Cobb

My iPhone Four

I went to the store
For my iPhone 4
It does what I want
Need I say more?

I went to Cerritos
expecting a line
within 20 minutes
The iPhone was mine.

It's faster than blazes
and brighter than day
I didn't get bumpers
My bars don't go 'way

My old iPhone 3
was slow as a pig
now I'm future proof
with 32 gig.

I don't understand
Why knuckleheads moan
I'm already bored
Because it's just a phone

I went to the store
For my iPhone 4
It does what I want
Need I say more?

Five Things To Be

Once upon a time, between the time I was 26 and the time I was 32, I had reduced my life to four essentials. If I could get my hands on it in appreciable quantities with good quality I was going to be happy. It was a necessary simplification of my life to serve personal ends, having been a bit over altruistic at my own expense.  Those four things shouldn't surprise anyone: {Sex, Money, Music, Computers}. It turned out that I was successful in relatively short order, which gave me the satisfaction that not achieving Unity had denied me.

There were three types of unity I was trying to aid in accomplishing in those disheartening days. The first was Black Unity. That's an old story I shouldn't belabor. It was a kind of resignation I gave on my own but those attached to me wouldn't accept. Which brings to mind a particular day in the Cal State Student Union where I tried to quit one of my offices graciously only to hear from my peers that anything was better than nothing. Perhaps that was a pivotal day whose lesson I have finally learned. 

The second sort of unity I was trying to accomplish was from Mishima, the Unity of Pen and Sword. It was my way of coming to accept America on more Rightist terms than ever, but culminated in a feeling of deep betrayal over Iran-Contra. So I think it must be said in retrospect that there has probably long been a desire in me to be the Conservative that I believe myself to be today, but a failure to grasp the principles and only judge Conservatism by the actions of its self-professed adherents had stretched that road to long and bumpy proportions.

The third sort of unity I sought has been achieved for me in the ascendancy of the social status of those of us in the IT business. I have suffered as a geek since the age of 14 when I first touched and fell in love with the logic of computer programming, a logic I have failed to see in my fellow men who castigate me and my binary life into a social zero. The bit has flipped. Now I make good, if not orthodontist money. And everybody agrees that us cargo pants wearing, command line jockeys with the Bruce Willis Surrogates style goatee are way cooler than orthodontists. Unity achieved.

All of those unities required me to be outwardly focused, to negotiate social paths and find ways for them to influence me and me to influence them. Without them, I felt that the world would not and could not understand a man like me. But in 1987, I turned my back on those social things and focused on ME. I had to get my four things, and so that was all I cared about, a brilliant luxury afforded a member of an emergent middle class. 

Atop Maslow's Pyramid at last I began at some point to consider which nation of which millions were holding others back. It was difficult for me to understand what germ had poisoned the minds of any dozen cuties in New York and Boston that made them so hesitant around one as unleashed as myself. I was beyond the yoke of ghettos sentiments and detriments but found myself as Eli walking in the badlands, looking for marriage among women with baggage. But even beyond that personal desire was a yearning to understand why. One clue was offered by Marshall Blonsky whose deep understanding has still not been adequately communicated to this day. Americans were buying signs of success and signifying to each other like monkeys without any deeper comprehension of the kind of great apes they should actually be. And so at the age of 31 or so, I recognized we all needed philosophy more than we knew.

--

Yesterday afternoon I came home after a brutal week's work in which expectations went awry and I had to report my project status moving from green to yellow. But by 4:30 on Friday all things seemed to be nailed back onto the table. So I arrived at the my front door with a smile beyond the coming inspiration of Papa John's Pizza for dinner. Five things to be popped into my head along the lines of the Epicurean Edge. Along with their polar opposites they were:

• Happy v Unhappy
• Healthy v Sick
• Rich v Poor
• Beautiful v Ugly
• Wise v Foolish

And then my mind immediately started partial combinatorial gymnastics developing an ontology of types. What if you are Happy, Foolish and Ugly?  What if you are Rich, Wise and Unhappy? What if you are Sick, Poor and Happy? It's difficult to resist creating a Myers-Briggs just for these formulations, especially since it's obvious that the second combination is Dick Cheney.

But overnight I realized with some regret that these seem to lack something akin to the concept of virtue. They are things to achieve, perhaps only surface attributes of something deeper. They are things to be, rather than things to do, and it must always be about what you *do* rather than how you appear to be. So now it seems foolish in retrospect that I joked about that list with my kids while ordering the pizza. Still, as I went online and gave the pizza guy my credit card numbers which rejected twice, ironically as Bank of America was calling me on the other line, I began to panic. After all, the house note is due. Where's my money? I just used another card and discovered that I had actually just gotten my second quarter bonus (Yay Unity Three!). I walked downstairs after paying a few bills online much more happy than I had trudging up. But the virtue question was unresolved.

--

Somewhere in the middle of that period of my young adulthood I ambled across the work of Stephen L. Carter. I have two of his virtue books, Integrity and Civility. As well, I read The Emperor of Ocean Park and his Confessions of an Affirmative Action Baby. The last book, I waited entirely too long to read and I think now with a bit of regret how I might be different if I had begun to love Carter before I began to love Cornel West. West whose provocations of the prophetic drew out that road to conservatism even longer with his socialist diversions tied to religious faith. Social Justice, another unity. I could have just dealt with making me a better me - beyond my being unleashed. 

Achieving those Unities is a shared responsibility. It's difficult for me to say how much we should share or if it is reasonable to expect to achieve them. I am much more certain about the value of personal virtue. I know it is a paradox. On the one hand you cannot know what the emergent whole of a million people doing is going to be. On the other hand you cannot really know or be a self without the context of the society. But you can know what you desire, what completes you on an an individual level, and you can know what you will or will not do to achieve that. And at any moment you can know how you feel about all that. So it makes the most sense, practically speaking, to measure yourself well and know how you will deal with whatever society might be. You cannot direct and create the Unity. Best comport yourself to your best self. You'll feel the friction or lubrication of society no matter what.

--

After pizza, we watched a couple movies as the girls took Sprite's braids out. The last was Surrogates.

Ever since 'Moonlighting' I've thought Bruce Willis is my actor. Finally I've seen him play a hero less prone to action than normal in a film that should have been a touch better than it is, but was good nonetheless.

That was all the thinking I've captured on a film that illustrates a great deal about how people lose faith in themselves and put it on their surface characteristics - how people are not whom they appear to be.

We all have to be something, and we have to do a lot in personal and social contexts to meet with our own personal destinies. Today I am decidedly for looking after number one, in the best way possible. To examine one's life thoroughly and come up with a consistency and honor one can live a long life with. To put it up for inspection and to share truths about life with others. I don't have a simple list of five things to be, but that's a start. Somewhere between the poles are where we are and I think its our virtues that drive us one way or another.

Just thought I'd share that.

The Epicurean Edge

The first story I want to get out is a memory of a magazine article I read when I was of college age but not yet in college. It was about the time that the term 'yuppie' was first being coined, and when I had no doubts that was the life for me. 

The article profiled several families and how they lived at their various income levels. And there were two that I remember in particular. One was a family of redheads with four kids. The dad looked something like Eddie Rabbit, I recall. They lived in a big huge rustic looking house. The family made something over six figures, which seemed just awesome, and the dad made the point that he really enjoyed having his big family and the extra money made it comfortable to do so. He specifically eschewed yuppie trappings to have a big happy family. That surprised me.

But the family I remember most was in fact the wealthiest family profiled. I don't remember anything about them other than this. The dad owned a restaurant in Los Angeles and pulled in about 300k per year. It was a very successful business and he had many offers to start another. But he didn't want to because he said at this point if he made more money all he would do is buy more expensive gifts for the people on his Christmas list. So he essentially said that more money could not make him happier.

Two very persuasive role models. 

Now that I think of it, I'm certainly more like the first family than the second. But what strikes me at this moment, is how my ambition to make even more money than either of those two has always hinged on my desire to be a philanthropist. Or as Cobb readers know, the KFSC - Kung Fu Santa Claus, kicking ass and giving gifts. And I have never before this moment considered that I would not be morally up to the task, or that there could possibly be anything immoral about philanthropy. It has alway represented to me, an end capable of justifying any money grubbing means. Today I am skeptical.

What I am much more sanguine about is what I'm calling the Epicurean Edge and it is boosted a bit from Hitchens. We all understand the axiom that the best revenge is living well. Well how about a good life is its own reward? Here is (read for the first time) the Wiki entry:

In the Epicurean view, the highest pleasure (tranquility and freedom from fear) was obtained by knowledge, friendship and living a virtuous and temperate life. He lauded the enjoyment of simple pleasures, by which he meant abstaining from bodily desires, such as sex and appetites, verging on asceticism. He argued that when eating, one should not eat too richly, for it could lead to dissatisfaction later, such as the grim realization that one could not afford such delicacies in the future. Likewise, sex could lead to increased lust and dissatisfaction with the sexual partner. Epicurus did not articulate a broad system of social morality that has survived.

Not too shabby.

I have a Catholic School / ghetto Bruce Lee appreciation for asceticism, but I also like bourbon and steak. So whom are we kidding?  I like the moderation of passion that comes from returning to Miller's Alley. One should not get overly concerned over matters one is not directly responsible for or cannot hope to influence. This was Dennis Miller's rule in dealing with agitated callers to his radio talk show who hated GWBush's foreign policy or the idiocy of Sarah Palin. Dude, get a life. Take a chill pill. Simmer down. Outrage is of little practical use, and beware of the man who would try to convince you otherwise.

I cannot think of Duke Ellington without thinking of 'Premature Autopsies'. The key phrase being 'elevate with elegance'. OH SNAP That was Jeremiah Wright!! Well...

Anyway the point is that there is something we should be able to see in the quality of our culture that tells whether or not we are morally healthy and psychologically sound. It may sound obvious, but what I mean to stress is that the Epicurean may transcend political or religious fidelity. That a politics that doesn't deliver steak and eggs is probably not a good politics, that a religion that doesn't deliver bourbon and tobacco is probably not a good religion, that a philosophy that doesn't deliver a sense of profound satisfaction as exemplified by a quiet moment by the fire is probably not a good philosophy. 

The Edge is in place to suggest that the ends of these goods are not the whole of the battle for moral and psychological fitness. You still need the payload of the PPE (philosophy, politics, economics) as well as its discipline, but if you find that in the course of applying that discipline that you're missing out, then you have a useful indicator. 

Simple Heroes

Men with chests.

And believe it or not, hand across my heart, I thought Super President was the greatest superhero of all time.

Government Motors

I hope I live long enough to see the 80s again, because beyond them will live the 90s. By my calculations, the 2010s will be the 70s. How can I tell? Lots of ways. And here is the harbinger of the 70s repeat. The Chevrolet Volt. It's environmental paranoia and its consequent emasculation of the American automobile. There is nothing quite so stark as the difference between concept and reality, and perhaps that will be the hallmark of the Obama Era.

Remember the Chevy Volt? That concept car that looked good?

This cretinous slugwort certifies the new fashion of ugly green at any cost econoboxes. It is the Pacer of the decade - except that at least the Pacer was affordable.

Nidermeier at the NYT spells it all out in painful detail:

For starters, G.M.’s vision turned into a car that costs $41,000 before relevant tax breaks ... but after billions of dollars of government loans and grants for the Volt’s development and production. And instead of the sleek coupe of 2007, it looks suspiciously similar to a Toyota Prius. It also requires premium gasoline, seats only four people (the battery runs down the center of the car, preventing a rear bench) and has less head and leg room than the $17,000 Chevrolet Cruze, which is more or less the non-electric version of the Volt.

In short, the Volt appears to be exactly the kind of green-at-all-costs car that some opponents of the bailout feared the government might order G.M. to build. Unfortunately for this theory, G.M. was already committed to the Volt when it entered bankruptcy. And though President Obama’s task force reported in 2009 that the Volt “will likely be too expensive to be commercially successful in the short term,” it didn’t cancel the project.

Actually, this picture doesn't do justice to the ugliness of the automobile, which will only do 40 miles a day. Less than a guy like me actually needs, but. Well, there's a lot of buts. All cars are more than we absolutely need them to be as any Neocomm will tell you, comrade. If you only needed to drive 40 miles a day and aesthetics and other sorts of consumer and market satisfactions were taken off the table - well then any second or third-world country could build a perfectly acceptable automobile.

Now of course the Volt is a great deal more advanced than the Zapo 968. But try not to forget the Chevy Cruze, the non-ideologically bound version. Cheaper, faster, roomier, longer range. And less than half the price. Did I mention cheaper? My nickel says it performs better too both for the consumer as driver and businessman as profit-seeker. But the Chevy Cruze like all of those cars created in the bygone days don't pass the board of censors of the Obama Era. It doesn't get its little green stamp, and therefore is counter-revolutionary.

I hate to see America regress in this way when it's so perfectly obvious that the last time we started making Pinto Pony MPGs and Chevette Scooters that it was a hugely stupid idea. How long will we be stuck in 1974?

Ted Hayes & America's Black Sheild

Ted Hayes, that unique and persistent activist, is at it again. I think Black Shield is rather catchy, don't you?

Senseless Violence, God's Mistakes & Evolutionary Biology

Chauncey DeVega, Respectable Negro Number One (with a bullet) has thrown an idea over the transom. The nut of it is this:

FROM feckless fathers and teenaged mothers to so-called feral kids, the media seems to take a voyeuristic pleasure in documenting the lives of the "underclass". Whether they are inclined to condemn or sympathise, commentators regularly ask how society got to be this way. There is seldom agreement, but one explanation you are unlikely to hear is that this kind of "delinquent" behaviour is a sensible response to the circumstances of a life constrained by poverty. Yet that is exactly what some evolutionary biologists are now proposing.

There is no reason to view the poor as stupid or in any way different from anyone else, says Daniel Nettle of the University of Newcastle in the UK. All of us are simply human beings, making the best of the hand life has dealt us. If we understand this, it won't just change the way we view the lives of the poorest in society, it will also show how misguided many current efforts to tackle society's problems are - and it will suggest better solutions.

Long before I was a conservative, back in the late 80s, I spent a lot of time thinking about a couple phrases. The first was 'senseless violence' and the second was 'God don't make mistakes'. In both cases I was thinking about the broad class distinctions between my sort of buppies, and the long suffering blacks of the ghetto. The first phrase related specifically to the matter of gang violence, and the second to teenage pregnancy. 

In both cases, I was generally defensive of the ghetto stereotype. Since I was not invested in racial essentialism, then or now, I readily copped to a cultural explanation.  While I had my own set of values that I would not sacrifice to be one of the multitudes, I did not appreciate the cultural dissonance or the Culture Wars that made use of racist reductions of black ghetto culture. Black ghetto culture had *logic* and that logic may not be my logic but it is logic. In this way I made some excuses and evasions for values I didn't believe in, expecting some political tolerance - or at least a more accurate and non-racial sort of dialog about The Struggle. 

Part of this was motivated by the long standing argument about what the responsibility of Cosby-type families and individuals should have for the likes of those who run afoul of the conventions of marriage and the social contract with police, law and order. Because this raised serious conflicts of interest. It was in recognition of these conflicts that I refused, not long after my college days, to enjoin any role modeling. I then began to call it 'role monkey'. How could you stand in front of people whose values you don't share and have the nerve to tell them that which makes your life work should make their life work. The absurdity of the imperative of the Talented Tenth was impressed upon me those days as it became clearer that much of Affirmative Action was cherry picking ,the symbolism of which did not resonate in the communities of hypersegregation, just around the way.

I had personally recieved a copy of a manuscript from Monster Kody, the notorious Crip leader who made the basic connection between his reign of terror and military leadership. It made perfect sense to me that he and his lieutenants were not merely father figures for that class of the fatherless in his neighborhood, but that he was actively challenging them and training them to his ends and purposes. He had more contact than all of the priests, and playground directors and coaches and neighbors combined. He was their world leader, and like with any great organization, the Crips broke down boys and remade them into men. There was logic and a basic understanding of human needs in that equation. And when you understand that human beings will take life and death decisions into their own hands, sometimes they will choose death. Was all that violence senseless? Of course not, it served the purposes of the Crips. But these gangs were operating counter to those purposes established by the American middle class whose lost boys traded loyalties. These gang soldiers did not lose their logic, nor their humanity. They simply did it for an outlaw team. 

Similarly, I asked myself if in all of its marvel the human female was able to get pregnant, by what rules should anyone say she shouldn't? Why should some bourgie version of femininity triumph over the biological urges of physically mature human beings? Why should any woman put up with chemical mods to stay the fetus? My girlfriend at the time was doing what Mexican and Mexican American women were doing - taking DepoProvera injections once every quarter rather than brave the hormonal roller coaster of the Pill. At the time, the introduction of Norplant was coming into fashion against accusations of subtle racist genocide. Here, my argument was similar. When human beings take life and death decisions into their hands, sometimes they choose life. At the same time, it was unavoidable to consider the value of teenage pregnancy without considering the counter-value of teenage abortion. In my own politics, I argued that there was something about the new black extended family that could bear the shame of teen pregnancy whereas the white nuclear family could not. Black women had babies. White women had abortions. An oversimplified argument to be sure, but it did beg the proper question of a cultural difference. 

The arguments against both of these 'ghetto mentalities' were cultural, and some were racialized, but overall they were economic. It was, after all, the question of an economic disinvestment in the cultural mainstream that was at the heart of the matter. The people themselves disinvested by their life and death decisions, and experts and pundits all over second guessed their decisions in their attempts to answer the degeneration of the Negro Question for the 80s. But it wasn't a Negro Question, it was a class question that hadn't often been posed making distinctions between black Americans of different persuasions. It was a political question of cultural choice in the context of the Culture Wars that still persist to this day but at bottom, economic. 

The economic and cultural and political questions around these basic human choices get ever more sophisticated, but the answers are still the same. Now 30 years later we have a new cadre of people suggesting yet another second guess of the 'ghetto mentality'. These cats call themselves evolutionary biologists, and as such come from the 'Nature' school. The Nature school as I see it says very little more than 'God don't make mistakes'. If you have an instinct to have a baby or to kill another human and you follow that unconsciously then you are following human nature, no matter how anti-social that action might be considered. Evolutionary biology gives us a 'healthy' option. If somehow human beings have instincts and learn to follow those instincts *consciously*, you might call it Nurture, or enlightened self-interest. That depends upon how many yuppies accept the premises of evolutionary biology. For example, these days a lot of runners and joggers are trying shoes that resemble feet, or even running barefoot. That's a social acceptance of Nature and God's design, n'est-ce pas? But I wonder if that's what the evolutionary biologists are all about. I think they serve the purposes of Progressivism or at least will have their studies hijacked for Progressivism's purposes.

You see when I was a Progressive, the solution to teenage pregnancy was not to accept that it was anti-social behavior, but to change society. How could we claim to have an economy that served the needs of human beings if it made social rules antithetical to the basic biology of human females? Indeed was not our economy and social mores hostile to women and black women in particular? The point of the social evolution of the 40 hour workweek is not to give men football games to watch. Restructure work so that women can get pregnant, dammit! To a lesser extent the same argument could be made for the Crip soldiers. Don't remove them from society because they kill, put those energies to work. Let them kill for America, not for street gangs. My Progressive friends didn't like that suggestion so much, but the logic was the same. Don't forcibly assimilate these people into the boring bourgie mainstream and destroy the spirit that enabled their courage to defy society, take advantage of that powerful blackness. After all, could Al Jarreau hold a candle to Ice Cube? Why should the nation of millions hold them back? All that did fit rather nicely into multiculturalism - halfway at least. Now multiculturalists forgive and forget gang murders, as witness to clemency against the 'prison industrial complex' shows time and time again.  Nobody cares much to stop harping against the vast income differentials in our society - even after Clinton's compromises on welfare. Children in poverty raised by single mothers is really only a problem to conservatives. No Progressive wants to curtail the female reproductive urge. 

In fact the evolutionary biologists will have nobody fighting any urges. We will all be told that our urges are Natural, and so they are. But we must also be social and we must always decide what kind of society we wish to maintain. And in that regard, what's natural is essentially an excuse. And if you wish to defy that point, consider the argument that whatever human nature is, is God's design, and then see if you're consistent. Consider the argument that evolutionary biologists are just the smartest humans yet in discovering what God intended. You see nobody knows what the brain is doing when we laugh, so there are many many years we have for science to come to its revelations of Truth. In the meantime we can trickle down this university study about the effects of chocolate or red wine on our health, and have plenty of time to adjust our lifestyles. Somehow I think whatever the finding, people will take the path of least resistance, or 'trust our guts'. In the end human beings will still make life and death choices, and experts will continue to second guess, and ideologues will hijack all of that to validate their agendas.

I don't choose a 'middle road'. I weigh the consequences of destroying or establishing another culture, and I look at the power involved in doing so. It's clear that people who take the Cosby Show values do better in the economic mainstream of our society.  It's clear that many humans in our society decide their life and death choices according to their local economy. But if it is true that these are serious choices, then it is foolish to try and undo them, and this is why there is a fundamental conflict in the conclusion of the article as well as the idea that we might socialize some solution. 

The solution begs questions of a classless society and the horror of income inequality. Income inequality is a power law phenomenon. There's no way around it except for to kill off the rich. America requires, as does Brazil, India and China, a way to have a civil society that works across multiple classes of people - you don't get that by engineering solutions that undo the choices people make that are appropriate to their situations. 

Bell Hell

The city of Bell, California is in total chaos as massive corruption has been revealed. Well, alleged. But there is the fact that one city council member makes about 9000 a year and others make about 100,000. And the police chief makes something like 400,000 and the City Manager makes over 700,000.
Bell is a city of about 38,000 people and City Hall is in a state of seige.

Word is out and AG Brown has issued subpeonas. Today I heard on the radio that there were about six different tax levies that were passed by *ahem* election, among charges that police officers went door to door suggesting which candidates and initiatives residents should vote for. Yesterday the City Council had made threatening noises about firing the entire police department.

Bell is one of those strange little towns subsumed by the concrete metropolis that is LA County. I'm not sure, but it may be one of those towns known to local Right Radio as a Reconquista Town, which is to say a town which refuses on principle to prosecute illegal immigrants. A haven. Whatever that case may or may not be, there's Hell up in Bell tonight. You may expect analogies out the wazoo regarding tax and spend government.

Basic Capitalism

Basic capitalism will never change. Check it out and remind yourself. http://www.prosper.com

Inception

I dreamed that I saw a pretty good movie the other day. 

Inception, it must be said, is one of those films that one has to watch a second time. What's odd about that is that it reminds me vaguely of another film that I puzzled my way through at this same level of intensity, except that I can't remember the name of that other movie at all. Perhaps it was Vantage Point. Or maybe it was Deception. 

What strikes me about Inception is that it is a gamelike film that creates for the audience, a set of rules that instruct you how to interpret the meaning of the action on screen. Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails. It works brilliantly in the jump cuts lacking continuity that force you to ask, how did we get here? It fails when you have to keep three simultaneous plots working in your head, two of which are visually arresting. And then the entire enterprise struggles under the weight of the unexpected and the subplot. Inception is easily the most complicated drama since Memento, and yet is more complex even than that, because it is possible that the entire movie takes place in a loop.

It is not enormously entertaining so much as it is intriguing to guess at how the director, writers and editor put the whole thing, which actually does congeal, together. This film sustains multiple levels of suspense and marvel that overwhelm the drama of the plot. You care about the primary motivations of the protagonist, and yet you know them to be a device to get to the complications. DiCaprio even plays against sympathy. 

All said, this is a movie worth talking about, three levels deep plus limbo.

Very Little to be Tory About

On the other side of the second mountain I stand on an uncertain plateau. On of the most striking lines in Hitchens memoir is his mention that his father was a Tory with very little to be Tory about. At the endo of a career of service to the British Empire, Commander Hitchens was left with a pension inferior to those who never even served in battle. At the same time Hitchens profers an attitude that I've heard echoed in the modus of Warburg during and after the Nazi era, which is to operate in life on an 'As If' basis.

I'm hesitant to hang a great deal of weight on the As If hook. It works too conveniently in the face of evidence contrary to hope. And what is the point of engaging in politics if not to execute something that must be realized in one's own time? There needs to be a time limit on the 'As If'.

The longer I live, the more comfortable I become with something that unnerved me as a younger man, which is the contingent nature of transcendant values. Perhaps a better way to think about it is the inefficiency of practical living. You engage your mind in the business of the world but you can only get so much work out of your mind. And then you work but you can only get so many results out of that work. By the time things become tangible, you will have exercised quite a bit of thinking - to what avail. That depends upon how much you manage to convert at every level, thought to work, work to profit. Then after all that you don't always manage to keep the profits you earn. So what is the point of disciplining ones mind if you don't get to keep much after all is said and done? You have to apply the As If. Hope. Faith. It's all about what you want to be and how much you believe. Of course there is no guarantee against disappointment.

I think it is a very key thing to keep in mind that in choosing to think and discipline one's thinking about moral, economic and political subjects (or PPE - philosophy, politics & economics - as the Baloil crowd called it) one must consider the efficiency of one's society vis a vis the leverage one can expect from conforming to some pre-thunk thoughts, some work that's always available and some currency with lasting value. This is how one situates oneself into history. Outside of the context of history and society, one man can think his way to heaven - but then it's only his own heaven.  That's the other side of 'As If'. It must be a shared, practical kind of hope, vision and faith. How long can one live estranged with a society of hope? Long but not well.

So perhaps it's not so horrid that one uses faith if one is in good company. But there still needs to be a time limit. What are we to do with the cynical, who dismiss those disciplines that don't work in one lifetime? Well haven't I nailed all the atheists in that? I'm not one of those, by the way, who expects all his profits in the next life and disciplines his mind towards worship to do that sort of worshipful work. My As If window is not infinite, nor is it life long. It runs about 4 years long as best I can tell, and I've gone through about 12 of them. That's actually rather impatient. But not so much that I would disregard so much as discount the discipline, work and profit of what I consider inefficient regimes of hope. This is my balancing act.

I've gone through a bit of drama over the past week or so about the existentials of black American conservatism, to the extent that I represent that. So the phrase 'little to be tory about' has been in the back of my mind. The inefficiency of our faiths is a sort of contingency we all live with. And there now is a bit more clarity about all that.

Taleb's Epistemocracy

That's what I'm talking about.

My dream is to have a true "epistemocracy"; that is, a society robust against expert errors, forecasting errors and hubris, one that can be resistant to the incompetence of politicians, regulators, economists, central bankers, bank ers, policy wonks and epidemiologists.Here are ten principles for a Black Swan-robust society.

What is fragile should break early while it's still small: Nothing should ever become too big to fail. Evolution in economic life helps those with the maximum amount of hidden risks become the biggest.

No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains: Whatever may need to be bailed out should be nationalised; whatever does not need a bailout should be free, small and risk-bearing. We got ourselves into the worst of capitalism and socialism. In France, in the 1980s, the Socialists took over the banks. In the US in the 2000s, the banks took over the government. This is surreal.

People who drove a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus: The economics establishment lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system in 2008. Find the smart people whose hands are clean to get us out of this mess.

Don't let someone making an "incentive" bonus manage a nuclear plant - or your financial risks: Odds are he would cut every corner on safety to show "profits" from these savings while claiming to be "conservative". Bonuses don't accommodate the hidden risks of blow-ups. It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us here. No incentives without disincentives.

Compensate complexity with simplicity: Complexity from globalisation and highly networked economic life needs to be countered by simplicity in financial products. Complex systems survive thanks to slack and redundancy, not debt and optimisation.

Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning label: Complex financial products need to be banned because nobody understands them, and few are rational enough to know it. We need to protect citizens from themselves, from bankers selling them "hedging" products, and from gullible regulators who listen to economic theorists.

Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence: Governments should never need to "restore confidence". Cascading rumours are a product of complex systems. Governments cannot stop the rumours. We just need to be able to shrug off rumours, to be robust to them. Do not give an addict more drugs if he has withdrawal pains: Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is not homoeopathy, it's denial. The debt crisis is not a temporary problem, it's a structural one. We need rehab.

Citizens should not depend on financial assets as a repository of value and rely on fallible "expert" advice for their retirement: Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as warehouses of value.

Make an omelette with the broken eggs: The crisis of 2008 was not a problem to fix with makeshift repairs. We will have to remake the system before it does so itself. Let us move voluntarily into a robust economy by helping what needs to be broken break on its own, converting debt into equity, marginalising the economics and business school establishments, banning leveraged buyouts, putting bankers where they belong, clawing back the bonuses of those who got us here and teaching people to navigate a world with fewer certainties. Then we will see an economic life closer to our biological environment: smaller firms and no leverage - a world in which entrepreneurs, not bankers, take the risks, and in which companies are born and die every day without making the news. -- Excerpted from the author's New Statesman article, Beware those Black Swans.

Andrew Wylie Goes to China

Andrew Wylie has just 'inked' a deal with Amazon that has the publishing world shitting itself. It is for me, little more than poetic justice and a great leap forward for the future of literacy and literature. Wylie is a high end literary agent who handles the rights of authors like Philip Roth, John Updike, Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis - Amis being one of my favorite writers and belonging to the club of English writers I expect to immerse myself in over the next year or so including Robert Conquest, Ian McEwan and George Steiner, all inheritors if Hitchens is to be believed of the tradition of Auden. I like Updike too - I never finished Portnoy got bored when I tried in high school and I found the Satanic Verses too dreamtimey.

This is actually a momentous occasion to me as a software guy and as a blogger, who constantly hears gripes from a certain cadre of snobs that the Internet is not real. My answer to that is, this is not English and you are not reading it. But of course it is, and the point is that you get it into your thick skull any way you can. Now the electronic way carry much more weight in its content than ever before.

I will be ever so happy to have Amazon as my librarian.

Post Western Philosophy

I want to kind of direct the open thread Thursday because there are several deeper questions raised during Race Week that have been poked around but not investigated. We can keep it tangential.

The tangent is this. If America gets in a war and is destroyed, what will racial minorities have learned from their sojourn in the belly of the Western beast? Which is to ask if philosophically there might be something rebuilt from the ashes that works better. 

One might go to Johannesburg and ask the same question, but my friend tells me that it's as beat up as Detroit. 

English & Partitions

Listening to a Hitchens podcast with Jeb Golinkin an interesting thought occurred to me that I hadn't much taken into consideration. That is the availability of world history to readers of the English language. Perhaps it is something I took for granted, but I don't really now. The mention of Penderel Moon, with whom I'm not familiar, spurred a search. There are six copies of his "Divide and Quit" in Amazon's cluster of sellers. At 75 dollars each, it seems to be rather precious information. It is an accounting, by an officer of the Raj, of how the British Empire left India in a rather sorry state, implicating another sort of failure in the empire, not so much of the way it conquered, but in the way it left them to all kill each other.

I gather now that I should exit politics and take advantage of this treasury. It will, of course, make my politics and philosophy so much better informed. But I do see the tragedy in this sort of devil take the hindmost attitude of what can't be described much better by me than disdain and cowardice. It's rather like Solomon deciding for the woman who would split the infant in half. Palestine, India, Bosnia, Korea, Germany. What's solved by giving rivals their own province and international standing as a state? 

It brings me back again to Israel, whose history I don't know very well and yet I still persist in asking what is so great about a two state solution. If Gaza would be a state, why is it not a state? Surely Syria could say "We recognize the state of Gaza" and "We don't recognize the state of Israel". Appropriate embassies could be built or destroyed and surely the UN would take whatever postcard application is required for their membership requirements. There it is. Two states. Except the states would war because what the real situation demands is control of Jerusalem, and while Arabs retain civil rights and Parliamentary representation in the Knesset, this is not enough for those who would vote for Hamas or Fatah. A Muslim Brotherhood that could operate freely in a democratic Israel is insufficient liberty for the true desires of the Two State Solution.

That said, the current state of occupation is in every way superior to civil war. Israel must, and probably will starve Gaza and the West Bank.

The implications for my thinking are that I am drawing parallels to disintegration and failures of leadership which are either inevitably a matter of insufficient skill, or of insufficient will. But I am very wary of suggesting that political will be ramped up for the sake of any imperial ambition. While I labor in my contingent manner, hyena consultant as I must be for lack of lions, I surely wouldn't like the world to be oligopolized. But I still like Google search, don't you? Aren't you glad that you can find it all because some authority has its tentacles everywhere, and that some people are employed to spell it out for you in your own language? Doesn't that fuel all our chatter and isn't our chatter moral and political? What a shame it would be if English literature and history only went as far as the size and shape of today's mainstream media - if our best writers were Beck and Olbermann?

Aristotle's Natural Slaves

From The New Criterion:

Our rulers are theoretically “our” representatives, but they are busy turning us into the instruments of the projects they keep dreaming up. The business of governments, one might think, is to supply the framework of law within which we may pursue happiness on our own account. Instead, we are constantly being summoned to reform ourselves. Debt, intemperance, and incompetence in rearing our children are no doubt regrettable, but they are vices, and left alone, they will soon lead to the pain that corrects. Life is a better teacher of virtue than politicians, and most sensible governments in the past left moral faults to the churches. But democratic citizenship in the twenty-first century means receiving a stream of improving “messages” from politicians. Some may forgive these intrusions because they are so well intentioned. Who would defend prejudice, debt, or excessive drinking? The point, however, is that our rulers have no business telling us how to live. They are tiresome enough in their exercise of authority—they are intolerable when they mount the pulpit. Nor should we be in any doubt that nationalizing the moral life is the first step towards totalitarianism.

Good article.

I don't subscribe to the paper version of The New Criterion. Somebody needs to get them webwise. This serves my purposes of getting epicurean in my age. Hmm. I haven't talked about that much.

Life and Death of The Boohab - An Anti-Racist Activist's Retrospective

CD asks: A question, I gave you a working, if not indirect definition of racism in my original query, please, and I would really find this useful, can you give me a definition of racism, and two, can you point to any example of anti-white racism in this country since its inception on the part of black people. Now, I am not talking about prejudice (deserved or otherwise), I mean racism, something with structural, historical, wealth, life chance consequences.

What I'm going to do is give a complete contextual reading of my interest in anti-racism from it origins and where it stands today. This will, if read carefully, help anyone understand why CD and I are principally different.

First of all, informing my opinion about race was established by the scholarship of K. Anthony Appiah of Harvard, a member of one of the families involved in the post-colonial governments of West Africa. Appiah's book "In My Father's House" sought to examine the causes for the failures of Nkrumah and Pan-Africanism from the point of view of their own internal failings. I read this book when it was new, which would be somewhere around 1992. The basic goodies of the book, and one of the reasons I was attracted to it was to find out what went wrong with Marcus Garvey and all of the black consciousness movements in America, and also why organizations like Malcolm's post-hajj OAU(?) failed to unite African and African-American political forces.

Appiah starts with a definition of race which I probably should quote more directly, but I don't have the book handy. I'm sure I got the gist of it, and what I do have are my own definitions.

I also came upon a matter of racism that struck me as intolerable during that same period. So it became a project of mine to define and sustain a singly principled anti-racist praxis that was specifically not relativistically defined depending upon what race you happened to 'be'. The incident had something to do with a campaign trick that essentially paid black ministers to keep their parishioners out of an election. It seemed to me at the time that blatant racism had gone underground and was being used in dastardly and secretive ways - ways that a sophisticated analysis could observe and combat.

Thirdly, it should also be noted that I felt that cyberspace was a medium through which conflicting ideas about race could be discussed due to the impersonal yet detailed aspect of the forums it could create. I didn't want shouting matches or encounter groups. The 'net provided.

So I took on the persona of 'Boohab' and became a 'persistent black object', as an anti-racist agitator in every major cyberspace forum of the day. This took place between '93 and '96-97. That was my project. Before that, I was only interested in talking to blackfolks on the web. 

So here are Appiah's race-neutral definitions of racism that I used as the basis of my online writing in support of a multicultural anti-racist praxis for American citizens.
--

I have said before in this and other fora that the best definitions I have come across are stated by Kwame Anthony Appiah in his recent book "In My Father's House" . I think his ideas are significant because of the depth and scope of his knowledge and experience and the fact that he is an internationally recognized scholar. I believe him capable of making his points clearly at any level of discourse. Unfortunately he's not on this particular distribution. So I will paraphrase.

racialism

The belief that there are differences between human beings which are inherited such that they can be ordered into separate races in such a way that each race shares traits and tendencies which are not shared by members of any other race. Each race has an 'essence'.

All forms of racism build from the premise of racialism. Notice that racialism is not saying anything 'good' or 'bad' about races just that mutually exclusive races absolutely exist and divide the species. The racialist would argue that you could trace the bloodlines of Jews throughout history and that you can definitely determine the 'jewness' of any human being according to his racial 'essence'.

A racialist does not necessarily believe that the races, as we understand them in America are complete. He may say that there are, in actuality, 37 races. We just don't know what they are yet. The racialist's point however is that race, whatever it turns out to be, is deterministic of human behavior and that we need to know.  

extrinsic racism:
    The extrinsic racist says that there is a moral component to the 'essence' of a race which warrants differential treatment.  These differences are, to the extrinsic racist, not particularly controversial.  The extrinsic racist, while maintaining the belief for example that Jews are  greedy, might not feel anything wrong with befriending a Jew. The extrinsic racist might very well applaud the Jew who proves himself not greedy and call  him a credit to his race.
 
intrinsic racism:
    The intrinsic racist says that the moral 'essence' of a race establishes an incontrovertible status for the race. no matter what an individual member of a race does he should be treated just like the rest of his race. the intrinsic racist would argue that the Jew is so greedy that he would hide his greed in order to gain other's confidence or that this generous person is simply not a Jew.

I use these definitions for a purpose. My interest is in generating and maintaining anti-racist praxis in individuals for the primary purposes of ridding racism from American politics. Thus it is important that these categories work for political ideologies as well as the thoughts of individuals. An individual bigot may be converted for better or worse any day of the week, but a policy enacted by like-minded individuals at any moment in time survives the individual.

Thus whether or not one individually holds racist ideas, the existence of racist policies is that citizen's responsibility.

--

So this gives me a basis for recognizing the fundamental error of racialist reasoning and a context for assigning moral weight to offenses that proceed from such bases.

It should also be said, that I was once a fan of Tim Wise and supported the premises of the project of Whiteness Studies. I no longer do, and that is because I find the premises to be flawed as well as the implementation of that project. But we can get into all that in the comments.

Apple's Revenge: Death Grip Contagion

Witness the new art of propaganda. Serves manic consumers right.

Imagine: Protest, Insurgency and the Workings of Astrology

Imagine: Protest, Insurgency and the Workings of Astrology
by Michael David Cobb Bowen with no apologies to Tim Wise
July 20, 2010

Let’s play a game, shall we? The name of the game is called “Imagine.” The way it’s played is simple: we’ll envision recent happenings in the news, but then change them up a bit. Instead of envisioning races as the primary characteristic of people we’ll envision zodiac signs of folks. The object of the game is to imagine the public reaction to the events or incidents, if the main actors were defined by something we know is meaningless, non-deterministic and not to be taken seriously, rather than race which fast-talking, know-it-all people obsessively invest with meaning and seriousness. This will help you gain the insight into the workings of race hustlers in America who keep loading meaning into the social construction of race by racializing every event that comes on the news.

So let’s begin. Oh. Just it case it gets confusing, you need to assume that humanity is divided into animal, human and object zodiac signs. As such, Geminis and Pisces don't get along.

Imagine that hundreds of Gemini protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters—the Gemini protesters--spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protesters--these Gemini protesters with guns--be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most Pisces as a danger to the republic? What if they were Saggitarians? Because, after all, that's what happened recently when Pisces gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation's capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country's political leaders if the need arose.

Imagine that Pisces members of Congress, while walking to work, were surrounded by thousands of angry Gemini people, one of whom proceeded to spit on one of those congressmen for not voting the way the Gemini demonstrators desired. Would the protesters be seen as merely patriotic Americans voicing their opinions, or as an angry, potentially violent, and even insurrectionist mob? After all, this is what Pisces protesters did recently in Washington.

Imagine that a Gemini artist were to say, in reference to a Pisces politician and presidential candidate: "He's a living turd and I told him to bite my Uzi." And what would happen to any prominent commentator who then, when asked about that statement, replied that the rapper was a friend and that he (the commentator) would not disavow or even criticize him for his remarks. Because that’s what artist Joe Spigot said in 2007, and that's how Deak Warson responded to Spigot's remarks when he was asked about them.

Imagine that a prominent mainstream Gemini political commentator had long employed an overt Pisces hater as Executive Director of his organization, and that this bigot regularly participated in Gemini separatist conferences, and once assaulted a Pisces person while calling them by a astrological slur. When that prominent Gemini commentator and his sister--who also works for the organization--defended the bigot as a good guy who was misunderstood and “going through a tough time in his life” would anyone accept their excuse-making? Would that commentator still have a place on a mainstream network? Because that’s what happened in the real world, when Paul Bissenden employed as Executive Director of his group, The National Trust, a blatant hater who did all these things, or at least their Pisces equivalents: attending Pisces separatist conferences and attacking a Gemini woman while calling her an astrological slur.

Imagine that a Gemini radio host were to suggest that the only way to get promoted in the administration of a Pisces president is by “hating Gemini people,” or that a prominent Pisces person had only endorsed a Pisces presidential candidate as an act of astrological bonding, or blamed a Pisces president for a fight on a school bus in which a Gemini kid was jumped by two Pisces kids, or said that he wouldn’t want to kill all of them, but rather, would like to leave just enough--“living skeletons” as he called them--“so we will never forget what these people stood for.”

Imagine that a Gemini pastor, formerly a member of the U.S. military, were to declare, as part of his opposition to a Pisces president’s policies, that he was ready to “suit up, get my gun, go to Washington, and do what they trained me to do.” This is, after all, what Minister Sam C. Smith said recently at a rally in Bluetown, South Dakota.

Imagine a Gemini radio talk show host gleefully predicting a revolution by the human zodiac if the government continues to be dominated by the rich Pisces men who have been “destroying” the country, or if said radio personality were to call Scorpios or Libras non-humans, or say that when it came to such people, the best solution would be to “hang ‘em high.” And what would happen to any congressional representative who praised that commentator for “speaking common sense” and likened his hate talk to “American values?” After all, those are among the things said by radio host and best-selling author Manny Sandoober, predicting Pisces revolution in the face of multi-astrologism, or said by Sandoober about Aries and Aquarians, respectively. And it was Congressman Slimp, from Vermont, who praised Sandoober in that way, despite his hateful rhetoric.

Imagine a Gemini political commentator suggesting that the only thing the guy who drove his truck into the Annandale, Wisconsin gas station did wrong was not blowing up the local radio station instead. This is, after all, what Alison Creer said about Tom L. Preston, when she noted that his only mistake was not blowing up the a national newspaper.

Imagine that a popular Gemini website posted comments about the daughter of a Pisces president, calling her “stinking rotten fish,” or a “whore” whose mother entertains her by “making bubble sounds.” After all that’s comparable to what some political group posted about (Gemini) Margaret French on livecityq.com last year, when they referred to her as “twin trash.”

Imagine that Gemini protesters at a large political rally were walking around with signs calling for the lynching of their congressional enemies. Because that’s what Pisces protesters did last year, in reference to party leaders in Congress.

In other words, imagine that even one-third of the anger and vitriol currently being hurled at the President, by folks who are almost exclusively Pisces, were being aimed, instead, at a Pisces president, by non-animal signs. How many Pisces viewing the anger, the hatred, the contempt for that Pisces president would then wax eloquent about free speech, and the glories of democracy? And how many would be calling for further crackdowns on thuggish behavior, and investigations into the radical agendas of those same non-animal signs?

To ask any of these questions is to answer them. And this, my friends, is what astrological privilege is all about. It is the ability to have your astrological sign taken seriously and given as proximate cause for all of your thinking and your actions, whether the real reason be personal, political, medical, religious, philosophical, emotional, psychological, random or any combination of any of that or something else that nobody can honestly figure out.

I hope this exercise has been instructional. You see just as astrological signs have been a social construction that is about as old as mankind, so has race. The advance of knowledge has proven that the movement of the stars and planets have no bearing on our behavior, and so it has been proven about race. Except people still know their signs and race and decide that they want to make important, it is a choice that says a great deal about one's character. It says even more about those who seek to keep people fixated on this powerful, yet foolish and immoral obsession.

Reagan: A Time For Choosing

Christian Soldiers

What I didn't know Friday, I know now. Watch out, it's going to blow your mind. The Salvation Army is a church. 

That's right, it is a Christian denomination. They have worship services and churches and the whole nine yards. Except that the Salvation Army does such a good job of Christian Fellowship that people don't know. Think of everything you know about the Salvation Army. Is it positive? 

German Health Care

It turns out that there is a system of European style Social Democrat heath care provision that I find attractive. It's something that can be described in under fifty words, none of which has been within my earshot. But since I reckon that it can also called 'single payer' there hasn't been much of an incentive for me to hear folks out on that score.

The German system consists of eight competing national non-profit health care firms that operate everywhere and compete for patients. You can choose any firm you like. You can change any time you like. You can mix and match. The government pays. There *is* no health care insurance, there are simply the eight firms and they provide. 

Wolfram says America should have 30. Sounds about right. 

The Scopes Threshold

(from the archives: October 2009)

There are those who believe that racialism can be scientifically validated. I believe it can. However no matter how much how accurate that validation it becomes it should never cross the threshold of legal standing.

It is a fundamental premise of Enlightenment thought that societies must recognize the basic equality of individuals. Which is to say that simply by the virtue of being human, of having a soul, that there is a plateau of respect below which no man should be placed. In saying so, we are also saying that there is a ceiling of respect above which no non-human should attain. These are the basics of human rights upon which Western society is built and towards which all of our civilizations aim.

A society of law seeks to place all humans as equals before the law and grants them standing as citizens to by protected by it and bound to it. In this way it establishes all of the expectations of all powers and freedoms, etc. It makes that plateau and ceiling. To be granted citizenship is to be placed on that plateau and acknowledged by that society as an equal in the eyes of the law. And to make that clear, here in America we establish that equality before the law WITHOUT REGARD to race, and a host of other distinctions.

So I repeat what I said about the racialists in the context of Skip Gates:

Many Americans strongly believe that positive discrimination works, and that it is, always and everywhere the best policy. And therefore when you boil it down there are two camps.

Ideological Tribe A
We believe that America is at its best when its mainstream is maintained without regard to race, creed, color.

Ideological Tribe B
We believe that America is at its best when its mainstream is maintained with special regard to race, creed, color.

[..]

But giant populations of people, especially Professor Gates himself and those of his current staunch defenders take it as axiomatic that special regard is the way to go. For example, white people should be sensitive to black people, because they are black. To them, race relations is a purpose and an end to itself. Whenever you hear the tell-tale words 'we still have a long way to go' it is an expression of their  ethics. Their purpose is not to destroy race, but to create a fixed and permanent indemnification whose implications are stamped into law but whose weights and measures are under ideological control. That is why every year and after every significant racial excressence they desire and demand to have yet another national debate on the subject of race. Just so they get their words and priorities into the court of public opinion where they have had the upper hand since the passage of Brown.

There are those like commenter RR, they are a special case of Ideological Tribe B, which is to say they are convinced that race goes far beyond something that should be stamped into law and whose weights and measures are under ideological control, but that race is the proper way to interpret human biology and genetics.

It is not illegal to be racist in this country. Socially, freedom of association is just that. There is plenty of racial discrimination that can, does and will always take place which is legitimately outside of the spirit and the letter of the law, and plenty that goes on otherwise as well. We are as racist as we want to be and it can be said that our society is at racial equilibrium. There are no pressing legislative ideas, nothing in the top 20 agendas of the past several congresses. To state the obvious, some communities are a great deal more racist than others. People are living in American society where the racial tone is appropriate for them. Otherwise they move.

--

So there is one thing to prove for these genetic racialists, and that is that for society's benefit there should be gradations in human and civil rights and the law should be changed.

That is to say that not to recognize that people are biologically and genetically inferior and superior forces people to live in a state of compromise that threatens society. Anything less than that, meaning a change in the law, is just a social freedom of the sort that allowed for White Citizens Councils and all sorts of other racialist and racist pressure groups. It's all a kind of big 'so what' if it doesn't involve the law, so far as I'm concerned. You're just another racist or racialist fragment of American society that's disenchanted with the way things are.

So where is your majority?

To question the premise of Enlightenment thinking, of the equality of man before the law, of modernism and the premise that any man can, no matter his blood, be taught any idea or speak any language, is a course whose options are thankfully small. But horrible ideas have long pedigrees as well. To violate the legal plateau is to ask to recalibrate the value of the individual and there is no doubt in my mind that the inevitable consequence will be a fascist atrocity with scientific precision.

The Ministry of Inclusion

Just wow!

The Treasury, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the 12 Federal Reserve regional banks, the Board of Governors of the Fed, the National Credit Union Administration, the Comptroller of the Currency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau...all would get their own Office of Minority and Women Inclusion.

Each office would have its own director and staff to develop policies promoting equal employment opportunities and racial, ethnic, and gender diversity of not just the agency's workforce, but also the workforces of its contractors and sub-contractors.

What would be the mission of this new corps of Federal monitors? The Dodd-Frank bill sets it forth succinctly and simply - all too simply. The mission, it says, is to assure "to the maximum extent possible the fair inclusion" of women and minorities, individually and through businesses they own, in the activities of the agencies, including contracting.

How can I exploit this and get away with it?

John Rosenberg and Me

Back when I was a black and proud race man, around the beginning of my blogging career, I would periodically cross swords with John Rosenberg over at Discriminations. I am pleased to see that he's still in the blogging business. Good.

We seemed to go a round a bit on the matter of Affirmative Action, and I recall enough about our exchanges to reduce our difference to one simple point. I have supported Affirmative Action in many different weak ways, never expecting much of it since I did the math in the 80s. I realized then, that Affirmative Action was always cherry picking, it would never do enough work to raise the race and as Sowell made painfully clear, that it would not always be politically acceptable to the mainstream. I can't remember the last time I got into a good Affirmative Action debate, but it probably was around Grutter. But when Rosenberg and I got into it, we were on accord about one controversial point. Affirmative Action is racial discrimination. The way I worded it was this: Affirmative Action is positive racial discrimination for the purposes of inclusion - and that is what distinguishes it from racial discrimination for the purposes of exclusion. Rosenberg had zero tolerance for any racial discrimination, a position I considered hokey and impractical. My basis for that had to do with the fact that the nation had, by acclimation, determined that Affirmative Action would be the political settlement negotiated with respect to historical discrimination and 'the legacy of slavery'. So long as people would employ those careworn phrases with political currency; well, a deal's a deal. This was especially viable considering that we were in the post-Bakke regime, meaning no numerical quotas.

All of this devolved towards the verbiage of 'diversity' which I considered mealy-mouthed and euphemistic. Affirmative Action, for what it was worth, at least had some hardball edges that appealed to me as a virulent, pro-integration race-mixer. Yeah. You're going to integrate your schools, dorms, churches, armies, civil services and institutions whether you liked it or not. And then things started to get multiculturally weird. 

Today, I have very little reason to give two craps about Affirmative Action. Nobody talks about it. I think Grutter was decided wrongly by the way. The exceptions should have gone to the undergraduate program not the certified graduate program. I never supported race-norming of test scores or any such actions that put meritocracy at risk. But it seems to me that supporters of multicultural diversity sunk their own ship when they opted for their identity politics that decided to traffic in more than just race.If you truly want to disable identity politics, racial or otherwise, then you must adhere to a standard of assimilation and conformity based on shared values. 'Diversity' became its own meaningless value and since the focus was almost always on young people, those values were nothing more or less than identity stereotypes. It became inevitable then that such logic and defense of such would be riven by hypocrisy.

Anyway, I dropped by his blog and am going to start tracking back and commenting over there, rather as a supplement (and countermeasure) to what I do at Respectable Negroes when I feel froggy on matters of race. What I expect will be a decent standard with some legal chops that doesn't wax lyrical or encourage speculation. We'll see.

Obama Gonna What? - Racism

I haven't read all of the details, but apparently some reprobate from among the 'baggers has offended one step beyond whatever the center of gravity of that amorphous organization is. I think I can reasonably say (OK I read it, big whoop) that Mark Williams' satire is more of the same - which is to say stuff that's not PC that dainty people cannot stomach. Yes it is. It is little more than another entry is the cliche'd bag of rhetoric in the trope of Black Democrats Plantation Mentality. And so now we are shocked, shocked that some WHITE man has the nerve to utter such words.

I don't expect, in all seriousness, to get any satisfaction from whatever arises from this tempest. But it occurs to me these days, as I just wrote in Theft and Failure, that there is an absence of conviction at the top. So looking for that it is my inclination, and snarky duty to ask, where was the President while all this Racist Tea Partying was going on? Why did he not use his tremendous power, intellect and sensitivity to stop this train wreck? Where indeed are the President's statements about the Tea Party, and why haven't I heard them?

Mark Williams' letter doesn't offend me, nor do I find it particularly funny. So if Mark Williams needs my advice, I would have him go head to head in a debate with the head accuser under the supervision of Brian Lamb. In the meanwhile whichever Tea Party excoriated his Tea Party as the new Racist Tea Party has done the dainty apology properly and it now must be accepted by those who demanded that apology and that hunky dory Tea Party will continue to do whatever it is they do. Who knows, maybe they'll get an Image Award. The evil Racist Tea Party of Mark Williams will thus become the official white supremacist Tea Party that dares speak without reverence to the Coloreds - I mean not real black Americans, but the ones who just wrote that letter to Abe Lincoln. Such drama! As somebody else recently said, maybe we can expect somebody to say something about the Nation of Islam too. Wouldn't that be a blow for justice!?

So I will watch and listen for one signal above all this foolishness and that is the extent to which the Man in the Oval Office makes some official remark. After all, if a black president can't stop this kind of talk, maybe we should get the kind of dictator who can!

Theft and Failure

An interesting direction may emerge in the way I approach a number of things. This has been an eventful week. 

Firstly, I finished a couple of books from Hitchens and given that I don't have anyone to discuss the entire thing with, it's likely that I'm going to internalize a lot of ideas of his without much reflection. He simply extends some things I've considered briefly to interesting lengths and conclusions, and there are certain fresh ideas that are simply too brilliant to ignore. 

Probably the most significant thing that I am noticing is the extent to which religious institutions and all institutions of moral value are vulnerable to intellectual hacking. Hitchens, more than anyone I know, is exactly that. A moral hacker of the first order. And he leaves a trail of tools. The one I picked up this past week is to beware of any religious capitalization in the language. So it is a new trigger in my alert system. Whenever I encounter a mystery capitalized, I recognize it as a term of art, a baited hook for fishers of men. Secondly, Hitchens has inserted somewhere into my source code a new intolerance for the coersion of eternal anything. Call it the Hotel California rule. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. It doesn't matter how lovely the hotel is, when that one freedom is taken away, it becomes a prison. All utopias are thusly prisons.

There are a number of other tools Hitchens has left in my path, but at this point I'm a bit more interested in figuring out the relative usefulness of evangelistic movements. As I suggested, it might well have been likely for Hitchens to have had some other sort of moral tank leading his path into enemy territory from whose cover he has become an excellent sniper, but he chose International Socialism. From my perspective of the thermodynamics of information theory - aka the amount of energy required to establish and maintain a certain literacy among millions worldwide, International Socialism is Imperial. So is Christianity, and so is Islam and so is the Neoconservative West. It seems, however, that only a certain kind of Islam is properly energized, but I speculate. The point is that you need something that grandiose to hold the attention of the sorts of talented people who would take an opportunity to change the world. There are NGOs and the UN and American all-volunteer Armed Forces (vis a vis Barnett's System Administration Force) as actors in this drama, although it's more difficult to pin down their ideologies. 

We are in interregnum and in between wars and collapses as well. This is a time of uncertainty and lack of confidence. We are spinning our wheels and spinning out of control. The problems are clear and present yet we don't quite possess the fortitude to see our way confidently solving them. Who do I mean we? I mean humanity. There is no Napoleon, nobody with any vision and power larger than Steve Jobs or Osama Bin Laden, and neither one of them is setting the world on fire at a Napoleonic scale. So we wait.

What do we wait for? The only two things that work when the hubris of power and moral certitude are in remission. We wait for theft and failure. In 2010 these are the two most reliable forces in the world. They both seem to be indicated by the status quo.

Those of us on the American Right understand this although we don't want to admit it. But the Republican Party is so blinkered and desperate it might welcome either with open arms. Am I being cynical? No. I hate cynicism and I detest (but expect) subversion. But I am coming to accept the probability that America does not at this point in its history possess the will nor the temperament to figure out and then do the right things with regard to immigration, sovereign debt, deficit spending, banking regulation, immigration, energy policy, foreign policy or political correctness. And so I think the prudent thing to do is expect that America will fail in each of these areas over the next ten years.

I only wish I could get my Social Security right now. Somebody give me that vote, please.

With regard to theft, I heard among many sparkling conversations this weekend, the moral case for theft of intellectual property. It goes like this. Imagine that Russia negotiated with Bill Gates to get the source code for Windows 7 so that it might pursue criminals. Or imagine that for Pfizer drug Lipitor, Cuba decided to hack and reverse engineer it. That for whatever purposes, states have negotiated or coerced out of corporations for free what the rest of us pay for and those state actors had morally sound reasons for doing so. That is a way out of an economic deadlock. The right thing gets done by sovereign actors. What are you going to do about it?

Theft and failure represent the breakthroughs that regimes cannot or will not afford. I'm not suggesting that the ends justify the means or that one should advocated the acceleration of failure or encourage theft, but these are ugly ways that good is done. Still, I am not entirely sure how much attention you should pay to the qualifications I just made. Because it is possible that I could see such sclerosis or corruption that I would welcome theft, that I would suborn failure. It would be a new way for me to operate.. I haven't negotiated such waters before. 

Bones Come To Life

Maybe. Perhaps. Is this what it felt like when you first heard Bob Dylan? This dude is the real thing. I'm diggin' it, seriously diggin' it. His name is Jonathan Mann.

The Whisky Android

I love this guy.

Gone Fishin'

See you Sunday Night.

Apple Antenna Song

Apple licks the boot anyway.

Every Day Racists

 

That's about the size of it.

Open Thread Thursday

What up?

NAACP: Next Under the Obama Bus

If I may make a prediction it is that the next entity to get kicked to the curb and rolled over by the Obama juggernaut is going to be the NAACP. The Washington Times has a scoop about the behind the scenes maneuvering by attorneys at the NAACP to put pressure on the Obama DOJ to dismiss the case against the New Black Panthers. And so the anti-racist bona fides of the old rundown org are going to have to stand another round of withering scrutiny - this time against the ACLU and the SPLC, two other organizations who have lawyers tangled up in this voter intimidation case.

There are tighter situations that The One has wiggled out of but this is one that potentially puts him in the rhetorical jaws of Sarah Palin who called on the First Lady (clever) to repudiate the NAACP's charges against the Tea Party

All Palin blather aside, the real throw down seems to be this memo demanding to get a certain Christopher Coates back into the heart of the matter, whatever exactly that might be. I'm not so great in reading memos between sparring legal eagles, but there's something that Coates knows that some people don't want out in public, some of those people evidently in the NAACP, like one Kristen Clarke. 

There seems to be an accelerating amount of beef here. Should be interesting to watch the NAACP melon get squished. Question is, how much of that will splash into Obama's face?

--

It's rather interesting that just a few days ago we were talking about the effectiveness of the anti-racist movement in the US, which I continue to mock and hound for a number of reasons. My other prediction is that if Abagail Thernstrom gets her name in print over this, she's going to end up being the Warren Christopher of this madness. That's what I would do if I were Obama because I don't think Holder has enough cred across the aisle.

Krugman: Him Say Stimulate

At this moment in history, Paul Krugman is taking up the cudgels of the Administration and saying, if the government would just spend more money, then everything would be alright. I oversimplify but below is my guy Ferguson to set up the terms of the conflict. Let us recall that in 2007 Roubini was telling us stuff that most Americans refused to believe about the toxicity of subprime mortgages. I didn't believe it. I figured that as various mortgage brokers went under - the subprime lenders - that would limit the damage and the markets would be out 600 Billion and that would be the end of it. Little did I know how much retranchified and over-securitized bilge was in the asset base of 1001 banks.

Followers of Roubini, who sounded like whackjobs were essentially whackjobs. It was difficult for me to get Roubini straight from the horse's mouth in those days of my pre-economic literacy. (FWIW today) The whackjobs were saying nationalize all the banks, I was saying let them fail.

Today I'm saying that Krugman is pretending that bond vigilantes are not just around the corner and unless and until the Obama adminstration does something seriously reformative, they are going to bite him and all of us in the butt before 2012. So where I said in 2007, it's bad but it can't get that bad, I now know that in 2010 that it is very bad and has a good chance of becoming catastrophic.

Hayek on Moral Values & Altruism

Hitch-22: First Look

The first thing I started doing as I put Hitch-22 on my MacBook Pro and broadcast the voice of the man reading his own memoir into my bedroom, was start to clean up. Like many, I have the reflex of picking things off the floor and earnestly cleaning up when I'm taking a browbeating. It comes from childhood of course, as Mom delivered her 'cyclone hit it' harangue as I cleaned up that mess I'd been making all day - taking the bedsheet tent down from the top bunk and removing the staples from the carpet.

Except with Hitchens, the reflex was not defensive against his words, rather my own sort of browbeating I give to myself. After all, it has been five months since I last downloaded an audiobook from Audible and I have been falling back in my reading. It all started tumbling back, that odd state of mind - peaceful and restlessly hungry at once that I once possessed back when I subscribed to Granta and poured over the shelves at Waterstones on Newberry Street.

--

There is a great deal that I have to say about Hitch, and that is because I come somewhat late to having an actual living intellectual hero, and it took me quite some time to get Cornel West out of my system. West is a teacher I should have had in my undergrad years so that I might get in touch with the ideas of the Pragmatists and understand how much of what I actually believed to be transcendently true of life was actually welcome within the US. I suffered the neglect many students of 'social justice' do in recognizing virtues of Ralph Waldo Emerson were my own and not something, as multiculturalists would have us believe, completely alien to dead, white, European males. Since I spent my aculturative years in the streets and in the harder sciences, I didn't have much ammo to push back with, and so my tardiness and ignorance. So now having followed him and Amis, more or less for some time, I am convinced that he has the perspective often lacking in purer natural philosophers - which is the real world of dodgy and inspirational politics. Along with Niall Ferguson who provides the sensible attitude towards economics, I'm getting there. So there are places of coherence I would like to address Hitchens which will not be complete, but let me scatter my shot.

Firstly, by joining the Conservatives as a direct result of recognizing what Amis said so clearly about the evil excess of Stalin, I opened myself up to the Straussians. And so it comes as no surprise that I worry about Hitchens as an anti-theist, as God comes so clearly evident in the American Tory package. Suffice it to say that my model in this regard is John Adams. As brilliant and comprehensive a life as Hitchens has had, I don't think even he could consume enough of it to be charged by too many philosophies. Having read his memoir I understand that he simply couldn't be much more than a Trotskyite by study and habit, but it is a habit that might have been born by any other number of disciplines. At some point, you can't simply swap out your networks for an entirely new, and so his is what it is. Except that in the whole of his book with two chapters to go, I can't recall him quoting Trotsky at all. Rather, Hitchens is more appropriately a steward of the best impulses of Liberalism and is thus committed  to the cause of Liberty itself.  His is a character to be admired, and so he appropriately shines a light on those attributes of character which ought to be found in the leaders we want but more often exposes and excoriates those defects in the leaders we have. He does so without being small minded or petty and most importantly to a true Liberal without the godawful smugness of those with solutions to pimp. He is an intellectual who understands and respects moral and physical courage, something we seem to have lost in the scholar-squirrels of the postmoderen Left.

Reconciling Hitchens protest and Christianity is something it is important for me to do because it will always be the case that we'll have more time to hear the echoes of our Christian society (as distinct from a purported Christian Nation or even Christian Society) than we are to hear the dons of Balloil. And since there is clearly no better International Socialist movement than there is a Prophetic Christian movement, we all are going to have to take our enlightenment and moral reinforcement where we can get it. That we must get it, Hitchens surely cannot be, witness to horrors that he is, some slavish Rousseauvian seeking some holistic, tattooed Natural world. Christianity can and does civilize. But here's the key and the thing I think that suggests that Hitch protests too much. There are many a slip between the act and the law, and Christianity in America - despite its reactionaries, does not approach the Christian Nation. Our secular law is not threatened by canon law and Christians understand and respect that. It is the ease with which American law and Christian ethics coexist in this, his adopted homeland that gives us security and enables the People a moral check on the balances of power. It is surely not only Christian ethics, but it has integrated better than any other religion.

I'm not sure how much Hitchens would have the State he knows, polluted by the likes of his enemies Kissinger and Stanley Baldwin, take more responsibility for the moral instruction of the populous, and seeing that he mentioned no scathing indictment of our free educational system to inculcate the greater values of the Enlightenment one wonders if he might be satisfied simply by the right and proper Great Man. For surely, like few others, Hitchens recognizes how the American Left has been reduced to pettiness. There has got to be more satisfaction than mere irony. Not if America falters enough to be done in by the certainty of devils.

There is a gap between Hitchens and the soldier he inspired to go to Iraq. It is a mediation Hitchens doesn't appear to know or connect with - not that it's his responsibility. I think he had bridged the gap admirably as an individual of palpably tender integrity. But we can't all fall in love with such a lovely man as he and do the necessary work of upholding liberty thought such mechanisms as email and like buttons on Facebook. There must be a democracy between us that works, and Hitchens seems to exist on the periphery of that democracy - or at least at a level far above my head where people actually read literature and use it to inform their sensibilities. 

So I have puzzles to figure out, and perhaps in time will do so. This is the first set of questions that itch me, and so I will continue on to get to know Auden a bit more, as well as immediately continue his Contrarian Letter. But I do understand the man much better now, and I will seek the company of his literary fellows, maybe McEwan, certainly Conquest, and more Amis, especially since the latter has pronounced his fondness for Merkel, whom I like too.

This is why to this Hayekian, he is my kind of writer, whose not inconsiderable love an talent with English ought to make those who speak of 'critical thinking skills' absent beauty's content pause and discover that they are actually defending nothing. Hitchens has found a world worth defending and celebrating, the texture of which can only be approximated by the finest of writers.

Obligatory Seriousness on LeBron & The World Cup

I have five things to say on LeBron.

1. If I was LeBron, I would have left Cleveland too. It makes little sense to be the world's best and live in a second rate city.

2. Shaq made no difference. It obviously takes more than two to make a winning NBA team.

3. The new Heat will encounter new defense, a la 'hack a shaq' that will shut down whatever the new trio is called in the first season. I like 'The Amazing Three' from the cartoon. I'm surprised that I haven't heard more.

4. Dan Gilbert doesn't need to be any classier than any other loudmouth NBA owner (Mark Cuban).

5. Jesse Jackson should mind his own business, and if I were LeBron James, I would find a way to quietly tell him so. 

--

I have five things to say on the World Cup

1. Suarez of Uruguay got the booing he deserved, but he was not as bad as Zidane.

2. Forlan of Uruguay got the Golden Ball he deserved. He made the most beautiful goal of the entire series.

3. I'm disappointed in NED. They depended too much on Robben against Spain.

4. If Muller hadn't got put out of the semis, I still think Germany would have won.

5. Yay USA. Expect a lot more attention from American sports fans. Still, Altidore pooped out and should have done more.

A Clear Test for the Scientific Rationality of the Obama Administration

There should be absolutely no moral way for the Administration to weasel its way out of dealing with the science behind High Frequency Trading, which according to a little common sense and increasing scientific rigor, is proving to distort markets. The sort of foolishness like outlawing drilling for oil and outlawing short trading defies Obama's intellectual reputation and half of that smears Volker in the process. But HFT is voodoo that nobody needs.

To wit:

Up until recently, any debate between proponents and opponents of High Frequency Trading would typically be represented by heated debates of high conviction on either side, with discussions rapidly deteriorating into ad hominem attacks and the producer screaming 'cut to commercial' to prevent fistfights. Luckily, all this is about to change. In a research paper by Reginald Smith of the Bouchet Franklin Institute in Rochester titled "Is high-frequency trading inducing changes in market microstructure and dynamics?" the author finds that he "can clearly demonstrate that HFT is having an increasingly large impact on the microstructure of equity trading dynamics. Traded value, and by extension trading volume, fluctuations are starting to show self-similarity at increasingly shorter timescales. Values which were once only present on the orders of several hours or days are now commonplace in the timescale of  seconds or minutes. It is important that the trading algorithms of HFT traders, as well as those who seek to understand, improve, or regulate HFT realize that the overall structure of trading is influenced in a measurable manner by HFT and that Gaussian noise  models of short term trading volume fluctuations likely are increasingly inapplicable." In other words, the author finds ample evidence that during the past decade (on the NASDAQ) and especially since the 2005 revision of Reg NMS (on the NYSE), stock trading increasingly demonstrates "self similar" fractal patterns, resulting in volatility surges, recursive feedback loops, and a market structure which is increasingly becoming a product of the actual trading mechanism. In the process, as demonstrated by a Hurst Exponent gravitating increasingly further away from 0.5 (i.e., Brown Noise territory), the Markov Process nature of stock trading is put under question, and thus the whole premise of an efficient market has to be reevaluated. Simply said: HFT has been shown to affect the fairness of trading.

If you're ordering good food, it's worth the wait. If you're ordering fast food, you have the wrong sort of hunger.

The White Post

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone,
you leave them as they are.  But you do not.  If you leave a thing alone,
you leave it to a torrent of change.  If you leave a white post alone, it
will soon be a black post.  If you particularly want it to be white, you
must be always painting it again: that is you must always be having a
revolution.  Briefly, if you want the old white post, you must have a new
white post.  But this, which is true even of inanimate things, is in a
quite special and terrible sense true of all human things.  

  -- G.K. Chesterton

The Most Dramatic Blimp In the World

It's funny until you realize that it's Skynet.

The Conceit of Being Well Read

(from the archives - April 2004)

I suspect that Hitchens is on a roll with his anti-religious rants in preparing himself to ramp up his rhetoric against the scourge of jihadism. It's almost enough to get me to put down Neal Stephenson in favor of Salman Rushdie. Not.

Last night he had a fair salvo of invective against Christianity's nut of forgiveness, but like most anti-theists his focus centers on the hole instead of the donut. All men are afraid of the dark, so what does it matter that one creates God and another creates Science if the purpose is obliterate fear? Well the conduct of those systems of belief does matter, and anyone is right to criticize a means that creates more fear than it settles. There is plenty of evidence that religion bears a great responsibility for that. Amis said that the purpose of philosophy is to show the proper way to prepare for death, and admirable goal. And so it works equally in that the age of Maoism and Stalinism and other like political philosophies a great deal of preparation was made of an ungodly amount of death.

It is only being well read that diffuses the conceit of any monotheism or single political ideology. But being well-read is a conceit as well, especially in that it arms one with a kind of grip which allows one to swing a more or less straight path through any jungle of diverse trees without getting bogged down in the fruits of just one. Such swingers as Hitchens, and Amis to a lesser extent, can quickly find the nut of contradiction in any single system given the broad understanding a life of sampling gives one. And yet it is only conceit that could justify ignoring the fruits of systems of belief entirely.

Goedel famously suggested, (and if your belief in math is total, you could say he proved beyond a shadow of a doubt) that it is impossible for any single system of proofs to be both complete and consistent. I generally take the example of Judaism to be exemplary of this. There are a huge number of rules which must be scrupulously followed by the faithful, and yet in the holy of holies, in the temple where G*d, who must not be named, there is only one human who can go to the single place. And yet what he sees must be nothing at all. Judaism, like every other monotheism is a faith around a void, and that non-existence is the article of faith which legitimize everything around it in perfect harmony with Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem.

That such religions have a singular provable flaw make them more consistent than the forest of trees the well-read swing through on their random paths toward enlightenment. For all such swingers must examine & abandon, revise & review their world view. This is called being progressive, and although it should be incredibly tiresome, men such as Hitchens remain faithful to its discipline. They cannot stop reading. They cannot stop writing. Their task is never complete for there are few settled truths.

Those that are, must then be observed religiously, and one is apparently the rejection of theism. This principle may often be practically correct, although I've yet to hear any anti-theist reject the principles of Buddhism. It is a conceit nonetheless, so let's not forget that.

I am not here to suggest that all things are relative. It is only that I am convinced all things are not which makes me conservative. I know of what it is I conserve and so I am not so likely to be swinging through forests of logic. I honestly believe I can be honest without knowing who Leni Reifenstahl was. (Although Google helps)

And that's all I have to say about that.

Afghanistan in High Definition

An astonishing set of images.

My First Arab Dream

Call me Raven.

I was a guest for an unknown reason in a Disneyland desert. My host was Darius, frustrated, masculine and mysterious but open to me as we made moves to unknown ends in a future Saudi Arabia. I stayed in his monorail apartment 400 feet above the metropolis and we made the vast circumnavigation at 100 miles per hour. It was an area the size of Houston and as we ringed it ever so smoothly I could not discern our motive power or what kind of structure kept his studio from shaking. I peered out the inner window through gauze curtains at a marvel of gold plated buildings in fantastic shapes. Statuary and sail shaped mosques. Flowing lagoons with pale blue painted concrete bottoms surrounded massive curved structures. Every edifice was an aqua and gold monument to moorish architectures. It was stunning.

We arrived at some sector and descended our building arriving at a plaza cafe. It was uncharacteristically linear, but exactly as pristine and new as everything else in the city - a city it seemed with no automobile traffic. Everyone walked and it was never crowded.

Prior to our arrival we had been stranded in the desert zone, an ecological disaster area with no cell phone coverage. A bank of rotary phones were our only communication and panicked our sensibilities when operators asked us for directions. The rates were obscene we only had seconds to alert our rescuers to our location. The streets were dirt and oil and sand and every low building looked as if it were from a wild west town only built up in stucco and blasted with shit colored earth by the scirocco. As the oily grit wind subsided I consulted my map written on parchment, hand drawn telling me I was in zone 3 of 3. That this was the edge of the civilized world.

But now on the pebbled pavement in the futuristic plaza under braided ficus there was only temperate sunshine and quiet. The place was deserted and Darius sat still staring off into the monumental distance. In the open kitchen behind a glass partition, silent workers eyed us suspiciously hovering over their sterno lit boiling trays of hummus and meats. And then it happened.

The mother and daughter crossed between us in surprisingly drab attire and sat without speaking. Darius suddenly asked insinuatingly of the younger, "I would like you to visit with me." He gave the air and she the smiling and negative response that this was an old game between them, polite and charged with ancillary meaning. It was all that was said, and the mother grunting like Mother Theresa stood and left her with us. And then both women disappeared and Darius returned to his dreamlike pose. He sat erect and turned a broad back to me elbow akimbo, hand on his chin. And was joined by another indistinguishable man and another until they looked like Henry Moore statues in black robes frozen in space-time. They broke and reformed and then he explained, breaking the silent pantomime. This is how we communicate. It is all non-verbal, like a fashion model game of freeze and by sheer force of will you stare down people into positions of dominance and submission. 

I was deferential as I had been all day, puzzling my way through, trying to get the gist of it all. There was only Arabic spoken but never a disparaging word, and now that more men and women were filling the square, I could begin to sense their disdain for the two of us. For although we were dark and dressed as if native in dark flowing robes as all were in this temperate amusement park, we were still strangers.

Darius emptied his pocket after more of the dramaturge and revealed chips of blue paint which upon closer inspection turned out to be gold leaf. "They have no idea", he confided. It's replaced every day. The city is fascist, the people are silent and cruel. Darius was a guest and I the guest of a guest in a police state paradise of astonishing beauty. All day and every day the populous engaged in a wordless stage play of mannerism all dressed in grays and blacks showing only their expressionless faces in hierarchical harmony.

I found a newspaper. I wanted to understand. There was a cartoon with African animals, sensuously drawn in black and white. It was the most popular cultural production. It was called King Ti, for the protagonist lion of the same name. He had a human male chest and was in most every frame telling everyone what to do, and them all agreeing. In this day's paper the lion had met his monkey and the monkey asked the lion, "Aren't you afraid of snakes?". It turned out that this was the most popular issue of the series. King Ti said "No!". The monkey asked again. "Then are you afraid of.." and was precipitously interrupted by a flash of lightning drawn in a negative reversal of black and white. The flash, like a nuclear sunrise blasting white and illuminating the skeletons of all the creatures. The panel was drawn as wide as the page of the newspaper trembling in my hand. It was the final panel and there was no reply. I tore through my stack and found no other mention, no continuation of the story. It was all that needed to be said.

My Arabic name is Raven, like a single named futbol star. I appear on the vast plazas, all beveled and pristine and I pose in my robes with the rest of the slaves. Everything is understood and nothing is said and every day the sun shines perfectly in the perfect and quiet monumental metropolis. Every night I return to the monorail studio and in the tall urn in the corner, I gather a fortune in paint flake.

The Purpose & Future of Black Media

I am creating this thread precisely because of the presence and attention of Thrasher, the pseud of a media star in black Detroit. Having done a stint for a year at NPR and still getting the occasional email from my piece on TV One, I've done a bit of mainstreamish media. I much prefer writing, but one cannot deny the power of the broadcast.

Having attended a conference sponsored by 3BAAS Media at USC last year, I was made more critically aware of a predicament that I could see coming. That is that black radio is going broke and its fortunes hang on the shoulders of a handful of people who don't always see eye to eye. That old media is having a worse time of it than the rest of old media and somehow it has to change or die. I've seen a great deal of political energy expended on convincing several powers that be that black (as the forefront 'minority') interests must be served, but none of them sound like the sort of joint collaborations more capitalist-minded folks like Spike Lee or Rush Simmons would sign on to. Instead they sound more like the sort of racial tantrum of another era - we are 10% of the consumers, therefore we demand 10% of the power or else we'll boycott and charge racism. 

My complaint is specific and I've spelled it out here. There is no Tony Brown.

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

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

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

What is to be done? Will black radio go the way of black newspapers, basically passing into irrelevance as all of black culture is mainstreamed, like Glovers Mange into Clairol? Will all black news cease? If so, is that a bad thing? Where is the business model and where is the capital, or are black American audiences actually served adequately anyway? In other words, does anyone care?

Thursday Fragments

George Clooney's "The American". He's a morally compromised assassin in a foreign country of course. That's not 'The American'. Surely we'll hear more on that.

Well now it's down to NED and ESP. Whoda thunk? No South Americans in the World Cup Final.

The new Graphite Kindle DX is tempting me. Very tempting. I cannot bring myself to buy a first generation iPad when I know they're going to do the next one iPhone 4 style. Even so, I'm on the fence.

My new entry into playing the stock market is doing OK. I'm up after a month. I'm developing the habits of watching markets again. I'm nice and sensitive, and can feel it when I lose even 20 bucks. But I'm being patient. It's a very interesting thing to know that a bad day at the market costs no more than a mediocre Chinese dinner. How many times have I thrown away that much cash? It has been about 10 years since I dabbled, having sworn it all off just before the Dot Bomb. Or was it just after? I fail to recall. BTW, Dear suckers. Thanks for buying Tesla stock on last  Wednesday. Elon Musk is the man, sans doubt. But you are a fool for thinking you could cash in on this stock.

Speaking of which, Dennis Prager speaks this morning about how it is that people remember their lives. For him, it all comes back to high school memories. My life, I think about in phases. I think I'm in Phase Ten but I could be in Phase 11. I never know exactly where the inflection point is until restrospect. If you don't know Dennis Prager, you don't know how Conservatives feel.

Here's a film short from Pixar. It's almost impossible to remember when such things were considered amazing. 

Open Thread Thursday

Perhaps to be a regular feature.

What's on your mind? What gets your goat?

Consultants, Scavengers & Squishy Meritocracy

The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
-- James Baldwin

Here's the problem. By the time you figure out a solution to the problem, somebody has already gamed your solution. So the proper thing is to act, and that's all. Not act and then setup a policy. What I'm talking about is inefficiency and the logic of its exploitation. 

It occurred to me the other day that consultants are with us forever. That's because only consultants have the experience of solving similar problems over and over again. It's what I do, so I know at least that much. There is a certain narrow class of problems that are fairly complex that I can do in my sleep. It works out nicely that these are problems that tend to be rather prolific in our society, and so I'm fortunate to have the skill and experience. But there's a downside. So let me tell you about the consultant's curse. 

The curse is the same as that for any adept who helps relatively ignorant people out of the ditches they drive themselves into. The consultant's curse is that he's hired by people who want to be smarter than they are. Nothing wrong with that, except people hire consultants like they go to restaurants. They think that the services of a consultant are like the services of a chef. You get the fanciest thing on the menu and no matter how fancy it is, you figure that your stomach takes care of it all the same. The problem is that with a consultant who builds a management program or a set of contracts or a computer system or a financial instrument or an aortal bypass or whatever workaround you needed because of your relative stupidity - well your system simply can't digest it. If you had the enzymes you would have never needed a consultant in the first place. But you don't have the enzymes and sooner or later, you're going to barf up the precious jewels you overpaid for. You can't handle P90X. You're just shocking your system, and six months later you're going to be on your lard ass again. Meanwhile, the consultant will be off cooking up another recipe for another sucker. The consultants never starve because there's always somebody whose eyes are bigger than their stomach. 

It sounds like a pretty good deal for the consultant right? Wrong. Because the consultant actually knows better. Like your widowed aunt, she knows what wrong with every man who walks in the room. None are as good as her late John, and she's right, and she's lonely because she won't compromise. But your consultant's life is full of compromise because your average consultants, like lawyers and all professionals are hyenas. They are scavengers. They have a taste for the best zebra, but they're really not fast and energetic enough to take one down. That's the lioness' domain, and there ain't many lions.

What all I'm saying, my pedigree chums, is that there is a very slim and fine meritocracy in these United States, and they are living large all around me in Chevy Chase, Fairfax and Bethesda. They are, as I've indicated, the Slice - the lionesses who work directly for the lions. They are the ones who invented the supply chain logistics for GM and made FedEx do it even better. They are the ones who know what they're doing and have become so efficient that they have time to sit around and wait for the rest of the little beasties take some leftovers. They are the top consultants, and like the smartest females anywhere, they know how to feed the lions what they want, crossing them at their deadly peril. The rest of the American meritocracy is squishy, and not really predatory, but as I said, scavenging. 

The smart money already knows where to hedge. The rest of us are just guessing. 

But there is a hierarchy in that guessing, and that's where the interesting inefficiency lies. The average consultant is squeezed out of the lion's share, but the hyena is no slouch. He eats very well and is not to be trifled with, and yet. He knows he will never be the lion. His meat is never quite warm enough, except for that time in '98, ooh that was a time. They are no more and no less than masterful hedgers those hyena consultants because most of the time, they don't don't know what the lion knows about the migrations of zebra. The hyena knows what the lions do. The vultures know what the hyenas do. The grave mistake is to confuse the act of scavenging with the act of predation. Prey is alive, moving, dynamic. It take more than a good nose to track them, but as you might imagine in a vulture's tiny brain, the smell of victory is the same as a whiff of carrion. That's not hunting. That's finding.

But in a squishy meritocracy such as we have, the aim of the peasant is the same as the aim of a savanna scavenger. It's to eat, and having satisfied that desire for millions, we in the US take a great deal of pride on having supported a broad and deep middle class. Lots of diners, a few great great gluttons and a few hunters. 

Ferguson Slams Obama

Niall Ferguson:

"If you're asking if the United States is about to become a socialist state, I'd say it's actually about to become a European state, with the expansiveness of the welfare system and the progressive tax system like what we've already experienced in Western Europe," Ferguson told Monday's kickoff session. Grove says the Harvard prof offered "a withering critique of Obama's economic policies, which he claimed were encouraging laziness."

Ferguson continued: "The curse of longterm unemployment is that if you pay people to do nothing, they'll find themselves doing nothing for very long periods of time. Long-term unemployment is at an all-time high in the United States, and it is a direct consequence of a misconceived public policy. Can I say that, having grown up in a declining empire, I do not recommend it. It's just not a lot of fun actually -- decline."

From The Detroit News: http://apps.detnews.com/apps/blogs/danielhowesblog/index.php?blogid=372#ixzz0t1oI5zYi

Surprised?

The Black Anti-Summit

My friend EC is concerned with hope about the accountability of black public intellectuals who have subscribed to the Involuntary Black Poverty Theory. The theory is more of an assumption which helps determine the burden of proof regarding whose responsibility black poverty is. Without going into any extremes of qualification, suffice it to say that the difference between Voluntary and Involuntary still must deal with economic structure and civil infrastructure. In many ways it's an existential, and thus to my way of thinking, somewhat inconsequential matter. That is to say if the best minds could determine the size, scope, budget and schedule for the final project to mitigate the spread between average American poverty and black American poverty, it shouldn't much matter to someone like me, who would be an engineer of that solution, where the funding is coming from. Rather, I'm worried that the nature of the solution itself has some fundamental implementation issues.

The one we are discussing now has to do with the roles and responsibilities of the leadership of such a project. EC is shaping himself up to be a world beater on the legal front and has picked out a locale for his, the third generation of movement after Brown. What we are confronting now is what we conceive of as the shortcomings of my generation's legacy.

I raise the question of the way you get this work done. Specifically, how do you set up a communications network that enables a virtual organization that can coordinate information about localities? This is something I have been doing, on and off, for the past 17 years. It's how I became an online writer.

First of all, where do we agree? We agree that there needs to be a colloquy of intellectuals who are capable of situating the sorts of problems of black poverty in an accurate context. There needs to be the kind of thoughtful people who might, for example, understand the shortcomings of trying to recruit a black male militia in Philadelphia in order to combat the high murder rate. We also agree that such folks need to have some real understanding about how real economies and businesses work.

EC and I agree that the current crop of intellectuals are not and cannot be held accountable, but any future such group must be accountable. Moreover, they must be effective. There are several reasons for the current lack of accountability & effectiveness.

• They are not elected.
• They are not independently funded.
• They do not own their own communications.
• They are not locally focused.
• They are not thematically focused.
• They are not coordinated.

That's plenty enough hurdles.

How would I go about it? Start an online portal as a joint exercise by a coalition of the top five black organizations in every metro. I did this during college for the 12 or so black clubs and organizations on campus. My group was called the Executive Central Committee, the ECC. It was only moderately successful and ultimately failed. That's because it was informal and had no budget, but the basic idea was sound, which was to coordinate calendars. What I attempted was to get an officer from every organization to attend ECC meetings and share what their group was doing. Nobody had the time, even though everybody agreed that communications were necessary because you would get low turnouts if events were double booked on campus. Where you might have enough people to make one event profitable, you wouldn't have enough to make two profitable. What I should have done was to have runners from the ECC to attend each of the clubs meetings and report back, then have the ECC calendar created from those reports.

This is the power of a decentralized communications organization. It works much better and cheaper than a summit. At a summit, the top leadership has to stop what they are doing and repeat their messages to some super group that gets together once a year. Except that nobody is accountable to the super group. This is why Tavis Smiley will fail if he hasn't failed already. You cannot herd all them cats. You just have to have a cat backchannel.

Right now, as Kevin Ross knows very well, that black American backchannel is black radio. But they're having their own economic crisis. The political end can actually be accomplished on the cheap. When that starts to happen, that will be the beginning of the beginning of a renaissance in black leadership addressing the issue of poverty and other black partisan politics. 

BTW, if you don't know Kevin Ross, then get to know him. He's about action, and he's got the connections.