demographic and psychographic realities of the broad variety of Americans, do we, especially anti-racists, dumb everything down to race and racism? It is because our discussion lacks nuance. You would have thunk as the Inuit have x number of words for snow and ice, that we would have a similar facility with race, but we don't. It's all just institutional racism, white privilege, white supremacy and racism, which all pretty much mean the same thing if your'e talking about black folks. It hurts, so don't *do* that. But how much does it hurt, and how much should any of us be bothered with that hurt? Moreover, how are things getting better or worse? Nobody wants to seem to want to say, or maybe DeVega has been saying such nuanced things all along and we've just thrown his Stuart Halls out with the bathwater in the same way he throws out the economic writings of Thomas Sowell.

I'd like to think, as a professional in private enterprise, that my way of thinking about all this is superior to that of those of professionals in academia. But that's just me. Let's get down to it.

So here's how to read my SWAG of the race. If you live on the Hill, then you represent 4% of all black America. Racism in all of its manifestations hold you down to 95% of your full potential, thus the Racial Friction Factor is 5. Can you read the second line? Of course you can. If you live in the Burbs, you are 11% of black America, and you're only cooking with 9 of your 10 burners because of those dad blamed racists and their legacy of oppression.

demo	% of all	RFF
Hill	4	5
Burb	11	10
Hood	45	20
Ghetto	32	30
Projects	19	35

So there you have it. Now have at it.

Of CIA Black Sites, Renditions & Such

I'm on the mailing list of the International Spy Museum in Washington DC. Now you know. Since I've been working here in DC for a while, I thought I might attend a seminar in their series. It was good.

On the dais were three talking heads who carried forth on matters concerning Rendition and CIA Black Sites. According to those gathered the CIA operated at least four. Thailand, Poland, Lithuania, Afghanistan and possibly Diego Garcia.

It was a very good session, but as expected, not long and detailed enough to satisfy my curiosity and questions. I did get an opportunity to ask two. Since I think quantitatively, my first question was how many do we know, of those external renditions detoured captives through the black sites? The answer was about 3 dozen over past 20 years. A couple of the speakers did throw around the word 'disappeared' used as a verb, but it was not made clear to me how long it is that a rendee is rent. If I'm in the business of moving Suspect A to Country Two in a legal rendition I do so with the cooperation of Country One and Country Two. So if I take him to Black Site X for n years, how long is it before Country Two starts pissing and moaning? It wouldn't make much sense to disappoint them, especially if we want some cooperation in the future. The overall numbers of renditions number in the hundreds but not in the thousands over the past 20 years. Starting somewhere around 1995 under Clinton there were 70 some-odd renditions, they stepped up sometime later and really got going after 9/11. 

It is also unclear to me the ratio of countries who use rendition vs those who use extradition. The manner in which the subject was discussed leads me to believe that extradition treaties are rarer than one would expect - rarer than say trade treaties, and so rendition picks up more than a little slack in the global market of prisoner exchange.The guy in the red shirt across the room asked that question derailing one of mine about the difference between rendition and extradition and Bellinger responded lawyerly well. Mine would have been more specific to Bush's Coalition of the Willing with regard to its expansion of the number of extradition arrangements we have with those countries specifically relating to enemy combatants. However Bellinger's response alluded to the heavy consequences of reciprocity in establishing extradition treaties and, well I think it should be rather obvious that Americans are often seen as criminals by the G77 and we'd be haggling all freakin' day. Better to use rendition than suffer the extra burdens of extradition - even for Al Qaeda.

So to be clear, my reckoning is that there were maybe 1200 renditions in the past 20 years some fraction of those were directly to the US and the great majority of all renditions lead to criminal trials either here or elsewhere. The more controversial of the renditions were those facilitated by the CIA between two countries other than the US, and the most controversial are those between other countries with a stop at a CIA black site along the way. And of those we know to the best of our ability to know that half a half dozen detainees were waterboarded on our properties, though some unknown number may have been subjected to more inhumane treatment by parties known to the CIA in exchange of coerced intelligence. Sources and methods, I'd tell you but I'd have to kill you, yadda yadda.

To remedy all of this madness would require someone with the cajones of Alberto Gonzales to stick his neck out and do independent research on what an enemy combatant is and how you handle such creatures. However since Gonzales was hung out to dry by the like of Nancy Pelosi and the loyal opposition in Congress, the entire subject matter has become uncomfortably taboo under the present Administration. And thus the solution to capture or kill has become kill. And today we have Predator drones doing dirty work that is more acceptable than GTMO work. In other words, instead of capturing personas non grata of foreign soil and subjecting them to the moral and legal complexities of rendition and coercive interrogation, we are merely subjecting them to remotely controlled high explosive munitions on foreign soil without a declaration of war. Pick your poison. Oh ye of Democrat short attention span, do ye recall your horror at Colin Powell's 'video game warfare' in Desert Storm? Well, there is a quantitative difference, but the fact that nobody's even trying to lawyer their way towards a better solution shows the damage done to the body politic by rhetorical bombast and overkill against Bush, Gonzales, Cheney et al. In the meanwhile the military tribunals are still in effect because those running them sued Obama when he tried to stop them.

So my second question was in reference to what possibilities we might have to get Judge Posner's ideas about a CT Circuit implemented. I got some appreciative nods from the panel but Bellinger steered the question back towards rendition. He suggested something I forget because it seemed off the point and tangent I was getting towards. Half of the disgust, from my perspective, with rendition has everything to do with whether the end result is a legitimate criminal trial. And as much as Halperin squawked about failure to Mirandize, as much as Priest duly noted the problems criminal judges have in bringing forth evidence of national security in open court, you'd think they would be much in favor of such a court. To this end, I think Bellinger was playing his hand as a Congressional lobbyist and former White House insider. He knows the answers about policy and now is in a position to get paid for shaping legislation out of a no-op Congress. I really don't know how that business works, but it sounds like a whole lot of fun and profit. Nevertheless, his point, though I forget it, made some sense.

Still, since we only had 90 minutes and three speakers it was predictable that various tactics were employed to make the maximizing (or minimizing) impact.

I came prepared not to like Dana Priest, since I was somewhat familiar with her Post work and noted how bloggers in my circle faulted her for not outing the political persuasion of Mary McCarthy, that woman most closely identified with being the source of her information on CIA black sites. Instead, she detailed a trail of evidence demonstrating the dogged determination of herself and her colleague in tracking down tail numbers of mysterious planes owned by mysterious companies with officers who all have 'Episcopalian' names. Hey, I resent that, says Michael David brother to Bryan Thomas, grandson of Raymond Curtis. But she didn't seem to have much of an axe to grind and was somewhat deferential to yet mystified by the awesome power of computer mediated communications, aka 'the internet' or as she called it, the 2.0 World.

As an aside, it turns out that I may have been one of the crowd whose participation in the planespotting swarm assisted in driving attention towards Priest's research. Oh no wait. That was a year late. Hmm. Point taken.

Without 'journalism', meaning the dogged determination of people with curiosity and database resources, we would not be able to know what it is the government doesn't want us to know. Of course the CIA may be a lot further down the pike with respect to their ability to corral dogged determination and database resources, but just because Dana Priest cannot bell that cat doesn't mean a lot of us mice cannot. I tend to, some would say callously, not give a rat's about the fate of three dozen international terrorist rats over twenty years. So I'm not so interested in belling the CIA cat. AFAIK they were not a rogue operation as the panelists agreed, and the convenient amnesia of critters like Nancy Pelosi is more disgusting to me than the cruelty heaped upon various and sundry jihadis.

Speaking of cruelty, there was no way that we couldn't derail the conversation in the direction of 'waterboarding is torture' histrionics. Mort certainly had a point, a crusader's point, but a valid one nonetheless that you cannot make any judgment on the merits of rendition without giving consideration to the ends of that rendition. If a legal rendition results in an illegal interrogation or worse, then the legality of that rendition is questionable. Moral figleaf. Criminal facilitation. Nor can you insert the comforting language of Condoleeza Rice with regard to the US' respect for the sovereign integrity of Country One and Country Two, if the assurances of rendition amount to a wink and a nod between two intelligence services. Do I trust the CIA when it collaborates with ISI or Shin Bet? Hell no. Those bastards can do anything, and that indeed is their purpose - to do what is doable. Mort's crusade is not without merit, it just defies logic and is ultimately indefensible. You can't ask spy agencies to be accountable in such matters as renditions and black sites. Well, you can, and you set yourself up for being the recipient of an arbitrarily long paper trail. And considering the fact that the Congress will necessarily dither based upon how electable it makes them, and the Judiciary cannot get a lawyer with good shoes in edgewise, especially in Lithuania, we are at the mercy of the Administration. In the case of Obama, Bush and Clinton, war is war, and they reserve all powers they can muster, including Monsters on a Leash.

What I could not get a good sense of was the degree of culpability approaching a standard of declaring some individual persona non grata and subject to an extra-territorial arrest, rendition, detention and such (such meaning interrogation approaching and including torture). 

I had some difficulty with Mort Halperin because he works for George Soros, the kind of globalist who defies nationalism. At the same time Halperin speaks about America being a beacon on the hill whose respect for the rule of law should have no peer, he crosses himself to defy America because certain European countries have laws against extradition and rendition to countries that have the death penalty. He has what seems to be an extraordinary faith in the ability to trust democratic actions to make the proper corrections for the excesses of executive action such as the CIA is involved in - all for the purposes of justice. But I think he believes that there is more justice in the world than the world is capable of delivering on time and under budget. Therefore it is his wont to go after the obvious excpetions, the biggest cases where we did wrong, wrong, wrong. Well there are plenty of barrelfish for that moral shotgun, starting with Khalid El Masri the German citizen who, in a case of mistaken identity, was actually kidnapped and detained in a black site for a year then dumped back into Germany without so much as an apology and a pack of hand sanitizer. That guy convinced an attorney that his incredible journey actually happened and so we have a real scandalous fiasco, and a legal victory for the victim. But as witness for the prosecution of the US, I think Halperin overstates (difficult for a neocon like me to admit) the intensity of America's beacon of light to the world. I am not one of those who believes that the level of civilization of a nation can be determined by the fate of its prisoners. I think it should be obvious that enemies of the state, such as Al Qaeda is determined to be, will face some of our most inglorious bastards, and they should. I am not so convinced that three dozen assassinations over 20 years is unacceptable, but perhaps I read too much history and am not so convinced that America breeds a different, kinder, gentler sort of human being.

So as Halperin rants under the wing of Soros, I tend to be very skeptical of his concepts of international law and of his application of it in this case. After all, it is not his job to keep anyone safe. And while I appreciate his appetite for limiting undemocratic power, I can't say with confidence that any greater good is adequately served by drawing attention to the families of Al Qaeda fighters who may have been used to draw such fighters into traps. Why should those widows and orphans be compensated by the US, ever? As well, Halperin stepped into a sandtrap in describing his view of 'the field of battle'. That was just an error born in the Vietnam era that has yet to be buried. It is not useful at all. 

All of the panelists remarked on the relative amnesia of the public and what's not getting done to move reasonably forward on this complex matter. And all said Obama's no better, which is not really a surprise to me. Still, I'm thinking, perhaps to the chagrin of both Bellinger and Halperin that some of us out here in the blogosphere are a very proper audience to all of the details that can be exposed. And the International Spy Museum is really missing out on an opportunity, given the SRO turnout at their 12.50 a head seminar, to extend this conversation onto a website. There may not be a business model that can get someone with the skills of Dana Priest, John Bellinger, and Mort Halperin to enter arguments and documents into a critical and thoughtful public. That is why I find it rather sad that they make money where they are tangential to their ability to hold forth an extraordinary discourse on a matter of such weight.

On the other hand, the whole thing was taped. Maybe we'll find it on YouTube.

Two Words For The Anti-Birthers

One of the continuing debates with which we periodically bow our heads and slog through is the matter of the 'racism' of the Tea Party aka the 'baggers. Since I have been in DC for about two months on the daily, I have gotten a bit of the flavor for the nature of the beast that keeps the suburbs rolling in green. The public eye is an endless source of creation and destruction of issues, and smart people can always be employed to manage that business. So I am starting to get the disease of snarking on the short attention span and the ignoring of history and the business of de-emphasis of inconvenient facts.

It is with that snark in mind that I think back way in my memory banks to two words that, if considered with any seriousness, would quiet down those who complain that the current president is being railroaded to any significant by that fickle public eye. Those two words: Vince Foster.

Once you read  Download Vince_foster_101_curiosities, you may or may not be convinced that Foster's death was suspicious, but what you cannot deny is that of all the things that have been thrown at Obama, nothing compares to him being accused of assassination. Sure he's thrown lots of people under his legendary bus, but murder?

His Name Was Jheri Redding

And he invented a curl.

Now you know what he looks like. Surprised?

Starbucks in West Virginia

Chauncey DeVega is starting to have a recognizable tone.

For example, government policy both directly and indirectly created the urban ghettos in America's central cities and a two tiered system of citizenship until it was brought down by The Black Freedom Struggle in the 1960s. By extension, government support for affirmative action and a robust effort to end discrimination in federal hiring practices helped to create the Black middle and professional classes. Conversely, government programs such as the GI Bill and FHA loan programs created suburbia, as well as the wealth and prosperity enjoyed by the white middle classes of the post World War 2 period--opportunities that were by design and in practice all but closed to people of color. And most certainly, government policy created the alienation and poverty that are as common to the Native American reservations of the Southwest as they are to the mining towns of Appalachia.

In total, The Limits of Policy exposes one of the central contradictions of neo-liberal, center-Right, Conservative politics in this country. When the government policy works in your favor it is invisible, and one's successes are all one's own, the result of hard work, individualism, and "good culture." You can nurse at the succor provided by the Horatio Alger myth of rugged individualism. When government policy fails, it is because "those people" have "bad culture," somehow tied to race and blood, and that the solution is less government and not more. Your failings are all your own.

In this regard, the final paragraph of Mr. Brooks' piece is quite telling: "Finally, we should all probably calm down about politics. Most of the proposals we argue about so ferociously will have only marginal effects on how we live, especially compared with the ethnic, regional and social differences that we so studiously ignore."

Sorry Mr. Brooks. Race is how class is lived. And yes, policy has a great deal to do with that fact.

I have several standing reactions and a few tangential considerations.

The first standing reaction is that something in the conclusion is lacking finesse, but I can accept the rhetorical excess for the validity of the point it tries to express. And to the extent that I find it agreeable the first thing I consider is Cornel West's edict about the existential burdens African Americans (choose to) bear regarding their enlightened self-interest. West essentially says that there is an additional hurdle black Americans must overcome before they can see themselves as beneficiaries of the American system. I agree. I call it 'the sound of the drum' and it is an exercise in self-discipline and discovery that black Americans must perform, not necessarily because of direct racism, but for the background noise of racism and racisms past. Ask how many black Americans are still dealing with DuBoisian dual-consciousness and you have a significant percentage. It's somewhat psychological but it is also cultural.

Just the other day I recounted for the first time since I was a kid, that I had to learn Ebonics. Neither my father nor my grandfather spoke anything but the English of New Englanders with little more than the accent of jazz club jive, which I tend to keep alive in this joint among you cats. As I became fluent in my own daddy's dialect I also had to learn how to speak alongside the neighborhood kids very Ice Cube, and then later amongst the prep school kids very Cary Elwes (yes James Spader was my favorite brat packer). Three distinct dialects, two of choice (plus French and Swahili). This has come to be known among Progressive circles as code switching, and it has been a standard mark of the Talented Nth where us'n ever we be. My point is that at a very basic level black Americans choose their own cultural markers and I think that a choice of dialect is very key when we start talking about 'the black community'. It is my preference, always and everywhere to breakup race into innumerable parts. Those cultural markers many find convenient to define race, culturally, as deVega does, I say nay - they are what they are. 

So I think that anyone who can choose a dialect can choose a politics and perhaps those who cannot, likewise cannot transcend their daddy's worldview either. Or at least for those who might, it's not worth the trouble. I say this in light of what I call black radical autonomy - which is a way of expressing a lightweight cultural nationalism through the privileges of Black Culture. Nobody really questions whether or not black Americans inherit MLK, whether we think our way through his philosophy or not. Nobody really questions whether or not we have any privileges in those things we have, whether it's Soul Food, Gospel Music, rhetorical signifying or anything else that 30 years of Black Studies on American campuses has revealed. If I told you I didn't know who Bob Marley was, you'd look at me strange. You'd say, how could I as a black man not know? There is a broad spectrum of this cultural privilege which is almost never considered anything but invisible until one of us darkies pipes up and says we're Republican. Then all hell breaks loose questioning our blackness and the invisible becomes suddenly visible.  My point here is that everyone has a choice, but as well we have a default. The default can be invisible.

I want to re-iterate my predilection towards monolith breaking when it comes to these cultural choices masquerading as racial markers. For example, I assert five socio-economic classes of black Americans of my generation. Where deVega might say race is how class is lived, I say yeah well there are five classes in the black race and we live quite differently. {projects, ghetto, hood, burb, hill} and there are urban and rural versions. (I only first saw rural projects in 1998 or so). It should be then a matter of course to consider these five classes of black Americans with regard to their attitude towards policy.

Now my longstanding excuse, and I perceive that it is deVega's as well, is that black Americans wanted more government because we had a cultural and political imperative to believe that whatever goods are being handed out in whatever form, we haven't been getting our share. That's just natural self-interest. But I'd say that natural self-interest would express itself differently depending on how much of the sound of the drum you've got, and what class of shoes you wear on the daily. And that latter form makes the most difference when it comes to policy.

If you're living on the Hill, why would you want the civil service jobs opened up by Affirmative Action? You wouldn't. If you're living in the Projects, why would you care about Ronald Reagan's invention of the IRA? You wouldn't. Some black Americans look at military service and say Bam! Instant middle class. That's for me. And for the three generations since WW2, how many black Americans have looked at military spending as a policy privilege, speaking of those GI Bills?

But let me get to the part that's nagging me about the entire matter of policy - and I'm likely to concur with David Brooks on this. There is a culture of earning / family business that follows all of the cultural/class archetypes of America. And when it came to black Americans, what you could never get to was a cogent way of talking about that past the legendary Philadelphia Negro. Everybody else has been mashed up into one monolithic 'black community' for various good and bad reasons. So we haven't evolved a coherent way of talking about in any significant way, those five classes of black American and distinguishing their needs and wants. It is this lack of common vocabulary that keeps the same pundits paid when it comes to talking about the Brothers and Sisters. (And even Chuck D knows every Brother aint a brother.) It's down to an ugly stupid 300 year old divide of House and Field, of respectability and coonery, of Aunt Obama and Uncle Tom. To hell with black diversity. Moreover that unbroken monolithic view of black Americans has yielded no conventional way to talk about a family like mine, four generations out of pidgin English and levels of professionalism and entrepreneurship we not only attain but inherit.

My own focus tends towards the reasons why, in typical bourgie fashion, I took up the political cudgels of the oppressed in the same way some society dork from P.G. Wodehouse might. After all, in black America It's not the voice from the streets or their hiphop producers that are calling for increased funds for Headstart or abortion on demand. I struggle a bit to identify how it is that Doshpoint money is acquired and families set for life, and almost every time what is confirmed is that it comes not from benefiting from government policy, but outwitting and gaming it. Then again, I'm the sort who would look at Goldman Sachs as an example to be followed, not a demon to be bled for my long overdue slice of government cheese. But even self-proclaimed Affirmative Action babies who never grew up on food stamps understand this aspect of gaming the system. So who's calling for that to be means tested? Did black people cheer for OJ? I didn't, but I did give props to Johnny Cochran. (and in fact saw him at SFO the day before the verdict, and wished him luck). My point here is that the idea of getting from no money to some money to new money to old money is a continuum in black America - and while there are industries pre-disposed to be culturally black there is an oversized fraction that just got started by the opening up of civil service and Affirmative Actions. (And too damned many went into academia, but we digress).

I'm one of those people who cursed under their breath that A. Phillip Randolph didn't finish his job. I see some excess of irreparable damage done by the Black Power Movement that networked among counter-cultural youth instead of in the laundries, hotels, restaurants and domestic service industries of America. Black America used to dominate all that. We should have owned at least Marriott by now. And I know of many families out of Michigan who are Ford or Chevy families depending on where their parents worked. And I would give props to any sort of organic politics that trafficked in real patronage as legitimate. I want to hear about local communities and policy - well, really I don't. I want to hear about how a national mainstream culture, political philosophy and public square supports local aspirations to grow their own businesses.

The problem with deVega's argument is that there is no real national black politics that is effectively organic. And the single most important thing that is most socio-economically true about black Americans of all sorts is that their children are born to single mothers, and there is nothing policy has done to get that same majority to admit that Moynihan was right. There's that black radical autonomy in play. So it is the fixation of clinging to a single dialect, culture and political worldview and calling that black that blocks a genuine conversation about who all these black Americans really are and what they really want. Saying that class is lived as race promotes the false monolithic fact of race by undermining black diversity and not contributing to the knowledge of how class is lived within race.

There are lots of true things about lot of various groups in America that we keep forgetting or never get right because of a fixation on race and on class. Because of that we stereotypically think that you are not going to find Starbucks in West Virginia. I haven't been there but I'll bet the mocha is just right. I don't think policy is meaningless, but we must really take into consideration that the varying enlightened self-interests of the diversity of black Americans is not being taken seriously.

The Conversion of Winston Smith

You must love big brother Steve Jobs.

United + Continental = TBTF

But the biggest airline in the world could never fail, right?

The New Sam Fisher

I have finished the latest Splinter Cell on medium. It is, I think, finally mature and has superceded all of its previous incarnations. The Clancy Universe does need what's coming next and I'm sure that along with Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon, this kind of splinter operation will be nicely useful in the future.

Since the introduction of the idea that the various aspects of game play across the Clancy genres will blend and mix in the future, I have been thinking about their various strengths and weaknesses. Clearly, the coolest thing about Ghost Recon are the advanced warfighter roles. Using drones, armor and calling in air support are part of the most interesting aspects of game play. Capturing large patches of territory with ground forces are just what that's all about. I also enjoyed for a short period, Clancy's voice command in EndWar but the fact that my own online buds didn't made it far less enjoyable than it might have been. I found that the lack of good collab online really destroyed the possibilities, and it was too complex for simple head to head in real-time. Too complex to be fun, that is.

Ubisoft may yet have an MMO in the Clancy Universe. If it happens, I'll likely enjoy a role with Rainbow Six special forces if my online buds come along, but if not, I'll be happy to go it alone as Sam Fisher.

It turns out that as I finish up the Realistic mode (about halfway through) I am also now going back for a second bite at the Mass Effect apple. This time I've made my character a total renegade - I have less patience for the cinematics and storytelling. Fisher puts you into that mode of intense concentration and tests your patience for physical strategy - almost like The Portal (I haven't played Prince of Persia much, and I don't particularly like it). The only other single character that ranks up that high for physical awareness in the environment is the one from Assassin's Creed. Fable and Halo don't really come close. Crackdown might, but that's a different kind of game, more like Mercenaries 2, both excellent with M2 being my preferred game of the two.

After a few hours, Sam's actions come very smoothly. The Execute feature is really cool and even cooler in multiplayer. The changing of the entire scene to black and white to indicate stealth is a stroke of genius and it executes so smoothly. I am surprised, however, that this edition has decided not to give Sam access to any sniper rifles. Not that he can't snipe, and silently at that, but I think it was a good decision overall. Sam works best inside.

As for the Conviction plot and story. It's all first rate. The environments are excellent and the voice talent is superb. I like all of the choices they've taken, including the projected instructions, reverse fly-throughs and lack of level maps. It has taken long for this package to arrive, but it is a complete package.

More Manic Islam

I am in agreement with Fernandez who suggests that Obama's tact with Islam has painted him and is politically correct synchophants into a corner. One of these days, the hoi of his multicultural polloi are going to have to admit that their relativism and diplomacy is Panglossian. There is evil out there and there are identifyable evil sects of Islam. Call them perversions if you like, but the perversions have names and claims. It's time to speak aloud and call muslims out of their corners to defend their sects.

Although there may be Presbyterian rapists who hide behind the clothe (more likely family members who molest) certain critics on the Left certainly have no problem making a Catholic distinction. Let's get specific, shall we?

My Stallman Moment

It was some time back in 1984 or so. I don't exactly recall. I attended a symposium at USC and the debate was free software. This was back when most people concerned thought of Richard Stallman in godlike tones, perhaps on the verge of the time when he began getting on people's last nerves.

I just recalled this moment when I stood up, having listened to all of the debate and questioned the sincerity of all involved. You see I did not own a computer nor was I a student in a college that had access to UNIX. So I questioned the value of free software given that only this select and elite fraternity of programmers had access to compilers and machines in the first place. Where were they going to distribute their free software and how was somebody like me going to get some? Egghead Software?

You could hear the crickets. And so I sat down wondering if anybody was nodding their head or if they all considered me to be an idiot. It was an uncomfortable moment.

Since I've gone Mac, I have gone back to recall the extent to which the Unix wars were so bitterly fought and how tenuous that fraternity was. I remember SCO and Kodak's Interactive Unix. I remember HP's visual programming environment and OSF-1. I remember when Apollo Domain was considered the most powerful operating system ever. Hell, I remember ADA.

I grew up in a very small memory model.

A Little Racial Obsession

A thoughtful reader sent me an email wondering if I have an opinion on interracial marriage. I only have an excuse, which is that any marriage is better than no marriage. But check out the link. I didn't know about Ernie Hudson, I have to say that was a surprise, also that he looks so short.

 This is what racial obsession looks like. You might note that Stormfront links to it. 

A Little Tax For Your Ends

What would you do if I walked out on you
Cause the song that you sing cost too much?
You would be blue 'cause then you couldn't do
All that socialist sharing and such.

But you're gonna try with a little tax for your ends
Oooh you'll get by with a little tax for your ends
Man, I'm gonna die from all the tax for your ends

What do I say when my job goes away
And my boss is not too big to fail
I'm not so sharp that I get my own TARP
Folks like me when we steal go to jail

But you're gonna try with a little tax for your ends
Oooh you'll get by with a little tax for your ends
Man, I'm gonna die from all the tax for your ends

Do you need some money?
I need some money today.
Could it be any money?
How bout a tax holiday?

Would you believe there's a socialist scheme?
Yes I'm certain that it happens all the time.
They're out to drown the American Dream.
But I tell you, this country is mine.

So I'm gonna fight a little tax for your ends.
And I'm gonna fight with a little help from my friends.
Yeah I'm gonna fight with a little help from my friends.

Do you need some freedom?
I need my freedom today?
What if they take your freedom?
I swear that they'll have to pay.

Cause I'm gonna fight all that tax for your ends.
And I'm gonna fight with a little help from my friends.
Yeah I'm gonna fight until this madness ends.

(you know the melody, now you know the words. tell a friend)

Tea Party 101

This is so irresistibly cute, and OBVIOUS.